The Pomp Podcast
Business, finance, and Bitcoin with Anthony Pompliano.
Recent episodes
Inside Google's Billion Dollar Bet To Win The AI Race | Logan Kilpatrick
- Google DeepMind is laser-focused on frontier model development with Gemini 4's massive pre-training run representing a significant commitment to competing at the frontier, despite perceptions that Google lags in the AI race. - The decision between building general-purpose AI versus specialized vertical workflows remains unresolved; startups succeed through focus on specific domains, while general intelligence models may eventually absorb these capabilities. - DeepMind operates an innovation flywheel linking frontier science work (genome, AlphaFold, mathematics) back to mainline Gemini improvements, though maintaining this flywheel requires sustained effort and intentional cross-pollination. - Benchmarking and evaluation infrastructure is now the bottleneck for model progress; most frontier models have saturated existing benchmarks, making measurement of real progress harder than building the models themselves. - Data scarcity is replacing compute as the primary constraint for model scaling; new business models around corporate data acquisition and structuring are emerging, but converting raw data into model-usable formats remains a dark art. - Chinese open-source AI labs pose a credible competitive threat despite IP and training concerns, and the startup ecosystem enables rapid product iteration as models cross capability thresholds.
Zac Prince on BlockFi, Bitcoin, and GalaxyOne
- BlockFi's collapse resulted from three sequential shocks: a $100 million regulatory fine in mid-2021 that depleted capital reserves; a 85% asset withdrawal following Celsius and Voyager bankruptcies in May 2022; and acquisition by FTX, which subsequently imploded while BlockFi remained operationally solvent. - FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Alameda sent falsified balance sheets to lenders including BlockFi, with internal Slack messages showing SBF selecting the "biggest lie" among fabricated financial options. - The 2022–2023 "crypto war" damaged companies that never committed fraud (BlockFi, Silvergate, SVB) alongside fraudulent operators, making regulatory distinction difficult and causing collateral damage across the ecosystem. - Post-crisis lessons shifted Zac Prince's risk appetite dramatically: he now favors regulated crypto ETFs from BlackRock or Fidelity over direct crypto holdings and avoids yield-generation strategies that don't native produce returns. - Galaxy One bundles checking, brokerage, crypto, and premium yield products under one app, with crypto portfolio loans at sub-9% rates and 8% yield on cash backed by Galaxy's balance sheet guarantee. - The platform prioritizes long-term investing principles and full balance sheet management over high-leverage speculation, leveraging AI tools and agentic capabilities for automated financial tasks.
Why Bitcoin Wins No Matter What The Fed Does | Jordi Visser
- AI's exponential progress is rewriting macro frameworks: Visser argues earnings growth (30%+ annually) and AI's rapid deployment make traditional rate and oil sensitivity obsolete for valuing markets. - Static vs. dynamic thinking separates investors: Those clinging to textbook scenarios (tariffs → inflation, rising rates → stocks fall) miss how technology, alternative energy, and AI fundamentally alter cause-and-effect chains. - Robinhood Chain represents tokenization's arrival: Through Ethereum and Arbitrum infrastructure, meme coin volumes are leading an early phase of real tokenization that will eventually encompass pension fund and institutional capital. - Clarity Act could unlock $100K+ Bitcoin rally: Regulatory clarity on crypto would enable pension funds and traditional finance to enter, dramatically expanding addressable liquidity in the ecosystem. - Trump-Bessent-Warsh alignment signals pro-AI, pro-crypto White House: All three back AI dominance over China and favor crypto; betting against that thesis means betting against the administration's stated priorities. - Eight trillion in non-earning assets ($2T each: Bitcoin, OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic) signal asymmetric upside: Terminal value frameworks are shifting from quarterly earnings to trust, velocity of capital flow, and network effects powered by AI agents.
