The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin vs AI: The Biggest Trade of the Decade? | Jordi Visser

Episode Date: October 4, 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 talk about why bitcoin is the purest AI trade available in the market, energy infrastructure, what is going on with the government shutdown, how interest rates, the Fed, the economy are all intertwined, and why prediction markets and tokenization are two big themes moving forward.======================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 or Ethereum 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. Visit https://figuremarkets.com/borrow for more information.======================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 - Intro1:58 - Why bitcoin is the purest AI trade 12:37 - The impact of new energy infrastructure17:47 - How Base Power is building a decentralized grid and other opportunities for investors 24:43 - Why retail spots themes before institutions33:27 - Retail orange-pilling each other in public 38:19 - What is the impact of government shutdown on financial markets? 41:19 - The rise of prediction markets and tokenization 50:22 - Where to follow Jordi on the internet

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What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat

any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. So I think with Bitcoin, we're kind of reaching that moment where people are starting to accept it. And this is one of the benefits of it sitting around the same level for a long period of time is at some point during the next breakout,

if again, the MAG7 aren't working well, Bitcoin has been an additive part. And for people that think this has been a disappointing year for Bitcoin, it's been disappointing relative to my expectations. It's still double the S&P performance for the year. And the year's not over. And the year's not over yet.

As people who have been around for a long time, they know fourth quarter. What's going on, guys? Today we got a great episode with Jordy Visser. Jordy is here to break down why Bitcoin is the purest AI trade available in the market. We talk about energy infrastructure, what's going on with the government shutdown, how interest rates, the Fed, and the economy are all intertwined, and then why he thinks things like tokenization, prediction markets, crypto, and AI are the big themes moving forward over the next six months or so. And on top of that, I need your help.

Please, please, please make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel. My goal is to get to 1 million subscribers. We're just under 630,000, so we're getting close. Hit that subscribe button button. And here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, you have said previously that Bitcoin is the purest AI trade. AI is super hot right now. Bitcoin has been lagging a little bit. I think there's a lot of people who say in October, it is uptober. It is time for shocktober. How are you thinking about Bitcoin in relationship to AI and how Bitcoin should perform to the end of the year? All right. Since you started with uptober. um yes seasonally this is a great month but um the last five years the the next six months have

been good um and i think there's a lot of people who were kind of timing the end of october as the end of the halving time and things were going to get dicey uh there's a major story in my opinion that's shaping form so i've talked about being wrong on where bitcoin would be at this point and it surprised me because of the network effects that were happening but also everything that was happening on AI that to me is directly related to it. But one of the things that became obvious to me this year is that for Bitcoin to really be making the move that we all think it should be, there actually needs to be a lot more acceptance by people outside of just corporations and treasury balance sheets. Because that's, you know, honestly, except for

micro strategies at this point, the majority of this is kind of this zombie type thing that that Saylor talks about. It's not a big number. It's not something that when you add them all together is enough to really drive a major price move. To drive a major price move, it can't just be retail. They're not big enough. It's a big enough asset now. So if I think about what drives things like Oracle and Tesla and big companies like that, Bitcoin's bigger than most of them. So it needs to actually have a lot of energy and heat behind it, which means we're at the stage now at this size that I think the traditional finance world needs another group in. So my mindset that I use with everything is that prices lead narrative. So I focus on what the narratives

will be six months from now. And to me, it's very obvious. And I'm just going to go through for you kind of what I see happening now that is a major story that we've talked about. So everyone who's watched this all year, none of these are going to be surprising, but I think they're all coming to a head now. So the first one is the job situation. So there's no doubt we have enough data now. It's not just the BLS numbers. It's all of the soft surveys that I cover in my weekly videos. People feel bad about their job. And regardless of whether it's 100% artificial intelligence, AI has an impact to it. Your brother and I talked about it last week in terms of all the things that happened in the month of September and how crowdsourcing is now saying that AI is

coming. Three of the four largest employers, private sector employees in the United States of America, Walmart, Amazon, and Accenture. Accenture had a big layoff announcement this week. All three of them have publicly come out and said they will be laying people off or they have laid people off. And number two, that they don't expect to hire anybody in net over the course of the next few years. And they're all saying AI is part of it. There's a bunch of other companies which we don't need to go through, but the pressure is growing on this belief. We had the ADP number this week. It was negative. There's no doubt right now that the job market is an issue and this feeds into a couple things. Number one, for the jobs market, that means the discontent

for people is only going to worsen. So anything disruption-wise that's coming, if people are not able to pay for housing and they can't do this, this is going to be an issue, which puts pressure on the administration in a year of the midterm elections. So I don't care what kind of printing goes on i don't care if it's giving people tax rebates out of the whatever it is there's going to be checks going out there's going to be help on the housing side because if you want to win elections and that's the whole thesis that we've talked about in terms of bitcoin the discontent in the system the profit margins are going up and the people are losing their jobs so this is going to be a story that will only worsen next year because ai agents are coming number two so real

