The Pomp Podcast - #1576 Jordi Visser | Why Bitcoin Just Became the Ultimate Safe Haven

Episode Date: July 19, 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 what is going on with bitcoin, what went on during Crypto Week and legislation, how we should be thinking about inflation, AI arms race, and opportunities he is excited about. ======================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.======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/======================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.=======================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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your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Details at JDPower.com. 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's a 30-year expert from Wall Street, and he is here to explain to us what's going on with Bitcoin, what happened with Crypto Week, and all the legislation and different acts that were voted on. How should we be thinking about inflation and why it's not going up, even though the tariff revenue is rolling in? On top of that, we talk about the AI arms race, things like hardware, software, energy, and much, much more.

In this conversation, Jordi and I do our best to unpack what's happening in current events, what's happening in financial markets, and how you should be navigating all of the uncertainty, chaos, and also opportunity that is laying in front of us. Here's my latest conversation with Jordi Visser. All right, Jordi, the big story this week in the traditional world, in my opinion, is there is immense pressure mounting for Jerome Powell to resign, to be fired. It feels like it is coming from all directions. You've got the president. You've got Bill Pulte. I mean, he's going ham on Jerome Powell online. The media is now starting to pick up these stories. There is

what I would consider the interest rate pressure. But then now there's also starting to be things around criminal probe rumors. There are things around this two point five billion dollar restoration of the Fed building. I mean, this is like getting to the point now where it's like people are just trying to figure out anything possible to get this guy out. You think it's going to happen? And what do you think the implications of all this pressure mounting is? I think it's going to be hard for it to actually happen, but I think it is happening. And I think there's already a trade here. So let's go back. This is my take on kind of the bigger picture on this. So if people want to take like a systems thinkers approach as opposed

to getting caught in the the Trump anxiety of what's he going to do, what's he going to try to get away with? The reason we're in this situation, the reason this is such an important thing is at the beginning of the year, at the end, you know, once the election was over, Scott Besson openly talked about the need to issue longer dated treasuries and get away from what Janet Yellen had done with having all of our debt be maturing in short-duration treasuries. That was completely given up on. I mean, Besson spoke over the weekend and he basically said, we can't do that right now. And I think rather than say right now, I'm going to say they can't do it ever. And there's a very simple reason, which is, I referenced Joseph

Schumpeter a lot here. I referenced it on my own YouTube video, and I talk about creative destruction. And if you go through Schumpeter's work, you end up in a situation where, number one, capitalism eventually cannibalizes itself. The biggest weakness to capitalism ends up being capitalism because you get a distribution of wealth inequality problem. We've referenced how that is a scenario that's showing up in New York City when you go through socialism now entering as entering politics in a much bigger way. Well, for the Fed, they have, or for the administration, they have a debt of over 100% GDP.

They have a deficit of about $2 trillion, of which $1 trillion of it is interest expense. So they have a need to get rates down. And even if it means running inflation a little bit hot, maybe 3.5%, they've made the decision that that is a risk worth taking. And Donald Trump even said that they can always raise rates if they need to, but we need rates down. And I think there's an argument that you can make as to why that would be the case. Now, you're going to have to sacrifice inflation. But the bigger story here, which I think people just have to accept it, is Fed independence is completely in question now. And whether it's a shadow Fed committee, whether Powell's out or not, I think we've already kind of come to the conclusion that there's something going on here.

That's a bigger story. And I think Fed independence is either done now or it's done when the next Fed chair comes in. But in my opinion, it looks done. All right. So one of my maybe lessons learned this week was I actually think that the White House may have penetrate tested the media and the market. Someone leaked that there was an incoming firing of Jerome Powell, that there was a letter that was pre-written. I don't know if it was a letter to Powell, a letter to the American people or a speech or whatever. But it seemed like, hey, this could be imminent at one point. The market, as soon as that story came out, started to go down. Two hours later, Trump was on TV in an interview and said, we're not going to do anything.

