State of Play: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Michael Saylor, the co-founder and CEO of MicroStrategy, joins Scott to give us the 411 on Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space. Michael explains why he’s been making big bets on Bitcoin and investing his company’s treasury into the cryptocurrency. He also shares his advice on navigating our world of superabundance. Follow Michael on Twitter, @michael_saylor. (14:47) Scott opens with his thoughts on Tesla joining the S&P 500 on December 21st and Disney’s mammoth content announcements. This Week’s Office Hours: why WhatsApp is Facebook’s most valuable asset, investing in the cannabis industry, and the second-order effects of remote work. Have a question for Scott? Email a voice recording to [email protected]. (45:35) Algebra of Happiness: a call to arms. (57:26) Subscribe to The Prof G Show on YouTube here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Galloway?

  Episode 40, the atomic number of zirconium. I don't understand rare gems. They find diamonds in my luggage and TSA thinks they're theirs. They find my edibles and all of a sudden they're mine. The 40-yard dash is an important metric in American football scouting. True story, I tried out for football in college. My notes back were small, but slow. Let's make this podcast big, yet fast and near diamond-like. Go, go, go!

• 0:34Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 40th episode of the Prop G Show. On today's episode, we speak with Michael Saylor, the co-founder and CEO of MicroStrategy. He's made a big bet, as in a monstrous bet, on Bitcoin and the crypto space since the start of the pandemic. And we're going to discuss the state of play and why his company continues to invest millions of dollars into Bitcoin. He's been somewhat of an evangelist for the asset, the currency, whatever you want to call it. And I asked Michael to come on and give us sort of the 411. Give us the delio, if you will, on the cryptocurrency that is Bitcoin. He's also this big systems thinker that seems to have insight into the future. Okay, what's happening?

• 1:16Scott Galloway?

  Let's be honest, this is the vaccine and the seven doors, meaning that there's really only one thing happening or one thing that is probably we're talking about or discussing. And we should take a moment of pause to praise this historic moment for humanity as the US became the sixth country to roll out the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine. I don't know if it's BioNTech, BioNTech vaccine. Anyways, this is exciting. And all 50 states have begun to administer the vaccine. The first dose was given to an ICU nurse in Queens. So we need to keep in mind here the logistical challenges as UPS and FedEx have to safely deliver or attempt to deliver the first 3 million doses of the vaccine to 636 distribution locations nationwide.

• 1:58Scott Galloway?

  Aside from that, this is an opportunity for us to demonstrate our citizenship as we need at least 70% of the population to get not one, but two doses of this vaccine to put an end to COVID-19. And other news, there really isn't any other news, but we'll talk about it. The end of big tech as we know it is coming. The FTC in 48 states attorneys general. Have sued Facebook for its abuse of power and anti-competitive behavior. Okay, better late than never. We have more on that during office hours, so stay tuned. We also have a full overview, more color, more details, more texture, coming up on the Prop G YouTube show, our Prop G YouTube show on Guest It, You Guest It, YouTube. We've linked to where you can subscribe in the episode description.

• 2:41Scott Galloway?

  You're welcome. What a thrill. So with that, let's move on to stocks and other exciting business developments. We're taking a temperature check on Tesla. The company is expected to begin trading on the S and P 500 on the 21st of December, less than a week away, and recently announced a $5 billion capital raise for the second time in three months. Why wouldn't they when the stock is up sevenfold year to date? And its market capitalization sits at, get this, $600 billion. It bears repeating that this firm is now worth more than, I don't know, let's call it General Motors, Chrysler, Daimler, Toyota, Volkswagen, Airbus, and Boeing. And it produces about 400,000 vehicles a year versus 24 million vehicles for those

• 3:25Scott Galloway?

  automobile firms. Actually, it's probably more like 30 to 40 million for those other automobile firms and, I don't know, a couple thousand or a couple hundred. Big boy jets, much like we've been talking about how Airbnb is the ultimate brand. Tesla is also one of the greatest brands ever built with no advertising. Because of Elon Musk's ability to drive the narrative, we see that they don't need advertising. And by the way, by the way, I still, I was on a call last night with a bunch of political consultants and they were talking about starting a media firm. I don't know why I'm avoiding it. The Lincoln Project, these are incredibly impressive people and their tendency is to start something around media or an ad agency or communications firm. And I'm like, come on, guys, you don't need to be the tallest midget. That shit is

• 4:06Scott Galloway?

  over. The sun has passed midday on the era of brand. Amazon, Tesla, Apple, they all shed the value or gain the value of IPG, WPP, Omnicom, and Publicity in a trading day. That is, anyone who starts talking a lot about brand, look at them and say, okay, I see a dead man or woman walking. You are going to be out of a job in about 24 months. Yeah, brand is a construct for which we use it as a guiding line for our strategy. Which core associations are we going to reinforce? And it seems like the only core association recently in the In the investment world is are we a disruptor? Yes or no? That's kind of the only question that seems to matter. Anyway, Tesla is joining the S and P 500. And why is that a big deal?

• 4:50Scott Galloway?

  For one thing, fund managers who run S and P 500 funds will need to add Tesla to their portfolios. According to Barron's, there is $5.4 trillion in index funds that track the S and P 500, and these funds will need to purchase an estimated $81 billion of Tesla shares. My guess is they've already done that. This also means one company will be leaving the index. So their shares will need to be sold. How should Wall Street value the stock? Who the fuck knows? Don't listen to me. I thought this thing was going to get cut in half. I don't know about 80, 90% ago or about 700% gains ago. I could not be. There are a lot of places I am very wrong. This is one of them. Let's not forget that Elon Musk tweeted back in May that in his opinion, the stock price was too high.

• 5:35Scott Galloway?

