#1559 Jordi Visser | Trump vs Elon: What This Means For Bitcoin

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 what’s going on with Elon Musk & Donald Trump feuding on the internet, how it will impact your investment portfolio, bitcoin, stablecoins, Circle IPO, why so much capital is flowing in, economic policy, and what to pay attention to. =======================This episode is brought to you by Figure, the platform to Earn and Borrow. Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Figure offers Crypto-Backed Loans, allowing you to borrow against your Bitcoin or Ethereum with 3-month terms and no prepayment penalties. They have the lowest interest rates in the industry at 9.9%, allowing you to access instant cash or buy more Bitcoin without triggering a tax event. Unlock your crypto’s potential today. Visit https://www.figure.com/pomp to apply for a Crypto Backed Loan today! Figure Lending LLC dba Figure. Equal Opportunity Lender. NMLS 1717824. Terms and conditions apply. Visit figure.com for more information.=======================Maple Finance is where real money meets real yield. With over $1.5B managed, Maple offers secure lending, Bitcoin yield, and premium DeFi assets like syrupUSDC. Get started today at https://www.maple.finance !=======================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 we've got an excellent episode with Jordy Visser. He's got 30 years on Wall Street and he's here to explain to us what's going on with Elon Musk and Donald Trump feuding on the internet. How's it going to impact your investment portfolio? We of course talk about things like Bitcoin, stablecoin, the Circle IPO, and why so much

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  capital is flowing into all corners of the investment portfolios that both institutions and retail have. And of course, we're going to talk about all the things geopolitics, economic policy, and why money printing and the national debt are the two things you've got to continue to pay attention to. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.

• 1:05Speaker 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.

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:58Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start the conversation is we have Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the world's richest man versus the world's most powerful man. I mean, this is entertaining as hell, but also probably not good for the country. What's your take on these two guys going at it in public?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  All right, well, first of all, it's all on social media. Everyone can enjoy it, so it was fun.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I'm actually taking a different take on this. So to get to this point, and you have to remember all of the videos of him at the inauguration, the childlike looks he was giving, how happy he was, the double thumbs up, and I mean Elon Musk, starting Doge, talking about trillions of dollars that he was gonna find. And in a span of four months, the world's richest man and arguably the smartest, who's created more billion-dollar businesses than anyone alive,

• 5:01Speaker 02

  he's broken by the debt and deficit. Like, literally, it came down to the fact that he's complaining that they couldn't do anything in this bill. So the fight at the end, Elon Musk got to the point where he's literally attacking, saying, "Throw them all out, get rid of them." If that isn't a statement that we tried everything we could with austerity, we tried everything we could to get out of this. The fight yesterday was just the culmination point of, "You can't stop the fiscal problems that we have, no matter how you try." And it was only a week ago that he said, "I guess I gotta go off and try to be, you know, productivity's gonna get us out of this."

• 5:44Speaker 02

  But he couldn't resist the fact that they were gonna put this bill in and it wasn't gonna do anything to fix it. I think people should just lean back and just realize if they had any doubts coming into this year about how we were gonna handle the economy. That was, that was the fireworks show to say, there's no way, because if there was anything possible that could have happened, the smartest man we found.

• 6:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It felt like, um, it was the, and I, before I say this, I love Elon Musk. I obviously think that he's an incredible entrepreneur, things that he's done, not only in terms of actual productivity and building products and services, but I think that he has really inspired a generation of people to think bigger and try to build things, et cetera. But it was kind of the temper tantrum at the end, right? It's like, you know, we got the, the kid, they get frustrated, they don't know what else to do, so they just, you know, scream. And that kind of felt like there was the explosion of that. Um, but what I do think is fascinating is I, uh, interviewed yesterday, uh, Russ Vaught, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And Ross, um, when I asked him about the blowing out of the deficit and the increasing of, uh, the debt, et cetera, he said to me, well,

• 6:49Anthony Pompliano?

  it depends on how you're analyzing it, which, you know, okay, tell me more. And what he explained to me was the CBO, uh, is using this like baseline, uh, kind of projection, and then they see each bill, does it increase or decrease it? I'm not an expert on the national debt or on, on these bills, but what I did find interesting was he claims that the bill that they're putting forward will reduce the deficit by 1.4 trillion dollars over 10 years. Again, I don't know if that's true or if it's not, but what I started to unpack from that conversation was a bunch of the forward projections of the impact of these bills really comes down to like, are we using your algorithm or mine? Are we using your spreadsheet or my spreadsheet? Like whose model? Who's baseline? Who's assumptions, right? And so it actually makes me wonder how much of the

