Top Bitcoin Holder: Ask AI To Do THIS, Stop Trying To Out-Work The Robots! | Michael Saylor

0:00 I used AI to make fifteen billion dollars last year. You did. I did. Because the AI gave us a solution to the problem that no one had ever encountered before in the history of the world. And so my advice is don't try to outwork the robots. What you want to do is ask the AI to do something that's never been done before. And if you want to create these incredible success things, you want to locate the magic. I know this because I'm a technology entrepreneur. We're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world, so what is my mission? I'm preaching the gospel of digital empowerment in Bitcoin with digital money, and it's gonna be the best long-term capital asset. And you can actually own something, and someone more powerful than you can't take a What you mean they can't take bitcoin from you. So this is a stack of currency. You walk through an airport on this, they ask you if you have cash. They just take it so cash in a physical form is a problem. So what do you do? You put it in a bank. So the bank then decides whether you get to keep it and whether you get it back. But I could move a million dollars of Bitcoin from here to anywhere. To London to anywhere in cyberspace in a few seconds. So the last thing in the world you want to save is money. So what about this? Why not just put all of my money into gold. Well gold is up twelve percent.

1:17 A year. But the coin is up thirty three. What about the S P five hundred? You're gonna get double the performance from BTC that you would get from like the S P index. So should I buy a house? I will tell you why you shouldn't buy a house. And then you sold a bit of Bitcoin recently after Telling a lot of people sell a kidney if you must but keep the Bitcoin. So why did you sell the bitcoin instead of your kidney? Because Michael, beyond just buying Bitcoin, what is a good strategy to build and become wealthy in your view? And then you have ten rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career. So let's go through these two. So first Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show The most shared episodes, the most rated episodes. I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple easy free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this one right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so so much.

2:23 Uh Michael. Because of your success as a technology entrepreneur, you are a multi billionaire from my Math. And you're heavily focused on digital currencies at the moment, specifically Bitcoin. What else do we need to know about you in terms of

2:40 what you've built and accomplished outside of that. I always wanted to make a technical contribution. So the the early business was business intelligence. So how do you extract intelligence from large raw data sources? And that was what Micro Strategy did. We created a global business intelligence company. And I think in twenty twenty, when the Covid lockdowns took place and the world turned upside down. That was when I discovered my greatest idea and it wasn't even my idea, right? It w it was Satoshi's idea, but I I discovered Bitcoin in twenty twenty and the company today is sixty billion dollars, but we peaked about a hundred twenty five billion. So we got somewhere between a hundred and two hundred times bigger. Since we discovered Bitcoin.

3:24 And when you speak to the general public now, when you do podcasts like this, what is the the essence of the message that you're aiming to communicate to them? Bitcoin is uh is digital empowerment, digital Capital we're living through the digital transformation of assets. And this is just as Profound transformation is digital intelligence. The real profound breakthrough of Bitcoin is this idea.

3:54 That you can take economic energy Convert it to digital form and tightly bind it. To the person, the family, the company. But the country. We can talk about how we all hate countries, but you know, the history of the world is all the weak countries getting smashed by all the big countries. So if what you're interested in in is empowerment and fairness and equity for the small company, the small family, the small person The small country, the weak.

4:25 How do you do it? Well, you basically encrypt The money put it in cyber space. Protect it with a private key.

4:35 S like now you can actually own something and someone more powerful than you. Can't take it away from you. There's two types two types of money there in front of you. There's dollar bills and then I've got a couple of bitcoin on the table. What do you mean They can't take Bitcoin from you. Okay, so this is a stack of currency. You walk through an airport on this, they ask you if you have cash. If you do they just take it.

5:00 Cash in a in a physical form is a problem. So what do you do? You put it in a bank. Well a bank is uh is a counterparty. So the bank then decides whether you get to keep it and whether you get it back. You go to the bank and you ask for it back. They might ask you why you ask for it back. If you ask For that much back they file a form with the Treasury Department, you know, if you ask for too much money back too soon, right, someone comes knocking on your door. So the challenge with this, this is fiat currency. And um you hold this at the pleasure of the nation state. And by the not just your nation state, it's like every country on earth gets to decide whether you get to spend this stuff. Right, w which is interesting. And if you want to actually transfer money to someone in another country, you need the permission of your bank, another bank, the central bank of their country, the correspondent bank. There might be seven different banks that have to decide whether the money gets from here to there. So this is permissioned money.

5:58 You know, that's uh managed by the state. And with Bitcoin, I can take a million dollars. I can actually encrypt it in a chip in a physical coin, uh the Cascasious coin. And that's a million dollars. I slide it across and it's literally a bearer asset, you know, and so that's one manifestation of it. But you could also put it into information form. I could transfer this to you just in the form of a private key that I wrote on a piece of paper. So I gave you a series of letters. Yeah, or I could send you a message.

6:32 I could send a text message like So good luck getting a million dollars of gold. From here to London. If people don't want you to move it. But I could move a million dollars of bitcoin from here to anywhere in a few seconds.

6:46 The idea was I don't want to trust Apple or Google. Or Morgan Bank. Or a central bank or a government

6:56 Right, and so in the extreme case You know, two people can meet in Africa and I can trade you some bitcoin for your truck. And I don't need the permission of seven banks and sixteen governments and thirty two other bureaucrats. In order to buy that truck. What is it that most people, the average person, doesn't understand about the nature

7:21 Of money. as it sat in their bank. as it relates to the debasement of it or the sort of inflation of it. Because most people think if they've got, you know, ten thousand dollars in their bank and they keep it there And maybe getting interest on it at four percent a year, they're gonna be good. So this is about ten thousand dollars, I guess. Um

7:40 One acre of land in Miami Beach on the water. Cost ten thousand dollars about a hundred years ago. I know this'cause I have a house on the water and I have the the deed of sale and it was about on two acres and it was twenty thousand dollars. The entire house cost a hundred thousand dollars and uh it's about twenty thousand dollars worth of land. Today, uh one acre of land on this the same acre On the water. Ten million dollars?

8:10 Maybe twenty million dollars. So You know? What happened here, right? It's the same dollar. It works out to be a thousand X increase in price. So when land goes from ten thousand dollars to ten million dollars, that means that the currency, the dollar, the money

8:30 Lost About seven percent of its economic value every year for a hundred years running. If you lose seven percent a year You know, then You get cut in half.

8:43 Right. Ten times. Right. So what do most people not know about about money? What they don't realize is that The best

8:51 Money being a medium exchange unit account store of value, the dollar. The best in the twentieth century and the twenty first century. Lost seven percent of its value every year. going for a hundred years. That's the best it's ever gonna get. It's not that good for everybody else. If you go to most other countries, they lose fourteen percent of their value and so they collapse in about thirty years. So What you have is a situation where

9:20 If you store your wealth and currency and and the money of the society The question really is just, are you gonna lose most of your money within ten years? That's the weak currencies in in Africa, for example, most currencies in Africa you couldn't hold you your walt even for ten years, maybe five years. Or are you gonna lose all your money in thirty years? hyperinflation happened in Brazil, happened in Argentina, you know, that's Mexico.

9:46 That's most places. And that's the status quo. The average fiat currency, you know, collapses in about twenty nine years, I think. And then the best is if you happen to be a citizen of the greatest nation in the world and you win all the wars. You're just gonna lose all your money in you know, half life is thirty five years, you're gonna lose your money over the course of a hundred years. So shall I buy a house?

10:10 So you get to the next interesting point, which is that hundred thousand dollars and nineteen uh Twenty six. And Miami Beach. Today would be worth a hundred thousand dollars, that house

10:24 Fifty to a hundred million dollars. So the house is better. Right, in fact, if you're trying to preserve your wealth, you have to acquire scarce desirable property. So your choice is do I buy real estate, do I b residential real estate, do I buy commercial real estate, do I buy a private company, do I buy a public company, like stocks, do I buy collectibles? So let me tell you why you shouldn't buy a house.

10:49 Because uh there's a two percent property tax on houses in in Florida, which means that if you buy a house you pay two percent of the value every year. Two percent. You know, means that every thirty six years you actually pay the cost of the house and tax to the government. not a very good store of value because uh You're taking on a massive tax load.

11:11 And you're taking on a maintenance load. It's still a better deal than just holding cash in a bank or holding cash in a safe. You know, commercial real estate looks a bit better, right? Because with commercial real estate you can offset the tax, the insurance and the maintenance cost with rents. So what really works out with commercial real estate most of the time is You buy a million dollars commercial real estate, you have a bunch of fees, you charge rent. The rent offsets the maintenance cost. You don't really make any money on the rent, but the underlying million dollars appreciates seven percent a year every year. And so you actually can build wealth.

11:50 With commercial real estate if you can just cover the maintenance expenses. Most people are are told that the way to build wealth when they leave university and they get into the working world is to buy A house. So most people that's what mo most people do. They they get a job nine to five, they take the money they get from that, they go and get a mortgage, they buy a house, and they move in. That's kind of what we're all told. Implicitly. Is that a good strategy to

12:14 Build and become wealthy in your view. The only way that it's a good strategy Is You're buying the house in a jurisdiction where the property taxes Are manageable?

12:29 Then yeah, you can you can generate some wealth. But if I flip that and you end up taking a seven percent mortgage and you get massive tax and massive insurance expenses. then that same investment, you know, works out the other way and it it crushes you to death. So A better idea generally is commercial real estate if you're s if you actually have the you know, the business acumen to to uh get into commercial real estate business'cause you can pass all the expenses through to your tenants. These things are all hard, right? Real estate business is hard. Starting your own company is hard.

