#1579 Jordi Visser | Why Bitcoin Will EXPLODE During The AI Era

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 going on with bitcoin, Fed independence, interest rate expectations, Azoria lawsuit against the Fed, PMI, and everything that has happened in the last week. ==========================Markets are at all-time highs. Public equities are outperforming. And individual investors are driving it all. It’s officially the rise of the retail investor. On September 12th in NYC, I’m hosting the Independent Investor Summit — a one-day event built exclusively for self-directed investors. We’re bringing together some of the smartest public market investors I know for a full day of macro insights, market predictions, one-on-one fireside chats, and actionable investment ideas from each investor. This is going to be an absolute banger event. Join us if you like markets and think retail is two steps ahead of Wall Street. TICKETS: https://www.independentinvestor.co/ (use promo code POMPYT25)=======================This episode is brought to you by Figure (https://figuremarkets.com/mobile/refer/CCI3O02A), the platform to Earn and Borrow. Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Figure offers Crypto-Backed Loans, allowing you to borrow against your Bitcoin or Ethereum with 12-month terms and no prepayment penalties. Access interest rates starting at 9.9%, the lowest fixed interest rate in the industry at 50% LTVs all with decentralized custody which allows you to see a segregated, personal Bitcoin wallet with your Bitcoin in it on chain. Unlock your crypto’s potential today. Download their app (https://figuremarkets.com/mobile/refer/CCI3O02A) and take out your Bitcoin backed loan (https://figuremarkets.com/mobile/refer/CCI3O02A) at industry low rates! Figure Lending LLC dba Figure. Equal Opportunity Lender. NMLS 1717824. Terms and conditions apply. Visit figure.com for more information.=======================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.========================Invest as you spend with the Gemini Credit Card® (https://www.gemini.com/pomp). Sign up today and get approved by 6/30/25 to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus. Terms apply (http://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-intro-promo-terms). The Gemini Credit Card is issued by WebBank. See rates & fees (https://www.gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement) for more details. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is sponsored by Gemini, but my opinions are my own.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we got a great conversation with Jordy Visser. He's a fan favorite. He's a 30-year veteran on Wall Street and in this conversation, he explains what's going on with Bitcoin. If the Fed's actually independent, will they cut rates? How should we think about the Azoria lawsuit against the Fed? Then we talk about the PMI, how there's such an inadequacy of labor for all of Things happening when it comes to energy production, the US grid, robotics, automation and AI. This conversation covers a lot and we go through in great detail what happened in the past week when it comes to financial markets and the business world. Our goal is trying to help you better understand what's happening in the world and what you can do in your portfolio to actually better position yourself for the future. Jordy does a great job as always. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.

• 2:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Jordy, I thought the best place to start today's conversation was around the White House and President Trump are now talking about potentially eliminating capital gains tax. This would be a massive boom to anyone who owns assets, Bitcoin stocks, anything. Do you think that it's possible that we could actually get 0% capital gains tax moving forward?

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Okay, so the the main point that I think emphasized is on the housing market. So he's talked a lot about eliminating capital gains. I think it gets harder once you get into a broader framework. Considering that the the Democratic side was looking to have a wealth tax. So I think if you go through what he said, where I do think there's a possibility and and we've talked about it over the last few weeks that I would watch. Bill Pulte, not just in his post, how how emphatic he is, but this focus that the administration has had that they need to. Unleash the housing market. They need transactions to be happening. They need people to be able to sell things.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  So one of the problems in the country with the housing market is obviously that people have locked in rates at lower levels. So if they sell their house, they have to pay the capital gains tax on the appreciation. And then they have to go buy another home and then they have to refund, they have to get a mortgage at a much higher rate. So the question is, how do you unlock that logjam where people aren't getting hurt? Well, one of the ways clearly that they they've come to. Is a possibility that if we eliminate the capital gains tax on housing, it's not like every house, every person would go out and get rid of their home. So it wouldn't unleash, let's say, an expense side to the government that was huge, but what it would.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Do is kind of release the ability of people to do this because if you have to reset your mortgage at a higher rate, but you're get foregoing capital gains tax, you obviously have the money to be able to do that. You have the money to put more money down. So I think they're trying to find something. I think the message that's really important out of this is the administration has not forgotten the Main Street versus Wall Street scenario that they talked about at the beginning of the year. The interest rate side, they're very focused on, they need to get rates down. I think most people have viewed that primarily as a deficit situation. But I think the housing component sits in as too, because if you can get rates down and you can get rid of the the capital gains tax on housing, you're talking about a very, very large stimulus part.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  And I think this becomes important because we've talked about the reindustrialization, what the government is clearly able to do already, the capex spend that's happening, the energy, the power needs. Unleashing the housing market would be a huge PMI boost and that's where most of my focus is, is surprise going forward.

