Transcription
When I wrote the Bitcoin paper on Substack last week, I had a lot of macro people that reached out to me saying, "Hey, why didn't you send me this? Why didn't it go out for 22V?" And I'm like, "Well, I write my crypto stuff on Substack so the community can read it for free. You guys get my expensive stuff." And I didn't think he cared about this. Like, no, we care about making money. And that's the whole point is that at some point, people care about making money.
>> Oil is rising, markets are getting volatile, and uncertainty seems to be everywhere. What do investors need to know to protect their capital and plan for success while still taking advantage of the opportunities we're seeing? Hello and welcome to Milk Road Macro, the podcast that hopes that the straight of America will be open for business soon. I'm your host, John Gillan. Today is Wednesday, March 18th, and today we are joined by the macro profit of AI, Jordi Viser. Jordan is the head of AI macro Nexus Research at 22V Research and the founder of Vister Labs, a consulting firm specializing in advising on AI and digital assets. With over three decades of experience in finance and macro, Jordy is one of the best analysts in the world to help people understand what to do in times like this. So, if all this sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it. Today's episode is brought to you by Nexo, earn interest, borrow and trade crypto, and Fortis X, your idol crypto's worst nightmare. And without further ado, welcome back to Milk Road Macro, Jordy Visser. How are you, sir?
>> I'm great, John. How you doing?
>> I'm really, really excited to talk to you today. Uh, Jordy, I think a good place to start the conversation would be with what everyone's talking about, which is oil. Um, I've heard you say that this shock in oil prices is just a trigger for a lot of underlying problems that are brewing below the surface. Um, you've also compared this combination of private credit stress combined with these oil shocks to situations you saw in 1998 and in 2008. I wonder if you could explain your thinking on this a little bit here. What makes this moment similar or different to some of these major market crashes we saw in the past?
>> Well, I'm not calling this a crash. Um, let's start there. um the 98 and the 2008 references um which I traded through both of them. One from Brazil and one ran managing my own portfolio. Those were deleveraging situations where the process basically was going on for a period of time beforehand and you eventually get to the point that investors and in particular people that have been using leverage want to delever. So rather than get into the contagion that happened in 2008, because remember in in 1998 this was an emerging market crisis that everyone ignored for a period of time in 2008. I mean, it's hard for people to believe this because they only remember in hindsight but people ignored what was happening in mortgages and the financial markets. There were plenty of deleveraging situations that happened throughout 2007 uh way before Lehman went under. Uh but the S&P made all-time highs in October of '07 and then it started to fall. But by then we had lost many mortgage brokers. A lot of the the debt had been put on other balance sheets. So the reason I'm bringing that up is I believe we were at we are in the very early stages of a new disruptive force that this time can't be let's say it won't end with more growth. It will end with what I believe will be a multiple compression story for fiat assets. Uh, and in particular, AI is going to change the way that people think about the future. And whenever you get into one of these periods, whether it's 1998 at the time or in 2008, people start to get really negative because they don't know what's going to happen in the future. uh that has started to play out this year and it started towards the end of last year with credit but I think this year with some of the things we've seen in the marketplace and in particular I have a turbulence model which measures the relationship uh between assets or cross asset volatility and correlations and that has been screaming since early February that we are seeing deleveraging and so I think we're in a deleveraging phase it's not a crash I wouldn't get people to be uh, you know, all negative uh mainly because AI is a structural bull market. There is no bubble. This will continue. And as someone who spends his time with AI macro nexus, um the macro is going to be disrupted, but AI is going to continue to zoom higher.
>> Gotcha. Okay. I appreciate you giving that context there. Um I wanted to ask you about how we get through this because you said like there's this compression that's happening, a lot of uncertainty. The Fed just had their FOC meeting today. They held rates constant, but they're sort of dealing with this crossfire of pressures. There's inflationary pressures from the oil shock, deflationary pressures from AI. Meanwhile, the labor market continues to soften. What are you expecting from the Federal Reserve? What path would you like to see them follow as we get deeper into 2026 here?
>> Beginning in the summer of last year, I started writing paper after paper and almost all of my exposts involved saying that PMIs would be going higher and we were entering a new phase. The new phase was related to the needs that AI had reached. So I had called it the end of the software era which began with the iPhone and post the GFC where everything that was working in the world all the alpha that was generated was related to software. Software was non-yclical. It was an asset class and I'll call it an asset class because it dominated everything. the Mag 7, but also companies like Salesforce.com and Adobe Adobe that were all seatbased, meaning as long as there were 2 million job creation each year, these guys had more business to do. And so it was a nominal GDP correlation, non-yclical. Well, now we're at a different stage. Um, at the end of last year, as PMIs finally did start to break higher, uh, in the fourth quarter, we saw DRAM prices go through the roof. We saw silver go through the roof. We saw copper go up. Now we're seeing energy prices going up. I have said that this will be a decade of this. Um we have underinvested in the hardware that is necessary to run artificial intelligence and the demand for artificial intelligence is infinite. It is not being financed out of debt. It is being financed primarily out of free cash flow at this point. There is some debt going on but it's not that big relative to the equity of these companies. And it will be financed by enterprises through labor. We will have a reduction in labor and that will mean reducing cost to invest into the infrastructure necessary. But we don't have enough copper. We don't have enough silver. We don't have enough memory. We don't have enough compute for the demand that is only increasing every day as AI progress grows. So instead of saying to people, you know, this is a problem, this is going to go on, this is what happens when you start to shift from software is this great thing. It's a given that it'll go uh and grow every year. We'll write debt on that. And then all of a sudden software stocks collapse even though their earnings are going higher. And the reason is because people are starting to realize that the progress of AI is going faster than they thought and the disruption is much sooner than we anticipated. So all long duration assets in my opinion are going through repricing. Commercial real estate is going through repricing. Guess what? If you're not going to have any labor, why do you need to have all these buildings? And certainly, how are you going to rent them out? You're having a uh decline or deflation in software. You're going to see the same thing in private equity. You're going to see the same thing in all of these different places cuz AI will disrupt all businesses and we're only seeing the early stages. So long commodities, long compute, and short anything built on code.
