Michael Saylor In-Depth: Bitcoin is Fire or Electricity

hi and thanks for checking out the coin

stories podcast i'm natalie brunell and

i'm honored to share my guest this week

is the one and only

michael saylor michael is an

entrepreneur an executive

an inventor author and philanthropist

and there's arguably no one in the

business

world with a stronger conviction in

bitcoin as chairman and ceo of his

company microstrategy

he is the first ceo of a publicly listed

company to make a long-term investment

in bitcoin

microstrategy currently owns more than a

hundred thousand

coins make sure to check out his website

hope.com for all the bitcoin resources

you could want

and without further ado i'm so grateful

to share michael's story

all right michael thank you so much for

joining me super excited to talk to you

and i want to take it

all the way back and start at the very

beginning i read that you're born

you were born in nebraska moved to ohio

at some point you lived on air force

bases you were basically an air force

brat right

yeah my father was a non-commissioned

officer in the air force

and he uh you know he worked on aircraft

and we lived all over the world in new

zealand and japan

and uh colorado nebraska

florida virginia

and you know i graduated from high

school

in ohio so wright-patterson air force

base

dayton just outside of dayton ohio and i

was always on military bases

and you had sort of your own top gun

fantasy right you wanted to be like a

fighter pilot astronaut well i mean if

you grew up on air force bases watching

airplanes fly

all over you and you know and uh

if you're a science fiction fan and i i

read lots and lots of science fiction it

was my

genre of choice growing up then you

can't help

but fantasize about being a

astronaut fighter pilot

spaceship designer so you went after the

footsteps of your dad right you got an

air force scholarship you went to mit

yeah i got a scholarship from the air

force

uh i went to mit

and i studied aerospace engineering

with a specialty in spaceship design

and while i was in the air force i went

to lachlan air force base as

and then i uh i went and learned to fly

at hondo

airfield in west texas just outside of

lachlan air force base

it was a very hot july and august and it

would be about a hundred

and degrees on the runway

and we were getting into these t-41s

and they were they're like military

military versions of cessna 172s but

they have no air conditioning

and so we get an airplane and then the

one thing you definitely want to do is

get the plane going

because there's no air conditioning you

open up this little

part of the window and if you get going

fast it would the temperature would drop

from 110 degrees to just 90 degrees

and then you want to get up high so the

temperature will fall

into the mid 80s if you're lucky you

sweat a lot

yeah i know i bet um but something

changed your

your track right two things happened and

you didn't end up going down

the fighter pilot route um i saw that

first the reagan ended the cold war and

then you were diagnosed with

a benign heart murmur so what happened

there yeah it was a it was a successive

one-two punch

i think um my final flight physical in

my senior year

and it would have been like january late

late 1986 or early 1987 january

i was uh i was worried my entire

undergraduate career that all my

studying would cause my eyes to

deteriorate from 2020.

