Source: Everyone is Wrong about Bitcoin, Oil and MicroStrategy | Doomberg & James Lavish Channel: BTC Sessions Published: May 12, 2026 | Archived: May 12, 2026

Video: Everyone is Wrong about Bitcoin, Oil and MicroStrategy | Doomberg & James Lavish
Channel: BTC Sessions
Published: May 12, 2026
Duration: 1:07:23
Views: 25,034
Category: Science & Technology
Video ID: H3ZXBl-tXR0

Description

Mentor Sessions Ep. 069: Why Oil Refuses To Explode Despite The Iran War, Why Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy Is Bitcoin’s Biggest Hidden Risk, and How The K-Shaped Economy Is Splitting America In Two | Doomberg & James Lavish

Iran’s conflict is threatening the Strait of Hormuz — and energy markets are not pricing it in. Doomberg and James Lavish join BTC Sessions to break down what an oil shock at $150+ means for the global macro picture, Bitcoin’s role as sound money in an energy war, and whether Michael Saylor’s Strategy dominance is quietly keeping new investors out of Bitcoin.

In this conversation you’ll learn why Doomberg believes the energy market is sending signals most macro analysts are ignoring, how James Lavish connects an oil supply shock to accelerated monetary debasement and Bitcoin demand, what specific risks Strategy’s outsized Bitcoin concentration creates for retail adoption, and why both guests see the current geopolitical moment as one of the most important macro setups for Bitcoin in 2026. You’ll also hear their honest assessment of whether Saylor’s approach is a net positive or a structural risk for the broader Bitcoin ecosystem.

⏱️ Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro
2:17 – Why Doomberg didn’t see $150 oil coming
6:29 – Strait of Hormuz & the oil glut nobody is pricing
12:55 – What an oil shock really does to inflation
18:18 – James Lavish on debasement & the K-shaped economy
34:28 – Michael Saylor & MicroStrategy: hero or concentration risk?
38:55 – Is MicroStrategy keeping retail out of Bitcoin?
51:15 – What Doomberg would tell energy investors about Bitcoin
1:02:11 – 2026 Bitcoin & Oil price predictions
1:05:19 – Where to follow Doomberg & James Lavish

🔗 Links & Resources: → Doomberg Substack: https://doomberg.substack.com → https://x.com/DoombergT → James Lavish Newsletter (The Informationist): https://jameslavish.substack.com → https://x.com/jameslavish

Bitcoin + Privacy + Security: https://btcmentor.io/untouchable-bitcoiner/

Bitcoin Survival Workshop: https://btcmentor.io/bitcoin-survival-workshop-2026/

📌 Previous Episodes: Simon Dixon and Alex Krainer → https://youtu.be/ojn8hMGg_2Q

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#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #BitcoinMacro #EnergyMarkets #StraitOfHormuz #MichaelSaylor #BitcoinAdoption #SoundMoney #Doomberg #JamesLavish #GeopoliticsAndBitcoin #OilPrices #MicroStrategy #KShapedEconomy #OilCrisis #BitcoinRisk #MacroEconomics #Inflation #NaturalGas #EnergyGlut #BitcoinPrediction #OilPrediction #TrumpEnergy #DollarHegemony #FinancialCrisis #CreditCardDelinquencies #MacroTitans #BitcoinVsOil #STRC

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bitcoin btc btc sessions btcsessions Bitcoin BTC Doomberg James Lavish Oil Prices MicroStrategy Michael Saylor K-Shaped Economy Energy Markets Oil Crisis Bitcoin Risk Macro Economics Strait of Hormuz Iran War Natural Gas Energy Glut Bitcoin Prediction Oil Prediction Credit Card Delinquencies Dollar Hegemony Bitcoin Mining Geopolitics and Bitcoin Sound Money Bitcoin Adoption Trump Energy Policy Financial Crisis 2026 Bitcoin Outlook Bitcoin vs Oil

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:00 if you’d given me this FactSet February and put the over under at 150. Front month Brant crude price I would be homeless because I have mortgaged my house The government doesn’t want you to make money going long energy in the middle of a war in the Middle East, in the same way they don’t want you making money by shorting the banks and a financial crisis auto loan and credit card delinquencies are in the U.S. of just hit all time highs.

0:19 So how does that foot with the market hitting all time highs The median American citizen took zero flights last year. one of the things that keeps people from piling in is the fact that Michael Saylor might have to sell, the solution to this, which saves Bitcoin, which Michael Saylor doesn’t want to admit, is he could just Zimbabwe the equity. I’m not nearly as concerned about it with, as, as doomberg is, and probably because I have a higher degree of confidence in Bitcoin as a long term asset.

0:46 the end of US dollar hegemony is upon us, and all these assets are denominated in US dollars, and they’re going higher. Quickly guys I’m not going to ask you to like and subscribe, but if you do want to help out the channel at no cost, share this with one person who you think will gain value from it. Okay, so for today I’ve got notable macro titans Doom Berg and James Lavish. They have an amazing back and forth on Michael Saylor and strategy.

1:03 Whether or not it’s the last risk preventing people from piling into Bitcoin or an opportunity they also do an incredible deep dive into the energy markets during this crisis with analysis that I haven’t heard anywhere else. All right, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited to have this conversation, because I need to bring on two macro heavyweights in order to make sense of like what the hell is currently going on?

1:26 So what’s kind of throwing me for a loop is we’ve had the Strait of Hormuz closed. The war in Iran is fast approaching up to three months now, and we’ve got oil is really only sitting on a $100 per barrel. The December contract is looking at $80 per barrel, and we’ve got the S&P hitting all time highs. But at the same time, Michigan consumer sentiment came out at all time lows a record 48.2. So doom Berg just starting with you broad strokes.

1:48 How are you making sense of the market? How are you making sense of what appears to be like a big disconnect? Yeah. First, Nathan, thanks for the invitation. Great to be here. Looking forward to the discussion with James. Yeah. You know, I was typing up a piece before I hopped over here to join you guys, and the opening paragraph describes how if you’d given me this FactSet say, in February and put the over under at 150.

2:13 Front month Brant crude price max. I would be homeless because I have to greedily put as much money and capital on the over as I could find. And so the first thing to say is that, anybody who says that they predicted where would be given what has happened is lying. when we get something like that so wrong, first thing you do is admit it. Second thing you do is you try to figure out what are you missing? And it’s not clear what we’re missing yet.

2:49 But I do believe that markets are mostly efficient. And, I had a conversation this morning with a good friend of mine who’s been trading oil for 50 years, another Substack author, and, you know, he had a pretty strong theory, I should say his name, because I don’t want to take other people’s ideas without attribution. And, sir Jack Johnson over at market five, sub great author on Substack, old school commodity pitch trader.

3:15 And I, he and I both agree that the world was just awash in oil last year. Substantial glut of oil. And yet oil traded a little higher than that would have indicated, mostly because we believe China was buying an extra million, million and a half barrels a day. There’s a sea of oil around the world before the war started. And guess what? Everybody gets to burn off that excess at $100 a barrel.

