#1462 Jordi Visser | Bitcoin Is The King Says Hedge Fund Manager

Jordi Visser is a macro investor with over 30 years of Wall Street experience. He also writes a Substack called “VisserLabs” and puts out investing YouTube videos. In this conversation we discuss important themes of investing for the next decade, all the value that is flowing into the digital world, bitcoin, artificial intelligence, traditional economy, national debt, and more. ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= The future is being built today and the future of currency isn’t dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it’s crypto. And Gemini thinks that’s a great thing. Because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that’s a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Go where dollars won’t. With Gemini. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today I've got a fantastic episode with Jordi Visser. In this conversation, we talk about some of the most important themes of investing going into the next decade. Jordi is a former hedge fund manager, and he worked inside the big traditional financial institutions, but he broke out. He changed his mind.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  He rewired the way he thought about the world, and he has come to the same conclusion of many of you. All of the asymmetry, all of the value is moving into the software digital world, and things like Bitcoin and artificial intelligence are going to be big winners. Jordi is spending 100% of his time at Jordi Visser Labs now, thinking about these themes, creating content around them, and helping other big traditional hedge funds go and figure out how to allocate their capital in the new world. Jordi sits down and we talk about everything, from the traditional economy, what's going on with the national debt, how monetary policy plays into these themes, and then things like Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, the MAG7, and other areas where many people are investing. Anytime that we can get somebody who left the traditional world and is now spearheading into this brand new world, it's always fascinating to understand what their journey was, how they came to this conclusion,

• 1:31Anthony Pompliano?

  and where they think value will accrue. I learned a ton personally in this episode, and I think you will too. If you listen to the end of the conversation, you're going to have a ton of unique insights and also a bunch of ideas that will make you think critically about where you allocate your capital and where different assets will accrue value in financial markets. Here's my latest conversation with Jordi Visser.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini. The future is being built today and the future of currency isn't dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it's crypto. And Gemini thinks that's a great thing because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that's a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Gemini teamed up with futurists, technologists, and designers like award-winning artist Matt Griffin, known for his illustrations for Dune, to craft a vision of the future with crypto at its core. The creative theme "Go Where Dollars Won't" emphasizes exploration, growth, and the crypto market's limitless potential. Whether it's going on that Martian safari to capture an unforgettable photo of a herd of woolly mammoths grazing the red planet, or using Bitcoin to pay for your Lyft pass

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  to go strata skiing down the mountain peak of a breathtaking comet. Whatever adventures we'll be living, one thing is for sure. In a future this fantastic, the limits of traditional currencies simply cannot keep up. Financial innovation will usher in this new frontier, and so go where dollars won't with Gemini. Go check them out at gemini.com/go-were-dollars-won't. Again, go check it out at gemini.com/go-were-dollars-won't. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappos. Picture this: every time you trade Bitcoin, the spread determines how much value stays with you. That's why securing top-tier Bitcoin trading fees is key to growing your Bitcoin wealth. But what if I told you that there's a platform that lets you save up to 90% on your Bitcoin trading fees?

• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Jordy here with me. This has got an excellent episode because Jordy is a very unique individual. He spent decades in the traditional financial world, but he has completely rewired his brain. He escaped the traditional financial system and he has realized using his radar, he's zoned in on two specific areas where he thinks most of the returns are going to be centralized in finance, AI and Bitcoin. So you guys all obviously enjoy that stuff. Jordy, I thought a great place to start with this is what is the biggest difference? Like, why is the traditional world not understanding how much value is going to get created with AI and Bitcoin?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I would say the hardest part is that when you think of the industrial economy, you're dealing with things that are linear, the movements, and almost every single data analytic that was used by people to make them money involves cycles. So I think the hardest part for people to start out with is, once the internet really started to change the world, you have to go back to it and think about what the world looked like. We still had recessions. And I said still had because whether we had one in 2000, 2003, it doesn't show up on my Bloomberg as being one. I think the MBR does count it as one. Then you get the great financial crisis and then you have 2020.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  So over that period of time, from really 1990, you don't really have many recessions. And the internet comes into play. Japan's the biggest weighting in the world at that point. And everything kind of changes. And I think during that time period, people have had a hard time adapting to exponential change, which really didn't take off fast until after mobile. And I just wrote a Substack, which I think probably answers the question just simply, and then you can, you can take it from there. In 2007, the iPhone is launched. In 2008, We obviously have Lehman Brothers, which leads to the Fed creating new tools that they

• 6:35Speaker 02

  use today. The debt at that point in the country was about $7 trillion and the Fed's balance sheet was $1 trillion. It's now 36 trillion and the Fed's balance sheet is still seven. You also have China hitting the peak and really was the caboose of the Industrial Revolution. They were the last country to go through this. They threw a lot of money. Everyone got excited, but that ended and then you had fracking in the US. So we went from the largest oil importer to the largest exporter. You have to think about that. We're the largest importer of oil, then we become the largest exporter of both oil and gas. So you go through these things and I think when you're dealing with

• 7:13Speaker 02

  the last 15 years post that event, it's really hard for people to forget 1970 to 2009. So I think this is just a linear to exponential and people still trying to use data that is garbage in, garbage out now.

• 7:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you're talking about linear type returns, there's linear inputs that were driving the value of these companies mainly. The commodities moved in a very kind of predictable way. There was kind of a wiring of the world. And if you go back and look at, you know, 60-40 global portfolios, if you look at portfolio constructions, if you look at different sectors, if you look at different geographies, there was this kind of mapping of how investors should approach things, how you could value companies, how you could think about future growth, how you could think about the relationship between these companies and the economy, the Fed, different monetary policy decisions, like all of these things that really were kind of the bible. And it wasn't so much trying

• 8:12Anthony Pompliano?

  to figure out something new as much as it was if you were a 22-year-old coming out of college and you wanted to learn how to be an investor, you had to just like go study the textbook, right? And the textbook had all the answers and it told you how all this worked. Today, we can look back maybe over the last five to 10 years, and a lot of that stuff has been proven to not be true in today's day and age. So you can look at in 2022, stocks and bonds both go down together. Well, that's not supposed to happen. If you look at the Federal Reserve stepping in in 2020, and we have this quote-unquote recession, and everyone is locked at home in their, you know, houses, the velocity of money should go to zero, and asset prices should sell off, and, you know, whoever sells first is going to be the king because they get a buy lower. But we get this V recovery, and asset prices are at

• 8:57Anthony Pompliano?

  all-time highs by the end of the year. And the Fed is using trillions of dollars and suppressing interest rates. And like, you kind of see all this stuff happening, and you say to yourself, wait a second. Maybe somebody like a Bill Miller in 2000 and 2001, buying Amazon and arguing that it was still a value stock because it was worth less than what he thought it was worth, but everyone critiquing him. Maybe he was actually on to something. And so when you look today at the investment landscape, you're spending all your time in AI and Bitcoin. Is it that you don't think money can be made in these other sectors? Or is it just that they still have these kind of linear type returns, and you want to go spend your time in kind of exponential type, you know, asymmetric opportunities? Like, is it just like, those are all zeros,

• 9:39Anthony Pompliano?

  and this is where the value is? Or is it, hey, everything's likely to go up, it's just that this is going to go up a lot more?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Well, let's go through what you said, and let's bring it back to linear, and let's think about investing. So when you're investing, you're making a prediction on the future. So the easiest way for people to just think about linear, in 1992, if you wanted to make a bet, not on where the market was, but a company, how much is a phone going to change from 1992 to 1997? And let's assume you wanted to make some bet on who's going to win the phone. How do they differentiate themselves unless there's just massive change? So the reason I brought up the smartphone coming up is kind of the inflection point. It also, and I didn't include this because I knew we'd eventually talk to it, but the Bitcoin white paper came out right at 2008,

• 10:30Speaker 02

  and Halloween. And I became fascinated with it at that point for the reason of what you said, which is, hey, how does something go up this much? Well, it's just money going into it, and technology people were all saying it would go there. Now, I started getting

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Let's say I gave up on business cycles in 2012. Okay. And the reason I say 2012, there was still a chance the world could have chosen, let's go through deflation and a depression. Let's get our balance sheets in check. They could have chosen that. Europe was about to break up and Germany, everyone feared, would not come in to bail out the rest of Europe. So Mario Draghi came out and did his famous line in the sand, not going to let anything happen. And that was it. And I sat there and said, so if Germany, who's supposed to be the most austere government, is going to do this, well, that means there's no more cycles. So now I have to go look at Amazon and think that if you don't have cycles, do these companies

