#1538 Jordi Visser | Will Institutions Drive the Next Bitcoin Surge?

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 with bitcoin, Wall Street participation, why the global monetary order is shifting, heading to the bitcoin standard, robots, tariffs, and how Jordi sees the future unfolding.========================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/=======================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today, we've got a very special episode. I'm traveling. I'm not in a suit and tie. I know, calm down. I'll be okay and I will be back. I promise next week. But today, we've got a conversation with Jordi Visser. In this conversation, we are going to go through what's happening with Bitcoin. Is it decoupling from stocks?

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  How should you think about Bitcoin and all of the brand new ways that Wall Street can participate through all of these public companies? Jordi gets into why he thinks the global monetary order is actually shifting, and we are headed towards the precipice of the Bitcoin standard. On top of that, we talk about robots. We talk about emerging markets. We talk about the Bridgewater memo that is out there that is very bearish, and Jordi shares what his thoughts are on it. And then, of course, we talk about the economic policies, tariffs, and how he sees the future unfolding. I always enjoy talking to Jordi because he has very unique views, and today is no different. So here's my latest conversation with Jordi Visser.

• 1:19Speaker 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.

• 1:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:08Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start the conversation would be Bitcoin on the precipice of becoming the Bitcoin standard. We've obviously seen the US dollars as the global reserve currency for many, many years now. I think people have been very excited about gold going up in recent weeks, but I think you are seeing Bitcoin in this kind of transition into a decentralized, resilient, digital world as something to really pay attention to. Explain how you're thinking about this right now.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, and I did hear your interview, and I definitely have a different view on this. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna spend normally, I try to only answer your questions for about two minutes, but this one's gonna take a little bit longer because I'm gonna take people on, on a history lesson because there's something unique that I haven't heard people really talk about. So let's start with the global reserve currency. I think everyone knows that for the US, it started after World War II, but there's really only been two global reserve currencies. So this has been an experiment. It's just that it was first the British pound, then it became the US dollar. But the new experiment, which is completely new, is to get off the gold standard. So this is an un-gold-backed global reserve currency. So you and I have talked about whether the global reserve currency, it's lost its status, and I've said I believe it has.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  So this is where Bitcoin fits in. So 1971, unbacked global reserve currency. 1985, we have the Plaza Accord. 1997, we have the Asian financial crisis. 2008, we have the financial crisis. Then we have COVID, then we have the largest bank run in history in the fastest amount of time, Silicon Valley Bank. So if you go back over history, which all macro people do, and you look at what's happened to this concept of the global reserve currency or any kind of situation where debt to GDP and the fiscal deficit gets to these levels, it ends in depression, it ends in deflation, it ends in war, it ends in revolution. And this is why most macro people get bearish. Something else happened in 1971, which feeds into the Bitcoin standard.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  That, or 1976, this is when the personal computer was born. So this was the beginning of the digital economy. And so when people talk about the Bitcoin standard, and I hear an economist talk about it, they're always fixated on this history of currencies and things like that. And when is Bitcoin gonna take over? There's a very different situation that's going on here, which is, right now China and the US are the two biggest economies in the world, and everyone's talking about how the US dollar is so weak. The Chinese yuan is unchanged this year versus the US dollar, which means it is also weak. The US has a trade deficit of about 470 billion with China. Europe has a massive trade deficit of close to 300 billion with China. This is not just one story. This is the two biggest economies in the world having a pegged currency,

• 6:29Speaker 02

  and the yuan cannot be the global reserve currency because of trust. What has happened so far this year? Is people are starting to realize that I don't trust treasuries anymore. When you start talking about a Mar-a-Lago accord, a restructuring of debt, when you start talking about a super bond, you're starting to lose trust. And it seems like the administration wants a weaker dollar and doesn't care as much as it did about the reserve currency because it's it's got other attachments to it that make it worse. The reason Bitcoin fits into this is after the personal computer, there was the internet. After the internet, there was the mobile phone, there was cloud. We've had the digital economy that has grown violently. And so right now, if you had euros in your pockets and we were sitting across from each other in New York

• 7:12Speaker 02

  and I had gold in my pockets and we went out to Starbucks, we'd have a hard time buying what we wanted to buy, trying to exchange those two things. If we had PayPal, we could transfer dollars into stable coins, dollars into Bitcoin, Bitcoin into stable coins, and we could pay there with PayPal. What has happened is there's two reasons why this is the beginning of Bitcoin. We will no longer have trust from the globe. So there's one thing that Bitcoin was created with a lack of trust on banks, a lack of trust on the governments. But now the governments of the world don't trust the reserve currency status and there is no replacement. So the birth of Bitcoin has to come from the realization that you cannot transact payments with gold.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And all of the countries in the world are fighting to make stable coin a payment system. And I don't think most people realize you can transfer Bitcoin to stable coins and pay for stuff already around the globe.

