The Pomp Podcast - #1559 Jordi Visser | Trump vs Elon: What This Means For Bitcoin
Episode Date: June 7, 2025Jordi 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 go...ing on with Elon Musk & Donald Trump feuding on the internet, how it will impact your investment portfolio, bitcoin, stablecoins, Circle IPO, why so much capital is flowing in, economic policy, and what to pay attention to. =======================This episode is brought to you by Figure, the platform to Earn and Borrow. Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Figure offers Crypto-Backed Loans, allowing you to borrow against your Bitcoin or Ethereum with 3-month terms and no prepayment penalties. They have the lowest interest rates in the industry at 9.9%, allowing you to access instant cash or buy more Bitcoin without triggering a tax event. Unlock your crypto’s potential today. Visit https://www.figure.com/pomp to apply for a Crypto Backed Loan today! Figure Lending LLC dba Figure. Equal Opportunity Lender. NMLS 1717824. Terms and conditions apply. Visit figure.com for more information.=======================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/
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What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening
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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 an excellent episode with Jordy Visser. He's got
30 years on Wall Street, and he's here to explain to us what's going on with Elon Musk and Donald
Trump feuding on the internet. How's it going to impact your investment portfolio? We, of course,
talk about things like Bitcoin, stablecoin, the circle IPO, and why so much capital is flowing
into all corners of the investment portfolios that both institutions and retail have. And of course,
We're going to talk about all the things, geopolitics, economic policy, and why money
printing and the national debt are the two things you got to continue to pay attention
to.
Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.
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check them out today all right jordy i thought a great place to start the conversation is we have
elon musk donald trump the world's richest man versus the world's most powerful man i mean this
is entertaining as hell but also probably not good for the country what's your take on these
two guys going at it in public all right well first of all it's all on social media everyone
can enjoy it so it was fun i'm actually taking a different take on this um so to get to this point
and you have to remember all of the videos of him at the inauguration the childlike looks he was
giving how happy was the double thumbs up. And I mean, Elon Musk starting Doge talking about
trillions of dollars that he was going to find. And in a span of four months, the world's richest
man and arguably the smartest who's created more billion dollar businesses than anyone alive.
He's broken by the debt and deficit. Like literally, it came down to the fact that
he's complaining that they couldn't do anything in this bill.
So the fight at the end, Elon Musk got to the point where he's literally attacking,
saying, throw them all out, get rid of them.
If that isn't a statement that we tried everything we could with austerity,
we tried everything we could to get out of this.
The fight yesterday was just the culmination point of you can't stop the fiscal problems
that we have, no matter how you try. And it was only a week ago that he said, I guess I got to
go off and try to be, you know, productivity is going to get us out of this. But he couldn't
resist the fact that they were going to put this bill in and it wasn't going to do anything to fix
it. I think people should just lean back and just realize if they had any doubts coming into this
year about how we were going to handle the economy, that was that was the firework show to
say there's no way because if there was anything possible that could have happened the smartest
man it felt like um it was the and i before i say this i love elon musk i obviously think that he's
an incredible entrepreneur things that he's done not only in terms of actual productivity and
building products and services but i think that he has really inspired a generation of people to
think bigger and try to build things etc but it's kind of the temper tantrum at the end right it's
like you know we got the the kid they get frustrated they don't know what else to do so
they just scream. And that kind of felt like it was the explosion of that. But what I do think
is fascinating is I interviewed yesterday, Russ Vaught, who is the director of the Office of
Management and Budget. And Russ, when I asked him about the blowing out of the deficit and the
increasing of the debt, et cetera, he said to me, well, it depends on how you're analyzing it,
which, you know, OK, tell me more. And what he explained to me was the CBO is using this like
baseline kind of projection. And then they see each bill. Does it increase or decrease it?
I'm not an expert on the national debt or on on these bills. But what I did find interesting was
he claims that the bill that they're putting forward will reduce the deficit by one point
four trillion dollars over 10 years. Again, I don't know if that's true or if it's not.