  Okay, that's a new strategy. That's a new IR strategy. Bloomberg reported that Goldman Sachs has a price target of $780 a share, while JP Morgan is at $90. Okay, what the fuck does that mean? Once at Goldman's at 780, JP Morgan is at 90? All right, okay. Enough about Tesla and its over or under valuation. The mouse, let's talk about the mouse. Who wrote unleash the mouse a few months ago? Who is basically dictating Disney and AT&T's strategy? From his little guest house and his mic? Two turntables and a microphone

• 6:14Scott Galloway?

  are moving the corporate world. We're changing the world of telco and content here at the Prof G Show. And I'm only half kidding. By the way, BTW, that's right, Bob Iger. That's right, Jan Stanki. I know you're listening to the dog. I know you're like one of those penguins that can hear the dog. The unique raspy Gladys Knight of strategy and shareholder value meets technology meets innovation. Voice of the dog. I know you're listening. I know you're out there and it's okay. We can keep it to ourselves. We're intellectual lovers on the side. I'm your side piece and that's okay. That's okay. All right, 87 million subscribers is nearly half of what Netflix has. That's what Disney Plus has.

• 6:56Scott Galloway?

  And the fact that an estimated one third of the streaming service's initial subscriber base came from the partnership with Verizon suggests low churn and customers are committed. To Baby Yoda and more. This is Disney Plus. Who predicted Disney Plus would be the baller streaming video service before it came back? Who predicted that? I'm not even gonna tell you. I'm not even gonna tell you. It's not Michael Saylor, who's a fucking genius around everything else, but I got the call here. Anyways, enough desperation for your affirmation. If there's one thing you've recently learned on this podcast, it's dispersion. This is my word of 2020 and 2021. Disney is taking its content and dispersing it into series on Disney Plus, moving content from the big screens to your homes and mobile devices.

• 7:39Scott Galloway?

  10 new Star Wars series. Oh, my God, not eight, not nine, 10, including The Mandalorian, will be new to Disney Plus over the next few years. And on top of that, the company is also spinning kid favorite movies, including Moana and Cars into series in 2023. In 2024, the company plans to spend up to $9 billion on Disney Plus content alone. In that same year, 2024, Disney expects to reach 350 million subscribers worldwide across all of its streaming services. Who predicted Disney stock would be up 30% on its move to Rundle? I was wrong. It's up 80%. It's up goddamn 80%. And guess what? It goes north of here because it is gonna bust a blue line path

• 8:21Scott Galloway?

  to 350 million subscribers worldwide across all of its streaming services. What can be learned? What can be learned? A move to the Rundle, a move to the recurring revenue bundle, requires vision. It requires the assets to make it an IQ test, not a consumer value proposition. But more than anything, the baller move it requires is to cross the Valley of Death, to say, "We're gonna pull this shit out of theaters." We're gonna say, "We're gonna give up that billion dollars in revenues at the box office, or those billions of dollars." They have made a huge bet here. What does this mean for the streaming wars? Let's assume there's gonna be a consolidation. It's kinda Disney Plus, Netflix, and maybe a kinda, maybe a kind of a distant,

• 9:03Scott Galloway?

  close third, HBO Max, which is finally getting its shit together and taking The Dragons or taking Game of Thrones and extending, doing its own spinoff with a show about dragons. By the way, by the way, all strategy, all strategy comes down to one question. What can we do? That's really fucking hard. What can we do that is really difficult, so difficult that few other firms can follow us? And guess what? Guess what? Well, let's come up with great, original scripted television. Well, I don't know. Netflix has a ton of talent and $20 billion to come up with 100 ideas so they can get to one, The Queen's Gambit. Hello, genius. Hola. Hola, Spanish word for genius, which I don't know. That thing is incredible. Oh, my gosh, incredible.

• 9:48Scott Galloway?

  Biggest mis-product placement or brand collaboration opportunity was for Netflix, not to start selling chess sets, but anyways, but I digress. They're doing just fine without that. But the bottom line is Disney probably can't even compete. Even Disney can't compete. Even AT&T can't compete with Netflix, but what can they do? Disney can look at the $100 billion in acquisitions it's made over the last decade, specifically Pixar, specifically Marvel, specifically Star Wars, Lucasfilm. They can look at those franchises and say, we're going to start spinning a bunch of interesting stories. And by the way, The Mandalorian isn't in any way diluting the franchise. It's absolutely supplementing it. But what do we think about strategy? Why is this so baller? Strategy is all about what you can do that others can't. It's really hard.

• 10:31Scott Galloway?

  And Disney Plus recognizes this and is leaning into the $100 billion they've spent on these incredible franchises. What does this mean for the streaming wars? Only time will tell, but you can predict, you can see how the ultimate flywheel here, whether it's Baby Yoda toys, experiences, it's Star Wars Galaxy Edge, or the reprisal of the car, car series franchise. What's creative thinking here? What's sort of a gangster move that if it happens would be so baller that it might be like predicting, I don't know, Amazon buys Whole Foods? If Disney were to buy Roblox? Roblox, think about this, the company that 50% of kids under the age of 16 have touched in the last 30 days. This could be the virtual theme park. One thing that Michael Saylor said in our upcoming interview that really kind of blew

• 11:14Scott Galloway?

  my mind was investing in the virtual. And I wonder if the next version of theme parks, and I hate to think this because you hate to think about your kids being in front of screens more, but anyways, Roblox could be an incredible acquisition for Disney. But the streaming wars are going to go through a consolidation. We're about to get to the final four, if you will, of the tournament. Sure, Gonzaga, you know, went, went the distance, but Hulu is probably going to roll up into Disney and most of these things just don't, probably aren't going to be able to carve out.

• 11:43Scott Galloway?

  The space that they need to occupy. So we're going to see consolidation, some rebundling in 2021. I don't know, though. I just think Disney Plus, oh, my gosh, what incredible momentum. And the other move here is we're going to see not just original scripted TV and movies go behind a wall and be part of the streaming wars. The next kind of salvo or the next really interesting entrant from a content arena into the streaming wars is going to be news and politics. Fareed Zakaria is the Queen's Gambit and Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper is the Mandalorian. Anyways, that's coming next in 2021 as his consolidation. We shall see. We'll be right back. Stay with us for a conversation about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies with MicroStrategy CEO

• 12:28Scott Galloway?

  and unique thinker, Michael Saylor.

• 12:32Scott Galloway?

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• 13:17Scott Galloway?

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• 13:35Scott Galloway?

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• 14:20Scott Galloway?