quick on this before you go number two is um i actually think that this is a point that people know is happening but people don't realize the magnitude it's not just i lose my job but it is i'm losing while i'm watching the people i used to work with winning and it is the economic impact but there's also a social like salt in the wound where if you lose your job but the stock price is going up you feel like i'm like being double screwed to a degree there's no doubt about it And that's why part of the thing with sitting at the event with you and talking to retail traders, a lot of them have jobs and they're doing this on the side and they feel that it's their obligation to try and make extra money because they know they're not going

to get it at work. So this mentality of I'm losing to the system and I need to do whatever it takes and be an entrepreneur and fight for this and go through it, whether they're doing it and they're retail traders and they're making money or they're just angry about it and they're voting ways towards it. It's all positive for this. I need a new system that's better for me. and i think you're going to see that with voting next year we have the mayor

election in new york coming up we'll see what happens number two is the spending side so i've talked a lot that one of the things that will get traditional finance people to invest the hedge fund side to focus on ai is if the mag 7 aren't an easy investable asset and that's to me starting to become an issue and that's funny to say when they're at all-time highs but not all of them are and the spending side is going to be an issue next year these companies are spending lots of money and I can feel the pressure building as they're releasing everything. It's like a firework show right now. OpenAI releases a bunch of news items. They release new tools. Claude came out with a new tool. The meta glasses came out. Apple talked about getting rid of Vision Pro and doing glass.

They're all trying to do something to collect revenues because their spending is going to go higher. And most importantly, the electricity prices are going higher. So their compute costs, all of this stuff is rising they are going to need to have some kind of revenues come in and if there's any spending issues that become a bigger question as their free cash flow goes down dramatically people have to remember that the mag 7 are a huge part of the global investment side i don't think people fully grasp how much they matter but this is where i'm going to bring it into a weaker dollar i think the dollar is going to weaken because of this situation the revenues of the of the mag 7 are going to be distributed to startup companies very gradually

cursor replet these companies all have little revenue streams that traditionally would go to these guys i don't care what tools they bring out they're in a race towards having lower cost on things and they're going to have to start raising prices to match up with the gpu cost because the gpu cost electricity is getting more expensive so they're going to start having to charge people corporations more money and the corporations will pay it so they're going to to get revenues in. But I think the question of the valuation and free cash flow is going to become an issue next year. I believe power and compute is the places that people should get into. If the MAG-7 are having trouble in revenues, and I won't go into large detail here,

the dollar is going to weaken because the number one correlation between dollar strength has been U.S. exceptionalism. U.S. exceptionalism can be broken down by one thing, the MAG-7 and the dominance on coding. And if coding is now ubiquitous and it's democratized, the rest of the world's entrepreneurs who are very hungry are going to create little businesses and they're going to eat at the revenue stream. They're going to have no expenses. And these companies are finally doing one thing, which I've always said was the thing that changed the investment horizon. They're starting to issue a lot of debt because they finally have reached the point where that software world doesn't exist. They need hardware for the software. And when

you need hardware, you need debt because you need capital. You need big buildings. So when they're talking about trillions of dollars of spending. This is very new for the MAG7 and not all of them are going to survive through this. One more thing just to finish it off. This power situation is really important for AI. And I believe the Bitcoin miners are going to become a major story next year. This is another place where the traditional finance world. So if they can't invest in the MAG7, they're going to look in other places. If they look to Bitcoin mining, they probably haven't done their work. We have a gas turbine and a transformer shortage. we need peaker plants bitcoin mining is a major positive tool for grid optimization

china has built all of their renewable solar has been a huge part even in the u.s we're still building solar to me solar batteries plus bitcoin miners are going to be a package that people are going to start to understand has to be part of this equation and as part of this equation that means that the hash rate, as it's going higher, if Bitcoin price were to fall and some of the miners who are still major holders of Bitcoin would need to sell them because the price went down, people are not fat. As they become part of the grid optimization, two things happen. Number one, they have a new revenue stream that's coming. And that revenue stream means they don't need to sell Bitcoin as much because it's not their only business line. So they're diversified.

The second thing that becomes very important is pension funds have viewed Bitcoin as anti-ESG. And if all of a sudden now the E becomes a positive for Bitcoin because they're actually helping the energy situation by forcing more renewables to replace dirty coal and they get another point. So I think all of these things will be narratives next year. And the price of Bitcoin, if I'm right on that, should start to go higher because it should start to build that in. And I think Bitcoin miners are going to become an important part of the puzzle now. And I've never mentioned them in a positive way on the show. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure. They're the largest non-bank mortgage lender in the United States

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kind of the output of a data center, right? Each one of those things, for the most part, is built in a modular capacity. Not modular like you can pick it up and move it, but modular in that the power generation companies have been doing the same thing for a really, really long time. Sure, there's some variation.

