Michael Saylor: The Ultimate Interview on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge and The Future of Currency

well my next guest is michael saylor the ceo of microstrategy he's the man who convinced elon musk to take tesla dollars or out of u.s dollars and move it into bitcoin we know what's happening to the u.s dollars right now his company holds over 2.5 billion dollars in bitcoin and he is the champion of the bitcoin standard michael is now the guest on my show michael welcome to the show a real treat to have you here thanks for having me real pleasure so let's talk about i want to get your take on some news of the day before we kind of get knee deep into gold and where you see bitcoin going and some of the cryptocurrency standards moving forward but this struck my eye this morning um you know this is to me something i talk about on our show all the time about uh you know poor people just getting screwed over by central governments and fiat currency and this was the news of the day today as venezuela uh takes you know as venezuelans are taking refuge in cryptocurrencies moving out of their their you know their fiat currency but we're seeing more and more of this what's your what's your thought on people there who living in tents finding refuge in bitcoin and crypto well um i think that um it's a basic human right to property and what property really means is the ability to store economic energy over time in order to sustain yourself we know there's 1.7 people that or 1.7 billion that are unbanked and if i really wanted to wreck your life first i would take away all your money then i would take away your banking account and then i would collapse the currency that you work in so that even if you do make a hundred dollars it's only worth 50 next year and 25 the year thereafter and and it buys nothing in uh in 36 to 48 months so if you look at the plight of venezuelans they've got a collapsing currency many of them are unbanked and um and of course the property that they could hold in the country isn't uh isn't holding value so what i think is that bitcoin represents hope uh to billions and billions of people around the world and uh the right to property is a is a basic human right and if we take away a bank of economic energy from humanity it's the same as sentencing them to slow starvation so obviously i'm i'm a big believer that bitcoin you know is a is critical to spreading human rights around the world and what you see right now is that is that uh in countries where the currency is collapsing the banking system doesn't work then people are turning uh to bitcoin and and they're using their mobile phones to hold a crypto asset in order to protect themselves yeah in order to take care of their family moving away from their country's currency as their country continues to print more money devalue debase the currency uh do you think that that's why some of these uh central banks are pushing back on on on bitcoin on cryptocurrency are they scared i really think that most central banks view it as an asset a crypto asset and so i think there's a narrative in the community that central banks are pushing back on i really don't think they are um if i look at all the utterances i think mark carney has said on the record it's a crypto asset jerome powell has said on the record it's like digital gold it's like an asset yeah he sees it as a store of value a store of value the deputy governor of the chinese central bank has said it's it's an asset christina lagarde of the eu central bank has said yeah it's a it's an asset i mean they might say it's a speculative asset but um currency is a medium of exchange and it's the province of governments and in order to be a currency you have to be deemed non-taxable upon transfer and bitcoin is not bitcoin is uh deemed property by the irs and and most countries deem it as property which makes it an asset not a currency so i think that the way the world is evolving we're going to see five billion or more people with mobile phones and mobile wallets and in that wallet is going to be a selection of currencies and a selection of assets and the strongest currency is the dollar and the strongest asset is bitcoin and in countries like venezuela they're going to lose their currency privileges and their citizens are going to default to the dollar as a medium of exchange but the only way that you can deploy uh dollars as a medium of exchange to billions of people across hundreds of countries and tens of thousands of banking systems or application networks is if you have a global settlement network which is a shared monetary protocol and that is bitcoin so bitcoin is the global monetary network that allows everybody on earth to store their economic energy over long periods of time and it also allows everyone to synchronize those mobile wallets in zimbabwe and venezuela and nigeria and india and argentina and the us and china and the like and so i see an emerging economy with a digital asset called bitcoin and a digital currency likely the dollar but if not the dollar perhaps uh the raymond b right and if not if not the chinese currency then perhaps the euro at the end of the day the winner is going to be the strongest currency which will come from the strongest country and the strongest economic network which will be the u.s and the winning asset will be the strongest crypto asset with the greatest security and the greatest acceptance and the most stability and that will be bitcoin so is it wrong then to be calling them crypto currencies yes it is wrong um most sophisticated people that have studied it realize they're crypto assets bitcoin is a crypto asset uh it's not a cryptocurrency it's a it's a tragic misnomer and uh and because people call it a cryptocurrency then it lends itself to a shallow criticism that it's not good as a currency because the central banks will ban it and because the tax treatment is poor and because the transaction rate is low but again those are all red herrings it's not a currency nor does it need to be a currency right any anybody thinking about it for even a few seconds realizes that if there's a taxable event every time i transfer it to you it can't be a currency so it's