Michael Saylor and Danielle DiMartino Booth: Swan Signal Live E33

This week’s Swan Signal Live features Michael Saylor and Danielle DiMartino Booth discussing Fed policies, running a company during monetary manip­u­la­tion, price discovery, and Bitcoin as a tool for freedom.

Michael Saylor is CEO of MicroS­trategy, a publicly-traded business intel­li­gence company. Michael burst onto the Bitcoin scene when he put MicroS­trategy onto a Bitcoin standard by converting nearly all of the company treasury to Bitcoin with a $450 million buy over the past few months. 

Danielle DiMartino Booth is a former Fed insider, she was a right-hand analyst for Dallas Fed Presi­dent Richard Fisher during the 2008 finan­cial crisis. Through that experi­ence, she came to call out monetary malprac­tice at the Fed in her book Fed Up: An Insid­er’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad. She now runs her own research firm, Quill Intelligence.

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Summary

0:00 Introduction 

2:49 Danielle’s thoughts on Bitcoin 

7:07 Michael’s view on central banks and Maco 

10:52 Are we in a currency collapse? 

20:20 Real estate as a store of value 

27:09 Onset of the virtual wave 

31:16 How does monetary policy affect company decisions? 

33:58 Zombie Compa­nies and the defla­tionary transition. 

41:43 Bitcoin as a force for good in the world 

45:38 Congress waking up to the role of the Fed 

52:30 Bitcoin on company balance sheets 

54:05 History of Bitcoin 

57:57 Thoughts on Infla­tion and CPI 

1:01:43 Do compa­nies take on dollar-debt to buy Bitcoin? 

1:09:02 Bitcoin energy usage 

1:12:01 Bitcoin quantum computer 

1:13:36 People of Bitcoin 

1:20:11 Which big company buys Bitcoin next? 

1:23:38 Bitcoin gives people hope and an exit strategy. 

1:31:25 Michael Saylor hype video 

1:33:00 Video response and appre­ci­a­tion for early Bitcoiners.

Transcript

Brady Swenson:

All right, everyone. Welcome back to Swan Signal Live. This is of course is a produc­tion of Swan Bitcoin. The safest way to accumu­late Bitcoin with automatic recur­ring buys at swanbitcoin.com. Swan Signal Live is a weekly show. We pair up great guests for compelling discus­sions about economics and Bitcoin. I’m your host, Brady Swenson, Head of Educa­tion at Swan. We have a monster of a show for you today. I’ve been excited about this one ever since we sched­uled it with Danielle DiMartino Booth and Michael Saylor. But before we dive in a exciting announce­ment to share with you about Swan Bitcoin, daily buys are up and running. We’ve been talking about it for a month or so now we’ve been signing people up for the Beta Program at swanbitcoin.com slash daily buys. You can still jump in on that. The team is now stacking daily, and we have been testing it. We are rolling it out slowly to all of the Beta Group.

So that’s super exciting. Automatic recur­ring buys our service dollar cost averaging is the safest way to accumu­late Bitcoin. You can stabi­lize your cost basis over time. Just set it and forget it. There’s no distrac­tions at Swan from all coins. We are laser focused on helping you accumu­late Bitcoin and educating you about what’s going on here. For example, through this very show. So let’s dive in to the show. Now we have the amazing Danielle DiMartino Booth with us. She’s a former FedIn­sider. She was a right-hand analyst to Dallas Fed Presi­dent, Richard Fisher, during the 2008 finan­cial crisis. And through that experi­ence, she came to call out the monetary malprac­tice of the Fed. In her book, Fed Up, an insid­er’s take on why the Federal Reserve is bad. Just straight up, says it right there. She now runs her own research firm Quill Intel­li­gence. Danielle really appre­ciate taking the time today. Welcome to the show.

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Brady Swenson:

Absolutely. And we have, of course, Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroS­trategy, a publicly traded enter­prise business intel­li­gence company, Michael burst onto the Bitcoin scene over the past few months when he put MicroS­trategy onto a Bitcoin standard by converting nearly all of the company treasury to Bitcoin $450 million worth over the past few months, Michael, welcome to Swan Signal Live.

Michael Saylor:

Thanks, Brady.

Brady Swenson:

All right. So yeah, as I just stated there in the intro­duc­tion, Michael is obviously a Bitcoin Bowl and this being a show focused on Macro and Bitcoin, I’d like to just start by getting your thoughts on Bitcoin, Danielle, before we jump in to focusing on your exper­tise and discussing macro­eco­nomics and monetary policy, there’s obviously so much that we agree on those two topics and we’ll unpack those two topics here on the show. So let’s just start with getting your general view on Bitcoin. And I was wondering if your thoughts have evolved at all in light of large investors like Paul Tudor Jones, or Jerome Powell buying Bitcoin and compa­nies like MicroS­trategy. And now Square, we recently found out is choosing to hold it as a corpo­rate reserve asset.

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

Well, clearly there’s about $7 trillion. Excuse me, former central bank are only thinking trillions. There’s about a billion dollars right now on corpo­rate balance sheets held as cash and cash equiv­a­lent. So you’ve not got a fairly new line item that says Bitcoin. And, I had a lengthy inter­view recently with a fellow by the name of Jeff Booth. And he has looked at defla­tion through the prism of technology and where that’s going to take the global economy in the next several gener­a­tions. And it was very impactful in that we spoke about the end game, which every­body talks about. Every­body talks about what’s going to happen. If, and when we go from, let’s say after the next three trillion, we tack on from 30 to $60 trillion of US debt, where does that take us? And the standard answer is especially inside the macro economic commu­nity, which I’m not trying to endorse in any way, shape or form, but there’s always some happy kumbaya debt Jubilee ending to where all of the major sover­eigns get together in a room, presum­ably including the United States and China.

And they agree to expunge all sover­eign debts, just wipe the decks clean. I’ve never really bought into the simplicity of that, given that there has been saber-rattling going on in the background and to an increasing extent as China has become larger on the world stage and has become techno­log­i­cally dominant. We know that they’re winning in the AI game. We know that they’re winning when it comes to the number of patents that they’re putting out. We know that they’ve already got a third of the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment on planet earth. So China is definitely marching towards trying to become the Economic Super­power. We know, however that Yuan is not an accepted medium of exchange as of yet still South of 2% globally. So Jeff’s main premise is that rather than Segway from a currency war to a trade war, that’s where we are right now in the cycle of cycles.

But rather from going from currency to trade to hot war, which is how histor­i­cally, since the Romans existed, how currency, reserve curren­cies have exchanged hands. And that is when blood falls. Rather than doing that, Jeff suggested that Bitcoin could rise up as a peaceful alter­na­tive to there being an actual alter­ca­tion between the United States and China. One group of allies versus another group of allies, China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia versus the United States and the rest of the world.

So it would require I think, a lot of standing down. And, but I do see that as being a poten­tial avenue going forward because much to the dismay of gold bugs, I’ve never seen the practi­cality of switching back to the gold standard. So with that, I will say that I used to be much more skeptical than I am. I under­stand that econom­i­cally speaking, if you’re talking about produc­tive capacity, that when quantum comes along, the math completely shifts in terms of the economics of Bitcoin. And that can also be a pioneering revolu­tionary step ahead. So I am much less skeptical today than I was say, six months ago, but I’m not letting go of my goal just yet.

Brady Swenson:

Excel­lent. Really appre­ciate your take on that. Michael, any reaction to Danielle’s take there? There’s lots of unpack. We have the idea of China perhaps competing, trying to compete against the dollar for a global reserve currency status. Of course, we heard about Iran changing their oil contracts to being denom­i­nated on you on from the US dollar. That was inter­esting news, but also, Danielle mentioned quantum there. I’m wondering if during your research, your exten­sive dive into Bitcoin before you made this move, that you, research that idea as a poten­tial catalyst for, a breach of with the Bitcoin network.

Michael Saylor:

Well, I guess I think that all curren­cies are collapsing right now and as every govern­ment printing money every­where in the world, that means there’s a stampede of value out of currency into something else. So, I think when you print more money, when you inflate, the curren­cies and you inflate the monetary supply, it’s the equiv­a­lent of like sucking all the oxygen out of the room. I’m an Astro­nau­tical Engineer. And so this concept called Adiabatic Lapse. And what it means is that as the pressure drops away, the energy drops out of the system. So every 1,000 feet you go up, the temper­a­ture dropped by three degrees. And if you go at 50,000 feet, the temper­a­ture drops by 150 degrees versus sea level. Which means that if I take you up high enough in the atmos­phere, I simul­ta­ne­ously starve you of oxygen and freeze you to death.

And of course, that’s why you don’t jump out of a plane at 50,000 feet. All the curren­cies are doing that, right? The govern­ments are basically inflating them up. It’s like taking every­body up 50,000 feet. So they’re freezing and they’re choking to death. And so now in that stampede, every­body’s chasing after something else with some tangible value. And one idea is Gold. And the other idea is Big Tech. I think Gold is defec­tive. And I spent 45 minutes explaining why on Peter McCormick’s podcast. Funda­men­tally the reason Gold is defec­tive is because it’s a commodity. And if you’re buying Gold as a store of value, you’re assuming that human beings will be stupid and won’t figure out how to produce any more. And that’s been a bad bet in the history of the world to assume that people can’t produce more of something they want.

