We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC076: Finding Asymmetric Investments w/ Bill Miller IV (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. Today's guest is a longtime friend and fellow bitcoiner Bill Miller the fourth. We've had Bill Miller senior on the show numerous times in the past, but never his fellow portfolio manager and son. During our conversation, Bill explains how him and his father first got into Bitcoin in 2013 haven't sold a single coin since. Some of his thoughts on the broader markets handling inflation, Bitcoin, very much, versus crypto, sage advice that he's learned through the years, and much, much more. So without further delay, here's my chat with Bill Miller.

Starting point is 00:00:40 You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. Like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Bill Miller. Bill, we've been talking for years now, and it is about time we actually had a recorded conversation. So I'm excited to be doing this finally. Me too, man. That makes two of us.

Starting point is 00:01:14 Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Man, it's about time. So let's just start with the overall markets because there's so much happening right now that, holy, moly, I mean, the currencies. Let's just start there. So when I'm looking at various currency charts, the DXY, the dollar is just ripping, absolutely ripping. And it's not like the dollar's ripping and you got all these other currencies that are about

Starting point is 00:01:42 halfway through their move. It appears like a lot of these other currencies, the Japanese yen, the yuan, the euro, any major currency appears to be stopping out at whatever previous limitation that we saw against the dollar in previous currency cycles. and I guess for me, when I'm looking at this, and I'm looking at the Fed getting ready to go into a 50 basis point hike, I'm thinking to myself, how in the world can, in the backdrop of that, like over in Japan, you got them still doing yield curve control. Like, how in the world is the market going to be able to handle this moving forward? So, first of all, I'm not a currency expert. Let's start with that. But, you know, with the Fed starting to raise rates and, you know, You'd expect, I guess, the dollar to be getting stronger.

Starting point is 00:02:33 They're right with everyone else dumping currencies or dumping fuel on the fires and their neighborhoods as well. Yeah. But it's a really interesting setup, I'd say macroeconomically here. I mean, if you think about what's gone on with rates, what's going on with the housing market, what's going on with inflation and prices. I mean, it's in a 40-year high in inflation, job markets on fire. People can't get enough housing. now the Fed's starting to raise rates. I mean, you wonder how it's going to resolve, the situation is going to resolve itself when you're looking at, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:06 mortgage rates have made a dramatic move here over the past just couple months. I mean, going from all-time lows at two and change now to five. That's a big change. I mean, that's some unique interest rate or mortgage rate volatility that people hadn't seen before.

Starting point is 00:03:22 But at the same time, housing prices are growing up at 19% a year. And you're financing that asset at 5%. So, you know, but interestingly enough, the home builder's ETF is off your date, a good amount. But, you know, demand for housing is going to continue. It's just part of the problem is people can't get the supplies to build stuff, you know, because of often talked about supply chain constraints. You can't get stuff.

Starting point is 00:03:47 And so that's slowing stuff down because inflation's been. And the Fed is so far behind the curve right now. It's interesting because the Fed was behind the curve. I think the entire past decade. And it seems like, and they came to a mea culpa, actually a couple years ago when the San Francisco Fed came on and said, look, you know, we told you two percent was a symmetrical target. Well, we actually went back and looked at our own meetings with a computer and analyzed

Starting point is 00:04:13 the verbiage used. And it turns out that we were actually thinking about 2% as a ceiling, right? And so, which was interesting because then you have all these capital allocators, CFOs and stuff going, putting funds into the market, going, okay, here, 2%, that should be a sort of symmetrical target. And reality was at ceiling. So they were too tight on the other end, which never allowed us to get to escape velocity. And now we're well beyond escape velocity.

Starting point is 00:04:37 And interest rates are still pretty much at zero. And inflation's at eight. So, you know, the Fed has a very hard job. It's super hard. But if I'm in the Fed seat right now, I'm going to come out of the next meeting and hike more than two hikes here. Right? Because the market's expecting two hikes and acceleration and inflation expectations are accelerated. So they got to get ahead of that and come out and do something like a, you know, maybe you come out and do, you know, 62 and a half basis points hike instead of 50.

