The Pomp Podcast - #1556 Jordi Visser | Are Bitcoin Bonds the Next Big Investment?

Episode Date: May 31, 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 what’s going on with bitcoin, bitcoin bonds, why countries are buying bitcoin, AI, what’s going on with tariffs, and how it all impacts your portfolio. =======================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 !=======================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp=======================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.=======================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 our weekly episode with Jordy Visser. Jordy's got 30 years of Wall Street experience, and he's bringing it to you fast and furious. Exactly

what you need to know about what's happened this week and how it's going to affect your portfolio. We get into what's going on at Bitcoin, Bitcoin bonds. Why are countries buying Bitcoin? What is also going on with artificial intelligence, the new VO3 model that just came out, and then how we should be thinking about the tariffs and the ability for the courts to maybe remove them or maybe not. We've got it all covered for you. Everything that happened this week and what it's going to do to your portfolio here today. 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

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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. Today's episode is brought to you by Core. You can earn yield on your Bitcoin by just holding your Bitcoin. It's simple. Core, the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, will reward you for not selling your Bitcoin. It's not magic. Here's how it works. Core is a protocol secured by elected validators you can help elect validators and secure the network by simply locking up your bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain no bridging no lending and just holding when your validator

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As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest. All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start this conversation is the idea of a bit bond, this bond concept with Bitcoin backing it. We now have the mayor of New York City saying he is going to use it. So this is no longer theory. It's no longer kind of academic, you know, kind of pontificating. We now are saying there's a city who's going to use a bit bond. What is a bit bond? And do you think these are a good idea? Well, first of all, I think they're a great idea. And that's not just from someone who believes in Bitcoin. We have the merging of two systems. And so, you know, we've talked extensively

not only about what's going on, but I kind of look at the world right now as the old fiat economy that's very industrialized. The digital economy, which has been growing rapidly, doesn't need debt. And then the payment side and using this new capital structure of the new system. So I've always viewed since the day that I kind of embraced Bitcoin as not a currency in any way, shape or form for me, but really as kind of the idea of the new capital structure. And because you have these separate economies, you have an enormous amount of capital that people want attached to Bitcoin. Michael Saylor's obviously done this extensively. So why shouldn't governments be doing it? As someone who grew up in the financial markets,

you're trying to issue structures whether they're bonds whether they're equities whether it doesn't really matter towards where the demand is so we've talked about how it's been hard very difficult for people to sell private equity there's been ipos are just not coming through m&a still slow but yet anyone that raises money for anything related to crypto oversubscribed and that's where the demand is and so the great thing about capital markets is you start migrating towards where the demand is. Now, the great thing about the bond is on the one side, New York and the whole country has a problem. They need to fund at lower interest rates to be able to deal with the budget problems. And if people are willing to take a lower coupon and get participation in Bitcoin as a way to get

higher returns and at the same point are guaranteed their principal, there's going to be demand for that at this point because Bitcoin has such a great track record. And that's the part I don't did you go to the bitcoin conference you did not you did not okay so one of my favorite lines i saw uh matt siegel who i've i've known um for a long time because he's another tradify person that that went into this route he wrote about bitcoin is the hurdle rate for innovation that's kind of what bit bonds are at the end of the day you're incorporating the hurdle rate which in this case the bitcoin returns it doesn't mean in the future we won't have the returns but when you're using any kind of structure, you're looking for demand and people going, I want to get

involved. But you know what? I kind of want to get involved in Bitcoin, but I want to have my principal protected. So give me the chance of making 15% but protect my principal. So I think this is step one of eventually the United States government figuring a way to do this and tapping the demand that's out there. So how will this work? Let's say that I have $100,000. I want to uh put it into a bit bond uh i will be told uh we will guarantee the return of your hundred thousand dollars um i will be told that maybe i'll get like a two three percent yield and then i can get up to fifteen percent return from the performance of bitcoin over let's say five years or something when i put the hundred thousand dollars in to buy this bond i have to get the bond