• 7:33Anthony Pompliano?

  entire debate is just like, don't even engage in it. And it's more so, I think what Elon is saying now, like, you just can only control one side of this equation, which is productivity. All of us should stop trying to get the government to do anything, and let's all just go try to build companies, you know, and increase GDP.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I find, so I don't think I've ever, I've, I've, we've ever done this here, and I may have mentioned it once, but I want to simplify the, the US economy, and it'll bring it into kind of the way it eventually brought me to Bitcoin, but especially this artificial intelligence side right now. Think of the economy as now being three pieces. It's the industrial economy, which is filled with Debt and is growing very, very slowly. We've been weaning off manufacturing jobs. We've exported or we've imported everything. We don't make anything and that part has a lot of the people that support Trump in it. You've got the digital economy, not as many workers, no debt. That one's growing rapidly. And then you have this other economy that was created to balance out

• 8:29Speaker 02

  the decline in the industrial economy, which is the government economy. The government economy is massive. Anyone who wants to sit here and nitpick about whether this is possibly gonna debt to GDP in this country has been going higher consistently since the computer came in and the digital economy started to go. The reason Bitcoin is so important in this conversation and bridges the two is because that government economy cannot shrink. And the reason it cannot shrink, healthcare expenditures are growing right now at eight to 10% a year because of Medicare, Medicaid, because of the health of the country. There's no way to reverse it. And almost 2 million people over the last year have started collecting social security benefits. Some of that is demographics. Some of that is just the fear now over the economy.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Regardless of any way you want to go through it, what we found out is we tried to do something to balance the deficit. The debt to GDP is not going, not going away. So the only parts about this that people should think about, are we gonna grow? Yes, I believe this is a growth package. Will it be able to grow more than interest rates? Well, that depends on what happens to long-term rates. I just think at this point, we're gonna have a normalization of rates. The pressure is gonna be on long-term rates to move higher, not lower. And even if they stay right around the same area, which is pretty much a good thing for equities, it's not a good thing for fixing the deficit in the budgets. They can play around with all the numbers. The reality is this has been going on for a long time. And the government cannot be shrunk because

• 9:53Speaker 02

  the voters don't want the government to shrink. And that's what we found out with this bill.

• 9:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So Q1, we had negative GDP. Q2, we're in boom times. The Atlanta Fed's GDP now is like up over 4%.

• 10:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like all the people who are predicting the recessions, depressions and Black Fridays, they don't want to talk about the fact that if you don't get two straight quarters of negative GDP growth, you can't have a recession. I think you previously had said a number of times, you can't have a recession if people aren't losing their jobs. How are you looking at this economic data right now? Because it sure looks like this was a V-shaped recovery. Reflexivity is real and the economic growth is coming roaring right back.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, first quarter was obviously distorted because of

• 10:40Speaker 02

  the import numbers which went violently ahead of the tariffs. So by having a ton of imports, no exports, the trade data subtracted a significant amount from GDP. So if you just use domestic final sales, the growth was close to 3%.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  The second quarter, I'm going to guess is actually going to be less than that. So I wouldn't take in what's happened. The main point is we're not in a recession. As I said, and this is an important part, healthcare is about 18% of nominal GDP. And that's growing, as I said, at 8 to 10%. So if you just take that part, forget the AI part that we took. There's just no way to have recessions and there's no way for the economy to fall off the map. Unless we do agree, you know, we fire tons of people from the government and we have tariffs go up to whatever. None of that's happening. So the economy is fine and that's the other pressure point for rates. It's the reason why it's going to be difficult for the Fed to cut. I will say, all of the data on the jobs situation

