#161 with Michael Saylor - Why Michael Saylor Believes Bitcoin is Hope

for everyone seven point eight billion people for a hundred million companies for everyone with money on earth or and everyone that earns a salary on earth this is the big idea of the podcast you have to i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to i'll put it all in it like a day's off on a less travel never look at what's up everybody we got a special guest in the house michael sailor the have you heard the nickname they give you on youtube the giga chad have you seen this one i might have heard at once or twice so cycle go ahead i was gonna ask you said have you heard this nickname that they give that they gave michael sailor the crypto is no but that's whole community you know sort of give it and take it away you know they are extremely passionate and devoted but they are also you know just nuts online like my my twitter mentions are unusable now i'm sure michaels are the same just because of that group but they are funny also so they they nicknamed him the giga chad because he is sort of like it probably the most credible established person and company with micro strategy to adopt bitcoin in a major major way and really is driving the kinda institutional pickup of it so if you're listening this you've never heard of michael sailor the reason that list of this is pretty interesting guy had a really your career but most notably in most known now for basically using his company micro strategy and buying about two billion dollars worth of bitcoin are they own two billion dollars worth bitcoin bought about i don't know how much do you guys put half a billion or a a billion no we we bought two point two billion worth a bitcoin we own about five a bit more than five billion depending upon the day more than five billion in bitcoin okay alright so you you you have a for the not everyone's gonna be able to see this but you have a ship behind you right like a huge what what is that it's an antique handmade model an a nineteenth century model of a seventeenth century gall like i think a model of the amsterdam a gallon that sailed out of amsterdam in the seventeenth century and it was it was made in the nineteenth century so it's a very interesting piece are are you are you a car guy i have a bunch of cars but no i'm not a car guy what's the coolest one you have i put i put i lean toward suvs i have a bunch of suvs i had had a lexus convertible that i used to love that i drove a lot but i i don't really drive a lot so you can go you can give sam grade sam just sold his company came into a bunch of money and he bought what what did you buy sam okay so i was driving it all this weekend and i've been getting made fun of i can't believe people are making fun of me do you know what an amg station wagon is like a mercedes amg so i can imagine okay so basically there's mercedes which is everyone knows mercedes and then there's amg which is like a subsidiary and they basically put race car engines in the cars and i bought this but the problem about fast cars and cool cars is that they're like super un practical mostly and but i wanted something that was like kinda of fast and fun to drive but i wanted it to be more practical and there's this thing called an amg e sixty three wagon it's a station wagon it looks like a mom car except you could put your dog in the back and it has five seats and but still goes zero to sixty in three seconds so i bought a soup up station wagon like the one of the fastest cars in the road but it's a station wagon that's my that's currently what i'm driving right works for you well i was looking for someone to geek out on it but yeah i guess that you're you're i would have i for some reason i peg you as a car guy but i guess i'm wrong i'm more into boats and planes than cars what do you what what what what does that mean if you're into planes well i like i like aircraft because if an aircraft can go mach eight nine or mach eight five you're allowed to legally fly it that fast where what is mock like two thousand miles an hour no mock be like like five hundred knots like or something like that so the point is like airplanes can fly at their full speed and and yachts or boats can go at their full speed over the water but an automobile that could go a hundred and sixty miles an hour you don't very often get to do that legally so so i like vehicles that you can operate at their design point legally and safely well what planes do you have feeling as an engineer i have a global express xr fucking before we get into bitcoin stuff and because sean been talking about you for like a year now because he was following a micro strategy and and all that but you own a a ton of domain names right yeah i bought a bunch like how many do you own now or how many of do i i won't count i mean i own hundreds and hundreds but the ones that are are top level primary domain names about sixteen like like words in the english language that everybody understands like i own emma frank i own my own name i own michael dot com i also own my nickname mike dot com so like my personal website i've i've got it on michael dot com you just type michael dot com to see all stuff about me hope yes sam go h dot com see where that takes you go to hope dot com yeah well actually bitcoin is hope so if you type hope dot com you get everything there's a know about bitcoin okay i actually rep path hope to all of our bitcoin resources and materials speaker i i owned voice dot com and i sold it for thirty million dollars a couple years ago that's the largest naked domain sale in a history of domain tell tell the tell the short version of that story the the story is kinda crazy i've heard it once before but i i would assume sam and most people have not heard the story of selling voice dot com you bought all these early on in the web you kinda recognized oh these are these are probably gonna be valuable to own these names there's only one you know there's only one owner of each of these names you you own it and you hold it for a really long time like over a decade and at some point you decide okay maybe we should see somebody wants to buy some of these so tell the story of selling voice dot com real quick well you know i bought all these domains because i thought it wouldn't be great to own them part of the english language i mean owning hopes or own owning voice i mean eventually there'll be a google voice so there'll be you know some some tel company that'll wanna launch some service and what a great domain on to launch on the on a word like voice dot com so we held them a long time and and i think at some point we were looking for joint ventures who were looking to commercial them i mean we did commercial a bunch for example i created a company called alarm dot com and alarm dot com is now publicly traded on nasdaq it's like four or five billion dollar market cap company and and you can guess what it does it actually integrates your home alarm into the internet you know and i created another company called angel dot com and we saw that for a bit more than a hundred million dollars and that was actually a speech interactive voice response like surrey or alexa before surrey and alexa came on and so i had voice and i was holding it and we're were looking for some kind of good commercialization and someone out of the blue they contacted us one of the domain brokers and they said well you know do you wanna sell it will give you a hundred fifty thousand and and you know i was like someone came to me said they have one hundred and fifty thousand i said no so i thought nothing of it because i just i couldn't see the point a week later they come by and said well they doubled it to three hundred thousand i said tell them no so a couple days later they go well the broker is really insist and so they went to six hundred thousand i said no so they said well what should you say said don't tell anything tell them you know like we're not interested it's gonna be something serious so they they went to one point two million i said tell them no i said well they wanna know what you want for it i said well send him a note or something and just tell them i said it's like it's it's the word voice in english language right so it's gonna have to be something you know north of i don't know i don't think i said seven or eight eight figures but i just said a lot of money and so it went on and they doubled again to two and half million and then and then five million and then around ten million then i they said i had like eighteen people in my office they're like or not eight eight eight people looking at me like aren't you are you gonna take the money it's like a lot of money now i said no send them back at this point send them back an a note pointing out that this is like the word voice in the english language and it's and it's it's worth a billion dollars to the right company and they said well you're gonna give them a response i said okay tom them thirty million tom i'll take thirty million for it because i thought like if i didn't give them some number they would stop negotiating after you know five knows so i said tom thirty man i don't wanna sell it for thirty nine i wanna sell it for a hundred million or more but i guess say thirty nine so the so at that point they said well you know they offered you i think they upped their their offered to like twelve million i said tell them no but if you want i'll i'll take a meeting with them so when it got to twelve million i said i'd i'll get on the phone for a half an hour so then we got on the phone and the call started with someone saying well how about twenty two million and i said let me explain this is like my daughter like i'm willing to i'm willing to like marry her off but only to a man that values her more than i value her so i value this domain you know at thirty million and so if you don't wanna give me the thirty you know i'm gonna regret after i sell it anyway i'll have sellers remorse but i would i would do it just to make the market but if you don't wanna evaluate at thirty i'll just keep it like okay well give you thirty i said okay so thirty you want you got a thirty from a hundred k so they did like double seven or eight times and i eventually they started a hundred and fifty k i think and we ended it and i said thirty we ended at thirty but but the point was i didn't really need the money it was a amount like if i had at the point maybe six hundred million dollars in cash in the bank and the company the micro strategy was is a multi billion dollar company so i was like a million is not gonna move the needle for me a hundred thousand not gonna move the needle for me five ten million is not gonna move the needle one way or the other so there's no point in doing it unless it was something material were you like you know the eight people in your office were were they like your coworkers or the i mean that business development the people that wanted the commission on the deal you know so like any any most it's a big right they wanna like do the deal and and the only way you get thirty million is to