what do they do with my hundred thousand dollars how do they generate the yield do you think and then how do they just put it all in bitcoin half in bitcoin you know kind of walk me through what at least we think they'll do as of right now. Now, again, it depends on the final structuring of how they go through this, but there'll be some sort of participation. And basically, there's infinite ways of kind of going through the Bitcoin piece. Let's just do the simple piece. You've got a bond that if they issued it normally, let's say had a coupon, a yield of let's just use five percent and it's 10 years. So five percent over 10 years, that's the interest you'd have to pay the person buying it. But instead you go, you're only going to get 1%. That extra 4% a year

goes towards, to make it as simple as possible, buying a call option on Bitcoin. So you take that money, you go buy a premium of call option on Bitcoin, and let's assume it's an at the money call option. As many as you can buy with that excess capital. So what looks like under the hood, the buyer of the bonds has purchased a zero coupon bond that matures in 10 years or something with a 1% that they're getting the amount that is necessary. They're guaranteed their principal plus 1% a year. The excess dollars that would have gone towards the yield is going towards a Bitcoin call option. So that means that at the end, they have, let's say, 90% is the bond portion in cash, principal protected, because it's already on the U.S. Treasury. And then on the other side,

they've got a call option on Bitcoin. And that's the way that you can structure them. So you could do it as a call spread. You could do it as an out of the money. There's a variety of ways to do it. But I think these structures are going to become more and more popular after they get done once, twice, three times, very similar to the Bitcoin reserves around the globe. You're getting more and more countries, more and more states doing it. As you get more and more people doing it, it's just the nature of how the capital structure is changing. Companies will do this, countries, cities. Do we think like the banks will do this? Is this just something where we can just go anywhere where debt is being issued?

you should expect Bitcoin and debt to be tied together in some sort of bond structure? I mean, one thing you can always guarantee with the banks, having worked at one, if there's money to be made, they will be selling these out of there. So I don't think it's a question that the banks will get involved in this. Remember, Michael Saylor is doing it to help strategy grow. So he's doing it from a treasury, a corporate treasury perspective. But he has proven that insurance companies will buy these types of things. it dominates the convert his his converts dominate the convertible bond market you're seeing emerging of these two systems and that's the thing that i think people just have to embrace

is you have the fiat system and then you have this bitcoin system as i'll call it the crypto world and they're just migrating together and stable coins is just another aspect of this in terms of helping now uh strategy has um the equity they have the convertible notes and bonds that people can uh participate in but they also have a number of other uh instruments um i think one is strike one is strife they've got uh msty which is not theirs but but you know is involved um how do you look at their fundraising are they pioneering different ways to raise capital there or are they just taking old instruments that maybe like the bitcoin world isn't used to and saying hey here's you know a old school playbook for a new school world

I haven't seen one thing they've done that Wall Street hasn't done in some other form. And I'll just give you an idea. I mean, they've got effectively what are like buy rights. So here you can buy MicroStrategy and we'll be selling calls against that position. Now, the structure and the way they're doing it is a little bit more modern day. But if I go back to when I first got was working at Morgan Stanley, there were things called perks and those were to help people during the beginning of the internet boom. So in 93, 94, you had a lot of people that wanted to own things like Cisco. And I use Cisco because Cisco's vol was very similar to where Bitcoin's vol was, say, five years ago, meaning Cisco was trading in a 60, 70, 80 vol because the

stock was going up 100% a year. And so if you're an income fund and you're like, I want to be part of this, but they don't pay any dividends. So what they did is they created a structure where you buy Cisco, but then there's a strike price. They sell a call option and that becomes the income portion of this product. Creating a structured product for the buyers is where the creativity comes in. The problem has been until you actually get to the point where you've proven there's demand for this, which is what Michael Saylor really did. He opened the doors for people to realize the demand side. And that's the part that New York City would not be happening without Michael Saylor starting this whole thing and showing that you can do this. Now, his goal