In fact, they seem to produce more of every­thing they want. There’s nothing in the history of the world that we wanted, that we couldn’t produce more of oil, real estate, whatever. So I don’t think commodi­ties work and we can delve in a bit, but I actually think that’s not the crowded trade. I think that every­body’s stampeding into NASDAQ stocks and Big Tech, right? So they’re charging toward Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, because they think that those are stores of value. Now, not because they’re more bullish on Apple, right? They’re trying to be bullish on Apple was a decade ago or Google or buy Facebook stock when it was 12 bucks a share when social networks refers hitting the idea that Facebook is a great store of value of $280 a share or whatever the number is right now is it’s a little bit late.

But the fact of the matter is people are so desperate to avoid getting froze to death, right? And this currency collapse that, they’re chasing toward grasping at anything. And right now their best idea, I think is Big Tech. So that’s, what I think.

Brady Swenson:

So Danielle, the Fed has printed 22% of all US dollars that have existed to date this year. Obviously we are just way too far down this path to turn back now, that was the case probably a long time ago. So we’re in a world of monetary socialism now. And I’m wondering, are we finally now at the points, Austrian econo­mists and Fed critics have been predicting the demise of the dollar and the results and, whatever the outcome will be for quite a long time. Are we finally at that point now where the Fed loses control of the dollar, and as Michael saying, are we in a currency collapse in your opinion?

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

I wouldn’t say that we were in a currency collapse in real time. The dollar has not yet been pushed. It’s the worst cliche I could use in response to that question, but we haven’t gone far enough in the process. And part of it is because the capital markets are still wide open and there is still enough confi­dence in central bankers to keep this ruse alive, to keep the narra­tive alive. And a lot of investors are depending on doing just that. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have come into the year with about 78% of corpo­rate debt to US GDP. And now we’re going to exit the year. I just ran the math at close to 95% of corpo­rate non-finan­cial debt to GDP. The end result of this is highly destruc­tive and not just highly destruc­tive for investors, but it’s highly destruc­tive on a societal level because when you pile on $2 trillion of debt on the corpo­rate Ameri­ca’s balance sheet, there was overlaying to begin with what you end up with in the event that the stimulus is not able to produce what we call escape velocity for macro economic growth. What you end up with is a lot of compa­nies that are way over lever­aged that don’t have very high recovery values. And that is why sometimes when we see such and such retail chain filed for chapter 11 and they’re closing all their stores. And what that means is rather than go through a restruc­turing in which a part of the company is retained. You end up having the entire entity destroyed because the Fed has managed to give so many walking wounded, so many zombies, one in five US corpo­ra­tions, that policy has managed to give them lifelines such that they can, in the case of American airlines, they can float a couple of billion dollars of debt based on their frequent flyer program. He can collat­er­alize anything for having say, but when, when the time comes there for the inevitable and they are inevitable, the Fed can postpone insol­vency. It cannot indef­i­nitely. It can not forestall insol­ven­cies indef­i­nitely. It can buy compa­nies time, but that’s it. But my point is the time that is purchased, puts more corpo­rate, more debt on corpo­rate Ameri­ca’s balance sheets, such that when the time comes to file, you end up with liqui­da­tions. Many more people put out of work than would have needed to have been the case. Had compa­nies not been walking a bit. And they restruc­tured when there was still value left to be carved out of the company.

Michael Saylor:

So, Brady, I have a take on this if I could.

Brady Swenson:

Absolutely.

Michael Saylor:

I don’t think we’re going to see a currency collapse. I wouldn’t say that. I just think the curren­cies are all just going to get weaker. They’re just sliding. I mean, a reason­able expec­ta­tion as the monetary supply expands by more than 10% a year for the next three years, instead of, I think Saifedean, he says 7% a year for a decade. So I’m guessing not more than more 7%. So let’s just say 10 to 15% a year for the next three or four years. And I think that probably happens every­where in the world. And every govern­ment is going to sort through their issues and there’s going to be tons of compli­cated micro­eco­nomic devel­op­ments of which I don’t think any of us can define exactly how they’ll turn out all.

I think all we know is that rational investors with hundreds of trillions of dollars of money are looking at this saying the only way I can hold bonds is if I think a terrific interest rates go negative. If they’re not going negative than buying a 30 year bond is like me giving you every­thing that I own waiting to the end of my life. And you give back a third of it to my heirs after I’m dead. That makes no sense, right? To buy a bond or our sover­eign bond. And it’s hard to buy real estate because half of it’s impaired and no one can figure out whether, our movie theaters that were going to be valuable again. It’s very compli­cated situa­tion and scary situa­tion. If you have a nice house, I recom­mend you keep it right. If you had extra cash and you wanted to buy a beautiful house, this is a good time to buy it.

So if there’s something that you love that you’re passionate about, then you probably ought to buy it. And other­wise you’ve got this extra monetary energy. It’s hard to find debt. And so now you’re down to precious metals or stocks and the Fed and the central bankers are crowded every­body out of every trade. Like liter­ally they’ve had the reason the stock market’s going up and the Gold is going up is because they bought up every­thing in the middle. So you either have to convic­tion on Gold and, and there are people that have it. You’ve got a billion people on the planet that think that Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are, walk on water. Right. And you can’t blame them. I mean they’re the biggest success stories of a decade. So I think really what’s going on right now is that the store of value for a billion people or however many has become technology stocks.

And that’s just means that as the Fed prints more money, there’s going to be a little tug of war. And I think over the near term, people will probably buy equities and stocks because it’s easy to do so. And they under­stand them. And I think over the long-term, this is a time horizon thing, right? If you’re looking out over the next decade, maybe five to 10 years, and yeah, buying technology is not a bad idea. There are fixtures are not going away. If you’re looking at between 10 and a hundred years, then you start to say, well, technology compa­nies, they’ve got CEOs and central opera­tions and competi­tors, and they’ve got countries that they’ve got to deal with. And they’ve got trade and regula­tory issues and a lot of compli­ca­tions and moving parts. They have to do a lot of things every year to be a store of value. Apple’s got to keep shipping upgrades to the iPhone, like the one they’re doing today, and then the Apple Watch.

And I’m just going to have an opinion about whether the new iOS or the new iPhone or the new Apple Watch was a good thing or a bad thing, and how the Chinese feel about it and how are we going to deal with it, et cetera, lots of compli­ca­tions. So your alter­na­tive of course, to Gold or to Big Tech is Bitcoin and Bitcoin doesn’t have compli­ca­tions. There’s no CEO to disagree with. There’s no board of direc­tors. There’s no one country. There’s no central headquar­ters. It doesn’t have to keep shipping new versions of itself. As it sits right now, the current function­ality of Bitcoin is to store all the world’s money forever in a fair and equitable fashion. And that’s enough. I mean that’s what we want, right? So I feel that right now, you’ve got a bunch of people.

They all agree on. One thing, every­body agrees currency is getting weaker and we have to run to a store of value. They all disagree about what are the store value was Gold or Big Tech or Bitcoin. But I think if people think about it a bit, I think they’ll conclude that the technology is a crowded trade it’s Ryan’s course. And if you wanted to make a lot of money in it, you probably should have bought all those things in 2010, 11 or 12. Right now they’ve got as many compli­ca­tions as they have benefits as a store of value. And I think with regard to Gold, as I said before, it peaked in the 19^th century. 95% of the cities in the world, they seized it in the 20^th century. And if they don’t seize it, then the gold miners will just make more.

And they’re your enemy. So I can’t see going back to a 19^th century idea as a 21^st century solution is very progres­sive. And that only leaves one choice, which is Bitcoin, which is a pretty good 21^st century solution as a store of value. So I don’t know what will happen in the next week or month. And I don’t know what compa­nies will succeed or fail. And I can’t tell you what every country is going to do and, and whether or not you should short the dollar go long, the dollar versus the yen or the wan or the whatever. And there are a lot of guys in the macro industry that care a lot about it and make a lot of money on it. All I can say is it seems pretty obvious to me that if your time horizon is 10 years or more, the store of value, with the most promise in the 21^st century with the least compli­ca­tions to it is Bitcoin.

Brady Swenson:

All right, Danielle, I saw you react to the comments about real estates. I’d love to hear your thoughts on real estate, both corpo­rate and residential.

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

There’s one thing that is very disin­gen­uous about saying that, the coron­avirus caused all of the issues that are currently in the economy. The coron­avirus didn’t cause corpo­rate America to be over lever­aged the coron­avirus didn’t cause what we’re finding out to be equity cushions on commer­cial mortgage backed securi­ties, to be so thin. All of this occurred in advance of, and in addition to that, what the coron­avirus did change, however, was where Ameri­cans want to live. People are looking to move out into the suburbs, into the exurbs. You used to have a millen­nial gener­a­tion that was like I’m hip. I’m spending my money on experi­ences, on traveling. I want to live in urban centers. I want to live close to every­thing. I don’t want the life of my parents. I’m going to shun that. And you had yesterday alone, there was a story on Bloomberg about three luxury retire­ment commu­nity build­ings that are going up in Manhattan, ready to open because the baby boomers were going to come in from the exurbs.

They were going to come in from suburbs and also want to be closer to their children and want to be close to hospi­tals. That’s all gone away. So coming into 2020, there were two kind of bullet­proof sectors in commer­cial real estate. They were office and multi-family, Urban Center office, central business district office, and Multi­family high-rise downtown. That math has been turned on a tech. Retail has been a train wreck, a long moving train wreck for a long time. Lodging was a surprise, obviously that is again, directly related to the coron­avirus. But what we’re finding out is that the debt that was taken out on some of this real estate was just off the Richter scale. And now it’s coming back to haunt the devel­opers. You’re seeing “jingle mail”, which is something that we referred to during this upfront housing crisis. But you’re seeing people get up and walk away from portfolios.