But what I started to unpack from that conversation was a bunch of the forward
projections of the impact of these bills really comes down to like, are we using your algorithm
or mine? Are we using your spreadsheet or my spreadsheet? Like whose model, whose baseline,
whose assumptions, right? And so it actually makes me wonder how much of the entire debate is just
like, don't even engage in it. And it's more so, I think what Elon is saying now, like you just can
only control one side of this equation, which is productivity. All of us should stop trying to get
the government to do anything. And let's all just go try to build companies, you know, and increase
GDP. Yeah, I find so I don't think I've ever we've ever done this here. And I may have mentioned it
once, but I want to simplify the U.S. economy and it'll bring it into kind of the way it eventually
brought me to Bitcoin, but especially this artificial intelligence side right now. Think
of the economy as now being three pieces. It's the industrial economy, which is filled with debt
and is growing very, very slowly. We've been weaning off manufacturing jobs. We've exported
or we've imported everything. We don't make anything. And that part has a lot of the people
that support Trump in it. You've got the digital economy, not as many workers, no debt. That one's
growing rapidly. And then you have this other economy that was created to balance out the
decline in the industrial economy, which is the government economy. The government economy is
massive. Anyone who wants to sit here and nitpick about whether this is possibly going to debt to
GDP in this country has been going higher consistently since the computer came in and
the digital economy started to go. The reason Bitcoin is so important in this conversation
and bridges the two is because that government economy cannot shrink. And the reason it cannot
shrink, health care expenditures are growing right now at eight to 10 percent a year because of
Medicare and Medicaid, because of the health of the country. There's no way to reverse it.
And almost two million people over the last year have started collecting Social Security benefits.
it. Some of that is demographic. Some of that is just the fear now over the economy, regardless of
any way you want to go through it. What we found out is we tried to do something to balance the
deficit. The debt to GDP is not going not going away. So the only parts about this that people
should think about, are we going to grow? Yes, I believe this is a growth package. Will it be able
to grow more than interest rates? Well, that depends on what happens to long term rates.
I just think at this point, we're going to have a normalization of rates. The pressure is going
to be on long term rates to move higher, not lower. And even if they stay right around the
same area, which is pretty much a good thing for equities, it's not a good thing for fixing the
deficit in the budget. They can play around with all the numbers. The reality is this has been
going on for a long time and the government cannot be shrunk because the voters don't want
the government to shrink. And that's what we found out with this bill. So Q1, we had negative GDP.
Q2, we're in boom times.
The Atlanta Fed's GDP now is like up over 4%.
It feels like all the people who are predicting the recessions, depressions and Black Fridays,
they don't want to talk about the fact that if you don't get two straight quarters of negative GDP growth, you can't have a recession.
I think you previously had said a number of times you can't have a recession if people aren't losing their jobs.
How are you looking at this economic data right now?
because it sure looks like this was a V-shaped recovery. Reflexivity is real and the economic
growth is coming roaring right back. Yeah. First quarter was obviously distorted because of
the import numbers, which went violently ahead of the tariffs. So by having a ton of imports,
no exports, the trade data subtracted a significant amount from GDP. So if you just
use domestic final sales, the growth was close to 3%. The second quarter, I'm going to guess is
actually going to be less than that. So I wouldn't take in what's happened. The main point is we're
not in a recession. As I said, and this is an important part, healthcare is about 18% of nominal
GDP. And that's growing, as I said, at 8% to 10%. So if you just take that part, forget the AI part
that we took. There's just no way to have recessions and there's no way for the economy
to fall off the map unless we do agree. You know, we fire tons of people from the government and we
have tariffs go up to whatever. None of that's happening. So the economy is fine. And that's
the other pressure point for rates. It's the reason why it's going to be difficult for the
Fed to cut. I will say all of the data on the jobs situation is starting to become a little
bit more problematic. And I think in the second half of the year, the realization is going to set
in that AI is not destroying jobs, but it's hurting the ability for companies to hire.
And I don't think we're going to be able to have like a significant growth period.
