BTC Sessions - NEW: Michael Saylor on The Future of Bitcoin, The Dollar, BTC Treasuries, Banks & Finance

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

In this EXCLUSIVE bombshell interview, Michael Saylor shares his latest insights on Bitcoin, global markets, and what’s coming next. From MicroStrategy’s bold moves to his long-term vision, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/saylorFOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/[e-mail] private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL - BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCpCRYPTOCLOAKShttps://qrco.de/bg5Dvo#btc #bitcoin #crypto

I think that if you're actually an individual and you're using Bitcoin right now, you're one of the early pioneers, if you're, if you keep it, you'll be insanely rich. You know, you're talking about $100 trillion of equity and credit. Every company, look, every family owner should adopt the Bitcoin standard. You know, the base network is going to have 10 to 100,000 big financial institutions. A lot of people rail about the evils of a fiat currency. But the truth of the matter is there's a lot of evils with all the other credit and equity instruments or all the other stores of value. The logic of burning your keys when you die is that...

Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. You've been on a couple times before, but glad to have you back in the first time in a one-on-one capacity. So appreciate you being here. Yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, you know, it's been a big year. There's a lot going on. But I have some questions for you that I've kind of formulated over time.

And I'm going to start with one that I was curious about. And this one, I'll tee up here a little bit. but if you were tasked with creating the monetary system for a brand new hypothetical nation, would you opt for Bitcoin as the money, a Bitcoin backed money, or something completely different, like more elastic and separate from Bitcoin? How would you do it? I would create a currency, and then I would back. back it with Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is digital capital. So you want to have that as a reserve

or a central bank reserve, just like you might have gold in the old days or you might have tangible assets. But I would create, I'd probably create another currency that's this closer peg to the dollar or it's floating plus or minus a bit near the dollar as the fiat currency. of the nation. So you would have a currency separate from Bitcoin coinciding with it so that people can kind of use one as a treasury asset and one as a completely separate thing? I think in the modern world, the best conception of money is that money has a medium of exchange component and it has a store of value component.

and you have a unit of account for the store of value and a unit of account for the medium of exchange. So the right metaphor is just think of the dollar versus BTC or checking account versus savings account. And so you're going to have sort of high-speed dollar-type instruments to price things in day-to-day. And then you're going to have another capital-ass. that you're going to use to store your value over the course of 100 years.

And I think that it's like I don't run a country, so no one's asking me. But I think it would be a mistake to try to establish a currency with a capital asset. For example, you don't really want to price all your sandwiches in New York City real estate, nor do you want to price your sandwiches in ounces of gold, nor do you want to price sandwiches and, you know, and you know, in Picasso paintings, right? I think that you've got capital and you've got currency. Bitcoin is capital.

It's digital capital. It's not digital currency. I think a stable coin, the dollar is digital currency like tether. And you've got weak currencies and strong currencies. A weak currency is the Bolivar or the Naira, like something which is inflating at 14% a year or 30% a year. I didn't get strong currencies that are inflating at 7% a year. And then you've got capital, which is not inflating at all. Bitcoin is capital.

It's not a strong currency. It's not a weak currency. It's a capital asset. So this kind of then leads me to. you've discussed many times, and as you kind of outlined here, that you see kind of obviously the U.S. dollar and Bitcoin coexisting, at least, you know, for the foreseeable future side by side. Does that position apply to other fiat currencies that exist? Some of them, all of them, none of them. How do you feel about others?

I think that you have a few currencies that are kind of pegged to the dollar that are struggling on. And I think you have a lot of currencies that are collapsing against the dollar. And then you have the dollar. And so if the stable coins succeed and they're going to succeed, if the U.S. passes the genius, bill and then U.S. corporations and banks are able to issue stable coins back by U.S. dollars, then that market's going to go from $250 billion to a trillion to $2 trillion to $4 trillion to $10 trillion. And you have to ask the question, who's going to be buying it?

And the answer is people that might have otherwise had rubbles or CNY or every African currency and every South American currency. So I think the weak currencies of the world are going to gradually be marginal. Like and I think that the dollar will grow. I think we have currencies will be marginalized. You see us leaning towards a, I mean, we already obviously have the dollar as a world reserve currency, but you see more and more people globally leaning into things like the U.S. dollar backed stable coins and then perhaps using Bitcoin as a long-term store

value. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the demand for stable coins, most of it's for U.S. dollar stable coins, U.S.D.T. U.S.D.C. There's not a lot of demand for stable coins that represent, you know, your favorite Egyptian currency or South African currency or Nigerian currency or the like. So that's what I think, yeah. All right. All right. I want to shift gears a little bit. I wanted to chat a little bit about, you know, I guess maybe I'm one of the crazy people that is kind of living on a Bitcoin standard. Of course, I'm in Canada, so we've got our Canadian dollar that's, you know, less desirable than say the US dollar. But I do use US dollars in terms of when I'm invoicing things like that.

