The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Crashed: Why I'm Still Buying | Jordi Visser

Episode Date: October 18, 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 the banking crisis, credit contraction, and what’s driving fear in today’s markets, Jordi shares what he’s buying, whether he’s worried about a broader slowdown, and we also touch on OpenAI’s breakthroughs, new AI models, and whether “the aliens are real.”======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================This episode is brought to you by Figure (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp), the platform to Earn and Borrow. Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Figure offers Crypto-Backed Loans, allowing you to borrow against your Bitcoin, Ethereum, & SOL with 12-month terms and no prepayment penalties. They have the lowest rates in the industry at 8.91%, allowing you to access instant cash or buy more Bitcoin without triggering a tax event. Your BTC collateral is protected by decentralized MPC custody. You can always see your BTC ownership in your FM account and verify holdings in your personal BTC vault on chain. Unlock your crypto’s potential today. Visit their app to apply (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp) for a Crypto Backed Loan (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp) today! Figure Lending LLC dba Figure. Equal Opportunity Lender. NMLS 1717824. Terms and conditions apply. Visit figure.com for more information. Figure Markets Credit LLC. 650 S. Tryon Street, 8th Floor, Charlotte, NC 28202. [phone]. NMLS ID 2559612. Terms and conditions apply.======================⁠In this episode, Pomp spotlights easyBitcoin.app—the app that pays you 1% extra on recurring buys, 2% annual bitcoin rewards, and 4.5% APY on USD. Download it now for iOS or Android at https://easybitcoin.onelink.me/F1zP/klc4v1p8 and start earning today. Your capital is at risk. Crypto markets are highly volatile. This content is informational and not financial advice.======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.======================Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro1:53 – Market panic and bitcoin 4-year cycle10:52 – Central banks view on gold vs bitcoin14:58 – US & China trade tensions and rare earths28:25 – Fed policy, rate cuts, and credit risks31:24 – Regional banks and financial stability35:41 – From pessimism to optimism in markets and rise of retail49:21 – AI breakthroughs and the future of technology52:58 – Have aliens come to earth?

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. The reason I'm buying Bitcoin is because I think when we get through the all-time highs again and basically get rid of this four-year cycle belief. Now there's no imaginary place for people to ever again care about. And that's normally what happens in equity markets. And oh, by the way, 2017 was the end of the Donald Trump tax cuts. We've had tariffs this year. We've had bad stuff happen this year. The equity market in 18 was bad. At one point, it was down 20% year to date in December. In 2022, the equity market is down. So the one thing about the

Bitcoin halving cycle. It seems to have been trading. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with Jordy Visser. In this conversation, we break down Bitcoin, the banking crisis, the credit contraction, what's going on in markets, why people are so fearful, whether Jordy is worried. What is he buying? Is he buying Bitcoin stocks, something else? Are aliens real? Should we be worried about the breakthroughs at OpenAI and all the new AI models? We get through a bunch of stuff fast and furious trying to keep you informed. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, we got to talk because the panikins are back. These people are screaming and yelling. They're saying that the market's going to crash. The world is over.

I'm surprised we haven't heard calls for the Great Depression. Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote an amazing book about 1929 that is fueling even more people saying it's all over. Go home and asset prices are going to get hurt. What are you doing in your portfolio? I heard you're buying bitcoin i'm hiding you're hiding yeah i think i think this you know what's funny is um i remember when twitter first entered my world of like wow in the markets you got to pay attention to this thing like you're you're getting news that isn't coming across my bloomberg at the same time even if it's rumors you're catching stuff so here we are now you fast forward it's probably a decade later back then and there's still some hedge funds that can't use twitter or at least banks and things

like that. The panic just grows quickly, but it's this thing that has shocked me that you and I have gone through this year, which is if we laid back and said all of the panics that have occurred. And I said last week that, Hey, you're kind of nighttime. I'm warning my son. Like there's deer out there when it's dark. And I mean, you nailed it. You were like three hours early. So all, and that, all that took was a tweet, um, AI bubble people are, I mean, they're all over this AI bubble. And just so people hear this, there are always bubbles in the market. Just like Jim Cramer likes to go on TV, there's a bull market somewhere. If a market is going up, there's a bubble somewhere. So define a bubble as zero revenue companies are trading at high

valuation. So whether it's Oklo, whether it's Fermi, whether it's a lot of these energy names, which don't have revenues right now, you can categorize those as bubbles. They're not the entire market. What dominates what happens in the market is nominal GDP, inflation. So you get back to real and you get to a scenario where earnings follow nominal GDP. So everything is everything is fine. But to get back to your point about Bitcoin, whenever this kind of situation happens that everyone's panicking and it's something that should be expected, China and the U.S. have to come to a deal. I'm going to say this again. Again, rare earth is the most critical factor in the world. It has been all year. We've watched tariffs be a fear. We've watched

inflation be a fear. We've watched inflation be a fear. I can't even remember everything that we've had to talk about here as fears, but now we have bubbles and we have credit risk and the world's going to end. For Bitcoin to actually have a sustainable move higher, I learned a very valuable lesson this year. The boogeyman of the four-year cycle, which you can tell me about, because I'm not smart enough to understand this whole, ooh, this is going to be a crash that happens? And I go back and look and I see, well, in 2017, right around this time period, it was the peak. 2021, oh, I get it. So that's two data points. I don't really live off two data points. And maybe there's one in 13. I didn't go back to look. It was still too new. But if you can tell

