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

28:05You're allowed to sell a product. It's not illegal to create a podcast. But you can't do what you're doing in Cuba, 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. So the point is, there are all sorts of laws and restraint of trade. like you can't have an Airbnb. 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, the less pain there'll be.

29:00Because in a more free society, you're going to have 10 ,000 new kinds of businesses pop up or 100 ,000 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 the technology. Steve, what are you doing? Just making myself a delicious coffee. From the freezer? From the freezer, have you not heard about Comteer? No. Oh my gosh, 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.

29:46What 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 and I mix it.

30:18And that is done. You can get$30 off your first order of Cometeer coffee if you go to cometeer.com slash Stephen. 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.

30:55Follow-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 I've watched scale well commercially all have a system their team uses every single day. And for my team, that system has been our sponsor, Pipedrive. 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 were a team of five or when our commercial team was a team of 50.

31:30Over 100 ,000 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 30-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 what book I need to read and to make that book for me versus being prescriptive to it. Because it has this huge memory on me. It knows what I'm dealing with. It knows the businesses I'm building, the problems I have.

32:06And so I just say, what's the question I should be asking you? What book should I be reading? And then can you make that book for me? Make it 20 pages. I like it in this particular style because it's my favorite style of author. And then I want to download it as an MP3 file and listen to it on my way to work. I have 43 minutes. Could you say, what's the question I should be asking you? Yeah, you're using that as an example, but at the end of the day, you have to govern the state space. For example, anybody could say, what questions should I ask? But the real issue is, what are the input constraints?

32:40If you're a baker in Nigeria, in Lagos, right? There's a certain set of conditions that are different than if you happen to be a fireman in Los Angeles. Yeah. Right? And so what's the state space that you're exploring in order to create a contribution? And I'll give you an example. Like I used AI. I used AI to make$15 billion last year. Is that a true story? This is true. You did? I did. Yeah. And I used an AI to make$15 billion in a way that no one would ever conceive that you could make$15 billion. This is a true story. Okay. Yeah. Let's go back to me in 2025. five. We have a company that has billions of dollars of Bitcoin,$30 billion of Bitcoin.

33:26We want to actually raise capital to buy more Bitcoin. We maxed out the equity markets. We became the largest issue of convertible bonds in the world. And we maxed out the convertible bond market. And that was our journey in the first five years of our Bitcoin. To simplify this for Jenny and Dave, you borrowed as much money as you could from traditional means. Yes. Okay. Yeah. To buy Bitcoin. Yeah. By the beginning of 2025, 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.

34:05one. So we went to the AI, I went to the AI and I started exploring, how do I design a preferred stock? 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 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 12 months and it looks like debt. I can give you a guaranteed coupon on it. I can give you conversion rights and make it look like equity. So we used AI to design a convertible preferred stock called STRK.

34:43When we did it, no one had ever created a preferred stock that was backed by Bitcoin before, 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. So we built it. And, you know, when we asked the lawyers and the bankers, they're like, well, no one's ever done it before. You know, 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.

35:25So 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 digital intelligence. And we're using a digital treasury company. So three new forms of something in order to create value. And after we'd done three of them, we decided what we wanted to do was create a short-duration credit instrument, one that would trade stably around$100, around par. And we're trying to figure out how do you get a preferred stock to trade at a stable level? It's 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 100, sell it at 100, collect the yield and not worry about it trading up and down or being sensitive to interest rates.

36:15Well, if you do that, you have to – 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 where we could change the dividend rate every month. Now, had anybody ever done it? No. In the history of the world, no one ever created a variable dividend rate preferred stock. Is it illegal? No. Why has no one ever done it? No one ever had a reason to do it. They never thought to do it. The lawyers, the bankers, the conventional investors are like, well, we've never seen it done before. We're not sure you can do it.

36:49We go to the AI. We said, well, can we do it? They're like, of course you can do it. Just do this, this, and this, and this. Well, they said they don't like that. We'll just do this, this, this. Which AI? Chat GPT. Open AI. So Chat GPT made you$15 billion? Yeah, because the short of it is we brought that IPO to market. It became a$2.5 billion IPO, the biggest IPO of the year to date. And then we put a shelf registration on it, and we sold another$8 billion of it. So we sold$10.5 billion of that instrument, plus$4 billion of the other instruments. So we basically sold$15 billion of credit, which kind of equates to the company making about$15 billion.