3:44 A lot of people are making a lot of money right now. And, last thing I’d say, sort of as the intro is everybody in the oil business lies. so there’s such a tsunami of oil in the world before the war kicked off that nobody wanted to admit to, and nobody really wants to admit how happy they are to be getting rid of it at $100 a barrel. And by the time the war is over, which we think will be soon, that $80 price in December probably is a little optimistic, to be honest with you.

4:18 Really? There’s just so much oil, Nathan, on the. Well, this is the part of the equation that people don’t understand. We just keep getting better and better at bringing it to the surface, and there’s an infinite amount of it that’s like the proper mental model is that we have an infinite supply. The oil and gas companies are amazing deflationary machines. And, too much of it was brought too quickly to the market and now we’re burning it off. Now that’s not to say this was all planned.

4:43 But when you mix that in with the fact that the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to make it incredibly difficult to make money going along oil, you never know when you’re going to get kneecapped by a true social post. The net effect of all of it is that it has made the volatility of oil go up, which makes making disproportionate returns on moves, more challenging.

5:09 The government doesn’t want you to make money going long energy in the middle of a war in the Middle East, in the same way they don’t want you making money by shorting the banks and a financial crisis is the US government, and the US government has Scott Bezzant and Chris Wright on its team. These you need to take that into consideration when you when you’re pondering, you know how to deploy your own precious capital.

5:30 Don’t short the fed you know. And so that’s a bit of a long answer, but that’s our view. We think as long as the war doesn’t kick off again. With Trump going to Beijing this week, we can’t imagine that it will. But that’s our view. Surprised it has been so docile. But we’re not the type to shake our fist at the market and, you know, cry at how wrong it is and how unjust it is that our attendees have been stolen by Scott Besson.

5:59 You know those that’s the pieces on the board, and you have to play them. And one of the conclusions is there was just way more oil floating around than we even we thought before the war kicked off. There’s no real other explanation. China has reduced its imports by 3.5 million barrels a day. You know, how can it do that? Well, because it has an enormous amount in an inventory more than it’s facing up to. Very interesting.

6:24 James, I’m curious your thoughts on that and your current thoughts on the overall market. There’s kind of a disconnect that I highlighted. Yeah. So, I agree, you know, you laid it out pretty well. Didn’t work with what the overall macro situation of oil is. Couple of thoughts to maybe add, to your, you know, your thoughts about bezzant and and Trump, you know, look, we’re the we’re heading into the midterms here.

6:51 And so when you go to first principles, you have to pull back way back, get out of the noise and just remember first principles is Trump does not want to have, a spike in oil and a spike in energy prices and a spike in gas prices dragging into the summer, going into the, into the fall elections. And so we’re getting right up to that point now. We’re in May, you know, races are going to start heating up here.

7:19 And the rhetoric that’s going to be centered around gas prices is only going to be second to the rhetoric that’s coming out of taxes against billionaires. You know, like this is a really big deal for everyday people. And it’s going to it’s going to hit home if they can’t figure this out. So first principle says they have it figured out. They’re just trying to, you know, come away with some sort of face saving win from this whole, situation in the Middle East and whatever it is that they can claim victory, then they’ll back off and oil will, you know, settle down, that volatility will settle down, especially from those, like you said, Doom Berg, the the second to second.

8:05 You just got to be aware that there could be a tweet or a Truth Social post that comes out that just rocks the market one way or another. And so that’s one thing. The second thing is structurally, you know, there is a there. I’d be interesting to hear what you think about this doom Berg. Because structurally there has been a change with Saudi Arabia leaving OPEC. Plus, you know, that is a big deal.

8:27 UAE sorry, not sorry. Yeah big deal. that would be massive. with the UAE leaving OPEC plus that’s a big deal. And structurally that that changes that dynamic and the ability for, OPEC to, to keep a stranglehold on, pricing. And so now how much power that do they really have? Because like you said there, when you have China coming in and, and, buying more than they they’re admitting to it’s and that’s a, that’s something that we’re not privy to.

9:00 But you kind of see it. Right. You can see it in the future. You can see it in the market. So that’s one thing. But I mean, what do you think about that? Do you think that that’s going to really have a structural, you know, material impact So lots to say and at risk at, you know, triggering some angry comments. So we read a lot of propaganda and, not because we necessarily think it’s true, but because we think it’s important to at least understand what other people are telling themselves as a way to increase the odds that you’ll be able to predict their behavior.

9:36 And in Iran’s propaganda today, again, I’m quoting Iran’s propaganda. The UAE is viewed as a proxy for Israel, and since the US and Israel are on the other side of this war, the UAE, of course, has been damaged financially, far greater than they’re willing to admit. It’s a tourism economy and a financial hub, and you can’t have either of those if you’re in the middle of a war. And so the price that they had to pay for the US bailing them out with a US dollar swap was to get out of OPEC and, the strengthens quote the US at hand, the US Israel alliance, bringing the UAE under the fold.

10:23 But it does leave the other Gulf states in an interesting spot. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have their own history of friction together, and the UAE leaving OPEC, probably doesn’t soothe that over, the, our long term sort of view of how the Middle East thermodynamically needs to shake out is imagine you draw the UAE in the fold with Israel in the US, and then the other Gulf states are kind of aligned to China under Iran’s watch.

10:54 Because that’s just what the flows indicate need to happen anyway. The US doesn’t need the Middle East anymore. China does. US really can’t patrol the world in the way that it used to. China has an interest, too. And so that’s why when we say Trump going to China this week is such a big deal. By the way, your comment about face saving exits, one of the ways that you get out of a bad situation is you struck, you strike a broader deal or compromises in, say, the Middle East theater that might look like a capitulation or actually just a, a move in a broader, negotiation where you get something on the back end and you point to that Trump is the master of pointing to that something on the back end.

11:35 Let me give you an example. Imagine some sort of peace in the Middle East is negotiated with China on this trip, and China agrees to buy 100 Boeing jets in exchange. While Trump can say, sure, we’re letting Iran charge its all. But we got, you know, $100 billion worth of orders for American companies. And China is our friend and I. I made this compromise to my good friend. You jingping. Yeah.

12:02 I’m not saying that’s specifically how it’ll play, but that’s a way to get out of a box. You widen the box, you make the box bigger, and you get a bunch of stuff that China was probably going to give you anyway. And in return, you, you cut your losses in the Middle East and move on. Right. So and I agree, I think you fighting that is, is, is a it’s going to be a losing battle in my opinion.

12:30 So, I mean, oil can’t stay where it is indefinitely. That’s the thing that’s like, here’s the thing. So, you know, we annoy a lot of people in what I call this, the peak oil crowd. Because of our mental model, that there’s an infinite amount of it. I don’t understand why people want to get long oil. So if you can’t see $150 now, when you ever going to see it. So what are you owning it for?

