The Pomp Podcast - #1500 Jordi Visser | Why Bitcoin CRASHED After Trump Strategic Reserve News

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

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 talk about what is going on with tariffs, how it’s impacting the economy, how to think about the bitcoin strategic reserve, and what investors are currently thinking about. =========================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.=========================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.=======================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/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? We've got an amazing episode with Jordy Visser. He is somebody who spent a long time on Wall Street in macro hedge funds, but now he sits at the intersection

of macro, AI, Bitcoin, and all of these innovative technologies. And he's become one of my trusted voices when I want to learn more about this. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with tariffs, how it's affecting the economy, how to think about the Bitcoin strategic reserve, and what investors are thinking both in the institutional world and also in retail when it comes to all the different gyrations coming out of the administration and asset price changes. This conversation touches on a lot, but that's how markets work. So you have to understand not only the complex economic machine, but you also need to understand things from technology and politics as well. So I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Jordy Visser.

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. It's no secret that Bitcoin ETFs have taken Wall Street by storm. With over $35 billion in assets in just one year, it's become the most successful ETF launch in history. My partner Bitwise is the first and only Bitcoin ETF provider to openly publish its Bitcoin wallet addresses, allowing anyone to verify

the fund's holdings. I believe this level of transparency is exactly the kind of innovation that only crypto makes possible. Bitwise is also the only ETF issuer that is a crypto specialist asset manager, meaning their team solely focuses on Bitcoin and they have the research, education and support 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 ETFs 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 bitwisepomp.com to learn more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwisepomp.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. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo. Picture this. Every time you trade Bitcoin, the spread determines how much value stays with you. That's why securing

top tier Bitcoin trading fees is key to growing your Bitcoin wealth. But what if I told you that there's a platform that lets you save up to 90% on your Bitcoin trading fees? Now here's the kicker. Not only do they save that money, they also are dubbed the Fort Knox of Bitcoin. Zappo Bank. They're the world's first fully licensed and regulated Bitcoin and banking group, and they have been delivering a unique blend of physical and digital security for over a decade. From military grade Swiss bunkers to cutting edge digital protocols, they've got you covered. And now they're bringing you the kind of competitive Bitcoin trading fees typically reserved for institutional giants.

Right in the palm of your hand. With Zappobank's ultra-competitive spreads, more of your Bitcoin stays where it belongs, in your pocket. Whether you're trading big or small, every move you make is designed to boost your gains and fuel your financial future. Head to zappobank.com forward slash pomp to join. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K dot com slash pomp. All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start the conversation is the market's freaking out right now. And I think a lot of people see it as it's throwing a temper tantrum over the tariffs. Maybe that's some of it, but I think you've got some unique views coming from kind of the hedge

fund world that you came from. So explain what you think is happening right now as to why asset prices are selling off and the market seems to be freaking out. Yeah, I think the best place to start this is that almost every survey I had seen with inside the hedge fund community and just research that I read in the question of, do you think the tariffs will be kept on, it was less than 30%. So I think the way I approach markets is they're building in a higher probability that tariffs will stay on because he's had multiple chances now to respond. So the market is searching for the pain point, which it always does. And when it finds the pain point with the administration, which I think at some point, the market's going to have to go much

lower just to see. And so if everyone believes, including the administration is serious, which they seem very serious about this. They're willing for there to be pain. In August of 22 was the last time I heard an official say there's going to be pain. And that was at Jackson Hole when Jerome Powell said, you're going to feel some pain. There will be pain. The administration is telling the markets there will be pain. I happen to believe that it's a very different scenario and that the tariffs are not going to actually accomplish what they want. I know you have a different view, but that's where I'll start this. What do you think that they're trying to accomplish and why do you think they won't be successful?

So based on what I've heard, the focus is to attempt to do something for Main Street at the expense of Wall Street in generalization. And so they don't care if the market goes down as long as long as they can bring interest rates down. They can stabilize things, possibly have the ability of reducing taxes as we get further into the year, which is all well and good. but i'm under the belief that all of that works well except for the fact that debt to gdp is not only 120 but the entitlements are staring us in the face and the stock market capitalization relative to gdp hit 211 and so i think you can play around with things but i've had this belief since watching lehman brothers and watching when you open pandora's box and you think we want to help main street which is what they did with lehman let's just let lehman go you're

opening up globalization and how intertwined the world is at this point and i think with trade policy trying to replicate something that was done over a hundred years ago with tariffs i think you're opening up the possibility for consequences that you're not prepared for so one of the questions that um i always start with is if they can accomplish what they're trying to accomplish Do we agree that that's a good idea to get interest rates down to, you know, kind of help main street investors? Very few people I talk to are like, that's not even a good pursuit, right? I think a lot of people are like, hey, I get what they're trying to do. And if they could accomplish it, then yes, that would be a good thing. The debate really is in the how do you