was different than New York City's, but he's tapping into demand. So you've seen the demand. Everyone who's out there who's involved on the crypto side is starting to see that there is an insatiable demand. And I think this will spread around the globe. And it already is. But I think this is just the beginning. And we've also seen a ton of announcements around tokenization. So kind of the flip side, right? Bitcoin is a new thing that is kind of going to the traditional world. But now the people in the Bitcoin and crypto world seem to be saying, well, let's take the old, you know, kind of incumbent assets and let's bring them into our world. And so we saw Robinhood recently come out and say that they're trying to get some tokenization stuff done.

We've seen Superstate actually partner with a public company to do that. What is your take on this and is it just a foregone conclusion tokenization is a foregone conclusion and i remember the first time i saw a presentation uh on this i don't know if you've ever had sandy call on the um on your show i think she's at franklin templeton right now she was at city at the time and i attended an event and i would say this is when i first started to get interested in in in the blockchain rather than bitcoin so this is between 18 and 20 and i went to an event and she took through her vision of tokenization. So I'm going to say this was 2019 and it was pretty compelling about giving access to investments to all individuals and being able to, from a

seller's perspective, being able to sell your house and not have to wait for one buyer because you have a very expensive house and you want to sell it. But actually having people go, you know what? I want to diversify my real estate investments. I'd love to have a little piece of Bergen County, New Jersey, which is one of the places that just said that they're going to start going to tokenization on deeds, which, again, has implications from a cost perspective for the governments of having all these things in on the blockchain. But then from a seller, it's the ability of increasing demand dramatically because you may not be able to find enough sellers for this stuff. I think this is very important now with what we're seeing with the private equity

world. They want to sell some stuff. OK, well, selling blocks of stuff limits how many buyers there can be. And if everyone knows you're a seller and behind it, there's a lot of sellers, you want to get as much demand as you can. And as retail has proven in the stock market, and this is one of the important things that we've talked about, but I don't think enough people realize the world's changing and retail has a lot more power than people realize. They're investing a lot. They're driving markets on the short-term basis, much more so. And they don't have the emotional connections to the fiat system, the historical baggage, I think that comes along with recessions and this is going to end badly.

And more importantly, it's a phrase that Michael Saylor said that changed my life in terms of thinking about it. It's this thing of if you're wealthy, you don't need Bitcoin. And if you're not wealthy, you're looking for something to change your life and to be in. And that's why he got involved in it for his business. It's a powerful story. And so I think tokenization, again, fits Donald Trump, what he's trying to do in the country

to spread the ability for people below a certain income to be able to invest in the same way that institutions do and the wealthy do. So I view tokenization as another decentralization factor that's very important to the overall distribution of securities in this country. Speaking of politics and economic policy, huge development this week

is the International Trade Court came out and they said, basically, tariffs are illegal. You can't do this in the way that you did it. You mean a tariff story isn't over? Yeah, it's not over. And obviously people went and they looked and they said, OK, it's not 100 percent of tariffs that fall under this court ruling, but it was a very large portion of them, specifically the reciprocal tariffs. But then there was an appeals court that at the end of the week came out and said, no, no, you're good. Tariffs are back on. So now we went from the president and the administration being the tariff on tariff off crowd to now the courts are tariff on tariff off.

And it feels like we're going to the Supreme Court. Like the only way this is going to get settled is go to the highest court in the land. and they're going to decide, can the president do this or can they not? What's your take not only on where that'll end up, but what is the impact on the market that we're still getting on, off, on, off on a day-to-day basis? So the court of the market already decided on this issue when bond rates went up, meaning stocks, bonds, and the currency fell at the same time. And as we've said, we haven't seen Peter Navarro much since then. We've seen a lot more Scott Besson. So this has already happened. I think rather than go through whether this prevents anything, Donald Trump posted immediately after that, you know, he's on a mission from God. So

