PBD Podcast - Michael Saylor Reveals Why Storing Money In Banks Is a Mistake | PBD Podcast | Ep. 267 | Part 2

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

In this episode, Patrick Bet-David and Michael Saylor will discuss: Why Storing Money In Banks Is a Mistake Biden interview Fake media FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on ⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://minnect.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://valuetainment.com/academy/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

30 seconds. Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm so close, I could take sweetest theory. I know this life meant for me. Yeah, why would you plan on galiah when we got bett David? Value payment, giving values, contagious, this world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value that hate it. I didn't run home, he looked what I'd become.

I'm the entrepreneur. If you're trying to use money that requires banks, you can't trust the banks, right? You certainly can't trust the banks in Africa, in South America, and most of Asia. It used to be Americans thought they could trust American banks. Now they're realizing that they can't trust American banks. So the first order impact of the banking crisis is people think, well, maybe the money ahead of the banks going away. And so I ought to put it in a bank in cyberspace that isn't controlled by the

government or by the bankers. And that's Bitcoin. The second order impact is the solution to the banking crisis is print more dollars. And if you print more dollars, the actual monetary inflation rate goes 10%, 15%, 20%. So you think, why do you think those bonds crashed? You know, because they're actually claims on dollars, do you really want to hold a billion dollars of Zimbabwe dollars? What if I offered you 10 billion Zimbabwe dollars? I mean, the answer is it's going to a nickel, okay? So if the paper currency keeps crashing, then you can't own anything that's currency related,

you can't own a currency derivative. You need to own something that politicians can't print more of. Okay, well, that's oil, that's land. But the problem is try calling 100,000 barrels of oil from where you are to London, where you want to be. How are you going to do that? I'll give you a billion dollars of land in Central Africa and then someone takes over with machine guns and declares that everyone with large amounts of land now loses it.

That happened in Zimbabwe. You're going to pick up the land on your back and carry it to France. So it's kind of, it's simple. If people lose faith in the banks, they lose faith in the currency. When they lose faith in the currency, they lose faith in the currency. When they lose faith in the currency, they lose faith in the government. When you lose faith in the bank, the currency and the government, and someone says, what can you trust?

The answer is you can trust Bitcoin because you can custody your own asset, you can run your own node. And at the end of the day, even if the Chinese want to shut it down, they can't, if the Russians want to shut it down, they can't, if any nation state wants to shut it down, they can't. If the Russians want to shut it down, they can't. If any nation state wants to shut it down, they can't. If the US wanted to shut it down, they can't.

And so everybody wants something that they can trust that is beyond the reach of a corrupt politician, a corrupt corporate executive, or they don't have to be corrupt. They can just be well-meaning trying to do the right thing in a misguided fashion and meddling with your economic life. If there's ever been a time for you to make that argument and make it aggressively and scream it off the top of your lungs is right.

Now, especially the fact that three out of the four largest banks that ever gone out of business in a history of America were done in the last 90 days, you got WAMO was the biggest which was September of 2008, 307 billion. First Republic was $212 billion that was May 1st. Silicon Valley bank March 10th, 209 billion. Signature bank March 12th, 110 billion. And the next one closest one to it is Indie Mac. If you remember Indie Mac was only a 31 billion dollar company back then in no way. So someone may be listening to this and say,

oh my God, man, this guy is right. Maybe I would start moving my money out of my bank as soon as possible. You know, Jamie Diamond, I know these guys are trying to get people not to take the money out of the bank and have too many bank runs because if they do that and some are taking the money out of their bank and putting in the money market is is Michael saying take my money out and put it in Bitcoin or are you saying maybe taking them put in a bigger

bank. I'm a little concerned Michael you sound smarter than me what should I do the average person's thinking that right now. So are you saying that these three out of four largest banks that went out of business that happened last 90 days, there's more to come and things are gonna get uglier than what it's been last 90 days. Are you just saying the fact that if you keep your money in the bank at any point,

they can make that decision and control your money? I'm saying that money is a store of value and there are multiple monies, and they're not created equal. So let me give you the world's worst money. The worst money in the world is like Argentine pesos or Venezuelan bolivars or Zimbabwe dollars or Nigerian IR, weak money.

That, the official inflation rate in Argentina is 105%. But that's the official rate, which is that under states it. The actual inflation rate would be higher. And if the inflation rate is 1% and 100%, that means your money is losing half of its value every 12 months. That means that within 10 years you have nothing. Okay, so bad money, bad currency or bad money loses all of its value over the course of a few years.

And Ben as well, you lose all your value in 36 months. And Argentina, and 10 to 20 years, the Argentine peso was one to the dollar 21 years ago. The Argentine peso was one to the dollar 21 years ago If you had if you had a million dollars 21 years ago the Argentine peso right now is about 480 to the dollar So that's not a 99% loss That's a 99.8% loss, right? In how many years 20 21 years

Okay, so what I'm saying is you don't have money if you have weak current eight percent loss, right? How many years? Twenty. Twenty one years. Okay. So what I'm saying is you don't have money if you have weak currency. Now let's take strong currency. Well, the strongest currency in the world is the dollar. That's not money. You're losing 99% of your wealth over the course of 90 years and the US dollar. Maybe more. The US dollar, the only difference between the US dollar and the peso is,

whereas it takes 20 years to lose your family's fortune in the peso, it takes about 90 years to lose your family's fortune in the dollar. Right? My house in Miami Beach was $100,000 in 1930. It was appraised at $46 million a few years ago. Do the calculation.