13:07 Investing in other companies is hard. The conventional thing, the safe thing is I just put all my money in a money market and I get paid three percent, and then after tax I've got one and a half percent, and the currency is losing seven percent of its value a year, and you're just losing five or six percent of your wealth every year for your life. So That's why Bitcoin is such a compelling thing. That's why people that believe in Bitcoin are passionate about it, because the average person shouldn't have to be a real estate expert. They shouldn't have to be a tax expert. They shouldn't have to be capable of launching their own restaurant or bar or bakery. You shouldn't have to be a stock picker. Why shouldn't the typical person just be able to take their money from

13:50 put it into an asset which appreciates in value fifteen percent a year and they don't have to worry about it. What about the S P five hundred? They could just put it into the stock market, right? Yeah, John Bogle's real contribution and the success of uh the S P five hundred. Is this idea that Currency is not a store of value.

14:10 Real estate is illiquid and scary and difficult. And inefficient and high maintenance. So what is the liquid capital asset that I can I can buy and it turns out to be like S P Y. It's just the S P five hundred in the form of an ETF. So that has returned fifteen percent over the past six years. Over a hundred years?

14:31 Maybe ten percent? Something like that. And if the US dollar is losing seven percent of its value in scarce desirable terms over the course of a hundred years and you're getting ten percent You're getting a two or three percent boost uh in in return for accepting the volatility uh being invested in the stock market, but

14:51 It's not a bad idea, right? If you want the conventional Best idea to preserve your wealth without taking on individual, you know, corporate risk and individual real estate risk. I just buy the S P index and wait. What about this?

15:08 This is gold. Yeah. Why not just put all of my money into gold? It's not an awful idea. To buy gold. Gold is up um

15:18 Twelve percent. A year for the past six years. So where's the S P's up fifteen, goals up twelve, the Nasdaq's up eighteen? Bitcoin is up. Thirty three.

15:29 Okay, so Generally if you look at the world and you say, Where do you want to save your money? You want to buy a capital asset. Goal's a winner. S P's a winner. Diversified tech stocks are a winner.

15:43 Bitcoin is a winner. Now you're gonna say to me. Well, so then well w why Bitcoin? Well the answer is If you're living in Turkey, if you're living in Argentina, if you're living in Brazil before the currency collapses, or Mexico or Venezuela, or any country in Africa, you don't get gold. You don't get the S P, you don't get QQQ. You can't buy diversified real estate in the US.

16:07 Those options I named are a Western world conventional capital assets. So The big mistake? Don't invest in non capital assets. Don't put all your family's money in soybeans. You know? Don't buy barrels of crude oil.

16:23 Don't buy cotton. Don't invest in things that a factory or a robot or an AI can generate infinite of. You buy things that the robots and the AIs and the big factories cannot pump out by the million gallons. And so what is that? It is maybe an ounce of gold. It is a share in the five hundred most desirable companies in the world. It is one out of twenty one million Bitcoin. All of those things are things that the robots are not gonna create infinite of. Those are capital assets. Which capital asset?

17:01 Is a function of where you live. And what your mindset is, if you're living in a war zone My advice is Bitcoin. Because you're not carrying this Through a checkpoint, right? Like

17:14 You know, if if you need to go through an airport, you want something that you get to keep and take with you. You talked about the robots there. Yeah. And uh when we say the robots, I think we mean both uh the surge in robotics we're saying, but also

17:29 Artificial intelligence that's going to um empower them to be very, very intelligent. Yeah. How has this changed your thesis and h how you view the future?'Cause it's it's a profound surprise, I think to all of us that artificial intelligence is accelerating at the rate we're seeing. Technology fails until it succeeds. When I was at MIT, people were trying to make you know speech recognition work. It just didn't work. For a thousand years people wanted to fly and it didn't work. And in nineteen oh two, the New York Times declared that every learned scientist knows that you'll never be able to fly. And then in nineteen oh three we fly. In twenty twenty three.

18:03 You know, the AI started working. You can see what's happening. We have affected the digital transformation of intelligence. Cars are gonna drive themselves. It's pretty clear that anything that takes massive human labor, you know, whether it's lawyering, writing a contract, or composing a poem, or composing a script, or composing a book, it's like you want a book? Tell the AI what kind of book you want. Here's my ten you know, I want this, I want it to be set in London, I want these protagonists, can you make it like that, put some more violence in it? Uh you know, Voltaire, right, was impressive because he created

18:42 You know, this much literature and in and when he did it, it came out of the mind of one man, and that was quite amazing. And You know, I think we're always going to admire the people that did it first. Right. But

18:56 You know. The AI shall think for us. You know, put the AI into the robot. We're not that far, right? Like when I s when I sit and I talk to my voice assistant, whether it's Chad or whether it's Grok and it's it's like she knows everything. And she keeps getting smarter.

19:14 You know, uh you know, every single week she gets smarter and it's like what happens when they go into a robot Well you can you pretty much can imagine A billion robots and maybe we'll pay two hundred bucks a month for a robot and the robot will just pretty much do everything. And so the question is do you want someone to do everything to cook? To clean

19:36 You know, to take out the trash. Would you like a self driving car? Of course you do. We're on the verge of these perfect products, right? That Like we'll get to the point where we're like I I I You used to actually have an oven that burned things.

19:52 Like Wha w w it was stupid? Yeah, it was too stupid to know it was gonna burn the Huh? Why don't you just put intelligence into the appliance? Right, why why would you ever have an unintelligent employee, right, at at this point when it gets exponentially cheaper?

20:09 We used to get in traffic accidents. Right, like like the big reveal, right, the bi the big inversion is when people realize that the self driving cars are safer. than the person driven. Cars, right? It's like

20:24 You used to make mistakes. You know the irony, of course, is now when you send a message to someone, if you want to prove that it came from you, you have to actually put errors in it. Right. It's like if you put errors in it, I believe you typed it. You know, the AI can draft the thing as though it had a PhD in English and it had twenty years experience as a copy editor. And so we're reaching this point where Lack of

20:50 of effectiveness is just laziness, right? Like if you wrote something which wasn't perfect It's'cause you're lazy. Not because you're not perfect. I mean The AIs create perfect documents, they do perfect research. The robots will do any amount of work. And I I think Elon makes this point, which is we're about to trip over an age of abundance

21:14 Do you believe that's true, yeah? W what does that say about Bitcoin? Because I'm looking at some of the quotes here that Elon said about the age of abundance, and he says, In the future where anyone can have anything, you no longer need money as a database for labor allocation, if AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then the relevance of money declines rapidly. I'm not sure we will have it. If you are stranded on a desert island with a trillion dollars, it will be pointless because there is no labor to allocate. In a benign scenario, We will have universal high income, not just universal basic income, meaning anyone can have any products or any services that they want. Universal high income via checks issued by federal governments is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI/slash robotics. Because AI and robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in money supply. So there will be no inflation. Work will become optional. Kind of like playing sports or a video game. You can go to the store and buy vegetables, or you can go and grow them in your backyard because you like growing them.

22:13 That's what work will be like. AI and robotics are gonna make so much stuff That w they will actually run out of things to do for the humans. Money is fundamentally information. The true constraints of the future won't be financial. There'll be energy and mass.

22:31 He's half right. I agree with you. With part of what he says that is Consumer goods, consumables, utilitarian goods, uh will become abundant, but there are always gonna be scarce desirable goods that will not become abundant. And uh I think he overstates the case. Money will still be valuable, wealth will still be valuable, but I I'll give you an example. Yeah. Henry the eighth didn't have clean water.

22:58 Did not have heat, did not have coaling. These things the King of England did not have And technology gave all these things to the middle class. And so if you live in the middle class today, you know, you can have your appendix out. Yeah. But Henry the Eighth didn't have dental crowns, he didn't have x rays. So you get modern medical care. I you know, the the infant mortality rate has plunged, life is safer, clean water. Clean air.

23:26 Right. Clean food. And technology gave them to us. We stamp out infinite Coca-Cola, infinite Hershey's bars, ice cream, right? Running water. Right, electricity. So all of those things have been given to the middle class, the working class, and the developed world. Not everywhere, but let's say in the developed world. But everybody doesn't get a Hamptons house. Everybody doesn't get their own private jet. They don't get their own private yacht. So what happened with the explosion of affluence?

23:57 Massive utilitari entitlement, lots of cars, but you know, okay, so everybody gets a car, but how many people get a Porsche? What happens with humanity is we always invent the luxury car. We come up with the trophy asset. And And again uh

24:13 But m most people don't actually want that. They want to be able to like feed their family and not have to worry about the bills. So all of those people, are you saying that those people are gonna be They're gonna be good. They're not gonna have to worry. I'm saying that if if your aspiration is a good life If you want infinite food. infinite energy infinite education, infinite

24:35 Entertainment. Right. You're probably gonna get it. My point is in theory, right, why does money matter today?

24:45 you know, has electricity and water. Because people want to buy something more than Water. By the way, water is the proletarian drink. What does that mean? It means that if you go to a restaurant and you don't and you can't afford anything else, you ask for a cup of water. Right?