Starting point is 00:05:06 Just let the market know you're ahead of things. If you're actually afraid of being too fast, I think that, you know, you can't rock the boat too much, but you got to get ahead of stuff at this point. That's funny you say that because Greg Foss said something to me probably two days ago. He was like, I think it's going to be 75. And nobody in the market's saying that. Most people right now, the consensus says it's 50 basis points. I think Bullard came out maybe one day in last week and said, it's not my base case, but 75 is a possibility.

Starting point is 00:05:35 They were kind of testing waters with that one. But who knows? I guess the thing that I'm really struggling with is I agree with that when you're looking at it just from like the U.S. lens and how much inflation we have here, how far away, how far from the rest of the curve they are with the federal funds rate. But at the same time, I'm looking internationally. And I'm looking at how all these other currencies are, they look like they're at a point that historically that trend line is suggesting that something breaks at this point.

Starting point is 00:06:06 And there's still a 25 basis point. Like you said, they basically haven't moved at all, right? They haven't moved at all. And the rest of the world is getting ready to break. I think when you, China alone, I mean, look at China. The videos and stuff I'm seeing coming out of there. It's just, it's asinine. I don't know what's going on over there.

Starting point is 00:06:29 It's pretty scary, actually. I was trying to figure it out on Twitter over the weekend. And it was interesting. People really sent me, you know, a wide array of different thoughts on it. And it, you know, it was a mix from people saying, oh, it's a strategic play to people saying, no, there's internal fighting within the CCP, and some of this has to do with just the resourcing that they have for food and water and whatnot, and you're seeing an infighting between Shanghai and Beijing.

Starting point is 00:07:01 I mean, one thing's for sure. The videos are strange, like very strange coming out of there. And I wonder how much of it's just stuff we just really can't even understand from a resourcing standpoint. But, yeah, I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with this. next hike and then kind of how the fixed income market behaves from there. Do you, I'm seeing a growing course of people suggesting that we're seeing the long end of the curve kind of peak out

Starting point is 00:07:29 right now and we actually might start to see it get bid because they're trying to front run the big deflationary fit that's on the horizon. Do you buy that or you think there's still more to sell off here based on the negative spread to the inflation numbers that we've seen printed? I mean, I think if you just look historically, when you're at this level of negative real rates, just the reflexivity of demand is going to be interesting. I think it's going to continue to be robust. With that said, if you get too much whipsawing volatility, it can throw off people's planning. And I think the Fed knows that.

Starting point is 00:08:04 And I think they're ahead of that. And I think they, I mean, the Fed knows that when the curve inverts, the bond market's predicting recession, right? They know that now. Yeah. They're five-year forward indicator as well. It's the five-year, five-year forward rate. They keep a good look at that. That's now accelerated out, too, to two.

Starting point is 00:08:23 I think it's like 260-ish now. It tells you they're kind of, I think, behind the curve again. So there's all kinds of things that are accelerating and changing. They're saying, okay, time to get ahead of this and shut it down. So there are things that are breaking. And I think that's why you continue to see this crazy volatility in all kinds of markets that are out there. But when I say breaking, I don't mean in a systemic sense necessarily.

Starting point is 00:08:45 because it's everyone, and everyone's incentive to keep the thing together, right, and to keep everything moving along. And so history has shown that's generally what happens. And so, you know, it's from an investment perspective, at least, it's hard to sit here and say, I got to go to cash or I got to, you know, all bonds or whatever, because I think a recession is on the horizon. It's a very low probability event. And the great quote on that one is more money is lost preparing for recessions in the market than ever is actually lost in the recession itself, or the bare market drawdown or whatever. But yeah, so it's not, I wouldn't say it's impacting like our positioning or the way we think about the world broadly because we tend to bet broadly

Starting point is 00:09:27 on growth and optimism and things working out. Well, yeah, I know. And I like that take. Somewhere, there's a bull market. You got to just kind of be able to look around and see where that might be. You know, when I'm thinking of one of the boldest calls, that you and your dad have made through the years. I think we all know what that is. I'm curious if you're willing to kind of maybe share some of the impetus and when you guys first kind of went into this trade. And I think it was back in 2015, was when you guys first.