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All right, so let's unpack this a little bit. We're jumping around a little bit in the questions I had planned, but let's go to this now. Um, you you've called software a dead asset, meaning that whether or not it goes to zero immediately, it's not going to be leading on growth anymore because AI has broken a lot of moes. And I'm curious your thoughts on the second order effects on this because investors are not going to be able to get alpha or outperformance anymore from software or from the mag 7. So where do you see capital or investors in the market going to try to get that outperformance in the future?
>> Again, I think it's going to be commodities and I think it's going to be compute. And people are underestimating how much compute is necessary. Along with compute, you need things like and aside from uh commodities, you need things like chemicals, you need things like optical fiber. Uh there's a tremendous amount, in fact, there's more companies that benefit than get hurt by this. The problem is most of the companies that get hurt by this are the largest market caps. So part of the disruption that's going on and part of the thing that creates the issue for people is their portfolios are not weighted towards this. When people look at the S&P 500 and they see it down on the year or they see the Dow down on the year and they're in ETFs are like, "Wait, what's going on? Mom's supposed to be making money. Q's are supposed to be everything's supposed to be up." But if you're long semiconductor stocks, most of them are up 20, 40, 30. Just take take your pick. So it's not that there isn't a place to make money. In the prior decade, you suffered if you were long small caps. You suffered if you were long the S&P 493 as opposed to the S&P 7. So you can call this whatever you want, but this is just really a rotation deconentration. And I think the hyperscalers in particular, that's Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the spenders of this thing. I I think they're going to have a really hard time. So software was first. I do believe it's a dead asset. And if people want to understand what that means, I'm not saying they're all going to zero. Some of the companies will absolutely go to zero. Some of them will not. Some of them, the majority of them will be dead money. And think about when Ozmpic came out. You knocked down all of the process processed food stocks. All processed food demand went down. Well, guess what? Ompic has continued to be a structural change in processed food. So, it's very very difficult to ignore the fact that software is going to have a headwind now when it had a tailwind for so long.
>> So, let's play this out a little bit more. The the Mag 7, as you've said, have turned from the MAG 7 to the Lag 7, and now they're the Drag 7, which is a phrase I'm coining and trying to get to catch on. Um, but it's starting to pull down the NASDAQ. The S&P is showing weakness as well. A lot of people are worried that it's going to roll over into a much deeper correction here. At the same time, we've got expectations for IPOs from SpaceX, Enthropic, OpenAI, many others in 2026 that could pull in three to four trillion dollars of capital to fund those IPOs. Do you think the US equities markets overall are going to be able to sustain this this rotation, this dispersion, or do you think there's like a broader risk here of a much deeper correction in US equities?
>> Um, I I think the let's let's say two things. First is um financials. When the financial stocks are trading as poorly as they are, they're the worst performing sector um year to date as of today. Uh they were at all-time highs on January 6. So this change has coincided with the risk and the weakness we've seen in private credit. So when you have a credit situation that's weakening, you have the financials following. So the stocks are agreeing that the credit risks are real. Um, and you have that below the 200 day moving average and you have the 200 day moving average pointed downward. As of when we got on here today, the Dow Jones was breaking the 200 day moving average. The technicals look weak. I think we're going to have corrections. We've had a lot of 15% corrections over the last 5 years, more so than I think um people are are comfortable admitting, but they happen. I think we're going to be in a world where people have to get used to more volatile situations. I believe that the environment is going to be somewhat similar to the 1970s. People hear a lot of horror stories of the 1970s and for a decade the stock market was effectively unchanged. The problem is it never could sustain a rally for very long. And I think that's the world that we're kind of going into now. Uh, as bullish as I am on AI, I think the waitings in the market when 50% of the market cap is technology and only 5% is energy and materials combined. The problem is if you believe what I believe, we need to see anything built on code which is primarily going to be the hyperscalers, the software names plus the communication services names. Um, semis will do fine and semis are now about, I think, 14% of the S&P. Um, they're going to do great. Uh, but I think people just have to accept the fact that maybe for the next, uh, 5 years we'll have episodic falls of 15 to 20%, we'll rally back because the earnings are going to keep growing. Uh, but I think overall we're in a period of multiple compression. So when I said the 1970s, earnings grew during the 1970s. The stock market did not go higher. What you saw was the S&P PE went from 20 down to eight. The problem is for people, they haven't experienced that sort of thing, but I think we're in for a very disappointing period. It's good for Bitcoin people. The reason I'm so focused on Bitcoin is because that money is going to chase returns because we need returns. And the returns to me are going to come from that asset class.
>> All right. Well, we'll come back to Bitcoin here in a second. I want to ask one more question about something you've touched on a couple times here, which is the risk in the private credit markets. Um, a lot of people have been flagging this as a concern. Something I've heard you say about it is that there is, well, maybe not an expectation, but a possibility that all this resolves with the Federal Reserve having to step in to provide some sort of liquidity back stop to sort of save the market from the risks in private credit. How serious do you think that is in terms of like your expectation for that being the outcome? And what does that look like when the Fed actually tries to implement that to sort of solve the risks you're seeing here in private credit?
