Wen deal? AI. HPC. BTC. ETH?
Hosted by @BitcoinAIGuy · 2026-01-12 · Tags: GLXY, IREN, LEMURIAN
TLDR
The conversation was overwhelmingly bullish on AI infrastructure, especially IRN and Galaxy Digital, with speakers arguing that scarce power, vertical integration and hyperscaler demand create substantial upside. They also discussed Lemurian Labs’ hardware-agnostic AI software, Bitcoin adoption, stablecoins and defense investing, while acknowledging execution risk, uncertain margins, extreme stock volatility and pockets of excessive AI valuation.
- Speaker 1 argued IRN could become a triple-digit stock as additional AI data-center deals validate its transition from Bitcoin mining to a neocloud platform.
- IRN’s early acquisition of low-cost power, vertical integration and ability to build data centers were presented as durable advantages over asset-light competitors.
- Skeptical participants questioned whether AI data centers are low-margin, capital-intensive and insufficiently differentiated businesses.
- Jeff argued the Microsoft agreement may have been discounted as IRN’s first major hyperscaler deal, with future contracts potentially carrying better economics.
- Dara Raheem Zadeh introduced Lemurian Labs’ Tachyon platform, which aims to run AI workloads across NVIDIA, AMD and other hardware without extensive code rewrites.
- Lemurian claimed its PAL number system could deliver 20 to 30 times more work on the same hardware and lower AI costs substantially.
- Speakers viewed power availability as a major AI bottleneck, although Dara emphasized that software efficiency can reduce hardware and electricity requirements.
- Galaxy Digital and its Helios data center were described as undervalued ways to gain exposure to crypto infrastructure, power and AI compute.
- Bitcoin, stablecoins, defense, robotics, energy and AI chips were identified as long-term themes supported by government policy and global demand.
- Participants warned that IRN and similar high-beta equities may still suffer 30% to 60% drawdowns despite strong long-term fundamentals.
Speakers
- Speaker 1 — Led the bullish case for IRN, emphasizing power ownership, vertical integration, data-center execution, hyperscaler demand and potentially dramatic long-term returns. Also discussed Bitcoin adoption, Galaxy’s Helios asset, public-market volatility and AI infrastructure as a generational investment theme.
- Jeff — Moderated the discussion, described improving IRN price action and argued that cheap secured power, first-mover advantage and better future contract pricing could support margins. He introduced Dara and explored Lemurian’s implications for NVIDIA, AI valuation risk and private-market investments.
- Speaker 3 — Due to diarization overlap, this label included several contributions: skepticism about low-margin AI infrastructure, technical-analysis views on Bitcoin and IRN, and bullish projections for GDP growth and enterprise AI adoption.
- Speaker 4 — Briefly compared low-margin infrastructure businesses with companies such as SMCI and raised concerns about weak operating economics and competition.
- Dara Raheem Zadeh — Presented his entrepreneurial and investment background, explained Lemurian Labs’ Tachyon compatibility platform and PAL number system, and described its hardware-vendor, neocloud and enterprise go-to-market strategy. He expressed strong conviction in IRN, Galaxy Digital, NVIDIA, stablecoin infrastructure and strategic sectors such as defense and energy.
Notable quotes
- “I think markets smelling a deal soon.” — Speaker 1
- “But I, I think the time to power aspect makes iron a compelling monopoly.” — Speaker 1
- “I mean, as power becomes more constrained, as it becomes more of the bottleneck, the more power you own, the better position you're going to be to take advantage of that.” — Jeff
- “It basically acts like a universal translator, allowing developers to write their code just once and then run it on any type of hardware without losing any performance.” — Dara Raheem Zadeh
- “So we can go 20 to 30 times more work done on the same type of hardware, which means companies can run their AI obviously faster and a lot more cheaply.” — Dara Raheem Zadeh
- “I think it could be the best overall performing stock in the stock market.” — Dara Raheem Zadeh
- “It wasn't like an April moment, but I just feel like, you know, if you, you know, you got to get really comfortable with that, that 50% drawdown to play in this space, right?” — Speaker 1
- “When you have the CFO of Open AI leading the US government for some sort of financial guarantees that that should scare you and I think it did scare the market for a couple of days.” — Dara Raheem Zadeh
- “I talk to being an infrastructure business and we talked to all types of companies in AI and I just don't see any signs of us being in a bubble.” — Dara Raheem Zadeh
- “I don't think people have seen enough of the AI demand.” — Speaker 3
Transcript
Speaker 1: Yo, can you guys hear me?
Jeff: Yep, I can hear you loud and clear.
Speaker 1: All right, cool. Is your your buddy joining?
Jeff: Yeah, I figured we'd start out with some opening remarks and stuff before we we queue it up for him. I'm going to make him a speaker here in just a moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nice day in the market. I see some green. Bitcoin is 93. It's looking pretty promising we might break 100K this week. Yeah. I mean, seeing some Southside analyst upgrades this morning. I saw Aaron got re rated higher. I think that was HC Wainwright, you know, good stuff. I think markets smelling a deal soon. That's my opinion. I think earnings is what, a couple weeks away in February, not sure the exact date, but I, I, I would assume it, a deal gets announced, you know, the days, maybe weeks leading into that earnings call. We know we're in mid January, so you know, the clock's ticking. So I, I, I feel pretty bullish on iron. I mean, it could, you know, have no idea. It could be, you know, a, a triple digit stock this quarter or or next quarter in the short term, but long term. But my, you know, my forecast hasn't changed. Like I think this is a, you know, this could be two hundred $200 stock at the end this year, probably next year at least. I still remember like my forecast and end of 24 December, I was like, you know, I, I was trading around $10 and I was like, I see this as a, you know, 697079 dollar stock, you know, in 25 and it hit like 10-12 months later. That was achieved right around the, the, the Microsoft deal. And I feel like this is, you know, they're at an inflection point where they just pivoted literally a pivot, but just so to speak, right from being a, you know, from dominating that Bitcoin mining market to now transitioning into a, a neo cloud, you know, to, to being a neo cloud market and, and being a lesser known name. And I think 2026 is that year of, of OK, we, we set these ambitious targets. It's 3 billion + a RRI think they're sandbagging again, just like they did with mining. And this is the year of execution and, and, and, and well, every year is going to be the year of execution, right? But this is the year they start scaling that business, right? We start and de risking it with multiple counterparties and multiple, you know, strategies in in terms of Co location and cloud. And I think that's going to paint a better story. You know, we we hear about this blended approach, right And you know, it's really difficult to to really crunch those numbers if if those numbers don't exist yet. We know we could see this pipeline, we could see what they have energized. It's very bullish. I'm very bullish, but you know, I think the market like just the general, you know, market participant, I think needs a little bit more proof of work, right. And I and I think Irene's middle name is proof of work. So I'm very bullish on on this year. And I think this is going to be another, you know, memorable year for for the bulls. And yeah, I'm, I'm just looking forward to next few weeks.
Jeff: Well, yeah, I would definitely agree. I'm I'm super excited. I was, I was speaking with Butcher the other day and was obviously skeptical and a little bit deterred with well, I mean, I was happy that Iron was starting to get some buying power back, but it was it was hitting that like lunchtime top and then just crashing for the rest of the day. And so obviously yesterday was getting excited to see the price action again, but was was skeptical it wasn't a hold and was really was reassuring to see that it was able to hold the $50 mark goes and and surpass it Even so, was stoked about that. It looks like we're showing some strength today as well. While we're not up that much most things in the sector, I know Nebius is red today. Core weave last time I looked was red. So it's nice to show some strength and I will tip my hat to to Bitcoin AI guy. We certainly did not follow Bitcoins price action today. When Bitcoin started to go down, we did not follow suit. So another, you know, check mark there was really excited to see that as well. So yeah, tip my hat to to guy. I was I was wrong there. I will say though, in the past couple weeks, it did look like it was following Bitcoin more, but I will throw that, throw that thesis out the door because it doesn't seem to be holding anymore, which is great. Before we kick things off and I introduced my buddy Dora Surferstocks, is there anything that was on your mind that you wanted to kind of open things up with before I introduce our guest speaker? Hey, guys. No, I, I'm, I'm kind of off here because I am a little bit bearish on the AI data center ecosystem, but I don't have much time. I'm going shopping right now, buying some stuff so dark and talk. So sorry. What makes you what makes you bearish? Just curious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, probably I'm going to get a lot of pushback on here since, you know, many people are involved in the whole space. But a high level overview is that when you look at the best performing stocks or the long term stocks that would be like your Palantir, NVIDIA, these types of stocks, you know, no one is no one is who's invested in Palantir or NVIDIA earning was bashing the table. Be like, Oh my God, look at the fucking valuation, look at the cash flow, right? I remember when NVIDIA was a $400 billion company and everybody's like, oh, it's too expensive, blah, blah, blah, don't buy it. You know, the same is kind of going for pounds here. And then what I'm getting at is, you know when you want to buy a good quality stock.
Jeff: You want to look at what the business does which is particularly unique, you know, and doesn't have a lot of competition. So I guess kind of why I take issue, maybe I just have a misunderstanding of what Iron does is, you know, it seems as though it's a low margin business and I really take kind of issue with that because a lot of low margin businesses, you know, their stocks don't perform well. You could look at SMCI.
Speaker 4: Which operates at like a 2% operating margin or competes against like this Korean company that does that. So yeah those are my comments but happy for push back so I could be wrong so.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So one of the reasons why they transitioned, you know, from Bitcoin mining to AI is the margins are much better and, you know, investors are just treated better, right. The valuations for AI businesses you know, are are are are are higher than like the the P and then PE of the price of sales of three right for for Bitcoin mining. But I, I think they escaped, you know, in Peter Thiel's words, like a perfectly competitive business, right? Like I agree with you, like you don't want to be in a business where all the profits are competed away and, and Bitcoin mining is the most competitive business in the entire world, right? As soon as Bitcoin starts really running, right, you, you, you tend to see mining equities start running and, and, and price. But margins wise, you know, you're competing against not just the public miners, but every miner on the Bitcoin network, right? And, and you, you're, you're competing in this, you know, this, this brutal refresh cycle, you know, this ASIC hamster wheel, so to speak. And margins, you know, can fluctuate drastically. And it's, it's, it's brutal, right? Like for, for a very long period of time, access to capital was very restricted for, for the public miners. And it, it wasn't a great place to be for investors, right? And even with Bitcoin and the 100 KSA lot of miners were spending more, you know, to pay their executives to pay their machines. And, you know, they're, they're losing money. Some, some miners are still losing money after you factor in depreciation and all these those other expenses I alluded to. And you know, obviously you know, we know that AI has a much higher CapEx cost, right. And you know the Jim Chanos's of the world have have been very vocal about those margins. But I think you know, to to your point, we just need more time, right. I think as more deals get announced and you see different types of strategies, right, with respect to cloud and Co location, you're gonna start seeing some margin improvement, especially if you in a factor in that some players like IRN are are vertically integrated, meaning they own their own, you know, land power and eventually they're data centers, right that they're developing. I think that's the the key asset that, you know, gets, you know, misunderstood, right. It's not the GPU. Yeah, the GPUs are, are very expensive and you know, depending on no one really understands how to, to value them. Like what, what is it gonna, what is the GPU gonna be worth in, in five years? Is it a 10/10 or 20% residual value? But I think the platform itself, that the engine that generates substantial cash flows into the future that you know, how you typically value a business. I, I, I think that's definitely a misunderstood right. And I think it'll become clear somewhere between that 3 billion ARR to 10 billion plus ARR over the next few years. And that's when you'll start seeing a RE rating process where you know, it, it, it looks like iron is in a very similar market, hyper competitive, very low margin, but it couldn't be further from the truth. And, and obviously buys him a bowl. It's my largest position. But I, I think the time to power aspect makes iron a compelling monopoly. They're the, you know, they're essentially printing gigawatts of power. And every time you hear, you know, hyperscalers complain about not really complain, they're paying the price, but you're hearing, you know, CEO of NVIDIA talking about the limitations of power, right? And you know, you can't go into maybe it's my echo chamber, but every time you open Twitter, people are complaining about a five to seven-year wait time, right? Aaron's got 2-3 gigawatts like today, right? And if you, if you dig a little bit deeper, you could find some of the sites that haven't even announced, right, with, with even more gigawatts potentially coming online this year, next year. And, you know, I, I, I think if they can get Microsoft, they can get every other hyperscaler. And, and, you know, I think they could command some serious pricing power, which is typical of a, of a company that's vertically integrated, monopolistic, You know, it's not an actual monopoly, But I think on a relative basis, they do have an edge on, on the time to power aspect. And I, and I do think their core competency as a developer of data centers will stand out. And I think 2026 to 2027 will start seeing other asset light companies start to underperform, start to lag, start to miss their targets and, and, and create excuses as to why they're not hitting their, their benchmarks right in, in revenue or whatever. Very, very, very similar to what happened in Bitcoin mining over the past few years, right? If you've been paying attention, if you've been following me for the past few years, you, you know the story. And, and my hypothesis is that the history is going to rhyme, right? And it doesn't matter how much capital you raise. It doesn't matter. You know who backs you, if NVIDIA backs you, it's just physics, right? If, if you, if you don't have control, you don't have the power, you know, you don't, you haven't nailed your, your, your supply chain. It's going to be very difficult to erect these buildings and, and, and be consistent, right? And I, I, I think iron is uniquely positioned and differentiated because they've been doing this for, for, for so, for so long, 6-7 years or so, right? But that the narrative, what I'm pitching and believing is not priced in, right? So it is a unique contrarian take, right? And I think next, this year, next year, they'll start getting some more credit. But it is a long game. You know, these data centers take a long time to, to build out, right, 200 MW deal is a, a very large, significant AI data center and right, I mean, very few players in the market can, can support the Blackwells because of the power, you know, the, the power requirements and demand of, of these next Gen. GPUs. And, you know, I, I think this neo cloud market's going to be the hottest market and, you know, every day we're going to start seeing some developments, you know, not just deals, but like, you know, who can actually deliver. So that, that that's my perspective, Jeff, any any thoughts on that?
Jeff: Yeah, I mean you, I mean you pretty much covered it end to end. I have a couple things that maybe I can piggyback off of just from a a higher level standpoint, right. And you kind of touched on this guy. Iron was one of the is going to get a first mover advantage. So they secured their power 5 seven years ago, right prior to the ChatGPT boom. This allowed them to secure this power at a fraction of the cost that it would cost them today or their competitors would pay today, right? That obviously is a direct correlation to the margins that they're going to be able to obtain off of it. So that's one thing I think that is worth considering, right? A lot of this power has been secured, has been sitting in their pipeline for quite some time now and they pay ridiculously cheap prices. The second thing I think you should consider is if you're looking at it as a low margin business and you're just basing it off the Microsoft deal. One thing that is worth considering is the fact that this was their first deal with a large company like Microsoft. The hyperscaler, right? Being in sales, being in software sales for 12 plus years. When you break, when you're a startup company like Iron is and you're trying to go land a big logo like Microsoft, you never do it at full value. There's no way you can, right? Many times you have to offer that product at a discount in order to validate your company with a hyperscaler type company from there, right, You've gotten the validation that you needed. You've gotten the proof of work that you can support a client like that and are there are the and then are able to charge higher prices moving forward on future deals. So I think that's something that is worth considering the I don't know if he's even on here, so I might just be speaking to the choir, but so I, I think that's the the second thing that I would definitely consider right. And the third thing is that right, basic supply chain economics. I mean, as power becomes more constrained, as it becomes more of the bottleneck, the more power you own, the better position you're going to be to take advantage of that. So I mean real simplistic, high level things, but I think those are the three things that I would kind of piggyback off of what Guy was saying. Guy, give me one second. I have a new foster dog and he's going a little wild. I'm going to introduce Dara here in about one second, but I got to get him under control.
Speaker 1: Yes, Sir, if I see you jump back as a speaker, it is your concerns are, you know, essentially what the market is pricing again, right? So this is how you're supposed to feel, right? And I agree with you because we need more information. I'm not blindly trusting, you know, any company. But I think with more information, more time, the story is going to get a little bit more clear. But you know, that's the price you're as an investor, you have to pay, right? I mean, we're making bets here and if I think I'm, you know, my, my cost base is super low. It's in, in, in, you know, in the single digits. But if I were to deploy new capital into any of these names, right? I mean, how high can this thing go? It's already in the 50s. If my forecast is, you know, 80 to 120 for the end of year close or 120 to 240 for the highs, right? Like how like where would you deploy capital? And I would say right now, like right when the, you know, momentum is, you know, increasing, right, there's still some great uncertainty in the fundamentals with respect to can they deliver these AI data centers on time and be consistent. And what do the margins look like? Right? I, I, I, I, I'm willing to bet, right, if I put up with new capital, right like that, the margins will improve. The risk will get become lower as you you know, more optionality in terms of strategy, you know, Colo more Colo deals announcer, a Colo deal announced new, you know, credit worthy counterparties that are not Microsoft or seeing Microsoft, you know, invest further at better terms could be definitely favourable and ideal. But but I think one of the other aspects to IRID score value proposition is, is just that that optionality, right, to support different platforms, you know, and when it comes to vendors, right, they're not married to NVIDIA, right? We saw some AMD purchases, you know, maybe Amazon, right, could be next and or Google right, seeing a, a mix of next Gen. GP us, you know, so, so, so, you know, Irene definitely values that independence and, you know, I, I, I think we might start seeing that this year, but I'm speculating, right, But I think that optionality is not priced in yet. And once the, you know, you start seeing those deals execute and that story become more clear. I think it's a triple digit stock, right. So by getting in at in the 50s and the low fifties, you know, is a steal with respect to where it's going and you know, 12 months, 24 months, 36 months.
Jeff: Guy on top of that too, I did want to make one last point that I forgot to make and it's going to be kind of a good way a good segue into my body Dara here one thing that I think people are underestimating is the fact that NVIDIA is not going to be able to keep these margins forever right there are going to be like G Google's TP us are eventually going to cut into margins and force them to lower prices and they're going to be software solutions that come out that are going to allow the Kuda MO to essentially shrink a little bit. And I'm going to let Dara speak to this because this is a, a direct, this is, this is more for Dara and Lemurian, but we'll get to that in one second. So I think that's something that you need to consider, right? NVIDIA has built this massive Moat with CUDA today that allows them to charge extraordinarily high prices and obtain high margins, making cost of capital for people like iron extremely high. That is not going to last forever, right? And so we'll dive into that here in a minute. And again, I think that's a good segue. I want to introduce my buddy Dara, Raheem Zadeh. He is an Angel investor as well as an investor in publicly traded capital markets, has a lot of Bitcoin and and crypto experience, and he is working on a special project called Lemurian, which we'll get to in a second. But without further ado, I want to, I want to bring him up, allow him to speak and let him introduce himself, and then we'll get to it.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Thanks guys. Appreciate you Jeff. Thanks to everyone for for hopping on. This is my first time doing something like this. So super exciting and thanks for the kind words, Jeff. Basically, let me start with a quick intro to myself, guys. I'm a serial entrepreneur, born and raised here in in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area, been a part of some really exciting, been lucky to be a part of some really exciting things at the crossroads of crypto, AI and then really like enterprise software. My last venture was a company called Mesh Mesh connect.com. I was the founding revenue lead, eventually the chief revenue officer there for a couple years. And basically what we did was we built the plot of digital assets. So basically we built connections with all the major C Phi, D Phi exchanges and wallets throughout the world for the purpose of allowing seamless cross-border transactions using stable coins. That company's actually really crushing it right now. There's some huge round of funding going to be announced, but they're, they're a Unicorn and they have investment from companies like PayPal, Finance, Coinbase, so on and so forth. My latest venture, as Jeff mentioned, is a company called Lemurian Labs, which is a little bit more relevant to the conversation we're having here. So while everyone's talking about sort of the shortage of AI chips at Lemurian, we actually think the crisis that can solve a lot of the problems in AI is, is the software gap. So like you guys mentioned earlier, Jeff, the industry's been really trapped by something that we call the CUDA tax. It's it's basically a massive hidden cost where software's hand tuned only for one specific type of hardware. And this lock in, it really acts like a tax on global innovation in a way, because switching, switching to more affordable or more available chips usually means spending months and months rewriting all of your code to be able to be compatible with that new type of hardware. So basically what we've done is we've built a way to break that cycle with our platform called Tachyon. And I've actually shared a lot about that with you, Jeff, but I'm, I'm happy to explain more about that here. It basically acts like a universal translator, allowing developers to write their code just once and then run it on any type of hardware without losing any performance. In fact, gaining some performance as well. We just raised our Series A 30 million, about 30 million bucks written leading VCs like Pebble Bed, uncorrelated untapped ventures, Origin Ventures, really, really great investor joining joining us. Keith Adams joined the board. He was the chief architect at Slack for many years. But we didn't just stop at at compatibility with our platform. We actually reimagined the underlying math that goes into to AI. So we have an amazing research team and basically they developed a new number system called PAL. So you could think of it like switching from a gas, you know, gas guzzling engine to a high efficient, high efficiency electric motor. So we can go 20 to 30 times more work done on the same type of hardware, which means companies can run their AI obviously faster and a lot more cheaply. So in my role, I, I actually lead the international business at, at Lemurian Labs. So wearing many hats like sales biz dev, partnerships, Corp dev, things like that. Our, our goal is really simple as affordability and sovereignty. We're helping companies lower AI costs by, you know, 8090% by really unlocking the power of the hardware they already have. And so like you guys know, AI is on track to consume 20% of global electricity in the near future, But with companies like ours who are using software to tackle this problem, we can significantly sort of reduce that power demand. And so I think the future is really bright. I'm I'm extremely long on, on companies like Iron Galaxy digital, been a really a long time investor there. Single digits, single digits in iron. I've been involved in crypto and ETH since 2013. My last company, Mesh was cryptocentric. And so we really believe in a future where, you know, global commerce is, is powered in part by stablecoin infrastructure. And a lot of people here, whether you know, you're from the US or from other countries, I think people from other countries or have family in other countries, this really hits home for them a little bit more. Personally, I have a lot of family in Iran. It's actually, you know, obviously been in the news a lot lately. But for a country that has a sort of such instability in their currency makes it makes it really apparent or easy to see the value of this type of economy that's based on stable coin infrastructure. And so all it takes sometimes is like looking outside the borders of the US and it becomes a lot more, you know, easy to see the value of the type of things that, you know, AI and stable coins and and crypto can provide. So that was a little bit of a long winded intro of the things that I'm interested in, things that I'm working on. But yeah, let me cut you off there just a second, right?
Jeff: 'Cause there's a there's a lot to unpack. So I just want to make sure that everyone's able to to follow along on a couple things, right. So, so today, if someone is using Google GPUs right, it's it's not an easy switch if they wanted to use a cheaper AMD solution where the hardware may be as good, but the software isn't. So Lemurian Labs or and Tachyon allows them to essentially use the same code that they've built for NVIDIA GPUs and run that on AM DS chips, correct?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah. So I mentioned earlier this universal translator that we built, which is Tachyon using that translator, correct, You could, you could run your, you can run your models on any type of hardware without rewriting what we call kernels, which are extremely complex piece of software that is required to be able to use a different type of hardware.
Jeff: Yeah. So how I understand it, and for those who may not be familiar with the kernel, if you think about like you were going to go bake a cake, right, there's a bunch of different steps in which you would take in order to bake that cake, right? Turn on the oven, you know, beat the eggs, add in flour, whatever it is. That might not be the ingredients, but you get what I'm saying, right? Each one of those steps is essentially A kernel, right? And those kernels are specific now to NVIDIA GPU's. Dara's solution essentially opens the door. So there's a universal kernel that would work on multiple hardware platforms. If you guys are following along, for those of you who might not be as technical, Dara, did I misspeak. Is that pretty accurate?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: No, that's, that's right on, dude. That's right on. And I think, you know, right now we're starting with helping customers move from NVIDIA to AMD because we saw some demand for AM, DS, MI 300 series. But eventually, you know, we're going to move into other in demand ships like Google Tpus, like you mentioned, Amazon has great ships they're building in house with the Tranium series, Cerebrus Intel. So, yeah, I mean that that that's our, that's our thesis here at Lemurian.
