The Pomp Podcast - Why Bitcoin Could Explode As Global Markets Crack | Jordi Visser

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

Jordi Visser is a veteran macro investor with 30+ years of experience and the author of the VisserLabs Substack. In this conversation, we discuss rising geopolitical tensions, higher oil prices, and growing risks in private credit and global markets. We also explore bitcoin’s resilience, how AI is disrupting software and jobs, and why Jordy believes commodities, liquidity, and volatility will shape the next major investment cycle.====================Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Take out a Figure Crypto-Backed Loan (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp), 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, paid hourly. Unlock your crypto’s potential today at Figure! https://figuremarkets.co/pomp====================Award-winning Fountain Life - Energy supercharged. Memory sharper. Life extended. Ready for the best investment you’ll ever make? Schedule a life-changing call at FountainLife.com/Pomp Get $1,000 off the cost of a life-changing membership with Fountain Life when you schedule a call at FountainLife.com/pomp====================This podcast is sponsored by Abra.com. Abra is the secure way to access crypto and crypto based yield and loan products through a separately managed account structure.Learn more at http://www.abra.com.====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.====================0:00 - Intro0:44 - Iran conflict & oil market shock8:09 - Commodity bull market thesis11:11 - Inflation risks & recession probabilities15:30 - How high could oil go?18:19 - Bitcoin vs gold performance discussion21:12 - Bitcoin as a global “escape hatch” asset29:20 - Inflation vs AI-driven deflation debate33:00 - AI disruption & labor market impact40:48 - Software disruption & tech valuations55:09 - Commodities, compute & future investment themes57:08 - GPU smuggling & AI geopolitics

So I'm going to keep pounding the table that the best thing for Bitcoin is a continuing credit problem, which I don't think can be resolved on itself. And at the same point, having a commodity bear market, a bull market, which is based on scarcity, and then a shorting of abundance, which is based on these growth assets. If all of that plays in. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great conversation with Jordy Visser. We're going to talk about what's going on with Iran, what's going on with oil prices, inflation, deflation in the tech industry ai are people smuggling gpus into china what exactly is going on in terms of your portfolio how you should prepare are software companies gonna be more or less valuable in the

future why is jordy getting bullish on bitcoin and thinks that it could be the escape hatch for a lot of things going on in the world all that much more in this conversation with jordy visser all right jordy other than it being saint patrick's week and us wearing green unplanned but still great look for both of us um let's start with iran you know very related to saint patrick's day uh not really. There was a ton of, I think, differences in people's opinion this week. First week, okay, cool. It's going to be quick. Second week, all right, you know, we're making progress. Third week, wait a minute here. Now we got LNG facilities getting blown up. We've got oil production significantly slowing. We've got the straight still closed. Lots of

problems. How are institutional investors thinking about underwriting the situation and what the ramifications could be in financial markets? I'm shocked. Here's why I'm shocked. I don't really care about the market reaction at this point because we live in a society of instant gratification. So the fact that people probably bought a lot of hedges, we've got expiration today. I'm not going to talk about the market. The reason I'm confused is that I don't think people are looking at the facts. So forget the amount of drones, forget people forecasting when this is going to end, when the Strait will be open.

Nobody knows that. And as far as I'm concerned, I care about the facts. Gas at the pump is now 392 as we sit here this morning. It started this journey at 280. So this is $1.10 on 280. That's a fact. Diesel prices are up $1.50. If you go look at what happened at the time that CPI went up to nine plus percent, this is a faster move than what happened back then for those. Oil prices, you put on the evening news, they tell you oil's around to $100. That's not true. The facts are that there's a lot of oil prices. Oil prices that go

to Asia hit close to 170 this week in terms of Oman and Dubai, 130, 170. Brent is way above where WTI is. So I think people are paralyzed. I think institutional investors are paralyzed. I think the sell side is paralyzed. And I think there's a very important reason for it that gets into my handicapping days at the racetrack. Why is a horse go off as the favorite? Well, it goes off the favorite because of the most recent results that happen. So when the Kentucky Derby comes, the guarantee will be the horse that is the favorite pretty much won its last race leading into it. Probably won its last two or three races leading into it. Probably has the fastest speed. There's a momentum thing of this is the highest probability. Well, last year,

we had the tariff fears at this point. And I posted something today because we are three weeks post the beginning of this disruption in Iran. And there is no sign based on the facts, meaning the price is going higher. There was a major attack on Ras Al Fahan yesterday in Qatar. it's responsible for over 35% of helium. Helium is a major component of semiconductors. Semiconductors are the most owned part. Most of my portfolio is in semiconductors. So if all of a sudden you get a change in kind of earnings estimates, you could have a problem. And this is where I want to just leave people with this. Last year, when the tariffs came out and you and I said everyone was panicking, I think we have the complete opposite. This is like a George Costanza do

the opposite moment. Nobody's panicking. Yet the facts are that we are actually seeing inflation that will filter through. We will see incredibly high inflation numbers. And it's not just from gas at the pump. Oil is in everything. And I think everyone knows that. So when you hear people say, well, the US is now a net exporter of this and that, and we produce so much natural gas, that's true. But we also import a lot of things, plastics and polymers and fertilizer and things that go into other components. And all of those spot prices have gone through the roof, batteries, semiconductors, everything. So the longer this goes on, the more we're getting closer. And this will be the trigger point. When you start seeing estimate revisions come down, and the reason

