Bankless - Has Bitcoin Bottomed? Jordi Visser on AI, Inflation, and Moats

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

Has Bitcoin already bottomed, or are investors still looking at the wrong signals? Jordi Visser joins Bankless to argue that AI is destroying software moats, reshaping inflation, and pushing capital toward scarce assets, with Bitcoin at the center of that shift. We get into his “AI is the new QE” thesis, the scarcity-versus-abundance portfolio, why the S&P may struggle in an AI regime, what a more muted Bitcoin cycle looks like, and where he still sees upside across the rest of crypto. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🟦 COINBASE ONE | GET 20% OFF https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 💰NEXO | YIELD + CREDIT LINE https://bankless.cc/nexo 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:07 Jordi’s bold Bitcoin call 4:18 The AI endgame lands at Bitcoin 9:26 Bitcoin as the purest AI trade 12:49 SaaSpocalypse, quantum fear, and the private credit risk 20:49 AI is the new QE 26:55 Inflation, deflation, and the scarcity squeeze 34:28 What happens to stocks from here 44:24 Is AI a bubble? 48:17 The Bitcoin IPO and muted cycles 1:01:01 Has Bitcoin already bottomed? 1:09:03 The broken social pact 1:13:21 The rest of crypto, from ETH to stablecoins 1:17:29 Inside the scarcity portfolio 1:20:42 Jensen vs. Dwarkesh, China, and the chip war 1:27:42 Jordi’s AI stack and where to follow his work --- RESOURCES Jordi Visser https://x.com/jvisserlabs Jordi’s Substack https://substack.com/@visserlabs --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bitcoin kind of tells me that the next time it breaks higher this time, if it does, when it does, whatever the case is, I don't think this one is going to stop as quickly. I think you're a lot of people that have been selling for a long period of time that have been moving out. And I know retail and ETFs are buy and hold and they're going to be raising their weightings. And so I've wrote a piece on this on the Bitcoin IPO. I believe we've had a massive distribution of which makes sense. And I think eventually when it breaks higher this time, I don't think it's going to stop. We've had a bunch of cycle investors on the podcast. Most of them are bearish. Most of them have said crypto has not yet bottomed. They're not bearish over the long run, but they're bearish right now. But our guest today is definitely not that. Jordi Vassir, he's not one of them. He's bullish now.

He thinks Bitcoin is already bottomed. He thinks that the crypto winter will be the mildest ever. He thinks inflation and AI is going to drive investors towards what he calls a scarcity portfolio. We get into that portfolio on today's episode. because he is front-running it right now. What's his thesis for this new regime? What are the best assets to own? We talk about all this.

One thing I've noticed, Ryan, lately, is that previously in early years of bank lists, we would have guests on the show, and they would be like, I'm bullish, or I'm bearish. And that's not what the pattern that I've picked up on lately. There's been a lot more people who I think are uniquely bullish in some parts of the market, and bearish in other parts of the market,

more so than I've ever seen in the past. Jordy, I think, articulated this very precisely, where he's like, these are the assets that are going to go up. These are the assets that are going to go down. And this is downstream of this big regime change in the market that he and many others articulating. And I think he articulated his version of this post-AI regime change market structure better than I've seen others.

And so enjoyed him coming on the podcast. Let's go into the conversation right now. Jordy, welcome to Bankless. It's great to have you. It's good to finally be here, Ryan. How you doing? Doing fantastic. Thanks for visiting a shitcoin or podcast.

We appreciate you. Maybe in the end, we'll get to your takes on some of the downmarket calls aside from Bitcoin, whether you think anything else in crypto is valuable. But I actually want to start with the king of crypto, which is Bitcoin. and I saw a clip circulating last week of you on CNBC. Thank you for visiting TradFi, CNBC, and talking to them about crypto. And you said this, I'll put my neck out on the line here and say that the next time I see you, Bitcoin will be significantly higher.

You said that to the CNBC host. So my first question is, when are you next planning to go on CNBC and be on that show and tell her that Bitcoin is higher? When's that going to happen? I'm already going to tell the producer I can't come back until it's higher. I've been going in about every four weeks. So my guess is it'll be a few weeks from now. And it would, you know, since you saw the viral clip,

but the entire context was really more about the world's transitioning and we're going to have negative real rates very soon. Merri Lisa, that's my belief. We'll certainly be close to the break-even point of real rates as we get into the next CPI number in May. current numbers are for around 3.6, so not far from the Fed funds rate. So my point to her in the brief time that I talked about Bitcoin, because to your point, I straddle the traditional finance world with most of my time,

most of my business is geared towards what's moving AI stocks, how AI is disrupting macro, but it all ends up in the same place for me, which is eventually the disruption is so big from this force, which is beyond anything people can comprehend, that you'll get to a point where that's where the benefits of Bitcoin start to really become known. And part of that is the physical constraints of AI,

which is the point we're at now, which is part of what's happening and going to happen with inflation. What I understand with what you just said, Jordy, just so I can check it out, is that the secular trends of the current market regime are so large that they inevitably conclude at Bitcoin and other assets that have similar Bitcoin properties. Is that what I just heard?

Yeah, but let me give it a little bit more constant. context in that so that people can realize this is not just a guess. This is an inevitability. The digital economy has been merging with the traditional finance world and the old industrial economy now for a long time. I mean, honestly, since the Manhattan Project, we started to have a visual on what technology would look like. And so imagine something, and you can use Bitcoin for everyone paying attention. The market cap of Bitcoin is still sub two trillion, while the market cap of the Fiat system is close to, I don't know, $750 trillion. So for everyone who's positive on it, you're looking for some kind of re-weeting of dollars transferring from one to the other.

Well, in the economy side, the U.S. economy is now $30 trillion. Of that, Home Builders is not a big portion of the growth. Car purchases are not a big portion of the growth. A big portion of the growth right now is semiconductors, it's artificial intelligence, it'll be robotics, it'll be all these different things, but these things don't involve labor and people as much as they used to in the past. And so you've had this massive distribution of wealth problem that's been growing literally since the beginning of the personal computer. So artificial intelligence gets into another realm. It gets into the disruption of the one advantage we have over technology, which is our brain. The other advantage we have over technology is our hands and our ability to move stuff. Well, that's

going to be gone with humanoid. So this labor versus capital problem, which arguably is what got enough people to be angry enough to actually think of the digital currency and think of having some way to get outside the system and decentralize. That is what AI does is it actually speeds up the process that's been going on for a long time. And that's why I say this is not a forecast. This is an inevitability. It was only a question whether Bitcoin would be the end result, but it has been chosen by people. And I always like to say, there are three moats in the world that have been decided by people that have not gone and they've survived the test of time. Gold, religion, and now Bitcoin. Maybe there'll be something else that people say this is not the chosen store of value in the digital

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These are some of the highest, most persistent yields on Earth. The problem, Defi can't access them. Bricks changes this. Built on Mega-Eath, Bricks takes emerging market money markets and sovereign carry and turns them into composable primitives you can access straight from your wallet. While defy investors earned 3 to 6% on stable coins and T-bills, institutions have been harvesting 10 to 50% yields backed by sovereign monetary policy. Bricks connects these worlds with institutional gray tokenization, local banking rails, compliance across jurisdictions, and real-time stable coin settlement.

Bricks does the heavy lifting so Defi can finally access real collateral and structured products on top of real world yield. Even the best carry trades can be within reach. Bricks brings Defi's promise to the emerging world and brings the emerging market yield to your wallet. Let the yield flow with Bricks. Jordy, I've heard you talk about Bitcoin being a form of the AI trade. Can you flesh out that thesis? You said Bitcoin is the purest form of the AI trade. I think for a lot of listeners, they will see these technologies as different.

