so i think the theme of this episode is rich guys crazy or genius we've got the bitcoin guy who's doing the treasure hunt and he's either crazy or he's a genius right he crazy or is he awesome ralph lauren crazier or genius looks like you came down on the side of genius i have another one for you i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel ever have you heard about this guy who's doing the two million dollar treasure hunt no i have no idea what you're talking about okay well can i interest you in a treasure hunt story yeah in two million dollars that sounds good to me there's this guy named john collins black and there's not a lot of info about this guy but he has basically hidden somewhere between two and three million dollars across america right now and different treasure chest so he's got five treasure chest out there each with a bunch of treasure inside and this specifically it's not just like cash it's things that are valuable so he spent the last five years buying valuable kind of artifacts and one of them has you know rare pokemon cards a two thousand and two holographic charizard card he's got one with george washington's jelly class that he bought out of an auction there's things from ant for old ship racks and in total the stuff is worth two to three million dollars he split it between five treasure chest and he's hidden it in physical locations across america and then he released a book that was that's called there's a it's called there's a treasure or something like that i barely call there's a treasure treasure inside yeah and it's basically just clues to find his treasure and so there's maps and clues and you can buy this book right now and go find this treasure wait hold on it's a this is it's steven fu it's on amazon it's a book on amazon called there's a treasure inside and the book is thirty five dollars so he's gonna recoup a little bit of it a little bit it a little bit of it but they're probably not as much so he's got like you know hidden a colombian green emerald and all all kinds of stuff inside and i find this kind of fascinating so this guy story is interesting was like a musician in la and that didn't really work out and then he was like okay he started creating websites for helping people find jobs and that started going good he used that to buy bitcoin earlier early ish on a i guess the story is he's a bitcoin multimillion millionaire who was also fascinated by adventure and so there's this thing called the fe treasure have you ever heard of this okay yeah fe treasure it's a cash of gold jewels that forrest fan an art dealer hid in the rocky mountains yes i actually do think i've heard of this i believe zach crockett zachary crockett he used to work for me at the hustle wrote a big article where he spent a week trying to find this treasure how did he do i don't think anyone anyone's has found it so so five people died trying to find this treasure because he it was like is it up in the mountains whatever so they're climbing so five confirmed deaths chasing the treasure then he announces somebody found it i think this is in twenty twenty ish twenty twenty two he says that somebody found it and then he dies months later it was revealed that former journalist and medical student jack s found it and then he auction it off for what for a total of one point three million dollars of what he found and so this guy john or whatever colin black was searching for that in twenty twenty and so he was like during covid he had he had searched for the treasure he thought this was really cool and when he when we were all in lockdown he decided i'm gonna do one of two things you there was like gonna create a children's book publisher or create a treasure hunt he did both so he created this he started accumulating assets for this treasure hunt i have a friend named chip for chip four is a crazy person i've been friends for ten years his brother is a aj four who started i cracked if you remember i cracked yeah and chip will go out he's friends with these guys who raise funding to go find ship x that they think have i guess some of them are valuable just because they're ship rec but some of them are valuable because they were like ships that had gold or other like valuable stuff in the in the ship and they raise money to go out and find these ship rec and he tells me all about it and it's like the type of story where the people who are into this it's the only drug that fills that need do you what i mean like it's it's like a it it is an into thing to find this like romantic there's a romantic idea about a treasure hunt right yeah like it's awesome and so like i understand why it's not my obsession but i understand why it is other people's obsession the other thing i think is interesting is choosing to release a book for this i feel like there's a missed opportunity feel like he should have done something with tiktok or social media where i feel like there was a more viral way to release the clues or to let people unlock the clues or search for this thing together like a weekly or a monthly announcement yeah you know i don't if you've seen there's these things that go really really viral on tiktok it'll be like some woman say telling this thirty nine part story of how her husband cheated on her and these things just a mess it's like a true crime they a amassed like tens of millions of followers that are yeah trying to just follow that they worry for the next piece of the story to drop and i do think that there was probably a way to do this that somebody could do which would be to let do a bit of a treasure hunt but use use social media use tiktok as a way to uncover the clues as they go and then people go in the real world using those clues rather than a book steve bartlett who's the podcast host of what's called diary of ceo before that he had a like a ad agency or whatever before that he worked for me makes aspect back when he was maybe nineteen and twenty years old twenty one years old something like that he was just like a young guy that we had was like a growth marketer and his job has come up with great growth at one of the things that he did at the time that i remember was he grew his twitter and instagram accounts like crazy by doing a very simple thing he was doing these like cash drops where he'd put just two hundred bucks in an envelope and he would say at a college town i think it was he'd be like we've dropped it here he would post a video of him hiding it and then they would be videos of people going and trying to search for it and they'd be basically they would tweet where they hit it in some way and then they would tweet people going and finding it that i don't remember if it was him that did this or somebody else that was doing this i'm gonna start doing that active strategy that's a great idea deal it was a great idea and it was like two hundred bucks it wasn't even that much money that they were doing and they were