The Pomp Podcast
00:07:45 · Jordi Visser
[00:07:45] S3: That is pretty much about what Marc Andreessen is saying. And if you go through the rest of the world, that's been about what's been happening. If you go to Europe, the stock market has done nothing since 2007. You go to emerging markets, it's done nothing. You go through most of the world, it goes through, I mean, a twenty year period where you get less than inflation. So that's been happening if you're a loser to AI, mall stocks, like all of these things, Ford, GM, I joke about them. They're still companies. They still make products that people buy, but they're not growth. So if you look out over a decade and you've owned Ford, what would you expect your annualized return to be? Are you thinking you're gonna get S and P? Or are you thinking you're gonna get S and P minus three, four, five? So what Mark said is that in the world of AI, which I agree with, all companies are gonna be disrupted. They can't reinvent themselves. So part of his argument is AI native businesses have a huge advantage. They grow. They grow rapidly, but they also run into competition eventually as well. Founders don't need there to be growth if their business is making money every single year. Right? Like if you're taking most of the money, if you're bringing in, isn't that effectively what a salary is to some degree? You're hoping you get inflation plus, but a salary is a number, and then you're hoping it grows in in some way when you first get the job. If you're a founder of a business and you have to sell off part of your business, the question is was it a good choice to make the sale? So Dario has created the most valuable company in the world, and how much does he own of it? We're starting to see that pressure growing, which was what market was talking about. And I think the eight call options, are the mag seven, they're being forced to spend an enormous amount of money for this massive payoff that may or may not happen. So if you think where nebious is, where core weave is, how would you price them? They're effectively bonds, they're not call options because I don't think they can grow up 10 times. I thought the infrastructure trades, and I still believe that the infrastructure trade will create S and P plus returns, but only for the next two years, three years, and then eventually efficiency gains and everything else will come in.
00:09:54 · Jordi Visser, Anthony Pompliano
So there's very few companies that you can say to me are gonna have a business that can outcompete anyone. If you told me SpaceX because they're doing something differently, that's great. But SpaceX is gonna have a lot of government involvement in terms of them. In fact, that might... He might be the company, the biggest target in the world right now with what's happening. So I think people have to start to realize that this election, the midterms take us to 2028, that's two more years of AI, that's two more years of a massive progress acceleration where we're gonna see pressure on jobs. I just think people have to start thinking about this for public stocks that way. [00:10:31] S1: The call options, you said there's eight, Mag seven plus SpaceX? Yeah. Is that the same thing? Okay. Now you mentioned that the 492 bonds would be S and P minus some number. If that's the case, does the S and P become uninvestable?
00:10:47 · Jordi Visser
[00:10:47] S3: I mean, we've talked about it. The reason that I'm interested in Bitcoin is because I'm looking for things that are benefiting from growth that is going to happen of which there's gonna be difficulty for competition. So the first thing is the crypto ecosystem. There's no doubt in my mind that tokenization, that agentic commerce, that all of those things are gonna happen over the course of the next two years. The one thing, the data center moratorium, that may create doubt in terms of, 2028 and this, but I've never been a believer that all of that compute that was necessary down the line... We don't know how much of it will be necessary. We just we just don't. We don't know the progress on the models. We don't know when we're gonna reach certain levels. I have people that are very smart on the tech side that swear to me, oh, no. We won't need memory in three years. We blah blah blah. I don't believe any of that stuff, but I do believe competition is coming, I think the Chinese are coming, I think other places are going, I think there's tremendous amounts of manufacturing and innovation that's happening, and I don't think we know what problems AI can solve. So, I do think over the course of the next three years, crypto is something that is a growth that should benefit Bitcoin. But then the other thing about Bitcoin is I do believe in in this this world. You wanna find something where money goes into that's growing. Bitcoin doesn't have the hurdles that stocks do. So you gotta remember, you've been doing this for a long time with Bitcoin. It's
00:12:17 · Anthony Pompliano, Jordi Visser
[00:12:17] S1: been [00:12:17] S3: under attack for the entire time. [00:12:20] S1: Correct. [00:12:22] S3: Public companies are going to be under attack. So the last twelve years, would say the mag seven or the hyperscalers, whatever you... Whichever one you wanna do it, both parties at some point were against them being so big. Even Trump to some degree. The problem is we need the AI build out, so it's very hard to stop them from it if you believe in the political side, which is why I think the current administration has focused on the race against AI. But I think going forward, this is not just government involvement. AI is an incredibly disruptive force. You and I both have businesses that are built on AI, where we're shocked at how few people we need to build the business. I think it's very, very challenging when you have something that very few people are using, and they're not using it because AI is hated in this country. It is absolutely hated, and more and more that's become evident to me. The voting, AI was not popular, data centers was not as big a story as affordability, but the distribution of wealth is a big story, and that again gets attached to AI. So I just think anyone that doesn't believe that there'll be government involvement, we've already seen it with Intel, We've seen it open up with OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of what it would be, and we're seeing already them involved more and more. I just think when the government gets involved in public markets, you can't expect the same types of returns.
00:13:42 · Anthony Pompliano, Jordi Visser
[00:13:42] S1: Based on what you're saying is, if the public markets are essentially uninvestable or getting close to that, why not put all of your money in Bitcoin? Like, what keeps you from just concentrating in your best idea? [00:13:55] S3: Well, you mean me personally? [00:13:56] S1: Just as an investor. Right? Like, forget your exact portfolio, but just... Okay. By process of elimination, if housing is not gonna drive a return in real estate, if, you know, the largest companies in America are not gonna drive, a return, if AI is gonna come under pressure because of the blue wave, you kinda end up with there's only so many assets, and if Bitcoin is the thing that you feel like is best insulated and best positioned, how do you stop putting money in? Like, at what point do you say, hey. I shouldn't put more money into this in my portfolio. Why not all of it?
00:14:27 · Jordi Visser
[00:14:27] S3: So Bitcoin is is, you know, a trillion and 0.5, trillion 7 asset. It's still doubted by almost everyone who has the money. Mhmm. We've seen such a dramatic shift in the last twelve months in terms of the banks. I mean, first it was the government saying, we're all in on Bitcoin. Now you have all the banks basically bending over backwards to basically be all in on selling people Bitcoin. So we've seen some things happen in the last two years with the ETF, with everything, where greed eventually sets in. These are the people selling things. The outstanding shares for the Bitcoin ETF hit new all time highs despite the fact that we are significantly off the all time highs, which means wealth managers are still putting money in there because as a diversification, I think it's legitimate. Now you and I talked about some of the headwinds for Bitcoin in the beginning part of this year. I did a video today, I don't know if you got a chance to see it, but I sent it to you. But there's a bunch of things in there which kind of fit in with this story in the bigger picture. Number one, I think with the midterms, we've eliminated the the bubble risk, which sounds funny when the market's going down, but my argument would be there isn't a bubble risk yet because we haven't done enough of the debt. We haven't done enough of the spending yet. If there was a macro event which slowed down the demand side or something happened in the next couple years and these guys spent more and more money, think it would be an issue. But if we're all believing that they're not gonna spend as much money for 2028, well then that would mean that CapEx would probably be less next year. They've already started on the stuff that'll happen now. If they're worried about 2028, maybe there'll be a delay and that would be good for the bubble risk, meaning it would push out the build out further and further, and that would be good. Second thing is there'd be less capital needed. That's put enormous pressure on rates to go higher. Second thing is if people believe that the market is gonna go down and there's gonna be of a build out and Brad Gerstner says this is 50 basis points off GDP, well then that means that growth will come down, which means rates should come down. At the same time, one of the contributors to inflation this year has been DRAM prices.