Transcript for:
Michael Saylor on Bitcoin and Economics

you have 100 billionaires in a room one middle class dude with a $300 gun walks in who's the most powerful person in the room the number that matters if you want to either get wealthy or stay wealthy is the rate of expansion of the currency Supply and so if you're not actually investing growing your cash flow growing your assets you're getting poorer Bitcoin is the system so diffuse that no one entity or person is systemically important or influential and everybody shares this common an economic protocol in a fair Equitable transparent Unstoppable immutable fashion it's famous that you've lost $6 billion in one day what were your thoughts like during this [Music] day Michael sailor thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour this is an absolute honor we really appreciate it Jack gr thanks for having me your house by the way is gorgeous thank you so we've seen plenty of your podcasts we've been absolutely just binging all of these different shows you've been on the Lex fredman one got like 10 million views why do you think people care so much about what you have to say there's like 450 million people in the world that have crypto some kind of crypto asset Bitcoin is spreading virally there's hundreds of millions of people that own Bitcoin this is an idea whose time has come and it's a and it's a fundamental idea it is we have developed a technology that empowers humanity and empowers the indiv ual it provides property rights to 8 billion people it provides Freedom economic sovereignty and the promise of sovereignty and dignity of the individual to 8 billion people and we do it with cryptography semiconductors and the internet so it punches all the buttons right it's about technology it's about Freedom it's about empowerment and it's about money and those are all interesting topics for people why should people listen to what you have to say I think that everybody ought to ought to do the own research and listen to a lot of different points of view so I'm certainly not the only voice my particular uh voice is is that with the background of an engineer I went to MIT and I studied Aeronautical Engineering and spaceship design so I have a engineering background um I have a long enthusiastic history as a tech investor as an early investor in Amazon and Apple and Google and Facebook um I wrote a book about the impact of Technology especially mobile technology on civilization and on the economy that's based upon my studies at MIT I studied science technology and society and the history of science is another one of my degrees and then when I saw the Advent of the mobile phone it became clear to me that that mobile phones were going to dematerialize cameras and tape recording and entertainment and relationships and money and commerce and Retail storefronts and news newspapers and books and when I thought about the dematerialization of all that I thought the world's going to change there are going to be these trillion dollar companies like like there are today apple and Amazon Google Microsoft I thought um that's going to make it difference I wrote that book back in 2010 published it in 2012 I rode that mobile W for about a decade and um I did that while I was running a company I created I created a company when I was 24 called micro strategy in 1998 we came public and micro strategy is is uh mstr it's still in business and I was the CEO for 30 something years now I'm the executive chairman so I spent a career running a public company our company sells enterprise software to Banks and governments and Airlines and large corporations and most of the retailers in the world so so before I discovered Bitcoin I had an engineering background a tech investor background I was a bit of a academic in the in the history of Science and I had a background in the real world running a software company that was multinational and I had a background as a public company CEO and and along the way I picked up lots of bruises as a tech entrepreneur I picked up uh lots of wisdom learning what it's like to do business everywhere in the world and Along Comes 2020 and the pandemic crisis and and and there there's covid and there were lockdowns and then the interest rates went to zero and there was Financial hysteria and and the world was uh turned upside down and split in half you know all of our office cultures they all got thrown out the window and we all went to remote work and we did it like overnight um all our prejudices and biases well we think we should do it this way they got thrown out the window and maybe we have to do it a different way all of our thoughts about uh money and banking it's like okay here's your money in the bank could earn 0% interest well what am I'm going to and by the way we're inflating the currency and eventually everything's going to cost twice as much houses are going to go up in price and yet your money is going to earn zero that causes people to open their mind to new ideas so in my case I uh approached this existential risk in 2020 running a publicly traded company and we happen to have two things we had about 500 million in cash earning 0% interest and we had a $500 million software business generating about 75 million in cash flow and our stock was a bit more than a billion dollars in value so the marketplace put 1X multiple on our business and 1X multiple on the cash and I looked at it my first concern was will the company survive the crisis you know in in March April May of 2020 we were all worried about you know our lives our family our businesses our business model and once I realized that wasn't going away my second my second thought was how is it possible that every Main Street business is having the worst year of their life every restaurant every bar every gym every yoga Salon everyone you know that shows up to work not only are they not working they're not allowed to work and if you open up your gym you know people getting arrested for opening up a gym to get healthy so on one side you have this crisis half the people in the world or half the businesses are having the worst year of their life and then in the summer of 2020 all the Wall Street firms had the best year of their life all the stocks doubled all the real estate assets went through the roof When we dropped the interest rate to zero real estate property values double you know all of a sudden you know all the big tech companies are shooting through the sky and S&P shooting through the sky and I just saw this Paradox how is it possible that one part of society thinks everything's great and another part of society thinks this is the most awful thing so we were worried a little bit about that but really we thought you know $500 million is going to be worth $500 million in four years except that you're going to need a billion dollars to buy the same amount of stuff as you could buy with $500 million today so we're destroying shareholder value to sit in our position the market doesn't care about us and we and on the other hand we don't own anything that's benefiting from all this inflation and from these low interest rates so we started looking around and and you know in that year my mind opened and I embrace a lot of new ideas I embrac the idea of podcasting I'd never done any podcasts until 2020 I embrac the idea of Zoom I would have fired you in February if you wanted to do remote work but in by the end of March it was mandatory you know so yeah it's like 10 years or 20 years of of innovation or Evolution you know all coming in a week or two weeks then I thought well what am I going to do with this money I either got to give it back to the shareholders you know and decapitalize and if I decapitalize I thought that's a fast death right our company was looking at a fast death a slow death or uh do something new and uh I wasn't interested in the fast death uh the slow death didn't have a lot of appeal just just uh get chipped away at by big tech companies and so it's kind of a desperate moment a Moment of Truth where you have to make a decision and take a risk and so we looked around and we and we said well what is what do we need right now well we need a hard asset that uh is scarce that um that people all want in the world and we need to get on top of the next big Tech Trend you know like is it is it uh digital relationships is it digital books is it digital photographs well it's too late to jump on top of Apple Amazon Google and Facebook you had to hit them and invest in them in 2010 2012 I said what's the next big thing and I thought what about Facebook for money what if someone actually invented a bank for that that a billion people or in this case 8 billion people needed that ran on the internet that actually had an asset which no government could debase which every wealthy investor wants which you could move with the speed of light that you could program into an iPhone what is this digital gold digital Capital digital property what if the next wave is the digital transformation of money of property of energy of all these ideas they weren't transformed in the first internet wave and I looked around I thought well that feels like crypto gold to me and so what if I could create something that was better than gold it had none of the defects of gold and and and it offered the promise of sound money to 8 billion people and then I could combine that with a digital Network like Google like Android or like iOS or like the internet that struck me as being the next big idea and so micro strategy became uh the first public company to buy Bitcoin and we bought 250 million dollars of Bitcoin in August of 2020 and no one had ever made such a large commitment to this scary new crazy crypto idea you worried about volatility at the time that you could make that investment and have it drop by 80 90% in a year yeah I was worried about volatility and and and the way that we dealt with that was we had 500 million in capital I wasn't worried that it would drop and we would Panic sell it I was worried that it would drop and our shareholders would would uh have a big issue with it and we might get suit yeah and so the way we dealt with it was we announced that we were going to do a $250 million stock buyback at a premium we call it Dutch auction and we paired it with a $250 million Bitcoin purchase and we allowed all of our shareholders to get out like if you didn't if you didn't buy into the Bitcoin strategy you could tender your shares back to the company out at a premium that rotated our shareholder base and and and we didn't have neutral or indifferent shareholders we had all Pro Bitcoin shareholders and that changed the dynamic of the company it turned out that uh that Dutch auction uh resulted in only about $60 million of shares being tendered so we had 175 million left at the end of the Dutch auction period 20 days later yeah and we bought another 175 million of Bitcoin and then we had 425 so at this point no one in the world I think the largest public company might have had one1 or2 million dollar of Bitcoin before that and we come over the top with 425 million and we declared to the world that we thought this was going to be our primary treasury Reserve asset right this is the way we're going to run our Treasury and that was that was a a brand new idea there's 43,000 public companies and we were the first one to say let's not put your capital in bonds or cash or just give it away let's invest the capital in this new liquid asset and this crypto asset called Bitcoin when we did that the stock doubled and we raised an another uh $650 million MH and then the stock went up again and we raised a billion dollars and and we raised a billion dollars about six months after this initiative in a convertible debt offering at 0% interest so we borrowed a billion dollars at 0% interest for about six years I think yeah and we went to buy Bitcoin with it so that point you know we had said not only do we think we're going to invest our free cash in Bitcoin we're going to go ahead and we're going to borrow money to buy Bitcoin and while we were doing it other public companies like uh square and then Tesla started buying Bitcoin and then all these Bitcoin miners came public and so from 2020 to 2024 that was the the crazy years of uncertainty people weren't sure you know will Bitcoin be banned will it be copied will it be hacked um is it a long-term thing the Skeptics thought well maybe you know some people the deniers said it's just tulip bulbs other people Skeptics said oh yeah it's it's really good it's better than gold but it's too good to be true and so the government's going to take it away from you and at one point china banned Bitcoin mining and that created a crisis and then they banned Bitcoin trading and that created a crisis so a lot of uncertainty there but our belief was Bitcoin is the solution to 8 billion people's problem it's the solution to 300 million companies problem it's it's the Innovation the the biggest innovation in money or property rights in the history of the human race it's like fire or electricity right it's this new monetary protocol which is going to elevate Humanity to new levels so so we became obviously very big Advocates we raised 500 million in a senior debt issue to buy more Bitcoin then we sold a billion doll of equity to buy Bitcoin then we sold another you know then we borrowed money against Bitcoin to buy Bitcoin then we issued more Equity to buy Bitcoin if you fast forward through the four years today as of today since we started well we've invested $7.5 billion in Bitcoin which is worth any given day 14 to 15 billion the market cap of the company went from 1 billion to 30 the Enterprise value of the company went from 600 million to more more than 30 so and the stock 10x so during that time period the company's stock outperformed just about every stock on the S&P index it outperformed Nvidia and Tesla and Amazon and Apple and Google and Facebook it outperformed Bitcoin itself and and and it's not very often that you 10x a stock 20x a market cap 40x the Enterprise Value and 44 months so we took a particular position which is Bitcoin is is a good strategy it's good for the world and we're not going to be shaken and uh while that was happening obviously Bitcoin Bitcoin when we bought it at at 11,800 it crashed down into the 9,000 so we took a m like a $40 million hit in the first week or two weeks so it was very stressful losing 40 million of 250 million right it's it's a it's a big thing but we double down and then Bitcoin rallied up and it eventually rallied went through the alltime highs and red to 66,000 then crashed down in the 40s then rallied to the 66 again and then this brutal crypto winner went from 66 all the way down to 16,000 brutal and then it rallied up and so it is today where it is you know and yeah everybody's got their own Bitcoin Journey but Micro strategy Bitcoin journey is we started out a desperation it was like do this or maybe just shutter the company we went from you know desperate offensive too opportunistic hey you know someone wants to give us $1.6 billion for nearly free for six years if I offered you 1.6 billion for free for the next six years to invest in anything you wanted would you take it absolutely we asked Dave Ramsey the exact same question he said no he wouldn't take it like like yeah yeah crazy um and you must not believe in anything right I mean if you're in business and someone's offering you in essence free money to invest in your business for the next six years and you don't want it well what it really means is you've run out of ideas you don't know what to do with the capital but um you know we went to we went from the first step to opportunistic and then it became strategic and we realized this we are a Bitcoin development company our job is to issue Securities and to engage in uh technology projects and advocacy and education in order to spread uh you know the the virtues of Bitcoin and and the opportunities of Bitcoin to the world how are you able to develop an ey to spot Innovation like that before the general public were you always like this at growing up as a kid to be able to spot Trends but before we get into that guys I have learned so much about building businesses and Entrepreneurship from the business experts we've had on this show but if you're like me and you're always hungry for more that's where I turn to our sponsor masterclass with Master Class you could learn from the best to become your best in fact master class is is the only streaming platform where you could learn and grow with over 200 of the world's best for just $10 a month an annual membership to masterclass gets you unlimited access to every single instructor plus you could access masterclass on your phone smart TV computer or even in audio mode like you could learn to build a business with Mark cubin get world-class leadership training from 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like this at growing up as a kid to be able to spot Trends I was a science fiction fanatic by the time I was in third grade like I think I think my parents they they uh hacked me when I was in first grade I had this comic book addiction and they offered me a dime for every every real book I read in some reading competition and comic books cost 25 cents and I calculated if I read two and a half books I could get a comic book and so I read like 60 70 books in the summer and I'd be like reading one a day you know and uh I got into science fiction I discovered all the great authors Robert heinlin Isaac azimoff Arthur C Clark got very interested in that it led me to a bit of fantasy I you know I'm the kind of guy who played uh board games simulation games before we had computers to simulate them on we had to use you know dice you know and and then I played Dungeons and Dragons and that got me into fantasy and all of that's about imagination and you know one of the more famous books is have space suit will travel by hind line and and in the book you know the hero discovers a spaceship a space suit fixes it up it's broken barking at the sky a spaceship lands he gets picked up he gallivant across theit Universe saves Humanity from the bugey monsters comes back and uh and as his rewarded gets a full tuition scholarship to MIT and I guess is stuck in my mind you know that if if if you're the you know the upwardly Mobile Alpha Male you know Tech forward thinker maybe you want to go to MIT so I went to MIT to study spaceship design and I was going to be an astronaut and a spaceship designer and that that brought me in touch with you know some just extraordinary individuals extra extraordinary professors extraordinary students like every one of my fraternity Brothers was like an eagle scout right like like okay welcome like everybody's a valoran everybody's an eagle scout and they're all brilliant and what they do for you know for fun they design space equipment or they hack the phone system or or or the like and while I was there studying uh aerospace engineering I stumbled on the history of Science and the history of science is all about you know how did we discover Immunology how do we discover that the Earth you know revolves around the Sun you know like how do we how do we get through the capern revolution what's the significance of Optics why do we stop bleeding people to death what's the significance of nuclear power what's the significance of Maxwell's equations or Newtonian physics or relativity and you know what Madam curri do for us and how does the society react when you introduce a new technology whether it's a railroad or an internal combustion engine or an airplane and and uh so if you look at the history of the world through a technology lens right then you you start to see things differently so when I came out of MIT you know I had the science fiction background I had the fantasy background I had the history of I I always loved history in general but then the history of science really opened up my eyes to Paradigm shifts I mean one of the most basic principles of science is the Paradigm Shift everybody Dr Harvey is the guy that discovered that the heart beats blood out through the arteries it circulates back through the veins for 10,000 years no doctor knew what the heart did and they didn't actually accept circulation Harvey discovers it and everybody in the medical profession rejects it like no we don't believe you now despite the fact they could probably determine this with some experiments but they don't believe him and Harvey says no physician over the age of 40 will ever believe me ever right then I think Max plank had had a a quote he goes you know science advances one Death at a time and Thomas cun says in the structure of scientific revolutions when you come up with a new paradigm shift whether it's you know the capern revolution right the universe doesn't revolve around the earth your diseases aren't caused by spirits and demons but rather by little germs and you know in the blood or relativity that Einstein put forward in the Paradigm Shift of quantum physics which Einstein rejected or you know Quantum uncertainty cun says these Paradigm shifts take place only after the old dies or in a war there only two ways you get people to turn the world upside down and see a new idea they either they either have to you have to see the Old Guard die we're seeing this in crypto right now I mean I go around and and I'll meet people and they'll say yeah my son told me I needed to talk to you it's like the 20s somethings the 30-some the teenagers they all know the 50s something 60s something 70 somethings that they're hearing about they're hearing it from their kids so this is a generational thing up and um I think you know so I was fortunate because my advantage was I kind of had the academic B grounding I had the passion I was always very interested in in how do we invent new things with technology I grew up in a coming of age where you know we started there were three channels of broadcast