So I'd say my unit of account is USD, but when I'm receiving invoice, I'm getting paid in Bitcoin, I'm saving in Bitcoin. I'm even using Bitcoin day to day. My question is kind of pertaining to, you wrote the mobile wave. It is 14 years old now,

so getting close to 15 years old now. And you were able to kind of, foresee, you know, the future and how integral mobile technology would be to our lives at that time. So taking the same, the same kind of forward-looking approach to Bitcoin, 15 years from now, what do you anticipate the average person's interaction with Bitcoin will look like? Are they engaging still directly with the protocol at all? are they engaging with layers of Bitcoin or are most people using some sort of Bitcoin bank for custody? What does that landscape look like?

I think that there are 400 million companies in the world and there's 40,000 big banks in the world. So I think that, and of course there are lots of institutions. So I think that as Bitcoin is integrated into the fabric of the global economy, I think you'll see, how about a thousand banks that are actually trading peer-to-peer with each other? I think that the banks, the custodians, megacorpse, I mean, I see a world where every major bank and every major tech corps, maybe a Google and an Apple and a Microsoft, you know, they're all, they're all settling or moving large amounts of Bitcoin around on the base layer. Governments. You would think that the biggest users of the base layer would be Apple and Google and the U.S. and Bank of China and Bank of Russia

and Bank of England. I mean, to the extent that any of those things exist, right? If the nation exist, if the bank exists, you know, you would think that city would be moving billions of dollars of Bitcoin to B of A, to Wells Fargo, you know, to Santer, to Deutsche Bank, to Swiss bank, to bank of Japan. I would think that Microsoft will move billions and tens of billions of Bitcoin between Microsoft and Google in order to work through some, you know, technical issue. I think all the, you know, I think visa and any of the payment networks, they'll have massive amounts of Bitcoin. So I think that if you're actually an individual and you're using Bitcoin right now, you're one of the early pioneers,

if you're, if you keep it, you'll be insanely rich. If you take money off the top or you sell it, then, you know, you'll remember that you used to have billions of dollars of Bitcoin. but you sold it for Ferrari, and that will be unfortunate. And so I think that there'll be some OGs that will still be heavily engaged. But I think ultimately, you know, the base network is going to have 10 to 100,000 big financial institutions that are going to be settling large amounts. And I think the network's going to scale in the layer two's and the layer three's. think something, you know, the Lightning Network is going to end up being a high-speed, high-frequency,

low-value settlement network that will stitch together 100,000 or a million websites, or a million mobile apps. Or you can imagine everybody with a mobile app that has payments built in, at some point, they might go peer-to-peer. They won't do it on the base layer. They'll do it on an open protocol layer two, most likely. And then there'll be like massive competition between Coinbase and Cash app and all the traders and the banks and the high frequency traders and, you know, the next person running MasterCard or Visa. And they'll try to create these layer threes.

And they'll have a layer three protocol and, you know, and maybe Binance wants you to move it on Binance and Visa wants you to move it on Visa and Coinbase wants you to use their network and Cash App and then Microsoft and Apple Pay and all these other tech networks, there'll be layer threes. And if a billion people trust Apple, you know, with their credit card, maybe a billion people will trust $10,000 worth of Bitcoin to Apple. And then maybe there'll be some successor to Apple, right? Like OpenA, you know, Tesla bot or something. So I think that there'll be a huge amount of transactions, you know, billions and billions of transactions a day, probably billions an hour on the layer three's, probably billions a day on the layer twos. And then you're going to have

the same number of transactions, you know, on the layer one, far fewer. And those will be $100 million, dollar, billion dollar type settlements, you know, between the mega institutions. And I think you'll see, you'll probably see Bitcoin security and Bitcoin credit type ideas built into a lot of financial and technical applications. And there'll be new applications, new use cases that we can't even conceive of right now. that will maybe for cybersecurity or social security or something else that will grease the wheels of digital commerce. Bitcoin Well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000.

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people aren't super well versed in and familiar with. And on the opposite side of that coin, is there anything in the development in and around Bitcoin that you think proposes a potential threat or that you're worried about? I think the most exciting thing going on right now is the issuance of BTC backed equity and the issuance of BTC backed credit.

Because, you know, you're talking about $100 trillion of equity and credit that's discretionary. So if I were to say every public company should recapitalize on Bitcoin, that would be a start, but that would be an understatement because I didn't include the 400 million private companies, did I? And I didn't include, I didn't include every institutional holder of any capital. So I think that that's a very powerful dynamic. And once that starts, that burns 100 million a week per company, a billion, you know, that can burn billions and that could be billions of dollars a week. And the same with BTC back credit. If you look at all the credit instruments, all the preferred stocks, all of the fixed income, all the annuities, all the corporate bonds, all the high yield bonds, the junk bonds, all the investment grade bonds, all that huge amounts.

It's all going to be recapitalized or reconstructed on a Bitcoin standard. That's bigger than the equity. And so I think that there's a digital transformation of the capital markets going on right now. And it's profound. And what it means is a company like Metaplan, it can go from being worth $10 million to being potentially worth $10 billion in a couple of years. So show me a better idea. How do you go from $10 million to $10 billion in 24 months or 36 months?