do it? Or like, is it possible less than in the outcome? Is that kind of your view as well? It is. I actually believe what they're doing makes perfect sense. I think the issue comes down to this concept of if he had 10 years to do this i i think they could find a better way to do it kind of slowly manage the process i think the factor that people leave out is he's trying to get this done before the midterms become two years and that's where the issue comes in is if you're trying to do it too fast i think when you have those structural issues and again back when reagan and i hear reagan brought up reaganomics i heard at the conference last week i hear it all the time debt to gdp when ronald reagan took over was 30 the market cap we had

just been in 10 years of no performance of growth and the market cap as a percentage of gdp was only 40 we're now at 211 which means whether people like it or not if the stock market falls 20 at a time that the economy is clearly weaker than it was a year and a half ago the increase of getting a negative response where the s p could fall 30 or 40 percent is real and you're seeing kind of internal factor movements rotations that have caught people off guard you saw it with the bun this week which had the largest single day rise in 30 plus years so that happened because of the policies of the administration and forcing germany to increase spending uh that was a shock the dollars had a shocking move yes tenure rates have come down but you have a lot of these these

kind of correlations that are breaking down and the one thing i know from working in the hedge fund world the biggest growth we've seen in the hedge fund world has been in optimized hedge portfolios which are dependent on historical correlations to be relevant and to stay fairly constant we're seeing a lot of historical correlations break down right now and that worries me that you probably have hedge funds losing money and this starts to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy of them needing to raise money to deal with stop losses so um how deep can this stock market kind of crisis go? I don't know if you saw, but there's a chart that people have started to share around, which is Trump 1.0 kind of tariff era. And there was this

big sell-off in assets. We're kind of right around the bottom of where that seems to be from a time and depth standpoint. And then obviously there was a big rally and the argument is like, hey, Trump 2.0 tariff era is really just we're following the same thing. There's some initial fear but like you know do not fear for long we're going back up what do you think so i i i happen to agree that that's going to be the mindset in people the s p is about six and a half percent off the highs that it made um so it is falling on playbook we got a rally in 2018 after the initial fears on the tariffs then we had a late fall in december but then we rallied back in january the following year so calendar year was a bad year for the s p but when you add in the january the

following year wasn't bad so the difference then and now in my opinion that does not get played out One of the reasons that Trump won is that the median voter has gotten angrier and angrier because of not inflation year over year, but because the inflation happened in COVID and the hollowing out of jobs, the job market to me and the inability for people to have any hope over upward mobility has taken literally a long time to get to that point. It's one of the reasons why I believe in Bitcoin, because I believe that workers are now exposed. Whatever they end up doing right now, if they're trying to help the median voter, AI is coming. Humanoids are coming. So this is going to be during his administration. And this is one of the reasons why I think the

S&P is acting a little bit more weak and will probably be weaker, primarily because people have been using the stock market as a gambling tool. And I'll remind you, we are at a very different position as the stock market relative to GDP than we were even in 2017 coming out of the tax cuts. It's a very different world. So I think we're more exposed this time than we were for maybe a sharper fall. I still believe that we're not heading into a recession. I just believe the market needs to digest this and kind of move on. One of the things that I've seen critiques levied at the administration is you put the tariff on, you pause it, you unpause it. You say you're going to take it off. Oh, wait, no, we're going to take it off on some products. There's not just

a very clear, certain, predictable kind of approach. It would be one thing if you said no tariffs to tariffs, that transition, there's going to be some digestion of it. Okay, fine. But it almost feels like there's this like radical gyrations that are occurring day to day or week to week. How do hedge funds deal with that? Are they like, you know, do they have a feed from Bloomberg and Twitter and all these different things? And they're just trying to figure out every single day like the rest of us? Or do they take somewhat of maybe a more medium term approach and they're not worried about the day to day gyrations? So let's assume you were a card counter and you thought you had an edge because you can count cards and all of a sudden they

changed it and they added a bunch more decks into it so the odds changed dramatically that's the way i would kind of go through it is that i think the lack of predictability on what's actually to come has led to people just taking off risk and that usually is in the form of leverage coming down so the s&p 500 cumulative breath as of yesterday it's almost at all-time highs and what that says is the S&P is 6.5% off the highs, but the breadth is up near the highs. So what's happened over the course of the last six weeks, it hasn't been people liquidating stocks. It's been a rotation away from the higher market cap stocks and into defensive names. And that's why the market is going down because the MAG7 are going down and they're down 16% off their highs or 17% off their

highs. But the rotation has been violent. Normally what happens, you don't make a low until we actually see the index see a flush. So my gut tells me that if the tariffs are still going to be going on on April 2nd, that as much as he thinks kind of playing this dance to try and help the market not go down fast, I think we still need to have a flush. And the way that I look at that is what's happening with earnings revisions as a factor, meaning hedge funds normally make their money. And this is not just long, short equity hedge funds. This spreads into credit, it spreads into everything based on three-month earning revision. So the companies that are actually seeing their earnings revisions go higher, that factor has been a dominant theme for the last

six years, which just means as you get a more concentrated market, there's not that many names that are actually still able to grow their earnings in this environment. So small caps are currently down for the sixth week in a row. I think it's the first time since 2018. So the weakness is there. We now have that earnings revision factor headed straight down in a way that we have not seen since March of 2020. And that says to me that we're going to get a flush unless something changes to give that predictability back. So right now it's just uncertainty