me in front of everyone watching right now why I should be worried about the four-year cycle, and then I'll give you a reason why I'm buying it aggressively every day right now. So you're buying Bitcoin aggressively? I'm buying Bitcoin all the way down to a hundred. I have bids under a hundred. Okay. There's three things that people will say about the cycle. And I do think that this is the like multi-trillion dollar question. Is the four-year cycle going to hold or not? I don't have a strong opinion, which scares the hell out of me. And I've been asking every single person I've talked to, if you've talked to me the last four weeks, I'm like, what do you think? Is it

going to hold? Is it not going to hold? The first thing people will say is that the halving creates this four-year cycle. So you get the halving 18 months later, you get a peak and it's basically you get a supply shock, you get the demand shock that follows, and that leads to this kind of four-year cycle. The second thing is people think that there's a four-year cycle, so they start taking profits around Q4 of each of these years. The third thing that people will say is that there is some sort of, maybe we can call it a woo-woo overlap between the four-year Bitcoin cycle, the four-year liquidity cycle in the macro environment and the uh four-year monetary policy you know kind of all lining up and so every four years i think michael howell has this great

chart where he basically has it you know kind of every four years there is expansion and collapse and monetary policy to say maybe we're living in a simulation i don't know but that chart looks pretty good when you look at it so those are the three things i would say people would say okay q4 this is going to be the peak all right so two things you said there which i i one of them is just like tradfi so in my trying to understand so when i have a view and it is and it doesn't happen and i thought we'd be much higher in bitcoin right now given all of the things that i expected in terms of the benefit the expansion of kind of the network effects this year we've seen stablecoin market cap go higher and bitcoin's not going higher bitcoin's like the same price it

was in December, to give you an idea of how little it's gone. We've got gold going higher. So we've had this year, we've got money supply growing. You've got everything that you would expect happening, including the stock market going higher. And Bitcoin has just not had the normal beta that it's had. But the TradFi world always has this thing that it comes into beliefs, whether it's before presidential cycle, you'll see all these seasonals come out and people believe them. And seasonals work until they don't work. And if too many people are worried about the seasonals. What normally happens is they sell in front of it. And in September and early October, it was very clear to me and the people I was talking to in the space that there were a lot of

whales slash OGs, people that have made a lot of money that were selling. And it would kind of make sense in the four-year cycle. But you said something very important. I just want to make sure people hear this. So my job in coming over from the traditional finance world as a macro person is to think about what I think the equity markets are going to do next year. So I believe that a lot of people think there's an AI bubble. There's not even a question. it's all day long it's non-stop i will continue to tell people if you want to make the mistake of believing that ai is a bubble and then lose money just i don't give a crap um this year for everyone who's bearish ai and his things it's a bubble the only thing that has saved them is one

thing i'm long gold give me gold and that's been if they're bearish ai the thing that has saved them this year is to be long gold so my gut tells me crazy uncle market yeah exactly so my gut tells me. The pain trade for next year is gold doesn't work and the AI doesn't bubble. And then everyone has to go pick something to buy. I thought that was going to happen this year, not with the gold part, because I think gold long term is going to go higher. But a China-US deal is critical to this whole situation. So what has led me to believe is that I do believe people were selling Bitcoin ahead of the four-year cycle. Great. So then the way I deal with everything in the traditional finance world, just like it was before, you know, any period that people believe, if you take out

the highs before that. So now 126 has been set in stone. The reason I'm buying Bitcoin is because I think when we get through the all-time highs again and basically get rid of this four-year cycle belief, now there's no imaginary place for people to ever again care about. And that's normally what happens in equity markets. And oh, by the way, 2017 was the end of the Donald Trump tax cuts. We've had tariffs this year. We've had bad stuff happen this year. The equity market in 18 was bad. At one point it was down 20% year to date in December. In 2022, the equity market was down. So the one thing about the Bitcoin halving cycle, it seems to have been trading with traditional finance markets. So when you say that Bitcoin's four-year cycle is going to play out

next year, you're also embeddedly saying you don't believe in AI and you don't believe profit margins are coming and you don't believe the earnings are going to be higher and the S&P is going to go higher. And you don't believe that the Fed's going to cut interest rates. Yeah, exactly. The Fed's going to cut rates. And for all the dot-com bubble people out there, just remember the Fed, the Fed was raising rates into the dot-com bubble. Every, for some reason, everyone highlights the fact that the Fed cut rates in 98, but they had to turn around and raise rates going into 2000. And we had the Y2K problem. So there's a lot of things with the dot-com bubble that just don't hold. So that's how, uh, Keith or boy, uh, he had this great tweet in November of 2021. He, uh, said

something about you know like top or something and i think it was a reporter in the replies was like are you calling the top and he just responded with yes and i remember reading that like oh my god i love keith keith's amazing i was like this is black and white i hope to god he's right he was off by like 12 hours right and so later i was talking to him and i was like how did you know like where's the crystal ball right like give me one and he was like no in 2000 they raised rates rates led to the market crash as soon as they started talking in november 21 about the fact that they were thinking about raising rates he said the talk markets are forward looking starts to come down like so he had learned from 2000 and you know to his credit in particular

he waited 20 years to apply the knowledge but he freaking nailed it right and so i do think that there's this very interesting dynamic right now where if they are going to cut rates which it looks like they're going to have to cut rates um and you have an acceleration globally of ai the central banks are buying gold because i believe that they all see what is happening to the debasement they see what's happening with the inflation number like like they are all believing hey this is forward looking here's what's coming the bitcoin thing still is not part of their uh portfolio so actually in a weird way bitcoin was adopted by individuals first and then it has kind of moved up. But usually the central banks and the big financial institutions, they