Starting point is 00:09:58 2013. 2013. Wow. Okay. 2030. Hey, Preston, let's not call it a trade. Okay. It's not a trade.

Starting point is 00:10:07 We've been consistent buyers since 2013. Thank you. Correcting that. I personally have never sold a Bitcoin button. What am I doing, calling it a trade? 2013. So everything that I've seen published is 2015. I did not realize you guys were in that early.

Starting point is 00:10:27 Walk us through it. So, I mean, you guys would have seen, and you guys would have had this opinion that the 2008 crisis was not solved. I'm assuming that was some of the impetus for the position. Walk us through it. What was where you go think? So it may be more simple now. But by the way, I do.

Starting point is 00:10:45 My dad's probably not watching this show right now, but I'll come out here and say this, that I actually want to go on the record and compare. I don't know if we can do this in the blockchain or via our original, wherever we originally bought Bitcoin. I want to go back and see who bought Bitcoin earlier, me or him. He obviously has way more than I do and has done way better in it. But I just want to go back and I do want to go back and take a look at that. But the impetus for it was, for me at least, was just repeatedly seeing this thing pop up in the newspapers.

Starting point is 00:11:17 And this crazy, interesting idea that was just this wacky thing. It had gone up a gazillion percent. It was really volatile and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so then, you know, they talk about the white paper and go, okay, I got to take a look at that. Go read that. You go, wow, this is pretty cool. This is really interesting. This is actually a unique idea.

Starting point is 00:11:36 It's a new technology no one's ever seen before. And it allows people to transact an exchange of value with no central party or processor. It can't be censored. Wow. The supply is known ahead of time. Everyone knows the rules. This could have some really interesting, you know, potential. And so we started buying it then and followed it ever since.

Starting point is 00:12:00 And the way it's scale, the technology is just so cool. And so we've been, you know, actively interested in it and trying to let people know as broadly as we can about it. And it's been a really cool asset for us. You know, whenever I first got into it, the big thing that was concerning, if you will, for its future was really kind of the scaling. How are we ever going to get to a point where we can do immediate settlement and have the bandwidth to go beyond, call it 400,000 transactions? you know, per block or per minute, I forget what the number was, but how do we get to something that was comparable to Visa or MasterCard to handle the throughput? And, you know, back then in 2015, there was ideas on what that might be, but there was no solution that seemed like

Starting point is 00:12:51 there was that was coming around anytime soon. So how did you guys, how did you guys think through that risk and what, you know, how to how to size the position back then? How to think through the scalability risk. Well, so there's actually different use cases for it, right? And that the transaction aspect of it doesn't need to occur necessarily for the idea to have value, right? And that you can have this digital ledger where you can store your own means personally. You don't need to necessarily be able to be using it every single day. As a matter of fact, I don't, why would you want to spend something that goes up at 200% of year?

Starting point is 00:13:33 So like, I don't know. And that's part of the knock against it is that they're one of the many fair cases that have prevented people from making a lot of money so far over the past 12 years. People say, you know, you can't, it's too volatile, right? You can't, you don't know what it's worth. Well, by the time it's no longer volatile, it'll be a million dollars plus a Bitcoin. And so if you just look at it on a mean variance, you know, portfolio theorem, traditional risk return basis. If you added to any portfolio, it would have done made that

