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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I used AI to make $15 billion last year.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  You did.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  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 the 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.

• 0:44Steven Bartlett?

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

• 0:47Speaker 00

  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 a million dollars 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.

• 1:12Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:15Speaker 00

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

• 1:20Steven Bartlett?

  What about the S and P 500?

• 1:21Speaker 00

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

• 1:26Steven Bartlett?

  So should I buy a house?

• 1:27Speaker 00

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

• 1:29Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Because.

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  So first.

• 1:52Steven Bartlett?

  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 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. 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.

• 2:27Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 2:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:24Steven Bartlett?

  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're aiming to communicate to them?

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Bitcoin is, 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.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  So if what you're interested in, 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.

• 4:41Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  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, in a physical form is a problem. So what do you do? You put it in a bank. Well, the bank is, 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 asked 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, 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.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  And by the, 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 want to 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 seven 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 a million dollars. I can actually encrypt it in a chip and a physical coin, the Caspicius coin. And that's a million dollars. I slide it across and it's literally a bearer asset, you know? And so that's one manifestation of it.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  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 to you.

• 6:27Steven Bartlett?

  A series of letters you could give me.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, or I could send you a message. I could send a text message like, so good luck getting a million dollars of gold from here to London. If people don't want you to move it, but I could move a million dollars of Bitcoin from here to anywhere in a few seconds. The idea was I don't want to 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.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And I don't need the permission of seven banks and 16 governments and 32 other bureaucrats in order to buy that truck.

• 7:16Steven Bartlett?

  What is it that most people, the average person doesn't understand about the nature of money as it's 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 going to be good.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  So this is about $10,000, I guess.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  One acre of land in Miami Beach on the water cost $10,000 about 100 years ago. I know this because I have a house on the water and I have the deed of sale. And it was about on two acres and it was $20,000. The entire house cost $100,000 and it's about $20,000 worth of land. Today, one 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.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  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, about money? What they don't realize is that the best currency, money, money being a medium exchange, unit of 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 going to get.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  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 the money of the society, the question really is just, are you going to lose most of your money within 10 years? That's the weak currencies in Africa, for example. Most currencies in Africa, you couldn't hold your wealth even for 10 years, maybe five years. Or are you going to 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.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  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 going to lose all your money in, you know? Half-life is 35 years. You're going to lose your money over the course of 100 years.

• 10:08Steven Bartlett?

  So should I buy a house?

• 10:10Speaker 00

  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 dollars. 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.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Because there's a 2% property tax on houses in, 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 and 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.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  So what really works out with commercial real estate most of the time is you buy a million dollars of 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.

• 11:54Steven Bartlett?

  Most people are told that the way to build the 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, they get a job at nine to five, 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?

• 12:17Speaker 00

  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, 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're, if you actually have the, you know, the business acumen to, to get into commercial real estate business. Cause you can pass all the expenses through to your tenants. These things are all hard, right?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  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 one and a half percent. And the currency is losing 7% of its value a year. And you're just losing five 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.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:56Steven Bartlett?

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

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, John Bogle's real contribution and the success of the S and 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 I can, I can buy? And it turns out to be like SPY. It's just the S and P 500 in the form of an ETF. So that has returned 15% over the past six years. Over 100 years, maybe 10%, something like that.

• 14:34Steven Bartlett?

  Every year.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  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 and, and 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 and P index and wait.

• 15:05Steven Bartlett?

  What about this?

• 15:08Steven Bartlett?

  This is gold.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:10Steven Bartlett?

  Why not just put all of my money into gold?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  It's not an awful idea to buy gold. Gold is up 12% a year for the past six years. So whereas the S and P is 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 want to save your money? You want to buy a capital asset. Gold's a winner, S and 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?

• 15:49Speaker 00

  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 and 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.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  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 one 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?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Like, you know, if, if you need to go through an airport, you want something that you get to keep and take with you.

• 17:21Steven Bartlett?

  You talked about the robots there.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:24Steven Bartlett?

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

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:34Steven Bartlett?

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

• 17:43Speaker 00

  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 a thousand 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 going to drive themselves. 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?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  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. You know, Voltaire, right, was impressive because he created, you know, this much literature. And, and when he did it, it came out of the mind of one man and that was quite amazing. And, you know, I think we're always going to admire the people that did it first, right? But, you know, the AIs will think for us, you know, put the AI into the robot. We're not that far, right?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Like when I, when I sit and I talk to my voice assistant, whether it's chat or whether it's Grok and it's, it's like, she knows everything and she keeps getting smarter. You know, 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 can, you pretty much can imagine a billion robots and maybe we'll pay 200 bucks 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?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  That like, we'll get to the point where we're like, I, I, you used to actually have an oven that burned things? Like what, what, it was stupid? Yeah, it was too stupid to know it was going to burn the, huh? Why didn't you just put intelligence into the appliance, right? Why, 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, 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.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  You know, the irony, of course, is now when you send a message to someone, if you want to 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 because 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.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And I think Elon makes this point, which is we're about to trip over an age of abundance.