It's on a path to be worth $100 million, which means that the US dollar will have lost 99.9% of its value over 100 years. Warren Buffett knows this, Charlie Munger knows this. Basically, the bottom line there is, your money in the bank isn't money. Okay, so the answer is you shouldn't have any money in a bank, right? You're basically losing 7% of all your wealth every year in a good year if it's the dollar. You're losing 15% of your wealth in a not good year if it's the dollar.

You're absolutely losing all your money over the course of a decade. So that's kind of weak money. Awful money is developing world money. The Lebanese pound, the Lebanese pound got devalued. I mean, you would have lost all your money in five years if you had the pound. The strongest money, decent money, okay money was gold, but not great. The strongest money in the world is Bitcoin because Bitcoin is absolutely capped to 21 million. It is global money.

You could take a billion dollars of Bitcoin across a border. You can transfer it to a counter party and no government can enter dick to that and nobody can inflate to that. And so my answer there would be, you can't trust any bank. You can't, yeah, you certainly can't trust a bank in Lebanon, read about Lebanese banks. You can't trust a bank in Africa, you can't trust a bank in Asia.

My goal, but if you call Chase, their customer service is amazing. How was the customer service with Bitcoin when you called 1-800-number? There's nobody working at the bank of Bitcoin to steal your money. No, no, no, no. Right, I think we're calling Bitcoin.

This is John Ducolon. I can't do nothing for you. You got to make the decision yourself, but I just want to say hi to you. But, you know, Bitcoin is a bank in cyber space run by incorruptible software. It's going to keep your money. If you are incompetent, then you're going to suffer the consequences. But let's think about what banking executives in the US do.

The US banking system is the best in the world. Here's what they do. You put a hundred billion dollars into system is the best in the world. Here's what they do. You put $100 billion into the bank, they have the deposits, they turn around, the Federal Reserve interest rate, short-term rate was zero. And these guys went and invested $100 billion

of those deposits in mid-dated, long-dated, sovereign debt that was yielding 1.8% interest. The Federal Reserve took the interest... Probably. Would you loan me money for 30 years at 3% interest rate? Can you imagine that? If the inflation rate was 8% or 10%, would you loan money out at 3% interest rate for the rest of your life?

Not at a million years. Okay. That's what the banking executives in the US did. At the point when the interest... You can't show the company bank. All of them, right? Pretty much. Not just the ones who went bankrupt, right? There's a host of banks. I think they had, what was like, $800 billion of unrealized losses or something, a host of banks went, and anybody that bought mid-dated

or long-dated bonds at the bottom of the market when interest rates were zero, they were loaning out money forever at 2% interest, or 3% interest, or 1.5% interest. And as soon as you were doing, what happened, of course, is the Fed raised interest rates from 25 basis points. Actually, the rates went from zero to 500 basis points

in 12 months about. That's the sharpest increase in interest rates and memory. That in itself is, I'm not going to say what it is, it's just horrific terrifying to think that any public servant would do that, but it's equally terrifying to think that if I was your money manager, and if you had given me all your money when interest rates were zero, and I said, well, I guess interest rates will stay zero for the next 30 years. And so I'm going to loan it out as a bond and lock in a price of 2%.

You know, you would have thought I was crazy. No, there is no individual, no corporation, no rational corporation, no economic actor that would loan money forever for 3% interest when inflation is running double or triple that. So the question is, who would? And the answer is a bureaucrat, either a governmental bureaucrat, someone that is coerced by regulatory policy where they're forced to, for example, a bank can't buy Bitcoin, but a bank is almost obligated to buy treasuries, right? So the politicians create a set of rules that strongly encourage you to do certain things and strongly discourage

you to do other things. And generally, they encourage you to do the thing which is probably least economically viable. But there are probably local organizations and banks and foreign countries that own their own local currency, right? Like, would you buy an African currency with inflation rate of 200% a year? No, but people do. Why? Because the government controls our own the entity, and so they force that.

So... Just to finish this topic before we move on, when you said all these guys that are given their money for 3% over 30 years or whatever, there's a lot of them. Silicon Valley banks, not the only one. Signature's not the only one. There's a lot of these guys that are going on. Most of the banks are doing the chart.

Remember that chart? Exactly, 64% who was above it. And then JP Morgan was the 14% at the, yeah. So the point is don't trust your money in any bank that's basically betting it on your rational investment. You say something like that as a guy that's a billionaire. The average guy's not a billionaire. The only thing they know what to do is walk up to the bank.

So it's a different scenario. You're on, but the question I'm going to ask you is the following. Are you saying there's going to be bigger banks that are on the line right now that we could see popping up that they're in the same situation because if most of them are doing it, Powell's not lowering rates and they're saying he's not gonna do until December. So how much longer can these guys

handle these types of conditions? Yeah, so let me just answer two questions. What I think will happen to banking system and what I think a person should do? What I think happens to the banking system is all of the regional banks, the small mid-sized banks are a massive disadvantage right now because the government is

is showing that they're not going to bail out those those equity holders so there's uh... there's a migration of deposits from the small banks to the big banks you know i think that you know the jp morgan's the bank of america's that the mega banks will continue to be'll be just fine. They'll be supported by the government. The small banks are going to struggle and that's what you see going on right now.

