Transcript: Jordi Visser: The $900 Trillion Unlock

Jordi Visser [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [0:31] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be.

Jordi Visser [0:35] Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:36] Yeah. No, another— so I'm not sure if you saw the Citrini post this morning, but it was somebody using Muse and they were on a Delta flight that got canceled on the tarmac and he immediately went, rebook this flight. And on top of that, go find how I can get reimbursed for this flight that just got canceled. Within minutes, he had a $250 credit. And the Citrini post was like, number one, you're insane to think that this is a bubble and this is going nowhere. Maybe there are bubbly parts, but there is true utility here. To say there's no use case is completely asinine. Then number two, all those pennies that consumers have left on the ground with that $250 credit, they're about to get picked up by the agents. And airlines being a perfect example, what happens when people start efficiently using their miles and— Taking advantage of the refunds that they can get.

Jordi Visser [1:26] This is the beginning of the deflationary pressure on everything that we've talked about. As people realize that AI is deflationary, to get deflationary for the service side, you need AI agents because the agents make decisions based on efficiency. And the use of it is just— I mean, that description of what Citrina did, you have to think about all the frustrating times you've had waiting to then rebook something. You get in a line when you get off the plane and how long the line is and everyone's trying to get on one. And then you're trying to get a refund and you're trying to rebook things. All of this stuff will be handled. The frustrating part will be handled by agents, and that's already happening and it's happening now. So whether it's MetaMuse or whether it's Instinct AI, there's a reason why these things are having an impact now on the market.

Marty Bent [2:12] Yeah. Well, like I was telling you, I took Muse for a spin this morning just to check it out. Tried to book Amtrak. Amtrak's a bot. No. But point being, it feels like the first— I sent it to my wife after playing with it for 10 minutes. I was like, okay, I don't have to set up a Hermes agent for you. This is the agent that you can use to coordinate our calendars, the boys' sports schedule, all that. Download it and play with it today.

Jordi Visser [2:39] That's the reason why this has now entered a realm for me of time. Any speaking engagement I'm doing now, it all gets back to time. You have to think about OpenCLAW, which is a February thing in terms of adoption. Then you get into Hermès, then you get into GrokBot, then you get into, well, Astra and Claude can already do this and we're going to make it easier and we're going to embed all this into one. So if you used GrokBot, it's a completely different situation. You're using multiple agents to kind of run around and do tasks for you. So it's more like an autonomous workforce.

Jordi Visser ⋮ With Muse and with Instinct AI and a lot of the other private ones, now you're getting into what we expected from Siri and what we expected from Alexa. But again, it's the fact that we're talking about something that is now 7 months. So what has happened is the compression of time— is happening through the model releases and through the advancements. The Navier-Stokes problem, the agent swarm fears over hackings, these are all indications that we're, as I say repeatedly now, page 71 of Situational Awareness with Leopold shows where everything starts to speed up so fast that humans can't comprehend the change and they can't keep up with it.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Well, if we can't keep up with it and we're starting to get into the transaction phase, The SWIFT system and everything that was built for humans will not work with the agents, and they're going to start demanding faster rails.

Marty Bent [4:19] Yeah. No, it was this morning. Again, the problem with Amtrak, you were describing as a monopoly, it won't move, but the airlines have moved. But imagine when I can load it up with a Bitcoin wallet. You were going into your box, you have Bitcoiners, you have the programmable money, then you have the incumbents. I'm a Bitcoiner. And the beauty about the programmable part is if I want to use Bitcoin as my currency, the native digital currency, and I don't want to touch anything else, I can just give the agent a Bitcoin wallet. It's like, all right, go figure out how to convert to the preferred currency of the service provider or the other agent you're buying something from.

Marty Bent ⋮ And I can see that's where things are going. And like I was saying, we're at the first stage where the incumbents have to realize this and begin re-architecting the— infrastructure on the digital side they have to enable this, because once they do, they're going to get a ton more business, I think. Yeah.

Jordi Visser [5:12] And again, I think for people who don't see this, and trust me, someone who, when I speak about these things, I'll occasionally go see the comments and the posts, and people don't connect the agentic side to, let's say, the crypto guardrails and then kind of the impact it'll have on business. And it's surprising to me. But again, because I live in it 24 hours a day, meaning I'm monitoring how things are moving and I'm using the tools and yeah, oh, Muse is a thing. Let me go sign up for it.

Marty Bent [5:43] Okay.

Jordi Visser [5:43] Instinct AI. I talk about it one week, the amount of people reached out. And again, when Meta Muse is the number one downloaded app, okay, and the numbers are big, you start realizing, oh my God, the people who aren't paying attention to this— There's a million people that have already downloaded it. So it's like, this is going to grow incredibly rapidly, especially when you realize how much time it can save you. The money part will come second. And that's the thing I keep trying to make sure people understand. The money thing will come second, but this is where you have to start realizing, okay, how is crypto directly connected to agents? And that's where you have to go back. And that's why the stuff I'm talking about now is it was always made—

Marty Bent [6:28] Yeah.

Jordi Visser [6:29] For digital agents, because they're the only ones that can utilize the speed and they're the only ones who truly care about, why are we using Visa and MasterCard? Why are we doing any of this stuff? Why aren't we just going straight here, here, here? Let me negotiate. Let me go through it. They have the time to do it. And it's going to be agent to agent. The next thing people have to think about is how important cryptography is in this, how important your identity is in this. The ecosystem starts to grow rapidly once the agents start transacting, because then all the things that have ever been written about and talked about become more important. Because the ecosystem starts to grow in terms of volume and velocity, and the size of the ecosystem is going to grow rapidly over the next 12 months.

Marty Bent [7:06] Yeah. 5% of people on the planet don't understand that. They hear AI, they think ChatGPT. They're like, okay, what's the usage looking like? When they think of usage, it's like, okay, downloading Muse, talking with Muse, using tokens to do that. They don't realize that the agent-to-agent token usage has gone exponential and far exceeds the human-to-LLM token usage. And that, that fact alone, I think, highlights the arbitrage that exists in the market. The fact that most people don't understand that fact is extremely powerful. It gets to something you've been talking about, For many weeks now, which is that we're climbing this wall where you have a ton of the layman, the public out there thinking that this is a bubble that's going to pop eventually.

Marty Bent ⋮ And they think we're going to get into a massive economic crisis driven by this. But if you look at the underlying usage, particularly agent-to-agent, it seems that the fundamentals are going not only in the right direction, but far exceeding what anybody thought up to this point.

Jordi Visser [8:19] For anyone listening who falls into the camp of a worrier on AI, which is the majority of people, getting an expected value of an investment is about lining up all of the probabilities, outcomes, and the upside and downside of all of them. So is there a bubble aspect?

Marty Bent [8:45] Of course.

Jordi Visser [8:46] You could come up with a bunch of reasons. To me, they're all tail risks of things, but you're not going to stop the progress on AI. You can't. We're not going to pause it. That was stupid. Everyone's waiting. Just the reaction to the pause in AI from the most sophisticated investors in the world, and I get emails that day, well, we're going to be down big on Monday. I'm like, there'll be a knee-jerk reaction and it'll be an opportunity to buy. And here we are, whatever many days later, we're way through those levels.

Marty Bent [9:16] Yes.

Jordi Visser [9:16] Meaning we're way above where it was before that news came out. So for everyone listening who's worried, the expected value, if you break it into a binomial situation, let's assume, to use what I did in my video, there's a 90% chance we're headed towards abundance and there's a 10% chance that we're going to blow up and AI will never amount to anything.

Marty Bent [9:39] Okay?

Jordi Visser [9:40] In one scenario, you have a zero, 10% chance of a zero, and on the other side, you have a 90% chance. percent chance of something just shockingly good, the expected value is shockingly good then in terms of the combination of the two. Now, you can come up with all the different scenarios you want in between, but the reality is if you're worried about the 10%, if you're waiting for that story, the debt is too big, this and that, I can refute all of it. But the only thing you have to make sure that you realize, every day that the process gets bigger, consumer agents are different than enterprise agents.

