The Wolf Of All Streets - How He Persuaded Michael Saylor To Buy Billions Of Dollars Worth Of Bitcoin | Eric Weiss, BIG Fund

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Michael Saylor famously sparked a bull market by buying Bitcoin and putting it on the balance sheet of MicroStrategy. That’s not the beginning of the story. Eric Weiss, a Bitcoin OG, is the legend that successfully orange-pilled his best friend Michael Saylor, convincing him to buy billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. This episode contains the incredible true story of how one man’s advice changed the crypto landscape forever. On top of that, Eric Weiss is a successful digital asset manager for high-net-worth individuals, so he really goes deep on why Bitcoin is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. -- Arculus: Arculus is the new crypto cold storage wallet that combines the world’s strongest security protocols with an easy-to-manage app. Store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus Key™ card. Order the safer, simpler, smarter crypto cold storage solution today at: https://thewolfofallstreets.link/arculus -- Kava: Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems and financial applications on DeFi’s most trusted, scalable and secure earning platform. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets. To learn more visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/kava --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This podcast is sponsored by Kava and Arculus. Stay tuned for more information about both of them later in this episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where two times every week, we talk to your favorite personalities

from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, music, art, sports, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, everybody here likely experienced the crypto winter that started at the end of 2017 to 2018. And arguably the catalyst that brought us out of that was one man and one company buying Bitcoin and putting it on their balance sheet. Of course, I'm talking about Michael Saylor and his company, MicroStrategy. But nobody's really bothered to go back to the beginning of that story and ask how Michael Saylor actually found out about Bitcoin in the first place. And the answer is that he was orange-pilled by today's guest, Eric Weiss, who is a digital

asset manager for family offices and high net worth individuals, but much more, actually bought his first Bitcoin at the end of 2013. I'm interested to hear his story, what he thinks is coming for the market in the coming years, and well, basically just to dig into all of his knowledge since he's been here for a lot longer than even I have. Eric Weissman, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. Let's dive right into it, man. I want to hear the orange pill story. How did you orange pill Michael Sandler? Yeah. So I'm certainly not the person that made Michael aware of Bitcoin. He

was aware of it. And as he's kind of said, clearly, he was not a fan of it initially. I started a fund in the space in February of 2018. And, you know, I am a digital asset manager. That's what I do for a living. But Michael and I have been friends for more than 20 years and we hang out quite a bit. So it wasn't in the context of being a digital asset manager that we had these discussions related to Bitcoin. It was as friends who talk about investments and technology and all kinds of things like that. So when I started my fund, you know, Michael cautioned me that this, you me that I come from a traditional finance background. And his cautioning me was along the lines of, hey, are you sure you want to do this? This is pretty new stuff.

It doesn't have the best reputation. You've got a good reputation. And so he was not on board. And in those initial conversations, it wasn't, hey, I'd like to invest. But over time, I kept mentioning it, I kept bringing up, I mean, it was something that I was passionate about, in addition to being my livelihood. And so it was always kind of a topic of discussion, you know, between us. And as he said, you know, he was always kind of like, just very dismissive of it. You know, he

had his own public company to run and had forecasted the mobile wave with unbelievable clarity and had done very well investing in technology as well. So this wasn't really on his radar. And during the lockdown pandemic, whatever you want to call it, we were actually spending a lot of time together hanging out because there wasn't much you could do. And the accommodations at his house were a lot more comfortable than mine. So we would kind of sit by the pool and talk about the world and how things were evolving. And we were really perplexed, very puzzled by this K-shaped recovery was something we were trying to make sense of. And in that context, when the government started going crazy, printing this money that caused this K-shaped recovery, it was in that context that when I brought up Bitcoin again, Michael was much more interested. And he remembers me saying that anytime there's a paradigm shift like this, there's opportunity.

And we just need to find the opportunity, meaning this great change with pandemic, etc. And then, as I often do, I talked about Bitcoin. And instead of dismissing me this time, he said, you know, gave me that now famous Michael Saylor look like this. And he said, tell me more about that. And I was surprised. And we spent the next, I think, probably three days going as deep into Bitcoin as I was capable of going. And when he was done taking all the knowledge out of my brain, he said, well, where can I learn more?

And I pointed him to a bunch of resources and books, et cetera, and Twitter. And he said, okay. And then we kept talking about it over the next handful of days. And yeah, then he got in a much bigger way than I anticipated. It was later that year, like in the June timeframe, when I was pulling into a restaurant here in Miami to meet some friends and the phone rang. And I see it's like Michael's on my caller ID and usually he'll text, not call. So I was like, oh, better pick this up. And he goes, well, I bought some Bitcoin. And I said, cool.

