Bitcoin's Next Move Depends On One Fed Decision | Jordi Visser

Jordi Visser is a veteran macro investor with 30+ years of experience and the author of the VisserLabs Substack. In this conversation, we break down the AI stock slowdown, why China's new Kimi K3 model is upending the AI trade, and the hidden cultural bias baked into these systems. We also discuss the cooler inflation report, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's early moves, bitcoin's reaction, and why robotics could be the next big AI trade. ====================== For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com https://anchor.fm/s/b4841110/podcast/Mengotomars.com. ====================== Looking for a better place to trade? BloFin gives traders access to deep liquidity, advanced futures products for crypto AND TradFi assets, fast execution, and a clean, intuitive interface—all in one platform. To celebrate their partnership with us, they're giving away $100,000 in Deposit & Trade Rewards. Deposit, trade, and earn rewards based on your activity during the campaign. Check them out at ( https://partner.blofin.com/d/Pomp ). ====================== This episode is brought to you by TikTok for Business. If you run a company, your next wave of customers may already be on TikTok. With more than 200 million monthly active users in the U. S. and 51% unique reach, TikTok gives brands access to audiences they can't reach anywhere else. Learn how to turn that reach into growth at TikTok for Business ( https://anthonypompliano.splashthat.com/ ) ====================== Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ====================== 0:00 - Intro0:50 - AI stock unwind & the summer slowdown5:45 - Framework for picking AI winners7:1 3 - China's Kimi K3 & open source vs. closed models11:09 - Model routers & how many models is too many?17:46 - The hidden "cultural weights" in AI models22:37 - Inflation report & Fed reaction 32:28 - Bitcoin's reaction & crypto allocation39:26 - Nasdaq outlook & where he's avoiding45:09 - Software stocks & what is the next trade?

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition, even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  But the AI thematic side or the factor side, the vol's up towards 100. Bitcoin vol is still at 30. So if you're putting an asset in a portfolio right now, you can have three times as much Bitcoin on a vol adjusted basis as you can AI. And that means that we're at a point where I think you should start seeing more and more people as they get more focused on Ethereum, get in. Once we get above the 200 day moving average, I believe we're at the start of something new.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great conversation with Jordy Visser. In this conversation, we talk about all the deleveraging happening in the stock market, why the mid-cycle slowdown in AI may be impacting your portfolio. We also get into what's going on with inflation and Kevin Warsh's recent comments. And then last but not least, we go and we cover what's happening with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the entire crypto industry. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, I thought we could start the conversation. It seems like there's a big unwind happening in the public market, specifically around a lot of the AI names. You started talking quite a bit about this like summer slowdown and how that may affect things. What are you seeing?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, this is probably gonna be a fairly high level discussion. I'm gonna get a little wonky with the leverage side, but I think people are gonna have to get used to this. So what's happening is the S and P is making new all-time highs, or equal weight S and P is making new all-time highs. Breath is making new all-time highs. The AI names are going down. So a lot of people are sitting there seeing their Micron go down and their Marvell go down. And there go through the list of all of the names. Every single name Caterpillar, Modine, everyone that's been, let's say, going up fairly fast

• 2:49Speaker 02

  is giving back some of that. Now, some of that is related to just what I talked about, which is the AI mid-cycle slowdown is a second derivative change. And Nvidia went through this back in 2024. And I highly recommend everyone go back and look because from ChatGPT to about June of 24, Nvidia went up 12 times. So very similar to, let's say, Micron going from 100 to 1200. Since that period in June of 24, Nvidia's earnings have continued to grow. They've continued to dominate the AI trade, but in two years, they've now gone up 48%.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Good returns. I mean, you're getting 20 plus percent returns. You're outperforming the S and P, but it's not the 12 times that happened. And that's where we are in AI right now for all of these names, meaning most of them had three to 10 times type moves, especially the semiconductor names, which mean they've built in a lot of the next two years. And I think what the market is going through is this second derivative where when you look at the earnings of these companies, you're like, oh, my God, they're up 400%, 500%. But then a year from now, they're only going to be up 30%, 40%. So you're decelerating. So that's the first part is I think the market is coming to term with the AI mid-cycle slowdown. And the other thing I wrote about, which is the fireworks show.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  The, the under the hood story is that there is absolutely a deleveraging happening. And I want to use again, a bunch of comparisons. So silver and gold were up massively last year. They had a drawdown, the biggest drawdowns they've ever seen in 30 years on different time horizons that were all within 20 days. The momentum factor for technology has seen an unprecedented move lower. I've posted an X about it. And what that does is the volatility rises. And whether it's a single name retail person that is taking out leverage, whether it's Korean investors whose margins accounts have been closed, or whether it's a long, short, multi-strat, market neutral hedge fund,