Maybe in some respects on the polar ends of each other. One is about sort of abundance, intelligence abundance, and the other is kind of a scarcity tool. How are they related in your mind? And why is AI actually bullish for Bitcoin? So my viewpoint of this is that every single thing that people own as a store of value gets disrupted by AI. There's not a single thing that people own that you guys own in your lifetime, nothing that won't be disrupted by artificial intelligence. Some of those disruptions

will happen now. Jobs for particular professions will are already being impacted where they're being replaced. But over time, if you own artwork, how do you know it's real? If you can create a fake, a digital copy, we already have fakes happening now on X of people. I'm dubbing. Dubbing. I'm dubbing. for my videos. I'm dubbing them in other languages so that people around the world can see the same content I'm doing with my, not just the audio dub, but my lips moving with it. It doesn't cost much money to do that. So there'll be no separation between what's real and what's fake. And I just don't think people realize how fast it's moving unless you use artificial intelligence all day long. And I was just on a call before this with a very sophisticated investor who asked me

a question. And I said, my number one theme right now is compute shortage. And I asked him, when did we get together last. He said it was November 5th. I went, okay, that was before Opus 4.5 came out. The world is changing so rapidly that whatever you believe is real will not be real. Whatever you believe has value, your job, anything will not have value. So the question comes in. When you question everything that you own and the money you've made, where does it go? It goes into store of value. And I've always differed from everybody who says that gold is the only store of value. For all human beings, they buy houses as a store of value. They buy the and P500. They buy all of this stuff. So a company is going to see their profits eroded over time. It might

take another 15 years. It might take another five. But with exponential, the one thing I've learned is you cannot predict when it's going to happen. In my opinion, as someone who has studied markets for a long time and got sucked into the belief that there had to be an end game for this disruption and this distribution of wealth that did not involve what historically has happened, a global war, a revolution from country to country. I believe that communities were being built, borders were being taken down, but for the final part of AI,

what needs to happen is there needs to be true scarcity. And what we are in right now is the destruction of abundance. Anything that was created on code in the digital economy has been getting killed. Salesforce.com, Adobe, all of these things which had moats around their businesses, were quickly unwound. So I think we're in the stage,

I think the most important stage for Bitcoin, where it no longer is considered a software, a piece of code. It is considered something that is scarce, and scarcity has value like DRAM, like CPUs, like silver, like gold, like all of these different components. So the question is, when does Bitcoin get treated less like abundance and more like scarcity? And I believe that time is coming soon.

Is this a reason that we're seeing, you know, what some investors are calling the SaaSpocalypse, where all of these SaaS companies are just like every time Anthropic releases a new version of Claude and it covers some. specific area, whether it's security or, I mean, I think earlier this week, it was Figma getting tanked because Claude dropped, Anthropic dropped some sort of design feature on top of its latest opus models and these software companies are sent reeling, you know, down 20, 30, 40 percent. Is that part of the story of moats being destroyed here? It's just the abundance of software

destroys moats for all software businesses. And then you're just extrapolating that out to just about everything else, any knowledge work, anything code-driven or involving intelligence, the moats disappear and this abundance, this super abundance, smashes through all of them, and the former store of value assets just lose their ability to actually store value because they're diluted. Is that the story? Yeah, but let me convert it, since your crowd is mainly Bitcoin, let me convert it into the risk that always gets asked the most of me. Like if this was family feud and I said,

What are the 10 best answer is why never to invest in Bitcoin? Number one always is quantum. So what is quantum? Quantum is something in the future. It is mythical at this point. It's not real, but it is something that progress will get to. What has happened in the saspocalypse or anything involving knowledge work is terminal value. So the way that people value assets in the fiat system is based on what they'll have

as value in the future. No one would buy stocks if they thought they were going to go down. over the course of the next decade. They buy stocks because they believe if I put that money in there, I'll get some rate of return, which is better than what I would get parking in the bank. What has happened to these names is if three years from now, AI is moving so fast that we believe you'll be able to create software with your mouth,

which are already at right now, then these companies lose value in the future, because the value of anything for stocks gets down to the future discounted cash flows. And so the terminal value of a company, where it'll be debt. What is debt 100 years if there's a little chance of companies going to pay back? Well, then the price goes down close to zero. So that is the Bitcoin example, is that AI is basically to all of these companies built on code

as quantum is to Bitcoin. It makes people question the value going forward of the asset and prevent them from owning it. So software names have gone through this. And then when you think about software names, you realize you're dealing with the largest sector in most of the private credit world where it's anywhere from 25% of the levered portion of the portfolio or it's closer to 50% in the unlevered, and you get a situation where you start to realize

that private credit is being impacted by the disruption that's happening in SaaS. So the Fiat system does lending and things amongst itself based on the assets that are there. That is why a debt-based system that is not based on scarcity can run into these troubles. So AI is a very disruptive force to the entire framework of what is the fiat system.

There's just a lot of discourse these days about how AI impacts investing, impacts evaluation of companies. And one thing that always kind of flags in my brain when somebody is like waving a flag saying like, oh, there is a big change happening. There's a brand new market regime. You know, the old way is gone.

There's incoming a new way. And we all have to adapt to it calling for kind of like a revolution of sorts in just everything, what we do. technology, SaaS, all this kind of stuff. My brain always goes to be a little bit defensive and be like, but are we sure and how do we know because it's unprecedented? So how do we have so much conviction about a future that is uncertain to us?

Now, I'll agree with you that the market when it comes to Bitcoin and Quantum is pricing in uncertainty. We don't know how Bitcoin will overcome quantum. We don't know if it will be smooth. We don't know if it will be rough. Markets don't like uncertainty. We don't know how AI will. will impact SaaS.

We don't know if Jevon's paradox will come and save us. And so what does the market do? It prices in uncertainty. And so I'm always of two minds of just like, maybe there is a grand, unique revolution in both technology and investing that we all need to swallow that pill and get over that hurdle.

Or maybe it's the future. It's not going to be all that different because humans and society is hard to change. And really what the market's doing is just pricing in a little bit of unknown risk, and that's why the market's behaving. How do you reason between these two sides of the spectrum? Well, first of all, there's not two sides.

In between there, use the Kentucky Kirby as an example since I was traded in horse racing. 20 horse field, any horse can win. You just have to have certain outcomes that can happen. I can make an argument where AI dies tomorrow because China and the U.S. say we're going to stop making models, or we blow each other's data centers up and we set things back 10 years.

but I live in a reality of what has happened, which is data that supports things. There is no question that artificial intelligence has improved significantly in just the three and a half years since chat GPT. It is impossible to look back and to go through. The people that have been dead right on technology and what the world will look like are the only people I listen to. So I think it's been easy for me to create thematic names on my website for people, a hundred of them in the last four months, that are,

up on average 30 to 40 percent, and they're all related to the build out of AI and what's necessary for the agenic world, which is just what's kicked in. So I keep monitoring my belief in what I've learned on, which is the economy grows a certain percent. You get to look at things that are working, things are not working. You get to listen to people on technology. Everything that you said is part of the distribution of outcomes. So we can all make bets on what's going to happen, which is what the stock market is. It's what Bitcoin is. So I believe quantum has had a much bigger impact on the price of Bitcoin than anyone in the crypto world understands because it is the number one thing that gets brought up to me. Everyone views it as, oh, quantum has moved higher. It'll sell off.

The reality is sometimes assets don't move higher because the overhang is the fear that most of the money has towards the thing that they believe is real. And most people don't need to get involved in Bitcoin because they've got semiconductor stocks and they've had the hyperscalers and they've had all these different things to put their money in, which have provided similar returns to Bitcoin, despite everyone's belief, the hyperscalers have done just as well, or the Mag 7 has done just as well, and Viti has done just as well. And so I think we're at a point where AI starts to consume everything, and that's the only time that I can see people make the decision to shift. And at that point, they won't care about quantum, because mythos, which is now being released, is a massive disruption in a much bigger way

to the traditional Fiat system, and has already been told, can you imagine if quantum was as real as Mythos is. Mythos has just been looked at by the government. It's being shoved into all the banks to say, okay, you guys need to fix your holes, Goldman Sachs. You need to fix your holes. And they talk about it. And they're looking at it.

Now the European banks, no one freaks out on that and takes all their money out of the banks and goes, oh my God, it might be hacked tomorrow. But the reality is there will be a hacking this year because Mythos allows anyone sitting at home, sitting has a computer, to hack things.

So I believe the distribution of outcomes for all things, just make bets on everything. I just think right now the AI Fiat world is underestimating the risk from AI and from a hacking basis. And the crypto world is being underestimated as the security of cryptography today. And I think that's one of the reasons that we'll be going into a very, very big move whenever the momentum starts in the space. So, Jordy, help connect some more dots for us. So if your underlying thesis is that AI destroys everything's moat, basically, AI eats everything.

then, like, I guess what does that world look like? So let's talk about this in terms of asset classes. So does the value and the productivity created by AI? Does that bleed into the S&P? Like, what does the S&P do? What does the NASDAQ do? We'll get more into the case for Bitcoin. You're pretty clear that some scarcity assets will do quite well.

But what about the rest of the field? Like what happens here? What happens to the economy? Are we getting, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8%? annualized GDP. What happens to inflation in this world? What happens to commodity prices? Can you paint this picture for us?

And I think one term here, I'd like you to explain too, because I've heard you say it a number of times and write about this is AI is the new QE, the new quantitative easing. What exactly does that mean? Let's start with what the world looks like because it's impossible. I mean, I think right now it was impossible

to get a sense as to what. what would happen with the agenetic side opening up. This has happened so quickly. And I'm sure most people that, I shouldn't say most, I actually don't know how this community, since it's a younger community, is involved with AI from a startup basis. But the changes that we've seen in the last six months

in artificial intelligence are breathtaking. As someone who's on it all day long, I used to have teams of people to do stuff for me that I can now do in a weekend's work. It's just, I mean, I work more hours, because of the fun I'm having. I used to have ideas. I'd give it to a team of people to build.