lead on macro decisions. And then it is the retail folks that follow. So it's a very interesting dynamic that we're watching play out right now. Yeah. So Michael Semblist, who has a free podcast and a free write-up, he did this whole thing on gold and central banks. And he made this great point, which again, just shows that you can create a story out of whatever rumors you want. It gets back to the central bank thing and this is not to say that central banks haven't been buying but when you do central bank gold reserves as a percentage of reserves it shows them going up but it doesn't adjust them for the gold price so their percentages have gone higher but that's because when gold's up 60 plus percent in a year well then no other currency reserves are moving

that much so they're a part of that and a good portion of it has been the rise in gold which means a lot of the buying that's happening gold is not just central banks. It is absolutely positively wealthy people. And when Donald Trump put the tariffs in, I think, you know, whether it was Russell Napier, whether it was all these people that did this whole capital flow argument, it made sense to me. It still does. And so that's why I don't think gold prices are going to go down. And there is a chance that if China and the U.S. come to a deal, the gold prices go higher. But I think it's more likely that people are going to be very, very angry with gold by the time we get a year from now. And it's not that I think it's going to collapse. It's just that a lot of this

is retail. A lot of this is momentum. So you can't have it both ways. You can't say there's a bubble in AI. Look at these charts going parabolic and go, but gold's not in a bubble. It's not the same. The reality is there's all this stuff going on. And when the Fed cuts rates, if people want to say, well, that's good for gold, I think they should go back and look at 2010 to 2016 because QE was happening. We had negative yields around the globe. And if you own gold from like 2010 to 2016, it was a horrible asset to own, even though we had negative real rates, even though we had QE going on at every time. I think people need to focus on stocks from an earnings perspective. And I would say the non-MAG7 stocks, because profit margins are going to

explode next year and the infrastructure names of AI are going to continue to explode. And I think they are just going to have to realize that the four-year cycle also was the stock four-year cycle. Last thing I want to talk about Bitcoin, do you buy into this gold runs and 100 days later, bitcoin runs like the data definitely suggests that do you think that there is some relationship or correlation there between gold kind of gets out ahead and then we will see bitcoin rise afterwards and they're tied together in some way i i do think there's there's a um a connection and the reason is when people do buy gold there's no doubt that it's a fear trade so this year aside from the things i mentioned the stagflation the inflation there's also been the the government's

going to default. So JGB yields have been very correlated to gold over the last three years, and they've just gone higher. And JGB 30-year yields are actually doing something interesting right now. I'm a big fan of when you get news that's supposed to continue a trend, and it actually be news that stops a trend. Right now, JGB 30-year yields have gone back down. They gapped higher, and everything kind of went in when the election situation went in. But now, of a sudden it's gone back down. I think this is a characteristic of the fears coming down. And I'll say this repeatedly. I'll tweet about it. I'll do everything. Can I say tweet? Is that still? You can say whatever you want. Okay, I can do whatever I want. You called the market

crash last Friday. This Friday is your show. The China-US deal is far more important when it occurs. And I do believe it will occur whether it's in November or whether it's in December. when it occurs, I think people have to sit back and take a look at what this agreement is going to mean. Because for this year, we've had a lot of problems. The Chinese export numbers came out over the weekend. They were up 8% year over year. The Chinese exports to the US were down 27% year over year. This has never happened before. So this has been a year where China has been kind of redirecting flows. They haven't bought any soybeans on the import side. They haven't done it. This is a trade negotiation, which has left a lot of people kind of worrying about what's

actually happening. There's a lot of businesses in this country that get stuff from China and they can't get them right now without tariffs. And so you've had this kind of disconnect. A deal happens. This is a major event for the world because it basically is going to mean a lot of things that I think people have been worried about. And gold is a worry thing. So where Bitcoin fits in is if people aren't worrying as much, then Bitcoin goes with the other side, which is stocks. And that's why I'll say again, I believe stocks will be higher next year because the AI situation that people are going is not only accelerating, it's picking up a pace. And all of the tea leaves that I've read over the last three weeks in podcasts are people are not

underestimating where we are in AI today. They're too focused on where it was in the past. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure. They're the largest non-bank mortgage lender in the United States with over $15 billion unlocked on their lending platform. They've just lowered rates on their Bitcoin and Ethereum-backed loans to 8.91%, improving their already industry-low fixed-rate 50% LTV loans. They keep building as well, being the only major CBL player to launch decentralized MPC custody to protect against single-entry failure, and they just removed interest deferral fees entirely so you can let Bitcoin price appreciation pay for your loan over time. What is MPC decentralized custody? It's a Bitcoin or ETH on-chain wallet

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We kind of, you know, if you go on the street right now and you ask people, what are the tariffs on China? I actually don't think anyone knows because there's just been so much movement. I think that the MAGA crowd, rightfully so, has believed that tariffs were going to be good for the United States. We have a surplus in September again.

We have not seen the sky-high inflation that was promised. There was not a big market correction in terms of a recession or a depression, you know, empty shelves, all that stuff. Now, I think the part that if you go back and you look at the way a lot of people discuss this is there was almost a belief like this U.S. was going to steamroll a bunch of these countries. And to be fair, like there were some quick deals that were made. And so there was I don't want to call it steamrolling, but it was definitely like, hey, the United States showed up, knocked on the door. You open the door, you negotiate, you sign the deal.

