#1542 Jordi Visser | Bitcoin Could DOUBLE In Price This Year?!

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 what is happening in the economy, monetary global policy, bitcoin, gold, financial assets, and handicapping the odds that bitcoin will win. ======================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.======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.=======================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? We've got an excellent episode with Jordy Visser. In this conversation, Jordy takes his 30 years of Wall Street experience and he breaks down exactly what's going on in the economy, what's going on with the monetary global order, and he goes hard at Bitcoin. He explains why he likes it, what he thinks is going to happen, why he thinks that Bitcoin

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  may have 100 to one odds to continue to be successful. And then he even uses some of his handicap experience with the Kentucky Derby, which is today, to actually go through all the financial assets and help us better understand what you should be doing with your portfolio. I always enjoy talking to Jordy and I think this one is special, it's unique. You should listen to the entire thing and then send it to all your friends. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.

• 1:08Speaker 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.

• 1:32Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Your Bitcoin stays safe in your vault, untouched, never lent out, and secured a global network of military-grade bunkers with cutting-edge security technology. Head to zappobank.com/pomp to learn more. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K dot com forward slash pomp. Go check out Zappos Bank today at zappobank.com/pomp.

• 4:10Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Jordy, the Kentucky Derby is this weekend and people do not expect us to talk about it, but you have a background, which I didn't even know, in handicapping horses, which people may not know that Warren Buffett, early on in his career, not only handicapped horses, but he actually published basically like a newsletter of handicapping horses. He started out as a gambler, became a very good investor, maybe you did as well. Let's use your skills of handicapping to handicap what you think the odds are of what happens in financial markets moving forward.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just two seconds on this because my father died this year. So I do a Kentucky Derby piece every year. My father didn't graduate high school. He was a construction worker. He invented all his own equipment, so he had a great engineering mind and a great math mind, but he grew up, son of someone who didn't speak English, came over from Holland, and he learned how to gamble. So he would play any games. I mean, you might call him a hustler. He could play pool, he could play poker, he could play darts, he could bowl, he could whatever the game was.

• 5:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So he was fun.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  He was fun. He taught me a lot about odds and, you know, when I started at Morgan Stanley, I didn't go to an Ivy League school, so I worked my way up. But the edge that I had, I think, was my handicapping skills. Handicapping is phenomenal because you're looking not to find the winner, you're looking to come up with your own analysis and then try to find where there's value. So in the market this year, we've talked on here, we've been optimistic, both of us. And the one thing people should know is we don't come in here and we're not going to agree. There may be a time when you're positive, I'm negative, but really, this has been, okay, what's the probability of a recession? I've talked about, there's very little chance of recession based on the way the economy is. And so everyone gets frustrated with that, and I still hear people saying a recession is coming.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  If it's in the paper that there is a recession, if it's in the paper that shelves are going to be empty, if it's in the paper, blah, blah, blah, that's a known thing. You do not make money betting on known things in the market, especially when the market has already fallen and positioning is low. So number one thing that got people negative was...

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Oh my God, Nvidia, DeepSeek, we're screwed. The capex numbers are not going to happen. Oh my God, the tariffs are in, capex is not going to happen. So the capex numbers are not only coming through. Anyone who bets against AI or calls it hyped has made a huge mistake. So we've had Meta, we've had Google, they're all, their capex numbers are coming through and their earnings are fine. At the same time, we got a jobs number again today. There's still no job losses. How do you have a recession without job losses when you have the scenario that consumption is 70% of the economy and without job losses, you're just going to continue to spend money. Income is still growing year over year at 4.3%.

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And not only were there not job losses, it, jobs numbers were better than expectations.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the weekly claims have not yet gotten to the point where you have any worries going forward. It's a real time indicator. So I think the problem is policies changed. It's less uncertain than it was on April 2nd. Whether people think the second half, the tariffs are going to be there, it's clear that they've rolled them back some degree and they have a different approach to things. So I don't care how you go through this from people analyzing the stock market. There's a reason why it's going higher. And what's scary to me for everybody who's included in the negative positioning, sentiment has not changed for hedge funds from anything, anybody I've talked to. It's changed for certain parts of the economy. And the big question every hedge fund should ask is, how's the market going higher with everyone still negative?