television and then a rapid succession you got to where we are today so um I obviously some people are a little bit more uh what is the word uh open-minded they've got more of a inclination an INT intellectual inclination to appreciate that than others so I always had a bias toward it and I just had some really good um formative experiences and opportunities in order to feed that inclination I'm curious who were some of your biggest in influences or like Inspirations when you were younger that kind of like I don't know maybe made you think the way that you think and as you elevate the financial ladder and you make this crazy decision or controversial I should say to put hundreds of millions of dollars into Bitcoin to turn it into billions of dollars now that you have all of that money who do you look to now for inspiration and how's that changed you know the great science fiction writers you know were Inspirations uh you know hline in particular not only is a good science fiction writer and he tells good story but he's also libertarian he's also a sound money advocate so his his writings are laced with with uh you know e conservative economics practical practical observations about politics you know so so a and uh inspirational stories of of improving Humanity with technology I think that's a very important formative experience you know Reagan Thatcher they were very very successful uh politicians in their day and they both preached limited government right uh power to the people Ein Rand and and uh her her books Atlas Shrug The Fountain Head very inspirational science historians you know and the you know the historians Alvin Toffler you know the people are Mega Trends Future Shock all those books that were you know how is the world going to going to turn upside down I thought that was very in very interesting inspirational and I think um you know arthury Clark's got a phrase a very famous statement I put it on the back cover of my IPO perspectus in 1998 when the company came public that's how important the phrase was and his phrase was any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic right and that and that was the Mantra of the great science fiction writers where it blends with fantasy it's like what's magic mirror well you know I look in the mirror and I talk and then somebody talks back well now you take uh you know an iPad or you take an Apple computer and you look at it and you zoom to someone in Singapore and you talk and they talk back and that's getting pretty magical but then at the point where they take your photo and they plug you into an AI and they bring you to life and they put you into the into cyberspace and I'm talking to an AI That's talking back to to me with your gestures am I talking to a demon a witch a demod a person you know what where did the science stop where did the fantasy begin and and uh that inspired me to start micro strategy and our idea was Intelligence everywhere's let's make everybody super intelligent like think about what some of these AIS can do today you you can basically ask the thing to scan the the body entire body of human writing MH you know give me a Shakespearean Sonet you know but and in the style of &m And in 100 milliseconds or 500 milliseconds it comes back you know what uh Jack did that last night yeah we plugged uh we said to chat GPT if we were to interview Michael sailor what should our format be and my gosh it gave us an outline that we would have probably spent an hour thinking of ourselves and it did it in I would say probably more than an hour it was pretty I mean we already had an outline I'm just kind of curious what chat GPT could provide and it was good that did you pray to your patron saint or your AI and your your demon or your angel in cyberspace for the answer you kind of did yeah right you actually is I asked a hundred years ago a thousand years ago ask God to guide me and and fantasy novels God's God becomes Gods I ask the god of of of my podcast to guide me and this is what they said right and and so where does where does fantasy where does science end I think I think it is extraordinary inspirational because it starts it opens up your mind right it's like what happens if I dematerialize every book that's uh that's ever been written and I can put it an iPad okay well I just gave a 100 million books to 8 billion people for a nickel okay well that's interesting that that's not linear thinking that but that's like second second order thinking third order thinking is okay let's just dematerialize every book and then let's read every book and let's give you you know the equivalent of a professor that's read every book and you can ask the professor anything you know and the first order is hey do I can you just give me enough money to print a bunch of books and give you a big library but you know printing the books is fish expensive for the civilization giving you know making you read them is double fishlyn you just read every book look over my shoulder think about what I ought to do and just do it yeah you're placing a lot of trust though in the AI do you worry about that and and people not having the self-sufficiency to be able to maybe see through some of that that might not apply to them or or or rely too heavily oh yeah well look we're all going to worry about a lot of stuff right when you get on an airplane you get in a tube and you fly 6,000 miles and you know the window blows open you'll freeze your death or you'll suffocate you know before anybody can do anything about it but meanwhile on on probably don't think about it you want me to make you worry cuz I'm an aeronautical engineer on approach right if the pilot takes his eye off you know off the approach for and gets unstable for two seconds the plane may go into a stale SP Tail Spin you're going to crash and burn and there's not a single thing you can do about it and does it ever occur to you to worry about what the pilot drank the night before he got into the plan see what I what I'm concerned about is if you have a mentally unstable pilot that wants to like you know do a lot of of harm to a lot of people that's what I'm concerned about but we can speculate all we want Graham and I are horrified of flying as it is like I look over at him fine for a while but like yeah I was I was fine up until let me f with you a bit more which is okay are we going to worry about AI Bots driving your car and are you worried about someone taking over the car and you know and crashing the AI driven car or next time you go into New York City or wherever you go and you call an Uber does it occurred to you that no matter how well you eat how well you drink how well you live your life how careful you are how good a shape you're in that the random person that picked you up in the Uber in two seconds can drive you off the bridge and kill you with no chance to appeal right your life is basically in the hands of a random driver every time you get in a taxi cab and you ought to be a lot more afraid of that than getting on the airplane because least with the airplane there's two pilots and they and by the way it's it's against professional rules and he will get fired or or she will get fired if they drink or and there's another person to look at them and assess whether they're sober when they walk on the airplane and if they lose it or sneeze or or have a seizure there's another person to land the plane now I'm going to put you back in the random Uber in a foreign country that's swerving in traffic and okay if you think oh I'm too smart because uh I own you know I breathalyze tests and I personality test the Uber driver when I get in the car maybe you think that has it occurred to you that the guy on the other side of you know of the median strip can just take a drug drink a thing and do this but but I think about that from time to time as I'm driving because you hear just random stories of exactly that of just a car that just made the wrong turn and just hit somebody who was in their Lane doing exactly as they should driving the speed 's a point to all this yeah which is people used to die falling off their horse a lot you just don't read about it because we didn't take good records and if you roll the clock back to 1950 without technology the average life expectancy was 50 if you roll the clock back to 1770 the average life expectancy was 32 people actually walked past the swamp got bit by mosquito and died of of malaria or some fever or they just they lived in a house that didn't have heat and they died of pneumonia and people are dying of all sorts of things before we had technology now we live in the 20 you know the early 21st century and there's a million things for you to worry about but if comp if we unleash Ai and the and the robots drive the cars and they fly the airplanes it's more likely than not the case that the average number of traffic deaths fall in this in the same way that in the modern era of antibi biotics and hospitals and Modern Dentistry you live in extra 30 years even though you're taking some kind of risk when you do it yeah we can worry about it all there'll be a debate there's going to be politicians that'll say you're safer in a car driven by a person than in a car driven by a computer that probably won't be the case but people will believe it's the case and and that's above our pay grade right it's going to be determined you know regardless of what you think about it with High likelihood H but before we get into that something you guys may not know about me is that I actually studied Spanish for 6 years and last year I actually went to Mexico and realized I could probably use a little bit of practice on my Spanish and what better way to do that than with our sponsor Babel for those unaware Babble is the language learning platform that's helping 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time we have a very special deal for our listeners you can get up to 60% off your Babel subscription but only for our listeners at babel.com again you could get up to 60% off at babel.com that's spelled b a BB l.com rules and restrictions May apply thank you so much Babble for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast you mentioned on Lex fredman that if you look at civilization half of the problems are due to the fact that our understanding of money and economics is defective what do you mean by that and what is the common and incorrect perspective versus The Uncommon and correct perspective the common perspective is to think that money is the currency that the government gives you and uh uh that the policies of the economic policies of the government are for the good are for your own good and you'll benefit by complying with them or accepting them and that most Eon most conventional economic principles uh and conventional economic education is useful or that conventional economic figures are valid economics as we enter the 21st century really is a pseudo cyle science and and I would argue that before Bitcoin all economics was an art it was somewhere between art pseudo science and religion and philosophy uh and and political science and it wasn't uh a scientific discipline or an engineering discipline I'm not even sure the economists would disagree over that by the way so we lived in a world where human race never had perfected money we never engineered money and that and in the absence of perfected money you can't have economics as an engineering discipline and that means that all of the political policies and political economic wisdom generally is is subject to debate and there is no right and wrong so people capriciously do what they want to do and they generate facts and metrics to support whatever they want to do it's kind of a religious again religious pseudo science uh and and it's not rigorous engineering is not anchored in mathematics scientific discipline and you can't characterize it as an engineering discipline now let me go back to the question of what is money fundamentally people think currency is money but but really the academic definition of what is money is is a medium exchange a unitive account a store of value what is it really well money is just you know the most tradable good the most uh the most durable tradable element or unit of something that we can trade for something else of value so in the history of the world you know you go back 10,000 years people might have traded sea shells or they traded Stone coins or polished glass beads or they or they might have traded arrow heads what is the universal commodity that we know people will accept and we use it to to create a market economy to solve the problem of Coincidence of once right everybody produces something different and you need to and if if you have stone axes and I have food and you know I want you know I want the stone Axe and you want the food we trade for some ratio but if everybody doesn't have exactly what everybody else needs that barter economy breaks down it gets too complicated so we know that have been sophisticated economies for a million years you can you can find Stone axe factories that go back a million years the issue really is how do you make those economies work um through a process of trial and error people eventually arrived at at uh Metals copper coins silver coins then gold coins and and they they worked with some kind of metallic unit of account and type of money but even in modern era you know you could see people use bales of tobacco as money in in the colonies before the Revolutionary War in prisons people use cigarettes as money and PS use cigarettes as money what's the problem the problem in is in the modern era we use fiat currency as money for the most part and is it a medium exchange sure it is is it a unit of account sometimes is the store of value it's a store of value with a halflife of some amount so what's the half life of the money how long does it take for the money to lose half its economic energy well that's what we'll call the inflation rate uh but the problem is the actual monetary inflation rate isn't reported nobody tracks it so if you actually have um a million dollars of capital and you invest it in the dollar and you hold it there for a 100 years the dollar supply increases 7% a year on average over 100 years which means that your Capital loses half its value every 10 years and over the course of a 100 years you're cut in half 10 times which means that you start with a million dollars and you end up losing 99.9% of the million dollars it gets worse if it's in a weak currency like the peso in that case you'd lose 99.9% of your capital in 20 years so what is capital e economic energy purchasing power most the time when people think about money they think about currency but currency is an awful way to store your economic energy so so you can't really hold money very long and then when they think about the inflation rate they always focus upon the CPI Consumer Price Index that's just um it's just a manufactured synthetic metric and what is it uh you know the The Establishment would have you believe that CPI is the rate at which consumer prices increase and that's what you ought to be concerned about neither of those statements are necessarily true those are those premises are wrong it's not the rate at which uh consumer prices go up and it's not the it's not the rate you should be concerned about it's simply the rate at which a arbitrary basket of goods defined by an economist goes up in price in a certain place so if I Define a basket of Goods in Kansas and uh I track the price of them then I've got a CPI for people that live in Kansas that live solely on that basket of goods but even that's not quite true because once I Define that methodology there's something called honic adjustments which means every year or every few years or every 10 years I can just arbitrarily take things out of the basket you know a late one Economist took coffee out of a basket but but for example if I Define a market basket of goods and that includes one concert every two months for the average person and concerts go from $10 to $500 I could just take the concert out of the basket and I could say well you know in the modern era people can watch Taylor Swift on Netflix and that's free so instead of giving you Six concerts a year that cost $33,000 a year that looks like inflation I mean how's the average person spend $3,000 a year on it'd be more than that after you add the merch and whatever okay $5,000 a year on concerts it used to cost a 100 now it costs 5,000 that's inflation but if I just rotate that into Netflix Taylor Swift concert not only do I not notice that that everything went up to $5,000 a year I actually announc gleefully that cost went down to you know to go to concerts now so conventional wisdom is people accept uh the conventional definition of money they they they accept a certain asset as money that's not really money and then they accept uh you know conventional definitions of inflation as being relevant and proper which is neither and then that causes them to make a whole host of mistakes like I'm going to give you 4% interest in your bank account the CPI is only two our Target is 2% if you're getting 4% then you're staying ahead of inflation well what if the real monetary expansion rate is 12% and I'm giving you 4% or 3% after tax well you're actually losing 9% of your wealth every year that you actually have your money in the bank and uh I think it's just really important for people to understand what's the true uh the true rate inflation rate or what does inflation even mean um what the the number that matters if you want to either get wealthy or stay wealthy or live a decent life is uh the rate of expansion of the currenty Supply and if the currency Supply in US dollars is expanding at say 10% a year then that means you can expect every scarce desirable asset that any anybody with money in America or anybody with money with dollars in the world is going to want to buy it's going to go up at a rate of 10% a year or more and so if you're not actually investing growing your cash flow growing your assets via that number you're getting poorer right you're not getting wealthier and and once you actually uh do that and you do an analysis of asset classes and investing what really pops out which is fascinating is is the S&P index uh is simply tracking the currency supply of US dollars for the past 100 years as when you invest in a diversified portfolio of stocks you're not making money all you're doing is preserving the capital that you had you're not getting poor you're not getting richer you're just tracking sideways you think you're getting richer in nominal terms but in real terms you're not and conventional economists would say real infl you know they would say real uh e economic growth or real asset growth should be calculated using the CPI but of course the CPI you could reasonably conclude is the lowest number that any that any self-respecting government employee Economist could possibly calculate it is the rate at which um an arbitrary portfolio of things the government thinks you should care about is going up in price the true inflation rate or I'd say the the the currency debasement rate the monetary inflation rate is the rate at which the supply of currency is increasing right which would be about 7 to 10% that's 7 to 10% might even be more I mean you can you can actually Trace um over a 100 years about 7% but in the past 20 30 years it looks like more like 10% in US dollar terms and weaker currencies 14% And the weakest currencies 20 to 30% a year do you think that's going to stop anytime soon no no it's impossible for it to stop because governments everywhere in the world just spend more money than they take in in taxes and so the Temptation is always just to print money to pay bills either to fight Wars you know to or to or to implement government policy if I'm going to forgive student debt if I'm going to fight a war if I'm going to implement uh a medical policy if I'm going to you know pay a bureaucracy I have to come up with money to do it how long is that sustainable for it depends on which currency you're printing I guess let's talk about the dollar well well let's talk about ones that are simpler let's talk about Salvador if you have a small country and you print your currency and you get into a civil war you print a lot of currency well when you print that currency the currency collapses and so sustainable for normally it's sustainable for about 4 to8 years in the event of a real war um when has that happened in the US it happened in most colonies uh before the Revolutionary War they all collapsed their currency every 40 years or so it happened to the United States Continental Congress have you ever heard the phrase is not worth the Continental um during the the Revolutionary War the United States government printed its own money green backs or or they I think they just printed Continentals and they expanded the currency Supply by a factor of 200 and so the entire currency collapsed and everybody that took those things was bankrupt by 1785 or something so in the event of a war your currency collapses pretty quickly the losing side in World War I uh the currency collapsed and between 1914 and 1917 the current CES and France and the UK were about to collapse the only thing that saved them was the US entry into the war so generally in the event of a war why do Wars last five years because if the government's printing money as fast as they can it takes about five years to suck all the economic energy out of the society in the Civil War uh the north printed greenbacks uh they collapsed and they were worth almost worth nothing by the end of the Civil War the South printed their currency that collapsed by the end of the war so um so in Wars the currency can collapse in 5 years if you take uh Argentina Argentina's collapsed their currency about every 20 or 25 years for the past 150 years about 20 years sure so the Argentine peso was one peso to the dollar about 25 