#1565 Jordi Visser | Bitcoin Is Front-Running the AI Revolution

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 why the Fed did not cut interest rates, how to think about inflation, Israel & Iran, how big bitcoin can get, AI, and market outlook. ======================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.======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:58Anthony 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.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we've got a great episode with Jordy Visser. Jordy is a 30-year veteran of Wall Street and we talk about all of the things that happened this week. We get into why the Fed didn't cut interest rates, how to think about inflation, what's going on with Israel and Iran, how to think about Bitcoin in a brand new presentation that just came out from a big time Wall Street investor and why they think Bitcoin's going to be bigger, but we disagree. We think it might be bigger than they think. And on top of that, we also get into artificial intelligence, what's going on with perplexity and much, much more. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, we got a lot to talk about today. I thought the first place we could start is COTU recently had their annual event. They put out this great presentation. It's one of the highest quality things that I see every single year, and they specifically talk about Bitcoin in here. And I think you've got some different thoughts, maybe than they have in terms of what Bitcoin

• 2:34Anthony Pompliano?

  is worth and how they're thinking about it. Give us an overview of how is COTU thinking about Bitcoin? And then what are the areas where you agree or disagree with them?

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, first of all, the report was great. I mean, it's so Mary Meeker put out a very long form report two weeks ago, three weeks ago. I didn't find that nearly as interesting. It was just a bunch of data. Some of it was old. The COTU stuff got into a real kind of futuristic look of what the market and public companies will look like, and it focused on the disruption from AI, the benefits that will come from AI from the macro perspective, especially debt to GDP, which we can go in. But the most interesting thing right off the bat was the Bitcoin part.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  To find COTU, I don't want to say embracing Bitcoin, but if you listen to the BG2 podcast, the brothers were interviewed on there. And Philippe spent a lot of time at the very beginning of the podcast, talking about Bitcoin. Now, in there, they kind of list what they think the market caps will be due to AI and just kind of their views of the future by 2030. And they had Bitcoin, I believe, is the third biggest company with Microsoft number one, and I think Nvidia number two. Now, the interesting part was the CAGR that's implied by the Bitcoin market cap, which they added about 5 trillion, is less than 20% over the next five years. Now, they didn't

• 4:03Speaker 04

  highlight how much of a deceleration this is, considering the three-year Bitcoin CAGR right now is about 75%. The five-year is about 65%, and the 10-year is about 85%. So somewhere within there, you're doing 65 to 85 on three, five, and 10-year. I've talked on here, and I believe that the difference between what they have is the explosive

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Numbers, they talk about an AI. And for those who have watched us now for the last five months, four months, three months, whatever it's been, we've covered a lot of the pieces in there that they brought up. We covered the Sachin Adella talking about 100 trillion tokens. They bring that up. We've talked about power. They talk about the energy side being basically the same. What's the difference between a semiconductor and a nuclear part of AI? These are both necessary before you actually get to the AI. The difference is, and where my views are very different from where they go, is on the belief of what AI is going to do. They don't talk about tokenization. They don't talk about the growth of the private market side. And

• 5:10Speaker 04

  most importantly, everything that they talk about with AI ends up being a revenue per employee thing, which is obviously a reduction of the labor share of profits for big companies. And this is where I think the end result is, the inequality and the distribution of wealth, and more importantly, the worker revolt, is one of the things that they didn't really get into this in too much detail. So I happen to agree with the fact that Bitcoin will continue to ascend. I think it'll be the biggest of what they had on the list there and only behind gold by the end of this year. But in their world, they're really talking about a major disruption. One other thing that's interesting is they don't have Apple in the top 40 companies, which is a really interesting thing five years from now.

• 5:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think when they're looking out at this, it's really hard to imagine that Bitcoin can keep the compound annual growth rate that it has had, right? You mentioned 65 to 85%, but one aspect that maybe is in reverse. Usually it is the big organizations that are adopting an asset, and then you get the smaller folks coming in later. We are seeing this acceleration, because now you have the biggest pools of capital coming into this, and you can see Bitcoin entering the public market. You can see Bitcoin obviously going into the sovereign wealth funds. And so there is a world where that compound annual growth rate is much stickier than maybe people otherwise would think. Now, I don't think it's going to stay at 65%. I also don't think it's going to be below 20% for the next five years. And so if they continue to extrapolate that out, compounding works wonders.