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what I think is hilarious is I went and I looked, um, over the last 12 months, S and P up double digits, NASDAQ up double digits, gold up double digits, Bitcoin up double digits. And there are still people talking about the Great Depression on Twitter. Like these people have lost their minds and uh, it does feel like April was the light that is going to separate people into who's rational and looking at data and who is not. And the reason I say that is because if you go and you ask someone right now, what happened in April, there are still a lot of people who, because of the headlines are saying to themselves, everything's down, everything's down, everything's down. The S and P was flat, NASDAQ was up, gold and Bitcoin were up.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the S and P X, the Mag 7 is now up for the year. So again, it's

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't hit them with that. Don't hit them with the truth.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  So for everyone who wants to remain bearish, I do believe that the market multiple should come down based on the policies that have gone, gone through. So rather than call for recession, let's just say Multiples have changed. I don't think we're going to see multiple expansion the way we did before. And that means there was a little bit too much fluff in the market. Earnings are still growing double digits right in here. Maybe they'll slow down, but as of right now, that is not the case. And so if the policies continue to move in the direction that they are, I just want to make the math simple for people. 5% nominal GDP would be a $1.5 trillion increase in GDP. A 4%, which is where I think we'll be of nominal GDP, which will still be positive GDP, is $1.2 trillion.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  If the capex spend is $300 billion, well, right off the bat, guys, that's 25% of that nominal GDP number. Consumption is 70% of the economy. So healthcare expenditures are 20% of expenditures. They're happening no matter what, too. So the problem is with people doing this and just saying recession, I don't know if they do any work whatsoever, like zero.

• 9:38Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Nothing. I don't think they do.

• 9:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's, let's flip around on the table for a second, and I'm going to defend the bears, even though they're wrong, but I'm going to defend them for a second. Which is, they look and they say, okay, I was told in an economics class that tariffs are inflationary. They do not pay attention to the fact that consumer sentiment or consumer spending habits change. They do not take into effect that people pull back from buying the tariffed goods. They do not take into effect the rise of domestic producing, right? All these things that we know that happen with tariffs that end up actually being deflationary. They just say they're inflationary. Okay. They then go and they look at some crazy data point, like, let's say, China port activity.

• 10:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And what they see is China activity from China to the US is down. But China port activity based on volume is actually up year over year around the globe. And one of the big things that I think people are missing is if China says, we're shipping something to Vietnam, and then it stops in Vietnam and then goes to America. You no longer counted as China to America, you counted China to Vietnam, right? And so all of a sudden, it still comes to America. It's just that you're looking at a data point that's highly manipulated because they're trying to get around these tariffs conversations. And so it's things like that, that I think that if you get caught on the like micro data

• 11:05Anthony Pompliano?

  points, it's really easy to tell a story where you're like, the world's going to end, the shelves are going to be empty, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I actually think that if you can zoom out and look holistically and say, wait a second, uh, China's still going to send stuff to America. They're just going to now manipulate it so they don't have to pay these tariffs. That feels like a much more rational way to view this than looking at these individual data points that frankly, we don't even know if they're true or not.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  I mean, again, everything you said is right in terms of the way people are extrapolating things and taking it too far. But I always go back to the same thing, which is you can't have a recession without job losses. Plain and simple. If you have a job, I don't, if you're getting paid 20% less than you were, you're still buying every staple that you need. You're still going out to dinner. You're still taking the subway. When people lose jobs, income starts to drop off significantly and that's what drives GDP. GDP is just, I mean, it's consumption plus some other things. That's why I say the capex for AI, people have to realize if 25% of the economy is guaranteed by companies that are in a race for AI and they have tons of cash to pay for it.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  This is not a debt backed fiat system anymore. It's not, there's not that much debt for companies or individuals. The debt is now being held by the US government, which is why we're doing all the policies in the first place. The government is still spending the money. And one other thing, if you haven't looked at it, when people, you know, they hear entitlements, entitlements are money from the government to people who then spend it. These are people who don't need a job as much anymore. So this is a demographic thing with social security, with Medicare, with Medicaid. This is spending. So transfer payments now are up to 1.5 trillion dollars.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  It's an, or no, they're bigger than that. Sorry. $4.5 trillion. You're dealing with an economy right now that is 15% handouts. So those people are going to spend, they're getting the money they're going to spend. So I think the problem is people have not come back to 2007 and they have not seen the change in the economy. And they're still using historical data, which is not useful for the modern day economy.

• 13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So we just got job data. You mentioned that it was not only positive, but better than expected. There's a couple of data points that are in the data, which I think tell a very interesting story. So the first thing is a native born American versus foreign born American. Now I'm going to caveat this whole conversation. There are people who abuse this stat for horrific things that I don't agree with, right? But I do think that it is important from a macro standpoint, Americans are Americans regardless of foreign, native, whatever. The reason why the government, I think, breaks the data out is because it really does show us from an economic standpoint, how important immigration has been to America, legal immigration.

• 13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And what we have seen over the last couple of years is that the native born workforce was not getting job growth at the same pace that the foreign born job growth was. That has shifted now. And so we just got a very big print in terms of native born American job growth and not so much on the foreign born. So that's kind of one big shift is native versus foreign born. The second is public versus private sector. The last four years, I mean, public sector was balling. There was like 20% of job growth was coming from government. Now we've had four straight months of public sector job decline and private sector job growth. And so how do you think these data points that kind of make up that jobs number? Are they worth paying attention to? Are they important?