I think people should just ignore all of the tariff back and forth and just focus on two parts. These are the structural realities. On the one side, you have a country that has a distribution of wealth problem that elected someone because the middle person in this country, the median person, is having a hard time surviving through the inflation that was created post-COVID and they're angry about it. And even though they have a job and even though they can go through it, they're realizing for a lot of reasons that they're stuck. And so he's trying to rebalance this a little bit. I don't think that's changing. AI is going to worsen the situation. It's not going to make it better in the short run. In the long run, it will make it better. But people

aren't feeling better about maybe living longer, having access to chat GPT right now. What they care about is their financial situation. So on the one side, I think the thing that's caused the problem, which is the innovation, which is concentrated wealth with very few people, has led to Donald Trump getting elected. And as he said, and Scott Besson, who's been very, let's just say, cool headed throughout this whole thing. You have to go back to what he said And in November of last year, he wants to be a part of the restructuring that needs to happen of the economic order, the global economic order. The tariff situation is just one part of this. We have a deficit. We have debt. They're going to keep going down this path of finding a way to get

more revenues in the country. Tariffs were one way. A weaker currency is already happening. That's another way. And I posted this the second that that court ruling came out. My immediate reaction was, if it's not tariffs, it's going to be capital controls. There's going to be a way that the problem that happens in the world where we have trade imbalances, that means we have a capital surplus. And if we have a capital surplus, it means foreigners. So let's just use Europe because he's brought this up. If Europe is being aggressive on our tech companies because we have monopolies over there and we're dominating. So they're putting extra taxes on them. His viewpoint on this could be, okay, fine. Then I'm going to put capital controls

on your investments here because on the one side, you guys own these companies as shareholders. And at the same point, you're taxing them. So let's normalize this. You want to take your money out of the country. That's fine. Well, we're going to tax you on the way out since you're taxing revenues going back in. That's a simplistic way to look at it. But I think the reality is people have to remember that trade wars are capital wars. Russell Napier has done extensive good work in terms of talking on the history. So I don't think what happened this week changes the short term ramifications of the market, because I think the market has become it doesn't care as much about tariffs. But I think what people have to be careful of, again,

is that capital controls are more likely on the investment arm if the trade side is going to be illegal so this bill the one big beautiful bill uh that has now come out um seems to have two different ramifications one it kind of breaches the subject of some of these capital controls which you're talking about um we'll see if it gets passed but uh that definitely would ramp up maybe the abrasiveness or the global competition the second thing that it does is uh i think it officially puts the nail in the coffin of cost cutting it feels like uh me i don't know about but me uh for sure many people i know were very excited about doge and uh the ability to cut government expenses my general read on this is there's a lot to cut they're not allowed to cut it

and i did an interview recently with a friend of mine who was one of the doge engineers at the va and he's like well you know we're not allowed to fire anyone yeah you know we did this thing and uh i created a better website literally in the first day he was there he He created a better interface for, I think it was like a mobile app or something. And he's like, but then they were like, well, you can't ship that because like there's this one guy who like lives off, you know, in the rural area. He doesn't have internet and like, you know, and he's like, what are we talking like bureaucracy, right? Just like, just like the blob at work. And he was like, and I showed them and he's like, I got like an audience with the secretary because they were like blown away.

Like this guy's like knows magic. and he's like he's like off the shelf you know ai coding software prototyping whatever um he's like to be honest it was kind of what i would expect you know like a regular engineer to do on any given day at work the bill does feel like we're regime changing now and you hear it in the language they're using but the bill is like to me that that's like the tablet that came down from on high that says we no longer are trying to cut expenses we now are going to grow is that how you read it yes and here's why i'll say yes just so quickly um elon musk took over twitter he was the trigger puller everything just happened there was no bureaucracy

it was just okay get rid of this uh can't do that in the government and you know the way the the constitution and everything was written up, it's really, really hard. But when people are trying to get elected or reelected or whatever, and you've got so many of them, it actually makes it a bureaucracy that is almost immovable in a lot of ways to cut anything real. And so I think if you read Elon Musk's tweet, and I don't know if we've talked about this here, so I'm going to open it up. We haven't, we've never discussed this. He basically said, okay, I got to go back to Tesla, because obviously we're not going to do this through cutting expenses, because he even said the deficit is going to the bill is going to increase the deficit, regardless of what the

