The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin, AI & the Next Macro Shift Investors Aren’t Ready For | Jordi Visser

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. 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

Starting point is 00:00:42 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. There's three

Starting point is 00:01:24 components of Bitcoin that I've kind of put my side on. When is this going to go back up? Because the one thing I believe in is that it's going higher. The question and the point you made, what's the probability? What would have to happen for it to sell off past 80,000 and down to 60? Crypto isn't getting money because it's all being sucked out by AI. I think that starts to change this year. What's going on, guys? Today in this conversation with Jordy Visser, we talk about the recent CPI numbers. What's going on with the Fed? How is the stock market performing? What is going on in artificial intelligence? We get very specific. How can you use this technology to learn and to get better at your job? We talk about Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And also, Jordy throws out a couple of names of different organizations and companies that you should be paying attention to as an investor. All that and more in my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start. We get the CPI numbers this week. Obviously, they came in ice cold compared to where expectations were. Maybe the two most interesting parts to me were actually economists thought that CPI was going to accelerate. It was going to go up, but instead it went down. And so, yes, the magnitude, I think, is what got everyone's attention. But to me, the like opposite direction was actually more telling where economists completely missed. Now, the critics are saying, hey, wait, there's a bunch

Starting point is 00:02:35 of data that's missing in here. This is basically, you know, not nefarious, but it is manipulated to a degree. And so let's wait for December numbers. What do you take away from the CPI measurement? The most important takeaway, in my opinion, for everyone who's listening to this is to care less about whether the number should have been year-over-year 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, and to go back to what Jerome Powell just said. His focus is on the labor market. His focus on the belief that the bigger risk is the labor market, and we can kind of look through the inflation because going forward, the bigger risk is on the labor side. We got jobs numbers as well. So when you combine the two, makes the Fed's decision look rational. And the reason the inflation stuff, I'll keep saying,

Starting point is 00:03:19 we will not have inflation of any magnitude that impacts the market could we see cpi above three percent next year yes but gas at the pump is going to have to go higher so right now you have this three i would say if you gave me the top three choices for inflation that matters in terms of the prince you're going to tell me what gas in the pump is done people should go look it's at four-year lows right now it's just coming down and it's coming down relentlessly it's 38 states it's under three dollars yeah so you're you're you're getting this and this has really fallen sharply over the course of the last few months the same point wages continue to go go down and at the bottom end they're going even further down if you don't have wages going higher it's really

Starting point is 00:04:04 hard to make the argument that inflation is going to be sticky when people are voting socialist and they're going through they're complaining about the fact they can't afford things so you have that and then we've got a polarizing thing of blaming what affordability means and who's on it housing is coming down. So owner's equivalent rent straight down, gas at the pump straight down and wages down and the inflation swaps, which are the market's expectation of inflation going forward. They're also at the lows of the year and in a, you know, a diamond ski slope down. So I think people should focus on the fact that there is a higher probability after this this week that the Fed's going to raise rates next year. And I think that's where it should

Starting point is 00:04:45 be. This becomes important as people still continue to focus on, oh my God, long-term yields are going up in Japan. They're going up in Germany. And I think people are going to have to start to face the facts that we have a steepening yield curve. The inflation data this week, regardless of whether you believe it or not, you have to leave inflation alone now for the next six months because the labor market remains the focus. Okay. So there's a couple of things in here I want to dig a little bit deeper on. So gas prices are coming down. Home prices are coming down as well. I understand gas is a little bit more pronounced than the home prices. The home prices is kind of like a little too late and a little too much. People would like it to be a

Starting point is 00:05:18 much more significant decrease in the home price to make, you know, kind of feel it, but it is coming down. Also food in many categories is coming down as well. And so if you have gas, food, and homes generally trending downward, I always go to why, why is it going down? How much of it is the economic policies that are being put in place versus there's market dynamics at play that actually are not being affected by the economic policy. Do you have a sense for what's driving this kind of deflationary or disinflationary aspect of the economy? Well, let's start with, before I get into kind of a driving force,

Starting point is 00:05:54 let's just start with mean reversion, first of all, meaning we had a massive monetary stimulus that took us out of a world where we had been in disinflation for a long time. That disinflation occurred during exponential innovation, which was seen in the form of mobile, the cloud, software, SaaS, everything that was coming in was disinflationary. We shoved a bunch of money in the system. Think of it as the holiday season. People went out, they had too much to drink. Okay. The inflation hangover lasted a while.

