Bitcoin Infiltrates Corporate America (w/ Michael Saylor and Raoul Pal)

michael great to get you on real vision you've become suddenly a legend in the crypto business and kind of a real thought leader for many people and i just thought it would be fascinating to get you on but before we go down that kind of crypto journey i'd love to hear a bit about your background where you came from and also micro strategies itself okay um i'm an air force brat my father was in the military i lived on air force bases my entire life so i got a scholarship from the united states air force to go to mit i went to mit and i and i was that generation where i read science fiction books i read them all a big fan of robert heinlein i decided i was going to be a rocket scientist and i got an aeronautics and astronautics degree with a specialty in spaceship design and while i was there i um i stumbled across this school of management uh system dynamics uh the construction of cons uh computer models to predict the future and uh i ended up getting a second degree in science and technology and society in the history of science so that that was formative because it was all about paradigm shifts the structure of scientific revolutions and how did people decide to embrace nuclear power or electricity or petroleum and a lot of people think that technology just kind of is a modern thing but of course and they think that technology companies are a class of investments and i'm always amused when finance people talk to me about the tech sector because they're only it's kind of an ignorant statement there's never been a successful growth company that wasn't a technology company once you understand technology for the past hundred years john d rockefeller was a tech company you know general electric was a tech company craft and hershey's were tech companies so um studying technology for the past hundred two three four hundred years and why people do it that was interesting to me i am thought i was going to be a fighter pilot astronaut right but uh so i learned fly in the air force and in my senior year reagan won the cold war they ramped down the military cut it in half and i had a macroeconomic event combined with just a random a random personal event that catapulted me into business the macroeconomic event was the end of the cold war the drawdown of um the united states military uh and uh the united states had paid for my education and i was like on the hook to serve i thought i'd be in the military ten years and um my final flight physical my senior year at mit they diagnosed me with a benign heart murmur and that disqualified me from flying jets now by the way the hilarious part of the story is they kicked me out of uh the aviation program uh i was a little bit dejected and then the next week they came and they said you can join the air force reserve and be a civilian and i was going to pay three times as much money as a civilian as i would have made in the air force so i thought well you just gave me a free education and i get to like not pay the money back by the way the week before they said well if you don't go in the military that's awol you go to jail okay so i went from you're going to be in the military for a decade or you go to jail to ronald reagan is giving you the gift of your freedom and by the way to make it easier if you want to be in the military you have to wait two years working a part-time job before we call you up and then maybe we'll call you up so i kind of got a kick out of the military and then a doctor said you can't fly and i was kind of dejected and i thought well this must be a sign sorry for interrupting your video but i have a very important message to share [Music] at real vision we pride ourselves on providing the very best in-depth expert analysis available to help you understand the complex world of finance business and the global economy so if you like what you see on the real vision youtube channel that's just the tip of the iceberg you should come to realvision.com and see how we're not leaving any stone unturned from publishing more in-depth videos live discussions written reports and our latest feature the exchange where you get a chance to engage with experts fellow subscribers and learn from everyone's experience which can't be wrapped in a video it's an experience which you live and learn from so if you go to the link in the description or go to realvision.com it costs you just one dollar to get a month's access to this incredible content i don't think it's something you could afford to be without so i kind of got a kick out of the military and then a doctor said you can't fly and i was kind of dejected and i thought well this must be a sign from god i should do something else so i joined the air force reserve and i left mit i am i worked for about two years and i was gonna go get a phd uh because i had a very simple list i have you know every every red-blooded american male in the 80s had this list rock star astronaut fighter pod astronaut top gun right obviously yeah professor okay or ceo so i tried my rockstar thing in high school and then i realized rock stars don't make any money or at least percent of musicians make like 20 bucks for the game i tried and i just can't play guitar i'm just not coordinated enough to have to give up for one reason the other we give up on rockstar yeah that was our first goal the second goal was fighter pilot astronaut and that that was dashed by some physician you were close by the way the hilarious part of the story is a decade later i go back to the doctor he goes oh you're perfectly fine i said i can't be fine i have benign heart murmur i'm mitral valve prolapse he goes no you don't i said but but i'm sure i do they kicked me out of the air force because i had it he said oh that was a mistake they used to make that mistake all the time you know we have much better equipment now so so i left my fighter pilot astronaut track because of a mistake and i ended up uh ended up working but i left the military track on february march my senior year i missed all of the financial aid applications for fellowships i couldn't afford i had no money i couldn't afford to go to a phd program so i worked for a year i applied for all the fellowships i got into mit and harvard and i was going to go get my phd and be a professor and life was done and uh just as i did that i informed my boss and my boss worked at the dupont corporation and he had i had built a computer simulation to predict the return on the investment of about a billion dollars of capital investment in titanium dioxide and they needed that model to get the board to give them the money so when i tended my resignation the guy saw his billion dollars of capital going away and i'm sure he said to someone that works for him go tell give the kid whatever he wants but he can't quit yet and i was 24 year old i happened to be important to a guy that needed a billion dollars you know i didn't know i was important i was just the right place at the right time so he tells a guy who tells a guy that comes to me and says okay well we'll give you a raise if you stay i said i don't want to raise i want to be a professor they said well what do you want i said i said rock star astronaut there's only one other thing i want i want my own company so i said i'll stay if you finance my i i want uh i got millions of dollars of contracts i got a quarter million dollars up front i got free office space for a couple of years i got all the computer equipment i.t support 10 people from dupont came over to work for me they didn't take any equity so it's the best deal ever and i you i did this one negotiation my best negotiation my life they you know i had zero money in fact when i started this company i went to a bank and i got the only unsecured loan that you can get as a 23 year old which is i said i want to buy five thousand dollars of furniture i mean they gave me a 5 000 furniture loan i was living in an apartment at 700 bucks a month with uh with milk crates for bookshelves and i thought five grand that'll last me six months i maybe that'll make it so i got a 5 000 furniture loan then i said to dupont i need a hundred thousand dollar cash check up front to start you can imagine these guys in suits and they thought the kid is out of his mind and and they said we can't give you that you might take that money and run off to the caribbean like maybe where you are right now and i was like well you know you got to give me the money because i and this is my negotiating story i said you got to give me the money because i have no money [Laughter] and they looked at me and i you got a point there you got no money so i they literally wrote me a hundred thousand dollar check and by rao at this point on seven hundred dollar a month rent i literally believe that hundred thousand dollars would last me for seven years i calculated i had seven years of capital took the money and i started micro strategy and where 10 people the first year and i thought i'm going to defer my phd program and when this thing fails i'm going back to college and the next year we were 20 people the next year we were 40 people the next year we were 80 people the next year we were 300 people and the next year people said you got to go public and at some point what year are we in what year are we in now we started i graduated in mit 87 i started this in 89 started microstrategy in 89 wow and i again i got so lucky like lucky that i got misdiagnosed by that doctor lucky that reagan won the cold war then i got lucky that the dot-com boom took off because if you recall between 96 and 99 everybody was going public and we were just coming of age in 96 97 you know and in 98 we came public june of 98 and of course it would come if we are two years late wouldn't have happened two years early wouldn't have happened we came out right that through that window and by then it was just too late for me to go back to college and i was like stuck as a ceo better worse so that's how microstrategy was founded it was if i could i couldn't do it again like in that twilight zone episode where the ceo goes back and gets all of his knowledge to try again he ends up the janitor if you put me back there again i'm like well i need the cold war to end and i need a doctor to make a mistake and i need someone to tell me to do the opposite of what i wanted to do and then you know it's just all random so were you a risk taker with the firm so as you go through the journey from you know going public so everyone's a risk taker when you start a business you have to be but then after that were you a risk taker i mean how did how did that kind of corporate journey evolved you were ceo you know i in hindsight i was a risk taker but at the time i didn't realize i was taking the risk the most dangerous kind of risk i you know like uh like if i if i could go back i would give myself counsel to do things differently but yeah we we did take risk although i'm one thing that i i did is i just was always very passionate about technology so we launched microstrategy as a business intelligence company and we were always inventing the next thing finally the first um the first risk that i took was i created a piece of software to create computer simulations on a macintosh and older wiser minds professors from mit told me uh that's how awful idea um the macintosh is not gonna win everybody knows that business people use the pc okay we were like a million dollar company then i said well i guess you're right but the macintosh is much more beautiful and better technology than the pc so we doubled and doubled again and they and the professor that gave me that advice was still running a 300 000 a year consulting business and we were 4 million with with the wrong technology so then the professor asked me what i was doing i said well i'm creating executive information systems using this spreadsheet called wings with a hyperscripting language and that professor said well all my friends tell me that excel is going to be the choice for all big businesses and wings is going to fail so i said well you may be right but excel doesn't have a scripting language so we'll try it for a while well we doubled again and doubled again we got to be 30 million and he was right and he's still running his 350 000 consulting business and then he asked me what i was doing and i said well i've decided to convert to microsoft visual basic and we're going to create relational analytics on top of big databases he said well do you have an experienced big database i said no none at all and he said well you know visual basic is not what people use for software engineering they use c plus i said yeah but i can't figure that out yet so we did it and we doubled again to 60 million dollars and he was still running his 350 million dollar a 50 000 consulting business not making a mistake at which point i realized you know you're kind of an idiot you need to write us the software in c plus plus so we took the money that we made making the first set of mistakes and we wrote it in c plus plus and we doubled again and then you know i'm sure someone said don't go public but basically i would say we mistake we're not very good at listening to people that's your problem you know i always chase after these shiny things okay but but there's a method to the madness which is you're better to be correct and do something that works now and then figure it out three or four years from now then to do nothing and sit and wait and be beat to death so i mean the short of the story is you know i took like six or seven risk and and every three years we had to invent something new web intelligence mobile intelligence we launched uh we launched a business called alarm.com about i got really enamored with domain names i you know i bought microstrategy.com for my email and then i got lazy and i thought i hate typing micro wouldn't it be better if i just had the email sailor at strategy.com so i bought it you know back in the day when you could buy it for a hundred thousand dollars i bought the word strategy and still own it so then i thought this is kind of cool what other words could i buy i thought it'd be cool to be sailor michael.com so i bought michael.com and then i bought mike.com and then i was like then i bought wisdom and by the way the world needs hope right everybody needs hope i own hope i own hope.com so i bought all these domain names hope i own allah if you would like hope by the way every about once every month someone wants to buy hope for me or they want some hope but they always offer me like a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars and i'm hoping for a hundred million dollars so i just keep it but that's a meandering way of saying i got re-enamored with domains back in the mid-90s to the late 90s and then i started thinking these are like real estate and cyberspace what if we could commercialize them so i commercialized strategy.com and i created this like uh it was like a twitter subscription you could sign up for alerts to anything under the sun and the company went from zero to 100 million in one year and then