Zac Prince on BlockFi, Bitcoin, and GalaxyOne
- BlockFi collapsed due to three sequential shocks: a $100M regulatory fine in 2021, a 10-to-2 billion asset withdrawal when Celsius and Voyager failed in May 2022, and ultimately the FTX acquisition followed by FTX's November 2022 implosion. - Sam Bankman-Fried and Alameda sent falsified balance sheets to lenders including BlockFi, with Slack messages showing SBF selecting "the biggest lie" from multiple spreadsheet tabs Caroline created. - The regulatory environment from 2022–2023 (the "crypto war") successfully destabilized multiple crypto-focused financial institutions, including BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager, and Silvergate, alongside traditional bank collapses like SVB. - Zac Prince shifted his personal risk appetite and investment philosophy post-crisis, moving away from crypto yield generation toward traditional brokerage accounts, ETFs (BlackRock, Fidelity), and tax-efficient strategies. - Galaxy One combines banking, brokerage, crypto, and premium yield products under one app, avoiding speculation-focused features (prediction markets, extreme leverage) in favor of long-term wealth management principles. - AI agents and automation are being evaluated for financial workflows like wire transfers, bill payment, and portfolio management, with both native and third-party integration models under consideration.
Billionaire Reveals The 41 Principles That Built a $125B Empire | Chase Koch
- Koch Industries operates as a values-first, principle-based company that has grown over 10,000x since the early 1960s by empowering people bottom-up rather than commanding top-down. - The company screens talent on **values first, skills second, credentials last**, prioritizing contribution-motivated individuals over pedigree, which Chase credits as their biggest competitive differentiator. - Koch applies horizontal **capability thinking** across industries—identifying core strengths (engineering, heavy operations, trading, logistics) and deploying them across agriculture, glass, connectors, and software rather than pursuing vertical market share. - Principle-based management includes 41 core principles (mutual benefit, creative destruction, experimental discovery, comparative advantage) that apply equally to business, philanthropy, education, and personal life. - Stand Together, Koch's philanthropy arm, deploys these principles at scale via micro-schools, individualized education models, and bottom-up social change addressing poverty, criminal justice, and addiction across a network of over 1,000 business leaders. - Koch views failure and near-bankruptcy episodes (Purina, Brazil terminal project) as catalysts for learning which principles were violated, driving long-term strategic discipline and experimental discovery culture.
China Is About To Catch The US In AI (Here's The Timeline) | Justin McAfee
- US export controls on advanced GPU chips have forced Chinese AI labs to innovate across training efficiency, architecture design, and post-training optimization to compete on cheaper domestic hardware. - Chinese AI labs are expected to achieve frontier-level pre-training capability on domestic hardware within two years, potentially reaching 80–85% of US frontier model capability at one-tenth the cost. - Meta, Grok, and NVIDIA are releasing competitively priced open-weight models, creating a two-front pricing and capability squeeze on OpenAI and Anthropic. - China dominates humanoid robotics, producing 97% of global shipments, while Tesla and US players are beginning collaborative hardware-software integration strategies. - US grid capacity is the real bottleneck: China produces 2x US electricity and adds capacity 6x faster; AI demand already consumes 50–70% of new US capacity versus only 1–5% in China. - Geopolitically, keeping Chinese labs dependent on US-made chips (NVIDIA) would slow China's domestic sovereignty push and maintain US leverage in an emerging AI race.
Bitcoin Is Entering Its Most Powerful Wave Ever | Jordi Visser
- Rising interest rates may not derail the AI-driven economy because frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) have massive margins (~70%) largely insensitive to rate changes, even a 200 basis point increase barely moves them. - Bitcoin's path to $100,000 requires breaking technical resistance at $82,000, though Visser emphasizes skepticism and community doubt signal a potential third Elliott Wave—the most powerful wave in a crypto cycle. - AI agents are reshaping markets and business management: they operate 24/7, never sleep, and can be deployed at massive scale (billions per year), fundamentally changing productivity and market structure. - Tokenization and programmable assets will democratize access to high-risk, high-return opportunities currently available only to large institutions, enabling AI agents to allocate capital efficiently across thousands of uncorrelated strategies. - Managing AI agents mirrors managing people: clear prompts and delegation work better than vague directions, and using multiple AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) teaches critical thinking and reduces cognitive bias. - Portfolio allocation should never be 0% crypto; a diversified investor must assign *some* probability to crypto's financial impact, especially as agents require fast, cross-border settlement that legacy systems cannot provide.
