What One Billionaire Knows About Outlasting a Dollar Collapse | Michael Saylor | EP 554

On average, the currency collapses every

30 to 40 years in most political

jurisdictions for all of human history.

Your storehouse of value, whatever it

is, is going to be deflated terribly

during your lifetime. The best currency

of the last 100 years is the dollar. The

winning currency of the 20th century,

the best currency in the world, lost

99.9% of its value. That's a winner.

Okay. Now you come across Bitcoin and

you talked about it as if it was

abstracted gold. If God's not going to

set up divine bank and solve all your

monetary problem, what's the second best

idea? We don't trust the government. We

don't trust a local bank. We don't trust

each other. And we want the bank to last

for a thousand years. Let's go ahead and

build out this Bitcoin network.

My guest today, Michael Sailor, started

a number of um successful companies,

successful by almost every standard. It

it wasn't sufficient to expand out the

full scope of his ambition. and I I

would say that in the most positive

sense he became deeply interested in

2020 in Bitcoin in consequence and has

been at the forefront of a revolution in

finance. Uh his company now owns 3% of

the Bitcoin in circulation and the

successful company that he built with

blood, sweat, and tears let's say 10

years ago has become a hyper successful

company. In consequence, he's been an

evangelist for Bitcoin. He's used

religious symbolism and terminology to

describe it. He's on fire for Bitcoin.

And we talked about things you really

need to know today. You need to know who

Michael Sailor is, where he got his

ambition, his how his grounding in

fantasy and science fiction allied with

his with the encouragement of his

parents to produce the ambition in him

that has culminated in this consequence.

You need to know that Bitcoin is

increasingly becoming uh an accepted

monetary standard like gold around the

world. That's there are revolutionary

transformations on that basis in the

last year, not least because of the new

Trump administration. If you're young or

if you're middle-aged or if you're old

and you're trying to understand how you

will store the work that will comprise

much of your life, you need to listen to

this podcast and hear what Michael

Sailor has to say.

So, you discovered Bitcoin, as I

understand it, in March of 2020, which

was relatively recently, and it had been

around for a while, and you had been

doing a lot of other things, but it

moved your life laterally as I

understand it. And I'm curious, you're

an engineer and a software engineer. I'm

curious about what it was that you

discovered and realized that produced

this profound change in your orientation

and why you think it's justified and why

you evangelized for it as well. I guess

I discovered Bitcoin 30 years into my

career. So I started a company late

1989. For 30 years I had been running an

enterprise software company, Micro

Strategy. We brought it public uh on the

NASDAQ in 1998.

Initially, we were focused upon one line

of business, which is to sell software

that allows banks or or large retailers

or insurance companies to analyze all of

the data in their databases and assess

risk and come up with marketing

campaigns. Or if you wanted to figure

out what sells with with what and do

market basket analysis or or any kind of

risk assessment and you're a large

enterprise, you would want to build a

proprietary analytical system. We call

that business intelligence. So that was

successful. Uh then I I was in my

expansionary era in my 30s and in my 40s

and I wanted to create lots of things

and so I launched 10 other businesses. I

uh I bought up all the domain names like

angel.com and alarm.com and strategy.com

and hope.com and and uh I launched

businesses and and some of them were

were singles, some were doubles. I

bought voice.com. I sold it for $30

million. I I sold the angel business for

about a hundred million. The Alarm.com

business, uh, we spun off. It's a

multi-billion dollar publicly traded

company today. Um, and then I launched,

I don't know, half a dozen, a dozen

other things. They just whiffed. They

failed. What was your what was your hit

rate? Just out of curiosity, can you can

you estimate it? I I would say that the

number the thing I started with turned

out to be the biggest success between

1990 and 2020 and then the next idea was

a small, you know, was a double and the

next one was a single and the rest uh

sputtered out. I spent a lot of time.