went from 100 million to zero in one year and i you know it was it was it was interesting i learned a lot from that i had the skin flayed off my back but you know then but then i went on to alarm.com and but we launched these under the microstrategy umbrella and the idea behind alarm was what if you could wire all your home alarm systems into the internet and they would talk to you and talk to your phone and they would tell they would call you and tell you if someone broke into your house and then and uh you know not a brilliant idea today amazon and google and apple are doing it pretty unique in the year 1998 or 1999 wow so we launched that and we launched it on alarm.com so if you go and type alarm.com right now what you'll find is it's a billion dollar company uh we eventually spun it off we made a decent amount of money off it then they went public with goldman sachs and it's it's a billion dollar nasdaq traded company now so that's one of my babies uh it flew away from home i created another one called i bought angel raw angel a-n-g-e-f my theory of these was very simple which is people have a hard time spelling and they have a hard time remembering things so everybody gets taught how to spell angel or hope when they're in high school or junior high so if i tell you my charity or my company or whatever is on angel you go am a-n-g-e-o you don't got to go to the google you don't have to go to yahoo you don't have to search for it if you search by the way for voice on google you get a billion hits you have to sift through a billion if your name of your company is something voice or whatever voice of the people there's a billion things you're fighting with if you own voice.com you go to the top by the way not only do you go to the top of the search engine right nobody needs the search engine you can bypass a search engine everybody knows how to type in voice right so the idea was own the word in cyberspace it's a scarce asset right it's fascinating and for 10 you know 1 000 years people been using the word so own the word so we basically commercialized on angel the idea of interactive voice response like emma i'm sorry not like uh siri siri or or or the like or alexa and uh we did it back in 2000 anybody could basically build an interactive voice response application we plugged it into your telephone and that started to work and about it was a sas application we ran it out of the cloud and you plugged in your telephone and we built it to a certain point but it was a totally different brand it was a different business model and and i had an enterprise software company and this was not enterprise software and it drove all of the accountants crazy so eventually we realized it was more valuable to someone else than it was to us and we sold it for about 120 million dollars uh and so that was my next little hit with a domain and then then at some point i started to realize that if you're not the best in the world at something nobody wants you for anything okay and it's like you know in the early days we all thought well i got 30 million dollars i can build this app everybody wanted to be what's up everybody wanted to be instagram or whatever i when i'm i gotta but if i had a nickel for every time someone said i have an idea for a mobile app you know it's like yeah you do right and it's worth a nickel i launched all these things some work some didn't work right and i you know i i tried i tried it many of them and then i eventually realized that you need to focus right it's the first hurdle is is can you acquire a thing can you build something okay you generally can i mean can you buy that thing the second hurdle is can you um can you compete in that market right can you can you maintain a competitiveness in that market that means investing every year as much as the next best person is investing forever right can you stay competitive that's a higher hurdle but the highest hurdle is can you commercialize or not can you profit from the thing so a lot of people can do a thing yeah most people can't do a thing better consistently forever and even if you can can you make money off it okay so this is a this is an articulation of stoicism just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing and every young man he sees everything he's like i have to do all this stuff i have an idea for this and this and this and this and this so i i went through that journey of do this and i kind of worked for you you have more successes than failures i failed up i got a lot of scars but i but it was humbling to i mean you have to have the failures uh along with the successes because if you if you don't fail eventually you get this big failure where it all comes crashing down so i guess i adopted along the way this idea of stoicism and i realized that you need to put all of your heart and soul into one thing and so at that point we sold off the one company we spun off the other thing and i realized you know my destiny was i could i could run microstrategy and be the world's best business intelligence company solely focused upon that one thing that's what we're going to be and um i went back to doing that and i let the other things go and i let the domain portfolio just sit and um it and and we just we're the little engine that could focus upon making our business intelligence better with web intelligence and mobile intelligence and cloud intelligence and and now our cool thing is hyper intelligence it's like it's like know the answer before you ask the question without clicking on anything you know and i tell you about that in a bit if you want but yeah i'm super interested i i was just busy minding my own business i got off i used to tweet you know i used to tweet all the time i got off twitter i focused on my core business and then eventually i came back i discovered bitcoin the day i put on twitter that we bought 250 million worth of bitcoin the entire hive mind of crypto twitter came to life and they went through every tweet that i had put out there a thousand of them and then someone dredges up the tweet where i had once upon a time in my imminent brilliance discovered that bitcoin was dead and it was going to zero and i enthusiastically posted that back in 2013. and and everybody wanted to know what i thought about that and and and what i got to tell you is i didn't remember i ever had an opinion on bitcoin until they reminded me that i had once been utterly wrong on it and so i i guess that's very humbling but uh but i i love the entire crypto twitter community i mean i think they're the smartest coolest most interesting uh charismatic individuals you know when they're right there right when they're wrong they're still kind of interestingly right and uh and i think they make us better versions of ourself but putting that aside i was minding my own business running micro strategy trying to be the best business intelligence company we can and i would say that's 150 focus on the p l and i was not you know and and with regard to investment my investment world consisted of this row it's like i was a technology investor in the year 2012 i published a book the mobile wave and in the mobile wave ion essence said software is leaping from out from under your desk beyond your laptop onto a mobile device it's going from solid state to liquid state to vapor state and it's going to be like vapor all around us and what that means is that the entire software world is becoming networked networked uh networked vapor state uh incredibly powerful dematerialized versions of of products and services and so the summary is is um apple computers going to rule the world buy apple facebook amazon google go if you read the book you know that's what i wrote i mean the epiphany was 2009 i asked my niece who was nine years old you know what do you want for christmas and she said i want the big apple and i said you want a trip to new york city and she goes no i want an ipad okay and i thought apple's going to replace new york city i was going to rule the world so my investment thesis was quite simple you know apple facebook amazon google a simple way for a tech investor to think is you buy a dominant network according to metcalf's law that's won the market the mobile network the information network the video network the social network i just named apple google youtube facebook the you know commercial very simple buy the dominant network and wait while all the naysayers on wall street and all the talking heads and all the people that know better tell you why you you know hedge i hate the word hedge like like like uh you know i can tell you wall street luminaries in 2012 would lecture me on they would say you know you shouldn't buy too much apple stock we've got a we've got a mutual fund and what we do is if your apple stock gets to be too much of your computer portfolio we sell it and buy hp and ibm to diversify you you know and i said well guys don't you realize that eventually apple's going to eat them all and there won't be a need for hp or ibm or anybody and what happens when apple is 150 of all the profit in the entire tech industry industry right well we don't see it that way okay that's what they thought and then they go well you know we're gonna protect you if uh if your share of your portfolio is too much technology we're gonna sell technology and we're gonna buy all these other assets and i was like but guys what happens when technology eats everything and there aren't any other assets okay in my opinion and i'm gonna be snarky here i think an ignorant investor thinks that technology companies are a part of of the index or they're a part of the industry in my opinion as a science historian john d rockefeller was running a technology company if you study the history of standard oil he did everything that jeff bezos did a hundred years earlier and if you study general electric once upon a time electricity was pretty technically interesting and if you've actually been to the hershey's factory in pennsylvania not a one of these investors could build the damn thing hershey's factory is a computer built in steel welded which is the most majestic majestic creation of mankind you could possibly imagine imagine writing a computer program and billions of dollars of steel and moving parts that spits out a hundred thousand candy bars an hour you know without contaminating them you know it's you think it's not technology or or craft you know i create ketchup the technology was i had clean room technology i had to take the tomatoes manufacture the ketchup put in a seal container without any bacteria in it so that it didn't rot over the course of the next year okay it's clean room technology no different than intel semiconductor chips so when these people think oh well we're not buying a technology company it's like every company that ever succeeded was a technology company and the only reason it grew was it had technology superior to everybody else so i i happen to you know back to 2012 i thought my investment thesis is you buy technology companies that have a dominant place in their industry that are going to eat everything and then you just wait while all the people that don't really think hard about this short you or diversify out of you and eventually some 80 year old investor that's got more money than god will discover that apple computer is not some newfangled you know uh gimmick right eventually and he will buy it at 10x what you bought it for and and but and then it will double again right and he will make some money and you will have made some money but you'll have to be beat to death by well well-educated well-intentioned diversifying experts while you wait for that to happen and they're going to say things like we're going to hedge you out of this or we don't want to don't want to take too much risk on apple don't want to take too much risk on google what if you had diversified your google search engine into every other search engine for the last 20 years you know one of the things i've talked about many times is there's a lot of people who want to trade they think trading makes money when you look at people who built real wealth it's basically one bet you know bill gates is who he is because he didn't sell his stock essentially you know and that's the same people take one clear bet filter out all of the noise and just pursue it we're all you know i listened to to uh your phrase irresponsibly long right but but you know it's really tongue-in-cheek you're not irresponsibly long you're you're just you're just uh unfortunately rational like maybe the word is is uh is like uh maybe uh some slightly early being rational like you're making a rational decision uh no i'm on what's the word for unpopular you're rational and unpopular exclu exclusively rational maybe that's the word exclusively rational so once you understand what's going to happen you kind of got to do it i i bought a lot of bitcoin recently like over the past before that why the hell did you have so much cash you know that was the question i was thinking okay great you bought bitcoin how come you had so much cash aren't you supposed to make cash if you're in business you're supposed to make money but what do you do with it it's just sitting in the business okay well this takes me back uh back to where we went off on my little tangent which is i was minding my own business running microstrategy where you know running the p l i was a wage earner you know you go and you make a salary and you spend less money than you make it's like it's a 20th century idea my dad taught me that like depression error economics spend less than you make so we're making money spending less than we're making putting cash in the bank and we're struggling to compete against you know my competitors are ibm oracle sap you know microsoft they're all 100 times bigger than us we're the independent we're the you know the switzerland so we're doing that that kind of takes up a lot of your attention and i'm not really paying attention to macroeconomics i don't you know my my investment thesis as i said was buy tech stocks but like you can't buy tech stocks as a public company ceo and put the treasury into tech stocks and you certainly couldn't do it near 2012 you might do in your personal portfolio but but the the conventional wisdom if you're running a corporate treasury is you're going to buy you're going to put cash and you're going to buy short-term treasuries short-term t-bills and i happen to believe before the financial crisis you know i remember the time when you can make five and a half percent interest on overnight money we're getting five five and a half percent yield you have 500 million dollars you're getting paid 30 million dollars finally i happen to remember when savings accounts paid six percent interest it's like and by the way we didn't think we were getting a good deal from the bank we thought that was totally reasonable and every conventional wisdom was the risk-free cost of capital is six to eight percent and then you get attack on a risk premium of four percent so your real cost to capital is 12 to do anything and that's the old day so that that's the way i