so that was my never-ending nightmare

but my eyes were fine when they gave me

the uh

the test but then uh a doctor

thought he heard some kind of heart

murmur and they

diagnosed me with a with a benign heart

murmur

and um i mean ten years later they

undiagnosed it but at the time they made

a misdiagnosis

and uh that that disqualified me

from flying aircraft in the air force so

i was a little bit

uh distraught since i spent my entire

career

thinking i was gonna be a pilot you know

a very simple plan

pilot you know test pilot astronaut

you know it turns out that my um that

one of my friends from high school this

guy greg johnson and greg johnson was a

bit ahead of me

from my same high school and he actually

ended up going to air force academy

becoming a

fighter pilot a test pilot and an

astronaut and he flew

he flew around the earth flew twice on

the space shuttle

so that was my idea and i watched a role

model do it

but i got knocked out because of that uh

misdiagnosis and uh i would have gone

as an engineer in the air force for

about five years

but reagan won the cold war

um and by 1987 congress said

i think they'd recognize that they

didn't need the same degree of military

budget so they cut the military funding

in half

they're doing a force drawdown and they

had too many officers probably just too

many people coming into the military and

so

they wanted to discourage people and

then one way they discouraged them is

they went to all the people in the rotc

programs and they told us

that if we wanted to go active duty we'd

have to wait about two years or more

before we got called up

or we could uh go to the air force

reserve or the national guard

so i guess about half of my class just

went into the

air force reserve or the guard i was

kind of like the lost

generation every every graduating class

before went into the military and every

graduating class

after went on an active duty

but the class of 87 was like uh like

the cracking of the whip it was that one

odd year

and so a lot of us got catapulted out

into the civilian world

and so i i found myself a civilian with

a few weeks to go to graduation

and that's that that kind of

drove my career in an odd unexpected

direction

so what were you thinking at that point

that you wanted to do

and backing up even further when you

were young i mean wanting to be

like a fighter pilot or an astronaut did

you grow up wanting

to be rich like did you think about

money when you were young

uh you know i think there's four things

i wanted to be

in succession uh and i think that the

four things every

every american male wanted to be in the

80s

i wanted to be a rock star or

i wanted to be a fighter pilot or i

wanted to be a professor or i wanted to

be a ceo

not rich rich was like unfathomable

these were just job aspirations

i never met anybody rich or with money

before in my life i think the richest

person in my hometown was the dentist

so that was our idea of wealthy the

dentist

and i think the dentist had a house on a

on a half acre lot which looked like a

large house in the town of faribault

ohio population 28

000 and uh yeah so

in high school i wanted to be the rock

star i played the rock band and then at

some point

i realized that uh most musicians don't

make a lot of money

and the odds were against me and so once

you know i was a little bit of a

statistician so once i concluded that

the odds of me being a successful rock

and roll musician were

one in a thousand or one in ten thousand

i decided i should probably try getting

the engineering degree so i went and i

got the engineering degree because i

figured

if i failed uh at music i could at least

afford to pay for my own amplifiers and

musical equipment and

guitars so it was kind of a hedge bet

and uh then i you know got more

enthusiastic about going

and flying and when i couldn't fly

anymore

i really wanted to be a professor so i

wanted to get a phd

but i was only i was only

becoming i was only able to do that

around

february march of my senior year and

that was

enough time for me to get into a phd

program

but all of the financial aid and all the

fellowships have been dispensed

by that semester so i couldn't afford it

it was very expensive you know the air

force had paid for my undergraduate

degree

i think my family's life savings were

enough to maybe afford

three weeks of college but no money

you know uh and so i couldn't really

afford to pay for it

so i thought i'll just go and work for a

year

or two years and then i'll reapply for

the fellowship and then i'll go back and

get a phd and then i will be a teacher

or a professor or something because that

seemed like an honorable thing to do

and uh so then i i went and i got my

first job

and uh that that didn't work the way i

expected

uh my boss kind of quit the company

about four months after i got there and

i ended up i ended up switching jobs

about

nine months after i got there and i

started working for the dupont

corporation

and i was building computer simulations

for them and i guess when i got to be

about 24 i was two years out of school

i got that fellowship i needed to go

back and get my phd

and i tendered my resignation to

dupont and they asked me to stay

they wanted me to finish this computer

model and i didn't