You’re seeing people abandoned hotels outright. They do the math. They say the debt against it is never going to be worth. I’m not going to spend another penny servicing it and away they go. So this will still be a process that takes some time to play out. Unfor­tu­nately, we’re seeing what we saw in the Consumer Price Index this morning that was released. We’re seeing rental infla­tion come down and that is going to scare the Federal Reserve even more than anything because it’s the stick­iest form of infla­tion. We’re seeing that act as a drag on the CPI, it’s going to play out the same way in the Core PCE that the Fed follows. In other words, the Fed is going to have even more license to continue printing in the background because it’s going to be afraid of the Boogeyman Defla­tion. So, but right now, commer­cial real estate is one of the few areas of the entire asset class universe, right?

Because the Fed is backstop­ping stocks. The Fed is backstop­ping bonds, corpo­rate bonds. They’re not backstop­ping anything but feder­ally backed multi­family loans. So it’s one of the few places where investors have found, wow, there’s price discovery here. And my reaction came from, the fact that Michael was talking about not knowing what the value is and we’re in that price discovery process right now. And it’s not pretty. And we’re going to find out what it looks like on the other end, but it is at least one place that, because foreign investors are pretty much gone. There’d been a lot of geopo­lit­ical tensions that have been driven up because of the coron­avirus. So you’re not going to have this flood of foreign investors coming in to save the day as we’ve seen in past cycles. The reason I’m so excited and animated and passionate is because when you have PTSD from working inside the Fed for so long, there are very few asset classes where you get to actually see true price discov­eries, where buyers and sellers come together and figure out this thing called price without any inter­fer­ence by the Fed.

That’s what we’re seeing in commer­cial real estate. What we’re seeing in residen­tial real estate, I’ll sum up for you in four different factors. There’s this Exodus to the suburbs and the exurbs. That’s the one and only funda­mental factor. FHA lending has gone bananas. You only need a three and a half percent down payment. And we’ve got Fannie and Freddie doing cash out refinanc­ings and about a $50 billion cash out run rate per quarter.

That’s a lot of money going into the hands of people who built up over $30 trillion of home equity. And on top of that, Fannie and Freddie are using… They’ve got 80% plain vanilla refinancing. They’ve gotten 90% of cash out, refinancing volumes. They’re using something called an automated appraisal waiver so that you don’t actually have to see the house, make sure that the value is there. They’re just pushing it through the system and putting cash out the back door. Very much the govern­ment led housing boom, in addition to the fact that there’s that one funda­mental factor of people truly wanting to get out of the city. So get real estate it’s going to get interesting.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. And Michael Daniels, they’re talking about true a real price discovery, they said here that we have in capitalism where you have a price for something that actually commu­ni­cates to the producer and the consumer. The value of something and obviously prices are very impor­tant when they become manip­u­lated. We have a bad outcomes and we’ll talk in a minute about Zombie Comp corpo­ra­tions, for instance all kinds of bad outcomes. And it’s not capitalism, it’s monetary socialism when you’re playing with the price signals so a reaction there as well. And I assume that you’re thinking Bitcoin is a space where price discovery is happening unimpeded.

Michael Saylor:

Yeah. I think Bitcoin is probably one of the few places where we’ve still got price discovery going on and I suppose to lock away it’s because there are people that disagree with us Brady and we should be happy that there are people that disagree with our views with regard to Bitcoin, because other­wise there’d be no one to sell it to us, and that would be unfor­tu­nate. I think the price discovery is being pushed out of most of the other markets this year. And that’s unfor­tu­nate for the Austrian econo­mist in the space.

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

We’re all nodding our heads at once.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. Michael, I wanted to ask you about a corpo­ra­tion in this environ­ment, you’ve been running micro strategy. Founded it… I think you said it was, you’ve been running it for 20 plus years. Right? Maybe 30 years now.

Michael Saylor:

30. We came public in 1998. So I’ve been public company CEO for 22 years.

Brady Swenson:

Okay. So you’ve been through quite a bit as the heading up a company, how has the monetary policy in the United States and its evolu­tion impacted your ability to run a corpo­ra­tion in this country?

Michael Saylor:

No, I think the primary devel­op­ment of this year and the inter­esting one is the onset of the virtual wave and by virtual wave, I mean the virtu­al­iza­tion of a lot of products. And a lot of processes that were previ­ously deliv­ered manually. So a lot of the things we did the practice of meeting and face to face with customers, the practice of having a one-on-one meeting, the practice of events and travel and enter­tain­ment and the way that customers view you changed dramat­i­cally between March 1^st and July 1^st in the second quarter. And I would say when we started the second quarter, I believe that people had to be working next to each other and we had to be face-to-face with a customer. And we didn’t really believe much in video confer­encing techniques. I’m not… When I say we, I mean, my company in partic­ular, every other company is a different stage in this journey, but we didn’t fully appre­ciate the power of streaming on demand video.

And I would say by the end of the quarter, what we realized is Zoom is magical technology. You can zoom anywhere at the speed of light, you can bend time and space. If I can zoom 6,000 miles away and then I punched the record button and then I can convince somebody that my software works. Then I could just upload that meeting to my website and let it run 97,000 times. And that causes you to think harder about why is it you’re taking 40 meetings a week? Why don’t you take 40 meetings second? And it’s you change your view? Like I used to hire a person in Sydney, Australia to run consulting. And now you realize you can have somebody in Singa­pore running consulting in Sydney, Australia and then you realize that one meeting a day isn’t really appro­priate. Why not seven meetings a day? And then you think, well heck, what if I just have the person that had the meeting record themselves and have 700,000 meetings a day? And then you start thinking, well, maybe I’ll just have the website, do all this stuff.

And so you have a complete collapse and demate­ri­al­iza­tion of hundreds of thousands of hours you go from one person has a one-hour meeting with a customer costs, a thousand dollars, and then they zoom there and it costs a hundred dollars. And then they recorded a hundred times and it costs a dollar. And then it streams 10,000 times and it costs less than a penny. And then you start thinking, why is it that I need to have a bunch of average people that are manually going through laborious processes, strug­gling to under­stand how things work. Why don’t I just have the engineer that built the product, explain how it works 187,000 times a week, and that’s mind blowing. And that’s the virtual way, it’s a complete collapsed materi­al­iza­tion of what you’re doing. And you have to rethink every­thing about a company. Once you under­stand that that’s the new idea.

Brady Swenson:

How has the monetary policy changes over the past 30 years affected your approach to the business? Obviously it’s led you to this point where you’ve converted your corpo­rate treasury to Bitcoin.

Michael Saylor:

I don’t think it changes the PNL I mean, to be clear, like if you’re in the business of selling pizzas or selling anything. Selling cars, you make cars, you sell cars, you make pizzas, you sell pizza is, you make movies, you saw movies. The monetary policy is not changing the PNL. The monetary policy when you’re printing 7% more money, I guess it changes your view toward the balance sheet. And so at 7% more money a year, then you conclude well the cost of capital is seven or 8%. So if you’re really smart, that means you have to buy your stock back, or you have to leverage up, or you have to invest in things that will have more than 7% a year in cashflow growth. So that the monetary policy drives your view as an investor on the balance sheet, it doesn’t change the way you view daycare or the way you view a paint job or any of those products and services.

So I would say that the primary impact of the change in the monetary policy this year is we went from a 7% expan­sion to a 15% expan­sion. And it’s like we went from second gear to fourth gear and people that could afford to be obliv­ious and be… What is the word? Be cavalier is the word. You could be cavalier with your balance sheet, with cash on it. If you had 2% infla­tion or thought you did. And if you had 7% infla­tion and if your company is growing 20% a year like Google, like Facebook like Amazon.

And in that case, you can probably be cavalier with all the cash on your balance sheet too, because it’s like a small factor. But if you have a low growth company, if your compa­ny’s growing less than 20% a year, if you were going 5% a year and if the asset infla­tion rate goes to 15% a year and if half of your enter­prise value is your balance sheet, well then you get into an inter­esting conun­drum, right? Because then you realize you might very well lose more value on your balance sheet than you can generate from all The work you do on your PNL. And that puts you into a new situa­tion. And I would say, “That’s part of the catalyst that got me here.”

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. Danielle, just thinking about the way this monetary policy is affecting corpo­ra­tions, I’d love to hear you talk about this idea that, money printing is propping up compa­nies like Michael is saying that aren’t growing and we call them Zombie compa­nies, they’re sort of walking dead. They should be in a capitalist society cleared out for, making way for innova­tion and new entre­pre­neurs come in and fill the space in a better way. So can you talk about the impact of Zombie compa­nies on the economy in the United States?

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

So just on a macro economic level, having one in five us compa­nies not be able to cover their net interest expense with their incoming cashflow is problem­atic. And as you say, it’s something that creates a long-term drag on produc­tivity because you end up having an inability for new entrance, new innova­tors, new job creators to come in the after­math of the end of a credit cycle. Because the credit cycle is effec­tively not ending, you’re keeping them alive. And we actually still have compa­nies that we kept alive from the finan­cial crisis. If you think about whatever Caesars used to be called and clear channel what it’s called today. And the examples go on and on coming into 2019, we already had 14% of us corpo­ra­tions were zombies to begin with. So we’ve been dragging around this dead weight, which is why growth has been so anemic for the past decade or so. Pushing this envelope as far as we have though, in the current environ­ment, listening to what Michael is describing, because he’s talking about massive levels of automation.

