The Pomp Podcast - Why All-Time High Stocks Are Bullish for Bitcoin | Jordi Visser

Episode Date: May 2, 2026

Jordi Visser is a veteran macro investor with 30+ years of experience and the author of the VisserLabs Substack. In this conversation, we discuss why the stock market keeps hitting all-time highs, the AI-driven semiconductor supercycle, why software is losing to chips and power names, where bitcoin fits into the macro picture, the rise of tokenization, and how to think about inflation and the Fed.=======================Consensus Miami is the largest crypto conference in the world — May 5-7, 2026 in Miami. 20,000 attendees. 72% director-level or above. The deals, partnerships, and investments that shape the next cycle get made here. Use code POMPLIANO for 25% off your pass → https://go.coindesk.com/c26pomp=======================Award-winning Fountain Life - Energy supercharged. Memory sharper. Life extended. Ready for the best investment you’ll ever make? Schedule a life-changing call at http://fountainlife.com/pomp Get $1,000 off the cost of a life-changing membership with Fountain Life when you schedule a call at https:www.http://fountainlife.com/pomp=======================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/ This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.=======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.=======================0:00 - Intro0:53 - Why the stock market keeps hitting all-time highs4:37 - AI vs. software (who's winning & who's losing)11:28 - Is this a bubble? Demand vs. supply dynamics13:00 - Why crypto is lagging the AI trade & bitcoin setup 17:22 - The industrial revolution thesis & why stocks won't stop20:40 - Inflation, the Fed & politics32:00 - How to use AI to get ahead33:08 - The compute cost problem & AI model wars48:13 - Retail vs. institutional investors — who has the edge 50:39 - Where to find Jordi's work

Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro level? This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. But I do want to make sure people realize what you said is important. This is a completely different economy and we are in the very, very early stages. I mean, it's year four of ChatGPT and all the first three years were about getting the IQ up. this is the agentic side. So digital employees are getting hired, which means profit margins are going to stay at these levels. And you guys need to be invested to some degree in the AI trade

and not worry about this bubble. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very special conversation with Jordy Visser. This one is worth paying attention to. The US stock market is on absolute fire. We continue to hit all time high after all time high. And Jordy's here to explain to us why is it happening? Where are the returns coming from? How is he changing his portfolio? And what do you need to understand about the stocks, about what's going on in AI, what's going on in the macro economy, and how he is thinking about what's going to happen through the rest of this year. This conversation has alpha dripping all over it. Make sure you give it a listen, and then let me and Jordy know what you think. Here's my latest conversation

with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy, the stock market is on fire. Literally, it cannot stop going up regardless of what happens in the world. A couple of data points is that we just saw in the month of April, the US stock market and the S&P went up over 10%. That has only happened 12 times ever in history. It also had seven all-time highs in the month of April, which is the seventh time that's ever happened. When you look at those data points out over the next 12 months, the numbers are bonkers. It suggests that we are likely to see a double-digit return over the next 12 months from the stock market, even though people are calling it a bubble and there's issues. What do you think is going on here? And why does the stock market keep going higher?

The stock market is being driven by something that we talk about every single week. It's something we agreed was a good thing for us to do on here. Your fashion sense? Yes, exactly. Brought my purple sweater out for the end of winter. We talk about AI. So let's leave crypto to the side for a second. But the disruption of artificial intelligence into our world. Six months ago, bubble was front page news every single week. Go to Google Trends. Just before Opus 4.5 came out, it was a bubble. Well, now we're seeing the revenues come in. And when you have a stock like Caterpillar, for example, so Caterpillar, it was up 10% yesterday. Their PE is now approaching 40. Those types of things don't happen for cyclical companies unless you're

kind of coming out of a recession and you've had things down. Their PE is almost double NVIDIA's now. I mean, think about where we are. Semiconductor names, every single one. Most of them are in one of my thematic baskets, my portfolio. They don't stop. So this is AI. And to show you how breath still allows people to be bearish, let's forget software, which is still near the lows. Let's forget the private equity companies, which have not budged very much. we make all-time highs in the S&P and the median stock is 13% below its all-time highs about half of the S&P 500 companies are up for the year and about half are down so unfortunately and I literally because I spent so many time with institutional clients and because

the subscriber wall went up and I'm like focused a lot I had to come up with a term for this because if you're invested in the S&P 500, which is what most individuals are through their financial advisors, there's a benchmark arbitrage that's happening. When you have something that we've both stolen from Elon Musk and said supersonic tsunami, it means something's moving fast and it's structural and it's just overpowering everything. So if you're invested in things that were around business cycles and the consumer, you're not doing very well. If you're in software, you're not doing very well. Even with the hyperscalers, you're not doing nearly as well as you are with all of the things related to power, all the things related to semiconductors,

all the things related to servers. Are those things extended? Yes. If you look at all these charts, it's a straight line up. And that's why when you look at the S&P, it doesn't look as crazy because it actually was down for a while and then it went up. But the semiconductors, the memory names, they've just gone through the roof. So I think what people have to in their mind have. This is the early innings of this. And if you're invested in the S&P 500, you're only up 5% year to date, five and change year to date. If you're invested in semiconductors and you're investing in these other things, you're up between 30 and 50%. And unfortunately for everyone that's sitting there waiting for the index to reweight, I would look into some other ways to get involved

in this, at least from a minimum of a small amount, because this is not the end of this. This is still going to happen, even though we'll have a correction at some point here. Now, one of the aspects that I find very interesting is you're talking about AI. We know the S&P is hitting all these new all-time highs. But if you dig in even deeper to a lot of the market, the Russell 2000, the Dow Jones Industrial, this is in a weird way, yes, 50% of the S&P is down, but the indexes in a very wide breadth are all hitting all-time highs in the month of April. And so how do you look at that?