• 5:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, you wrote this piece about PMI. Can you explain after last week's conversation, there's a couple of people who are like, why is PMI important? What is it? Can you just explain kind of like a 30 seconds, you know, very dumbed down version of like what PMI is? Why you find it important? And then let's talk about this piece that you wrote and kind of why you're so focused on PMI right now.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is funny that there's two things. There's it's the ISM PMI. So it's the Institute of Supply Management Purchasers Manufacturing Index. So this is just a survey of how people feel about the manufacturing side. So when it's below 50, that means less than 50% of the the companies that are asked for this survey believe things are good. When it's above 50, the majority of industries see this as good. So we've been in a time where this level has been below 50, which historically is during recession periods.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  And it's been below there since 2022, except for two months at the beginning of this year. A lot of this year, the beginning, was a combination of enthusiasm over Trump taking over and people believing that business on the manufacturing side was going to get better. And then the second part was the front-loading ahead of the tariffs where people are ordering things ahead. The reason this is so important is that the PMI has a very, very high correlation with earnings in the S and P 500. And there's a reason for it. If the manufacturing side is good, think of that as you're producing more goods, well, the demand side must be there to produce more goods. So you have the demand and supply side, basically both in growth form.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  What we've been having for a long time, and this has really been, and this is my thesis, we have not had a PMI that's gone up because of industrialization since before the great financial crisis. So we came out of that, the housing market obviously was, you know, horrible for the next seven, eight years. We've gotten a little bump in housing, but nothing dramatic. Commercial real estate is not moving right now, and the auto production side has been hurt both by the tariffs but also by kids are less likely to buy them. And once interest rates went up in 2022, you kind of knocked everything out because those groups are very sensitive to interest rates. For the last 18 years, this economy has been driven by software. It's been driven by the MAG7.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  They've dominated stock market performance. Everyone who has a pension fund has benefited from the software side, but everyone in the middle part of the country that's been based on the manufacturing, they've seen it be hurt, partly by the globalization and China labor, but China labor has now normalized to some degree. But the discontent from many people, whether it's students in cities who are discontent because they have loans and they can't get affordable housing, or the manufacturing side of the economy, has suffered by us not having a true manufacturing cycle. I believe, and I wrote a paper, that that is changing. And for the next decade, investors at the institutional side and hedge funds and asset allocators need to be focused more on a re-industrialization, which is happening.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  It's happening because now for AI, we've exited the software time, which was about The L L Ms, which are still software. But now we've reached the point where we're getting into the embodiment side. The putting the brain, the software into physical hardware. And the easiest way for people to think about this is drones, which are fighting in wars right now. But eventually, humanoids, which you've heard a lot of stories on, robotaxis, which are now spreading across the country. All of these things obviously need hardware, but the biggest need is the data centers and then the power to supply it. So without those things being built up, there's an issue and I'll, this has been a long, and normally I don't try to talk for this long into one of your questions. But I think you asked me to, to describe the P M I.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  I'm trying to give people not only the importance of it across the, the, the country, but also just kind of the think about where this fits in. So from a geopolitical basis on the tariffs, there was clearly a recognition by the administration when they ramped up the tariffs on China. And then after about six weeks, not only reversed course, but you don't hear any negative conversation, negative rhetoric from the U S around China, the way it was before. And part of the reason was we recognize the dependence that the country has on rare earth minerals. And that China is responsible for processing 90% without going through the wonky details of that. The way people should think about it is we are at the mercy right now from a manufacturing basis.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  From China in terms of critical components that go into everything that we use today that has semiconductors, which is almost everything. From, you know, washing machines to refrigerators to your car. But also from a military basis, from an A I basis, we need rare earth and so, and they need chips. And so that's where the truce came in. We talked about it on here way before people on, on Wall Street did, in, in my opinion. Uh, and now I think it's become a focus and you're seeing more and more deals between the Department of Defense. And rare earth, both in the U S, there's only one real company. If people want to go to look at it, it's M P materials. You can go see the D O D did a, a deal with them this month as an investor now, and Apple did a major deal with them as well.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  So the P M I is really critical to. Let's say a tide ride, getting the tide to lift all boats. So far, the only boats that have been lifted over the last 18 years have been software companies. We're about to get into the energy, materials, mining, power, everything.

• 11:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the US grid system. There are a bunch of data points that these AI kind of data centers or energy production. There's just a massive strain on the grid. We saw in certain areas, the megawatt per day pricing started to skyrocket. We have seen people say that there is just literally not enough data center space. We see companies pouring, you know, tens of billions of dollars into this. We also see there's companies like Base Power in Texas, who is trying to build like a decentralized grid so that people can actually store energy, either sell it back into the grid when it's needed or power their home when the power goes out.

• 11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, there's all of this technology, energy, in terms of mental energy and also capital going into this sector. Can we actually solve this problem? Like, is this a solvable thing where if we put enough people on it and enough money, we can build a grid that will be able to handle the pull of both the consumer and kind of these very, very energy intense AI models?