• 14:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they tell us anything about GDP growth or kind of the health of the economy moving forward?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And again, this, you know, immigration is a big thing for people to think about along with demographics in terms of jobs. So when people talk about a recession, let's go back and think about your kids. Every year your kids grow up until a certain point. You're not going to bet that they don't grow some year. There may be a year where they only grow an inch or something, but the economy grows, meaning every year because we're printing more money, because we've been growing population. We've had a situation that GDP grows. So if you look at a GDP card growth, you look at a job chart, it grows. The problem with immigration is once you stop it, now you're running into a really big trouble, a really big problem because a lot of the offset to the demographic where people are retiring was the immigration side.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  So even if it's a one-year, two-year phenomenon or three-year and it changes over time, the reality is when you slow or reverse immigration, you're going to have shortages and that means people are going to have to be hired. So this again gets into the structural change. So pre 2011, and again, if people don't realize how the last recession we had that involved credit, that involved job losses was back in 2008 and 2009. It was not COVID, which was induced and we came back quickly. The first baby boomer actually retired after the great financial crisis. So the labor shortage that's happening is why we're talking so much about the need for humanoids because it's only going to get worse, which means it is again harder

• 16:06Speaker 02

  for there to be job losses because you're starting every year with a million and a half job creation a year if you do 120,000, which is kind of where, you know, I think most people think will be. If the immigration pushes us from maybe the 70 to 80,000, which I think is the bottom end and you get up to 120, that's how it's showing up in the numbers. You just have a bias towards people, towards job creation when there's less people coming in the country.

• 16:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So if we then extrapolate this out to asset prices, stocks we've talked about, Bitcoin and gold relationship is very unique. Gold has outperforms up over 20% year to date. Bitcoin is up, it's like 3%, 4%. But in the last five days, Bitcoin is up, gold is down. Do we see some sort of decoupling between these? Are these charts that show gold runs and then Bitcoin kind of lags and runs 100 days later or so? Like, how do you look at the relationship between digital and analog sound money?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  So I think this is where, and we don't talk about this a lot, but I was just in London for three days and I talked to probably 15 to 20 different investors. And they wanted to hear my views on AI, they wanted to hear my views on, a little bit on Bitcoin, not as much, but definitely in what's happening with the global reserve currency and the dollar in general, which is what fits heavily into these. So I think I'm more negative in terms of the change that's coming, not because of necessarily the policies, but I think the global reserve currency absolutely, you know, on the one side, I think the rest of the world doesn't trust that they're going to get paid on their debt.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  We're talking about restructuring and doing super bonds, so I think that's in people's mind and I think China's worried about it. The weaponization and using it for sanctions and things like that has led to more gold from central banks, less involvement in treasuries. We already saw the treasury market kind of came under pressure three weeks ago and that's what really triggered the administration kind of turning. I don't think we're out of that situation yet. So for everyone watching, I think the stock market could get to new all-time highs. I also think it could fail somewhere not far from where it is and then start another decline. I'm expecting a more choppy environment where people are going to invest more in commodities. So I think gold is going to continue to have a bid, but in terms of Bitcoin, for everyone who's positive, they don't want to see the Mag 7 go back to all-time highs and start trading at a 50 multiple.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  They actually want what's happening. And the reason I say that is I really do believe that by the time we get into the summertime, Bitcoin will be at new all-time highs, the stock market will approach new all-time highs, but then run out of gas. And the one thing people have to remember, which is really important, if you need to meet returns for some liability, which is really what most investors have, they have to go find something that's working. And if not much is working to outperform interest rates... Like tech stocks, like any stocks, if they're not seriously beating it, they have to go find something that works. And if Bitcoin is at new all time highs, that means we're up 15, 20% year to date. The stock market's not going to be up that much this year.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  So best case scenario for the stock market is I think we inch out some gains later in the year. But I think it's going to be driven more by the things we've talked about here. Healthcare, financials, commodities, those are not sexy stories. In the past, you've been able to have sexy growth stories. So I think there's going to be a massive transfer from growth stocks into something that's working. And I'll end it on this, if you didn't see the news with Harvard reduce selling out of private equity. That is both a liquidity story, meaning they need, they need money, but they also need returns. So endowments have liabilities. And I think that situation means how are they going to generate the returns? If they can't get it from private debt and they can't get, or can't get it from private equity. If they can't get it from VC, which I don't think they're going to be able to get. The stock market doesn't provide it.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  They're all going to start moving to whatever can provide a lot because they have to meet liability. So I think more and more institutions as well as platforms and retail are going to be forced into something that's working. And I think Bitcoin is going to have a higher move than I thought for this year because this has been a dramatic shift. I think the tariffs were a big surprise. I think the global reserve currency view was a big surprise. And so I've been upping my views in terms of where Bitcoin is going to be at the end of the year. Do you think that we hit S and P 500 all time highs before the end of the year? I do, but I don't think we're, I don't think this is going to be a, a performance base year. I think what's going to take us to all time highs is the fact that people, so for everyone who's wondering.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  So we fell 20% and you could see who sold, like you saw the sentiment come down. We still have bearish sentiment on the AII at levels that are close to 60. I just want to remind people that in 2008, in the great financial crisis, when I was managing a macro book, I went back to look. So I remember in May of 08, people were bullish, bearish sentiment on that same gauge in May of 08. This was only two months after Bear Stearns was closed and multiple mortgage banks were closed. You were in the twenties at bearish sentiment. We're in the high. High 50s to 60. You don't get a big sell off with sentiment at those levels. So what needs to happen is everyone who is bearish is going to have to eventually get back in. Corporate buybacks, they're on pace for a trillion dollars this year.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  They're buying no matter what. Pension funds, what are you going to buy? Bonds? You can't buy bonds. So stocks, you gotta go. I just talked about people need to meet liabilities. They have to invest. So a 20% fall, of course, they're buying more. Retail, they don't bail out. As we talked about, hedge funds have quarterly redemptions. They've got monthly kind of performance. They're bearish. I think when they finally jump back in, it could take us to new all time highs. But once they've jumped back in, I think we're probably going to go through a little bit more of a problem. Cause I don't think the mag seven are going to be able to generate the earnings that are going to be excitable. I think right now they just had a low bar and they've been able to meet them.

