The Pomp Podcast - #1550 Jordi Visser | If You Miss This Bitcoin Run, Don’t Say You Weren’t Told

Episode Date: May 17, 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 evaluate economic data, bitcoin, stocks, inflation, acceleration of AI, and the global economy. ======================Figure Markets is where crypto meets real-world finance. Trade 24/7 with speed and transparency, borrow against your crypto with no credit checks, and earn—all on-chain. Stocks and real estate trading are coming soon, giving you 24/7 access and instant settlement. It’s the best of TradFi and DeFi in one platform. Get started today at https://www.Figure.com/pomp!Disclosures: https://www.figuremarkets.com/disclosures/======================Maple Finance is where real money meets real yield. With over $1.5B managed, Maple offers secure lending, Bitcoin yield, and premium DeFi assets like syrupUSDC. Get started today at https://www.maple.finance !=======================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? Today, we've got a great episode with Jordy Visser. Jordy is a 30-year veteran of Wall Street, and we talk about it all today. We talk about what's going on with inflation, stocks, Bitcoin, AI, and why the market

is doing what it's doing when everyone else said it was going to do something else. The whole conversation has one key theme, is that you may be at an advantage if you don't have the biggest brain in the room. No, seriously. Jordy explains it very articulately, and I think that it's a unique way to think about the world. So here's my latest 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. today's episode is sponsored by figure markets the place to go to earn yield and borrow against your bitcoin or ethereum figure markets crypto back loans let you borrow against your bitcoin or ethereum with up to a 75 loan to value ratio one of the highest in the industry whether you're looking to reinvest and double down back into more bitcoin cover everyday life expenses or just have cash on hand these loans make it simple interest rates start as low as 12.5 with no credit checks no long applications and no prepayment penalties. Worried about using your Bitcoin as collateral to someone you don't know? Figure Markets is a subsidiary of Figure, the largest non-bank

HELOC lender in the United States with over $14 billion of home equity unlocked and founded by Mike Cagney, who founded SoFi. Sign up today at figure.com slash POM or download their app to explore all their offers. They're currently giving away $50 to new users who deposit and trade $100. Explore crypto, loans, earning opportunities, and more with them. Go to figure.com slash POM. Today's episode is brought to you by Maple, the go-to place for on-chain asset management. There aren't many teams in crypto who manage real money the right way, but Maple does. Maple now manages over a billion dollars, combining serious finance experience with

DeFi innovation. I use Maple because they make it simple to earn real yield, whether that's allocating stable coins for over-collateralized lending to institutions, depositing Bitcoin to their institutional Bitcoin yield offering, or accessing their premium DeFi assets like Syrup USDC. If you're serious about putting capital to work, then go to maple.finance to learn more. Once again, that's maple.finance. Go check them out today. All right, Jordan, we got a ton to talk about this week. The first thing is everyone was super scared about inflation, the tariffs, a recession. People were talking about Great Depression,

empty shelves like they were all over the place with all this fear mongering we just got data from april that suggests that sales data is actually still pretty strong that prices of certain products were actually going down not up and the inflation number went down in the latest reading as well so are we out of the woods how do you look at some of this economic data that we're getting stocks obviously are recovering very rapidly and they seem to think that the parties on like it is 99 or 2021 all over again uh yeah i worth because of the situation with the getting rid of the worst of the tariff situation so if you kind of go through the last five weeks it started with hey we'll put a pause on things for 90 days but we'll leave china we'll raise

china we'll raise it again and now we're at the point where we're kind of heading back towards what Stanley Druckenmiller said was a good result, 10% around the board, China may be a little bit higher. So the policy uncertainty has come down dramatically. And so everything on the economy side gets into the divergence that's been there between the soft data, which as we've talked about, it gets this phrase of soft data. It's really people worrying, CIOs worrying. The hard data has remained fine because the hard data is driven by two parts. It's driven by the consumer, which when the stock market was falling down, you're getting a little bit of weakness. Okay. All good. But the other side is the AI trade and AI in general about the spending side.