• 4:59Speaker 02

  or it's a systematic quant strategy. And we've seen reports and numbers released from the prime brokers of just very large losses in a short amount of time. And because the volatility has gone higher, whether it's risk parity, whether it's any kind of quant strategy, when the volatility goes higher, you not only have to reduce your risk at that point just from vol targeting, but it also means that that position, when it starts to come back, cannot be as big. So I think the best way for people to understand this, this was going to happen in a case like Micron, by going from 100 to 1200 and back down to 800 as of early this morning, you've given back now, depending on the name, 30 to 50%. We've done enough based on what I think is there.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  And I think we'll probably start to form some sort of a bottom here. But like silver, like gold, and another one, like Bitcoin after October 10th, these things have not come back yet. So their vol may have come down, but those things have been on the downside and they haven't gone back. The difference is with the AI trade, they were significantly above their 200 day moving average. And so everyone hears this. Many of these names like Micron, they were unchanged for years. Micron was the same price at liberation day lows that it was in 2017. So a lot of these were breaking out of long-term ranges. They're way above their 200 day moving average. I think somewhere between this 30 and 60% retracement,

• 6:27Speaker 02

  they're gonna hang in there and they'll start to move higher again. But I think the fireworks show is over. And I think from this point on, some names will do well, some names won't do well, and you'll see volatility gradually come down, but not quickly and not something that's gonna just turn into a, oh, that was no problem. It was something real and it's about leverage.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Do you have a framework for identifying which are the ones that will do well and which ones won't?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Well, what I'm going through, and I wrote a paper about memory. I think memory is the most important part of the AI trade. I am focused on companies that have not yet see their step up function in earnings. So in the case of Nvidia, when it peaked in 2024 from a 12-bagger, one thing started to happen, which is they started to only beat earnings by a little bit. So the names that I'm focused on are the ones that I still think are gonna beat earnings by a significant amount in the quarters to come, not just this quarter. Memory obviously blew away numbers. So far, we've seen Micron blow away numbers. We've seen Samsung blow away numbers. We've seen ASML blow away numbers.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And all the stocks traded lower. So the semiconductors are gonna be fine, but memory is the place that I'm gonna be focused on. And then I'm writing a very long piece, or I did write it, which I'll release on my paywall this weekend about Vera Rubin. And Vera Rubin is another area where there are certain names in there which haven't seen the step up function in earnings yet. That is gonna be the things that drives it is you're gonna need to beat earnings significantly. And if you're just beating them by a little bit, you can still produce 25% a year returns like Nvidia has, but you're not gonna get back up into the 60 and 70. So I think everyone's gonna have to now do some homework. That's the reason why I have my 100 name portfolio and I'll be spending the time on which names are better than others.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Now, a lot of what has been driving the AI trade has been all of these bottlenecks. And a huge piece of the bottleneck was that there was two major American companies. Maybe a third was trying to enter the fray in terms of Grok. But we just got the Kimi K3 release, and this is a Chinese open source model. It seems to be performing as well, if not better than Fable or any of the latest closed source American models. Does that change any of your analysis if all of a sudden the winning models are these open source models versus them being the American closed sourced?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  No, and this is, this is a good time to bring this up. So I wrote a paper this week on Brad Gersner's interview on, well, it wasn't an interview. He was a guest on the All In Pod. And on that, every answer he gave on this to me was very balanced. It kind of went through the pros and cons of all these stories. But the comment that I really focused on the most, which I think people have to understand, this is the largest TAM that will ever exist, at least on planet Earth. We'll see if the TAM in space will actually be something that happens. But that TAM is about intelligence.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  And intelligence will drive revenues that will drive compute demand. So here's the thing with open source and with the frontier models. Right now, if I wanted to use Kimi K 3.0, I couldn't do it. Neither could you unless you had the hardware. There's no way to use it, meaning could an enterprise use it? Yeah, so it's isolated right now to people that have enough hardware to use it. There's no way to even get the hardware. You have to have GPUs to be able to run it. Like this is a big model. That's the only way it competes with the frontier. If you want to use Anthropic, you just go onto the cloud and you go use it. So there is this element of, well, who's going to be the people that use it? Will developers use it?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, they probably will. They're trying to reduce costs. So AI native businesses are going to have a huge advantage. Will an enterprise company in the United States of America use a Chinese open source model? Maybe over time, but they're trying to get adoption from the humans plus the agents. Humans need cowork. Humans need all of these things and they get used to using a model. So you just can't keep swapping out every time there's a new model. It's not that easy. And so I think if they're, you know, if they're going to bet on something from an enterprise perspective, which is where the revenue is being driven. I don't buy into the fact that these Fortune 500 companies are going to all of a sudden go, you know what?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  I'm going to get rid of Fable 5 and Anthropic and I'm going to move to this Chinese model. We're going to download it and we're going to teach our employees how to use something which doesn't have the tools. So the intelligence and the benchmarks may be there, which is fine for someone who knows how to code themselves and someone who's an engineer, but it's not that easy for the employees to actually go through. So I think people have to be very careful about this. I hear this repeatedly and go back to Brad Gerson's side. This is the largest individual TAM. Will people use open source? 100%. Will most of the token usage be open, open source? Yeah, it already is. But what we've seen so far over the last six months, and they talked about this on the