37:29I'm thinking about what this means generally for the average person listening. Because everyone's like searching for business ideas and new ideas. And you're telling me that 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 for people. It's almost like hearing that there's an arbitrage opportunity with this intelligence. I was reading something the other day that said only 2 % of households have a chat GPT or AI subscription still. So do you think there is an arbitrage there for people who go to AI now and can build business ideas from it?

38:06If you're an entrepreneur, right, if you aspire to create a business or create something of value, then 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 just different tools. It's kind of like saying you've got to learn how to use a computer and you've got to learn how to read, reading, writing, arithmetic, right? Just basics. And then once you've done that, you do need to have some domain expertise in something, right? The question is what are you going to do, right? You either want to create a new product or you want to create a new service or you want to radically transform an existing product or service using AI to be much cheaper, much better.

38:58But to my mind, you know, I would try to create something magical. Like, for example, can you create something that does everybody's accounting, you know, does the work of a million accountants and sell it for$10 a month? right if you're 18 now if your kids came to you and said dad what should i 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 want to study the new thing right you want to 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 the s-curve is for a thousand years we try to fly and infinite energy makes no progress.

39:39You cannot fly. And then in 1903, all of a sudden we can sort of fly. And in 66 years, we go from flying 20 miles an hour to flying 300 miles an hour. First a fighter jet, then a passenger jet. Then we have like rockets that are unmanned. Then we have manned rockets. And then we have rockets to go to orbit. And then we have rockets to go to the moon. And so that's an example of an S-curve. But then you know what happens. In the mid-70s, we designed the 737, the 747, and we hit a wall, you know, and 737 is still the primary airplane for the next 50 years. And if you look at the efficiency of an airplane from 1975 to the year 2025, over 50 years, the modern airplanes are 15 % more efficient.

40:27Like, 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 an s curve on the screen and also uh the new s curve coming in below it like when i was at mit you know everybody basically flocked to 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.

41:03You basically start studying something that has hit diminishing returns. And once you hit that diminishing return, no material progress may take place for 100 years. It might be that 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, on a tank of gas that's this much, right? Or fusion drives. Well, because we don't. Now, on the other hand, semiconductors started exploding and semiconductor technologies continued to advance. We haven't hit that limit yet. And that's why so many profound breakthroughs were made in computer science over the past 50 years.

41:52This has kind of hit an S-curve, hasn't it? As a form factor, to my iPhone here. You know, since the iPhone, as you said, since the iPhone 6, it hasn't really gotten thinner, but the battery hasn't really taken a leap forward as such. So we're now looking for another form factor to interface with computers. Yeah, you know, the iPhone 1 didn't have cut and paste. And we didn't get cut and paste till the version 3. 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 70 in a hurry.

42:38And then you would have gone from 70 to 90 over the next few iterations. And then you're 91, 92. You hit that limit and if you are starting a company, right, you don't create another iPhone, right? The real question right now is can I create smart glasses where I have something that's like my Maui Jim sunglasses? I put them 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 and plug that into AI. And in 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 because i know they've talked about it publicly which is just a it was just a plain wrist strap 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.

43:46So I was just sat here with this little wrist strap. The wrist strap, again, was just like a cotton bracelet, very thin cotton bracelet. And as I just looked around, I could click on everything and open things and call people in, send text 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 going to be some sort of like almost a contact lens type thing that I can just... 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 talisman.

44:18You know, I have a necklace. What does it do for? Oh, it makes me omniscient, all powerful, immortal, indestructible. I live forever. Well, what do you have to do to make the product work? 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 started on the topic of what should you study, right? It's study technologies that allow you to create magic things that your parents could never...

44:52If your parents would say that's magic, you're on the right track, right? So like, how about what's better than the wristband? Just like, how about you just like implant one pellet? Neuralink. Yeah, maybe it's a Neuralink. Maybe it's when I'm born, there's a slight implant. And now I hear, like, I can talk to the AI in cyberspace forever. But should you go study that? Because conceivably, the artificial intelligence and the robots are going to 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?

