Join Marty and Don as they dive deep into all things AI, tech, and crypto with Bitcoin mining pioneer Aster Janute from American Bitcoin and HUD8, and Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick to talk about all the incredible things happening in the Keystone State and the recent AI Energy Summit there.
00:06:30.000Into all things AI, tech, and crypto with Bitcoin mining pioneer Aster Janute from American Bitcoin and HUD8.
00:06:39.000We'll also then have Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick to talk about all the incredible things happening in the Keystone State and the recent AI energy summit there.
00:06:50.000So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing so you never miss one of these major episodes.
00:08:46.000Well, yeah, I got to, you know, full disclosure, I'm also involved in American Bitcoin, but we had a lot going on in the last week as it relates to crypto.
00:08:54.000You obviously had the passage of the Genius Act.
00:08:57.000But before we get into those things, maybe can you introduce yourself to the audience, lay out sort of your mission within the Bitcoin ecosystem and perhaps crypto in general, where this story starts for you and where's it going?
00:09:14.000So we started this business called US Bitcoin Corp back in 2020.
00:09:19.000My co-founder was one of the earliest miners out there, started mining Bitcoin really back in 2014 and 15.
00:09:26.000And the industry has grown and evolved.
00:09:28.000And ultimately, what we fell in love with is Bitcoin feels like this new digital gold is what people call it.
00:09:36.000But really what it's backed by is real large physical infrastructure.
00:09:40.000And so where we found our niche and where we've really built our careers in this industry is we've connected real physical assets to the digital ecosystem, to the crypto ecosystem.
00:09:51.000And so our data centers are the ones that are able to verify the blockchain and are able to create security around it.
00:09:57.000So when people transact and transfer Bitcoin from point A to point B, they know that the ledger is secure and that our facilities are actually running that security around it to protect it.
00:10:08.000And so we live in this intersection in between hard physical infrastructure and energy infrastructure and crypto, Bitcoin, and the whole digital ecosystem.
00:10:18.000And so that I think was a big driver behind American Bitcoin spinning off of Hut Aid to really have two businesses that embody both of those at the full extent.
00:10:27.000Yeah, I mean, talk about sort of that admission for American Bitcoin because it's not just sort of, it's not just custody of Bitcoin.
00:10:33.000And it's not, you know, just so people sort of understand it.
00:10:36.000Cause I think, you know, obviously you have the crypto bros that know all this stuff.
00:10:40.000And then there's people that are just kind of figuring out like, what is this funny thing?
00:10:45.000Because there's so many misconceptions about it.
00:10:48.000It's frankly so much more advanced than, you know, than conventional fiat, I guess, in many respects.
00:10:56.000You know, talk about that a little bit from the American Bitcoin standpoint.
00:11:00.000So Bitcoin is really the first and the oldest cryptocurrency and really brought blockchain into the center of conversation, right?
00:11:09.000The idea is, Don, if I want to send you money and I want to send it to you on a Saturday, why do I have to go through an existing banking institution or go through payment rails?
00:11:18.000Before, if you wanted to send a wire and ACH, outside of business hours, you're out of luck.
00:11:23.000But now, I guess you have Zell, you have Vemmo, you have all these other kind of tools that allow you to function, but that doesn't cross countries.
00:11:30.000When I go into Europe or when I go elsewhere, it's really hard to pay, right?
00:11:35.000You have to go to an ATM, you have to pull cash out of it, pay a fee.
00:11:38.000And so really what the blockchain allows for is you're removing the middleman.
00:11:41.000What you're saying is, I own my wealth.
00:11:44.000If I want to send it to someone else, I have the ability to send it how I want and when I want.
00:11:50.000It'll be validated through a public ledger that basically records where money transfers from point A to point B. And you're not relying on a banking institution or a transfer agent in order to facilitate that.
00:12:04.000And so that's why Bitcoin and the blockchain in general and cryptocurrencies, I think has been so transformative, right?
00:12:12.000And we'll talk about, I'm sure, the genius bill and a little, the genius act in a little bit and what that means.
00:12:16.000But for Bitcoin itself, you have that initial layer of the blockchain.
00:12:20.000And then on top of it, you have this idea of digital gold.
00:12:25.000When people buy gold, they're really hedging against the dollar, right?
00:12:29.000They're saying, okay, if there's inflation or if we think prices are going to run, we have this scarce asset, which gold for kind of the history of humanity has been this thing people have viewed as kind of having a scarce supply.
00:12:42.000I'm going to put a percentage of my portfolio here with for kind of a de-hedge.
00:12:47.000And then I'm going to put a percentage of my portfolio into equities and real estate and so forth.
00:12:51.000But the problem with gold is you can go mine more and more of it, right?
00:12:55.000This idea of kind of infinite supply or finance supply isn't necessarily there, where with Bitcoin, there's only ever 21 million Bitcoin that will ever be produced in existence.
00:13:06.000And mining and Bitcoin mining is the thing that produces the Bitcoin.
00:13:11.000So, what happens is we have these large data centers, and every time transactions happen, we're validating the ledger.
00:13:17.000So, instead of a third-party bank that gets paid, we are creating the infrastructure to support the transactions that happen to make sure that there's no fraudulent transactions happening.
00:13:27.000And so, ourselves, in addition to all the Bitcoin miners around the world.
00:13:31.000And so, why Bitcoin is, I think, so valuable for the normal person and why my parents are interested in who've never kind of understood cryptocurrencies, friends, is because you have this thing that will only ever produce 21 million units of this coin.
00:13:47.000And if you think about scarcity and supply and demand, you're not going to exceed and have inflation that kind of grows past that.
00:13:54.000And so really people see it as an alternative to gold in a digital era.
00:13:58.000People are not walking around carrying gold.
00:14:00.000They're holding their ownership in gold via digital currency anyways, via whether it be a ledger on their brokerage account or whatever else it may be.
00:14:08.000And so now you have this digital version of gold that allows you to own wealth and allows you to retain that.