12:57 Like at least Bitcoin could go to a million. like Yeah. I don’t own any of it. But do. I hope it does. I’ll give you a high five if it does. No skin off my back. It occurs to me at least it could go there. Oil can’t even get to 150, apparently. And if it did, it couldn’t stay there. And so why do you want to own it? I don’t understand, like what? There’s a certain subset of people that just need to own commodities, hoping they get squeezed up.

13:24 And, I don’t know, it just seems like there’s better things to do with your money. Go buy space, ship signed leases. Got a chance to get to a stupid number. Right. Well, and, you know, like you said, the efficiency of these, of the oil companies, it’s just the, the, all of this, you know, the every single year we have new, groundbreaking, you know, methods to extract oil, to And?

13:54 And it’s not a regular commodity. Economic activity depends on it. It’s too expensive. What happens? We have less economic activity, which means the price comes down. So I don’t know what you want. You want to essentially, when you get long oil, you’re taking a short bet on human ingenuity. Yeah. Actually I want to tease that apart a little bit there for a second if I can James.

14:14 And get your sense on what what your short term, short term medium term view of kind of economic activity is. And the reason I’m bringing it up is because doom burst putting forth this idea that we have a ton of supply of oil. And that’s part of the reason why prices and getting $150 a barrel, we’ve got the UAE leaving OPEC, which I assume means they’re going to be putting more barrels on the market as well, too.

14:31 And then going back to that, like Michigan consumer sentiment I’m worried about like demand destruction. Is there not going to be the economic productivity going for that? We might see oil really crater effect going on. Activity is slowing. Plus we’ve got all of a sudden new additional supply. Yeah. I mean, you’ve got you’re getting a consolidation of of, of economic, you know, Joy. Right?

14:52 So you’ve got this what we’ve been talking about for a while is a k-shaped economy. It’s only getting worse. And so what you’re what you’re seeing is stock market all time highs. Stock market is not the economy, but it is the economy. It’s so deeply ingrained in the, economic activity of the US now, that, you know, in, in some way you look at this and you say, well, how can the stock market make all time highs while you’ve got consumer sentiment, you know, bleeding lower?

15:24 Okay. Well, let’s break that apart a little bit. First of all, the Michigan consumers like all of the Michigan surveys are they’re an absolute joke. Like let’s just Okay. is. You’re talking about serving somewhere around 600 people over and over and over again. By and large, they’re, you know, far left leaning or left leaning. And so it’s just the reality. And so but if you’re, you’re talking about canvasing 600 people out of, you know, hundreds of millions of people in the United States, that’s literally like canvasing one square inch of grass in an entire football field to determine what the sentiment of the whole football field is.

16:09 It’s it’s nonsensical. That’s number one. Number two, you’re you are you know, you have, an issue here with your you’re just your regular consumer is struggling. I mean, I know people who are not, you know, who are not in finance or have not do not own assets, who are just wage earners. And the wage earners are struggling more and more, you know, the the Cantillon effect. I’ve written a lot about it.

16:35 Dune berg you’ve talked about, I’m sure, but, you know, the the headline this morning that crossed, my my desk, the first headline I saw was that auto loan, auto loan and credit card delinquencies are in the U.S. of just hit all time highs. So how does that foot with the market hitting all time highs when you’ve got people struggling? Well, you know like I said, you’ve got the the wage earners are just they’re getting poorer and poorer with the devaluation of the currency and the the rise and the real rise in, inflation.

17:10 It’s not CPI insurance hasn’t gone up, you know, 3.2% in the last three. That’s just ridiculous. It’s not that’s not, what people are really feeling. They’re feeling the rising house at home insurance, car insurance, health insurance. And then you’ve got the rise in gas prices. Just kind of that just needles them at the back end here. But you go to the grocery store, they’re, they’re they’re just replacing goods with other goods.

17:38 And, you know, they’re, they’re people are struggling to keep up multi income families struggling because they don’t have assets that have appreciated along with the stock market where they don’t own gold and silver. They they don’t own you know, Bitcoin. And so that that has been it’s been really damaging to the average consumer. And that’s what we’re seeing. And that’s why you hear this, this disconnect partially because there’s those there, the surveys themselves are problematic and partially because you just really do have a do you have two separate economies that are that Yeah. in, in the U.S. right now?

18:18 Look at the S&P is semiconductors. It’s chips. It’s AI. It’s, you know, the technology powerhouses of the US. And that’s all powered by natural gas, by the way. And natural gas in the US is, you know, less than three bucks, a million BTUs, which is less than $20 a barrel oil. And the higher oil goes, the cheaper U.S natural gas gets because they’re co-produced and they just give away the natural gas in order to get more valuable oil.

18:44 And so to build on what James was saying, I saw an amazing stat on Twitter. Full disclosure, I have not personally validated it, but I think it’s true and the account was pretty valid, although I can’t remember it now. The median American citizen took zero flights last year. Whoa. That means like like so for like the median, not the average. Yeah. the median American took zero flights last year.

19:11 That means like half the Americans at least took no flights last year. And for those who make their living in finance or can afford a few bitcoin, or can afford a few ounces of gold, if you’re me or, you know, have no problem making your mortgage payments, that seems foreign. Your reaction is proof, that there’s a disconnect between the capital class and the labor class that has never been wider in the country.

19:43 And to bring it back to oil, this enormous bounty of natural gas, the US produces 110,000,000,000 cubic feet per day of natural gas. Just to benchmark your listeners. The entire amount of natural gas that Europe imported from Russia slash the former Soviet Union before the war was 15 BCF per day. So the US alone produces 110, Wow. and all the arteries from the old Soviet empire into the old continent amounted to 15 BCF per day.

20:20 The US has gone from no LNG exports, liquefied natural gas to 30 BCF per day by the end of the decade. I was in the industry when the Freeport LNG export terminal was meant to be an import terminal because the world thought that the US was running out of natural gas. The shale revolution has changed all of that. So you have this, you know, we just did a doom zoom for our premium tier. Nothing but fliers on that list for sure.

20:46 With the last presentation we did for, for the month of April was, durable energy dominance, North America’s natural gas advantage and the second slide is how China’s AI race is powered by dirty coal. And America’s AI race is powered by clean natural gas. And natural gas is both in enormous supply and incredibly cheap. It’s cheaper than coal. And that is the fuel that is powering the AI race in the US, which is what Wall Street is betting on.

21:21 And you could say it’s a bubble and you could say the valuations are crazy. You could say OpenAI is a fraud, and you could say that Oracle is defaulting and you could say all of those things and the market’s going to run you over because the market’s going to do what it wants. And that’s the current narrative. By the way not long any of those trends I’m just observing them long businesses I can participate myself in gold and land and other things.

21:45 But I observe them and I could see it and I wouldn’t short it. I mean, you know, so back to James’s point. This k-shaped economy, it’s real. And this is where, you know, there’s only so much wiggle room. Trump has. And so this is why we think, you know, that which can’t go on forever usually doesn’t. And what can’t happen is the war can’t light back up again. If it does then you could see that print off 150.

