Transcript of Michael Saylor Interview on Bitcoin: Diary Of A CEO

Because most people think if they’ve got $10,000 in their bank and they keep it there and maybe getting interest on it at 4% a year, they’re going to be good.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: So this is about $10,000, I guess. One acre of land in Miami Beach on the water cost $10,000 about 100 years ago. I know this because I have a house on the water and I have the deed of sale and it was about 2 acres and it was $20,000. The entire house cost $100,000 and it’s about $20,000 worth of land. Today, 1 acre of land on the same spot on the water, $10 million, maybe $20 million.

You know what happened here, right? It’s the same dollar. It works out to be a 1,000x increase in price. So when land goes from $10,000 to $10 million, that means that the currency, the dollar, the money lost about 7% of its economic value every year for 100 years running. If you lose 7% a year, you get cut in half 10 times, right?

So what do most people not know about money? What they don’t realize is that the best currency — money being a medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value — the dollar, the best in the 20th century and the 21st century, the US dollar lost 7% of its value every year going for 100 years. That’s the best it’s ever going to get. It’s not that good for everybody else.

If you go to most other countries, they lose 14% of their value. And so they collapse in about 30 years. So what you have is a situation where if you store your wealth in currency, in the money of the society, the question really is just, are you going to lose most of your money within 10 years? That’s the weak currencies. And in Africa, for example, most currencies in Africa, you couldn’t hold your wealth even for 10 years, maybe 5 years.

Or are you going to lose all your money in 30 years? Hyperinflation happened in Brazil, happened in Argentina, that’s Mexico, that’s most places. And that’s the status quo. The average fiat currency collapses in about 29 years, I think. And then the best is if you happen to be a citizen of the greatest nation in the world and you win all the wars, you’re just going to lose all your money. The half-life is 35 years. You’re going to lose your money over the course of 100 years.

Should You Buy a House?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So should I buy a house?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: So you get to the next interesting point, which is that $100,000 in 1926 in Miami Beach today would be worth $100,000. That house, $50 to $100 million. So the house is better, right?

In fact, if you’re trying to preserve your wealth, you have to acquire scarce, desirable property. So your choice is, do I buy real estate? Residential real estate? Do I buy commercial real estate? Do I buy a private company? Do I buy a public company like stocks? Do I buy collectibles?

So let me tell you why you shouldn’t buy a house. Because there’s a 2% property tax on houses in Florida, which means that if you buy a house, you pay 2% of the value every year. 2% means that every 36 years you actually pay the cost of the house in tax to the government. Not a very good store of value because you’re taking on a massive tax load and you’re taking on a maintenance load.

But having said it, it’s still a better deal than just holding cash in a bank or holding cash in a safe. Commercial real estate looks a bit better, right? Because with commercial real estate, you can offset the tax, the insurance, and the maintenance cost with rents. So what really works out with commercial real estate most of the time is you buy a million dollars of commercial real estate, you have a bunch of fees, you charge rent, the rent offsets the maintenance cost. You don’t really make any money on the rent, but the underlying million dollars appreciates 7% a year every year. And so you actually can build wealth with commercial real estate if you can just cover the maintenance expenses.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Most people are told that the way to build wealth when they leave university and they get into the working world is to buy a house. So most people, that’s what most people do. They get a job, a 9 to 5, they take the money they get from that, they go and get a mortgage, they buy a house and they move in. That’s kind of what we are all told implicitly. Is that a good strategy to build and become wealthy in your view?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: The only way that it’s a good strategy is if you’re buying the house in a jurisdiction where the property taxes are manageable, then yeah, you can generate some wealth. But if I flip that and you end up taking a 7% mortgage and you get massive tax and massive insurance expenses, then that same investment works out the other way and it crushes you to death.

So a better idea generally is commercial real estate, if you actually have the business acumen to get into the commercial real estate business, because you can pass all the expenses through to your tenants. These things are all hard, right? Real estate business is hard. Starting your own company is hard. Investing in other companies is hard.

The conventional thing, the safe thing is I just put all my money in a money market and I get paid 3%. And then after tax I’ve got 1.5% and the currency is losing 7% of its value a year and you’re just losing 5 or 6% of your wealth every year for your life.

So that’s why Bitcoin is such a compelling thing. That’s why people that believe in Bitcoin are passionate about it, because the average person shouldn’t have to be a real estate expert. They shouldn’t have to be a tax expert. They shouldn’t have to be capable of launching their own restaurant or bar or bakery. You shouldn’t have to be a stock picker. Why shouldn’t the typical person just be able to take their money, put it into an asset which appreciates in value 15% a year and they don’t have to worry about it?

The Case for the S&P 500 and Gold

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the S&P 500? They could just put it into the stock market, right?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah. John Bogle’s real contribution and the success of the S&P 500 is this idea that currency is not a store of value. Real estate is illiquid and scary and difficult and inefficient and high maintenance. So what is the liquid capital asset that I can buy? And it turns out to be like SPY. It’s just the S&P 500 in the form of an ETF. So that has returned 15% over the past 6 years. Over 100 years, maybe 10%, something like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Every year.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: And if the US dollar’s losing 7% of its value in scarce desirable terms over the course of 100 years and you’re getting 10%, you’re getting a 2 or 3% boost in return for accepting the volatility of being invested in the stock market, but it’s not a bad idea, right? If you want the conventional best idea to preserve your wealth without taking on individual corporate risk and individual real estate risk, I just buy the S&P index and wait.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about this? This is gold.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why not just put all of my money into gold?

The Age of AI, Robots, and the Future of Money

MICHAEL SAYLOR: It’s not an awful idea to buy gold. Gold is up 12% a year for the past 6 years. So whereas the S&P’s up 15, gold’s up 12, the NASDAQ’s up 18, Bitcoin is up 33. Okay? So generally, if you look at the world and you say, where do you want to save your money? You want to buy a capital asset. Gold’s a winner. S&P’s a winner. Diversified tech stocks are a winner. Bitcoin is a winner.

Now you’re going to say to me, well, so then why Bitcoin? Well, the answer is, if you’re living in Turkey, if you’re living in Argentina, if you’re living in Brazil before the currency collapses, or Mexico or Venezuela or any country in Africa, you don’t get gold, you don’t get the S&P, you don’t get QQQ, you can’t buy diversified real estate in the US. Those options I named are Western world conventional capital assets.

So the big mistake is, don’t invest in non-capital assets. Don’t put all your family’s money in soybeans. Don’t buy barrels of crude oil. Don’t buy cotton. Don’t invest in things that a factory or a robot or an AI can generate infinite of. You buy things that the robots and the AIs and the big factories cannot pump out by the million gallons.

And so, what is that? It is maybe an ounce of gold. It is a share in the 500 most desirable companies in the world. It is 1 out of 21 million Bitcoin. All of those things are things that the robots are not going to create infinite of. Those are capital assets. Which capital asset is a function of where you live and what your mindset is. If you’re living in a war zone, my advice is Bitcoin because you’re not carrying this through a checkpoint, right? If you need to go through an airport, you want something that you get to keep and take with you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talked about the robots there.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when we say the robots, I think we mean both the surge in robotics we’re seeing, but also artificial intelligence that’s going to empower them to be very, very intelligent. How has this changed your thesis and how you view the future? Because it’s a profound surprise, I think, to all of us that artificial intelligence is accelerating at the rate we’re seeing.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Technology fails until it succeeds. When I was at MIT, people were trying to make speech recognition work. It just didn’t work. For 1,000 years, people wanted to fly and it didn’t work. And in 1902, the New York Times declared that every learned scientist knows that you’ll never be able to fly. And then in 1903, we fly.

In 2023, the AI started working. You can see what’s happening. We have affected the digital transformation of intelligence. Cars are going to drive themselves. It’s pretty clear that anything that takes massive human labor, whether it’s lawyering, writing a contract, or composing a poem, or composing a script, or composing a book, it’s like, you want a book? Tell the AI what kind of book you want. Here’s my 10, I want this, I want it to be set in London, and I want these protagonists. Can you make it like that? Put some more violence in it.

