Why All-Time High Stocks Are Bullish for Bitcoin — Anthony Pompliano

But I do want to make sure people realize what you said is important. This is a completely different economy and we are in the very very early stages. I I mean it's year four of Chat GBT and all the first three years were about getting the IQ up. This is the agentic side. So digital employees are getting hired which means profit margins are going to stay at these levels and you guys need to be invested to some degree in the AI trade and not worry about this bubble. What's going on guys? Today we've got a very special conversation with Jordi Visser. This one is worth paying attention to. The US stock market is on absolute fire. We continue to hit all-time high after all-time high. And Jord is here to explain to us why is it happening? Where are the returns coming from? How is he changing his portfolio? And what do you need to understand about the stocks, about what's going on in AI, what's going on in the macroeconomy, and how he is thinking about what's going to happen through the rest of this year. This conversation has alpha dripping all over it. Make sure you give it a listen and then let me and Jordy know what you think. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. All right, Jordy. The stock market is on fire. Literally, it cannot stop going up regardless of what happens in the world. A couple of data points is that we just saw in the month of April the US stock market uh in the S&P went up over 10%. That has only happened 12 times ever in history. It also had seven all-time highs in the month of April, which is the seventh time that that's ever happened. When you look at those data points out over the next 12 months, the numbers are bonkers. It suggests that we are likely to see a double-digit return over the next 12 months from the stock market, even though people are calling it a bubble. And there's issues. What do you think is going on here? And why does the stock market keep going higher? >> The stock market is being driven by something that we talk about every single week. It's something we agreed was a good thing for us to do on here. >> Your fashion sense. >> Yes, exactly. Brought my purple sweater out for the end of winter. Um, we talk about AI, so let's leave crypto to the side for a second, but the disruption of artificial intelligence into our world. Uh, six months ago, bubble was front page news every single week. Go to Google Trends just before Opus 4.5 came out. It was a bubble. Well, now we're seeing the revenues come in and when you have a stock like Caterpillar, for example, so Caterpillar was up 10% yesterday. Their PE is now approaching 40. Those types of things don't happen for cyclical companies unless you're kind of coming out of a recession and you've had things down. Their PE is almost double Nvidas now. I mean, think about where we are. Semiconductor names, every single one. Most of them are in one of my thematic baskets, my portfolio. They don't stop. So, this is AI. And to show you how like breath still allows people to be bearish, let's forget software, which is still near the lows. Let's forget the private equity companies which have not budged very much. We make all-time highs in the S&P and the median stock is 13% below its all-time highs. About half of the S&P 500 companies are up for the year and about half are down. So unfortunately um and I I literally because I spend so many time with in institutional clients and because the the subscriber wall went up and I'm like focused a lot. I had to come up with a term for this because if you're invested in the S&P 500, which is what most individuals are through their financial advisors, there's a benchmark arbitrage that's happening. When you have something that we've both stolen from Elon Musk and said supersonic supersonic tsunami, it means something's moving fast and it's structural and it's just overpowering everything. So if you're invested in things that were around business cycles and the consumer, you're not doing very well. If you're in software, you're not doing very well. Even with the hyperscalers, you're not doing nearly as well as you are with all of the things related to power, all the things related to semiconductors, all the things related to servers. Are those things extended? Yes. If you look at all these charts, it's a straight line up. And that's why when you look at the S&P, it doesn't look as crazy because it actually was down for a while and then it went up. But the semiconductors, the memory names, they've just gone through the roof. So, I think what people have to in their mind have, this is the early innings of this. And if you're invested in the S&P 500, you're only up 5% year-to date. Five and change year to date. If you're invested in semiconductors and you're investing these other things, you're up between 30 and 50%. And unfortunately for everyone that's sitting there waiting for the index to reweight, I would look into some other ways to get involved in this at least from a minimum of a small amount because this is not the end of this. This is still going to happen even though we'll have a correction at some point here. Now, one of the aspects that I find very interesting is uh you're talking about AI. We know the S&P is hitting all these new all-time highs, but if you dig in even deeper to a lot of the market, the Russell 2000, the Dow Jones Industrial, like this is in a weird way, yes, 50% of the S&P is down, but the indexes in a very wide breath are all hitting all-time highs in the month of April. And so, how do you look at that? is that just like it's all the AI trade, but some of it is uh the large scale tech companies, some of it is data centers, power uh generation, and then you get into commodities, chemicals, photonics, like it's everything tied to AI and that's why you're seeing all the indexes hit alltime highs. >> Yeah, it's a good question. This is the whole point of this because there's a lot of small cap businesses that are tied into commodities, that are tied into power, that are tied into chemicals, that are tied into semiconductors even. since we like to do some like stats on the thing. Go through it because the Russell 2000 is making all-time highs as we go through this. >> Are we stat heads? Is that what we are? Like >> I'm definitely I mean it's Kentucky Derby weekend. My my papers, you know, going out today. So you can find it on LinkedIn and and and >> Well, you see Jordy and I in the streets. You better call us a stat. All right. >> Remember, I was trained in handicapping. This is like a big weekend for me as someone who's gone to the derby like about 15 years. So >> man, I love doing this every day every every week. Go ahead. >> Jeff Bezos famously said, "Your margin is my opportunity." >> So, six, seven companies took all of the opportunity. Your