Pod Insights The Pomp Podcast #1550 Jordi Visser | If You Miss This Bitcoin Run, Don’t Say You Weren’t Told About this episode 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 evaluate economic data, bitcoin, stocks, inflation, acceleration of AI, and the global economy. ======================Figure Markets is where crypto meets real-world finance. Trade 24/7 with speed and transparency, borrow against your crypto with no credit checks, and earn—all on-chain. Stocks and real estate trading are coming soon, giving you 24/7 access and instant settlement. It’s the best of TradFi and DeFi in one platform. Get started today at https://www. Figure.com/pomp! Disclosures: https://www.figuremarkets.com/disclosures/======================Maple Finance is where real money meets real yield. With over $1.5B managed, Maple offers secure lending, Bitcoin yield, and premium DeFi assets like syrupUSDC. Get started today at https://www.maple.finance !=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:https://dreamstartupjob.com/Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Anthony Pompliano? What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today we've got a great episode with Jordy Visser. Jordy is a 30-year veteran of Wall Street and we talk about it all today. We talk about what's going on with inflation, stocks, Bitcoin, AI, and why the market is doing what it's doing when everyone else said it was going to do something else. The whole conversation
0:46 Anthony Pompliano? has one key theme, is that you may be at an advantage if you don't have the biggest brain in the room. No, seriously. Jordy explains it very articulately and I think that it's a unique way to think about the world. So here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.
0:59 Speaker 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.
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2:23 Anthony Pompliano? Today's episode is brought to you by Maple, the go-to place for on-chain asset management. There aren't many teams in crypto who manage real money the right way, but Maple does. Maple now manages over a billion dollars, combining serious finance experience with DeFi innovation. I use Maple because they make it simple to earn real yield, whether that's allocating stable coins for over collateralized lending to institutions, depositing Bitcoin to their institutional Bitcoin yield offering, or accessing their premium DeFi assets like syrup USDC. If you're serious about putting capital to work, then go to maple.finance to learn more. Once again, that's maple.finance. Go check them out today. All right, Jordan, we got a ton to talk about this week. The first thing is everyone was super scared about inflation, the tariffs, a recession.
3:08 Anthony Pompliano? People were talking about Great Depression, empty shelves, like they were all over the place with all this fear mongering. We just got data from April that suggests that sales day is actually still pretty strong, that prices of certain products were actually going down, not up, and the inflation number went down in the latest reading as well. So are we out of the woods? How do you look at some of this economic data that we're getting? Stocks obviously are recovering very rapidly and they seem to think that the party's on like it is 99 or 2021 all over again.
3:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, because of the situation with getting rid of the worst of the tariff situation. So if you kind of go through the last five weeks, it started with, hey, we'll put a pause on things for 90 days, but we'll leave China, we'll raise China, we'll raise it again. And now we're at the point where we're kind of heading back towards what Stanley Druckenmiller said was a good result, 10% around the board, China maybe a little bit higher. So the policy uncertainty has come down dramatically. And so everything on the economy side gets into the divergence that's been there between the soft data, which as we've talked about, it gets this phrase of soft data. It's really people worrying, CIOs
4:20 Speaker 02 worrying. The hard data has remained fine because the hard data is driven by two parts. It's driven by the consumer, which when the stock market was falling down, you're getting a little bit of weakness. Okay, all good. But the other side is the AI trade and AI in general about the spending side. And as we went through the first quarter, All the AI stuff was great. The hard data was good. So it makes sense that once the policy uncertainty goes down, we get the snapback in the S and P. And basically, when you go look at everything now, the fact that we're up for the year after all of the things that we talked about on here and we went through where everyone's panning and going through it. Now there's still people saying recession.
5:04 Speaker 02 The reality is there is no recession. I'm happy to say that. And I'll keep saying the same thing I said. The definition of a recession is a historical thing that most economists and politicians and everyone learned in school. They do not exist in the framework of today's world.
5:21 Anthony Pompliano? So as I look at all of the data points that are out there, one of the things that I continue to see is a politicalization of economic data. And a good example of this is the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey just came out. In it, they ask people about their inflation expectations. Do you think inflation is going to be high, low? What do you think it'll be, et cetera? Democrats have an expectation of incredibly high inflation, two times higher than they ever had under Biden. Republicans' expectation is like one fourth or one fifth, I forget the exact number, of what the Democrats' inflation expectation is.
6:05 Anthony Pompliano? Both of them are sideways to slightly up in the last couple of weeks. But the difference between all the Democrats who think it's going to be this massive number, all the Republicans who think it's going to be this very small number. How do we try to find data that we can trust? Because that survey is 300 people. And I saw somebody online saying, you know, there's 300 million people in America. We're asking 300 people what their expectation is of inflation. And then if you break it out by political party, it's so skewed. It's basically like two different extremes. And so I think I kind of come to this stuff. One of the things the Bitcoiners, I think, got right is they pretty much reject most of the traditional data. And they say, this is wrong.
