Reporting from Nashville, Tennessee… 

Another Paradigm Shift Summit is in the books.

If you’ve ever been, you know every summit has one session that runs differently from the rest.

At the end, the editors climb on stage. Somebody hands them a drink. The slides go dark.

That’s Whisky Bar, a longstanding tradition. 

Nobody reads from a script. Our editors give you their bare-knuckled takes and argue with each other in front of the room.

The team crowded up there with Barolo, tequila, Guinness, Miller Lite and one cup of tea. (James.) Of course, the market already provided all the drama. That afternoon, the Nasdaq broke key support. Red everywhere.

So the first question the moderator, our own Doug Hill, asked was simple: What do you buy right now?

Enrique Abeyta: Buy the power plant

Asked what he’d buy on a red day, Enrique didn’t hesitate. Talen Energy (TLN).

Talen owns a big nuclear plant and a fleet of gas plants in Pennsylvania. Its power is sold out through 2030. “If there’s not another data center built in the world, it doesn’t impact their earnings,” he said. He sees the stock at $450–600 within 6–12 months.

Then Enrique turned to bonds, and the room got quiet.

In 2008, banks sold mortgage bonds stamped AAA. Today, he said, AAA bonds are backed by Nvidia chips and data centers. Insurance companies have loaded up on them. 

If the AI buildout overshoots, that collateral loses value fast. And those insurers are borrowing heavily. “When you’re levered twenty to one,” he said, a bond that drops to 90 cents on the dollar means bankruptcy.

“We’re making a different version of the same mistake.”

JC Parets: The broker wants you to gamble

Enrique worries about the safest bonds. JC Parets watches the riskiest ones. In JC’s words, the worst junk, CCC-rated bonds, is “your drunk brother-in-law who’s broke and has a brilliant get-rich idea.”

Here’s the twist. On a red day, even the brother-in-law held steady. Stocks sold off hard. The bond market shrugged. Credit spreads barely moved. The dollar held. Emerging-market currencies stayed flat.

“The bond market didn’t care what happened today,” he said. To JC, that sets the stage for violent short squeezes. “This is the type of market environment where” the Nasdaq can move 10% in a single day.

Then he took aim at brokers and their latest obsession: prediction markets. Brokers like Robinhood earn far more from prediction-market bets than from stock trades, he said. You open an account to save for retirement. The app pitches you a bet on tonight’s NBA game.

“They want to be a casino.” 

JC’s advice: know who profits from your bet, and avoid betting against the house.

Altucher vs. Scheidt: Who survives AI?

James says plenty of software companies will die. Somebody built a Photoshop clone in a day, working from a bedroom. “The moat is no longer the technology,” James said. “The moat is trust.”

Zach agreed on trust and drew a sharper line. You as an individual will switch to a free photo editor in a heartbeat. A corporate IT chief won’t swap the company’s customer database for something built in a garage. If the new software works, he gets a small raise. If it breaks? “You’re going to get fired.”

Both Zach and James are right. 

And Adobe (ADBE) is still a good example of a company that dies. Its products, like Photoshop, have notoriously steep learning curves. People stuck with it because they’d spent years learning it. That was Adobe’s moat. AI drains it. 

Now you type “remove the guy in the background” and it’s done. Nobody needs to learn the menus anymore. You might get fired for adopting a Salesforce clone and it breaks. Nobody will get fired for dropping Photoshop.

Jim Rickards: The Russia door is opening

Rickards called it a trade “not on anybody’s radar screen.”

The first Russian deals are already moving, he said. He pointed to Lukoil, one of Russia’s largest oil companies. Rickards said its big retail network is set to be sold to an investment group tied to Jared Kushner and the Trump family.

“Those are big deals,” he said, “but they’re just a little bit of the door opening. It’s going to open a lot wider.”

The real prize sits farther east. Rickards expects Western oil majors to return to Sakhalin Island and Siberia for major exploration. Those are some of the richest oil and gas regions on Earth, and Western companies have been shut out of them for years.

Washington politics won’t stop it. Democrats just swept the elections but sanctions belong to the President. A President who imposes them can lift them just as quickly.

“There’s nothing a Democratic Congress can do about that.”

The main event: Inflation or deflation?

Byron called the 113-year experiment with paper money doomed. Money is running to hard assets, he said: gold, silver, oil, and things nobody can build fast, like shipyards, steel mills and refineries.

Badiali added real estate, metals and collectibles. The more money the government prints, "the more of that paper it's going to take to pry the real assets out of my hand."

Then James flipped the table. Technology always pushes prices down. Computing has gotten cheaper every year since 1960. The cost of running AI falls about 90% a year. James blamed today's high prices on wars and the money printed in 2021 and 2022. Those shocks fade. Tech keeps going.

Ray Blanco went further. He's cheering for deflation. From the Civil War to 1900, prices fell, and America grew from an economy the size of Italy's into the world's largest. Ray sees AI as the next industrial revolution, with falling prices as its natural result.

JC brought bond data. TIPS, the Treasury bonds that protect against inflation, price in about 2.3% a year for the next decade. That’s right around the Fed’s target. “The bond market is telling you the inflation story is made up,” he said.

Byron took the other side: a Senate race in Mississippi, where a challenger is winning on hamburger prices. Everyone feels it when they go to the grocery store. "I don't care how cheap AI is," he said. "All they know is prices are going up."

Rickards ended the round. If inflation runs at 7–8% and interest rates sit well below that, real rates are deeply negative. 

"That is the perfect setup for gold." Deflation works too. The Great Depression brought the longest deflation in U.S. history, and gold rose 75%, he said. Gold follows negative real rates. Either way, he said, gold wins.

A stage full of experts, and few agreed on the biggest question in markets. That’s a lesson. And it’s also why we focus on owning what wins both ways. Think power plants that are sold out through 2030, hard assets nobody can build fast, and things that can’t be printed. 

Enrique got the last word: “The one area we are seeing deflation in a major way in the economy right now is actually in whisky.”

Finally, a trend we can all toast.