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• 14:55Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Michael Saylor, the co-founder and CEO of MicroStrategy. So, Michael, I think a lot of us look at Bitcoin and pretend that we know more than we do. Can you give us sort of the Bitcoin for Dummies Cliff Notes on the origins of Bitcoin and why it has been, for lack of a better term, so disruptive? And there's so much excitement around it?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, first of all, the problem is that there's $300 trillion worth of money invested in stocks, bonds, real estate, and cash. They're all fiat instruments. And the central bankers are devaluing the currency. So that's the problem faced by 7.8 billion people. It's the problem faced by every investor on the planet. Every investor on the planet in the next three to five years is going to lose half their wealth unless they come up with a solution to the currency devaluation. So let's put that in one corner. Now, what is the solution? Well, the solution in theory is a synthetic safe haven investment grade asset. Call it pharmaceutical grade gold.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  If I had an asset which was totally provably scarce, immutable, no one could create any more of, and everybody on the planet agreed that they were going to store their money in that asset, then you would have something better than gold, better than any other treasury reserve asset that you could use to protect yourself against asset inflation. And now, what is Bitcoin? It's a crypto asset network. It's decentralized. No company controls it. No government regulates it. It runs on thousands and thousands of decentralized nodes. And the obvious thing it is, is it's an investment grade, safe haven treasury reserve asset. That's the obvious thing.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  That's what the security BTC is. What is Bitcoin, the network? Well, you wrote the four. We both know about Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook. They're all big tech networks that dominate their particular sphere of influence. Bitcoin is the world's first monetary network. It's a crypto monetary network, which means like Facebook gathered all the social energy and channeled it, stored it, and Google gathered all the information energy and YouTube gathered all the video energy and Apple gathered all the mobile energy and Amazon gathered all the retail energy on a network. Bitcoin is gathering all the monetary energy.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  As it gathers the energy, it stores it across time. It can store it for 100 years with no power loss. It's a big monetary battery and you can channel it across space as a settlement network. If I wanted to put $100 million on a network and give it to my grandchildren in 30 years, and I didn't want a CEO to screw it up, a government to steal it, I didn't want to have it seized by anybody, I didn't want to have it inflated away, debased, impaired in any way, Bitcoin is pure monetary energy. It's your best bet. So what is Bitcoin? It is a solution to everybody's problem. How do I store value in the face of currency inflation?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And it's also a monetary network that you can plug Square and Apple Pay and PayPal and Amazon and any tech into. And so that's what makes it so exciting right now. It's a big tech play and it's an investment safe haven asset at the same time in a year when everybody in the world understands they have a problem that they were kind of oblivious to last year, but now it's like in your face with a K-shaped recovery and you can't not address it.

• 18:50Scott Galloway?

  Are you really saying, and this is my first observation and you're connecting dots for me, that Bitcoin is the first currency, because a currency is just two parties agree that something is a store of value, but it's a currency that is actually because of its limited supply that we can trust will be limited, has become an asset, that it's actually, it's not subject to the same fluctuations or political manipulation that most currencies are? Hasn't it jumped the Rubicon here and become an asset, not a currency?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of confusion and it's called cryptocurrencies and people talk about it becoming a reserve currency, but I think that's more of a red herring because what it really is, Scott, is a crypto asset. And what people want is they want to take their money, their savings, and put it in a bank in cyberspace where they're going to get interest and where no politician's going to debase it or devalue it. It used to be, right? If we didn't keep printing money, you would put your money in a savings account, get 5% interest, and you would feel like in a few years you had more money than you started with. But now, nobody believes that if they save their money in the bank in five years, they'll have more purchasing power than they started with. And so there's

• 20:05Speaker 02

  a mad stampede for a store of value that leads people to buy Tesla stock and Amazon, and they're looking to big tech because everybody knows they can't hold cash. And not only is the bank going to pay you no interest, but the government is going to double the amount of US dollars in supply in four years, and that means that the same, that double the number of dollars are chasing after the same number of assets and goods and services. Ergo, the purchasing power of your money is collapsing. You need to find something that is immutable. Bitcoin is the first thing in human history where we figured out how to create a crypto asset that nobody can screw with and they can't debase and inflate and make more of.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  And so it's a good idea. The only question is, would it be hacked? Would it be banned? Or would it be copied? The reason that people didn't adopt it immediately is they're afraid of hacking, banning, and copying. And it took about 10 years to conclude it's not going to be hacked. No one's hacked it yet. It's not going to be banned. The IRS has normalized it. The SEC, by the way, Scott, says it's property. It's not a security. And that's a very important distinction because it's property like land in Texas, not a security because no CEO, no company can control it and manage the supply. It can't be corrupted.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And that means it's much more broad-based to the average person. It means it crosses borders. The issue with cloning is, people tried to clone it 10,000 times. And so Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, Bitcoin Gold, all those were clones. They all failed. The other 7,000 cryptocurrencies, they didn't establish themselves as the monster asset. Bitcoin is $350 billion in monetary energy today. So it's crossed the event horizon. It's got its senator, Cynthia Loomis, who believes in it. It's got a congressional caucus, Warren Davidson, that supports it. It's got Brian Brooks at the OCC saying banks can

• 22:14Speaker 02

  custody it. It's got the IRS saying you can check the box. It's property. They've given it, you know, normal tax treatment. It's got Fidelity. It's got banks in Wyoming that are chartered. And in this year, since March, an avalanche of shoes dropping. You've got Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Bill Miller coming on board. My company was the first publicly traded company to buy it on our balance sheet. And we just, we did that. We bought $425 million worth of it. It traded up. Square was the next publicly traded company. Then you had Square build it into Square Cash. And Square Cash sold

• 22:56Speaker 02

  $1.7 billion of Bitcoin in the last 12 weeks. And you want a growth number? Up 100% quarter over quarter, up 1,100% year over a year.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  If you, why would you do that? Well, because if I have a bank account in my hand, I've got free checking. When I plug it into Bitcoin, Bitcoin's been appreciating against the dollar 100% or more every year for the past decade on average. It's like having a savings account that pays you 100% tax-free interest. Why wouldn't you want that? And so when Square did that, that juiced their business and now PayPal copied them. And so you're probably going to see 10 to 15 billion dollars of Bitcoin sold off of mobile phone apps between Square and PayPal. And eventually you're going to see the other players follow them. So it's big tech. It's being driven by technology.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  It's being driven by the inflationary economy of central banks. And by the way, it's disturbing in the US when the Fed triples the monetary expansion rate. But if you're in Argentina, Lebanon, or Venezuela, you're going to starve to death. I mean, it's not disturbing. It's a matter of life or death. If the currency collapses by 90%.