25:00 And then if you have some more money, you get yourself a Coca Cola or a soft drink and that costs five bucks. But if you have more money, you buy yourself a vodka. And then when you have more money, you want to buy yourself the specialty high end tequila and and eventually people find a way to spend thirty eight dollars on a drink. And uh you know, in New York City, you know, you can see that everywhere. Why do we go to restaurants and pay three hundred dollars to eat at a restaurant because you can actually feed yourself on three bucks a day? And the answer is There's always gonna be a hierarchy of affluence and people are gonna find things to aspire to that will be more than The utilitarian mien that everybody gets. If I give you a universal health care, people want private health care. If I give everybody a house

25:47 Someone's gonna want a house twice as big. Everybody's always going to have a reason to want something more because we're status. Orientated animals. That's the cynical way to look at it, but the other way to look at it is I wanted to be sitting on a mountain peak skiing, but not that mountain peak. Because the snow's not good on that mountain peak this week. And it's too busy on this one.

26:12 Yeah. And that one's too crowded. You know it's like There there's always going to be Some exclusivity, you know, there's going to be a quest. So I I think that

26:24 Money's not going away. I think it's pretty obvious if you look around you that that uh People still need money. It is true. That the basic needs in life, basic transportation, basic energy, basic health care

26:41 All of those things can be manufactured in quantity and they'll get progressively cheaper. We'll call them consumer goods. If this uh knowledge work does become I guess taken by the robots and the AIs. There's some people say there's gonna be new jobs created and everyone will be fine. But it's not clear to me that there will be enough new jobs created in the period of

27:01 Time. Um to satisfy the demand. of people to have something to do. Professionally. It used to be everybody was a farmer, right? And then all of a sudden in America we have new jobs like called accountants and lawyers and film producers. You're a podcaster, your job didn't exist.

27:18 twenty years ago. It did you know, the job description did not exist, the business did not exist. There's a lot of things that exist today. Yeah. There are people that make a living putting on makeup and clothes and posting on Instagram, and that was not a job that existed thirty years ago. So there'll be a lot of new jobs, there'll be dislocation, there's going to be political unrest. What do I think? I think this is the best argument in favor of encouraging a free market and allowing

27:48 Uh liberal uh unregulated businesses to prosper because If you have a progressive society, by the United States is sort of more progressive. Defined progressive in this context. You're allowed to start a business. You're allowed to sell product?

28:08 It's not illegal. Uh To create a podcast? Well, you you can't do what you're doing in Cuba. Yeah.

28:15 Right? In North Korea, you couldn't do it. I read something crazy last night about driving autonomous cars. It said lawyers are trying to stop block EVs. Because these particular lawyers make a lot of money from litigating car accidents. We wouldn't want people to not crash. Yeah. Yeah, so the point is there are all sorts of laws and restraint of trade Like you can't have an Airbnb.

28:39 In the face of modern technology, if you have modern technology and it's creating dislocation, if your goal is to Embrace the technology create maximum productivity And then minimize the disruption and the inflammation then the more degrees of freedom you offer

28:59 the less pain there'll be because in a more free society you're going to have ten thousand new kinds of businesses pop up. or a hundred thousand new business opportunities that no one conceptualized. And they'll be threatening to the status quo but they'll be rational and they'll create value and then they will create gainful employment and they'll create wealth for all the people that are displaced. Right, by by the technology. Okay.

29:30 Uh just making myself a delicious. From the freezer? From the freezer, have you not heard about Contier? No. Oh my gosh.

29:38 This is gonna change your life. Couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty. And they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, knock yourselves out. And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, Oh my God, what the hell is that? It's so delicious. All I have to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in.

30:17 And I mix it. And that is done. You can get thirty dollars off your first order of Cometeer coffee if you go to cometeer.com slash Steven. Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me and let me know if you love it as much as I do. One of the things you've heard me talk about quite a lot over the last couple of years, and this is something that's true in business and content, but also with everything in life, is that consistency is the thing that really, really compounds. The same is true in sales. When your team is small, consistency happens naturally. The team knows of every deal, so nothing gets missed. But as I've experienced, when you grow, This starts to break down and deals start to slip, follow ups don't happen, leads go cold that shouldn't have. And when this happens, a lot of leaders look at it and think they have a people problem. When actually it's a systems problem. The businesses that have watched scale well commercially.

31:06 all have a system their team uses every single day. And for my team, that system has been our sponsor Pipe Drive. It's an easy to use intelligent CRM tool for growing sales teams that gives you visibility of every deal in your sales pipeline at every single stage. And it shows you what needs to happen for that deal to move forward all in real time. It's what keeps our commercial operation consistent when we're a team of five. Or when our commercial team was a team of fifty. Over a hundred thousand companies are already running their sales on it. So if you'd like to join them, sign up at pipedrive.com slash CEO, where you'll get an exclusive thirty day free trial instead of the usual 14 days, and there's no credit card needed at all. Head to pipedrive.com slash CEO. You know, earlier you were talking about how you can get AI to write a book. I was thinking as you were saying it, the interesting thing is, I now ask my AI.

31:55 Um what book I need to read. And to make that book for me versus being prescriptive to it and because it has this hum huge memory on me. It knows what I've I'm dealing with. It knows the businesses I'm building, the problems I have. And so I just say, What what do I what's the question I should be asking you? Which book should I be reading? And then can you make that book for me make it twenty pages? I like it in this particular style, because it's my favorite style of author. And then I I wanna download it as an MP three file and listen to it on my way to work. I have forty three minutes. Could you say what should what's the question I should be asking you? Yeah, you're you're using you're using that as an example, but at the end of the day

32:32 You have to govern the state space. For example, anybody could say what question should I ask, but the real issue is what's the what are the input constraints. I if you're a baker in Nigeria. And logos. Right? There's a certain set of conditions that are different than if you happen to be a fireman in Los Angeles.

32:51 Yeah. Right. And so What's the state space that you're exploring in order to create a contribution? And uh I I'll give you an example. Like um I used AI. I used AI to make fifteen billion dollars last year. Is that a true story?

33:07 This is true. You did. I did. Yeah. And I used an AI to make fifteen billion dollars in a way that no one would ever conceive that you could make fifteen billion dollars. This is a true story. We have a company that has billions of dollars of bitcoin. Uh thirty billion dollars of Bitcoin. We want to actually raise capital to buy more Bitcoin. We maxed out the equity markets.

33:32 Uh we became the largest issue of convertible bonds. in the in the world and we maxed out the convertible bond market and and uh that was our journey in the first five years of our Bitcoin to simplify this for Jenny Dave, you borrowed as much money as you could from traditional means. Yes. Okay. Yeah. To buy Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. By the beginning of twenty twenty five, we had issued as many convertible bonds as you could issue. We were the largest issuer in the world. And it wasn't scalable. So we needed to invent a new type of security, a new type of credit instrument that we could use to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. So We went to the AI, I went to the AI and I started exploring how do I design a preferred stock

34:13 And so I said, I think I want to create a security that's not a common equity, and I don't want it to be a bond. I want it to be some hybrid in the middle. A preferred stock, you know, for the layman, it's it's just a security that could be anything. You can give it any terms. I can sell you a preferred stock and give you the right to put it back to me in twelve months, and it looks like debt. I can give you a guaranteed coupon on it. I can give you conversion rights and and make it look like equity. So we used AI to design a a a convertible preferred style called S T R K When we did it, no one had ever created a preferred stock uh that was backed by Bitcoin before. And uh and we'd never issued it. And so it was kind of a combination of financial engineering and digital asset engineering and legal work and securities law.

35:01 So we built it and uh and yeah, when we asked the lawyers and the bankers they're like well no one's ever done it before. Okay. And you know, their the their answer, by the way, is no one's ever done it before and people don't do that. So we don't think you should do that. And we're like, well, everything else that people have done, we've maxed out. And so we're kind of at the point where our growth is going to stop unless we find a way out of the box. So we're going to have to do something no one's ever done before using New technology, right? We're using digital capital. We're using uh

35:35 uh digital intelligence and we're using a digital treasury company. So three new forms of something in order to create value. And uh after we'd done three of them, we decided what we wanted to do was create a short duration credit instrument, one that would be would trade stably around one hundred dollars, around par. And we're trying to figure out how do you get a preferred stock to trade at at a stable level. It's well what you would call technically short duration credit, but it's like we're trying to create a money market type instrument where people can buy it at a hundred, sell it at a hundred, collect the yield, and not worry about it trading up and down or being sensitive to interest rates.

36:15 Well, if you do that, you have to ver in order to get it to trade stable, if you want the price to be stable, you have to change the dividend rate. And so we created an instrument that where we could tra change the dividend rate every month. Now had anybody ever done? No. In the history of the world no one ever created a variable dividend rate preferred stock. Is it all legal? No. Why's no one ever done it? No one ever had a reason to do it. They never thought to do it.

36:42 the lawyers, the bankers, the conventional investors they're like, Well we've never seen it done before. We're not sure you can do it. We go to the AI, we said, Well can we do it? Like, of course you can do it. Just do this, this and this and this and that. Well they said they don't like that. Well just do this, this, this Which AI? Chat GPT. Open AI. So Charlie GPT made you fifteen billion dollars. Yeah, because the short of it is we brought that IPO to market. It became a two point five billion dollar IPO, the biggest IPO of the year.

37:10 To date And then we put a shelf registration on it. We sold another eight billion dollars of it. So we sold ten and a half billion dollars of that instrument plus four billion of the other instruments. So we basically sold fifteen billion dollars of credit Which kind of equates to the company making about fifteen billion dollars. I'm thinking about what this means generally for the average person listening. Because everyone's like searching for business ideas, new ideas. And you're telling me that you you can use AI now to come up with novel business ideas and solutions that are outside of the box and that would generate value.

