The Pomp Podcast - Is Bitcoin The ONLY Safe Haven Now? | Jordi Visser

Starting point is 00:00:00 The government next year for the midterm elections, in my opinion, is going to have to do things that are going to be viewed as printing money. I just I don't know what to see, whether it's tax rebates, whether it's getting involved in the housing market, whatever the case is, there's going to have to be more things that are pro Bitcoin. It has to be. And the reason is. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with Jordy Visser. In this conversation, we break down why is everyone think that there's a bubble? And does Jordy agree? Is he bearish or bullish right now. On top of that, we get into the AI trade, why there is such a supply and demand imbalance in all the things around energy and infrastructure. Then we talk about the debasement

Starting point is 00:00:34 trade, why institutions now are willing to allocate to Bitcoin and gold. We even get into some talk about capitalism, socialism, and humanoid robots. We go all through the topics that happened this week. I'm excited for you guys to be here. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, we got a lot to get through this week. So we're going to go Fast and Furious. First up is bubble talk is dominating the market. Everyone is yelling bubble, bubble, bubble, which makes me think maybe if everyone's looking for a bubble, we're not in one. But what do you think? So everyone who's bearish is talking bubble, but everyone who's bullish is worried about a bubble. I've never seen anything kind of like

Starting point is 00:01:09 this. Retail, different story. I don't talk to retail, so I don't think they're worried about this. But on the institutional side, it feels like a bubble. It looks like a bubble. i will say this uh i was in brazil in 97 and 98 and left in january of 99 and at that time the dot-com bubble quote-unquote bubble was was going on so i flew back got a nice promotion at morgan ceiling i took over the largest option book at the firm the s p book and so now i was talking to institutions in the us but also seeing people in america and it was very clear to me in terms of a bubble there's been a lot of publications that have come out this week in articles that have been sent to me because i do my video and all i talk about is how don't fade

Starting point is 00:01:58 ai and so everyone now is concerned and they wanted my take on things and and i would say every single thing that gets sent my way is either clickbait or it's people that were bearish in april and may probably sold out of their ai trades and just have not had the opportunity to get back in because they were worried about the tariffs and i think that's a dominant theme and i think think that's what people need to recognize. The dotcom bubble was a build out that occurred with sentiment at all time highs. I've talked about the fact that you, Mish, is near the all time lows in sentiment right now. At the time, it was at the highs. The Fed was raising rates. The Fed is cutting rates. The PMIs were up close to 60. They're now still below 50. And that's a

Starting point is 00:02:41 survey, a diffusion index. If people are feeling it at the PMI level, it's probably trickling down to their individual portfolios. I had friends, I grew up in a blue collar town. I, my friends, when I came back, we're buying houses. And when I still remember one of them say, yeah, my AOL stocks allowed me to buy this house. I put it up as collateral. It's just, it's a different time period. And so this is not the bubble, the way that people think, but I just want to remind people, we have a supply demand problem. And back then we had a supply demand problem too. We were building out massive infrastructure, but the app store and the iPhone didn't happen for a long time after the build-out.

Starting point is 00:03:21 And those were the things that actually brought the revenues. In this case, we're building supply for demand we have now. We don't have enough supply for the demand we have in AI. And I still don't believe Oracle has not convinced people about this revenue story. I was thinking about it this week, saying to someone, you understand they have the revenues. They just don't have the supply to make them. If you walk into a restaurant and say, I'd like $300 billion of cheeseburgers, and you don't have $300 billion supply, there's nothing you can do to fill the orders.

Starting point is 00:03:50 That becomes an RPO. You got to figure a way to build it out and do it. That's what this whole thing is about, is you're actually doubting the AI story. And the demand is way ahead of supply. Two podcasts I heard this week. One, Sam Altman was interviewed on A16Z, and he said clearly, the models that we have internally are much better than the models that you guys see. And the reason is they don't have the compute to give it out to 800 million users at this point. Listen to those stories and realize that if NVIDIA comes in and they're like, hey, take a look at what we have right now, they're going to make an investment if they see what it looks like right now.

Starting point is 00:04:29 The same thing is kind of happening in the humanoid space as we speak. Other podcasts, Dylan Patel, the number one person to listen to. I can say this loud. I love people on the sell side. They can have their day in the sun. There's no way you can compete with Dylan Patel on what's happening in the AI supply chain. And very clearly on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best, he said, yeah, there could be a bubble here, but for there to be a bubble, the models have to be stalling and they're not stalling. And so until we get to the point that we're not having inference demand, that we're not actually moving forward

Starting point is 00:05:02 on all of the benchmarks. And we actually stop, forget the training models, the inference side at this point. There isn't a bubble. And so I think people are going to miss this. Doesn't mean we can't have corrections. Doesn't mean the AI stocks won't fall at some point. They all look parabolic at this point, I agree.