And he goes, yeah, 10,000. And at the time, Bitcoin was like almost exactly $10,000 per Bitcoin. And I was like, you bought one Bitcoin? And he goes, nowhere. I bought 10,000 Bitcoin. And my heart literally stopped. Quick multiplication, I'm like, holy shit, that's $100 million. And so I went from thinking, hey, I'd like to get my buddy involved in this to, oh my God, he just invested a hundred million dollars in this. And if you've been in it as long as we have, the one thing you know for sure is there's some volatility and there's some ups and downs. And I went from thinking, glad I got my buddy in to hope he has a good experience and hope this doesn't impact our friendship. So anyway, that's kind of the short version of the story. Doesn't that echo the conversation that everyone's had with a close friend or family member who they convinced to buy Bitcoin right before it went down, right? You always win in the end, but seemingly in the short term, it's always something that you regret

telling them about or that they blame you for, right? Yeah. I mean, fortunately, he's had a fairly good experience. I mean, he's continued to buy a lot more at varying prices, but his initial investments and his biggest investments are looking pretty good still. You touched on the accommodations being nice at his house. I've been there and I can echo that certainly. And I believe you're sitting there right now. I am. Yeah. Actually, the table that we were at by his pool when you were here, that's the exact table that that orange pilling conversation occurred at. Incredible. Yeah, it's incredible. But I don't think I've seen yourself and him collectively because, you know, obviously everybody can see on Twitter how much conviction he has, how deep he's gone down this rabbit hole. But you're the person that is constantly there and bouncing these ideas back and forth.

So you probably have developed sort of your own even much deeper narratives, I would imagine, than you even had probably a year and a half ago, even all those years owning Bitcoin. So I really want to hear what the last few years, seeing him going through this process, you going through it with him and all those macro things you've discussed, the money printing, how do you view Bitcoin now, I guess, versus how you maybe even viewed it a year and a half or two years ago. Yeah. So it's interesting because Michael, his depth of knowledge and the depth to which he researches something is unlike anybody I've ever met. He's truly the most intelligent human being I've ever met. And he has this encyclopedic knowledge of history, of finance, of all these different things. And he's able to view things in a context that's very unique. So look, when I bought Bitcoin initially

in December of 2013, I come out of the venture capital world, which I know on Twitter now is a dirty phraseology to say, but I was a technology venture capitalist and primarily investing in businesses that were leveraging the internet. And I went to a conference in Miami in the early part of 2013, I believe a Bitcoin conference. And this was the first time that I'd seen Bitcoin and it clicked for me that the internet was really good for transmitting information quickly but not particularly secure right think of emails or you know sharing photos that kind of thing information just letting someone know that you have something for sale kind of thing but not particularly safe and secure when I saw Bitcoin this was the first time that you could

transmit value using the internet safely and securely. And even better than that, party A didn't need to know or trust party B to do a transaction. It was trustless. So this was kind of mind blowing to me. So my thought was, I got to drop what I'm doing and do something in this space. I've got to start a business, but racking my brain, I'm like, what business could I possibly start? And I business, but racking my brain, I'm like, what business could I possibly start? And I thought, well, I could do a directory of companies that are accepting Bitcoin. But at the time, obviously there's still very few, but at the time it was like de minimis. Yeah, exactly. Small directory. And I came to the conclusion that if this was going to work out, that the price of Bitcoin would have to go up and there was no point taking the business

risk, the execution risk of doing a business, that I should just buy some Bitcoin. So I did in December 2013, I bought some Bitcoin, but more like a passion buy. I would say that on a risk adjusted basis today, Bitcoin is a much better investment than it was when I made it back then. But I just, I felt like I had to do something. And then the price shot up. I felt like a rock star. The price fell way below my cost basis. And I felt like an idiot. And then it got back up above my cost basis again. I think I was up something like 50%. And I sold it all. Talk about big mistakes, right? And I still don't have as much Bitcoin now as I had then. And I've been buying Bitcoin for a long time. But, you know, to answer your question about my view of it, at the time, it was kind of hope,

potential, libertarian perspective, more of a technology-based investment that kind of, hey, this is what the internet could be used for. And now I think of it almost as something borderline religious, although I'm certainly not a zealot and I'm not a hardcore maximalist. But when I look around us now and I think about what the governments are doing around the world, whether it's kind of theft through money printing and inflation or it's taking away people's civil liberties that they may have had previously, it just feels good to me to have something that is counter to that. And the fact that it's also financially beneficial is great too. Professionally, I went from educating people on Bitcoin and telling them the different ways that they can get exposure to it if they want, but not going as far as to say, hey, you should really have some of this stuff. Now things have progressed to a point that I'm comfortable actually telling people that

they should have some investment in Bitcoin. Right. Well, you're obviously you're managing these assets for family offices, high net worth individuals. Walk me through that first conversation with someone who's a complete crypto virgin, a Bitcoin virgin. I heard about this thing, Bitcoin. I'm scared of it. What are the questions they ask? What are the answers? And of course, how much do they want to put in? Is this a 1%, a 5%, a 10% thing? Usually, it takes place with either their son or daughter on the call. It's usually their son or daughter who has said to them, you know, mom, dad, you've got to be in this. We've got to do this. Why are we not invested in this? And the story is usually that the parent

has dismissed the child for some period of time. But now they A, see that their kid was right. And B, they're starting to hear about this, not just from their kid anymore. They're seeing it on CNBC or whatever programs they watch or whatever news things they use. So now they're saying, yeah, it looks like my kid was probably right. Maybe I should find out about this. Somewhere or another, they get to me and we start to have a conversation and the questions run the gamut. The biggest one is, you know, why can't there be any more of it? Like, why is 21 million the max? And no matter how many times you explain it to them, it just doesn't, they're like, yeah, but computers get hacked and someone could hack in and change the code. And I'm like, you know, you try to explain it, distribute it. And it's just for some folks, they get it. And for others, it's just age wise generationally, it's just too far away from the things they understand. And so I find that sometimes the most effective narrative is digital gold. And I come back to, you own gold? Yeah, I own some gold. Okay. Well, these are just 21 million gold bars.