• 22:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I um, I agree. I think we'll get Bitcoin all time high and S and P 500 all time high before the end of the year. When you, I was saying that when we were down 20%, people were, as you can imagine, not excited and thought I was stupid. Now I think the odds are much higher. People are like, okay, there, there's a world where that could happen. We'll see. I though have thought the way we get it is one or two interest rate cuts and a couple of good news announcements for trade deals. Interest rate cuts, if you look, the market's pricing them in, right? So, so we should get them. We'll see if we do. Trade deals, we don't have any yet though. How do you think about those trade deals and the importance for the economy, for the stock market? And maybe even the confidence in the economic policies that are being put forward.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Trade deals are going to happen. They have to, um, you know, I, I, I've been very outspoken about the fact that mutually assured destruction is just not an option for any country. And whether everyone likes how the US has handled it, the administration has gone through this, it's irrelevant. We'll come to deals. I, I do think there's a structural difference. So, you know, the Ray Dalio piece that came out on Twitter, I agree with it. Like I, I.

• 23:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Summarize it real quick for those that didn't read it.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  He's just saying that things, if this doesn't get better soon, which I agree with, meaning, and let's just say what needs to get better. There's two things that could go wrong. One is the pause ends and then all the tariffs go back up to whatever he had as the levels. Number two, there's some kind of collusion that goes on regarding uh, China and the other countries and China's tariffs stay high. This can't happen and I don't think it will. So I think there's going to be deals and I think it'll be around. Not surprisingly enough, Independence Day. So we had Liberation Day. Now we're gonna have good news around Independence Day, and that's the way this administration's gonna roll, and everything will be fine. So I think it is gonna happen, and we're gonna get through

• 23:50Speaker 02

  that stuff very, very quickly. I believe that what Ray Dalio said, which is true, is that this doesn't get rid of the problem we had. So we went into this thinking Doge was going to cut a lot of money. The betting numbers have collapsed in terms of getting to 250 million. So you're hearing numbers sub 100. We're not cutting enough. And if that's the case, we're still gonna have the fiscal deficit, and we still have debt to GDP. And now we've angered the bondholders of the globe. And so the pressure that was there, which he talks about, we're gonna have to find some kind of a beautiful deleveraging, which is what he wrote in the piece. And I just think it's getting harder and harder. So his point, which he said is, within three years, if we haven't done this, it'll be

• 24:34Speaker 02

  an issue. I think the tariffs will cover some of it. But he also wants to get the tax cuts through. So again, we're still stuck with the structural situation.

• 24:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw a tweet, and I'm gonna forget who said it, but it paraphrased. It was like, Ray Dalio's been waiting for this for a decade, right? He's been talking about this. He's like, he's ready to rock and roll. This is his Super Bowl. He's got a bunch of draft tweets ready to go. But, but I mean, the crazy part is like, he's not wrong. Yeah. Right? And so if we've talked about the assets, if we've talked about things like Bitcoin kind of being a big winner in this, are there things from an economic policy standpoint that you think that they will have to roll back or step off of that they previously thought? And one of the aspects that has got me thinking about this is this US-Ukraine minerals deal. And don't take my opinion for it. If you ask perplexity or one of

• 25:27Anthony Pompliano?

  these AI models, what was the deal? And what were the changes to the original proposed one? Perplexity would tell you, the first deal is very US lopsided, and Ukraine basically held out, got a better deal. It's more equal. So it's not that they took advantage of the US. US didn't take advantage of them. Ukraine has sovereignty over their minerals and extraction, what they mine, when they mine it. The US is not gonna get paid for previous aid. They're only gonna get paid for aid going forward. There's the partnership and the strategic alliance, you know, all these aspects.

• 25:59Anthony Pompliano?