It's not very common. So I really think that's the part that's underappreciated. I mean, people in the business staring at it. Like literally, most of the crypto-OGs that have been in the business for 15 years are staring right at the thing and ignoring it or rejecting it as it's happening. That's the irony to me. And I think that's because, again, they're, they're, their metaphor is they're looking for some technical widget to create instead of reconceiving

the way that wealth is stored. You know, if you're looking for the technical ideas, the technical ideas are just harder. They take a lot more work. I mean, eventually, eventually you would think that Bitcoin is the basis for all payments, you know, via something like the Lightning Protocol. And so clearly the Internet of Money, that's a cool idea. It's a lot of work. It's going to take a while.

And then I think Bitcoin is the basis of all identity and authentication. It's another interesting technical idea. Presumably public-private key cryptography on a Bitcoin network. It ought to replace most of the forms of authentication and identity and verification in the world. So I think that those are two technical dynamics that are operating. But on the other hand, if you launch 100 companies with those two ideas, 99 out of 100 are going to struggle, and one will achieve something maybe. Whereas I can take a dying hotel or a dying restaurant chain and I can make it worth a billion dollars

just using Bitcoin as digital capital. and on the margin is more likely to work than not. And so I think that the really big compelling ideas are the monetary ideas, or the financialization of Bitcoin, the securitization of the network. I think the technical ideas will probably come later. They will come. They're coming. David Marcus is doing great job with Spark, you know, and Light Spark.

I think it's very interesting. and they're having good progress, you know, and I think we'll see a lot more things like that, but those are a little bit more difficult to forecast because of the vagaries of technology entrepreneurship. I want to touch on the treasury part here as well. Obviously, you really spearheaded this whole movement, and it seems like every other week,

or every week now, we've got new announcements. It's pretty wild. My question is, are we still so early that simply adopting a, you know, a Bitcoin treasury strategy is enough? Or are there certain fundamentals that the underlying company must have? Are there instances where you might not suggest it? So I'm just kind of curious your thoughts and around that. Every company, look, every family on Earth should adopt the Bitcoin standard, right?

What is that, a billion families? Yeah. Every person on Earth should adopt the Bitcoin standard. That's 8 billion people. Every company on Earth should adopt the Bitcoin standard. That's 400 million companies. Now your next question is, well, is there anything I can do that's better than that? Well, there are a lot of other twists to it.

If you know, if you take a private company, take it public, right? You add value. Now, all of these companies are competing to do something. The issue is what's the something? It depends on the company. So I think we're very early. I mean, not even 0.1% of companies are doing this, right? So, I mean, if you're less than 1% adoption, you're still pretty early.

There's a lot of different business models you can pursue. If you're a private company and you're raising $10 million in order to fund operating losses, you could just raise $50 million and buy $40 million of Bitcoin and fund $10 million in operating losses, and I would definitely recommend that. That's better, right? So every private company can do that. Now the question is, can you raise the money? Okay, well, it depends on who you are and whether or not we like your company and whether you're trustworthy.

these so this all becomes an exercise in capital raising and the question is will some companies be better at raising capital than others sure they will or there's some markets if you're launching a company a bitcoin treasury company in japan your odds are higher than if you're launching that same company in venezuela right i mean where's the money right so so i think that the successes will be uh companies well first of all every company will be successful, right? What's the alternative? You're holding Egyptian pounds in your treasury.

So every single Egyptian company that adopts the Bitcoin standard will be more successful than if it did it, right? It's just that there are certain options right now for people that are creative to go beyond just success. If you're the first company in Japan to adopt a Bitcoin standard and you grow rapidly and you generate a lot of capital, then not only do you have the most compelling BTC backed equity in the Japanese capital market, you can have the most compelling BTC credit instruments. What is trillions of dollars in Japan, right? So how many companies in Japan can do that?

I mean, not every company can be the Amazon of, you know, of whatever, of capital markets in Japan, but at least one can be. Now, what about the rest? What happened? You know, the subtext is always, well, is it too late for the rest of us? No, you're still better off than if you didn't. Right, for example, how many companies have issued mortgage-backed securities? How many companies have issued mortgages or how about how many companies have ever issued

junk bonds? If you're the first company to issue the junk bond, then I guess that's good, but what about the second or the third? They work for them, too. So I think as a practical matter, everybody benefits. The early adopters benefit more. Those that are run by a charismatic leader and a good management team can grow faster. The more creative you are, the better.

And if you're, you know, if you're not disciplined in the way you run the capital structure, then you won't do as well. My, I guess, follow up to that would be, you know, historically we've seen ill-placed criticisms thrown at Bitcoin because of people doing irresponsible things with it and their company's blowing up. So I'm talking about, you know, exchange blowups and paper Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff. And Bitcoin is very efficient at pointing out the irresponsible behavior and punishing it. So I guess my question as it pertains to companies that go with the Bitcoin Treasury strategy, if companies come into that space that, you know, we're underwater already that, you know, weren't running an efficient business.

and then, you know, more or less ape into Bitcoin with debt that they perhaps couldn't afford and the market hits a downturn. Does it also, in a way, kind of clear out the riffraff in an expedient manner there? Or does it rescue those people that weren't being particularly prudent with their funds? Well, there are good companies and bad companies, right? So if I give you a company making $100 million a year and they adopt Bitcoin and they start buying $100 million worth of Bitcoin, they'll be 10x better. If they borrow a billion, they'll be 100x better. If they manage to launch in a two market, there'll be a thousand X better.