doing these mystery cash drops as a way to just generate hype but the genius of it was the content that they created kinda before the drop and then after the drop of people searching it made it feel like a big deal and then they would do the next one and the next one i think it was just an account called like mystery cash drop that was doing this that was working was getting really big i they this was i like ten years ago i'm trying to remember the guy who ran that account messaged me he listens to the pod like it's you never heard of this guy mystery cash up he messaged this before we even started of the podcast in a long time no but he still does it like yeah it was at hidden cash i think that was cash one did these guys what of these guys just messaged us you don't remember this and you what for some reason it came into our world where i forget what happened someone tagged us on his twitter and was like i love those guys and then dm me and just said hey something like that so but maybe i got this wrong maybe steve wasn't the doing it maybe steve showed me this and we were gonna like copy this strategy i'm i don't remember the link steve definitely put me on us because it was happening both in the in san francisco and also in the uk the account now is suspended for hidden cash which i remember happened back then they got suspended i'm not a hundred percent sure but why but let me just read this article this was back in twenty fourteen so this is literally ten years ago it says an anonymous ben has been leaving cash hidden not crossed san francisco inviting strangers to find it via a series of clues they left money under chairs in public parks and stair ways or in public bathrooms and they basically post a picture of them holding the cash and then like a zoomed in thing of where they put it like it's like under a toilet but you don't know which toilet and then they they their quote was i've made millions of dollars last few years more than i could ever imagine and yet many friends of mine cannot afford to buy a home in the bay area this has caused me quite a bit of reflection and i'm determined to give away some of the money i make to charity and and to do fun creative things like this and that he or she will leave it once or twice a week did somebody should just do this again this is it would work today i think this is awesome i think i'm gonna start doing this the the other day the other like a hobby it's like running we just were jogging we're talking about like i think else i think i'll pick up this hobby it's like i i'm wanna play real life really won like i just wanna like start could i wanna like start controlling people's lives one hundred dollars at a time and just see like if i can like make all the monkeys dance that's kind of like what this it's like you're just like wanna be a puppet tier a hundred dollars at a time a little bit but it is like kinda of fun i think one of the problems is like you get that initial hit of like excitement and attention and everyone loves it and then it's gonna fade away this and then you're gonna keep hiding in the cash but you're not gonna get that same hit so you're have to it's like an addict you have to do more in order to get so then you're like you know it'd be a shame if somebody got hurt finding it but that would make for a whole another new cycle around this and then you sort of x you just keep escalating the prizes and then things weird after a while it's like hey willy won why do you have a chocolate river and invite children all the time like this is just dangerous do you know like what's up point to be hey could you get can we go and touch dinner and you not like high two dollars before we're walk into the restaurant the funny thing is we're so old that like everybody who's listening to this that's like under the age of twenty five like yeah you know this is how every youtuber you know tries to get famous this is doing this exact same thing yeah they're like i like what are gonna do go give like a homeless almost guy a hundred dollars and film yourself like giving him my haircut like that exactly stick exactly i think maybe the takeaway is you know what's old is new for some of these things like the what the hidden catches guy was doing it's not really all that different than what mister beast does and has done to great effect alright can i tell a story about a different way to look at adventure about someone who's like obsessed over a little bit and i think you know this person you know of them and i think out i'll i'll tell you a few facts that kinda like shock you but also i think you're gonna be into this person more than before so the story is about a guy named ralph lip shit he was a jewish kid from new york city grew up i believe in the thirties and the story is basically that he wanted to be an actor he grew up poor but he loved like seeing all these movie stars on tv and he was like you know i love that you can dress up and pretend to be a another person and if you pretend hard enough people kinda start treating you seriously and start treating you like that person and i love that i love that and i also love the idea that you can write a story and make it a movie and i can live my life through that lens that that the lens of that movie and it gives me hope so he was like intoxicated by this but he sucks it acting and so he's like i can't go i can't become an actor however what i can do is i can shape these movies and direct these movies not with a camera but with clothing and so we get super into clothing what kind of leave of faith is that i can shape these movies not the writing or interacting but through clothing yeah so pretty ridiculous state statement no it's not i'll give you an example so he was like he's got this quote where he was like i love how like these actors like i like you could dress up as like a military person and you kinda of feel a little bit tougher sometimes or i could dress up like a farmer and like i actually wanna go outside and like get dirty a little bit i could dress up like a cowboy and i wanna go and like do cowboy shit like if you dress up with a suit people kinda take you seriously and i think that's cool that you can like pretend but it kinda like what's the difference between pretending and reality if you do it long enough like it kinda becomes like the same thing and so he was like i can't really act but like i can dress up like these characters and i kinda a little bit start actually feeling like these characters and eventually ralph lips shit he got made fun of a a lot because his name even like the jewish kids were like dude your name has the word shit it like that's like like do and so he changed his name to ralph lauren and so he starts that is ralph lauren the the cl company he starts selling clothes for brooks brothers like in their store and then eventually at the age of twenty eight he starts his own business and he's like my first thing that i'm