years ago it's a thousand pesos to the dollar right now so you know you can see the same thing in Nigeria so in a in a a third tier currency it'll last about well third tier currency it'll I would say a third tier currency is in a war the currency collaps in 5 to 10 years second tier currency that collaps in about 20 25 years first tier currency the world Reserve currency is say the United States compare the United States the dollar compare it to uh the German currencies the Germans have lost two Wars so their currencies collapsed like three times how about the Japanese currency it's collapsed right how about how about every other currency the Russ the Russian currency it it's collapsed about three or four times the last time it collapsed was 1998 Lebanon it just collapsed a few years ago us won every war in the last 100 years we are actually the strongest Nation for the past 100 years so we're the Victor we were the Glo we're the world Reserve currency so what has the US dollar done um an acre of land in Miami Beach where I live cost $10,000 100 years ago it cost $10 million today okay did the currency collapse it's point it's worth 0.1% MH right it lost 99.9% of its value so in fact that's the winner right and how long will that go on how long can it go on I mean at 7% I mean you can presumably do it another 30 40 50 years something like that but it's it the world Reserve currency goes to the to the end it'll last until the uh the Merkel Empire fails where you see the frang on the edges is you see the collapse of the Sri Lankan currency you see the collapse of every currency in Africa the collapse of the currency in Nigeria the collapse of the currencies in Lebanon the collapse of or the weakening of currencies in in uh turkey you see that right now Turkish L has fallen by 75% against the dollar in the last 36 months generally the biggest risk is in the second tier third tier country in a third tier country your currency's broken right so what do you do normally you actually just flip to the dollar that's why is there so much demand for tether right you know stable coins if you live in Argentina you live in Nigeria you live anywhere in Africa it's like the dollar looks like a pretty good idea everybody knows what the dollar is if your currency's falling 30% a year and the dollar is only falling in value 7% a year it looks like the dollar is gaining right whatever 20 25% a year right because your currency your your your economic system is so relatively weak so what you have is you have a a whole world um that goes through this currency collapse is this new no it's not new if you read the history of the world go read um there's 15,000 pages of Durant's story of civilization you know I read it for fun I I reread it for fun there's thousands of stories of an Empire Rising you know the first king conquers the sun maintains the third the third one in the line comes along and decides to overreach overspend debases the currency you know bleeds the people dry eventually can't pay the military and collapses and what happens is they always blame it on the barbarians it's like the bad people that live next door you know they you know they abused us but what really happens is every single Empire in the past 10,000 years of that we've got a recorded history on they go through this Dynamic of their weak and virtuous they struggle they rise against another adversary the you know the big the big strong Empire becomes fat dumb happy it becomes corrupted from within the Roman Empire the French Empire the Russians the whatever fill in the blank and after the after the Empire becomes corrupted within it collapses the new Empire Rises it stays virtuous for some amount of time it might be 50 years it might be 100 years it might be 200 years eventually it becomes corrupted it collapses and this is just the story of civilization why are we here well if Bitcoin had not been invented this would be pretty Downer podcast I'm just telling you that you know you know the world's got economic problems the government's going to debase the currency spend it on things you disagree with and you're going to be poor right and that's how it ends but Satoshi is as profound as Prometheus sat you know Maxwell gave us electricity Newton gave us Newtonian physics Einstein gave us relativity Satoshi gave us money Satoshi developed veloped a protocol that combines uh cryptography uh networking with semiconductor technology with mathematics with uh a bit of economics and some engineering and manag to create um something that's simultaneously a technology a network an asset and an ideology and it's this thing we call Bitcoin it's the world's first engineered money and the first engineered monetary Network so let's just step back and say well what re what really is Bitcoin and what would you like to have well if um if you had a billion people and they didn't trust the banks and they didn't trust each other and they didn't trust any company and they didn't trust any government and they realized that their life savings was being drained out of their accounts via massive hyperinflation of the currency and if they had no rights and if they if they were being driven out of countries because they were the wrong sect or the wrong color or the wrong religion or the wrong political view and they felt like they would like to they would like to have ownership of their own economic energy their own life force they'd like to have sovereignty they like to have property rights that could not be taken away from them let's assume you're one of those people right and you could see why you'd be one of those people because in 1492 when the Spaniards uh discovered the new world I think March 31st of that year uh King Ferdinand issued an edict saying all the Jews had to leave Spain like 500,000 of them within 120 days and leave all their property behind you know or else they're getting jailed murdered and and so the king of Spain just seized all the property of 500,000 people in 4 months and then a few years later the king of Spain issued the same edict for all the all the Muslims in in the south of Spain but gave them three days history I could give you 10,000 Stories like that it's like you're the wrong the wrong religion the wrong political party and the person in power just says we're taking all your stuff you need to leave now and and if you don't now use can't leave we're just going to kill you and take your stuff so let's assume you live through that history which every human being did now God comes down from heaven above and God says okay I've decided to solve your problem I'm going to run a bank in heaven I'm going to issue 21 million God coins and they're infinitely dividable and I'm just going to go ahead and and uh do this for you for just about nothing and you can telepathically uh move the coins between each other to pay off your debts and I'm going to make sure that no Bank no government no counterparty you know no country no criminal takes your money away from you and I promise never to inflate it I'm just G you know so there's your money there's your bank it's a bank in heaven right and uh a person can hold a gun to your head but you've got the money in your head and and the angels will you know protect you they might they might murder you but they're not getting your money so if I thought about that I'm thinking okay God run God is going to run an honest bank for me okay good that's probably good but in the absence of God offering to run the bank you know and protect your property rights forever from everybody the next best idea is we create a piece of software using cryptography and and then the software instantiates in the protocol 21 million coins subdividable by 100 million so 2.1 quadrillion satoshis which is effectively enough you could subdivide it more if you needed to we create that system and now you can send a, 100 a million a billion 10 billion1 billion dollars worth of that from anybody to anybody without asking anybody's permission using a computer you can hold a million dollars in your head a billion dollars in your head you could hold it in your hand if if you know you're going to get arrested you can just zap it to your sister in Singapore if you don't trust the bank in New York you can put it with the bank in London right you and and if you don't trust any Bank you self- custody that's Bitcoin and let's say you don't you know so who's going to run the software I don't trust you to run it you don't trust me to run it let's say we all liked each other well do you trust great grandchildren nobody trust anybody so how do you create an anti- fragile fault tolerant uh self-correcting self-healing system that will run forever and the answer is everybody runs the software so everybody can download the node it's all open source you can read the code you run the software it's a protocol if if you decide you want to Tinker with the code and you change the code so there's 42 million Bitcoin instead of 211 million Bitcoin we don't recognize you you get kicked off the network so this is a virus it's a monetary virus everybody can opt into the monetary virus or the protocol the more people that opt in the more powerful the network it so it starts as a Flicker and it spreads like a flame and then it's a fire and then then it's like okay I released this thing and it's spread everywhere in the world and it's and and everybody shares this common economic protocol for settling their differences in a fair and inequitable transparent Unstoppable immutable fashion that is the idea Bitcoin although you know what before we go into that really briefly we got to talk about the stock market because I'm not sure if you're paying attention to this but Nvidia just recently passed $1,100 a share it's catching up to Apple in terms of Market app and how did I know this well it's all thanks to our sponsor yahoofinance.com and trust me guys it's really important to know what you're doing when you're investing because I didn't a couple years back and I brought a portfolio from $20,000 all the way up to $770,000 and you might think Jack you cashed out right no I brought it down to $4,000 and that's because I was uneducated now obviously since then I've wisened up and I feel like I'm being a much smarter investor these days and the reasons why I invest are because a you make money when you do it correctly and B it gives you a sense of confidence for your financial future and really when it comes down to all of this the best thing that you could do if you want to expand your knowledge is just get free information learn as much as you can read as much as you can and Yahoo finance is a fantastic place to do just that so level up your investing knowledge at yahoofinance.com we have a link Down Below in the description strongly recommend it it's one of the best places to get all that information yahoofinance.com thank you so much yaho finance and back to the episode so you seem like somebody who's looking at the pros and cons of everything what do you you think is the best case against Bitcoin and what would it take to convince you that perhaps you could be wrong the idea of Bitcoin is I'm using technology to create perfect money the first question is you know will it be banned will it be copied will it be hacked right does Bitcoin represent Sound Engineering does it represent sound ethics does it represent sound economics it's very very difficult to know that in the first year or the first two years in fact people tried to launch something like Bitcoin a hundred times before Bitcoin came along right and and all of those early attempts failed Bitcoin caught and it started to Flicker and and you know for the first year and a quarter it traded no no one ever did a transaction with it on Pizza day after year and a quarter uh Bitcoin traded for effectively a third of a penny so it was worth a third of a penny to to half a penny after a year and a half so it had um it had a a slow early germination period uh the ethics of Bitcoin are Satoshi created away he gave it away and he went away so the ethics are are what we call the Immaculate Conception someone gave this as a gift to the world and if it if it wasn't given as a gift to the world if if there if Satoshi was still here Rich you know and bragging about it and then and then uttering opinions about how you ought to change or modify the network that would be an ethical failing and and that would represent unsound ethics the engineering of Bitcoin is based upon proof of work Shaw 256 hashing so the network has evolved such that it uses something like 20 gaw of electricity which cost5 billion a year running on $25 billion do or more of semiconductor hardware and that Hardware is special purpose single P perp purchase purpose it's like specialized Asic chips and why is that important because if it was CPUs the network could be attacked by Google or Facebook or Microsoft that had more CPUs and if it was GPU use then it might be attacked by the AI data centers but because it's it's Shaw 256 as6 those other types of semiconductors can't be used to undermine the security of the Bitcoin Network it is simply put the most powerful computer monetary Network and maybe the most powerful computer network in the world if you if you calculate power using the shaw 256 hash you know running 600 ex aash you you can't Dent it with all the other computer power in the world so just just to clarify there's like a place where they have all of this hardware and data and no one I'm guessing has any idea where it is no it's better than that the network is decentralized if there was a place it would be fragile you don't want it to be in one place um it's an open protocol which means that anybody in the world can run a Bitcoin mining rig and anybody in the world can run Bitcoin nodes so imagine tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes and millions and millions of different Bitcoin mining computers spread across thousands and thousands of locations in Russia in China in Africa in South America in Australia in North America in Iceland in Scandinavia EV everywhere and imagine that's shifting all the time and no one can stop it right it's uh it's kind of like where is the cold virus in the race but back to Graham's question what is the best argument against Bitcoin and what would it take to convince you that it's not that's well the best argument against Bitcoin is you've got a better monetary Network and if you had a better monetary Network then all the smart money in the world all the smart people with money would be using it right so bit so Bitcoin has accumulated the most physical power in in terms of electricity the most computer power in terms of hash power it's accumulated the most economic power 700 800 billion dollar of real money has been invested in it it's got the highest market cap worth 1.3 1.4 trillion and it's accumulated the most political power hundreds of millions of people who are passionate about defending it and so how do you know it's not working well if someone came along and launched something that was that was more popular with intelligent people then I guess it wouldn't be working but of course bitcoin's been growing first 200% a year then 100% a year right now it's still uh growing 40 to 50% a year so it's a monetary virus that's spreading and it's it's uh extracting the capital from all other Capital assets right so that the proof that coin is winning is the performance of Bitcoin is 5X the performance of the S&P index and Bitcoin is outperforming gold outperforming the SNP outperforming every individual stock outperforming bonds outperforming cash outperforming real estate what do you see you see intelligent people with money voting with their money and what they're doing is they're selling the weak assets buying the strong asset and why Bitcoin over ethereum uh if you're trying to launch a monetary Network you need it to be ethically sound it needs to be sound ethics Sound Engineering sound economics the economic policy of Bitcoin is 21 million coins unchanged very difficult to change extremely conservative in fact no one ever would ever think you could change the supply which is transparent and even the second order economics the the bandwidth of the network I is the subject of bitter bitter fights the block side Wars was a fight over whether or not the second order scarcity should change and whether the bandwidth should change and as the network gets bigger it it becomes much more conservative economically so now it's it's nearly impossible to change the economic policies of Bitcoin and and if you compare that to ethereum ethereum changed the economic policies with every hard fork and so it's changed it half a dozen times and so economically the real question is how much uh of that asset will there be in a 100 years or a thousand years and can anybody change it and what you really want is for nobody to be able to change it and you want you want to know that you're buying 121 millionth of all the economic energy in the network a thousand years from now so all of the hardware all of the semiconductor technology all of the electricity that's being used to secure the network disappears now the network is secured simply by the staking of a token with economic value but you're going to lose More's law because if you have to stake $50 billion of tokens you can't make the $50 billion of tokens worth 500 million and keep the same amount of security over time but you see with uh with Moore's Law and with um a silicon ratchet you can actually create $50 billion of security with $500 million of Hardware over time like let me illustrate a different way you have 100 billionaires in a room and then one middle class dude with a $300 gun walks in who's the most powerful person in the room right the guy with the gun the the is a very special purpose machine for projecting and channeling energy if you actually want to get productivity if you want to spend $300 in order to hijack a billion dollars right you do it with a but on the other hand if you want to protect a billion dollars without spending like without spending 10 or 20 billion you protect the billion dollars with the with the hardware so so the engineering of Bitcoin plugs you into semiconductor technology to Moors law to electricity and what it what it also does is it creates this this very interesting Dynamic where if you have billions of dollars of Bitcoin in Manhattan yourit Bitcoin is being defended by Bitcoin mining off of hydroelectric power in Bhutan you might be getting defended the network is defended by a Bitcoin mine running on on uh stranded natural gas in Kazakhstan and so if your B if your money is only defended at a bank in New York and the mayor of New York wants to seize your money he just takes it what you want is a very distributed Network and you want incentives for every nation state and every type of actor to build massively powerful centers if you see these Bitcoin mining centers they're you know they're 100 megawatt 200 megawatt data centers and you think well what would incentivize someone to build such a massively powerful you know defense mechanism and the answer is somebody's got a dam with water flowing over the dam and no one wants to buy their electricity and so they've decided to build a Bitcoin defense center in order to monetize the running water on their Dam 8,000 miles away so there's there's a genius to that engineering because it's continually expanding continually growing continually becoming more efficient and it anchors the Bitcoin Network into the electrical Network and into the technology network of the world and incentivizes good semiconductor Engineers to be thinking all the time about how to create more efficient defense mechanisms to keep a hacker from hacking the network and that just takes us to the last point which is ethics you know if you want an ethical monetary Network like like do you want to trust all your money in a bank run by three people that you know or do you want to trust all your money in a bank that's collectively owned by Humanity where nobody in the human race can possibly hack the bank and it's a it's it's one of them is a protocol beyond the reach of any individual any Corporation any government you Bitcoin is is a system so D so diffuse that no one entity or person is systemically important or influential right whereas whereas ethereum or any these other proof of stake protocols if there's a company if there's a Founder if there's a engineering team if you can identify them then they can change it and and the ability to change the network undermines the integrity and the security and the immutability of the network and the one thing you want with a monetary network is you want to know that a 100 years from now 500 years from now a thousand years from now the Network's going to maintain its integrity and if it relies upon any individual action you've already failed that's why for example you speak English and you don't speak the language made up by your best friend that's a little bit more efficient that's got special words in it like you're buying into a a a shared protocol of all of the smart money in the human race and and the smart idea if you study history is don't trust anybody don't trust yourself right like you could you could say Michael would you rather invest in a Network where you controled I'm like no right I'm the weak link right we're all the weak Link at the end of the day so you want to you want to um to put your energy and your support behind a network which transcends any institution that's what secures you that's what makes it you know safe and and economically sound although you know what really quick while we're on that topic if you run a business there's no better sound than hearing and if you want to hear a bunch more then it's time to get started with our sponsor Shopify for those una aware Shopify is the global e-commerce platform that's already helped transform millions of businesses worldwide for example Shopify is an endless