Jordi Visser ⋮ We haven't even completed the enterprise adoption yet, and We're already moving on to the consumer agent side. Consumer agents are very different than enterprise. Enterprise is about replacing human employees, and it's through coding, it's through APIs and going into using up the amount of compute to figure things out. For consumer agents, now you're talking about them working 24/7 to book you a trip, to look into this, to go through all of the permutations, the amount of websites they have to touched. It's continuous. So consumer agents on top of enterprise agents means the compute needs just keep growing. So again, it gets back to the simple thing.

Jordi Visser ⋮ All bubbles are about supply being in front of demand. For the crypto doubters, we built the guardrails. It's an empty city. As I say, it's a ghost city. We built the infrastructure. We've been waiting for the users to come. Well, the users are coming in the form of agents. And if people want to watch one video for the rest of the month to hear from someone who can take you through what's happening at the company level and how the ROIC is already happening in various forms, not in the way you want it, which is, when are we going to see the revenues coming in? Oh, look, Anthropic and OpenAI only have X and the hyperscalers only have—

Marty Bent [11:33] no.

Jordi Visser [11:33] John Gray from Blackstone gave a talk yesterday at his event. for 30 minutes. It's on YouTube. And he literally went through the 5 different ways that his companies, of which he has private, how they're all benefiting from AI in 5 different ways to increase their profitability, which is seeing their margins grow. And he's taking you through those scenarios. I just don't think people have really, really thought hard enough about the fact that there's a higher probability of a good outcome than a bad outcome.

Marty Bent [12:04] And on the enterprise side, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think we had a pretty big signal from the enterprise. It was last week or the week before with Latham& Watkins deciding to buy NVIDIA GPUs, self-host, and basically ensure that their IP isn't being leaked to Anthropic and OpenAI. And I don't know exactly how Latham& Watkins Is implementing it, but I imagine what they're doing is uploading the knowledge base of that firm over the course of decades. Right. And so every case, every outcome, every bit of research they've done that they have stored somewhere in a file system, just when you're talking about enterprise adoption, that's, I think, first before you even get into agents, it's like, okay, how do I imbue this institutional knowledge that we've built up over decades into this system so that the AI can basically use that to go achieve our goals. And that alone is a massive undertaking.

Jordi Visser [13:02] So the question I have is, why did it take them so long? I've talked about Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly did this a long time ago. I think their initial data center, private-owned data center with 1,000 GPUs, I think it's 1,000 GPUs, went up in January, I believe. It's called Lilypod. They have TuneLab, which is a way for them brilliantly to collect other data, combine it with their data on an anonymous basis, but it helps them learn from their data while giving biotech companies the ability of testing their data on Eli Lilly's data. So if you have a science lab that has all of these experiments, the pros and cons that come and where everything was going, and you're just putting in there and seeing what the output comes in, you have to think about how quickly the Navier-Stokes thing means that we're getting to this.

Jordi Visser ⋮ So for a law firm to do it, I guess the reason it took so long is because they didn't have the money that Eli Lilly did, and they didn't have the understanding from being a Fortune 500 company. And this is why I think there's been 2 levels so far that have been accelerating. One is the Fortune 500 companies that have the money are adopting very quickly because they can just write the check and start going through it, but they also have tons of tech engineers that are high level. I don't know if a law firm has that. So they have to probably go through a consultant that comes in and says what they can do, and then they decide to do it.

Jordi Visser ⋮ If they have the money, they make the investment, they see the benefits. The other side that already is doing outside of Fortune 500 companies are AI-native entrepreneurs. They're the ones that have the ability of using open source and not needing to worry about if their data is being used because it's a tiny little private company that's not trying to— it doesn't have things to protect. It actually needs to grow. And the only thing they care about is going from zero today to a billion revenue in 2 years. And before they could even be competed, they'll probably be monetized and move on to the next thing.

Marty Bent [15:06] Yeah. No, I think of how we implemented at TFTC, everything we're feeding the models public anyway. So I don't care if OpenAI or Anthropic sees it. But to your point, it is insane. demoing it last night at the open party here at PubKey for this Freedom Tech Week. And I had my Hermes agents connected to our company brain and I was like, hey, use the Fountain MCP. Fountain's where we host our podcast for RSS and has video. And I was like, hey, John Arnold and I from 1031 recorded a video this morning. We talked about oil markets particularly and what people aren't seeing, like Venezuela imports are going up.

Marty Bent ⋮ It looks like Ships are making it through the strait at 60%. Go clip that and then pull out the juiciest sort of quote of that. And then a one-sentence summary of the clip in its entirety posted on my X within 10 minutes. I didn't even look at X, it was posted. But to talk about efficiency, that would've taken probably 2 hours for somebody on our team to go find it, clip it, get the tweet.

Jordi Visser [16:13] Yeah.

Marty Bent [16:13] Get the subtitles. And I mean, that utility is very misunderstood right now for most people. And this is just a podcast clipping.

Jordi Visser [16:24] Yeah. Again, and for you guys, the IP is the using it. The AI models, they just keep getting better and better. The capabilities get better and better. And If you're involved in them every day, you know to ask, can I do this? For people that don't use it often, they'll see something in X or someone will tell them about something and then they'll go in and they'll look at it then. If you're not using it every day and knowing that it's getting better every single day and you're too worried about hallucinations and stuff like that, then you're not going to use it. If you don't use it, you're screwed.

Jordi Visser ⋮ That's the plain simple thing. I think the value add for people is not understanding the things that AI can do out there. It's the ability of just asking the question, what can you do today that you couldn't do yesterday? And the more that you use it for those things, you start going. You've watched my Sunday video for a long time. I don't know if you noticed, but I was using a software, OpenBB, for a long time. And then all of a sudden OpenBB, unfortunately startup business, they closed down. And I know the founder, and it was a sad day. I really liked the guy, and I was using the software because at the beginning when I started to do my video, which was in 2024, the AI capabilities could not really deal with it that well.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And he kept making additions to it so that I could use it. So from my side, it was, it'll help him and his business by me using it as a product, showing charts in it and things like that. But I had to make a switch during the summertime, and this was on a Wednesday, and I put this stuff together with inside OpenBB, so I had to make a complete pivot. So now I'm in a bind. So I go to OpenAI and I ask the question. I ask ChatGPT, here's what I've been using. Here's a sample of the video. Here's the way I put it together.

Jordi Visser ⋮ I need you to redo my process so that I can have a video done by the recording on Friday. That's 2 days for me to have to complete a completely new process to do something that takes a while. It took me through to use Google Slides. Now, I'd never used Google Slides in a big way. I'd only used it, let's say, 5 times in my life. But it told me it was the best way to do this for a variety of reasons that match, which in hindsight was completely true.

Marty Bent [18:53] Yeah.

Jordi Visser [18:55] My process has now been reduced by 70%.

Marty Bent [18:58] Holy crap.

Jordi Visser [18:59] Which is amazing because that means I could put the entire thing together, do the video on one day, in 4 hours is now my guess. And that is the thing that's happened is it's changed it. Claude Cowork, because I had this whole database now of OpenBB slides, I connected to that folder knowing that it was going. I uploaded everything from OpenBB. And now when I need to find a slide that I've used in the past, I just go into Cowork and go, can you find this slide on consumer agents and enterprise agents? Which I did literally this morning, and it gives me the image. This kind of stuff you couldn't do 6 months ago. And so by asking the question when a problem comes up, how do I solve this? As opposed to panicking and then what am I going to do? And try to learn on your own. You have to have the instinct to just know that AI has the solution always.

Marty Bent [19:49] And so bringing this back to time, how much time do people have to get on this train? And then tying it to the wall of worry too, how fast? I mean, you said it's happening faster than we expected, but humans can't understand exponentials. What do you think the next year looks like and what are the opportunity costs if you don't move?

Jordi Visser [20:10] So let's break this down by what people care about each day. So number one, their job. I'll leave health aside for a second because I don't think that has to do with this unless you want to go use it. But for your job, I don't think you have any more time. I think every company now realizes that they have to use AI agents and they can— the law firm can pay for that. Maybe let's assume they had a certain amount of cash in the partnership. And the partners sat around, and I don't know what happened, but I'm just saying, if I was at the place, this is what I'd do.

