Bitcoin Is The Best Hedge Fund That's Ever Existed

You don't find Bitcoin, Bitcoin finds you. You don't find Bitcoin until you're either personally or your business has been so destructed that you can't get out of a hole that you're looking for something to park your money while you figure out a plan. In his case, [music] Bitcoin went higher, it allowed him to do what he's done with strategy, but that's why most people think this is a scam. In my opinion, >> What's going on, guys? Today's conversation with Jordi Visser is a great one. We talk about the slide down in AI stocks, what happened with Ken Griffin and Leopold and the entire book. Then we go into what happened in Korea and Japan and all the liquidations that have happened there. We talk about Kevin Warsh and the Federal Reserve and all the interest rate decisions. And then of course, we talk about crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, much more. Today's conversation with Jordi Visser is full of insights I think you'll find very valuable. So here's my latest conversation with Jordi.

All right, Jordi, there's a huge week, we got a lot to talk through. Let's start with the unwind in AI stocks, uh Leopold and situational awareness. They basically are forced to sell uh their entire book, it sounds like. Um you've lived through a couple of these unwinds. What are your takeaways given what's transpired over the last week or so?

>> Well, I guess there's um there's two parts to this. And yeah, I I was in Brazil uh in 1997 and 1998 into '99. And I was uh I was a part of the LTCM uh unwind. I was a part of the true unwind, meaning I came back to the US in the beginning of '99 and I took over the S&P book. And later on in 2007, uh I was managing a portfo- a macro portfolio uh during the quant unwind, which was really a garp unwind, which was during the great financial crisis, but very early. And then I would even say Archegos or Archegos or whatever the name he had for his thing that blew up in 2021. I've been through a bunch of these and uh here's the most important thing and I don't think I've seen this in in the news yet in terms of the way it's written.

So, the one interesting thing about leverage in the hedge fund world is eventually when you get to the end, meaning where you've had a drawdown and that is so significant, you have to try and find buyers for your portfolio or it needs to be liquidated. And that happened in all three of those scenarios. And once that starts to happen, where you start needing to either call people up or your prime brokers know everything and they're calling people, which is normally what happens cuz the prime brokers at the investment banks are the lenders of these and once they're involved, everyone starts to see the portfolio, they look at their own risk and say, "Where am I exposed?" And they start hedging. So, the one thing I want to want to make sure people know, um this was a cleansing event in my opinion. Uh it doesn't mean that we're not going to see continued volatility, but what he went through is a situation where you start losing money mainly because of the reasons I talked about the AI mid-cycle slowdown, which is when things become too crowded and everyone has the same positions. And especially when you're dealing with someone who got all of this fame from making so much money and you could see his positions reported in 13F holdings and he hasn't been through this before and he believes in the fundamentals, stock prices diverge from fundamentals all the time. We saw that with Liberation Day last year. You can have the stock market fall 20% and nothing change economically, nothing change earnings-wise, and it can snap back just as fast. So, the AI trade to me, um started getting narratives about Anthropic's in trouble, uh the hyperscalers are in trouble, uh we're never going to get the revenues, uh open source, all of these things. Every week it was a new thing that we had to talk about when the reality is for the month of July we saw a record factor unwind. It took down Leopold to a level that he needed to get out of his portfolio. What we don't know all the true story about is when did Citadel find out? When did Millennium find out? I bring this up because these were the names that were reported in the paper and once they see things they have exposure to this as well. So there was a four-day move beginning on Friday of last week. Uh into this week with the final part being in in the 2 hours after the Fed. And to me that was basically an enormous amount of people that were not only liquidating his portfolio but making sure that they were reducing their risk and then using his positions to allow them to be in a better position coming out of this. So for everyone who's watching this who's wondering, well, what's going on? This is markets. And as I've talked about one of my themes is more bubbles, more parabolas, and more speed crashes and we just lived through {quote} {unquote} a mini bubble that you could see through a parabola and now we've had a speed crash and remember, no matter how fast markets go up in a bubble, they look like you're going upstairs during it and then you fall down the elevator shoot on the way down and I think that's what happened.

>> And over the course of this month. Do you think that Citadel knew he was in trouble and so this like surprise Fed hike story, was that like a potentially intentional way to put him in a bad position or is that just the internet putting on the tin foil hat and trying to draw a good story?

>> We'll never know. Um it helped the case. Um you know, I I did a mid mid-week video this week where I went through number one, the the the losses that happened before these four days. So, Leopold's losses, they were not caused by him either being reached out to by Ken Griffin or reaching out to these places or through the prime brokers. Um the losses were happening because there was going to be a correction and things don't go straight up. Uh I think what he got caught into is the losses were compounding so fast and so many people had on the same trades that it reached a point where he needed to find something or he could be out of business. And I think whether it was the hyperscaler earnings reports, whether it was the fears that the Fed were going to raise rates. I will say this, there's a lot of press that Citadel came out and said they'd raise rates. There were other people that thought they would raise rates. The probability was close to 40%. Um so, it's not like they caused this and I don't think we'll ever know whether that's the case, but I do think when you have someone that is uh suffering and heading towards a catastrophe, uh it seems like he was able to get out of this with significant gains still on the year and be able to cleanse his book. But, the reality is we'll never know the answer to your question.

