BTC Sessions - Lavish vs Doomberg: The Shocking Risks in Oil & MicroStrategy No One Else Sees
Episode Date: May 12, 2026Mentor Sessions Ep. 069: Why Oil Refuses To Explode Despite The Iran War, Why Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy Is Bitcoin’s Biggest Hidden Risk, and How The K-Shaped Economy Is Splitting America In ...Two | Doomberg & James LavishIran's conflict is threatening the Strait of Hormuz — and energy markets are not pricing it in. Doomberg and James Lavish join BTC Sessions to break down what an oil shock at $150+ means for the global macro picture, Bitcoin's role as sound money in an energy war, and whether Michael Saylor's Strategy dominance is quietly keeping new investors out of Bitcoin.In this conversation you'll learn why Doomberg believes the energy market is sending signals most macro analysts are ignoring, how James Lavish connects an oil supply shock to accelerated monetary debasement and Bitcoin demand, what specific risks Strategy's outsized Bitcoin concentration creates for retail adoption, and why both guests see the current geopolitical moment as one of the most important macro setups for Bitcoin in 2026. You'll also hear their honest assessment of whether Saylor's approach is a net positive or a structural risk for the broader Bitcoin ecosystem.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 – Intro 2:17 – Why Doomberg didn’t see $150 oil coming 6:29 – Strait of Hormuz & the oil glut nobody is pricing 12:55 – What an oil shock really does to inflation 18:18 – James Lavish on debasement & the K-shaped economy 34:28 – Michael Saylor & MicroStrategy: hero or concentration risk? 38:55 – Is MicroStrategy keeping retail out of Bitcoin? 51:15 – What Doomberg would tell energy investors about Bitcoin 1:02:11 – 2026 Bitcoin & Oil price predictions 1:05:19 – Where to follow Doomberg & James Lavish🔗 Links & Resources:→ Doomberg Substack: https://doomberg.substack.com→ https://x.com/DoombergT→ James Lavish Newsletter (The Informationist): https://jameslavish.substack.com→ https://x.com/jameslavishBitcoin + Privacy + Security: https://btcmentor.io/untouchable-bitcoiner/Bitcoin Survival Workshop: https://btcmentor.io/bitcoin-survival-workshop-2026/📌 Previous Episodes: Simon Dixon and Alex Krainer → https://youtu.be/ojn8hMGg_2Q⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #BitcoinMacro #EnergyMarkets #StraitOfHormuz #MichaelSaylor #BitcoinAdoption #SoundMoney #Doomberg #JamesLavish #GeopoliticsAndBitcoin #OilPrices #MicroStrategy #KShapedEconomy #OilCrisis #BitcoinRisk #MacroEconomics #Inflation #NaturalGas #EnergyGlut #BitcoinPrediction #OilPrediction #TrumpEnergy #DollarHegemony #FinancialCrisis #CreditCardDelinquencies #MacroTitans #BitcoinVsOil #STRC
Transcript
Discussion (0)
If you'd given me this faxed at February and put the over under at 150 front month Brent crude price,
I would be homeless because I'd have mortgaged my house.
The government doesn't want you to make money, growing long energy in the middle of a war in the Middle East.
In the same way, they don't want you making money by shorting the banks in a financial crisis.
All alone and credit card delinquencies are in the U.S. just hit all-time highs.
So how does that foot with the market hitting all-time highs?
The median American citizen took zero flights last year.
One of the things that keeps people from piling in is the fact that Michael Saylor might have to sell.
The solution to this, which saves Bitcoin, which Michael Saylor doesn't want to admit, is he could just Simabwe the equity.
I'm not nearly as concerned about it as as Duneberg is, and probably because I have a higher degree of confidence in Bitcoin as a long-term asset.
The end of U.S. dollar hegemony is upon us, and all these assets are denominated in U.S. dollars, and they're going higher.
Quickly, guys, I'm not going to ask you to like and subscribe, but if you do want to help out the channel at no cost, share this with one person you think will gain value.
from it. Okay, so for today, I've got notable macro titans, Dumeberg and James Lavish. They have an
amazing back and forth on Michael Saylor and strategy, whether or not it's the last risk
preventing people from piling into Bitcoin or an opportunity. They also do an incredible deep dive
into the energy markets during this crisis with analysis that I haven't heard anywhere else.
All right, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me. They're very excited to have this
conversation because I need to bring on two macro heavyweights in order to make sense of like
what the hell is currently going on. So what's kind of
throwing me for a loop is we've had the street of Hormuz closed. The Warren-Arand is fast approaching
up to three months now. And we've got oils really only sitting about a $100 per barrel. The December
contracts looking at $80 per barrel. And we've got the S&P hitting all-time highs. But at the same
time, Michigan consumer sentiment came out at all-time lows, a record 48.2. So, Duneberg,
just starting with you broadstrokes, how are you making sense of the market? How are you making
sense of what appears to me like a big disconnect? Yeah, first, Nathan, thanks for the invitation.
Great to be here.
Looking forward to the discussion with James.
Yeah, you know, I was typing up a piece before I hopped over here to join you guys.
And the opening paragraph describes how if you'd given me this fact set, say, in February
and put the over under at 150 front month Brent crude price, max,
I would be homeless because I'd have mortgaged my house to greedily put as much money and capital on the over as I could find.
And so the first thing to say is that anybody who says that they predicted where it would be given what has happened is lying.
And when we get something like that so wrong, first thing you do is admit it.
Second thing you do is you try to figure out what are you missing.
And it's not clear what we're missing yet, but I do believe that markets are mostly efficient.
and I had a conversation this morning with a good friend of mine who's been trading oil for 50 years, another Substack author.
And, you know, he had a pretty interesting theory.
I should just say his name because I don't like to take other people's ideas without attribution.
Sir JJ, Jack Johnson over at Market Vives, a great author on Substack, old school commodity pits trader.
Anyway, he and I both agree that the world was just awash in oil last year.
substantial glut of oil.
And yet oil traded a little higher than that glut would have indicated,
mostly because we believe China was buying an extra million,
million and a half barrels a day.
There's a sea of oil around the world before the war started.
And guess what?
Everybody gets to burn off that excess at $100 a barrel.
A lot of people are making a lot of money right now.
And last thing I'd say, sort of as the intro, is everybody in the oil business lies.
And so there's such a tsunami of oil in the world before the war kicked off that nobody wanted to admit to.
And nobody really wants to admit how happy they are to be getting rid of it at $100 a barrel.
And by the time the war is over, which we think will be soon, that $80 price in December probably,
is a little optimistic, to be honest with you.
There's just so much oil, Nathan, and the world.
This is the part of the equation that people don't understand.
We just keep getting better and better at bringing it to the surface,
and there's an infinite amount of it.