margin, they they destroyed >> so many companies in its path and you had concentration. >> When you get into your the new the new line that I've I've put in, >> your capex is my opportunity. >> Oo. >> Well, now you're taking up everything. And the reason is because we underinvested in manufacturing. We underinvested. So if you go back to a year ago, whatever your beliefs are and what the White House goal was, their goal was to get the middle part of the country growing again. It was to focus on AI. It was to f they basically said we're making all of the rules for this. So if you missed it, that's your own problem. Now I would remind people they've also been focused on crypto. So at some point by the end of this year, you're going to look back and go, "Oh, the administration was positive on crypto as well. Why didn't I get involved in that?" So you still have things that are lagging behind that I believe are part of this bigger plan. But for AI, this involves so many companies that have been left for dead. And the semiconductors alone, it's very topheavy. So Nvidia, when people hear semiconductors, like look at these charts. I'm like, the dollars that are going into chips, it's mainly chips. If you guys haven't heard this, you can find it, you know, on on my website and I've written about it. the five layer cake that Jensen Yuang has talked about. The three bottom layers, energy/power, chips, and infrastructure. He's telling you what names to be long. Now, a lot of those names have been left for dead because they've been in a bare market for 15 years. It's all been about software. So, the transition from software into semiconductors, into power things, into G. We don't have enough compute. So you can take that chip and that power thing and say are there going to be episodic moves where these things fall 20 30%. Of course but do I have confidence that 5 years from now we're going to need more compute? I have uber confidence that between humanoids coming, moving to space, we we don't have enough compute. And so the chip needs are really just going to keep going. And so these companies are going to be the leaders of the future. And that's why these multiples are so high on those names. And they're becoming so low on software because software is dead. These stocks, we need them for the foreseeable future. And that's when multiples typically are high is when you have some kind of certainty that 3 years from now, not only is a company going to be in business, which you can't say about software, but you can see there's still going to be shortages, which is where most of these things are. >> So, what's interesting to me is uh as we go to build, we as as an easy example, uh we went to go build data centers and we said, "Okay, well, we need power." And there was enough power and eventually we ran out of power and everyone said, "Oh, let's go run into the power generation." And then when there's that shortage of power, all of a sudden people say, "Hey, let's build more power." and they start to pull on all these commodity, you know, inputs in the supply chain. And we just keep hitting shortages, bottlenecks, stress, etc. And it does feel like the market is just running around and the best investors are just saying, "Where is the next bottleneck that we're going to hit? Let me go and buy that before everybody else." What I find interesting is uh let's take the Roundill Memory ETF. I don't know if you've looked at this uh DRM. Um I think very highly of the Roundill guys in general. I think they they understand the pulse of the market and they've been very good at thematic ETFs. Uh but when I looked into why did it explode, they went from zero to like 2 billion in assets in let's call it 2 weeks or so. They have two companies that US investors can't get access to and they're doing it via swaps essentially. And so there's also the arbitrage not only of finding the shortages, >> but then there is the like which investors have exposure. So you have Korean companies that US investors have a hard time buying. if you now can bring them to the US market, all of a sudden you get an explosion of demand and that leads to a lot of capital inflow. And so it feels like the investment community is basically saying, what are all the different ways that we can exploit this for financial gain? But that's what you want in a capitalistic system is because it's ultimately bringing capital in to solve these problems. >> I I mean this is again this gets into this first the topic you just asked about. This is a broader rally than just US software companies. So when you look at the Korean stock market, it's through the roof. And part of the reason is because a lot of the things that we need particularly on the chip side, whether it's Taiwan Semi for memory, whether it's SKHX or Samsung, these are companies that are listed in Asia. So this does create an opportunity for thematic ETFs that are related to things that people can't get here and put them into. This is the reason why when I say I have a thematic portfolio, it's all around AI. So, the stat I gave you that about 50% of the companies in the S&P are uh down for the year. Third uh 17% of my 100 names are down for the year. The ones that are all up, again, it's all the things that we've talked about. And I think people should listen to and really take into heart this supply uh shortage situation. You and I like to look at companies and we think about investing. You want to invest in companies where the demand is insatiable and the supply is limited. You have pricing power. It lasts for a long time as you're trying to get that the supply. Yes, you have to invest money to get the capex. But this is why when I say that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have a combined $1.3 trillion of a backlog. >> Mhm. >> I mean, it's an enormous number. So, everyone who was arguing that they're not going to get the revenues in, they have contracted agreements. Now, so did Oracle and their stock collapsed, but it's found a bottom and now it's started to rally a little bit. I think what people need to realize is when you hear bubble, bubbles are times where supply is significantly above demand or demand is fake. The demand for AI is insatiable. Now, the price is going higher. Maybe that'll slow demand at some point. That's what usually happens. And so if there is a correction this year that knocks semis down 30 40% my guess it'll be from what Elon has said which is we don't have enough power to actually light these things up. So you can buy as much of these as you want but if you don't get the power to light up the semis then you have all this inventory and you got to wait until the power comes. So I don't think it's going to be a debt thing. I think there'll be fears over there being too much supply relative demand in the short term but the