• 6:39Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, it's the eighth wonder of the world. You don't have to change that percentage that much. If you go from sub 20 to let's say 35 or 40% and you extend it from five years to 10 years, you get a very, very different number at the end of that timeframe than you would otherwise if you just keep it at a lower rate for a shorter period of time. And so to me, I think that when I see these guys talking about this stuff, they're so used to thinking about stocks and the bigger something gets, the more that that company growth rate comes down. But Bitcoin does feel like the one asset in the world that is bucking a lot of these trends. And it's very hard for folks to kind of wrap their head around how big it can get and how long this can last for.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I completely disagree with the argument that as this gets bigger, it's going to take more to move it and the CAGR should come down. I actually think the CAGR is going to accelerate and I'll give you the reason why. So the MAG7, I mean, their numbers have been staggering. They already broke the law of diminishing returns as you get bigger. And the reason is again, because of technology and exponential innovation. Exponential innovation leads to concentration of wealth in smaller places. We've already seen that. The problem is Bitcoin has not outperformed the MAG7 over the last eight years. It's been competing with it.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  I think what is going to happen is as we end up in a point where the public markets start to underperform, the private markets that never go public, which is what is beginning to happen. More and more people will equate the Bitcoin market cap as the disruption to the public markets. It's a new capital structure. Bitcoin is the base layer of the new capital structure. So I believe network effects are going to accelerate this year because of stable coins. They mentioned that. Okay, great. So you're going to have more activity happening in the digital economy. Digital money is going to transact. And it's all based on disrupting the incumbents to lower cost and be a decentralized force. The entrepreneurs, the people getting fired are going to move into, they still have to make money.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  They're going to have to make money one of two ways. Either they're going to have to invest and they're not going to invest in the public markets. They're going to invest in what's working and we keep. Driving more and more people that are angry, just like you did with unions after the industrial revelation, revolution, more towards Bitcoin. So I see Bitcoin as again being this place that is actually the direct result of AI accelerating, just like we saw the cloud, just like we saw mobile disrupting more and more employees and the labor share continuing to be under pressure. So I think this is actually going to drive more people into it at a time where, like you said, and I wrote a paper on this, my Substack, so far Bitcoins accumulated to the market cap it is, driven mainly by a bottoms up movement. It has not been a

• 9:24Speaker 04

  top down movement, meaning the wealthiest people of the fiat system have no reason to invest in it. So they haven't moved. What CO2 signals to me is they're looking at it. They still don't understand how it fits. I'm reaching out to them now and saying, this is a disruption of public businesses and Bitcoin represents this other digital economy world. And that's why I always say that is the S and P 500 of the future, not the public markets.

• 9:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I mean, you just use Bitcoin. It's the hurdle rate, right? If you can't beat it, you got to buy it. And I think that people are now starting to recognize there is this highly sensitive asset to global money supply into debasement. And if that is really your true hurdle rate is you have to at least be outperforming that debasement rate, using inflation as the measurement, obviously doesn't make a lot of sense. And so I think that you're going to continue to see people who want to find kind of a new benchmark and Bitcoin seems to be that thing.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, one thing they said that I don't, I want to make sure we hit on, and I don't think you've seen the entire thing, or maybe you didn't spend as much time on it. They did get into this aspect that AI could solve the debt to GDP problem. And there's a nuance in here, which again, I don't agree with. They didn't answer why debt to GDP has been rising and you just hit on it. And for everyone watching, debt to GDP is rising because of the distribution of wealth gap. So I wrote about this, and this is a big step on my journey from a top down basis of understanding what, why Bitcoin's been growing, but more importantly, why debt to GDP has been growing. Bitcoin came out before debt to GDP really started to accelerate exponentially. It's been lined up with

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Technology, the more you disrupt workers, the more the government has to subsidize and has to come in with more money to help those people. And it comes at a time when we're already going to see debt to GDP getting higher just because of the health of the country. Do I think five years from now that AI will start to impact that? Yes. But I think the next five years is a little bit more of a dystopia. It's a painful point where AI accelerates so fast and companies are out there trying to get rid of employees to keep their profit margins higher. And small businesses are having trouble compete. I actually don't think the next five years is reducing the pressure on debt to GDP. I think it's actually increasing it.

• 11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the other aspects I think that has surprised people is everyone was predicting the recessions, depressions and the Black Fridays. Now it looks like Q2 is going to be a bonanza, three or 4% GDP print. I think that some of that, as you've previously mentioned, is a recovery from Q1. But also it does feel like now that we're getting some of this economic data, people are starting to think very differently about the economy and what the rest of this year looks like. The Fed, they seem to not be very worried. They're not cutting rates. They are kind of steady Eddie.

• 12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously, the administration is yelling and screaming at Jerome Powell almost on a daily basis now, saying that he should be fired or he's behind the curve, etc. How do you look at the economic data, the GDP print, kind of this jobs softness that we're starting to see? And then what that means for the Fed and their decision not to cut rates this week?

