Anthony Pompliano
Bitcoin Is the Toll Collector of the AI Economy
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TL;DR
Research summary
▶ AI agents, crypto, and the “bank apocalypse” thesis
The introduction previews discussion of AI agents, the convergence of crypto and Wall Street, whether the trade is shifting from contrarian to consensus, where AI value may accrue, and bubble concerns. Jordy explains that “bank apocalypse” is a play on the software “SAS apocalypse,” not a claim that banks will go to zero. He expects pressure on banks’ valuation multiples over the coming year as agents seek cheaper financial services and as same day settlement, stablecoins, and tokenization reduce the value of banks’ deposit funding spread and payment float. He says banks can still make money, but their historical edge and terminal value may be reduced. In his view, consumers benefit from lower fees and more efficient services, while middlemen face pressure; investors in crypto as a small asset class and other financial guardrails may benefit.
▶ Agent friendly businesses and institutional constraints
The conversation separates banks’ deposit business from their service and brokerage businesses, and considers whether a bank designed for agents could gain value. Jordy contrasts large, bureaucratic banks with Stripe, which he says has 10,000 employees versus Citibank’s 200,000, a valuation around $160 billion versus Citibank’s $200 billion market capitalization, and revenue up 41% year over year according to Stripe. He says Stripe is prepared for crypto and agentic commerce, while legacy firms may move too slowly. He also argues that consumer agents cut across the separate business models of large technology companies. He cites Amazon blocking some bots or agents and Apple changing iOS as signs, in his interpretation, of incumbents defending their territory and competing for the same total addressable market.
▶ Model routing, compute, and competing views on AI value
The host raises the possibility that Grok routing requests to the best available model could pressure other providers to open their systems and signal model commoditization. Jordy disagrees with the implication that leading models will lose value: based on his own use, he considers Opus 5.5 the best for his needs, including images and video, and argues that compute can improve model efficiency and response time as well as answer quality. He says demand for tokens and compute remains early, with coding agents having begun adoption only within the prior year, and argues that high end tasks may still require models backed by substantial compute. He estimates that open source models may approach zero cost for 90% of tasks, while the total addressable market for the remaining 10% continues to grow. His stated investment themes for the coming year are agentic compute, meaning AI infrastructure, and financial guardrails; he says these could create alpha.
▶ Specialized workflows, applications, and monetization
The host argues that personal agents such as Muse and Instinct, and specialized legal or financial systems, may be ahead of the large labs in their respective applications. He reports that processing 500 million tokens on Claude costs about $5,000 in his example, while processing the same amount with his company’s model and hardware is 97% cheaper. He expects general purpose models to face commoditization and says sustainable monetization and moats may lie in applications, comparing this with crypto’s “fat protocol thesis” and the value that also accrued to infrastructure and applications. Jordy questions how Muse would make money; the host suggests transaction-based revenue, payments from merchants or processors, and potentially advertising through a larger platform. Jordy argues that agentic transactions could expand the market and benefit consumers and merchants, while the host questions whether attention-based advertising will persist as agents replace consumer browsing. Jordy concludes that his preferred focus is crypto’s digital money guardrails and “toll collectors.”
▶ Compute scarcity, enterprise models, and practical investing
Jordy argues that compute will remain in short supply relative to agent demand, and that leading labs with substantial compute could retain access to the strongest models, particularly for businesses and scientific work. The host counters that companies could fine tune open source models to their own data and architecture at lower cost, while acknowledging uncertainty about whether businesses have the talent and budget to do this. Jordy says firms may try many tools before settling on them, but expects cheaper custom models to serve some businesses. He adds that AI could enable one person businesses at much greater scale. His practical advice is to focus on signal over noise, keep building skills and income, and, if job growth is too slow, build apps and accumulate revenue; he gives an illustrative example of ten apps each bringing in $10,000. The discussion then turns from technology to Bitcoin and bubble concerns.
▶ Bitcoin outlook and crypto adoption conditions
Asked why Bitcoin is not at $100,000, Jordy urges patience and compares Bitcoin and Ethereum’s movement around their 200 day moving averages with Micron’s earlier price history, while saying he is not sure Bitcoin and Ethereum will follow the same pattern. He says his crypto thesis is entirely connected to agents and expects the largest crypto moves next year as traditional investors do more homework on tokenization. He calls the current market a bull market because crypto is above a rising 200 day moving average, and says it has risen despite higher rates and falling gold. He identifies higher tokenization volumes and asset size, plus higher stablecoin volumes, as conditions that could bring in more traditional finance and accelerate crypto. A following advertisement promotes hosted Bitcoin mining and crypto backed loans; its marketing claims are separate from Jordy’s investment views.
▶ Crypto becoming consensus and the macro case
The host notes that BlackRock, Bloomberg, and Citrini have discussed the intersection of crypto and Wall Street, and asks why the spread of this idea from contrarian to consensus could be positive. Jordy says investors make money when others who previously disagreed enter and push an asset higher; the investment task is to anticipate where money will flow. He says more public voices discussing the agent to crypto connection are useful, and plans to attend more conferences next year. On macro conditions, he expects 10 year yields to be around the same level a year later, unless the jobs market weakens noticeably; he does not expect that weakening and says it would make the debasement theme more prominent. He argues that AI is driving growth, that AI demand will exceed supply for the next few years, and that continued buildout and spending will support the agentic economy and crypto. He expects the pace of change and associated confusion to increase next year, and the host asks how people can navigate it.