I mean, magni­tudes of automa­tion, the likes of which we haven’t seen, you have to bear in mind that one in 10 global employees in January 2020, was employed in travel and tourism talk to any CEO, including Michael. And they will tell you, there’s no reason that their former travel budgets shouldn’t go straight down to the bottom line going forward. Because they need to put the employee in business class, travel and fly them halfway around the world and put them up in a five-star hotel for a week, it’s negated effec­tively. But there are economic prices to pay for that in terms of long-term unemploy­ment, not just in the United States, but globally. And it’s good to look at things in a vacuum, it’s good to be agnostic about how we approach invest­ments, but there are definite economic prices to be paid on a societal level for fostering zombies for not allowing new entrants to come in. Because you’re going end up having much too large of a propor­tion of your workforce, who’s out of work and that is problematic.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah, I can see why that’s problem­atic. Michael was talking about the de materi­al­iza­tion of work, driven by exponen­tial advance­ment in technology. And you mentioned at the begin­ning of the show that, or before we started recording. That you’d spoke with Jeff Booth and his book Depres­sive Tomorrow ‚talks a lot about the defla­tionary forces of technology budding up against the infla­tionary policies of the Fed and other central banks around the world at this point. So how do you see, what we’re talking about here, this defla­tion in jobs powered by technology affecting the economy and the dollar and the curren­cies, et cetera.

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

So I think that the people who markets right now have gotten ahead of themselves, the yield curve steep­ening it’s prema­ture. We still have to deal with the millions and millions of Ameri­cans and millions and millions of people world­wide, who are out of work. Out of work it’s a simple way of saying I don’t have enough money to buy what I need to buy. So I need the govern­ment to help me and it is that dynamic. And the fact that there are going to be greater redun­dan­cies, as techno­log­ical as we demate­ri­alize in to use Michael’s term, they’re going to be greater and greater numbers of redun­dan­cies, such that we have to think about public spending that is going to be benefi­cial to the future. If you look at what they do in China, they throw tons of money into their economy.

They have plenty of bad banks there, plenty of bad debts. I don’t deny any of it, but there is at least an IRR there’s return on the invest­ment of stimulus spending. And it’s such that they get infra­struc­ture spending out of it. Germany’s had a focus for gener­a­tions on… They’ve got the lowest youth unemploy­ment rate in Europe because they’re so focused on vocational training and reskilling their workforce. These are things that the US economy that US politi­cians they don’t do, they certainly don’t do enough of them and private public partner­ships. The last thing we want to have is from what is being described Bitcoin, a handful of technology compa­nies and gold falling off and the technology compa­nies falling off as well, just leaving Bitcoin in its way, then where do you leave?

Because the society that leaves behind is devas­tating, and there has to be a solution such that we can start to ride up on. Again I mentioned that Huawei controls nearly a third of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment that math doesn’t work, long-term. And you end up having one global dominant super power and those are the problem­atic issues that take us back to, why I liked what Jeff Booth had to say, because it’s peaceful in nature and then the nature of man and I don’t think you can divorce one from the other.

You have to talk about what’s going to happen in an economy with extremely high jobless­ness and what the impli­ca­tions are. And I would prefer to see that what govern­ment resources are printed, because if we try and print our way completely out of this, we will go through a period of defla­tion. We will flip to stagfla­tion and then we will wake up to the mother of infla­tion and it will go in that process. It will be a process, but we’ll wake up to it if we try and do absolutely nothing more than give handouts. And hopefully that’s not the way we’re headed, because you’re going to have a lot of Ameri­cans not living in America in the end.

Brady Swenson:

Michael. So we’re facing this future increasing unemploy­ment based on the and techno­log­ical advance­ments and demate­ri­al­iza­tion of jobs. We have this defla­tionary money that can compli­ment those forces. What do you think is Fed going to do in reaction and in effort to try to push this down the road as much further as it can. One thing in partic­ular, when to about is the idea of a Fed point, right? A digital currency issue directly by the Fed and given directly to US citizens in wallets controlled by the Fed. Do you see that as a way that the Fed could sort of increase its monetary policy tools and reach.

Michael Saylor:

And I have no inside into the Fed and politics are above my pay grade.

Brady Swenson:

Fair enough. All right.

Michael Saylor:

I’ll defer on those.

Brady Swenson:

I’ll pass it on back to Danielle, but I’ve got one for you. Square’s press release when they bought $50 million with a Bitcoin to add to their reserve, talked about the empow­er­ment that Bitcoin provides. And Danielle was talking about the humane aspects of money and maybe this money printing is inhumane in a sense. It’s unfair, it’s stealing time as Robert Breedlove might say, right? What are your thoughts on that aspect of Bitcoin for the future of humanity, as the empow­ering aspects of it?

Michael Saylor:

I think that Jack said refer­ring to Bitcoin as an instru­ment for economic empow­er­ment. And I agree with him. I think the same day I tweeted, I think there’s 932 million people living in countries where the curren­cies are near collapse and all of them don’t have a stable currency that they can put their life savings or their monetary energy in, that’s nearly a billion people on the planet. We talked about store value, store value means store of money, which means store of monetary energy, which means store of life, energy, which means life force. Right? So when we talk about store of value, we’re talking about your life force your blood. So it’s a very basic human need to stay alive, right? To store your life’s energy. And if you can’t do it in a currency, then what are you going to do it in?

And so you’ve got a billion people in the world that are being driven to desper­a­tion that their oxygen has been sucked out of their blood by the collapse of the curren­cies. And so are they going to actually store their life’s energy and gold? I mean, the answer is no, they can’t buy it. If they could buy it, they can’t hold it. Someone’s going to steal it from them. Try walking around with gold in your pants and most of these places. And there’s no supply, they can’t get their hands on it.

Are they going to put their life’s energy into Apple stock? I mean, how many people in Subsa­haran Africa can buy Apple stock? How do you buy a house with Apple stock? Right? How do I leave a war zone with Apple stock? So I can’t see that big tech is a store of value for those billion people. I can’t see the precious metals are a very good store of value for them. I suppose it was the best idea again, in the 19^th century and maybe the 20^th century. And if you took away Bitcoin, I guess I’d be trying to come up with gold, put them in my pockets and carry them around.

I certainly wouldn’t be… I don’t know, I don’t have any other ideas. So I think that Jack put his hand on an incred­ibly powerful concept when he referred to Bitcoin as an Insti­tute for an instru­ment for economic empow­er­ment. And I think that it’s really not under­stood by a lot of non Bitcoiners they’re not really thinking that someone that lives in a country that’s currency has collapsed is about to lose every­thing and starve to death and be desti­tute and the absence of a solution. And I don’t think Google stock is the solution with all due respect, nor do I think is the spider nor do I think govern­ment T‑bills and 30 years and 10 year bonds are the solution nor munic­ipal debt more is a nice vineyard in California solution, nor is it car in New York city, a solution, try to come up with a solution for the billion people that have a problem. And Bitcoin is a solution for them. And I think that’s pretty compelling.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. I’m listening to you talk about it is absolutely compelling. Danielle, before we jump back into that Fed coding question, cause I want to hear your thoughts on that. Can you comment on the humanity or the ethics of the Fed and this cancel on effect this top-down approach, like some call it Ponzi scheme because the people at the topicals to the money and get it at near zero or 0% interest rates and then it just goes all the way down. They charge more and more interest as the money gets dissem­i­nated. And I would argue that also happens on an inter­na­tional level with the United States benefiting from having the reserve currency. Can you talk about the ethics of the Federal reserve and monetary policy they present?

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

Well, I think that right now, the Federal reserve has provided Congress with a reason to take away its second mandate. Its second mandate is maximizing employ­ment, it’s first mandate is minimizing infla­tion, which they’ve actually stated that they want to double every 50 years, which is just asinine. But their second mandate is maximizing employ­ment and they’re constantly going to Congress and saying, you’ve got to spend money, you’ve got to pass legis­la­tion, we need a couple of trillion dollars of fresh treasuries. We need more product out there for us to buy and thereby grow our balance sheet. The Fed has effec­tively said, “We have failed on our second mandate.” We do not have a trans­mis­sion mecha­nism by which we can get liquidity that is created directly to the people who need it the most. The people who need the jobs, the people who are being fired. What the Fed can do is get it to the largest corpo­ra­tions and help enable share buybacks, which decreases the number of shares that are out there. Which increases earnings per share to the tune of 40, 50% over the last decade.

That’s great for the people who run the compa­nies, their bonuses are based on earnings per share. And it’s been great for people like Apple. Apple’s like whatever, a fifth of all share buybacks since buybacks have come down as much as they have. So it’s fine for finan­cial engineering, but the Fed second mandate of maximizing employ­ment, doesn’t do anything to get to the people who need it most. In fact, it makes the income inequality divide, which we’ve seen play out in riots in the streets of America that much worse. And to hear Fed officials outright deny that quanti­ta­tive easing increases the inequality divide it liter­ally. I mean, I have to have a box of Kleenex sitting by, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry because they’re lying and they know that they’re lying and they know that there is no such thing as a wealth effect, except for it makes those who have the wealth feel better and spend more.