• 8:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, does that mean that they will simply buy a Bitcoin and hold it and it becomes a global reserve? Or do you see this as they're going to use Bitcoin for bilateral trade? And the promise of kind of electronic peer-to-peer cash actually comes to fruition? And it's the nation states that drive that because they're not doing the micro payment to buy coffee for $5. They're doing very large transactions where actually maybe Bitcoins, uh, security, um, and transaction volume and things like that, uh, may lend itself to be much more, uh, kind of effective?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think you just described it perfectly. And this is why when, when Bitcoin started, everyone figured the governments would never allow it to happen. Well, the governments didn't want to. Lose that control. Well, they've lost it. It's happened. So stable coins are growing. Bitcoin is up to the fifth largest asset. We've talked on here repeatedly. It will be the second biggest asset by the end of the end of the year behind gold. So I think the government's already lost that fight. Now the administration's because of both democracy in the US, which is going to force everyone to do it. But also what you've seen is stable coins are now becoming a threat around the globe because 99% of the stable coin is backed by dollars. So at this point, exactly the way you described it, transactions will happen this way. There'll still be dollars. There'll still be, you know, currencies that go because the government need that.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  And no, at no time does technology completely take over. There's Uber, but there's still taxis. So these are parallel systems to me that are just going to continue to shift to the digital economy. It'll just take longer than what people expect.

• 9:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, what does this shift look like, right? Because there's some nuance here, maybe that the US dollar is the global reserve currency that United States benefits from having that. Foreign central banks have been buying lots of gold. The US has gold. If we revalued it, it'd be a lot of gold. Do we sell existing assets and then start to convert that to Bitcoin? Do you hold the assets that you already have on your reserves and Bitcoin is kind of like an additive thing? It's kind of like almost like an option to the upside and then you begin using it for transactions. You know, it's impossible to predict the future, but how do you see this maybe most likely playing out? And I ask that not just from a sense of like, what's going to happen to Bitcoin? Is Bitcoin going to go up in price? Which I think people are getting excited about, but also what's going to happen to, you know, treasuries and gold and these other assets that maybe

• 10:18Anthony Pompliano?

  are going to become less popular in this worldview?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that that's the point where I think we always have to put in a context, the number that every person who believes in Bitcoin knows, which is there's more than 500 trillion assets in the world and the value of Bitcoin is still $2 trillion. So you don't need to really have anything considering money supply grows around the globe at, say, 3% to 5% a year. And everyone thinks that it's only money supply which grows Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been driven a lot by money supply in the past solely because when you look at a liquidity measure, the S and P 500 has done the exact same thing. This year now, we're sitting at a point where US technology stocks are still down significantly for the year and Bitcoin is now up for the year.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  This has been the transition that needed to happen to get the wealthiest people because we know that it's very concentrated in terms of the 500 trillion. So what I think is going to happen this entire year. Is that gradually people will be transacting and reducing their holdings in other securities or money or bonds, whatever it is, but I think they're all underperforming inflation at this point. So the debasement story that's been there, I actually think is going to get worse from here. I think there's been a loss of trust in what is happening for corporations on the public side because they are very dependent on the trade with China. I mean, the rare earth story is a real story. Tesla just announced that they're going to have

• 11:43Speaker 02

  to slow, maybe stop production on humanoids. You just did an interview with Chris Camillo on humanoids. It was a great interview. No one talks about the fact that you can't have humanoids production without rare earth and China banned rare earth trade. So the interconnectedness of and the need for fighter jets, for iPhones, everything that's dependent on rare earth has kind of slowed down. So I think we're at the point where people are going to not have trust that this won't happen again. And Bitcoin is a technology and an innovation that has no need on the tariffs. It is not impacted by it. So I think you're going to see Bitcoin outperform and then all the momentum will start to fit into it when technology stocks are not working because people want growth.

• 12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So you mentioned that Bitcoin is up on the year, technology stocks are down. I think one of the big questions that I've been getting in private, I've seen people talking on television, and now it is even seeping into like the online discourse is will Bitcoin break out? Will it decouple from the stock market, from tech stocks, et cetera? I think in moments of illiquidity or kind of liquidity crisis, all correlations go towards one. And so people start to say, oh, Bitcoin's not this safe haven. Gold was going up. Gold's the safe haven. The Bitcoiners are idiots. They're wrong. Now it seems like people are changing their tune. And so how do you look at the relationship between Bitcoin and maybe stocks broadly, but also these technology stocks and like, you know, is it breaking out? Is

• 13:07Anthony Pompliano?

