The Pomp Podcast
Business, finance, and Bitcoin with Anthony Pompliano.
Recent episodes
My Biggest Bitcoin Regret Ever | Anthony & Polina Pompliano
- Bitcoin's recent pullback to $80K is creating a narrative dislocation from fundamentals, presenting an attractive entry point for investors with conviction in the asset. - Hash rate recovery to near all-time highs and net new buyer demand (ETFs, perpetual preferreds) demonstrate underlying strength despite short-term price weakness. - AI abundance technologies increase scarcity value of Bitcoin and other finite assets; Anthropic's S1 filing signals potential for major capital flows into AI companies. - Anthropic's governance structure—particularly Buddy Shaw's role as chair of the long-term benefit trust without equity—raises concerns about power concentration disguised as altruism. - AI psychosis and Bitcoin psychosis both represent extremism that blinds investors; maintaining conviction while keeping "clear eyes" without "laser eyes" is the winning approach. - Separating product quality from corporate narrative and founder behavior is essential; great technology can coexist with uncomfortable ideological positioning.
Everyone Is Bearish And That’s Exactly Why You Should Buy | Ryan Detrick
- October weakness is historically normal and predictable; late October typically marks a market low before year-end rallies, with the strongest day of the year historically occurring on October 28th. - Breadth is improving beneath headline weakness in tech; while large-cap technology has struggled, 300–400 stocks participated in gains last week, and equal-weight indices show strength similar to patterns seen during the dot-com bust. - Record cash sitting on the sidelines (money market and cash ETF flows at all-time highs) is a contrarian bullish signal, as these surges historically correlate with market bottoms. - Midterm election history shows the S&P 500 has risen in 19 of the last 19 instances one year after midterm elections, averaging 15% gains (nearly twice the typical one-year return), regardless of which party wins. - Earnings growth remains strong globally, with 88% of early reporters beating on EPS, and forward 12-month earnings rising on small caps, mid-caps, and internationally; consumer spending remains solid across restaurants, recreation, and housing. - AI and big tech spending risks exist (hyperscalers committing record capital for data centers), but valuations on NVIDIA and Amazon are at multi-year lows and justified by 30%+ earnings growth; the tech trade is not over, just consolidating.
85% Of The AI Boom Is Still Ahead Of Us | Dan Ives
- Dan Ives returned from Korea reporting **30% memory demand surge** in the past 4–6 weeks, validating fundamental AI strength despite market jitters and CoreWeave concerns. - The **AI bear narrative** overlooks real CapEx deployment by hyperscalers with trillion-dollar balance sheets; bears have missed every major transformational tech stock for 25 years. - Tesla and SpaceX merger is 80–90% likely; deal would require Tesla stock to reach $500–$550 (30–40% premium), creating a $4–$5 trillion combined entity. - Market concentration in the S&P 500's largest companies reflects early-stage CapEx concentration; broadening to software, infrastructure, and energy expected over next 12 months. - AI agents and autonomous trading will reshape investment industry; fintech platforms racing to enable agent-driven strategies while legacy banks restrict access. - Regulatory and political uncertainty around data centers and AI development dominates narrative, but fundamentals show continued strength.
Bitcoin Is Just Getting Started, Says Billion Dollar Investor | Moez Kassam
- Moez Kassam discusses how to profit from hype cycles by identifying themes early, understanding sentiment, and knowing when to exit before peak euphoria. - Bitcoin evolution from deal-making opportunity to institutional asset class adoption, with treasury companies becoming a major recent theme. - AI valuations remain frothy despite legitimate disruption; competing with large funds on mega-cap picks like Tesla and SpaceX offers no edge. - Korean memory manufacturers (Samsung, SK Hynix) represent significant opportunity as sentiment has turned negative despite strong forward earnings. - Long activism replacing short selling as a more effective strategy in fragmented smaller-cap markets; Lionsgate and Moderna are current examples. - Prediction markets serve as a reliable signal for insider knowledge; social media sentiment analytics inform retail investor positioning.
Is Bitcoin Ready To Rip While Wall Street Breaks? | Jordi Visser
- Long-term Capital Management parallels: Jordy Visser draws lessons from LTCM's collapse to explain current hedge fund leverage issues, arguing that hedge funds are being systematically deleveraged as AI disrupts their traditional arbitrage strategies. - Tokenization as industry disruptor: Tokenization could unlock trapped capital in illiquid assets (private credit, real estate, private equity) and fundamentally reshape how hedge funds operate by enabling real-time pricing and liquidity. - Bitcoin as defensive hedge: Bitcoin has held strong during recent market weakness, positioning itself as a defensive asset against broader portfolio disruption caused by AI acceleration. - AI growth trajectory remains intact: Despite near-term volatility and concerns about Anthropic's deceleration, revenue fundamentals remain solid; the issue is not whether AI will succeed but the concentration of capital required to fund it. - CPI and traditional macro metrics increasingly irrelevant: Core inflation data matters less as AI-driven deflation becomes the dominant force reshaping markets and business models across all sectors. - Anthropic vs. open-source models debate: Disagreement on whether enterprises will stick with frontier models (Anthropic, OpenAI) or migrate to cheaper, sovereign open-source solutions; both paths will likely coexist.