Liquidity facilities are also something that have become part of our lives since the great financial crisis. And all a liquidi liquidity facility means is like mom and dad when their kids when they say to them, "I'm not giving you any more money." And then all of a sudden they have some emergency that comes up, then mom and dad throw them money. Um this the Treasury and the central bank are in a very um challenging position with private credit. On the one hand, they want to let this thing play out because in the documents of all of the people who decided that private credit was a good investment um for the extra 200 basis points that they would receive over a liquid junk bond uh ETF, they're paying the consequences now of being in something where they're trapped. So, the reality is they signed these documents. This is part of it. This is they deserve to go through some pain. The question is when does the private credit market become an issue for the bigger economy? I think that's going to happen mainly because the redemptions are going to keep happening and as redemptions happen they have to get cash for that and as they get cash they have to sell off these bonds. As they sell these bonds and go through the clearing mechanism it ends up having issues on other and you start getting markdowns and this runs into a situation where it spreads a lot faster than people think and that has always been the issue with credit. I do believe this one is easily contained by them having to do something as a liquidity facility to offer the ability of buying some of the being the buyer for these bonds and still letting people get out but at a discount that way just like it happened with Silicon Valley Bank the depositors can get their money. I think there will be some pain but I do think that this is going to be an issue and all that has to happen at this point. There are two things that go on in the fiat economy when there's a deleveraging situation. And people have to understand this. The US economy is incredibly levered. The global economy is in incredibly levered. That's what the fiat system is. You run a fractional reserve banking system. You have assets that are worth more than the underlying currency against it. Well, if all the assets are going down, you end up in a very dangerous situation because then selling beget selling get selling. And I've seen this time and time again. And it doesn't take much when you have oil breaking out the way it is. If crude is at 150 in in three weeks, I'm sure the stock market will be down finally and it'll be down 20 25%. If private credit has fallen and if one of the private equity guys is in trouble, that's when the facility will be put in place because they'll know that if they do anything, it'll stop the asset side from falling. Now, you have the politics on this as well. It's a midterm election year. So, I just think that when people um start thinking more about private credit, it is an obvious issue for the people on Wall Street, they've been talking about this being a bubble for years now. Uh because of the fact that people were doing this for no mark to market. And when you start to make decisions because you don't have mark tomarket and you're taking the liquidity risk, eventually people will want their liquidity back so they're not sitting in something that's going down in their face and they'll start yelling and screaming about it. lawsuits will start happening and that's when the problem starts to grow. So I do think we're in the midst of something that is uh I don't want to say systemic because I don't think it is. I really believe what happened in 2008 and 2009 cannot be repeated ever again. One because the printing press and the ability for the Fed to create facilities out of nowhere exist. And number two, there's a difference between a run on a bank like what happened with SVB and a credit situation where you want people want to run out but they're captive into the into their uh investments and they can't get out. So I just think it's going to cause a lot of problems uh more on the political side and also people kind of uh wanting to sell other assets to get cash back.
you you've painted quite a complex picture here and you've described a lot of these different pressures of of AI impacting the markets of private credit of oil um you know but you've also pointed out that the Federal Reserve has sort of normalize the tools to deal with these things. I I just kind of like give me some sort of timeline for some of these things. Do you think this is a like by May thing or is this like over a decade like you said the 1970s over a decade these things play out or is it a mix of both? Like what what are you kind of expecting in terms of timing on some of these things?
>> Well, historically credit events would take 9 to 18 months to kind of play out and I and I think this credit situation really started with first brands and triricolor back in September. So if we were using the old playbook before the GFC it would it would go slower. What we learned from Silicon Valley Bank is that in a world of X, Twitter, information just goes so rapidly. And when people start hearing, there's not a single person on the planet that doesn't know that private credit is an issue right now. During the GFC, when you watch the movie The Big Short, trust me, everyone on Wall Street knew what was going on for well over a year and going, "Why is this not happening?" All the people that are on that movie for the two three years that this was going on, they were all in our office. I remember seeing them all the time and we're all we had we had the big short on. Everyone did. So again, I think what ends up going on in this is that normally things would take longer. But in this world of the digital phone and everyone and spreading information, the run happens faster, the fear happens faster, and that tends to lead to sharper falls in a shorter amount of time, but also a violent move the other direction. So, if I had to guess and I say, okay, if it used to take on the long side 18 months and it would be at least 9 months for these credit things to play out, I'll say, you know, we're we're getting into the early stages of when it would make sense for this to become a problem. Um, I think the oil thing could be the tipping stone and be the trigger for this to accelerate if oil continues to go higher because if it pushes the Fed in a position that they have to talk about hiking, which would not surprise me if they have to do that in the next uh FOMC meeting. People need to remember that in 2008 that exact thing happened and it happened three months before Lehman Brothers and most people don't remember this but in June of08 oil prices had just reached $150ish dollars. Um this was driven by the demand side of China. But at that point the whole world ECB tightened and the US was talking about tightening and that led to an acceleration and then we had to bail out the entire system less than four months later. So I think the trigger point if it's going to happen sooner is probably going to be because of oil. Um that would be my guess because inflation expectations are running high and the Fed is at this point uh after today's statement willing to ignore it. I don't think they're going to be able to ignore it if gas at the pump is up at $5 when the next meeting happens.
