SaaS Apocalypse, 18-Month Bear Market & Bitcoin vs Quantum

Summary

• The SaaS apocalypse trade: long mega caps, short the software vendors. Jonah’s thesis is that AI has flipped the build-vs-buy calculation every business runs — “now I think it’s very efficient to build it yourself” — so the revenues flowing to Atlassian (-47% YTD), Adobe (-25%), Salesforce, Workday and Slack get reabsorbed as margin by the Googles that can build in-house. “This is like the best trade of all time,” and B2C is exempt only because “the average consumer is really dumb” and never runs that calculation.
• Hyperscalers are “the Exxon Mobils of the compute world” — CoreWeave is “a landlord for chips.” Avi maps data centers onto oil’s upstream/midstream/downstream: vertically integrated owners extract full optionality from assets (in a compute glut, internal demand soaks it up like Exxon shoving crude into its own refineries), while a midstream asset-owner just holds depreciating hardware whose returns converge on commercial real estate. “I wouldn’t be long CoreWeave here, that’s for sure” — AI may be “the final wave in the set.”
• Crypto winter, 9-18 months — with pushback. A tweet likely from Mike Ippolito’s call (bear as bad as 2022, maybe 2019: valuations reset once a regulated cash-flow path exists, “crypto is getting absolutely mogged by AI,” “we didn’t build anything useful”) gets a “pretty reasonable” from Avi, but Jonah calls the timeframe “pulled out of his ass” — past bears had Luna/FTX catalysts, whereas today’s regulatory backdrop is constructive. Jonah proposes the pair trade: short Coinbase / long Hyperliquid, short WIF / long Aerodrome — pets.com is dying and Amazon is getting hit in sympathy.
• Avi’s Bitcoin value zone is 60-64k, with 52k the back-up-the-truck level — hedged with the admission “that’s what I said at 80” before it traded 93 back to 86. There’s no bull narrative left: BTC has decoupled from gold too long for that story to return, so it needs a global-liquidity, fastest-horse market — or a price everyone calls a bargain.
• Prediction markets are the new shitcoins, but they’ll drain retail faster. Jonah’s case: every market is literally zero-sum and staffed with insiders (insider trading isn’t illegal there), while crypto’s moat is correlated winning — Jonah’s framing: a casino where for 15 minutes “everyone’s slot machine is hitting,” “a tool for gambling with your friends.” That’s why “it can’t go to zero” — animal spirits always return once valuations get low enough.
• Quantum FUD is real but forkable. Avi: quantum-resistant accounts require moving coins, and Satoshi’s 4 million unmoved BTC dwarf MicroStrategy’s six-year haul (stated as 2.88M) — “not even 75% of what will be unlocked when quantum computing comes, which it will come.” Jonah’s playbook: devs fork before the hack, Bitcoin-pre goes to zero like BCH/BSV, Bitcoin-post “keeps on trucking” — and since quantum also threatens “your grandma’s stocks and bonds,” society forks everything. “There is no reason to fear.”
• Disclosure-relevant book-talking: the hosts’ own 1000x terminal is slated for a “major major major update” in 2-3 weeks via a partnership with an internal-LLM team, with at least half of revenues pledged to the 1000x coin — currently an 800k market cap.

Deep dive

1. Rent, don’t buy: the Vitol/Glencore lesson

• Avi’s dictum from physical trading: “if it flies, floats or [expletive], you’re supposed to rent, not buy” — and the corollary that hard assets belong in the same category, because they depreciate. Vitol is the proof: asset-light, “the world’s second-largest navy… it’s all rented boats,” and Avi vouches for the earnings table in the book firsthand — “I was up in there and those numbers check out.”
• Glencore is the counter-example: post-IPO (~2011-12, minting billionaires on the way out), it went asset-heavy — mines, cargoes, “all sorts of crazy things” — and gutted shareholder returns. Avi’s model for trading firms: asset-light, majority employee-owned. Glencore flipped both and got the quarterly-earnings treadmill.