00:14:15.000So I think when people think about kind of the whole crypto ecosystem, the way they should think about it is Bitcoin is really a store of value.
00:14:22.000It's an alternative to gold in the modern era.
00:14:25.000And then you have the blockchain, which is what drives kind of all of cryptocurrency, which allows you to transact from point A to point B on different systems that allow you to do so.
00:14:35.000You have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum, you have Solana.
00:14:37.000And then you have stablecoins, where stablecoin says, you know what?
00:14:40.000I don't want to take a bet on what this underlying coin is worth, right?
00:14:46.000I don't know what Ethereum is worth, but I know what a dollar is worth.
00:14:49.000And I have trust in the value of a dollar.
00:14:51.000And so how do I engage into this new digital world, but trust that the value of that dollar will hold?
00:14:58.000And so that's kind of the value of the stablecoin and obviously a lot of the excitement around the world in what happened with the Genius Act this last wave.
00:15:07.000Yes, I mean, you're one of the leaders when it comes to Bitcoin mining and AI data centers.
00:15:13.000How exactly are you pioneering this use of energy?
00:15:36.000So at Honey, the vision and the mission statement that we have is how do we harness power to support the technologies of the future that drive humanity forward?
00:15:45.000If you look back in the history of time, every new innovation we've ever had has increased our consumption of power.
00:15:51.000And so I think this idea of let's consume less power, let's be more efficient is not real, right?
00:15:57.000Because the more efficient you are, the more use cases you'll have for that power and the more you'll use on an absolute basis.
00:16:03.000And so I think that is something that is really a mindset that needs to shift because in the US, I think there was so much focus historically on let's reduce our consumption of power.
00:16:14.000Where you have places like China where they're building seven-seed nuclear plants, they're growing on generation.
00:16:19.000And in the US, and we've seen this in this administration, there's been a new revival of power in the US, right?
00:16:29.000You've seen a revival of let's build and have entrepreneurs build manufacturing, build the digital ecosystem in the US.
00:16:35.000And so I think when we think about power, power, we believe, is kind of the fundamental driver behind pushing and empowering technologies forward.
00:16:44.000So starting with Bitcoin, how do you go and you produce a Bitcoin?
00:16:48.000Basically, what happens is there's this algorithm called SHA-256.
00:16:51.000And what that algorithm does is it says, I'm going to validate every transaction in the Bitcoin ledger.
00:16:57.000And I'm going to say, are these transactions accurate or are they inaccurate?
00:17:01.000And so every kind of miner around the world verifies what the last ledger was, what the new ledger was, and creates a uniform consensus that this is what should exist.
00:17:11.000And this is how we validate that there's no fraudulent transactions in the ecosystem.
00:17:14.000In order to power that, we have massive data centers that we build and they consume power.
00:17:37.000In some areas, we're offsetting some of the bills for the local residents who are in those areas.
00:17:43.000And so I think power fuels data centers that fuel Bitcoin compute and help power the reliability and trust in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
00:17:51.000So I mean, it's definitely a different sort of energy philosophy than what you have today, which is like, do less, do nothing, don't do any of it.
00:18:03.000And then, I mean, now you switch over to AI, which I think everyone has embraced, right?
00:18:07.000With Bitcoin, we can talk about this in a little bit, which is, I mean, we were scrutinized for years, right?
00:18:12.000This administration has really reinvigorated, I think, the entrepreneur who wants to build in the U.S., where before we were scared.
00:18:20.000We would tiptoe into new areas and be like, should we invest in here?
00:18:22.000We're investing hundreds of millions of dollars into neighborhoods and we're scared to even tell people because we don't want them to not like what we're building, right?
00:18:29.000And so there was this kind of taboo around it.
00:18:34.000But with AI, you have the same problem.
00:18:36.000We need large-scale power to deliver compute at scale.
00:18:40.000With compute at scale, we're able to now drive better AI models.
00:18:45.000We're able to drive faster evolution of advancements of technology.
00:18:50.000And we're able to do so faster than the rest of the world.
00:18:53.000And so making sure we're able to have large-scale campuses that are able to produce large-scale data centers will help us stay at the forefront of technology.
00:19:02.000And I think it's really, really important that the U.S. continues to be at that forefront, whether it be in technology with AI, whether it be in technology driving innovations around cryptocurrencies.
00:19:14.000And that also drives to, I think, the fundamentals of how do you power these things.
00:19:22.000It's all digital, but they're really powered by real hard physical assets.
00:19:27.000They're powered by power plants, by data centers.
00:19:29.000And that's why I think manufacturing in the US and not relying on other places on these raw materials because these things can only happen when you have the physical infrastructure to support them.
00:19:39.000And so, here we have HUD8 that focuses on building the infrastructure that supports the digital world in Bitcoin and AI.
00:19:46.000And now, with American Bitcoin, we're trying to create the purest accumulator of Bitcoin.
00:19:54.000I can either buy it or I can own an ETF, but I will only ever get, if I own one Bitcoin, I'll only ever get one Bitcoin return.
00:20:02.000If Bitcoin goes from $100,000 to $200,000, I made $100,000.
00:20:06.000The idea behind American Bitcoin is as we generate more Bitcoin through Bitcoin mining, being able to mine at a 50% discount in the market, being able to use different financing structures to accumulate more, instead of owning just one Bitcoin and gaining that appreciation, you might own 1.2 Bitcoin.
00:20:22.000And so you get that $100,000 lift, and then you get an additional 0.2 that you would have otherwise not have.
00:20:26.000And so there's this like dividend yield mechanism that we'd like to create through the operating business.
00:20:32.000Yeah, talk about that a little bit more because it's sort of interesting.
00:20:34.000Again, there's so many misnomers about how it now, but now as you've seen big banks start to adapt these things, you talked about stables a little bit, but obviously with American Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin focused.
00:20:47.000Talk about that because whether it's yield or staking, these sorts of things that you could create availability of people don't necessarily understand that.
00:20:55.000So it's not just holding gold, but you can actually hold gold that's earning an interest, not just going on the appreciation.
