The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Just Had Its Biggest Week In History | Jordi Visser

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

Jordi Visser is a veteran macro investor with 30+ years of experience and the author of the VisserLabs Substack. In this conversation, we break down bitcoin's explosive weekly surge and why this "sigma move" signals a real bull market. We also discuss the collision of AI and crypto, why bitcoin is the purest AI trade, Stripe and Ramp's battle to control AI model routers, and how to think about sizing bitcoin in your portfolio.=======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! =======================Figure’s $160k Community Appreciation (https://www.figure.com/crypto-community-appreciation/T&Cs (https://www.figure.com/crypto-community-appreciation/disclosures/) Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Take out a Figure Crypto-Backed Loan, allowing you to borrow against your BTC, ETH, or SOL with 12-month terms, 8.91% interest rates, and no prepayment penalties. Or check out Democratized Prime (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp) and earn ~8.5% APY on real world assets. Unlock your crypto’s potential today at Figure! https://figuremarkets.co/pomp Figure Lending LLC dba Figure (NMLS 1717824). Loans subject to approval. Crypto collateral may be liquidated. Terms apply - see full disclosures at http://figure.com/disclosures/=======================For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://www.Mengotomars.com.=======================0:00 - Intro1:02 - Bitcoin's weekly surge & the "sigma week" behind it5:38 - The bitcoin vibe shift & intersection with AI 15:26 - Is multiple compression a warning sign for the market?19:03 - How much bitcoin should be in your portfolio?23:27 - Moderna, AI & the future of biotech29:20 - Stripe's OpenRouter deal & the fight for AI model routers34:13 - Are model routers a threat to Anthropic and OpenAI?44:00 - Why people fear data centers more than nuclear plants54:46 - Jordi's bitcoin call to arms 

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It cannot be destroyed because it is built on beliefs, beliefs that it will have a store of value just like gold except for one thing. It's digital. And so I think everyone needs to adjust their views. And my job has always been. I'm going to keep quiet on Bitcoin until the tape tells me that it's time to be loud again. It's time to be loud again. What's going on, guys?

Today we have a great conversation with Jordy Visser. And boy, is this one fun. We talk about Bitcoin and the 22% surge this week in the price. What's driving it? Is it sustainable? And how should you think about Bitcoin in your portfolio? We also talk about Stripe, Ramp, Anthropic, Open Eye, many of the AI companies that are embracing various aspects of the industry.

And then we talk about what's going on in public companies and why the multiples are compressing, how competition is now such a cutthroat part of this industry. And then we even talk about how investors are going to navigate all of the volatility, all of the change. And where exactly will Bitcoin? end up over the coming months and years. I hope you enjoy my latest conversation with Jordie Visser. All right, Jordy, Bitcoin is ripping higher a week ago.

You said that the prior two weeks were the two biggest weeks in Bitcoin's history, potentially. Here we are with Bitcoin now up 22% over the last seven days. Explain what has happened and why you think that this is a sustainable bull market now. Well, when we talked two weeks ago, it was the week after situational awareness. It was the week after Kevin Warsh did nothing and basically said the bond market was doing the work for him. And then finished off that week with the most important thing. And I do believe the thing that most people either missed or for macro people in general debating whether this will work or not. And that was the intervention into the end.

It was the beginning of what I would call intervention by Scott Besson to highlight in a contextual way with the economy racing, with stocks at all-time highs, and yet he felt the need to intervene for the first time since 1998 in the yen in a way that basically said, we don't want yields going higher. Then you have the quarterly refunding announcement shortly after where they change some language in there leading into what happened this week, which is a change in the debt buyback. So rather than everyone sit there and argue about whether this is going to happen or not, I just want to remind people one thing, and I'm going to cover this extensively in the video this weekend. The tape doesn't lie. And the one thing that had been going on is despite everything that was happening, Bitcoin was acting better. was handling bad news. We had the hacking into a wallet. We had Michael Saylor selling Bitcoin. We had all kinds of negative news, Clarity Act not getting through. And yet it was still trading well. It was hanging in there. The tape was telling you that something different was happening.

But then when you get this week, and everyone should go read the ex post that I've put out there, so far this is a seven sigma week in Bitcoin. There's only been three in the last decade that were greater than five. And so people understand what a Sigma week is. This is taking the movement of Bitcoin for a weekly basis. In this case, over 20%, as of when we got on here about 23%. And going through and dividing it by what a normal weekly move would be. And in this case, a seven, you know, we had a vol,

a 60-day vol, which is what I'm using for my actual Sigma calculation of 23. So it's a daily volatility. So when you go through it, you have basically a seven standard deviation move. The prior two that were above five, they happened in April of 19th and January of 23. And I hate to say that those were the beginnings or the end of the prior four-year cycles. since I've said on here, I don't subscribe to any four-year cycle. But in this case,

we are getting the exact same Sigma move. And in those other two cases, believe it or not, we also broke above the 200-day moving average. So all that leads into something I've said, which is I don't care about even trying to pick the bottom of this thing from a saying it's positive until we break above the 200-day moving average.

And both of those prior times, we stayed above the 200-day moving average going forward. And Bitcoin started leading to a very, large rally, I happen to think with all of the things that we've talked about, the AI agents, the fact that the government is showing that they want to run things hot. You have a secretary, a treasury secretary who is quoting Satoshi in ex posts. You have Kevin Warsh, who's a Bitcoin lover. You have everybody in the administration that people should be paying attention, that something more important is going on here as the financial guardrails of the agentic world are

starting to play out. And I'll leave with one more thing, which we can either talk about or not, but I'm spending a lot of time with what Stripe is doing. And my whole thesis is that the merging of AI and crypto, and for Bitcoin, it will always be the purest AI trade at a time where we have AI not working as well as people want it to, getting frustrated, and you have a move in Bitcoin, which is 23% in a very short amount of time. Before we get to Stripe, Bitcoin itself, feels like there's a couple of key components here. Earlier this week, I recorded a podcast and was asked, you know, what is my thoughts about Bitcoin and why it's been so stable?