like say no to twenty two million right and then well any reasonable most reasonable people which the reason you are where you are is you're many would probably consider you you're not reasonable i mean you have you're you're you're extreme personality type and that's why you you're very successful but any reasonable person would say what are you an idiot like you paid there nothing for this ticket it were you but were you always that like my you want is that the english language is gonna be important to the human race for a thousand years and in a thousand years from now voice or probably still have value just like a lot of like hope it's a valuable word forever i mean until you murder everyone that speaks to english language if you think about how valuable it is my my real view is is i think people are crazy for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to market a brand that's a miss spelling of a normal word is like i gotta convince you how to sell with like two y in a z you know i'm like why would you do that because in the modern era of spell checkers when you try to type these crappy brands that are misspelled the you know your iphone un spells it for you or properly spells it so try going to a website that's a spelling of a name most brands and most brand consultants i just disagree with them all they you know they charge a lot of money to come up with a miss spelling of a common word and then you spend half a billion dollars marketing the brand a much better idea would be by the word hope or angel or alarm or alert or or voice even if you gotta pay a hundred million or two hundred million or five hundred million dollars because if i see your your ad and you tell me that you know your brand is alert dot com i can remember it in one second i can spell it in one second you leap immediately to the top of the google search engine so i just i always view domains as being undervalued and then mark people spend hundreds of millions of dollars have gone crappy marketing to send someone to a place they can't spell that they can't remember i think the world will gradually come around to that point of view but they're not there yet but that so that was my view like i didn't wanna sell it to tell you the truth like if you owned the word angel or the word alarm or the word hope or voice like the truth is google should pay a billion dollars for the word voice i mean if they're gonna try to launch a voice service it's worth it to them and eventually you know what you're gonna see is apple amazon facebook google are just gonna keep generating more money but the word voice or the word hope or you know fill in the blank any kind of positive positive easy to spell short word in the english language is gonna be an awesome place to build a brand and so right now it looks like you own or you owned or or you i own a strategy wisdom dot com alarm dot com angel dot com a a alert courage mike dot com voice dot com usher dot com hope speaker dot com michael mike sailor dot org so you own a bunch of them yeah and so and so my view is like like trying to sell the i i got twenty picasso and i wanted the world of market to value picasso so i sell the first one for thirty million but the next one i want a hundred million for or i or i really would you know someone to create a a billion dollar business with me on that right that's the right way to think of it and i mean i look at it this way how many people have learned that have learned to speak english on earth what is that number two billion maybe yep how many how many years of your life do you learn do you spend learning english i mean a typical person spends it takes english ten years like from kindergarten through twelve maybe twelve years but let's say that we shorten it two billion people spend four years of their life and that's eight billion years of time spent figuring out how to spell and type your brand what's the if you value the eight billion years at twenty dollars an hour that's a hundred and sixty billion dollars worth of money spent teaching people that hope is a good thing right what's it worth like what's it worth like to have a brand which is universally understood and easy to spell that's burned in the head of billions of people you know you couldn't have you're gonna go and buy advertising to convince them that h o o p is a good thing hop or that like not really so i i think that i'm they're just good investments they're scarce real estate and cyber space and they'll always be good and the world under value them but in time like when i tell you alarm dot com you can remember alarm you can go type alarm when you get off this podcast anybody that wants to go check out what alarm dot com does they don't have to go and like look it up and sort through a hundred and ninety seven thousand google search pages to figure out which one is the one that sale was talking about yep my friend started calm calm dot com the meditation app and the the first thing you did was is took the domain basically and it decided early on our alright i'm gonna build a brand around the feeling of being calm and it took the form of a meditation at but he sort of decided up upfront what it was gonna be and had got that domain and really like had to negotiate to get it and it was you know these domain go prolonged but but definitely another i don't know success story of that that time and i'll remember it too by the way like like what you just said you just pitched me on an idea i'll get off and if off this podcast and if four weeks from now someone asked you so what was that meditation business thing i'll be like c a l m dot com right hopefully they got the right spelling of it right yeah now there's three l's no i'm joking it's the it's the right one alright so let's let's talk about work let's talk about something now so you you you've been in the game for a while i think you might be how long you've been this you've been like the ceo of micro shredder at thirty years almost since nineteen eighty nine so thirty one years i've been a public company ceo since nineteen ninety eight i think sam last nineteen public public company ceo you you've been the you've been a public traded company or a public ceo you longer than i've been a lot and so and you've kind of had some ups and downs so i i saw an interview of you on charlie rose you know you were looking like tom cruz you go on charlie rose and they're you're flying how you're a thirty four year old guy who took the company public i think micro microsoft was worth eleven billion dollars or something at that point and and best all i think you own half of it or maybe a little bit more than half of the company and so you're you know a thirty four year old billionaire and i think you know few years later the stock price crashed pretty dramatically but you i think there's two kind of remarkable things hey i wanna hear what was it like to be in that position and then face that crash and then be how the hell did you keep your job was it because you owned the controlling stake at the company because most ceos cannot survive a stock price crash from three hundred something dollars a share to under fifty cents a share how did that happen know i think if you if you're in business long enough you're gonna have setbacks and you know you can't let the setbacks crush your spirit or or or cause you to stop thinking and stop you innovating and stop growing so i mean they're humbling well we all kinda know that's the right answer but like when sorry we we all kinda know that's the right answer like hey sat happened you got pick yourself up and that's true and everybody sort of agrees but when it does happen what like do you remember what that felt like what the day was when when when you're experiencing this crash what were you thinking as it was happening it's not pleasant it's not pleasant but you know you have to move on right you have you have to focus you have responsibility okay and you're were you were talking about at one point you like alright when i was selling this domain when did you sell that domain name how many years ago two years ago maybe okay so not that long ago actually but you were saying like well we had i had six hundred million dollars in cash we the company was doing great why continue staying as the ceo when it seems like you're incredibly i mean bitcoin seems like you're one of your main top two focuses next to micro strategy why not just focus entirely on that as opposed to continue continuing to run this business well first of all the the business has two strategies and the first strategies is we sell business intelligence software to our customers and the second strategy is we acquire and whole bitcoin that is the business got it and and and if you look at what we've done we we bought two hundred fifty million dollars worth of bitcoin that we had generated as a publicly traded company so without the business we couldn't have bought the first two hundred fifty million dollars a bitcoin and that required you know an intricate set of of due diligence and disclosures then we did a dutch tender offer but basically it's an an equity offering of sorts that you could think of it that way but we did a we did a reverse dutch auction and with the at the end of that point we bought another hundred and seventy five million worth bitcoin and so that's another thing you have to have to be a public company to do then we swapped our cash flows as a public company into bitcoin we bought fifty million more bitcoin and without the company couldn't done it then we did a convertible debt offering for six hundred fifty million dollars of debt at seventy five basis points and without being a public company we couldn't done that one either there and we bought bitcoin and then it went up again and then we did we bought some more with cash flow and then we did a billion dollar debt offering and we did that billion dollar convert offering at zero percent interest you couldn't have done that without being a public company so there are benefits to being a public company public companies are credible they're really the gold standard as a counterpart party right i mean there's a hundred million companies in the world there's only about four thousand publicly traded companies on us listed exchanges so it's a very very rare thing you have to go through a huge amount of of compliance you know we're we're following ten qs ten k's we've got a lot of a lot of compliance architecture security architecture i'm signing sa ox statements you know every quarter right we're responsible for fc you know etcetera responsibility so that gives that gives investors comfort with a publicly traded company so probably the most important thing to to take away from the podcast is bitcoin is an exploding asset class it's it's really a it's it's the greatest treasury reserve asset of our lifetimes and it's the solution to every company's treasury problem so if you have a corporation that has capital or generates cash flow you can immediately double or improve the value of the company or dramatically enhance the value of the company simply by