And what I, from the outside looking in, appears to have happened is they were testing. hey if the market had gone up when they announced that he might have got fired this week right like that kind of felt that you know that was the like hey let's do an ab test here now if they're not going to fire him it's hard for me to see him resigning right part of the legacy like all that so it's kind of like if you're not willing to you know go to the mat and fire him he's not going to resign he probably ends up uh finishing his term to your point though if we lose independence at the Fed, which you could argue whether we've already lost it or not in the last couple of years. But let's say that it is still independent and we were to lose it in the future. What are

the ramifications of that moving forward? How detrimental or maybe positive is it if the Fed is not independent moving forward through these market cycles? So the first thing is, and I agree with your analysis, and people may have forgotten this, but they did the exact same thing with the 90-day tariff pause. There was a rumor on the Friday, or on the Monday, after the whole Liberation Day fiasco, they threw it out there. He came out and said fake news. The market had ripped higher. And then a day or two later is when he made the formal announcement. So I think this administration is absolutely doing trial balloons to see what the market reaction would be. And they could make their estimates that, okay, the dollar would get hit hard,

long-term rates would go higher. That's the knee-jerk reaction. I actually, as you went through it, I hate to say the Fed independence is gone, but this gets back into the concept of fiscal dominance. Fiscal dominance is you can't reverse it. So the Fed is already muted in the fact that we've got debt to GDP at over 100% with entitlements growing. The one big, beautiful bill that went through is not going to take down the numbers in any meaningful way, even if they grow, which I think there will be growth. So I think it's already happened. It's just a question of when it goes. The one thing is, if you go back on the history of the Fed and you go back to the history of central banks across every developed nation, the independence thing is very important.

I just think we're getting gradually going there. And this brings up what happened also with the Stablecoin Act, the Clarity Act, everything going on. We're already getting to the point where the digital economy and the monetary system going forward is changing. And so I think the administration is thinking about that as well. It may not be directly involved with what's going on in the Fed, but I think they've made a clear thing that they want to help people that they said they would help, and they need rates lower to help with that, and they're not getting it at this point.

So I think it's absolutely going to happen one way or the other. Do you worry at all about the $2.5 billion change to the building and the renovations and restorations and all this stuff. Like, it seems absurd. You know, I saw Bill Pulte tweeted that that's more money than the Dallas Cowboys spent to build their state-of-the-art stadium. So like on a relative basis, you're like, that's crazy.

At the same time, somebody was telling me, they're like, yeah, but don't you want the Fed to like seem credible and big and, you know, people go visit the Fed and whatever. And I was like, I kind of don't care, but what is your take on, you know, some of these things that I think as people learn where their tax dollars are going,

they're kind of like, do we really need marble floors? Like, couldn't we go as like the cheaper option? I find the whole thing stupid. So the whole government spending thing, thank God it's coming to an end. But I think, again, it puts it into context of how ridiculous the amount of money is. I remember after the great financial crisis and I throw these numbers out all the time, but you have to remember that from the beginning of the United States of America until the great financial crisis, the total amount

of debt that was created at the government level was 9 trillion and now it's 36. So we've done another three times what we did in effectively 200 and change years in just the last 15. So the concept of how much money has been printed has distorted everything. I say there's no recessions anymore. The reason there's no recessions anymore is because the size of the debt and the ability of printing dollars is just enormous. And that growth in debt that I said doesn't even include the fact that the Fed still owns a very large majority of Treasuries outstanding as well. So you've gotten to the point where if you were debating whether it was a Ponzi scheme, it is a Ponzi scheme. So two and a half billion out of, you know, thirty six trillion dollars of debt, thirty seven trillion dollars of debt.

It doesn't surprise me. And I don't really think about it too much. All right. Let's talk about crypto week in D.C. There have been a roller coaster of announcements, updates, emotions. There was, hey, it's not going to go through. It's going to go through. There was an Oval Office meeting. Trump was tweeting from the Oval Office during the meeting saying, I got like 16 people here. And it kind of felt like he was like holding them there until they all agreed.

We got three different bills that all got voted on yesterday or on Thursday. We got the Genius Act. We got the Clarity Act. And we got this anti-CBDC. I think we should start going in reverse order, because to me, the anti-CBDC Act is like the least controversial and the one that everyone seems to be like no brainer. We don't want the surveillance components of our government being able to use digital dollars to look after us. Is that kind of your take on that one? Yep, that's it.

And again, reverse back a little bit. I think all the theatrics that were in this, you know, I remember I always look up fair shake whenever anything's going on just to see see what the the crypto pack is is talking about. And they were just reminding everyone that the midterms are coming up in a year. So I think there's this thing of we got to do what we need to do for our constituents. But at the same time, this needed to be a part of it. So, yeah, I'd say the least controversial of it by far. This is not my opinion, but I feel like there's some alpha for people out there. There are a lot of rumblings that I have heard and I've been approached on, which I can kind of sit on the sidelines for.