And I explicitly called out the fact that I didn't see a catalyst on the calendar. It wasn't obvious where the catalyst was going to come from. This seems like a very big kind of surprise announcement from the Treasury. Now, I think you understood kind of what was happening with the yen and the fact that they were likely would have to do something, et cetera. But I think to the general market, they were not expecting the Treasury to come in with, you know, kind of doubling of the capital going in here. And you see this stock market, Bitcoin, everything, you know, kind of rallying in response.

And so I guess part of this is if you go and you look at these past moves, Rafael, who's one of the co-founders of the Glass Node, he did the analysis and said in the past, there's been about 14 different five Sigma moves are larger. The forward return off of those moves over the next six months with 80% appreciation. So put aside for a second, 80% sounds like a great number. who knows, you know, kind of how specific the numbers, but just a very large move happens after that. Do you put any weight on the vibe shift and the feeling that it kind of like awoken the Bitcoin community and all of a sudden you see the persistent bid this week is going to be one of the

biggest ETF inflow weeks since the all-time high Bitcoin price? Like it just feels like the world kind of got shaken awake and reminded Bitcoin is the answer to this government undisciplined monetary policy? So I think that's probably the way the community thinks about it. I think that the thing that matters the most for this particular move is getting traditional finance people involved. And this is where from my lens, like everything that you said is a lens that would have been used by the Bitcoin community over the last decade. From my lens and my seat in talking to hedge fund people and mutual fund people and let's say the majority of people being above the age of 45 that have already made a lot of money in their life, that's not what I'm hearing.

I'm hearing more about the fundamentals associated with the financial guardrails. I'm hearing more about what was discussed at the White House and everyone there. I'm hearing more about what is figure. We talked about figure. I included in my video last week. That's there.

You have the 13F filing news with Stan Druck and Miller basically buying into crypto, Bitcoin miners, and some other parts of the ecosystem, like hyper liquid. Like the financial guard. are changing. And when you have one of the greatest investors of all time who is on the higher end of the age scale, who believes in what's happening, who believes in the financial guardrails, that is the underpinning. And this is the reason why I do the videos. This is the reason why we started doing this,

is I believe these two systems were going to merge and people were going to start to realize that Bitcoin is not something. It's not, it's not, it's not a, it's random thing. It's attached to crypto. It's where crypto was born, it's the white paper. It's what Mark Andreessen wrote about when he put in why Bitcoin matters. All of that is now here. And if you go back to that Andreessen piece, which I advise everyone who has never read it, just go pull it up on the internet and go read it. I think it was January of 2014, why Bitcoin matters and go through and understand that everything that he wrote in that paper, Mark Andreessen, where he called it the third most important innovation in computer history, why it matters and the fact that it would take the next

20 years. He didn't say 10. He didn't say 15. He said 20 by 2034. That aligns with AGI. That aligns with AI agents. That aligns with everything that the hedge fund community will now be buying. In my side, I believe and will continue to say, it is the purest AI trade with AI being bringing us to abundance where it destroys every single public company growth. The ability to grow, we're watching it with Anthropic. And I think it's just very insightful that the fastest growing tech company in history that is growing insanely. People start getting worried about whether their ARR is 65 billion or 75 billion or what the number is. And I'm getting all these text messages. This is the end of AI and blah, blah, blah. No, it's not the end of AI. It's not the end of anthropic.

But their growth rate will slow down significantly because of competition. Open source is competition. Open AI is competition. Grockbot is competition. Competition comes out of nowhere. So Bitcoin needs to be in people's portfolio because it is a hedge against abundance. It cannot be destroyed because it is built on beliefs, beliefs that it will have a store of value just like gold except for one thing. It's digital. And so I think everyone needs to adjust their views. And my job has always been, I'm going to keep quiet on Bitcoin until the tape tells me that it's time to be loud again. It's time to be loud again. What I think is really interesting about maybe the intersection of AI and Bitcoin is AI,

AI, to your point, has hypercompetition. We are seeing now almost every single day. Somebody is launching something new. Somebody is coming through with some announcement of an engineering breakthrough. The ability for companies to get more intelligence at a lower cost is the pursuit of almost every business I talk with. They want to figure out how to slash costs but continue to benefit from this great technology. all of that hyper-competition reminds me, Bitcoin has no competition. And I think that it's a very unique thing because the framework that a lot of folks have used,

including myself, is like, if AI is about abundance and there's going to be abundance of information, abundance of intelligence, abundance of content, et cetera, then scarcity becomes valuable. And you and I have talked about, you know, Bitcoin being that scarce asset. But it's also, if there's hyper-competition, you know, kind of the Peter Thiel approach of, like, you want to invest in monopolies. You want to go invest where there is no competition. He's got a famous talk competition is for losers. And Bitcoin, you know, stable coins have a different use case.

