PBD Podcast - Michael Saylor | PBD Podcast | Ep. 212

Starting point is 00:00:00 I know this life meant for me. Yeah, why would you plan on Goliath when we got bad David value came in giving values contagious this world on entrepreneurs we can't no value that hate it out of run homie look what I become. I'm the I'm the one. I become We're ready all right all right all right. Okay, so this is Part two with the one and only Michael sailor obviously Michael from the last time we sat down To today last time Bitcoin was 44,000 today it's 17k Ethereum was 3000 today's 1262. I figure we do a part two because it's been very quiet

Starting point is 00:00:45 the last nine months, not much has happened in the cryptos. Not like there's been a guy that screwed a lot of people over. It's not like there's a lot to talk about, but we're so happy to have you back here for part two. I was worried you'd be bored of me. It wouldn't want to. I think that's the last thing.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Yeah, crypto space very boring right now. No news, nothing of note. Very busy. I ran out of stuff to talk about. Well, you know, since you ran out of stuff, last thing. Yeah. Crypto space very boring right now. No news. Nothing of note. Very big. I ran out of stuff to talk about. Well, you know, since you ran out of stuff, I think some people worked very hard to create new content for you to talk about. So, by the way, have you ever had any interaction with the Sandbankman Freed or not? Have you guys ever spent time together? I haven't spent time with them, but I've talked to him. Okay. What do you think? Like, was anything that's going on with him, anything, I mean,

Starting point is 00:01:26 you're a guy that's, I've seen the numbers. I don't know what the number is today. Was it 100? You own, you own 139,000 bitcoins. That's a big number. 130,000. 130,000. At microstrategy. At microstrategy. And then that also doesn't include what you have personally. Yeah, and I own like another 17. So 17 personal, 130 thousand, not 17? Yeah, correct.

Starting point is 00:01:47 Yeah, so it's not like your... I've a bit of, I'm somewhat long, Bitcoin. Oh, yeah, I saw what you said in the article, you said, if you were, this is the first bear market, if you're in this business for just kind of a mess and around and you know, you're not in a long term for four years, you're not doing your self-adjustice but going back to SPF so any of the stories that came about did the guys in the industry like yourself the heavy was were you aware that something was going on at SPF or no? Yeah I mean I think that you have the Bitcoin community opposite the crypto community.

Starting point is 00:02:25 And there's been a low grade sort of boiling guerrilla war between the two camps for the past two and a half years. And Sam is kind of like the poster child of the crypto world. Right. Sam makes billions of dollars on an unregulated exchange. Offshore, he makes billions of dollars issuing his own air token. He spends hundreds of millions of dollars giving to the crypto lobby and to politicians. One of their messages is Bitcoin is bad for the environment. It uses too much electricity, but not to fear. We have a staked air token, which does the same thing as

Starting point is 00:03:05 Bitcoin and it's environmentally friendly. So, you know, we've always seen that going on. And I think that, you know, the Bitcoin community would say, you know, there's something ethically broken about being able to issue your own unregistered security, right? They call it committing the sin of shit-coinery. Yep. Right? So, Sam and most of the people in the crypto world were always guilty of the sin of shit-coinery or pumping and promoting unregistered securities. And that was obvious. I think, you know, that was obvious to the chair of the SEC to most politicians, right? The phrase that pops up over and over again is the vast majority of all crypto tokens are unregistered securities. But I think the diabolical twist in the FTX story that none of us saw coming, but it is

Starting point is 00:03:59 particularly diabolical. Bollicle's. So Sam creates, you know, $8 billion worth of air token with SRM and FTT. Then he issues himself, locked token, secret locked token, marks it up on his balance sheet by another four to $8 billion and calls it 16 billion worth of collateral. Okay. Then he goes shopping for a bank to give him a loan against this. Well, if I took a billion dollars of Apple stock and I went to a legit bank, Bank of America, JP Morgan Goldman Sachs, I said I got a billion of Apple stock, they would say, well, we will give you collateral value for up to the amount you have or 5% of the daily trading liquidity on a legitimate regulated exchange. So if you show me a security that trades a billion dollars a day and you have a billion

Starting point is 00:04:50 dollars of it, I might give you 50 million of collateral value and that means you could bar $25 million against it at 50% loan to value, but I'm going to margin call you if it moves a tick. So it means practically speaking, a billion dollars of that legit security is probably going to give you 10 million dollars worth of a loan. On a billion. On a billion. That's 1%. Okay. Right. Because the gating factor is what's 5% of the trading liquidity of that token or that asset? Because if I have to dump that thing in the market, I want to sell the entire position

Starting point is 00:05:27 without moving the price. Okay, so that's the traditional world on shore. What Sam did was generated 14 to $16 billion worth of Solana, you know, FTT serum, and then he went shopping for a bank to give him a loan. But he didn't want, you know, you wouldn't get a loan from Goldman Sachs on it. No one's going to borrow your money, at least no non-crypto company. So what he did was he went to himself, he runs a bank called FTX.

Starting point is 00:05:56 He applied for a loan from himself. He granted himself a loan. Yeah, the loan. He were a loan from himself. Well, secretly applied. He didn't tell anybody, but he graced it. When they say, well, Alameda had a margin account and the margin position was totally bigger than I thought.

Starting point is 00:06:11 What he means is, oh yeah, they pledged a few billion dollars of air token, gave them self a $10 billion loan and they extracted, even if he had pledged 15 billion worth of air token. Giving yourself a $10 billion loan means that you gave yourself about 100x the collateral value you would have got on a regulated exchange on shore. So what he did was, in essence, extract $10 billion

Starting point is 00:06:37 of real stuff, dollars, Bitcoin, saleable assets, and he pledged $10 billion worth of air tokens stuff. And of course, it's a double diabolical thing. Here's the problem. So I create a token, I have 300 million tokens, and then I basically trade it with myself. Like I give it to you and you work for me and you give it back to me. Then I lean on it, so I lever it up 10 to 1. You know, on FTX, could lever it 20 to one.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Then I borrow your money, your depositor. So I take your money, you have $10 million. I levered up 20 to one, I have $200 million. I buy my own token, I drive my token up by five bucks, $5 times 300 million makes me 1.5 billion in collateral. I post the collateral and then I would draw $1 billion of, you know, $100,000 people's money.

Starting point is 00:07:28 I put it in Alameda and then Alameda gives a $3.5 billion loan to Sam, right? He gave $3.3 billion to either himself or his personal family holding company. So here's the diabolical twist. I didn't just generate $10 billion of an unregistered security to dump it on the unsuspecting retail. That would take me 500 trading days, dumping 20 million a day, right? They didn't do that.

Starting point is 00:07:55 What he did is he generated $10 billion in unregistered security and then just borrowed $10 billion secretly from his depositors and then went and gambled it, traded it, spend it, lost it. And that is like, it's particularly impressive. So here's a question. You know how you, he goes and he raises the two billion, okay. And he gets the two billion from not small people.

Starting point is 00:08:19 He gets it from the best, the best, the best, the best, right? You got black rock, you got insight. I think you know the names. I don't need to give you the names. You know the names. best of the best, right? You got black rock, you got insight. I can, you know the names. I don't need to give you the names. You know the names. So page your names, right? Then they don't get any seats, board seats in return. These are very, very smart people who are seeing this.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Are they just as responsible for the fall of FTX as Sandbankman Frieders? The Bitcoin maximalist would say that the problem in crypto is greed, arrogance, and foolishness, okay? Anybody that's investing in it is either greedy, arrogant, or foolish. So there's three constituencies that got taken for billions of dollars here.

Starting point is 00:08:59 The VC investors put two billion dollars into an offshore exchange. The exchange, just to be clear, was an ethical and illegal from the very beginning. It's illegal to do what they did in the US. And it's unethical, if you think, I am front running my customers, issuing a token, manipulating the price of the token, dumping it on them. If you did that in stocks, you're going to jail if you've run run. It's not.

Starting point is 00:09:22 It's absolutely. Yeah. FTX was its own regulator, its own market maker, its own exchange, the issuer, right? All at the same time, this is such a con and the hedge fund. Too much conflict of interest. So, but the three constituencies are the VC, they put the two billion into FTX. They were supporting basically an offshore, unregulated casino, running an opaque fashion, account of the interest of its own customers. They didn't ask for a board seat. They didn't do due diligence.

Starting point is 00:09:56 They were chasing what they thought was insane gains, right? FTX is showing a company that goes from 50 million in revenue to 500 million in revenue to a billion in revenue. And they thought they just had the next great thing. So you know, sam lies that any con, right? It's like, I think I'm getting a deal that's too good to be true. And the con man is lying to me. We're all lying to each other. And so that's the first two billion goes down the drain. There's another four billion or something like that and just loans made by crypto industry. I think Alameda borrowed hundreds of millions and billions of dollars from Genesis,

Starting point is 00:10:32 from three arrows, from Voyager, from Celsius, from BlockFi, et cetera. So it's like if you start with this fiction that FT&T is a real thing. If I create, you know, again, like yo-yo token and I manipulate the price up to $10 billion by trading 2% of the float, if you think it's a real thing and I act like it's a real thing, then I pledge it as collateral and you give me real stuff for air thing. And so there's like four billion dollars of that

Starting point is 00:11:05 and they went and they lost half of that. That was part of the reason that Voyager and BlockFi going bankrupt and the reason that Sam wanted to bail them out is he didn't want to actually have the loans called. Right, he was actually trying to buy BlockFi and buy Voyager with FTX equity, which of course is fraudulent and worth nothing but if I borrowed a billion dollars from a company and they want the money back and I can

Starting point is 00:11:34 simply give them a billion dollars of equity take over the company and not pay the loan back, I can roll the entire fraud forward. So that's a second. The third is, this is also diabolical. FTX said, we're built by traders, four traders, and Sam Bragg that they only charge like three basis points trading fee, and he was 30 times cheaper than coinbase, or much cheaper than finance. So he's stealing customers off of the other crypto exchanges by an essence offering near-free trading.

Starting point is 00:12:09 He's not trying to make money off the trading. He's trying to actually get the assets on his platform. Because once he had the assets on his platform, he basically used FTX like his own personal piggy bank. It's like there's $10 billion there. Everybody else is going to get wiped out if if their margin positions trade down 20% for a minute. Except Alameda. Alameda has god mode. They never get margin cold. So in an exchange, you know, like in the US, it's illegal to go more than

Starting point is 00:12:42 50% loan to value. That means you're kind a million dollars, you borrow 500,000, you're 1.5X leverage. Okay. Well, FTX started with a hundred X leverage and then they backed it down to the responsible 20X leverage, which means that you post a million and you can take a 20 million dollar per cent. Okay. Who allows that? Now, here's the insane. What if I put a billion dollars of air token, FTT,

Starting point is 00:13:08 on the exchange, I recognize you, and I let you take a $10 billion bet. Like, whatever, you took a $10 billion bet, and now you would draw $4 billion of real cash, and you use that to buy property and buy everything under the sun. So, Sam basically, he scraped billions from unsuspecting investors in Silicon Valley. They should have known better. He took billions

Starting point is 00:13:32 from crypto hedge funds and crypto banks like BlockFi and Voyager. They should have known better. And then he took probably 10 billion or more from depositors on his exchange, they have the best argument. It's like they were staring at terms and conditions that said he's not going to re-hypothicate or use their assets. He just, you know, he lowered them with the promise of cheap trading, high leverage. And you know, if you thought, well, Sam is manipulating the price of FTT and Serum in Salana, and he was, right? That's illegal and unethical, right?

Starting point is 00:14:10 It's a pump and dump scheme. We talked about this before, but if you accept the idea that crypto tokens that are issued by some offshore, you know, dood or okay, then you're thinking, well, I guess I want to go buy some of that and get behind Sam and Alameda because they're going to drive the price up. I think Salana went from three bucks to, I wanted to go to 50, it went way up and FTT went to $50 a token or something. So you could have made a lot of money trading those tokens, but you probably would have wanted to go to the FTX exchange

Starting point is 00:14:45 because guess what, newsfush, it's illegal in the US. Can I ask you a quick, just a question about SPF, not so much the inner workings, the mechanics, the inter plumbing of how it all works, just more of the person. You've used the word diabolical multiple times explaining what he's been doing. Do you think, like he's been compared to Bernie Madoff, Ponzi's schemes type of thing?