00:21:01.000And I think a good way to think about it is when you own, let's just say you own a ton of dollars.
00:21:08.000People who have large amounts, they own tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars.
00:21:13.000They're able to take that money, reinvest it, generate yield, and be able to grow the absolute basis that they have.
00:21:20.000If you're smaller, you might say, you know what, I'm going to deposit my cash at the bank.
00:21:23.000And as we all know, there's very, very low interest that you get.
00:21:25.000The bank is now taking your money to go make money and you're kind of just stuck.
00:21:30.000I think with American Bitcoin, it's the same idea.
00:21:33.000People can either just hold their Bitcoin and they can just hold it and wait for the appreciation or they can invest and be a shareholder in American Bitcoin.
00:21:43.000What we can do is have a large reserve of Bitcoin that we own.
00:21:46.000And with that reserve, we can go and generate yield.
00:22:39.000And by going public, it allows us to do so.
00:22:41.000And so with that, once we're public, because of the volatility of Bitcoin and mining, now we have access to being able to raise low-cost dollars, whether it be through the convertible note market, through the ATM market.
00:23:21.000And so the idea here is we are creating the democratized Bitcoin bank where we are allowing people instead of just depositing their Bitcoin and saying, all right, now you can just hold it and you can sit on your Bitcoin.
00:23:35.000And we're able to now use our treasury, use our access to the capital markets and drive yield and continue to grow and grow that reserve.
00:23:42.000And look, someone who's pioneered this is Michael Saylor, right?
00:23:46.000Michael Strategy has been one of the top performing stocks over the last five years.
00:23:50.000And they've really, really shown that this model works.
00:23:53.000And I think we're excited because we're able to have that model in addition to having the Bitcoin mining business to bring those two worlds together.
00:24:02.000And we talked a lot about this a little bit, but when we met you and we met your brother Eric Trump, we talked about how Michael Saylor was telling us, hey, you guys got to start running the strategy to accumulate Bitcoin.
00:24:18.000And so American Bitcoin is really the influence of everything coming together to create one of, in our opinions, the best Bitcoin accumulators for people to have ownership into.
00:24:30.000I'd like to get your thoughts sort of about the Genius Act.
00:24:33.000My father recently signed it into law.
00:24:34.000It was, you know, I guess last Friday.
00:24:38.000It establishes sort of the regulatory framework, not just for Bitcoin, but for stablecoins and really the regulatory framework that all of crypto was sort of junching for.
00:24:50.000What should we know about the bill, what it entails, what it does for the industry, et cetera?
00:24:58.000So the analogy that we like to talk about internally is the Securities Act of 1933, right?
00:25:04.000During that period of time, you had basically a crash in the stock market and regulators said, we need to come in, we need to regulate securities and we need to put structure around this ecosystem.
00:25:14.000And what that in turn created and allowed for was one of the biggest booms.
00:25:19.000If you think about it, the U.S. today is the leader in the capital markets, right?
00:25:23.000When people want to list their companies, they come to the U.S. They come to the NASA, the New York Stock Exchange.
00:25:28.000But the Securities Act of 1933 is really what created that framework for people to be able to build and to know what the rules and the regulations were.
00:25:37.000If we think about cryptocurrencies, I think it's one of the only ecosystems that has actually asked for regulation.
00:25:44.000We've asked for regulators to say, please, everyone wants less.
00:25:49.000We just needed to say, tell us what the rules are.
00:25:51.000We'll navigate within those rules and we'll go build great businesses.
00:25:55.000And I think what the Genius Act has done, and it's kind of the first of a series of these regulations, one of the first modern regulations that is put down for the crypto industry.
00:26:05.000And it's created a very clear and easy way to understand this primarily around stable coins, right?
00:26:10.000And what a stablecoin is, it says, all right, if I own one unit of this token, right now it's backed by the dollar and you have a one-for-one backing.
00:26:19.000The problem historically with stable coins is people will say, okay, well, does this thing actually, is this thing actually worth a dollar?
00:26:25.000Are people holding the dollar in a bank?
00:26:29.000So now this regulation says, we'll give licenses out.
00:26:32.000We'll make sure that we're regulating this industry.
00:26:35.000And so now when you're buying these stable coins, you know that they get audited, that the money is actually there.
00:26:41.000And so when you own a token, you know that behind that stable coin, you actually have a real dollar that backs it.
00:26:47.000And I think that's really, really important because what I've seen is you have entrepreneurs that have really been driven internationally to go build in the crypto industry, right?
00:26:56.000Because they're scared to build in America.
00:26:58.000In the last administration, people were getting, were getting attacked.
00:27:03.000The regulatory regime was coming after them and they were just saying, tell us how you want us to operate and we'll build business that framework.
00:27:10.000I mean, with the guys from World Liberty, which is just stablecoin side of what we're working on in crypto, it was like that.
00:27:16.000You could hire the finest lawyer in America and be like, this is what we want to do.
00:27:20.000It's like, it probably works, but we don't actually know because there was nothing.
00:27:23.000And so, I mean, you literally took five years, six years where you were sending people to other places that they knew they just weren't going to jail for doing that.
00:27:32.000And again, it wasn't that they were trying to do something shady.
00:27:52.000I mean, the U.S. is the financial engine of the world.
00:27:55.000And the genius that is building on that framework of the modern equivalent of the Securities Act and being in ensuring that the U.S. is a place that entrepreneurs and people in this industry want to build.
00:28:06.000And also the dominance of the dollar for hundreds of years to come, right?
00:28:09.000Having the dollar backing these stable coins and really having that be the currency that's supporting a lot of these.
00:28:15.000I think when we look back in history, this will be a really, really important and huge milestone in time and in history because people will see where was crypto really let go and how did it really start impacting the world and impacting financial systems, businesses.
00:28:46.000That wasn't even in kind of the mindset.
00:28:48.000And so now I'm seeing more than ever my colleagues, entrepreneurs, people who are building internationally coming back to the U.S. and saying, you know what?