i didn't really think much about it but

the computer simulation was going to be

used to

acquire about one and a half billion

dollars of capital in a capital budget

so i was this kid making 50 grand a year

and i was on the critical path to

someone

getting one and a half billion dollars

and so i guess they decided well we

should just give the kid a raise

or give the kid whatever he wants

because the billion dollars is more

important than

the kid going back to college

but i could not be bought you know i

couldn't you know they could they're

like do you want to race no i don't want

to raise what do you want

well i don't i know i'm not going to be

the ceo of the dupont corporation i'm

not a chemical engineer

and i don't have 30 years so i want to

be professor and they said well what do

you want to do if

i can't be a rock star i can't be an

astronaut and i can't be a professor i

went back and there's only one thing

left on my list which is to be ceo

so if you let me start my own company

then i'll stick around and starting my

own company meant

well i had no money so i got a 5 000

furniture loan that was

that's the only source of unsecured

financing that a 20 something can get

at least at that time but i knew 5000

wasn't gonna make it so i needed more

money than that

so i got the dupont corporation to give

me a couple of million dollars of

contracts

and uh 250 000 initial

initial contract and a hundred thousand

our cash advance

and that was back when a hundred

thousand was worth more than it is today

oh yeah i've i actually figured natalie

that i could go seven years on the

hundred grand

yeah 100 grand and uh and then they also

gave

me free office space and computer

equipment

they kind of let me be a little bureau

inside dupont so i set up in the middle

of dupont headquarters

on my own floor but i had my own company

and i was able to hire over a bunch of

people that worked for me that

that would work for dupont so dupont

incubated the business

and it was just kind of a lucky fluke i

mean

it's it only would happen if you just

happen to be in the right place at the

right time with the

you know i had the right relationships

and people liked me and

and at the end of the day okay so we

give the kid

a half a million dollar contract or a

quarter million dollar

contract we're trying to get the billion

dollars

so i guess it made sense to them i

thought it was a good deal for me

and in my mind i figured well when the

business doesn't work anymore if we fail

i'm just going back to college to get

that phd

and uh the first year we did about 750

000 in revenue and the next year about a

million in the next year 2 million the

next year 4 million

and then we had a slow year we did 5

million and then we did 10 million and

then we did 20 million

then everybody started lobbying me to

take the company public

and then we thought well that might be

fun we'll try that

and then we went public and i'm just

kind of stuck and i realized i wasn't

gonna i was gonna be the least educated

person in my company

all the people who work for me have

these master's degrees and phd's

and i'm just the entrepreneur

i'm not i don't quite have college

dropout status

of steve jobs or zuckerberg or larry

ellison or bill gates or michael dell so

i didn't quite achieve that

but i kind of styled myself as kind of a

drop out

because i dropped out of a graduate

degree program

in order to start a company so that's my

sacrifice to practicality do you ever

think back

on that time like early in your career

and what vision did you have for your

company because it sounds like you were

almost just

you felt like you got lucky a lot and

you were almost living

day to day you know facing the

challenges that might come and

it sounds like you were surprised that

you kept surviving

i just didn't want to work for anybody

else natalie

makes sense i figured use technology

to do something good right so we were

always using

technology to help people make better

decisions

and there was always a new technology if

it was the new apple computer or the new

windows or the new

database or the new internet or the new

thing

there's always a new thing that you

could do something useful with and so i

figured i would

help people make better decisions make

the world more

intelligent and i wouldn't have to work

for somebody else was there a point

where

you said wow i've i've made it like i'm

successful

i'm still working on that

and uh i read that you i mean before

bitcoin you owned other scores

scarce assets within cyberspace right

domains you had all these domains and

you made some good money from that can

you talk a little bit about that

it all started in the mid 90s when um

we got email and we got email and all of

a sudden

your company's micro strategy so you

gotta own microstrategy.com

so then there is that big vanity you

know vanity license plates whenever you

select their vanity license plate so we

had our vanity emails

so of course i'm gonna have sailor at

microstrategy.com

and then uh and then i thought you know

microstrategy.com is cool but what if i

just had strategy.com

i mean because that's even cooler

because people used to always misspell

micro strategy

they would all be like is that micro

strategies

you're from micro strategies right or

that the mic