But sure as hell doesn’t , doesn’t trickle down to the people who need it the most. So I’m the most conser­v­a­tive person I know. But when you allow the American dream to die on the vine and when you ensure that the rich or the older ones who get richer then somebody should stop you and say, “Hey, you know what? Your policies are destruc­tive to the future of the sover­eignty of the United States of America.” Maybe we should sit back, reopen the Federal reserve act of 1913 and move a few things around because you’re actually making the problem worse than what it was to begin with. So I think we’re there.

Brady Swenson:

Here. First, what do you think the prospects of that actually happening are? And second, obviously if that’s not the prospects are not good for that to happen and the Fed does create some Fed coin. What kind of monetary policy does that direct relation­ship with United States citizens allow for the Fed?

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

Well, I think Congress is going to wake up and smell the coffee. If right now modern monetary theory dictates that, we can spend a kingdom come print it all. And then insur­ance that infla­tion is never, ever going to be around. And that if it is, we can just raise income tax rates and call it a day. That’s not how things work in the real world, I think Congress revisits how blurred the lines have become between treasury and the Federal reserve, right? There should be a dark line between the two and yet what happened on March the 23^rd, 2020 is that the Federal reserve was able to set up and run world contact with off-balance sheet struc­tures on the Treasury’s balance sheet, in order to buy corpo­rate bonds, high yield ETFs, all of these things are in direct viola­tion of Federal reserve act, unless you-

All of these things are in direct viola­tion of federal reserve act, unless you monkey with accounting tricks and maneu­vers and set up these SPV special purpose vehicles on the Treasury’s balance sheet. I think that all of this comes into question when we see infla­tion, because that’s when your typical Joe Q Jane Q, politi­cian’s going to start caring about the federal reserve.

Until then the federal reserve is just going to keep lining the pockets of the lobby­ists who pay them. And is it… I mean, if we were system drain the swamp four years ago, God knows we’ve just added toxic sledge to it. So nothing’s been changed, but I think that there will be scrutiny and a revis­iting of the 1951 treasury federal reserve accord, which separated the two after the fed capped interest rates, throughout world war II to finance more spending. I think that we will see a re sever­ance, become incum­bent upon Congress. Once you see the fed saying, infla­tion is too low, infla­tion is too low, infla­tion is too low. When one day they print so much, you flip a switch and infla­tion so high, that 2% target is so far in the rear view mirror they can’t see it anymore.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. Danielle, thank you so much for analysis. It’s been fantastic to have you on the show. I really appre­ciate your perspec­tives and the fire that you bring and the passion that you bring for getting this message out there. Obviously we’ve been quite dedicated to getting this message out there as well. So can you let us know about Quill Intel­li­gence, tell people where to find your analysis and kind of keep up with what you’re thinking?

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

Sure. Visit my website, Quill Intelligence.com. I was never popular when I was inside the fed because all the research that I produced had no agenda to it. It wasn’t based on somebody’s old PhD thesis. So visit me at Quill Intel­li­gence. We publish daily, we have an insti­tu­tional product for money managers, family offices, what have you? We publish weekly as well. So just come see samples of the research and if you’re bored, follow me on Twitter at Martini Booth. Love to have you.

Brady Swenson:

All right. Thanks so much, Danielle.

Danielle DiMartino Booth:

I followed Michael too, so, then Michael followed me. So that’s it. That’s my follow de jour.

Brady Swenson:

Awesome. Well, Michael puts out some fire Bitcoin poetry, so enjoy it. All right, thanks so much. We’re going to bring in Swan under Cory Clips ton and just nerd out on some Bitcoin with Michael before he takes off. Cory, you ready to pop in?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah

Brady Swenson:

All right. Welcome. This is Cory Clips ton for those of you who don’t know, is the Swan’s founder and CEO. Michael, thanks for sticking around with us for a little, Bitcoin session, jam session here. Cory, you want to take it away and ask your question?

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, sure. So we’ve got you, as the first shoe to drop, thanks for your contri­bu­tion to the world of Bitcoin. And then we had Jack who was possibly spurred on by you. And then this morning, you know, it’s a little bit of a different category because it’s not neces­sarily an operating business, but we saw the NYDIG, I think it’s digital invest­ment group, announced that they put a $100 million worth of Bitcoin on their balance sheet, which I thought was another really inter­esting devel­op­ment, especially given that this is actually the group that was rumored over the summer, to be selling by far the highest volume of out of the money calls and then shorting the absolute crap out of Bitcoin with leverage whenever it tried to punch through like 12, 12, 5. So we’ve been talking about this in our own channels for the last few months and just kind of like wondering when they would say, okay, that risk is not worth taking any more and flip long.

My suspi­cion is that it’s exactly what happened over the past week or so. I tweeted out last week that I thought they probably went neutral in that long. And then now the announce­ment comes out this morning, which I think is just them essen­tially trying to choose the position that they’ve already put on, which is going super long. And I, it’s not just the 100 million on the balance sheet, they’ve also got, you know, a few billion dollars, you know, one or $2 billion in this fund that they put positions on with. So I don’t know, man, I think you’ve started something here, Michael. So thank you.

Michael Saylor:

I’ll get lot say for the record, it was pretty clear that something got started long before I came along, quite clear. And I think that Toshiba and the early advocates, how funny and the like, they started a fire in cyber­space. And I think it was a small one. And I think it was a massive Civil war in 2017 that was followed by a bunch of Bitcoin Maximalist and the rest, along with a lot of other strug­gles and fireworks. I think most of the world wasn’t really under­standing or paying atten­tion, but I think the success of Bitcoin was assured I mean first by the founders, because other­wise be nothing. And then by the Maximalist, who won that war and when they got to the hard forks and by the time 2020 came along, it was pretty clear that the fire was raging, Bitcoin was the winning digital monetary system. And I feel fortu­nate that I kind of had 2020 hindsight. I had the benefit of every­body doing all the work and all of the bricks were in place. I just had the problem, right? I was motivated by getting kicked in the back of the head by this pandemic, and currency crisis. And so, I had to discover it for myself, but I think that what you’re seeing is a lot of other people that are just rational actors that are waking up in 2020, and they’re not the heroes, they’re not the vision­aries. It’s visionary when, when you’re sitting around and how Finley’s writing his notes in 2010 that’s visionary. And when in 2017 or 2016, you’re going through a hard fork with Bitcoin cash. And as SV, that’s terri­fying, like fight to the bitter death.

And at that point had that fight then lost, right? None of us are here. At this point, what I say to people a lot is it doesn’t seem that hard to me. You see one network Bitcoin with 93 or 94% hash rate dominance and the proof of work networks, every­body else’s 2% or 1% of that. It’s not a terribly different, terribly diffi­cult conclu­sion to come to or analysis to come to. I think people just have to shake themselves out of their standard behav­ioral patterns and move into something new and different.

Brady Swenson:

When you were falling down the rabbit hole. You know, we talk, we ask the Bit coiners about this all the time on our podcasts and that share the experi­ence, the visceral experi­ence of it. I’d love to hear you talk about the moments that you realized what exactly was going on here. Just the experi­ence you had as a person when you were falling down the rabbit hole.

Michael Saylor:

I can’t say there’s any one partic­ular moment. I think… Hard to put my finger on any one moment. I wouldn’t say I just, I think there’s so many good pieces of content and so many good materials that have been created by such a wide range of Bit coiners that each one of them is part of the mosaic that causes you to come to conclu­sion. So I don’t have a strong opinion on that, by the way, I do have a strong opinion on something else we talked about, which is infla­tion. And my obser­va­tions, I don’t think we’re ever going to see infla­tion. I there’s, macro economic talk about when will infla­tion come. From what I can see the metrics in Europe and in the United States, they both exclude energy and food. So if you can calcu­late an infla­tion metric without energy and food, and if the US calcu­lates infla­tion metrics without energy and food, because they say they’re highly volatile, which I think that means it’s because they go up in price.

But in what universe that you expect to live in, do you expect to be able to live without food and without energy? And so, if the metric excludes food and energy, and if it also excludes every asset, every luxury asset, and it excludes annuities and excludes bonds and excludes stocks, and excludes dividends and excludes every­thing scarce and rare and excludes all of the labor inten­sive activ­i­ties and all high-end services, and every highly desir­able painting you ever saw or sculp­ture, what’s left, right? I think that the govern­ment agencies will just contin­u­ally redefine the market basket of elements to include streaming videos, and manufac­tured low variable cost items. And there will never be any infla­tion. Does anybody really think that streaming YouTube videos are ever going to go up no matter how much the fed prints?

Brady Swenson:

It’s a good point.

Michael Saylor:

Like it won’t happen. People keep waiting for the hyper­in­fla­tion. There won’t be a hyper­in­fla­tion, but if you wanted the hyper­in­fla­tion, the hyper­in­fla­tion is a million dollar bond that cost $10 million today, which means you’ve got 22% infla­tion on an annuity for the last… Every year for a decade. And so if every macro caught every macro econo­mist ignored 22% infla­tion and the single most impor­tant thing in the world for a decade running, why would you think that they’re going to discover 2% infla­tion sometime in the next 10 years? Let me say in a different way. A bond that yields $50,000 a year is a lifetime annuity. It’s an early retire­ment. It used to cost a million dollars to retire early, never work again in your life. And now it costs $10 million. So there­fore the single most impor­tant thing in the world in my opinion wouldn’t it be to live comfort­ably forever without working?