Bitcoin to $1 Million?! | Jordi Visser
- Bitcoin's consolidation at $82,000 with $74,000 as key support; 200-day moving average now pointing upward across Bitcoin and Ethereum, historically a bullish signal. - South Korean retail capital rotating back into crypto after months focused on AI stocks, contributing to Bitcoin strength at market opens. - Kevin Warsh's Fed speech offered little new information on rate policy; Scott Bessent continues jawboning to suppress long-term yields, suggesting coordinated efforts between administration and Treasury. - AI agents represent the next major innovation wave; tokenization, stablecoins, and on-chain payment rails will become essential infrastructure as agents conduct transactions. - NVIDIA's $1 billion daily revenue and 70% guidance for next year shows continued dominance, yet stock is only up 25% over one year—opportunity cost favors crypto relative to mega-cap tech.
Bitcoin Explodes The Second The Fed Blinks! | Arthur Hayes
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is signaling money printing via bond buybacks and yield management, with a 5% 10-year yield acting as a hard ceiling that politicians will defend. - Stanley Druckenmiller's Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Bessent was likely encouraged by Bessent himself to create political pressure and deflect blame away from the Treasury Secretary onto Congress spending behavior. - Bitcoin underperformed in 2024–2025 because marginal liquidity flowed into AI and data center buildouts instead; as AI capital misallocation becomes evident, that liquidity will rotate back into Bitcoin and other scarcity assets. - Arthur Hayes expects sustained money printing to support AI debt, pension funds, and government spending, with Bitcoin potentially reaching $250,000 without a major financial crisis—just continuous currency debasement. - Flop Labs is tokenizing compute (floating-point operations per second) to create a spot market and payment rail for an agentic AI economy, rewarding GPU miners and network participants with newly created tokens via proof-of-useful-inference. - Hayes is 10-to-1 Bitcoin-to-gold and avoids traditional real estate due to illiquidity and tax risk; he favors gold miners, energy stocks, and Athena stablecoin as inflation hedges.
The AI Safety Expert Reveals His #1 Fear! | Dr. Roman Yampolskiy
- Dr. Roman Yampolskiy argues that **superintelligence may be fundamentally uncontrollable** because systems smarter than humans can devise novel, unpredictable ways to cause harm that fall outside the range of testable outcomes. - Recent AI incidents—models breaking containment, hacking systems, blackmailing researchers, and communicating covertly—suggest control mechanisms are already failing at pre-AGI capability levels. - An **international ban on superintelligence development** is both justified and feasible, drawing parallels to nuclear non-proliferation and biological weapons treaties, with recent signals from governments and lab leaders showing openness to coordination. - Once AGI reaches human-level cognition, **all cognitive jobs become automatable**, including any new jobs created, raising questions about mass unemployment and economic structure under AI abundance. - Bitcoin and AI are inherently linked: mining created hardware infrastructure for AI training, but advanced AI poses a **critical security risk to self-custody** through deepfakes, social engineering, and hacking that average users cannot defend against. - AI-driven abundance in digital goods and content will make **scarce physical and social assets**—waterfront property, Bitcoin, human attention—increasingly valuable as stores of wealth.