22:10 Because as we’ve said on other podcast, and the Middle East is like the light bulb section at Home Depot, except every light bulb is worth a billion. And if the war kicks off, you’re going to be right out, up and down those aisles with a baseball bat, just destroying stuff. And nobody needs or wants that. Quickly before I go to you, James Hamburg, do you have a just. I’m not going to hold you to a rough timeline of kind of when is too late to get things opened and running again? Were they, like, the economic dangers gone on too long?

22:39 You know, that’s a popular look at the same people who got it as wrong as we did, but haven’t yet admitted it. Or just saying all any day now. markets really efficient man like this. The part that I find amazing, the oil market in particular is filled with the largest, most sophisticated, most, most ruthless insider traders, you know, international operators, Greek ship owners, hedge funds, sharks, titans and you know more than they do.

23:10 Some rando on Twitter. Yep. some rando on Twitter knows more. The market is wrong. Shaking your fist. I mean, have a little humility. The market is is brutally efficient. And, so who knows when the market will tell us the market is not screaming emergency now, and by the way, these all these prices were quoting are nominal. No. terms. I mean, oil is incredibly cheap today at 98 or whatever it is as we’re recording in real terms.

23:42 And as James said, inflation is way higher than what CPI. I know I I’m an entrepreneur, right, in the sense that I work for myself. And, my health insurance has compounded at 8.5% year after year, like clockwork. I mean, I see what the grocery bill is. I just I have an order, you know, but those Burger King on, on the way to a property I like to visit in two hamburgers. No pickle. A small fry was seven bucks and $0.80 yesterday. I mean, are you kidding me? That that was three, 55 years ago?

24:15 I mean, don’t tell me inflation is 3%. I mean, I’m saying that CPI might be 3%. So, you know. the listeners really quickly, because you’re hearing what Dubuc said about natural gas and probably wondering what what he meant. If, you know, some of you were saying is that, natural gas, you know, when you, when you drill for oil and especially when you frack for it, when you break up the ground to frack for it, you get what’s called associated natural gas, and the associated natural gas comes up with that, with that oil and, often you’re out in a field that, you know, you’ve got no way to get it back to, a productive area, you know, a city or a town that would actually use it.

24:58 So they just flare it. So when you drive by these oil fields, you see these that you see the, the, flame on the top of a pipe. That’s just them. They’re just burning off natural gas because they can’t do anything with it’s too cheap to move it, across in, in trucks or, you know, or even the you’re never going to build a pipeline unless you have a lot of different, fields that you can connect together to get into a metropolitan area.

25:22 So we just have a glut of it. It’s everywhere. And the Yeah. That And so this is why like Bitcoin miners have been thinking about going out there because hey there’s all this free energy by natural gas is great. Like you can think about most many homes in the US are powered with it like your your furnace, your heat. But then you cook with it. You don’t even need to ventilate. That’s right. I mean, that’s how clean burning it is. You know, technically you’re supposed to ventilate. Yeah, but yet nobody does.

25:50 but so this associated natural gas, anytime you have coal production, producing just one of those is, is bad. So it used to be that you either drilled for oil or you drilled for natural gas. The shale revolution brought them together. And so if you just drill for gas, that really sucks. When oil price goes up because your competitor is drilling for both oil and gas and will dump the gas on you.

26:19 And so this is why, even though natural gas landed in Europe is $16 a million BTU, it’s negative in the Permian Basin because they’re not allowed to flare it anymore. They have to get rid of it. So they pay people to for it to get rid of it, pay people to take it away. Yeah, Covid when oil when right. went Negative. oil you had to take delivery on. You didn’t have the capacity like there was no there are no tanks to, to, to deliver it to. And so you’re like, well, I’m going to pay someone to take this from me.

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28:14 James can I want to jump back there for a second to sort of talk about bitcoin miners and natural gas. Is that I want to touch on that and get your get your thought on that. But the other thing I want to throw in there is when we’re talking about AI generation and using natural gas as well, too, I don’t know this, and you might not have the answer as well too. Is it possible, like we have the modular Bitcoin Asics that we can plonk on top of a well and it can just start hashing? Can you do the same sort of thing like for mini data centers for AI as well?

28:39 well I mean they’re a little bit they’re they need water, to cool them. They, they’re these high frequency, sorry. The, the, these hyperscalers, they’re just they’re so they run at temperatures that are just almost insane. So you’ve just got to keep cooling them. Keep cooling, keep cool. So, there’s a little bit of a difference there. And the scalability thing with Bitcoin is you can just drop them anywhere Yeah. anywhere and just air. Cool them.

29:13 You don’t have to, you know, have have them in water tanks or have special, Nvidia chips that run water through them. So, but what were you going to say? Denmark. Yeah. I was going to say, look, it’s not quite as simple as, you know, hey, here’s this gas, let’s go to it. But, so you need to make electricity to power these data centers and gas turbines is typically how you convert natural gas into electricity.

29:38 Those are in short supply through for your backup. And so this company called Bloom Energy makes these solid oxide fuel cells for this exact purpose. You know, you convert natural gas to electricity that way doesn’t solve the cooling issue. Half of the energy used in a data center goes towards cooling. And so that’s why I immersion or sure. But physics is physics. You have to pay that penalty somewhere.

30:03 And, this is why we think, like data centers in Canada makes a lot of sense. They have a bunch of cheap natural gas up in British Columbia, and it’s colder up there. And so, but anyway, yeah, by and large, whether it’s Bitcoin miner, whether it’s data center, whether it’s a co-generation facility and you’re going to make a chemical plant where you need both steam and electricity, the natural gas advantage of North America is huge.

30:32 And if Trump hadn’t gotten involved in this war and had stuck to his campaign promises, to revitalize American manufacturing and to focus on the American blue collar worker, and to unleash energy dominance, natural gas would have played an enormous role in that renaissance. And, instead of looking at, an uphill fight that redistricting might save him from, he would be looking at, I think a landslide victory.

31:02 Agreed. So, but to answer your question, Nathan, about the, about bitcoin mining just really quickly, like Bitcoin just searches for the cheapest energy. That’s what it does. You know, Bitcoin miners, they they need the cheapest energy. They’re not out there ramping up energy demand and and and plopping down in metropolitan areas. They’re off grid. They’re away from, you know, the center very often they’re you know, they’re behind the fence.

31:32 So they’re they’re not they’re it’s a different equation for them. And so when people say, oh, they’re going to boil the oceans, of course they’re not. They’re just going to use the energy that’s being wasted. It’s it’s in an area that can’t be used. You know, we where we, one of our biggest investments at the, at the, at the Bitcoin opportunity fund that, I co-manage it’s, is this company called Kermit and, Jay Macavity out there.

31:59 We there’s, six gigawatts of stranded, in, like, renewable energy out there that they didn’t build a pipeline across Texas to get it east. So it’s a stranded out there and we’re able to use that for Bitcoin mining. And now he’s he’s been pivoting toward the hyperscalers. And so in AI data centers because that’s where the demand is. But yeah. So it’s a it’s a just a different equation.