Is that just like it's all the AI trade, but some of it is the large scale tech companies, some of it is data centers, power generation, and then you get into commodities, chemicals, photonics, like it's everything tied to AI. And that's why you're seeing all the indexes hit all time highs. Yeah, it's a good question. This is the whole point of this, because there's a lot of small cap businesses that are tied into commodities that are tied into power, that are tied into chemicals, that are tied into semiconductors, even since we like to do some like stats on the thing, go through

because the russell 2000 is making all-time highs as we go through this are we stat heads is that what we are like i'm definitely i mean it's kentucky derby weekend my my papers you know going out today so uh you can find it on linkedin and and and well you see jordy and i in the streets you better call us a stat head all right remember i was trained in handicapping this is like a big weekend for me as someone who's gone to the derby like about 15 years so man i love doing this every day every week go ahead jeff bezos famously said your margin is my opportunity so six seven companies took all of the opportunity your margin they they destroyed so many companies in this path and you had concentration when you get into your the new

the new line that i've i've put in your cap x is my opportunity oh well now you're taking up everything and the reason is because we under invested in manufacturing we under invested so if you go back to a year ago whatever your beliefs are and what the white house goal was their goal was to get the middle part of the country growing again it was to focus on ai it was to vote they basically said we're making all of the rules for this so if you missed it that's your own problem now i would remind people they've also been focused on crypto so at some point by the end of this year you're going to look back and go oh the administration was positive on crypto as well why didn't i get involved in that so you still have things that are lagging behind that i believe are

part of this bigger plan but for ai this involves so many companies that have been left for dead and the semiconductors alone it's very top heavy so nvidia when people hear semiconductors like look at these charts i'm like the dollars that are going into chips it's mainly chips if you guys haven't heard this you can find it you know on my website and i've written about it but the five-layer cake that Jensen Yuang has talked about. The three bottom layers, energy slash power, chips, and infrastructure. He's telling you what names to belong. Now, a lot of those names have been left for dead because they've been in a bear market for 15 years. It's all been about software. So the transition from software into semiconductors, into power things, into

we don't have enough compute. So you can take that chip and that power thing and say, are there going to be episodic moves where these things fall 20, 30%? Of course, but do I have confidence that five years from now we're going to need more compute? I have uber confidence that between humanoids coming, moving to space, we don't have enough compute. And so the chip needs are really just going to keep going. And so these companies are going to be the leaders of the future. And that's why these multiples are so high on those names and they're becoming so low on software because software is dead. These stocks, we need them for the foreseeable future. And that's when multiples typically are high is when you have

some kind of certainty that three years from now, not only is the company going to be in business, which you can't say about software, but you can see there's still going to be shortages, which is where most of these things are. So what's interesting to me is as we go to build, we, as an easy example, we went to go build data centers and we said, okay, well, we need power. And there was enough power. And eventually we ran out of power and everyone said, oh, let's go run into the power generation. And then when there's that shortage of power, all of a sudden people say, hey, let's build more power. And they start to pull on all these commodity inputs in the supply chain. And we just keep hitting shortages, bottlenecks, stress,

et cetera. And it does feel like the market is just running around and the best investors are just saying, where is the next bottleneck that we're going to hit? Let me go and buy that before everybody else. What I find interesting is let's take the Roundhill Memory ETF. I don't know if you've looked at this, DRAM. I think very highly of the Roundhill guys in general. I think they They understand the pulse of the market and they've been very good at thematic ETFs. But when I looked into why did it explode, they went from zero to like two billion in assets in let's call it two weeks or so. They have two companies that U.S. investors can't get access to, and they're doing it

via swaps, essentially. And so there's also the arbitrage not only of finding the shortages, but then there is the like which investors have exposure. So you have Korean companies that U.S. investors have a hard time buying. If you now can bring them to the U.S. market, all of a sudden you get an explosion of demand and that leads to a lot of capital inflow. And so it feels like the investment community is basically saying, what are all the different ways that we can exploit this for financial gain?

But that's what you want in a capitalistic system is because it's ultimately bringing capital in to solve these problems. I mean, this is, again, this gets into the topic you just asked about. This is a broader rally than just U.S. software companies. So when you look at the Korean stock market, it's through the roof. And part of the reason is because a lot of the things that we need, particularly on the chip side, whether it's Taiwan Semi for memory, whether it's SK Hynix or Samsung, these are companies that are listed in Asia.

