What Does AI Mean For Your Future?

Summary

• Avi’s core call: get maximally invested before AGI, not despite it. The doomers jump straight to AGI-driven unemployment; Avi thinks AGI “might be” ~7 years out, and until then the companies building AI infrastructure — data centers, energy, compute — will accumulate “astronomical” capital. His prescription: “save every dollar that you possibly can… live like a bug person for the next three to four years and shove all of your money into the markets.”
• The earnings-collapse fear doesn’t hold, per Avi: 50% of all spending comes from the top 10%, who are the least likely to be displaced by AI — the people losing jobs first over the next 2-3 years “aren’t spending money anyway,” so he doesn’t buy a mass-unemployment earnings crash “in any way, shape, or form.”
• The labor crisis is age-stratified. “For you, the under-25-year-old, your crisis is here” — recent grads and the “laptop class bourgeoisie” (Bain/BCG/McKinsey, Capital One analyst types) are most replaceable, while 30+ operators with skills and networks have runway and electricians have more runway due to regulation and physicality. Avi, once dismissive of ChatGPT as “a fundraising ploy,” now sees “kind of no reason” to hire non-elite entry-level people — ending, both agree, in voted-in redistribution.
• Trade expression beats thesis, Jonah’s commodities-desk law: “Being wrong and losing money is actually way better than being right and losing money.” Don’t buy natural gas on an AI-demand thesis (too much supply, other drivers) — buy the manufactured-commodity node: utilities near data-center builds, construction companies, or the S&P at 2,400 during COVID (“buy hard assets, yield curve control is coming”).
• Mag 7 capital concentration is “unfightable”, Avi argues — “like trying to fight the ocean.” Everyone’s bearish on capex, but that underperformance has already played out: “you’re going to need a new reason for them to underperform cuz that reason is going to be priced in.” Passive indexing may not be the right expression; and for crypto-2017-scale wealth creation, Jonah says, “you got to go private” — data-center physical security, buying Des Moines warehouses off corn farmers and flipping them 5-10x post-retrofit.
• Bitcoin: Jonah calls the bottom, Avi wants proof. Jonah: “I think the lows are in” at the 60k wick, and selling these levels will look “generationally dumb” in 10 years. Avi’s thesis was disrupted — he expected institutions to buy 50% off the highs, but the bounce capped at 70k; he wants a hard bounce off a 60k retest before turning very bullish, and gets more nervous the longer it goes sideways.
• This is crypto’s “dot-com bubble burst moment”: only revenue-producing assets get out, most tokens “should be worth zero,” and value is rotating from OGs to institutions who “have better fish to fry.” Memes proved the regime change — the pop fully retraced, and Avi had called shorting it “free money.”

Deep dive

1. The doomer thread went viral — the hosts keep the trades, dump the woo

• The trigger was the Schumer thread telling readers they have “two years to escape the permanent underclass.” Jonah’s first read: “I thought it was AI slop… it was so woo woo. There was no conclusion.” But he grants the real takeaways: short businesses that sell human time, buy the ones that own the means of AI production or the commodities feeding it — power and compute.
• Avi’s prescription, delivered as the episode’s thesis statement: “You should be saving every dollar that you possibly can… live like a bug person for the next three to four years and shove all of your money into the markets.” Where he differs from the doomers: they jump straight to AGI and mass unemployment; he thinks AGI “might be” ~7 years out, and the capital AI infrastructure builders accumulate until then “is going to be astronomical.” He agrees “100%” with Andrew Kang’s article on the exponential phase.
• Avi’s own arc is the honest change-of-mind: he first dismissed ChatGPT as “just a fundraising ploy” — another Luddite panic like fearing the wheel. Now, using ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude Code, he sees “kind of no reason to hire entry-level people who aren’t utterly elite” — leading to social unrest and, eventually, “redistribution voted into the political spectrum — socialism.”

2. The crisis is age-stratified: under-25s now, everyone else later

• The mechanism: technology is leverage — Ford needed tens of thousands to assemble cars, and every advance shrinks headcount per unit of output. The evidence is already vertical: App Store launches and GitHub commits have “gone absolutely vertical” post-AI.
• The distributional punchline: “For you, the under-25-year-old, your crisis is here. For me and you, Jonah, the 30-plus with skills, the crisis is much further out.” Most exposed: the “laptop class bourgeoisie” — the Bain/BCG/McKinsey track, the Capital One business analysts (Avi was one “for about three and a half seconds”). Most protected: electricians — regulatory hurdles plus a physical job.
• Jonah’s pushback on “make yourself indispensable with AI” — worth keeping: it’s a “tired trope” that precedes AI. His proof: Lehman went bankrupt his first year, Barclays bought him out of the wreckage, then fired 15,000 and made him re-interview for his job every Friday — he survived by being young, cheapest, most technically capable, and willing to do everything “from answering the phone to doing actual trades.” His concession: if you’re not using AI for leverage now, someone else will make you dispensable.