6:49 Anthony Pompliano? They may not be able to articulate why they think it's wrong, how it's wrong, what a better metric is, et cetera. But it does feel like by rejecting the data points that a bunch of people use, it has led to better decision making for them. So how do you look at this data and like, do you put weight into it?
7:04 Speaker 02 Well, first of all, you've hit on a topic which, as I've got more immersed over the last two years in the Bitcoin community, let me first describe why I think the Bitcoin community has a big advantage in these times. Number one, this is all social media driven. And I say that in the framework of people blame the media, but really, social media is, if you want, whatever you want to see, you can go see. The doom and gloomers, and I never realized this, I mean, I don't have a ton of X followers. If I was bearish, I'd have five times the amount. Of course, you sound smart, but you don't make money. Yeah, it's like you gotta be bearish all the time and go through this. And many macro
7:46 Speaker 02 people that I've been out to dinner with, they have a lot of X followers, they're on Substack, they've got people paying them, they only write negative things. And so Bitcoin people have an advantage that they've been playing from this, this place of being oppressed, of being morons, of being deplorables. And what I like about it is that just gets you up to not believe anything you're reading. And that's the important thing about making long-term investments. You're living in a world where exponential AI is happening, and the history is just not, it's just not as important. So if you're telling me the tariffs and comparing what happened in the 1800s and 1900s, when there was no news. When there's horses.
8:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, how did you find out the news? Of course, there were no inflation expectations. No one actually knew what was going on. We're here, oh, I'm really worried about inflation because I was on Twitter and the shelves are going to be empty. And Ryan Peterson said, there's no boats at the ports and blah, blah, blah. Like, it's nonstop all day long. So I think Bitcoin people just have the ability to look through things and just not believe anything. And one of the key things is to not think you know anything. If you actually believe that you're just following what's happening, and you believe that inflation is happening, and it's the government's job to make sure that with all this debt, I mean, this is the most simplistic first principle of macro right now, we have a lot of debt. We are not fixing the deficit based on the tax bill and based on the fact that Doge
9:12 Speaker 02 hasn't found anything and we already backed off on the Main Street versus Wall Street thing, they get it, which means, okay, well, then the easier solution is what we've been doing, which is we're gonna try to grow our way out of this by debasing the currency and bonds will be uninvestable and that's good for Bitcoin. You have to read through the noise and there's a tremendous amount of noise.
9:30 Anthony Pompliano? So you're being very kind right now because we're talking on the recording, but the better way to say this is most of the Bitcoiners, me, et cetera, they don't know what they don't know. They don't know anything really, right? And on one hand, I would say that is true for a lot of things in the economy. If you go and look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin was an asset that you shouldn't have invested in based on the old way of looking at the world. And I've previously said that I think that Bitcoin is an intelligence test, but not intelligence in the sense of are you smarter or are you not? Do you have the intelligence and the intellectual humility to update your worldview and realize the way that people used to look at it is not the world we live in today? So you're like, you're dead on
10:14 Anthony Pompliano? with this, right? Now, what I also think is very important here is that the Bitcoin crowd, they essentially have grabbed on to this idea of what you're talking about, where the only thing that matters in the economy is that they're going to debase the currency. If they continue to debase the currency, everything else you're being told is a distraction that is trying to shake you out of your investment portfolio. And in a weird way, retail understands that better than the institutions, because guess who was buying on April 9th? The bottom of the market.
10:51 Speaker 02 Yep.
10:52 Anthony Pompliano? It was retail. And I saw the smart, sophisticated money going on television and they had all their charts, they were pontificating, they weren't crying, but they wanted to, you know, they were yelling and screaming, doing their whole thing. And guess what? If you went on X or anywhere else, buy the dip, you know, these people are idiots, all that stuff. And so to me, What I wonder is as capital flows more into these people's hands, which you now are seeing all the financial institutions talk about, they're trying to get customers that are self-directed investors, self-directed investors, independent investors, retail, they use all different names for them. Those people are the market now. And so, yeah, the institutions have a lot of money,
11:34 Anthony Pompliano? but they're doing things like I saw Jim Chanos recently, he's shorting a
11:40 Speaker 02 Micro
11:41 Anthony Pompliano? MicroStrategy, buying Bitcoin. Basically, he has a, you know, non-directional trade on, he's trying to lock in a premium. Like, that's the stuff that Wall Street's doing. What are the retail people doing? They're one direction. They just buy, and they keep buying, and they don't sell their Bitcoin. And so you can look across these assets. That's why Tesla, that's why Palantir, that's why GameStop. Like, it is a reoccurring theme in society now, is that the retail investor has this persistent bid, and when things go down, they buy, which is actually what you should do as an investor. And I think Wall Street looks at it like, look at how dumb these people are, they're buying right now. But in hindsight, it actually looks like that is the winning strategy moving forward.