Every once in a while, you get a little bit of technology innovation, but for the most part, power is power, and they've been generating that power. Transmission or transportation of it, all the way through. The data centers now are starting to see some innovation because you're having to build net new data centers, right?

And so people can incorporate the latest technology. In the Bitcoin mining world, you get like liquid emerging cooling, things like that, right? And then of course, where there's always been rapid acceleration and change has been in what are you doing with the compute that's coming out of the data center, right?

So in a way, as we eat back into that supply chain, back to the power generation, what I have not yet seen, but I feel like is a big opportunity. It's a big opportunity because there's a lot of risk involved given the capital that's needed, is a net new, fully designed system, which if that was possible and somebody went after it, you actually may build your power generation system specifically

with Bitcoin mining attached to it so that you can do grid optimization and kind of offloading of the power, et cetera. So to me, it feels like until we get either a geographic area or we get a company that has access to capital and the ambition to go and say we are going to structurally redesign a net new system built for the future not the past we're going to continue to get these kind of like siloed or modular improvements and what i don't know is will we see the hyperscalers be the ones to do it right if you see you know uh open ai with this like stargate or whatever it is like they're all starting now to look a lot like industrial businesses right where they're going and building all this stuff it's just do they simply take the blueprint of the old power

generation the old data centers and just say let's do it do it at size or can we actually get a fully vertically integrated kind of net new system that is optimized for the future which if it happens that feels like a you know elon type company where it's a zero to one multi-trillion dollar type opportunity see what what you hit on here and i'm i'm gonna take what you said and i'm gonna take the pieces that people should be listening to. The grid is the old industrial revolution. There's been no change to it. It's archaic. And one of the reasons that we have this problem is because it was set up a long time ago. We never did anything with it. It's old. You've heard this repeatedly in the papers. Now you're taking hyperscalers and Bitcoin miners. There's

a common thread between the two. They're both innovation experts and they're both modern day digital economy groups. So you're talking about solving this problem. Well, you need this group to solve the problem because this group doesn't know this problem. So when I listen to people on podcasts, I'm listening to the head of energy at Microsoft for exactly the reason you're saying. And I think what people have to realize is if they go spend time on this, we don't have enough gas turbines to use natural gas. So we can have as much natural gas in the United States of America. If you don't have the gas turbines, there's nothing you can do. And if people really spend the time to go look at how many gigawatts we need by 2030, which is pretty much only going higher

every single day. And then you go back and say, how complex is a gas turbine? Oh, it's pretty complex. What is it used for? Well, pretty much for planes and for gas peaker plants and anything involving turning natural gas into electricity. Okay. So how many can we make a year? How many companies make them? How big is it? You go through the numbers. It's very simple that even if we put half the country on this. We don't even have people experienced enough to build out the numbers we need. So you have to come up with an innovative solution. And the people that are thinking about this are the people in Silicon Valley and they're going through it. So this is why when Elon Musk talks about solar and the fact that we can't avoid solar, well, that energy is

there. We don't have to go on the ground. It's fairly cheap to make. The question is, can you put together a novel solution? Can you locate it in a place that it would work? And that's why when Bill Gates says that every lake in the country that's near a mountain is owned now. The smart people are realizing that we have a massive power problem. And I think where people need to go for the solution is towards the Bitcoin mining group to just realize that these are people have spent a lot of time to optimize. Number two, batteries. Batteries needed for storage. And number three, you can't throw out wind and solar as like an investment theme. And since they've been thrown out because of what the administration has kind of said and the way people have interpreted it,

we're getting back to needs for BTUs. And I think your point is valid. The intersection between technology and the old school grid is going to happen. So I have two things here. The first is this is not new, right? If people go back and they study history, Rockefeller had a very big problem, which was he needed to move oil and he ran into a couple of problems using the railroad. Chiefly, the railroad operators decided they want to be in oil business as well. And wouldn't it be difficult if all of a sudden you couldn't use the railroads to move your oil? So oil pipelines became an entire thing, right? And I think that this idea of if you have capital, if you have frankly ambitious and courageous type leaders, and you

have that entrepreneurial spirit, he pretty much said, okay, if you're not going to let me use the rail line, I'm going to look at what should be a challenge. I'm going to turn it into an opportunity and I'm actually going to become more efficient. I'm not going to have to pay you. It's going to be lower costs, right? Like all these advantages and bam, now we have oil pipelines. That's essentially the equivalent of what these guys got to figure out now, right? It's okay. If we use your legacy technology and your legacy grid and your legacy infrastructure, we're screwed. So we're going to have to figure out how to upgrade it. The second thing is I'm going to do something that I almost never do, which a lot of the companies that I've invested in, they get mad at me because

they're like, hey, you're talking about the themes that we're involved with and you're not talking about us. And I always tell them, I say, I don't want to shill the private companies, right? but i'm going to tell you about one of them that i actually think is important and uh base power is based in texas um they are building a decentralized grid essentially so the way that it works is um everyone knows about these tesla power walls right tesla sells them for i think it's like 15 20 000 whatever it is um you put in your home uh power comes into your home and you can store it in a battery uh and then you can use that to consume if there's a blackout or any issue you can charge your car you can be all this kind of stuff um it's cost uh prohibitive for many