I mean, don’t you think that if you took a boat and you said, what does every­body want? And the answer is I’d like to retire comfort­ably with full security for the rest of my life and never have to work again and never have to worry about it. That’s what my father got after 30 years in the air force or our 40 years in the govern­ment service, you get a pension, you get a retire­ment benefit. So the single most impor­tant thing to go into a consumer basket would be, would be an annuity or a comfort­able retire­ment. And that’s the one thing that is hyper inflating. I mean, if you think the 22% infla­tion is hyper, no, one’s discov­ered it yet because no one’s looking there. So I don’t think they’re ever going to find it. And I think it’s kind of silly to say that well, wait and see what happens when the fed finally gets hyper­in­fla­tion, cause they won’t.

Cory Klipp­sten:

You know, a flip side of the yield on these bonds going to the floor is now there’s this oppor­tu­nity for compa­nies to take extremely cheap debt onto their balance sheet and essen­tially, pull off the best carry trade in the history of humanity. It was just talking with manage­ment of a private company, a large Asian, private company that has a big operating business. And they’ve been doing this already. So they are, they have loaded up on cheap, one ish percent debt, 2% that, and bought a ton of Bitcoin on the quiet. But you know, it’s not that surprising. Why wouldn’t you?

Michael Saylor:

Well, like it’s been a classic in the currency market. It used to be that when the yen had a very low interest rate, people would fund in yen and they would use it to buy dollars because there’s a two and a half percent spread. And you know, the only issue is just, do you think the yen is going to strengthen or weaken. And so if Bitcoin is just another currency, then in fact, you’ve got the ability poten­tially to fund in euros or funding dollars or fund in yen and carry it. And Bitcoin and you’re right. I mean, the equiv­a­lent for…, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, I said, Bob, why don’t you mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin with it? The obvious thing to do is refinance your real estate at very low interest rate.

Michael Saylor:

You can refinance less than 3% by Bitcoin and you could get something. If you think you’re going to get more than 3% on Bitcoin and you’re going to pay less than 3% on your house, then you’re basically funding in dollars and investing in Bitcoin. And there are inter­esting ideas. They all just come down to matters of convic­tion and wherewithal.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah. And it’s inter­esting. I mean, you’ve hinted at it right at some point it just becomes a rational thing. And then, you’ve had to take the jump by building extreme levels of convic­tion and then making sure that all of the inter­ests around you were aligned and had, you know, approaching your level of convic­tion to pull it off. But at some point it just becomes the right trade. And some people already recog­nize that. Like I have a lot of friends, from the finance and trading worlds that have, even long ago, it just made that asymmetric bet. You know, I’ve got a friend with a few thousand Bitcoins, who still thinks that Myspace, it might be My space and Facebook might be around the corner, but he’s made the bet just because the risk reward is so isometric. So it’s that when that really starts to take off as well, they just start to fuel each other. Cause it, it just starts to confirm the people with convic­tion that they were right. And then the traders see the gains, you know, it’s just fuels itself.

Michael Saylor:

Yeah. I think with regard to theory, if I have a $100 million and I put 33 million of it in the gold and I put 33 million of it into big tech and I put 33 million in into Bitcoin, right? If you think the Bitcoin is going to move with the expan­sion of the monetary supply, and if you plug in a number, let’s say you plugged in 15%, if you, and this is where it gets real, if you thought the monetary supply was going to expand at 15%, well, you know, Bitcoin’s scarce, which means that you’re looking at a 15% advan­tage or 50% real yield there, if nothing else changes, right? If they’re the other drivers that Bitcoin would be adoption, technical utility, Coda Equity of the people in the network, et cetera. But, but throw those out and just focus upon just the relation­ship between the monetary supply that is trading and say it in flights at 15% now go to technology stocks or go to any stock.

If the stock is based upon our predi­cated upon revenues, which drive cash flows in a given currency, if the revenues are growing 3% and the cash flows are growing 3% and the monetary supply is expanding 15%, you’ve got a minus 12% yield. You have to actually be invested in a company that’s growing. Its cashflow is North of 15% to be flat. And of course, most of the S and P and most equities, aren’t going to be growing more than 15%. And there are then, so there are two condi­tions. Then I got to find a company that’s growing. Its cashflow is North of 15%. And I have to buy it at a fair price. And if I buy it, if I miss on either of those two, right, that’s a problem for equities.

For gold, you know, you’ve got a minus 3% or 3% dilution or debase­ment from mining and re hypoth­e­ca­tion and the counter­party risk you would ratio­nally, you would say you ought to put in a two to three or two to 4% a year load on that. So now you start to look at your entire portfolio and you say, are you really going to put 1% of your portfolio into Bitcoin at plus 15 and 99% and to stocks at minus five or minus 10? Because I think no one expects cash flows to grow that much this year, right?

Brady Swenson:

No, I…so I listened to your Peter McCormick inter­view this morning, looking forward to parts of you dropping. You talked about how you’re going to, you’ve decided to fund a Bitcoin devel­oper, which I think is awesome. And I hope happens more as compa­nies, corpo­ra­tions, and bigger investors get some skin in the game and they can pick up the tab for a devel­oper to just focus on Bitcoin a 100% wondering if you have thought yet about going into mining either person­ally or through the company, running some of those cyber Hornets yourself.

Michael Saylor:

I think with, with all of these things, especially when you’re a public company, you have to like ratio­nally and prudently, do all of your diligence and do your research and become educated on the economics and the options and the legal and regula­tory issues. And then the capital risk issues. And after you’ve cycled through all that, you can come to a conclu­sion, with regard to, supporting Bitcoin and Bitcoin devel­op­ment. Right now, I’m going through an educa­tional process where I’m educating myself and the company is getting educated on, on every­body, in the space, every­thing is being done, every­thing that needs to be done, how we can support it and how we should best move forward. And, and I’m really excited about that. I mean, I have incli­na­tions, but I’m…, It’s early in my educa­tion there and the compa­ny’s educa­tion so, we have to absorb more. I think with regard to mining, I think it’s the same thing. We just have to absorb more and, under­stand all the dynamics. And I don’t have any other thoughts on that.

Brady Swenson:

What about thoughts on in your studies on Bitcoin mining and energy usage, has that been a concern for you?

Michael Saylor:

Concerned about the use of energy and Bitcoin mine? No, actually I’ve referred…I feel like Bitcoin is protected by a wall of encrypted energy and the fact that there’s a lot of energy involved, I think is a good thing. It creates security to the network. If we had 12 servers with 12 stakes of some random coin on them, and we were trusting those 12 servers to protect $200 billion, I would think that’s much riskier. I think I’m not really inter­ested in finding quick, elegant, cheap short­cuts to protecting all the money in the world. And I think it’s kind of a silly notion to be concerned about the use of energy and Bitcoin mining. As I said before…, First of all, it’s coming off the marginal points of the grid. The only places people are doing Bitcoin mining are places where there’s there’s power.

That’s an excess that has where the highest marginal utility of the powers, Bitcoin mining. If human beings were willing to pay more, then they would price the Bitcoin miners out of the market. And so every place where we need electricity, or we need energy for either facto­ries or human welfare, the price is high enough. The Bitcoin miners are driven away from that. Bitcoin miners go to the end of the earth to the end of the grid. And they’re using energy that would have other­wise been wasted is either wasted hydro­elec­tric energy, or for example, natural gas, wells that are about to be closed in and either have to close them in or flare them. And they can set up Bitcoin mining rigs there. So I think they’re, recycling marginal energy in order to create a digital monetary system that’s capable of holding all the money on earth. So what’s wrong with that idea? You know, I can’t figure that out. It seems totally rational to me and compare, what’s the cost of protecting all the money on the earth if we don’t do it this way.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. I mean, it’s incal­cu­lable. We can’t know for sure he can make a rough guesses, but it’s a lot. I think it is a good deal by compar­ison for sure. I mean, it’s got to be more efficient.

Michael Saylor:

I think, I mean, there are critics and skeptics of Bitcoin, and sometimes they’ll throw the energy thing in your face, but again, I think it’s a silly notion and then there are skeptics there’s the quantum computer argument, people keep talking about what if they come up with a quantum computer? And I think it’s kind of like, well, and of what if a human being comes up with the unstop­pable weapon and what if he uses it against us in partic­ular? Well, if he really invented quantum computer 99.9% of the money is somewhere else. And why don’t you just take over a country or stop the human race and its track or steal anything you want from anybody, any which way you want to do it with your quantum computer, because in theory, so as a practical matter, what’s more likely to happen.

It seems as computing power is going to get more powerful computers, get more powerful. And the people that have the biggest vested interest in harnessing computer power are going to be Bitcoin miners. And they’re going to upgrade their mining rigs with whatever advances we have in computer power in order to make the network more secure and to the benefit of Bitcoin. And… I just, I think, somebody thinks, Oh, I invented genie and the genie can cast a magic spell. And I’m really worried they’re going to attack Bitcoin with it. Well, if I have a genie that can bend space and time, I think they might do other things with it too. There’s a lot more stuff to do with infinite God-like power than attack 0.01% of the world.

Brady Swenson:

Yeah. And we’ve got really smart people working on, quantum resis­tant cryptog­raphy already. So it’s being worked on thought about,

Cory Klipp­sten:

Hey Michael, we have a really close friend of the company. And a lot of us person­ally, Robert Breed love, who’s based here in So quel where some of us are, and obviously it’s becoming quite the Bitcoin philoso­pher. We under­stand you’ve recently spent quite a bit of time with him. I just wanted to get some thoughts and reflec­tions on kicking around.