thought about the treasury and then i thought and then there were other people what else can i do with the money you can buy your own stock back or you can buy another company now i teach a course in uh management theory to all my managers and my number one question is how do you wreck a software company in my history and by rao i'm like the longest presiding public company ceo in the enterprise software industry nobody has been ceo of a public enterprise software company longer than me 22 years 88 quarters i count them one at a time everybody came and gone okay how do you wreck a software company you know you have an answer for me what do you think number one way to wreck it i'm assuming it's going to be acquire somebody else make a acquisition make a bad acquisition okay bingo the ceo of sap comes in he lasts for nine months he buys autonomy they take an 11 billion dollar write-off it's pretty impressive to burn 11 billion dollars in 11 months on one transaction that you probably spend i don't know a few hours on i mean like how many lifetimes how many a million lifetimes to make 11 billion dollars so um the number one way to kill a company is make a bad acquisition so i got all this cash do i go buy something i i have lived long enough to see 90 percent yeah how about microsoft buying nokia that was a good idea right uh by the way you could have seen that one coming a mile away that was the most awful idea you could imagine uh you want to count the number 90 of all acquisitions end awfully right and and there's a few accretive ones if you buy a small company pump it through a massive distribution channel jack it up by a factor of 10 with no variable cost you know maybe it works but acquisitions are bad so i'm not going to buy a company so what else do you do with the cash you buy your own stock back okay how many how many companies have gone toys r us gone bankrupt because they bought that you know they lever up they issue a massive dividend they drain the capital right drain all the capital out of the company they're running on um what happened if you were actually running on uh on vapor when covid hit yeah it's all over everybody is insolvent they're all out of business overnight okay so that's another way to kill the company you drain all your capital so so what's left what what the heck is left okay steve jobs is my hero steve jobs had a near a near-death experience with this company apple computer was almost you know there was a point when michael dell told apple they should just give the money back to the shareholders and shut down right that's a tweet you probably don't like coming back okay so steve jobs kept all that cash you know until the day he died and they accumulate they didn't buy back the stock i would you know i thought maybe i would like microstrategy to not die and so i was going to keep the capital and by the way so i can serve the customers yeah you have nightmares of your cfo the nightmare is you let a customer down right like some when someone actually invests 10 million dollars in my company software and then they build something with it and they deploy it you know like you're going to go tell them oh we decided not to update the software let me put it differently how would you feel if you put 100 million dollars into bitcoin and then the miner said we're turning off the rigs and the developers said we're not going to patch the bug or upgrade and so it's just going to stop working right so you have a you have an ethical moral obligation to your customers and a lot of times these ceos they kind of they kind of get cute this is the problem with the the lbo guys we're going to get cute we're going to buy it i'm going to buy marvel comics i'm going to leverage it up drain the capital out of it and bankrupt marvel right happened right sad happen right so don't want to do that so what can i do i just leave the cash in the bank and i'm buying the stock back at some rate and then along comes covid and and covet is this transformational experience thomas kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions which is the seminal work on the history of science he wrote when the paradigm shift comes along write the old guard you know when we invent uh antibiotics or or the science of sterilization or or nuclear energy or whatever it is we invent the old guard rejects it no one accepts it until they're dead unless there's a war and the one thing that'll get people to change their mind is when they die and their kids take over that changes some minds right and and the other thing that gets people to change their mind is a war you know world war ii it you know and as as trotsky said you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you and when the war arrives you all of a sudden get interested in stuff that you were able to ignore because it was of an academic interest to people somewhere else so this year we got two wars we got a war on covid and it and it and by the way what's the warren kovac done i would have fired you rau if you told me you wanted to work from somewhere other than my office i you know i would have said you don't show up to my office you're not sitting next to me you don't have a job here last year i was firing people that didn't want to come to work let me tell you what happens next covet hits lockdown hits i'm like i'm hating that idea then i gotta have a meeting and at nine a.m in the morning we got a meeting and we're on on video conferencing technology a which i will not mention and the line drops the sound doesn't work there's a war ball i blow throw a little hissy fit all my it people scramble by 11 a.m we're on video conferencing technology 2 and i got 12 executives and we're talking blah blah blah blah blah and two of the executives freeze and one of them doesn't work and i throw a second hissy fit by 1pm they're like well you know mike we've got this thing called zoom and we haven't tried it yet but we thought we might try that i said hook it up by 2 p.m we're using zoom it's working well like you and i are working well by 4 p.m email goes out from the ceo to the entire company zoom is now the corporate standard we will discontinue all other uses of video conferencing everybody in the company will be certified on zoom zoom webinar zoom video recordings you know a stipend to purchase your own home microphone will go out to everybody buy green screens if you need to i expect it to be done no more meetings other than zoom by a.m the next morning 2 500 people have turned left okay that's what war will do to you okay in a hurry it's like because you got to now the first war was the coveted war and that changed everybody's p l and that's half the business i have a 500 million dollar operating business and we sell enterprise software and and in a matter of weeks we needed to figure out how to sell that stuff virtually and how to deliver service virtually and 500 consultants went from being on site to being uh to being remote and you know like the war hit rel and we started worrying about what's going to happen to our business nobody knows four weeks later 500 people had gone had gone remote and i was waiting to see like whether a meteorite was going to hit me on the head and you know whether whether that was going to be mass destruction would the revenues crumple would customers go ballistic crazy okay and then here's what happened we stopped spending five million dollars a quarter on on running around on flying around in hotels our next 15 million dollars worth of marketing events trade shows got cancelled on us then we realized we couldn't stage 150 000 symposiums even we wanted to and then we realized that every expensive sales and marketing and services activity we had previously heretofore engaged in was no longer appropriate or practical or possible or relevant or necessary well like i think i just made 40 million dollars a year and about 40 million dollars a year on a 500 million dollar a year revenue stream i got kicked i got kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe [Laughter] all right i don't want to make light of it because a lot of people are suffering a lot of pain okay and there's a you know someone's one person's state cost savings is another person's revenue right so if you look at the other point of view there's a lot of people in the events industry the hotel industry the airline industry et cetera and they're suffering right but i'm the ceo i have to be the fiduciary for my shareholders and for my customers and at the end of the day what happened at the p l is we realized we were going to be much more profitable and be much more efficient after this despite the ceo kicking and screaming being dragged into the virtual age right right so that that's me i had an opinion i was wrong war hit me bang on the head okay i see it differently today and by the way at that point i saw what everybody else in the virtual world had been seeing so clearly three years before me four years before me but i had to go through three different vendors and i had by i had to change my technology my customers had to be forced to take my technology my employees had to be forced if i had walked in and i said to the cios that i deal with i'm not going to meet with you face to face i want you to zoom to me 12 months ago they would have told me to you know go pound sand so what happened really was the war changed everybody's behavior right and and uh so we got uh now i'm gonna pick it's a let in quote right i mean there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen right and so the war didn't change me the war changed everybody and so my p l is different my operating income is different and now that takes us back to the ballot sheet the balance sheet which was an afterthought i got a bunch of money i'm buying some stock back our stock you know got hammered through the floor and then what happens so i'm watching the market and and i'm living the pain of main street and i'm watching that all of these operating businesses are getting destroyed getting destroyed and it's just the most horrific awful thing of my career horror right it's like i i i have no words for it i'm not even going to articulate the words for it except for this to say i watched and felt with a horrifying pain the dismantling of my entire world view of which not a big fan okay now having watched that change then i watched a v-shaped recovery with talking heads on msnbc and i just watched the market go like that and i watched every equity go through the roof you know apple stock goes it doubles even though any rational persons how can apple be worth twice as much when half of the world's economy just got wrecked and when when their revenues and their earnings are looking constant so that the earnings multiples blow through the roof right it's like and then i watch but this is one that blows my mind ralph if you told me if you're a bond salesman and you said to me mike i have an idea for you i want you to buy 30-year 30-year government bonds that are going to yield two percent interest for the rest of your life i said are you out of your mind are you you must be crazy to sell me these bonds those bonds had a 22 gain in 12 weeks so you would have made a 22 gain on the long bond index i might and i feel like an idiot like i would have made money buying bonds a two percent yield for the rest of my life i would have made money buying leveraged equity of everything as the world is going through the floor and i'm holding my little bucket of cash as this is happening and that takes me to my second war but the first war is the warren covet the second war is the war on currency but like people say there's a currency war i heard it i didn't understand it i thought currency war by the way i don't even know if everybody agrees or even under interprets it the way i do i thought currency war was was the us wants to weaken its currency so that our exports are more affordable in europe i thought well that's kind of cool uh you know when the uh when the currency weakens all of my revenues in europe denominated in the euros go up by 20 percent and my revenues and dollars go up by 20 percent and it's good for my stock in dollars it's like that's kind of that's kind of cute that's our currency adjustment we get that every quarter and if the us dollar is weak we feel good about it when the us dollar is strong we have currency headwinds okay that's second order currency war okay the first order currency war is every every buddy in the world declared war on currency and your hundred million dollars in the bank that bought a bond that you know maybe i i buy a bond for a million bucks that yields 50 000 a year okay that's an asset that's interesting to me i want to retire i buy a million dollar bond yielding 5 interest and i get 50 000 a year when the currency war hits now that bond trades up to two million dollars and it deals 20 50 000 a year but is two and a half percent yield so what happened was the bonds shoot through the roof and they appreciate by a hundred percent what really happened in the past 12 weeks is assets we saw asset inflation of 25 to 40 percent okay cpi is such a misnomer right like people talk about inflation like it's cpi well you can measure the inflation rate of of consumer products and services yeah i buy a domino's pizza and i buy netflix and i buy youtube those aren't inflating when i measure the market basket of consumer assets it's like my retired dad would like to buy a million dollar bond that yields fifty thousand dollars a year in interest when i measure that you're talking about you know six seven eight percent in a normal year as the money supply increases all of the things that i want to buy i'm being snarky all the things i want to buy are going up eight percent a year in a good year all the things that are being given away for me that are manufactured by machines there's also a function of this and just listen to you just clarified a thought for me right the function of inflation is generally driven by demand right i i don't believe it's necessarily fully a monetary phenomenon maybe demand is passed but demographics plays a big part right the largest demographic wave of all time are the baby boomers those guys guess what they want to buy retirement assets you know and so you know that you know there's a perceived value in that so it's kind of crowded within certain things and it's created this enormous bubble in it and that's that's where my dispute is with with all the entire media fixation on inflation as cpi it's like do i want to buy a million dollars worth of domino pizzas and do i want to buy a million dollars worth of netflix or a million dollars worth of consumable products or do i want to buy a million dollars worth of assets that let me not work for the rest of my life well that they're measuring the things that are easy to manufacture with a robot or a factory they're not measuring the things that i want that because the things that i want are scarce assets that have a yield and you know let's take a share of apple stock well you wanted a share of apple stock when it was a quarter of what it costs today yeah okay