37:46 for people. Um though there is it's almost like hearing that there's an arbitrage opportunity with this intelligence. I was reading something the other day that said only two percent of households have a chat GPT or AI subscription still. So do you think there is an an an arbitrage there for people who go to AI now and and can build business ideas From it. If if you're an entrepreneur, right, if you if you aspire to create a business or create something of value, then it's The no brainer is you definitely should pick one or more of these AIs and maybe you want to become adept using multiple. They're they're just different tools. It's it's kinda like saying you gotta learn how to use a computer and you gotta learn how to Read reading, writing arithmetic, right? Just basics.

38:31 And then Once you've done that, yeah. You do need to have some domain expertise in something, right? The question is What are you gonna do, right? You either Wanna create a a new product or you want to create a new service?

38:47 Or you want to radically transform an existing product or service using AI to be much cheaper, much better. But to my mind, you know, I would try to create something magical. Like for example Can you create something that does everybody's accounting, does you know, does the work of a million accountants and sell it for ten bucks a month? Right. If you're eighteen now, if your kids can change and dad, what should I

39:16 Go and study at university. And what shouldn't I study at university? Would your answer be different now as we stand on the foothills of this new technology? You wanna study the new thing. Right. You wanna learn the new thing. And so if you look at the history of of science, the real question is what's on the S curve. On the S curve. The whole theory of the S curve is for a thousand years we try to fly. And infinite energy makes no progress, you cannot fly.

39:41 And then in nineteen oh three. All of a sudden we can sort of fly. And in sixty six years We go from flying Twenty miles an hour to flying three hundred miles an hour. First a fighter jet, then a passenger jet, then we have like rockets that are on man, then we have man rockets, and then we have rockets to go to orbit, and then we have rockets to go to the moon.

40:01 And so that's an example of an S curve, but then you know what happens. In the mid seventies, we designed the seven thirty seven, the seven forty seven. And we hit a wall. You know, and seven thirty seven is still the primary airplane for the next fifty years. And if you look at the efficiency of an airplane from nineteen seventy five Uh to the year twenty twenty five, over fifty years.

40:24 The modern airplanes are fifteen percent more efficient. Like so what you got was a diminishing return and when you're on the S curve, things are doubling every three years. You're doubling, you're doubling, you're doubling your exponential growth. And then you hit diminishing returns, and then you stagnate, and then you stop, and then things are just not getting any better. So let's show a nice curve on the screen and also Uh the the new S curve coming in below it.

40:50 Well when I was at MIT, you know, everybody basically flocked to uh electrical engineering and computer science. Because that was the cool thing. And so The mistake to make when you go to school is you get at the end of the S curve. You you basically start studying something that ha has hit diminishing returns, and once you hit that diminishing return, No material progress may take place for a hundred years. It might be that

41:16 You just can't Break through. Propulsion. technology is the limiting factor. Like why don't we have planes that will fly, you know, supersonic, you know, on um you know, a tank of gas that's that's this much, right? Or fusion drives.

41:33 Well because we don't. Now on the other hand semiconductors uh started exploding and semi and semiconductor technology has continued to advance. We haven't hit That limit. Yet, and that's that's why so many profound breakthroughs were made in computer science over the past fifty years.

41:52 This has kind of hit an S curve. Hasn't it? As a form factor, my iPhone here. Yeah, the over since the iPhone as you said, since iPhone like six. It hasn't really gotten thinner better, the battery hasn't really taken a

42:05 Leap forward as such. So we're now looking for another form factor to Interface with computers. Yeah, you know the iPhone one didn't have cut and paste. And we didn't get cut and paste till the version three.

42:17 And so there was a rapid improvement versions one through six or one through seven call it And at that point you start hitting diminishing returns. And if you were to do some utility function and you were to score it on a scale of one to a hundred You would have gone from like five to seventy in a hurry, and then you would have gone from seventy to ninety over the next few iterations, and then you're ninety-one, ninety-two. You hit that limit and now if if you are starting a company, right, you don't create another iPhone. Right. The real question right now uh is uh Can I create smart glasses where I have something that's like my Maui Jim sunglasses, I put'em on, they weigh nothing, and they have the camera and they see what I see and they hear what I hear and they know where I am.

43:08 And plug that into AI and at that point I can just say, Hey Eve, what is that? You know, where am I? And tell me about that. And and it's like Why do I have to type anymore? When I met um Mark Zuckerberg, he showed me the The device that's on the way from Meta. This is not a secret,'cause I know they've talked about it publicly. Which is just uh it was just a plain wrist strap.

43:33 With no screen on it. But it linked to The glasses. And in the glasses, when I looked around I could see all of my screens and everything like that. And I and if I just because of this wrist strap, if I just click, it clicks on all the stuff. So I was just sat here with this little wrist strap. The wrist strap again was just like a Cotton.

43:50 Bracelet, very thin cotton bracelet. And as I just looked around, I could click on everything and open things and call people in Sentex and go on YouTube, et cetera. And it was just up here in my peripheral. Imagine again, imagine that on an S curve. At some point it's gonna be a some sort of like almost a contact lens type thing. That's that I can just say. By the way, this is why you should study fantasy, right? Because they have this, right, in magic worlds, right? This is like You know, like I just wear my Talsman. Uh you know, I have a necklace. What does it do for oh, it makes me omniscient, all powerful, immortal, indestructible. I live forever. Wha well, what do you have to do to make the product work?

44:28 Nothing. I'm wearing the wristband and I walk and every door opens to me and stuff happens. And here's where Elon gets it right. It's like the number one engineering mistake is engineers want to optimize a part that shouldn't exist. Like make the parts go away. Right. We start on the topic of what should you study. Right. It study technologies that allow you to create magic things that your parents could never if your parents would say that's magic You're on the right track, right? So like how about

44:58 What's better than the wristband? How about you just like implant one pellet? Nearlink. Yeah. Maybe it's a neural link, maybe it's uh maybe it's when I'm born there's a slight implant and now I I hear right I can talk to the AI and cyberspace.

45:15 Forever. But should you go study that because conceivably the artificial intelligence And the robots are gonna be the ones that create that technology if they have a PhD in everything and that's accelerating. Yeah, well I guess we're back to the what should you study. You ought to t study digital intelligence or digital assets. If you can generate Yeah. Generate proteins, gener uh generate any kind of uh life form or enzyme or protein or the like. Maybe it's interesting.

45:45 But I think um With regard to AI You don't want to learn how to do things the AI can do. What you wanna do is learn how to ask the AI to do something that's never been done before. Like if I were to go back to school. Ninety five percent of what I learned, uh, I probably wouldn't want to study.

46:05 What about a surgeon? Do you think you want to be a surgeon? No. What about a uh a lawyer? No. Accountant?

46:12 No. Driver. No. At some point What you have to do is ask

46:19 Uh uh uh the AIs aren't really answering the question yet, but you have but you have to ask whatever is the marginal question that hasn't been answered by the civilization. Could you maybe I'll take it I'll I'll take that position, which is The way you create value in the world is you bring something into the world that wasn't here before. This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the drivers here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal. It can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps. And we call this in our team the one percent. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done.

47:10 So that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these one percent diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for You. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at the diary. dot com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscribe but, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button. It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.

48:03 Beyond just buying Bitcoin. Is there any sort of actionable steps that the working class should take right now to prepare for this? robot transition that you're talking about. I mean the actionable stop is Is

48:18 Learn Not about the reverse. Digital. Like understand digital, for example. How much content's available on YouTube right now? Like infinite rather than right. What can you get for free on YouTube and what can you create of value, right? If you're in the business of content creation, my advice would be study digital channels. I'd it's like should I go and become a stage actor on Broadway?

48:46 It's a it's a it's a s A much smaller thing, Mr Beast can get a hundred million subscribers. You can get twenty million subscribers. You're not getting twenty million subscribers if you do the thing that your parents parents did. So I think that you want to look at digital platforms. There's there's digital communication like X or Instagram, there's YouTube and A and the like, but there's also There's also digital intelligence.

49:14 Let's just stress test that first point a bit. Uh I guess a lot of content creators are thinking at the moment, now because of these frontier models, that can produce video, content, pictures, a kid in Mumbai, All Man Han. Where we are now. A hundred videos while I'm asleep. on this every single platform.

49:35 Actually I'll make five agents and I'll ask all of them to post A hundred videos each. So you're gonna have this you have in terms of supply and demand, presumably that's a supply shock. There's this slop tsunami coming in. And then if you look at demand of attention online, it is arguably fixed. Fin Financial Times did a report said that young young people are actually starting to come down in terms of time spent online. Uh slightly older generations are starting from a lower base. They're still going up, but they're starting from a lower base. So you've got a tsunami slot of supply and fixed demand. Again, this even this business feels a little bit insecure. Actually, a lot of the po major podcasters are actually down on YouTube.

50:10 If I look at the top. who I would consider the sort of top five podcasters in my niche, um, every single one of them's down at least fifty percent. In the last twenty ish uh twelve, twelve, twenty-four months. Well the solution is certainly not to not pay attention, right? So for example, If you're in the business of creating content right now, you would ask the question, Can I enhance the content with AI? Or

50:33 Can I better market or distribute the content with AI? What is the moat? The moat's going to be the most talented content cre the person creating the best stuff that everybody wants to see. There are videos being created like here's a walk through of a sixteenth century warship. And you know, I don't know if you've seen a guy construct the entire warship from the keel and he creates the ribs and he shows you the lower deck and the ballast and he takes you through every step and it's a three dimensional Uh video animation Takes about an hour.

