#1533 Jordi Visser | Why Bitcoin Will Hit An ATH 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 market, world reserve currency outlook, how tariffs could impact markets, AI, machine learning, stock market, small businesses, and what a bitcoin future could look like.=======================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://figure.com/pomp or signup here to earn your $50 on their Exchange! Disclosures: https://www.figuremarkets.com/disclosures/=======================BitcoinOS is bringing Bitcoin into a new era. For the first time, Bitcoiners can access real DeFi across the entire crypto ecosystem, powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology. No more trusting sketchy bridges or giving up security. BitcoinOS reunites all of crypto around the chain where it all began. Follow BitcoinOS on twitter @BTC_OS and Be early to Bitcoin again.=======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony 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 awesome episode today with Jordy Visser. Jordy breaks down exactly what is happening in the market, why he thinks that you shouldn't be as bearish as you probably are. He explains exactly what's happening with the Fed, the Treasury, and the President, how tariffs are going to impact markets, where are some of the areas

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  of risk, how things like humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technology is playing into all of this. And then he even tells us some of the areas in the stock market that he's interested in that you may want to take a look at as well. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.

• 0:58Speaker 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.

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:48Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:32Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:16Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:59Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start the conversation, American exceptionalism. That is a term that Americans love and lots of people internationally, they hate it. They think it's egotistical. They think that this idea of the city on the hill, that America somehow, the paternalistic, you know, governor of the world, they think is bad. And one of the things that I always take out of this is the criticisms of American exceptionalism tend to be very emotional driven. They don't point to facts or data. They don't say, well, you're wrong about that. But I do think one of the big problems right now is that people are starting to point to structural changes that are happening in both the US economy and also how they perceive the impact of these tariffs. And they're saying, well, actually, we may have criticisms in the future where American exceptionalism will go away because

• 5:43Anthony Pompliano?

  of factual changes in the economy, not just emotions.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this week, so I consume a lot of content and it's very hard right now to listen to a podcast of the ones that I generally listen to on the markets from a macro perspective where the number one conversation isn't about the end of American exceptionalism. Because of the bonds, stocks and the dollar all weakened last week, everyone has jumped on this. So I have a couple of thoughts on it. Number one, this feels a lot like... When people said New York was dead during COVID, during the worst of it, it'll never come back. And that's just not the case. Is it back to where it was before COVID? No, is it as bad as it was during COVID? Obviously not.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So the first thing is, as is usual with the way people, especially in this day of social media and people putting stuff out, they try to put out something that'll get a headline. And I think American exceptionalism and saying it's over makes no sense. I do think that there's a reshaping of global trade. I do think there had been a massive amount of investments that were sitting in the US that were very exposed to what has happened. The administration wants a weaker dollar. They're getting a weaker dollar. If you own long-term treasuries in the US and you're living in Europe, two weeks ago or last week, it was down 10% for the week on something that's yielding foreign change for long-term bonds.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  So I think there's been a reshifting, which makes sense. I will say this, I've always believed as someone from a macro perspective that people underestimate what happened from 2007 to 2025 to put us in this position. The only way you have American exceptionalism as a theme is if the markets accrued so much market cap over that time period. There were two major things that happened that cannot be refuted. Number one, technology and innovation, the software boom was dominated by the Mag 7. They took no debt to do this and they've grown significantly. So the US is very tech-heavy, so it deserved to have that because of the innovation that everyone has benefited around the globe from. The second thing is, Europe's in a problem right now where they still depend on their energy to a great degree from Russia.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  The US was the largest net importer of energy back in 2007 and have turned it into one of the largest exporters of energy. So those two themes that dominate the history of progress, innovation and the power needed for the innovation. And as we go into AI, humanoids, robotics. It's deserved. We actually got there. So I don't think it's over. I just think there's been a repositioning and I think people are over, as usual, dramatically taking this to a level that is not realistic.