• 11:43Speaker 02

  is starting to become a little bit more problematic. And I think in the second half of the year, the realization is going to set in that AI is not destroying jobs, but it's hurting the ability for companies to hire. And I don't think we're going to be able to have like a significant growth period. Housing market is very, very soft. It's not collapsing. So anyone who sits there and starts seeing charts of there's so many sellers in this. It's just soft, commercial real estate, soft. We've talked about long duration assets. I think the economy is kind of in this state where the second half of the year, people should expect 2% GDP in terms of real growth. Maybe if inflation stays lower, we can get closer to three. But from an equity versus bond perspective,

• 12:28Speaker 02

  bonds are not the investment. It is stocks, stocks, stocks. And I think we're getting closer. One important thing on the stock market for people this week. So far, this rally has really been driven again by tech as we've come out of this. So you and I have talked and I believe that semiconductors and some of the names that I've mentioned here, like Micron broke out this week. We're starting to see the realization, I'm hearing it more and more like, hey, this build out of both nuclear and the data centers. This compute thing is real, so they're finally getting back on board that. And semiconductors are unchanged from a year ago. So I think there are some investment themes that'll get people excited. But the thing that they should all watch is we need to see some kind of inclusion from small cap,

• 13:09Speaker 02

  particularly with this audience that cares a lot about the utility side of crypto. You need to have small caps start to come up a little bit here, and I'll talk about that later.

• 13:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, explain why that's so important.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  So at this point, it's been a very concentrated market. And as I've gotten more, let's say, in the community from the crypto side, I've started to realize the importance of, and I'll just give three that I monitor every single day, Ethereum, Solana, and Sweet. And I'm just watching. And the reason this is important is there's two sides of the crypto market. The one is the institutional movement towards Bitcoin, which is happening. You and I both hear it, we see it, it's there, there's a bid underneath that acts like a raging thing that'll eventually break out to the upside. And I still believe that we're going to have a short squeeze this year. What has contained it, though, is we don't have the enthusiasm and the trading

• 14:02Speaker 02

  and the oomph that's necessary for the innovation side. It's clearly happening on the stablecoin side. People see it. I mean, you saw the way Circle traded, you saw the excitement, you've seen what's happened on every deal that's come to the market. Crypto has, it has an energy there, but it doesn't have the speculation right now. It doesn't have the meme coin side, it doesn't have any of them. If you do charts of any of those names I mentioned relative to Bitcoin, it's straight low. It looks like QQQ to IWM, or for people not following those ETFs, innovation versus small cap stocks, at some point, beta needs to do well. And I think that's what we're getting close to. I've kind of said, once Ethereum gets above 2650 to 2700,

• 14:46Speaker 02

  and you actually get a break above there, I think that is going to be the point where you start to see more speculation and belief that the innovation side of crypto is there on top of the institutional adoption side.

• 14:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start looking at Bitcoin in particular, it feels like Bitcoin trading down while Elon and Trump were arguing. I had a lot of people calling me, I think you had people reaching out to you saying, hey, is Bitcoin going down because these guys are arguing? Or does it just happen to be a coincidence? How do you evaluate kind of a decentralized liquid asset that trades 24/7 when the two most powerful, rich people in the world are over here debating?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  The great thing about watching retail traders, they're all momentum based and they're just going with what's working. If you do an overlay of a chart this year and actually into the election, let's think about Elon Musk was connected to Trump, Bitcoin was connected to Trump. The overlay of those two Bitcoin and Tesla has been very, I mean, it's almost one for one. There was like a brief period where they broke away for a little bit, but it's pretty much the same thing. There shouldn't be that way. And so I understood why people to some degree were like, oh my God, it's not going. And it was because it was falling. But the reality is what Tesla and Musk represent to me was the only thing working in the market for the speculation side. Palantir has gone back

• 16:10Speaker 02

  up to highs. But again, it has been a very difficult time for traders. You and I saw each other in Miami back in January. You know, we were wearing bananas around our neck. It was a little, you know, the banana zone was, was what everyone was talking about. Well, you know, the inauguration kind of destroyed that enthusiasm with the meme coin coming out. Then you had the Malay situation and everyone kind of lost it. And then everything broke down. I think we've been building up the trading side right now and Tesla falling to me will break the correlation between Bitcoin and Tesla. And now I think again, it's gonna, for us to get to 200 in a short amount of time in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and so we have to be part of that move. And I think we're getting closer to that move now.