that's causing people to lower the leverage in the portfolio. Now, at the same time that maybe the stock investors are freaking out and a little worried, there's euphoria in Bitcoin land because they got the strategic reserve. We saw this week, Trump's in the Oval Office, sign it. I think David Sachs' phrase was, it is a digital fort knox for digital gold what is your take on the strategic reserve and uh maybe

also like why the price of bitcoin actually went down rather than up on the news well in terms of of whether it's a good thing or a bad thing um i believe the announcement they gave is good for bitcoin everyone should be happy um it's not maybe what everyone thought they would announce in terms of buying it but i think we keep moving in the direction that i think you and i both agree with which is if you're going to hold analog bitcoin in the form of gold you should be holding digital gold and i believe that that's a perspective that more and more companies and countries around the world that have done it have seen the benefits and i happen to believe that this is going to be a good thing i think the announcement itself the reaction was negative gets back into that

thing of people hoping that we're going to announce that we're going to go buy it and it fell to, I think, about 85 and then it rallied right back to 89. And I think that was the perspective that this is just another step in the direction of what the Senator Lummis bill is really supposed to be geared towards. I think they're committed to this. So I think everyone should be happy. And I'm very happy that we went from a reserve that included other coins and we've now settled on Bitcoin. I think you and I are completely aligned on this, that I don't understand if you want to have a stockpile of other stuff that you end up accumulating on for whatever reason, great. But in terms of a reserve asset for the country, Bitcoin is the only one that

I think should be in it. Yeah. What's interesting to me is you put business people into positions of power and influence in the administration. And I think what they've learned over time is if you get a financial asset through confiscation or criminal investigations or whatever, one very easy change in maybe approach, don't sell financial assets for dollar assets that are guaranteed to lose value over time. Right. And so, hey, we kind of don't care what coins we confiscate. We're just not going to sell them. And maybe they go to zero, maybe they go up. But like that, to me, is much more of a risk taker mentality, which coming from business people, kind of makes sense. But the Bitcoin executive order, there is this language in there that says

the Treasury Secretary and the Commerce Secretary have the ability to find budget neutral ways to accumulate more Bitcoin. And there's rumors that we could revalue the gold. There's rumors that we could sell off the reserve of cheese. There's things where it's like $40 billion or so sitting on the sidelines in some sort of fund that people have identified and said, hey, we could just take that money and do it. It almost feels like it's too loud. There's too many people with too many ideas saying, here's ways to do this for us to do nothing. Now, maybe it's not $40 billion. Maybe it's only a billion or two billion or whatever. But the momentum, I kind of feel like this administration is very much governing off of vibes. And they have too many people in their

ear, too much online noise for them to kind of ignore and not try to buy more Bitcoin. Is that your take? Yeah, there's two things about what you said. And, you know, I'd love to hear your comments on this, because this is coming from an outsider. But every time that I hear a description of the way Donald Trump manages anything, the good part is he takes a lot of ideas from people. So people may not like the fact that those ideas might go one way and then change direction real quickly, but it seems like he's making the final decision and he's very in tune with what the public is thinking. And this is why on the tariff side, if the S&P is down 30%, I'd be shocked if he didn't say, what actually happens to the deficit with the market down 30%

and not take the tariffs off and watch everything go higher? That's the reason why I believe in Bitcoin, because I don't think you can work your way out of this problem. In terms of the vibe that I'm hearing and seeing on this, I actually really do believe he's trying to learn about this on the job and go through it, which there's a good side, a bad side. But if someone goes in there and highlights to him, we have cheese, we have gold that hasn't been valued. These are all things that why not? Like, why shouldn't we be looking into this? Why shouldn't we be making decisions particularly if someone and i'm happy to do it i'm sure you're happy to do it convince him as to why there is a technological region a reason for bitcoin to be part of it i listened to

your you know your interview with lex friedman i'm just telling you the way you described why digital gold and the technology of why it's important in the digital climate which i subscribe to and you're saying you have to do the work on it i think the administration honestly including david sachs they're all going through the work on it themselves they might have beliefs in it in something that's worked well but i think it's a good thing because bitcoin is not um it's not a given to every single person so i think there should be more communication i think it's really good for bitcoin as a whole because i think the more that the us learns more about it and thinks about it and does it carefully as opposed to just diving in in the long run it's better for everyone

who believes in the outcome of what the benefits come from it feels like um a lot of the folks that are sitting around the table they started to buy bitcoin because of price and you know it's the the personal incentive right you think that you're gonna make money from it um but that uh evolution of what is this thing what are the ethos behind it what are uh kind of the structural advantages that all these things are now very quickly being um kind of uh explained and i do think it's hilarious that what a week ago we got the post on truth social of like you know we're gonna put xrp and Cardano and Solana and ETH and like all these things. And like he kind of sort of followed through with it. But really, we ended up with a Bitcoin only strategic reserve. And so it does