  To me, that actually may signal to us that the administration is more willing to do deals with a China or somebody on an even playing field than getting a huge one-sided, you know, kind of deal or they're not going to do anything. Is that kind of your read as well as to how this stuff, it was like an anchoring thing, come out with these huge numbers, this crazy, you know, policy plan, and then we'll end up kind of in a rational spot?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Yes, but here's the thing, to go back to Dalio's point, I don't think people put enough context into global reserve currency. So one of the reasons I've upped the Bitcoin estimates for this year for me is because we're gonna have deals. They will truly end, from both angles, the dollar reserve currency status. It will not be this given flow that, and this is the thing, I just don't think people fully grasp, if there's big trade deficits, those dollars get recycled back into US assets. It's not just bonds, and it's also a capital account surplus. So, you know, when these Mag7 companies report,

• 27:07Speaker 02

  50% of their earnings are coming from overseas. When I was in London, I felt the anger towards the US. I think there is a nationalist thing going on across the globe. And so we're in the divorce period where, like I said, you know, two countries or the whole world gets divorced, trust is broken. And what ends up happening is they still have to go to the soccer games to see each other. They still have to go to the weddings of their kids together. Not, this is a world where everyone is interconnected, and so it can't happen overnight. But what the missing link of this is the dollar. So the dollar to me will continue to weaken. Where stable coins fit in is what we're seeing, which is, okay, we need someone to buy the treasuries. The government's probably gonna have to buy some and...

• 27:50Speaker 02

  The new system is going to have to buy some. So I think when people look at it, the Ukraine thing was a situation where that's really the first deal that got signed. We were together at your event when the whole thing broke down with Zelensky. So now we've got back to that. So that's the way all these deals are going to play out. And you said it best. He negotiated, he, we had this big drama and then it came back and now it's fair. And if every deal is quote unquote fair, I think what happens is the US gets more investment or something into the country there and it helps manufacturing, it helps the middle class, they get all these things. But at the end, really what they're doing is breaking the linkage between the countries on the dollar is the main currency. I don't think that is going to come back again.

• 28:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the downsides or negative aspects for the US, the US economy or US citizens in that scenario?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  The biggest thing to me is, is again, the relative performance of the stock markets from the earnings that are being generated from overseas. It's an enormous, it's an enormous thing. When you travel the world and you see, let's first go Nike, Starbucks, McDonald's, just go through the consumer side. I think these countries at the end of the day are going to be buying less America than they were before. I think there is some kind of a change that's happening. But the biggest thing for me does not have to do alone with the policies. You cannot look at the policies, which yes, it's an abrupt shift, but the changes are going to end up being somewhat linear, meaning if they happen too draconian, which is what he was initially doing, it would have set the system backwards. Instead, the thing that's

• 29:23Speaker 02

  moving faster is AI. AI has a huge impact. And if I'm right about my thesis that from 2007 to 2025, the commodity that drove performance for stocks was coding. And now AI has made coding ubiquitous. So it's commoditized. Now it's free and everyone has the best coder. So the US dominated in the same way that China dominates rare earth and has 90% 90 plus percent of rare earth. Processed? Well, that goes into fighter jets, that goes into iPhone, that goes into humanoids. It slows down the entire thing and everyone has talked about it. In the case of the US, we dominated because we had all of the coders. We had Silicon Valley and we created these behemoth companies.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  They have an issue now because coding is all over the world. And so they're spending tons of money in a race for AGI, which I don't, I don't even know. And no one has been able to prove what that means. And I think it's going to hurt their earnings. And I think most importantly, if you want to replace Google search in Germany, you can now. So I've kind of viewed this as the US stock market is not heavily weighted towards commodities. Power and commodities are going to be needed and that more benefits emerging markets. It benefits Europe more because they don't have the tech side. So having a lot of tech in your stock market, which did work for the last 17 years, I think it's going to underperform going forward.

• 30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  When we think about Bitcoin, there's the asset and spot, but there's also companies like MicroStrategy or Strategy, Metaplanet, some are scientific. And I mean, there's a bunch of these now.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about those businesses? And we're talking, Michael Saylor recently announced an $84 billion capital plan after his, I think $42 billion capital plan. So how do you think about these?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  This is my baby. I love talking about this. I really do. Instead of, you know, getting caught in the dynamic of taking what those companies, especially Strategy are doing and looking at them through the lens of the fiat system, you have to change your perspective on what the capital structure of the future is going to look like. So we've talked about the monetary system of the future. I think the capital structure of the future is, is evolving and changing in front of our eyes. You and I are both involved where we talk about tokenization all the time and you think about the dynamics of that. I just want to say to people, if you can envision a world where

• 31:52Speaker 02

  The corporate debt market as a percentage of the stock market goes down. Well, that's what's happened since 2007. There's just not as much corporate debt. And the reason is because the MAG7 didn't issue any debt. The capital structure is changing like and it's going towards something where you don't need debt to grow a business. Well, at the same point, they were funded through VC. So what is the common thread between those companies? Well, if they were successful, the founders themselves didn't own as much of the business because they had to give up some to VC owners. I believe, as I've said on here and I've said in every podcast I do, that I remember when Y Combinator said on a podcast,