• 16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And the participation of kind of the altcoin market, is that net new dollars coming into the market, you think, or is that kind of a redistribution of people saying, hey, Bitcoin's gone up a lot since maybe I bought during this last cycle. And now I'm just going to kind of push out further on the risk curve to try to capture more upside as we continue in the bull market?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  I think, to use a phrase that I hear a lot, pencils are down with a lot of people right now. I don't know if you're getting approached. I've had more people ask me about BitTenser in the last month. And these are from people that have never bought crypto. So the one thing I like is that family office, like everyone's now realizing, you know, I have to have an allocation here. They're not doing it because it's at all time highs. They're looking at these things because they believe in AI. And so BitTenser, they literally send me something, they send me the deck. Hey, I'm getting presented this. What do you think? I go, which part? Well, you're an AI guy and a crypto guy. This should be right up your alley. And I'm like, here's the, here's the deal. If I'm right about Bitcoin, all of these things are going to do well because to get to those

• 17:55Speaker 02

  levels, there has to be energy and investment from you guys with inside the beta because the beta forces the strong to go higher. The S and P 500 cannot go up right now without the NASDAQ. It needs the NASDAQ because the Mag 7 are part of it. I've said this before and I know people don't embrace it this way. I view Bitcoin as the ultimate S and P 500 of the world in 15 to 20 years, that it will just keep sucking in all of this money. And the beauty of it is that it can't be out innovated. That's the beauty of it, is that it can't actually lose its status as an investment where everything in the equity market always does. We brought up Tesla. I just want to

• 18:39Speaker 02

  make sure people realize this. The market cap of Tesla is $1 trillion. They have almost no debt.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Ford and GM combined, you see more of those on the road than you do Teslas, their cars. If you don't know, it's $100 billion of equity. That's their market cap, 100 billion. They have 300 billion of debt. That is that industrial economy. What Bitcoin doesn't have is it doesn't have any of that stuff. It just has a store of value that makes it kind of like gold, but really as more money goes into the ecosystem. And that's why hearing people call about BitTenser, that means people that have never invested crypto are like, I think I gotta get involved in this, but I want to find stuff that can go up tenfold. And I always say the same thing. Your problem with investing in any of these innovations, if you invest in 10 of them and you get two of them right, you've done well. The exit strategy on these things is very, very difficult.

• 19:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I think it's also, even if I look at my own portfolio, right? Like Bitcoin is the thing that I will never sell. It's kind of the timeless investing principle, buy great assets, never sell them. Everything else that we've ever held in crypto, whether it's for short periods of time or medium periods of time, we always knew when we bought it, we're going to sell it. And I think that that is a very, very different mentality. And then naturally, everyone is trying to sell before the next person, right? And so you just kind of short circuit those things. One of the things that is going very well right now is the Circle IPO happened this week and Circle went out, I think at one point the stock was up 200, 300% on the first day of trading. How do you read so much excitement and performance coming from something like the Circle IPO?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Circle represents something very important. So people here

• 20:17Speaker 02

  I remember back in October when I started kind of going around to people that that understand the crypto space extremely well, one macro person in particular, and I said, I think stable coins the most important investment theme for next year. And he's like, how do you make money off stable coins? And I'm like, stable coins are the bridge between the two worlds. It's gonna bring confidence in people that this is the place that I have to invest in, and it'll lead to stuff in the altcoins, it'll lead to Bitcoin, everything. We need the ecosystem to grow with wealthy people. The only types of people that I've seen, I see trad, I'll leave you out of this at this point on one side, you've been in long enough. So the OGs that have been involved from a very early stage, and then the tradfi

• 21:02Speaker 02

  people that made the bet to get involved. But to get wealthy people that are wealthy from the fiat world at this stage, and then have them come in, it's very challenging. It's very hard for them to say, I want to be involved. And if they get involved, they want to move into the ecosystem. What Circle has done, in my opinion, it matches up with the stablecoin bill. Like, it forces people to understand, like, why is this so important? Why is JP Morgan? Why Goldman Sachs? Why are all these people now speaking publicly about what are stable coins? I think people haven't understood it. And this will force more people to go. And once you get into stable coins, and you really dig deep, I think you can easily make the transition over into the other side. And we've talked

• 21:44Speaker 02

  about this, but I just want to make sure people get it. The volumes are going to explode over the next five years, not just because the guardrails are going up, not just because of the work of Bridge and Stripe and all these people that are out there going, it's gonna go up because of AI agents. That connection and the amount of volumes that are gonna happen where the easiest way to pay is in that way. I listened to a podcast this week, and a guy who doesn't code went on to Replit, he had the one of the, he had the Replit founder on. And he said, I created a software overnight and I connected it to Stripe and I got a payment in already this morning. That's the kind of world we're living in and the fact that stable coins are going to be the chosen transaction, the money system and the bridge between the two is there.