There's, you know, tokenized securities, all these other kind of assets. But Bitcoin itself has no competition. And that feels like that is going to become only more valuable over the next couple of years. This gets into competition to me when it's infinite and it's happening in seconds. That's getting us closer to abundance because what is intense competition? that comes out of nowhere. If you run a business and someone is able to do it at a cheaper price, you are driving prices to zero. This is the deflationary aspect of the capitalist system. If it starts going into hyperspeed and what used to happen in a month happens in a day or in an hour

or in a minute, then by definition, any idea that comes up, there's a new one competing with it immediately, especially when the agents are running. I did that whole thing last week where I just said to people, if you have a digital agent, they're shrinking a year into 70 days just on the workload side. They work constantly. So all of this stuff, when you line it up for competition, you have to understand that the way people are going to think two years from now is how do I hedge against everything that I own as a fiat asset,

having extreme competition to where it can't grow anymore? People invest in growth assets. There are no growth assets in my viewpoint anymore. When you start moving to scarcity, well, it makes sense that Micron should do well and go through it. But ask anyone that's owned Nvidia for the last two and a half years how they feel. It has been a horrible stock to own in the way people think. And I hear this from every hedge fund person. Nobody's on Nvidia as like their big AI trade.

But since June of 24, so over two years, Nvidia's up has compounded about 80%. It sounds great. But there were only four months where that entire gain happened. Four months out of the 24. Aside from that, it went sideways. And the reason is because people think Nvidia is going to have competition. Its earnings have printed, and yet the stock has been lagging. That is the AI trade going forward.

The AI infrastructure trade will still outperform the S&P. It is still a place in the stock world that you want to have a lot of your money. But as I've talked about, I've moved on to the application layer. I've moved on to people living forever. I've moved on to Eli Lilly. I've moved on to the scarcity side in silver, but also Bitcoin. I still own things in infrastructure. I still own Marvell.

I still have a little bit of Micron that I purchased in this down move. And I still have other names with inside the space as my equity holdings. But right now, my overweights are towards the scarcity trade because I believe the basement was coming. But number two, if we're right, if we're entering a point where competition becomes the big thing, I just think people are underestiming how many people need to hedge the risk of that. And that's the way to think about Bitcoin. It's in a world of abundance. That means hyper competition, which means AI is winning.

Remember what happened to software companies in the first quarter of the year and how it was spreading like a disease across the market. It's happening in the S&P 500 because multiples are compressing. It's happening in the hypers scalers because multiples are compressing. It's happening in VDIA. Now it's going to happen in all of the AI trade, including Micron, include all of these. They will see multiple compression over the next three years because behind them for scarcity

is humanoid's coming. People are not paying attention to how, you're going to be able to go to a race to zero for the cost of running a business and how quickly you can compete. And you're going to be left with where do I put my money? Well, the guardrails are just being built. So that's a growth asset. At the same time, Bitcoin becomes the S&P 500 of the future. It is a stable value investment that grows with the dollars flowing into it that are moving from one system which is old and has no growth anymore into another system that is taking that money and is still growing positively.

So one of the things that I think is very interesting about watching this all happen is usually when multiples compress and stocks either are stable and earnings continue to grow or the stock price itself falls, then people get excited. Hey, I can buy this thing for a cheaper valuation than I could a week, you know, a month ago, three months ago. What you're really issuing is maybe a warning that says just because multiples are compressing does not mean that the market is being irrational and therefore it is a buying opportunity. You're actually really making the argument that the multiple compression is a sign that the market

is nervous about future competition and the ability for these companies to be resilient. Is that a fair characterization of the multiple compression? Yeah, and combined in that from a, you know, a, let's say a fundamental perception of fiat assets, you have two things which are also shrinking. One is terminal value. So you don't know, if the competition is growing, then multiple compression to me represents the risk that in three years there's actually no growth anymore. So if your whole thing about the value and why something should trade it 23 times,

why should something trade it 20 times earnings and not one times earnings? Why shouldn't? Well, this is all the leverage in the system and this is all the belief that there'll be terminal value in the future discounted cash flows. If you don't know three years from that, whether you're going to be in business or forget going out of business, just not having growth. Nobody invests in something that isn't growing. People want to invest in things that are growing. I don't believe that three years from now, anyone can have certainty, whether it is Adobe on the obvious side or Micron on the side that

looks dirt cheap. I don't know if there won't be competition three years ago. And I know this. Nobody does. So at some point, the probability of there being no value to a company five years from now, seven years from now, eight years from now, you take those discounted cash flows from that point on, and you produce a lower valuation or lower probability of them actually being there, you compress the PEs. And that's what's happening to me. And that's what's going to continue to happen. On the leverage side, the Fiat system is based on ever-increasing leverage. I believe because of the volatility that we've seen in these stocks, each company's volatility has gone through the roof. Micron is trading at four times Bitcoin's volatility. Think about that. If you take the 60-day

vol for Bitcoin, it just finished last week at 24. 60-day realized vol. Micron, 120. You can't own as much micron as you can Bitcoin right now because it's less volatile. So the whole world has gone topsy-turvy. And what that says to me is Bitcoin is a safer investment than a company three years from now. And because of that, when you start to go through this, you have to question how your portfolio is, how you're invested in it. I think hedge fund leverage has peaked and will forever go down. And the point is that I don't think the volatility difference that's happening. There's no way to hedge this risk in the stock side. The only way to hedge things is to move money into an asset which benefits from the volatility in the competition.

And that gets us back into things that are based on scarcity and are going to benefit from AI to finish off again. I've talked about silver before. Silver is the perfect cross thing. It fits in with the gold thing. It fits in with the monetary asset replacement, but it is a mineral that is needed for all AI, and we have a shortage of it. So that is the reason why at this point, when I think we're entering a point where gold, silver, and Bitcoin are going up together, it's not just at the basement trade.

It is a scarcity trade. You have to be worried about competition on the other side of your portfolio. Now, there's a lot of different ways to think about Bitcoin in a portfolio. Obviously, people who go on TV and, you know, frankly, have either no conviction or scared because their lawyer told them to be careful, they'll say, oh, you should put one to two percent of your portfolio in Bitcoin. If you go and you talk to maybe somebody who's got a more macro view, they'll say 60-40's broken. You could go 60 percent equities, 40 percent Bitcoin and replace your bonds with Bitcoin. And then if you go to the hardcore Bitcoin maximalist, they'll tell you why would you own anything, including, you know, a table, a chair, a car, a house, or a dollar. You should just have 100 percent of all your wealth in Bitcoin.