Starting point is 00:14:06 portfolio much, much better on sort of the traditional financial metrics that people have cared about over time. But again, you don't need the transaction aspect to it. And I don't know if we necessarily saw that these additional layers would be built on top, you know, like lightning at work, that sort of thing. But we saw that certainly the case for the value storage and the fact that the value couldn't be inflated away. And that's not a concern in the U.S. It's a concern in countries, or hasn't been, at least in the past. But now in other countries, that is a huge benefit to it. You can do remittances and occurrence. It's something that is appreciated over time as opposed to lost purchasing power. And so there's all kinds of unique aspects to it that are

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Starting point is 00:19:04 Talk to us about the idea of not selling your winners. I think this is something that you and your dad have just, you know, when I think about what your dad especially is known for is really kind of this idea of not selling your winners. I know he's pretty famous for the whole Amazon, just owning that and not taking it out of his portfolio or D reducing his size. He just lets it ride. So talk to us about this idea and why this is so important for successful investing. Yeah. Well, so there's a couple of things you want to do to be successful investing. One of those is minimize your liabilities. And so anytime you sell a heavily appreciated asset, really, the only thing you know for

Starting point is 00:19:46 sure when you sell that heavily appreciated asset as you just create a liability for yourself. And so even if you have a heavily appreciated asset, the total addressable market is still huge, so it could still grow. Assuming its valuation isn't crazy, you know, relative to its potential longer term, even if you're going to compound at a below market rate, it may actually be rational to hold on to that just because if you look at the after-tax return, it's going to make sense. So, but if you can find something that has a massive addressable market with a phenomenal management team that can keep attacking it and just growing and building upon their scale

Starting point is 00:20:25 and their moats, then you never want to sell that. And so, you know, watching him and his personal accounts been pretty cool, too. I mean, that's been, I've learned a lot from work with him, but, you know, one of the things I've learned is watching him manage his own money. And he'll finance stuff with margin debt regularly. So, you know, just because you don't have to create the liability, the margin debt costs, percent a year and he's confidence going to grow faster than that. Not that I'm sitting here recommending people use margin debt because I think it requires a very thoughtful framework and

Starting point is 00:20:55 approach to managing it and knowing the rules to it, which he obviously does and has done very well. But yeah, and minimizing that tax liability is actually a very important thing that, you know, not enough people do. And, you know, one of the great books on investing is I have it somewhere around here is the old Jesse Littermore reminiscences of a stock operator. One of the points, and all the money he made was in sitting, not in trading, right? The big money has made the big moves. And that's, you know, I know that was one of my dad's inspirations for the approach. You know, it's funny.

Starting point is 00:21:29 I read that book after talking to your dad and him saying something very similar to me years ago about figure out what the big move is. And then once you get there, stay as long as you can. And as long as you think that there's like you're saying an addressable market that can keep letting it run. And that's how you really make a lot of money in some of these positions. Awesome, awesome feedback there. So, Bill, let's change gears.

Starting point is 00:21:56 Let's talk about the recent news here with Twitter and Elon Musk. What are some of your thoughts on this? So we just found out today that the buy is going to go through. What are some of your thoughts around this one? Man, I could not be happier. I think this is such a win for humanity. I saw Senator Warren tweeted that said or said or something, this is dangerous. I thought dangerous.

Starting point is 00:22:24 It's dangerous that the most successful entrepreneur in the history of the world is going to allow free speech on the town square for the world. What is the problem? I mean, this is fantastic. This is so good. You know, it's going to be cool. So we'll see what happens. but I'm very excited about it. I'm excited about the news and I'm remaining skeptical on the application of everything that he says he's going to do.