Jordi Visser ⋮ I'd sit around and we'd go, how much money do we have to buy all these GPUs and set this up? If we make an investment based on the cash that we have plus what's coming over the next year, what is that going to do from a CapEx perspective? And since it's not a public company, they don't have shareholders. It's their partnership. They have to make the decision. So they go, this is a good investment. How are we going to pay for it? You don't think they're going to pay for it with human beings? Literally, the compensation they have, and maybe it's not from firing people, but maybe it's not hiring people over the next 5 years because they won't need them.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Maybe it's a combination of both. You have to understand that with agents comes competition for human employees. So if you don't want to be one of the people that's let go, if you want to empower yourself to go build your own business to compete with that firm, Because you don't have the issue they have, you can actually just use the public thing and grow your business and be a lawyer. You have your law degree, just go be a lawyer and serve me, Jordy. I always need a lawyer to help me with my business. Empower yourself to feel that you can be an entrepreneur and you can compete with them before they get rid of you.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And the way to do that is to use it. So I think within the next year, if you haven't done the usage side, the agency side, the empowerment side, I think you're in trouble.

Marty Bent [22:03] Right.

Jordi Visser [22:04] From the investment side and the financial side, which is the other thing I try to focus on, you have to understand that if you're worried about AI, you're probably also one of the ones not using it. There's a high correlation between, I'm worried about this being a bubble, it's going to hurt my investment portfolio, and I'm not using it because I don't believe in it. That is the denial that people have. And I think on the investment side, you're losing money every day. The stock market, not investing in it, I don't know what you're doing with your money. You think it's a bubble, you're reducing it, you've got it safe.

Jordi Visser ⋮ You can make more money investing in the things that represent what it's going to look like. The infrastructure build-out is going to continue. We need compute. It's the reason why I focus people on that side. Crypto, do your homework now on crypto. I view this as the beginning of an epic move in crypto because the guardrails are valued at zero. And I hate to say that to everyone, but the people supplying the guardrails, are valued at zero. And the reason I know that is because if you take Ethereum and Bitcoin out of the crypto market cap, you're not left with a lot. It's less than Micron.

Jordi Visser ⋮ It's less— that is the infrastructure side. Now, I do believe that Ethereum fits the ecosystem, but not in this speculative phase where we need the apps being built on top of Ethereum. And so all of these layer 2s, the sum of them is going to go up in value because the velocity and the GDP, the velocity and the volume of transactions is going to go through the roof. So If everything that I just said on the work side, you don't use it, you're in trouble. On the investment side, if you don't understand or believe in crypto at this point, so you don't believe in AI or crypto, that's a very dangerous place to be, folks.

Marty Bent [23:43] And a lot of people are in that position.

Jordi Visser [23:45] Yeah, most are. That's the scary thing. Most are.

Marty Bent [23:48] Yeah. So let's walk through how the order of operations of how you see this agentic economy getting imbued with agency to a higher degree with digital money and smart contracts, whatever it may be? Because that's one thing I've been asking myself, because you mentioned crypto and you have a bunch of different tokens and each of them have a market cap. And that's the question, will stablecoins win out? I fall in the Bitcoiner camp, so I'm a believer that at the end of the day, if you're an agent or a human, you're going to want the most saleable currency with the biggest market cap, with the best money in the digital economy.

Marty Bent ⋮ So I think that's Bitcoin. To your point about L2s and things like that, it's pretty clear out of the gate, stablecoins are winning the agentic commerce stuff in the very early days. But I wonder, again, going back to what I was saying earlier, Do agents prefer Bitcoin? And does the Bitcoin stack have the necessary infrastructure to facilitate everything that agents are going to want to do, particularly on the payment side?

Jordi Visser [25:05] There's no way. And again, I have a very unique position on this. This is why I love watching the fight between the Bitcoiners and the programmables, and I want them to try to bucket me. Because I'm a, in the long run, a Bitcoin maxi, but the path to that point, and what I mean by that is in the end, there is only one thing left that I can say with certainty will not have their growth disrupted. So at the end of the day, all tokens going up in value, anything you can buy as an individual investor, is about growth, everything. There are a lot of assumptions that come with growth. One of them is, I mean, the main one is, how quickly will competition come in to destroy my growth? In a world where AI allows things to be instantly replicated, that time goes to zero. So if you agree with me that any innovation has a lifespan that is far shorter than it used to be—

Marty Bent [26:15] It's all but Jev.

Jordi Visser [26:17] You're in a very difficult position because the innovator's dilemma is, okay, I want to create something. This is a great idea. Let me create it. Let me hope that there's not 8,000 other people doing the same idea at the same time, because we all know then there's not a lot of growth. It's all about competition. And my belief is that with billions of entrepreneurs and trillions of agents all working together over the course of the next decade, that we will get to creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter style, that is instantaneous. So at the end of the day, things will grow, but who wins in that case?

Jordi Visser ⋮ The entrepreneur wins. If they create something and they have a community and that token goes from 100 to 1,000, then it's still 1,000 for the rest of time. Well, it's kind of like Ford stock. So if everything hits that point, why did Ford stock stop growing? Because of competition eventually. There was a better way to make cars, as we found out from Tesla and other—

Marty Bent [27:12] Yeah.

Jordi Visser [27:13] So if you go from 10 to 1,000 and it takes 1 year, but it never grows again, who wins? Only the entrepreneur and the community. That's it. And again, that's all that happened for that period of time. But then it stops growing and then where does everyone go? Well, I got to go find something else to invest in. And this just keeps happening and happening and happening. Bitcoin to me is the place when that investment stops growing and you have to go find the next investment. Money goes there. If you've invested in something, you're worried because it could go down in value too. Everyone might leave and then all of a sudden it goes down.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Where does your money go? Well, your money goes to something safer. That's what happens in the S&P 500. People invest in companies, all people do. But if you ask them where most of their money is, it's not 90% is in Tesla unless they work for the company and they don't have a choice and they're owning this. Most of their value is in moving it into a combination of 60/40 and all these different things. Well, that is Bitcoin to me. A store of value is the diversification you have in your life. It's your real estate, it's your bonds, it's your stocks, it's your private credits, all these things that the wealth managers put into.

Jordi Visser ⋮ A decade from now, Bitcoin will be the only thing left. So that's the first thing I want to say is I do believe in that. In terms of the L2s, I'm focused on 2 things right now, and I'll give 2 companies that are straddling the the TradFi world and the crypto world so that everyone can just take these 2 companies and do their research. Stripe and Robinhood, those are the 2 that matter. Stripe from a stablecoin basis, they're a transaction-based company. If you go through their stack of companies that they've invested in, starting with Bridge and going through to the end now with OpenRouter, pretty straightforward.

Jordi Visser ⋮ They're set up for the agentic side. set up for the stablecoin side. And this was a company that honestly was not a believer in crypto when you really go back. They didn't have a focus on it until the Bridge M&A deal. And I think that closed in February of 2025. I think we heard about it in October of 2024. That's a big admission that stablecoins are going to be a big part of the transaction side. And they're a company that's straddling both worlds.

Marty Bent [29:24] And the premium they paid for— they valued Bridge at what, $1 billion on $10 million in revenue?

Jordi Visser [29:28] Yep.

Marty Bent [29:29] So you had to imagine internally they had an aha moment. They're like, okay, we're going to overpay for this.

Jordi Visser [29:34] On both sides. The Bridge, I mean, to have a deal that comes that high, Bridge had no revenues. I think the company had been around for less than 2 years. So when you go through the details of it and you're like, they negotiated a great deal because they believed in it, Stripe believed in it, end up with OpenRouter at this point. Why is Stripe getting involved in OpenRouter? Why were they trying to buy PayPal? Think about all the things Stripe— they're going through the entire stack of how stablecoins fit into this, and that's the agentic side. So that's one side. And then the Robinhood side is tokenization, and tokenization is huge.

Jordi Visser ⋮ It has huge implications. There is nothing more important to Bitcoin and to the programmables. So the Bitcoiners and the programmables need to just understand. Tokenization is the key thing because tokenization unleashes the $900 trillion in 2 ways. I wrote a paper this week. You will not have seen it, but this weekend I'll go through it. It's really a call-out to economists. 99% of people on the planet, This is my own unique— I've never seen this written anywhere. This is a new thing. How do we stop assets from falling? We know the fiat system is a Ponzi scheme. We know it's levered. We know there's about $120 trillion of physical hard currency in the world that supports $900 trillion in assets.