Housing market is very, very soft. It's not collapsing. So anyone who sits there and starts
seeing charts of there's so many sellers in this, it's just soft commercial real estate, soft.
we've talked about long duration assets. I think the economy is kind of in this state where the
second half of the year people should expect two percent GDP in terms of real growth. Maybe if
inflation stays lower, we can get closer to three. But from an equity versus bond perspective,
bonds are not the investment. It is stock, stock, stocks. And I think we're getting closer. One
important thing on the stock market for people this week. So far, this rally has really been
driven um again by tech as we've come out of this so uh you and i have talked and i believe that
semiconductors and some of the names that i've mentioned here like micron broke out this week
we're starting to see the realization i'm hearing it more and more like hey this build out of both
nuclear and the data centers this compute thing is real so they're finally getting back on board
that and semiconductors are unchanged from a year ago so i think there are some investment themes
that'll get people excited. But the thing that they should all watch is we need to see some
kind of inclusion from small cap, particularly with this audience that cares a lot about the
utility side of crypto. You need to have small caps start to come up a little bit here. And I'll
talk about that later. Yeah. Well, explain why that's so important. So at this point, it's been
a very concentrated market. And as I've gotten more, let's say, in the community from the crypto
side, I've started to realize the importance of and I'll just give three that I monitor every
single day, Ethereum, Solana and Sweet. And I'm just watching. And the reason this is important
is there's two sides of the of the crypto market. The one is the institutional movement towards
Bitcoin, which is happening. You and I both hear it. We see it. It's there. There's a bit underneath
that acts like a raging thing that will eventually break out to the upside. And I still believe that
going to have a short squeeze this year. What has contained it, though, is we don't have the
enthusiasm and the trading and the oomph that's necessary for the innovation side. It's clearly
happening on the stable coin side. People see it. I mean, you saw the way Circle traded. You saw the
excitement. You've seen what's happened on every deal that's come to the market. Crypto has it has
an energy there, but it doesn't have the speculation right now. It doesn't have the
meme coin side. It doesn't have any of them. If you do charts of any of those names I mentioned
relative to Bitcoin, it's straight low. It looks like QQQ to IWM or for people not following those
ETFs, innovation versus small cap stocks. At some point, beta needs to do well. And I think that's
what we're getting close to. I've kind of said once Ethereum gets above 2650 to 2700 and you
actually get a break above there, I think that is going to be the point where you start to see
more speculation and belief that the innovation side of crypto is there on top of the institutional
adoption side. When you start looking at Bitcoin in particular, it feels like Bitcoin trading down
while Elon and Trump were arguing. I had a lot of people calling me. I think you had people
reaching out to you saying, hey, is Bitcoin going down because these guys are arguing or does it
just happen to be a coincidence? How do you evaluate kind of a decentralized liquid asset
that trades 24-7 when the two, you know, most powerful rich people in the world are over here
debating? The great thing about watching retail traders, they're all momentum based and they're
just going with what's working. If you do an overlay of a chart this year and actually into
the election, let's think about Elon Musk was connected to Trump. Bitcoin was connected to
Trump. The overlay of those two, Bitcoin and Tesla, has been very, I mean, it's almost one
for one. There was like a brief period where they broke away for a little bit, but it's pretty much
the same thing. There shouldn't be that way. And so I understood why people to some degree were
like, oh my God, it's not going. And it was because it was falling. But the reality is
what Tesla and Musk represent to me was the only thing working in the market for the speculation
side. Palantir has gone back up to highs. But again, it has been a very difficult time for
traders. You and I saw each other in Miami back in January. We were wearing bananas around our
neck. The banana zone was what everyone was talking about. Well, the inauguration kind of
destroyed that enthusiasm with the meme coin coming out. Then you had the Malay situation,
and everyone kind of lost it, and then everything broke down. I think we've been building up the
trading side right now. And Tesla falling to me will break the correlation between Bitcoin and
Tesla. And now I think, again, it's going to for us to get to 200 in a short amount of time in
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. And so we have to be part of that move. And I think we're getting
closer to that move now. And the participation of kind of the altcoin market, is that net new
dollars coming into the market, you think? Or is that kind of a redistribution of people saying,
hey, Bitcoin's gone up a lot since maybe I bought during this last cycle. And now I'm just going to
kind of push out further on the risk curve to try to capture more upside as we continue in the bull
market? I think, to use a phrase that I hear a lot, pencils are down with a lot of people right
now. I don't know if you're getting approached. I've had more people ask me about BitTensor
in the last month. And these are from people that have never bought crypto. So the one thing I like
is that family office, like everyone's now realizing, you know, I have to have an allocation
here. They're not doing it because it's at all-time highs. They're looking at these things
because they believe in AI. And so BitTensor, they literally send me something. They send me
the deck. Hey, I'm getting presented this. What do you think? I go, which part? Well,
you're an AI guy and a crypto guy. This should be right up your alley. And I'm like, here's the
deal. If I'm right about Bitcoin, all of these things are going to do well because to get to
those levels, there has to be energy and investment from you guys with inside the beta because the
beta forces the strong to go higher. The S&P 500 cannot go up right now without the NASDAQ.