• 21:13Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe that's true? 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.

• 21:57Steven Bartlett?

  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."

• 22:31Speaker 00

  He's half-right. I agree with, with part of what he says, that is, consumer goods, consumables, utilitarian goods will become abundant, but there are always going to 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.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  So, you get modern medical care, you know, 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, and the developed world. Not everywhere, but let's say in the developed world. But everybody doesn't get a Hampton's 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?

• 23:57Speaker 00

  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, and again...

• 24:12Steven Bartlett?

  But most people don't actually want that. They want to 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 going to be, they're going to be good? They're not going to have to worry?

• 24:24Speaker 00

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

• 24:53Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 24:54Speaker 00

  It means that if you go to a restaurant, 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 five bucks. But if you have more money, you buy yourself a vodka. And then when you have more money, you want to 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 three bucks a day. And the answer is, there's always going to be a hierarchy of affluence, and people are

• 25:34Speaker 00

  going to find things to aspire to that will be more than the utilitarian mean that everybody gets. If I give you a universal healthcare, people want private healthcare. If I give everybody a house, someone's going to want a house twice as big. Everybody's always going to have a reason to want something more, you know?

• 25:55Steven Bartlett?

  Because we're status-oriented animals.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:11Steven Bartlett?

  And it's too busy on this one.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  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, I think that money's not going away. I think it's pretty obvious, if you look around you, that, 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.

• 26:47Steven Bartlett?

  If this knowledge work does become, I guess, taken by the robots and the AIs, there's, some people say there's going to 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 a period of time to satisfy the demand of people to have something to do professionally.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  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. 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

• 27:49Speaker 00

  liberal, unregulated businesses to prosper. Because if you have a progressive society, by the way, the United States is sort of more progressive...

• 28:02Steven Bartlett?

  Define progressive in this context.

• 28:03Speaker 00

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

• 28:17Steven Bartlett?

  I read something crazy last night about driving autonomous cars. It said lawyers are trying to stop block EVs because these particular lawyers make a lot of money from litigating car accidents.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  We wouldn't want people to not crash.

• 28:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  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

• 29:17Speaker 00

  value, and then they will create gainful employment, and they'll create wealth for all the people that are displaced, right, by, by the technology.

• 29:26Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, what are you doing? Just making myself a delicious coffee.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  From the freezer?

• 29:34Steven Bartlett?

  From the freezer. Have you not heard about Comteer?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my gosh. This is going to 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 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.

• 30:19Steven Bartlett?

  You can get $30 off your first order of Comteer coffee if you go to cometeer.com/steven. 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.

• 31:04Steven Bartlett?

  The businesses that I've watched scale well commercially all have a system their team uses every single day. And for my team, that system has been our sponsor, PipeDrive. It's an easy-to-use intelligent CRM tool for growing sales teams that gives you visibility of every deal in your sales pipeline at every single stage, and it shows you what needs to happen for that deal to move forward, all in real time. It's what keeps our commercial operation consistent when we're a team of five, 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.

• 31:47Steven Bartlett?

  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, what do I, what's the question I should be asking you? What book should I be reading? And then, can you make that book for me? Make it 20 pages, I like it in this particular style, because it's my favorite style of author. And then, I want to download it as an MP3 file and listen to it on my way to work, I have 43 minutes. Could you say, what should, what's the question I should be asking you?

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're, you're using, you're using that as an example, but at the end of the day, you have to govern the state space. For example, anybody could say, what questions should I ask? But the real issue is, what's the, 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.

• 33:05Steven Bartlett?

  Is that a true story?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  This is true.

• 33:08Steven Bartlett?

  You did?

• 33:09Speaker 00

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

• 33:16Steven Bartlett?

  This is a true story?

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, let's, 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, in the world, and we maxed out the convertible bond market. And, and that was our journey in the first five years of our Bitcoin.

• 33:43Steven Bartlett?

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

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:47Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:49Steven Bartlett?