demand is insatiable. It's the power that might not be insatable. That's the part about this that if if right now you've been lucky enough uh to be heavily involved in the Roundtill ETF and you've had a huge move in memory and you've had a you've been invested in semiconductors and some of the names we've talked about here. I believe the power names oil stocks are not priced properly for where oil is now. Chemical stocks are not priced properly. They also haven't run as much. They're steady Eddie growers. They're not going to get you this but they're going to outperform the S&P. So, the way that I'm trying to think about things is when you rotate from some of these things, if you're a momentum player, great. Ride it until it starts to show signs, but then move to the other side. And the other angle is I still believe that if the market's going to sit up here, make new all-time highs, Bitcoin's going to be part of this and so is Ethereum and these other places are going to be in there. And I think that stuff is coming soon as well. I was at a conference uh over the last week or so and both were that there was a there was an individual there who runs a very large brokerage in Korea and I was talking to him about um you know some of the investing trends and and all this and he explicitly said the reason why crypto is suffering is because so many of the Korean investors have gone into the AI trade and I know that there is a belief between you I and many others that these things are inter uh intertwined and and they're linked together but I do think that retail flows are chasing the AI trade merely because it is more volatile and it is driving more returns right now than crypto is. At some point maybe that evens out or even you know shifts back to crypto but people that are ignoring that data point are lying to themselves. I completely agree. I I've said it here as I've gotten to know the crypto space. The retail community is the energy for crypto. It's if you don't have the energy, you can still work your way higher, but what's the difference if crypto is up or down 5% for the year? It doesn't bring the enthusiasm as a growth asset. So, it needs to be in a place where the other stuff isn't working or where it's not as obvious and it's not going through. Now, the problem is when you get this kind of move higher in these things and it's still not participating and semis are driving everything, then it makes it hard. So, I think the retail crowd is going to have to be brought in at some point. I'm not really sure what the the catalyst will be at this point, but catalyst shortterm tend to play out. The only thing that needs to happen is there needs to be something that moves Bitcoin. We we go in these stages. First, it was 74. We got above 74. Now, we keep pushing up to 80 and we keep falling back. I do think there's an underlying bid which will continue to push it. talked about how I had been buying things and I bought some call options on Micro Strategy. And the reason is because I do believe that in the second half of the year, you're going to start to get money that's moving into this space. I think it's coming soon, but again, I agree with you that I hear the same thing. I didn't hear it at my conferences, but mine was pension event and then it was I went to a second conference and spoke and this one was more for market structure people in the trady world. uh not everyone is talking about it but one of the topics that did come up in both events was tokenization. So I think tokenization is a place where you can get some enthusiasm about the market starting to embrace this and I did have a conversation with a senior person um at one of the organizations in crypto and we spent most of the time talking about tokenization as well. Today's episode is brought to you by Consensus Miami. I'm going to be speaking there on the main stage in a couple of weeks. This is the event the entire industry shows up for. Wall Street, the White House, all of crypto and web 3. This May 5th through May 7th, you can discover everything from crypto at scale to institutional integration and agentic commerce. It's the forces driving trillions on chain and reshaping global finance. 20,000 decision makers are going to be in attendance. Three action-packed days. Deals get signed here, funds get raised here, and the next cycle starts here as well. You can't afford to miss it. I'll be there speaking. And you can use the code PMPO to get 25% off your pass and join me there. Go in the description and look how to spell my name and use code PMPO to get 25% off your pass to join me there. So, uh, this past week was the 5-year anniversary of Franklin Templeton's Benji Fund, right? Which is kind of the first tokenized thing that I think really was the first tokenized thing from a major financial organization. And there's some people who like tokenization, don't like to whatever. But um Sandy Call who runs a lot of the crypto business there was telling me um you know look this was kind of the first foray it's been 5 years but they are very aggressively looking for what are the other opportunities that they can go into and I think that they look at it as they're really modernizing themselves their products etc and so if you go back that is really kind of my thesis and I I was explaining to you earlier it feels to me like we are living through a modern-day industrial revolution where we are laying the infrastructure we are laying all of the uh kind of foundations for the next century. And it sounds kind of bombastic when you say that, but the last 100 years or so was really driven by the original industrial revolution. We laid all this stuff. We were able to build on top of it and we built this amazing uh economy and society. There is change happening right now. We are upgrading and we are automating and we are you know electrifying etc. To me, if I had to sum up, why is the stock market continue to go up regardless of what happens in the conflict in Iran and all this stuff, >> it is that there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world that want to own a piece of the future and they realize that right now in this industrial revolution, I got to buy something. And whether that is the large tech companies, whether that's a commodities, you know, uh, oriented firm, whatever the thing is, however they want to play it, there is just this wave of capital that will not stop coming into the market because everyone realizes, oh shoot, there this change is going to be where all the returns are for the next, you know, decade or so. And I think that you've been calling this out in different ways now for, you know, months, if not over a year. >> So here's the interesting thing about this. Um, and very few people, if anyone, I've ever heard say this. So let's go back actually before the great financial