▶ Bubble warnings, risks, and portfolio focus
Jordy responds to Ray Dalio’s statement that bond yields may prick the AI bubble, describing it as a headline and arguing that Dalio has repeatedly warned of bubbles. He lists past shocks that, in his account, were followed by market recoveries: the pandemic, rapid rate hikes and high inflation, bank runs including Silicon Valley Bank, tariffs, and an oil supply shock. He allows that there could be a 20–30% correction next year, potentially if high rates expose indebted businesses, but says governments may intervene as they did after Silicon Valley Bank and during the pandemic. He tells listeners to examine AI demand versus supply and says returns have been concentrated: he states that only 24% of S&P 1500 companies produced returns above the index as a whole. His highest conviction investment areas are companies involved in building compute, because he says supply is insufficient and will keep expanding, and crypto. He also recommends learning to use AI and building something as a way to feel more empowered amid change.
▶ Closing remarks and book discussion
Jordy says he plans to speak at more crypto conferences over the next 12 months because he wants more people to understand the case for crypto, especially as other voices grow louder. The hosts joke about travel and an event in Washington, DC, then discuss the host’s book: Jordy says it consists of short passages or letters and that he is reading it gradually. The episode closes with thanks to viewers and an announcement that they will return next week.
Full transcript
[0:24] Anthony Pompliano: moves in crypto because of it what's going on guys today we've got a great conversation with Jordi Visser in this conversation we talk about what's going on with ai agents how crypto and wall street are coming together then we talk about the idea of this going from a contrarian to a consensus trade and then Jordi and i we debate a little bit as to general purpose models versus specialized workflows where is value going to accrue in the ai industry and then we get into the bubble talk all these people worried about a big bubble and Jordi helps us separate both the signal from the noise here's my latest conversation with Jordi Visser All right, Jordi, this week there's a Bloomberg piece about you. The Bloomberg piece said, forget the AI bubble. Jordi Visser says the bank-pocalypse has begun. Congratulations on the Bloomberg coverage.
[1:06] ?: You're a big deal now. They waited for me to say something negative. Negative. They didn't say anything positive.
[1:11] Jordi Visser: No, no, no. The media loves a bearish thing.
[1:14] Anthony Pompliano: Well, bank-pocalypse will definitely get clicks. What is the bank-pocalypse and why do you think it is coming?
[1:21] Jordi Visser: So I posted an ex that morning. I didn't see the article until someone pointed it out to me. We've talked about it before, but I really did a lot of it on my video last weekend. So rather than turn this into some like the banks are all going to go to zero thing, the software companies went through their SaaSpocalypse. So number one thing, it's a play on the SaaSpocalypse thing. SaaS got hurt for two reasons or two stories behind it. One is the recognition from people that AI was going to disrupt seed-based SaaS software. Not all of software. Cyber's done well. Bitcoin miners have done well. They're in there as well. Microsoft's been fine. But the reality was AI hurt these companies despite the fact that they continue to print, for the most part, record earnings. And that was a sign, if you remember in that first quarter, one of the most important signals for everyone to think about when it comes to sectors. is that because of exponential innovation and AI continuing to increase progress at some point it will be a negative for almost every single industry and especially legacy industries and i just want to make sure because i tried to i tried to show that in the x post and i'll use some of that here i believe the banks now are going to go through a problem which is they're going to come under multiple compression over the course of the next year because of two factors one is the rise of AI agents which means consumers are going from let's say lazy individual small businesses have their money in banks that pay them zero yield that's really good for the banks when the banks can take your deposits of which there's a lot pay you zero take that money invested in treasuries yielding four percent short term not like SVB did long term but short term uh you can Get a spread on this. So we saw the article from Torsten Slack with an agentic bank run. So he was going a different angle, but that's part of it. And I don't want to say that there's going to be a run because that's what's going to happen. What I want to say is that agents are not going to make mistakes. They are going to search for the cheapest way to do thing. And that means that as agents control more of the money decisions, banks are going to be in trouble. The second thing is that the guardrails are going to apply pressure as well. And this is where crypto fits in. So when you have the users, the consumers, no longer being humans, but being digital agents, and at the same time you have financial guardrails, which are being in the system more, where there's same-day settlement, which means stablecoins, which means tokenization, we're headed towards that. Settlement, long-term settlement is a good thing for banks, for Visa, for MasterCard. The longer it takes for somebody gets that float, somebody gets the chance to invest that money for a day, for three days, and if it's instant settlement, it's not the same. So this was really a belief that... banks will still make money um but the spread the edge that they had their multiples over the future are going to be hit by terminal value again so it's not a like doom and gloom thing i kind of played with the sas apocalypse to create bankpocalypse but that is what in my opinion is certainly going to happen with the rise of consumer agents is there a positive to this like the consumer wins in this scenario Yeah, the consumer wins. The people who invest in the financial guardrails are going to see more traffic. So if you invest in crypto and it's a small asset class, you'll do well. The only place I see getting hurt is the middlemen. And so labor versus capital has been an issue. The consumers, we have a K-shaped economy. Anything that is going to make it more powerful to bring inflation down, at least on the service side. is going to be positive in the long run. So your question, everyone should be thinking about it. What's the positive side? Well, the positive side is if we can reduce the fees, you'd be shocked at how much money the banks take purely on a spread basis from everyone.