If you're a depositor, I mean, you'll probably get bailed out by the government. If you're a bond holder in the bank or an equity holder in the bank, you won't get bailed out, right? And so there's a crisis for investors, whereas everybody that's a deposit doesn't want to sit around and take the risk, right? I mean, who wants any anxiety? So I think that to the extent that you rely on banks, clearly the world is waking up and the US is waking up

and they're thinking I want to be with big banks. I wouldn't have my money in a bank anywhere outside the US in a weak country, right? You need to be in a rich, strong country with a rich, strong bank. With regard to what individuals should do, I think the logical answer is for expenses, if you have expenses in the next three months, you have your expenses in the

local currency, which is the peso, the niara, the whatever, because it's legally obligated for you to pay in the local currency. For the next three years of expenses or one to three years of expenses, you put your wealth in a strong, the strongest world currency in the world. That's the dollar right now, but you make sure that you have that currency, either self-custodied or you have it in a bank that you trust. That's hard. If you can't find a bank, if you were in Lebanon right now, if you were in Lebanon right

now, you wouldn't put your money in any bank, you would actually put it on the Bitcoin blockchain. For any amount of money you want to keep the rest of your life, if you want to give it to your kids, if you want to actually retire on it, anything that's investable asset, you would put it in Bitcoin. You would put it in the strongest possible world currency, the global money, and that's Bitcoin. You're not going to get rich investing in dollars. And you'll lose all your money if your dollars are in a weak bank.

And if your dollars in a strong bank, you'll just get poor slowly. And you're going to get poor. You're going to get poor rapidly if your money is in not the dollar, but a weaker currency. And you're going to get completely bankrupt if you trust a weak bank. And so, micro-strategy, by the way, has we had like $90 million. We had four plus billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. So go figure, right?

98% of our assets are actually in the strong money. 2% is in the world's strongest currency in a good bank and one of the big four banks. Right? And that's about as much exposure as I want to a currency. You're obviously a true, true, true believer when it comes to Bitcoin, no doubt. How much of it the fact that we live in Miami, and we see people fleeing Venezuela, Argentina moving their money here, getting out of Brazil, getting out of Cuba, you know, it's all South America moving to Miami, as well as all around the world. But how much of that helps, I guess, codify your ideology on Bitcoin, or you're 100% anyway,

and this just sort of reaffirms everything you believe, when you see these people moving here. You know, you need this near death experience, this mortality event before you will open your mind to embrace a new idea. Mm-hmm. You know, and if you live in Argentina, and when you talk to Argentines,

they say, my family has been completely bankrupted twice in the past 30 years. Okay, so in South America, if you live in Venezuela, well, they've all been bankrupted twice and 10 to 15 years. If you live in Brazil right now, I think the interest rates getting approached approaching 14% right,

money is hard to come by. If you live in Africa, the Africans live under the CFA, colonial Frank, where they lose half their money every time they change currencies and it's not convertible. And if you lived in Nigeria, you just, you wake up one day and the bank says, you're only allowed to have $42 a day. And if you live in India, you wake up one day, this press release that says, all, all rupee notes of 10,000 rupees or whatever above are now illegal. And you have to turn them all in in the next 48 hours or else they're null and void.

And someone just invalidates the currency. If you lived in Russia in 1998, all the banks failed and the rubble went to zero and every lost everything. So I think that people that live in other jurisdictions, if they've ever been completely bankrupt or seen their economy completely collapse, Sri Lanka, another good example. When that happens, then when someone says, okay, well, here's a bank in cyberspace and an asset that no one can metal with

and no one can corrupt or tamper with, you think we'll tell me more about that. But if you're a wealthy American, if you're Warren Buffett, if you're Warren Buffett, you know, we have a very famous example, a video that's going viral on Twitter. 13 year old girl says to Warren Buffett, I'm really worried about the US dollar

is the reserve currency of the world. We're printing lots and lots of dollars. And if we're not the reserve currency, the value of the dollar is gonna collapse, we're gonna have hyperinflation. What should I do, Mr. Buffett? You know, and I wouldn't normally criticize, you know, a respected, successful business person of his age, but he and Charlie Munger did choose to go up on stage and answer questions

and give financial guidance and advice, an investment advice, and they are looked up to. And so you watch Warren Buffett answer the question. And his answer is, well, yeah, I mean, I guess the Fed inflated the money, but they needed to. And it's really difficult, and politics have difficult problem. And yeah, you're right, it is a problem. And Munger will say, the dollar's going to zero. It's going to zero. They, it is a problem. And Munger will say, you know, the dollar's going to zero. It's going to zero.

They know it's a problem. And then he kind of meanders through it with an end advice, which is, well, you know, I don't know, but America's a great country. Don't bet against America. But the blood curdling, terrifying, depressing takeaway from the clip is, is-year-old girl knows what the problem is. The country's full of people that can articulate the problem and write thousand-page books on

the problem. If you're rich in America, you don't have the answer because you're too comfortable. Right? And so what you've got is a bunch of mega billionaires that are very successful in America, but they don't have an answer or solution to the 13-year-old girl. The solution to that question was Bitcoin. Right? And Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger can't allow themselves to understand that because they're so successful they don't need to open their mind to embrace a new idea. If Warren Buffett woke up tomorrow and his bank seized all of his assets and they were devalued to zero and he was a pauper and his neighbor, the Uber driver, was walking around with $100,000 worth of Bitcoin on a

hardware wallet. Warren would say, what is that again? Explain that to me. What do you mean? My government, my bank can't steal all my money. That's a pretty good idea, right? And so I think that when you're a refugee from fleeing Iraq or you're crossing the border and you know, when you try to go through an airport and a hostile regime steals all

your money and seizes all your gold, when you have to flee your thousand acre or ten thousand acre farm in Africa because a hostile regime decided it was illegal for people like you to own land. When that happens, you become a believer in a non-sovereign store of value crypto asset network, which is what Bitcoin is. The people that came to this country, the Huguenots, the settlers, the colonists, I think they understood it. I mean, they had all their property seized

from them from wherever they came from. And their idea was, here's a place where I can own something and people might not steal it from me. As soon as they got here, people started trying to steal it from them again. Right, that's the human condition. Just slower. Just slower.