crisis and let's make that the demarcation line because the iPhone came out in the exact same time period. So that was the beginning of my entree of connecting exponential innovation to macro and how it would disrupt the macro world and we'd never have a recession again. And so when I say that people kind of gloss over and they go, "Yeah, we won't." And and I've said it repeatedly and it's been true. The only recession we had since the great financial crisis was COVID which was self-induced and was not a traditional recession. A recession happens because the credit dries up and what had happened in the past is all of those consumer/industrial related things start to roll over and it becomes an issue. Even the dot bubble was driven to some degree by overspending in debt and just taking out tons of debt to build for the future. What is different about what happened from 2009 to 2000, let's just say to 2024 before we start getting into this year, the biggest companies in the world grew without taking any debt. So the Mag 7 became the Mag 7 with no debt. That had never happened before. And although they hired people, they did not hire as many people as the companies before. So if you looked at those companies and their revenue per employee versus the rest of the S&P 500, I mean, the numbers were off the charts. So that's the way software grew. That's the way the Mag 7 grew. So now we're at a different stage. Are they taking out some debt? Yes. But these companies are 20 plus trillion dollars of market cap. They're only spending, you know, let's let's let's round it up to a trillion even though it's going to be about 800 billion this year for those companies. A trillion dollars on 20 some odd trillion dollars of market cap. That's not leveraging yourself. So everyone who's had this doom and gloom is not paying attention to what you're saying, which is you're fading money that's flowing in. This is not about retail driving this higher. This is about literally money coming number one from these companies and their equity. But there's another thing. We're not creating jobs. If you create jobs, well then your compensation grows. That's an expense. If you don't create jobs and your and your revenue growing 7% a year, that's margins. Well, we have record margins in the S&P. Everyone wants to fade that. They're worried about, oh, the doom and gloom like Satrini writing, we'll lose all these jobs. We're not losing all these jobs. We're just not hiring people anymore. So you're breaking the framework of what used to be that old industrial consumer relationship. We buy more, you guys build more, we have a recession, then we go through this, the government gives money, they cut rates. We don't have that anymore. So when Iran when tariffs happen, we don't go into a recession. When Iran happens and oil spikes, everyone freaks out. The doom oil situation on X is unbelievable. Now, I do believe inflation's going to come, but unfortunately, what that's doing is it's hurting the bottom end of the economy again. >> Mhm. >> They're not able I mean, rates are moving higher. Inflation expectations are moving higher. Gas at the pump's moving higher. Diesel's moving higher. Fertilizers driving food higher. There's no way to get around it. And for people that are living quote unquote paycheck to paycheck that don't have assets, they're in the same boat that they've been in before to some degree. Now, jobs in the middle part of the country are definitely in a better situation. You're seeing growth there. You're hearing it from a lot of the people talking, but I do want to make sure people realize what you said is important. This is a completely different economy and we are in the very very early stages. I I mean it's year four of chatbt like we just started year four post chatbt launch and all the first three years were about getting the IQ up. This is the agentic side. So digital employees are getting hired which means profit margins are going to stay at these levels and you guys need to be invested to some degree in the AI trade and not worry about this bubble. >> When you see something like Jerome Pow and FOMC decide to leave rates flat um there is immense amount of debate online and I think that if I was to uh do my best to objectively describe the two arguments. One is, hey, all these inflationary pressures uh give the Fed pause and therefore they're worried about inflation coming back in a big way, so they shouldn't be cutting interest rates. The other side is, hey, wait a second, all these inflationary pressures are probably temporary to some degree. The structural thing is AI, robotics, etc., and there's deflation coming. How do you evaluate what the Fed is doing, what they should be doing, and maybe even like the uh the language they're using around their their decision-m? >> Okay. So, I I there's two things going on. So, I'm going to connect Jerome Powell this week with the Musk Altman court case. Okay. Um >> the TMZ situation, you mean? >> Yeah. This is all part of the fourth turning. all of it. Um, you've reached a point where politics are part of everything. Politics are part of the Fed decision- making. >> Jerome Pal decides he's not going to step down >> to keep the voting. I mean, you can't make this stuff up that we're at this point where you have let's tax the billionaires. Let's run it hot. Like, you have a bifurcated situation that is polarized where everyone's angry about it on the same side. How do you pick a jury for the Elon Musk case? I mean, is anyone like Elon Musk except for the two of us? Like I He He He pissed off the Democrats. He pissed off the Republicans. >> Maybe the only person who is less liked than Elon in California is Sam Alman. >> There you go. It's two It's two people fighting on this. You've got Daario on one side of the AI. you have everyone else that's going up and and like it's it's become a a very uh polarized situation that extends far beyond just the polls. It is everything that's going on in every decision making being made. People can't get their political bias out of the decision. So I think when you go through the Fed situation, Kevin War is going to take over. How how do you run what is effectively an Sane asylum now? So, it begs the question though, if everything is politicized, should you just put political people in because they actually have experience operating that environment? Like that that scares me to say like if if that is what we would do if all of a sudden like politicians were running the Fed, I would be very even more nervous than I already am. But if everything gets politicized, do you just ask people who have no experience to deal with the situation or what what do you do? I I'm so scared of politics and I remember after the great financial crisis that a few people tried to get me to run for some office and I and I