If they screw it up, they won't. If I give you a company that's losing $100 million a year and they announce that they're adopting a Bitcoin standard, no one's going to give them any money. Maybe they don't have any Bitcoin. So the point is, you know, putting a, you know, putting on a press release doesn't solve your problem. Yeah. So, so, you know, in that particular case, if the company's got a billion dollars of debt losing $100 million a year, putting out a press release announcing that you adopted the Bitcoin treasury model doesn't help you, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Right? And if I take a bad company, if I take a bad P&L and I attach a good balance sheet, eventually I burn all the money on the balance sheet. Like, would you invest $500 million a Bitcoin into a company losing $100 million a year than intended to keep losing it? Probably not, right? So the thing about this market is the Bitcoin Treasury company movement is is traditional. companies trading in the public markets that have adopted the Bitcoin standard. It's not crypto companies. So it's impossible for them to actually generate or take on the leverage the crypto companies took over. The crypto companies were levered 20 to 1, 30 to 1, 50 to 1. It was very

common for in the, you know, in the crypto, in the height of the crypto era, people would give you a billion loan for 800 million of Yo-Yo token as collateral. Okay. You can't get a loan to buy Bitcoin in traditional finance market. So for example, I can't sell a bond. Like, like, and so all these Bitcoin treasury companies, they're not getting levered up. They're raising equity. They're not raising debt. The debt markets won't give them capital. So whereas if you look at what created the crypto winner, it was, I was levered up 20 to 1 on FTT token, and then I pledged a billion of FTT for some tether, and then I went and I bought some whatever, Luna or something, and you ended up daisy chaining 10x leverage three times. You created a thousand X leverage on

Yo-Yo token, and yo-yo token collapses, and the entire thing collapses. You can't do that in traditional finance markets. Like if you can't borrow a billion to buy Bitcoin, no one will give you the money. If you had a billion dollars of Bitcoin, you can't borrow a billion against it. You can't even lever it two to one. My company's levered 1.1, like 1.2. So you might get 10, 20% leverage, maybe 30% leverage. You can't get 10x leverage.

And so all of these companies that are being launched are governed by much more concerned. conservative financial principles. The thing that bothers us is, let's take the capital markets or the credit markets. You can't get a credit rating. We have stuff that's 10-X. We have bonds that are 50x over collateralized, 50 times. We can't get a credit rating on them. Okay, so why would you sit around worrying that these guys are getting over-levered?

That's not the problem at all. All the Bitcoin treasury companies can't get over levered if they wanted to because the conventional credit markets are so hyper conservative. They actually value Bitcoin up until right now is worth zero. You can't lever it at all. So who's funding all this? It's equity. And, you know, who's behind the convertible bonds?

That's equity. For example, when someone buys a $200 million convertible bond from you, they sell $150 million of your equity in order to hedge it. So what you've really got is probably not even 5% leverage in the entire system. Like if you had $100 billion of Bitcoin, you might have $5 billion of some. It looks like leverage. That's about all you have. So there's really not that much there because there's no way to get it.

The only way to sell a convertible bond is have so much liquidity in your equity that the convertible arbitrages can short the stock, you see. So if you don't have liquidity, and if you don't have cash flow, then how do you get a Bitcoin Treasury company working? And the answer is you have to actually go and find equity investors. You have to find someone that will inject a slug of $100,000, $500 million, $500 million, $500 million, $500 million, and they might do it in the form of U.S. dollars, or they might do it in the form of euros, or they might give you Bitcoin. But at the end of the day, they're equity investors. And so this entire movement is really the creation of BTC-backed equity. And the reason it works is because if you look at a chart,

and we put a chart like this in our Stride presentation about a week ago, out of about $100 trillion, it's under control of institutional money managers where they can reallocate it any given day, 35 trillion is equity, 65 trillion is earmarked for credit. There's only three trillion that's invested in something that akin to a commodity. 2.3 trillion of it is gold held by central banks. They're not going to sell their gold to buy Bitcoin or to buy your equity anytime soon. So you've got about $700 billion of money. in the institutional market that could be invested in commodities like Bitcoin. So there's 100x more money available for credit or equity.

And it's like $700 billion versus $35 trillion available for equity. So at the end of the day, the money is sitting in these funds that have mandates to invest in equity. and they can buy blockchain group or they can invest in smarter web or they can invest in meta planet or they can invest in strategy they just can't invest in bitcoin they can't they won't they just can't it's just that simple so so these companies are essential in order to bridge the traditional finance economy with the crypto economy and if you don't have the companies in the middle there's no way for the capital to flow. But with the company, like SmarterWeb or like Metaplanet,

then the capital that is locked up in a retirement account in Tokyo or London can flow into a Bitcoin treasury company that can then take it and buy Bitcoin with it. And, you know, we could go into lots of details about why is it like that and is it fair and is it rational? It's above our pay grade. The world is structured, the way it's structured. And that's where the capital is. And the way you've got to look at it is in a couple of seconds,

the money can move from there into the equity, or we can wait 30 years and see if the world changes, and then maybe it will or maybe it won't. But it's like 30 seconds or 30 seconds, for 30 years. That's your issue. So the Bitcoin treasury companies are meeting a need, right? They're bridging the gap and they're solving this problem for the investor. And that's worth something. And so that's why they merit a premium. And because they generate that premium, because they're more tax efficient, they're more capital efficient. I guess. Simple example,