12:19 Speaker 02 So here's the ironic thing about it, and there's so much in what you just said, which I agree. And, you know, we haven't done this before. We've been doing this now for six, seven, eight weeks, something like that. I get reached out a lot from people. I saw someone today who's an ex Goldman partner, and thanked us for doing the show. So I'm going to thank everyone for paying attention and going through it. What you just said, and the reason it's important for this, Wall Street has always said there's a Fed put, always. We just have to find the level. The problem is, historically, like the great financial crisis, everyone with debt gets screwed, the market falls down, and then the bottom happens, but it's not a V bottom, it's kind of one of these U bottoms.
13:00 Speaker 02 That's what recessions were. The reason I say there's no such thing as a recession anymore is is two parts. One is the economy has been completely
13:11 Speaker 02 And now it's being AI'd. So the economy's changed. Contingency workers, there's just no way for enough people to lose their jobs to have a recession. On the, on the other side, it would be a policy choice to have a recession. So the Fed put is there, but now we're not having U bottoms. First, we were having V bottoms. This one is not a V bottom, people. This is an I bottom. We went down, we went straight back up. Now, the reason the Bitcoin people get it so real, the Fed put is the debasing time.
13:41 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, it's, it's always there.
13:42 Speaker 02 It's always there and it has to be. And that's why whether Jeff Booth got me down this path before, where if you view the world as two components, one is deflationary, which is innovation, and the other one is inflationary, which is the government defending the median worker who is displaced by the, the, the deflation. They always have to come back to the puzzle and that's what we're watching. And that's why the spending has to happen in the easiest way other than war, revolution. It's debasing. That's it. And so I think the Bitcoin crowd just gets it more. They have a mentality because I've talked about this. They have more reps. If you're an online poker player, you're getting lots of reps. It's a lot harder to go to Vegas and then go to AC to put in all that time. Online poker, you can play all day long. You get more reps.
14:25 Speaker 02 You kind of become immune to the losses and it allows you to stay sharp and look at the next hand. Let me let that one go. There's no tilt. You're reducing that, that problem. And I think in the markets, they just have more of a comfort of buying when everyone's panicking and putting money to work quickly because they've been through this.
14:39 Anthony Pompliano? There is something about being terminally online, right? That the speed, the, the memes, the, maybe the volatility, the critiques, like all of this stuff. You know, I was very, very positive on tariffs. I was very clear that I thought the stock market was going to do very well this year. All of the fear, I think I tweeted at one point, much to the chagrin of many people that anyone who was fear mongering was going to look ridiculous in hindsight, you know, right?
15:09 Anthony Pompliano? The more pushback I got, the more right I knew I was. Because it was basically, there's this consensus, and you know, earlier this week, I talked about the number one signal I knew as to why the analysis of the tariffs was wrong was because all the economists agreed, which meant that dissent had been outlawed, because economists never agree on everything.
15:27 Speaker 02 No.
15:28 Anthony Pompliano? Right? But the second they all agree on one thing, that means that you now actually have left rational analysis, and you now are in a world where dissent is outlawed. And if you say it, you're like, almost like being blasphemous. And so then you know that thing is true. Right? And we've seen this over and over again, last four, five, 10, you know, six years, whatever.
15:47 Anthony Pompliano? When I look at the stock market today, I think the stocks are forward looking. Now, people who I have a lot of respect for, who I think are very intelligent, who obviously have made a lot of money, and from the scoreboard of success are doing very well. They think that stocks are going to retest the lows. Paul Tudor Jones has said this, and a number of other people. How do you think about, okay, we kind of got through that first wave, stocks are back up, not back to all time highs, but you know, on the way. But there's very smart people saying that we're going to retest lows, agree, disagree, or how would you analyze that?
16:18 Speaker 02 You know, I disagree with that. I do think stocks will find again, some point this year, some, some trouble, but the, the problem with the stock market is the earnings are growing and the economy is fine. So it, you know, I think, to be fair to Paul, he said that the weekend before the China tariff deal, and he said on CNBC, I like Paul a lot, so I'm giving him a little bit of, a little bit of credit here for at least saying, even if they come down to 50% on China, and now we've got a pause, and we're talking about lower numbers possibly. So I think in fairness to him, he said it before that announcement came out, there was new information, you adjust your views and go through it. But Steve Cohen this week talked about a 45% chance of recession and a retest of, of the lows.