>> When um when you look at his performance, it's now rumored that he was up like 400% um and through the month of June, uh he had like $25 billion in the hedge fund that he started I don't know, two, three years ago. Um it is objectively one of the um kind of craziest runs I think someone has had in starting a hedge fund uh over the last couple of decades. Being down 80%, 70%, you know, whatever the number actually is, still means he may have like $10 billion sitting in the fund. So, if you were um a potential LP or maybe somebody who was evaluating whether you'd go work there, does put him in like a negative light and people say, "Hey, you know, he's he's a failed hedge fund manager. Everyone's going to run away." Or are people going to be like, "Look, now we got a guy who's obviously skilled, he's got a chip on his shoulder, just got a great reminder about risk mitigation, and so maybe now's actually the most attractive time, and he may, you know, go put up really good numbers."

>> I I I think um that whole conversation is uh I I've learned throughout my years of people being able to raise money. If you produce returns, people will give you money. Um out of the 10 billion, I mean, it's being reported that about 5 billion of that is private an anthropic position. Um so I I don't know how much money he raised. I don't know what went on. I'm sure he did take in money. I think it's very hard to come back from a scenario where you're 25 years old and you're talking about you've just had a learning experience, which is what was reported in the the letter that he sent out. Um I think it's going to be really hard for large people to give him money um on this. I'm sure there were people that were using his knowledge as well uh for what to invest in. So I Th- This is a different thing, and I don't know how much we've talked about it, but you know, the market structure is changing, and we've met, you and I, uh around the nexus of AI and crypto. I like to spend my time on AI. I'll keep saying over and over again for anyone who wants to go to my my YouTube and watch that compute demand will be outstripping supply for a long time. And along that journey, unfortunately, we're going to see a lot of what we've seen this year. So let's go back and recap. We saw a collapse in software stocks at the beginning of the year. It spread into other sectors. Everyone was worried that the terminal value of companies, you couldn't value them 3 years from now. That's a fact. Hedge fund leverage was at all-time highs to begin the year, and according to data in the papers, Goldman Sachs said it was the largest increase in gross exposure that they had seen in any 5-month period in history. If all of that is true, and I believe it is, hedge fund leverage was going up at a time when terminal value, or being able to value a company in 3 years, is going down. I think what we saw with Leopold, and what we're going to see with the entire market, is a structural change. AI agents are getting more involved in decision-making. There's more optimized portfolios, because it's very easy to go in and do that. Robinhood just put out another agentic tool this week that allows people sitting at home to immediately get technical indicators immediately from AI agents. The game is speeding up, and so innovation's changing. We're going through a period where everything is speeding up dramatically, and what used to take 30 years is now taking 3 years. And that means that for the entire financial markets, but in particular hedge funds that borrow money, generally have quarterly liquidity, and they're making investments in things at sizes on leverage that they couldn't get out of in a short amount of time if they wanted to, and positions are getting more crowded than ever, which is why we've seen the largest momentum unwind in history. The market structure is changing, and I don't think leverage is ever going to go back to the highs. So, in the same way that I've said repeatedly, which has been the case this year, earnings growth in the S&P 500 is above 20%. The S&P is not on pace to be up over 20% for the year. We've seen multiple compressions so far. I think we're going to see the same thing in leverage. So, my belief is that for public equities and for hedge funds, there's going to be a a scenario where speed crashes are going to happen more often. We're going to see more events like Leopold. It's going to force people and prime brokers to not extend as much leverage as they used to. So, not only are indices going to see multiple compression, but you're going to see more and more of these extreme cases within side uh hedge funds.

>> Let's talk about uh Korea and Japan. I'm going to read you a couple of statistics. So, uh South Korea's stock market collapsed 45% in about 40 days and erased $2 trillion in market cap. Then, in South Korea, there was about 1.2 million leveraged retail trading accounts that got triggered on margin calls as of July uh mid-July or so. And then if you go and you look in uh Japan, there's about $200 billion that was wiped out uh in the Japanese stock market um in a single day when it dropped, you know, nearly 3%. And so, when I see that, my initial take is that, "Hey, we live in this interconnected world and if the US is seeing, you know, drawbacks, um obviously other markets are likely they are, too." But, when I read the statistics around South Korea and the leveraged retail trading accounts, that feels like it is very unique to that geography versus the United States. How do you read the impact that, you know, the Asian markets can have on the US?

>> Well, first of all, um Korea's up 56% year to date. So, in the same way that Leopold um had a huge drawdown needed to be bailed out, according to the data we have, he's still up 80% year to date, I believe, based on what I saw today. Um the Korean market, you just named how big the correction is, but their market's up 56% year to date. The S&P 500 is up about 8% year to date. I I just think that um AI is allowing people, because of the speed, to jump into things and trends because fundamentally I mean where Samsung, where SK Hynix, where Micron are trading I mean they're trading at multiples that mean people are already building in the end of this cycle at some point because they're cyclical companies and so I think people were buying these because they had a math behind it. Um, again, for everyone who's who's watching this who has more of a trad-fi mentality and and less about Bitcoin I believe the market is going through over the course of the next five years AI will destroy all public companies. And when I say destroy, it will destroy the growth certainty of all companies going forward and that's why multiples should come down. It's not that companies will go out of business, it's that you won't be able to know whether you have a company that will survive because it will be eaten away by AI native startup businesses that have much more margins in their business and are able to compete on everything that you do. It will take time to get there. The physical constraints allow Micron and Samsung and SK Hynix to be able to have again, scarcity and that's why the Korean market was in there, but I do think the mentality of margins is very different in the Korean market than it is in the US market, but remember too the US market has gone through a secular bull market where from 2007 the S&P has produced over 15% a year while the rest of the world has only seen equities break out above their 2007 levels as a whole over the course of the last three years. That's the difference, Anthony, is that you're getting people that are getting a taste of a bull market they haven't seen in a long time. On the US, people have been involved in this they don't need the leverage as much because the household net worth in the country is over 180 trillion dollars.