I give you a suburb. And on the left side of the street, our houses. that you can buy and put a mortgage on with no money down, and it's cheap mortgage. And the right side of the street, you have to pay for the house in cash. Okay? And you've got the identical houses on both sides of the street, but what do you think the house on the left side of the street that you can get no money down will trade it a premium to the house on the right side of the street that you've got to pay for with cash? Right.

I mean, the answer is obvious, right? the house on the left side of the street will be double or triple or quadruple because the world's full of people that want a house and the world's full of people that don't have the money to pay for the house. So the Bitcoin treasury companies are giving you the ability to get Bitcoin exposure with someone else's capital or with capital that's stranded. And that's why they're growing rapidly. And that's why we need more of them. So in terms of of, you're talking about all this capital on the sidelines that's beginning to make its way into Bitcoin via treasury companies as an easy avenue to do so. In terms of, I guess that type of adoption, but even just broader adoption of Bitcoin, how are you kind of mapping the adoption?

Are you thinking of it as your typical technological S-curve, or do you feel like because of regulatory things? it's going to be a bit of a slower grind. And if we're on that S curve, where would you say that we're at currently? I don't have a strong model. I just think every quarter, every year we get more adoption. And it's going at a different rate in different parts of the world. That's the famous William Gibson phrase, the future is already with us. It's just not evenly distributed.

So in some places, the adoption is going to be more conservative. and it's going to manifest itself in financial institutions that are conservative. And in other cases, it'll be through new technical things. You know, like, for example, the news story this morning was the largest shareholder in my company is Vanguard. Okay. So that's an example of hyper conservative adoption because because, Vanguard's a company run by a CEO that said that he doesn't believe in Bitcoin and they don't want to let anybody buy it. Okay. It's not a technology leader, right? It's not a tech. It's not it's not the Bitcoin is running on an iPhone or an Android phone. It's not an AI. It's actually a completely passive adoption. It's, but it's it's so passive and subtle that even the company that doesn't even like the asset ends up owning a lot of it, right? So I guess the metaphor is like, okay, you're a retired firefighter and you own Bitcoin even though you hate it.

You see, well, how did I end up owning it? Well, I mean, I've got a pension fund and the pension plan is sitting in an index fund and the index fund owns a percentage of the whatever and they own a lot of Bitcoin. So you will see that kind of adoption passively creeping into the financial system. I think we checked or we did an analysis. We observed there are about 55 million beneficiaries of MSTR. You think they all know that they own Bitcoin? Most of them don't even know. They don't even know who we are, right?

So there's a lot of people that are beneficiaries. They just don't know, right? If we ended up getting put in the S&B 500, there'd be 100 million plus that wouldn't know. So I think that that's one end at one extreme, which is just passive adoption by osmosis just because you can't escape it. And then the other extreme is, is, you know, I hold my keys, I run my node. I have, you know, I have my signing device. I have multi-sig. I'm hardcore, right?

And I'm very, I'm very determined or decisive about it. And then, you know, there's everybody in between, you know, it's, I got cash app or, or I have Apple pay. And then on one day, Apple will push an update giving everybody access to Bitcoin. And it's like I didn't ask for it, but it's, you know, the icon popped up on the phone. You know, so there'll be that too. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, Aqua Wallet has you covered. It's user-friendly and puts you in full control of your Bitcoin. with secure self-custody.

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blow your mind with one because they're fun. But I digress. I wanted to quickly touch on. So I on the side, often do some help with the Human Rights Foundation. I imagine you, I imagine you you're familiar with like Alex Gladstein and all the work that they're doing using using Bitcoin as a tool for human rights and freedom. So I'm just curious if you had any thoughts on kind of what they've been doing and how you view Bitcoin in that realm. Yeah, well, I think that the asset and the network provides a strong foundation for economic empowerment and freedom everywhere in the world.

And so I think that what they're doing is interesting and it's good for the world. And I think that as the technology that sits at the layer two's and the layer threes improves and as it spreads everywhere in the world, it will get easier for them to do what they're doing. I think I'd like to see a world where, you know, you've got a mobile app that's sitting with a lightning interface that gives you the ability to move friction-free any currency and or Bitcoin switching between a fiat currency and Bitcoin anywhere in the world at the speed of light with privacy, with security, with simplicity, right? And at that point, that's kind of, you know, the killer app. I mean, it's not going to solve the human rights problem. The human rights problem is there are other issues. If I'm sitting in jail or someone's got a gun to my head,

then giving me an Android application that does that doesn't necessarily solve my problem. But it'll, it gives you a tool that you can use to empower those that otherwise are, in a pretty hopeless situation yeah yeah i will say it's been pretty compelling watching um some of some of these activists and people in pretty dire situations that you know not not say that bitcoin's a silver bullet but them realizing that it's a tool in the tool belt that can help further further their causes which is great to see um i did also uh want to ask you on a on a personal level especially since you've kind of come onto the scene, you know, your announcement in 2020

of what you were planning on doing and up to today. What is one of the opinions that you may be held about Bitcoin at that time as you were starting to pull the trigger that has most shifted or maybe completely changed over the past five, five and a half years?