White House is going through. You've got different opinions. But Elon Musk said, OK, this is I got to go back to focusing on productivity. So I'm just going to throw this out to people because I don't think people realize that government spending, let's just take the number of about $6 trillion. Do you realize that half of that is related to health and aging? Half. So Social Security, an aging thing, and then Medicare and Medicaid. So just those alone, you're about at $3 trillion. So if the AI guys are right, and longevity is about to enter the exponential zone, the way that this will eventually be dealt with, in my opinion, is through the health of the country, the productivity that's going to happen through that. So, Elon Musk is focused more on

the productivity from a humanoids basis, from making the country more efficient, being able to grow GDP without less labor or cost, whatever the case is, and moving the cost of goods closer to zero. So, whenever people go, well, there'll be no jobs, in Elon Musk's world, he's like, well, no, no, no, you won't have to work because the cost will be going down equivalent to the ability for us to be more productive through humanoids and things like that. But I think the health side people are going to have to start focusing on because i do think the medicare and medicaid thing if you made people more healthy if you eliminated diseases over the course of the next five years and that's not me talking about this is this is demis hasabis at deep mind saying

yeah i think we can get to the point that within five years we'll have the ability to cure diseases at a pace people understand dario modi same same thing ray kurzweil so i think when people look at this and they look back, for the next five years, it's really difficult to take down the deficit. So the pressure on bonds will be there, everything. But for people looking for a hopeful side, I do think if they really analyze this, if we can make people healthier and we can make people live longer, the deficit problem will get much better over time. If that deficit problem does improve, what is the impact on financial assets? See, this is a question that I'm going to use Tom Lee as an example. So Tom Lee gets, I think, ridiculed a little too much as a permable.

His long-term structural argument to me is very sound, which is we have a massive labor shortage, and he's talking about millions of people. If you want to go look up again, Elon Musk, about every month, he puts out a tweet saying, we're going to have a collapse of the civilization if the birth rate doesn't change of the developed worlds, which is true. I mean, we're at a point where the labor force is an issue and below the replacement rate. Yeah. And without immigration in the country, I mean, I've gone through the numbers. We lose about 300,000 people in the labor force. So when everyone's talking about there's going to be a recession, people are going to lose jobs.

I'm like, right now we got a problem. We're losing 300,000 people just from the fact that we don't have enough to replace the people that are either retiring or dying off like it's a problem. And so when you get into kind of this theme of, all right, how are we going to deal with it? Tom Lee basically says we actually need the productivity to be there. So he's calling for massive gains in the stock market because what he's talking about is replacing the compensation expense size of humans with technology, not by firing the people, but by the natural. if 300,000 people are coming off a year, instead of needing to go find the people to replace, you're replacing those with robotics and AI agents and productivity, the margins should continue to improve. And that's what we've seen. And I think we're at that moment, because we've talked about inference, that people have to start to focus on the fact that inference is the key

change. It's the thing that allows AI to impact. I wrote something for 22V this week on Disney as a company and just the amount of places that the company is working on AI being integral to their profit margins going forward. And so if you just take Disney as an example and you're like, okay, VO3 comes out. Well, that could help reduce the cost of making the movies that they're putting out. They can do personalized ads and things like that. The way Netflix has kind of dominated this stuff through, because they have a lot of the channels. They have these brands that will last forever and they're handed down from generation to generation. Disney has that ability, but the parks themselves, having humanoids replace some of the characters, being able to use VR and