And I was just telling someone the other day that do you realize how long, and they were very familiar with some of the things that I had my team build, do you realize how long it took to go from that idea to actually having a model to use?

I mean, we were talking months in many cases, and that's because of the iteration. They have to go code it, then they have to go bring me the output, then I have to say this sucks. They have to go back. We make changes.

We make iterations. that whole thing that was done in a matter of hours for me. So what happens to the, to the world is that deflation starts to take over. Technology is a deflationary situation. You're already having that. I mean, it's amazing that gas at the pump is up where it is, having moved as quickly as it is, and the CPI number is expected to be 3.6% year over a year at the next print, despite the fact that fertilizer prices are going higher. Plastic prices are going high. Now, I think inflation's going to go higher. But the reason it's not, going that much higher is because wages aren't growing because we don't have a job market that's

healthy. We don't have an auto market that's healthy. We don't have a housing market that's healthy. We don't have consumers that are actually happening. And that's a form of deflation on one part of the economy. And that's really related to the service side and anything that isn't scarce at this point. And so I think we're going to end up in a point 15 years from now. Think of everything as being somewhat free. We're going to get to that point in 15 years. Humanoys are going to allow the physical world to become cheaper too. So my vision of this is not about how. how it will look. It's about the pressures that are coming. And there's no way that people have thought about deflation in a way. They think about productivity. If you have negative 10% inflation a

year and you have no nominal GDP change, well, then you have real GDP of plus 10%. So when people talk about GDP, I think they're missing one element, which is it's a relationship between the addition of money that's necessary, less the inflation that comes. Well, if there's no one There's actually deflation. You're in a very different world. And that's what Elon Musk talks about. Now, that questions the whole concept of money. And that gets a lot into kind of this point of Bitcoin, but really into the QE side. So if the QE side is about, okay, why did we put all this money? It was to keep companies from being in trouble. It wasn't for you, you know, for people sitting at home. It wasn't for labor. It was to keep businesses alive because they were basically dead. We had to keep

the credit system flowing. We needed there to be a buyer of last resort. org so that the market could heal itself. It's almost like being in a hospital for a period of time and being on intravenous while you can't eat anything. You have to get the fluids in your body. So that's what QE is. What AI is is the ability for company to fire people and still have the ability to make growth. So it becomes at the expense of labor. Now, the one thing I will never agree with people, companies like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, I don't ever envision their employee count going higher. I envision them going lower. Now, when people make an argument that will have job creation, it might be, but it won't be at big companies because they have a major issue. AI is against human labor.

It is against organizations getting people to adopt. It's very easy for me, as I said, to make things. That example I gave of having a team of four data scientists to build something for me, the most friction I've ever had, they have their own opinions, they have their own beliefs, they have their own sleep needs, they have their own laziness, they have their own whatever. these agents don't care. I mean, I'm showing tomorrow on a webinar my bot, giving me the answer and not giving me any problems, my open claw. So you have to understand that my belief in this situation is that, number one,

QE is going to be for companies that exist and ability for them to get rid of people in the form of AI. So if they can replace every person with a bot, that's great. The only issue that happened this year, which is where the major story is that I entered with, Unfortunately, the adoption rates have gone faster than the supply of the data centers and the supply of the compute. We are running out of compute to allow these companies all to embrace AI, which slows down their ability to fire people. So now the big question is, will their margins be under pressure if they have to buy AI at higher prices or where their revenues not or their earnings not grow the way that people think?

And I think that's becoming a risk because of the costs and the compute shortage. Can we go to a back to the inflation versus deflation kind of dichotomy and double click on that, open that up a bit further? So you said AI was deflationary and the things that get cheaper are things like labor, software, you know, professional services, basically anything that you can replicate and that you can do by way of agent, which is probably to your point, the best employee anyone's ever had and is only getting better the compounding weekly basis. So that is kind of a, well, I guess that's a inflationary type of effect on things. Well, actually, no, that's the deflationary side of things. Those are the things that are getting cheaper. The inflationary side of things, I suppose that is by route of government spending, stimulus.

It seems like energy is getting more expensive. Oil is certainly getting more expensive. You talked about some component parts that get into the physical meat space. side of the world. So that's another effect. But I guess what is the net winner of these two forces? The deflationary force coming from AI and the inflationary force that we're seeing by route of a fiat and money printing. You said you think that inflation will actually rise on the air. I think I've heard you say, you know, north of maybe 4%. That's where we're headed pretty soon. Talk about those because this seemed almost like a paradox in terms of what you're saying,

which is like how can AI be so deflationary in such a force? And yet the net of that is, at least in the short run inflationary, which force wins? Well, ultimately deflation wins. But we have to get through the underinvestment that we've made in the part that everyone's underestimating. So everyone should listen to the interview with Jensen Yuang and Dorcas from last week. And Jensen made it very simple. So AI, so whenever I write papers, there's a time where I'll say something where we're

going from a time of bits to a time of atoms. You can't separate energy from technology. All technology needs energy. Now, we just went through a 17-year period since the launch of the smartphone and the rise of cloud computing where we didn't need anything hardware-wise anymore. Commodities were in a bare market, and that's because we didn't need hardware. So when computers were based on hardware, we needed commodities. But eventually we get to the point. where there's no more cameras, there's no more, and just go through every app on your phone and realize it was a transfer from atoms to bits.

Well, now we're going the opposite way, because the only thing that creates the intelligence necessary, the amount of energy it takes our brain to do work, is the same as what it takes at this point for AI to progress. So Jensen said, there are three components to artificial intelligence progress. Let's leave the engineers out. talent on one side. That's for the algorithmic improvements, the efficiency improvements that

invidious chips. But you just said it's power and chips. Okay, well, those are both in the physical world. So we need a lot of power, which we don't have in the United States of America. That's why electricity prices are going up. We don't have the ability of converting those atoms into bits. China has excess energy at this point, but China is short chips at this point. They're not giving them chips. So for us to get to where we want, we need more of the AI, but there's another component. Every single thing that is in your apartment, every single thing that you use on a daily basis now that involves technology has semiconductors in it. We have moved into a world where the digital economy has become our world, our phones, our dishwashers, our microwave, every single

thing, our cars. They need semiconductors. And for AI, which they're all going to be infused, with they also need memory. AI is going to be infused in everything. And so we can't do that until we actually get all of the things necessary. And we don't have enough copper. We don't have enough silver. We don't have enough energy in general. We certainly don't have enough electricity. We might have enough natural gas in the world, but to convert the natural gas into what we need for the bits, we need gas turbines, we need all of these things that we don't have. So eventually when you've underinvested, which is what capital does, when the stock market is basically 50% technology, and it's really more like 55% technology. And that's accrued where the Mag

7, who are software companies for the most part outside of Nvidia and outside of parts of Apple, but Apple's a service company. It's all built on code. And so we've underinvested in that side. So you have to have a period of inflation on the commodity side. The service side, no, the wage side, no. We're going to be in trouble in terms of having wages go higher when you have this disruption coming. So it's a very weird world where you're going to have both deflation and inflation, but to be honest with you, that has always been the case. I think people get into and they say inflation, they think everything goes higher. That's not the case. Some things go higher, some things go down. I lived in Brazil for two years and trust me, there was a depression happening there at the same

time there was a internet bull market happening here. So I think that's the way you have to think about it is we're in a gateway to true deflation in my mind, but to get there, we need a hell of a lot of physical capacity that we just don't have right now. think in the interim in the short run that that glut of physical capacity will result in higher inflation, you know, like this year, north of 4%. That's, you know, I don't know how many investors are thinking about that, but you certainly believe that to be the case. Well, year-over-year CPI is 3.3 percent, so we're not that far away. And after we get through the next CPI print in early May, it will be 3.6 or higher. So we're not far from four. And the following month, I think what

rolls off as either a zero or a point one, which means all you'd need is the kick in from inflation, from plastics, from diesel. I mean, this country, anything shipped to you is on a truck. Diesel prices are up, you know, 60, 70 percent from where they were a month ago. So it takes a while for those things to filter through. So if we learned anything from COVID, it was very clear that inflation was coming. The Fed called it transitory. I think right now the market is calling it transitory. I think it's at stake. Only because this disruption is still not over, what has happened in the Strait of Hormuz is arguably you could have asked 100 people before it happened as to what would be the worst thing that could

happen for inflation from an oil perspective. And that would have been named by most people within inside the commodity space. So right now it might not be having an impact in the way people think. But fiat markets have nothing to do. They're following earnings and they're following GDP. And I don't think there's any recession and I don't think earnings are coming down. What I do think is going to be a problem that people have to remember is if inflation goes back above 4%, and there's more that's happening lately,

which is the job market over the course of the last four weeks has shown signs that we might get an NFP print that will be higher than expected, which would make people fear that we're going to have to raise rates. We're not raising rates. We're going to look through the inflationary component in the jobs market after one data point is not going to change anything, but I think you're going to be stuck in a situation, like I said, where you're going to have inflation above the Fed funds rate, and you're going to have a new Fed chair who's focused on thinking about where CPI is going to be based on AI and not based on where it is on oil. Wow.