There can never be any more. They dig two to 3% more gold out of the ground every year. They're not digging any more than 21 million Bitcoin out. That's it. That's all there'll ever be. And your generation like this yellow metal, future generations that grew up with iPads in their hand, they like this digital gold. This is what they identify with. So if your kids or grandkids are gonna be like, why did you have this stupid yellow metal when you should have had this stuff? And that usually gets them to dip a toe, some allocation, somewhere between one and 10%.

Yeah, one and 10% seems like what I would expect, right? And then I guess if they become much more passionate about it, or of course their they become much more passionate about it, or of course, their gains make them more passionate about it, maybe they lever up or scale up a bit down the road. The other thing that I found effective in scaling up is a lot of wealthy people still have exposure to bonds and fixed income. And it's like- 60-40 is dead, right?

I mean, yeah, it's dead. Right. And when you explain to them, okay, so let me get this straight. You're locking in a 3% yield for 10 years, but you acknowledge that the inflation rate is significantly more than 3%. So in real terms, you're locking in a loss for 10 years. Why are you locking in a loss? And they'll understand from a Ray Dalio point of view that cash is trash and your cash is being devalued. And in order to not lose your purchasing power, you need to be invested in something that is going to hopefully keep pace with inflation. And that seems to say, okay, maybe I shouldn't be so wedded to my bond portfolio. Maybe I shouldn't be so wedded to my real estate with 3% annual rent increases. And they start to think about things differently. And once you start viewing it through this lens that the purchasing power of your money is being stolen from you and inflated away, then people start to think about it and kind of, you know, exactly what got Saylor into it.

As he said, you know, where his company had 500 million in cash. He's got a business that's hoping to make $50 million a year and the inflation rate is 10 plus percent. So he's losing $50 million a year in value on, you know, this $500 million nest egg. So he's literally got 2000 people working their ass off to be on a treadmill just to hope to stay even. And that's what, you know, the same applies to people. People are just little corporations. Families are just little corporations. Right. So that definitely applies to the wealthiest individuals and the ones who are coming to his clients. But I think it's actually a really interesting corollary for probably the experience of your average American or your

average person anywhere in the world who probably never really thought about money at all, what it was, what it meant, what impact it had on their lives until 2020 when the stock market didn't stop going up, but they still couldn't afford food, which was rising in prices. So I think the context of what happened in the last two years probably has made it a much easier sell, right? I mean, it was an idea everyone understood, but you could see it in practice. Yeah, I think the irony is I think Bitcoin is an infinitely more important and more powerful tool to the people at the bottom of the wage gap, right? If you're rich and you own homes or art or something that's scarce, you're getting the benefit of this inflation through asset appreciation. You're staying some version of current, right? But if you're a wage earner, your paycheck's not

going up by 100% to keep up with inflation. You just aren't making enough or keeping enough to stay current. So for those people, Bitcoin does more than it does for the wealthy, right? Because a lot of people still are able to save. And if they could save in Bitcoin versus dollars, that would help them enormously. Plus, there are a lot of people who just literally can't save because they're unbanked, but they have mobile phones. And if you could turn your phone into your Bitcoin bank and save the fiat you make in Bitcoin, as that Bitcoin appreciates relative to fiat, that wage gap will be narrowed and they know, disproportionately benefited from that. And I think it's one of the things that upsets me the most is that, you know, Bitcoin seems to be political in some way. And it seems like, you know, the most progressive folks, the Elizabeth Warrens of the world seem to be against it, which can only be a lack of understanding.

Right. I mean, I can't think of someone who seems, right? I mean, like Jack is, Jack's entire interest is in that area. He's not interested in the rich getting richer. He's interested in helping people. And I think that's why he's done everything he's done. And I just, I don't understand why that narrative isn't better understood. And I also don't understand why this isn't more of a bipartisan thing that could actually bring political parties together. Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, politicians just want to get reelected. And they say whatever they think is going to do that job, unfortunately, and the people probably get left behind in most of those conversations. And

I mean, that's right. Yeah. And I think that that's also talk about things that have been exposed over the last two years, right? I mean, it's very hard to watch. They only want the solutions that they've come up with. If it's a solution that they didn't come up with, it appears to be not a great solution for them. They want credit. Guys, unless you've been living underneath a rock for the past few months, then you've definitely heard me talk about one of my favorite platforms, which is Kava. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platform. They have borrow APYs as low as 0% and reward APYs as high as 200%. They let you mint stable coins, lend, borrow, earn,

and swap safely and efficiently across the world's biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional grid security and quality. Guys, if you have not checked out Kava yet, then what are you doing? You can check it out at thewolfofallstreets.link slash Kava. Do it now. Guys, I'm so excited to tell you about this new crypto cold storage solution called Arculus. Their cold storage technology keeps your crypto keys off the internet and on an Arculus keycard. With no cables and no USB connections, it insulates you from the thousands of hacking attempts that happen online every single day. You can store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus keycard. And if someone were to get a hold of

your card, it doesn't even matter because they have three-factor authentication, ensuring that the only person with access to your crypto is you. Guys, you can check out Arculus at thewolfofallstreets.link slash Arculus. That's A-R-C-U-L-U-S. Secure your assets, secure your future with Arculus. Also, it seems like everything is just like a headline, right? It's clickbait. It's for press. Bitcoin uses more electricity than Argentina, right? We all know that it's not true.