[5:18] Anthony Pompliano: Well, the reason I say that is we never see the headlines of the positive news. Like one of the chapters in the book, I don't know if you know this, is planes that land safely never make the news. Right and so like same thing here is when people see disruption occurring they always cover it from the angle of who is being disrupted they never are like consumers will make x billion dollars more because they now will have their money not parked in you know low yielding assets or whatever so the perspective I think matters but it also plays into I don't know if you saw Paul Graham uh this week uh Amazon made the decision to stop I think it was Muse and some other bots or agents from accessing Amazon. And he came out and I thought it was probably one of the most interesting perspectives this week was the first time in decades that he believes someone could expose or exploit a wedge to disrupt Amazon. And his point was, if somebody could build an Amazon that was made for the agents, that could be very disruptive. Now, Shopify, I think is... We're leaning into, hey, how do your agents come and buy things and do all this? But that feels like the banks are the same thing. Like, if somebody builds a bank that is agent-friendly, it's probably going to be pretty valuable, right?
[6:39] Jordi Visser: Well, let's separate the bank, meaning where you place your money. If they pay you the fair spread, meaning if you deposit money in a bank and they pay you and all you're doing is I'm getting interest on that money, then there's the other service side. They call you up. We want you to invest. They all own brokerage houses. They want to make sure they're making money. This is the service side of the business. Stripe is not a bank, but Stripe is competing with all of them. And that's what I included in the piece. This weekend, I will go through about 15 slides of Stripe. Citibank is a $200 billion market cap company with 200,000 people. Stripe has 10,000 people. It's about $160 billion currently off the latest valuations. If you go through their M&A activity, if you go through their volumes, their revenue's up 41% year over year according to them. You go through every metric in their revenue side. They have already built for the crypto world. They already are set up for this. They're already set up for the agentic side. They've been talking about agentic commerce for a long time. These older banks of which I worked for one, It's very hard to get through the bureaucracy and make a decision. They've always had the ability and this is one of the things that I think people should just really listen to when it comes to something that I feel by using AI and why I try to help people use it as much as you can. The progress is insanely fast as you and I both know. These businesses never move fast into something. First of all, there's a calendar year. The summertime, nothing gets done. And then you come back in September and they start focusing on when they're going to pay people for bonuses. And that process, trust me, it's a while. Then they've got to do 360 reviews. Then they have to hand out the bonuses. They have to sit and put a budget in for the next year. This is all time.
[8:35] ?: AI doesn't wait for that. Stripe doesn't wait for that.
[8:38] Jordi Visser: They don't have the amount of people that Citigroup does. They don't have to bring in the managers from overseas. It's a completely different side. So I think the nimble companies, and what Paul said about Amazon, if I remember exactly what it said, he basically said never in their history have they had to do this. The reason I think this is important for people to think about when it comes to the hyperscalers, I say all the time, You have to look at how these mags, not the mag seven, but let's say the mag seven became so big, they don't compete with each other for the most part. Apple has its own business model. Amazon has its own business model. Google has its own. AI agents cut through all of them. They all want consumer agents. And if they start playing this game of we're not allowing Muse to come in because we're waiting on Alexa, and then Siri does the same thing. Apple also announced their... changing the iOS and they said it was because they didn't want agents penetrating so they used the scare tactic as opposed to no we don't want agents to get into this i would love it right now if my ai agent in muse could get my apple messages it would make make it a lot easier i think they're all now in trouble that they're all basically trying to defend their turf so they're playing for the same tam now and that means that their business to me is being disrupted and i think amazon what paul graham wrote is just a sign that they don't know what to
[10:04] ?: do because these companies are big bureaucracies now uh elon musk tweeted uh two or three days ago saying that grok was going
[10:12] Anthony Pompliano: to open up the back end to any model and for those that are unfamiliar if you use openai they will Give you either a model that you select, or if you are just talking to ChatGPT, they may route your query to an OpenAI family of models. They would never send your query on ChatGPT to Anthropic, Claude, etc. Grok historically has used their internal stuff, but now they're opening it up and they're saying, well, we're going to actually just route to whoever's the best model to answer your question. If that forces the hand of the other players, To me, that signals that the models are commoditized. And now the value of those models becomes much more in question than they already are. I personally think that's where we're headed. Like we bet Sylvia on this of building a model router and saying, hey, we don't really care what the model is. We just want it to be the best one to answer for the end user. Now Elon's doing it. Does that force OpenAI and Anthropic both to open up themselves as well? Or do you think that they can keep these kind of closed kingdoms and similar to how Amazon seems to be kind of creating a closed kingdom? Like we're playing this game of like bundling and unbundling that is like the story of business and finance for decades.
[11:33] Jordi Visser: So this is the one place where you fit in with the masses. So when we talk, like I disagree with where you're headed with this. Okay. um and i i've heard this repeatedly from people over the course next six months this is not exactly what you're saying but it's pretty close open ai and so chat gpt and claude are the best models plain and simple like i don't care what anyone says to me as someone who uses all of them and has used open source models the best model right now is opus 5.5 the next best general general purpose stuff no no for the stuff that i do so that includes images video like A general model that will do everything that I need. Gemini makes a lot of mistakes, and it comes back with answers that are ridiculous. Opus 5.5 is a game changer. Now, here's the thing. You tell Gemini it's silly.