so no it's not a currency it's an asset and if you think of it as an asset it's very helpful because then you realize it's not competing with the dollar and the euro it's competing with gold and silver it's competing with bearer instruments uh and and to a certain degree it's competing with bonds as a store of value and it's competing with etfs like the s p 500 index as a store of value and once you understand it that way then you're not so afraid anymore because you understand the regulatory framework that comes to bitcoin is the same regulatory framework that comes to gold silver and s p 500 indexes it's just know your customer anti-money laundering regulations and if you're if you're afraid to buy bitcoin because you're afraid of regulation you shouldn't be because if it is regulated parapursu or at parity with these other assets it will create um it'll create a avalanche of institutional money flow into the asset class because it'll simply normalize the treatment in the western world the irs in 2014 deemed it to be property right and it's property it means that it means that when you transfer it you owe a capital gains tax so there is like zero chance the irs is going to reverse that it is property it's not a currency and if you don't report it it's a felony i mean it's i mean this is the problem i think i wanted to touch on a little bit is that i think you see a lot of these crypto billionaires on you know so millionaires on on youtube and other places where buying flashy cars and so forth if they're using if they're using their crypto in order to buy those things and they're not reporting it to the irs that's a huge mistake yeah it's not very wise to transfer bitcoin to pay for anything i mean the only if you were to say to me i can pay you in bitcoin it doesn't make a lot of sense because it's the transactions are slow but if i had highly appreciated bitcoin i would be accelerating a shorter long-term capital gains bill in order to pay you and so the only way that i would pay you in bitcoin would be i would take a hundred dollars i would buy bitcoin and then one minute later i would transfer the bitcoin to you so that uh the basis and the bitcoin is equal at the time i acquired it and the time that i uh transferred it so i i think that this is a vestige from the first decade when there are a lot of retail uh retail users of uh of bitcoin and before they understood the law but the law has been very clear in the us since 2014 and any institution right any high net worth any individual any corporation any institutional investor understands that you acquire this stuff you're going to hold it now i'll make one more point it's it's doesn't make any sense to pay for anything in bitcoin for two reasons the first reason is because it's a taxable event and you're a fool to accelerate taxes on your own person by a decade the second reason it doesn't make sense is because it's a long duration asset that's deflationary which means it's likely to go up in value it's been going up 150 to 200 a year every year for a decade so why would you why would you pay a million dollars in bitcoin to buy something which is gonna which is going to um depreciate in value when the million dollars in bitcoin may very well double one two three four five more times right so it's an it's a long-term investment asset a much wiser course of action would be to borrow money against bitcoin if you have an appreciating asset never sell it finance it and um and the assets appreciating at twenty percent a year and if the interest rate is five percent then it's pretty pretty obvious what you ought to do is keep the asset pay five percent interest because um the tax bill on um money that's borrowed is zero so you could live off of off of your borrowings against your appreciating asset for the rest of your life with ever paying the asset back without without ever paying the the loan back and without ever paying any income tax and without ever paying any capital gains tax in the in the us other tax regimes may be different but in the us right now that would be the treatment and i hope my audience is paying attention because that's exactly i mean the brilliance of you and what we try to teach here on the channel about means why i'm a long-term buy-and-hold real estate investor because you're not paying the taxes on the debt and that's how you build you can build wealth appropriately and using it that way so don't be just selling your bitcoin and buying ferraris with it um you know don't be a knucklehead with it um what if you don't really have native ferrari you're better off to borrow the money against the bitcoin like you can be rich with a ferrari a yacht and a jet you need to have borrowed the money against a tangible asset which is going up in value as the money supply expands in order to keep and pay for the ferrari the yacht and the jet exactly exactly are there any alternative coins any altcoins that you invest in or you're bullish on when you look at i mean i don't look at any of these that are out there right now you're looking at cardano or ethereum are you just strictly they're all they're all ventures right i mean bitcoin's the dominant crypto asset ethereum is the dominant crypto application you can divide the entire universe into some segments you know and ethereum is competing with binance smart chain and solana that's very competitive they're very complicated they're very centralized much more centralized than bitcoin they have to be centralized because they need to run on proof-of-stake networks because they need the speed so proof of stake itself is orders of magnitude more centralized than proof of work because you don't have these sprawling networks of miners with their asics everywhere on earth sucking up energy to keep any one person from getting control the network so bitcoin is is like the dominant the dominant winner of sound money these other things they're just very risky they could crash one could win one could lose ethereum doesn't even run on proof of stake yet so you know basically you don't know when they turn on proof of stake the entire thing's not going to go in some bizarre way right what will happen you don't know interesting so uh so