• 11:30Speaker 02

  ever really go through a value shift? Is there ever this point where traditionally, when you look, you go into a recession, things get cheap again, and you buy them up and you go through it? And that's the way most wealthy people, they had money. There's a recession that comes. They're not forced to delever everything and then they put all their money in and this cycle just keeps going on and on. So in 2012, I had to take a trip. I went out to California. I went to Singularity University and I spent time with Peter Diamandis and the boys and ladies who were talking about stuff which seemed insane to me. And they were doing it a very convincing way that we will be here in 10 years. And the reason we know that is, A, it's mathematical, Moore's Law said that.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Secondly, just go look at Ray Kurzweil's predictions from the 1980s and 1990s. He was spot on, which again, you know, you can go through the websites now. He has like an 86% hit ratio on things he said before. And I think in 1999, he said we'd be at superintelligence by, in 2029. And we're still, Elon Musk is saying we'll be there ahead of that. To make a prediction like that, 1999, way before any of this, there's obviously a reason to listen to them. And the reason this gets important is I listened to someone, I don't know if you've had Jeff Booth on before. Okay. So Jeff Booth made it very simple for me in this thing of industrial revolution and where we are today. Let's not separate the two. Let's just say. There's two forces in the fiat world.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  There is deflation, which is the natural course of innovation. We are running at, let's say, a deflation rate at three to 5%. Now, the government is there to put money into the system to prevent a depression. And they obviously figured this out to an exponential scale after Lehman Brothers. We're like, wait a second, we can print as much money as we want to get us out of SVB, to get us out of a pandemic, and everything will come back quickly. This is fantastic. And his argument was, at some point, the debt gets too big, the money gets too big. And this all started, this inflection point, when the Bitcoin white paper came out. So to me, technology and my focus on it is that to focus on the past and believe that,

• 13:37Speaker 02

  we were joking about it, a lot of people are trying to say the US, American exceptionalism is over. And what I've said is, it's not about America. This is not a country thing anymore. That was an industrial revolution thing. Google gets over 50% of their revenues from outside the US. These companies are really countries. They're bigger than countries. When you add all of them up, they're enormous. We're 70% MSCI. Don't think of it as, these are US companies. These are technology companies that happen to be built in the United States. And technology has crossed all borders. And that just makes this all break down. So I think industrial revolution was about countries. It was about currencies. It was about linear thinking. And that's all changed. And you have to take your mind out. And Singularity Versity did that for me in 2013.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So in this new world that we're going into, how do you evaluate where value will accrue? Right? So I'll give you a couple of examples. There are digital assets. There is obviously AI with the pursuit of superintelligence. There's still hardware. There's data centers, there's chips, there's all that kind of stuff. But there's also this very interesting dynamic of, in a weird way, automation is just slamming into that industrial kind of economy. And so when you have that like impact zone, it feels like there are businesses that end up actually losing value. There are businesses that end up accruing value. And then you can almost look at like the vertical stack, right? So this like superintelligence and automation of certain jobs, et cetera.

• 15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, there are multiple places in the stack where you can go and you can invest. So like, walk me through your process of, okay, I now understand we're leaving that industrial economy and that linear thinking. We're now going into this new world. Where will the value accrue?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  All right. So when you say value...

• 15:21Speaker 02

  We haven't talked in a long time and I think when we did talk, I didn't bring this up a lot because to me it wasn't in the foreseeable future. There wasn't a time period. But when ChatGPT was launched in November of 2022, it changed the world. And I viewed it as an accelerator, just like the iPhone was. The iPhone allowed there to be a value to the internet. So if I said to you, what's the value of the internet? Well, you'd have to think, well, let's see, I get it for free. And so does someone in the poorest place of Africa and Cambodia and Brazil. They all get access to the same thing that a wealthy person gets with Google search. They can all, everyone can use it.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  So the internet technically doesn't have any value, but obviously all the companies that are worth all the money are based on the internet coming into our life. So I think on the framework of like what the value is, these companies are still middlemen figuring a way to charge money. Peter Diamandis said, and Ray Kurzweil both said, and I subscribe to this because Elon Musk has said it, Eric Schmidt has said it. Actually, every single great futurist of technology that I've listened to in the last three months has made this statement. We will in the next 10 years have 100 years of innovation.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  So if you convert that back into value and then you start hearing people say, and Elon Musk said this with Peter Diamandis recently, I think the cost of everything goes to zero. And it happens in the next 15 years, 20 years. If that's the case, then the middlemen will have no, have very little value relative to what they did. And that's to me, when I hear value, it's about how can you build a moat around your business to actually be there? We talked before about how I've used Cursor. I used it for about a month. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen coding for me, building stuff. And I've already moved to Replit. I didn't even last for six weeks with this one technology.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  They're coming so fast and there's no moats that I just think the pace of innovation is going so rapidly that value can only be contained in the bank. And to me, the bank of the digital economy, where it's all headed is Bitcoin. That's the bank. That is the, the digital store of value. That is the place where if you build a business, you make money in a crypto, you make money in fiat, you take some of it, you're putting it parking it in Bitcoin because that's been the chosen one by everyone. And that's the one that was the Bitcoin white paper. That's the one that said, we now have the ability of having cash transactions with, or transactions in the digital economy. So I've kind of taken the value side and been like, I think you're really making a trade for the next five years.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  But eventually you're going to hit this thing where the cost of everything is going to migrate towards zero. And in that, the middlemen don't last long and they don't make much money.

• 18:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting about this is when you think of value or price, usually it is a, a fraction, right? There's a numerator and a denominator. And when the denominator is Bitcoin, everything else does fall in, you know, kind of value at the feet of it. And there are sometimes where that's really good, right? I mean, I've talked a lot about the median home in America was 664 Bitcoin in 2016. Today is less than six. It might've been less than five now, depending on where the price of Bitcoin is. And so a 99% reduction in the price of a home is very good for the world. There are other things like stocks. If you go take any stock for the most part, other than maybe Nvidia and you denominate it in Bitcoin, it is down significantly over the last eight to 10 years.

• 19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you see that happening, you start to say to yourself, okay, are we having a return back to savings? And I think that that is probably one of the biggest mental or kind of philosophical shifts that I see in the Bitcoiner kind of thought process versus traditional world is that the idea of saving in dollars or whatever fiat currency has been not only eroded, just destroyed, right? Anyone with half a brain realizes, hey, we cannot save in this currency. Therefore we have to push out on the risk curve and kind of do all these investments, et cetera. But Bitcoin's bringing it back to, no, you can actually just save in this. And so how do you think about kind of the reintroduction of savings as an investor and someone kind of operating in this new world?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  All right. Well, first of all, when you say savings, there's actually not a lot of money in the world. I forget what the latest numbers, but let's just say of, and I don't mean M2 because M2 is probably about China's 42 trillion. The US is 22 trillion. Europe is probably similar. So you're dealing with about a hundred trillion dollars of M2. But if you actually took the physical hard currency, it's probably, you know, more like 20 trillion, 30 trillion globally. But the total size of the assets in the world are 900 trillion. I've seen numbers 700 trillion. I've seen 900 trillion. Let's just say it's a lot of hundreds of trillions. So really, there isn't a lot of savings in cash. There's savings in assets.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And I forget which billionaire technology person said this, but they always said the point. You really can't do anything with more than a billion dollars because once you have a billion dollars, you couldn't spend it even if you wanted to. Because if you spent it, what can you buy for half a billion dollars? Other than something that's going to be going up in value with the printing of the money. So you make an investment, it still goes up. And the point I think was, and this is what I've always said, we live in a Ponzi scheme. It's a bunch of assets that as long as everyone doesn't come to sell them at the same time, everything's fine. Where I think Bitcoin will end up winning versus everything is it's a deflating of the asset bubble of the fiat world gradually through.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  And they, you know, you can call it the basement of the fiat, whatever, but it's happening gradually and it'll just continue to happen. It'll happen with demographics. It'll happen with assets stopping to go higher. One of my favorite things that I like to talk about is MSCI world X the US. So every stock in the world X the US. Forget underperforming versus Bitcoin. If you go look at the chart, it's basically unchanged since 2007. It's up like 12, 15%. This is in dollar terms.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So if you're a US investor and you've invested in the stock market outside this, you're up only 11% in 17 years. So this debasement has been happening. The Barclays ag, the bond market benchmark unchanged since 2017. And give you one thing though, that you said that hasn't happened yet, and I tweeted about this. And it was the largest viral tweet I had, which included.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  The only thing in Bitcoin that it has not outperformed since 2017 is the Mag7. So the Mag7 as an index, which includes Nvidia, includes all of them, believe it or not, it's gone up as much. It's like literally unchanged. So what I've said is it gets overbought whenever Bitcoin outperforms the last fiat component, and that's the final one. And I think that's what this year is. I think it's a massive outperformance in 2025 of Bitcoin over the Mag7, and that'll be when people are forced into adoption.