So this does create an opportunity for thematic ETFs that are related to things that people can't get here and put them into this. This is the reason why when I say I have a thematic portfolio, it's all around AI. So the stat I gave you that about 50% of the companies in the S&P are down for the year, 17% of my 100 names are down for the year. The ones that are all up, again, it's all the things that we've talked about. And I think people should listen to and really take into heart the supply shortage situation. You and I like to look at companies and we think about investing.

You want to invest in companies where the demand is insatiable and the supply is limited. you have pricing power. It lasts for a long time as you're trying to get the supply. Yes, you have to invest money to get the CapEx. But this is why when I say that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have a combined $1.3 trillion of a backlog. I mean, it's an enormous number. So everyone who is arguing that they're not going to get the revenues in, they have contracted agreements. Now, so did Oracle and their stock collapsed, but it's found a bottom and now it's started to rally a little bit. I think what people need to realize is when you hear bubble, bubbles are times where supply is significantly above demand

or demand is fake. The demand for AI is insatiable. Now, if the price is going higher, maybe that'll slow demand at some point. That's what usually happens. And so if there is a correction this year that knocks semis down 30%, 40%, my guess it'll be from what Elon has said, which is we don't have enough power to actually light these things up. So you can buy as much of these as you want.

but if you don't get the power to light up the semis, then you have all this inventory and you got to wait until the power comes. So I don't think it's going to be a debt thing. I think there'll be fears over there being too much supply relative demand in the short term, but the demand is insatiable. It's the power that might not be insatiable. That's the part about this that if right now you've been lucky enough to be heavily involved in the Roundhill ETF and you've had a huge move in memory and you've been invested in semiconductors and some of the names we've talked about here. I believe the power names, oil stocks are not priced properly for where oil is now. Chemical stocks are not priced properly. They also haven't run as much.

They're steady eddy growers. They're not going to get you this, but they're going to outperform the S&P. So the way that I'm trying to think about things is when you rotate from some of these things, if you're a momentum player, great, ride it until it starts to show signs, but then move to the other side. And the other angle is I still believe that if the market's going to sit up here and make new all-time highs, Bitcoin is going to be part of this. And so is Ethereum and these other places are going to be in there. And I think that stuff is coming soon as well. I was at a conference over the last week or so. Both were.

There was an individual there who runs a very large brokerage in Korea. And I was talking to him about some of the investing trends and all this. And he explicitly said, the reason why crypto is suffering is because so many of the Korean investors have gone into the AI trade. And I know that there is a belief between you, I, and many others that these things are intertwined and they're linked together. But I do think that retail flows are chasing the AI trade merely because it is more volatile and it is driving more returns right now than crypto is. At some point, maybe that evens out or even shifts back to crypto.

But people that are ignoring that data point are lying to themselves. I completely agree. i i've said it here as i've gotten to know the crypto space the retail community is the energy for crypto it's if you don't have the energy you can still work your way higher but what's the difference if crypto is up or down five percent for the year it doesn't bring the enthusiasm of as a growth asset so it needs to be in a place where the other stuff isn't working or where it's not as obvious and it's not going through now the problem is when you get this kind of move higher in these things and it's still not participating and semis are driving

everything, then it makes it hard. So I think the retail crowd is going to have to be brought in at some point. I'm not really sure what the catalyst will be at this point, but catalysts short term tend to play out. The only thing that needs to happen is there needs to be something that moves Bitcoin. We go in these stages. First, it was 74. We got above 74. Now we keep pushing up to 80 and we keep falling back. I do think there's an underlying bid, which will continue to push. I've talked about how I've been buying things and I bought some call options on MicroStrategy. And the reason is because I do believe that in the second half of the year, you're going to start to get money that's moving into this space.

I think it's coming soon. But again, I agree with you that I hear the same thing. I didn't hear it at my conferences, but mine was a pension event. And then it was I went to a second conference and spoke. And this one was more for market structure people in the TradFi world. Not everyone is talking about it. But one of the topics that did come up in both events was tokenization. So I think tokenization is a place where you can get some enthusiasm about the market starting

to embrace this. And I did have a conversation with a senior person at one of the organizations in crypto. And we spent most of the time talking about tokenization as well. May 7th, you can discover everything from crypto at scale to institutional integration and agentic commerce. It's the forces driving trillions on chain and reshaping global finance. 20,000 decision makers are going to be in attendance.

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Go in the description and look how to spell my name. And use code POMPLIANO to get 25% off your pass to join me there. So this past week was the five-year anniversary of Franklin Templeton's Benji Fund, right? Which is kind of the first tokenized thing that I think really was the first tokenized thing from a major financial organization. And there's some people who like tokenization, don't like tokenization, whatever. But Sandy Call, who runs a lot of the crypto business there, was telling me, you know, look, this was kind of the first foray.

It's been five years, but they are very aggressively looking for what are the other opportunities that they can go into. And I think that they look at it as they're really modernizing themselves, their products, et cetera. And so if you go back, that is really kind of my thesis. And I was explaining to you earlier, it feels to me like we are living through a modern day industrial revolution where we are laying the infrastructure, we are laying all of the kind of foundations for the next century. And it sounds kind of bombastic when you say that, But the last 100 years or so was really driven by the original industrial revolution. We laid all this stuff.