  it decoupling? Is it important that it decouples? And kind of like, what should people be paying attention to over the coming months?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, well, clearly in some measurement, the decoupling has already happened just by the fact that it's up and tech stocks are down. But here's what I think has happened this week, which was very important. U.S. retailers went to the White House and the very next day, we saw

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And easing in, let's say, the rhetoric towards China. And actually, the first time we heard the administration say they could see tariffs being lower and they don't envision them being up here for longer. So the whole theme for this week for the market where stocks rallied has been, okay, so I guess there will be negotiation. I think the better way to think about it, and this is where it fits in with the decoupling. If you ask me how the rest of the year is going to play out, we're not going to settle the China-US trade thing in the next two weeks. I think investors are getting comfortable with the thought that earnings are going to be weaker for now. The economy is going to be weaker for now. By the end of the year, I think it'll be okay. And so stocks can have a bid underneath

• 14:16Speaker 02

  it. That means a floor has been put in. We now know that they're not trying to take it to a depression. The Main Street versus Wall Street thing has turned. I will reiterate that the low was made the Monday after Howard Lutnick talked about millions of people screwing screws into iPhones, because that was a ridiculous statement. And I think it's become something of the bottom in the market. And so for Bitcoin, everyone wants to make money and they want to invest. Bitcoin is going to go higher solely on short covering basis. But since it has a passionate base that doesn't sell in down moves, I bought more in the down move. I don't know if you did, but I took advantage of the fact that it went down because I thought this year it would double in price. Well, now my expectations are starting to get higher, because once it does break out, I think it's going to

• 15:01Speaker 02

  force people who are stuck not worrying that the market's going to collapse. But I don't know how people are going to jump back into equities. If the economy and the uncertainty is there, Bitcoin will do well with the uncertainty.

• 15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So we saw the, I think it was the Walmart executive team, a few others, they all started talking about the shelves will be empty. And there's this great tweet that I sent you where this guy, maybe we can even pull it up. He was talking about like, America having full shelves is actually the promise of America. Like, we don't have scarcity, right? We have abundance. And maybe that has lent itself to the consumerism of America. But is this idea that the retailers are like, they're not threatening, but they're kind of maybe fear mongering a little bit with like, the shelves will be empty? Do you think that that's actually a potential path forward? Or is this just a way to convince the administration? Like, hey, let's back down, deescalate, and let's get back into a regime that maybe they're more comfortable in?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So unfortunately, the reality is when you become dependent on one country for the majority of your manufacturing, if on the one side you're saying we need to rebuild the manufacturing base, well, that means the manufacturing is outside the country. And if China has most of it, unfortunately, the easiest way to, to, to, let's say, verify what they're saying is you go look at what we talked about last week, the port data. There's nothing coming in from China right now. The numbers are staggeringly slow in terms of the ships. And as you look at the ports, they give you kind of the three week look forward of what's going to be there. The drop off is just dramatic. So there will be empty shelves. There's no doubt about it. Now, will it be every shelf is empty? No, because there's plenty of things we make in the U.S. There's plenty of things we get from other places.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  But if you like a certain, you know, good, it's already started to show up even in Amazon and stuff where you can't get things or there's a long lead time. So unfortunately, this does have a little bit of COVID to it. It's not as bad as what they were saying. But unfortunately, and I didn't mention this last week, but this is something I did on my video, you know, within the market, the inflation forecasts for months, meaning three months ahead, you can, you can bet on them, there's swap markets on them. They have the annualized CPI for the next three months at over 5%. And this is one of the reasons why the pressures is increasing on the administration, because if the shelves are empty and you've already seen auto parts, everybody has said they

• 17:22Speaker 02

  have to raise prices, snowboard prices, everything. In the long run, it's deflationary. In the short run, how can an administration deal with inflation being annualized and see the headlines of, hey, it was 50 basis points this month, it was 40 last month, it was 30, that's where these estimates are. So I think the pressure, not only from the retailers, but also from the inflation stuff, really started to become knowledgeable to them.

• 17:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you agree that inflation would go that high? Like, from my perspective, the tariffs are deflationary, definitely long run, but even in the shorter run where you're seeing consumer, you know, consumption pattern shift, you're seeing pullback and that kind of economic slowdown, you also are seeing certain prices of gas and other kind of major staple stuff crashing as well. How do you look at the inflation outlook? And, you know, let's say that we just froze in time right now, no policy changes moving forward, what would your expectation of inflation be over the next, you know, I don't know, six months?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Well, what I said is the next three months, you will absolutely have higher inflation. Now, that'll make headline CPI year over year tick up. So it's down around 2.4, 2.3%. It will go back above three under this scenario because of the drop offs that are coming and the higher month numbers. After we get through the three months, we'll have to see. But the problem is with inflation, someone needs to eat it. If you're not bringing goods in, or if there's tariffs, it is a consumption tax. So it goes higher. So yes, consumption comes down, but the problem is the businesses either go out of business because they still need to sell them. They can't take the loss and eat it themselves. Someone has to take the loss. So consumption does go down and that in the long run ends up being deflationary.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  But in the short run, businesses need to pass through if they're small businesses. They don't have a choice because they can't lose money.