• 24:17Scott Galloway?

  What is the catalyst here for Bitcoin as an asset other than just supply and demand? Is it because more it'll be a default currency more? Is it, or let me put it another way. Why is MicroStrategy? Your shareholders don't need you to buy Bitcoin. They can do it on their own. So you obviously think that Bitcoin must add value to your enterprise.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  There's two, you know, there's two questions there. Why did MicroStrategy bought it? And let's hold that for a second. I'll explain that. But let's talk about asset valuation. Commercial real estate, cash, bonds, and stocks are all fiat instruments. So the value of them is based upon the underlying discounted value of the cash flows with maybe a terminal value. But ultimately, you value the bond based upon the discounted value of the cash flows. And the cash flows in the currency that the bond pays the coupon in. Hence, if the bond's paying me 3% interest and the currency's been inflated at 15% a year, it's not going to hold value unless you get a capital gain in the bond.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  And the only way you get a capital gain in the bond is the Federal Reserve has to crank down the interest rate. So bonds will hold value if the interest rates keep cranking down from 5% to 4% to 3% to 2% to 1%. If they don't go negative, Scott, then that's the end of the road for bonds because they've, they're obviously not going to yield north of 10% coupons. So that takes you to real estate. But real estate is kind of like a bond, except the rents are the coupon. And now the issue is, is the real estate yield north of 10%? Not, generally not. And so the only way to make real estate work is the interest rates keep coming down. You refinance the real estate leverage up. And when the interest rates hit the end of the run,

• 26:06Speaker 02

  this is why so many people are screaming, "Please take interest rates negative." If interest rates go negative, it's a big win for people that own bonds or real estate. Now let's go to stocks. Well, if I got a company that's yielding 5% cash flow per share, or 5% yield, and the money supply is expanding at 5%, I'm kind of holding value. The CFO is probably going to go leverage up, borrow some money, short the dollar, buy their stock back, get the cash flow yield to 8% or 9% or 10%, the stock will go up. That's how, that's how you get the stock to hold its value and its low growth. If it's a high-growth stock like Google, Facebook, Amazon, they're going 20% a year top line and 20% cash flow.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  They can stay ahead of a 5% or 6% hurdle rate without leverage. But when the hurdle rate goes to 15%, 16%, it gets hard for everybody. It got three times as hard. Now, that's, that's the problem with fiat assets. So what about a scarce asset? If I knew there was inflation coming, I might go buy a massive ranch in Napa Valley or in Argentina, or I might buy a big beach house. Or I might buy a Picasso. Those are all scarce. The Federal Reserve can't cut that in half, and it's not based on cash flows. But the problem is California can tax your ranch in Napa Valley, and they can tax it away from you. In Florida, I pay 2% tax, property tax.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  So if they keep raising the valuation of your property in 30 years, you lose your property. If the government puts in place a wealth tax in California, United States, you can't move your building and maybe you can't get the gold out of the country. You can't, how do you move $100 million of gold from New York to Tokyo when someone doesn't want you to move it? You put $10 million of Bitcoin in the network and you could move it to Switzerland in 30 minutes for three bucks. It's the ultimate empowerment for the individual that wants to take custody of their own life energy. And by the way, I'm not necessarily advocating the crypto anarchist approach. Like you don't need to be planning for the zombie apocalypse with Bitcoin.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  You could simply take the view that, isn't it better that I invest $10 million in Bitcoin knowing that every 10 minutes I can audit the entire supply from my own node everywhere in the world? That's totally transparent. B, I don't have to trust a bank, or if I lose trust in my custodian, I can move it to another custodian in 15 minutes, or I can take self custody. That's a big advantage. It keeps everybody honest. And then C, this is the most tech-friendly asset in the world because over Thanksgiving, Scott, over Thanksgiving, if you had Apple stock or Amazon stock, it stopped trading

• 28:58Speaker 02

  at 4:00 PM on Wednesday and then it traded from 9:30 AM on Friday until 1:00 PM on Friday, three and a half hours. If you had Bitcoin, it traded 113.5 hours instead of three and a half hours in every country, in every language, in just about every currency on earth, every second of the day. So it's a great global asset and that's what makes it the global monetary network. It's suitable for any country, any person, any currency, any language, any time, any place, and that gives people great comfort. MicroStrategy?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  I just don't want to lose half my shareholder value in my treasury over 36 months. So let's get to that question, like why did we buy Bitcoin?

• 29:48Scott Galloway?

  Well, just let me interrupt you there because you not only bought Bitcoin, so I'm on the board of a public company that has a half a billion dollars in cash and on a regular basis, we talk about the best way to deploy that cash for shareholders. And we ultimately always end up going...

• 30:06Scott Galloway?

  You know, as safe as can be because if you want to be invisible till you screw up, be a board that takes your cash and invests it in a risky asset. You not only took cash off the balance sheet, you did a bond offering. You levered up and purchased $650 million in Bitcoin, if I understand that correctly. Tell me how that started, what your board asked you and how you got them over the hump to do this. Cause that's a, I mean, that's either an exceptionally visionary or dangerous decision.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  It's unique. I think it's utterly rational. And once you understand our reasoning, I think, I think you'll agree, but everybody's entitled to their thoughts on it. So let's, um, let's start here. I have a company that's basically low growth, generating a lot of cash, stable enterprise software company. When we came into the year, you know, we were generating 20, 30 million in cash flow a year. And we had $550 million of excess cash. And we had traditionally invested our treasury in short-term bonds yielding was 5% a decade ago. And then three, and then two, and then one, and then pretty soon it was yielding nothing.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  And then we bought our stock back and we would buy, we bought hundreds of millions of dollars of our stock back. And we were saving the treasury for a rainy day. And I thought it's responsible not to take debt and to have a cash balance so that we can make good on our obligations to our customers, our counterparties, our vendors, our employees. And okay, well, so what happened in March? The economy shut down, you had a K-shaped recovery. And then on one hand, everybody needed our software more than ever because we're selling business intelligence software to banks, governments, big retailers, organizations, they're all, they're all using it. So the value proposition is intact, but we realized that everything we'd done in terms of marketing and sales and services