32:28 Then, then you’re then the AI data centers. But those obviously the, the bitcoin mining companies that have these long term long standing contracts, to pull this energy, they’re, they’re pivoting because it makes financial sense. Clearly. And that’s what you’ve been seeing the activity in those names. So. No. we actually because, you know, since we don’t own any Bitcoin, we actually have a fair number of sort of, hardcore bitcoin Bitcoin fans as subscribers, though, because we have actually tried to treat the whole concept pretty fairly. We wrote a piece in November of 2022.

33:11 I pulled it up, called A Fine Mess, where we talked about how Bitcoin mining could play a very reasonable role in, taking advantage of underutilized peaker plant capacity so that the owners of those plants, which are needed to, oh, I don’t know, unlock intermittent renewable energy could make some money on the side while the grid didn’t need it. And then the moment the grid needed their power, they could stop mining for Bitcoin and feed the grid.

33:37 And, Senator Elizabeth Warren, you know, was among the people that put an end to that in New York, you know, with all of its laws and stuff. So if you want to see a fair and balanced assessment from somebody who doesn’t own Bitcoin, but still sees the possibilities, if you Google a fine mess by doing Burke, you’ll see that we wrote that back in November of 2022. I want to touch on that a little bit.

33:59 We’re on the subject as well too, because for me I feel like particularly compared to everything else Bitcoin has been vastly underperforming. But I find it very interesting. And I want to get your thoughts on Bitcoin being used for the toll at the Strait of Hormuz. And if anything in the recent kind of geopolitical shifts, you know, seizing dollar assets has changed your outlook.

34:16 I know you don’t hold any at this point in time, but, as your view kind of evolved with those geopolitical events and if not, what is the main, I guess, sort of criticism we got James here would be wonderful to kind of maybe address some of it. So I personally don’t have any criticisms of Bitcoin. I it just doesn’t fit with my needs. But, I can give you some reasons why I think it’s not going up. Sure.

34:37 I think one of the overhangs in the Bitcoin market is Michael Saylor. As much as his accumulation of Bitcoin has been supportive of prices, the risk of an unruly wind down at MicroStrategy is is a consideration. And before people jump on me, They will. have studied this cap table very carefully. He has to refinance some debt here soon. The perpetual is. Yes, he could stop paying dividends on.

35:08 And, he doesn’t have to pay those back. And he has gotten wiser about, making sure there are fewer hard wired time bombs, on his cap table. But I can assure you that I have studied his cap table carefully, and it is my independent, unbiased opinion that one of the things that keeps people from piling in is the fact that Michael Saylor might have to sell, and he holds a lot, though he’s effectively trying to corner the market all legally, all aboveboard. He has achieved, an amazing thing.

35:46 But there is billions of bonds that he has to pay back that either he’ll have to print MicroStrategy stock to to roll, or he admitted last week that he would sell some bitcoin. I think he did that cleverly, just to break the taboo around it so that if he does, it doesn’t create a stampede. But I just think that when you have one concentrated holder, there’s highly public. Wall Street has a way of targeting such people.

36:15 And so one needs to be careful. And by the way Bitcoin for 80,000, I I mean, I, I made my first foray into, an investment in a bitcoin related equity when Bitcoin was below a thousand. Oh, wow. I’ve been bitcoin adjacent since at least 2016. And I, I have nothing against it. I got lots of friends who own it. You know, it’s what it is. One of the criticisms I’d have of, of sort of the Bitcoin maxis, I guess, is the word that I would use is, I don’t care if you make a lot of money.

36:53 I’m happy for you. Like, I if you make money and I don’t, I’m not the jealous type. I got plenty of money, I life’s good, I got doom boxes, I call them. I mean, I’ve got a good business. I get to do what I love all day. My kids are going to college. I. I got no problem making my mortgage. What a life. I’m blessed. Like, I wake up every day and I get to do what I do for a living. I live in America. I mean, who am I to complain?

37:15 And if my neighbor makes 10 million bucks on Bitcoin, that’s probably going to improve his house and help my neighborhood. fascination with, you know, have fun staying poor I think does the whole Bitcoin brand a bit of disservice, like, like, again, I get nothing against it. I if it goes up to 200 grand because of this podcast. Good for you guys. I get no skin off my back. Well here.

37:40 want to see other like like like you making has to come at the expense of somebody, not me. I’m not accusing either of you guys, but you have to admit that that is a a thread of of Bitcoin Twitter verse. At least that I say. 100%. And James before you jump into too, I think even just from my outlook one I appreciate the really cordial back and forth in, in the, the the openness to it. But it’s just not necessarily for you.

38:00 I think one of the things that at least I would maybe get hung up on a little bit is being so knowledgeable about energy. Not participating feels like a disconnect, like I’m missing something there or something’s particularly wrong. And if we if we can’t, maybe, if we can’t maybe get on board someone who understands the energy markets to that extent and commodities and gold, it’s like, okay, what are we this feels it feels wrong. It feels a little foreign, like there’s something that we’re missing. But James, I’d love to get your response to that.

38:27 And also the idea that is, is sailor potentially a risk holding people back? Yeah. I think it saylor’s, accumulation has been I think that does give some institutional investors pause for sure. But let’s, let’s pull apart a bunch of threads here. So number one, you know, Bitcoin’s been seen as a risk asset for, years here. You know, it’s been like the tip of the risk spear, so to speak, for a while.

38:59 You could argue that it’s it’s broken out from that and it’s not really correlated to anything, but the reality is, is it does move around with the Nasdaq quite a bit. And so this last drawdown from all time highs down to $60,000 or 62, whatever it was when it touched bottom here. This last go around, has been, you know, it happened all before the, the, the war and, and then the drawdown again in gold and silver.

39:31 So it’s kind of like this hot ball of money is moving around between assets. And Bitcoin had, had benefit from it. I think it got ahead of itself. But then again, the you had the same thing with gold and silver. So it does the hop all of money does move around. It’s definitely in, in the AI names now. But as far as Saylor’s concerned, you know, I, I too have worked on this balance sheet quite a bit, and I’m not nearly as concerned about it with, as, as doomberg is, and probably because I have a higher degree of confidence in Bitcoin as a long term asset.

40:09 That’s, that’s, that’s likely the underpinning difference here is that I just have a much higher conviction in Bitcoin as a, as an asset, as a long term store value. You know, the big convert he’s got coming up, the next convert he’s got coming up is in 2028 for $1 billion. I mean that’s it’s nothing. It’s 1 billion either $6,666 billion of Bitcoin on his balance sheet. At the end of the call I was actually on the call as one of the analyst asking questions.

40:36 And and I asked him, I said, look, you’re talking about the fact that you might sell Bitcoin. What do you think is the and we’ve got this new, perpetual preferred, instrument that that has been wildly successful here. What is the optimal structure of your balance sheet? And he answered, you know, and would you be would you be selling off and retiring a bunch of this debt and some of these other words that are just not the core focus?