[12:26] Anthony Pompliano: It's the most disrespectful thing you can say to a man. It's just, you're silly. Gemini, you're silly.
[12:30] ?: I don't understand.
[12:32] Jordi Visser: Maybe it's because I use them so much that... I don't get frustrated by the answers. I don't have to explain twice to them. And trust me, you have employees and you know which ones you might have to say something twice to.
[12:46] Anthony Pompliano: Listen, I... today's episode is brought to you by arch public arch public has just expanded its agentic trading platform beyond crypto so pay attention this is a big one now they are automating strategies across stocks commodities and etfs and i think that this is going to be huge you can now automatically take profits when one market hits new all-time highs and rotate that capital into other markets showing more opportunity whether you're rotating capital into ai stocks gold if you're investing in the s p 500 or you're accumulating bitcoin Archpublic brings real discipline and automation to your investment strategy. Additionally, they've launched a powerful new tax loss harvesting tool. With crypto being so volatile and its exemption from the wash sale rule, Archpublic can offset gains with losses without compromising your long-term positions. It's exactly what every serious investor does. Institutional-grade automation that works across every major asset class. There's no more emotional trading, no more missing tax opportunities, just smarter, hands-free execution of your preferred strategies. go to archpublic.com right now connect with our team set up a time bring your account if you'd like then you can learn what automated trading can do for you archpublic.com i'm a very big believer and uh have always said i think that people underestimate the importance of their intuition because it is you know it's your human algorithm you've been training it just as there are benchmarks that are these like objective open source benchmarks that all the models try to you know game or whatever And what you're describing is that Opus 5.5 is the leading model in the Jordi benchmark.
[14:18] Jordi Visser: Yes, and it's not just for me. How many times does Grok get announced as solving the greatest math problems ever? How many, who's in the fight for that? Like, it's not just me. Who finds an enzyme for CRISPR? Okay, that used to be Google. That's what AlphaGo was. That's what AlphaFold was. that's not what's happening anymore the stuff that's happening is in these models and here's the issue when you start realizing how much compute is needed for consumer agents so the Paul Graham thing what you didn't see Elon also posted that and said seriously like this is we're gonna have commoditization in intelligence there's no doubt about it the difference is and what people don't realize the amount of compute you have leads to the models being more efficient So if you haven't felt this yet, I'm surprised. The cost of the models for like Opus 5.5, they're getting more efficient because they have a ton of compute power behind it. But if it takes you two minutes to get to an answer in Opus 5.5 and a cheaper open source model takes you 12 minutes. When you add up the token usage and the cost and it comes through, the time does matter, not just the answer. And I think everything in AI is about the time relationship to the probability of getting the right answer. So everyone only talks about the cost side. That's not the way the world works.
[15:51] ?: We have cheap cars. We have expensive cars.
[15:54] Jordi Visser: Like everything in life becomes that. I just think for solving cancer, for solving the greatest problems in the world that... People are gonna need to get to space to do this We're getting there's gonna be high-level things that are gonna take these models and the problem is Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna own most of the compute going forward and if the compute matters that much Which it will because I still will keep saying and I hear this on the other side People still fight on like there's a bubble coming like we are so early in the demand side of tokens so early the coding agents didn't even exist a year ago so that just started the adoption that means for corporations we went through token maxing now we're going through okay we can't throw this much money at it we have to be more efficient with our thoughts while they're figuring out how to do that the models keep progressing and getting better and Vera Rubin's going to come out next year as Vera Rubin comes for the same amount of gigawatts you're getting more that well who owns most of that The really smart groups own most of that. So that's where OpenAI, Anthropic, but also Elon Musk. He owns a lot of it too. He's been buying as much Vera Rubin as he can. So I think we're going to get to a point as you move down the road that the open source is fine for the majority of tasks. 90% of them will be close to zero. But for the 10%, the total TAM of that 10% is going to continue to grow through adoption. And that's where Jevons Paradox actually matters because the cost of it and the efficiency will keep going. And that's really important for people when they think about investing because I will continue to say there are two themes that I care about right now. Agentic compute, so the AI infrastructure, and the financial guardrails. That's what I believe over the next one year will create the alpha. And if you look back over the last four years, the alpha has all been about AI.