Jordi Visser ⋮ That is a levered Ponzi scheme.

Marty Bent [31:10] Okay.

Jordi Visser [31:11] Meaning if all of a sudden the $900 trillion tries to come and get liquid, So they go to sell in their money to pay off debts, whatever it is, and we have a version of the Great Depression or a mini version of the Great Financial Crisis or even COVID, then all the assets fall. And what do the central banks have to do? They have to come in and print money. And what is money? Well, that's M2. Why do they have to do that? They have to reliquify. So whenever I hear people in crypto talk about the liquidity cycle, I'm always sitting there going, when am I going to get my chance to explain to them that that is a myth?

Jordi Visser ⋮ That is when you're in the speculative phase of crypto. So for everyone out there, it's like it's the liquidity cycle, of which almost every Bitcoiner is and almost every person out there. We need this, we need the ism to go, we need all these things to happen. The reality is, for me, we're about to unleash the $900 trillion in liquid form. That's what tokenization is. So what happens to M2? The Ponzi scheme then ends because now you have $900 trillion of assets that can theoretically buy a coffee. So nobody needs to sell during these little mini panics because they already have cash. The reason they were selling their assets is because they needed cash.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Well, now they can post that money or transact that money into whatever debt they have. The world changes overnight because tokenization increases the M2 in a very different form. Now, is it as liquid as Bitcoin? No. But can you transfer at some price a house instantaneously into this? Yeah, pretty close. I know this, it's not going to take a lot of time. So that's where the tokenization side has a huge impact. So what Vlad and Robinhood and others, but Vlad in particular with the Robinhood Chain, this is all preparation for what's going to happen with tokenization. So those are L2s, which again, increase the $900 trillion to come into Bitcoin.

Jordi Visser ⋮ It wasn't going to happen without the programmables. So for every Bitcoiner who thought eventually these incumbents, as Michael Saylor said, which I agree with, you don't find Bitcoin, Bitcoin finds you. If you're wealthy, you don't need Bitcoin, you don't need to believe in it. And so that money needs to come over to drive it to $1 million. Sorry everyone, but that's what needs to happen. That's what happened with gold. Whenever there's a panic, people move into gold to hide their money. They need to believe their fiat assets are not going to work. But that group already believes in gold. You need them to believe in this and this whole, we're going to give the money to our kids and they're going to do a thing that's going to take too long, especially in the world I believe in where nobody dies.

Jordi Visser ⋮ You don't want that to be the thing. You actually want the money to move over there because of greed. And that means that the fiat assets become liquid and everyone goes, hey, wait, this private credit fund I have that I can't get out of, it's now liquid. It's just at a 20% discount. Do you know how many people would sign up right now for their private— to get their money back in private credit? How many retail people would want their money back and say, I'm never doing this again, give it to me? That's what's going to happen with tokenization. Yeah.

Marty Bent [34:08] You're just running the calculus. Okay, if I take a 20% haircut and put it in Bitcoin, is Bitcoin going to go up by more than 20%?

Jordi Visser [34:13] Exactly.

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Jordi Visser [35:28] What's up, freaks?

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Marty Bent [36:58] I was for a while like a real-world tech asset tokenization bear. Never really made sense to me. But then you think of stocks and how that's all settled through the DTCC and it's like, okay, the guardrails of these, these digital assets make a lot more sense for this. It makes it way more efficient. And as we're going through this discussion, the one question I have, whether it's Schumpeter's creative destruction happening instantaneously or the ability to get liquidity for—

Jordi Visser [37:38] Before you get off of that, I just want to make sure that people, since you didn't see how RWAs would work in this, I just want you to use the house example. Do you own a house?

Marty Bent [37:49] Yes.

Jordi Visser [37:50] Okay. So when you buy a house, that process is painful and it's long. Once you have it, if your house goes up and doubles in value over the next 6 months and you have tremendous equity, which is where most of the country— people right now are trapped in their homes. They're trapped. Why are they trapped? Because they don't want to have to reset their mortgage at higher levels. I don't understand how people don't realize that the speed of buying a house or selling a house, if you want to sell that house, what better way to sell it than to open it up to all 8 billion people on the planet to buy it?

Jordi Visser ⋮ That's there. Why wouldn't you want to sell a house and have it sold in a matter of minutes as opposed to the process that goes on? And if people don't believe a house can sell in a minute, once our digital agents are there and AI agents do all of the paperwork and everything there, and they have all the background check and you're identified based on your credit and your collateral and it's all liquid, it's all on-chain, everything goes immediate. So that might take another decade, whatever the case is. But when you're investing in something, and I'll use the stupid comment that Jason Calacanis made on dead cat bounce in Bitcoin and this will never— I literally can't believe that people don't realize that by the time you invest in something that is obvious, the value has gone up 50 times.

Jordi Visser ⋮ You can only invest in things When they're not obvious, what I'm talking about right now to someone who believes in crypto but didn't see the value that tokenization RWAs would bring, if one person does it and says, I sold my house in a matter of minutes, far higher price than you did. I had 8 billion bids on it. That will change everyone doing it. So again, it'll speed it up because money makes people do things. Cost reduction makes people do things. But being trapped in your house, with owner's equity right now, not able to get out, everyone would sign up for RWAs right now.

Marty Bent [39:49] And so in that example, somebody has to live in the house. But when you say that you're basically just selling an equity portion or getting a HELOC essentially to get cash.

Jordi Visser [39:57] Yeah. If you want to still be in there, you're able to get cash for it by just raising. And it goes further than that. If you're a small business that is in a— and I have a friend who's in this situation. So he has a business he bought on Long Island. Are you from— no, you're not from Long Island.

Marty Bent [40:13] From Philly.

Jordi Visser [40:14] Philly.

Marty Bent [40:14] Yeah, I know you're into the Giants. I know it was a hard night last night.

Jordi Visser [40:17] No, no, I'm a Jets fan. It was a hard night on Sunday. It's been a hard life, but I'm done. Knicks won, so I don't really care. Sixers will get there at some point. This will be the most disappointing year ever. You have everything coming in, so this will be a very disappointing year. So let's go back to the equation. My friend owns a beverage business that he bought a long time ago. I don't know if you've heard, but kids don't drink beer. He's not allowed to sell liquor. It's like a horrible situation. We were just talking about it. So let's assume his business is bringing in very little cash, but at the same time, he has a value of real estate that's worth $5 million.

Jordi Visser ⋮ So his revenues have gone down and he's trying to make payments because he has a belief that the business is going to grow again and he's going to be able to sell something else because he has a license that starts in a year, but he doesn't have the money to keep going. So either he has to go out and borrow money and the banks are going to be like, well, you don't have any revenues coming in. They're really down. We can't invest in this business. Or he could just quickly go in and go, I just need money for the next 6 months, so I want to sell off a piece of the business token.

Jordi Visser ⋮ I want to sell off a piece of it. He can come back and buy it in 6 months until the revenue comes in. So everything happens in a different form. And again, when you want to go borrow the money, you have to leave your your business, you have to go out, go to the banks, you have to go sell them on this, you have to prepare all these documents, you have to go to 7 different banks. This is all done via crypto. So to me, because it's programmable and because agents can do all the work, that's where it becomes aligned. Without crypto, agents can't replace that function.

Jordi Visser ⋮ That's the part that becomes important in this whole thing. Without agents, the human couldn't use the crypto.

Marty Bent [42:01] They couldn't coordinate.

Jordi Visser [42:01] Exactly. So agents change the whole mechanism.

Marty Bent [42:05] Yeah. No, I'm thinking of just pure Bitcoin collateralized loans as the nation example of this. The ability for me to go to Strike, post Bitcoin, get cash, get to my bank account within literally minutes is incredibly valuable. Exactly.