said no for you. >> Yeah, I know. I know. It's very nice of you. >> I'll do the same for you when you run. Um you you dress for the run. I I can't. You know, my my uh my jean shirts and stuff, they're not going to work well in in in Washington. >> You never know. There's crazier things that have happened. John Federman wears a Carheart sweatshirt and he's doing just fine. >> That's true. There's always there's always change, but I'm me. Like I don't pretend to be anything but me. And I think politics have just reached a point where I just know that nothing can get done. >> And this is the one thing about artificial intelligence. It's the thing about crypto that I believe in. I don't know how this year is going to play out. I do know that markets do not go up in a straight line forever. Uh they have corrections. Even in the great years of 2010 to 2020 when rates were at zero, we had corrections. uh it just happens. The best thing for Bitcoin would be if a correction happens because of inflation breaking higher and then people kind of changing their views, a little move down in the in the equity market for 3 months, all of a sudden crypto's working and people go to it. I I think for politics and for what this is going to play out, I don't think this is going away. And I think this is why I'm actually attracted to saying the fourth turning. I think that the the reality of the fourth turning is no matter how no matter how you look at it, um when I was out in California, I read a story about the closure of some very famous store in Napa Valley. And I've heard a lot about how bad wine sales are, especially high-end wine sales. And part of the reason is >> the demographic shift, part of the reason is the ompic. It's it's a variety of things. I think when you go through all of the distribution of wealth problems and the the health differentials between wealthy people and there you you you kind of you see it, you don't think about it, but I think it shows up in all politics and I don't think it's going away because I don't think you solve these problems quickly. I think the fourth turning means we're going to be in this demographic problem for another decade, especially when you bring humanoids into it. Especially when you bring all of the things that we're talking about. I just don't think this problem is going away quickly. So, I'm gonna pull this up. Did you see uh what happened uh recently is supposedly um there's a surge in what people are calling ompic breath. So, the the rise of use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ompic has led to a surge in demand for mints and gum. And it's a phenomenon driven by a side effect called Ompic breath. Now, why that's interesting. Hershey's CEO Kirk Tanner reported an 8% increase in sales of their Icebreakers mints and gum in the first quarter of 2026, largely attributed to users managing GOP1 side effects. And I I saw this yesterday and I had to go look it up to make sure it was true u because you never know these days. That blew my mind. Hershey's which is it's not like it's a new product 8% growth. And so it goes back to we're talking about AI. Okay, like there's demand for synthetic intelligence and then what are all the downstream effects? who there's some manager out there who decided you know what I took a GLP1 I have bad breath I'm using mints I wonder if other people are doing this right they probably figured it out but when I saw that data point I just said we are living in a whole different world than I grew up investing in so when you see this happening over and over and over again you start to realize technology is now the uh barrier to using it has dropped so significantly somebody in our office who will go unnamed said to me the other day in What world is it that in 2020 and 2021 people refuse to take the vaccine but they are happy to take peptides that they get from a lab in China. They're both inject, right? So, you get into this world of like we are living in this crazy situation where how it's presented, who's behind it, well, how do you learn about it? Like that actually may be more important than like will you inject this in your body? Because there's a hell of a lot of people using GOP1s and peptides and you know, all this kind of crazy stuff, but those same exact people and like there's probably a pretty big overlap. >> Yeah. >> The peptide crowd was the antivax crowd. >> And then, you know, of course, when I say this online, somebody's like, "Well, like were the antivax people, right?" you know, and you get into this like whole crazy debate, but it all goes back to it's politicized. >> A lot of the conversation was just politics. >> I I it's not something I So, here's the bad thing. Uh politics does not drive any of my decision-m, but it does with many of my children. >> Mhm. So, I've had to learn to just accept um because unconditional love for my kids, they can do whatever they want. They can attack me for being non-political and not raising my voice and going to protest on this part or this part. They can say they're never going to leave a particular area or live here, whatever. And I just have to embrace them as my children and let them go through it. I I we've talked about it before. I'll bring it up again. Um this is the reason why I love reading the Daily Stoic. uh human beings and their anxiety, their beliefs, they change. They are whatever they are. And it's been that way since we finally were able to think and have these thoughts. So to read the Daily Stoic and just go back to Marcus Relius and realize that this person back during the Roman Empire writing about these things was writing about the same issues we're talking about now. And so politics has always been a part of the way people think about things because there's always someone winning and there's always someone losing. And with human beings, we have an anim animalistic side where we care about how we're winning and we care about how we're losing. I figured this out very quickly when I started managing people. And I was shocked. And the story that you hear is true. I don't care what I get paid as long as I get paid $1 more than the person sitting next to me. And I I I hate to say like if people are listening to us, that's not true. It is true. And I I remember it and as someone who was the son of a construction worker that when I got to Morgan Stanley in that first year I made $40,000. I was like if I ever get 100,000 I'm set for life. And literally that was what my brain was because I didn't know any better. I mean my father didn't graduate high school. So for me that was the way I was going to go through it. So to hear someone who went to an Ivy League school push back a paper to me when I knew they were getting paid more than 99.9% of the people on the planet, it just kind of it made me realize that it's not just