Starting point is 00:05:17 But that's because we're in the inference stage and nobody was ready for it. So basically what you're saying is when demand completely outstrips supply, you have a very healthy market and you're getting a pull into the market. It's when supply starts to outstrip demand, then that's when you get the glut, and that's when you get kind of the grounds or the ingredients for some sort of market crash. Yeah, and they're talking now about the debt growing, and the debt's going to grow.

Starting point is 00:05:41 And this is one of the reasons why, if you ask me, 2030, I think there's a problem for all public companies. But in particular, at some point between now and then, the MAG-7 is going to have an issue because not all of them are going to be able to gather enough revenues to justify without competition coming from the other side. Do I think it's going to be horrible? No. But when your free cash flow is declining and your debt is rising, when these companies never needed debt before, that's a situation that could be an issue. But the telco situation, you have companies that had nothing to do with the end demand, building out the infrastructure, using debt for it. That's a disaster that tends to happen. Remember, in 2001, we had 9-11. People forget that part of the bubble theme of 2000 and 2003 and part of the delay of when the iPhone and smartphone and the cloud and everything that was necessary from that build out, we did have 9-11 in between, which put the economy into a recession. We ended up having some job losses, not a huge recession.

Starting point is 00:06:36 In fact, if you go back and look, it's not even counted as one. But that was a completely different story. And I want to end it on one point. The NASDAQ, the NDX this year is up about 20% to 24%. In 1999, it was up 100%. In 1998, which was the year I was in Brazil when the world was falling apart, it was up 85%. It more than doubled in the prior three years.

Starting point is 00:07:00 This is nothing like that. You can't even compare it. We're not even in the stratosphere of what happened in 99. You wrote a great piece this week, Edison's Lesson for the AI Age, Why the CapEx Boom is in a bubble. And you write in here, today we're witnessing a compressed seven-year sprint to spend $7 trillion on AI infrastructure. When you think about the size of the spend that is happening, another component I don't hear a lot of people talking about is a very large portion of that spend is coming from the cash flows of these large companies. So it's not like,

Starting point is 00:07:34 hey, we're getting super over levered and we're basically trying to get anyone to give us money to go and do this. Now, there are areas where I think people are worried about the circular nature of some of the money. There's definitely some debt that's being taken on that historically wasn't taken on. But I think it's something like 60% of cash flow is being diverted to go and do this build out, which seems pretty healthy that the companies can actually go ahead and fund this stuff with equity. And that's the whole point. I mean, you complain on the one side that the markets too concentrated of wealth. Well, now that wealth is investing the money back into things for everyone in the hope that they'll get their money back. They may not get their money

Starting point is 00:08:14 back in the form that they need. It might mean their equity prices have to go lower. We're not at that stage yet, but that's really the point that people need to start going through is that if it wasn't for them taking all of the money in the prior decade from around the globe, meaning dominating market share, destroying retailers. They hurt jobs. They've created a K-shaped economy. In the end, they're investing that money back into an infrastructure which everyone gets to use. The democratization of intelligence allows entrepreneurs to rise. It allows them to do stuff. It's going to hurt public companies. If you work at a public company and you're not allowed to use AI every day that you're sitting in that seat,

Starting point is 00:08:51 you're losing opportunity costs to learn a skill that can be learned in a very short amount of time. But every year that you're in that seat, you're falling further and further behind unless you're demanding to use not just one tool, not just Microsoft Copilot. You have to use all of them. And so those companies are actually investing back in here. And the point of writing the paper on the electricity side was to make sure people realize it was a long time from the light bulb, which triggered the build out of electricity grids in the US to when people in rural towns actually got the electricity. I think, I mean, before the whole country was lit up, it was like an 80 year process. We're taking that entire time and shoving it into what effectively is going to

Starting point is 00:09:33 be a seven year build out from the time that chat GPT happened to the power and the power and the compute that's necessary. Just remember $7 trillion. Don't invest in the mag seven for they're the spenders, but all of these semiconductors and all of these power names, especially the smaller ones, there's a reason why they're parabolic because those dollars are massive and they're the ones that have these people coming into the restaurant to buy their food. They just don't have the supply for it. What I also don't see a lot of people talking about is the size of the revenue jump compared to what the revenue used to be. There's the nominal number or the aggregate number, but then there's also just the rate of growth of some of these

Starting point is 00:10:14 firms and their revenue numbers is off the charts. I think that's why Oracle is such an interesting situation. Let's talk about the impact of this AI kind of adoption. Bernie Sanders, of all people, not a big fan of capitalism, but he now has come out with this big report. He's not a big fan of capitalism. Shocker. And he has said that in this report, 100 million people are going to lose their jobs due to AI. Now, I always am weary of listening to someone who probably couldn't spell AI and doesn't really understand the technology. But let's assume that there's a staffer somewhere that works for Bernie who actually understands the technology

Starting point is 00:10:48 and helped put this report together. What is your take of a report like this coming out, the estimation of 100 million, but also the likelihood and timeline for something like that to actually come to fruition? I mean, we have 160 million people employed. Well, 100 of them are going to lose their job. Didn't you read that report? Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:11:08 I'm like, you know, and maybe I'm missing something. I mean, we have 30 million people that are in the healthcare field We don't have humanoids coming soon. So first of all, I mean, as much as I believe the job market is going to remain weak in the near term, that is because of a displacement that will happen for every one person who loses their job at a as a knowledge worker with inside, you know, a company that does knowledge work. Remember, there is more people that work in nail salons, that work in gas stations. You can go through the list. There's plenty of service-based jobs of which are not going to be replaced anytime soon. So, you know, all of these reports are really meant for politics at this point. And I think it's another sign of the K-shaped economy.