A Fed fair, a Fed chair informed by CPI or by AI rather than, rather than oil prices. That would be certainly something new. What does all of this imply about stocks? Like, where do they go? Is there something to do with a rebalancing here away from kind of some of the more software-based companies, let's say, to some of the hard asset? type companies, energy producers, maybe commodity producers. Is there a rebalancing here? Where do you think the net of the S&P and the NASDAQ actually go? Because a lot of people are looking

to this and saying, okay, AI boom, productivity boom, your margins stay strong, companies don't have to hire labor. All of this implies higher margins over time. This has got to be good for the stock market. Maybe this is the reason S&P is all-time highs. Nasdaq just, hit all-time highs. Do you think that continues as AI eats the world? Well, first of all, the stock market is a discounting mechanism. I think people forget this, but it's not like during every conversation I had in the weeks after COVID when I was trying to convince people that the amount of money they printed was going to cause inflation. If I could just have had those on tape to show people as to how violent people were that this was the, we were going into the Great Depression,

everything was going to collapse. And I literally just asked one question and say, okay, at what number of printing will you change your mind? And it always paused at that point. Because I'm like, well, we've already hit that number. I don't understand why you can't see that at some point, if it's $4 trillion and the size of the economy is only $20 trillion, you're talking about a huge amount of impact that we've never seen before

that has to happen in inflation. The market discounted that and started to discount the fact that the amount of money would overwhelm, the amount of people dying over the fear and over everything. We didn't have the vaccine at that point. We had speculation. So I bring that up because on the flip side, I think the disruption I'm talking about has already started to be built in.

The only reason the stock market is up for the years because of semiconductors and the things related to the things I've talked about. The majority of companies, again, have had a hard time this year. Financials are down on the year and they're below the 200-day moving average, or at least they were when I got on this call, and the 200-day moving average is turning down. We've obviously seen private credit and private equity names be hit. We've seen software be hit.

And their earnings are good. Every one of those groups that I mentioned, their earnings are fine as of now. I think the disruption from AI will start to be built in, like I said, about the risk being here. I think this year, the negative side for people is going to be two sides. One is we've met the physical constraints of the AI world, and one of two things have to happen. Either the compute shortage translates into less adoption, which means we're not going to get the ROIC that we need for the CAPACs.

or number two, the inflation side is going to be there. I just don't see where it comes from. And then on the flip side, on the third side, you have an angle where software companies were disrupted, not by earnings. Their earnings are great. Nothing wrong with Salesforce.com's earnings. Their stock went down based on discounting the future,

which is the progress of AI is so massive. It's so fast that the majority of money, like if you wanted to go figure out who owns most of the stocks in the U.S., think about it. Silicon Valley owns a really high portion of them. If they know the disruption is coming, do they want all their money sitting in something that's going to be disrupted?

So there's kind of an insider angle here of getting it out of software because the people that know the most right now see what's coming. And I don't think any of them are positive based on what I hear about what the world is going to look like for their businesses, meaning they don't know.

So why have all your eggs in one basket if you have them in technology stocks? A lot of these companies have stock-based compensation. These companies look worse. when obviously stock prices are going down. So I think there's an element of disruption from AI, which is already built in. So I've said to people, my view is that we'll look back 10 years from now

and the S&P 500 will probably be around the same level it is now. Now, making a 10-year forecast is ridiculous because it could go up 30%, then go down 30%, go up 100%, then fall 100%. But my reality for me is that AI will continue to disrupt all public companies. I believe the economy will double. So what I'm saying is not that S&P won't have strength, but right now the S&P 500 market cap

is more than two times the size of the economy, a record going back all the way to the Great Depression. I'm not saying that speculation. I'm saying that private sector has suffered dramatically. Startup businesses have suffered dramatically, and this is the rise of startup businesses, and that all human beings that are entrepreneurs can go out and make money,

much more so than they can in the jobs and not have to deal with the garbage it comes for working for someone. That is the reason why I don't work at this point in terms of working for people. I build my own business. I have my own stuff. I talk to my own clients. My business is growing rapidly and I haven't hired anyone since it started growing rapidly and that's the way I view it. So that's kind of the meld of I think the S&P is going to have a really hard time and the money is going to be distributed elsewhere, which is in a decentralized world.

Okay. So, Jordy, if you're 10 years from now, the SMP is about the same as it is now, but the economy is twice as large. You're saying all that excess value creation is going to not just generally labor, but a specific class of labor, call them kind of the super agent, the super entrepreneur,

small business individuals. Is that where the excess value creation is going? Because that's doubling the economy. It's a tremendous amount of value being created here. And that's going to individuals, but not just individuals kind of working for, a boss in a corporation, but those individuals that are marshalling and leveraging AI and their own businesses? Yeah, and we're already seeing that. I mean, just think about where Anthropic has

gone from in terms of their evaluation. Think about where open AI. Those are not public companies. And even though they're going to go public, they're not going to be part of the S&P when they go live. You're seeing companies rise from zero to very large companies very quickly. Now, they peter out and they start going the other direction. I mean, if the stories about open AI are correct, and their valuation is already trading down in markets when they're one of the leading AI companies and have the most user, that means everyone's vulnerable.

Anthropic is now rumored to be at a trillion dollars. Well, that's great. They're running out of compute. So if they run out of compute, what happens to them? I think a lot of what I talk about, I don't spend a lot of time getting into long conversations about it with people because everyone goes, well, how do you think this will happen?

And how do you think this will happen? Everyone has their own views. and that's all well and good. What I think is going to happen is the distribution of wealth problem that exists in the world is going to be redistributed, plain and simple. It's the only reason.

Everyone who's involved in Bitcoin has to believe in that thesis. So part of what I came into to accept Bitcoin as the end result was what I'm talking about. I believe there had to be a solution to the distribution of wealth problem that didn't involve UBI.

There had to be some sort of end game and that end game involved deflation. So if we have a world of competitive deflation, which I believe we will. Public companies are the worst companies to own. And the reason is because they have a cost which is harder for them to get rid of, many costs that are harder. And having been as a young person already managing hundreds of people at Morgan Stanley,

right around when I was 30 and I could still see this, I bailed out of the industry, or at least that company, because I knew my job was going to be firing people for the rest of my life. When you're 30 and you're already managing 100 people and you're moving up and like, well, you can do this and you can do this, you can run this, you can run this. My job was handing out bonuses to people that were highly educated that were never happy about the bonus they got. And yet it was higher than 99.9% of the people on the planet. So why did I, a son of a construction worker, want to be in that seat, having those

discussions with people every single year and being miserable? I think companies have a culture that is based on, well, I got paid, and next year I get paid some formula, which is percent of last year. That's the way people think. So if they were, overpaid dramatically, it's very hard to move them down. So what you do is you either fire them or there's no other alternative. Because if you pay them down 40%, then they're just going to sit around the office and not do anything anyway because like, why should I be? I should go look for another job. So this thing while AI is growing fast is not a way to grow a business. And so like I said, I think they're going to have trouble adopting to AI in a meaningful way. They've clearly

written checks to Anthropic. Their revenue rum rate says that. But integrating it into their business, no. As someone who uses it all day long, it is not an easy tool to just say, push a button. And these people have all been trained to just push a button. You go to Waze, you hit Ways, you go to this, you hit this, you go to this. That's not the way AI works. You need to talk to it. You need to embrace it. You need to use it. You need to deal with the fact that it makes mistakes, just like human beings and then move forward. So I think what's going to happen is the rise of the smaller, decentralized world of entrepreneurs is going to grow rapidly and make up for the differential because they can survive in a world of deflation because whatever entrepreneur

loses margins because it's not there anymore, meaning they're selling something that they can make for $1 for $5, but then the next time they come in, it costs them a dollar to make it, but now they can only sell it for $2 because there's 100 other competitors. Well, then they'll move on to the next thing because that's what an entrepreneur does. They figure out, oh, let me get out, let me go. Big companies can't do that. They are stuck trying to fix the world of deflation. So they actually need inflation to be able to survive, not deflation.

And I think they're going to be stuck into deflationary world. How do you respond to people who say things like AI looks like it's in a bubble? I mean, this is similar to kind of the dot-com bubble. They'll run with some of the cases that you mentioned of, you know, Anthropic going from like a $10 billion company in just a few years. And now it's north of a trillion. I mean, it's just historic in terms of the value creation. And they'll point to something like, you know, 2000s era, Yahoo, for instance, or Cisco

or name your dot com company. Is AI in a bubble? Can you see that? Can you steal man that case? Or do you think it's the wrong analogy entirely? I think it's a stupid word. If you type in Bitcoin bubble, how many bubbles have there been in Bitcoin?