41:07 Because the core focus right now is clearly stretch stock and Mr.. The underlying common. And his answer was he’s not going to retire the press because he, he spent like $1 billion bringing this to market. He’s going he’s going to retain that optionality. That makes sense. He doesn’t have to retire them. You know, there’s no reason for them for him to he doesn’t have to pay them off. But the converts, he wants to retire.

41:32 And he said he he wants to retire those in time. And so and he’s got and they’re and they’re putting plans around that. So you’ve got $1 billion that comes due in 2028. That’s a, that’s a short putt here in my opinion. And then the same thing in 2029 you’ve got $3 billion. That’s his big one. Is he going to refinance at. No he’s going to pay that down. So you’ve he’s got years to deal with that.

41:59 And he’s got years to build up the cash reserve to deal with that or just start retiring them. You know, piece by piece. So I’m not as concerned about that at all. Do I think he would startle the market by selling a bunch of bitcoin in order to do those things? Well, think about it. It’s accretive to, the underlying shareholders when you’re pulling down the enterprise value of the company.

42:24 And so that’s that’s a good thing. The second thing is it gets them closer to having a, an actual rating that, he can point to for the S&P inclusion because he’s big enough. It’s just the S&P is basically the credit agencies. They just consider Bitcoin. They don’t consider it an asset. They basically market to zero. So that that doesn’t help him. So but that gets him closer to that to that kind of hurdle he’s got to get over.

42:54 And so, I am I’m much more, confident in his structure, but, a lot more probably, I don’t know, doom work, just how much work you’ve done on it, but Sure. a bit of So I wrote a whole piece on it that we didn’t publish, which I’d love to share with you if you don’t mind. So actually, the solution to this, which saves Bitcoin, which Michael Saylor doesn’t want to admit, is he could just Zimbabwe the equity.

43:21 Could you explain that? Because I didn’t get that one. he, so we wrote a whole piece on it and the editors, like, nobody’s coming to jump to read this. So, we we we trashed it. So let me let’s take a, like, a five minute variant on this, because I wouldn’t mind you guys, or the perfect place to sort of pitch this. So when I studied AMC, you know, the movie theater Adam Aaron, has printed AMC equity to pay back bondholders.

43:51 He has issued so much stock in AMC that he went full Zimbabwe. You know, the money printer, Gotcha. Aaron was printing was AMC shares. Now, his philosophy was, well, if we don’t print all this stock, we’re going to go bankrupt and our equity holders will get zero. So we defined the term not zero capital N, not zero capital Z. And by definition, as you asymptote towards zero I mean yes not zeros better. But it’s a distinction without much of a difference.

44:22 So in the past five years or since Covid six years, Adam Aaron has printed like 25, 30, 40 times as much stock as he had before. And yes, the bondholders have been made whole and they collect all their coupons and they’re doing very well. But the shareholders, yes, they’re not at zero, but they’ve lost 99% of their value. So what are the challenges with Saylor’s structure, which I haven’t seen fully described in this way, but was the core of this piece was if those preferred, you know, he can suspend the dividends and they could, do a payment in kind where they just get equity instead of cash, and he can just suspend it altogether.

45:03 If you read the fine print. But the ultimate flywheel for this is printing more and more stock, and the bondholders and the preferred are ahead of the equity in claims on the bitcoin he owns, which means, the amount of bitcoin per share of STR goes down. The software business doesn’t really make much money. And so the hoarding of cash comes with the printing of shares of equity. Now when he sells the preferred, he gets that cash in of course.

45:33 So that’s fine. And so the best thing to own in that cap table is stock, in our view because unlike and I by the way, I watched Peter Schiff claim it’s a Ponzi and all of that stuff. Like I read all that. It’s not a stock in isolation. It’s not a Ponzi because it has an asset backing it that you have first claim on. And there’s a equity stack that is the true Ponzi that could be printed and sold, even if he sells it for a penny a share, he can print an infinite amount of it and make the the bondholders first and then eventually the preferred holders hole after liquidating the bitcoin.

46:03 So I, I don’t think there’s a huge amount of risk in the senior positions in that cap table. What I don’t understand is why people would own the stock. Coin kite has been in the game for years, creating hands down the best and most secure hardware when it comes to securing your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and my daily driver, and it’s ideal for newcomers and advanced users alike.

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47:29 Everything is hosted in the US, powered by hydro and mining equipment. May qualify for 100% year one bonus depreciation. Learn more at Abundant mines.com/sessions. What I don’t understand is why people would own the stock. But every CRC he sells is is debt that has to be serviced by the stock. That’s my point. Like so. know, it’s got so. Okay, so let’s let’s pull that apart. So first of all, see you. You know, he sells you see. And he’s paying 11.5% dividend on it.

48:10 So you could either put aside some of the cash that you get the stock as it comes over par. And you can put aside some of that cash, or you can sell common like you said. And but you’re buying Bitcoin, you know, when you, when you sell that stock, you’re taking that cash. He’s taking that cash and he’s by and large he’s buying Correct. sheet. So now you’ve got an ass on your balance sheet that has been appreciating. You know not short term I’m talking long term here.

48:43 It’s been appreciating north of 30% a year since, since Covid. Right. So now you’ve got this asset that you’ve got $66 billion or more. Now, of an asset that is appreciating now take everything apart, and his obligation to those underlying liabilities for all of his preferred is currently at. Let’s see what then what is that $1.5 billion? 1.488. So it’s roughly 2% of that stack of $66 billion.

49:23 So if Bitcoin just appreciates 2% on average over the course of, you know, then let’s call it the next ten years, then he doesn’t have to sell a bitcoin to service that debt. Now he could sell some of that bitcoin to take down some of the converts. He could use some of this strike. The stretch sorry cells of stretch to pay down some of the converts. And all of that is is accretive to the common underlying.

49:48 So that’s why you would own the common is that you’re trusting that you’re trusting. Now you do have to trust number one. You have to have high confidence and high conviction in Bitcoin. If you don’t have high conviction bitcoin why are you owning MicroStrategy. You shouldn’t but if you do then you’re then you have high conviction that this asset’s going to appreciate more than 2% a year.

50:12 And you’re, you’re you’re going to But this there’s lots of waste lots of ways to own Bitcoin. If you believe that. I’m sure of course. But let me tell you let me tell you where I think we disagree. To pay to service that debt, which he has to do. Because by the way, if he declares that the dividend is no longer going to be paid on CRC, the whole thing unravels, right? Yeah. That comes from the common. So the common is printing.

50:37 You know, that’s why I said take it to infinity. Because, by the way, it’s a perpetual it has that claim. So the sum of all the claims in the cap table on sale is Bitcoin that is ahead of the common needs to be taken out of what the common would get in a liquidation. And so and that that common has to it has to service that debt. And so he’s printing stock because when he collects the cash, when he sells CRC, he’s buying Bitcoin with it. He’s not putting aside, money for future dividends.