They they were my favorite idea, a great

idea. I loved them. I invested a lot of

money in them. It turned out the world

didn't think the same way I did. I over

complicated it. And so it's an important

part of the story because by 2010 uh we

had overexpanded as a company we'd

launched I wanted to be the conglomerate

10 you know like the 10 different things

and I found that the one thing worked

and the other nine things didn't work

and I couldn't I needed to focus so we

refocused on the core business and for

the next decade I had two dual

experiences I had the experience

professionally

uh and I had an experience personally in

finance Here's the professional

experience. I worked 2,500 3,000 hours a

year with 2,000 people doing a 100,000

things, right? I tried everything under

the sun. We had a $500 million

enterprise software business. And we

found that we were the winner. 99 out of

a hundred of our competitor or 99 other

competitors had gone bankrupt or left

the industry. We were the winner and we

were competing against

Microsoft and Microsoft is Microsoft and

so we were the pure play the you know

call it the David against the Goliaths

and so for the next decade I spent huge

amounts of money on development it

didn't work I spent huge amounts of

money on marketing it didn't work I

worked I I rebuilt every information

system in the company it didn't work I

obsessed over systems for HR obsessed

over systems for sales for marketing. I

spent huge amounts of money on digital

advertising, everything you can imagine.

I I would fly around the world. I flew

around the world for a month and I

talked to I talked in every city

everywhere in order to get the message

out. So I had tried every conventional

thing imaginable and 10 years later the

company was still about a $500 million

company. We were like a very low growth

and we were banging our head against uh

a company Microsoft which is more you

could more easily leave the United

States than you could leave the domain

of Microsoft. It's they're just

everywhere. So my professional

experience is I figured I'm not a stupid

guy. I worked very hard. I had brilliant

people working with me. We tried

everything imaginable, but we could not

dent, you know, the digital monopolies

of the world. And we were this we were

this I'll call us a zombie company. It's

a a publicly traded company that makes

money that won't go out of business

that's uninteresting because it's not

growing 20% or 30% a year. It's not

Google. It's not Facebook. It's not a

It's not a monster, but it's But you

know, there are 10,000 companies like

ours. Right. Right. Most companies are

like ours. So we were there and uh and

then here's my personal experience. I uh

got very fascinated with technology. I

wrote a book called the mobile wave. And

in the mobile wave back I was 2012 that

I published it 2012. I wrote it 2010

2011 and and the book the theme of the

book is what happens when software

dematerializes when the software runs on

a phone when the computer goes from

under your desk to in your hand when

it's no longer solid state or liquid

state but it's vapor state and you go to

sleep with the phone next to you and

what kind of software would happen in

the mobile world and of course we know

all about it right the Instagrams the

Facebooks the Ubers, all of these things

became possible during the mobile era.

They were inconceivable when the

software ran on a computer. So, the

theme of the book is, you know, uh

software is going to leap from under our

desk to our clothing. We'll wear it.

We'll hold it. Uh and it's become

ubiquitous 24/7 365 and it's going to

change. We're going to dematerialize

27,000 devices. 20,000 device companies

died so Apple could live. We're going to

crush 20,000 retailers because

everybody's going to want the Amazon.

You're going to see 20,000 newspapers

crushed because Google and Facebook eats

them. And uh, you know, the message of

the book is, you know, you probably

ought to just buy the Amazon stock or

buy the Apple stock. And as an

investor, I took, you know, a a decent

amount of money, call it $25 million

that I'd made over the previous 20 years

as a CEO and as a founder of a company.

I invested in these stocks and I 20xed

it. If you, you know, how do you make

money in the tech world? You uh invest

in something everybody needs, nobody

could stop, and very few people

understand. like most people will in the

year 2010 if you had said hey I really

think that Amazon's going to work people

would have said you're crazy Amazon's

losing money no one's going to do this

you know and they would have thought

you're nuts uh and if you had said I

remember with Apple you say well Apple I

think this iPhone's a cool thing they

would say well no eventually it'll it'll

go to the price of $25 a phone like

Nokia it's going to be commoditized they

can't hold their margins are too high

they're going actually have their

margins collapse like Dell or like

Nokia. And of course, and of course the

conventional wisdom was Apple's not a

good investment. Amazon's not a good

investment. Facebook, what is this goofy

thing? And of course, for the next

decade, here's what happened. I work an

hour a month as an investor and I get

rich.

You know, make half a billion

dollars. Not working. Embarrassing. All

you got to do is just buy the

Magnificent 7 in 2010. And and the

conventional wisdom of Wall Street is if

the stock doubles, you should diversify.

You should sell half of it. If if Apple

doubles in price, go buy some IBM and

some HP and some other computer company.

If it doubles again, you sell some more

of the portfolio and you buy the thing.