51:05 And it's absolutely riveting. I have no reason to care about sixteenth century warships, but I can't take my eyes off it because it's just so fascinating to see him explain everything. Are you saying creativity is the mo still? Or understanding what humans want and then delivering it. Which I guess is creativity. Let's say the Led Zeppelin example. But what what you see in human history.

51:30 Is Within ten years Of whenever there's a new technology platform, there's some geniuses. They push it to the limit and they do ninety five percent of everything that can be done, and it all happens within ten years and they live forever. So why didn't anybody before Beethoven do stuff with the piano? Well the piano comes out, some genius does stuff with the piano, right? And between Beethoven and Chopin and uh you know, and a a few players, it's like it's not clear to me if humans try for another ten thousand years, they'll do

52:04 Much better. So with Led Zeppelin you had electric guitars and you had amplification and everything kinda clicked Late sixties. Like the sound of the early sixties was not quite there, and then by nineteen seventy one, seventy two you could do some amazing stuff. And if you think about all the classic rock Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty, you have human creativity and

52:28 pushing the edge of the envelope in so many directions, and then you hit this diminishing return. And then along comes sampling, right? And then you get Swedish house mafia and Aviche, and that's new technology. And then they push it to the extreme. And then along comes YouTube. And Justin Bieber comes out of a Nowhere. You know, and Mr. Beast comes out of nowhere and they push it to the extreme

52:52 And what you see with every generation is I give you a new thing, whether it's a piano or electric guitar or uh internet. Think about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and what he did at just about the point when you could do that with the web and then think about the early mobile apps, you know, WhatsApp and the like. And it's like What you want to do if you want to create these incredible success things is You wanna locate

53:20 the magic opportunity right at the right point on the S curve where it just now became commercially viable to do it. And it's a zero to one moment. And you want to be there. You want to be the first person That applies that technology. Right, uh to this new idea. Like what did our company do to to go from nothing to sixty billion dollars or from one billion to sixty billion? We were the first company to take digital capital. Bitcoin. And put it together.

53:54 with digital credit. And a digital treasury model. So we created a credit instrument, a security that you couldn't ever create before. You couldn't have made it ten years ago. You couldn't build it on top of anything other than Bitcoin. So we needed to get to the point where we had ten or twenty billion dollars of capital. And then we could create this thing that was a multi billion dollar thing and that becomes resonant. And that window? It's like twelve to twenty four months.

54:24 And you go through that window and you create something that might be a hundred billion dollar thing because you go through if you went through thirty six months early, you smack into a wall and you fail. And if you wait. Like at this point, our company is twenty times bigger than the next biggest one. fifty times bigger than the company doing something similar. Did we plan it? Not at all.

54:46 We found some extraordinary cool thing. We committed to it with all of our heart and soul, and we declared we were going to make it work come hell or high water, and we got punched in the face a hundred times, and every single time we ran into a problem. We stopped, we recalibrated, we went a different direction, and the process of creating something beautiful. Like the beautiful thing like everybody wants a bank account that pays ten percent. So if you can figure out how to give people this thing they want. With a new technology

55:18 That was impossible, that did not exist. Five years or three years earlier. Then you resonate in the society, right? You'd go viral. Like we were just the first ones to get there. It exploded. If you gave me a billion dollars right now and said run a marketing campaign, it wouldn't be As effective.

55:36 Why you couldn't buy the success with a billion dollars of marketing. You just have to The LEDs up guys, they didn't spend a billion dollars marketing. You gotta be in the right place The right time And you have to have the courage. To offer people the new thing.

55:54 I Have been thinking a lot about this, this idea of you said, you know If you've spent a billion dollars, you couldn't go as viral as that. And if someone came along and spent a ton of money today, they couldn't go b as big as Let's say Michael Jackson. When we go back through history, I was thinking about this this idea because I watched the Michael Jackson documentary recently and he was

56:13 At a level of fame that is I don't think we've ever seen since. And I think part of the reason why was because there was a constraint on the distribution channels back then. So in my house, there was twenty albums over there, box set albums. And Michael Jackson, three of them. And then the other way that we could consume. was the TV over there, and there was like six channels, and MTV was one of them, and it was Michael Jackson all day.

56:37 In the world we live in now where there's my phone experience is a completely different phone experience to yours because of AI. AI is learning what I like and showing me My own little version of the world. I wonder if it's possible to be As big as a Michael Jackson once was for anybody these days. And actually I I even with the U chie you you mentioned earlier, I wonder now if fame or cool. Being a content creator or a musician.

57:04 Once look like this. This sort of like high Ceiling. And then You're known for a hundred years like Michael Jackson?

57:14 And now with algorithms that are personalized. Does it now look like this? Shorter. And shallower. Is it possible to get big? You could say, Well, I can't get as big as Michael Jackson but on the other hand, Elon Musk got big. Right, like like there are things that get big, right? Companies get big. Open AI went from nothing to how many users in just a few months.

57:40 So I think what you could say is going viral is about hitting a resonating frequency in the civilization, whether it's an artistic frequency or it's a political frequency or it's a it's a technical frequency. Yeah, there are some things Where there's going to be a glut, there's going to be Well, uh let's take Instagram, right? It's like

58:02 On one hand, a billion people have like bad photos posted online, but on the other hand, there are people that manage to get you know, eight million followers and they you know Are the Kard Kardashians, you know, you have these people that get massively big and that's the other side of the equation. So I don't really know how it all plays out.

58:29 Except for the fact that it seems clear that there is room for human creativity and innovation. And If your goal is to make contribution Right. If you're at if you're in your working years where you want to upgrade the world and make a difference and be remembered for something Then a a pretty simple principle is

58:53 don't keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year fighting against the modern automation you know, epidemic, right? Don't try to outwork the robots. It's like you're you're lamenting, you know how difficult it is for a content creator, but let me remind you that it used to be You would go be a college professor and teach two hundred students a year for twenty Years.

59:21 And you would feel that your life contribution was four thousand people whose minds you touched. And now You get four thousand people a second. Okay. So You're judging yourself against

59:36 The next thing But if you look back in time. Technology has given us the ability to amplify Or intellect and amplify

59:47 our creativity in in a way that is uh unprecedented in human history. Yeah, I think I think in part it's I'm wondering now if we're kind of it i we technology said okay, you can reach more people in T V, radio, all these things. And actually now with intelligence, it's saying, Oh, we can figure out exactly what Michael wants. So we're starting to live in these smaller echo chambers where your creative idea or your creative piece of content reaching lots of people is going to become harder because the algorithms are now in the way and they're deciding who sees what. Um and they're optimizing for The the I guess the platform. The the platform's monetary design. The other thing that I think is really interesting and I've been mulling for the last couple of

1:00:26 months is that That which is really, really hard and scarce. And actually you could say h something being hard and scarce are are the are the same,'cause to create something scarce is also hard, like you did with that financial instrument. Very few people on earth could have created that. We don't run public companies, we don't have the information, et cetera. Or even that YouTuber you mentioned who walks you through those uh the sixteen hundreds or whatever, that is very hard to do. I've theorized that actually pursuing that which is hard and scarce Getting you to come here today is not easy. So that's kind of my note.

1:00:57 Michelle Obama coming and sitting down with me here is still kind of my note. Um Is is is what we should aim at. What do you think of that as a theory? I agree. Let's say you have a business, whatever your business is.

1:01:11 Right now the right thing to do is to spend an intense time with the AI considering what are all the ways you can Upgrade. and improve the product or the service you create, right? Uh for example like It it used to be you do this in English and the issue is, well, what if what about Japanese or Chinese or French or whatever and

1:01:33 Yeah, the hard way is you learn twenty languages and you know, but then how does your guest uh or do we translate it or you hire you know, we used to spend money to hire translators, but now You could have the AI translate this into a hundred languages, right? Now the question is, should you? Or not. Can I enhance it? Right. It's interesting when someone describes something, but you're like, let's just put up a chart of the S curve there. And then the next step is can I market it better or distribute it better? And the next step is

1:02:02 Am I creating something that'll be valuable in a decade? Well will it be valuable in a hundred years? Well this is probably a good time to mention this. Uh twenty four months ago we started exactly that, which is there are aliens in your stuff. No. Uh Arabic. Yeah and ask yourself how many people that do podcast interviews offer that level of quality of content and outstripping like I don't know of anybody else that's done enough. Right. We started uh almost three years ago. And for the first twenty four months, it was a tragic failure. So you had the data scientists in the corner of our office failing for twenty four months. And then

1:02:46 About twelve months ago, for the first time ever, we saw that the translation technology us had improved and that we could get the view duration in Spanish. To be. Higher. Yeah. And how many months do you think Jimmy Page spent trying to master the electric guitar?

1:03:02 More than twenty four months. Yeah, not longer. My advice to an entrepreneur is Your focus You commit If you're successful in less than four years, you got lucky. It's probab yeah. If it takes you ten years, well between four and ten years is is very, very normal.