• 32:05Speaker 02

  was going to be much less expensive and our cost structure decreased by $40 million a year or more with no. No diminution in the value proposition. So we went from thinking we're going to generate 20 to 30 million a year and we might need cash for a rainy day, to thinking we're going to generate 60 to 90 million in cash a year, you know, ad infinitum. We're not going to need the cash for a rainy day. The rainy day came, it's the pandemic, we know what happened. And we couldn't spend the cash if we wanted to because I can't, you know, I can't book a hotel, I can't fly in an airplane, I can't have an event. All of the expensive marketing and sales activities went away.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  And then finally, the cost of capital, Scott, went from 5% to 15%. Like, all my investors started saying to me, "We don't value your cash at anything." Nobody can be a professional investor, holding their money in cash, yielding 20 basis points. And so their view is, "Well, give it back to us," or, you know, "Or do something with it." When the Fed started expanding by a factor of 15%, now I'm losing $75 million a year in purchasing power to generate $50 to $75 million a year in accretion in cash. I could work forever to stand still. And at that point, I realized that holding a bunch of cash is like holding a melting

• 33:29Speaker 02

  ice cube. It's a liability, it's not an asset anymore because it's minus 15% times the amount of cash I'm holding. So, what do you do? I have to invest it in something. And so this is actually what causes CEOs to go crazy. What are you going to do? You can buy back the stock or dividend it out to the shareholders, but then you decapitalize the entire company and you go from having 500 million in treasury endowment to having zero. And if you actually stumble with zero, then you're insolvent and you go bankrupt. And so, that's not very appealing. You can also go and buy another company.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  So a lot of companies, they go and they buy other companies because they want to get top line revenue growth, or they want to show operating income growth, and they're desperate. But why is it that you're treated like a loser if you don't grow your company's cash flow or revenue by 20% a year? And Scott, that is a direct result of the Federal Reserve expanding the money supply 5, 10, 15, 20% a year. If the Federal Reserve didn't expand the money supply at all, if we had flat currency, then that would mean that the value of the currency would go up every year and everything would get cheaper. And if you were holding your revenues constant, then your company would be doing fine and

• 34:53Speaker 02

  no one would treat you like you're losing and you're a failure in business. So I could basically take every dime I have and bet on a company which is competing against Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM that's growing a couple of percent a year, that has to do 100,000 things perfectly in order to continue to do business and maybe will grow 5%. Or I could take my treasury and put it into a big tech network which is 30x more dominant than its nearest competitor, that's growing more than 100% a year, that's been growing more than 100% a year for the last decade.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  And I'm just strapping on 100% growing juggernaut to enterprise software company. And it seems like that's a less risky thing to do, right? And to the key point, Bitcoin's property, and because it's property and not a security, our decision to invest in Bitcoin created massive value for potential investors in the convert market or the public equity market because we're actually, we're going through the due diligence, the custodial, we're managing the security, the custody problem, the acquisition problem, and we're making the decision for them.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  The marketplace, the key is, the market, the people that are buying the stock understand what they're getting. They're getting an enterprise software company with a novel treasury strategy. Some people would say it's risky. On the other hand, I fully expect to lose half the purchasing power of my cash over 36 months. So when someone's going to steal half your money in 36 to 48 months, you know, at what point do you decide you'll do something different and take a risk on something new? Because there's a guarantee of losing half if you don't take the risk.

• 36:51Scott Galloway?

  What is so say someone's listening to this podcast and thinks, okay, I want to put 10,000 bucks into a cryptocurrency. Do you think there's any value to taking a portion of that and putting it into the sort of the tier two cryptocurrencies, the Ethereum's of the world? Or are you just, you think that if you want to play in this asset class, it needs to be Bitcoin?

• 37:08Speaker 02

  You know, I think the right way to think about the market is there's three tiers. Investment grade treasury asset, synthetic gold, that's Bitcoin, right? That's one tier because it's 25 times more dominant than the next like kind thing. It's it's a 95% gorilla. And you would trade safe haven assets. If you have bonds, negative yielding debt, gold indexes, and you just want to have safe haven, that's the asset. The next thing is Ethereum. It's like a unicorn. It's like Uber, Airbnb. It's big. It's scary. It's coming like gangbusters. There's, there's like, you know, 50, 60 billion dollars of monetary energy in it.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  I don't think you're going to see, you know, insurance companies and investment grade corporate treasuries putting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into that because there's a lot more moving parts. There's a lot more questions. It's much more complicated. And then the third category is a bunch of cryptos that are, I would call like venture investments. They're all doing different things. Is it privacy? Is it speed? Is it smart contracts? Is it, you know, lots of stuff. You know, there's going to be, you know, some winners. There's going to be a 99% failure rate, you know, it's like. 8,500 cryptos. I mean, you think they're all going to succeed? So if you actually have your money segmented as safe haven, treasury reserve

• 38:38Speaker 02

  versus aggressive unicorn versus venture capital, then I think you think about it the right way.

• 38:45Scott Galloway?

  So I want to switch gears. You started MicroStrategy at the age of 24. What professional advice, we have a very young, very male listenership. What professional advice would you give to your 24-year-old self? Right now, you're 24 years old. You're coming out of college, or maybe not, and you're thinking, how do I allocate my most precious capital, and that is my human capital, my time? What advice would you give to your 24-year-old self, or to some of our listeners?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Well, I think you have to invest your time and your energy on the technology platforms that are going to dominate over the next decade. You know, at this point, I think we're going into the virtual wave. And the virtual wave means you can zoom anywhere at the speed of light and bend time and space. So what are you going to do with that? And so on one side, you've got to be thinking about, how do I take an existing service and virtualize it to make it 100,000 times better, faster, cheaper? Or you've got to think about an existing product that virtualizes, that transforms fundamentally.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Or, you know, think about what we just did. We virtualized our balance sheet. I'm going to basically switch from dollars to Bitcoin. I'm going to take a disruptive, major change. I'm going to rethink the way that I see my world. You're going to have to embrace some kind of massive exploding of virtual technology. So you have to specialize, focus, choose your platform, and commit.