I think I figured it out pretty well very early on. I don't have one for you. Okay, fair enough. You can go back and look at what I said when I went on Pomp's podcast or Rowe's podcast. It was September of 2020 and see what I thought then. I still think it now. My views of Bitcoin haven't changed. I've found a lot of other ways to raise money to buy Bitcoin that I didn't know then.

So I did know that. I guess the one thing that's really evolved for me is, is my, um, my, uh, awareness, uh, or at least my appreciation for Bitcoin as a tool to digitally transform capital markets. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Initially, I thought of it as a tool, uh, to save the company or save the individual. But now I actually see it as, as a tool to reap.

build all the capital markets in the world, which means all the credit markets, all the equity markets. So I guess it's another way to say it is my view of Bitcoin hasn't really changed, but my view of the equity markets and my view of the credit markets has changed. So I guess if you want to riff on that a bit, it's like you learn Bitcoin and then what's your conclusion? The big overarching conclusion is not how good Bitcoin is. It's just how defective the Fiat currencies are that we used to rely on before Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin is a pure monetary asset, it causes you to realize how inadequate

all the previous monetary assets were in the previous 10,000 years. and because it's a pure monetary asset, you realize how inadequate the existing equities are. And then you realize how inadequate the existing credit is. So, you know, if you accepted the world and said, well, the bond market is healthy, the equity markets are healthy, the money markets are healthy, you know, that was before Bitcoin. And then after Bitcoin, a lot of people realize, okay, well, if Bitcoin is good money, then I guess the other monies are defective. But not many go beyond that to point out that the implication is all of the existing equity markets are impaired and all of the existing credit markets are impaired.

So a lot of people rail about the evils of fiat currency, but the truth of the matter is, there's a lot of evils with all the other credit and equity instruments or all the other stores of value. You know, like people that thought they were going to save their hard-earned wealth by buying an apartment and Airbnb, being it, you know, or I invested in real estate, or I decided to buy a house instead, and then they realized that the house was weighed around their neck. Or I bought a portfolio of corporate credit. And if you look, you know, if you look at the writings of libertarians and you look at the writings of the Austrian economists, right?

Whether it's, you know, Rothbard, the Libertarian Manifesto, right, or Von, you know, Mises or Hayek, they're very long on history. They tell you the history of money, the history of libertarian causes, the history. And then they have a lot of criticism. This is why it's wrong. But they're very short. they're very lacking on the science and on the engineering. So for example, none of the Austrian economists actually lay out perfect money.

They kind of end with all existing fiat currencies are bad and gold is less bad. And gold is better. And then they stop. And the libertarians, they tell you why government intervention in all policies, is generally iatrogenic, why government intervention is dysfunctional. And then they wish that governments didn't intervene. And then they hope that people will just adopt a libertarian view. But I think that the big breakthrough of Bitcoin, if you think about it really hard,

is Bitcoin is an example of a perfect monetary asset. So once you saw perfect, then you can ask the question, what makes it perfect? And then you can see what's the defect. And so I guess what's really changed for me over the five years is having spent enough time thinking about engineering of capital and engineering of economics, you know, and looking at the door that the Bitcoin opens. I just realized that the Austrians and the libertarians, they struggle because they didn't have the science. They didn't have the engineering.

And so they were hopeless. And their plight was hopeless. And Bitcoin, as we said, is hope. The solution to all these problems is never in the history of these. ideology it's in the science and the engineering so why is it that power tends to come what is the word congeal why do why do why do big companies get bigger and why do the powerful get more powerful and why do countries and nation states accumulate power right why and then what are you going to do about it right and I think you know after you've embraced bitcoin if you think hard and deep enough about it

you begin to realize that there are scientific reasons why markets don't work the way you want them to work and why and why political systems are dysfunctional and then once you embrace the scientific reasons why then you start to engineer a solution Right. And in my case, I realized that you could use Bitcoin to engineer better credit and engineer better equity and engineer better capital markets. Right. And without Bitcoin, you can't. And the other people, they don't know they have a problem because they've never seen a perfect solution. right so they're mired in an imperfect world i like that um i want to bring it down to uh maybe the the individual level and uh get some uh michael sailor advice for your your average bitconer here let's say you've got you know somebody they're youngish starting a family you know getting their

career underway, coming from you, and this could be Bitcoin related or not, what is one of the biggest pieces of advice that you would give to this hypothetical person that's beginning their life that they can do to ensure success in the future? Harness digital intelligence and harness digital capital. The two biggest trends in the world right now are digital intelligence. and digital capital. And digital intelligence, we call colloquially AI, right? But it means that you should focus on it, master it, figure out how to use it, don't be

afraid of it. You know, I meet a lot of people. I meet a lot of people in their 20s and they're like, I'm working very hard, you know, a bank analyst. I'm running spreadsheets, I'm doing this. I said, well, so are using AI to do that? They're like, no. Okay.

