The Pomp Podcast - #1565 Jordi Visser | Bitcoin Is Front-Running the AI Revolution

Episode Date: June 21, 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 discuss why the Fed did not cut interest rates, how to think about inflation, Israel & Iran, how big bitcoin can get, AI, and market outlook.  ======================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.======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.======================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/

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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. 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. 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 all of the things that happened this week. We get into why the Fed didn't cut interest rates, how to think about inflation, what's going on with Israel and Iran, how to think about Bitcoin in a brand new presentation that just came out from a big-time Wall Street investor, and why they think Bitcoin is going to be bigger, but we disagree. We think it might be bigger than they think. And on top of that, we also get into artificial intelligence, what's going on with

perplexity, and much, much more. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, got a lot to talk about today i thought the first place we could start is kotu recently had their annual event they put out this great presentation it's one of the highest quality things that i see every single year and they specifically talk about bitcoin in here and i think you've got some different thoughts maybe than they have in terms of what bitcoin is worth and how they're thinking about it give us an overview of how is kotu thinking about bitcoin and then what are the areas where you agree or disagree with them yeah first of all the report was great i mean it's so mary meeker put out a very long form report two weeks ago three weeks ago i didn't find that

nearly as interesting it was just a bunch of data some of it was old the kotu stuff got into a real kind of futuristic look of what the market and public companies will look like and it focused on the disruption from ai the benefits that will come from ai from the macro perspective especially debt to gdp which we can go in but the most interesting thing right off the bat was the bitcoin part um it to find co2 i don't want to say embracing bitcoin but if you listen to the bg2 podcast the brothers were interviewed on there and philippe spent a lot of time at the very beginning of the podcast talking about bitcoin now in there they kind of list what they think the market caps will be due to ai and just kind of their views of the future by 2030 and they had bitcoin i believe

as the third biggest company with microsoft number one and i think nvidia number two now the interesting part was the kager that's implied by the bitcoin market cap which they added about five trillion is is less than 20 percent over the next five years now they didn't highlight how much of a deceleration this is considering the three-year uh bitcoin kager right now is about 75 the five year is about 65 and the 10 years about 85 so somewhere within there you're doing 65 to to 85 on three five and ten year i've talked on here and i believe that the difference between what they have is the explosive numbers they talk about in ai and for those who have watched us now for the last five months four months three months whatever it's been um we've covered a lot of the

pieces in there that they brought up we covered the satchin adela talking about a hundred trillion tokens he they bring that up we've talked about power they talk about the energy side being basically the same what's the difference between a semiconductor and a nuclear uh part of ai these are both necessary before you actually get to the ai the difference is and where my views are very different from where they go is on the belief of what ai is going to do they don't talk about tokenization. They don't talk about the growth of the private market side. And most importantly, everything that they talk about with AI ends up being a revenue per employee thing, which is obviously a reduction of the labor share of profits for big companies. And this is where

I think the end result is the inequality and the distribution of wealth. And more importantly, the worker revolt is one of the things that they didn't really get into this in too much detail. So I happen to agree with the fact that Bitcoin will continue to ascend. I think it'll be the biggest of what they had on the list there and only behind gold by the end of this year. But in their world, they're really talking about a major disruption. One other thing that's interesting is they don't have Apple in the top 40 companies, which is a really interesting thing five years from now. Well, I think when they're looking out at this, it's really hard to imagine that Bitcoin can keep the compound annual growth rate that it has had, right? You mentioned 65 to

85%. But one aspect that maybe is in reverse, usually it is the big organizations that are adopting an asset, and then you get the smaller folks coming in later. We are seeing this like acceleration, because now you have the biggest pools of capital coming into this. And you can see Bitcoin entering the public market, you can see Bitcoin, obviously going into the sovereign wealth funds. And so there is a world where that compound annual growth rate is much stickier than maybe people otherwise would think. Now, I don't think it's going to stay at 65%. I also don't think it's going to be below 20%

for the next five years. And so if they continue to extrapolate that out, compounding works wonders. It's the eighth wonder of the world. You don't have to change that percentage that much. If you go from sub 20 to let's say 35 or 40% and you extend it from five years to 10 years, you get a very, very different number

at the end of that timeframe than you would otherwise if you just keep it at a lower rate for a shorter period of time. And so to me, I think that when I see these guys talking about this stuff, they're so used to thinking about stocks and the bigger something gets,

the more that that compounding growth rate comes down. But Bitcoin does feel like the one asset in the world that is bucking a lot of these trends. And it's very hard for folks to kind of wrap their head around how big it can get and how long this can last for. Yeah, and I completely disagree with the argument that as this gets bigger, it's going to take more to move it and the caker should come down i actually think the