• 11:39Speaker 02

  all in, the actual enterprises are reducing their open source and going more towards this because that's the way their bureaucracy and everything works. And I think people have, who haven't worked for a Fortune 500 company, which I have done, the bureaucracy of getting decisions made, how long it takes to decide on a model, how long it takes to decide on software. And then once you do, you have a long-term plan. I don't see the Fortune 500 companies in the United States switching to a Chinese model anytime soon.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  So there's two parts of this that I think are, are interesting. And these are just things that we're actively trying to figure out at Sylvia. And so I'm going to use that experience extrapolate where I think a lot of these companies are probably doing. The first is we recently built and released in the product, a model router. So the average consumer that's using Sylvia has no clue that this is happening, but they can think of each query previously was going to kind of the highest intelligence, which also is the most expensive model to be able to go compute it, which is great when you ask a really complex question. But if you ask, what is the date? We probably don't need, you know, superhuman intelligence to be able to go and answer that question. And so the way the model router works is basically can use the highest intelligence,

• 12:54Speaker 03

  most powerful model for really complex things, but it can direct queries to whether it's open source or kind of, you know, lower cost, lower compute intense models for simpler questions. And what I find interesting about the model router is one, we already are seeing a positive impact from it. It's, you know, putting some questions over to the, to the less powerful model. What I don't know, and we're actively trying to figure out, how many models could you put into the model router? Does it make sense to do it with two or three? Would you do 20 or 30? And I saw Sierra, Brett Taylor's company, I think that they have a blog post from their engineers where they have about 20 different models. That doesn't mean that's the right way to do it, but it does feel like in a weird way,

• 13:37Speaker 03

  I agree that the open source model for the average employee is not going to be the thing that they're going to just, you know, put on their computer and all of a sudden start using. But I wonder if some of these companies start to create this, you know, harness and environment and the tools, and then they basically just use the models on the backend and the end user doesn't even know what they're using. They just know that, hey, this is faster. This is, you know, more accurate. What do you think about that?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I think that's the way it'll go. I don't think there's any question. I think the barriers to doing it right now are, are hard. There will be companies that make it easier. So you're getting to the point of, let's think of the models as outsourced intelligence. So let's just pretend like these are people and you're like, okay, so I have access to these 20 people. Well, you're going to pay the highest price for the most sophisticated things. Where this shows up is that we're in the early stages, the very early stages of the Jevon's paradox situation, but adoption is still extremely low. And we know that because there hasn't really been any job losses for any of the companies.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  And so far they just haven't been hiring people. I think when we get to that point, the downside to me, which I've always thought is when people extrapolate Anthropic's ARR and they're like, it'll be a trillion dollar, that what we're saying, which I agree with, and I don't buy into, they're going to be there. I believe AI will disrupt all businesses because intelligence will be commoditized. Now, that is not going to hurt Anthropic in terms of growing their ARR, but I have believed and I still believe that taking this pace and just because they did it the last three years, 10 times, 10 times, and they're on pace for 10 times again to get to 100 billion ARR. People are extrapolating and saying, well, next year there'll be a trillion.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And I do think there's an element of Jevon paradox, but what you're talking about, and I think what people should see and get, I don't think they're going to get to those numbers. Do I think they could get to 200 next year? Yeah, well, that's doubling, that's not 10 times. So with everything in AI, I think what people have to realize, what I said with Micron and with all these places, I think it goes with Anthropic as well. Eventually you reach a point where this was a surge out of nowhere, but eventually competition shows up. And you and I have talked about this and I've said it before, and I'm saying it more actively as time goes on. Demis Hassabis wrote a piece on AGI. Demis Hassabis is the person that I think is the most level-headed of the people who

• 16:09Speaker 02

  I also think wouldn't say anything unless he was confident that we were getting there. I think Dario Modai, I think Sam Altman, they run businesses where they're talking about Sundar Pichai. The, Demis Hassabis doesn't run Google. He has talked about AGI since 2010 and forecasted that it would be around 2030. So he's right on the number. Well, he's now convinced and saying the world is going to change over the next three years. And what it means for public companies and private companies and any company that exists, you don't know if your business will be disrupted by AI, but the probability of that happening rises every day that we get closer to AGI. So we've talked about terminal value.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  We've talked about how you can't view Adobe and Salesforce past the next three years. I think you're starting to get into that with all companies and especially with AGI. It even hits the physical companies, the energy companies, the Microns, the stuff like that, three years from now. So I think that's all coming and that gets us back to, this is the reason why I say Bitcoin is the only thing that has a moat, which is what's an asset that I don't have to worry about it being disrupted by AI, but I still have to invest. I think every single asset is going to run through a problem where AI is going to run into its moat.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  All right, boys. I need you to pay attention and listen. Most of you don't realize, after the age of 30, testosterone drops about 1% a year. And the bigger issue isn't just total levels. There's a protein called SHBG. Yeah, I'm in my science bag with that one. SHBG. Then it actually binds your testosterone and it locks it up. So even if your number looks fine, a lot of it isn't doing anything for you. That's where Mars Men comes in. Mars Men is designed to fix that. Clinically dosed ingredients that help free up bound testosterone and support natural production, energy and recovery. It works with what your body already makes, not against it. And the feedback that they're getting is consistent. People are reporting more energy throughout the day, sharper focus, better gym recovery. It's not one-time spike.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  It's just simply a higher floor. Now this product is made in the United States. It's third-party tested and it's backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time, our listeners can get 50% off for life plus free shipping and they'll get three free gifts too. You can go to mengotomars.com. Again, that's mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Again, mengotomars.com. Go check out your testosterone and fix it if it's broke.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  What I also find interesting about the open source models versus the American closed source models is everyone is, I think, excited about open source allowing you to self-host and be able to actually use your data in your environment without having to worry about the zero data retention policies or, you know, the big model labs going to take your information and train their model or eventually compete with you. The downside though, is a lot of what we're seeing with Sylvia and the Chinese open source models is it is not well-understood how some of the Eastern world values are incorporated into the weights. And so one aspect that I think is not a conversation really at all, but will be a conversation is this idea of like cultural weights.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  So if you think of finance maybe as the best example, if you use the generalization of America in the West is capitalist and China in the East is more socialist, well, you obviously want the capitalist responses or that kind of capitalist weights into the model if you're in the West. We just don't know, right? It's really hard and I don't see a lot of research there yet, but I do think that just as much as people are worried about, you know, what is the Google algorithm or what is the TikTok algorithm feeding to people? This idea of like these cultural weights is going to become a huge part. And it goes back to your point about these large companies. There's like a technical and user experience barrier that they've got to overcome. But then also, you know, if you're, I don't know, a customer service, uh, uh, product