[17:37] Anthony Pompliano: So I have somewhat of a hot take. Good. The big labs already are behind. In two very important ways. What are the leading personal agents? Muse and Instinct. Not the big labs. I know they don't launch DOTS. We'll see what happens. But Muse and Instinct are out in front leading in those two. When you look at specific applications, legal, finance, etc., the large language models are not the leading models. They're leading in general purpose, but when you start to get specific, they're not. When you look at it on a cost, perspective i can just go off of our data if i process 500 million tokens from uh on claude about five thousand dollars if we process the same 500 million tokens on our own model and our own hardware it's 97% cheaper so what i think is going to happen but i think the fact that you and i don't agree on this actually is like maybe that's the story of like nobody really knows right is You're going to start to see the large language models say, we got to pick our battles. Where do we go and fight to win? Because just having the general purpose model is actually not going to be as valuable because of the commoditization. And so we should accelerate into specific use cases. Anthropic recently announced that they're going to go really heavy into bio and all the biotech stuff they want to go do. it feels like they think that is a massive opportunity if they can win there that is trillions of dollars of value that they can create OpenAI is saying dots and personal assistant and they've always been more of a consumer type company than an enterprise type company and so i don't think it's just like hey go all in on one specific use case but it does feel like they're now realizing that the general purpose model can serve as like a foundation but the monetization of this and the sustainable moat is going to be in the applications and This goes back to the idea of in crypto, if you go back to 2017 or so, there used to be this thing called the FAT protocol thesis. And the whole idea was like all the value accrues to the protocol layer. And I could be wrong on this, but I just continue to go back to the FAT protocol thesis. The equivalent in the AI is like the FAT model lab thesis, where all the value accrues to the model lab. What we found in crypto was there was definitely some value that accrues to the protocol, obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. but actually a ton of the value accrued to either the infrastructure underlying it in terms of miners and things like that or the application layer it feels like that's the same thing happening here where as the technology gets built out we have tons of infrastructure that's making money we have tons of applications that are yet to be built but I just find it really hard if like Anthropic and OpenAI just stayed as general purpose model providers I just think that is like a cutthroat business it's like kind of a race to zero who can get the you know highest level intelligence for the cheapest cost and so like what's the moat what is the the the you know thing that defends against everybody else but i don't know maybe you think differently i do um i don't
[20:43] Jordi Visser: think the application so when you say muse and these things how i i i don't understand how muse is going to make money oh
[20:51] Anthony Pompliano: i think they're going to print cash okay so i don't understand how they're going to because again the they have a couple of and many more. revenue model he has said that he would like to keep it free forever facebook they got one business model yeah and you and their target is about to get way better right and so whether it is actually transactions where they get paid or the advertising is where they get paid i worked inside that business trust me if you're gonna use their products and you're gonna give them more data they're gonna get better at ads and so to me it's not Muse makes money as much as Facebook makes money. They just happen to own the Muse thing. And look at WhatsApp. They've started to do this across a lot of their interfaces. And I go back to when I opened up Instagram and I've got an interstitial at the top of my Instagram feed that's like, download Muse.
[22:12] ?: They're going to get people to download it. They're going to get the data. Then they're going to target you.
[22:17] Jordi Visser: You listened to the Noah Shin interview?
[22:20] ?: Yeah. Okay.
[22:22] Jordi Visser: When you say ads, that's... He called that the attention economy. The attention economy is going to collapse. Maybe. Personally, I don't... I mean, part of what's going to happen, it is very clumsy at this point to have to use your phone for your personal agent. Agreed. Okay, so that's why they're all trying to figure out the next gadget to go through.
[22:44] Anthony Pompliano: By the way, I think that Instinct, which we really haven't heard Meta talk as much about this, but Instinct, he specifically... And so... Is there going to be like agent to agent advertising?
[23:28] Jordi Visser: Here's the point, and this is where we can end this conversation. I only believe there's two things to focus your attention on. The toll collectors, that's crypto. As far as I'm concerned, I want the digital money guardrails, the toll collectors. I don't want to invest in Muse and then watch as seven other agents are released. and that's before we have agents in Europe and agents in Asia like this is the thing we have competition globally i just want tall collection velocity i don't want the attention economy these are all things to me of the last 17 years i want to bet on the things that we are always going to have demand greater than supply we will not have enough compute for the agents that is the way to play what you're describing in my opinion the competition it's all going to be commoditization the reason i say i don't agree on the anthropic and open ai is because i think there's infinite amounts of money for super intelligence and they're going to have it open source models can never have the size intelligence they can because they can't have the compute all of these places they don't have the compute so they can keep Copying distilling the models but at some point you need this because we won't release the best models to the market they will go to the businesses and that's where it can't be commoditized so at some point people have to realize if you have the compute you get the best model if you have the best model and it can solve all the math problems then every single science and physical place humanoids will want that model You don't release it to the public. And if you don't release it to the public, how do you distill all the information if it's not a public model?
[25:14] Anthony Pompliano: Maybe this is like the root of where we see a different world. I don't think that Claude will be able to create a model that outperforms a company. Let's say that you're a huge law firm. Let's say you're a huge finance firm. If you take open source models and you customize them via fine tuning, to your specific architecture your specific data etc you should be able to out compete them so again how many businesses are going to do that do they have the talent it costs money like there's a lot of what ifs in there but if that is the case i guess that's where i get a little bit more less enthusiastic is just like you can keep iterating on the model but it's still a general purpose model yep the businesses that say hey we're going to build custom models for ourselves you can show up with the smartest model you want but they're like But it's not customized to us, and so the business is less likely to go do it. Now, I think to your point, that's a black and white analysis. What's probably going to happen is businesses are just like, give us all of it, and then we'll figure out what we use, and over time they'll kind of fall away, but they'll try almost everything. And that's kind of what we saw. There's a Wall Street Journal article that says, the title is, Spending on AI is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget, which is basically this story, right?
[26:34] Jordi Visser: and it's it's a great one so i i we'll leave it at this i i don't disagree at all with what you're saying the models will not be the models behind a law firm those will be more open source and cheaper things the problem is the law firm will end up being a one-person law firm and a billion of them so if you're like i hear you talking and and i think you think differently than i do in the end game which is i don't want to be a vc fund like i don't think you can pick the winners in the world you're describing because i believe it will always be an entrepreneur that says i'm willing to make less 100 and i'm going to build the business and i don't i only need to make 100 grand a year so when people ask me how to like and this was asked to me yesterday's like okay i'm i'm in my 20s i want to i want to be a part of this i'm watching your videos like okay focus on signal verse noise don't listen and just keep working hard ai is going to keep going the alpha as you're stacking your chips building a poker chip which you're getting through your job if you don't feel like you're growing fast enough in your job then go build an app on your own and collect ten thousand and then go build a second app collect ten thousand believe it or not because of stripe you can do that like you can create an app that competes with the world and if you create ten of them they're each making ten thousand and that's a hundred thousand dollars and at your job you're making a hundred and fifteen thousand then you can quit your job and go create these regularly and build up a stack and invest that money in a compounds i met people at your event That's what they basically do. They've made their financial wealth through investing by not listening to the bubble talk. We got to do some bubble talk. It was a bubble week again. I want to talk Bitcoin and bubble.