• 22:35Anthony Pompliano?

  When we see adoption occurring, I've been trying to unpack, what is the driver? Right? It's obvious that people are buying Bitcoin. Bitcoin's price is going up, finite supply, cash comes in. Why? It's kind of like there's a multiple choice, and it could be one of the options, or it could just be all of the above, and it's very unclear. And it kind of depends on who you talk to, right? It's kind of like everyone experiences inflation differently. Everyone buys Bitcoin maybe for a different reason as well. And I thought maybe we could just kind of go through some of these potential reasons. You give me your thoughts. The first is monetary policy. So we know that they're going to print money. We see the national debt going up, you know, about a trillion dollars every 100 days. I think that there is a psychological shift over the last, you know, 15 years where people

• 23:20Anthony Pompliano?

  realized the Fed has this Fed put, easy money is, you know, the name of the game. Recession's have kind of been outlawed to a degree. And if they're going to devalue the currency, then asset prices go up, and so I should go and find these store values. But we also see an element of, right now, interest rates being cut, M2 global supply going up, and so kind of like a return to this regime that has been very kind to Bitcoin. And so how do you look at monetary policy and it being a driver to people buying Bitcoin?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  So we have to separate the United States from the rest of the world, first of all. And I remember, so I opened an office for Morgan Stanley in Brazil in 1997. And I was an options trader. And when you trade local options in Brazil in the late 1990s, but even today, interest rates, local rates were 40%. So when you're an options trader, you have ROE risk, your interest rate risk. When you trade options in the US, rates don't move that fast. So that's not really any Greek you look at. And the reason I bring it up here is Michael Saylor said something which hit me hard because it shows where most of the growth has happened in the world. There's a reason why the US doesn't dominate the number of users in the world.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Because what he said is, and Jeff Booth said this too. In fact, for people who want to learn the most about converting TradFi into Bitcoin, believe it or not, Michael Saylor, his journey from 2020 on is a really interesting story. As someone who's like, well, my company's not going to grow anymore. So I'm just sitting here with this cash and it's going to be destroyed if I don't do something with it. So I either can buy a company. And he went and did the work on Bitcoin. Jeff Booth talks about deflation happening and that the government's job is to fight it off. But deflation is really just the progression of innovation efficiency. And as it speeds up, the debt should speed up as well. So the adoption thing is happening in countries where they don't trust their government, they don't trust their bank, and they don't trust their currency.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  So that's why it's happening in Argentina. I lived in Brazil. I'm sure it'll speed up there. Someone will run and they will realize that doing a quote unquote either strategic Bitcoin reserve or what El Salvador has done, whatever the case. And El Salvador is buying back their bonds now. Argentina has seen their bond spreads come down. These countries are realizing that this is a way of quote unquote freedom money. So I think the hard thing in the US is people don't need it here. Their stock market goes up 20% a year. So why do they need to put money in Bitcoin? And it should be the last country to really see people, because it's the wealthiest country. And so they need it the least. I think it will continue to grow. And that's why I like watching the wallets and the users.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  And every year, even in 2022, when the thing was down. You just see more users at the same pace that it was before. So then you're like, this is going at a faster pace than internet adoption. So there's something here. So I just, I think when people look at it, the adoption for the US is always going to be keeping up with the Joneses. It's always going to be FOMO because people have money. And so I've joked about the fact that once the weather turns warm here, and I believe Bitcoin will be up close to 150,000, and people are at the golf course and the sun's out. If the stock market's unchanged for the year and Bitcoin's up at 150,000, and the president who won in a very, very big popular landslide is telling people and bringing people into the cabinet saying,

• 26:50Speaker 02

  we're going to lead Bitcoin. His son gave a presentation last week in the Middle East, saying it's going to be a million. Like, people will start investing in it just because they want to make money.

• 27:02Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the parts that's fascinating to me is 100,000 seems like a psychological barrier, where now a lot of people who previously thought it was a fad are like, hey, maybe this thing's going to be around. But also, as the price goes up, it becomes less risky. And so the largest pools of capital, you know, at 2 trillion market cap, now people are like, oh, now I can invest. Right? I can go put 10, 20 billion dollars in this, where historically, when the price of a stock goes up, everyone gets nervous. Yeah, right. And so what do you see happening there? With kind of like the de-risking of Bitcoin as it's gone higher?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  So you hit on, and that's really the point for me. If you would, my journey on Bitcoin was, it comes out, I don't pay attention to it. 2012, I start hearing about it. I go to,

• 27:48Speaker 02

  I go to Singularity University, not mentioned. Marc Andreessen, in fact, everyone who hasn't done this, Marc Andreessen has written a lot of famous op-eds. But he wrote one, and I think the title was Why Bitcoin Matters. And it was in 2014. And Marc Andreessen's now working in the White House in some capacity as

• 28:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Volunteer.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Volunteer, yes.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  A lot of volunteers associated with Doge. He got a lot of press because there was deep banking comments, but he wrote, I mean, two really important papers. Before the Bitcoin one, he wrote, "Software is going to eat the world." And that gets back to the fact that software has taken over the world. And so there is no Europe and the US. There's a technology breaking down borders as we go. Less than a year later, he did the article on why Bitcoin matters. And I think it's an important one for people to go read because he went through this whole thing on, on, on why it fits in. So for me, I didn't, I paid attention to it and I went, oh, that's interesting. I did my reading at that point. I saw the blockchain was the key part of this. I see

• 28:53Speaker 02

  that being able to, why we'd never had digital currency work before, and now it can't be copied. And I started understanding and going through it. But I honestly did not put any money into it until we got into 2019. And then 2020 is when I really started to invest in it, partly because of COVID, partly because my son was printing money, trading crypto, which he eventually lost, as every good young entrepreneur should. But I wanted to understand how he knew so much about the pump and dumps that he was talking about. He knew all about these and he was getting it from Reddit. It taught me a lot about where this stuff was, but that's when I ran into Michael Saylor's podcast. And I probably listened to 10 of them on rides with him and I up to Vermont,

• 29:35Speaker 02

  New York skiing, listening to how he explained it. And that got me convinced that this was a reality. But the only thing that hadn't happened yet was it hadn't reached critical mass to me. And so I needed to see it survive a bear market where it came out of it again. And the only reason I said again is because the prior ones, it was too small. So it was a combination of surviving the test of time. Stan Druckenmiller said at the end of last year, "I wish I owned it," or "I wish I owned more of it," something like that. But he, but he did say, "But it's a brand." And that statement is so simplistic, but so important because it became the symbol, the brand of, in my opinion, the digital economy. And when you last for a long enough

• 30:18Speaker 02

  time, 16 years, and you're making new all time highs after only starting and trading, what's 2010, January, the first, first transaction, you're talking about something that's only 14 years old and it's at all time highs and going higher. And I think by the end of next year, it'll be the second biggest asset in the world behind gold. So.

• 30:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Right now, I think it's the seventh largest asset.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Somewhere in there.

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Gold is around 18 trillion, I think.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin is at two.

• 30:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that Bitcoin matches gold in the future? It is two times bigger, 10 times bigger. And the reason why I ask this question is for years, I've always pointed that I cannot think of a digital asset that is not more valuable than its analog kind of sister, right? The digital one just ends up being

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 31:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Worth more.