  To buy Bitcoin?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  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, it's just a security that could be anything, you can give it any terms. I can sell you a preferred stock and give you the right to put it back to me in 12 months, and it looks like debt.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  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 that was backed by Bitcoin before, and, 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, and, you know, when we asked the lawyers and the bankers, they're like, well, no one's ever done it before. Okay, and, and, you know, their, 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.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  And we're like, well, everything else that people have done, we've maxed out, and so, we're kind of at the point where our growth is going to stop unless we find a way out of the box. 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, three new forms of something in order to create value. And after we'd done three of them, we decided what we wanted to do was create a short-duration credit instrument, one that would 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

• 36:00Speaker 00

  level? It's what, 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, in order to get it to trade stable, if you want the price to be stable, you have to change the dividend rate. And so, we created an instrument 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.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  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 it. 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.

• 36:55Steven Bartlett?

  Which AI?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  ChatGPT, OpenAI.

• 36:59Steven Bartlett?

  So, ChatGPT made you $15 billion?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:29Steven Bartlett?

  I'm thinking about what this means generally for the average person listening, because everyone's like, searching for business ideas, 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, and can build business ideas from it?

• 38:06Speaker 00

  If, if you're an entrepreneur, right? If you, if you aspire to create a business or create something of value, then it's, the no-brainer is, you definitely should pick one or more of these AIs, and maybe you want to become adept using multiple of them. They're, they're just different tools. It's, it's kind of like saying, you got to learn how to use a computer, and you got to 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 going to do, right? You either want to create a, a new product, or you want to create a new service, or you

• 38:48Speaker 00

  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 bucks a month? Right?

• 39:12Steven Bartlett?

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

• 39:24Speaker 00

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

• 39:32Steven Bartlett?

  On the S curve?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  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 to go to orbit, and then we have rockets to go to the moon. And so that's an example of an S curve. But then you know what happens? In the mid 70s, we designed the 737, the 747. And we hit a wall, you know? And 737 is still the primary airplane for the next 50 years.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  And if you look at the efficiency of an airplane from 1975 to the year 2025, over 50 years, the modern airplanes are 15% more efficient. Like, so what you got was a diminishing return. And when you're on the S curve, things are doubling every three years. You're doubling, you're doubling, you're doubling, 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.

• 40:45Steven Bartlett?

  Let's show an S curve on the screen and also the new S curve coming in below it.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  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, because we don't.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Now, on the other hand, semiconductors started exploding and semiconductor technologies continued to advance. We haven't hit that limit yet. And that's, that's why so many profound breakthroughs were made in computer science over the past 50 years.

• 41:52Steven Bartlett?

  This has kind of hit an S curve, hasn't it? As a form factor, my iPhone here. You know, since the iPhone, as you said, since iPhone like six, it hasn't really gotten thinner, but the battery hasn't really taken a leap forward as such. So we're now looking for another form factor to interface with computers.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the iPhone one didn't have cut and paste. And we didn't get cut and paste till the version three. And so there was a rapid improvement, versions one through six or one through seven, call it. And at that point, you start hitting diminishing returns. And if you were to do some utility function and you were to score it on a scale of one to 100, you would have gone from like five to 70 in a hurry. And then you would have gone from 70 to 90 over the next few iterations. And then you're 91, 92. You hit that limit. And if you are starting a company, right, you don't create another iPhone. Right?

• 42:53Speaker 00

  The real question right now is, can I create smart glasses where I have something that's like my Maui Jim sunglasses? I put them on, they weigh nothing, and they have the camera, and they see what I see, and they hear what I hear, and they know where I am. And plug that into AI. And in that point, I can just say, hey, Eve, what is that? You know, where am I? And tell me about that. And, and it's like, why do I have to type anymore?

• 43:23Steven Bartlett?

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

• 44:07Steven Bartlett?

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  By the way, this is why you should study fantasy, right? Because they have this, right, in magic worlds, right? This is like, you know, like, I just wear my Towelsman. You know, I have a necklace. What does it do for, oh, it makes me omniscient, all powerful, immortal, indestructible, I live forever. Well, what do you have to do to make the product work? Nothing. I'm wearing the wristband and I walk and every door opens to me and stuff happens. And here's where Elon gets it right. It's like the number one engineering mistake is engineers want to optimize a part that shouldn't exist. Like, make the parts go away, right? We start on the topic of what should you study, right? It's, it's study technologies that allow you to create magic things that your parents

• 44:51Speaker 00

  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?

• 45:03Steven Bartlett?

  Neuralink?

• 45:03Speaker 00

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

• 45:16Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 45:26Speaker 00

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

• 46:05Steven Bartlett?

  What about a surgeon? Do you think you want to be a surgeon?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 46:07Steven Bartlett?

  What about a lawyer?

• 46:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 46:10Steven Bartlett?