changing your treasury policy so if you you company with with cash and you invest in bitcoin you have you converted a liability to an asset and so so i was enhancing the value of the company by pursuing the bitcoin strategy they go together they're synergistic so let's let's lay out the the kind of the context for people who have who don't know exactly how it all played out because i would say in our audience right we're gonna get about three hundred four hundred thousand listeners this month and in that audience probably you know five percent are as crazy about bitcoin as me and have put like you know you know a a huge chunk of their net worth into bitcoin and then you know fifty percent are curious and fifty percent are novice let's say you know it's roughly rounding things out and so just to put into context micro strategy is this couple billion dollar public company it's been around for a while has good track record has a business selling enterprise software you generate a ton of cash your business spits off cash you have about five hundred six hundred million i'm just using fuzzy numbers does does specifics don't matter you use about five hundred six hundred million dollars of cash that's your treasury for your company and you're looking for something to do with it and at some point you realize you have this treasury problem and and you're not alone actually all companies have this treasury problem whether they are aware of it or not so can you describe the treasury problem that you experienced and you experienced at a five hundred million dollar level but anybody including an individual with five hundred thousand dollars or that you know hundred thousand dollars in the bank has the same fundamental problem so explain the treasury problem as you saw it a few years ago or yeah ago the the treasury problem is that subsequent to march twenty twenty the cost of capital exploded from eight percent to twenty five percent and you can see that in the performance of the s and p five hundred index which went from about eight percent a year for a decade to more than twenty five percent in that next year that means that anybody investing money on behalf of a of a limited partner or any other investor has to generate that cost of capital in order to avoid destroying wealth if you in if you generated less than a eight percent yield for the decade from two thousand ten to two thousand twenty as a financial adviser you destroyed wealth because the alternative was just to buy the sp index if you generated less than twenty five percent from march of twenty twenty onward you destroyed wealth because you could have made twenty five percent actually a bit more depending on what day of the week you measure it or what day of the year you measure it you could have generated that much just by owning the index now the pro the treasury problem is that when the cost of capital is zero if by the way the cost of capital is being driven by the expansion of the money supply the federal reserve is in expanding the m two money supply by about five to six percent a year for that decade and when you tackle on the risk premium you get to your eight percent s and p return when the when the federal reserve expands the m two money supply by twenty to twenty five percent that's where you get that explosion and the cost of capital the inflation doesn't show up in consumer goods the inflation immediately shows up an assets we have asset inflation within minutes of when the central bank decides to stimulate the economy the price of all the assets explodes and so the problem for every company all one hundred million companies in the world every private company every public company the problem is you have capital and your treasury and that capital has to yield the cost of capital and if it doesn't you're destroying shareholder value another way to say it is if you generate cash and you put it into the bank account to pay zero interest and if if the cost of everything you wanna buy goes up by ten percent a year in seven years you'll only be able to buy half as much you've lost half of the value of your savings when that discount rate or that cost of capital doubles well then in three and a half years you've lost half your money at a twenty five percent cost of capital in three years you've lost half your wealth so the treasury problem is the cost of capital has exploded and the cost of capital as it goes through the roof puts every company in a quan they either have to d and give all of their assets back to their shareholders because they can't if sam is controlling an investment company that invest in dollars and you were running an investment company that invest in the s and p five index and i gave each of you a million and sam proudly tells me how he didn't lose my money and you tell me you made twenty five percent return i'm pulling all my money out of sam's fund and i'm putting it into your fund so ultimately the the problem is the company sitting on capital if it can't meet the cost of capital it has to give the money back to the shareholders or at least it's under extreme political pressure from the share everybody's beating you up as ceo saying what are you doing with all that cash you should just pay a dividend or you should buy the stock back and and the second pressure you have is if you run a company and your cash flows are growing at eight percent a year but the cost of capital is twenty five percent a year that means that i'm discounting you at a rate that's higher than your growth rate in essence the value of your stock is gonna be forecast to go to zero you can't hold value in a company growing it five percent a year when the cost of capital is twenty five percent a year that's why the only thing i you can buy is gonna be a high tech stock that's growing you you need to buy a tech mono monopoly that can grow twenty or twenty five percent a year and if you come to me with a business idea for a company which makes a lot of cash or or is makes a lot of money but is growing two percent a year or one percent a year i'm just not interested in a high cost of capital environment so the problem we faced in march is what do we do give all the money back to the shareholders or can we find something to invest in that you that's going to actually generate more than twenty five percent return and that puts us to a question so what we did in essence was split the difference you know if if i was in a situation in the ideal situation you would just buy five hundred million worth of bitcoin and put out a press release and do it but if you did that that would be such a shock to the outside shareholders that the fear would be well is someone gonna sue us or dump the stock because you were so aggressive because they'll claim that you took a risk that you didn't disclose so our responses is let's disclose everybody we're about to take a risk and after that let's go ahead and take a risk but at the same time let's give everybody an insurance policies so we we offered to buy back two hundred fifty million dollars worth of the stock in this dutch auction so if you disagree with the decision to buy bitcoin you can sell the stock back at a at a profit our stock was one twenty we offered to buy the stock back at up to one forty and so we cushion the blow of the investment strategy by giving people an exit strategy from the equity that rotates the shareholder base and then we began to pursue the bitcoin strategy as a primary treasury reserve asset with with a different shareholder base so let me ask you a question now yeah i like the analogy or the the kind of the awareness that hey we have this giant bowl of ice cream that's melting that's that's your cash pile that's melting and the heat is basically the money printer that is causing acid inflation i ice cube that's melting ice cube five hundred million dollar ice cube and it's melting twenty percent a year and gone so you needed to do something with that you didn't want it to all melt away so you decided to do this now a couple quick questions one is sort of rapid fire i've i have a couple rapid fire questions for you yeah in twenty years from now what do you think has generated more value or more income to the company to micro strategy is it the operating income of micro strategy or the investment income of the bitcoin it holds the investment income for sure okay and then you know to be to be very clear what happened in march of twenty twenty is when the cost of capital goes to twenty five percent that means that every investor and all investment income every every investor generated twenty five percent more doing nothing right and every main street company that work twenty five percent harder got nothing right right you literally tilt the playing field so that if you don't own if you own an assets you're having the best year of a thirty years and if you don't own assets it's impossible to have a good year right and and so so the second question is you as you acquire as you acquire more and more bitcoin is micro strategy bet like do you just position the company at this point like it's a bitcoin etf it's like by this buy this bitcoin buying some companies it's not a bitcoin etf or everybody's you're sloppy with those words and etf is of a company that invest in securities and it tries to keep its assets under management equal to the amount of shares of etf that it's sold it's a financial company and et atp is a similar type of company that invest in commodities if you create you know if you create this bitcoin entity that that that equal assets under management equal to the shares you sell you created a bitcoin et atp we're neither of those things we're not a finance company we're not an etf we're not an atp we're not we're not buying or selling bitcoin to equal assets under management we're an operating company that owns property bitcoin is property and in that way you should think of it as a company that like i i bought a million acres of land in texas or i bought a million gallons of of fill in the blank a million bush of soybean you can buy any kind of property right and and you're holding it on your balance sheet as a company right that's what we that's what we are now what's your question you are talking about like let's say the the cost of capital being twenty five percent right because since march that's what the p five i hundred on but the the stock market goes you know it does go up and down in years where you know the market dips and and goes up you know the average of you know over time the geometric mean is whatever seven or eight something like that so some would argue okay yes this year assets inflated by that much that doesn't mean next year it's gonna remain at twenty five percent a year and so you have to make some prediction right and so are you are you basically forecasting it at twenty five percent fifteen percent ten percent eight percent and does the decision change at a certain number there so so first of all for the decade from two thousand and ten to two thousand and twenty it was generally about eight percent like it was it was pretty consistent and the