let me say it a different way if you have if you're a crypto investor and you run a venture capital fund and you want to make investments with high risk high reward and you want to study it and you want to take the risk then you can trade in those things but in my opinion they're a hundred times less lucrative over time and they're 100 times more risky so it seems like it's a you know ten thousand to one difference i wouldn't do it but other people do it and it's probably good for the industry because it markets the industry right right and and you know they're venture capitalists they have to do it like i'm not gonna you know i'm not gonna tell them not to do it it's like this is this is one risk tranche this is a different wrist tranche if you're super smart and if you get you know if you guess will it be buying a smart cone or ethereum or maybe it's both maybe you trade but you know when you get into that you get this question of well when are you going to take money off the top and when are you you know when are you going to diversify and are you going to be in it forever i right you know i tend to think i would prefer to invest in things like a hole for a decade if not 100 years but but there are plenty of people whose job is their venture capitalist and the venture capitalists are betting on things where they think there's a 90 probability it'll fail but they think that they'll get 100x return if it hits you know so that's it's a different thing right so i would say it depends on your portfolio of money like what are you investing someone else's money your own money or your vc are you a private equity investor are you a saver converts their money into a strong currency an investor manages a portfolio of risk i buy some apples from facebook some google they've all got risk a trader manages a portfolio of risk derivatives i'm guessing you know i've got options in apple and i think that apple's going to beat on the next quarterly release right right i'm not even it's not even a portfolio of risk over a decade it's a portfolio of risk over 90 days or it's the second derivative of risk i'm like shorting apple options against google options because i think the spread is coming in and it's something you can do right it's just a different thing right i'm arbitraging people's risk derivatives and fine knock yourself out if you're bored if it's your profession but and another analogy is like a decade ago if you bought if you bought apple on amazon and just held them you probably would have made a lot of money you would have made 10 to 20 extra money now if i could go back 20 years or 10 years would i give people advice about when to buy and sell apple in the year 2012 or what you know how to trade apple options against amazon should you buy or sell amazon in your 2014 can you remember off the top of your head whether you should have bought or sold amazon in 2015 so you could buy it back cheaper in 2016 or did it by the way if you you know jeff bezos was at war with donald trump before the election and so what's the worst thing that could happen to amazon you would think that it would be donald trump getting elected right right but you know if you had actually sold amazon once you know that donald trump was getting elected it would have been the most catastrophic decision in your life because amazon stock doubled in the first 12 months after donald trump was elected understand what i'm saying right it's like you're a trader and you know the future you'll probably still lose money because the best thing that ever happened to jeff bezos okay jeff bezos his his greatest enemy got elected president jeff bezos stock went from like 800 to 3 200 okay jeff bezos got divorced is that bad should have been bad for amazon didn't seem to be bad it's good for them you know like all sorts of it's hard to predict what might be good or what might be bad you go back a decade and if i told you i think facebook google apple amazon are good companies what's your best strategy i have no idea yeah well it's it's simple buy and hold it oh yeah just buy and hold it i guess yeah yeah because you could have these ups you know who is facebook going to be affected by amazon's privacy and in their new ios update 14.5 you know is how is that going to play out you know your best strategy would be to buy it and then mortgage your house and buy some more like don't trade it on margin you know where if you get a 20 drawdown you get liquidated but but mortgage your house mortgage your car mortgage your company buy amazon apple facebook google and wait if you can't more if you can't raise debt then take all your money in your piggy bank and buy and wait and all this uh you know and by the way if you if you basically just bought them and turned off the television and didn't read a newspaper for a decade you'd be better off yeah and don't pick up the washington post which in that in the interim was purchased by amazon yeah because everything that you read is just calculated to give you anxiety and hysteria and and get you to trade or hedge your position right i want to ask you about janet yellen yesterday made comments that sent the markets into a nosedive and nasdaq dropped pretty big yesterday on her discussion of having to possibly you know increase interest rates here to help stabilize things then she walked it back a short time later all of this of course around the idea of inflation and jerome powell saying we're going to let this run hot for a while so how does bitcoin how does cryptocurrency fit into this inflationary discussion right now i think bitcoin is the best monetary inflation hedge in the world if you know that um that the central banks are going to expand the currency supply then the most important thing you can do is construct a portfolio of high quality assets that are scarce that are going to appreciate in price at a faster rate than the currency supply expands and so that means uh bitcoin because it's ultimately scarce and fungible you can transfer it anywhere in the world and people with money are always going to want it and after that perhaps clearly the home that you want to live in the rest of your life trophy real estate that has tangible value to you