• 12:11Speaker 04

  That is the big question that I think every technology person is focused on. I mentioned last week, the interview that Eric Schmidt did on moonshots, where he literally started off the conversation by saying, "The limit to or the limit and constraint to artificial intelligence and its growth is not semiconductor chips, it's electricity." He gave a, he testified before Congress. I believe it was in April. It was, it was before the tariff situation, the liberation day. And he specifically talked about this issue that we need approximately 90 gigawatts of power in his estimation by 2030.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  The probability of getting that is extremely low based on just what we know today. So there's two parts, I guess, that Or answer to your question. As an investor, I love situations where demand outstrips supply and that's what we have in the power industry right now. So it's great for jobs in there. Goldman Sachs put out a report this week that they think the industry needs 500,000 solely for the power side of the electricity grid. So forget the increased energy we need to go into the side. So coal stocks were doing well this week out of nowhere. There's a bunch of reasons for it, but fossil fuels have had a lack of investment now for the last six, seven years because of the climate deal that was put in place. So you've had under investment in fossils,

• 13:38Speaker 04

  you've had a lot of fossil fuels, you've had a lot of pressure, you've had the renewable side that's gotten strong, but the one beautiful bill kind of put down on it. So we're at this logjam and the best way as an investor to see is to look for not anecdotal things, but like big stories that are happening. And most people have heard the headline stories like so and one of the hyperscalers basically invested in Three Mile Island. So you hear Three Mile Island for the first time in a long time and for the reasons of we need to do something. That's because we've used up basically all the excess capacity. So the pricing that you mentioned is from an excess capacity side. So for everyone out there in, I'm sure Texas for sure, you've probably seen

• 14:20Speaker 04

  your electricity bills go up sharply in June and July. The reason is because the demand side from AI is accelerating. There's two things about that. Unless the states put in some kind of cap to help individuals, this pricing is going to continue to go higher because the demand side is just enormous. So the answer to your question on the solution is it's going to take some novel solutions. Elon Musk bought and is importing a power plant, which highlights, he doesn't find a way to get it through the permits and everything. So he's doing that. He also bought some land in Mississippi this week that's been dead for a while that used to have a power plant on it with Duke Energy. And he did that for the same reason. He's trying to

• 15:04Speaker 04

  find any possible novel solutions by buying existing equipment where maybe he doesn't have to go through the regulations, the permitting and all the stuff to be able to get it. But this is a major problem that will be a major story. I started talking about this on my videos about eight, nine months ago, that we'd get to this point at some point. I think we're at that

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, let's talk about the human capital component to this, right? So you and I have talked in the past about, um, okay, uh, I saw Bernie Sanders. He just tweeted, uh, I think it was today or, uh, yesterday or the day before where he said, um, there's a picture of remember like the old school drive-in restaurants where, uh, like somebody would come out on roller skates and they would like serve you food. So he had a picture of, uh, a woman on the roller skates with the food. And then he had one of the, uh, Tesla humanoid robot also serving food, uh, doing the same thing. And he was like, you know, Elon Musk's vision of the future is this, like, how many jobs is he gonna kill, blah, blah, you know, like clear fear mongering of like, the robots are gonna take your job. Okay, that's gonna happen in some areas.

• 16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that there's a shortage of people who want to work at a fast food restaurant or something. Now, you go talk to some of those people, they would say maybe there is a shortage, but for the most part, I think that they're trying to figure out, you know, where, where to find people. Energy, physical world, manufacturing, blue collar companies, like there's a massive shortage there. So in a way, robotics is actually not going to displace workers, it is going to fill the gap that the workers are not willing to fill, because people don't want those jobs. And then on top of that, uh, I'm an investor in a company called Durin Mining, where, uh, mineral extraction, a very large percentage, I think something like 60, 70% of the cost of extracting the minerals is actually in the human labor. And so what they are trying to do is they are trying to build a, uh, technology company

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  that will allow for automation. And so it starts out with, uh, my understanding of it is there's somebody in the actual machine, they're doing it, the software is merely monitoring what they're doing. Every time they push a button or control or whatever, and it's learning, it's using machine learning to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, what are the conditions they're doing it under, et cetera. Eventually, there's a potential world where from a remote location, they will be able to control these, uh, mineral extraction, uh, kind of, uh, machinery to actually go and do all of this, you don't need a person sitting there inside of the machine. Now, whether that future actually comes or not, it is obvious that's where the world is going across a lot of these industries. And so is that really what America should be leaning into? Like, we saw the White House come out with this AI action plan.

• 17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  We just go put all of our time, energy, money, et cetera, into let's go build robots to solve this stuff? Or is that 500,000, you know, kind of human capital or human labor need? Is that where we should go and spend it on training? Should we go spend it on recruiting? Like, how do we fill the gap and do so both in the short term? And then what's like the long-term solution as well? What's going on, guys? One of the most important trends in all of finance is the rise of the retail investor. What I call a self-directed investor. These are people, they don't have a financial advisor or a stockbroker. They simply go and learn on the internet and then they direct their own capital directly into the market. These people are taking Wall Street by storm. And so I'm going to bring all of us together on September 12th in New York City for the Independent Investor Summit.