We were able to build on top of it. And we built this amazing economy and society. There is change happening right now. And we are upgrading and we are automating and we are electrifying, et cetera. To me, if I had to sum up, why is the stock market continue to go up regardless of what happens in the conflict in Iran and all this stuff? It is that there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world that want to own a piece of the future. And they realized that right now in this industrial

revolution, I got to buy something. And whether that is the large tech companies, whether that's a commodities-oriented firm, whatever the thing is, however they want to play it, there is just this wave of capital that will not stop coming into the market because everyone realizes, oh, shoot, this change is going to be where all the returns are for the next decade or so. And I think that you've been calling this out in different ways now for months, if not over a year. so here's the interesting thing about this um and very few people if anyone i've ever heard say this so let's go back actually before the great financial crisis and let's make that the demarcation line because the iphone came out in the exact same time period so that was the beginning

of my entree of connecting exponential innovation to macro and how it would disrupt the macro world and we'd never have a recession again and so when i say that people kind of gloss over and they go yeah, we won't. And I've said it repeatedly, and it's been true. The only recession we had since the great financial crisis was COVID, which was self-induced and was not a traditional recession. A recession happens because the credit dries up. And what had happened in the past is all of those consumer slash industrial related things start to roll over and it becomes an issue. Even the dot-com bubble was driven to some degree by overspending in debt and just taking out tons of debt to build for the future. What is different about what happened from 2009 to 2000, let's

just say to 2024, before we start getting into this year, the biggest companies in the world grew without taking any debt. So the mag seven became the mag seven with no debt that had never happened before. And although they hired people, they did not hire as many people as the companies before. So if you looked at those companies and their revenue per employee versus the rest of the S&P 500. I mean, the numbers were off the charts. So that's the way software grew. That's the way the mag seven grew. So now we're at a different stage. Are they taking out some debt? Yes. But these companies are 20 plus trillion dollars of market cap. They're only spending, you know, let's, let's, let's, let's round it up to a trillion, even though it's going to be about

800 billion this year for those companies, a trillion dollars on 20 some odd trillion dollars of market cap. That's not leveraging yourself. So everyone who's had this doom and gloom is not paying attention to what you're saying, which is you're fading money that's flowing in. This is not about retail driving this higher. This is about literally money coming, number one, from these companies and their equity. But there's another thing. We're not creating jobs. If you create jobs, well, then your compensation grows. That's an expense. If you don't create jobs and your revenue is growing 7% a year, that's margins. Well, we have record margins in the S&P. Everyone wants to fade that. They're worried about, oh, the doom and gloom, like Citrini writing, we'll

lose all these jobs. We're not losing all these jobs. We're just not hiring people anymore. So you're breaking the framework of what used to be that old industrial consumer relationship. We buy more. You guys build more. We have a recession. Then we go through this. The government gives money. They cut rates. We don't have that anymore. So when Iran, when tariffs happen, we don't go into a recession. When Iran happens and oil spikes, everyone freaks out. The doom oil situation on X is unbelievable. Now, I do believe inflation is going to come. But unfortunately, what that's doing is it's hurting the bottom end of the economy again. They're not able.

I mean, rates are moving higher. Inflation expectations are moving higher. Gas at the pumps moving higher. Diesel's moving higher. Fertilizers driving food higher. There's no way to get around it. And for people that are living, quote unquote, paycheck to paycheck that don't have assets, they're in the same boat that they've been in before to some degree.

Now, jobs in the middle part of the country are definitely in a better situation. You're seeing growth there. You're hearing it from a lot of people talking. But I do want to make sure people realize what you said is important. This is a completely different economy, and we are in the very, very early stages. I mean, it's year four of ChatGPT. Like, we just started year four post-ChatGPT launch, and all the first three years were about getting the IQ up.

This is the agentic side. So digital employees are getting hired, which means profit margins are going to stay at these levels, and you guys need to be invested to some degree in the AI trade and not worry about this bubble. When you see something like Jerome Powell and FOMC decide to leave rates flat, there is immense amount of debate online. And I think that if I was to do my best to objectively describe the two arguments, one is, hey, all these inflationary pressures give the Fed pause and therefore they're worried about inflation coming back in a big way. so they shouldn't be cutting interest rates. The other side is, hey, wait a second. All these inflationary pressures are probably temporary to some degree. The structural thing is AI robotics, et cetera, and there's deflation coming. How do you evaluate what the Fed is doing,

what they should be doing, and maybe even the language they're using around their decision making okay so i i there's two things going so i'm going to connect jerome powell this week with the musk altman court case okay um the tmz situation you mean yeah this is all part of the fourth turning all of it um you've reached a point where politics are part of everything politics are part of the fed decision making drone pal decides he's not going to step down to keep the voting. So, I mean, you can't make this stuff up that we're at this point where you have, let's tax the billionaires. Let's run it hot. Like you have a bifurcated situation that is polarized where everyone's angry about it on the same side. How do you pick a jury for the

Elon Musk case? I mean, is anyone like Elon Musk except for the two of us? Like he, he, he pissed off the Democrats. He pissed off the Republicans. maybe the only person who is less like than elon in california is sam altman it's two people fighting on this you've got dario on one side of the ai you have everyone else that's going up and and like it's it's become a very uh polarized situation that extends far beyond just the polls it is everything that's going on in every decision making being made people can't get their political bias out of the decision. So I think when you go through the Fed situation, Kevin Walsh is going to take over. How do you run what is effectively an insane asylum now?