00:28:55.000Let's build here because the U.S. will be the crypto capital of the world.
00:28:59.000Yeah, watching those guys sort of all get behind this, it just, it makes so much sense.
00:29:03.000And again, I think there's probably a lot of resistance because at least even in Congress and whatnot, because the banks and the traditional way of doing things, not so efficient, not so simple, not so quick.
00:29:14.000A lot of people getting paid a lot to do things that blockchain is going to make obsolete.
00:29:18.000I mean, it's a brave new world and that's probably scary for a lot of people.
00:29:22.000And there are lobbyists who are paid really well to protect those industries that, again, could probably use a little bit of a shakeup.
00:29:30.000I mean, I'm sure everyone has been in a situation where they have money in their bank account and they're trying to take money out of the ATM or they're trying to transfer something they can't do.
00:29:50.000This is for everyone who wants control of their own wealth.
00:29:53.000I know, Don, when we kind of got together and really formed American Bitcoin, you and your brother were saying that like a big part of you guys coming into the space and adopting the space was after the first administration where the debanking started to happen and you couldn't get access.
00:30:07.000And it's crazy to think about that these should be service providers that first and foremost take care of the people that have their wealth in these institutions.
00:30:16.000And they've become these massive powerhouses where people don't have control over their own access to their own wealth anymore.
00:30:24.000It wasn't like we were all that innovative.
00:30:26.000I mean, we were old school real estate guys, you know, again, doing some cool stuff, but not exactly, you know, a leading edge tech kind of business.
00:30:35.000And then all of a sudden, you know, we get into politics, that, you know, switch gets turned off.
00:30:52.000And so we adapted it really out of necessity.
00:30:55.000But then once you actually get familiar, that's why it's like, you know, for some of the people who are just like, I don't understand this funny thing.
00:31:02.000You know, once you actually get into it and you get a little vested or you buy a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin, you start paying attention to all these things and you figure out like, oh, once you get through the acronyms and the nonsense and everything like that, it's actually pretty simple to understand.
00:31:18.000And once you get rid of that fear, it's easy to kind of get on board.
00:31:23.000And so once we saw it and our eyes were open, I'm like, oh, my God, like this is going to make so many things, even in the old school world of stuff that we did simpler.
00:31:30.000You know, when I think about real estate, I think about, you know, title insurance ending up on the blockchain.
00:31:43.000You could check it in two seconds for $0.
00:31:46.000You know, there's just all of these middlemen and stuff that, I mean, I think this is going to make it obsolete.
00:31:51.000Like AI is going to make a lot of things obsolete as well.
00:31:53.000And you integrate AI with the blockchain and you unlock so much opportunity.
00:31:58.000And I think that's the thing is, look, being in this industry, well, I'll be honest in College of Fame and Spade.
00:32:04.000In any new industry, there are good actors and there are bad actors, right?
00:32:08.000And so as you think through kind of crypto over the years, because there was no regulatory framework, you had people coming in trying to build great businesses and you had people coming in trying to make money quickly.
00:32:17.000And so when someone gets burned, they go to the other extreme and say, this whole thing is bullshit.
00:32:20.000This is not a real industry and so forth.
00:32:22.000But when you look at the dot-com era back in the 90s, think about how many of those companies kind of came up overnight, disappeared because they didn't try to Create true value.
00:32:31.000But today, the most valuable companies in the world were companies that were born in that era.
00:32:35.000And so I think we're living through this same moment in time where you'll have some of the largest companies born now that in the future, when we look back, and you'll have all the noise of companies that don't drive value.
00:32:46.000And I think that's where, as a consumer, like the Genius Act is one of the first steps into that regulatory framework of how do we make sure that people are building great businesses, that we can rely in good actors.
00:32:58.000And then by doing so, we allow this industry to really get uncuffed and really grow and blossom.
00:33:39.000And I mean, every day, I mean, I talk about it on the show all the time.
00:33:41.000It's like, you know, here's another $10 billion from this company.
00:33:44.000And like, why wasn't this already happening?
00:33:47.000Like, it didn't seem like it was that hard to actually incentivize people to actually do things in the United States.
00:33:52.000But like, when you're an idiot and you don't do anything and you don't, you've never built anything and you've only signed the back of a paycheck, never the front, it's like, I don't know, this guy told me to do it.
00:34:06.000So it's amazing how quickly we could turn that around.
00:34:22.000I mean, you're basically using supercomputers.
00:34:25.000So I'd love to actually hear you talk about the evolution of that.
00:34:28.000But I know you've said before that it's not just about being the biggest, it's about being the most efficient.
00:34:34.000You know, what are the key indicators and benchmarks to assess that when people are looking at doing this, if they're looking into getting crypto this way through American Bitcoin?
00:34:43.000So today, when we go and we mine Bitcoin, our cost of energy to mine a Bitcoin is under $40,000 of Bitcoin.
00:34:49.000And so if you think about it, that's not too bad.
00:34:51.000If Bitcoin right now is getting close to $120,000 a coin and we're being able to mine that at a cost of under $40,000, that's a pretty good margin, right?
00:35:00.000And so how do we think about kind of the cost structure that goes into mining a Bitcoin?
00:35:04.000First, you got to go build the data centers and you got to go buy the chips.
00:35:07.000In the structure with American Bitcoin, Hade is building the data centers, not American Bitcoin.
00:35:28.000We provide a service agreement where American Bitcoin keeps light SGNA so it can toggle in and out based on need rather than just a fixed cost that has to burn every single month just keep the lights on.
00:35:38.000And so from a Bitcoin perspective, then really our major cost is that cost of electricity, where are we able to consume electricity at a low cost relative to the price of Bitcoin?
00:35:48.000And so we've been very, very good on controlling that.
00:35:50.000And the way that we think about it is this.
00:35:52.000If we spend money buying these supercomputers, if we bought Bitcoin instead, are we generating more Bitcoin by buying these supercomputers than having just bought Bitcoin itself?
00:36:02.000And that's really the metric we hold ourselves to.