And the source of the electricity is what matters. But that doesn't make as good of a headline, right? And so, but interestingly, now, you know, we've seen what happened with the infrastructure bill this year, for example, right? There was this one sort of like afterthought of a provision about crypto that sort of galvanized the crypto community. Everyone came together. We froze the largest infrastructure bill in history for four days while they debated basically this crypto provision. So wouldn't you think now that politicians maybe would open their eyes and say, my constituents care about this and we can actually politicize this issue enough that it becomes something they have to support

to get reelected, flip it basically. I think that's happening. I mean, as we've seen like Chairman Powell and Gensler and others in front of Congress, I've been really surprised at what, you know, senators and Congress people are saying to these, you know, heads of divisions, they're saying, your job is to protect the consumer. If you outlaw these things or make them illegal, you're going to be hurting the consumer, they have a lot of wealth in these

things. And honestly, it's a little mind blowing for me, right? That it's like, that they've taken such a strong stance politically to be in favor of crypto in general, which I think is great. You know, you can have a debate about the value propositions or legality of different digital assets, you know, but at the end of the day, what's really clear is there is no digital asset on as solid a footing legally as Bitcoin, right? So I mean, no matter where you think about what your opinions are in that spectrum, Bitcoin, I would think, should be the one that people have the most comfort in owning just because it's on such great footing. And you can almost look at all those other digital assets as a moat around Bitcoin, right? There's a lot of MicroStrategy. So I think there's something there. It's a little strange to me that Gensler, the head of the SEC, who is so incredibly well versed in Bitcoin and digital assets. Yeah, I mean, you probably watched, you know, some or all of the, you know, his courses. And it's, I mean, he is as, truly his knowledge

is as impressive as it gets on Bitcoin. And my perception of watching those courses was that he actually has tremendous admiration and respect for Satoshi and Bitcoin. So I'm a little surprised that he hasn't done more to kind of protect or help Bitcoin, whether it's giving a spot ETF or something of that nature, or just being a little more constructive with his words. Yeah, it just seems like for him, politicians, all of them in general, they've just taken sort of the easier path, right? A Bitcoin futures ETF was very easy to approve because it was in a comfortable

structure that mirrored basically a mutual fund. And they didn't have a viable argument not to do it. And by doing it, they could completely kick the spot ETF down the road, potentially for years, right? Basically throw you a bone. There you go. You got it. It's a subpar product. It's crap, but Hey, we gave you your ETF, right? Yeah. The interesting, when they rejected the spot ETF, the, my interpretation of the, the reasoning they gave, um, it made a lot of sense, you know, from their perspective, I think it seemed like what they were saying is we can't grant this ETF because the exchanges on which Bitcoin trades don't comply with US regulation, security regulation that we're comfortable with.

And therefore, they might be manipulated and we're not getting a sufficient amount of information to green light this. And my interpretation of that was what they're really saying is it's very hard for us to regulate these exchanges because of all the assets they trade. So they're looking for like one throat to choke kind of thing. And they're trying to use this spot ETF as pressure on the exchanges to come into whatever their version of compliance is. And I think they're trying to use the entire Bitcoin community who has the most leverage in the digital asset space to put pressure on the exchanges to say, hey, get your shit together

so we can get our ETF. I think that was part of the rationale behind what they did. Yeah, I agree with that. But that said, how important is a spot ETF at this point? The narrative has always been like, we need this asset that the risk managers of this big wall of money, the endowments and the pensions of them, we need an asset that the risk managers can say, yes, I can comfortably invest in this, right? But-

I don't think it's important. Right, of all people who destroyed that narrative is Michael, right? He said, given he has tremendous control of micro strategy, but he proved that a publicly traded company with every barrier to entry possible, that it could be done, that you could go buy billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, the actual asset, you could custody it securely. So that was really the narrative for the spot ETF. So I'm assuming you just said,

you don't think we need it. I don't think we need it. But I think you could even take that a step further and say MicroStrategy is a great proxy for a Bitcoin spot ETF. I mean, you can own MicroStrategy. I think MicroStrategy has demonstrated clearly that their goal is to find ways to buy more Bitcoin. So in some ways, it's like a levered spot ETF, right? It seems like they keep buying more. Michael said that they're going to continue to explore ways to buy more. And on top of that, you've got all the derivative products that come with MicroStrategy. You've got put and call options, right, that trade on the exchanges. You can also, holding MicroStrategy in a brokerage