single biggest driver of cost of capital is the rate at which the broad money supply expands and if you look at if you go google m two money supply fed you'll get a chart and you'll see the chart by the the charts not all over the place the chart is very consistent seven percent slope for a decade it's not jerk around so it's not that volatile it was very consistent monetary policy for a decade then that chart goes like this straight up twenty four percent so if you if if you're going to make a decision as an investor and this is any investor what this this has to do this applies to all four hundred trillion dollars worth of investors and applies to every company on earth they all have the same exact thing may have to calculate which is you have to estimate the rate at which the money supply will expand each year for the next eight years and so that's the if you wanna figure out the signal or or the single most important thing in the world for everyone but for everyone seven point eight billion people for a hundred million companies for everyone with money on earth or everyone that earns a salary on earth this is the big idea of the podcast you have to estimate the rate at which the currency is going to expand and if you believe the currency is going to continue to expand at fifteen percent a year for the next eight years you come to one conclusion if you plug in ten percent it's a different conclusion if it's twenty five percent it's a different conclusion so what do i think i think that fifteen percent is fifteen percent for the next eight years is reasonable if you're a pe you could say twenty if you're an opt you could say ten but the money supply is expanding because the federal reserve and the eu central bank are buying a trillion dollars worth of bonds every year each and it's also expanding because the the government of the eu and the us are running a multi trillion dollar deficit and it is also expanding because of trillion dollar plus stimulus and there's no reason to think that's gonna change in the next four years and i don't think in the next eight years i think i think that at the point that the democrats took control of the senate and the house you saw that you have if you could have you could have forecasted twelve percent inflation it was it was a split government but i think that in a in a in a a non sprint government there seems to be remarkable consensus that we should run deficits continue to keep interest rates low and continue to stimulate the economy so what does that mean if you plug in a number fifteen percent it means that the risk free interest rate or the the risk free return is fifteen percent it means you have to generate in excess of fifteen percent on your money every year for the next four years in order to stay ahead of the rate of asset inflation a reasonable person would say the assets are going to inflate at that rate that's that's pretty much what they do that means that if your company is not growing its cash flows you know at a twenty percent rate then it's not gonna hold value as a stock it means that if your bond is paying you an interest rate of less than fifteen percent you're destroying value in the bond if your rent yield is less than fifteen percent your commercial real estate destroying value and if you're holding cash you're losing fifteen percent of it a year that's that's the negative real yield so once you actually embrace the idea of asset inflation and asset inflation equals cost to capital equals the rate of the money supply expansion once you have that rate then you realize that there's a negative real that you real yield on everything except for to bitcoin for the most part the negative real yield on gold is three percent that's the rate at which we mine it or hypo it the negative real yield on sovereign debt is about twelve percent thirteen percent the negative real yield on corporate debt is ten percent every company that's got a growth rate of less than fifteen percent has got a negative real yield on it so you know once you do that then you can then what you realize is you can't really have a business strategy as a company unless you find a way to solve the treasury problem so the big idea here is you wanna fix any company sweep all the cash flows into bitcoin convert the treasury into bitcoin borrow against your future cash flows and dollars convert that into bitcoin finance all your fixed assets and dollars convert that into bitcoin and issue equity as much as you can now at the highest valuation you can now in dollars and invest in bitcoin right and and you might say why bitcoin well because bitcoin is the apex property it's the most scarce monetary asset in the universe you can't make any more of it it's encrypted money and and what that means is it's least likely to be impaired by a property tax and execution issue money printing dilution counterpart risk and corruption so we have we have engineered a superior asset a thermo dynamically sound technically superior asset it's placed on a global digital monetary network which is open an open protocol and the combination of this the the apex asset on the open monetary system makes it the the most disruptive technology in the world when you were first starting micro strategy you were you were in the weeds you were thinking i have to make a product that solves a problem and i i have to make money off of it right now you've gone way up the hierarchy of now we can do whatever we want now you could do whatever you want at what point did you notice a shift like oh my gosh like this business is stable it's working it's working pretty well yeah it's quite predictable at what point did that shift happen because what you're talking about now is quite according to what i think we look we solved our problem when we actually embraced bitcoin i i i i could say to you oh yeah well not when i had five hundred million dollars in cash in the bank i could and then we were focused but the problem with that is that if you have a bunch of cash generating zero interest the cost capital goes twenty five percent then all the public company investors for sake the company and if the stock if if the stock market for sake the company the mainstream media for stakes the company right then the employees become d deducted because eventually you're gonna have facebook amazon apple or google steal one of your employees if you can't drive the stock up right nobody wants to invest in a company that makes a lot of money growing at five percent a year i mean it's it seems brutal to say that it but it wouldn't be true if the cost capital was zero if we had a sound money policy in this country then you could hold your head up high and say i run this great restaurant and we made a lot of money last year we're gonna make a lot of money this year and our plan is to keep doing what we've been doing and i pat you on the back and say that's good that's honorable but if if i tell you i'm gonna dev value the the cash by twenty five percent a year or twenty percent a year at some point you're driven into this cycle where i have to either do a big acquisition to keep my revenues growing i i have to take extreme risk and do d diluted acquisitions or i have to go borrow billions of dollars to buy the stock back to leverage up the cash flow per share and if i don't do either of those things the investors dump the stock and they dump the stock the employees start feeling like you know why don't they go work someplace cool and hot and you're gonna get all your engineers stripped away by facebook or amazon or something so the truth is when we actually fixed the balance sheet we fixed the stock and we fixed the you know at this point the company has five billion dollars more than five billion dollars in assets if the if the cost of capital remains it let let's say it goes up twenty percent if if we print twenty percent more money next year i can reasonably expect to generate a billion dollars of investment income which would be a you know twenty percent increase in bitcoin right but the truth is i can reasonably expect better than that if the cost to capital is ten i can reasonably expect five hundred million dollars in investment income well all two thousand people doing a hundred thousand things right perfectly for the entire year competing against microsoft that has more money than god they can generate seventy five million a year okay so so the truth is the company its future became secure when we actually converted the balance sheet to bitcoin because now we don't have to struggle let me say it a different way i don't think any company could be successful without a financial strategy in the year twenty twenty one like i wouldn't have said it three four years ago if you have a sound money macroeconomic environment where the money supplies is expanding at two or three percent a year you can go out and make things and create things and market things and sell things and service things and generate cash with that and then and that makes sense but if the money supplies is expanding a twenty percent a year you need to own assets because because what's happening is no one's going to invest in any project that doesn't generate more than the twenty percent hurdle rate and so what who can generate consistently risk free twenty percent returns you have to be a monopoly yeah you have to have a digital monopoly or some kind of monopoly so it becomes exponentially harder to grow and what and so what happens next all these other companies get could squeeze out of the ecosystem right they're they get d capitalized and rendered ins solvent by by the monetary policy so i i would say that you know if i can get my my stock was a hundred and twenty dollars a share what is it right now like i haven't checked in the market sixty eight okay so if i if i get my stock up then i can actually make my shareholders happy i can change the narrative i can recruit i can retain talent i can get you know i can inspire the confidence of my customers i can i can drive momentum and then we can do what we wanna do i guess it's it's similar to if you're a university and you had no endowment you know and or university has a billion dollar endowment or university is a hundred billion dollar endowment you know if you're a professor which university you wanna work for if you're a student where do you wanna go you know do you you have a shiny building coming or not right if at the end of the day right money is a measure of energy and so if you have monetary assets you have energy and if you have high energy you can pursue your vision you know with integrity and what percentage of your time now are you spending on this on investing the income versus on the day to day of micro strategy you have just the the business as usual making the products that making business intelligence products versus investing the the income i'm am i'm the ceo but we have a president and the president and the company is fa lee and he actually has day to day operational responsibility for sales marketing and even technology development at this point so i'm the chairman and the ceo i i