and it just kind of irked me like people

could never figure out whether a micro

strategy

like strategy is like its own plural

guys there's no strategies

and i just realized you could talk

yourself to your blue in the face but

you

if you just change the word to strategy

then they wouldn't screw it

up so i thought can we buy strategy.com

and i and lo and behold we could buy

strategy.com

so then i started thinking what other

words can i buy

i thought well i could be mike michael

at strategy.com but what wouldn't it be

cool if i was me

at michael.com so i went and i found

that i could buy michael

and i thought well what about mike so

you know you know you know about nike

nike that's kind of a cool brand

i you know i i thought to myself if you

have a very short word

that blocks well on a sign like nike

coke mike and so i got this idea that

you know

what if you just own the word

you know and michael is the arch angel

in heaven like when god is out michael's

in charge of heaven i thought that was

kind of cool

and i thought maybe michael jackson or

michael jordan might want to buy it one

day and if not

michael so uh so we started looking for

cool domains and we bought every word we

could buy

so we bought wisdom wow and hope

hope right bought hope we bought courage

speaker we bought voice

we bought angel i mean angel.com i

figured that would be neat and we bought

alarm

and we bought alert and then i even

bought some other words you know i

remember

uh jane austen's book emma

i bought emma and uh i bought usher

and then i bought frank and how much are

these costing you

how much were domains back then they

arranged you know

we started paying like 25 grand you know

it's back in the days when people

thought i got to pay 19

for a domain and i i had more than 19

so i think we might have might have paid

10 or 20 grand for some and then we

started paying 100 grand

and the most we ever paid was maybe a

couple hundred thousand dollars wow

and a couple hundred thousand dollars

would have been daunting to me in that

first year in business but once we got

to be a 30

40 million dollar business then we could

afford to pay it and i thought

you know what's a hundred or two hundred

thousand dollars to own a word

and my thinking was the english language

has been around nearly a thousand years

i think it'll be good around for another

thousand years

so we eventually created some businesses

on these so we created a business called

alarm.com yeah

and you can imagine it's kind of a home

automation alarm system plugged into the

internet

and today that's a publicly traded

company worth about four billion dollars

on nasdaq

so these i mean i think it generally

worked out we ended up um

creating more than a hundred million

dollar business from angel

alarm is a four billion dollar business

today

um we sold voice for 30 million dollars

just just the word i didn't really want

to sell it natalie i liked voice but

i figured that was the highest amount

that anybody ever paid for just a naked

domain name and

i kind of wanted to create that

comparable in the market so that

you know the next time someone wants

something like this they'll pay me a

hundred million or

wow hundreds of millions we'll see what

happens

i don't know but yeah it's scarce you

could think about

com as like it's the primary domain

for um it's just the primary blockchain

for domains if you will

and uh just like bitcoins the strongest

crypto

currency dot com is the strongest you

know

domain thread yeah well even recently i

mean you weren't thinking really about

bitcoin until

uh 2020 and it seems like you've really

done well on the fiat system

so i mean why did you start to think

that there's an issue

with it um i yeah i did well

creating my own company and i i had

other interesting

ventures that i launched like angel and

and then i i you know i was an early

investor and all the mobile wave

companies so i did well with facebook

and amazon and apple and google and

the like and i have no complaints about

that

i think that when i got to 2020 in march

my thought was the big tech

trade it's no longer unique and

everybody agrees with me that apple

amazon facebook and google are digital

dominant monopoly networks

that's not debatable it would have been

a debate in the year 2010

and then it was you know so if you're 10

years before everybody else

then it's good investment i think the

best investments

are when you buy into a technology trend

that everybody needs nobody can stop

and nobody understands and that would

describe

facebook became before they came public

or twitter before they came public or

or amazon back in 2010 or 2011

they were already 10 years into their

run as digital retail

there was no competitor but 98

of wall street was hating on them

they don't make any money you know

amazon doesn't make any money

you know how can you buy amazon they

don't make any money

well one day everybody will want to

order things from their smartphone and

they're the only one that's

the only app is going to run on a

smartphone

so when 5 billion people have a

smartphone then maybe

you want to own the icon which stands

for retail on the phone

and then everybody's money's going to

squeeze through that icon

so those are good investments then when

if it's obvious it's going to happen