• 18:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a one-day event that I'm hosting where I'm going to have a bunch of my friends come together and talk on stage, explain what their thoughts on the market are, what their best investment ideas are, and how they think you should change up your portfolio to better position yourself for the future. I've got Jeff Park, Jordy Visser, Darius Dale, Chris Camello, the Najarian Brothers, and many, many more that are all coming. These people are incredibly smart. They've made lots of institutions, lots of money throughout their careers, and they now are going to bring this information and share it directly with you, an independent self-directed investor. So September 12th, the Independent Investor Summit in New York City. Please go into the description, click on the link there, get your ticket, and I'll see you in Manhattan on September 12th.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  So, you know, you brought up a lot in there that I think is important for people to hear. And I'm going to use a couple, a couple of things for people to, to listen to. So Mark Andreessen, these two podcasts are both on A16Z. Anyone can go listen to them. But Mark Andreessen in particular did an interview at the Reagan Economic Forum back in June with Joe Lonsdale. And you have two technology people talking about the re-industrialization of America. And Mark Andreessen is a great historian. He studies this stuff. He spends a lot of time. But it helps shape kind of the divide that's in the country, definitely the divide that's in the city, between the issues of people that are left in the city, like who can afford to be in the city? He talks about all of that.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  He talks about the need for re-industrialization. He talks about technology being a part of it. Second one, later this week, A16Z had a person who left Tesla from their battery division, who's starting a similar company to what you described, which is a mining company. And he talked about His background and how he always wanted to get into this. So I think one of the things people have to realize is the blue collar worker of today is going to involve the robotics of technology. We need to build out the industrial of finding the materials and then servicing the materials. So my father, construction worker, he's a core drill, was a core driller.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  And so he was an engineer, incredibly brilliant person, but was a construction worker. He invented his own equipment. We're going to need more people going that way. And Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was on CNBC this week and he said, kids need to go into physics instead of coding. And that's the transformation that's going. We are getting into needing to work in a world with robotics as opposed to them being scared of them. It's not replacing all of jobs. The robots are not fixing the robots. We're barely by 2030 going to have that many humanoids in here. They're certainly not going to be replacing all the jobs because we have a labor shortage that gets worse every single year as well. So we need them to fill the gap. And plus, we need them to do the horrible jobs that lead to my father

• 21:08Speaker 04

  losing his hearing from being a core driller, from people losing their backs working in a warehouse. Like, there's certain things that the humanoids are going to be replacing that actually help allowing humans who are working in these physical labor jobs to not be as hurt as they were during steel plants and stuff. So this is a major change. It's something that's big. I think people need to think about this more the way they probably knew someone who worked at GE, who is a really, really smart person, went to college, but was involved in thinking about the way GE could build these massive things back when we needed the industrialization. We're having a re-industrialization and college graduates need to focus on the physical side as opposed to the coding side.

• 21:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about the Federal Reserve, which has kind of a background impact on a lot of things that are happening in the economy and where capital is being invested. There are now questions about the Federal Reserve's independence and kind of what is happening there. We also saw this week a lawsuit from James Fishback and Azoria that the Fed has been conducting all of their official FOMC Business behind closed doors. There's this sunshine law at the federal level that says if you are an official government entity, then you need to do that in public. What's your take on the, I mean, the Fed's under attack from everywhere. They're under attack for their innovation. They're under attack for interest rates. They're under attack now for having private meetings. I mean, it feels like they are the punching bag of the finance world right now.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Uh, it's, it's just funny that every week there's seven or eight new people out, new approaches. I think Bloomberg called it flooding, uh, Powell at this point. And yet Trump will always come out at the end of this saying, I'm not going to fire him. So, uh, I think there's a couple of things here that people should realize. Number one, I said last week, uh, and I'll continue to say the Fed independence is officially over. Now, people can think that it'll come back at some point, but the reality is that there's no way to, to miss that what has happened is that we have a fiscal problem where we have a massive debt situation and we have a deficit of six to seven percent.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  The reason people need to connect these two things is that fiscal dominance has become a story that when the size of the government gets so big and with the interest, which is a transfer from the public sector to the private sector, meaning the government's interest expense is going higher and their net over a trillion dollars now a year. That money's going into the savings accounts. That money's going into the money market. So there's a transfer that happens, which is one way for the economy to still have this kind of growth. Now normally you get heavy inflation, uh, which becomes the negative. And right now we don't have that. So they need rates to get lower to bring down that interest expense to prevent the fiscal spiral from happening. And on the flip side,

• 24:01Speaker 04

  If they didn't want to, you know, if they gave up, which they did on the expense, let's kill expenditures, let's see if Doge can work. We don't even hear Doge anymore. They basically said, we're going to grow our way out of this problem. Well, to grow your way out of your problem, here's what you need. You need 5% nominal GDP, which I think they're going to get because of the changes in the one big beautiful bill towards bonus depreciation, which will front load some things. The AI capex, which is happening, the power needs, which are happening, plus consumption still running ahead at, let's say, 1% to 2%, even if it's down there, you'll still get the close to 5% nominal GDP. Well, they need interest rates to be below that. That's the way you grow out of your jet, out of your debt. You keep the interest rates below the nominal GDP and you grow your way out of it. Well,

• 24:43Speaker 04

  for that to happen, we need a bigger cushion. And he wants rates down to 1%. If you got them down to 3%, doesn't matter. If I'm right and the PMI is going higher, at the same time, they're looking to cut rates, that means you've got fiscal on your side, you've got monetary on your side, you've got AI profit margins on your side. This is the reason why the stock market is going higher and why it is not a bubble, because we haven't seen anything like this. The only thing that can hurt it at this point, which I do think, and I'm going to go back to this, I've been wrong on this, but if I'm right about the PMI and I'm right about the power side, you're gonna start to see inflation move higher from here. I don't think it's going back up to levels that are too concerning, but I do think you're likely to see inflation over the next 12 months go higher than it is today.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  And if it goes back up to four, at the same time, the Fed is cutting rates, that's a different investment environment. That's more of an inflationary boom scenario. And during that, you want to be long commodities, you don't want to be long technology. And that's the momentum shift that I see happening in the market early right now.