• 8:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I find that a lot of the analysis ends up being deterministic. They say, hey, or binary, right? They're like, this is true or this is not true. There's no probabilistic kind of analysis. And so right now, American exceptionalism, it like at risk of going away, 10%, right? You know, some small percentage chance. It's not zero, but it's not 95%, which I think many people would want you to think. And I think that that probability is very important here because it maybe it used to be 2% and it's jumped to 10%, but we're still at 10%, right?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I always laugh that sometimes people will say, oh, the recession, it's a 30% odds. I'm like, so 70% odds, we don't have the recession, right? Which always people kind of forget. Another thing that we've talked about, and I can't get this idea out of my head, is the United States as that global reserve currency, kind of top of the capital stack, you know, we're kings of the mountain. Could we be actually taking ourselves out of that position and moving more towards this like decentralized world where maybe there's a bipolar or tripolar type environment? And so there's not a single global reserve currency. Instead, we're moving more towards something where there may be a couple of different currencies based on regions that people choose to use?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  So this is a great question. And this is where I'm going to say to everyone who reads macro people, before you even ask this question, you said something really important. It's very binary right now. And I always say to people and they go, oh, the market's going to go down a lot further. I'm like, okay, so that means the fiscal deficit is going to get worse. So do you think it's a depression? No, I don't think it's a depression. I go, okay, I, I kind of view this as the problem we have here is a, it's binary to some degree, meaning if you're going to let the stock market fall and your debt to GDP is at such a high level and your fiscal deficit's there, you're going to end up in a problematic situation. I have looked and I needed a solution in my mind back in 2018 because none of the

• 10:22Speaker 02

  things we're talking about weren't already headed to this path. This has been going on for some time, so I needed to find something and I couldn't. Innovation was the initial thing that made me optimistic. The reason that your question about not being in this single place, I actually 100% believe the US has lost its reserve currency status. I still think it's the best currency in the world of all the currencies, but the reserve currency is being used right now and it's being weaponized. This is not the first time, meaning they've made the decision, they did it with sanctions. Sanctions were weaponizing things. So I think the world has been moving away from the dollar for quite some time. China's been doing it and they've been preparing for this moment. I think what people have to get comfortable with is that's what Bitcoin was the solution

• 11:07Speaker 02

  for me. The more macro people that I meet, if they can't talk about artificial intelligence from a knowledge basis, if it starts with AI is a bubble, okay, well then there's no reason to have a macro conversation. They generally, those same people have no interest in Bitcoin. So I think a decentralized capital stack, a decentralized world where people are migrating and it's not the people at the top. I keep saying this, there's a revolution that's happening and the reason I got interested in Bitcoin is because I can see the democratization of entrepreneurship through AI and I can see the democratization of wealth creation through this decentralized network, which is a digital economy, and there's no doubt in my mind that that's going to happen.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  So for the macro people that regurgitate historic books that they read about how the French Revolution ended this way and how this ended this way and it has to go this way, Russell Napier has been very smart about this. There's national capitalism happening, which in a sense is a breaking down of borders, which is really what I believe is happening and that's what has allowed Google and Amazon. They've kind of broken down the borders of the way trade was done and the way delivering stuff was done. I think it's happening on a global basis, I really do.

• 12:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the positive impacts to the everyday person as we move towards a decentralized world in many facets of their life? Is it just like the government doesn't have as much control and oversight over them? Do they get more kind of autonomy and agency? Like what impacts their life in particular?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  So that's a good question because at a dinner I was at last night, when I kind of described this democratization side, you're dealing with people that have kids and a lot of them haven't gone off to college yet. My kids have gone off to college. I said they don't have a lot of hope if they're in the healthcare field of rising up the ladder. It's when we, when we were down at a crypto event in Miami together, that was the thing I took is the reason people were so interested in Bitcoin was the hope side. I think if people kind of break down and they can get through the philosophical side of if none of us have work in 20 years because the abundance world gets here, can you have a happy life that

• 13:22Speaker 02

  way if you don't have to go to an office and you don't have to work? I think we've been kind of heading that path since 2007. Most people don't realize that about 50% of the people that of the jobs in this country, they're not in an office anymore. They're, they're not only gig economy people, the people riding the bikes, delivering stuff on the service side, but they're also people like me that don't want to work in a business anymore. I want to create content. I want to develop, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to go out and give people research to help them navigate this. But what I really want to give them is the hope that they have that this world is going to get better. So I think for the people that are having trouble, and I'll just again use my kids, that they have no hope of living in Manhattan on the salary that they make unless I help them.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  That's a pretty depressing thing. I think AI and if they had to work less and they had more time and the cost of things started to come down, and that's why you have to believe in a world of abundance. If inflation actually is something that people are very wrong on and the productivity boom is actually coming and they've forgotten that, then people benefit from prices coming down and it's the exact problem we've been in. If my daughters can live in New York City and afford to live here and they're still making what they make in the social work or the healthcare field, they'll be ecstatic. And I think we are going to get that. I think it's going to take a little less time, but AI and innovation is going to be the thing that drives it.