when there's so much momentum and

inertia you can't stop it

but when people still don't understand

it

i would say by 2020 everybody understood

amazon like if you did

how could you not understand amazon you

were locked in your home

and you were going to starve to death

and so that was the year when all the

late adopters

downloaded the amazon app and got an

account

you would have to be really creative to

not

use amazon and youtube and google's the

same way

it's like if you can't go to the movies

and you can't leave your home and you

can't go to school

then maybe you discover a streaming

video

so i think amazon apple facebook and

google uh

their their transition from being

fast growing digital innovators

to being to being quasi technology

utilities

that are almost monopolies in their own

right

that transition was 20 20. so

at that point i looked and i said well

are those things going to go up by a

factor of 10

from here and i don't really think so i

thought that there

there are more like cash cow

utilities and and yeah you could hold

them but

but uh they're not the same companies

they were anymore

there's too much politics getting

involved right i mean they're going to

be congressional hearings

about what can apple do and what can

twitter do and what what

can facebook do and what can amazon do

and should you unionize them

and and is it fair that they you know

should they have the apple store i don't

know what will happen but

uh but it doesn't feel like a nimble

technology business anymore

so my my passion for big tech

you know uh my passion for big tech

kind of died died down

we could say amelia rated and then at

the same time

my uh my confidence in traditional

treasury strategies

languished it was pretty clear that if

you have 500 million dollars in cash

and the interest rate goes to zero and

it's going to stay at

zero for 36 months

then it's like putting all your money in

a savings account earning zero

well you know there's no upside

but if there's hyper inflation in assets

or asset inflation and you're holding

all your money in cash not only is there

no

upside but you realize that there's

there's downside

you know um the the real yield on

cash is negative

but if you're tracking asset inflation

it becomes negative 20

so if you want to be rich

or if you want to if you want to get

rich

you can't track cpi you have to track

asset inflation

and so you know you look at the s p 500

and you say well i mean that's the

hurdle rate

so i think in march of 2020 you know i

realized

that you couldn't

you couldn't continue to hold cash and

the best idea probably wasn't the big

tech trade anymore so what is the best

idea and so that drove me on a search

and then

and i found bitcoin because i had a

problem

and the traditional solution didn't look

like a solution anymore it looked like

the bloom wasn't off the the big tech

rose

so what would you like you would like to

have a big tech network

that has like all the dominance of apple

or google

or facebook but without the company

attached

so bitcoin is big tech but without the

company

what you're getting is just the pure big

tech network

no ceo no board of directors no product

iphone there's there's no employees so

there's no one to unionize

there's no you don't need an iphone 12

to be competitive

because the product of bitcoin is just a

bitcoin

and if bitcoin just gives you 121

million to the network now

it's quite reasonable that 121 millionth

of the network in a hundred years is

just as valuable

probably more valuable than one one

bitcoin in a hundred years is more

valuable than one bitcoin today

but you can see that one iphone

one iphone 3 today is worth nothing

and one iphone 12 in 100 years will be

worth nothing

so the product that apple is selling

isn't going to last a thousand years

the product that bitcoin is selling is

121 millionth of all the money in the

world

that doesn't have to change it just kind

of has to not break

so what i liked about bitcoin was it was

it was a digital gold or a digital

property that you couldn't inflate

and it was on a big tech network that

you could

accelerate using computer technology

so call it um call it digital gold

without all the imperfections of

gold but the big tech element meant that

you could plug layer 2 and layer three

applications into it like

square cache lightning apple pay google

pay

and if i plug if i plug uh

applications into the bitcoin network

then i can create smarter faster

stronger

gold smarter faster stronger property

and and pretty much the core principle

of how you get rich

or how you stay rich in the 21st century

is you dematerialize something

from the physical world to the digital

and you make it smarter faster and

if you if you digitize music you create

amazon and apple music or pandora

it's smarter faster stronger and you

give it to billions of people

and if you de-materialize cds and dvds

and

or de-materialize concerts

and broadway shows and you have youtube

and if you dematerialize every every

library and every book and every

university on the planet

you have youtube and ibooks and uh

and so the digital transformation of

information

and entertainment is how you provide

joy and education

to the world ergo the digital

transformation of property