people right fifteen thousand dollar outlay um and then two is it is a battery that can be consumed internally in your home but it's kind of like an end point right like the power sits there what base has done is they have created a power wall equivalent uh they uh sell it i forget i think it's like 500 bucks or something like it's like very very cheap and then you pay a monthly subscription that is 15 or 20 bucks a month if i remember correctly uh but they're vertically integrated and so what they look at is they holistically look at the system now that power that sits in that uh unit in your home can be consumed it can be sold back into the grid and so they can start to actually monetize that power and depending on the demand on the grid versus a

blackout in your area, like it becomes a smart system, right? Now, as they spread throughout Texas, I personally believe that they are going to end up building one of the largest power networks or power critical grids in the world, but it's going to be decentralized, right? And it's a vertically integrated. And so again, I'm not saying that that's going to go solve the hyperscaler problem, but what I am saying is on the residential level, these guys have kind of gone back to first principles and said, hey, what does this look like given modern technology and the modern problem set that we have uh and how do we even not just evolve on the technology side but also on the business model side right we need that equivalent at the industrial scale for

these large players and i think that is an area where you mentioned like microsoft has a head of energy that alone should be a data point as to they think this is important right um as an investor okay i see the problem i see the you know where the opportunity is what do i do where right Are there companies in the public market I can buy? Do I have to go in the private market? Do I have to just wait, right? Like, how do I think about it as an investor? So one of the things,

and I think this is going to become another important theme next year. So I mentioned the gas turbine situation. Let's use Oracle as well. So let's use GEV. So General Electric, Renova, and Oracle. If you go look at their earnings, phenomenal. If you go talk about their AI demand, it's insatiable.

Okay, great. most of this is over the next five years and they're kind of sold out on capacity and their pe's are very high so the question is are those good investments if they've sold out of everything for the next five years and everyone knows that where does the extra growth come from and so i think this reality is going to start to filter through and this gets back to the spending side, I think people are going to start looking for growth from AI. And there is growth. Semiconductors, it's going to expand because of the things we talked about. We're at the early stages of the auto upgrade, the phone upgrade, the PC upgrade, humanoids, robotics. We're going

to need lots of new semiconductor stuff. We're going to need lots of data centers still because NVIDIA is going to keep building chips for those data centers. The question is for people next year, what do they invest in that's still an AI trade, but hasn't already priced in everything? And that's where I think the migration is going to be. I think if you're long all of these companies that are based on gas turbine buildouts and data center buildouts, I think that's already built into the market. And I think the risk is if these companies say, well, that's what our earnings are. Well, you already told me that. What's new? And I think this is going to be the shape and form. That's why I keep looking that power is still a major story to your point. You just have to be

creative because this is where technology meets the old industrial revolution. The reason that Bitcoin miners are interesting to me as a play on this is because they were actually the first grid people way before the current LLM stuff went on. They were the ones pressing. They were the ones that everyone said they shouldn't be allowed to do this. This is not good. So to get a change on this, to get that connective point that, whoa, these guys are really good and they're going to be part of the solution and they are part of the solution. So these stocks have started to run higher. And I think the reason they're running higher is because retail is starting to get this narrative because they always seem to get it first because price momentum drives it. And I want to

say that to everyone. Retail loves momentum. Well, guess what? The way that is happening now is if you want to find the companies that are leading, I'm telling you, as an investor who's been involved, price leads narrative. You will find the story out later. Somebody knows. 3% of the people know, then 4% no, then 5% no. And all retail's going is, I want to ride that wave. I don't know anything, but I'm going to ride it. And then it keeps going, and they start shaping a narrative. I can see that the narrative towards the energy plus AI is going to be a theme for next year. Batteries, storage, all of these things, these stocks, a lot of them, they haven't had the story. And I think you can get three, four, five times movements on these, where I just don't think that

the big names that have already built it in can move that much anymore. So it's interesting you say this about retail um i i knew that retail was smarter than people gave them credit for i also knew that tools like x had a lot more information it was denser than maybe people credit for yep i have now come to the conclusion that the reason why retail is beating the institutions to a lot of these trades is three things that are come together the first is the buy the dip mentality if there is any sort of weakness they're blind to it and they just say stocks go up forever i'm buying they don't try to get too cute they don't worry about i have three days till the end of the quarter i've got to you know show a print what do i do how do i hedge all

that kind of stuff um so that's one the second is uh i actually think that retail um is like terminally online and so they start to see some of these narratives take shape because of the hive mind on the internet and i have started talking to a lot of young people that work inside of these large financial institutions they're sitting on twitter all day like they now are saying look i got the bloomberg i can do research whatever but like the idea generation the uh the narrative like i'm paying attention to what retail is doing they're following retail right but the third thing is uh this idea of you you call it kind of momentum um you kind of don't get the opportunity to talk about in a bullish way one of these themes unless you're invested in the theme