And as we went through the first quarter, all the AI stuff was great. The hard data was good. So it makes sense that once the policy uncertainty goes down, we get the snapback in the S&P. And basically when you go look at everything now, the fact that we're up for the year, after all of the things that we talked about on here and we went through where everyone's panicking going through it, now there's still people saying recession. The reality is there is no recession. I'm happy to say that. And I'll keep saying the same thing I said. The definition of a recession is a historical thing that most economists and politicians and everyone learned in school. They do not exist in the framework of today's world. So as I look at all of the data

points that are out there. One of the things that I continue to see is a politicalization of economic data. And a good example of this is the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey just came out. In it, they ask people about their inflation expectations. Do you think inflation is going to be high, low? What do you think it'll be, et cetera? Democrats have an expectation of incredibly high inflation, two times higher than they ever had under Biden. Republicans' expectation is like one-fourth or one-fifth, I forget the exact number, of what the Democrats' inflation expectation is. Both of them are sideways to slightly up in the last couple of weeks. But the difference between all the Democrats who think it's going to be this massive number, all the Republicans who think it's

going to be this very small number. How do we try to find data that we can trust? Because that survey is 300 people. And I saw somebody online saying, you know, there's 300 million people in America. We're asking 300 people what their expectation is of inflation. And then if you break it out by political party, it's so skewed. It's basically like two different extremes. And so I think I kind of come to this stuff. One of the things the Bitcoiners, I think got right, is they pretty much reject most of the traditional data. And they say, this is wrong. They may not be able to articulate why they think it's wrong, how it's wrong, what a better metric is, et cetera. But it does feel like by rejecting the data points that a

bunch of people use, it has led to better decision-making for them. So how do you look at this data and do you put weight into it? Well, first of all, you've hit on a topic, which as I've got more immersed over the last two years in the Bitcoin community, let me first describe why I think the Bitcoin community has a big advantage in these times. Number one, this is also social media driven. And I say that in the framework of people blame the media, but really social media is if you want whatever you want to see, you can go see. the doom and gloomers. And I, I, I never realized this. I mean, I, I don't have a ton of X followers. If I was bearish, I'd have five times the amount. Of course you sound smart, but you don't make

money. Yeah. It's like, you gotta be bearish all the time and go through this. And many macro people that I've been out to dinner with, they have a lot of X followers are on sub stack. They've got people paying them. They only write negative things. And so Bitcoin people have an advantage that they've been playing from this place of being oppressed, of being morons, of being deplorables. And what I like about it is that just gets you up to not believe anything you're reading. And that's the important thing about making long-term investments. You're living in a world where exponential AI is happening, and the history is just not as important. So if you're telling me the tariffs and comparing what happened in the 1800s and 1900s,

when there was no news? When there's horses. Yeah, like how did you find out the news? Of course there were no inflation expectations. No one actually knew what was going on. We're here, oh, I'm really worried about inflation because I was on Twitter and the shelves are gonna be empty.

And Ryan Peterson said there's no boats at the ports and blah, blah, blah. Like it's nonstop all day long. So I think Bitcoin people just have the ability to look through things and just not believe anything. And one of the key things is to not think you know anything. If you actually believe that you're just following what's happening and you believe that inflation is happening and it's the government's job to make sure that with all this debt, I mean, this is the most simplistic first principle of macro right now. We have a lot of debt.

We are not fixing the deficit based on the tax bill and based on the fact that Doge hasn't found anything and we already backed off on the Main Street versus Wall Street thing. They get it, which means, okay, well, then the easier solution is what we've been doing, which is we're going to try to grow our way. out of this by debasing the currency and bonds will be uninvestable and that's good for bitcoin you have to read through the noise and there's a tremendous amount of noise so uh you're being very kind right now because we're talking on the recording but the better way to say this is uh most of the bitcoiners me uh etc uh they don't know what they don't know they don't know anything really right and uh on one hand um i would say that is true for a lot of things in uh the economy If you go and look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin was an asset that you shouldn't have invested in based on the old way of looking at the world.