• 40:28Scott Galloway?

  And I want you to think about this next question, Michael. I've known you for about... Gosh, probably the better part of two decades now. And you've always struck me, I don't know you well, but I know you. And you've always struck me as a pretty self factualized guy. You were sort of dancing to your own drummer. My sense is you have a clear, fairly clear set of values around the way you want to live your life and aren't, you know, don't really care what the, you know, what I'll call the standard or society is telling you around how to operate a company, how to be a CEO. What personal advice would you give to a 25 or 30 year old? What has worked for you and what has not worked in terms of your own personal happiness and your own set of values and reward system?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Take care of your health. Right? I mean, what we're, you know, what we're seeing clearly is, is low sugar, low starch, low alcohol, exercise. Right? You know, you start with that platform, right? If you, if you don't exercise, drink a lot of alcohol, consume a lot of sugar, consume a lot of starch. Right? Then, then that's a drain on you. So I put that in one bucket, which is take care of your health and, and you can learn as much as you want to know on YouTube or anything else on that if you care. But, but, you know, some people don't put that first. I think that's really important. I'm sensitive and you've talked about this a lot. You're probably the expert on it. I think that addiction

• 41:58Speaker 02

  to insane amounts of everything is the scourge of modernity. I think that there's too much. You know, you can, you've got infinite porn, infinite videos, infinite Netflix, infinite alcohol, pharmaceutical grade downers, pharmaceutical grade uppers, you know, pharmaceutical grade steroids. Anything you might want in this world, we produce too much of it. I can be 22 years old and get an addiction to, you know, to anti-anxiety medicine and they'll give it to me for the rest of my life by walking into a doctor and, you know, having the You know, having the maturity to know that just because you can do a thing and you can

• 42:43Speaker 02

  get a thing, doesn't mean you should. On one side, the beauty of the modern age is I can go on YouTube and I can learn anything about anything and my mind can go anywhere in time and space and I can educate myself on anything. And it's very beautiful. That's the beauty. And the horror is I can get locked in a loop where all I'm doing is watching the same looping, enraging, brain-numbing thing over and over and over again, and it'll feed me that, too. So I think that, you know, when you're, when you're starting your career, the key is to have

• 43:21Speaker 02

  very strong values. We're just too good at creating stuff in the modern era. We create too much of everything.

• 43:32Scott Galloway?

  Michael Saylor is a technologist, entrepreneur, business executive, philanthropist, and bestselling author. He currently serves as chairman of the board of directors and CEO of MicroStrategy. Since co-founding the company at the age of 24, Michael has built MicroStrategy into a global leader in business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services. He joins us from his home in Miami. Michael, thanks for your time and stay safe.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Scott. Always a pleasure.

• 44:03Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 44:07Scott Galloway?

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• 44:50Scott Galloway?

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• 44:59Scott Galloway?

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• 45:23Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Let's bust into office hours, the part of the show where we answer your questions about the business world, big tech, higher education, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected].

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Hello, Scott. My name is Rob and I'm from Ireland, but living in Dubai for the last 10 years or so, part of your UAE fan club. My question is about Facebook. So with all this antitrust pressure that they're facing at the moment, do you think that there's any chance that if they're forced to divest one or more of their assets, that Mark Zuckerberg can end up choosing to get rid of Facebook, the big blue app itself, rather than, say, Instagram? Some estimates say that by next year, Instagram could account for up to 40% of the parent company's advertising revenue. This has been getting bigger and bigger every year since they really started generating revenue back in 2015. With some other beefed up revenue generating features like shopping also gaining traction on Instagram lately, it's maybe not crazy to think that in the next couple of years, Instagram could end up bringing in more cabbage, as you say, than Facebook itself.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  And with all these controversies around fake news and content moderation on the Facebook platform, it's starting to seem like it's more trouble than it's worth. So what do you think? Could Mark Zuckerberg ever give up his baby for a potentially greater shot at better future revenue?

• 46:37Scott Galloway?

  Rob from Ireland, living in Dubai. It's good to be young and international. And by the way, most importantly, let's talk about how big the dog is in the UAE. That's right. If you go to chartable.com, you'll find out that The Prof G Show is the 134th most listened to podcast in the UAE. Who would have thunk it? But that's not what you asked about, Rob from Ireland, living in Dubai. So which company would Zuckerberg spin? And to a certain extent, does it even, it doesn't matter. It's an interesting kind of existential question, and that is if Jack Dorsey can be the CEO of two distinct public companies, why couldn't Mark Zuckerberg? All it means is a separate capital structure, although I guess they couldn't coordinate any longer. The notion is, the principle of a spin is that

• 47:20Scott Galloway?

  once you have separate shareholders and separate corporate governance, that they each pursue their own shareholder value and they stop coordinating and cooperating, if you will. But it could be kind of weird if they spun one or more of them or divested them. And the ruling might be they need to sell it, not just spin it, meaning, sorry, boss, you need to sell two of these. So where would Mark Zuckerberg go if he could only be CEO of one of them? I think Instagram, to your point, is a juggernaut. I think it's probably going to decline a little bit in the short term, just in terms of sheer awareness at the hands of TikTok or even something like Roblox. But I'm fascinated by social commerce, specifically Instagram's ability to merchandise incredible products.

• 48:04Scott Galloway?

  And you think, oh, my gosh, it's creepy that they registered that or figured out that I want a new pair of those on cool running shoes. And I actually made my first purchase off of Instagram. I think Instagram is actually arguably worth more than Facebook right now. But the kind of the baller move, I think, would be to go for him to helm. If I were him, I would probably want to run WhatsApp. I think WhatsApp could go after Zoom. I think WhatsApp could go after Teams and Slack. I think WhatsApp is incredible and has basically been used as a DOPA data bag to feed the corpus that is Facebook and Instagram. So I think WhatsApp has tremendous, tremendous upside.

• 48:48Scott Galloway?