they're not coming down yet is because last year they came down and they were wrong. And this gets back to the handicapping thing. The recency bias is we changed our S&P target last year for tariffs. We're not doing that again. We changed our estimate revisions for EPS. They were so wrong on the earnings last year for the S&P. We're not doing that. Institutions that sold the market on the fears of these things. So I think everyone is paralyzed trying not to make the same mistake as last year. In a weird way, the taco trade is helping Trump. Everyone thinks that he's going to pivot, end the war, claim victory. I hope that happens, right? Both as an investor, as an American, and frankly, as just a human, is if the missiles stop getting shot in both

directions, that means that there is more peace rather than conflict. That means that the straight probably opens back up. That means that oil prices aren't as high. It means that inflation won't go as high. And it means that the market probably can continue in its general up into the right direction. I don't know if it's going to end anytime soon. Right. I think that's the question. And it's like the longer it goes on in a weird way, Iran has more of a negative impact on the rest of the world, which means they're getting more and more leverage every day because they're basically forcing our hand and saying at some point is the United States going to cry uncle and say, OK, we've had enough of this. But this is the exact same thing. Last year, when he was

doing taco, people said, but that's not going to work with China because China has a chip and the chip is rare earth. Iran has a chip and like it was with rare earth last year, if Trump says I'm done, what does that have to do with Iran's decision? They've been assassinating. I mean, there's a lot of people that are dead. We don't even know who's making decisions now. So I don't know if people should be looking at this as, okay, I can just say it's all

done. what will affect the economy. He had control over that last year. He said the tariffs will be 50%. Okay, we're going to hold off on tariffs. He can't say, okay, gas is going to go down. Diesel is going to go down. Helium prices are going to go down. Iran had a tax this week on energy facilities in the Middle East, and they accomplished it. They clearly can do this with little drones, not with missiles. So the thing I worry about, again, is not that this is like all situations, this will end in three months from now, six months from now, we'll look back and realize this drove things higher. What we don't know is three and six months from now, will oil

prices be 80 or will they be 110 or will they be 65? We don't know that. And I think what the market is telling you in these parabolic moves that are just like what happened with memory just like what happened with silver. I believe we are in a commodity bull market. I think oil had lagged behind these other metals. And as I said in some presentation I did yesterday to people, silver, even with the fall that's happened relative to six months ago, is up 60%. Copper relative to six months ago is up 20%. DRAM prices are up 500%. Now oil is up 60%. percent. This is a commodity bull market. And I think the geopolitical ramifications of a commodity bull market, which we saw in the 1970s, are what we're seeing now.

So let's talk for a second about what the United States could do to get oil and LNG down. End the war is one thing. The second thing, obviously, is we can drill more, which would probably require us to deregulate or maybe even make government investment into domestic drilling and production. We can probably do some stuff with the Venezuelan oil that we have influence over. There is a strategic reserve that is pretty depleted. It does not seem like we have a lot to release there, but there are some allies that have a couple of weeks. Frankly, it doesn't seem like there are six months worth of reserves, but definitely weeks. And then there's always the reduction of demand, which is very hard for the government to influence, but there's probably

some things they could do on that front. That's all oil. I think it's pretty well understood, but definitely stopping the war is probably the single biggest thing. On LNG, I'm not an expert in any form or fashion, but the little research that I have done online seems like that is much, much more difficult to influence the price of LNG. And that's really where some of the recent destruction of energy infrastructure in the Middle East is focused, the gas field, and then the largest, um, LNG exporter. And so do you worry more about the LNG side or is it all just energy in your mind and you can kind of put oil and gas together and, and, uh, they'll go in the same direction. So natural gas prices in the U S have barely budged natural gas prices around the globe

are up sharply. So you have to separate, we are flush with natural gas in this country, which is great, except for again, that doesn't help us on gas at the pump. That doesn't help us with diesel. When people sit there and say, well, then we're fine because we're not going to see the same spike in our electricity, but all that's true. But the issue is it is a global economy and you still have about 40% of the revenues in the S&P 500 coming from globally. And we import a lot of things, semiconductors, all the equipment we're using for building out the the data centers a lot of that stuff comes from overseas so if prices overseas are going up this is where as much as i want people to like not panic i i don't know how you can ignore charts

that look the way they do when the bombing is still going on on energy facilities today i think too many people are caught in when is this going to end and go back to where it was Commodity bull markets and the 1970s, whenever inflation started to pick up even slightly, just like I use the handicapping side, what are people still freaking out about here in elections? It's inflation. Inflation has not gotten better. So it was already a problem now.

No, in people's minds, the way they're making decisions. So forget true inflation, all this stuff. Most people here are still voting. We saw an election in New York. Affordability is getting worse in their mind. Yeah. And let's, let's move it that way. The affordability thing, this just makes affordability worse.

Yeah. And for the record, true flation over the last three weeks has gone from 0.8 to 1.65 as of Friday morning. And so the true flation real time metric has doubled. So forget whether you believe the true flation, whatever, just the direction to your point is explosively moving higher with oil, et cetera. And just so people know that is a year over year number. Correct.

So if it was month over month, when we see the next month over month number in headline CPI, I mean, I think a 1% or higher number is going to happen on the headline number. We'll see what core does. But this is the reason why I think people are in that instant gratification side. They haven't adjusted. I'm just giving people the scenario of I think when we move a few weeks out, you will start to see the probability of an increase in a recession. And I just want to emphasize, I've been fairly negative on this podcast because of private credit, because of the financial stocks. All of those things were happening long before inflation expectations went higher.

