You Don’t Find Bitcoin, Bitcoin Finds You: Why It’s the Purest AI Trade

I’ve said it in nearly every one of my videos, Substack posts, and conversations with Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin is the purest AI trade. Since the first time I said it publicly, every week there are always people reaching out to say they don’t see it or understand it. I don’t like to engage in dogmatic conversations regarding Bitcoin or AI for that matter. I arrived in this place through over a decade of trying to figure out what exponential innovation would mean for markets, companies, jobs, and especially the fiat system and its assets. This journey began for me at Singularity University on a trip 12 years ago and continues today. Along the way, I have looked for reasons that this may not be true, but my probability distribution of outcomes still leaves me solidly believing that the purest AI trade is Bitcoin.

I decided to save myself time, to avoid both dogmatic conversations around this belief from others and to help those looking for the reason to add to their own probabilistic journey and write something finally to answer people’s questions. This statement wasn’t born from a single insight but rather a journey that unfolded across three distinct steps and four accelerating forces that helped me connect the dots between monetary policy, exponential innovation, and a world shifting faster than our corporate, financial, and government systems can handle, and our brains, for that matter. The three steps were personal awakening, macroeconomic context, and the recognition of Bitcoin as foundational infrastructure for the digital economy. The four accelerating forces were: (1) unprecedented fiscal and monetary intervention which I believe marked the final climax of the global government debt supercycle and ultimately the dollar as the global reserve currency, (2) deflationary pressure from exponential technologies, (3) accelerating institutional obsolescence through AI, and (4) Bitcoin’s emergence as a sovereign digital asset—independent, decentralized, and not defined by any nation-state. The exponential innovation story began at Singularity University, but the Bitcoin connection started later.

The first step on this journey came in 2021, during the massive fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic. The government believed it had no choice but to print trillions to keep the system afloat after shutting down the economy for fears a vaccine would take at least four years. AI solved that problem in days in case you did not know. After the printing, asset prices jumped and crypto prices were rising daily, and I was struck by the fact that my 13-year-old son, who was actively trading various tokens and making money, could explain the space in a way that I could not understand. Aside from a basic awareness of Bitcoin, I had never committed the time to better understand it, but out of trying to understand how my son could make that much money and at the same time learn for myself, I became curious. That curiosity, combined with a desire to understand what was really happening beneath the surface, led me to my first serious exploration of Bitcoin and to the voice that would frame much of my early understanding: Michael Saylor. Listening to Saylor talk about the history of money and his own journey helped me see that inflation wasn’t a temporary bug it was a feature of a structurally broken system. His articulation of how governments were debasing currency to solve every problem made something click. But what stood out even more was how he tied this to his own experience as CEO: his business was being disrupted by Big Tech firms like Microsoft. This connected the dot from my knowledge around exponential innovation learned from Singularity University. He wasn’t just protecting his cash he was trying to protect his company from exponential change. Around that time, I also read Paul Tudor Jones’s now-famous investment letter about the coming inflation from the decision to print trillions, where he highlighted Bitcoin as a credible hedge and “fastest horse in the race” in a world of fiscal excess. That was the spark. Between the macro environment, Saylor’s clarity, and respected investors like Jones publicly validating the asset, I began to see Bitcoin not as a speculative bet but as a rational response to an irrational system looking for a new one.

The second force came into focus as I absorbed the ideas of Jeff Booth. I was introduced to him listening to a podcast, and his message immediately resonated. It was direct and powerful: innovation is always deflationary for the economy so the baseline for inflation is always negative, and the only reason we don’t experience its full impact is because governments are printing money to counteract it. As Joseph Schumpeter taught us, innovation is creative destruction, and the government’s job through the voters is to help the disrupted. His ideas stayed with me long after the episode ended, and eventually I asked ChatGPT to help me unpack his book The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future more deeply. What emerged was a theme that I now return to often in my own thinking: we live in an Economic Trilemma. Booth helped me see that we are living in a world with three economies operating at different speeds and with different rules. First, there’s the fast-growing digital economy, scalable, capital-efficient, exponentially deflationary by nature, and increasingly labor-light. Then there’s the aging industrial economy, linearly deflationary burdened by debt, legacy infrastructure, labor unions, and the inability to compete with exponential technologies. Finally, there’s the government economy, expanding rapidly in size and inefficiencies to subsidize and prevent the failure of the old economy while trying to contain the disruptive spillover effects of the new one.