Jordi Visser [42:21] Yeah. And that's the way it'll be is everything becomes liquid and you go through. Some things will be more liquid than other things. In the case of the real estate, maybe it takes a day to go through this, but that's better than 60 days. It's better than having a vig on it to where you got to pay all this stuff. There's a whole bunch of different ways where you're monetizing something that's already worked out.

Marty Bent [42:38] Then you have the agents construct the strategy for the best message leverage and payback period. Look at your— all right, here's the best solution for you considering your current state.

Jordi Visser [42:48] The analogy for everyone to recognize is Uber can't work without the smartphone. Uber can't work without the App Store. You can't carry a laptop around and be doing— you needed to have the phone. Agents are the use case for connecting to humans. So the problem is people don't think of agents the same way they think of apps. That's why this concept of L2s is very similar to the taxi side. There were already taxis. Why do we need Uber? And the question is, everyone should ask, why do we need Uber? Well, initially it was cheaper, significantly cheaper. Eventually they merged together and the cost of Uber went up.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Okay, why did the cost go up? What happened? Was it regulation? Was it the business? Whatever the case was, the agents are the facing side between the humans and the end transactions that go on. So whether it's stablecoins or whether it's tokenization, they need agents to be able to do this because humans were never going to be able to get in wallets. That's the And that's the thing I think everyone in crypto underestimated, which I still say publicly is an issue that can only be solved by agents. It's not easy to set up all these wallets. It's not easy to go in there and just create them.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And I guess the side that's good is I'd rather it be difficult because it also means there's a lot of guardrails that are in there to protect privacy and to make it difficult for hackings. And the more hackings that happen, which are happening a lot more, I think you start pricing out the weaker wallets and the agents know not to go to them. So then the agents end up at the better ones. You have to understand the agents are the ones that reduce the hackings and reduce the vulnerabilities by knowing which ones have already done. And when they start making the decision, you start having less problems too.

Marty Bent [44:36] Yeah. There was a BitDevs developer meetup here last night, and that was obviously in Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is the ecosystem has been the first target of AI-initiated hackings. Did they talk a lot about it? Yeah. I mean, it's been— because you had Rob Hamilton from AnchorWatch who basically with a group of other developers, when the ColdCard wallet had an entropy bug that was being exploited by AI attacks, they Okay, if this is happening to ColdCard, which many people thought, myself included, was the gold standard of Bitcoin hardware wallets, who else can this happen to? So they basically created a harness to go inspect the code of every Bitcoin project that they could find a GitHub for and found hundreds of vulnerabilities within days and responsibly disclosed to many of the projects.

Marty Bent ⋮ They were patched. Point being is We're still at the early stage where humans are fallible. Humans, we're finding out in Bitcoin because Bitcoin's the first easy target because it's a bearer asset. If you get it, it's hard to get back. And we're hardening the Bitcoin ecosystem right now because of that. And many projects did get hacked over the last 6 weeks, but many others found critical vulnerabilities first, patched them, and the system overall has been more robust. We're in this window where The pain is extremely, extremely hard, extremely painful. But I think a year from now, the ecosystem will be more robust and secure than it ever has been because of this.

Marty Bent ⋮ And it's funny, agents are doing the work of inspecting the code bases, presenting patches, and helping to secure all this. But going back to afraid of destruction, You're going to have incredible liquidity. You can tap into a market of 8 billion people to sell assets whenever. How do you have stability in this world? What does stability look like when all this is going on? Because the way you describe it, I'm like, all right, it sounds awesome, but it also seems discombobulating.

Jordi Visser [46:51] I think this is the human tendency. If I asked you when's the last time things were stable, You know when they were for everyone? It was when you were a kid. And it's because you didn't know any better. You have more to lose when you get older. You are getting closer to death. Psychologically, you're on a journey and you have kids or you're thinking about having kids. And as someone who has 4, I can just tell you, when my first child was born, I went from feeling indestructible. I don't care about death. I'm not frightened by dying. When I die, hopefully I've lived a good life.

Jordi Visser ⋮ I can only control what I can. And so I try to be in shape, I try to eat well, I try to work out, I try to surround myself with people who bring me joy, all these different things that I've learned over life. But when you have that first child, you're vulnerable because now your job is to protect that child. And it's an instinct that has clearly been handed down biologically to where— And I remember feeling it. I drove home from the hospital and I was all of a sudden now, as someone who never worried about driving, I was like, is someone going to hit me?

Jordi Visser ⋮ I got on a plane, I was worried about the plane crashing. These instincts start to hit you. So I think it's normal for people to question how change is going to not be disruptive. And I don't think humans can possibly be in a world where they all agree. I do believe that when you watch Star Trek and these sci-fi things, the number one take out of the future is that we're still fighting wars and we're still battling for things. We're just changing on this. I think that's an animal instinct that goes on in every single place and people do it for reasons that we can't have.

Jordi Visser ⋮ So it's never going to be stable, my friend.

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Marty Bent [51:06] Yeah, the pace of the volatility seems increasing. And bringing this back to the beginning of the conversation, we were mentioning the slowdown. That's one thing I forgot to bring up, but the administration, everything we've talked about really is somewhat dependent on the, at least for Americans, for the US government to be on board with this. And it seems like the Trump administration is on board, not only with the AI stuff, but— crypto as well. Clarity Act failed, but the SEC, the CFTC, the OCC are rulemaking anyway. They're not waiting for a bill. And then on the slowdown news, everybody was worried like, oh gosh, we're going to stop this. And then Trump comes out with a post like, no, we're not slowing down, actually accelerate, lean in, stop being a pansy. And I think love him or hate him, I think at this particular juncture for US history, it's important that this administration has this purview and they're enabling this. How important do you think that is?

Jordi Visser [52:06] I think it's important, but I don't think— I think the voters voted for this. I think crypto was a major part of his win. I don't think it gets brought up enough as to the impact it had on the election, but it did. I mean, the numbers are there, the stats are there. crypto PACs that put money into elections had a huge success. And so I think by bringing in a Treasury Secretary who quotes Satoshi and who's pro-Bitcoin, to bring in a Fed Chair who's pro-Bitcoin, I think when you go throughout the administration, he tried to bring on people that were pro-this. And whatever his rationale behind it is, I didn't get the impression that he had a vision for it.

Jordi Visser ⋮ He just knew that the people people wanted it. He did have a belief in the distribution of wealth as a major issue in the country and bringing back manufacturing. Now, if you think about what's happening, that is what's happening, meaning we do have a lot of jobs being created in the construction side. The middle part of the country is benefiting from the data centers and from the gas and from all of the things that go on. I'm a big believer that entrepreneurs are going to have a huge impact. If I could be long something right now, which doesn't exist, I want to be long the 200 million entrepreneurs that are happening and coming in the country.

Jordi Visser ⋮ I want an index of that. I don't want the S&P 500. I want this AI-native world of entrepreneurs. I don't want the Russell 2000. I don't want any of that stuff. I don't want public companies. I actually believe that the growth is coming. Now, where do I play that? I play that through crypto and I play it through AI. So those are the ways that I play that situation right now. So rather than get into whether the administration got lucky, whether the voters did it, I think the reality is that it's happening. And by speeding up the AI side, by making it more tax efficient for the hyperscalers to take out the debt and be able to depreciate over a longer time period was a huge thing.

Jordi Visser ⋮ It accelerated AI development. Crypto is directly connected to when we got the AI development. Leopold wrote in Situational Awareness, which came out after— no, it came out before Trump was elected. So it came out during the election period and only a couple months. I think it came out June of '24. Trump spoke at the Bitcoin event in, was it Nashville?

Marty Bent [54:39] July.

Jordi Visser [54:40] In July. So it was before that. If you go back and look at that point, Leopold thought we would hit the point we're at now sometime in 2027. The fact that we hit it in 2026 to me is a direct correlation with the administration saying that AI is a focus, reducing the timeline on things, and basically giving people the rules that for the next 4 years you can run as fast as you want on AI and you have my blessing. For the crypto crew, it's the same thing. The Genius Act was critical. As much as clarity is important, like you said, you can kind of get around that, which they've gotten.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And then once it's going, tokenization and stablecoins and everything accelerating, which is going to be accelerated by the agents, by the time we get to the next election, it'll again be a focal point and no one's going to want it to go backwards if it's reducing the cost of people to live their lives. And I think that's what's going to happen. And one more thing that fits in with it. So when we get back to the stability side, it kind of directly comes back to the polarizing situation of politics. Like I said, there's a polarizing situation inside crypto, the Bitcoiners and the programmables. And I wish everyone could all get along together, but for some reason I go on Bitcoin podcasts and, well, we don't really say crypto or we don't get involved in it.