• 31:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I also think that Bitcoin is probably 10x better than gold in terms of portability, mobility, you know, all these different things. I don't know if that means that it should be worth 10 times more or two times more or worth the same or whatever. So like, how do you think about Bitcoin and gold's relationship with each other as we kind of move forward in the future?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so whenever I get into conversations with, I want to say the, let's say the Warren Buffett crowd, so the people that were trained on Graham and Dodd, and they're generally value investors, they're usually around 70.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And they have a valid argument that I've grown up my entire life valuing things with some kind of, I can't value it. And then I'll ultimately ask them if they own any gold. And a lot of times they don't, but when they do, I go, well, how do you value that? How do you value a Babe Ruth card? How do you value, like, these are all just assets. Bitcoin's different to me, and this is the point, I know, and I'm sure you do, and Mac, maybe you've done this, I haven't paid for anything with Bitcoin, but I know many people that have, including my son. So if you're getting into the world of being able to use it in that, then it has to be more than gold. And to your point, the valuation of it, the ultimate market cap, I don't see how it's

• 32:31Speaker 02

  not bigger, but I will say this, A, it doesn't matter until you get to about 16 trillion, and then you can just go back and forth of where it is. I really am more interested in how Bitcoin gets to that level and what happens to the rest of the fiat assets. Gold is less important to me. The question to me is that, that I just know it shouldn't be such a small percentage of the fiat assets. So if the total fiat assets, for argument's sake, are 900 trillion, and we're at two, whatever, 2.1, 2.2 trillion right now. That's too small. And that's why I have comfort saying to people, it's going to 700,000.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  And I don't know if you've seen me say this, but one time I did a video and it was around the 100,000 thing. And I said, don't get caught in 100,000 things. In fact, let me show you a chart of something that went from 100,000 to 700,000. And I showed the chart and I said, look, it took 14 years for this to happen. Bitcoin moves at about a third of the time. So I think four years from now, we'll go from 100 to 700. It was Berkshire Hathaway stock, which again is a fiat, you know, system comparison. So I just think that it's really more of how this plays out, that Bitcoin advances at the expense of the fiat system and how that plays out. Do these things go sideways? Do they gradually decay? And that's the question that's the one that I think about more than gold itself.

• 33:56Anthony Pompliano?

  In 2018, I had a gentleman come on the podcast. It's one of the first 50 podcasts that I ever recorded. His name is Barad Mahavad and he, you know, at the time was very, very passionate about Bitcoin. I'd spent a lot of time thinking about it, had really done a lot of work in terms of how monetary assets kind of come into adoption, with the impact is, the timelines, the driver, you know, just a bunch of work that I think today, maybe people talk about Bitcoin world, but this was the first time that I heard it. It was by far most successful episode ever at the time. And I used to joke that it was the only time that I've ever listened to a podcast in conversation. And as soon as it was done, I turned to my computer and I bought more Bitcoin.

• 34:41Anthony Pompliano?

  That's how compelling it was. And if I had to pick one idea out of that conversation that I think resonated with people, that made it such a viral conversation, but also two has stuck with me. It was the idea that Bitcoin was going to demonetize these other assets. And I think there had been conversations about Bitcoin and gold. And yeah, there was even I think I believed at one point that maybe gold's market cap would kind of collapse and Bitcoin would surpass it. Gold at the time was 10 trillion, Bitcoin was, you know, a couple hundred billion. And so wouldn't it meet 7, 8 trillion? Now, at the time when he had that conversation, he was talking about art, homes, right? You start thinking of all these other assets where people store. What's fascinating to me is that gold's market cap has continued to go up, as has Bitcoin.

• 35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin's going up faster, but they'll cross at some point.

• 35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But I do think that younger people in particular are not likely to go buy the like exotic fiat assets when there's this hard digital money that is available to them that provides the same liquidity, fraction, you know, fractional ownership, etc. And so like, how do you see that world playing out, right? Do you personally own some of these other things that maybe we'd put in like the traditional, you know, store of values outside of gold?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Every single thing that I have of value in terms of real estate, everything, non-stock, non like what I would call traditional savings, is now Bitcoin, all of it. So I have small amounts of things, but when you go through it, Bitcoin has taken over partly through the appreciation, but partly through, I really do believe that what Michael Saylor is doing of selling off fiat assets to go buy this is a form of what you're saying, demonetization. But I want to go back, demonetization, I don't think of it as happening from just my

• 36:41Speaker 02

  son not having like, my kids all love vintage stores. They don't want to go shop, like they love vintage stores. My, I have four kids. My girls are all involved in the healthcare side. It's shocking how little money they make doing really important things in mental illness, in, one of my daughters is, works for the Arkansas Police Force in terms of doing a lot of social work for them. It's just, it's a very, very weird world to hear that these people start. And one of my daughters who just started working has to commute for an hour and change. And

• 37:22Speaker 02

  She's never gonna have the money to buy these things unless it gets handed down. So the reason I bring that up, I think that takes a long time and that'll happen. That's part of just every dollar that's transferred. I don't think the younger people believe in that. I think there's a reason why Metaverse and all these things make older people crazy in terms of not understanding. So I do believe in the demographic side, but demonetization to me gets back into the competition side. This is gonna happen because of AI. Bitcoin is just a reflection of the pace of innovation. So if you believe that Bitcoin is the bank account of the digital economy, just the bank account, and that we're gradually gonna get there, the same way that the internet,

• 38:04Speaker 02

  it took a long time to go from Netscape to the mobile phone to spreading to everyone. Bitcoin's gonna continue to grow in adoption, but right now it's growing from people that don't have much money. At some point, it'll grow with the people that have the money or they'll hand the money down. Or like we're seeing pension funds will allocate money, BlackRock will say, I think 1% to 2% of everyone should have it. This is the beginning stage of that form of demonetization. But I believe the one that's the most disruptive is what happened with Amazon and the retail malls. That was a form of demonetization as well. And I think that demonetization will eventually get to the Googles and the Apples and all that because AI will eat at their business eventually.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And I think that's why they're spending so much money in this race for a super AI. Because at some point theoretically, that would control everything. But I think the race there is gonna end with people leaving and starting their own entrepreneurial business and competing from the bottoms up, and I'm sure you meet them all the time.

• 39:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think you're a good example of two things. When you talk about your portfolio and kind of you almost demonetize these other assets in your own portfolio. Bitcoin is a big winner there. But two is as, in the same way that the self-directed investor has access to information now that they previously didn't have, and they have the tools to access financial markets that they previously didn't have. People like to self-direct. They like to be their own investor. They're gonna go and use autonomy and freedom and go and put their own money into the market and say, I don't need to call a stockbroker anymore and I don't need to rely on somebody behind a black curtain to tell me, you know, what the world's gonna happen. I can do this myself. I think that same thing is coming to work in general where you see, you know, maybe on the extreme example, there's like the OnlyFans stuff, there's YouTubers,

• 39:47Anthony Pompliano?

  there is, you know, kind of content creation, stuff like that. But we're starting to see more and more of this show up. AI is a big part of it. I think that Bitcoin is actually a big part of this story where people are saying to themselves, wait a second, I only went and worked inside of these corporations because that was the path to making a living, to having some structure, to being productive, et cetera. But if these tools now are handed to me and there's a reduction in the friction for me to be able to produce a good or a service and I don't need to go work in a big corporation. Well, that sounds pretty compelling. I think that I might want to do that. And so how does that impact kind of the US economy in general? And I really think of that as like, that is part of productivity and growth. And everyone is so focused on like, let's spend less, which really is just like, let's get the debt down.