And I've previously said that I think that Bitcoin is an intelligence test, but not intelligence in the sense of are you smart or are you not? Do you have the intelligence and the intellectual humility to update your worldview and realize the way that people used to look at it is not the world we live in today? So you're like you're dead on with this, right? now uh what i also think is very important here is that the bitcoin crowd they essentially have grabbed onto this idea of what you're talking about where the only thing that matters in the economy is that they're going to debase the currency if they continue to debase the currency everything else you're being told is a distraction that is trying to shake you out of your investment portfolio and in a weird way retail understands that better than the institutions

because guess who was buying on april 9th the bottom of the market yep it was retail and i saw the smart sophisticated money going on television they had all their charts they were pontificating they weren't crying but they wanted to you know they were saying yelling and screaming doing their whole thing. And guess what? If you went on X or anywhere else, buy the dip. These people are idiots, all that stuff. And so to me, what I wonder is as capital flows more into these people's hands, which you now are seeing all the financial institutions talk about, they're trying to get customers that are self-directed investors, self-directed investors, independent investors, retail they use all different names for them those people are the market now and so yeah the

institutions have a lot of money but they're doing things like i saw jim chenos uh recently he's uh shorting uh micro micro strategy buying bitcoin basically he has a you know non-directional trade on he's trying to lock in a premium like that's just what the wall street's doing what are the retail people doing they are one direction they just buy and they keep buying and they don't sell their Bitcoin. And so you can look across these assets. That's why Tesla, that's why Palantir, that's why GameStop. It is a reoccurring theme in society now is that the retail investor has this persistent bid. And when things go down, they buy, which is actually what you should do as an investor. And I think Wall Street looks at it like, look at how dumb these people are. They're

buying right now. But in hindsight, it actually looks like that is the winning strategy moving forward. So here's the ironic thing about it. And there's so much in what you just said, which I agree. And, you know, we haven't done this before. We've been doing this now for six, seven, eight weeks, something like that. I get reached out a lot from people. I saw someone today who's an ex-Goldman partner and thanked us for doing the show. So I'm going to thank everyone for paying attention and going through it. What you just said and the reason it's important for this, Wall Street has always said there's a Fed put, always. We just have to find the level. The problem is, historically, like the great financial crisis, everyone with debt gets

screwed, the market falls down, and then the bottom happens, but it's not a V bottom. It's kind of one of these U bottoms. That's what recessions were. The reason I say there's no such thing as a recession anymore is two parts. One is the economy has been completely apt, and now it's being AI'd. So the economy's changed. are contingency workers. There's just no way for enough people to lose their jobs to have a recession. On the other side, it would be a policy choice to have a recession. So the Fed put is

there, but now we're not having U bottoms. First, we were having V bottoms. This one is not a V bottom, people. This is an I bottom. We went down, we went straight back up. Now, the reason the Bitcoin people get it so real, the Fed put is the debasing time. Yeah, it's always there. It's always there. And it has to be. And that's why whether Jeff Booth got me down this path before, where if you view the world as two components, one is deflationary, which is innovation, and the other one is inflationary, which is the government defending the median worker who is displaced by the deflation, they always have to come back to the puzzle. And that's what we're watching. And that's why the spending has to happen in the easiest way other than war revolution.

It's debasing. That's it. And so I think the Bitcoin crowd just gets it more. They have a mentality because I've talked about this. They have more reps. If you're an online poker player, you're getting lots of reps. It's a lot harder to go to Vegas and then go to AC to put in all that time. Online poker, you can play all day long. You get more reps. You kind of become immune to the losses and it allows you to stay sharp and look at the next hand. Let me let that one go. There's no tilt. You're reducing that problem. And I think in the markets, they just have more of a comfort of buying when everyone's panicking and putting money to work quickly because they've been through this there is something about being terminally online right that um the speed the uh

the memes the um maybe the volatility the critiques like all of this stuff um you know i was very very positive on tariffs i was very clear that i thought the stock market was going to do very well this year uh all the fear i think i tweeted at one point much to the chagrin of many people that anyone who was fear-mongering was going to look ridiculous in hindsight you know right um the more pushback i got the more right i knew i was because it was basically there's this consensus and you know earlier this week i talked about the number one signal i knew as to why the analysis of the tariffs was wrong was because all the economists agreed which meant that dissent had been outlawed because economists never agree

on everything right but the second they all agree on one thing that means that you now actually have left rational analysis, and you now are in a world where dissent is outlawed. And if you say it, you're almost like being blasphemous. And so then you know that thing is true, right? And we've seen this over and over again the last four, five, six years, whatever. When I look at the stock market today, I think the stocks are forward-looking. Now, people who I have a lot of respect for, who I think are very intelligent, who obviously have made a lot of money and from the scoreboard of success are doing very well. They think that stocks are going to retest the lows. Paul Tudor Jones has said this, a number of other people. How do you think about, okay,