>> Now, speaking of leverage, um people may think of it a little bit differently, but the large hyperscalers, they are dipping into their free cash flow. Uh they've been taking on some debt. Uh they are not speculating necessarily on day-to-day, you know, stock prices, but they are making a big bet uh they're going to see an ROI from uh from the CapEx investment. Uh Door Dash had a great uh piece this week that um I know you've got some thoughts on. What was your takeaway from his piece?

>> Um his piece I I'm going to cover a lot over the weekend. I thought it was great and it it kind of took a uh a contrarian bend in one side and it got into this thing of there really being concentrated winners and you can make this case for both Anthropic and OpenAI, but you can also make it for the hyperscalers. Uh I don't think this is going to happen, but his argument [clears throat] really got into the fact against something that people have talked about, which I happen to agree with. So, his argument was that in the case of Anthropic and OpenAI, they're actually going to control even more of AI than people realize because they're going to be the only ones that are going to be able to have the compute and offer it out to people and that the most valuable things are going to want tokens per watt. And this is the thing that gets really efficient. If we never get to the point or if it takes us a long time to get to the point where compute lines up on the supply side with demand, we're going to have a problem and the analogy that I'm using in over the weekend is what happens to the way people think about buying a car if gas at the pump is a dollar versus at $10 a gallon. So, at a dollar per gallon, people don't mind buying gas guzzlers. They're cheaper than more expensive cars, but if it's $10 a gallon and now a car is 50% more for an efficient car that gets 40 miles to the gallon as opposed to 10-mi to the gallon, more people are going to go for that efficient car because it makes more sense. And that's what's going to happen, and the company that I just want to use as an example is Disney. How much is the compute available? If there was only a finite of night of a finite amount of compute that Anthropic could offer to all of the companies in the world, and let's assume, just to make it simple, it was a number, and they had 100 gigawatts worth of compute. And Disney came in and said, "I want all of that compute, and I'm willing to pay you a trillion dollars for that compute." And everyone else is only willing to pay 100 billion dollars, and Anthropic goes, "Fine, you get that compute, and no one else gets compute." The reason Disney would be wanting to do that is because the most token-hungry scenario is video. So, let's assume they wanted to make a movie that instead of costing 3 billion dollars would cost 50 million. But, they can go out and sell it at the prices that will bring in revenues. So, their revenues per token, they're willing to pay more money for because they have the distribution. This is what his argument is, is that because the supply of compute is just nonexistent, and every day the capabilities are getting better, people are going to want that. Now, the argument on the other side for why the hyperscalers are at risk and all of this stuff is the fact that people believe that you'll never be able to get the revenues in. But, if you can sell something at a price because there isn't the deflation, if Disney can sell movie tickets at $20 a seat, and no one else can underprice that, and now they have this. Well, this is why Micron is having margins now at levels that we've never seen in memory because they have scarcity of it. Compute scarcity is a reality, and I don't care what anyone says all the CDS on the hyperscalers and all of this, we just went through Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now. And the total sum of their backlog of contracted orders is nearing 2 trillion. If you add in Oracle, you're over 2 trillion. And they all said the same thing on their calls, which I'm going to go through. We have orders to match up with our CapEx. So, they didn't cut CapEx, they overall raised CapEx. Basically, assuming it was in line with all the price changes. I just think that when you read the Dwarkesh article, he's making a very contrarian spin, which Gavin Baker echoed as well, which is if there's a finite amount of compute, the company that is able to deliver the most efficient models, which is what Anthropic and Open AR, they're going to take the big orders from everyone because they've also been the ones smart enough to secure the compute available. This goes against the open-source story, it goes against everything. And I happen to believe that it's going to show up in the ARR numbers for Anthropic and Open AI until that's not the case, and I don't know when the compute supply is going to get close to demand because demand just is accelerating.

>> So, let's say that he is right on this. Then, you go and you look at um Microsoft XAI or SpaceXAI. Um you look at uh Meta, Google. I mean, these people have enormous access to compute. Why are some of them opening up their compute to others? Do they just not need as much as they've actually built? And then also, does that mean if they have a more access to compute than Anthropic or Open AI does, actually, you know, Open AI and Anthropic are at a disadvantage compared to these large guys who can catch up?