• 19:09Anthony Pompliano?

  If we go and we take a look at maybe the traditional economic environment, the outlook, it's pretty bearish. I think people are trying to figure out where do they go? They're hoping that there is change with the administration economic policies. But simultaneous, it feels like if the traditional world is becoming bearish and pessimistic, the Bitcoin world is becoming optimistic and enthusiastic. And we see that with, you know, strategy continues to buy Bitcoin. Meta planet continues to buy Bitcoin. We have a new entrant into the market in this 21, which is Cantor SoftBank and Tether coming together. Brandon Lutnick has been very instrumental, I think, in kind of organizing this. Jack Ma is going to be the CEO. How do you look at those two forces?

• 19:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this a world where like the pessimism in the traditional world pushes people to Bitcoin? And at the same time Bitcoin is giving the market more abundant opportunities to invest. And therefore that just like accelerates the capital flow into the market?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  With, without a doubt. I mean, you, you mentioned the monetary side. We haven't talked a lot about all the stablecoin bills and all the things that are happening. The stablecoin issuance by banks, the fact that banks are going to have a part of this. Like you have to remember there were two parts of this. The US was both trying to. Get rid of some of the benefits of the global reserve currency, but at the same time, it was trying to impact the crypto side and be the leader in crypto. So you don't want to fade the government on one side. Why would you fade it on the other side? So I've said before, and I'll keep saying it. Bitcoin is the S and P 500 of the future of a world of AI and crypto. So AI disrupts all businesses. It gets very hard in the capital structure to make a long-term investment in any company, in my opinion, five years out.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  I don't care what company you have today in software that is built on code. If you can tell me with certainty that AI will not gobble up your business over the next five years, I think they're lying. And so five years from now, how do you value something with a PE? The way it's been done in the past. The great thing about Bitcoin is the negative that I heard from people. When I talk to baby boomers or wealthy people running RIAs or family offices in their seventies. And I say, do you have Bitcoin? Their answer, and I'm sure you've heard this before. I don't buy anything if I can't value it. Well, I don't think any company now that runs a business can be valued in a world of AI accelerating going forward. So now you're dealing with equal footing.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Well, I have no value on one side, but I have an asset that's only $2 trillion in terms of the S and P 500. I have one over here that's $50 trillion. I think Bitcoin and crypto, because of the innovation side, the global payment side, the fact that the reserve currency is ending and the payment systems are going to explode around the globe. Bitcoin is going to stop in most of the capital in terms of people that are excited. And as the price of Bitcoin goes higher, it will bring more capital in.

• 21:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's so fascinating that Bitcoin, even though now, you know, between the $80,000 to $100,000, continues to get de-risked the higher the price goes, right? Usually it's the opposite, that the higher Nvidia goes, the more risky it becomes. People get worried, the P ratios, historic valuation measurements, all the things that kind of Wall Street prides itself on. But there is no doubt that as Bitcoin's price goes up. The risk goes away or significantly decreases, but also the largest pools of capital, both from a risk mitigation standpoint. But now they start thinking to themselves, well, I can actually put billions of dollars into this. It's not just a game of, hey, let me buy a little bit, you know, half a percent, 1%.

• 22:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I know some portfolios in the hedge fund world, they have, you know, double digit percentage of gold. Do you expect to see, whether it's hedge funds or kind of large, you know, institutions, pension funds, endowments, hospital systems, sovereign wealth funds? Are we going to see big allocations to Bitcoin? Or is this going to be kind of a risk mitigation, 1% to 2%? I won't get fired and that's going to be my strategy.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  So here, here's the great thing about your question. And one of the things that we said on this weekly thing that I've gotten, you know, brought back to me is this concept of hedge funds have a quarterly cycle where they have to manage certain things. Meaning retail can keep buying throughout the down run and people can mock them as, oh, we're not going, we're not going to have a bottom in the market until retail's done. I'm like, well, retail doesn't have the same pressures you do. If they believe the market is going to be up a year from now, they can buy it and hold it. Hedge funds can't do that. They care about the path they are. And so it makes it very difficult. The groups you're mentioning, they all have one thing in common, whether it's an endowment, a pension fund or a sovereign wealth fund. They have liabilities on the other side that they have to meet.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  So this is not a redemption, they're not, they're not doing this from a speculative basis. They are doing this because they actually have payments they have to make. If you don't think bonds are a good investment because they're not going to beat inflation over the next five years, why would you hold bonds? A lot of people were heavily weighted towards stocks and all of those groups you mentioned. They were heavily weighted towards growth and technology stocks. What will force them into Bitcoin is the fact that they need to have growth. So as it works, remember, people have been doing their homework. I'm sure you've had more people, in fact, I walked in here one day and you had someone from an institution that's more on the institutional side. What ends up happening is they're asking questions. They actually need to be doing their homework and the ETF only started a year ago. So the access got easier.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  So I think to your point, if you listen to Matt Hogan speak, when he spoke at your conference, he's like, we are getting lots of interest from institutions. We are getting the people you're mentioning. I just think people have underestimated that now there's a decoupling. It means I can buy this and I should be buying it because I can actually make money in this that I can't make in stocks.