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we've talked about this before, but just to make the economy much simpler to kind of think about. Let's just take the AI investment side, which is massive. Let's take the profit margin side, which means earnings grow. And let's go to wealthy people. That means they keep spending.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  It's really hard to have a recession with that going on. It's not about, you know, unless we're having severe job losses and the stock market is down. If profit margins are growing and nominal GDP is staying near 5%, which is what's happening. All of this stuff about recession is just ridiculous. It's not possible. Do I think the economy is? Growing rapidly? No. What I think is happening is the AI portion of the economy is fueling the entire movement right now. So whatever percent of nominal GDP, I think AI is responsible for 75, 80, 90% of it. Between the capex from the hyperscalers, between again, the profit margins for the S and P 500, which is at the expense of workers. It's at the expense

• 13:33Speaker 04

  of wages. It's at the expense of all of this stuff. What it leaves the median person in the country is in this point where we still have the inflation sitting at the levels that we did back from COVID. They haven't come down. Food prices haven't come down. Nothing has really come down at this point in a meaningful way. And now with oil, you're gonna see pressure, gas at the pump, and you're gonna see oil unless it comes down quickly. And we have an end to the war very, very quickly because we've taken oil prices up, diesel prices are going up, and gas at the pump probably has another 20 to 30 cents to go. It's already a 10 cents or 3% from where it was. So I think the median voter in the country is still suffering, I don't want to say recession, but let's just say

• 14:14Speaker 04

  a, an environment where they can work, but they don't feel like they'll necessarily have the same job in a year. And I think that's the best way I can kind of frame this is everyone's worried about AI. I get asked questions all the time through email, through chats, through Twitter DMs about people that are like, hey, can you do something to show me how my kids can survive this? I think people are more worried, and that just means soft consumer spending at the bottom 50%. But because we're a top-heavy, you know, portion of the economy, as long as the S and P 500 is going up 7% a year, I'm not even saying 20, I'm saying 7. You just can't have a recession. So it might feel like recession to the bottom 50%, but it doesn't to the top 50.

• 14:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you see that, I remember there was an interview that Scott Besen, Treasury Secretary, did, I think it was with Chamath and David Friedberg, early on. And he was asked whether he believed the economic data. He said no, and then very quickly kind of polished his answer. But they were talking about this idea that all the polls, all the data said one thing. But then when you went and talked to people, they told you a different story. They felt something that was different. And there's always the example that like, maybe people, you know, that they kind of don't believe the data because they're biased, or they've got some sort of, you know, anecdotal experience that actually isn't true. But his point was, we can sit here and try to measure all this stuff as much as we want.

• 15:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But if people are telling us, I can't afford to buy a home. I can't afford food. I can't afford gas. I can't afford all this stuff. And we're sitting there saying like, what do you mean? Americans are better off today than they've ever been. He's like, there is a point in time where you have to go actually listen to the people and understand why is it that half the country is saying one thing, but the data is telling us another thing. And it feels like that's what you're highlighting here is that both things can be true at the same time. The aggregate data can tell us one thing, but then there can be a very large portion of the population that has a completely different experience and is actually being hidden inside of that data in a way that maybe we don't have the sympathy or the empathy to really understand.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and again, I think this is, should be obvious to people. Let's go back to what we said about the rate of return that has happened for the MAG7 relative to all other parts of the global market, the globe, the global equity market, but also with inside the S and P 500. Does it feel like a bull market to Ford and GM? And just go through the, the amount of companies in the S and P 500 that are suffering. At the same time, the MAG7 have gone up exponentially. Their market caps have risen just insanely since 2009. So what you're dealing with is if you take the S and P 500 and we hear all the time, well, you know, there's very few stocks going up. It's very concentrated. This is acting like a bear market.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  This is the way bear markets start. Use the same analogy for inflation. Use the same analogy for any part of GDP that you want. You can actually have the S and P 500 going up, but with not many people, not many companies participating. You can have inflation going up slightly. And you could have some things that are really, really high, like house prices, as you brought up. Housing affordability has been at horrible levels and it remains at horrible levels. But you're starting to see, because there's not a lot of people that can benefit or that can actually afford a home, you're starting to see house prices come down. And it's, there's a lot of people forecasting they'll be down this year. I don't know if we've ever had house prices down in a year and not had a recession.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  It's very difficult to have house prices down, but somehow or another, because the median voter cannot, and I keep saying median voter because I want people to realize the middle person in the country is feeling the pain. And the stock market is still going higher. So when you go through the S and P 500, the middle company in the S and P 500 is feeling the pain. The pain of higher rates, the pain of losing to the mag seven and the pain of not being able to embrace AI. The whole country is going through this, and that's why it's kind of like a recession in the way some people look. And if you say you can't trust the data, the reason I can't trust it is because what they think should be happening is not showing up in the data. And I think a lot of that is garbage in, garbage out, using historical models to model what isn't relevant anymore with AI.

• 18:30Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the aspects that we are getting clarity on is legislation, the genius act passed the Senate. This would give us a federal framework for stable coins. It feels like everyone is jumping headfirst into the stablecoin game. A couple of headlines over the last week or two, Amazon and Walmart, they are looking at potentially creating their own stablecoin. You have a 20 year veteran, a Citigroup, he left, founders fund backed him with about $10 million. You also have the tether $13.7 billion in profit last year. The circle IPO, they're up 300, 400% on that. You saw JP Morgan come out with the JP MD, I think they're calling it, or the JMPD,

• 19:13Anthony Pompliano?

  which is a essentially like a commercial bank note that they're tokenizing. And the list goes on and on. I mean, there's tons of these things. I think Stripe announced that they are partnering much more deeply with Shopify in 34 different countries, Coinbase announced Coinbase Payments. You know, it's just like, we could talk about this for hours. Why is this happening? Is this just the technology is so good, it's a black hole and all companies, all talent eventually ends up with the stablecoins? Or is there some other way to read the progress that's being made in this part of the market?