45:29You ought to study digital intelligence or digital assets. If you can generate proteins, generate any kind of life form or enzyme or protein or the like, maybe it's interesting. But I think with regard to AI, you don't want to learn how to do things that AI can do. What you want to 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 95 of what i learned uh i probably wouldn't want to study what about a surgeon do you think you want to be a surgeon no what about a lawyer no accountant no driver no at some point what you have to do is ask the ais aren't really answering the question yet but you have to ask whatever is the marginal question that hasn't been answered by the civilization.

46:26Maybe I'll take it. 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 realized that the Diary of a CEO 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.

47:03And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1 % 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 colors 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.

47:40And you can get yours at thediary.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 subscriber, 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. 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?

48:14I mean, the actionable step is learn digital. Digital. Like understand digital. For example, how much content's available on YouTube right now? Infinite, I don't know. 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 was like, should I go and become a stage actor on Broadway? It's a much smaller thing. Mr. Beast can get 100 million subscribers. You can get 20 million subscribers. You're not getting 20 million subscribers if you do the thing that your parents' parents did.

49:00So I think that you want to look at digital platforms. There's digital communication like X or Instagram. There's YouTube and the like. but there's also digital intelligence. Let's just just test that first point a bit. 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 or Manhattan, where we are now, can set up an agent while they're asleep and say, listen, just post 100 videos while I'm asleep on every single platform. Actually, I'll make five agents and I'll ask all of them to post 100 videos each.

49:39So you're going to have this, 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. Financial Times did a report that said that young people are actually starting to come down in terms of time spent online. 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 slop of supply and fixed demand. Even this business feels a little bit insecure. actually a lot of the major podcasters are actually down on youtube if i look at the top who i would consider the sort of top five podcasters in my niche every single one of them is down at least 50 percent in the last 20 ish 12 12 24 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 can i better market or distribute the content with AI.

50:36What is the moat? The moat's going to be the most talented content, the person creating the best stuff that everybody wants to see. There are videos being created like, here's a walkthrough of a 16th century warship. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen a guy constructs 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 video animation takes about an hour and it's absolutely riveting i have no reason to care about 16th 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 most still or understanding what humans want and then delivering it which i guess is creativity let's say the led zeppelin example.

51:27But what you see in human history is within 10 years of whenever there's a new technology platform, there's some geniuses. They push it to the limit and they do 95 % of everything that can be done. And it all happens within 10 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 you know and a few players it's like it's not clear to me if humans try for another 10 000 years they'll do much better so with led zeppel and you had electric guitars and amplification and everything kind of clicked late 60s like the sound of the early 60s was not quite there and then by 1971 72 you could do some amazing stuff And if you think about all the classic rock between 1970 and 1980, you have human creativity pushing the edge of the envelope in so many directions.

52:31And then you hit this diminishing return. And then along comes sampling, right? And then you get Swedish House Mafia and Avice. And that's new technology. And then they push it to the extreme. And then along comes YouTube. And Justin Bieber comes out of nowhere. you know and Mr. Beast comes out of nowhere and they push it to the extreme and what you see with every generation is I give you a new thing whether it's a piano or electric guitar or 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 what's up and the like and it's like what you want to do if you want to create these incredible success things is you want to locate 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, to this new idea.

53:41Like, what did our company do to go from nothing to$60 billion or from$1 billion to$60 billion? We were the first company to take digital capital, Bitcoin, and put it together with digital credit and a digital treasury model. So we created a credit instrument, a security that you could never have created before. You couldn't have made it 10 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 10 or$20 billion of capital. And then we could create this thing that was a multi-billion dollar thing, and that becomes resonant. And that window is like 12 to 24 months.

54:24And 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 36 months early, you smack into a wall and you fail. And if you wait, like at this point, our company is 20 times bigger than the next biggest one, 50 times bigger than the company doing something similar. Did we plan it? Not at all. 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 on hell or high water. And we got punched in the face a hundred times. And every single time we ran into a problem.