That's like the proper mental model is that we have an infinite supply.
The oil and gas companies are amazing deflationary machines,
and too much of it was brought too quickly to the market,
and now we're burning it off.
Now, that's not to say this was all planned,
but when you mix,
that in with the fact that the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to make it
incredibly difficult to make money going along oil. You never know when you're going to get
kneecap by a true social post. The net effect of all of it is that it has made the volatility
of oil go up, which makes making disproportionate returns on moves more challenging.
The government doesn't want you to make money, growing long energy in the middle of a war
in the Middle East. In the same way, they don't want you making money by shorting the banks
in a financial crisis.
When your counterparty is the U.S. government,
and the U.S. government has Scott Bessent and Chris Wright on its team,
you need to take that into consideration when you're pondering,
you know, how to deploy your own precious capital.
Don't short the Fed, you know.
And so that's a bit of a long answer, but that's our view.
We think as long as the war doesn't kick off again,
with Trump going to Beijing this week, we can't imagine that it will.
but that's our view.
Surprised, it has been so docile,
but we're not the type to shake our fist at the market
and cry at how wrong it is and how unjust it is
that our attendees have been stolen by Scott Besson.
You know, that's the pieces on the board
and you have to play them.
And one of the conclusions is there was just way more oil
floating around than we, even we thought,
before the war kicked off.
There's no real other explanation.
China has reduced its imports by,
three and a half million barrels a day, you know, how can it do that? Well, because it has an
enormous amount in inventory, more than it's fessing up to. Very interesting. James, I'm curious
your thoughts on that and your current thoughts on the overall market and this kind of disconnect
that I highlighted. Yeah, so I agree. You know, you laid it out pretty well, Duneberg,
with what the overall macro situation of oil is. A couple of thoughts to maybe add to your, you know,
your thoughts about Besson and Trump, you know, look, we're headed into midterms here.
And so when you go to first principles, you just have to pull back, way back, get out of the
noise and just remember, first principles is Trump does not want to have a spike in oil and a spike in
energy prices and a spike in gas prices dragging into the summer going into the fall election.
And so we're getting right up to that point now.
We're in May.
You know, races are going to start heating up here.
And the rhetoric that's going to be centered around gas prices is only going to be second
to the rhetoric that's coming out of taxes against billionaires.
You know, like this is a really big deal for everyday people.
And it's going to hit home if they can't figure this out.
So first principle says they have it figured out.
They're just trying to, you know, come away with some sort of face-saving win from this whole situation in the Middle East.
And whatever it is that they can claim victory, then they'll back off and oil will, you know, settle down.
That volatility will settle down, especially from those, like you said, Duneberg, the second to second, you've just got to be aware that there could be a tweet or a truth social post that comes out that just,
rocks the market one way or another. And so that's one thing. The second thing is structurally,
you know, there is a, there, I'd be interesting to hear what you think about this,
Duneberg, because structurally there has been a change with Saudi Arabia leaving OPEC plus.
You know, that is a big deal. UA.E, sorry. I mean, UAE, sorry.
Saudi Arabia would be a real big deal.
No, no. Saudi Arabia would be a real big deal. So with the UAE leaving OPEC plus,
that's a big deal. And structurally that, that changes that dynamic.
the ability for OPEC to keep a stranglehold on pricing.
And so now how much power do they really have?
Because like you said, when you have China coming in and buying more than they're admitting
to, that's something that we're not privy to, but you kind of see it, right?
You can see it in the future.
You can see it in the market.
So that's one thing.
But I mean, what do you think about that, Duneberg?
You think that that's going to really have a structural, you know,
material impact, near-term, long-term?
Lots to say and at risk at, you know, triggering some angry comments.
So we read a lot of propaganda,
and not because we necessarily think it's true,
but because we think it's important to at least understand
what other people are telling themselves
as a way to increase the odds that you'll be able to predict their behavior.
And in Iran's propaganda today, again, I'm quoting Iran's propaganda.
The UAE is viewed as a proxy for Israel.
And since the U.S. and Israel are on the other side of this war, the UAE, of course, has been damaged financially far greater than they're willing to admit.
It's a tourism economy and a financial hub.
And you can't have either of those if you're in the middle of a war.
And so the price that they had to pay for the U.S.
billing them out with a U.S. dollar swap was to get out of OPEC.
And this strengthens, quote, the U.S.TAN, the U.S. Israel Alliance, bringing the UAE under the fold.
But it does leave the other Gulf states in an interesting spot.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have their own history of friction together.
and the UAE leaving OPEC probably doesn't soothe that over.
Our long-term view of how the Middle East thermodynamically needs to shake out
is imagine you draw the UAE in the fold with Israel and the U.S.
And then the other Gulf states are kind of aligned to China under Iran's watch
because that's just what the flows indicate need to happen anyway.
The U.S. doesn't need the Middle East anymore.
China does. The U.S. really can't patrol the world in the way that it used to. China has an interest to.
And so that's why when we say Trump going to China this week is such a big deal, by the way,
your comment about face-saving exits, one of the ways that you get out of a bad situation is you strike a broader deal or compromises in, say, the Middle East theater that might look like a capitulation or actually just a move in a broader negotiation.
where you get something on the back end.
And you point to that, Trump is the master of pointing to that something on the back end.
Let me give you an example.
Imagine some sort of peace in the Middle East is negotiated with China on this trip.
And China agrees to buy 100 Boeing jets in exchange.
Well, Trump can say, sure, we're letting Iran charge a toll, but we got, you know,
$100 billion worth of orders for America companies.
And China's our friend.
and I made this compromise to my good friend,
Eugene, thing.
I'm not saying that's specifically how it'll play,
but that's a way to get out of a box.
You widen the box.
You make the box bigger.
And you get a bunch of stuff that China was probably going to give you anyway.
And in return, you cut your losses in the Middle East and move on.
Right.
And I agree.
I think you're fighting that is a, it's going to be a losing battle.
in my opinion.
I mean, oil can't stay where it is indefinitely.
That's the thing.
Here's the thing.
So, you know, we annoy a lot of people in what I call this with the peak oil crowd because
of our mental model that there's an infinite amount of it.
I don't understand why people want to get long oil.
So if you can't see $150 now, when are you ever going to see it?
So what are you owning it for?
Like at least Bitcoin could go to a million.
I don't think it's going to go to a million.
I don't own any of it.
But hey, you guys do.
I hope it does.
I'll give you a high five if it does.
No skin off my back if it goes to a million.
At least it could go there.
Oil can't even get to 150 apparently.
And if it did, it couldn't stay there.
And so why do you want to own it?
I don't understand.
Like, there's a certain subset of people that just need to own commodities,
hoping they get squeezed up.