Starting point is 00:06:26 We're still mean reverting back. That's the first thing. The second thing is if we have a K-shaped economy, and if the top end of the wealth is owned by very few people, that means the average person, the median voter in this country, does not have the money to go spend at a restaurant the way they used to, does not have the money. So if you believe in Michael Green's paper and you believe in the poverty thing, whatever your beliefs are, at some point, that means that there isn't enough money to YOLO it and just go do what you want. So I think that's had an impact.

Starting point is 00:06:57 but the third thing and probably the most important is ai um ai is the force behind disrupting the labor market putting a cap on wages there's a reason why michigan consumer confidence is near all-time lows when back in before the dot-com bubble it was at all-time highs new orders for the ism is for pmis are below 50 back before the dot-com bubble they were up above 60. you have a very different world right now in terms of the disruption that's happening from from artificial intelligence. The reason I spend so much time going through this, it will remain this disinflationary force. But more importantly, next year is something that you've said something on this podcast that I very seldom hear people say. But the reality is we're going to hire lots

Starting point is 00:07:42 of people next year, lots of employees next year, but they're all going to be digital. And so if we're hiring digital employees, they're not spending. And if they're not spending, that means the people that are actually at jobs have their wages capped. So I think the artificial intelligence side next year with the agentic stuff starting is going to be an issue. And then three years from now, we start getting into the AGI deflationary forces. Inflation, in my opinion, will not be a story again for the markets that matters and people that focus on it and get all like buggy eyed over it. It's going to be a big mistake when you're staring at the most deflationary force the world has ever seen. So when I go and I look at what could happen next

Starting point is 00:08:17 year, let's listen to the White House first. They would say real wages are going up. There's going to be the largest tax refund season of all time. They just delivered $1,776 warrior dividends to the military. They believe that tariff revenue is going to continue higher. And they're essentially setting the stage for this economic boom, which would be great for investors. It'll be great for GDP. Trump is talking about 20, 25% GDP. Howard Levin is talking about six, right? We're at 3.5, 3.8. It's just obviously they're going to paint a very rosy picture. But the things that they are talking about, I think you can at least see a dotted line if we continue in the path that we're going. GDP should continue to grow faster. Real wages should continue to go up. What is the

Starting point is 00:09:05 opposite case? What do you think? You mentioned possibly raising of rates rather than dropping of rates or just like walk me through maybe how you are positioning mentally for 2026 and like what your expectations are. Okay. So everything that you mentioned, I would say at this point is now becoming consensus okay there's nothing within there i think three months ago it would have been a different story but now as we're going into the end of the year and people are forced to make decisions we've seen a rotation in the market that started in in june and it's kind of accelerated and that's been out of growth and into more value related things it's been out of momentum it's been into small caps out of large caps those are traditionally kind of the rotations

Starting point is 00:09:46 that happen when pmis start to go higher which i've talked about and it hasn't started yet but I think it's not only going to start next year, but I think it's going to keep going. So the question of what do I expect? I expect the forgotten misfits of the market to outperform the very crowded leaders. And I think this rotation has been happening. I think it's going to be much harder to make money in AI infrastructure names that dominated during the LLM period. And people need to start shifting their attention towards the VLM period, the visual language

Starting point is 00:10:17 models, Tesla, hated by most people. i think it's going to be the best performing mag 7 stock i still think nvidia will do great i think apple will do great those are all because those are going to start benefiting from brains and machines nvidia will just keep doing well because people are actually bearish it and going through it i don't like the hyperscalers and anything built on code next year as like a general theme now here are the risks if i had to pick two things that could be the thing to cause a a 20 correction, which I think has a reasonable probability of occurring next year, it would be, first of all, the rotation that's happening. If I'm right and PMIs are heading up towards 60,

Starting point is 00:10:56 this would be the first. I want to make sure people understand this because whenever I say PMIs, people kind of glaze over. We haven't had a build out on the manufacturing side since 2003 to 2007 that's been synchronized around the globe and has been driven by multiple things happening at the same time. We've had inventory rebuilds where because people got really scared, they stopped buying things, thinking a recession was coming. Think about the European situation when we thought Brexit, where we thought Greece and everybody was going under. Take the oil situation, 2015, 2016. Take COVID. In all of those cases, we stopped buying things for a period of time, it was like a mini recession. And then we got this rebuild, which was only to rebuild

Starting point is 00:11:41 inventories where it petered out. But we haven't seen anything that has been on a big scale. We're going to have data center build out. But now we're going to get into the agentic world. Now we're going to get into the embodied AI world. People need to start understanding what this means. We're going to have a synchronized upgrade for computers, for phones, for autos. We're going to continue to have the data center build out. We're going to need to build nuclear plants. We're going to need to go out and mine for material this is going to be a pmi going higher we'll keep saying that but the risk is if the mag 7 or the mag 4 that i'm saying if the hyperscalers don't do well and they just kind of go sideways this year alpha still needs to be created in hedge funds and