• 40:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But growth is a big part of this equation as well, and maybe we can grow our way out of the problem.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think this is going to quote unquote, "end badly." And that's on two levels that you brought up. Let's go to the second one. I think we can grow out of the debt or we'll figure out a way for the debt to just not matter anymore. And again, I hate to say that because I'm a macro person. I should be saying that this is ridiculous and, you know, that we've overspend and we're not dealing things for our kids. I really do believe that if innovation accelerates and AI accelerates, then the debt ends up taking care of itself. And this whole strategic Bitcoin reserve is just a version of it in terms of like the thought process. I don't believe you can have a train wreck that I've been hearing about for 30 years

• 41:21Speaker 02

  and in Japan's case, longer, and it just still be sitting here unless at some point, just like when Bitcoin survives a 14 year, you're like, when are you going to give up and stop fighting it? You can't sit there and worry about the debt and you can't be sitting there doom and gloom saying, so that's the first. The second thing to answer your question, I'll just tell you the way I'm thinking about it with, with my daughters. And I think there's probably a lot of parents that have kids around my kid's age, you know, twenties, just out of school. I want them to live in the city because I don't want them to commute. But I also don't want to subsidize their existence. But if I did, because I'm the son of a construction worker, I paid for my own education.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Like, I don't understand the concept of handing someone money because I want them to kind of go through the pain and just know that I'm there. So I just have this approach of unconditional love. You know, the bumpers are up on the bowling alley. And if something's happened, I'll just be there, put it back in the middle and you'll get a strike. You've just got to be patient. But I listened to an interview recently with the mayor of Vancouver. And I don't know if you saw this, but Vancouver proposed, he did. And it kind of leaked out. I don't think he's publicly said it, but a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And so I listened to a podcast with him where he talked about his journey to this thing. And the thing that made sense to me was, he said Vancouver, which is, I think it's number three, maybe number four of all the globe of real estate price inflation over the last 30

• 42:46Speaker 02

  years. And what he said was, an apartment in Vancouver, if today versus where it was 30 years, it's the exact same price in gold. Okay. Which is really interesting. It's obviously incredibly high in Canadian dollars. But it made me think, and he said, we have to find a way to get our real estate cheaper for the people, for the medical people, for the people that are there. How do we do that? And so his argument of using the strategic Bitcoin reserve was to help the city in the same way that parent would be subsidizing their kids. And so I have already started to work with my kids and say, hey, if I put money into

• 43:28Speaker 02

  a Bitcoin account, you stay, work from home for a year, save up enough money, then you move to the city. You already have a job. Now you've saved up a year's worth of saving and you'll have this money in Bitcoin. You just can't touch it other than an emergency situation. You get one shot at it and I'll explain to it. I think this is compounding at a really high pace. And so you're going to be growing your savings at an incredibly fast pace, the same way that Michael Saylor's been thinking about it, El Salvador's been thinking about it. And again, it gets into a weird Weird concept for me, which is, well, that assumes that it compounds every year. But that's what I believe has to happen in a world where we just keep printing debt. And this gets back to the Jeff Booth.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  They've printed so much money that it either ends badly or it ends with Bitcoin doing well. Those are the only two alternatives. And I think the easiest one for people to handle where they figure out how to deal with it. Cause it's kind of a slow motion train is that I'd rather have Bitcoin at 13 million and have all the kids have benefited and all this stuff go up. While the rest of the fiat system, maybe the worst case it goes sideways and it just doesn't appreciate. And so all the wealthy people are not getting wealthier. And now all the rest of the people that don't have the money, they're the ones benefiting. And that's to me, the best kind of elegant solution to the problem.

• 44:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's funny that you bring up real estate because I wrote this piece where I said, you know, the boomers had house, uh, housing. And now the millennials have Bitcoin. And of course, immediately everyone starts yelling and screaming, you can't live in your Bitcoin. Like, of course, got it. But what I was talking about was this idea that I believe that it's 50% of boomers on average net worth is tied in their primary residence. 42% of all homeowners in America have a mortgage free, uh, home now. And a lot of that is just because they've been paying off for 30 years. So, you know, they're not at a point in their careers where they don't have the mortgage.

• 45:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So it is probably the largest wealth generator for kind of an older generation. Young people are priced out of that. They, they can't afford to go buy a home, right? It's half a million dollars is a median home. And so you say to yourself, okay, well, actually Bitcoin may be a better solution because you don't need the down payment. You don't need to get the mortgage approval. You don't have maintenance costs. You don't have like all these different things. Can't live in it.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:48Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of tax benefits and the tax code for real estate, et cetera. But from a pure wealth generation standpoint, Bitcoin's done a lot better than housing over the last 15 years. And so, um, moving forward, you know, I've seen, uh, for example, um, there's this guy Brad Gerson, who, uh, has a, what I think is a pretty interesting idea called Invest America. And he wants to put a thousand dollars in a account and buy US stocks for every child in America. And the whole idea is, you know, get them compounding from day one and, uh, do this. Buying a thousand dollars of Bitcoin for every kid may actually end up having a more profound impact on the United States of America and our economy than anything else we could do in

• 46:30Anthony Pompliano?

  terms of social programs, et cetera, because what you basically are going to do is you're going to drastically increase the net worth of every citizen regardless of where they live, you know, their education level, et cetera. And so it becomes this question, which I think a lot of people are actually asking themselves. I heard the Bitcoiners in the 2010s, they sounded insane. They were on the internet. Frankly, they were assholes. They were, you know, mocking everyone. They were saying how stupid we all were. They were telling us how rich they were going to get.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  That's still going on at times.

• 47:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. As I say, you know, be gracious in victory, but not everyone listens to that.

• 47:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I hated these people, right? They're just, they're, they're mean. 2020 to 2024 happens, they kind of convinced me they might be right.

• 47:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, I am somebody who believes Bitcoin has value. Maybe I don't think it's as going to be as valuable as the Bitcoiners believe, but I believe it has value. I don't work in the Bitcoin industry. So I'm the CEO of Newmark. What if I put Bitcoin in my real estate fund? I work at asset management firm. What if I take Bitcoin and I put it in an ETF wrapper? I work at name many other roles around the world.

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  The question becomes, is Bitcoin this like magic bullet? And everywhere you put Bitcoin, does it actually create a solution for a lot of these problems? Or are we so deep in the, you know, kind of silo in, we only want to see the good things, but there are still plenty of problems where Bitcoin necessarily wouldn't be effective?

• 48:09Speaker 02

  So when, when I had my podcast, one of the things that I said a lot when trying to describe Bitcoin in an analogy that people could understand, or at least, let's say, it sums up what you said, because you brought up jobs, you brought up real estate, basically brought up the American dream when we were kids, which is, all right, we go to school, we graduate, we start working, we save money, and then eventually the dream is you get a house and you live somewhere. Well, the world's changed drastically since the internet. And mobility is really important. So the ability to move.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Is big. Renting is big. Like, a lot of the businesses we have, like DoorDash and Uber and Airbnb and this whole sharing economy, this is all meant to lower the price of things because, believe it or not, the kids realize, hey, does it cost money to have the grass mode? Does it cost money to have things? When you say real estate hasn't done as well as Bitcoin, when you put the carry costs on a home,

• 49:14Speaker 02

  you're really falling back on the investment side.

• 49:16Anthony Pompliano?

  The data, I just tweeted this, so it's top of mind. It used to be to own a home was about $230 more than renting, and I think that's on a per month basis. The data just came out that now it is like $1,300 more per month to own than rent, which comes to this idea of carrying costs.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And again, now when you, like, for people that, I mean, I live in Williamsburg. I live in a great building. I have insane amenities that are in my building that I pay a small amount of money. I owned houses, big houses. It costs a lot of money to heat them. It costs a lot of money. It doesn't cost a lot for... I just think this concept is changing. Mobility is important. Experiences are important to people. They want to move. They're having kids later in life. Everything is changing. And so to your point, the analogy I used for Bitcoin was really that you have to think of people that go to Bitcoin as Michael Saylor's thing of, if you don't trust your bank, you don't trust your currency,

• 50:18Speaker 02

  and you don't trust your government. Well, guess what that was? That's why people came to America in the first place. So Bitcoin and everything about it, in terms of this, is something where people go, I have a better alternative. If I go here, there's less friction, there's less centralization, there's less government. And I'll just remind everyone, you know, a lot, if you ask Andreessen and all the people who worked at Metscape and all the people involved with the internet in the late 80s and early 90s, they were a bit like the Bitcoiners, the early ones. They were anarchists. They were, you know, they believed that they were breaking the government and that this was going to give them this... It's a very similar thing. This has been happening for a period of time, and that's a lot of the reason that people came to America. And that's why when you look at

• 51:00Speaker 02

  technology and what's happening with the MAG7, it's really a country, and Bitcoin is part of that. And that's why when I look for when we're making the transition from the software into the final stage of moving the money into a digital bank or into this place, it is when Bitcoin outperforms the MAG7. I will keep saying it because we were waiting for AI to accelerate, and now it's accelerating. And that should mean that we're accelerating into the endgame. And the endgame to me is where people are now leaving the MAG7 investments and you're moving into Bitcoin.