account, that's marginable. You can borrow against it, all these other things. So I think, and the Bitcoin miners and the GBTC, even though I think that fee structure is scary and it's not a product that I love, although I love the company and Barry and I give them props, but it's not something that I would hold. But I think there are plenty of alternatives in addition to no shortage of information publicly available on how you might want to get your Bitcoin and hold it yourself. It's interesting about MicroStrategy. If you want to buy it as a proxy sort of spot ETF is that you not only get the Bitcoin exposure, but you get an actual profitable and successful company's earnings underneath, right? You kind of get the benefit of investing in a successful company and the Bitcoin part of it. Even better, they seem to be taking those profits in fiat from

the company and buying Bitcoin with it. It's like a synthetic miner, right? They're like generating dollars through their core business. They're using those dollars to buy more Bitcoin at every opportunity they get. So when you buy in, you kind of get the feeling like you're going to end up owning more Bitcoin than you're buying into today. So I don't know. I should disclose, I don't own any MicroStrategy stock and I haven't. It's just not something I trade in just because we're close buddies. So unfortunately, I don't dabble in it. Otherwise, I would have had the benefit of going from $120 a share when this journey started to the 600 or so it is today. Right. And at a point over a thousand. Right. Yeah. I was watching a podcast the other day and they were talking about the best trades of the year or something or whatever. And they talk about Bill Ackman's trade. And I'm just amazed that nobody's talked about,

you know, what MicroStrategy has done. I'm amazed that it's not the front page of Forbes or something, you know, or like Barron's like, this is maybe the best trade of the century. Right. I mean, it's amazing. He's taken a stop from, he started with $250 million and has turned it into billions of dollars of shareholder value. So I think it's quite a story. It's an incredible story. And what's interesting is, you know, obviously, I believe August, September 2020, right, that the first MicroStrategy purchase happened. And then obviously, you know, in the months after that, we saw Tesla add Bitcoin to the balance sheet. And you had this feeling,

especially you guys had the conference, you know, hosting all of these CFOs and company heads about putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet. I had the feeling everyone did. I think that we are going to see this huge wave of just hundreds of companies adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet. And it sort of didn't happen. Why do you think that that's the case? Or is it something that takes a long time and maybe is happening? I mean, to clarify, Michael had the conference. I don't have any affiliation with MicroStrategy. But I think the reason is the tax code. And the tax code is just incredibly punitive for anyone who's subject to GAAP accounting, which are all US

publicly traded companies. And I'm not a CPA. I don't profess to know a ton about it. But the shorthand version is, if you have Bitcoin on your balance sheet, and it goes down, you've got a market at the lowest price that it went down to. And that loss counts against your business as an operating loss, as if your business lost money. Now, if you're in a situation where your micro strategy and it becomes your entire balance sheet, pardon me, people are maybe willing to look through that and say, okay, how many Bitcoin does the company own? I can do multiplication and I can see where this is the equity value. I give that, right? If you're an Apple or somebody, right? And you've

got $60 billion worth of cash on your balance sheet, and you decide to buy $3 billion worth of Bitcoin, and it goes down and you get hit with a $100 million loss that screws your earnings by a couple of cents per share. Is anyone going to parse through an entire Apple balance sheet to see that, oh, this really just came from a $3 billion markdown in Bitcoin, which is already back up or something. So I think that's the deterrent is the accounting. Marking to the lowest price is absurd. It's absurd. And you're right. So why would any company take the risk, even if they believe in it, that it could destroy earnings for a quarter and send their stock down 10% for the

small gain that they might get in Bitcoin if it's trading sideways or something. It's literally not worth it, but I'm optimistic that it will change if only because I think at its core, Gap Accounting's goal really is to show an accurate picture. And if Bitcoin trades down to $35,000 in the quarter, and you've got it marked on your books at $35,000, and at the end of the quarter or something, it's currently trading at $50,000 for Bitcoin, and you're forced to show the value of that 30,000 level, it's just not an accurate representation. We know the price of this every second of every day. We can do a better job of marking the market and showing a more accurate picture. So I'm optimistic that it will change. That should be when your quarter closes.

Yeah. I mean, it's just pretty obvious. Like that's when your last penny of earnings right up until the close counts, right? Absolutely. So why would you only get the downside? Why don't you market to the highest price that it ever was during the quarter? Yeah, equally as ridiculous, right? Equally as misleading. Yeah, it really is very, very misleading. So knowing that that's a challenge,

but knowing that we have probably literally thousands of companies. I think it's a massive opportunity. Like if and when they make that change. Oh, they're going to flood in. That's literally what I was just going to ask. So assuming they make that change, we know that probably hundreds, if not thousands of companies would be willing to at least throw half percent, 1% of their treasury into Bitcoin. I think we'll see billions of dollars of Bitcoin purchase, billions and billions. If that doesn't change, how can these companies participate if they want to?