3. Why no earnings collapse: the displaced weren’t spending anyway

• Avi’s load-bearing stat: 50% of all spending is done by the top 10%, who are the people least likely to be impacted by AI. “I don’t buy the argument at all in any way, shape, or form that we’re going to have a massive collapse in earnings because of high unemployment” — the first-displaced are the lowest-spending segment of society.
• Jonah’s rhyme with COVID: when printing started he took out leverage and bought a house, Bitcoin, and the S&P at 2,400 — “it’s all been an amazing trade. Everything’s tripled.” His viral tweet this cycle: “buy hard assets, yield curve control is coming” (120,000 views).
• The difference this time: no crash to buy. “There hasn’t been a huge crash that gives you the dip. Instead there’s just some tinder that has been dowsed in gasoline and lit on fire” — this is the last plateau “before assets go really parabolic and labor goes south.” The clear and present trade is “borrow money, buy stuff” — with the caveat that you’re “not supposed to take out too much leverage.”

4. Expression is everything: right-and-losing-money is the cardinal sin

• Jonah’s commodities-desk law: “Being wrong and losing money is actually way better than being right and losing money” — wrong means the thesis was invalidated and you learn; right-but-losing is “shame on you.” The trap in this market: dead right on energy consumption, buy natural gas on the highs, the cold snap ends, gas plummets.
• His taxonomy for the AI-energy trade: commodities are mined (oil, gas), manufactured (gasoline via a refinery), or useful (locomotion via the engine; electricity). Data centers drink the useful commodity — but nat gas is “largely driven by other factors” with “a ton of supply.” So target the manufactured node: public utilities where the data centers are being built, construction companies doing the builds — or, for the entrepreneurial, become the general contractor yourself.

5. Public compounding vs. private wealth creation

• Avi’s book: uranium (“very critical to powering the next stage of energy production, especially in Europe”) and rare earths as crossovers between the AI megatrend and the shift to a multipolar world; Google and Amazon — “probably not Facebook” — as the consolidators; industrials serving the $500bn data-center build. Run 12-18 month horizons and stomach the volatility.
• Jonah’s disagreement: public markets get a young person 50-100% over two years with zero effort, but for the kind of wealth creation crypto delivered in 2017 or 2021, “I think you got to go private.”
• Avi’s specimens of going private: a startup run by a likely former Anduril employee building physical security for data centers — “filled with a lot of things a lot of criminals would love to get their hands on” — who raised big VC money on it; and a friend who hired college students to cold-call likely Des Moines warehouse owners who used them to store corn, buy the warehouses without saying why, retrofit them for data centers, and “flip it for like a 5 to 10x.”
• On the fashionable Mag 7 bearishness: capital concentration is “an unfightable megatrend… like trying to fight the ocean.” Everyone cites capex, but “their underperformance has already played out… you’re going to need a new reason for them to underperform cuz that reason is going to be priced in.” Passive index funds, Avi warns, may no longer be the right vehicle — own the concentrators.

6. Bitcoin: “the lows are in” vs. show-me-the-retest

• Jonah’s call: “I think the lows are in” — the wick down to 60k was it. The bear case he takes seriously: “the chief” thinks this is 2007 for crypto, pre-crisis — and it does rhyme with Lehman in ‘07, when “the market sniffed something” with no newswire catalyst. But once-a-decade generational unwinds are rare: “I don’t think it’s the latter, frankly.” Bitcoin has simply “lost its momentum and its narrative for now.”
• Avi’s honest thesis-repair: he expected institutions to treat BTC 50% off the highs as an attractive entry — instead the bounce off 60k “capped out at 70.” His take now: 60k is the bottom, possibly via the classic wick-and-backfill double bottom — but “the longer that we go sideways, the more nervous I get.” To turn very bullish he wants a hard bounce off a 60k retest; otherwise he sits on the sidelines.
• Jonah’s structural read: value is rotating from OGs and crypto-natives to institutions, who “have better fish to fry” — especially since “most tokens should be worth zero,” which scares capital away from the ones that shouldn’t be: “Bitcoin, Hype and a few others.” The offset: “the regulatory backdrop is suddenly constructive” — the narrative comes back, it just takes time.

7. Crypto’s dot-com moment — only revenue gets out alive

• The through-line of the crypto segment: “This is the dot-com bubble burst moment for crypto… It is only the assets that produce revenue that will get out of this.” Memes proved the regime change — after the “crazy move” they “retraced the entire move and more,” exactly as Avi had called on a prior show: “if you get a pop for memes, that’s free money. You just short the [expletive] out of that.”
• Jonah’s confession, filed under his own rule: he was right about memes and worthless tokens — and still lost money being long Bitcoin. “Shame on me. It’s just one of those punches in the face that you have to take.” But he won’t sell 50% off the highs, and if it hits 45k, “I will absolutely be coping the whole way.”
• The long view he closes on: Bitcoin has been down 70% before, the four-year cycle is “apparently” real, and “it’s going to look insane to sell these levels 10 years from now — like, generationally dumb.” The name of the game: survive the chop, hustle on the AI boom, don’t get stopped out.