gonna sell is ties he likes ties and he goes and he pitches something like blue nails and he's like hey can you guys sell my ties and and the guy's like these are great ties i would love to sell them but it has this name ralph lauren on the back of the tie like no one wants that shit dude like no one knows who you are i don't give a shit about ralph lauren you gotta take that off there and he had its kind of a sylvester stall loan moment where he was like look i'm a nobody but i'd need my name to be on these ties like this is just a a deal breaker and bloom dale was like alright well no we're not gonna do this deal and so eventually he keeps on hustling and he gets his ties into like macy's or something like that in the first year of business he does like half a million dollars in revenue which is a home run he did this in then sixties that's the equipment of like three and a half million dollars today home run after a year three or four he starts coming up with different ideas and he comes up with this idea of polo so the polo brand the college shirt that used to everywhere and he par by the way what's what's the backstory of that what was his info do you know for the polo shirt was basically i said he grew up as this poor jewish kid in new york but what he loved was this idea of like class and old money this idea of like wasp even though he's not a wasp he like love the idea of like sophistication and to to him the sport of apollo that like screamed like both utility because it's the sport but also like sophistication because it's like supposed to be like a rich people who play it and the collar that polo players wear they would always wear a collar and in particular they would button down the collar so an oxford button down cloth shirt that's comes from the the sport of polo and so do like certain style boots certain style pants and so there was a little bit where it was like already considered like a fashionable sport and so says like i'm gonna name my brand polo and so he builds polo and this shit over like the course of a handful of years it takes off so now ralph lauren he's worth something like ten billion dollars he still owns i think eighty percent of the company and he's a great businessman but that's not what i actually am impressed by him what i'm impressed by him is two things the first he has this idea of like you are the director of your own life and your life is basically a movie and he has this idea where he was like i would wear clothes that would i almost i think tony robbins said this or you told me that tony robbins said this where he was like if i wanna act tough or confident i make my body tougher or confident so what do you call that thing where you like like flex power posing where like flex your chest when you're not feeling comfortable and you put your body into like a confident position and your brain kinda follows your body she sorta of is saying the same thing but with clothing where he was like you know if i wanted to feel a little bit more sophisticated than i actually felt at the moment i would dress a certain way and like my brain would follow and i find that to be like a really cool idea and the second thing that he did that was really interesting is i don't know if you remember this because we were kids but do you remember ralph lauren advertisements do you do you remember any of those like the photos and magazines no what was it what was interesting is that what he would do is he would he had he used a lot of the same models and the models oftentimes we're not professional models but what he would do is if he wanted to like he would set the stage so basically he would act like he's filming an entire movie and so they would rent a home in the hampton let's say it's like the ad is for some type of summer summer wear for the beach he would rent a hampton house and he would be like well if i'm a like a wealthy family in the hampton who has this like beautiful home like how what would you guys be doing right now like maybe you'd be playing football maybe you you'd all be sitting on in the parents bed in the morning as if like the kids just like woke you up but he would create these like elaborate sets where he would like make you live like your in a movie on set and so he's like we're gonna all like pretend that this is like real and they would do this whole elaborate thing just for a handful of photos but if you look at a lot of the ads they're really like in endeavors and it maybe me start thinking a lot about like what startups and what you and i do we sometimes are just reactive to like to like whatever like customers are saying not more so like how do we set the stage for what what do we want the world to be and i think amazon used to do this small thing where they're like before we launch any product i want you to write the press release like tell me what do you want a customer to feel about this or how do you want this to be described what it's all said and done right and because the internet has such a low barrier entry and it's really easy to adapt and change things rarely do we sort of think ahead and like this is like my vision for the world and at least everyone in my small world how i want them to feel how i want my customers to think how i want them to appreciate us i do think there's something cool though i'm looking up vintage ralph lauren ads and i see what you're saying which is like a really heck heavy lean into like yeah like true lifestyle shoots rather than studio or sort of framed you know just like let's go here let's get the single shot you in front of the water boom yeah this is churn and burnt it's like well this is somebody's house in the hampton wearing these clothes doing what they do with all of the little you know family photos in the background and whatnot like it's it looks a lot more authentic and this is one of those things that interesting because as a business person it never pencils out on a spreadsheet to do this right like up up upfront there's no way to sit here and justify this but then there's things in your gut and there's the the the people who do who actually do make the bet and do pull it off and then in retrospect it sounds obvious you know i'll give you an example there is a brand e ecommerce brand and they were talking about influencers it was like well what's the what's they're talking about influencer company they're gonna spend a million dollars on an influencer campaign with these instagram moms i said what's the return on ad spend of that you put a billion dollars in how much you're gonna get back directly and they're like might be you know fifty percent meaning we might put a dollar room i get fifty cents that's not the way to do it well what's your face once your facebook ads return on ad spent and and they're like it's like you know a dollar forty but a dollar and get a dollar forty out why are you spending a million dollars on these influencers and are you are