Michael Saylor:

Rober is awesome. And I love his work and I think he’s conscious­ness expanding. He’s really, he’s gotten people to stretch their minds in lots of different dimen­sions. And I think that’s wonderful. I think Robert’s, one of the great intel­lec­tual leaders in the Bitcoin space, and he’s one of the people that makes it a joy to be in this industry.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Expanding on that a little bit. Have you seen any sort of common­al­i­ties about people that have found Bitcoin and gone down the rabbit hole and come out the other side, both as far as what type of people come into it, and then also maybe what Bitcoin does to them, in terms of being members of society or being sort of profes­sionals or whatever it is, what is a Bitcoin, or I guess I’m asking,

Michael Saylor:

I would say that there’s a consor­tium. I would say there’s a consor­tium of freethinkers, liber­tar­ians, intel­lec­tuals, good econo­mists, by the way. People would say Austrian econo­mists, but I would just say good econo­mists, because it seems like there’s so much bad economic thinking. So thoughtful economist…thoughtful scien­tist. There’s a lot of ideas in Bitcoin that are simply things that you learn in thermo­dy­namics. Closed system thermo­dy­namics or mechan­ical systems or engineering every design an airplane or a ship or a heat exchanger, right? I mean, concepts like 80 abatic lamps and isolated systems and conser­va­tion of mass and energy, all of those things pop up. So great scien­tists, great philoso­phers, great thinkers, great econo­mist, great technol­o­gists, people that love software, people that people believe in Liberty, people who believe in math and truth and integrity. There’s all of those things. It reminds me of that.

What is the t‑shirt where it’s just says, because math, because math, right. So yeah, I went, when I was at MIT, it reminds me of my freshman year at MIT and freshman year. And probably it’s the same in a lot of schools, you know how Fannie went to Caltech. Right. I bet it was the same at Caltech too. And I bet it’s the same and a lot of great univer­si­ties, but you show up for your hometown and you were the smart kid in your hometown and you were kind of the nerd or the valedic­to­rian. And you were the person that like read, read deep books and talked about ideas and people looked at you and they’re like, but you know, you don’t play soccer. You’re going to homecoming and still got to get, I’ll kick your ass right.

And then you’re off to college. And you get to college. And I got to MIT and, and it was like every­body was valedic­to­rian and every­body had perfect scores on the SATs and they were all the smartest person in their town. And then they started talking. I’m like, Oh my God, these people have so many inter­esting ideas. Like they’d been every­where. They thought about every­thing. You know, one of my roommates built robots, for fun. And my other roommate designed, designed a video game, competing with Pac-Man and got a cease and desist letter from Atari for stealing all of that revenues. So he thought it was kind of funny to like, to launch his own pirate video games. And another one had started his own. One of was Pete D Amman as he started inter­na­tional space univer­sity, you know, and they’re all changed the world there’s or the other guy be like, come and come, we’re going gliding.

What do you mean we’re going to flying? What are the next ones? They were to do space shuttle stuff. One of my frater­nity brothers for fun. He went and he hacked all the eleva­tors at MIT. So if you punch the third floor, you went to the roof and you punched the roof. He went to the basement and you know, the other one figured out back in the day, when phone calls cost you a lot of money, they figured out how to hack the phone system. And he called his girlfriend in Malaysia for free for like a year. And she got busted for $48,000 for the phone bills.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Phone freaking, I didn’t think we’d talk about phone freaking today.

Michael Saylor:

Just inter­esting people. And, and you got down, like, these are just my kind of people, they’re just my kind of people, they’re inventing stuff, they’re inventing project Athena. It came out of MIT, and they’re inventing carbu­retor. You know, I remember it came into my, my frater­nity and I knocked holes in our walls and they wired it for ethernet back in 1985. And we were getting our own worksta­tions. And it, there was just a sense that the world was going to change and we’re going to use our brains to make it a better place. And, and that’s what I see with Bitcoin. A lot of people thinking for themselves using technology and math to do good things for the world.

Cory Klipp­sten:

I love this. So obviously we’re aware of the people that you’ve talked to, on camera or on podcasts. Are there any of the scien­tists in Bitcoin or the, the hardcore coders that you’ve gotten the chance to talk to? The Adam back’s of the world or people that have been around kicking around and contributing to core?

Michael Saylor:

I’m starting to make my way through Bitcoin core and the Bitcoin devel­op­ment commu­nity. And, and I’m going down that rabbit hole, if you will, and learn about how they do what they do and, and what their prior­i­ties are. And I’m looking forward to that. I’m enjoying that a lot.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah. I can imagine the way you’re talking about being able to scratch that itch on the tech side, it’s got to be a big part of this for you. So we’ve had a little, a little game we’ve been playing about the FAMGA compa­nies in which one is most likely to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet first. So Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Which one do you think would, would go first and why? We’ll put pressure on them the way you did Jack.

Michael Saylor:

That was the cyber hornet’s giving him a construc­tive nudge. What is it? What is the word? You know, a cheerful nudge, it could be anybody. I mean, I mean, there are arguments to be made in favor of Microsoft and I’ve read those. And then, and then I’ve heard other theories that Facebook is a logical one because of, because of their mission of, of inclu­sive­ness for the world. I think when we came out with our announce­ment, right, and we said, we said, Bitcoin is a, is a fine treasure reserve asset for publicly traded company. Right. We kind of opened up some space for another publicly traded company to put it on its balance sheet. And then when Jack came out with his announce­ment, he said, this is an instru­ment of economic empow­er­ment. And I think that that is just as impor­tant, if not more impor­tant in creating and creating a halo and air cover and a prece­dent for the next company. So you’ve got to ask the question, what’s the next big tech company that would like to be a propo­nent of economic empow­er­ment for the world.

Cory Klipp­sten:

So, yeah, we’re finding out very quickly. Obviously Bitcoin is a very fond of making memes and under­stand the power of memes. And we talk about the great money, mean more is with the 2020s, you’ve already become such a, you know, well, you’re a meme yourself, which is pretty fun, but you’ve also been the source of some great fodder for me. It was like, the turn of phrase is really, really impor­tant. I was just actually listening quickly to, it sounded like you had a new list of four in a category, something that started with an a, that you were taking off on Peter’s show. Do you remember what that was?

Michael Saylor:

Yeah. I’m not quite sure-

Cory Klipp­sten:

I’ll have to go back and listen to it again.

Michael Saylor:

… What you’re refer­ring to.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, it’s okay.

Michael Saylor:

I said a lot of stuff.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Yeah, no, it was, it was, it was a nice, it was a nice new frame­work. We’ll we’ll go grab it and tweet it out. But yeah, I was hoping it was something new you were coming up with, but yeah, the cyber Hornets is great.

Michael Saylor:

I referred to an arc of encrypted energy to escape the flood. That was one of my, my latest metaphors that I think is apropos for people that have no other way out. And I think it aligns well with Jack Dorsey’s phrase, instru­ment of economic empow­er­ment. Yeah. You said it very, his words were very eloquent, right? Eloquent and elegant. And I think they struck a chord with a lot of people. And at the end of the day, you got to decide if you’re not, not going to do this because you think it’s the rational invest­ment strategy. Why don’t you do because it’s good for the world. And there’s a billion people that have no choice or have no have no hope other­wise. And there’s 5 billion people that will benefit by the support of Bitcoin as an instru­ment for economic empowerment.

Cory Klipp­sten:

There’s been a, when people have pressed me and said like, well, let’s not try to make the price go up too high so we can stack more SATs for ourselves or whatever, to me, I always go back. So it was just one thing that Andreas Antonopoulos said, five or six years ago on one of his videos, which I’m sure you watched, which was basically if, if Bitcoin adoption spreads fast enough that we can head off one incident of hyper­in­fla­tion in any country in the world and save the people of whatever that nation is from going through that, you actually have a moral oblig­a­tion to spread Bitcoin adoption as fast as you possibly can. It’s something that we certainly feel very, acutely at Swan. It’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. We’re trying to make it happen as fast as possible, trying to get to 10 million, sort of hardcore Bitcoiners in the U S as fast as we can. Do you feel, it sounds like you do empathize with that at least, but you actually feel a bit of a moral oblig­a­tion to make it happen or try to make it happen.

Michael Saylor:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I, I talked on McCormick show about my experi­ence in Argentina and I have opera­tions in Argentina, in Brazil. I have in Mexico, I have opera­tions in South Africa. I have business in Turkey. So we, we have business in places where the curren­cies have dramat­i­cally weakened. And I had the experi­ence in 2010 or so of watching 90% of our wealth in Argentina evapo­rate overnight. Like liter­ally overnight just ripped from our hands. And there’s nothing we can do about it. And it was, it was a pretty painful experi­ence then for me, even though it was not even 1% of our enter­prise value. So, so at the end of the day it was, it was, it was like getting poked in the arm really, really hard. Or maybe breaking your arm, like, it’s enough that you remember the pain, but it wasn’t debil­i­tating for the company. But I try to imagine what it would be like. Yeah. What a chart

Cory Klipp­sten:

That’s that’s. Yeah. I was just thinking about the first time I went to Turkey in 2010, I think it was like 1.5 and it’s creeping up on eight right now and clearly on the way to 10.

Michael Saylor:

Now imagine what you would, what would it be like if you had all of your life savings and Argentina and you lost 90% of them overnight. Okay. And at that point there wasn’t a Bitcoin. And so it was truly hopeless. I mean, honestly, if there wasn’t no Bitcoin and you’re in one of those countries, it’s hopeless. I had that, I have that funny story with Peter. I said, look, they came into my office in 2019 or so. And they said, it’s happening again in Argentina? I said, can you buy some gold? No, can you buy a yacht and sail it to the Caribbean? And my lawyers looked to me like I had gone nuts and the, and the finance people. They try to figure out how, how do we tell the CEO that he’s out of his mind? And I’m like, I, I wasn’t thinking Bitcoin, all I was thinking was we’re not to lose another couple million dollars for something, buy a boat, put it in the water.