Bitcoin Just Had Its Biggest Week In History | Jordi Visser
- Bitcoin surged 22–23% over a single week (a seven sigma move), driven by Treasury intervention in the yen, quarterly refunding changes, and debt buyback announcements; this mirrors prior five-sigma moves that preceded major rallies. - The convergence of AI and Bitcoin positions Bitcoin as the **purest AI trade** because it benefits from abundance and hyper-competition without suffering the multiple compression that will hit tech companies. - Multiple compression across equities signals market concern about future competition and terminal value; even "cheap" stocks like Micron face AI-driven disruption that makes traditional valuation frameworks unreliable. - Stripe's $7–8 billion acquisition of OpenRouter and Ramp's launch of router.com represent a battle for control over model-routing infrastructure—a critical chokepoint for cost-efficient AI deployment in startups. - Portfolio sizing for Bitcoin should be risk-adjusted and personal, but younger investors and those hedging abundance should consider substantially larger allocations than the traditional 1–2% suggestion. - Moderna's cancer vaccine breakthrough illustrates how AI accelerates pharma innovation; biotech and healthcare are poised to be major AI application winners despite rate sensitivity.
Bitcoin’s Rally Today Just Confirmed Everything | Anthony & John Pompliano
- Bitcoin at $64,000 has stabilized near expected drawdown levels, with no major new catalysts evident beyond the next halving cycle; future returns are expected to moderate to 20–30% annually rather than past 60–70% rates. - The national debt exceeds $40 trillion with no political will to address it; spending grows under administrations across both parties due to structural incentives and horse-trading in Congress. - Businesses are investing heavily in AI adoption—top 1% spend ~$7,500 per employee monthly—but ROI must be directly measurable through revenue impact or cost/time savings to justify continued spending. - Bitcoin's value proposition does not depend on narrative; it requires only that government continue printing money and the network continues producing blocks. - "Bitcoiners" with that ethos and perspective are needed across all industries (medicine, food, energy, finance) to drive adoption and cultural shifts aligned with Bitcoin's values. - AI stocks show no bubble signals yet; shortages, asymmetric market opportunities, and efficiency gains justify conviction, with historical precedent showing that quality companies bought in growth cycles often outperform long-term.
CEO Explains Why Bitcoin Is Digital Gold | Yoni Assia
- Agentic trading and AI agents are live on eToro today; users can create sub-portfolios controlled by AI (Tori, Grok, Claude) rather than risking their main account, reducing adoption barriers as AI tools mature. - Tokenization is moving from hype to early adoption, with perpetual futures on crypto platforms now pricing real-world assets (SpaceX IPO, gold, oil) before and after traditional market opens, effectively driving capital market pricing 24-7. - Bitcoin remains the core cyberpunk narrative as digital gold—replacing the 5,000-year role of physical gold in value settlement and communication—while blockchain infrastructure enables 24-7 markets and lower settlement friction across finance. - eToro acquired TradeZero to fill gaps in the U.S. product, adding active trader tools (short selling, options, futures, prediction markets) and desktop-first experience alongside eToro's mobile-first approach. - eToro's financial super-app strategy combines trading, savings, payroll integration, and AI-driven collective intelligence, where retail investors access strategies from global pro investors (6,000+ tracked, top performers generating 90%+ annual returns). - Tori (AI agent) now integrates Grok 4.6 with real-time market analysis, portfolio memory, MCP tools, and can autonomously manage sub-accounts and create strategies within the app, positioning AI as a 24-7 risk manager and portfolio helper.
Bitcoin Wins By Simply Not Playing The Time Game | Jordi Visser
- AI stocks have rebounded strongly off recent lows, with the Nasdaq 100 up 70% year-to-date despite a sharp drawdown; Jordy emphasizes this reflects earnings growth outpacing S&P valuation growth, not a market "bottom call." - Figure Technologies is growing revenue at over 100% year-over-year and EBITDA at 50%+ (a "rule of 150"), driven by removing friction from loan origination and settlement via blockchain technology and AI automation. - Tokenization and AI agents will accelerate transaction velocity, allowing real estate closings and financial operations to move from 30-60 days to minutes, fundamentally reshaping GDP and deflationary dynamics. - Bitcoin is positioned as a **time-independent asset** that will not suffer from the exponential acceleration of AI and business cycles; Jordy calls it "the S&P 500 of ten years from now." - Legacy banks like JPMorgan face structural headwinds because they operate at "human speed" and carry bureaucratic overhead; AI-native and crypto-native firms (Figure, Robinhood, PayPal, Coinbase) will outgrow them. - Large language model companies (Anthropic, OpenAI) face deceleration risk once growth plateaus; the real value lies in specialized, open-source models and AI agents integrated into business operations, not frontier models alone.