Starting point is 00:15:08 Sam the person, do you think he's, he's obviously brilliant and smart and was able to get away with a lot of stuff, but was he a criminal from the onset? Did he just make some foolish mistakes? Mentally, where was he throughout all this? Sam, he's like the 14-year-old kid that stole the family car. He doesn't have a driver's license. He got eight of his high school friends in the car.

Starting point is 00:15:35 And then he found out that there's like a hundred thousand dollars of cash, a bunch of drugs and a gun in the car. And then they went joyfully. That's go-man, sorry. They night. Wow. And the entire thing ends, you know, horrifically, with the car wrapped around a tree,

Starting point is 00:15:51 half the people hiding. But that analogy, I think, is very important to clarify that analogy. And maybe he's an honor student in high school, but the point is he was not ready to drive the car. If he had 30 years of experience, if he was surrounded by 200 good attorneys and accountants and banking credit managers, if they, if then they would know what they

Starting point is 00:16:14 don't know. And maybe they could have constructed a company that might have managed this amount of, of risk. You're saying he's not smart enough to have cont people. You're saying he did that accidentally or was intentional like knowing what he's doing. I'm saying that he basically, incompetently, foolishly, greedily, enthusiastically pursued what he thought was a good idea, but he didn't have the combination of the real world experience and the ethics and the legal understanding and the banking understanding to even know what he didn't know. So is it criminal? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:16:55 It's criminal. It's like if you roll over a bunch of people in a car and kill them all, it's illegal, right? But at the end of the day, it's not clear to me that Sam understands what he did wrong now. Like, for example, what did he do wrong? There's accounting fraud here. There's basically equity fraud by creating an air token. There's all sorts of credit fraud. There's investor fraud, misrepresenting the equity you saw the investors, their self-dealing, he issued them self loans, there's front running, there's insider trading,

Starting point is 00:17:30 there's wash trading, there's such a litany of ethical and legal lapses, but if you look at all the coverage in the cryptogs world, they miss the fundamental issue, which is it's illegal and unethical to issue your own air token. I mean, that, that the entire premise of the industry and exchange that trades on registered securities and an issuer of unregistered securities, that fundamentally is unethical everywhere in the world, illegal, nearly everywhere in the world. And yet they built the business on that premise,

Starting point is 00:18:08 on top of that premise, then he inflated the accounting values, built back doors into the, into the, it's just non-stop, illegal stuff going on. What were you gonna say, Pat? Yeah, here's what I was gonna say. So two things, one, last night I'm watching a documentary. And let me just, before I forget what this documentary was I'm watching this documentary last night

Starting point is 00:18:28 It's the story of the good nurse the movie and the documentary came up at the same time to dark documentary I don't recommend it. It's called capturing the killer nurse I don't know if you've seen this documentary or not it just came out so it's a story about a guy named Charlie Colin or something like that where he's working out this, just type in the capturing the killer nurse. And this guy intentionally gives this drug to his patients that they don't track at all in the ICU and over a 16 year span in this hospital in Jersey, he kills an estimated 400 people with the shot that he gives.

Starting point is 00:19:07 And if you look up what the drug is, the drug is a Jackson, I don't even know how to pronounce this, D-O-G-X-I-N, something like that, okay. Well, I've hit images over there. So, he gives this drug and he kills him, and eventually one of his coworkers like why are all his patients dying?

Starting point is 00:19:23 Why are so many of his patients dying? And so they eventually gets caught. One of his coworkers mics herself because she's dealing with the FBI and goes and says, stand with him and talk. And she says, why are you doing this? And then all of a sudden the mic cuts off. And then there's a live interview of him.

Starting point is 00:19:37 And he says, and he starts crying. He says, I'm just doing this because I didn't know what I was doing. I'm just doing it because I want to put these people out of their misery. And I don't know what I was doing. I'm just doing it because I want to put these people out of their misery. And, you know, I don't want to experience this pain, you know, it's kind of like Sam Bankpin Fried is like, hey, today's Wall Street Journal,

Starting point is 00:19:52 FTX founder, Bankpin Fried said he couldn't explain what happened to the billions of dollars that customers of his failed cryptocurrency exchange sent to bank accounts of his trading firm, Alameda. What do you mean what happened? He doesn't know what happened. So to me, this guy knew what he was doing. This guy behind his captain.

Starting point is 00:20:08 He knew he's killing people. And this guy knew what he was doing. So the part that this leads me to is two different things. One, let's say Bitcoin goes to 100. Let's say Bitcoin doesn't drop the way it did. Let's say Bitcoin goes to 100. Let's say Ethereum goes to 6K I'm just making numbers up right now saying the Ethereum goes to 6K Bitcoin goes to 100,000

Starting point is 00:20:30 Does anything happen to him if Bitcoin goes to 100K and Ethereum goes to 6000 does he get caught yet? Yes He had created an extremely fragile situation where he had extremely fragile situation where he had one account, Alameda, that had a $10 billion plus margin position backed by air. And if that air token, a FTT or a serum, if they had been attacked by anybody, the entire thing goes up like a house card. So, I think if you look at all the blow-ups, right? Celsius block, FI, Doquan, Luna, Terra, three arrows, Genesis, and FTX. All of them were going to blow up at some point because like Luna, Terra, it was a $20 billion worth of a stablecoin back by $2 billion of real assets and a $50 billion Luna thing that had $50 million a day of real liquidity. So they were all running on 100x re-hypothicated leverage and they were going to blow up.

Starting point is 00:21:39 It's just a question of when they're going to blow up. I think that this is a painful, de-leveraging of the entire industry, but if you look at everybody that was kind of behaving badly, like doing stupid things, like again, aggressive lending in the real world is 1.4 leverage. That's insanely aggressive lending. These guys were all running at 20X 10X. That's insane. So you had a lot of people behaving badly. They were destined to blow up. It might have

Starting point is 00:22:14 been held off for a bit, but I have seen pretty credible evidence circulating in the Twitter sphere that Alameda had already taken a three to four billion dollar loss in 2021 during the bull market because they were just doing stupid things. So how come nobody caught them then? What was the tipping point? Was the tipping point when he went to the Binance CEO and says, hey, I need you to, why don't we partner up and I need a billion dollars from,

Starting point is 00:22:42 he said, oh yeah, we'll do the deal. And then the last one, no, no, no, we're not doing the deal because even if we buy, it's just not the interview that he, which was fascinating by the way, the CEO Binance. So very impressed by that guy, he says, no, we're not even touching him. He says, are you concerned that you're losing a company like FTX as a competitor?

Starting point is 00:22:57 He says, he's not a competitor. If you know this business, we're not competitors. So what was, if you're saying last year, they lost through to four billion in a very bear bullish market. What was the tipping point when all of a sudden, hey, we got to get away with this. He's running a private, unregulated set of companies, right? He had his private holding company, Paper Bird. He had Alameda, a private company. He had FTX, a private company, no transparency, no disclosure. If you were running a public company, you got to actually publish audited financials every quarter

Starting point is 00:23:31 and make AK statements and you have adult supervision. I have lawyers, banker. I have two sets of lawyers, two sets of accountants, an army of internal accountants, external accountants, etc. And if I just came on your show and said, hey, I just want to do announce that MicroStrategy has 175,000 Bitcoin, my phone would start ringing. By the lawyer. By the time I put the down, they'd be like, what are you doing? You're crazy.

Starting point is 00:24:00 And you know, they would say it not just because it's wrong, they would say it because just because it's wrong, they would say it because their careers are on the line and they don't want to spend 10 years in litigation hell. So there's a way that you run a public company and there's a way you run a regulated company and on the other hand, Sam was his own regulator. He could make up his own rules. He was accountable to no one. And if you have $10 billion in the bank and then you lose $4 billion and the bank doesn't

Starting point is 00:24:30 have to disclose what is done with the money, you just go and give yourself a $4 billion loan secretly. You know, he didn't tell anybody. So they were able, in essence, because they had so much power as private, unregulated, it's not just unregulated, it's one thing to be unregulated. It's unregulated and opaque. If you look at and poorly run, right? There are some offshore businesses, tethered bynance that are not regulated

Starting point is 00:25:01 and they're not onshore in the US, they're not public, but by common wisdom, they generally are viewed as better run, like adult supervision, because when people ask them to redeem $15 billion, they can do it, right? I think that FTX, three arrows, these companies that went bankrupt,

Starting point is 00:25:20 Dokewann and Lunator, they would just really poorly run opaque crypto organizations. And it was destined. Now, what was the pen? I think, look, there was a simmering war going on between the Bitcoin movement and the crypto movement in DC. And the Bitcoin movement is Satoshi gave us ethical money. Nobody controls it.

Starting point is 00:25:49 You have to pay for it by burning energy or by buying it with real cash. And you can't corrupt it. You can't issue more. It's capped at 21 million. Nobody gets to co-opt it or use it in a user's fashion to make them self-rich. That's Bitcoin. The crypto world is, well, we invented salon or use it in a user's fashion to make them self-rich. Okay, that's Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:26:05 The crypto world is, you know, well, we invented salon it to be better than Bitcoin and we invented such and such FTT to be cleaner than Bitcoin. And don't mind the fact that we gave 80% of it to ourselves, right? And that we're going to dump the rest in the general public and we're opaque about it. Now, that war is going on in Capitol Hill where the crypto lobby is lobbying for light or no regulation. Let us basically

Starting point is 00:26:32 issue these tokens and make them commodities. And so we don't have any securities laws constraining us. The regulators that understand better, like a guy like the chair of the SEC would say, look, they're all securities. You can't just let them trade as commodities. That's the same as saying anybody can issue their own equity and lie, cheat, and steal the general public. And that would threaten the entire hundred trillion dollar securities market. But, you know, Sam, you know, Sam was the number two donor to the Democratic Party. He was the number three donor to the Republican party. They've admitted to 200 million to 300 million in donations,

Starting point is 00:27:07 but they might have donated hundreds of millions more. You're saying that he was donating that much Republican? I mean, we were very familiar with how much he's donated to the Democratic Party. He was, I believe, number two, but he needs both sides. I tell you, it's diabolical. We know that he was the number two donor

Starting point is 00:27:24 to the Democratic Party. And until about a month ago, that was the narrative. And then we found out that the chief operating officer that worked for him was the number three donor to the Republican party. And that guy gave 25 million to the Republicans in the last few weeks. So not to eat himself, not himself, because he is fully supportive of what the Democratic beliefs are. Look, I mean, he wanted to be viewed as, remember he said he was going to give a billion dollars in the next election cycle? Yeah, he might have given a billion in the last election cycle. We don't know.

Starting point is 00:27:54 But he wanted to be viewed as the great progressive savior and financier. So they gave hundreds of millions of dollars to celebrities. They gave hundreds of millions of dollars to academic institutions, hundreds of millions of dollars to celebrities. They gave hundreds of millions of dollars to academic institutions, hundreds of millions of dollars to politicians, huge amounts of money to journalists. Why wouldn't you? Keep in mind, if I can generate 10 billion dollars in air token in order to make a billion a year, all I got to do is take $10 million, lever it up five to one, lean on the liquidity on my own exchange, and the price moves three or four bucks. I get $2 billion more. I made two, you know, I made two billion in the year and investment income, and then I

Starting point is 00:28:37 go and I borrow one or two or three or four billion in my margin account. Right, they had a net, they were counterfitting money, and then they were using the counterfeit money to steal other money, or either to steal it from their deposit, or steal it from their investors, or steal it from creditors, then they were funneling that into the political

Starting point is 00:28:58 and the marketing process. And that's why you saw them on the Super Bowl ad. That's why the FTX arena was named after them. That's why every celebrity is getting sued right now. Right? What business is better than counter-fitting money as a business? Right. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:15 So what burst the bubble here? Well, this can't go on forever. And in DC, there's a war over whether or not the SEC should regulate crypto or whether the CFTC should regulate crypto. So Sam supports a bill, the Stabinon Boseman bill, and they give huge amounts of money to politicians. And if you read the bill, the bill said crypto will be regulated by the CFTC. What's the CFTC?