It’s already in the water. North is some politi­cian going to reach out from heaven above and take 95% of my boat. I mean, so, and we’re going to go, well, we can’t do that. And so a world without Bitcoin is liter­ally hopeless. Like for those people, like for, you know, you’ve got your hundred years, life savings, every­thing your family’s ever done, all your hopes, your aspira­tions, and you’re about to lose it. You know, it’s some snarky comment and I’m like, Oh yeah. Why don’t you buy some stocks with it? You’re not buying NASDAQ stocks with it when you can’t, you don’t have the stock market, right. You can’t get the capital out of the country. You’re not buying gold with it. You can’t get it out of the country. I’ve lived that. And I lived that as a global multi­na­tional, and I had a hundred X the resources that anybody that lived in those countries has.

And so Bitcoin really repre­sents hope. And I’m aware that if you don’t have a functioning exchange in the country, then you still run into a problem. So I’m pretty supportive of that. I kind of feel like as Bitcoin is more successful, the exchanges are more successful. We want to see people like Binance and all the other exchanges be successful so that they make money so that they have capital so that they go and they set up subsidiaries in all of these countries so that they can allow people to exchange their property and their assets and their fear and every place on earth for, for Bitcoin that will hold its tangible value, in the face of volatility and adversity,

Brady Swenson:

I agree 100% with you about Bitcoin, providing hope in the world. And especially like, I can’t really even imagine not living in my first world, US kind of privi­leged, view of things. I was still pretty hopeless about things. I kind of resigned to like, I’m just going to, live my life with my family and we’re going to, basically live without hope for a better monetary Existence and a PRI you know, even right to privacy and privacy issues. You know, Bitcoin’s really provide some hope on that front as well. So do you think at this point that Bitcoin is inevitable and what does a Bitcoin future look like to you if you could sum it up?

Michael Saylor:

Well, I mean, I’ll say this right. Nothing is for certain on this earth, nothing is inevitable. And that’s why we have to get up every single day and do our jobs, right? You guys have to get up every day and you have to do your job. I have to do my job. Every Bitcoiner has to do their job. We need the miners to do their job. The devel­opers have to do their job. And on the day when every­body in the Bitcoin commu­nity thinks it’s inevitable, we’re done. And we’re assured we’re probably no better than all the politi­cians and central bankers that we criti­cize. Right? So I think that in nature, every­thing is at its finest when tomorrow is uncer­tain, right? Every creature gets up in the morning and tomorrow is uncer­tain. And yet having said all that, it’s most beautiful when every­thing is strug­gling in order to maximize, maximize its potential.

So I think that the future looks good for Bitcoin, and I think that it will succeed, but I think it will succeed because nobody in the Bitcoin commu­nity takes it for granted. And every­body gets up every single day and gives it their finest.

Brady Swenson:

Love it, love it. I think that’s a perfect segue into our video celebrating our new Bitcoin philoso­pher on the scene and the poetry you’ve been dropping. We gathered up some of your clips, your tweets, and our creative director Brekkie, put it into an awesome video. So we’ll roll it right now. Sorry, if we embar­rass you just a little bit, but we wanted you to, we wanted to share it with you.

Michael Saylor:

We have A mega mega mega problem. And the mega problem is I have a lot of cash and I’m watching it under a good year for the past decades. The monetary supply expan­sion by seven to 8%. That’s my battery draining by 8% a year. And this is not a good year for us, right? This is a year where you can make the argument that the battery is going to drain $25. What is the point of all this-

Brady Swenson:

Well, all right, technology prevented it, but it’s on Twitter. So I got over 50,000 views. We put it up yesterday, people are loving it. So I’ll DM it to you and you can watch it. Unfor­tu­nately, this timing didn’t work this time.

Michael Saylor:

I’ll say for the record. I think you guys had Swan are the funnest group of podcasters, and you seem to enjoy your job or, and or your life and Bitcoin more than anybody else I’ve actually seen podcasting. So I think that’s a cool thing. I did see the video somewhat embar­rassed because again, the real heroes, the real heroes, somewhere, the debate between Satoshi and the early Bitcoiners, like Al fanny. And then every­body that fought that battle in 2017. And those, those are the guys that really strug­gled. I’m a Johnny-come-lately, but I’m happy to be part of the team. And I will do my part as much as I possibly can. And I’m, I’m coachable.

Michael Saylor:

So you guys keep coaching me. I keep me on the straight and narrow and we’ll all play our position and try to do the right thing for Bitcoin. Because as I said, it’s, it’s a bunch of cyber Hornets. I just want to be one of the Hornets.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Well, Brekkie, he did see the video. So we’ll just, we’ll just post the link in the comments for everybody.

Michael Saylor:

It’s creative. I give you that.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Excel­lent. Excellent.

Brady Swenson:

If you’re not having fun with Bitcoin, what are you doing? You got to have.

Michael Saylor:

I’ll make one point for you guys, which I think is really the strength of Bitcoin. And this is the strength of, of, of the cyber Hornets and the entire swarm, which, and decen­tral­iza­tion. If I hired a hundred people in marketing and I gave them three months and told them to come up with some good marketing for Bitcoin, they would work with each other. They would come up with a thousand ideas.

Michael Saylor:

They would put 10 in front of the execu­tives, 82, we got knocked down by the lawyers. They would come up with something which is one, one hundredth as good as what you’ve done. It would cost a million times more money and nobody would pay atten­tion to it.

Brady Swenson:

So organic distrib­uted marketing team, and it is fantastic. Just, it is a, you know, Twitter really it’s like this, a crucible for the best ideas, the best ways to present ideas. And, and those memes that will, go mainstream hopefully, and really teach theory, word phrases. What the hell is going on here?

Michael Saylor:

So this is exciting,

Cory Klipp­sten:

Michael, this is going to sound cryptic, but it’s actually extremely impor­tant for our company strategy. If you were going to be an animal cartoon character, what animal would you be?

Michael Saylor:

You already know what animal I want to be. A hornet, cyber hornet.

Cory Klipp­sten:

Okay. That’s what we thought. So we just wanted to make sure.

Michael Saylor:

With all due respect, I think there are a lot of brilliant metaphors moving through the entire Bitcoin commu­nity, but I don’t want to be a mushroom and I don’t want to be a fungus. I just want-

Cory Klipp­sten:

I don’t know if you knew, but Actually Brendan Quittem runs commu­ni­ca­tions for Swan. So we actually wrote all of our emails and-

Michael Saylor:

He’s brilliant and I read it. Okay. Okay. And I, and I agree with it. It’s just a question of like, what do I want on my t‑shirt?

Brady Swenson:

Great. Cyber Hornet, it is.

Michael Saylor:

Okay.

Cory Klipp­sten:

All right.

Michael Saylor:

Thank you guys.

Brady Swenson:

Thank you, Michael. This was a ton of fun. I really appre­ciate it, man. We’ll just drop it right there. Don’t forget, swan daily bias one bitcoin.com/daily buys. It’s rolling out now. Get hyped every single day. You can buy automat­i­cally. Just hang out on Twitter. Make up memes. Let us buy the Bitcoin for you. Thanks, everybody.

Past Episodes

Episode 8 –Andy Edstrom and Ansel Linder

Episode 9 –Rockstar Devel­oper and Jeremy Rubin

Episode 10 – Bitcoin TINA and CK Snarks

Episode 11– Gigi and Knut Svanholm

Episode 12 –Adam Back and Preston Pysh

Episode 13 –Alex Gladstein and Matt Odell

Episode 14 –Robert Breedlove and Tuur Demeester

Episode 15 –Isaiah Jackson and Max Keiser

Episode 16 –Gigi and Udi Wertheimer

Episode 17 –Aleks Svetski and Jimmy Song

Episode 18 –Stephan Livera and Marty Bent

Episode 19 –Mark Moss and Ben Prentice

Episode 20 –Samson Mow and Parker Lewis

Episode 21–Lyn Alden and Jeff Booth

Episode 22– Robert Breedlove and Cory Klippsten

Episode 23 — Saifedean Ammous and George Gammon

Episode 24 –Jameson Lopp and Eric Martindale

Episode 25 –Preston Pysh and Andy Edstrom

Episode 26 –Lyn Alden and Nic Carter

Episode 27 — Erik Townsend and Yan Pritzker

Episode 28 — Max Keiser and Tone Vays

Episode 29 –Preston Pysh and Andy Edstrom

Episode 30–Raoul Pal and Vijay Boyapati

Episode 31–Dan Tapiero and Dan Matuszewski

Episode 32–Robert Breedlove and Parker Lewis

Links

Swan Bitcoin

Swan Bitcoin — the best place to buy and invest in Bitcoin

Swan Bitcoin on Twitter

Swan Signal on YouTube

Swan Signal on Facebook

Swan Signal on Twitch

Swan Signal Podcast

Swan Signal Telegram Chat Room

Michael Saylor

Micros­trategy

Micros­trat­e­gy’s Bitcoin Page

Michael on Twitter

Michael’s personal website

Danielle DiMartino Booth

Danielle on Twitter

Danielle on LinkedIn

Danielle’s personal website

Danielle on Facebook

Danielle on Instagram