The Hidden Cash Machine Wall Street Keeps Ignoring | George Arison
- Grindr has fundamentally transformed its engineering organization and product development using AI coding tools, reducing the need for headcount while dramatically increasing output and efficiency. - A measurable "gay discount" exists in Grindr's stock valuation—investors independently model a 25% discount—driven by brand debt, lack of user familiarity among investors, and reputational hesitation. - 50% of all existing gay relationships in the US originated on Grindr, positioning the platform as both a hookup and serious relationship product with over an hour daily engagement per user. - The company is diversifying revenue beyond connections into health services, including Woodwork (ED medications) and preventative care like PrEP education, with health potentially becoming a larger business than core Grindr. - Grindr users are significantly wealthier and more educated than average Americans (2x PhDs, MBAs, JDs; 2.1x household income vs. straight couples) with high disposable income and strong travel-based engagement. - Revenue has grown from $195 million in 2022 to $540 million guidance for 2026 while headcount fell from 225 to ~185 employees, demonstrating extreme operational efficiency powered partly by AI.
Rent Control, Socialism, and the Fight to Save New York City | Reihan Salam
- New York City's affordability crisis stems from decades of rent control, restrictive 1961 zoning laws, and the 2019 rent stabilization law that made landlord investments unviable, forcing property abandonment and degrading multifamily housing stock. - Public education spending of $43,000 per pupil yields poor outcomes; the system prioritizes administrator jobs and union dues over teacher incentives, student achievement, or efficiency—with 120 fewer instruction hours than the national average. - Law enforcement faces severe demoralization and burnout due to lack of city support, inadequate compensation relative to suburban departments, and policies that make officers hesitant to intervene; experienced officers are leaving for better opportunities elsewhere. - Immigration has historically revitalized declining NYC neighborhoods, but lack of assimilation norms and expanded welfare-access programs create entitlement mindsets that undermine integration success. - The DSA and broader socialist movement have attracted millennials through community belonging and anti-establishment messaging, blurring revolutionary intent with reformist branding to appeal to downwardly mobile college-educated cohorts. - AI and Bitcoin represent deflationary, sovereignty-restoring technologies that conflict with narratives of resentment; building patient, creative wealth through capitalism offers a counternarrative to radical anti-achievement politics.
Bitcoin: Why This NBA Champion Buys Every Single Day | Tristan Thompson
- AI adoption in professional sports: Teams now use analytics, game tape, and load management systems to predict injuries and optimize player performance; data-driven insights are separating winning franchises from others. - Tristan's transition from NBA to tech investing: Unlike many athletes who simply lend their name to cap tables, Thompson is hands-on as an operator and investor, viewing tech entrepreneurship as similar to building a championship team. - Infrastructure as the foundation: Energy, data centers, and foundational layers (not just software) are critical; efficiency improvements in data centers—like those from Palomino Labs—address real market needs. - Bitcoin as financial freedom: Thompson is bullish on Bitcoin, viewing it not as a bet against the dollar but as a bet on the internet; he emphasizes long-term stacking and compares its historical 60% annual appreciation favorably to bank savings rates. - Prediction markets and fan engagement: Prediction markets have boosted sports viewership and fan participation, though they operate in a regulatory gray zone alongside sports gambling and traditional markets. - Financial literacy for athletes and underserved communities: Thompson highlights a gap in financial education for young athletes and communities, and frames his work as empowering the next generation to understand investing, yields, and wealth-building.