Starting point is 00:22:49 I suspect that he's going to open things up and we are not going to have this crazy censorship that is so obvious, so insanely obvious on just so many different fronts. And man, I'm here for that. If that's what is put in place and I'm definitely here for the bots, these reply bots, all my God. Have you seen some of Michael Saylor's thoughts on implementing basically, you know, like an orange verification badge for people that load Bitcoin into some type of escrow? And then I think this is such a brilliant idea and something that is so needed. You have to have some type of feedback mechanism that just prevents the spamming. I mean, my Lord. Any other comments or things on that? I'm excited. I just, yeah. And anything Michael Saylor says, I am

Starting point is 00:23:40 I'm a big fan of, so brilliant, brilliant. Brilliant. Bitcoin versus crypto. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I do have some thoughts on this, actually. I don't own any quote unquote crypto. I think B3 owns some Ethereum, I think maybe through liquid traded vehicles, less so than owning it direct. But yeah, I just think that I think there's one.

Starting point is 00:24:05 I don't want to say I think there's one. I think there's one that stands above the rest. It's Bitcoin. I think when you look at the just theoretical underpinnings of it, the way it was constructed, the fact that there is no central person or a set of people tied to it, I think that is just a massive, unique underlying attribute that's important to think about. And when you look at the verification, we should let's call it consensus mechanism here for processing new blocks, proof of work is important, I think, in that the base layer,

Starting point is 00:24:39 should be hard to create. It should take time. It should take energy. And the process has been set underway and it just seems unstoppable at this point when you think about just the overall security around it and the feedback loops and all kinds of other stuff. It was really, I'd say a stroke of genius for Satoshi. It's pretty cool. But when you think about crypto and defy and the other stuff going on there, that obviously has a lot of potential. In some ways, I, you know, I, I, you know, I, I'm not sure that we're probably beyond the point of them being ruled illegal securities offering some of these other things, but you never know, right? And that's already been ruled out, I think, for Bitcoin, which is one of the reasons I think why institutions are increasingly buying

Starting point is 00:25:24 it, putting out their balance sheet. It's, I mean, a lot of it's been de-risk from that perspective, from the scaling perspective, from the technology, proving the concept. But, you know, a lot of people say, hey, invest in my crypto thing. And my take is, why would you? couldn't I just buy Coinbase stock, right? Because, or that should be their benchmark, quite candidly, if you want to talk about establishing a benchmark for a crypto thing, should be coin based stock. You know, Coinbase stock, they have, they are the 800 pound gorilla. They sit in the middle of it all. They have a ventures arm where you get access to all these other currencies, right? You don't have to deal with some new setup. Most people probably have a stock account.

Starting point is 00:26:05 Could it fail? Sure. I think it's unlikely. I think it's increasingly unlikely at this point when you look at the evolution of the ecosystem, but Coinbase is probably the place you want to be if you want to be in quote unquote crypto and have exposure to that whole, to the entire ecosystem. And so it's not an expensive stock. I don't think at this point we think about the long-term prospects of what's going on there. That's probably the way to get exposure to it, and a really easy way for people to get exposure to it, I'd say long-term. I like your point about there needs to be some type of work or some type of energy commit to a base layer of this entire ecosystem. Because without that, I just, I don't know how we're really saying we're solving anything compared to the existing system and quandary that we're in. And I think it's important that, at the end of the day, opinions are opinions, but there needs to be some type of incentive that actually drives that to be the outcome. And when I look at the whole mining process and I look at a lot of Michael Saylor's points about these reinforcing network effects that just naturally occur around proof of work, I suspect, and I think I'm very biased in this, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I suspect that that is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is going to be paramount over all these other competing protocols is because those reinforcing network effects around energy. And we're seeing this. with the energy companies starting to really, I think their eyes are really starting to be opened up as to how this is going to assist them into handling additional energy production.