caker is going to accelerate and i'll give you the reason why so the mag 7 i mean their numbers have been staggering they already broke the the law of diminishing returns as you get bigger and the reason is again because of technology and exponential innovation exponential innovation leads to concentration of wealth in smaller places we've already seen that the problem is bitcoin has not outperformed the mag 7 over the last eight years it's been competing with it i think what is going to happen is as we end up in a point where the public markets start to underperform the private markets that never go public which is what is beginning to happen more and more people will equate the bitcoin market cap as the disruption to the public

markets it's a new capital structure bitcoin is the base layer of the new capital structure so So I believe network effects are going to accelerate this year because of stable coins. They mentioned that. OK, great. So you're going to have more activity happening in the digital economy. Digital money is going to transact, and it's all based on disrupting the incumbents to lower cost and be a decentralized force. The entrepreneurs, the people getting fired are going to move into they still have to

make money. They're going to have to make money one of two ways. Either they're going to have to invest and they're not going to invest in the public markets. They're going to invest in what's working. And we keep driving more and more people that are angry, just like you did with unions after the Industrial Revolution, more towards Bitcoin. So I see Bitcoin as, again, being this place that is actually the direct result of AI accelerating, just like we saw the cloud, just like we saw mobile, disrupting more and more employees and the labor share continuing to be under pressure. So I think this is actually going to drive more people into it at a time where, like you said, and I wrote a paper on this, my sub stack.

So far, Bitcoin's accumulated to the market cap it is, driven mainly by a bottoms-up movement. It has not been a top-down movement, meaning the wealthiest people of the fiat system have no reason to invest in it, so they haven't moved. What CO2 signals to me is they're looking at it. They still don't understand how it fits. I'm reaching out to them now and saying, this is a disruption of public businesses, and Bitcoin represents this other digital economy world. And that's why I always say, that is the S&P 500 of the future.

not the public markets yeah well i mean you just use bitcoin it's the hurdle rate right if you can't beat it you got to buy it and i think that people are now starting to recognize um there is this uh highly sensitive asset to global money supply um into debasement and if that is really your true hurdle rate is you have to at least be outperforming uh that debasement rate using inflation as the measurement obviously doesn't make a lot of sense and so i think that you're to continue to see people who want to uh find kind of a new benchmark and bitcoin seems to be that thing yeah one thing they said that i don't i want to make sure we we hit on and i don't think you've seen the entire thing or maybe you didn't spend as much time on it they did get into this aspect

that ai could solve the debt to gdp problem and there's a nuance in here which again i don't agree with they didn't answer why debt to gdp has been rising and you just hit on it and for everyone watching debt to gdp is rising because of the distribution of wealth gap so i wrote about this and this is a big step on my journey from a top-down basis of understanding what why bitcoin's been growing but more importantly why debt to gdp has been growing bitcoin came out before debt to gdp really started to accelerate exponentially it's been lined up with technology the more you disrupt workers the more the government has to subsidize and has to come in with more money to help those people and it comes at a time when we're already going to see debt to gdp getting

higher just because of the health of the country do i think five years from now that ai will start to impact that yes but i think the next five years is a little bit more of a dystopia it's a it's a painful point where ai accelerates so fast and companies are out there trying to get rid of employees to keep their profit margins higher and small businesses are having trouble compete i actually don't think the next five years is reducing the pressure on debt to debt to gdp i think it's actually increasing it one of the other aspects uh i think that has surprised people is everyone was predicting the recessions depressions and the black fridays uh now it looks like q2 is going to be a bonanza three or four percent gdp print um i think that some of that

as you've previously mentioned is a recovery from q1 but also it does feel like now that we're getting some of this economic data uh people are starting to think very differently about the economy and what the rest of this year looks like. The Fed, they seem to not be very worried. They're not cutting rates. They are kind of steady Eddie. Obviously, the administration is yelling and screaming at Jerome Powell almost on a daily basis now saying that he should be fired or he's behind the curve, etc. How do you look at the economic data, the GDP print, kind of this jobs softness that we're starting to see, and then what that means for the Fed and their decision not to cut rates this week? Yeah. So we've talked about this before, but just to make the economy

much simpler to kind of think about, let's just take the AI investment side, which is massive. Let's take the profit margin side, which means earnings grow. And let's go to wealthy people. That means they keep spending. It's really hard to have a recession with that going on. It's not about, you know, unless we're having severe job losses and the stock market is down, if profit margins are growing and nominal GDP is staying there 5%, which is what's happening, all of this stuff about recession is just ridiculous. It's not possible. Do I think the economy is growing rapidly? No. What I think is happening is the AI portion of the economy is fueling the entire movement right now. So whatever percent of nominal GDP, I think AI