perhaps uh trophy art a mona lisa you know something which is extremely scarce you know a van gogh painting if the currency supply increases by a factor of 10 and you have a very scarce piece of art presumably the price of the artwork is going to go up uh the best thing going of course would be scarce assets that you can finance so if you have a home that you love and you can get a two and a half percent mortgage for the next 10 to 30 years against it then it makes sense to maximize the mortgage hold the property when the money supply is expanded by a factor of 10 if your home is in a place where no one else wants to live it won't go up by a factor of 10 because it won't be scarce but if you've got three acres in the hamptons on the beach or in palm beach right if you if you live in a truly desirable community the price of the home is going to go up and as the price goes up your loan's going to be fixed you'll be able to refinance the home you've got leveraged equity if you will or leverage property i think bitcoin fits into that is bitcoin is appreciating at the fastest rate faster than the nasdaq or the s p or or luxury real estate or or or average real estate around the country because it's the most scarce most desirable asset so that's how it fits in how do you see what is the exit strategy then for for bitcoin for you um there's no exit strategy no and i mean do you think that we'll see some sort of a fed vehicle like the 1031 exchange that would allow you a a move out of something like this into something else a like-and-kind asset i mean see the point is why like why would you exit from the best investment asset in the world if it keeps getting better like there's nothing you can buy that's better so you're you're selling the winner to buy the loser if um let me let me make it uh simpler if you owned um if you owned uh a company in venezuela and the company sold anything and you got paid in boulevards and you decided that and you knew that the boulevard is going to keep falling like 20 30 a year and you roll the clock back 20 years if you were if you were unwise you just keep working and eventually your assets go to zero and if you were smart you would convert your cash flows into us dollars and put it in a bank in new york city now when would you exit from the from the dollars in new york city and trade back into the boulevards in venezuela right unless if that became a standard if that became the leading currency in the world what if the united states government said well you know you can do it tax-free you're still not going to do it no right exactly right i mean and that would be the case for any any uh weakening currency in argentina and if you're in zimbabwe when are you going to exit your us if you basically bought you know a new york city apartment and companies in new york city and you're a billionaire in the united states when are you going to sell all that and reinvest it back in zimbabwe you're not ever right right so because the point is one of the assets is stronger than the other asset if bitcoin is capped at 21 million for the next thousand years it's only going to get more valuable right you can make more you can make more apartments in new york city you can print more u s dollars you can create more houses on the beach you can create more artwork you know give me something which is scarcer than pure monetary energy on the dominant global digital monetary network there's not ever going to be anything like 100 years from now there won't be anything right right this is not it's not like buying you know you could say it's like buying a block of manhattan 200 years ago but it's better than that because if you bought if you bought land in manhattan 200 years ago when would you sell it to buy land in kansas to buy why would you ever right you wouldn't ever sell it but this is better than that because this is one city in cyberspace where five billion people are going to live there you don't need the second city or the third like like whereas you can make the argument that well you need a tokyo and a london and a paris but in cyberspace people in tokyo london and paris and manhattan are all putting their money in bitcoin so so this is uh it's a global dominant pure monetary energy network so there's you don't need an exit strategy right diversification is selling the winner to buy the losers you're not getting here you know like it's like an exit strategy from from a country where the currency is collapsing you're reinvesting back into a place that's uh that's weakening so the right thing to do is the opposite and what you should expect is an inversion of the entire financial order as uh bitcoin grows you're going to see people sweep greater portions of their investable assets into bitcoin and the entire ecosystem will reorient where bitcoin is the center of the universe and at some point bitcoin becomes 100 trillion to 200 trillion dollars of an asset and everything else is a derivative of bitcoin it's basically synced to the bitcoin standard the bitcoin standard and holding it forever i mean there is no exit strategy as a store of value i mean so you truly see it as the ultimate store of value then there's nothing better you see yeah like bitcoin is a is a crypto asset network engineered to be the ultimate long duration safe haven asset uh all the things about it for example the 21 million hard cap protocol that's critical the proof of work uh mining network that's critical um the the fact that uh it's thermodynamically sound with an open permissionless protocol that's critical is there anything better than that on earth no no it's a hundred times more powerful than the next closest like kind thing so you're not gonna you know the world's not going back to a gold standard because gold isn't a network and it doesn't have a protocol you know you can't you can't synchronize gold on 5 billion mobile phones every second right you're not going to go to a silver standard you're not going to go to uranium or lumber so what are you going to do you're going to use sovereign debt no because you can't synchronize u.s treasury bills on a 5 billion mobile phones in zimbabwe it's illegal to do it in nigeria or venezuela it's not going