Five. We were just talking about this. So it's like, theoretically, a bubble would mean that it's not justified as you go down. So when you're in five bubbles, but then you make new all-time highs, doesn't it get rid of the fact

that you were ever in a bubble and say that it was real. Yes. So it's a word that people use for social media. It's a word people use for the media. Stokesphere. Yeah, I mean, like I like battery names. If I go look at battery stocks right now,

they're down 70% from where they were when Bitcoin peaked. Is there a direct relationship? Yeah, the relationship between batteries and Bitcoin at $125,000 was the fact that retail was heavily involved in both of them. When uranium names fall, So I think we have rolling bubbles, which just means rolling speculation. And I think the best way to put it is every asset now trades like Kalshi or Polymarket. If you're watching a game and you're betting on a team and Fanduil and there's, you know, one period left in the hockey game and a hockey team is 98% chance to win.

And then all of a sudden the other team scores three goals and it collapses to 40%. Was that a bubble? no, people had too much money in one place and it just went the other direction. I think in a world of uncertainty with AI, you're going to have a lot more of these massive spikes higher and significant falls lower. And I think that's just a world where, and I've called it a world of all of all when you have less certainty, but a tremendous amount of money and you have a gambling mentality, meaning you have a lot of traders, which is what we do. And it's not just in the U.S., it is global. I mean, Asia is a massive place for stock.

trading and everything. And so I just think, rather than call it a bubble, we're going to have episodic moves where things overshoot to the upside. They overshoot to the downside. They kind of consolidate for a while. You get a chance to get back into them. And I'll give you an example. Was silver in a bubble when it was 120? It's now 78. It got down to 60-ish. No, silver, in my opinion, is in a long-term secular trend that I can make an argument that even at a thousand, and it doesn't hurt what it's needed for, which is almost every single technology tool known to mankind, and because we need more drones and because we need more semiconductors,

and because we need all of these different things, including solar, that silver has unlimited upside because there's a limited supply. So I think we're going to have these episodic moves higher that are violent, and then we're going to have sharp falls lower, and I think the best way for people to deal with that is, realize that's the name of the game. If you get out too early, fuck it up.

It'll come back to you at some point, but Bitcoin kind of tells me that the next time it breaks higher this time, if it does, when it does, whatever the case is, I don't think this one is going to stop as quickly. I think you're a lot of people that have been selling for a long period of time that have been moving out. And I know retail and ETFs are buy and hold, and they're going to be raising their weightings.

And so I've wrote a piece on this, the Bitcoin IPO. I believe we've had a massive distribution of which makes sense. And I think eventually when it breaks higher this time, I don't think it's going to stop. Can you talk about that Bitcoin IPO concepts just so we can move forward to because I want to go in that direction? What is this Bitcoin IPO concept? It was really the fact that what was happening

with the amount of quote-unquote OGs that were selling when we were up near the high for whatever reason. And in my opinion, it makes perfect sense the same way that IPO, you're going to see this with SpaceX. SpaceX just made announcements to allow some of their employees to sell off more than they otherwise would.

And the reason is because if you're involved in something that was worth zero, and now it's two trillion dollars. And it's just ironic that that's where the Bitcoin IPO paper when I wrote it, and that's where SpaceX is. You have people that made investments, Google, worth $100 billion. And why would they hold on to it at this point when they've got other places to use the capital? If Google needs to buy a bunch of data centers because their AI is their business, you don't think they're going to sell out of SpaceX and take some of that capital and move it somewhere else. So a distribution of investments when it was just a dream or a hope where people made billions of dollars they should do it because they've got other opportunities, but they should also

do it because of the quantum risk. And it's not that the quantum risk is legitimate, but it is part of the distribution. So why would you have a billion dollars sitting in Bitcoin when you could take that half of it and move it to other places that number one could produce better returns or number two, diversify your portfolio? So that was the whole point of it, is it felt a little bit with the distribution going up there. But at the same time, a lot of new buyers that are coming in. And that's what happens after an IPO is that normally it falls off. Look at what Circle did. Look at all these IPOs did. They all fell off. They all went through this. And if Circle's going to be a winner going forward and it goes through the highs, that was their IPO moment. And I think Bitcoin

symbolically went through the same thing. With every Bitcoin bubble, we see kind of the same pattern where the long-term holders churn out into some newer holders. I'm sure every bankless system understands this right of passage that I think everyone goes to where, you know, Bitcoin bubbles up, you learn about it for the first time, you get excited about it, you go down the rabbit hole, you buy the top, and then you turn into a bag holder, and that's just the Bitcoin right of passage, and like retail investors are all too familiar with this. And this is what is happening with, you know, where we were at when Bitcoin almost hit 140,000, you know, a lot of the long-term holders churned out to buy into some newer holders.

Those newer holders were largely in some of the ETFs or overall people buying because of all the, you Trump's making a Bitcoin treasury, that was the newest wave. Is this most recent bubble, this most bubble, is this most recent, you know, this IPO moment, the long-term holders turning out to the newer term holders, the most recent one? Is this different than the ones past, other than the fact that it's the biggest one,

is this one idiosyncratic in any particular way, or is this just the most recent one? For me, and you guys obviously have looked at space longer, but I'm a bit of a market historian in terms of whatever I want to be involved in, I want to know what's different. So here's what I'll tell you was different, is that this top in Bitcoin did not involve altcoins making it

through their highs in 2021 and 2022. So normally, based on history, when you get a Bitcoin bubble, you also have an altcoin bubble. You didn't get that this time. And I think that's important to the way that I viewed it as an IPO situation, which was when Google IPOed in 2004, that was after a, I mean, a collapse in Internet stocks. and a lot of the great companies of the world came during that period of what I think were the true companies coming out of it.

And I think in crypto, you lost a lot of entrepreneurs. I spent a lot of time with people in the community. And I kind of judge them one or two ways. Are you really committed to this because you believe in it long term and it's fun for you and you like it? Or are you trying to make back the money that you've lost from investments that you had in 2021 and 2022? And I will tell you that there's not a lot of people that I view as having this. same enthusiasm, they're going through it. Are there fresh faces? Yes. So a lot of the people that were in there, I think they probably got in for the get rich and thought they had something and they're

stuck to it. But then there's a lot of people that are merging into companies and buying distressed assets at this point, and I'm spending a lot of time with them. I think we're going through a reshaping that reminds me of the post.com bubble and crypto. I think this is the beginning of a regulatory tailwind, which is good for the industry. The people that I respect and I think are rational in the space. are willing to, if it takes two years, three years, it doesn't really matter. And that attitude to me is different than, oh, no, it's coming now. It's coming now and it has to go.

I think we're at a point where whether it's NFTs, which I believe in, stablecoins, which I believe in as the beginning of the network effects that are going to accelerate with AI agents, and then also Bitcoin from the store of value perspective as the only true investment vehicle as part of a portfolio for the traditional finance world. I do not think will ever change. I think this is a different ecosystem. The energy of the retail trader is necessary for Bitcoin to do well and for Ethereum to do well and for the entire space to do well.

You need retail. I've been to enough events now between Raul and between Pomp. And I've seen enough of this. When I was at the DAS one recently, I got to see a bunch of different people. And I go there to see the enthusiasm, to see the different types of people at the different events. But I'm trying to get a sense as to where we are and kind of will you buy it the next time it breaks out.

And I think the next time we have a breakout, number one, we will have gotten rid of a lot of that redistribution. I think the amount of selling that happened. And the reason I wrote the IPO piece is because we still have a concentrated situation in Bitcoin that needs to be overwhelmed over time. You need to reduce the concentration significantly. The fact that the ETF buyers have done what I expected them to do, which is continue to buy the whole way down. They have not turned around and started selling. They've continued to buy. Sailor has continued to buy. I think he's an important part of this process because he is the single largest owner. and always will be the single largest owner of a public person in the space. He can ever be beaten in that part. So all of these things have continued to happen. And I think that just means that between the entrepreneurs, the recycling of smart people from the traditional finance world that are shifting in, I was not involved in crypto before. I'm much more involved in it now. And even

though I'm invested in and have been since the day that I believed in it, I'm just more connected to the space and more involved with entrepreneurs than ever before. And I see a very, very good outcome that's going to happen once the Fiat system is looking for a growth asset home, and that's what I've talked about. I think Bitcoin will be the growth asset of choice by the end of this year. And that's the way that I'm looking for it. I think it has a lot to do with the community. In 2026, Bitcoin has the most diversified investor base that it's ever had. It's gotten into the point of some of the largest financial institutions, ETS, just like who and how they own Bitcoin

is the most diffuse, diversified that we've ever seen it. And then we've also seen just a lot more muteness in Bitcoin volatility from peak to trough over the cycles. You know, the 2013 cycle versus the 2017-2017 cycle is nothing compared to the 2025.

