The Pomp Podcast - The AI Boom Is EXACTLY Why Bitcoin Exists | Jordi Visser

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Starting point is 00:01:07 is Bitcoin. And the reason is because eventually... What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with Jordy Visser. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on in the US economy, the jobs report, what the Fed is likely to do in the coming months, how the Iran conflict, Venezuela, Cuba, and much more should impact your portfolio. And then we talk about AI, software, hardware, and how exactly is all of the tectonic shifts going on in financial markets going to impact your portfolio? This conversation we cover a lot. Jordy and I have a lot of fun. We even throw in some book recommendations that you may enjoy picking up at your local bookstore. Here's my latest

Starting point is 00:01:40 conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start the conversation this week is the US economy right now is in a very weird place. It's very confusing to a lot of investors. You have a jobs report that just came out this week that shows the US has pretty much not gained any jobs according to the official data since April of last year. You also have the Iran conflict that's going on. And I think people thought that oil was going to explode higher, that the stock market was going to be very volatile. And those things haven't really happened in the way that people thought they were going to happen. You've got a Fed who's not cutting rates. And you also have, I think, investors who are trying to

Starting point is 00:02:13 figure out what is the value of these software companies in the public market and how to think about the S&P 500. When we just kind of zoom out for a second, what is the current state of the U.S. economy? And like, do you think that the economy is strong or do you think that the economy is like teetering on a lot of problems? I'm going to tell you when we start this, normally, you know, there's a few things to talk about. You just threw like a lot in there. There's a lot for people to think about and talk about. And there's some statements like oil hasn't gotten up higher, but gas at the pump is up 55 cents in less than two months. And it's up for the week, I think 33 cents. So all this is happening fast. Here's the thing about the economy. It has been

Starting point is 00:03:02 an economy that has had two parts now for really since 2022. Once we raised rates significantly. And the housing market died. And then we had Silicon Valley Bank, the commercial real estate market died. Because there was so much money thrown into long duration assets in 2021, particularly software, because of COVID and crypto, think about 2021, 2022, and just how much money flew in. Then the Fed raised rates. Then we've seen long duration assets. It's not just commercial real estate it's not just the housing market it is private equity we're going through the private credit it's vc so i think that part of the economy if you ask anyone that's in those areas i mean you know a lot of crypto entrepreneurs it's been a bloodbath um housing

Starting point is 00:03:52 market bloodbath i mean we're still sitting at at all-time lows in terms of or close to all-time lows in terms of house purchases and things have been on one side of the economy bad we've had auto lenders going out like the the private credit world has seen a lot of defaults it's now it's seen a lot of fraud when the tide of liquidity goes out you get to see who's naked and we've been going through that so on that front everything's been horrible the problem with the economy and what's driving it now it's all ai a hundred percent of everything going on is artificial intelligence if it wasn't for artificial intelligence i doubt the stock market would be at the level it is because we wouldn't be having the earnings the earnings have been driven

Starting point is 00:04:34 at least until very recently, predominantly by Nvidia and the mag seven. That's how we ended up with so much concentration. So it's a very, very strange, uh, market and economy that has really no historical comparison, but I think people have to realize that behind everything that's going on right now. And so when the fed paused or when they pivoted in October of 2022, a month later is when ChatGPT was released. So you have these two forces of the overhang of rates being higher, hurting all of these businesses. But now you have AI, which has gone from a stupid 100 IQ problem, meaning hallucinations everywhere, to 130 IQ, where Opus 4.6 comes out. And so as I said, when we were at your event, I think people have to be prepared that we're at the beginning

Starting point is 00:05:28 of what is going to be an incredibly volatile period that has no historical precedent. And the paper I'm going to write for next week for 22V and my subscribers is this reminds me of LTCM and this reminds me of the quant quake. Now, in both of those cases, the S&P, I think in 98, the S&P finished up for the year. And if it didn't, it finished pretty close to it. But there was a lot of breakdown of historical relationships. And that's what you're seeing is that the historical relationships we have a great economy jobs will be good all right we're not having jobs be good with a great economy all of those historical relationships are breaking down right now so let's focus on the jobs report first and then we'll go to the ai stuff on the

Starting point is 00:06:11 jobs report side um i mean there's it was bad jobs report i don't know if there's any other way to kind of really describe it um does that just force the feds hand now and then they have to be aggressive. We're getting a new Fed chairman. And so like we should just expect significant rate cuts, maybe even as much as like 100 basis points over 2026. Or how are you thinking about what the Fed should do and how that will impact the market? Well, first of all, when you say it's a bad jobs report, what happened in the jobs report, which is new. So last month we had what, 130,000 jobs created? Allegedly. 137,000 of them were in healthcare. So ex-healthcare it was a negative number this month the reason that we're in negative territory is because

Starting point is 00:06:58 health care was negative this month now that's not going to happen going forward this was a one month thing but what do you think that it was negative there was some strikes and some other issues that were one off and remember you you had bad weather you had a whole bunch of things which could have impacted the survey and everything along those lines so i i'm going to say that we're still tracking in the same way we have been. I'm a statistics geek. We have not created any jobs now for over a year if you strip out healthcare. And the reason I keep saying healthcare, healthcare is a different kind of job and it's very hard to be displaced from AI right now. Eventually it will, but it's very hard to do that. All the other jobs,

Starting point is 00:07:40 accountants, legal, all that can be disrupted. AI is definitely killing businesses and bankruptcies. We're seeing more bankruptcies, and I think we're going to see more of them, which means there's job losses. We still have companies. I mean, last week we went through XYZ. This week you've had Morgan Stanley announced that they're laying off people, Oracle slashing jobs. This is not the normal thing at a time.