you able to measure the halo effect i'm like using all this jargon and he goes hey does your wife like does she follow like any of these people and i show my wife and he's just like yeah all of these people he goes ask them like a quote couple of questions about these people like hey do you know like how many kids do they have what's their names what products do they use what's the last product you bought that you heard them mention and like my wife could just rat these from memory if my always memory is like i could you know we watch all of game of thrones ed if i asked her today what's a lannister she'd have no idea she thinks it's a part of a staircase and so i'm like she's knows exactly what's going on with these influencers and he goes that's why we're spending a million dollars with influencers and i was like yeah you know there's these things that if the result is not easy to measure but it is true right it's gotta be both it's gotta be actually actually work and not be easy to measure those things are usually pretty mis priced meaning not not as many people are willing to do them because most of us want the safety and comfort of things that are proven measurable and i could spreadsheet my way to conviction well it's basically all rooted in can i justify this if i'm about to get fired yeah there or just about even my own self doubt right even at like my companies because i'm not always thinking i'm gonna get fired who's gonna fire me i own the company but i don't wanna be an idiot and i don't wanna lose it i don't wanna fail and i don't wanna lose money and it takes courage to make bets and courage is easier when you can when you when the logic when you can logic your way there when you can spreadsheet your way there do you do any of these courageous bets that are non spreadsheet because i think you i i think part of the reason you idol these is that you didn't typically do that i didn't typically do that and i and i still struggle with it but i have to like when i watch some of these things like we talked about martha stewart it recently and we're talking about ralph lauren like when you talk like and when you talk about some of these like culture changing brands or companies or people are us internet or start be people there's like we think we are above the full where we're like logical and we are like well it's easy you put this one much money in you get this much money out like why would anyone do anything otherwise but then there's one step above that which is it's the right thing because it's the right thing like right you know i wanna be like it's like it's like you know i can't measure this thing but like i know it's awesome right do it because it's awesome yeah and so there's like we try to ask like we are some like sa internet nerds where it's like the math says x y and z but there's always there's one above that which is yeah but it's it just makes sense and so and peter t who's like the sa cervantes of sa has said like there's this fifth tent pole of this equation which is called brand and he goes i don't understand brand though but like i don't exist but i don't understand it and that's what we're talking about here which is like it just feels right yeah yeah exactly so so long as story short i don't do this but i i respect it and i know that since this and i want to do more of it are you doing any of it with hampton i guess there one you can think of that you do yeah like we have we own this podcast called money wise and like it like the only way that we think that it trends in roi if someone joins and they said they heard about it through us but that's that's like the low end of the tote pole of like is it easily track right but then no no like i don't do enough but i i do need to do certain things like this the the the problem with this is you get caught in the day day and you also get caught in the bills and there's also a lot of stories of ralph lauren where like him has lost the company many many many times where he like just didn't pay attention and in one hand you need a visionary who does pay attention to the profit because sometimes the shit that makes the most profit doesn't makes sense right off the bat right so i think the theme of this episode is rich guys crazy or genius we've got the bitcoin guy who's doing the treasure hunt and he's either crazier or he's a genius right is he crazy or is he awesome ralph lauren crazier or genius looks like he came down on the side of genius i have another one for you alright and it's michael sailor have you seen what michael sailor is currently doing with the market and and bitcoin in his stock i don't understand it exactly but i understand that he's always up to something like like i i always i know that he's like the berry bonds of business where we're like there's always an asterisk next to everything he does yeah it's a good explanation okay so can i explain what's going on micro strategy is a software company they sell software that you know that's the time they're selling software products and the software business might make like seventy five million a year of profit it was like a small cap stock it had been doing great for like ever like it was a great like he'd been rich for a long time right yeah the the business had been he i think he's the longest tenured ceo of a public company i mean he's been the ceo of this company for like twenty four plus years or something like that and but the stock had been flat if you look go if you just zoom him out on the chart it looks like a very flat line and when he came on the podcast it was because at the time he was doing something very interesting he had taken his company's cash reserves like their treasury which normally you either keep a cash maybe treasury bills or you used it to buy back the stock and instead he used it to buy bitcoin so basically micro strategy was a software company the software company had hundreds of millions of dollars in their bank account which they're supposed to just hold in case they need it and his plan was i'm gonna invest that money in bitcoin yeah we're gonna switch our treasury strategy to being bitcoin so september fourteenth twenty twenty bitcoin priced at ten thousand dollars a coin and he buys a hundred and seventy five million dollars worth of it and then a month later or so he buys another two hundred fifty million dollars of it which looking back at it that sounds great yeah at ten thousand dollars eleven thousand dollars of coin and he has since been buying more and more bitcoin he now holds thirty seven billion dollars of bitcoin micro micro strategy does he himself also i think personally owns like hundreds of billions it's not a billion dollars bitcoin wow they are up fifteen billion dollars under their bitcoin position in four years so he's generated for fifteen billion dollars of value doing this strategy so starts out by saying i'm gonna convert my you know step one convert our company's