Like, well, it doesn't really feel all that euphoric. The bear market, as it stands today, doesn't even feel all that berry. How does, what do you think, like Bitcoin, just the nature of the Bitcoin movements moving forward. We see a lot of discussions in this space of just like, are the four-year cycles over? Are they not over? And I think part of that is downstream of we're all kind of looking to understand the different

behavior that Bitcoin, the price action around Bitcoin expresses because we understand that things feel different now. What's your take about how things are going to be different moving forward or not? No, you brought up something really important. And it's, again, probably one of the lenses that I can look at things through. So for my website with stocks, the hardest time I have with people is them buying some of the names on my list. And even though the list came out a while ago, the names are up in some cases, 300%, 400%, and we're talking in six months. When I first went on Palm Show a year ago, the name I kept pitching was Micron.

It was $100 and then sub-100. Now it's 400 and change. So Bitcoin is trading with a 30 plus volatility now, and it's been declining over time. So one of the negatives for Bitcoin, which has been completely washed out, is how do I buy Bitcoin when it's so volatile? Well, now it's only moving at a 30 ball, and it's been stuck in this horrible range, and it tends to just be boring for long periods of time. Micron's not boring. Micron just went from 440 to 320, and then it went back to 440, all within the span of one

month. Well, that's the way Bitcoin used to trade. So the problem is when people say there's too much volatility in it, if you want to make money in a stock market now, trust me, the names that are working, they're going up four or five hundred percent a year. So they look the way all coins used to look. They looked the way Bitcoin used to look. And so you're getting people trained gradually over time on the type of volatility that happens in the names that they need to invest in to make money. The SMP 500 is up 4% so far this year. Last year it was up 15%. Okay, great.

So at some point this year, if it sells off again, and let's assume by the end of the year we're only up two, then over two years you're going to be up, what, 13? Well, that's barely beating the Fed funds rate. You're getting to the point now where Bitcoin at a 30 volatility, if it's trading higher, actually wins on a sharp adjusted basis to a lot of the names that are winning that I think you're getting harder for people to hold.

So it's a little bit nuanced for people, but when you see these charts, and I mean, I think everyone sees them. These are straight lines higher in stocks. But these companies can fall violently, too. That's the way Bitcoin used to trade. So in this sleepy kind of way, Bitcoin has gotten easier for ETF holders to own as part of their private wealth management basket. And they only look at it in that way because the way they judge things is at the end of the year, they look at a blended number. And the blended number is very simple. How did I do in bonds?

they're not doing well. How did I do in stocks? They're not doing well because most of them are overweight growth assets, which have been a disaster. Okay, how am I doing in, well, I don't own commodities because that was in a bare market. So what else do I own? Well, you own private credit. What? When did I get into that? Okay, that sucks. What about this Bitcoin thing? So if Bitcoin finishes the year up, and let's just pick a number, 25%, okay? And the wealth manager goes, so that's why you were only up 4% this year. But wait, Bitcoin, gave me how much of the return? Well, you have 1% in Bitcoin.

Well, shouldn't we have five then? Like, is this thing going higher? Aren't you guys pitching this? Isn't there good things happening? That is what is going to happen, but what needs to happen is they need their other assets to not perform, and I think that's what's starting to happen. When the market pulls back, most people just wait.

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Head to the link of the show notes, download OKX, and see why it's the NYSE's go-to for going bankless in the United States. Not investment advice, services not available in New York, Kentucky, and Texas. Just to flesh out your price thoughts on Bitcoin for the year, you think, think Bitcoin is going to finish higher this year. Do you also think that the bottom is in, that we saw the bottom in February of this year? I think there's a high probability, just because I think there's a high probability at this point that stocks have put in a bottom. It's not to say that I don't think we can go retest them, but this move higher out of stocks, I find it very difficult for it to

change rapidly without a change in earnings. So many people miss this rally again, just like they did after COVID because it happens so fast and so violently, all during the worst of the Iran war situation. If you spend your time on X and you just, I mean, I've never met a group of people like the oil people that try to scare the hell out of people more than the, I mean, I got to tell you, it was like I was back in COVID about how bad it was going to be. I went to a dinner and some person who has a couple hundred thousand followers on X. I mean, he ended his thing with a monologue of about five minutes about how the world didn't know what it was going to be and this was just like COVID and I just remember leaving going I don't even know how you can say that like COVID was a different

thing like yeah I understand the straits closed but it could be open again like this is not the same thing we're not going to have something so I'm going to live with the fact that for Bitcoin I think we're separating our itself from stocks I did a video last week to just say that I think the Oracle software, let's say death trade is over. And now we're going to go into idiosyncratic selection. So there'll be some names that collapse. It won't be the whole

group. But Bitcoin was clearly hurt a lot by software. I put a stat up and quadrants and I just said, show me the returns on Bitcoin in periods where we have negative real yields using year-over-year CPI relative to the Fed Fund or three-month

bills. So when CPI is above the three-month bills, Start with that and then go, is the Fed raising rates or is the Fed at ease, meaning they're not moving or they're easing? And the returns are all happen in Bitcoin since the launch of the white paper when we've had negative real yields. And I don't think most people in the community know that, but that's 100% of the returns. They've all come at times when CPI year over year has been above the Fed funds rate. And part of the reason for that is the majority of the returns have occurred during QE. and when CPI was 2% and rates were effectively zero for that entire time period.

Yes, there were times where they fell, but that was usually when the Fed was raising or something else was going on. So we're going to be in that quadrant very soon, if I'm right. If inflation doesn't go above, maybe it takes a little bit longer. But I think once inflation gets above three-month bills, I would hope that what happens is the employment situation is stable, GDP is still good, oil prices are still high, Silver is going higher and Kevin Warsh takes over and he has to make a decision.

And if his decision is I'm betting on AI and I am not going to raise rates, even though inflation is above three month bills, that is the serious point in time where I think Bitcoin is going to go higher because I don't think the Fed chair can raise rates if the job market is not strong. This is one of a, I think, the strongest pieces of evidence in your thesis that we've bottomed, actually, Jordy. And so I'll refer people to that table that you were just talking about. So your most recent substack will include a link in the show notes. But you're saying this, and it's worth emphasizing the strongest regime for Bitcoin throughout history since 2010 is when CPI year-over-year is above the three-month bills and the Fed is on hold or easing. Right now,

it's safe to say the Fed is on hold, maybe moving in the direction of easing. And so that's one bet that puts you in kind of the bottom quadrant here. The second bed is if you think CPI is increasing effectively, and if you think that's going to exceed three-month bills. If so, when we're in that regime, historically, Bitcoin has performed 247% annualized when we're in that type of regime, and that's the bulk of all of its performance has happened during this type of regime. So your thesis is basically just like, we're headed towards that regime.

this is a regime that's good for Bitcoin historically, why shouldn't that be the case now if indeed we enter that regime? Yeah, and I just want to make sure that people understand why this is so important and not, I mean, I did it because the numerical side is there, but human beings create narratives. Narratives drive stocks. They drive investors. The narrative is going to be,

and what really got Bitcoin to be created in the first place, was angered towards the system where, again, And behind everything, during that period of 2009 to 2020, I think people forget this. Why were rates kept at low levels? Well, we started that period after the Great Financial Crisis with unemployment up around 10%. It took the entire decade to get it back down to where we are today. We are at a point now where the labor market has created zero jobs over the last 16 months. Zero.

And if you take out health care, it's negative. So we have a weak jobs market. And the problem is the Fed has a dual mandate. It has to focus on inflation, but it also has to focus on the labor market. If you believe AI is going to accelerate, which I believe everyone does, it hurts labor in the future and it causes deflation in the future. Maybe not today, but you believe that it will have deflationary pressures in the future. So if you're a Fed chair and you're looking at these two, which is why it's critical for people, to think about the fact that Donald Trump selected a Fed chair that would follow effectively

what Scott Besson has said, which is we believe Allen Greenspan handled the 1990s the right way. We believe we should be looking through any inflationary pressures and be focused more on the productivity gains that are going to come from technology. That's all well and good. But that is the issue that comes up as it still goes. People are looking for another alternative where they can make money. So I do believe there's more behind just the math. I think the narrative that will come out is that we're going to have inflation. And I'll bring up one more thing. We talk about a lot Bitcoin and the importance of the ETF, and it becomes very U.S.