is how you provide wealth to the world

it's very simple idea it's not only

bitcoin it's all the applications

on top of bitcoin of which

you've got paypal and coinbase and

binance and square but you

and you have the block fi credit card

but microstrategy is an application on

bitcoin like our stock is a layer 2

application our debt

is a derivative of bitcoin our converts

are

derivatives of bitcoin so all sorts of

things can plug into bitcoin and

all of them are in essence they're

building applications and platforms

on top of digital property in order to

construct the 21st century

cyber economy smarter

faster and stronger

thinking a billion times a second moving

at the speed of light

so yeah that's how you do it that's how

people create value you either build on

the internet platform or the pc

you know uh thomas watson built on the

mainframe platform and bill gates built

on the pc platform

and jeff bezos was built on the internet

platform

and then apple came back and revitalized

on the mobile platform

and now you got you know the next

platform digital property as a platform

it's it just made sense so

i discovered it because i had a problem

we adopted first defensively in order to

avoid losing all our money

like if i told you natalie i'm just

going to take all your money next

tuesday

all of it you would spend between now

and next tuesday

researching to figure out how not to

lose your money but then after we

figured out how not to lose all our

money

we started thinking maybe we can use

this offensively

in order to grow the business and that

was serendipitous

you know it wasn't obvious to me all

that that would happen

but you know the truth is when i started

in business

if i if you'd asked me what success was

i would have

said successes if i could one day afford

to hire

10 people and if you'd ask me at 10

people what success i'd say maybe one

day we'll have 100 employees

you know it's like success is iterative

and you keep finding the next thing that

you might be able to do and so

opportunities present themselves

organically once you get into the market

yeah well i wanted to ask you because we

have a mutual friend eric weiss and i

know he helped orange

pill you but there was some tweet that

resurfaced at some point and it was it's

i think it was

even back in like 2013 that you said

bitcoin would die

or something so had you heard about it

prior to that and just kind of

passed it off and said no this is not

going to work yeah i mean i

i just read about it i knew it was

decentralized money

and i got the idea it was kind of a cool

thing and

there are a lot of like fanatic people

that liked it but i

it wasn't the solution to a problem i

had

it was just one more thing so

there's a thousand things you can invest

in you know uber and airbnb

and bitcoin and the next instagram thing

and the bumble thing

and tinder and you know and and

buildings and

the like there's always something

it just i'm not a venture capital i just

kind of focused on my things i did

alarm.com and i did angel.com

and i did microstrategy and

it was just uh that long tail thing i

did

you know like a lot of people are

critics of bitcoin

if you study it for an hour and you've

got

a and you've got a lot of other

priorities and a lot of other passions

you can find something to criticize

about it

it's it's not very difficult to study

somebody for a few minutes

or an hour and come up with something to

criticize

it takes 40 hours before you start to

understand

some of the nuances of it and why it's

unique

it might take you a thousand hours

before you start to have some modicum

of facility or expertise and

some people would say it takes 10 000

hours before you've mastered it

but pretty much anybody on earth if you

let them study it for

10 minutes to an hour or two hours

they'll just find something to not like

or to be or to be afraid of

in 2013 it was small i didn't have a

problem i hadn't spent much time on it i

looked at it and i thought

well maybe it'll go the way of online

gambling you know by the way i like

gambling

i liked online gambling i thought it was

good i i don't

i i didn't think it was a good thing

that people outlawed online gambling

like they outlawed poker online they

would arrest people

you know going through dulles airport

because they were running online poker

sites i didn't

think that was a good thing and people

want to play poker online why shouldn't

they be able to

there was something called trade sports

you know where you could go online and

you could bet on the outcome of

elections

or the you know who's going to win the

olympic gold medal i thought that was

cool thing too

and you know the regulators cut off uh

cut off

currency flows or like bank accounts to

trade sports and shut it down

so i looked at bitcoin it was 2013 that

was before the irs even gave it property

tax

treatment that was 2014. so i thought

some regulator is going to shut it down

maybe and then i tweeted and i forgot

about it forever

and hey the bitcoin community didn't

really care much about me at the time

either

so nobody noticed that i and natalie the

joker courses

i didn't even remember i said it like

years went by and then about six other

bitcoiners tried to orange pill me

from 2017 to 2018 2019

2020 and i didn't remember when