>> Well, let let's go through the difference between um who's who's offering up their compute and who's gobbling up the compute. Open AI and Anthropic are not offering out compute. They are the gobblers. They are the ones eating everything. Um XAI or SpaceX is offering compute because he doesn't need it right now. He's going to need it eventually for his humanoids and full self-driving and everything else that he's going to have. On the other side with Meta, Meta cares about personal agents and he cares about the fact that the agents that they're going to need, the demand is much bigger. Sam Altman gave an interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best. He specifically talked again about something that I show in my videos every single weekend, which is we are still in the I mean, we're not even out of the first out in the first inning of the agentic needs for inference. All we're doing so far are the coding agents. The personal agents we haven't got to. Until people can speak into a pin, their phone, something with an AI model that is able to talk back like Siri, do things that we want it to do. Siri doesn't work yet. Alexa doesn't work yet. If you're in a bad um cell spot, you can't actually use uh your Open AI on your phone in a way that allows you to go through it. It needs to be on the phone. That means the hardware needs the memory. We're in this situation where again, I can't I can't say it loud enough to people, we just don't have the hardware and the capabilities to get the AI to everything that we need. So, the demand is going. There are ways for sure that supply will catch up with demand. But, that is not even close to what's happening. So, there will be algorithmic efficiency impacts and Sam Altman talks about all of these in the interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but he literally says, "We underestimated the amount of supply." And this is Open AI, which has arguably been the most aggressive spender of this and because they underestimated it, think about Anthropic. Anthropic underestimated big time. Dario Modi was warning everyone about the ROIC last year that you're taking a huge bet. He was betting that OpenAI was going crazy and now you know what Dario's thinking? Oh my god, I wish I would have more. Luckily for him, SpaceX and Meta have built so much that in the case of SpaceX, SpaceX not only sold it to Anthropic, they also sold capacity to Google. Google's a major cloud provider that doesn't have enough capacity and their Gemini, they haven't made a major model and they were one of the leaders on this. So everyone underestimated the amount of supply of compute that was necessary and this comes while every investor who's worried, who sends me an email, is telling me that we've overbuilt, that we're not getting the revenues in when every single smart person that's involved with building this stuff and seeing the demand is saying they can't keep up with it.

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It's funny because it's almost like Elon's too good at building, you know, and compute. He's too good at building energy. That's why he's been able to outbuild what he needs, whereas everybody else, maybe they misjudged how much they would need, but also, you know, if you put Elon up next to Google and said go, you both have to build, you know, 100 megawatts or you know, whatever, who would get it done faster? I think Elon, you know, beats almost every single person in the world.

>> Well, this is one of the things that to me, if there's one takeaway from this week that people should have, go back and read Leopold's 2027 situational awareness paper. He's been spot-on about where things would be. He talked about AGI being here by 2027, the government getting more involved with the company. All of these things are actually happening. If anything, they're happening slightly faster than he expected. I think with this whole thing proves, with the excess capacity of xAI, with the excess capacity of Meta, with Sam Altman saying he underestimated, with Dario Amodei is scrambling to find compute from anywhere, the smartest people involved with AI all underestimated one thing. And this is the human being side. The danger with what happened with Dario Modai, if you go back and listen to his arguments last year about what Sam was doing, his argument was we're not seeing the adoption at the pace that we expected. And that had to do with human beings and enterprises. What surprised everyone was the enterprises picking up the pace. The reason this is important for everyone to matter, and this gets heavily into what's going to happen over the next 12 months with crypto. Everyone underestimates how quickly that the agentic world brings humans with it. Agentic movement happens fast. The thing people can't comprehend is what it means to have AI agents doing everything. That's what's happening within inside enterprises for workflows is the agents are figuring out how to do this. Once we get into the point where you use Leopold and you say, "Hey, if you wanted to compare something with Leopold and you had to find, you said the fastest or the best hedge fund from the start, arguably Bitcoin is the best hedge fund ever. Its returns look like Leopold's. We have corrections. Leopold gave up what, 70, 80% of his gains? Well, Bitcoin at the very early start gave up 70, 80% of its gains, has continued to compound. Why did you have trouble getting all of the famous people, investors that you mentioned over the course last decade to invest in Bitcoin where they threw you out of their office. All of these stories that you have, it was because they knew better. These types of returns don't happen. In the hedge fund world, if you walk in and you're Leopold and you show I'm making this much money, "Okay, great. I'll give you tons of money." We saw this happen with Melvin Capital. We saw this happen with everything. It's about your past performance, which is not indicative of future returns. What AI agents are going to look like, they're not going to look look at this and say, "I don't believe in Bitcoin." They're going to look at the returns and go, okay, let me discount this. Let me put some probability that it's a it's a new asset. I won't give it all of my money, but what I will do is put 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. And those people that have 0% once agents start making decisions for them, the same thing that we've seen with the adoption here, the adoption of crypto will go through the roof when AI agents are more involved in transactions and more involved in investing.

>> Kevin Warsh he he stole the show by doing nothing. I think everyone was pontificating which actually about Citadel saying there's a surprise rate hike. I think with the cooling inflation, there's just a lot of moving parts here. And so they decided to just kick can down the road. Agree or disagree with their decision.