  But these are good problems. The notion that he would spin one or which one is going to be strange. It'll come down to if they're found guilty of antitrust violations, what will the remedy be? If he's asked just to spin something, he could technically still be the CEO, which I think would be sort of like, well, what's the point? So I hope they force him to sell it to a distinct entity. But if I were him and got to choose, I would probably, I would probably want to do. WhatsApp first, Instagram second, and Facebook last. But then again, I'm not like him. I'm not like him. And that's probably the nicest thing I've ever said about myself. Thanks for the question, Rob from Ireland, living in Dubai. Question number two.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Hey Scott, thanks for your good work and your bad dad jokes. I'm a 50 something woman in Boston, considering investing in the cannabis industry. I'm thinking more around equipment and cultivation products than cannabis itself. But I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that. Thank you.

• 49:52Scott Galloway?

  Thanks very much for the call. So while I'm a consumer, the cannabis industry, I haven't touched it because it seems as if one of those industries, it's just very hard for me to get my head wrapped around it because the valuations looked insane and then they came back down. I think that first off, the way you're thinking about it is the right way. And that is, if I were to go or invest in that business, I'd want to invest in the picks and the shovels, not in the mine itself. Investopedia looked at the top marijuana stocks for December 2020 and found that Harvest Health and Recreation to be one of the best valued stocks. That's according to Investopedia. It's a Canadian-based cannabis company specializing in cultivation dispensaries and production facilities for medicinal and recreational marijuana and a reported 86% year-on-year increase in total revenue.

• 50:34Scott Galloway?

  I'm not recommending the stock, but Investopedia actually does look at kind of things like valuation and underlying metrics. Grow Generation, a distributor of agricultural products, landed a spot as one of the marijuana stocks that had the greatest total return over the last 12 months. The company offers plant nutrition, farming soils, crops, advanced lighting technology, hydroponic and aquaponic equipment. I don't know the difference between hydroponic and aquaponic. Maybe Aquaman knows. And recently acquired the GrowBiz, the third largest chain of hydroponic garden centers in the US. In sum, in sum, I think this is something that if you're like me, and you are in your 50s, you dabble in it, you go into the infrastructure. I wouldn't go into retail.

• 51:18Scott Galloway?

  I just think that shit right now is overvalued. So I like the infrastructure plays or the distribution plays. And I wouldn't put more than, call it 10% or 15% of your net worth into this asset class because it strikes me as an asset class that will be very volatile. And at our age, we want to be able to sleep at night. We typically, yeah, we like to get rich, but more importantly, we don't want to get poorer fast. It's just not worth the stress. So as you get older, I think you want to be more diversified. But as a whole, I think you're right. Go after the infrastructure side of it. The space, though, I don't know it well. I have a difficult time wrapping my head around it. Although, the wind in your sails, the wind in your sails are probably the most exciting thing about the sector is

• 52:00Scott Galloway?

  that if you were to glean one takeaway from the 2020 election, simply put, was the green wave. The green wave. Well, first takeaway, we said, and a repudiation of Trump, but really, the bigger takeaway, or as big a takeaway, is the green wave. Initiatives, ballots all over the nation, propositions around marijuana changed dramatically, or there's basically, overwhelmingly, the nation said that we are going green, if you will. So you have that wind in your sails. Anyways, thanks for the question. Best of luck to you and your marijuana investments. Don't forget to send the care package to your favorite podcaster. Don't forget, he's big in Dubai, and he's big on Dubage. Next question.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Hey, Prof G. My name is Michael. I'm from San Francisco, now working remotely in Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side. My theory about remote work is that proximity is power. I'm 26, career-driven, and work at a startup. While I'm enjoying remote work now, I can't help but think that being back in the office provides a competitive advantage over those who would choose to stay remote. I have a hard time believing that my VP is going to promote Chad, who's working remotely from Tulum, over the gal who got back into the office. If you're a 26-year-old who isn't fearful for your health, are you getting back in the office to accelerate your career? As a business owner and operator, do you think that affects your decision-making on who gets promoted, all things being equal? Be safe, be well, and thanks as always for taking the question.

• 53:28Scott Galloway?

  Your instincts are right on. A survey conducted by PWC in June found that executives are more likely to report that employees have become more productive, 44% while working from home during the pandemic. That's the good news. But the bad news is, is that proximity or relationships are a function of proximity. And guess what? Promotions are a function of relationships. As a matter of fact, I'm reminded of the research that my colleague at NYU, Ponkos Gemawat, did in the last decade, where he found that the further from headquarters a retail store is, an individual store, the less profitable it was. Proximity to headquarters, no doubt about it, is an accelerant for your career. You're just more likely to think of, okay, who should run our Southeast Asian division?

• 54:12Scott Galloway?

  Well, there's Bob and there's Suzie. I see Suzie every day. I get to see how smart she is. She's in meetings. I like Suzie. We've developed a rapport. Yeah, I want Suzie to win versus Bob, who, as you said, is in Tulum. So there's just no getting around it. Proximity, if you have the ability, the discipline, the economics, the willingness to live close to work, put on a suit, all the bullshit required around being at HQ every day, you are going to advance your career faster. There's just no getting around it. There's no free lunch. If you want to hang out in Tulum or you want to hang out at home with your kids, it's going to cost you. One of the unfortunate things here, one of the second order negative effects, is that work from home will have, one, it'll increase income inequality

• 54:57Scott Galloway?

  because the people who can't afford to live in cities, who get to live in the outskirts of Denver, don't realize that if your job can be moved to Denver, it can be moved to Delhi. And two, it'll have probably, it'll probably be a step back for women. Because if you look at most relationships, if one person is going to give up their career so they can live... In beautiful name of mountain resort here. Typically, they decide that it's the woman's career that should be put on hold, or that she should work remotely, or that she should give up her job to spend more time at home. And I think you're going to see fewer women at HQ. What does that mean?

• 55:38Scott Galloway?