1:03:21 If you haven't had success by the ten year point, you're probably not cut out for the business. But You know, what you're doing is it's totally logical. It's like is AI going to remake this industry? The first issue is can you make the product better? And the second question is what's it worth? Right. Right. You can do that. Can you get paid and you know, and by the way, even if you didn't get paid I would argue that your audience have a limited attention span. It's like I don't have time to listen to every Lex Friedman, every Joe Rogan, every diary of the CEO and every one of the next twenty. And so I'm going to become loyal. I'm going to become a customer and a fan of whoever

1:04:02 serves me the best content and certainly if I'm a native Portuguese speaker. Or a native Russian speaker, you all of a sudden just leaped right to the top. This goes to my point about hard and scarce because it's not a good thing. People in in Portugal. Maybe have Netha.

1:04:18 Heard Michael Saylor before. In Portuguese. So in terms of scarce, it's actually the only interview now available that is two hours long of Michael Saylor talking in Cantonese. with Stephen, you know. And so that th we then are competing, we have that's kind of the moat then, right? And that that becomes a benefit to all your guests.

1:04:36 You're the distribution channel for me. to send the message of digital capital digital empowerment to the world and then Your guest become your moat. I think that

1:04:50 With every single business it's pretty clear you have to ask the question Is technology going to cannibalize my business or disrupt it? And am I going to be the one that embraces it and evolves and grows with it? Or am I gonna fight it? And then of course You're in a dialogue with the market. For example, the great thing about what you've done is if you've done it, you can look and see how it runs and ha and whether YouTube actually expands your reach and then you can look at the engagement and and figure out whether or not you're able to monetize that, whether you're able to

1:05:24 Able to convert that and then you tweak it. Right, and adjust and you're Six months or twelve months can be enough that you have a lasting advantage forever, right? If you're twelve months ahead of everybody else, and you're compounding in Yeah, it compounds over time and then maybe they never catch you. Like a

1:05:42 That's you know, and but that's the story of every business. Right, that's the s that's the story of Ford Motor Company and Standard Oil, that's the story of Microsoft, it's the story of Facebook, it's everybody's story, which is You just have to focus, commit, and then if you're good enough Invariably what happens is

1:06:02 Is your customers Will make you the winner. The world needs someone to do what you do. Like someone had to has to win, right? There needs to be a winner the audience out there wants they want what you do. They want they They want to walk into the living room and figure out what Obama was thinking, or they want to hear, you know, what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking, and they want someone

1:06:28 to bring them into that living room. They want you to host them in. They need someone to do that job. You don't You don't have to be what perfect or better than anybody ever lived. You need to be better than the people that are currently doing it now, or you need to be one of You know, a handful of people. that are that are doing it because at that point

1:06:53 Right, the audience comes to you, the guests come to you. You're making a market, right? You're the market maker in that information. It's just the real key is know what your value proposition is, stay in your lane.

1:07:09 Y no don't don't try to compete. in an area where you're not gonna be the best in the world But on the other hand Right. The the one thing that's pretty clear is that Anybody can have the best in the world in like two seconds at their fingertips. And so you don't want to be the third best.

1:07:29 You don't want to be mediocre across a bunch of things. You want to be exceptional in one area. Figure out what that one area is and then Maybe you have two million followers, then two hundred million followers, right? Then eventually, you know, over a hundred years, two billion. You d you just you just have to have this vision. One of the things that comes with the pursuit of being first is You go over the hill, you take the arrows. As the phrase goes. And so even in that experiment that I just showed you that we started three years ago, which was trying to figure out how we translate the Deriv C into lots of different languages, it sounds simple. Problem is you you discover you go fuck Spanish words are longer?

1:08:06 So the video in Spanish is three hours ten, but in English it's three hours. It's just three hours. And then the video's gonna be up and then Cantonese how long is Cantonese words? And then you go my God, you have to and then translate all the thumbnails and all the titles in twenty languages at the same time, that's why you end up three years in when you thought it was just a Yeah. But also, if you zoom out even further, there's this graveyard of other things we tried that never worked. There's this the other ninety percent of experiments we ran in the corner that did nothing. And It's I I always say to the team, there's two things a year that define us.

1:08:38 And of that, in our failure and experimentation team, which is literally what it's called, we tried sixty things. Yeah. But there's this th you know, five of them are math. Two of them. Game changing. So the attitude of dealing with failure. at the very forefront of trying to be first.

1:08:53 I think is something people don't talk about enough. Focus your energy. Guard your time. Just'cause you can do a thing doesn't mean you should Do the thing. Right, most of the time the the reason people fail

1:09:06 is they get successful in their thirties and they're successful at one thing and it's like all of a sudden they've decided they're gonna do ten other things because they're good at everything and they dilute their focus in ten ways. People always underestimate the maintenance obligation. Like o always And so I yeah, the right The right solution to growth is

1:09:30 I would like to make whatever I'm doing twice as good. And if I do ten things to make it ten percent better, I'm probably diluting, distracting the uh phenomenon that causes most businesses to fail. It's uh diluted distractions or it's it's diluted expansions. They do one thing, it works, and then instead of Turning their energy in. To make that better and better and better and better.

1:09:55 They start to bifurcate and trifurcate and they expand and they over reach to too many areas. It's like the dude with the great restaurant. And he's got the second restaurant. And he's got a chain of thirty seven restaurants and they all suck.

1:10:11 And it's like, Yeah, I remember the guy used to have there there's no one, by the way, with a failed restaurant chain. There wasn't a successful restaurant here at scale one. Right. Like you didn't get to a failure of thirty seven or sixty two or four hundred and thirty seven until you had a good one. But it's very, very common. that people think that they can just cookie cutter these things out and You can't, and so the conundrum

1:10:36 that you're putting your finger on is I want to grow and progress, but I want to not dilute. and distract and that requires this maturity of saying, I tried it. Had a moderate success, but it's not enough. Kill it.

1:10:53 Like and and and move on because it's just not gonna work. There's two things that came to mind there. The first is a lot of young people come up to me and they're nine months into their idea and they're not rich yet. So the they look over there and they see their friend has started a thing with a CBD. And so they're like, I think I need to go into CBD. And so their careers kind of look like this sort of like swinging through the jungle, grabbing onto the next branch and letting go of the last, and never really making um upward motion towards any goal. And then the other thing I thought about as you're speaking is I've been mulling a this um over the only only over the last two months, this idea that If you take a long term approach to things, you make f foundational decisions today. That create huge competitive advantages.

1:11:40 And the simple analogy I would give. If you gave me ten seconds to make the highest possible tower that I can, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go like this, and I'm gonna go like this, I'm gonna try and Do something like this and just by nature of the time constraint. It's unstable. If you gave me ten years and infinite blocks again, I would start like this.

1:11:59 I'd do this one here, I put this one here, I put this one here, and I build something more stable. And when I look at some of the great founders and also when I saw that you'd been at your, you know, micro strategy for m more than three, almost four decades, I think it was. I think Oh, you're one of the rare long termists in a world where most of my generation we think about our career or what we're working on in like maximum five year periods. Then we'll be able quit and go do something else. Startup founders. They build so they can sell and then they they you they're sort of holding it together with tape as the acquirer comes to buy the thing. And they're nervous as the contract's being signed,'cause they know if the the acquirer looks under the hood, they're gonna see some But then I look at Elon.

1:12:36 And I go, Oh gosh, we fucking went and rebuilt a brand new battery and then built the charging network and SpaceX took two decades. My question is About this long termism. And does it create a a s uh competitive advantage?

1:12:51 I think Elon thinks like a like an engineer And uh if you if you look at his businesses, they're all built upon each other. Like i if you figure out how to launch a rocket and you have the uh the highest payload capacity and the the the cheapest cost to orbit. Then you've got an advantage. Now the question is what do you want to put in orbit? We put satellites, but what satellite like Starlink satellite because that's the thing everybody wants. Internet. And so

1:13:21 All of a sudden he's got an advantage. you know, in the sky, and then you build on that advantage. And You know, with battery technology, right? But he could have gone to Russia and bought a rocket and just shot that up and Yeah, would have been the short term with Tesla, you could have bought the batteries off forward or One great natural example is like a chambered nautilus. If you look at if you look at a creature and it's building a shell and it's spiraling out on itself and basically it keeps building on its own structure and it's nature's solution for growth under pressure.

1:13:53 It's the Fibonacci sequence too. If you look at a Fibonacci sequence, if I have this and then the next structure is here and the next structure is there and the next structure is there. Part of my previous business is the foundation for my next business. And so if you're thinking your growth strategy is to build on a foundation of something you already had and extend its functionality in a natural fashion. That's natural, stable growth. When your second business idea is unrelated to your first business. In any way other than the fact that you own both. Right. Now you're not building on a stable foundation.

1:14:32 So most of these businesses that work and and the the best ideas that they start with someone dominating a market. I'm really good at this. Yeah, and now what is the natural thing that I can add that I can use my existing business to m to maybe I'm marketing it? Well your Coca-Cola. Well we deliver a pall of drinks to eighty seven thousand restaurants in the UK every morning. What's the natural extension? Well I can put one more type of drink on the palate, right? You need to use your distribution strength, your market strength. your technical strength in order to lever. I think you look at all the great businesses

1:15:15 in the history of the world. I got standard oil, Ford Motor, Boeing, Microsoft. The things they did that worked were generally building on top of their foundation, either loyal customers or distribution or some financial asset they already had. Another way to say it is If there's no one else in the world that has And that is better situated to do this thing than you? Then you're probably in good shape, right? If there are 97 other companies that have more assets than you in that space, well

1:15:51 Yeah, you gotta bet that all ninety seven of them are not gonna react to you when you do it. It's a bit harder. So the long termism comes in, because to build that fundamental advantage it it It by definition. It's gonna take. Time. Good example.