And I don't know, it just seems like there's better things to do with your money.
by SpaceX IPO or something.
At least it's got a chance to get to a stupid number.
Right.
Well, and like you said, the efficiency of the oil companies,
it's just the, all of this, you know,
every single year we have new groundbreaking, you know,
methods to extract oil, to move oil.
And it's not a regular commodity.
Economic activity depends on it.
It's too expensive.
what happens. We have less economic activity, which means the price comes down.
So I don't know why you want to, essentially when you get long oil, you're taking a short bet on human ingenuity.
Yeah. Actually, I want to tease that apart a little bit there for a second if I can, James, and get your sense on what your short term, short term, medium term view of kind of economic activity is. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because Duneberg's putting forth this idea that we have a ton of supply of oil. And that's part of the reason why price isn't getting $150 a barrel. You've got the UAE leaving OPEC,
which I assume means they're going to be putting more barrels on the market as well, too.
And then going back to that like Michigan consumer sentiment,
I'm worried about like demand destruction.
Is there not going to be the economic productivity going forward that we might see oil really crater?
If that kind of activity is slowing, plus we've got all this new additional supply.
Yeah.
I mean, you've got you're getting a consolidation of, of economic, you know, joy, right?
So you've got this, what we've been talking about for a while is a K-shaped economy.
It's only getting worse.
And so what you're what you're seeing is stock market all time highs stock market is not the economy, but it is the economy.
It's so deeply ingrained in the economic activity of the U.S. now that, you know, in some way you look at this, you say, well, how can the stock market make all time highs while you've got consumer sentiment, you know, bleeding lower?
Okay, well, let's break that apart a little bit.
first of all the Michigan consumers like all of the Michigan surveys are they're an absolute
joke like that's just call it what it is you're talking about surveying somewhere around 600 people
over and over and over again by and large they're um you know far left leaning or left leaning
and so it's just the reality um and so but if you're you're talking about canvassing 600 people
out of, you know, hundreds of millions of people in the United States.
That's literally like canvassing one square inch of grass in an entire football field to
determine what the sentiment of the whole football field is.
It's nonsensical.
That's number one.
Number two, you are, you know, you have an issue here with your regular, just your regular
consumer is struggling.
I mean, I know people who are not in finance or have not, do not own assets who are just wage earners and the wage earners are struggling more and more.
You know the cantalone effect. I've written a lot about it. Dunberg, you've talked about, I'm sure.
But, you know, the headline this morning that crossed my desk, the first headline I saw was that auto loan and credit card delinquencies are in the U.S. have just hit all-time highs.
So how does that foot with the market hitting all-time highs when you've got people struggling?
Well, you know, like I said, you've got the wage earners are just, they're getting poorer and poorer with the devaluation of the currency.
And the rise in the real rise in inflation, it's not CPI.
Insurance hasn't gone up, you know, 3.2% in the last three.
That's just ridiculous.
It's not what people are really feeling.
They're feeling the rise in house home insurance, car insurance, health insurance, and then you've got the rise in gas prices just kind of that just needles them at the back end here.
But you go to the grocery store, they're they're just replacing goods with other goods.
And, you know, their people are struggling to keep up.
Multi-income families struggling because they don't have assets that have appreciated along with the stock market where they don't only.
gold and silver, they don't own, you know, Bitcoin. And so that has been, it's been really
damaging to the average consumer. And that's what we're seeing. And that's why you hear this,
this disconnect, partially because there's those, the surveys themselves are problematic.
And partially because you just really do have a, you have two separate economies that are,
that are operating in, in the U.S. right now. Look, the S&P is semiconductors.
It's chips.
It's AI.
It's, you know, the technology powerhouses of the U.S.
And that's all powered by natural gas, by the way.
And natural gas in the U.S. is, you know, less than $3 a million BTUs,
which is less than $20 a barrel oil.
And the higher oil goes, the cheaper U.S. natural gas gas,
because they're co-produced.
And they just give away the natural gas in order to get more valuable oil.
And so to build on what James was saying,
I saw an amazing stat on Twitter.
Full disclosure, I have not personally validated it,
But I think it's true, and the account was pretty valid, although I can't remember it now.
The median American citizen took zero flights last year.
Whoa.
I didn't know that.
So for like the median, not the average, of course.
Yeah.
The median American took zero flights last year.
That means like half of the Americans at least took no flights last year.
And for those who make their living in finance or can afford a few Bitcoin or can afford a few ounces of gold if you're me or, you know, have no problem making your mortgage payments, that seems foreign.
Your reaction is proof that there's a disconnect between the capital class and the labor class that has never been wider in the country.
And to bring it back to oil, this enormous bounty of natural gas, the U.S. produces 110 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas.
Just to benchmark your listeners, the entire amount of natural gas that Europe imported from Russia slash the former Soviet Union before the war was 15 BCF today.
So the U.S. alone produces 110.
And all the arteries from the old Soviet empire into the old continent amounted to 15 BCF per day.
The U.S. has gone from no LNG exports liquefine natural gas to 30 BCF per day by the end of the decade.
I was in the industry when the Freeport LNG export terminal was meant to be an import terminal because the world thought that the U.S. was running out of natural gas.
The Shale Revolution has changed all of that.
So you have this, we just did a doom zoom for our premium tier, nothing but flyers on that list for sure.
The last presentation we did for the month of April was durable energy dominance, North America's natural gas advantage.
The second slide is how China's AI race is powered by dirty coal, and America's AI race is powered by clean natural gas.
and natural gas is both in enormous supply and incredibly cheap.
It's cheaper than coal.
And that is the fuel that is powering the AI race in the U.S.,
which is what Wall Street is betting on.
And you could say it's a bubble,
and you could say the valuations are crazy,
and you could say Open AI is a fraud,
and you could say that Oracle is defaulting,
and you could say all of those things,
and the market's going to run you over
because the market's going to do what it wants, and that's the current narrative.
By the way, I'm not long any of those trends. I'm just observing them.
Long businesses I can participate myself and gold and land and other things.
But I observed them and I could see it and I wouldn't short it.
I mean, so back to James's point, this case-shaped economy, it's real.
And this is where, you know, there's only so much regular room Trump has.
And so this is why we think, you know, that which can't go on forever,
doesn't. And what can't happen is the war can't light back up again. If it does, then you could
see that print of 150 because, as we've said on another podcast, the Middle East is like the
light bulb section at Home Depot, except every light bulb is worth a billion. And if the war kicks
off, you're going to be running up and down those aisles with a baseball bat, just destroying
stuff. And nobody needs or wants that. Quickly, before I go to you, James Duneberg, do you have a
I'm not going to hold it to it to it.
A rough timeline of kind of
when is too late to get things opened and running again
where the economic damage has gone on too long?