Voltaire was impressive because he created this much literature, and when he did it, it came out of the mind of one man, and that was quite amazing. And I think we’re always going to admire the people that did it first. But the AIs will think for us. Put the AI into the robot. We’re not that far, right? When I sit and I talk to my voice assistant, whether it’s Chat or whether it’s Grok, it’s like she knows everything and she keeps getting smarter. Every single week she gets smarter.

And it’s like, what happens when they go into a robot? Well, you pretty much can imagine a billion robots and maybe we’ll pay $200 a month for a robot and the robot will just pretty much do everything. And so the question is, do you want someone to do everything? To cook, to clean, to take out the trash? Would you like a self-driving car? Of course you do. We’re on the verge of these perfect products, right?

We’ll get to the point where we’re like, you used to actually have an oven that burned things. Like what? It was stupid? Yeah, it was too stupid to know it was going to burn the— why didn’t you just put intelligence into the appliance? Why would you ever have an unintelligent appliance at this point when it gets exponentially cheaper? We used to get in traffic accidents. The big reveal, the big inversion is when people realize that the self-driving cars are safer than the person-driven cars, right? It’s like you used to make mistakes.

The irony of course is now when you send a message to someone, if you want to prove that it came from you, you have to actually put errors in it, right? It’s like if you put errors in it, I believe you typed it. The AI can draft the thing as though it had a PhD in English and it had 20 years experience as a copy editor. And so we’re reaching this point where lack of effectiveness is just laziness, right? Like if you wrote something which wasn’t perfect, it’s because you’re lazy, not because you’re not perfect. The AIs create perfect documents, they do perfect research, the robots will do any amount of work. And I think Elon makes this point, which is we’re about to trip over an age of abundance. Do you believe that’s true?

Elon Musk’s Vision of Universal High Income

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, what does that say about Bitcoin? Because I’m looking at some of the quotes here that Elon said about the Age of Abundance, and he says:

“In the future where anyone can have anything, you no longer need money as a database for labor allocation. If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then the relevance of money declines rapidly. I’m not sure we will have it. If you are stranded on a desert island with a trillion dollars, it will be pointless because there is no labor to allocate. In a benign scenario, we will have universal high income, not just universal basic income, meaning anyone can have any products or any services that they want. Universal high income via checks issued by federal governments is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI/robotics because AI and robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in money supply, so there will be no inflation. Work will become optional, kind of like playing sports or a video game. You can go to the store and buy vegetables, or you can go and grow them in your backyard because you like growing them. That’s what work will be like. AI and robotics are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans. Money is fundamentally information. The true constraints of the future won’t be financial, they’ll be energy and mass.”

Scarcity, Status, and the Hierarchy of Affluence

MICHAEL SAYLOR: He’s half right. I agree with part of what he says. That is, consumer goods, consumables, utilitarian goods will become abundant, but there are always going to be scarce desirable goods that will not become abundant. And I think he overstates the case. Money will still be valuable, wealth will still be valuable.

But I’ll give you an example. Henry VIII didn’t have clean water, did not have heat, did not have cooling. These things the King of England did not have. And technology gave all these things to the middle class. And so if you live in the middle class today, you can have your appendix out. Henry VIII didn’t have dental crowns. He didn’t have X-rays. So you get modern medical care, the infant mortality rate has plunged, life is safer, clean water, clean air, clean food, and technology gave them to us. We stamp out infinite Coca-Cola, infinite Hershey’s bars, ice cream, running water, electricity. So all of those things have been given to the middle class, the working class in the developed world. Not everywhere, but let’s say in the developed world.

But everybody doesn’t get a Hamptons house. Everybody doesn’t get their own private jet. They don’t get their own private yacht. So what happened with the explosion of affluence? Massive utilitarian entitlement, lots of cars. But okay, so everybody gets a car, but how many people get a Porsche? What happens with humanity is we always invent the luxury car. We come up with the trophy asset. And again—

STEVEN BARTLETT: But most people don’t actually want that. They want to be able to feed their family and not have to worry about the bills. So all of those people, are you saying that those people are going to be good? They’re not going to have to worry?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I’m saying that if your aspiration is a good life, if you want infinite food, infinite energy, infinite education, infinite entertainment, right? You’re probably going to get it. My point is, in theory, right? Why does money matter today? Because everybody has electricity and water, because people want to buy something more than water. By the way, water is the proletarian drink.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: It means that if you go to a restaurant and you can’t afford anything else, you ask for a cup of water, right? And then if you have some more money, you get yourself a Coca-Cola or a soft drink, and that costs $5. But if you have more money, you buy yourself a vodka. And then when you have more money, you want to buy yourself the specialty high-end tequila. And eventually people find a way to spend $38 on a drink. And in New York City, you can see that everywhere.

Why do we go to restaurants and pay $300 to eat at a restaurant? Because you can actually feed yourself on $3 a day. And the answer is there’s always going to be a hierarchy of affluence and people are going to find things to aspire to that will be more than the utilitarian mean that everybody gets. If I give you universal healthcare, people want private healthcare. If I give everybody a house, someone’s going to want a house twice as big. Everybody’s always going to have a reason to want something more.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because we’re status driven, orientated animals.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: That’s the cynical way to look at it. But the other way to look at it is I wanted to be sitting on a mountain peak skiing, but not that mountain peak because the snow’s not good on that mountain peak this week.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it’s too busy on this one.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah. And that one’s too crowded. There’s always going to be some exclusivity. There’s going to be a quest. So I think that money’s not going away. I think it’s pretty obvious if you look around you that people still need money. It is true that the basic needs in life, basic transportation, basic energy, basic healthcare, all of those things can be manufactured in quantity and they’ll get progressively cheaper. We’ll call them consumer goods.

AI, Job Displacement, and the Free Market

STEVEN BARTLETT: If this knowledge work does become, I guess, taken by the robots and the AIs, there are some people who say there’s going to be new jobs created and everyone will be fine, but it’s not clear to me that there will be enough new jobs created in the period of time to satisfy the demand of people to have something to do professionally.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: It used to be everybody was a farmer, right? And then all of a sudden in America, we have new jobs called accountants and lawyers and film producers. You’re a podcaster. Your job didn’t exist 20 years ago. The job description did not exist, the business did not exist. There are people that make a living putting on makeup and clothes and posting on Instagram, and that was not a job that existed 30 years ago.

So there’ll be a lot of new jobs, there’ll be dislocation, there’s going to be political unrest. What do I think? I think this is the best argument in favor of encouraging a free market and allowing liberal, unregulated businesses to prosper. Because if you have a progressive society, by the way, the United States is sort of more progressive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Define progressive in this context.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: You’re allowed to start a business, you’re allowed to sell a product. It’s not illegal to create a podcast. By the way, you can’t do what you’re doing in Cuba. In North Korea, you couldn’t do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I read something crazy last night about driving autonomous cars. It said lawyers are trying to stop, block EVs because these particular lawyers make a lot of money from litigating car accidents.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: We wouldn’t want people to not crash.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: But yeah, so the point is there are all sorts of laws and restraint of trade, like you can’t have an Airbnb in the face of modern technology. If you have modern technology and it’s creating dislocation, if your goal is to embrace the technology, create maximum productivity, and then minimize the disruption and the inflammation, then the more degrees of freedom you offer, the less pain there’ll be. Because in a more free society, you’re going to have 10,000 new kinds of businesses pop up or 100,000 new business opportunities that no one conceptualized, and they’ll be threatening to the status quo. But they’ll be rational and they’ll create value, and then they will create gainful employment and they’ll create wealth for all the people that are displaced by the technology. Steve, what are you doing?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just making myself a delicious coffee.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: From the freezer?

STEVEN BARTLETT: From the freezer. Have you not heard about Cometeer?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh my gosh, this is going to change your life.

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You know, earlier you were talking about how you can get AI to write a book. I was thinking as you were saying it, the interesting thing is I now ask my AI what book I need to read and to make that book for me versus being prescriptive to it. And because it has this huge memory on me, it knows what I’m dealing with. It knows the businesses I’m building, the problems I have. And so I just say, what do I— what’s the question I should be asking you? What book should I be reading, and then can you make that book for me? Make it 20 pages. I like it in this particular style because it’s my favorite style of author. And then I want to download it as an MP3 file and listen to it on my way to work. I have 43 minutes. Could you say what’s the question I should be asking you?