• 20:17Speaker 03

  and all of a sudden you start sharing, you know, kind of cultural values in response to customers, companies are probably going to get pretty uncomfortable very quickly. And so it just feels like it's not only technical, there's also this other element that is very, uh, not understood at the moment that we're going to have to do a lot of work on.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is why in the end you left one thing out, or I don't know if it's intentional, or you guys haven't thought about it with Sylvia, but there is no way that we know for sure that if you host your own model on your own computer, that you're safe from people having information from you. And let me, let me, let me make sure people understand why. Once you start going on the internet, you're exposed. So if you have this thing sitting some place and it's contained, but you're never accessing it to the internet, we don't know what backdoor things could be in any of these models to get through. So I've, I've heard people talk about it. I think the naive part is when people get into this, well, I'm not exposed.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  If I use ChemiK 2.5, which I have on one of my hardware, I'm not worried about it in the same way, only because I don't have any of my important information on my business in there. But on me going into the internet or anything like that, if I use agents and they've got credit card information or wallet information, I just don't think we're there. So I, everything that you said, I think it leads back to the fact that it is very difficult for a US Fortune 500 company to not use US frontier models and probably Google, Amazon,

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Microsoft as the cloud provider in some kind of, you know, cyber related way that they can think about things along with their own cyber. And that's why I think the adoption will continue to go. The reason I said that on the AI side, I'm not worried about where we are and what stocks I wanna, I wanna be involved in. I said it last week, I'll say it now, and I'm gonna show it on the weekend video. We have barely entered the agentic world, barely. Consumer agents are coming. Right now, we're at enterprise agents and they're barely being used. And that's why when you go back to Brad Gersner's line, this is the largest TAM of intelligence that it could be. So if we knew that the number was

• 22:42Speaker 02

  $20 trillion and that there were six model companies, they're all gonna make money. Like in the end, they're all gonna make money. So getting worried about, you know, will they make any money? Will open source take everything? It's not gonna work like that. It's gonna be spread out. There'll be lots of different players. Jevon's paradox is in play. Compute demands are everywhere. Everyone's gonna get a little piece of the pie. The question is, if you're pricing this stuff really low, like the Chinese models are, like Meta is, do you have other ways to make money? Meta is trying to get it through the consumer agent side, through advertising, through a bunch of things with inside their world. Apple's trying to do this with the Gemini model to get Syrian, to get volume

• 23:24Speaker 02

  going that way on the hardware side, as well as dominating in, in terms of the personal intelligence side. Everyone's in a race to monetize this. I think it's a big pie. I just think the model providers are gonna have an uphill battle from here compared to the last two years.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Another thing that happened this week that I think is having a big impact on the market is obviously the inflation report. It came in much cooler than I think people were expecting. We also got some comments from Worsch. What was your take on the data? And then his commentary afterwards?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Well, I think the most important part, you know, which you and I talked about the last couple of weeks, and I said probably about three weeks ago, that one of the biggest surprises to me with this whole thing in the straight of form moves is how people could literally be this wrong on something they had studied for, I don't know, 20, 30 years. If this ever got shot down, and we took down 20% of this, what would happen? And the fact that not only did crude oil trade down, and obviously we're trading back up now with rekindling and bombing and everything, but the second you stop bombing, we have the next ceasefire, what's gonna happen to crude? I can't imagine it doesn't go straight back

• 24:32Speaker 02

  down. I mean, I don't fall for the trap again, especially when inflation swaps this week actually went down. So two-year inflation swaps as of yesterday were actually lower than where we started the week. So we're at the lows. So I think when you go through the inflation data, number one, there's just no way to read it unless this month was a fluke on the core services side. Every single inflation data but one, PCE core is the only one that's pointing upward. Everything else, whether it's median inflation, trimmed mean, whether it's the CPI core, whether it's sticky inflation, or whether it's trueflation,