1:16:07 Mm. Amazon? Prime, right? Where Amazon started giving free shipping you know, first free shipping or very cheap shipping and one day shipping and and everybody said, Well you're losing money, you're losing money, you're losing money and they lost money this for like a decade. And then they got to some point where like everybody in the country

1:16:28 was a member of Amazon Prime and they're like, Okay, well now it's twenty bucks a month instead of ten bucks a month and it's like an extra ten dollars a month times like a hundred million Oh my God, they just made twelve billion dollars in one press release per year in cash flow And that's worth like two hundred fifty billion dollars. And you're like uh w what

1:16:50 What were you doing? It's like we were We are building the moat. That story is not uncommon with every other thing. It's like you first believe You build the biggest distribution channel you can, people are gonna tell you, they're gonna tell you, well, there's no future to whatever to podcast, there's no future to Something

1:17:10 And what'll happen is ninety nine percent of the people will drop out because they don't believe And the true believers, the ones that are not created won't adapt. And then there'll be some that'll say, I believe, but I also know there's a threat, but I'm going to channel the technology threat and I'm going to evolve and I'm going to emerge as something a thousand X better. Than anybody could conceive. And that's a beautiful story.

1:17:36 Speaking of strong foundations, You have ten rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career. And you've talked about two of them here, which is focusing your energy and not chasing every good idea. Yeah. The second one was guard your time. The third one is train your mind. And with that you've got train your body. You know, the funny story of that is I I was invited to a cocktail party of a billionaire on the French Riviera in a beautiful home, and I showed up and I walked into the party think I was gonna hang out.

1:18:05 And another billionaire showed up and he said, You know, Mike, I just had twins, a boy and a girl, and I'm walking around asking all of all of my friends for advice for them, and I want you to like write some advice for them that I can give to them on their twenty first birthday. And he's got this book where he's actually collecting advice for his his children that to give them on their twenty first birthday. So I sit down and I think think think think think and I'm like Focus your mind, f guard your time, and train your mind. You gotta learn that you gotta

1:18:41 learn something, right? You gotta learn reading, writing, arithmetic. You you have to actually develop a culture base. So it's like get an education. And then train your body. Wait, because if if you're weak. You're not gonna make it, right? You're not you're not gonna survive. And then think for yourself.

1:18:58 Everybody in the world wants to program you to believe to do something they want you to do. And you have to have the presence of mind to think that's not right, just because everybody that I know and famous, rich and beautiful people tell me it's right doesn't make it right, you need to decide think for yourself. And then curate your friends. Because you you know, you become who you surround yourself with, and if you surround yourself with positive uh inspirational talented people

1:19:27 you'll be the best person version of yourself and if you surround yourself with negative, cynical failing people, they're gonna want you to fail, or they're not gonna inspire you to succeed and And they'll bring it down. And so after curate your friends, curate your environment, right? Like Make it a happy place where you can work or you can live and you know

1:19:50 The world didn't say you had to be in the dark in an ugly situation and and after that. Keep your promises. At the end of the day, people remember if you didn't keep your promise, so you y you tell you tell somebody you're gonna do something, do it, right? If i if you keep your promises, you'll find those are the people that invest in you, they uplift you, they make you successful. There may be the difference between life and death, or the difference between success and failure for you. And And ultimately You know, we're all in relationships with each other.

1:20:21 Right, and uh and no one is so powerful that they can afford to take anybody else for granted Uh, we all need each other, and and um Finally Stay cheerful and constructive. It doesn't matter whether bad things happen, the the point is People wanna come to work with someone that's cheerful and happy and constructive. They wanna, you know, they wanna be in a relationship with that person.

1:20:46 All those are just basic Principles to get through life and then the final point is upgrade the world. If you have a plan, if you're on a mission To upgrade the world? You're gonna feel better about yourself. You get up every day, you have a mission, you have something to do. Like

1:21:01 What is my mission? You know, I'm preaching the gospel of digital empowerment, right? Satoshi. Created This

1:21:11 Economic property right. He gave economic empowerment to eight billion people for the first time in human history. And uh we created the world's first perfect money. We created You know. Digital energy, digital matter, digital property.

1:21:27 Right. We can be a thousand X more as as humans with technology than we were. I look through all human history and I see it's a story of misery. Yeah. Why do people die? Lack of clean water, lack of clean air.

1:21:44 Lack of clean food. Lack of clean money. What do we want? We want to live forever. We want to live happily forever. Do you want to live forever? I wanna live as long as I can live and you know, constructively and make a contribution. If if I could be if I can be engaged and vital, then yeah, at the point that I can no longer make a contribution. Uh then I will move on gracefully.

1:22:11 Pressing it guaranteed you immortality. Would you press it? I think so. I suppose so. Why aren't you then um committing more of your efforts It's too longevity. Peck Elon the same question. I think

1:22:23 There's eight billion people on the planet. And there are many people that I respect that are much more qualified to pursue that mission than me. And the thing that you've chosen to focus your efforts on and become the leading voice on, and I've watched you for many, many, many, many years, is I've, you know, when Bitcoin comes down in price and one sometimes I need a bit of a therapist, uh Remind me of why I've invested in Bitcoin and that person has been you over the years. Uh and then when it's up, you know, you're you're you're you're To your credit, you're consistent about it. And that is

1:22:51 Yeah, I I have watched you and talk I think this guy must be he's either like Batshit crazy or genius. And it's sometimes hard to tell. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier when people will say you're crazy at first and and then you'll be proven right. Now, historically you've been proven right. If you if you zoom out from when you started advocating for Bitcoin. Um, Bitcoin is down right now. So again we're back into fear. People are scared again. And uh it's funny what happens because when it was going up a couple of months ago, everyone thought, Oh my God, this is gonna be the future of money, and now it's down.

1:23:19 Everyone is like convinced that it's it was always a Ponzi scheme and it's it's done. You've got a Uh w I guess uh trying trying to simplify this for for average people, you've taken a lot of debt out to buy more and more and more and more and more bitcoin. Is that accurate? I guess we've got about six and a half billion dollars of convertible debt and fifteen billion dollars of preferred stocks outstanding, and we're sitting on top of about fifty eight billion dollars of assets right now. So We have raised

1:23:46 About sixty five billion dollars in capital to buy Bitcoin, but most of it wasn't debt. Okay. Of the sixty five billion. For the most part, we've raised capital with equity and some debt. in order to buy bitcoin and we've been doing that because we wanted to pump sixty five billion dollars of Capital.

1:24:05 Of money, of energy into the ecosystem. So we're powering the ecosystem with capital. Everyone theorizes. I've seen a few people on my timeline that I follow theorizes how bad it would have to get for Bitcoin in terms of price for you to be in trouble. If Bitcoin could fall to five thousand dollars a coin, we would still be over collateralized against the debt. You'd still be fine. Yeah. And the other thing people theorise a lot, and I again I did a comment analysis to figure out what people wanted to hear from you, is you sold a bit of Bitcoin.

1:24:32 You've been asked this a few times, I know. You sold a bit of Bitcoin recently. After Telling a lot of people maybe to hold on to their Bitcoin. People want to know why you sold the Bitcoin. Okay. Well so let's make the first point.

1:24:47 The only person that's never sold more Bitcoin than me Satoshi? It's Satoshi. Satoshi never sold a million? A million one bitcoin Our company has eight hundred forty seven thousand Bitcoin. And so we bought more and we're holding it more than anybody other than Satoshi. And Satoshi is not active. So we have a reasonable chance of of never selling more Bitcoin than Satoshi if we just keep at it for the next few years. Um

1:25:14 What I've said is um so I should probably show this this is why there's a kidney. Yeah Sell the kidney if you must, but keep the bitcoin. I I have I have wage the campaign nonstop every day. For six years. to to promote and advocate Bitcoin as a long term store of value. Right? And and what I would say is if you have money that you don't need for the next four years

1:25:38 And your choice is do I invest it in the S P or a house or a private company or soybeans or money markets or debt instruments. I think that Bitcoin is the best, right? I think that Bitcoin is digital capital. It's gonna be the best long term capital asset. And uh you know. So why did you sell the bitcoin instead of your kidney? Yeah. Um We sold some Bitcoin a few weeks ago because there was a narrative or a belief in the market

1:26:09 that our company had become so systemically integrated or important to Bitcoin that we could never sell. And if we sold Bitcoin would go to zero. And our stock would go to zero. Because you own four percent of the total supply of Bitcoin. Yeah, because we own four percent. Because we're the biggest buyer we we're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. So the first sentiment was well bitcoin will never succeed if they don't keep buying. And the second sentiment or belief.

1:26:36 uh misconception was if we sell it'll crash bitcoin and it'll crash the company And because of that short sellers and and certain people in the market took the position that the fifty five billion dollars of bitcoin we own Was worth nothing. And so what we had was this ignorant

1:26:57 Uh sceptical notion. That All of the company's assets were worthless. And because the company's assets were worthless, we wouldn't pay our dividends, and because we wouldn't pay our dividends, the credit would go to zero, and the equity would go to zero, the company would fail, and Bitcoin would fail. Um

1:27:14 We said well, Bitcoin is trades twenty billion dollars a day or more and we've got fifty five billion of it and if we were point oh one percent of the market, we could still meet all of our obligations and it's not going to change the price of Bitcoin. But no one believed us. So if if you want people to believe that you can do a thing, you have to do the thing. If you told me you could do a back flip right now, but I said you w you can't, at some point you have to do the back flip. Right. Especially if I tell you that I'm gonna throw you in jail if you can't do a backflip. Who told you that? Well, that's exactly what's going on in the market. The market's position was the company is worthless, the stock is going to zero, Bitcoin is going to zero because they can't sell.