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, I think the most powerful thing to take out of this is people have to remember, we're only two and a half years out of a mega bear market in crypto. Meaning, you're talking about just 22 was an environment, and you know this better than I do, where destruction was across the board. We're still getting through a lot of the lawsuits and bankruptcy cases. For this to be happening at this pace now, and I can remember the first time we did a show together, and even before we did, I think in January I was on, I talked about this, the number one thing for this year was stablecoins. And no one really knew how to make money off stablecoins. Well, now, all of a sudden, you're starting to see, oh my gosh.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  So you can make it through Circle. Coinbase was up 16% on, I believe, Wednesday. Anyone that even says stablecoin at this point, everyone's kind of jumping through it. People have texted me saying, shouldn't Circle be $1 trillion market cap? I mean, everyone is now getting completely on board. Here's my take, simplistically.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Stablecoins are the bridge. They are the bridge between the traditional finance world, which means transactions, everything that goes into GDP. Digital money is not Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is about wallets. Bitcoin is about the thing that enabled this bridge to be built. And the more people that are getting involved in it, the more people that are going to allow, and when I say people, the more that companies are going to allow individuals to transact. That money's going to end up in the digital economy. It's going to be digitally native. And that's why, for me, this is exactly the network effects that I expected to happen. Part of this is individuals, but part of this is going to be set up through AI agents.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  The same way that I never really had to deal with my wallet and my iPhone to just start tapping things. It just kind of happened. Well, the fact that that already happened, and I'm not kidding, I never, it's not like I sat down one day and said, you know what? I'm gonna go, I really gotta investigate this wallet thing. No, I just connected a credit card to it and I started tapping. And I realized that in most dinners now, paying, there is true Story that yesterday on the holiday we had here, I went out to a really nice dinner and I looked around, I'm like, oh, I didn't bring my wallet. Said, I use my phone for everything. I literally stopped carrying my wallet and I didn't bring my backpack that I normally bring. So I think that's what's happening is stable coins are just kind of that ability for everyone to jump on board.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Realize that if they want to get the consumers to use it, they need to have it. And so everyone from a bank. I mean, when Walmart, when, when Amazon, when Shopify, when those three companies in a single week are openly talking about it, when Uber is talking about it. I mean, I can't think of anything more powerful in terms of the movement we're having and what it means to, again, the public market companies. Because they're the ones that are going to suffer from this.

• 22:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I interviewed this week, Paul Ardenio, who is the Tether CEO. And one of the things that was really interesting is we talked about the Circle IPO. And I asked him, I said, you know, based on those multiples, you guys would be pretty valuable. And he had a number of different, you know, frameworks to think about valuation, but he said, look, you know, there's a world where Tethers worth $2 trillion. Given the performance of the business and some of the assets they own. And at first you're kind of like, what do you, come on, stop it, like a $2 trillion company. And then you start thinking about it, you're like, he's probably not far off. And I think that that's just one company in this space. You add in the circles, all these big banks. And so it does feel like it's going to come down to the challengers versus the incumbents. And the banks are not going to just like roll over and give up this market.

• 23:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And so they feel like here they come. JP Morgan, obviously announcing this like a commercial bank note is maybe one step. But I got to imagine that you are going to see many of these banks figure out, do they build something, do they buy something, do they partner together with other banks? Like, how do they use the advantages that they have to box these challengers out? And it's gonna be fascinating because maybe just the market has already spoken. You know, the taxi uh kind of conglomerate tried real hard to keep Uber out. People wanted Uber, right? And that might be what happens here is that people just want non-bank stablecoins. Both internationally and domestically.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Alright, so I'm not gonna comment on what you just said because I completely agree. And I think we've hammered this point home that the merging of if you haven't spent time on stablecoins, which I know a lot of people that are in the more traditional finance still have not spent time. I literally have a vision of just a bridge between these two worlds and the bridge is being built as we see. One of the things that I I haven't done this on this show. I want to ask you a question. So how do you think about if stablecoins are gonna explode and we're gonna be doing five times the amount of volume by the end of this year that we're already doing right now because of this? What about Ethereum? What about a Solana? What about all the guardrails that are supposed to be benefiting from the volume expansion? They're critical in my views of what will happen to Bitcoin before the end of the year.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  I think that is the next phase of this. This has been my view is that as stablecoins explode, we should start seeing the energy behind this with Ethereum and Solana and we and all the other the components. How are you thinking about this?

• 25:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if the stablecoin thing plays as much into this thesis as uh maybe as in general, the second that everyone thinks like altcoin season is not coming, it will show up, right? And Bitcoin has done such a great job of sucking the air out of the room and rightfully so. It's the king. It will always be the king. Uh, I think that it has really ascended to uh an asset that now is accepted on Wall Street. But I do think that you're going to see people push out onto that risk curve in the second half of this year. And as we get further in the year, it means that that like alt season is more compressed. And so what you're gonna likely get is you're gonna get this very like reflexive move up.