oversee the company strategy and i oversee the i i oversee financial strategies i oversee long term direction and i and and i oversee technology strategy but i'm not i'm not in the weeds in the day to day running the business that's really left for the operating executive team so about a year ago i tweeted out that i had moved twenty five percent of my net worth into bitcoin which is now become like i don't know fifty plus percent almost and a friend called me our friend who comes on this podcast and name's andrew wilkinson very successful business guy he's got a public company in in canada now sort of has your owns businesses that are worth about over a billion of the over billion dollars and he called me and he was just like hey i just wanna make sure you know what you're doing here and you know like a a concerned friend and and he comes from like kind of the warren buffett you know he's a warren buffett disciple and famously buffett and mu you know charlie mu called bitcoin rap poison and then buffet called it rap poison squared and so you get really intelligent people who are well respected for what they've done talking about bitcoin so first what's your reaction to the buffett opinion on bitcoin i think everybody's captured by their frame of reference warren buffett would would you agree that warren buffett for the most part made money investing in stocks yeah and non technology stocks primarily and and maybe and maybe overseeing operating companies how successful would he have been if he did that in nigeria or let let's say zimbabwe or argentina for the past fifteen years have venezuela not not very strategy wouldn't have worked right for example there is no strategy that would work if you were a business person in zimbabwe when the currency collapse and if you look at the argentine blue dollar the argentine dollar the argentine peso actually used to be worth the dollar and then it was worth and then it was three pesos to the dollar today it's on the black market they call it the blue market it's worth about a hundred and fifty pesos to the dollar there's you know if you live in a world where you just let's just start by assuming the currency is strong and we have no problem with that and that stocks are going to work and then let's talk about our investment strategy well if if you if you live in that world then you and you can make those assumptions great but what if the currency weakens at fifteen percent a year for the next decade then then your strategy doesn't work so i i think that for the most part the world's full of successful people but there's two things they're missing one they're they're assuming optimistic that that in the united states and western europe whatever currency challenges we have whatever weakness of the currency we have will be rapidly rectified they're either in denial like for here's how you'll know ask someone as an investor how they did last year if they're honest they'll say oh all my you know the dollar crashed and all my stocks are up twenty to fifty percent because the dollar weaker and and if they tell you oh i had a great year all my my portfolio is up thirty seven percent or fifty percent because i'm a genius stock picker right that's how you interpret the world is the dollar weakening or is the market getting better right and so there's a lot of people that that have been successful in their frame of reference and so they just attribute the virtuous activity of you know their virtuous stock picking or their virtuous business strategy for their success right and then they wonder why everybody else can't be like them right right and then i think the second part of this is bitcoin is paradigm shift it's the first time in the history of the human race that we managed to put first layer money on a digital network i mean there is no there is nothing to study someone that's telling you they've studied this how could you have studied it it's like we invented fire or we invented electricity it's such a new invention that if if your friend said i spent forty seven hours studying bitcoin right and i have the following you know detail concerns about how it's going to evolve as a dominant digital asset network and these are the things i'm worried about maybe it would be constructive conversation but i i think that most people don't they don't even understand yet that it's a digital monetary network they don't even know there's a class of such a thing it's the first such thing in the history of the of the human race so so i've created the ability to manifest property in cyber space using strong encryption and i have decentralized that network such that no company or no ceo or no country could be a point of failure right this is this is oh first in the human race that you know this is a fire in cyber space it's that's burning with a trillion dollars of energy it's the fastest growth to a trillion dollars of any digital network in the history of the world twelve years and so if you embrace that and you say okay i've got two things going on here i have a macro i've this is the first time in thirty years that the money supply the the broad money supply in the us and europe is all linked and all and all collapsing at a rate north of twenty percent we didn't have this not in your lifetime not in my lifetime the last time we got something similar this is nineteen eighty but and before in the seventies but in the seventies you had a bunch of different central banks the german bank the french bank the us bank the us was not the world current it was like thirty percent of the currency trades in the nineteen eighties it wasn't ninety percent so we had the formation of the eu the eu tied all of european currency to the dollar that became ninety percent of all the currency every other central bank tightened the dollar so we arrive in a period in the last twelve months where where the behavior of the us fed and the expansion of the m two money supply is in essence weakening every currency on earth at the same time you've only got three sets of currencies you've got the strong currencies weakening at the same rate as the dollar you've and that's like twenty rich countries then you've got you've got most currencies weakening twenty to forty percent more against the dollar and then you've got the last basket of currencies weakening eighty percent or more against the dollar they're utterly collapsing and so you have a macroeconomic circumstance we've never seen in our lifetime and then you have a technology the most disruptive technology of our life more disruptive than google than face book more disruptive than youtube more disruptive than zoom more disruptive than than the iphone it took google twenty two years to get to a trillion it took amazon twenty four years to get to a trillion book it took apple forty two years to get to a trillion it took microsoft forty four years to get to a trillion it took bitcoin twelve it's a it's it's a monetary fire it's burning and cyber space and these two things together you know by way how do you feed a monetary fire with money think more money than ever the money is feeding the fire right and anybody living in a comfortable environment with a business strategy that worked last year right that they're going to be late to understand this because they haven't had this jarring realization that there's something fundamentally different but if you lived in argentina or are you lived in lebanon and your currency like let's take lebanon it collapses overnight by eighty percent and if someone handed you an iphone and said you can put bitcoin on this and you won't be broke and starving tomorrow you would have an incentive to learn about this new technology because your entire world crashed around your head but if you're living in a world where it you think you just made thirty percent return on your portfolio you don't quite have the same appreciation of the problem yeah go ahead sam so you you it it almost is it's almost like rooted and the decision to do all of this is definitely shareholder stuff shareholder value but a lot of it was like rooted like well just wanna attract great talent or that was definitely a a factor how has how many people work there now two thousand what two two thousand how how has this impacted your ability to recruit and retain people it's it's great for retention has been great for recruiting we can get we we get people first of all the company's brand has been amped up by a factor of a thousand i mean a lot more people know us now and like what's the culture like now the different just more just happy bitcoin is hope okay so let me say it different way if your family has a hundred thousand dollars and you showed up you know today and i told you it was in a bank in lebanon and now it's twenty thousand but you can't spend it and it's going to zero what's your family's more morale right well it's same death and if you if your family at a hundred thousand in bitcoin at the same in the same year and i told you oh by way bitcoin is up by a thousand percent and now you have a million dollars and it's probably gonna keep going up forever and you don't have to worry black white like that it's not like black not i'm looking at your glass door reviews i'm looking at the glass door reviews not everyone agrees like surely there's downside to this i mean not everyone agrees i i i'm looking at i see a lot of bad reviews and every great company has a lot of bad reviews but it's not black and white that everyone i mean you have a forty three percent review in glass door i know that glass door isn't the full picture but it's clear that not everyone agrees with your opinion i i don't know is that is that only stats for the past six months because i you no there's a there's a thousand reviews and it's been basically isn't it for the past decade but i can sort by date so i can i can tell you a a number by any you could just i can set it by any constraint right now it's all so one thousand views with and it's and it's a low review and i and so it doesn't seem like where my crazy so you you're looking at the past ten years and if if you go back over the past ten years we had we had one point where the company was contracting and we laid off employees and so so no i'm looking at reviews all from two thousand twenty there's i think truth truth be told no nobody gives a shit about glass door reviews right like you know that's do no i like this i think that there i think there's two no no better health than the pancake there's always two sides but there's bits of truth in all of right you could you could gauge chris what is the do you what is the point you would like to make and what shall we discuss what i wanna know is is what's been the downside of this because it's not black and white that everyone agrees with you it's not black and white that like this has been perfect sam can actually a slightly different way that yeah i think i get what you're what you're trying to say so it's not not necessarily owe have people disagreed with you because right now also you look like a genius you bought the thing the brand is up the stock is