we kind of got through that first wave, stocks are back up, not back to all-time highs, but on the way. But there's very smart people saying that we're going to retest the lows. Agree, disagree, or how would you analyze that? I disagree with that. I do think stocks will find, again, some point this year some some trouble but the the problem with the stock market is the earnings are growing and the economy's fine so it you know i think to be fair to paul um he said that the weekend before the china tariff deal and he said on cnbc uh i like paul a lot so i'm giving him a little bit of a little bit of uh credit here for at least saying even if they come down to 50 on china and now we've got a pause and we're talking about lower numbers possibly so i think in fairness

to him he said it before that announcement came out there was new information you adjust your views and go through it but steve cohen this week talked about a 45 chance of recession and a retest of of the lows um you always have to be careful when people come out publicly and say because if they miss the rally and they got a lot of people following this would be a good way to get people maybe take correction and be able to buy some stuff i'm not sure he's doing that he's got bigger things to worry about with the mets but i don't think we're gonna have a retest and the reason i don't think we're going to is because the most important factor that came out of q1 and the most dominant factor going on is the math behind AI. And I just want to bring something

up so people realize this, because there's a little bit of accounting arbitrage that goes on with this. It's very unique. So everyone knows the $300 billion of CapEx, but $300 billion of CapEx is a spending number, but it doesn't count as an expense for those companies this year. So it's not like they have to make $300 billion of revenues to offset it. That number gets depreciated over 7 to 10 years. So let's just use 10 years. That means $30 billion a year. So the big question has been whether the Mag 7 can get the ROI on that expense, which I still think is a very difficult thing for them to do. But the $300 billion, they're spending it. So that's a revenue for NVIDIA, for semiconductors, for anything that they're spending it on. So on

the one side, you have $300 billion of revenues. On the other side, you only have $30 million of expenses. So without going through the math on it, that's a really good profit margin when you aggregated in the S&P 500. This happened with cloud and they eventually made the money back. It also happened during the dot-com bubble with the telco. They blew up, but they blew up because they had debt and eventually it became a bad investment. I still believe that at some point, two years down the road, three years down the road, this will be a problem for the mag seven because the numbers, Sequoia has done work on this. I've gone through it myself. I just don't see how this doesn't become an issue. And one of the things that we talked about before we sat down

here, one of the advantages you have in the market that say a Steve Cohen doesn't have or a Paul Tudor Jones doesn't have, they're depending on people to tell them what's happening. You get to work with people involved in AI. You're investing in little tiny companies. You actually see how fast these companies are growing. These companies are taking money away from the bigger companies. It's happening slowly, but it's an ecosystem that's growing. So eventually the negative Nellies on the stock market. I think it will happen because we're spending a lot from the Fortune 500 companies. The startups are actually coming back, but it's going to take a couple years. I think you'll start seeing this more and more a year from now. So I don't think we'll

retest, but I think once we get through the all-time highs, we'll start to run into a little bit of trouble. It's interesting you say this because I'll throw a couple of companies out there. Lovable has publicly announced that they're at $50 million in ARR in six months. I know that Replit, I'm an investor in Lovable, investor in Replit, they're up, I don't know, maybe they've doubled, you know, uh, very quickly. Um, if you go and you take a look at maybe a company, um, like a, uh, uh, maybe a Riverside, which, uh, is infusing AI into their product and doing all kinds of stuff, growing incredibly fast, right? Uh, we have a company where, uh, we have one engineer and myself, two people who, uh, have built something.

It's growing very rapidly. The biggest competitor has 12,500 employees. Good luck to them. Uh, The data does not look so good for them so far. And it's only been a couple of weeks, right? And like, you see this stuff and you start to say, like, okay, the speed is one component, but speed, if you're building the wrong thing, doesn't help you. Speed, if you're building something

that can't be monetized, doesn't help you, right? It's also the fact that you can very quickly get to product market fit and then accelerate. And so I think of it kind of like a running back, right? When you hand the ball to the running back, sometimes the running back just runs right to the hole because the hole's there. But the best running backs, they take the ball

and they kind of look for the hole in the line of scrimmage and then they accelerate through it. And that to me is what the AI companies are doing is they're very good at kind of hanging around, trying to build, tinker, find. Okay, once they have product market fit, they just accelerate in a way that a company really can't do anywhere else.