to happen right what are you going to do etfs nope another crypto well there is no other crypto that's got the proof of work stability and security of the bitcoin network so so there isn't anything right so that's why you don't trade in and out of it you buy it and then you hold it and you just let nature take its course because the energy the monetary energy in the world is is just surging into this network as people realize it's the strongest monetary protocol and the strongest monetary asset in the world i want to talk a little bit about gold i know you've had great debates on gold and why you see bitcoin as a far greater store of value you've mentioned it just here a few minutes ago but let's talk about that you have a lot of gold bulls who who see gold running up to two thousand dollars it has becomes i don't scarcer i mean people say it's the scarcest resource but perhaps bitcoin as a digital asset is scarcer where do you come down on this great gold debate do you see it close to gold is is gold a close second in any way no i think that the people that buy gold believe in sound money and they're idealist but they're being tragically misled by gold promoters most of the people that are selling gold don't actually own the gold that they sell the gold miners are all short gold they dump gold on the market as fast as they possibly can and no none of them hold gold as a treasury asset none of the gold promoters hold gold as a treasury asset i don't think you can find a single gold promoter that has more than 51 percent of their balance sheet invested in gold in fact most of them on the record either say they don't own any gold they just own gold miners or they own no more than 10 percent so like you know the people that own more than 50 of their portfolio and gold are idealist but the problem is gold is a defective asset on a non-existent network why is it defective asset well i mean it peaked in the 19th century but it's it's not thermodynamically sound you can make more gold at the you know at the nature level we keep the miners keep dumping gold on the marketplace to spend 100 billion dollars a year to dump gold on the marketplace um the difference between that and bitcoin is is bitcoin is capped at 21 million gold is infinitely increasing in supply i mean the second reason is defective is because there's like 90 000 tons of gold sitting in jewelry so whenever the price goes up people melt down their jewelry and they recycle gold to drive the price down the third reason the assets defective is because there's no protocol to synchronize paper gold or the gold applications at the banking level with the underlying physical gold which means that that paper gold or gold derivatives can short the physical gold 100x or more that means that as the price of gold goes up gold bankers and gold sellers keep dumping more gold paper on the market to hold the price back so i would say gold is hopeless it's really a tragic hopeless asset and i think that the people that are buying it are getting misled by promoters most of the promoters get a commission to sell it or the gold miners are are making money selling it but you know think about it for a second if i pass the law making gold mining illegal everywhere in the world what would happen to the price of gold wouldn't you think yeah it would skyrocket okay well the point is bitcoin is capped and so gold is competing as a sound money store of value against something which is capped gold is a commodity commodities don't hold value right you might as well invest your money in wheat or corn or coal or oil at the end of the day the reason they don't hold value is when the price of the commodity goes up by a factor of 10 everybody on earth scrambles to invest in more machinery more manufacturing capacity and they recycle and they dump and they and they short the commodity that's that's why it's a commodity if you want to you don't really want to store your money for a hundred years in silverware or some something that's used as an industrial metal or something as you gold and silver uses industrial metals if you want to store your money for 100 years you want to put it in a pure monetary asset which cannot be debased or inflated or manipulated the thing that's special about bitcoin is it's an asset plus a network plus a protocol the asset is capped at 21 million and is only going to shrink uh it can never go up people can lose their bitcoin but they can't create any more the network is an open network which means i can move a block of a billion dollars of bitcoin from here to tokyo in an hour for a few dollars and uh you know that'll eventually be moving 10 billion dollars and then 100 billion dollars so it's a very powerful final settlement network if you wanted to move a billion dollars of gold from new york to tokyo you're talking three months and five million dollars you can't so gold is tragically centralized there is no network uh and then there's no protocol the protocol of bitcoin means paypal can integrate 330 million mobile phones into an underlying bitcoin network and keep them synchronized with integrity um you can withdraw your bitcoin off the custodial exchange and that means that the exchange can't go a hundred x naked short on the bitcoin if they do there's no fractional banking or it's fractional banking at your uh at your own peril and bitcoin because you know look my company doesn't have two and a half billion worth of bitcoin we have like five and a half billion worth of bitcoin we can take it anywhere we want to any exchange in one day so if you were to you know if you were to and we got it in coal storage so if i had five and a half billion dollars worth of apple stock then the bank could short it and lend it out to drive the price down if i had five and a half billion dollars worth of gold it'd be sitting in a bank and other banks and and bullion bankers will write uh derivative contracts against it and short it and they're working against me so the problem with gold is the gold miner if you decide to invest money for a hundred years in gold the gold miner is your enemy he's going to take 90 of the value by inflating the price of gold the gold banker is your enemy they're going