it now costs four times as much how can you say inflation is two percent if the uh if the thing i wanted to buy went up by 400 and without the underlying business changing without the underlying business changing so now we come back to a currency one the wars on the currency and and the result is 25 inflation on cur if you're holding currency and you want and what do you what can you convert treasury assets to you can convert them into other assets okay i'm not going to buy domino's pizzas with treasury assets i'm going to i'm going to eventually buy a stock that has a dividend or i'm a stream of cash flows or i'm going to buy a bond that is a stream of cash flows and right now the bond that i can buy is going to yield 1.3 interest for the rest of my life so now you start thinking i i didn't have to really think about it until i got hit in the head with the 2x4 of this currency war and and then if i wasn't paying attention the internet explodes msnbc explodes if if you haven't noticed it now right i mean you must be living under a rock somewhere right it it's pretty noticeable so then i start getting introduced to the concept of i always knew nominal interest rates were low yeah that i get but then i started thinking about real interest rates but every system oh the real interest rate on a 10-year bond is like well minus one percent well no it's not i mean it's only minus one percent if you buy into the notion that cpi is is inflation but if you actually start thinking in terms of of inflation is a vector based upon what you want to acquire with the cash then you realize the rate at which tech equity has been inflating is a lot faster than like what's the what's the rate at which apple stock has been going up is that it's cpi right is that 10 is that 50 so now if i look at asset inflation i start thinking you know at at that point the real yield on my cash yeah but there is a cap but the bonds had a capital gains as you pointed out before so the net offset of bonds over the course of this year bonds versus nasdaq it's been a pretty close run yeah you're you're right i think we're doing well if you were smart enough it's totally counter to my thinking how could a person rationally lock up its com his company's capital for the next 30 years for two percent interest see if if i'm the ceo and you said no you you'd invest it back in the business at the very least if not you're saying your business cannot generate a two percent roi okay here's my my problem is moral hazard if i took 500 million dollars and i put it into a 30-year bond yielding 2 interest and if any if if any rational economist took over the fed you would think the interest rate's gonna go to four percent or five percent the inter everybody knows that the economy cannot function with a zero percent interest forever right interest rate is the value of time we're in a war with time we want to stop yeah will you give me everything that you own will you give it to me for the rest of your life if i return one third of it to you when you're dead right that's what one percent interest is well right right give me everything you own i will give you one percent of it back each year for the next 30 years and when you're dead you will get 30 your heirs will get 30 of what you gave me now so here's here's the moral hazard i well that or the dilemma for me as a ceo if i invest the 500 million in the 30-year t-bills at 2 i'm taking the risk i'm i'm making the bet that no rational actor will ever fix the problem in in in in the fed right i'm like i have to bet all my company's treasury that the world will stay irrationally priced everything it kind of it was the right bet for a japanese ceo to have made it's like by the way you know if ray dalio says cash is trash right like um i don't know if he says it the trolls say he says it but uh like i'm gonna wait for 30 years and see whether whether the government has inflated the cash and then you're going to give me back the 500 million in 30 30 years it's like i that doesn't make any sense because i pretty much bet i i can't but i can't construct a rational argument whereby 30 years from now i will have made money on it but here's here's what i would think any rational person would think that you lock up 500 million dollars for 30 years at 2 interest when the interest rate goes to 4 percent your bonds are going to trade down by 30 or 40 and you're going to lose the 200 million dollars right so what i'm looking at i'm thinking you know that's the craziest thing ever right i can't imagine that so if you're a shorter term trader i'm like okay have at it buy the 30-year long bond index you're gonna but no one seems to be thinking they're gonna hold it for 30 years so but i i can't get that so so on one hand i look at that it's just massive hazard moral hazard craziness and on the other hand i look at all these of the equities i'm like well i can't just buy individual equities i mean there's too much equity risk there and then meantime i just watch you know i watch the talking heads we get beat to death with this issue of real return and i start to go to school on that and i realized that you can calculate a real yield if if your real yield is take the asset inflation rate and subtract that from the the nominal yield then the conclusion you come to pretty quickly is that the real yield on cash this year is minus 30 minus 25 right if you were holding the cash if you were holding a 30-year bond you broke even or may you know or maybe you're okay but i but i'm not if you're holding a two-three four-year instrument the real yield is obscenely bad it's minus 10 20 15 20 30 depends upon how you see that the real yield on on on uh anything i was holding is bad now the question is how do i get a positive yield like i i i use this phrase i said you know i come to the horrifying conclusion that i'm sitting on a 500 million dollar ice cube that's melting it's it's melting at six percent in a good year and for the last decade it's been melting at six percent okay i i was there but i could ignore it in good times you ignore the six percent but then when you have to actually get educated on macroeconomics you realize it's been melting at six percent and then you realize that this year it's melting 25 percent and then you have to look out over the next three years and ask the question is it going to continue to melt at 20 percent a year for the next three years is going to melt at 15 or 10 percent you know and uh but if you think about your terms because basically part of your construct is that opportunity cost is is your negative yield essentially right now let's say you're a corporate treasurer and you've got 500 with the ceo you've got 500 million dollars as you said you could choose to make an acquisition well guess what 40 more expensive now in in the sector that you want to acquire so as you say your opportunity cost has been incredibly expensive by setting in cash so to offset that which i guess is what your mentality is you need an asset that can offset that opportunity cost without overpaying for the asset you know raleigh and you say you say a wise thing that an investor gets i was ceo i didn't get it i like i didn't get some things until i got it okay until this year i would go to my investors and i said well we got a great company we got 500 million 600 million in cash a great bulletproof balance sheet and they looked at me like like we're not going to value the cash like they didn't value my cash they thought you know they thought it was like worth nothing and you know i kind of took offense to that like they don't get it like the cash means that we're indestructible we're going to live forever and we can do the right thing by our employees our shareholders and by our customers right and why why is it i'm being punished for being virtuous for saving my money and for being responsible and conservative and i was kind of you know angry you know not angry irritated a little bit like they don't get it and then i realized they kind of do get it they had a different perspective i just didn't understand what they were trying to tell me and their perspective is i mean there's no rational investor that would raise a billion dollars and say my plan is to put it in cash and wait right you can't go raise that money so their perspective was assets are inflating at six percent or seven percent a year in a good year if i'm not beating seven percent i can't stay in this business so that takes you to this this notion that the asset inflation rate is actually just the cost of capital okay and okay bingo your cost to capital if you're the ceo of a publicly traded company in a good year in a normal year is six percent or seven percent you better actually generate more than seven percent with it or you got to give it back to the shareholders i mean down to the razor thin margin now now there's a certain elegance to that um why didn't we actually do that well it used to be we're thinking i i've got a bunch of capital we're buying our stock back at a at a measured rate you know and uh we were very friendly traded so if i bought 20 of the stock back in the windows without moving the market it takes me like seven years you know it takes me some number of years to buy it all back you know it's very frustrating and if i like if i and i can't go any faster than that you know without doing a tender offer of the light so we're we're doing a bit of that and then along comes the pandemic and everybody gets kicked into high gear and the opera the p l gets kicked into high gear and we're transforming and then this macroeconomic change takes place and the cost capital now row it's not six percent anymore the cost of capital just spiked and so the fascinating thing here is if you're a corporate treasurer your cost of capital was six percent this year your cost capital is 25 and then all the assets that you could buy go through the roof and now that this is a problem like do i go buy a company 90 likely i burn the business i destroy the if i buy a bad acquisition then i probably make a mistake that's a that's a peril do i go by um the s p 500 after it spiked up today the most crowded trade right they're saying the most crowded trade is also the future expected returns are basically negative by most people's assessment for the next 10 years so you're basically locking into a loss it feel it could very well be a lost decade uh for for equities so but i watched television for the past like four months and it's just it's amazing to me that that um the equity commentators managed to find something positive to say every single day you know every single day it's amazing so yeah that doesn't it doesn't really work for me so my cost capital spikes i get i get sensitized to the issue we start thinking we got to do something okay so now you put yourself in my situation you have 500 million in cash cost capital went through the roof and and every central banker wants to print more money and every intelligent investor is telling you that cash is trash what would you do if you're me i i came to the same conclusion you did i mean it's basically is you need to look for an asset that's going to protect you in a number of scenarios that has a high expected upside that beats the cost of capital and so that's the only thing i can think of and so it to me it came down to golden golden bitcoin so so we tick through these so what what can i buy i'm not going to buy an individual equity i'm not going to buy another company can i buy a portfolio of commercial real estate oops half commercial real estate's impaired the other you know the other half is overinflated and who's going to sell me 500 million dollars worth of commercial real estate at a fair price that's not impaired this year right that's not going to work so now i'm down to uh can i buy an index of stock well anything you want to buy company wise that's cheap is basically insolvent and comes with a bunch of debts anything that doesn't cover the bunch of debts is crazy ludicrously expensive okay you're right i get it and and so mark that off the list so so now i i what have i got precious metals and bitcoin so i look at two things that i completely dismissed was oblivious to my entire life rel right like and so all of a sudden you get hit in the head with a two by four and you cross off your list and every door is shut to you but these two other random doors and so you got to open up the doors and start to look and so now i go down the rabbit hole and i start studying and you know you can learn anything on the internet so all of a sudden you get discovered by me pomp gets discovered by me i ha i have this friend eric weiss who's who's uh runs a crypto hedge fund and a couple years ago he told me about bitcoin i thought well that's crazy i i kind of dismissed it out of him like like well i mean couldn't someone else create a bitcoin cryptocurrency and then all the money will drain away and maybe you know how how do you know it's going to work and so i just don't even look at it don't even think about it you know and um when all the other doors shut this one opens and now i now i have a problem right if someone took 500 million dollars out of your bank put it in your backyard open the back gate and then every month someone came in and they burned two percent of your money you know it's like you go from thinking your money is safe to having extreme anxiety extreme so now i got a problem assault i i first had to solve the p l problem now we switch to the balance sheet and uh so what do we do well take this off first i go and i start you know i study the stuff and i get to introduce the stock to flow right now all of a sudden i'm looking at plan b and what is stock to flow okay two percent you know two percent of the gold supply gets inflated every year and then i start doing the math and i start thinking about it i'm thinking well two percent minus you know whatever it's it's better and then i start looking at crypto and i look at bitcoin and then i realized this is what i and then i start with all the concerns about bitcoin right what if it gets forked right i mean you know there's nothing more anxiety inducing than when someone puts eight pages in front of you of what happens to your crypto if it gets a hard fork or a soft fork and you're studying it so i started studying it but but then i realized here's what i realized in short order bitcoin's the 200 billion dollar asset bitcoin is a hive of cybernetic hornets doing the bidding of mother nature protected by by a a wall of encrypted energy right that's what i saw once i started to dig it it's it's a it's a living cybernetic harm hive creature with a wall of encrypted energy and and lord help the guy that tries to shove his hand into that hornet's nest and steal from it right it's and i thought that's interesting and then i studied aetherium that's the number two and then i realized ethereum is is something totally different a world computer and they're still chasing after functionality uh you know all sorts of functionality and like more power to them decentralized finance it's interesting it's experimental there it might be