up the bitcoin price is up like if you really disagree now this is your own personal problem at this point strategies clearly worked up till now the question is more that hey we've had periods of time i've been holding bitcoin since twenty thirteen twenty fourteen and i've seen bitcoin go down you know seventy eighty percent drawdown downs and you have basically taken out a bunch of debt you bought bitcoin you own five billion dollars bitcoin the majority of the company's value is the bitcoin that the assets that it owns and if we do see i i think we we kind of agree volatility will dampen over time but that doesn't mean we can't see a drawdown like that again what happens when bitcoin price drops by fifty percent again you know what's your reaction to that how you know how does that affect your strategy or what's your overall viewpoint of this possibility that's not that that that's not downside strategy right yeah yeah yeah on a day to day level at the company i sound i imagine there's a ton of people that love this but what's is what has been any of the downsides of this because with every great decision there's always gonna be downsides as well as upsides i can't see any downside for the employees they've all benefited i can't see any downside for the investors that stayed with us they've all benefited right i mean there are critics out there that don't like bitcoin and by way there are people that will say you're a ceo you shouldn't invest you know there are there are people that will say operating companies shouldn't have assets right there's a like there's criticism people say well your ceo you should go back to your cubicle and write software and leave the investing to the professionals but i think that the the fundamental elephant in the room here is that the macroeconomic environment is so incredibly unfair to people without assets like literally if you're a operating company or a main street company you have to work thirty percent harder to stand still and if you're a wall street company you can stand still and get thirty percent more like the the playing field is so tilted in favor of property owners or asset holders against manufacturers and and companies that that do things that you you can't really be successful in business unless you have assets as part of your strategy and so so okay so me and sam we're asking different questions sam wanted to know more about the moral morale i wanna know if we do see another bitcoin you know crash draw but drawdown down fifty percent sixty percent what happens to your position and what happens to your your point of view well we we we have permanent capital so it doesn't make a difference to us right like right now for example we have a three billion dollar investment gain so if you cut bitcoin in half we would still have an investment gain right i mean our basis is twenty four thousand so if it goes down to less than twenty four thousand and stays there forever then it will have not been a good investment i suppose but otherwise we we've got a long term strategy which is you buy it and hold it and and i think that a lot of people live in fear of volatility but a lot of people live in fear of a lot of things right if you're if you have enough fear you won't leave your house you won't do anything and so you have to have a bit of courage and conviction i i can give you a thousand reasons why i think it makes sense to invest in bitcoin i i can't give you any reason why why i should be afraid to do a rational thing mh so you know it it doesn't really bother me right there's this is a rational strategy if i had to do all over again what i of course i would right ask all the investors that made billions and billions of dollars you know over the timeframe frame right of of course you would do it again and i think we're gonna we're gonna have to wrap based on time so appreciate you coming on do you wanna leave anybody with a way to way to find you place to follow a place to take a next step if they you know liked what they heard sure if you're interested in bitcoin bitcoin is hope so go to h hop hope dot com we have lots of information in it if you wanna follow me i'm michael underscore sailor on twitter how how much you think bitcoin dot com is worth roger rivera owns it now how much would you be paying for bitcoin dot com i don't know i i wouldn't speculate wouldn't speculate you know i think for most people a lot of what you're were saying and i think is gonna be over their heads that listen to this to to be perfectly honest with you i think but but i could dis instill it down into a very simple a simple way of looking at it i for anybody that listened to this and they were intrigued but they didn't know they haven't you know sort of gone down the rabbit hole yet which is very simply if guys like michael sailor who own public companies that have a ton of money are worried about what they're gonna do because their money is melting and they're looking for you know investment grade you know sort of the the most powerful treasury asset and he's decided it's bitcoin and you know square has put some money in paypal has put money in tesla put a billion and a half dollars into into bitcoin it's likely that there are more companies out there and it'll take them six months to a year to make this move but they will take a portion of their treasury reserves and they'll move it into bitcoin and these are long term holders these are not retail day traders that are gonna be you know buying and selling the thing like crazy so the real simple thing is you can sort of invest into the network you can buy bitcoin yourself and you can front run the institutions that are coming that was a very simple very simple thesis a very simple takeaway for somebody who's listened to this if you're a company you better be thinking about what you're gonna do the cash if you're a individual person you should also be thinking about what you're gonna do with your cash and the easy move is that for once you get to front run the institutions and you get to get in before they all get in whereas typically the retail for investor is last i i think that's a it's a a a reasonable thing to say i agree with it another big picture way to say it is there's a hundred trillion dollars of treasury assets that have a negative real yield of minus ten to minus fifteen percent a year that means they're they're destroying ten trillion dollars a year of value the solution is convert all of that money into bitcoin bitcoin is a trillion dollar asset the you know people that understand bitcoin think it's going to grow to become the ten trillion dollar asset the gold is and then it's going to replace negative yielding sovereign debt and then corporate debt and and ultimately it will become the primary treasury reserve network and treasury reserve asset and so if you have a company if you're an investor it makes sense to buy it because it's got a brilliant future and it solves a problem that everybody on earth has and if you're a company it makes sense to plug your treasury into bitcoin because the road to surf them is working exponentially harder for currency growing exponentially weaker right you're just gonna work yourself to death you know put yourself in a position of working as hard as you can in venezuela argentina or zimbabwe and roll the clock forward a decade and ask yourself the question what do you wish you did and the answer is protect your assets protect your your monetary energy your treasury by putting it into a scarce asset in a bank and cyber space where no one can steal it deb base it or destroy it and and that's the bitcoin ethos we're simply trying to we're trying to make it worthwhile to do the other stuff there's no point in doing a hundred million other things if at the end of the journey you've got nothing to show for it yeah why why create all the value if you cannot store it so here's a better store of value right yeah that's the big idea and that's and that's a business strategy for everybody small medium large doesn't matter and you know i'm just kind of anticipating somebody hears this and they say but we're not argentina we're not venezuela do i really need to worry about this and what's your answer to that my answer is the single most important thing for you to to have in your life is a forecast for the money supply expansion in your country for the next eight years so i would say the before you invest the next decade of your life doing whatever stop and study up on macroeconomic and form an opinion about the rate at which your currency is going to lose economic energy and then you can act accordingly if you think that the currency is going to hold by the way the currency has never held it's lost six percent of its value every year forever right it's always losing six value you just have to decide for the next decade whether or not the cost of capital is gonna be eight twelve sixteen or twenty and once you make that decision that will inform you with regard to with what what degree of enthusiasm will you pursue a hard asset strategy if you think that the if you think that the currency is going to weaken rapidly then you would shift you would you would shift and prioritize hard asset strategy and hard asset acquisition aggressively and if you think that the currency is going to not weaken that rapidly you would prioritize other strategies right and you everybody's got make that decision for themselves but when you know when zimbabwe started to crash normal companies management the consulting companies started buying lumber and coal and oil and anything they could buy because at least you'll still have it tomorrow whereas the cash the currency the receivables will be worth nothing so you just have to make that decision we can't yeah there's plenty of information in the world for you to form your own opinion once you formed your opinion then then you can act accordingly cool alright michael thank you for calling gentlemen yeah we appreciate this is great thank you we just did this interview with michael what's this sailors yeah the l right and no i mean i trevor a sailor or sailor without an now recap it and then explain your opinion for but first objectively try to recap it objectively we had this guy on he's objectively successful financially objectively a wonderful businessman he came on for he he said ahead of time his objective for this interview was to promote bitcoin which that's cool we could talk about that for a bit that we i'm down with that i wanted to ask him a little bit more beyond that but we didn't get to it and he talked for sixty succeed plus minutes all about this topic and i personally pressed them on a few topics and he disagree disagreed with me and my vibe this is alright past the objective part my vibe from this was i don't trust i don't trust his opinion okay so i'll give you mine two cents and then we'll we'll we'll we'll just talk about it real quick so i just was i thought he came on just kinda low energy slash maybe like kind of arrogant i don't know if sm a little bit not in a bad way but i think at the beginning we were clearly