We started pricing out Fed cuts. Two-year rates have now gone up shortly. These are other issues. So financial conditions, that magic phrase that you hear people talk about, credit spreads are widening. Oil prices are going higher. The dollar is going higher. stocks are going down. All of these things are saying the same thing right now, which is

be more in cash. Let's be patient with this. And there are times where you don't want to be offensive with investing. And I think this still remains one of those times to be defensive and to wait for better prices. Do we get a recession? The only way that we would have, quote unquote, a recession would be a technical recession, meaning where GDP is negative in real GDP terms over two quarters, I do not think we will see any kind of job losses that are meaningful. We haven't seen anything in jobless claims yet. But the problem is we also have had no job creation. So the reason I'm reluctant to say that it won't be something that gets defined by the NBER, if oil prices stay where they are, around the globe,

the probability of the global economy going into recession goes higher, and the US by definition does. If we can't order more semiconductors and we have to slow down data centers, then we're in trouble. We ain't got no housing market. We ain't got no commercial real estate market. AI has been the dominant theme. So when people worry about a CapEx cut, maybe the CapEx cut comes in, we actually can't do anything right now because we can't get the equipment that we need to build the stuff and the bottlenecks get worse. That is what the 1970s were about. They were about bottlenecks. And if people want to go back and look at the 1970s, so far year to date, the performance of the S&P 500 by sectors where energy, materials, utilities, consumer staples, real estate,

those are the best performing sectors, the ones that are the worst, technology, financials. That was basically the decade of the 1970s. And I'll just say one more thing on this, because I've talked about Bitcoin being the big beneficiary. I believe over the course of the next five to 10 years, GDP is going to go up faster than the S&P 500. What that means, I don't know. But if nominal GDP goes up faster than the S&P 500, you get multiple compression. That's what we've seen so far too, especially in software and the hyperscalers. A multiple compression five-year period where commodities go higher, which is the norm, means you want to have some investments in other things. I will keep preaching that I want to be in hardware. I do not want to

be in software. I think the hardware stuff may come under a little bit of pressure because it's over-owned at this point. So I think people should be, again, in more cash for at least the next few weeks, just kind of waiting. And if prices do fall down, I don't think there's going to be a serious recession, but that's all dependent on the fact that oil prices don't shoot higher or go much higher than they are. How high could they go, right? Like oil prices, obviously, I think throughout my lifetime, there's been oscillation between generally 50 to 150, right? And there's times where they spike, they come back down, they've really kind of sat, let's call it somewhere in that like $60 to $100-ish range as maybe a guiding light. Can we see $200? Like I said,

Oman got up to $170 this week. It's still up at $160. Dubai. And again, these are not fake oil markets. They're real oil markets. WTI is for Texas. Brent crude, European, $110, $120. Of course we can see 200. I don't think it can stay up there very long, but that means demand destruction happens. When demand destruction happens, then all of the analysts have to take the numbers down for everything. And that's where we're kind of headed towards. Do I think we're going to get up there again? I think people making prediction on this are really trying to say when Iran is going to make the decision. We know that Trump does not want this for the midterms. But what does Iran want? This gets back to my conversation about China. We've bombed them

and they want to secure some sort of leadership in whatever is left of the country. And I think that means still showing that they're not giving up. So I don't, I literally, I've listened to a bunch of people. I have a lot of friends that are geopolitical strategists. I was listening a couple weeks ago. Most of them have been wrong to this point. And it's not that they're wrong. It's that they honestly just don't know. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure. If you believe in Bitcoin long term, the worst move you can make is selling it just to access liquidity. That's why you should check out Figure. Right now, Figure offers crypto-backed loans at 8.9% interest with 50% LTV. And so you can unlock capital without creating a taxable event or giving up your Bitcoin

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Hold your Bitcoin, unlock liquidity, or put capital to work. Check out Figure using my link in the description or go to figuremarkets.co.pomp. figuremarkets.co.pomp. What about Bitcoin and gold? It seems like both of those assets that for a minute there, you know, gold was selling off, Bitcoin was running. now towards the end of this week. We've seen Bitcoin kind of cool off a little bit as well as I think, you know, still some of the sets in people's minds. So there's a few things that are

interesting. So since the war started, Bitcoin is, I think, the best performing asset by a good amount to gold is now falling sharply. And I think it's down eight or nine percent since the beginning of the war. And Bitcoin is up five to six since the beginning, which is an interesting dynamic on itself. Now, I said it last week, I'll say it again. Some of this is just mean reversion, meaning gold had outperformed significantly. But I do think there's a couple of things going on with inside the Middle East. You've got the UAE focused on liquidity for the banking system. So they're already having to pump money into the system. We do have an inflation issue that has picked up. And even though gold is a good, theoretically, inflation hedge, not if it

means rate cuts are going from zero to up. Bitcoin already discounted this, so it already got ahead of it. If we're going to have a recession and private credit is going to become a bigger issue, then I'm going to go back to my thesis for Bitcoin, which is they're going to have to do something to provide liquidity to the system. If you can't get the oil price down, I hate to say it, guys, but if private credit is worsening, they're going to have to do something for private credit. I wrote about it last week. I'll say it again. This is my belief that the 1970s are the most important thing for Bitcoin. Not in the fact that inflation in the 1970s was high. We all know that CPI got up to higher levels than in 2022. Then it came down, then it went higher again,

then kind of went sideways. It just never died. We could be in a three-year period where now that oil prices are no longer sitting there, and I think we're in a commodity bull market, where we could have headline inflation stay high, core inflation for services could come down because of the deflationary pressures on AI. The deflationary pressures on AI are crushing software and they're crushing anything built on code. And like I've said, if you at the end of this year are sitting there and you realize that the S&P 500 was unchanged or down slightly, and next year, there's not a lot of hope for anything changing because we're still in a commodity bull market and people are like, what's going on here? We've got a credit problem. We've got this.