is responsible for 75 80 90 percent of it between the capex from the hyperscalers between again the profit margins for the s p 500 which is at the expense of workers it's at the expense of wages it's at the expense of all of this stuff what it leaves the median person in the country is in this point where we still have the inflation sitting at the levels that we did back from covid they haven't come down food prices haven't come down nothing has really come down at this point in any meaningful way and now with oil you're gonna see pressure gas at the pump and you're gonna see oil unless it comes down quickly uh and we have an end to the war very very quickly because we've taken oil prices up diesel prices are going up and gas at the pump probably has

another 20 to 30 cents to go it's already up uh 10 cents or three percent from where it was so i think the median voter in the country is still suffering i don't want to say a recession but but let's just say a an environment where they can work, but they don't feel like they'll necessarily have the same job in a year. And I think that's the best way I can kind of frame this is everyone's worried about AI. I get asked questions all the time through email, through chats, through Twitter DMs about people that are like, hey, can you do something to show me how my kids can survive this? I think people are more worried. And that just means soft consumer spending at the bottom 50%. But because we're a top heavy, you know, portion of the economy,

as long as the S&P 500 is going up 7% a year, I'm not even saying 20, I'm saying seven, you just can't have a recession. So it might feel like a recession to the bottom 50%, but it doesn't to the top 50. And when you see that, I remember there was a interview that Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary did, I think it was with Chamath and David Friedberg early on. And he was asked whether he believed the economic data he said no and then very quickly kind of polished his answer but they were talking about this idea that all the polls all the data said one thing but then when you went and talked to people they told you a different story they felt something that was different and there's always the example that like maybe people you know that

they kind of don't believe the data because uh they're biased or they've got some sort of you know anecdotal experience that actually isn't true but his point was we can sit here and try try to measure all this stuff as much as we want. But if people are telling us, I can't afford to buy a home, I can't afford food, I can't afford gas, I can't afford all this stuff. And we're sitting there saying like, what do you mean? The Americans are better off today than they've ever been. He's like, there is a point in time where you have to go actually listen to the people and understand why is it that half the country is saying one thing, but the data is telling us another thing. And it feels like that's what you're highlighting here is that both things can

be true at the same time. The aggregate data can tell us one thing, but then there can be a very large portion of the population that has a completely different experience and is actually being hidden inside of that data in a way that maybe we don't have the sympathy or the empathy to really understand. Yeah. And again, I think this is should be obvious to people. Let's go back to what we said about the rate of return that has happened for the mag seven relative to all other parts of the global market, the globe, the global equity market, but also with inside the S&P 500. Does it feel like a bull market to Ford and GM? And just go through the amount of companies in the S&P 500 that are suffering. At the same time, the MAG-7 have gone up exponentially.

Their market caps have risen just insanely since 2009. So what you're dealing with is if you take the S&P 500 and we hear all the time, well, you know, there's very few stocks going up. It's very concentrated this is acting like a bear market this is the way bear markets start use the same analogy for inflation use the same analogy for any part of gdp that you want you can actually have the s&p 500 going up but with not many people not many companies participating you can have inflation going up slightly uh and you could have some things that are really really high like house prices as you brought up housing affordability has been at horrible levels and it remains at horrible levels, but you're starting to see because there's not a lot of people that can

benefit or that can actually afford a home. You're starting to see house prices come down and it's a lot of people forecasting they'll be down this year. I don't know if we've ever had house prices down in a year and not had a recession. It's very difficult to have house prices down, but somehow or another, because the median voter cannot, and I keep saying median voter because I want people to realize the middle person in the country is feeling the pain and the stock market is still going higher. So when you go through the S&P 500, the middle company in the S&P 500 is feeling the pain, the pain of higher rates, the pain of losing to the mag seven and the pain of not being able to embrace AI. The whole country is going through this. And that's why it's kind of

like a recession in the way some people look. And if you say you can't trust the data, the reason I can't trust it is because what they think should be happening is not showing up in the data. And I think a lot of that is garbage in, garbage out, using historical models to model what isn't relevant anymore with AI. One of the aspects that we are getting clarity on is legislation. The Genius Act passed the Senate. This would give us a federal framework for stable coins. It feels like everyone is jumping headfirst into the stable coin game. A couple of headlines over the last week or two, Amazon and Walmart, they are looking at potentially creating their own stable coin. you have a 20-year veteran a city group he left founders fund back to him with about 10 million