55:01We stopped. We recalibrated. We went a different direction. And the process of creating something beautiful, like the beautiful thing, like everyone's a bank account that pays 10%. So if you can figure out how to give people this thing they want with a new technology that was impossible, that did not exist five years or three years earlier, then you resonate in the society, right? You'd go viral. 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. Like you couldn't buy the success with a billion dollars of marketing.

55:40You just have to, the Led Zepp guys, they didn't spend a billion dollars marketing. You got to be in the right place, the right time. And you have to have the courage to offer people the new thing. I have been thinking a lot about this, this idea of you said you know if you 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 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 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.

56:22So in my house, there was 20 albums over there, boxer albums, and Michael Jackson was like 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. 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, even with the YouTube you mentioned earlier, I wonder now if fame or being a content creator or musician once looked like this, this sort of like high ceiling, and then you're known for 100 years like Michael Jackson.

57:14And now with algorithms that are personalised, 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 there are things that get big. Right. Companies get big. Open AI went from nothing to how many users in just a few months. 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 technical frequency. Yeah, there are some things where there's going to be a glut.

57:57There's going to be, well, let's take Instagram, right? It's like on one hand, a billion people have like bad photos posted online. But on the other hand, there are people that managed to get, you know, 8 million followers and they, you know, are the 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 except for the fact that it seems clear that there is room for human creativity and innovation. and if your goal is to make a contribution, right, 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 pretty simple principle is don't keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year, fighting against the modern automation epidemic, right?

59:04Don't try to outwork the robots. It's like you're lamenting 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 200 students a year for 20 years, and you would feel that your life contribution was 4 ,000 people whose minds you touched. and now you get 4 000 people a second okay so you're judging yourself against the next thing but if you look back in time technology has given us the ability to amplify our intellect and amplify our creativity in a way that is uh unprecedented in human history Yeah, I think in part, I'm wondering now if we're kind of, technology said, okay, you can reach more people in TV, radio, all these things.

1:00:01And 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. and they're optimizing for the the i guess the platform the the platform's monetary desire the other thing that i think is really interesting and i've been mulling for the last couple of months is that that which is really really hard and scarce and actually you could say something being hard and scarce are are the same because 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 etc or even that youtuber you mentioned, who walks you through the 1600s or whatever, that is very hard to do.

1:00:49I'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. Michelle Obama coming and sitting down with me here is still kind of my note, 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. 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? For example, like it used to be you do this in English and the issue is, well, what about Japanese or Chinese or French or whatever?

1:01:32And, you know, the hard way is you learn 20 languages. And, you know, but then how does your guest, 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 100 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, am I creating something that'll be valuable in a decade? Well, will it be valuable in 100 years?

1:02:07Well, this is probably a good time to mention this. 24 months ago, we started exactly that, which was there are aliens each is never - No, no, no, no, no, no.

1:02:18Arabic? Bruce Tyson. Still me. Yeah, and ask yourself how many people that do podcast interviews offer that level of quality of content. I think you're outstripping. I don't know if anybody else has done it that well. Not me the do I. Right? We started almost three years ago. And for the first 24 months, it was a tragic failure. So you had the data scientists in the corner of our office failing for 24 months. And then about 12 months ago, for the first time ever, we saw that the translation technology underneath us had improved and that we could get the view duration in Spanish to be higher than English.

1:02:58And how many months do you think Jimmy Page spent trying to master the electric guitar? More than 24 months? Yeah, a lot longer. My advice to an entrepreneur is you focus, you commit. If you're successful in less than four years, you got lucky. If it takes you 10 years, well, between four and 10 years is very, very normal. If you haven't had success by the 10-year point, you're probably not cut out for the business. But what you're doing is it's totally logical. It's like, is AI going to remake this industry? The first issue was, can you make the product better? And the second question is, what's it worth?

1:03:37You can do that. Can you get paid? And by the way, even if you didn't get paid, I would argue that your audience have 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 20. And so I'm going to become loyal. I'm going to become a customer and a fan of whoever 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 people in Portugal maybe have never heard Michael Saylor before in Portuguese.