• 14:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Global debt to GDP is a huge story. I think over the next two or three years, you've been very instrumental in me understanding, I think, some of the nuances here. I think when we talk about AI, robotics, all that, like Bitcoin, five, 10, 15, 20 years, you know, you can be wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and it's super exciting and it's going to change the world, right? And I truly believe that. We've got some problems in the next two, three years. Describe a little bit as to this global debt to GDP number and what's going on there that's, you know, making that you pay attention to it.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this, this is, um, this is where people, I think, should, should write down some of these numbers or go read some of the reports. In fact, there, there are two research reports, one by the OECD, and you can get it online, which kind of, it's called the Global Debt Monitor and Global Debt Report. It'll take you through the numbers, some of the numbers I'll talk about. But then also, uh, there was a paper released by the IMF in January of last year, which went through the title of it, "How Did the US Work Out of World War II Debt?" And those two things will kind of highlight that we're in a similar situation that we were post-World War II, but not just the US. And this is the, the thing about the numbers. So, we're hearing that US Treasury yields are going higher. Okay? No one's got

• 15:53Speaker 02

  a front-page headline saying Japanese 30-year yields are rapidly going higher and are even at higher levels relative to history than the US. Uh, the UK, UK had a big problem in the long-term part of their curve back in 2022, uh, and they had to do something to kind of stop it from going higher. There's $100 trillion globally of debt at the public and corporate level. Forty percent of that matures before the end of 2027. So, the reason the bond markets are freaking out is not just because of what Trump is doing. I've said it here, I've written about it. I actually believe this is a better, more controlled way of dealing with an inevitable problem that was going to happen over the next three

• 16:36Speaker 02

  years anyway, because of the amount of debt that needs to be financed by someone putting money in. And in the last week, for the people who want to be bearish, liquidity has evaporated. It is the number one story that I'm fixated on when I do my YouTube video for this week to kind of show people what's happening. We've lost liquidity in the most liquid assets in the world. We've lost liquidity for junk bond deals, for leveraged loans. The banks got hung with two deals this week. Liquidity's dropped off. When you're levered this much, if the economy freezes, which is where we are, The reason I'm optimistic, and I hate to say this, is because it will turn into a depression very quickly unless we restart the economy, unless we're going to print.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  And there might be both of them, but I don't believe that we can sustain this kind of freezing of the economy with China for more than another month without having someone come to the market with liquidity, which I think will happen.

• 17:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the areas that you're paying attention to right now in the stock market in particular? And I went through this exercise recently. I asked perplexity, what are the three stocks that someone should buy right now if they're optimizing for resilience in any market condition and significant potential upside in the future? And I just wanted to see, you know, what is it going to do? And not so much what are the stock picks as much as like, what was the rationale? And it told me three stocks, told me Alphabet, Google, Johnson & Johnson, and Digital Realty Trust. And, you know, the kind of logic behind it was actually like, pretty okay. You know, it's just like, hey, I understand how somebody can make this argument. Maybe I agree or don't agree, whatever, but like, it makes sense. For you, when you see the market come down, if you go and you look at the one, three, five,

• 18:16Anthony Pompliano?

  10-year returns, I think it's something like, if the market draws down 15%, the forward five-year return on average is something like 66%. It's 185% over the next decade, right? These are, these are numbers that people get very excited about. But is it just like an S and P thing? Or is it like, hey, there's certain market segments that you actually are analyzing and saying to yourself, I'm most attracted to this because either drew down so much or the future prospects are so high? How do you think through this?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  So I'll take it on two things. Let's barbell, and everything that, in my opinion, people should think about is barbell. Barbell meaning, what are the steady kind of tortoise and the tortoise and the hare side? And then what are the fastest ones to come out of this problem? So the fastest ones to come out are always the innovation and growth stories that are going to sustain regardless of what's happened. That for me is not the Mag 7. I've been very negative on the group. I thought the valuations made no sense. And that's the reason on the innovation side for the fastest horse, I'll just keep saying it. I think once we get any kind of clarity on two levels, so I think over the next month, we will get clarity on either. The tariffs will be paused with China, will come to a deal,