Jeff: So would you say what does success look like for Lemurian? Would it be to essentially democratize AI, get clients out of vendor lock in which I guess would in turn have a ripple effect within the industry, right? If you're successful, Nvidia's Moat around CUDA is eventually going to shrink, right? That's going to have a pretty big impact on on the industry. Industry wide, they're not going to be able to keep the same pricing. Margins are going to have to go down for someone like NVIDIA and it's going to equalize the playing field not only for clients who may not be able to spend top dollar on NVIDIA GPUs, but give some of these guy up and comers like AMD, the Google TPU, the Terranium chip with Amazon more power and I guess eat at Nvidia's market share. Would that be fair? If would that be like?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: A it's fair for the most part, although I wouldn't say that you can literally linearly say that Nvidia's, you know, margins will go down because they have so many different business lines and products that we haven't even we don't even know about. Not to mention they're kind of the smartest people, you know, in the world, right, working at NVIDIA. I'm I'm extremely long NVIDIA as well. But what we can say is success for us looks like democratizing access to the hardware that enables really smart people in the world to build, you know, AI for the betterment of of humanity, right? Whether it's through healthcare, whether it's for the government, whether it's in defense, whether it's in law, whatever, you know, we need to provide these, you know, people with the right types of resources to build these tools that are going to help, you know, take our society forward. That's basically what successes like for us.
Jeff: Awesome, awesome. Hey, guy, you got your hand up. You're the host, man. You don't have to raise your hand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I mean, from a technology perspective, I think it's definitely needed, right? But from a, you know, finance perspective, like if I was Google, I would, you know #1 invest into somebody like you or just eat that cost myself, right? And you know, if I was a hardware giant like Google AMD I, I would just offer that solution for free right to the clients just to switch to my platform. You know, what are your thoughts on that? Like are, are there any large, you know, hardware manufacturers, designers backing you guys? And what are the threats there for for your business?
Jeff: Yeah. I guess on top of that, are there any other software companies that are competing against you in this space as well trying to do the same thing?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: No, I think you know Bitcoin AI guy, you, you nailed it right on the head. Our go to market strategy is actually 3 pronged. The first one is working directly with the big AI manufacturers, chip manufacturers like you mentioned, the AM DS, the Nvidia's, the the Googles, the AWS of the world, AWS has the Tranium chips. The second one is working with the Neo clouds, right? So Neo clouds typically have an assortment of vendors they offer on their cloud. We make it easy for customers to switch or or adopt new types of hardware. And then the third one is enterprise AI companies who are actually always our end user anyways. And so Bitcoin AI guy, you said that the, the vendors, the hardware vendors who jump on this and offer for free, that's exactly what they're doing. That's actually exactly what they're doing. They're offering access to our platform for free and then. Down the line, we'll be able to monetize that relationship with the enterprise AI customer who's our end user.
Speaker 1: So, so let me what was your pricing strategy like? You can't just give away your your software for free. Like how do you monetize your business model? If I'm, you know, AMD and I see a trillion dollar opportunity to switch, you know, prospects from NVIDIA to AMD and you know, I see your, you know, software, your company, right? What what stops AMD from just competing against you, right? And saying like, hey, like we could raise $30 million too, right, from our balance sheet and just, you know, cut you out or like, you know, giving you the, you know, the benefit of doubt and, and saying, OK, like you're, you're here to stay. You know, how are you going to monetize this, right? And, and what's, what's your, what's your, you know, your strategy to actually make money?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, good point. So AMD I'll use them as an example because you mentioned them and and they are you know a part of our long term plan. They are of the philosophy through their AMD ventures sort of early stage, early stage and growth stage fund that they like to to fund companies like ours who are, you know, up and comers in the AI infrastructure space. And so rather than like, you know, having their software team change course and try to build different types of infrastructure platforms, often times they will either partner with and best invest in or in some other way offer access to their customers to platforms like ours. And so that's kind of what's happening in this case. You know, I can't say exactly what the nature of our relationship is with them publicly, but I will say that they are super interested in working with companies like ours, especially when it comes to building 3 way relationships between themselves, us and sort of the neoclouds that are offering their hardware to to enterprise AI and users.
Speaker 3: The way that.
Speaker 1: We're I can see that like if if I was like on the AM DS corporate development team, right? I mean, I would definitely have like, you know, ventures team like evaluate solutions like yours right to, to just, you know, to scale the, the business. I I, I, I definitely get it. That's, that's interesting, right? I've heard Jeff say some some great things about your project. So it's nice to, you know, have you on as a speaker. Tell me about more your your, you know, you as an investor and you know how you're thinking about the public market. You know, heard some of your background on the private side. You know, how long have you been a public market guy? And, you know, eager to hear more about your crypto background?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, for sure. Been a public investor, public equities investor for the last, I would say decade or so. Started with some smaller money and you know, work my way up a little bit. But right now I'm really focused on on infrastructure, whether that's, you know, AI infrastructure or financial infrastructure involving involving stable coin transactions like I was talking about before. I think that's going to be much bigger than people, much people, much bigger than people think right now. And I think that sort of experience with countries that have unstable currencies gave me that sort of inside track a long time ago to see this sort of thing coming. So I think that's going to be really huge. Like I mentioned, I'm invested in a company called Galaxy Digital who is sort of like, you know, they, they have a few different lines of businesses, which are one of them was like a crypto based hold Co And they have this amazing ventures team where they, they have their hand in almost every exciting, you know, crypto project or infrastructure platform that's, that's popping up these days. And obviously they have the Helios project, which is which is looking to be one of the larger data centers in the US. It's an interesting sort of all in one play for me to get access to or exposure to stablecoin infrastructure up and coming exciting projects in in crypto and blockchain and then also get access to Helio's data center, which I don't think is priced in at all. So there's like amazing asymmetry there as well. I think the company's probably at a 10 or $12 billion market cap right now. And then you look at the needs that the country in the world has in terms of, of energy, power and, and just straight up gigawatts. There's, there's a lot of asymmetry there. And I think all of us would agree, right? That's probably why we're all here. We want to talk more about that stuff. Same kind of thesis for Helios applies to Iron slightly different business there that, you know, you guys have touched on a little bit more, but I, I can't get enough exposure to companies like Iron Galaxy companies that are, you know, they have gigawatts in hand right now. So that's, that's at a high level when I'm focused on. I also think when it comes to investing in publics, like sometimes the government tells you what to invest in. If you, if you look hard enough and, and, and don't overanalyze things like for example, right now, it's pretty obvious this, this Trump administration is, is, is telling you where to invest through their actions, right? And what I perceive that to be are I think it's a, you know, almost a dozen, less than and less than a dozen things, AI chips, space, crypto, energy, drones, robotics, defense, healthcare, rare earths and and self driving cars. I think would be would be a huge one as well. So I think to to a certain degree, like it's great to have your own thesis and, and try to predict what's happening in the future. But in my experience, you're going to win more by trying to ride the, the, the macro wave, so to speak. Invest in what the government's telling you to invest and they'll tell you that through their actions by, you know, what kind of laws they're passing, what are they saying? What are they saying in public? And that takes a little bit of work. But once you can figure out the right places to look for that information, it makes investing a lot easier, which, which a lot of you already know, I'm sure you guys are much more experienced investors even than I am. So that's, that's my thesis right now. I'm, I'm super invested in, in a lot of those areas. I'm not I'm not as exposed to things like rare earths and manufacturing, looking for ways to get exposure there, but definitely in the you know, and, and and space crypto AI chips and and robotics for sure right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we're the only community that is really talks about Bitcoin, crypto, AI, right? Like as a from the investor, like we're the largest investor community on X and Galaxy is part of our community, not at the company, but the individual members, right? Like the employees that that that worked there. We've got the largest Galaxy investor base as well. I've been following Heroes since like 2020, right, when Argo blockchain controlled that asset and and Galaxy got the deal of a lifetime, you know, acquiring Helios, right? And I and I do yeah, obviously I'm in the iron camp, but I can comment on all of them, right? Like I think the Helio business could be worth more than what the entire company Galaxy right, is currently priced at, right? So I think there's an asymmetric opportunity there. I agree with you and I, I think we're in this AI super cycle, right? So I, I've been in crypto for a very, very long time as well, like 2013. That's when I got into Bitcoin as just a, you know, not as a, a big investor, but just as a, as a user. I see the use case. I mean, even today in developed countries, you mentioned from Iran, you know, you look at the, the real right, like this is a developed, you know, oil country, right, with a, with a significant population of 90 million citizens, right? You're seeing a, a currency collapse, just like you saw with Venezuela and you know, and others, right? So I'm, I'm definitely you and I have a lot of similarities, right? Like we're very interested in AI infrastructure, crypto, you know, and, and that this decentralization component, right? Like when you said like follow the government, like my, my crypto Bitcoin. So I kind of like, you know, hesitated. But I agree with you. If you just follow the money, you follow the actions of, you know, what the White House is doing and Trump's doing, you could find some alpha there. I mean, I was at the Bitcoin conference. I was in the front row at the docks myself, but I was like, you know, a couple feet away from Trump when he kept saying, you know, the importance of Bitcoin. Obviously, it was a Bitcoin conference, but the importance of power. And my bags, like, felt a little bit heavy at the time. I was like, oh, shit, he's talking about my bags and my Bitcoin miners control a ton of power, right? So I got excited there. And now we're seeing some serious action now that Trump's been elected and all this movement to position the United States as a leader in, in AI and, and one of the, you know, the bottlenecks is power, right? And, and that narrative is, is starting to shift in the, in the markets where in the capital markets where the GPU narrative is starting to transition, right. And I disagree with you on the software being the next. I think it's like physics, right? It, it, it's that power scarcity and availability that, that the United States is really making an, an emphasis on, right? And in companies like Galaxy that have gigawatts in their pipeline, right? You know, are, are our favourites in the, in the mining mafia, right? You know, have dozens and dozens of gigawatts right, of power collectively energized and at different stages in, in, in their pipelines, right. So it's an incredibly symmetric opportunity there by but by falling with the government once. But at the end of the day, I'm a bitcoiner first. Like my, my story is, you know, I, I got excited about equities because of Bitcoin, right? I was 1920 years old when, when I became a bitcoiner. I'm 32 now. And when I got into equities, I was, you know, I was already a crypto guy and I wanted some extra leverage without being like rug pulled by shit coins, right? And then I, I learned that I, I could get rug pulled by, by equities too, right? And, and I've experienced some 9799% drawdowns holding Bitcoin mining stocks and crypto equities in 2020-2021, 2022. And that didn't really hurt me because I've been in crypto for so long and, and, and I've seen so many scams and rug pulls, etcetera. And I saw this each asymmetric opportunity where you can get some, some great assets at a, you know, more than 99% discount, right? You, you saw iron at a dollar, you saw, you know, clean spark at $2.00 marathon at like $3, right? You know, these, these stocks were in the single, single digits dollars, right? And, and now they've, you know, they've, they've, they've grown drastically just in the past, you know, 3 or so years, right? Like making 100 X 50 to 100 X whatever in the public markets is an extremely rare opportunity. Like typically those types of gains are reserved for like crypto, small market cap, you know, coins or in, in the in, in, in private equity, right? So I, I think it's an incredible time to be a public markets investor. And I think over the next one to three years, some of the Ogs in the space could could see a 200500X right since the bottom of that 2022, right? If you got iron at a dollar and iron became A200500 dollar equity over the past, over the next year, 23456 years, you know, you're not going to get a return like that. You know, it's very difficult to, to get that in, in, in the stock market, right? So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a Unicorn like opportunity. And I, and I, and I think fundamentally the, the story is getting better, right? I mean, you know, we're seeing the market mature, we're seeing the individual companies mature, a more sustainable business with real assets and you know, with real assets that could support various verticals, right? Like AI is one form of compute, right? Bitcoin mining is one form of compute, right? And I and I think the trend over a longer period of time, 1020 years is, you know, this isn't going away, right? People are talking about data centres in space. I'm not invested in in that thematic, but you know, it, it, it's, it's just, it's, it's an exciting time, right? And I think there's a lot of alpha to be mined just in the public side, right. So, you know, glad to hear your perspective, Jeff, Any, any, any thoughts?
Jeff: No thoughts. I was more so going to ask a question and just how your investment style differs from obviously when you're investing in private markets, that's a very long time horizon investment, high risk, high reward. I would imagine similar, similar plays when you're investing in publicly traded companies, you're invested long term darling, not trading, comfortable with volatility, so forth and so on.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, definitely, definitely in terms of public equities long term, I'm not a trader. I have, I have really strong conviction and I'm in it for the long term. And and not to say that, hey, if macro conditions change, I won't change my mind. Of course I will, right. I'm, I'm not, I'm not like gonna gonna light money on fire. But for the, for the long term, I'm definitely a holder when it comes to private markets. Like I, I honestly wouldn't recommend it for everyone unless you have, you know, a few things which are like, you know, access to like really, really great deals. Some people think they have access to good deals, but you know, the power law really applies to private markets. I think 20% of people get 80% of the best deals. So you have to have access to the best deals, You have to have access to the best investors so that you can invest alongside them because typically, you know, you want to follow the smart money. They are the ones that that help the startups, you know, get to the next step and succeed and graduate and and become huge companies. So I wouldn't recommend private, private market investing unless you have a certain number of qualifications in terms of access to deal flow, enough capital and then access to like a community that can help you make that due diligence decision. But if you do have that, it's an amazing way to build wealth. I think as you guys know, working at 95 is not going to is not going to get you, you know that that ten 9 or 10 or 8 or 9 or 10 figure net worth, right? It depends what you're going for. You want to have a nine figure net worth, You're not going to get that working 9:00 to 5:00. You got to figure out how to get meaningful equity and world changing companies. Private market investing is a way to do that, but so is public company investing. So that that's my philosophy. I'm trying to be really smart with private market investing, invest alongside really smart people, powerful people, and, and, and really invest in technologists who are, you know, showing certain characteristics in terms of, you know, the not just their, their technical skills, but people who are like naturally forces of nature, right? You meet those people, you know, right away, like, oh shit, like this guy, he's not going to fail. Like you'd rather die than fail. So that, that's kind of my thesis there. And I'm happy to talk about that more from other times.
Jeff: As much as companies then I would guess.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Definitely, definitely.
Jeff: One real quick thing on the private markets and it's more just a comment. Very jealous. You know, I was looking for those of you are interested. Dara's Angel investment fund is called Cursive Dara. If you want to post the the the company site on here, you can so people can take a look. But I know you got into Anne Dorrell. Do you have any comments on Ann Dural that you want to share? I'm I'm super bullish on them. That's like my top company that I want to see go public so I can get a stake of them. I think they're absolutely changing the game. You know, along your point earlier, I think government is telling you to invest in defense initiatives. Trump is going to keep pumping the military, keep spending more money. He's going to you know, for as long as NATO is alive right and mandate that NATO increased their defense spending and I think they're changing the game with how they're constructing their products much cheaper much more affordable, shorter timelines, different types of contracts. I I love their leadership right. I was watching losing his name right now. Lucky.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Palmer Lucky.
Jeff: Yes, Palmer Luckey, I was watching him on Joe Rogan. Fascinating dude. I mean, this guy invented Oculus. I think it was like 18 years old, sold it to Google, was a billionaire by 20, didn't have to do anything and then chose to to start up and dural. So I know you're an investor there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on there. And then I got one quick question for you on Iron and Galaxy after.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, definitely. I mean, not too many thoughts to to be honest with you, kind of speaks for itself. It's a generational American company. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm really interested in investing in areas of of national interest and, and obviously and drill is, is an amazing bet there in terms of, you know who they have at the leadership guys from, you know, Palmer came from I think Meta and then they have a bunch of leadership from Palantir, really, really close ties with the US government. They have something called a something of record, like a program of record with the US government where sort of puts them in the inner circle of of government vendors, which is an incredible place to be for for a company sort of they're sort of the SpaceX of the defense industry, which is an incredible place to be. And in general, I'm trying to increase my exposure in public and private markets to areas of national interest. And so, you know, if you want to know what that is, you can look that up a little bit more. But you guys talked about it a little bit more. It's like defense, energy, infrastructure, things like that I can't get enough of.
Jeff: Nice, nice. And then you know, lastly, I just want to I know you've been, you've said you've been in irons and single digits as well as Galaxy. What are your price targets for Galaxy and Iron End of the year, if you had to take a guess, Obviously no one's going to hold you to it, everyone.
Speaker 1: Also I mean also I would ask how did you hear about Irene in the single digits? Like, I feel like I knew everyone that were that was around. I think it's at least on Twitter. I mean, I know you're not a big Twitter guy, but I, I'm curious. Like getting into the iron in the single digits is like pretty rare, not just from a return perspective, but like iron was, you know, unknown, right? It was a Bitcoin miner, even though it never identified itself as a Bitcoin mining company, but it was, well, you had a crypto background too. So. So I guess you might have been more familiar with the names, just just curious.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, so that is the main reason. But also I've been a Galaxy holder for a really long time. Like I've seen, I've seen a lot of shit with Galaxy and a lot of big, big crashes. And so just through that investment, I've been familiarized with all the miners and then.
Speaker 3: I sort of whittled.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: It down to the ones I thought were the most high quality management teams. Aaron stuck out to me along with with Novogratz and Co. And then I think it was like, you know, April, there was that massive crash. I think we saw Aaron go down to the like fives for like 590. I follow it a little bit, 6789 and then, you know, I pulled the trigger and then I've been buying. I've been buying ever since. I've been buying all the way through. I even made a purchase at 50. Like I have a ton of conviction in this company in the asymmetry it presents. I think along with Galaxy 2, Galaxy's my biggest position, Iron's my second biggest position. So super bullish on both of those companies. We could talk about those for hours, but I think Iron is is poised to be in my opinion, the best performing stock of 2026 as long as they can execute. Execution is the biggest thing for.
Speaker 1: Them in terms of what like crypto equities, it's not really crypto equity or in terms of NEO clouds, like what do you mean best performing stock?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: I think it could be the best overall performing stock in the stock market.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I, I, I definitely agree Like that. That was, you know, I think 2025, we got a taste of it. I think 2026 competition might because we're already at like in the 50s, right? I mean, it was down into the low was what, 34? So what's your target? My, my high targets are 16240, but I don't think it'll close there. I think the 5060% downside volatility is not going away and like yourself, I mean, I consider myself a long term investor too, but with this volatility in this high beta names, I do this full time, right? So I think there are going to be some incredible trading opportunities, not financial advice, right, Especially if you if you have these in AI array, right? Like if you have have a significant amount of of my capital in Iraq, right. I mean, I, I, I think it'd be silly not to, to, to take some and, and, and trade a, a percentage of whatever your risk tolerance is. If, if, if this, if you know, you know, mathematically that these equities have A at least a 30% downside, right? To 60%, just just to get these 10/20/30 X, you know, moves to the upside, right? I, I think it's, it's just just physics and math. So I, I'm excited about like the long term fundamentals, but as well like as just using these equities as a, you know, as a trading business, right? I think you could multiply, you know, your position and that's what gets me really excited about the, the, the public markets for on the private side. I think you can make the case that being a public market investors is, is quite difficult, especially I mean, you know, even seeing some, some some professional investors in our community, you know, the, the, the seeing the price fluctuations every single day is is not easy, right? It can definitely fuck with your emotions, your feelings, like there are, you know, a handful of nine figure investors in our community with a couple billionaires right and up a hedge fund managers, institutional investors, and you know, we're all humans at the end of the day. Like we talk, we talk and it's not easy, right? Like just because you're managing, you know, a large fund or your own, you know, a family office, whatever the the case is like seeing a 20% drop in a day, you know, 50% drop in a in a few weeks. It's not easy, right? Like, you know, I, I think one of the advantages, you know, deploying capital and, and, and, and, and the private equity spaces that you're not getting bullied by the, the daily, you know, fluctuations of, of price, right? So if you're a like, if you're just an investor with capital, you know, that's one relief you have, right? That's just my opinion, right? I mean, I've just gotten so desensitized to, to price movements, especially like being in, in the crypto side for a long time and, and the high beta equities for, you know, 5-6 years that, that like, you know, I, I remember I, I joined a group chat with some iron Bulls and you know, people are getting really excited on the move from like, you know, 40 to 80, right. And I was like, guys, you know, my gut tells me it could drop 50% and I, I still, I won't, I won't lose any enthusiasm. And then I got like trolled in that chat. They're like, dude, if, if it drops 50%, it means like AI has failed. I'm like, Nah. I just, I just think it's just, it's just math, right? And, and, and I got greedy myself too, right? It's not like I, I timed that top, it bought the bottom. But I just, you know, I, I just, I just knew that I could handle that volatility without losing any enthusiasm. It wasn't like an April moment, but I just feel like, you know, if you, you know, you got to get really comfortable with that, that 50% drawdown to play in this space, right? So if you're a new investor getting in at 50 and it and it goes to 1150, right? Don't be surprised if it goes drops down to 7580 again, right? I think you need to develop this, this emotional fortitude to, to see these great fluctuations. It doesn't mean the stock is worth 75. It could be worth 2535450. But I, I do think the daily, you know, scoreboard can definitely hit, you know, seasoned investors, professional investors and especially like the tourists, right? And that's where the volatility comes from.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Definitely, I agree, man. And also I think we're at a unique time where well, first of all, us like data center minor investors, like do we the draw downs we've experienced I think is like, you know, if you know, you know, right, like that, that stuff is really hard to handle the first one or two times and then you kind of get get used to it and because you know it's going to come back, you know what you're invested in and so you worry less. I also think we're at a really interesting time right now in public markets where you're able to invest in these data center names that like basically private market valuations like these are, these are 10X potential across the board in my opinion. And if you look at irony, you have to deal with Microsoft, you have the, you have the software revenues. I'm looking at end of the year, like I don't think it's 60 billion, $60 billion market cap is, is is far fetched at all. As a matter of fact, I would be surprised if it doesn't approach 60 at one point during the year, which would be, I think, you know, something like AA3X from from where we're at right now. So I'm on board with you, Mr. Bitcoin AI guy. I think that's exactly where it's going to be around, you know, 150 to 200 is, is my price target as well. And I think that would be good news for my Galaxy Holdings as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I I just, I know these are not equivalent companies and I talk about Galaxy or iron right now, but just like I'm not, I'm not deep into the world of private equity, right? I'm not, I'm not that guy. But seeing valuations in this space for like open AI, What it what was the last valuation high?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Watering, dude, it's like it's, it's damn near a trillion at this.
Speaker 1: Point. That's what I'm saying like this, seeing the that type of capital right at that and people are pouring in like with some serious, I mean, they can afford, you know, these investors have a ton of capital, right? They can afford to hold a bag and lose money, right? The the average market participant in the public market is not that right. But seeing that type of valuation, when you see clear monopolies in the public markets like iron, in my opinion, not financial advice that are, you know, trading at a 8090% discount to where they could be based on future cash flows and, and, and just holding great assets on the balance sheet. It, it gets me excited, right? Like that is a true asymmetric opportunity in a liquid market. You could sell at any point, right? Like it's very difficult, but you don't, but you also get a discount, right, as a, as a public equity, right compared to public that can trade at A at a premium. But you know, you know, $500 billion, two hundred, 300 and 400, whatever the, the number is like there's a huge gap. I know the businesses aren't equal the apples and oranges, but seeing such exuberance and the, the level of capital already deployed, allocated and, and and and it doesn't seem like that train is stopping. I'm not saying I'm not suggesting private equity valuations and AI are a bubble by any means. I, you know, I, I think it could be a multi trillion dollar opportunity. I, I, you know, I think, you know, as a, as a crypto Bitcoin guy, you know Fiat is a scam, right? Like it, it, it could be a, you know, these numbers don't even make sense, right? But it's just, you know, if you denominate by dollars, right, like it's just crazy numbers. But seriously, like if you just look at the valuations and in the public markets, I, I think there's an incredible arbitrage asymmetric opportunity and you get the benefit of, of that liquidity, right. And, and, and This is why I hold these spaces. There's a community of investors that are really excited about this just from, yeah, just the basic fundamentals and even, you know, technical traders. I, I, I think it's a very, very fun time to be in, in, in this, in the, in the public markets. And it's a once in a lifetime opportunity, especially if you got an early, you know, man, I'm not sure what's going to happen over the next three to five years, but I'm, I'm just, I'm just excited about like just, just just to be here in holy spaces and on the Bitcoin side, right? I think very early on the institutional side of Bitcoin, you know, 2024 was when we saw those spot ETFs, you know, announced were like what, in year 2/3 of that adoption, right? And if this carries on to be AA30K girl over the next 10 years, you know, we're looking at A7 figure Bitcoin Fiat price, right? So I, I just think, you know, being in that being in crypto Bitcoin AI is like the right thematic to, to really be in right. And obviously defense and robotics are, are very compelling areas as well. It's just that I, I, I, I've been in, you know, in crypto Bitcoin for a while. So I have a a preference and a biased in favor of them, but I just can't. I can't imagine deploying capital in any other thematic right now. I think this is a very exciting and early time.