Starting point is 00:29:41 The commodity futures trading. Okay, gosh, we know what the SEC is. Okay, the CFTC would regulate if futures trading mission. Okay, gosh, we know what the SEC's here is. The CFTC would regulate if you were trading soybeans or pork bellies or oil or anything. Come on, he's got it. Okay, a commodity is an asset without an issuer. Okay, a commodity is a much more ethical thing

Starting point is 00:30:00 to promote and to trade than a security. A security is yo-yo coin or penny stock. I invented it. The difference between a security and a commodity is if I looked at you right now and said, you know, I don't like people in Japan, I'm just going to turn off all their steel. I can't do that, right?

Starting point is 00:30:20 I can't make steel not work in Japan. I can't turn off electricity in Japan or turn off oranges. Right? So a commodity is an asset with an issuer, no matter how much money you have of pork bellies or lumber, you cannot invalidate somebody else's lumber. Okay. And that's why it's impossible to commit securities fraud.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Is that because that's, these are natural resources? I want to come on a store. These are natural resources? I'm gonna come out of the party. These are natural resources, everything in London, or in the park, everything. Because they're, I get, it's land, right? If I said to you by land in Texas, and I was wrong, okay?

Starting point is 00:30:59 It's like, I didn't create the land in Texas. I can't remove the land in Texas. But what if I said, by Texas coin, there's only a million Texas coins, it's going up. And then you buy Texas coin, and then I go and I give myself 10 million more unlocked Texas coin. I dump it on the market, the price goes to zero.

Starting point is 00:31:21 Now, do you feel like you got cheated? You see how it's possible to cheat you with a security because I can manipulate the characteristics of the security. A security is an asset with an issuer. So, if you have an asset with an issuer, for example, a publicly traded stock, like micro-strategy, MSTR is an asset with an issuer. I have ethical civil obligations, right?

Starting point is 00:31:48 You know, if I lie about it, I can't just say, I can't, I'm not even say what I'm gonna say, right? I don't even talk about it. I wouldn't tell you to buy it or not buy it. I would say, read our disclosures. There's thousand pages of risk factors. Everybody in the board of directors, everything we've done, everything we think we're going to do.

Starting point is 00:32:06 If we change our mind about what we're going to do, you're going to read it in 8K within four business days because I have an obligation to be transparent on a security. But on the other hand, if I say, I really think you ought to stock up on lumber in case, you need to burn it this winter. I'm promoting a commodity. Maybe you stock up on lumber and you overpay for it. Maybe you stock up on lumber and you don't need it during the winter, right? Did I defraud you? I'm promoting lumber. Maybe I gave you bad advice, but the difference between promoting lumber and promoting lumber coin is I can

Starting point is 00:32:42 print 100 trillion lumber coin you know, on Saturday night and dump it on you and drive your lumber coin to zero. I can't create 100 trillion forest overnight by snapping my fingers. It's a natural phenomenon. Doesn't that speak to just a bigger question about the crypto market in general?

Starting point is 00:33:02 Like a lot of people will be like, yeah, I don't, you know, I can't touch it, I can't hold it, even with NFTs, meaning real estate, I can hold it, I can touch it, commodities, cash, these are tangible assets, even the stock market, however, with crypto, it's all very digital, you can't touch it, and I feel like a lot of people are uncomfortable with that.

Starting point is 00:33:20 Yeah, it gets to the fundamental point of one of those assets. Some of those assets are crypto commodities. A crypto commodity is a token without an issuer that cannot be manipulated by some CEO or corporation or other party, right? There are cryptocurrencies like Tether and Circle. They are actually tokens meant to represent the US dollar or some other stable asset. They have an issuer and generally they're going to be regulated as securities and as currencies

Starting point is 00:33:54 by the banking established when the SEC. Then there's crypto securities, Solana, FTT, Serum, those were all securities. They had an issuer. There were companies behind them. There were companies behind them. There were CEOs behind them. People could make more of them. People can destroy them. There are some people insiders that had disproportionate

Starting point is 00:34:13 interest in them. Those could only be ethically sold to the general public, pursuant to a full and fair disclosure. Right? This is common sense. If you create something and you dump it on the general population, you have an ethical obligation to tell them who made the decision, how much is there, you know, what is your background, what's going to happen next.

Starting point is 00:34:35 That's what you do when you take company public. So coming back to this crypto issue, you had a little war between the two factions, and the right answer is, if you're selling a crypto security, it should be regulated by the SEC. If you have a crypto commodity, then it's not a security. Now, the question is, what's a crypto commodity? The chair of the SEC has said the only crypto asset that's clearly a commodity is Bitcoin. The chair of the CFTC had said as of a few months ago, the only crypto assets that are commodities

Starting point is 00:35:12 are Bitcoin and Ether. But Ethereum's not really a commodity. Ethereum is a security and that has been a big fight in the community below the surface. As of last Wednesday, the chair of the CFTC went to Princeton, gave a speech and said, the only crypto asset which Idemas commodity is Bitcoin. So now you have the CFTC and the SEC and certain other regulators that had a treasury, the head of the Federal Reserve, you know, all of them. In essence, endorsing Bitcoin as a commodity and leaving us to figure out what we're going to do with the securities and the currencies that exist in the system. The thing that brought FTX crashing down is that Sam went to DC, spent a lot of money

Starting point is 00:36:01 on lobbyists, lobbied for this bill that would have made both Bitcoin and Ethereum commodities and would have put the CFTC in control, would have created light regulation, would have created a path for other crypto tokens to be viewed as commodities. And in addition to like giving a lot of money to the media, a lot of money to the academics, a lot of money to the politicians and a lot of money to the academics, a lot of money to the politicians, and a lot of money to the celebrities. He also inserted in the bill that the crypto exchanges would send fees to the CFTC. And they, in essence, try to bribe the CFTC with crypto usage fees in order to get light

Starting point is 00:36:42 regulation. That didn't go over well with the whole set of regulators that thought that that was a way to undermine the securities industry. It was at a deadlock. That's why we haven't had any regulation because of this deadlock between I think people that know better. And locked to crypto people have, they have billions of dollars of counterfeit money. Sam, just, Sam alone spent billions of dollars of counterfeit stolen money.

Starting point is 00:37:11 But imagine if everybody that was generating a crypto tokens doing the same thing right now, and I'm not going to go into the, into the others involved, but you can probably figure out what's going on. You have a lot of money trying to get a very light regulatory regime, wide sand blow up. Well, Sam went to DC and in addition to trying to get fairly exceptional treatment just for his exchange, he then started bad mouthing, Binance, and implying that the other offshore exchanges buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and buying and sheet. When the Alameda balance sheet leaked and it was clear that something like $10,

Starting point is 00:38:05 $12 billion of $14 billion in assets were air tokens back by nothing. It became pretty clear that they were rickety. Imagine if I said I have $12 billion of air token, it trades $10 million a day. Okay, well, all you got to do is dump $100 million on the market, it's going to zero. So once they saw that I think CZ Has CZ the heavyweight a CZ the heavyweight of heavyweight or would you put? Yeah, he Look look off that's a CEO of finance. Yes, sure right offshore the most influential

Starting point is 00:38:41 Person in the industry a CZ but worldwide I Think the most influential person in the industry of CZ, but worldwide, I think the most influential person in the industry is the chair of the SEC. And the entire Gary Gensel, and the entire industry pretty much is waiting to see what Genselor will do. And Genselor is pretty much the one person who could provide a playbook, a set of rules of the road that would cause this industry to move forward in an economically responsible ethical fashion. This guy is not a like guy. He's a guy that some people are in the middle,

Starting point is 00:39:16 are careful on what to say about him because they know they need him. Some people are very careful to see if you push too much, he may over-regulate you, he may take because he's got a lot of power. He's like a true wrestler. He's got a very powerful person in the mouth. You brought up Joe and Powell. What?

Starting point is 00:39:32 Wigger than Powell? No, he's not big. I don't know if he's big. No, he's not big of an Powell. Powell may be a shaman, it says Powell, maybe the most powerful man because he controls wars. If the interest rates go high, you can't finance a war. But what are your thoughts about what he's doing with Ripple? The Ripple army. I had John the Eaton here,

Starting point is 00:39:47 the lawyer representing Ripple. What are your thoughts about what's going on with Ripple and how he is handling the Ripple case? Ripple's an unregistered security. It's pretty obvious. There's a company. The company owns a bunch of it. They sell it to the general public,

Starting point is 00:40:04 but they never took the company public. There's no disclosures. Right? So, the SEC's position is you're selling an unregistered security. It's a crypto token. Just like Ethereum is an unregistered security. It's controlled by a few people in the Ethereum foundation and consensus.

Starting point is 00:40:23 Fair. Just like FTT, just like Solon. Perfect, but here's a follow up on my quote. They're all unregistered, secured. Here's a follow up on that. I don't own a single ripple, just so we know. So full disclaimer, I'm not a ripple guy. But if both of them are unregistered,

Starting point is 00:40:35 why target ripple and not target Ethereum the way he is targeting ripple? And by the way, this is coming from a guy that owns Ethereum, not ripple. Yeah, I think the best thing for the world would be with the if the SEC pretty much shut down all of it. It's all unethical, right? I mean, the Bitcoin position would be Bitcoin is an ethical commodity. All of these other altcoins are unregistered securities. They're all just equity tokens issued by a company

Starting point is 00:41:05 in order to get around going public and they're committing securities fraud. If thearium included, of course, especially Ethereum, Ethereum's got $20 billion of eth token locked up in the staking contract right now and there's a couple of people that may or may not give it back to you ever. Now, isn't that the definition of investment contract? If a bank took $20 billion of your assets, froze the window and said, you can't have your money back ever. Maybe in the year 2024, we're not sure.

Starting point is 00:41:36 We're just gonna keep it. We may actually give you interest on it. We may take it all. We may slash it. That's the definition of a security, right? It's an investment of money and a common enterprise. We may take it all, we may, you know, we may slash it. That's the definition of a security, right? It's an investment of money and a common enterprise, you know, relying upon the efforts of others

Starting point is 00:41:52 and expectation of profit. The whole point is if you want a crypto asset to be a commodity, you can't rely upon four engineers, a company, a CEO. If a person can make a decision, it's not a commodity anymore. The fact is, Ripple's got a company, Ethereum's got a company. Ethereum Foundation has engineers. You are literally waiting on the engineers that work for

Starting point is 00:42:20 the Ethereum Foundation to write the code to give you your money back. And then you're also waiting to find out what the monetary policy will be. They change it half a dozen times in the last six years. It's always changing. To you, it's XRP and Ripple the same thing. They're both on registered securities. Yeah, XRP is just the equity token of Ripple. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:48 I mean, it seems quite obvious, right? If you want a roadmap for how you create a commodity, you have to do it the way Satoshi did it. You create a protocol, you give it to the world, you display the beneficial ownership of it, you display the control of it, and you disappear. That's what Satoshi did. It was a gift to the world.

Starting point is 00:43:11 If the founder is still around, and the founder is a billionaire, and the founder is spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to defend the token, isn't it obvious that it's a software company with an equity? So I think that it's a software company with an equity? So, I think that that's pretty evident with all these crypto tokens. What you have is you have the complete sham Ponzi schemes, like the Collapse and a Horry, like Terrelluna. Then you have crypto tokens that are unregistered securities

Starting point is 00:43:44 that are perhaps somewhat pseudo-competently managed that don't collapse, but they're still unregistered securities, which makes them unethical to promote. And then you have cryptocurrencies like Tether and Circle, they attempt to have backing, right? Circle purports have 100% backing for their coin. We know that to like 83% of tether deposits are backed by US treasuries if you're to believe their attestations. But again, those

Starting point is 00:44:16 are not publicly traded companies. So I think the one thing that's missing in the crypto industry is by and large, nearly everybody in the crypto market has never taken a company public. They don't understand securities law. They're like, if you're going to be kind, you're going to say they're well-meaning technologists that are enthusiastically pursuing new ideas. But generally, they're pursuing new ideas in an irresponsible, inappropriate, unethical fashion. Is that based on greed? What is that based on? The same reason Sam did it.