It needs the NASDAQ because the mag seven are part of it. I've said this before, and I know
people don't embrace it this way. I view Bitcoin as the ultimate S&P 500 of the world in 15 to 20
years, that it will just keep sucking in all of this money. And the beauty of it is that it can't
be out-innovated. That's the beauty of it, is that it can't actually lose its status as an
investment where everything in the equity market always does. We brought up Tesla. I just want to
make sure people realize this. The market cap of Tesla is $1 trillion. They have almost no debt.
Ford and GM combined, you see more of those on the road than you do Tesla's, their cars.
If people don't know, it's $100 billion of equity. That's their market cap, $100 billion.
They have 300 billion of debt.
That is that industrial economy.
What Bitcoin doesn't have is it doesn't have any of that stuff.
It just has a store of value that makes it kind of like gold.
But really, as more money goes into the ecosystem, and that's why hearing people call about BitTensor,
that means people that have never invested in crypto are like, I think I got to get involved
in this, but I want to find stuff that can go up tenfold.
And I always say the same thing.
your problem with investing in any of these innovations, if you invest in 10 of them and
you get two of them right, you've done well. The exit strategy on these things is very,
very difficult. Well, and I think it's also, even if I look at my own portfolio, right? Like Bitcoin
is the thing that I will never sell. It's kind of the timeless investing principle, buy great
assets, never sell them. Everything else that we've ever held in crypto, whether it's for short
periods of time or medium periods of time, we always knew when we bought it, we're going to
sell it. And I think that that is a very, very different mentality. And then naturally, everyone
is trying to sell before the next person, right? And so you just kind of short circuit those things.
One of the things that is going very well right now is the Circle IPO happened this week. And
Circle went out, I think at one point, the stock was up to 300% on the first day of trading. How
do you read so much excitement and performance coming from something like the Circle IPO?
circle represents something very important so people here um i remember back in october when
i started kind of going around to people that that understand the crypto space extremely well
um one macro person in particular and i said i think stablecoin is the most important
investment theme for next year and he's like how do you make money off stable coins and i'm like
stable coins are the bridge between the two worlds it's gonna bring confidence in people that this is
the place that i have to invest in and it'll lead to stuff in the altcoins it'll lead to bitcoin
everything we need the ecosystem to grow with wealthy people the only types of people that
i've seen i see trad i'll leave you out of this at this point on one side you've been in long enough
so the ogs that have been involved from a very early stage and then the tradfi people that made
the bet to get involved but to get wealthy people that are wealthy from the fiat world at this stage
and then have them come in. It's very challenging. It's very hard for them to say, I want to be
involved. And if they get involved, they want to move into the ecosystem. What Circle has done,
in my opinion, it matches up with the stablecoin bill. It forces people to understand,
why is this so important? Why is JP Morgan? Why Goldman Sachs? Why are all these people
now speaking publicly about what are stablecoins? I think people haven't understood it. And this
will force more people to go. And once you get into stable coins and you really dig deep, I think
you can easily make the transition over into the other side. And we've talked about this, but I
just want to make sure people get it. The volumes are going to explode over the next five years,
not just because the guardrails are going up, not just because of the work of bridge and stripe and
all these people that are out there going, it's going to go up because of AI agents, that
connection and the amount of volumes that are going to happen where the easiest way to pay
is in that way. I listened to a podcast this week and a guy who doesn't code went on to Replit. He
had the Replit founder on and he said, I created a software overnight and I connected it to Stripe
and I got a payment in already this morning. That's the kind of world we're living in. And
the fact that stable coins are going to be the chosen transaction, the money system and the
bridge between the two is there. Yeah. It's fascinating to me that once you start to hook
up a lot of these technologies, it's kind of like Bitcoin is an accelerator. Stablecoins are an
accelerator. AI is an accelerator. Humanoid robots are an accelerator. But then when you stack them
on top of each other, it's like you're not one plus one plus one plus one. It is like times five,
times 10, times 20. And what I think that does do, though, is it draws a line in kind of time.