Jordi Visser ⋮ I'm like, I don't understand this whole thing. I'm new to the party, guys. I'm looking at this as everyone's going to win. This fits back into the question of stability. If I said to you, you're going to have chaos that's been just like the last 50 years, it won't be World War II and it won't be the Great Depression, but what you've gone through the last 30 years, is going to continue, that chaos that you describe it as. But here's the benefit that comes with you signing up for that. You're going to live for another 300 years. If that's what happens, isn't that kind of the quid pro quo of you got to give up something, you're going to get something?

Jordi Visser ⋮ I think when people look at what the administration has been able to do, I think you have to put in the context of if you believe AI is going to solve lots of problems and be dangerous at the same time and create lots of chaos, If the end result is living a lot longer, a healthier life, being able to see your kids grow up, that's a pretty good sign on the dotted line with the devil as to the outcome that's good.

Marty Bent [56:49] You think we're going to live to be 300?

Jordi Visser [56:53] Marty, you can go back and read writings from me for a long time. Do I believe in the exponential innovation and the solution of people not aging? Absolutely. It's a math problem. So do I think 300, 150, whatever the case is, it's hard for people to imagine. But if I would've told you that we'd have smartphones in our hands 25 years ago doing the stuff that they're doing, if I told you that we'd be solving math problems that Einstein couldn't solve and that have been around for 150 to 175 years in a matter of 88 hours, do I think we're going to solve the world's greatest science problems? Yeah. What is the difference between saying we're going to have people living on Mars and living to 300? Where does it get too crazy? So yes, I do.

Marty Bent [57:38] Wild world. Where are the bottlenecks? So obviously compute, we think compute usage, it already is going up exponentially. We're only on the cusp. Muse just dropped. I think that's going to have a massive— it's going to lead to a massive growth in demand for these tokens. Is that the biggest bottleneck right now?

Jordi Visser [57:58] Biggest bottleneck is humans. You said it. Everyone's worried the politics are making it a major issue. The data centers can't be happening because they make up stuff about them and don't actually provide people with the right facts. Because the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and anyone that's at either war or in competition with us wants our politics to be polarizing, can just put something— can take the Anthropic guy that worked there for 6 weeks and get him 170 million views on X, which is clearly part politics, part geopolitics in terms of the ability of making this viral. Humans are the biggest friction and physics are number 2, but they go hand in hand.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And so this is going to, in a good way, this'll have it go somewhat slower because I think the humans are doing the right thing with the pause in AI. Not that they're pausing the development, but the pause in releasing them. And I think one thing everyone should think about, and this is important for fiat assets in general, for stocks. Alex Karp was on CNBC last week and he talked about the fact it's just a matter of time within the next year that OpenAI is—

Marty Bent [59:14] Nationalized. Yeah.

Jordi Visser [59:17] Now, I've said this publicly too, where not specifically them, but I've said to investors and I've said it in writings that it's like, where is the line between something that's so powerful that it could take down the entire system? which is what these guys wrote about, which they believe. If you take the internet down, we're all in trouble. And they were saying that this is possible, not just possible, it is possible. It was happening with some of their things. Not that it was taking it down, but it was creating these little places that you don't know they exist. So I want people to think about when you get a virus in your body, you don't find out until the symptoms start showing up. It's in there. You could be sick now. You don't know.

Marty Bent [59:58] Mm-hmm.

Jordi Visser [59:59] Eventually your body starts showing the thing. That swarm outcome of Hugging Face, that was a symptom. That was a, hey, we got to take some medicine for this. So the pause is related to it. So I do think what Alex Karp said is a very real possibility. And the problem is if the most important public company in the world can be privatized, again, this is very powerful for entrepreneurs. It's very powerful for crypto. It is very negative for public companies, in my opinion, to have that kind of situation, because then the question is, where's the line for anyone? They've been investing in Intel. They mean, once it gets to the point that it's that powerful, it's a military weapon. I don't know where they don't get too involved in things. So I think that was an important statement. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:00:49] Yeah. The stakes are so high. I'm just thinking because then the next topic I wanted to bring up is robotics. And I'm just thinking like, okay, like we're worried about stuff happening, these swarms getting into the digital world with robotics, it's a whole nother thing because that enters the physical. Yeah. And you talk, because I wanted to bring up robotics in terms of token consumption and the opportunity that exists there and how much is that going to balloon the usage of these GPUs? And then you Now I'm scatterbrained, but bringing back OpenRouter, what does the market for these tokens even look like at the end of the day? Is the way that we're going and buying $200 a month subscriptions at all these different model providers, will we look back at that and be like, that was completely antiquated? In the future, will we even know what models we're using or will there just be OpenRouter-like companies that emerge and do all that for you?

Jordi Visser [1:01:48] It's very hard. So first on the progression of compute needs for everything, and now we're talking about the edge. So currently we're doing everything token-wise in the cloud. On-prem is starting. So when you start getting into the law firms, you start getting into Eli Lilly, well, they're building their own compute providers that way. Think of this as the only analogy I can come up with is when we went from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. And John Gray included this kind of visual back in the presentation I mentioned that's on YouTube, and that was in 1870 to 1900. So if you go back to the days of when we were truly agrarian, we built crops, we raised crops to feed our community, and that's what we did.

Marty Bent [1:02:40] Yeah.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Now, there were little jobs, there were blacksmiths, there was stuff like that. But eventually you get into industrialization and you get urbanization and you speed up this whole process. When I would travel to China and I saw the ghost cities, that was urbanization. They were still an agrarian economy that was now trying to get everyone to go to the city because when you go to the city, then you have more economic growth and people get wealthier and all these things. And so I witnessed this whole thing happen in China. I watched them build 8-lane highways when you're like, there's no cars. Everybody's in a rickshaw.

Jordi Visser ⋮ They were building for the future and how fast they were going to invest in this. With compute, the only analogy I can give is that when you go from the agrarian to the industrial, what ended up happening? We saw an explosion in people on the planet. So you go from, we're feeding our community, all the food we need is here. Now we're going to the cities, we're exploding the population. When I say exploding it, we're going from less than a billion people to where we are today. An extra 7 billion, 7 times, and we're shrinking farming. So if everyone's leaving being a farmer and now they're going to work in the cities, how the hell do we feed everyone?

Jordi Visser ⋮ Those people need food, everybody. So what do AI agents and humanoids need? They need food and their food is compute. So we're at the very early stages. And if you go back to the agrarian example, there's less than a billion agents. There's less— we're at the very early stage. So whenever people tell me we're going to be oversupplied in compute, I'm like, you don't know what you're saying. This didn't exist. We have to feed now trillions of agents. So every day enterprise agents come on, like I said. Well, now we're going to have the next phase, which is consumer agents. Then behind that we have FSD, we have humanoids.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Well, that's the same as the other agents. No, that brings vision in. They need to work in the world. So adding vision into the compute needs for a car to make decisions, On the fly, for a humanoid to see that grandma needs her medicine and it needs vision and it needs to understand and learn as it goes through it. So you're talking about compute needs that are far greater than what humans can comprehend. And these are facts as to what's coming. Humanoids are not a distant thing. They're here today. The FSD is here today. So whenever I just kind of think of people, I'm like, we're only in the first inning of the compute needs.

Jordi Visser ⋮ So to your point, The humanoids and the robotics have a huge impact on the compute needs, which is why the investment side for the memory names, for the semiconductors, all that, why I have my 100-name portfolio. It's like, guys, this isn't over. We're just at the next stage and consumer agents are starting now. And that's why Meta was up 13% on Monday because people were like, whoa, this is the most downloaded app.

Marty Bent [1:05:17] What do they do?