centric. I view the true story for Bitcoin to be a global asset. I believe it is the most important global asset in the world. The fact that Iran has said they'll take Bitcoin for oil. All of these things are important in the long-term trend of Bitcoin being accepted as an asset. They're not doing it with gold. They're doing it with Bitcoin. Now, emerging markets that don't produce commodities are going to be in a lot of trouble if

what we're hearing about fertilizer and food and all this is right. We're going to have inflationary pressures around the globe. That could lead to, again, pressure on the local currency of these markets and them needing to fight through rates and people looking to hide their money again from the system in these countries where a lot of them are the owners and the major owners of Bitcoin. It might be small amounts. But I bring that up just because I think the anger towards the way the governments of the world are dealing with things is running is is running a mock and I do think if we have inflation people are underestimating what might happen to yields in Japan what might happen to yields in Europe what might

happen to yields in the U.S. And we might get back into that. Can the global fiat system handle all the debt when we have inflation but we can't raise rates? And the reason we can't raise rates is because interest as a percentage of GDP has gotten up to high levels. There's a whole narrative that I think it's going to be created, which is not bad for stocks. It's not bad for the economy, but I think it's very, very good for Bitcoin. Well, there's another question here, though,

which is, can the fiat system survive this rift, this breaking of the social pact? If you are right that AI can produce productivity to capital without hiring labor, then that means labor is a smaller portion of that share. And it has been the case, you know, since America in the 1950s coming out of World War II, that at least in the first part of that,

labor benefited when the rest of the economy benefits. That might not be the case in this new future, in this new world, this new AI-QE regime that you've been talking about. Well, this just create kind of a social rift that starts to impact, I mean, a lot of things. It has a lot of downstream effects. Maybe we're seeing kind of the beginnings of populism in our politics coming to the U.S.,

do you expect that to accelerate? I mean, how do you think we're socially able to handle these changes? Well, first of all, this has been happening now for quite some time. I mean, Donald Trump doesn't get elected the first time without that already being a belief in the system that things need to change.

It's regardless of who wanted it, meaning if his voters back in 2016, we're mainly on the base. boomer side that had been disrupted by globalization, it doesn't really matter. It's still the same thing. This trend has been persisting with problems that have shown up. I want to make one thing clear. I do not believe that we will have severe job losses. The social pact that has actually been hurt is the fact that people can't have the jobs they want. They can't have the mobility they want. There are endless amounts of jobs if you want to cut people's hair, if you want to take care of their

kids if you want to drive around on a scooter and deliver food throughout Williamsburg on DoorDash. There are unlimited jobs, meaning you've never had a time where you can get a job. But the amount of times I run into someone working in Whole Foods that used to work into finance or work into some place, that's not why they went to school and got an education. So there's different ways for the social pack to break down. I think that's the reason why the consumer confidence levels, especially when it comes to the jobs, numbers have been so weak, is I think AI is actually having more of a psychological damaging point than an actual one. I know that when I got to Morgan Stanley, my drive was about

getting paid more the next year and moving up the ladder and getting other things and blah, blah, and then eventually I reached a level and realized, oh, my God, I didn't have money. I've achieved the things that I thought I'd achieve. And now all I'm doing is firing human beings. I actually like not doing that. I don't want to do that as my job. Let me go figure a way to make money and start a hedge fund and go that route. So I think this is more about ending the mobility with inside the corporate ladder for people that have a college education in the same way that globalization made it very difficult for electricians and plumbers and everything else along the lines because we just weren't building anything. So I'd be more that we've been in this for a long time. And I think the anger has been

there. And that's why the consumer confidence, I mean, University of Michigan consumer confidence is a lot of information. But if you take Democrats are the most miserable they've been. You take Republicans, they're semi-miserable. When Biden was in charge, the Republicans were miserable and the Democrats were semi-miserable. No one's been happy. Like, there's nothing with inside that report that ever shows up as good. And that's why the consumer conference levels are literally at all-time lows. And when we had a bubble in the dot-com bubble, and I showed this all the time in my videos, we were at all-time highs in March of 2000 on the University of Michigan Consumer Confidence.

That's when I remember everything was good. I came back from Brazil about a year earlier, and I said this was the biggest bubble I'd ever seen because my high school friends that were blue-collar kids like me were buying houses using AOL stock and stupid things like that. And I was like, you guys are out of your mind, but anyone who wanted money had money because the stock market was going up. This one is different.

It's a gambling market. It's not some outrageous bull market where the NASDAQ is going up 50% a year. It's a very different time period. So I'm going to just say that we've been in a very, very painful period and all the things that you were mentioning. I think they've been happening.

It's just that they happen very slowly and AI is just a structural force, which is never going to let up on the trends that have been happening. We've talked about Bitcoin a lot this episode. Do you have a bullcase for the rest of crypto or anything else in crypto? I know you mentioned stable coins. You may have also mentioned Ethereum.

But what else is attractive in crypto to you as you've been peeking in here? Well, before people throw things at the YouTube screen and get mad at me, so I believe ideas have been commoditized. So what I mean by that is any idea that you have, if you bring it to Claude, and you describe it and you say, okay, I want to plan on how to turn this into a monetizable idea, you have an actionable plan of which, if it's related to code, it can do the entire work for you. So the reason that's important is because to go from idea to monetization, which is really what any kind of a business is, has never been faster.

You can do it in light speed. And that means two things. One, competition comes very rapidly. Number two, the lifespan of a good idea or a quote unquote moat is not very far. So my son was the one who got me into crypto initially because he was making an enormous amount of money in what he called, no, you just have to pump and dump. And I went, I'm going to teach me about this pump and dump 13 year old man because I got I got 100 PMs that have worked for me over the years.

And they never mentioned this concept of pump and dump that it can turn $700 and $70,000 and six months. Give me a lesson, young man. So we took a ride up to the cat skills. We went skiing. And in the trip, he described to me, and I was in shock at how much he knew about these tokens and what went on. But the pump and dumb thing to me is what I believe ideas are now. So it's not that I don't think Ethereum. I own Ethereum. I own Solana in very small amounts. I don't know why I own them, to be honest with you. I do. I believe they're going to outperform during the network effect days over Bitcoin. So the chart I look at the most right now is Ethereum relative to Bitcoin. I love it. I think it's awesome. I think it's great. And the reason is because it just kind of goes

sideways right now as Bitcoin moves up and down. So Ethereum has has a nice up move that happened last year relative to Bitcoin from the Liberation Day lows. And then it's gone sideways. And if you ask me where we are, I think we're at the infrastructure volume side of the business, which stable coins and Ethereum. And I believe that traditional finance world need discounted cash flows. And I think they can get that to some degree from Ethereum. And so I think when the world moves over, Ethereum and Salon are going to be the place that they fight over. But I don't think it's permanent. I think it's temporary. And I don't know with AI whether that's a year, whether it's two years or three years. So my argument is that I believe Bitcoin has a moat. I believe it's

durable. And if it goes up 50% a year and these other names go up 75% a year, but then they eventually have a 50% fall and Bitcoin continues to go higher, that's kind of the way I look at it. There's no replacement for Bitcoin, in my opinion, with inside the world that I see, no replacement. That is the thing I believe that separates itself from all other ideas. So the only thing in my portfolio, honestly, of the things that I own that move around, aside from money market funds and gold, they're really related to Bitcoin and anything scarce, which means memory stocks, which means a lot of silver stocks, which means a lot of, at this point, Marvell and things like that that are related to the agenic world.

So I'm going to pass on spending too much time on all coins, just like I don't spend too much time on stocks. But right now I'm in the world of stocks. They've got momentum going this way. if I start getting a sign that the Ethereum relative to Bitcoin starts breaking out, I will probably go buy a bunch of alt coins that I think fit and I'll ride them for six months, but not for very long. So you're kind of hinting about what your portfolio looks like.

I just want to ask you directly. So what's in the portfolio right now? So we've got this new AI regime, AIQE, everything that you're talking about. So express those insights into the Jordy portfolio. Well, everything in there is related to the Eighty portfolio. East-West movement of Blackwell and Vera Rubin, which is what's needed to deal with the extreme volume of the eugenic world. So imagine if all of a sudden we, you know, we had a world where there were, we shifted every gas car to electric tomorrow in the U.S. And I don't know how many gas cars

were on the road, but let's, let's assume there's 150 million for argument's sake. And let's assume out of that that 135 million of them are gas. But all tomorrow, everyone went to electric and we now had 150 million of electric. I want to invest in producing electricity for the cars because we don't have enough infrastructure for it. So everything that I own is related to the agenic side, which took off. So that means that micron is in there. That means that pure storage is in there. That means Marvell is in there. I've got names related to Lithuanian. for batteries. So that has names like ALB and LAC. I said silver. I've got silver miners. I've got Brazil because Brazil is a mineral producer. So in the theme of AI, it's all related to the infrastructure

supporting the power that's necessary for them, the DRAMs, the chips that are needed. I have Nvidia. I just increased Nvidia. Cadence design systems and synopsis. These are all companies related and most of them are companies that Jensen Yuan has announced. One tip to all you guys watch it. Just download all of Jensen Yuan's transcripts for the year. Put them into one knowledge brain, which really just means download them into one folder. Have Claude Co-Work go in there and just ask it what companies to buy. What companies have you mentioned? What is he talking about? And you'll get all the information you need. He basically is a walking insider information of what to buy. And most of the names I mentioned, in fact, the Dwar Cash podcast, if you guys,

I haven't watched it, just listen to the first 15 minutes. The first two companies he mentions, Cadence, design systems, and synopsis. They're both on my basket, my 100-name basket, and when Jensen says two names on there, and they're down for the year, Jordy's going to buy them. It seems like, Jordy, there's a theme here too, which is just like you're on the scarcity side of the ledger, right?

