Transcript of Michael Saylor: He Asked AI To Build Something That Never Existed. Here’s What Happened! | Michael Saylor New

I used AI to make $15 billion last year.

You did?

I did. Because the AI gave us a solution to the problem that no one had ever encountered before in the history of the world. And so my advice is don't try to outwork the robots. What you want to do is ask the AI to do something that's never been done before. And if you want to create these incredible success things, you want to locate the magic opportunity. I know this because I'm a technology entrepreneur and we're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. So what is my mission? I'm preaching gospel of digital empowerment, and Bitcoin is digital money, and it's going to be the best long-term capital asset. And you can actually own something, and someone more powerful than you can't take it away from you.

What do you mean they can't take Bitcoin from you?

So this is a stack of currency. You walk through an airport on this, they ask you if you have cash, they just take it. So cash in a physical form is a problem. So what do you do? You put it in a bank. So the bank then decides whether you get to keep it and whether you get it back. But I could move $1 million of Bitcoin from here to anywhere, to London, to anywhere in cyberspace in a few seconds. So the last thing in the world you want to save is money.

So what about this? Why not just put all of my money into gold?

Well, gold is up 12% a year, but Bitcoin is up 33%.

What about the S&P 500?

You're going to get double the performance from BTC that you would get from like the S&P index.

So should I buy a house?

I will tell you why you shouldn't buy a house.

And then you sold a bit of Bitcoin recently after telling a lot of people, sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin. So why did you sell the Bitcoin instead of your kidney?

Because—

Michael, beyond just buying Bitcoin, what is a good strategy to build and become wealthy in your view? And then you have 10 rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career. So let's go through these.

So first—

Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Michael, because of your success as a technology entrepreneur, you are a multi-billionaire. From my math, and you're heavily focused on digital currencies at the moment, specifically Bitcoin. What else do we need to know about you in terms of what you've built and accomplished outside of that?

I always wanted to make a technical contribution. So the, the early business was business intelligence. So how do you extract intelligence from large raw data sources? And that was what MicroStrategy did. We created a global business intelligence company. And I think in 2020, when the COVID lockdowns took place and the world turned upside down, That was when I discovered my greatest idea, and it wasn't even my idea, right? It was Satoshi's idea. But I discovered Bitcoin in 2020, and the company today is $60 billion, but we peaked about $125 billion. So we got somewhere between 100 and 200 times bigger since we discovered Bitcoin.

And when you speak to the general public now, when you do podcasts like this, what is the, the essence of the message that you are aiming to communicate to them?

Bitcoin is, uh, is digital empowerment, digital capital. We're living through the digital transformation of assets, and this is just as profound transformation as digital intelligence. The real profound breakthrough of Bitcoin is this idea that you can take economic energy, convert it to digital form, and tightly bind it to the person, the family, the company, but the country. We can talk about how we all hate countries, but you know, the history of the world is all the weak countries getting smashed by all the big countries. So if what you're interested in is empowerment and fairness and equity for the small company, the small family, the small person, the small country, the weak, how do you do it? Well, you basically encrypt the money, put it in cyberspace, protect it with a private key. It's like now you can actually own something and someone more powerful than you can't take it away from you.

There's two types, two types of money there in front of you. There's dollar bills, and then I've got a couple of Bitcoin on the table. What do you mean they can't take Bitcoin from you?

Okay, so this is a stack of currency. You walk through an airport on this, they ask you if you have cash. If you do, they just take it. Cash in a physical form is a problem. So what do you do? You put it in a bank. Well, a bank is a counterparty. So the bank then decides whether you get to keep it and whether you get it back. You go to the bank and you ask for it back, they might ask you why you ask for it back. If you ask for that much back, they file a form with the Treasury Department. You know, if you ask for too much money back too soon, soon, right? Someone comes knocking on your door. So the challenge with this, this is fiat currency, and you hold this at the pleasure of the nation state. And not just your nation state, it's like every country on earth gets to decide whether you get to spend this stuff, right? Which is interesting. And if you wanna actually transfer money to someone in another country, you need the permission of your bank, another bank, the central bank of their country, the correspondent bank.

There might be 7 different banks that have to decide whether the money gets from here to there. So this is permissioned money, you know, that's managed by the state. And with Bitcoin, I can take $1 million, I can actually encrypt it in a chip in a physical coin, the Cas Casius coin, and that's $1 million. I slide it across and it's literally a bearer asset, you know? And so that's one manifestation of it. But you could also put it into information form. I could transfer this to you just in the form of a private key that I wrote on a piece of paper. And I gave you—

So a series of letters you could give me.

Yeah, or I could send you a message. I could send a text message like, so good luck getting $1 million of gold from here to London if people don't want you to move it. But I could move $1 million of Bitcoin from here to anywhere in a few seconds. The idea was I don't wanna trust Apple or Google or Morgan Bank or a central bank or a government, right? And so in the extreme case, you know, two people can meet in Africa and I can trade you some Bitcoin for your truck and I don't need the permission of 7 banks and 16 governments and 32 other bureaucrats in order to buy that truck.

What is it that most people, the average person doesn't understand about the nature of money as it sat in their bank as it relates to the debasement of it or the sort of inflation of it? Because most people think if they've got, you know, $10,000 in their bank and they keep it there and maybe getting interest on it at 4% a year, they're gonna be good.

So this is about $10,000, I guess. One acre of land in Miami Beach on the water cost $10,000 about 100 years ago. I know this 'cause I have a house on the water and I have the deed of sale and it was about on 2 acres and it was $20,000. The entire house cost $100,000 and it's about $20,000 worth of land. Today, 1 acre of land on this, the same acre on the water, $10 million, maybe $20 million. So, You know what happened here, right? It's the same dollar. It works out to be 1,000x increase in price. So when land goes from $10,000 to $10 million, that means that the currency, the dollar, the money lost about 7% of its economic value every year for 100 years running. If you lose 7% a year, You know, then you get cut in half, right? 10 times, right? So what do most people not know about money? What they don't realize is that the best currency money, money being a medium exchange unit, account store of value, the dollar, the best in the 20th century and the 21st century, the US dollar lost 7% of its value every year going for 100 years.

That's the best it's ever gonna get. It's not that good for everybody else. If you go to most other countries, they lose 14% of their value. And so they collapse in about 30 years. So what you have is a situation where if you store your wealth in currency and, and the money of the society, the question really is just, are you gonna lose most of your money within 10 years? That's the weak currencies. And in Africa, for example, most currencies in Africa, you couldn't hold your wealth even for 10 years, maybe 5 years. Or are you gonna lose all your money in 30 years? Hyperinflation happened in Brazil, happened in Argentina. You know, that's Mexico, that's most places. And that's the status quo. The average fiat currency, you know, collapses in about 29 years, I think. And then the best is if you happen to be a citizen of the greatest nation in the world and you win all the wars, You're just gonna lose all your money. And you know, half-life is 35 years. You're gonna lose your money over the course of 100 years.

So should I buy a house?

So you get to the next interesting point, which is that $100,000 in 1926 in Miami Beach today would be worth $100,000. That house, $50 to $100 million. So the house is better, Right, in fact, if you're trying to preserve your wealth, you have to acquire scarce desirable property. So your choice is, do I buy real estate? Do I, residential real estate? Do I buy commercial real estate? Do I buy a private company? Do I buy a public company like stocks? Do I buy collectibles? So let me tell you why you shouldn't buy a house. Because there's a 2% property tax on houses in Florida, which means that if you buy a house, you pay 2% of the value every year. 2%, you know, means that every 36 years you actually pay the cost of the house in tax to the government. Not a very good store of value because you're taking on a massive tax load and you're taking on a maintenance load. But having said it, it's still a better deal than just holding cash in a bank or holding cash in a safe. You know, commercial real estate looks a bit better, right?

Because with commercial real estate, you can offset the tax, the insurance, and the maintenance cost with rents. So what really works out with commercial real estate most of the time is you buy $1 million commercial real estate, you have a bunch of fees, you charge rent, the rent offsets the maintenance cost. You don't really make any money on the rent, but the underlying million dollars appreciates 7% a year every year. And so you actually can build wealth with commercial real estate if you can just cover the maintenance expenses.

Most people are, are told that the way to build wealth when they leave university and they get into the working world is to buy a house. So most people, that's what most people do. They get a job, a 9 to 5, they take the money they get from that, they go and get a mortgage, they buy a house and they move in. That's kind of what we're all told implicitly. Is that a good strategy to build and become wealthy in your view?