[28:15] ?: I've had enough of tech.
[28:17] Anthony Pompliano: What's going on with Bitcoin? I think I beat him into submission there.
[28:23] ?: Did you just cry uncle? Maybe this is us.
[28:26] Jordi Visser: It's like us at Thanksgiving now. We were together twice this week.
[28:29] Anthony Pompliano: For those that don't know, Jordi and I try not to talk during the week so we can come in here, but we had a midweek session.
[28:38] Jordi Visser: It's like Thanksgiving at the Pompliano house right now. No, no, no. I've been a guest for too long.
[28:43] Anthony Pompliano: All right. What's going on with Bitcoin?
[28:46] ?: It's consolidating. No, no, no.
[28:47] Jordi Visser: So I do want to give, because a bunch of people have asked, and I want to make sure everyone hears this. For Christ's sake, be patient.
[28:57] ?: Jordi, why isn't it at 100K?
[28:59] Jordi Visser: Yeah, exactly. Come on, it's October. What happened? Let me go through. I want everyone to go bring up a chart of Micron. You know, we talked about Micron when it was $100. We talked about when it was $150. If you go look at 2024, we started this thing. A lot of people in your office bought Micron. Should I stay in it at 200? Should I get out at 200? It went to 1400. Now, if you go back and look, it broke above the 200-day moving average, just like Bitcoin, just like Ethereum. And then it retraced back to it. It tested it. I am not sure that's going to happen with Bitcoin and Ethereum and the rest of the crowd. But you have to go look at why that happened. When it starts to happen, there's an AI theme behind it. I want to make sure people realize when it comes to crypto, this is 100% for me about agents. And I'm telling you the amount of traditional people that continue to bang on my door to talk about tokenization, to talk about
[30:00] ?: how to make money on this. They're doing their homework now.
[30:02] Jordi Visser: I think next year is going to be the year that we see the biggest moves in crypto. because of agents and so i just want people to realize that i've watched this now a lot but in particular with the semiconductors it took a long time when it was obvious to me because of ai because we were going to need an enormous amount of memory but very smart people were not on it and right now there are a lot of smart people running around saying we're in a bubble That prevents people from jumping into anything. They see the rates going higher. Everyone should be grateful that with rates going up as much as they are, somehow another crypto went higher. With gold going down as much as it has gone down, crypto somehow has been distancing itself and going higher. So when you go through this whole thing, I really do believe people have to be patient with this. It's a bull market, and I feel comfortable in saying that because I said when it was a bear market, we're above the 200-day moving average, the 200-day moving average is pointed upward. just be patient these things can never go as fast as you want and the thing that will accelerate it the most is when the traditional finance crowd comes into it and for that we need the tokenization volumes to go higher we need the tokenization asset size to go higher we need the stablecoin volumes to go higher that's why i talk so much about stripe because stripe is talking about this daily it's happening Every person listening
[31:25] Anthony Pompliano: to this show, you probably own Bitcoin and you got it the same way. You paid full price on an exchange. But there's a smaller group of business owners, family offices, and investors with sharp CPAs, and they're quietly getting theirs a very different way. They own the machines that make it, mining. Here's how it works. You buy the miners, and Simple Mining hosts and runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates that you could never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet. There's two reasons I find this interesting right now. One, the economics. cheap power lets you convert electricity into bitcoin at a discount to spot you're acquiring the asset below the sticker price that everyone else pays but second and listen closely you've got a big income here miners are classified as computer equipment equipment means depreciation qualifying buyers can write off the entire purchase in year one it's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades pointed at bitcoin Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year, and so with attractive financing available, you can deploy these assets without selling any of your assets to do it. This is not some garage operation. Simple Mining runs over 40,000 machines and was just ranked the fastest growing company in Iowa on the Inc. 5000. They put together a valuable resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. It covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid them before deploying capital. You can access it for free at simplemining.io slash pomp. That's simplemining.io slash pomp. Go check it out today. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra, the secure way to grow crypto wealth. Abra offers individuals and institutions end-to-end crypto wealth management solutions, including custody, trading, yield, and crypto-backed loans through a unique separately managed account structure where title is retained by you, the client. In other words, your assets stay your assets. Abra has been partnering with crypto holders for 8 years and has processed over $2.5 billion in loans to date. With Abra's loan product, you can access up to 50% of the current value of your collateral. There's no minimum or maximum loan sizes, and Abra can handle 9-figure plus loans. Rates are extremely competitive in the 4.5% to 6.5% APY range. Loans are open term, meaning you can keep borrowing against your collateral without closing a loan as the price appreciates. Buy a house, take a trip, make a large purchase, or diversify your investments without selling your Bitcoin. All deposits are held in secure MPC wallets and there is no rehypothecation. Find out more at Abra.com and tell them Pomp sent you. Again, that's Abra.com and tell them Big Pomp sent you. So in the last two weeks, I have seen BlackRock, I have seen Bloomberg, and also Citrini. They put out a research piece with a nice image that had DeFi on Wall Street on it. And if I did not know Citrini wrote it, and I read through the notes of this, it could have been a Jordi Visser piece in terms of the main message of there's this intersection of crypto and Wall Street. I think that some people will read some of these other pieces, whether it's BlackRock, whatever, and be like, oh my God, Jordi Visser's ideas are infiltrating whatever. You said something to me interesting though which is this is good because it means that like we're transitioning from almost like a contrarian view to consensus view and you kind of need that can you explain a little bit as to as people see this idea show up in other places why
[34:47] Jordi Visser: that's actually a positive sign it when you when you talk so the way people view you uh-oh you've been positive on Bitcoin for how many decades now
[35:04] Anthony Pompliano: Well, Satoshi got the idea for me, didn't he here?