1:04:21So in terms of scarce, it's actually the only interview now available that is two hours long of michael saylor talking in cantonese with steven you know and so that we then are competing we have that's kind of the moat then right and that becomes a benefit to all your guests you're the distribution channel for me to send the message of digital capital digital empowerment to the world and then your guests become your moat i think that 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?

1:05:03Or am I going to 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 whether YouTube actually expands your reach. And then you can look at the engagement and figure out whether or not you're able to monetize that and whether you're able to convert that. And then you tweak it, right, and adjust. And six months or 12 months can be enough that you have a lasting advantage forever, right? If you're 12 months ahead of everybody else. And you're compounding in. Yeah, it compounds over time.

1:05:39And then maybe they never catch you. But that's the story of every business, right? 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 your customers will make you the winner. The world needs someone to do what you do. Like someone has to win, right? There needs to be a winner. The audience out there, once 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 what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking.

1:06:27And they want someone 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 doing it. Because at that point, 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, And, you know, don't try to compete in an area where you're not going to be the best in the world.

1:07:16But on the other hand, right, 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. 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 200 million followers right then eventually you know over a hundred years two billion you 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 diversity into lots of different languages it sounds simple problem is you discover you go fuck, Spanish words are longer?

1:08:05So the video in Spanish is three hours, 10, but in English, it's three hours. It's just three hours. And then the video is going to be up in Cantonese. How long is Cantonese words? And then you go, oh my God, you have to then translate all the thumbnails and all the titles in 20 languages at the same time. And that's why you end up three years in when you thought it was just a one hour job. But also if you zoom out even further, there's this graveyard of other things we tried that never worked. There's the other 90 % of experiments we ran in the corner that did nothing. And I always say to the team, there's two things a year that define us.

1:08:37And of that, in our failure and experimentation team, which is literally what it's called, we tried 60 things. But there's five of them and there are two of them game-changing. So the attitude of dealing with failure at the very forefront of trying to be first, I think is something people don't talk about enough. Focus your energy, guard your time. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do the thing, right? Most of the time, the reason people fail is they get successful in their 30s and they're successful at one thing. And it's like all of a sudden they've decided they're going to do 10 other things because they're good at everything and they dilute their focus in 10 ways.

1:09:19People always underestimate the maintenance obligation, like always. And so the right The right solution to growth is I would like to make whatever I'm doing twice as good. And if I do 10 things to make it 10 percent better, I'm probably diluting, distracting the phenomenon that causes most businesses to fail. It's dilutive distractions or it's dilutive 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, they start to bifurcate and trifurcate and they expand and they overreach 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 37 restaurants and they all suck.

1:10:11And it's like, yeah, I remember the guy used to have, there's no one, by the way, with a failed restaurant chain that wasn't a successful restaurateur at scale one, right? Like you didn't get to a failure of 37 or 62 or 437 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 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. And move on because it's just not going to work.

1:10:57There'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 they look over there and they see their friend has started a thing with 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 upward motion towards any goal. And then the other thing I thought about as you're speaking is I've been mulling this really only for the last two months, this idea that if you take a long term approach to things, you make foundational decisions today that create huge competitive advantages.

1:11:39is, and the simple analogy I would give, if you gave me 10 seconds to make the highest possible tower that I can, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go like this, and I'm going to go like this, and I'm going to try and do something like this. And just by nature of the time constraint, it's unstable. If you gave me 10 years and infinite blocks again, I would start like this. I'd do this one here. I put this one here. I put this one here. And I'd 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 more than three almost four decades i think it was i know 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 a quick go do something else startup founders they build so they can sell and then they they 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 because they know if the the acquirer looks under the hood they're going to see some but then i look at elon and i go oh gosh he 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 competitive advantage 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 if you figure out how to launch a rocket and you have the highest payload capacity and the cheapest cost to orbit, then you've got an advantage.

1:13:11Now, 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 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 that would have been the short term. Even with Tesla, he could have bought the batteries off Ford. One great natural example is like a chambered Nautilus. 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.

1:13:53It'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.