technology that makes people entertain. There's just so many ways that they can reduce the cost over time. And so instead of firing people, it's a revenue per employee thing that I think is going to happen. So to your question, I think big companies that can afford the AI side, they're going to benefit dramatically in the short run. But I do think the startup world is going to compete with the coding businesses uh and the losers in this unfortunately are the inefficient smaller businesses that are sensitive to debt because i don't think yields are coming down for the near term and i don't think they have the culture or the money to spend on ai and so they're kind of in the vice grips of these two forces of higher rates and technology so with the

vo3 um we were looking at it and i'm fortunate that i have a very expert video uh uh announcer uh here matt and um matt was showing me things it's a nice thing to say about matt you've never you never never say anything nice about matt on the air congratulations matt um is uh there was this director online and she was pointing out and matt and i were pretty blown away um there was a video and you could see the reflection of a hand in the glass while she was filming or there was another part of a video where it actually changed the exposure so it made you know you like the sun is there it's too bright in the back and then all of a sudden you can now see the sky those are expert level type touches that the ai is able to figure out to make it seem ultra realistic

i was telling you earlier that um i remember years ago walking through the streets of new york city and had kind of like this weird epiphany where i was like none of these people know or understand about bitcoin bitcoin was at a much lower price and i was like oh my god they like i just want to shake them right and i i i just thought of the big short movie where he's walking around he's like nobody knows nobody knows right v uh vo3 to me feels like the same moment where you're you're like you saw into the future nobody gets this yet there's a very small group of like terminally online people who are like whoa but the rest of the world they have no clue and now maybe i can do a big reveal with you here for the last three days

I have been running an experiment on X where I have uploaded a photo that is AI generated. First one was of me and Michael Jordan sitting courtside at the Knicks game. Second one was me and Tom Brady in a golf cart on a golf course. And the third one was me and Tiger Woods at a charity event. More than 50% of people, probably 60% or so, if I had to guess, think they're real. This is the worst the technology is going to be. yeah it only gets better from here and so if you think about that i didn't say anything in the image and it right i just posted the image

if we're already at more than 50 of people can't tell on first glance scrolling through a social media feed what is this going to be like i mean this is insane i actually don't know what all ramifications are to you no i i remember the first time i did a podcast on this by the way what what did you use i think it's important which um ai do you remember what you used um i think i was playing around with a couple different ones but i think we ended up using uh grok okay for uh uh for those three okay the reason the reason i ask and and by the way i'm an equal opportunist i use them all i use all my friends working all different models i was like hey you better be using i use all the models for all kinds of different things that one was grok i'm i i do i use all of them for

all different things. And I've been on all of them within the last 24 hours, every single one of them. A lot of times I do one in one and then I have a check in another to make sure that it's actually completely eradicated of hallucinations. So I remember the first time I did something on this, it was an argument for why the blockchain was so important. Meaning at some point you need documented proof of what's real and what's not real. And immediately, like you had with NFTs, getting something that has a documented, this is, I created this, this is what it is, but you're never going to know for sure what people are printing. So the reason I asked what it was is imagine if people actually did this, my, my issue with VO three and, and I'm going to,

I'm going to take your, your Bitcoin like big short moment, a different level. I've, I have that every day. And Wall Street, still with Bitcoin, you're not in the same group of people that I am. It's very hard for me to convince anyone on Wall Street as to why Bitcoin is the purest AI trade, why Bitcoin has a role in the future. Everything that we talk about here, it's not a game. It's actually, you see it from one angle. I came to your side. You know about my world, I know about yours and we bridge the gap. I don't understand how people don't understand this. So let me bring it to VO three. Now I believe what this, when this thing came out and when I used it and I used up all of my monthly allotment in about five minutes and I posted one