list of Integrations thirdparty apps and flexible templates to help customize your online store exactly the way you want to and what really sets Shopify apart from their competitors is their ability to turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkouts that's 36% better on average than other leading e-commerce platforms plus Shopify actually powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States supporting Brands like alirts rothy and Brooklyn and in over 175 countries in fact 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famous examples Alexander the Great went off and and waged 200 Wars murdered millions of people and managed uh to fight and drink himself to death by the age of 33 and within a few hours of his death his Empire broke up and he just left you know everyone that followed him ended up dead everyone in front of him ended up dead it was like a massive shambles and yet he's the great Julius Caesar got stabbed in the back by all of his best friends and The Human Condition is you know most commonly it's an alpha male in their 20s or 30s and they feel like they were put on Earth to make a difference and to fix things uh but generally it's just someone feels like they have to actually improve something or make a or or fix something or or uh correct right or wrong or Revenge their their family or their friends or something like that and so they go off and and they wage some political initiative they can't afford or they fight a war and then they fight another War take Napoleon like I'm born in Corsica I live through the French Civil War and it's actually uh success would be not getting murdered Right double success is actually being being affluent into the war triple success is they put you in charge of the entire country does he stop it's like no I need to be in charge of Spain I need to be in charge of Italy I need to be in charge of Germany and then after I'm done with all that why not just invade Russia what is a corsan that Liv through the French Revolution doing deciding to like bring civilization to all of Russia that doesn't work out well right and then and somewhere along the line oh yeah I think I'll invade Egypt that doesn't work out well either uh so I I think the human condition is is people are always working to to expand their influence and they reach very aggressively and you know and and on the other hand you have examples Frederick the great he was supposed to be the philosopher king and voler loved him because Frederick was the genius cultured sophisticated well-educated King that understood The Perils of warfare but in his Reign he eventually started a war with and he started the war with the excuse that I need to fight this war because otherwise they'll get powerful and start a war with me later I don't know it's The Human Condition is it's no one will no one will ever just leave it well enough alone they always have to expand you know you know that Louis the 14th created Versailles I don't you know I don't know if you know that he starved a good portion of the French people you know fighting his Wars and creating Versailles and he impoverished his entire nation collapsed his economy so you think Bitcoin is the first thing that actually combats The Human Condition effectively there are hundreds of challenges that the human race has pride and ego I did it for my son I did it for my family I did it for my God I did it because I was sent to do it I did it because I was interested I did it was because it was cool there are all these things uh people all have these good ideas and and and these intents that end up going horribly arai and there's million examples of them I don't think that's going away um so I don't think Bitcoin fixes that it won't stop Wars it won't stop governments from collapsing it won't it won't stop Bad Medicine it won't stop bad ideology it won't stop criminal Behavior so it's not the solution to that it's just a solution to bad money so money is yeah maybe uh what we ought to do is just focus upon what what is the role of of money it's like you have you you did a lot of work and now you want to save up your money so that sometime in the next 10 20 30 40 years you'll be able to afford to live so you're storing economic energy um you could think of money as economic energy just like you could think of fat as organic energy you eat a lot you store fat and now if you have to go without food for 2 three four weeks you're not going to starve to death if you can't form fat cells you're type 1 diabetic a type one diabetic can't store organic energy and they dwindle and they will starve to death it's a it's a just horrific disease being able to store fat isn't a bad thing we think it's a bad thing but actually for most of human history right the number one reason you died is you starve to death so so it seems pretty intelligent that when you get excess uh excess energy you can store it and hold it for a while now let's imagine a person as an economic diabetic where do you see that uh in um in a society where the currency is collapsing and hyperinflation the Yar Republic famous example so you work I pay you know in Zimbabwe they had it in Venezuela they had it in Nigeria they're getting it right now you work I give you $100 and the $100 buys you four meals but then in three months it buys you one meal and then in 12 months it buys you one soda and in 24 months it buys you nothing okay so now you got a problem you can't store economic energy so what happens when when the currency dies or the money dies well the society gets ripped back to Stone Age barter what it means is you can't you can't save anything and also it means that the unit of account breaks down so you can't trade it's like okay you have you have bullets and I have soap how many bars of soap for bullets and how do you figure that out give me a chicken and I'll give you you know a bottle of water things get very complicated the civilization just gets ripped back to Stone Age bar when that happens all the factories break down like IM imagine trying to trade with your friend for Dentistry work you know you just be your own dentist try that one be your own doctor take out your appendix so the money breaks down the civilization breaks down that's the danger but normally in most modern societies the money doesn't break down as a medium of Exchange it breaks down as a store of value so that means that yeah you can store money for 12 to 36 months or maybe up to 10 years in the dollar you can't store it for a lifetime so if if uh you have some money you can't just store the money if you want to keep your economic energy you have to gamble it or invest it you have to speculate with it or you know you worked your entire life you have a certain amount of retirement and now if you store it in the bank it'll be worth nothing so you have to go and invest it in the stock market but if you pick wrong you lose it so we basically force uh we force people to be gamblers speculators or hedge fund managers if the money's broken and the money is broken so what is the significance of Bitcoin well let me say it a different way just you just take your money take everything you earn you buy Bitcoin and you wait and it goes up 20 to 40% a year forever or you take your money and you invest it in a bank account and you get 3% after tax and everything goes up 10 to 15% a year in price and you just get poor and poorer or what are you g to do buy GameStop at the right time are you you know buy a building run an Airbnb I force you to go and for forcing you to be a hedge fund manager is horrifically inefficient for the society it's just as inefficient as saying okay be your own dentist and doctor right I if the if the medical system was broken and you have to be your own doctor it's not good for society what happens people die 20 years early is what happens so when you have to be your own Banker or be your own hedge fund manager what happens is you just get poor or you lose faith in the in the future if I told you your money was going to be worthless in 36 months what would you do with it you would spend it what if I told you your money's going to be worthless next Monday you would go out this weekend make a decadence weekend and you would just blow it all you would buy anything things you don't need it's like if it's for sale I'm just buying it so Bitcoin actually solves the problem by saying well what if you just had a money that the government couldn't debase the bank couldn't steal that would last for forever okay it profoundly changes incentives because now a corporation instead of buying back its stock or instead of dividing out dividing out its cash flows would just keep the money and the money would go up in value 20 30% a year so so that's what micro strategy did like what's our secret right we're just holding the money and it's an appreciating asset let me try to make one more analogy that might help it's like you're an athlete your blood is is carrying oxygen oxygen is energy if you're an athlete you need the oxygen to circulate and you need the blood so before your race I show up and I say well conventional wisdom is I need to bleed you now so I take a bunch of your blood and now you run the race and then next week before the game I show up and I bleed you again and what if I just bleed you every week what if I bleed you every day are you as good an athlete if you're not sure about this try this experiment but think any athlete will tell you no you know the goal is to have as many red blood cells and as much oxygen in your bloodstream when you compete not to bleed the blood out of your system so when the government is is telling you you should use a currency the currency is the blood of your corporation or your family or your civilization when I'm inflating the currency I'm bleeding the civilization and in the extreme if you do this thought experiment if uh if I just double the currency Supply in a Banana Republic and your company had whatever a a million dollars worth of currency but I double it and now it only buys half as much and I double it again and it buys half as much again you see you see it's yeah now now take it back to micro strategy in 2020 we were we had 2,000 people working as hard as they could work to generate $75 million a year in cash flow and then we had $500 million of actual assets and then the government was increasing the currency Supply by 20% a year at 15% a year if they increase the currency Supply at 15% a year then you're losing $75 million of capital value of wealth every year for the 75 million you're you're winning so at the 15% inflation rate of the money Supply 2,000 people are working as hard as they can doing 100,000 things right for an entire year to stand still and if I crank the inflation rate up to 30% I tilt the playing field such that you're running as hard as you can and you're falling backwards so another way to say it is everything you do is worthless your time is worthless your life is worthless you're failing right and then one more analogy I put you in a rowboat and you row 7 miles an hour and the wind starts blowing the opposite direction or the current is blowing the opposite direction and you're actually rowing as hard as you can and you're not moving at all and then the current picks up and you're rowing as hard as you can and you're going backwards but but there's this point where you're rowing s miles an hour and the current 7 miles an hour and then you and you're in the middle of the Atlantic and you horrifically realize you're going to die because you're not getting across right you're not going to make it and so what do you do you reach down you pull up the sail you can't row you you can't row against current you put up the sale you catch the wind and let the wind blow you you're going to have to change the way you do work in an inflationary currency right you probably can't outwork inflation no matter how hard you work unless you can grow your revenues if you ask your boss for a raise 20% a year and you get it every single year then yeah maybe you can outrun inflation but most people won't be able to do that why does it seem like older people are so resist to the idea why they're so resistant to change and what do you say to Warren Buffett who doesn't like it because he says it doesn't produce anything I mean Warren Buffett never invested in Microsoft you know he did Apple yeah know a guy that worked for him did Apple and you know what happened he made more money off of that proxy investment in apple than everything else he did his entire life everything he did his entire life and so the truth is the only the reason Berkshire hathway isn't the failure now is because he allowed someone that worked for him to invest in a in a big Tech idea right why the senior people don't accept things well it's because generally once you get past your 40s you stop exp you stop uh embracing new technologies why remember what Harvey said yeah well how many people over the age of 40 will spend a 100 hours to master a totally new idea first of all they they have a you have less uh interest in it second you have less incentive you don't need to if if you're already wealthy like Warren Buffett is wealthy he's not going to be he's not going to be UNR at that stage in your life you're successful you're wealthy you've already married or not you've already made a name for yourself you've got nothing to prove you know Meanwhile your eyesight is failing your motor skills are in your attention span is flagging and your interests have shifted to your children your grandchildren or or something else when you're uh 22 you have everything to prove you've got no money no Fame you know you're in search of Fame and Fortune right you're your athletic Peak you know you're your hormonal Peak you know you're able to go harder run harder you're you're an athlete right you're an intellectual athlete uh you're a physical athlete and you have men less to lose and a lot to gain MH right so I mean it's just human nature that um the youth are going to embrace new ideas a because they can B because they need to you're not you're not getting ahead by doing what someone did 30 years ago already done it why were you different because it seems like you were also at the same place where you were wealthy I don't think you had anything to prove you had you had a great company no actually um the first time I heard about Bitcoin is 2013 and I was invested in apple making a lot of money on big Tech Investments and I was busy running my company and it was just the third thing an oddity a distraction I thought it's interesting it'll probably get banned I you know famously one of my tweets is I think it'll go the way of online gambling but I didn't need it and I was busy with something else so if you have other priorities and you don't think you need it you'll generally be dismissive and then you'll just you know did you did I spend a 100 hours but by the way was it was much it was embryonic then too it was probably 100x is R risky but in 2020 as I said the choice was a fast death or a slow death for my company so why did coming back to Thomas cun why do people Embrace new ideas they die or a war 2020 there's a war I mean there's a war on Co there's a war on Capital when you set the interest rates to zero that's like trying to make time flow backwards right that's literally a if someone said oh you have real estate you're a real estate investor um I'm just going to set the rents on your real estate to zero and throw you in jail if you attempt to charge rent because the people need to not pay rent did that happen yeah that actually happened happened in 2020 people said you know people aren't paying rent so if you're if you're um if you're owning a building and the political system said your building is you know you can't pay rent then all of a sudden you know your model gets broken you better come up with a new idea if you own a bunch of capital and the government says we're paying you zero Well's say you have a million in the bank and the government says we're actually going to charge 1% interest we're going to take 1% of your money in the bank what are you going to do take your money out of the bank maybe MH right so what inspired you you know a war a disruptive uh disturbance in the force of the universe but now what set you apart versus the other people who would simply say I'm going to retire this is a great point where I could step back and just take it easy well that was my choice some people did just retire yeah um again our company was very unique uh and I as I said like I made a choice fast death slow death or take a risk um the fast death would have been retirement just sell the company and disappear right I guess I guess um Everybody reacted to covid and lockdowns differently and I looked and I said well there's hundred things in the world I don't agree with but I'm not going to be able to change those but this thing I can change I mean I can do this thing I guess part of it is when when when you're actually faced with you know this crisis situation or this this world turned upside down is there something you can do and so if there is then you do it so we had a company I'm the controlling shareholder of the company so one advantage we had is I have the majority of the voting shares the second Advantage we had is we had no debt the third Advantage we had is we had 500 million in cash right and the fourth Advantage we had is I had enough background in technology uh and in finance to recognize the opportunity that was Bitcoin and even having said all that we still I still basically offered I paid $250 million for the ability to take the bet it's like I offered to buy out all of my other shareholders at a loss to myself at a profit to them so that I could bet on bitcoin and I did it because because I thought it was the right thing to do and the alternative was just to roll up shop and and go away and give up on life and I guess I wasn't ready to give up on life how do you see the regulatory environment evolving for cryptocurrency and do you anticipate any changes well um a week ago I would have said it's it's uh grudgingly Pro Bitcoin and the rest of crypto is highly uncertain until after the election ction but there's a massive political shift just this weekend and this week I would say uh what we have is a political environment which is pro- crypto very Pro Bitcoin the Republican party has gone from from crypto friendly to crypto passionate and the Democratic party has been to crypto has gone from crypto unfriendly to crypto moderate you know you know so so one one part's moderately uh moderately supportive and the you know and the other party is passionately supportive so the entire Overton window has just shifted and I think that that's very auspicious for the asset class what that means is that crypto is an asset class it's a political a political movement that's too powerful for anybody to stop you know there's no politician is going to win any votes by being anti- crypto and probably they'll lose elections by being anti- crypto and I I think that's becoming pretty clear there's a lot of things uh that would be helpful to bitcoin like banking custody of Bitcoin like the ability to trade options on top of Bitcoin spot ETFs like the ability to do cash or inine creates a Bitcoin ETFs and like institutional adoption of Bitcoin I think all of that will go forward now and I think that there's a lot of interesting ideas in the crypto space like stable coins like crypto exchanges 247 trading crypto tokens crypto Securities crypto art nfts I think that uh that there'll be a lot of enthusiasm to put together a regulatory framework and there'll be a lot of back and forth but I think I think at this point we will arrive at a digital assets framework that allows people to much more enthusiastically much more aggressively uh build crypto related projects who do you think should regulate crypto do you think that should be its own division do you think it should be the government or do you think that should be the SEC seems like they're getting somewhat involved I think ultimately Congress will make that decision but if you break down the asset classes in in crypto you have digital Commodities an asset without an issuer reasonably decentralized no entity can control it that'll probably float to the Commodities and Futures exchange then you have digital currency like tether like Circle a stable coin it's a crypto token that represents a dollar or a Euro or a Yen it's hard to imagine that the banking Regulators will give up control over that they're not going to want a a shadow Bank to be able to move hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of Dollars around without some banking oversight so I would I would suspect some the FDIC or treasury or some banking regulatory organization and finson will be involved looking at digital currencies there's an aspect of digital currencies that also makes them sort of security like because whoever sold the hundred billion dollars of digital currency invested it and maybe they have the money and maybe they don't have the money right so if I sell you a billion dollars of digital currency and I take your money and I steal it okay well that's a problem right so it's so you kind of look like a bank right and so I expect probably banking Regulators will probably get involved there then there's a third aspect um uh digital um Securities a token that's being launched by an entrepreneur or by a company and there's you know or maybe Tom Brady coin or something and if Tom Brady launches Tom Brady coin obviously Tom Brady has a lot of influence over the value of Tom Brady coin and if Tom Brady says he's going to issue 10 million and issues a 100 million then you know that's kind of a Securities violation right so I think that probably at that point there'll be somebody like a Securities regulator it'll either be there or maybe it'll go to Consumer Protection Agency like if Tom Brady sold you a million concert or