• 22:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to me that once you start to hook up a lot of these technologies, it's kind of like Bitcoin is an accelerator, stable coins are an accelerator, AI is an accelerator, humanoid robots are an accelerator, but then when you stack them on top of each other, it's like you're not one plus one plus one plus one, you know, it is like times five, times 10, times 20. And what I think that does do though is it draws a line in a kind of time. And I don't know where you would place the exact bifurcation, but there is an old world and there's a new world. And I think over the last decade at least, we have lived through this explosion from really what was like the first internet era to now we got the Facebooks and you know, the Xs and all of those things really kind of hit

• 23:13Anthony Pompliano?

  their stride, grew to large scale. And we also started to get the cryptocurrency, we started to get a lot of the AI stuff, etc. What I wonder is how much of the legacy financial system is set up to understand this world? So not even invest yet, just understand it. There's a story from this week that you called out that I think is really important where now economists, this is not you and I, this is not zero hedge, this is not, you know, maybe people that we would be sympathetic to, you know, these are economists who are calling into question the US inflation data and they're saying it may not be accurate, partially because they don't have enough people to use their antiquated methods to go and calculate the inflation. And so it goes back to this thing of Secretary Besse,

• 23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  it was asked by the All In Podcast, do you believe the economic data? And the first word out of his mouth was no. And then he quickly backtracked and tried to make it more kind of a polished answer. What do we take about this idea that the inflation data may be wrong? Or other economic data points that are used for the traditional financial world to invest capital?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Well, we have the payroll number today. The expectations at this point that I've seen are that last year and this year, the data will have been overstated by about 50 to 60,000 jobs a month. All the data is bad. It's hard enough to capture what happens in an economy that's complex. But as we've gone more into the digital economy and things have sped up, as Elon Musk said, we're still using systems from hundreds of years ago. The technology is archaic in terms of being able to count anything. And I found in his case, what he said, not just the fraud, but the inability to do things. And when he asked to actually see the treasury receipts and actually go the way anyone would go through to figure out what the math is,

• 25:01Speaker 02

  he couldn't believe he couldn't see anything. So I think people have been able to trade off this because there wasn't another world that existed.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  I listened to an interview with Demis Hassabis this week. I've listened to him about three times in the last two weeks. This was a really good one. It was again, right after the Google I/O developer conference. But he just talked again about how fast things are speeding up. And so when you revise jobs a year reverse, and what he's saying is that what equates to every year in innovation of AI is about 10 years of the past. You have to really think about what, I mean, that's just a staggering number. That's how fast everything is changing on the AI side. So there's no way that GDP, a statistic created in the 1930s, can possibly comprehend what happens with the intangible side of the economy.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  I will say, I'm beginning to hear more economists, they tend to be on the younger side.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Admit this, I've been yelling this since I first went to Silicon Valley and started changing my views, which was in 2013 at Singularity University. I don't think most economists have done this, but they are starting to turn. And I think that puts a much more difficult situation on all of the traditional finance world because they are still believing, still.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  That we're going to go back and retest the lows. We had the Xi-Trump call this week.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Rare earth was all over the papers this week. We talked about it, I think, last week, if not the week before, about how important this was, that China controlled the world's rare earth. That phone call to me, followed up by Trump admitting that we're going to go out to China. If there was any doubt about what's going to happen between China and the US, it's the tariff. We do not have the upper hand on the tariff situation. I'm not saying they don't have the same kind of risk, but this is a mutually destructive situation, which means for everyone that's there, I like seeing that small-cap stocks are about to break higher. I love that the sentiment's still not there. I love that Ethereum and Solana haven't broken out. I kind of get the feeling this squeeze thing is going to be a summertime thing more and more.