You know, that's a popular,
again, the same people who got it as wrong as we did
but haven't yet admitted it
are just saying, oh, any day now.
The market's really efficient, man.
This is the part that I find amazing.
The oral market in particular is filled with
the largest, most sophisticated
most ruthless insider traders, you know, international operators, Greek ship owners, hedge funds,
sharks, titans, and you know more than they do.
Senators and congressmen.
Yeah, some rando on Twitter knows more.
The market is wrong, shaking your fist.
I mean, have a little humility.
The market is brutally efficient.
And so who knows when?
The market will tell us.
The market is not screaming emergency now.
And by the way, all these prices we're quoting are nominal.
You go back in real terms.
I mean, oil is incredibly cheap today at 98 or whatever it is as we're recording in real terms.
And as James said, inflation is way higher than what CPI.
I know.
I'm an entrepreneur, right, in the sense that I work for myself.
My health insurance has compounded at 8.5% year after year like clockwork.
I mean, I see what the grocery bill is.
I just, I have an order, you know,
a little Burger King on the way to a property I like to visit.
And two hamburgers and old pickle and a small fry was seven bucks and 80 cents yesterday.
I mean, are you kidding me?
That was 355 years ago.
I mean, don't tell me inflation is 3%.
I mean, I understand that CPI might be 3%.
So, yeah.
Just for also for the listeners really quickly,
because you're hearing what Duneberg said about natural gas
and we're probably wondering what he meant.
Some of you, what he's saying is that natural gas, you know, when you drill for oil,
and especially when you frack for it, when you break up the ground to frack for it,
you get what's called associated natural gas.
And the associated natural gas comes up with that oil.
And often you're out in a field that you've got no way to get it back to a productive area,
a city or a town that would actually use it.
So they just flare it.
So when you're driving by these oil fields, you see the flame on the top of pipe.
They're just burning off natural gas because they can't do anything with it.
It's too cheap to move it across in trucks or you're never going to build a pipeline
unless you have a lot of different fields that you can connect together to get into a metropolitan area.
So we just have a glut of it.
It's everywhere.
And the shale, yeah, the revolution really.
And so this is why, like, Bitcoin miners have been thinking about going out there because,
hey, there's all this free energy.
Metrogase is great.
Like, you can think about most, many homes in the U.S. are powered with it, like your furnace,
your heat.
But then you cook with it.
You don't even need to ventilate.
That's right.
I mean, that's how clean burning it is.
That's right.
Technically, you're supposed to ventilate, yada yet.
Nobody does.
So, so this is a.
associated in natural gas,
anytime you have co-production,
producing just one of those is bad.
So it used to be that you either drilled for oil
or you drilled for natural gas.
The Shell Revolution brought them together.
And so if you just drill for gas,
that really sucks when oil price goes up
because your competitor is drilling for both oil and gas
and will dump the gas on you.
And so this is why,
even though natural gas landed in Europe is $16 a million BTU,
it's negative in the Permian Basin at the Waha Hub,
because they're not allowed to flare it anymore.
They have to get rid of it.
They have to get rid of it.
They'll pay for it to get rid of it.
Like back in-
Or like back in COVID when oil went,
the oil features went negative because you had all this oil,
you had to take delivery on, you didn't have the capacity.
Like there was no, there were no tanks to deliver it to.
And so you're like, well, I'm going to pay somebody to take this from me.
Wild, yeah.
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James, I kind of want to jump back there for a second.
You start to talk about Bitcoin miners and natural gas.
I want to touch on that and get your thought on that.
But the other thing I want to throw in there is when we're talking about AI generation
and using natural gas as well too, I don't know this.
And you might not have the answer as well, too.
Is it possible?
Like we have the modular Bitcoin A6 that we can plonk on top of a well and it can just start
hashing.
Can you do the same sort of thing like for many data centers for AI as well?
Well, I mean, they're a little bit.
They need water to cool them.
them. They, they, these high frequency, I'm sorry, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, these hyper scalers are just
they're so they run at temperatures that are just almost insane. So you've just got to keep
cooling them, keep cooling them. So, uh, there's a little bit of a difference there. Um,
and the scalability. The thing with Bitcoin is, you can just drop them anywhere and be mining
anywhere and just air cool them. You don't have to, um, you know, have, um, you know,
have them in water tanks or have special invidia chips that run water through them.
But what were you going to say, Duneberg?
Yeah, I was going to say, look, it's not quite as simple as, you know, hey, here's this gas,
let's go to it.
But so you need to make electricity to power these data centers.
And gas turbines is typically how you convert natural gas into electricity.
Those are in short supply three, four year backup.
And so this company called Blume Energy makes these solid oxide fuel cells for this
exact purpose, you know, you convert natural gas to electricity. That way doesn't solve the cooling
issue. Half of the energy used in a data center goes towards cooling. And so that's why immersion or you can
have to pay that penalty somewhere. And this is physics. You have to pay that penalty somewhere. And
this is why we think like data centers in Canada makes a lot of sense. They have a bunch of cheap natural
gas up in British Columbia. And it's colder up there. Yeah, Calgary. Yeah. So, yeah. So, but anyway,
Yeah, by and large, whether it's Bitcoin miner, whether it's data center, whether it's a cogeneration facility and you're going to make a chemical plant where you need both steam and electricity, the natural gas advantage of North America is huge.
And if Trump hadn't gotten involved in this war and had stuck to his campaign promises to revitalize American manufacturing and to focus on the American.
American blue-collar worker and to unleash energy dominance, natural gas would have played an
enormous role in that renaissance. And instead of looking at an uphill fight that redistricting
might save him from, he would be looking at, I think, a landslide victory. Agreed. So,
but to answer your question, Nathan, about Bitcoin mining just really quickly. Like, Bitcoin just
searches for the cheapest energy. That's what it does. You know, the Bitcoin miners. They, they
need the cheapest energy. They're not out there ramping up energy demand and plopping down in metropolitan
areas. They're off grid. They're away from, you know, the center. Very often they're, you know,
they're behind the fence. So they're not, they're, it's a different equation for them. And so when people
say, oh, they're going to boil the oceans, of course they're not. They're just going to use the energy.
It's going to be wasted. It's, it's in an area that.
can't be used.
You know, we, we, one of our biggest investments at the, at the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund
that I co-manage is this company called Corman and Jamie McAvety out there, there's six
gigawatts of stranded, like renewable energy out there that they didn't build a pipeline
across Texas to get it east.
So it's just stranded out there.
and we're able to use that for Bitcoin mining.
And now he's been pivoting toward the hyperscalers.
And so, and AI data centers because that's where the demand is.
But yeah, so it's just a different equation than the AI data centers.