And I don't know where you would place the exact bifurcation, but there is an old world and there's a new world.
I think over the last decade, at least, we have lived through this explosion from really what was like the first Internet era to now we got the Facebooks and, you know, the X's and all of those things really kind of hit their stride, grew to large scale.
And we also started to get the cryptocurrency, started a lot of the AI stuff.
what i wonder is how much of the legacy financial system is set up to understand this world so not
even invest yet just understand it there's a story from this week that um uh you called out that i
think is really important where now economists this is not you and i this is not zero hedge this
is not you know maybe people that we would be sympathetic to in the internet these are economists
who are calling into question the u.s inflation data and they're saying it may not be accurate
partially because they don't have enough people to use their antiquated methods to go and calculate
the inflation and so it goes back to this thing of uh secretary bessett was asked by the all-in
podcast do you believe the economic data and the first word out of his mouth was no and then he
quickly backtracked and you know trying to make it more kind of a polished answer
what do we take about this idea that the inflation data may be wrong or other economic data points
that are used for the traditional financial world to invest capital?
Well, we have the payroll number today.
The expectations at this point that I've seen are that last year and this year,
the data will have been overstated by about 50,000 to 60,000 jobs a month.
All the data is bad.
It's hard enough to capture what happens in an economy that's complex.
But as we've gone more into the digital economy and things have sped up,
as Elon Musk said, we're still using systems from hundreds of years ago. The technology is
archaic in terms of being able to count anything. And I found in his case, what he said, not just
the fraud, but the inability to do things. And when he asked to actually see the treasury receipts
and actually go the way anyone would go through to figure out what the math is, he couldn't believe
he couldn't see anything. So I think people have been able to trade off this because there wasn't
another world that existed. I listened to an interview with Demis Hassabis this week. I've
listened to him about three times in the last two weeks. This was a really good one. It was again,
right after the, uh, the Google IO developer conference, but he just talked again about how
fast things are speeding up. And so when you revise jobs a year reverse, and what he's saying
is that what equates to every year in innovation of ai is about 10 years of the past you have to
really think about what i mean that's just a staggering number that's how fast everything
is changing on the ai side so there's no way that gdp is statistic created in the 1930s can possibly
comprehend what happens with the intangible side of the economy i will say i'm beginning to hear
more economists they tend to be on the younger side uh admit this i've been yelling this since
I first went to Silicon Valley and started changing my views, which was in 2013 at
Singularity University. I don't think most economists have done this, but they are starting
to turn. And I think that puts a much more difficult situation on all of the traditional
finance world because they are still believing still that we're going to go back and retest
the lows. We had the she Trump call this week. Rare Earth was all over the papers this week.
We talked about it, I think, last week, if not the week before, about how important this was that China controlled the world's rare earth.
That phone call to me, followed up by Trump admitting that we're going to go out to China.
If there was any doubt about what's going to happen between China and the U.S., it's the tariff.
We do not have the upper hand on the tariff situation.
I'm not saying they don't have the same kind of risk, but this is a mutually destructive situation,
which means for everyone that's there,
I like seeing that small cap stocks
are about to break higher.
I love that the sentiment's still not there.
I love that Ethereum and Solana haven't broken out.
I kind of get the feeling this squeeze thing
is going to be a summertime thing more and more.
Well, with China, it feels like that mutual destruction
is like who can withstand more pain, right?