17:04 Speaker 02 You always have to be careful when people come out publicly and say, because if they miss the rally, and they got a lot of people following, this would be a good way to get people to maybe take correction and be able to buy some stuff. I'm not sure he's doing that. He's got bigger things to worry about with the Mets. But I don't think we're going to have a retest, and the reason I don't think we're going to is because the most important factor that came out of Q1 and the most dominant factor going on is the math behind AI. And I just want to bring something up so people realize this, because there's a little bit of
17:30 Speaker 02 Accounting arbitrage that goes on with this, it's very unique. So everyone knows the $300 billion of CapEx. But $300 billion of CapEx is a spending number, but it doesn't count as an expense for those companies this year. So it's not like they have to make $300 billion of revenues to offset it. That number gets depreciated over seven to 10 years. So let's just use 10 years. That means 30 billion a year. So the big question has been whether the Mag7 can get the ROI on that expense, which I still think is a very difficult thing for them to do. But the 300 billion, they're spending it. So that's a revenue for Nvidia, for semiconductors, for anything that they're spending it on. So on the one side, you have 300 billion of revenues.
18:13 Speaker 02 On the other side, you only have 30 million of expenses. So without going through the math on it, that's really good profit margin when you aggregate it in the S and P 500. This happened with cloud and they eventually made the money back. It also happened during the dot com bubble with the telco. They blew up, but they blew up because they had debt and eventually it became a bad investment. I still believe that at some point, two years down the road, three years down the road, this will be a problem for the Mag7 because the numbers Sequoia has done work on this. I've gone through it myself. I just don't see how this doesn't become an issue. And one of the things that we talked about before we sat down here, one of the advantages you have in the market that say a Steve Cohen doesn't have or a Paul Tudor Jones doesn't have,
18:55 Speaker 02 they're depending on people to tell them what's happening. You get to work with people involved in AI. You're investing in little tiny companies. You actually see how fast these companies are growing. These companies are taking money away from the bigger companies. It's happening slowly, but it's an ecosystem that's growing. So eventually the negative Nellie's on the stock market. I think it will happen because we're spending a lot from the Fortune 500 companies. The startups are actually coming back, but it's going to take a couple of years. I think you'll start seeing this more and more a year from now. So I don't think we'll retest, but I think once we get through the all time highs, we'll start to run into a little bit of trouble.
19:32 Anthony Pompliano? It's interesting you say this because I'll throw a couple of companies out there. Lovable has publicly announced that they're at 50 million in ARR in six months. I know that Replit, I'm an investor in Replit, they're up, maybe they've doubled, you know, very quickly. If you go and you take a look at maybe a company like a, maybe a Riverside, which is infusing AI into their product, doing all kinds of stuff, growing incredibly fast, right? We have a company where we have one engineer and myself, two people who have built something, it's going very rapidly. The biggest competitor has 12,500 employees. Good luck to them. The data does not look so good for them so far, and it's only been
20:17 Anthony Pompliano? a couple of weeks, right? And like you see this stuff and you start to say, like, okay, the speed is one component, but speed, if you're building the wrong thing, doesn't help you. Speed, if you're building something that can't be monetized, doesn't help you, right? It's also the fact that you can very quickly get to product market fit and then accelerate. And so I think of it kind of like a running back, right? When you hand the ball to the running back, sometimes the running back just runs right to the hole because the hole's there. But the best running backs, they take the ball and they kind of look for the hole in line of scrimmage and then they accelerate through it. And that to me is what the AI companies are doing. Is they're very good at kind of hanging around, trying to build, tinker, find, okay, once they have product market fit, they just accelerate in a way that a company really can't do anywhere else. And so I think the question then becomes,
21:02 Anthony Pompliano? when you see the perplexities, you know, they're rumored to be raising money at like a 14, 15 billion dollar valuation. Obviously, OpenAI is raised at 300 billion, these are crazy numbers. It's not just these little small things that are going to take away a little bit of market share. These things are going to be disruptive. I mean, again, we'll see what happens, but these AI companies could disrupt Google, right? I mean, you know, it's like you're going after the giants. And one of the best ways that I know to evaluate kind of opportunities is there's this saying, judge people by the enemies they select, right? Or by the competitors they select. And so I always say that if you look at Aptronic or Figure AI, the humanoid robot companies, they're basically choosing to
21:43 Anthony Pompliano? go and compete against Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, right? That says a lot about the type of company that you have, et cetera, right? Now, on the other hand, if you take a look at these AI companies, they're going after the big guys. And so that Mag7 kind of issue you're talking about, like, it just feels like people are missing the forest from the trees when they're worried about like, what is an inflation print? What's the sentiment survey? And you're like, dude, The world is literally shifting in a way where we're never going back to where we were five years ago.
22:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. And so two things on what you said that I mentioned this last week, and I'll just say it again. So the numbers you threw out, unless people tape this, you know, or tape it, unless they rewind, go through this and write everything down.
22:31 Speaker 02 If you go to the Stripe keynote speech, Stripe, who's a very important player in this whole ecosystem, because most startups end up working on Stripe right away. They went through these numbers. You mentioned Replit. So Replit, I used for a little while and then Cursor came along and I use Cursor. Cursor, I think, is at 300 million AR now. So you're talking about two companies, Replit and Cursor, and the same thing. You've got Windsurf as well. These are the things that allow you to speak, to create code with having no code skills. You can create apps in the same day. You can watch this, go on YouTube, spend an hour, you can go create an app without a doubt, anything you want on your phone, it'll be an HTML and then anyone can use it.
23:14 Speaker 02 The fact that you can do this means anything built on code is obviously at risk. The number one thing that AI is doing is replicating code. And even though it won't be ever as good as, let's say, the top 2% of coders, you're still replacing the bottom 80% already and that number keeps going higher and higher, which means businesses have an advantage. I want to give you a better, not a better visual, a different visual with the running back thing. So a startup company, let's say, has only three linemen they have to get through. A Fortune 500 company has seven linemen. That's the friction of them to move forward. They've got an infrastructure, they've got a culture, they've got security issues, they've got things to protect. Big companies do have problems getting through the hole because they've got to change
23:59 Speaker 02 and they've got to adopt and the adoption has friction where small companies don't have that kind of friction. The problem is for kind of the middle, let's say, 2,000 companies that exist, the small cap and the mid cap companies, they don't all benefit from this. I think the infrastructure plays do, there's plenty of them. But the problem they have is a lot of them had to take out debt, so they've got the problem of higher rates. This is one of the issues that AI has done, which is not, inflation may not be going higher. But it's also at this point not going down to a level enough that rates are going down. So one of the things that's starting to show up is I believe the frictions are hollowing out kind of the businesses that have probably survived too long that have debt. We're going to lose more of them. The startups are racing really, really fast and they're going to eat lunch of those, but they're too small right now.
24:43 Speaker 02 But that you can see where this world's going to look like. Five years from now, the S and P 500 companies are going to have a problem with these, these companies. The question is, will those companies ever go public? You have that answer better than any senior macro person in their 60s by far.
24:59 Anthony Pompliano? The part to me where everyone got really excited was, I forget the name of the company, but they were using, it was kayak or something. They were like slashing customer service costs, like 40% reduction in, in costs. And everyone's like, oh, look, AI, AI, AI, which yeah, it's going to help there for sure. But I do think that there's something like, I know a guy right now, he's in New York. He's building a ERP system. It is called, or I think it's actually sales tax, I should say. But it's an ERP kind of accounting type system. And his big like quote, quote insight is everyone knows AI agents are going to be a big thing. So the idea that I'm going to have, you know, five agents and this one does this, this one does this.
25:41 Anthony Pompliano? They're kind of like, almost like employees, but they work for you and they're software. He's like, yeah, but if you build the AI agents into a platform, now they're the expert in that platform. So imagine if every time you went to go use Salesforce software, you got to be on the phone with the Salesforce rep who literally walks you through anything you had live while you were using the product. Be a way better experience, right? Because you would never have questions. You'd never get confused, never get lost. If anything broke, they would fix it immediately, all the stuff. So his big insight is what if you just built the agents right in? Now you have experts on a platform. So your AI agent may be an expert in you. His AI agent is an expert in his platform. Now there's a huge flow of information back and forth, a lot of automation, you do all the stuff.
26:24 Anthony Pompliano? I have also seen, and they've publicly talked about it, perplexity is coming out with this kind of browser comment.
26:33 Anthony Pompliano? Insane what this thing can do insane. And you start to say to yourself like, there's a compounding that's happening. And I think it's hard for people to see because they hear the anecdotes.
26:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:44 Anthony Pompliano? But it's like, okay, the AI agents is a big unlock just for one individual. Then if the AI agent is able to use a browser that's optimized for this and can very quickly go find things, answer things, do actions, et cetera. But then it's also talking to an AI agent that is inside the softwares that you're using. Like now you're starting to stack this stuff on top of it.
27:04 Speaker 02 Yep.
27:04 Anthony Pompliano? And when that occurs, again, it goes to the acceleration of a company that's able to do it. But I actually think a lot about, um, you can now accelerate the consumer. And this is a part that people haven't really been talking about yet, right? But if I'm able to do more things in a day, ideally, I should be able to make more money in a day. But also I should be able to consume more things from a monetary standpoint in a day. And so you get this like vortex of efficiency, speed, acceleration that starts to play out, where it's actually going to lead to higher revenues for a bunch of companies. It's going to lead to more personal income, more tax revenue, you know, all this stuff. How are you not long stocks, right?