How AI Helped Michael Saylor Make $15 Billion

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, you’re using that as an example, but at the end of the day, you have to govern the state space. For example, anybody could say, what question should I ask? But the real issue is what are the input constraints? If you’re a baker in Nigeria, in Lagos, right? There’s a certain set of conditions that are different than if you happen to be a fireman in Los Angeles.

And so what’s the state space that you’re exploring in order to create a contribution? And I’ll give you an example. I used AI to make $15 billion last year.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that a true story?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: This is true.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You did?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I did. Yeah. And I used an AI to make $15 billion in a way that no one would ever conceive that you could make $15 billion.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this is a true story.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Okay. Yeah. Let’s go back to me in 2025. We have a company that has billions of dollars of Bitcoin, $30 billion of Bitcoin. We want to actually raise capital to buy more Bitcoin. We maxed out the equity markets. We became the largest issuer of convertible bonds in the world and we maxed out the convertible bond market. And that was our journey in the first 5 years of our Bitcoin.

STEVEN BARTLETT: To simplify this for Jenny and Dave, you borrowed as much money as you could from traditional means.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: To buy Bitcoin.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah.

Inventing a New Financial Instrument

MICHAEL SAYLOR: By the beginning of 2025, we had issued as many convertible bonds as you could issue. We were the largest issuer in the world and it wasn’t scalable. So we needed to invent a new type of security, a new type of credit instrument that we could use to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin.

So we went to the AI, I went to the AI and I started exploring how do I design a preferred stock? And so I said, I think I want to create a security that’s not a common equity and I don’t want it to be a bond. I want it to be some hybrid in the middle. A preferred stock, you know, for the layman, it’s just a security that could be anything. You can give it any terms. I can sell you a preferred stock and give you the right to put it back to me in 12 months, and it looks like debt. I can give you a guaranteed coupon on it. I can give you conversion rights and make it look like equity.

So we used AI to design a convertible preferred stock called STRK. When we did it, no one had ever created a preferred stock that was backed by Bitcoin before, and we’d never issued it. And so it was kind of a combination of financial engineering and digital asset engineering and legal work and securities law.

So we built it and, you know, when we asked the lawyers and the bankers, they’re like, “Well, no one’s ever done it before.” And their answer, by the way, is, “No one’s ever done it before and people don’t do that. So we don’t think you should do that.” And we’re like, “Well, everything else that people have done, we’ve maxed out. And so we’re kind of at the point where our growth is going to stop unless we find a way out of the box.”

So we’re going to have to do something no one’s ever done before using new technology, right? We’re using digital capital, we’re using digital intelligence, and we’re using a digital treasury company. So 3 new forms of something in order to create value.

And after we’ve done 3 of them, we decided what we wanted to do was create a short-duration credit instrument, one that would trade stably around $100, around par. And we’re trying to figure out how do you get a preferred stock to trade at a stable level? It’s what you would call technically short duration credit, but it’s like we’re trying to create a money market type instrument where people can buy it at 100, sell it at 100, collect the yield, and not worry about it trading up and down or being sensitive to interest rates. Well, if you do that, you have to vary— in order to get it to trade stable, if you want the price to be stable, you have to change the dividend rate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Rate.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: And so we created an instrument where we could change the dividend rate every month. Now, had anybody ever done it? No. In the history of the world, no one ever created a variable dividend rate preferred stock. Is it illegal? No. Why has no one ever done it? No one ever had a reason to do it. They never thought to do it. The lawyers, the bankers, the conventional investors, they’re like, “Well, we’ve never seen it done before. We’re not sure you can do it.” We go to the AI, we said, “Well, can we do it?” They’re like, “Of course you can do it. Just do this, this, and this, and this, and this. Well, they said they don’t like that. We’ll just do this, this, this.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which AI?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: ChatGPT, OpenAI.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So ChatGPT made you $15 billion?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, because the short of it is we brought that IPO to market. It became a $2.5 billion IPO, the biggest IPO of the year to date. And then we put a shelf registration on it and we sold another $8 billion of it. So we sold $10.5 billion of that instrument plus $4 billion of the other instruments. So we basically sold $15 billion of credit, which kind of equates to the company making about $15 billion.

The AI Arbitrage Opportunity for Entrepreneurs

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m thinking about what this means generally for the average person listening. Because everyone’s like searching for business ideas and new ideas. And you’re telling me that you can use AI now to come up with novel business ideas and solutions that are outside of the box and that would generate value for people. It’s almost like hearing that there’s an arbitrage opportunity with this intelligence. I was reading something the other day that said only 2% of households have a ChatGPT or AI subscription still. So do you think there is an arbitrage there for people who go to AI now and can build business ideas from it?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: If you’re an entrepreneur, right, if you aspire to create a business or create something of value, then the no-brainer is you definitely should pick one or more of these AIs, and maybe you want to become adept using multiple of them. They’re just different tools. It’s kind of like saying you got to learn how to use a computer and you got to learn how to read — reading, writing, arithmetic, right? Just basics.

And then once you’ve done that, you do need to have some domain expertise in something, right? The question is, what are you going to do, right? You either want to create a new product or you want to create a new service, or you want to radically transform an existing product or service using AI to be much cheaper, much better. But to my mind, I would try to create something magical. Like for example, can you create something that does everybody’s accounting, does the work of a million accountants and sell it for $10 a month?

What Should Young People Study in the Age of AI?

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you were 18 now, or if your kids came to you and said, “Dad, what should I go and study at university and what shouldn’t I study at university?” Would your answer be different now as we stand on the foothills of this new technology?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: You want to study the new thing, right? You want to learn the new thing. And so if you look at the history of science, the real question is what’s on the S-curve?

STEVEN BARTLETT: On the S-curve.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: The whole theory of the S-curve is for 1,000 years we try to fly, and infinite energy makes no progress. You cannot fly. And then in 1903, all of a sudden we can sort of fly. And in 66 years, we go from flying 20 miles an hour to flying 300 miles an hour. First a fighter jet, then a passenger jet. Then we have rockets that are unmanned, then we have manned rockets, and then we have rockets that go to orbit, and then we have rockets that go to the moon. And so that’s an example of an S-curve.

But then you know what happens in the mid-’70s? We designed the 737, the 747, and we hit a wall. And the 737 is still the primary airplane for the next 50 years. And if you look at the efficiency of an airplane from 1975 to the year 2025, over 50 years, the modern airplanes are 15% more efficient. So what you got was a diminishing return. And when you’re on the S-curve, things are doubling every 3 years. You’re doubling, you’re doubling, you’re doubling, you’re exponential growth, and then you hit diminishing returns and then you stagnate and then you stop and then things are just not getting any better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So let’s show an S-curve on the screen and also the new S-curve coming in below it.

The S-Curve of Technology

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Like when I was at MIT, everybody basically flocked to electrical engineering and computer science because that was the cool thing. And so the mistake to make when you go to school is, you get at the end of the S-curve. You basically start studying something that has hit diminishing returns. And once you hit that diminishing return, no material progress may take place for 100 years. It might be that you just can’t break through.

Propulsion technology is the limiting factor. Like, why don’t we have planes that will fly supersonic, on a tank of gas that’s this much, right? Or fusion drives? Well, because we don’t. Now, on the other hand, semiconductors started exploding and semiconductor technologies continued to advance. We haven’t hit that limit yet. And that’s why so many profound breakthroughs were made in computer science over the past 50 years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is kind of hitting the S-curve stuff, hasn’t it? As a form factor, my iPhone here, since the iPhone, as you said, since the iPhone 6, it hasn’t really gotten thinner, better. The battery hasn’t really taken a leap forward as such. So we’re now looking for another form factor to interface with computers.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah. The iPhone 1 didn’t have cut and paste, and we didn’t get cut and paste till version 3. And so there was a rapid improvement, versions 1 through 6 or 1 through 7, call it. And at that point you start hitting diminishing returns. And if you were to do some utility function and you were to score it on a scale of 1 to 100, you would’ve gone from like 5 to 70 in a hurry. And then you would’ve gone from 70 to 90 over the next few iterations. And then you’re at 91, 92. You hit that limit.