The only way that it's a good strategy is you're buying the house in a jurisdiction where the property taxes are manageable, then yeah, you can generate some wealth. But if I flip that and you end up taking a 7% mortgage and you get massive tax and massive insurance expenses, then that same investment, you know, works out the other way and it crushes you to death. So a better idea generally is commercial real estate. If you actually have the, you know, the business acumen to get in the commercial real estate business, 'cause you can pass all the expenses through tenants. These things are all hard, right? Real estate business is hard. Starting your own company is hard. Investing in other companies is hard. The conventional thing, the safe thing is I just put all my money in a money market and I get paid 3% and then after tax I've got 1.5% and the currency is losing 7% of its value a year and you're just losing 5 or 6% of your wealth every year for your life. So, That's why Bitcoin is such a compelling thing. That's why people that believe in Bitcoin are passionate about it because the average person shouldn't have to be a real estate expert.

They shouldn't have to be a tax expert. They shouldn't have to be capable of launching their own restaurant or bar or bakery. You shouldn't have to be a stock picker. Why shouldn't the typical person just be able to take their money, put it into an asset which appreciates in value 15% a year and they don't have to worry about it?

What about the S&P 500? They could just put it into the stock market, right?

Yeah. John Bogle's real contribution and the success of the S&P 500 is this idea that currency is not a store of value. Real estate is illiquid and scary and difficult and inefficient and high maintenance. So what is the liquid capital asset that it can— I can buy? And it turns out to be like SPY. It's just the S&P 500 in the form of an ETF. So that has returned 15% over the past 6 years. Over 100 years, maybe 10%, something like that.

Every year.

And if the US dollar is losing 7% of its value in scarce desirable terms over the course of 100 years and you're getting 10%, you're getting a 2 or 3% boost in return for accepting the volatility, of being invested in the stock market, but it's not a bad idea, right? If you want the conventional best idea to preserve your wealth without taking on individual, you know, corporate risk and individual real estate risk, I just buy the S&P index and wait.

What about this? This is gold.

Yep.

Why not just put all of my money into gold?

It's not an awful idea. To buy gold. Gold is up 12% a year for the past 6 years. So whereas the S&P's up 15, gold's up 12, the NASDAQ's up 18, Bitcoin is up 33%. Okay, so generally if you look at the world and you say, where do you wanna save your money? You wanna buy a capital asset. Gold's a winner, S&P's a winner, diversified tech stocks are a winner. Bitcoin is a winner. Now you're going to say to me, well, so then, well, why Bitcoin? Well, the answer is, if you're living in Turkey, if you're living in Argentina, if you're living in Brazil before the currency collapses, or Mexico or Venezuela or any country in Africa, you don't get gold, you don't get the S&P, you don't get QQQ, you can't buy diversified real estate in the US. Those options I named are Western world conventional capital assets. So The big mistake, don't invest in non-capital assets. Don't put all your family's money in soybeans. You know, don't buy barrels of crude oil. Don't buy cotton. Don't invest in things that a factory or a robot or an AI can generate infinite of. You buy things that the robots and the AIs and the big factories cannot pump out by the million gallons.

And so, What is that? It is maybe an ounce of gold. It is a share in the 500 most desirable companies in the world. It is 1 out of 21 million Bitcoin. All of those things are things that the robots are not going to create infinite of. Those are capital assets, which capital asset is a function of where you live and what your mindset is. If you're living in a war zone, my advice is Bitcoin because you're not carrying this through a checkpoint, right? Like, you know, if, if you need to go through an airport, you want something that you get to keep and take with you.

You talked about the robots there.

Yeah.

And when we say the robots, I think we mean both the surge in robotics we're seeing, but also artificial intelligence that's going to empower them to be very, very intelligent.

Yeah.

How has this changed your thesis and how you view the future? Because it's a profound surprise, I think, to all of us that artificial intelligence is accelerating at the rate we're seeing.

Technology fails until it succeeds. When I was at MIT, people were trying to make, you know, speech recognition work. It just didn't work. For 1,000 years, people wanted to fly and it didn't work. And in 1902, the New York Times declared that every learned scientist knows that you'll never be able to fly. And then in 1903, we fly. In 2023, you know, the AI started working. You can see what's happening. We have affected the digital transformation of intelligence. Cars are gonna drive themself. It's pretty clear that anything that takes massive human labor, you know, whether it's lawyering, writing a contract, or composing a poem, or composing a script, or composing a book, it's like, you want a book? Tell the AI what kind of book you want. Here's my 10, you know, I want this, I want it to be set in London, and I want these protagonists. Can you make it like that? Put some more violence in it. Voltaire was impressive because he created this much literature, and when he did it, it came out of the mind of one man, and that was quite amazing. And I think we're always going to admire the people that did it first.

But The AIs will think for us. You know, put the AI into the robot. We're not that far, right? Like when I sit and I talk to my voice assistant, whether it's Chat or whether it's Grok, and it's like she knows everything and she keeps getting smarter. You know, every single week she gets smarter. And it's like, what happens when they go into a robot? It's like, well, you pretty much can imagine a billion robots and maybe we'll pay $200 a month for a robot and the robot will just pretty much do everything. And so the question is, do you want someone to do everything, to cook, to clean, you know, to take out the trash? Would you like a self-driving car? Of course you do. We're on the verge of these perfect products, right? That like, we'll get to the point where we're like, I, I, I, you used to actually have an oven that burned things. Like what? It was stupid? Yeah, it was too stupid to know it was gonna burn the, huh? Why didn't you just put intelligence into the appliance, right? Why would you ever have an unintelligent appliance, right?

At this point when it gets exponentially cheaper. We used to get in traffic accidents, right? Like the big reveal, right? The big inversion is when people realize that the self-driving cars are safer than the person-driven cars, right? It's like you used to make mistakes. You know, the irony of course is now when you send a message to someone, if you wanna prove that it came from you, you have to actually put errors in it, right? It's like if you put errors in it, I believe you typed it. You know, the AI can draft the thing as though it had a PhD in English and it had 20 years experience as a copy editor. And so we're reaching this point where lack of effectiveness is just laziness, right? Like if you wrote something which wasn't perfect, it's 'cause you're lazy, not because you're not perfect. I mean, the AIs create perfect documents, they do perfect research, the robots will do any amount of work. And I think Elon makes this point, which is we're about to trip over an age of abundance Do you believe that's true?

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

That's what work will be like. AI and robotics are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans. Money is fundamentally information. The true constraints of the future won't be financial, they'll be energy and mass.

He's half right. I agree with, with part of what he says. That is consumer goods, consumables, utilitarian goods, uh, will become abundant. But there are always gonna be scarce desirable goods that will not become abundant. And I think he overstates the case. Money will still be valuable. Wealth will still be valuable. But I'll give you an example. Henry VIII didn't have clean water, did not have heat, did not have cooling. These things the King of England did not have. And technology gave all these things to the middle class. And so if you live in the middle class today, you know, you can have your appendix out, you know, but Henry VIII didn't have dental crowns. He didn't have x-rays. So you get modern medical care, the infant mortality rate has plunged, life is safer, clean water, clean air, right? Clean food. And technology gave them to us. We stamp out infinite Coca-Cola, infinite Hershey's bars, ice cream, right? Running water, right? Electricity. So all of those things have been given to the middle class, the working class in the developed world. Not everywhere, but let's say in the developed world. But everybody doesn't get a Hamptons house.

Everybody doesn't get their own private jet. They don't get their own private yacht. So what happened with the explosion of affluence? Massive utilitarian entitlement, lots of cars, but you know, okay, so everybody gets a car, but how many people get a Porsche? What happens with humanity is we always invent the luxury car. We come up with the trophy asset. And again—

But most people don't actually want that. They wanna be able to like feed their family and not have to worry about the bills. So all of those people, are you saying that those people are gonna be, they're gonna be good, they're not gonna have to worry?

I'm saying that if your aspiration is a good life, if you want infinite food, infinite energy, infinite education, infinite entertainment, You're probably gonna get it. My point is, in theory, right? Why does money matter today? 'Cause everybody, you know, has electricity and water because people wanna buy something more than water. By the way, water is the proletarian drink.

What does that mean?

It means that if you go to a restaurant and you don't, and you can't afford anything else, you ask for a cup of water, right? And then if you have some more money, you get yourself a Coca-Cola or a soft drink and that costs $5. But if you have more money, you buy yourself a vodka. And then when you have more money, you wanna buy yourself the specialty high-end tequila. And eventually people find a way to spend $38 on a drink. And, you know, in New York City, you know, you can see that everywhere. Why do we go to restaurants and pay $300 to eat at a restaurant? Because you can actually feed yourself on 3 bucks a day. And the answer is there's always gonna be a hierarchy of affluence and people are gonna find things to aspire to that will be more than the utilitarian mean that everybody gets. If I give you universal healthcare, people want private healthcare. If I give everybody a house, someone's gonna want a house twice as big. Everybody's always going to have a reason to want something more. Yeah.

Because we're status-oriented animals.

That's the cynical way to look at it. But the other way to look at it is I wanted to be sitting on a mountain peak skiing, but not that mountain peak because the snow's not good on that mountain peak this week.