27:49 Anthony Pompliano? Like, that's what I keep coming back to is like, what is the, I don't know, three plus year argument to be bearish on pretty much any asset? I just don't see it, but obviously there's some people who do.
28:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, so let's, let's, let's convert what you just said, because we, we, we spent five minutes on just how much AI is going through. So when, when I listen, um, I listened to a podcast today, I love Russell Napier. He's a historian on markets and there's two things I'm interested in. I do not care about recessions and I do not care about the tariffs. What I care about is the capital flows of the world changing, which I think are happening. And I think there's definitely, uh, an impact from the tariffs in terms of repatriation of currencies back to their homeland. That is going to happen, so the dollar will remain under pressure. It has impacts for yields, but in terms of the stock market, to get to your point,
28:43 Speaker 02 there are two driving factors in the AI economy for the stock market and for the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, we're in a position where the top 10%
28:54 Speaker 02 Are driving 50% of consumption. Consumption is two thirds of the economy. So it's really hard to have a recession for everyone listening, for every economist and every person saying recession's coming. If the top 10% are driving 50% of consumption and the stock market is even unchanged for a year, there ain't no problem. We have $170 trillion of net worth in the country, not creating an issue. When you add in the transfer payments and the entitlements, you're getting a lot of other money for retirees that are sitting at home that are a part of that 10%. So consumption is fine as long as the stock market's unchanged. On the flip side, you have, and profit margins are growing. So AI is going to continue to grow the profit margins. And so as I mentioned, you have this arbitrage. So it's really hard for the stock market to go down. Could it go sideways? Yeah.
29:38 Speaker 02 But I don't think that's going to happen for at least the next few years in terms of like the eating away from smaller businesses. And that's where you could be losing some of the pie. But even then, I don't think the stock market goes down. I just think it has trouble outperforming inflation. The 300 billion of capex means they're spending money for the AI. This is an AI economy. You're not losing jobs and you're growing capex to build out this massive infrastructure, which needs more power. So all of the noise that people are hearing, I agree with you. It's really negative. It's really bad place to worry about the next three years if you need to save money. If you've taken your money out and put it in the bank because you think Donald Trump's going to end the economy, you're betting against AI. You're not betting against Donald Trump. You are literally betting against something which is compounding at a pace that most
30:23 Speaker 02 people can't comprehend. Do not leave the stock market and put your money into cash if we're not going to have tariffs that are going to create the stock market to fall down 20%. I don't think that's going to happen. So.
30:35 Anthony Pompliano? Let's talk Bitcoin. Bitcoin rallied from $75,000 up to 103,000, 400, $5,000. I think people are like, okay, that drop was not fun, but we're back. And there's some really big numbers out there. How do you evaluate Bitcoin's performance relative to the US-China trade kind of clarity, the UK, the air quotes, deal? And kind of what's happening with the, the economic policy right now?
31:05 Speaker 02 So I believe based on, you know, I do this weekly video and I go through X and I take all of the institutions, governments, countries, sovereign wealth funds that are putting money in. The adoption is growing rapidly. It's very clear to me, these are not like minor things. And the reason that's important is I think people are finally talking about it as an asset as part of the puzzle. And this was very necessary. I needed to see that they were like, you know what, if I put two to 5% in, that's actually adding to my portfolio because it was uncorrelated during a very important time. And I think that's one of the most important messages is when it rallied back, it rallied back before the stock market
31:47 Speaker 02 did. And I think this year, there will be another leg. So even though I think we're going to get to all time highs, I think we're going to run into another issue. This one's going to come, as I talked about in the last couple of episodes, second half of the year, the deficit and the debt is going to become an issue and we're going to see rates move higher. We're in the sweet spot right now. So people hear this. When you go into a regime where people fear recession, this has gone on almost every year since 2009. Almost every year, we have a recession fear. And then eventually, what happens is the government stimulates and we rally back. We didn't get government stimulus, but we kind of did because, hey, tariffs rolled off. So we went from uncertainty to certainty. Couple of social media posts in there.
32:28 Speaker 02 Couple, couple posts by the market. Go ahead, go through it. But the problem is rates didn't go down when the market was going down and they've jumped back up and we have 30 year yields sitting near the highest level since 20 years ago. And the problem is this has a lot to do with the tariff situation in terms of the repatriation, which is a real thing. It is going to happen. There is no way that the world is not being divided and Asia has been a huge funnel for our rates being below where they're supposed to be. The second thing is, we actually have a problem now that the fiscal and Debt situation of the country, the way we started the year, based on the tax bill and based on everything, it's going to be worse. So at some point, rates are going to become an issue, not necessarily for the stock market to collapse. I think people are worried about
33:13 Speaker 02 it, but from the move of, let's say, four and a half in 10-year rates to five, when you come out of a recession, fear, rates going higher usually goes on with the stock market going higher. But at some point, probably around 480 in 10-year rates, 485, you'll start to see where stock bond relationship starts to shift. And I think pension funds, and this is an important point, retail might be buying, corporate buybacks are still going on, but pension funds are now fully funded. They're fully funded because of the rate move and because of the equity move. And I think they will be rotating more into bonds as time goes on because they're fully funded. And I think that's going to become an issue at some yield level.