And now if you are starting a company, right, you don’t create another iPhone. Right? The real question right now is, can I create smart glasses where I have something that’s like my Maui Jim sunglasses? I put them on, they weigh nothing, and they have the camera and they see what I see and they hear what I hear and they know where I am and plug that into AI. And at that point I can just say, “Hey Eve, what is that? Where am I? Tell me about that.” And it’s — why do I have to type anymore?

The Future of Human-Computer Interfaces

STEVEN BARTLETT: When I met Mark Zuckerberg, he showed me the device that’s on the way from Meta. This is not a secret because I know they’ve talked about it publicly, which is just a plain wrist strap with no screen on it, but it linked to the glasses. And in the glasses, when I looked around, I could see all of my screens and everything like that. And because of this wrist strap, if I just click, it clicks on all the stuff.

So I was just sat here with this little wrist strap. The wrist strap again was just like a cotton bracelet, very thin cotton bracelet. And as I just looked around, I could click on everything and open things and call people and send texts and go on YouTube, et cetera. And it was just up here in my peripheral. Imagine again, imagine that on an S-curve. At some point it’s going to be some sort of almost like contact lens type thing that I can just — by the way, this is why you should study fantasy, right?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Because they have this in magic worlds, right? You’re like, “I just wear my talisman. I have a necklace. What does it do for me? Oh, it makes me omniscient, all-powerful, immortal, indestructible. I live forever.” Well, what do you have to do to make the product work? Nothing. I’m wearing the wristband and I walk and every door opens to me and stuff happens.

And here’s where Elon gets it right. It’s like the number one engineering mistake is engineers want to optimize a part that shouldn’t exist. Like, make the parts go away, right? We started on the topic of what should you study, right? It’s study technologies that allow you to create magic things that your parents could never — if your parents would say that’s magic, you’re on the right track, right? So like, how about what’s better than the wristband? Just like, how about you just implant one pellet?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Neuralink.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, maybe it’s a Neuralink. Maybe it’s when I’m born, there’s a slight implant and now I hear — like I can talk to the AI in cyberspace forever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But should you go study that? Because conceivably the artificial intelligence and the robots are going to be the ones that create that technology if they have a PhD in everything, and that’s accelerating.

What Should You Study in the Age of AI?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, well, I guess we’re back to the what should you study? You ought to study digital intelligence or digital assets. If you can generate proteins, generate any kind of life form or enzyme or protein or the like, maybe it’s interesting. But I think with regard to AI, you don’t want to learn how to do things that AI can do. What you want to do is learn how to ask the AI to do something that’s never been done before. Like if I were to go back to school, 95% of what I learned, I probably wouldn’t want to study.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about surgeons? Do you think you want to be a surgeon?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about a lawyer?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Accountant?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Driver?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: No. At some point, what you have to do is ask — the AIs aren’t really answering the question yet, but you have to ask whatever is the marginal question that hasn’t been answered by the civilization. Could you ask? Maybe I’ll take that position, which is the way you create value in the world is you bring something into the world that wasn’t here before.

Actionable Steps for the Working Class

STEVEN BARTLETT: Beyond just buying Bitcoin, is there any sort of actionable steps that the working class should take right now to prepare for this robot transition that you’re talking about?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: The actionable step is learn digital.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Learn about the robots.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Digital. Like understand digital. For example, how much content’s available on YouTube right now?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Infinite. I don’t know.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Right? What can you get for free on YouTube and what can you create of value? If you’re in the business of content creation, my advice would be study digital channels. It’s like, should I go and become a stage actor on Broadway? It’s a much smaller thing. MrBeast can get 100 million subscribers. You can get 20 million subscribers. You’re not getting 20 million subscribers if you do the thing that your parents’ parents did. So I think that you want to look at digital platforms. There’s digital communication like X or Instagram, there’s YouTube and the like, but there’s also digital intelligence.

The Content Creator’s Dilemma

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let’s just stress test that first point a bit. I guess a lot of content creators are thinking at the moment, now because of these frontier models that can produce video content, pictures, a kid in Mumbai or Manhattan where we are now, can set up an agent while they’re asleep and say, “Listen, just post 100 videos while I’m asleep on this every single platform. Actually, I’ll make 5 agents and I’ll ask all of them to post 100 videos each.”

So you’re going to have this — in terms of supply and demand, presumably that’s a supply shock. There’s this slop tsunami coming in. And then if you look at demand of attention online, it is arguably fixed. Financial Times did a report said that young people are actually starting to come down in terms of time spent online. Slightly older generations are starting from a lower base. They’re still going up, but they’re starting from a lower base. So you’ve got a tsunami slop of supply and fixed demand.

Again, even this business feels a little bit insecure. Actually, a lot of the major podcasters are actually down on YouTube. If I look at the top, who I would consider the sort of top 5 podcasters in my niche, every single one of them is down at least 50% in the last 12 to 24 months.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Well, the solution is certainly not to not pay attention, right? So for example, if you’re in the business of creating content right now, you would ask the question, can I enhance the content with AI or can I better market or distribute the content with AI?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the moat?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: The moat’s going to be the most talented content, the person creating the best stuff that everybody wants to see. There are videos being created like, here’s a walkthrough of a 16th century warship. And I don’t know if you’ve seen, a guy constructs the entire warship from the keel and he creates the ribs and he shows you the lower deck and the ballast and he takes you through every step. And it’s a 3-dimensional video animation, takes about an hour, and it’s absolutely riveting. I have no reason to care about 16th century warships, but I can’t take my eyes off it because it’s just so fascinating to see him explain everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you saying creativity is the moat still, or understanding what humans want and then delivering it, which I guess is creativity.

The S-Curve of Innovation and Timing

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Let’s say the Led Zeppelin example. But what you see in human history is within 10 years of whenever there’s a new technology platform, there’s some geniuses, they push it to the limit and they do 95% of everything that can be done. And it all happens within 10 years and they live forever.

So why didn’t anybody before Beethoven do stuff with the piano? Well, the piano comes out, some genius does stuff with the piano, right? And between Beethoven and Chopin and a few players, it’s like, it’s not clear to me if humans try for another 10,000 years, they’ll do much better.

So with Led Zeppelin, you had electric guitars and amplification and everything kind of clicked late ’60s. Like the sound of the early ’60s was not quite there. And then by 1971, ’72, you could do some amazing stuff. And if you think about all the classic rock between 1970 and 1980, you have human creativity pushing the edge of the envelope in so many directions. And then you hit this diminishing return.

And then along comes sampling, right? And then you get Swedish House Mafia and Avicii, and that’s new technology. And then they push it to the extreme. And then along comes YouTube and Justin Bieber comes out of nowhere, and MrBeast comes out of nowhere and they push it to the extreme.

And what you see with every generation is I give you a new thing, whether it’s a piano or electric guitar or internet. Think about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and what he did at just about the point when you could do that with the web. And then think about the early mobile apps, WhatsApp and the like. And it’s like what you want to do if you want to create these incredible success things is you want to locate the magic opportunity right at the right point on the S-curve where it just now became commercially viable to do it. And it’s a zero-to-one moment, and you want to be there. You want to be the first person that applies that technology to this new idea.

Like what did our company do to go from nothing to $60 billion or from $1 billion to $60 billion? We were the first company to take digital capital, Bitcoin, and put it together with digital credit and a digital treasury model. So we created a credit instrument, a security that you could never have created before. You couldn’t have made it 10 years ago. You couldn’t build it on top of anything other than Bitcoin.

So we needed to get to the point where we had $10 or $20 billion of capital, and then we could create this thing that was a multi-billion dollar thing. And that becomes resonant. And that window is like 12 to 24 months. And you go through that window and you create something that might be a $100 billion thing because you go through, if you went through 36 months early, you smack into a wall and you fail.

And if you wait, like at this point, our company is 20 times bigger than the next biggest one, 50 times bigger than the company doing something similar. Did we plan it? Not at all. We found some extraordinary cool thing. We committed to it with all of our heart and soul, and we declared we were going to make it work come hell or high water.

And we got punched in the face 100 times, and every single time we ran into a problem, we stopped, we recalibrated, we went a different direction. And the process of creating something beautiful, like the beautiful thing, like everybody wants a bank account that pays 10%. So if you can figure out how to give people this thing they want with a new technology that was impossible, that did not exist 5 years or 3 years earlier, then you resonate in the society, right? You go viral.