feel like there's again, like those gyrations back and forth, like the iteration is part of the process. And then he ends up in a pretty good spot. And maybe that's actually what you want in governance is sure, maybe it's a little bit of a bumpy road, but you'd rather end up in a good spot than somebody who's like, hey, we're gonna have a smooth road, but it's a smooth road to you know a bad spot so you you made a comment that i've that i've heard and i'm gonna i'm gonna take it a different way if the government announced that they were gonna buy the s p 500 i'd be completely against that yeah same so we're in a line there the fact that we both believe that bitcoin should be part of it people have to start really doing the work to understand even if it's

just our views why the s p is not okay why this is okay and this fits in with what i believe is happening with ai right now it's what's happening with nvidia it's what's happening with europe versus the us this all fits in with david sachs is the czar of ai and crypto i always say they're aligned together so whenever i hear people talking about crypto and i go i don't like the name i prefer to talk about bitcoin and then all the new innovations that are happening on the blockchain and separate those because those are like s p 500 kind of companies and i view bitcoin as the s p 500 of the future economy and so i think we should have bitcoin as a country here to lead that technology the same way we've led ai and clearly at this point ai is getting democratized china's

catching up in terms of producing things but also it's the adoption phase it's the agent phase we're leading into the humanoid phase which means that those companies that have been dominating they'll go through the normal process that the s p 500 does which is it's amorphous it loses like new innovation pops up and i think you've been in this space long enough to know that there's if you get eve then you get solana then you get sweet you just keep going there's always an innovation that's faster there's always innovation that's better but bitcoin itself is not an innovation itself it has become a large asset and i think we should be the leader in it personally and it feels like um you're speculating with tech stocks or even the s p or whatever it feels like you're

saving in gold and Bitcoin. And I think that's maybe the big difference is you actually don't want your government to play a capital allocator and risk-taking. You want your government to play a capital allocator and protection, right? It's like offense versus defense. And there's plenty of people who will be like, what do you mean Bitcoin is saving? What do you mean Bitcoin is defensive? Whatever. But if you look at their assets, the strategic reserves are defensive. The purpose of it, right? I went down this big, deep rabbit hole and we have things like home heating oil for Northeastern homes, right? Why do we have that? Well, it's because we defensively can protect those homes during certain moments of crisis. Why don't we have the petroleum? Why

do we have cheese? Like all these things. It's a defensive posturing. And it feels like Bitcoin is probably the only thing in the whole kind of crypto blockchain world that is actually a defensive posturing. Everything else is very offensive. And how do we create? How do we capture value? How do we extract value? And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a very, very different posturing than the Bitcoin thing, which is, hey, this is an insurance hedge. This is something that's going to protect me if there is some sort of continued debasement

of the currency. Yeah, I would love to know why it's OK for us to have as much gold as we have. Like, I don't I want to understand the purpose of holding something. Do you think that the gold's in Fort Knox? As Trump said, I hope it is. We're going to find out, though. Have I told you my theory on Fort Knox? go go ahead um i think there's more gold than they're saying oh this is a good theory so

everyone is so convinced that there's less gold than what they're saying in there and they that's why i want to do the audits all the stuff but if you think about what would what would have had to have happened for the us to have less gold than they're saying is that they would have had to somewhere along the way make the decision we should go sell that right so a politician probably the president somebody would have had to been like hey we're going to go sell this and not tell the american people keep it marked on the books in a certain way but go ahead and sell it there's a possibility maybe we somehow lost or misplaced gold but the fact that it's all been in one location very unlikely right so it's like an active decision is the most likely reason why

we would not have the goal i think that's very difficult for us to agree that that probably happened what i think is probably more likely to have happened is we've been in a lot of conflicts around the world we have engaged in a lot of different things and the anecdotal experience that i share with some friends is when i went to iraq in 2008 2009 uh some of the guys there were on their second tour and if you're on your second tour in 2008 2009 that means that you likely were there in oh 30405 and many of them had photos sitting in saddam's palace there was bars of gold they were there you know all this stuff right and so did you get the bar of gold of course not so like where did that go and so my theory is that we have accumulated more gold over time if we're

accumulating gold in foreign lands where do we put it we'll put it in fort knoxville the rest of the gold is and so actually if we were to go and quote unquote audit we would end up with more gold not less. And then if you revalue it, right, we'd have a lot of explaining to do of like, hey, what do you mean we have 20% more gold than you were telling the American people? Oh, yeah, we just found this, right? Like, you know, there'd be a lot of questions there. And so the reason why I say that is the US is great at accumulating things. We're actually not that good at making like portfolio rebalancing decisions. And so it feels like not only is why do we have so much gold that they're telling us, we probably have more than what they're telling us, which would

beg the question of like, we definitely should probably sell some of it. Yeah. No, no, no. You make a very good case. And it's funny, I've read a bunch of pieces over the course of the last month because everyone's speculating on it. No one's really come at that angle on it. But I happen to agree that if you did confiscate stuff, you wouldn't announce it and it wouldn't go through. So accumulation, especially from that exact situation makes sense. Yeah. Like you're not going to be like, hey, we took all this gold from Saddam's palace And we're going to add it to our reserves. I mean, you see the controversy right now with the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Russian assets, which also, I mean, one of the things that people mention from time to time, but I do think is probably feeding into a lot of this nation-state adoption stuff is we not only went after the Russian assets, which plenty of people will debate whether we should have, should have not, whatever.