So it begs the question, though, if everything is politicized, should you just put political people in because they actually have experience operating in that environment? That scares me to say. If that is what we would do, if all of a sudden politicians were running the Fed, I would be even more nervous than I already am. But if everything gets politicized, do you just ask people who have no experience to deal with the situation or what do you do i i'm so scared of politics and i remember after the great financial crisis that a few people tried to get me to run for some office and i and i said no i didn't put it for you yeah i know i know it's very nice of you i'll do the same for you when you run um you dress for the run i i can't you

know my my uh my jean shirts and stuff they're not gonna work well in in you never know there's crazier things that have happened john fetterman wears a carhartt sweatshirt and he's doing just fine that's true there's always there's always change but i'm me like i don't pretend to be anything but me and i think politics have just reached a point where i just know that nothing can get done and this is the one thing about artificial intelligence it's the thing about crypto that i believe in i don't know how this year is going to play out i do know that markets do not go up in a straight line forever they have corrections even in the great years of 2010 to 2020, when rates were at zero, we had corrections. It just happens. The best thing for Bitcoin would

be if a correction happens because of inflation breaking higher, and then people kind of changing their views, a little movement down in the equity market for three months, all of a sudden crypto's working and people go to it. I think for politics and for what this is going to play out, I don't think this is going away. And I think this is why I'm actually attracted to saying the fourth turning i think that the the reality of the fourth turning is no matter how no matter how you look at it um when i was out in california i read a story about the closure of some very famous store in napa valley and i've heard a lot about how bad wine sales are especially high-end wine sales and part of the reason is the demographic shift part of the reason is the ozempic it's it's a

variety of things. I think when you go through all of the distribution of wealth problems and the health differentials between wealthy people in there, you kind of, you see it, you don't think about it, but I think it shows up in all politics. And I don't think it's going away because I don't think you solve these problems quickly. I think the fourth turning means we are going to be in this demographic problem for another decade, especially when you bring humanoids into it, especially when you bring all of the things that we're talking about. I just don't think this problem is going away quickly so i'm going to pull this up did you see uh what happened uh recently is supposedly um there's a surge in what people are calling ozempic breath

so the rise of use of glp-1 weight loss drugs like ozempic has led to a surge in demand for mints and gum and it's a phenomenon driven by a side effect called ozempic breath now why that's Interesting. Hershey CEO Kirk Tanner reported an 8% increase in sales of their icebreakers mints and gum in the first quarter of 2026, largely attributed to users managing GLP-1 side effects. And I saw this yesterday and I had to go look it up to make sure it was true because you never know these days. That blew my mind. Hershey's, which is, it's not like it's a new product, 8% growth. And so it goes back to, we're talking about AI. Okay. Like there's demand for synthetic intelligence? And then what are all the downstream effects? Who? There's some

manager out there who decided, you know what? I took a GLP-1. I have bad breath. I'm using mints. I wonder if other people are doing this, right? And they probably figured it out. But when I saw that data point, I just said, we are living in a whole different world than I grew up investing in. And so, when you see this happening over and over and over again, you start to realize technology is now the barrier to using it has dropped so significantly. somebody in our office who will go unnamed said to me the other day in what world is it that in 2020 and 2021 people refuse to take the vaccine but they are happy to take peptides that they get from a lab in china they're both inject right so you get into this world of like we are living

in this crazy situation where how it's presented who's behind it well how do you learn about it Like that actually may be more important than like, will you inject this in your body? Because there's a hell of a lot of people using GOP ones and peptides and, you know, all this kind of crazy stuff, but those same exact people. And they're like, there's probably a pretty big overlap. The peptide crowd was the anti-vax crowd. And then, you know, of course, when I say this online, somebody's like, well, like, we're the anti-vax people, right?

But, you know, and you get into this like whole crazy debate, but it all goes back to it's politicized. A lot of the conversation was just politics. i i it's not something i so here's the bad thing uh politics does not drive any of my decision making but it does with many of my children so i've had to learn to just accept um because unconditional love for my kids they can do whatever they want they can attack me for being non-political and not raising my voice and going to protest on this part or this part. They can say they're never going to leave a particular area or live here or whatever.