Starting point is 00:11:56 It's another sign that the government next year for the midterm elections, in my opinion, is going to have to do things that are going to be viewed as printing money. I just, I don't know what to see, whether it's tax rebates, whether it's getting involved in the housing market, whatever the case is, there's going to have to be more things that are pro Bitcoin. It has to be. And the reason is, although I don't believe there's a hundred million jobs, I think the point of that report, the one that was filed with the economist to the secretary of labor saying they're worried about it. I absolutely believe that for the next couple of years, people are going to are underestimating the impact that the agentic worker side is going to have. Now, at the same

Starting point is 00:12:35 time, Jensen Huang is saying we're going to need hundreds of thousands of electricians and plumbers. And, you know, the Moonshots podcast this week, they talked about it as well. And they said, yeah, the average starting pay for this is 100 to $200,000. So these are real jobs. These are jobs now happening in the middle part of the country. You're going to see some of those. I don't think it's going to offset the knowledge worker side, but maybe we stay around zero job. It's really less about the firing, in my opinion, over the next year to two years. It's more about the displacement and the anxiety that is over people because they're going to watch as it continues to accelerate. The one thing about AI that never happens, it doesn't go backwards.

Starting point is 00:13:14 It's this exponential compounding. And that's why it scares people. Because the further you don't do anything. It's like watching a car drive down the street. It's like at some point it's out of your vision and it's very hard to run and catch up to it. You have to get through. So I wouldn't take these reports as, again, anything more than politics at this point. But I do think from a macro basis, it's going to have an impact on the K-shaped economy. Are you telling me that the report, which is titled The Big Tech Oligarchs War Against Workers, is related to politics? Okay. I'm glad you broke that down for me. You mentioned rebates, things that are positive for Bitcoin. One of the news stories that I've seen is taking tariff revenue and essentially doing

Starting point is 00:13:53 like Trump bucks again and handing out the $1,200. Sounds ridiculously bad idea to me. I don't know if it's actually a policy that they're considering or not, but that feels like the most egregious and obvious. Like if we want to give money to people, let's just literally hand them a check. Do you see that in the next two or three years happening i that's not a no that wasn't a no no i i'm just trying to think whether i think it's more likely in the next nine months uh again i think there's going to be cash handouts to people i think we're at some point and again i want to say this because i i do believe the market i i heard you speak this week and you know for everyone who's trading and get involved. There's a big difference between Micron being at $60 and being at $200. At some

Starting point is 00:14:43 point, you've built in at least a lot of the good news for the near term. I do think the market as a whole, sentiment-wise, because of all the things that are fairly obvious, Fed's cutting rates, market's making new all-time highs, earnings are growing, that maybe people should be ready for something that occurs. I mean, I can't remember the last time, and I'm normally pretty good with bringing out stats, but I'm going to say something that I just know. September was an up month. For September, October, November, December to not have a correction of, say, 4% is almost impossible in my mind, meaning I don't know how many times in history during those four months, because usually either September or October, there's a correction. Sometimes it can go in

Starting point is 00:15:23 November, seldom in December, but also possibly there. I think we're going to get a wake-up call for people. So when you hear stories like this, I think it's a mini sign of COVID. If we're going to keep throwing money, and I think they have to because the bottom end of the economy is not seeing anything good happen. I mean, I don't know what else to say to people. If the job situation is not good, if sentiment is low, and if we're seeing things blowing up in kind of auto loans, if we're seeing things in student loan delinquencies, you still have the bottom half of the economy that's suffering. And I think there's going to be something that happens in the short term. So a warning sign to everyone trading stocks, be prepared for some kind of a correction

Starting point is 00:16:05 between now and the end of the year. Do not worry on the AI stuff. If stuff falls, there was a negative article on Oracle this week. It fell down to about 270. When we came back in here today, it was back above 300. When these things occur, they're actually opportunities. It's like a reset. Yeah, I'd be I'd be trading more actively and being aware of things as opposed to just writing things right now. So one of the things that I said, which I think you're referencing is today's episode is brought to you by Figure.

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Starting point is 00:17:47 you should be bearish now because I actually don't think that's the right position. But I described it as emotional control. Just avoid the exuberance. Avoid the like euphoria and just keep a level head. And I think your point about like, could there be a correction? Could there be this stuff?