Starting point is 00:08:00 So I still hear too many people saying, well, the normal job creation, because we don't have immigration and because the demographics is not that far above zero BS, like this is just complete garbage. And if you listen to people like that, AI is disrupting jobs. It's not going to create mass firing, in my opinion, but we also know that it's going to get worse. So it wasn't as bad a number as I think people are going, but it does show that if you're not creating jobs and you have gas at the pump going higher, which means we're going

Starting point is 00:08:29 to see a huge inflation print in the next month because gas is a major part of the headline inflation number. It may not filter all the way through core, but you're going to see an inflation number that I'm sure, based on what we've seen of gas at the pump, is going to be at 1% or higher. So that's for one month. That's an annualized number of 12. We're going to be back in kind of the, oh my God, we're in 2022 period again. And that's coming in the next month. So I think it's just a period of uncertainty, both in the labor market, but this is going to add uncertainty on the inflation side. Because the one thing I will say is on the Iran situation, when you go to

Starting point is 00:09:02 polymarket, the betting market does not think this is going to be a short thing. And it's much more difficult to have an off ramp like we did for liberation day where you just reverse course and an off ramp for ai and an off ramp for a situation with iran so on the iran situation um i think i am on record well i know i'm on record as saying the triple parlay of the century would be venezuela iran and cuba uh venezuela what appears to have happened there is we pretty much went down there we grabbed maduro put a bag over his head took him back to new york sitting in mdc with Sam Bankman Freed. And then we said, okay, well, Delcy, who was second in command, you can now be the leader of this country, but we're going to be friends. We're going to have

Starting point is 00:09:47 some much closer relationship, much more friendly relationship than your predecessor. And so the US seems to have gotten some control and access to Venezuelan oil. There's now this gold deal that recently was struck. But Trump, in talking about Iran, has explicitly said that he was involved and blessed Delcy taking over as the second in command. He's saying that because he's saying in Iran, he wants to be involved in the process of selecting whoever the leader there is going to be. And then in the last 48 hours, he has said that Cuba is likely to fall soon as well. They really want to do a deal, et cetera. Who knows how true that is as much as if we do see Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, this like Donro doctrine, if you will,

Starting point is 00:10:31 where they are going and driving a lot of adversaries to become much more friendly to the United States. Do we just at some point say, okay, cool, we accomplished our goals and that's it? Or do you have to keep being the aggressor, the forward-facing, we're spending money in these countries and doing this? How does this end, I guess? Well, I'll connect everything you just said back to one thing last year. The trade war ended. Why? Because China told the world they have the world's rare earth. What is the connection between Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba? When you go into the China, Iran, Russia proxy and you get into the, hey, we control rare earth. All right, let's make sure with Greenland, which has a lot of rare earth

Starting point is 00:11:25 that we have at least the possibility. When we do a deal with the Ukraine, let's make sure rare earth is involved. In terms of China, China gets, I think, 20% of their oil, either from Iran and or Venezuela. So there's a China connection to this whole thing. And remember, there's a Xi-Trump meeting coming up in April, I think. So when you get into kind of the intersection of things, I think the rare earth card was played. I think the oil slash, let's make sure that you don't have control over these areas the way that you did, that if you're going to shut off rare earth, well, now we can have more control over what goes on in oil and the world, whether or not that's the true side of it. There's absolutely no doubt that behind all of this is AI. You had the

Starting point is 00:12:13 philanthropic fight with the defense department the maduro situation you left out the mexican cartel our involvement in using artificial intelligence in in moments like this and the ability to do things that we've never seen before like venezuela i think people just have to realize that this is a new world of again artificial intelligence that will only intensify as we get into humanoids right now we're just dealing with autonomous drones and we're seeing that that also means that it's not just Iran. If people haven't looked up, go look at what the Mexican cartel has with drones. We're fighting battles with people that actually have advanced military. And I think having the ability of having an advantage in artificial intelligence is something that this

Starting point is 00:12:58 administration is very focused on. Whether or not when the midterms come, that'll continue to be there, because I think these are all going to be major issues with the midterm, especially now with gas going up and the jobs market going down. But then when you fast forward it to the next presidential cycle, I think it's absolutely going to be there because in three years, we will be talking more about humanoids being really, that's why whenever we do the show and I meet people either on it and in particular right now, financial advisors are kind of the place I'm spending a lot of my time because they're the voice to investors, investors that are day traders. They may not have a financial advisor, but you know, with Sylvia and these

Starting point is 00:13:34 things, like there are a lot of people that tune into the show to hear what's going on. these things are unprecedented. Most importantly, they are not going away. So my job with RIAs and financial advisors is hopefully to provide them some kind of a calm backdrop as to what's going on, give them some tools and AI to deal with this. But I think everyone just has to realize that no matter how many questions you ask me today, artificial intelligence is involved in some way, and so is China. It's funny you bring up the financial advisors. We've had a lot of inbound interest at Sylvia from the financial advisors, and I've been telling them, there's basically two reactions. I have a group of financial advisors on the

Starting point is 00:14:09 internet who think that I am like the second coming of the devil and we're trying to automate their jobs. And then you have a lot of RAs that are saying, wait a second, this is a tool that can augment our humans and make us more productive, help us make more money, increase the number of clients we can serve per advisor, all this stuff. And what I find that's very interesting is the people who are running towards the technology, whether it's Silvio or just other AI type tools, they tend to have the growing better more profitable companies like this is just the mentality they have it's like let's find things to make us better versus there's like kind of a pessimistic you know contractive type mindset and they're the ones who you know are upset about the