And so I think the question then becomes when you see the perplexities, they're rumored to be raising money at like a 14, $15 billion valuation. Obviously the open AI is raised at 300 billion. These are crazy numbers. it's not just these little small things that are going to take away a little bit of market share these things are going to be disruptive i mean again we'll see what happens but these ai companies

could disrupt google right i mean you know it's like uh you're going after the giants and one of the the best ways that i know to evaluate uh kind of opportunities is there's the saying uh judge people by the enemies they select right or by the competitors they select and so i always say that um if you look at aptronic or figure ai the humanoid robot companies uh they're basically choosing to go and compete against elon musk and jeff bezos right that says a lot about the type of company that you have etc right now on the other hand if you take a look at uh these ai companies they're going after the big guys and so that mag 7 kind of issue you're talking about like it just feels like people are missing the forest from the trees when they're

worried about like what is an inflation print what's the sentiment survey yeah and you're like dude the world is literally shifting in a way where we're never going back to where we were five years ago yeah and and so two things on what you said that um i mentioned this last week and i'll just say it again so the numbers you threw out unless people tape this you know or tape it unless they rewind go through this and write everything down uh if you go to the stripe keynote speech, Stripe, who's a very important player in this whole ecosystem because most startups end up working on Stripe right away. They went through these numbers. You mentioned Replit. So Replit, I used for a little while and then Cursor came along and I used Cursor. Cursor,

I think, is at 300 million AR now. So you're talking about two companies, Replit and Cursor, and the same thing. You've got Windsurf as well. These are the things that allow you to speak to create code with having no code skills. So you can create apps in the same day. You can watch this, go on YouTube, spend an hour. You can go create an app without a doubt, anything you want on your phone. It'll be in HTML and then anyone can use it.

The fact that you can do this means anything built on code is obviously at risk. The number one thing that AI is doing is replicating code. And even though it won't be ever as good as let's say the top 2% of coders, you're still replacing the bottom 80% already. And that number keeps going higher and higher, which means businesses have an advantage. I want to give you a better, not a better visual, different visual with the running back thing. So a startup company, let's say has only three

linemen they have to get through. A fortune 500 company has seven linemen. That's the friction of them to move forward. They've got an infrastructure, they've got a culture, they've got security issues. They've got things to protect. Big companies do have problems getting through the hole because they've got to change and they've got to adopt. And the adoption has friction where small companies don't have that kind of friction. The problem is for kind of the middle, let's say 2000 companies that exist, the small cap and the mid cap companies, they don't all benefit from this. I think the infrastructure plays do. There's plenty of them. But the problem they have is a lot of them had to take out debt. So they've got the problem of

higher rates. This is one of the issues that AI has done, which is not, inflation may not be going higher, but it's also at this point, not going down to a level enough that rates are going down. So one of the things that's starting to show up is I believe the frictions are hollowing out kind of the businesses that have probably survived too long that have debt. We're going to lose more of them. The startups are racing really, really fast and they're going to eat lunch of those, but they're too small right now, but that you can see where this world's going to look like five years from now, the S&P 500 companies are going to have a problem with these companies. The question is, will those companies ever go public? You have that answer better than any

senior macro person in their 60s by far. The part to me where everyone got really excited was, I forget the name of the company, but they were using, I mean, it was Kayak or something. They were like slashing customer service costs, like 40% reduction in cost. And everyone's like, oh look ai ai ai which yeah it's going to help there for sure um but i do think that there's something like i know a guy right now uh he's in new york he's building a erp system um it is called uh or i think it's actually self-sex i shouldn't say but uh it's an erp kind of accounting type system um and his big like quote-unquote insight is everyone knows ai agents are going to be a big thing so the idea that i'm going to have you know five agents and this one does this

this one does this they're kind of like almost like employees but they work for you in their software he's like yeah but if you build the ai agents into a platform now they're the expert in that platform so imagine if every time you went to go use salesforce software you got to be on the phone with the salesforce rep who literally walks you through anything you had live while you were using the product be a way better experience right because you would never have questions you'd never get confused never get lost if anything broke they would fix it immediately all stuff. So his big insight is, well, what if you just built the agents right in? Now you have experts on a platform. So your AI agent may be an expert in you. His AI agent is an expert in his