dollars you also have uh the tether 13.7 billion dollars in profit last year the circle ipo they're up 300 400 on that um you saw jp morgan come out with the jp md i think they're calling it uh or the jmpd uh which is a uh essentially like a commercial bank note that they're uh tokenizing and the list goes on and on i mean there's tons of these things i think stripe uh announced that they are partnering much more deeply with shopify and 34 different countries uh coinbase announced coinbase payments you know it's just like we can talk about this for hours why is this happening is this just the technology is so good it's a black hole and all companies all talent eventually ends up with the stable coins or is there some other way to read the progress that's being made

this part of the market well first of all i i think the most powerful thing to take out of this is people have to remember we're only two and a half years out of a mega bear market in crypto um meaning you're talking about just 22 was an environment and you know this better than i do uh where destruction was across the board we're still getting through a lot of the lawsuits and and and bankruptcy cases for this to be happening at this pace now and i can remember the first time we did a show together and even before we did i think in january i was on i talked about this the number one thing for this year was stable coins and no one really knew how to make money off stable coins well now all of a sudden you're starting to see oh my gosh so you can make it

through circle coinbase was up 16 on on i believe wednesday uh anyone that even says stablecoin at this point everyone's kind of jumping through it people have texted me saying shouldn't circle be one trillion dollar market cap i mean everyone is now getting completely on board here's my take simplistically uh stable coins are the bridge they are the bridge between the traditional finance world which means transactions everything that goes into gdp digital money is not bitcoin but But Bitcoin is about wallets. Bitcoin is about the thing that enabled this bridge to be built. And the more people that are getting involved in it, the more people that are going to allow.

And when I say people, the more that companies are going to allow individuals to transact, that money is going to end up in the digital economy. It's going to be digitally native. And that's why, for me, this is exactly the network effects that I expected to happen. Part of this is individuals, but part of this is going to be set up through AI agents. the same way that I never really had to deal with my wallet in my iPhone to just start tapping things. It just kind of happened. Well, the fact that that already happened and I'm not kidding. I never, it's not like I sat down one day and said, you know what, I'm going to go, I really got to investigate this wall thing. No, I just connected a credit card to it.

I started tapping and I realized that in most dinners now paying, there's a true story that yesterday on the holiday we had here, I went out to a really nice dinner and I looked around. I'm like, oh, I didn't bring my wallet. And I said, I use my phone for everything. I literally stopped carrying my wallet and I didn't bring my backpack that I normally bring. So I think that's what's happening is stable coins are just kind of that ability for everyone to jump on board, realize that if they want to get the consumers to use it, they need

to have it. And so everyone from a bank, I mean, when Walmart, when Amazon, when Shopify, when those Street companies in a single week are openly talking about it when Uber is talking about it. I mean, I can't think of anything more powerful in terms of the movement we're having and what it means to, again, the public market companies, because they're the ones that are going to suffer from this. I interviewed this week, Paul Ardino, who is the Tether CEO. And one of the things that was really interesting is we talked about the Circle IPO. And I asked him, I said, you know, based on those multiples, you guys are really pretty valuable. And he had a number of different,

you know, frameworks to think about valuation. But he said, look, you know, there's a world where Tether's worth $2 trillion, given the performance of the business and some of the assets they own. And at first you're kind of like, what do you mean? Come on, stop it. Like a $2 trillion company. And then you start thinking about it. You're like, he's probably not far off. And I think that that's just one company in this space. You add in the circles, all these big banks. And so it does feel like it's going to come down to the challengers versus the incumbents. And the banks are not going to just like roll over and give up this market and so they feel like here they come uh jp morgan obviously announcing this

like a commercial bank note is maybe one step but i got to imagine that you are going to see many of these banks figure out do they build something do they buy something do they partner together with other banks like how do they use the advantages that they have to box these challengers out and it's gonna be fascinating because maybe just the market has already spoken you know the taxi uh kind of conglomerate tried real hard to keep uber out just people wanted uber right and that might be what happens here is that people just want non-bank stable coins um both internationally and domestically all right so i'm not going to comment on what you just said because i completely agree and i think we've hammered this point home that the merging of if you haven't

spent time on stable coins which i know a lot of people that are in the more traditional finance still have not spent time i literally have a vision of just a bridge between these two worlds and the bridge is being built as we we see one of the things that i i i haven't done this on this show i want to ask you a question so how do you think about if stable coins are going to explode and we're going to be doing five times the amount of volume by the end of this year that we're already doing right now because of this what about ethereum what about a solana what about all the guard rails that are supposed to be benefiting from the volume expansion they're critical in my views of what will happen to bitcoin before the end of the year i think that is the next phase of