But those, obviously the Bitcoin mining companies that have these long-term, long-standing contracts to pull.
this energy, they're pivoting because it makes financial sense, clearly. And that's what you've been
seeing the activity in those names. So we actually, because, you know, since we don't own any Bitcoin,
we actually have a fair number of sort of hardcore Bitcoin Bitcoin fans as a travers though,
because we have actually tried to treat the whole concept pretty fairly. We wrote a piece in November of
2022, I pulled it up called A Fine Mess, where we talked about how Bitcoin mining could play a very
reasonable role in taking advantage of underutilized peaker plant capacity so that the owners
of those plants, which are needed to, oh, I don't know, unlock intermittent and renewable energy
could make some money on the side while the grid didn't need it. And then the moment the grid
needed their power, they could stop mining for Bitcoin and feed the grid. And Senator Elizabeth Warren,
It was among the people that put an end to that in New York with all of its laws and stuff.
So if you want to see a fair and balanced assessment from somebody who doesn't own Bitcoin,
but still sees the possibilities.
If you Google a fine mess by Dumeberg, you'll see that we wrote that back in November of 2022.
Actually, I want to touch on that a little bit.
We're on the subject as well, too.
Because for me, I feel like particularly compared to everything else, Bitcoin has been vastly underperforming.
But I find it very interesting.
And Duberd, I want to get your thoughts on Bitcoin being used for the,
toll at the straight of Hormuz.
And if anything in the recent kind of geopolitical shifts, you know,
seizing dollar assets has changed your outlook.
I know you don't hold any of this point in time.
But has your view kind of evolved with those geopolitical events?
And if not, what is the main, I guess, sort of criticism?
We got James here.
It would be wonderful to maybe address some of it.
So I personally don't have any criticisms of Bitcoin.
It just doesn't fit my needs.
But I can give you some reasons why I think it's not going up.
Sure.
I think one of the overhangs in the Bitcoin market,
as Michael Saylor.
As much as
his accumulation of
Bitcoin has been supportive of prices,
the risk of an unruly
wind down at
micro strategy is a consideration.
And before people jump on me,
I have studied this cap table
very carefully.
He has to refinance
some debt here soon.
The perpetuals, yes, he could stop paying
dividends on. And he doesn't
have to pay those back. And he has gotten wiser about making sure there are fewer hardwired
time bombs on his cap table. But I can assure you that I have studied his cap table carefully.
And it is my independent, unbiased opinion that one of the things that keeps people from piling
in is the fact that Michael Saylor might have to sell. And he holds a lot. He's effectively
trying to corner the market. All legally, all above board, he has achieved an amazing thing.
But there's billions of bonds that he has to pay back, that either he'll have to print
micro strategy stock to roll, or he admitted last week that he would sell some Bitcoin.
I think he did that cleverly just to break the taboo around it so that if he does, it doesn't create a
stampede. But I just think that when you have one concentrated holder,
It's highly public.
Wall Street has a way of targeting such people.
And so one needs to be careful.
And by the way, Bitcoin, about $80,000, I wouldn't say.
I mean, I made my first foray into an investment in a Bitcoin-related equity
when Bitcoin was below $1,000.
Oh, wow.
I've been Bitcoin adjacent since at least 2016.
and I have nothing against it.
Again, I got lots of friends who own it.
You know, it's one of these, one of the criticisms I'd have of sort of the Bitcoin
Maxis, I guess, is the word that I would use, is I don't care if you make a lot of money.
I'm happy for you.
Like, if you make money and I don't, I'm not the jealous type.
I got plenty of money.
Life's good.
I got doom bucks, as I call them.
I mean, I've got a good business.
I get to do what I love all day.
My kids are going to college.
I got no problem making my mortgage.
What a life.
I'm blessed.
Like, I wake up every day and I get to do what I do for a living.
I live in America.
I mean, who am I to complain?
And if my neighbor makes 10 million bucks on Bitcoin,
that's probably going to improve his house and help my neighborhood.
What do I care?
I mean, this fascination with, you know, have fun staying poor,
I think does the whole Bitcoin brand a bit of disservice.
Like, again, I got nothing against it.
If it goes up to 200 grand because of this podcast, good for you guys.
again, they'll skin off my back.
I don't understand why you don't want to see other.
Like you making has to come at the expense of somebody not making.
I'm not accusing either of you guys at that,
but you have to admit that that is a thread of Bitcoin Twitterverse at least that I see.
100%.
And James, before you jump in there too, I think even just from my outlook,
one, I appreciate the really cordial back and forth and the openness to it,
but it's just not necessarily for you.
I think one of the things that at least I would maybe get hung up on a little bit
is being so knowledgeable about energy.
not participating feels like a disconnect.
Like I'm missing something there or something's particularly wrong.
And if we if we can't maybe,
if we can't maybe get on board someone who understands the energy markets to that extent
and commodities and gold,
it's like, okay, what are we,
this feels,
it feels wrong.
It feels a little foreign.
Like there's something that we're missing.
But James,
I'd love to get your response to that and also the idea that is,
is Sailor potentially a risk holding people back?
Yeah.
I think Sailor's accumulation has been,
I think that does give some institutional investors pause for sure.
But let's pull apart a bunch of threads here.
So number one, you know, Bitcoin's been seen as a risk asset for years here.
You know, it's been like the tip of the risk spear, so to speak, for a while.
You could argue that it's broken out from that and it's not really correlated to anything,
but the reality is it does move around with the NASDAQ quite a bit.
And so this last drawdown from all-time high is down to $60,000 or 62, whatever it was.
When it touched bottom here, this last go-around has been, you know, it happened all before the war and then the drawdown again in gold and silver.
So it's kind of like this hot ball of money is moving around between assets and Bitcoin had
had benefit from it.
I think it got ahead of itself.
But then again, you had the same thing with gold and silver.
So that hot ball of money does move around.
It's definitely in the AI names now.
As far as Sailor's concerned, you know, I too have worked on this balance sheet quite a bit.
and I'm not nearly as concerned about it with as as Duneberg is and probably because I have a
higher degree of confidence in Bitcoin as a long-term asset. That's that's likely the underpinning
difference here is that I just have a much higher conviction in Bitcoin as a as an asset as long-term
store value. You know, the big converties got coming up. The next converties got coming up is in
2028 for a billion dollars. I mean, that's it's nothing. It's one billion. I'd
the $66 billion of Bitcoin's gone as balance sheet.
At the end of the call, I was actually on my call as one of the analysts asking questions.
And I asked him, I said, look, you're talking about the fact that you might sell Bitcoin.
What do you think is the, and we've got this new perpetual preferred instrument that has been
wildly successful here.