>> Gotcha. Okay. So, now you're saying that oil is a trigger is what you've said. I've heard you say that before. And the trigger is now something where the Fed is going to have to start dealing with this and not just saying we're monitoring the situation. Um so, we'll pay attention to see how that develops. Um something I'm curious to get your thoughts on here. Uh last time that we spoke when last time you're on Milk Road Macro, um Presidents Trump and Xi were going to have their summit in November. um and they are scheduled to have another meeting as Trump is now slated to go visit uh China and meet with Xi. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what you're watching for coming out of this because a lot of people were very focused on USChina relations then Iran happened and now no one's paying attention but this is still a very important economic meeting is as I uh you know I view it. Um what's your view on this? Does the US have the upper hand after what's happened in Venezuela and Iran? Does China still have leverage here? What are you watching for? Is is this going to be a market moving thing or or just a nothing burger?
>> Well, I think it'll end up most likely, if I had to guess, being a positive. Um, but it depends on when it happens, too. I do think, and again, there's I find this to be ironic that most um geomac people do not believe that there is a direct relationship between what happened in Venezuela, what happened in the Panama Canal, uh what happened in Greenland, and what's happening in Iran. Um, I do believe they're all related. I do believe that this is part of the 1970s. To me, again, AI is a race for supremacy on a military basis. The fact that the US military has been incredibly active from a president who ran on no forever wars. And I really do believe he believes that. Um, he's involved in here. And what changed? Last year, the US learned that China not only has a strangle hold on rare earth, but if it can't get rare earth, they can't make anything. That was a gamecher for the tariffs. It changed the entire equation. I started preaching about it in April, May of last year, saying this is the only thing that matters. China has pulled out the rare earth card. Once they did that, that it's rock paper scissors. So by having oil and by watching what's already happening in Asia where the price of oil for Asia is dramatically above where it is right now for WTI crude. I mean I think today it got up over $130 where WTI is at 90 something. They were a difference of a few uh dollars before the war started. So I do think there is a um a part of this which is related to the strength that the US has is energy. the strength that China has is rare earth and solar power. They're going to be in this game of fighting for AI supremacy because if either one of them was able to restrict the other from getting one of the two, it creates a big issue. So, I do think that it's more likely to be a positive outcome because I think at a minimum by hurting Iran at this point and doing so much damage in there, even though they've been able to keep the straight Hormuse closed for the time being, we all know that it's going to open up eventually. I would put it as a very low probability that it doesn't because Iran is not only hurting the US, it's hurting the entire world and eventually you are selling stuff to the rest of the world. And if they're the ones that are keeping it closed at some point after they get, you know, don't look beaten and they want to get some kind of ceasefire, uh, I would imagine that at that point the US can go into China with a little better position. So I do think that it matters. I get the impression just based on the tea leaves that have come out of Washington DC from so many people that I follow that the most positive person on China in DC is Donald Trump and that sounds like he wants to make some kind of a grand bargain between the two countries. I'm not going to bet my life on it, but I do think it's more likely to be positive than negative.
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>> Gotcha. Okay. So, you're expecting some sort of vaguely positive outcome from these discussions. Um because I agree with you. It does seem like both countries, you know, your old metaphor was like they're trying to get a divorce but amicably. Um and so they're trying not to blow up each other's economies or, you know, get into entanglements they don't want to be in at the same time. Um so that that'll be positive. That's again something I'm watching, but it's just completely slipped off the radar for most people um because of these recent events. Um Jordy, whenever I see you, we always argue about which one of us is more bullish on Bitcoin. Your latest subsect this weekend, you repeated your thesis saying Bitcoin usually falls first in a liquidity event, which is kind of what you've been describing you're expecting to happen here um with the Fed and and dealing with the private credit issues. Um but then you said it it rallies the hardest once the rescue begins. Walk me through your outline outlook for Bitcoin here. it's been showing a little bit of strength during all this volatility from the war. Uh why do you think benefit uh Bitcoin is going to benefit so much from the outcome of all of this?