And it's too busy on this one.

Yeah. And that one's too crowded. You know, it's like there's always going to be some exclusivity. You know, there's going to be a quest. So I think that money's not going away. I think it's pretty obvious if you look around you that people still need money. It is true that the basic needs in life, basic transportation, basic energy, basic healthcare, all of those things can be manufactured in quantity and they'll get progressively cheaper. We'll call them consumer goods.

If this knowledge work does become, I guess, taken by the robots and the AIs, there's some people say there's gonna be new jobs created and everyone will be fine, but it's not clear to me that there will be enough new jobs created in the period of time to satisfy the demand of people to have something to do professionally.

It used to be everybody was a farmer, right? And then all of a sudden in America, we have new jobs like called accountants and lawyers and film producers. You're a podcaster. Your job didn't exist 20 years ago. It did, you know, the job description did not exist. The business did not exist. There's a lot of things that exist today. Yeah. There are people that make a living putting on makeup and clothes and posting on Instagram, and that was not a job that existed 30 years ago. So there'll be a lot of new jobs, there'll be dislocation, there's going to be political unrest. What do I think? I think this is the best argument in favor of encouraging a free market and allowing, uh, liberal, uh, unregulated businesses to prosper because If you have a progressive society, by the way, the United States is sort of more progressive.

Define progressive in this context.

You're allowed to start a business, you're allowed to sell product. It's not illegal to create a podcast. By the way, you can't do what you're doing in Cuba, right? In North Korea, you couldn't do it.

I read something crazy last night about driving autonomous cars. It said lawyers are trying to not block EVs because these particular lawyers make a lot of money from litigating car accidents.

We wouldn't want people to not crash.

Yeah.

But yeah, so the point is there are all sorts of laws and restraint of trade, like you can't have an Airbnb. In the face of modern technology, if you have modern technology and it's creating dislocation, if your goal is to embrace the technology, create maximum productivity, and then minimize the disruption and the inflammation, then the more degrees of freedom you offer, the less pain there'll be. Because in a more free society, you're going to have 10,000 new kinds of businesses pop up or 100,000 new business opportunities that no one conceptualized. And they'll be threatening to the status quo, but they'll be rational and they'll create value. And then they will create gainful employment and they'll create wealth for all the people that are displaced. Right by the technology. Steve, what are you doing?

Just making myself a delicious coffee.

From the freezer?

From the freezer. Have you not heard about Comptier?

No.

Oh my gosh. This is gonna change your life. Couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So what they do is they they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty, and they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, "Knock yourselves out." And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, "Oh my God, what the hell is that? It's so delicious." All I have to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in, and I mix it, and that is done. You can get $30 off your first order of Cometeer Coffee if you go to cometeer.com/stephen. Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me, and let me know if you love it as much as I do.

One of the things you've heard me talk about quite a lot over the last couple of years, and this is something that's true in business and content, but also with everything in life, is that consistency is the thing that really, really compounds. The same is true in sales. When your team is small, consistency happens naturally. The team knows of every deal, so nothing gets missed. But as I've experienced, when you grow, this starts to break down and deals start to slip. Follow-ups don't happen. Leads go cold that shouldn't have. And when this happens, a lot of leaders look at it and think they have a people problem when actually it's a systems problem. The businesses that I've watched scale well commercially all have a system their team uses every single day. And for my team, that system has been our sponsor, Pipedrive. It's an easy-to-use intelligent CRM tool for of growing sales teams that gives you visibility of every deal in your sales pipeline at every single stage. And it shows you what needs to happen for that deal to move forward all in real time. It's what keeps our commercial operation consistent when we are a team of 5 or when our commercial team was a team of 50.

Over 100,000 companies are already running their sales on it. So if you'd like to join them, sign up at pipedrive.com/ceo where you'll get an exclusive 30-day free trial instead of the usual 14 days., and there's no credit card needed at all. Head to pipedrive.com/ceo. You know, earlier you were talking about how you can get AI to write a book. I was thinking as you were saying it, the interesting thing is I now ask my AI what book I need to read and to make that book for me versus being prescriptive to it. And because it has this huge memory on me, it knows what I'm dealing with. It knows the businesses I'm building, the problems I have. And so I just say, what do I, what's the question I should be asking you? Which book should I be reading, and then can you make that book for me? Make it 20 pages. I like it in this particular style because it's my favorite style of author. And then I want to download it as an MP3 file and listen to it on my way to work. I have 43 minutes. Could you say what's the question I should be asking you?

Yeah, you're using that as an example, but at the end of the day, you have to govern the state space. For example, anybody could say, what question should I ask? But the real issue is what are the input constraints? If you're a baker in Nigeria, in Lagos, right? There's a certain set of conditions that are different than if you happen to be a fireman in Los Angeles, right? And so what's the state space that you're exploring in order to create a contribution? And I'll give you an example. Like I used AI, I used AI to make $15 billion last year.

Is that a true story?

This is true.

You did?

I did, yeah. And I used an AI to make $15 billion in a way that no one would ever conceive that you could make $15 billion.

And this is a true story.

Okay, yeah, let's go back to me in 2025. We have a company that has billions of dollars of Bitcoin, $30 billion of Bitcoin. We want to actually raise capital to buy more Bitcoin. We maxed out the equity markets. We became the largest issuer of convertible bonds. In the world, and we maxed out the convertible bond market. And that was our journey in the first 5 years of our Bitcoin.

To simplify this for Jenny and Dave, you borrowed as much money as you could from traditional means.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

To buy Bitcoin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By the beginning of 2025, we had issued as many convertible bonds as you could issue. We were the largest issuer in the world, and it wasn't scalable. So we needed to invent a new type of security a new type of credit instrument that we could use to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. So we went to the AI, I went to the AI and I started exploring how do I design a preferred stock? And so I said, I think I want to create a security that's not a common equity and I don't want it to be a bond. I want it to be some hybrid in the middle. A preferred stock, you know, for the layman, it's just a security that could be anything. You can give it any term. I can sell you a preferred stock and give you the right to put it back to me in 12 months, and it looks like debt. I can give you a guaranteed coupon on it. I can give you conversion rights and, and make it look like equity. So we used AI to design a, a convertible preferred stock called STRK. When we did it, no one had ever created a preferred stock, uh, that was backed by Bitcoin before.

And, uh, and we'd never issued it. And so it was kind of a combination of financial engineering and digital asset engineering and, legal work and securities law. So we built it and, you know, when we asked the lawyers and the bankers, they're like, well, no one's ever done it before. Okay, you know, their answer, by the way, is no one's ever done it before and people don't do that, so we don't think you should do that. And we're like, well, everything else that people have done, we've maxed out. And so we're kind of at the point where our growth is going to stop unless we find a way outta the box. So we're going to have to do something no one's ever done before using, new technology, right? We're using digital capital, we're using digital intelligence, and we're using a digital treasury company. So 3 new forms of something in order to create value. And after we'd done 3 of them, we decided what we wanted to do was create a short-duration credit instrument, one that would be— would trade stably around $100, around par. And we're trying to figure out how do you get a preferred stock to trade at a stable level?

It's what you would call technically short duration credit, but it's like we're trying to create a money market type instrument where people can buy it at 100, sell it at 100, collect the yield, and not worry about it trading up and down or being sensitive to interest rates. Well, if you do that, you have to vary— in order to get it to trade stable, if you want the price to be stable, you have to change the dividend rate.

Rate.

And so we created an instrument that— where we could change the dividend rate every month. Now, had anybody ever done it? No. In the history of the world, no one ever created a variable dividend rate preferred stock. Is it illegal? No. Why has no one ever done it? No one ever had a reason to do it. They never thought to do it. The lawyers, the bankers, the conventional investors, they're like, well, we've never seen it done before, we're not sure you can do We go to the AI, we said, well, can we do it? Like, of course you can do it. Just do this, this, and this and this and that. Well, they said they don't like that. We'll just do this, this, this.

Which AI?

ChatGPT, OpenAI.

So ChatGPT made you $15 billion.

Yeah, because the short of it is we brought that IPO to market, it became a $2.5 billion IPO, the biggest IPO of the year to date. And then we put a shelf registration on it and we sold another, $8 billion of it. So we sold $10.5 billion of that instrument plus $4 billion of the other instrument. So we basically sold $15 billion of credit, which kind of equates to the company making about $15 billion.

I'm thinking about what this means generally for the average person listening. Yeah. Because everyone's like searching for business ideas, right? And new ideas. And you're telling me that you, you can use AI now to come up with novel business ideas and solutions that are outside of the box and that would generate value for people. Though there is, it's almost like hearing that there's an arbitrage opportunity with this intelligence. I was reading something the other day that said only 2% of households have a ChatGPT or AI subscription still. So do you think there is an arbitrage there for people who go to AI now and can build business ideas from it?