idle cash into bitcoin okay did that but now the company doesn't generate the and the idea was every year when we generate more free cash flow we're gonna do the same we're gonna you so we make seventy five million bucks we're gonna buy more but over time he starts doing more aggressive bets so what he starts doing is he starts issuing these convertible bonds now so he goes to marketing he says hey our here's a corporate bond you could buy the bond we're gonna take the proceeds from the bond sale and we're gonna go buy bitcoin and he does that over and over and over again and on top of that if you look at micro strategy stock today so when he was last on the podcast oh well let's just actually say this in march of twenty the stock was ten dollars in march of twenty one the stock was seventy eight dollars and today it's four hundred and ten dollars correct and it is so it's up in the last five years by two thousand six hundred percent okay so it's shot up it's if you compare it to even nvidia stock this year it's outperformed nvidia which is pretty insane and so what is going on here this you know his company is now worth eighty billion dollars as of you know as of today and how much revenue and profit does the actual business that actual software business is declining ten percent a year and is something like a couple hundred million in revenue and under a hundred million of net income so it is rounding her it is not it is no longer relevant to the stock price and does he have employees who like work there yeah they still have employees that just keep running that software business but the stated strategy is her job is to acquire bitcoin in the most effective ways possible and hold forever that's what he wants to that's a that's a that's a like an inspiring talk every friday at your all hands right like that's a that's a bitcoin prices is up great job everybody we did no job and you know to his credit he's been buying throughout all the dips so like you know bitcoin price went up to sixty thousand then it goes down to sixteen thousand and even during that process you know bitcoin in december twenty two twenty two bitcoin price is seventeen thousand he buys another fifty million he buys another fourteen million he buys another hundred fifty million he just continued to buy throughout the whole process and bitcoin at an all time high and as of today he just bought another five point four billion dollars of bitcoin at the you know from all time high price how did he have the money to do that again he's raising money in these bonds and so there's okay so what's interesting about this here's what i wanna talk about is genius or crazy i guess like i hesitate to even bring this up because a this is outside of my zone of competence meaning like i don't know corporate bond strategies said don't know why i don't know how options traders look at this i don't know what the bond market is like that is not something that i've spent twenty years in my career and i i'm a startup up guy okay so on one hand un qualified to talk about this on the other hand i've been a crypto holder and believers as far before meg michael sailor and have seen throughout each cycle how new players come in with new strategies and build you know massive profiles and success on the ups wing and i've seen things go very very badly you know last cycle there was sand bank fried with f t there was do there was three arrows capital there were several people that for a moment in time looked like absolute geniuses they were hailed by everybody they were on the cover of magazines you know sequoia is investing in in and everything looks incredible and then it all comes crashing down either due to bad acting or bad risk management i don't know anything about crypto and i can give you an example of a red flag that was on air on our podcast so i don't remember exactly i think it was thirty or forty five minutes in i asked him a question i go so michael you're buying all this bitcoin with your company's money cool what are the downsides because like it appears as though like one of the downsides could potentially be you're losing focus on your main money making software but and and i think you think that's worth it but what are some other downsides and his answer was there are no downsides and i was like well i mean like every decision has a downside like the downside of being healthy is that you have to go to bed early when you wanna go and hang out your friends like but it's worth it like there there are downsides and he kept insisting there are no downsides and in my head i thought if you can't be honest to me about this like pretty straightforward thing or is there anything else that you're being dishonest about yeah so there are no downside said every charlotte than ever right that that is a it is can be a red flag that doesn't mean it's damning no let me give you not mean but it's a red flag look let me give you the generous interpretation of this so i actually agree with michael sailor in one weird way when he said there's no downsides which is that for him personally there were really no downsides at the time at that time that if you go back and you listen carefully to michael sal interviews most of the interviews he just talks about how he had the epiphany and he realized that bitcoin is the way and he started doing it the true story is that there's one like precursor to that epiphany which was that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place he had this software business that was successful it was profitable and i think at the time it was even you know it had shown growth or had been showing growth over the last ten years and he was getting zero credit in the stock market for it and he's like what am i supposed to do like we're a a successful company we've been operating successfully for you know fifteen plus years and the market is basically saying give us back the cash we don't we will not value you for any of the cash you have on hand you should just give it back to us we're gonna give you no stock credit for how you might invest it how you might use that cash how you might grow your business we're gonna give you zero credit for and so he had this problem which was no matter what he did with this company at the time he couldn't get the stock price to go up he couldn't increase shareholder value and so he had in some ways nothing to lose because he was stuck and he had been stuck in this plateau for so long and the market he he says in some like the market was giving me a very clear message we don't believe that you can invest this cash in any way that's gonna grow your business well then he's like well through that well why don't just do something else with it if i can't grow micro strategy with it maybe i can grow it through investment and he went and looked at real estate and he looked at gold he looked at all the different ways that he could do it and basically at that point d