to hypothecate it and dump derivatives and then and then the government is your enemy if gold gets too high they're just gonna sell their reserves or short it or seize it because you can't you know try try leaving the country with a hundred million dollars of gold in your pockets right right it's not gonna happen so ultimately this is why the gold standard failed in 1914 and why why gold reserves standards they just don't work the reason that bitcoin standard will work is because the custodial rights of five billion people are are unprecedented um there's never been a property in the history of humanity that gave the people more custodial rights you know if you have a 50 android phone in zimbabwe you can walk around with 10 000 worth of bitcoin in your pocket and nobody knows you have it and even if i hold a gun to your head i can't if i shoot you i'm still not getting it if i firebomb your house i'm not getting it i can't take it away from you and if you have one minute notice you can zap it to the other end of the earth so you can't do that with land you can't do that with cattle you can't do that with gold or silver you can't do that with a stock or a bond or a piece of commercial real estate you can't do it with a pile of cash what's better right and the answer is nothing and so if you want the bitcoin standard to work where the gold standard failed the key is the protocol and the network because the network guarantees that anybody that holds substantial amounts of bitcoin have custodial privileges and they can move it between any jurisdiction and any custodian in order to avoid counterparty risk and avoid being victimized by the custodian or the um the province uh of custody if new york wants to tax it i can move it to wyoming if wyoming wants to tax it i can move it to switzerland if i don't trust the bank in switzerland i can move it to singapore and if i don't trust anybody i can move it to my own phone and if i don't trust my phone i can memorize the seed phrase and put in my head you can't do that with anything else ever deemed property in the history of the human race the thing that causes the asset to hold is value is the fact that the counterparty can't counterfeit it hypothecate it or seize it that's what caused it to have value that's why silver and gold don't hold their value that's why these other fiat currencies don't hold their value that's why bitcoin is going up in value faster than any other asset that's why it's the most sound property in the world wealthy people and corporations are thinking maybe this is like the next monetary index so once you know that you know money's currency is coming inflation's coming sell everything that people can make more of buy everything people can't make more of right and what you know what can people make the politicians can inflate the currency so don't hold dollars and euros and pesos um other another class of government bureaucrats can inflate the debt that new york bonds sovereign debt so don't own that so what can you own right you you move on to you could own stock but the ceo of the company can create more stock so you gotta think hard about that you could own gold but gold miners can create more gold you can own commodities they've actually done really well because the demand ripped but over the course of five years companies can create more lumber they'll figure it out once it's legal to show up to work right right so what what is it that people can't really make any more of like mona lisa it's trophies trophy asset bitcoin something which a dominant monopoly you know five acres in bridgehampton but i mean as long as anybody wants to live in bridgehampton your risk is the new york governor tracks the taxes through the roof and no one wants to live in new york right and you can't move your house that's why bitcoin is better than five acres in bridgehampton because if they jack the tax on bitcoin in new york city i can move it out of the city but i can't move my building out of the city you can't transport it down to tennessee or a more tax friendly environment i totally agree with you and i think if we can get this message out to more people people that are scared about you know this thing that's unfamiliar you know you fear what you don't know and so i think that's what a lot of people are right now they think that it's it's safe it's cushy to sit there in their 401k um to continue to you know trade time for money and you know and and watch their u.s dollar continue to be debased and printed when you have last year was it 25 of all u.s currency was created and printed last year in 2020 that means your bonds had a negative real yield to minus 22 you lost 22 of your value in bonds right yeah people that are holding bond portfolios are living in fear and a lot of people holding gold are living in fear uh because they're they're clinging to something in the past they thought was a store of value if you're holding a bunch of real estate and there's a massive property tax on it every year you're living in fear and you know and so how do you find property that you can custody that someone's not going to tax every year or they're not going to steal from you or they're not going to inflate away or hypothecate away right and that's right that require you got to do work you got to do you know you got to study and you got to learn something new and the people that are their fastest learners they're going to jump on top of this the soonest and the people that the slowest learners you know rich uh rich elites they're not gonna bother learn because they're they get a lot of money and if they own the s p 500 index they made a lot of money last year doing nothing so they feel smart and safe and warren buffett and charlie munger they're not going to learn because in your 90s when you've got more money than god there's no catalytic event that'll force you out of your comfort zone right people in venezuela get forced out of their comfort zone right you've got to be jarred out of your comfort zone and then you got to spend anywhere from 10 hours to 100 hours and then you'll start to find a new set of tools and there are some tools that are better than others i obviously think the bitcoin is