trying to like warm them up just talk to him about something that he had zero interest in in chatting about anything besides the virtue of bitcoin and so that was a little bit i don't know that's personally a little off putting i guess like i i find it more fun when a guest comes on and there's somebody that you leave the podcast being like man i wanna i'd love to hang with that person more i think that's a great sign for the guest and i think in this case you know i didn't walk away with that feel i agree with all the things you said objectively he's super smart you know literally a rocket scientist who built a billion dollar company by the you know a ten billion dollar company by the time he was thirty four you you know from twenty four to thirty four built a a ten billion dollar company has been running it for thirty years as a public company ceo went into bitcoin heavy and has made three billion dollars at bitcoin like you guys is definitely a smart guy and i think ahead of the curve in many ways i've read his book the mobile wave which you wrote twenty twelve basically saying that mobile gonna like mobile is gonna destroy everything and which in twenty twelve was a sort of safe prediction but still a good prediction nonetheless i don't agree with you that he was like what'd did you say like not trustworthy or something so explain well and let me just say this this is like a d jerk reaction so i don't want my opinion certainly evolving as as it's going and and i've sean you've talked about them all the time so that was my experience with my very wikipedia page and i probably watched the top two or three interviews that's that that's my experience i don't wanna say dis distressing but there was something about it so in the interview i questioned about something's silly not not silly i don't think it's silly sean thinks it's silly and that's okay i understand why someone thinks that i i said your glass door reviews are pretty shitty like recently well no you're actually more more reasonable question you said it's all been okay great bitcoin up this is your stock prices up but like what have been the downsides which think it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask and he was just like well there are no downsides and i was like well that's like objectively false because at there's there there some people they they're anonymous and and it's glass door so that doesn't ton of weight but there's a lot of people in your reviews that say that this is crazy and that your products are failing and you're doing this to distract that like what are the downsides and he i think he he kinda dodged the question and i couldn't get the truth out of them and because of that i'm like if i can't trust something so obvious or if someone can't give me a straight answer on something i feel is so obvious of saying like yeah look there's a ton of upside which i've discussed but here's some of the downsides then in my head i'm like well i can i believe anything you're saying right once you are once you are not reasonable or rational about one thing i can't fully think you're reasonable and rational about this other thing that you're telling me about that's kind of what you're saying and i only think is how you do everything and and i also think that anyone who brag about how rational they are are some of the least rational people i don't which i don't think he brag about it i think it's like when you ask him how you know this this bad thing about it he's like well i just think it's a clear because of this this is true that's a rational thing in my opinion i don't think he was yeah he he he he never claimed he never said that correct but he said like well this this is an incredibly rational decisions decision and i don't see downsides and i'm like well were naturally so not rational i'll i'll his i'll defend by the way i spent most of the podcast podcasts basically even though i'm a huge bitcoin bull i spent most pac podcast podcasts bringing up things that a critic of his strategy and a critic of bitcoin would say just because i wanted to hear his answers but in general like i get what he's saying that look we bought two billion dollars worth of bitcoin it's gained three billion more our stock price is up i don't know four x since we made this strategy change and you're asking me like how do my employees feel like they feel great our brand just went up a thousand x people know what micro strategy is now they didn't know what the hell it was before our stock prices up our assets are have we've gained a lot more value in our assets so what are you talking he he was basically like there's no downside that's all upside so i get that but he didn't you know give you the inch that i think most most reasonably people would do was just to say that yeah everything has its trade offs maybe like it he could have said it was really complicated to go through the process of being the first public company to make this huge bitcoin purchases so that was a huge just you know regulatory and legal you know like mess we had to walk work through but i'm glad we did or like you know there's always some people in the company that disagree with the decision and so they you know they haven't you know they're no longer with us or you know they've had to get on board with something that they didn't see as was the right decision and that's always tough whenever you have strong minded people you're not all get a hundred percent agree with a radical strategy he could've have said any of those things he didn't but how does it make me personally dis trust him i think for you that was a turn off i i don't wanna i like i said before the this is all knee jerk it just happened i i so i wanna be careful in my words if i said dis trust i i actually i i take that back i don't entirely dis distress but i i mean that there's something going on that i had this gut feeling that i can't just believe what you're saying and i want to go and and this should be case i'll i wanna go my right i think it's all pretty above board which is he's basically bet his entire company on bitcoin now they own five billion dollars of bitcoin the company's worth seven billion dollars and bitcoin you know so obvious and he his objective is stated objective to us coming on was to communicate that nature and vi virtue is of bitcoin to the audience and leave them excited about the opportunities at bitcoin offers so he wasn't there was no bait and switch he said what he wanted to do he tried to do that and it's clear that he is incentivized for more people companies and and individuals to buy bitcoin because he is maybe the largest holder of bitcoin in the world i don't know what i don't know what satoshi steak is worth now i agree you maybe check that out is does he have more bitcoin than sent satoshi he he i don't think so he said i think might be send the podcast three billion at one point his three billion is his gain he own they own five billion dollars worth so what is satoshi supposed stay with either way he's one of the top five bitcoin whales in the world he clearly wants bitcoin to go up and wants more people to adopt it to me that's like you gotta have a natural discount of what somebody's saying when it comes to when they are highly highly incentivized for you to invest in that same thing that doesn't mean he's wrong or he's like doing anything dishonest it's like you just have to know that hey this guy's clearly he believes he has high conviction and he has an incentive to make other people believe it too bra you what did you think i mean i think i i'm are you just q and fear right now what you really wanna say so let's let's not let's not not say i say that i for the most part agree with what you guys said i mean talking about michael himself like super intelligent but prop professor he like he doesn't make for a great guess and you see this on other podcast as well like when joe has like some kanye we're renowned like super intelligent like scientists on sometimes they're you know they're they they just wanna go on about their field and their studies and so they those don't make for the best guess so i'll say that yeah we're is kinda sad because you know from my point of view of my i i i guess we both walked away from the podcast feeling a little dish disheartening or i don't know like whatever we didn't we didn't feel like we we had a slam dunk i think you for a different reason than me for me it was just i didn't think it was highly entertaining for people and i i'm kinda bummed about that because i actually think it's a super fucking i think he's a super fucking interesting guy has had a super interesting life and business story and also what he's doing with bitcoin i think it's super interesting so somehow despite there being underlying like substance that is super interesting i don't think it got communicated i almost wish i could just do a bill of the weak segment just explaining everything i know but michael sailor doing the voice yeah to this interview i think that would be way more entertaining than what actually happened when he came on was basically talking about quite technical in economically technical terms that i think for most people they're not gonna resonate with it's not gonna quick and doing it in a way that was sort of like it didn't feel like somebody who was trying to break it down and make it more accessible it was just like this it is what it is and i can sort of explain it in bits and pieces to you if you want and if you don't see it you're crazy you know what one of the best parts was towards the end sean when you like took a few minutes and kind of explain what we just talked about a high level i thought that was like the easiest parts that digest the whole thing and more that should have been more of what the podcast was and unfortunately it wasn't and it wasn't for a lack of research as far as like the interview not being that great like we put you guys put a ton of of research into this i think sometimes just the guest personality doesn't make for the the best podcast and well i think people can listen to it it's an hour long i i i wanna say i appreciate him coming on michael is a big deal i i definitely appreciate him coming on i'm gonna i wanna i definitely wanna take back like you the whole i don't trust him entirely but there there's something sitting there's after that interview there's something sitting right where something inside and he's like something is going on here and i gotta figure out what it is maybe we can have them on another time now that we kinda like know him a little bit more but yeah i'm sure themselves you know i actually it it'll be kinda interesting because we're gonna leave this in by the way like the of whatever our discussion about it and i hope hope it kind of gets received as what is this is a instant hot take reaction to something that we're really excited about then it happened we're giving a quick reaction i think you know sam basically didn't see the the kind of the bitcoin bull case as black and white as maybe taylor put of all like let me just say that i when i my opinion of