00:36:04.000Because the better your supercomputers are, the newest generation, the better efficiency they are.
00:36:10.000You can run at a higher energy cost because you have higher margins, because you're producing more Bitcoin for less computer power.
00:36:17.000And so with that, why that's really important is I think sometimes people say, all right, which company has the lowest cost of energy or which company has the most amount of exahash, the most amount of Bitcoin that they're mining?
00:36:29.000And sometimes these metrics are skewed because if you have a massive margin, I'd rather spend a bit more money on energy, be online a bit more and produce more Bitcoin, right?
00:36:38.000Or if I'm producing a ton of Bitcoin and my average cost to produce Bitcoin all in with everything is $130,000, I'm really losing $10,000 mining that Bitcoin, not making a big margin.
00:36:48.000And so when we think about it, scale matters, but being really, really efficient matters and making sure when we spend the dollars, we're actually driving a yield more so than buying Bitcoin itself.
00:36:59.000And I think one way that allows us to do that is HUD8 now is kind of the low volatility energy infrastructure company.
00:37:06.000So when we invest into a project, we think about it as a real estate investment.
00:37:10.000We can look for a much longer term return.
00:37:12.000We can have a lower year-on-year IRR because we're investing in infrastructure.
00:37:16.000When we're investing in Bitcoin and supercomputers, we need a much faster rate of return because computers are coming out every single year and we need to make that payback better.
00:37:25.000And so we've really separated and I think created one of the best balances in terms of cost of capital.
00:37:31.000And so now American Bitcoin, I think, allows people to say, okay, I get the best of micro strategy in MetaPlanet where I can, the company will go and accumulate Bitcoin and tap into the capital markets.
00:37:41.000But it also takes the best of the largest Bitcoin miner in the world by saying, I'm just going to go get the highest margin Bitcoin that we can mine without all of the other costs that go into this business because of the relationship with Hade.
00:37:55.000And look, if American Bitcoin and Haraid, if Hade is one of the largest shareholders of American Bitcoin, right?
00:38:02.000And so we're economically incentivized for American Bitcoin to do really, really well.
00:38:06.000Without that synergy, other companies wouldn't create that type of structure because that wouldn't make as much sense.
00:38:11.000And so that's where I'm really, really excited with American Bitcoin because I think what we've all built here is we've built this great business.
00:38:19.000And look, it's been a fast period of time.
00:38:22.000If we think about it, we launched American Bitcoin to the world April 1st.
00:38:25.000I'm excited for us to share with them how much Bitcoin we've accumulated in a very short period of time before we go public.
00:38:31.000And hopefully we're sprinkling towards getting this company public in the short while here.
00:38:39.000Again, going public, what is it as it relates to scalability, achieving everything you've been talking about?
00:38:46.000What enables going public, what does that enable you guys to do that you couldn't do right now?
00:38:51.000Right now, when we think about growing and raising capital, really the way we raise capital is we go to investors, they invest into the business.
00:38:58.000And there's some information that Came out through our recent filing on a private capital raise that we just did as well.
00:39:04.000But in the public markets, you have so much more access to different instruments.
00:39:09.000And this goes back to my bank analogy.
00:39:11.000As an individual, you don't have access to all these different yield generating opportunities.
00:39:17.000But as a bank, you have way more optionality of where you can deploy that capital to derive a yield.
00:39:21.000And so when you think about a company, when we're private versus when we're public in the public markets, we can look at the volatility of our stock and we can get 0% or 1% convertible note paper because they're able to say, I'm able to trade around your volatility.
00:39:36.000So I'll give you really cheap capital.
00:39:37.000As a private company, you never get that.
00:39:39.000Your cost of a convert may be 8% to 10%, right?
00:39:42.000And so you drive down that cost of capital.
00:39:44.000And why that's important is when you have really low cost money and you're able to invest that into Bitcoin, which has been an appreciating asset over the tenure, one of the highest appreciating assets in the world during the life cycle of Bitcoin, now you have this really, really interesting mismatch.
00:40:00.000You have TradFi and traditional finance giving you cheap dollars for you to deploy into Bitcoin that is an appreciating asset at a double digit appreciation with a longer tenure.
00:40:11.000And so by going public, we are able to continue to build the great business we have today in mining Bitcoin at a low cost.
00:40:18.000And now we're able to add this layer of this financial engineering that MicroStrategy has done so well.
00:40:24.000I think what we're excited by is, look, they're over a $100 billion company.
00:40:28.000When they started to accumulate Bitcoin, they're around $1 billion.
00:40:31.000So they have 100X in terms of their market cap.
00:40:35.000And right now, for them to go from 100 billion to $1 trillion, that's a big jump, right?
00:40:42.000For us to go from where we are to 100 billion, there's a lot of that ramp.
00:40:46.000And look, I think kudos for Sailor for setting the track, for honestly convincing us all into the beautiful opportunity that's here.
00:40:56.000And I think we brought kind of what we knew very well.
00:41:00.000We brought the Bitcoin world together and you and your brother having really embodied and I think now being kind of spokespeople for this industry, creating this great business and this American business.
00:41:12.000I think that was a key to American Bitcoin as well, right?
00:41:14.000We didn't want to just be in a Bitcoin company.
00:41:16.000We want to be a Bitcoin company that's built and based in America, hence the name American Bitcoin and really embodying this new digital era and this new currency that people can be a part of and can be owners of as well, not just customers of.
00:41:30.000And so we want people to have access as a public company to own a part of the business and be a part of this journey with us.
00:41:36.000So Asher, as people sort of start to, they're watching this, they're trying to wrap their head around the concept of things like mining, decentralized finance, blockchain.
00:41:49.000How do you go about educating others about the importance of all of this?
00:41:56.000I mean, how do people take those first baby steps that they can sort of figure it out?
00:42:00.000Because it was complicated for me at first, but then it's like, oh, then it just clicks, but you got to, where do you start?
00:42:08.000I think that's a great question because it is really complicated, especially when you get into DeFi and now you're swapping and you're going into and you're having your wallets.