Starting point is 00:27:44 And they've got these requirements for peak energy versus their standard steady state energy demand that so much of this is going to be reinforcing to Bitcoin. Is that what you're seeing as well? Or is there something else that maybe you're looking at? No, I think that's exactly right. I think, you know, Bitcoin solves a lot of problems. And one of them is it helps eliminate waste in that current system. And so it's really interesting to see some of the innovations that are occurring in the mining space, people using all kinds of unique energy sources that had either gone to waste before or had just not been properly utilized, you know, Exxon's flaring gas to mine Bitcoin now. It's just crazy to see the extent of innovation. going on around it. And so that's super exciting. There's less obviously attention and innovation, I'd say,

Starting point is 00:28:36 around the overall process to this other stuff, to a lot of these other coins for obvious reasons, because they have different consensus mechanisms, I'd say. Less robust consensus mechanisms, I would say. But no, it's super interesting to see all of the innovation going on, not only in the financial aspects, but the energy, you know, Bitcoin mining side of things too. Talk to us about, here's another thing that I find interesting about you and your dad is this idea of concentrated investing.

Starting point is 00:29:07 You hear some really greats through the decades that talk about this idea where I think Buffett has a pretty famous quote of saying that you have a pretty small amount of eggs that are in the basket and then you watch that basket really closely. What are some of your thoughts around this idea of concentrated investing that you'd like to tell people? Yeah, I think that's how, you know, massive amounts of wealth is made is through concentration. It's not through diversifying into different asset classes that will do 8% or, you know, 8% with some level of specified volatility and, you know, put all kinds of constraints around what could happen. But at the same time, you know, concentration does come with risk. But if you can find something at a very small size that could grow, that has a great management team again, that we can talk about all these characteristics,

Starting point is 00:29:56 potential for high returns on capital, on eventual moat, natural monopoly type characteristics, anything like that, and you want to ride that as far as you can, so long as you're not going to be left in a position where if it goes back to some other, if it collapses or something doesn't go your way, you're not going to be broke or something.

Starting point is 00:30:13 But concentrated investing is, if you look at actually the market in the history of the market, it's actually a very small number of stocks that drive the overwhelming amount of returns in the market. and the overwhelming number of stocks in the market at any given time underperform the index they're in over their lifetime index. So, you know, if you get concentrated and you buy, you know, most of the things you buy are probably not going to do very well.

Starting point is 00:30:39 So if you've got to find the stuff that makes sense, but if you find it, you want to stick with it for sure. You know, when you go to college and you study, you know, finance or you get an MBA, they throw around the term risk and it's almost like there's an equal sign to volatility. And like that's just it. Like that's just the law. Risk equals volatility. I tend to think that when I hear the word risk and volatility, I think that's for a money

Starting point is 00:31:08 manager. That's for somebody who's managing somebody else's money who is entrusting them to do smart things with it. And they're risking losing that person as a client because there's too much volatility. volatility in their portfolio. When I think about the volatility in a, I'm sorry, when I think about the risk in a company, it's the competitive moat, like you had said, right? That's the thing that, like, is there going to be impairment to the underlying assets that that sit on that company's balance sheet? That's the risk to the business and the risk to maybe their market

Starting point is 00:31:43 premium and whether they're going to continue to have free cash flows into the future and all that kind of stuff. So, like, risks should be based around, you know, a really deep analysis on the underlying assets and how they sit in a competitive environment. But it's almost like that's not even discussed in college. Like, why, how in the world does that, like, not get discussed? It's about volatility and betas and this and that. Like, it's just. Right. Right. Well, things that go up a lot are going to be volatile, by definition. By definition, yeah. So that's important to keep you mind. But, um, Yeah, no, if you think about investing, it's an optimization problem.

Starting point is 00:32:22 And a lot of these people that want to bucketize things and put things into these unique categories, all they really do is constrain their outcomes. And optimization problems generally do better with fewer constraints, right? And so at the same time, it gives you more opportunity to do something dumb. But the whole mean variance portfolio theorem, I think it misses a lot of, I think there's underlying assumptions about it. I'm sure academics will tell me I'm wrong on this, but you think about the whole premise there. And it's you got to hit this rate of return because you got to draw down some portion of fund

Starting point is 00:32:56 or you need a big portion of it at a given time. If you don't need the money in a year or two years, why are you caring about the volatility of that in the short term, right? And so if you can do well on something volatile over the long term, it makes a lot of sense to just sit in it and not think too, too much. about it or try and trade it. As we said earlier, the big money is made in the big moves and then sitting, not in, you know, trying to trade stuff around and create tax liabilities. And then you got to spend time figuring out that, managing your gains and losses. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer.