then all of a sudden people are looking for growth assets and they look around and I think Bitcoin will be the best performing asset this year when you put it in the growth bucket. And if that's the case, we already have the momentum. So I'm going to keep pounding the table that the best thing for Bitcoin is a continuing credit problem, which I don't think can be resolved on itself. And at the same point, having a commodity bear market, a bull market, which is based on scarcity, and then a shorting of abundance, which is based on these growth assets. If all of that plays in. Bitcoin's like uniquely positioned. It's uniquely positioned. Yeah. It goes back to this idea of

Bitcoin is a battery that you can store capital in when other things are either broken, not working, you're not excited about. It's kind of like that store of value. And I do wonder from a mental perspective, I have in my head this framework, huge generalization. There will be plenty of anecdotes that disprove this on a smaller scale. The Middle East is much more open to the idea of Bitcoin than Asia is. And so really last year, the talk was like the Chinese central bank, right? The Asian countries, they're the ones who are de-dollarizing, de-fiat, you know, currency. Now we're talking about the Middle East and the Middle East scene, and you can see it in the headlines, right? Some of their sovereign wealth funds, they've bought the ETFs. We've seen them

participate with the stable coin stuff. They're trying to really kind of financialize and tokenize and do all stuff. Maybe that is part of that decoupling of gold and Bitcoin, or maybe the inverse correlation is that actually we're moving from a China capital flow dominant narrative to a Middle East capital flow dominant narrative. And if that's the case, then their asset is more Bitcoin than gold, whereas China was the opposite. Does that resonate? Yeah. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm actually, so I agree with you. And I think that is a, so I can tell when we walk into the Anthony Pompliano zone where he knows more than I do about a subject. Oh, that's like one, one minute of this entire podcast. Perfect. No, no, no. This

is my minute. Let me get ready. I'm going to take over the questions now. So, uh, and again, I want to answer what you said, but then I want to flip the question back because I think this is an important thing for people listening. So we get a lot of different listeners to both the community that knows me from my macro days and the community that's known you since 2013-ish. I think everyone should care about this topic because I'm saying that Bitcoin is going to come out of this as the asset that macro funds and everyone needs to add to their portfolio as we get closer to the end. You just brought up a topic which I completely agree with, which is we are going to have a pivot in the globe where the Middle East now, which is in chaos.

What do you want to old and store? Gold. There's rumors that the reason gold has been falling is because Middle East sellers have shown up. Whether or not that's true, I think the love affair with gold for India, for China, for the places there, relative to Bitcoin, when you already said something, they're already involved in this, but they're also involved from a sovereign level of really buying into AI.

So the question I want to ask you is, you get hammered by people whenever Bitcoin falls. Have those, the people that hammer you normally who are anti-Bitcoin, have they slowed down? And what is the sentiment right now from, let's say, the crypto community looking for a bottom? Where are people now? Well, let me talk about from my personal perspective first. Going into the year, when people would ask me in private, you know, what's your outlook for Bitcoin? I would describe to them that I am a tempered optimist. And the reason was because I thought that deflation was the big risk going into the start of the year.

And if you have deflation, that's a headwind for asset prices. If you have deflation, then liquidity is not drastically increasing. And so therefore, if Bitcoin is very sensitive to liquidity, it doesn't mean that it's going to drop 80%, but it does mean that it is going to have some struggle in terms of driving a huge return. I actually wrote yesterday, I am now starting to change my mind because of the short-term oil price impact and the increasing likelihood of inflation. Now, what I think is unique about Bitcoin is, and you mentioned a little bit, the Middle Eastern countries, what they're really going through is they have young people who have risen into positions of power and influence, and they are trying to digitally transform their countries.

And as they go through that digital transformation, that includes artificial intelligence, that includes getting everyone mobile phones and internet and all that kind of stuff. It includes e-commerce. It includes eliciting all of the big industry giants of Silicon Valley and the West into their countries. But it also includes them looking at stable coins and Bitcoin and tokenization and, you know, financialized assets as well. and so if you go just look at saudi as an example i mean they pretty much went from not very quote-unquote developed to they're talking about neom right and you know kind of hold everything and they're not just talking about hey we're going to build the line or neom or whatever how they do it what are the considerations of which they're building how green or renewable energy or you know uh the way that it flows and all these things that are super cutting edge and so i do think that when i when i view gold and you said to me you know what are the cultures where gold is most embedded it is the like when it's not every single friend i have that is indian

or from india will tell you my uncle my grandfather my father is that you know passing the family gold that like it's a generalization but it's because it's true yep china very similarly right That was the chosen asset. And those are very patriarch driven kind of consensus cultures where, you know, go online. Like people will be like, I just sold my company for $500 million and my dad's still asking why I didn't become a doctor, right? You know, type thing. I do think that there's something about the individualism of the West and the breaking away from, hey, what did the quote unquote like boomer class do? I want to do something different. And sometimes I actually think in America, the individualism is more about like

being your own individual more so than being right yep well is the middle east actually transforming from a society standpoint to more individualism right like they are quote-unquote deregulating from a lot of the the religious stuff it's you know all this kind of stuff that to me is a very very interesting thing when you get the geopolitical overlay now because how many people are trying to keep their money in the country versus get it out and it doesn't mean they're all going to rush and go buy bitcoin or anything like that but i do think that the society is just like it's been warmed up more to an idea like this and then if your sovereign wealth fund is buying it openly yep and you're mining in your country it's like not