>> Well, the the first thing is um you know for all the things that I was fairly accurate on for last year and for part of this year. Um I thought Bitcoin would be much higher today than it is. So I want to I want to start with that. And what I've learned over the years is whenever there's I I do things in a very thoughtful manner. I think hard about where things are going to be in the long term and I probably spend more time than most that I that I meet about what the future is going to look like 2 3 years from now and when you're in an exponential world like we are now that's a very helpful way to frame things because when I talk to people if they say well this is going to happen in four years I'm going did you did you incorporate humanoids into your thought process did you incorporate the fact that most transactions will be happening via sta with stable coins and AI agents. There won't be human consumers. I mean, the Substack that I'm either going to go out with this week or next week is on 8 billion consumers turning into trillions of consumers because that's what's going to happen with AI agents. So, the first part is why was I wrong on Bitcoin last year? And the reality is for me um I have said repeatedly at everything since I got involved in the crypto community that crypto will never be an accepted asset until something very important happens to all the fiat investors of the world. Growth needs to not work anymore. Meaning the one thing that is always consistent is pension funds always need returns because their liabilities are always growing. As AI happens, people won't die as quickly as they did. Longevity will increase, which means pension funds really have to their liabilities are just going to continue to increase and increase. So, they've got an issue. They need to produce returns. If the MAG 7 never went up again, and all they did was go down. If software never went up again, which I don't think it will, it's a dead asset. They need to find a growth asset. Commodities are not a growth asset. Commodities are something that eventually if they go up too far too fast, they have to come back down because there's demand destruction. So what is built on code is part of the technological future. Well, that is the crypto guardrails. We all know that that's coming. We all know at this point that agents can't use the fiat guard rails which move at a snail's pace when they're moving faster and faster every day. So my thesis has always been that Bitcoin will be the asset of choice. It has already been chosen. And I will not debate people on this anymore. It has already been chosen by hundreds of millions of people around the globe that is a store of value with inside the digital economy. You can doubt it. Don't argue gold. Stay inside one lane. One lane is the digital economy. What inside the digital economy do you put your money to get higher returns in the future? And also has great sharp ratio. That's Bitcoin. So I believe that what's going to end up happening software has stabilized. The reason Bitcoin has done well in the last two weeks is because software has stabilized. When software fell, Bitcoin fell. What I want to see happen is when we finally get through this and the equity market falls far enough, the credit markets worsen, then the same thing that has always happened and led to the biggest rallies in the history of Bitcoin. All of them occur when the governments get involved to stop the deleveraging cycles that happen. I don't think people fully have looked at this. I know none of the crypto people have really spent their time. I'm not talking about the 2020 print. I'm talking about things like uh a Fed pivot from hiking to all of a sudden saying, "Ah, we're done hiking," which was the end of 2022, which led to a big rally before we got into the ETF. Every single part of Bitcoin and every single part of crypto involves something where the liquidity moves from one of the other assets into the fastest asset. And what always happens is Bitcoin comes out faster than everything. Okay, great. So, that means that any speculators, retail, when they think it's over, like at liberation day, let's go buy Bitcoin. That's great. Well, this time when they buy it, there's another thing sitting there, which is the guardrails are happening already. We have exploding volumes in stable coins. We have exploding market cap and stable coins. And for the first time in the history of stable coins versus Bitcoin, Bitcoin is not rallying as the market cap and the volumes of stable coins are going higher. So I do believe that when we get the next phase where this stabilizes from lower levels, not only will Bitcoin go higher on a higher beta, but because the hyperscalers and this time the other growth assets will not be bouncing, this is a commoditydriven situation. I think Bitcoin will now separate itself from that dead asset class. And then every pension fund and individual in the world will be like, "Hey, I got to make my returns. If the S&P 500 can't rally because of the stupid commodity bull market, let me go buy something that does." And they'll start buying Bitcoin.
>> Gotcha. So, you're looking for this decoupling of Bitcoin from software and you're expecting Bitcoin to start rising and outperforming and software not to follow it and that'll produce this kind of change in the market dynamics. I I appreciate you laying that out. I think that's helpful for our audience. Um, I want to ask another question about something else you mentioned here which I've been very curious to hear your thoughts on. The Agentic economy, like you said, is going to take the global economy from billions of users and participants to trillions like you said. I'm curious how you see this playing out and who benefits because some people are saying it's going to be smart contract platforms, some are saying it'll be stable coin issuers, others are saying it'll just be the US dollar. Um, and I'm curious what your views on this and and how you are thinking about investing around that or if it all just settles back down to Bitcoin for you.
>> So, the the funny thing is I I was going to say until you said the US dollar, I was going to say yes to all of it. Um cuz you name themes and and again all the themes that we've heard in crypto all the things that the entrepreneurs have been basically betting their life on they're all going to happen. NFTTS will happen smart contra every single thing will happen. Now investing in that to me is I I'm not in the camp that some other people are in the crypto world. I actually don't subscribe to the the altcoin um rally or anything. I I believe there will be periods that it goes higher, but you have to understand if you learned anything in the last 6 months, and this is for everyone to just think about. You're talking about software companies, okay? Everything you describe, at the end of the day, it's a software company. Didn't we just see what happened to software companies in the public market? So I I don't believe that anything that is an innovation that needs growth can sustain itself. Cursor is a startup AI company that to me has already plat has already reached a peak and was the fastest growing company ever. That reminds me of what happened in the crypto world. So it's not that people can't make money um investing in certain tokens. Uh I I think at this point when we make a bottom this rally they can pretty much invest in anything and you'll get some five baggers some 10 baggggers some whatever but then once we reach a level that there's another competitor because AI is a disruptive force for everything. So the reason I care about Bitcoin is because it doesn't have anything. So the problem is I have subscribed to this belief that human beings invest in something because of a narrative. That's it. They believe in it and they invest in it. When every single narrative eventually ends in time, there's not a single thing that doesn't eventually end. An innovation. There's always a better innovation around the corner. We've gotten used to as hum as a human race thinking that the next Mag 7 is right around the corner and it's going to be this or that or that. I don't believe that's the case. So, I've said before, I'll say it again. I don't want to invest in anything that can't build a moat. And the only moat I know at this point is religion, gold, and Bitcoin. Everything else that needs a moat, it ain't going to happen, guys. AI is going to destroy everything. So,