• 25:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you're going to get a very violent move down over time. And you know, it goes back to the people who I tend to see playing in that space. There are more traders or short term optimized, you know, uh, kind of strategies. The folks that are just, hey, I'm holding something for 30 years. They're holding Bitcoin. And so there's many ways up the mountain of success, right? You, you know, there will be people who make money in both of those uh, kind of worlds. But I agree with you that there is, you know, it's not a very long tail. It's not like there's a hundred assets. Maybe there's five or six that will benefit from stable coins. They will benefit from people wanting to push out on the risk curve, you know, as Bitcoin has run. Um, and then also you're starting to see now the public market with the Bitcoin treasury companies.

• 26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Now you're starting to see the Ethereum treasury company, the Solana treasury company, uh, Tron is going public, right? I mean, like they're all going to do this as the classic, well, like if it worked for Bitcoin, why can't it work for fork coin? And I promise you, somebody is going to create a meme coin. There, there's a guy in Canada, um, that is, uh, he's the chairman of soul strategies. Uh, this guy, Tony G and Tony, um, who, you know, uh, I'm his friend. We work together on the soul strategy stuff. But Tony had another company and he recently turned it into a hyper liquid treasury strategy. And so naturally all the people who are interested in hyper liquid, they're now here they come, right? And so I do think that you're going to see that kind of like eat the tail of crypto.

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so whether it's the public companies or a private, like these things are going to get a bid, um, even if you don't think that they're sustainable. What do you, what do you think? You agree with that or no?

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I agree with it. And I think the important message, and I'll, and I'll say this more from the, so we have the merging of the traditional finance world and the crypto world coming together in a very powerful way. This is not the crypto, um, tokens and speculation going higher. Driving in the traditional finance world. Um, this one is actually happening very differently. So you mentioned just kind of how this alt token season, alt season. We were kind of in it after Trump took over and then it collapsed. The reason I'm so interested in it is because we're seeing it right now with Circle.

• 27:57Speaker 04

  There's no doubt in my mind that Circle is kind of this energy that's going that is crypto-related, but it's in the traditional finance world. There are people that have made money on it. Now they're doing the research, they're thinking about it. The CO2 report just came out. I think the more that people spend time on it, they may go back to some of these all-in podcasts where, hey, didn't Chamath say that this would be the year of stable coins? Didn't Pomp and Jordy talk about the fact that this would be stable coins and the network effects are starting? I actually think that Ethereum having an ETF is like a very big positive in this whole thing. I think the traditional finance world is going to help fuel this along with the people with inside the token world that are waiting for something and a breath to happen.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  On my video last week, I highlighted that almost every single token is down between 20% and 50% this year. So when you're down 20% and 50% year-to-date, and that's only year-to-date, that means you're down even more from when Trump was elected. I think the next phase when Ethereum, I'm gonna say it, closes two weeks above 2,700, because that's the level I've been looking at. Once we close two weeks above there, I think it'll be the kickoff for the alt season.

• 29:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So you think that we need Ethereum to close above 2,700 for two weeks and that will kick off the alt season?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  I think it broke above last week and then it came back down. But I think the enthusiasm behind Circle, and again, my kind of world on this is that AI agents are accelerating, token usage is accelerating. It's not just Sachin Adella that said it, Sundar Pichai said it recently. Like, we're getting explosion, AI agents are coming. AI agents are critical to the explosion of stable coins. So stable coins' growth right now is not happening from AI agents. It may be starting that way, but I think the convergence between stable coin usage and volumes exploding in a manner that everyone has to start doing evaluation calculation on it, I think it feeds back in. That's why I asked you about Ethereum and Solana, because there is a

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Relationship between the volumes happening and Ethereum and Solana and Sui and Tron and all these other pieces. So if you get that energy component associated with it and people start drilling down, they do have access to it through the ETFs. And like you said, it's starting in the treasury side. So I think this is a broadening out move. So yeah, two weeks above 2700 and I think it's the kickoff.

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about AI. You and I, we woke up earlier this week and Orvin from perplexity, his founder and CEO. He had posted a clip of us talking about perplexity and AI, et cetera, which was, which was fun and cool. I think you and I both have gotten to know him and the team over there. What is your takeaway from perplexity in particular? It seems like they have really used these AI models to significantly change the way that people are able to get information. I mentioned to you earlier that Howard Marks, the famed investor and memo writer. You know, now every time I talked about a successful investor, I'm going to reference whether they're a podcaster, an influencer or a memo writer,

• 31:04Anthony Pompliano?

  because that seems to be the, the thing for the young guys. And so Howard Marks used perplexity to write part of his memo. And he explained that he was using it, but it was pretty damn good compared to his normal writing style. And so how do you see this all playing out and what are the areas you're maybe most excited about?