on X, I immediately started going, this is not only incredible for the reasons you mentioned, how much compute did this take? And I wanted to find out why Google was only letting you do eight seconds and why you had to be on the $20 a month for the certain amount, finite amount, which I used up in one day, and then the $250 amount. And I asked a question. I said, if enough people used it, because you remember when Ghibli came out and you were kind of playing around with that and you posted something, that's one of the reasons why the token number that Satya Nadella talked about was so high in March. This number, if everyone, there's not enough GPUs anywhere today. So anyone that was in the deep seek moment going, that's it. We're not going to need as many GPUs. Got a

short NVIDIA. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Like this inference moment for me, because that's what this is. This is an inference moment. This is the beginning of the gateway to the embodied intelligence side. So this might just be a video, but people have to understand is the way that this thing is doing things. Like literally what you said, creating the lighting and making it, it's doing thinking and reasoning at a level that costs a lot more. So in token terms, for everyone who's used ChatGPT or Grok and just type something in, on average for a prompt, you're talking about 30 to 50 tokens. For the eight second video, not the audio, the video, it's a hundred times that. Those are the numbers we're talking about for inference. So when

everyone was saying, oh yeah, that's the end. We're, we're at this, the inference numbers are going to go through the roof because who's not going to make videos. I mean, it was fun. Did you, you made some, right? It's fun to make, like you're putting in a prompt and you're creating something and playing around. It's really fun to do. Yeah. My artist era. I was telling Matt, I want to, I want to do a short, like 15 minute video, pay for the pro and, and do eight second, like increments and build a whole, a whole short movie out of it. So I just don't think people realize that when you start getting into humanoids and you start getting the full self-driving and you start getting into anything related to the optical side and the inference side, you're just

dealing with a lot more compute. We don't have enough GPUs. We don't have enough data centers. We don't have enough power. And that's why with NVIDIA's like stock price, it consolidated for a year while everyone's stressed about this, VO3 to me was the gateway to the next leg of this with people realizing that the token numbers are just going to explode. What does that do from a investment standpoint for the MAG7 versus others? And maybe a way to think about this is like, if I have money and I want to play AI today, what are my options, right? I can go, there's real estate you know kind of reet type stuff there's obviously companies like nvidia there's the mac 7 like how do you think about it today um so semiconductors to me right off the bat um

especially since they haven't done anything now for a year because it wasn't just nvidia it was everything and then after the deep seek moment everything fell down significantly i don't think people fully grasp what you need for what vo3 does and if you put that if you put that brain inside a humanoid the amount of battery needed the electricity needed the high bandwidth memory that's needed the optical semiconductors you're getting into old school hardware stuff which has really been left for dead and in many cases like micron technology is trading below a 10 pe off next year's earnings and you have a lot of these things out there the hardware side and the commodity side is a big part we didn't talk about it but the nuclear executive orders that were

sign last week with him saying that he wants to have 300 more gigawatts by 2050 of nuclear power. I mean, a gigawatt cost, you know, and this is just using numbers that are probably not including the tariffs, but let's just say on average about $8 billion per gigawatt. So when you're getting into 300 gigawatts, you're talking about two and a half trillion dollars over the course of the next 25 years. Let's just straight line it. That's a hundred billion a year. You have the CapEx already from the hyperscalers going in at 300 billion a year. There's a lot of stuff and we just changed the bonus depreciation to allow this. I don't think people grasp the GDP impact, the data center side, there's cooling that's needed for this. There's a lot of plays on the

AI side. And the problem is for people in the market, if they're looking for other things to change, like will Ford benefit for this? Well, if the company has a lot of debt and they don't have a benefit from AI in the efficiency side that's going to offset the cost of this. This is really isolated, unfortunately, to the companies that are more geared towards AI. But I think the compute and power needs are the number one place that people should focus on. When you think of your portfolio, there's been a lot of changes over the last month or so since I've asked you this. What have you changed and what have you doubled down on? So the semiconductor thing was a big thing for me during the middle of the tariff. So luckily,