Jeff: Dara, I got a question for you. Like on that note, talking about open AI and I don't want to put you on the spot, but does I know obviously you don't feel AI is a short term bubble, right? Personally, I feel like everything is a bubble. Everything has an expiration date. I don't think it's popping anytime soon like like the bears do. I think this is a much longer, much bigger bubble that's going to pop, you know, maybe 5-10, twelve, 15 years from now. Something that's really you can't even put into your investment thesis. But talk to me as like somebody who evaluates companies like, does open AI scare you like the amount of money that they owe? Like do you think they're going to be able to pay it back? You know, what are your, what are your thoughts on that? Does that does that worry you for the AI trade in general?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, some of it does, some of it does. When you have the CFO of Open AI leading the US government for some sort of financial guarantees that that should scare you and I think it did scare the market for a couple of days. Having said that, we did see the USGDP grow by by a meaningful amount. And I think Elon came out and said, you know that I think it was 4%. And he said that double digit growth is possible in the next few years and then triple digit growth is possible in the next decade. So as long as we start, we keep seeing like GDP growth, the amount of productivity increase that we expect to see with AII, don't think we're going to see the bubble pop. And I don't think we're necessarily in a bubble. I think certain companies like Open AI, you could argue are overvalued or or not. I mean, you look at their recurring revenue numbers and it's hard to argue that, you know, they, they should be valid. They, they shouldn't be valued as high as they are. Like they're absolutely crushing it, right? But then again, they are losing market share quickly. So there's a lot of things that go into valuing companies and sectors. Sometimes you, you can't say that the entire sector's in the bubble because of certain companies overvalued. It's not that. My apologies.
Jeff: I got someone up to speak and I actually muted you for a second, so keep going.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, no worries. But yeah, that's basically my stance on that. So I hope that, I hope that's helpful, but I'm not, I'm no, I'm no hedge fund analyst or expert like that. I just try to make things as simple as possible. Look at look at look at revenue numbers, look at growth rates, look at GDP, look at productivity caused by AI, look at penetration in the private markets. And if you look at the fact that almost every single, you know, startup and public company alike is implementing AI, every single worker at these companies is implementing AI into their daily workflows. It's hard to say we're in a bubble, right? Like your, your refrigerator's going to have AI, your phone, your TV. It's hard to say we're in a bubble right now. It really is, especially as I, you know, work in the space every day. I talk to being an infrastructure business and we talked to all types of companies in AI and I just don't see any signs of us being in a bubble. Having said that, are certain companies overvalued? Of course, don't invest in those companies. That that's my thesis.
Jeff: Cool, cool. Dara, I know you've got to run here real quickly. I want there are two people who came up to speak. I want to see if they had anything for you specifically before you hop off. Can you? Can you hang out for another 5-10 minutes?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, definitely. And and before I hop off, love to connect with everyone here at any point you guys want. So just shoot me a follow. I'm trying to build up my I'm kind of new to the Twitter game. So shoot me a follow. Love to talk to anyone who wants to talk about making money in in public, private, crypto, AI, anything you guys want shoot me a follow shoot me.
Speaker 1: A invite to to Barry Mafia. But we've got, you know, all, we've got the largest AI and crypto investor community on Twitter.
Jeff: Cool. Yeah, I'll, I'll repeat them one after this. Real quick though, Dara, before you hop off, I want to give protocol a chance to speak and then we'll go to stock meetups. If you can stick around for their comments. I'm not sure if they're comments or questions for you Dara, but if you can hang out for release those, that would be awesome.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yeah, yeah, I got about 5 more minutes before I got to hop onto a call, so let's do it.
Jeff: Protocol you.
Speaker 3: Hey guys. How are you guys doing?
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Hey, what's up, man?
Speaker 3: Are you guys? Thank you for having me. For me, just a bit of about my background predominantly a trade up, right? So that's how everything started off for me since 2016, a day trade, swing trade started off with specifically the indices, right. So USNP, NASDAQ, the Dow, that's how that's where my expertise pretty much comes from. Then about in 2018, I started, you know, looking into crypto a bit and initially started trading it as well, similarly to the way that I would be stock market. And then I started noticing potential in those things, right? And I started building up sorts of my longer term portfolio and started allowing some of the capital that I've made from the day trading to start flowing into the crypto in general and started investing in crypto and so on. Now notably, for example, I've made a few TAS, one of them on my page being about the ES, the SNP, and about on the 4th of January or the 5th of January, I believe it was, we were trading in about 68186 or so. And I've called to the local bottom for that. And I did mention in my post, I believe this to be at least a short term bottom in a local range. And since then we've gone up to trade into over 7000 ish area. And then similarly recently with Bitcoin being at around 90,000, the lower margins of 1990 thousand, 203 hundred, I've taken a trade from that as well, you know, and I'm iron as well. As far as TA goes, I think there's an enormous potential there as well. But yeah, pretty much my background is in TA and I've had someone say that I believe it was the Bitcoin AI guy. And I believe, you know, this is just the start, you know, not just institutionally, but ultimately just globally. I think, you know, Bitcoin if but especially Bitcoin is something that at first will be explored very much by everyone. And I always say this, it's not about who will, you know, buy it or who will hold it, but it's more so about who will get the hands on it fast. And that's something that always go by. So I believe this is a perfect opportunity and a perfect place to start accumulating and positioning yourselves. Yeah, I would say those are just my 2 quick sense.
Jeff: Awesome. Well, thanks for coming up and joining us. You're obviously welcome anytime. We'd love to see some more of your your technical analysis. I believe I'm following you now. So yeah, looking forward to seeing some of it and I'll definitely be following along Stock meetups. I know you came up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll be.
Jeff: To chat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, I'll be. Yeah, I'll be quick. Yeah. So the main thing, right, So first of all on the GDP question, so we were supposed to do almost 7% in Q4, but because of one month of shutdown, we are doing around 5.4, which is pretty amazing. And with the interest rates going down this year with the new Fed chair coming in, I would not be surprised if we at maybe Q4 of 2026, we'll see a 10% GDP growth, which would be astonishing. That's my gut feel because of the amount of investments the big tech and everyone is doing into AHPC and data centers and space and rockets and etcetera, right. The other thing which I wanted to bring to the notice of this group is, I mean, I, I work in one of the big tech. I've seen a lot of people start using, you know, for mostly document retrievals, packs and emails around, you know, all this whole the the copilots, but only this year and maybe end of last year, people started really, really leveraging this into coding, right. But when once coding, even if you look at a lot of the coding agents like you know, cloud A and or cursor or lovable or Devon, they're also evolving a lot. So you'll see even more rapid increase in the amount of usage of AI into their day-to-day work life as well as productivity as well as coding. I don't think people have seen enough of the AI demand. I would I'm super bullish that 26 and 27 you would see a very steep, you know, ramp up on the usage and that will be a big catalyst for overall stocks like iron and other AHPC is my gut failed sense.
Jeff: Stock me to real quick, while we have Jan and Dara's here, I wanted to just ask you, I'm not sure if you were here in the beginning when Dara was talking about Lemurian Labs and how hardware is kind of advanced past software and the NVIDIA Kuda MO is preventing people or is locking customers in to specific hardwares costing a lot of money to rewrite software. Like what are your thoughts on that piece, right? Do you think, what are your thoughts on software kind of being a bottleneck and hindering AI from that standpoint?
Speaker 3: See, I mean NVIDIA still will have his leadership position for some time, but I think at the same time you see you know there is the the Pytorch and the Tensorflow, right? So I think most of the folks use Pytorch which is on on the CUDA and NVIDIA overflows. But I think Google is also building a lot of tools to ensure that there is easy migration for because 98 or 99% of the data science and applied science people who are working on this models, etcetera, they use the the Pytorch. But if they really have to get a lot of support for Tensorflow, then you have to migrate all those libraries and etcetera into Tensorflow. So that way you get the same kind of support when they're working on Tpus. So that is a bottleneck even for AMD if you have to because.
Speaker 4: How you work on AMD the, the, the processes and the NVIDIA process and the TP us are quite different, right? So I know a year ago that AMD will catch up eventually slowly. But you know, NVIDIA is not also going to lose its battle, right? So they will be, you know the ramp up from Google as well as I mean from TPU as well as AMD side.
Speaker 3: But the same time, it would be a fierce battle. I don't think Jensen will also try to lose his leadership position. But eventually, maybe a decade from now, you'll get into a stage like how it was in cloud, right? OK. When AWS came in, they were, you know, leaders. It took maybe a decade or two for Google and Azure to catch up. Finally, I think Azure was able to catch up. Google is still behind a little bit on the cloud.
Speaker 4: That's how I I foresee, but everyone will have their market share because this whole industry is going to have a huge shift. And there would be a lot of AI which gets used in in the robotics and automation and the and the battles, even golden Dome. There would be a lot of AI and the chipsets, whether they work on the on the machine. Maybe NVIDIA will come with with is a smaller models which can work on the robotics and whether as drones and unmanned vehicles. Yeah, I think this space is this next 2-3 years. I mean, the amount of investments and GDP growth will be phenomenal, is my, Gutfield says. Unless something bad happens.
Jeff: Awesome. Always love your insight. Dara, I know you're up against the gun here and have a call coming up. So wanted to thank you for for joining us. Stock meetups. Dara, I'm sure you guys could have a great conversation on that and that segment. Stock meetups. I put Lemurian Labs in the chat in the comments. I'm not sure if you've been familiarized with it. Really cool company that Dara's working on. He's an investor as well as wearing several hats within the company and working on the frontline. So I'm sure you would probably find it really, really fascinating. But anyways, Dara, thank you for joining us. Obviously you're welcome to join us any single time you'd like. We have this weekly on Tuesdays, so again, thank you.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Yes, Sir. Thank you guys for the chance to talk and nice meeting you guys and this is really awesome. I'll be definitely joining you guys in the future. Thanks everyone.
Jeff: Appreciate you. Good luck with your call.
Dara Raheem Zadeh: Thanks.
Jeff: On that, I just, I just had an opportunity to look at iron and I am oh, go ahead, stock meetups.
Speaker 3: I mean I would like you to, you know, just finish. I thought I have a question on Ethereum there I always hear about this Ethereum then there is a oral the network can scale it might you know, I mean is that a true statement or did the deploy changes so that it can scale up? Anyone has any idea around it?
Jeff: Guy, I'll, I'll throw that one to you if you want to comment on that. You're you're more of the crypto cryptozar than me.
Speaker 1: So what's the question? Is it a finance question or is it a technology question?
Speaker 3: It's a technology question. The technology question is I keep hearing that hey, you know, Ethereum is a little slow. It won't scale up for the international, the transactions, the load at which people are, you know, trying to think about is a true statement or not or did they or the Ethereum Foundation, did they deploy any new, new architectures which can help scale up the overall world transactions?
Speaker 1: That they really want. I've been crypto for a while, right? So I'm not deep in the the weeds of the technology, but I hear the same thing about Bitcoin, right? You hear shit corners like, you know, in poor, poorly managed spaces out here on Twitter, like you'll if someone that's about to speak, they'll say bitcoins going to 0. It's not scalable, it's a terrible money. It's not bitcoins, not decentralized. Look at all the centralized pools and that's Bitcoin, right, it's a multi trillion dollar decentralized, you know, asset that's now in in early stages of institutional adoption, right. That's the framework I I look at from a finance perspective, right? And if I hear this flood on Bitcoin, right, like there's, there's always going to be a new shiny crypto that is, you know, that solves the, the trilemma, right? Decentralized, like, you know, has a, has a better consensus. It's not proof of work. It's super energy intensive, right? It's this proof of stake. Like there's always going to be a new idea that's more scalable, right? It's more scarce, right, That's that that solves every future problem. You know that there's no pre mind, there's no rug pulls and it and it you know, there's it sounds really, you know, too good to be true at times. And most of the time it is right From my perspective is it's a financial perspective, right? It's still here, right. How many crypto assets are are still around? There's millions and millions of projects, you know, shit coins that are, that are born every single week, month day, right? Bitcoin is still here, Etherium is still here, right? I mean, does it, it doesn't mean that it's, you know, it, it's like the perfect asset to, to attack, you know, stable coins or, you know, smart contracts or, or be the Internet of money, right? Like it could be, there could be another new project, right, That, that can, can beat in that. But I think from a, from a, you know, a trust perspective, 'cause every, everything comes down to trust, right? In a capital markets perspective, you know, Bitcoin is the most trusted crypto and Etherium is a is you know, there's a close, I mean, not a close. There's a very far gap between 1:00 and 2:00. But Etherium is the next best crypto asset. And the narrative you're hearing on Wall Street and finance and the interwebs and Twitter is that tokenization is going to be the next big thing in crypto and Nexus stable coins. And Etherium is entrenched in, in the crypto markets, right? In the ecosystems, right? So it's going to be very difficult to displace very similar to NVIDIA, right? You know, NVIDIA has that tax that, you know, Jeff's friend is trying to solve, right? And I think Etherium has a very similar, you know, Moat monopoly in in, in the crypto markets, right? So sure, there might be something better. Etherium might not be the perfect foundation, but I think it is, it is the one that's most entrenched, most volume of, you know, with respect to the ecosystem. And then most importantly in in the financial world, it, it's what the institutions want, right? As part of this, you know, the, in terms of the asset class, right, Ethereum is the, the asset that's going to be used for, you know, what's it called just for, for tokenization, right? Like this is, there's a reason why Black Rock is really pushing that narrative. You're seeing the spot ETS with Ethereum, you're seeing volumes pick up. And, and I think from that perspective, right, just keeping it very high level, Ethereum has a place in, in the ecosystem, right? And obviously, if you talk to Bitcoin maxi's, right, they'll, they'll say Ethereum's a piece of shit. That's what POS stands for, right? Proof of stake, proof of that piece of shit. But at the end of the day, like it's just where capital is going to be deployed because if it's a, you know, has a place in the, in the ecosystem and the financial markets, right? And I don't, I don't think it's a Ethereum versus Solana type of thing. I don't think they, they really, I think they're different categories, right? Etherium has been around longer. It's, you know, that's more reputable and there's more capital, right? And Wall Street isn't the type or track traditional finance, right, even than the name 'cause they're not going to pick the most innovative thing. They're going to, you know, they're going to put their, you know, billions and trillions of dollars in capital into something that's going to be likely to last, right? I don't think Etherium is perfect. I don't think Bitcoins perfect, but I, I, I think in true monopolies, you want to put your thing not, you know, it's not, it's not just the, the idea that's like the first mover advantage like Bitcoin had, right? I think you want to invest in the idea that's going to last forever, right? You know, I, I, I have a significant bias in favour of Bitcoin because I think it's going to be the last crypto asset. It happened to be the first major crypto asset. But it, it, you know, I, I think if everything goes to, you know, the pandemonium breaks out. I, I think Bitcoin is going to be the place where everyone wants to store their value. I think Etherium solves a different problem, various different problems, and you could definitely use the theorem as a store of value. But you know, in the, in the short term it hasn't been a great decision. In the long term, you know, we don't know yet, but statistically, you know, Ethereum's been around for a while and it's, you know, they've, they've done a lot of great things. I, I don't, I don't think the track record is perfect. And the, you know, I would rather have, you know, 99% of my assets in Bitcoin, right? And maybe 1-2 percent in Etherium, right? I think in terms of risk, you know, Etherium should be a, a very small position relative to your, to 1's Bitcoin position, not financial advice, but I think there's an opportunity for a 1000 X maybe, you know, or more in that ecosystem. And Etherium has its place, you know, in the crypto market and ecosystem, right? So you know, of, of all the non Bitcoin assets and most bullish on Ethereum for that reason. And it's just so simple. Where's the money going type of answer And I apologize, not the most technical answer, but you know, I, I, I, you don't need to be the most technical person to make a lot of money in the market.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So just quickly on that note as well, right, So EF has had some upgrades, right? They had the EIP 4844 upgrade, which so our focus mainly on the fee reduction. But then there are other things, you know, and it's a work in progress. But ultimately, I think this is the important part to note here, right? And I think there are already major institutions, including governments that are eyeing some settlements on EF, some of which have already been rolled up. I've had UAE, for example. I don't know how accurate of an information that is. But essentially the thing with this is it gives the institutions or it gives the, you know, countries, it gives them, it gives them economic security, right, compared to, for example, some of the other assets. And I think that's a very, very key factor here as well to consider. So some of the things on EVE like the scalability of it is the way that it is, I would argue, at least by design, right? Compared to let's say something like Solana, for example, right? I think it's already much better than the traditional, you know, means that the institutions would be using prior to exploring something like EVE, plus it gives them the security, you know, of the of of it. So it's essentially two birds with one stone and this one, That's just what I would say.
Jeff: Yeah, I think there would be a lot more.
Speaker 3: Push because there is another bill which is going to get passed in the House and Senate probably this month or next and and the current administration is fully behind crypto. They want to ensure that there is a new banking with the crypto because the current administration always have a problem with the big banks how they were debanged earlier in the last four years. So with counter admission, we'll do everything possible to ensure that this crypto becomes mainstream as much as possible. So in terms of support, in terms of legitimacy or trust, I think there will be a lot of backing. My main thing was in a technical performance question on the overall the network. I think, you know, you answered the question. It became it became better. So thank you for that.
Speaker 1: Well, the market's definitely public today. I'm, I'm curious to see if the Bitcoin breaks 100K this week and if we start seeing some major, you know, movements in, in Bitcoin and crypto, maybe it could happen this week. You know, my, my bull case for this year IS17240, but that you know, once you know, Bitcoin historically, when whenever like the tourists die out, right, all the hype fades and Bitcoin just trade sideways for a period of time. You know, that's typically the best time to start paying attention, right? Especially when everyone's talking about AI and other forms of, you know, interesting technologies, robotics, automation, etcetera, you know, and Bitcoin looks dead, crypto looks dead. That's, that's the best time to start looking at allocating at, at Bitcoin in particular, you know, we could see insane movements. Like it doesn't take much to move it. I mean, Bitcoin can go from 94 to 170 in a in a month, right? The, the, the capital is there, right? You're seeing worse, you know, on Twitter, we're seeing all these developed nations currencies collapse overnight due to, you know, shitty governments, right and, and, and Fiat systems designed to go to zero. I mean, this is the perfect use case for Bitcoin being decentralized and, and a great store value. So that that's, I don't think that's adequately priced in the, in the current price. I mean, I, I think Bitcoin should be 170, two $100,000, you know, per, per unit, per per coin. And, and, and we're not seeing that it's, it's like a essentially a 50% discount to where I think it should trade. And eventually, like there's not going to be enough. You know, the sellers at sub 100,000 Bitcoin are going to get exhausted, right? There's only so many individuals, institutions, whales, early Ogs that are willing to sell, you know, below 100,000 before the price moves higher and, you know, the institutional flows accelerate, especially as the, the macro seems more favourable. And, but ultimately, I mean, the, the basement trade, I think is, is, is going to continue to, to go and over the next few years, decades to support AA10 year, 30% CAGR, a 20 year, you know, 25% CAGR based on power law trends. So I I think it's a very exciting time to start looking at Bitcoin to allocate and figuring out ways you want to accumulate Bitcoin, whether that's via your own proof of work, working a job, running a business or or using financial engineering or trading equity shit coins. Whatever you do right to cube a Bitcoin. I think you know, now is the time to start figuring out how many Bitcoin you want 10 years out, right. If you want 100 Bitcoin or 10 Bitcoin or 1000 Bitcoin in the year 2034 twenty you know or or you know 2036, whatever it is. You know now is the time to start thinking what if the what if the matches are correct right? What what if Bitcoin does fix every problem right? You know, how many Bitcoin do I I need to support this new, you know, new world, this digital world where you know, TI is melting AI is going to do all the the the tedious, boring in labour intensive work, right. Where can I put my wealth in a significant allocation in in which asset can I trust the most? And I think Bitcoin's proof of work decentralized, you know, characteristics appeal to to wide variety of traders, investors and individuals that are going to look to, you know, add Bitcoin to to to put their to their energy, right. So I think, you know, that should, especially in this community, you know, focused on investors looking for alpha. I, I think the best risk reward is definitely Bitcoin, right? I mean, it's not an equity, it's not a stock, it doesn't have management risk, right? You know, up time. I mean, it hasn't gone down right for since 2008, 2009, it's still here, right? And it's reached critical mass. So this is a great time to start accumulating Bitcoin and, and positioning for the next, you know, leg up in terms of like the short term, but in the long term, right? I mean, you're, you're, you're buying a, you know, multi $1,000,000 asset for under 100K, right? So it's so that in itself is attractive.