the best tool if you can't do that find something truly scarce that you value is that why elon musk was actually took your advice when you said to him were you surprised by the way that he did this after you encouraged him to move the you know out of it for tesla in away from us dollars into bitcoin he's very decisive and a courageous executive and so he generally moves with alacrity when he decides it's time to do something and i think he does understand the challenges of sound money and he understands that if you're sitting on top of billions of dollars of currency in a conventional treasury strategy then you've got a negative real yield and and most people don't they don't calculate the negative real yield right uh conventional treasury strategies for corporations are yielding one percent at most and the money supply is expanding at 15 or more you could argue 20 you could argue 25 percent depending upon what you look at but if you track the m2 broad money supply a number between 15 and 20 percent it looks pretty likely on a year to year basis so that means the negative real yield on treasury strategy is -15 and that means if you divide that into 70 it means you're cutting your entire treasury in half at about four and a half years that means in 10 years you're cutting it by 80 percent that means if you had 10 billion dollars you're burning eight billion dollars in the decade at the current rate that's eight billion dollars of shareholder value so as a fiduciary you could probably look the other way when the monetary inflation rate was seven percent but when the monetary inflation rate goes to 21 percent at some point is irresponsible as a corporate officer to burn 21 of the money in your treasury every year because you're afraid to do anything different well he's going to be making an appearance this weekend on saturday night live and there's a lot of buzz about what he might say around dogecoin of course he loves to tweet about that um here is uh dogecoin at this uh this hour uh 59 cents was up to 67 back and forth back and forth what's your take on this type of coin and the buzz around it when you you know obviously you're a bitcoin guy but when you hear something like dogecoin what do you make of this and what would you say to my audience about it i would say that the um that the fed is expanding the money supply at 20 percent a year and they're buying 120 billion dollars worth of bonds and the eu's buying 120 billion dollars a month worth of bonds so you've got all of the bonds in the world being bought by the central banks so investors have been squeezed out of bonds you can't buy you can't buy bonds with any with any decent nominal yield the real yield on bonds and cash is minus 15 to minus 20 percent that's created a mad scramble for a store of value for all investors and so they've all scrambled into etfs and first it was this is the spyder etf and then it was other etfs there's 2500 etfs equities have become the store of value and that keeps pushing people out because they've lost confidence in conventional strategies and conventional conventional money conventional bonds conventional treasury strategies because they've lost confidence and they've literally lost hope they're being driven uh to speculate more and the result is the game stop uh saga the result is the arc arc archigos saga where where they put on a huge leverage on equity the result is the spac explosion where people are literally buying uh speculative shell companies to do nothing but potentially do something that we don't know what but they figure that's better than holding cash they're being crowded into cryptos and i think that the wise ones are buying bitcoin because they understand that this is sound money for the next hundred years but i also think that people are speculating in other crypto currencies and and uh it's it's not that different than the game stop thing you know people are looking for something other than to wait and watch their money get debased i think also you know it it provides entertainment people are getting entertainment from robin hood they're getting it's kind of fun you know dogecoin is fun and um if if i take away the ability to uh go to professional sporting event and gamble at the sporting event then this is another way for me to gamble in the market so i think ultimately it's good you know it's understandable in the monetary environment it's good for the crypto industry it's generating massive uh awareness and massive uh enthusiasm lots of people are signing up lots of people are opening up accounts i think they're three million people a week or more that are opening up accounts i i don't think that you're going to want to leave dogecoin to your grandson or granddaughter but on the other hand you know i wouldn't begrudge you gambling on a boxing match or gambling on a basketball game if it were illegal in the jurisdiction when you do it i mean what's the difference between that and buying a lottery ticket or just paying to go to the game right i mean it costs money to do it you know it costs 200 to go to a concert and so if it's if it's not allowed to go to the concert and i have the 200 and i'm bored on a saturday night what's my outlet i think uh people are going to take a portion of their money and they're going to invest it in things they deem safe and a safe a safe thing to a savings account is like bitcoin and they're going to take a portion of their money and they're going to bet it on equity that might not be so safe and they're going to take some of their money and they're going to gamble on something which is just fun and a flyer and sometimes they just do it to give the finger to somebody and sometimes because out of frustration what else are you going to do well i think the i think the finger thing that i think you spot on i think because you know i was a you know i worked in the mainstream media for 20 years i know how the belly of the beast works and i see all the you know the corporate mainstream media wanting to point the finger at the gamestop trader the little guy who wants to be in dogecoin when the real you mentioned spax when you look at the the massive speculation i mean here's here's an article just