Starting point is 00:44:51 It was one part greed, one part enthusiasm, go fast and break things, one part lack of adult supervision. Right? What you, what, what you could say is that, you know, the, the regulators ought to just be very, very clear. If you were very clear, you'd say, look, you've got like 180 days in order to register your token with the SEC and you register and give us all fill out these forms, give us all these facts, answer our questions and we'll tell you whether you're a currency, whether or not you're a commodity, whether or not you're a security, and whether or not you're allowed to trade. And at the end of the 180 days, if you haven't actually registered, you're shut

Starting point is 00:45:38 down and nobody can buy and sell and trade this thing anywhere in the world. And that would actually clean up the industry in a hurry. I got a crazy question for you. Can you pull up the article that I sent you a bunch of articles while we're talking? Pull up the one about Maxine, her tweet. If you can pull up Maxine Waters, here's her tweet that just came out.

Starting point is 00:45:55 We appreciate SPF, San Bank, McFreed. We appreciate that you've been candid in your discussions about what happened at FTX. You're willing to talk to the public with the, will help the companies, customers, investors, and others. To the end, to that end, we would welcome your participation in our hearing on the target.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Why, she speaks more respectfully to a young kid than she does to a former president, which is interesting how her style of communication. But you know, I will tell you this. So you know how the story just came out with Twitter and Hunter Biden, okay? And Talib, Talibi that is the one that put the tweet out. There was a whole five and a half hour.

Starting point is 00:46:31 No, no, no, no, Matt, Matt, yeah, there was a Twitter live yesterday hosted by Amar Yohe, and Vitamion, Myslav Yalan, and Jordan Peters. It was like eight of us that were supposed to be on, I was on a freaking flight back. I missed the call, but I heard, everybody has to listen to it if you haven't heard it. That's when Yalan must come from, I have no these out at Komitsu's side. The question was asked, which was kind of interesting.

Starting point is 00:46:53 But there was a part, there was a part where he talked about, he certainly has to be protecting himself because he wouldn't be surprised. His life is at risk, in other words, kind of the way he put it. So the more and more these guys go through the emails and they find out how the Twitter executives were communicating with the Biden administration

Starting point is 00:47:15 on what stories to post and what stories not to post and how he was colluding and all this other stuff. And some people are now saying, well, at the time when he was colluding, he wasn't a president, the stories that are spinning. And then you hear a story that comes out that three crypto billionaires died. I don't know if you saw that one or not.

Starting point is 00:47:31 If you want to pull that up, go a little lower zoom in and go a little lower, three crypto bosses died in recent weeks. I think these guys were all billionaires. Nikolai, Moussierriens, 29 years old, Tian Tian, Kulander, 30 years old, and Viasheslav, Turan, 53 years old, all of a sudden, they all die within a week. It's kind of weird. You know what countries they're from? I mean, it's all over the place. One is Russia, you know, anyways, you can kind of see where these

Starting point is 00:47:55 stories are coming from. Russian entrepreneurs are one of them, you know, the causes of that are Helicopte, Stéthatap, St stay at the top. I was reading it, helicopter crash, while sleeping and drowning. Kinda weird, helicopter crash, while sleeping and drowning. Those are the three different. Those are the three, which kind, that's a little, little weird. Helicopter crash, near Monaco.

Starting point is 00:48:15 And then, yeah, so this is kinda weird. Now here's a part. Some of these guys who know a lot, if they know, I don't know if you've seen the story or not, if found I can read it for you, Michael, if you're not following it. So the 50-year-old Russian is a third cryptocurrency boss to be found that under his mysterious circumstances after Celacopto-Crashnirmanico, indeed it appears that the crash occurred in good weather conditions.

Starting point is 00:48:40 And after another passenger, allegedly canceled a flight last minute, thus raising suspicions. For these very reasons, the deputy prosecutor from Nice, who visited the scene, said that the fault of a third party cannot be ruled out. Terran, co-founder of the trading and investment platform, Labor Tax and Forex Club,

Starting point is 00:48:57 and was flying from a lausanne with an experienced pilot in a single engine, H-130 helicopter, when it crashed around 1 pm on 25th of November, the 35 year French pilot was also killed. Anyways, we can go on with all these stores. So here's a part. So you're seeing how Maxine Waters and many of these folks,

Starting point is 00:49:14 he had an event with Bill Clinton, he had an event with a lot of these guys. There be an extremely, extremely respectful to this SPF guy. Now, as a street person who grew up watching power plays and different kind of things being done and who respected to for what motives, they're being very careful with this guy. Does he know some things that they want?

Starting point is 00:49:33 They don't want people to know about. Is there some speculation? There are these three bosses on the crypto side that are going, there's a lot of conspiracy stories, theories that you're hearing about. Just a lot of weird things going on in your space. Okay. Do you have any commentary on everything I just said here?

Starting point is 00:49:50 Yeah. Well, helicopters are dangerous. That's my first copy. You know, probably 10 to 20 acts more dangerous than traveling in an airplane and, you know, Kobe, you know, died in helicopter. Lots of people die in helicopter. So, so that's tragic if it's just a helicopter wreck. There's a war in Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:50:10 There's, there's Russians, Ukraine's are caught in a life and death struggle. And so there's a, The difference is if Lebron, Kobe, and Michael died the same week, it's a little weird. No, I'm agreeing with you. If, if you're a Russian with access to a huge amounts, and Michael died the same week, it's a little weird. No, I'm agreeing with you. If you're a Russian with access to a huge amount of money moving freely through Europe

Starting point is 00:50:31 in the middle of it, in a time period when there's a war between Ukraine and Russia, right? You got to wonder what money was moving to home and maybe... Right. That's why I asked what country these guys are doing. Maybe a stiff, the wrong person. I don't know. But I don't have any insight one way or the other. What I'd say is be careful around helicopters.

Starting point is 00:50:54 That's my first thing I'd say. Second, it's not easy in Europe right now for Ukrainian or Russian. I don't, it's not easy for anybody, especially for someone in the middle of a war. It's tough time. Third, I think everybody wants to interview Sam because Sam's the big get. And if you can get him in front of your committee, you get all the TV cameras on you. It's a huge media, you know, score. And it's not very often that someone that stole $10 billion is willing to give interviews, right? You know, and my thought about that is, it's obvious.

Starting point is 00:51:33 He stole billions from creditors. He stole billion from investors. He stole billions from depositors. You know, they're gonna do five movies, probably three TV shows, four books, and there's going to be a thousand lawsuits, and you're going to be reading about this horrific findings for the next five years on this thing. You know, and it may take years and years for them to sort out everything that happened.

Starting point is 00:52:01 And so it's not surprising to me that the wheels of justice would move slowly just because it's so complicated. But if you're in the industry and you have a modicum of common sense and some life experience, you look at it and you say what happened. Well, it's pretty obvious what happened. It's kind of like they got on on free money, you know, I created a hundred million dollar token. It became a billion dollar token. Then I could borrow against it, holy crap, I could borrow two billion dollars against a billion dollar token. If you could borrow two billion dollars against a billion dollar air token and it only cost ten million dollars a day to get your air token to double in value. Wouldn't you be tempted to recycle the money you borrowed back into the money you counterfeited?

Starting point is 00:52:48 So it just got to be too easy. And once they got to that point, right, they go from nothing to he's worth nothing in 2018 or 2019 to being worth $20 billion. Now, now you've got politicians, you've got Clinton, you've got Tony Blair, you've got everybody in the world wants to talk to me, I'm on the front cover of every magazine, it goes to your head,

Starting point is 00:53:14 and then you just wanna go harder, and then at some point you start to embellish and cut corners this way and that way. And it's like, if you're going, you know, speed kills, you start going fast enough. At some point, you're going 180 miles an hour down a highway and then you decide to take a rocky road and you fly off the side of the road. And everything is just fine until you go off the road. And then you look down your eyes. It's a 500 foot drop and you're going 180 miles an hour at that point, you're going to go up in a ball of flame. You can't pull it back.

Starting point is 00:53:49 Now, you know, at what point did it happen? Isn't it the human condition that like young men with a huge amount of power, you know, let it go to their head and then they overdrive the car and then they wreck it. Where does this... Yeah, but there's a problem here. I mean, the difference is you're hoping that young kid or young man was raised properly to not be able to do things like this.

Starting point is 00:54:17 We know what his mother wrote in 2013 in a paper as a professor of Stanford. I don't know if you saw this one, where San Bankman freeds a professor of Stanford, I don't know if you saw this one, where San Bankman freeds a professor, mother, penned 2013 essay shredding philosophy of personal responsibility, which a kid raised with a mother who doesn't believe in personal responsibility would do something like that, and say, who cares?

Starting point is 00:54:37 But that's not even my concern. My concern is the following. Here's my concern. You're a very sharp guy. Very. My understanding of crypto changed. I saw what a lot of different people, until I sat with you, your way of teaching,

Starting point is 00:54:51 you'd be the kind of a teacher I can sit there and listen to because the way you explain is, it works for me. Maybe not for others, I like your style of teaching and explaining. So, you know, for somebody to be used, the other day they had Ari Flyscher here, I don't know if you remember Ari Flyscher, So, you know, for somebody to be used, you know, the other day they had Ari Fleischer here, I don't know if you remember Ari Fleischer, was a former press secretary for President Bush from 01 to 2004 at the peak of 9-11

Starting point is 00:55:13 when all that mess is taking place. So imagine that job every day, you're answering all these different questions that you have to answer about what happened, who was behind it, you know, all this other stuff. And then story came about CIA agent, on CIA, director of CIA, George Tennant, that you know, all this other stuff. And then story came about CIA agent on CIA, director of CIA, George Tennant,

Starting point is 00:55:27 that George Bush kept Clinton's CIA agent, director of CIA, George Tennant. And he was the one that walked into the room and told President Bush, rums filled everybody and said, hey, there's what was award use? Without a shadow of a doubt, they have weapons of mass destruction there. And President Bush went on his intel to say, if they do, then we got to do what we got

Starting point is 00:55:47 to do here, right? It's kind of like Adam Schiff coming out and saying, without a shadow of doubt, there's collusion with Russia and the right. Okay. So then I said, okay, who are the ones that are simply using President Bush? Would a Donald Rumsfeld, if you've seen a movie vice, use President Bush to make money, stocks, all this other stuff because of, you know, the military equipment being sold and it was a great business model, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:56:17 Okay, maybe. So in this case, because I don't trust George Tennant giving counsel to the President and he was representing, you know, President Clinton. He will, he, the only two presidents that shows the prior director of CIA, one was president, Bush, the other one was Jonathan Kennedy, right? They used the same one as a prior one. Do you think? The sky right here, our friend, the Sam Bankman freed, is you being used as a puppet to protect him and there's a lot of paper trail behind closed doors that if people really found what he was doing, others knew that this guy was doing shady business, but they were protecting

Starting point is 00:56:53 him because a lot of money was coming in. Do you think there could be any of that coming out? Or no, it's just a guy that was extremely smart found a way to make money. And his passion, because of his mom, was to give a bunch of money to the Democratic Party to make the biggest advancement for progressive philosophies. I think he gave a lot of people a lot of money and so it's a bit embarrassing to a lot of people that they all took his money. And then I think there's this question of will they give it back?

Starting point is 00:57:20 The fascinating thing here is is is every is every organization is the media, the academics and the politicians, are they all going to give the money back to the bankruptcy trustee to go to the depositors or not, which is the right thing to do or not? So I think, you know, if, if you just got a lot of money from, from someone and then you find out that they stole it. If the message is they stole the money, then that's a fraudulent conveyance. And you were paid off with stolen money, maybe you got to give it back. That's a challenge. So I think that a lot of people are going to be slow to come to that conclusion because they've got a conflict of interest. But I don't think he's

Starting point is 00:58:04 going to get away with it. I think that the wheels of justice are slow, but they do grind forward. And it's just so many smoking guns here. You can't very well steal $15 billion to $20 billion from so many different constituencies and not be held responsible for it at some point in time. They're just gonna play with him in the media

Starting point is 00:58:32 as long as he gives these interviews and as long as he's willing to show up, a lot of people are gonna indulge him. But, you know, like what should happen? He should be arrested, right? I was just gonna ask you that. You used the analogy that many movies are gonna be made about San Bakeman-Fried.

Starting point is 00:58:51 So how does this movie end? We talked about personal responsibility and being held accountable. Do you think he's gonna see jail time? Should he see jail time? What kind of sentence should he be facing? He's still billions and billions of dollars from innocent people.