• 25:15Speaker 02

  they've all come down while the PCE core is at the highs of the year. And so I'm leaning towards the fact that the inflation side is a non-story for the rest of the year. Now, that being said, with the change in inflation, we reduced the Fed rate hike significantly. And I've talked about how I think this is a very big positive for the debasement trade, a very big positive for crypto. We haven't seen it play out yet. We've seen Bitcoin act much better during a momentum unwind, which is not normal. But what Worsch said, again, he's reiterated, he, basically, the headline for me is, this is not a hawkish dovish thing. This is a reform thing. He is fixated on a point that you, you know, brought up at the beginning of the year repeatedly, which is, we can't trust any data from the

• 26:00Speaker 02

  government. He believes that the Fed has been very backward looking, which I know I agree with. I think looking at anything at a time of AI, you know, six months later, when the data gets revised for, you know, a long time, how can that be the types of things that you make decisions on? So I think his message to everyone there is, we're in a completely different time, and I think that aligns with AI. He has talked about the fact that AI is very disruptive. He's a big believer in AI. He's also a big believer in digital assets, and I don't think people should forget that. So I think monetary policy, the old traditional way, is gone. And the most important thing for people is we've

• 26:38Speaker 02

  now taken the July rate hike to a 10% chance. So if you believe what the, where the expectations are, which is one rate hike before the end of the year, you're kind of saying he's gonna raise rates before the midterm elections. And if he was gonna do it, I think July would be the time. I don't see him doing it in September, October.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  One of the aspects to me that feels like it has been exasperated in my understanding of all of this. Last Sunday, I went to the Jay-Z concert, and while we were there, we walked around and I interviewed a bunch of people, which basically just meant I put a microphone in their face and said, you know, why is everything so expensive? If you knew nothing about economics, you had never seen a data point in your life, you would think that every single person is just completely unable to afford anything. Groceries are too expensive. Gas is too expensive. We did it the day after the news came out that rent in New York City, the median rents just hit a brand new all time high of like $5,250

• 27:41Speaker 03

  or whatever, right? At the same time, they're at a concert where the tickets are, you know, 500 bucks, 700 bucks, whatever. So like, there's a little bit of irony in people who were at this event where the ticket prices were really high, talking about how everything's so inexpensive. So obviously, they got money from somewhere. They know somebody's got money. But the second aspect of it was, almost nobody was actually referring to inflation. They were just referring to the aggregate increase in price over the last five or six years. And so what I do wonder is, you know, is there good news on the horizon? It's just gonna take a couple of years? Well, that doesn't help politicians at the midterm. But it does feel like so much of the discontent, the, the kind of issues in the actual economy

• 28:24Speaker 03

  in terms of people's perspective of their real life experience, it's all aggregate price increase. Almost none of it has to do with, you know, the inflation that you and I would think about in terms of the difference between 3.5% or 3.9%.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, so I've thought a lot about this, and here, here's my, here's my take. If something bad happens to you, you know, you have a ski accident, you hurt your knee, you get into a car accident, for the next five years, that thing is pretty front and center in your brain. I believe what's happened is we can all remember what things cost before COVID. Like, it's in our head. We remember what the car we bought cost. So every day, someone has to just make a decision because cars have a, some type of lifespan. You're like, you know what, I'm gonna go buy, I'm gonna trade this one and go buy a new car.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  And, I mean, I've run into this recently where I wanted to go see because I have a Model S that I bought in 2021. Well, they're, they're stopping the Model S. I'm actually using the full self-driving now on my car, and it's an old version. I want the newest version. The car, the cost is up significantly from when I bought it in 2021. So my brain remembers what I paid on something. And I think this is one of the things with you, with, with us, with COVID, never does inflation go up that much in that short amount of time. Not in all of our lifetimes. So normally, when inflation goes higher, it's this gradual process. When it happened in the seventies, it was driven by oil prices. And so oil went up, oil went down. This one wasn't that. This was, here you go, here's trillions of

• 30:06Speaker 02

  dollars. Everything went up in price. Every single thing went up in price. And so I think we all remember when eggs didn't cost $6, $7 a carton. We all remember when XYZ didn't cost this. And I think it takes a long time for that to wear off. But I think when you add in the polarization and the fact that people need someone to blame for this, and the fact that AI is standing in front of them where they don't feel like their job is ever safe the way it was, I really think, I'm getting to the point now, I agree with you, because I grew up in a house where my grandmother told me about the Great Depression all the time, about not having money for food, being thrown out of her house in her teens to basically, they couldn't afford, she had to go out and get a job, she had to go do something. And just remembering what the Great Depression was, this is not a, we have the unemployment

• 30:51Speaker 02

  rate at near all time lows. You can borrow money from anything right now. So I agree with you that I think this is more of a psychological inflation thing, and I think it has a lot to do with just what has happened the last five years.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Given Worsch's comments, yeah, the first meeting that he really did, her press conference, he didn't say much. This was a little bit more robust in commentary. Did you change your mind at all about how you're thinking about him as the leader of the central bank or actions he may take?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  No, I actually, I think he's the right person for the job because I do think the most important thing for this current Fed chair to be is young enough to understand the importance of AI, which I don't think Jerome Powell had. They didn't even pay attention to AI honestly until like the fourth, third, fourth quarter of last year, at least from what they said publicly. The second thing is, I think it needs to be more of a market person and less of an academic. And I think that's another important part that, you know, Worsch worked at Morgan Stanley, like Worsch has a background in capital markets in the same way that Besen does. So you have Besen and him involved right now in the market at