And so I call it the price of admission. If you want to participate in the conversation at the bar on Thursday night, well, you had to play in the corporate softball game because everyone's talking about the softball game. Yep. Right? If you don't play in the softball game, then you just sit there and you kind of listen to everyone and you don't know what they're talking about. The same thing is playing out in financial markets and online where, okay, if I want

to be a participant in this conversation, I got to own some of the stocks. And so what you're starting to see now is people are starting out and they'll just post it. I bought 1000 shares, about 1500 shares, about 2000 shares. Yes, you know, you turn around and I see guys posting screenshots of $10 million positions in companies. And you're like, that guy went from this is interesting to I have conviction in six months, and kept building a position over time. But it was because he found a community of people to talk to about it. And so there's something about the retail hive mind and the intelligence that comes from the crowd that is changing financial markets. And I think that we are underestimating how much the institutional

portfolio managers are participating in a passive or anonymous way. And that's why you're starting to see momentum be even more is because you get retail plus the institutions kind of working in tandem, unexpectedly or unplanned. Everything you said is hitting on so many points. And what I'm going to do, and I had no idea you're going to do this, but sometimes my brain connects dots in a way. I'm going to take what you said for retail, and I'm going to connect them to Stan Druckenmiller. Okay. Perfect. It's a fun game, right? Right. The goat. Yeah. So let me start with the negative for hedge fund managers in an environment like this the first thing is um and we talked about this they're all managed in some kind of random percent and time drawdown level

meaning they're managed by their investors or they're managed by the place they work at the pod the pod so you can only lose and have a ball of x and you can't have a drawdown of this much or we'll close your strategy so for for just specifics for people who don't understand how how these pods work. Each one's different, but there may be something like if you have a two and a half percent drawdown, we take back half the money that we allocated to you. Five percent, we take back half again. Seven and a half percent, you're out the door. Perfect way to just kind of make it easy for people to understand, which means if the market has a violent fall like Liberation Day and vol spikes and your names go down online,

you hit the drawdown, you're forced to defend that place or you're going to have capital. Hedge. hedge immediately. So you've got this problem of if these happen episodically, and I've mentioned that Nvidia has had a 1300% price move since chat GPT, 13 bagger, really good. It's had five 20 plus percent corrections during that three-year period, five. So if you're at a pod, you've had to deal with some big corrections and they all happen on fears that AI is going to happen. So the first thing is you've got kind of this negative gamma situation where as things go lower, people are forced to sell. So that's the first thing. The second thing is going into the

Stan Druckenmiller side of concentration. You also, to meet those, you have to be diversified. Now, 10% of the S&P 500 is generating most of the returns since JATGPT. So you have this concentrated return and earnings thing where it's only been this AI bubble group. It's very hard when you're running, trying to manage risk to not hit the 2.5% drawdown without being very diversified. Stan Druckenmiller has talked about the success he believes in is, I don't believe in diversification. I find five great ideas, I put them on and I'm sizing up, so I might have one big, huge idea. Basically, what Stan Druckenmiller is describing is the way retail thinks of things. They look for an idea, they get in, they size it up and they're riding that.

They might be long Palantir for the entire ride where a portfolio manager might have 60 names to try and defend against some factor risks that they have to deal with. That is a big problem. But the other part you mentioned, which is really critical, this thing of getting in early, Druckenmiller famously said about Millais speech, he watched Millais speech and he went out and just bought whatever the five biggest. I think he said he went on perplexity and he just searched and he said, what are the five most liquid ADRs in Argentina or from Argentina?

And then he just bought them and didn't do any other research. And he bought them. Now, the thing he didn't say, which you could do today. By the way, he doesn't buy in small size, so he's making a big bet. And this way he bought some to be involved. That is a retail move. Like, oh, I like this idea. We're going to run out of power nuclear.

I'll go buy it. And then they do the research later. Now, here's the difference between what Stan didn't say, which is today's world. which I show on my videos and I'm gonna be showing extensively this weekend, the work you can get from AI to look at those ADRs now is insane. Meaning show me what their valuation is,

give me everything about their business. You can know their business very quickly. And now you've bought something, you have the story. My son did this with crypto back in 2020. That's the reason I got involved with Bitcoin because the way he described the stories to me and how he got them, which was in Reddit and X, I could not believe how a 13-year-old could talk to me like a portfolio manager solely by the

community that was talking about this idea. It didn't matter to me whether the idea was going to work or not. You could do your research. You could come up with it. So Druckenmiller's thematic bet, Argentina because Malay is taking over. Great. Okay. Nuclear, quantum, whatever it is, retail goes out and they find the story and then the community's involved and these things move higher. That is the reason why I say Bitcoin has one negative thing right now from the quote unquote community. It's a big asset. Retail is not moving that thing. They can move quantum stocks. They can move retail. But I think you need the traditional finance world. And that's why I say I'm trying to connect everything back. So I think retail not only has gotten a bad thing, I think