something that micro strategies build something on in the future for ethereum yeah i mean i guess i guess what i'd say is is um i saw all that stuff but it's there's still a question of of will it work it has to be proven and there are centralized competitors to it and they're not done with the functional architecture i mean if you understand proof of work then when the founder says well we think we're going to switch it to proof of stake because we don't think proof of work will work for us then you know you realize there's there's a fundamental dogmatic set of assumptions and there's an existential debate going on there sure you know fast forward to the conclusion which is if you look at all the proof-of-work crypto networks bitcoin is 92 percent of them all the next competitor is two percent the next competitor is one and a half percent the next competitor is less than one percent it's the market screaming to you that there's a winner right so when everybody says well you know there might be another one no they wouldn't be well this might be the myspace well no if you knew anything about the history of myspace you would know that myspace flamed out at a billion dollars you know it flamed out when it was less than one percent of what bitcoin was you know bitcoin was never myspace you know bitcoin is the facebook of of closed digital monetary networks and it's already crushed everything and it's eating it's software eating the world right software eating money and it's only going to get more powerful so now we're back to my issue i know i got to buy hard assets it's a question of silver gold bitcoin and now i start thinking about it you know and here's what i'm thinking row it's like i think everybody's too short-term on this stuff you want to really understand it step back from the noise look at the big picture how does this feel across time and space i'm gonna take a hundred million dollars and i'm going to give it to my successor in a hundred years okay you want to send something to your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren if you want to endow anything of value a park a company an institution a foundation a family or whatever whatever you're a religion you a political system i don't care what it is if you believe in it and you want it to be here a hundred years from now you got some money how are you going to convey the hundred million dollars across a hundred years without losing it would you invest in apple stock apple might not be around would you invest it in dollars traditionally traditionally real estate's been that answer but even that's risky okay so you want to buy a hundred million dollars of real estate in california yeah no okay do you know what the property tax rate is in florida that's true i forget about u.s property taxes yeah i know it's two percent if you take a hundred million dollars and you buy florida real estate it's two million dollars a year and by the way it gets appraised up every year which means that over 30 years you'll lose it all the property tax rate on anything in the real world is going to drain it from you you can't buy real estate if you look at all assets you can buy the clock you buy a stock you buy an equity you've got a property tax you've got an income tax you've got you've got employee payroll taxes you've got regulation you've got customs you've got trade you've got tariff now i'm going to come back to you with a question how are you going to convey your family's wealth across the generations for 100 years and if you're not i'll just stop right there how are you going to do it you tell me well the only thing is and gold is not easy because where do you store it and how do you pass that along okay so let me stop you there and tell me what the i'm going to tell you what the problem is the goal i thought about take your 100 million dollars and put it in gold in a vault gold miners are going to print 2 million 2 percent more every year okay if if gold miners produce if you own the entire supply of gold in the world and if it was pure right for london delivery gold bars and it isn't right but if it was and if you were sure you owned it all if gold miners create two percent more every year the rule of 70 says every 35 years the goal supply doubles which means that you would own half the gold supply in 35 years a quarter of the gold supply in in another 35 years and in a hundred years you're going to own about 15 percent maybe even 12 of the goal supply so here you'll like this so i was thinking through something similar in a different way i just wanted to look at the fed balance sheet growth over the last whatever period i wanted to choose and i looked at every asset against it the fed balance sheet outperformed everything outbound goal by 50 so gold's done a bloody lousy job it's better than many things there's only one asset only one asset that did it and it killed it was bitcoin okay and by the way and i know why now and and i'll tell you what i think it is in a second um i thought i was going to buy gold and a very smart guy that that works for me my consolidaire he said he said mike i remember you know gold back in the 70s and the 80s was 600 600 and then it traded down and and it's gone nowhere for a decade and i can i'm like everybody says gold's the ultimate hard money what's the problem what am i missing in this picture and then here's what i realized goals got an inflation rate of two percent over time that means a hundred million dollars is going to be worth twelve and a half million dollars at two percent you're going to lose 80 85 or 87 percent of your wealth if it inflates at two percent but it's worse than that because gold's not pure half the goal supplies floating around right it's not all stamped good delivery bars in london yeah that's the second problem the third problem is if gold price goes up every miner is your enemy they're going to print more they're going to mine more gold they're going to ship more gold they're going to capital invest in more gold this is the dilemma of every commodity business and i used to work for commodities of dupont the dilemma is if the price of the commodity or let's go back to oil fracking we fought wars over oil rail we went and fought wars over oil to protect our oil what happened when the price of oil went to a hundred dollars a barrel fracking we invented a new technology to and by the way what happened the us produced so much oil it became a world crisis we doubled and we we produced five million barrels of water a day and now we produce 10 million bills of oil a day and then 11 and 12. and everybody was like hold it you're going to produce too much oil okay and then you realize opec the secret to making money in oil is a cartel john d rockefeller understood it a cartel anything that humans can produce with with their brains and with capital is going to get over produced and that's this and that's the problem with uh with using um a commodity as a money because ultimately if if gold is successful then intelligent people are going to produce more gold and you're going to double triple quadruple the supply of it anything with a supernormal return gets arbitraged away so those returns are only available for a period of time everybody gets into the game the margins collapse i mean it's everywhere i mean that that's capitalism and and so people that think they're buying hard gold the problem by by the way i we could have another cast i could talk with you for two hours about about um the technical problems with gold you know and but i don't want to get derailed by that um i want to i want to basically start with a simple premise if i look at bitcoin there's a lot of people at bitcoin community talk about stock to flow and how it's going down and and i appreciate it and i and i think it's a good contribution but i have a different take on that as a public company ceo which is this every time i print my share count there's only one number that matters i print fully deluded share count no one ever asked me well how many shares do you have this minute nobody ever asked me how many shares are going to vest with employees next month or next year they just ask me one question what's your fully diluted share account we take your earnings we divide by that we're done take your revenue divide by that we're done the fully deluded bitcoin count is 21 million done the fact that it's going to trickle out about it i don't care fully diluted bitcoin count 21 million instead of saying it's the heart stock to flow is higher now stock to flow is exponentially going to infinity stock to flow is infinite which means it's infinitely hard because a rational actor and i consider myself a rational actor i didn't buy bitcoin expecting i was buying you know this much bitcoin divided by 18 million 500 000 i bought the bitcoin thinking i was buying that share of 21 million and i knew that and i and so now we're back this very simple thing you take your 100 million dollars and you hold it for a year in fiat currency you're going to have one percent or half a percent of it left you're going to lose 99 of your money in a hundred years by the way wrong i know that to be the case i have a house in florida a nice house in florida it would cost you 15 million dollars to buy that house 20 million today i have the sale deed for that house in 1930 you know what the number is on it a hundred thousand a hundred thousand dollars in nineteen thirty count the number of years between 1930 and the year 2020 and figure out what the uh depreciation rate was on fiat currency in the us dollar i it's it's you're going to lose 99 of your money if you put it in cash okay so we all agree on that okay this is the thing that people don't say you're gonna lose for sure 85 of your money if you put it in gold you're gonna for sure by the way and that you're you're assuming that nobody invents a better chemistry for gold we don't find gold anywhere else nobody invests any more money in gold mining nobody gets any smarter and the gold price doesn't go up too much and if all those things are true and people still use gold you're going to lose 85 of your money but if human ingenuity kicks in gold's a commodity you're going to lose 90 of your money in gold now if you put your money in bitcoin you're keeping it all you're not losing anything once if you don't believe in fully deluded bitcoin count you have a 15 loss in 100 years but if you do believe in it there's no loss now let me give you another analogy you want to cross the atlantic if you cross the atlantic in a vessel made of fiat currency it's like stitching together a bunch of inflatable rafts your crop by the way you're crossing the atlantic and in an inflatable boat with a leak in it or you want to cross the atlantic and in a gold vessel you're across the atlantic in a wooden ship oh it's sort of good but it's rotting you know it's a wooden ship it's better than inflatable it doesn't have a leak in it but it's wood and it's going to decay it's decaying two three percent a year you're crossing the atlantic in bitcoin it's a steelhole freighter the thing about steel you know like i say to the guys that say well why do i want to steal boat they go well because steel is indestructible and the welds are harder than the original steel if you put a hole in steel and you weld it the weld is stronger than the original material steel will last as long as you maintain it will last forever okay so rubber boat wooden boat steel vessel and now here's an epiphany right i mean if that's not enough right i mean like there's no comparison between losing 80 to 90 percent of your money versus not losing any of your money there's no comparison but here's another epiphany i'm an aeronautical engineer from mit i studied i studied spaceship design i studied aircraft design i studied building design you know the entire science of civil engineering requires one element you know what the element is steel think about it for a second i build a building with with wood you can build a two-story building you ever see a five-story wooden building i built you know that's that's fiat i build a building of stone you know and masonry look at all of europe all of beautiful europe every building in europe five stories six stories that's as far as you go you know with brick what happens when i invent steel i build a 50-story building you think steel is twice as good as bricks yeah you you can build a hundred story building right steel steel is is elemental to or instrumental to new york city there is no new york city without steel you know there is no skyscraper there's no science of civil engineering until you invent steel right you could say iron maybe if you want but into but without the element without the element of steel there's no civil engineering now flip to air space you know aerospace you ever see a plane made of steel no they don't fly steel is the perfect element except for the fact it's too heavy to fly that's why we use aluminum no aluminum no airplanes no industry nothing take away aluminum the entire aviation industry goes to zero right andrew mellon made his money on aluminum andrew carnegie made his money on steel right these are fundamental things these were technologists the entire industry is based on it now the gold standard good idea in the 19th century right the best idea you could have in the 19th century but i mean just like wooden ships pretty good idea to have wooden ships if you're the british empire if that's the best you can have you know now along comes bitcoin cryptocurrency it's it's when i say it's harder than gold i mean it's not just 10 times harder because it goes it goes 100 years without losing any of its value i say it's harder because it's an organic nest of cybernetic hornets feeding off of encrypted energy it's a living thing which means that the miners are going to keep upgrading their equipment the developer's going to keep upgrading their development the nodes are going to change everybody the ecosystem is going to change and they're changing in this terrifying darwinian capitalistic libertarian aggressive winner take all hold no bars you know no you know no one company country companies holding like that like i've been ceo i thought i was right i was wrong you could be the most brilliant ceo at all you know anything that's controlled by a ceo is crippled controlled by a state is crippled controlled by a country it's crippled this entire thing is its own ecosystem you know gold is not going to get a million times smarter in the next 10 years it's not thinking at all it's a lump of metal lying there right what's you know nicholas taleb wrote anti-fragile i think taleb is brilliant you know i love all of his books read every one of them twice right uh bitcoin is an anti-fragile evolving evolving thing it's the heart it's hardest currency because it's getting continually exponentially harder it's getting harder but it's also smarter stronger and faster than gold right it's smarter because these com i i can create a computer program i can put on a machine behind that bar and i can have it make a million trades with your crypto every night while you're