  Accountant?

• 46:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 46:12Steven Bartlett?

  Driver?

• 46:13Speaker 00

  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. Maybe I'll take it, I'll, 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.

• 46:37Steven Bartlett?

  This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the diaries here, 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 much of our success here. So what we've done is 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.

• 47:19Steven Bartlett?

  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 subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please, could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.

• 48:03Steven Bartlett?

  Beyond just buying Bitcoin, is there any sort of actionable steps that the working class should take right now to prepare for this robot transition that you're talking about?

• 48:14Speaker 00

  I mean, the actionable step is, is learn.

• 48:19Steven Bartlett?

  Learn about the robots.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Digital.

• 48:21Steven Bartlett?

  Digital.

• 48:22Speaker 00

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

• 48:27Steven Bartlett?

  Infinite, I don't know.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  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, it's a, it's a, a much smaller thing. Mr. Beast can get 100 million subscribers. You can get 20 million subscribers. You're not getting 20 million subscribers if you do the thing that your parents, parents did. So I think that you want to look at digital platforms. There's, there's digital communication like X or Instagram, there's YouTube and, and the like.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  But there's also, there's also digital intelligence.

• 49:14Steven Bartlett?

  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 five 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 slot tsunami coming in. And then if you look at demand of attention online, it is arguably fixed. Financial Times did a report that young, young people are actually starting to come down in terms of time spent online. Slightly older generations are starting from a lower base.

• 49:58Steven Bartlett?

  And they're still going up, but they're starting from a lower base. So you've got a tsunami slot 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 five podcasters in my niche, every single one of them is down at least 50% in the last 20ish, 12, 12, 24 months.

• 50:20Speaker 00

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

• 50:36Steven Bartlett?

  What is the moat?

• 50:38Speaker 00

  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, have you seen a guy constructs the entire warship from the keel and he creates the ribs and he shows you the lower deck and the bowels and he takes you through every step. And it's a three dimensional video animation, takes about an hour, and it's absolutely riveting. I have no reason to care about 16th century warships, but I can't take my eyes off it because it's just so fascinating to see him explain everything.

• 51:15Steven Bartlett?

  Are you saying creativity is the moat still? Or understanding what humans want and then delivering it, which I guess is creativity?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  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. So why didn't anybody before Beethoven do stuff with the piano? 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.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  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 out of nowhere, you know?

• 52:48Speaker 00

  And Mr. Beast comes out of nowhere and they push it to the extreme. And what you see with every generation is, I give you a new thing, whether it's a piano or electric guitar or internet. Think about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and what he did at just about the point when you could do that with the web. And then think about the early mobile apps, you know, WhatsApp and the like. And it's like, what you want to do, if you want to create these incredible success things is you want to locate the magic opportunity right at the right point on the S curve where it just now became commercially viable to do it.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  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 five years or three years earlier, then you resonate in the society, right? You'd go viral. We were just the first ones to get there. It exploded. If you gave me a billion dollars right now and said, run a marketing campaign, it wouldn't be as effective. Like, you couldn't buy the success with a billion dollars of marketing.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  You just have to, the Led Zeppelin guys, they didn't spend a billion dollars marketing. You got to be in the right place, the right time, and you have to have the courage to offer people the new thing.

• 55:54Steven Bartlett?

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

• 56:37Steven Bartlett?

  In the world we live in now, where there's my phone experience is a completely different phone experience to yours because of AI. AI is learning what I like and showing me my own little version of the world. I wonder if it's possible to be as big as a Michael Jackson once was for anybody these days. And actually, even with the YouTube you mentioned earlier, I wonder now if fame or 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?

• 57:20Steven Bartlett?

  Shorter and shallower?

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Is it possible to get big? You could say, well, I can't get as big as Michael Jackson. But on the other hand, Elon Musk got big, right? Like, there are things that get big, right? Companies get big. 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, 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.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  But on the other hand, there are people that manage to get, you know, 8 million followers and they, you know, are the Kardashians, you know? You have these people that get massively big and that's the other side of the equation. So I don't really know how it all plays out, except for the fact that it seems clear that there is room for human creativity and innovation. And if your goal is to make a contribution. Right? If you're in your working years where you want to upgrade the world and make

• 58:46Speaker 00

  a difference and be remembered for something, then a pretty simple principle is don't keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year, fighting against the modern automation epidemic, right? Don't try to outwork the robots. It's like you're lamenting how difficult it is for a content creator, but let me remind you that it used to be you would go be a college professor and teach 200 students a year for 20 years, and you would feel that your life contribution was 4,000 people whose minds you touched.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think in part, I'm wondering now if we're kind of, we, technology said, okay, you can reach more people, 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

• 1:00:35Steven Bartlett?

  scarce is also hard, like you did with that financial instrument. Very few people on earth could have created that. We don't run public companies, we don't have the information, et cetera. Or even that YouTuber you mentioned, who walks you through those, the 1600s or whatever, that is very hard to do. I theorize that actually pursuing that which is hard and scarce, getting you to come here today is not easy. So that's kind of my moat. Michelle Obama coming and sitting down with me here is still kind of my moat, is what we should aim at. What do you think of that as a theory?