• 19:24Speaker 02

  or we will be forced to put liquidity in to stabilize the markets while the dealing and the negotiating is going on. Either one of those scenarios, to me Bitcoin explodes higher. So I'm very fixated. New all time high by the end of the year? Oh, for Bitcoin, I think absolutely we'll be at new all time highs. And part of it is because I don't, not part of it, I don't believe a depression is, is the answer. I don't believe the S and P going of thirty five hundred is allowed because in the tax treaties he won't be in there. So on the innovation side, it's going to be geared towards that. The second thing is that I believe the embodiment side, the hardware side, the data center build out is going to happen.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Nvidia and stuff like that, they've got so much depending on the China US relationship that it's very hard for, I think, people to jump back into them. But for the memory side, I will continue to fixate on Micron, on SK Hynix, on stuff that is geared towards robotics, memory, to me, that will happen no matter what. One of the things that I think people should really start to realize, humanoids are a big part of kind of the competition between China and the US. Again, not just from a, hey, we're building stuff, but actuators, which are kind of the muscles of humanoids. With the tariffs we have on, China provides most of that and export most of it.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  So when people talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US, there are some things that are not manufactured here at all. And it would take a long time, it would put us back big time and humanoids, because I saw you posted something and talked about humanoids. They're a critical part of kind of the next five years and it will slow down with the tariffs. So that's why I don't believe it's going to happen. I would focus on the embodiment side. For the, for the slower things, the tortoises, I've talked about it before. The one thing that will not change is that our health expenditures will continue to rise as a percentage of GDP. And companies like McKesson, Cardinal Health, Cigna, ones that have already shown that they're using AI with inside their, their, their inefficient businesses to get better. I still think the healthcare providing side that is already incorporated AI will be in there.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  And if I throw one more for people, I think you're getting a discount on power names. The energy stocks, they were leading this year. Now they're back in the middle of the pack. For AI to still work second half of the year, we need more power and I think energy is going to be a big play. Now,

• 21:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Those are pretty interesting sectors, but you mentioned liquidity. And if something goes down, the US has to step in. Scott Besant gave an interview to Bloomberg, I think it was in Buenos Aires earlier this week. And he talked about essentially the Treasury taking the place of the Fed in terms of the tools that they have to control liquidity. And I was texting with a friend of mine and we're kind of joking back and forth of like, so let me get this straight. The president said, cut interest rates. The Fed said, no. So they said, we're basically going to break your will by we're going to slow down the economy. We're going to force you to cut interest rates. And now that you also have the Treasury stepping in and saying, and by the way, if you don't want to provide liquidity to the market, like we have our own toolbox.

• 22:24Anthony Pompliano?

  We got our own ammunition over here and we're willing to do it as well. And so it does feel like multiple groups are ganging up on the Fed. And the Fed's not going to be able to withstand this like assault. But talk a little bit about the Treasury in particular, what he's talking about here. And then do you think that this is, you know, kind of a leading indicator that the Fed is going to capitulate and have to cut rates and kind of provide more of this liquidity?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  So one of the things I want to make sure people remember and realize, I believe if the Fed were to cut rates in a surprising fashion, you'd get even higher moves in long-term yields. So I think the thing people have to just stop with is the rate cut side. The market would view cutting rates into short-term inflation, which is what tariffs will bring. They might bring long-term deflation, which I think you and I are on the same page with. But short-term, if you're going to immediately have, I mean, Drucke Miller said, well, it's a consumption tax. So it does move price, they're passing through prices. And if they don't pass through prices and small businesses go out. So the first thing is, I think if they were to cut, remember what happened in September.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  They cut aggressively and long-term yields are significantly higher than they were. 10-year yields were 360 when they began the rate cutting cycle and we're now at 435.

• 23:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain why that happens.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Well, at that time, I think people were very, very scared that this was going to be inflationary. And I think that's where the fears have been is inflation may not be a justified thing right now, but we kind of knew that Trump was in the lead. We kind of knew what was coming. People just extrapolated and said, well, if you're going to cut this aggressively when inflation is clearly about to take higher, this must be an election decision. We're going to go, it hasn't changed. So if people thought that that was about. Whatever it was, rates are higher. So I think the issue for the liquidity question, and it's really important for people to understand, the Fed is not going to do QE and come into the market and buy long-term bonds. The reverse repo facility is basically empty now. It's taken