Starting point is 00:14:48 stuff um one other aspect that i do think is uh maybe feeding some of the activity it feels like our memories are so short so we've talked in the past about like we went we got maduro within three weeks no one was talking about it anymore this week i didn't realize this because i'm just so terminally online but i was talking to a a real life friend who isn't on the internet and i said to him yeah did you see what we did in ecuador and he was like what and i was like oh yeah we were just bombing uh you know a narco terrorist group in ecuador as like uh and i saw somebody called a side quest right like while we're doing the iran thing we're like let's go down here and get these guys he had no clue he's like dude i never saw this in the news i never you know what

Starting point is 00:15:30 mean? And so it almost feels like the military complex can get aggressive because there is this like amnesia. I don't know if that's a positive thing long term or not, but it does feel like the rapid speed of this is changing the way that people are able to operate. Businesses are doing it, but also governments and militaries as well, right? Yeah. And again, it's the speed. I will tell you that like in the Ecuador situation, the problem with finding it on X is that it's not the most talked about thing and there's so many things that are talked about right now uh it's just impossible and this gets down to like things you're seeing now about the app store and the competition and software it's like we're creating so many things every single day and that stuff is

Starting point is 00:16:11 getting sent out i'm a person that's trying to keep people up on the most important news stories for the markets related to ai and all the things we're talking about it's getting harder and harder for me to actually extract the information which is what i use my open claw agents for which is to go surf through Reddit and to go surf through XN each morning, give me the news based on what's trending as opposed to the news that would be in the FT or the Wall Street Journal, which arguably is news from a long time ago. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure. If you believe in Bitcoin long-term, the worst move you can make is selling it just to access liquidity. That's why you should check out Figure. Right now, Figure offers crypto-backed loans at 8.9% interest with

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Starting point is 00:17:28 to 8.5% APY, paid hourly, backed by real-world assets, not yield games or token inflation. Hold your Bitcoin, unlock liquidity, or put capital to work. Check out Figure using my link in the description or go to figuremarkets.co.pump. I'm going to say this from a, a very good place to the mainstream media. I married a journalist. A lot of my friends are journalists, et cetera. Um, this is a generalization, but I do think that the mainstream media has become somewhat, uh, documentarians of the internet. If you go through most of the stories outside of maybe politics, most of the stories are talking about things that happened on the internet or were announced on the internet or went viral on the internet etc

Starting point is 00:18:20 and in a very weird way they are now an amplification of the internet more so than they are like they're creating the news at the mainstream media and then the internet is talking about it it's kind of reversed and so financial markets may be one of the areas where this is you know accelerating more so than anywhere you see people uh are going and robin hood is streaming their announcements directly to the internet or to youtube or whatever and then both the you know twitter crowd and the mainstream journalists go and race to who can write the stories who can go and cover what's happening but the people on the internet they just clip the video post it they're viral before the article's ever hit so it's like a very fascinating way this is happening right

Starting point is 00:19:01 yeah i'll add one more thing into it and this is something that i hope as people get to know me both here and on on my weekly there's too much focusing on the tales of things so last week we talked about the citrini report and what everyone wanted to debate and this is what happens the you know x becomes half the people believe it's going to happen and half the people say it's not going to happen when the reality is jobs are going to be displaced it's not no it's not jordy no it's not prove it prove it but here's the thing to say that it's going to be at 12 unemployment is an extreme to say that it's going to do nothing is another extreme jobs will be displaced and if nothing else because of the trends we're seeing which we've already seen it has a huge impact

Starting point is 00:19:53 psychologically so maybe there's some intelligence and nuance software they're all dead don't be don't be rational don't be rash don't bring that rationale in here well i'll give everyone An important one for everyone to focus on is what's happening in private credit. And the reason is this. I've been around many of these scenarios like private credit where retail is trapped. Retail is trapped in products and they don't know what's going on. So just so people, because many people are probably not following this story, explain a little bit as to some of the data points that we've gotten, Blue Owl, I think it's

Starting point is 00:20:26 Blackstone, et cetera, in terms of what's happening. Yeah, you've had a situation with Blue Owl that's really been in play for a couple months now where, you know, they were getting more redemptions. And the way these things were structured, these funds, a certain amount could be taken out. And this is something that people have to understand is everyone wants to get a higher yield than what they can get on money market funds. So if you can get an extra 500 basis points, so, you know, and right now, most of these funds were producing 8 to 10 percent returns. really since 2020. So to be able to get those types of returns, they took in a lot of money because they're also don't have many down months because these things don't trade that much. So if you don't have to mark things to market, the returns look great until they don't. And when

Starting point is 00:21:14 they don't is when there's a combination of losses and defaults and things happening. So you had tricolor, you had first brands, which we talked about in October, and you got some crack showing up but then you've had more and when software collapsed and people realized that anywhere from 13 to 25 percent in some of these funds was in technology slash software well then those bonds go down and then people want their money back and when they want their money back then these places have to go sell bonds down and blue owl had to sell some stuff to the marketplace that a cap captive insurer bought and a whole bunch so that got 99.7 percent and then this week blackstone had a scenario that they had about 1.7 billion net come out. The partners there put up some money

Starting point is 00:22:00 and the firm put up some money to make sure that they could get their money back, even though there's a restriction on how much. They wanted to give enough, so it still stayed in that level. And then today we have BlackRock. So what is happening, and I've seen this too many times, retail wants their money. And unlike SVB, where you could just go on your phone and get rid of it, there's a run happening and is it justified they don't want to sit for the losses that are probably going to happen is it a like contagion type thing where okay i see you know kind of uh one crack i see a second crack i see a third crack i'm actually not even going to go do the work to figure out whether i'm safe or not just give me my money back and i'm like i'm running for the hills

Starting point is 00:22:39 just out of an abundance of caution which then creates so much of this pressure it does but i don't think we'd be in this position if it wasn't for the software stocks. So what people have to realize, and again, this week, BlackRock, and this freaked everyone out yesterday, they had a bond in their private credit fund that was marked at par, 100, a few months ago. And then they announced yesterday, it's a zero. That doesn't happen usually unless there's fraud. So we don't know the details behind it, or at least I haven't read the details on how you could go from 100 to zero. But when that kind of stuff is happening, it makes people scared justifiably. Now, the private credit market is large.