• 24:43Anthony Pompliano?

  When we see the institutional interest coming, when we see these public vehicles coming out, one of the aspects I come back to is, right now, these public market vehicles, I saw Matt Levine, who generally I think is very smart, obviously is a very good writer, he's making the argument that you can sell $1 of Bitcoin for $2 in the public market, and so everyone's gonna go do that. Now, I don't know if he is just kind of being snarky in the way that he writes, and you know, he's kind of mocking to a degree on what's happening, or if he actually believes that's why people are paying more than what the NAV of the vehicle is. But what I think becomes really interesting is, my understanding

• 25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  of these vehicles is that people are actually paying for the future purchasing of Bitcoin, kind of the increase in the Bitcoin per share. They're saying to themselves, if I buy right now, and let's say one share equals one Bitcoin, I am going to try to figure out, well, what is the Bitcoin per share going to be in the future, and then I'm gonna have some sort of multiple or growth rate, and there's some valuation that I'm willing to pay in order to kind of capture that future upside. It does not feel like that is very well understood, or explained, or covered, right now. Do you expect that to become kind of a core component of, you know, financial education? If you go to some sort of class in college 10 years from now, this is something that they're gonna be talking about, it's like Bitcoin

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  per share, and kind of a new metric? Or should we be cautious when people start to create new metrics, and you know, there's history of when these new metrics get created, like community-adjusted EBITDA, maybe that actually ends up being a, something to be worrisome about?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so, this is a great question. I, we've never discussed this point, so I think I've mentioned on here, I own MicroStrategy. I consider myself a reasonably, you know, educated person who's been in the finance world for 30-plus years. I very seldom meet a hedge fund person who owns MicroStrategy. In fact, most of them want to short it, and they say this is a scam, and this makes no sense. So what's the difference between my view and theirs, and to your point, what it is? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring up a couple of things, I think I may have said these on here, but this will feed into the way the world's gonna look in the future, and your point. So when I talk about people on the fact that jobless claims haven't gone higher yet, and I try to say, the jobs

• 27:08Speaker 02

  market is not the same as it was before 2006, or 7. And the great financial crisis happened then. So the debate usually goes towards that. But I always say, you understand that 50% of people that work are contingent employees now. Five zero. And they have no idea. They've never heard the phrase. They've never done the work. And I'm like, I'm a contingent employee. I kind of do a lot of different things. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm pretty sure you're a contingent employee. Maybe you're not. You have a business. You have people here. But to some degree, we're just entrepreneurs who are doing a bunch of different things, have a bunch of different revenue streams. That's only going to increase with AI. If you're a consultant that used that as a domain expertise, you're a contingent employee.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  If you're a DoorDash driver, an Uber driver, you're a contingent employee. So the market has changed because of the iPhone. You couldn't do those jobs without people being able to speak 24 hours, do videos, the whole thing. So everything changed at that point. The reason I bring that up as part of this, you have to adapt to technology and the capital structure. What Michael Saylor has proved to me is that the capital structure of the future will be different. It will be completely different. So the biggest companies in the world, when people say US exceptionalism is dead. I go, well, the companies that won the last 10 years, they happen to be in America out of Silicon Valley.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  But 50% of the revenues are around the globe and it's innovation that really is kind of borderless. Meaning Google search is 94% in Germany. How, what other, I mean, there's no car companies. There's no anything that happened. So everything has changed because those companies have no debt. So when the companies that, you know, got up the, they have no, they have no debt. So the capital structure of the world has changed dramatically. And that's why I think everyone is still fixated on this debt fiat backed system. And capital structure is a big part of that. In the future, your comment about Bitcoin per share, Michael Saylor sold me on the fact. And that's the reason why the premium for his company relative to his holdings.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  If he's able to lend this out, if it becomes the collateral that replaces treasury, what is the value of that? If he has a moat on it. So that's where I kind of think people are going to have to get to is they have to question their beliefs on the capital structure of the future of the world. In a world with no debt and with Bitcoin as the global reserve currency.