00:42:16.000And so I think to start, people just just start accumulating some of their own coins, right?
00:42:21.000The main coins today are stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana.
00:42:25.000It's these coins that are really kind of standing the test of time.
00:42:29.000I think stablecoins, the right ones are backed by US dollars.
00:42:33.000So you have comfort there that you're really just saying, all right, instead of owning a dollar in the bank, I'm owning a dollar via stablecoin.
00:42:40.000Yeah, and that stablecoin is backed by U.S. Treasuries.
00:42:43.000It's what we're doing with World Liberty Finance.
00:42:44.000That's, you know, the stablecoin side of, you know, the DeFi platform of what we're doing, which is the, you know, sort of, again, sort of the oil, the transactional stuff.
00:42:52.000And then you have the gold on the Bitcoin side with American Bitcoin.
00:42:55.000And it allows you to start getting involved into the ecosystem without actually taking risks on the underlying asset, right?
00:43:03.000Because everyone is already taking exposure to US dollars.
00:43:05.000You're saying, all right, I'm just holding a different form of this currency now.
00:43:08.000And so I think that's a great way to start dabbling.
00:43:10.000Then Bitcoin has stood the test of time.
00:43:12.000Bitcoin has had an unbelievable appreciation cycle.
00:43:16.000If anyone's bought and held Bitcoin, they haven't lost money, right?
00:43:19.000And so Bitcoin is that store of gold is the first and I think the longest cryptocurrency out there.
00:43:26.000Ethereum, people kind of put as like the, if Bitcoin's a digital gold, Ethereum is like the digital oil where you have transactions and things that are built on the Ethereum network.
00:43:35.000And Solana has come in and has really built a great technology as well, where a lot of developers are building on top of that.
00:43:41.000And Solana and Ethereum are competing right now.
00:43:45.000And you have a lot of other coins as well and different projects and companies that people like to bet on.
00:43:49.000So I would say start simple, start with the key main ones that you know.
00:43:54.000And the reality is when Bitcoin goes up by 5%, everything else goes up by 20%.
00:44:00.000But when Bitcoin goes down by 5%, everything else always also drops by 20%.
00:44:04.000And so if you don't want to take that much risk and you don't want to gamble as much, go in with the more larger, trusted, stable coins.
00:44:12.000So just understand how to interact with the ecosystem, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, where you have a little less volatility and you already have a lot of adoption to those coins.
00:44:21.000And then you can start dabbling, right?
00:44:23.000I'm sure you and I, when we have a friend tell us, oh, there's this interesting company or this early stage company, why don't you write a check?
00:44:29.000That's what some of these coins are, right?
00:44:31.000They're early venture checks and most of the time they don't work out.
00:44:34.000And sometimes they do and you make a ton of money and it's great.
00:44:36.000But I think people need to know what they're putting their money into.
00:44:39.000Am I investing into a blue chip company that has a lot less volatility and is not going to drop and go to zero overnight?
00:44:45.000Or am I investing into a startup that has a ton of upside, but could also disappear overnight as well?
00:44:50.000And so I would say people should start dabbling.
00:44:53.000And you can open a wallet on, I mean, there's Coinbase, there's Genesis, there's Anchorage, there's all these platforms that you can open a wallet onto, or you can buy just some with your ETF, right?
00:45:56.000And with American Bitcoin coming out, I mean, I think we are one of the most well-packed talent startups in the world and are at the very beginning.
00:46:05.000And hopefully people will have an ability to be a shareholder with us and grow with us at the start of this journey as we come out and become a public company.
00:46:18.000And coming up, guys, we'll get into much more on all the energy investment going on in the great state of Pennsylvania with Senator Dave McCormick.
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00:47:39.000Joining me now, Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick.
00:49:37.000That was shipped abroad by the time I got there.
00:49:39.000So I sort of had my formative years, eighth grade through graduation of high school, in these towns where you could see just the ruins of what used to be incredible America.
00:49:50.000And you see what so many politicians did at taking those American dreams and just shipping them to China.
00:50:12.000And when you have an 8,000-person town, that just guts it.
00:50:16.000So that energy, the shale revolution, the coal and the anthracite in the northeast, bituminous in the south, the nuclear power capability, that's a huge advantage.
00:50:27.000But then the second thing is we got this incredible skilled workforce, welders, pipe fitters, steam fitters, electricians.
00:50:35.000And in the AI world, you need to build these huge data centers.
00:50:39.000You need skilled workers who can build them.
00:51:45.000Second, you know, we had 100, because your dad's there, we had 150 media outlets.
00:51:52.000So we got all these people, Bergham, Wright, Lutnick, all these CEOs telling the story of why Pennsylvania is at the crossroads of the energy revolution, the AI revolution.
00:52:01.000Then finally, I said to the president, Hey, listen, Mr. President, look what's happening here: $92 billion, at least tens of thousands, probably 75,000 construction jobs, tens of thousands of permanent jobs.
00:52:27.000But so, you know, Senator, talk about what's at stake here, right?
00:52:31.000We've heard at times, you know, AI is a threat to jobs, but it honestly seems to me like maybe there's actually a lot more opportunity, right?
00:52:39.000AI is not really a threat to the guy that's a welder and the construction guy.
00:52:42.000It's probably more a threat to the, you know, the bureaucrats that are probably not voting our way.
00:52:48.000But, you know, there has to also be a lot of sort of new sector jobs that are going to evolve from this technology.
00:52:55.000You know, what does that mean for the working people of Pennsylvania?
00:53:16.000And as you said, so from a national security perspective, it couldn't be more important.
00:53:21.000But from an economic perspective, this is happening.
00:53:23.000So we can either resist it or embrace it.
00:53:26.000And I think in Pennsylvania, we are embracing it because just as you said, this is much more opportunity for blue-collar workers than risk.
00:53:35.000These data centers will create huge opportunity for these skilled labor.
