The Real Scarcity in an Age of Abundance: Jordi Visser on Bitcoin, Longevity and Rethinking Wealth

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Jordi Visser, macro strategist at 22V Research and former Weiss Multi-Strategy CIO, to discuss living to 100, heart rate variability, the limits of money, artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, and whether young people should still make homeownership a life goal. Underneath these ideas is one question: in a world where technology could make more things abundant, what is actually worth protecting?

Longevity Starts With Refusing to Accept Decline

Jordi’s interest in longevity began with his grandfather. Although his grandfather lived into his early 70s, Jordi felt he had “died way before then” because his mobility and health had deteriorated much earlier. That experience made him ask not simply how to live longer, but how to stay capable for longer.

Today, he jokes that he wants to be skiing at 100. His “MINDS” framework stands for meditation, immune system, nutrition, education and sleep. He traces unhealthy periods in his own life to travel, poor sleep, stress, overwork and even relationships that drained him. His conclusion is simple: “the time when you’re the happiest is usually when you’re also the healthiest.”

Why Jordi Became Obsessed With HRV

One metric became particularly important to him: heart rate variability, or HRV.

Jordi describes HRV as an indicator of balance, particularly the body’s ability to enter a stress response and then settle back down. What fascinated him was that he could look physically healthy, keep up with much younger people, and still have an HRV that was only average for his age. So he made improving it a project. The biggest change, he says, was not physical but mental: “not ruminating over things, not worrying about things for very long.” 

For Jordi, becoming better at recovering from stress translated into greater happiness.

What Wall Street Taught Him About Money

Jordi makes a habit of questioning conventional wisdom, particularly in finance.

He entered Wall Street without the pedigree normally associated with it. His father was a construction worker who had not graduated from high school, and Jordi became the first college graduate in his family. He started in a controller role around derivatives at Morgan Stanley, yet within five years was asked to help open the firm’s office in Brazil.

The experience dismantled two assumptions for him. Attending the “right” school was not the same as being more intelligent, and accumulating more money was not proof of either intelligence or happiness.

Growing up without much money, Jordi once believed that if he could earn $100,000 a year, he would be set for life. Then he discovered that the target continued moving. “No matter how much money you make, you always think you need more.”

Eventually, he says, money itself becomes the competition. That does not mean money has no value. Jordi acknowledges that it can provide security, healthcare, travel and access to experiences. The distinction is between using money as a tool and allowing it to become the scoreboard for your life.

AI and the Coming Age of Abundance

This leads into Jordi’s most ambitious thesis: AI will make much of what is expensive today abundant.

He believes AI can democratize access to intelligence and expertise that historically sat inside elite schools, companies, and institutions. Over the next 15 to 20 years, he expects AI agents, automation, advances in energy, and new materials to dramatically reduce the cost of solving problems and producing many things people need.

It is a sweeping prediction, but it also explains his investment philosophy.

Jordi describes himself as “long scarcity and short abundance.” He is interested in things that remain difficult to produce or constrained in supply, from gold, silver and copper to memory, optical fibre and semiconductors, while expecting AI to place pressure on businesses whose output becomes increasingly easy to replicate.

And this is where Bitcoin enters the story.

Why Bitcoin Is His “Hedge Against Abundance”

Jordi watched Bitcoin from the sidelines until 2020. The monetary response to COVID made him think more deeply about money creation and the financial system. Then his teenage son turned $700 into $70,000 trading crypto before eventually losing it during the crypto downturn. Instead of dismissing what had happened, Jordi asked his son to explain his positions as if he were one of his portfolio managers.

What struck him was how much his son understood, and how he had learned it through Reddit, Twitter, and other online communities. From there, Jordi went deeper into Bitcoin and the history of money. His eventual thesis can be condensed into one sentence: “Bitcoin is a hedge against abundance.”

If AI makes technology, labour and eventually many goods cheaper, Jordi believes scarce assets will become increasingly important during the transition. He views Bitcoin as a form of digital scarcity with a large enough network of believers to give it durability. For someone looking for protection, he suggests thinking of a 5% allocation almost like an insurance policy. Bitcoin itself has since grown to be the largest portion of his net worth, and he says he has never sold any.

Maybe the Real Asset Is Optionality

That same thinking explains one of Jordi’s more unconventional views: he would be perfectly happy if his children never owned homes.

He values mobility, the ability to travel, live somewhere new, and change direction, more than buying a house. Previous generations treated ownership as a marker of success, but in a world where work is becoming more portable, tying yourself permanently to one location may carry its own opportunity cost.

His advice for staying young is similarly concise: “do new.” Maintain the habits that protect your health, but do not allow routine to become stagnation. New places, new experiences, and new challenges force us to keep adapting.

Jordi is not simply making a case for Bitcoin or longevity. He is asking us to reconsider the assets we spend our lives accumulating. Money matters. Property can matter. Bitcoin definitely matters. But so do health, curiosity, time, mobility, and the freedom to keep changing your mind. In an age that Jordi believes is moving toward abundance, those may turn out to be the scarcest assets of all.

👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ9Vmp2hZ48