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, stocks happen to be up. I look at the S and P, it's up like a couple percent since the close on Liberation Day. Does that mean that actually all the policy has been positive for stocks? Does that mean that everyone who is selling and panicking and fear mongering and doomsday predicting, they're dumb? Like, how do you look at stock performance compared to the close of Liberation Day?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna jump into that one. I think it's gonna take, I think it's, I think the policy decisions have been handled in a way which made the market fall very sharply. And I don't think this can be unwound very quickly. That being said, I think the lows are, you know, I did an interview this week and said, I'll put 85% chance that the lows are completely in. I think there's maybe another 5%, we could go through them again and bounce back. The economy is going to be weak. Earnings are going to be weak. We don't know when some kind of settlement is going to happen. But as I mentioned last week, and it's been my theme, I'm a second derivative person. Rate of change is what matters in anything regarding markets. And since this was a policy induced

• 30:39Speaker 02

  crash, policy started changing the day after the army of a million screws in iPhones. That was the day, that Black Monday, the, it's going to be Black Monday and the market didn't change. That was the day they threw out the, well, what if we did a 90, a 90 day pause and the market rallied? So I think what we've, what we've done here is the economy's going to be weak, earnings are going to be weak. We don't know how bad it's going to be. But Google said their capex is going to keep coming through. The AI trade, the AI resilience, the profit margins are still going to come. So I'll keep saying what I've said every week, you've said it here too. By the end of this year, or the beginning

• 31:24Speaker 02

  of next year, I think we'll be at new all time highs in stocks. The path there will be very, very back and forth. It'll be very volatile. But positioning and sentiment is the liquidity that, that could take us close to the all time highs sometime sooner than people realize just because of positioning.

• 31:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's maybe zoom in a little bit on the stock performance since the liberation day. Forget for a second, all the people who were screaming and yelling, but the fact that stocks are up since that moment, does that tell you anything about the way the market looks at these economic policies? Or is that just something where because there's so much volatility, we shouldn't read into it?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  No, you have to read into it. And this is actually a great point. If you think about how much selling happened after that, how much the sentiment dropped off. In my weekly thing, I've shown, I mean, the most bear, we're at levels of, of the great financial crisis and like the worst times in history, depending on how far back you have data, sentiment and positioning is still extremely low. So if everyone was a seller, how did the market hang in here? If nobody's buying and we're hearing every foreigner selling, and hedge funds are selling, and CTAs are selling, and everyone's selling, when a market is higher than it was the day after that, there's obviously buyers that are out there too. Now, retail's been buying, and everyone views that as, as negative. The thing people

• 32:44Speaker 02

  forget is buybacks continue to happen. What has happened is once people made their sales, they just stopped trading. So there's a lot of funds that are just sitting there waiting and sitting on their hands. And you hear this across the country, I'm not doing anything until I see what's going on. The problem with that is the buybacks keep going on. And that means if you decide to change your mind, you're going to have to buy at higher prices. And that's why I said, you could get close to the all time highs with nothing more than this verbal liquidity bazookas that just keep coming out. Meaning, do you want to be short on Friday before weekend when we might have deals with India and Vietnam and Japan announced? And then you come in Monday and it's up another 2%? No one's shorting it. And this is the thing that I think has become an issue. I hear a lot of sell the

• 33:26Speaker 02

  rally things, but really, it's been a buy the dip market since liberation day. And I think it's going to stay that way. I just think now, if you, if I had to put a range on things, I think we've upped the lower end of the range to maybe 5,300. I think the bottom end of the range, or the top end of the range is getting closer to 5,900 in my mind. And so we're just kind of shifting the range. And as long as, even though China's saying, we're not coming to the table until he basically kisses the ring, I think they both realize this has gone on long enough. And I think we'll continue to see marginal improvements and a de-escalation over the course of the next two weeks.

• 33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I recently interviewed Chris Camillo and Chris is pretty interesting because he's known for social arbitrage was the investing strategy. Basically just listens to what people are talking around him and he goes and he buys it before things show up in the data, right? And so you can imagine if you're on the internet and you see everyone posting photos of Saratoga water, my guess is that all of a sudden sales a couple of weeks or months later show up in the data. So that arbitrage of understanding what people are talking about. Now, what he is talking about now is humanoid robots and he is like all in. He told me it's the biggest investment he's made as a sector. It's the biggest personal investment in a single company he's made. He's spending all of his time doing this off camera. He told me a bunch of things that he's been doing of understanding from talking to, you know, robotic PhDs all the

• 34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  way to visiting factories and everything in between. I walked away from that conversation with maybe two major takeaways. One was this is going to be hyper deflationary and two is the world is going to look very different 15, 20 years from now than it does today. We spent a lot of time talking about kind of financial assets and the monetary world order and kind of people's portfolio with the assets that are available today. What did you take away from that conversation? And maybe like, are there any things with these humanoid robots that people should be preparing for in their portfolio as the rise of those robots becomes more prevalent?