But there's a lot of people who are not happy with, I think, fair shakes, positioning and dominance and lobbying, et cetera. It's not surprising. The industry is very big. There's kind of all these different perspectives and opinions. But there is talk of people creating kind of competitive or complementary of these lobbying efforts. And in a weird way, if Fair Shake, which appears to have been very effective at getting some of this stuff through, if there's more of those, it's kind of like we're just starting the impact on Washington. If one organization that's well-funded can do this, imagine if there was 10 of them, right? And so I think that you're right in saying watching who's influencing the politicians is probably a pretty good way to understand what's going to end up being the end result. Yeah. And, you know, when you get to the point where fair shake is that large, that important, you're going to have more that are going to come in. But I think it's just a representation of how now the industry is mainstream. I mean, this is no longer if you really could take this back a year ago.

And I think it was in August that Trump spoke at a crypto event. And I just remember watching it, sitting on there, going through it. I can't believe I'm watching a president of the United States talk about it. Think about where we are now a year later. We not only have these bills get through, but now we're going to grow the lobbyists. And it's going to be on more minutiae rather than just pro-crypto. And it's going to get into which guardrails are the best, what should be going on. I think that's just, again, a representation that the digital economy for the financial rails is growing. The investors are going to have to focus on it more and more. This won't be taken, in my opinion, for non crypto people as like a major week, meaning it's something that was known.

But I really do believe that the United States has done something which the rest of the globe is now going to have to pay attention to and have to realize, if they hadn't already, that the financial guardrails of the global economy are really, really important. The global reserve currency status of the dollar may be going down in the traditional fiat world, but right now we're going the opposite direction where we're really putting pressure on the Chinas and the Russias and the BRICS that this is where the people underneath their economy are going to be transacting and be doing stuff. And I always say this all the time. I remember when I had a conversation with Michael Milken, who said to me in his house, if you opened up the doors to America today, there'd be 7 billion people that would want to come in. And that's the difference between central banks and macro people thinking from a top down basis of what the dollar represents, but then thinking about what America represents to a lot of people around the globe on a relative basis. And I think that's where Bitcoin, stable coins, everything, it's becoming more mainstream. And I think it's a drastic change now, one year ago versus today. So we also have the Genius Act and the Clarity Act. My general thought process around these are they are creating federal frameworks to create clarity around what's a security, what's a commodity. But also it is essentially opening the door for the quote unquote adults, I'll put in air quotes, to start to participate.

and you look and it seems like the banks are like salivating. Now, they may not be like, let's go put Bitcoin on our balance sheet. But that stablecoin thing feels pretty risk mitigating and right in line with what we do around payments or, you know, treasury operations, et cetera. And so is this really the year that kind of Bitcoin and crypto grow up? This is the year finally that the government is putting its stamp of approval. We're getting these regulatory clarity bills.

And now we should expect Wall Street to kind of jump headfirst into the deep end of this industry. Yeah. And let's just remind people, you know, over the last three weeks, maybe four weeks, we had talked mainly and this whole year we had talked a lot about Bitcoin. We'd also talked about how Ethereum, Solana, Sui, everything else, all the altcoins were still down for the year. And I remember saying once we got two weeks where we closed above 2700 in Ethereum, we'd be at a different level. And this would be the expansion of the ecosystem. When Tom Lee said that the Circle IPO was the chat GPT moment for crypto, I think in hindsight between that and now with these acts and the bills getting done, and Ethereum getting up to 3,600, approaching the 4,000 technical resistance area and outperforming Bitcoin significantly. We've had a big drop in Bitcoin dominance, which obviously is great for

the ecosystem because it means we're getting more participants growing. I think your comment about getting more adults in the room after two years of the government being anti-crypto and basically throwing Wells notices that every creative person and every innovation that was going on, this is a complete 180. And I think it just opens up the door for an enormous amount of innovation to be happening. And I think you're going to start to see it. I think we passed through $4 trillion in market cap. And again, for those people trying to figure out how big the valuations can be in crypto, at $4 trillion and thinking about the value that it puts in when NVIDIA is a $4 trillion company by itself. The crypto market cap is going to grow significantly

over the next three years. And I think people are going to look back at this circle IPO and realize that the network effects were happening because of stable coin, but everything has led up to something that we talked about. This should be the year of network effects. And I think people are starting to see it. You know, what's fascinating to me is that these businesses that are not like the Bitcoin treasury companies, but in the public market, Coinbase, Robinhood, they're all hitting all-time highs.