• 31:21Speaker 04

  You know, I said it last week and for the perplexity team, I'll say it again. It has replaced 60% of my Bloomberg usage. I have a lot of

• 31:32Speaker 04

  thoughts and ideas on how it can replace more of it. The one thing I've used as kind of a comparison side. I remember in 2009 and 2010, and if you remember, if you didn't see it. In this theme, Bloomberg versus perplexity, I would go watch the, the BlackBerry movie that came out. I don't know if you saw it. Great movie on kind of a tool that the financial world use, which is the most similar I can say to Bloomberg. Meaning everyone liked the keyboard on the BlackBerry. So it was a very, very slow change.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  To the iPhone, part of it was security, just like perplexity. Part of it was people not really thinking about needing to use it or all the benefits that came. What I think is going to happen with perplexity, and I already see it happening, and the team should really spend time with me on this. The community of perplexity should be building the competition. I already have things built in that I'm showing hedge funds. I believe most of the AI platforms will have some form of a community-based app store for the people who are using it. Because I've always said domain expertise plus creativity plus curiosity leads to an app store that is basically rep. It's a brain store.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  You're getting someone else's brain. The whole way that AI is going to democratize things, in my opinion, is to use other people's brains, the users, not the companies. That is the power of AI is to find people who use it. Because if I said to you, this is how I use it in perplexity. It's stuff that I figured out that I rabbit hole in and I can go get down to the bottom. And I know you've used it in the same way. I can get lost in a conversation with both perplexity and chat GPT while walking down the street to talk about the things that we talk about here. When I read the code to report, I had about a 30 minute conversation with chat GPT about what I thought in the report. It had the report. So I was having a conversation on something that was released two weeks ago.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  And I'm having a conversation on my views that are different than that one. And it led to kind of some of the thoughts we shared here today. I do the same thing with perplexity, maybe less so with the voice mode side. But building tools to look at charts, to set up workspaces, to set up the ability to do it. And so every time I hear a Bloomberg user say, I don't know how you're getting to that level. I can't access us where our current CDS is on perplexity. I can't access when the debt maturity is on this. Great. There's no way at this point that it should be able to replicate everything that you can do in Bloomberg. But Bloomberg cannot do the stuff that perplexity can. So you have to kind of look at it both ways. I said 64.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  The reason I said 6040 is because the fact set data and the company commentary, I can get instantaneous and then I can be in another company and another company and another company with similar commentary. There's no comparison to me. Perplexity has already beaten Bloomberg on the ability of going lateral with thoughts as opposed to being locked in a silo.

• 34:38Anthony Pompliano?

  At some point, do you think that whether it's perplexity or somebody else will eventually just invest money as well? That we saw the rise of the robo advisors, but those were really just kind of like indexers to a degree. If you can train the model to answer questions that you then are using to go and make investment decisions. Is it that crazy to think the natural extension is that it can learn from those questions you're asking it and eventually be able to allocate the capital itself? Today's episode is sponsored by Figure, the largest non-bank home equity lender in the United States with over $15 billion unlocked on their lending platform. They are now in the crypto-backed loan space and they offer industry-low interest rates when you use your Bitcoin as collateral to get cash. You can access interest rates starting

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• 36:08Anthony Pompliano?

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• 38:32Speaker 04

  Eventually, we will get there. I think the human element is still very important to people. So there is a separation between it ever being full-blown robo-advisor. But I think with younger people, they don't care as much. For older people who still control most of the money of the world, they need that personal kind of hand-holding touch. But if there's a verbal conversation, and that's why I always say if you use voice mode, it changes things. That's why when I wrote the paper, that if you want to get started with AI, the first thing to do is to just talk to it. And I say build a relationship, and I think it kind of freaks people out. But the way that you use it is the way that you use it. I mean, if you look at a golf swing and you take 100 people, their golf swings are all completely different.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  For the golf fans out there, Scotty Scheffler's feet move like nobody I've ever seen move. He's the best golfer in the world. Everyone's golf swing is different. Everyone as a user of AI is completely different. When you get into software and you're pressing buttons and it's doing things for you, there's not as much creativity. I do want to add one more thing because you've had experience with this. I've had experience with this. When I think of, and I'll just use perplexity again, but if I connect perplexity to cursor, that's where I am in my brain. Meaning, I want to build the applications and the tools that I want to have in perplexity or connected to perplexity. That's what we're getting to is how do I create the software that I would otherwise use that I'm in their world?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Risk management tools, turbulence tools, things that I've always wanted to build that I would have data scientists build for me or pay software vendors for. Now, I'm going to be able to create them myself. There's no right answer to those questions. But when you create an app yourself by verbally going through it, and then you connect it back to your workflow, and if that workflow, like GitHub or anything where you can then go out there and offer it to other people in a brain form, I really do think with everything we're talking about, it's going to become very, very personalized and people will be building their own solutions as opposed to depending on solutions.

• 40:34Anthony Pompliano?