Starting point is 00:59:07 Yeah, he should be in jail a long time. Really? So a lot of people think that he's never gonna see jail. Ever. You know, I took three years, I think, I read before they brought charges in the Enron case. Okay, so Twitter is a high, a fast Twitch response system where somebody posts something and five minutes later, everybody is indignant. If you haven't come to a conclusion, yes or

Starting point is 00:59:36 no. But, you know, when you're building a case or a complex financial case, if you were to build it in two months or four months, it would be light speed for complicated financial cases. So I think the justice will arrive and I think it's pretty obvious, like, as I said, every type of fraud imaginable, that the complication is half the frauds, like the securities fraud and the like, half the frauds are harder to assert because he was an offshore jurisdiction. And like Sam wouldn't have actually gotten this big if he had been operating in New York City under the U.S. law because nothing that he did is legal.

Starting point is 01:00:22 You can't, it's not legal to issue a token, it's not legal to trade against your customers, it's not legal to give 20X leverage, it's not legal to trade without a license. You know, so he couldn't have gotten there in a mature environment and a rule of law. You know, he went to a sunny place for shady people, maybe like they literally searched every jurisdiction in the world. I mean, he wasn't, he was in Hong Kong and it was illegal to do what he was doing in Hong

Starting point is 01:00:55 Kong. They were Singapore, it was illegal to do what he was doing in Singapore. They just tripped every which way. It would be illegal to do anything that they were doing in Europe. It's illegal to do anything that they were doing in Europe. It's illegal to do anything that they're doing. You have to assume that it was pretty much illegal to do anything that he was doing anywhere except for a small handful of places. And then even given that, the stuff he agreed, he disclosed that he was doing is only half

Starting point is 01:01:23 of what he was doing. The other half of the stuff that he didn't disclose, that was not legal in the Bahamas either. This past initial question, I think, is very valuable about, do you think he would have got caught if Bitcoin would have kept going and the crypto market would have kept going up to 100,000? Like, what's the famous phrase? He would have been caught because he was counter-fitting money

Starting point is 01:01:46 And then he was Racklessly pledging it in order to borrow more money and spending it, but would have taken Decades like you know the famous phrase like only when the tide goes out you discover who's swimming naked like Bernie made off the greatest Ponzi Schema ever he was operating operating for decades, decades, decades, and it was only until 2008, the financial collapse and there was banquerons, people needed money, did finally his Ponzi team get exposed. So meaning of crypto would have kept going and going and going, could it possibly have

Starting point is 01:02:17 been decades before Sandbagman freed an FTX, where it's been. No, because there were two reckless. I mean, made-off was extremely buttoned down, controlled, right? Very deliberate. And actually in the greater scheme of things conservative, but you know, made-off didn't put his name on a stadium. He didn't splash. Did made-off give a billion dollars to politicians?

Starting point is 01:02:39 Did made-off ever put a depressurgy saying, I'm going to give, what happens when a person with no money 24 months ago puts out a pressurgy saying, I'm going to give what happens when a person with no money 24 months ago puts out a press release saying I'm going to give a billion dollars to the Democrats in the next two years. Good point. You don't think your head down wasn't looking for headlines. But SPF was searching for headlines. But if you listen to people that talk about how they came into NASA, guns ablazing, he came and he bought every piece of real estate,

Starting point is 01:03:06 they said, well, here's this penthouse, they want 40 offer and 32, it doesn't matter, it's a rounding error, give them 36 or whatever, he was just splashing money around like it was free. But Michael, you're in the crypto world, right? Pat and I are, maybe we own some Bitcoin Ethereum. But I feel like, and rightfully so, Michael, you're in the crypto world, right? Pat and I are, I mean, maybe we own some Bitcoin Ethereum. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:25 But I feel like, and rightfully so, there's a lot of Monday morning courting back about San Bigman, Freedom FTX. Well, it turns out, illegal. It turns out this, where there's stories circulating a year ago, two years ago, during all the fraud, not the aftermath. Like the stuff in the domain a year ago was,

Starting point is 01:03:48 SAM makes 10 million a week at Alameda. Alameda is a money machine that generates 10 million a week or 500 million a year, and that's his cash cow. And the exchange is just the exchange. And then people couldn't quite figure out the rest, except for the fact that obvious, all these tokens are air tokens that are being manipulated offshore.

Starting point is 01:04:12 So the belief was they were good traders and they were manipulating air tokens and running an unregulated exchange. The truth, of course, that comes out now is they weren't good traders. They were goofballs. And really, the machine that made this all work, the brilliance of it is to generate $10 billion worth of fake collateral and then borrow $10 billion. Scruises to me. Well, I mean, three things. I generate $10 in fake collateral. I take 10 billion of money out of my bank

Starting point is 01:04:47 from my real customers. I show fake fraudulent accounting statements to investors and get them to give me billions more. And then I pledge the token collateral to other crypto hedge funds and get them to give me billions of loans. So you could say that last part, that was, you know, was, I took advantage of some other crypto

Starting point is 01:05:08 bros that were also a bit, what is it? Risk addicted, like, you know, too aggressive. And I took advantage of venture capitalists that through caution to the wind that weren't paying attention. But, and the first part is, you know, I attracted all those billions by just telling people, I'll give them extreme leverage and let them trade these tokens and make it cheap.

Starting point is 01:05:35 And then, again, there are these diabolical twists where Sam would, he would like buy BlockFi and then pressure them to put their assets on his exchange. So he bought a lot of things and when he bought the things, he would pressure the people to put their assets on his exchange or trade with him. So I'm issuing equity, like the equity in FTX was worth. I mean, Sam would say, oh, it's a $32 billion valuation. You remember reading that and Forbes and Fortune?

Starting point is 01:06:09 Okay, I've got a $32 billion company. I'm gonna give you a billion dollars worth of FTX equity. And then I've got my shadow equity, eight, 10 billion dollars with a FTT. At one point, FTT was worth $15 billion. So they generated these two equity tokens that are based on what, opaque financials that are fraudulent. Right?

Starting point is 01:06:33 If I have fraudulent financials, then I crank up the two equity tokens, then I can use them to do acquisitions. You're rolling the entire thing forward. So I guess my point here is, if you're rolling the entire thing forward. So, it was, I guess my point here is, if you're doing that and you're extracting $5 billion of real cash, and then you're bought, he put a billion into a Bitcoin miner, he put a billion into marketing, he bought a billion

Starting point is 01:06:59 worth of other stuff. If you're actually extracting real cash, you're burning the candle of both ends. And so it was destined to blow up because they were just too aggressive. Just like with Tara Luna, you know, Tara, UST was a stable coin. When it was a couple billion dollars and Luna was a few billion more, it's like a six eight billion dollar and unstable thing. But what blew it up was when Doe Kwan decided he wanted to offer 20% yield on USD

Starting point is 01:07:30 and he took that $2 billion stable coin to be worth almost 20 billion. Now you've got $20 billion and then Luna became worth 60 billion or 50 billion. So you've got like this $65, $70 billion complex, getting big too fast. It's like I borrowed, if I borrowed $20 billion and I agreed to pay you 20% interest. I have to come up with $4 billion a year in real cash to roll that forward. And if I'm printing my own equity token to pay the four billion, eventually that equity

Starting point is 01:08:06 token crashes because it gets diluted in the market and the entire thing just goes to zero. So going fast on a Ponzi scheme, cause it to blow up. Bernie made off went slow. And that's why he was able to roll and he didn't, you know, he didn't wave a red flag at the bull. Sam was going hard. He was basically attacking the entire Bitcoin community by supporting all this ESG BS about using electricity. He was also attacking the other crypto exchanges like Binance. He was also going head to head with the SEC. Those are three powerful sets of enemies, you know, while you're going 180 miles an hour. Do you think he knew he was going to get caught at some point?

Starting point is 01:08:57 No, I think he was. I really, you think he's doing all this illegal stuff. You use the 14 year old kid who stole the parents' car analogy with the drugs and the gun in the back. He's doing all this. He's defra the 14 year old kid who stole the parents' car analogy with the drugs and the gun in the back. He's doing all this. He's defrauding people, investors, consumers. He's doing all this stuff. All this illegal stuff with Bahamas. Yeah, left, right? Legal, legal, legal. And you generally think he didn't think he would ever get caught. He's delusional. No regrets. He's delusional. Like a week after he blew the entire thing up, he was thinking he could just make a phone call and raise $10 billion in order to save it. He's going to process this for the next two, three, four years and, you know, many years from now, he may look back if he's honest with himself and figure out what he did. I think he's just

Starting point is 01:09:37 deluding himself. You know, it's like these stories we tell ourselves that if we tell them, we tell these, like for example, if you listen to Sam's language, he doesn't say, okay, I stole $10 billion from my customers and I used FTX like my personal piggy bank and I gave it to Alameda and then Alameda gave $4 billion of it to me and then I spent it on stuff. He doesn't say that. He says, I didn't realize that Alameda had a margin position. It was a little bit bigger than I thought it was and we had a little bit of messy account. I didn't realize that Alameda had a margin position. It was a little bit bigger than I thought it was. And we had a little bit of messy account. I didn't realize I marked it up $6 billion and took the money.

Starting point is 01:10:10 Our accounting was messy, and our margin position was a bit large and I understood. He doesn't say I counterfeited $14 billion worth of air tokens. He doesn't say that. He says, well, we had $14 billion in assets, but we just didn't have the liquidity at the time we needed the liquidity. If we had more liquidity, then

Starting point is 01:10:31 we could have met these particular demands, and it would have all been fine. So living in this world of liquidity and margin is a way, it's a way for you to say, you don't have to say, my customers put $10 billion in my bank, and I took it and lost it and spent it. He just says, my customers had margin positions, I had margin positions. It was all, everybody, ours was a little bit bigger. Now, he still hasn't kind of admitted

Starting point is 01:10:58 or fast up to this fact that he had God mode, and there was no way for Alameda to be liquidated. Everybody, what's God mode in your mind What it means is is you put me on touchable no no accountability do whatever you want playing God No, it's like it's like I run a casino Everybody comes in the casino and you roll the dice and if you lose you lose your chips But but my son is able to bet infinite money and And if he loses, he can double down with infinite money. And he can keep, and he never has to pay it off.

Starting point is 01:11:28 And so there's one player in the casino that never loses only when and can always double down. And so the result is Sam set up a casino. Everybody else was subject to being liquidated. And Alameda had this God mode where they could bet and they could withdraw any amount of money and they could bet and if and they would never be liquidated So what that means is over time Alameda ended up with a $10 billion debit There was 10 million credited to the rest of the players when i made a one to fifteen billion or a debit right now i think collapses and he's he still hasn't kind of come to grips with fact that that's unethical michael but but to have that kind of confidence for you to ask the question did you know he was gonna get caught

Starting point is 01:12:17 there's a part of me that agrees with michael there's a part of me that agrees with you because to michael is like yeah you know he uh... didn't think he was going to get caught. You're saying he eventually was going to get caught. He knew it, right? But to me, when you give money to lobbyists, somebody has to say, don't worry about it. I got your back. Don't worry about it. We got your back. Keep going. Nothing's going to happen to you. To play that reckless where you believe, I'm nothing's really going gonna happen to you. To play that reckless where you believe I'm nothing's really gonna happen to you.

Starting point is 01:12:48 We got you, whether that's lobbyists, whether that's politicians, whether that's whoever. You have to realize the ripple effect, not to say ripple effects, but the ripple effect of an FTX going down. How many YouTube channels were doing sponsorships about crypto? We got calls from every single crypto company

Starting point is 01:13:06 to for us to do sponsorships. We said no to every single one of them because it's two, it's two, you know, you got to be careful taking that kind of money because you don't know the stability is not there yet. But how many YouTubers were making, oh, I'm making 20 grand amount sponsorship from FTX. We'd go to meetings. One time you and I were with somebody, it's like, oh, yeah, you would be amazed. Crypto companies are throwing money at us. Locked right. I was ready to give up. So anyway, so you have those guys.

Starting point is 01:13:31 You have Scare and Mochi, you have Kevin O'Leary, you have all these athletes, you got names, you got celebrities, you got FTX Arena, I think got 135. I don't know the exact number, but it was a large number that they got. You know, all of these people, you were talking about the night clubs. Miami, if you want to bring it on, what's going on with Miami? The story there.