>> Uh well, I agree with their decision. Um I actually like what Kevin Warsh is doing. Um I I believe using old academic models is going to be a problem. This is one of the reasons why the hedge fund leverage situation is going to come down. There's a reason why and I'm going to show some charts which are going to show people how structurally the stock market has completely changed. For those of you who who care about factor risk, I will go through a lot of charts on factor volatility, on S&P volatility, on Nasdaq volatility, comparing them all on single name volatility versus index volatility. The market's changing and the market's changing because of AI. Kevin Warsh is saying the Fed needs to change because of AI. If you're using the prior three months of data in a world that is now every month is equivalent to three months or 30 months, if everything is 10 times what it used to be in terms of the speed, how can you use inflation data from yesterday to make decisions other than from the psychological basis of dealing with humans? Well, in the case of what the market reacted, we got a steepening of the yield curve when he basically said, "Well, we didn't really need to do anything because you guys wanted a tightening and the market has tightened for us. 10-year rates have gone up, 2-year rates have gone up. So, really the market already did did it for us while inflation came back down a little bit. So, we got time to wait for inflation and see where it is." I think this new no forward guidance going into the meeting, people had a 40% chance of a tightening, where in the past there'd have to be an article released beforehand to be a tightening. I think this is going to add more volatility into the system and more uncertainty. So, it gets back to the point I made about leverage. If the Fed was also contributing to the leverage in the system through QE, meaning whenever assets fell, they would grow their balance sheet, he wants to shrink his balance sheet. Well, that means he wants the Fed to be less levered. All of this leads to the same conclusion, which is there's going to be less leverage in the system. And as tokenization comes, which I believe he and Bessant have both talked about, tokenization will release money supply in a way that will allow the Fed to delever at the same time. That's what I believe is going to happen is that AI agents and tokenization will allow dormant assets, which are just sitting there but have a value, to be monetized in a way in daily liquidity and in transactions through pieces of them in fractionalization. And I think once that happens, the Fed won't be needed as much and I think him and Bessant both believe this as people that believe in crypto and Bitcoin.

>> Do you think it's a good idea for the Fed to get delevered?

>> Yeah, I I well, I think it's going to happen and I do. I think it's going to help the distribution of wealth problem. So, I I think um the K-shaped economy has been formed because of the leverage of the balance sheet. I think since the great financial crisis to to avoid a great depression, they had to use their balance sheet whenever there was a problem. We have a financialized stock market. But right now, it doesn't seem like we need those tools the way we did in the past. One is there's not as much leverage and the leverage that is growing where CDS is going wider is on the best balance sheets in the world, the hyperscalers. That's why I'm not worried about them. Their CDS should be going higher because clearly the markets are having a trouble having trouble providing the capital on a short-term basis that's come to the market. I think one thing people need to recognize is that SpaceX comes to the market. Plus there's a lot of lockup that's coming in that's going to hit the market. You've got Anthropic, you've got OpenAI, you've got all of them raising money for CapEx for these things. We're tapping the market in big size. Google did an $80 billion These things have never happened before. It takes a while for this kind of capital coming to the market to be digested and I think that's what we've seen in AI as all this has gone on. So I think the Fed balance sheet will help the K-shaped economy. I think you have to look at this the way Kevin Warsh does. He's not saying he's going to shrink the balance sheet in the next year. He's saying opportunistically when he can, he wants this stuff to come down. But it would also happen with rates coming down. So I think when he's comfortable on inflation and when the labor market is soft enough, I think you're going to see rate cuts combined with the balance sheet being run down a little bit.

>> When we look at um the impact that this would have on uh stock market, on Bitcoin, on gold, many of these different assets, um is that something that investors should be excited about? Or is this a situation where if you want to help Main Street, you know, Wall Street suffers? You want to help Wall Street, Main Street suffers.

>> So again, I'm going to go back to what I said. I think over the course of the next 5 years, the most important force that's going to happen is AI. So let's just assume that everyone starts with one number. And just assume this number is true that the total household net worth of the planet Earth is about $700 trillion and the total value of crypto is about 3 trillion. So we've all heard, and this is the way I value crypto. What I think will happen over time is that that total value will either stay the same overall. So it's let's say 703 trillion. 700 trillion in non-crypto, 3 trillion in crypto. Let's assume in 5 years it's still 703 trillion. What I believe will be happening is that the money will be redistributed. Now some of that will go into crypto. Um in terms of this. The main point is I believe small businesses win in AI. So let's assume the winners of the the stock market, the companies that win the revenues, they're all AI native. Well, the AI native businesses grow bigger, but a lot of these AI native businesses are like my business, like Cursor, like Anthropic, like OpenAI. Meaning they're AI native businesses with very few employees. They own the majority of their business. Not in the case maybe of OpenAI and Anthropic, but of most private companies, the founders are going to own most of their business. And let's assume it only goes to a $100 million business. Well, in the past that $100 million business needed to go to 5 billion, and I don't think that's going to be the case anymore. And the founder is going to own 75%. So crypto's going to end up being say $100 trillion in a decade. The rest of the assets of the world will still be 603 trillion, and will still be around the same overall number. There'll be a transfer, and then within the 600 trillion, I think the public stock markets will be effectively unchanged, and private businesses will grow in their valuations, and you'll be able to access these through ETFs that are tokenized that give you every asset in the world. And that's what the future is going to look like. And as someone who ran ETFs at Morgan Stanley back in the late or for early 2000s, I can just tell you that nobody believed in ETFs back in 2000. Now, it's an accepted thing that dominates the market. Tokenization is a massive change to the structure of the market. AI agents are a massive change, and all of this stuff is coming. It's a certainty. It's not an not even an if. It's not a when anymore. It's happening, and it's happening this.

>> Based on all of your experience and seeing these different technology trends or different that kind of asset structures go from not popular or contrarian to consensus and popular. Uh let's say that you were 25 years old just starting your career. What would you do in able to benefit from this trend? Whether you were starting a business or going and looking for a job, like how would you position yourself given everything you've seen in the past to um get the tokenization trend as the maybe a tailwind?