platform. Now there's a huge flow of information back and forth, a lot of automation, you can do all this stuff. I have also seen, and they've publicly talked about it, Perplexity is coming out with this kind of browser comment. Insane, what this thing can do. Insane. And you start to say to yourself, there's a compounding that's happening. And I think it's hard for people to see because they hear the anecdotes, but it's like, okay, the AI agents is a big unlock just for one individual. Then if the AI agent is able to use a browser that's optimized for this and can very quickly go find things, answer things, do actions, et cetera. But then it's also talking to an AI agent that is inside the softwares that you're using. Now you're starting to stack this

stuff on top of it. And when that occurs, again, it goes to the acceleration of a company that's able to do it. But I actually think a lot about you can now accelerate the consumer. And this is a part that people haven't really been talking about yet. But if I'm able to do more things in a day, ideally, I should be able to make more money in a day. But also, I should be able to consume more things from a monetary standpoint in a day. And so you get this like vortex of efficiency, speed, acceleration that starts to play out where it's actually going to lead to higher revenues for a bunch of companies. It's going to lead to more personal income or tax revenue, you know, all this stuff. How are you not long stocks, right? Like that's what I keep

coming back to is like, what is the, I don't know, three plus year argument to be bearish on pretty much any asset. I just don't see it. But obviously, there's some people who do. Yeah. So let's convert what you just said, because we spent five minutes on just how much AI is going through. So when I listen to a podcast today, I love Russell Napier. He's a historian on markets. And there's two things I'm interested in. I do not care about recessions, and I do not care about the tariffs. What I care about is the capital flows of the world changing, which I think are happening. And I think there's definitely an impact from the tariffs in terms of repatriation of currencies back to their homeland. That is going to happen.

So the dollar will remain under pressure. It has impacts for yields. But in terms of the stock market, to get to your point, there are two driving factors in the AI economy for the stock market and for the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, we're in a position where the top 10% are driving 50% of consumption. Consumption is two-thirds of the economy. So it's really hard to have a recession. For everyone listening, for every economist and every person saying recession's coming, if the top 10% are driving 50% of consumption and the stock market is even unchanged for a year, there ain't no problem. We have $170 trillion of net worth in the country, not creating an issue. When you add in the transfer payments and the entitlements,

you're getting a lot of other money for retirees that are sitting at home that aren't a part of that 10%. So consumption is fine as long as the stock market's unchanged. On the flip side, and profit margins are growing. So AI is going to continue to grow the profit margins. And so, as I mentioned, you have this arbitrage. So it's really hard for the stock market to go down. Could it go sideways? Yeah. But I don't think that's going to happen for at least the next few years in terms of the eating away from smaller businesses. And that's where you could be losing some of the pie. But even then, I don't think the stock market goes down. I just think it has trouble outperforming inflation. The $300 billion of CapEx means they're spending money

for the AI. This is an AI economy. You're not losing jobs and you're growing CapEx to build out this massive infrastructure, which needs more power. So all of the noise that people are hearing, I agree with you. It's really negative. It's a really bad place to worry about the next three years if you need to save money. If you've taken your money out and put it in the bank because you think Donald Trump's going to end the economy. You're betting against AI. You're not betting against Donald Trump. You are literally betting against something which is compounding at a pace that most people can't comprehend. Do not leave the stock market and put your money into cash if we're not going to have tariffs that are going to create the stock market to fall down 20%.

I don't think that's going to happen. Let's talk Bitcoin. Bitcoin rallied from $75,000 up to $103,000, $104,000, $5,000. I think people are like, okay, that drop was not fun, but we're back. And there's some really big numbers out there. How do you evaluate Bitcoin's performance relative to the US-China trade kind of clarity, the UK, the air quotes deal, and kind of what's happening with the economic policy right now? So I believe based on, you know, I do this weekly video and I go through X and I take all of the institutions, governments, countries, sovereign wealth funds that are putting money in. The adoption is growing rapidly.

It's very clear to me. These are not like minor things. And the reason that's important is I think people are finally talking about it as an asset, as part of the puzzle. And this was very necessary. I needed to see that they were like, you know what, if I put 2% to 5% in, that's actually adding to my portfolio because it was uncorrelated during a very important time. And I think that's one of the most important messages is when it rallied back, it rallied back before the stock market did. And I think this year there will be another leg. So even though I think we're going to get to all-time highs, I think we're going to run into another issue.