If you're an entrepreneur, right? If you aspire to create a business or create something of value, then it's stuff. The no-brainer is you definitely should pick one or more of these AIs, and maybe you wanna become adept using multiple of them. They're, they're just different tools. It's, it's kind of like saying you gotta learn how to use a computer and you gotta learn how to read, reading, writing, arithmetic, right? Just basics. And then once you've done that, you, you do need to have some domain expertise in something, right? The question is, what are you gonna do, right? You either wanna create a new product or you wanna create a new service, or you want to radically transform an existing product or service using AI to be much cheaper, much better. But to my mind, you know, I would try to create something magical. Like for example, can you create something that does everybody's accounting, does, you know, does the work of a million accountants and sell it for $10 a month? Right.

If you were 18 now, or if your kids came to you and said, Dad, what should I go and study at university? And what shouldn't I study at university? Would your answer be different now as we stand on the foothills of this new technology?

You wanna study the new thing, right? You wanna learn the new thing. And so if you look at the history of, of science, the real question is what's on the S-curve?

On the S-curve.

The whole theory of the S-curve is for 1,000 years we try to fly. And infinite energy makes no progress. You cannot fly. And then in 1903, all of a sudden we can sort of fly. And in 66 years, we go from flying 20 miles an hour to flying 300 miles an hour. First a fighter jet, then a passenger jet. Then we have like rockets that are unmanned, then we have manned rockets, and then we have rockets that go to orbit, and then we have rockets that go to the moon. And so that's an example of an S-curve. But then, you know what happens in the mid-'70s, we designed the 737, the 747, and we hit a wall, you know, and 737 is still the primary airplane for the next 50 years. And if you look at the efficiency of an airplane from 1975, uh, to the year 2025, over 50 years, the modern airplanes are 15% more efficient. Like, so what you got was a diminishing return. And when you're on the S-curve, things are doubling every 3 years. You're doubling, you're doubling, you're doubling, you're exponential growth, and then you hit diminishing returns and then you stagnate and then you stop and then things are just not getting any better.

So let's show an S-curve on the screen and also, uh, the, the new S-curve coming in below it.

Like when I was at MIT, you know, everybody basically flocked to electrical engineering and computer science because that was the cool thing. And so the mistake to make when you go to school is you get at the end of the S-curve. You basically start studying something that has hit diminishing returns. And once you hit that diminishing return, no material progress may take place for 100 years. It might be that you just can't break through. Propulsion technology is the limiting factor. Like, why don't we have planes that will fly, you know, supersonic, you know, on,, you know, a tank of gas that's this much, right? Or fusion drives. Well, 'cause we don't. Now, on the other hand, semiconductors started exploding and semiconductor technologies continued to advance. We haven't hit that limit yet. And that's why so many profound breakthroughs were made in computer science over the past 50 years.

This is kind of hitting escrow, hasn't it? As a form factor, my iPhone here, you know, since the iPhone, as you said, since iPhone like 6, it hasn't really gotten thinner, better. The battery hasn't really taken a leap forward as such. So we're now looking for another form factor to interface with computers.

Yeah. You know, the iPhone 1 didn't have cut and paste and we didn't get cut and paste till the version 3. And so there was a rapid improvement versions 1 through 6 or 1 through 7, call it, And at that point you start hitting diminishing returns. And if you were to do some utility function and you were to score it on a scale of 1 to 100, you would've gone from like 5 to 70 in a hurry. And then you would've gone from 70 to 90 over the next few iterations. And then you're at 91, 92, you hit that limit. And now if, if you are starting a company, right, you don't create another iPhone. Right? The real question right now is, can I create smart glasses where I have something that's like my Maui Jim sunglasses? I put 'em on, they weigh nothing, and they have the camera and they see what I see and they hear what I hear and they know where I am and plug that into AI. And in that point I can just say, hey Eve, what is that? You know, where am I? And tell me about that.

And it's Why do I have to type anymore?

When I met Mark Zuckerberg, he showed me the device that's on the way from Meta. This is not a secret because I know they've talked about it publicly, which is just a, it was just a plain wrist strap with no screen on it, but it linked to the glasses. And in the glasses, when I looked around, I could see all of my screens and everything like that. And I, and if I just, because of this wrist strap, if I just click, it clicks on all the stuff. So I was just sat here with this little wrist strap. The wrist strap again was just like a cotton bracelet— very thin cotton bracelets? And I just looked around, could click on everything and open things and call people and send texts and go on YouTube etc., it was up here again in my peripheral vision. Imagine that all an S-curve at some point there's going to be almost like contact lens type thing but I can just ba-ba-ba-bah!

By the way this why you should study fantasy because they have this right in magic worlds... This is like: You know, like I just wear my Talisman, you know, I have a necklace. What does it do for me? Oh, it makes me omniscient, all-powerful, immortal, indestructible. I live forever. Well, what do you have to do to make the product work? Nothing. I'm wearing the wristband and I walk and every door opens to me and stuff happens. And here's where Elon gets it right. It's like the number one engineering mistake is engineers wanna optimize a part that shouldn't exist. Like make the parts go away, right? We start on the topic of what should you study, right? It's study technologies that allow you to create magic things that your parents could never, if your parents would say that's magic, you're on the right track, right? So like, how about what's better than the wristband? Just like, how about you just like implant one pellet?

Neuralink.

Yeah, maybe it's a Neuralink. Maybe it's when I'm born, there's a slight implant and now I hear, like I can talk to the AI in cyberspace space forever.

But should you go study that? Because conceivably the artificial intelligence and the robots are going to be the ones that create that technology if they have a PhD in everything and that's accelerating.

Yeah, well I guess we're back to the what should you study? You ought to study digital intelligence or digital assets. If you can generate, you know, generate proteins, generate any kind of life form or enzyme or protein or the like, maybe it's interesting. But I think, um, with regard to AI, you don't want to learn how to do things that AI can do. What you want to do is learn how to ask the AI to do something that's never been done before. Like if I were to go back to school, 95% of what I learned, uh, I probably wouldn't want to study.

What about a surgeon? Do you think you want to be a No. What about a lawyer?

No.

Accountant?

No.

Driver? No.

At some point, what you have to do is ask, the AIs aren't really answering the question yet, but you have to ask whatever is the marginal question that hasn't been answered by the civilization.

Could you ask?

Maybe I'll take it. I'll take that position, which is the way you create value in the world is you bring something into the world that wasn't here before.

This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that the Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% Diaries, and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again and you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.

There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribe, you're already subscribed. If it says subscribe, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. Beyond just buying Bitcoin, is there any sort of actionable steps that the working class should take right now to prepare for this robot transition that you're talking about?

I mean, the actionable step is learn—

Learn about the robots.

Digital.

Digital.

Like understand digital. For example, how much content's available on YouTube right now?

Infinite, I don't know.

Right? What can you get for free on YouTube and what can you create of value? Right? If you're in the business of content creation, my advice would be study digital channels. It's like, should I go and become a stage actor on Broadway? It's a much smaller thing. MrBeast can get 100 million subscribers. You can get 20 million subscribers. You're not getting 20 million subscribers if you do the thing that your parents' parents So I think that you want to look at digital platforms. There's digital communication like X or Instagram, there's YouTube and the like, but there's also digital intelligence.

Let's just stress test that first point a bit. I guess a lot of content creators are thinking at the moment now because of these frontier models that can produce video content, pictures, a kid in Mumbai or Manhattan where we are now can set up an agent while they're asleep and say, listen, just post 100 videos while I'm asleep on this every single platform. Actually, I'll make 5 agents and I'll ask all of them to post 100 videos each. So you're going to have this, you have in terms of supply and demand, presumably that's a supply shock. There's this slop tsunami coming in. And then if you look at demand of attention online, it is arguably fixed. Financial Times did a report said that young people are actually starting to come down in terms of time spent online. Slightly older generations are starting from a lower base. They're still going up, but they're starting from a lower base. So you've got a tsunami slop of supply and fixed demand. Again, this, even this business feels a little bit insecure. Actually, a lot of the major podcasters are actually down on YouTube. If I look at the top, who I would consider the sort of top 5 podcasters in my niche, every single one of them is down at least 50% in the last 20-ish, 12, 24 months.

Well, the solution is certainly not to not pay attention, right? So for example, if you're in the business of creating content right now, you would ask the question, can I enhance the content with AI or can I better market or distribute the content with AI?

What is the moat?

The moat's going to be the most talented content, the person creating the best stuff that everybody wants to see. There are videos being created like here's a walkthrough of a 16th century warship. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen, a guy constructs the entire warship from the keel, and he creates the ribs, and he shows you the lower deck and the ballast, and he takes you through every step. And it's a 3-dimensional, uh, video animation, takes about an hour, and it's absolutely riveting. I have no reason to care about 16th century warships, but I can't take my eyes off it because it's just so fascinating to see him explain everything.