today from david dayan financial speculation is about more than gamestop day traders the real speculation is happening at the top of the market through skyrocketing merger transactions and increases in the power of the biggest companies and these special acquisition companies so it's very easy to paint the little guy as causing all this hysteria when the real you know when the real thieves are sitting at the top am i wrong yeah i know i don't begrudge any individual investor uh their investment um i think you uh you got to give in power to the people right i mean you should empower the public uh they're adults let them live their life right like mark cuban said i'd much rather buy dogecoin than uh then then buy a lottery ticket i i think he's right about that um i want to get you out of here on this uh michael which is i know if you caught this interview um or this this piece that was floating around um bill maher the other night on hbo um taking the taking the piss out of out of bitcoin of crypto currencies and admits in this whole thing that he didn't even know really what he's talking about i want to play this and just get your get your take on this and finally new rule nothing with crypto in the title ever turns out good there is a mania rising in the country these days about cryptocurrency and how the train is leaving the station so you better get on tesla has jumped in with both feet and microsoft accepts it for software now exe etsy accepts it now and so does paypal and starbucks and whole foods and home depot one in ten americans used their stimulus checks to invest in one of these of cryptocurrencies in existence bitcoin being the most famous but there's also ethereum binance tether even one called com rocket there's also one called dogecoin that someone started as a joke but as far as i can tell it's exactly the same as all the other cryptocurrencies because the whole thing is a joke by the way it sounds like half of his audience had invested in dogecoin before they went into the theater what do you what did you make of bill maher's comments on this i i you could either just say it's indicative of the success of uh bitcoin in the crypto industry in general so that now it's um it's uh something people want to roast i guess that's the most charitable way to say it he's getting laughs um i don't think he's invested a hundred hours in bitcoin to understand what it is that much is clear i imagine comedians made jokes about automobiles planes and trains uh he himself uh you know disparaged mobile phones you know right back in 2003 so he's a comedian i wouldn't take my investment advice uh from a comedian right i mean there's hundreds of millions of people that disagree with him but you know if he if he says it funny enough they might laugh uh you know it's uh if anybody were to take him seriously it would be a tragedy because you know it's this is critical to the human rights of billions of people around the world and so so he's a little bit out of touch with uh the humanitarian elements of this and um you know billions of women and children that are going to starve to death without the ability to store property so they can feed themselves in the future isn't really a laughing matter i mean he makes it into a laughing matter but if if i stripped away all of his money and kicked him out on the street and i closed his bank accounts and i let him wander around and and then i said well bill we don't want you to lose electricity because because there are some people some rich americans somewhere that don't like your use of it it would seem a little bit cruel and insensitive i think yeah like the story we talked about earlier in venezuela i mean you have little kids sleeping in tents i mean this little girl sitting here with a mask and this is her toy it's a branch that she's sitting with while she's sleeping because she gets her parents maybe get three dollars a month and they're moving into cryptocurrency it's not funny to me and i guess the thing that i have so much trouble with is he purports to be you know progressive of some kind and and wants power for the people and doesn't want people to be ripped off by their governments or by you know rich elites etc and he says in this piece that he's getting advice from from warren buffett and these other you know these other old rich white guys who are part of this you know old system so that's elitist and out of touch right but but hopefully maybe he'll get some feedback following this monologue and he'll go do the research and he'll realize that this is monetary electricity for 8 billion people on the planet and depriving 8 billion people of thermodynamically sound money and a digital monetary network is just as cruel and non-progressive as turning off their running water or their electricity or depriving them of antibiotics or or any other modern technology we might as well strip away everybody's automobile plane and train from them because someone's got a problem with energy usage right i mean it's right it will be it will be looked back as laughable in a decade right now it's only funny because half the people don't really understand how the energy gets used well said my guest has been michael saylor i really appreciate you joining us here on the show it's been a real treat we'd love to have you come back more often our audience was really excited about having you here so thank you for being a voice uh especially we talk about oppressed people um and making bringing this education to the world so thank you so much for what you do really appreciate it yeah thanks for having me absolutely and thanks to all of you for subscribing to the channel we really appreciate it um our goal with this channel is to bring financial education to you the things we were not taught in school and who empower you to take financial control of your life outside of this corrupt system so this is what we were talking about today so much love to all of you thank you for subscribing we appreciate it

Channel: Morning Invest

Views: 472,782

Keywords: Morning Invest, Clayton morris, investing, Michael saylor, bitcoin

Id: zr_3F-zNM8g

Length: 56min 59sec (3419 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021