And their thought was, you got to stay

diversified. But the problem is Apple

won. Everybody else lost. At one point,

Apple made all the money in the mobile

phone business. Everybody else

collectively lost money to compete with

them. Amazon won. Samsung as well. All

of them. Yeah. If you look at the

winners, Yeah. in this era, right? I

mean, Apple was a winner. Amazon was a

winner. Google, Facebook were a winner.

Samsung is the winner in the in the Far

East. Um Walmart kept up. every other

retailer. You know, it's like there's

two or three that kind of keep up. Maybe

a Walmart, maybe a Target, but there's

20,000 that went out of business. I know

as a clinical psychologist that any

given teenager is going to fall prey to

peer pressure from time to

time. If you listen hard enough, people

are likely to tell you everything. Our

son, who's in seventh grade, he's

starting to fall in with a with a bad

friend group. Teenagers are desperate to

fit in. and obviously desperate to have

friends and not to be the isolated

target of exclusion and bullying. How do

we as parents get involved and engaged?

The reason people don't have these sorts

of conversations is cuz they don't want

the emotion. And the longer you let it

go on, the more mess you're going to

have to clean up. Our daughter was

bullied at her school. How do we protect

our kids when this is happening? Don't

let your kids drift away when they're

teenagers. They don't want to, but they

will if you don't pay

[Music]

attention. Do you think that's partly a

consequence of the like is there a

radically centralizing tendency of the

mobile world? There is. And so it's

increasingly a winner take all because

when everyone's connected, the prito

distribution goes out of control. That's

what it looks like to me. There's like

one person occupies each niche or one

company because everything's connected.

There's no micro markets anymore. These

all became dominant digital monopolies

and and they became dominant because

Apple can ship a new feature to the

iPhone over the weekend to a billion

people. the cost the electricity and

before Apple you would have to Kodak or

Polaroid or or fill in the blank would

have to create a new device it would

take a year and then they would have to

sell it and it would take another year

and there's a variable cost to it so

when the functionality becomes software

there's a 99% gross margin and you can

give it to 100 million a billion right

Apple could do Apple music and give it

to IP ownership matters right and so

they They dominated the rails and they

be and they had these you know I used to

say Apple's going to be the most

valuable company in the world because

it's the most valuable company in the

world because it's the first time one

company could deliver a feature to a

billion people overnight that you know

we never had that 30 years ago or 40

years ago. So there were all these

natural monopolies that built and at

some point you know Microsoft dominated

you know business software and Facebook.

How did you see that early? I mean you

the the companies you listed off that

was pretty good that was a pretty good

hit list and like you said you know you

worked you worked yourself half to death

but all the money that you made or the

majority of the money you made was

actually a consequence of an hour you

said an hour a month in investment

strategy but like what and this is

gerine to the Bitcoin question because

one of the things you're doing is

setting up the circumstance you could

you saw the direction the digital world

was going you bet money on it which is

actually an indication of commitment to

it and the bets that you made paid off

and they paid off in in some ways more

than your hard work on the business

front. You know, you got to roll back

to, you know, first grade. My parents

told me they'd give me a dime for every

book I read and I had a comic book

addiction. So, one summer I read a

hundred books and won some reading

competition. I started reading in first

grade and that led me to a love of

science fiction and fantasy, especially

science fiction. And I read the big

three, Heinline, Clark, and Azimov. And

my entire generation, you know, Elon

Musk, Jeff Bezos, a lot of us were

influenced by that. So yeah, I was

reading 10 a week when I was well in

grade three and four. My neighbor across

the street had a wall of science fiction

and he let me come in once a week and

take, you know, as many books as I

wanted. And this I was reading exactly

the same crew that you described. I

liked Ray Bradbury, too. One of the

Well, the a famous book by Heinland is

Have Space It Will Travel. And in the

book, uh, uh, precocious youth builds a

spaceship, gets picked up by, you know,

bugeyed monsters or by space aliens,

gallivance around the universe, saves

the human race from bugeyed monsters,

comes back, and because he saved the

human race through his uh, courage and

his capability, he gets a full tuition

scholarship to MIT. Well, I read that I

guess by sixth grade and I just thought

I was going to MIT. Oh, yeah. So uh so I

you know I liked you know and then my

era you know we used to play Dungeons

and Dragons. We used to do board games.