Why? At this point, any problem that I run into, I would go to one of a couple of AIs. I put it in deep research mode, and I would grind it, and then I would do that 20 times. And then I would look for ways to grind it against itself. And I find that it will oftentimes do the work. of 20 people that would take a month that I can get the work done in 10 minutes. Maybe I can get 200 man years of work done in three hours. So I would be horrified and terrified if I wasn't using AI to do whatever I'm going to do.

So if you're going to work, probably the most productive work you can do is figure out how to program and AI to do that work. It doesn't matter what it is, whether you're an artist or a, you know, if I'm a podcaster, I'd be thinking, I wonder if I can take the podcast feed it to AI and spit out a hundred different languages. And can I use the AI to market it? Can I use the AI to translate it? Can I use the AI to summarize it?

Can I use the AI to sell it, right? You know, I would be, can I use the AI to redistribute it on different distribution channels? And then I would be thinking, will the AI eat what I'm doing? you know, et cetera. So I would be thinking very hard about that. And then on the digital capital side, I mean, it's simple. If I live in Canada or wherever, I figure out how to get a government sponsored or subsidized loan and buy Bitcoin with it. If you can borrow money, you know, I remember people used to make fun of it.

It was like I said mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin. The mortgages were 30 years. cost 2.75% interest and Bitcoin's returning 57% a year for the past five years. You could literally lock in, you know, if you borrowed a million bucks, you can make $500,000 a year with no work if you did that silly thing. And so, and it's not even risky. It's like there's like zero risk. And yet, and yet I still meet people, you know, the conventional person, you know, wants to figure out to pay off their mortgage. So paying off your mortgage is investing your money in a suppressed government credit

instrument that pays three or four percent. Why would you invest in three or four percent if Bitcoin is returning 55 percent or more, right? So I would figure out how to do that. I mean, personally, I would look for long, dated, inexpensive. debt wherever I could find it. And then if you can't do that, then start a company and then sell equity in the company. And then as soon as you can sell preferred equity or sell debt in the company or take the company public. So vocationally, whatever you're going to do,

you've got to plug digital intelligence into it. And then if you want to make money, find a way to raise capital, find the cheapest cost of capital, the largest amount of capital and cover into Bitcoin. And if you're really good at it, then that becomes the business, right? Like Metaplanet, you know, if those 10 people can create billions of dollars in a year, well, they could create 10 billions of dollars in a year. They could create 100 billion in a year. They could create a, you know, they could create the first trillion dollar company in Japan. So do that, right? If you can do that, right?

Why wouldn't you do that, right? This decade that we're in right now, you know, it's inevitable. The cars are going to drive themselves, the robots are going to do the work, someone's going to launch a company that provides a million accountants worth of advice while only employing two accountants, right? You're going to unleash these things that do a million times as much work as million times faster or a million times smarter. And so before you pay someone to do the work for you, see if the AI will do the work,

and then while you're at it, see if you can create a revolutionary new product or service with the AI. And if you've got a conventional product or service, figure out how to use the AI to make it better, or smarter, faster, stronger, but don't lose focus to the idea that if you have a lot of a company that's worth $2 million right now, the single most lucrative thing you could do is sell half the company for $2 million and own 50% of a company worth $4 million and invest the $2 million in Bitcoin, which will grow 60% a year. And in 10 years, you can retire from the other company, right? $2 million growing 60% a year, you know, it doubles five times.

You've got two, four, eight, 16. At some point in 10 years, you've got a $32 million company growing 20% a year and you're not working. Or you can work yourself to death for the next decade and you're not going to be making, you know, 8 million a year doing an hour of work a month. So I think it's I see a lot of people that work very hard, but trust me, I've worked very hard in my entire life. You can work 4,000 hours a year for 20 years running and still not make any progress if you're not sophisticated with regard to the way you construct your finances or your balance sheet. So make the capital work for you. All right. I've got two last questions for you.

The one I wanted to touch on was, you know, you've mentioned that you're taking your Bitcoin, or I guess, taken it to the grave with you, but, you know, I guess gifting it to the Bitcoin network, more or less, right? It's, it's, uh, you've said that, uh, you intend on, uh, never selling it, uh, never giving it away just, it's just going to go with you kind of to the end. I'm just curious if you maybe could outline the, the thinking behind that versus doing something like, um, you know, maybe seating future generations or, or doing something like time locks, have you ever looked into, you know, explicit instructions of, oh, do this with it in a hundred years? Or do you just think that the gifted deflation is a pretty good option? I think everybody can do what they want with their estate. And there are a lot of, you know,

that comes down to a system of values. Do you want to endow our children? hospital in your hometown while you're alive? Do you want to endow a children's hospital for the next thousand years after you're gone? Do you want to trust someone else to distribute your money, you know, pursuant to some charter for the next X years? All of those are different possibilities. I've, you know, I've seen them all. We know what the Rockefellers have done. Ironically, Rockefeller gets criticized for things that were done by people that are six generations past when he actually contributed the money. So I think there's no doubt that sometimes big charity goes awry.