  The last thing I want to talk about today is Israel and Iran. There's been a lot of rockets flying back and forth, ballistic missiles. The Iron Dome was penetrated. There was also some very surgical strikes from Israel and Iran. There has been a fracturing, I think, of the Republican Party's kind of thoughts on whether this should be done, should not be done. There's always going to be high debate and controversy whenever you overlay religion, philosophy, politics, and economics, right? And there's probably other things in overlay there as well, but at least those four things are kind of four core pillars to this whole thing. How does an investor navigate what is happening?

• 41:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And seems to be changing on an almost daily basis, including the President of the United States tweeting like, "We know where the Ayatollah is and we're not going to kill him yet, but you know, you should be scared." Which is, you know, kind of like, "We could do things, but we're not going to do the things, but we want you to know we could do those things." Which only kind of muddies the water for an investor.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Yep. Again, I say it all the time on my videos, I'm sure I said it here last week when we briefly talked about it. You don't make any money extrapolating geopolitics into earnings in the economy. So what could happen there to impact investors here? And why does the market care at all? The market cares because of the price of oil. The market cares for the possibility that World War III could start. So what's the probability of those events? They're both low. I think the oil or the Straits of Hormuz is rising in probability, and that's seen through a couple of ways, but let's just take oil back at $65 and say now it's at $75.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Most people say it'll go to 120 if the Straits of Hormuz are shut down. Whether or not that's true or not is irrelevant, but that means there's right now a very small probability still built in. If we've had a $10 rise and they think there could be another $45 rise, let's say it's somewhere between 15 and 20% to go to just make it a simple straight line probability in there. I don't think investors should care. The second... Second thing is if oil did spike, I think very quickly it would come back down because that's what happens with almost every oil spike. Meaning if they did something, I think that forces the US in, I think it forces a lot of other countries to get in there because it changes the dynamic. So for me, I have always viewed geopolitics as a way to take advantage of the opportunity that it presents.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Because very, very seldom in history does it turn into anything meaningfully bigger or important. It happens to come at a time when the S and P is sitting right near the all time highs. It happens to come at a time when the blackout period for buybacks is about to kick in. Buybacks have been averaging anywhere from five to seven billion dollars a day of demand because of how big they are. When they go into a blackout period, the market isn't going to have that steady demand. Sentiment has normalized to at least around bullish bearish, but maybe 50 50. So I still think we're going to stay around here. Maybe we correct for a little bit and then we go higher. But I think for investors, if they watch the news and they see the bombs going off and a hospital gets hit or an energy plant gets hit or there are threats of nukes.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  I think you're going to make irrational decisions and I think at the end of the day, you just always focus on the structural things that are happening. AI is happening, earnings are good, GDP is fine. We need to see oil go up significantly, but there's probably a reaction function that happens, which means if the S and P did fall, I would be looking to put money in that. The only thing I'll add is I will continue to reiterate the Venn diagram. When you try to find two separate investment themes that are connecting. If Israel Iran lasts for a long time, and this isn't the beginning of something, or the risk of it being there remains, which seems likely, then oil probably has a floor somewhere around 65.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  If it's going to stay at 65, people forget that energy stocks fell off because when the tariffs were on, we took oil from 65 down to 55. Well, if now we've put in a floor there, the second half of the year, token usage is going to explode. Stablecoin usage is just going to explode. Energy is going to be needed. I cannot say this loud enough to people. I just wrote a piece for 22V on Chevron and Exxon, not because they're pure plays on AI or pure plays on power, but they're the two biggest parts of a sector that's only three and a half percent of the S and P while technology is 50. Power, power, power is the theme for the second half of the year and all that the Iran Israel thing does is put a floor under oil.

• 45:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I do think that there is a very interesting dynamic of the United States went and took, what is it, our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We significantly depleted that. It seems like we are trying to fill that back up and the price of oil going up is not necessarily helping in terms of our abilities there. But also, a huge part of Trump's kind of campaign platform was drill, baby, drill. And so you've got kind of the things happening in the Middle East, which the United States, on one hand, you know, could be benefiting from if we're selling the oil and oil prices are up. But on the other hand, that drilling is not necessarily keeping

• 45:53Anthony Pompliano?

  the price at kind of a sustainable level. And so there's a lot of like interesting dynamics of not only, you know, just the oil price, but then how does this affect individual countries' production? How does that affect importing versus exporting? And if you really, you know, kind of even go back a couple of years now, you also have the Russia-Ukraine crisis. You have, you know, you kind of like start stacking this stuff up. And on one hand, the fact that oil is not, you know, $100 plus is maybe surprising. Like, you would think that there's been so much disruption, so many geopolitical conflicts that now are impacting oil itself. It's held in there maybe better than I would have expected.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. And I think you've brought up a point, and just so people know this, like, China and Russia are brought into the Iran-Israel thing. So I think everyone gets the Iran-Russia connection. But for China, China's been supporting their ability to sustain themselves by buying almost all of the exports that Iran has on the oil side. So there are relationships on this that make the geopolitics interesting from the global side. But I think it also makes it that China doesn't want Iran to be in a position where it can't export oil anymore. And if it shuts down the Straits of Hormuz, it ends up being a very, very... Let's say messy situation. It doesn't get a lot of press at the same time, but Taiwan has been saying that they're noticing

• 47:14Speaker 04

  that China's drills are looking more real at this point around them. So I do think geopolitics is a part of the discussion always. And we're at a more difficult, let's say risky time, but the probability of it escalating into something is still very low. If people want to do things at this point, you can still get long energy stocks, you can still get long puts on the S and P, or at least do something if you're really worried because the stuff has not been built in. So when you say oil hasn't gone up too much, I completely agree. I also think that volatility and stuff hasn't gone up too much. So if there's any kind of escalation, you could see these things pick up.