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  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 AI considering what are all the ways you can upgrade and improve the product or the service you create, right? For example, like, it used to be you do this in English and the issue is, well, what about Japanese or Chinese or French or whatever? And, you know, the hard way is you learn 20 languages and, you know, but then how does your guest, or we translate it, or you hire, you know, we used to spend money to hire translators. But now you could have the AI translate this into 100 languages, right? Now the question is, should you or not?

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Can I enhance it, right? It's interesting when someone describes something, but you're like, let's just put up a chart of the S curve there. And then the next step is, can I market it better or distribute it better? And the next step is, am I creating something that'll be valuable in a decade? Well, will it be valuable in 100 years?

• 1:02:07Steven Bartlett?

  Well, this is probably a good time to mention this. 24 months ago, we started exactly that, which was there are aliens, each step is...

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:02:13Steven Bartlett?

  Arabic?

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  Still me. 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?

• 1:02:36Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

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

• 1:03:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, a lot longer.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Like, my advice to an entrepreneur is you focus, you commit. If you're successful in less than four years, you got lucky. It's probably, yeah. If it takes you 10 years, well, between four and 10 years is very, very normal. If you haven't had success by the 10-year point, you're probably not cut out for the business. But, 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.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  It's like, I don't have time to listen to every Lex Friedman, every Joe Rogan, every Diary of the CEO, and every one of the next 20. And so I'm going to become loyal. I'm going to become a customer and a fan of whoever serves me the best content. And certainly if I'm a native Portuguese speaker or a native Russian speaker, you all of a sudden just leaped, right, to the top.

• 1:04:12Steven Bartlett?

  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 two hours long of Michael Saylor talking in Cantonese with Stephen, you know? And so that, we then are competing, we have, that's kind of the moat then, right?

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And that becomes a benefit to all your guests. You're the distribution channel for me to send the message of digital capital, digital empowerment to the world, and then your guests become your moat. I think that with every single business, it's pretty clear, you have to ask the question, is technology going to cannibalize my business or disrupt it? And am I going to be the one that embraces it and evolves and grows with it? Or am I going to fight it? And then, of course, you're in a dialogue with the market. For example, the great thing about what you've done is, if you've done it, you can look and see how it runs and whether YouTube actually expands your reach.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  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, able to convert that, and then you tweak it, right, and adjust. And you're, six months or 12 months can be enough that you have a lasting advantage forever, right? If you're 12 months ahead of everybody else...

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  And you're compounding in.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it compounds over time, and then maybe they never catch you. Like, it's, that's, you know, but that's the story of every business, right? That's the story of Ford Motor Company and Standard Oil, that's the story of Microsoft, it's the story of Facebook, it's everybody's story, which is, you just have to focus, commit, and then if you're good enough, invariably what happens is, is your customers will make you the winner. The world needs someone to do what you do. Like, someone has to win, right? There needs to be a winner. The audience out there wants, they want what you do.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  They want, they, they want to 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, 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, 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.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  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 two seconds at their fingertips. And so you don't want to be the third best. You don't want to be mediocre across a bunch of things. You want to be exceptional in one area, figure out what that one area is, and then maybe you have 2 million followers, then 200 million followers, right? Then eventually, you know, over 100 years, 2 billion. You just, you just have to have this vision.

• 1:07:48Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:08:33Steven Bartlett?

  And it's, I always say to the team, there's two things a year that define us. And of that, in our failure in experimentation team, which is literally what it's called, we tried 60 things. But there's this, you know, five of them are meh, two of them, game changing. So the attitude of dealing with failure at the very forefront of trying to be first, I think is something people don't talk about enough.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Focus your energy, guard your time. Just because you can't do a thing, doesn't mean you should do the thing, right? Most of the time, the reason people fail is they get successful in their 30s and they're successful at one thing, and it's like, all of a sudden, they've decided they're going to do 10 other things because they're good at everything and they dilute their focus in 10 ways. People always underestimate the maintenance obligation, like, always. And so the right, the right solution to growth is, I would like to make whatever I'm doing twice as good. And if I do 10 things to make it 10% better, I'm probably diluting, distracting.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  The phenomenon that causes most businesses to fail, it's dilutive distractions, or it's dilutive expansions. They do one thing, it works, and then instead of turning their energy in to make that better and better and better and better, they start to bifurcate and trifurcate, and they expand, and they overreach to too many areas. It's like the dude with the great restaurant, and he's got the second restaurant, and he's got a chain of 37 restaurants, and they all suck. 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?