• 25:44Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a meeting this coming week that they are going to hold, whether it's on a live stream or not, we're going to find out. If for some reason, the Fed decides to cut rates, what happens? If for some reason, they decide not to cut rates, what happens?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  For this meeting, there's not anything built into the market that they would cut rates. So if they cut rates, it's a massive surprise. I do think the interesting thing that people will be looking at, at the next time either there's a rate cut or they acknowledge, because in September, we're still just above 50%. If they kind of guide towards cutting, everyone's going to be looking at two things, the dollar and long-term yields. And I think that will probably be the issue that kind of starts to spook the market a little bit. Without that happening, so far, the earnings season's been great.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  I think this thing that you mentioned with Fishback on Monday, it's probably a bigger story than people are making it out to be, just from, again, not just the independent side, but Besen specifically was talking about the way the Fed works today. So I think one of the things that the media has done a bad job of is, I happen to agree that academics at a time like this, using historical data, it's garbage in, garbage out, in a world of artificial intelligence. Using data from the 1980s to make a decision on monetary policy does not make any sense to me whatsoever. We don't have a credit situation.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  So when they talk about their mandate, which is inflation versus labor, we don't have a credit bubble. We have credit spreads at all-time tights. So on the one side, you could say the economy's fine, they don't need to lower rates, but that's a question of what is their job right now? The country has a deficit and has a debt problem. Shouldn't they be focused a little bit on that and changing their views? So I actually do think there's an argument that the philosophy and the academic nature of the Fed should not be the same as when we have a debt and deficit problem of this size.

• 27:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, there's been pressure for Powell to resign. I continue to say I don't think he's going to resign. I don't think they're going to fire him. I think he's going to finish it out, but let's see. Most of the people calling for the resignation frankly have been on the right side of the political aisle. Most of them have been either in the administration or tied to the administration in some form or fashion. And so I think that there's a lot of folks who are just like, eh, you know, it's a political kind of angle of attack. Whether you agree with that or not is just, that's what, you know, some people are saying. This past week, though...

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  There's somebody who is not very political, who started to say, I think it's time. Mohamed El-Erian, who's like a storied economist and, you know, very well respected, I think, across the political aisle, in finance, on Wall Street.

• 28:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Him saying that Powell should resign feels like a breaking of the dam a little bit and like, oh, wait a second, this may not be a political story. This may actually be like a finance story.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I, I agree. When I saw it, and I'm, I'm gonna use it in my video this week because I think it's more important. It didn't get enough press. That's someone who I would put as,

• 29:08Speaker 04

  he is an academic. He is a Fed person. He's someone that you could see in that role. When I was in Brazil, he was one of the more important people that I listened to back in the late 90s regarding the emerging market crisis. He is very well trained at his times at various places. And for him to come out and say that, basically saying, I think now, for the future of Fed independence, it's important for Powell to step down. So it's an interesting take on the situation that at some point, if the President of the United States is pressuring you in every way, including creating a shadow Fed, you already don't have the job. So let someone else take it over at this point, and maybe this problem can, can go away and the Fed independence can,

• 29:52Speaker 04

  can still be there. In some ways, it's like if the administration, if someone came in and immediately cut rates, well, then that just highlights the fact that there is no Fed independence at this point. We're gonna have a dissent at this meeting, most likely, from Waller. So you're, you're really in this point where, especially for the people on Bitcoin, on anything in crypto, I mean, this is a really important moment in the history of the country to even be talking about Fed independence, Fed independence, because central bank independence is a global developed market thing. It's considered banana republic stuff when it's outside of that, where the government just says what the central bank policy is gonna be. So this is an important part, I think, for the way people view markets, and in particular,

• 30:36Speaker 04

  the dollar and crypto, because this gets into, if you don't have independence with the central bank, then we really need an independent thing to invest in that isn't kind of dealt with this, because really will, to me, create a lot of people speculating how this could lead to a bubble if rates were taken lower as growth is picking up.

• 30:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin feels like it is just primed to explode higher in the coming weeks and months. We're now getting data points that a lot of the maybe sanctimonious people on Wall Street have been preaching something that is not true now for a decade. I will pick on Warren Buffett only because he is kind of the, he's the king of this viewpoint. Do not own nonproductive assets. Instead, you should own cash flowing companies. Gold has now outperformed the S and P 10 years and 25 year timeframes. Of course, you can pick any timeline, you could put five years, 15 years, like there's all these different data points,

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

  but 10 and 25 are pretty well accepted timeframes to look at. Gold is outperforming the S and P 500 Bitcoin video game number, like just destroying all of them, right?