How do you think about building a portfolio for yourself or for others in terms of, is Bitcoin something that is a very small percentage and is more of, you know, a replacement for a single name stock? Is it kind of a larger percentage and a replacement for something like bonds? Is it the entire portfolio? Just walk through maybe the framework you would use for people to think through how Bitcoin fits into that portfolio. Okay.

So I'm going to answer this two ways. First, I'm going to bring Sylvia into it. What would Sylvia? say. Like, Sylvia is going to customize to the person, right? And for that to work, the person needs to talk about the risks it wants. It has to be based on how they spend money, what they want their lifestyle to be, how young they are, how healthy they are. Rick Edelman, you've interviewed him, right? I mean, he made the argument that, you know, people should have more because they're going to live longer. Well, what did Moderna come out with this week? What new? news hit the market that made a stock more than double in a day. Something I know we've talked about, and I even said it already in this show, people won't die from disease at some point in the future.

And when it gets cheap enough that everyone can have that, we're getting to the point where when you get to cancer in particular, where you can say that there can be a vaccine, that they're making headway on this for melanoma, which is a very complicated cancer. people have to understand that would mean, okay, I'm going to live longer. I need more growth in my portfolio and less bonds. Okay, well, if I say there are no growth assets anymore because AI is destroying growth,

then where do you go? So from my side, I are on the side for the younger you are and the more you want money to work for you. Bitcoin breaks all of this stuff. It's the purest AI trade. It's a time hedge. It's an abundance hedge. It's all of these things. And so if you have lots of money,

money and you've already made it and you're older, I still think you should have a lot more money in Bitcoin as an anti-dake side on the other side, which is the assets that you own. But again, only if you're focused on growth. I think it needs to be part of the growth bucket. I think it needs to be aligned with the risks that you're taking. And I think that's a personal thing for everyone who has the real money and decides. I know for me, it's out of an asset allocation relative to stocks and this, it was the biggest, before the AI stuff started to outperform Bitcoin,

and I'm sure if Bitcoin does what I think it's going to do, it's going to be the largest. But now I have a lot more in silver and also precious metals. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure Markets. All right, everyone, who wants a slice of $160,000? Our partner figures running a promo where they're given back to their community. From July 27th to August 27, any user who has never completed a crypto-back loan with them can qualify for this giveaway.

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It obviously, you know, anytime a stock does that, it's going to cool a little bit. It came down. But today, as we're recording this on Friday, it's up 16% to start the day. And so that is not kind of announcement driven. That is obviously the market trying to figure out what is this worth, right? How real is the phase three trial results? Who is this going to impact? What does this look like from a revenue or earnings potential, you know, a year from now,

etc? And so the other side of companies, quote unquote, not growing is innovation. And you've talked about like Eli Lilly, heavily investing in AI and building out these data centers and, you know, the revenue is growing 50% year over a year as a trillion-dollar company. But I do think that part of the competition story and the growth story is not only external. Yes, the big model labs are under pressure from, you know, everyone from Kimmy K3 to Nvidia's open source to, you know, every single company going after specialized workflows and applied AI.

But they're also in competition with themselves and the ability to kind of constantly disrupt yourself. And I think Moderna is a great story where if you had talked to people on Monday of this past week, they would have said that basically Moderna had a bunch of legacy assets from COVID. That was really the value of that company. I don't think a lot of people were pointing to it saying like, oh, they're going to be where innovation around cancer is going to come from. And I heard Martin Schrelli talk about the fact that a lot of people had even abandoned the idea

of this specific phase trial and drug, et cetera, as not going to really be something that worked. It's innovation. It's, you know, competition. It's disrupting yourself. And it does feel like that is now the kind of playbook. Every company is going to have to follow if they want any fighting chance to create value in the future, is they basically have to every 12 to 18 months figure out what. what do we want to be when we grow up, which is very different than what they had to do in the past.

Yeah, and the Moderna thing is, again, is something for everyone to make sure they read about and understand the importance of AI involved with us getting over this hurdle and how this is going to be a door opening for so many cancer drugs, cancer treatments, everything along those lines. There's only one, well, actually, no, I know the Lily one, too, but let's say the only Dave Johnson, who I assume is still with Moderna. The only reason I know his name is because I listen to many podcasts with him when they and how AI helped them figure out the vaccine so quickly for COVID. And that's when I started to realize, oh my gosh, when we get to the point where machine learning is ubiquitous like it is today, where we have the model companies advancing so advanced. That was done before alpha fold three, all of this stuff. You reach a point where you should be able to take things from stage two, which is where things usually die in the IP side in terms of getting through the FDA approval.

And with AI, AI, you should be able to get that IP over the finish line. So biotech and pharma are not growth industries because they're moonshots. They can change overnight. I am going to show this weekend, I've written a bunch of papers on pharmaceuticals beginning in November of last year about how they will eventually be the biggest winners out of AI from the application side. And I think that is starting. Pharmaceuticals, despite it being a year where rates have gone higher and they're usually sensitive to rates and they're usually viewed as a defensive sector, well, healthcare is outperforming the S&P by, I think, 7, 8% this year. It made new

multi-year highs on a relative basis. It's still way below the all-time highs. And I think pharmaceuticals are going to be a place that money is going into. I think the entire healthcare field is someplace that AI is going to go into. So when we look at these things and we think about the way people view them both from an investment standpoint and what you were talking about in terms of people either working for the companies, what's going on. I do want to add one thing here that fits in with you bringing up the hyperscalers, which we've talked about. There are two economies right now. One of them, I call the AI native one, but I just want to say that that is the entrepreneurial economy, and the other one is the public companies. The majority of talent is starting to leave the public, big,

bureaucracies and move to the entrepreneurial economy. My son is going to be a junior in college. He's seeing the power of being an entrepreneur. He's seeing the ability to do it. He and I talk all the time. I told you about his chief of staff and spinning out agents. Well, I just created so many agents this week in Grockbot. It blew my mind. Like I used it extensively over the last three days and I'm doing the same thing that he's doing and in a framework that is so much easier than what I had to build an open claw in Hermes and it works there.