Like we were just the first ones to get there. It exploded. If you gave me a billion dollars and said, run a marketing campaign, it wouldn’t be as effective. Like, you couldn’t buy the success with $1 billion of marketing. You just have to— the Led Zeppelin guys, they didn’t spend $1 billion marketing. You have to be in the right place, the right time, and you have to have the courage to offer people the new thing.

Fame, Algorithms, and the Changing Nature of Virality

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have been thinking a lot about this idea of, you said, if you spent $1 billion, you couldn’t go as viral as that. And if someone came along and spent a ton of money today, they couldn’t go be as big as, let’s say, Michael Jackson.

When we go back through history, I was thinking about this idea because I watched the Michael Jackson documentary recently, and he was at a level of fame that is, I don’t think we’ve ever seen since. And I think part of the reason why was because there was a constraint on the distribution channels back then. So in my house, there was 20 albums over there, box set albums, and Michael Jackson was like 3 of them. And then the other way that we could consume was the TV over there, and there was like 6 channels, and MTV was one of them, and it was Michael Jackson all day.

In the world we live in now, where there’s my phone experience is a completely different phone experience to yours because of AI, AI is learning what I like and showing me my own little version of the world. I wonder if it’s possible to be as big as Michael Jackson once was for anybody these days.

And actually, even with YouTubers you mentioned earlier, I wonder now if fame or being a content creator or a musician once looked like this, this sort of like high ceiling, and then you’re known for 100 years like Michael Jackson. And now with algorithms that are personalized, does it now look like this? Shorter and shallower.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Is it possible to get big? You could say, well, I can’t get as big as Michael Jackson, but on the other hand, Elon Musk got big, right? Like, there are things that get big, right? Companies get big. OpenAI went from nothing to how many users in just a few months.

So I think what you could say is going viral is about hitting a resonating frequency in the civilization, whether it’s an artistic frequency or it’s a political frequency, or it’s a technical frequency. Yeah, there are some things where there’s going to be a glut. Let’s take Instagram, right? It’s like on one hand, a billion people have bad photos posted online, but on the other hand, there are people that manage to get 8 million followers and they are the Kardashians. You have these people that get massively big and that’s the other side of the equation.

So I don’t really know how it all plays out except for the fact that it seems clear that there is room for human creativity and innovation. And if your goal is to make a contribution, if you’re in your working years where you want to upgrade the world and make a difference and to be remembered for something, then a pretty simple principle is don’t keep doing the same thing over and over, working harder and harder every year, fighting against the modern automation epidemic, right? Don’t try to outwork the robots.

It’s like you’re lamenting how difficult it is for a content creator, but let me remind you that it used to be you would go be a college professor and teach 200 students a year for 20 years, and you would feel that your life contribution was 4,000 people whose minds you touched. And now you get 4,000 people a second. Okay? So you’re judging yourself against the next thing. But if you look back in time, technology has given us the ability to amplify our intellect and amplify our creativity in a way that is unprecedented in human history.

The Value of Hard and Scarce

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I think in part, I’m wondering now if we’re kind of— technology said, okay, you can reach more people in TV, radio, all these things. And actually now with intelligence, it’s saying, oh, we can figure out exactly what Michael wants. So we’re starting to live in these smaller echo chambers where your creative idea or your creative piece of content reaching lots of people is going to become harder because the algorithms are now in the way and they’re deciding who sees what. And they’re optimizing for the platform’s monetary desire.

The other thing that I think is really interesting, and I’ve been mulling for the last couple of months, is that that which is really, really hard and scarce, and actually you could say something being hard and scarce are the same, because to create something scarce is also hard, like you did with that financial instrument. Very few people on earth could have created that. We don’t run public companies, we don’t have the information, et cetera. Or even that YouTuber you mentioned who walks you through the 1600s or whatever, that is very hard to do.

I’ve theorized that actually pursuing that which is hard and scarce, getting you to come here today is not easy. So that’s kind of my moat. Michelle Obama coming and sitting down with me here is still kind of my moat, is what we should aim at. What do you think of that as a theory?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I agree. Let’s say you have a business, whatever your business is. Right now, the right thing to do is to spend an intense time with the AI considering what are all the ways you can upgrade and improve the product or the service you create, right?

For example, it used to be, you do this in English and the issue is, well, what about Japanese or Chinese or French or whatever? And the hard way is you learn 20 languages, but then how does your guest, or do we translate it, or you hire, we used to spend money to hire translators, but now you could have the AI translate this into 100 languages, right? Now the question is, should you or not?

Can I enhance it, right? It’s interesting when someone describes something, but you’re like, well, let’s just put up a chart of the S-curve there. And then the next step is, can I market it better or distribute it better? And the next step is, am I creating something that’ll be valuable in a decade? Will it be valuable in 100 years?

Committing to the Long Game

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, this is probably a good time to mention this. 24 months ago, we started exactly that.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah. And ask yourself how many people that do podcast interviews offer that level of quality of content. And I think that you’re outstripping. Like I don’t know if anybody else has done enough.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We started almost three years ago. And for the first 24 months, it was a tragic failure. So you had the data scientists in the corner of our office failing for 24 months. And then about 12 months ago, for the first time ever, we saw that the translation technology underneath us had improved and that we could get the view duration in Spanish to be higher than English.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: And how many months do you think Jimmy Page spent trying to master the electric guitar? More than 24 months?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, a lot longer.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: My advice to an entrepreneur is, you focus, you commit. If you’re successful in less than 4 years, you got lucky. If it takes you 10 years, well, between 4 and 10 years is very, very normal. If you haven’t had success by the 10-year point, you’re probably not cut out for the business.

But what you’re doing is totally logical. It’s like, is AI going to remake this industry? The first issue is, can you make the product better? And the second question is, what’s it worth? Can you get paid? And by the way, even if you didn’t get paid, I would argue that your audience have limited attention span. It’s like, I don’t have time to listen to every Lex Fridman, every Joe Rogan, every Diary of a CEO, and every one of the next 20. And so I’m going to become loyal. I’m going to become a customer and a fan of whoever serves me the best content. And certainly if I’m a native Portuguese speaker, or a native Russian speaker, you all of a sudden just leaped right to the top.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This goes to my point about hard and scarce because people in Portugal maybe have never heard Michael Saylor before in Portuguese. So in terms of scarce, it’s actually the only interview now available that is 2 hours long of Michael Saylor talking in Cantonese with Steven. And so that we then are competing, we have, that’s kind of the moat then, right?

Building a Lasting Competitive Advantage

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Right. And that becomes a benefit to all your guests. You are the distribution channel for me to send the message of digital capital, digital empowerment to the world. And then your guests become your moat.

I think that with every single business, it’s pretty clear you have to ask the question, is technology going to cannibalize my business or disrupt it? And am I going to be the one that embraces it and evolves and grows with it, or am I going to fight it?

And then of course you’re in a dialogue with the market. For example, the great thing about what you’ve done is if you’ve done it, you can look and see how it runs and whether YouTube actually expands your reach. And then you can look at the engagement and figure out whether or not you’re able to monetize that and whether you’re able to convert that. And then you tweak it, right? And adjust.

And your 6 months or 12 months can be enough that you have a lasting advantage forever, right? If you’re 12 months ahead of everybody else and you’re compounding — yeah, it compounds over time and then maybe they never catch you. Because that’s the story of every business, right? That’s the story of Ford Motor Company and Standard Oil. That’s the story of Microsoft. It’s the story of Facebook. It’s everybody’s story, which is you just have to focus, commit, and then if you’re good enough, invariably what happens is your customers will make you the winner.

The world needs someone to do what you do. Someone has to win, right? There needs to be a winner. The audience out there, once they want what you do, they want to walk into the living room and figure out what Obama was thinking, or they want to hear what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking, and they want someone to bring them into that living room. They want you to host them in. They need someone to do that job.

You don’t have to be perfect or better than anybody who ever lived. You need to be better than the people that are currently doing it now, or you need to be one of a handful of people that are doing it. Because at that point, right, the audience comes to you, the guests come to you. So you’re making a market, right? You’re the market maker in that information.