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no, no bagels. But I was at Rayos of all places, which for those that don't know is a famous New restaurant and um i was sitting there my favorite eating experience it's incredible incredible uh not biased at all uh and um i was sitting there and um a gentleman comes up to me and um he's probably i don't know maybe his 50s maybe early 60s and uh he's like i'm so sorry to interrupt right uh but uh i watch all your stuff i have a group chat with my son and some of his friends right like can i just take a picture because i want to send this right and nice guy right right whatever and then he said something to me he says uh he was a a police officer for like 30 years he uh runs security um at a company that people would know and uh he's sitting at a table

with three other guys and he points to the table and he says i was just telling them all about bitcoin i was just trying to convince them so i walk over right all right what do you guys do right you know do the whole thing and they're like cautiously interested right but they're not hardcore and any whatever but he is orange pilling three guys at the table okay right by the way at of dinner right the whole day right okay fine one-off data point i don't really think about it two days ago uh i'm walking into uh the building i live in and uh all of a sudden from the side i hear some guy go oh shit and i turn right you know you kind of turn like what's going on right and uh the guy goes hey sorry uh and he's uh works at a maintenance company and he was working at the

building and he says you know i watch all the videos i said oh yeah nice to meet you you should shake his hand whatever and then he turns and he's got his buddy with him he goes i was just telling him about bitcoin so i asked the guy said do you own any whatever he's like he's like cautiously optimistic right and so those two data points in the last week or two i realized for some reason bitcoin now i'm sure it happens with stocks to a degree whatever but bitcoin feels like a thing if you know it and you're convicted you feel obligated to tell your friends your family almost to the point where they're probably like hey shut up about it but that word of mouth is why i think you get such a fervent belief in an asset that when you see

that to me that is the most important fundamental right yes the network has to stay up yes you have to get the demand from the institutions whatever but it is an idea that spreads like wildfire and when that idea spreads eventually it gets to every single person and it's kind of like the they'll buy Bitcoin at the price they deserve. I don't know if that works for Palantir or Tesla. They have really engaged bases. Sure, there's a degree to it. But I think Bitcoin is very unique in the orange pilling process almost feels like a rite of passage or a responsibility for people in the community to go and tell other people about it. Yeah, it's funny because there's one element that's the same. Let me talk about the over time because one of the things you're saying,

I think the most important thing for me was the reaction that people were having. They weren't saying there's no way I would ever do it. They're kind of, they've been beaten down. So people that haven't invested yet, this reminds me of every time I would talk to someone who had never used Uber and they were still getting taxis. It's like, do you even have the app? No, I don't have the app. And I mean, I won't name people I knew, but it took a long time.

Same thing with the iPhone. Name them. My stepfather. at some point you have to get a smartphone and not a blackberry at some point you have to be using ways in google maps i mean i have a story that i used to tell a lot i can remember in 2016 being in a car heading to new york city with two other couples and looking going hey you're headed towards the bridge and we're coming from jersey bergen county like we should be going to the tunnel have you looked what does your gps show no my gps what do you

mean i'm like you know that google maps will show you the traffic or ways or anything you're headed into a major traffic jam like it's like tell the future right you tell the future so i think with bitcoin we're kind of reaching that moment where people are starting to accept it and this is one of the benefits of it sitting around the same level for a long period of time is at some point during the next breakout, if again, the mag seven aren't working well, Bitcoin has been an additive part. And for people that think this has been a disappointing year for Bitcoin, it's been disappointing relative to my expectations. It's still double the S&P performance for the year. And the year's not over. And the year's not over yet.

As people who have been around for a long time, they know fourth quarter. Don't worry. Don't worry. You know, like in a football game, you know how all the players, they start holding up four for fourth quarter don't worry fourth quarter is always fun uh before we end we have to talk about the government shutdown which is hilarious to me because it feels like this time everyone's like whatever like you guys want to shut down knock yourselves out to the point where the republicans the democrats are memeing each other online yep right like this is like we have entered full-on this is a circus and uh there are real people who are affected by the government shutdown but for the average american they either don't know the shutdown happened they don't care or

they're just like, the stock market's going to keep going up. I'm not even going to do anything different. How should people think about the government shutdown and its impact on financial markets? I hate to say what I'm about to say, but the reason people in the markets know that this doesn't matter is because it always ends the same way. It just ends at a time where they're both going to lose. And that time, according to prediction markets, is in two weeks. And I think prediction markets are pretty good at this whole thing and and i think actually since you brought that up i don't want to end this episode without some kind of talk on tokenization even for a second and the reason that triggered my mind is because of the prediction markets people have to

understand that the way markets are deal with things is number one is this new news or is this old news this is old news this happens every single time before midterm election like it's It's like clockwork. Number two, is it gonna end with any big thing or whatever? No, I don't think it is. Is it a signal that these two parties have to continue to print money? Yes.