>> Well, ETFs the changing of products or structures didn't impact in my opinion the overall situation. It hurt business It hurt mutual funds. Um it obviously changed stock ownership, meaning BlackRock has been a big winner, but it's not like they've gone parabolic. I I think the way to have made money since ETFs came out really was about innovation and which companies were going to dominate. You're basically betting on where moats will be. Um Warren Buffett made money on investing in moats. Um the Mag 7 have moats. Now, their stock prices have not moved over the last year for the hyperscalers. We're seeing multiple compression, but right now I'm trying to invest in scarcity because I think we're at the phase of innovation where we can't actually produce the energy necessary. So, we're converting, as David Friedberg said in the podcast this past weekend, we're con- converting molecules into bits, and I want to be involved in the molecule side right now. And that's why I focus my attention on scarcity. So, scarcity's not just Bitcoin. Scarcity is Micron. Scar- Scarcity is um GE Vernova. Scarcity is all of these things that are necessary to build out the compute that are still going to have the earnings growing. Their multiples can compress, and this is the thing people have to understand. Just because you're making money, I believe in multiple compression because even for these companies that are based on scarcity, in 3 years, when humanoids are a reality, and they're making it cheaper for every physical business, meaning they're involved in building buildings and being involved in in the uh the uh the semiconductors, including all of the intelligence at the level. I think all businesses and ideas will be disrupted, and that means you have to get into the only thing that gets hurt the least. And that's the thing that I want to make sure people realize. If you don't believe in Bitcoin, you have to go back at some point uh and go listen to the Michael Saylor interviews in 2021 about why why he did this. He did this because of two forces that were hurting him. One was competitive innovation. His business had a billion dollars on the balance sheet, but he could not compete with the size of Microsoft and the bus- the the competition was just not there. And this was after the Mag 7 had come to existence. He talks about it all the time. So, one was he lost to innovation. Number two, he was now losing to the basement from the government. They had moved rates down to zero. So, he had a successful business with a billion dollars of balance sheet, but with very, very difficult in terms of making money. So, he made a decision to invest in something that was going to be defendable versus debasement. I think where Bitcoin comes in is the same the quote that he uses all the You don't find Bitcoin, Bitcoin finds you. You don't find Bitcoin until you're either personally or your business has been so destructed that you can't get out of a hole that you're looking for something to park your money while you figure out a plan. In his case, Bitcoin went higher and allowed him to do what he's done with strategy, but that's why most people think this is a scam. In my opinion, 5 years from now, almost every business will be in strategy MicroStrategy situation where they will be competing against the basement and they will be competing against the pressures of competitive companies, but these will be AI native businesses of which there will be hundreds of millions if not billions of them because one person with an AI agent can set up 100 businesses. It That's the problem is that the scale of competition goes through the roof and so the investment gets into where will people put a store of value where my money is going to be worth more than it is today 3 years from now? That's getting harder and harder every year that we go forward.

>> Other than Bitcoin, what else falls in that category for you?

>> I I I Again, I don't know what can be worth more in 3 years from now. In my in my store of value view, I I mean, I would guess I would select gold just because as much as Bitcoin would be there, it's a store of value. Uh I I think the hardest thing for people's going to be if the deflationary pressures of AI get to the point that we all believe I mean, I know that you and I believe that that it will. At some point, the deflationary pressures destroy all businesses and all assets because there's no need for the assets to be worth the value that they are if everything is heading towards free. And that's the issue that comes up. I I think Bitcoin right now because of the the size of it relative to those 700 trillion, it really is more of a hedge against what I'm saying happening than something that people need to believe in. At some point, diversification, even at 5%, is you saying, "I want to have diversification in real estate and private equity and private credit and private public equities." In all of these different things, I think crypto needs to be 5%, and 3 years from now, I don't know if Ethereum is safe on that. I don't know if Solana is safe on that. I don't know if Sui is. I don't know if BitTensor is. I don't know because the ideas are going to keep coming faster and faster from AI. So, I want to have something that has is not built on ideas. It on beliefs of people believing that it's a store value. That gets into gold and that gets into Bitcoin.

>> You previously have talked about Ethereum, and that seems to be outperforming Bitcoin. What's going on there?

>> Again, I This is a big part of why I'm I'm I'm adding uh at least two times a month a crypto-focused YouTube. And the reason is because I believe the ecosystem is growing. Despite all the fears and worries over the Clarity Act. Despite everything going on, the ecosystem of my 40-name index is based on the energy that's happening inside the ecosystem. And that gets back into AI agents. That gets back into the amount of volumes and transactions. I like looking for a variety of signals that are, you know, creating a mosaic that this is happening. Part of them is Ethereum over Bitcoin. It's saying that the ecosystem, the network effects are kicking in. Part of this is how my 40-name basket is doing, which is outperforming Bitcoin at this point. So, it's not just Ethereum, it's the eight verticals or sectors within inside crypto that are equal weight that are outperforming Bitcoin. You've got Stripe heavily involved in looking to make takeovers of companies involved with transactions and volumes. So, for me, that is a signal that, despite all the doom and gloom, that we AI is finally starting to kick into the agentic side. It should match up with meta. It should match up with Siri. It should match up with Alexa, meaning once consumer agents become real, the explosion in volume and transactions should go through the roof, and that's where the financial guardrails matter. So, think of Ethereum for me as the asset that most traditional finance people that have a lot of money already know. And

So, it's the safest of the Solanas, the Suis, wherever you want to go at this point from the money that matters that will drive assets, which is the $700 trillion. They chose Bitcoin. That is the store of value, but the energy side for, "Hey, I think stablecoins are going to be used all around the globe, and I think there's going to be more adoption, and I think consumer agents are coming. I think Ethereum's going to benefit the most."