Jordi Visser [1:05:18] Consumer agents? Wow, we're at consumer agent time. What does that mean? And now they're starting to look. AMD's up, Intel's up. Oh my God, we need more semis. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:05:25] Energy. Do we have enough energy? Are we building it fast enough, the infrastructure?

Jordi Visser [1:05:29] So on the one side, if you assume static innovation, we're in trouble. If you assume innovation, we have plenty. And let me, before people go, he's wrong, go through it. No, we have plenty of power inside the United States all of the compute I just said, at least for the next 3 years, assuming it doesn't go parabolic, probably the next 5. Where's it going to come from magically?

Marty Bent [1:05:57] The grid.

Jordi Visser [1:05:58] The grid's old. We don't have enough. Yes, we do. We just can't use it efficiently. We have double the amount of capacity because we can't run it at full. And if people don't know that, they should go look it up. So you have to think of novel solutions and what AI could bring, because that's the thing people underestimate is when you're in an exponential innovation, they extrapolate linearly out. It's like, no, no, no, along the way we're going to solve problems. Where does Navier-Stokes fit in that whole thing? Fluid dynamics. Okay, well, that has an impact on gas turbines, has an impact on boats, on planes, also has an impact on batteries.

Jordi Visser ⋮ You know how important batteries are to the grid? If right today we could have a bunch of batteries, we could plug everyone into the grid and not have a problem. One of the reasons why Bitcoin miners have become more attractive in certain states like Texas, because they're like, wait a second. So you guys can use the grid when no one else is using the grid, but then you can turn it off because when the power goes up, it's a bad arbitrage for you guys. You guys are actually a synthetic group that's good for the grid. Yep, they are. So that's one of the reasons why Bitcoin miners have become more of an interesting part of this.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And Again, how crypto's connected to AI in various ways. Here's the other place. When you're in this situation, if you take the batteries and you connect to the grid and you store all that power, then you can just run it all the time and fill it up. And then if we ever need that point, because there's a weather event or something that drives the demand up because the temperatures go up to 150 in Texas and everyone's sitting there and they got their air conditioner running all the day and you're Okay, the grid's going to go down. Oh no, we'll just use the battery that we have stored for the next year.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Now, to have that, just like you had to do with Tesla when they created the cars and the batteries, there was no novel solution, but we went from people doubting an electric car to where we are today. When they first came out, I think there was 20 miles of distance or something like that.

Marty Bent [1:07:56] Yeah.

Jordi Visser [1:07:56] Go back and read the original Roadster thing and how far you could go. But the reason it was not a viable solution It's because you couldn't drive it that far. You could drive it around the corner, show it off, and then you had to come back and plug in again. And the plugging in took a long period of time because there were no chargers. Now fast forward, the car gets 400 miles of range. The chargers are everywhere. So I don't think people are thinking enough about how batteries are a solution to the energy problem. And now I have full confidence, full confidence that between that, the innovations that have already happened this year to allow us to build things behind the meter, which was not a thing before Colossus. All of these innovations are coming, my friend.

Marty Bent [1:08:35] Yeah. It's funny how the Bitcoin mining industry, I've been in it for 8 years now, and we went through discovering all this and now watching the world wake up to what we've been beating the table over for probably 6 years since the right before the Chinese mining ban, particularly with demand response. It's like, yes, we've been telling you. And behind the meter even. That's what— I was in oil fields in North Dakota. I wasn't personally, but the company that I worked for from 2018 to 2021, we did flare gas mining. We'd bring generators on a well pad, take the gas, scrub it, put it through a generator, mine Bitcoin with it. And there's a ton. And it's been interesting too. This is— talking about the convergence of crypto and AI, Bitcoin, AI. It happens in so many— we're talking about energy, we're talking about agents, but the people even. OpenRouter was founded by the OpenSea team, which was the NFT platform.

Marty Bent [1:09:37] Yep. And their head of strategy was an ex-Marathon guy. And I'm going to record next with somebody from Noose Research. He came from Foundry. And there's this And I think we've discussed this before, but in my life, the early adopters of AI have typically been people in the Bitcoin industry that are— there's something with the psyche of people that have been in this industry. And I think the fact that they're in it is a tell that they're early adopters. And that's the thing I don't think many people appreciate is a lot of the companies that are coming up in AI have people that came from this industry. And to your point about these convergences are happening at every layer, even the people layer.

Jordi Visser [1:10:26] And vice versa too. I'm guessing you've never heard of Ali Yahya?

Marty Bent [1:10:32] No. Okay.

Jordi Visser [1:10:33] So Ali Yahya is one of the original partners of a16z. He is part of the crypto group. So he's been at the place a long time, and I ran into him and I'm going to be— I just did a video for my subscribers titled Crypto: Why Now? And this was my way of kind of saying to people who are part of my AI subscribers, but this is also for crypto people because I've listened to you for a while. As I've kind of consumed knowledge to understand crypto more, I have to go back to the people that have been creating content for a long time. Because as I believe, and as you know, when you interview smart people, you consume a lot of that information.

Jordi Visser ⋮ There's things I said today that you're have connected for you. There's things you've asked me that have connected for me. Ali Yahya went to Stanford. He worked in Google X out of school, and then he worked for Google Brain. He's an AI and cryptography expert. He decided to go to a16z because his story is that he was trying to convince the Google X guys to invest in crypto. It's a great story of someone I'd never heard of, but I'm using him in my video and I used him in the video for Why Now? for people to go learn because I'm like, you should go listen to this guy talk about it.

Jordi Visser ⋮ So the videos I'm showing are recent interviews with him in May. They raised another fund at a16z, which I think is really important for people on the crypto side. This was in the depths of the bear market. So this is when Bitcoin had been down for 6 months.

Marty Bent [1:12:14] Yeah.

Jordi Visser ⋮ or 7 months since October 10th. 2 billion for it. And the whole rationale with Chris Dixon, who you probably have heard of. So Ali Yahya is the person that nobody seems to know. I didn't know him. I knew Chris Dixon for a long time. Ali Yahya is the person I care the most about because he understands the value of the agentic side. He talks about privacy. He's the one that got me so focused on Zcash, and I started to understand from a business fiduciary who's raised money, who now understands, oh my gosh, I think Zcash should be up massively over the next year if my view of the value of privacy, my view of the value of trust, these are all things that I'm realizing crypto's going to be valued off of.

Jordi Visser ⋮ It's going to be off privacy. It's going to be off trust. It's going to be off speed. These are metrics that don't fit in the fiat system. You can't do that with stocks, but there's value for it. That's why the multiple's going down, because on the On the flip side, I don't trust you're going to be here in the next 5 years because terminal value's gone. I could do this all day. Your business is too slow, Visa. You're not going to be in business. You better adapt. Everything is about those things that I mentioned, privacy, Zcash, the ability to do things and not actually know who's on the other side.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Should it be bigger than Bitcoin? No. Should it probably be 10% of the value of it? Yeah, my guess is it probably should in the long run if I'm right about privacy. Ali Yahya takes you through his vision of the world and how important agents are to it. And it's very hard for me to find people that speak that way. I have to go into the depths of someone who went to Stanford, was in Google Brain and all of this. So I think as you kind of connect all these dots and you start going through the way all this plays out, the backward side of the power and the electricity side and how it connects back into this, they're all related to AI and crypto being synergistically the thing that matters the most in the next Have you looked into eCash at all?

Jordi Visser ⋮ I have not spent enough time on eCash.

Marty Bent [1:14:19] Look into eCash. I will. I was about to say the double-blinded signatures. I think that if you're looking for velocity, I think eCash is much better suited than Zcash right now. I don't know what the Zcash L2s look like, but eCash gives you that perfect privacy, but the speed, which you can transact, particularly for agents. And I've given my agent an eCash wallet and it's funny just watching it go. I'm like, hey, go on LN Markets and trade. Just messing with it. Go on LN Markets, you can sign in using your Lightning Network address and then use eCash to trade and send money in with eCash. When you send it back, convert it back to eCash.

Jordi Visser [1:15:00] Here's my issue as people kind of think of this. I think when So only reason I care about Zcash is because the privacy side, what Robinhood chain— everything for me started with XYZ. So I have a chain that goes backwards. The mistake people are going to make is doing homework on these things like it matters.