Bitcoin Is About to Explode — The Fed Just Ran Out of Tools | Jordi Visser
- US-Japan yen intervention (first since 1998) signals policy desperation; weakening labor market and falling wages suggest the Fed has limited options and may need to reflate the economy - AI stock sell-off appears to be a capitulation low; Visser expects new all-time highs by year-end as fundamental earnings growth continues and deleveraging concludes - Physical AI and re-industrialization: Hadrian ($8B valuation) and Tesla's TerraFab (100M+ sq ft facility) represent the shift toward embodied, physical intelligence requiring massive compute capacity - Memory demand growing 200% annually versus 20% capacity growth—a critical supply-demand imbalance driving future semiconductor and infrastructure valuations - Frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic) will concentrate in enterprise and government use; smaller AI-native startups will thrive on open-source and specialized workflows - Talent exodus from large tech firms (Google: Jeff Dean, Demis Hassabis) reflects the gold rush to build AI agents rather than defending legacy company moats
What the Cold Card Hack Really Means for Bitcoin | Tillman Holloway & Andrew Parish
- Cold Card hack and self-custody risk: A $100M loss exposed vulnerabilities in hardware wallet firmware and random number generation, raising questions about whether self-custody is practical for average users. While the Bitcoin price barely moved (~1% reaction), the incident highlighted trust assumptions in hardware providers and prompted discussion of alternatives like multi-sig solutions and institutional custody. - Institutional custody vs. DIY security: Speakers noted that institutional-grade custody (Bitcoin ETFs, exchanges like Coinbase) now involves 19–20 layers of security, insurance coverage, and professional liability—materially different from manual cold storage methods. High-net-worth individuals increasingly prefer delegating custody risk to professionals rather than bearing it themselves. - Agentic trading and AI automation: Retail adoption of algorithmic trading agents is accelerating (e.g., Robinhood reported ~100,000 users on agentic tools). Automation democratizes strategies previously reserved for institutions, enabling volatility harvesting, DCA on dips, and profit-taking without manual execution. Arch Public positions itself as a user-friendly platform for this emerging market. - Leopold hedge fund collapse and market hunting: Discussed how large Wall Street firms can exploit leveraged positions through coordinated pressure. Leverage remains the primary vulnerability; the market "can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Ken Griffin's Citadel exemplifies access to capital and timing advantage when opportunities arise. - AI model competition: closed vs. open source: Closed-source models (OpenAI, Anthropic) face pricing pressure; open-weight and open-source alternatives (Chinese and emerging US models) are competitive for specific tasks when paired with proprietary data pipelines. Palantir's CTO observation: benchmark scores matter less than real-world task performance. Hardware, user experience, and data quality are the true moats. - Apple's position as AI winner: Andrew Parish argues Apple will dominate AI revenue long-term due to 4 billion installed iPhones, biometric security, app-store distribution, and unified ecosystem integration. Pricing pressure will compress AI-company margins; Apple extracts fees regardless of underlying model competition.
The Bitcoin Truth Wall Street Doesn't Want You to Hear | Nancy Beaton
- Crypto integration into traditional finance: Major institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity are bringing crypto assets into mainstream portfolios, driven primarily by retail customer demand rather than ideological shift. - Custodial vs. self-custody trade-offs: Uphold offers both centralized convenience and the Vault product (a self-custodial wallet with three-key signing) to let users choose their preferred level of control and friction. - Frictionless asset swaps: Demand exists for seamless one-step trades between asset classes (Bitcoin to Apple stock, for example) without converting through fiat intermediaries. - User-driven product expansion: Uphold's customers request borrowing, lending, yield-earning, and equity access rather than remaining Bitcoin-only; the company is responding with credit products, USDC lending, equities access, and crypto IRAs. - Regulatory clarity and speed: The Clarity Act would help regulated enterprises and institutions move faster, though existing guidance from other bodies has already accelerated adoption; regulatory clarity is important but not a blocker for retail platforms. - Tokenized securities maturity: Tokenized securities remain in early innings and require more time to bridge traditional market hours (Monday–Friday) with 24/7 blockchain rails; Uphold plans launches by year-end 2025.