But that's why they kept going west. It's like, I got to go west where there's no politicians to steal it from me. Right? And that's a pretty powerful driver. So I think that the conclusion is people that are comfortable, they're fat, dumb, and happy in the United States are gonna continue to reject new ideas like crypto assets, like Bitcoin, because they don't have to.

If I don't have to embrace a new idea, when I get to a certain age, I won't. And that is, that is as old as the, it's the Thomas Cune structure of scientific revolution. He said, paradigm shifts only get embraced in times of war or when the old guard dies. If you want to introduce a new idea, you need a war. War is kind of work because if we're fighting a war and I introduce an airplane and I drop a nuclear bomb on your head, then you stop rejecting air power and you stop rejecting

atomic weapons. You embrace the reality that yeah, they do work and maybe you need to figure it out. War's work, but abs and a war, people just have to, you know, they just have to pass on because they're not going gonna embrace a new idea. So you talked about Charlie Munger. And Charlie Munger gave the famous rap poison speech, right? He actually gave two speeches. And the second one, he said, no, I didn't say it was poison.

I said it was rap poison. So you're saying that he's in the middle of the system. Was he disingenuous? Was he dishonest or was he mistaken? If you don't spend, first you have to have an open mind and say, is it possible that this works? And then second, you have to spend somewhere around 10 hours to understand it.

I just don't think he has an open mind and I don't think he spent 10 hours, right? I mean, it's not uncommon, right? People in their 80s and their 90s don't generally embrace the wonder that is the unreal engine or TikTok or all the 90s. Or all the 90s.

Right, so I wouldn't, again, if they were private citizens, I don't criticize private 80 and 90-year-olds, octogenarians and the like, for not embracing the new cool thing, right? They don't have to like, you don't have to like drone races, you know? You know, my father doesn't have to like drone races in his 80s. That's fine. But the point is, if you're going to tell people how to invest hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars and you're going to give advice to a 13-year-old about how she cannot be poor or not starved

to death. I think that then you have to actually study these things. And the elephant in the room is everybody in the world is facing inflation. Everyone in the world is facing counterparty risk. Everywhere in the world we're losing faith in governments, banks, and currencies. The solution is a bank that isn't run by people, that isn't subject to the whim of a government that is incorruptible, that allows you to be your own bank.

Right? And that is a message that's getting out. We just need to keep beating the drum on that It is I think the most important economic Opportunity slash issue slash technology of our time. I got a question for you I got here asked a question, but for me I kind of want to go through this and then I'll go to this super chat What what percentage if I if we were to break down the amount of content you consume, okay,

percentage-wise in the last 12 months, okay? What percentage of your research and reading is the market, like the whole market? What percentage is purely crypto? What percentage is politics? If you were to break that down, and they have 40% of what I consume is this. 20% is this.

10% is this. I would say something like a quarter is politics, and a quarter is macroeconomics. And a quarter is the crypto economy and Bitcoin related things in the crypto economy and Bitcoin related things in the crypto economy. And the last 25% is a micro strategy, business activity,

our capital operations, capital market structures and our strategic initiatives. So there's nothing that is more than the other. You're evenly split amongst the four. Very interesting how you do that. I would say I'm evenly split amongst the four. I'm quite aware that my impact is at the microstrategy level. I get to decide whether we're going to pay off

a $205 million loan or not. I get to decide whether we're going to issue a billion dollars of equity or not. And I get, you know, so I have an impact over what micro-strategy is doing as the chairman of micro-strategy. And I have a responsibility to my employees, my shareholders, and the like. So a lot of my work is there. And then I have the ability to have an impact and a need to be engaged in the crypto economy. So I'm spending a lot of time on Bitcoin, Bitcoin education, lightning,

development of Bitcoin application, the lightning network, those sort of things, right? That's where I can have an impact. And the macro economy, I study it because I want to know what's going on with China and Russia and interest rates and hyperinflation in Argentina. But I have no belief that I'm going to be able to control that, right? I don't pretend to be able to direct Argentine macroeconomic policy.

And with regard to politics in general, you got to pay attention to what's gone with, you know, the Tucker Carlson's of the world. Then you got to pay attention to the presidential race and the politics, the Senate in Congress and the regulatory activities. But it's above my pay grade, right? I have a, there's a hundred things that are going on, the political sphere. And I have- When you say above my pay grade, I? There's a hundred things that are going on the political sphere. And I don't have-

When you say above my pay grade, I don't have control over it, it's what you mean. A, you know, I don't have control over it. B, my opinion is not welcomed. Right? C, I don't have credibility, right? I'm not gonna express strongly how the opinions on medical policy or interest rate policy

or the like because it is distracting. And so I think you have to study it. And you know, I have to know where the wind is going. For example, there are some countries I would not live in right now. I'm not going to tell you which ones. I'm just not going. There are some places I would not go, right? So, same in countries that people you would assume are safe to live in. Why wouldn't you? Tradition. I'm, look, there's a war going on in the Ukraine. Right. So, I mean, do you pay attention? You pay attention, right? There are places I wouldn't make an investment. Sure. There are places I would not go. There are places I would not live, right? But if you look at my Twitter profile, I have laser eyes.