Starting point is 00:23:18 It's estimated to be two to four trillion dollars. There's interval funds which are starting to get stories on X as well. These are going to be in the same type of situation. So here's the thing I'll say that's positive. Is this going to take the economy down? No. Does this have a bigger impact than people realize? Yes, because it is tied very, very closely to the insurance industry.

Starting point is 00:23:39 and the insurance industry has a tremendous amount of leverage the companies were mentioning blue owl there was an insurance company involved apollo has a theme blackstone is in the insurance like all of these places some of them have captive insurance companies and they've got they've been selling stuff to retail a lot of the big hedge funds just change their liquidity terms in the last few years to five years this will be a story in my opinion this year as well so i think the private credit thing that people are reading about is something that should be on the front of their mind is again, another one of these situations where in a world where things are moving so fast, not just the news, the news impacts this in two ways. One is everyone now knows private credit

Starting point is 00:24:24 is an issue because all they have to do is see how fast it's spreading. The networks get a lot of their news now from X because something that would have taken weeks to be a story is now out there the second it goes viral, because we're all looking at viral stuff. So again, go back to It's a Wonderful Life. The way you found out there was a run on a bank is seeing everyone run to the bank. That's where the phrase came from. Well, now we're having these virtual runs. And I think the private credit market is mispriced and all credit spreads are mispriced for what software went through. So remember, software fell and stock started getting volatile. And I talked about my turbulence model, which I sent a big thing out this week to people. You started getting these

Starting point is 00:25:01 shakes in early February. And the reason was software was falling so fast. And the reason it was falling fast and then started to impact all these other industries was people don't know what three years from now is going to look like with when you're lending people money for 10 years. If you don't know what the world's going to look like in three years, how can credit spreads be tight? Cause that means the probability of me getting paid back over the 10 years is a hundred percent. I think what they're discounting now is that it isn't. And that means credit should continue to go up and volatility should go up. And I think that's going to be the nature of this year. So people should just buckle up. If you've got FAs and if

Starting point is 00:25:36 there's FAs watching, reach out. All of this stuff is there. And I think using AI to help be able to give you more details on this and provide your investors with some things, I'm trying to help them. But I think at a minimum, you also need to be on top of how to use artificial intelligence. Private credit is going through, you know turbulence and pressure are you someone who thinks that people who are sophisticated and understand this should be running into the fire and there's gonna be lots of opportunity in these distressed assets and and all this uh chaos or is this something where you'd be running away from it and saying you know the people who are leaving are intelligent and stay away from the stuff i i

Starting point is 00:26:14 don't think it's um something anyone should be getting involved in yet and we're at the start of the crisis, not near the bottom of a crisis. Yeah. With assets, I think they're just going through the place. If you listen to one thing I'm saying, all of the capital structure of the world is adjusting to a world where there is no certainty three years from now. That means volatility has got to be higher. Number two, multiples have to compress in the equity markets. I'm a deleveraging person. That's the reason why I'm in Bitcoin. Explain this concept because I've heard you say this a couple of times. I do not think that most people are paying attention, nor do they understand. When you talk about the equity

Starting point is 00:26:53 market deleveraging or the fiat system deleveraging, what does that mean? If over the next decade, the economy grew by 6% nominally a year, but the S&P 500 was unchanged. Right now, we're at 220% of S&P market cap to GDP. that number is doubled what was considered dangerous before we've financialized the entire market this is the reason why back last year when the government was trying to do what it was going to do i was on here saying this is not going to work you eventually are going to have to throw in the towel on these plans because if you let the stock market fall 50 then we will go into a recession because we financialized it the only way you can exit the leverage in the system is slow

Starting point is 00:27:42 moving. Wealthy people get hurt not in losing money and consumption because they're driving a lot of consumption. But if the S&P is unchanged over a 10 year period and most of the economic growth from a dollar perspective goes to private entrepreneurs. And this is the thing. If you take the GDP of the country, 30 trillion dollars, and you say the market cap of the S&P is 65 trillion, That's how we get to 220%. What if the S&P 500 in 10 years is still $65 trillion, but GDP is now $60 trillion? Well, we've lowered that. Nobody lost money. They were just debased, right? On the other side, if the revenues left the S&P and went into these private companies, these little entrepreneurs making lots of money, well, we got the redistribution without a tax,

Starting point is 00:28:28 and it happened through debasement. Now, if that occurs, this is where I believe Bitcoin will soar. because the money will be moving away. Now, I can give you a lot of reasons why I believe this is going to happen. But instead of it being viewed as bearish, which I am not, I just believe this is a debasement tax on the wealthy that is going to the entrepreneurs driven by the democratization of intelligence and the democratization of the financial rails, opening up the ability for the middlemen to be extracted. That is the whole nature of crypto is if the middleman can't make the money and if AI disrupts

Starting point is 00:29:02 the wealthy people, because now a single person can build a business worth a billion dollars and it would be a business that Google would own in the past. And that's not the case. Then everything is shifting away. And I believe that is going to happen. And I believe it's the healthiest way for this to actually end as opposed to a revolution in a war. The revolution is happening where the open claw people are winning. If your kids aren't using open claw yet, they should be. Sponsor it. Get involved in it. Get them a Mac mini. Get them a MacBook Pro. Get them using this stuff and let them start building stuff with AI agents. When we think about this deleveraging, if I'm an individual, I've had a financial advisor