And it's doing so many more things and I trust it more that I think people have to view that public companies, which are what they invest in, are losing the best talent. And that's the other switch that's going is I think the more talented, curious, the less you want to sit at a desk,

the less you get frustrated by your boss, the less you get frustrated with your investors, come over to our side. Come over to the entrepreneurial side and build things and go through them. I think it's a better place and I think you'll have more fun. I think that's going to be the other place that's draw people. And that's huge for the crypto world because Stripe and all of these companies that are private and they talk about them. They have that whole ecosystem there.

They're growing rapidly. And that's why whenever they publish something, when you go read the numbers, it's not just the stable coin volume they're seeing. It's the startup world and what the startup world is doing and how fast they're growing. Let's talk about Stripe, maybe through the lens of they purchased OpenRouter for $7,8 billion this past week. And for those that don't know, OpenRouter is, it's an API that allows anybody building an AI to route a query to another model. So rather than just say, hey, I'm using Claude or I'm using Opus or, you know, chat GPT, it basically says, hey, you can now route this to a variety of different models. Now, there's a difference between the access to a model router, which is what open router provides, and the intelligence of which model each query should be routed to.

And the engineering team at Sylvia had this huge announcement talking about how they built a intelligence later that basically predicts the effort needed for a query by looking at the first 500 characters. And so that is a layer on top of just the model router is also the intelligence component, which each company is having to figure out, hey, how do we predict which query needs to go to which model? simultaneous to the Stripe story, Ramp, which I would argue is the closest thing to a competitor with Stripe in a different way. They're not directly competing, but it is like the fastest growing fintech company that also, I think people say, hey, that's just like Stripe. They announced router.com, which is also the ability to route tokens. And it feels like everyone is coming to the

conclusion that a very valuable kind of choke point is going to be who controls that router. And so you have Stripe, you have Ramp, all now getting into this game, and it looks like there's going to be a little friendly war as to who can get which companies using this thing. Stripe used to be a payments company. Then they kind of felt like maybe they were becoming like a payments company that likes stable coins. Now they feel more just like a tech company. Ramp, on the other hand, used to be like a business kind of finance management platform or spend management. platform. They issue cards and do budgets and stuff. Now they feel like they're kind of like an AI research lab with the finance component on top of it. And so how do you just look at these

companies are evolving very quickly and they're coming out with these new products and they're all doing it at the same time? It's a big win for the consumer or for the business client, but what are your other thoughts? My other thoughts is they're betting on the ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs, plain and simple. And whether or not they're intentionally doing that, I think they look at their companies. And let's assume that Stripe is dealing with startup companies that are growing rapidly. Not all of them are going to be, quote unquote, AI native in the fact that they're

experts in tech. So if you want to set up your own sourcing and efficiency side of the cost side of your business with AI, it's very challenging unless you have expertise. Jason Calcanus talks about this all the time on the All In Pod, that in his businesses, he identifies the fact that it's fairly complicated to use open source and use Anthropic and figure a way to do that and keep your costs down. It's a lot of work. So OpenRouter allows you, and anything which is going to do the routing side of AI, should be an offering that goes to startup businesses in a way for them to make sure that they're keeping their cost efficient. Stripe is in the game of trying to grow the ecosystem of entrepreneurs. They are not in the business of selling to the big Fortune 500 companies.

So the pie of entrepreneurship is going to go up dramatically in revenues, and it's going to be taking away from the Fortune 500 companies. I don't know how to make that any clearer in like my opinion, which is, again, the reason why I believe in a less centralized future of investments going forward, that public companies the bureaucracy, the fact that they're stuck on Outlook and Microsoft and Salesforce and all of these things, whenever people talk about, well, Salesforce isn't going out of business. No, they're not. But neither has Ford. It doesn't mean that it's a growth company anymore. And it doesn't mean that they're not serving the right people in terms of the ones that matter. You need to be focused on entrepreneurship right now. And so I think Stripe is just an ecosystem company in the same way that almost all tech companies that have been successful,

When they figure out their niche, if Amazon is about serving humans in delivering stuff and also in Amazon Web, I think what Stripe is doing is staying with inside their channel. They're just looking at it as entrepreneurship and the businesses, the merchants, the companies that they do business with. And when they get into PayPal, which is who they're trying to buy, well, that's taking the consumer side and connecting it. So they're definitely a payment company. They're definitely a crypto financial guardrail company. but I think they're also a business company that's trying to grow the entrepreneurship

that fits in with AI as well. Now, when you think of these model routers, do you think that that is a direct attack on the open AIs and the Anthropics, not like an adversarial way, but just in terms of if you are routing a query, that means that you may be routing them to open source or kind of challenger model groups.