as taboo whereas in china it's still you know debatable whether it's illegal or not to mine and you know there's just like a different thing so to me yes that that is happening now on the crypto sentiment side the americans it's in the toilet still like they're all super frustrated whatever and so in a weird way we're back to where we started which was in the u.s unless you were speculating for the most part most people were like what's the point of bitcoin people in middle east aren't asking that question right now they understand very intimately what the value of bitcoin is it's just whether that's going to be a tool they use or not whereas in the united states were like uh you know oh i could use stable coins now i could do this my you know atm works it's

just a different analysis here's something so with everything you said and i hope people listened when anthony talks about this because this dynamic of the way people think of bitcoin with inside the world this conversation wouldn't have happened in 2022 and there's a reason why going back 2022 2022 wall street hated bitcoin we didn't have the etf we didn't have uh the genius that we didn't have clarity sitting on the edge like we're in a different time period bankruptcies were rampant it had fallen exactly 80 percent etc and we had all that money that had been printed in the reason i want to bring that up if there was no iran war right now what we'd be focused on a lot more is the next fed chair so i just want to bring this up to people we're in a very different

situation we were in 2022 for a very important reason. We still have massive debt that was created post-COVID, but the money supply stimulus side is gone. The credit side is in a very big downturn, and we have AI now sitting here. This is the reason why I want to say to people, we have a deflationary force of AI sitting in front of us on one side. We have headline inflation that is going to be higher for the next three months related to all these things on the hardware side. And we're going to have a new Fed chair that is going to have to ignore headline inflation. We have someone coming in. And so this to me is an interesting dynamic. We're on the one side. This administration has been very clear. We are not focused on inflation today. We are focused

on inflation in the future, which is going to be like the 1990s. I can't think of a better scenario for Bitcoin. I really can't. And I think it would be more of a discussion if the war wasn't going on that a Fed chair was coming in. I still don't think at this point people will be focused on Bitcoin. The reason I think the focus has to be on Bitcoin is because the first part of the year was the software destruction. And it made people realize I can't depend on these growth companies the way I did. And all long duration assets are under attack. And I will keep saying it over and over again. I believe liquidity is going to become a real thing. I think liquidity for people is a major story. We're seeing it in private credit. We saw it with the endowments last year. If you

want to generate returns, you need to get the liquidity back. That's why tokenization matters. All these things are very positive for Bitcoin because it's a 24-7 daily liquidity product with volume. I think Bitcoin is going to explode out of here once we get to the realization that the Fed is going to be focused on the deflation side, not on the inflation side. And these two forces are going against each other right now. I have written multiple times last week about the battle between short-term oil impact and inflation versus long-term tech deflation. I think that I am comfortable saying one of the hardest parts about commenting about, let's say, the next 12 months is you don't know how long the short-term oil inflationary aspect is. But that will drive the short-term numbers.

The long-term deflation is even bigger today than it was two weeks ago. And if you think about what happened this week, Jeff Bezos rumored to go and buy up a bunch of manufacturing business. 100 billion dollars worth and he's going to put ai robotics etc automation into them uh elon musk is yelling from the rooftop about everything from self-driving cars etc uh we now have uh jensen huang talking about how they're no longer just software that it's going to be all of the robotics you know etc travis kalanick came out of nowhere you know eight years of uh underground pops up it says by the way my company's named adams we are going hard into ai in the physical world etc like these are some of the smartest most well-capitalized entrepreneurs in the world

it's like a memo went out in the last 30 days okay everyone software everyone already is convinced now let's talk about hardware and ai in that world well if they accelerate the robotics component of this and you get software and hardware happening at the same time the deflationary force just like two or three x maybe even bigger just given how much of the economy is still in these physical businesses, right? Yeah. And, and I think the change, so if you take Jensen Yu Wong and you start at the beginning of the year, he gives his, um, his speech at the CES in like on January 6th, you know what he doesn't mention that day is open clock. You know what he's mentioned repeatedly since, and that's because open call was not a thing, even though the, it was already in GitHub,

It didn't really become a thing until late January. Since then, the entire AI world is about OpenClaw. Andreessen posted something about it yesterday and just talked about how important this moment was. We opened up the agentic world, which means digital employees are a real thing. The amount of things that I've heard built, so I've been open about the fact that I've two OpenClaw setups at home. I was saying to Matt before we started this that my weekend is now about how I have to

take it to another level because of the things that people have said to me. Here's the interesting thing for people sitting at home. People in their 30s and 40s, they really don't use AI that much. Now, let me say at least 30. Most people are having kids in their 30s now. If you're in your 40s and you have a 12-year-old kid, you're going to baseball games and football games. You're going to lacrosse. You don't have the time to sit and do open claw. But for people in their 50s like me, where their kids are already off to college. That's interesting. People in their 20s, there's a gap that's happening.

And the young people are using OpenClaw, but I'm starting now to get the best ideas from 50 plus year olds that are putting the time into it. So if you're watching this or listening to this and you're in your 50s, you have no excuse. These are amazing things. And the things that people have built that they showed me, I went, oh my gosh, I'm not doing enough with this.

It is amazing, the things that I've heard. And the reason I bring it up for this conversation The labor pressure for all of this stuff is now increasing. You and I have joked about digital employees. Using open call allows you to have as many employees as you want to have to literally do stuff and to be able to go through this. So I think we've entered a period where if the economy starts to slow down, what's that going to do to the job situation?

If you need to make numbers, are you more apt to err on the side now of reducing labor faster? They've been doing this while the economy has been good and earnings estimates have been going up. I worry about the labor situation for this year. Actually, if the oil price stays up here, that these companies that are already thinking about now how to incorporate the agentic side into their business, that they realize that this is the best time to take a hit on their earnings in terms of spending money and then

reduce their headcount as the offset because people had been rewarded. I will say one thing. Meta, at the end of last Friday, leaked out that they're going to get rid of 20% of their workforce, and now there's numbers it could be higher. Their stock price gapped higher on Monday. It's gone right back down. Oracle beat numbers a couple weeks ago. Stock's right back down.