Are you saying creativity is the still, or understanding what humans want and then delivering it, which I guess is creativity.

Let's say the Led Zeppelin example. But what, what you see in human history is within 10 years of whenever there's a new technology platform, there's some geniuses, they push it to the limit and they do 95% of everything that can be done. And it all happens within 10 years and they live forever.

Ever.

So why didn't anybody before Beethoven do stuff with the piano? Well, the piano comes out, some genius does stuff with the piano, right? And between Beethoven and Chopin and, you know, and a few players, it's like, it's not clear to me if humans try for another 10,000 years they'll do much better. So with Led Zeppelin, you had electric guitars and amplification and everything kind of clicked late '60s. Like the sound of the early '60s was not quite there. And then by 1971, '72, you could do some amazing stuff. And if you think about all the classic rock between 1970 and 1980, you have human creativity pushing the edge of the envelope in so many directions. And then you hit this diminishing return. And then along comes sampling, right? And then you get Swedish House Mafia and Avicii, and that's new technology. And then they push it to the extreme. And then along comes YouTube and Justin Bieber comes outta nowhere, you know, and MrBeast comes outta nowhere and they push it to the extreme. And what you see with every generation is I give you a new thing, whether it's a piano or electric guitar or internet, think about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and what he did at just about the point when you could do that with the web.

And then think about the early mobile apps, you know, WhatsApp and the like and so on. Like what you want to do if you want to create these incredible success things is you want to locate the magic opportunity right at the right point on the S-curve where it just now became commercially viable to do it. And it's a zero-to-one moment, and you want to be there. You want to be the first person that applies that technology right, to this new idea. Like, what did our company do to go from nothing to $60 billion or from $1 billion to $60 billion? We were the first company to take digital capital, Bitcoin, and put it together with digital credit and a digital treasury model. So we created a credit instrument, a security that you could never created before. You couldn't have made it 10 years ago. You Couldn't build it on top of anything other than Bitcoin. So we needed to get to the point where we had $10 or $20 billion of capital, and then we could create this thing that was a multi-billion dollar thing, and that becomes resonant. And that window is like 12 to 24 months.

And you go through that window and you create something that might be a $100 billion thing because you go through, if you went through, 36 months early, you smack into a wall and you fail. And if you wait, like at this point, our company is 20 times bigger than the next biggest one, 50 times bigger than the company doing something similar. Did we plan it? Not at all. We found some extraordinary cool thing. We committed to it with all of our heart and soul, and we declared we were going to make it work come hell or high water. And we got punched in the face 100 times. And every single time we ran into a problem, We stopped, we recalibrated, we went a different direction. And the process of creating something beautiful, like the beautiful thing, like everyone wants a bank account that pays 10%. So if you can figure out how to give people this thing they want with a new technology that was impossible, that did not exist 5 years or 3 years earlier, then you resonate in the society, right? You'd go viral. Like we were just the first ones to get there.

It exploded. If you gave me a billion dollars right came along now and said, run a marketing campaign, it wouldn't be as effective. Like you couldn't buy the success with a billion dollars of marketing. You just have to— the Led Zepp guys, they didn't spend a billion dollars marketing. You gotta be in the right place, the right time, and you have to have the courage to offer people the new thing.

I have been thinking a lot about this, this idea of, you said, you know, if you spent a billion dollars, you couldn't go as viral as that. And if someone came along and spent a ton of money today, they couldn't go be as big as let's say Michael Jackson. When we go back through history, I was thinking about this idea because I watched the Michael Jackson documentary recently and he was at a level of fame that is, I don't think we've ever seen since. And I think part of the reason why was because there was a constraint on the distribution channels back then. So in my house, there was 20 albums over there, box set albums, and Michael Jackson was like 3 of them. And then the other way that we could consume room was the TV over there and there was like 6 channels and MTV was one of them and it was Michael Jackson all day. In the world we live in now where there's my phone experience—

Yeah.

Is a completely different phone experience to yours because of AI. AI is learning what I like and showing me my own little version of the world. I wonder if it's possible to be as big as a Michael Jackson once was for anybody these days. And actually, I, even with YouTuber you mentioned earlier. I wonder now if fame or cool, being a content creator or a musician once looked like this, this sort of like high ceiling, and then you're known for 100 years like Michael Jackson. And now with algorithms that are personalized, does it now look like this? Shorter and shallower.

Is it possible to get big? You could say, well, I can't get as big as Michael Jackson, but on the other hand, Elon Musk got big, right? Like, like there are things that get big, right? Companies get big. OpenAI went from nothing to how many users in just a few months. So I think what you could say is going viral is about hitting a resonating frequency in the civilization, whether it's an artistic frequency or it's a political frequency, or it's a technical frequency. Yeah, there are some things where there's going to be a glut. There's going to be, well, let's take Instagram, right? It's like on one hand, a billion people have like bad photos posted online. But on the other hand, there are people that manage to get, you know, 8 million followers and they, you know, Or the Kardashians, you know, you have these people that get massively big and that's the other side of the equation. So I don't really know how it all plays out except for the fact that it seems clear that there is room for human creativity and innovation. And if your goal is to make a contribution, right?

If you're in your working years where you want to upgrade the world and make a difference, be remembered for something, then a pretty simple principle is don't keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year, fighting against the modern automation, you know, epidemic, right? Don't try to outwork the robots. It's like you're, you're lamenting, you know, how difficult it is for a content creator. But let me remind you that it used to be you would go be a college professor and teach 200 students a year for 20 years, and you would feel that your life contribution was 4,000 people whose minds you touched. And now you get 4,000 people a second. Okay? So you're judging yourself against the next thing. But if you look back in time, Technology has given us the ability to amplify our intellect and amplify our creativity in a way that is unprecedented in human history.

Yeah, I think in part is I'm wondering now if we're kind of, technology said, okay, you can reach more people in TV, radio, all these things. And actually now with intelligence, it's saying, oh, we can figure out exactly what Michael wants. So we're starting to live in these smaller echo chambers where your creative idea or your creative piece of content reaching lots of people is going to become harder because the algorithms are now in the way and they're deciding who sees what. And they're optimizing for the, I guess, the platform, the platform's monetary desire. The other thing that I think is really interesting, and I've been mulling for the last couple of months, is that, that which is really, really hard and scarce, and actually you could say something being hard and scarce are the same, because to create something scarce is also hard. Like you did with that financial instrument, very few people on earth could have created that. We We don't run public companies, we don't have the information, et cetera. Or even that YouTuber you mentioned who walks you through those, the 1600s or whatever, that is very hard to do. I've theorized that actually pursuing that which is hard and scarce, getting you to come here today is not easy.

So that's kind of my note. Michelle Obama coming and sitting down with me here is still kind of my note, is what we should aim at. What do you think of that as a theory?

I agree. Let's say you have a business, whatever your business is, Right now, the right thing to do is to spend an intense time with the AI considering what are all the ways you can upgrade and improve the product or the service you create, right? For example, like it used to be, you do this in English and the issue is, well, what if, what about Japanese or Chinese or French or whatever? And you know, the hard way is you learn 20 languages and you know, but then how does your guest, or do we translate it or you hire We used to spend money to hire translators, but now you could have the AI translate this into 100 languages. Right now the question is, should you or not? Can I enhance it? Right? It's interesting when someone describes something, but you're like, let's just put up a chart of the S-curve there. And then the next step is, can I market it better or distribute it better? And the next step is, am I creating something that'll be valuable in a decade? Well, will it be valuable in 100 years?

Well, this is probably a good time to mention this. 24 months ago, we started exactly that, which was there are aliens who just never— No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Arabic. Yeah.

And ask yourself how many people that do podcast interviews offer that level of quality of content. And I think that you're— I think you're outstripping— like, I don't know if anybody else has done it that well. Right.

We started almost 3 years ago. And for the first 24 months it was a tragic failure. So you had the data scientists in the corner of our office failing for 24 months. And then about 12 months ago, for the first time ever, we saw that the translation technology underneath us had improved and that we could get the view duration in Spanish to be higher than English.

And how many months do you think Jimmy Page spent trying to master the electric guitar? More than 24 months?

Yeah, yeah, a lot longer.

My advice to an entrepreneur is is you focus, you commit. If you're successful in less than 4 years, you got lucky. It's pro— yeah. If it takes you 10 years, well, between 4 and 10 years is, is very, very normal. If you haven't had success by the 10-year point, you're probably not cut out for the business. But you know, what you're doing is, it's totally logical. It's like, is AI going to remake this industry? The first issue is, can you make the product better? And the second question is, what's it worth? Right? Right. You can do that. Can you get paid? And, you know, and by the way, even if you didn't get paid, I would argue that your audience have limited attention span. It's like, I don't have time to listen to every Lex Fridman, every Joe Rogan, every Diary of the CEO, and every one of the next 20. And so I'm going to become loyal. I'm going to become a customer and a fan of whoever serves me the best content. And certainly if I'm a native Portuguese speaker, or a native Russian speaker, you all of a sudden just leaped right to the top.