sleeping and move it around right but i can't do it with gold if i want to move a hundred million dollars of gold i got to put it on a jet fly it around the world it's 250 000 dollars to physically deliver 100 million dollars worth of gold i can physically deliver 100 million worth of bitcoin in five bucks right five dollars and and 30 minutes you know depending upon how risk-averse you are but if i if i want to move it i can put a piece of software on it by the way ralph you know when i move a hundred million dollars into a crypto exchange to buy crypto i got to talk to like three bankers on the phone and they're asking me they're asking me for my birthday ralph you can go on google and you can google michael saylor and do you know what the i you don't have to click do you know what google puts underneath the google for my birthday my birthday you know so the banking system is running about a million times slower and less secure to move this stuff around um when i put it in when i put this this elemental energy into bitcoin it's smart because it's getting smart as fast as the smartest crypto bank can program something intelligent and i am in awe of how of how many of these uh these things are going on so fast d5 and c5 right it's not clear to me whether you're going to use d5 or c5 doesn't matter whatever is going to work is going to work it's all happening yeah it's faster because it's dematerialized gold i look at all my employees and i say we're in the virtual wave guys you can now move at the speed of light and bend time and space what are you going to do with it right if if i can actually take your 100 million dollars worth of gold dematerialize it chop it into 10 million pieces and move it around the world 100 times a second something new is going to happen and then it's and it's stronger it's stronger because you can liquidate a hundred million dollars with the bitcoin on a saturday afternoon in a foreign country in a foreign currency and you know you can do this and maybe you might take a three percent haircut you know you might like oh holy crap it's volatile it moved down 300 bucks well three percent haircut to liquidate 100 million dollars of gold on a saturday afternoon try doing that in in istanbul try liquidating 100 million dollars sitting in a vault in new york city in tokyo on an afternoon on a weekend right so the issue is gold's going to be audited once every by the way i apologize for digressing but you can't make this stuff up it's really hilarious when i borrow 100 million dollars from a conventional bank you know how they verify my collateral they ask me to have my accountant prepare a financial statement as of the end of last fiscal year and so i actually deliver a statement that has all of my assets on it and if i'm borrowing money on june 30th i'm giving you a january first financial statement and and by and i'm asserting that i have not double pledged the collateral or committed bank fraud and my accountant is asserting it and that's a pretty serious thing but you know i'm saying it tongue-in-cheek right yeah that's ridiculous why why do people care about publicly traded companies well you know public you know a public company has more credibility than a private company and has a lot more pred credibility than a private individual and here's one reason why i and my cfo sign uh sarbanes-oxley statements financial reports and every quarter i signed my financial report if i lie to you ralph it's a crime right i go to jail right if a public company officer mis uh misrepresents the state of the balance sheet the state of the business uh you asked me like how's the future of the business i'm going to equivocate i think we're you know the future of the business will be the future of the business and we're just really excited about working on the future of the business it's because it's a crime for me to mislead okay so so the way that we actually certify collateral is is via regulations and criminal statutes and that's why the most credible entities in the world are american publicly traded companies right because everybody knows that if you trade on the nasdaq or the new york stock exchange and you're a ceo or a cfo of an america it if i heard a guy that worked for a guy that worked for a guy that worked for a guy that worked for me in a foreign country was actually doing something sloppy i'm thinking well foreign corrupt practices act makes me criminally liable for that and that person gets chopped off okay so so that's the way that you actually pledge collateral normally with bitcoin we've totally turned his head anybody can inspect the fact that i own the bitcoin in one second yeah and and uh every 10 minutes you could take a complete audit of everything i mean i wrote that article about it being the world's most pristine collateral i mean it's perfect for the struck the foundation stone of everything as you were talking about you know it's the steel of an entire new financial system is this i i think what you've said is brilliant but i don't think it's understood when you say it's the world's best collateral the world is operating on like gold is collateral it gets audited every seven years or every three years it might be there it's impossible to move and it's impossible because of rehypothecation and the reuse of assets right it's not clear bitcoin ownership is guaranteed so it's so pristine the only thing we haven't got is a yield curve so your third yes you've got it implicitly in the fact that it's got a limited supply but eventually there will be a market for you to lend out your your bitcoin and it's going to trade at a premium to bonds us bonds because it's like you lending out a piece of art well [ __ ] it if somebody's going to borrow your piece of art they're going to pay you for it i totally agree and i i think the yield curve is coming and when i look at the forward contracts it's very fascinating to me but yeah summary of my entire meandering analysis is bitcoin if it's not a hundred times better than gold it's a million times better than gold and there's nothing close to it and and most people they're focused upon stock to flow is better and what they haven't they haven't factored in is it the smarter faster stronger makes it a million times better and it's steel to masonry for the firmament of the 21st century financial ecosystems love that analogy so here's another question for you so you make the brave decision to do this it doesn't seem brave to you because it sounds it feels like the most intelligent rational decision you can make right but yeah everybody else oh my god what's he doing so you go to your cfo and go okay i've got bitcoin currently it's marked as an intangible we can't we don't get any appreciation of the value of it and gap accounting doesn't work how the hell did you get through that all that [ __ ] to put it on the balance sheet and yeah so not to be marked where you bought it all the time so now we shift to the subject of how do you build consensus in a in an institution or a publicly traded company yeah because yeah it's one thing uh for me to believe it but there's a lot of other fiduciaries and they have to understand it and they have to assess all the risks so what happened next is um i started cheerfully assigning homework to all the officers and all the directors of the company right you know and you can imagine some of your podcasts got linked to them a lot of uh pomp's podcast got sent to them um eric voorhees debate famous epic debate with peter schiff over the future of of fiat versus bitcoin as the world's best currency got sent to them the bitcoin standard uh the bitcoin center lynn alden's paper on three reasons i'm now bullish on bitcoin got sent to them right um uh andreas antonopoulos is you know what is bitcoin got sent to them you know lots of so lots of compulsory youtube watching guys i'm gonna need you to watch these things on youtube then i'm going to need you to read this then lots of individual meetings meet everybody i'm going to meet you know i'm lucky i've got a very intelligent board i've got a very engaged board i've got a very a very entire you know i'm out with i met with my general counsel and uh and i said i was worried you know like general counsel is going to tell you a million reasons you can't do something i said well you know i think we should be thinking about bitcoin and i you know and this and this and this and this and this and this uh you know and i waited for him to tell me no way in heck can we ever do this ever and he goes yeah that's a very interesting thesis um you know i i bought bitcoin two years ago [Laughter] i love it you know like i was like oh i get my but you know so it turns out that uh you know i talked with my with my board and it turns out that half of them had already invested in bitcoin personally so that we went through this round of study it think about it evaluate all the options meet as a group break after that you know the cfo went off and he like he met with our auditors and our our outside authors and and more auditors and the nrgc met with attorneys and more attorneys and more attorneys than our outside attorney and then we started sifting through all the you know all of the regulatory filings of everybody with that you know i went down the rabbit hole they went down the rabbit hole and you know and the board went down a rabbit hole we all came together and and i'm just i'm really proud of the team but uh but at the same time i'm i i think uh i think it's it's important to say that rational people if they're put if this is put on the table and if they're given enough time and the right resources they all unanimously unanimously come to the same conclusion that i come to right no dispute no dissent everybody's gotta gotta be part of the process and the and you got to give everybody time to absorb it and you got to do your due job how do you get the order how do you get the auditors across the line so you read internal consensus fine okay now you've got to have the bloody auditors agree that you can do this okay well the auditors uh give you the feedback on how you're going to account for it yeah and that's their position and they're good at telling you how to do that right and so we take their advice and at some point we talk to lots of different auditors and i i do think that um that we're um we're leading the way here like uh clearly in fact it's news that we did this it'll be news when we uh when we put out our 10 qs and if you want to see exactly how it gets accounted for people be looking at the 10 cues to figure out what does that do the balance sheet and the p l and that's right but let me but let me make one point ral which is you can run your business in order to in order to make your gap accounting beautiful if you did that you would never issue a stock option and if you look at every successful tech company they they have uh stock option expenses and and every screaming success you know facebook comes public and there's huge amounts of stock options that they've issued and they take non-cash charges for them so the result is most public companies have pro forma results and they have after adjustments there are mega adjustments based on currency fluctuations and all sorts of non-cash and tangible things and uh the investment community looks at those and generally they focus more on the as adjusted at you know pro formas you know as long as you explain what it is then people don't care because because gap doesn't necessarily keep up with the reality of the business right and like for example if i told you you know would you buy a company that's going to go up in value by a factor of 10 if it had a if it printed a gap loss or would you not and also the other thing is as you told me before that the investors valued your cash at zero so what the hell you got to lose if you say well it's a non-zero asset now and whether it's whether or whether it's not including your gap accounting it's like well he wrote it off to zero anyway so now you can either value it as an option or not yeah let's say if we buy bitcoin and it gets valued as an intangible and then we're forced to write it down to down based upon the volatility you know it could happen we could buy uh we could buy a bunch of bitcoin it could be written down by 50 percent then you have you have a a gap right down and intangibly as carries an intangible on your balance sheet on the other hand if the value of bitcoin doubles if you have a billion dollars of bitcoin right and the gap the gap accounting says you're only showing 200 million the investors are going to look at that they're rational yeah i mean they're right by the way they're the investors are rational and they normally will they will understand that you have a billion dollars worth of something even though gap accounting doesn't what let you mark it as a billion dollars but if the market is irrational over the long term you sell some of the bitcoin buy all your stock back right in fact in the extreme if you if you have ten if your net asset value is worth more than the value of the company outstanding you buy your shares you buy the company at the end of the day if the bitcoins worth 10 billion and then and then the accounting says it's worth zero and if the investors insist upon looking at the zero accounting and they value you at nothing you buy you buy every single share of the stock back and you got a private company with nine billion dollars worth of bitcoin in it right but there's a point to what i'm saying which is you can't run a business in order to make to make the gap accounting optically look perfect if you did that you wouldn't be in any business that outstrips the rate of of accountants that have a 30-year lag yeah and also just the point being is is you have a reputation the firm's resistance for a long time as long as you can explain to people what you're doing nobody cares either like it or they don't that's what shareholding is and that's okay i think i think we have an obligation to be as clear and articulate and respectful to our shareholders as we possibly can be and if you look at what we've done over the past three months we have tried to be extraordinarily transparent and methodic you know first we say we think we've got a you know a treasury issue and we we need to either buy our shares back or invest our shares or sorry we need to buy our shares back or invest investor treasury then we said we've done the analysis and and we're going to do a 250 million dollar tender and we're going to do 250 million dollar investment or done in bitcoin then we let the investors decide what they want to do that's their choice right and then the investors decide to tender some of their shares and we buy some of those shares and we have some extra cash then we take the extra cash well and then we ta you know we tell the market it looks like we have some extra cash by the way our treasury policy is to invest in bitcoin then we invest in bitcoin right and uh and if anybody if anybody's holding the stock right this is very important for them that they understand what's going on and i i can't tell you how