But then we also went after the oligarchs. Yep. And again, whether you think we should have done it, should have not done it, whatever, a objective outcome of that is a lot of people are saying, how do I make sure I have some degree of my portfolio in something that can't be seized? I agree. And you brought it up with the nation state side. Have you had Marco Papachon ever?

No. Marco's a, he's a good guy, especially if you want to have a conversation with someone on geopolitics. He's entertaining. He's very smart. but i actually think we had him one time okay yeah i think we did have one time he he wrote a piece about the metaverse unfortunately for him it was right at the peak of kind of the the metaverse thing but his argument was that borders are coming down and nations are coming down and i think

bitcoin fits into that exactly what you're you're saying which is if borders are coming down and people are kind of migrating to this decentralized place it's the same way when i say when you democratize intelligence and all of a sudden people that have lived in the wrong zip code for being financially successful they now immediately got a good zip code because they have the best teacher in the world they have access to building stuff and it should end up to where whether you're living in brazil you're living in indonesia you're now living in the world of the digital economy you get to participate on social you get to participate in a way that you can make money from and that is i i really do believe that whether you do it from the wealthy

people hiding their money or you do it from the people that are finally getting the chance to make some money and they don't want to have their money confiscated in a very similar way just from their own country through debasement and through the loss of their FX and the banking and seizing, I think it's all ending up in the same place that the more that you attack people either through not allowing them to move up the corporate ladder or wealthy people where you're confiscating their money and they're worried, I think it all migrates into this decentralized place. So the borders in the nation states for sure coming down. And it's one of the arguments for people when they have money. And Michael Saylor has said this until you actually

need Bitcoin until you actually need it. You just don't care. And that's why Wall Street doesn't care for the most part. Speaking of caring, there's a lot of people who care about AI right now. That seems to maybe we're kind of in a local bear market of hype for AI, but we're still pretty elevated. There's plenty of people who think that this thing is going to change the world. It does seem like a lot of the promises is happening. But one thing I saw recently was that Microsoft is rumored to be canceling some of their data center contracts. Talk a little bit about what's happening with AI, which is like very software oriented, but it is heavily dependent on this kind of physical infrastructure build out. And maybe we're overbuilding. Is that like the takeaway

there? So Satya Nadella talked about this on an interview with Dwarkesh beforehand. And then he microsoft came out and said they're not canceling anything i mean they are canceling leasing so let's go through one thing microsoft and what sacha said is he believes that he needs to make a bet right now and the bet he has made is that he'd rather be leasing data center than building it out and the reason is he believes that this will be completely commoditized what he said that was interesting and i actually happened i happen to agree with what he said i don't know what it actually means, but this is something for people to think about. So the story has been that the reason the build-out is going to happen is because every company is worried that if they don't get

to AGI first, then everything else loses. And this resonates with me as someone who, you go through this, I don't, how many times do people ask you, is quantum going to destroy Bitcoin? It's a fear that people have. So AGI, different than quantum, but you're getting to point where okay this can do everything and that means that we've destroyed all other it's one winner and he does not believe in winner takes all so he's using leasing because he's like i want to save my money to benefit from ai and benefit i mean they're a software company so there is a little bit of a difference uh he doesn't believe in this now they're not building their own so they were aligned with open ai that's another difference that comes in where these other

companies i think they all have a reason to so i think his situation got blown out of proportion i think there's absolutely as someone who now uses grok3 most of the time that is a i'm telling you that is a big shift i have gone through all of them last time we spoke in miami i told you i was using perplexity all the time i'm now using grok3 the most for everything um deep research i'm still using open ai but the reason i'm using grok3 so much is because it's the fastest and it literally is entertaining and it's good and he built colossus and enabled this the professor if you want to do more you still have to completely build out and one thing and this does not get it doesn't get brought up enough this is the inference side the difference between

memorization and reasoning is a massive amount of compute so when people talk about the stage of the hype they're talking about the llm reasoning side and i said this on stage i'll say it to everyone a million times but two times two everyone knows the answer is four because they've memorized it 37 times 28 people that are good at math they'll figure it out but it's going to take a lot more brain power and that's the way that reasoning has to go through things so i just think ai is the most important structural force and if i was the administration and i know they know this they're trying tools to get back to your point at the beginning they're trying things they should try i don't think they shouldn't try the tariffs i don't but you have to pivot and

change when the market and when things are not going and you start reading the numbers i have full faith that donald trump will not get stuck with the decision and will pivot he won't have to admit he's wrong he'll just pivot or the deal says you keep going and you keep going but i do think the ai thing will save out at the end and will be the thing that ends up helping us get through the economy and go through it so by the end of the year ai will continue to be a major story is there a world where we start to replace some of the government workers with ai like one of the things that um everyone will joke about forever until recently is the government's antiquated it's bureau uh big bureaucracy um they don't know how to build technology i remember um

was it harper reed i think is the guy's name who went in to fix obamacare's website uh and it was like this huge thing silicon valley comes to save you know uh the government website um there was just like a ton of these uh examples where the government is not very good at building technology It now feels like we got a lot of good technologists in there. And so it doesn't mean that you're going to go to the DMV and there's going to be a virtual assistant who's going to do it, but it does feel like there's quite a number of processes. And you see this with the government retirement process where they were using physical paper and manila envelopes deep in a mine, which I mean, it's like literally out of a movie, right? This is like crazy.