This goes to my point about hard and scarce because people in Portugal maybe have never heard Michael Saylor before in Portuguese. So in terms of scarce, it's actually the only interview now available that is 2 hours long of Michael Saylor talking in Cantonese with Stephen. And so that we then are competing, we have, that's kind of the moat then, right?

Right. And that becomes a benefit to all your guests. You are the distribution channel for me to send the message of digital capital, digital empowerment to the world. And then your guests become your moat. I think that with every single business, it's pretty clear you have to ask the question, is technology going to cannibalize my business or disrupt it? And am I going to be the one that embraces it and evolves and grows with it? Or am I gonna fight it. And then of course you're in a dialogue with the market. For example, the great thing about what you've done is if you've done it, you can look and see how it runs and whether YouTube actually expands your reach. And then you can look at the engagement and figure out whether or not you're able to monetize that and whether you're able to convert that. And then you tweak it, right? And adjust. And 6 months or 12 months can be enough that you have a lasting advantage forever, right? If you're 12 months ahead of everybody else.

And you're compounding compounding in.

Yeah, it compounds over time and then maybe they never catch you. Like, it's, that's, you know, and, but that's the story of every business, right? That's, that's the story of Ford Motor Company and Standard Oil. That's the story of Microsoft. It's the story of Facebook. It's everybody's story, which is you just have to focus, commit, and then if you're good enough, invariably what happens is is your customers will make you the winner. The world needs someone to do what you do. Like someone had to, has to win, right? There needs to be a winner. The audience out there wants, they want what you do. They want, they, they wanna walk into the living room and figure out what Obama was thinking, or they want to hear, you know, what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking. And they want someone to bring them into that living room. They want you to host them in. They need someone to do that job. You don't have to be what, perfect or better than anybody ever lived. You need to be better than the people that are currently doing it now, or you need to be one of, you know, a handful of people that are doing it.

Because at that point, right, the audience comes to you, the guests come to you, you're making a market, right? You're the market maker in that information. It's just the real key is know what your value proposition is, stay in your lane, you know, don't, don't try to compete in an area where you're not going to be the best in the world. But on the other hand, right, the one thing that's pretty clear is that anybody can have the best in the world in like 2 seconds at their fingertips. And so you don't wanna be the third best. You don't wanna be mediocre across a bunch of things. You wanna be exceptional in one area, figure out what that one area is. And then maybe you have 2 million followers, then 200 million followers, right? Then eventually, you know, over 100 years, 2 billion, you, you just, you just have to have this vision.

One of the things that comes with the pursuit of being first is you go over the hill, you take the arrows. As the phrase goes. And so even in that experiment that I just showed you that we started 3 years ago, which was trying to figure out how we translate the Darjeeling into lots of different languages, it sounds simple. Problem is you discover, you go, fuck, Spanish words are longer. So the video in Spanish is 3 hours 10, but in English it's 3 hours. It's just 3 hours. And then the video is going to be out and then Cantonese, how long is Cantonese words? And then you go, oh my God, you have to then translate all the thumbnails and all the titles in 20 languages at the same time. That's why you end up 3 years in when you thought it was just a 1-hour job. But also, if you zoom out even further, there's this graveyard of other things we tried that never worked. There's the other 90% of experiments we ran in the corner that did nothing. And I always say to the team, there's 2 things a year that define us.

And of that, in our failure and experimentation team, which is literally what it's called, we tried 60 things.

Yeah.

But there's this, you know, 5 of them are meh. 2 of them Game-changing. So the attitude of dealing with failure at the very forefront of trying to be first, I think is something people don't talk about enough.

Focus your energy, guard your time. Just 'cause you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do the thing, right? Most of the time, the reason people fail is they get successful in their 30s and they're successful at one thing, and it's like all of a sudden they've decided they're gonna do 10 other things because they're good at everything and they dilute their focus in 10 ways. People always underestimate the maintenance obligation, like always. And so the right solution to growth is I would like to make whatever I'm doing twice as good. And if I do 10 things to make it 10% better, I'm probably diluting, distracting. The phenomenon that causes most businesses to fail, it's dilutive distractions or where it's, it's dilutive expansions. They do one thing, it works, and then instead of turning their energy in to make that better and better and better and better, they start to bifurcate and trifurcate and they expand and they overreach to too many areas. It's like the dude with the great restaurant and he's got the second restaurant and he is got a chain of 37 restaurants and they all suck. And it's like, yeah, I remember the guy used to have— there's no one, by the way, with a failed restaurant chain that wasn't a successful restaurateur at scale one, right?

Like you didn't get to a failure of 37 or 62 or 437 until you had a good one. But it's very, very common that people think that they can just cookie cutter these things out and you can't. And so the conundrum that you're putting your finger on is, I want to grow and progress, but I want to not dilute and distract. And that requires this maturity of saying, I tried it, had a moderate success, but it's not enough, kill it, right? Like, and move on because it's just not gonna work.

There's two things that came to mind there. The first is a lot of young people come up to me and they're 9 months into their idea and they're not rich yet. So where they look over there and they see their friend has started a thing with CBD. And so they're like, I think I need to go into CBD. And so their careers kind of look like this sort of like swinging through the jungle, grabbing onto the next branch and letting go of the last and never really making upward motion towards any goal. And then the other thing I thought about as you're speaking is I've been mulling this, really only over the last 2 months, this idea that if you take a long-term approach to things, you make foundational decisions today that create huge competitive advantages. And the simple analogy I would give, if you gave me 10 seconds to make the highest possible tower that I can, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go like this and I'm going to go like this and I'm going to try and do something like this. And just by nature of the time constraint, it's unstable.

If you gave me 10 years and infinite blocks again, I would start like this. I'd do this one here, I'd put this one here, I'd put this one here, and I'd build something more stable. And when I look at some of the great founders, and also when I saw that you'd been at your, you know, MicroStrategy for more than 3, almost 4 decades, I think it was, I thought, oh, you're one of the rare long-termists in a world where most of my generation, we think about our career or what we're working on in like maximum 5-year periods. Then we're going to quit and go do something else. Startup founders, they build so they can sell, and then they're sort of holding it together with tape as the acquirer comes to buy the thing. And then nervous as the contract's being signed. 'Cause they know if the acquirer looks under the hood, they're gonna see some— but then I look at Elon and I go, oh gosh, he fucking went and rebuilt a brand new battery and then built the charging network. And SpaceX took 2 decades. My question is about this long-termism and does it create a competitive advantage?

I think Elon thinks like an engineer. And if you look at his businesses, they're all built upon each other. Like if you figure out how to launch a rocket and you have the, the highest payload capacity and the, the cheapest cost to orbit, then you've got an advantage. Now the question is, what do you wanna put in orbit? We put satellites, but what satellite? Like Starlink satellite, because that's the thing everybody wants, internet. And so all of a sudden he's got an advantage, you know, in the sky. And then you build on that advantage and, you know, with battery technology, right?

But he could have gone to Russia and bought a rocket and just shot that up. And that would've been the short term. Even with Tesla, he could have bought the batteries off Ford or—

One great natural example is like a chambered nautilus. If you look at a creature and it's building a shell and it's spiraling out on itself and basically it keeps building on its own structure and it's nature's solution for growth under pressure. It's the Fibonacci sequence too. If you look at a Fibonacci sequence, if I have this and then the next structure is here and the next structure is there and the next structure is there, part of my previous business is the foundation for my next business. And so if you're thinking your growth strategy is to build on a foundation of something you already had and extend its functionality in a natural fashion, that's natural stable growth. When your second business idea is unrelated to your first business in any way other than the fact that you own both, right? Right? Now you're not building on a stable foundation. So most of these businesses that work and the best ideas, they start with someone dominating a market. I'm really good at this.

Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah. And now what is the natural thing that I can add that I can use my existing business to, maybe I'm marketing it. Well, you're Coca-Cola. Well, we deliver a pallet of drinks to 87,000 restaurants in the UK every morning. What's a natural extension? Well, I can put one more type of drink on the pallet, right? You need to use your distribution strength, your market strength, your technical strength in order to lever. I think you look at all the great businesses in the history of the world, like at Standard Oil, Ford Motor, Boeing, Microsoft, the things they did that worked were generally building on top of their foundation, either loyal customers or distribution or some financial asset they already had. Another way to say it is if there's no one else in the world that has, that is better situated to do this thing than you, then you're probably in good shape, right? If there are 97 other companies that have more assets than you in that space, well, you know, you gotta bet that all 97 of them are not gonna react to you when you do it. It's a bit harder Yourself.