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  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 going to work.

• 1:10:57Steven Bartlett?

  There's two things that came to mind there. The first is, a lot of young people come up to me, and they're nine months into their idea, and they're not rich yet. So they're, they look over there and they see their friend has started a thing with CBD, and so they're like, I think I need to go into CBD. And so their careers kind of look like this, sort of like swinging through the jungle, grabbing onto the next branch and letting go of the last, and never really making upward motion towards any goal. And then the other thing I thought about as you're speaking is, I've been mulling this, really only for the last two months, this idea that if you take a long-term approach to things, you make foundational decisions today that create huge competitive advantages.

• 1:11:40Steven Bartlett?

  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, micro strategy for more than three, almost four 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 five-year periods, then we're going to quit and go do something else.

• 1:12:23Steven Bartlett?

  Startup founders, they build so they can sell, and then they, they're sort of holding it together with tape as the acquirer comes to buy the thing, and they're nervous as the contract's being signed, because they know if the acquirer looks under the hood, they're going to see some... But then I look at Elon, and I go, oh gosh, he fucking went and rebuilt a brand-new battery and then built the charging network, and SpaceX took two decades? My question is about this long-termism, and does it create a competitive advantage?

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

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

• 1:13:30Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  One great natural example is like a chambered nautilus. If you look at, 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.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  When your second business idea is unrelated to your first business in any way other than the fact that you own both, right? Now you're not building on a stable foundation. So most of these businesses that work, and the best idea is, they start with someone dominating a market, I'm really good at this.

• 1:14:41Steven Bartlett?

  Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  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 the 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

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  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 got to bet that all 97 of them are not going to react to you when you do it, it's a bit harder, so...

• 1:15:58Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  Good example, Amazon Prime, right? Where Amazon started giving free shipping, you know, first free shipping are very cheap shipping and one-day shipping, and, 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 bucks a month instead of 10 bucks a month, and it's like an extra $10 a month times like 100 million people, and people are like, oh my God, they just made $12 billion in one press release per year in cash flow, and that's worth like $250 billion.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  And you're like, 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 going to tell you, they're going to tell you, oh, there's no future to whatever, the podcast, there's no future to something. And what'll happen is, 99% of the people will drop out because they don't believe, and the true believers, the ones that are not creative, won't adapt. And then there'll be some that'll say, I believe, but I also know there's a threat, but I'm going to channel the technology threat, and I'm going to evolve, and I'm going to

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  emerge as something 1,000x better than anybody could conceive. And that's a beautiful story.

• 1:17:35Steven Bartlett?

  So speaking of strong foundations, you have 10 rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career, and you've talked about two of them here, which is focusing your energy and not chasing every good idea. The second one was guard your time. The third one is train your mind.

• 1:17:51Steven Bartlett?

  And with that, you've got train your body.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  You know, the funny story of that is I was invited to a cocktail party of a billionaire on the French Riviera in a beautiful home. And I showed up and I walked into the party thinking I was going to hang out. And another billionaire showed up and he said, you know, Mike, I just had twins, a boy and a girl. And I'm walking around asking all of all of my friends for advice for them. 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's actually collecting advice for his, 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,

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  and train your mind. You got to learn, you got to learn something, right? You got to learn reading, writing, arithmetic. You have to actually develop a culture base. So it's like, get an education and then train your body. Like, because if you're weak, you're not going to make it, right? You're not, you're not going to survive. And then think for yourself. Everybody in the world wants to program you to believe to do something they want you to do. And you have to have the presence of mind to think, that's not right. Just because everybody that I know and famous, rich and beautiful people tell me it's right doesn't make it right. You need to decide, think for yourself. And then curate your friends. Because you, you know, you become who you surround yourself with. And if you

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  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 going to want you to fail, or they're not going to inspire you to succeed. And, 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 and an ugly situation. And, and after that, keep your promises. At the end of the day, people remember if you didn't keep your promise. So you, you tell, you tell somebody you're going to do something, do it, right?