• 32:32Speaker 02

  instead of trying to find the 123 $100 billion winners, I think we're going to be in a world where there's 301 billion dollar winners. Now, $1 billion company in today's world, that's a private company. That's not a public company. If the founder owns most of it, because number one, they don't have to hire too many people. Number two, they can get to scale. And you've seen this in some of the businesses you get involved in where you don't need to take money. Well, that means more companies are going to stay private. So the the ratio of the private market to the public market is going to change. And what that means is the capital structure again is changing. You don't need this. So what strategy in these companies are doing is they're going, well, if this is going to be a system where there's not as much public companies,

• 33:16Speaker 02

  where AI is disrupting all businesses, the only thing that's left, and this is what I say. When everyone goes, how do you value Bitcoin? I went, why is it a bad thing? How do you value a stock? And they go, well, a company, it has a 20 PE. And I'm like, yeah, but embedded in that 20 PE is the next 10 years of discounted cash flows. What if I told you AGI was here in three years and that business was completely disrupted? What if I told you it was in four years? At what cutoff point is the value of that company go down to zero? Because it is based on the ability it to compete. And I said, so one of the beauties of Bitcoin, it has no value. It literally, and that's why I say it's the S and P 500 of the future capital structure system.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Now, that is what Michael Saylor basically says, but I think he does it in a bombastic way for intent. And he goes behind the scenes and he's talking with everyone to do it. So I just think that the mistake people are making is they still view Bitcoin as a currency. It's never going to be a currency. It's not going to be the global reserve currency. But the capital structure of capitalism is changing in front of our eyes and it's going to continue to accelerate. And I think Bitcoin is a winner.

• 34:20Anthony Pompliano?

  In that world, what does Bitcoin's price go to this year, this cycle, and maybe over, you know, 10 years?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  So I have been shocked at things that have happened this year with the tariffs, where if you, at the beginning of the year, you know, it was going to be the most pro-business situation. And I thought, okay, this is good for Bitcoin. I think it'll double this year because of the administration's efforts to deregulate and how much that'll create the network effects with stable coins which are growing. And I mean, the announcements this week on stablecoin, whether it's the Visa, Mastercard, I'm starting to say repeatedly to people what I said here last week, which is, I can go into any store in this country, and as long as I can use my phone right now, I can buy anything I want with Bitcoin. I can't buy it with Bitcoin, but I can transfer the Bitcoin into stablecoins and go pay for

• 35:13Speaker 02

  stuff. Well, with Mastercard and Visa now having and saying, well, we have a, you know, a new card through Bridge, which allows us, allows people to pay for things. People are starting to realize if you can't walk into a coffee shop and buy with gold, and you can't buy it with yen in a US place, we're kind of breaking this down. And I think this has accelerated this year with just the deregulation. What has changed for me is that I didn't expect him to do the tariffs to the degree that he did, and be willing to disrupt everything to where the MAG7 is now being disrupted in a way that people need to find something to invest in. And we're seeing the institutional demand side there. This thing acts great. I think companies are going to buy it. And I will bring up one thing that you and I

• 35:56Speaker 02

  have not talked about. Have you talked to anyone about the Bitbond idea?

• 36:01Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Okay. So at some point, because of Dalio's situation, and what I believe is a problem, meaning the debt to GDP is still a massive problem. How do we get out of this? We have a major problem with the deficit, where the debt just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and that's really bad. So the idea is to issue a Bitbond, which would be a US Treasury with 10% basically backed by Bitcoin. So it's a structured product, which is where my career at Morgan Stanley did. But what's really interesting is, okay, 1% coupons, whoever buys it, they have a 1% coupon. Now, I did this in Brazil. So that's why this is something similar. This is why this is interesting. A 1% coupon.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  And then up to four and a half percent, the current rate of of of tenure rates are about that, they get 100% of the participation of that Bitcoin 10%. So you're getting basically a guaranteed on your your investment plus 1% coupon, plus you're getting the variability on Bitcoin. And

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So so let me be sure I understand. I buy the coupon.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I get 1% guaranteed.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  You're guaranteed 1% instead of the four and a half that you'd be getting.

• 37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  If Bitcoin goes up, I get up to another four and a half percent.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  You get the first 100% to get you to four and a half.

• 37:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  What happens after this, and you'll like this part, the way it was structured is from that point, the investor, the person who bought the bonds gets half of whatever performance happens, and the US government gets half.

• 37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's just use easy numbers and say, I put $100 into a bit bond, I'm going to get 1%, so I'm going to get $1.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  1% a year.