this this has been my view is that as stable coins explode we should start seeing the energy behind this with ethereum and solana and sweet and all the other the components how are you thinking about this i don't know if the stable coin thing plays as much into this thesis as uh uh maybe as in general the second that everyone thinks like altcoin season is not coming it will show up right and bitcoin has done such a great job of sucking the air out of the room and rightfully so it's the king it will always be the king i think that it has really ascended to an asset that now is accepted on wall street but i do think that you're going to see people push out onto that risk curve in the second half of this year and as we get further in the year it means that that

like alt season is more compressed and so what you're going to likely get is you're going to get this very like reflexive move up and then you're going to get a very violent move down over time and you know it goes back to the people who i tend to see playing in that space uh they're more traders or short-term optimized you know uh kind of strategies the folks that are just hey i'm holding something for 30 years they're holding bitcoin and so there's many ways up the mountain of success right you you know there will be people who make money in both of those uh kind of worlds But I agree with you that there is, you know, it's not a very long tail. It's not like there's a hundred assets.

Maybe there's five or six that will benefit from stable coins. They will benefit from people wanting to push out on the risk curve, you know, as Bitcoin has run. And then also you're starting to see it now in the public market with the Bitcoin treasury companies. Now you're starting to see the Ethereum treasury company, the Solana treasury company, Tron is going public, right? I mean, like they're all going to do this as the classic, well, like if it works for

bitcoin why can't it work for fork coin and i promise you somebody is going to create a meme coin there's a guy in canada um that is uh he's the chairman of soul strategies uh this guy tony g and tony um who you know i'm his friend we work together on the soul strategy stuff but tony had another company and he recently turned it into a hyper liquid treasury strategy and so naturally all the people who are interested in hyper liquid they're now here they come right and so i do think that you're going to see that kind of like eat the tail of crypto. And so whether it's the public companies or private, like these things are going to get a bid, even if you don't think that they're sustainable. What do you what do you think? You agree with that or no? Yeah, I agree with it. And

I think the important message and I'll say this more from the so we have the merging of the traditional finance world and the crypto world coming together in a very powerful way. This is not the crypto tokens and speculation going higher, driving in the traditional finance world. This one is actually happening very differently. So you mentioned just kind of how this alt token season, alt season, we were kind of in it after Trump took over and then it collapsed. The reason I'm so interested in it is because we're seeing it right now with Circle. There's no doubt in my mind that Circle is kind of this energy that's going that is crypto related, but it's in the traditional finance world. There are people that have made money on it. Now they're

doing the research. They're thinking about it. The CO2 report just came out. I think the more that people spend time on it, they may go back to some of these all in podcasts where, hey, didn't Shamath say that this would be the year of stable coins? Didn't Pomp and Jordy talk about the fact that this would be stable coins and the network effects are starting? I actually think that Ethereum having an ETF is like a very big positive in this whole thing. I think the traditional finance world is going to help fuel this along with the people with inside the token world that are waiting for something and a breath to happen. On my video last week, I highlighted that almost every single token is down between 20 and 50% this year. So when you're down 20 and 50%

year to date, and that's only year to date, that means you're down even more from when Trump was elected. I think the next phase when Ethereum, I'm going to say it closes two weeks above 2700 because that's the level I've been looking at. Once we close two weeks above there, I think it'll be the kickoff for the alt season. So you think that we need Ethereum to close above 2700 for two weeks and that will kick off the alt season? I think it broke above last week and it came back down but i think the enthusiasm behind circle and again i my kind of world on this is that ai agents are accelerating token usage is accelerating it's not just uh sacha nadela that said it sundar pachai said it recently like we're getting explosion ai agents are coming

ai ai agents are critical to the explosion of stable coins so stable coins growth right now is not happening from ai agents it may be starting that way but i think the convergence between stablecoin usage and volumes exploding in a manner that everyone has to start doing a valuation calculation on it i think it feeds back in that's why i asked you about ethereum and solana because there is a relationship between the volumes happening and ethereum and solana and sui and tron and all these other pieces so if you get that energy component associated with it and people start drilling down they do have access to it through the etfs and like you said it's starting in the treasury side so i think this is a broadening out move so yeah two weeks above

love 2700. And I think it's the kickoff. Let's talk about AI. You and I, we woke up earlier this week and Irvin from Perplexity, the founder and CEO, he had posted a clip of us talking about Perplexity and AI, et cetera, which was fun and cool. I think you and I both have gotten to know him and the team over there. What is your takeaway from Perplexity in particular? It seems like they have really used these ai models to significantly change the way that people are able to get information i mentioned to you earlier that howard marks the famed investor and memo writer uh you know now every time i talked about a successful uh investor i'm going to reference whether they're a podcaster an influencer or a memo writer because that seems to be the uh the thing for the young