2. Hyperscalers are the Exxons of compute; CoreWeave is a chip landlord

• Avi’s framework: “every company is a trading company — Google kind of trades ads and compute.” Oil’s hundred-year precedent splits any industry into upstream, midstream, downstream; for a midstream intermediary, “buying assets is the stupidest thing you can do and it feels like a honey trap,” while upstream and downstream have no choice but to own.
• Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft are “the Exxon Mobils of the compute world” — vertical integration justifies owning data centers because the assets carry optionality: in a compute glut, internal demand “far outstrips their physical infrastructure ability to provide it,” exactly as Exxon shoves surplus crude into its own refineries.
• CoreWeave is the midstream trap — “basically a landlord for chips” whose assets depreciate rapidly. Even if chip development plateaus at physical limits (the Bitcoin-miner arc: horrific investments while efficiency 20x’d per generation, development timelines lengthened once difficulty growth became volume-driven), returns converge on “a commercial real estate empire” — solvent, not hypergrowth. “I wouldn’t be long CoreWeave here, that’s for sure… I think this is the final wave in the set.”
• Avi’s caveat: the capex is a bet on exponential demand growth, and walkbacks are possible — which would be great for mega-cap stocks (buybacks return) and bad for everything data-center adjacent. His read on the current rout: “this is a pretty good time to go buy Google… to go buy Meta.”

3. The SaaS apocalypse pays for it

• Jonah’s core mechanism: businesses run build-vs-buy on every contract, and the high cost of building software historically forced “rent.” AI broke that — “now I think it’s very efficient to build it yourself.” His categorical call: “in the next 3 years I guarantee you that a lot of people are getting rid of Salesforce.”
• The money doesn’t vanish; it migrates. Spend on Atlassian, Workday, Adobe, Slack and Salesforce becomes internal savings at the mega caps — “the revenues from all these companies are basically going to get back in and reinvested in the mega caps that can actually create them internally… this is like the best trade of all time,” though “it’s already sort of played out”: Atlassian -47% YTD, Adobe -25%. This, he argues, is what “AI improves margins” actually means in practice.
• B2C is carved out: “the average consumer is really dumb,” never asks could-I-build-this, and is sticky once bought in — distribution is still king.
• Jonah’s shorting mechanics — don’t chase Salesforce down 50% (189 now vs. a 362 all-time high in early 2025 and 131 lows in 2022). Wait for a violent 15-20% one-to-two-week bounce and short into strength. These shorts are easier than crypto shorts because the revenues are auditable: “are people actually canceling services? If you don’t think there’s anything to reverse that trend, these are phenomenal shorts.”

4. Ippolito’s 9-18 month winter — and why Jonah doesn’t buy the clock

• Jonah reads a tweet likely from Mike Ippolito in full: likely a “full-on crypto winter,” possibly as bad as 2022 or even 2019. The logic: crypto valuations were set by “the hot ball of money” while generating token cash flows was effectively illegal; now that a regulated cash-flow path is coming, “that is all the market will want” — which is why fundamentals grow while tokens sell off. Plus: “crypto is getting absolutely mogged by AI… we didn’t build anything useful. All in all, my best guess is it is a 9 to 18 month bear market.”
• Avi: “pretty reasonable, but it depends what you mean by bear market.” The garbage bears; he argues quality can still be good trades — Morpho and Uniswap “are getting bought up by large institutions right now,” Hyperliquid generates real capital, and “Hype’s trading as much volume as Coinbase now” while valued nowhere near it.
• Jonah’s pushback, worth keeping: the 9-18 months “feels like a time frame that’s been pulled out of his ass.” Past bears had catalysts — Luna and FTX blew up, volumes fell 90%. Now the regulatory and narrative backdrop is constructive, so why should valuation convergence take 18 months? The trades are sitting there: short Coinbase / long Hyperliquid, short WIF / long Aerodrome — “Pets.com is dying and Amazon is getting hit in sympathy. But the next 25 years are pretty bright for the projects that actually build.”
• Avi’s resolution — two things are true: the Trump-era pump (“launching his Trump coin, launching the grifty-ass Melania coin”) pulled forward enormous value that needs washing out, and “animal spirits always return.” All it takes is valuations low enough that little capital moves them — if Pepe hits $50-100M, “it’s probably going to five to 10x at some point after that.”