And I just have to embrace them as my children and let them go through it. We've talked about it before. I'll bring it up again. This is the reason why I love reading the Daily Stoic. Human beings and their anxiety, their beliefs, they change. They are whatever they are. And it's been that way since we finally were able to think and have these thoughts. So to read the Daily Stoic and just go back to Marcus Aurelius and realize that this person

back during the Roman Empire writing about these things was writing about the same issues we're talking about now. And so politics has always been a part of the way people think about things because there's always someone winning and there's always someone losing. And with human beings, we have an animalistic side where we care about how we're winning and we care about how we're losing. I figured this out very quickly when I started managing people and I was shocked and the story that you hear is true I don't care what I get paid as long as I get paid one dollar more than

the person sitting next to me of course and I I hate to say like if people are listening to us that's not true it is true and I I remember it and as someone who's the son of a construction worker that when I got to Morgan Stanley in that first year I made forty thousand dollars I was like if I ever get a hundred thousand I'm set for life and literally that was what my brain was because I didn't know any better. I mean, my father didn't graduate high school. So for me, that was the way I was going to go through it. So to hear someone who went to an Ivy League school push back a paper to me when I knew they were getting paid more than 99.9% of the people on the planet, it just kind of, it made me realize that it's not just politics, it's money, it's all

the things you hear about. And I just realized that human beings do this stuff and it just goes on. So rather than go through it, our job is to try and figure a way to stay sane, enjoy life in a happy, happy way. And part of that is to be able to make money. And the reason that we do the show is hopefully to bring some sort of unbiased view towards all of this stuff, bring it back in some light. But for me, I'm focused on helping people learn AI and make money based on it. If they can do those two things, I think they can navigate through a lot of the things we're talking about because those things will give you empowerment in your job. They will give you empowerment in building things and having more time in life and enjoying it. But they will also

give you some more time in terms of making money and being involved in things that maybe you can't get from the work world. So remember, there's different ways to accumulate money. Some is by investing and being in the right theme. Some is by working hard and doing things that other people aren't doing. 90 plus percent of people that I meet do not use AI in any way outside of chat. I would say 99% don't go past a little bit of co-work. I'm going to do a video because now we haven't talked about this. There are three things on Claude. For those of you who have Claude, I want you to go look at this later on today. You've got chat, collaborating, brainstorming with something really, really smart. Great. Then you've got co-work. That's your assistant. That's

your productivity enhancer. Learn one special thing on it to do it. And I'm going to do a video that'll be very short on those two. But then there's code. That's building. That's actually creating something new. That's something that doesn't exist. So I think if people do that, they will be ahead of 95% of the people. If they can do all three of those in just one way every single day, those types of things, you don't get those opportunities too much in life. So there's two ways to look at this. One is the world is kind of in trouble. The second one is people are so blinded by politics and so blinded by this, that just like when you're trying to compete in athletics, if no one's really focused in working out, you can go do it. Go work out on AI and

forget some of this stuff i have something that me you and your kids are all going to be on the same page for uh i would like to create a protest that you and i are going to lead we're going to be the co-conspirators of this protest do you remember the guy uh who i think he ran for like a local politician seat a couple years ago and he became a meme and he would yell the rent is too damn high remember that guy yep all right you and i are going to lead a protest that the token prices are too damn high. These guys are ratcheting it up the price, right? I see it. They're announcing it sometimes, but you can see that, okay, the VC subsidies are slowly starting to dissipate and no different than the Uber that was $3 to get across town is now 30. Token prices are starting

to go up. And so token prices are too damn high. We should create a protest to keep them down and And artificially suppressed for a little bit longer. Yep. So it's happening, and we've been warned about this by the model providers. NVIDIA, one of their senior executives said this week or last week at a conference, the price of compute has now reached a point where it's more expensive than a human employee. Narrative violation. Yeah. Now, what I would say is there's two things about the statement.

Number one, for each employee, you have how many digital employees? So it doesn't mean that people aren't going to lose their jobs. It doesn't mean that they aren't going to pay for it. What it does mean is that for people like you and me using it at home, if Morgan Stanley wants to compute, they're willing to pay more money than I am. They have more money to pay. And so the price is going higher for those computes, and it's much harder for someone like me or an entrepreneur to compete on price unless, again, we don't have as many employees, unless we are able to move to open source and move in some of the Chinese models. And that's the way I've run my business.

I use, and we haven't talked about this, ChatGPT 5.5 has taken over much of my clod at this point. I didn't think that would ever happen. I thought I was in clod for the rest of time. um it stole back most of the time changed it so i'm using 5.5 5.5 the one the model that came out last week um just what when you say it's stolen back most of your time and you're using it it's better what faster you think it's more accurate what is specific um first of all smarter okay and that may sound funny to people who don't know to know a difference when you use them as much as I do smarter means not as verbose, meaning you type something in, I get a quick response and

the response is succinct. It gives me the answer I want. You don't understand how valuable that is, but for a lot. Yeah. And, and if, if you get an answer that's really long and you have to go read the whole thing, it's literally becomes, like I said, book is a waste of time. Oh, people had opinions. Oh, people had opinions. Exactly. It was very, very funny. So, but I will say a lot of people actually agreed with you yeah and again i i i was at a dinner the other night and i named like seven books and someone said i thought you said books are waste of time i wasn't gonna say you say you read the daily stoic but go ahead i read a page in it i'm not saying reading is a waste of time i'm saying reading a whole book is a waste of time reading a chapter is not a way i