This one's going to come, as I talked about in the last couple episodes, second half of the year, the deficit and the debt is going to become an issue. and we're going to see rates move higher. We're in the sweet spot right now. So people hear this when you go into a regime where people fear recession. This has gone on almost every year since 2009. Almost every year we have a recession fear. And then eventually what happens is the government stimulates and we rally back. We didn't get government stimulus, but we kind of did because, hey, tariffs rolled off. So we went from uncertainty to certainty. A couple social media posts in there. A couple posts by the market. Go ahead, go through it. But the problem is rates didn't go down when the market was going down and they've jumped back up and we have 30-year

yields sitting near the highest level since 20 years ago. And the problem is this has a lot to do with the tariff situation in terms of the repatriation, which is a real thing. It is going to happen. There is no way that the world is not being divided and Asia has been a huge funnel for are rates being below where they're supposed to be. The second thing is we actually have a problem now that the fiscal and debt situation of the country, the way we started the year, based on the tax bill and based on everything, it's going to be worse. So at some point, rates are going to become an issue, not necessarily for the stock market to collapse. I think people are worried about it. But from the move of, let's say, four and a half and 10 year

rates to five, when you come out of a recession, fear, rates going higher usually goes on with the market going higher but at some point probably around 480 and 10 year rates 485 you'll start to see where stock bond relationship starts to shift and i think pension funds and this is an important point retail might be buying corporate buybacks are still going on but pension funds are now fully funded they're fully funded because of the rate move and because of the equity move and i think they will be rotating more into bonds as time goes on because they're fully funded and i think that's going to become an issue at some yield level the 10-year rate where do you think that we need it to get to when you say need it what do you mean oh that's for you to determine

but the good side or the bad side i think there's a lot of folks who they know the administration is looking at that number they want it down okay right um the critics have magic numbers in their head of it going up and hitting certain levels. But I think for the administration and the US economy, is it sub 4%? Is it even lower than that? Where do you kind of see, you know, success look like? Okay. So this is the most important point for Bitcoin this year. And this is where I think the short squeeze is going to occur. So the correlation between the dollar and bonds is going to be critical in the second half of the year. All right. We've had a bounce in stocks. the dollars barely budged and rates have stayed higher so when you kind of go through what was

the problem this year stocks bonds and the currency went down at some point that's going to happen again this year at some point in my mind it's going to happen episodically the reason the bond market is so important for this conversation there's other than doing outright qe which would just be great for bitcoin i don't think they're going to be able to do that So I think when rates go higher, this will become a problem for people. I mean, we already have delinquencies. We already have credit card delinquencies and mortgage delinquencies up at very high levels.

He is trying to help those people, the people that have been suffering. Now, he can't guarantee they'll have jobs. The tariffs are not going to guarantee that they're going to have manufacturing jobs. None of this stuff is going to happen. But I do think he's committed to doing this, which means somewhere behind the scenes, one of the policies that I think is going to have to happen is to figure out ways for their, especially housing market people, people that are in houses to get some kind of rate, which is lower. Mortgage spreads are at very, very high levels. They've been there really since COVID and the spending.

And as Asian repatriation goes on, you're going to see more pressure on mortgages. And I just don't see how they're going to be able to deal with this. New home buyers, same problem. So I think what they're going to have to do is something on the housing side. It's not going to be pure QE, but just like the bank term funding facility was set up for SVB, I think they're going to have to do something. So that's the way I think this rate thing is going to go. I don't think it's going to stop the economy. And that's the main point I keep saying to people is in an AI driven economy, higher rates does not affect the AI companies on the startup side. And it certainly doesn't affect the mag seven at all. No, in the AI companies, I think you can make an argument

the higher the rates are the bigger the advantage the ai companies have in some ways they their equity multiple side comes under pressure and this gets back into the common but their competitors have more expensive capital and you know what i mean like it pushes more people out of the business and that's part of the issue is we have i mean bankruptcies are going up in the in the country but startups are going up too it's a weird dynamic and that's why the ai but is it healthy like this That's an interesting point. Is it healthy for us to have bad businesses go out of business and be replaced by better businesses, better built for the future? I don't want to see any entrepreneur have their business go out of business, right? There's like a, there's an emotional, empathetic, you know, kind of human component where when a business goes out, jobs are lost. That's real people, real families, you know, real income. I get all of that. Yep. But if you can kind of take a clinical look at an economy, no different than if you look at an organization, you know, there will be people who say, oh, we shouldn't fire anybody. Yep. But