We play all these simulation games and

and uh you know when you play these

games they give you a 64 page uh set of

rules and a set of dice and you're

creating a simulation of a naval battle

or army battle or or you know whatever

it might be. That was just before

computers got big. Mhm. So I got very

interested in all that. That drove me

down a path where I went to MIT. I

studied spaceship

engineering, astronautics really. And

while I was there, you know, I studying

uh studying uh astronomical engineering,

I stumbled across uh another course at

the school of management there called

system dynamics and I became fascinated

with that. It was the computer

simulation of uh human behavior. So the

so people were building the big names in

system dynam dynamics. J Forester

founded the school and uh the idea was

build a computer simulation that shows

what happens if you change uh the

dynamics of a traffic system in a city.

I mean the classic example is I build a

beltway around the city and I build hub

and spoke system and I build

superighways because I want to speed up

travel time. M but invariably what

happens is the city increases by a

factor of 10 and the travel times go

back to what they were because of the

because of the feedback right if you

built the roads and then no one reacted

to it then you would be able to get

around faster but the world would be a

much simpler place yeah another classic

example is you remember the club of Rome

study you know they declared that the

world was going to run out of resources

within 10 years and they declared it

because all the oil reserves were for 10

more years. But if you thought about it,

you would realize that an oil company

only has an incentive to identify 10

years worth of reserves and everything

after that's a diminishing return. So we

always have 10 years, right, worth of

reserves. And so if it's a time horizon

issue, not a resource issue. If you see

the world as a dynamic nonlinear

feedback system and you consider the the

human behavior or the reaction to what

you do, then you're much more

sophisticated and you start to realize

the simplistic linear models don't work

and you have to consider human behavior

and economics and and uh urban planning

and and um and business planning. And so

I uh I studied that. I did my thesis in

it. I started building computer

simulations. I learned from the computer

scientist in the in the school of

management. I I got very fascinated in

in the school got very interested in

politics, philosophy, economics. I ended

up taking another degree in the history

of science and uh you know as I started

where did you take that? At MIT. It was

at MIT too. So at the same time when

were you there? 1983 to 1987. And when I

was there, I was also an Air Force

cadet. You know, the Air Force paid for

my education to go through MIT. I was

very fortunate in that regard. So this

is all just backstory, but I had the

background as as you know, a cadet, a

commissioned officer in the Air Force. I

I grew up on Air Force bases my entire

life. My father was career

non-commissioned officer, so I lived on

military bases. Move a lot. Moved a lot.

So I saw the world. I had the science

fiction background. I I had the Dungeons

and Dragons, the fantasy background.

Um I got very interested in the history

of science that's all about paradigm

shift you know uh you know how do people

embrace new ideas whether it's the

capernac revolution or whether it's you

know whether it's relativity and and

Einstein's ideas or whether it's quantum

physics or whether it's uh whether it's

what happens when I introduce railroads

or electricity or crude oil or radio.

How does it change the culture? How does

it change the politics? How does it

change the economics of the

civilization? So that was my academic

background. So and so I always was

fascinated by science and technology. I

was surrounded by technologists at MIT.

I got I got into the space and but I but

the fantasy background was very

important because in fantasy um there's

this idea that if you know the name of a

demon, you can summon them. you can

control them. Names are very powerful.

And uh when the internet hit, I was

typing out

uh sailor

sailor@microstrategy.com in my email and

I thought, well, it'd be a lot better if

I just typed out sailor strategy.com.

And I started thinking about domains and

it inspired me to go and buy up all the

domains I could. So I bought hope, you

know, like how would you like to own

hope? Like the nice thing about owning

Hope that was when what year was that?

Between 94 and 98.

Pretty early. Pretty early on. I And and

so I thought, how many do domain names

do you think you bought? I bought lot I

bought a bunch, but I bought about 30 of

the classics. My idea was the most

valuable thing in the is is a

constructive uh word in the English

language that has a positive connotation

that everyone understands, everybody can

spell. So, I bought Emma. I bought

Michael. My own Michael.com. I bought

mike.com. I bought hope. I bought voice.