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, with China, it feels like that mutual destruction is like, who can withstand more pain? Right? We know that both sides are being kind of chipped away at, and it's just like, who calls uncle first? And the meeting in Switzerland where they decided to reduce the tariffs by 115% was kind of like, hey, we're not really going to destroy each other, right? It's like, let's put, you know, let's lower our guns. You don't have to put it down completely, but just like, don't point them at each other right now. And so that then brings us to investment portfolio. We know stocks have done very well off the lows in April. You've called out the small-cap stocks being very important. I think also the small-cap coins, kind of a similar type idea.

• 27:51Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at all of the stocks that have been performing, it seems like we're watching a rotation occur, right? It does feel like, okay, Mag7 isn't what it was a year ago, two years ago. But then you see like the Circle IPO. And so like, is this something where we're actually going from incumbent to challenger in the stock market? Like, does that feel like a theme that people can start to kind of pay attention to? Because to me, the Mag7, we know they're going to spend a lot of money on the AI stuff. We know they're going to benefit from that stuff. But it's actually the core weaves and the circles. And like, if you think of the stocks that have done really well so far this year,

• 28:30Anthony Pompliano?

  they do seem to have kind of this challenger positioning, and they seem to be outperforming the incumbents in their various sectors.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  So when you get to a point where you've had this major V, what I try to look at at the market is what was working on the way down and is still working on the way back up. So as an example, gold was working on the way down and it's still sitting at the all time highs. So it didn't reverse. The dollar has been weaker. Was weakening on the way down. It's barely bounced back with everything going on. Those are structural things and they're both related to the same thing. And the structural thing is the dollar is not the global reserve currency anymore. And the rest of the world realizes that it's kind of nationalism. And so the dollar has to be under, has its overweight right now in everyone's portfolio. The same thing as US stocks and gradually over the next three to five years, as long as the tariffs don't force people to panic out,

• 29:23Speaker 02

  it'll be a slow bleed over time and you should expect that the dollar is going to be on the weaker side. The other thing, so the AI trades did fall. They fell violently. They've snapped back violently. The AI situation in terms of the news did not change. If anything, Meta jumps into constellation. Meta had already upped their investments on the data center. Everyone who got negative on what's happening with AI in the compute side was dead wrong. That's why we're at the early stage of this. Silver broke out this week, very important level. And I see silver as being part gold, but also part of the electrification side. Copper broke above 500 this, this week on the futures. There is a shift that's happening in a rotation.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  The AI trade is still dominating. The, the crypto world is still on this path with government supporting it. Government is supporting nuclear, government is supporting AI. Government has to support the healthcare and things like that. It's still trying to help the bottom end. I think everyone just has to get ready. By the end of this year, the number one theme is going to be the embodiment of AI and the people understanding that this whole talk of humanoids and everything is going to be real. It has scary consequences for the job situation in terms of this. I get reached out more on this show from things that I say from people. About AI, many people have reached out about, hey, I just lost my job. You seem like you you're using AI that much.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  What's your advice on how to do that? And I'll, for the most part, I'll send them a response. But the thing that's come up more and more now is that they're starting to worry about their kids. So this is a weird world where from an investment side, I think people need to have money in Bitcoin, because I think this is part of that hedge on that, that disruption that's going. And then for the stocks, I think from an investment standpoint, the semiconductors, I believe the power side still remains a great place to be. And then even though we'll see a trade in small caps, I think small cap companies have a really hard time competing with the larger cap companies. But in particular, we're going to move away from software and away from coding. And I think we're going to spread more into the physical world again.

• 31:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And in that physical world, there seems to be an intersection of technology in the physical world. So we know that robotics is a huge part of the American manufacturing. Now, we do have the administration coming out saying we don't want to make socks and T-shirts here. We want to make, you know, kind of higher end stuff that requires kind of precision manufacturing, advanced manufacturing. Do we have enough talent, you think, to actually execute on this stuff? Like, do we have enough robotic engineers? Do we have enough people who can actually operate in these facilities? Like, I always go back to this idea of, you know, Trump even says it, right? Like, he's trying to take money from Harvard to give to trade schools. And it does feel like there's like a goal. And then we have to ask ourselves, do we have enough of the minerals and resources?

