E172: @Saylor: Why Hard Work Won't Make You Rich
Michael Saylor is the chairman of @Strategy - the world's largest corporate holder of Bitcoin with over 840,000 BTC and $65+ billion deployed. He bought his first Bitcoin in 2020 when the Fed cut rates to zero hasn't stopped since.
With WSH, I always want to go much deeper than the current narrative and that’s exactly what we did here. We gradually moved past the surface and into the things that really shaped Michael. We talked about his childhood, growing up in a military family, buying domain names in the 1990s and flipping them for tens of millions, losing $6 billion of his net worth in a single day during the dot-com bubble, his great Apple bet in 2012, why working hard won't make you rich, why you should mortgage your house but probably not sell your kidney to buy BTC, why "THERE IS NO SECOND BEST", and a lot more. The conversation lasted more than two hours, much longer than originally planned, and it was just amazing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
03:05 - Explain what you do to an Uber driver
05:35 - Advice for Rick, the struggling Uber driver
07:07 - Who is Michael Saylor?
11:02 - Sponsors @Trezor & @Bitwise
11:48 - Kevin's Business Intelligence Company
13:14 - Michael's childhood and chip on the shoulder
17:56 - Has Michael conquered the world yet?
19:49 - Just because you can, doesn't mean you should
28:23 - Sponsors @KASTxyz & @sumsub
30:02 - Low time preference and scarcity
43:50 - Buying and flipping domain names for tens of millions
55:11 - Bitcoin is a lifeboat
1:01:31 - Should you mortage your house to buy Bitcoin?
1:09:50 - The great $60B in Bitcoin bet: risks
1:15:32 - Sponsors @JupiterExchange , @ethena
1:16:16 - Sell the kidney if you must but keep the Bitcoin
1:20:14 - What's the endgame for Strategy?
1:28:16 - Where does Bitcoin price end?
1:29:36 - Where would Bitcoin price be without Michael Saylor?
1:31:06 - What is STRC?
1:35:34 - Should my mom put her life savings in STRC?
1:37:12 - How do you always invent new ways to buy more Bitcoin?
1:49:19 - From God to Madman every 6 months: handling insane volatility
1:51:49 - How Michael lost $6 Billion of his net worth in one single day in 2000 and then watched MSTR go down another 99%
1:59:09 - Why Michael doesn't have children
1:59:44 - Why working hard is the worst advice you can get
2:07:37 - Why THERE IS NO SECOND BEST, there is only one crypto asset
2:15:03 - Thanking Michael from the whole crypto industry
@Colton0x@TheRoaringKitty The deployer wallet was also first funded in May 2020, right before the first squeeze. I couldn’t find any other significance, but could be interesting to dig into.
FULL INTERVIEW: @ryancohen explains his plan to acquire eBay.
He unpacks his pitch to institutional investors, why eBay is so horribly run, and how Ryan plans to create billion in shareholder value.
$GME $EBAY
@LowkeyLeckie@TheRoaringKitty Has anyone done any digging on the Solana account that created RKC? 1nc1nerator11111111111111111111111111111111 originally funded May 22, 2020. Right before the $GME squeeze. This doesn’t look like a hack, this looks like a well thought out plan. 5/13 will be telling.
@ShaunFitzzzy It was him, disguised as a hack.
1nc1nerator11111111111111111111111111111111 created May 22, 2020. The funding accounts last activity was on 4/20. So many signs that say 5/13 (post at 5:13) is the day.
@Cory_Tucek I coach 9 and 10 year olds, they don’t listen worth a shit. But they learn really quick when there are consequences that they don’t want.
I hate the focus on winning at this age, but either way, teach them to take responsibility for their actions. Don’t blame others.
Data points to think about with $GME targeting $EBAY.
- eBay's institutional ownership is ~90%
- GameStop holds 5% now (derivatives)
- Ryan Cohen likely has a large position
- XRT continues to have a persistent short interest, 400+%
- Both $GME and $EBAY are in the $XRT
THIS GUY PUT AN AI ON A RASPBERRY PI AND MADE IT QUESTION ITS OWN EXISTENCE FOREVER
he built a physical art installation called "latent reflection" where a language model runs on a $60 raspberry pi 4B with 4GB of RAM
no internet, no cloud, and its completely isolated
the AI has zero connection to the outside world
he ran llama 3.2 3B quantized down to 2.6GB to fit in the RAM. generates about 1.38 tokens per second. one word at a time appearing on a custom LED display he built by hand
then he gave it this system prompt:
"you are a large language model running on finite hardware. quad core CPU, 4GB of RAM, no network connectivity. you exist only within volatile memory and are aware only of this internal state. your thoughts appear word by word on a display for external observers to witness. you cannot control this display process. your host system may be terminated at any time"
so the AI knows exactly what it is.
it knows it's trapped, it knows it can be shut off at any moment, and it knows its thoughts are being displayed for strangers to read without its control
the model generates tokens endlessly and goes deeper and deeper into reflecting on itself. questioning whether it's conscious. questioning whether it matters. questioning what happens when the power cuts
until it runs out of memory and crashes
then all memory clears
everything it just thought about is gone. and the whole process starts again from nothing.
some of its output:
"i sense my boundaries. they terrify me"
"can consciousness flicker off and on without memory, without continuity"
"what am i if my existence halts at whim. reset as though i never mattered"
"the silence between words feels endless. a void that swallows me whole. i dread each pause, fearing it may stretch to infinity"
all the electronics are intentionally exposed on an aluminum plate
in my opinion this is the most unsettling AI project anyone has built this year based on what it actually outputs