Starting point is 00:29:43 or something, and they told me be 60, 40, you know, maybe I've got a half of my equity portfolio in the S&P, maybe some in NASDAQ. Maybe I've got a couple of individual stocks that I decided to pick because I, you know, enjoyed or intellectually stimulated. 40% is in, you know, some sort of fixed income, mostly treasuries, but maybe some other stuff. what should I expect to happen in my portfolio over the next decade? Like, am I dead in the water? Am I going to keep seeing it grow? Just not at a rate that I'll be excited about what happens? No, this is where, so everything still gets back to, um, the connection between driving

Starting point is 00:30:17 revenues and driving GDP. Cause at the end of the day, GDP is just a representation of all the transactions. So if you invest in foreign markets, in my opinion, as an overweight position and you're underweight, the S&P 500, which has worked significantly since Netscape. I mean, we own technology. So if for the next decade, the S&P is flat, but a private business is doing phenomenal and then foreign markets are doing well, I think the way to make money is to be invested outside of these companies. I think commodities are going to do great because we have to build out everything that

Starting point is 00:30:53 we need to power the AI. tokenization is going to come and allow you to invest in all of these private companies that are there they're going to trade like prediction markets that's why prediction markets are real because a startup business that never becomes monetized never goes public because they don't need the capital and they just grow rapidly and they get to a billion dollars like a cursor maybe cursor's done but if it if you could have traded it and they grew to that level and then you got out of it you don't care if it goes back down axi infinity existed and then it was gone the crypto world, you get used to things pop up, they go down. I think people have to get used to the speed

Starting point is 00:31:28 of AI and the monetization of a great idea that people want right now into something that grows and then it stops. And I think we're just moving time. I keep saying it time and time again, when I use the supersonic tsunami thing at, I don't think people listen. Like he really, Elon's telling you, fast and powerful. That's what AI is. And so the capital structure is not built for that. The capital structure of this economy is built for slow. The risk models of a large quant hedge fund or a multi-strat hedge fund is based on COVAR, which is the historical relationship between volatility and the correlation of assets. That's why I say this reminds me of LTCM in slow motion. It reminds me of the quant quake in August of 2007.

Starting point is 00:32:16 And I do believe that this is going to play out this way this year, but it's not a bearish thing. It is a up and down thing. If you're a day trader, it's a phenomenal period. So I have tons of names that I hope the market sells off 10% so I can go in. Last night we had Marvell report. Marvell is a big part of the ASICS explosion that's going to happen. I love finding companies like that.

Starting point is 00:32:42 So I think you can stock pick. I think you can day trade. I still love Palantir relative to Microsoft. I still love Bitcoin relative to the software sector. I actually think it's a more enjoyable time for people that are doing their homework in AI. I think for people that have been passive and just sitting in things, which is what private credit was about, and it's what the S&P 500 or the passive indices are.

Starting point is 00:33:02 It's a more active environment. And I think everyone knows that because they watch their kids. Why don't you like baseball? It's boring. Why don't you want to play golf? It's too slow. Everything is about speed now. i don't think the older generation tends to want speed bloom energy is a company that uh seems to

Starting point is 00:33:19 be getting a lot of attention it's up a lot but um we've seen uh leopold and a couple of other uh fund managers who have come out and they own you know significant stakes in this company we haven't talked that much today about like energy infrastructure and the things that i think we've spent a lot of time talking about over the last year or so are you still bullish on that stuff or or do you think that there are maybe other areas that deserve more attention well i'm still bullish on anything related to powering um and let me rephrase this and so you guys will start to have a little lesson here so i think what everyone needs to start doing is separating and some of this is because of iran which i'll talk about but i brought it

Starting point is 00:34:01 up last week the cloud which is where these massive gpu clusters are training the iq of of the brain. So those continually need to be built out because we need to solve fusion. We need to solve longevity. We need, that is what those are going to be. We're going to have Einstein times a thousand and then a billion of those solving problems. So everyone should just remember that when you hear a data center and these massive things being built, they are really to create a massive brain to do everything. At the same time, companies are going to use the cloud because that's where they are so when you're on your your phone or your laptop and you're using the app you're going to the cloud to do all that work where i have all my mac hardware is my own

Starting point is 00:34:50 little world where i don't want it dealing with the dangers involved in my own files the important stuff the stuff i don't want you have two systems you have like a human driven system and then you have an automated system including hardware software etc yeah everyone knows what the human system is because they have one describe in this um kind of agent driven system you have open claw like what is like the stack what is the hardware does it have a phone number or an email address i kind of walk through what that setup is so it is on i have two separate ones so i have a mac mini setup that was the first one i bought but then i bought a macbook pro the reason i wanted two things is i want one to be able to carry around with me um basically not i i'm running

Starting point is 00:35:34 out of space in my apartment. So and I'm not in Maine enough right now because I'm too busy. But these things are there to help me with the content finding. I create these structures to say, hey, go out and find this. Go run. Your job every day is to go into Reddit, go into X, go through the Internet and give me the stories that are the most important so I can stay on top of showing people what's going on. At the same time, every now and then I want to tweak my turbulence model. And what I used to do was I'd have three to five data scientists that would do that for me. These are my data scientists. I give them the code and I go, Hey, I'm using this in production. So what I want to make sure people realize my computer, my think pad and my, my Mac,