Starting point is 00:18:02 Yes, but it's almost like this reset. You kind of clean out some of the euphoria. You remind people like, hey, it doesn't go up in a straight line forever. But the underlying fundamentals are pretty strong. And so it's actually an opportunity in many of these names to add to rather than say, hey, it's over and I got to go sell and move on. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:17 The analogy I gave to my son who's trading more and more and was trading as a young kid, when he needed an analogy of when I say, okay, I think you have to be trading more rather than riding things at this point. You can ride things when sentiment's been extremely negative. And once you get that move up like you had in April, then any dip to me is a buy. At this stage, and the way I said it, and this might be more of a Northeast thing during the early springtime, but when he's driving around and when he could drive, I'm like, all right, at nighttime, be very aware of deer. Drive more cautiously. Don't take your eyes off the road for even a second because they just kind of go out.

Starting point is 00:18:58 During the day, they're not as likely to do that. You're more easy to see. That's the way the trading mentality for me. I used to do that in Brazil. it was like, okay, I'm expecting vol to go higher, which means there's more opportunities, but there are also more chance to get stopped out of stuff. And I want to be in a position to add to things and trade them back and forth. So I think it's one of those times, watch for the deer. All right. There's a story that I understand one inch of, right? I need to go deeper. We need

Starting point is 00:19:25 to drill for some oil here. In the credit world, there is this bankruptcy from First Brands. There's a couple of other stories. I think that there are increasingly over the last 48 to 72 hours, more and more people are saying, wait a second, what is that over there? And there's some people who are like, that's the canary in the coal mine. There's other people who are saying that doesn't mean anything. Explain what happened here. And then what is your kind of read into what I think a lot of people are saying maybe, you know, worth paying attention to. so there's been two two credit events uh over the last two months it's really been over the last 40 days uh tricolor which is an auto lender for cars uh again subprime and then first brands which is a parts supplier both of them involved in the car market and both of them uh have been they're being investigated now by the feds for fraud so you've had two events uh they've both led to bankruptcies in the case of first brands which is a very large one it has brought in jeffries into it who was involved in it i think their stock is down 20 to 25 percent so when you

Starting point is 00:20:41 When you have a bank that falls that much, you're starting to get some people looking around. The problem is a lot of this stuff is off balance sheet. It has a lot of Enron type kind of components to it. There's apparently about $2 billion of cash missing. So think about what FTX did to the crypto market. Did you see the email? Yes, I did. That email is amazing.

Starting point is 00:21:02 So for those that didn't see his email, there's a lawyer emails another lawyer and basically says, uh can you please tell us uh what the company did with the 1.9 billion dollars and then in parentheses they say regardless of what the answer is and then they say can you please tell us how much money is in you know some bank account and the recipient lawyer responds with number one we don't know number two zero dollars i saw a screenshot somebody said not the answers you want to get from these questions. So here's what's happened. This has gone into the private credit world. And so private credit world has been viewed as a bubble for at least the last five or six years. Now, I don't think this is going to turn into something catastrophic,

Starting point is 00:21:49 but it does highlight the risks inherent in an economy that has commercial real estate market that's horrible housing market that's horrible those are two areas with lending and even though the housing market has tons of equity the commercial real estate market's not great the auto market's not great you've got people defaulting on on student loans you don't have a great economy for the bottom 50 and this is directly related to subprime so i think people should pay attention to private equity stocks are selling off relative to the market all of them so i think there's about six or seven listed private equity companies they're falling um bdcs are falling as well. So funds, income funds, they're all kind of getting hit here if they

Starting point is 00:22:32 owned any first brands. And so you're getting this little thing where, okay, it's not a big deal, but then you look for the contagion. Junk spreads have widened out, like, I want to say 15 of the last 18 days. Again, nothing catastrophic, nothing that says this is a major problem. But when you're in a market that is, let's say, hasn't had a correction in a while, and I think We're going since August 1st without a 1% correction in the S&P. Crazy. Yeah, it's a long time. So that's an issue where it's kind of like if it hasn't rained for 30 days, you light a match, everything can go up.

Starting point is 00:23:07 Do we go 100 straight? Can we get a 100-day streak if we're not down 1%? Can we? Of course we can. I don't think we will, but of course we can. But there's one other thing going on that I just want to make known to people. So I'm a derivative person by training. I spent a lot of time on correlations and a lot of time on factors.

Starting point is 00:23:25 The hedge fund that I was at, we did market neutral. So I followed factors a lot. The factor world has been, let's say, showing signs of stress as well. And what I mean by that is the most shorted stuff is going straight up. And the things that have good fundamentals, quality stuff has been underperforming. Now, this has been going on since June, but it took another leg at the exact same time as tricolor ended up being an event. And this is the way contagion goes.