But then they just processed the very first digital retirement. And you're like, okay, one probably doesn't matter that much, but if you could process all of them digitally, forget cost for a second, just time and less employees needed. Like you're using software for what it was built for. Can we start to just hack away at a bunch of these government processes and AI is making us more efficient? So, yes. And I'm going to get back to the point I made at the beginning. And Elon Musk is obviously the one screaming for this, but if you go listen to his podcast with Joe Rogan. Have you heard of yet? The last one, not yet. Okay. So if you just listen to the first 30 minutes where he's describing how archaic it is, he also says in

there something I believe having worked at Morgan Stanley, they still have mainframes at Morgan Stanley. It is very difficult to take out old technology and just immediately replace it with new technology. It's costly, but more importantly, it's not an easy thing to do. So the question is, Can they do that, again, in 18 months as fast as they want? So they got out of the gates. They're doing a lot of stuff. I think it's more problematic than people think to be able to do it in the way you're describing.

I don't think they can get rid of a lot of employees. Do I think they can get rid of some? Yeah. Do I think over a 10-year process? Absolutely. It should be completely redone. It should be a major plan here to renovate the whole thing technologically. I just think the problem we have is in our country, the midterms have never mattered

more. they just do ronald reagan i the democrats were in charge of i believe the house the entire time that he was president it's very very hard to think that we're going to change all this up when people we have unemployment at four percent reagan had it at 10 and change inflation by the time it peaked it was 14 with reagan we're complaining about inflation at three like we're in a very different place where i think the reason people are so angry is a because of what happened in covid and secondly because they're having trouble with their job so let's go to instead of the government goldman sachs yesterday there was this announcement or something where they're forcing

managers to choose between dallas or utah salt lake city this is the third fortune 500 company that i've seen for the first time that i can remember applying pressure to employees jamie dimon released something that clearly meant to be released about how i don't care what you guys do doing. If you want to work from home, you're not working at this firm. And Meta fired 5% of their workforce with their stock up $1.5 trillion in market cap over a two-year period. And they're in AI and they're firing 5% of their workforce. I think AI is starting to have an impact. So for the government, I think it's harder for them to do, but I think everything is showing up. And I'll leave you with something because we have the payroll numbers today. So I look at the

payrolls a different way. There's only been three sectors contributing to jobs really over the last nine months and this has been a pattern that's gone on so if you take the entire 145 million payroll number and you break it into two components one component i call the cyclical jobs and a cyclical job is anything except health care and education government and leisure and the reason i had those as non-cyclical is because those are really about older people and about we have to fill in teachers because they're retiring and we have to have more nurses because people are sick. And then the government's been a steady thing. The leisure part is where baby boomers, they just keep traveling. And so the amount of spending in the country has gone up.

The only jobs we're creating are government, leisure, healthcare, and education. And that number, so when we're down to 150,000 a month, almost all of that now is those three groups. So if you get rid of government, well, then you're really in trouble. And then the non-cyclical or the cyclical jobs, that's where AI is having the biggest impact. Those places down now, AI is not going to have an impact. So we're hollowing out that top part. And that's where most of the people work and that's impacting small businesses. So it's a long answer to your question, but I don't think they can do it quickly. And I think the job situation in the country is much weaker because of AI. I saw that the number of illegal border

crossing engagements, whatever the terminology they use, is the lowest in the month of February than it has been since the year 2000. And when you look at the chart, it just fell off a cliff. Political parties are going to take that and they're going to spin the data and they're going to try to use it for political gain. Put all that aside for a second.

I'm of the belief that the reason why the border was opened was actually an economic decision where the Democrat administration said, we need more workers. open it up. We know we're going to deal with some bad people coming in, but that's going to be the cost of us trying to get cheap labor into this economy so that we can bring prices down, address inflation, yada, yada, whatever. I'm not saying that it was a good thing. I'm not saying they

should have done it, but I do believe that people are all searching for why did they do it? To me, that is the most rational answer because anything else means that you're basically treasonous, right like you know it pretty much anything else you come up with is insane and like you actively are working against the country so i'm actually giving them the benefit of the doubt say it was an economic thing trump comes in and says i don't care about the economics i am going to seal the border you don't have a country without a border i'm going to deport all these people but whatever the border appears to be closed we see videos online although anecdotal of deportations what is the economic impact of essentially removing workers and stopping the