• 32:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Do we have enough capital? Do we have the desire? Do we have the talent, right? Do they have the skills? Like, there's a lot to this that maybe is not so obvious on the surface. And talent being kind of a kind of, you know, crazy component here.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  We, I mean, I hear this repeatedly, even from from the housing market, with people that are still building, they they just say they have shortages. We we don't have enough people in that aspect of the economy, because we've directed everyone more towards different parts. The service side, we have shortages.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Everything in social work and healthcare nurses and now that immigration is going to be changed significantly and I don't think people have fully come to the reality of what that means. The whole thing with student visas and we don't have enough people right now for the physical side of the economy. I wrote a paper this week for 22V on Brazil and I'm very positive on Brazil. I live there. There's just certain times and it usually comes down to two things. If the dollar's weakening, that usually is really good for Brazil. And if there's a commodity boom, that's usually good for Brazil. And I mentioned last week the rare earth side in Brazil being a large player in that market. The rare earth side, we don't have enough. We're gonna have to go get it. It was funny that in, you know,

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Greenland was brought up by the EU this week on rare earth. Like everyone realized across the globe this week, in case you guys didn't see it. China not only stopped rare earth exports to the US, it did globally. And that's because the US was gonna try and isolate China and negotiate with everyone. Said, "Oh, okay, if you're with the US, you don't get rare earth either."

• 33:57Speaker 02

  No auto production, no military. Like China was putting out this really big trump card and saying, "No, fine. If you guys are gonna all gang up on us, then we're gonna stop rare earth." So I think when we come out of this, which I expect now the negotiations to go much faster with China, that's what I think this week with the rare earth kinda set off. I think what you're gonna have is people start to move around and start to focus again on, "Okay, we have to go as fast as possible with rare earth, as fast as possible with finding people to work in here." Because it becomes an AI race and everyone realizes that the supply chains have to be rebuilt in three to four years. So.

• 34:31Anthony Pompliano?

  When we look forward, you previously said that you thought stocks would go near or hit new all-time highs. We have seen this kind of acceleration. Do you think that with the Q2 economic boom, the current economic policies, the fact that Elon Musk is throwing the temper tantrum and saying, "Hey, there's no way we're gonna be able to cut the budget. We gotta go focus on productivity." Like, free walk to all-time highs by the end of the year?

• 34:56Speaker 02

  There's no such thing as a free walk. It's all probability adjusted. There's still a chance that especially with with Trump in office, anything could happen over the course of the next month, but

• 35:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Next 24 hours.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. But since tariffs have been the overhang and people, the sentiment has not gone back up to where it was before. And I do think the economy in the second half of the year, where people still kind of are talking about recessions and things like that. I think we're probably going to have a squeeze beforehand. So I would be surprised at this point. If we don't get to new all time highs before the end of the summer, driven by the fact that the positioning is still way off base. The next time that I think we're probably going to run into some kind of problem, and it's possible that, you know, like as an example, that we don't get the bill through by July 4th.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  But if we do, and you go through the next month, okay, if China and the US can come to some agreement and the bill gets through, and that's really all that is needed. We did this whole rally with one deal with the UK. Nothing else has changed. And yet people are still waiting for the next leg lower. I believe we're about to see the accelerant, the realization by people are just about how much, how many benefits are coming from AI. The profit margin is the big deal. And here's the risk. Trump has said, like in the case of Walmart, I expect you guys to put no prices through. In the bigger picture, the reason he says that, he wants corporations to eat this. And that would be a transfer from labor to, from companies to labor. That's what he's hoping.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  The profit margins will be really interesting. I think AI is going to do that, but what he might be squeezing the sausages, you guys can't raise prices. Okay. Well, that means our margins are going to go down a little. That means we're going to have to get rid of a few more people and bring AI in a little bit faster. That's unfortunately the place that we are with a lot of the corporations that make up the S and P 500. There's a race to try and keep your margins up at higher levels and benefit from AI and the fact that agents are coming and humanoids are coming. It's going to be a very difficult game between the work side and this, and that's why the government is just going to keep printing money. And I'll just keep saying it. I believe capital controls will be a story before we get through the summertime.