And the significance of laser eyes is, if you want to make progress in this world, you have to focus and channel all of the energy you have behind a very, very particular objective. And I have one laser like focus, right? Bitcoin is good money, right? Bitcoin is good for the world. Bitcoin is global freedom, global property rights. Right? Like, I have a hundred other opinions, but if I actually filled my feed with,

here's what I think about bicycles, and here's what I think about diets, and here's what I think about diets, and here's what I think about health, and here's what I think about labor policy, and here's what I think about states rights, and here's what I think about this country. At some point, you just dilute your focus, and you just, you don't have that much energy in this life.

What we really brought you today to talk about what your thoughts were on a plant-based diet, because I know you've been researching that for a long time, just obviously joking with you. I don't say at my point, I talk for an hour about it, but the point is I'm not gonna change anybody else's deeply held opinion on plant-based diets. What sources do you go to?

When you say you're researching, what do you read? Are you a zero-header guy? Are you say you're researching, what do you read? Are you a zero-hedge guy? Are you a Wall Street Journal? What do you read? You know, I'm scanning everything on Bloomberg news. I'm scanning everything on the Wall Street Journal homepage. I'm scanning the news feeds on anything related to Bitcoin. Scanning the major papers, the New York time to see what they're thinking,

I'm scanning Twitter. What they're thinking? It's useful to know what they print, right? New York Times thinking, like they do a lot of... Yeah, we could go there. Yeah, but you know, I'm just thinking in New York Times and the same sense. The point is, what's on the front page, what is the narrative on the front page?

What is on the front page of the Wall Street Journal? What's a paper you read that's not a common paper? Is there a site or a journalist you trust, somebody that writes that you follow an expert? No, I don't think you could, I don't think you could in good faith endorse any one news outlet in the modern world. I think you have to scan everything and you have to consider

what's statistically significant. And of course what you find in the news media is often times, if 92% of the people are dying of natural causes, 95% of the bandwidth, it bleeds at least. 95% of the bandwidth is the most colorful way to die, right? It's not the most likely way to die. It's the most colorful way to die. And so I think that all media is distorted, and they're all edited, and they're all focused

to a certain agenda. The only thing you can reasonably do is you can scan a bunch of them. You can scan your own Twitter feed will also be distorted. So you have to scan other feeds, and then you have to be continually going through this exercise in your head of saying, that happened, is it true?

And then how significant is it? For example, Argentine inflation, 105 percent, is it true? No, because the actual inflation rate is higher. It's indicative of a truth. How significant is it? Well, how many people live in Argentina? That's one level of significance. The second is how much money is in Argentina. And the third level of significance is how symbolic or how indicative or catalytic is it to other activity that will happen the rest of the world? How symbolic is it?

So I think that I'm in my 50s, I'm 58. If I'm in fourth by the way. February fourth. I'm birthday as me, that's why I like that. If you roll the clock back and you read the same newspaper in your teens, you'll interpret something different. If you read news in your 20s, it's different.

And your 30s, it's different. And your 40s, it's different. Powerful. When you get to your 50s, if you read the same history book and you're reading it in your 50s, like, well, I totally interpreted it this differently when I was a ninth grader, right? When I was in college, I interpreted this differently.

So you have to have real world experience. Oftentimes, you'll read a story and they'll state something and the truth is the exact opposite of what the story is. But you have to have lived life, like for example, you read a headline. We found 500 stone axes in a cave in Africa. They're between 1.2 and 1.7 million years old. Well, a school kid will say, oh yeah, so I guess they found some stone axes.

I look at that and I say, well, there was a factory that made stone axes in Africa 1.7 million years ago. That meant that there was demand for thousands of stone axes a year. That meant that there was an entire civilization that existed, right? In fact, there was money, there was a government, there was a furniture factory,

there was a clothing factory, there was agriculture, there was an entire society. You had to have 10,000 people all working together in coordination to justify having an inventory of 500 stone axes, right? And the only reason that you actually read about the stone axes is the stone axes, the only thing that's going to last a million years from now, right?

And so what was there was 1,000 acts more interesting. The fact is there was an interesting higher level civilization with agriculture one and a half million years ago. They're not writing that in the history book because the literal historian only wants to report the bare minimum. But the reason that I could actually tell you a thousand other things is that I actually read books on Austrian economics. I ran a business, I traded, I saw the meltdown and the creation of dozens of industries. And I understand human nature. Right?

And so if you understand, and you live the life, you're like, well, if I, you know, if I drink cartons of orange juice every day for months in a row, I know what's going to happen to me. It's not good. You can reverse that. And you can figure out what people ate a hundred thousand years ago. You know, they didn't do the things that we don't really think are good ideas today because they wouldn't have procreated through 100,000 generations. So,

I think that when you read the news in your 50s, if you've lived the life, and by the way, like, a lot of things I interpret are because I ran a company for 30 years. You know, like, for example, you know, like a teenager, if you look at movies created by people in their 20s, they have this view of business people. The badass billionaire business guy walks in and he tells everybody what to think. He's the evil, Dr. Evil genius. If you've actually run a business, I remember back last time I told somebody what to think, and they told me to go, F myself. Right?