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was a great interview. I've heard him. I didn't even know who he was until say three months ago. So in my podcast, kind of travels, I search by themes and I listened to a two hour podcast with him. Your interview was better, not to give you kudos, but the reason it was better is you kind of gave him more bigger picture themes where the last one was a little bit more associated with with the excitement over humanoids. And what I mean is you just said 15 to 20 years. He was very balanced in what he said. He said, it's not today's thing. And he said, he gave me something unique on China. He said, all

• 36:00Speaker 02

  these videos that you see on X, they're real, but their battery doesn't last very long. So they're not ready for this. So they can do all those. Things physically, but the power situation's not there. So what I took out of this and I, you know, for 22V research, I did a, a 20-page report on embodiment. And the fact that you need a lot of materials and pieces to actually do the production side. So before we can have the deflationary side of humanoids, which again, 10 to 15, 20 years down the road is when we'll have millions to billions of them. Great. Well, you need a lot of parts to get there. So I've talked about the need for memory and he talked about you need a lot of memory.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  You need actuators, the reason actuators are the muscle part of humanoid. So it's not just rare earth that you need. You actually need certain parts that again, I hate to say it, but the Chinese make. If we're going to get into a military war with China and we can't make humanoids for the next 10 years, we're at a really big disadvantage if they're producing a lot. So that was one thing that came out. Another thing in this, I guess this is something that people just have to, start to recognize, and this is another deep dive piece I did. We don't have enough power. I was gonna, you know, say to you, you like to learn just like I do. There was on April 9th, which was a week after liberation day, Eric Schmidt was part of a, a hearing in Washington on the power needs. It was on AI and how do we become competitive against China in AI?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  A lot of that hearing was on the need for power. We do not have enough energy to make the humanoids go. We do not have enough to have a billion humanoids. So the investments that are going to be necessary in physical hardware. Remember, we just left a world where cloud investments and software were big. Code. I used, code was the greatest commodity over the last 15 years. We're getting back into old school commodity stuff like copper. If you look what copper did, it fell down violently on liberation day and it bounced all the way back up. And I'm sure the Chinese went in and bought as much as they can because it's needed for the power build out and they're, they're doing a lot. So that's what I took out of Chris is it's down the road. It's very sexy. It's very interesting.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  It brings up the trade situation because we need actuators and we need rare earths. So we got to solve this thing with China to be actually to grow them or they're going to slow down. And at the same point, we need a lot of power to fuel them. So that's the way I kind of think about markets is what's in the near term? What's in the long term? I'd be buying energy and utilities at this point.

• 38:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, speaking of the big picture, Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, they came out. And this, I don't know if it was leaked or they published it, but there's this like letter that is now making its rounds online. And they seemed very bearish and they seem to be calling attention to a very historic change in the monetary order. And there are a lot of folks who are paying attention to like, are stocks up or down? Which, you know, portfolio is doing well, what do I do tactically? These guys seem very focused on, hey, wait a second, there is like a once in a century, you know, kind of situation playing out, or once in a couple of decades situation. We know that Ray Dalio has written a number of books, he's studied this at length. What did you take away from this?

• 39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And maybe, do you agree with them that that's part of what we're going through?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  So I, the video I did, I think, two weeks ago, had a title on it, it's the end of the world as we know it. So I agree. But I'll, I'll do the humanoid side because A, remember, they manage money, they're positioned a certain way. They're talking their book, for sure. Here's what I'll say. Humanoids will replace labor. There's no doubt about it. If, I mean, I think Chris Camillo called it, infinite labor is coming, and that's why it's so deflationary. 24 hours a day, you can have these things doing the job. Okay, great. That moment in time is not today. That moment in time is going to take time.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  So the part I would disagree with what Bridgewater said is, they're making the assumption, which again, is a very dangerous assumption. I agree, the monetary order has changed, and I think this changes capital flows for the rest of time, but I thought this was going to happen anyway. Because of the competition from AI. The decentralizing nature of the advantage that the Mag 7 had was going to be disrupted. So if you break it down that way, it's less alarming, and maybe it's not as immediate as they're writing it. I think everyone is right to say that the US will not be 75% of global equities three years from now. But if they're 60%, 50%, and there's an underweighting and the rest of the world has

• 40:42Speaker 02

  done better, and US stocks have underperformed, it's not as alarming. I do agree with the concept, I just don't agree with the alarming nature of what it's going to look like over the next two years.