Starting point is 01:13:50 Well, we both live in Miami, so this is a story that's near and dear in my heart, but obviously FTX sponsored them. Miami, Heterina, formerly known as American Airlines. Love it, but there's a story out there in the financial times that here it is. Miami night clubs mourn the absence of high-rolling crypto entrepreneurs. So they started interviewing people I know, friends of mine, who run Groot Hospitality, Dave Grutman's nightlife place, and then also everyone over at 11, right? And I think the geno Lapinto runs 11. He says, last year, $6 million was spent in crypto.

Starting point is 01:14:27 This year, it's down to 10K. So the ripple effects is what you're asking about. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You gotta say that slower. Yes. 11 started accepting payments in crypto on April of 2021. The club process more than $6 million of transaction in 2021, but in the past three months,

Starting point is 01:14:43 the club is only processed less than $10,000. Right. Holy moly. So Michael, you got a good lot of money. You're not really enough lately. Two thoughts, right? First of all, he bought everybody. And how did, okay, and let me just make a stark observation.

Starting point is 01:15:00 He counterfitted $10 billion in one year. If you could counterfeit, if you created 10, it's, look, you have a 300 million FTT tokens, move the price 30 bucks, do the math, right? $30 on a token when you give yourself 300 million of Ms. 10 billion. And that's just one token. So if you fall off the turnip truck and you find that you can generate $10 billion in a year, what do you do? You go buy everybody. You buy every influencer. You buy every politician.

Starting point is 01:15:38 You buy every celebrity. You buy the stadium. You buy all of Albany. You buy the government. You buy the everything that's for sale. Right? It's hard to find a crypto influencer that didn't take FTX money, but he hired everybody, go as fast as you can.

Starting point is 01:15:53 How much can you spend a billion in a year, two billion here? They thought they had found the fountain of money, right? There is nothing more lucrative than a license to print money. This is why the Bitcoin Maximus just gets so angry, right? They declare a war on the shit coiners and shit coinery. The idea that you can just create your own token, solid to the general public, and manipulate the price of it and dump it on.

Starting point is 01:16:18 But here's where the poor Bitcoiners never figured out. Their view is they're creating a shit coin and dumping it on retail. But again, Sam's twist on it was, no, I'm not going to dump it on retail. I'm driving into the sky. I'm never going to sell it. I'm going to use it to buy other banks. And then I'm going to drain the assets out of the bank by giving myself an under the table loan. It's so much more diabolical than just dumping a shit coin on unsuspecting retail traders. So yeah, he did it. He, you know, and he invited that scrutiny and it was inevitable. He reminds

Starting point is 01:16:55 me of one other person, by the way, if you want to know the antecedent 10 years before Sam Bankman freed came along. Yeah, who's that? Jolo. Jolo. Jolo. Jolo. If you talk to these same club guys and say hello. That's Jolo. This is different. Who is Jolo?

Starting point is 01:17:12 Jolo. Jolo. How do you spell that? Yeah. Billion dollar whale, I guess was like Jolo. Oh, check out one MDB scandal. One MDB Jolo. How do you spell Jolo, Michael?

Starting point is 01:17:28 J-O-L-O. Just like Jolo. Okay, so here's what. Malaysia. This is what happened. 27 year old guy comes, all the sudden hooks up in a relationship with the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Convinces the Prime Minister that they should set up a sovereign wealth fund, and they're

Starting point is 01:17:48 going to raise money and invest it for the good of the Malaysian people. Was the Malaysian president a male or a female? Male. So they're gay lovers? No. It was in the Gieb. It's all, it was in the Gieb Reak was the prime minister and the jeep was in Kahoot with Jolo and Jolo ended up raising $14 billion.

Starting point is 01:18:13 And the way he raised it was, he sold fraudulent bonds. They took the money and of course none of the money found its way to the Malaysian people. Jolo just took it, stole it, and spent it. At 1.700 million was wired into the prime minister's personal account. $50 million worth of diamonds and shoes got bought by the prime minister for his wife on a weekend. The Wolf of Wall Street, the entire movie, was financed by Jolo, the, the, there he is with Leonardo DiCaprio right there.

Starting point is 01:18:48 There he is. At the Wolf of Wall Street premiere, it looks like. It's very famous, the great guy. Get out of here. Okay, that entire movie cost more than a hundred million bucks. It was paid for with money stolen from the Malaysian people. Jolo wanted to be a movie star. Jolo dated Starlets.

Starting point is 01:19:04 He bought multi-hundred million dollar yachts. He would spend five million dollars a night in clubs. He would come down here, the Miami night clubs, and I wish I ran into them. Yeah, and... Jolo, J-H-O-L-O-W, two words. Jolo. And here's the point.

Starting point is 01:19:22 The guy would, he would walk in a night club and he would spend $4 million. He would buy a hundred, $2,000 bottles of champagne. Like that, spray it every, buy a hundred more of them. And people said, how can this guy spend a million a night or two million a night, or the like? And the answer is he stole the money.

Starting point is 01:19:43 Yeah. He stole billions and billions of dollars, and he spent it like he stole it. If you made $20 billion, you wouldn't spend money like that. Right. Any event, he's a fugitive internationally, but before Sam came along and the entire crypto thing blew up, it was this massive sovereign wealth scandal, and there are lots of colorful stories.

Starting point is 01:20:07 Yeah. You bring up such a good point with this wasteful spending because anybody that legitimately makes money knows how hard it is to make money. Kevin O'Leary talks about, if I forget to claim my air miles, like I'll go back and call the airlines because I know what it takes to get the amount of money to do this, but these people that fraudulently just come up with money They'll gladly make it rain millions of dollars because it's fake It just came too fast. Yeah too fast. Who's the Nexus BF? How many more SPFs are out there that we don't know about or maybe nowadays? Hopefully we're running out of them

Starting point is 01:20:43 Right, I mean if we look at this entire thing, it reached its peak. Peak was, you know, Tara, Luna is worth $70 billion. And, you know, Dokewann and a couple of people are all the sudden the whales. And I think the, you know, the bubble popped on the cycle when the fed started raising interest rates. To your point, your own policy, the most powerful person, because he sets the price of money for $500 trillion worth of assets. So that's a pretty powerful job. They took the short-term rates from six basis points up to 470 basis points on the one

Starting point is 01:21:24 year in 12 months. So when the Fed started tightening that put pressure, the first thing to break was the most fragile thing, which was a poorly engineered unstable coin called Teraluna. That brought down three arrows, three arrows crashed and brought down Celsius and Voyager and BlockFi. And it fatally wounded Alameda. And maybe we'll see what I was with Genesis. But it definitely fatally wounded a lot of other players. But it wasn't obvious.

Starting point is 01:21:59 And the reason it's not obvious again is to make this point is publicly traded companies have a fiduciary obligation to disclose transparently within four business days or less on an 8K. Like, if my CFO said, guess what, we just did something stupid and we lost a billion dollars. I don't sit on that for a year. I don't sit on that for a quarter. Like, some number of hours at 9.30am on Monday, when the market starts trading, people are trading my stock. And if I have material information that a rational investor would think is material to their buying or selling the stock, I have an ethical and illegal obligation to disclose it. It's pretty obvious why. I mean, if you

Starting point is 01:22:43 were on the other side of the trade, I would want to know. Yeah, so it's Celsius. Celsius went and they they borrowed $500 million from, you know, I think equity first or something. And when they returned the money, they didn't get their collateral back. And they got, you know, somehow they made a they borrowed money and then their creditor kept their collateral and they lost half a billion dollars. But they didn't disclose that anybody for a year. They just kind of went on and they raised more equity from pension funds and then they took more deposits

Starting point is 01:23:17 and then eventually they were rendered insolvent. And then at that point in the bankruptcy, you find out that a year and a half early, they just made a $500 million booboo. Okay, and that's what you're finding out with Alameda. You will find out that, oops, it turns out that like 12 months ago, they lost $3 billion, but they didn't tell anybody.

Starting point is 01:23:36 They probably didn't tell, I bet you, they didn't tell their equity investors. Yeah, nobody puts a billion dollars into a company with a $30 billion valuation if you made billion dollar trading errors or two billion dollar trading errors. So what you had was a bunch of opaque private operators that there were an essence lying dissembling or it's like, I didn't technically lie because FTX didn't lose the billion. Alameda lose the billion. Alameda lost the billion.

Starting point is 01:24:06 And the investors, you know, they should have said, wait a minute, these companies are all related parties. And unless I know the financials of Alameda and Paperbird and FTX, and I can compose it all, there's no way that I can put money in this. And I think that, you know, the answer is, when you're private, people can cut all sorts of corners when they're doing private deals. It's like, so Sequoia, they're adults, and they blow a few hundred million dollars, okay,

Starting point is 01:24:32 adults doing stupid things, but they're adults. Who the hell negotiates that? You give two billion without any board seats. I mean, that's the part that I'm, because the back and forth of that, when you give that kind of money, I mean, it's just like, yeah, we want some sort of accountability.

Starting point is 01:24:47 By the way, there's this kind of, there's nothing right about it. Right, there's nothing appropriate about it. Part of it, right? I understand what he did. I totally get what I do. No, it's nothing right about them investing. That's what I'm saying.

Starting point is 01:24:58 It was totally inappropriate. Like, because you would ask for a board seat. Are you a man getting me a board seat, right? How does that work? Even to every gave the most out of the two billion, you have to be asking about. You have to be asking about monthly reports to see what's going on.

Starting point is 01:25:10 What do you mean you lost three billion, we don't know for a year? Or, I mean, that doesn't make any sense to me. The lack of accountability. And by the way, that's what happens when you go a, I'm having dinner with David Solomon Goldman Sachs as a CEO a couple nights ago in Miami. And they're talking about this, right? How 428 months economic expansion, what happens?

Starting point is 01:25:33 You start becoming a little bit cocky. You start thinking this is going to be like this forever. You start thinking money is just going to be printing and you just, here's a billion, here's a hundred million, here's 50 million, here's 200 million. And then now all of a sudden everybody's going back to, what's your EBITDA? What's the real business plan? Who's on your team versus, yeah, we're going to turn this $2 billion into $20 billion and our investors are going to love us for it. By the way, does this kind of validates? And I'm actually curious to know what you say to this now, not nine months ago.

Starting point is 01:26:03 The fact that are you yourself sitting there saying, honestly, I'm kind of like hoping they figure out this regulation thing fairly quickly, sooner rather than later. Are you leaning now towards more regulation than maybe you were nine months ago so that it can filter out the actors at a game? Look, I think that regulations are good thing

Starting point is 01:26:23 for the industry and I've never really been against it. If you're holding Bitcoin, or if you want to act as a responsible sound institution, you don't have a problem with regulation, the people have been fighting regulation, or those that actually want to sell the unregistered securities or manipulate them. So my position was always, the industry should be regulated. The roller coaster ride that is Bitcoin is because of unregistered securities trading on unregulated exchanges. That's why Bitcoin is so volatile. And so to the extent that your life is miserable

Starting point is 01:27:02 in the Bitcoin world, it's because of unregulated exchanges, manipulating unregistered securities. So yeah, I mean, I think that if we look forward, you know, what's important. People sometimes, they can, what is it? They think that regulations a bad thing. I mean, it's, it's, should you be able to cheat people? Like, like, if you went on a vacation in the Bahamas and someone put a gun to your head, stole all your money and beat you, have to death. And then you came back, you know, in a stretcher to the United States.

Starting point is 01:27:42 Would you then say, I really appreciate the unregulated and violent in the Bahamas? Ah! I mean, who? Certainly not taking a helicopter there. Everybody, so everybody with regard to money, they expect things to be fair and equitable, right? And the real problem in the industry is it's too hard, it's too easy for unethical actors

Starting point is 01:28:07 to victimize honest people. And so we need to fix that, whatever you call that. Now if we look at the future of the industry, I'm going to take a very pro crypto point of you for a second, which is, here are the good things about crypto. Digital commodities like Bitcoin, that's a good thing. Digital currencies like Circle or Tether, a dollar that can move at the speed of light to 8 billion people on a mobile phone.