I bought angel. I bought alarm. I bought

speaker. How did you pick the words? I

mean, you you laid out I bought every

good word that I could buy. I was It was

a real estate a digital real estate gold

rush. Right. If you would sell it to me,

I would buy it. I figured, you know,

what did I think? I think if a billion

people learn to speak English, I'll give

you an example. A billion people learn

to speak English. How many of them know

how to spell

strategy? How many of them have a

positive impression of

strategy? Now, right now I name my

company Micro Strategy. Let me tell you,

for 30 years, half our customers

mispronounced it. Micro

Strategies. Like when you pick a word

that's not in in the English language,

if you teach it to third graders or

sixth graders, the education system is

burning the word. What does hope mean to

you? Right? That's different than naming

a company

[Music]

celebrity to be able to buy words which

is essentially what happened and it and

it happened in the internet era. Yeah.

Right. Now if we go to mobile, my

fascination was this idea that if

software goes from the back office to

the

desk to my

pocket. It goes from solid state to

liquid state to vapor state. It's all

around me. What happens when I can talk

to it? What happens when it can talk

back to me? Well, you know, now you have

to you have to have an imagination. sci

science fiction it's valuable because it

says if you learn science and

engineering you can you can figure out

like what's the optimal way to get to

Mars from the US you start to understand

gravity wells you understand physics

that's very important for one part of

the story but the other part of the

story is

fantasy you know

it I'm creating something in cyerspace

I'm an engineer and I can imagine uh

throwing a baseball in orbit and And if

I throw it fast enough, it stays in

orbit. And if I throw it harder, it

breaks Earth's gravity field and it

orbits the sun. And if I throw it

harder, it breaks the sun's

gravitational field and it spins off

into, you know, Milky Way. Well, that's

what that's what science fiction or

engineering teaches you. Fantasy teaches

you. I can throw the baseball and will

it to be a flock of seagulls that land

on my head and turn into a pot of gold.

So those are those are little paradigm

revolutions fantasy

frame breaking. The significance is in

the hardware world you're subject to

thermodynamics and physics and you

better know it. But in

cyberspace you could you're not subject

to thermodynamics and physics. You could

imagine uh you know I look at mirror

mirror on the wall who's the fairest of

them all right and Snow White gave you

the answer right because you know when

when that happens in a in a fairy tale

the mirror talks back to you it comes to

life you know and eventually we got to

you know zoom and video and pretty soon

your iPad became a magic mirror and

pretty soon you could talk to, you know,

a a relative of your of yours 8,000 mi

away and that was pretty magical. But

then when you put the AI behind it and

the AI generates an AI image, you're not

talking to a person, you're talking to

an angel or a demon, right? And so now,

if you want to design that stuff, if you

want to design uh magic software, why

those words an angel or a demon? Yeah.

Yeah. Because you see, one of the things

I wanted to talk to you about today was

the use of imagery, the your use of

imagery in your tweets and your

marketing for Bitcoin because like you

you have a strange mind in many ways

because you're you have your engineering

background and you think that way, but

you also have a foot in the world of

fantasy. And that's a that's not a

that's I mean there's a lot of well

there's lots of engineers that are sort

of possessed by the world of fantasy.

you know, they live in a Star Wars

ethos, right? And and many of them had

their philosophy shaped by the science

fiction that they read when they were in

their early adolescence. And that really

produced the religious and fantasy

substrate of their thought. But there's

not a lot of examination of that. But

you thought about fantasy by all

appearances a lot more in a lot more

detail than that.

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Yeah. Well, when I was at MIT, I was

surrounded by some of the most brilliant

mathematicians and engineers in the

world. But what distinguished me is is I

was a pretty good engineer. Like I

probably wasn't like a Fields metal

mathematician, right? I I wasn't like

that, but I was a good engineer. But I

had a liberal arts bent. And the truth

is, if I could have afforded it, I would

have gone to Yale and studied history as

an undergraduate. I just didn't have any

money and they didn't have an ROC

program and the government wasn't paying

Air Force cadets to go study history at

Yale. So my my love was history that you

know history, science fiction, imagining

the future, fantasy, uh imagining an

alternative future. Would you say you

think in pictures or words?

Images. You think? I'm a synthesist. So

I generally

uh I'm the person that would tell you

why the steam engine, you know, and the

governor of steam engineer is similar to

a political process that was implemented

in medieval Russia.