What is the optimal structure of your balance sheet?
and he answered, you know, and would you be selling off and retiring a bunch of this debt
and some of these other preferreds that are just not the core focus?
Because the core focus right now is clearly stretch, STRC, and MSTR, the underlying common.
And his answer was he's not going to retire the press because he spent like a billion dollars
bringing those to market.
He's going to retain that optionality.
That makes sense.
He doesn't have to retire them.
you know there's no reason for them for him to he doesn't have to pay them off but the converts he
wants to retire and he said he he wants to retire those in time and so and he's got uh and they're
and they're putting plans around that so you've got a billion dollars that comes due in
twenty twenty eight that's that's a short put here in my opinion and then the same thing in
twenty nine you've got three billion dollars that's his big one is he going to refinance that no he's
going to pay that down. So he's got years to deal with that. And he's got years to build up the cash
reserve to deal with it or just start retiring them piece by piece. So I'm not as concerned about that
at all. Do I think he would start all the market by selling a bunch of Bitcoin in order to do
those things? Well, think about it. It's accretive to the underlying shareholders when you're pulling
down the enterprise value of the company. And so that's that that's a good thing. The second thing is
it gets him closer to having a an actual rating that he can point to for the S&P inclusion because he's
big enough. It's just the S&P is basically the credit agencies. They just consider Bitcoin.
They don't consider it an asset. They basically market the zero. So that that doesn't help him. So
but that gets him closer to that,
to that kind of hurdle he's got to get over.
And so I am,
I'm much more confident in his structure.
But I'm a lot more probably,
I don't know,
Duneberg, just how much work you've done on it,
but I've done quite a bit of work on it.
So I wrote a whole piece on it that we didn't publish,
which I'd love to share with you if you don't mind.
Sure.
So actually the solution to this,
which saves Bitcoin,
which Michael Saylor doesn't want to admit,
is he could just Zimbabwe the equity.
Did you explain that?
Because I didn't get that one.
So we wrote a whole piece on it and the editors like,
nobody's coming to Doombie to read this.
So we trashed it.
So let's take like a five-minute variant on this
because I wouldn't mind you guys are the perfect place to sort of pitch this.
So when I studied AMC, you know, the movie theater,
and Adam Aaron has printed AMC equity to pay.
back bondholders. He has issued so much stock in AMC that he went full Zimbabwe,
you know, the money printer. The money Adam Aaron was printing was AMC shares.
Now, his philosophy was, well, if we don't print all this stock, we're going to go bankrupt,
and our equity holders will get zero. So we define the term not zero, capital N, not zero, capital Z.
And by definition, as you asymptote towards zero, I mean, yes, not zero is better, but it's a distinction
without much of a difference.
So in the past five years or since COVID, six years, Adam Aaron has printed like 25, 30, 40 times
as much stock as he had before.
And yes, the bondholders have been made whole and they collect all their coupons and they're
doing very well.
But the shareholders, yes, they're not at zero, but they've lost 99% of their value.
So one of the challenges with sailors' structure, which I haven't seen fully described in this way, but was the core of this piece, was if those preferreds, you know, he can suspend the dividends and they could do a payment in kind where they just get equity instead of cash.
And he can just suspend it all together if you read the fine print.
But the ultimate flight wheel for this is printing more and more stock.
And the bondholders and the preferreds are ahead of the equity in claims on the Bitcoin he owns,
which means the amount of Bitcoin per share of MSTR goes down.
The software business doesn't really make much money.
And so the hoarding of cash comes at the printing of shares of equity.
Now, when he sells the prefers, he gets that cash in, of course, so that's fine.
And so the best thing to own in that cap table is STRC.
in our view because, by the way, I watched Peter Schiff claim it's a Ponzi and all of that stuff.
I read all that.
It's not a Pond.
SCRC in isolation is not a Ponzi because it has an asset backing it that you have
first claim on.
And there's an equity stack that is the true Ponzi that could be printed and sold.
Even if he sells it for a penny of share, he can print an infinite amount of it and make the
bondholders first and then eventually the preferred holders whole after liquidating the Bitcoin.
So I don't think there's a huge amount of risk in the senior positions in that cap table.
What I don't understand is why people would own the stock.
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What I don't understand is why people would own the stock.
Yeah.
Well, because you believe that STRC is going to move out of the retail sector and into institutions,
small family.
But every SCRC sells is debt that has to be serviced by the stock.
That's my point.
No.
No, it's got so, okay.
So let's let's pull that up.
part. So first of all,
STRC, you know, he sells the STRC and he's paying 11.5% dividend on it.
So you could either put aside some of the cash that you get STRC as it comes over par.
And you can put aside some of that cash.
Or you can sell common, like you said.
But you're buying Bitcoin.
When you sell that STRC, you're taking that cash.
he's taking that cash and he's buying large, he's buying Bitcoin.
Correct.
So now you've got an asset on your balance sheet that has been appreciating.
You know, not short term.
I'm talking long term here.
It's been appreciating north of 30% a year since COVID, right?
So now you've got this asset that you've got $66 billion or more now of an asset that is appreciating.
Now take everything apart.
And his obligation to those underlying liabilities for all of his preferred is currently at,
let's see, what is it's $1.5 billion, $1.488.
So it's roughly 2% of that stack of $66 billion.
So if Bitcoin just appreciates 2% on average over the course of, you know,
then let's call it the next 10 years, then he doesn't have to sell a Bitcoin to service that debt.
Now, he could sell some of the Bitcoin to take down some of the converts.
He could use some of the stretch, sorry, sales of stretch to pay down some of the converts.
And all of that is accretive to the common underlying.
So that's why you would own the common is that you're trusting that you're trusting.
Now, you do have to trust, number one, you have to have high confidence and high conviction in Bitcoin.
If you don't have high conviction in Bitcoin, why are you owning micro strategy?
You shouldn't.
But if you do, then you have high conviction that this asset's going to appreciate more than 2% a year.
And you're going to get more Bitcoin.
Lots of ways to own Bitcoin.
There's a lot of ways to.
Sure, of course.
Let me tell you where I think we disagree.
To pay, to service that debt, which he has to do.
Because, by the way, if he declares that the dividend is no longer going to be paid on STRC, the whole thing on Rouse, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That comes from the common.
So the common is printing, you know, that's why I say take it to infinity, because, by the way, it's a perpetual.
It has that claim.
So the sum of all the claims in the cap table on Sailor's Bitcoin that is ahead of the common needs to be taken out of what the common would get in a liquidation.
And so that common has to service that debt.
And so he's printing stock because when he collects the cash when he sells STRC, he's buying Bitcoin with it.
He's not putting aside money for future dividends.
He has put aside some money for future dividends.
And if you actually do the math, most of it came from at market common stock sales, which is all fine.