I worry about the fact that for a lot of the deflation that's happening in the software side, that people are underestimating how fast this is going to go, and it makes sense that they were the first ones to be disrupted. But I think the jobs market for knowledge workers, and if you get the chance, I meant to send you this. Andre Carpathy put out a, did you see it? Yeah. AI jobs. Yeah. Amazing dashboard to go spend time at and go look. And he put it on GitHub and I'm going to be posting on the video this week, but he just went through and showed how many people are at disruption for this whole situation. Today's episode is brought to you by Fountain Life. Are you ready to seize the day

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So I'm in your target cohort of people who don't have a lot of time because I'm 37 years old. I have children. We've got all these businesses, et cetera. I can now admit that I tricked everyone in our companies this week. For one day, I genuinely thought I was going to have to travel. And I figured out early in the week that I was not going to have to travel.

But I didn't tell anyone that the trip was going to get canceled, except for two people. And I said, hey, on Thursday, I'm going to have me an AI day. And I sat and all day, set a bunch of stuff up, did whatever. it is the single most addicting thing I've done in years. Because as soon as you start tinkering, and I was already playing with like really easy, you know, like really get into it. Oh man, I was excited to show up on Friday, right?

How do I get out of these meetings to go back to doing this? Because you can just see how exponential it is. Another data point, Pulsia, the guy who's building the, was no employees, one to 5 million in annualized revenue. I think it's 18 days. Yeah. I mean, at what point are people like, hey, this thing is real, right? We have now seen the Instagram accounts with all of the different AI characters explode. I'm talking millions of followers on these things, right?

Then I go and I look and I start to say to myself, hold on a second. I can see on Twitter people who are using the AI stuff. Super viral. It's AI. But it's good content, right? Then you go and you start to look at some of these businesses. And as you start to pick apart what the AI stuff is doing, my biggest takeaway from it all is, and I actually think I disagree a little bit with you. we have not in any of our businesses gotten rid of a piece of software because we built it

internally what we have done though is not hired people that we thought we were going to have to hire because it's like we've been able to automate the role before we had a human in the role we have not laid anyone off because of this maybe that everyone who works for us maybe that'll happen um but uh when you think about it from that perspective it is like the labor part of this if you're 25 years old and you don't know anything about ai i would be very nervous right now right and so it really does come back to me on okay these businesses how many of them are going to use this stuff versus the ones that are going to be able to persist a restaurant i actually think is super interesting because they can probably use a lot

of this stuff right it's not a high-flying tech company yep i got a friend in the industrial space He runs like an electric components business. He's like, dude, we're running rapid throughout our entire business trying to figure out how to implement this. And so I think your point about like this is going to become so pervasive, still to this day, people are drastically underestimating how pervasive it will be. They are. And let me push back on something you said and just give you a very simple analogy.

Your argument that I hear repeatedly from people about, I'm not getting rid of my software. When the VHS was the way to watch movies and you've got a library of 100 VHS tapes and then all of a sudden a DVD player comes out, not a lot of people run out and then go replace all of their VHS even though the DVD is a better picture. Everything's better. Well, then you fast forward another three years and all of a sudden we're streaming. The reason people are stuck in software is because it costs money to go buy the other machine. And if you want to go replace all those videos that you watch, your kids watch time and time again, you have to go buy that. There's a cost side. So everyone who does this is full of shit.

They're just full of it. Well, can I make one suggestion or maybe one point? What I am very closely watching is can existing businesses adopt this before they get disrupted? i'll give you a great example so uh that's what make you the ai stuff so this hold on ai one of the things that um i was using was uh was notion to uh to do something and i was in an lm and i basically said here's what i want to do here's some of the parameters here's all the stuff uh i'm dumb help me create a plan let's strategize before i do anything give me step by step super actionable but whatever okay great one of the steps was get the notion open create three databases

here's the names of the databases put these fields whatever i said i've used notion a bunch of times i've never set it up myself other people on the team will create it and i know how to navigate it whatever but like i'm not the notion builder i'm the notion user i don't know how to do this so i was ready to go google how to set up a database in notion whatever but i logged in a notion and i saw that there was a you know co-pilot essentially copy and pasted what chat gbt told me put it in there all of a sudden i had three databases with the names the fields and i said oh my god this thing just gave me the exact experience that i want i don't want to do the work i just want to tell you what to do you do it for me sure can someone disrupt notion

that is you know ai first bubble whatever if a company like notion is adopting it inside of their product, I'm more skeptical of that. Now, the question is, when you start to think of AI native, maybe actually you don't even need an interface at all for the next Notion, right? It's just like purely agents are interacting. It's like something that is radically different. Okay, maybe. But this in-between period, by having that co-pilot, Notion essentially locked me in as a user because I get the experience of the AI in their product, but I don't need to go find some AI you know note-taking whatever type thing did they charge more money yet no i think i uh no not not for uh not for using that tool yeah so somebody's losing meaning somebody's paying for that right

so eventually your price has to go higher true so the way ai is moving in the fact or the vcs just keep subsidizing it we have co-work dispatch do you know if maybe co-work dispatch could work better than notion no you don't okay so when you buy i'll find out today when you buy a mac mini if the mac mini the operating system has ai doesn't that replace notion possibly well you know what i i went and i uh went to the apple store mac mini sold out in new york city i said okay what's the bigger one i just kept calling got a computer showed up i have a mac mini that i you know used for my own personal stuff and then had this thing and i just said apple what are the earnings report coming up these guys are going to print money so the reason i i've done