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Starting point is 00:36:30 Past performance does not guarantee future results, current distribution rate as of 1231, 2025. carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. And that's a good highlight that you had there as well, which is the, you know, if you know you're going to need whatever amount in a year from now, well, then you have to think about that volatility a whole lot more than if you're buying stuff like Bitcoin and you plan on owning it until the cows come home. You're not trading it. Not a trade. I appreciated that correction. I really did. Talk to us about this idea of dematerialization

Starting point is 00:37:24 and about institutions, very important institutions through the years and how so many of them are being dematerialized. Super interesting. And it's all being driven, I think, by technology and the accessibility of information now. We can get educations online for free. I mean, and just, it's all out there if people want to learn. Right.

Starting point is 00:37:45 And so at the end of the day, you know, I think schools are becoming more behavioral management organizations rather than, you know, actually needing to provide the education. And if you just think about, let's go to schools. You talked about organizations abroad, let's touch on. schools. I'm a big believer in education. My whole family is a big believer in education. I spent a lot of money and time at good schools. Did post school education through CFA, CMT, got to learn every day in your energy and what we do. So I'm a big believer in it. I just think

Starting point is 00:38:18 that when you kind of look at the core role, it's evolving a little bit. And education, the cost of a college education has gone up, I think it roughly three times. the rate of CPI over the past like three decades. And so that's just, that's not sustainable. And so I think a lot of these schools have become victims in a way of their own success. And what happens is over the years, people will go to these schools and they were centralized locations for learning in times when this kind of information wasn't accessible more broadly on the internet.

Starting point is 00:38:55 And so, you know, people will go to these schools to learn and they'd learn a lot of stuff. And they'd be, you know, some people would be very successful and earn a lot of money. And they'd give it back to the schools, rightly so, because the schools helped them learn what the knowledge that allowed them to generate, you know, fungible means. And so they would give it back to the school. It made a lot of sense. And then that process just continued and continued and continued and still continues today to the point now where a lot of these schools just have such large pools of resources that they don't necessarily need. It attracts certain types of people that don't necessarily care about tangible outcomes

Starting point is 00:39:33 in all kinds of different ways, right? And so this then just feeds on itself in a way over time. And interestingly enough, now people can get their educations online if they really want to. And, you know, people, these schools are still great filtering, you know, or, you know, SIV mechanisms to get, you know, if somebody went to a really good school, they probably studied hard and there's some floor on their IQ or capability set or something, I think. But, you know, it's interesting to see how this evolves. By the way, this is coming for someone that highly values education.

Starting point is 00:40:11 But I think right now that one of the implications for our investors is that there's probably going to be a lot of money made in education, educational pursuits online. Yeah, the dematerialization of the status quo of learning, if you will. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And this is another one of Michael Saylor's big things that he's really working on is like, how do I make, how do I dematerialize the cost of education?

Starting point is 00:40:39 Because I can warp myself through space and time and gain access to some of the best professors on the planet for whatever the subject might be. You know, it's funny, there's this app. It's dragon something that my son, who's very young, is there learning algebra. He has no clue how to do algebra. All he knows is when I match this picture or inverse this picture or whatever, he's learning like the rules and the process of algebra. And then they just swapped out the pictures with numbers. And there he is like doing algebra. It was somewhat crazy to witness. He doesn't understand why. or how, but he's conditioning his brain through these apps. And I think that's just like one small example of so many things you can do in the education space moving forward and like people paying a quarter of a million dollars for an education. And it's like, my God, you can learn a majority of this for literally nothing online if you, you know, just have the-

Starting point is 00:41:43 You put your mind to it. If you put your mind to it and you have the drive and desire, right? All right. Final question here for you. What's up with you and your dad with the firm? Is he retiring soon? Is he kind of slowly, you know, phasing out from doing it? What's going on?