introduced that bitcoin was his best bet to invest the money to actually grow the stock and was he like a crypto guy so two thousand twenty for a lot of the hardcore was late in the game for crypto was he like he was he was skeptical he he did not believe bitcoin and somebody had told him about it he didn't believe he wasn't one of these like early halftime he went watched a bunch of pumps interviews and he started reading about and he started learning about it the other thing that was true was that he looked at the amount of inflation and he realized that the kinda stated goal of two or three percent inflation was misleading that it didn't count a bunch of other things it also didn't take into account the fact that if you were an invest just put the money in into sp five hundred it was growing at you know ten fifteen percent a year and he was like look if i can't beat that there's really no reason to invest in my company if i don't have the ability to beat that rate and so dude what he wanted to do was yeah you know like the most bitcoin maximal they just at the end of the day they look at fiat currency and they believe that here you have a a weak currency and if you could ever if you could borrow a weak currency at zero percent interest rate and use it to buy a hard currency like bitcoin that's a good train so that's the the two things that he wanted to do was he wanted to get out of fiat because he didn't like the direction that the fiat was going with inflation and a and secondly he knew his stock with stock okay so that was that part back then but at that time he wasn't doing this thing where he's borrowing billions of dollars to buy bitcoin and so let me just like kinda walk you through the model of what he's doing now okay so basically micro strategy issues debt they use that that convertible bond corporate bond and so that like today they just did a five billion dollar or whatever corporate bond off who they raise it from bond buyers the bond market so there's trillions of dollars that get invested in bonds and one of the things you know he might say why does why do why do people buying a micro strategy bond is it because of the underlying business and it it's just buying bitcoin themselves or just buy bitcoin themselves so the the re the arbitrage is that he realized there's you know a trillion dollar plus market of people who of people who buy bonds that because of their structure they're not allowed to buy security so they can't buy stocks they can't buy real estate they can't buy bitcoin directly they can't buy the bitcoin etf so the bond market cannot access bitcoin unless they access it through a bond got it that's the mandate of those funds is that they can only buy bonds that's why people gave them the money was you're gonna buy bonds it's a zero percent interest rate but it could you can convert the bond into micro strategy stock at a certain price at that three hundred four hundred five hundred six hundred dollars a share higher than the current price of the thing so it's like a long term call option on micro strategy okay so if you were in the bond market and you wanted access to bitcoin but your by laws and your mandate does not allow you to buy bitcoin directly then that's crazy loophole that's a crazy loophole supply demand so he's the only supply on the market to absorb this this demand that's there to to get access to bitcoin type of yield by by issuing these these things okay so that's the first part so then he buys bitcoin and he goes and he tells the whole market i'm i'm a forever buyer of bitcoin i will increasingly be buying billions and billions of dollars at bitcoin i'm doing it at the market price and i will continue to doing that that instill a bunch of confidence in the bitcoin market because bitcoin says wow there's this whale who says i don't give a damn i'm doing this i'm pocket and i'm gonna keep doing this and so he takes supply off the market he signals to the market that i'm a forever holder and he says i'm gonna keep buying bigger and bigger amounts as we go so the bitcoin price goes up so now bitcoin price goes up which then causes his stock to go up because his stock is based on the fact that they have thirty billion dollars of bitcoin sitting there and the stock goes up and then he sells more equity at a premium and he buys even or bitcoin now he's selling shit equity shares to buy bitcoin it rinse repeat is he selling any of his equity in the company i don't know i'm not sure and is he liable for any of these convertible bonds or these bonds it's not like a personal care no it's a corporate pun if this goes south and this collapses then his you know net worth which is highly based on his holdings of micro strategy are gonna go down right and his reputation and everything else and what's his net worth now how much of the micro strategy does he own he owns nine point nine percent of micro strategy so as of today just off micro strategy he's worth eight billion dollars okay in two thousand twenty the company was worth one point four billion so he was worth a me hundred and forty million dollars so he's grown from a hundred and forty million dollar net worth assuming that is his only money which is probably is a all the way up to close to ten billion so it's it definitely had asymmetric upside versus downside for him right like hitch his wagon to the bitcoin rockets ship represented a way for him to like you know go explode up in a good way in a way that he was never gonna be able to do with just micro strategy the declining software business at the same time you know they're obviously is reputation risk and there's capital risk now okay so how is it going they've basically they acquired almost four hundred thousand bitcoin they've outperformed every company in the p five hundred and last week alone it saw a hundred and thirty six billion dollars of trading volume to put that in perspective even games during the games games stop never saw this so he's basically created he's intentionally turned him turn micro strategy into a meme stock meaning he's detached it from the underlying business in the way that games stopped did and and created at a product that the option traders want that the bond traders want that the bitcoin maximal want that the bitcoin skeptics hate and wanna go short now what what could go wrong let's go let's go to there and by the way let's also say the craziness of not only doing this but then spending the last four years just on tour being a bitcoin evangelist is also like a really extreme step to take right like there were no half measures in what he did this is a you know sort of elon musk style all in reputation all in financially all in and he has that personality he's got the types of i've i don't know him other than the sixty minutes we spent virtually with him but it seemed like he had the personality where he's super high iq super low like emotional normal or human emotions where he's