Starting point is 00:12:20 passive investment everyone's going to start rotating into what's working that could become very disruptive because it could leave people in a position where they need to buy illiquid things and get out of liquid things. Very easy to get out of the liquid things. We've seen how Bitcoin, you can get out of that if you want, no problem. But we haven't seen when people want to go buy small caps, what that actually does. So I think when PMIs are actually going this way, it could be a negative. The second thing, and this just gets back into it. I don't think it's going to be an AI bubble thing. In fact, that's another consensus for the people on the negative side. I guess if I was going to pick something, then go through it's the bottleneck side that

Starting point is 00:12:57 the bottlenecks from the power get worse and that the GDP doesn't actually come through because we're at a standstill with rolling out Blackwell and getting these data centers up and running. I don't think that's going to happen, but that will be another thing. Both scenarios hit the hyperscalers relative to the other names. And that's why I think growth is going to underperform value and size is going to be shifting too. Now, there's a couple of things happening in AI that I think are worth paying attention to. We've got Google DeepMind, we've got Microsoft. They've had a bunch of comments recently in terms of what's happening here. But there's been a lot of focus on Oracle. And you and I were talking before this about Jim Chanos, and he had a pretty

Starting point is 00:13:35 rational take, I think, on maybe the bear case for Oracle. Can you talk a little bit, maybe summarize his thoughts, and then maybe have a response yourself? Yeah. I've listened to, I'd say, five really good podcasts this week. It's been a good week for him. Sam Altman did one, Demis Hassabis did one, Mustafa Suleiman did one, Bill Gurley did one, and then the Jim Chanos one. So I listened to the Jim Chanos one, which was on monetary matters, and I wanted to basically hear how bearish he really was. And here are my, I guess I'll narrow it down to three takes. Number one, he's not that bearish. So when you read X, it's this like, oh, the world's going to collapse. He did say it reminds him of the dot-com bubble.

Starting point is 00:14:21 and it should it like any time that innovation whether it's railroads or anything and bill girley said this extremely well there is no time in history where they're not bubble like feelings because speculation happens it's gonna happen so he made the point that this feels like the dot-com bubble that was the only one he referenced which i'll keep saying one comparison is not a good comparison for investing if you can do it for 10 other things that's great but he did bring it up. What he did say about Oracle, which I think is true, if you asked me to pick one name in this whole thing that had the biggest risk, it would be number one, someone who's using their balance sheet in the manner that Oracle is. And number two, it would be a company that doesn't have

Starting point is 00:15:06 the revenues coming in to offset it. So it is really a bet on the ability of other customers to pay them and for this to happen. And the risk is even in my scenario, I believe three years from Now, we have no idea what the world is going to look like. We'll be approaching AGI. I think three years from now, there's a cliff drop in terms of certainty. I'm writing a sub stack right now, comparing it to Picasso, who was a realist painter at the beginning of his career, and then realized that photography was going to ruin that. So he moved to cubism and abstract.

Starting point is 00:15:43 That's kind of what I see happening is there's a cliff of realism into cubism or abstract in three years because AI is going to move too fast. Jim Cheno said the risk is that we never get the revenues and that they're delayed out to 2028. I think that is a legitimate argument and a legitimate risk. The reason I differ for, and I love hearing the bear case, is because I fully believe we will start seeing the revenues accelerate last year,

Starting point is 00:16:06 and they've already been accelerating. Dario Modi's business has 10 times the- You're saying that next year, you think that we'll start to see the acceleration? Absolutely, and I think this is a big moment for people that are listening. I will absolutely cover why AI agents is so important and how this brings some names of the past into the leaders of next year. That is a major focus for me next year because that is

Starting point is 00:16:26 more PMI related. There's a lot of them too. So Jim Chanos did a really, really good job. And most importantly, if you guys go listen to it, I want you to think, is he being probabilistic or is he being hyperbolic? He was very probabilistic. When Michael Burry does things, I find it to be very hyperbolic. It's like, it's the end of the world. This is what's going to happen. So he talks like someone that's betting on a hundred to one shot. And Jim Chanos is saying, I think this is going to happen, but who really knows? And he says, who really knows? I asked ChachiBT. How many times did he say, who really knows? Six is what ChachiBT came up in some form of that. So I think it's a good interview to listen to. Today's episode is brought to you by