The thing about Michael Saylor that I, again, not critical of him, he discloses all of this like completely fully thoroughly above board legally.
There's nothing.
It gets fully disclosed.
Here's your bet.
When we look at the totality of those disclosures, if you want 10% yield, STRC is a great asset.
If you want exposure to Bitcoin, MSTR isn't, in our view.
There's better ways to do it.
But what he's doing is totally legal, totally justified.
My analysis is he has to print stock in a, let's say in a world where we wake up tomorrow
and Bitcoin goes to 20,000.
I know it's like, you know, but when you're measuring risk, you have to consider.
to those outliers. Is it possible? Sure. Of course. Sure. So at 20,000, he's printing a lot of shares at a very
low price to cover the coupons on the bonds and the preferreds. So it's a risky bet. It's Michael
Saylor. It's what he does. Tip of the Hat to him. We literally wrote a piece I believe
called Tip of the Hat to Michael Saylor. He called a shot. He's won. He's done an amazing thing.
He's built this amazingly large balance sheet of an asset that could go to a million. And if it does,
he's going to spike the football and I'm going to look stupid.
That's fine.
And that's the thing is it's, you don't look stupid.
It's the, it's just a different.
Sure.
Look, and I have this conversation with other, you know, people come from my old world like,
like you did too in the institutional world.
It's just a different level of conviction.
I have a higher level.
And so, and I know Michael and his team.
And I sit on the board of strive asset management.
we're doing something similar in a very small scale.
And I do think it's an important, it's an important distinction to make, though.
These things stretch is not a money market.
I wrote a whole piece about it this weekend.
It's not a money market.
But you're getting paid 11.5% for something, for, you know, taking that, the risk that you
defined, which is that Bitcoin, like, you're literally just taking the bet that Bitcoin's
going to not go to $5,000 and you're going to be paid these dividends.
I got nothing against STRC.
Again, I actually think about owning it sometimes.
Like, why am I sitting in 4% shy?
I can't say you should because I sit on the board of something that's the same thing.
But I do own these things in lieu of cash.
Basically, it's paying you 10% where the coupons coming from some other asset that you don't
own, which is being printed ATM style.
It's a small amount now, but these things compound.
And fine, in a liquidation, you're covered in the sense that you've got a senior claim over the equity, but you're junior to the bonds.
Your coverage ratio is probably going to get par back.
So what everybody's hearing is, and this is good, and this is really important, because I started my career as an arbitrageeurer.
Then we did, I did a lot of debt and distressed investing.
I mean, God, we owned TWA before the plane crash in 1990, what was it, 95 in Long Island.
I mean, you know, 97 was it? God, it was awful.
And so all you care about is claims.
You claims, claims, claims, claims, it's all you care about.
And it's true.
And it's when you're a debt investor, you don't care about anything, but what are the claims?
Where am I on the capital stack?
And what's the liquidation value?
And what's a liquidation value.
So it's in there, and that's what it comes down to is if you believe in Bitcoin, you
believe that, you know, this is going to appreciate, you're getting more Bitcoin
per share underlying on this thing, is it ever going to be liquidated? I sure hope not. But I'm not
worried about that in particular. And so that's kind of the play. And so is it something that, look,
it's just like you said, it's a little bit of a difference in philosophy. But we both understand it.
And we come from it from kind of from different areas. I can see from this point and I do that work
purposefully, so I understand it fully as an investor.
But yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean, there's a chance that MSC are yolos in a way that Bitcoin can't.
I mean, there's all, like, Matt Levine's written some great stuff on this subject as well.
But when I look at STRC, I, so again, I watch Peter Schiff on Twitter and he, you know,
he had a spaces where he's like asking me anything, you know, and prove to me that STRC is not a Ponzi.
And I get where he's coming from.
Well.
And I'd love to see him in Sailor debate.
It'd be fun.
But this is another thing.
Like, when I see somebody say something I disagree with, it never makes me angry.
No.
It's like, okay, where are they wrong or where am I wrong?
What are they teaching me, right?
And so I'd listen to that spaces.
And I think what Peters gets wrong on STRC in particular is that you have the Zimbabwe
of the equity backing you and you have asset coverage on the loan.
So if I pledge a private stock, like when Elon pledges his stock in SpaceX to a bank to get a loan,
the typical coverage ratio is 4 to 1.
What's the last paper mark?
All right.
The company's worth $100 billion.
You own 10% of it.
That means you own $10 billion.
I could lend you $2.5 billion before I start to feel uncomfortable, right?
Bitcoin's pretty liquid.
It's an asset.
You have a senior claim on it.
They're going to pay you 10% and they're going to sell some other entity you don't own to pay you.
Fine.
Sign me up.
Yeah.
But the thing is, too, he has, at the end of the call when I asked him what the optimal balance sheet
look like. He basically said no converts. Stretch is the only preferred, the perpetual preferred in common.
That's it. That's the optimal balance sheet. And so you know that's kind of where he's working toward,
which is only better for common to get rid of the to get rid of the converts, as you said. And I see
the path from to do that. And I expect it to happen. And by the way, the reason why he wants to
just stretch is because he has maximum flexibility, he doesn't have to pay back the principal. And he can
even suspend the dividend, whereas if you're a bondholder, they come in and they put you in
bankruptcy court and they, you know, again, he's learned along the way what the best easiest capital
to get is. And so this is what you do. Anyway, that was a diversion, but I thought it was fun.
No, that was a wonderful exchange. It's definitely been a hot topic. It is nice to have kind of
two respectful opposing views with a ton of knowledge on the subject. I don't know what we
opposed each other on. I mean, we sort of, I would say it was more slightly different interpretations
of the same data. Fair enough. So you guys are over here talking wonderful macro and
finance and I'm just a Neanderthal who only has Bitcoin.
I just stack sats and that's it.
It's all I got.
But I did want to just touch-
We got a big green chicken on the screen here.
Yeah, fair enough.
Just I wanted to unravel one thing quickly just for any of the audience that doesn't
necessarily understand it.
And James will maybe get you to answer this one.
We talked about preferreds.
We talked about converts and the bonds as well too.
Particularly, I think the preferred we kind of covered in terms of where it is in the
stack.
Could you outline what the converts are and how that might apply to what's going forward?
And then additionally, just teasing it out a little bit,
project we're guessing into the future do you think they're going to take the the equity or are
they going to stay with the with the bond position um the oh the converts well i mean yeah look it it depends
of which convert you're talking about some of them are in the money you know they'll just convert
over to equity for sure um but uh the they've got you know they've got a total of eight billion
eight point two billion dollars of converts um and they and they mature anywhere from 28 to 32
Okay, so let's just talk about capital structure.
So in a company, you know, you've got the claims on assets like we've been talking about.