5. Bitcoin’s value zone, and the OG-to-TradFi handoff

• Avi’s value-vs-momentum framework: momentum is clearly down; value sits at 60-64k BTC, and at 52k “you really can back up the truck.” Then the honest caveat, unprompted: “candidly, that’s what I said at 80” — before the trade from 93 back to 86 — “and you’re like, okay, I guess there’s just infinite sellers.”
• The narrative problem: BTC “decoupled from gold for too long” for that story to return. What’s left is a global liquidity narrative — the fastest horse in an everything-up market — or a price so low everyone calls it a bargain.
• Avi’s analogy for the moment: crypto is being handed from OGs to TradFi like the 18 TikTokers who once offered to rent his house — full disclosure, they’ll be “crashing Lamborghinis into the front staircase.” TradFi’s response: “maybe we’ll DCA into Bitcoin over the next 72 months instead of FOMOing your bags.” Until that clears, both agree pairs trading is “probably the only way to actively trade crypto here.”

6. Prediction markets are the new shitcoins — but crypto’s casino has friends

• Jonah’s claim: gambling attention has migrated — “why bet on Monad or Aptos when you can gamble on how many times Bad Bunny grabs his junk at the Super Bowl halftime show? Prediction markets are the new shitcoins.”
• But they’ll “drain retail a lot faster than crypto did”: each market is literally zero-sum, and “every single one of these markets has some insider who actually knows” — insider trading there isn’t illegal.
• Avi’s counter is that prediction-market events are uncorrelated, so nobody wins together. Jonah’s riff is the episode’s best: crypto is a casino where “for like a 15-minute period, everyone’s slot machine is hitting.” “It is not a tool for gambling. It is a tool for gambling with your friends” — and crypto escapes zero-sum by importing outside money “the way that the United States of America is not zero-sum.” Hence the standing conclusion: “you can’t write crypto off… it can’t go to zero.”

7. Quantum FUD: Satoshi’s 4 million coins are the real issue

• Avi separates the fear into layers. Cracking private keys needs qubit counts “most experts think” arrive at least until 2030 or 2035; mining is less exposed because quantum has “a much harder time breaking SHA-256” than randomly generated keys; and he expects developers to introduce quantum-resistant accounts. The genuine problem: resistance requires moving your coins to a new address — and Satoshi’s 4 million BTC sit unmoved. His scale-setter: MicroStrategy’s six years of buying (stated as 2.88 million BTC) “is not even 75% of what will be unlocked when quantum computing comes, which it will come. It is an inevitability.” The hopes: a non-greedy first cracker burns the coins, or a soft fork locks them — at the cost of Bitcoin’s immutability claim.
• Jonah’s play-by-play, delivered as settled fact: before the chain is ever hacked, devs fork. Your cold-wallet coins become Bitcoin-pre, which “will trend toward zero just like BSV and BCH have,” while Bitcoin-post “will just keep on trucking.” And the threat is society-wide — “your JPMorgan account, your grandma’s stocks and bonds… society’s just got to fork everything.” His verdict: “this has literally happened already… there is no reason to fear.” Closing gag: Satoshi is likely Mike Ippolito, and “he’s smart enough to move his coins over.”

8. Housekeeping: the hosts are talking their own book

• The 1000x terminal gets a “major major major update” in two-to-three weeks via a partnership with a team running “a really, really, really good” internal LLM (their own dev broke his arm, stalling the product two months). The 1000x coin trades at an 800k market cap, and at least half of terminal revenues are pledged to it — “promises made, promises kept.” They say they’ve personally sunk “multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars” in. The show’s standard disclaimer says hosts may hold positions in companies, funds, or projects discussed.