• 24:25Speaker 02

  two and a half years for us to get there, but as of the other day, it's almost empty. Which means theoretically, just you can see the drying up of cash, excess liquidity in the system through a combination of QT and the drawdown in the reverse repo facility. We've gotten to a point where there's still cash out there, bank reserves, but what Besen talked about was trying to bring some stability and help, which did work for what is called the term premium for long-term rates to try and get it more under control. We don't know 100% whether this was all the basis trade unwind. We don't know whether this was some other type of levered position taking off, or whether it was foreign owners selling bonds.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  But the thing that we do know is they didn't want rates to go higher on the long end. And the only way to control that, and this is what they were trying to do, is say, okay, we're going to be around. The issue is to me, everyone keeps looking at these auctions. Just the fact that we're paying attention to auctions and rates are still not coming down. That's why liquidity is really evaporated inside the marketplace. And so when you have junk deals that don't happen, it's the longest stretch for loans, 14 days now, that we haven't been able to bring a loan to the market. There were a couple buyout bonds that were issued this week. The banks got hung with them. They own them right now. And so you're already seeing the freezing up that we last saw during COVID. And that's why liquidity is completely evaporated. The longer this goes,

• 25:50Speaker 02

  the more chance there'll be a negative GDP print in the second quarter, which I think is probably going to happen. But most importantly, and this was today, the federal tax receipts are released every day and you get to see what's happening.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  The numbers are starting to show that we're probably going to start to see some job losses. I think that would make

• 26:11Speaker 02

  The White House flinch again, so.

• 26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And when they flinch, they just start striking deals, they remove the tariffs, they create more certainty. You know, flinch, i- if you're playing poker, folding is pretty much the only flinching that you can really do. Here, it's more like they're playing chess, allegedly, right? Or, or some people, the critics will say they're playing checkers and, and the supporters will say they're playing chess. There's a lot of options of what they could do. What do you think is most likely if they do flinch?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  So I, I think one thing Donald Trump is the master of is something I call the second derivative of speaking. So second derivative in the economy is when you go from 3% growth to 2% growth. So the second derivative is moving down. His second derivative speech is, I don't care if the stock market goes down too. Okay, everyone, it's, it's a good, great time to buy. He just, we had a, we had a shift in the rate of change of kind of the words. I think you see it with China where he's actually, every time he speaks about China, like yesterday, he said, we're going to get a very good deal done with China. It's less now of the, think about where we were with Mexico. Think about where we were with Europe.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Think about where we were with China two weeks ago. I think the messaging out of his mouth has toned down. I think Besen, as I've said to people, has moved to the front seat of the car. Lutnik and Navarro have moved to the backseat of the car. I'd rather have Bussin, Besen in the front part of the car at this point to kind of keep everything.

• 27:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Is the language changing because China hitting back hard is loosening the language? Or do you think that it is, you start out really tough, they start out really tough, you take a step towards the center, they take a step towards the center and like you eventually, you, you know, you're going to meet, you're going to do a deal, but you have to like, in a weird way, give a indirect olive branch of loosening your language so that now they don't have to lose face by showing up for a conversation? Because over a couple of weeks, you're like de-escalating?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  All right, here's my opinion on this in a

• 28:19Speaker 02

  a mathematical, political way. Okay. I have said to people that I believe if you take an approach of analyzing how popular Donald Trump is, he's arguably the most popular politician of our time. And before everyone throws things, whatever, his base, no matter what he does, loves him. Hundred percent. So forty percent of the country loves what he is. I think when he started backpedaling a little bit, and this happened last weekend. It's amazing how much can happen, but on Friday, we, you know, we do this. Saturday morning, there was something saying, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna pare back tariffs on Tim Cook's goods.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  And I'm telling you, the, the base was not happy about that. They want him to just continue to be aggressive. So I think for him, he has to kind of play this line of his base is not stock market. And then he's got the stock market where he knows his base gets hurt if the stock market just continues to go down. So he's kind of been put in this position when they lost the bond yields. And until the bond yields moved, there was no kind of change. So I think bond yields became the trigger point for him to kind of do the second derivative of talking. And to me, knowing that we are down at the levels we are in the stock market because of the tariffs, people should have looked at the possibility that the lows are in happen when the second derivative changed, because that's what drives markets. We know there's going to be a recession.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  The question is, what will the economy look like in December of, of next year? And if the economy is growing at two percent and we have a negative two percent in Q2, the market's going to start discounting that and it's going to be a buy on dips as opposed to a sell on rallies. And that's where I think the secondary showed up. So I think it's a very nuanced thing, but I think he needs to kind of straddle, be aggressive for my base and help them, which he's going to do with the tariffs. And at the same time, not get too aggressive that it ends up being a depression.