these two examples and i just want to make sure people understand because they're important so with the vhs one to the dvd that's a good example and but here's the thing as a parent you're just like, I like grainy TV. I'm fine with that. As a business, you can't do that because if another business is using DVDs and people see them and they're like, I'd rather watch that, then gradually it goes. Now in a linear world or linear change, you've got time in exponential time. The reason I brought up the cowork thing is because we don't know the answer, but already cowork was meant to do a lot of the things notion did. I made the decision with notion not to upgrade things. And there was a reason for it. I really believe that there was a way

to replicate everything because I use Notion for every single video. That's where I collect all my news items. But I would much rather just tell my phone, hey, put this in a file this week's file. And it just does it. And that's where we are with dispatch. So dispatch is a walkie talkie as I'm sitting there and I'm all over. It just posted right on my computer. Right now, I'm doing it on the cloud in here. But what I'll be doing with dispatch, which is another form of open call, but now it's built into your system and it's safer, I can use co-work to just say, create me a new file for this week's videos.

Take this one, post it in there. It's moving so fast that we don't know what we can do, but it's very disruptive to notion because that's just a matter of time before you figure it out. and in a world with X, I find, I mean, you and I find the newest things in X. If it wasn't for X, how would I know what to do in AI? That's why so many people I think fall behind and they don't understand it. And the reason is because they don't actually, they're not an X. I don't know how you can keep up with AI without being an X. I don't know. But think about how many people that we know that are my age that don't use X for anything. They're on blue sky. But I don't know

Honestly, I don't know what they do. For people that are not on X, you can't possibly keep up with AI because it is the only way to stay on top of the changes that are happening. We didn't talk before, but when I say, hey, did you see carpathyjobs.ai? Yeah, I saw that. We're talking about things. I don't think people appreciate the fact we don't prep for this. We're both in X all week for different reasons, but they're all the same reason, which is

to stay on top of things, to hopefully continue to move forward at a pace that is the same as AI, but to be relevant because people want to talk to me because I know things they don't know. Well, the way that I know things they don't know is by using AI, but in particular, by being on X. It's, I'm, I'm probably Elon's best spokesperson for that. It's like a decentralized research team, right? And what I love about it is, uh, there's not a financial incentive necessarily, right?

Uh, at least directly there's this, um, social incentive. Like when you post, you want the feedback, you want the engagement, you want this stuff, right? So everyone is incentivized to keep throwing the latest, greatest, whatever in there. I find it very fascinating. The one thing I will say about all of the software that's being built though, we have walked away from a couple of different acquisitions that we were considering because we quickly realized we could just do this ourself, right?

Maybe not as well in the beginning, whatever, right? The second thing is, take for example, there's AI powered business builders. I've seen a couple of those get launched. There's one, I think, called Ready. There's another one called Durable, et cetera. Each of them have their own bells and whistles, whatever. But like the technology is now here where you can basically say, I want to create a business that does X, Y, Z, create a website, do my, you know, sales and marketing content to create a drip campaign, find me customers, whatever. There's going to be a lot of these, right?

Just like there was a lot of website builders back in the day, whether it was Squarespace, Wix, you know, but whatever. And so I do think that it is becoming a full-on race because there's these moats that aren't technology-driven, which actually an underappreciated point is how amazing is it for the consumer? The cutthroat competition between all of these different people who have the same technology and are trying to get you to use their product, it just pushes the pace. We're seeing it in the models. We're now seeing it in the applied AI component. And it reminds me a lot of, you know, the trope is always like, remember when you could drive across Manhattan or San Francisco for three bucks because the VCs were just pouring cash in.

Now, you know, it's $25 and you're like, hey, what happened? Like there will be a day where this like 20 bucks a month is not going to be 20 bucks. Yep. And so I just hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. So, you know, thank your local VC for the time being. No, I think the point is valid. But I'll give one one thing to software companies on an argument that came up over the course of last month. And again, the the the good thing about the spike in oil is now I don't have to get any debates about software like it's fallen.

It's sitting there. It's a dead asset. I'm not getting any more arguments on this stuff from people. So no one's out there saying, I think this is a mistake. I think this is going higher. It's like just kind of died out, which is good for the people that were, you know, putting their. this is a mistake it's kind of like maduro remember that whole thing oh wait what so here's my because i'm a startup business and i'm i'm not paying for much software but i have a bloomberg

terminal and it's really expensive um bloomberg ai is now finally out and i'm using it is it good uh so here here's the thing it is not good uh but here's what it does mike mike listen here's what it does do in the world of bloomberg to know all the functions to find the indices and stuff has always been a hassle for people i've considered myself in the point you know one percent of users because i think i'm very good at finding things and doing my bloomberg charts it just got easier because of it because what i use it for is actually to figure out how to use bloomberg get an even bigger, bigger pace. But I've also built probably 15 different screens regarding my model portfolio thing that I'm building out for the paywall service. I did that in perplexity

computer. Bloomberg can't do it. What I had to do was go pay for data, which cost me $600 a year, but now it's all up to date. It took me three minutes to build something that I can't build in Bloomberg. So for all of you Bloomberg people, meaning the people who use it are like this software is everyone who says perplexity absolutely can build you the most amazing interfaces that just sit up there as an HTML pulling in real prices. And it looks just like a Bloomberg screen. And it takes three minutes to build. I put in all the names. I give it the technical things that I want to have up. I click all throughout the screen. It's all there. So if someone wants to tell me that being able to search through Bloomberg and learn how to get this and

the messaging service is worth the 30,000 a year, you guys are up a bad tree. There will be less seats for Bloomberg going forward than there has been. So it's not a public company, but that is my view of software. And you gave an interesting thing for people. You're looking at software that comes in and you go, now we can probably build this. That is the, and the one where you said you're not getting rid of them. That is friction. The other one is choice. If you were already locked into it and they came into it, then you're going to make the decision with notion. Do I want to pay more money for this? If they put that on you, that'll change your decision-making process. And that's where I think we are with software. Talk your shit, Jordy. Talk your shit.