And then, you know, and you are addressing, oh, you know, you're, and now I have a meeting and I'm very polite, you know? Like, and the more talented you are, the more polite, I am, you know, because I realized that the world will go on without me. Like those people think, oh yeah, well I got to work for the man.

Well no, you don't. I have 2,000 people in my company right now. I have hired 30,000 people. They don't have to work for the man, right? The truth is- Unbelievable point. You know, you hire people, you realize that they will quit if they don't like.

The CEO gets fired more often than employees do Yeah, yeah, I lost 27,500 employees, all right? So you you think I take them for granted? Yeah But you have but I but I didn't when I was 24 like what a perspective The time when you are most confident when you have the most amount of formal education and the least amount of real world experience, like in your early 20s, right? Because you think you can do it better than everybody else, and you haven't failed. And when you get another 25 years out, you're like, oh, I tried that, that didn't work. I tried that, that didn't work. I tried that, that didn't work.

Oh, yeah, that was a really good employee, but they quit, because I was rude to them. Oops, I wish I hadn't done that. Oops, took that for granted. So, I guess I'm coming back to your question. What do I think about the news? It's like, can you give us one name, one source? Like, do you go to something

that's not the traditional one everybody else goes to? Any person, I it's not a hundred percent accuracy you trust, but give us one sort. I think I think to give a boost to Twitter and Elon Musk. The boost is there are analysts and there are domain experts on Twitter that don't have corporations that don't have lawyers to tell them they're not allowed to say that thing. And they actually say the truth. Can you give us their names? A couple of them. Michael, I'm gonna hold you to give us one name.

No, no. Give us one name. Follow me on Twitter. I mean, you can look at all the people. I follow about 600 people on Twitter. Okay, so then follow the people you're following. There are honest analysts, and there are people that are domain experts experts and they publish

their unadulterated thoughts. And if you actually put together a mosaic of all those things with your own real world experience, you'll start to synthesize a view of reality, which is, I think, probably more reliable than anyone edited traditional media source. Somebody just gave a $500 super chat and asked this question,

said, have more people been hacked owning Bitcoin than banks have failed? Bitcoin's never been hacked. This is John Coaster. Bitcoin's never been hacked. So the only people that suffer with Bitcoin are people that trust their Bitcoin to the sand bank

and freezo the world. If you put your Bitcoin in Celsius or BlockFi or FTX, if you put it in a wildcat bank and the bank steals your money, right? The real message of Bitcoiners is don't trust verify and be your own bank and not your keys, not your coin. So the message of Bitcoin is you can't trust verify and be your own bank and not your keys, not your coin. So the message of Bitcoin is, you can't trust anybody.

If I actually told you, the world is made up of imperfect people. And let's say there's 100 families, and we all have money, and none of us trust each other, and we all know we have idiot kids that are gonna take over the family business and time. And we

want to create a community bank where we can collectively put our money. The answer would be, well, you don't put anybody in charge of it. You don't put anyone family in charge of it. You know, you might be the smartest amongst us and your, and your son's going to have an 80 mic son and eventually three generations down the road is not going to work anymore. So you write a piece of software. Everybody checks the software. We all agree the software is honest. We put the software on a computer.

Nobody trusts your computer. We create a hundred computers. Everybody runs their own computer with the software. We all agree collectively not to change the software. And anybody that tries to change the software gets kicked out of the network. That's what Bitcoin is. It's an honest approach to solve a problem when you can't rely on a person, you can't

rely on a family, you can't rely on an institution, you can't rely on a government. What we rely on is the collective self-interest of rational people over time with regard to that one thing. And it really is a beautiful invention. How monumental would the Bitcoin having be? I think it's expected in April of 2024, so in a little less than a year, How big of a deal is that? I think it's a catalyst to the upside. Coil, I mean, the amount of Bitcoin that the miners receiving a reward

they might sell will be cut in half. So that's a good thing. But I would say that any rational person that studied Bitcoin for 10 hours knows that there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. And so you know there's less than that because some millions of Bitcoin have been lost and they'll never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. And so you know there's less than that because some millions of Bitcoin have been lost and they'll never be spent.

And so you're buying Bitcoin because you know it's capped and you know the gold and silver and oil and soybeans and paper currency and land and apartments are not capped. Everything else on earth is gonna keep increasing and supply forever. Bitcoin is not. So once you figure that out, then the only question is, is there anything better?

And you shift to the other 20,000 cryptos. And if they're not better and they're not better, then this is the one. Now, every intelligent person with money has put their money on Bitcoin. So what are you going to bet on? You're going to bet on the networks that were invested in by people without money that aren't intelligent.

Right. So so Bitcoin is the winner because the smart money has chosen it. There are a lot of other catalysts, right? Every time there's hyperinflation in a place like Argentina, it's a catalyst. Every time a bank fails, it's a catalyst. Every time someone builds an application that's cool on Bitcoin, right? Like all the ordinals and inscriptions and whatever they're driving up transaction fees, it's catalyst. Every time a company like MicroStrategy buys another $100 million with the Bitcoin, it's catalyst. Every time a regulator actually clarifies the fact that Bitcoin is a commodity and asks that without an a commodity and asset without an issuer and it's special. That's catalyst. So lots of catalyst, they're all going to continue. The result will be Bitcoin will chop its way up with volatility

forever. Just going to keep grinding up because for you to believe Bitcoin's going to grind up, all you got to believe is that human beings have a natural tendency to want to improve their life and protect their property and benefit their friends and family. It's somebody gave two billions in Bobway dollars to appreciate. It's actually $540. It's actually $540 that they gave. Michael, can you give us your take on ordinals, TX and fees on Bitcoin, our BTC, our currently

hired in any point in the last three years, and we are seeing use cases like NFTs on BTC main chain. Well, this shift developers from Ethereum to Bitcoin is Sailor Pro or Anti-Ordinal? This is from an Assyrian brother, Ninos and Ninos. So what are your thoughts on this? Ah, my boy is Ninos. Okay, so Sailor is pro-freedom and pro-markets. And Sailor believes he's an Austrian economist.