It’s just the real key is know what your value proposition is, stay in your lane. Don’t try to compete in an area where you’re not going to be the best in the world. But on the other hand, right, the one thing that’s pretty clear is that anybody can have the best in the world in like 2 seconds at their fingertips. And so you don’t want to be the third best. You don’t want to be mediocre across a bunch of things. You want to be exceptional in one area, figure out what that one area is. And then maybe you have 2 million followers, then 200 million followers, right? Then eventually, over 100 years, 2 billion. You just have to have this vision.

The Cost of Being First

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that comes with the pursuit of being first is you go over the hill, you take the arrows, as the phrase goes. And so even in that experiment that I just showed you that we started 3 years ago, which was trying to figure out how we translate the Diary of a CEO into lots of different languages, it sounds simple.

Problem is you discover — you go, f*, Spanish words are longer. So the video in Spanish is 3 hours 10, but in English it’s just 3 hours. And then the video is going to be out and then Cantonese — how long are Cantonese words? And then you go, oh my God, you have to then translate all the thumbnails and all the titles in 20 languages at the same time. And that’s why you end up 3 years in when you thought it was just a 1-hour job.

But also, if you zoom out even further, there’s this graveyard of other things we tried that never worked. There’s the other 90% of experiments we ran in the corner that did nothing. And I always say to the team, there’s 2 things a year that define us. And of that, in our failure and experimentation team — which is literally what it’s called — we tried 60 things. But there’s this, you know, 5 of them are meh. 2 of them are game-changing. So the attitude of dealing with failure at the very forefront of trying to be first, I think, is something people don’t talk about enough.

Focus, Guard Your Time, and Avoid Dilution

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Focus your energy, guard your time. Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should do the thing, right? Most of the time, the reason people fail is they get successful in their 30s and they’re successful at one thing, and it’s like all of a sudden they’ve decided they’re going to do 10 other things because they’re good at everything, and they dilute their focus in 10 ways. People always underestimate the maintenance obligation, always.

And so the right solution to growth is I would like to make whatever I’m doing twice as good. And if I do 10 things to make it 10% better, I’m probably diluting, distracting.

The phenomenon that causes most businesses to fail — it’s dilutive distractions, or it’s dilutive expansions. They do one thing, it works, and then instead of turning their energy in to make that better and better and better and better, they start to bifurcate and trifurcate and they expand and they overreach to too many areas.

It’s like the dude with the great restaurant and he’s got the second restaurant and he’s got a chain of 37 restaurants and they all suck. And it’s like, yeah — there’s no one, by the way, with a failed restaurant there wasn’t a successful restaurateur at scale 1, right? Like you didn’t get to a failure of 37 or 62 or 437 until you had a good one. But it’s very, very common that people think that they can just cookie cutter these things out and you can’t.

And so the conundrum that you’re putting your finger on is I want to grow and progress, but I want to not dilute and distract. And that requires this maturity of saying, I tried it, had a moderate success, but it’s not enough. Kill it, right? And move on because it’s just not going to work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s 2 things that came to mind there. The first is a lot of young people come up to me and they’re 9 months into their idea and they’re not rich yet. So they look over there and they see their friend has started a thing with CBD, and so they’re like, I think I need to go into CBD. And so their careers kind of look like this sort of swinging through the jungle, grabbing onto the next branch and letting go of the last and never really making upward motion towards any goal.

And then the other thing I thought about as you’re speaking is I’ve been mulling this really only over the last 2 months — this idea that if you take a long-term approach to things, you make foundational decisions today that create huge competitive advantages.

The simple analogy I would give: if you gave me 10 seconds to make the highest possible tower that I can, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go like this, and I’m going to go like this, and I’m going to try and do something like this. And just by nature of the time constraint, it’s unstable. If you gave me 10 years and infinite blocks again, I would start like this. I’d do this one here, I’ll put this one here, I’ll put this one here, and I’d build something more stable.

And when I look at some of the great founders, and also when I saw that you’d been at MicroStrategy for more than 3, almost 4 decades, I thought, oh, you’re one of the rare long-termists in a world where most of my generation, we think about our career or what we’re working on in like maximum 5-year periods. Then we’re going to quit and go do something else. Startup founders, they build so they can sell. And then they’re sort of holding it together with tape as the acquirer comes to buy the thing. And they’re nervous as the contract’s being signed because they know if the acquirer looks under the hood, they’re going to see it.

But then I look at Elon and I go, oh gosh, he f*ing went and rebuilt a brand new battery and then built the charging network. And SpaceX took 2 decades. My question is about this long-termism and does it create a competitive advantage?

Building on Foundations: The Elon Musk Model

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I think Elon thinks like an engineer. And if you look at his businesses, they’re all built upon each other. Like if you figure out how to launch a rocket and you have the highest payload capacity and the cheapest cost to orbit, then you’ve got an advantage. Now the question is, what do you want to put in orbit? We put satellites, but what satellite? Like Starlink satellite, because that’s the thing everybody wants — internet. And so all of a sudden he’s got an advantage in the sky and then you build on that advantage with battery technology.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But he could have gone to Russia and bought a rocket and just shot that up. And that would have been the short term. Even with Tesla, he could have bought the batteries off Ford or —

MICHAEL SAYLOR: One great natural example is like a chambered nautilus. If you look at a creature and it’s building a shell and it’s spiraling out on itself, basically it keeps building on its own structure and it’s nature’s solution for growth under pressure. It’s the Fibonacci sequence too. If you look at a Fibonacci sequence, if I have this and then the next structure is here and the next structure is there and the next structure is there — part of my previous business is the foundation for my next business.

And so if you’re thinking your growth strategy is to build on a foundation of something you already had and extend its functionality in a natural fashion, that’s natural stable growth. When your second business idea is unrelated to your first business in any way other than the fact that you own both, right? Right now you’re not building on a stable foundation.

So most of these businesses that work and the best ideas, they start with someone dominating a market. I’m really good at this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Mark Zuckerberg.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah. And now what is the natural thing that I can add that I can use my existing business to? Maybe I’m marketing it. Well, you’re Coca-Cola. Well, we deliver a pallet of drinks to 87,000 restaurants in the UK every morning. What’s a natural extension? Well, I can put one more type of drink on the pallet, right? You need to use your distribution strength, your market strength, your technical strength in order to lever.

I think you look at all the great businesses in the history of the world — again, Standard Oil, Ford Motor, Boeing, Microsoft — the things they did that worked were generally building on top of their foundation, either loyal customers or distribution or some financial asset they already had.

Another way to say it is if there’s no one else in the world that is better situated to do this thing than you, then you’re probably in good shape, right? If there are 97 other companies that have more assets than you in that space, well, you’ve got to bet that all 97 of them are not going to react to you when you do it. It’s a bit harder.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s where the long-termism comes in because to build that fundamental advantage, by definition, it’s going to take time.

The Amazon Prime Lesson: Building the Moat

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Good example — Amazon Prime, right? Where Amazon started giving free shipping, first free shipping or very cheap shipping and one-day shipping. And everybody said, well, you’re losing money, you’re losing money, you’re losing money. And they lost money doing this for like a decade.

And then they got to some point where like everybody in the country was a member of Amazon Prime and they’re like, okay, well now it’s $20 a month instead of $10 a month. And it’s like an extra $10 a month times like 100 million people. And people are like, oh my God, they just made $12 billion in one press release per year in cash flow. And that’s worth like $250 billion.

And you’re like, well, what were you doing? It’s like, we were building the moat.

That story is not uncommon with every other thing. It’s like you first believe, you build the biggest distribution channel you can. People are going to tell you, well, there’s no future to whatever, to podcasts. There’s no future to something. And what’ll happen is 99% of the people will drop out because they don’t believe. And the true believers, the ones that are not creative, won’t adapt. And then there’ll be some that’ll say, I believe, but I also know there’s a threat, but I’m going to channel the technology threat and I’m going to evolve and I’m going to emerge as something 1,000x better than anybody could conceive. And that’s a beautiful story.