could get them going real fast all right go ahead go keep going um it's smarter it gives more succinct answers it makes it easier to have a conversation and move forward number two claude has the three buttons codex it's really one thing the imaging on it if you haven't tried the imaging people i've used nano banana exclusively for i don't remember i don't remember when it came out it was this good nine months ago i have not used nano banana since chat gbt 5.5 came out and i do so many images because that's the way i like to learn and when i presented at this pension event I had eight slides. They were all images and half of them were ones I created because the imaging is so good. Now, the reason that's important is because the imaging can is built

into this whole thing. So if you want to have it, if you want to create a prompt library and you go into codex, Hey, I want to create a prompt library. Cause I have like a hundred prompts that are sitting in notion. It immediately gives you a unbelievable visual of what it can look like. That is something that Claude does not do. So having these abilities to go through it, it's not an image thing. And this is a big thing. Like there's no image. You got nano banana and now you have GPT-5. So the imaging part for what I do for my business is very, very important. But I think for everyone to be able to look at something as opposed to this verbose thing is very, very important. So I've just used it a lot more.

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flow or do you think people will get locked into kind of a winner take all for their work may not be winner take all in the market but you know you're a chat gpt user i'm a claude user and regardless of one of the models being better or worse like i just get used to using that product see i think it depends on your business and and how you operate i i use all five of them so far today, I've used all five today. I mean, it's early in the morning on a Friday. I've used every single model today. I've used Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all in the last 24 hours. It's very seldom that I don't use all of them. It's very seldom in a day where I don't use all of them. And yeah, it moves around. I mean, there was one point perplexity I was using the most for

what I was doing within finance. That's all changed now. So it just depends, I guess, on what you're doing and how it's going. I just think that what I'm really good at because I use all of them is when there's a change in the model, I feel it. It's just different. And GPT-5 is just smarter. Now, in fairness, and David Sachs retweeted something about this, when you put them on a scale mythos and gpt5 are very similar on a lot of the benchmarks so this is a mythos thing so it's kind of like why did anthropic release mythos and have this whole big to do great marketing it could be great marketing it could also be we don't have enough compute to release it well that that's uh that's the white house's argument um i saw david sacks talking

about this idea of like it's good but there's many other models you know that have similar uh capabilities and if they came out and said we don't have the compute would that actually hurt anthropic and so the better thing to do is say oh it's too powerful i don't know i'm not in the room right but uh it's very interesting to think about there is like a global chess game going on with trillions of dollars that are being wagered on who's going to win how they're going to win and we've done all of this talking about infrastructure whatever the the the dark night of elon and xai and terra fab and all this they're kind of just building and it sounds weird to say but like elon's kind of building it quietly people are not really talking about it in the way

that you would think that they would be and it feels like he's just going to turn this thing on and all of a sudden he'll suck a lot of the attention and usage back over and so we just getting in this game where everyone just keeps leapfrogging each other and outside of the increasing costs like the winners or the consumers yeah i mean again even for i pay for all five at the max level um my business is growing i'm helping people and the only way that i can do it in a way that gives people the tools they need in my opinion to be successful is to use all the models i just think that all the models are different and i will say one more thing about 5.5 uh i had a lot of problems with claude with i don't want to call them hallucinations but let's just say fill in the

blank i got a lot of that um where the answers were wrong and i had i'd put it into my academic checker which i've always said is gemini hey check these out uh this is wrong this is a bold claim and I'd have to go back and change it. Now, I had a process for it. GPT-5, I do the same thing. The stuff I did this week, no errors. If there was an error, it was because I didn't do the prompt properly to give it the instructions. I think the hallucinations for this thing are just insanely low. So that's why I say, if you haven't played around with it, it's smarter. And if you use any the other models a lot i think this one is just as fast as what grok was and that probably means that this one is out because of blackwell and it might be the first true like blackwell advanced

model where i don't think claude is going to have that capability i think they've already shown that they're going to be doing stuff on tpus they made these deals with amazon and with google so i i think we're at a stage where the leapfrogging will continue But I think we've also reached a point where the intelligence on these things is so good that it doesn't matter much anymore. Did you see that the internal memo from Zuck, he made mention to the fact that, you know, they're screenshotting the employees and recording their screens for the workflow. And there was reference to the fact that the average Facebook employee likely has a higher