So all value is subjective. So here's what I think. I think everybody should be able to launch whatever business they want to launch. And I think everybody should be able to launch whatever business they want to launch. And I think everybody should be able to pursue pursue their happiness however they want and I think that lots of people will create lots of things that won't work.

So I'm not going to give you a recommendation of stocks because some businesses will work some won't and some stocks will, you will buy too high and some you will not and I don't want to be on the hook for 10,000 stocks. I'm not going to tell you how to gamble but I'm not going to tell you not to. I'm not going to give you a recommendation for a private business. You want to collect art. You know, I'm not going to tell you not to. I'm just not going to tell you which piece of art to buy to make money. I don't know which thing is going to work. And I know that over time, all fiat currencies will fail.

And over time, I believe most businesses, in fact, all businesses will not be as good as investing in Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the low risk asset. I do think that what happened over the past five months is pretty interesting. If you go to New Year's Eve, the average fee on the Bitcoin blockchain was like three sats per V-bite. There were blocks every 10 minutes

that had $600 of transaction fees in them, right? And so the miners were getting a reward of $100,000 with $600 or $300 of fees. So the fees were 1% of the reward. There were nothing to minimize. And what happened over five months is Bitcoin had a massive rally. All of a sudden the miners were getting $150,000 or $200,000

reward. But then we saw fees, transaction fees that got to more than six Bitcoin, which was $180,000 in fees. So we went from $1,000 in fees to $100,000 in fees, a factor of 100 increase. And the fees started to approach parity with the reward. If you're an investor in Bitcoin mining, if you're a Bitcoin miner and you want to bullish thesis, in order to have a bullish thesis, you want to see that fees, transaction fees are at parity with rewards. And then you want to have a belief that transaction fees will increase at a rate faster than the hash rate.

So if the hash rate's going up 20% a year and transaction fees are going up 30% a year, then that's a good business, a really good business. And so in a world where transaction fees are 1% they're irrelevant, you don't have parity, and then the growth rate doesn't matter. And then all you see is the rewards are decreasing 18% a year. And that's a bearish scenario. So I think that what happened with ordnals and NFTs is we crossed this chasm from what was a bearish scenario to a bullish scenario. If I was a minor, I would be ecstatic.

I think that long-term, there are a lot of implications. Long-term, the implication is there's going to be a lot of applications on the Bitcoin base layer. If I can inscribe a piece of art, right? An NFT is kind of an art. But I could also inscribe my last-well-intestiment. And if my last-well-intestiment is moving a billion dollars for me to you, how much is it worth to you to have that burned onto the blockchain

and cryptographically verified? Yeah, at least a billion dollars for me, Michael. Would you pay 20 bucks? Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Would you pay a hundred dollars? Of course. There you pay $100? Of course. There you go.

So there are interesting applications. If I have a corporate resolution to make a billion dollar investment and I document it and I'm worried about getting sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in the future, would I pay a hundred bucks to burn that on the blockchain? Maybe, probably. If I have a message I want to send around the world and I don't want a hostile nation state to interfere with that message,

is that worth 20 bucks or 50 bucks? Sure it is. So what people are realizing is that transactions on the blockchain, they are the ability to send a message that a nation state can't stop. Their ability to send a message that a nation state can't stop their ability to put To put a document on on a network for a hundred years that knowing can actually tamper an immutable blockchain I mean if I can store a billion dollars for a hundred years. That's valuable, but you know if you had if you wanted to move $10 million of oil from New York to London,

it will cost you about $350,000. So what if I want to move $10 million of Bitcoin from New York to London? What if I want to move $10 million worth of a document of something of a, if you wanted to sell a $10 million work of art, that's $500,000 to a million or more in auction fees. So people have thought, well, transactions, man, there's no future for them. But I actually am of the opinion that transactions

at a dollar or two dollars transaction, they're very undervalued. This is the most valuable, most tamper proof, immutable, secure transaction network in the world. If I gave you $100 billion and I said attack the network, you couldn't do it. If you were a nation with $100 billion and four years, you could slow it down, but you couldn't stop it.

So I think that the real significance of ordinals and NFTs and inscriptions is people used to take the transactions for granted and they undervalued the Bitcoin mining network. And now I think what you have is a lot of speculation and you also have, you have a migration of crypto development energy from the other cryptos to Bitcoin.