• 32:03Speaker 02

  a very important time. For people not focused on digital assets, and again, this is, you're going to be hearing me talk about this a lot more. I mean, our, our lives are crossing over to a very important point, starting there because, you know, everything I'm starting to do in my video is related to what's going to happen for me in the second, the final four months of the year when I get out of Maine. I mean, I'm very focused on the rise of agents and what Besen and Worsch are talking about, which is the importance of the United States of America being the leaders of the financial guardrails, not losing the, the benefit that they admit has been a huge benefit for the world, which is the reserve currency

• 32:46Speaker 02

  of the world, SWIFT, all of these different things. Digital assets are a major part of it. And the growth that's happening in prediction markets, the growth that's happening in real world assets and tokenization, the news we saw this week on tokenization, all of this stuff is happening. And so I think Kevin Warsh is the right person at a major inflection point that very few people on Wall Street that are on the hedge fund world are fully embracing yet. I think they're realizing they have to. And with AI now being in a massive volatility spike, I think now we're going to start to see some money looking for new beta. And I think that's where Kevin Warsh is going to be a, a big asset. So I'm very happy with the reform that's going to happen on all these fronts related to AI.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  The second that inflation starts to cool and interest rate hike odds start to come down, I think a lot of people look at something like Bitcoin and try to understand how is that reacting and what is that telling us about the future? Seems like Bitcoin had a pretty strong bid this week. What was your read on that?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm actually going to take it a different direction. I don't, I mean, I know Bitcoin is, is, is more of your focal point. Ethereum's had the big move. It's up as of yesterday's close, or let's say, yes, since it doesn't close, as of yesterday's equity close, it was up close to 20% month to date. And just so people understand, that would be, if we finish the month with 20%, the largest month or the best month since August of last year. Ethereum has outperformed Bitcoin. It's been the largest on a cross versus Bitcoin since then. The reason I care so much about Ethereum is because I do believe if AI agents are coming, if tokenization is coming, if all these things are happening,

• 34:28Speaker 02

  this is an energy with inside the revenue side of crypto. And we, there's, there's no, there's no way to get around what's happening volume wise. I think the Stripe bid for PayPal was a big deal too. I have my crypto 40 name equal weight basket, similar to my AI thematic one meant to deal with the agentic world. And PayPal was one of the names in it. And so, number one, I was happy I've done my homework and figured out which public companies, because there's six of them that are in there, including Robinhood, how they all fit in with this crossover with the AI agents. But I think Bitcoin is just hanging in there

• 35:07Speaker 02

  very well on a relative basis. It's obviously done well versus AI. But the AI thematic side or the, the factor side, the vol's up towards 100. Bitcoin vol is still at 30. So if you're putting an asset in a portfolio right now, you can have three times as much Bitcoin on a vol adjusted basis as you can AI. And that means that we're at a point where I think you should start seeing more and more people as they get more focused on Ethereum, get in. Once we get above the 200 day moving average, I believe we're at the start of something new. Until we are above there, I'm trading it actively. I'm trying to make sure that if the bottom is made here, it's there. I even put little,

• 35:48Speaker 02

  started to buy a little bit of Micron this week and some of the semis. Micron, I have a position, again, it's very small relative to what it was back then. And I'm buying it at higher prices than where I ended up selling it on average. But that's because the new news that has come out over the course of the last six weeks and the consolidation and the, the deleveraging that's happened, I feel more confident in terms of putting a little bit, little bit of money in there, but I'm still much more heavily weighted towards crypto.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  When you think of the crypto allocation, is it just Bitcoin and Ethereum?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  For me, at this point, it's Bitcoin, Ethereum and MicroStrategy. So I'm not, I'm, I don't think from, I'm sure this will change as I spend more time in the space.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  I've never been a big stock person as a macro person. It's been thematic. So even though Micron is in the portfolio, if you ask me why, it's because of AI. Everything I have in the portfolio, to me, is either an AI trade or it's a crypto trade. And so that's it. I really, Eli Lilly, it's an AI trade. Silver, it's an AI trade. Like, anything I have in the portfolio is related to the stuff that I write about and I talk about. I believe we are at the convergence between AI and crypto, and that all public companies will be disrupted the same way Adobe and Salesforce have been, same way the hyperscalers had. They're, they just rallied off the bottom. That's why the S and P's hanging around

• 37:19Speaker 02

  the all time highs while AI trades lower. But over the last nine months, they haven't done anything. So again, when you go through things, I'm just more focused on the AI infrastructure trade. Once the agentic side starts to accelerate, once AGI gets here, I believe the ROIC is headed towards private companies. I believe small private businesses are going to be the winners of this. The enterprises will find a way to reduce their expenses over the next two years. We are seeing that happen inside the public companies. If you haven't seen it so far, about 40 of the S and P 500 companies have reported so far. And just like happening Q1, the surprise ratio right now, we're, we're outperforming