they did or maybe i did and uh then

finally you know when you get hit in the

head with a 2x4

you know if you're in nubbin on and the

bank seizes all your money then maybe

you would discover bitcoin

or if you're in a country or your family

is in a country where there's

hyperinflation that's a wake-up call you

discover bitcoin

so the pandemic was a wake-up call the

lockdowns were a wake-up call for a lot

of people in a lot of

areas maybe you figured out zoom or

discovered zoom for the first time

you know maybe you learned about youtube

and you could do stuff on youtube for

the first time maybe you discovered

twitter for the first time

so i i had a problem i discovered

bitcoin for the first time

and then when i finally put out that

tweet saying we bought 250

million dollars worth of bitcoin other

bitcoiners

they discovered my previous tweet and

they threw it right back at me and i was

like wow i said that

interesting and i could have deleted it

but i thought just better just to leave

it there

just as a reminder that sometimes we

think one thing

and then we change our mind yeah no i

was talking to sephidine

last week and he admitted himself too he

was once an ignorant no coiner but you

have to go down that rabbit hole and

like you mentioned it is

really nuanced you have to do a lot of

research and one of the things i

i found interesting that you've said

before is that we're living in a time

where the asset prices are so inflated

so people

out of like arrogance and ignorance

think that they're doing great because

they have

tech stocks or maybe their house is

really appreciated in value

but in the background the money is

collapsing

and they don't realize that we're headed

for

this you know brick wall in a

fast-moving train

so how do you how do we get people to

that i mean at what point do you make

how do you get hundreds of millions of

americans to really understand this

system and what's wrong with it

persistent cheerful constructive

educational efforts through all channels

available

to us i think your odds are better doing

it on youtube

than doing it traveling door-to-door

knocking on doors you know

the 19th century way was knock on doors

there's a while when people would go

from town to town

set up a tent and you know preach

have a carnival whistle stop tours

that's like how

politicians used to educate

you could write books but books you know

books don't travel the way they used to

i think that uh youtube youtube videos

podcasts you know there's some cable

cable networks you have to build

relationships build alliances

you're educating people when you um when

you take your bitcoin miner public

that's educational

microstrategy educated a lot of people

when we bought bitcoin

um when we went we did our bond offering

we educated people in the bond market

it's not just educating individuals in

the consumer world

um you're educating across all

dimensions right so like

is it more important to educate a

million people with one dollar

or one person with a million dollars

or how about one person with a billion

you know it is after all it's a battle

for the hearts and minds but it's really

a battle for the money

so i think anything you can do in order

to educate investors

is good educating politicians it's good

you educate financial analysts there's

no one channel

we created a bitcoin for everybody

course you can go online learn that

we created hope.com so that anybody can

go on the web and they can get educated

that way

i think i think you've got a hundred

different channels to educate people

in a hundred different countries yeah in

all languages

and all cultures and it's it's a very

it's a massively parallel

decentralized effort

i still i can't do stuff you know in

korean and japanese or

spanish but there are other people that

will

look at what we might do if it's unique

and translate it and take it those local

markets and

that's that's part of what's really

wonderful about bitcoin

bitcoin you could think of is um you can

think of it as a

as a bank in cyberspace or the central

bank

you know in cyberspace or

ross stevens might say that decentral

in cyberspace but

everybody else can become their own

fractional reserve bank

using bitcoin as the central bank so

when you set up your own uh exchange in

korea you set up a

a branch of bitcoin in korea and if you

set up

a mobile app that's a bank in nigeria

you set up another branch of bitcoin

so bitcoin is creating its own system

of thousands and tens of thousands

of banks and applications if you will

and so there is no one channel

hundreds of channels hundreds of places

with all sorts of different technologies

all at the same time

and they're all you know i just read um

i just read about

spike lee got hired to do a marketing

campaign

for a bitcoin company that's pushing

like crypto

currency atms something like that

okay well that's education yeah you know

so every business

every business every investor and every

holder of bitcoin

is doing their own education and if it's

a business they call it marketing

but if it's an individual talking their

family that might be education

but if it's microstrategy so we're

holding billions of bitcoin and every

time we talk to our investors

or we raise money we're educating the

financial markets