We know that both sides are being kind of chipped away at,
and it's just like, who calls uncle first?
And the meeting in Switzerland
where they decided to reduce the tariffs by 115%
was kind of like, hey,
we're not really going to destroy each other, right?
It's like, let's put it, you know, let's lower our guns.
You don't have to put it down completely,
but just like don't point them at each other right now.
And so that then brings us to investment portfolio.
We know stocks have done very well off the lows in April.
You've called out the small cap stocks being very important.
I think also the small cap coins, kind of a similar type idea.
When you look at all of the stocks that have been performing,
I mean, it seems like we're watching a rotation occur, right?
It does feel like, okay,
Mag7 isn't what it was a year ago, two years ago,
but then you see like the Circle IPO.
And so like, is this something
where we're actually going from incumbent
to challenger in the stock market?
Like, does that feel like a theme
that people can start to kind of pay attention to?
Because to me, the Mag7,
we know they're gonna spend a lot of money on the AI stuff.
We know they're gonna benefit from that stuff.
but it's actually the core weaves and the circles.
And like, if you think of the stocks
that have done really well so far this year,
they do seem to have kind of this challenger positioning
and they seem to be outperforming the incumbents
in their various sectors.
Yeah.
So when you get to a point where you've had this major V,
what I try to look at at the market
is what was working on the way down
and is still working on the way back up.
So as an example, gold was working on the way down
and it's still sitting at the all-time high so it didn't reverse the dollar has been weaker
it was weakening on the way down it's barely bounced back with everything going on
those are structural things and they're both related to the same thing and the structural
thing is the dollar is not the global reserve currency anymore and the rest of the world
realizes that it's kind of nationalism and so the dollar has to be under has it's overweight
right now in everyone's portfolio the same thing as u.s stocks and gradually over the next three
three to five years, as long as the tariffs don't force people to panic out, it'll be a slow bleed
over time. And you should expect that the dollar is going to be on the weaker side. The other thing,
so the AI trades did fall. They fell violently. They've snapped back violently. The AI situation
in terms of the news did not change. If anything, Meta jumps into constellation. Meta had already
upped their investments on the data center. Everyone who got negative on what's happening
with ai in the compute side was dead wrong that's why we're at the early stage of this silver broke
out this week very important level and i see silver as being part gold but also part of the
electrification side copper broke above 500 this this week on the futures there is a shift that's
happening in a rotation the ai trade is still dominating the the crypto world is still on this
path with government supporting it. Government is supporting nuclear. Government is supporting AI.
Government has to support the healthcare and things like that. It's still trying to help
the bottom end. I think everyone just has to get ready. By the end of this year,
the number one theme is going to be the embodiment of AI and the people understanding that this whole
talk of humanoids and everything is going to be real. It has scary consequences for the job
situation in terms of this. I get reached out more on this show from things that I say from
people about AI. Many people have reached out about, hey, I just lost my job. You seem like
you're using AI that much. What's your advice on how to do that? And for the most part, I'll send
them a response. But the thing that's come up more and more now is that they're starting to worry
about their kids. So this is a weird world where from an investment side, I think people need to
have money in Bitcoin because I think this is part of that hedge on that, that disruption that's
going. And then for the stocks, I think from an investment standpoint, the semiconductors,
I believe the power side still remains a great place to be. And then even though we'll see a
trade in small caps, I think small cap companies have a really hard time competing with the larger
cap companies. But in particular, we're going to move away from software and away from coding.
And I think we're going to spread more into the physical world again.
And in that physical world, there seems to be an intersection of technology and the physical world.
So we know that robotics is a huge part of the American manufacturing. Now we do have the administration coming out saying we don't want to make socks and T-shirts here. We want to make kind of higher end stuff that requires kind of precision manufacturing, advanced manufacturing. Do we have enough talent, you think, to actually execute on this stuff?
Like, do we have enough robotic engineers? Do we have enough people who can actually operate in these facilities? Like, I always go back to this idea of, you know, Trump even says, right, like he's trying to take money from Harvard to give to trade schools. And it does feel like there's like a goal. And then we have to ask ourselves, do we have enough of the minerals and resources?