Do you want someone a thousand years from now or 100 years from now to use all of your money as they see fit? What if I were to tell you they were going to use all your money to destroy Bitcoin? Because it was politically correct at the time. You take a lot of risk when you delegate capital. And so I think you've got to consider that. Right. But it's a value judgment. It's a principal judgment. So I'm not going to tell other people what to do. I'm going to point out that The logic of burning your keys when you die is that you've made a pro rata distribution to everyone in the network. So you could reasonably infer that you put all of your life's force or energy behind the support of the thing you believe in at the time you did it. And then should the network become corrupted or go awry?

it's not your fault. On the other hand, right? There's a lot of large charities that have gone very, very badly awry, and you could probably identify them if you thought long and hard enough about it. And then if you were to ask the person that endowed the charity, did you mean for them to do this? That person would always say no. No, I didn't think that I was creating harm.

The joke, of course, is there are literally people saying that the medical industry, you know, the modern medical establishment is, is, what is the word, is doing damage to the health of the people that treats, right? It's been corrupted. And they blame Rockefeller. Rockefeller lived to 99 and three quarters, and he was, he believed in homeopathic treatment. He didn't believe in medicine. Like he didn't believe in doctors. He didn't trust them.

He didn't believe in medicines. He didn't believe in surgeries. He ate simply exercised every day of his life, outlived all of his doctors. He outlived every single medical school faculty member that he endowed. And he's blamed for the transgressions of the medical establishment. that he sponsored. And the truth is probably a lot of stuff that he endowed turned out very, very well. And probably there's someone four generations down their line that misused the funds.

And you just have to ask the question, what do you want your legacy to be? I mean, you've got Satoshi's example, right? What does Satoshi do? Right. I mean, the real issue is can you find fault, fault with? it if Satoshi had left his money to support a particular cause, don't you think that like half the world would be angry about that cause right now? Definitely.

In fact, if it was a liberal cause or a conservative cause or American cause or a not American cause, it would be tearing the Bitcoin community apart because people would be very angry that Bitcoin was being used for this thing they didn't agree with, right? Yeah, yeah, of course. In order to make the network work, you needed to have an asset which is self-referential. Like that is, we pay the miners with Bitcoin, right, every 10 minutes. We don't pay them with Fiat. And so if you don't value the Bitcoin, you wouldn't mine the network, right?

You wouldn't protect the network because you're getting paid. And so the logic was, we want the people that protect the network to have a vested interest in making sure that the thing they're getting paid and is not corrupted. So in a way, if you spent your entire life defending the network, growing the network, and you managed to accumulate a lot of capital, you know, what is the least risky way for your life's work to continue in perpetuity? It's pretty much to burn the asset on the network. right?

Yeah. Right, which is what Satoshi did. I mean, so Satoshi said an example and he is like, what's the famous quote, lost coins or contribution to everybody else? They make everybody else's coins more valuable. Yeah. I mean, but, but it was kind of a classic understatement. It's classic understatement.

It's like, you know, the thing that you love, you and view with your estate. You know, so you're a father. You love your kids. and you want to give them something. You're a patriot. You love your country. Right? You're devout.

You love your church. All you're going to do is walk through any cathedral in Europe, right? You see all the chapels and you see, you know, very wealthy people contributed their entire estate in order to finish the, you know, Notre Dame or St. Peter's or the like. So it's a human idea. I'm going to use my estate to further whatever my ideology is. So you just got to decide what are your values, right?

And I believe in the logic of laser eyes, if you're lucky enough to have one mission in your life and have any modicum of success, then you should count yourself fortunate, right? you're probably luckier than the great majority of the vast majority of people that ever lived. The world's full of people that were successful at one thing, but then they actually picked a second to third or a fourth thing. And when you pick the second, the third of the fourth thing, you kind of destroy your legacy or you dilute it, right, at the very least, or distracted. You built a business, your entire life, you give it to your, you know, your idiot son.

son, you know, the derelict, any bankrupts the company? Was there anything honorable about that? Like, if you really love the company, you don't leave it to your, you know, your idiot son. You leave it to the most qualified employee. You know, you pick the one out of a million people that's going to actually protect the customer, protect the investors, protect the employees, improve the product, right? So in this particular case, you've got to kind of consider is your ego? getting in the way of pursuing your interests or not.

Okay, I can appreciate that. All right. Well, Michael, I've saved the most important question by far for last. And I'll tee this one up by just saying there's an issue that is tearing the Bitcoin community apart at the seams and it needs to be resolved here and now with you. And so Dr. Savadina Moose posited this question to you, and he's wondering if you can settle it here. When it comes to cookware, are you pro cast iron or stainless steel? You know, I guess I see the appeal of cast iron.

It's got some kind of vintage quality for me. Yeah. I like the authenticity of it. This is going to be the spiciest take of the whole interview, I think. The memeers will run with this one. All right. So we'll mark down Michael Saylor for Team Cast Iron. Am I hearing that right?

Yep. All right. Well, I think this is a perfect spot to wrap it up. Michael, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. And thank you for the future deflation as well. And for the great conversation. Thanks a bunch.

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