And that's where the long-termism comes in because to build that fundamental advantage, it, it, it by definition is gonna take time.

Good example, Amazon Prime, right? Where Amazon started giving free shipping, you know, first free shipping or very cheap shipping and 1-day shipping. And everybody said, well, you're losing money, you're losing money, you're losing money. And they lost money doing this for like a decade. And then they got to some point where like everybody in the country was a member of Amazon Prime and they're like, okay, well now it's $20 a month instead of $10 a month. And it's like an extra $10 a month times like 100 million people. And people are like, oh my God, they just made $12 billion in one press release per year in cash flow. And that's worth like $250 billion. And you're like, Well, what, what were you doing? It's like, we were, we were building the moat. That story is not uncommon with every other thing. It's like you first believe, you build the biggest distribution channel you can. People are gonna tell you, they're gonna tell you, well, there's no future to whatever, to podcast. There's no future to something. And what'll happen is 99% of the people will drop out because they don't believe I believe, and the true believers, the ones that are not creative, won't adapt.

And then there'll be some that'll say, I believe, but I also know there's a threat, but I'm going to channel the technology threat and I'm going to evolve and I'm going to emerge as something 1,000x better than anybody could conceive. And that's a beautiful story.

So speaking of strong foundations, you have 10 rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career, and you've talked about 2 of them here, which is focusing your energy and not chasing every good idea.

Yeah.

The second one was guard your time. The third one is train your mind. And with that, you've got train your body.

You know, the funny story of that is I, I was invited to a cocktail party of a billionaire on the French Riviera in a beautiful home. And I showed up and I walked into the party thinking I was gonna hang out. And another billionaire showed up and he said, you know, Mike, I just had twins, a boy and a girl. And I'm walking around asking all of my friends for advice for them. And I want you to like write some advice for them that I can give to them on their 21st birthday. And he's got this book where he is actually collecting advice for his children to give them on their 21st birthday as young adults. So I sit down and I think, think, think, think, think. And I'm like, focus your mind, guard your time and train your mind. You gotta learn to, you gotta learn You gotta learn something, right? You gotta learn reading, writing, arithmetic. You, you have to actually develop a cultured base. So it's like get an education and then train your body. Like, because if, if you're weak, you're not gonna make it, right? You're not, you're not gonna survive.

And then think for yourself. Everybody in the world wants to program you to believe, to do something they want you to do. And you have to have the presence of mind to think that's not right. Right. Just because everybody that I know and famous, rich, and beautiful people tell me it's right doesn't make it right. You need to decide, think for yourself, and then curate your friends because you, you know, you become who you surround yourself with. And if you surround yourself with positive, inspirational, talented people, you'll be the best person version of yourself. And if you surround yourself with negative, cynical, failing people, they're gonna want you to fail or they're not gonna inspire you to succeed. And they'll bring you down. And so after curate your friends, curate your environment, right? Like make it a happy place where you can work or you can live. And you know, the world didn't say you had to be in the dark in an ugly situation. And after that, keep your promises. At the end of the day, people remember if you didn't keep your promise. So you tell somebody you're gonna do something, do it, right?

If you keep your promises, you'll find those are the people that invest in you. They uplift you. They make you successful. They may be the difference between life and death or the difference between success and failure for you. And ultimately, we're all in relationships with each other, right? And no one is so powerful that they can afford to take anybody else for granted. We all need each other. And finally, stay cheerful and constructive. It doesn't matter whether bad things happen. The point is people want to come to work with someone that's cheerful and happy and constructive. They want to, you know, they want to be in a relationship with that person. All those are just basic principles to get through life. And then the final point is upgrade the world. If you have a plan, if you're on a mission to upgrade the world, you're going to feel better about yourself. You get up every day, you have a mission, you have something to do. Like, what is my mission? You know, I'm preaching the gospel of digital empowerment, right? Satoshi created this economic property, right? He gave economic empowerment to 8 billion people for the first time in human history.

And, uh, we created the world's first perfect money. We created, you know, digital energy, digital matter, digital property, right? We can be 1,000x more as humans with technology than we were. I look through all human history and I see it's a story of misery. You know, why do people die? Lack of clean water, lack of clean air, lack of clean food, lack of clean money. What do we want? We want to live forever. We want to live happily forever.

Do you want to live forever?

I want to live as long as I can live constructively and make a contribution. If I can be engaged and vital, then yeah. At the point that I can no longer make a contribution, then I will move on gracefully.

But if there was a button in front of you now and the button, pressing it guaranteed you immortality, would press it.

I think so. I suppose so.

Why aren't you then committing more of your efforts to longevity? People ask Elon the same question.

I think there's 8 billion people on the planet and there are many people that I respect that are much more qualified to pursue that mission than me.

And the thing that you've chosen to focus your efforts on and become the leading voice on, and I've watched you for many, many, many, many years as I've, you know, when Bitcoin comes down in price, someone sometimes I need a bit of a therapist. Remind me of why I've invested in Bitcoin, and that person has been you over the years. And then when it's up, you know, to your credit, you're consistent about it. And that is, you know, I have watched you and thought, I think this guy must be, he's either like batshit crazy or a genius. And it's sometimes hard to tell. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier when people will say you're crazy at first and then you'll be proven right. Now, historically, you've been proven right. If you zoom out from when you started advocating for Bitcoin, Bitcoin is down right now. So again, we're back into fear. People are scared again in there. It's funny what happens because when it was going up a couple of months ago, everyone thought, oh my God, this is gonna be the future of money. And now it's down. Everyone is like convinced that it was always a Ponzi scheme and it's done.

You've got a, I guess trying to simplify this for average people, you've taken a lot of debt out to buy more and more and more and more and more Bitcoin. Is that accurate?

I guess we've got about $6.5 billion of convertible debt and $15 billion of preferred stocks outstanding. And we're sitting on top of about $58 billion of assets right now. So we have raised about $65 billion in capital to buy Bitcoin, but most of it wasn't debt.

Oh, okay.

Of the $65 billion, for the most part, we've raised capital with equity and some debt in order to buy Bitcoin. And we've been doing that because we wanted to pump $65 billion of capital, of money, of energy into the ecosystem. So we're, we're powering the ecosystem with capital.

Everyone theorizes, I've seen a few people on my timeline that I follow theorizes how bad it would have to get for Bitcoin in terms of price for you to be in trouble because you—

Bitcoin could fall to $5,000 a coin. We would still be overcollateralized against the debt.

You'd still be fine.

Yeah.

And the other thing people theorize a lot, and again, I did a comment analysis to figure out what people wanted to hear from you, is you sold a bit about Bitcoin. You've been asked this a few times, I know.

Yeah.

You sold a bit of Bitcoin recently after telling a lot of people maybe to hold onto their Bitcoin. People wanna know why you sold the Bitcoin.

Okay. Well, so let's make the first point. The only person that's never sold more Bitcoin than me, Satoshi, is Satoshi. Satoshi never sold a million, a million one Bitcoin. Our company has 847,000 Bitcoin. And so we bought more and we're holding it more than anybody other than Satoshi. And Satoshi's not active. So we have a reasonable chance of never selling more Bitcoin than Satoshi if we just keep at it for the next few years. What I've said is—

So I should probably share this. This is why there's a kidney.

Yeah.

'Cause you said, sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.

I have waged a campaign nonstop every day for 6 years to, to promote and advocate Bitcoin as a long-term store of value. Right. And, and what I would say is if you have money that you don't need for the next 4 years and your choice is do I invest it in the S&P or a house or a private company or soybeans or money markets or debt instruments? I think that Bitcoin is the best, right? I think that Bitcoin is digital capital. It's gonna be the best long-term capital asset. Set.

And you know, so why did you sell the Bitcoin instead of your kidney?

Yeah, we sold some Bitcoin a few weeks ago because there was a narrative or a belief in the market that our company had become so systemically integrated or important to Bitcoin that we could never sell. And if we sold, Bitcoin would go to zero and our stock would go to zero.

Because you own 4% of the total supply of Bitcoin.

Yeah, because we own 4% because we're the biggest buyer, we're the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. So the first sentiment was, well, Bitcoin will never succeed if they don't keep buying. And the second sentiment or belief misconception was if we sell, it'll crash Bitcoin and it'll crash the company. And because of that, short sellers and certain people in the market took the position that the $55 billion of Bitcoin we own was worth nothing. And so what we had was this ignorant, skeptical notion that all the company's assets were worthless. And because the company's assets were worthless, we wouldn't pay our dividends. And because we wouldn't pay our dividends, the credit would go to zero and the equity would go to zero. The company would fail and Bitcoin would fail. And we said, well, Bitcoin trades $20 billion a day or more, and we've got 55 billion of it. And if we were 0.01% of the market, we could still meet all of our obligations and it's not gonna change the price of Bitcoin. But no one believed us. So if you want people to believe that you can do a thing, you have to do the thing.