• 47:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there anything else that you're paying attention to over the next week or two that you think is worth calling out for people in advance?

• 47:58Speaker 04

  We haven't talked about it here much, and you might have more to talk about this. I will say for the next week, it's about expirations. So today is quarterly expiration for stocks, but Derabit has a massive expiration going on next week in Bitcoin. Like I said, I think Ethereum is very close to breaking out here, and I think if it coincides with Derabit options expiration, there has clearly been vol selling that has gone on because we've seen vol compress in Bitcoin below 40. It's at all time lows in terms of implied volatility. You've got a lot of people that have been selling call options. I'm still living with the short squeeze side. I think Ethereum needs to break out.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  I also think we need to get through one of these expiries and then be in a situation where there's a catalyst. Well, now you have a catalyst that if there's any kind of negotiation between Iran and the US, Iran and Israel, and we get any pause in that, we're going to get the next move higher. That'll take us to all time highs, I'm very certain of in the S and P. But then you're also going to start getting to earnings report for Q2. And I think the AI earnings stuff, again, what we've seen from Broadcom, what we've seen from Nvidia, what we've seen from all of the companies that have come out, but in particular Oracle, Jabil this week, we have Micron coming out, I believe, next week, if not next week, the following week. You're going to have more and more companies that are talking.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  So I'm looking actually for that, but then I'm going to throw it back at you on one thing. Cynthia Lummis. The Senator said, first thing we need to get done is the Genius Act. Okay, so we're through the Senate on that. We'll go through the House. It was a bipartisan vote. He had 68. I mean, when's the last time we had anything in the Senate that had 68 votes? Which means that enough Democrats jumped on board. Elizabeth Warren obviously did not. But what's coming up after? Because we've still had a lot of speculation that they'll do something in Bitcoin. They'll do something in other parts. We got stage one done of her plan. She's talked openly about what will be happening after that. Do you have any insights for anyone on what you see happening after this bill goes through?

• 50:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, they definitely got, you know, the market structure and the stablecoin bills. I recently talked with Patrick McHenry, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. And he said that he thinks they should put them together and just make one bill. And it looks like that's a possibility here. I do think that buying more Bitcoin is going to be something that happens in 2025. Let's see, you know, how long that takes. And then the other thing that frankly, I really see movement on is how banks can participate here. And it used to be that the regulators would go to the banks and say, hey, don't touch this stuff. And the banks said, well, we weren't going to touch it anyways. And, you know, no problem. Whatever you say, you know, salute them and move on. Now the banks are turning around and saying, we're going to do this now. Like, you know, you better get out of our way. And I think that the regulators are kind of on their heels saying, okay, fine.

• 50:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Well, we'll figure out some rules and let you guys do that. So everyone is very focused on what I'll call like the structural stuff and the way that, you know, things that touch them. But I think that the banks are a really interesting area to watch because if all of a sudden they can bring these products to market, they have distribution. They already have the customer base. They already have the accounts. They have the assets. Like, there are some significant advantages that they can capture there. I think that's really an area that maybe is not getting as much attention as it should.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  I agree. And the reason I ask the question is, I believe the second half of the year is about the crypto space. I think the first half, people may have Not realized, but we were waiting for this bill for the entire first half of the year. There were people speculating that there'd be Bitcoin purchases. Maybe everything just got delayed to the second half. The Circle IPO gets done. It brings a lot of enthusiasm, but more importantly, between the Circle IPO and the COTU report, eyeballs from the traditional finance world are migrating to crypto. And I think people are underestimating the amount of positive news that's going to come out that basically is being released because had to get everyone set up, had to get everyone through. Like, we just are getting

• 52:11Speaker 04

  this whole movement going. And I think when the meme coins and everything were flying through the roof from November until mid-January, I think people might be falling asleep. And that's why I keep saying, when Ethereum closes above 2,700 for two weeks, two weeks in a row, it closes above 2,700, I think we're setting up for a whole big second half of the year, driven by AI agents, stablecoin, and more positive reception from the traditional finance world.

• 52:37Anthony Pompliano?

  That would be fantastic. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Find me posting on X. They can find me on YouTube at Visser Labs. They can find me at my Substack. And of course, for the institutional crowd out there, 22V Securities, 22V Research.com, regular research pieces.

• 52:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Jordy, thank you so much for doing it. And we'll do it again next week.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Thanks, Bob.