Starting point is 00:36:16 the two I use for both work and for kind of my videos and stuff, no open claw on them. I won't allow AI agents to run free because I don't want things that I built that I use destroyed. Right. So your human system is insulated from the agent system. And then on the side is the place where I let them run wild. And if it destroys something, there's nothing on there, but the internet and all these things. So it doesn't have my Gmail. It doesn't have my work site. It just doesn't have anything that has me associated with it. What I do is I take the output from that and then I bring it over to this computer when it's ready. How do you send the output between the two? At that point, I will send it either in an email or I'll do it on Google

Starting point is 00:36:54 drive or something like that um just to be able to not connect the two but this is the way that i just exchange it between it and that's the way companies in my opinion are going to end up and this week a lot of the podcasts that i'm going to be showing people there's a lot of people in silicon valley that are now finally starting to talk openly about how important open claw was as just a thing this is why software fell this much because silicon valley is like oh my god this is a different world ai agents are here which means it's no longer humans building software it's them building software. So if I say to them, come up with 10 different versions of this model addressing something that I haven't thought about, they just run off and do it. And then I get in the

Starting point is 00:37:33 morning like, oh, that's a great idea. I didn't think about that. So I know a turbulence model is important. And so people, if people understand turbulence model for me is the representation of the daily volatility of these big, massive hedge funds. That's what it stands for. Uh, if things are shaking, like what happened during LTCM. And I was in Brazil and then was, was part of the shutdown in terms of being used. And I got to interview all of the people that worked at LTCM. I just want to see what's happening. It's does not mean they're losing money. It just means it's moving a lot every day. So they could all make money it's, but they're going to have to take their leverage down because this means that it's moving too much and they have a set volatility

Starting point is 00:38:15 that they want to be at. So I have it just figure out what to show me. So I think all companies are going to have this set up part off the cloud, Azure, all that stuff. But then part of this stuff is going to be on premise off to the side, their own data centers that are built there. And those data centers that are built there are not going to be on the same hardware as what the clouds are. Heavy GPU, heavy Blackwell, heavy big clusters. These are going to be ASICs and this is going to be different. And that build-out is going to be much bigger than the data centers. That's when Jensen Yuan says, we're going to have AI factories and they're going to be $85 trillion around the globe. This is not the $6 trillion you're hearing in terms of the spending.

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Starting point is 00:41:34 uh so the tasks that it's doing for me are freeing up time that to me is ridiculous time that i have to spend the cutting and pasting of all this the putting it into notion it really is a productivity thing it doesn't come up with novel ideas so i listen to one of the podcasts and as i show every week, when I get the transcript and I go, what are the most important insights out of this that I can make money off of? There's nothing. And that's why I have to listen to the podcast. So this one in particular was the guy named Jerry Murdoch, uh, insights partners. It's a great one. I'll send it to you. Um, but he just talks about how much the world is changing. And then you had Josh Wolf send out something to his LPs on the fact that he's worried about all startups right now.

Starting point is 00:42:25 And the reason is because of the speed. So he's Lux Capital. All of a sudden, now a lot of people with Inside Silicon Valley are talking not about software is dead. This is going. It's more the nuances involved, which this is an important thing. And this is changing who the winners and losers will be. But more importantly, the architecture that fits into a firm. What I didn't bring up with the Iran thing, which I kind of teased. If you're a company and your sensitive information is going through ChatGPT Enterprise and up to the cloud, you think you're safe. I think we're at a point with the Mexican hacking at the government that all companies and large enterprises, Iran is a very sophisticated country when it comes to cyber. I don't know what's going

Starting point is 00:43:06 to happen, but I do know this, more and more people both in Washington and the banks are warning about an attack. And the reason they warn people is because they want to be able to go back and say, I told you this was going to happen. There were plenty of warnings before 9-11 when before 9-11 occurred in terms of people knowing that, hey, we don't have enough protection. We're we're letting things happen that shouldn't happen. I think cybersecurity is going to be a major issue. And this is where you get into the thing of I want to do some work in the sandbox that is protected and anything can go wrong there. But for my stuff, I don't want you guys being involved in it. I don't want to be exposed to cyber. And that's where I say when that cyber

Starting point is 00:43:42 attack occurs, Bitcoin and cryptography all of a sudden is going to be another important thing, because as much as the RSA work that CrowdStrike and all these guys go through, I think the blockchain and bitcoin is going to be another thing that people think about oh my god we need to have thing on chain because of the cyber risk one um one area that um i'm thinking a lot about just given that you know we've got a bunch of different businesses and a lot of our businesses benefit from uh content right the content is the distribution and we put the businesses kind of through that um the rise of synthetic media and uh kind of ai generated content a couple of examples um there are these instagram accounts uh that are rabbis i don't know if we've talked

Starting point is 00:44:30 about this before but uh basically they are i think they're ones like rabbi finance rabbi you know whatever and it's very clearly ai yep but the content is good and so it'll be you know hey here's what uh rich people do with their money here's how you know uh good parents raise their kids here's how whatever and i watch a lot of them right and i and i find myself and i'm like I know this is AI, but it is still valuable to me because it doesn't actually matter whether humans telling me this idea or the AI avatar is telling me the idea. It is cut in a way, it is structured in a way, et cetera, where one, it's entertaining, but two is I'm actually getting value out of the information. Then I shared with you, and maybe we can even play for folks,

Starting point is 00:45:15 a video of Glenn Beck, who I haven't heard his name in a while, but he's got a very large podcast and media interviewing george washington and when he interviews george washington they put george washington in a t-shirt which i thought was pretty funny but in this again you now have synthetic media with a human and it's edited in a way where it looks like they're sitting at the same table right like you you're kind of shooting over glenn's shoulder and you see george washington there etc we've talked about you know there's a podcast now uh called epstein files and it's all ai made you start to see this and you're like wait a minute that we are headed towards a world where people are just going to create this content they're still going to be global competition like

