The Pomp Podcast
00:00:50 · S2, Jordi Visser
Ad[00:00:50] S2: Annual plan only auto renews TNC apply estimate based on average combined Walmart Plus and Sam's Club Plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus nonmember or club member pricing slash fees. Excludes membership fees. See Walmart Plus terms and Sam's Club terms for more [00:00:59] S3: Progress is moving faster than humans can handle it. And those humans are government. Those humans are the companies that have lots of people. When Microsoft says they're gonna get... Offer buyouts to 27% of their employees, How is that not like a major warning sign that we have reached a level where this has never happened before, and they're offering for 27% of the people in the company to go? This is a very kind of dystopian dystopian time that's only gonna get worse going forward.
00:00:59 · Jordi Visser, Anthony Pompliano
[00:00:59] S3: Progress is moving faster than humans can handle it. And those humans are government. Those humans are the companies that have lots of people. When Microsoft says they're gonna get... Offer buyouts to 27% of their employees, How is that not like a major warning sign that we have reached a level where this has never happened before, and they're offering for 27% of the people in the company to go? This is a very kind of dystopian dystopian time that's only gonna get worse going forward. [00:01:28] S1: What's going on, guys? Today, got a great conversation with Jordi Visser. In this conversation, we talk about the midterm elections. What's going on with the AI slowdown slash the crash that happened this week in your portfolio? How does he thinking about Bitcoin, crypto, oil, stocks, and much more? And then we get into a very interesting idea that maybe the S and P 500 is made up of 492 bonds and eight call options, and that is gonna be a part of the conversation you really wanna pay attention to. And then we go around the news and all of the different current events. We talk about some things that we used AI for this week. We even throw in a couple of memes and jokes that'll get you laughing. So here's my latest conversation with Jordi Visser. Alright, Jordi. The midterm elections happened this week. It was a blue wave for the ages. Now people are freaking out. There was a big sell off in the stock market through the end of the week. What's your take?
00:02:14 · Jordi Visser
[00:02:14] S3: This is not what hedge funds wanted. It's not what my portfolio wanted either. But, first of all, the the Democrats were favored to win going into it, so it wasn't the outcome of the Senate. It was the extent of the damage. It was Texas and the surprise because Abbott was over 60% going into it. But I I think the story, rather than get into people's fears over what this will mean, I don't really think it has a huge impact on next year from what'll be built. Most of the things that are already under construction will get finished. I think the fear for people really comes from, number one, this is a tangible thing to make the next two years slower, for sure. Regulations will get heavier in certain states, and those states are important. There's no way having a new governor in Texas won't slow down the process of getting it done. So to a degree, we were living in a world where when you have all of the major tech people on inauguration day in the presence of the president, and then you have this happen, I I wouldn't say it's too surprising that the market on the AI side or the tech side in general is is not happy. For me, I don't think this changes the demand side of compute. I don't think it changes the fact that the stocks had already discounted this. And when I say they've already discounted this, we're significantly off the highs in most of these stocks. I can tell you from the ones that I still had left, plus the ones I started adding a couple weeks ago, of which I've added more this week, I've yet to make a purchase that isn't lower than it was when I made the purchase over the course of the last couple months. So it's been a problem, but we've been talking a lot about deleveraging. And I've made some bold statements, which I'll keep saying, which is the peak of hedge fund leverage has passed. We will never ever ever again be as levered as we were in dollar terms overall. There's rumors today, we're recording this on Thursday, there's rumors today of a couple hedge funds being, at least their equity business being shut down, but bigger stories floating around coming my way. But today is kind of the first day that I would say there's a liberation day type panic selling.
00:04:37 · Jordi Visser, Anthony Pompliano
And for me, that just means that after going through what's effectively been we peaked in early June, we've given back, depending on the name, the overall myogenic portfolio has given back over 60% of the gains that had happened from the beginning of the year till then. It's still less than that from a year ago, from when Opus 4.5 came out. But we have done significant damage on the AI trade, and I think the way people should think about it going forward, when I've talked about the difficulties that all public stocks will have by 2030, and the fact that I think the growth of pretty much all public companies will be done, and they will effectively become, as Marc Andreessen has said, bonds, and that's what we're in. We haven't talked about this before, but I'm writing a paper on... You may be interested in this, this will be good for you. But Marc [00:05:32] S1: I would love to understand what you mean by growth of public companies will be done by 2030?
00:05:39 · Jordi Visser
[00:05:39] S3: Yeah. I think all all companies that have large groups of people will be disrupted by AI. I think this is a world headed through tokenization, through small entrepreneurship, that the government, what's happened in the midterms, and the most important thing for people to take away, do you believe that AI progress will only go up from here? Of course. Okay. So that means cyber risk will go. Terror risk will increase. Job replacement will increase. Companies that have a monopoly on this stuff, that have margins that are enormous, that are firing people, the labor versus capital situation will worsen. If you're a big public company, you're targeted via cyber. You're targeted via government intervention. You're targeted... The public companies, the big ones, I don't think there'll be any growth. So Marc Andreessen made this comment two years ago, which I'm writing a paper on. He said everything in the S and P 500 is basically 492 are bonds, eight of them are call options, which is exactly what I believe. Starting when AI took off, the eight biggest companies became a mad race to dominate AI. Larry Page publicly said, or Gavin Baker said for Larry Page on an interview, I'll bankrupt this company in the race to AGI. We don't talk about AGI as being this winner, one takes winner thing anymore. So my whole belief has been, and this is the reason why I believe in Bitcoin is that there are no more moats. And that when your business gets there, it's not that you won't be a $5,000,000,000,000 company. But growth comes from a lack of government involvement. It comes from multiple expansion. It comes from all of those things. We're starting to see the the negatives of of AI this year, and I think it's only gonna worsen.
00:07:28 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:07:28] S1: Alright. There's a lot to unpack here. So let's start first with the 492 bonds in the S and P 500. Can you unpack, like, does that just mean they trade basically at whatever the inflation rate is? Does that mean that you get inflation plus something? Like, what would your expectation be for the 492 bonds?