• 51:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So MAG7 is interesting to me because I'll go on, and you can just search very quickly on Twitter, and you'll find plenty of people who say they're overvalued. There's no way these companies can keep going up. Look at the historical valuation comparisons, yada, yada, yada. If you look at the businesses, they are way more efficient. They are way more dominant. There's a strong argument that the current valuation metrics are reflective of just how much better these businesses are than businesses were 50 years ago. And so when you look at those companies, if they do not go buy Bitcoin and put it on their balance sheet, which still, you know, they could do, but, but most of them seem like

• 52:10Anthony Pompliano?

  they're not going to do it. How do you think through whether they will be valuable 10, 20 years from now? Right? These are businesses that, on one hand, have competitive moats and have been very successful. Some of them have network effects, some of them have distribution advantages, some of them have brand advantages, whatever. But technology is a ruthless game. And if we went back and we looked at the top seven companies, you know, 50 years ago to today, it doesn't look the same. Many of them weren't even started, you know, that are now the seven most valuable companies or most impressive companies. And so what does that framework look like? And is there an argument to, hey, you should buy Bitcoin, but also you should be allocating to MAG7 because, you know, there's cash flow

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  or assets or kind of some of these more traditional ways to view an investment portfolio?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Well, on your first point, and I've tried to say this to people, the reason I view this as the endgame for fiat stocks, and when I say endgame, they're not collapsing, and I think the MAG7 will continue to outperform small caps for a period of time. So I don't, I don't want this to come off as bearish, but.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  If you go back over time, the thing that changed in 2009 that I never hear people talk about. I was in Michael Milken's home, I want to say 2017. And we were having a conversation and we ended up having a debate over the valuation of these companies. And he was talking about at that time, how much debt Tesla had. And we were going through it and he's obviously a huge believer in exponential innovation. His, I mean, I've learned a ton, particularly in health from what he does globally. But I learned a lot at that time about the junk bond king and just kind of his thoughts on how this had to end. And I knew it wasn't going to end that way.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  So you're talking to someone far more experienced than me and someone who invented this corporate bonds. And me going, I think it all just ends with them either being bought out or paying off their debt. Like they'll gradually just, the ones will default and they'll go out of business because I don't see how they can compete. The reason I bring this up to say, yeah, if you go back 50 years and you look at the Nifty 50. One thing that has changed with these companies, I use Tesla, they had convertible debt. None of these companies have debt.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  None of them, relative to the cash they have. Every single time in the history of mankind, to grow a business, you needed to borrow money for the future. These companies are spending the money to build the infrastructure of AI out of cash. Number two, and this is the most important one, eventually you have to hire people. So on my, one of my most recent video, YouTube videos, I just highlighted, hey, look, Salesforce.com revenue continues to go higher. And I showed the last 15 years of Salesforce.com overlay of their revenues and the number of employees. Google, number of employees sideways, like these companies are not hiring anymore on the net. Like they might be hiring people and firing other people.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  And so Salesforce hires some people for AI and they get rid of people that are not AI. And these companies, to your point, are getting more efficient. We never saw this before. So the reason we had so many cycles. Is because of something you mentioned. Well, the boomers go through different phases and they get, then they get older and they go through this. This isn't happening anymore. There's no more cyclical based stuff. Everything is service based. And these companies have a huge advantage. So their competition to me cannot come from existing companies in my mind. The companies don't have the cash. They have borrowed money in a lot of cases and they're getting screwed by interest rates being at high levels. So these companies have a stranglehold of AI competition. They don't have, they haven't spent the money.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  And I saw this in the hedge fund world. If you didn't have a hundred million dollars spent on technology, how do you compete with quant shops that have all this? They can pay for alternative data. Well, that's businesses too. So what will happen is a few employees will leave Google, a few great ones. They'll go off and start their own business. Who started Anthropic? Well, it's someone who left OpenAI. Like you can go down the lineage of the competitors with insight. They started and they went, oh, this is great. We'll leave. There will be competitors that start to pick little pieces of businesses out of them, the same way that how did Salesforce start? Well, someone left Oracle. Like you go through this thing and I think there's going to be competition, but I think it's going to happen at startups. But what AI will prevent is those companies ever getting big enough to beat those companies.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  So you'll have these companies stop growing. These companies will go up. They'll own more of their business because they won't need to get funded the way they did in the past. And a lot of cases, the founders will make more money only going to a billion dollars or two billion rather than going to a hundred billion dollars.

• 56:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's interesting because the big guys have a huge advantage, obviously with the AI stuff. They've got the money to spend. They've got the, the ability to train the data, et cetera. But also these smaller teams, they're benefiting from the same efficiency. And, um, you know, one of the trends I'm watching very aggressively is this kind of like one raise and done. So you raise a little bit of money to get the company started, but you don't have to do the follow on rounds and the follow on rounds are obviously very dilutive at times. Um, and so, uh, again, it goes back to this idea of if you're a employee at a business and you see a path to, uh, doing something similar, but doing it for yourself and making just as much or more money, like Substack team out and you know, I've been involved with the Substack team.

• 57:36Anthony Pompliano?

  For a long time, I think I was one of the first, I don't know, 20, 30, 40, 50 writers on the platform. They've been incredibly good to me. I've watched the transformation of that platform. And one of the things that I didn't understand early that at some point I realized and kind of your eyes, you know, get wide, like, oh my God, is they provided the ability for people to do the same job, but to capture more of the monetary reward for it. So rather than work inside of a large media company where you're writing an email and that email is making a million dollars a year for the company and they're paying you 100K. Substack showed up and said, hey, you can literally write the same email. And now what we're going to do is you may not make a million dollars, but you may make $250,000.

• 58:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the employee doesn't care about the decrease from a million to 250 because that wasn't their money, right? They care a hell of a lot about the 100K to 250. And so this idea of efficiency isn't just companies now. Now, now it's these employees who are saying, wait a second, I basically now have the tools to go and become more efficient myself.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you, when you see this playing out across society, it reminds me, I think you've got this kind of heuristic of like, we're leaving a world of scarcity and we're moving to a world of abundance. Explain a little bit more about this idea and kind of what is that world of abundance that you see?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Well, the, the first part is scarcity is what economics has been built on for 2000. I mean, since the beginning of time, it's really from, you know, it's when the plow was invented and people could feed the, the town with less people. And then the extra people could go off and get jobs in the city or do whatever. Scarcity is, is what economics is about. And that's why, you know, you have late cycle, you have early cycle. There has to be some scarcity involved. Abundance, which is where we're headed, is when a 3D printer can make everything we need like that. And we know that's coming. And the reason we know that's coming is because if you're using AI and you're using it daily,

• 59:37Speaker 02

  and like, just like I said, from cursor to Replit.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  All you have to do honestly is in maybe one weekend, learn about what the terminal is on your computer, learn how to run a Python script, not write it, just how to run it. Go to cursor, verbally say into it what you want it to build. It'll build it. You run the script and it shows up.

• 1:00:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Magic.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Magic. Then that used to take a long time. Replit, step further and it gives you the ability of doing a little bit more than cursor does. And I'm sure the next one will be even more insane. At some point, if you can 3D print everything you need, it becomes an issue. I really do think it becomes an issue for businesses that right now, it reminds me the way Amazon started to kill things. The reason we paid a lot of money for a shirt at a store on 52nd Street that was $75 is because we didn't know they were selling the same shirt two blocks down for $38.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  So the internet brought us the ability of knowing this. Well, eventually all that middleman stuff will be completely eradicated in a time of abundance. And that's what we've been headed for. So, you know, to finish up, because you brought something up. So when I hear VC people speak, especially if I listen to all in podcasts and they start, and they were doing it on the one from this weekend, they start talking about, well, yeah, we're making these, I mean, 10 year investments in startups. Like it's going to take 10 years. Like, how does that jive with what I'm hearing Elon Musk say that we're going to be doing 100 years of innovation in 10 years? Because that means you're going at a speed that is so fast that there will be so many more competitors to your business than there were, say, five years ago,

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  because we're going at a pace which is much faster because ChatGPT came in. And so if that's the case, there's 100 competitors on day two, when it used to take maybe 10 years for there to be 100 competitors.