They can hold funds. So you can invest in a Bitcoin fund, and there are plenty of them. I have one, but there are many others. And in that sense, you're investing in a fund, you're not investing in Bitcoin per se, even though it may ostensibly be like a Bitcoin ETF kind of thing. And then you treat it just as any other fund type investment that a company may make. So there are no shortage of ways around it. They can hold other stocks that may have Bitcoin exposure, et cetera. So there are plenty of options. And how about, in your opinion, Bitcoin as an actual method of payment for companies? Because it's another place that I thought we'd see a bit more adoption. Obviously, you know, Elon Musk,

Tesla's going to accept Bitcoin, then Tesla's not going to accept Bitcoin. Some people think that was the catalyst for sort of the summer downtrend. I don't buy that personally. Well, I think in hindsight, it was clearly China, right? It wasn't Iran. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think Elon's a challenging friend in this space, right? Because he did buy a lot of Bitcoin. He does continue to hold a lot of Bitcoin. He said publicly that it's the only material thing that he owns any amount of, et cetera, and transactions. And he seems to kind of willfully not acknowledge

the Lightning Network and other ways that this works. But I think the transactional aspect is not essential to me. I know that that's kind of not always a politically correct thing to say in Bitcoin maxi land. But I don't think it's an essential part of the puzzle. I think that you can store your wealth in Bitcoin and protect yourself from inflation and all these other forces. And when you need to transact, you can convert to currency, be it a dollar or a euro, and convert as much as you need and transact the way you want. And that's it. And you don't really need to transact in Bitcoin for it to be, you know, a hundred trillion dollar,

you know, asset. I a hundred percent agree with you. You know, I think people get caught up in the white paper saying peer to peer cash because it's sort of the idea of what it was supposed to be, but maybe isn't what it evolved into of the idea of what it was supposed to be, but maybe isn't what it evolved into. Yeah, maybe it evolved into something better. I agree. Yeah. So it's interesting now that we have all these sort of competitive ways within crypto to transact, you know, stable coins and other currencies and all these things. And there seems to be this sort of division that Bitcoin, or this belief, I would say, on one side, that Bitcoin has to be all those things.

You obviously just hinted to the fact that it doesn't. But do you believe that all of the things being elsewhere can be built on, you know, layer twos or built on Bitcoin, or do they even need to be? I think they, I mean, that's not my area of expertise. It appears to me that they can, that everything that's needed can be built around Bitcoin on top of Bitcoin.

I think the part that is really, Bitcoin's done the part that's really hard, right? Like even if you started, right, exactly. And like technologically, you could do it today um conceptually you could do it today but could you do it in such a pure autonomous way where there wasn't kind of this founder group or something that was compromised where it wasn't some polarizing figures that were involved be it it governments or others. And so I think we have this really unique kind of immaculate conception of sorts, right? Where we had a year of time where this had fucking zero value.

Nobody cared, right? Like that would not be the case again. So we've built this, we've got this core thing now, which we can do these things on top of. And I think that is the secret sauce here, not the technological advancement, software, software. I mean, people can build, if they can build it on a different L1, they can build it on Bitcoin. Yeah. I think that that's a very interesting and reasonable take. I love that idea of an immaculate conception because it really was the perfect asset at the perfect time and presented in the perfect manner. I really don't think anything like it. I mean, it's very short-sighted to say nothing could happen again,

right? But I can't imagine in this world, in this context, something like that happening. I agree. It's kind of like everybody's antenna is now up, right? There's a level of skepticism now that like you kind of, you only get one first shot. What's really amazing to me is that it worked, you know, like that's the amazing thing is, you know, they put it out there or he put it out there or she put it out there, whoever it is. And it's kind of worked, you know, it didn't fall on its face. So I don't think you can go back there and do it again. And it's kind of worked. It didn't fall on its face. So I don't think you can go back there and do it again. I think that the whole world is kind of looking now that people understand the value proposition. And I think we just got lucky. Yeah. And what's

amazing to me and the thing that seems to be missed is not only did it work, but it's survived these massive crashes, this massive FUD, bad news, incredibly terrifying price action without any intervention. Every other market in the world, the beloved stock market, all these things, the second it drops a few percent, there's a circuit breaker and the market's shut. And we need the Fed to step in and start buying things. Even at its worst, you have half the hash rate moving out of China all at once while price absolutely crashes and the network just keeps on going. Yeah. I was at a crypto conference, Bitcoin conference. I was at a conference in 2016 and there was a hedge fund manager, traditional hedge fund manager on stage who was being interviewed. And they asked him about

Bitcoin and they asked him kind of what his interest was, why are you interested in this asset? And he said, look, he said, if something won't die over years and years and years, you have to start to pay attention to it. And so he was kind of looking at like this Lindy, you know, thing where it's like, yeah, exactly. And it's like he was just, you know, kind of looking at the fact that lots of entities, lots of people, lots of agencies have tried to kill this thing and it just won't die. It just keeps coming back. And that's indicative of something that's just wanted by a lot of people in order for that to happen. And I think it gets even more remarkable when you think about the fact that there is no centralization. It's not like $10 billion of venture capital was raised to market

this like an Uber or something, right? This is something that people have gravitated towards all around the world because it helps them and solves a problem and it's something they believe in. So I think it's a real natural, organic kind of grassroots movement that is just not going to be stopped. That guy said that in 2016, right? 2016. Think about what we went through through 2018, 19. And then obviously March of 2020, Bitcoin was going to zero, there's still credible people screaming that at the top of their lungs. And it's like, at what point do people just acknowledge they were wrong? At what point does like a Peter Schiff, who's been saying that this is crap and garbage and going to zero from the time that it was like, infinitesimal. And now it's like, draw a line in the sand, say, okay, when it hits a certain mark, whatever it is, I'll capitulate. And I will say that it's now a thing, like the world has decided. So I don't know. For me, in my mind, that number is 100,000 in US

dollars. I think when it gets to 100,000 in US dollars, you're going to see a lot of the naysayers kind of disappear and just be like, all right, I don't want to be associated with being wrong this much anymore. Yeah, 2 trillion, 3 trillion, 4 trillion dollar market caps, you start talking about being bigger than the largest companies in the world and competing with metals. It's very hard to argue against at that point. Such an interesting study in human psychology, though. You talk about Peter Schiff, of course. He's the perfect sort of villain for the Bitcoin space. But it has nothing to do with rational thought anymore. I think it has to do with just emotionally admitting he's wrong. In fact, the day that Peter Schiff says I was wrong is probably when we should sell.