to think about this right but by the way it's like you know you would hear rumors like oh i don't think investor will like it so we went we met with all the investors you know it's like 80 of us yeah that's a probably that's kind of a good idea you know that's kind of interesting right right and and uh so and then they're like they go to me well this one investor he was kind of concerned about it and he had a problem with it you know i met with him he goes well why don't you just like uh buy back all the stock and i said um i said well you know the issue is we would decapitalize the company if we buy back all the stock we'll have no treasury assets and if we have no treasury assets no capital then that puts our customers at risk and so you know i have to be able to my customers are governments banks big organizations i need to be able to represent to them that for the next 30 years they can count on me so i can't like drain the entire assets of the company you know even though you know and and that's the problem with just buying with draining and treasury i have to have a treasury balance and so then i proceeded to explain the bitcoin thesis to him he cuts me off halfway through he goes oh yeah i get it i own bitcoin okay so so the point is this is an example somewhere everybody's really afraid everybody says oh that's a really ballsy risky you know they're all along themselves they're all along bitcoin it's the same in the hedge fund world paul tudor jones goes you know you're the paul tudor james of the of the corporate world paul was the first guy to stand up and go well i bought bitcoin in my fun well guess what every bloody fun manager i know owned some bitcoin already and you know not to beat up on paul tudor jones if he's listening but paul like if you believe in it buying one percent but one percent is like i go to vegas and i want to i'm the rich guy that goes to vegas with my friends and i want to convince them i'm cool and i go yeah i really get gambling i really believe the gaming so i take out a hundred thousand dollars i put on a table i pay blackjack for a few hours and i impress my my friends that i'm really cool that's that's one view on the other hand if you're really a baller you're howard hughes he went to vegas howard hughes bought vegas right if you really believe in gambling if you get gambling you don't gamble a hundred thousand dollars or one percent of your wealth in vegas you buy the casino yep but paul doesn't care he's rich enough so for him and again whatever he says and does are two different things i know him very well from the past and paul can move his positions on a dime we've seen him be you know three or four times levered you know the guy knows what he's doing so even if he says one percent that was that snapshot of that afternoon that he finished that note it could be anything okay and you know and i noticed like the hedge fund guys they either say the opposite of what they're doing or they say or they talk their book and it's amusing to do that but i mean just to state what i what i think is pretty obvious once you understand bitcoin right you're you you have anxiety about being short once you understand it completely terrified of being not having enough and if that's the case then if you're running 10 billion dollars of money you go take one or two billion dollars of it or three or you just buy it all like i mean don't you sit around i sit around and think i i'm trading this bitcoin row and and to buy this much you can't buy it in a minute or an hour you can't even buy it a day i'm when i'm in the market i'm buying bitcoin four days in a row every minute are you doing it yourself well i haven't given it to anybody else i gotta i i control it all but you know yeah i i yeah take if it's worth doing do it yourself so here's i wanna ask you two questions yeah questions the practicalities right so there is the the terrifying moment when you transfer your bitcoin from the exchange to your hard wallet and you're like [ __ ] i hope i put in the right numbers because there is nobody i can call up at the bank say oh i made a mistake in the transfer did you not get the terror of doing that and how do you store it okay well so a couple of points i'll make one one point i can't give you too much details about about how we do it and how we handle our crypto just for security reasons obviously right i mean in private off the record we talk about it but in public i can't um generally our approach is to work with institutional grade crypto exchanges and institutional grade crypto custodians and and then like handling nitroglycerin handle it very carefully right i handle my crypto very carefully and that means that before i you know we're white listing everything every which way and i'm moving 0.01 bitcoin before i move anything material right and you know like you know the first time it took me like 60 minutes or 90 minutes to get it confirmed man i was like you know i'm working on but let me make the next point which is if you want to if you want to trade this stuff you need a great team of of like over-the-counter uh brokers you work with and they have to have great technology because you're going to buy this thing in 89 000 small bytes of 0.2 bitcoin each if i'm in the market you don't know i'm in the market right like i get a a laugh when i watch people come in and hammer the price up by a hundred bucks and and people are thinking is that some whales is that well if you wanted to buy a hundred million dollars of it there's no way you're chasing it up 100 bucks so i'm waiting for someone to panic at which point i'm going to buy 10 million dollars in one minute why they think they're getting the better of me right that's the way you're going to do that and then my last point is while i'm sitting there for all those days and i'm trading this stuff and i'm like day and night right day and night trading it everybody thinks well bitcoin's too volatile when people like me or these other institutions get into it we've got computer programs that are trying to buy it every minute of the day day and night and pretty soon there'll be one set of computer programs talking another set of computer problems there's no people involved right there's no people involved and the volatility is collapsing right it's already collapsing anybody that's watched this stuff over the past three months you would see the volatility is coming in the other day i'm watching it bitcoin's less volatile than apple it's definitely less volatile than it's less welded than amazon less volatile than all the big tech companies that's a story my last point it's like who are these people that are selling it to me like i can't believe someone is willing to sell it to me but i'm i'm thanking my lucky stars like hit me again hit me again hit me again right and i see these guys on crypto twitter and they're like yeah sailor's gonna buy it and he's gonna dump it or he's gonna buy it he's gonna like buy another company with it i like he's gonna buy it until he gets like this profit he's gonna do whatever i'm like they don't really there's a lot of traders in the market they don't understand the mindset of longs like i'm buying it for the dude that's gonna work for the dude that's gonna get hired by the guy that takes over my job in a hundred years i'm not selling it right when it goes up by a factor of 100 i might be borrowing a little a little to go buy something that i want but this is what am i going to buy with it right that's better than what i'm buying right every other treasury asset and i count 250 trillion dollars worth of stuff this is not about gold right gold fixed income sovereign debt cash equivalents every other treasury assets got a negative real yield what am i going to buy with it no there's no other asset to buy with it and that's why i got into the irresponsibly long thing in the end i just looked at everything and said right fine you can trade around do stuff but if there's anything you actually want to put a real position in for an extended period of time that there is only one thing i can really see you know i've got gold in a storage vault and i'm like i can't see the point you're tipping me over the edge of saying i can't see the point i like gold i have no problem with it you know i'm not going to hold it for 100 years so i don't really care but i kind of like bitcoin's gonna swallow the world if i told you gold has a has a minus it's got a minus three percent real yield yeah but you know i don't mind because i'm likely to hold gold three years i'm not you know bitcoin's different for me but gold for three years through this particular transition phase right so maybe it goes up 100 and i lose 10 percent in in negative real yield that's okay to me is that time horizon i i think that um and this is where time horizon matters so much if your time horizon is 12 months and you got you you're a hedge fund guy you're like you know you're like looking at like the volatility curve wave right you guys are trading gamma and stuff like that which like i can't even i got degrees from mit and i can't figure out gamma yet so i need a speech on that but you're living in the world of like minutes to days to weeks to months to years let's say when you go out more than a decade if you go out more than a decade all this stuff all the noise drops away everything gets really clear totally great when you come in less than five years there's a lot of different options you got to consider so the real question is what's your time horizon here yeah 100 agree and you know and that's exactly the conclusion but for me why i'm so interested now of all time really intensely focused is across almost every single time horizon it now looks superior that won't always be the case there'll be a time when whether it's technology stocks or whatever it is will outperform bitcoin but when i look at almost every time horizon you know going from a month that would be the shortest i'd look at a month out to 100 years bitcoin looks like it's going to be everything for the time being great that's a home run opportunity so rao that makes the decision easy yeah i need to sell my gold and that's why i think if you're really a hedge fund person and you really get bitcoin and the decision's so easy are you really going to tell me you've decided to take one percent and take a you know and hedge and try it like if anybody really gets bitcoin there's nobody investing one percent of their portfolio in it no no exactly my biggest position by far in a way and almost you know a very significant part of my liquid net assets you know outside my properties and shareholdings and stuff you know in real vision or whatever you know it's bitcoin is the bet you know i said the other day i said you know for this this is not a speculation nor is it a hedge this is a deliberate corporate strategy to adopt the bitcoin standard that's what we're doing right and and i think that lots of people want to minimize what's going on here or they're afraid they're in fear to actually come out and say what they believe mike they don't understand yet people are it's like as you know you suddenly get to that point where it's like oh christ i get it now you kind of think you get it for a while then you question yourself then you sort of get it then you realize you know nothing and then you come to the epiphany is not knowing anything about it apart from one core set of things that this is superior to anything else around it and it could be an entire ecosystem a whole structure that's all you need to know after that it's like okay i've got hard money with upside brilliant and now so now we're sitting here waiting to see how long it's going to take for all the other rational actors in the world to come to the same conclusion exactly right and i you know that's that's the journey you know we're launching this crypto channel and real vision it's part of the same bet i know where this is all going and i've been talking about this in 2012 and i knew that macro and crypto were about to collide and i knew it was going to happen in the next recession or i didn't i guess it would and here we are and then what's happened is you've actually moved it on further by saying okay it's not just about markets and investments everything else we're now talking about a new standard that becomes the new gold standard i.e corporations around the world apple where their balance sheet and everybody else should think of this as a reserve asset which was my point that i've been talking about is this is the world's most pristine reserve asset and that's what you're doing you bought a reserve asset and put it on your balance sheet brilliant imagine a ceo of a construction company that said we thought we'd start building buildings with steel this year and every other construction company is saying oh what a risky thing that's too expensive as well and all the other arguments that you would have had we've not tested it in earthquakes or whatever it is i think we've covered a lot of ground and i think we'll probably have another conversation down the track because there's a load of things i love the philosophical things that you're thinking about and just also your you know how you've observed the tech industry and everything else so i'm definitely going to get back in touch with you again and we'll as your thinking evolves and that's other people's thinking evolve it's just nice because you're outside of the noise of a lot of the financial market stuff and you look at it differently it's brilliant and just let bravo you that as you said it's a logical conclusion but most people haven't reached it yet and you've done something really inspiring for a lot of people well i like i would return a compliment though and point out that that i was obsessing over everything that you published before we made this decision and so so the truth is you're more that you and and the entire crypto community that went out there especially on youtube and published everything they're the inspiration and and it's a wonderful community and there's you can learn a lot on youtube so so if people ever wonder does anybody listen to the stuff we say the answer is yeah i listened everybody every one of my board members listened all right so you so we wouldn't be here i wouldn't be here talking to you nor would i have done anything had you not said what you said when you said it that's very cool welcome the opportunity in the future thanks for having me but yes i i loved it i reached out on twitter i said listen i'd love to tell your story you're like and you replied i love real vision and that's great we're all doing we're all doing the right thing spreading the word mike brilliant to speak to you thank you ever so much for your time i'm sure people are going to get a lot out of this thank you ralph thank you for watching this video now this is just a taste of what we do at real vision to learn more about the complex world of finance business and the global economy click on the membership link in the description it only costs one dollar for a month's access this will be the best dollar you ever invest