This trilemma has created an economy out of balance. The industrial economy can’t grow its way out of its structural decay, especially as innovation from the digital accelerates, rates are high, and top-line revenues shrink across sectors losing share to digital players. That declining growth collides with towering debt loads leaving only one option: government intervention. To maintain the illusion of stability, the government steps in with artificially low rates, quantitative easing, and fiscal stimulus. But that strategy only works for so long. As deficits expand and debt service costs balloon, AI fuels faster exponential innovation in the digital economy, more people begin to sense that the system is unsustainable. At that breaking point when the old rules stop working and trust begins to erode with citizens and countries around the world, Bitcoin enters the conversation. Unlike fiat systems propped up by printing, Bitcoin requires no debt, no central authority, and no growth targets to justify its existence. It simply exists natively digital, auditable, and uncompromised by the economic contradictions plaguing the legacy world. Again, a new system is emerging built on the winning digital economy.

The third force was understanding the role of digital money in this transition and the realization that AI would only accelerate the need for it. As artificial intelligence began disrupting every industry, every job function, and every assumption about future productivity, governments responded the only way they knew how: with more money printing. That was when I came across Why Bitcoin Matters by Marc Andreessen. Of all the thinkers who influenced my journey, Andreessen had the greatest impact at this stage. His framing of the Bitcoin whitepaper not just as a piece of code, but as a foundational invention on par with the creation of the internet itself gave me the clarity I was searching for. He wasn't trying to sell Bitcoin as a replacement for the U.S. dollar or any fiat currency. Instead, he positioned it as a protocol, one that finally made digitally native money possible. Shortly after reading the essay, I found an interview Andreessen gave to The Washington Post, which reinforced this view. It shifted my perspective entirely. I stopped thinking of Bitcoin as a competitor to national currencies and started seeing it as the base layer for a new, decentralized economic system. Stablecoins may serve as the bridge between the fiat world and this emerging digital landscape, but they remain tethered to the very institutions they’re trying to outrun. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is untethered. It doesn’t rely on trust in any government, company, or bank. It simply exists, verifiable and immutable. In a world where AI speeds up both innovation and institutional obsolescence, and AI agents begin to cause digital money transaction volumes to explode, Bitcoin provides something that no stablecoin or fiat-backed system can: sovereignty at digital scale. It is the digital asset that leads people not just to speculate, but to opt into the digital economy for innovation, for growth, and for preservation.

The final force is AI itself. For years, we’ve said software is eating the world. But now, AI is eating software and soon it will eat everything in its path. The disruptors of yesterday are becoming the disrupted, as intelligent agents and automation rewrite the rules across industries. The United States once held a monopoly on code, capital, and compute but AI is leveling the playing field, democratizing access to intelligence, creation, and productivity. As abundance replaces scarcity, the very idea of value is being rewritten. Anything that can be digitized, copied, or reproduced whether it’s software, art, media, or fiat currency is at risk of falling in value. Most assets built on artificial scarcity will lose their moats. This was the dynamic Michael Saylor foresaw as early as 2020. He has openly explained how MicroStrategy was being outcompeted by mega-cap tech firms specifically calling out Microsoft and how sitting on a pile of cash in a zero-interest-rate environment meant a slow, inevitable death for his company. The government had removed the natural constraints of capital by pushing rates to zero just as inflation was beginning to rise. Faced with a choice between bleeding slowly or making a radical pivot, Saylor chose Bitcoin. What he recognized then is what more and more businesses, employees, and even countries are realizing now: AI will destroy everything eventually not maliciously, but systematically. And the economic system we’ve built on top of scarcity, debt, and centralization is not equipped to survive it. A new system is born running parallel to the current aging system.

Michael Saylor has often said, “You don’t find Bitcoin, Bitcoin finds you,” a phrase that resonates more powerfully in this AI-driven age. As artificial intelligence accelerates a global redistribution of wealth, consolidating power in the hands of a few mega-cap firms, it also exposes the vulnerability of everyone else and ultimately the few as well. It is not a coincidence to me that the people least receptive to Bitcoin are the wealthiest individuals and institutions, the people who have the most to lose from believing in it,because those who control the fiat-based financial system have the least incentive to move into Bitcoin, even though they are the most exposed to what AI will bring from its path to abundance. So adoption is beginning from the bottom up: individuals in emerging markets who no longer trust their banks or governments, companies that can’t compete with AI monopolies, and countries like El Salvador that see Bitcoin not as a luxury but as a lifeline. This bottom-up foundation is setting the stage for a future top-down capital rotation as FOMO and greed eventually force more and more of the doubters in. As AI disruption expands and destabilizes even the strongest incumbents and all the middlemen of the fiat system, the case for a decentralized, deflationary, non-sovereign asset becomes undeniable. That’s why Bitcoin is, in many ways, the purest AI trade an opt-out of a system being reshaped by intelligence no one fully controls.