Speaker 3: Definitely, I think you know on the on your bull thesis and your target for Bitcoin, I think 170 even 180,000 is very doable. I think we could even peak to 200 and above as long as all the dots align and connect the the economic ones. You know the CPI and what the inflation is looking like. What will the rate cuts look like going forward? Who will be doing Fed chair and you know, what role will he play and significance will he play? And I think the other thing is, well, important to watch for is how the other, you know, global economies are positioning themselves outside of the US as well, right? Are they as well, for example, rushing to accumulate? Are they rushing to allow for more pro, pro crypto legislations, which I think a lot of them are, right. Like yes, the US is positioning itself what sort of to me looks like very similarly to the 2019 plus a lot of pluses, right, such as the institutional adoption that we have now and some of the other things. But outside of that in terms of data, right, if I had to draw a comparison, I think the 2019 for me looks very similar, right? And I think that, you know, Bitcoin and Eve as well, I think we could even reach up to 10,000. I think that's a very doable target as well. And you know, this isn't financial advice, but I would, you know, advise people just for educational purposes. And that would be to look into the ecosystems, right, like the ecosystem and explore what potential lucrative investment you could have over there as well. And, you know, some of the treasuries as well to look into those things. And yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then with like all these, you know, there's so many crypto things that support the major L ones, right. And then you have like this new market of crypto equities, Bitcoin equities, whatever you want to call them. I I I think most people get this wrong and which is why most people lose money. I think everything, the, the hardest game and investing, I don't think is finding unicorns or picking winners, right? I, I, I think the hardest thing is like sizing your bets right. And, and everyone, you know, struggles with this, and especially professional investors, you know, when it comes to these proxies, you want to own the thing that's not, that's going to last, right? Bitcoin's going to last, in my opinion, Etherium's going to last, right? And, and if you want to, you know, not lose, you should there's not financial advice. Again, you know, you want to have Bitcoin, right? You, you don't want to be 99% MSTRASST, you know, and meta planet, because those, those people, they all died, right? Like they, they went down 99%, right? But if they had 99% in, in Bitcoin, they'd still be in the game. And if they had a 1% position in some of these equities, you know, that draw down wouldn't have really hurt them. But no one does that, right? People get excited, right? They go all in, You know, they think they're going to get a 10X in a month, 100X in a year. It's just unrealistic, right? And then that that's like the perfect recipe for losing all your money. And if you could see it on on crypto sort of before you've even modified the algorithm, you know, all these Bitcoin proxy bulls are saying like they've lost all their engagement. They've been rug pulled by Twitter, but they were, you know, the, the, you know, most of their followers are rug pulled, you know, months before that happened in the market, right? And it's because they fail to size their bets properly. I think if you want leverage Bitcoin, then treat leverage Bitcoin as a, as a call option, right? A very small, insignificant, you know, bet right, that could have the potential to 100X or more, right? We, we, we have screenshots in our community, right? People are making hundred X returns in a very short period of time or more. 200, three, 100% sorry, 1000% gains in months years, right? Because they, you know, they invested in some of these Co options at the very bottom prices of the equities, right? If you longed, you know, some, some, some great call options in April of 2025, you know, there's some easy 100X returns on, on, on some of these contracts, right? But the problem is a lot of people, you know, were over levered and this happens all the time in, in, in, in, in the public markets, in crypto markets, you know, where their their entire portfolio is like 99% out of the money call options or 99%, you know, and some meme coin. And then when Bitcoin pulls back, you know, they lose everything, right? So I, I, I, I don't think Taurus always have their, their place in, in the markets, right? Like that's where the volatility comes from. That's how you get this outperformance, these 100% thousand percent moves in in contracts and equities is because people don't know how to size their best. But if you want, if you're a serious, if you're a serious investor, you know, that wants to stay in the game, truly build wealth over decades, you know, and, and compound your capital, you know, you, you're going to have to play the long game and, you know, you take asymmetric opportunities, but also you got to protect the downside. And you know, you're, you're seeing a lot of people tourists, right? You know, invest into crypto equities, Bitcoin proxies, so they can get more Bitcoin, but they ended up with less Fiat and no Bitcoin because they went all in, right? I, I, I think that's a, a tragic thing. And now they're back at Walmart stocking shelves, you know, driving Uber, right, washing dishes so they can get more Fiat and, and, and hopefully get some more Bitcoin, right. So I, I think it's tuition that everyone has to pay, right? You know, being in crypto for, you know, years, decades. So you'll see a lot of Ogs like how they get scammed, right? Like the, it's, you know, they lost their Bitcoin by trading shit coins. You know, shit happens, right? And in the, in the crypto universe, But now that we're in this institutional age, I think even betting on like the boring names like Bitcoin, Etherium are still great asymmetric opportunities, except you're not going to get that 10X in, in a month or a year, right? And I think, you know, tourists are still going to be tourists, right? Once you start seeing a major run on Bitcoin, a, you know, 100% move in a year or two, that's going to attract a lot of traders and tourists to, to some of these other proxies, right? And some, some incredible gains are going to be made and, and, and some of these equities and the same thing is going to happen, right? Like people are going to go all in on calls on some of these equities and they're going to learn a hard lesson. So if you want a nice margin of safety, you know, the, the best margin is like managing your, your, your, the size of your bet. And then the next thing is like, are you, are you buying in at a, at a good price? And then have you, do you understand the risk that you're taking? Is the company solid? Do they have a good balance sheet? Who's running the company? Those are, those are all things to consider when you're making, you know, a 1% bet, right? Like, you know, to, to, to look for opportunities to multiply your, your Bitcoin or you know, your to, to get in, you know, to, to, to, to grow, right, your portfolio. But most people don't do that. They'll, they'll just, they'll see a tweet from their favorite influencer and say, hey, I'm going to put half of my net worth into this one idea, right? Because it's going to the moon. I, I, I think most people lose in that situation. I.
Speaker 3: Think for me. I'll make a bold prediction here and that would be that Bitcoin and EVE and crypto in general I think will outperform all the assets in the near term to long term. I think because we've seen you know the precious metal they've had their run in the stock market has its run multiple times. And by no means am I saying that those things have stopped out and will not see any more uptight right. I do believe that we still have more upside left in the stock market and in precious metals as well, but I think it ties well in with what you mentioned earlier. And that was, you know, when you start noticing that the interest has died down and you start seeing all these influences on AG, you know, calling for a 30,000 Bitcoin, 40,000 Bitcoin, you know, and that we will have the biggest global crash. I think this is exactly like you mentioned. When the attention dies down, that's when it's key and important to pay attention.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's even a step further, right. So you know, when there's blood in the streets, that's when the the bears get loud and say bitcoins going to 30K right. But I think the step after that is more exciting when they stop talking about Bitcoin going to 30 K because they've moved on. That is the time bitcoins at right now. I, I think the bears, you know, don't care to talk about the Bitcoin. Bears don't care to talk about Bitcoin when A30K, but it's because they're more, they'll get more engagement talk about how AI is a bubble, right? They've moved on to a bigger fish. And when everyone's talking shit about AI being a bubble and being distracted by everything else in the world, that's, that's when Bitcoin is exciting, when no one is talking about it, when there are no bears, when the tourists have been wiped out, when the, the, the Bitcoin influencers are, are being de platformed and all their engagements being pulled. That is an optimal time to strike and, and stack stats and, and, and allocate to Bitcoin, right? As a, you know, as a defensive strategy, but also as a growth strategy, right. So I, I, you know, I'm looking to add more Bitcoin this year and I, I, I feel emotionally underweight Bitcoin relative to AI and, and, and I don't think there's going to be a perfect balance, but where I want to be in 1020 years, the answer to me is clear. I need more Bitcoin.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, ultimately that is something that is like a safe haven with the Best Western award both at the same time relative to some of the other investments, right? So you can go and invest your money somewhere else and pull it relatively safer in quotation marks. But then in return, you will not have the gains that you would have investing into something like Bitcoin, right? But I think also, and I would encourage people to look into the ecosystems like I mentioned earlier, right? Like you don't have to invest if you don't feel comfortable, invest in Bitcoin, invest in beef Eve, sure, but look past it, right? Land, crypto, land blockchain. I mean, trillions will start flowing on chain like we've started, we've started to hear now often and we already see some of those transitions. A lot of things will be on chain, right? And it's important to learn. Like for example, for me, I had a rule, right, initially when I got into crypto and I made some decisions and I did get banned at times. And that was to never, for example, touch any meme coins because I got banned, right? To my surprise, you know, recently I got into one, right? I saw an extreme upside, the potential, right, one that I think would be long term. And I looked into it and I invested and probably will be the last one that will invest and I'm planning on to hold it for quite a bit, right? I will not mention the name. I don't want you to think that I'm shilling. I'm not affiliated with it in any type of way. But I think it's important to land past just Bitcoin and investing in Bitcoin. Look deeper, land more. I think there's an enormous amount of opportunities that will present itself and then need to long term, especially in the crypto space. And it would be very important to not important, sorry, I can't say that. But I would advise people to try and seek if they can somehow capitalize on that opportunity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. But the, the, the thesis I have is like, you know, the people get excited very easily. You know, you have your average like Gen. Z, you know, new that gets really excited about some shit coin that's $50 million market cap. They think they're going to be a millionaire by investing the entire net worth of, you know, 2 slices of avocado toast and some Diet Coke, right? And they think that's going to take them to the moon. But then they get rug pulled, right? The message I have is take risks, but take calculated risks where you, you, you make small bets and then you protect your capital, but also your positioning for growth, right? So I think the 1% allocation is, doesn't sound sexy if you only have 100 bucks, you know, putting, you know, putting a dollar into an idea to get, you know, back to $2.00 doesn't seem sexy at all. But if you have more capital, it, it could, it could mean something, right? It could mean you can get some more Bitcoin, more Ethereum, buy house, right? Get get the asset that you want to accumulate by by taking these these risks, right? Or these bats with some great asymmetry, right. But most people don't don't get that in the beginning. So they have to pay the tuition, they have to get hurt, they have to burn themselves. They have to you have to lose money, right? Like there's no escaping pain, right. And any high beta idea you but I don't think I've met any serious investor that hasn't lost money early on, right? Pretty much every person, any individual that has a significant amount of Bitcoin they've all been scammed. You know, they've all been you know seen their close friends get hacked right. They've, you know, they've, you know, they're playing, they feel like they're playing catch up because you know, they, they, they might have had 10,000 bitcoins, but now they only have 1000 because you know, a factor is out of their control or even in their control by getting too greedy by by trusting the wrong individuals or companies being in the wrong communities, right. So I think you know, the the entire game for investing crypto stocks, whatever it is, is managing your risk and, and, and controlling well, you can control which is your, the size of your, your bets. And you know, the more crypto proxy shit coiners. I, I, I, I see, I just know. I can just smell the fact that they, they don't own enough Bitcoin and me myself, I, I, you know, someone who's an advocate of Bitcoin and, and, and AI equities. I, I feel like I don't even have it on Bitcoin, right. So, you know, I, I think, you know, too many people get excited about short term ideas and metrics like Bitcoin per share. I think, you know, these are, these ideas are, you know, sound good in, in the short term, but really they're long term ideas, right? Like you want the the companies you invest in to accumulate more capital, more assets? Over a long period of time, but in the short term, people put too much emphasis on very on, on these metrics and overvalue them, right? I, I think Bitcoin per share was a bubble right in, in the short term, but over a long period of time, I think companies that can grow their enterprise value and you know, and accumulate Bitcoin over a, a decade, 2 decades are going to be winners. But they're already going to be in a position where they have billions and billions of dollars in capital because they have a great business, because they did the right, because they made the right investments, because they had the right strategy. And I think it's a natural adoption of, of, of, of Bitcoin right over a long period of time. But that's not sexy, right? That's not going to get you 100 X in a year. But yeah, I mean, that's that's how I feel.
Speaker 3: I'm not known this for an AI guy, just I want to thank you guys for having me. I'll hope to join you guys again sometime. And yeah, thank you guys. It was nice talking to you guys.
Jeff: Thanks for joining man. We always love hearing from new people and especially when when they're as intelligent as you. So please, please enjoy. Join us whenever you'd like, man.
Speaker 3: Absolutely will do. Thank you guys. Thank you. Speak to you guys.
Speaker 1: Soon, So Mara's no longer the largest Bitcoin miner in the public markets bit.
Jeff: You just took the words out of my mouth. Where's that goddamn?
Speaker 1: Pigeon now pigeon like you know, I was reading some comments. Some guy was like, what's Mara #1 in now? And I and my I, I answered we.
Jeff: Fucking assholes, that's their.
Speaker 1: Number no, no, no, they're number one in SG and a like they have, they have like the the highest expenses, management expenses, selling and general administration expenses, right? They'll spend the most in conferences, right? They'll they'll spend a lot on their management teams with no result. But I, I, you know, I have a contrarian take on, on, on marathon, right? I think they're ripe for a takeover, right? If you can find a group or just the board just fires the CEO and hires new leadership, I think that could their assets could be attractive and, and, and produce some serious free cash flow, right? All you got to do is like fire all the managers, right? Hire a competent CEO that's paid fairly, right? Focus on cash generating opportunities, monetize the gigawatts, monetize the the Bitcoin huddle strategically, you don't have to sell. You don't have to market sell, you know, 50,000 Bitcoin in, in one, you know, in one day. I think if you spread that out as Bitcoin goes from, you know, 170 to 300,000, I think there's definitely an opportunity for, for Marathon to improve and, and so their shareholders get some relief, right. I think a $30.50 dollar, $60.00, maybe $80 depending on how great this the new CEO is going to be. I think the current CEO is, you know, I think I think that definitely needs to be replaced. Clearly incompetent, you know mercenary that has made hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars extracting value from from their shareholders. You know, and I I question the integrity of their board as well, you know and and and and and seeing their vocal shareholders on Twitter like the lowest IQ right. It's a it's a great representation of where Mar is a company right. I think everything is I think the market is correct and in the short term and and has been in the long term like they've destroyed trust and and shareholder value and blocking shareholders from speaking. I, I think it's a tragic case, but you know, if you just look at the, if you just use logic, you can determine that there's definitely going to be a new CEO very soon, but it doesn't make Mara a great investment. I still believe in proof of work that you have to not only have a great strategy, but you have to have a great delivery or execution against clear goals, right? KP is whatever you want to call it and be consistent over a long period of time, which historically none of the Bitcoin, 99% of the Bitcoin miners have it done in the public market. So I think it is a great takeover opportunity. I'm not investing in them, right. I think Mara was very attractive at $6 and, and six years ago, you know, that's, that's what got me into these these markets. But I, I do think like as a contrarian, you know, when everyone's telling me, why are you talking about Mara? That's when I like to start paying attention to the losers, right? Like I'm not allocating A percenter even, right? I'm, I'm just eager to see change, right? And maybe with new management, there could be an opportunity to, to, to, to double, triple, quadruple your money. But it, it might not outperform Bitcoin over a long period of time, right? Or even a short period of time. So it could be A and asymmetric opportunity at once, you know management changes.
Jeff: The other thing I wanted to say too, I mean iron really hip thrusted through power hour. We just closed over $53 today, really strong momentum, 40 million in volume about I don't know, 2530% over our average volume. Looks like the buyers are back and it's bull season again, baby, I'm, I can't, can't tell you how happy I am. I'm almost unable to sit at my kitchen table at the moment just for bodily reasons because I'm so happy. But yeah, man, I, I think, I think this run is going to last. I the fact that we didn't like have our 11 AM crash during lunch is extremely bullish. I don't know if this is kind of a buy the rumor type situation and people are expecting a deal when deal, but.
Speaker 1: Well, look, I mean, it's not, it should be expected, right? If you just look at what Mark Zuckerberg said, right, he wants hundreds of gigawatts. Well, where's that going to come from today, right? I mean, there's, there's, it's just game theory, right? Very, very. You don't need to be.
Jeff: Note though, Nabius is down like a lot of the other neoclouds are down today like we were.
Speaker 1: I don't think it really matters. I think they're all going to do. I mean, obviously I'm an iron Bull, right? So you know, it's easy to make fun of all these other players relative to Iron, right. But I think at the end of the day, if you, if you're controlling gigawatts, there's gonna be some sort of deal, right? It's just if, if there, if there's only 10, I'm, I'm just throwing random numbers out. These are, these aren't accurate numbers. If there's only 10 gigawatts right today and there's a demand for 100 gigawatts today, even if you're a shitty, you know, CEO with a terrible track record, you're gonna you're gonna nail something, you know, so I, I think the demand is aside is getting more clear. And I think if I was Black Rock Jane St. you know, very large institution, right. I would try to trick people like you, Jeff, retail investors to, to, to dump their neediest core weave and, and, and tank the price 6070% so I can accumulate those names. And I've already accumulated iron in, in the threes, fours, fives, 10s seventeens long ago, right? Obviously I'm bullish, right? I think this is a triple digit stock in the short term, but you know, we're in the public markets where this is very heavily manipulated, right? I I wouldn't trust the short term price action of the the lesser names, right? Yeah, I think iron should be $150.00 today, but that doesn't mean Nibia should be down 50, sixty, 70%, right? I think that those tourists, just like the Bitcoin tourists, Bitcoin equity tourists are going to learn a lesson, right? A lot of the people are just buying these names because some, you know, some, some dude on Twitter or NVIDIA, whatever, you know, they're just chasing a name, chasing a narrative without deeply understanding the the fundamentals of of the business in the market. And I think over a longer period of time, the market reveals the truth, right? So maybe Nebus does deserve to be a $300 stock, right? And the price action you're seeing today, you know, is what the market makers, what the institutions want, you know, you to believe like that, that it should be an inferior stock that you should dump it so they can accumulate more shares, right? I mean we've already experienced that with iron several times, especially in the move down from 15 to 5, right, the institutional interest or holders ramped up so.
Jeff: No, I wholeheartedly agree with you. The only point I was trying to make was it's just rare to see iron very green on a day where the entire neo cloud sector is pretty red. That was the only, I wasn't trying to draw any like further conclusions or, or go down that route. I was just saying it's, it's, it's a bit strange, right? Like typically if the neo cloud sector or if iron is green, the neo cloud sector is usually green with it. Obviously, there are days where that doesn't always align, but I would say 70 percent, 80% of the time, you know, Iran's color for the day is going to resemble the neocloud sectors as well. So I was just just pointing that out. I mean, they're down pretty.
Speaker 1: Considerably, It could be a wide variety of factors, right? I think it could be Bitcoin that's pumping, right?
Jeff: Which is yeah, now over 94,000.
Speaker 1: Right, that's one factor it's an easy factor right to to assume, but I also think like it's not prices of Bitcoin miner right. So I don't think Bitcoin is actually I think it's just a coincidence that Bitcoin is pumping and iron is pumping. I I, I think the market is bullish 'cause you're seeing some other smaller market cap players in the space like with like pure, you know, smaller players like you know, edge mode and new era digital like they're up like over 20%. You're seeing, Yeah. So you're seeing.
Jeff: Galaxy's up a good amount, probably following iron. Maybe they were listening to our conversation earlier and we were talking Iran and Galaxy and those that's the reason why they're they're leading the bigger neo clouds or I'm sorry, bigger miners.
Speaker 1: I think it's just a macro and catalyst for the market. I think power is becoming a clearer narrative, a trade on right, and so development pipelines are getting, you know, are increasing in in, in value, right. Investors are willing to speculate on on on on power that isn't available yet, but also like proven winners, like I read. I mean, I, I think there's, mark has definitely validated the demand side, right? And you know, I think there could be a, a deal that's imminent. But even if there wasn't a deal that's imminent, I, I think it, it, it should be a, you know, rated much higher. I think it should be at least in the 80s today, right? And inching towards a triple digit price in in the short in the short term, right, I think.
Jeff: I mean, yeah, you could argue that IRN's assets a lot like physical assets today, right? They're land. They're the data centers that they already have. The the GPU's that they already have accumulated are probably worth it more than what their market cap shows.
Speaker 1: And, and like the, you know, just, you got like the, the market isn't giving them credit on, on, on what they're future position is going to be right. So that, that tells me like really the, the major move hasn't happened yet. And I think you give iron enough time, they're going to continue hitting their targets, right? So that's what they've done historically. Once they have that, you know, their business update on their earnings call. I wish they, they still had their monthly update, but you know, seeing this market in the past 5-6 years, you know, my gut tells me that they're ready to surprise. And yeah, I, I, I think, I think we could see a deal in next few days, few weeks. And yeah, I mean, more and more analysts on Wall Street are are guiding up or targeting up their targets for for iron, so I'm glad.
Jeff: Freight that moved from a sell to a buy today and like doubled their price target.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was HC Wainwright.
Jeff: Real quick side note, just curious if anybody else in the chat or in the spaces is having an issue with X chat on mobile? For some reason I got kicked out of like my frond subscriber group chat and then I also like any message that I get on mobile is like blacked out. It's very strange I, I, I tweeted at Elon to see what what the hell was going on, but I'm not sure if this is specific to me or if anybody else is having issues on mobile as well. I mean, give me a thumbs up if you're experiencing that on mobile. Would love to know if it's a wider spread issue if.
Speaker 1: It's just, I think, you know, there's a new chat feature that I, I, I mean, I created the My Mafia chat. We've got 328 people in there. We had 333 people, which is like, it seems to be a glitch too, for the benefit of me, right? Like I think I have the largest group chat on Twitter right now, but it's still still very glitchy. We have people that can't get any messages at all. But yeah, it seems like the limit for group chats is like 300 or 256, right? And somehow, like, I, I had 333 people at one point in, in the group chat. So I asked Brock too. I was like, hey, like, what do I like, what's the limit? How do I have over 300 people in this chat? And they're like, oh, it's impossible. Like the limit's only 256. So I think there's, you know, excess folder glitches. I'm surprised this space has gone on for as long as it has, honestly. Like usually, typically by now, we've we've had to, we would have to restart the space 3-4 times, right? So at least at least spaces is working, but chats seem to be getting rug pulled. And the common denominator is we, we, we need more compute to, to just to function right. So I think we're in the right area, in the right thematic when you know, things that should normally work with basic functions aren't working right. And, and clearly you're hearing people that use LLMS and other AI tools struggling right with their functionalities.
Jeff: Yeah, no, I, I this is just like weird. Like I'm getting my DMS. It's just they're like where the bubble would be. It's like all black. It's very and like where I type in messages, it's like all black. It's only on mobile though. It's like it's fine for me like on on desktop. But yeah, very strange. I just wasn't sure if it was a specific issue that I'm having. I, I always seem to get like weird bugs like and it's specific to me for some reason. And then it was weird too, like I tried like deleting the app and re downloading it guy. And when I re downloaded it on mobile, it booted me from Franz's subscriber group chat. Unless Franz just had enough of my antics And it's just like, fuck this guy. He's out, he's gone like that. That's very possible. But yeah, no, it was, it was just, it was very, very strange. So thanks, thanks for those who put the thumbs up there. Makes me feel a little bit better that it's not specific to, to just me, but yeah, man, I, I'm like, I couldn't be more excited about iron right now. Like it feels so good to like ride through all of like the entire shitstorm. Like, and it was raining shit for a while. Like, I never lost faith. It's obviously sad to watch money burn like paper gain. I mean, they were paper gains at the end of the day. But yeah, man, I just, I, I'm grinning from like ear to ear at the moment. I didn't expect us to have such strong price action until a deal was announced. I was talking to Butcher about this. I just, I felt the stock was kind of stale, right? Like we were like almost like the Cinderella story last year. We were the market darling. And then everyone wanted to shit on us. And when it, when it started raining, it, it was pouring shit. And I thought it was going to take like something, I thought it was going to take a tangible event for us to overcome that. But it seems like like the buyers are back, baby, and we're going to the fucking moon again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's always, I felt the same way since it was $510, right. Like I was like, this is going to be, I mean, I already I already mentioned it, but if there's new new listeners, but when it was a $10 stock, I was like, it's a $6979 stock. Now that it's a $50 stock, I'm like, this is a $500 stock that that clearly no one the market isn't pricing any short term catalyst, right, especially on not pricing and all the optionality it has in the future. But once it's more clear, right that, you know, I don't it's going to be a triple digit stock in the one 20s one 60s low 2 hundreds when people are going to start talking about the narratives that we're talking about today. Like I remember, you know, before the Microsoft deal, we're talking about this stuff, right? And and now you're seeing some larger accounts talking about the same things we were talking about a year ago, right. So I think history is just gonna repeat itself. And I like the fundamentals are definitely gonna line and we're not just, you know, spitting out random things, but once more time passes, you know, and they deliver on their, you know, the revenue targets, people are going to get very bullish again. I, I, I think today is just another day, right? Like I only checked the price a couple times. Yeah, it's a. It's a nice move, but. You know, wake me up when you know, Iron's $160.00, right, that that's when I'll start to feel like the the bulls are back. But again, you know, even if we're in that range, expect more manipulation, expect more blows to the face, right? This 5060% drawdowns definitely not going away, 3040% get used to it. This is the price to pay for you know, 5-10 X right like this is in the public market. That's an incredible opportunity. I.