like right but it makes sense the bat says this therefore i do that even if that is a ridiculous thing to most people's standards high iq high t count yeah like yeah like he he pony up okay so now what's the you know at the same time maybe i'm just like a a ptsd deed from past crypto cycles but like i mentioned every crypto cycle this happens somebody gets uber aggressive they're seen as a genius they over extend or the commit malpractice and they come crashing down when the cycle you know inevitably these things are all cyclical when it goes down last cycle it was t it was do it was three hours capital these were multi billion dollar vehicles that were created very quickly they they burned bright and then they fizz out due to one of those two reasons so i'm on the lookout right now bitcoin at an all time high instead of just i'm just keeping an eye out you know fool once shame on you fool me twice shame on me type of thing so i'm just keeping an eye what might what might it be the cycle on the other side he's has made a couple of genius calls so back in i wanna say when was it does the seven ish time frame there's a bunch of interviews that michael sailor talking about apple maybe two thousand twelve and he basically talking about he's on a thing and he's like apple's gonna go to two thousand dollars a share and he's like yeah you don't understand what's happening apple is in and he the same way that he's talking about bitcoin how bitcoin is this you know the greatest invention ever how it's gonna be millions of dollars of coin he was talking about apple the same way he's like you have a supercomputer in your pocket do you understand what this means you you know that four billion people are gonna be carrying this thing around and that apple's gonna be making ex and all the numbers just sounded insane to people at the time and when he was talking about it and it's all come true like his his entire bet on apple he's like he's like i don't know why you would own any stock besides apple and like if you listen to a seller at that time so he's always been he's always had this like you all are stupid this is obvious and he's right sometimes yeah i mean i don't know these are over overs but yeah like i guess the guy's fascinating he is a fast guy i think he's described in well he's extremely high iq he's extremely high and when he gets conviction on something he sounds insane and so okay we're you know i think the the main thing is where does this go wrong so i think the main place goes wrong obviously if it bitcoin priced starts to crash the problem will be if for whatever reason micro strategy stock which today trades at like a two and a half times multiple of nav you know what nav is the net asset values like the the underlying asset that it holds right it owns thirty three billion dollars big bitcoin so the question is why is it a eighty three billion dollar company which is what you think it should be it should if you owe like a thirty five billion dollar company it should be it should be whatever the asset is plus like the multiple profit for software it's a bitcoin holding an acquisition company and so maybe you say okay here's its holdings great and then on top of that maybe there's some premium for the fact that it's able to acquire them on leverage it could do things that bitcoin etf can't right bitcoin etf can issue a bond it it is different but the question is is two and a half the right multiple the other i the question is the down spiral looks like this the unwinding looks like this which is micro strategy for whatever reason either because bitcoin price goes down or the stock market just changes its tune on it starts to not trade at such a premium to the nav and now all this money that it's borrowed these bonds expire twenty twenty seven twenty twenty eight twenty twenty nine if those were to convert he would be forced into selling bitcoin and once he becomes a forced seller now the whole market the whole bitcoin market will start to crash because it'll will say oh my god micro strategy is gonna have to unwind its entire bitcoin position that's gonna be thirty five billion dollars or more of bitcoin hitting the market how much is bitcoin worth like how much what percentage of a player is he he owns about one percent of the bitcoin float today and he's trying to get you know two percent basically hey this guy's is intense yeah this guy's i i guess my short story is i don't know what's gonna happen i i guess my disclaimer is i do not know what's gonna happen more than that i'm a a novice when it comes to this however i've been in a few crypto cycles before and i've seen in every script every single crypto cycle when crypto goes up somebody starts being very aggressive acquiring buying big buying crypto using leverage like he's doing right now it hasn't ended well in previous cycles and right now everybody is calling this the infinite money glitch you go on youtube you search micro strategy infinite money glitch he's a god he's the best and it always makes you wonder what is the scenario where this unravel and do i believe that that could come true here there is no strategy that is risk free there is no free lunch and i think that right now the entire narrative is about how this is a free lunch how this is a free money glitch and i don't believe that i don't know enough to know the specifics about this but am my spidey sense is tingling who's the the most conservative bitcoin per so could conservative it being like they're rational and make could explain the pros and the cons without being overly emotional who who's that bitcoin world so it's a good question who do i trust the most to have a rational opinion about bitcoin that is a great question yeah who could so there's there's this a guy like andreas who i believe is that but he's a technologist so you don't you you listen to him about how bitcoin as a technology has has great potential so you know you read his book which is called the internet of money and he's extremely rational and he's a good faith actor who's who's the person that's like you know if we all buy into this and if it works you know the upside is this but if we don't the downside is this and this is and like who just says like like here's all i think a lot of people say that i think a lot of people understand this figured a lot of people say like look bitcoin has these properties it could become x it could become the next gold actually most people fall into the bucket of they don't price that as a hundred percent certainty right they say right it's possible and there's a potential for that that's why i own some of it but i don't put my entire net worth in it and it is also possible that it doesn't doesn't get adopted or that there's a technical flaw or that governments beat it down in these ways or that it becomes unpopular for these reasons and that's the risk in this right like able that feel that those vocal thought leader