IQ than the contractors that the other firms are using for training data. And he thinks that will give them an advantage. just amazing how seldom i even say meta it's just or facebook or whatever they want to be do you think that's because they're so far behind or do you think that they're not doing a good job marketing or do you think you just don't use their products like why is it that they don't come up in conversation well they're clearly i mean at the beginning i mentioned llama all the time i don't even know if llama's the model there i like i it's just reached a point where it's because they don't have anything that i use um and i use all the other ones all day long all day long

i mean open claw changed my life on this trip i've been using it a lot but i was on a jet blue flight shout out great wi-fi yeah no free ads everything was great and i was having a brainstorming session with open claw the entire time. And this was on my model portfolio. And what I realized at this point was before I left, I uploaded a lot of stuff. So it has all the memory and the ability to have a conversation and say, Hey, of the thematic model portfolio, what's the average market cap of semis? What's the largest market cap? Okay. How many of the names are up year to date through Friday? Okay. How many of the names have a PE of X? I can do all this stuff and it's instantly like giving me the answers because it has all the data that i uploaded so this is a

thing that i can't do in a context window on a plane for chat gpt and for all these like this is phenomenal stuff and then when i have it i brainstorm with and say okay save this i want to do this so i wanted to do a long form paper on chemicals which i ended up doing and i gave the way that i want to approach because my argument and this so everyone's watching and they get this. The way that I brainstorm with this stuff is I come up with a crazy thought. And my crazy thought was, okay, oil's clearly not having an impact on the economy the way it used to. Chemicals are, like we need a lot of chemicals for advanced packaging, for fiber. So I literally said, if we continue to see the growth we're seeing in AI, which doesn't consume a lot of oil,

It needs power, but the electricity is not being generated by oil and we're not transferring much as much in trucking and stuff like that. Is this going to be a world where chemicals could be an increasing part of GDP intensity, which means I want to invest in them relative to other sectors. And we had this long brainstorming session while on the plane. And then when I got off, I extended it into the LLMs. So I'm going to write a paper on this. And that's the way that I take a thought that pops into my head that I think I want

explanation on because the chemical names are doing so well and the oil names are doing fine they're good but i think they're like 15 to 20 percent a year performers which is better than the s&p but maybe not as bad as as good as chemicals specifically tied to semiconductors it's very interesting to me that um you've been going to a lot of these institutional events you went to a pension fund event this past week and um the same conversation that's happening on the internet seems to be a couple weeks delayed in these meetings when you tell me, you know, kind of things that you're either hearing people talk about, things you're learning or whatever. And so one that's a, hey, if you're on Twitter or reading, you know, newsletters,

listening to podcasts, like you have an advantage because you're getting information faster. At the same time though, I do think I'm pretty impressed with, it used to maybe be, there was like a year long lag before institutional investors got to something, but they've accelerated as well. And so if you told me that the lag used to be a year and now 26 weeks, like they're catching up is my takeaway. Yeah. Well, I think it's getting harder and harder, but I do think the arbitrage is, is there. I, I, it, it seems like forever because I wrote it over the weekend, but I published a paper Monday morning at seven 45 on power semiconductors, which was all related to a report I posted on, on the subscriber thing on the edge devices.

And this came from last week, Texas instruments report and Intel, where they both highlighted the edge is coming. And then Qualcomm this week, it's coming. And when I say edge, that means autos, that means phones, computers, and humanoids. That part of the investment thesis is going to play. Now, that needs different semiconductors to some degree for the power side. So I wrote this thing on power semis. They're up over double digits this week. And again, this stuff goes so quickly because you're responding to something that happened in the news, and you're connecting it back to these other themes. What I did was I connected it back to a report from NVIDIA over their need for data center equipment from South Korea for their new 800 volt DC

power side, and they need power semis. So I don't think Southside Research from the banks can keep up with this. It's very, very hard because you have to be paying attention to the news around the globe. And to get that stuff, you're getting it from X. It's not like you can read the Wall Street Journal and the stuff is in there. It's in no newspapers. It is a story by a local person in Korea that puts it out. Maybe it's in Korean. You hit the translate button. You get to see it. But you and I stay on top of this stuff. I still believe there's enough of an arbitrage, but I think retail is ahead of the game in a big way because they see this stuff and they just jump in right away. 100%. Where can we send people to check out the work that

you're doing with 22V and all of the different products that you're offering? if if they go to 22vresearch.com they will see an AI macro nexus button on the top that's me and if they go there that's where they can get some of the things I referenced if they go to the YouTube they can still see me going through the weekly kind of rundown on things and I will keep you up on what's happening I am going to do a video and I will figure out how it's going to go up on this thing I mentioned on Claude and to those of you who've reached out especially the kids in college. Part of the goal is for you guys to use AI and realize how powerful it is. I mentioned my son. He is starting an internship and his work that he's done

in the last four months has blown me away. And this has all come from him spending more time on Claude. So the way that I'm with GPT-5, I think most people should start with Claude and do the verticals one by one because you have to understand the computer architecture. And I'm trying to make sure that people understand where every day they can do these three things. How do I brainstorm with it on everything? How do I actually use it to be more efficient in my taxes,

in my bank statements, in my kids' bills, whatever it is? I will show you how to do that. And then how do I build something? How do you build your first app for your workout routine, for your recipes? It doesn't really matter. whatever part of your life, you need to build that first app. And all you got to do is verbally speak into it. So if I show people how to do this and I keep it short and succinct, if you give that

to your kids or you do it, and then you get your kids, you show it to your kids, you do it. I think it's really important for the parents to both set an example, but also show how easy it is because the kids are not allowed to use it in most schools or they're prevented from doing the things that I'm talking because they don't have access to this particular situation. So that's the main thing that i want people to get from when they come visit me and of course they can find me on linkedin x and substack everywhere all right guys talk to you next week