Whoever's kind of first to sign the deals get somewhat of a better deal. Right. China, I think, has hit back very hard. And I think that there are people saying, oh, you know, if we don't get a deal here, this could get really ugly because both countries are going to dig their heels in and could do all kinds of things. So the soybean thing is one. And obviously the farmers in America are all up in arms about this. Trump is talking about trying to find ways to relieve that. But I think the rare earths seem to be the thing that has been the big trigger where now all of a sudden I see Trump.

I see Powell. I see Besson. I see all of them starting to talk about this, insinuate things, threaten things, et cetera. Let's start with what is a rare earth? Because I don't think a lot of people realize they're not rare. So walk us through a little bit. It's like, why is this important? Why is this the thing that is the final trigger point? All right. So rare earth minerals are critical to pretty much everything that people deals with in the modern world. So let's just start with the simple thing. It's in anything that has semiconductor chips in it, which is even washing machines and cars.

Like, everything has some form of rare earth mineral that is in it. And just on this point, there is electronics, you know, phones, all that kind of stuff. To your point, washing machines, et cetera. I don't think people realize LED lights, right? I mean, just like literally anything that is electronic or kind of, quote, unquote, technology has this. And cars. I mean, everything that you own that has become in some way digitized through electronics, which is everything that we're involved in, involves rare earth.

But it's also part and an important part of military weapons, especially the modern day ones of drones and everything like that, of humanoids coming up. Like, it's critical. And the problem is the US outsourced this to China, as did the rest of the world. Now, the irony is the reason it was outsourced to China to mine for these is incredibly toxic i mean so where are you going to do this in the u.s so whenever they go well we'll just do it in the u.s not an easy thing especially when there's states and there's regulations and they won't even let us build a pipeline in the u.s so i mean rare earth is toxic so china has been like

yeah we'll do it and so they've done it for the world and and they have big deposits and they have big deposits and there's quotes from as early as like 1980 from deng chao peng that they were going to do this for exactly the reasons that have come up. We'll do it for this reason. So the Chinese always get talked about that they think and they make plans 30 years in advance. Well, this was a 30-year plan, knowing that it would be in this position. Now, they didn't know when someone like Donald Trump would come, when the U.S. would be in a fiscal situation. Because remember, when you think of the tariffs, when you think of the trade negotiations, you have to remember this goes beyond this. This is NATO. This is everything. The world is becoming more independent. It's

breaking up and it's becoming less centralized. And the U.S. was the dominant feature. The dollar was the dominant feature. So rare earth is the bargaining power of China. And it's really important because there's no way for the U.S. to get the supply, even if they fast track it. And they, you know, J.P. Morgan said, we'll put up one and a half trillion dollars. The Pentagon said they're going to put a billion dollars into this, everything they've invested in companies. There's no way, listening to every single expert on rare earth, that the US can come up with enough of it in the next three years to deal with the problems they have. Is there enough for the next six months? Yeah, everyone has kind of front loaded. They bought things. They got what they

needed from what I hear, but they will run out. So this becomes an issue. So this is China's bargaining power. Now, the good thing is, if the US can get what it needs in three years, either internally or in other countries that are also worried about China, because it's a global issue what they did. Chinese lose their bargaining power fairly soon. So they're either using it for military reasons, like they're going to go invade Taiwan, which I think is highly unlikely, or this is part of the trade side and they're dealing with Donald Trump the way that you need to deal with them. As a reminder to everyone, because when you hear China, you think of country, And so people get the numbers. The U.S. economy is close to 30 trillion. The Chinese economy is

close to 20 trillion. The next economy below that, guys, we're dropping all the way down into the low single digits. So this is the pound for pound heavyweight fight. So he can't just walk in. And that's what China's saying. You can't just walk in and put tariffs on and go through it. So if you ask me what's likely to happen, there will be a deal. I've tried to figure out how it can end up that Donald Trump doesn't look bad and the Chinese are able to get what they want. I think almost no tariffs on China, believe it or not, almost no tariffs with a large investment into the U.S. in something and purchases of soybeans and all this stuff. So he can say he got investment dollars and this happened and then everyone can go figure out how to deal with things

on their own for the next three years as part of this divorce process of the coupling. But one thing I want to remind people that I fully believe in as part of my Bitcoin thesis, China has decided that they will back their yuan in gold. So they're looking at gold in yuan terms. So they have reserves. On the US side, we've chosen stable coins. These are the two kind of new worlds that are going on. China's not too happy about the stable coin thing. Europe's not too happy about stable coin thing. This just means that the capital flow argument that all of these great historians have said is taking shape with the old framework of gold and the new framework of stable coins. And this is why Bitcoin is going to be a major, major part once the deal is done, because

then we've set the table between gold and stable coins. So there's this great article that you sent me from Patrick Springer, who writes, Beijing activated stage two of a strategic export control campaign, expanding rare earth export controls in a way that structurally increases geopolitical risk across global manufacturing. And I thought that was interesting because it doesn't increase risk for China necessarily, right? They have access to this stuff.

But what it does do is, this to me is them tipping their hand. This is probably, other than a kinetic war, this is probably the thing that is kind of the like smash glass in case of emergency, is we're going to start to play with the exporting of rare earths around the world. We saw in the U.S. treatment of Russia, sanctions, going after the oligarchs, etc., that was the U.S. kind of tipping their hand. And that was our smash glass in case of emergency. We know central banks saw that all around the world, allies and foes, and said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's what that's the emergency thing that you're willing to go to. We are going to go. We're going to put gold in our reserves. We're going to diversify. We are going to significantly reduce the risk of your sanctions in the future.