And so that is taking revenue away from those companies, does the more we hear about Stripe and Ramp and, you know, model routing and kind of the whole innovation aspect of this, does that feed into the concerns around Anthropic and Open AIs revenue? Well, it definitely, so it's not taking revenue away from them. Let's just say it's reducing the share of the pie that they're still growing. So it's really hard when a company is still growing so fast to say that they're losing anything. I know it's hard for people to understand Jevin's paradox, but the reality is

Jevin's paradox is in play here. So let's say I view there being, in a simplistic way, two verticals for the Open AI and Anthropic. Two. One is they will get Fortune 500 company business because they have a lot of risk to use open source and they don't want to get involved in the liability side, the hacking side, all of the things that will be associated with it. On the other side, you have the high-end, we need the highest IQ side. So Millennium on the hedge fund side, they're not paying Kimmy K3.0 to build them a risk to work on a risk system. They're using Anthropic. If you want to solve cancer, are you going to use a open-source Chinese model with an IQ of 130?

Or are you going to use a frontier model with an IQ of 1,000? You don't need a thousand IQ for the majority of tasks that are done that create revenues. So I think all of those tasks will eventually go towards the open source model. The ones that take a higher IQ will go to those and they'll secure that compute capacity. So there's two separate lines there that I think people should focus on. But if you ask me, Anthropic and Open AI will keep growing. But the question is, when does their growth rate reach a point that they start to hit multiple compression? And that'll happen at some point, even if it means that the other part that needs to be owned, is it, if you're getting into solving cancer, should you be a public company or should you be owned by the government?

Are you, like, these lines will become very blurred as we get into the 200 IQ, 2,000 IQ area, because if those are the models that are doing it, then those should probably be more involved with the governments, if the governments are getting in there. And I think that risk absolutely is real. And so terminal value becomes an issue for them because what should a government-owned company trade at versus a private company growing at 300% a quarter? I think you get into a different world. So that's where I've kind of broken those two down. Either way, the people that win are the ones that are able to use open source. The routers are going to help them. They're going to keep their cost cheap for the next year or two.

I like companies like Palantir because I think the orchestration layer becomes much, much more important because I think AI sovereignty is an issue that also impacts Anthropic and Open AI. And I think that's where Palantir and some of these other types of, not routers, but groups that are able to use open source models for a company in a way while they keep their AI sovereignty. I recently did an interview with a professor of computer science at University of Louisville. And he is the gentleman who he coined the term AI, safety back in 2011. And he's actually very bullish on AI, but very concerned that eventually we will get to systems that we can't control.

And when we can't control them, there's all these challenges. And so his belief is that the government is now showing signs of understanding this and they're starting to step in. So that interview is going to come out in a couple of days. But what I found fascinating about it is he's also a pretty hardcore bit coiner for a lot of the reasons that we've talked about. He is not really into too much else in the current. crypto industry, and I explicitly asked him, like, are you a Bitcoin maximalist or not? And he said, no, he said, I just don't have time for everything else. So he, you know, kind of limited time.

He's focused on AI safety. Now, the reason why that becomes interesting, I think, in our conversation about Anthropic and Bitcoin is what you're really seeing here is almost nobody has a fear of Bitcoin. Right? There used to be like, oh, was the government going to ban it or any of this stuff? But like, pretty much every single fear of the future in Bitcoin has dissipated. And the only thing that is debated is will it be worth more or less in the future?

Now, in the AI companies, I think every single person is like, they're definitely going to be worth more in the future in the sense of like they're growing. They have revenue. They have kind of all these tailwinds. But there's a lot of fear of what that future world looks like. And it does feel like that is a natural adoption point because we saw it in Bitcoin. Ten years ago, people were scared. They wanted to know, are we going to defund the government? Is there going to be instability, civil war?

I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff people were worried about. I do wonder how much of the anthropic story today of, you know, last week or so they started talk a lot about biotech. How much of that is because they actually think there's value there versus them trying to put out a marketing message of like, we're going to help the human population and is to try to quell the fears. And if we get in a world where all of a sudden strategy and the product roadmap starts getting dictated by the way it's going to be received, these companies may look very different

12 months from now than they do today, right? Yeah, and this is an interesting point. And I know this wasn't the direction you were going, but you're talking about kind of these frontier model companies, they really are in a way very similar to where Bitcoin was in the early 2010 to 2014 period. Number one, they're growing fast. Their evaluations have grown Bitcoin-esque.

There's a tremendous amount. amount of speculation, but there's so much uncertainty. And you have the government, which is already getting involved in their business and shutting them down for a period of time ago. It has a lot of the similarities that went on with Bitcoin. You have the bubble talk. You have all of the stuff that's gone on. So I do believe that this fits in with an important point, which is this is another sign

since these are the fastest growing companies in the history of the world by a huge factor. There's nothing ever close to see a company go from, you know, such a small valuation to multiple trillions of dollars in a matter of a year. But that's what Anthropic has been able to do. I think we're witnessing something really important in terms of, again, the Fiat system and what's happening to it. And everyone should be questioning every asset they have in their own portfolio. And partly that's what swings over to Bitcoin because you don't worry about it as much, especially if it starts to make new highs as a point of, well, what are we going to shoot against it now?

Because we've basically thrown everything at it and nothing has happened. Even the quantum side, like there's more conversation I'm working on it. But more importantly, we have so many hackings going on in the Fiat system and fears about what AI swarms are going to be able to do, which will happen. That when that happens there, it's probably going to be a positive for Bitcoin. So that's the ironic thing about this is the Fiat system and AI, whether it's taking the power, the miners are having to do things in AI. We haven't seen the benefit that's come from that yet in terms of them now being focused

on the AI side because their computer is so valuable as opposed to making supply of Bitcoin. All of this stuff has entered a very weird dynamic. That is all because of where AI has gotten. And I'll continue to say, you can hear me say Bitcoin is the purest AI trade and stop thinking about it from how does Bitcoin benefit from AI and start getting into the point of how does Bitcoin not get disrupted by AI? And that's the point in all this stuff is you're watching this bizarre world where Bitcoin is coming out on the other side, maybe with less worry than everything that's related to AI that looks like a good investment.