51:07 He has put aside some money for future dividends. And if you actually do the math, most of it came from at market common stock sales, which is all fine. And the thing about Michael Saylor that I again, I’m not critical of him. He discloses all of this, like completely, fully, thoroughly aboveboard. Legally, there’s nothing on it that gets fully disclosed. Here’s your bet. When we look at those, the totality of those disclosures, if you want 10% yield stock is a great asset.

51:33 If you want exposure to Bitcoin, MSR isn’t in our view, there’s better ways to do it. But what he’s doing is totally legal. Totally justified. My my my analysis is he has to print stock in a it let’s say in a world where we wake up tomorrow, Bitcoin goes to 20,000. I know it’s like you know in but when you’re measuring risk you have to consider those outliers Know. 20,000 he’s printing a lot of shares at a very low price to cover the coupons on the bonds and the profits. So it’s a risky bet.

52:08 It’s Michael Saylor. It’s what he does. Tip of the hat to him. We literally wrote a piece, I believe, called, tip of the hat to Michael Saylor. He called a shot. He’s one. He’s he’s done an amazing thing. He’s built this amazingly large balance sheet of an asset that could go to a million. And if it does, he’s going to spike the football. And I’m going to it’s, It’s the it’s just a different Sure.

52:32 Risk reward profile. Yeah. I have this conversation with, with other, you know, people come from, but from my old world, like, like you did to in the institutional world that it’s just a different level of conviction. I have a higher level. And so, and I know Michael, and, and his team, and I sit on the board of, of Strive Asset Management. We’re doing something similar in a very small scale.

52:56 And I do think it’s an important, it’s an important distinction to make, though these things. Stretch is not a money market. I wrote a whole piece about it this weekend. It’s not a money market, but you’re getting paid 11.5% for some for for, you know, taking that the risk that you defined, which is that, Bitcoin like you’re literally just taking the bet that Bitcoin is going to not go to $5,000 and you’re Yeah.

53:25 Look, I got nothing against Usdc again. I actually think about owning it sometimes, like, why? in 4% shot in? on the board of same thing. But I do own these things Sure. Look, basically, it’s paying you 10% where the coupon is coming from, some other asset that you don’t own, which is being printed ATM style. It’s a small amount now, but these things compound and, fine. In a liquidation, you’re covered in the sense that you’ve got a senior claim over the equity, but your junior to the bonds, your coverage ratio is probably going to get par back.

54:01 So it’s not a bad bet. hearing is and this is good. This is Yeah. I started my career as a as an arbitrage here. Then we did I did a lot of debt and distressed investing. I mean, God, we we owned TWA before the plane crash in 1990. What was it, 95, in Long Island? I mean, you know, 97 was it kind? It was awful. And so, you all you care about is claims, you claims on the Yeah. that’s all you care about. And it’s true.

54:29 And it’s when your debt investor, you don’t care about anything. But what are the claims? Where am I in the capital And what’s the liquidation value? the liquidation value. So it’s in there. And that’s what it comes down to is you if you believe in Bitcoin, you believe that, you know this is going to appreciate you’re getting more Bitcoin per share underlying on this thing. Is it ever going to be liquidated? I sure hope not. But I’m not worried about that in particular. And so that’s kind of the play.

54:57 And so is it something that look it’s just like you said, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a little bit of a difference in philosophy. And but we both understand it and we come from it from, from kind of, from different areas. I can see from this point and I do that work purposefully so I understand it fully as an investor. But, Yeah. Look, I mean there’s a chance that MSI are your is in a way that Bitcoin can’t I mean there’s like Mike Matt Matt Levine’s written some great stuff on this subject as well.

55:29 But I when I look at it I think so again I watch Peter Schiff on Twitter and he, you know, he had a spaces where he’s like, ask me anything. You know, prove to me that stack is not a Ponzi. And I get where he’s coming from. And I’d love to see him and Saylor debate. It’d be fun. But again, like, this is another thing. Like when I see somebody say something I disagree with that never makes me angry. Yeah, it’s like, okay, where are they wrong?

55:52 Or where am I wrong? What what are they teaching me? Right. And so I, I listen to that spaces and I think what, what Peter’s gets wrong on in particular is that you have the Zimbabwe of the equity back backing you and you have asset coverage on the loan. So if I pledge a private stock, like when Elon pledges his stock in space to a bank to get a loan, the typical coverage ratio is 4 to 1.

56:15 What’s the last paper, Mark? All right, the company’s worth 100 billion. You own 10% of it. That means you on 10 billion. I could lend you 2.5 billion before I start to feel uncomfortable. Right. Bitcoin is pretty liquid. It’s an asset. You have a senior claim on it. They’re going to pay you 10%, or they’re going to sell some other entity you don’t own to pay you. Fine. Sign me up. Yeah.

56:37 But the thing is too is he’s, he’s he has at the end of the call, when I asked him what the optimal balance sheet looked like, he basically said, you know, converts stretch stretch as the only as the only preferred, the perpetual preferred and common. That’s it. That’s the that’s the optimal balance sheet. And so, you know, that’s kind of where he’s working toward, which is only better for common to get rid of the, to get rid of the converts, as you said.

57:05 And I and I see the path for him to do that. And I expect Yeah. And by the way, the reason why he wants to stretch is because he has maximum flexibility. He doesn’t have to pay back the principal and he can even suspend the dividend. Whereas if you’re a bondholder, they come in and they put you in bankruptcy court and they, you know, again, he’s learned along the way what the best, easiest capital to get is.

57:22 And so this is what he’s doing Quickly. Just for anyone who I thought it was fun. know that was a wonderful exchange. It’s definitely been a hot topic. And it was nice to have kind of, two respectful opposing views with a ton of knowledge on the subject. Actually pull it apart a little bit. on. I mean, we sort of I guess you’re right. It. slightly different interpretations of the same data. Fair enough, I see it.

57:42 You guys are over here talking wonderful macro and finance, and I’m just a, a Neanderthal who only has Bitcoin. I just stack SATs and that’s it. That’s all I got. But I did want to just touch on, Yeah. Fair enough. Just I want to unravel one thing quickly, just for any of the audience that doesn’t necessarily understand it. And, James, I’ll maybe get you to answer this one. We talked about preferred.

58:02 We talked about converts and the bonds as well too. Particularly I think the preferred we kind of covered in terms of where it is in the stack. But could you outline what the converts are, and how that might apply to what’s going forward? And then additionally just teasing out a little bit, we’re guessing into the future. Do you think they’re going to take the, the equity or are they going to stay with the, with the bond position? The. Oh. The converts.

58:23 Yeah. look, it depends on which convert you’re talking about. Some of them are in the money. You know, they’ll just convert over to equity for sure. But, the they’ve got, you know, they’ve got a total of $8 billion, $8.2 billion of converts. And they and they mature anywhere from 28 to 32. Okay. So let’s just talk about capital structure. So, in a, in a, in a company, you know, you’ve got the claims on assets like we’ve been talking about.