I mean, we should probably never sell, right? I know you agree with that. But I think actually the Peter Schiffs of the world are awesome for Bitcoin. You need a personification. Like there's no personification of a yellow rock. So it's great that there are the Frank Giustra's and Peter Schiff's of the world who will continually try to champion gold. And what's particularly

interesting about that to me is if you peel that onion back a layer, what you invariably find out is none of these guys who are pitching gold own that much of it. And businesses surrounding it. Exactly. Peter actually admitted on Pomp's podcast, like, you know, recently he said verbatim, gold is a small part of my portfolio. Like those exact words on video, Peter Schiff said, if that's not, I mean, I hesitate to say charlatan, but it's like really close to that, right? It's like, you're not even eating your own cooking. You're selling something that you don't believe in. And it's like, oh, when you really peel it back and look at it, you own the gold miners. So you're in the business of selling gold. You're not in the business of holding gold.

And I think that's really unfortunate because these people are actively misleading people and hurting them financially by giving this bad advice. And it's really a fairly evil thing to do. Imagine having to divide, transport, or store a whole lot of gold if you were a truly wealthy person and decide to put 10% of your net worth in it. So that's impossible. Yeah, but not only is it impossible, we've left gold behind. If you go back to kind of a Roman era, I mean, I don't know what percentage of the world's value was held in gold, but it was high, right? Maybe it was like 80% of all the value in the world was in gold. Now it's less than 2% of the world's value. So literally as a store of value, gold is storing a infinitesimally small percentage of the world's value. So literally, as a store of value, gold is storing an infinitesimally small percentage of the world's value. So it's already broken. It's already not working. We've already left it in the

dust. It's just not dead yet. Also impressive, though, that gold has not died yet. I mean, there's a place for gold, I do think. But if you're a new investor looking at one versus the other, maybe we're biased, but I just can't see choosing the shiny rock. Maybe, but I'm still a fan of the thing that's going up 150% a year as opposed to the one that's going down. Yeah, I think that anyone would- Yeah, if gold is supposed to be an inflation hedge though, and we're in the most inflationary environment that we've been in more than three decades you know, more than three decades, then why is it gold the same price per ounce as it was a dozen years ago? It just doesn't make sense. Yeah, it really doesn't. And they'll argue, obviously, that they have 5000 years of history, and we have 13 years, and you can't make an argument. But those are the 13 years

we have, man. Yep. I'll take our 13 years over their last 13 years. Oh, man. Imagine making the decision when you did in 2013 and being like, I'm going to buy some gold instead of buying some Bitcoin. By the way, what if MicroStrategy did that? What if MicroStrategy bought $250 million worth of gold when the stock was $120, $140 a share instead of buying Bitcoin? The stock would be $120 or $140 a share. of buying Bitcoin. Stock would be 120 or 140 bucks a share. That's right. At best. I mean, no question. Yeah, at best, it might actually be down because that decision now, as crazy as it looked for him to buy Bitcoin, it looks like a hero. He would look a lot less heroic if he had bought a few hundred million dollars worth of gold at that point.

It would have been a multi-billion dollar mistake. So obviously being so deeply down this rabbit hole, you guys are talking, you're talking about this with people every single day, all day, seemingly, right? So 2021 was somewhat exceptional, of course, right? But we've had exceptional years before, plenty of them. We've had even larger gains when it was a more nascent and smaller asset, but I don't ever ask anyone for a price prediction. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm just curious how you see this growing over the next few years. Do you think we've plateaued or do you think that we're just scratching the surface? Where do you think we're at? Yeah. So I don't have any short-term price predictions in US dollars, but I think of it

in terms of a digital gold. I really do. I mean, there's the energy narrative that Michael and I talked about last night on the spaces and that speaks to me. But as a financial investment, I think of this as a digital gold. And if I look at history and I look at the digital successors of analog predecessors, those digital successors always dwarf, you know, the analog predecessor massively. I think that, you know, like mobile phones versus rotary phones kind of thing, right? And so- Blockbuster and Netflix, right? Exactly. There are tons of examples and it kind of almost always holds true, right? So if I think of Bitcoin as a digital gold versus gold, there's $10, $11 trillion worth of gold

in the world. We've got now sub $1 trillion in Bitcoin. I think that it's realistic to think that Bitcoin is certainly going to equal gold, which would put us at roughly $500,000 per Bitcoin at some point. And I think that once we get to about half that, roughly $250,000, $5 trillion worth of Bitcoin, two times the size of any, you know, large tech company kind of thing. I think that what Bitcoin can do becomes pretty awe-inspiring. Yeah. Like at that point, wouldn't it take out the $17 trillion of negative yielding sovereign debt? Might it take out the $100 trillion of sovereign debt with like a 1% handle. So I think there's tremendous potential. I also think that all the political risks go away at that point too. So I think from