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Starting point is 00:17:54 I think that's healthy, right? And I think I've been pretty surprised by, as you mentioned, maybe the presenting of Chanos' ideas versus when you actually hear him talk, the like rationality behind it. When I go and I look in the AI world, it really feels to me

Starting point is 00:18:09 like there is two tails of the tape if you will. There are the infrastructure, so the energy, the models, all this stuff. No one can say that ChatGPT is not popular, right? It's very obvious, both from a data and investment standpoint and an adoption standpoint. But then I go and I see maybe application-specific things. So the latest one I saw on X, and I don't want to pick on them in particular. I'm just using them as an example. I'm not very familiar with how accurate these reports are. But there are now reports coming out that Harvey AI on the positive side has gone from zero to 100 million in annualized revenue very quickly. They are excellent at getting these big law firms to adopt

Starting point is 00:18:51 a law-specific AI application and using it internally. The knock or the negative or critique is that the usage inside of these law firms is not very high. And the argument that I saw that made me kind of think about this is law firms bill by the hour. Efficiency gets passed on to the customer, not onto the law firm. In a way, by adopting more AI and becoming more efficient, it leads to less revenue, which could be a negative kind of incentive. On top of that, I now have heard multiple times through different anecdotes that a lot of these organizations are starting to quote unquote adopt AI because they want to feel like they are AI native or they are embracing this technology. But it's coming top down. It's the CEO, the executives, the partners

Starting point is 00:19:41 at a law firm saying, hey, we need to be using AI. But the people who actually would be using on a day-to-day basis are not either bought in, don't find it valuable, feel like they're going to make less money, whatever. And so maybe I'll connect that to, I saw a study recently that said the companies that have been talking about AI in their earnings calls, outperforming companies who have not been talking about AI. So how do you start to weave together this, like, okay, we're heading into 2026. Nobody thinks AI is not going to be valuable in the future, but are we yet at a point where people are adopting it as like applications and the usage and all that? And does that have an impact on whether it's the NVIDIAs, the open AIs or anyone else?

Starting point is 00:20:18 So let me, let me answer this in a way that will also give people some homework. Perfect. So harvey.ai, if you go download the transcript from the Bill Gurley interview and also the Mustafa Suleiman interview. So I had no idea what you're going to ask, but this is where my brain goes. I want to download everything I can about harvey.ai.

Starting point is 00:20:41 And then I want to put it through the lens of the two transcripts of really smart people that had something to say on this. And then I'll bring it back to my thoughts on what this means in the end. So if you take those transcripts and then you bring in whatever information you can on harvey.ai. And then you say, I want you to analyze their business from the lens of what

Starting point is 00:21:02 Bill Gurley said in his transcript and what Mustafa Suleiman said, pick the points for their business relative to open AI competing with them. Can I ask a question real quick? Because I think that when people hear that, they say that sounds smart, but there's a large portion of the audience who says, I don't know how to do what he just said. Let's just spend two seconds to talk through, can you walk through, okay, where do they go and get a transcript? How do they do that? And then are you going to chat GPT or using a different tool like when you're personally doing this? And are you uploading a PDF or just like kind of walk through the steps so that if somebody wants to go do this, they have a blueprint. So if you go to YouTube and you go to

Starting point is 00:21:41 the interviews of the two I mentioned, Bill Gurley was in Tim Ferriss and Mustafa Suleiman was on Moonshots. If you go inside the more thing where it describes, you can hit a transcript button. it'll bring the transcript on the right-hand side. You might have a button up there that allows you to press it to already copy the transcript, and it'll immediately bring up that transcript with inside ChatGPT. If you're copying the transcript, just copy it and paste it in. Don't make it organized. Just copy the entire transcript, highlight it, and paste it in just like you would anything else. Do it for both of them in the same chat thing that you have open, and then go get whatever information you have on harvey.ai and copy that and put that in

Starting point is 00:22:21 they're all three of them. And then at the very end, just say, I want you to analyze this in the lens of this. If they do that, it will analyze it from the lens of Mustafa Suleiman and Bill Gurley based on what they said. And there's two points about that. Number one, Bill Gurley openly talked in there about how to compete with the big mega companies on being your own vertical with inside this is very difficult because the question is, you can grow to $100 million valuation really quick, but will OpenAI just absorb that at some point? Because at the end, how are they doing this? This is the thing people have to remember, and this is the difference between the dot-com bubble. If you take one thing from me on this, the dot-com bubble was financed with the telecom