guys and so howard marks used perplexity to write part of his memo and he explained that he was using it, but it was pretty damn good compared to his normal writing style. And so, how do you see this all playing out and what are the areas you're maybe most excited about? You know, I said it last week, and for the perplexity team, I'll say it again. It has replaced 60% of my Bloomberg usage. I have a lot of thoughts and ideas on how it can replace more of it. The one thing I've used as kind of a comparison side. I remember in 2009 and 2010, and if you remember, if you didn't see it in this theme, Bloomberg versus perplexity, I would go watch the BlackBerry movie that came out. I don't know if you saw it. Great movie on kind of a tool that the financial world use,

which is the most similar I can say to Bloomberg, meaning everyone liked the keyboard on the Blackberry. So it was a very, very slow change to the iPhone. Part of it was security, just like perplexity. Part of it was people not really thinking about needing to use it or all the benefits that came. What I think is going to happen with perplexity, and I already see it happening, and the team should really spend time with me on this. The community of perplexity should be building the competition i already have things built in that i'm showing hedge funds i believe most of the ai platforms will have some form of a community-based app store for the people who are using it because i've always said domain expertise plus creativity

plus curiosity leads to an app store that is basically rep it's a brain store you're getting someone else's brain the whole way that ai is going to democratize things in my opinion is to use other people's brains the users not the companies that is the power of ai is to find people who use it because if i said to you this is how i use it in perplexity it's stuff that i figured out that i rabbit hole in and i can go get down to the bottom and i know you've used it in the same way i can get lost in a conversation with both perplexity and chat gpt while walking down the street to talk about the things that we talk about here when i read the kotu report i had about a 30-minute conversation with chat gpt about what i thought in the report

it had the report so i was having a conversation on something that was released two weeks ago and i'm having a conversation on my views that are different than that one and it led to kind of some of the thoughts we shared here today i do the same thing with perplexity maybe less so with the voice mode side but building tools to look at charts to set up workspaces to set up the ability to do it. And so every time I hear a Bloomberg user say, I don't know how you're getting to that level. I can't access where a current CDS is on perplexity. I can't access when the debt maturity is on this. Great. There's no way at this point that it should be able to replicate everything that you can do in Bloomberg. But Bloomberg cannot do the stuff that perplexity

can. So you have to kind of look at it both ways. I said 60-40. The reason I said 60-40 is because the fact set data and the company commentary, I can get instantaneous. And then I can be in another company and another company and another company with similar commentary. There's no comparison to me. Perplexity has already beaten Bloomberg on the ability of going lateral with thoughts as opposed to being locked in a silo. At some point, do you think that whether it's perplexity or somebody else will eventually just invest money as well? We saw the rise of the robo advisors, but those were really just kind of like indexers to a degree. If you can train the model to answer questions that you then are using to

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And you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. Eventually, we will get there. I think the human element is still very important to people. So there is a separation between it ever being full-blown robo-advisor. But I think with younger people, they don't care as much. For older people who still control most of the money of the world, they need that personal kind of hand-holding touch. but if there's a verbal conversation and that's why i always say if you use voice mode it changes things that's why when i wrote the paper that if you want to get started with ai

the first thing to do is to just talk to it and i say build a relationship and i think it kind of freaks people out but the way that you use it is the way that you use it i i mean if you look at a golf swing and you take a hundred people their golf swings are all completely different um for for the golf fans out there, Scotty Scheffler's feet move like nobody I've ever seen move. He's the best golfer in the world. Everyone's golf swing is different. Everyone is a user of AI is completely different. When you get into software and you're pressing buttons and it's doing things for you, there's not as much creativity. I do want to add one more thing because you've had experience with this. I've had experience with this. When I think of,

and I'll just use perplexity again, but if I connect perplexity to a cursor, That's where I am in my brain, meaning I want to build the applications and the tools that I want to have in perplexity or connected to perplexity. That's what we're getting to is how do I create the software that I would otherwise use that I'm in their world? Risk management tools, turbulence tools, things that I've always wanted to build that I would have data scientists build for me or pay software vendors for it. Now, I'm going to be able to create them myself. There's no right answer to those questions. But when you create an app yourself by verbally going through it and then you connect it back to your workflow and if that workflow like GitHub or anything where you can then go out there and offer it to other people in a brain form, I really do think with everything we're talking about, it's going to become very, very personalized and people will be building their own solutions as opposed to depending on solutions. the last thing i want to talk about today is uh israel and iran um there's been a lot of rockets