Do we have enough capital? Do we have the desire? Do we have the talent? Right. Do they have the skills? Like there's a lot to this that maybe is not so obvious on the surface and talent being kind of a kind of crazy component here.
We I mean, I hear this repeatedly, even from from the housing market with people that are still building. They just say they have shortages. We we don't have enough people in that aspect of the economy because we've directed everyone more towards different parts.
the service side we have shortages um everything in social work and health care nurses and now
that immigration is going to be changed significantly and i don't think people have
fully come to the reality of what that means um the whole thing with student visas and
we don't have enough people right now for the physical side of the economy i wrote a paper
this week for 22v on brazil and i'm very positive on brazil i live there there's just certain times
and it usually comes down to two things if the dollar is weakening that usually is really good
for brazil and if there's a commodity boom that's usually good for brazil and i mentioned last week
the rare earth side in brazil being a large player in that market the rare earth side we don't have
enough we're gonna have to go get it uh it was funny that in you know greenland was brought up
up by the eu this week on rare earth like everyone realized across the globe this week in case you
guys didn't see it china not only stopped rare earth exports to the u.s it did globally and
that's because the u.s was going to try and isolate china and negotiate with everyone said
oh okay if you're with the u.s you don't get rare earth either um no auto production no military
like china was putting out this really big trump card and saying no fine if you guys are gonna all
gang up on us, then we're going to stop rare earth. So I think when we come out of this,
which I expect now the negotiations to go much faster with China, that's what I think this week
with the rare earth kind of set off. I think what you're going to have is people start to move
around and start to focus again on, okay, we have to go as fast as possible with rare earth as fast
as possible with finding people to work in here because it becomes an AI race and everyone
realizes that the supply chains have to be rebuilt in three to four years. So when we look forward,
You previously said that you thought stocks would go near or hit new all-time highs.
We have seen this kind of acceleration.
Do you think that with the Q2 economic boom, the current economic policies, the fact that
Elon Musk is throwing the temper tantrum and saying, hey, there's no way we're going to
be able to cut the budget.
We got to go focus on productivity, like free walk to all-time highs by the end of the year?
There's no such thing as a free walk.
It's all probability adjusted.
there's still a chance that especially with uh with trump in office anything could happen
uh over the course of the next month but next 24 hours exactly but since tariffs have been the
overhang and people the sentiment has not gone back up to where it was before and i do think
the economy in the second half of the year where people still kind of are talking about recessions
and things like that uh i think we're probably gonna have a squeeze beforehand so i would be
surprised at this point if we don't get to new all-time highs before the end of the summer
driven by the fact that the positioning is still way off base the next time that i think we're
probably going to run into some kind of problem and it's possible that you know like as an example
that we don't get the bill through by july 4th but if we do and you go through the next month
month okay if China and the US can come to some agreement and the bill gets through and that's
really all that happened is needed we we did this whole rally with one deal with the UK nothing else
has changed and yet people are still waiting for the next leg lower I believe we're about to see
the accelerant the realization by people are just about how much exp how many benefits are coming
from AI the profit margin is the big deal and here's the risk Trump has said like in the case
walmart i expect you guys to put no prices through in the bigger picture the reason he says that
he wants corporations to eat this and that would be a transfer from labor to from companies to
labor that's what he's hoping the profit margins would be really interesting um i think ai is going
to do that but what he might be squeezing the sausage is you guys can't raise prices okay well
that means our margins are going to go down a little that means we're going to have to get rid
a few more people and bring ai in a little bit faster that's unfortunately the place that we
are with a lot of the corporations that make up the s p 500 there's a race to try and keep your
margins up at higher levels and benefit from ai and the fact that agents are coming and humanoids
are coming it's going to be a very difficult game between the work side and this and that's why the
government is going to keep printing money and i'll just keep saying it i believe capital controls
will be a story before we get through the summertime and what's going to happen in that
scenario you think that they will just disincentivize any capital from leaving the market
it'll it'll cost money people have to make a decision to take money out i i just i don't
see how he's not going to continue with trying every sort of redistribution and if in the china
situation we don't do the tariffs which is kind of the pressure that's going then it has to be
something that, okay, your money's here. That's great. But if you're going to leave, you're going
to have to do this. There's a whole bunch of things. I think it'll be overread as something
bigger than it is. But I think for Bitcoin, anything with capital controls in the US is
unthinkable. But I know most of the things, the people I listen to, most of the people I hear
that are talking, they're paying attention to this. Hey, it was in Stephen Mirren's paper.