Starting point is 00:23:08 companies building out the fiber that was necessary for the bandwidth that was going to be used by the future companies of the Mag7. The VCs were funding those startups. Those were the people that were the dream of what was going to do it. So what happened is you needed both the startups to keep getting money and growing to use the bandwidth that they were taking the debt out. There was a long gap between the actual proof of concept and this. That is very different than OpenAI, Microsoft being able to monetize the gains because they're the ones funding the build out instead of the telecom companies. And it's all about intelligence. At the end of the day, how is Harvey AI doing this? Do they have their own frontier model? And if so, how are they going

Starting point is 00:23:51 to compete as the models get faster and faster? Or are they using the models, meaning they're paying someone else for the intelligence? Well, if they're paying someone else for the intelligence, that cost keeps going higher and higher. That's what's happened to Cursor. That's why Cursor had to go raise lots of money. At the end of the day, the commodity is the intelligence. They're pricing the intelligence based on what someone's going to pay for it. So just remember that Harvey.ai will compete, and Bill Gurley made that point. The reason I brought up Mustafa Suleiman, he specifically mentioned how we are at a critical stage now. As AI agents happen, knowledge workers are exposed. Knowledge workers are under attack. And between the two of them,

Starting point is 00:24:31 they said, to survive in this world, and this is what my goal is going to be with my webinar series, with all the teaching and the stuff i did it's very easy for me to say this stuff people may not know how to do it i'm going to show people how to do it you have to be ai native which means you have to use it for everything in your life i'm going to show them so many ways they both said you want to be the one who's working with the ai agents or managing the ai agents not the one that the ai agent is displacing that's why the parents have to get their kids up to speed on this the schools are not doing it the government's not doing it someone's got to do it it's kind of the reason why i'm here so the third point the reason why i think this is a problem so what does

Starting point is 00:25:05 does it mean for law firms? If you run a law firm right now, and what Anthony said, you get charged by the, it's all revenue per employee. And at the end of the day, do you have too many employees versus a startup business that's going to figure out a way to make more money by expanding the amount of clients that they can handle using the agents, as opposed to you slowing down the business, trying to become more profitable. It's still at the end of the day becomes a race to revenue per employee. And I think firms that are going to win in the end are going to be the ones that can do it for the least amount or making the most revenue per employee. That is a hyper competitive. And that's why I say we go from realism to abstract over the course of the next

Starting point is 00:25:45 three years. Now talk a little bit more as to how these companies are going to evolve, right? You know, one of the areas that probably you and I both are very familiar with and people consume content is content creation. And I've been paying attention to 11 Labs with the audio and kind of this like synthetic audio. I've seen people who have created human-like avatars. So you can do people who don't actually exist, but you also could train a bunch of data on videos of you. And now you have a Geordie avatar that looks and talks and it may not be perfect. It's a little robotic. But in content, no different than in some of these other verticals, I don't know, three years, five years, it's going to be better. And it's probably going to be just as good as if

Starting point is 00:26:29 you and I sat down and sat in front of a microphone. How does content evolve? How do people think about their business? And if AI actually is going to be able to do what they do, what is the Picasso realism to abstract kind of transition look like? I'm trying to think which pot. So I hate doing this where it's constantly going back to podcasts, but I say this all the time. You get some of the best information on answers to these questions from that. So I do believe as someone who creates a lot of content that I am trying to touch into emotion from people. I think it's still very hard for an avatar to do that. I think it's very hard for AI to do that. Mustafa Suleiman talked about that in terms of the consciousness

Starting point is 00:27:15 of ai and kind of the ability to connect with human beings i i do think for people that maybe don't care about the connections but if an avatar says they have three kids if they can't describe the personal relationships which they have to have all this information i can give you many many reasons why with my kids my four kids what what main meant to them what the experiences we had together i'm going with two of my kids to the next game tonight like these these things that you have experiences are always going to be very difficult, not impossible, very difficult to connect. And I think this is what separates still at the end of the day, a great movie and a good movie. So if you just use movies as an example, I'm connected to the movie Good Will

Starting point is 00:28:02 Hunting. And if I had to analyze why, I find it to be a psychological journey. I like those things, but it's not just me that likes that movie. It was nominated. Why does that separate from something else? Why does Avengers get us? Do I think it's easier to take Avengers and do what Good Will Hunting? I think Good Will Hunting is harder for an AI to do. So I may be wrong on all this stuff. I wrote a paper that Ben Affleck said it would never replace this. But I do think the connection between human beings will always separate this stuff in some way. And I think we will be walking with humanoids and artificial intelligence, but humans will still be the one passing on the emotion and connecting with people. Today's episode is brought to you by