flying back and forth uh ballistic missiles um the iron dome was penetrated uh there was also some very surgical strikes from israel and iran um there has been a fracturing i think of the republican party's uh kind of thoughts on uh whether this should be done should not be done um there's always going to be high debate and controversy whenever you overlay religion philosophy politics and economics right and there's probably other things in overlaid there as well but at least those four things are kind of four core pillars to this whole thing how does an investor navigate what is happening and seems to be changing on an almost daily basis including the president of the united states tweeting like we know where the ayatollah is

we're not going to kill them yet but you know you should be scared uh which is um you know kind of like uh we could do things but we're not going to do things but we want you to know we could do those things um which only kind of muddies the water for an investor yeah i again i i i say it all the time on my videos i'm sure i said it here last week when we briefly talked about it you don't make any money um extrapolating geopolitics into earnings in the economy uh so what could happen there to impact investors here and why does the market care at all the market cares because of the price of oil the market cares for the possibility that world war iii could start so what's the probability of those events they're both low i think the oil or the straits of hormuz

is rising in probability and that's seen through a couple of ways but let's just take oil back at at 65 and say now it's at 75 most people say it'll go to 120 if the straits of hormuz are shut down um whether or not that's true or not is irrelevant but that means there's right now a very small probability still built in if we've had a 10 rise and they think there could be another 45 rise let's say it's somewhere between 15 and 20 percent to go to just make it a simple straight line probability uh in there i i don't think investors should care the second thing is if oil did spike uh i think very quickly it would come back down because that's what happens with almost every oil spike meaning if they did something i think that forces the us in i think it forces a lot of

other countries to get in there because it changes the dynamics so for me i have always viewed geo politics as a way to take advantage of the opportunity that it presents because very very seldom in history does it turn into anything meaningfully bigger or important it happens to come at a time when the s p is sitting right near the all-time highs it happens to come at a time when the blackout period for buybacks is about to kick in uh buybacks have been averaging anywhere from five to seven billion dollars a day of demand because of how big they are uh when they go into a blackout period the market isn't going to have that steady demand sentiment has normalized to at least around bullish bearish but maybe 50 50. so i still think we're going to stay around here maybe

we correct for a little bit and then we go higher but i think for investors if they watch the news and they see the bombs going off and a hospital gets hit or an energy plant gets hit or their threats of nukes i think you're going to make irrational decisions and i think at the end of the day you just always focus on the structural things that are happening ai is happening earnings are good gdp is fine we need to see oil go up significantly but there's probably a reaction function that happens which means if the s p did fall i would be looking to put money in that the only thing i'll add is i will continue to reiterate the venn diagram when you try to find two separate investment themes that are connecting if israel iran lasts for a long time and this isn't the

beginning of something or the risk of it being there remains which seems likely then oil probably has a floor somewhere around 65. If it's going to stay at 65, people forget that energy stocks fell off because when the tariffs were on, we took oil from 65 down to 55. Well, if now we've put in a floor there, the second half of the year, token usage is going to explode. Stablecoin usage is going to explode. Energy is going to be needed. I cannot say this loud enough to people. I just wrote a piece for 22V on Chevron and Exxon, not because they're pure plays on AI or pure plays on power but they're the two biggest parts of a sector that's only three and a half percent of the s p while technology is 50 power power power is the theme for the second half of the year and

all that the iran israel thing does is put a floor under oil i do think that there is a um a very interesting dynamic of um the united states went and took uh what is it our strategic petroleum reserve we significantly depleted that it seems like we are trying to fill that back up and and uh the price of oil going up it's not necessarily helping um in terms of our abilities there but also a huge part of trump's kind of campaign platform was drill baby drill and so you've got kind of the things happening in the middle east which the united states on one hand you know could be benefiting from if we're selling the oil and oil prices are up but on the other hand that drilling is not necessarily keeping the price at kind of a sustainable level

and so there's a lot of like interesting dynamics of not only you know just the oil price but then how does this affect individual countries production how does that affect importing versus exporting and if you really you know kind of even go back a couple of years now you also have the russia ukraine crisis you have you know you kind of like start stacking this stuff up and um on one hand the fact that oil is not you know 100 plus dollars uh is maybe surprising like you would think that there's been so much disruption so many geopolitical conflicts that now are impacting oil itself um it's held in there maybe better than i would have expected yeah i agree and i i think you've brought up a point and just so people know this like

china and russia are brought into the iran israel thing so i think everyone gets the iran uh russia connection but for china china's been supporting their ability to sustain themselves by buying almost all of the exports that iran has on the oil side so there are relationships on this that make the geopolitics interesting from the global side but i think it also makes it that china doesn't want iran to be in a position where it can't export oil anymore and if it shuts down the straits of four moves it ends up being a very very let's say messy situation uh it doesn't get a lot of press at the same time but taiwan has been saying that they're noticing that china's drills are looking more real at this point around them so i do think geopolitics is a part of the discussion