>> okay. So, you're saying that there will be this huge rise of this agentic economy, but the rise of AI itself will make it very difficult to invest in that um and have a thesis around that. So, I I think that's helpful, too. We'll see how all this plays out. Um because I think that, you know, nobody's quite sure yet, but I think your your thoughts are very useful on that. Uh Jordy, when we met and spoke at uh Anthony Pompiano's Bitcoin Investor Week a couple weeks ago here in New York, here in New York, you said that the market was faster than you expected about repricing software lower. In other words, you thought this would take longer, but you know, as you've already pointed out, the market has been much slower than you expected about repo pricing Bitcoin higher. Um and some analysts like Luke Groman, for example, have capitulated on Bitcoin and just gone in on gold instead. Um, how long are you willing to wait before you for your thesis on Bitcoin to play out before the market behavior is going to start to make you doubt or question that thesis? Um, and yeah, like how long can Bitcoin lag before you start to question its thesis? Here,
>> I would I I'm at this point it's it's gone down. My thesis on it is very simple. It's long it relative to software and to the Mag 7. So on that basis, it hasn't underperformed. It's performed with software. Exactly. Um if you bring the chart up of it, it's been great. So I don't really think of it in the terms that you brought it up and bailing out on a belief in this. I would need to not believe in crypto anymore, which is not going to happen. Uh I think that's a certainty. Uh the same way I think AI is a certainty. So AI and crypto are linked to me. The reason I'm not working at a company is because I believed and again I I'm I I do what I uh what I believe is right. I don't believe any company can survive without using AI all day long. And I don't think any company with more than one employee can effectively use AI all along because of the friction that's involved in it. That same friction goes to crypto. If AI is going to be dominating public companies and changing the way we all live, then crypto is going to be part of it. So I would need some new accepted asset. Meaning if Salana and Ethereum were outperforming Bitcoin, maybe I changed my mind, but that's not happening. So it depends on how you look at things. And I think this is a problem everyone has. And maybe it just comes in that I started as a derivative person. You cannot value something by itself and you can't pick a random time period to decide where it is. Uh, no offense to Luke Roman, but how's gold done over the course of the last, you know, whatever. I I mean, I think Bitcoin's outperformed gold since the beginning of the Iran war. So, what would I like I I think you pick random time periods and people go through it. Um, I know that as as someone who does content, people want me to pick exact places in the sand to pick things and to go through this, but that's just not the way it goes on. I mean, I'm fairly bearish right now. Um, I'm long VIX as a hedge against my longs and I'm going to stay in that until the VIX gets up to 30 on some of the later contracts because I think we're in a repricing of the situation. Am I worried about not having more money in Bitcoin while we're down here? Yeah, while I'm sitting here waiting and being patient. But I will get involved again. And I think people should stop caring about whether Bitcoin is 70,000 or 50,000 and whether it's the end of time and then just going, is this going to be around 10 years from now? And if it is going to be around 10 years from now, when do I want to put more money into it and what do I want to take it out of? As opposed to just, okay, I made more money in my income, let me put it in. I'm selling other things and in this case it's money market funds to put money into that or I'll get out of some of my semiconductors if I think that's the case. So I just think people should think differently about it and not try to pick a line in the sand on this. I think it's going to be a major asset for the next decade.
>> So you're not watching the calendar or the price levels. You're just being patient and holding for the the thesis to play out. Um a lot of wisdom in that just in and of itself. Uh Jordy, one more question here around uh crypto and Bitcoin. Yesterday, the SEC released a statement that they called clarifying the application of federal securities laws to crypto assets. In it, they defined what is meant by words like uh digital securities, commodities, collectibles, tools, stable coins. The Clarity Act is still being debated by Congress. It's likely that might pass this year as well. You spend a ton of your time talking to professionals about AI, about crypto. How important is this regulatory clarity to them? Do you think this unlocks a new wave of investor interest that might revive the thesis on Bitcoin here or do you think this is something that people are going to shrug off as well?
>> No, I think um and this again gets back so let's go back to to what I just said because when you summarize it, I want to make sure it's it's clear. Everything that you spend money on or you have money for is related to either spending or saving for the future. How you invest your money is a relative thing. How you eat food or spend your money is a relative thing. Investing and spending money are all relative. They are not in a vacuum. When you decide to buy something, it's in lie of something else. If you decide to save something, you might spend less. So, I think there's too much of this binary thing. Is it a bare market? Is it
A bull market? Is it going up? Is it going down? Bitcoin is doing just fine in relative terms to software. It is part software. At the same time, it is part credit. That was the whole purpose of what I wrote inside the fiat paper. So when banks are going down, that's typically not good for Bitcoin because that means liquidity is going down. So when there's a credit event, typically Bitcoin is getting hit into the credit event. And if you throw software down, well, that's a big problem, too. So when people say it's just the NASDAQ, it goes down. So I think on that front, people need to really think about how it's a relative decision that you're going through.
Now, I think the last 3 years have been incredibly positive in my discussions with Wall Street, which 3 years ago hated even the discussion of Bitcoin. They've been worn down. And here's why they've been worn down. And this is a period where even though it's not it's it's during one of its worst times in terms of just kind of the last 6 months now, you had the ETF come out which enabled people to buy it and be able to not have to open a wallet. You had a president that not only supported it, but the voters of the country voted him in. And in many cases, the election was decided because of the crypto community. You've survived a bare market that was epic in 2022. And yet, it doesn't go away. There's still conferences. I'm speaking at one next week. I was at Pomps. I was at Raul Palves. I'm doing them all. That the community is not dead. The community is still there. It's a belief system because people have been involved and they know it. I think Wall Street is actually closer than people realize to embracing this. I get a lot more questions on the papers I write. And for 22V, where I do my institutional writing and most of my conversations with um the institutional community, I will say that at least a couple times a week there's a conversation related to, hey, if I wanted to make money on stable coins, how would I do it in the public markets? When should I buy Bitcoin? When I wrote the Bitcoin paper on Substack last week, I had a lot of macro people that reached out to me saying, "Hey, why didn't you send me this? Why didn't it go out for 22V?" And I'm like, "Well, I write my crypto stuff on Substack so the community can read it for free. You guys get my expensive stuff." And I didn't think he cared about this. Like, no, we care about making money. And that's the whole point is that at some point people care about making money. They haven't needed Bitcoin because the Mag 7 worked and software worked. It is much harder to buy Freeport Macmaran which can go up 40% and fall 30% because an underlying commodity goes down. It has no diversification to its business. But guess what that's like? That's like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is more comfortable being compared to commodities that have higher volatility and go up and down because they have no underlying business except for one commodity. That's what Bitcoin is. So if you get rid of software then the investors of the world start to change and they start to embrace something that is about a scarcity issue and all of a sudden Bitcoin comes in. So I think it's been a very good year. I think the Clarity Act and all the decisions being made out of Washington are moving the ball forward. I think they're going to have an an impact on the election uh in 2028. Regardless, I think whether it's Democrats or Republicans, they're not going to be able to say they hate Bitcoin or they hate crypto. I think it's going to be a part of our world. And I I think that means that the uh investing community will be there for all the reasons that I just mentioned.