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  If, 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, and ultimately, you know, we're all in relationships with each other, right? And, and no one is so powerful that they can afford to take anybody else for granted. We all need each other. And, 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 of those

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  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. 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 eight billion people for the first time in human history. And we created the world's first perfect money. We created, you know, digital energy, digital matter, digital property,

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  right? We can be a thousand X more as, as humans with technology than we were. I looked through all human history and I see it's a story of misery. Now, why do people die? Lack of clean water, lack of clean air, lack of clean food, lack of clean money. What do we want? We want to live forever. We want to live happily forever.

• 1:21:51Steven Bartlett?

  Do you want to live forever?

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  I want to live as long as I can live, you know, constructively and make a contribution. If, if I could be, 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.

• 1:22:08Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  I think so. I suppose so.

• 1:22:15Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

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

• 1:22:30Steven Bartlett?

  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, and sometimes I need a bit of a therapist to remind me of why I've invested in Bitcoin, and that person has been you over the years. And then when it's up, you know, you're, to your credit, you're consistent about it. And that is, you know, I have watched you and thought, I think this guy must be, he's either like batshit crazy or a genius. And it's sometimes hard to tell. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier, when people will say you're crazy at first, and, and then you'll be proven right. Now, historically, you've been proven right. If you zoom out from when you started advocating for Bitcoin, Bitcoin is down right now. So again, we're back into fear. People are scared again. And it's funny what happens, because when it was going up a couple of

• 1:23:15Steven Bartlett?

  months ago, everyone thought, oh my God, this is going to be the future of money. And now it's down. Everyone is like convinced that it's, it was always a Ponzi scheme and it's, it's done. You've got, I guess, trying to simplify this for, 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?

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

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

• 1:23:51Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  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 dollars of capital, of money, of energy into the ecosystem. So we're, we're powering the ecosystem with capital.

• 1:24:11Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  Because Bitcoin could fall to $5,000 a coin, we would still be over collateralized against the debt.

• 1:24:24Steven Bartlett?

  You'd still be fine.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Steven Bartlett?

  And the other thing people theorize a lot, and again, I did a comment analysis to figure out what people wanted to hear from you, is you sold a bit of Bitcoin. You've been asked this a few times, I know. You sold a bit of Bitcoin recently, after telling a lot of people maybe to hold on to their Bitcoin. People want to know why you sold the Bitcoin.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, so let's make the first point. The only person that's never sold more Bitcoin than me.

• 1:24:51Steven Bartlett?

  Satoshi?

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  Is Satoshi. Satoshi never sold a million, a million one Bitcoin. Our company has 847,000 Bitcoin. And so we bought more and we're holding it more than anybody other than Satoshi. And Satoshi is not active. So we have a reasonable chance of, of never selling more Bitcoin than Satoshi if we just keep at it for the next few years. What I've said is.

• 1:25:15Steven Bartlett?

  Sorry, I should probably show this. This is why there's a kidney. Because you said, sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  I, I have, I have waged a campaign nonstop every day for six 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 four years, and your choice is, do I invest it in the S and P, or a house, or a private company, or soybeans, or money markets, or debt instruments, I think that Bitcoin is the best, right? I think that Bitcoin is digital capital. It's going to be the best long-term capital asset. And, you know.

• 1:25:57Steven Bartlett?

  So why did you sell the Bitcoin instead of your kidney?

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:26:21Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  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, and certain people in the market took the position that the 55 billion dollars of Bitcoin we own was worth nothing. And so what we had was this ignorant skeptical notion that all of 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

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  would go to zero, and the equity would go to zero, the company would fail, and Bitcoin would fail. And we said, well, Bitcoin is, trades 20 billion dollars a day or more, and we've got 55 billion of it. And if we were 0.01% of the market, we could still meet all of our obligations, and it's not going to change the price of Bitcoin. But no one believed us. So if, 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, you can't, at some point, you have to do the backflip, right? Especially if I tell you that I'm going to throw you in jail if you can't do a backflip.

• 1:27:46Steven Bartlett?

  Who told you that?

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  Well, that's exactly what's going on in the market. The market's position was the company is worthless, the stock is going to zero, Bitcoin is going to zero because they can't sell, 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 and digital credit. And if you have a billion dollars of Bitcoin, and they believe it's worth a billion, you can sell 200 million dollars of 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

• 1:28:28Speaker 00

  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 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, 59,000, and it traded up. And so we broke that misconception. We broke that, 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

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

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

• 1:29:33Steven Bartlett?

  Without having to sell more Bitcoin.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  Now, the whole point of this was, we were selling equity in order to pay the dividend on the credit.

• 1:29:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

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

• 1:29:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 00

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

• 1:29:56Steven Bartlett?