When you mentioned BitTensor, that seems to be the thing that is most AI crypto overlap. Have you spent time on that?

Not enough. Um, one of the things I'm doing as part of being ready, and the reason I keep saying September, early October, is because I have to be able to answer these questions in a way. I'm never going to be a bottoms-up person all over things, but I need to understand how all of the AI agent parts of crypto fit in. How they fit into what should happen. So, I've spent a decent amount of time, but not enough that I want to start having conversations about it because part of being I I spent a lot of time on deep dives. I mean, we won't talk about this, I'm sure, this week, and I don't know if you've seen it, but Ezra Klein had an interview with uh Kevin Rudd, who's the former Prime Minister of Australia. Kevin Rudd is Kevin Rudd is kind of world-renowned at this point for his knowledge of Xi Jinping. And because China and their open-source plan is so important to investors, I know China really well. I traveled there for a month a year. So, one month out of every year from 2007 to 2012, I was in China. And I got to understand the culture. I got to understand things from a grassroots roots perspective. And you really start to realize that most of what you hear in the Western media is not true. And you want to understand more. Well, Kevin Rudd in this interview with Ezra Klein really went through what their AI plan is. How they're thinking about things. And a lot of it gets into the K-shaped economy of the Western world. A lot of it gets into their beliefs on on Lenin and Marx and what we're seeing and they believe that socialism is going to rise here because of the K-shaped economy. So, he talked a lot about this and where it fits in. And the reason I bring this up to your BitTensor question, I need to do research on things before I want to talk about them. I connect dots really well. Um, things that I knew in the past all of a sudden pop up. And in the case of this China thing, listening to Ezra Klein interview Kevin Rudd, I had a greater appreciation for the plan that China has in place. What that means for what David Friedberg talked about on the All-In podcast with this molecules to bits and how China basically owns the manufacturing already. They own this. Well, this is all part of their long-term plan. But to hear it presented in a way that is best for their economy and navigating their own situation, which is how do we make sure that we don't have a big problem here even though college kids are having a tough time getting jobs, entrepreneurs are having a hard time making money, and the housing market is not going up. To hear him talk about it in the AI context was very important. So, once I've done the same thing on BitTensor and I've listened to 10 Kevin Rudds give me their opinion on their business and where it fits in, I'll be better in a position to answer.

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Um, this is uh speaking of connecting dots. One thing I've been thinking about and um maybe I'll pose this question to you and to the audience and then next week we can come back and talk about maybe some conclusions we have. But um I was watching, I don't know if you've seen these videos of uh um the migrants in Spain. And there's basically, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of people who are coming on shore. And I'm not an expert on Spain or the policies or or whatever, but it's a it's a pretty um jarring video when you see this. And what it made me think about was immigration to the United States used to happen on boats where people would come over and they pretty much could bring whatever they could carry. That was, you know, kind of the the assets that you could bring with you. And there were stories of, you know, people uh getting on trains and uh people confiscating the gold at the train station or, you know, like all of these different kind of things, right? Now though, when money moves digital, there's a very different, um, kind of what can you bring with you? But then vice versa, what can you send back? And we know remittances are huge, you know, outside the United leaving the United States or leaving some of these countries going back into places where immigrants are coming from. And so, what I don't yet have a strong opinion on is how important is some of the migration patterns and some and some of these things that we're seeing that I think a lot of people look through a political lens, but actually in a weird way, the financial rails being digitized, the markets being opened is empowering a participation that historically wasn't there. You know, you you you would have to get physical dollars or or currency, you'd have to get gold, like these things that just no longer exist. It does feel like that is part of the crypto story, that is part of the digital rail story, uh, etc. It's just not, you know, tokenization and Hayes, NYSE or Nasdaq going to win, right? It's much more kind of like on the ground actual people using this stuff in a way that maybe people in America don't quite yet understand.

Yeah, so you left one thing out and again, I'm I I I only do this because I spend so much time on this connection. So, everything you said is true. Um, by having digital currency, by having the ability to move things easily to go through it, borders are going to break down by definition. Um, the capitalist the the financial guardrails are changing, but the part that is different, if you go through why people would leave a country and go to another place. And let's leave out the debasement cuz now you have the ability of hiding your money in something that doesn't debase. So, if you want to stay in Argentina and the currency is devaluing 50% a year, you just put your money in stable coins, dollar stable coins, you're fine. Like, you couldn't do that while I was in Brazil. You had to go to a black market and do that. So, we've already kind of resolved that. The other thing is, if you wanted to hire educated people and run a business, get an education, that was the reason why people came to America. You wanted to get an education here, then you would stay here, you have a big labor force that's educated. If you were from Brazil, there just wasn't enough educated people to kind of build a business the same way. And so, what has changed with AI connected to crypto is now you can build a business with no people. You have the cloud you have platforms, so you can sell your product globally, anywhere you want, and can have the money come in in stable coins. You pay the local tax, Stripe does all this stuff for you. Everything has made it easier for you to live anywhere and run a business. You don't have to grow it needing to go to school to certain place. You can use AI to lose learn whatever you want. You can hire AI agents so that we don't have to find smart. This is where we're going is that to me borders are breaking down. And a person I've mentioned to you that's a good friend is Marco Papic, and he wrote a paper on the metaverse back in 2021. Now, it happened to coincide with the crypt the crypto peak and the metaverse peak, but a lot of what he wrote in there as a geo macro person was 100% true. Cuz then you start getting into well, if the metaverse exists, then aren't all borders breaking down over time? And so, I do believe you're losing some of it. You never lose the nationalism of people loving their country and where they were born, but it does change the fact that over time I think less people are going to need to leave anything and they can do whatever they want financially, transaction-wise, from a location, and going anywhere will be easier because you'll be able to virtually go anywhere anyway. So, all of this stuff with borders and countries is going to become more fragmented and people's views on are going to change over time.