• 37:57Speaker 02

  earnings. It's been 16% in terms of the beat. So we're again, headed towards another big, big, big month, big, big quarter for earnings. And a lot of these have happened in the banks and in insurance companies.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Today's episode is brought to you by Blowfit. If you're actively trading crypto, then you already know the platform matters. Execution speed matters, liquidity matters, and reliability during volatile markets, that definitely matters. That's why more traders are starting to use Blowfit. They've built a trading platform focused on fast execution, deep liquidity, advanced futures products, and a really, really clean user experience. They don't overcomplicate things. You can trade hundreds of spot and perpetual pairs. They integrate directly with TradingView, and they've built a platform for both active traders and people who are just getting started. Security is a major focus, obviously. Assets are custody with fire blocks, they provide proof of reserves, and they've built a strong reputation for platform stability during those high volatility environments. And to celebrate the partnership with us, Blowfit is now giving away $100,000. That's right.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Blowfit is going to give away $100,000 in deposit and trading rewards. So if you're looking for a better place to trade crypto, go check them out today using our link in the description. Again, that's Blowfit, the trading platform built for serious crypto traders. Go sign up, pay attention, because they're giving away $100,000 in deposit and trading rewards. Today's episode is brought to you by TikTok for Business. If you run a company, you are probably already spending a bunch of money on ads, search, X, maybe Meta. But there's a platform your competitors are sleeping on, and the window to move first is closing. TikTok has over 200 million monthly active users in the US alone, and 51% of that reach is unique, meaning that those users aren't reachable on any other major platform where

• 39:40Speaker 04

  you are already buying. Unlike follower based platforms, TikTok's algorithm rewards strong creative, not audience size. That means a well-made video from a brand no one's heard of can reach millions of relevant users. For companies trying to acquire users cost effectively, that's a fundamentally different model. TikTok for Business gives you full funnel tools built for performance. Whether you're looking to drive awareness, introduce your products, or convert new audiences, TikTok is becoming an important discovery engine for businesses and cryptocurrency alike. If you're a founder, a CMO, or growth lead, and you haven't run a TikTok campaign yet, now's the time to change that. Click on the link in the description or go to antonypompliano dot splash that dot com. Again,

• 40:22Speaker 04

  click on the link in the description and go check out TikTok for Business today.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  What are the areas that you're actively avoiding? We talk a lot about where you're putting capital. Is there any areas that you see maybe people talking about that you're more nervous about?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  I still have no interest in, in SaaS seat based software. So, you know, a lot of people are trying to pick bottoms in, in that. Aside from that,

• 40:50Speaker 02

  I think you're going to get a lot of sectors that are S and P 500 related. The things that I mentioned, like I think between now and the end of the year at these levels, regardless of whether Micron sells off another 20%, I don't see how the memory trade, the earnings don't grow and how the S and P doesn't go higher. So that's one of the things when people get worried about things, they extrapolate a fall in a certain stock market to something else. So you've heard a lot of people talk about the debt side. Oh, this is unbelievable. The debt's going to go. And I want to make people feel very, very comfortable about this. One of the reasons I care so much about crypto is because of the budget deficit.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  We still have a deficit of five to 6%. So again, the government is spending five to 6% a year more than they're getting in receipts. The printing press is still happening, meaning this is good for nominal GDP. At the same time, the government is in a race against China. So they're going to make sure this AI trade works. They're going to do whatever is necessary. If the funding markets, if we see long-term rates go higher, they got to do something because they can't lose to China on this. And China just gives money and opens up things in a very different way. So I'm very fixated on the capex is going to happen. AI is going to continue to accelerate. The companies that people are worried about, the hyperscalers, their debt to equity is it's nothing.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  So unless their stock price falls violently, they have tons of ability to raise capital. They have $2 trillion of RPOs still sitting there. And again, so people understand, I've never understood over the next two years, if they took debt for all of the capex, we're talking around $2 trillion? Well, there's $2 trillion between Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle contracted for the compute. So again, we already have demand for this stuff and these guys are going to have money to go through it. So I'm not worried about the debt. I'm not worried about that. So I think people should be focused on the areas that are going to have a beta associated with them. And I'm going to stick with AI infrastructure, all the names that I've mentioned, plus the crypto side.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  So I'm more focused on the beta. But if you want to just go by the S and P, I think you're going to get great returns in the S and P for at least the next couple of years as well.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  What about the NASDAQ?

• 43:15Speaker 02

  The NASDAQ has a beta side associated with, I think is, is, is good. You can, you know, if you're going to buy S and P, I think you're generally going to get more on there. The area on, on, on the NASDAQ that I'm most interested in is, is probably biotech at this point. The good thing about the NASDAQ, it is obviously heavily weighted towards the mag seven, which is a negative. But the reason that it still has outperformed is because it's not a pure cap weighted side. So you're not overly weighted towards it in there. And I think there are a lot of areas with inside the NASDAQ, which will do well. But I, I'm not sure they're going to be able to outperform the S and P in a, in a big way.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  I got asked the question, which I think was a good, a good question. There's a lot of people have talked about the fact that this won't end until we have a true bubble. And they talk about it like the dot com bubble where Cisco is trading at 100 PE and that we're still in the early stages. And I want to, I want to, the people who are bullish, I want to take them a different direction on this because when I was asked the question, what do I think on it? And I said, number one, demographics are completely different than the dot com bubble. The money being made, you know, with the baby boomers in this, they were still working. They were still taking risk. Now they're passive investments. They've got advisors, they're playing on the golf course, they're not sitting out there gambling, plus they've made so much money, they're not trying to make money the same way.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  There's obviously active traders that are doing it. That's fine. But then the other element that to me is very different. And I think that's something people have to get involved in. It gets back to this concept that if in three years we have AGI, at some point, the stock market is going to start saying, hey, all businesses are going to be disrupted.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  I don't think people realize what that means. One of the reasons that oil stocks basically really never go higher in a major way and see multiple expansion is because it's dependent on the price of oil. So if oil stays at $60 forever, or if natural gas stays at $3 forever, how is, how's a company that generates their revenues based on the underlying asset moving actually going to get there? Well, I think if tokens are commoditized to zero, they don't hurt the model companies necessarily, but I think what they do do is they make it easier for AI native people to compete with all public companies because the inability for public companies to embrace