Starting point is 01:28:33 That would be a good thing. Digital securities, maybe you want to create a Salona and Ethereum. I don't have a problem with smart contracts and all the rest. It's just that if there's a company or a set of developers behind them, they audit discloses who's making the decisions, who owns the stuff, and what is my risk? Can they simply seize all of my money tomorrow if they want or not? So digital securities would also be a good thing, and then digital tokens.

Starting point is 01:29:02 If you're Katie Perry and you want to issue a Katy Perry token, you don't want to spend $40 million on lawyers and accountants and take three years to do it and spend 25 million a year to keep a current. That is the cost to issue an analog security like Microsoft or like Apple or like MicroStrategy. So it would be great. And it's very reasonable. If you could issue a digital token as one of 100,000 celebrities and do it ethically and technically in a sound fashion. And maybe you spend a couple hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars to set it up, but not a hundred million.

Starting point is 01:29:38 And if you're going to do a digital security, you ought to be able to do it, but it shouldn't be as hard as maybe it is to take public a very complicated company. Now what's good about those things? 24-7 trading to 8 billion people, personal property rights to your iOS or Android phone, the ability for artists and creators to monetize their brand. And then with a commodity, the ability to have a non-sovereign store of value beyond the corrupting influence of a company,

Starting point is 01:30:09 a CEO, or a government. Those are all the good things. That's the promise of digital assets or the crypto industry. Smart contracts would also be a good thing. These are all good things. What's the problem? The problem is most of the ideas have been built

Starting point is 01:30:23 on an irresponsible foundation or an unstable foundation. That is economically they collapse and they're not engineered properly or ethically, they're not quite right or there's no regulatory clarity. So the guys at Circle, they're not public, at Tether, They're not public. Well, if you were going to have a bank that held $500 billion of money and you issued 500 billion worth of tokens, wouldn't you think they ought to actually have to make public disclosures? If the CEO dies over the weekend and there's a new CEO, don't you think that you should tell the people with the $500 billion at risk what's going on? Yeah. Well, here's, here's the challenge. We are in a passive, aggressive environment right now, which is no one in the crypto

Starting point is 01:31:14 industry has been given a path to register their asset with the SEC. There's no obvious way to register a digital commodity. If you thought that your token was a commodity, you can't just file a form and get back an answer. There's no way to register a digital currency. The currency has been caught in a fight between Treasury Department, the FDIC, the SEC, and it's like, how do I actually register one?

Starting point is 01:31:46 And what do I got to do in order to be anointed as a ready-to-trade token? There's no way to register a digital security. There is no definition, no taxonomy of a token versus security versus a commodity versus a currency. Most people don't even understand. What I just said, define a digital currency, digital token, digital security, digital commodity. How many lawmakers would give you a one paragraph definition

Starting point is 01:32:12 of the difference, ethically, technically, economically? Zero. Yeah, so if you're an entrepreneur, you're like, well, if I come to the US, what can I do? I can buy and hold Bitcoin. What else can I do legally? Nothing. I'm a publicly traded company in micro strategy. What do we do? We buy in the whole Bitcoin. Why do we do it? Because that's a regulatory safe harbor and an ethical safe harbor. Everybody agrees. That's a commodity. Everything else, you know, there is no obvious path forward. So if we want a progressive environment, you know, people in DC, the regulators and or

Starting point is 01:32:55 the lawmakers, they have to say, here's a definition of a digital currency. You want to register it, register it with the SEC or with Treasury. They can't decide who to register with. CFTC, SEC Treasury, probably the SEC ought to be the first stop. Everybody sends their token to the SEC and the SEC says, you're either ethical or unethical. If you're a Ponzi scheme, they should just reject it, right? But if you're ethical, they say, this is the disclosure we need from you, your commodity, your currency, your security. What's the difference between

Starting point is 01:33:29 Katy Perry token and Apple stock trading on a digital exchange? Well, clearly, I think you could, you could agree that Apple is a much more complicated company than Katy Perry fan token would be. So presumably Apple spends $100 million a year to stay in compliance with securities law, Katy Perry shouldn't have to spend the 100 million a year to actually issue a token. And so what we're waiting for is for someone to give us a taxonomy and a process.

Starting point is 01:34:01 And the deadlock at congressional level was stuck. The way this gets solved is either the SEC just publishes the guideline. They could do it, right? If you're the chair of the SEC, you could just put out a 20 page memo and say, this is the way it's going to be and everybody would just fall in line within the next 12 months, almost certainly. Or Congress has got to put out a law and the law's got to say, these are the classes of digital assets and this is the regulator that gets to

Starting point is 01:34:30 register you. And then, you know, what is a digital exchange? A digital exchange is 24, 7, 365 trading venue, like a coin base or like a Binance. So you see, the traditional world is $100 trillion of analog securities trading on traditional exchanges. The trade 930 to 4 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, except on bankers holidays. And the problem with that, service level is bad. It disenfranchises 7 billion people. You can't take personal custody of your Apple stock on your Android phone.

Starting point is 01:35:07 That's not going to happen. And so, and your bankers have a monopoly on your assets. You can't lend or borrow against your assets except through the bank that controls them. So, there's lots of monopolies in the traditional world and they're not evolving. Well, a different idea would be a digital exchange world where everything circulated 24, 7, 365, you could take custody of it on your phone. What if I could take a share of Apple stock

Starting point is 01:35:35 and zap it to someone in Zimbabwe and they could take it and cold storage on a hardware wallet, like they could really own it. You think we're going that direction? No, I think I've laid out the most progressive policy, which is a world where digital assets, a hundred thousand digital assets circulate to eight billion people with full empowerment.

Starting point is 01:35:57 I don't think we'll get there. I think the best we can get to is a few digital exchanges that are regulated, the trade a few dozen assets, you know, a dozen stable coins, a dozen crypto assets that are either securities or commodities that have passed through regulatory jurisprudence or regulatory review. And I think 98% of all the stuff that circulates

Starting point is 01:36:21 in the ecosystem is probably going to get squeezed out. Most of the crypto entrepreneurs get squeezed out and the control of the industry is going to move to the fidelities and the blocks and the, you know, a publicly traded regulated company or bank in the US or in Europe that's got an army of lawyers and accountants behind it. Laman's terms, how do you explain the difference between centralization, regulation, or decentralization, or deregulation if you were to explain that to a sixth grader? A decentralized asset is one that is so diffused on so many different computers, and the hands of so many people, that no one person can change it or corrupt it.

Starting point is 01:37:08 Means Bill Gates can't corrupt it. The head of the SEC can't corrupt it. A president of, you know, the head of Russia or the US or the U.A. can't corrupt it. No company can corrupt it. If I own a billion dollars of it, I can't corrupt it. And so a decentralized asset is like a, is like the cold virus. You get the cold, a billionaire gets the cold.

Starting point is 01:37:32 You both have the same cold. The billionaire doesn't duck the cold. You can't give the billionaire a different cold than you got. It is just a force of nature. We all equally share and benefit and suffer. If I give you an orange and I give a billionaire an orange and I give the head of Russia and orange, you all got the same orange. Nobody gets a better deal. That is a decentralized commodity. A centralized asset is like Apple

Starting point is 01:38:02 stock. If Tim Cook gets up and decides to print 10 million more shares of Apple stock, he could. If Tim Cook decides to cut the price of the iPhone to zero, like Mark Zuckerberg, here's an example of the risk of owning a security. Zuckerberg decides that Facebook should be meta and the price of the stock falls by 65%. And is it legal and ethical for him to do it? Yeah. If you bought Facebook stock, you read the report,

Starting point is 01:38:28 you know he controls the company, you know he's the CEO, you know he could do it, you can complain about it, but that was the risk you had going into it. You're never going to wake up and be holding an orange in your hand and find out that some dude that hates you around the world, cast a magic spell and made two thirds of your orange disappear. You see. So one of these things is a natural asset.

Starting point is 01:38:55 The other is an artificial asset. Securities or man-made assets, commodities are nature created assets. They both come with risks, but when you buy a bar of gold and you lose money, it's not because the CEO of Gold Corp made the gold copper, right, and then made it like rot away on you, right? Gold, it is what it is, it's a natural risk, not, and so that's why securities laws are

Starting point is 01:39:26 structured such that the liabilities of officers of companies lie in the manipulation of the securities. And so if I was explaining it to a kid in school, I would just say a truly decentralized thing results in a commodity where no one can corrupt it. And a centralized thing is a security. You're reliant upon the effort of somebody else and you have to trust them. And if you trust them, you may get a benefit, but you know, just like trusting a bank, you know, when you when you own someone's fiat currency, you trust the government not to print more. When you put your money in a bank, you trust the bank to give the money back to you. And when you buy a stock, you trust the CEO or the management team not to destroy the company

Starting point is 01:40:19 through an aptitude or not to dilute your stock by, you know, just giving it all to themselves secretly and not telling you. I got two other questions before we wrap up. We got 18 minutes. Let's see if we can pull this off or not. So I don't know if you remember or not, that article came out talking about the fact that how Bitcoin matches, I don't remember the exact numbers, 74% of the time. It was 74 of the last 90 days. Every time the market went up, Bitcoin went up, every time the market went down, Bitcoin went down.

Starting point is 01:40:52 I don't know if you remember this or not. So an article that came out, probably nine months ago, eight months ago, even around the time that we sat down together. It tracked the correlation between four-legs going in the stuff. Very, very close each other, right? But now, now, when all the way down to 28.

Starting point is 01:41:08 Okay. SMP went down to, I wanna say, 3300. I don't know the exact number, I wanna say, 33 something. Maybe even 3280, give or take. And then, Dow's up right now. How much is Dow? Can you look at what SMP 500's at right now? I don't know what the exact number is.

Starting point is 01:41:21 Yeah, the Dow's at 3300. I wanna say, SMP is 4,080,020. SMP is now $3,999. $3,999, okay, perfect. So if you look at the rolling 12 lowest was what, 52 week low, $34,91, okay. So 34,91. But if you look at Bitcoin, go on Bitcoin at the same time,

Starting point is 01:41:37 and let's look at what Bitcoin's at, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is currently at $16,900. Okay, but if you go high high is what rolling for the year I want to say 50 rolling 12 go one year go one year One year one year right there. No, that's one month go to one year one year is that what 50 something If you go all the way at the top go all the way at the top 50 something so Gold they would say if you print money

Starting point is 01:42:04 Gold will go up inflation goes, gold will go up. Inflation goes up, gold will go up, right? Bitcoin was matching the market. Now it's not matching the market. At least it was matching the market. And when the market was going up, now the market went up. And if you look at this, it's flat lining

Starting point is 01:42:20 and going lower and lower slightly, right? If you look at every time it comes down, boom, spike up. Every time it comes down, pump, spike up. Every time it comes down, boom, spike up. Come down, boom, spike up. Today, Draper comes out and says, by the end of next year, Bitcoin's gonna go up to $250,000. I think he said that earlier today,

Starting point is 01:42:38 but at the same time, he was supportive Elizabeth Holmes till the very end. So when you look at some of this stuff and you compare them with the numbers that you see, why isn't Bitcoin no longer responding to the market the way it was before? And now it's kind of the correlation is no longer the same.

Starting point is 01:42:55 What do you think's the cause of that? I mean, Bitcoin goes through phases where it's either positively correlated to risk assets or is negatively correlated or it's uncorrelated. It all comes down to the micro dynamics, like how are all the exchanges and all the other crypto traders, how are they behaving, and then the macro traders, how are the macro traders perceiving it. That's continually evolving.

Starting point is 01:43:24 Let me give you one interesting stat. On August 10th, MicroStrategy decided to get into this business. So August 10th, 2020. So if you go back to the summer of 2020 when it was just unclear, what are all these assets gonna do? You said August 10th.

Starting point is 01:43:39 August 10th. So I track this, because this is my scorecard, because on August 11th, we announced we bought a quarter billion dollars worth of Bitcoin and we've been long Bitcoin ever since. If you had taken a billion dollars and you had bought bonds like long bonds, 20 year bonds in the summer of 2020 and held them through today, you would be down 19%. 8 10, the B O N D index is minus 19%.