flow of those workers? And is that something to be concerned about? So this is an interesting question and it's hard. I've heard people obviously politically biased, try to argue both sides. I a hundred percent agree with you that polls were showing that inflation was the biggest problem and that they had to find a way to get inflation down. And regardless of what people want to believe, wage inflation is a contributor to this. So by bringing in more workers, you're going to bring the unemployment rate up, which is what the Fed was trying to do anyway. And that's what happened. The unemployment rate went up and it was hard to get in. I actually don't believe that it's going to have a huge impact on the labor situation. So I don't think this is now

going to get to a point that we're going to see a wage inflation spike. Do I think the data will kind of work itself out? Maybe. But the reality is we were creating 375,000 jobs a month during 2022. We're now at 150,000 jobs over the course of the last nine months. And as I said, those are only coming from three sectors. The economy is weakening. So anyone that wants to look at the stock market and be, it's overreacting. It's not overreacting. We just had the weakest real spending number in the country since back in 2020 or 2021. We had the biggest drop in new orders with inside the PMI data, which again was supposed to be the thing that would increase. So we saw front loading of buying of stuff before the tariffs and then we saw the new orders drop

that front loading of stuff made the import numbers skyrocket so the trade deficit was weak so we had the gdp now number go down consumer confidence has dropped and it was the largest monthly drop like every single data point retail sales has been suggesting that the economy is weaker so i think what is happening is we're dealing with something that we need to deal with structurally but ai is going to have an impact on just softening things and in today's report the u6 number which is the discouraged workers and underemployed uh had its biggest monthly increase i believe since april of 2020 so during the worst part of of covid and the only reason that's important that's the part that i think starts to become important for people

we the work week has been going down and i think before firing people what ai is going to have an impact on is the work week should go down it'll be good for people in the long run but in the internet so i i actually think the border side will be a very positive thing for trump as time goes on i think fighting for fentanyl at the borders is something that the country needs um so i'm i'm all for that i don't think it's gonna have a huge economic impact at the end of the day do you think it had an economic impact like when it started do we think that inflation was lower because we did this no no again i it's just too much on the edge and it's not like actual a big enough number

no and and so we all live through this i was writing content in in april of 2020 and i'm sure you i think you said on the the lex fridman thing that when the government started printing money you're like oh my gosh this is this is insane i gotta go buy bitcoin yeah so did paul tudor jones And so did a whole, I was writing about this going, how, how many trillions of dollars have to be printed before you guys stop being bearish and realize this is inflationary. So it was not only inflationary for the stock market, eventually the lagging indicator is it shows up in CPI, which it did. So now we've kind of normalized back to a level and I'm starting to lean with the policies

that, that Trump has. I think tariffs are deflationary. I don't think they're inflationary. Explain that. Cause there's a lot of people who don't agree with that. And I've been trying to explain it. I, so yes, if you put tariffs on things, it will move prices higher, but the way demand will work is that demand will start to drop. And in the end, if demand drops and the economy slows at

a levered economy, and this is the whole point. I, I don't know if we sat in the room with the administration, including Scott Besson, and we said, how much are you willing to let the stock market go? And are you willing for the deficit then to get larger? I don't think they would say yes and i don't know if the number would go so i believe it's deflationary it has been over time i think it's causing the problems that we're seeing and unfortunately in the last 24 hours the reaction of canada mexico and the rest of the world is we're going to fight you on this which to me means the probability of a trade war forget tariffs which is almost like a one-sided thing well the other side is a trade war and a trade war is deflationary because then everyone

doesn't know what to do with their business and you see all business confidence drop off And so far, that's the numbers that we're seeing. So I think we've isolated that we want to raise tariffs. We want to go back to the way it was in the 1800s. Great. I'm not sure that's a good bet, but Google exists and there's no tariffs on Google. So we'll see what happens. I think there's other ways that this fight will play out.

And I think it opens up Pandora's box. So I think it's deflationary without any doubt whatsoever. And the S&P 500 is showing it. Oil is showing it right now. The dollar is the one thing that doesn't make sense. But the dollar was bid up because people thought something else was going to happen. rates are going down too so everything in the market says deflation right now i completely agree i've been yelling from the mountaintop saying that you can look at 2018 the prices of

all the goods that he tariffed ended up lower within 18 months um but that's just not how people i think uh view it um scott uh besant recently gave an interview uh he was at the economic club of new york and he talked about we don't have a revenue problem we have a spending problem. And it was the first time I heard somebody in that position explicitly call out, it's spending stupid. It's the spending that we have to go after. Do you think we can get to a balanced budget? I think it's possible, but not without a stock market that's going higher. Okay. Explain. So I think you will lose too much on the revenue side. So if you cut spending, obviously there's an austerity side to this. Austerity, and I tweeted about this or posted

about this this week, it's a very dangerous game when you have a levered economy to try, to the degree that we are, to try austerity. It doesn't work. And that sounds weird because you're like, well, you're levered. You want to get back down. I'm like, we're levered by such a large amount. To actually get the debt to GDP down to a manageable level when you have increased spending coming from entitlements, how are you going to do that? So if the stock market doesn't grow at 25% a year, I think you can figure it out. But I think you need to have the revenue side stay fairly stagnant. And the majority of revenues that come in, and you can just go back to what happened the last time the market was down. If you go back to 2022 and look at income