There's no way to avoid the fact that we have a socialist move happening and we have a let's run it hot to grow our way out of the debt move. So on the one side, we're gonna be giving free stuff to people satisfy the fact that they can't afford enough and on the other side we're going to run the economy hot to hopefully try to grow our way out of the debt the reality is for everyone involved this

is just a representation of where we are in the system and the frustration that comes down to when you have a huge debt and deficit problem and it's not fixed in any way shape or form if you go through the way we started this year the conversations you're having are we gonna are we gonna fix the deficit we're gonna get this down we're gonna go through it and right now we're at this point of the year and all we've done is agreed that we're going to spend more money do some little cuts here and there doge is gone it's not even a thing you hear about anymore even though there's stuff going on and ai is racing down and jobs are getting disrupted so i think people get frustrated by this because they're like this is going to do nothing for me

for market participants unless something dramatic happens and dramatic would be something along using it to fire people legitimately like you're at a job and you're not going to get a job after this, then maybe there'll be some market reaction, but it's not going to change earnings and it's not going to change the economy. And unfortunately for people, that's the main story that comes out of it. And we won't get the jobs data, which means that people won't freak out later when they revise it down anyways. Exactly. All right. Tokenization you think is a big deal. I am very surprised by the way, prediction markets is kind of, I think the thing that got you on the tokenization. I am surprised at both how much more popular they have become with the people

than i thought they would be at this point like i knew that they were going to be valuable but just like the surge and sports is i think the the big driver that was kind of the unforeseen or unpredicted you know area where they would find a product market fit uh but also how much the mainstream media and like the institutional world this might as well not exist like they're just kind of like oblivious to the whole thing and so it feels like there's like this like weird paradox of the people are like we have this new shiny cool toy that we're all going to use and like go make money or figure out information and the legacy world is like you know sweep that under the rug let's not even pretend that's there oh by the way it may be smarter and more accurate than

us it's like let's ignore it yeah so this is an evolution of things like this fortnight to me is a very similar thing when it was going on as a parent you're like what are you doing in there what's going on like what's happening jordy's the meme of like how you doing kids you know he's got his headset on he's screaming at people he's yelling he's at some i'm like what's happening he's at a concert and then you go look at the numbers you're like oh my god how many people use this how did this become an overnight success and millions of people are using it like night one and and the next night jordan's got his headphones on exactly i've got i've got add i'm gonna sit on there i can go through this too um and then you get back in the prediction markets it makes sense

like gambling's a growing business in this country so fan duel prediction markets like all the stuff the fact that crypto's figured a way to be involved in this it also feeds back that that's where the tokenization part came in i enough podcasts now that i've listened to with ai people have talked about the changing of the financial guard rails so i want to bring up one thing to people before the tokenization thing chat gpt released had a few announcements this week they had some new tools come out pulse fantastic i've already used it significantly um sore 2 video that'll melt some more gpus so they're looking for revenues they're looking for staying in front of everyone get more users but the other thing which got less i think press was their

agreement with shopify and with etsy so if people go back to june with shopify you can make payments there with stable coins so again ai think of shopify and chat gpt is a way to to compete with amazon a way to compete with google through advertisement stuff like that and on the other side stablecoin is an option on payment on shopify when you put all that together which has all happened in three months and you start thinking about what tokenization is coming and i say tokenization because the government is telling people and obviously vlad at robin hood is talking about this constantly 24 hour day trading of everything eventually illiquid assets And so in the recent Moonshots podcast, Ahmad Mostak talked about this and he made this comment.

If you want to see a bubble, real bubble, AI is not a bubble. If you want to see a bubble, it's going to happen. It's going to be the amount of entrepreneurs that are going into crypto for tokenization and what you can do with it. There are so many things that this unleashes. But most importantly, what he talked about was the network effects that will come from it. And I've talked about the importance of network effects from stable coins transactions. What he's talking about, which I didn't think about, is a massive movement. Because if you have tokenization happening, you're talking about big dollars transacting constantly with fiat assets.