10 Rules for Young Adults

STEVEN BARTLETT: So speaking of strong foundations, you have 10 rules for young adults building a strong foundation for their life and career, and you’ve talked about 2 of them here, which are focusing your energy and not chasing every good idea.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The second one was guard your time. The third one is train your mind. And with that, you’ve got train your body.

Life Advice and Bitcoin Strategy

MICHAEL SAYLOR: You know, the funny story of that is I was invited to a cocktail party of a billionaire on the French Riviera in a beautiful home. And I showed up and I walked into the party thinking I was going to hang out. And another billionaire showed up and he said, “Mike, I just had twins, a boy and a girl. And I’m walking around asking all of my friends for advice for them. And I want you to write some advice for them that I can give to them on their 21st birthday.”

And he’s got this book where he’s actually collecting advice for his children to give them on their 21st birthday as young adults. So I sit down and I think, think, think, think, think. And I’m like, focus your mind, guard your time and train your mind. You have to learn something, right? You have to learn reading, writing, arithmetic. You have to actually develop a cultured base. So it’s like, get an education and then train your body. Because if you’re weak, you’re not going to make it, right? You’re not going to survive.

And then think for yourself. Everybody in the world wants to program you to believe, to do something they want you to do. And you have to have the presence of mind to think that’s not right. Just because everybody that I know and famous, rich, and beautiful people tell me it’s right doesn’t make it right. You need to decide, think for yourself, and then curate your friends because you become who you surround yourself with.

And if you surround yourself with positive, inspirational, talented people, you’ll be the best person version of yourself. And if you surround yourself with negative, cynical, failing people, they’re going to want you to fail or they’re not going to inspire you to succeed. And they’ll bring you down.

And so after curate your friends, curate your environment, right? Like make it a happy place where you can work or you can live. And the world didn’t say you had to be in the dark in an ugly situation. And after that, keep your promises. At the end of the day, people remember if you didn’t keep your promise. So you tell somebody you’re going to do something, do it, right? If you keep your promises, you’ll find those are the people that invest in you. They uplift you. They make you successful. They may be the difference between life and death or the difference between success and failure for you.

And ultimately, we’re all in relationships with each other, right? And no one is so powerful that they can afford to take anybody else for granted. We all need each other. And finally, stay cheerful and constructive. It doesn’t matter whether bad things happen. The point is people want to come to work with someone that’s cheerful and happy and constructive. They want to be in a relationship with that person. All of those are just basic principles to get through life.

And then the final point is upgrade the world. If you have a plan, if you’re on a mission to upgrade the world, you’re going to feel better about yourself. You get up every day, you have a mission, you have something to do. Like, what is my mission? I’m preaching the gospel of digital empowerment, right? Satoshi created this economic property, right? He gave economic empowerment to 8 billion people for the first time in human history. And we created the world’s first perfect money. We created digital energy, digital matter, digital property, right? We can be 1,000x more as humans with technology than we were.

I look through all human history and I see it’s a story of misery. Why do people die? Lack of clean water, lack of clean air, lack of clean food, lack of clean money. What do we want? We want to live forever. We want to live happily forever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you want to live forever?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I want to live as long as I can live constructively and make a contribution. If I can be engaged and vital, then yeah. At the point that I can no longer make a contribution, then I will move on gracefully.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if there was a button in front of you now and the button, pressing it guaranteed you immortality, would you press it?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I think so. I suppose so.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why aren’t you then committing more of your efforts to longevity? People ask Elon the same question.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I think there’s 8 billion people on the planet and there are many people that I respect that are much more qualified to pursue that mission than me.

Bitcoin Conviction and MicroStrategy’s Strategy

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the thing that you’ve chosen to focus your efforts on and become the leading voice on, and I’ve watched you for many, many, many, many years — when Bitcoin comes down in price, sometimes I need a bit of a therapist to remind me of why I’ve invested in Bitcoin. And that person has been you over the years. And then when it’s up, to your credit, you’re consistent about it.

I have watched you and thought, I think this guy must be either batshit crazy or a genius. And it’s sometimes hard to tell. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier when people will say you’re crazy at first and then you’ll be proven right. Now, historically, you’ve been proven right. If you zoom out from when you started advocating for Bitcoin, Bitcoin is down right now. So again, we’re back into fear. People are scared again.

It’s funny what happens because when it was going up a couple of months ago, everyone thought, “Oh my God, this is going to be the future of money.” And now it’s down, everyone is convinced that it was always a Ponzi scheme and it’s done. You’ve taken a lot of debt out to buy more and more and more and more and more Bitcoin. Is that accurate?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I guess we’ve got about $6.5 billion of convertible debt and $15 billion of preferred stocks outstanding. And we’re sitting on top of about $58 billion of assets right now. So we have raised about $65 billion in capital to buy Bitcoin, but most of it wasn’t debt.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Of the $65 billion, for the most part, we’ve raised capital with equity and some debt in order to buy Bitcoin. And we’ve been doing that because we wanted to pump $65 billion of capital, of money, of energy into the ecosystem. So we’re powering the ecosystem with capital.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Everyone theorizes — I’ve seen a few people on my timeline that I follow theorize — how bad it would have to get for Bitcoin in terms of price for you to be in trouble because you—

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Bitcoin could fall to $5,000 a coin. We would still be overcollateralized against the debt.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’d still be fine.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah.

Why MicroStrategy Sold Some Bitcoin

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other thing people theorize a lot — and again, I did a comment analysis to figure out what people wanted to hear from you — is you sold a bit of Bitcoin. You’ve been asked this a few times, I know.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You sold a bit of Bitcoin recently after telling a lot of people maybe to hold onto their Bitcoin. People want to know why you sold the Bitcoin.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Okay. Well, so let’s make the first point. The only person that’s never sold more Bitcoin than me—

STEVEN BARTLETT: Satoshi?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Is Satoshi. Satoshi never sold a million, a million one Bitcoin. Our company has 847,000 Bitcoin. And so we bought more and we’re holding it more than anybody other than Satoshi. And Satoshi’s not active. So we have a reasonable chance of never selling more Bitcoin than Satoshi if we just keep at it for the next few years. What I’ve said is—

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sorry, I should probably show this. This is why there’s a kidney.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you said sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I have waged a campaign nonstop every day for 6 years to promote and advocate Bitcoin as a long-term store of value. Right? And what I would say is if you have money that you don’t need for the next 4 years and your choice is, do I invest it in the S&P or a house or a private company or soybeans or money markets or debt instruments? I think that Bitcoin is the best, right? I think that Bitcoin is digital capital. It’s going to be the best long-term capital asset.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So why did you sell the Bitcoin instead of your kidney?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, we sold some Bitcoin a few weeks ago because there was a narrative or a belief in the market that our company had become so systemically integrated or important to Bitcoin that we could never sell. And if we sold, Bitcoin would go to zero and our stock would go to zero.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you own 4% of the total supply of Bitcoin.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, because we own 4%, because we’re the biggest buyer. We’re the biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world. So the first sentiment was, “Well, Bitcoin will never succeed if they don’t keep buying.” And the second sentiment or belief — misconception — was if we sell, it’ll crash Bitcoin and it’ll crash the company.

And because of that, short sellers and certain people in the market took the position that the $55 billion of Bitcoin we own was worth nothing. And so what we had was this ignorant, skeptical notion that all the company’s assets were worthless. And because the company’s assets were worthless, we wouldn’t pay our dividends. And because we wouldn’t pay our dividends, the credit would go to zero and the equity would go to zero. The company would fail and Bitcoin would fail.

And we said, “Well, Bitcoin trades $20 billion a day or more, and we’ve got $55 billion of it. And if we were 0.01% of the market, we could still meet all of our obligations and it’s not going to change the price of Bitcoin.” But no one believed us. So if you want people to believe that you can do a thing, you have to do the thing. If you told me you could do a backflip right now, but I said you can’t, at some point you have to do the backflip, right? Especially if I tell you that I’m going to throw you in jail if you can’t do a backflip.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who told you that?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Well, that’s exactly what’s going on in the market. The market’s position was the company is worthless. The stock is going to zero and Bitcoin’s going to zero because they can’t sell. So if we want to defend Bitcoin, we have to prove that we can sell it on occasion.