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He posted a chart this week. This is going to blow your mind if you didn't see this. He writes nearly three times as many people, 44% versus 15%. So nearly three times as many people say they'd support a nuclear power plant being built near where they live rather than a data center. That is insane. And then somebody else pointed out twice as many people would support a coal power plant being built near them compared to a data center. I mean, I saw this. I look 14 times at the chart to make sure that he read it correctly.

This is like crazy town we're entering now of the fear, not even of age. I mean, yes, there's the fear of AI and flock cameras and kind of that whole thing. But we're talking specifically about a building that you put computers in that delivers superintelligence for pennies to people. I don't even know how to discuss this anymore when I see data like this. You do. So everything is... I don't think I'm allowed to say what I think.

That's the problem. Well, let's just keep it this way. I mean, it's impossible to comprehend how much information that we take in in our heads because of the smartphone and how easily our brains get programmed based on the stuff that we read in there. And it becomes a confirmation bias when you only listen to the people that are sending the things that you want to read and go through it. So I don't think people know how the human brain works. But if you've heard what PTSD is, to get PTSD, if you're repetitively having a story sent to you, no matter what, your brain starts to change and you start saying things or believing things that don't have to be true. You just don't have enough information in your head to think about the other side.

And I'll just give you my own anecdote without naming people. But so I'm an introvert. I really like to hang around in my home. It's hard to get me out of it. But I do like intellectual people that provoke thought. And I like people that really challenge me. It's one of the reasons why I spend a lot of time in podcasts. It's the reason why I spend a lot of time at YouTube.

But if you put me in a room with someone who's got, you know, I can have a conversation with about a lot of different topics and we can go in and out and in and out. But I had a conversation with someone over the summertime in Maine where their views shocked me on this issue. Shocked me. and I said, I know for a fact that at least 70% of what you just said to me is not true. And the reason I know that is because I spend so many hours on data centers, and I wanted to hear whether any of what you just said is true. This person, I don't want to give their job away and everything,

but let's just say they are very high IQ, graduate of one of the best universities in the technical universities in the country. And they literally said to me things about data centers, which are not true, including the water side. And when I brought up the fact about, do you drive by golf courses? Do you see the sprinklers on every single morning? Do you realize that they use more water than a data center? And the old data centers are different than the new data centers and things change. Where did you get your information from?

I realize more and more in life that when I have conversations with people, once I read this, I realize a lot of it has to do with their government beliefs. A lot of it has to do with their rigid brain of what they follow and in terms of where they're getting their news from. In this person's case, their news comes from one TV station, and that's where they get it all. I think we're in an age where this goes on more than it's happening, and it worries me, but I think in the case of AI advancement, I've actually come to the conclusion that the good side of this is that if we have things move too fast, bad things happen. So in a world of different opinions, regardless of where they're coming up with their views from, friction to some degree when you're moving this fast actually might be a positive because I think it allows human beings to come to a better viewpoint of AI in a longer period of time, while the advancement can't get to the point where it's a bubble, where everything's blowing up, where we're building things without any rules. So as much as I don't think we should be having a lot of regulation and a lot of rules to slow it down, I do believe that it's going at a pace which allows it to be.

handled more because if not exponential is something human beings can't handle and it might drive people crazier that way jordy you should have just called me i could have told you exactly what was going on you were talking to you were talking to an over-educated dumb person like like there's a lot of those people out there i'm sure you've heard from many of them in your bitcoin days yes yes i mean look it is uh it is true but it is also in a weird way um you can't can be overeducated and it can be a huge hurdle to understanding the current world. And the example I've given a couple of people who are very close friends of mine who maybe, have different views on certain things or whatever and all kind of, you know, Toyota 5,

why them and say, you know, how did you get to that conclusion? And it really will come out of like, well, in college, I was taught, blah, blah, whatever. And I say, okay, that's great. If something is true today that was not true before, how long do you think it will take to get into a college textbook? two years, three years, five years, there's some massive lag. And so if you read something in a book 10 years ago, that really means it's probably a belief from 15 or 20 years ago. And it was cemented in the book, and then here we go.

And so I don't know if that's everybody. I don't think it is everybody. Like, you know, their views are just dictated by what they read in college or something. But I do think that there is a very high correlation between the people who adopt new technology, the people who are more entrepreneurial, the people who update their thinking. on a constant basis, it's like you kind of are almost like a mental athlete. And as a mental athlete, what do you have to do? If you are entrepreneurial or you are constantly adopting new technology, you have to be quick on your feet. You have to constantly be updating your worldview.

You have to take in new information. You have to synthesize it. You have to always be asking yourself, is this true? Is this real? Is this something that I want to incorporate into my thought process? if you work like a nine to five kind of chill job and you don't have a lot of the mental athlete requirements you can operate off of five years ago you know kind of mental framework nothing really changes in your day-to-day life and so you're like quite literally unprepared for the world that we're in today because you just don't have the practice or the the kind of skill set needed to update your worldview every you know at the pace we're going right now every month you got to update it right so this is an important thing and