I mean, these things are exploding. And we know that there's a lot of risk-taking happening in the traditional stock market. I saw a data point recently, two-thirds of all option volume is now zero-day options. If you go and you look at things like, I think it is the Goldman Sachs non-profitable index of tech companies

that is up like 40-something percent since April. So there's a lot of like, quote unquote, risk taking that's happening. But these companies are doing very, very, very well. And it's been in a world where Bitcoin was going up. But I don't think that Coinbase or Robinhood really are predicating their business on just Bitcoin success. Like they really are actually saying, hey, it's the entire industry. Like part of the value proposition is that they offer everything else.

And so it kind of feels like actually if everything else now is going to run, those things may do better than they've been doing with just Bitcoin run. Yeah. And I think people I mean, I hear and I saw X post this week from, you know, the grumpy old guy in the front yard on their lawn chair arguing about the fact that, oh, it must be a top because retail options are are dominating. I mean, I just don't think people realize the demographic shift that's happening. Gambling is part of the U.S. culture, whether you like it or not. It's a very steady incline. As I've mentioned before, we're about equal now to new auto purchases in dollar terms versus gambling on an annual basis. And the gambling side is a linear chart going straight up. And the new auto sales are basically unchanged over a long time period.

So you have a gambling culture. Part of that is because the iPhone, in terms of kids having less attention span and just looking for more entertainment, part of it is they want to spend money on something that brings them experiences. So there's an experiential side. I've talked about my son and how he really got me into crypto when he was 13 years old, because I was shocked about how much he knew he was using information. He was gay. This is really a demographic shift to me that is in the early, early stages. And so the Robin Hoods of the world, the Coinbase is of the world, the circles of the world. I think traditional investors are just going to have to spend the time because most of them are past the age of

where they can truly understand. And they still believe this is a bubble that's going to end when the reality is AI moves so fast. The compounding of compute moves so fast. We're hitting AGI soon. Then we're going to hit ASI. You just keep going and going. You can't think about five years from the future.

And I think options are really what this is, the same way that meme coins mean something in the entertainment side. So I think all of this is just a big part of the culture and a big change that is a result of technology and creative destruction. Now, when we start to look at the retail demographic shift, I think that there has been a bifurcation, obviously, in asset allocation. Hedge funds have not been allocated nearly as

much as retail. Retail bought the dip. They've done very well there. But also, I think part of the reason that happened is the retail audience had a very different view on inflation than the traditional kind of finance folks. There was kind of the academic, the economist-driven viewpoint. Inflation is going to come raging back. There's going to be this massive issue. Inflation continues to be way cooler than people thought it was going to be. And Kelly Evans at CNBC actually wrote a great piece that came out this morning, or I'm sorry, came out yesterday, where she said that the tariffs are obviously being collected. we see tariff revenue up significantly. Inflation has not really showed up and the economy is way

stronger than we thought. And so her conclusion was, well, the foreign producers, the foreign companies are eating the tariffs. And she has some data that showed that. Is that your read as to why the tariffs are in place, revenues up, treasury has a surplus, but we're not seeing inflation? So first things first, for everyone watching, because X is still filled with people talking about inflation, like they will not throw in the towel. I threw in the towel. I was wrong about it, but it wasn't solely about the tariffs. I thought we were going to get inflation from other things, from commodities. Commodities are higher. We have copper higher. We have natural gas, a lot of things that are up. And yet the inflation data has not come through.

So we've now gone through five CPI prints in a row where it came in lower than expected. And this is during a time with tariffs. I think the number one reason is something I joked about when there's originally people were coming up freaking out about tariffs early in, I guess it was mid-January. And the only data points that you can really truly use on the impact it would have on inflation is all speculative. There's nothing to really sit there and go through it on. there's so many replacement costs or replacement uh places that people can go if american

companies are able to sell cars and the only way a japanese company can sell its car is to not raise the prices significantly there's an effect that it's going to have a deflationary pressure i believe we are in a deflationary time i think ai is standing in front of us the most deflationary event any of us could ever possibly imagine. And I think the reality is that inflation is sitting at levels that are already elevated from where it was in the past, and it's going to stay around here. Rather than focus on whether we're going to get a 2.9 year over year or a 3.6 year over year, what the market is saying is it's totally irrelevant whether it's 2.9 or 3.6. And I think one of the reasons that people are obsessed with inflation is because of this ridiculous