00:53:40.000I think journalists, I think software developers, I think people that traditional white-collar jobs, highly educated, I think that is where you're going to see more turmoil and more change.
00:53:52.000But I think this is the next industrial revolution as part of President Trump's reindustrialization of America strategy.
00:54:01.000It's next generation technology, these huge data centers and energy innovation.
00:54:06.000You probably know this, but the prediction is that energy demand will triple in the next 15 years.
00:54:13.000The only way to do that is drill, baby, drill, frac, nuclear.
00:54:18.000One of the big announcements directly tied to the president's energy dominance strategy was Westinghouse announced they're going to build 10 new reactors beginning by 2030.
00:54:30.000Meaning they go online by 2030 or are they starting online?
00:54:36.000And what the CEO said at the summit with your dad at the table was, Mr. President, I wouldn't have done this except for the executive order that you put forward on nuclear power.
00:54:51.000So, Senator, when you drive through Western Pennsylvania and central Pennsylvania, do you see signs of an American revival?
00:54:59.000For far too long, we've let sort of the globalists, the globalization destroy critical manufacturing.
00:55:06.000I think of many companies like Pennsylvania House Furniture, which had all their jobs shipped overseas.
00:55:12.000It feels like now we actually have an opportunity to really write a new chapter that's about growth, about righting these wrongs.
00:55:18.000Every day I open up, here's another billion dollars into America from a company that's an American company theoretically, but was doing everything overseas.
00:55:25.000But now they're, you know, whether it's tariff policy or otherwise, they're like, nope, now we're going to put that money here because it makes sense.
00:55:46.000Every business that I met on the campaign trail, 500 stops in 24 alone, they basically said, listen, regulation is killing us.
00:55:53.000So the deregulation agenda under the Trump administration is going to be the biggest deregulation push we've had since 1981 when Ronald Reagan came into office.
00:56:04.000I mean, we are embracing it, not only eliminating the subsidies on wind and solar, but doubling down on fossil fuels, whether it's coal or natural gas or oil and nuclear.
00:56:15.000All of these things are pro-growth, pro-economy.
00:56:49.000And then the fourth thing that's happening, I think, on tariffs, if you believe we have unfair treatment, which I believe, and you believe that the tariff strategy of the president reciprocity is going to ultimately end up in fair trade for America, we're now seeing that start to come to fruition, whether it's the deal with Vietnam or the deal that will ultimately come to be with Europe or Canada.
00:57:12.000We're seeing, I think the markets are looking through that and seeing when the dust settles, it's going to be a fair trading.
00:57:19.000And so I think you're starting to see the capital investment, the green sprouts that result from businesses believing that things are moving in the right direction.
00:57:33.000I wish we had been doing it for years.
00:57:35.000It doesn't seem like it was all that hard to actually accomplish.
00:57:37.000You just need a little bit of that resolve.
00:57:38.000I mean, you know, when you talk about some of those things in the big, beautiful bill, I think one of the things I like to point out on this show, you know, it felt like for a long time, sort of the conventional sort of Republican dogma was, hey, corporate tax cuts, corporate tax cuts.
00:57:51.000But I mean, one big beautiful bill, and I know my father spent sort of a lot of political capital making sure that a huge part of those tax cuts actually translates not to the corporate guys, but to the real workers of America.
00:58:12.000It was about doing for the corporations and the guys who have the lobbyists and they get their tax cuts and everyone else may get a benefit from that.
00:58:19.000Maybe the shareholders do, but no one really else.
00:58:22.000I thought that was such a big part of what we were fighting for.
00:58:24.000And it was great to see guys like yourself actually, again, break away from sort of traditional Conservative dogma, which is all about corporations and actually make it all about the people.
00:58:34.000Yeah, no, listen, President Trump felt that on the campaign trail.
00:58:40.000And frankly, it was an education for me.
00:58:44.000You go town to town, family to family, you hear this over and over again, and you realize how the economy had not been working for working families, particularly under Joe Biden, because prices went up by 20 plus percent and wages, real wages didn't keep up.
00:59:00.000So you've got this squeeze that working class Pennsylvanians are feeling.
00:59:06.000The median income in Pennsylvania is $52,000 a year, Don.
00:59:11.000And what the Big Beautiful Bill did, first of all, the 2017 tax cuts, I mean, regardless of all this nonsense that Democrats say, was highly, highly progressive.
00:59:20.000By that, I mean most of the tax benefit, the reduction of taxes went to the lower part of the income.
00:59:28.000And the people at the higher end of the income bracket got less of a tax cut.
00:59:33.000So just as a general rule, the 2017 tax cuts helped working families.
00:59:38.000But then on top of that, what the Big Beautiful bill did, it eliminated tax on tips.
01:00:01.000So if you're a family that makes $50,000 a year and you can't afford to have a kid, this gives you another $2,500 in your pocket.
01:00:08.000It has a child care tax credit for families that have two working parents.
01:00:12.000So this was designed to help people that are struggling to get by, that live paycheck to paycheck, have the opportunity that America has to offer.
01:00:21.000Now, the last piece of the puzzle, which President Trump is hammering on right now, and I think appropriately, is interest rates, because a big part of the American dream is to be able to have a home and to be able to afford rent.
01:00:36.000Rent's gone up by more than 11% last year in Pennsylvania alone.
01:00:41.000House prices are more expensive because of interest rates.
01:00:44.000So if we can get interest rates down, which I hope the Fed will do because it's clear that inflation is under control, that's going to round out the puzzle for working families.
01:00:55.000And I think you're going to see a continued just explosion of opportunity for people across our country.
01:01:01.000Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
01:01:03.000I mean, for those who watching who may not know your background, I mean, you know, you ran some serious businesses on Wall Street.
01:01:09.000I mean, this is what you did for a long period of time.
01:01:11.000So, you know, you're not just one of these politicians talking about things.
01:01:14.000You actually did this stuff in the real world at a, you know, pretty much the ultimate level.
01:01:19.000It was interesting when I watched, you know, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, you know, he cut interest rates, what was it, 50 basis points right before the election when inflation was not under control, when it was rampant and egg prices were through the roof and everything was.