If you told me you could do a backflip right now, but I said you can't, at some point you have to do the backflip, right? Especially if I tell you that I'm gonna throw you in jail if you can't do a backflip.

Who told you that?

Well, that's exactly what's going on in the market. The market's position was the company is worthless. The stock is going to zero and Bitcoin is gonna zero because they can't sell.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So if we want to defend Bitcoin, like we have to prove that we can sell it on occasion, right? So what we're doing is we're commercializing the market in digital credit. And if you have a billion dollars of Bitcoin and they believe it's worth a billion, you can sell $200 million of credit credit and then you can grow the business if they believe that. If they don't believe that the Bitcoin is worth anything, you can't, and you sell the $200 million of credit, the credit's worthless and the company's worthless. And so we were in a doom loop, or the, the market was in this doom loop, this, this negative short, I don't know, like a, a psychosis, almost like hyperventilating, saying that the largest buyer of Bitcoin can't sell it. And if they do sell it, Bitcoin will fail. And what we needed to do was demonstrate that if we sold Bitcoin, it wouldn't fail. So when we sold the Bitcoin, it was $60,000, $59,000, and it traded up. And so we broke that misconception. We broke that narrative. It turns out that the break-even point for us is about 3.2%. So if Bitcoin appreciates 3.2%, we can pay the dividends forever by just selling the Bitcoin.

But you can imagine if you're a short seller, you say, well, you can't sell the Bitcoin, ha ha ha ha ha, because Bitcoin will fail. And so they wanna say, that the credit is worthless because you won't sell the Bitcoin. So the way to break that cycle is you sell the Bitcoin. Now you can illustrate that the credit is actually good credit. We can pay the dividends forever. And now the credit investors—

Without having to sell more Bitcoin.

No, the whole point of this was we were selling equity in order to pay the dividend on the credit.

Yeah.

And the short sellers took the position that you're gonna sell the equity until the stock goes to zero. Zero because you can't sell the Bitcoin.

Yeah.

So how do you actually get, how do you break that? Well, you have to say, well, we can sell the Bitcoin.

And you sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividend.

So we sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividends to prove that we could fund the dividends with Bitcoin, which means we don't have to sell the equity. And if, if we don't have to sell the equity, then the equity trades at a premium to Bitcoin, trades rationally, and then the credit trades rationally. So it was a benefit to the equity investors and the credit investors to show that you can power the company company with Bitcoin.

Do you intend to sell more?

It's not our primary strategy. So if the common stock trades at a premium to the underlying assets, then probably we're fine with the common stock. But if the common stock ever sells at a discount or trades at a discount to the Bitcoin assets, then you sell Bitcoin in order to protect the common stock.

And where do you think Bitcoin's going in terms of monetary value in terms of one Bitcoin currently? What did you say? It was what, $68,000 or something?

I think it appreciates about 30% a year for the next 20 years, right? And then it'll slow down to being appreciated about 20% a year.

So you think it's the best asset to put your money in really, really respective of who you are?

Another way to say it is I think it, I think it outperforms the S&P index by a factor of 1.5 to 2.

Who shouldn't invest in Bitcoin?

The right people to invest in Bitcoin are long-term capital investors. So if you have a certain amount of money and you don't need it for the next 4 years, and ideally 10 years, then you would take a portion of your capital investment portfolio and buy Bitcoin. And if you believe in it, if you're a Bitcoin maxi, if you spend 100 hours cutting it, you'd buy a lot. And if you're not sure, you'd probably diversify that portfolio across, you know, some real estate, some equity, some other long-term assets, and some Bitcoin. The people that shouldn't buy it are people that need the money back in 12 weeks.

What about like a regular 25-year-old? The, one of the questions that I saw emerging from some of the interviews you've done is if, if a normal young person has a few hundred dollars to invest today, why should they bother with Wall Street products like stocks or corporate stocks instead of just buying a real Bitcoin and holding it themselves?

Yeah, I think if you have money to invest for the long term, you're gonna get double the performance from BTC that you would get from like the S&P index.

But for that 25-year-old, would, would it not be smarter for them to spend it on something that's gonna help them train their mind like you said?

If you only have $100, I wouldn't go spend $500,000 on an expensive university education, but I would spend $20 a month on an AI subscription. So yeah, you should definitely spend money necessary to get the Super Grok or the Pro or the Professional Edition, whether it's $20 a month or $200. $200 a month is the most I would spend, $20 a month is probably the least I would spend. But look, we're talking about your Netflix subscription at that point. But after you've done that, then you're talking about what you ought to be invested in. I think that the— that you ought to be invested in digital capital because you can take it with you anywhere in the world. If you invest in an Airbnb or real estate, you know, you're locked into a certain city, you can't travel with it, it's high maintenance, there's a risk. If you invest in an individual stock, you have a lot of anxiety because they come and they go, and you got to pick the right stock. And most stocks will fail, but some will succeed. But, but it, it really is much more challenging. I, I think really it comes down to if you have a liquid portfolio, you know, are you going to invest in like the S&P index if you're a conventional capital investor, or you going to invest in Bitcoin if you're a digital or, you know, a, a technology capital faster.

Michael, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, what is one thing you believe that maybe you haven't talked about enough that you think likely 99% of the world don't yet believe?

If I look at my life and I think about something that's had a real impact on me, it's after I got a full education, you know, uh, from college, I, I eventually went back and I studied two topics on my own. One, uh, like practical applied statistics, all, all the stuff that Nicholas Taleb wrote, like Fooled by Randomness and Skin in the Game and The Black Swan. And, uh, you know, how do you know the difference between something that's meaningful and something that's just misleading random data? That was profoundly valuable to me. And I would say I would say, you know, anybody that hasn't read all of those books probably ought to go read those books and obsess over applied statistics. That's the one thing the AI will not be able to do for you. When you have to decide whether to cross the street while you're typing on your phone, you know, the AI will not give you a never-ending real-time stream of common sense to tell you should or should not do that thing. And so I think that that's really important. And the second thing that I did after I left school and after a lifetime of experiences, like I went back and I just read The Story of Civilization by Durant, every page, 11 volumes, 14,000 pages.

Most of the history that you read in school, it's the Cliff Notes. But if you go through the entire thing, and I recommend that one just 'cause I think it was a pretty well-balanced history that covered art and culture and politics and technology. And it's not just military history, not just political history, but it was all a very synthetic history. When you go back and you read it all as an adult, then it gives you such a profound appreciation for humanity and it gives you so much wisdom. And what you'll find is all these things you think you're discovering discovering, they got discovered in like 15th century Russia and then they got rediscovered. You know, like most of these things that people tell you, or this is new and profound. Oh, it was new and profound 100 times in a row or 1,000 times in a row. It was just the story was told a different way each time.

Give me an example of a thing that we think is new, but history tells you—

Maybe the fact that currency started getting debased when Nixon went off the gold standard. And what happened in 1971 or whatever. And the truth of the matter is that was the point at which the US dollar started weakening at a much more rapid rate. But it turns out that every currency everywhere in history has been debased. My point here really is, I think people think that they learn stuff in college, but really it's not too late to go back and relearn math math, especially applied statistics, and it's not too late to go back and relearn history. And as an adult, you always appreciate those things much better. Yeah, you almost— it's like the education is wasted on the youth, you know, because you don't have the life experiences to appreciate what you're reading. But also, you know, they're summarizing, editing, and censoring a lot of the stuff you and if you just go back and say, I'm just gonna, you know, read the entire thing in its entirety. And there are a lot of other things you could also read, full histories of other things. But as an adult, I think that that just makes you a better person and makes you a better business person, makes you a better leader.

And also it helps you overcome the arrogance of thinking, oh, I'm the first guy in human history that ever did this. Ever encountered it. And what you'll realize is no, you're not. And the empowering part is someone else did, and this is how they worked their way through the issue. And that can be very inspirational for you.

Michael, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for opening all of our eyes and thank you for building a business which has continued to innovate in such a way that people never thought was possible. Thank you for introducing me to Bitcoin. I think you both introduced me to it, but also you enabled me to have a mental framework for not selling it. When I, when, if I had, I would've lost a lot of money. And thankfully now I don't even know where it is. My brother and some of my siblings take care of it for me and I don't have to experience the angst. And also just thank you for pushing for this idea of sovereignty. Cause I think in the world of increasing censorship and centralization, Sovereignty, I think, is a really winning idea. And I think that's what you're sort of philosophically aiming at as well. And yeah, I hope to speak to you sometime soon because you're an individual capable of speaking about such a broad range of subjects that I care so much about.

It's a pleasure to be on the journey together.

Thank you, my friend.