• 30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Ryan Peterson from Flexport. He is, him and Craig Fuller, I think are the two I'm paying the most attention to. Craig has FreightWaves, kind of Bloomberg or data for a supply chain. And then Ryan has a freight forwarding business where he really understands, especially with China, a lot of the details there. Ryan had this great thread where he basically was talking about, you know, thousands, if not millions of small businesses are under threat. Here's kind of how this all works. What did you take away from that whole kind of analysis?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's really important because this is, I think, part of the unintended consequences that you just don't know the answer to. Part of the problem with small businesses who, let's say, buy their, let's assume they sell toys or apparel, of which there's a lot of them. I mean, I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and you walk down the street, there's a lot of really cool little shops where entrepreneurs have set up kind of these goods and they obviously get almost all of them from China. The problem is Walmart sells lesser goods that are cheaper, but Walmart doesn't have to raise prices. They treat these events as something where they can put small businesses out. What Ryan wrote about in this thread, which was a great thread, is just,

• 31:31Speaker 02

  we're starting to see the small businesses be in trouble. They can't afford this. They will have to start laying people off. I've heard it from friends in the last week who do small business lending, individuals who do lending throughout the country to these places, and they just said, they're frozen right now. They need more money because they still need to make payroll. So if you're not selling anything and your costs are about to go through the roof, which is kind of the dynamic that's happening, and you don't know what it's going to look like three months from now, because nothing's being shipped across and you don't know what your cost is going to be, small businesses who may not have enough money saved up and they might live paycheck to paycheck with a little bit of money coming in, a lot of those small businesses are

• 32:14Speaker 02

  in trouble. And I think his thread kind of highlighted that this needs to end soon. He didn't say it was wrong. He just said, if you keep this going on, you're going to start losing small businesses. That's why I think the first time that job losses show up in data, which we still have not seen, even on the weekly job loss claims. I think that's where the next second derivative will be. We're still waiting to see when a China conversation will happen, but I think that Ryan's thing is very important because trade is a critical part of everything in this economy.

• 32:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I kind of think of it like, you know, when kids are experimenting with each other, what the pain thresholds are, right? And it's like, all right, I'm gonna do this thing to you and I'm gonna keep doing it and go harder or press something into your arm or whatever, and then you just yell when it hurts, right? And you kind of start real slow and then somebody like, all right, all right, stop. That feels like what the economy does, right? Is the economy can absorb some degree of change, uncertainty, disruption, quote unquote, pain. And then at some point, people start yelling uncle.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And what I think you're pointing out is bond yields yelled first, jobless claims is gonna be the second, like uncle.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:25Anthony Pompliano?

  But actually, we're okay so far. Like, no one's yelling uncle. But when that comes out, then it's a feedback loop and the administration will say, okay, we hear them yelling, let's change, let's de-escalate, let's, you know, kind of move. Now, is that their grand plan or do they just have to respond? I'll leave that up for the political people to debate because frankly, it just depends on what side of political aisle you're on, is how you view that. But it does feel like, in a weird way, there's an elephant in the room and no one wants to ask. And I'm gonna ask the question, probably gonna get, people are gonna come at me for it, but it's a important question. I've said for years, I'm on record, over and over again, 50% of jobs come from small

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  businesses is the backbone of America. I think people get, I'm pretty pro-America, I'm pretty, when possible, bi-American versus not. It's not always possible, I get that, right? But generally, being, you know, kind of supportive of the country, I think is a good thing.

• 34:28Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of businesses that I've seen online posting videos. I make this blah, blah, blah, whatever. Some portion of them, and I'm gonna say it's less than 50%, but some portion of them, you start to ask yourself, are you actually kind of a, like a Zerp phenomenon? And we saw this in tech. That's the only reason why I think it came up, right? Is there was a bunch of people who had accessed the cheap capital and they started companies that actually weren't good companies.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:52Anthony Pompliano?