• 31:53Anthony Pompliano?

  But going forward, I do wonder if this whole idea of cash flowing companies, being able to outperform these nonproductive assets. If that starts to change, because people start to say, wait a second, it's all about dollar debasement and dollar debasement is going to inflate Bitcoin and gold's prices at a faster rate than it inflates the earnings of these companies. I don't know if that's true, but that feels like a backdrop. You then overlay the fact that bonds are basically trash and just getting destroyed left and right. And then you add in the fact that we now have over 100 different public companies all buying Bitcoin. We have the ETFs exploding in terms of AUM.

• 32:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You now are starting to see JP Morgan talk about, well, maybe you should take that nice little Bitcoin you have and put it here and we'll lend against it or we'll custody it. And like, it just feels like Bitcoin has now arrived. It's the main show on Wall Street. Wall Street's full undivided attention is on Bitcoin and there's only 21 million. And so if you increase, you know, capital flow, price has to readjust higher. You disagree with any of that?

• 33:00Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 34:26Anthony Pompliano?

  to help investors navigate the space with confidence. All of that is great, but what I love most about Bitwise is probably their commitment to developers. Bitwise donates 10% of their ETF's profits to Bitcoin open-source developers. Bitcoin developers are the unsung heroes, working tirelessly to maintain, improve, and innovate the blockchain. Their efforts ensure that Bitcoin remains true to its promise as a decentralized system that is built to last. Go to bitwise-pomp.com to learn more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwise-pomp.com. Bitwise, P-O-M-P dot com. As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest.

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 35:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Go check them out today.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  So, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take what you just said, and I'm gonna bring it back to make sure that people... I've said this a lot. I've done it on, on my YouTube. I've, I've talked about it here, but I've never really explained a little bit. So, I'm, I'm gonna take what you said with, starting with Warren Buffett, and I'm gonna bring back this whole thing to Bitcoin for people that they have to think about from an investment standpoint of their portfolio, not in the next couple of years, but over the course of the next decade, which is what artificial intelligence allows to have happen. Eventually with humanoids, eventually with all this stuff, if people aren't working as much, the question is, what is a public company? Because Warren Buffett has made his money investing in public companies.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  There is a reality that the lifespan of a company has continued to decline for a long time. As we get into the digital world, everyone who has children has seen them switch apps so often. Like, they come out of nowhere and TikTok destroys this app, and, you know, Facebook, oh, that's an old person app. You like, these things and the loyalty and how quickly that happened. Now, that happened at a time with moats. My argument has been that with AI, people are underestimating how quickly a business can be set up. You've seen it personally. You've invested with entrepreneurs for a long time, but you're seeing these companies grow rapidly. Rapidly. They also will peak rapidly and you'll see that they might get to 500 million ARR overnight.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  But the question is, can they go to 1 trillion or 1 billion or 100 billion? Can they get to 200 billion, 300 billion, a trillion, 2 trillion? The question that really comes is, how much of that is based on speed and competition? If competition can replicate your idea instantaneously, then you're disrupted overnight. And it's not that the business goes away, it's that it doesn't become a cat, an investable asset, meaning there's no growth anymore. And that's what I think is going to happen in a world of AI is that over the next decade, and that's why I talked about the 2030s are going to be a disruption to all public companies. The S and P 500 companies, they will be disrupted. So when you mentioned that gold has outperformed the S and P 500,

• 38:10Speaker 04

  let's say the S and P 493, it's total destruction. It's seven companies that kept the S and P afloat. So for all of you that are looking at your portfolio, you didn't make money from great investments in stocks. You made it because the Mag 7 actually took over and outperformed. I think that's going to be very hard going forward and most of the great companies of the future will never go public. And so this is where tokenization becomes important. It's what Vlad at Robinhood is focused on, it's what everyone is going. Understanding the new capital structure going forward to me is really important. And I've said it before, I think Bitcoin relative to the S and P and Bitcoin relative, especially to the Mag 7 is the most important chart for the rest of the year. I hit your point, I do think it's going to break higher.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  I think we're doing the typical thing, which is we get to a new level. We run into resistance, but a lot of it has to do with the options expiration. 120 is the big expiration price. We break through it, which I think will happen shortly before the end of the month and we start to break higher. Ethereum now is going to have to get above 4,000 for this to roll, but above 4,000 in Ethereum and above 120,000 in Bitcoin. I think this is going to move a lot faster than people realize. And I'll just leave people with one thing they should think about. Two years ago, Bitcoin outperformed gold by over 100%. Last year, it outperformed it by 75%. This year, obviously, gold has done extremely well. Everyone's talking about it, the tariffs, the wars, everything.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  As of last night's close, Bitcoin relative to the gold, relative to gold, was near unchanged for the year. So it made up all of the stuff that had gone on in the outperformance. For all the gold bugs out there and the people who have just not accepted Bitcoin, it's catching up again.

• 39:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that gold is an attractive asset to hold in a portfolio for the next 10 years?