What do you think the rest of the world will do now that China has kind of shown their smash glass strategy? Do we all just go start digging up rare earths? Do we start getting alliances? You know, it's not like, hey, just do a deal with China and that's the end of the chess game. it does feel like now the rest of the world is like, oh my God, like we actually are beholden to them to some degree. Yeah. So I view this as very positive for the rest of the world in the same way that Donald Trump got rid of this connection between, okay, you guys buy our military stuff. We are supportive of NATO. We contribute most of this. He's tried to rebalance that. The manufacturing side is going to overbuild around the globe. So the one thing I do agree

with. We are going to globally spend a lot of money building out things, which may eventually cause problems down the road in terms of a lot of resources that were, let's just say, bad money spent building out things. But that process is going to take years, whether it's data centers, whether it's fighting with military and believing that this military is going to be here in three years. Everyone now has to build their own manufacturing. They can't depend on China, the supply chains and kind of depending on you have to be reshoring. And everyone's doing that. Germany announced that they're going to do it with their military. The U.S. is obviously doing it. Every country is kind of, you know, at the big side. And it's really Europe. And to go

back to that hundred and ten trillion dollar global economy, China, U.S. and Europe combined as a group. I mean, that's 65 percent of it. So every other country broken up, it's small. Europe's going to reshore. China's going to reshore and the U.S. is going to reshore. So that manufacturing side, what the rare earth has done the same way that the tariffs have done China, it is China's version of the tariffs. That's exactly what it is. You can't actually build anything for the next three years because you don't have rare earth. And oh, by the way, you know what we're going to do? We're going to put a tariff on all of you. If you want to use rare earth in anything, we need to know what it is and we have to give the clearance before you

can do it. And that's what this whole thing is about. I don't think that that's something that can happen and for people who want to go through because i think patrick covered this too they did this to japan in 2010 and it eventually went to the wto and was ruled that it couldn't happen and they gradually kind of took them off or at least reduced them so i think this thing is not going to go to that extreme because i think this is a bargaining chip that they're going through but they have set the precedent that they have done it before and that's the reason why the u.s reacted so badly right after we spoke last week is all of a sudden Trump freaked out and I mentioned it. So it wasn't like it was new news. It had happened the day before, but the markets didn't care about

it. And so the market started to freak out. What we talked about last week, if you go back, it wasn't just the rare earth and how important it was, but I also talked about the fact that the financial markets were kind of showing a lot of credit risk. We were seeing private equity stuff. We had the first brands, we had to try color. Well, now this week you get into it. You not only of the china thing everyone freaking out about that stuff too and it reached a level where we're clearly getting closer and closer to where the fed's gonna have to do something you think we can get an emergency rate cut no um that doesn't need to happen uh i agree they should have emergency rate cut earlier this year but i agree they're they're gonna cut

and it's gonna help but like during during the um during the hangover that occurs when kind of markets start to go down for a little period of time. I just want to highlight to people, we have 10-year rates below 4%. Gas at the pump is probably going to break below 3% this weekend. So for everyone out there, gas at the pump peaked recently at around 320. If it breaks below 3%, you're talking about close to a 10% fall. I can tell you right now, the CPI number is going to be a positive for the markets when it comes out with gas down here. I've highlighted in every one of my videos, until gas at the pump goes higher, you're getting another boom for the stock market. So you're getting lower rates, you're getting the Fed cutting rates, you're getting all of this,

which is being helped by this plumbing situation. But so people understand, this is part of fiscal dominance. This is what you have to understand. I don't even know the best way to describe it because there's a lot of terms like SOFR, the standing repo facility. Let's just say you're a homeowner and all of a sudden you have a lot of bills coming at the same time. And you're scrambling to get cash because you don't have enough cash sitting around. That's kind of where the financial system is right now in the U.S. There's a certain threshold level of where bank reserves need to be. And if it goes below that, the banks will have to kind of rush for cash and go through it. So there's been this pressure, which normally happens

every quarter end. But it's happened now. And I think part of the reason it's happened now is because of the first brands in tricolor, which when you're really tight to the level, you end up with a lot of kind of people scrambling around. So all of a sudden, SOFR, which has to do with overnight, let's say collateral-backed securities, the spread has gotten extremely high, which says there's problems going on. General Powell said this week, we're probably going to have to stop QT. So for everyone out there that's kind of freaking out, the problem is, guess what? Checkmate. You got the Fed, QT, they're buying the bonds from the treasury and the treasury needs to issue

lots of debt because the debt didn't get any better this year. So remember when we started the year, there's a debt deficit problem. We did doge, all this stuff, nothing has solved the problem. And so we have these revenues coming in on the tariff, that's all well and good, but we still have the treasury issuing lots. And this gets back into the Michael Howell thing, which is we have a lot due this year. We have a lot due next year. And so this puts pressure onto the Fed and that's why they can't let the runoff happen anymore.