• 1:01:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what's interesting about this is,

• 1:01:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Early-stage investing, like pre-seed and seed investing, is probably the only part of the market that will be insulated from cyclical nature. And I always say that, you know, the act of creating always creates value, right? Going from zero to one, you will create value. How much value, in what way, whatever.

• 1:02:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But in a weird way, the world has gone towards more spreadsheets, more specialization, more, you know, I would have gone into finance, but now I'm going to go be a VC because that's the hot way to make money, et cetera. But I actually think from an investing perspective, the only strategy that will work moving forward is early-stage investing in people. Because what you're describing is basically such a dynamic, chaotic, uncertain environment, that the only thing that will be constant is the person that you are giving the money to. And so you're betting on a jockey that you are saying, you got to figure this out. And as that abundance happens, as that iteration of innovation, and all these things occur, you better hope you get in the one round that they raise.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  So you just brought something up, and this gets into the early stage. And this, this will sound odd, but you've gotten to know me a little bit over the few times we've, we've spoken. My brain goes various directions. At some point in my life, I started thinking about the fact that there are serial killers, and there are serial entrepreneurs. And if you break down what you say of like, okay, you watch any psychology shows about both of them, it is the chaos, it is the living on the edge all the time. It's thrill-seeking, but for serial entrepreneurs, like, I don't mind building something new every week. I actually love it. I mean, I write something every week, and I do a video every week. And to do that, I have to absorb a lot of information, and I have to constantly come up with ideas.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  And I'm sure you're the same way. The more you do those, the smarter you get, the more your brain is firing. It's that whole thing. It just feels, and the energy is flowing. I'm addicted to it. I cook. It's the same thing. I love cooking something new. I don't like cooking the same thing. I don't have this routine. And when I worked at a company for a long time, You're tapping in the same time every day. You're leaving around the same time every day. You have these, as we said, one-on-one meetings with your therapy sessions. Sometimes you get into bigger meetings and you look at your watch halfway through. You're like, oh, God. And as I rose up the ranks and I got to say, that's it for this meeting. Let's go through it. But still, you've wasted so much time. So I think time in this world of moving faster, for some people, they're going to thrive on it.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  And for other people, if the cost goes to zero and they don't want to be a part of it. I also love being in Maine where there's nothing. There's no human beings. And so the balance of life gets really important. And I think the people who understand, to bring it back always to Bitcoin. For people who understand Bitcoin, it buys you time for sure. Because if you're invested in something that's moving as fast as it is, what's the biggest negative people say about investing in Bitcoin? The volatility. Give me any volatile asset that makes new highs every three years. Like, I just want, if it's volatile and it's going up at the pace it is, how long is it going to take for the S and P to go up? I mean, last year, this year, we're probably up 150% Bitcoin now.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Last year, we were up 150%. Okay, what other things compound at that?

• 1:05:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a lifetime of returns.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. So it's like, you can ignore it. You can say you're scared of it, but you've been riding things that have been going up. I always like to say, to translate the S and P, the S and P is up 75% of the years. So to put it in terms for you, that's a football team favored by seven points, winning the game on the money line, 75% chance of it. So you can equate to it. When you're betting against the S and P, you're picking a team that's seven and a half, seven-point favorites and you're betting against them. So it doesn't happen that often. And I think in Bitcoin's case, it's not about how often it happens. It actually goes up less than the S and P does in consistency, but it goes up far more.

• 1:05:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, one of the aspects of society that has changed is, and you're kind of getting at this, is we were in a society of batting averages and we're moving to a society of slugging percentage. And so you see this with venture capital is a really good example, right? If you think about batting average, most hedge funds were just trying to be right each time. Maybe the best investors, like, you know, listen to a source or a drucker, whatever, say, hey, it's how much you make when you're right, etc. But venture capital really is a slugging percentage game. In stocks, I think that most investors, even self-directed or professionals, they thought more in batting average, linear, you know, what was kind of thought process. Bitcoin really introduced this idea of it's all about slugging percentage.

• 1:06:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's like, hey, this is the best idea. How good is your second best idea?

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And when you start to kind of think about the slugging percentage, you see the power law everywhere.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And so AI, to me, is just the next big power law, where, again, there's a lot of different technologies that are out there that could be powerful, could be interesting, could create value. It's pretty clear, in some form or fashion, AI is going to create that power law. And so when you think of this kind of Bitcoin and AI world, you broke out of the traditional, you know, kind of thought process, market, investment strategy, et cetera. Is it really as simple as just people are going to buy Bitcoin and are going to invest in these AI companies? Or will investing look different in some form or fashion? Like, there's a lot of pro-innovation, pro-growth type investors.

• 1:07:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You have the Kathy Woods, you have, you know, kind of traditional hedge funds, you've everything in between. What does it look like in terms of actually allocating capital moving forward?

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  So, again, I'm going to go back to, I think this year is the beginning of the end for, and I say the beginning of the end, for the indices doing exceptionally well. And I do think that it's just a matter of time before, maybe it takes two years, maybe it takes three years. But the AI agent part, meaning, this is truly the application part of artificial intelligence. We've been focused on the boring stuff, meaning, okay, Nvidia, all right, that's the one. And then you get the Mag7, but like you said, I mean, Google slips out this quantum computing thing last week.

• 1:08:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, they have been at work.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Well, the funny thing about it is, it's like, okay, we made advancements in quantum computing. It's like this little thing, no one really. The person at Google who's been working on this has been there for, I forget how long, it's like 12, 13 years working on this. And that's this thing of like, they have so many investments in like, you know, through DeepMind and through these other places working on things where these advancements will keep coming. So I think they'll keep making advancements on this, but I think the faster they are at making advancements on this, the more they're creating competition for their own business. And that's the thing that I believe in is like, okay, is there more money that they can bring in revenue wise? Because the benefit of AIs is

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  a replacement of expenses of people. It's efficiency. It doesn't mean there's going to be more transactions. And I think people forget this, that transactions are what GDP is. GDP is just the sum of transactions. So if AI agents are coming, they will be doing the transactions. Now, those transactions, because of efficiency, they're not going to be with physical currencies. Like, you know, any- Bitcoin and stablecoins are the money for the machines. Stablecoin has to be the money for the machine. When Stripe bought Bridge, I just remember doing, it's the only video I've done on YouTube that wasn't a, when I do them, it's what happened in TradFi this week, AI and Bitcoin adoption, and then Bitcoin. So it's like a third, a third, a third to help people with this bridge of getting over. But I did one on Stripe

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  buying Bridge because I thought it was so important for a variety of reasons. Also the fact that, hey, guys, they paid a billion dollars for something with 15 million of revenue. Like, you don't do that unless there's something really important here. And when you go through stablecoins hitting a mark, going through, you know, a new all-time high market cap, and you start realizing the cross-border transaction, you start reading in the depths, like, AI agents are coming and they're going to start transacting and doing all the transacting. Now, whether that takes next year, the year after, the year after, once they're doing a huge portion of the transactions globally, to me, that's when Bitcoin should really be accelerating. And so I have thought this entire year that you have massive new tailwinds of AI agents starting to come in.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  So the transactions of stablecoins, this stuff is just going to keep going. You have a government that has basically said, we're all in on crypto, and I don't know what else they have to do. Everybody they've hired, like, I don't know what else the president has to do. You come out of a time where we had severe regulation on the space, and you're now learning about, like, concepts like de-banking.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Forget all the adoption, all the stuff going on. The ETF started this year like it's like, how many things need to happen before you're like, okay, this is accelerating?

• 1:10:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know one thing I think that they should do? It would really piss off the establishment, the new administration. It would really piss off the establishment, which immediately they're interested, right? Two, I think it would be very symbolic. And three is, I actually think that it would wake up the world is at the White House. They obviously have the American flag hanging. There's more than one flagpole. I think that they should put the Bitcoin flag on one of the flagpoles, not as high as the American flag, but they should raise it maybe halfway. And I think that if for one day, the Bitcoin flag was waving on the grounds of the White

• 1:11:41Anthony Pompliano?

  House, people would just say, oh, my God.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  You're only missing one thing.

• 1:11:47Anthony Pompliano?

  What?

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Put a microphone out there and let you come out and say bang, bang.