Starting point is 01:44:07 That's what I'm saying, a billion dollars will be $810 billion. Yeah, if you bought gold, you'd be down 13%. Okay. If you had bought the NASDAQ, you would be up 3%. It pretty much chopped. Sure. Right? If you had bought the S&P index,

Starting point is 01:44:23 you would be up 19%. Not bad. Not bad. Sure. Not bad. If you bought Bitcoin, you'd be up 43%. Bitcoin doubled the performance of those other assets, even as it got beat around the ears. And if you had gone into big tech, and you bought Google, you'd be up 34%. Not as good as Bitcoin, but better than NASDAQ. Apple's up 30%, Microsoft is up 20%. So those three are monopolies, the three most powerful tech monopolies in the world. But Netflix, down 34%, Amazon down 42%,

Starting point is 01:44:58 and Facebook slash meta down 54%. And that's why NASDA asking you to do these sideways. Now, what is the point? Well, Bitcoin is really volatile. No doubt about it, it's hair on fire. But if you, and if you're gonna be an investor for less than 12 months, you are just a speculator and you're a trader and God bless you.

Starting point is 01:45:21 If you go short, you make some money, if you pick it right, but if you pick wrong, you're face ripped off. And I don't know how to do that. I mean, you have to be a trader. But if your time horizon is four years, two years, four years, eight years, beyond. And if you're buying it as a long-term store of value asset, and you're just, are you disgusted with the manipulation of the fiat currency then you buy Bitcoin because you're angry that they keep printing more pesos and bolivars and dollars and yours. Are you disgusted that the CEO of your favorite company screwed you by making bad decisions? I won't name the company, fill in your own. Then you're gonna buy Bitcoin. There's no CEO, Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:46:07 Are you, you know, so if you want to escape that particular risk, and what you wanna do is you don't wanna trust a CEO, a company, a government, or anybody, and if you wanna buy something that you can hold for 30 years, well, I can't pick a single company that I would want to hold 30 years. I can't, you know, there's not a piece of land I would hold for 30 years because I don't know that the mayor wouldn't, you know, the guy that replaces the mayor next might decide to triple the property tax.

Starting point is 01:46:41 And, you know, so there are a lot of things in this world that are just very risky. Bitcoin fits in a portfolio and it's performing just fine as long as you have a two year plus time horizon. And if you have a short time horizon, if you want to look at 12 weeks, 18 weeks, one year, every single investment in the last 12 months looks pretty hideous. And I can probably tell you that if you lost 20% of your money or a fool, if you lost 40% you feel like a bigger fool. If you lost 60% you feel like a bigger fool.

Starting point is 01:47:13 So real estate investors, securities investors, bond investors, crypto investors, Bitcoin investors, there's no winners in the current environment on a short time frame other than the shorts, the guys that are just short hedging. Somebody, I mean, I can say this. One thing, you know, having been, uh, series seven since, uh, 2001, you know, financial industry 20 plus years, myself, not at your level, you, you, you'll see mutual funds that have come out with their perspectives and you look at the date they run in. Since this time and since that time, we can run dates to make your argument better or worse.

Starting point is 01:47:49 Everybody can do it, we can do it, everybody can do it. Some may say, well, you know, the article that came out saying the fact that you guys lost 1.8 billion dollars, right? And that happened. But by the way, did you guys have a margin call or no? Did you get margin calls or no? No, no, no.

Starting point is 01:48:04 Okay, so. Oh, and I didn't, and I didn't, too, our? Did you get margin clothes or note? No, no, no. Of course not. Okay. Oh, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't,

Starting point is 01:48:10 and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't,

Starting point is 01:48:18 and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn't, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, and I didn, a billion? There, when Bitcoin got to $50,000 of coin, we sold a billion dollars worth of stock at $700 a share. We converted the equity into Bitcoin, Bitcoin traded down, and so technically,

Starting point is 01:48:41 the Bitcoin that we bought at that point is worth less today. And so you can say that's bought at that point is worth less today. And so you can say that's a non-doll. When you bought at 32K or 39K some like that, you bought it at 39,000. If you bought Bitcoin more than the current trading price, then you can say that you lost money buying it. But if you actually paid for it with cash or equity that was valued proportionate, then you've actually created shareholder value. We've actually created enterprise value.

Starting point is 01:49:06 The company's enterprise value is expanded by a factor of five. Our shareholders have made more money than any other investment. So they're all fine. People are just cherry picking random trading periods in order to make some observation. Got it. And in this story here, to the Ethereum folks

Starting point is 01:49:24 who would love for me to ask you this question, there's no second best. Micro strategy would be a 1.6 billion if it invests in an Ethereum. This was a month ago. What are your thoughts on this wonderful article? The problem is Ethereum is a security. I mean, I don't mean to be mean about it,

Starting point is 01:49:40 but it's pretty evident, Vitalik is the CEO of Ethereum. There is a 10 year roadmap with 160 blocks. One of the little blocks in the roadmap says, elect secret leader. Another block is give people the bill to un-stake their coin. Another block is set the monetary policy. Ethereum is an incomplete crypto network.

Starting point is 01:50:04 It's a work in progress. And so the problem fundamentally is, it's a security, which means to promote a security is securities fraud. It's that simple. Right, when you're promoting a theory, I'm you're promoting Joe Luben and Vitalik's company. And as they're token, there was a pre-mind, there's an ICO, they

Starting point is 01:50:26 change the monetary policy, and they currently are holding $20 billion worth of their investors assets hostage, and we don't know when the money will be released. So here's the issue. At some point, the SEC is going to deem them a security. If they are a security, it's illegal to trade them on any exchange, you know, in the US, really in the world, right? I mean, unless someone creates a path to register a digital security, look, I would have nothing against a theorem. If they said, well, we're a company, this is a security, we're going to register it. Okay, what's the board of directors?

Starting point is 01:51:03 Who owns it? What's the rules? Give us all the risk factors. I mean, a very simple question. Do you know who's going to make the decision to give the $20 billion of ETH back? Because there is no representation as to when you'll be able to un-stake ETH. It's not clear who makes the decision. Is it one, what happens if that one person disappears? What if they decide to never give you your teeth back?

Starting point is 01:51:29 Okay, that is a problem. So as a publicly traded company, I'm gonna make a technical argument. Publicly traded companies can't hold more than 40% of their balance sheet in a security. Like, if it was Apple stock and it had a hundred thousand pages of disclosures, I still couldn't hold more

Starting point is 01:51:46 than 40% of my balance sheet in it because an operating company can't hold any more securities without becoming an SEC 40 reporting company. It's a totally different thing. So technically, we couldn't buy securities that we wanted to. Otherwise, Bitcoin's protocol has been pretty much set in stone with a series of only soft forks for 13 and a half, 14 years. Ethereum changes every six months. And so it's a different thing. As for back testing it, I could go back and say,

Starting point is 01:52:25 what if I had bought such and such yo-yo coin token too? But as I've said, there are 22,000 tokens, nearly all of them are unregistered securities, which means they're trading illegally, unethically, on illegal exchanges. What could go wrong? Like, I wouldn't put a penny into any of those tokens. If you said, you know, my cousin Vin said, my cousin Venys got yo-yo dying

Starting point is 01:52:48 and do you wanna buy some of the penny stock and just trust me, I was like, no. I mean, there's no different than boiler room, right? Or the Wolf of Wall Street, right? The Ethereum people have an aggressive technical ambition, but ultimately it's not a complete project. They've got a 10-year road map. When it's complete, five years after that, you'll know if it breaks or doesn't break. And at some point, there's the question of, you know, is it decentralized or not?

Starting point is 01:53:18 It's pretty obviously not decentralized when you're waiting for the Supreme Leader to give you the plan. That's the Supreme Leader. Final question on what's his name? Top customer service representative who became a billionaire Elon Musk who just bought Twitter. Do you have any opinions on Elon Musk, what he's doing with Twitter? I think that Twitter is coming back to life. I think Twitter had too many training wheels on it, too much governance on it. If you look at any economy, I mean any economy at all,

Starting point is 01:53:51 I mean the recipe for crippling the economy is too many well-intentioned bureaucrats regulating and everything telling you what you can and you can't do. Ronald Reagan fixed the U.S. economy or Margaret Thatcher. The intelligent thing they do is when they deregulate, get out of the way and stop second guessing the people. I think on Twitter, I mean, they act so many accounts, right? When you act people that disagree with the current thing and you obliterate their accounts, it's very chilling.

Starting point is 01:54:20 And so Elon has, I do believe that his motivation is give free speech to the world. I think it's a very complicated thing to do when there are so many laws about what's acceptable speech and what isn't. But I think that Twitter was kind of stuck in a malaise and they were basically, they're a digital monopoly on public speech. And they were siphoning off all of their energy simply to regulate the speech. And when you step back and say, what if we just let people talk and we put our energy into improving the product, like make the product better. I mean, there's no reason why you can't provide, like, give 100 million people the ability to get verified. Why didn't they do that?

Starting point is 01:55:09 It was a very, they had a very socialist communist idea, which is 300,000 blue checks, and no amount of money or effort on your part will get you verified. So 300 million proletarians, and 300,000 elite. And even if you wanted to write me a $10,000 check to verify you, I'm not taking it. So it was very stuck.

Starting point is 01:55:33 And- Well some employees took some checks and they gave verification behind closed doors, but I'd tell them. Same thing with Insta. And the same thing happens in communist regimes where you have rationing. It's invariably of a black market form.

Starting point is 01:55:46 So I think that Elon is making moves to improve the process and prove the functionality, open up free speech. There should be debate. People should not live in fear of what they say. You say the wrong thing. You express the wrong opinion and your account gets locked and you get shadow banned. I think that that undermined the use of the platform. And so I'm in favor of where they're headed.

Starting point is 01:56:15 I think it's good for the world. I think it's all spacious. It's gonna be a bumpy ride. Like most of the time with Elon's business, they're all bumpy rides. Tesla was a bumpy ride. Like most of the time when with Elon's business, they're all bumpy rides. Tesla was a bumpy ride. He likes that. But you know, when you step back, you're like, it's Tesla's a bumpy ride, but it looks

Starting point is 01:56:32 like we're getting the point where cars will drive themself and you start to think, well, maybe when we get to the end of the ride, it'll be a good thing. Last question for you on my end. This Bitcoin having that happens every four years. Obviously you're very familiar with this. So the next having is March of 2024, correct? Where do you see Bitcoin in March of 2024? So if we do another interview, 15 months from now,

Starting point is 01:56:58 best case scenario for Bitcoin. I think we're really close to the bottom of the de-leveraging cycle. I think we've taken out a lot of the bad actors. I think that a fire is lit under the DC politicians and the regulators. I think that we're going to get clarity and I think that that clarity is going to bring in a bunch of institutional money, a bunch of institutional banks and big investors and big corporations. And at some point, you know, maybe not between now and the end of the year,

Starting point is 01:57:28 we're going to get to the to the bottom of the market. And then we're going to begin the next bull run. And I think, I think that we'll be midway into a really nice bull run. And and Bitcoin's going to be, you know, way north of where it is right now. By the north of the high of 60,000 or north of 100,000 or you know, I don't want to give a hard number because it would be irresponsible of me, but I just feel like Bitcoin has suffered the de-leveraging, like the, you know, guys like FTX, they took $10 billion and then they panic sold it. Our fire sales sold billions of dollars of assets and that's what's got us to where we are.

Starting point is 01:58:09 Once all of the bad actors and all of the irresponsible players have fire sold and you know panic sold all of their Bitcoin, then what you've done is you've transferred it into much stronger hands. And so I just, I think that certainly we ought to be back to a solid place. What you're saying is the future looks bright. I think the future is definitely bright. Hey, Kyle, folks, if you learned as much as I did, give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel.

Starting point is 01:58:35 And we're going to put the link to Mr. Sailor's Twitter account for you to go there and follow him, give him feedback about today's thing. Every time you're here, I learn. And I get smarter and smarter. It's like my brain is having a workout listening to, and the muscles are getting more and more cut up. I appreciate you for coming out, really enjoyed it. Tomorrow we're doing a home team podcast. It's just going to be us. We may have a surprise podcast sometime this week with somebody that's currently a controversial figure, not who you think, but maybe, maybe we'll see. We'll see. Even Adam doesn't

Starting point is 01:59:04 know about it because we'll keep it a secret until this thing becomes verified. Michael, I appreciate you for coming out. Truly. Thank you. Have a good one. Thanks for being here, Michael.

PBD Podcast - Michael Saylor | PBD Podcast | Ep. 212

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.