>> I really enjoyed that. I think that's really insightful commentary too that at some point people do like to make money. Um and that's a nice reminder sometimes. Uh in your interview with Anthony Pabiano this weekend, you mentioned you said a line that stuck out to me. You said that people should remain hunkered down through this volatility. Unpack that a little bit for us. What does hunkered down look like at this moment to you? What does that mean? Is it just buy Bitcoin and huddle or is there more to it than that?
Now I so what I've what I've taught I'd say my one of my children my son who about investing is hunker down at this point means be ready for putting money to work. We're getting closer to a time to put money to work than we are to take money out. And the reason is because when these types of events that I mentioned are happening it's usually closer to the end than it is the beginning. And that's in time. And that's the whole point. Liberation Day came and went like a blur last year. I wrote a paper on April 10th. I think it was a it was the Monday after it was the Monday we came in after liberation uh day weekend where everyone thought there'd be a a black market Monday and this was all over the internet and everybody was crazed and I wrote a paper basically saying light at the end of the uh or yeah light at the end of the turbulence and when people start getting negative to the degree that they did which we're closer to people are negative right now they're worried That means you're closer to a buy than you're not. I believe that AI is the most powerful force. There are tremendously non-yclical components to it. Meaning it's going to be higher. The demand is going to be there. And as I said, it will be financed from free cash flow from the biggest companies in the US that dominate all the market cap of the world. They will be funding this growth. They will be spending the money on applying it. And hunker down just means get ready for the news to get worse. Get ready for things to kind of feel a little shaky. But at the same point, save up your money right now so you have more to invest. Take out your money out of things that you want to get into a vehicle that's going to move faster because I think when you look back 3 months from now, definitely 6 months, Bitcoin from this point, regardless if it sells off and it goes down to 50,000, from this point on, I think it'll be the best performing asset.
So, so I'm just going to pause there because I want to tell you guys about something that's been going on on Milk Road. We always talk about Milk Road Pro, but we've actually spent the entire year of 2026 rebuilding it. Milkro Pro is now a set of analyst portfolios. So you can see what John, Kyle, Martin, Vincent, Melvin, what they're trading in real time and the strategy they bring. Some of those calls even this month are actually already up quite a lot unexpectedly. We want you guys, our loyal listeners, to get a glimpse and decide whether it's right for you or not. Maybe pro wasn't right for you in the past, but maybe this completely new approach will be. For 14 days, Pro is only a dollar. It's literally barely anything. You can get the offer right now. It's good until March 24th and the link is in the description. I'm super excited about what we built.
>> Well, it's hard to beat that. Uh Jordy, I want to end with a couple of questions around self-development, personal development because this is a huge part of your brand and of what you do online. Um, and I thought, you know, a simple question to start with would be tell us why it's so important for professionals to begin using the full power of artificial intelligence as opposed to just using it like a glorified search engine.
>> Well, the main reason is empowerment. I I I I find it um it's very alarming to me when I meet people that are arguing against it. If you're arguing against AI, you haven't used it. Um I was in a a text message exchange with a friend of mine who built something today. And I'm in a little community of people that say, "Hey, can we do a quick 20-minute Zoom? I want to show you what I built in Claude Code. Hey, I want to show you what I built. Hey, which" and we exchange. What data set did you do? What did you type? What went on? If they see something on my video, they do that. I have kids from colleges that are reaching out saying, "Hey, you inspired me. I did this." People from New Zealand. On the opposite side are people who haven't used it and are arguing against it. So on the one side, the people who are the most defiant never use it. Oh, it sucks. 30% hallucinations, blah, blah, blah. I don't even bother asking which model are you using? Are you paying $200 a month? There's a difference between the free model and the $200. Like those should be givens at this point that everyone should know that it's when a college kid sends me what they built. It's when my son sends me something that he built. Hey, it was my girlfriend's birthday and I made her a game. It was the cutest little thing. It was a great game and I sent it to her. I Those types of stories to me mean people are going to feel empowered. They're not scared of AI. They're not worried about it taking their job. It is a game of musical chairs and work. In the same way that I said that investing is a relative game, work is a relative game. No matter what, if you're want to be a baseball player and you never make it out of the minor leagues, it doesn't mean you weren't a great baseball player. It means you weren't great enough to be in the top whatever 30, you know, 30 teams, 30 players. You're not in the top thousand. You're number thousand1. That's not a bad thing. Um, it's just the reality of you're in the top thousand of 300 million and 50 million people, but you can't be in there. And AI allows you very quickly to be in the 0.1% of workers in the country. And so if people are thinking of quitting their job, keep your job, but on the weekends for the time being or the days that you're working from home, if you're if you're remote working two days from home, use AI, build something, pay for it yourself if your firm won't pay for the best models, and just use it. And you'll be shocked at how much um improvement you get very quickly. I've used an analogy. This won't work for everyone, but for people who play golf or ski, you cannot get better at something without putting in the reps. That is the only way to get better at something. And with AI, it's the simplest way for me to explain it. If you just use it every day, if you go online and you pick a YouTube every single day, 20 minutes, and just say, "What did this person do?" If you go to X and you just have some prompt there, you just copy the prompt, paste it in, and just see what it does. every day you do that, you'll have empowerment. And I think once people have empowerment, this is my belief, they're closer to happiness. And that is the thing that I try to teach to my kids is empowerment. So I think if people just use that and realize if they do that, they won't be scared of losing their job because they'll find another place that wants to use the talents that they have because they're Superman now with having their uh AI skills.
