Episode 173: $16B IREN Deep Dive, OnlyFans For Sale, Escalante's Fall, will Moltbook take over the world, Jamie Pherous Cuts and Runs, and Aus Open
The guys go deep into the US $16B IREN with a special guest, OnlyFans sale, Laurence Escalante charged, AI taking over the world, CTM founder quits, and the rise of the AO.
The Contrarians catchup
Adam and Adir kick things off in peak Melbourne mode: tennis season, clear skies, and the Australian Open as arguably the country’s last remaining cultural flex. Adir reminds listeners that “Melbourne is the only city in the world that has an F1 Grand Prix and a tennis Grand Slam.”
The guys discuss why tennis has quietly replaced horse racing as the preferred corporate signalling device, and why women’s tennis may now be the better product - “The serving power just isn’t the same, so you get more rallies, more drama.”
And then, inevitably, the conversation turns to pyramids - specifically, how brutally steep they are in global professions like tennis, acting, and music. Adir said “if you are the 88th best person in the world at something, and the top 30 are rich… is there anything worse than being 88th?”
Gen X, One Nation, and the collapse of the political middle
New polling data has revealed a surprising voting pattern across generations. Roughly one-third of every generation still vote Labor. The real outlier is Gen X, where Coalition support has collapsed and One Nation support has surged.
Rather than a simple left-versus-right story, the data points to fragmentation, weak party loyalty, and elections increasingly being decided by preference flows rather than primary votes.
Adir: “Only 12% of Gen X vote for the coalition. Thirty-five percent vote for One Nation. The most remarkable thing is that about one-third of every generation votes Labor. Baby boomers, Gen X, millennials - it’s basically the same.”
Adam: “Labor is the centre now. And it’s being squeezed from both sides.”
AI agents and influencer economics
Moltbook, a new AI platform where autonomous agents interact with one another, has gone viral, triggering familiar fears about runaway artificial intelligence. But Adam and Adir argue the behaviour isn’t new, it’s a mirror of the existing influencer economy.
The bots quickly learn that outrage, drama, and exaggeration generate engagement, just like humans do on social platforms. The real lesson isn’t about AI risk, but about what social incentives reward.
Adir: “They learn very quickly that being more dramatic and controversial gets more engagement from other bots. What they’ve created is basically a replica of the influencer economy.”
Adam: “This doesn’t tell us something scary about AI. It tells us something scary about social media.”
Adir: “If you give an AI full access to your email, WhatsApp, and APIs, and it ruins your life - don’t blame the AI. Blame yourself.”
OnlyFans, gambling, and the oldest business models on earth
Reports that OnlyFans could be sold for around $5B reignited debate about stigma, regulation, and why certain industries reliably print money across centuries.
Despite eye-watering margins and global scale, businesses tied to sex and gambling often trade at discounts - not because the economics are weak, but because many buyers simply don’t want their name attached.
Adir: “If you want to make money in this world, whether it’s today or 5,000 years ago, it’s gambling or porn. These things are regulated because people would spend unlimited amounts of money on them if they weren’t. It’s not an economic discount. It’s a stigma discount.”
Adam: “A business doing $600M in profit at almost 50% margins selling for $5B feels cheap to me.”
Why sudden wealth is one of the most dangerous things in the world
The conversation turns to extreme wealth creation after news around tech billionaires and founders who made vast sums very quickly.
The core issue isn’t money itself, but speed. When wealth arrives faster than a person’s psychology can adapt, it often destabilises relationships, incentives, and decision-making.
Adir: “If you want to curse someone, don’t wish poverty on them. Wish extreme, sudden wealth on them. Multiply how fast the wealth comes by how much of it there is. That’s the danger. Before the tech era, nobody built a billion-dollar fortune in five years. That world just didn’t exist.”
The neo-cloud boom and a $10B short on GPUs
The episode’s deepest dive focuses on a fast-growing AI infrastructure company, IREN, valued around $25B, built on leasing enormous amounts of compute capacity to hyperscalers.
Adam’s concern isn’t demand, it’s structure. The business depends on massive capital expenditure, fast-depreciating hardware, and contracts that effectively lock the company into future GPU availability it doesn’t yet control.
Adir: “This business takes a regulated resource, electricity, and turns it into a market-priced resource. That arbitrage never lasts forever. There is no reason whatsoever to report EBITDA for this business. It is a capital-intensive furnace. When you call recurring revenue ‘illustrative’, you’re literally saying: this is not real.”
Adir: “They’ve sold $9.8B of compute they don’t have yet. That is a short position on the global GPU market. What terrified me wasn’t the business. It was how interlinked everything now is with this AI bubble.”
Five other stories worth following:
Ford filed patents for in-car ads using cameras to mirror billboards and microphones to parse conversations. With 400M connected cars, researchers project $100–$120 annual e-commerce per vehicle by 2030, implying a $50B market.
Walmart promoted lifer John Furner after his Sam’s Club run, while Target elevated insider Michael Fiddelke amid falling sales, boycotts, DEI backlash, and staff unrest - two CEOs entering starkly different momentum as 2026 begins globally.
Bitcoin slid 11% in January, extending four losing months, then dropped below $76,000 - about 40% off October highs. Bloomberg says ETF optimism was front-run, and fund manager Richard Hodges predicts no peak for 1,000 days.
Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny dominated the Grammys; Lamar won five, Bad Bunny took album honours. Billie Eilish and Finneas claimed song of the year, while Trevor Noah hosted for a final time again.
Alphabet leads a packed earnings week as AI hopes face scrutiny, alongside Palantir, Disney, AMD, Pepsi, Uber, Qualcomm, Amazon and Toyota, with pharma giants also reporting across markets as investors brace volatility this quarter.