politics, it's money, it's all the things you hear about. And I just realized that human beings do this stuff and it just goes on. So rather than go through it, our job is to try and figure a way to stay sane, enjoy life in a happy happy way. And part of that is to be able to make money. And the reason that we do the show is hopefully to bring some sort of unbiased view towards all of this stuff, bring it back in some light. But for me, I'm focused on helping people learn AI and make money based on it. If they can do those two things, I think they can navigate through a lot of the things we're talking about because those things will give you empowerment in your job. They will give you empowerment in building things and having more time in life and enjoying it. But they will also give you some more time in terms of making money and being involved in things that maybe you can't get from the work world. So remember, there's different ways to accumulate money. Some is by investing and being in the right team. Some is by working hard and doing things that other people aren't doing. 90 plus% of people that I meet do not use AI in any way outside of chat. I would say 99% don't go past a little bit of co-work. I'm going to do a video because now we haven't talked about this. There are three things on Claude. For those of you who have Claude, I want you to go look at this later on today. You've got chat, collaborating, brainstorming with something really, really smart. Great. Then you've got co-work. That's your assistant. That's your productivity enhancer. Learn one special thing on it to do it. And I'm going to do a video that'll be very short on those two. But then there's code. That's building. That's actually creating something new. That's something that doesn't exist. So I think if people do that, they will be ahead of 95% of the people if they can do all three of those in just one way every single day. Those types of things, you don't get those opportunities too much in life. So there's two ways to look at this. One is the world is kind of in trouble. The second one is people are so blinded by politics and so blinded by this that just like when you're trying to compete in athletics, if no one's really focused and working out, you can go do it. Go work out on AI and forget some of this stuff. I have something that me, you, and your kids are all going to be on uh the same page for. Uh I would like to create a protest that you and I are going to lead. We're going to be the uh co-conspirators of this protest. Do you remember the guy uh who I think he ran for like a a local politician's seat a couple years ago and he became a meme and he would yell, "The rent is too damn high." Remember that guy? Yep. >> All right. You and I are going to lead a protest that the token prices are too damn high. These guys are ratcheting up the price, right? I see it. They're announcing it sometimes, but you can see that, okay, the VC subsidies are slowly starting to dissipate. And no different than the Uber that was $3 to get across town is now 30. >> Yep. >> Token prices are starting to go up. And so, uh, token prices are too damn high. We should create a protest to keep them down and and artificially suppress for a little bit longer. >> Yep. No, it's so it's happening and we've been warned about this by the model providers. Um, Nvidia, one of their senior executives said this week or last week at a conference, the price of compute has now reached a point where it's more expensive than a human employee. Now, >> narrative violation. >> Yeah. Now, what I would say is there's two things about the statement. Number one, for each employee, you have how many digital employees? So it it doesn't mean that people aren't going to lose their jobs. Uh it doesn't mean that they aren't going to pay for it. What it does mean is that for people like you and me using it at home, if Morgan Stanley wants to compute, they're willing to pay more money than I am. >> Mhm. >> They have more money to pay. And so the price is going higher for those computes. And it's much harder for someone like me or an entrepreneur to compete on price unless again we don't have as many employees unless we are able to move to open source and move in some of the Chinese models and that's the way I've run my business. I use and we haven't talked about this chat GBT 5.5 has taken over much of my claude at this point. I didn't think that would ever happen. I thought I was in clawude for the rest of time. Um it stole back most of the time. changed it. So I'm using >> five 5.5 >> 5.5 the one the model that came out last week. Um just >> what what what you say it's stolen back most of your time and and you're using it and it's better. What faster? You think it's more accurate? What what is specifics? >> Um first of all, smarter. >> Okay. >> And that may sound funny to people who don't know to know a difference. when you use them as much as I do. Smarter means not as verbose, meaning you type something in, I get a quick response and the response is succinct. It gives me the answer I want. You don't understand how valuable that is. But for Yeah. And and if if you get an answer that's really long and you have to go read the whole thing, it's literally becomes like I said, book is a waste of time. >> Oh, people had opinions. >> Oh, people had opinions. Exactly. It was very very funny. So, >> but but I will say a lot of people actually agreed with you. >> Yeah. And and again, I I I I was at a dinner the other night and I named like seven books and someone said I thought you said books are waste of time. >> I was going to say you say you read the Daily Stoic, but Go ahead. >> Yeah. I read a page in it. I'm I'm not saying reading is a waste of time. I'm saying reading a whole book is a waste of time. Reading a chapter is not a waste of time. >> I can get them going real fast. All right. Go ahead. Go. Keep going, though. >> Um it's smarter. It gives more succinct answers. It makes it easier to have a conversation and move forward. Number two, Claude has the three buttons. >> Codeex, it's really one thing. >> The imaging on it. If you haven't tried the imaging, people, I've used Nano Banana exclusively for I don't remember. I don't even remember when it came out. It was this good. I nine months ago. >> Mhm. >> I have not used Nano Banana since Chat GBT 5.5 came out. And I do so many images cuz that's the way I like to learn. And when I presented at this pension event, I had eight slides. They were all images. and half of them were ones I created because the imaging is so good. Now, the reason that's important is because the imaging can is built into this whole thing. So, if you want to have it, if you want to create a prompt library and you go into codec, hey, I want to create a prompt library because I have like a 100 prompts that are sitting in notion, it immediately gives you a unbelievable visual of what it can look like. That is something that cla does not do. So having these abilities to go through it, it's not an image thing and this is a big thing like there's no image. You got nano banana and now you have GPT5. So the imaging part for what I do for my business is very very important but I think for everyone to be able to look at something as opposed to this verbose thing is very very important. So I I've just used it a lot more. >> Today's episode is brought to you by Fountain Life. Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Unless you look true wealth isn't measured in possession. It's measured in the time you gain, the energy you feel, and the life you create. It may be the smartest investment of your time you'll ever make. 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Are we going to just enter a world where you're going to have to have multiple subscriptions for these and then whoever kind of comes out with the best model at any given time you shift your work uh flow or do you think people will get locked into kind of a winner take all for their work? It may not be winner take all in the market but you know you're a chat GPT user. I'm a clawed user and regardless of one of the models being better or worse, like I just get used to using that product. >> See, I think it depends on your business and and how you operate. I I use all five of them. So far today, I've used all five today. >> I mean, I it's it's early in the morning on a Friday. I've used every single model today. >> I've I've used uh Grock, Claude, Chad GBT, and um uh Gemini all in the last 24 hours. >> It's very seldom that I don't use all of them. It's it's very seldom in a day where I don't use all of them. Um, and yeah, it moves around. I mean, there was one point Perplexity I was using the most for what I was doing within finance. That's all changed now. So, it just depends, I guess, on on what you're doing and how it's going. I I just think that um what I'm really good at because I use all of them is when there's a change in the model, I I I feel it. It's just different. And GPT5 is just smarter. Now, in fairness, and David Saxs um retweeted something about this, when you put them on a scale, Mythos and GPT5 are very similar on a lot of the benchmarks. So, this is a Mythos thing. So, it's kind of like why did Anthropic release Mythos and have this whole big to-do >> great marketing? >> It could be great marketing. It could also be we don't have enough compute to release it. Well, that that's uh that's the White House's argument. Um I saw David Saxs talking about this idea of like it's good, but there's many other models, you know, that have similar uh capabilities. And if they came out and said we don't have the compute, would that actually hurt anthropic? And so the better thing to do is say, "Oh, it's too powerful." I don't know. I'm I'm not in the room, right? But uh it's very interesting to think about there is like a global chess game going on with trillions of dollars that are being wagered on who's going to win, how they're going to win. And we've done all of this talking about infrastructure, whatever. The the the dark knight of Elon and XAI and Terraab and all this. >> Y >> they're kind of just building and it sounds weird to say, but like Elon's kind of building it quietly. people are not really talking about it in the way that you would think that they would be and it feels like he's just going to turn this thing on and all of a sudden he'll suck a lot of the attention and usage back over and so we just keep getting in this game where everyone just keeps leaprogging each other and outside of the increasing cost like the winners are the consumers. >> Yeah, there I I mean again even for I pay for all five at the max level. Um my business is growing. I'm helping people and the only way that I can do it in a way that gives people the tools they need in my opinion to be successful is to use all the models. I just think that all the models are different. And I will say one more thing about 5.5. Uh I had a lot of problems with Claude with I don't want to call them hallucinations, but let's just say fill in the the blank. >> Mhm. >> I got a lot of that. um where the answers were wrong and I had I'd put it into uh my academic checker which I've always said is Gemini. Hey, check these out. Uh this is wrong. This is a bold claim. And I'd have to go back and change it. Now, I had a process for it. GPT5, I do the same thing. The stuff I did this week, no errors. >> Like, if there was an error, it was because I didn't do the prompt properly to give it the instructions. I think the hallucinations for this thing are are are just insanely low. So that's why I say if you haven't played around with it, it's smarter. And if you use any of the other models a lot, I think this one is just as fast as what Grock was. And that probably means that this one is out because of Blackwell and it might be the first true like Blackwell advanced model. uh where I don't think Claude is going to have that capability. I think they've already shown that they're going to be doing stuff on TPUs. They made these deals with Amazon and with Google. Uh so I I think we're at a stage where the leaprogging will continue, but I think we've also reached a point where the intelligence on these things is so good that it doesn't matter much anymore. Did you see that the internal memo from Zuck, he made mention to the fact that uh you know they're screenshotting the employees and recording their screens uh for the workflow and there was reference to the fact that the average Facebook employee likely has a higher IQ than the contractors that the other firms are using for training data and he thinks that will give them an advantage. It's >> just amazing how seldom I even say meta. It's just or Facebook or whatever they want to be called. Do you think that's because they're so far behind or do you think that they're not doing a good job marketing or do you think you just don't use their products? Like why is it that they don't come up in conversation? >> Well, they're clearly I mean at the beginning I mentioned Llama all the time. I don't even know if Llama's the model there. I like I it's just reached a point where it's because they don't have anything that I use. >> Um and I use all the other ones all day long. All day long. I mean, OpenClaw changed my life on this trip. I've been using it a lot, but I was on a JetBlue flight. >> Shout out, Jet. >> Great Wi-Fi. >> Yeah. No free ads. >> Everything was great. And I was having a brainstorming session with OpenClaw the entire time. And this was on my model portfolio. And what I realized at this point was before I left, I uploaded a lot of stuff. So it has all the memory >> and the ability to have a