Channel: Real Vision Finance

Views: 881,594

Rating: 4.8647323 out of 5

Keywords: Finance, Markets, Economy, Stock Market, Investing, Trading, Education, Financial Literacy, Recession, Interview, Conversation, Strategy, Insight, Analysis, Facts, Data, Fraud, Entertainment, Thesis, Short Seller, Real Vision, Equities, real vision finance, raoul pal, raoul pal bitcoin, michael saylor, michael saylor bitcoin, bitcoin, crypto, cryptocurrency, bitcoin news, crypto news, bitcoin today, bitcoin price prediction, microstrategy, btc, blockchain, real vision tv

Id: Cg10yYZjK94

Length: 121min 31sec (7291 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheMessenger18]

Ok, we are going too far now.

[u/AmeriChino]

Seriously I don’t understand why everyone keeps using Saylor’s old photo with dark hair. That’s so old! The current Saylor with white hair is the Bitcoin Bull.

[u/ueharajohji]

saylor u crazy as mf

[u/100_PERCENT_BRKB]

This is Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy

On MicroStrategy's quarterly earnings conference call in July 2020, Saylor announced his intention for MicroStrategy to explore purchasing Bitcoin, gold, or other alternative assets instead of holding cash. The following month, MicroStrategy used $250 million from its cash stockpile to purchase 21,454 Bitcoin.

MicroStrategy later added $175 million of Bitcoin to its holdings in September 2020 and another $50 million in early December 2020. On December 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced that it had sold $650 million in convertible senior notes, taking on debt to increase its Bitcoin holdings to over $1 billion worth. On December 21, 2020 MicroStrategy announced their total holdings include 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin. Saylor, who controls 70% of MicroStrategy's shares, dismissed concerns by observers that the move is turning MicroStrategy into a Bitcoin investment firm or exchange-traded fund (ETF).

Another remarkable clip from later in the same Michael Saylor interview:

https://youtu.be/Cg10yYZjK94?t=1h26m40s

The arm/hand movements are maybe a little over the top, but you have to admire his passion

On the other side of the argument, we have Warren Buffett talking about cryptocurrency after his lunch with Justin Sun:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BerkshireHathaway/comments/i2emys/buffett_discusses_cryptocurrency_cnbc_interview/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Buffett states flatly that "Bitcoin has no value" and that he "will never own it"

[u/Endearing_Asshole]

I’m convinced he’s an AI that’s programmed to find the most relevant metaphors but since he’s not human but he goes too far into a sea of abstract ideas...

He’s adrift in that sea and there’s bulls aboard his vessel and the storm clouds are coming but he’s a Saylor so he knows how to navigate...and...ahhh it’s sucking me in....assimilate....

[u/UBCStudent9929]

I mean... now you are getting to the point where even I cannot take Saylor serious anymore

[u/butcherofballyhoo]

Sounds super culty. I’ve been in crypto since 2012. Dude sounds weird af.

[u/XtraLyf]

"Forgive me, bitcoin, for I have sinned. It has been 12 days since my last withdraw."