Yeah, in metaverse thing's are so funny to me. Um, I was never uh a big believer in what I call like um the video game metaverse. Kind of the like we're all going to have avatars and you know, that that type of thing. I I just for whatever reason never really was like that's going to be the the future. But what I used to talk about is like you and I are hanging out in the metaverse right now. Right? We are talking at um in a way where we can be ourselves to a meeting on the internet. And we don't have to be together. We can do it in real time and then we're able to we could be live and you could have people all around the world watching. Or you can record it and post it and you know, watch later. So I I think that the concept maybe to your point of the metaverse or or kind of this like digital uh world is definitely already happened. I wouldn't even argue that it's going to happen. It's already happened. We you know, Zoom and and Twitter and you all these things. At the same time, I don't know how much of it is like the you know, cartoon avatars and and that whole thing. I think maybe people have gotten a little bit more sour on and then probably rightfully so.

Anyone that is a child the same age as my son, so 21 has gone through two phenomena. One is the crypto side during COVID where it just took off. But before that, Fortnite. And Fortnite was a very metaverse thing. You're playing a video game and it grew rapidly from zero, I mean it was the fastest growing video game in history. And we all had that thing of hearing our son or daughter playing this game in a room screaming and they were talking to friends online playing the game at the exact same time with the headphone on. Like this has already happened. That used to be, you know, me running around playing fort outside. My mom was like get out of the house, go run around the backyard. This was happening virtually. Um, the crypto side, my son traded aggressively at 13 years old and made a lot of money and lost a lot of money. Something that Leopold just did at 25, he's barely older than my son. My son has already accomplished what Leopold did blowing up and leverage and getting involved in crypto and going up and down. But there was something else that happened that I've mentioned before. The Philippines went through an economic change because of Axi Infinity. And for any of you watching that have never read about Axi Infinity, go bring up a YouTube documentary. I know there's a bunch out there. There's one that's 30 minutes. It impacted the entire economy of the Philippines. So, that is another form of metaverse. That is gaming meets the economics. It was all about gambling. It was all about a video game. It was like Fortnite, but it was pay-to-play and it was having an impact on the economy and I my son played it for one day and said he could never win because they were too good. That is the world I absolutely believe we're heading towards. The only reason it hasn't happened yet, crypto and the ideas are still good. They're still all of the entrepreneurs that came up with these things. It's going to happen. When I hear Candy Digital and I realize as a sports fan that that scenario of a sports and the memories you have being valuable, being at a game, the dunk. You already have a painting of OG that I saw in your office, that moment in time I'll never forget. I'll never forget where I was. I'll never forget being under the basket for that and the people I was with. I'll never forget that even if I never see them again. So, I think people have to realize that the world that you're describing, this virtual world, virtual money, all of these things, they're happening. And it's owned the money of the world, the 700 trillion is owned predominantly by people that are baby boomers and people that are above the age of 60. As the demographic shifts, these younger people like my son, like Leopold, they believe in this type of I hate to say it, balls-to-the-wall type approach. The entertainment is coming from living life and going through the ups and downs and virtually traveling and all of this. It's a different world and I think it's going to remain a different world for a long time.

I love it. I mean, why not why not live life that way versus be bored, you know?

That's why I'm in Maine, my friend.

[laughter]

All right. What what what are you going to cover in your video this week? For anyone who goes go on YouTube and just search Jordy Visser, go check out the video that he puts out on Sunday morning. But what what are you going to cover this week?

So, I'm going to go through the the Leopold situation. I'm going to go through the details on the factor moves, the market structure change, and then I mean, again, I think people based on my subscribers and based on the people that are involved with me on a regular basis, I had to do four videos in true, you know, four this month on top of the four that I already do for the subscribers, because during these months, it gets very nerve-racking and you're more prone to making emotional decisions. I'm going to cover why I think the bottom is in for the AI trade and why people should be going through I'm I'm going to show how I've created report called Combing Through the Carnage to go through all of the details and which names at this point technically didn't break down. They've reset and as my father used to say, if in May the odds on the AI trade working were one to two and you were barely getting any payoff over the next 6 months, you'll be shocked right now that with the correction we've had, which is still in a bull market, we're still above moving averages, the odds have now gone back to three to one on a lot of things. So, I mentioned last week that I bought Micron or 2 weeks ago. Well, I got chance to buy a little bit lower and as I said, these were nibbles. Now I feel more comfortable buying into weakness rather than just buying strength. I don't think we're zooming right to the top of things. I think there's going to be more of a more liquidations coming particularly in the first week of August, but I do think that the Leopold situation ended up getting a tremendous amount of sell pressure. So, I'm going to go through that, my experience on those, and we'll cover it all this weekend.

Amazing. All right, Jordy. Thank you very much. We'll talk again next week.

Thanks, bud. Have a good one.