• 37:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. Then I'm going to get, and Bitcoin, let's say, goes up 50%, right? So I'm going to get 1%, then I'm going to get the four and a half percent, the first 100% move of four and a half percent of the Bitcoin. So now now I'm at a total of the 5.5% return. And then if Bitcoin went up 50%, I would essentially get half of whatever's left over.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, rather it's it's a little bit more complicated than that because you're doing 10 years of performance. So you're talking about the performance of Bitcoin. So the way that I've seen the like, the way you would do in structured products is go, okay, let's assume Bitcoin only does the 10th percentile of what it does over the 10 years. So let's just assume that they assume if Bitcoin has been compounding at, and let's just say 50% a year, it's been more, let's just say 50%, and they go, okay, well, at 5% a year, what you're going to end up getting is you'll get your four and a half percent. If it's doing much higher, you can get up to a coupon, you know, up to a payment that would be on a 75th percentile, about 17%. So you have upside in getting paid more. And the only

• 38:40Speaker 02

  thing that's happened is it's attached to Bitcoin. So the way the government deals with this is it issues. A trillion dollars, it takes 10% and buys 10% Bitcoin. That is also a way that they're not using taxpayer dollars. So what's the win-win here? The government gets a lower rate, 1% versus 4.5%, home run. If Bitcoin collapses, they still pay the 1%. The investors get the 1%. They lost out on being able to get 4, but who wouldn't? That's why Michael Saylor's had success doing that. This is a Michael Saylor-type idea. The reason I believe it may happen is because it makes total sense. And the reason it makes total sense is, right now, markets are kind of frozen in the IPO market,

• 39:23Speaker 02

  the capital markets, we've talked about bonds. Every time a deal comes out, Michael Saylor, he's being able to sell fiat assets to buy Bitcoin. I always hear it's a scam. I'm like, who's buying the assets he's selling? It's not a scam if he can actually sell. The only way it works is if he can sell the $84 billion. Somebody needs to buy that. There is demand for anything related to Bitcoin, and that's why he's been able to create these structures. So I think it's something that people are going to talk about. I brought it up on the trip and said, I would go do your homework on it now, guys, because if you're not paying attention to Bitcoin now, it is part of the monetary system because this administration has everyone in the cabinet is on it. You've talked to Bo Hines, you've talked to the CIA. I mean, it doesn't matter who you talk to, everyone is on top of this.

• 40:08Anthony Pompliano?

  How does it fail? What's the risk?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  The risk is that Bitcoin is exactly what people said, a scam. Everything has been there. I wrote a Substack on that this week, referenced your wife's book. I can't get people to change their mind on the fact that it's not worthless or a scam that are on the intelligence side of believing the fiat system is going to break down. So a lot of people like myself that are macro historians, this always ends badly historically. It really does. There's always a new system that comes out of this. It may be after war, it may be after revolution, it may be after depression, it may be after deflation. The reason I believe this is the way this is going to end is because at this point, Bitcoin has been around too long, it's too big, it's too accepted by 500 million people on the planet.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  It's accepted by voters, it's got politicians in. Everything that you could have imagined which could have stopped this, which is primarily the US government. The US government is the most important thing. If you're the global reserve currency and you're saying, we don't want to be the global reserve currency, and at the same time, you're going, we want to be the leader in crypto. Isn't that all you need to know?

• 41:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that um

• 41:19Anthony Pompliano?

  people are not going to like it, but Bitcoiners are going to end up being right and um.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  You said people. Do you really? What about younger people? Let's let's bring up people below the age of thirty five.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's a lot of people who don't want to see the Bitcoiners be right. Yeah, because I think that um there's folks who they feel like they missed out. They feel like, oh, my friend told me about it and like my friend's a crazy friend. Of course, they're right, you know, like I like they can't be right on this. They made money. I didn't make money. You know, it's like all these like human nature type things that play into it. I think that's one big piece. The second thing um which is really hard truth, and I actually believe this is one of the key reasons why um online I get so much pushback is because

• 42:00Speaker 02

  It's not the suit.

• 42:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoiners Bitcoiners understand um Bitcoiners understand the economy better than the fiat uh folks. And what the Bitcoiners realize is most of the core concepts that the fiat folks believe are not true. They understand things very simple. They don't believe the government data on inflation where a lot of the fiat, you know, folks do. They don't believe uh some of these core concepts like uh the printing of money is driving all of the stock market growth uh in prices. And therefore, if you simply are uh trying to drive a return, you should actually be holding things that can't be printed like gold or Bitcoin, right? Like it. There's all these kind of core things that are embedded in the traditional financial world,

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  which I think Bitcoin was the first time, maybe other than gold, where you could essentially call the bluff. And you could say, I don't believe that. I'm going to buy this other thing. And um doesn't mean it will continue to work, but so far it's been the best performing asset of the last fifteen years. And so this like alternative viewpoint on the economy, on finance, on assets uh has proven to be correct. And moving forward, there are, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and name them, but I could think of tens of people at least that I know their identity is tied up in the Bitcoiners are wrong. And it is becoming an emotional argument, not a rational, you know, argument. Doesn't matter what you tell them, they're never going to change your mind.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you would, if we, I think we met and had our first conversation after 2020, if I'm correct. And the reason I say that is because before 2020, if you would have asked me what's your view on Bitcoin, I would have said, you know what, I, there's two parts of it I don't see. I don't see the government allowing it to happen. And number two, everything I know about it from an innovation, it cannot be a form of payment. And the problem is, it's the biggest part of crypto and the only one that makes sense. So I get it as kind of this community-based brand that people like, but I don't see it as an innovation that is going