Starting point is 00:46:02 what content is good and what is not but we're getting desensitized right at first it was novel it was cool and now we're just like yeah it's just it's all content yeah i so you know one of the unique things about me that i've never said i that i can't remember saying publicly so i i don't read fiction i don't either okay well the george that's why we like each other maybe that is why i so i love you know you know why why do you yeah why do you not uh read fiction i i i just for some reason i like collecting data to use and like when i watch a george washington thing there's nothing in there that's factual yeah i mean it's it's it's a made-up thing i i i laugh when you know every now and then i get sucked into reading a couple posts by people and i write a lot

Starting point is 00:46:53 and people will never say that's a i written i'm like fuck you it is it like the accusations now are crazy i mean i spend so much time doing what everyone does when they write, which is when you go to school and you have to write a paper, you go to the library and you know what you get from the library information that you then turn into a paper. AI is no different than that. I come up with the concept. I come up with my, I add my personal anecdotes and parts into almost everything I write. Like we, I'm the one I mentioned today about comparing this to LTCM and the quant quake. I was involved in both of those. I'm doing it from a place of being there. Am I doing research to add value into it? Because I don't remember

Starting point is 00:47:41 everything with LTCM. Of course, is AI helping me with that? Of course it is. Why would I go to the library and go waste time? So for all you people out there, this is AI written. Fiction and AI generated, I can tell because it's just, there's no personal anecdotes and it's just like blah that comes out. I write a sub stack that gets a lot of people to read it. I think it's because I'm coming up with ideas. Uniqueness. Yeah. Uniqueness that goes. And I think that is what will separate good content from bad content going forward. But I don't, AI, as I've seen it right now, it can't create good content because it doesn't have the context, the context that people want to hear. Writing a story about LTCM and the quant quake wouldn't matter last year

Starting point is 00:48:25 during the liberation day. Right now, what we talked about, there is no doubt that jobs are not being created while the economy is growing. Inflation is going higher, but job rates are going down. It puts the Fed in a difficult position. AI is creating an environment where for people to fully, I think, be able to accept the chaos that's happening, part of that's going to happen with time and just getting used to all these things. But part of it is feeling like you're expecting them. And there was one thing in there, and I can't remember the exact line, but I'm going to use something from that. So there was one fact in there. What he said in there, George Washington, he said, a quote that I said was to be prepared for war basically is the

Starting point is 00:49:16 insurance for. Well, that's the theme with AI. I think to prepare for the disruption that's coming, you have to basically open your mind to humanoids coming in five years. This is not the end. This is the beginning. Most people don't accept it. They freak out when we talk about humanoids. That's not going to happen. It is going to happen. Autonomous vehicles are going to happen. Job losses are going to happen. You have to accept that and not say it's a bubble. It's going to happen. And then that's preparing for the disruption. Part of it is just letting it be part of your brain. And the only way to make that happen truly is to stay up with how fast it's moving, because that gives you a stage on how close it is. So the reason I feel comfortable

Starting point is 00:50:00 talking to some of the smartest people in the world from an investment standpoint, who I've known for years and feel like I have an edge in one thing that they don't have, I use it so much that I know the difference between Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 and Sonix 4.6 and OpenClaw. They don't know because they're not allowed to use it and they don't have the time. So partially this is that George Washington thing. In the preparation for AI,

Starting point is 00:50:23 the insurance of being able to survive this, not only for yourself, for your kids, you have to stay on top of what's going on, expect that the next four years are gonna happen. So you have to read more about just the future of it. And then the second thing is to make sure that you're involved in it So you see the real-time change happening.

Starting point is 00:50:40 One of the aspects that I do find very fascinating is AI is amazing when it's given direction. Go and find this information. So like the quote as maybe one thing, we know that understanding history is really important. And so people who read a lot, people who, you know, like all of that is generally associated with, oh, you are wise. You have wisdom. You are, you know, able to weather the storm. You don't get too excited. you don't get too down, whatever. What I don't know is what is it going to take for society to

Starting point is 00:51:15 be normalized where you are essentially now having the digital employee, the digital partner, the digital assistant, and it is the human plus the digital assistant. So for example, when you were talking about the writer, if you hired a human and they did a bunch of research for you and then you wrote and even if you copy and pasted some of the research right in didn't change a single word no one would care right yep but when you automate that person with technology now all of a sudden it becomes this whole thing same thing as if you know we're talking about financial advisors earlier one of the ways that we've talked to financial advisors is hey just think about you're hiring somebody who could be the first line of defense to answering every single question from

Starting point is 00:51:58 every single client yep how much would that make you more productive right all this kind of stuff You go and you look at some of these companies, OpenClaw maybe is another good example. People are just automating the digital workers, which then ties it back to like the jobs report is not looking great, but companies are still producing profits. Why? Because you're automating away all these tasks. I have I'll leave you with this one thing. I have a friend who's a very kind of hot, you know, Silicon Valley startup. And he recently told me that he is doing I think it was twice a day demos of people in the company have to show him what they're building with AI. And he's like, it is pervasive, our finance team or this team, our growth team, whatever. And he walked me through a couple of different you know, I'll call them kind of divisions, but like their ads team running paid ads. He's like, they had eight people. Now it's down to like, I think it was one or two. And he's like, and we're making more money off the ads. So he's like, so we cut costs, but it's, we're better at doing it now. And so when you hear that, you're just like, of course, every single executive is going

Starting point is 00:53:05 to be like, well, how do I do that? And so I think that there is just a lot of change happening now. Maybe you can leave us with, we're doing this in March of 2026. as an investor are you excited or are you scared and nervous about your portfolio and everyone else's portfolio over the you know the rest of the year all right let me let me answer that after i i fill in something because what you just said what a hook what a hook no no i i will do it because i do have a view on that but i think this part might be more important to people so the change that we're going through and all the