  There wasn't true demand for their product. There wasn't true, um, I would even argue, ability to build the thing that they were building. They built it really badly. Um, and what we saw was that injection of capital led to an explosion of these companies. And then they all kind of subsided and they went out of business. And there's been analysis, people have been like, hey, that was a Zerp thing. But that's kind of the game of venture capital, right? Is the people who are providing the capital know that some large portion of them are gonna go out of business. The founders are, in a weird way, trying to make asymmetric bets. And so they expect some of them not to work. And so like, it kind of smooths over because everyone's like, hey, this is the game. Small businesses, that's not the game. Small businesses are very much, uh, this is, you know, the operator's personal income. They're employing usually family members or friends,

• 35:36Anthony Pompliano?

  people in their community. Like, it's a whole different ballgame. But I do wonder, maybe it's 5%, maybe it's a bigger, I don't know. But in the small business bucket, are there certain companies that got created that, when you don't have economic downturn, when you have cheap capital, like, all of that stuff allows for them to persist, and now all of a sudden, it's kind of like the tide goes out. And I guess I see some of these videos and I'm just like, I get how you could make money. Is that really a business that should exist for a long period of time, given where we are in the technology cycle, et cetera? Like, how do you think through, you know, again, it's kind of this like, almost like ruthless question of, are there certain businesses

• 36:18Anthony Pompliano?

  that are gonna go out of business that were really like a Zerp phenomenon?

• 36:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And you can emotionally say, I want all of those small businesses to be successful, but also be realistic about, not every business, not every business idea is a good idea, right?

• 36:33Speaker 02

  So this...

• 36:36Speaker 02

  You know, we don't really prep for this. We just kind of talk. What you just asked, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna be a little bit economic history side here and give people someone

• 36:48Speaker 02

  to go into chat GPT on and just ask that. So Joseph Schumpeter wrote a book called Creative Destruction and he's the economist on creative destruction. So there's two parts to your question. And again, I mentioned that in, in 2018 and then finally in 2020, I made a big step towards why Bitcoin was important in the world. And the reason was Joseph Schumpeter said that creative destruction creates all these issues. And if you just bring up what he said, he basically goes through the steps that happen and it takes time. But every time there's new innovation, it destroys other businesses. So let's just take your example.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  I'm sure everyone, and I do this where I live, I know small businesses in my town in Williamsburg and I love them and I will pay extra money to buy 100% on the butcher there. You do the same thing. I do with bookstores. I go into the independent bookstore. I know it's more expensive. I can go on Amazon. Exactly. But it's like, hey, I like these people. So on a rainy day, if you're home and you sit there or if wherever you're buying and you're like, oh, I, I want to get this tomorrow and I order it on Amazon. No matter how much I want that small business to make it, Amazon's on my phone and I get to do it. And so no matter what, at the country level, whether it's DoorDash and not going to a restaurant or and buying, you know, you order from DoorDash, it comes there. My building is flooded with kids that that do that. I prefer to go out and buy the food, come back, make it myself. But it.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Old school.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  You like to make your own food? Blasphemy.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  This, this. Dara said, give you his money.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  All right, I'm making you food. You and your wife come over next week and I'll make you guys some dinner, okay? Then we can have a proper conversation about the food that I'm making. So Schumpeter's path of creative destruction eventually leads to the government getting bigger and bigger, leading to populism. These are all things he wrote about in the 1940s, and the reason was because the job of the government is to help the median person in the country. So when the distribution of wealth gets bigger and bigger because of technology, they have to do more printing, they have to raise the debt. He literally wrote all this until it leads to populism and some sort of an eventual revolution. And so he forecasted exactly where we are, if you break down what you said. We've destroyed businesses to where

• 39:11Speaker 02

  I think 70% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck. Now, that doesn't mean, like literally, they can't pay for anything, but it means if they went out of work and lost a job for a few months, they wouldn't be able to survive because they have a lot of debt and they haven't gone through it. Businesses, small businesses are no different. I respect people that try to fight through and don't want to work for Home Depot and run a hardware store, but we know they don't make that much money because we know how Home Depot has taken away from their business. So I, I, I believe what you said, the Zerp thing is a big part of it, but I believe Zerp was put in place to try and help people. It's getting harder and harder. And so the only answer I can see is either we do what Donald Trump is doing from a tariff perspective to try and help.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  At the same time that Bitcoin and the decentralized situation gets better, the currency is getting weaker, which will help the trade deficit. He's just trying to balance this out a little bit. I think the end result for people is that Bitcoin slash, I mean, gold is the same thing. I think people just need to invest a little bit of their money in there and they have to hope at this point that they can have cheaper prices in the future from technology and that Donald Trump and government is going to try and help them again, get us to that point. It's not an optimistic scenario, but it's the one that's happened.

• 40:30Anthony Pompliano?