random number of the Fed target for inflation. They're not going to sit there and aggressively raise rates because we're at three and a quarter percent instead of two. I mean, I always thought that was stupid anyway, in terms of the way that people became anchored to it. This is really a bearish mindset that people get involved in. I think inflation is going to run hotter between now and a year from now. So I do think inflation will be up a year from now. We'll see if I'm wrong on that one. But that's because I do see what's happening on the shortages and supply chains with inside artificial intelligence, which are going to start to impact the power market because we have a shortage of electricity over the next five years. And we do not have an ability

to produce that electricity without having significant increases on the hardware side and some of the cost side. So I'm a little bit, I'm still going to go on and say that inflation a year from now will be higher than it is, but that'll be driven by commodity prices. And it'll be good inflation, in my opinion, not the core services driven by wage inflation and things like that. Today's episode is sponsored by Figure, the largest non-bank home equity lender in the United States with over $15 billion unlocked on their lending platform. They are now in the crypto-backed loan space and they offer industry low interest rates when you use your Bitcoin as collateral to get cash. You can access interest rates starting at 9.9%, the lowest fixed rate

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Visit simplemining.io. One of the aspects that I think people just don't want to admit, that the tariffs were deflationary is because people took such a hard stance if people had come out and you know back in april or or uh even march had said something to the effect of i believe that it is likely these are going to be inflationary let's wait for the data and took kind of a prudent but pessimistic position i think you'd have a lot of people saying hey you know look it wasn't as inflationary as i thought it was no harm no foul move on but there was such a visceral stance and such a like severe digging your heels in the ground that you heard from

the media, economists, people on X, et cetera, that it almost became part of their identity. And it's really hard for them to say, I was wrong. Right. I think that's why people enjoy listening and hearing to you is like, you're just like, well, I thought this is not that okay here. Now, where do we go from here? Right. And kind of that even keeled, you know, prudent type of approach is very rare because I think we live in a world where extreme communication is what ultimately drives eyeballs. And so you see people, rather than say, I think there's a 50% probability of something, people will say the world is ending. And so that very extreme stance has actually led people to be less likely to change their mind. And that I think is really

why you see so many people who are under-allocated to the market in this recovery is that it almost became a thing of, I want to be right more than I want to make money. And one of my thesis moving forward for the next decade or so is we are going to see more of this. We are going to see these very extreme swings in people's viewpoints. Consensus will build much quicker. And when that happens, you will have a group of people who control a lot of money in the market who actually will not be able to mentally be flexible enough to then change their mind. And in a weird way, the source of information, which has been this great boom for so many of the retail investors, is going to act as if it is some sort of corralling and groupthink for many of

the institutional investors. And so then it kind of falls back on that demographic shift, which is like maybe the retail investors are going to have a bigger advantage going forward than the institutions because they have a lot of flexibility where it's not, I'm trying to manage my reputation, I'm trying to make sure I don't look stupid internally, my boss, my bonus, like all that stuff does not exist for the retail investors. And so I think that you're seeing retail investors with that nimbleness that has allowed them to enjoy in one of the greatest market recoveries in at least our lifetime while institutions are still sitting there. And I had dinner recently with somebody who runs one of these places and they're like, you walk into the investment

committee and convince everyone that we should plow all the money in one tariff so that... And he's like going through the whole thing and he's just like, it wasn't even worth trying. right and he's looking by the way like i didn't think that was going to be the recovery it was but still it's like you know you're facing your colleagues and so i just think the dynamics of the decision making are fascinating here and put the institutions somewhat on their back foot compared to retail yeah so this gets into an important point and having spent my life in the traditional finance world first trading myself with morgan stanley and covering hedge funds and asset managers, and then being a part of them and having many, many portfolio

managers report to me, I'll just tell you, the thing that I think is the biggest problem, and for everyone out there who's an allocator who's watching this, Bitcoin is the hurdle rate for everyone now. And I don't bring that up as a selling point for it. I bring it up as you need stuff that moves fast. What you described, and I agree with you, hedge funds and asset managers can't move fast. We talked about this, why retail can move fast. Greed, I always said, was a social emotion.