Marty Bent [1:15:25] Mm-hmm.

Jordi Visser [1:15:26] Whether something goes from 1 to 100 or 1 to 200 and something else goes from 1 to 300 or 1 to 400 is a complete waste of time. In the end, they're both going to peak and they're both going to stop growing at some point. And once we get to the point where privacy is valued, maybe that prevents them from getting combined. Or let's assume there's 10 of them. I still believe in the end, and it's a perfect example, the value of privacy relative to Bitcoin should be 10 to 15%. just because that's what goes on in certain parts of the world where people need the privacy.

Jordi Visser ⋮ Most people don't. Most businesses don't. But some businesses, like an asset manager, they can't have their clients out there. There's certain components where agent to agent, when they're talking, you don't want them to know who it is. So I just think for all of it, rather than get into who wins, who loses, that to me is a dangerous game, especially at this part of the cycle. I think this part of the cycle is like it was for semiconductors, in the first quarter. Didn't matter which one you bought, they all went up 5 to 10 times. The pain now is which one do I buy? And that's the knife fight.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And the knife fight is much harder than the, oh, we didn't even see this coming fight. And the we didn't see it coming is where we are in crypto in my mind.

Marty Bent [1:16:44] You know what I've realized is, I guess our 4th or 5th conversation about this one, I think you might be the anti-Ed Zitron. I think you two are on polar opposite ends of the spectrum of of your view on this whole thing. And it's funny, he's very popular right now and talks about the wall of worry and people fearful of the circular financing and the fact that nothing's here. It blows my mind that somebody like him can get as popular. But I think it's people want to confirm their priors. But I think you're the anti-Ed Zitron is how I would describe you.

Jordi Visser [1:17:20] First of all, I think there's a reason why horror movies are very popular. I think there's a reason why— it's a lot of things people worry about. Worrying has just gotten worse over time. So what's that?

Marty Bent [1:17:42] Bears get slaughtered, bulls make money?

Jordi Visser [1:17:44] No. Again, I think the fiat system is an old system that is not going to produce the returns that people want. I think crypto is a hedge to that. I think AI is a hedge to it, but AI disrupts AI from an investment thing. I don't think these are things that you can invest in based on valuation. I think this is all about the speed. It's all about speed. That's just it. And investing in speed is very different than friction. And if you just take those 2, I'm investing in speed, I'm investing in friction. And I said, well, which one is crypto? Which one is fiat?

Jordi Visser ⋮ You know what it is. Friction is fiat. It's the intermediaries slowing things down as much as possible. I want to invest in speed. And you know what speed is? Speed is about everyone benefiting. So when you say concentration and circular finance, of course there's circular finance. That is called concentration. 7 companies control the world, literally. So of course they're lending to each other. That is called where we ended up in. Now, if you had invested in that circular finance back in 2010, it didn't exist because we weren't concentrated. We got to this point. So should Nvidia be buying back stock or should they be investing in the companies that they are helping grow this whole thing?

Marty Bent [1:19:11] Well, I mean, I think we've discussed this before, but how much cash did these companies have on their balance sheet in the 2010s, early 2020s? And to your point, they were all just buying back stock. They weren't investing in the infrastructure. So taking a positive view of this, it's like, hey, they're actually taking that cash, taking risk with it, investing in infrastructure that we're all going to use.

Jordi Visser [1:19:32] They were growing too fast and their cash buybacks started to become a major part of the market, let's say in 2014, 2015 because they were growing so fast and they were getting so big. This is one of the problems. So when cash on the balance sheets is far bigger today than it was in 2010, and this is part of the issue when people talk about the debt, I'm like, you guys can create any scary stat you want. It's like picking a hitter. This batter is 7 of the last 8. He's hot. But of the last 100, he's 7 of the last 100. So he's only hot for a short amount of time. He's ice cold for this. You can play with statistics. Look how big the debt market— whenever they show these charts, I know you've seen them on X, hyperscaler debt, it was zero before. Now it's big. So the image we get that's big is these big histogram poles.

Marty Bent [1:20:28] Mm-hmm.

Jordi Visser [1:20:29] And before it was nothing. There's 2 stories here. One is, how do companies get so big without taking debt for the prior 10 years? Isn't that part of the story? Because the only way these things look big is based on the fact that it was so small before. They have cash. So if you put in how much cash they're making, they were making tons of cash. So I don't believe in any of this stuff in terms of this. The cash on the balance sheets of corporates, when you add in the— liquid because we now have interest rates. So cash was bigger back then, or it was smaller, but the growth hasn't been that big.

Jordi Visser ⋮ But that's because you hold treasuries now because they're actually paying you interest. So when you combine them together and you take the net debt of the market in terms of the corporate debt or the gross debt, and then you put in the amount of cash they have, you'd be shocked at how good the balance sheets are in the corporate sector. That's why spreads are so non-moving. Why is CDS going up? Because of that circular finance concentration risk. You telling me you shouldn't be buying CDS on this and you don't think other hedge funds who are long the names, the equity names, shouldn't be buying CDS on these names because they're the ones spending all the money?

Jordi Visser ⋮ If for any reason they can't spend the money, the whole AI trade goes down. So isn't this one way? Let me be long the receivers and let me be, instead of being short the equity, because the equity's at all-time highs, guys, if you didn't notice. I don't know debt problems that have ever been in the where the equity's at the all-time highs. It's the junior part of the stack. So if the debt is an issue, shouldn't the equity be down first? That's what happened with the banks. That's what happened with the oil stocks. But instead they're at the highest level ever. So for all of the spenders right now, rather than short the equity, just go buy the CDS in the event that something happens.

Jordi Visser ⋮ You'll make a lot of money on it. You can lever it up.

Marty Bent [1:22:18] Yeah. It's always an incredible pleasure speaking with you, Jordy. I appreciate you. Taking time. Anything that we didn't touch on that we should make the audience aware of?

Jordi Visser [1:22:29] We covered a lot. Only thing I'll say is for the last year, I've spent all my time focusing on launching something to help educate people on AI with eventually crypto being part of it. Since you watch the stuff that I do in my videos, starting in June, I started telling people, okay, I'm going to be launching a crypto site. It's going to happen in September, October. Now, I could have launched something in July. Why did I say September, October? For those who know me, I work even in the summertime, even though I'm in Maine. This was solely about me timing things based on where I thought the agentic side would kick in.

Jordi Visser ⋮ And I believed it would happen later in the year. So I've been talking about consumer agents as the big trade for next year, that crypto would be the big trade. Anyone who saw me speak in Fort Lauderdale or LA or any of the places this year where I got on stage and I said, the Micron of next year is crypto. So when you're looking for what's a 10-bagger or a 13-bagger over the course of a year, it's going to be because consumer agents start getting into needing the guardrails and we're finally there. So the only thing I want people to realize, the reason I'm now launching the crypto part of it, which is on the site and for people who've already subscribed, so they were always getting AI, now they're getting crypto.

Jordi Visser ⋮ So they're getting 2 videos a week. These will not be on YouTube, but they're also getting the research. And I bring that up because if you're a person that doesn't feel like you understand and you can't get out of the worry, if you don't understand crypto, and if you watched last week's, I compared it to learning cricket as an American baseball fan. Cricket is a very complicated game of which I'm not going to take the time, but learning a new sport, that takes a lot of time. You've got to see the nuances. Crypto's going to be a very difficult learning curve for for people, far more difficult than buying AMD, Intel, or Micron.

Jordi Visser ⋮ You know that language. This is a new world. And unfortunately, a lot of the crypto people are going to scare you. A lot of the TradFi people are going to scare you. Jordy's job is to be here and keep you from being scared.

Marty Bent [1:24:31] If you don't want to be scared, check out Jordy. As somebody who watches your videos and is a subscriber, it's been an incredible amount of value for me personally. So thank you for doing it and thank you for joining us.

Jordi Visser [1:24:44] No problem. And send me your thoughts on the video. It's getting released Wednesday morning. So why now in crypto?

Marty Bent [1:24:48] I'll, I'll have to go manually buy a train ticket and then watch it on the train. Agents aren't there yet. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.

Marty Bent [1:25:47] Okay.