So what we’re doing is we’re commercializing the market in digital credit. And if you have $1 billion of Bitcoin and they believe it’s worth $1 billion, you can sell $200 million of credit and then you can grow the business if they believe that. If they don’t believe that the Bitcoin is worth anything, and you sell the $200 million of credit, the credit’s worthless and the company’s worthless.

And so we were in a doom loop — or the market was in this doom loop, this negative short — almost like a psychosis, almost like hyperventilating, saying that the largest buyer of Bitcoin can’t sell it. And if they do sell it, Bitcoin will fail. And what we needed to do was demonstrate that if we sold Bitcoin, it wouldn’t fail.

So when we sold the Bitcoin, it was $60,000, $59,000, and it traded up. And so we broke that misconception. We broke that narrative. It turns out that the break-even point for us is about 3.2%. So if Bitcoin appreciates 3.2%, we can pay the dividends forever by just selling the Bitcoin.

But you can imagine if you’re a short seller, you say, “Well, you can’t sell the Bitcoin. Ha ha ha ha ha. Because Bitcoin will fail.” And so they want to say that the credit is worthless because you won’t sell the Bitcoin. So the way to break that cycle is you sell the Bitcoin. Now you can illustrate that the credit is actually good credit. We can pay the dividends forever. And now the credit investors—

STEVEN BARTLETT: Without having to sell more Bitcoin.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: No, the whole point of this was we were selling equity in order to pay the dividend on the credit. And the short sellers took the position that you’re going to sell the equity until the stock goes to zero. Because you can’t sell the Bitcoin.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: So how do you break that? Well, you have to say, “Well, we can sell the Bitcoin.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividend.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: So we sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividends to prove that we could fund the dividends with Bitcoin, which means we don’t have to sell the equity. And if we don’t have to sell the equity, then the equity trades at a premium to Bitcoin, trades rationally, and then the credit trades rationally. So it was a benefit to the equity investors and the credit investors to show that you can power the company with Bitcoin.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you intend to sell more?

Bitcoin as the Best Long-Term Investment

MICHAEL SAYLOR: It’s not our primary strategy. So if the common stock trades at a premium to the underlying assets, then probably we fund with the common stock. But if the common stock ever sells at a discount or trades at a discount to the Bitcoin assets, then you sell Bitcoin in order to protect the common stock.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And where do you think Bitcoin’s going in terms of monetary value in terms of one Bitcoin? Currently, what you said is what, $68,000 or something?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I think it appreciates about 30% a year for the next 20 years, right? And then it’ll slow down to being appreciated about 20% a year.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think it’s the best asset to put your money in really irrespective of who you are?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Another way to say it is I think it outperforms the S&P index by a factor 1.5 to 2.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who shouldn’t invest in Bitcoin?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: The right people to invest in Bitcoin are long-term capital investors. So if you have a certain amount of money and you don’t need it for the next 4 years and ideally 10 years, then you would take a portion of your capital investment portfolio and buy Bitcoin.

And if you believe in it, if you’re a Bitcoin maxi, if you spend 100 hours studying it, you’d buy a lot. And if you’re not sure, you’d probably diversify that portfolio across some real estate, some equity, some other long-term assets, and some Bitcoin. The people that shouldn’t buy it are people that need the money back in 12 weeks.

Advice for Young Investors

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about a regular 25-year-old? One of the questions that I saw emerging from some of the interviews you’ve done is if a normal young person has a few hundred dollars to invest today, why should they bother with Wall Street products like stocks or corporate stocks instead of just buying a real Bitcoin and holding it themselves?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Yeah, I think if you have money to invest for the long term, you’re going to get double the performance from BTC that you would get from the S&P index.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But for that 25-year-old, would it not be smarter for them to spend it on something that’s going to help them train their mind, like you said? If you only have $100?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: I wouldn’t go spend $500,000 on an expensive university education, but I would spend $20 a month on an AI subscription. So yeah, you should definitely spend money necessary to get the super Grok or the pro, the professional edition, whether it’s $20 a month or $200. $200 a month is the most I would spend. $20 a month is probably the least I would spend. But look, we’re talking about your Netflix subscription at that point.

But after you’ve done that, then you’re talking about what you ought to be invested in. I think that you ought to be invested in digital capital because you can take it with you anywhere in the world. If you invest in an Airbnb or real estate, you’re locked into a certain city. You can’t travel with it. It’s high maintenance. There’s a lot of risk.

If you invest in an individual stock, you have a lot of anxiety because they come and they go and you’ve got to pick the right stock. And most stocks will fail, but some will succeed. But it really is much more challenging. I think really it comes down to if you have a liquid portfolio, are you going to invest in the S&P index if you’re a conventional capital investor? Are you going to invest in Bitcoin if you’re a digital, or a technology capital investor?

The Closing Question: What Does the World Not Yet Believe?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Michael, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is, what is one thing you believe that maybe you haven’t talked about enough that you think likely 99% of the world don’t yet believe?

MICHAEL SAYLOR: If I look at my life and I think about something that’s had a real impact on me, it’s after I got a full education from college, I eventually went back and I studied 2 topics on my own.

One, practical applied statistics — all the stuff that Nassim Taleb wrote, like Fooled by Randomness and Skin in the Game and The Black Swan. How do you know the difference between something that’s meaningful and something that’s just misleading random data? That was profoundly valuable to me. And I would say anybody that hasn’t read all of those books probably ought to go read those books and obsess over applied statistics. That’s the one thing the AI will not be able to do for you — when you have to decide whether to cross the street while you’re typing on your phone, the AI will not give you a never-ending real-time stream of common sense to tell you whether you should or should not do that thing. And so I think that that’s really important.

And the second thing that I did after I left school and after a lifetime of experiences — I went back and I just read The Story of Civilization by Durant, every page, 11 volumes, 14,000 pages. Most of the history that you read in school, it’s the Cliff Notes. But if you go through the entire thing — and I recommend that one just because I think it was a pretty well-balanced history that covered art and culture and politics and technology. And it’s not just military history, not just political history, but it was a very synthetic history.

When you go back and you read it all as an adult, then it gives you such a profound appreciation for humanity and it gives you so much wisdom. And what you’ll find is all these things you think you’re discovering, they got discovered in like 15th century Russia and then they got rediscovered. Most of these things that people tell you are new and profound — it was new and profound 100 times in a row or 1,000 times in a row. It’s just the story was told a different way each time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me an example of a thing that we think is new, but history tells you—

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Maybe the fact that currency started getting debased when Nixon went off the gold standard. What happened in 1971 or whatever. And the truth of the matter is that was the point at which the US dollar started weakening at a much more rapid rate. But it turns out that every currency everywhere in history has been debased.

My point here really is, I think people think that they learn stuff in college, but really it’s not too late to go back and relearn math — math, especially applied statistics. And it’s not too late to go back and relearn history. And as an adult, you always appreciate those things much better. It’s like the education is wasted on the youth, because you don’t have the life experiences to appreciate what you’re reading. But also, they’re summarizing, editing, and censoring a lot of the stuff you read.

And if you just go back and say, “I’m just going to read the entire thing in its entirety” — and there are a lot of other things you could also read, full histories of other things — but as an adult, I think that just makes you a better person and makes you a better business person, makes you a better leader. And also it helps you overcome the arrogance of thinking, “Oh, I’m the first guy in human history that encountered it.” And what you’ll realize is no, you’re not. And the empowering part is someone else did, and this is how they worked their way through the issue. And that can be very inspirational for you.

Closing Remarks

STEVEN BARTLETT: Michael, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for opening all of our eyes, and thank you for building a business which has continued to innovate in such a way that people never thought was possible. Thank you for introducing me to Bitcoin.

I think you both introduced me to it, but also you enabled me to have a mental framework for not selling it — when if I had, I would have lost a lot of money. And thankfully now I don’t even know where it is. My brother and some of my siblings take care of it for me, and I don’t have to experience the angst.

And also just thank you for pushing for this idea of sovereignty, because I think in the world of increasing censorship and centralization, sovereignty is a really winning idea. And I think that’s what you’re sort of philosophically aiming at as well. And yeah, I hope to speak to you sometime soon because you’re an individual capable of speaking about such a broad range of subjects that I care so much about.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: It’s a pleasure to be on the journey together.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you, my friend.

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