Bitcoin Is the Toll Collector of the AI Economy | Jordi Visser
- AI agents are disrupting traditional finance and banking, creating what Visser calls the "bankpocalypse" through lower spreads and instant settlement via stablecoins and tokenization. - Stripe is positioned to compete with legacy banks due to agility and existing infrastructure for crypto and agentic commerce, while traditional banks move too slowly. - General-purpose AI models are becoming commoditized, but compute and specialized workflows will create lasting value; the debate centers on whether specialized fine-tuned models or general models win. - Bitcoin and crypto are consolidating and testing technical levels; patience is required as traditional finance adoption through tokenization and stablecoins will drive the next leg higher. - Crypto adoption is shifting from contrarian to consensus trade as major players like BlackRock and Citigroup publish research connecting agents, DeFi, and Wall Street. - Bubble talk and doomsaying (Ray Dalio, bond yields) are noise; demand for compute and crypto infrastructure remains greater than supply, and previous crises (pandemic, rate hikes, bank runs, tariffs, geopolitical shocks) did not crash AI or crypto.
Bitcoin Is Headed to $300K and Nobody's Ready | Bill Barhydt
- Bitcoin price momentum despite macro headwinds (higher rates, rising oil, widening bond yields) reflects liquidity flows and reduced ambiguity around policy, with potential path to $250K–$300K if debt spiral persists and productivity gains offset inflation. - Shrinking Bitcoin volatility cycle-to-cycle (30x return 2018–2021; 8x return 2021–2024) suggests future gains may compress further, though absolute value expansion from $5T to $20T remains substantial. - U.S. government debt spiral creates no-exit scenario: lower demand for Treasury debt forces higher yields, triggering inflation and currency debasement; only massive AI-driven productivity gains offer a viable escape. - AI agents and agentic orchestration are reshaping software engineering, product management, and wealth advisory—technical product managers now need AI architecture skills, and portfolio management will shift from static allocations to real-time, agent-driven construction. - RIA industry fundamentally unprepared for tokenization, DeFi products, perpetual futures, and prediction markets; regulatory rigidity and misaligned incentives (flat fees regardless of performance) prevent advisors from adopting faster, AI-powered tools. - Abra's tokenized yield platform (BTC.AF, USDA.F) enables collateral stacking—borrowing against Bitcoin that simultaneously generates 3–4% yield offsets ~4.5% borrow costs, creating near-zero-cost loans and composable collateral across DeFi.
Bitcoin OG Predicts What The World Looks Like In 20 Years | Simon Dixon
- Simon Dixon's 15-year journey from Bitcoin-only investor to diversified portfolio across 100+ companies, then back to Bitcoin focus while helping others achieve sovereignty through self-custody. - The structure of global power: the financial industrial complex (BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs) partnering with geopolitical military interests and emerging technical/data monopolies. - The Coldcard hardware wallet hack and its implications for self-custody; hard lessons on key management security but ultimately validating the importance of learning custody skills early. - Tokenization and AI as evolving frameworks where individuals must choose between controlling their private keys or surrendering control to centralized systems that can weaponize their data. - The K-shaped economy: those owning productive assets outpace wage earners; Bitcoin and sovereignty are tools to exit the system, but most people remain subordinate to financial structures. - Geopolitical multi-polarity, data center dominance, and the shift from currency wars to ETF flows as the real proxy battle between nations; BlackRock's Aladdin technology as a coordinating force across sovereign wealth funds and central banks.
Hunter Biden on Bitcoin, the Laptop, Trump & His Next Chapter
- Hunter Biden's belief in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as solutions for financial inclusion and unbanked populations globally. - Critique of Biden administration's knee-jerk, caustic approach to crypto regulation versus Trump administration's direct personal profit-taking and conflicts of interest in the industry. - Hunter Biden's recovery from addiction, his decision to stay silent during his father's presidency, and his emerging public voice on social media and platforms like this podcast. - Artificial intelligence and superintelligence as both existential threat and potential solution to climate change and human challenges, requiring strong leadership and regulation. - Launch of Laptop Token with transparent tokenomics (20% airdrop, 30% prediction market, 10% for Hunter, zero to insiders) as opposite of Trump's meme token extraction play. - Hunter Biden's art practice, his rejection of running for elected office, and his focus on serving those impacted by addiction rather than pursuing political ambition.