And that just means that they're gonna be in the market easing liquidity whenever these happen. So I don't think this is a one-off shock because what's causing the first brands in the tricolor? It's the K-shaped economy. We have a problem, guys. And unless the labor market gets better, which is not gonna happen with AI,

into the midterm elections, they're gonna have to juice the system. another reason to be positive on Bitcoin. So regional banks seem to be in the crosshairs. If I go and I listen to certain people on the internet or even in mainstream media, they'll have some story about credit market is showing cracks, the stock market, it'll show up later. We are now in a market downturn. All the economic policies have broken the system, massive issues watch out below the regional banks have sold off aggressively this week um some of it has to do with the credit issues that you were talking about

how do you read those banks i mean some people look at them as canary in the coal mines other people look at them as uh they're just one of many sectors to kind of pay attention to so zion's bank corp and western alliance disclose that they have some losses okay um this is not a systemic problem and if people want to go back to the what happens if there's anything even close to a systemic problem just go back and type in silicon valley bank and go look what comes i wasn't gonna say i'm glad i wasn't gonna say remember bellagio with the billion dollar bitcoin bet he was showing the charts he was like these guys are underwater, but they don't have to say it. The rule is if you're worried

about a systemic issue, just like it was with the tariffs, I'm going to say this again and again. Unfortunately, we're in a situation where the economy has been financialized. If the stock market is allowed to fall, we will go into not a recession. We'll go into something much bigger because the only thing keeping the economy up is the spending on the data centers and the spending by the high net worth individuals who own the stocks related to the data centers, plain and simple.

And whether, you don't have to like it, it is, I admit it, it's not a fair place right now, but innovation has caused the government to use their transfer mechanism and mommy and daddy come out with money whenever they need it, especially in an election year. So to take what is happening in two small banks that has taken the stocks down somewhat.

To worry about where Jeffrey's stock price is, to worry about where anything is on these things, I think you're underestimating what ends up happening once this goes through. Today's episode is brought to you by EasyBitcoin.app. They offer a simple, rewarding Bitcoin investment experience. With EasyBitcoin, every recurring buy

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and sign up today. That's X-A-P-O bank.com slash pomp. Go check it out today. So there's two movies that came out over the last 15 to 20 years that I think define financial markets. One had a positive impact, one had a negative. The positive is the social network.

Social network basically convinced a bunch of people about technology, Silicon Valley, the fact that you could go and write software code and you could build something that could change the world. There are negative side effects to so many people seeing that because a bunch of people thought they could be angel investors and they basically lit money on fire, et cetera. But for the most part, I think it was a net positive.

You convince an entire generation, technology is good, software is good, and you can get rich. And it kind of put the incentive out there and kind of people went West. They went from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. The second movie was highly destructive to investor psyche is The Big Short. These people are running around thinking that they're Michael Burry and everyone wants to call bubble every five seconds and they will basically take any single little issue and extrapolate it out and immediately go to it's a systemic thing.

If you thought that you were Michael Burry or any of the big short investors, you got your butt handed to you over the last 15 years or so because stocks just went up into the right. Sure, there was market corrections here and there. But if you look at both the pandemic and in 2025, the drawdowns were what? A couple of weeks? Yep. Like, are you tactically good enough to call the top, sell, buy back at the bottom and write it? Come on, stop.

So in a weird way, those two movies, to me, define tech of optimism. And Wall Street became filled with pessimists because there was like glory attached to being the person to call the top being the person to short the market and it just feels like everything that we're seeing right now all this fear all this is just like that on steroids because people are saying oh two regional banks there must be you know there's a dead bodies that'll float up to the top of the water later like this is the language people are using uh for something that just doesn't really seem that big of a deal so the interesting thing about the the two of us um So when you mentioned the big short, you were young when that whole event occurred.

I was. I was a young pup. Yeah, you were. I mean, that was 18 years ago when the whole thing started. I was managing a billion-dollar fund, and I was heavily involved with the scenario. Big dog in the house. And I do remember vividly all of the Michael Burry thing. Now, when we came out of that, I was kind of one of those people before. Meaning, if you would have met me, I started my career trading Mexico in 94. They had a devaluation two months after I took over the book from Morgan Stanley.

Then I moved to Brazil in 97. They had a devaluation in 99. I traded a bear market there. Then I came back to the US. I took over the S&P options book from Morgan Stanley at the end of 99. And we had the crash there. I was kind of a doom and gloomer. And when I got, Hey, get out of Bitcoin, man. No, see, this is the good part. This is what

changed. And Bitcoin was right around the same time I believed. And I had moved a very, very high majority of my money into gold and had been one of those people that took my money and said, all right, what's the, uh, what am I guaranteed in the banks? What's the FDIC where we're okay. So 250,000 and all your banks, like everything was dispersed into many, many banks so that I could be sure. I thought the banking system was going under. So beginning in the time when the bottom was made, and before the bottom was made, S&P bottom famously was at 6.6 in March. But in October, I started becoming a perma-optimist. And when I say perma, I was scared during the EU Greece situation. But when that ended in August of 12, I went to Singularity University in June

of 23, or I'm sorry, June of 13. And that was to answer my question of how Amazon was in a bubble. How is this stock not a bubble? So everyone that calls AI a bubble, I already went through the journey that you should go through, but they have no need to because most of the people that say this in social media, they're either just dark individuals or they've made a lot of money and they actually want to be right about this one thing because they believe the system is a Ponzi scheme. I will say on our show, watched by many, many people, the fiat system is a Ponzi scheme. It is. Of course. But the government was $7 trillion of debt in 2007 when Michael Burry challenged the system, when George Soros challenged the system, or Druckenmiller

challenged the system. They were big relative to the system. Now the government is $37 trillion. dollars. It's 120% of GDP. They can't allow it to go under and they have tools that were created. We still have QT. We weren't supposed to have QE for more than a year after we did it. Bernanke told us it wouldn't be here. So for everyone kind of going through this, unfortunately for all of you, it is not only a Ponzi scheme, but the end game is not a crashing. The end game is it being replaced by the new system. The new system is stable coins. The new system is Bitcoin. The new system is tokenization all of this is coming and next year is going to be a boom year for all of those things you know the uh mental framework that i have is uh when you have a balloon you can pop