a narrative point of view, it's constructive to think about Bitcoin as digital gold for those that want to see Bitcoin succeed because gold is threatening to no one and nothing. Yeah. You talk about that risk. It's interesting, the political risk. I think that even a year ago, a year and a half ago, certainly before Michael made the first purchase, I think risk managers, companies, countries across the board, if you said Bitcoin, you could get fired, right? If you were the crazy person in the room, if you were the crazy person in the room who had the audacity to even mention

that this was an idea, you had literal risks to your job. Now I think it's quite literally flipped. If you walk into a room and you can't answer questions about Bitcoin and you don't have a plan for this asset, even if you don't like it, you could get fired.

I mean, I was watching CNBC sometime in the past few months. And there was a time when Jamie Dimon said he would fire anybody at JP Morgan that he saw doing something with Bitcoin, right? And the anchor on CNBC, whose name I won't mention, previously, she had been pretty negative on Bitcoin and had asked Michael some pretty challenging questions. And then she posed a question to the group of experts that she was talking to and asked, after Jamie Dimon's most recent comments, if he was the right guy to be CEO of JP Morgan because he had this blind spot. And I just thought, this guy's arguably considered to be the best financial CEO of a generation. And now we're posing the question, is he fit for the

job because of his blind spot to Bitcoin and digital assets? So I think you're right. I think it's totally shifted from, you can get fired for mentioning it to maybe you should get fired if you're not considering it. What a world. But the funny thing is, is that with a lot of these guys, Jamie Dimon, certainly he can talk one thing, but you can watch what's happening in the background with his company. I mean, JP Morgan coin, right?

So he knows that blockchain technology is certainly superior for remittances and cross-border payments. And they're allowing their wealthiest clients to buy, right? So he's offering that service now. At that time he wasn't, but they're offering that service because begrudgingly, but like, why would you stay with JP Morgan if you want to buy Bitcoin and JP Morgan's not offering you Bitcoin? No matter how much he hates it, it's adapt or die. That's why they did it. The head of the private bank went to Jamie Dimon and said,

we had $2.8 billion leave the private bank this quarter, which was, I think, three X more than had ever left in a quarter. And he wanted to know why. And they told him that the money had left to go into Bitcoin. And that's when he said, okay, give them what they want. We can't be losing this money. Well, see, the good thing there though, to his credit versus like the Peter Schiff's of the world, there's strong opinions loosely held. Some people, he'll never admit he's wrong, but you can watch what he's doing, right? And know that he still realizes that he's running a business and has to service his know, to service his customers. So I begrudgingly give him credit for actually doing it, even though he hates it so much.

I'm with you 100%. I think in general, Bitcoiners and maximalists in particular need to learn to appreciate progress, right? I mean, Jamie Dimon went from saying, I'll fire anybody in my employee that I catch trading in or using it to now offering it to customers of the bank and going as far as to say something along the lines of, hey, you know, we sell tobacco companies and cigarette stocks to people too. I don't smoke, you know, and like, like notice the progression. Not everybody has to get to the end point right away, but like, think about the progress from you'll get fired. This is a fraud, you know, to, okay, we'll sell it to you to, I don't use it to like, what's next. Right. Like. You're so right. It's just not,

I talk about this all the time. It's not bipolar. It's not an all or nothing progression. It's not an all or nothing situation. Just because you're skeptical or you're not all in doesn't mean that you don't have value and you're not helping advance the ball. Right. And so that is a maximalist sort of problem. Like you can also like other things or you can still invest in the stock market and have some Bitcoin. It's OK. I couldn't agree with you more. I think another way that I like to kind of articulate it is I love all Bitcoin holders. Every hodler is good. Right.

And that applies to Elon, who holds an awful lot of Bitcoin, Tesla. And I love him and I love that. And I love the person that has $1 worth of BTC. And I love the person that has a billion dollars worth of BTC. And it doesn't matter what percentage of the money they have that is. We're going to need everybody to get on board in some way in order for this to fulfill the expectations and dreams that we all hope it can be for so many people. And I would just love to see a community that embraces all hodlers. Great. Well, I'm counting on you to orange pill some more

multi-billionaires and get us over the next hurdle. So where can everybody follow? Go ahead. Sorry. No, I said I'm doing my best and I know you are as well. And that's one of the great things about Bitcoin is like, you know, it's like nobody's doing it for any reason other than we all believe in it and we want the people that we care about to prosper and, you know, have freedom as well. Absolutely. So where can everybody follow you and keep up with you after this conversation? Yeah, I'm on Twitter is probably the best way. It is Eric underscore B-I-G fund. That's E-R-I-C underscore B-I-G fund, which stands for Bitcoin Investment Group. Well, man, speaking with you, I can understand how you orange-pilled him and are orange-pilling other people. You make a great spokesperson for us, and you make a great argument.

I look forward to sitting down in the future and doing this in person. It's kind of you to say. I look forward to seeing you soon, buddy. Thanks, Eric.