  The reason I bring it up is because, um, I have a number of friends who own small businesses and most of my friends, I think, run businesses that they've got a shot to be able to kind of weather the storm and they'll figure it out. And some of them frankly operated in other industries and then they've gone into these markets. But there's a couple of friends where, you know, we've kind of started to have the conversation of like, should you fight the trend? Or are you actually better, hey, get this thing to keep running for as long as you can, but you should be looking for what is the tailwind in another industry that you can actually, you know, kind of position yourself for. And it's hard, right? It's very difficult. And I always joke that whenever I talk to people in the finance world or the tech world, and they're like, I'm working hard. I'm like, you're

• 41:12Anthony Pompliano?

  working hard, maybe hours wise, right? Or whatever, but like, you're not going into a machine shop, right? You're not going into, and you name some of these things and you go and you look at these businesses. And, you know, I think I've said in one of our previous conversations, I mean, I went over the last two years to a bunch of these industrial manufacturing businesses, pretty much all over, like the eastern part of the United States. And one of my biggest takeaways were, in tech, if I want to change something, engineer can make some changes. And if we have enough traffic, we very quickly, within a day or two, we know, was that a good idea? Or was it not? Do we roll it back? Or do we keep it? In these businesses, it may be, hey, we should order our different materials. Okay, it's gonna take three weeks to get here. Right? Now, we gotta put into the product. Now, we gotta go put it on the shelves and see if people

• 41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  will buy it. Right? And so like, that may take months. And the feedback loops just aren't nearly there. And so, one of the benefits is right now, some of the tariff stuff hasn't hit some of these businesses. But also, any changes that they're making in preparation, they're not gonna know for a couple of months whether it works or not. And so I do wonder, you know, again, is that like another point of like crying uncle? So you get the jobless claims, but then if all of a sudden, people start saying, wait a second, my business is going out. That feels like a pretty, you know, material moment where, and again, Ryan was talking about businesses that are sourcing things in China, specifically.

• 42:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Creative destruction, maybe there's other places that pop up in the world and say, hey, we can do this too. He outlines a lot of reasons why he doesn't think that'll happen. But I think that, you know, it's not just like, hey, steel or, you know, these really large products. We're also talking about, you know, I'll use it affectionately like trinkets, right? People who are trying to sell things for five, 10, 15, $20 that they're sourcing from outside the country. That's a big part of the US economy.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  So one of the best X posts I saw in the last week and a half was from someone who just is part of Donald Trump's base. And he was very, as a small business owner, and he basically started off with, I'm 100% supportive of what you're doing. He complained, and again, this is the complaint that shows up. You didn't give me any time. If you would have said by the end of this year, this is where the tariffs are going to be on China and nothing can come from there. He's like, I can work with that. I'll figure it out. But to immediately put the tariffs up, I can't work with that. I have no certainty. So I have no demand coming in and I don't know what to do with my business because I won't be in business if a year from

• 43:39Speaker 02

  now we're at 125%. So I think the, the, the logic of seeing someone that literally was like, I agree with what you're doing. I think this has to happen. As a small business person, I think the way you're doing it without giving us time is wrong. And that's why I believe if the base is saying that, as small businesses, as opposed to

• 43:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You get the de-escalation.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I, I think that is a way that if you come up with a scenario, it's like, okay, let's take it down. But the tariffs are going to ratchet up over time. China's going to do foreign direct investment in the US of X millions of dollars. I don't think people know the numbers again. China, last year, we imported $460 billion from China. By itself, it can't put the economy into a recession with even 145% tariffs. I mean, it's not going to kill the economy, but can they ratchet that down and say, you're going to buy this, we're going to do this? Of course. And that's, I do believe that will happen because of those posts from the base. I think the base is making logical requests. It makes sense. And I think this was negotiating leverage. I really do.

• 44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 44:43Speaker 02

  They can find me on my YouTube and Substack at Visser Labs or J Visser Labs. And for institutional people, they can find me at 22V Research. I'm really focused a lot. If you're looking for figuring out how to make money coming out of this, which is what I think people should be doing now, even if the market were to make another new low, it's time to be offensive because the second derivative of policy policy words has shifted. And we could go down in the S and P for a day under the low. And then I think they would be forced to come back because when the liquidity drives up in a levered Ponzi scheme, I hate to say it all the time. They have to come with liquidity and they don't want to come with liquidity. So we're going to get some kind of a bounce here. They can find me at 22V on the institutional side.

• 45:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Thank you so much. I learn something every time. We'll do it again next week.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Appreciate it.