• 40:01Speaker 04

  I think gold should be part of a portfolio. Anyone who owns Bitcoin, to me, should own some gold. If for no other reason, just if Bitcoin, for any reason, especially with quantum and stuff that went on, people would, I think, look for some other alternative that maybe didn't have anything related to the AI disruption. There will be times where gold will outperform, but I think more importantly, I just don't see the investments in bonds, the investments in anything really as being as stable of an investment and non-disruptible. There can be a disruption to gold eventually over time if we can figure a way to make gold at a very easy way. But that's way down the line and not a focus for

• 40:45Speaker 04

  people in the technology world. So I think gold should be a portion of the portfolio. This is all about the debasement story, as you know. And I think governments, until the debt and deficit is taken care of around the globe, people need to protect themselves from governments trying to get their money. And, you know, we've got capital gains tax now, but on the other side, you get a new administration and all of a sudden it's a wealth tax side. And there's no better way to kind of hide your money than get it in gold.

• 41:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Gold, Bitcoin, two very obvious things that people can put in their portfolio. Is there anything else that you think mixes the defensibility against dollar debasement with maybe some of the things that younger people care about in terms of liquidity and kind of asymmetry of investment?

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Well, I think we talked about it at the beginning. I mean, this is more of a tactical thing for the near term, but I really do think people need to focus on the fact that we have right now, uh, weightings in the S and P 500 at over 50% technology, weightings in the power side, when you combine utilities and energy are about 6%. Um, we're just out of whack from where we are. I don't think it's going to shift in energy and utilities will go up to 50% and tech will go back down. But I do think over the next kind of couple, let's say two years, I do think focusing on industrialization, steeper yield curve, weaker dollar, uh, that should all be good for commodities. It'd be good for foreign, uh, countries that are focused on commodities. That's why I've written things on, on Brazil,

• 42:13Speaker 04

  uh, which continues to have a lot of things going on. If you have a weaker dollar and you have higher commodity prices, countries like Brazil, uh, do well. But those are tactical things. Honestly, at the end, I would, um, I would overweight those things relative to the current weightings. One thing about passive investing that people have moved a lot of money into, you're assuming the winners of the past will remain the winners of the future based on the weighting. And I think for the next five years, if technology stocks have trouble going up too much, uh, and they're disrupted. I mean, you've seen what's happened to Tesla this year. You've seen what's happened to Apple. Those are not the same kind of disruptions, but I do think AI is going to have some shocking disruptions from tech companies going forward.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  So I would overweight, uh, foreign, uh, foreign countries that have commodities and commodities at this point.

• 43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And then when you look at the market today, one of the stories I just can't stop looking at is this whole idea of the retail investor, the self-directed investor. We've seen open door, uh, Eric Jackson is the, you know, one man army pulling together, uh, a whole bunch of people who think this thing's going much higher. Um, there's obviously an explosion of, of volume there, whether it actually goes to $82 or $8 or whatever. It's obvious that there was a trajectory change in that stock. Um, Sydney Sweeney, the ad campaign, I wrote about it this week, I think is, uh, everyone's focused on the photos, the videos, the woman, uh, you know, all that kind of stuff. To me, the most interesting part was really simple meme. Sydney Sweeney has great genes, up 20%, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of

• 43:44Anthony Pompliano?

  value creation, uh, kind of this memetic warfare that really resonates with the self-directed investor. And when you go online, um, our friends over at liquidity, uh, came out and he said, hey, look, look at this post on Reddit where somebody literally saw the ad campaign immediately went and bought, you know, I think it was hundreds of thousands of dollars of shares and was just like, I understand memes, like the meme is going to work. I'm in, stock price goes up, they make money. Um, it feels like that is driving the market more so than anything else. It really does feel like there has been this, uh, this, um, sea change. And I don't know if we're at the point where, if you ever watched the movie Captain Phillips, uh, where he's like, you know, uh, I'm the captain

• 44:28Anthony Pompliano?

  now, right? And, uh, uh, the pirates take over. I don't know if we can say really retail or self-directed investors have taken over, but it feels like they got way more influence. They got way more capital in the market than they did five years ago. And so in a weird way, everyone's always talking about like, what's Wall Street doing? I've started to pay more attention to like, what's retail doing? Cause they're the ones who actually may be driving the market and Wall Street is just supercharging what retail is doing by following retail.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  I, this has been a big change for a while now, but it really accelerated after 2020. Um, I, I, again, that's when I got involved with crypto because my son had done really well trading it. He was 13 years old and I wanted to understand why. And I thought it was just gambling, but it wasn't. And it was the mindset again of a kid who two years later was playing Fortnite all the time and had no interest in baseball because it was boring and it took too long. I think this gets back to the Fed question, which is, is the Fed able to manage monetary policy in a world where gambling is a big part of PCE and it's a consistent growth period where meme coins are something people invest