always and we're at a more difficult and let's say risky time but the probability of it escalating into something is still very low if people want to do things at this point you can still get long energy stocks you can still get long uh puts on the s p or at least do something uh if you're really worried because the stuff has not been built in so when you say oil hasn't gone up too much i completely agree i also think that volatility and stuff hasn't gone up too much so if there's any kind of escalation you can see these things pick up is there anything else that you're paying attention to over the next you know week or two that uh that you think is worth calling out for people in advance we haven't talked about it here much and you might have more to talk about

this i i will say um for the next week it's about expirations so today is quarterly expiration for um stocks but deribit has a massive expiration going on next week in bitcoin i like i said i think ethereum is very close to breaking out here and i think if it coincides with deribit options expiration there has clearly been vol selling that has gone on because we've seen vol compress in bitcoin below 40. it's at all-time lows in terms of implied volatility you've got a lot of people that have been selling call options i'm still living with the short squeeze side i think ethereum needs to break out i also think we need to get through one of these expiries and then be in a situation where there's a catalyst well now you have a catalyst that if

there's any kind of negotiation between iran and the us iran and israel and we get any pause in that we're going to get the next move higher that'll take us to all-time highs i'm very certain of in the s p but then you're also going to start getting into earnings report for for q2 and i think the ai earnings stuff again what we've seen from broadcom what we've seen from Nvidia, what we've seen from all of the companies that have come out, but in particular, Oracle, Jabil this week, we have Micron coming out, I believe next week, if not next week, the following week, you're going to have more and more companies that are talking. So I'm looking actually for that, but then I'm going to throw it back at you on one thing. Cynthia Lummis, the Senator said,

first thing we need to get done is the Genius Act. Okay. So we're through the Senate on that. will go through the house uh it was a bipartisan uh vote uh you had 68 i mean when's the last time we had anything in in in the senate that had 68 votes which means that enough democrats jumped on board elizabeth warren obviously did not but what's coming up after because we've still had a lot of speculation that they'll do something in in in bitcoin they'll do something in other parts we got stage one done of her plan she's talked openly about what will be happening after that Do you have any insights for anyone on what you see happening after this bill goes through? Well, they definitely got, you know, the market structure and the stable coin bills.

I recently talked with Patrick McHenry, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and he said that he thinks they should put them together and just make one bill. And it looks like that's a possibility here. I do think that buying more Bitcoin is going to be something that happens in 2025. Let's see how long that takes. And then the other thing that, frankly, I really see movement on is how banks can participate here. And it used to be that the regulators would go to the banks and say, hey, don't touch this stuff. And the banks said, well, we weren't going to touch it anyways. And, you know, no problem.

Whatever you say, you know, salute them and move on. Now the banks are turning around and saying, we're going to do this now. Like, you know, you better get out of our way. And I think that the regulators are kind of on their heels saying, OK, fine. Right. We'll figure out some rules and let you guys do that. So everyone is very focused on what I'll call like the structural stuff and the way that, you know, things that touch them. But I think that the banks are a really interesting area to watch because all of a sudden they can bring these products to market. They have distribution. They already have the customer base. They already have the accounts. They have the assets.

Like there are some significant advantages that they can can capture there. I think that's really an area that maybe is not getting as much attention as it should. I agree. And the reason I asked the question is I believe the second half of the year is about the crypto space. I think the first half people may have not realized, but we were waiting for this bill for the entire first half of the year. There were people speculating that there'd be Bitcoin purchases. Maybe everything just got delayed to the second half. circle ipo gets done it brings a lot of enthusiasm but more importantly between the circle ipo and the kotu report eyeballs from the traditional finance world are migrating to crypto and i think people are underestimating the amount of positive news that's going to come out that basically is being released because had to get everyone set up had to get everyone through like we just are getting this whole movement going and i think when the meme coins and everything were flying through

the roof from november until mid-january i think people might be falling asleep and that's why i keep saying when ethereum closes above 2700 for two weeks two weeks in a row work closes above 2700 i think we're we're setting up for a whole big second half of the year driven by a ai agent stablecoin and more positive reception from the traditional finance world that would be uh be fantastic where can we send people to find you on the internet uh you can find me posting on x they can find me on youtube at viscer labs they can find me at my sub stack and of course for the institutional crowd out there 22v securities 22vresearch.com regular research pieces

amazing jordy thank you so much for doing it and we'll do it again next week thanks mom