>> Jordy, one more question around this uh self-development uh theme here. You've become very health consscious. I'd like you to talk to us a little bit about this. You launched a new Substack called Jord's HRV Substack which is focused on health and wellness. Why does the rise of AI make it so much more important than for people to invest in their health?
>> Well, I think there's there's two parts to it. One is um if people haven't read my my regular Substack, I I think about a lot of things and I like to connect dots and at a very early age I became obsessed with staying healthy for as long as I could and there were a bunch of reasons. Most of them have to do with I didn't like watching my grandparents get old. I think it's very sad to watch someone get old, not be able to walk. Um, I can remember my grandfather took me to Disney and then eventually he was sitting in one of those scooters and I remember watching going, "Okay, he has no his knees have been destroyed. I'm never going to let that happen to me. I'm going to focus on staying the same weight and doing the same things." But it was really a journey of learning at that point. And um I'm going to go a little off topic here, but for people who want a book that'll make all sense to everyone about why I did an HRV substack, but also why I'm so focused on longevity. Um there's a great book called The Art of Learning, which was by Josh Weightskin. Um it's a phenomenal book. There's not a single person who I've recommended it to that didn't enjoy the book. And without going through all the details, it's literally about the person who was in the movie, The Search for Bobby Fischer, about a a chess child prodigy. He was that kid in the movie. His father helped create the script. And then later when he was older, he talked about his journey of being this stressed out kid who had all this pressure on his back for being the next chess champion. And that he eventually burned out and he got and he stopped and he went from a world champion in chess as a young kid and then decided that he wanted he was still had this competitive side to him. So he decided to uh become a pushing hands champion in Tai Chi which is a martial arts and he basically was successful in that. He talked about the journey of being a world class in two separate things that have nothing to do with it and how learning anyone can learn anything and anyone can do anything. I bring that up because that person Josh Whiskin has had a huge influence on the way that I approach things uh the way that I think about things. I've always been an insatiable learner, but HRV became really interesting to me when I first heard about it in 2019. I thought it was incredibly insightful. It was this thing I was already trying to meditate or I was meditating but not to the success that I had wanted, meaning I wasn't doing it every day and I knew I should. But then I started to learn more and then COVID happened and HRV became a big part of my life. I think it is the absolute best measurement for true happiness. Um, and the reason is because it's the measurement of your heart rate variability which really is impacted by your breathing and the communication between your brain and your gut. And for people in thinking about AI and technology, technology has really made us more stressed out. It has caused tremendous anxiety for kids. It has led to many many issues including not breathing out of our our nose. We breathe out of our mouth. Why is that? because our diaphragm is bent over all the time because we're sitting in our chairs or we're hunched over and looking at our phones and that has made us more anxious and I wanted to get back into a point where I was eating healthy where I was exercising healthy and over that journey of about 6 years I realized that I had made so many changes into my life my HRV had gone up in a way that no other person and I know plenty of people that have the aura ring my numbers went through the roof and so I decided to share it with people uh I've had a great response from health people. Uh I did my first health podcast this week because people who really know the metric, they suffer with it. And the reason is they're type A and they're usually very stressed trying to be perfect and trying to be in perfect shape and eating healthy foods and not drinking and doing all these things like Brian Johnson does. But at the end of the day, their heart rate variability doesn't change. And so I'm doing this more and more. But more importantly, it was about learning and learning something new and sharing it with people.
>> Jordy, I really love that answer. This is one of the reasons why I love having you on Milk Road Macro. You are such a, like you said, voracious learner, but you're great at explaining a lot of different topics and giving people a lot of things to take away from this conversation to learn more for themselves. So, thank you so much for being on Milk Road Macro. Uh, I am looking forward to seeing you again at the Digital Asset Summit here in New York in a week or two. We can argue about who's more bullish again. Uh, but in the meantime, where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
>> Well, they can find me on X. They obviously can find me on Substack. Um, and >> all over Substack. Yeah, at this point if you just type Jordy Visser. Yeah, I don't know of another place that has two substacks. So, I think I'm dominating in multiples at this point. And then for people who are interested in my institutional research, they can go to 22v um research.com. And if they want to be a subscriber to my investment stuff, uh there's different levels for people if they're interested. They can find it there at AI Macro Nexus Nexus uh on the 22p research and of course on my YouTube every single Sunday at 8:30. I will release my slideshow.
>> It's always a lot of fun waking up to you every Sunday morning. Jordy Vistister, thank you so much for being on Milk Road Macro. I hope we can have you back again soon.
>> Thanks, John. See you next week. Uh, thank you all for joining us. I hope you all learned something today. So, until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of Milk Road Macro. Thanks for being here, everyone. Bye. Want Insights on what's really moving markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel, then join the Milk Road Macro and Macro Pro newsletters. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.