  And you sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividend.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  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 with Bitcoin.

• 1:30:21Steven Bartlett?

  Do you intend to sell more?

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

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

• 1:30:43Steven Bartlett?

  And where do you think Bitcoin's going in terms of monetary value? In terms of one Bitcoin? Currently, what you said is what, 68,000 or something?

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:31:00Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

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

• 1:31:13Steven Bartlett?

  Who shouldn't invest in Bitcoin?

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  The right people to invest in Bitcoin are long-term capital investors. So if you have a certain amount of money, and you don't need it for the next four years, and ideally 10 years, then you would take a portion of your capital investment portfolio and buy Bitcoin. And if you believe in it, if you're a Bitcoin maxi, if you've spent 100 hours studying 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.

• 1:31:56Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

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

• 1:32:23Steven Bartlett?

  But for that 25-year-old, would, would it not be smarter for them to spend it on something that's going to help them train their mind, like you said? If you only have a hundred dollars?

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  I wouldn't go spend $500,000 on an expensive, you know, university education, but I would spend 20 bucks a month on an AI subscription. So, so yeah, you should definitely spend money necessary to get the, the super grock, or the pro, the professional edition, whether it's, you know, $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, 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

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  estate, you know, you're, you're locked into a certain city, you can't travel with it, it's high maintenance, there's a lot of risk. If you invest in an individual stock, you have a lot of anxiety because they come and they go, and you got to pick the right stock. And most stocks will fail, but some will succeed. But, but 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 and P index if you're a conventional capital investor? Or are you going to invest in Bitcoin if you're a digital, or, you know, a, a technology capital investor?

• 1:33:56Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:34:14Speaker 00

  If I look at my life and I think about something that's been, that's had a real impact on me, it's after I got a full education, you know, from college, I, I eventually went back and I studied two topics on my own. One, like, practical applied statistics, all the stuff that Nicholas Taleb wrote, like Fool by Randomness, and Skin in the Game, and The Black Swan. And, you know, how do you know the difference between something that's meaningful and something that's just misleading random data? That was profoundly valuable to me. And I would say, you know, anybody that hasn't read all of those books

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  probably ought to go read those books and, and obsess over applied statistics. That's the one thing the AI will not be able to do for you. When you have to decide whether to cross the street while you're typing on your phone, you know, the AI will not give you a never-ending real-time stream of common sense to tell you you should or should not do that thing. And so I, I think that that's really important. And the second thing that I did after I left school, and after a lifetime of experience is, like, I went back and I just read The Story of Civilization by Durant, every page, 11 volumes, 14,000 pages. Most

• 1:35:38Speaker 00

  of the history that you read in school is the Cliff Notes. But if you go through the entire thing, and I recommend that one just because I think it was a pretty well-balanced history that covered art and culture and politics and technology. And it's not just military history, not just political history, but it was, you know, all, a very synthetic history. When you go back and you read it all, as an adult, then it gives you such a profound appreciation for humanity, and it gives you so much wisdom. And what you'll find is, all these things you think you're discovering, they got discovered in like 15th century Russia. And then they got rediscovered, you know, like, most of these things that

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  people tell you, or, this is new and profound. Oh, it's new and profound 100 times in a row, or 1,000 times in a row. It's just, the story was told a different way each time.

• 1:36:33Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  Maybe the fact that currency started getting debased when Nixon went off the gold standard, you know, and what happened in 1971, or whatever. And the truth of the matter is, that was the point at which the 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, that they learn stuff in college. But really, it's not too late to go back and relearn math, especially applied statistics. And it's not too late to go back and relearn history. And as an adult, you always appreciate

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  those things much better. You, you almost, it's like the education is wasted on the youth. You know, because you don't, you don't have the life experiences to appreciate what you're reading. But also, you know, they're, they're summarizing, editing, and censoring a lot of the stuff you read. And, 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

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  history that ever encountered it. And, 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, and that can be very inspirational for you.

• 1:38:20Steven Bartlett?

  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, when if I had, I would have lost a lot of money. And thankfully, now I don't even know where it is. My brother, my brother and some of my siblings take care of it for me. And I don't have to experience the angst. And also, just thank you for pushing for this idea of sovereignty. Because I think in the world of increasing censorship and centralization, sovereignty, I think, is a really winning idea. And I think that's

• 1:39:02Steven Bartlett?

  what you're sort of philosophically aiming at as well. And, yeah, I hope to speak to you sometime soon, because you're a very, you're an individual capable of speaking about such a broad range of subjects that I care so much about. Thank you.

• 1:39:13Speaker 00

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

• 1:39:14Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you, my friend.