maybe Katie Perry sold you a million concert tickets but then she canceled the concert and she didn't actually give you the money back like who would you complain to right so I feel like probably there'll be some consumer protection agency that make get involved in in in digital tokens that are issued by companies and celebrities um and then if there's digital Securities the Securities and Exchange Commission will get involved I mean the big question really isn't it isn't um can I issue a token without disclosures and trade on a crypto exchange the bigger question is why can't you trade Apple stock on a crypto exchange like here's a company Apple everybody trusts you've got all the disclosures why can't I self- custody Apple stock on my mobile phone why can't I uh send a share of Apple stock from me to you on Saturday why can't I sell the Apple stock on Saturday night right that that's an interesting question right uh but it's it's totally ethical it's totally Progressive why wouldn't you want to be able to do that and right now you can't think you can in the future because that's an interesting concept if I uh want to transfer you my stock you're right I mean it's I don't think you can so see the the good ideas the progressive ideas in the crypto universe and digital asset spacer the idea of self- custody you know ability to transfer peer-to-peer ability to trade 247 365 ability to write a program that will programmatically trade Apple stock on Saturday afternoon while I'm or Sunday night while I'm sleeping right these are all very Progressive ideas right they um they all that innovation has been shut down in the traditional Finance market for 40 years there's no API to trade stocks on the NASDAQ you know like that that a entrepreneur in South Africa can write against on an Android phone right so coming back to your question I think ultimately the question of what are the Dig what's the digital assets frame work is uh a legislative one and that'll be worked out between the House and Senate and and the administration I think that the question of which agency should regulate it well it's really a question of what's the nature of the asset is it a Katy Perry token is it a security is it a commodity is it a currency and then there'll be a question of well you know who regulates the exchanges you know will it be the commodities Futures exchange or will it be the SEC or will it be somebody else you know and and will the exchangers be able to trade all these different asset classes the status quo or or or the conventional view of the administration last week was the only thing that a digital exchange can trade is Bitcoin and they wanted them to stop trading everything else well that's that's going to change right that's changing this week that's and so when you have the digital assets frame come out they're going to Define all these things and they're going to define the Safe Harbor and then they're probably going to Define who regulates what and there's going to be a a political back and forth I think that um what's good for the world and what's good for America and what's good for the industry is you know a clear digital assets framework that allows people to pretty aggressively develop digital art digital tokens digital Securities digital Commodities digital exchanges and then all of the uh mobile software noal software internet networking software and Bot software that actually that actually creates value from these things that would be good for the world it would expand it would grow the industry from two trillion to 100 trillion pretty pretty quickly it would create a lot of efficiency in the civilization and empowerment but you know I was of the opinion that uh all the prediction markets and all the you know like remember trade sports or 10 years ago people can can bet on the outcome of anything I thought that was a really good idea and the politicians shut it down there's like online poker or online gambling they did shut down a lot of online gambling and even today they regulated so what's the best idea isn't necessarily what the political system will support what you could say optimistically though is there seems to be a lot more consensus to do something and I think that the the likelihood as of two three weeks ago was nothing was going to happen until after the next election now I think the likelihood is something will happen before the ne before the next election or or before the next Administration and then uh whether we like maybe we're like two on the dial of one to 10 of crypto adoption we're like a two like grudging Bitcoin and everything else under question mark and I think we'll get to a four five by the next election and then probably if you have a very Progressive Administration they'll dial it up from 5 till 7 or 5 to 8 and if we have a more con a more regressive skeptical Administration maybe it'll get to four or five and maybe it'll creep to six over four years so what do you say to the people who feel like they're too late or they see the price at 70,000 and they feel like they've missed the boat it depends on what it is I mean the truth is the only thing I advocate is if you have a portion of your portfolio that you don't if you have money you don't need for four years and you want to hold it for more than four years for between four years in the rest of your life that's your long-term Investment Portfolio then you take a portion of that and you buy Bitcoin which is digital property you know if you if you had if you want a diversified portfolio I would say you buy some rental real estate or some real estate you're going to hold as a store of value maybe you H buy a Market Basket of high quality stocks that you think will last for decade or decades or you buy the andp index and and then uh you buy collectible items trophy assets you want to hold your entire life right that's normally what goes in that basket of long-term assets I think the the Apex property of the human race is Bitcoin Bitcoin is Manhattan and cyberspace if you think about investing in Manhattan as a good metaphor the question is is it too late to invest in Manhattan well was it too late in 1680 no was it too late in 1776 no was it too late in in 1865 no was it too late in 1914 no 1945 no 1976 no 2000 no what is the story of and and why is that by the way it's because Manhattan's built on an island there's a limited amount of land it's the Nexus the commercial the commercial center of the North American Trade Network or the Western Trade Network everybody with money and power wants to go through or needs to go through Manhattan at some point in time that's been the case for hundreds of years everyone that ever bought Real Estate in Manhattan bought it from someone that paid less for it than they're currently buying it for right and why does it keep going going up it keeps going up because we keep printing more currency right it's and so so scarce desirable assets go up forever and in this case is uh is Bitcoin safer investment than Manhattan I think so because Manhattan competes with Tokyo and London and Paris and Manhattan is just a physical City Bitcoin is is the center of the digital uh the center of digital Commerce or of the digital economy it's like the capital city it's the the Nexus point of the entire digital economy and it has appealed to everybody on Earth speaking every language you could think of it as a city that's 276 blocks high 276 blocks wide 276 blocks deep that is the energer cube root of 21 million and um when you're buying one Bitcoin you're buying just one of those blocks that's how many there's going to be for a hundred years a thousand years no one expects there to be any more and why is it a useful thing to buy because it passes the Bernard Arno test the Bernard Arno test says I have a lot of money what should I invest it in I should probably buy something that someone richer than me more cultured than me smarter than me will want to buy from me in 10 years so when you look at the things you own in your portfolio and you think will the smart money or the Glo will all of the Global Intelligent wealthy class will they want to buy that from me and if it's Picasso probably yes if it's 25 blocks in the middle of Miami Beach or 25 boxs in the middle of Manhattan probably yeah right if it's if it's uh the Magna Carta probably maybe it's a trophy asset in the civilization but Bitcoin is the most popular most well-known financial asset in the world that is an investment right I mean it's it's it's second to the dollar I suppose as a pure Financial thing everybody knows the dollar but the dollar is not going up in value measured in dollars so the dollar is only an investment asset for people in economies with hyperinflation if you went to 10,000 Rich families and you said how'd you get rich not by buying dollars how'd you get rich not by buying gold now that you are rich what are you going to buy dollars no gold no what are you gonna what are you gonna buy a sports team maybe right uh Leonardo da Vinci paintings maybe uh The Magnificent Seven stocks maybe a Bitcoin digital property maybe the one thing that's for sure they'll say is property I own I own buildings and property in London Paris Tokyo New York San Francisco LA Miami they're the ones that own the three acres on the beach in Palm Beach that's worth $250 million right now that's what they're buying and why because they know that everybody else with money in the world is going to be competing to buy that from them if they want to sell it and because it's scarce desirable now the the perfect Capital asset is something scarce desirable and portable durable maintainable right and what is that that's Bitcoin what what was that over the last 500 years maybe trophy art if you're a wealthy person and you're in the middle of a hyper inflating economy and in Argentina or Russia or Nigeria what do you want to what are you going to get out of the country with you you can't take the gold you can't take the building you can't take the company you can't take the land what can you take you're going to roll up your Picasso and you're going to fly out of the country hope you can smuggle it through custom how would you compare that with something like a board ape a board ape is Art okay and and so I'm not an art investor like the issue is the Millennials probably want the board AP more than they want the Picasso right right when you're buying into art right there's the question of the community the and cultural reference and there's uh there is very scarce desirable uh Japanese art that has no value maybe to a Russian and there scarce desirable Chinese art and scarce desirable Western European art and you know and and Modern Art and of course the people that love classic art hate Modern Art but people that love Modern Art don't want to own classical art so art is a a segmented Market of of assets and they Collectibles and they're all interesting but the point is there's a thousand of those markets and and so help me understand what happens if we go like 50 to 100 years in the future with Bitcoin if the valuable very simplified to be adopted by many people and it also seems like it's the world around it needs to keep failing for it to continue getting value so provided those are all true then it will continue to grow and people I'm guessing will continue to mine it sure even if it is yelds questions but let me break them down one at a time um the reason it's V Bitcoin is valuable is because if I gave you a billion dollars and dropped you in Nigeria and said buy anything you want anywhere in Africa but you have to hold it a hundred years there's not a single thing you would buy anywhere in Africa that you would prefer to have rather than a billion dollar of Bitcoin nothing there's nothing in the entire continent so the value from Bitcoin comes from the fact that there is nothing to buy in Cuba in Venezuela in Argentina in Africa that you can put away for a hundred years and you can put in your pocket or move anywhere on Earth so the appeal is global digital property rights or Global digital Capital the reason that that um Apple Works is because a billion people want an iPhone whether the world stinks whether the world is chaotic at war or not at War people still want a billion iPhones because the iPhone's a good idea and it's a better idea than a pad and paper a hundred years ago and the reason Bitcoin works is because I can put all my money on my phone and zap it at the speed of light and no one can steal it from me and and I get rich so the point is the getting rich and having freedom and having power you know in power is why will AI work because I can ask any question to my phone and it will answer that it's going to work whether the world is screwed up or not it's just that in a world that's screwed up and it's a life or death decision and you need to ask a question and get an answer in five minutes maybe it'll save your life yeah but it doesn't have to save your life it's just a good technical idea now go ahead you have a follow question how are you so convinced it's going to be going up in price 20 to 40% a year over the next let's say 10 to 20 years you have to buy something with price Supply in elasticity so what is the one thing on the earth that you can buy where they can't make more of I would say beachfront real estate would be one of them but also Bitcoin front real estate is the is the closest conventional idea to a scarce desirable asset that the politicians can't make more of what what is it the government can't print more of they can print more bonds they will issue trillions of dollars of bonds they could print more currency so don't buy that corporations can manufacture more Hershey's Bars and more Kellogg cereal and more you know Netflix can stream more videos MH right so anything a company can create more of and a factory you don't want to buy anything an AI can create yeah you know you want to buy you know art rights well if the AI can generate infinite free art personalized then those art those rights might not be worth anything so you don't want anything a robot can do you don't want anything an AI can create you don't want anything a manufacturer can create you don't want anything a politician can create you ask the question what's the thing that's least likely to be taxed or or expropriated seized from you okay and so bitcoin's interesting and beachfront property is interesting but beachfront property is it's illegal to buy it in certain countries in the UAE you couldn't buy it if you wanted to you have to be a member of the royal family to buy it that's actually a law in Florida the beachfront property comes with a 2% property tax so that means that you can buy it but you're going to have to come up with an equivalent amount of cash to pay the tax to keep it for 30 years but another way to say it is over 30 years or 20 years the state's just going to take it away from you so maybe you want to buy some floating property that doesn't have a 2% tax on it and the advantage of Bitcoin is maybe Bitcoin isn't property in Florida Bitcoin but you can buy beachfront property in Wyoming can't I guess you can't no right so how do you move your beachfront property to Wyoming tricky with Bitcoin you can actually move your Bitcoin from Florida to Wyoming and the worst case you could put it with a custodian in Singapore or Monaco or London right carry it with you so it's less likely to get a property tax if you own the best building in a country where there's a coup toah they're taking your building like look at every look at what happened to everybody that owned property in Cuba Castro took it all right and so you're you're asking the fundamental question why do I think Bitcoin will keep going up because every other investment is being deluded it's either being uh it's being mismanaged you know like you want to buy codak stock or Xerox stock how'd that work out for you right either your competitor destroys you the management team destroys you or it gets unionized what happened to you know if you buy a car company gets unionized and then it gets bankrupted by the union maybe that wasn't a good investment so companies have tariff risk Union risk competitive risk tax risk execution risk Nexus risk Alibaba was a good company but maybe they can't do business in the US right so did you want to put all your money into a company that'll get banned in the country you live in that's the challenge there all that stack of risks you can easily say that it adds up to about 7% per year if the return on the S&P index is 7% if I could get the risk to go away the return would be 14% And so that's what we call Equity risks and there's a bunch of them but if I go to property real estate maybe the real estate gets rank controlled maybe the real estate gets taxed maybe the tax increases maybe the real estate is struck by a tsunami maybe the real estate rusts maybe the the real estate has the neighborhood goes bad maybe people stopped coming to the city right you at the best real estate in this in a city that died because the industry died right maybe the country fails maybe the state fails right real estate in theory is scarce desirable but you know we can make more land half of Miami Beach is all just man-made half of Boston is man-made look at Emirates a lot of man-made stuff go to Monaco right now if there's not if if the value of your land goes up too high they just build out and they'll reclaim the ocean the entire airport in Hong Kong is made on reclaimed land so even land itself isn't truly scarce and of course ultimately there's there's plenty of real estate in the world I mean if you fly over the United States and you look down you'll notice that 98% of the country is not occupied land doesn't make a good treasury asset the ideal asset for a corporation or a wealthy person is is an asset which is uh liquid and fungible so I've got a certain amount of money and on Saturday afternoon if I need to raise cash is is there somebody somewhere in the world that will will create a market for the that I have to sell and and there is a market for Bitcoin on Saturday afternoon worldwide in fact it's the greatest Global Market there's not a market for your Ranch in Texas on Saturday afternoon how does it differ from the ETF because you're talking a lot about self- custody and having complete control over your assets with an ETF is that a reason against buying it or do you worry that an ETF might be at risk of someone else's management you should think of Bitcoin is like it's the granite underneath Manhattan and you can build a 10-story building a 100 story building an apartment building a townhouse you can build a park there's a lot of ways to use the granite so you're like well do you want to live in your own townhouse where you can walk out on the street or do you want to live in an apartment 35 floors up where you have to take the elevator the ETF is the 100 story building where you got to take the elevator you know what's the problem well you trust the building what's the benefit oh it's 10 times cheaper and easier to live there and maybe you can't afford you know to to buy the town house right now today I think there's 28 different active ETFs okay so there's ETFs in Hong Kong the Chinese government the Hong Kong government may not let you invest your funds in Bitcoin in fact they'll make crypto trading illegal but they'll let you buy the ETF how about the ETF that will come to China you'll be able to buy that and get Bitcoin and get the benefits economically of Bitcoin but you won't be able to buy the underlying Bitcoin and so what ETFs do or they meet the need for people that have uh stranded Capital that's locked up in a 401k you might have money in a 401k and you can either buy the S&P index or you can buy Bitcoin but Bitcoin will double the S&P index but you can't get your money out of the 401K maybe it's just it's impossible to get it out maybe you get tax on it the ETFs are securitized versions of Bitcoin they applications of Bitcoin that meet a certain need now why do the Chinese maybe they might want you to buy the ETF and not buy the underlying Bitcoin because the Chinese don't want Capital to flow out of their country they have Capital controls it's illegal for a Chinese citizen to move more than $50,000 a year out of China so you have $100 million in China your choice is lose it all inflate away on stupid bad Investments or buy a Bitcoin ETF in China and then double it every 3 years is that good for you yeah is it good for the Chinese Nation yeah it's actually good for the the nation and good for the investor okay well what' you do you trusted the custodian of the ETF that's the negative is it as good as owning the Bitcoin outright theoretically no because you've lost the ability to switch custodians and you have to trust a single count counter party but this falls in the category of you don't have a choice your choice is lose all your money or have a wrapped version of Bitcoin the wrong way to think of it is hey um I I self custody Bitcoin is this better the right way to think of it is 99.9% of the money in the world is not invested in Bitcoin bitcoin's a trillion out of a thousand trillion right so 99.9 % of the money is invested in something else how are how is that money going to flow into the ecosystem and um ETFs will be one of the solutions to actually uh pull that money into the ecosystems and and it's not about it's not about uh diminishing the value of Bitcoin it's about improving the value of your ETF right it's fixing the ETF right if there's hundreds of billions of dollarss invested in defective ETFs the ones on bitcoin are not defective anymore so in fact you're fixing that part of the economy and the money is Flowing this way in order for Bitcoin to continue increasing in value what things need to happen if I were to rephrase my question from earlier which would I'm assuming would be more people need to know about it the information surrounding Bitcoin all that context needs to be simplified