1:14:32So most of these businesses that work, and the best idea is that they start with someone dominating a market. I'm really good at this. Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, and now what is the natural thing that I can add that I can use my existing business to, maybe I'm marketing it. Well, you're Coca-Cola. Well, we deliver a pallet of drinks to 87 ,000 restaurants in the UK every morning. What's a natural extension? Well, I can put one more type of drink on the pallet, 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 in the history of the world.

1:15:16I 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 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, you got to bet that all 97 of them are not going to react to you when you do it. It's a bit harder. And that's where the long-termism comes in because to build that fundamental advantage, by definition, it's going to take time.

1:16:05Good example, Amazon Prime, right? Where Amazon started giving free shipping, you know, first free shipping or very cheap shipping and one day shipping. And everybody said, well, you're losing money, you're losing money, you're losing money. And they lost money doing this for like a decade. And then they got to some point where like everybody in the country was a member of Amazon Prime. And they're like, OK, well, now it's 20 bucks a month instead of 10 bucks a month. And it's like an extra$10 a month times like 100 million people. And people are like, oh, my God, they just made$12 billion in one press release per year in cash flow.

1:16:45And that's worth like$250 billion. And you're like, what were you doing? It's like we were 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 going to tell you, they're going to tell you, well, there's no future to whatever, to podcast. There's no future to something. And what will happen is 99 % of the people will drop out because they don't believe. And the true believers, the ones that are not creative, 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.

1:17:33And that's a beautiful story. So speaking of strong foundations, you have 10 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. 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 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 thinking i was going to hang out 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.

1:18:16And I want you to like write some advice for them that I can give to them on their 21st birthday. And he's got this book where he's actually collecting advice for his children to give them on their 21st birthday as young adults. So I sit down and I think, think, think, think, think. And I'm like, focus your mind, guard your time and train your mind. You got to learn that you got to learn something, right? You got to learn reading, writing, arithmetic. You have to actually develop a cultured base. So it's like get an education and then train your body. Because if you're weak, you're not going to make it, right?

1:18:54You're not going to survive. And then think for yourself. 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 know, you become who you surround yourself with. And if you surround yourself with positive, inspirational, talented people, you'll be the best version of yourself. And if you surround yourself with negative, cynical, failing people, they're going to want you to fail or they're not going to inspire you to succeed and they'll bring you down.

1:19:40And 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, the world didn't say you had to be in the dark in an ugly situation. And after that, keep your promises. At the end of the day, people remember if you didn't keep your promise. So you tell somebody you're going to do something, do it, right? 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.

1:20:16And ultimately, you know, we're all in relationships with each other, right? And no one is so powerful that they can afford to take anybody else for granted. We all need each other. And finally, stay cheerful and constructive. It doesn't matter whether bad things happen. And the point is people want to come to work with someone that's cheerful and happy and constructive. They want to, you know, they want to be in a relationship with that person. 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 going to feel better about yourself.

1:20:58You get up every day, you have a mission, you have something to do. Like, what is my mission? You know, I'm preaching the gospel of digital empowerment, right? Satoshi created this economic property, right? He gave economic empowerment to 8 billion people for the first time in human history. And we created the world's first perfect money. We created, you know, digital energy, digital matter, digital property, right? We can be a thousand X more as humans with technology than we were. I look through all human history and I see it's a story of misery. Now, why do people die? Lack of clean water, lack of clean air, lack of clean food, lack of clean money.

1:21:48What do we want? We want to live forever. We want to live happily forever. Do you want to live forever? I want to live as long as I can live, you know, constructively and make a contribution. If I can be engaged and vital, then yeah, at the point that I can no longer make a contribution, then I will move on gracefully. But if there was a button in front of you now and the button pressing it guaranteed you immortality, would you press it? I think so. I suppose so. Why aren't you then committing more of your efforts to longevity? People ask Elon the same question. I think there's 8 billion people on the planet, and there are many people that I respect that are much more qualified to pursue that mission than me.

1:22:30And 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 when Bitcoin comes down in price, sometimes I need a bit of a therapist to remind me of why I've invested in Bitcoin, and that person has been you over the years. and then when it's up you know you're you to your credit you're consistent about it and that is you know i have watched you and thought i think this guy must be he's either like batshit crazy or a 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 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 in there it's funny what happens because when it was going up a couple of months ago, everyone thought, oh my God, this is going to be the future of money.