Jeff: Hear you I hear you small cap. I see you're up. Always love hearing from you. What's on your mind, What's going on, guys? Great audience today. I see a lot of the the mining mafia guys in here, some followers, Mark little mafia, those guys are on top of everything. But yeah, nonetheless, just as far as Irene, strong close today. Strong, really strong close today. Strong yesterday. Obviously I think I saw like there's about 4040 million shares traded today, which is good participation. What are we open at like 5050 1/2 today. So continued on momentum that built in the afternoon after yesterday's close. I mean basically open at the same spot 5033 yeah, I don't think it's like a random pop. I think it's just we're kind of just riding the wave of yesterday's momentum heavy volume and and then you get a solid catalyst with HC Wainwright upgrading us from a cell, I think. I mean there was some I didn't realize that HC had it as a cell. I thought it was neutral in some of the notes. But from a cell to a buy is is pretty big. And then obviously Jack and the price target up to 80 from like 52 or 53, something like that. So that's a, that's a pretty big flip, right? Like over 50% implied upside from recent levels. And I think it's just more of like a clear signal. You know, analysts are believing in the AI pivot, not just the AI story in general. And then, you know, we have Bernstein too, right, Naming Iron as a top AI pick for 20/26/75 dollar target there the streets consensus is like clustered around 70 to $80.00 for multiple firms. And it's not just hype, you know, like you guys were talking about Mara and, and, and Bitcoin AI got said looking for proof of work And even the first space that I ever joined with you guys and, and, and even Franz and, and Butcher. I think it's everyone's just a big fundamental, you know, proof of work, investor proof of work guys and gals. If there's, I don't know if there's any out there. So I don't think it's hype, right? They're just, they're citing GPU deployments, GRID secured power, Microsoft prepayment, obviously fueling expansion, covering some of that capital and, and that debt risk and just the overall path in 2026 to about 3 1/2 billion in AR. So I think Wall Street's catching up and I think the price action kind of reflects it. Buyers are stepping in. There's a ton of volume. So, but at the end of the day, right, like nothing's happened yet. So that's something else to think in or think about. And I, you know, you guys say, they say that all the time. Nothing's happened really since the Microsoft deal other than, you know, raising capital and little bit of dilution, which is not to be worried in my opinion at all. I get and you can give a little nod to Bitcoin too, right? Like right now we're up. I think it's about 333 to 3 1/2 percent, which which is worth noting. You know, irons mining tools or should I say their roots and mining it still matters. So Bitcoin hovering in the 92 well now 94 1/2, but 92 to 94 range today up until like the last hour or so or a couple hours gives like a gentle tailwind and you know correlation is not as tight anymore because of the AI shift. But when Bitcoin grinds higher like this, it kind of just adds a little bit of like a levitation to the miners turned in for AI infrastructure. Neo cloud like cloud plays like iron without like dominating the narrative. And just again, the analysts are I think Wall Street and the analysts are buying in on the narrative and on the pivot. You know, I posted a, a, a video I've been listening to a lot about of, of the guys who are involved in the top 510 companies on the planet, right, like Bezos, Elon, Zuck, Jensen, you know, Eric Schmidt, former chairman, CEO of Google. And obviously, you know, take what take what they say to an extent with a grain of salt because clearly, you know, their companies are positioned and have hundreds of billions of dollars, even trillions if we're projecting 1020 years from now in CapEx to this pivot and sector. So they're not going to come out and and just obviously say that it's not happening. But you know, I posted a video, another video today, Eric Schmidt, it's in my pin tweet. It's awesome. It's you know, he has been screaming from the rooftops since for the last like 3-4 years and recent interviews, congressional testimonies that the and he says it in that video that I posted the wall for AI isn't chips or funding, it's electricity. And you know, he says that like AI is a learning model, right? It and learning models or what, whatever you're doing, it has their their limits. And right now the limit is electricity. And the guy said to him, interesting, So not chips. And he just said, you know, like looked him in the face and electricity, you know, he, he warns that we're barreling towards like AGI super intelligence by 2026 to 2020, but I think it's like 2027 to 30. Take it with a take it how you, how you want to. I know there's a lot of like we can get super deep and talk scientifically. Like you can't reach AGI without humans, like solving consciousness, the consciousness or understanding what true consciousness means. And I'm not like a I'm, I'm going to kind of stray away from that. But someone commented about it and my mind started to wander. But, you know, power demand could explode from 3% of total US generation to massive chunks. And, you know, he's throwing out numbers like needing 90 plus gigawatts or more in very short periods of time, like not just 203020272028. And that's equivalent to dozens of nuclear power plants that we aren't building fast enough. And, you know, you just straight up says, like, we're going to run out of electricity before we run out of anything else. And that's why these guys are talking about, you know, the future of computing and the future of of AI. Like we're going to end up taking the topic of data centers in space, right? And that's just because like, eventually we're going to run out of electricity here. But that's great for our thesis, right? Like if we're going to run out of electricity here, then that means that every single MW that can be brought online is going to be monetized. So that's the bottleneck, right? Like data Centers for training and inference. They are power animals. They, they are take up an obscene amount of power. And with hyper scalers racing for GPU's, the choke point, the bottleneck everyone says is the grid. So where do we stand, right? Like iron position exactly where guys like Schmidt and Bezos, specifically Schmidt where he says the winners will be. And it's renewable focus power at relatively low cost, right? I think it's running like less than $0.05. What is it like kilowatts per hour or however it works less than less than $0.05 per cost. Someone correct me the kWh I'm not the greatest with my acronyms and A and a massively growing pipeline to three gigawatts. So and and then also, I mean we're attributing it in the mining sector, just the ability to flex from Bitcoin mining and pivot from Bitcoin mining to to AI workload. So the upgrade the price pop. It's basically just the market saying in my eyes, yeah, like power constraints are real. Iron has the power or iron has the juice. And if Eric Schmidt is right, and he's been spot on about trajectories and and and projections and AI and spending and everything since 2022-2023, the company solving the energy puzzle are going to keep running while others stall. So I think just today's move sort of feels a little bit like more validation on the thesis and you got analyst conviction reality check with power and steady Bitcoin support. That's just going to keep pressing the stock and, you know, pressuring it upwards. So I, as far as like an $80 price, you know, back to highs and $100 a 150. I think it's like, I'm just like, not that worried about it. I, I, I think that the stock like iron could come down again to like the low 40s at sometime soon. But at the end of the day, I mean, we have so much volatility coming this year and rebalancing and balance sheet expansion and the Fed new federal, new Fed share of tariffs are coming up, right? There's so much that could happen. And but at the end of the day, I don't think it like stops the train of of iron like getting back to 20 billion, right and 304075 a $100 billion company eventually. So I think it's just again, it's good validity to our all of our thesises and, and, and kind of what we think of what, what we're thinking in the sector. Definitely agree too. And I think like something else that speaks to that. I, I, I've been, you know, pumping battery stocks for a couple times on the spaces. If you've been watching battery stocks been going up or earths are going up, like everything power related is, is really kind of reacting in a positive way as of late. So, yeah, I think that just validates everything that that you were saying smoke out. Yeah, totally, man. And it's, it's like it's, it's like we talk, we kind of talk about the same stuff every week, right. But it's, I think every week you get, there's just so much conviction and like for these miners that are transitioning in, in this pivot to not be successful, it's like something catastrophic would need to happen, in my opinion, like whether it's like broader sector or just, you know, internally with the, a specific asset, like if, if there's a fraud or, or you get what I'm saying, like I, I just don't see how it, it doesn't happen eventually. And, you know, on Franz and and Butcher's space the other night, Stocksniper joined and he said something like he loves adding on dips that aren't related to the core thesis. And so like Bitcoin are, you know, iron still kind of has some of those mining roots and some, you know, in my opinion, like it still has some flexibility with respect to the, the, the, you know, underlying price and, and movements in Bitcoin. So yeah, that's kind of like when like the trade war with China was going on a little bit earlier this year and iron was getting hit by that. And I was just laughing. I was like, OK, well, yeah, give me, give me another couple 100 shares here. I mean, Iron doesn't have business in China. They don't do business with China. They don't rely on any Chinese parts. The, the pressure that it's under as a result of the trade war is just kind of laughable and giving me an opportunity to accumulate more shares. So yeah, no, I, I, I'm 100% with him on that. When, when the outside noise doesn't directly impact the signature or the thesis, then pump it, baby. Literally. I'm with you on that. And you know, if Bitcoin comes back down to with, with, you know, assuming no news or any new deals or any massive headwinds or upward pressure drivers with regards to like the Mac 7 and, and the video and just data centers or AI in general. You know, if Bitcoin dips again below to below 90K, right? I, I wouldn't be surprised if like I would feel some of that pressure, but I think it's just an opportunity again to just to, to buy both of them, right? And you guys were talking about I was listening maybe 3045 minutes ago. I couldn't, I couldn't join as a speaker, but Bitcoin, a guy, I was talking, what was he saying? He was saying something about like, how are you going to accumulate more Bitcoin? And what, I don't remember exactly how he was saying it, but like what tools and what strategies, whatever it is, are you going to, you know, utilize to accumulate more Bitcoin? And like I'm doing the same thing, you know, I, I, I bought NUAI like very small size position on that that day. Like December 29th is when my first order at 277 and it, it's now about, it's now up like 60%. I don't know where it closed today, but it was around 441. I sold it. I heard it was up like 20% today. I haven't looked at it to be honest, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Today was nuts. But like sometimes, you know, when a stock gets gets beat down on some sort of news or again, the market like knows everything and the market takes into account everything. Like the market takes into account law. You are innocent until proven guilty, right? So NUAI has that gets accused of, you know, hiding profits and and some sort of like waste disposal discrepancy. The stock drops 50% in two days or 40% in two days, starts bottoming. So like I'll take advantage sometimes of, you know, I, I was well, I was already like researching the stock and like felt pretty decent about their JV with Sharon AI. Sharon AI is a hell of a company. So it's like, you know, they're clearly not running a scam if you're part, if you have AJV with Sharon AI. But it but Long story short, right, like I buy some new AI on, on that, that crazy news dip, which I thought was a little bit of an overreaction. I would have never expected it to recover this quickly. But anyways, like sold the whole position for 60%, rolled profits into DCA more ASST at .9 and then put the rest of like the the cost basis into Bitcoin. So it's like there's so many different ways to, but again, you got to know what you want to accumulate, what you want to own. Like for me, I want to own as much Bitcoin as I possibly can, especially under 100K, and just just keep the stack going and then have to get more exposure to companies like iron, companies like Cipher, like, you know, even Amazon, NVIDIA, these are the companies that I see that that are shaping going to shape the future. So I've had an AUI on my watch list for quite some time now and I find it very interesting. I think it's a good play. And every time I go to buy it, I end up just buying more iron. And I just, yeah, that's just, I can't, I can't, I can't seem to justify buying that right now over iron when iron is priced the way that it is, especially given my conviction with it. But I'm a weirdo. No, you're not. I don't think you're a weirdo at all, man. Like I don't want to buy anything other than, you know, if we're strictly equities, not including Bitcoin. Like I don't want to buy anything other than iron other than cipher. NVIDIA, Amazon, like TMDXI got like 5 or 6 names that I want to buy and and why even waste time unless you're taking advantage of what you think could be like a really quick opportunity to, you know, make bang out a quick 20 percent 30% and then roll it right? Well, like I, I have other like investments that I like, right, that I keep that I buy, but like every anything that I like as far as AI infrastructure goes, I just, I can't seem to justify buying anything else at the moment over iron the way that it's priced. Maybe when iron goes on its run, I'll be a little bit more tempted to, to buy something else just to for a little diversity. But I mean, I've already built out my position with Nedia, so I don't plan on adding right now anytime soon. I've, I've got a pretty substantial stake in Rocket lab. So if like I'm feeling like frisky and I don't really want to buy more iron at the day, which those days don't really happen often, maybe I'll Rocket Lab or or one of my, you know, battery stocks. But yeah, I have a really hard time justifying buying AI infrastructure stocks that aren't iron at the moment. Right? And I'm with you on that. And like, the last thing I'll say is just, again, this is not financial advice or it's just my thoughts. I just something catastrophic would have to happen for iron to not get back to 70. What was it 72 or 77? What whatever the, you know, N3 day high of like 80, I want to say at one point, whatever, a Jewish 74 somewhere around right, exactly like I, I just how does how do we not get there? You know, there's so much more power and infrastructure and just you got the, in my opinion, the second best hyperscaler regarding AI infrastructure and computing on the planet right now. It's just how do we not get back there? So whether you're buying a 50 or buying a 33, I mean, I, me personally, I don't worry about it. You're just, you're just stacking. Yes, Sir. Well, I want to give my my favorite butcher before I call you up, I want to give my favorite bear an opportunity to, to chat with us a little bit more. He posted recently shared some interesting stuff about Iran and them potentially not taking advantage of the opportunity in Canada. I don't want to speak for him. That's why he's here. So I will give the floor to him and then butcher will go to you because I have a feeling what you wanted to say already. You'll probably have some other things that you'll want to add in after our panda bear speaks here. Lads, that's your cue.
Speaker 1: Awesome, Jeff, thank you for letting me speak. So I just posted it underneath the space for Bitcoin AI guy. And it was just a model that kind of quickly made-up for the British Columbia. And I tried to stay as true as I could to what management guided to and their statements and just model out what would happen if they converted all of British Columbia. They're 160 megawatts into their cloud business and I think the only one that management and guide to is I use their pricing level from Lambda AI think I like change it between 32350 for GPU hour that they're getting in the B200. And the reason I did that is because the biggest push back I got in the Microsoft deal is that, you know, it's a validation deal. Now they're gonna be able to charge more and I think even Matthew Saigo posted how the H100 average pricing like went up 15% since I don't know the last few weeks. So now if H100 pricing is going up, Irene got validated by Hyperscaler and I admit, you know, you're definitely wanna, you're going to pay more to someone who's able to offer compute to Microsoft versus, you know, some random Bitcoin miner. So I use those numbers values into the model, got it in and I have to admit, you know, it's bullish. Like I'm getting some great numbers for it. But the problem that comes from that is that why is an IRN pouring everything they can into this investment if those are the numbers they can get? And to me it seems illogical, you know, like, I don't know if you guys read the Bible, but even Jesus used a parable about how the Kingdom of heaven is basically like a treasure that man finds in the field, sells everything he has and buys that field. And it's like, if you just have something you could purchase a lot more valuable, a lower cost, you should do it. And it's the same thing for Irene. It's the best investment available to them right now and they're just not maximizing on it. And it, it dumbfounds me like either something is wrong, either their CapEx figures are off, either the pricing power like they can't get it, whatever it is. But the longer they wait, they're losing this opportunity because those data centers are air cooled and they, they mentioned they over engineered this so they could, you know, able to run on a longer time frame or if they were expecting to run GP us, whatever the case is. But Rubens are coming out, you know, end of 2026 and that's when British Columbia comes on. He just lost one year of cash flows because he waited to build this out 'cause you, you know, you can't run liquid cooling unless you upgrade it. So it's like time sensitive opportunity that to me irons not taking advantage of and it just dumbfounds me and it kind of goes well. The reason I kind of started thinking about it is 'cause I was waiting for the numbers or like an update for the year end guide for the 250 million. And I believe it's like what, 2 weeks now and there's no update. I don't know if they're late. I don't know if they're just waiting until earnings to share it, but I thought it would be a good catalyst for them to like share that was looking out for and then they kind of could rolled into momentum into basically expanding it for all of Canada. So if you guys have any ideas, if you have any pushback for it, I'm willing to listen. Cause to me kind of like it does not make sense, especially when I look like I, I kind of knew there was a good opportunity, but once I did the numbers, now it's like mind blowingly amazing opportunity and it just seems stupid. They're not pouring everything in right now.
Jeff: Sounds like we're slowly winning you over. If we can address this, I would agree with you. I think there is a big opportunity there. I can't speak for management, honestly, I, I don't have any thoughts that I think would be logical as to why they're not taking it over. But I, I'm sure Bitcoin, I'm sure Butcher has, has some thoughts on that. So I'll, I'll give the floor to him because I know he was, he's been waiting to speak as well.
Speaker 3: One the original comment I had was for small cap sniper just for people that are NUAI are researching it. They actually bought out the interest in sharing AI. So I just thought I would provide that for everyone and that that's easily the search. So they have full access to that now they still have their own unique challenges, but back to iron for Lazarus. I would say to you that your conclusion, I don't think you've made a conclusion necessarily, but I think you'd agree that you're leaning in One Direction, that they're not taking advantage of an opportunity to which I would say to you, I don't think that's conclusive yet. And we will find out at earnings whether what you're saying is true or not. I tend to believe that. I think they learned from the end of last year that.
Speaker 1: They were doing monthly operating reports which I'd like the transparency because it kept bears on us and they we could see the progression in the business. But now they have gone silent since the convertible note and direct equity offering, which is was part of the reason why we drew down so low to 33 because there wasn't really any counter argument coming from management. And there hasn't really been much until more recently Dan being more vocal about. But he's also speaking quite frankly, like it's ambiguous and it's hard to tell. And that's where there's an element of faith that comes in. We've spoken to before Umbe some is track the Bitcoin mining. So prior to transitioning to.
Speaker 3: Cloud in Canada, the company had 50 XA hash, which was about the equivalent of what Cleanspark's production was, but more recently that they fell behind Cleanspark again. So that leads us to believe a bull case would be that the drop in hash rate suggests that those miners are being transitioned in Canada. And God Particle had good commentary on why he believed that they've reached the 225, which is the midpoint of the 200 to 250 million guidance that they had for 12/31. I tend to agree with you that it would be nice to hear it and be validated that they're on track.
Speaker 1: But I could also argue that's an opportunity where there's no reason to believe they haven't met it. And with earnings coming in the next two to three weeks, my gut feeling is they just start keeping it till earnings and we'll speak to it. But the company did guide last quarter for the 1 1/2 billion in ARR for Canada. So there's no reason to believe that they're not going to.
Speaker 3: Carry through with the plan like the way you phrase it and I you can speak to what you mean, but the way I interpret it as is if like they stopped at 23,000 GPU's and they're not doing anything else right now when the company's guided for 40,000 more GPU's at those sites. Now how they prioritize that. I think what you're saying is your argument is the cash flow that would be generated would be so profitable that it could fuel the rest of their other businesses. And while I tend to agree with the profitability of those sites, part of the iron business model though too to address another bare case of GPU obsolescence is to have instead of leasing those GPUs at spot rate where they could charge a little more, they specifically lease out GPUs for two to three contract, two to three-year contract so that the GPUs paid off so that they have no risk and then the value becomes more so the data center and then they can trade in the for the residual.
Speaker 1: Value and re up the contract for a new GPU or to your point earlier H100 rates are up 15%, So maybe the B2 hundreds and the B3 hundreds last longer and then they really start generating cash flow. But all of that assumes that they de risk it on the front end. So if they've been focused on negotiating with the hyperscaler and maybe it's possible that their attention to filling those other 40,000 GPUs, even though they're more profitable. I think the counter argument to you would be saying if they can sign Google, which we believe to be true with either Sweetwater or Horizon 5 if I'm walking into a room and I'm trying to get institutional buyers.
Speaker 3: Are you going to be more attracted to AI startup lab or are you going to be more attracted to hearing Microsoft and Google and that ultimately flows into their cost of capital. So those were just some of my initial thoughts. But yes, we would like to see Canada scale to the 500 and the 1.5 and maybe that 1.5 was conservative and it becomes 2 billion and the even a margin on it or the hardware margin, I should say it was in the 80s or 90s. Like yes, that would produce a ton of cash and minimize the need for convertibles and help service the debt. Like I'm all about it.
Speaker 1: But I think you also can see from a strategic standpoint, if you can have another brand name like Google and show progress in your infrastructure as a service business in the states, that the business becomes more valuable and it's more sellable to institutions.
Jeff: Do you guys see just, you know, kind of Canada's politics and and regulatory agencies as being a possible reason as to why what we're hoping for what Lazarus was talking about hasn't really happened yet? I mean, it's a completely different obviously, excuse me, they have the power and, and like the sites, right, but it's a completely different grid like BC Hydro versus ERCOT in Texas. It's I mean, there's a lot of like shortcomings and like possible even more possible bottlenecks just within that that province. I mean, I know that we talked a little bit about it with I think it was Guneet who joined your spaces butcher on Sunday. But I feel like that's, you know, a big reason for it, you know, like, why would, you know, a hyper scaler want to, I guess go to a site where you can't really build out more that that's that that's kind of what's going on in Canada right now. And I think it kind of just automatically lowers the multiple. I mean, I could, I mean, I'm, I'm kind of free balling right now. It's footballing, but I just, it seems like there's a lot of issues in in Canada right now, specifically BC.
Speaker 1: I'm a bear and I'm not really sure those issues apply. No, Canada, you know, may not be as bullish on helping like developers build out data centers, but from my understanding is that Ivan has already this amount of power online. They would just be converting their Bitcoin operations into data centers and base. I don't know if it was the, I think it was the province or the city, I'm not really sure, but they banned Bitcoin mining expansion there. And just based on that, seems like they would obviously value having a data center taking the same amount of electricity versus Bitcoin mining. Like, you know, that Bitcoin mining doesn't really help anyone around in the province. If it's a data center, then you know it's going to attract businesses. If it's serving anyone close to or I think even to like Seattle, it's 5 or 600 miles. So, you know, compared to Texas, once kind of like inference starts being becoming a problem latency, that's a pretty decent location to have since the Amazon, Microsoft, Microsoft, I'm not really sure who's in Seattle, but that's a good demand picture for that. So from my perspective, the, you know, province, government, whatever. If I was them and kind of considering how they're bearish on Bitcoin and data centers by nearly every metric, having a data center so have a Bitcoin mining operation is just better. And they'll likely trickle down to bringing business into and not just construction jobs for renovations or anything like that, but just having a compute there that could, you know, someone wants to start business. It's like, oh wow, perfect data center right there. That that's my opinion. I know you guys mentioned something about how they initially maybe had like 750 megawatts and then they got stuck, they couldn't expand or something like that that I'm not really knowledgeable about.
Speaker 3: I was just going to add that we're talking about 160 megawatts right now that potentially based off of Franz's research could expand to 210 megawatts. Yes, the Cap X is unique in that on the Conservative side it's 4 to 5 million while Childress was for the Microsoft deal was the midpoint was 15,000,000. But if you exclude the Super cluster like it's roughly half if not a third of the cost and CapEx, no one will debate that. But what I would say to you also, as is the if they cannot make headway with the Canadian government, whether it be their federal government or the British Columbia government.
Speaker 1: 160 or 200 megawatts is roughly going to be 5, no more than 10 or five and maybe is down to we'll just say 5% of the portfolio and we're 3 to 4 mega, 3 to 4 gigawatts, excuse me. So 5% of the space, albeit more profitable, it might not make sense to spend all of management's time there or at the same time, they might have clients where they're allowing clients that they know will grow into the space. They, they're not rushing them into an additional purchase instead of shopping it to new customers. So I, I would just caution everyone to jumping to a conclusion and I think it's a good question for management.
Speaker 3: But I don't.
Speaker 1: Think there's enough to suggest that they that they've missed the deadline yet just because they haven't announced it, Like we're going to find that out in a few weeks. And then as far as how they're choosing to deploy the additional 40,000 GPU's, well part of the problem too is they have to still complete the financing for the GPU's that they committed to purchasing for, for them to meet their deadlines with Microsoft, which I think is their number one priority as a management team, they have to do one of two things. They have to 1st construct the data centers, which appear to be on track based off of Franzis satellite imagery. But the second piece is they have built into their guidance that they were going to.
Speaker 3: Announce the financing deal for 2 1/2 billion dollars to fund those GPU's which costs $5.8 billion. So until they finalize that which they may have, they may have not have. I can understand why that's a higher priority to management right now than signing a new client. Because if you fuck up the Microsoft deal, then everything else doesn't matter in my opinion, and it's harder to sell yourself to Microsoft or, excuse me, Google, Amazon or Meta if you're not delivering on your promises that you made to Microsoft.
Jeff: Awesome. Thanks, Butcher. Appreciate that. Yuppie X, your new face for me haven't gotten a chance to talk to you. Welcome. Now is not the time to be shy. You know what, Jeff before, before you yuppie X if he, if he comes up or not real quick, just to on the last combo with I agree with Laz to an extent as far as like the policy that BC Hydro has in British Columbia. You know, like the data centers, like the, the framework says you, you can build data centers, but only if the economic return justifies it. So they're taking into account, you know, like housing, like electrifying houses and manufacturing jobs and, and just the local industry and trying not to expose the, the county or the Providence, excuse me, the province to like a single customer dependency risk. So, you know, and, and which then when you think about that, it's like, OK, like the power's already online. It's not as if you can't just utilize that power to HPC. But as Butcher was saying, I think that I think what Butcher was saying kind of makes the most sense, right? Like one, don't jump to conclusions because because we really don't know. And two, you know, hyper scalers typically they want data like a very large data centers that and request power in hundreds of megawatts and they want to lock long term, right? So you want massive upfront power, long inflexible contracts and centralized control and minimal, you know, local workforce relative to the, the power that's going to be consumed. And from the perspective of, of like BC, it looks a lot like crypto mining did, just with a better branding. So they're like, you know, they're capping and slowing down the data centers and putting them through competitive allocation. And I think iron could just possibly not really want to, you know, management not really want to put all their eggs in one basket and, and focus on something that has risks like this. I mean, they are BC is super focused on an extremely like clean, reliable and like low cost, relatively low cost grid. So I I personally also just the last thing I'll say is I just think it when things like that happen, the multiple decreases slightly for hyperscalers, you know, you just have like a future risk to it. But you know, who knows? I guess we'll have to just see what happens in in the monthly updates are on the call.