Starting point is 00:42:03 He hasn't been on the show for a while? No, well, he's trying to, he's trying to just pursue his own intellectual pursuits. And he's doing a lot more philanthropic stuff and thinking about that. And yeah, he's not, he's becoming. increasingly less involved in the day-to-day management of the actual funds. He is, you know, I'd say he's still actively involved, but he's not doing as much as he used to. And he's not doing it around the clock like he used to.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Can he hang it up? No, I think he's always going to be looking for the next big idea for sure. Yeah. For sure. So he can't really, he's never really going to hang it up. I totally agree with you on that point. Does he is looking to... Does he become more lethal as he's more focused on only a couple things?

Starting point is 00:42:55 Yeah, actually, it's a very good point. That's a massively important point. Focus matters for sure. And no, he's just looking to turn it over the next generation. So I'm excited to actually take in a little bit of a different direction here is because I think technology is now at a point. And the investment landscape is at a point where you can do some really interesting things and level the field, I would say, for the retail guy and actually help them understand more

Starting point is 00:43:21 what an active investor is doing, why they're doing it. You can see new types of products that have daily transparency, right? So people can actually see what you did yesterday and maybe you can let them know why you did it yesterday, which you couldn't do for a retail crowd before, you know, the mutual fund thing is shrinking slowly every single year as the data shows. And I think there's an opportunity to, you know, launch a platform. here where you can better help the retail investor think about active investing and where it fits into their portfolio and their financial planning space. And, you know, there's just a ton of really

Starting point is 00:43:57 good content out there. I don't know if you read The Psychology of Money. No, I haven't read that. I highly, I thought I put one around. I know I have one on this shelf. This book, Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money. Great, great. Oh, I'll have to pick it up. You have to read that. I'll send you a copy for having me. Yeah, I'd love to have it. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Starting point is 00:44:21 But that kind of stuff, you can even take the contents in that book or the ideas, right? And boil them down and do them in a different, you know, format and, you know, do some pretty cool stuff on the media side of things. So we are actively hiring for people that can help with that kind of thing and produce that content. Oh, cool. That's awesome. Okay. All right, Bill. Well, I mean, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Starting point is 00:44:47 Like I said in the intro there, we should have done this a long time ago. And it's just been a pleasure knowing you and your dad through the years. And it was awesome seeing you down in Florida. Super cool. That was really quite interesting. And it was even more interesting that when I bumped into you, I was there with Tur, Demester. Yes. I mean, come on.

Starting point is 00:45:07 That's just so serendipitous because I know, was it probably back in 2017, you're dad reached out to me and he's like, hey, do you know TUR? And I was like, yeah, let me introduce you to him. And so those two linked up. And then you and I just happened to bump into each other down in Florida. And there's TIR at the same time. It was just wild. So cool. So neat. That's just crazy. Yeah. I had a great conversation on Michael that's in all kinds of fascinating Bitcoin topics. It was super cool. I mean, you know, that was the first time I met Michael when we were down there. and having interviewed him, just meeting him in person, like, oh, my God, he is beyond smart. He's awesome.

Starting point is 00:45:52 Just so nice and just so nice and just easy to talk to, just a great guy. I learned a ton that day. It was super cool. Yes. All right. Well, thanks for coming on, Bill. And we'll have links to all your handle on Twitter and also the company and the firm and all of that. Is there anything else that you wanted to highlight before we wrap it up? No, I had a great

Starting point is 00:46:14 time. Thanks for having me on. Let's do it again. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, all right, thanks so much, Bill. Thanks, Preston. It's great. Thanks again. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, If you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again

Starting point is 00:46:54 next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC076: Finding Asymmetric Investments w/ Bill Miller IV (Bitcoin Podcast)

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