33:50 Anthony Pompliano? The 10-year rate, where do you think that we need it to get to?
33:55 Speaker 02 When you say need it, what do you mean?
33:57 Anthony Pompliano? Oh, that's for you to determine.
33:58 Speaker 02 But the good side or the bad side?
34:01 Anthony Pompliano? I think there's a lot of folks who they know the administration is looking at that number, they want it down.
34:07 Speaker 02 Okay.
34:08 Anthony Pompliano? Right? The critics have magic numbers in their head of it going up and hitting certain levels. But I think for the administration and the US economy, is it sub 4%? Is it even lower than that? Where do you kind of see, you know, success look like?
34:27 Speaker 02 Okay, so this is the most important point for Bitcoin this year. And this is where I think the short squeeze is going to occur. So the correlation between the dollar and bonds is going to be critical in the second half of the year. All right, we've had a bounce in stocks, the dollar's barely budged, and rates have stayed higher. So when you kind of go through it, what was the problem this year? Stocks, bonds, and the currency went down at some point. That's going to happen again this year at some point, in my mind, it's going to happen episodically. The reason the bond market is so important for this conversation, there's other than doing outright QE, which would just be great for Bitcoin, I don't think they're going to be able to do that. I think when rates go higher, this will become a problem for people.
35:12 Speaker 02 I mean, we already have delinquencies, we already have credit card delinquencies and mortgage delinquencies up at very high levels. He is trying to help those people, the people that have been suffering. Now, he can't guarantee they'll have jobs. The tariffs are not going to guarantee that they're going to have manufacturing jobs. None of this stuff is going to happen, but I do think he's committed to doing this, which means somewhere behind the scenes, one of the policies that I think is going to have to happen is to figure out ways for their, especially housing market people, people that are in houses, to get some kind of rate which is lower. Mortgage spreads are at very, very high levels. They've been there really since COVID in the spending. And as Asian repatriation goes on, you're going to see more pressure on mortgages.
35:55 Speaker 02 And I just don't see how they're going to be able to deal with this. New home buyers, same problem. So I think what they're going to have to do is something on the housing side. It's not going to be pure QE, but just like the bank term funding facility was set up for SVB, I think they're going to have to do something. So that's the way I think this rate thing is going to go. I don't think it's going to stop the economy. And that's the main point I keep saying to people is in an AI-driven economy, higher rates does not affect the AI companies on the startup side, and it certainly doesn't affect the MAG7 at all.
36:27 Anthony Pompliano? No, and AI companies, I think you could make an argument, the higher the rates are, the bigger the advantage the AI companies have.
36:35 Speaker 02 In some ways, they, their equity multiple side comes under pressure. And this gets back into the common.
36:41 Anthony Pompliano? But their competitors have more expensive capital. You know what I mean?
36:45 Speaker 02 Like it pushes more people out of the business. And that's part of the issue is we have, I mean, bankruptcies are going up in the, in the country, but startups are going up too. It's a weird dynamic and that's why the AI.
36:57 Anthony Pompliano? But is it healthy? Like this is an interesting point. Is it healthy for us to have bad businesses go out of business and be replaced by better businesses, better built for the future? I don't want to see any entrepreneur have their business go out of business, right? There's like a, there's an emotional empathetic, you know, kind of a human component where when a business goes out, uh, jobs are lost. That's real people, real families, you know, real income. I get all of that.
37:21 Speaker 02 Yep.
37:22 Anthony Pompliano? But if you can kind of take a clinical look at an economy, no different than if you look at our organization, you know, there will be people who will say, oh, we shouldn't fire anybody.
37:30 Speaker 02 Yep.
37:30 Anthony Pompliano? But the best organizations, maybe they fire 10 or 20% of their staff every year, right? And they rotate in and they continue to improve. And, and is that kind of what is happening right now in the economy?
37:40 Speaker 02 So that's technically a recession and that's what's supposed to happen. I'd rather have a recession this way. This is the creative destruction that's going on. Let me ask you a question. How, how, how many hours a day do you use perplexity or any AI?
37:57 Anthony Pompliano? AI in general?
37:58 Speaker 02 Yep.