and surrounding economy need to continue failing I would say it uh like this uh Bitcoin uh is succeeding it's succeeding faster than any any monetary economic idea in the history of the world that's gone from0 to $1.4 trillion doar in 15 years without any support from a company without marketing without anything so so it's growing it's going to continue to grow uh because of the falling drivers One driver is just education information spread like you said you know 10 million people can watch a YouTube video 20 30 years ago if I retired and I taught college and I taught a thousand students a semester and I did it for 20 years you know I might get to 40,000 people now you get that many a week you know while you're sleeping so uh information is going to spread and as people realize this is a safer better way to protect their wealth to store their life savings and to create wealth and as companies realize it you're going to see uh adoption by individuals by families by corporations by nation states by governments by institutional investors that just happened that that is happening right in front of our face we're watching it every day there's hundred million dollars or more flowing into the ecosystem so uh the second thing that's going to drive adoption is regulation and Regulatory clarity as um as Regulators like when the House of Representatives and the Senate vote Pro bit Pro crypto Pro Bitcoin and if the White House says we in favor that sending a signal to the establishment that traditionally is very conservative you know and people thought well it's tulip bulbs the the deniers they go away the Skeptics go the government's going to ban it well they go away because because if the government's embracing it then the deniers are out of consensus the Skeptics you are dismissed and now you're into the Traders well should I buy it should I sell it well that's a big deal to move from skeptic to Trader and then you get to investors and eventually of course you get to the maximalist that think it's an instrument of economic empowerment regulatory signals matter and we've got 28 spot Bitcoin ETFs active today they're active in on Australia in Hong Kong they're active in Europe they're active in South America they're active in America those things are marketing legitimizing and spreading and they're creating a channel an ETF is like a website like if you have um uh if you have a restaurant or a museum and you didn't have a website people have to call you on the phone to get information it's very inefficient and then when the web came along you create your website you know museum.com food.com I hit the website I see the menu I see the location I get directions I see the photos it you know maybe I order right now you can't really be a business without a website you know you need a website with ETFs what ETFs did is they said well it used to be you had to go to a mutual fund and you had it took you like six weeks to get kyc with the mutual fund and then you had to study it and then you had to wired them your money and then they invested it and if you wanted your money out you had to make a request and you had to wait 30 days and maybe give you your money back and you know it's very complicated and scary and takes a commitment and when the ETF came along it was like oh you want this you just punch in those four letters and hit buy or you change your mind hit sell and and who wired every Brokerage in the world every monitor in the world is that you type ibit you type fbtc there it is so having that ticker is like having the URL hope.com and it's like all you got to do is say it and everybody immediately is empowered so those ETFs they're spreading everywhere in the world and and you're seeing Financial infrastructure get created and the what's the impact of the on- wp well billions of dollars and then tens of billions of dollars then hundreds of billions of dollars flow companies like micro strategies when we when we adopt Bitcoin as a treasury asset we had none and then we had 250 million and then we raised 7 billion and then we bought and then we had 15 billion but then people will go and they will short our stock and they will buy five billion more so there might be 20 billion probably there's 20 billion do or something like that a Bitcoin that's that's actually locked down because one company what happens when the second company the third company the fourth company the fifth company so so corporate adoption as a treasury asset drives the price up adoption by individuals drives the price up a I do you know there's company Millennium they just announced they own $2 billion worth of spot Bitcoin ETFs that means that some the ETFs had to buy $2 billion worth of bitcoin right just one hedge fund they've got 64 billion dollar right as these hedge funds come in then they drive adoption so beyond that you got to keep in mind a technology and so take out cash app and look at it it's all about Bitcoin cash app is used by more than 50 million people and they sell $2.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin a quarter 10 billion worth of bitcoin a year or more via that phone when companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft when they build support for Bitcoin into their payment apps into their mobile phones into their operating systems that makes Bitcoin more compelling that'll drive demand that'll drive up the price and and by way all of those are just just natural things that the human race is going to do you mention a driver which is chaos chaos and and inflation in the world yes that's a driver too the more chaotic the society uh the less if I don't trust the currency I look for an alternative one if I don't trust the bank I look for an alternative one if you lived in Lebanon right now and you just watched 98 % of your wealth Frozen by the bank debased and then the bank wouldn't give you your money back for 20 years and I said well what do you think about the idea of buying property that's not in Lebanon that's not in the bank that keeps go up in value that you control and then no one could take away from you you would think wellow that's I wish I'd known that five years ago but like you would swear by it in those societies uh crypto adoption accelerates go to Brazil they had hyperinflation they remember they're very Pro crypto Pro Bitcoin and you look at people in Venezuela or Cuba what else are they supposed to do but I I think it's important to make uh two points one point is you don't need the world to burn for people to decide that having all their money on their iPhone is a good idea right the world doesn't have to burn for you to take photos with your iPhone Apple would be successful regardless just happens right that the more ch chotic certain parts of the world are the more there's a stampede of capital toward the thing that's safe everybody would come everybody would move to the United States with all their money if they could I'm just curious how much they can't how much leverage do you feel like is in the Bitcoin market and do you ever worry that maybe with the ETFs buying up Bitcoin driving up the price that there is a chance if people over leverage that could cause a flash crash most of the Leverage is in the crypto Market it's and all the other altcoins like those altcoins are 10x to 100 to one lever and so all the leverages in the altcoins and most of the volatility and Bitcoin comes from the altcoin leverage the Bitcoin Market is isn't nearly that leverage people that are buying Bitcoin or buying Bitcoin as a long-term store of value and so they're generally buying it to hold it forever but um there's a lot of speculation in the rest and you know you can't stop them it's a free unregulated market Market they do what they're going to do I'm not discouraged by uh the the volatility in Bitcoin because the volatility makes it the most interesting asset in the world and that's what draws all the capital and that's what draws all the Traders and that's what drives up the demand for it and that's what drives up the price so in fact uh the volatility is a virtue on Saturday night if you think there's a war you're going to dump what you can sell which is Bitcoin but when you realize there isn't a war you're going to buy back in and there's going to be massive trading and people are people that understand it are going to say hey that's part of the asset class just growing and getting more powerful and people that are afraid of volatility will run from it but you know Bitcoin bitcoin's got a higher sharp ratio it's got a you know and it's got a higher return it's like do you want to 5x your money and be in a volatile way or do you want to lose all your money in a non-volatile fashion or do you wanted just one extra money in a normal volatile fashion and and that's that's uh an issue of adoption or education but coming back to longterm longterm what what happens is this is an idea whose time has come it's good technology so every technology investor and every technology executive is going to recognize that it makes their company better it makes their offering their their device or their service more compelling it's good economics which means that you inject it into your mutual fund or into your fixed income fund or you injected into your ETF right you know Larry fank runs1 trillion doll of assets on television the other day he said our Bitcoin ETF is the most successful ETF in the history of the marketplace okay so you know people that might not have a different opinion say this is good business why wouldn't it be good business because it's the highest quality asset right um and it's it's good ethics you're giving property rights and freedom to 8 billion people what else does it so it's got a strong ideological drive and back to this the point that I was making is if you live in a in Cuba or Africa in a coup or you live in a hyper inflating economy in Russia or in South America if you could you would take all your property all your money all your family you'd pick up you move to America but you can't you can't move your proper from from hyper inflation collapse to America and you can't move your family there's there there are limits to to immigration and there there are practical limits the next best thing is you teleport your money into cyberspace which is almost better than moving it to America I'm I'm moving it into cyberspace outside of the reach and outside of the risk zone of the physical world and the political world and the economic world that that's the appeal of Bitcoin right now now you asked one more question about Miners and I didn't address it but I probably should Bitcoin secure because it has this massive Diversified decentralized network of Bitcoin uh security data centers which we call miners but they're really driving up massive hash rate to secure the network they are uh subsidized by uh a Bitcoin block reward and they're also subsidized by transaction fees the block rewards for the most part run out after the first 30 years of the network you know between 2009 and you know in [Music] 2035 we will have mined 99% of the Bitcoin by 2035 so that's running down but the transaction fees will grow and are growing over that period because there's a scarce amount of block space you can maybe process 30,000 transactions an hour and if you want to move your money or you want to do that transaction that's a limit you have to put a bid to get your transaction in the next block people are going to bid high if I want to move a billion dollars I'll bid a lot of money if I need the transaction to take place I'll bid it up the more people in the network the more demand for that transaction ban with um what would you pay to uh to sell $10 million worth of real estate in New York City today what you might pay a million dollars you might pay a million dollars in transaction fees the transaction fee economy works just fine for Real Estate right there's no block reward for real estate people don't just get a bunch of free real estate every 10 minutes for being in the real estate business they all work on the basis of a commission the same is true in the financial markets so there'll be commissions and fees to trade there's a very limited amount of transaction space the the fee will go from a few dollars a transaction to $30 a transaction to $300 a transaction to 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 and and that being the case there's no reason to think the mining ever stops it will be more efficient as of like in a world right now I guess you have a trillion doll asset class and the Bitcoin miners get paid 10 billion a year so the cost for the security right 10 billion a year is is like 1% right the fees will Trend to be less than that and so that that 1% security cost will probably become half a percent a third of a percent a quarter of a percent a tenth of a percent but there's no reason why the revenues can't go up while uh the value that's uh that's protected goes up and the incentive is always going to be to run the equipment even if uh the transaction fees aren't high once you've invested $100 million in Bitcoin mining equipment it's a sunk cost you can't repurpose it to anything else if your electricity is free and if you have $100 million of equipment then it doesn't matter whether you make a million a year 10 million a year 100 million a year you would run it for a million a year you would run it at a 99% lower price because a million a year is still better than nothing A year the electricity is worth nothing to you a third of all the electricity in the world is valueless it's it's wasted stranded we've got too much like you have a dam nobody wants to buy electricity from the dam the water just flows over the dam right or you can mine Bitcoin so the the the the genius of the network is everybody that gets into Bitcoin mining does a one-way trade you take a billion dollars you invest it in Bitcoin mining you can't get your money out you can go bankrupt the equity holder can go bankrupt then the Creditor gets the Bitcoin mining the credit the debt holder can go bankrupt then the electricity company the power company gets the mine the power company can go bankrupt the nation state The Sovereign that owns the power company will own it if you notice electricity companies never go bankrupt Maybe they're owned by the state or they're owned by the country but people decide they want electricity and they'll keep running them there's no way to turn them off and that's why even in a crypto winner or bare Market the hash rate just keeps going up it's a it's a one-way silicon ratchet and it's like got an 8 to 10 year natural frequency it's like 8 years after the business became awful my equipment starts burning out but you see even if the equipment burns out like people bought they would buy Bitcoin mining rigs for $10,000 at the height of the bull market and then the market price crash and then they're buying the same rig for $1,500 so the price of the equipment will compress by 90% the price of electricity will go to zero How does it go to zero everybody that's just mining on expensive electricity goes out of business so when they go out of business where does their equipment go it migrates to the next buyer who's the buyer of Last Resort someone that has free Power there are actually places where there's negative where the power is uh negative cost where people will pay you to take the electricity you know that that happens on um solar and wind grids where uh the sun is shining the wind is blowing and we're going to burn out the grid unless you take the power wow right you see yeah you know and it happens if I'm flaring methane gas or if I'm flaring natural gas the regulator says to you if you don't actually use this if you don't cap the flare and use this then you have to write off and close in the well and then you take a $100 million write off there's always going to be people that are going to want to mine Bitcoin and they will there will always be a market for Bitcoin equipment that's used and you you know you want to be a doomsday or well okay 10 years later all the Bitcoin mining rigs all burn out what happens well what happens is the big semiconductor manufacturers like bitm already have the engineering specs they will sell this equipment at a at a variable margin of 3% right you know what does it cost for a 386 chip you know or what does it cost for for 30 year old computer right at some point you manufacture it for 5% of the original cost it gets insanely cheap like they put they put computer chips and greeting cards now right MH and so you're working your way down this manufacturing curve and this Moors law it's just like the truth is guns are cheap they're too cheap right you could buy a for $100 right that that works what you have here is a network defended by technology and the technology is a one-way function and the hardware is one-way investment you can't unknow how to you know how to set off an explosive you can't unknow how to build an Asic but now that you know how to manufacture it and now that you own it what can you do with it there's only one thing you can do with it the only thing you can do with it is to is provide security for Bitcoin so so it's a quite elegant engineering design that I entice so many Engineers to invest so much money to Simply defend my economic rights against those who would steal from me do you think that the government would just forgo control of the economy I feel like I wouldn't think that the United States would would do that if Bitcoin got to the point of being used as a currency and being traded and kind of you know it's not traceable it can't be controlled yeah it's a good a good has only ever increased their control over time so I think the important point there is it's not a currency like um a a currency properly defined would be a medium of exchange that is deemed legal tender by the nation state so if uh if I give you 15 bucks you know for three cups of coffee it's it's tax-free it's a tax-free exchange if I give you $15 of Bitcoin for that coffee and if I bought the Bitcoin uh a year ago for $5 I just generated a $10 capital gain and I owe $3 to the government in tax so in fact for me to pay you in Bitcoin cost me $18 not $ 15 and I generate 87 million accounting transactions which will will break your brain so um as a practical matter currencies will be are established by nation states and when a nation state deems the asset to be legal tender they give a corporation or an individual the right to trade it tax-free and that's a pretty big advantage that's a big enough advantage that no company in the United United States will ever like like no company will ever trade Bitcoin uh highp speeed to pay things or to pay bills because with normal volatility you can show mathematically that everything costs 20% more if you trade it and it's not legal tender you see so nobody's stupid right just why would you pay 20% more for everything you buy and accept 20% less for everything you sell right so it's not a currency and if you think of it as a currency you invite all sorts of concerns and risk like it doesn't fit with the accounting systems you know the only way to trade as a currency is not pay your taxes and not admit it but then now you're a tax evader right so so that takes you to a a difficult place if you just say it's Capital right money uh medium Exchange store value well the store value element of money is capital capital preservation I'm keeping my it's it's my savings account I'm going to hold for 30 years currency checking account I'm going to spend in this this month right so if you think about it as capital then or as property I bought a building did you intend to use it to buy coffee tomorrow with no you bought a building why why'd you buy it because you wanted to store your Capital you thought it would double in value in 10 years that's why you bought the bill it's investment so when you think of it as property or think of it as Capital then all of those concerns disappear now if you look out at the future um companies as long as they exist will issue Equity if apple and Facebook and Google exist they're going to issue Equity Equity will not go away is it an investment at a certain price you know if you can buy the stock and it has a 22% dividend yield it's good investment if it's too high it's a bad investment so there's a there's a natural market clearing price where where Equity is an investment asset how about property people buy uh real estate airbnbs buildings as an investment is it a good investment if it has a 15% or 10% rent yield and it's going up 10% a year in value and it's a good desirable place then it's good investment if the rent pays 2% you know after tax and it's in a crappy place and it's not going to be value it's a bad investment so real estate is a good or bad investment so property will will stay here the the city of New York uh uh city of London or whatever they will issue bonds as long as your municipalities and states and they can issue uh bonds and they can borrow money or countries they will issue bonds will you see sovereign debt Municipal debt State debt sure you will is it a good investment not normally but credit is not normally a good investment if it paid 10 15% interest and if the currency wasn't collapsing then it might be but if it pays 10% interest and the currency is collapsing at 20% a year it's not a good investment but will they do it yeah and who will buy it you know the governments will buy it froms you know central banks will buy their own bonds institutional investors regulated Banks regulated Banks regulated corporations the state power company they will buy municipal bonds because they're required to by their Charter and so that will circulate countries the United States will issue the dollar China will issue the CNY the Euro will issue the Euro how long will that go on until the nation states collapse where does it collapse well you know half the countries in Africa don't have a currency they use