You're another bridge between the two, just like an ETF, just like a stable coin. All of these bridges are being created. But tokenization, to me, will dramatically increase the network effects immediately. And there's an element of the prediction markets, like you said. I'm not sure everyone has really looked into the impact of tokenization. but I do believe entrepreneurs will be there. They'll find ways to release money in housing and all the things that we've talked about that are necessary. And if you bring transparency and liquidity into the illiquid markets and you're bringing more transactions into thing, 24 hours,

seven, you're going to get a lot more moves. You're going to get a lot more things going on. And that's going to make the world very transactional. And most importantly, the speed is going to intensify. And this was the thing, again, if you go back to the ruck and miller retail side hedge funds have a process i look at names and then i gradually invest well if micron technology goes from 60 to 180 in five months and they've been doing their work for three months to see whether they should buy it they've had all these people come in and the stock's already doubled it's very hard to buy something when you started your work at a price and it's doubled and then people are like let me move on to a next one retail has speed speed is

happening. Tokenization is going to bring more speed. Everyone needs to be ready. It's funny you say this. I was talking to a founder who runs a pretty large business, nine figures of revenue, has been incredibly efficient, raised less than $5 million, built an incredible business. It's in a hot sector where there's a very decade-long bull market upon them. And we're talking about the advantages of being a private company versus the advantages of being a public company, and then by nature, the disadvantages of both. And one of the things he said was, he said, I don't think I could operate with the speed that I have in decision making if I was in the public market. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, last week, we made a purchase of a piece of real estate for something they were doing. And he goes, pretty much, we heard about it. We did some high level diligence. We made a decision in like a week. And it was like not a small investment. And he's like, I don't think you can do that in the public market. And I think that is really a perfect example of, obviously, he's very self-aware of what their advantage is in terms of that speed.

But I think what tokenization will allow for is the combination of this stuff. And you're starting to see, again, very early signs of this. Forget the stock performance of Opendoor for a second. If you look at what Kaz and the team is doing there in terms of the product iteration, they just announced that you can buy a home, seven-day trial. You move all your furniture and everything. You can hang out for seven days. And then if you like it or not, if you like it, you stay. If you don't, you give it back.

Kind of crazy, right? And then 100-day warranty on everything in the house. Now, the only way that that works, one, you got to have a good product that you have confidence in all this stuff. You got to get the cost down, right, of the transaction. So as you automate away real estate agents or whatever you're stripping out costs, you can start to do things that actually are a better experience. Now, that's in real estate, and I think it's kind of one example. you're going to start to see this all over the economy where people start to say wait a second we can start to offer things that actually don't cost money if we have a good product but are going

to be a much better service for folks and we're going to do it because we're saving so much money on the automation side on tokenization on uh the speed and efficiency that we're driving we talk a lot about the infrastructure and investment opportunities etc i am very excited for what is going to happen in people's lives as this stuff becomes prevalent and across society. Because I think that we are going to look back and be, I can't believe we lived in a world without this technology in a decade. It is highly deflationary. And this combination of crypto, meaning getting rid of the middle person with inside the financial guardrails, and I can't emphasize this enough, all of the things with closing on a house, how many things

go on. Crypto and AI are going to gradually compress that. This is highly deflationary. and it won't happen overnight. So this is not something to go. But what it is, is this offset of like, when you're thinking of the Fed, the Fed's cutting rates, guys, they're cutting rates with the economy growing at 5% nominally.

We have no job creation. This is basically the productivity thing you were seeing. Now, is it good for people? It's good for capital and profit margins. It's not good for people. It's great for entrepreneurs because they're the ones that are sowing the seeds. The guardrails of the financial world

and all the things you mentioned They're not coming from big established housing companies. They have to come from technology-friendly companies who already have the culture and have the ability of using these tools. And I think people just need to be on top of this because this stuff is going to happen as the regulations come down and the acceleration happens. It's going to be going incredibly rapidly the next few years. And that's why profit margins are a trend that are just going to stay there.

You're going to have deflationary pressures. You're going to have job disruption, which means the Fed's going to be cutting rates. the economy is going to be fine because unfortunately for the economy, it's a combination of building out the capex necessary for AI and the consumption that unfortunately happens from two levers. One is from the top down, which is the wealth creation from stocks. And the second thing is the transfer payments that the government's doing. They're going to have to increase the transfer payments as the disruption gets bigger, especially as we go into an election year. That is so pro-Bitcoin. That is so pro-crypto in general. People need to start making the

connection between the traditional finance world intersecting, whether it's power and Bitcoin mining, whether it's housing and all the disruption that comes, they have to make those connections because this is the next three years where it's going to happen. Man, I'm excited. It's a great time. I am. I'm very excited. Thank you for coming today. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? My YouTube channel, my ex LinkedIn, you can find me in all those places. And the good thing is for people on 22v um i have figured a way with them to be able to we're going to be changing the website we're going to be offering things for retail traders so that they can have access to ideas and themes that i'm doing at the same time i'm finally giving into the pressure

that is there and i'm going to create a series for people that they can find on 22v related to how to use AI, not just for you, for the empowerment. See Erica? Good. For the empowerment in your financial life. So the same thing that you're trying to do with Sylvia in terms of giving people the feeling that they have control over their finances, which is a very empowered thing in a time where people are very worried about their jobs. They need this. They need to be saving. They also need to know how to invest and actually grow that money and how to trade. And so what I'm going to try to do

is show them how to use AI to get up to speed on this because the tools are phenomenal. They get better every day. And so I'm going to do demos, a bunch of them to show people how to do this. I love it. Thank you very much.

Talk to you guys next week. Thanks.