conversation and say hey of the thematic model portfolio what's the average market cap of semis what's the largest market cap okay how many of the names are up year to date through Friday okay how many of the names have a PE of X I can do all this stuff and it's instantly like giving me the answers because it has all the data that I uploaded so this is a a thing that I can't do in a context window on a plane for chatbt and for all of these like this is phenomenal stuff and then when I have it I brainstorm with it and say okay save this I want to do this so I wanted to do a long form paper on chemicals which I ended up doing and I gave the way that I want to approach because my argument and this so everyone's watching and they get this the way that I brainstorm with this stuff is I come up with a a crazy thought and my crazy thought was okay oil's clearly not having an impact on the economy the way it used to chemicals are like we need a lot of chemicals for advanced packaging for fiber. So I literally said if we continue to see the growth we're seeing in AI which doesn't consume a lot of oil, it needs power but the electricity is not being generated by oil and we're not transferring much as much in trucking and stuff like that. Is this going to be a world where chemicals could be an increasing part of GDP intensity which means I want to invest in them relative to other sectors? and we had this long brainstorming session while on the plane. And then when I got off, I extended it into the LLM. So, I'm going to write a paper on this. And that's the way that like I take a thought that pops into my head that I think I want explanation on because the chemical names are doing so well. And the oil names are doing fine. They're good, but I think they're like 15 to 20% a year performers, which is better than the S&P, but maybe not as as as good as chemicals, specifically tied to semiconductors. It's very interesting to me that um you've been going to a lot of these institutional events. You went to a pension fund event this past week and um the same conversation that's happening on the internet seems to be a couple weeks delayed in these meetings when you tell me, you know, kind of things that you're either hearing people talk about, things you're learning or whatever. Um and so one that's a hey, if you're on Twitter or reading, you know, uh newsletters, listen to podcasts, like you have an advantage because you're getting information faster. At the same time though, I do think I'm pretty impressed with it used to maybe be there was like a year-long lag before institutional investors got to something, but they've accelerated as well. And so if you told me that the lag used to be a year and now it's only 6 weeks, >> like they're catching up is is my takeaway. >> Yeah. Well, I think it's getting harder and harder. But I I do think the arbitrage is is there. I I it it seems like forever because I wrote it over the weekend, but I published a paper Monday morning at 7:45 on power semiconductors, which was all related to a report I posted on on the subscriber thing on the edge devices. And this came from last week, Texas Instruments report and Intel, where they both highlighted the edge is coming and then Qualcomm this week. like it's coming and when I say edge that means autos that means phones computers and humanoids like that part of the investment thesis is going to play now that needs different semiconductors to some degree for the power side so I wrote this thing on power semis they're up over double digits this week and again this stuff goes so quickly because you're responding to something that happened in in in in the news and you're connecting it back to these other themes what I did was I connected it back to a report from Nvidia over their need for data center equipment from South Korea for their new 800VT DC power side and they need power semis. So I don't think I don't think sellside research from the banks can keep up with this. It's very very hard because you have to be paying attention to the news around the globe and to get that stuff you're getting it from X. It's not like you can read the Wall Street Journal and the stuff is in there. It's in no newspapers. It is a story by a local person in Korea that puts it out. Maybe it's in Korean. You hit the translate button, you get to see it. But you and I stay on top of this stuff. I still believe there's enough of an arbitrage, but I think retail is ahead of the game in a big way because they see this stuff and they just jump in. They just jump in right away. >> 100%. Where can we send people to uh check out the work that you're doing with 22V and uh all of the different products that you're offering? >> Yeah. If if if they go to 22vresearch um.com, they will see an AI macro nexus button on the top. That's me. And if they go there, that's where they can get some of the things I referenced. If they go to the YouTube, um they can still see see me going through the weekly kind of rundown on things. And I will keep you up on what's happening. Um I am going to do a video and I will figure out how it's going to go up on this thing I mentioned on Claude. And to those of you who've reached out, especially the kids in college, part of the goal is for you guys to use AI and realize how powerful it is. Um, I mentioned my son, uh, he is starting an internship and, uh, his work that he's done in the last four months has blown me away. And this has all come from him spending more time on Claude. So the way that I'm with GPT5, I think most people should start with Claude um and do the verticals one by one because you have to understand the computer architecture >> and I'm trying to make sure that people understand where every day they can do these three things. How do I brainstorm with it on everything? >> How do I actually use it to be more efficient in my taxes, in my bank statements, in my kids bills, whatever it is, I I will show you how to do that. And then how do I build something? How do you build your first app for your workout routine, for your recipes? Doesn't really matter. Whatever part of your life, you need to build that first app and all you got to do is verbally speak into it. So if I show people how to do this and I keep it short and succinct, if you give that to your kids or you do it and then you get your kids, you show it to your kids, you do it, I think it's really important for the parents to both set an example but also show how easy it is because the kids are not allowed to use it in most schools or they're prevented from doing the things that I'm talking because they don't have access to this particular situation. So, that's the main thing that I want people to get from when they come visit me. And of course, they can find me on LinkedIn, X, and Substack everywhere. All right, guys. Talk to you next week.