Speaker 1: Let me, let me jump in. So when a government like Canada says you can't mine Bitcoin, or when you you you can't expand. Bitcoin operations that that is like the advertisement to buy Bitcoin, right like the government's trying to control markets is the is 1 bull case for Bitcoin on the decentralization aspect. And historically, whenever a government says tries to ban Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining, the price of Bitcoin goes goes up right, because demand goes up as people lose trust in governments and Fiat system. So but in in this particular case for AIII think the stars are aligning right. Silver lining is you know it's it's just a game of marketing right. Oh, Iran's no longer a Bitcoin miner. We're building AI data centers and if you want your economy to thrive and compete against, you know, the United States, you're going to need to start attracting talent and capital to major macro trends like AI, right? So I think the Canadian government needs to play more competitively and, and, and, and keep talented, you know, individuals, companies and grow and compete against the United States in AI. But you know, I wouldn't blame Canada to not trust a small quote UN quote crypto miner like Iran. So they think the, the partnership with Microsoft, you know, it's no, it's no longer Iran, a small player, seemingly small player crypto miner, you know, planning expansion and AI and the government having to trust this, this crypto company on its AI ambitions. It's it's now Microsoft saying, hey, virtually into our company. You know, Microsoft can be seen as stronger than most than many governments and world economies, right, in countries, right? So it's it's Microsoft going and saying, hey, we are going to bring some seriously talented folks from, you know, from Canada and we're going to give them jobs and we're going to, you know, invest billions and billions of dollars. And that's going to translate to, you know, taxes that they that Microsoft ultimately pays for and improves the economy, the local government and then hits their initiatives, right. It's no longer iron trying to promise that, which is a hard sell, right 'cause you know, historically governments don't trust crypto, crypto as an idea and also companies that, that you know, that mine crypto and Bitcoin. So I, I think it's like a bull case for, for Bitcoin. I think it's a bull case for irons, you know, Canadian operations, but also goes to irons optionality, right? I think the best companies have the most optionality and iron can say, hey, like you know, yeah, I mean we can afford to lose Canada. It's a great opportunity to develop and and build that business. But there's gigawatts and gigawatts that are being printed, right, so to speak in Texas and in the United States, right. So I think that that, you know, if anything, Canada should be begging Iron Microsoft to expand operations because otherwise they're just going to Iron's just going to focus on the United States, which is competing against Canada. And Canada wants to, you know, be their own independent, robust country, economy nation, right, just like everyone else. So I think that you're, you're seeing several game theory, game theories in the, in the works here across Bitcoin, AI and, and, you know, just politics, world politics. So it's, it's, it's interesting, but I think like you guys mentioned, it's Canada's a very small percentage of the total portfolio. And you know, I, I, just, as a Bitcoiner, I just don't, I don't, I don't, I don't like governments telling its people and, and businesses to not do what's in the best interests of the markets and freedom, right. So I, I, I think at some point Canada will be begging Iran to expand for the benefit of the Canadian government and its citizens. I guess I'll just say something. I'm kind of surprised you guys are like skeptical about Canada kind of, you know, I don't know, kind of like downplaying it. I think the governmental issues, especially for the power capacity they already have online doesn't really apply to them right now or at least not for their 160 megawatts online. And by any metric you look at it, it's their like cheapest cost to build out, it's the quickest they could put online and it's the most profitable. If you just look at, I know you guys mentioned the price target by HC Wainwright, they were using something like 12 1/2 multiple for their cloud EBITDA. So if they basically convert all of the Canadian site to cloud, they're going to be bringing in over a billion dollars in EBITDA. So if you apply the same multiple, you're already over 10 billion value. Just add it to the market cap, which management claimed they could do 6 to 8 weeks. You know, you could add a few more weeks, basically burn and testing while putting online, but that's like 12 weeks roughly and you're adding ten billion to the market cap. Like to me, I would do that if I could. I don't know why they're not doing it. I'm, I'm not bearish on Canada. I'm, I'm, I'm just more bullish on optionality, right? And I think that's not priced in. I think ultimately that expansion will happen and, and Canada will be excited for that. I think Microsoft, I think iron will be excited to expand in Canada and they should right. But I, I, I think the, you know, the, the fact that they, they, you know, they're controlling their own destiny and they know things that we don't know, right? They're, they're months, quarters ahead of, you know what we know, right, as public markets people. So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not bearish on Canada at all. In fact, I think all the bear cases eventually are going to turn into, you know, bulls, right? I think Canada is going to be begging iron to expand. I, I think GPU prices are going to improve because they need to, for the, for the market to develop and mature. I, I think opportunities to disrupt the, the CUDA attacks or the CUDA monopoly that NVIDIA has. I think these are all natural, you know, technological innovations that just tend to happen right when, when these monopolies or, you know, form, right. So I, I just think there's a lot of margin expansion opportunities, you know, not just related to Canada, but just you know, as CapEx prices trend trend down over a period of time. Since no one else is talking Bitcoin guy, can I ask you how you view Bitcoin for the?
Speaker 3: End of the year.
Speaker 1: Basically your price target for 26 'cause I remember you mentioning you're kind of bearish on it and you've been, well, I'm being smaller than I am. So I'm bearish in the fact that I want it, right? Like when I, I, so it's like it's, there's a, it's nuanced, right? Like I'm, I'm bearish on Bitcoin going to 300 K this year, but I'm bullish on it going to 170 K And, and I'm so bullish that Bitcoin can hit 170 K this month. It doesn't look like it, but it could happen at any point this year, right? So I reserve that optionality. But the, the, the, the thing I want is Bitcoin to go down so I can accumulate more Bitcoin, right? So I, I'm very bullish on AI, right? I'm, I'm, I'm going to use AI equities to accumulate Bitcoin at low prices. But in the long term of 10/20/30 years, you know, buying Bitcoin at, you know, 150K or 200K, right, is pretty low when bitcoins, you know, a twelve, $20 million per coin, right? So it doesn't really matter, right? This is just a game, right? My, my target was 170K to 230K last year, right? And I think that those targets are still on the table for, for this year. So Bitcoin in the 90s is a steal, right? But it just depends on your objective as an investor. If you're a bitcoiner that wants to keep Bitcoin accumulated Bitcoin, now is the best time to buy Bitcoin. It's early institutional, you know, stages. But as AI equities person, I I think the best AI equities, not just iron, but others that you might be bullish on are actually, you know, more discounted than Bitcoin is today, right? Even if I believe that Bitcoin should be 170 K at at least this year, right? So you could do the math, right? So if Bitcoin should be a double, right then then I think some of these equity should be at least, you know, a triple, quadruple 5610X, right? Like, I think that is, you know, those are the returns needed to justify not buying Bitcoin at these low prices today.
Jeff: Bitcoin is now at 95,000 and climbing almost like 95 1/2. It's ripping right now, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, but I, I, you know, it's, it's gaining some momentum, but we, we need to see it, you know, get to 100K very quickly in order to get to the one 20s and, and reach new all time highs. So it could happen. We'll see, you know, we'll see what the bulls, the Bitcoin bulls, I think. But I, I, I think it should be, you know, 170K today at least. So can I ask 'cause you followed the space a little bit longer than I have, what you believe is basically keeping like Bitcoin price down?
Speaker 3: Especially relative to.
Speaker 1: People want to sell Bitcoin. There's, there's only a finite amount of people that, that want to sell Bitcoin at 100K and those people are, are, are starting to, you know, stop selling at a certain level, right? And I think they, the, the people, it could be OGS, could be, you know, companies, it could be old miners, whoever they are, right? I, I think they had a great run, right and a great window to sell a ton of Bitcoin for like a year, right? I mean, Bitcoin hasn't done anything for a year. So I mean, if your cost basis for bitcoins under 3000, under $300 and you're sitting on like, you know, 100 million, a billion in Bitcoin, you had a, a, a great window to sell. Like, I like to compare it to iron, right? Like you had a, you had a nice window to sell in the in the 70s and in the 60s, right? And, and these windows are just going to keep coming, right? Like, but for Bitcoin, it's been a while, right? So I think at some point could be right now that, that time, that window, you know, the, the, the people are, are that there's that we're selling, are gonna stop selling and just hold because they've been holding for, for, you know, 812-1516 years, right? So I, I, I think, you know, if this is all short term stuff, right? So it's, it's very difficult to to predict, but what's more important as an investor is what you want to hold and accumulate over 10 plus year horizon, right? And I think Bitcoin is a multi $1,000,000 asset. And if you're pricing it in Fiat, it's, you know, it's an easy, easy 10X, right? So yeah, buying it today under 100 100K and buying it under 200 K, you're buying it at 200 K could be a great deal, right? Depending on on you know what your goals are.
Jeff: With that guys, I'm going to give you a quick apology if you hear squeaky noise in the back. One thing about me I do, I foster Doberman. So I I actually have two myself and I work with a rescue to help foster Dobermans in need of a home. So I usually take them under my wing for however long is needed and help them find their forever home and get them out of the, you know, typically what's not the best situation for them. So if you hear some squeaky noise toys in the back. My my new foster boy is not thrilled with me sitting on his faces for three hours. So apologies for that, but want to give a relentless gamma squeeze here an opportunity to chat. I know he's been waiting for for a little while now. I don't believe you've come up and spoken before so looking forward to hearing you chat.
Speaker 3: Can you guys hear me? It's my first time.
Jeff: Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear.
Speaker 3: Hey guys, I just want to thank, you know, the whole community here for, you know, coming out and voicing your opinions on iron and Bitcoin. It's helped me a lot with having conviction for the keeping the stock. You know, I bought it at 15. I held on till 75. I didn't sell. I actually sold some at 50. Kind of waiting to see what's going to happen. And basically I've overheard you guys talking about Canada and the risks and personally, you know, I, I live in Canada and you know, we have Mark Carney, he's ex Goldman Sachs guy from the 90s. I think he, they made a, the government made a deal with Microsoft already. They have a really strong stance on that clean energy. So I think iron's a well positioned and I think that if there's going to be somebody that's going to maybe even do sovereign AI for Canada, it could be iron. And so that's just a thought that I had. And yeah, basically I just wanted to say thanks again for coming out and, you know, talking about the stocks. And yeah, that's all I got to say.
Jeff: Question for you, what what what caught your eye with iron initially? What? What made you invest?
Speaker 3: I think it was like basically somebody that I've been following for a few years now was Eric Jackson. I think in 2022 he made an appearance on the compound in Friends. Yeah, I thought he was cool. I thought like I, I liked his sort of perspective and his sort of methodology towards stock picking, you know, just basically, you know, comparing the multiples of companies and saying, hey, like if they come, if Wall Street ends up re rating this company, you know, you can have some huge gains because they're only, you know, sort of they only want to pay a certain amount for this company, but it's almost the exact same like this company, you know, and if it gets re rated, you can make a lot of money. So I kind of like that method method idea towards that stock picking. So I I, you know, just sort of paid attention to, you know, his picks and, you know, when he, you know, was calling for Iran and Cipher in May and June, I just sort of, you know, hopped on board. And then I found this community on on X and sort of just started, you know, paying attention to what you guys were saying and, you know, listening to the convictions that you guys have towards Iran and Cipher. And so, yeah. And then I was paying. Then I found out about Mike Alfred. And, you know, it's not every day. I think it's really cool what Mike does. You know, he's on the board of Iran. And even though he doesn't sort of give us any details on, you know, the company, because there's obviously compliance issues with that, you know, it's just still hearing him, you know, having a, you know, a very important person, you know, talk about the company and sort of his other stock ideas, you know, sort of keeps, keeps me listening. So yeah, that's, that's what happened. The, the only one thing that I, I've noticed here being in Canada with Bitcoin is that I find a lot of people don't believe in Bitcoin here. And you're sort of like this, lost.
Speaker 1: Hope.
Speaker 3: In making money and I think I don't know what what's happened over the few last few years here, but a lot of people sort of have like a negative perception on Bitcoin and crypto. And I think it's just the volatility. But yeah, I think that that's the biggest headwind. If you could like just people not like retail sort of.
Speaker 1: Let let me get that. I'm a Bitcoin OG. Yeah. I've been doing this since I was a, you know, young, young college student. It's the same thing in the United States. But it's funny enough, like when I think about when this industry started and the public Bitcoin mining market a lot, it was a significant amount of Canadian investors, right retail. In particular, so it's, it's funny, I was like, am I like the one of the few Americans that are excited about this space because everyone I was talking to listening to, you know, 5-6 years ago, there are a lot of Canadians, right? Yeah, I think, I think.
Speaker 3: Like with like apps like so in Canada we have well, simple and that's like like the raw, like, I guess the equivalent of Robin Hood, maybe a little bit more sort of, you know, not sophisticated, but like, I don't know, it's, it's gear. It doesn't have that sort of, I know in America if you say you have Robin Hood, they kind of think, oh, you're gambling, you know, well, simple has that little bit more of, you know, sophistication to it. And I think like there's, there's been a lot of commercials for that. And I think Canadians are more prone to sort of investing in like stocks versus crypto, But I'm, I'm not sure. I, I have no idea, but.
Speaker 1: But but it's it's yes, it's yeah, the people that have capital are just in general very a minor percentage of population, right? So you know that that's just the reality, right? So very few individuals in any country are are, you know, independent, financially independent investors, right? So, you know, obviously we're in a, in a bubble here, not like an AI is a bubble, but like, yeah, people have money here, right? So, but when the market was much, much, much smaller, right, when you know, the, the public equity, Bitcoin equity market was like less than 20 billion, right? Like Iran today was, you know, it's whatever it is about 16 to 20 billion. Yeah, yeah. So at one point in 20/20 to 20/21/22, like that was all of the value in the entire crypto equity space. So and the miners, I mean, Marathon was at eight, $9 billion market cap and then right was the other half, right. So, so iron today is pretty much the same size in market cap than 100% of the market was in 2021 at its peak, right? So that's how small the market was a few years ago and it was primarily retail driven, right. So you when I was, and I wasn't really a poster back then, right. I was a lurker and that's one of my regrets. Not really building not just the community, but like relationships in the space because more short term oriented, you know, which was the right thing to be at that time, right, Because the the the industry, the market wasn't mature. The idea of holding multiple years, you know, wasn't the right playbook, right? But you know, now, because the market is maturing access to credit in capital, debt, etcetera, and other forms, other verticals exist like AI and HPC to some of the better operators. The sector is finally becoming more investable. And also Bitcoin is now an institutional asset for the first time in history, just since since 20/20/24, right? So it is a, you know, I, I've seen Bitcoin when, when it was $50.00, right? I bought Bitcoin under $100. I've seen some of these equities like actually become, you know, real companies that are differentiated and and own great assets. And I still think it's really early for Bitcoin and for these equities, right. So I think what you're seeing is correct that Bitcoin is still a niche idea, even though it's been around for a long, seemingly a long period of time.
Speaker 3: I also think that like it's kind of like when a company does a stock split or reverse stock split split, like right now people look or see Bitcoin, Bitcoin at 94,000 and they just think it's like too late, right? They can't, you know what I mean? And they don't understand that they can buy just like a fractional amount like that's another.
Speaker 1: Headwind that Bitcoin.
Speaker 3: Faces and then the problem is is they end up trying to buy, you know, like a a coin for a dollar. Some like shit coin.
Speaker 1: But those those people are not moving.
Speaker 3: The market. Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin is in a new era, yeah. It's attracting investor, investor class, institution. What would we say? Institutional investors, but institutions are just one component of the investor class. It's people like myself, Jeff, you butcher write their own businesses, right, that have good high paying jobs, that have capital, that have savings, that have income, that have other investments that can that want to be allocated to a decentralized digital monopoly. That is Bitcoin, right? So that is a new idea. When I was in Bitcoin, you know, I, I wasn't when I was in college, there was no real community that I was trying to be a part of. It was just something my roommate who was buying weed on, on Silk Road, what was doing right? And Bitcoin was just the, the, the token to do so, right. So my understanding of Bitcoin back then was not, you know, it was I was not looking at Bitcoin as an investment, right? It was just, you know, it was something that, you know, criminals were, were using to, to do bad things. And the idea of Silk Road back then was very interesting. I thought this was like the, the Amazon of, of drugs and, and, and illegal things. And, you know, I was just, I was fascinated that this thing actually existed. And with the execution was, was very impressive. I, I saw the whole thing just from a, you know, observing a consumer of it, but now you know, it, it's the people that have that those unit biases. Those are not serious investors, right? The people that have capital are the, are the minority of the people on the planet. And you know those those those individuals have built well through, you know, founding businesses, you know, an accumulating capital of making good decisions over a period of decades, right? And they tend to be older, right? So you're seeing a lot of older people into Bitcoin. And I've pulled buying mafia that we're the largest Bitcoin investor community and AI community on Twitter right now. The average age is in the in, in the mid 40s and in, in early 50s. I'm, I'm 32, so I'm I'm an outlier for sure across many metrics. But there's a reason for that, right? It's it's because older people have money. Older people have capital. Older people tend to be more likely to be financially independent, more likely to own a house, a second house, you know, other investments that are not crypto related stocks, right. And they, they want an allocation, they have an allocation, they own a Bitcoin more more than one Bitcoin they they've allocated to I bit, etcetera. So this is a new wave that we're in that I get to see and I, I, I can appreciate because I, I, I, I've seen the, the space like mature over, over the years and it's completely different, right? The conversations that we're having in these spaces are, are different than the Bitcoin spaces or Bitcoin, you know, conversations on Twitter over the past few years. We're talking about cash flow, we're talking about EBITDA, we're talking about traditional metrics. And in the same breath, as we're talking about Fiat being a scam, that was not really the case just three, 5-6 years ago, yeah.
Speaker 3: 11 last thing I'm going to just put out there, I was on Instagram and I, I saw a guy, you know, just talking about Bitcoin and I, I guess he's had it since 2015 and he sort of floated this out there. And I think it's going to start like surfacing, you know, a lot more is the idea of, you know, if you had $1,000,000 and you're thinking about like where to allocate that $1,000,000. And, you know, he was just saying, and I kind of believe, I actually believe in this. Why would you even take that $1,000,000 and start a business and run the risk of potentially losing that? And his idea was that like, he's just going to buy Bitcoin and a Bitcoin compounds that like, you know, 30 to 40% per year. He's obviously going to do a lot better. And I think that's, you know, personally, I think that that's going to start happening where people are not going to be able to, you know, like compete against like, you know, large corporations or whatever. And like opening up small businesses is going to be sort of, you know, you're just better off to just buy Bitcoin. And I'm personally in that camp also that, you know, where I try to, you know, figure out, obviously I have a business, you know, I work for myself, but you know, if I want to actually like, am I going to grow?
Speaker 1: The business at this.
Speaker 3: Point, you know, there's so much competition in my field. I kind of feel as though there's no like no point. And if Bitcoin can get past this little, you know, you know, moment it's having over the last, you know, four months or whatever, you know, I'm going to, you know, go with that, go with that idea and just sort of just say I'm going to allocate. I, I don't have $1,000,000, but I'm just going to allocate that money and instead of reinvesting into my business, I'm just going to buy Bitcoin. And I think that if people, if that concept starts to become mainstream, that you're just better off to do that instead of like, you know, potentially losing the money, which a lot of small businesses do. Yeah, I think that that that that could be a huge tailwind. And also, this is the last thing I'm going to say is that yesterday there was a a rumor, I guess, or I guess it was confirmed by Rick Reader or Rick Ryder, I don't know how to pronounce it, from Blackstone and that he's been interviewed by Trump for the next Fed chair. I think that that is the the.
Speaker 1: Best thing to.
Speaker 3: To happen to the Fed, personally, I think that would be a really good thing and I think that would be good for all financial assets and you'd have like a highly well capable person in that.
Speaker 1: Seat.
Speaker 3: And I think it would be really bullish for, you know, equities and crypto, a high quality crypto. So yeah, that's all I'm going to have to say. And that again, thanks for having me on the space and I'll keep on listening and keep on doing what you guys are doing. Thanks a lot. Can I just ask?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I could talk about Bitcoin for like 20 hours straight. So I you guys don't. I think Bitcoin is great and it, and it's really, I think it should be in the background of every serious investor. I think AI is, is, is more exciting, which is why, you know, I'm my alarm bells are ringing, right? Because as soon as something else gets more exciting than Bitcoin, that means I'm underexposed to Bitcoin and, and, and, and, you know, it's, it's something I've just observed over a long period of time. But yeah, I, I think it's Bitcoin is definitely going to attract a lot of small business capital away from small businesses and into the stock market and into Bitcoin as just a natural progression of, you know, you know, it's where the if you can get a better return. But I think a bigger idea is not just better returns than a traditional small business, but just in terms of time, right? I think small business owners, managers, they work a lot of hours, right? More than the traditional 40 hour work week, right? So if you're working 50607080 hours a week and you're making slightly above medium median wage, Bitcoin gives you your time back and, and pays you competitively based on what you could be doing and it gives you that Peace of Mind. So I, I think that that narrative, that thesis is still pretty early. I, I know some people that, whose main business is Bitcoin, just holding Bitcoin is like your primary business and they're, they tend to be older, you know, finished with their careers, retired, financially independent, whatever you want to call it. And then the, the idea of starting a new business, deploying capital outside of Bitcoin is like, it's a nightmare. It's like Oh my goodness, like why would I want to work when I can just not and and increase my purchasing power?
Jeff: Bitcoin or a guy are you a fan of businesses keeping well, I know you're not like a big fan of treasuries in general, you'd rather just buy Bitcoin. But like do you think keeping Bitcoin on your balance sheet is a is a good move for most companies? Or do you think only select companies should be utilizing?
Speaker 1: I think we're as individuals, we are all companies, right? I think, I think I'm a company. I think you're a company. I think you don't need to have an operating business as as individual to be to think like a company, right? If you have AP and Li think it just depends on, on who you are, what your age is, what your time horizon horizon is. And they're like really good business. They're really good entrepreneurs that aren't really great investors. So I think there's a going to be a lot of learning to happen. I think putting you know, Bitcoin on the balance sheet is a good idea. But my question is, do you unders like the for the companies that are doing that, can they hold it right? Is there are all their shareholders going to be aligned on that idea? And in the event that Bitcoin does another 3040% draw down to us in the high beta equity community, a 30% drawdown is a, is a, is like a paper cut, right? You don't lose sleep over it. You just wash your hands. You might not even get a Band-Aid, right? Like that's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a major hit, right? A 75% drawdown that that's when start, you know, people start second guessing and questioning their, their thesis, even if they're, they've been in the game for a while, right? I, I think those days are over for Bitcoin. I, I think over a long period of time, 20 years, right? If you can increase your Bitcoin per share, it's a good idea. But I think you should also, you know, consider like, are your cash flows improving, right? Are you creating more optionality for your shareholders, for the company? Are you, are you attracting the right employees, the right partners, the right shareholders? Because in, in the current moment, the companies that historically it's only been a couple years that have adopted that strategy attracted the wrong shareholders, right? Michael Saylor in his last interview, he was, he was like calling out the tourists. He was like, hey, there's nothing wrong with micro strategy. There's there was, there was a bubble or there was a problem with the shareholders that were buying micro strategy at the at the peak. He, he was not taking accountability of, of his strategy. He said he was doubling down on, on, on himself. He was like, hey, like there's nothing wrong with Bitcoin treasury companies. It was the tourist that that got over levered with high cost bases that dumped and now they're complaining and trolling and shit posting. So in a in a way I agree with that, right? I think over a long period of time, if you have, if you can build a business that's a true monopoly and sustain it and build value over over time, that the the idea is good, right? But I don't think every business is going to build a monopoly. I don't think every business is going to last forever, which is why you should own Bitcoin And I, I, I think Bitcoin treasury companies that can differentiate themselves in their business can, can, can be a good idea. But the idea that Bitcoin per share is valuable in, in a, in a, in a period less than five 1020 years, I, I, I think is a distraction, right? I think I advise CE OS, right, like I tell them the same thing, like, you know, it's cool, but you know, here like the opportunity cost for not being a Bitcoin is is high, right, If you truly understand it and do you really want to attract the wrong investors? Like I think of think of yourself as a, as a small business, right? Like you, you want, if you, if you're raising capital for a new idea, right? And you're, you already understand Bitcoin, so you understand the opportunity cost is at least 30%. Do you really want to go in into business with someone that's a gambler, right? That is not, you know that that has recently come into money, right? That has bad habits, right? That isn't that educated on, on on the markets that they're, that they're trying to compete in and isn't like a, you know, it isn't long term oriented. And at every bump in the road, they're going to complain, they're going to want their money back. That's the wrong partner, that's the wrong investor. You don't want to go into business going into business with someone like that, whether even if it's a close friend, family member, someone you grew up with, that's not a good idea, right? So the public markets are really hard because you don't know who your partners are. So you just like speaking to the masses when you're on a space, you don't know if someone's a, a real shareholder or they're shorting a company and it, you know, sometimes not a, a great idea to be a public company. So it's, it's hard. It's, it's very nuanced, but I think if you have a great business and a great business is one that's differentiated. Is producing cash flows. It has a line of sight to increasing profitabilities even in the high growth sexy market like AI, like we can point to the neo clouds and say, hey, there's revenue here. And we can hypothesize and say, OK, the ones that are more vertically integrated can have the opportunity to, to, to expand their margins and to, to be more profitable than the ones that are not and grow faster because they're vertically integrated. I think that's a good I, I idea, right. And then the question is like, OK, bringing it back to Iron, why is iron not holding Bitcoin on, on it's balance sheet? Because they, they, the company believes that the opportunity cost of holding that Bitcoin, you know, doesn't make sense when they can deploy that capital faster and using their own confidence and team platform, etcetera, can, can, can produce returns that are higher. And also, I think there's a greater confidence that the market will reward their efforts via higher valuations, right? So I think it comes down to confidence as well, which is why historically Bitcoin mining companies had had had very low multiples because the market didn't trust them. You know, their management structures weren't solid. You know, they're run by companies and executives that really just wanted to milk their shareholders, didn't really care about execution and just wanted to pump their stock, right. And I think, you know, you have to, you have to consider all, all these different dynamics.