1:23:17And now it's down. Everyone is convinced that it was always a Ponzi scheme and it's done. You've got, I guess, trying to simplify this 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$6.5 billion of convertible debt and$15 billion of preferred stocks outstanding. And we're sitting on top of about$58 billion of assets right now. So we have raised about$65 billion in capital to buy Bitcoin, but most of it wasn't debt. Of the$65 billion, for the most part, we've raised capital with equity and some debt in order to buy Bitcoin.

1:23:59And we've been doing that because we wanted to pump$65 billion of capital, 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. Because Bitcoin could fall to$5 ,000 a coin, we would still be over collateralized against the debt. You'd still be fine. Yeah. And the other thing people theorize a lot, and again, I did a comment analysis to figure out what people wanted to hear from you, is you sold a bit of Bitcoin.

1:24:32You'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. The only person that's never sold more Bitcoin than me. Satoshi. Is Satoshi. Satoshi never sold a million, a million one Bitcoin. Our company has 847 ,000 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 what i've said is um sorry i should probably show this this is why there's a kidney yeah you said so kid me if you must but keep the bitcoin i i have i have waged a campaign non-stop every day for six years to to promote and advocate bitcoin as a long-term store of value, right?

1:25:33And what I would say is, if you have money that you don't need for the next four years, 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 going to be the best long-term capital asset. And, you know. So why did you sell the Bitcoin instead of your kidney? Yeah. We sold some Bitcoin a few weeks ago because there was a narrative or a belief in the market that our company had become so systemically integrated or important to Bitcoin that we could never sell.

1:26:16And if we sold, Bitcoin would go to zero and our stock would go to zero. Because you own 4 % of the total supply of Bitcoin. Yeah, because we own 4%. Because we're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. So the The first sentiment was, well, Bitcoin will never succeed if they don't keep buying. And the second sentiment or belief misconception was if we sell, it'll crash Bitcoin and it'll crash the company. And because of that, short sellers and certain people in the market took the position that the$55 billion of Bitcoin we own was worth nothing. And so what we had was this ignorant, skeptical notion that all the company's assets were worthless.

1:27:02And 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. And we said, well, Bitcoin trades$20 billion a day or more and we've got$55 billion of it. And if we were 0.01 % 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 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 backflip right now, but I said you can't, at some point you have to do the backflip, right?

1:27:42Especially if I tell you that I'm going to 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. So if we want to defend Bitcoin, we have to prove that we can sell it on occasion. So what we're doing is we're commercializing the market in digital credit. And if you have a billion dollars of Bitcoin and they believe it's worth a billion, you can sell$200 million of credit. and then you can grow the business if they believe that.

1:28:21If they don't believe that the Bitcoin is worth anything and you sell the 200 million of credit, the credit's worthless and the company's worthless. And so we were in a doom loop or the market was in this doom loop, this negative short, I don't know, like 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. And what we needed to do was demonstrate that if we sold Bitcoin, it wouldn't fail. So when we sold the Bitcoin, it was$60 ,000,$59 ,000 and it traded up. And so we broke that misconception. We broke that narrative.

1:29:02It turns out that the break-even point for us is about 3.2%. So if Bitcoin appreciates 3.2%, we can pay the dividends forever by just selling the Bitcoin. 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. Now the credit investors... Without having to sell more Bitcoin. Now, the whole point of this was we were selling equity in order to pay the dividend on the credit.

1:29:42Yeah. And the short sellers took the position that you're going to 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? We have to say, well, we can sell the Bitcoin. And you sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividend. 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 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.

1:30:21Do you intend to sell more? it's not our primary strategy so if the if the the common stock trades at a premium uh to the underlying assets then probably we fund with the common stock but if the common stock ever sells at a discount or trades at a discount to the common 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 in terms of one bitcoin currently what you said is what 68 000 or something i think it appreciates about 30 % a year for the next 20 years, right? And then it'll slow down to being appreciated about 20 % a year.