01:01:34.000I mean, that to me, as a business guy myself, was about as politicized as you get.
01:01:42.000And it was like, well, we got to control inflation.
01:03:05.000Your dad just spoken out publicly in the last week or two.
01:03:08.000I don't think it makes sense for him to remove Jerome Powell.
01:03:11.000I mean, he hasn't said conclusively he's not going to do that.
01:03:13.000I think the independence of the Fed is an important thing.
01:03:17.000However, the president's going to have a chance to put his imprints on this pretty quickly because he's going to have a chance to pick a new Fed chair and two new Fed governors.
01:03:25.000And listen, I think it's very appropriate to criticize the Fed for missing both ways.
01:03:31.000It was too slow in raising rates to counter inflation under Joe Biden.
01:03:35.000It's been too slow to acknowledge that inflation is under control under President Trump.
01:03:40.000The first benefited the Biden administration.
01:03:42.000The second is a negative for the Trump administration.
01:03:45.000I'm hoping that gets corrected here in the next couple of weeks when the Fed has a chance to reduce rates.
01:03:50.000So, Senator, we've also been talking a bit about the Genius Act on the show.
01:03:54.000From your perspective in the Senate, what will it help to do to drive innovation?
01:04:01.000Well, I think it's a really important step forward.
01:04:03.000Just stepping back, I know you've been active in this area as well.
01:04:07.000Crypto and blockchain are the next big wave of innovation.
01:04:10.000This is incredibly important that America remain on the forefront of that to be at the center of financial markets.
01:04:19.000And you go to the Middle East or Europe and you see lots of innovation happening.
01:04:23.000And blockchain essentially disintermediates the government.
01:04:26.000It takes the financial institutions and the regulators out of it.
01:04:30.000It's inherently conservative because it's for independence and freedom.
01:04:34.000And so crypto is a great driver of that.
01:04:37.000And Stablecoin, which is regulated and established through the Genius Act, is essentially a risk-free payment source because it's backed by the U.S. dollar.
01:04:53.000But what it allows people to do is be able to transact in a way that is much more cost-effective and much more streamlined.
01:05:02.000And crypto in general, despite what some of the critics have said, Elizabeth Warren and others, actually is a much clearer way to inform and guard against money laundering and other things because blockchain has a clear collection of all the transactions and actions.
01:05:19.000It doesn't identify the end users, but it creates that track record.
01:05:23.000If you're a prosecutor or the FBI, it allows you to follow the breadcrumb trail of where bad things may be happening.
01:05:31.000The most important thing about it, in my mind, is that stablecoin is backed by the U.S. dollar.
01:05:35.000I think most Americans don't understand the importance of America being the reserve currency.
01:05:42.000Having reserve currency status gives us privilege around the world.
01:05:52.000It's a great source of economic strength.
01:05:55.000Because digital payments are growing so rapidly and stablecoin will become the digital currency of use for many around the world.
01:06:06.000That means that there's going to be even a greater demand for dollars.
01:06:09.000And with that greater demand in dollars, that strengthens America's dollar and its position as a reserve currency of the world.
01:06:15.000Yeah, and I think that's so fundamentally important.
01:06:17.000You've seen sort of the attacks, whether it be from China or other actors around the world trying to basically knock sort of dollar hegemony, where dollar is the dominant currency out there.
01:06:37.000And I think it's exactly the opposite.
01:06:40.000I mean, when you look at these things being backed by U.S. treasuries, they're going to replace a lot of the big actors that were traditionally the buyers of these treasuries, which then enabled us to borrow and do some of the things that not always good.
01:06:54.000Sometimes we borrow a little too much and funded billions of dollars for trans surgeries in Guatemala, whatever the hell we were doing.
01:07:01.000So maybe not all of it was good, but I think it still allowed America to be a dominant player in the world.
01:07:06.000I think these staples are going to be actually the ones bolstering that as other countries try to get away from that.
01:07:12.000I think that's hugely important from a sort of macroeconomic perspective.
01:07:27.000And as you said, stable coins and then stable payments will be a growing source of dollar-denominated transactions, which is great for liquidity, great for opportunity, and great for the reserve, the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.
01:07:44.000So last time we were on, we talked a little bit about your book, Who Believed in You.
01:07:50.000It was also right after you were with my father at the NCAA Wrestling Championships that you mentioned in the beginning.
01:07:56.000What was it about the wrestling culture in your state that helped shape the character of the people you represent?
01:08:03.000Yeah, when your dad was coming to the Nationals, I wrote an article that day that actually got published in the Wall Street Journal.
01:08:12.000And the title of it was, When I Watch Wrestling, I see America.
01:08:16.000I see the best of America and the best of Pennsylvania because wrestling, you know, there's a new league being started, amateur wrestling, but wrestling is a combat sport.
01:08:29.000It's basically you and the opponent under the spotlight, nowhere to hide.
01:08:35.000When they say, you know, fatigue makes cowards of us all, there's nothing more exhausting than seven minutes on the mat with an opponent of strength and endurance and caliber.
01:08:52.000And it's more than anything else, a mental game.
01:08:55.000And through that, you learn perseverance, dedication, hard work, grit, determination, toughness.
01:09:02.000And, you know, the people of Pennsylvania have been at the forefront of America for 250 years, whether it's been the founding of the country or the Civil War, the arsenal of democracy during World War II.
01:09:13.000Pennsylvania has proven itself always to be at the forefront of America's toughest fights and at the forefront of America's innovation.
01:09:21.000And so I see that connection to this moment we're in where the future is unknown, but our leadership will depend on us being able to find that grid and hard work and determination that we see on the wrestling mat, we see in the steel mills, we see in these data centers.
01:09:39.000Well, as someone who dabbled myself in my youth, I couldn't agree more.
01:09:58.000I said during the campaign that, you know, in college, I always knew that if I could get into the third period within a point or two, that I'd persevere because the last two minutes is not about skill.