Fear is a personal emotion. Now, what that means inside, what you described is like an investment committee. At the end of the day, in a lot of hedge funds, they might have hundreds of employees, but if the person at the top is worried about their pocketbook and they want to take risks down, the whole place takes the risk down. If you want to fire someone because they've had a drawdown and it might be the best time to invest at that point, a portfolio manager's had a drawdown because of the shakeout with the tariffs and they're like, nothing's changed with my companies and they get de-risked, they get fired, and then the stuff snaps back. We're in a world where I

think things are just happening more violently than ever before, partly because there's just less liquidity relative to the size of the assets that are out there. That's what makes Bitcoin so great is that it's still only a two trillion dollar asset. It's very, very small relative to where it should be compared to gold, compared to the stock markets, in my opinion. And so I think this is kind of a representation of people just having a hard time being aligned with the cycles. If there's no more recessions, you're still having cycles. But these are liquidity cycles, not credit cycles and liquidity cycles tend to be violent down, violent back up. And you just have to think tariff man came back last Sunday. He's announcing big tariffs all over

the place. The market's at all time highs and everyone's now sitting there going, why isn't it falling? I don't understand. It should be falling. This is ridiculous. The stock market's higher than it was. People just don't adapt. They don't adjust. And I think it's because of the things that you mentioned. I also think they can't possibly imagine that retail could know more than them. And that's one of the things that makes them go, I know this, I have the right thing because retail's buying, which means I should stick with my position. I heard that at one dinner from three people at the table, this was back in April, mid-April after the bounce. And I just think retail has hurt people because they're trading more from a place of not having to deal

with having something to lose. It's very Bitcoin-ish at the end of the day. I love it. Let's talk about the ai arms race the u.s and china locked and loaded meta is throwing money around like uh not even like a professional sports team actually just like a tech company in a talent war um open ai is launching tons of new things we've seen uh lovable now uh is like a multi-billion dollar company um we've got companies like perplexity and anthropic i mean it's just every single day there is new news that is all about the software layer and then that doesn't even include all of the hardware and energy and the facilities and just everything that's happening here. How are you looking through this AI arms race?

And where are maybe the areas that people who are watching or listening to this should have their eyes focused on so that they can avoid the noise and just focus on the signal? Well, the most important thing this week, and again, I hate to pat us on the back, but I think you said something important. You and I have just kind of stayed steady during this and said, is it really as bad as people are saying? I think that's one of the most important things is to ask the question, is it really as bad as what people are saying? So one of the things that we hit exactly right on was the fact that the rare

earth situation was a major part of the overall tariff situation. And so once China was clearly, and they still are, wielding this rare earth dominance as a way to impact the way the tariffs would be negotiated. NVIDIA had an announcement this week where their export ban has been lessened with China. So I think Jensen Yuan is actually in China right now. And the reason that's important to start the conversation on the AI arms race is that there is definitely a truce between China and the US, and it is a race now that is faster than ever. So in my opinion, once both countries realize that number one, they need each other. And I think China already realized this, but I think the U S understood clearly that rare earth is a, is a necessity the same way that chips are

necessity for China, that we are now in a place where people have to start focusing on the race. There is a podcast, which I listened to this morning with Peter Diamandis. He had Eric Schmidt on Eric Schmidt is by far the most level-headed person. If people like the level-headed nature of us, they should go listen to Eric Schmidt. He went through everything on this podcast in an hour and a half and he covered exactly the point that you mentioned which was no matter how fast we think things are moving software always gets ahead of hardware and then hardware needs to pick up the one thing he did say at the very beginning and i'm going to use this this quote and i'm not going to give it exactly as it was because i haven't memorized it yet but he was asked what

are the constraints he said the only constraint of ai in terms of where we're going to get and the timing is electricity. He did say, interestingly, for people that have heard me talk about power, but also this hardware and embodiment side, he did say that all of the nuclear that we've talked about building, that's all well and good, but we'll have ASI before the first one is actually brought to the market. He said, we're going to have to use traditional sources of energy. And that just means this is a powerful thing that's starting to show up. And I will just tell you that in earnings reports, I've been looking to see, if you go through JP Morgan's earnings report, you go through Goldman Sachs, you will see endless pieces of information inside

their earnings report about the productivity and efficiency gains they've already seen from incorporating AI and how they have agents coming continuously after this to just do more. But there were companies in Switzerland, ABB out of Switzerland and Legrand out of France, both of them highlighted that U.S. data center demand has just driven their earnings for the quarter. You are going to see a massive build-out, and the U.S. is leading the charge on this with China. And there is no way, as Eric Schmidt said, that either one will allow the other one to win, which means this is going to be a race which will go for military supremacy and for the ability for us to dominate around the globe. And that's where I just think in both

cases, people have to, whatever they thought about AI at the beginning of the year, just like I said with stablecoins and where we are a year from today, six months ago is when DeepSeek was a story. The new story is that you better get ready for the build-out because the build-out is coming and there's waves and waves of dollars that are going bigger and bigger every single day. It is fascinating to me how bifurcated the AI story is. The power, the electricity, the kind of hardware side is so different than the software side. And obviously, the software folks are aware that that stuff's important.