And so for the listeners, the highest claim on asset is basically, you know, it's pretty much bank debt.
You know, if you get a line of credit with a bank, you're, you got to pay that back before you're paying anything.
And then you've got senior secured, you know, senior subordinate, subordinate, subordinate, unsecure.
and then you just go down the ladder.
Anything that's a bond is up there.
And if it's secured, that means that bond has a secure on a certain asset.
It could be the buildings.
It could be, you know, it could be some of the technology or patents, whatever it is.
It's secured to something.
And you have claims on those assets.
When you have a liquidation, you're going to bank, you know, you go through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy
where you're just going to liquidate it all and give,
the holders of everything, it goes all the way down the line.
You got to pay everybody off all the way down.
It's going down to the converts, all those bonds, down to the converts, then the preferreds,
and then the common.
And typically the common is typically going to get a few pennies on the dollar.
If you have a bankruptcy, there's not going to be anything left for them.
So that's just kind of the way it works.
If you liquidated the company now, there would be plenty of claim for the common,
but they're not going to do that.
So the way to look is imagine
I've stacked champagne glasses at a wedding
and you pour the champagne in the top glass.
Nothing gets filled below it
until those glasses at that level get full, right?
And so that's sort of the liquidation waterfall, if you will.
And by the way, they don't get more than whole.
The secures get whole and then the debts get whole
and then the preferreds get hold
and then what's left over goes to the common.
And so when I look at the cat full table right now,
I just pulled it up on my terminal.
There's 15 billion in claims above the equity.
There's 8.2 in various bonds, convertible bonds, mostly now, because they're all yielding
basically zero.
And then you have the preferreds.
Looks like another $7 billion there.
So whatever the value of micro-strategy's Bitcoin is, minus $15 billion is what's
left over for common stock clubs at today's prices.
But then if you have to...
to sell and everyone knows you have to sell back to the point earlier, are you really going to get
today's price for all of that Bitcoin?
Well, that's, and there's, there's a difference in our philosophy or our conviction in Bitcoin
because I believe Bitcoin is going to double, triple, quadruple in price from here.
And that means that the claim for comm is easy to, easy to quench that claim.
Much higher.
Like, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to fill up those glasses and
there's going to be, you know, a late.
left over 100%. I don't disagree one bit. If Bitcoin doubles from here, Michael Saler is a winner.
Which I love it. I believe is a no-brainer, but that's where I come from on that.
But, you know, I manage a Bitcoin fund. And so we're deep, we're deep in the weeds on this stuff.
Put your money where your mouth is. I love it. Okay, quickly, just for fun, James, Bitcoin end of year, Duneberg Oil, end of
year. God, I don't want price predictions. That's terrible. I won't hold you to it at all, I promise.
I think that we resolve the war issue and that Trump gets his face-saving victory, whatever that may be.
And I happen to believe that we're not going to crash. You know, this case-shaped economy is real,
and it's just going to keep going for a while. I don't know how long, but I think we haven't, you know, I don't,
I'm not a one of those guys is calling for the market to just fall apart here.
So, and caveat, even if it did, we know what happens.
There's the, the Fed and the Treasury are absolutely trapped by Congress.
They have no choice but to print more money.
It's just, it's an obvious outcome.
You know, they printed $5 trillion in 21 to 23.
They're going to print a multiple of that next time around.
If we have a black swan, which, you know, I mean, I've been in the,
this business for 30 years and I've seen I think 700 year events you know so there's another one coming at
some point I don't know when when it does they're going to print massive amounts of money and what's
going to benefit from that assets that can't be you know debased things like gold silver bitcoin
like they're going to they're going to just absolutely rip and of course stocks will too you know
companies that can't just be copied you know things things like the the mag 7 and then when
Anthropic and ChatG Open AI and all those come to market and SpaceX.
They'll benefit from the money printing, meaning just to make this absolutely abundantly clear
that they're going to reflect a mirror image of what has been debased against it.
That's what's happening.
And that will happen.
All right.
So to answer your question, though, end of year, we're bumping up against or above the
all-time high again.
And that's just, that's what I expect for Bitcoin.
Beautiful, Duneberg, into your oil?
50 bucks.
Ah, okay.
Can you?
Here's why.
All shortages are followed by gluts.
And the war has to end soon.
And in a world where the war ends and a gusher of oil trapped behind the strait suddenly
hits the market, just as the supply response that is spooling up right now comes
online, just as demand is destroyed.
I could see 50 bucks by the end of the year.
And by the way, I agree with James's analysis.
All roads lead to the printer.
We didn't even get into it,
but I do think that the end of U.S. dollar hegemony is upon us,
and all these assets are denominated in U.S. dollars,
and they're going higher.
Beautiful.
I love it, gentlemen.
We'll have to get you guys back again,
because it's funny,
we went so into the weeds and so in depth there that we,
there's so much more we could cover perhaps next time.
We should make it a standing appearance.
Let's do it.
That's great.
Once every six weeks or so, the three of us come on and shoot the breeze.
Okay, I'll set up the next one and we will get back on and see how we see how we're doing, see how things are looking.
Duneberg, where can everybody go to follow your work, find more, tell them where all that good stuff is.
Yeah, everything's at Duneberg.com.
We write about 90 articles a year.
So we have to research, write, edit, publish, promote, and defend a piece every four days.
And then we have a monthly presentation for our premium tier, our Duneberg Pro, which is for,
that wealthy Bitcoin holders, probably the tier you want to slot into.
The most Bitcoin-friendly no-coiner you'll find in the content world.
And that was a pleasure, Nathan and James.
It was great to meet you and enjoy the conversation.
And James, where can everybody follow your work?
Yeah, likewise, Doomberg and Nathan, also good to talk to you and finally meet you,
Doonberg.
So you can find me at James Lavish.com, just like Doomberg on Substats.
and I write The Informationist.
It only comes out once a week because it's just me,
but it is meticulously written and researched.
And what I try to do is simplify Wall Street,
like a simple walkdown Wall Street
and give people an idea of what's going on week to week
so they can help manage their own investments and finances
with stronger macro signal than you get from mainstream media.
So and then of course, if you're an accredited investor and you are interested in Bitcoin and Bitcoin
adjacent companies, you can go to Bitcoinopportuny.fund and just write us a note, we can jump on
the phone and see if it's something that would be appropriate for you or not. So, but yeah, it's always
good to get on a show where we can actually talk about things civilly and have some differing.
But, you know, I think what's important is for the little.
listeners is that it it all the roads are leaving to the same place and we all agree on that and
that's the that's the most important thing to get away from all of this from to come away with
if you enjoyed this episode with james lavish and duneberg please do share it with a friend
and check out our previous episode with alex craner and simon dixon