[35:07] Jordi Visser: So I don't bring that up as a dig. I bring that up as once you kind of have this story that you say over and over again, and this works for me too, your voice doesn't appeal to people who don't believe in you because they go, well, he's a perma bull on crypto, so it doesn't matter. So in fairness, the reason I'm saying this is if Jordi gets viewed as someone who will only be positive on Bitcoin, which isn't true.
[35:37] ?: No, you were bearish last year.
[35:38] Jordi Visser: No, but bearish was, I was never bearish. What I said is we're in a bear market, like acknowledging the facts.
[35:46] ?: You can't fight the market. Like the market is the market.
[35:49] Jordi Visser: I believe the market knows everything. What we're trying to do is forecast what the market will think in the future. And people have to realize the only way you make money in anything that you invest in is not because you were right. It's because other people that didn't agree with you at the time came in and pushed that asset higher. At the end of the day, you are trying to bet where the money is going to go, not where the asset is going to go. So that is the problem that happens. I mean, Salesforce.com is down. yet their earnings are good so fundamentals don't matter what's driving it's because people were overweight sass because they had a view that it was a stable business because private credit has a lot of software there's a bunch of reasons so for me we need citrini we need blackrock we need other voices to speak up in fact i'm going to say this right now jordy wants to go to as many conferences next year that makes sense now i'm saying this you're going to help me i've already reached out to natalie like i'm gonna i'm gonna get out there because I do want to sit and make sure that people hear why I'm positive on
[36:52] ?: it. Jordi Visser World Tour?
[36:54] Jordi Visser: The one thing I don't hear enough about is the connection that Citrini did, which is agents to crypto is really important. It gets back to the Marc Andreessen piece. And that's why I don't want this to be about the basement. I don't want, oh, the bonds are going down. The government's going to have to step in. I believe a year from now, It is very likely that 10-year yields will be about the same level a year from now as they are today. The only way I'll say they'll be lower is because if the jobs market gets noticeably weaker, which I don't think it will over the next year, I definitely think it's going to hover around zero. But if it got weaker, then the debasement thing will become a bigger thing. But other than that, it's because we're growing so fast. What that means is the only thing that's driving growth is AI. It's the only thing. and so the bet becomes about AI and I have full belief that demand is greater than supply over the course of the next few years so the build out is going to happen the spending is going to happen which means nominal GDP is going to happen I don't think the government can move rates down lower and so if we're going to run this thing hot that means the agentic world will continue to accelerate and that means crypto is going to do well so i think the pieces by citrini by blackrock by everyone is very important i think where my edge is in this whole thing is really spending the time every single day of connecting consumer agents importance to what's happening right now and when you look at that chart that i've said so many times from page 71 of situational awareness everyone should just recognize that the chaos is going to be worse next year than it is this year what we saw this year All of the chaos, the daily, oh, we're in a bubble, we're this. It's only going to get worse because people are overwhelmed with the speed of change and we're going to accelerate next year in speed of change.
[38:45] Anthony Pompliano: How do they prepare and navigate that?
[38:52] Jordi Visser: Signal versus noise is really important.
[38:54] ?: But how do you do it?