  That means fewer women accelerating their careers as fast, or fewer women on the same career trajectory as men. And we've made a lot of progress here. Women under the age of 30 who are college educated have largely closed the wage gap with their male counterparts. The problem is once they have kids. The problem is once, once a woman decides to actually, and her partner, decide to use the ovaries that pay plummets to 77 cents on the dollar. And kids, the assholes that they are, the needy jerks that they are, want someone to be at home. And typically, those responsibilities, let's call a spade a spade, fall disproportionately to the woman. So I wonder if remote work will have the second order effects of, one, the people who decide not to be at HQ are going to not advance as quickly.

• 56:22Scott Galloway?

  And you're right, if you can figure out a way to be at HQ every day, your career will be on a different trajectory than those that aren't. And two, it seems to me that it will likely, it will likely set women back because you're going to see more women working from home. As research shows, that a disproportionate amount of the additional work required for things like remote learning, or buying a house that's further from HQ, it's usually the woman who sacrifices her career, or her proximity to HQ, or her old HQ. And as a result, we're going to see, I think, the wage gap widen again. But that is an interesting question, and by all means, if you can be at HQ, then my brother, HQ the shit out of that bitch you call your company. Thanks for the question.

• 57:11Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of happiness, citizenship, answering the call. So many of our mothers, fathers, our grandfathers, our grandmothers, people we will never meet, people we will never know, have answered the call, who realize that the wonderful society we live in is a function not only of... Our prosperity, not only a function of shareholder value, not only a function of innovation and people coming up with electric vehicles or photo sharing apps, but people sacrificing. And I believe in our country, we have conflated sacrifice with stimulus, that people see patriotism as some sort of fucked up, or have lost a sense of patriotism and are more focused on their individual liberties

• 57:53Scott Galloway?

  rather than registering or understanding that your liberties are a function of people's sacrifice. And we seem to be very comfortable enjoying those liberties that other people have sacrificed for, but don't seem to want to pay it forward. And the most recent example is all the bullshit I'm hearing around people's reticence to take the vaccine. And if you look at the data, if you look at the science, your chances of an adverse reaction from a vaccine are not less than being eaten by a shark or less than being struck by lightning. They're less than being eaten by a shark as you are struck by lightning. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives. And there have been some terrible, well-publicized instances where they have not worked and there's been negative reactions.

• 58:37Scott Galloway?

  There are risks in everything. There are risks when you get in a fucking Uber, for God's sake. Look at these risks. Look at the actual science here, and you're going to see that the risks are nominal. What is the upside? And this is what really, really is so upsetting. People are thinking, "Well, okay, I'm injecting a foreign substance into my body. I don't like that." First off, that substance is cleared out of your system in about two weeks. What about the long-term effects? I'm worried about the long-term effects. Well, guess what? The clinical trials, the majority of adverse effects registered across historic vaccines have manifested themselves or appeared almost right away. And because the clinical trials have now aged,

• 59:16Scott Galloway?

  we know that short-term adverse effects are not a problem with these FDA-approved vaccines. So the majority of the hysteria or any sort of bullshit notion around the danger of these vaccines just is not supported by the data. And the narrative that is really upsetting is, "Well, I'm just going to wait. I'm healthy. If I get it, that's bad, but it's not profoundly bad. I'm just going to wait." Well, you know what? It's not about you. We have a web, a web of death and despair, sweeping through the nation over and over, and it is snaring our weak and vulnerable, and it is killing them. And when you refuse to take the vaccine, or you decide, you know, I'm just gonna wait,

• 1:00:01Scott Galloway?

  you risk becoming another threat, or specifically a carrier, a node, a node of infection in that web. It's not about you. Yeah, 90%, 99% likelihood, you will be just fine if you get the novel coronavirus. But will the person who gets caught in your web be fine? Let's think about the numbers here. Angela Merkel, who, by the way, by the way, has a PhD in quantum chemistry, said at the outbreak of the novel coronavirus that she thought, without a vaccine, 60% of the population of Western Europe and the US would ultimately contract COVID-19. Let's take 60% of 350 million people. That's 210 million people. Let's call it a mortality rate of 1%.

• 1:00:44Scott Galloway?

  That's 2.1 million people. 300,000 have died already. That means there's 1.8 million people who are gonna die if we don't get the herd immunity. In May of 1940, the Germans drove British, Dutch, French, and I believe Belgian soldiers to the beaches of Dunkirk. They'd overextended themselves. They drove them to the beach. They were out of munitions, out of supplies, and it was basically gonna be a turkey shoot. And for a bunch of reasons, some people say that it was a general who was reticent to wake up Hitler. For a bunch of reasons, we were granted, or the Allies were granted, with a couple of days' extra time to get off the beach. But they had no way off the beach. But what happened?

• 1:01:26Scott Galloway?

  They sent out a call to Britain, and every sailboat, every fishing boat, every trawler, anything that floated that had a motor on it, was fired up by British citizens, and it headed straight for the beaches of Dunkirk. They didn't know what was out there. They didn't know if there were U-boats out there. They didn't know if there was gonna be Messerschmitts or Stukas raining fire on them. They just answered the call, and they got 400,000 young men and boys, and let's be honest, some of them were boys, some of them were so young, off the beach. They ensured they didn't face a certain death. We have, we have in this country. Two million people are most vulnerable on the beach.

• 1:02:10Scott Galloway?

  Get the vaccine. Get our brothers and sisters off the beach. This isn't about you. This is about answering the call. So few of us have had to answer a call around our citizenship in this country. So many of us are actually in a better place than we were pre pandemic. Are you one of those people right now that's made money? That's had a chance to spend more time with loved ones? That's had a chance to watch more Netflix? Well, guess what? You need to answer the call first. I'm one of those people. I am first in line. And this bullshit temptation to say, I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna wait. Well, guess what? This isn't about you. Let's get our brothers and sisters off the beach.

• 1:02:56Scott Galloway?

  Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week for another episode of The Prop G Show from Section 4 and the Westwood One Podcast Network.

• 1:03:18Scott Galloway?

  Gangster, I've gotta find the Spanish word for gangster. Anyway, anyway, I have no idea what I was talking about. I've totally lost my train of thought. Oh, my God, the dementia is here. The dementia is here. Anyways, stay away, stay away. We want to be diversified. We want to be diversified. Oh, oh, God, bring me back. Where am I? Oh, I was over here. Okay.

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

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