rational what do they say about michael sailor they don't take a position like right now even as i'm saying this i'm thinking myself you know i'm gonna go cut this in post because why take a position what's the upside the the upside is well there's some ups upside might right few years from now you're gonna look good by like predicting things and there's also the upside of like just doing what's right and telling everyone don't waste your fucking money on this thing yeah but i i guess it's you have to be a smart enough to understand it b you have to have the desire to like look right by putting your neck on the line with a prediction yeah the bitcoin immunity has doesn't seem like it typically has the like the the moral fiber no no i wasn't able to say that i was able to say they don't mind express it they don't they're they're very vocal they you know if someone thinks your full of they're very wish about their bags right that's i think that's goes back to your question of who could you trust to not speak just hopefully about their bag right they just they wanted it to be true so much that they convince themselves it's true and risk well what i'm trying to get at is who's the person who i can trust to find out what the opinion of michael sailor is i have searched long and hard because before this podcast i did research to say can and i literally tweeted this out so if you think i'm gonna idiot i also think i'm an idiot my tweet today was can someone with a better brain than me explain what sailor is doing hey no strategies without risk what are the risk what is the math if bitcoin drops to x dollars it becomes a problem and b why is the stock trading at such a premium to nav that post has you know maybe a hundred plus replies i read every single one of them i read other threads that people have put out about this if there was one great explanation i would just pointed you to it and i would read it out loud i have not found one myself that doesn't mean it doesn't exist i have not found one myself that i can read and i could say oh in simple terms i understand why he's doing this why it's working today what the risks are how we would unravel if it unravel i'm only recently at the age where i don't trust everyone like like like up until recently like my logic was constantly like well the institutions are buying into this therefore it must be safe or like you don't like whoever's raising the money for this guy like surely they know what they're talking about so now i'm i i've just two years ago got to the age where it's like you know they're flawed humans just like me and so i don't know who to trust with that with these deceptive of situations because i'm so uneducated on the topic but i have my spidey sense tingling i wouldn't i with my own money i wouldn't touch any of this yeah yeah we're not that's what i say right now i have i have no proof other than it just it doesn't feel good do you know what the i think i think the the supreme court or someone like that like define pornography at like they said like you know we don't see it it's hard to they're like it's hard to find but you know it when you see it you know what's difference between pornography and like nudity of the national geographic tv show you know it when you see it i know exactly know it what i see it this situation with him but i know that something doesn't feel right and i can't explain why okay so here here's my commitment i brought this up today half baked and i admit that i'm gonna go and try to find the smartest people i can to explain this to me until i am satisfied with the simple explanation of what's going on and then i'll share that if i leave this in i'm saying that as a bookmark to say let's hold opinions tell part two i might just take this whole part out because i'm uncomfortable with the a level of half informed speculation that was in the section i think it's interesting i think it's interesting but you know that like shockingly people look to you for like this like you are like i asked you that question of like who's rational that people look to there are many people who would say sean i am rational but you had two criteria who's rational and intelligent but a lot of people that i fall a little short on in terms of these things right and i think i think that you volt like vocal like like i'm still working through this problem i think that's actually quite valuable yeah i guess i'm just like only ten percent of the way working through it and i'm just thinking maybe i should gone to fifty percent before coming on the pod of talking about it but i will say this a lot of bit a lot of the people have done well with bitcoin and the people who understand bitcoin it is the mid wit team like they they look at bitcoin and they look at all the information and then they reduce it down into a very simple way of looking at things and the you know the simple way of looking at things which is either this is it's a better version of gold and so it'll be you know it's a it's a tech improvement on gold there's people who reduce it down and basically just say would i rather have would i rather have hard money or soft money meaning would i rather save wealth in a whatever i rather store wealth in a currency that can't inflate mathematically or a currency that will inflate and if you just whittle things down like that to level of simplicity you can be right without even knowing all the details and so i think one of the challenges with your question of who are the smart intelligent people is that the smartest most rational people i know about bitcoin a long time ago you know eight years ago told me a very simple thing bought it put it in cold cold storage and moved on with their life and they don't follow all the twists and turns and they don't try to hop on the next wave in the next trend and they don't do crazy options training or hundred x leverage they don't do any of those things and they made a simple opinion based on a very simple assessment and they proven to be right and not over complicated kidding it this has been the signal of who's actually intelligent about this versus somebody who's every day on the news has an opinion on every single thing is trying to outs outperform everybody those tend to not be the people that i actually you know trust their opinion on this stuff have you seen that show love on the spectrum yeah i have actually this show about autistic people dating right yeah and there's this one episode where these two a guys dating this girl and he was like do you like tacos and she goes yeah i like chicken and cheese and he was like i don't have anything else to say but i wanna let you know i'm having a good time and i wanna normalize that on in both dating and on this podcast which is and that's sort of how i feel right now which is i don't have anything else to say but i wanna let you know i really enjoy this topic i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back