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Starting point is 00:30:55 nobody complained about that. Everyone was complaining about the message of it's the worst time of the year. And so my takeaway was actually the mob cared more about the message than the AI stuff already. We're only in 2025, right? It's not like we're in like 2035 and it's been going on for a decade, whatever. And so it does feel like to your point, yes, there's probably this emotional connection, but I do sense we're already to a point where people are used to the AI content and um i love kathy wood to death they got her this week they got her with the ai slop yep um they you know it was a video or it was a photo of a man with his like orphan daughter and it had some you know emotional message and kathy retweeted it was like you know happy birthday

Starting point is 00:31:39 that's why kathy's kathy and like you know emotionally uh uh there and you know uh positive message etc but it was the ai photo and so you start to look at this and you say man this is happening way faster than people were expecting like you know remember three years ago when everyone was like it was very easy to tell ai yeah i don't know man so let me give you my my take on this because as jordan's like yeah the photo got me too no here's the funny thing um so there's there's two things about me that maybe we've never discussed here but But so I don't like short snippets of things. They don't, like, I like a story.

Starting point is 00:32:25 I don't, so I'm not attracted to like, boom, boom, boom, boom. You're not into the TikTok videos? No, I'm, honestly, as someone who loves technology, I remember the first time I went to TikTok, I can't do this. Like, it's just not the way my brain works. I actually like to think about things and I like to connect them. I need the time to connect dots on things. So the Picasso thing that I mentioned, this realism, that comes from Bill Gurley. If you listen to the podcast, you will listen to the way my brain works. I hear him say something. I'm like, that's really interesting. I didn't know he was a realist before he became a cubist and abstract. I immediately leave the subway on the way here and I write a paper. I literally write a paper. So it's going to go up on Substack probably today. I wrote that in there all about connecting dots between a bunch of different things.

Starting point is 00:33:09 I actually like, I need to get some depth from something. So this is probably the reason why I hated school because honestly, there's not a lot of depth in school. It's not connecting dots laterally. It's literally just shoving something down your throat. It's the reason why I hate Malcolm Gladwell books. No offense to Malcolm Gladwell. He's been very successful. How many times do I have to have beaten over my head 10,000 hours? You become a master at something. I didn't need to read that book for the 300 pages. I left it on a plane because I was bored very quickly going, why the hell do we got to keep doing this? Second thing about me, Jordy left it on a plane. I literally could not believe it. So the second thing about me,

Starting point is 00:33:46 my parents got divorced when I was a junior in high school. They probably should have got divorced earlier, but here's the thing. It, it caused this side of me of not to trust people as much. So if I get something on X, I assume it's not real or the people don't mean what they're saying so if you lead with that with and everyone can gauge on a scale of one to ten how much they trust i i lead with i don't trust you got to prove to me that like you're trustworthy you know in uh uh they say in like an aa meeting you know the first step is like acknowledging you have a problem uh hand up i've gotten tricked right there's definitely been photos i've seen and i think it's real i go on and i'm like wait a minute and i go back and i realize which tells

Starting point is 00:34:30 me there's probably plenty of times where i see the photo i think it's real and i don't even you know realize later that it wasn't real yeah and um i actually don't think the photos and videos like you know people are using this for uh essentially like entertainment dopamine driving you know type things whatever uh sure there are people who now are starting to do the commercials i think there's a coca-cola commercial with the polar bears and all that kind of stuff What I actually think is most interesting is McKinsey is now talking about using AI. And if you think about McKinsey, consume a bunch of information, synthesize it, output of, you know, recommendations. I was listening to Gavin Baker on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's podcast, and he talked about this idea of anything you can verify, you can automate.

Starting point is 00:35:23 And so I started going to the extremes of what are the things, where are we going here? and so when you start to just think of inside of a business this idea that you could have a business that is fully run by ai agents and maybe have one or two kind of human coordinator you know type strategist that doesn't seem as crazy to me as i two years ago i was all right you guys are you know off the reservation i don't know i i think that we are pretty damn close to somebody pulling this off and you know there's kind of this race of like who's going to be the first billion dollar one person company type thing. So if you pull it back to like, okay, I'm an investor and I'm trying to figure out, I have a dollar, where do I put it in the market? You kind of have a stack

Starting point is 00:36:08 that you can go and invest in. None of the model companies for the most part are like pure play model companies are public. So I could go buy Google. I could go buy some Tesla stocks, something like that. And there's a way to play, you know, kind of a, uh, maybe indirectly I can go and I can, NVIDIA hardware, chip design, Micron, I know that you've been very bullish on how to blow out earnings. I can go buy power and energy and some of the stuff that's happening there, Bitcoin miners that are transitioning, that type of stuff. I actually think that there is a huge hole in the market right now where public market investors don't have that many options of how to play the ai thing compared to the private market right and we know most of those