Starting point is 00:23:55 You need leverage. There's a lot of hedge funds, especially quant strategies, that could have been in that trade. And then on the other side, another part of their book may have been a long, short equity quant strategy. We're seeing signs. And it's been about, I want to say, almost the exact same amount of time. but in particular about the last 10 days where it's been fairly violent and fairly consistent. I can do an overlay chart, which I'm going to show in my video, which shows

Starting point is 00:24:21 these types of positions, like the shorted names versus the S&P. It's a big move higher. Now, the last time this happened was in 2020. We had a similar type event and that led into GameStop. I think you have a situation here where the market structure is kind of shaking a little bit. And I would expect that unless it starts to change, you're going to start to see more volatility in the space. So the second that we have a 1% correction in the S&P, I think that's going to be the trigger point of more liquidations for a week or two. And how big of an issue or how much concern should people have if the streak breaks, there is this kind of liquidations? Is it a healthy correction or is it there's cracks in the armor, don't get the bucket of

Starting point is 00:25:08 water like run because the dam may break the best way i can say it is um for people who are married if you haven't had a fight with your your husband or your wife in a month every now and then a little fight yeah it might be fine for cleansing to to to just make sure the passion is still there everything is still good a good kind of debate on something every now and then is is healthy and i think the market needs one of those too it's like i had a coach at uh high school football he used always say, if I'm not yelling at you, be worried because that means I don't care anymore. Complacency sets in when there's not volatility. And so I don't think everyone should treat when we do get a 1% correction. What I would be doing is have your list together of the names that you

Starting point is 00:25:53 really like that have just started to move out, the battery names, stuff like that. If you can get a big correction, Bitcoin miners, things that like people are focused on, maybe they've had a big run. They look kind of parabolic. You look over the five years, like, I think this is just starting. Those are the ones I'd be focused on in terms of, okay, if we get a correction, let me have my list together. It'll be a mini version of liberation day, but I do think we're getting close to one of those. Okay. Um, the debasement trade is all the rage, uh, AKA just by Bitcoin and gold. Um, gold has done very well. Silver also doing well. Bitcoin, um, I think has done well, but people are a little disappointed. We'll see if it catches up. Um, why is it now

Starting point is 00:26:36 that wall street is finally saying we believe the debasement trade right this is something that people have been talking about on the internet i mean gold books have been saying this for 30 years right uh the bitcoiners have been yelling and screaming about this on the internet for a decade is it something about covid is it something about like the china central bank now says hey we're going to make a multipolar world like what like what is the thing that is now it is okay for everyone to go and put the trade on honestly if if and this is just my take on something unique that has happened and i think charlie ballello put this out this week yeah and and again easy's on my x list and i'll look but in for the first time and obviously in bitcoin's

Starting point is 00:27:21 history the number one and number two assets are gold and bitcoin year to date the reason that's a problem is as much as you know it seems like people would own gold the majority of people do not own gold the majority of people do not own bitcoin i think um with the changes we're seeing like morgan stanley has their their global investment committee has approved crypto and i think they said an allocation of two to four percent makes sense they did put a disclaimer i love which is but we'll be very aggressive with rebalancing meaning if bitcoin goes up a lot we're gonna sell out of that and rotate back into the others i think the problem is bonds have been a horrible investment relative to inflation stocks have been have been good but it's been more about

Starting point is 00:28:02 global stocks this year where people are not as overweight as they are in U.S. stocks. And U.S. stocks have been okay this year. But again, I think when we talked last week at the peak this week, I think Bitcoin was up 33% when it got to 125 year to date. Well, at 33%, the S&P was up 14, 15%. So you're still doing two times this year. So I think this is a way for the banks to kind of edge into. I think you need to have the debasement part of your portfolio, which would be gold and Bitcoin. And I think this is a way to get the FAs to have the conversation. That would be my guess because it's funny. And I posted something about this this week. For every person saying that AI is a bubble or that the stock market is a bubble, they're also positive on

Starting point is 00:28:48 gold and they don't say that's a bubble. So it's like, okay, the miners are up over 100%, but that's not a bubble. So the irony of all of this stuff is for people who are bearish, they've accepted gold i think for people sitting at home that are retirees and people that are doing asset allocation i think the debasement part of the portfolio which you know to give him credit i mean darius dale's talked about this forever he's had gold and bitcoin as a big part to replace bonds uh you need to have some of that so i think this is the bank's way of kind of catching up to darius today's episode is brought to you by simple mining have you ever been interested in mining bitcoin as a miner myself i've been using simple mining for the past few months and the

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Starting point is 00:30:29 You can even get started today with a seven-day miner trial. Visit simplemining.io slash pomp to get started today. That's simplemining.io slash pomp to get started today. With Simple Mining, they make it simple. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of crypto asset manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly. That's why, every week, I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto.