Jeff: Speaking of the Saylor interview, wow he absolutely berated that dude. I thought it was a little bit unnecessary. I didn't think he came across well like he was. He was all bent out of shape that the guy brought up the topic and then he like wouldn't let the topic go for like a solid 7 minutes as he proceeded to RIP him a new asshole. I wasn't sure if you had any thoughts on that, but I thought that was pretty wild. And then we'll go to Jeff Ward real quick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I, I, I think some people have said it was like a setup, that he was just trying to get attention and, and all attention is good. I think that's a terrible take. I think it's a pure copium. I think sailors should act like he's running a trillion dollar company. I, I'm a, I'm a big fan of Sailor. I, I was a bitcoiner many, many years before Sailor, you know, bought Bitcoin. I remember when I, I, that tweet when he was talking shit about Bitcoin, I commented, responded to it, I laughed at it. I think Sailor needs to take a break. You know, I think he needs to go on vacation. I think he needs to enjoy his life if he wants to be an ambassador for Bitcoin. I, I, I think he just needs to have a, you know, lead a great life and not be so obsessive and share the spotlight with his Ceoi think it's the CEO needs to be the face of the company. I, I think, you know, I think he's too, too deep for a chairman. I think he should be a more high level and not as intense and be more balanced, right? I think he's an innovator, which is very difficult. It takes everything very seriously 'cause he is, you know, leading the way. And I think he's already turned around the company, right? I mean, he's a sailor, has been very successful doing what he did. And now I think it's time for ACEO to, to step up and be ACEO and, and not be like an assistant to Michael Saylor, right? I, I, I think that is the opportunity for MSTRI Think MSTR is a monopoly. I, I don't, I, I don't own it. I think allocating the bitcoin's a better idea. And if I did buy micro strategy, it's going to be after, you know, irons 300 to $600.00 equity. And then after after that is the case, I'll probably be buying, you know, more Bitcoin. And if depending on how micro strategy is trading, acting, executing, I'll probably, you know, invest 1% of my net worth into micro strategy depending on how I feel.
Jeff: Yeah, I I agree with you. I think I think, well, yeah, like you said, any press is a good press, right. But I just thought that was an absolutely terrible look. You didn't need to do that. I hope it was a setup. I just thought he was way out of line. I didn't think there's really anything wrong with the question, but small cap, before we go to you, Jeff came up. I want to give him an opportunity to speak. Jeff, my brother from another mother. Welcome. Hey, what's up Jeff? Bitcoin chat. You know that sailor interview? I have a different take on it, but I appreciate your perspective. I think what Michael Saylor was doing was trying to craft and set up the next narrative that needs to be present in order for Bitcoin to advance. And like he murdered that guy, obviously. And like everybody, everybody realizes that. I don't think that guy took it personally. I think he realized that the the role he was playing was to advance the questions that are dominating crypto Twitter and to listen to that response. And so I think he stood there as a proxy for crypto Twitter and your local meet up or whatever blogosphere you're in and and gave the correct questions. And I think the way Sailor answered was really brilliant in that it it did craft the next narrative that we need to be on as we start to move to the upside of the S curve. So when you brought bring that conversation about the Sailor interview it over to the Bitcoin treasury company space, I think we've already had our pets.com moment in that in that space. And it's important that you really realize the Bitcoins role is just pristine capital and and not try to confuse it for having any other role. If you just look at it in isolation the way Sailor does, that explains a lot of the wisdom behind the reverse split from Strive today. And it also explains that we're past our pets.com moment and we're looking for the Amazons. And so, you know, the treasury space was a little noisy before, but now people that are focused on Bitcoin as capital and understand that are in a are in a real good position to execute, especially when we get some tailwinds. So, you know, not every Bitcoin treasury company or publicly traded company that holds Bitcoin on their balance sheet, They're not all created equal. I follow a a biotech company that holds Bitcoin on the balance sheet and they're in a lot of R&D and they've got a lot of expenses. They've got a good pipeline, but they do hold Bitcoin. You know, if you get some serious tailwinds behind Bitcoin and larger portions of traditional finance start to realize it's function as a capital asset that that R&D company, that that biotech company is able to utilize some of the tools that Saylor has introduced into the space for themselves in order to raise capital to fund their research. Because they believe, like you were saying, Bitcoin AI. They believe then in that space, that deploying that Bitcoin as productive capital to raise money to finish their products and drive them to market is going to outperform Bitcoin itself. That's when Bitcoin performs its function as pure, hard, pristine capital that's able to just pour gasoline on the fire of an existing company because now you don't need a bank. You are the bank, you are your own bank. And when when people who understand your space, whatever your space is your butcher shop. And I think Bitcoin butchers here. If you're a butcher shop and you're going to deploy some Bitcoin in order to expand your operations. Did you think the games going to out outrun what you could make a Bitcoin and you're going to use that game to probably buy more Bitcoin? Like that's the engineering flywheel that's going to, we're going to see more adoption of. I'm not scared of the similar merger at all. I'm happy to see it. And the reverse split, as far as I'm concerned, is just a Band-Aid that needed to get ripped off. And people that confuse unit bias with fundamentals are going to, are going to have to learn the hard way how to separate, you know, what other people do or what you've always done in, in, in your vertical versus like a, a big picture, fundamental look at what a company is and what a company does. I don't, I don't have any issue with strive at all. I'm, I'm a shareholder. I, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't really, I'm, I'm happy they did it. So I think the Sailor interview and the Treasury companies, the Strive merger, it's all the same theme to me is that when we get the tailwinds, you're going to see the wisdom of all the things Sailor said. You know, it's just like every major interview where has tongue shifts. You look back on that interview two years later and say, yeah, it should have been obvious. So I'm personally still heavy in Bitcoin. I have a 9010 portfolio and you know, I'm not looking to deploy any of my capital from from Bitcoin until I can see a clear path for me to get a better gain out of it. And, and part of my going forward approach from that Sailor interview is I'm, I'm not going to look at any company that doesn't already understand Bitcoin and at least hold some of it on their balance sheet as a capital asset. And so I understand that limits, you know, the investability scope of what I can look at. But at the same time, I'm still heavy allocated in Bitcoin, you know, I don't really care. So, yeah, so if a company's holding Bitcoin, but they do something else, I wanna have a look at that company because they're going to have the capital necessary to dominate or grow or whatever develop in their vertical. And if they're that forward thinking that that's to me a vote of confidence in a, in a team that has some serious strategy in mind. So that is ironically named. That is the strategy. It's it's Bitcoin. And I'm I know I'm early, but I also know I'm not wrong. And I'm happy to wait it out because I'm sitting in safety, yield back the balance of my time to the chat. Love to hear your comments guys.
Speaker 3: Jeff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when we say so we say pristine collateral. Like that's a Michael Saylor term, right? I mean, when I was, you know, you know, 5-10 years ago, no one really talked about Bitcoin as a store of value. And you know, the original Bitcoiners saw Bitcoin as money, right? So this new store of value narrative is still pretty, pretty new, right? I agree with you. It's the pristine store of value. But that, that, that phrase is, is a new idea. I, I think over 30-40 years, every investor is going to be a bitcoiner, right? If it's pristine collateral, right? And and they haven't discovered that idea yet. So it's bit bitcoins in price discovery. I think every company is going to be an AI company, just like how every company is an Internet company today, right and and and it's greatly, you know, outgrowing bitcoins adoption curve, which is an incredible adoption curve, right. So it's an exciting space, right. I, I think AI Bitcoin probably like the the ideas are, are going to be like the the best ideas of our lifetime. We'll go to Butcher and then we'll wait for Mike to come and then we'll close out.
Speaker 3: Jeff, I had a quick question for you. I'm a newer Stride shareholder. It was primarily just a play on the liquidity cycle starting to ramp up again and potentially a new Fed chair. And you had spoken to Unit Bias and there's a reverse split today. I bought it under a dollar and cost basis and now I'm trying to it's a smaller position, less than 2% of my holdings. But I would just after today's merger, I'm familiar with Eric Semmler and how they acquired 5000 Bitcoin and through this all stock transaction that Strive has now, you know, has a larger huddle of approximately 12,000 Bitcoin. What in your opinion, since it sounds like you've been in it a little longer, why is Semler a good strategic target for Stride as opposed to just buying the 5000 Bitcoin in, I don't know, TC desk or in the spot marketplace. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Jeff: Hopefully you're talking to me. Yeah. So similar, you know, it has a real business. You know, they're in medical devices and so you know, that's going to that business still functions like MicroStrategy still has, you know, a software company or whatever it is that they they used to do. So they still have some, some basic earnings that come from that think you can improve the quality of their earnings reports. But it was really going after a business with Bitcoin. This is like the beginning of the mergers and acquisition season, in my opinion, in in the Bitcoin publicly traded company space. And so it's a wonderful experiment. I have a, you know, a small allocation of My Portfolio is there 3%. So like I, it could shit the bed. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but it, you know, there's some really brilliant people at Strive on their board and in management and I think they need time to run and I think the market needs time to digest it. And I'm, and I, I took a swing on it. My cost basis is now $0.77. I, I, I literally, you know, have very, very minimal risk. So for me it's, it's not a big deal, but it's a, it's a way of levering Bitcoins price action if that narrative starts to take over and strategy's the biggest guy. So yeah, I agree with Bitcoin AI about he's too big, he's got too much of A monopoly, Probably not going to have the same returns as I would in a smaller player that I think is going to execute well. And if they have a business they can backstop at the same time, great. Or maybe maybe Strive just starts like acquiring crap tons of like things in the medical field. I mean, I don't know what they're going to do. I I can't speak to that. But you know, similar semblers want maybe they're going to find other opportunities as that talent pool kind of merges and maybe it's just a huge M and a season for Bitcoin treasury companies. I have no idea. Maybe they would buy Atai Beckley that that would be wonderful for me. I yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot they could do and a lot remains to be seen. And I didn't like Jeep my bags over there. You know, I I just took a position. So I'm going to hang on and just give them time to run.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate that. I, I looked at the management team as well and the CEOs former, you know, involvement with CalPERS and workmen and punter Jaffer, pretty sharp guys. And then Ramaswami has a lot of success in the medical biomedical fields. So I, I do see an opportunity without digging too deep in the financials and the way it's positioned, if anyone is looking at why I hold it, I'm kind of with Jeff where I'm more betting on people at this point and waiting to get more details to better understand the story going forward and what they can do. But I also think we're at a time before Bitcoin is that that inflection point where if they're holding 12,000 and I, I have a hard time believing giving the institutional adoption that we're not on our way to 150 or 200,000 in the next.
Speaker 1: Year or two, that's why I feel relatively safe tipping my toe in here and then seeing what these guys can do. And I think they have an opportunity where I formally held MicroStrategy and I got out.
Speaker 3: Around $400.00 before it's stepped down to 170. And I still believe micro has a monopoly on Bitcoin which is important. I just haven't seen what their. I think what's different with Strive versus MSTR is Strive appears to be trying to acquire operating businesses and grow their operational cash flow so that they can support their purchases without diluting the common shareholder, which I haven't seen enough with with MSCR as of late. But I'm sure there's MSCR rules that want to correct me and can feel free to DM me your thoughts because I'm always looking to learn. But thank you, Jeff, for your insight.
Jeff: Yep. Thanks guys. We'll quit dominating the chat. One other name to look there on their board is James Lavish. James's brilliant guy, small cap I you had your hand up we'll go to you and then Chris we'll we'll jump to you right after yeah you know on the the sailor topics I I watched that whole interview and I agree Bitcoin AI guy as far as how he has to you know he should handle himself like he's running a trillion dollar company cuz I the projections and you know paces that he views Bitcoin going like that's. That's eventually what it's going to be, right? But you know, at the same time, like the Sailor model and just effect of what he's done, like those comments that that Daniel made or you know, he sees it, Sailor sees it as attacking entities that are accumulating Bitcoin, which obviously that that's what it was. And whether it was, you know, like a little unnecessary or not, that's such a big part of strategy. And he sees entities actively accumulating Bitcoin as just a net positive for the security, the liquidity and just the overall global like adoption speed. So I like understand where he's coming from, right? And it's and it's technical. He's the pioneer of the Bitcoin treasury strategy, no pun intended strategy and right, like, like he's been doing this since 2020 and engineered a capital structure at strategy that he leverages asymmetric upside, right? He's got, you know, low cost debt. The the convertible notes are, you know, anywhere from zero to 3/4 of a percent coupons equity issuance at premium M nabs when bitcoins rallying and just leverage from bitcoin's appreciation outpacing borrowing costs long term, right? And his model just exploits the like long term compounding while hedging the short term volatility through dollar cost averaging and credit markets. So every critique of smaller treasuries, whether it's, you know, bad execution or over leveraging themselves, not enough cash flow, bad timing, It's it it like he takes it as a as an existential threat or just a threat in general to the playbooks legitimacy. And, you know, if the narrative sours on on corporate Bitcoin adoption, even broadly, you know, it could kind of tarnish the optionality that he relies on, which are banks extending margin loans against collateral and, and in fair value accounting and derivatives, commercialization of derivatives and, and just regulatory tailwinds that turn Bitcoin into digital capital and supporting credit issuance digitally. So, you know, again, it's his baby, right. The Bitcoin treasury strategy is Michael Saylor. It's.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So let me, let me jump here. I hear you. All the talking points you're saying are off a presentation, right? That, that the company has pitched. But like, I, I encourage everyone to be a little bit independent, right? And I, I fall victim to this as well, where, you know, I, I've, I've studied a company so deeply that I, I say some of the talking points, but as a Bitcoin, I, I, I try to be super independent. And, you know, I, I think every company that has a monopoly, a good monopoly, right? I'm not saying a corrupt, evil monopoly, but the monopoly that, you know, Peter Thiel described in his book zero to 1. And I think it's a highly impactful book for entrepreneurs and investors. But basically, if you have a real monopoly, some a company that's differentiated vertically integrated has some sort of branding power, not necessarily the first to market, but built to be the last to market, right? That can produce sizable cash flows in the future, etcetera, right? That that is a good monopoly that that, that Peter Thiel describes in his book, right? That, that is a great business to strive for, to, to build, to own, right. You will never hear an actual company that has a monopoly to say that they have a monopoly. They'll say the market is growing, you know, and they won't describe themselves as, you know, a, a, a Bitcoin monopoly. They'll say that they're they produce digital credit, You know, they'll they'll they'll say they're financial engineering. They'll say, you know, bitcoins early in its adoption curve. They'll they'll say all these things like sailors, like the great example of of the fact that he's painting a narrative, right? And he's propping up these other companies that are, you know, competitive in nature, also known as non monopolies, right. So it's a very difficult time for a non MSTR treasury company. But I think that in capitalism, just like in nature, you know, the strongest, most fit will survive and and not everyone's going to make it. I think Bitcoin is a tool to to help individuals and companies improve their purchasing power and and and go towards freedom, whatever that means for for them. But I see the treasury market very, very similar to December 2022, January 23, where no one wants to. Like when I was posting on Twitter, when I had fifty 100 followers, when I talked about Bitcoin mining companies, right? It was like, I was, I was shilling a shit coin, right? The Bitcoin Maxis would make fun of me and they would be like, hey, why are you talking about Mara? Why are you talking about Riot? Why are you talking? And then, you know, when, when Marathon started running, I made a lot of money again on Marathon running. And I was, you know, I was celebrating with the Mara pigs, right? And I saw this little company called Cleanspark that no one's heard of. And I mean, it's how I became popular. I, I sized in a clean spark at $2.00. And it was like, I was talking about some, some Casper coin, some shit coin and a 10X in under a year, right? And, you know, people think I, I, I, I built a name because of iron. No, I was, I, I, I made incredible trades investments long before iron. And iron is, you know, one of my best investments in my lifetime, but you know, it's it, it reminds me where we are today in the treasury market of, of where Bitcoin like people don't want to talk about other treasury companies outside of MSTR. And then and then, you know, people on Twitter, a lot of them got burned by holding MSTR, right, because it failed to be that leverage proxy. And again, it, it, it shows more about the lack of experience of those investors than than micro strategy itself. I'm not saying micro strategy is going to always outperform Bitcoin. I I just think everyone was all tourists were exposed and under exposed to, to Bitcoin itself. So I, I, I suggest like going forward that you should, if you're a bitcoiner, you want to own Bitcoin and if you want Bitcoin proxy should have various different exposures, whether that be I bet. And, and if you want that treasury like treated as a call option, like a 1%, I, I think MSTR should be a 1% position, right? I think you should have, you know, 8090 times more Bitcoin, more, more, more Satoshi's than you should shares of MSTR, right? And that's not a popular idea, right? People like to say MSTR is like, like the new Bitcoin. I, I think that's bullshit. I, I, I think there are, there are a lot of monopolies on the market that you can own as stocks. MSTR is just one of them, right? But that doesn't mean you know, it's going to outperform Bitcoin. I think the what, what you're competing against as an investor or other investors, right? So there could be a reality where MSCR is a new Mara, right? You know, look at Mara's chart over 2 five years, they have destroyed capital. And I, and I think there could be a reality. I tweeted about this. It wasn't, it wasn't popular, but I think there could be a time where Mara and Riot have incredible runs and MSTR, it becomes the most hated stock where institutions are going to, you know, increase their position size to like 99% of MSTR. It's going to shake out 99% of all the retail investors on Twitter. It's going to be the most hated Bitcoin equity, while Bitcoin, you know, flies to 200300400500K over the next few years and MSTR might lag or hardly keep up and people are going to be questioning sailor sailor strategy. But again, I, I agree with Michael Saylor and the fact that people don't own enough Bitcoin. They, they, you know, they lever up on the wrong ideas at the wrong time and the wrong size. And people just need to learn the hard way. Like you have to lose money to be a good investor. And, and you got to understand, you know the risks you're going to be taking. And sometimes you don't understand until you lose.
Jeff: Yeah, and and Bitcoin AI guy, just to clarify, you know, I don't I'm completely on your side as far as that goes. Like I don't own MSTR and if anything, like if I were to own something a part of like the strategy, you know, breakdown, I'd rather own MSTY over, you know, MSTR right? It it's the synthetic covered call play on MSTR selling calls to generate like that, you know, massive weekly or monthly income in the short term. But you know, at the end of the day, if you if you believe in Bitcoin and believe that it's like the last best idea, the scarce decentralized compounded digital monopoly with no competition, then you should just own Bitcoin directly and not treasuries. And that's that's what I do like I don't own MSTR for, you know, the reason that treasuries in general, they give you leverage exposure and some convexity through premium M nabs and debt recycling. But they come with layers of risk that you don't need if you're all in on Bitcoin long term, right, like dilution, leverage, blow up scenarios, corporate governance and just short term noise and attacks on on scrutiny in like regulatory wise. So sailors playbook. I think it's brilliant for institutions or funds that can't or just won't hold hold spot Bitcoin directly. But for individuals like it's, you know, straight Bitcoin is cleaner pure removes the middleman, no debt covenants, no board decisions. It's just you and say that the 21 million cap. So if it's really the last monopoly worth owning forever, then why why I had the extra steps? Just just own the thing itself. That's where that's where I come from. But as far as where he's just defending himself like I, I, I just I, I get it like none of this. Who knows if the whole treasury shit happens if it's if it wasn't for him making those moves in 2020. So.
Speaker 1: Where I can also, you know, I, I, I could also be a representative of the bears, right? And also, if you're a contrarian, this might be a really good time. Not financial advice to allocate to MSTR and the treasury companies because, you know, it's like me a few years ago being a clean spark bull or Mara bull when the Bitcoin Maxis were making fun of me, right? I, I, I, I, I'm now the bad guy, right? I am now that Bitcoin maxi, but the maxi back then, we're not like serious investors. They're not serious individuals talking about managing their risk, you know, sizing their their bets properly. None of that conversation was happening because they were not serious investors. They were just ship posters and on Twitter, right? Like so yeah, now we have Mike on. Let's let's go to Mike.