we ended up being right during the middle of the melee. And, you know, as I've I've I've kind of said here, my viewpoint on alpha creation has changed really since 2013, where I view the best alpha opportunities for people sitting at home that are investing money is that when recession fears are very high, it is a great time to start putting money to work. And that's where the dollar cost averaging should start so when you see the recession fears go up it should go because it's just not possible um it's not possible uh the old school traditional recession thing's not going to happen so if we just continue to grow at four to five percent of nominal gdp which is what i think will happen you usually get good bargains on the artificial intelligence and the more crowded trade

so deep sea created the first bit of opportunity but it wasn't until the recession stuff came up on the tariffs, that you had these things selling. I mean, I think Micron got down to about $60. It's around $100 now. And NVIDIA got down somewhere around $80, and it's at $140 as of yesterday. You have to think about those types of returns. Now, NVIDIA is higher than it was the day before DeepSeek, and it's higher than it was the day after DeepSeek.

So you could have bought it then, but I think waiting for the recession fears has been up So that's been the biggest change for me. I obviously also put some money to work in Bitcoin. And what I do is I just harvest some of those and I'll wait for the next recession. I don't think yet we've seen the sentiment come down low enough that I'd be getting out of anything at this point.

I still believe we're gonna make all-time highs, but at that point, things will change. I did focus a lot more on Bitcoin because I've talked about it here. I do think there is a short squeeze coming in this issue. That's why I'm so fixated on what's going on with donald trump's uh decisions is number one it's what he was elected on because of the distribution of wealth problem so bitcoin to me is number one associated with how do we fix this

distribution of wealth problem not just in the us but globally while these guys are all fighting from a government level over tariffs and this and that that is not the story the story is the distribution of wealth problem which will continue to be exacerbated by the artificial intelligence side artificial intelligence will help everyone in the country through higher profit margins and stock prices being able to hold up not having recessions so people will be able to get jobs so it's not this horrible thing if people at home are in that bracket where they're like i can barely survive you got to start putting in my opinion some money into bitcoin as kind of the hope side but also on the belief that as these systems go through this this is the way it's

gonna work out i um i tend to agree i also think that uh you and i were on an island when stocks were going down now that it has shifted i do find it fascinating that retail is buying and institutions still are pretty unexposed to this equity rally um and in a weird way wall street's too smart that's what it is they're looking at all these nuanced data points all the stuff i have have some friends who work some of these hedge funds uh and i was talking to one of them recently and he was saying stuff to me and i literally just looked at him when i said dude you're speaking another language right now i like everything you're saying i'm sure makes sense but whatever let me explain to you how i think the world works assets go down buy because assets are coming back

up and he was like yeah but you know warren buffett indicator he was uh going through uh p e ratio i said dude i get all of that and there are certain stocks that are overvalued versus undervalued and you can get into the nuanced evaluations but on a macro basis bear markets have been outlawed yeah and i could just see like there was like smoke coming out of his ears right he was like what do you mean whatever and i was just like look man i'm just telling you on a broad basis what's happening and that's why retail's buying um there was a phrase i heard yesterday on a podcast uh and i'll give a shout out to the forward guidance podcasting their weekly one at the end is good and the reason it's good is because they're rational but this one guy

said i'm so bearish i'm bullish and that that line to me is so true because they talk about if it reads this bad if it seems this bad somewhere with inside the system the government is going to print money. That's it. And so when you're a Bitcoin person, you believe that that's the end game is that the system has been made to make sure that the average voter is not going to be hurt. And that average voter stops Doge. Yep. That average voter stops job losses that average. It's just the way it is. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet? People can reach out to me in Visser Labs. I'm doing a lot more work on there directly for people to help them with AI and transitioning on it. Some people on the Bitcoin side. And then

22V Securities now on their website. I do a lot of deep dive research on there for them. And then they can find me on X and YouTube. Next time, I want to make sure we talk about quantum. If there's one thing that I'm sick of dealing with, with people scared of Bitcoin, it's that quantum is coming. Make sure you subscribe to the channel for next Saturday. Talk to you guys next week. We'll be right back.