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Starting point is 00:31:45 people who cover the hedge funds. I mean, it was a pretty wide group of people. And in this meeting, one, they couldn't have been nicer. I mean, they were genuinely interested in learning. But the questions, I was surprised at the perspective that they had on this. And there was a point in the meeting where I started talking about the fact that investors should be reporting their returns in dollars, in gold, and in Bitcoin. And all of a sudden, a lot of LPs will take back their money and be like, wait a minute, these are not real returns against assets that can't be debased. You would have thought that I was speaking like, not even a foreign language, like a language from an alien colonization that people have

Starting point is 00:32:25 literally never heard before. They were looking at me like, what are you talking about? And after I left, I started thinking more about it. And I said to myself, in a world where non-productive assets are outperforming productive assets, that actually violates the core of what investors have been taught their entire lives yep and so to me that is like the paradigm shift and the question it begs is okay people say 60 equities you know 20 bonds 20 gold i think is what morgan stanley came out with um i think you or i would say well maybe the bonds don't really need a part there right whatever but actually like is it time for us to say wait a second here like the majority of the portfolio should actually be in the

Starting point is 00:33:07 non-productive assets and it's these you know ai or other kind of momentum based technology you know innovation stories that should make out the you know kind of fill out the portfolio but the core in this world of fiat you know kind of printing like that's actually what should be being told to the financial advisors or whoever so i know we've talked about this um but you know I'll always go back to this and say to people, whatever you know about Michael Saylor is wrong. It's just wrong in terms of the company and the whole thing. I consider myself someone who likes to learn from other people and podcasts and reading and all types of stuff. When I got where this point went, where I think it's really important is during COVID, the fact that everyone

Starting point is 00:34:01 didn't take the time that they had on their hands and really focus on what was happening with crypto why it was going higher and start to ask the question am i missing something important here the biggest change that's happened in my opinion breaking from historical correlations is that the stock market is called a bubble but sentiment is near all-time lows. That should be making people go, what's going on here? And for me, if I didn't spend time listening to Michael Saylor talk about what the government was doing to our future in March of 2020, in April of 2020, in May of 2020, and the following year by printing all of that money, the reason we have a K-shaped economy is because we printed money to make

Starting point is 00:34:51 assets continue to go higher. We gave people money, which they spent in jobs that could have been saved and everything, but people were YOLOing it and all this stuff. And so now when the whole tide goes back out, AI has taken off. AI is just the end result of what was happening from the dot-com bubble build-out. The dot-com bubble build-out allowed for the smartphones. It allowed for the cloud. It allowed for all of this disruption of jobs. Michael Saylor talks about that. Jeff Booth talks about it. It's something that as a macro person, I needed to hear, which is when you print money and you allow innovation to go at this fast pace and Moore's law kicks in, it's meant to eventually displace jobs. And so Bitcoin relative to housing, if you took all of

Starting point is 00:35:33 the money that you got from the government and you put it in the Bitcoin, I don't think people would want to know what it's worth because Bitcoin was down below 10,000 and now it's at 125. So if You put that money in Bitcoin at that point, it would have gone up significantly, much more than the housing went up, much more than your food prices went up, much more than all this stuff. So I think the problem is you get a massive surge in inflation. So your costs are reset higher. You get all this money for your job.

Starting point is 00:35:59 And guess what? You spend it all. You're playing catch up from that point on. And I don't think that people fully grasp that that event had a huge impact on the way that this debasement trade is going. I think people are finally starting to understand the majority of the country, which is why we're going to have an election in New York City. And now he's up to 89%. Young people can't afford to live in the city that they want to live.

Starting point is 00:36:27 And their parents are worried because they're having to help them with being able to live and come out of school where now they're not getting hired out of jobs. It's a very, very combustible situation for the young people. So the basement to me all starts back there. And what Bitcoin and gold are part of is the fact that if you're just going to keep printing, I need something that isn't paper. I need something that actually can keep up with the assets that you're forcing higher to keep us when we have a time of debt. It's all linked together. But to me, it really comes back to COVID and this whole sentiment thing for younger people. I haven't said this publicly, but I'm going to go on record.

Starting point is 00:37:02 I could be wrong. I'm going to be a weasel. I'm going to be weasel and I'm going to give myself an out. But based on the facts I know today, and I reserve the right to change my mind, based on the facts today, Andrew Cuomo is going to be the mayor of New York City. Mom Donnie's not going to win. Wow. So, okay, you've got some good money to make off that.

Starting point is 00:37:19 I mean, if we're 90% in polymarket right now. Yeah, maybe I should. I've never, you know, I'm kind of an all or nothing guy. So, I've stayed away from actually investing in the prediction markets, but I might go set up an account and see what happens there. That's like buying Opendoor at one and watching it go to 10. I mean, you're getting a payoff. it's big yeah the the uh uh the thing the reason is um momentum in uh in the polls and uh i think

Starting point is 00:37:46 that um actually that feeling of like help helpful or helplessness that was the initial surge the stock market and everything going higher there are more people who are benefiting in this city in particular from all of that where that uh that felt really bad in april and may like hey actually this isn't working i think there's a lot of people say actually the system you know it's it's uh i got a couple more shekels in my uh in my brokerage account than i thought i did before right and so in a weird way the stock market is helping cuomo over mom donnie and it's like this like release valve of a lot of that helplessness where i do think that he would have won in the summertime before we got the kind of uh bubble blow off top excitement bull market whatever you