Speaker 4: You don't have to come to me right away, but I certainly appreciate the consideration would have loved to join earlier. But this is these are the kind of days that dreams are made of in investing and there's just been it's been shooting fish in a barrel today. Huge overreaction to the you know, it's kind of a buy the rumor, sell the news situation with similar like nothing has changed at all with drive like 00 things have changed, right? Like the economics are still the economics. It'll go up when Bitcoin goes up. It doesn't matter if you do a merger. It doesn't matter if you do a reverse split. What matters is that Bitcoin is the hurdle rate and Bitcoin, as long as it's going up fast enough to meet your Fiat obligations, then you create at least for a period of time, the situation where you can accumulate Bitcoin at scale. And I think that's what we're seeing. I mean, I posted a tweet within the last week about MSTRI think the math is clear. No one will ever have more coins in MSTRMSTR will be one of the biggest financial institutions of any type in the world at some point when bitcoins, you know, a million, 2,000,005 million a coin. And so it's like early days for figuring out like who's going to control what piece of the strategic real estate once you get to scale, like once you get to $1,000,000 a coin and you basically have all these governments using it alongside gold and other assets as a store value. You've got people settling large amounts of cross-border transactions like flow of funds between countries as you're settling trade. It's, it's going to be a really important place, right? Bitcoin, if you think of it as a place going to be a very important place to do business and it'll be one of the only places that at least for a period of time should be somewhat immune to being attacked by AIAI will be very good at attacking traditional financial institutions and traditional financial structures because there's so, so many vulnerabilities. You know, Bitcoin has so few vulnerabilities at like a physics level that it's AI may want to hack into Bitcoin. I mean, who who wouldn't if if you're smarter, if you're that smart when you were left alone, why wouldn't you try to hack into Bitcoin? But I don't think AI will be able to hack in to Bitcoin. And I think that is a really important point going into the kind of the next few years. You know, Bitcoin just needed to go over 94. That was like the key technical level that a lot of people were eyeballing for the past few weeks. I had a sense that mid month would sort of be when we cruise through that area. We seem to be cruising through that area now. There doesn't seem to be a lot to stop Bitcoin from going to 1:10 or 1:20 in the short term. And then we just have to see when it when it meets all time highs, is it super impulsive and reflected in that area and sort of continue on towards 14150 and higher or do we have to consolidate for some period of time? But it feels like from everything that I can see, from all the different things that I look at across the whole space, it feels like the macro is really turning over for the first time in three or four years. You know, those of you who are here, the last time Bitcoin went to 90K or 100K, it felt totally different. It felt hard to get to 100K. And then we didn't stay there very long and it felt hard to keep 90K for a while. We even went all the way back down last spring to 74, right? And it was a lot of consolidation over the past two or three years. We moved up a lot from the absolute lows, but it never felt like a traditional Bitcoin bull market because there really haven't been the correct liquidity conditions for Bitcoin to behave like that. And that is sort of manifested and and not seeing any rally whatsoever in the broader crypto ecosystem in aggregate where where we haven't made much progress there over three or four years. And also measured very clearly in the sort of the US business cycle by the lack of an expansion in the ISMPMI, which we we haven't seen at all. So while there, there has been some adoption of Bitcoin and there has been some significant adoption of AI, we haven't seen any of the traditional markers of what a bull market would look like. So that means we've just been basing for two or three years. We've effectively we were a rubber band that stretched too far in Q4 of 2022 where like things were too dark and too negative and people throwing out everything. And now we sort of snap back to like a more normalized valuation, sort of a pre market normalized, a pre bull market, normalized valuation that like reflects everything that could be known, but doesn't reflect prices and liquidity conditions further out on the curve. For example, if we get 150 or 200,000, I can assure you that nothing in the Bitcoin ecosystem is priced for that right now. You can see that in the options market. You can see that in sort of the general sentiment, you can see that and sort of the lack of a real push even on the institutional side. There's institutional adoption, but there hasn't been any impulsive or reflective behavior in Bitcoin yet because there's there's no compelling reason quite yet why you have to allocate. But what happens as these cycles progress is, is increasingly as you get to the third, 4th, 5th inning, there are a ton of things pushing different participants into the market all at the same time, which increase increases sort of the overall by pressure. And I think that's that's what's kind of flipping now. We said it a couple weeks ago, like there's really nobody left large left to sell. Like if you didn't sell between 80 and and 126 over the last year, it's unclear what would suddenly cause you a need to sell here outside of some personal right, like if you have some personal need to do so. But but there are again, because because of the absolute scarcity of Bitcoin and the fact that there just isn't that much to sell, you can't just like make more Bitcoin to sell. And the amount of Bitcoin mined per day is only like 450 right now. So the idea that there's going to be large amounts of selling, I think that was a delusion that a lot of these sort of kid analysts and sharp squigglers have had over the past couple months. And they used sort of the week support of of a four year having cycle for Bitcoin and the timing of previous cycles. And that they forgot to look at every other factor in the global economy and every other liquidity factor, every other sort of macro condition that would cause the same thing to happen. This time has happened, say three years ago, four years ago. And so they just missed like effectively everything because everything else was not saying we were going to 70K or 60K Bitcoin. Everything else I'm seeing is saying we're just in a transition period between the pre bull market to the actual bull market, which is when it actually feels like a bull market, like a bull market is something that. If you've ever been in one, if you've ever traded one, if you've ever invested through one, like it, it doesn't feel anything like the last two or three years. So I get, I get that some people say, oh, well, the S the S&P is, is up a lot. And it's like, well, yeah, I mean the, the equal weighted S&P isn't up much because it's really just a small group of companies that were benefiting from a couple of themes, right? And, and those themes were largely like not helpful to the big chunk of, of the, the economy. And in the US that includes small caps, that includes industries outside of technology, etcetera. And so you can point that out and, and people just ignored it. You could point out that there was 0 real sustained euphoria even for weeks at a time in the broader crypto ecosystem. There were a couple runs, certainly. But again, in retrospect, I think you can view those as as largely rebasing moves to just get back to some normalized valuation area that it would sort of live in, in a neutral world. So I'm, I'm sitting here now and I'm going, OK, Bitcoins probably heading TO15020250300400 in the next few years. Some of that move may happen in the very short term, some of it may be elongated into 2728. Again, there's, it's really hard to see where you get a major, major draw down when you have the biggest CapEx cycle in absolute terms in history in its early stages right now playing out. It's still not big and relative terms that compared to like the railroads, for example, as one, as one example of a, of a sort of new type technological trend that reshaped society's CapEx priorities in the short term. Like we, we are seeing a major reshifting of resources away from things that are sort of antiquated now to generating compute. I, I, I like to say that probably the only thing more scarce than Bitcoin in the global economy right now is, is AI compute or just compute in general and memory and all the associated components that allow you to generate compute. That seems to be the only area that is demonstrably more scarce than Bitcoin, but I think that's a shortage that can be addressed. The thing that people still don't get about Bitcoin and maybe we'll continue to not get for a while hopefully is Bitcoin is the only thing in the economy where your desire to create it or to close the gap in terms of shortages or just to create more in the economy. It's there's nothing you can do based on your desire to accelerate that. The the supply issuance in the supply curve is completely preordained via the algorithm and via supported by the mining and the nodes in a decentralized fashion such that your desire to want more of it or to make more of it or to accelerate it is not going to change the outcome. But in AI compute, for example, at some point again some point in the future, maybe 2345 years out from now, it's possible there might be over investment. But I would argue today the the relative scarcity of AI compute to Bitcoin makes a clear argument that we've under invested in AI compute and in fact, we need to double or triple or quadruple down as Meta and Google and others have announced it in recent months. And I certainly wouldn't bet against those companies. I mean, if you look back 15 or 20 years back from from now, then think back to who people thought were the smartest people in the economy 20 years ago versus who ended up being the smartest people in the economy. I, I don't know why you'd bet against the smartest people in the economy when they're straight up telling you that AI compute is the most scarce thing in the world today. It's way more scarce than Bitcoin in the short term. That may flip, right. As I said, they'll always be oscillating around some, some mean, right? So there'll be mean reversion both directions. We may have gone too far from a sentiment standpoint towards AI relative to Bitcoin, but I'm not sure in, on absolute terms if we're overheated at all. Like we may actually again, still be in absolute terms, we still may be under investing in AI, but in relative terms, we may have over invested relative to Bitcoin. So you could see a situation where AI continues to get bigger in absolute terms with Bitcoin gets bigger and sort of oscillates around that, that line of relative valuation, right? And I think more and more as they think out 20 years, that's probably what's going to happen. They're going to keep becoming anchor to each other at the energy layer where they have to consume large amounts of energy to, to grow and sustain both technology stacks. And so for various periods of time, when the institutional investors are dead set and, and, and committed to AI as they are now and where they think it's basically a sure bet at almost any valuation for almost anything, then you can get scenarios where on a relative basis bitcoins like systemically undervalued. But again, that that's not to say that any of that behaviours are rational, because in fact, it may be completely rational to invest more in AI even while Bitcoin is sort of systemically undervalued relative to AI. So let me pause there because I said a lot, but these are some of the things I've been thinking a lot about as I've been investing right now.
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on the Michael Saylor's interview that he recently had?
Speaker 4: Do you do you think I have time to watch that? I mean, look, I, I don't need to watch Michael Saylor on an interview to understand what he was doing, right? Like I, I understood what he was doing right when he started doing it. I understood Bitcoin before Michael Saylor understood Bitcoin time wise. He probably has a much deeper understanding now in a lot of ways, right? And, and I have nothing but respect for him, but he's, he's still relatively new to Bitcoin, right? And so it doesn't really matter. Like what he says on a podcast, what matters is what is the company doing? And if you just look at the strategy, he's doing exactly what you would do if you have a huge lead and you want to make sure it becomes increasingly clear that it's insurmountable. And I think, you know, because he's so high IQ and he's been doing this for so long. And even though he may not admit it, there's probably periods of time where he gets tired. He's going to be annoyed some days. Like some, some questions are dumb and some people are dumb and like, it's OK to say that. In fact, if you're going to be a billionaire, you're, you're going to have to like be confident in your own views relative to the average person's views. If, if, if you're not confident in that and you don't think you have any edge, well, you're not going to be a billionaire anyway. So I think it's funny to criticize billionaires for just being human crossing a billion or 5 billion or 10 billion. And and that worth does not change you're humanity. You're still, you still get tired, you still get hungry, you still get grumpy, you still need to exercise, right? You don't need to take time to to detox from social media. And candidly, you need to take time for detox from podcast. If you do too many podcasts and it becomes annoying, right? Just stop doing them, but separately. Like I don't blame the guy at all for being annoyed if somebody asks repetitive or or dumb questions. A lot of these journalists are, are, are not really that interesting, right? They're they're good at like taking a story and writing it and putting it. I'm not talking about any particular journalist right now. I'm talking in general about media creation, including mainstream media, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etcetera. Like they're nice people. Some of them are quite smart, but none of them are risk takers. None of them are principal investors. None of them are entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs. They write about those people they write about and they talk about and they ask questions of the people who are in the arena actually building shit and changing the world like Elon Musk and Michael Saylor and others. And so, well, they're the ink that they're spilling has some value because people read it in a shapes narrative and opinion. I give it really low weight, most of it relative to what I know for sure that each of these world class builders, investors, etcetera, actually believes about the way the world works because what Michael Saylor believes is a lot more important than what he says on a particular podcast. So Long story short, I I've watched like 2 minutes of clips. I really don't watch that podcast. I really don't listen to very many podcasts at all. I don't have time right now because I'm in the market and there's so much money to be made in the market. I don't have time to consume other people's content.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm the same. I, I, I, I just watched a clip of the entire podcast that and it was of Saylor yelling at the podcaster.
Speaker 4: I I honestly, honestly, I'd yell at that guy too, but go ahead.
Speaker 1: And I'm, and I'm not just an influencer, I'm an investor. I just happen to be funny. So how confident are you are in MSTR performing Bitcoin and over the course of a few years in a decade?
Speaker 4: I mean, that's not a bet that I'm going to I'm going to make actively right now. I like MSTR the most when it was most asymmetric because my perception in the fall of 22, right coming into 23 was that most people in the market did not understand what MSTR was. And I did, and I understood it because I had traded all the way through the previous cycle and I understood Bitcoin before MSTR is pivoted into Bitcoin. So I was able to see all that happen in sequence, in context. And I saw it as a very asymmetric bet. Like if they could pull off that strategy, they would become the biggest Bitcoin holder in the world. I think that's a fate of complete. I think that's a done deal. It's what I said in a tweet the other day. The issue is not that they're not going to be the biggest. The issue is that the equity returns may not actually be significantly larger or or not larger at all than Bitcoin as it approaches Bitcoin and in terms of its structure, right. So if he had one other business in there that was larger, right, that he was still shrinking down in order to to buy more Bitcoin or something like that would create more torque, I feel like. But because the balance sheet is already basically just Bitcoin, what's going to happen to MSTR over long, long periods of time? Again, as you approach Infinity is is, is a bit effectively MSTR return should approach the return of Bitcoin itself as measured in some other anchor point, right? And that's the challenge. If Bitcoin actually becomes the unit of account, then effectively you start measuring everything else in the economy relative to Bitcoin, not measuring Bitcoin relative to dollars as we do now. And so there's a whole paradigm shift that could happen somewhere out on that 2030 year curve. But what I'm looking at now is like, OK, the the general idea that you can take a pool of Bitcoin as long as the Bitcoin for a period of time out runs the cost of capital effectively as expressed as like, for example, the sum total of all the payments you need to make on the convertible notes plus the preferred like the STRC, the stretches and the strides and the stripes and all these things, right? Like if, if he if that actually happens, then he will just maintain his lead. And if anyone tries to accumulate enough Bitcoin to actually challenge that lead, that of course would create a market impact on Bitcoin that would drive the price of Bitcoin up such that he would be able to consistently issue more security. So I think it's a done deal that MSTR is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin probably ever, unless you fork Bitcoin at some point to to change the rules of the game to allow someone else to come in. There's, there's effectively no way mathematically for someone easily to catch MSTR. But I think that should be more priced in now in the sense that most investors who care about Bitcoin treasury companies largely know MSTR is the best and will probably remain the largest. And the question is, is there enough of the shock or surprise to consensus expectations such that you can get this sort of highly convex outcome over 5 or 10 years? And so that's where I'm betting on stuff like Strive, where Strive is similar in, in approach in terms of wanting Bitcoins return to out, you know, to outrun basically their cost of capital. The difference is they're smaller and they're less understood. And so people don't have as high of expectations for Strive as they do for MSDR. That said, the management team there is quite sophisticated at structuring these preferred securities and there are no, there's no debt on the balance sheet. So effectively you can make a large bet and wait. Because if I'm right and Bitcoin does go to 150 or 200,000, it's not quite deterministic math equation because there's a lot of things you don't know for sure, like like what sentiment is going to be and how that's going to change multiples between now and then. But I'm feel pretty confident saying that I think ASST can beat bitcoins return on the next major move or to higher like to 140 or 180 or 210 or whatever, whatever those kind of major moves end up being. And in that window, I think you can do quite well because the market will still be learning about what strive as much as it was learning about what MSTR was 2-3 years ago or even further back, right. So yeah, that's my view today.
Speaker 1: I as a trader, I agree with you. I don't own any ASSTRMSTRII just think I mean, I mean how how like it just crashed like when it crashed 8090%. So I think there's a strong margin of safety there for a tiny 1% position. But I, I, I think like when, you know, the cycle started, you know, December 22, you know, early 23, I wasn't really paying attention to MSTR. I didn't really care about what MSTR is doing. I, I think now MSTR is more interesting because it is a monopoly, right. So I'm curious, I don't, I don't think anyone knows this, but if it was a true monopoly, I would expect some sort of premium pricing and the market is not pricing that end. So which is, which is why over some period of time, 1234 years, I'm, I, I'm thinking about, you know, building 1.
Speaker 4: Percent because it's not a monopoly. It's it's, it's just a guaranteed #1 position in absolute size. That's not the same thing as the monopoly, right? Like a monopoly would be. They've cornered the market on Bitcoin such that no other treasury company could compete as a treasury company that would be. And that's one of the reasons why you're not going to get substantial premiums above and beyond the balance sheet Bitcoin until the company proves that there's something else there that's sustainable in the model, right? And I think they're on to something with this digital credit. I mean, I was just thinking today, if you wanted 10 to 12% yield right now and you understood Bitcoin and you wanted Fiat yield, it's sort of like a bond like play on Bitcoin, right? Because if Bitcoin continually performs, you're going to get paid first in Fiat as long as they don't reduce those, those yields, right? But like, to the extent which they protect those yields to try to create value in those securities and they build a track record of doing that, they're effectively creating yield vehicles that have never existed before, powered by something that, again, the market doesn't understand, therefore, likely to, if successful, generate substantially higher yields than the alternatives. And I think there's something significant there. The bigger your Bitcoin stash, like on paper, ostensibly the more the more of these securities you should be able to issue over time. But I think it's still so early and people are still so skeptical that there's anything that's actually sustainable. And so again, you can take whatever position you want on this, but I think I think it's really clear from a industrial logic standpoint that there's no monopolies in Bitcoin treasury company because anyone could do it. And the just like in mining, anyone can say they're a Bitcoin miner, right? If someone will give you a billion dollars, I've said this many times in the last three years, you could someone can give you a billion dollars or even $5 billion and you won't be able to be iron because you would have needed to buy iron specific sites 2345 years ago when they were trading at a fraction of the current cost. And that's what I meant by relative scarcity. People misunderstand the fungibility component here. The Childress site, there's only one site like Childress in Childress that can do what Childress is doing. But if I sell 1000 Bitcoin right now, like I might have to pay more in two or three days or I might have to pay less in two or three days or two or three months more or less. Like we don't know, right? Like that's Marcus are about probabilities, but I can always as long as I have enough capital, I can always find 1000 Bitcoin at some price. You there's no price for Childress. There's no price for Sweetwater because there's only one site. They're one of one sites. They're like NFTS for large scale infrastructure. And so people look, they're better than NFTS because NFTS are just some kids artwork that they slapped on something and threw a party and convinced people to part with their Ethereum. Like it is what it is. You know, people are going to do what they're going to do. These large scale powered infrastructure NFPS have real world stuff behind them such that they have sustainable value that you can't really attack. But they're also unique, like a one-on-one piece of artwork, right? And so people just fungibility and scarcity are things that should be taught like in basic economics classes and really understood deeply from first principles as opposed to stuff you just skip over as like, it's a chapter on supply and demand and economic textbook. No, it's like it's much, some of these things are much bigger and more important. And if you don't understand them deeply, you're going to miss some of these really obvious opportunities to make a tremendous amount of money in markets.
Jeff: Awesome Thanks Mike. Chris, I want to go to you really quickly. I know. Oh, it looks like you just dropped. I was going to say Chris has been waiting for like 45 minutes and I feel bad small cap, you have your hand up something for Mike. Yeah, real quick. You know it's it's funny because we Mike, you talked a little bit about just the scarce the scarce products, right. Like obviously Bitcoin and then you transition all over to talking about power. And now that we're on the topic of it, I think it's funny that it's like the universe is, is listening to this conversation because I just got a, a notification that Jim Chanos commented on a video I posted today. So I posted something about, you know, Google, the former chairman of Google Air Schmidt, like talking about that there's one natural limit in AI. It's it's electricity. It's not the chips or or processing or anything else and someone it's in my pin tweet, someone commented and said where's Shin Chanos? If he responded, he said he's right here. If you think the lack of power in the United States is is the permanent limiting factor for.
Speaker 3: AII can't help you.
Jeff: There's two there's two things our our country has an abundance in land and cheap power. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you like, where do you think the discrepancy or I guess shift in mindset comes from someone who basically, you know, believes in someone like Jim Chados that powers bonded and cheap to guys like ourselves that, you know, where we see like the scarcity and obviously, you know, an asset like Bitcoin and then power, which is kind of becoming like the next commodity.
Speaker 4: For the future of of the economy, I mean, look at electricity is objectively and and empirically scarce. Otherwise they would trade at much lower prices and be free. We're talking about some of the lowest prices in the US in West TX. That's one of the reasons why people go there. So if you can get two or three or four cents per kWh, great. But most of the world is much more expensive than that. And much of the regulated world is more expensive than that. And it is not. There isn't enough power. That's that's why Trump's all over the companies now about, about the usage of electricity utility level. The utilities are all actively investing to try to increase their capacity and, and the hyperscalers are recognizing A shortage and they're investing in and partnering with alternative energy providers. Again, not something you'd see if, if electricity was sort of ubiquitous and, and cheap and, and everywhere. So I, I don't, I said this to your, I don't know, few days ago or over the weekend, but like you don't have to. I like Jim Chanos because he's a fun. Like it's like sparring, right? Like you put the, the little guy in there and you're not going to learn as much. You want to put the big boss in there. Like the big short. You bring in Jim Chanos and you, you punch him a few times and he punches you back and it's just, it's just sparring. But like you're never going to convince him because his worldview is fundamentally negative. His entire worldview is fundamentally bearish. He, he spent 30 years or 40 years of his life doing short only investing. And so his whole lens that he uses to see everything is, is a negative sum, right? Like 0 sum kind of kind of view of the world where like somebody has to lose if someone else wins. And if somebody wins too quickly, they're, they probably cheated. It's probably unfair and there's probably accounting issues and there's got to be something wrong because his whole business model is predicated on finding things that are wrong. So that can be problematic though, when you're in a technology trend like AI, which is going to run for 30405060, a hundred years of adoption and just like the Internet for most of the 1st 5 or 10 years of, of steep adoption, almost everyone's going to underestimate it because it's really hard to see for most people beyond like the next few weeks to few months. Everybody thinks that they're thinking ahead and everybody thinks they can visualize the world. But almost nobody in like the early 2000s understood like how big the consumer Internet was. If you were saying you were bullish on the consumer Internet in 2000 and 2001 and 2002, people looked at you like you had three heads. And right now consensus is at least with most people, is that AI? We know AI is there, but we don't think it's really going to affect us yet. And then you have these shorts who are like, OK, we know AI is, is really rapidly growing technology, but it's definitely over invested in and the valuations are too high and there's too much circular economies going on in this village. And Nvidia's loaning something to the blacksmith and the blacksmith is going something to the, to the horseshoe maker and the horseshoe makers loaning something to the guy who picks the flowers. And it's just like, no, that's, that's not actually what's happening. What's happening is this is a technology megatrend that's going to be one of the biggest in all of human history. And so short sellers who are trying to find something to do are going to try to try to take something that has a 50 or 100 year runway and they're going to try to fit it into whatever narrative they need to in order to try to make money. And they're going to get blown up doing it. And if they catch some of these dips, right, like they're going to have to be super nimble traders like I've been with the silver ETF, because if you try to short into a trend, unless it's going to stop, which silver will, AI won't, right? So silver's a much safer thing to mess around with and and trade because at some point it will collapse back down as more supply comes in to address whatever real or not real shortages or perceived shortages are there. You can't do that with Bitcoin, right? Because there's no way to fill in supply when demand spikes. And right now it's really hard to do that with AI because there simply is not enough power even for the very next things you want to do over the next 12 months. And again, I'll go back to Meta and and Google. I mean, they both announced 10s of billions of dollars of new CapEx. And in a lot of cases, that'll be devoted to the areas where companies like Iron and Cypher are operating. And you just, you're not going to do that in a world where Jim Chanos is, right. So I can explain why I might be wrong, right? I'm not sure he can't, right? Like I might be wrong if AI and Bitcoin aren't as big as I think they are. Like, to me, it's a pretty binary bet at the compute level. You're not picking winners at all. I'm not saying that with that bet. I'm not saying that open AI is going to beat perplexity or Gemini is going to be anthropic. I'm not making a bet like that. I let other people make those bets. If they think they have an edge, they can go for it. I don't think you need to to make that bet because I think you can make a shit ton of money betting on the inevitable exhaust stream of that competition, which is that they will absolutely need more and more and more power and compute because it's like a battle to the death. It's existential. And if a 2 trillion dollar, $3 trillion company doesn't defend their Moat, then they're everyone's going to lose their jobs and it's going to go down. And Harvard Business Review as a case study for failure to understand the future. And you don't want to be written in that article, right? You don't want to be the one pointed out to as the Kodak or the blockbuster moment for Big Tech where you were the mag 7 and you didn't invest in AI until you became Blockbuster, right? So that's what's happening. And that process, even if I'm wrong, even if I'm wrong and AI is not as big as we think, the process we're in right now is going to take two, 3-4 years to play out before we know whether that CapEx is was well spent or not. Again, my, my view right now probabilistically is that we're underspending and that we're going to have to accelerate spending in that window. But that doesn't, it doesn't require that every enterprise application of AI work in the structure. It doesn't require that open AI hit X billion dollars of revenue. Those would all be nice things and we will see some IP OS in the next 12 to 18 months, but none of those things are going to stop or, you know, put a put an end to the need for power that's going to last for several decades at the least, in my opinion. And that the only reason again, one of the comment I'd make is the only reason why we're even talking about AI data centers in space is because we don't have enough power and infrastructure on this planet, right. Like think about it. Why would you go to space if power was so ubiquitous that you could build as big as you needed to? Maybe because it's not true. But again, I'll, I'll let the market speak on this. I'm never going to. Jim Chanis will never agree with me on anything. That's not the point. The point is he's a perfect foil, right? He's like the guy you just you jab at and you punch with or whatever. And he brings more eyeballs from trad Fi into the sector. And so let him do his thing. He's just marketing for us. We'll let him. We're not even going to give him the title, but we all know that he's basically our VP of junior VP of marketing for the AI data center sector, and he's doing a good job getting some eyeballs on the space.
Jeff: Awesome, Mike, I always love hearing you talk. Great Alpha. As always, we are going to go ahead and wrap this up. I know there were a bunch of people who were who were requesting to speak tonight and I apologize we weren't able to get to you, Bitcoin AI guy and myself. We start at 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. So we've been at it for almost 5 hours. I've got a Doberman that I am fostering. It's his second day here, so I need to make sure we we touch some grass and and have a little play time. Otherwise his head might explode. So really do appreciate all of you guys joining us tonight. Great speakers as always. Looking forward to seeing you guys next Tuesday, same time, same place and Bitcoin AI guy and myself. I think will be hosting another one later this week, but more details to come on that. So thanks everybody. Have a wonderful evening.