But when I go and I talk to entrepreneurs who are building these software companies, they're not experts. They don't pretend to be experts. They're not very interested. They're just like, look, I'm in my lane. The hardware folks, they are not very well versed in some of the software stuff. And so in a weird way, this bifurcation, you need both sides to be successful. And what it is doing is it is sucking in even more talent, right?

Because it's not like you have one person who crossed over into the AI industry, and now they can do software and hardware. In most cases, they're picking a side to a degree. Now, there are some companies or groups of people who are trying to do both, but those are few and far between compared to the energy companies and the hardware manufacturers versus some of these software companies that, frankly, have very few people and are growing very rapidly. One thing I will say is I finally have started to have conversations with people where I am hearing that accounting firms, law firms, they are not necessarily firing people right now, but they are slowing their hiring of entry-level individuals because they see what is going to happen over the next, call it, five years or so. And so what I wonder is where do those people go, right? If you've been trained to be a lawyer, and you're now trying to go work at a law firm, but there's less jobs, there's going to be a plethora of people with certain training and experience, but nowhere to go. And it's not like you can just like go in house because you have no experience as a lawyer, right? So I do think that there's some things that we're gonna have to figure out. And I wonder how many of those people are going to be smart enough to say, well, I have a legal background. Let me go understand this artificial intelligence thing. And maybe actually I can use the skills that these tools provide me to apply my legal understanding to some new sector, etc. Right. It takes a pretty entrepreneurial type of person to do something like that. And so as we see the fallout of this happen, I think that the ramifications, we're just seeing the start of it. Right.

And another example maybe that I'll share is, I was talking to an Uber driver recently. And I said, hey, I saw that they're going to bring self-driving cars to New York. And he said, to put me out of business. And he said it kind of tongue in cheek, but there's a lot of people who drive taxis and they drive Uber and they drive Lyft and they do all this stuff. And so I do think that although we kind of, from an academic perspective, know this stuff is coming, the real world ramifications are going to be much broader than maybe people appreciate today.

And that will change many aspects of the economy, both positively and negatively, as we go through this kind of entire revolution. So here's the only thing I'll say. I think what everyone should do is a homework assignment. Okay, two things. Um, number one, spend about an hour talking to chat GPT voice mode about entrepreneur, the word, the mindset, what you need to be an entrepreneur, uh, the limitations of being an entrepreneur in the past.

So when you said entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur right now. whatever you needed in the past you can get now from grok for okay three hundred dollars for one month if you're a person a graduate who's having trouble getting a job the greatest thing you have right now for one month is no job which means you have unlimited time you can become an entrepreneur in one month without any question start with looking up entrepreneur and then go have grok four build a website so you and i've talked about repler replet and cursor and windfall and lovable and all these these code engines that allow you to build things just voice the well grok four can do that so you don't have to go out there and try to get another application up just start with

grok four because that's where we're getting to is the llms are getting so powerful and remember grok four is created by elon musk through colossus which is one of the most amazing stories in engineering history as far as i'm concerned and something i'm spending a lot more time on but if you spend one month on grok for start building your website if you were just fired as a lawyer start picking some place to do it create your website then go out learn how to use social media to go market your new business which will be i don't know pick whatever legal thing you want you'll do the shorthanded documents you'll do whatever and see if you can get to the point, we're within a month of $300, because that's all Grok4 is. It sounds expensive, but

that's because if you buy it, which I did, and you keep it for a year, well, that's thousands of dollars. But in one month, in 15 hours a day, which is an entrepreneurial mindset, you'd be shocked at what you can get done by just conversing with it. And then in $300, you have the power of an entrepreneur. I believe entrepreneurial capabilities for all human beings take actually just trying once, being successful with it. Because once you get it, the same way I hear the term golf bug all the time, so I'm gonna go play golf and I got the bug.