Starting point is 00:38:34 want to call it now i i think what you need to do is um on this saturday go take a cruise to williamsburg where i live where the hipsters are walk around you might feel a little differently there might be a few more a few more people in that town in the younger part of the city that are 100 on the opposite side so you might be feeling a change in manhattan with the people you're dealing with but you're actually you know you're getting on the older side now you got to kind of come back to williamsburg and join join the underground all right i'll i'll do my trip around the net uh let's talk about humanoid robots there's tons of i mean this is like fast and furious news at this point um i think you mentioned something earlier that uh i've noticed

Starting point is 00:39:14 there's four or five guys that uh i know that are very much in this trade um chris camello and drew kang right a couple these guys they all keep hinting at i've seen the future and it's not yet public and i'm trying to put more money in that's usually a pretty good sign something's happening behind closed doors that uh is exciting or innovative what's your read on the uh the humanoid space right now i mean that you know i wrote a piece on tesla back in um in the summer because i i think you and i because like x is our dominant way of gathering news and information the brain is really good about connecting dots as information just kind of overflows this crowdsourcing part our brains are good for that like if you're good as an investor you're

Starting point is 00:40:05 like this is not the first time i've heard this and the way you described it is what i felt with tesla i'm like i can't name all the things to you guys about all the tweets and all the podcasts but like, I get the impression that we're much closer to this humanoid thing, whether it's robo taxis, which are again, humanoids on wheels, or where we're making a big advancement here. So I've noticed the same thing. First of all, I listened to Chris Camillo's dumb money podcast and yeah, he, I mean, I gotta be honest with you. He was fairly negative on, on optimists. Even at your event, I, he wasn't negative, but he just didn't think they were as close as people did. He was the one that, you know, kind of was the nail in the coffin for me as to, I think

Starting point is 00:40:49 there's something people have to pay attention to. So what he highlighted was number one, the shareholder meeting is coming up for Tesla on November 6th, I believe. And on the cover of the invite is an optimist. He had this huge pay package that was set up, which again, to me, if that's the way it's going to be and they're doing this they must believe it's coming soon i've talked about gavin baker and brad gerstner and jensen yuang of all the you know over a four month period said yeah this is going to be the biggest industry that the world has ever seen so what chris said was i don't know if the november 6 he's going to wheel out optimus 3 or not because no one has seen optimus 3 optimus 2 there's a kung fu video crazy crazy on there

Starting point is 00:41:36 But there's two Kung Fu ones. One is inside the Tesla thing that reportedly was filmed by Musk. But then at the Tron event, there was another one. And that one, no one knows for sure, but it looks like 2.5. So the question Chris said is, if he shows three, that's a big deal. Now, yesterday, figure AI showed figure 03, which to me would be like we're seeing with the AI models which is let me get in front before they do something so that everyone saw my and i don't know if you saw the video with figure three incredibly impressive uh the every video i see now i'm like this is so obvious where the world is going i wasn't saying that a year ago but now now we have hit the point where like every single video i sent to 10 friends i'm like look look at

Starting point is 00:42:29 what they made a machine do yeah and that one in particular the the whole thing with grabbing the egg and doing this. Now, yes, they can be orchestrated. That's why if Elon Musk is willing to show it, not on a video, but at an event, if he does show Optimus 3 and the advances that he made, then all of a sudden you have to take that entire multi-trillion dollar valuation, you have to start to move it up for the entire humanoid space. And I just want to remind people when Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone, I mean, arguably this is far more important. And that's what Chris was saying. He's like, this is an asymmetric event. Now, if he does show Optimus three, I want to have, I want to be invested in Tesla for the event. If it comes out and it's

Starting point is 00:43:13 another, you know, thing where Alon is showing 2.5 and we leave disappointed stock will fall 30 bucks immediately, but he doesn't want to miss the chance that this thing could be an asymmetric event. So I just think people should pay attention to two things. Number one, fading ai is like fading the compounding side you can't have humanoids without the ai movement that we've had every day that the movement continues to move forward means humanoids are coming closer and closer to that event and you want to know what the tam is on that immediately and i think that's the big event and so figure doing this them doing this and for so everyone remembers chris is involved with aptronic i mean he's he knows this space as well if not better than anyone

Starting point is 00:43:58 So the fact that he's talking about it, I think everyone should go listen to his Dumb Money podcast. What a great podcast name, Dumb Money. It's great. Right. All right. My last question for you is, a couple of weeks, maybe months ago, you were very, very bullish. I feel like right now in talking to you for the last hour, maybe you're more prudently optimistic, cautiously optimistic. Is that a fair way to categorize how you're feeling right now?