That's a good thing, I think. It's inevitable because Bitcoin is the low risk crypto network and the high security crypto network. So you're going to see speculation move, you're going to see development move. But long term, what's really significant here is that people are going to see Bitcoin as the most secure cyber network or the most secure computer network in the world. And if I told you, I'm going to burn a document and I want it to stay immutable for a hundred years and I don't want any hostile corporation or nation state or actor to be able to tamper with it or stop it and in a hundred years

I want to prove that that's my document. You know Satoshi could sign a digital document. He could sign a message today and prove that he owns $30 billion of Bitcoin and he could do it in a split second. That's the power of the Bitcoin network. And that has been under realized. It's underestimated. So I think that what's going to go right now is it's going to be a lot of excitement. But ultimately, the ethically sound, technically sound, economically sound future is for people to realize that Bitcoin is this immutable, you know, incorruptible, non-sovereign computer network, and it's going to protect your money, but

it's also going to protect your integrity, and people are going to pay money for truth on that network. And that's what's going to finance those miners. And when you look at all those minors running in Texas, you're saying, what are they doing? They're protecting the integrity of Western civilization, maybe of all, they're protecting the integrity of the human race for the next thousand years.

And that's worse something. That's powerful. We've got five minutes. And I want to go through two things with you. One, you said Satoshi, how often do you guys text each other? Are you guys like in communication regularly or? I think about Satoshi every day. Really? Does he think about you? Is there like a direct line of community because you're becoming gradually the Billy Graham of Bitcoin? Like, you know, you went from a non-believer to a believer. It was a one-way gift.

The reason the Bitcoin is ethical is Satoshi made a one-way gift to the human race asking nothing in return and that is an extraordinary thing. So as a guide that you said, you hire 30,000 employees. 2,000 are still with you. You've been operating for 30 years, okay. You've been a billionaire for a minute. You were a billionaire in the late 90s and you've been in that talks.

For you, it's probably not a big deal because you've been that for a while, but to the average person to see that category with there's only 700 to 900 of you in America, it's a pretty big deal to get to a place like that. There's a guy right now that could be potentially looking for another job. And he was being interviewed on MSNBC

by this lady named Stephanie Rool. And he was asked the question, I'm curious to know if you would hire somebody like this. This is a phenomenal question here. There's not a Fortune 500 company in the world looking to hire a CEO in his 80s. So why would an 82 year old Joe Biden be the right person for the most important job in the world?

Because I've acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom. I know more than the vast majority of people, I'm more experienced than anybody's ever run for the office. And I think I've proven myself to be honorable as well as also effective. Would you hire somebody like that to run a, I don't know, like a $45 trillion your company, whatever the number, $32 trillion company give or take, I could be off on the GDP.

You think that would be a good seal for a company that size? Now you're asking me a question that's somewhat above my pay grade. I think that... Wait, wait, you're a voter. Tom, let's see what he's got to say. I think that the number one criteria to run an organization is humility combined with a bit of wisdom from life experience, but combined with an extraordinary amount of energy, you have to eat, sleep, and breathe the thing. And I think that organizations that have people

with too much confidence, they tend to go off the rails. And so it's good to know what you don't know. Got it. So to understand the what you meant, we have to speak sign language. So he left it to you guys. You decide what our friend here meant by that, whether he just just for your own company, if you were looking again to a point where you would be replacing yourself as a CEO, would you look at somebody and value a person with, you know, who's 82 years old wanting to be the CEO of microsratergeo, would you look for somebody younger, or would

it even matter to you age wise? Well, I mean, I did have the opportunity to replace myself last year, and I'm the executive chairman, and we appointed a new CEO, and the CEO is fondly, and he's, he's in his 40s early 40s. So you weren't like you weren't going on like seniorseos.com and looking for recruiters to find like maybe that's not even seniors right because baby boomers what 1946 to 64. So you weren't interested in experience. Then I'm not going to say the perfect age to be CEO because there are a lot of examples. I mean, I myself appointed myself CEO at age 24, but then again, I was only responsible

for myself. And I couldn't mess much up because I inherited, you know, and it took me many, many years to get to the point where I could break something. Well, I think that the bigger the organization, the more careful one needs to be. This is a pretty big organization we're talking about. And this guy's applying for that job. 300 million. Anyways, so Michael, every time you come, by the time you're done talking, my brain feels

like has had a four hour workout, even it was only 90 minutes today, because you make me think, and I love the way you explain, and you're always gathering information from different places, and the audience loves it. So this is, I think, you're one of only three or four names that we've had on three times. So if you've never felt like, maybe if you recently have not been getting enough love, we just want to make sure you know we love Michael Saler, the Billy Graham, Bitcoin. That's going to be the new nickname by the way. The evangelist. The evangelist, the Billy Graham of Bitcoin, baptizing folks and Bitcoin around the world. Okay. If you don't remember anything else I said today, just remember Bitcoin is hope

and go to hope.com. That's where all the information is. Really? Bitcoin good. Laser eyes. Bitcoin good. You can draw it all down to hope.com. That's where all the information is really good laser eyes Bitcoin good you can draw it all down to that everything else is complicated and big week next week. I mean Bitcoin conference is gonna be yeah, 15,000 cyber hornets coming to my I'll be right here. It's gonna be awesome. You got to baptize all of them and name the Satoshi Bitcoin and what would be the third? You know, there's gotta be the technology, right? Anyways, Michael, once again, thank you, gang, all the stuff is below links, Rob,

let's put it there for people to be able to find Michael. I asked him a question earlier about Michael, who do you follow on social, what you read their articles? If you go follow his Twitter account, you'll be able to know who he follows, and that's where you'll see where he gets his intel from. Okay, maybe that's one way to find out who those 590 people are that Mr. Sailor follows. Anyways, gang, we're about to announce the next live podcast.

If you want to be one the first to know about a text award podcast, to 310-340-1132, again 310-340-1132, text award podcast. Take everybody. Bye-bye. to 310-340-1132, again 310-340-1132, text award podcast. Take care everybody, bye bye bye.