All of Bloomberg. You know how many times people tell me the chat is what, and I'm like, yes, I understand. That is why people enjoy using this product. What happens though, if their compliance team lets them go into a bigger chat called x where they can talk and dm and do all this stuff right but then you need everyone else who's in their 50s and 60s to do the same thing so uh i don't know what this thing is called let me tell you uh i've been um i've been uh beta testing something i think they're going to call it x chat that's what it looks like uh this thing is called x chat and uh basically it is uh breaking out uh twitter x dms into a standalone app and i've been on there um one of the underrated points that uh i didn't realize

until i started beta testing it um it may shock people i have my notifications turned off for x like i don't need that that chaos every day but i will miss dms and i won't see them for you know 12 hours 24 hours because i don't go check the the dm thing all the time with x chat i get a notification just for the dms but i don't get it for anything else right and so it's been a very welcomed you know component of this but if all of a sudden you can chat you can get information you can talk you know again i don't know let's see let's see what happens i it's a weird thing two things are true at the same time they can hold on for longer than people think but also the end result does not change it's uh it's going to be very high pressure but holding holding on which

i agree is a friction thing but that's not growth and this is the thing i keep saying to people with bitcoin we have destroyed the ability of people to know that they have growth you're getting more and more people in x chamath did something this week and regardless of your viewpoint of chamath he's a great guy i i don't know him so you can you can you can speak for for him um what i've been nice to me. Good. And then, then you should say that as, as I defend you, when everyone says anything about you and hopefully you do the same thing for me. Yeah, Jory spends half his week on Twitter having to defend me. No, no, no. But there, there, people are starting to talk more about terminal value and moats. And rather than get into the, is this software going out of

business today? None of these softwares, Bloomberg's not going out of business today, but that's not the way that these companies should be valued. They should be valued. Like I said, with the VHS in three years, will people still be using them? Okay. Yes. But will they be buying more VHS videos or will they have a DVD player as well? And this won't grow. If you're going to be priced as a growth asset in a world that used to have growth like this, the world has changed. And so I will emphasize it again, because I care about the people trying to manage their money right now. I do not think there will be a recession. I think you're going to have a better buying opportunity for things. Go through the volatility this year and hope that the

semiconductors come down again. Hope we've had a correction in silver. I'm buying silver in terms of companies this week because I, in my mind, believe that three years from now, silver will be needed because of all the drones and all of the technology and all the semiconductors. I'm not touching software because three years from now, I think they will be like the VHS video machine. You're not going to be selling anymore because people are going to gradually be migrating. So there's no growth for it. I want to be long commodities. I want to be long compute. If people get a chance, listen to the Dwarkash Patel, Dylan Patel interview from this week. Phenomenal. And all he talked about is we don't have enough compute. He even made the argument, Dylan Patel,

who is probably the most, I would say, have you had him on? No. Okay. Definitely you should have him on. One of the smart, he should want to be here. He does semi-analysis. You should have him on. Very smart, fast speaker, knows his space inside and out. But more importantly, he just said power is not the issue. And I've started to migrate that way over the course of the last four months for a variety of reasons in terms of optimization of the grid. It's not that we have enough power right now, but I think the solutions that are happening allow us to kind of, that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is we don't have enough memory and we don't have enough compute right now relative to the demand that has now shown up because of OpenClaw. Agentex used a

tremendous more amount of compute. And that's why Jensen Yuan is talking about it. That's why he made the pivot to inference i know that we got to go here in a second but um i still believe one of the most exciting investments i've made is base power they're the ones to the decentralized uh power in texas they just got their uh license to go into illinois so now two states uh zach dell tweeted two down 48 to go i said let's go um but i want to ask you about uh fraud crime exports hair dryers um three people were arrested this is not like some twitter stuff but it does look like actually this started on x that people started to raise the alarm as much as two or three years ago saying i think somebody is smuggling the gpus into china the u.s government

the department of justice just arrested three people who are executives or board members at super micro yep i mean what is your take like this is crazy this is this needs to be a movie oceans 14 uh so rather than get into the fact that this goes on because as we've learned with the credit markets there's a lot of fraud that goes on throughout the world but when the regulators are looking at a particular situation and it's up for national security. And I think that's where we get into the spotlight gets a little bigger and the inability for, you know, the corrupt people to pay off the people that need to be paid off. So I'm not surprised by anything that happens behind the walls of people trying to sneak GPUs around because it

is. I think Jensen Yuan this week said the world will realize that this is now a token economy, that the most important commodity in the world is tokens and i think gpus have been a major part of the need from a military basis to catch up so i think everyone wants them and smuggling things and moving things around that's not always because someone wants to it's because of if i've watched enough movies uh there may be more to the story in terms of why they were going over there and who had what on what so the uh the red flag yeah should have been in the first sentence of the doj press release that is titled three charged with conspiring to unlawfully divert cutting-edge u.s artificial intelligence technology to china two of the individuals they have their name their

official like government name but one of them goes by wally and the other one goes by willie and i was just like wait what i had to read it three times i thought that like there was some sort of i was like it's like you and i just coming up with a new name and just be like you're gonna be wally i'm gonna be willie all right guys that's it for today we'll talk to you guys next week