the CFA um the colonial Frank right they literally don't have a functioning currency their own you know and El Salvador doesn't have a currency so those countries will they will either dollarize or they will use the CNY or they'll use the EU the Euro or they'll use the CFA and um and so what where does Bitcoin sit in all of this it's an asset in a portfolio it's better Pro it's Global property everybody else doesn't have to fail for Bitcoin to succeed right when we're when we're preaching Bitcoin going to 100 trillion or 200 trillion that doesn't mean you might not own a building is my building a is my you know beachfront property in Palm Beach a bad investment well not necessarily but there are certain assets that are quote unquote monetized that is people buy the asset just as a store of value over and above the utility value gold is an example people that are buying gold as a store of value probably are you know 70 80% of the value of gold is monetary value and and the last part is utility value one could think that over time Bitcoin will demonetize gold uh there is this there's a scandal in Canada where people uh the Chinese were coming well the the the narrative was the Chinese are coming into Canada buying up all of our apartments and all of our houses and driving the price of housing up well I mean maybe also the Canadian government was printing a lot of money driving up the price of housing too and maybe corporations were buying a property because that was the best way for them to invest their shareholder Capital because they had a lot of money the problem with that is that the houses you know tripled in value but the wages of the people that to live in the houses don't triple and so if you triple the price of the house and if you double the interest rate then the middle class working class person can't buy a house that's an example of monetizing a useful asset to the detriment of the society what should happen is the people that were buying the houses as a store of value should sell that real estate buy Bitcoin with it the price of the houses will become more affordable and then you know 20 something thing starting their career can buy a house instead of living with their parents that the world is rationalizing when people don't irrationally buy Assets in order to avoid losing their money right in the extreme if I tell you all your money is worthless next Monday you Stampede to buy anything you can buy and you monetize soap and you monetize toilet paper and you moneti you see where I'm going with this it's like like when I panic you you I anything because you don't want to be holding worthless paper better to own food yeah you know where do you get all of your knowledge from are there websites that you look at are you drawing from personal experience is it mentors there's a lot of information that circulates on the internet I mean so some comes from X Twitter some comes from YouTube there's a lot of depth in in YouTube a lot comes from Reading you know read the story of Civilization by Durant read uh history of economic thought by Murray rothbard read you know there you there's infinite books you can download There's audio books and you know you can listen to them while you're running walking exercising and the like I would say uh it's that combination of podcast books you know inative uh informative stuff on the internet on YouTube and then the the realtime stream coming off of X that I get most of my information from like what podcast well you know like Lex fredman do you know he just does these really in-depth interviews that's a good a good source you know all the Bitcoin podcast they will touch on economic history protocol history current events you know when you hear when you hear people talking about Bitcoin is useful as a lens because if you hear someone from Argentina describing what it means to them then you get uh the conditions on the ground in Argentina from an economic a practical economic perspective it focuses you right and when you hear someone talking about what what it means in in Iran or you look at you know what's going on in China what's going on in Russia what's going on in Europe or what's going on in Iceland or what's going on in Canada or Australia right what you've got is a crowdsourcing of macroeconomic information you're not hearing it from the talking heads on cable television I mean another source really is you know financial news CN CNN Bloomberg CNBC all these things but those conventional news sources and you know you know and you know the New York Times The Wall Street Journal etc those conventional sources they tend to filter the information in a conventional fashion so there'll be a big debate about the unemployment number coming in 0.1% high and is at 3.2 or 3.1% this month but really 40% of the people don't have a job and maybe 70% of the people in the world don't have a job that they can sustain them but the debate will be over the 0.1% on the faux metric and it doesn't really even matter so the conventional channels are useful because they tell you what conventional thinking is it's good to know what what the conventional traditional institutions are thinking but you have to go think for self and if you want to understand for example what's going on in the crypto economy like you know fit21 is a bill that passed by a by a an avalanche a landslide a day ago in the house it's 484 pages long you can go click on it and download the PDF and start reading so I think listening to Congressional testimony which is now available you know and and uh you know Gary gendler's the chair of the SEC he taught a class at MIT the class is online so I went and I took the class I was I was a few years late but luckily nothing ever dies on the internet so if you listen to 24 hours of lectures that date back to 2018 by the person that runs the SEC today and you listen to every word and then you read every word and every utterance and then you listen to all the Congressional testimony and then you read all the bills and then you talk to 100 people in the industry and then you listen to a thousand podcasts you know and and and if you have a laser-like focus then you can synthesize where do you have the time for that is this all you do and how do you have a laser-like focus do you think that you've learned that or do you think you were just kind of born with that this is just a um an exercise in humility there's a hundred things in the world that we could talk about that I might have an opinion on and there's someone in the world that's passionate about that thing you know all hundred things there's someone that's very passionate about diet or medicine or Dentistry or politics in the UK or soccer or the future of women's basketball or you know fill in the blank I mean there's people that are passionate but what I've come to conclude is in life you're lucky if uh if you can gather enough information to form a meaningful opinion on one thing and to be useful in one area right if you want to be the domain expert right so I feel like laser like Focus laser is the right metaphor I have a flashlight it'll go so far a laser might go 10 miles well how you're focusing you're giving up the ability to project light every other way yeah you you know you have to make sacrifices and so in my case yeah I mean I was the CEO of micro strategy and now I'm the executive chairman but one reason I stepped down two years ago and I put another guy as a CEO and I just took the executive chairman role is that allowed me to spend 100% of my time thinking about digesting what's going on in the Bitcoin crypto economy and figure out what's good for Bitcoin right what's good and and how best to uh Advocate adopt commercialize evangelize and even raise money to buy more and I thought that was a pretty good use of my time the the CEO of 2,000 person software company has to be concerned with the careers of 2,000 people and 10,000 customers and there's a lot of other stuff to do and that's a full-time job there's a value to focus you got to focus your energy you got to focus your effort partly because you start to make breakthroughs if you can uh triang if you can pull all of the uh the The Source information if you if you are are pulling the raw information and not getting it synthesized and regurgitated by someone that knows less than you you know sometimes news is like the sound in the fury you know signifying nothing you know told a tale told by an idiot right it's like people will write a story but they'll write the exact opposite conclusion of what's really going on because they don't understand the subtleties like there's there's the what the headline says and then there's the what the person what the what the government official says and what the executive says and then there's what they meant but what they meant is never said mhm what's implied and the only way to understand what's implied is to is to have enough information about the entire industry and the physics and the Dynamics right uh that you that you can imagine or you can fill in the blanks like I know they said that but that's what they said because they couldn't say anything else but this is why they did what they did and this is what they mean so I think you can say you're a surfer you know like and you're writing stories about surfing and you know the average person goes and they watch the surfer and then they see the guy ride the surfboard but the guy that's the championship Surfer that surfed for 30 years that obsessed over it goes and watches the same competition and writes the story they probably write something different they're like why did he do that well he did that because of these falling 14 things the you know the wind and the current and there's something else and where the was and you know there's just a lot of Dynamics and if you're not a domain expert then you can't parse the news feed intelligently being a generalist you know you uh you sacrifice that so I think um is it worthwhile to focus well well sure it is I mean we're talking about solving half the problems in the world right I mean I think Bitcoin is a solution to half the problems in the world every corporation every government every individual will benefit so yeah can I afford to focus on bitcoin and what do I study I study Bitcoin is relationship to the crypto Market the macroeconomy every other asset and I think about I think about the regulatory environment for corporations and and individuals everywhere in the world and how that's evolving and I try to stay a breast of all that and that changes by the week and that's worthwhile and useful to do and I you know I would say that somebody else wants to be an expert on something they should just focus on that but in OB a laser likee focus do you think that's something that you born with or do you think that that's something that you can learn to have I think uh you can learn it I and I think some people are better than others but I actually think I I came to it more through experience and failure like for example if I go back earlier in my life I would be very focused for a phase we'd have a lot of success and then and then I would say okay I've been successful now I'm going to launch 10 other businesses yeah you see this often times you know as a dynamic someone starts they have nothing they're focused they launch a business the business gets to a certain size and they declare Victory and then they're like okay now I'm going to do this and this and this and this because I'm too good and I'm too smart to be tied down to this one business and so they stop focusing upon the one thing they under invest in it and the thing that they launch begins to decay and then they launch 10 new things and like most of them fail mhm or they whiff and then they realize that it's jugl too many balls right and then they realize oh well I probably should have go go back and focus upon the basic thing and um I I lived through that at micro strategy I mean I eventually realized you know that I launched probably a dozen businesses after our initial business intelligence business and there were some singles and some doubles and I made some money here and there but none of them were as successful as the original business and I realized that I had shifted my focus off of the Core Business I came back and I had to focus on that with a Vengeance and uh it gave me an appreciation that that um people overestimate what they can accomplish I guess I would say it's uh there's this conundrum which is um you have this with the boat right uh you see a boat you like the boat you're at a boat show you're like can I buy the boat yeah okay I I'm going to stretch I'm going to buy the boat and then they underestimate how much it cost to maintain the boat oh my I have to spend 10% of the purchase price of the boat every year to keep the boat from sinking H that's so expensive so they underestimate the maintenance on the boat and they just think can I afford the boat well can you afford the boat and pay 10% of the boat's value a year forever and then and so that's the second hurdle and then the third hurdle is oh can I enjoy it oops I bought the boat I'm maintaining the boat but I'm too busy with everything else to ever use the boat right so the hurdle of can I can I acquire it can I maintain it will I enjoy it right that's a high hurdle in business it's can I create the product that's not so hard can I actually make money selling the product that's 10x 100x harder and then the last hurdle is can I actually compete successfully against everybody who's going to sell a similar product to me so that I grow faster than they do forever can you get into a business make money and then can you grow and dominate the market right that that's a thousand times harder than can you you know here with podcast everybody's like oh I'm gonna launch podcast it's not very hard to launch podcast the issue is okay now can I make money in the podcast and make it a good podcast right that's a lot harder okay now there's other people all the time can I actually grow and compete and stay relevant by continually upping my game continually well you can imagine if I tell you you got to grow your podcast you got to make money growing your podcast you got to keep the quality really high you know and then you say to me well we've been doing it for three years and now I think we want to you know launch a restaurant and a clothing brand and we have three other things we want to do we want to get into politics because and I would say I you know I really think you ought to go back to focus why do we respect like uh Jimmy Fallon or why do you respect the tonight's show or Dave Letterman they showed up every single night year after year day after day you know and like they didn't like run off to launch their own whiskey brand but how do you know when to Pivot because it seems like you ended up pivoting somewhat of your business model to a certain degree at the right time I mean you could obviously say you should have done it sooner but how do you know when the right time is to take on more or to make a big change rather than focus in this particular case we we have a a p&l a bit the thing we do that we work at is a software business it's a steady company making money but it's not going to grow 20 30 40% a year and then we have a treasury and the treasury was a liability and so at some point you know the the world changed I saw the world in a new fashion and I realized that I should just turn my treasury into an asset and so we launched that new business what about for the average entrepreneur by everybody can do what I what I just described it's the equivalent of you guys you run the podcast but now you adopt the Bitcoin standard and whenever you make money you invest it in Bitcoin and then when you go to an investor and they want to invest in the podcast and they want to give you a million dollars or $10 million you say why don't you give me $50 million I'm going to invest it in Bitcoin and the podcast okay and at some point you're still doing the podcast but bitcoin's going up 20% a year and you're making 2030 million do a year on the on the treasury but you're you have a endowment and you're going to do your podcast like should you do that yeah it's it's kind of like saying you know when should a company buy uh get into the internet or start using mobile phones or start you thinking about website or you know when should we start posting our stuff on YouTube well when you concl that YouTube is a good distribution channnel or a good technology you should you know technically the business didn't pivot you know five people six people work on the treasury part of the business 2,000 people work in the other part of the business you know what we did what we did is just we fixed um a defective investment strategy or a defective treasury strategy by flipping the polarity of that and if you're asking you know for my advice for any entrepreneur I think my advice to an entrepreneur is you've got a business think of think of your business with a p&l and then your balance sheet if your balance sheet has money if you have money on the balance sheet and you're investing it in uh treasury bills you're generating 3% after tax but the cost of capital is 12% so you're losing 9 to 10% of your treasury every year in shareholder value so you've just jacked into a parasitic system which is sucking the life out of you you're being bled to death and the simple fix there is flip the treasury asset from one that's deluded 10% a year the one that's acreative 10% a year if if Bitcoin goes up 24% a year and the cost of capital is 12 right then you're doubling your treasury every three years instead of cutting your treasury in half right that's a very simple um a very simple thing but that doesn't change how you run the p&l my what you did is you plugged into a technology platform to make you more powerful to make to to basically preserve or increase your capital on the p&l the answer is you plug into a technology platform that makes your product or your service more powerful so it depends on what your product and service is but you know it's it's simple if you're a podcaster right you think about where are the eyeballs and and what is the format you know you could create an audio only format or you can create video and audio and if you create video and audio then you make the best quality video and audio you can which means that you get on a plane you travel to the person you want to interview and you set up the cameras and if the light's bad fix the light create the product right so you create the right product then you put it on the right Channel and then and there you focus upon building that uh that viewership so if if you spread yourself too thin and you kind of create a product which is inferior for 10 different channels then maybe that's not as good as creating an an awesome product for one or two or whatever channels obviously if you want to go on Tik Tok you create Tik Tok content you take this you splice it into 15 30 second Tik Tok videos and you run it if you want to run an Instagram you create real content on YouTube it's smart to make sure you you know make it YouTube friendly put in the timestamps put in the description you know people some people are stupid like they they'll post a video and they're like they'll like not enable comments and then they'll put the wrong header in it and they have a famous name and a famous topic you wouldn't say you wouldn't say we interviewed a dude about the problems in the economy you would say we interviewed Michael sailor about Bitcoin because my name Trends and the economy smart really smart when it comes most people have no idea about YouTube just the fact that you said that you're beyond almost everyone else that we've interviewed you're just focusing on creating a great product you know and you're asking the question like you're saying like how do we use AI right how do I use AI to to create a better show for you know when this thing comes out it'll be an English you know you can actually translate it to Spanish and Portuguese and maybe you capture the Spanish and the Portuguese Market if you actually have content in you or Korean or Japan so if I was a podcaster I'd be thinking hard about the channel and the platform i' be thinking hard about creating content that's Global I'd be thinking hard about how I format it and the right form factor that drives the maximum engagement the maximum likes right all of those things and of course every year the technology shift right like is Ali you know is is Alibaba or Tik Tok coming and going is Alibaba coming and going is you know and then not even just AI but if you do an AI and it translates garbage and there's another AI that'll actually create a good Spanish Lang language translation and obviously find the right one and I would say probably in this era you got to allocate 10 20% of your time to just considering the changes in the technology landscape can an AI drive your car do you sell cars can they you know can you put AI on your robot can you build a robot will a robot build what you're will someone create what you're creating yeah right and and so there's a defensive there's an offensive and then you're Reinventing yourself but the model the model I've always had and I I had the you know one of these fossils on my wall you my office for a while it's a a chambered nautilus and a chambered nautilus represents a really good model for entreprene R preneurial growth in business because it's a creature a mollusk that you know lives deep down and under high pressure and it creates a shell and then it's growing and as it's growing it's creating a geometrically larger shell but it's creating it by turning in on itself so it's always using its previous work as the foundation for its next its next work which is twice as much so it's like it's it's the Fibonacci sequence it's a one and a two and a four or sorry I'm going to get this wrong I'm not to it's not that but you understand