I mean, all these kind of energy, DRAM, silver, these are all scarcity assets that you want to own in this abundance era. You don't watch my video, do you? Every week it starts with a gigantic Gemini produced or nanobanana produced visual of scarcity and abundance. Everyone who's watched it knows. It's like get out of anything that is abundant

and only be invested in things that are scarce. That's it. So you don't want to be in anything where they're being disrupted by AI, and that means anything built on code. You only want to be invested in things that are getting all the money from Nvidia and the hypers. And that's it.

By the way, Jordy, since David and I were having a discussion about that episode, the Dorcasch and Jensen episode, and we're having kind of a conversation about like who, whose arguments were stronger, specifically when they got to that more contentious part about China. I'm curious, what's your take on it? So who, who would the stronger arguments with respect to, like, Jensen was very much on the side that Nvidia,

should be everywhere, essentially, should sell into China, should sell into the world, because a strong Nvidia and a strong U.S. kind of platform for AI is going to put the U.S. an advantageous place. Whereas Dwork Hatch was saying, well, no, actually, China has all of this excess energy. And it's a good thing that the U.S. figured out mythos first. And we need to preserve that advantage. We shouldn't sell specialized Chinese. chips to China? Right. What was your take on that?

What was your take on that? Sport controls. That was the crux of it, really. So I'm 100% in Jensen's camp. You left a couple things out. So I'll do what I like to do with anything I hear or anything goes on. So the one thing you left out, he completely agreed for the U.S. not to sell them the most advanced chips.

So when you add that to the equation, it kind of really, that little nuance changes a lot of what you just said. He did not say they should not sell anything to China. His point was to get to superior computing capabilities like Mythos. Okay? Takes power, engineer, and chips.

That's what he said. So China wins in power. China wins in the volume of chips and they win in talent. They just don't win yet in the efficiency of chips. And Dwarkash was stuck on this seven, you know, inch wafer side. Jensen got angry because he's like, okay, you're taking one part and you're being very

narrow focused, which I agree with. If they come out with a model that's as good as mythos tomorrow, because there is no other thing than mythos. This is like saying, no one says when quantum gets here, no one goes, oh, when a better quantum gets here. We have a tool that can hack anything. You really don't think with the Chinese models that are only six months ahead without invidia chips or with some form of

invidia chips that they have, they're not going to be there. Deep Seek version 4 is coming out. The rumors in Silicon Valley are that this will be at a level above Opus 4.6, which would mean it's at that level. At the same time, there's an engineering side.

Remember that leak source code from Anthropic two weeks ago? The Chinese are distilling their models constantly. There's no way to hide in this. they may already have mythos and just haven't announced it. I think Jensen's point was, which I agree with, play from a position of strength. I bought Nvidia the day after I heard the interview, or the morning after I heard the interview, because I thought he was a great leader.

It reminded me of her Brooke speech at the USA Olympic game in 1980. I found it to be awesome. We play with strength. I think you're playing with fear. I think you're bringing up some kind of thing that doesn't exist. Like you can't be scared of AGI. You can't, you don't even know what it's going to mean. And to think that China can't get there before us based on what they have is ridiculous when they've survived and won everything eventually in terms of hardware.

So I think that's what his point was. And again, the biggest fear, and this may be an impact on the market. So I'll say it here. I don't know when this is getting released. But when Deep Seat gets out, there's two things to look for. One is obviously how strong the model is. But the most important thing would immediately bring this interview. or front and center.

If it's not, if it's built only on Huawei chips, it's a problem. So if they're able to use Huawei Ascend chips and basically do what he said they're going to get to anyway, and that happens only two weeks after the interview, trust me, that'll be a major market event. It'll probably make the stock market sell off in the U.S. The semiconductor names and things like that because it means China, the biggest player,

is now a competitor of the U.S. and the ecosystem, which is what he was arguing, You don't want Thailand and the Philippines and the Middle East to be running on China stuff. You want it to be on U.S. stuff. So I'm 100% in Jensen's camp on this one. Jordy, square this one for me because I'm not sure I followed on this.

So you think the next Deep Seek might be more performant than the latest versions of Opus. And yet you purchased Nvidia right after that. I mean, the last time Deepseek came out, there was an Nvidia sell-off. So why purchase Nvidia if you think, deep sequel have kind of a catch-up here. Well, even if it has a catch-up, I don't know, I'll buy more if the thing sells off.

NVIDIA's too cheap here. So I don't believe that the narrative will be correct. I'm telling you that you need something to stop a NASDAQ that was up 14, 15, 16 days in a row. That may be the event and people freak out again. I love the freakouts and semis because they're great time to put money to work. But remember, Vindia has gone sideways for the last, I think it's 10 months now, meaning it hasn't gone anywhere. When a stock whose earnings are growing 60, 70% goes nowhere for a while,

that's called multiple compression. That means you're being able to buy it at the cheapest PE in the last decade already. So if the name sells off again, I'll buy it again because I don't think this ends the thing. I'm just saying that this will end that argument that they had with Dwarkesh and Jensen. I still believe that in the end, Nvidia is going to be a major supplier because the efficiency gains make it useful for all Western world companies. And I don't think Europe and the U.S. are going to use China models. I do think that they'll be used in other countries.

And I think the open source model side will be an issue. It's funny that you mention this because my biggest thing is, if Deep Sea comes out and it's that powerful, I've run into a problem that I got to figure out because I didn't buy enough Mac studios and MacMitt a few months ago. And I'm not, this is not a joke. Another shortage. There's a shortage because my anthropic clod is starting to suck, and I need to get some more power.

And an open source deep seek, which is going to be a massive model, which is going to need a lot more memory, Kimi K2.6 came out, I think, today. And that Chinese model was off the charts, and it gets you to Opus 4.6. And it's free, basically, but I can't download it because I don't have enough memory on my stupid computers right now. so my open clause salivating and knowing you could have this.

Jordy, this has been great. It's fantastic to have you on bank lists. We've appreciated every moment. Just curious, as you talk about kind of your, I know you're an AI super user these days. What's the most valuable part of your stack right now? So you're using OpenCla. Claude, is that kind of your primary go-to model?

Use code. You use cloud code. What's kind of the stack that you're using on a day-to-day basis? All of the above, but I also use Perplexity. I use Gemini. I use Chatchip-T. I use GROC. There's not one that I don't use every single day.

I've got fact checking on some of them. Whenever I'm doing something that I'm going to give to subscribers for information, like this past weekend, because I have 100 names in the portfolio, I needed to give people a trading sheet. So I put together basically a handicapping sheet of all the technical things, created a score thing. And I did that in clot. So that was in Claude Code.

It built it for me. I put it up on the website, and then one of the subscribers pointed out, hey, a couple of the numbers are wrong. And I looked at and I went, huh, I thought I put this through my quality control check. So I took it down and what I do is I give it to Open Claw, have it check everything. And then I put it on Gemini and I have a check everything. So I had to find out who the bad quality checker was in this thing. And I found out it was me.

So somehow or another, I didn't listen to my agents and my other thing. So I use all of them. And again, I pay for all the highest models, but it allows me to produce things. I mean, I've done seven pieces of research in the last six days that I've put on the website. I just did one on edge devices, which is probably six to nine months ahead from when it'll be a story. This gets more into autos, it gets more into handsets, it gets more into humanoids, but just the companies that will benefit like Qualcomm, that's down 20% for the year. I'm very focused on that.

So for me to do all this research, for me to do a paper right after Jensen speaks, I need all my agents and I need all my people helping with me. Incredible, what one person can produce with the assistance of AI. Jordy, this has been fantastic. So remind folks where to find you. So substack, you're at Vassir Labs. Also, YouTube, Jordi Vaseer Labs. Are you still doing a weekly show?

Is it every Sunday? Or is it, what's the cadence for the show? Every Sunday at 830, it drops in YouTube. I just dubbed one in Thai. I done one in Japanese. I dubbed one in Chinese. I'm talking to platforms in. and in those countries to see if they want it there.

But 8.30 a.m. Sunday morning, Eastern Standard Time, it gets released. And again, people haven't seen it. If you're interested in what's happening in AI, what's happening in macro, and how it fits all into Bitcoin, I just do a 45-minute rapid fire. There's no way to be bored because it's 100-something relevant news stories from the week and some Gemini created visuals and just try to keep people entertained. And they can find me on the substack. And if you ever get lost, just go to my LinkedIn.

there. Awesome. Jordy. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Ryan, David, good to finally see you guys. Thanks. Thanks, Shorty. Bankless Nation, got to let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.