the best organizations, maybe they fire 10 or 20% of their staff every year, right? And they rotate in and they continue to improve. And is that kind of what's happening right now in the economy? So that's technically a recession and that's what's supposed to happen. I'd rather have a recession this way. This is the creative destruction that's going on. Let me ask you question. How many hours a day do you use perplexity or any AI? AI in general? Yeah. Hours, multiple hours. Now, if you didn't have a job, you could use it more. Correct. Okay. If someone loses a job tomorrow, this is just my, as someone who went through this, I had to make a decision a year ago when our hedge fund shut down and I had to go,

do I want to go back into the hedge fund industry or do I want to be an entrepreneur? And I made the choice to be an entrepreneur. And what I did is I went on Coursera. I took free courses on Python. I did five of them in a couple weeks. And then I was able to manipulate AI in a way that I didn't think was possible. I could be doing anything I want right now. What I got was time. And I'm saying this to people. If they lose their job, they can't learn AI going to work every day. 100%. But if they go home and they're really committed, and you and I believe one thing, I think the reason we get along so well, we're hustlers. We work hard. No one's going to stop me from learning anything. I'm 58 years old.

I'm going to keep learning for the rest of my life because I love learning new things. You're the same way. Anyone who's out there who loses a job, go spend the time on AI, then go back and look for a job. You'll be in a much more powerful position. I guarantee you. It's funny to be 58, but look 21. The math doesn't work, right?

A lot of drugs. um last thing i want to talk to you about is going forward uh president trump his team just went on this big tour of the middle east uh tons of investment pouring into the united states i think i saw howard letnick tweet and say three trillion dollars was raised during the trip now it's not all going to come in this year it's over you know periods of time um but it does feel like at the same time the u.s is hitting all these other countries with tariffs we also are like the US is open for business and those countries are taking

the United States up on that? Are we making friends? Are we making enemies? Does it matter for the economy? We live in a global world, but it does feel like a lot of these countries are actually doing a lot of business with us that maybe people didn't think they were going to be doing.

Maybe I disagree with you a little bit on this. One, I don't trust any numbers I hear, especially if they're spread out over five years, ten years. I think that's fair. The net investment position of the United States, which is a real number, which anyone can go get on their own, is a negative $27 trillion. Meaning the world has already invested in here a ton of money. So we're net against foreigners. They own $27 trillion of our assets on a net basis relative to what we own overseas. So if there's repatriation, which again,

if the dollar is weakening, that means those investments, the bogey for being productive assets, it's getting harder and harder. So when people look at this, if the currency is going to weaken, which to me, I don't see a way that the dollar, because they've kind of set it up that they either want it or they're doing it. We have a debt problem. We have a deficit problem. We're not going to deal with it. Dollar weakness does not happen overnight. It's kind of a gradual thing. when bonds mature. Right now, there's no QE going on, but every week that the Fed is buying bonds that are maturing. They've got bonds maturing, and then they're only doing $5 billion of QT. So they got to put money back into the things as they're getting cash back, they're

maturing. The same thing is going to happen with Asian investors and with European investors. they own us bonds but if they get 100 billion maturing over three months maybe they're only putting 80 back in and 20s going back home i think it's a gradual process and so i'm i'm not as positive on the whole fdi thing it to me that the problem with this is the ai side i think people don't realize how democratizing competition is globally for artificial intelligence we talk about the startup community in the us there's a startup community in every country on the planet and we've dominated the tech world so the reason coding has been our baby of which if you go through the net investment most of that is in the mag 7. if we believe the mag 7 is going to be under pressure

then there's a repatriation that's happening solely from the revenues being redistributed around the globe because ai competition for a cursor and replet here anyone in europe can go build their own cursor and replet as well and they can have some of the revenue there 100 i mean it makes uh makes complete sense um all right where can we send people to find you on the internet um they can find me on youtube they can find me on x they can find me on sub stack viscer labs and again for the institutional side i did three papers this week on i did one on inference ai yep yeah and this was a big one this was the inference moment to me i'll do a little bit of it on the on the video there but they can find it at 22vresearch.com uh and that's where

they can speak to me and get a hold of me with some of the sales people there amazing thank you so much i appreciate you taking the time to do this uh last week was a big week for us this week i think might be a bigger week let's see what happens but uh appreciate all of you guys watching and we'll do it again next week.