what I'm saying which is it's going to spiral out like this and when you look at the creature what you say is that is Nature's solution to growth under pressure or disciplined growth because it's always building on its past asset it's past Foundation it's not just I've got this and I reach over here this gets snapped off Under Pressure right whereas this this spiral or chamber Nautilus that actually has integrity under pressure that doesn't get crushed by the weight and in your business you know if you're taking an asset like for example maybe you've got a body of content good podcast but you've never been in the in the Brazilian market and you figure out how to translate everything to Portuguese but you know you you try that in the Brazilian Market you know do you want to go learn Portuguese and then just restart you know or work twice as hard interviewing Portuguese people for the Portuguese market and Portuguese and interviewing English speakers for the English Market you're like well you know you can see how that becomes uh too many balls and you drop the balls and pretty soon you're you're not using technology to do something a thousand times cheaper or or a thousand times better you're just trying to do twice as much and growth growth that relies upon you working twice as hard isn't sustainable you you need to find a way to use your assets but be the first person to a new platform with these assets if you hypothetically for example if you could create an AI that would look at your podcast and automatically generate 27 short reels that run on Tik Tok and Instagram that then Dy the pulled the most exciting things said and then dragged people in 37 languages to 37 full full podcasts and that was all done in the 30 minutes after you finished each podcast by the AI That's pretty good you know sometimes I think I'll get on Twitter and I'll say something I'll do stuff and it'll run 500,000 video views and I I can accomplish more in 5 minutes than if I had a marketing team of 40 people in a $20 million year budget yeah and in fact I would say sometimes if I gave you a $40 million year budget and 40 or 50 people and 10 lawyers they would all come together to tell you you can't do anything you get less done by trying to do things the conventional way then the new way so so I think with entrepreneurs on the p&l you're just always looking for how you how you harness platforms and the two most powerful ideas right now this year digital money digital intelligence right those are breaking right uh digital intelligence is AI it really wasn't commercial two years ago we're like in year one year two of a 10year run and magical things will happen that were that were written about in science fiction books 50 years ago but you know the way science works and s-curves work is people will talk about doing things for a hundred years and they'll never do it and then they year before it becomes feasible people will think it isn't but then it will be and all of a sudden you're on an s-curve and the entire world changes over the next 10 20 years the automobile the airplane Etc and so right now we're at the beginning of a massive s-curve in digital intelligence and the same is true with money so if you were trying to do things a conventional way on your balance sheet or a conventional way with your p&l this is a good time for you to rethink that because either it will make you 10 times or 100 times more successful or it'll keep you from being torn apart by the Challenger that uses that technology while you're still trying to create Studio movies the oldfashioned way with a thousand unionized workers and there's a dude with one other person in a computer that spits out the entire series like Godzilla is a good example of that scary right yeah it's famous that you've lost six ion Dollar in one day which I can't even fathom what were your thoughts like during this day it's really uh stressful and unpleasant because you think about all the other people that you let down right I mean it's a the sharehold if you if you have that change that's in a public company right the public stock crashes and you think about the shareholders and the employees that are affected by it and their families right and so I mean the truth of the matter is if you have a billion and you lose 6 billion or if you have a 100 million and you lose 6 billion if you have 10 million lose you know your your lifestyle isn't changing uh one way or the other at some point you know these are just numbers that move back and forth but the people like you know the people that the small investors or your employees their life is changing so the hardest thing about it is is knowing that they're not going to have money they thought they had or if you have to lay off people or someone that it's it's particularly brutal if someone invests in you and they trusted you and you feel like you let them down or you did let them down right so so I think that that's that's the emotional toll on that and I you know I I mean to this day like people ask me you know what about should I buy micro strategy stock and and I don't want them to like like I would never recommend anybody to to buy it because you might buy it and it might trade down 10% you might feel like I let you down or I didn't I don't want you to rely upon me I'm like do your own research make your own decision it's very risky right like it's volatile and that's why I think even with Bitcoin I would say if you're not ready to hold it for 10 years don't hold it for 10 minutes like I would prefer if you look at me and said I really need the money in the next four years I would say definitely don't buy it I mean it's it's reasonable no one's ever lost money holding it more than four years but really your attitude ought to be it's a 10-year investment I'm going to buy it and hold it and if if you don't have that attitude what you ought to do is not buy it what you ought to do is spend more time until you get the conviction that you're ready to hold it for 10 years just invest invest money reading and thinking and otherwise don't because I don't want to be the guy that said bitcoin's good and it trades down 177% and you tell me that you know your family's bankrupt because of it having so much money invested in pretty very iable assets like Bitcoin and your company what is it to have swings like aund million swing 200 million dollar swing in your net worth with that happening nearly daily for you yeah do you feel anything outside of that like how can any other life experiences compare to that sort of financial swing I'm going to tell you a true story I'm with a friend of mine uh in Vegas and he's a big Gambler okay and so he'll go sit at the table He he'll say give me $50,000 in chips you know we we sit down at the table he's got $50,000 in chips I have $500 in my pocket I'm like you know I don't have any money it's like it's okay I'll spot you here take 10,000 we're gonna play and we start playing and we're playing multi th000 hands okay and the truth is I would have a hard time just gambling $50,000 going up and down $10,000 he has no problem at all but I have no problem at all having a billion dollar bet and having a trade down $300 million or a $15 billion doll bet and having a trade down $3 billion doesn't bother me in the in the least but I would not gamble $30,000 in chips on a blackjack table that would just drive me bananas so the truth is you could imagine that it would bother it doesn't and here's why it's because the gambling table I feel like the odds are stacked against me and the house is going to win and it bothers me that I'm playing a game that's stacked against me but with Bitcoin I feel like the odds are way in my favor and you know at at some point you know 18 months ago we had uh $25 billion dollars of Bitcoin and we had a you know $2 and half billion dollar market cap or something like that and everybody else is freaking out I'm not freaking out I'm Bitcoin traded from 16 66,000 to 16,000 people said what are you going to do I'm like well I'm going to wait for it to go back up again right it's it's it's been oversold it's it's going up you know my view is it's going up forever if you owned Central Park in Manhattan and you know for hundreds of years and someone said well there's a war I hear that the price of real estate Manhattan just dropped 30 40% what are you going to do I'm I'm here forever right I mean I'm not selling I don't need to sell I'm just waiting for the world to rationalize so it's not it's not really stressful in fact in fact um there's a very a subtle point to be made here micro strategy's attribute is that it's volatile like the reason that we're able to raise billions of dollars of capital is because we're more volatile than Bitcoin and Bitcoin is more volatile than the S&P index so that's actually an attribute it makes the options valuable that that's why there's $30 billion or more of options trading in the options Market because if there was no volatility the options are worthless and if the options are worthless we can't raise money so we can we can go to the market and raise a billion dollars and pay 60 basis points or 70 basis points I can borrow money for half a percent you probably can't borrow a billion dollars forif for half a percent interest I can borrow for half a percent interest for six years okay and so you're going to say to me are you bothered by the swings no I'm aware that the because of the volatility I'm able to sell a convertible Bond that's got a seven-year duration or six year a seven-year duration and pay 80 basis points interest that's no recourse unsecured right which is and and if I didn't have the volatility if it went away I would pay 10% interest and by way I'd have to pay 10% interest and I would only be able to borrow about 1/4 as much money you have to embrace the volatility in the same way that you get out in the ocean and you put up the sale and the ocean kind of does this to you and this is your cabin and you're like are you bothered by the motion I'm like well I mean the alternative is get out and swim yeah but it's still not good I mean the truth is I'm not going anywhere if I don't accept the volatility and there's a difference between uh volatility like micro strategy had $500 million of cash it didn't need and no volatility four years ago today micro strategy has 14 or 15 billion dollar of Bitcoin $3 billion do or three and a half billion in debt so it's like plus 12 13 billion dollar of assets it doesn't need what difference does it make whether the whether the amount trades up a billion a day or down a day it's a billion when when Bernard R know goes from being worth you know 180 billion to 160 billion to 120 billion to 200 billion do you think it bothers him does it change his behavior Ian the reason he's successful is laser likee focus on the luxury business right it's like that that's just a you know an artifact of it and we can make that volatility go away you know how we do that we just give away all the money like uh Bernard Arno could just give away all the stock and he would have any volatility in micro strategy if we gave away the $15 billion we wouldn't have any volatility but volatility is Vitality it's it's life right so so you're better off you do you do bring up an important point which is conventional wisdom in corporations is volatility is bad and capital is toxic so most corporations in the world what they do is they say we have to give the capital back to the shareholders because holding it is debt is obviously destroying shareholder value right you notice the big buyback at Apple the big buyback at Facebook the buyback at Google the BuyBacks you know the capital is toxic it's like I want to get rid of it why why is money a bad thing I think about it for a second because you've got the invest in the wrong asset you've got the wrong kind of money you're holding 100 billion of pesos it's going to zero if you're holding 100 billion of Bitcoin is doubling in three years right so the capital is toxic so they decapitalize which is which is pernicious and the other thing is volatility is toxic and so they want to get rid of volatility Microsoft sells contracts three years in advance like a three-year Enterprise agreement like you know I just want long-term rental contract like I want you to agree to buy the same thing from me for the next three years with the CPI escalator and that way there's no uncertainty I mean the issue is if there's no volatility on the p&l and there's no volatility on the balance sheet then if I want to evaluate the stock I can look at it once a year put a price on it buy and snooze on you for the next 364 days right I mean what's going to happen nothing Well if nothing happens the options are worthless you're not going to trade the options that means you're not going to trade the underlying Equity that means the stock options for the employees become worthless so how can you succeed you know if you have no capital and you have no volatility right and the answer is you're just going to have to work yourself to death if you can't grow your revenues 15% a year then you're going to fail and so that and so in that case that explains why most corporations have a life expectancy of 10 years they're all dying in 10 to 15 years because they have toxic capital and they have dysfunctional Financial strategies and so these things that other people want to run away from I think you should be running toward those things what's your biggest insec secur that's an interesting question I I suppose my biggest insecure is I don't want to let people down like at some point if more and more people trust you or put their faith in you or you feel more responsible for them whether they I've got employees 2,000 of them I hate the idea of letting them down I've got shareholders now Lots I've got Bond holders you know and I've got stakeholders so now we become important to them and then you've got the entire Bitcoin community and bit and Bitcoin is a team it's a global team I I travel everywhere in the world I get off on a flight line and the guy that's actually refueling the aircraft is like going like hey I own Bitcoin I bought something for my kid you know you go through a bar and the guy behind the bar knows you or the or the waiter or the waitress or the you know all these people and what this means to them is is there a chance at economic sovereignty and so and security it's given them hope so if you're actually if you're lucky enough right if you're lucky enough to have employees have investors and have people that listen to you then the thing you should fear is is letting them down right and so I I I think it's it it's becomes a greater responsibility as more people take you seriously in life last question that I have is what's something that nobody knows about you that you feel like they should know not a very interesting question you know a lot of people know a lot about me I've done a few podcasts yeah yeah so I'm trying to think about something uh that I haven't really spoken about much I think one thing is is uh I have a profound appreciation for nature and natural law and natural beauty and I think a lot of the most uh beautiful things in life and the most important wisdom is D is derived from a close study of nature and uh a lot of people think that you know because they see me in technology and in in commercial environments that I'm a technologist but I actually think a lot of the inspiration and the best inspiration comes from nature and I think that we all we would all do well to be grounded in it to the extent that we can be cool anything else the only other thing is we looked up photos of you and it looked like you used to be bigger did you shed some weight yeah like that looked pretty impressive at one point yeah I was probably 30 pounds heavier and uh and what happened is I started appreciating I mean the things that you can learn today if you study paleo diets lean proteins steak salad vegetables stay away from too much starch too much sugar too much alcohol right if you want to if you want to be 30 pounds heavier drink sugar water drink alcohol drink starch eat a lot of pizza potatoes pancakes rice Etc eat processed food eat uh eat fast food you know all of those things take their toll but but you know what's the secret to life I think someone said it the other day they said to get plenty of sleep um put good nut nutrients in your body eat good food nutritional food eat food that would rot it's not you can't leave it out for three days and still eat it right so eat organic food the closer the closer to organic the better and uh don't poison yourself right with toxins there's a lot of different types of toxins but just don't put them in your body right and then uh get exercise get routine exercise so I think that um you know uh that helped a bit that I would recommend that to anybody and I would say coming back to Natural principles one one thing I think about a lot is is this something that my grand great great great grandfather would have done a 100,000 years ago because the human genome right that and Humanity has evolved over millions and millions of years and if you think about all those Generations how did you evolve and what did you adapt to there are certain things that we do today that they wouldn't have done a 100,000 years ago and uh a lot of times those things are pricious drinking a carton of orange juice yeah impossible to do 100,000 years ago sugar and that yeah but you know you give yourself diabetes or or or the like if you just pound that stuff too much so I I I think you know just looking at uh at diet exercise nutrition is useful I think 30 years ago there were just some pernicious ideas like you know it used to be every alpha male business leader wants to brag about how little sleep they get oh I can bu on three hour sleep I can bu you know it's like when uh when the um the competition is to brag about how little sleep you can get it's just here's an unhealthy habit and I do it and of course a lot of people I think lied about it like a lot of times people say stuff in public you know in an interview what's your secret well I don't need that much sleep I eat you know I sleep three hours and you know what an awful disservice you do to the humanity because yeah you know you find a lot of people die because they didn't sleep enough and then uh you know I when I grew up you know I looked at all the athletes and the bodybuilders and I and I was like well I don't look like that guy and I thought I just wasn't trying hard enough and then I you know at one point I realized they're all taking steroids or performance-enhancing drugs and you know it was only in the modern era you know when information comes out on YouTube guys like more plates more dates see that yeah them on the show tell you what steroids this after he came on the podcast and I'm like I started listening to him and my mind is blown and I'm realized like everything I believe was not you know it's like oh how' you bulk up for this movie oh yeah I ate a lot of chicken no you didn't twice a day I ate a lot of chicken and I had a trainer and and that's just pernicious like untruth so when you start to actually understand how people achieve what they achieve and you're like well that might work but that might also give me cancer at age 27 and maybe I don't want that I think it helps you make rational decisions about what to eat how to live right um how much to sleep and then um and there's like even even with exercises like yeah you can do the Hollywood you know special specialty exercises but you know to a great degree you know simply low impact aerobic activity that's not going to destroy your joints is a pretty good thing and uh engaging in full com contact Combat Sports you know might not be the F path you know over the long run so so I don't know I think I get a lot of wisdom or gleaned a lot of wisdom about health uh just from all sorts of unfiltered unbiased internet sources that's awesome cool well thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for being so generous know with your time I mean yeah I appreciate it thanks for having me is there is there anything else that uh that you feel like we didn't touch on that you want to talk about I guess would end uh just by saying you know my personal opinions are all my own you know form your own opinions uh my my primary professional opinion is uh bitcoin's good and uh if you don't know that Bitcoin is good don't go buy Bitcoin because I said it's good what you want to do is go learn about Bitcoin I think that I think that you will spend 40,000 hours of your life maybe 60,000 hours of your life trying to make money it is worthwhile to spend a hundred hours of your life figuring out how to keep it and figuring out what it is and thinking about that so most people won't most people will they're like they'll just go do something because their friend told them to do it but if you do it for the for a shallow reason you'll probably panic and sell it or do the wrong thing or get confused by another shallow reason so I think that the best investment anybody can make is go spend a 100 hours you know studying B coin then study economics then study the you know history of money and then think for yourself and think really really hard about about risk and the like and some resources to do that are if you go to hope.com H just remember Bitcoin is hope it's a website we run it's got a ton of Bitcoin resources courses books materials interviews you know re Etc that you can get to and other other people that are experts you can go Trace down that rabbit hole and look at them so so that's one place to go I think uh if if people are interested in in my Bitcoin musings follow me on X Twitter it's I'm sailor s a y l r and otherwise um I wish everybody the best cool yeah we'll link to all we'll link to everything down below in the description so it'll be super easy including hope.com okay thank you perfect thank you so so much till next time