the balloon and i think that's what everyone thinks is the end of the fiat system like you pop it bam uh you can also deflate you know you just slowly let the air out and that to me feels like not actual like deflation in the sense of uh thing but like you're just slowly allowing the old system to kind of move into the past and that new system is showing up and so i think that it is uh the like anti-climatic aspect of i want the pop it's not really that almost never in history yes there are certain things where there has been you know massive devaluations or there's been you know like very severe financial crashes but in terms of these regime changes even you know ray dalio and anybody you go read, they are very kind of sequential in nature. And so it then brings us

to this question of, okay, if you're a retail investor today, I think more than ever, you got more information, you have more access to the market, you can trade 24-7, you have things like prediction markets, you have stocks, you have access not only to the US stock market, you got access internationally as well. There seems to be this belief that retail investors can take their capital put in the market and they're going to benefit from this stuff there's an article in the wall street journal recently that said uh the bottom 50 percent of americans have more exposure to the stock market than ever before uh since 2020 the equity values of that the collective equity value has gone up almost 500 since 2020 so they're putting more money into the market

which is a good thing but then there's this uh now infamous uh article in the economist from the former chief economist of the IMF, I'm sure she's a nice lady, who basically made the argument that when the stock market crashes, it is going to be bad for the world because too many people have stocks. So I don't know how we can say,

hey, not enough people own stocks, the rich people own all the assets, this is bad, we need to do financial education, get more people. But then the economists are literally saying that no people own too much stocks. What should retail people do? And do you think that there is concerns

about how retail investors are allocating to the stock market? Retail should keep doing what they're doing. It's been my absolute pleasure to deal with that world more and more every day. And I mean that sincerely. I mean, I hope the content that I do helps people because I'm trying not to be sensationalized and all this. And I'm trying to give people help in terms of what the long-term view is.

But there's two important events that have allowed retail to challenge the old institutional framework of Wall Street and particular asset managers. Actually, I'll say three. Number one is the democratization of information. So when you say social media, when you say not only X, but Reddit, discords, anything that they're involved in, I love putting on X and there's a, I can just jump on any spaces and listen to something, even if it's for 10 minutes while I'm kind of walking around or cooking or whatever, and just hear what retail is talking about at that point.

They're intelligent. They have information. The democratization of information is really powerful. It didn't exist in the 1999, in the 90s, and it barely existed in the 2000s until we started to get social media rolling out. The second thing is the democratization of intelligence. They have the ability now of using AI. And here's the advantage. People my age don't use it. They're scared of it. I'm giving presentation after presentation and doing consulting work. It is really painful to watch people not use it, partly because in fairness to them,

they're working at these jobs and they don't have the time, but they also don't have the curiosity and they don't have the desire to look stupid. So it's just part of it. The third thing, which is really important and retail needs to hear this traditional wall street. And this is going to sound funny from where we started the conversation. It's based on cycles. So a hedge fund manager has, there's a PM and let's say two to three analysts. Those analysts go out and they come up with ideas. They don't come up with ideas today. They do work. They go through it. Well, embedded in that whole process is an assumption that you have the time to do that work. The market moves much faster now. And that's the thing about Bitcoin that has trained retail

really, really well. The time you can have a stock, which we've seen go from three to 38, to go from five to 15. The one thing I will tell you is an analyst comes back to a PM and goes, I really like EOS. Looks good at 18. Where were you? The thing was five. He's getting thrown out the door. They're not buying that stock. Retail is like, huh? Momentum. It's good. Let me go into the discord. Let me ask some people. We still got more upside on this. Okay. I'm in. They don't care about the revenues. They don't care about the fundamentals. Which just real quick, the GOAT, Stanley Druckenmiller, famous buy and then research. He might be the ultimate retail investor. He's ahead of his time in terms of making sure that if something comes at him and

it resonates with him by first, because he can always get out. And that's the thing is he doesn't become married to his ideas. When people ask me how people can still be negative on Elon Musk, I mean, of all of the things in modern day, the fact that anyone can challenge this man's, I mean, it's unbelievable. You have to really think about the fact that people actually hate elon musk and he's even before the politics like it a guy who's done he's flying ships up catching them he's building electric cars autonomous cars humanoids he's got the biggest ai data center didn't you hear his dad had a diamond mind the whole thing is insane and i people ask me he didn't start tesla yeah in fact that's a perfect way to say it that's the ai bubble

people. Elon Musk is a bubble that can't last. That's the best way I can say. And once people make that statement, they never change their mind. I did the math at one point. For 30 years, he has averaged every five years a multi-billion dollar company. I mean, just think how crazy that is. That is a generational run who I don't know if there's ever been anyone in history who's been able to do that over and over and over again. Even if inflation adjusted, whatever. How many people can say they've created six or seven different multi-billion dollar companies that are the category creators slash leaders in their industry. Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. And more importantly, I don't like his tweets. I'm just fascinated by the anger towards them. I just

really am. I think it is a, it is the modern day situation of what you said. And I want to bring up one thing just so people hear this, because you did make a statement. I do think historically, to be fair to people, when we've had situations like this, they do normally end in some sort of revolution. So I do think when you have a stock market that's gone up relentlessly without any kinds of like sustainable down periods, meaning we make new all-time highs within a year constantly, I do think historically, this has been a period where it's too easy. So there needs to be a cleansing of the system. I have lots of reasons why this one to me is the end game of capitalism, which is a different topic. But I do think people need to realize one thing. I lived in Brazil.