• 45:40Speaker 04

  in that are no different to me than people investing in memorabilia, baseball cards, whatever the case is. You're assuming these things go up, they go down, there's no value attached to them. The value is attached to other people buying them. It's just that it moves faster. So if someone buys a Babe Ruth card and over the course of a decade, it goes higher, then there's a, you know, uh, all of a sudden a big fall in all baseball cards and the Babe Ruth card falls 50%.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Meme coins have a lifespan. It's just shorter than what people would recognize for most of them. And kids' attention span is shorter. So again, when you're using too much history and too much thought on what should entertain people, at the end of the day, consumption is about entertainment. And if people find something interesting like Sydney Sweeney's meme, then it goes viral and then it becomes something real. I mean, we've watched the Kardashians become billionaires. We've watched all this stuff happen over the last, you know, 20 years. I think people just need to accept the fact that what Warren Buffett talks about, I mean, no offense to Warren Buffett, but he has no context for what the Kardashians do or this and they're billionaires. So the world has been changing for some time. I just think people's attention span and the movements are only going to

• 46:51Speaker 04

  get shorter and shorter. And that's why I think investing in a company is different than making money through trading. Kids and younger investors are using options on this because the market goes up 83% of the years, guys. And the amount of hedge fund people that talk about bubbles and trying to predict the next crash is off the charts. It goes up 83% of the time. Like, this is just the normal part of life. And they've just said, wow, the odds are in my favor. I make money doing this. I'm going to keep trading it. And when the market goes down and I lose money, I'll just get back up and do something again. Guess what? You've seen crypto people do that for a long time.

• 47:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto people are way ahead. I mean, we've talked about it. You know, bank runs in the traditional financial system. Crypto people were out of there before anyone even knew the bank run was coming. They could smell that stuff coming from a mile away. Now they got experience, right? If you just think of, I remember writing a, I remember writing a piece, there's an investor who, I think is a very good investor. I think that he, you know, was issuing a word of caution, a big crash is coming, blah, blah, whatever. And he was so worried. He's like, all this risk taking in 2021, 2022, whatever. And I remember just being like, no, man. The people, the young kids, they got way stronger stomachs than you in the traditional world. They've got the true, you know, kind

• 48:09Anthony Pompliano?

  of diamond hands. And I went back and I looked at them like, they're coming from the crypto world where they're used to 80% drawdowns that happen every four years, right? A 30% drawdown is a buy signal to them, right? Like, like they buy the dip is a crypto mantra. And we went through 2022, 23, sure. Of course, no one wants to see their portfolio go down. But you know who was selling? You know who was selling around Liberation Day? Oh, it's usually older people, the more sophisticated people, like they're the ones who almost outsmart themselves. And it's kind of like, you know, the, uh, the people who pushed west on the American frontier.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 48:48Anthony Pompliano?

  They were either too dumb or too courageous to not go. Right? Kind of same thing in investing. It's just like, there's a group of people who are just like, you cannot shake me out of my position. For better or worse, I'm going down with the ship or I'm going to hold through, you know, the storm. And I just think that that it's really hard to compete against those people because there is nothing that is going to happen that is going to convince them to sell the asset. And so that's why you see some of these things, you know, kind of come flying back. And now if they start going into the stock market, I, you know, open door to 82, I guess. Like, I don't know.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  Well, I'll finish the one point left that when I said the PMI and I connected back to everything that's happening. I believe we are at the beginning of a re-industrialization where the focus is going to be not just on getting the power and the data centers built to fund AI. The robotaxis, the drones, all of this stuff is happening over the next decade. There's, there's absolutely no question about it. The issue that people don't believe in is, oh, well, the MAG7 will be fine. They're going to benefit, which is all well and good, except for one thing. I believe we are at a 18-year turning point in the market where the winners of the next five to 10 years will be very different than the winners of the last five to 10. It's about hundreds of winners as opposed to seven winners.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  And that change in the marketplace means people are going to have a bunch of commodities which are very cyclical. They bounce around, their earnings are very dependent on things. And even though I don't, I think this is a structural change, people have to remember if you run out of power or we have shortages of gas turbines, we have shortages right now of transformers. Elon Musk is buying power plants. Like, there's going to be bottlenecks. And bottlenecks in supply chains mean earnings can miss for a quarter and you have to look through them. The only technology investment of the digital economy that I think is going to be able to work in that period, which is why I say Bitcoin over the MAG7. I will continue to say it. I think this inflection point of the PMI is very good for crypto because the Fed is going to be cutting rates at the same time. You have to make sure that you understand that the winners of the last 18 years to me

• 50:53Speaker 04

  are going to be under pressure from all these trends that are happening at the same time.

• 50:57Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Well, the PMI piece was in Substack at Visceral Labs. For the institutional people who want to talk to me about the PMI and the types of names and stuff and the power thing, I'm doing a lot of work for them on the power side and with some of the people there. So they can find that at 22v Securities or 22v Research. And then my X side, the YouTube, every Sunday morning. Whatever, my friend. It's all there.

• 51:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You're doing a great job. Keep it up. People love this. By the way, for all you people who keep writing comments, this is a Saturday morning viewing experience, subscribe to the channel. Come on, let's get these numbers up so that Jordan can get more people watching this.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. Go for it.

• 51:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate it and we will do it again next week.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  See you then, bud.