Like I I'm thinking about the mechanisms

and how they function in the physical

world, the political world, the economic

world, the the fantasy world, the magic

world, the whatever world. So I I would

always be thinking

simultaneously across that. So when I

went to MIT most of them were there to

do engineering. I was actually half

liberal artist half engineer. And that

was that was what was uh different about

me. And when I and of course when I came

out of MIT I didn't work for I don't

want to work for someone else doing

something they told me to do. I wanted

to create something. And I think that I

think that um you know when you're that

that entrepreneurial bent probably goes

along at least to some degree with that

proclivity to appreciate fantasy because

well entrepreneurial activity is

associated with trade openness which is

the creativity dimension. And so it it

it

it makes sense that you would have that

entrepreneurial bent combined because

you have to imagine possibility to be an

entrepreneur. Right? So that's the

fantastic element. You have to conjure

up something that doesn't yet exist and

then you have to pursue it and it has to

captivate you. So you have to have the

temperament for that. So you've got Do

you like fi Do you still read fiction? I

do not as much as I used to in my

current stage in life. Um, I spend a lot

more time reading history like like

cover to cover Durant's history of story

of civilization every volume all 15,000

pages or all the history of uh America

be you know you know conceived in

liberty Rothbart's history of America

before the revolutionary war or history

of economic thought. So, a lot of

history, a lot of biography, a lot of

monetary theory. And of course, today I

spend my time reading

legislation, all of the developments in

the political economic world relevant to

digital assets, digital technology

because there's a a flood of it and I'm

expected to have an opinion on it. But

when I can sneak away, I'll I'll go read

his artistic interests,

landscape, architecture,

residential archite when I first came

here I went to Talison West Franklidd

Wright's architecture all architecture

everywhere in the world right well

that's a good blending of aesthetic and

engineering as well so very much

but uh to address two of your points

that are important one in fantasy

there's this idea of casting a spell

right so if you can imagine it you can

you can cast it that's a very

interesting idea Can you make the world

a better place? Can you shape it in a

certain way? Um and um the second the

second point you brought up about

metaphor, right? Imagery. Yeah. That was

in relationship to the angels and the

demons. You know, if you if you write a

book about something, you know, write a

book about Bitcoin and it's 200 pages

long. I I wrote the book about

something, what I discovered is 1% of

the people will read the book in five

years. maybe 0.1%. It's very, you know,

and when they read the book, if you

wanted to explain something in 200 pages

or 500 pages, they might have forgotten

what they read on the first 50 pages by

the time they get to the end. And so, a

200page explanation isn't nearly as

powerful as to say, "Oh, that's a demon

coming out of cyerspace." Right? Well,

that's the power of poetry because a de

a it's like, "Oh, what is that? That's

an actor in cyberspace with hostile

intent that I should be afraid of. And

so there's a lot of overexlaining in the

world. And what I've discovered is in

that, you know, in the modern world, we

live in an age of abundance and there is

so much infinite information. I, you

know, I watched your podcast on YouTube.

I I I came to know you before COVID and

I was fascinated by them. it. Then I

stumbled across chess videos and then I

found you could spend your entire waking

day watching chess videos. And then I

realized you could spend your entire

life watching Magnus Carlson chess

videos. And then I realized you could

probably spend an entire day watching

different chess commentators covering

one Magnus Carlson game from 30

different points of view. And if you

want to go down that rabbit hole,

whether it's uh you know, diets, the

carnivore diet or chess or pocket knives

or someone sailing around the world,

there is literally infinite depth

content. Yeah. you know, and and you

know, then comes along Netscape and

YouTube, you know, and all these other

streaming and then Lord help you, you

fall into a Tik Tok hole, you know, and

you're like, you start swiping and then

YouTube decided to steal it and they

have these shorts and when you pull up

the YouTube short, you know, the

algorithm is thinking, what is the

statistically most likely thing to

capture your attention and punch your

buttons and hit your dopamine and you

find yourself going, "Yeah, is that an

angel or a demon?" That algorithm. Yeah.

And you are, you know, you are stuck and

it's an addiction if you're not careful.

And and of course, well, it's optimized

to grip short-term attention, you know,

and that's there's something really

there's something really distressing

about that because the more immature a

mind is, the more it's gripped by

short-term attention. And these bloody

algorithms maximize for short-term

attention. And the attention fragments

are getting shorter as the content gets

shorter. And so we're literally training

super intelligent AI systems to hook us

in keeping with our hedonistic drive.

It's just so that's a demon I would say.