I've written a lot about this. I spent a lot of time in my life studying the brain. I read Freud when I was very young from a psychological basis and a psychiatric basis to understand who I was as a person from my upbringing. Most of our brain consumes the most information from zero to four, but we don't remember anything from zero to four. So I went into Freud and eventually into Jung and Skinner and did a whole bunch of reading on this stuff to understand it. Then I wanted to understand the way that it works so I could

understand how to make my brain work better. There were all different types of understanding the reason people think this way and get caught in this trap. So I'll give people a little background on my relationship with my father. My father died recently, but he was an atheist. My mother was a devout Catholic. So I would go to church two or three times a weekend. She sang in the choir, and my father told me there was no God. So you grow up in a house as a young kid and you're consuming this type of information, but the advice my father gave me, which just shows how important that little example was to keep my brain open. And I'll summarize what you said for people with Thomas Bays and with Annie Duke as two people for them to spend time with. He told me nothing you

will hear in life is true, except two plus two is four. Now, that's obviously simple. You can go into into all things related to science and get up with facts. But his point was true, meaning everything you'll hear from a human being is someone's opinion. And if you go through life, then it immediately makes you, in my case, when combined with my ADHD-type brain, hate school. Because why am I learning this? You're giving me one person's opinion from a book. I don't care because I want to read a thousand people's opinions and then shape my own.

That is the beginning of a Bayesian brain. That is the beginning of taking new information, change your views based in the information you have. And then Annie Duke, who wrote the book Thinking in Betts, who I love to death and had a great conversation with her on this whole topic. Life is all about thinking in bets. You're making bets every day of your life, whether it's the drive you're taking into work, whether it's the food you choose for the day. Every single thing you're doing is thinking in bets.

And they're all investments in some future outcome. And so unless you go through life being open to new information and changing your views in bets, that it's a common. constantly formula that keeps changing, I think you're going to have a really hard time right now, because the world is changing so rapidly that if you're stuck in your views, you become an academic in the past. But this is what the opposite of my father was. Everyone that did well in school thought there was an answer to a question. They thought there was a grade that would get them a particular occupation. They thought they'd make a certain amount of money by a certain age. That doesn't

exist anymore. I can't remember the name of the book right now, but Daniel Pink wrote a book in like 2005 or 2006, which was all about the left, you know, the change from the world being dominated by people that were more mathematical and had this whole formulae capriced and ones that were more entrepreneurial and more artistic. And that's what's happening. And that's why I keep telling people, it is better to learn how to fail right now. Fail, get back up, build something new. Fail, build something new. Fail, build something new. Then, hey, I want to get a job at so-and-so, and I want to be at that company for the next 20 years. That world doesn't exist. exist anymore. And I think it fits into what you were saying, which is when you watch news or you come up with an opinion, that opinion cannot be in stone and you can't reinforce it with sourcing people that are going to go through it. You have to be open to different parts. And that's where the Bayesian side gets in and the Annie Duke. We're getting close to the holidays. I say this every year. Go by thinking in bets for your kids. It is the single best book that they can read in terms of making sure their mind is thinking in a world that's exponential. I love it. You, uh, tomorrow on some,

Sunday are going to issue a call to arms for the Bitcoin and Crypto community. Tell us about this video that you're cooking up. I've said repeatedly that I'm preparing to add a crypto side to my weekly stuff on the subscribers. And it was meant to coincide and it just happens to be the perfect timing at this point. We'll see if it stays that way. But it was really meant for when people came back from the summer because I believe that we'd be entering a period where for the rest of this year, people will be dragged into paying attention to Bitcoin, and then the investments will be made next year.

The investments being next year when we get to the new calendar year. So I'm going to go through all the reasons why, because I've been waiting for the tape to tell me the time was right. And as of right now, the tape has spoken loudly. It has spoken proudly. I will ask everyone at 8.30 a.m. is when the video comes out. I put this an X. It will go out there.

For those of you who are on X, for those of you who are on LinkedIn. I would greatly appreciate for this video if you would go show it around. And let me give you the reasons why. This is not me asking you to do something for me. It will help me, obviously, just like subscribing does. But here's the main thing. I do these videos to get back to the point we just said with Bayesian and Annie Duke. Your kids, your friends, your parents, everyone needs to make sure that they understand what is about to happen. This, in my opinion, is the most important point. That's why I call it the AO macro nexus point. AI is disrupting the world. Bitcoin is on the other side of it. The crypto guardrails are being put in place. You need to understand this

in a way. I know everyone has not read the Bitcoin white paper and I don't expect you to, but now you don't have a reason not to. You don't have to read it. You just have to upload it into chat GPT and ask it questions while you're walking around at a park. It is time to understand. You don't have to agree with Anthony and I on Bitcoin in the way that we described. it, but I think you need to be open to accepting new information and impossibly changing thinking in bets. And at a minimum, if you believe there's a 20% chance that we're right, well, that means theoretically you should have somewhere near 20% of your savings in Bitcoin. If you think there's a 5% chance, you should have 5%. But somewhere within there, you should be hedging out the probability or the

possibility that what we're saying is right. And I think for everyone that wants to kind of learn about it, I'm going to take you on a long journey of learning for at least the next few years in this. Sign me up. I'm in. We're in together, bro. All right. Sounds good. Thank you very much.

For all the people who in the comments for the last three, four, five, six weeks been saying, when is Bitcoin going to move? You guys keep saying this Bitcoin's not going to move 23% up in a single week. I'm not saying it was Jordy, but I am saying that he kind of didn't get it right. So, you know, get the man a little bit of grace here. he weirdos in the comments. All right. And I appreciate it. You have your hoodie on for this week.

That's a telltale sign right there. So we're going from the hootie. I was wondering if you saw that. You don't know. The suit is a bare market phenomenon. The suit has always come out in the bare markets. You know, you've got to be a little bit more serious. People are like, the thing is down.

Are you a serious person? Well, you know what? I'll be back in the studio next week. So I'll hopefully you'll be there. If not, I'll be there with Matt. and I'll get to see whether you have the suit on or the hoodie in the library. I love it. I love it.

All right. We'll see everyone next week. See you.