• 45:46Speaker 02

  AI and, and, and make it work is going to be much more challenging. So I only bring that up. I think the market is going to go through multiple compression. So I think earnings are going to be great. I think the S and P is going to grow less than earnings, like we've seen so far this year. And I think that's going to be a trend at some point in the next three years. I actually believe that multiple compression story will become a much bigger story.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, um, it's going to be fascinating, I think, to watch this play out because part of what you mentioned earlier, I think is underrated. I see a lot of people trying to pick bottoms in SaaS software. And I think that you have held steady on a view that AI is going to have a significant impact on those businesses and it's more of a structural change than a, than kind of a sell off that is somewhat temporary.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  And it does feel like AI now, like I don't hear anyone saying AI is not going to be valuable or AI doesn't work, right? You know, three years ago, I heard a lot of like, oh, I talked to the, the chat bot and it was stupid. It, you know, it lied to me type stuff, right? That, that conversation's gone. Now what I hear a lot is like, who are the winners going to be? How big can, can the winners be? How profitable can they be? What's the impact of Chinese open source? You know, we're in the nuance now. And so I take that as everyone is convinced this is real. But I think that the one area I still, and I did some of the math with Sylvia this week, a very large portion of my portfolio is exposed to physical AI and robotics.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  And it just feels like, you know, the software side of AI has now, we've gotten so into the weeds because everyone is looking there, that the next big, you know, kind of move of capital in, within the AI trade will be that, that robotics, hopefully, you know, at least has fun betting on. Do you have any exposure there? Are you thinking at all about the, the robotics stuff?

• 47:46Speaker 02

  So first of all, in this past weekend's video, I, I put up a chart and I got, I got a lot of good responses from people on it, which was, and I don't think you and I have talked about this.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  When people want to compare the AI situation, yes, the dot com bubble would come up a lot. But the other thing that comes up that I think it's both more recent, but I think people are thinking about it the right way is they bring up fracking and what happened to all of those companies. Now, the reason I bring it up here, oil demand at the end of the day is driven by people. And that's why it grows with nominal GDP. So it's a function of how many more people are on the planet, how much money do those people have to spend? Are they using more energy? Like, that's pretty much what drives the majority of energy price. And that's why if you ask any oil person, so how much does oil demand go up a year? Well, what's nominal GDP? Nominal GDP is the answer.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  The problem with that is eventually with fracking, technology made the supply side go exponential. It actually outpaced what happened with the demand side. So if the demand side stays linear and all of a sudden we get a technology that changes the supply side, well, then we end up in the situation we're in, which is no matter what seems to happen with oil, it ends up going back down. And we probably don't know, like with Hormuz, how much was shifted to natural gas? We have endless natural gas. What, what, all of these different things have clearly changed. The problem and what you're bringing up and the reason I'm so focused on the infrastructure side, we haven't reached a point yet where we can change the supply side of what's necessary

• 49:32Speaker 02

  for this build out because we haven't been focused on it. That's why I say Micron was the same price in 2017. You know what companies don't do when their stock price doesn't rise for seven years? They don't build new capacity. They don't have it. So that's why I'm convinced that on the memory side, when you haven't built the capacity for any of this stuff, it's not there. For robotics, it's the same thing. So you have exponential demand for tokens. Tokens are driven by computers. They're driven by digital employees. They have nothing to do with human beings. The reason they're going parabolic is because you just put your computer on overnight and you say, okay, do this job for the rest of the day. What you're doing at Sylvia, if you go through your token usage, it's not just the cost that's going higher, your usage is going higher too.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  As you grow more people, as you guys build more systems, as you have more agents, it'll just use more and more tokens. It never goes down. And so until we get the supply side to move up on an exponential, to match off the exponential demand, this is something we haven't seen before. And this is why whenever I say it, I'm like, guys, you're missing the point. Like when consumer agents come, we're going to need a lot more tokens. When humanoids come, we need a lot more tokens. When FSD comes, we need a lot more tokens. So the way I'm playing the robotics side right now is the AI structure trade. It's a semiconductor trade. What is Elon Musk doing for the robotics trade? He's building TerraFab because we don't have enough chips. So eventually, and I'm sure I will start buying some of these robotics things because

• 50:59Speaker 02

  I do think the next trade is embodied AI because like you said, with software, I don't want to fight this battle with software names. It's going to continually be an issue.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  I, I completely agree. I appreciate your time today. The audience loves hearing from you. We'll do it again next week.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  All right, bud. Have a good one.