Starting point is 00:44:26 For anyone who doesn't care what happens for the next month or two and is only looking about the next six to 12 months, nothing has changed for me. You're like Max Bullish. Yeah, I think for the things that I care about, which are all compute and power, compute and power, compute and power, compute and power. Okay. We are still in the early stages. For anything related to edge devices, NPUs, all the things that we've talked about over

Starting point is 00:44:54 here. We're in the very early stages. It's applied digital APLD. If you go look at the chart, we just took out four years ago's prices. That's the PMI trade. Again, we're entering a period where the physical hardware of the world is necessary. If I showed you an aluminum price today, it's breaking out. I want to focus on the things that are there. One more thing we haven't talked about, which I want to make sure we do before it ends. China put curbs, export curbs on rare earth and battery materials this week. Now, this is a few weeks ahead of the scheduled meeting with Trump at the APEC summit. I still expect there to be a grand bargain out of this, but I do believe this tit for tat is China continually showing that it wants leverage. So the fact that they've

Starting point is 00:45:40 said they want to change the language on Taiwan, there's a whole bunch of things that Chinese seem to be asking for that the news is putting out there. And I think when you add them all up again, crowdsourcing, I think China is negotiating and trying to get certain things. The farmers in the country are suffering in a very, very big way. The Chinese have not bought any soybeans. If you type in farmers, United States, you will see it is, I mean, there's bankruptcies happening. So I do think this China-US thing, if I'm wrong, this is another event that would be viewed as a negative. I don't think the market would gap higher on a Chinese grand bargain, but I do think on that event, it would be a positive now that would be a week before elon musk and it would be before the your

Starting point is 00:46:22 big call on andrew cuomo so yeah i i just think it's all um there's a pendulum in this country and um i think that there was this massive shift towards um and trump got back in office all like the tds stuff the terror i mean you know it was like he was shooting at the ground dancing right as he was doing all this stuff. And so you got this like huge pendulum swing. The world didn't end. And so I think naturally the pendulum kind of starts to swing back towards like,

Starting point is 00:46:53 okay, maybe there's like positives. You see these AI deals being announced, you know, one after the other, et cetera. I think a lot of the like anger towards Doge and these things now has like migrated now towards ICE, right? And so it's just like, it's the same thing. It's just moving to like wherever the puck is. But what happens is ICE is pretty far away

Starting point is 00:47:14 from economic policy and markets. Doge was like directly related, right? This whole idea of like, we're going to cut government spending, we're going to like do this stuff. And so as you get a lot of that further away from the market, you do start to see this kind of swing.

Starting point is 00:47:28 And I'll come out to Williamsburg and we can walk around and see what, look, I love the people in Williamsburg, but- They love you. I think that a lot of those folks are in a better spot today than they were in April or in May.

Starting point is 00:47:44 They may not want to admit it, but the stock market going up, I do think impacts a lot of people in a positive way. And so when you start to think through this, it just feels like there's a slight little bit of optimism. And one of the aspects that I don't know how to really read into, but I think it provides some clarity, is things like the Middle East peace deal. And so it's like you're getting more clarity in the market. You get a little bit more optimism back. you start to say to yourself okay things aren't going to be as bad as we thought they were six months ago now doesn't mean there can't be corrections can't you know all the things we talked about today um i do think that mom donnie in particular was a radical change to a situation

Starting point is 00:48:27 where there felt like there was no hope you have to do you have to you have to switch so hard if all of a sudden there's a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel the radical change may not be as attractive we're gonna find out i could be completely wrong on this right but like i just feel like there's been a little bit of a vibe shift where now it says wait a second i don't know if people are as hardcore i mean his base sure but like the person on the edge adam shops out if uh silwood drops out you get a two-person race i don't know i think it's jump ball so you're you're i hope you're right um i do i i thought you were out there uh knocking on doors from mom donnie no i'm following polymarking going through it i i actually so this is i mean

Starting point is 00:49:13 the reason i'm in i i believe in bitcoin is because i do believe socialism will be kind of coming through the country um bitcoin represents to me a form of anti-establishment of just hating everything and i i think socialism for all of us is still a fringe thing and i think for young people who don't necessarily either understand or or are feeling intense pressure from ai and from student loans i i i've i've studied joseph schumpeter part of the end game for capitalism in his mind was eventually cannibalizes itself and to cannibalize yourself that's kind of socialism so i i'm kind of thinking uh in the back of my mind that the young people are just feeling like they need they need to try something and like i said about the market every now and then you need

Starting point is 00:50:05 to try something something doesn't work and then you come back to something so in the long run i don't think handing stuff out for free and doing those things we're both capitalists we both believe in it um we believe the country was built on it and i think as an as a country as a whole there's a very big difference story between a fringe thing in new york city because i do think young people are feeling more pressure than people that are wealthier known assets i'll leave you with this which is um i saw somebody tweet uh they said okay so let me get this straight you want to take the mta which is broke and you want to make the buses free so we're going to take money away from the people who are already broke that sounds like a great way to uh to run the program uh

Starting point is 00:50:44 That's it for this week, guys. I'll see you guys next week.

The Pomp Podcast - Is Bitcoin The ONLY Safe Haven Now? | Jordi Visser

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