tax. It was a drop of, I think, $400 billion. Then you go look at corporate taxes and you get businesses that are not making money the way they were. So you're going to lose for, if you have a 2022, which was not a huge correction, tax receipts were down for the 2023. They came in at $400 billion less than the year before. So it's very hard with that kind of thing. And I think Torsten flock at apollo highlighted this that you have tariffs of three trillion you know you have imports of three trillion dollars you have income taxes of about three trillion i saw it more as 2.6 but he whatever it was and he said okay how are you going to get rid of income taxes and pay for it with tariffs you're gonna have to make them a hundred percent bigger than to offset it and then

you'll have demand go down so you have to make it 200 and i happen to agree with that situation so So I think he can do it, not in a year, not in two years. Over the course of four years, I think there's enough excess spending in the government that I think Elon Musk can find. The question is, will he have the ability of doing that? Will we have the Democrats and the Republicans agreeing that this is a good thing to do? I think a great start in that would be to get $500 billion off the table and at the same time have the market finish up 2% to 5% so you're not losing that much in revenue.

That's kind of my thought process on this. I agree the stock market needs to go up. I also think they're going to cut spending, how much remains to be seen. I think the tariffs, the external revenue service, all that stuff, yes. And then the wild card is monetizing the balance sheet. And when Letnick told me back in November that he thought he could drive a trillion dollars of annual revenue off the sheet i remember thinking like that sounds like an insane number and so he explained it he's like you know we have buildings that are empty we have land we have minerals we have ip he like went all through stuff and i was like this is like crazy like how are you going to do this and then i saw

like oh we'll just get like 50 of tick tock and i remember saying to myself like on one hand that like a pure financial exercise again they're going to be able to extract you know a pound of flesh from a lot of companies from a like american citizen and american ethos standpoint i don't know if we want our government actually would argue we probably don't want our government essentially you know extracting a pound of flesh from every deal that's getting done or going to their you know uh vendors and being like hey we'll give you this you know government contract we give us two percent of your company that seems like you're kind of again opening kind of a pandora's box that could be very detrimental i i completely agree so you and i were talking about kind of the

macro picture at the end we're trying to debate not debate but can we get to a balanced budget can we avoid inflation i don't believe with ai coming and the entitlements coming those two those are structural forces they're they're not leaving and as much as i believe that america is going to get healthier the people that are sick and aging are not going to benefit from the technology that's coming as fast as we would like them to be able to those dollars in ai are coming that are going to make it very very difficult to accomplish the things that happen so my gut tells me if you had to if i had to write down what the highest probability is i think trying to open pandora's box on austerity and the tariffs will force the equity market to go lower than you and i

both think. It will create a situation that I posted about, which is when the tide of liquidity goes out, as Warren Buffett said, you see who's naked. There are always levered naked people. We just saw it in the meme coins. We saw it in the alt coins. These are warning signs that you can't mess around with liquidity. And now it's starting to happen in the S&P 500 and the economy is weakening. And so if you keep the tariffs up, I think it will freeze consumer confidence and freeze business confidence in a way that people just aren't going to realize because they don't know what's going to happen. And that's what the economy is based on with the stock market at the level that it is. And so eventually we'll have to turn and we'll have

to do what we always do, which is cut rates and start the liquidity cycle going the other direction. And that's already started with the dollar weakening, with rates going down. So maybe it doesn't have to get that bad. And Donald Trump has the ability at any point to bring certainty back into the market with the tariff situation. And I think that's the only thing. I don't think one person who voted for him and people that didn't, don't disagree that the government spending should come down. They all agree with that. And I think you can find it without having a multiplier because government spending is a waste of money. So the problem is if the market goes down, now you're dealing with something that's far bigger. I think that's what's

going to happen. Where can we send people to find some of the content you've written? You put this tweet thread out. It's very good on austerity. You've also written a couple of pieces over the two or three weeks that i've read around ai and bitcoin and things like that so i'm on substack um i'm on youtube i'm aligning myself right now with a company called 22v research where this will be more institutionally focused deep research on ai and on on macro they're a macro boutique place that used to be part of ai uh part of isi so you can find me kind of all over there um what's the what's the sub stack uh well it's under my name at viscer labs yeah um it's very good i i read every piece and thank you i think i think very highly of it so if people if you haven't

subscribed yet i suggest you go do that um do you agree with my stable coin piece if you didn't see it it was the one i released this week on monday uh no i have not read that one okay that one i have a stack of papers that i read every saturday morning and yours is dude you're on top of everything and now you're doing a daily thing you have to be reading everything the the stablecoin thing is on the network effects it was from the stripe annual letter i read it over the weekend it blew me away as the most positive thing for anyone who wants to be positive or negative on bitcoin once you get through this liquidity thing in in in the markets uh stablecoin and what they showed their numbers and the growth they are the most important company for bitcoin in terms of

what's happening in the digital economy and the payment growth not just in the us from startups but also overseas amazing stuff stripe is uh continuing to uh to really nail it huh uh they are the collison brothers seem to have it so all right thank you very much for doing this thanks