And that that you know that it's not a

fair fight. It's not a fair fight. It's

a 16-year-old boy against the smartest,

you know, AI in the world trying to

addict the boy to the imagery they feed,

right? And and so yeah, the smartest the

smartest engineers and the smartest AI

systems that are actually operating in

ways that we don't even understand

because they're reinforced. They learn

by reinforcement. But so they understand

things about us that we don't

understand. They understand. Coming back

to my communication style, then what I

realize is people just don't have the

time. Like you can, for example, in in

life, you can equivocate. You could say,

well, you know, you might do this and

you might do that and do your own

research and if you think blah blah blah

that this might happen and read these 82

pages. Yeah. Yeah. Or you can say this

is digital gold, but it's going to crush

real gold by a factor of Okay. So, let's

let's leap ahead into the Bitcoin issue

because I I still want to know cuz you

set up the background now. You've

described how your mind works. You

described the fact that you recognize

patterns and that you see possibility. I

want to hear how that translated into

your discovery of Bitcoin and where that

went. Okay, it's March of

2020 and in March of 2020, uh, Michael

Sailor, the CEO, is

slaved for a decade, working infinitely

hard, working his 2,000 employees

infinitely hard uh to compete against

Microsoft and Magnificent 7 and to and

to put growth back into this public

company called MSTR. The company is

perfectly fine company, but we're, you

know, a company growing one, two, three,

four percent a year is uninteresting to

every professional investor in the

capital markets and we've tried

everything under the sun and we cannot

break free and our our our employees are

paid in stock options and the stock's

not going anywhere, right? And so I am

at a dead end there. Very frustrated. My

wit's in. Mhm. And then Michael Sailor,

the individual, occasionally buys some

Apple and Amazon stock and he's made a

fortune.

And I'm thinking this is not good. Why

is it not good though? Like because you

I mean let let because I want to dig

into that a little bit. You had a

company that was growing moderately.

Let's say it wasn't spectacularly

interesting. There were stock problems,

but the company is quite functional and

it's doing quite well and it does its

thing well. And then as an individual,

you've made these like home run

investments. So what is it that's

dissatisfying you? Exactly. What's

dissatisfying is to think that you

peaked 10 years earlier. You've hit a

plateau and you cannot you cannot go any

further. I I see. So it's a plateaued

adventure, right? We plateaued. We can't

break free. You know what's the And work

isn't fixing that. What's the satisfying

is to see the Elon Musks or the Mark

Zuckerbergs, you know, of the world have

extraordinary success and you grow up in

that generation and you feel like you

hit the wall. They they launched the

Instagram, they launched the Facebook,

they launched the you know electric car

and you uh you somehow have created

this this uh it's a successful business

but it's now a low growth business which

is you know comparable. Why do you think

why do you think that that why do you

think that ground at you like I mean

because in by many by many indices

you're multi-dimension you were

multi-dimensionally successful already.

Now, you talked about the fact that the

the big league leap, so to speak, didn't

occur, but why in the world do you think

that particularly disturbed you and

drove you to seek

other avenues of of expansion? I just

thought, is this all there is? There's

got to be more. I wanted to change the

world. You know when you you know you

start you think you can change the world

and you get to some point where you

realize you fulfill one 2% of the demand

of a given niche of the world which has

now become a mature cash cow business

and the world's done with you. Do you

have any idea where that ambition came

from?

Oh. Uh, must have come from my

mother when I was, uh, my first job was

as a paper boy and, uh, you know, so I'm

delivering papers in Dayton, Ohio, uh,

through the bitter cold, the Blizzard

78. And at some point there's going to

be a competition uh, for the best paper

boy of the Dayton Daily News. And my

mother enters me in the competition and,

you know, she creates this book of

entries. you know, I'm the musician,

I've got the book collection, I'm the

gamer, I'm a this, I'm a that. And I

swear she must have thought I was God's

gift, you know, and and it never occurs

to me that being, you know, the number

one honor paper boy in Dayton, Ohio,

isn't necessarily the pinnacle of

achievement, but in her eyes, it was.

And she entered me in the competition

and I end up number two. She had faith

in you. But I thought, you know, she

thought I was the greatest person on

earth. She's like, you're going to

change the world. Freud's mother thought

that about him and he said that it had

given him a tremendous advantage. You

know, it's it's really something to have

a parent who has like unblinking faith

in you, especially if they've actually

identified those elements of you that

are useful. I was a smart guy. Like I

was like number one in my class

normally, but being number one in your

class in a public elementary school in

middle Ohio is no statistical

justification for thinking someone's

going to grow up and change the world.