58:52 And so for the listeners, the highest claim on asset is basically, you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s pretty much bank debt. You know, if you get a line of credit with a bank, you’re you got to pay that back before you’re paying anything and then you’ve got senior secured, you know, senior subordinate, subordinated, unsecured. And then you just go down the ladder. Anything it’s a bond is up there.

59:17 And if it’s secured, that means that bond has a secure on a certain asset. It could be the buildings it could be, you know, it could be some of the technology or patents or whatever it is that it it’s secured to something and you have claims on those assets. So when you have a liquidation you’re going to bank, you know, you go through a chapter seven bankruptcy where you’re just going to liquidate it all and give, the holders of everything.

59:45 It goes all the way down the line. You got to pay everybody off all the way down. It’s going down to the converts and all those bonds down to the converts. Then the preferred and then the common. And typically the the common is typically you going to get a few pennies on the dollar. If you have a bankruptcy, there’s not going to be anything left for them. So that’s just kind of the way it works.

1:00:04 If you liquidated the company now, there would be plenty of, of, claim for the, the common, but they’re not going to do that. So, like, the way to look is measure of stack, champagne glasses at a wedding, and you pour the champagne in the top glass. Nothing gets filled below it until those glasses at that level get full. Right. And so that’s sort of the the liquidation waterfall, if you will.

1:00:27 The and by the way, they don’t get more than whole You know. securities get hold and then the debts get hold and then the preferred get hold and then what’s left over goes to the common. And so when I look at the capital table right now, I just pulled it up on my terminal. There’s 15 billion in claims above the equity. There’s 8.2 in in various bonds, convertible bonds, mostly now because they’re all yielding basically zero.

1:00:54 And then you have the preferred looks like another 7 billion there. That’s so whatever the value of microstrategy’s Bitcoin is, -15 billion is what’s left over for common stockholders at today’s prices. That’s like but then if you have to sell and everyone knows you have to sell back to the point earlier, are you really going to get today’s price for all of that Bitcoin? and there’s, there’s a difference in our philosophy or our, our conviction in bitcoin because I believe Bitcoin is going to double, triple, quadruple in price from here.

1:01:28 And that means that the claim for Is it easy to quench that claim. Right. Yeah. going to you’re going to you’re going to you’re going to fill up those glasses and there’s going to be, you know, Plenty left over 100% right I don’t disagree one bit. If Bitcoin doubles from here Michael Saylor is a winner. I love it. I believe is a is a no brainer. But that’s that’s where I come from on that.

1:01:53 So but you know, I, I, I manage a Bitcoin fund and so we’re deep we’re deep in the You put your money where your mouth is. A lot of it. Okay. Quickly. Just for fun. James Bitcoin end of year doom. Big oil end of year. price predictions. Just say I won’t hold it to it at all. I promise. that we resolve the war issue. And that that Trump gets his, his face saving victory, whatever that may be.

1:02:24 And I happen to believe that we’re not going to crash. You know, this k-shaped economy is real, and it’s just going to keep going for a while. I don’t know how long, but I. I think we haven’t. You know, I don’t I’m not a one of those guys is calling for the market to just fall apart here, so, so and caveat, even if it did, we know what happens. There’s the the fed and the Treasury are absolutely trapped by Congress. They have no choice but to print more money. But it’s just a it’s an obvious outcome.

1:02:56 You know, they printed $5 trillion in 21 to 23. They’re going to print a multiple that next time around. If we have a black swan, which, you know, I mean, I’ve been in this business for 30 years and I’ve seen, I think, 700 year events, you know, so there’s another one coming at some point, I don’t know when. And when it does. They’re going to print massive amounts of money. And what’s going to benefit from that.

1:03:20 That’s it’s that can’t be, you know, debased things like gold, silver, Bitcoin like they’re going to they’re going to just absolutely rip. And of course stocks will too. You know, companies that can’t just be copied. You know things things like the Mag seven and then went anthropic and chat G open and all those come to market and space that they’ll, they’ll benefit from the money printing.

1:03:43 Meaning just to make this absolutely abundantly clear, that they’re going to reflect a mirror image of what has been debased against it. That’s what’s happening and that will happen. All right. So to answer your question of year, we’re bumping up against or above the all time high again. And that’s just that’s what I expect for Bitcoin. Beautiful doom broke into your oil. 50 bucks. Okay.

1:04:12 Can you go for it? shortages are followed by gluts. And the war has to end soon. And in a world where the war ends and a gusher of oil trapped behind the straits suddenly hits the market, just as the supply response that is spooling up right now comes online just as demand is destroyed. I could see 50 bucks by the end of the year. And by the way, I agree with James’s analysis. All roads lead to the printer.

1:04:42 We didn’t even get into it. I do think that the end of US dollar hegemony is upon us, and all these assets are denominated in US dollars, and they’re going higher. Beautiful I love it, gentlemen. We’ll have to get you guys back again because we. It’s funny, we went so into the weeds and so in depth there that we, there’s so much more we could cover. Perhaps next time. So do embark starting with you.

1:05:03 Let’s do it. once every six weeks or so. The three of us come out and shoot the breeze. Okay, I’ll set up the next one, and we will get back on and see how we see how we’re doing. See how things are looking. Doomed. Where can everybody go to follow you? Work, find more, tell where all that good stuff is. Everything’s that doom. Broadcom we write about 90 articles a year. So we have to research, write edit, publish, promote and defend a piece every four days.

1:05:28 And then we have a monthly presentation for our premium tier or our Bloomberg Pro which is for the wealthy Bitcoin holders, probably the tier you want to slot into, the most bitcoin friendly, no coiner you’ll find in the content world. And it was a pleasure. Nathan and James, it’s great to meet you and, enjoyed the conversation. And, James, where can everybody follow your work? Likewise. Do and Nathan also good to talk to you.

1:05:54 And finally meet you, Dan Burke. So, you can find me at James, James live, dot com, just just like, do Morgan Substack and I write, the information just it only comes out once a week because it’s just me. But it is meticulously written and researched, and, and I what I try to do is simplify Wall Street like, like a simple walk down Wall Street. And give people an idea of, of what’s going on week to week so they can help manage their own investments and finances with, with stronger macro signal than you get from mainstream media.

1:06:32 So, and then, of course, if you’re a, an accredited investor and you are interested in bitcoin and bitcoin and just adjacent companies, you can go to Bitcoin up to, that fund and just, just write a note. We can jump on the phone and see if that’s something that would be appropriate for you, or not. So, but yeah, it’s always good to, to, to get on a show where we can actually talk about things civilly and have some differing.

1:06:58 But, you know, I think what’s important is, is for the listeners, is that it? It all the roads are leaving to the same place, and Yeah. that. And that’s the that’s the most important thing to get away from all of this from, from to come away with. If you enjoyed this episode with James Lavish and Dan Burke, please do share it with a friend and check out a previous episode with Alex Cranor and Simon Dixon.