[38:56] Jordi Visser: Okay, so this week, a very famous hedge fund manager, Ray Dalio, was quoted as saying, bond yields may, and I emphasize the word may, Prick the AI bubble. So this gets a lot of attention. People send it to me and they go, what do you think? Bubble talk. Now, if this was said by, you know, Joe Smith on the corner. By me. If Joe Smith got interviewed by Bloomberg and said, I think it may prick the AI bubble, it wouldn't even, nobody would care. But because Ray Dalio said it, they care. But here's the thing. And I'll show this this weekend. Ray Dalio, if you just go into any LLM and say, how often has Ray Dalio said there's a bubble over the last 15 years? It's a lot. And it's not to say that he's not a smart guy. What it is to say is he has now made a career, his like post hedge fund career. He's writing books about the history of the world. he's a very smart guy in understanding the history of the world so he's saying we're going to end up in the exact same thing that we've had and maybe we will maybe they'll maybe something will go on but i think he has a um a thesis that he has to stick by and this is he's just going to keep doing it and so before it was a bubble on something else and as i sent you something and i'm going to show this weekend if there was truly a bubble i think if we had a pandemic the whole market would collapse Oh, check. We already had that. It didn't do that. We were back at new all-time highs and up for the year. Okay, well, if the Fed did the fastest rate hike in the history of the United States in an unexpected manner, we would certainly blow up this bubble of $40 trillion in debt and the whole world would collapse. We had that one. Didn't do it. Inflation hit almost 10%. Didn't do it. Okay, maybe after they were done, though, we'd see the... The After Effects, and we'd have the biggest, fastest bank run in the history of the country. Oh, check, we had that with Silicon Valley Bank, plus all the little banks that fell too. We had deposits flowing out, and guess what? New all-time highs. Maybe if we decided to go back to Smoot-Hawley and we announced massive tariffs around the globe, that would do it. Okay, we fell 20%, and then we rallied back to new all-time highs. Finally. This one there's no way you can stop because those were all kind of easy ones for the Fed to print money out of so you could think that they were going to print money. What about if we shut down the Strait of Hormuz? Oil would go to 200, 300, 400, 500 and we would, well, we had that this year, can't print money and yet somehow or another the market found a way to go higher. So now the new one is rates are going to do it. So I think people have to just understand the way markets work. We've had new all-time highs many many times during my career and there's been many many bad things that have happened and there may be another 20 30 percent correction next year and it might be because rates get to such a high level that we end up with I don't know a Bunch of businesses that we didn't know had a lot of debt in Europe in wherever that end up collapsing. I don't know but i also know that if that happens the governments have financialized everything so they will come in just like they did after silicon valley bank and make sure that they put money into the system to make it not go down a pandemic took trillions and they did that i don't know what other people want to do so i think when you listen to these bubble talks particularly when it comes to ai the way to navigate watch my video i am showing facts about the demand versus supply i am going to show why ray dalio's Conversation, although maybe true, it's just the headline that he's put out there. The alpha, which names are working? I'm literally going to go through and say, okay, almost nothing has worked. Nothing. Over the course of the last decade, very few companies have made money. If you go back to ChatGPT, only 24% of the companies in the S&P 1500, so 1500 companies, only 25% have produced a return greater than the index as a whole. 25%. So it's very concentrated. Guess what? We've been concentrated for a long time with the Mag7. If you're trying to make money, you need to know the things that are working. The only thing that I think you can make money on with the highest probability of certainty is things related to building out the compute because we don't have enough of it and we're going to continue to build it out. On the other side, I think you need crypto. So the alpha I'm trying to give. And then finally, the best way to feel empowered is to learn how to use AI. If that's what's causing the problems, And that's where the biggest fear is. If you want to make sure that you know more than Ray Dalio, trust me, he doesn't sit on an LLM all day. So go build something, upload it to GitHub. You have something over Ray Dalio that he doesn't know about today's world. So the agency side, the empowering side is very important too.
[43:57] ?: I could not agree more. What are you going to do your video on this week? I just kind of did it. It's a bunch of that stuff.
[44:04] Jordi Visser: We just talked about it, but in more detail. And seriously, I enjoyed doing this. I had a great time with... the group that I saw and I'm not kidding for people that in the crypto community that are having big conferences where you have a lot of people where you think I can add some value I'm going to go to a lot of them next year and before my calendar fills up with things for you and for other people that have first dibs I would like to be in a position where I can Go to places and talk. I think the most important time to get back to your thing about Citrini, BlackRock, Joseph Chalom, William McGuire, whoever you listen to right now, the voices are getting louder and louder on crypto. I think making sure that people have a chance to hear this and understand it and learn from it. is really important so i think the next 12 months is is something i regret with the micron thing of not really explaining to people but i didn't have a big enough audience now i have a big enough audience i want to make sure that as many people as possible hear our show but they also learn about the importance of crypto the jordi visser world
[45:05] Anthony Pompliano: tour begins january 1st 2027. book them now with the four His availability is out. By the way, did you know that I'll never ask you to go anywhere other than in New York City because I don't go anywhere for any event? Like, if we do an event, it has to be in New York City because I don't want to travel.
[45:23] Jordi Visser: I wish I had a video for everyone to see that you and I passed each other in D.C. where you didn't tell me you were going to be there. And it was literally not a joke. You were going out of turnstile. I was coming in a turnstile.
[45:34] ?: High-fived. And that was it.
[45:37] Anthony Pompliano: And by the way, he was going, and Jordi's an amateur when it comes to conference attendance. He was there for like two days. I went down on the train in the morning, did my 15-minute talk, and went right back.
[45:48] Jordi Visser: I had the best time I've had at an event with those people in DC.
[45:52] Anthony Pompliano: They were great. I had to come back for other reasons. But I have one last thing, a surprise for you. Did I hear that you read some of the chapters of my new book? Yes, I did. The book is so good that I made Jordi read. Just think about that. That's the only ad you need. It got Jordi Visser to read a book.
[46:10] Jordi Visser: It's really not a book. It's very similar to a book that I love, The Daily Stoic, because it's just passages.
[46:20] ?: So I can read like a page. I can read a page a week. I'll finish it by the end of the year.
[46:24] Anthony Pompliano: They're letters, so they're like two pages long, and there's 50 of them. But I figured out, what's the best ad that I could make? The book's so good, Jordi Visser read it.
[46:34] Jordi Visser: And I love reading about spinach, so it's fine.
[46:38] Anthony Pompliano: The devil doesn't tempt you with spinach. All right, thank you all for watching.
[46:41] Jordi Visser: We'll see you guys next week. See ya.