There's an entrepreneurial bug too that once you start it and you get going with it, I think you can create businesses and have an app going so quickly with a website, a game, whatever you want, you'd be shocked at how you could grow your business within one month. And I put that challenge to every parent,

fund it for their kids, 300 bucks for a month. help get them to do that, I think you can build amazing things. And I think you can have a business much faster and it's going to eat away at the big places that fired you or that didn't hire you. I could not agree more. I think that, um, you know, I've got young kids and, uh, one of the best things that, uh, you can do is, you know, it's like the old joke. Uh, if your parents tell you something, you don't believe them, but if your friend's parent says it, then all of a sudden you believe them. Uh, I use the voice mode and I would just ask simple questions and I put it, you know, on speakerphone. And so my daughter in particular can hear it. And all of a sudden

she's like, Oh, okay. Like I, you know, she, she understands or agrees with her beliefs when the machine says it. But if I tell her the same thing, she's like, you know, my dad's an idiot. And so, um, I can only imagine as she gets older, these tools are going to get better. Um, but you can do things regardless of your kid's age. Right. And I think that there is some really, really cool stuff where, um, we have an Alexa, uh, as an example, um, that, uh, really we just used to play music frankly um now my kids know how to talk to it and ask it to do things and so one of the aspects that is fascinating to me is they are growing up in this voice mode uh kind of interface in a way that probably you and i did not have um or become used to um but also the machine

that they're talking to is smarter than me right and that's kind of you know yeah sure the computer was smarter than my parents, but she had to do a lot of work to get the information. You had to ask the right question. You had to go into the links. You had to go extract it, all this kind of stuff. Now, this thing knows everything, right? And so to your point, it's easy for a young child to ask simple questions. What's the capital of some state? But what you're talking about is that same machine can also tell you how to build the website and even do it for you. It can tell you how to optimize the business. I don't know if you saw,

there is this pretty well-known guy in the Bitcoin industry. Well, I should say, there's a guy in the Bitcoin industry. I don't want to get too excited. But Udi has been around for a long time. And I think that I saw him post on X. He bought a Mac mini.

He loaded it with a Bitcoin wallet. And one of the models, I forget which one, but it was like $5,000 or $10,000 worth of Bitcoin. and he said, go help me accumulate more Bitcoin. And he's going to kind of document, you know, what does this machine do? So there's no like legacy information. There's no anything, and I'm fascinated, right?

Like imagine if it is actually able to go accumulate more Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of people who are like, wait a second, I want the machine employee that, you know, doesn't need to get paid money, doesn't need that, you know, all these things. But like, that's where the world's going. And it's cool to see those types of experiments

because it pushes the edge of what is possible. Yep. And that's the point. I don't think people understand an entrepreneurial mindset is the belief that you have in yourself that you can build anything. Once you have that power, okay, I need to make money.

Well, then I'll just go make money. How will you make money? I'm an entrepreneur. I'll go make money. Once you have a job and that job has been disrupted, you have to do something new. You have no choice.

So an entrepreneur never worries because just like Bitcoin, it doesn't have a moat. It doesn't have this story around it and not a moat. It doesn't have a story around it that can be broken. Getting a moat is what an entrepreneurial situation is. And I think everyone has to have that mindset. And Eric Schmidt talks about that at the end of the interview, where it always evolves into what are people going to do?

There will always be some form of business or something. I can't even imagine, even in a world of abundance, that there's not some kind of exchange that's happening. The value and how it is done might be different than what we all expect, but there's going to be an exchange of value that happens. So when you talk about this, and I keep trying to say to people,

I'm a very creative person in terms of thoughts. I like connecting things. It's one of the reasons why I love X over a book is because I do have a form of ADHD. My brain runs all over the place and I like to learn new things. the great thing about chat GPT voice mode is if I come up with a conversation for the two of us that I think would be interesting for us to have and I don't want to lose that thought I have a

conversation with chat GPT it's not just now an expanded knowledge base for me that entire conversation I don't think people realize it's now in history it's in the chat so you can go back and reference it so every single conversation you ever want to have in your life is documented it. The power of having that at your fingertips at all times is insane information. It's just insane empowerment to know that every question you've ever asked is there. All the answers you can see you're learning. So, you know, if we leave anything with people and I know I get reached out and I'm sure you do too, it's like, don't be scared of AI, embrace it, use it, have your kids use it. It will bring power and empowerment to every individual who uses it, but you got to start

and you got to literally just say, start with day one and just keep going with it. So I think people are doing it but i think it's gonna have a huge impact on the economy could not agree more where can i send people to find you on the internet actually i'm having someone uh really focus on on answering that question more i literally hired an intern to do something for me so i'm not going to go through yet what it is because just like your experience with ud and watching how this is going to go making bitcoin this is a much simpler thing but they can find me on youtube they can find me on substack they can find me on on x they can find me on linkedin they can find me wherever it's Geordie Visser and it's Visser labs or some version of that, which is why I need to

have a website that just organizes things a little bit better for me. Amazing. All right. Well, thank you for doing this. We'll talk again next week. See you, bud. Have a good one.