• 37:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And what's going to happen in that scenario? You think that they will just disincentivize any capital from leaving the market?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  It'll it'll cost money. People will have to make a decision to take money out. I I just, I don't see how he's not going to continue with trying every sort of redistribution. And if in the China situation, we don't do the tariffs, which is kind of the pressure that's going, then it has to be something that, okay, your money's here. That's great. But if you're going to leave, you're going to have to do this. There's a whole bunch of things. I think it'll be overread as something bigger than it is. But I think for Bitcoin, anything with capital controls in the US is unthinkable. But I know most of the things, the people I listen to, most of the people I hear that are talking, they're paying attention to this, hey, it was in Stephen Mirren's paper.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Hey, it's in the bill, like remittances. That one's easy. But for investors and dividends on things like, it's just, I think there's other ways to play this other than the tariffs. And I think this would go more towards hurting pension funds and stuff like that, less towards the sovereign wealth funds. And I think that's the route he's going to go.

• 38:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's it's fascinating to think through. The economic policies could still throw a wrench in all of this. But I do wonder, the taco trade, has that now resonated? It's kind of like retail investors, right? Like they buy the dip. Every time there's a dip. I saw, I forget who put it out, maybe it was Adam Kobi C or somebody put out saying, every time that we've had a down day, the next day in the stock market this year was up 0.36% on average. And that compared to historical was like 0.02%. And so what they were basically saying is like, every time there's a dip, retail is buying and you get the green the next day. That is now like a religion, right? That like we have left any, no, nobody's looking at numbers.

• 39:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Nobody's looking at anything. They see, I see red, I put my money in the market. I do wonder how much of the investor base, both retail and institutional, I don't care what the economic policies are. I don't care what the what's being announced. The single biggest intelligence test of our generation is, are they going to keep printing money? And if yes, buy, right? Like, like, that kind of seems where we're ending up, that people almost don't even really pay attention over time.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  That's why, to bring it full circle, what happened with Elon Musk yesterday is very symbolic of that whole thing, which is, regardless of what happens, there will be more printing this year in some form, some shape or fashion. Either the deficit stays at this level, or they figure out some way again to help the people they're trying to help. And I think Trump has made it crystal clear. So if rates go higher, which again, in my opinion, I don't think this is a panic moment, but the housing market is a problem. Housing affordability is a major problem inside, inside the country. And he needs to make housing more affordable if they're going to win the next election. Like, it's a part of kind of what's going to go on. So you can stimulate growth, but if rates go higher, then we have to do something.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  And that's where this whole thing gets back to. You can't run away from 120% of debt to GDP and you can't run away from, oh, the fiscal deficit is at 7%. We'll get there in four years. That's not the way it's going to work if rates start moving higher. And I think that's what's going to happen.

• 40:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, I tend to agree. Let's see what happens. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 40:42Speaker 02

  I'm still on YouTube doing my weekly. I'm still on Substack doing my weekly. Visser Labs is attached to it. I'm posting on X. I've been real busy lately, so it's been less. And then for the institutional people, 22vsecurities.com, you can find me there. And all there, I'm doing research papers on AI and doing a lot of consulting work for them, for, for asset managers, for family offices, on how to incorporate AI into their business. This has become a bigger thing for me.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  I know you've been involved in this and I'll just say this to to to finish this for people. I don't think any decision that you make in your life now should be done without consulting AI. It's a quick thing. You can do it verbally, but it's come to the point now where I incorporate it in every decision like it's a partner of mine. In terms of, okay, I'm I'm gonna go do this. What do you think of this idea? What am I not thinking about? What should I do? It is the more that you do that with, to get back to people reaching out, the better your situation will be at work, the better decisions you'll make. But also, the more that you use it as an adult, the more you're setting the example for your children. Your children need to be using it every single day.

• 41:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I think then uh it is the single easiest thing to incorporate into your life that has such an asymmetric impact and uh.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  And it's free.

• 42:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and some people aren't gonna do it, but it's okay.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Chat G P voice can voice mode. Use it. Trust me. Voice mode, not the little microphone. The voice mode, it's free. Download the app, have a conversation about any book you want, walking down the street. It will be fantastic.

• 42:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I I use it for my daughter whenever I tell her something and she says that's not true. And then I ask, right? Because I know that I can get that get what the answer that I want. And it's fascinating how much she immediately defers to, oh, if the if the AI said it, then that must be true. So, all right, we'll do this again next week.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.