him is totally separate of bitcoin i would say i'm a i'm a i'm a huge novice i i'm not an expert but i felt that he was actually he he was a poor representation of it because there's something about it that i'm like i don't know i could trust this right because he's representing it you weren't buying what he was selling i don't i don't know how to put it but and nothing no attack on his character you just didn't walk away from listening to the guy for the hour and you didn't fully buy and like we do sometimes with certain guests where they start to explain what's going on in their field or their business and we walk away saying shit that guy knows what he's talking about and like i totally agree with the way the world is going and i wanna invest in that guy's company you know that's sometimes the way we feel he didn't persuade me if that was his goal i don't think it i don't think goal was not achieved can i give people the like i'm gonna can i try a three minute like billy the week segment on this guy real quick this is your podcast you do what you want yeah go it i mean i i are you i don't know if you're interested okay so let just do it here's here's okay michael sailor to me is you know more than the bill of the week he might be the bill of the month okay so here's some cool things about him that i i found doing some research for this so the guy's a badass ass he you know graduates first in his class in high school vale he's voted most likely to succeed he goes to mit on a like you know rot you know scholarship he goes to the air force he wants to be kind of like fighter pilot and you know eventually like you know he i think for whatever reason he did he wasn't gonna be able to be a fighter pilot i think some he didn't pass one of the physical or something like that and so he's like you know because they have a very strict requirement for that so anyway he decides at twenty he's he's he's working at dupont i don't know if you knew this part sam he's he works at dupont when he's like right out of college basically and he's doing simulations for dupont and dupont is trying to make a billion dollar decision should we invest in this or not and if anybody's been in a big company you know that when an executive trying to make a case for when the executive wants to do something it's sort of their pet project they don't really want the simulation to be this really objective case of pros and cons they're kinda just want some data to support what they already wanna do so they can go get a billion dollars of funding to go do the thing they want and so he builds the simulation and the simulation basically says don't do it and and anyways he he ends up just like leaving dupont like i know why the hell i'm at this company they just didn't even want the results of the simulation they just wanted me to say what needed to be said so that some executive could go pitch their case so i'm leaving this place and the executive is based on hey where's that kid who's doing that model i need that data and he's like he's like and they're like he left the company he quit and so the guy's like go hire them back give him what he wants and so they go to them him and they say hey we wanna hire you back and we'll give you more money he's like i don't really wanna work there so i don't want more money and then the executives like give him more we give him what is whatever you wants just give to him and he's like well i kinda wanna start my own company so why don't we do this you give me a quarter million dollars and i wanna hire some of my colleagues from dupont i wanna hire eight to ten people from there and i want you to be my first customer so i you to give me a you know a few million dollars worth of contracts to do work for you and i'm gonna start my company micro strategy which does the same stimulating thing for companies and you'll be my first customer so pretty bad ass negotiation he goes in instead of being an employee he basically gets dupont to seed fund his company and become a multimillion million dollar customer for him so from there he's twenty four years old that's micro strategy how it starts basically what they do is like what's called business intelligence or executive intelligence they they take all the data you have so like you're victoria's secret you have all this data purchasing and all your stores all across the country micro strategy goes in and says hey you're carrying the wrong sizes you you need bigger bras in chicago than in new york you're so if you rebalance your inventory you're gonna save all this money and there's data you you're sitting on this gold mine of data you just don't know how to analyze it we can give you intelligence from this data he does that for rick mcdonald's and for victoria's secret all these different companies by thirty four he's a billionaire the company's public it's worth eleven billion dollars he owns the majority of the company he owns over fifty percent and he's doing this thing now over time two thousand and three to this four stock price crashes from three hundred thirty three dollars a share to forty two cents a share or something like that and you he goes to that whole transition he's been the ceo of micro strategy for like thirty years like literally i was born in nineteen eighty eight sands born in nineteen eighty nine he's been the ceo of micro since nineteen eighty nine you know like that's pretty pretty wild and more recently like you know micro strategy has just been flat for like a decade stock price not really going anywhere business is profitable he's got five hundred million dollars of cash in the bank but the stock price is not growing and he's like five hundred million dollars i think personally he said no i think in this case it was the corporate treasury who had about five hundred six hundred million dollars he owns the majority of the company i he owns currently i i think i think in the podcast he was like i have whatever he he's basically he was incredibly wealthy and the company was great he's incredibly wealthy and the company's credit be wealthy if he basically comes to this realization during the covid crash and he's talked about this on other podcast podcasts which is he comes this realization that wait a minute if the money supply you know we hear about government stimulus we hear government printing two trillion dollars six trillion dollars thirteen trillion dollars total the money supply is increasing which means if you had five hundred million dollars in the bank if you go back and look it'll still say five hundred million dollars but it won't be able to buy you as much as it did before because there's all this trillions of new dollars in the in the in the in the in the money supply and similarly like people have been wondering during covid wait a minute all the businesses are shut down and people are locked in their homes why are all the stock prices at like all time highs what's this disconnect between main street and wall street and what he's pointing out i think rightfully so is that when you have all this money printing assets inflate basically assets like companies inflate so that's why the stock prices are going up it's not that you know zoom or you know a zoom is a bad example it's not that apple is making all all this much more money than they were three months ago it's that apple stock is more of a hard asset to own versus own just keeping cash and dollars which is getting printed and diluted essentially by the government right so long story short micro strategy goes out and they they basically do this aggressive aggressive aggressive strategy to buy a quarter billion dollars of bitcoin they're kind of the first public company to go do such a bold bet and then he keeps buying bitcoin more and more and more he's basically bought two billion dollars of bitcoin so first he took all the money they have majority of the money they have and they bought bitcoin with it and and he first announced it and he told his shareholders look we're gonna buy a bunch of bitcoin with our cash if you don't wanna hold our shares we'll buy your shares back from you if you don't like that strategy so they bought sixty seventy million dollars back they use the rest of the cash to buy bitcoin then he starts issuing debt he goes and he raises five hundred million dollars he goes raises a billion dollars of debt from the public markets takes all that money buys bitcoin with it and so since then he's basically put in two billion dollars he's gained three billion dollars and he has a total stake of bitcoin of five billion dollars which i think makes him makes micro strategy you know a top five owner of bitcoin in the world you know just behind satoshi and maybe a couple others and since then you know famously elon tweeted out something about bitcoin michael sailor responded saying hey from one rocket scientist to another let me show you how we let me explain to you why we did it and you should too and a few months later tesla goes and buy one point five billion dollars of victory so he's kind of was ahead of the curve on this stuff in addition to that some other cool things early on in the doc he sort of identified early on that the internet was gonna be a big deal and bought a bunch of domain so we spent about two million dollars bind domains like alarm dot com wisdom dot com strategy dot com michael dot com mike dot com angel dot com courage you a hope and he owns all these premium domains one word english word domains and he has since you know sold or created businesses under those domains for you know over a hundred billion dollars so he turned to you or two million billion one or two million dollars sorry one or two million dollar domain purchases into over a hundred million dollars of value he also has this thing called sailor dot org which is just like a free education it's just a free university and he said you know it since nineteen ninety nine they've had over half a million students in it so it has done a bunch of cool shit and i think he's like a pirate of the best kind like super smart super smart business guy has just been in the game for so long and is doing pretty radical things so that's why you know i think this guy's a baller unfortunately i didn't feel that all that came through on the podcast but know i'm a afraid well i i i think michael and his team will reach out and say thank you sean because i think that you did an awesome job of you did a better job of showing showing off him than him which is cool and you i think i think you're just you're just better at storytelling so maybe the maybe maybe people will have a the same opinion efforts interview the the part that i kinda was like i don't know how i feel about this it happens like probably fifteen minutes left in the episode maybe a bra you or someone will market and you guys will be able to hear for yourselves but i think sean you're just really good at this and i guess we'll see the this episode is gonna be weird it's i wonder what the people are gonna say i guess we'll find out yeah same alright cool yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back