1:27:57 If we want to defend bitcoin Like we have to prove that we can sell it on occasion, right? So What we're doing is we're commercializing the market and digital credit And if you have a billion dollars of bitcoin and they believe it's worth a billion, you can sell two hundred million dollars of credit. And then you can grow the business.

1:28:19 If they believe that. If they don't believe that the Bitcoin is worth anything, you can't and you sell the two hundred million of credit, the credit's worthless. And the company's worthless. And so we were in a doom loop, or the the market was in this doom loop, uh this n this negative uh short, I don't know, like a s a psychosis, almost like hyperventilating. saying that the largest buyer of Bitcoin can't sell it, and if they do sell it, Bitcoin will fail.

1:28:48 And what we needed to do was demonstrate that if we saw Bitcoin, it wouldn't fail. So when we saw the Bitcoin it was sixty, fifty nine thousand and it traded up. And so we broke that misconception. We broke that uh that narrative. It turns out that the break even point for us is about three point two percent. So if Bitcoin appreciates three point two percent, we can pay the dividends forever. By just selling the bitcoin.

1:29:12 But you can imagine if you're a short seller, you say, Well, you can't sell the Bitcoin, ha ha ha ha ha, because Bitcoin will fail. And so they want to say that the credit is worthless because you won't sell the Bitcoin. So the way to break that cycle is you sell the Bitcoin. Now you can illustrate that the credit is actually good credit. We can pay the dividends forever, and now the credit investor Yeah. Without having to sell more Bitcoin. No, the whole point of this was We were selling equity in order to

1:29:40 Pay the dividend on the credit. Yeah. And the short sellers took the position that you're gonna sell the equity until the stock goes to zero. Because you can't sell the Bitcoin. Yeah. So how do you actually get how do you break that? Well you have to say

1:29:55 Well we can sell the Bitcoin. And you sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividends. So we sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividends to prove that we could fund the dividends with Bitcoin, which means we don't have to sell the equity. And if if we don't have to sell the equity, then the equity trades at a premium to Bitcoin. Trades rationally. And then the credit trades rationally. So it was a benefit to the equity investors and the credit investors to show that you can power the company. With Bitcoin. Do in do you intend to sell more?

1:30:23 It's not our primary strategy. So it If the c if the The Common stock trades at a premium. Uh to the underlying assets, then probably we find with the common stock. But if the common stock ever sells at a discount or trades at a discount to the common uh to the Bitcoin assets, then you sell Bitcoin in order to protect the common stock. And where do you think Bitcoin's going in terms of monetary value?

1:30:46 In terms of one bitcoin. Currently what you said it's what sixty eight thousand or something? I think it appreciates About thirty percent a year for the next twenty years. Right, and then it will slow down to being appreciated about twenty percent a year. So You think it's the best asset to put your money in, really really respective of the

1:31:04 Who you are? Another way to say it is I think it appre I think it outperforms the S P index by a factor of One point five to two. Who shouldn't invest in Bitcoin. The right people to invest in Bitcoin are long term capital investors. So if you have a certain amount of money And you don't need it for the next four years.

1:31:25 And ideally ten years, then you would take a portion of your capital investment portfolio and buy Bitcoin. And if you believe in it. If you're a a Bitcoin maxi, if you spent a hundred hours studying it. You'd buy a lot. And if you're not sure, you'd probably diversify that portfolio across You know, some real estate, some equity.

1:31:49 Some other long term assets and some Bitcoin. The people that shouldn't buy it or people that need the money back in twelve weeks. What about like a regular twenty five year old? Um One of the questions that I saw emerging from some of the interviews you've done is if if a normal young person has a few hundred dollars to invest today,

1:32:06 Why should they bother with Wall Street products like stocks or corporate stocks instead of just buying a real Bitcoin and holding it themselves? Yeah. Yeah, I think if you have money to invest for the long term, you're gonna get double the performance from BTC that you would get from like the S P Index. But for that twenty five year old, would would it not be smarter for them to spend it on Something that's gonna help them train their mind, like you said. If you only have a hundred dollars.

1:32:33 I wouldn't go spend five hundred thousand dollars on an expensive, you know, university education, but I would spend twenty bucks a month on an AI. subscription. So so yeah, you should definitely spend money necessary to get the The super groc or the pro the professional edition, whether it's you know, twenty dollars a month or two hundred dollars two hundred dollars a month is the most I would spend. Twenty dollars a month is

1:32:58 Probably the least I would spend. But look, we're talking about your Netflix subscription at that point. But I After you've done that, and Then you're talking about what you ought to be invested in. I think that uh that you ought to be invested in digital capital'cause you can take it with you anywhere in the world.

1:33:16 If you invest in an Airbnb or real estate, you know, you're you're locked into a certain city, you can't travel with it, it's high maintenance, there's a lot of risk. If you invest in an individual stock, you have a lot of anxiety because they come and they go and you gotta pick the right stock. And most stocks will fail, but some will succeed, but But і really is much more challenging. I I think really it comes down to If you have a liquid portfolio.

1:33:44 You know, are you gonna invest in like the S P index if you're a conventional capital investor, or you're gonna invest in Bitcoin if you're a digital or a you know, uh a technology capital investor? Michael, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is what is one thing you believe That maybe you haven't talked about enough. That you think Likely.

1:34:08 Ninety nine percent of the world don't yet. Please. If I look at my life and I think about something that's been that's had a real impact on me. It's after I got a full education. You know, uh

1:34:23 From college I I eventually Went back and I studied two topics on my own. One, uh like practical applied statistics. All all the stuff that Nicholas Taleb wrote, like Fool by Randomness and Skin in the Game and The Black Swan. And uh you know, how do you know the difference between something that's meaningful and something that's just misleading random data?

1:34:46 That was profoundly valuable to me. And I would say, you know, anybody that hasn't read all of those books. probably ought to go read those books and and obsess over uh applied statistics. That's the one thing the AI will not be able to do for you when you have to decide whether to cross the street while you're typing on your phone. The AI will not

1:35:10 give you a never ending real time stream of common sense to tell you should or should not do that thing. And so I I think that that's really important. And the second thing that I did after I left school and and after a a a lifetime of experience is Like I went back And I just read uh The Story of Civilization by Durant. Every page. Eleven volumes, fourteen thousand.

1:35:37 pages. Most of the history that you read in school is the cliff notes. But if you go through the entire thing, and I recommend that one just because I think it was a pretty well balanced history that covered art and culture and politics and technology and mil it's not just military history, not just political history, but it was You know, all a a a very synthetic history. When you go back and you read it all.

1:36:05 As an adult. Then it gives you such a profound appreciation for humanity and it gives you so much wisdom. And what you'll find is all these things you think you're discovering. They got discovered in like fifteenth century Russia. And then they got rediscovered, you know, like most of these things that people tell you or This is new and profound. Oh, it's new and profound a hundred times in a row or a thousand times in a row. It's just uh the story was told a different way each time. That we think is new, but

1:36:37 History tells you. Maybe the fact that currency started getting debased when Nixon went off the gold standard, you know, and what happened in nineteen seventy one or w whatever. And the truth of the matter is That was the point at which the US dollar started weakening at a much more rapid rate. But it turns out that every currency

1:36:58 everywhere in history has been debased. My point here really is uh I think people think that they that they learn stuff in college. But really, it's not too late to go back and relearn math. especially applied statistics, and it's not too late to go back and relearn history and as an adult

1:37:19 You always appreciate those things much better. Yeah, yeah. You almost uh it's like the education is wasted on the youth. You know, because you don't you don't have the life experiences to appreciate what you're reading. But also, you know, they're they're summarizing, editing, and censoring a lot of the stuff you read. And and uh if you just go back and say, I'm just gonna

1:37:44 You know, read the entire thing in its entirety and it There are a lot of other things you could also read, full histories of other things, but As an adult, uh I think that that just makes you a better person and makes you a better business person, makes you a better leader. And also It helps you overcome the arrogance

1:38:02 I'm thinking, oh I'm the first guy in human history that ever encountered it and and what you'll realize is no you're not And The empowering part is someone else did, and this is how they work their way through the issue.

1:38:16 And and that can be very inspirational for you. Michael, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for um opening all of our eyes and thank you for Uh building a business which has continued to innovate in such a way that people never thought was possible. Thank you for introducing me to Bitcoin.

1:38:33 Um, I think you both introduced me to it, but also You enabled me to have a mental framework for not selling it. Um when I when if I had I would have lost a lot of money. And thankfully now I don't even know where it is. My brother uh my brother and some of my siblings take care of it for me, and I don't have to uh experience the angst. And also just thank you for p pushing for this idea of sovereignty,'cause I think um in the world of increasing censorship and cens centralization, sovereignty I think is a really winning idea.

1:39:01 I think that's what you're sort of philosophically aiming at as well. And um Yeah, I hope to speak to you sometime soon, because you're a very you're a an individual capable of speaking about such a broad range of subjects that I care so much about. It's a pleasure to be on the journey together. Thank you, my friend. Uh

1:39:18

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