Brazil is in a perma K-shaped economy, incredibly high net worth. The U.S. has become an emerging market to some degree, both on the debt level, but also in the K-shaped economy. I think the way this is playing out, it's good for retail. It's good for the K-shape. I think they're going to get what they want because I think AI is going to drive people out of crappy jobs. If you're losing your job at a big Fortune 500 company, I'm telling you, as painful as it is, go use AI for six months and then go get a job started at a smaller company, you'll be in better condition. This transition that's going to take where people are in jobs, sitting at work, if they're not allowing you to use, use AI, you're in a bad seat. You need to leave and go use AI

because the future is about being able to utilize AI and know how to do it. And you can do it at home. You can do it at a job, but I think the world is going through a massive transition in the next two years is kind of this final two years of just AI accelerating the job situation, get more unstable. The K-shaped economy continues to worsen. The government has to cut rates. And at the same time, the deflationary pressures are coming, which means we're getting closer to a world of abundance. And that's where the disruption and everything fits in with rates being lower, Bitcoin going higher, and more and more people looking for an alternative for saving their money. I have two questions before I let you go. The first is Sam Altman did this interview

with A16C. He basically made an insinuation that they have had a development, some sort of improvement internally. Then we've got two tweets here. One is from a pseudonymous account that's hearing multiple independent whispers that OpenAI just had a breakthrough too big to announce casually, something emergent, people inside calling it phase two, others saying level four. I don't know if that's true or not, but obviously that'll get the people going. And then there's another one that says we're doing all kinds of stuff with these models the public isn't even thinking of yet. And that one obviously did very well. Are you excited or worried if OpenAI is making big breakthroughs and we don't know about them yet i i listened to the interview it's it's

on the a16z podcast and the words the specific words he used which i'll be showing in my video this week or capacity overhang and what he what he actually said was they've run into this issue where the models are always in front of what they've released to the public and part of that you can see with sor and everything else they just don't have enough compute for it but he made it clear that the exponential movements of the models are getting so far ahead that the problem is the compute is still moving at a linear pace. Even with all the spending and everything, you don't flip that switch on. It's going to take a while for the compute to match up. Dave Blunden, who's one of the people on the weekly Moonshots podcast, which we talk about a lot, he also was interviewed

this week. And it was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it. I think it's called The Next great idea. But you never get to hear him talk in a long form. And again, he talks about his story. He talks about being at MIT in the 80s and going there because of Marvin Minsky and all of these different things, the godfather of AI. But what he talks about was the exact same thing Sam said. And he said he was at OpenAI twice this summer. This is why I wrote a sub stack this week on how podcasts are the place to get real-time information. There's so many nuggets. So to match up with Sam Altman, what Dave said was, I was there and we're already at a point where open AI has bottlenecks. And he insinuated that this has to do with them already hitting recursive learning.

And so people start to hear this. And I made this mistake once. I'll do it again. At this point, you can pause, go to ChatGPT, look up recursive learning, then come back to us, okay? Nobody in the room likes to hear that when I tell people to do that, but I even do it on my own video. Recursive learning where computers are learning on their own is a very powerful thing because then you're not depending on human knowledge. You're actually, they're going through and they're learning on their own.

That is when you're getting closer to AGI. What these guys are all saying is that we're much closer to AGI. And Dave Blunden goes further when asked, when do you think we'll hit AGI? And he basically says, in some form next year. This is really critical to people because this means so many things for our world and so many things. And that's why for people who are bearish on AI, the profit margins accelerate with recursive learning.

the data centers explode in terms of dollars. You are crazy. And he can raise as much money as he want because these models are what he's showing the people for these cyclical exchanges of cash. Like he's showing them what they have. And I think the other quote, and I could be wrong, but Google deep mind said the same thing this week. Like there's a quote out there, which I'm going to show where it said, if people could see what we can do right now with the models who blow their mind and they had a cancer release in terms of making progress on that, like everything that's going on is just going to blow people's minds in terms of longevity, in terms of the sciences. We're entering a new period. This is stage two of AI, which is the biggest part of the bubble to me.

My last question for you, I know we only have two minutes. Do you think aliens have come to Earth? There's all these revelations now. There's this big documentary that's coming out where they have Marco Rubio. They have people inside the government who are basically saying there is something that we don't understand that is hovering over some of our nuclear facilities there are you know uh people who are coming out and saying i've seen them i've seen the non-earth crafts or uh in some cases living uh organisms etc i'm fascinated by it just because it would be you know a huge development something's been rumored for a long time but like does that have any impact on markets like if all of a sudden they were like oh no aliens are real

like here's one of the crafts what do you think i do know one thing there's no such thing as aliens are true when the market goes up okay really yeah i don't think anyone's gonna be like oh there's aliens excellent i'm gonna go buy i don't know man maybe there's like some energy source that they have that all of a sudden the data centers can now uh be like way more uh powerful and ai all of a sudden is like uh superhuman and now you're now you're sounding like a traditional finance analyst that's gone and done the work i think the first reaction the knee-jerk would be i'm going in the basement lock the doors every movie i've ever seen this is a bad ending okay so i will say this uh shortest answer i'll ever give on on on on this interview uh

number one do i think aliens exist i think my brain always assumes that we're not the only living creatures on the planet and that somewhere in the expansive universe there are other living creatures so i'll say that uh number two whether or not that is china hovering above us and something we don't know that's invisible because they've created some technology i don't think we know and it doesn't make me think about it for more than five seconds well china doesn't have any uh crazy stuff because they still just put the balloons over america right why do you need state-of-the-art technology. You just use the balloon.

We ain't going to shoot it down anyways. All right. Thank you very much. We will do this again next week.