• 1:11:49Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no, no. I think they're doing plenty, plenty well. I did say, I mean, you know, we're recording on the day that Masayoshi Son went to Mar-a-Lago. And if our economic strategy is just to get rich investors to come to Mar-a-Lago, stand in front of the media and to get shaken down by the President of the United States, we're going to be really rich. We're going to get a lot of investment.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  No problem asking the question. Got to ask the question.

• 1:12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and do it in front of the media, right?

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, Masai did not look very comfortable, but we got the extra 100 billion, right?

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  The white sheet at the inauguration, like everything you do publicly.

• 1:12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to, something I've been thinking about that I'm growing confidence, but I'd love for you to riff on this for a second before we end.

• 1:12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Global financial crisis happens and the Fed steps in, they do their well documented actions. Throughout the 2010s, I think that there's a lot of people in financial markets that believed the market had changed, the rules had changed, the ground had shifted, but they didn't know for sure, right? It was unclear because yeah, things are going up, but hey, it's only been a couple of years, there could be a market downturn coming, etc. In 2020, we pretty much ran the experiment. The most dangerous thing to do in an economy is to stop the velocity of money, lock everyone in their homes, you know, shut down business. I mean, just, just absolute economic destruction occurred because of this.

• 1:13:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And the Fed ran so quickly back into that market and created that V-shaped recovery, that I think that in hindsight, people's intuition was confirmed. And since 2020, it is not thought that the market has been broken. It is now confirmed that the market is broken. And so people are just like, forget saving, forget dollars, forget, you know, all that normal stuff. The Fed will not allow us to live through a prolonged bear market. You know, I keep saying 18 months or longer is not allowed anymore. Agree, disagree? Do you think 2020 was kind of a confirmatory type event where now the psychology of investors has completely changed and we should expect kind of that to be, you know, one of these

• 1:13:59Anthony Pompliano?

  turning points?

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  So confirmation to me is denial that it was already there. Again, this is, the fiat system is a Ponzi scheme. Fractional reserve banking is a Ponzi scheme. Like, you know, you can, you can sit there and debate it and argue it. If you print money, there's a negative that comes out and the negative is usually found through inflation. I think, and you may want to expand on this before we end it. I do think there's a negative that people have forgotten that'll, that'll show its head this year. But instead of confirmation, it really is amazing. You know, those things I brought up in 2008 and 2009, let's just go back and use what you're saying.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  The Fed's balance sheet was 1 trillion. It's now seven. It was much higher.

• 1:14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's nine at one point.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they obviously had the tools to do what they want. The money supply went from 7 trillion to 22 trillion. So from the forming of the United States, we had created $7 trillion of M2. And then since 2009, we've taken it up 200%. China. At that time was about $5 trillion of M2 in 2007. They're now 42. They're double the size of the US. So they matter a lot, which is the other reason why when you're thinking Bitcoin right now, China's printing. I mean, they're doing what they can and people are debating whether they're going to be able to get their economy to go up. But the reality is, I can't think of anything more they can do other than say every day, we're just, we're going to get the consumer to spend again. And they will.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  I mean, we've proven the fact to your point. So if that was confirmation, every person who now thinks the Fed can keep us out of things, for some reason, they don't think China can. But they don't have to get anything through Congress or anything. They just don't want to do it, but they certainly have the power to do it. I think the more confirmatory thing for most people was Silicon Valley Bank. Because Silicon Valley Bank, to think how quickly a bank could go out of business, that was the negative of the digital economy. That, I mean, we lost FTI, all of that stuff had happened in a short of Silvergate in a short amount of time. And that's where a lot of the things came that, oh, my God, we raised rates. We, we let these guys invest, but then they came up with a new tool and allowed the banks

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  to do term funding on the asset. So if it wasn't confirmed in 2020, it was guaranteed in, in 2023. The thing I wanted to bring up is if you keep printing money, there are two elements that can come up to, to make things bad. One is inflation. Now, we saw that in, in, obviously in 2021 into 2022, but I think that was just a massive amount of money that came in in a short amount of time. Everyone spent it and we had the supply shock. And now inflation's back where it'll stay to me at three to 4%. Still higher than it was before because you still have the hangover of so much money that was put in. But the other thing that people forget, if deflation is technology, if you spend that much money, what happened in 2020 in Silicon Valley?

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's what led to Silicon Valley Bank. So much money came in. Startups were trading at ridiculous prices. Innovation accelerated. AI probably happened faster in terms of ChatGPT because of that. Well, the negative is going to show up starting this year and into next year. And no one's talking about it in a big way yet. You need energy. So the one thing we haven't solved for yet, and you see this because what are the Mag7 doing? They're trying to secure nuclear plants. They're going like, this should be telling people, I think we might have a power shortage at some point soon. And it's gonna happen. And if you look at some of the forecasts, Goldman did a great one last week. You're talking about parabolic energy needs for the AI situation. If people haven't read about Colossus yet, go read about what Elon Musk did. It wasn't supposed to be able to happen. In fact, BG2,

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  the podcast with Brad Gersberg, it's a great one. But they interviewed Jensen Huang. That should be a must listen to for everyone. And he, Nvidia's CEO, said, I can't, no human being could have done what he did in Nashville in the amount of time he did it. But the power needs that it takes and what's going to go on, we're gonna have an energy shortage of some sort while oil's sitting down here. And it's not an oil need, but electricity eventually feeds into oil, diesel, wherever you want. I saw this in China. No matter what power it is, eventually it ends up in the same place. So I do think there are negative consequences from printing money, but it's not the stock market going down. It's inflation will be higher than it otherwise would be. And then eventually, if technology is growing so fast, the power

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  needed to support it is going to be a shortage. And I think that's going to pop up as the story next year.

• 1:18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like as the world turns faster, more chaos, more uncertainty, more disruption, more innovation, more iteration, the things that will stay constant are actually areas where value will accrue. And it reminds me of, I think it's both Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos have their own variation, but so much of investing is trying to figure out what's going to change. But Bezos talks about, we want to bet on consumer trends that are not going to change. Buffett wants to buy businesses that have sell products where trends are not going to change. Something like Bitcoin, something like software, which is really what all AI

• 1:19:20Anthony Pompliano?

  is. Those, I mean, I don't know a single person who could make a strong argument that there'll be zeros 10 years from now. And so, in a weird way, a lot of what people are putting in the bucket of what is new, is actually just a recreation of Buffett, Bezos, and others saying, what are the things you believe are not going to change over the next 10 years?

• 1:19:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't think of two better ones than Bitcoin and AI.

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Yep, and I, and I do think that one of the intersections between them, and this is why the, the, the podcast I referenced with, with Peter Diamandis, uh, he connected Bitcoin to AI, but he also connected Bitcoin to longevity. And I thought it was a very elegant way of, of, of, of bringing it in. And I do think if you're looking for spending, the world has a crisis of healthcare. There's just no way around it. Now, will there be solutions 10 years from now? And will there be cures for everything? Will they have a technology to go through our body? Yes. But over the next three to five years, a lot of money is going to be spent on healthcare. And if you want to see the place where we all know, other than the DMV, where when

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  you walk in, you're like, oh my God, how long is this going to take? It's a doctor's office. It's a hospital. It's all those things. So AIs and robotics are going to have a huge impact on that. And so if that's the case, these stocks trade at incredibly low PEs, but have insanely high revenues. So it's not just drug companies. It's the payment places and stuff like that. I think healthcare is going to be another part. And I think Peter, Peter Diamandis talked about longevity. I believe in it. It's the other passion of mine of just focusing on doing things that are the right for my body to stay happy, to stay energetic as I get older. And I think that's going to be a big spending thing. It's where I spend, I honestly, of my regular spending, working out and stuff, I spend

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  a lot of money on, on healthy food, going to the farmer's market, working out, uh, taking trips that are healthy, spending money on cold plunges and all that. Like you spend a lot of money. I think that's going to be a big, big spending thing going forward.

• 1:21:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Could not agree more. Where can we send people to find both your writing and also the videos that you're making?

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  So on YouTube, it's Jordy Visser Labs. My Twitter, you can absolutely get everything. And I, and I don't tweet six, seven times a day. If I do, I usually do threads of thematic things. I'm very thematic oriented in terms of this, so I try to get big picture stuff out. Same thing. My Substack, I can't remember the handle, but there's really not a lot of Jordy Visser's. Jordy Visser, search, you'll find me.

• 1:21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  Thanks, Anthony.