Starting point is 00:36:54 companies are going to die they're not going to make it but it does feel like given where this technology is going i don't know if you and i sat down and we came up with the names that we thought were really interesting ways to play ai could we come up with 50 names probably right i don't know shouldn't we be able to come up with like 500 200 you know some much much bigger name and so So it does feel like there is a wave that has not yet hit the public market where everyone's calling bubble, but you're like, Hey, you can't even play. I don't know half the trends in the AI industry. So let me, let me answer this in a, in a, a way that will both promote what I'm doing, but also we got them boys. He is now officially indoctrinated into

Starting point is 00:37:45 the internet promote what i'm doing but also uh give an answer that that i guess makes hopefully makes people think so when you but number one do number one before number two well it you won't even know it's promoting i'm just kind of all right perfect no i say promoting because i am going to start giving names to people on ai because i don't believe the way we describe it So artificial intelligence is not a new thing. Machine learning, let's go back to 2007. We've been on this path. Software.

Starting point is 00:38:23 Yeah, but big data. Remember big data in the 2010s? Exactly. But machine learning has been happening and we've had all kinds of different stages that have gone on. It's only when the Transformer paper came up that we went to this

Starting point is 00:38:34 and then that they realized, I mean, there'll be a movie at some point about OpenAI deciding to release this stuff. Demis Hassabis did an interview this week, or I listened to it this week, with Axios, where he talked about the fact that if they hadn't released it, so once they released it, it became a mad race to outdo each other to monetize. Before that, it was kind of behind the scenes in what we were doing. Was it going to be to solve cancer? Was it going to be to this? Well, then it became a consumer product, the nano banana and all the things you're talking about. So

Starting point is 00:39:04 you have to really think about the fact that AI is not itself the technology. The real value is about to happen now. So to me, Tesla is an AI company, but isn't an AI company. It can't work without the advancements in AI because the computer vision necessary for robo taxis and humanoids can't happen with it. So Tesla is an AI company and I'll take Tesla as being entering the artificial intelligence machines era, agentic world. I'm going to start talking about Cisco regularly. Why is Cisco going to matter? Right now, we have chat GPT on our phones. That's a cloud-based thing. If you're a big organization like Morgan Stanley, where I used to work, it would be great if someone could just go in in their enterprise and be like, hey,

Starting point is 00:39:50 what did the fixed income division say about this? Connect this all for me. And it's everything inside the firm in one bot. That's coming. Now, for that to happen, you need a lot of routers. you need a lot of traffic, you need a lot of protection, cyber. So Cisco has been benefiting from the data center side. Same way I talked about Corning. Corning is going to benefit from the expansion into Glass. And those are all AI companies. People are thinking in first order principles about this. It's about artificial. No, artificial intelligence, the real power is about to come with VLMs. That's why I keep writing about this. So I'm going to explain to people that I can come up easily with 100 names. The banks are AI trades right now because they have

Starting point is 00:40:31 the ability of putting in this intelligence and replacing knowledge workers. So source four, hey, where are the workers, knowledge workers? And I'm going to finish it with one thing. If three years from now, if you just focus, what do I think three years from now will still be growing revenues and their multiple is relatively low to the market or at a market multiple. And what they're doing three years from now is going to happen. Pharmaceuticals, AI drug Discovery. I talked about this. Eli Lilly, Merck, all of them were transitioning to a different phase of AI. And that's why I keep saying this is not about Palantir anymore. They've already built in three years of earnings. If three years becomes uncertain, it's not that Palantir won't

Starting point is 00:41:12 be making money. And I would not say short it, but I don't think it's as easy to trade. And even Bill Gurley said, there's no way you can say the easy money is still here. The 10 baggers have been found, like the, the anthropics and that people have made money. SpaceX, the SpaceX is going to go a hundred times from here. No, it's not. But can you still make money investing in it? If you could at a, you know, at a trillion dollar valuation or a trillion and a half. Yeah. But is it going to be a hundred trillion? No. So now you get into the point of kind of we're at a different stage of AI. Careful, you know, last time somebody told Elon, he wasn't going to do it. A hundred trillion, you know, his eyes get big.