Hey, it's in the bill, like remittances. That one's easy, but for investors and dividends on
things like it's just I think there's other ways to play this other than the tariffs. And I think
this would go more towards hurting pension funds and stuff like that, less towards the sovereign
wealth funds. And I think that's the route he's going to go. Yeah, it's it's fascinating to think
through the economic policies could still throw a wrench in all of this. But I do wonder the taco
trade. Has that now resonated? It's kind of like the retail investors, right? Like they buy the
dip every time there's a dip i saw uh i forget who put it out maybe it was adam kobisi or somebody
put out um saying every time that we've had a down day the next day in the stock market this year was
up 0.36 on average and uh that compared to historical was like 0.02 and so what they
were basically saying is like every time there's a dip retail is buying and you get the green the
next day that is now like a religion right like we have left any no nobody's looking at numbers
There's nobody's looking at anything they see.
I see red.
I put my money in the market.
I do wonder how much of the investor base, both retail and institutional.
I don't care what the economic policies are.
I don't care what the what's being announced.
The single biggest intelligence test of our generation is, are they going to keep printing money?
And if yes, bye.
Right.
Like that kind of seems where we're ending up, that people almost don't even really pay attention over time.
That's why to bring it full circle, what happened with Elon Musk yesterday is very symbolic of that whole thing, which is regardless of what happens, there will be more printing this year in some form, some shape or fashion.
Either the deficit stays at this level or they figure out some way again to help the people they're trying to help.
And I think Trump has made it crystal clear. So if rates go higher, which again, in my opinion, I don't think this is a panic moment, but the housing market is a problem. Housing affordability is a major problem inside the country. And he needs to make housing more affordable if they're going to win the next election. Like it's a part of kind of what's going to go on.
So you can stimulate growth, but if rates go higher, then we have to do something.
And that's where this whole thing gets back to.
You can't run away from 120% of debt to GDP, and you can't run away from, oh, the fiscal
deficit is at 7%.
We'll get there in four years.
That's not the way it's going to work if rates start moving higher.
And I think that's what's going to happen.
Yeah, I tend to agree.
Let's see what happens.
Where can we send people to find you on the internet?
I'm still on YouTube doing my weekly.
I'm still on Substack doing my weekly.
Visser Labs is attached to it.
I'm posting on X.
I've been real busy lately, so it's been less.
And then for the institutional people, 22vsecurities.com.
You can find me there.
And all there, I'm doing research papers on AI and doing a lot of consulting work for them,
for asset managers, for family offices on how to incorporate AI into their business.
This has become a bigger thing for me.
uh i i know you've been involved in this and i'll just say this to to to finish this for people
i don't think any decision that you make in your life now should be done without consulting
ai it's a quick thing you can do it verbally but it's come to the point now where i incorporated
in every decision like it's a partner of mine in terms of okay i'm i'm gonna go do this what
do you think of this idea what am i not thinking about what should i do it is the more that you
do that with to get back to people reaching out the better your situation will be at work the
better decisions you'll make but also the more that you use it as an adult the more you're
setting the example for your children your children need to be using it every single day
i think that uh it is the single easiest thing to incorporate into your life that has such an
asymmetric impact and uh and it's free yeah and some people aren't going to do it but it's okay
chat gp voice voice mode use it trust me voice mode not the little microphone the voice mode
it's free download the app have a conversation about any book you want walking down the street
it will be fantastic i uh i use it for my daughter whenever i tell her something and she says that's
not true and then i ask right because i know that i can get get what the answer that i want and uh
it's fascinating how much she immediately defers to oh if the ai said it then that must be true so
All right, we'll do this again next week.
Thanks for having me.