• 44:08Speaker 02

  to work. What changed my mind, and where I think we are now, it's still not a payment system. But what I described is, you can convert Bitcoin to stable coins to coffee. Hundred percent. You couldn't do Bitcoin to coffee. And I never thought that would happen based on everything I heard and all the energy inefficiencies and everything. So there's been an innovation that took it to the next level. The fiat people don't understand that, like when I talk about it. So I always say, well, can you take gold and convert in this? No, you can't even carry the gold. So it's already won that game. I didn't think the governments of the world would be in a position that they would support it. But in particular, I didn't think the United States, which was the global reserve currency and all the benefits

• 44:50Speaker 02

  that came with it. So if any fiat person doesn't see that that's happening, and then at the same time, and this is something not known by many people. So I talk on here about the stock market being 200% of GDP. The total size of the assets of this country are massive. Household net worth $170 trillion. If you need to sell an S and P future, the liquidity is near all time lows post the GFC. So the size of the assets are big. The ability to sell them is really small. That's got to scare the hell out of people when they need to get out of things. The reason I bring that up for crypto. Tokenization fixes that. Tokenization brings every person into the pie to allow them to buy things.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  And so I believe that tokenization is the other thing that will solve the liquidity problem. That if you need to sell a $10 million home and there's nobody to buy the $10 million home, the price is not 10 million unless a bunch of people that can pay $100 are like, I'd invest in that because I think it's going to go up. Tokenization is the other thing that allows for fractionalization and breaks down this whole system. So I think all of these technologies are now screaming at fiat people, but they won't do the work.

• 46:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Anthony Pompliano?

  They better.

• 46:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going on almost 10 years yelling and screaming about this.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  I only joined your party recently.

• 46:11Anthony Pompliano?

  My, uh, I'll leave you with this, which is my favorite thing that every single time somebody says some version of you're an idiot to me on Twitter. I think to myself, should I just respond with, well, I found the best performing asset of the last 15 years. What'd you do? And then I say, that's not nice. And I put my phone down for five minutes. But if you extrapolate that out, it's like, you know, everyone who's calling the Bitcoiners stupid. If you're so smart, why didn't you out, why didn't you outperform them? Right? And I think that that's like the, uh, the hard uncomfortable truth that, um, again, it just rubs people the wrong way, which I understand. Like if I was on the other side, I actually think that like my personality, I would be like dug in, right? And I'd be like, no, you're wrong, whatever. So like, uh, thankfully I'm on the right side,

• 46:53Anthony Pompliano?

  hopefully. Um, but, but I just think it's, uh, it's unique.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  So let me, let me, before you, before we end this, so I'm going to use the Kentucky Derby as an example for Bitcoin.

• 47:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  So the horse that is the favorite for tomorrow is journalism. Journalism will probably, um, it'll probably go off at seven to two is my guess. Should go off at about eight to five. That's how good the horse is. But my father trained me to look like never to look, starting with the favorites, to look for value where. You would, in a perfect world, you want to find a horse that you think should be three to one, but is actually 10 to one. Here's what I'll say about Bitcoin. I love the fact that wealthy people hate it. And the reason is, they have all the money. The transfer is coming. Whether it comes from them giving the money to their kids when they die, or they need to do it just to say they own it. They're all coming. They're gonna come. So this is the first time in my life where I've done my handicapping,

• 47:49Speaker 02

  and I could be wrong, but I believe Bitcoin is the favorite in the race at a hundred to one odds. So that's why so much of my net worth is in it now. It's why we, why I've spent the time like thinking about it and talking about it is because I think there's a lot of money to be made here by people who open up their minds. The door is still barely open for the most money on the planet, whether it's an endowment, a sovereign wealth fund. And I'm happy to go inside and go, I grew up in the traditional finance world and I was converted. I'm not Michael Saylor. I'm, I can bring it into context of history. This is going to happen. And all of your fears, it's gonna happen.

• 48:25Anthony Pompliano?

  A hundred percent. Where can we send people to find your stuff?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Uh, well, first of all, the Substack is definitely where the Kentucky Derby piece, it'll be, it'll be very long, but I'll give an executive summary so you can get it there. The YouTube channel, I will do my weekly there. And 22vresearch.com is where people can get the deep dive on everything. And I'm starting to do more Bitcoin there because hedge funds are definitely more interested than they've been in the past.

• 48:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Thank you for doing this. We'll do it again next weekend.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Thanks, Anthony.