Starting point is 00:41:48 I want to talk about Bitcoin real quick before we go. Sideways. I think maybe after something goes from $126,000 down to $80,000 and drops almost 40%, maybe boring is the new good. It's better that we've stopped the bleeding of the sell-off. It doesn't mean it couldn't sell off more, but at least we've kind of stabilized in this $85,000 to $93,000 range. Any new thoughts on Bitcoin concerns or things that you're excited about? Yeah. So let me do this in my Annie Duke style for people. And again, it's the holiday season. I haven't spoken to Annie Duke in a couple of years. I think she's awesome. And I think her

Starting point is 00:42:37 book, Thinking in Bets, is a great preparation for AI along with Make Your Bed by Admiral more craving. I think those two holiday books for your kids, even if they don't read them, I will be telling people how these fit into being able to benefit from AI. There's three components of Bitcoin that I've kind of put my side on. When is this going to go back up? Because the one thing I believe in is that it's going higher. The question and the point you made, what's the probability? What would have to happen for it to sell off past 80,000 and down to 60. Well, number one, the chart is horrible. There is no way. I've said repeatedly, I'll keep saying it, until you close three days, three days in a row above 92,000,

Starting point is 00:43:22 I think the downtrend is in place and you have to be very careful that it could extend further than what you believe. What would make it extend? Well, the equity market needs to get worse. I don't think that's going to happen, but like I said, there is a risk to me that growth is going underperform value if that happens which i don't think the market's going to go down because when you have pmis going higher the big risk is that rate hike fears start to enter the market like i said we have disinflation at this point this looks like the beginning of a reflation stage which is very good for markets generally so i think it's a good year for stocks but if for some reason the rotation dropped down the hyperscalers because in the next earning

Starting point is 00:44:01 reports. They actually show some risk. Bitcoin could sell off. I don't think that's going to happen. And on a probabilistic basis, a move down below 80 for any significant round of time to me is a low probability event. The technical side is still bearish. The good side for me, again, I wrote the paper about a silent IPO. I still believe that's going on. I get multiple, and I'm sure you do too. Novogratz spoke on something this week, and I like listening to Mike because he has a lot of insight on what's happening because he controls a lot of the flow. And he said 30% or approximately 20 to 30% of all market makers went out of business from that fall off in October. Whether or not the number is right or not, I'm just going to take Mike for

Starting point is 00:44:42 his word and just say the event of October was a big deal. And now we have no retail buying because the chart's horrible until the chart's positive. Macro funds that trade it and retail is not going to be involved. So you need that to turn positive. That's the 92,000 thing. And that number matters more than just the technical thing. It's also unchanged for the year. So I think once we get back above it, I think it's an important thing. But I really do believe that the catalyst that's going to take this up, Bill Gurley said, there are no dollars for anything on the VC world except AI. That has hurt Bitcoin this year because not getting dollars mean people don't view it as a growth trade. They don't view it as something the way they did. The last time we had a SaaS

Starting point is 00:45:24 move, crypto was a major part of it. Crypto isn't getting money because it's all being sucked out by AI. I think that starts to change this year. I think that the future of finance is artificial intelligence and Bitcoin. At different times, it will be popular or not popular. And people kind of rotate back and forth. But these two things are... One more way for me to say that to people stable coins is a cisco trade you're gonna have a lot of cisco on this place i'm gonna be talking a lot about cisco because let's go a lot more volume a lot more transactions and when people start going how do i invest in in in stable coin volumes how do i invest in in tokenization how do i do that that's when bitcoin will start going no one is thinking about that now so i'm

Starting point is 00:46:08 giving them the first kind of traditional finance name cisco i love it all right where can people find your video this week? Just on YouTube at JVisser Labs. They can find it there. I'll do the one this week. I'm not planning to do one next week. I am doing my sub stack. And then for people who care about HRV, heart rate variability and happiness, I will start a new sub stack in January with a blog on my journey to taking my HRV up from the high 20s into the 80s with times getting above a hundred over the course of the last five years. Uh, I go very in depth into probably, I don't know, a couple hundred things that I've done in my life to change. And I just want to say, thank you for bringing out the holiday facial hair. Everyone is there. I was

Starting point is 00:46:56 going to say, you know, Geordie Claus, this video on Sunday, Geordie Claus is going to come out. Watch out guys. I got bad news for everybody. This is the last one that we're doing this year. So the next time you're going to hear from us is the first Saturday, uh, in January. Um, we have, uh, we're pretty much going to take the next two weeks. Everyone who works in this building, I'm going to give them time off. Everyone's going to go relax. They're going to hibernate, you know, it's raining, snowing, et cetera, New York city. So everyone's going to take two weeks, chill out, spend some time with your families.

Starting point is 00:47:24 We're not going to create content. So you don't waste your time on YouTube. And then, uh, in January, we'll come back with lots of insights, lots of information. So we appreciate you guys watching and we'll see you guys in January. Thank you.

The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin, AI & the Next Macro Shift Investors Aren’t Ready For | Jordi Visser

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