But my mother believed it. She believed

in me. She imbued it in me. And for

whatever, if your parents think that

about you, they program you and it

works. So somehow in my head, I I was

programmed at an early age, you know,

believe that you could do it by an

inspirational figure to believe I could

do it. Do you think that was ambition

exactly or do you think that was faith

in your ability to solve problems?

Cuz those aren't the same thing, right?

I mean, you could you could imagine a

situation like that that would produce

someone who is narcissistic. That's

that's a different that's a very

different outcome than someone who

believes that if they hit a problem hard

enough, they can crack it and move

forward. You know, uh if you combine the

influence of my parents and my mother

especially with my father is a very

inspirational figure as well. He's like

the He's the Air Force sergeant, you

know, at 6:30 in the morning saying,

"Hit the ground running, son." Okay. He

was the So that's the work ethic. He was

the work ethic, you know, you know,

straight arrow, work hard, you know, and

uh and do your job and do your duty. And

my mother was I I have the smartest son

in the world. He's going to change the

earth, right? And and so that was the

two. But, you know, once I got into into

reading, you know, if you read Heinland,

Heinland's, you know, stories, his

juvenile stories are and his stories are

here's a teenage kid that's going to go

off and go to Mars and make peace with

the Martians and change the course of

human history. Right. Right. Or, you

know, and you name them, every one of

these. So, you found that hero mythology

in, you know, like all of his figures

are inspirational figures, you know?

Yeah. Right. If you think about the

Highland uh ethic, right? It's like uh

self-reliance,

resourcefulness, you know? Well, he was

a libertarian, too. Very much so. It's

like when I know the lefties used to

think of Heinland as a fascist. I

remember that. It shocked me. I never I

never realized when I was like 13 that

the science fiction I was reading had

political implications. I didn't I

didn't think that. And that's not my

takeaway. My takeway is he says when

when wherever you're living gets too

crowded and there's too many

bureaucratic busy bodies telling you how

to live and how to breathe and what to

do it's time for you to find a new

frontier go somewhere else go west go to

cyberspace go to out in his case go to

outer space right it's you have to you

know well there are frontiers everywhere

and you found them in the digital world

and and something you know it's always a

struggle but something good always comes

of it right in all of his books Right.

Right. Right. And so you have the

inspiration of of him as you know as

kind of a a a figure and then you have

the inspiration of you know your parents

in a different way. And then of course

once you start reading books right you

if you read enough you're inspired by

the lives of human beings that came

before you. So I think uh all of that

okay made me think I was put here to do

something. Okay. Right. Okay. And I get

to 2020 and uh I'm frustrated and it's

it's a very pivotal point in my career.

I'm just deciding am I going to sell

this company? Am I going to retire and

drift quietly out of history? Right. How

old are you at this point? 55. Right.

Right. Okay. Lots of people stop at 55.

Right. They decide they're retired,

whatever that means, and then they're

well looking they're looking for purpose

for the next 20 years, which is not a

good fate. It's not a good fate. I've

watched this many people at right around

that age, you know, they decide in a way

that they're old and they stop looking

for further adventure and generally

that's a catastrophe. But you, when you

hit it, you thought you hadn't hit an

apex. You hadn't had the apex that you

wanted and then you you found Bitcoin in

2020. Yeah. Well, you know, I felt like

I'm not done yet. But I had invented 10

things and that didn't work to invent

something and then I had tried 10

different business strategies and not

bit small like I bought $30 million of

my stock back. I was like I'm going to

spend hundreds of millions of dollars

and this is against a company that made

75 million a year, right? So I spent

huge amounts of money to try to fix it.

I literally rewired every single IT

system, rebuilt everything, rethought

every business process as the you know

thinking if I just work if I work harder

and focus more air force dead. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the thing is the funny thing

is so that's the contradiction between

conscientiousness and openness, right?

Because the conscientious types are

managers and administrators,

incrementalists. Their solution to a

problem would be make what we're doing

better. But the fantasy people, the open

people think, "No, no, like no matter

how efficiently we go down this road,

it's not the right road. There has to be

something else. There has to be a

radical

transformation." As a spouse, a parent,

or a leader, people count on you. But if

you're constantly tired, unfocused, and

just not feeling like yourself, how can

you show up the way they need you to?

That's where Merrick Health comes in.