Starting point is 00:53:44 things we're talking about is unprecedented, but it's because of the time. It's not unprecedented. Humanoids coming in to me is no different of a, a, a shock to people than going back 2000 years and telling people you'll be flying in the sky when they thought the earth was flat. So it's the time it's not, it's not the innovation, but here's the thing I will tell you that has not changed. And the reason history is important. So I have studied Buddhism and I meditate every day and i've studied stoicism and when i you know did my podcast in search of green marbles g3 who was the host one day he's you know we had a conversation and he literally said no you're you're more of a stoic really i feel i'm more buddhist he went no you gotta spend more time on stoicism and i did

Starting point is 00:54:29 and this is what i want everyone to think about if you go buy a book called the daily stoic you have it i have read it yes okay um ryan holiday right yes yeah it's it's not a book in my opinion that you read it's a book you just have there and you read a passage from it every day the reason it's important is because you get to read marcus aurelius talking about things 2 000 years ago that are the exact same things today but there's no talk it's not the innovation so in 2 000 years we will all be fine like this is a moment in time regardless of how many humanoids and how many people come into our life. Buddhism is more of a nature philosophical thing. Well, I like stoicism because it's in your head. And I think it's a great thing for all kids to read and parents,

Starting point is 00:55:15 just a passage every day to make you realize what you're seeing in X. Iran, we're all going to die. We're not going to die. This has literally been going on. It's just happening faster than it ever has. So in the portfolio, the reason I bring that up is that speed is the way you have to think about things. I know I said it here. I said it in a webinar I did for the subscribers on my website. Last week, I told people to go buy VIX. I still believe volatility is mispriced. And so I bought a bunch of UVIX, U-V-I-X, as a hedge against my portfolio because I don't want to get out of my silver and my Bitcoin and my semiconductors and all of these trades. And I want to be in a position as the chaos happens and we reprice volatility and we reprice credit spreads and we reprice the

Starting point is 00:56:07 multiple of the S&P. That's what I believe is happening. And I do believe the Fed is or whether or not it's not the Fed, the Treasury, I do think the private credit situation is going to need a solution at some point. And when that solution comes in, we all know who the fastest horse in the race is when you come out, which is Bitcoin. So right now I'm adding things into my portfolio for volatility to keep the structural positions I want. And then when I think the coast is clear and the sixth contract of VIX gets up to 30, which is where I think it needs to go, we're only at 23. So I think we have months of this left. When it gets up there, I'll get out of my volatility and I'll probably be adding Bitcoin and stuff into that, especially as the

Starting point is 00:56:47 private credit situation gets worse. The worse the private credit situation gets, the better it is for Bitcoin. And the reason is you're connecting the two things that I think need to happen. Number one, there is no more cutting rates to make the economy grow because we're already growing. So this is not the Jeff Booth thesis that we have to come in during a deflationary period. But what it is, is what I always believe would happen. The truest AI trade is Bitcoin. And the reason is because eventually AI destroys everything, as Joseph Schumpeter said, because

Starting point is 00:57:16 capitalism gets swallowed up by the exponential innovation. And when that happens, you don't have a moat around your business anymore. So what is the best asset that has no story or narrative or anything? It isn't there. It's just a place to go put your money for appreciation. And I think Bitcoin represents the fiat system demise at the same time as being the money. So I think that's the way people should deal with this and get to Daily Stoic. And trust me, everything will be fine.

Starting point is 00:57:44 You ever play hide and seek when you were a kid? Probably, right? If I didn't, I'd be in really, really weird, right? All right. so you know like uh let's say you play at your house uh maybe play in your neighborhood wherever for a very long time there's a spot that no one ever finds you right that's what bitcoin is to me in financial markets it's it's the hiding place all the chaos is happening right it's kind of like a barren hibernation i don't have any clue what's going on in the world just hangs

Starting point is 00:58:13 out there and then at some point it emerges later and everyone's like oh okay we're all good on your Remember one thing. When people say, I don't get Bitcoin, I always turn around and go, what do you get? Okay, software. Software was the easiest trade in the world for the last 15 years. Why did it fall 50%? Why did that happen? Because it has a story.

Starting point is 00:58:38 So I just believe that when people go through this, and they're going to go through this with the hyperscalers who are going to be nationalized, and all this stuff is going to happen as we get closer and closer. What if you spend all your money on AI? Well, that's a nuclear weapon. We need to own that. You're not a public company anymore. Are you a public company?

Starting point is 00:58:53 What's the valuation of a utility company? This is all going to be a story at some point over the course of the next three years. So if you're overweight that, go to countries that don't have AI in terms of going through it and only have commodities manufacturing. So that mindset of just opening up your eyes that the world over the next three years is going to change dramatically. And if you're sitting on things that you thought were certain, go to something that you actually don't get.

Starting point is 00:59:17 It's the age of not getting what's going on because what you think you know, you don't know anymore. You know what I tell people when they say they don't understand Bitcoin now? What? I say, God bless you. I just, I wish the best for you. Last thing I'll leave you with is,

Starting point is 00:59:33 I don't know if you ever read the book, Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke. It's a very kind of Marcus Aurelius stoic type thing, but it's a little bit lesser known book. and um you know maybe people start coming here for some book recommendations from you and i yeah you know daily stoic rules for a night daily stoic is a must own for everyone i believe on the planet so wow okay use his link for uh commissions on amazon all right we'll talk to you guys next week

The Pomp Podcast - The AI Boom Is EXACTLY Why Bitcoin Exists | Jordi Visser

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