• 40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  If the US goes from 75 to 60 or 50, what are the areas around the world that you would pay the most attention to, where you would tell people to go and spend time actually investigating whether there's investment opportunities?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  So, the commodity thing to me is a really big deal. I really do believe emerging markets that have commodities are going to benefit a lot from this. I was talking to the person who's the energy specialist at 22V this week, and we're collaborating on this power situation. And I remember hearing that Argentina had massive amounts of gas reserves. And he said, "Yeah, they just made the decision," I'm sure it was part financial, "not to do it." If you believe in a tripolar world, which I do, where China's kind of focused on Asia, Europe's focused on Europe, and the US is going to be focused more on the Americas, I think Brazil and Argentina, which are incredibly undervalued assets at this point, they benefit a lot from commodities.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  I don't believe this is a 1970s-style commodities are just going to go higher. But what I see happening is anything that has a high multiple, so 30-plus PE, based on technology, which can be hurt by AI, those multiples should come down for the reason I said, which is, long-term, you just don't know. The great thing about commodities are, we have a shortage of them in most places. We just don't have enough copper in the short term, and it takes a long time to get new mines. So, we're kind of back in this old-school, physical world, and this is where innovation, if it goes too fast and you need power for it, it's a problem. People have to realize that post the great financial crisis, we didn't need, we were

• 42:34Speaker 02

  getting off of physical things and off of power because of the switch from all of the things that changed. You look at that iPhone and that app, and if you take all of those apps and you go back to what you had to buy, cameras and GPS and everything that you needed, a calculator, and think about how many trucks needed to carry that stuff around, how much diesel needed to carry it around, we're just not shipping as many things as we used to ship. Now, I think we're going to be in a place where commodities and physical things are going to be needed to power the AI side. And so, I'd be looking at emerging markets, any commodity-producing places, any of the stuff, and there'll be a re-wating towards healthcare, financials, and energy and commodities.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned earlier that in the Bitcoin dip, you bought more Bitcoin. Is there anything else over the last couple of weeks that you've been doing tactically with your portfolio? And I use that as a way to maybe highlight things that you previously thought that you no longer believe, or maybe things that you didn't believe that today you believe?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  No, see, the funny thing about this is I, once I got interested in Bitcoin,

• 43:40Speaker 02

  everything changed for me. It's funny to be a macro person and have had your money saved in different ways, but my focus really shifted to Bitcoin. And I hate to say this to people because it's not diversified. My diversification in my holdings for them, for my savings, it's heavily skewed towards Bitcoin and it's higher than it was before the year started, even though the price is now unchanged. And the reason is because I did buy more Bitcoin. I did buy micro strategy. I took advantage of the situation where I thought the administration and going with the government would be a good thing. And I always believed the first time we met, or the first time we physically met in Miami, I gave a presentation and I said, my trade for this year, and this was at all time highs

• 44:24Speaker 02

  for stocks, I want to be long Bitcoin versus the Mag7. That's over 20% this year. It was over 20% last year. It was over 20% the year before. The reason I bring up all three years, Bitcoin outperformed the Mag7 during the bull market years for the Mag7, and it outperformed during the bear market years. So I just believe that stocks as a whole are just not going to participate with Bitcoin. And I have a lot of money in money markets. So I view my portfolio as being this thing where traditionally I'm a believer in diversification. But right now, for where things are, I don't have a lot of faith in the fiat assets. And once we get out of this and things settle down, I would probably be buying energy companies and things like that out of the cash side, because you can get dividends on that and

• 45:06Speaker 02

  the appreciation. So the energy side is going to be much more attractive to me. Financials too, because I believe in the blockchain and the AI benefits that come. And I'll just say it again, I've said it on here, healthcare is a huge, huge benefit coming from AI because of the inefficiencies inside that space.

• 45:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Jordi, where can we send people to find all the great information you're putting out online?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  The YouTube channel, they can get my recap every week, but also this one in particular, I'll go through some of the things I said on here with some details. The historic part is important for people to know. They can find me on Substack. And then if they go to 22vresearch.com, I'm putting out a lot of deep dive research. I did an interview this week with a policy person. I'm going to be spending a lot more time in DC because I want to be more engaged with the digital asset community and the policy side down there. And because I work with this group and they do a lot of stuff in DC, they've been interested in kind of the angle on the macro side and the fact that this is a major turning point in the global monetary system. As Bridgewater said, I wouldn't focus on the downside.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  They have to keep that system kind of going because it's mutually assured destruction for everyone if it doesn't work. And I think they should be focused on which new system is going to come out of it. And that new system, as you know, is based on Bitcoin, it's based on stable coins, it's based on tokenization, which is going to be a major part of this. All of those things are happening in Washington. So 22vresearch.com, they can find me there.

• 46:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. We'll do it again next week.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Thanks, Anthony.