1:31:00So... You think it's the best asset to put your money in really respective of who you are? Another way to say it is I think it outperforms the S &P index by a factor of 1.5 to 2. 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, and ideally 10 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 Bitcoin maxi, if you spent 100 hours studying it, you'd buy a lot. And if you're not sure, you'd probably diversify that portfolio across some real estate, some equity, some other long-term assets, and some Bitcoin.

1:31:52The people that shouldn't buy it are people that need the money back in 12 weeks. What about like a regular 25-year-old? One of the questions that I saw emerging from some of the interviews you've done is, if a normal young person has a few hundred dollars to invest today, 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 i think if you have money to invest for the long term you're going to get double the performance from btc that you would get from like the s &p index but for that 25 year old would it not be smarter for them to spend it on something that's going to help them train their mind like you said if you only have a hundred dollars i wouldn't go spend five hundred thousand dollars on an expensive you know university education but i would spend 20 bucks a month on an AI subscription.

1:32:42So yeah, you should definitely spend money necessary to get the super grok or the pro, the professional edition, whether it's$20 a month or$200. $200 a month is the most I would spend. $20 a month is probably the least I would spend. But look, we're talking about your Netflix subscription at that point. But after you've done that, then you're talking about what you ought to be invested in. I think that you ought to be invested in digital capital because you can take it with you anywhere in the world. If you invest in an Airbnb or real estate, you know, you're locked into a certain city. You can't travel with it.

1:33:22It'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've got to pick the right stock. And most stocks will fail, but some will succeed. But it really is much more challenging. I think really it comes down to, if you have a liquid portfolio, are you going to invest in the S &P index if you're a conventional capital investor? Are you going to invest in Bitcoin if you're a digital or 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.

1:33:59And the question left for you is, what is one thing you believe that maybe you haven't talked about enough that you think likely 99 % of the world don't yet believe? If I look at my life and I think about something that's had a real impact on me, it's after I got a full education, you know, from college. I eventually went back and I studied two topics on my own. One, like practical applied statistics, all the stuff that Nicholas Tolleb wrote, like Fool by Randomness and Skin in the Game and The Black Swan. And, you know, how do you know the difference between something that's meaningful and something that's just misleading random data?

1:34:46That 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 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. You know, the AI will not give you a never ending real time stream of common sense to tell you should or should not do that thing. And so I think that that's really important. And the second thing that I did after I left school and after a lifetime of experiences, like I went back and I just read the story of civilization by Durant.

1:35:33Every page, 11 volumes, 14 ,000 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 it's not just military history, not just political history, but it was, you know, all a very synthetic history. When you go back and you read it all 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 15th century Russia.

1:36:20And then they got rediscovered, you know, like most of these things that people tell you are this is new and profound. Oh, it was new and profound 100 times in a row or 1 ,000 times in a row. It's just the story was told a different way each time. Give me an example of a thing that we think is new but history tells you. Maybe the fact that currency started getting debased when Nixon went off the gold standard, you know, and what happened in 1971 or whatever. And the truth of the matter is that was the point at which the U.S. dollar started weakening at a much more rapid rate. But it turns out that every currency everywhere in history has been debased.

1:37:00My point here really is I think people think 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, you always appreciate those things much better. you almost it's like the education is wasted on the youth you know because you don't have the life experiences to appreciate what you're reading but also you know they're summarizing editing and censoring a lot of the stuff you read and if you just go back and say I'm just going to you know read the entire thing in its entirety and there are a lot of other things you could also read full histories of other things but you As an adult, I think that that just makes you a better person and makes you a better business person, makes you a better leader.

1:37:59And also, it helps you overcome the arrogance of thinking, oh, I'm the first guy in human history that ever encountered it. And what you'll realize is, no, you're not. And the empowering part is someone else did, and this is how they worked their way through the issue. 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 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 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 my brother and some of my siblings take care of it for me.

1:38:48And I don't have to experience the angst. And also just thank you for pushing for this idea of sovereignty. Because I think in the world of increasing censorship and centralization, sovereignty, I think, is a really winning idea. And I think that's what you're sort of philosophically aiming at as well. And yeah, I hope to speak to you sometime soon because you're a very, you're 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.

1:39:24THE END

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