37:58 Anthony Pompliano? Hours, multiple hours.
38:00 Speaker 02 Now, if you didn't have a job, you could use it more.
38:02 Anthony Pompliano? Correct.
38:03 Speaker 02 Okay. If someone loses a job tomorrow, this is just my, my, as someone who went through this, I had to make a decision a year ago when our hedge fund shut down and I had to go, do I want to go back into the hedge fund industry? Or do I want to be an entrepreneur? And I made the choice to be an entrepreneur. And what I did is I went on Coursera. I took free courses on Python. I did five of them in a couple of weeks. And then I was able to manipulate AI in a way that I didn't think was possible. I could be doing anything I want right now. What I got was time. And I'm saying this to people, if they lose their job, they can't learn AI going to work every day.
38:42 Anthony Pompliano? A hundred percent.
38:42 Speaker 02 But if they go home and they're really committed and you and I believe one thing, I think the reason we get along so well, we're hustlers. We work hard. Like no one's going to stop me from learning anything. I'm 58 years old. I'm going to keep learning for the rest of my life because I love learning new things. You're the same way. Anyone who's out there who loses a job, go spend the time on AI, then go back and look for a job. You'll be in a much more powerful position. I guarantee you.
39:05 Anthony Pompliano? It's funny to be 58, but look 21. It's the math doesn't work, right?
39:09 Speaker 02 A lot of drugs.
39:12 Anthony Pompliano? Last thing I want to talk to you about is going forward, President Trump, his team just went on this big tour of the Middle East, tons of investment pouring into the United States. I think I saw Howard Letnick tweet and say $3 trillion was raised during the trip. And it's not all going to come in this year. It's over periods of time. But it does feel like at the same time, the US is hitting all these other countries with tariffs, we also are like, the US is open for business. And those countries are taking the United States up on that. Are we making friends? Are we making enemies? Does it matter for the economy? We live in a global world, but it does feel like a lot of these countries are actually doing a lot of business with us that maybe people didn't think they were going to be doing.
39:57 Speaker 02 Maybe I disagree with you a little bit on this. I, one, I don't, I don't trust any numbers I hear, especially if they're spread out over five years, 10 years.
40:08 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, I think that's fair.
40:09 Speaker 02 The net investment position of the United States, which is a real number, which anyone can go get on their own, is a negative $27 trillion.
40:18 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
40:18 Speaker 02 Meaning, the world has already invested in here a ton of money.
40:23 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
40:23 Speaker 02 So we're net against foreigners. They own 27 trillion of our assets and a net basis relative to what we own overseas. So if there's repatriation, which again, if the dollar is weakening, that means those investments, the bogey for being productive assets, it's getting harder and harder. So when people look at this, if the currency's going to weaken, which to me, I don't see a way that the dollar, because they've kind of set it up that they either want it, or they're doing it. We have a debt problem. We have a deficit problem. We're not going to deal with it. Dollar weakness does not happen overnight. It's kind of a gradual thing. When bonds mature, right now, there's
41:03 Speaker 02 no QE going on, but every week that the Fed is buying bonds that are maturing. They've got bonds maturing and then they, they're only doing 5 billion of QT. So they got to put money back into the things as they're getting cash back, they're maturing. The same thing's going to happen with Asian investors and with European investors. They own US bonds, but if they get... A hundred billion maturing over three months, maybe they're only putting eighty back in and twenty's going back home. I think it's a gradual process. And so I'm not as positive on the whole FBI thing. To me, the problem with this is the AI side. I think people don't realize
41:45 Speaker 02 how democratizing competition is globally for artificial intelligence. We talk about the startup community in the US. There's a startup community in every country on the planet, and we've dominated the tech world. So the reason coding has been our baby, of which if you go through the net investment, most of that is in the mag seven. If we believe the mag seven is going to be under pressure, then there's a repatriation that's happening solely from the revenues being redistributed around the globe because AI competition for a cursor and replit here, anyone in Europe can go build their own cursor and replit as well. And they can have some of the revenue there.
42:20 Anthony Pompliano? 100%. I mean, they makes makes complete sense. All right. Where can we some people to find you on the internet?
42:25 Speaker 02 They can find me on YouTube. They can find me on X. They can find me on Substack, Visser Labs. And again, for the institutional side, I did three papers this week on I did one on inference.
42:37 Anthony Pompliano? AI, yep.
42:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. And this was a big one. This was the inference moment to me. I'll do a little bit of it on the on the video there, but they can find it at 22vresearch.com. And that's where they can speak to me and get a hold of me with some of the salespeople there.
42:51 Anthony Pompliano? Amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. Last week was a big week for us. This week, I think, might be a bigger week. Let's see what happens. But appreciate all of you guys watching. We'll do it again next week.
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