The AI Boom Is Bigger Than Anyone Thinks | Dan Ives
- Dan Ives argues the AI trade is in early innings with only 4% of US companies having adopted AI, creating massive runway for growth across infrastructure, software, and enterprise. - Token consumption is declining per customer as companies build sovereign AI internally rather than relying solely on frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic, creating pricing pressure on large language model providers. - Regulatory capture concerns suggest Anthropic and OpenAI's calls for AI regulation may aim to slow competitors rather than reflect genuine safety concerns; profitable companies like Meta and Google aren't advocating slowdowns. - The US-China tech race is critical; slowing AI development domestically hands advantage to China, making data center approvals and open-source initiatives essential to maintaining US leadership. - The Ives Ultra Fund (IVAI) is a new public vehicle allowing retail investors to gain exposure to private AI companies previously accessible only to institutions.
Bitcoin Meets AI Agents And Everything Changes | Tillman Holloway & Andrew Parish
- AI agents are becoming prolific users of crypto and tokens, requiring new forums for trading compute power and hash rate in real-time markets. - Bitcoin's special use case as collateral is superior to real estate, gold, or physical assets because of low repossession costs and smart contract automation. - 24/7 trading markets are coming to traditional exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, CME); AI agents will be necessary to execute trades when humans sleep. - Tokens in finance and compute tokens in AI represent encrypted representations of value that enable global inclusion and eliminate barriers to entry for billions of unbanked people. - AI trading tools require human direction and oversight; the goal is an extension of personal will and judgment, not autonomous money-making machines. - Wall Street adoption of Bitcoin through ETFs (especially Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, and Bitwise) signals a shift from speculation to institutional allocation and retail demand.
He's Made Money On 95% Of His Deals (Here's How) | Christopher Zook
- Modern portfolio theory and the "holy grail of investing" requires 8–15 uncorrelated assets to reduce risk by 80% while increasing returns, proven by Nobel Prize–winning research. - CAZ Investments avoids emotion-driven decisions by focusing on worst-case scenarios first, allowing upside to take care of itself; the firm has achieved a 95% success rate on realized and unrealized private market investments over 25 years. - Bitcoin and crypto exposure is best achieved through infrastructure and "picks and shovels" (blockchain companies, early-stage ecosystems) rather than direct coin ownership, reducing volatility uncertainty. - Space and defense represents a generational shift from legacy "prime" contractors to "neoprimes"—companies like Anduril that build faster, cheaper, and more efficiently without cost-plus government contracts. - Diversification does not require boring assets; scarcity-driven investments (sports teams, GP stakes, crypto infrastructure) can deliver strong returns while maintaining low correlation to public markets. - AI job displacement is the real concern, not existential risk; automation will eliminate rote roles (truck drivers, factory workers) but create demand for service-oriented, relationship-driven, emotionally intelligent work.
Bitcoin's iPhone Moment Will Trigger Wall Street FOMO | Jordi Visser
- Bitcoin and crypto holding up well despite negative macroeconomic news, driven by fundamental demand rather than liquidity debasement; 10-year rates up ~100 basis points while Bitcoin up 60% for the quarter. - Consumer AI agents (like Muse) emerging as the critical infrastructure breakthrough for crypto, similar to the iPhone enabling Uber; agents will strip out middlemen and disrupt payment processors like Visa and Mastercard. - Wall Street FOMO building as institutions realize crypto is not dead; large asset managers now asking about tokenization, though regulatory access to individual tokens remains limited. - BlackRock's AI and crypto paper signals institutional consensus shift; the company is putting three funds on-chain and acting ahead of traditional banks. - Tokenization of the $195 trillion in US household net worth over the next five years will create unprecedented liquidity without requiring currency printing. - AI model capabilities reaching parabolic situational awareness stage; Noam Brown and OpenAI's admission that "we underestimated the capabilities of AI" marks the beginning of breakthrough science (cancer cures, robotics, humanoids).
Bitcoin & Stocks Are Going Higher (The Money Printer Is Coming) | Darius Dale
- Scott Bessent's Treasury strategy involves testing the bond market with measured interventions before deploying full "firepower" if needed, backed by Federal Reserve coordination and bank regulation relaxation. - The U.S. fiscal position requires $12+ trillion in annual capital flows (40% of global savings, up from 20% pre-COVID), creating a structural supply-demand imbalance in Treasury bonds. - Budget deficits are politically impossible to cut; the U.S. is in "paradigm C" (grow the economy) rather than "paradigm B" (cut spending), with paradigm D (money printing) as the eventual fallback. - A K-shaped economy is widening: the government spends ~$2.6–2.7 trillion on benefits flowing to wealthy Americans, while only ~$1.2–1.3 trillion goes to poor people via means-tested programs. - Social Security, Medicare, and housing lock-ins (old mortgages at low rates vs. new high rates) trap younger generations in dependency and prevent wealth accumulation. - AI and Bitcoin democratize productivity and capital defense, yet are paradoxically opposed by those who would benefit most, while re-industrialization and automation create job displacement challenges.
Bitcoin & Sports Teams Are The Best Hedge Against Inflation | Chris Kelly
- Chris Kelly's Bitcoin ownership stems from viewing it as a hedge against inflation and a global store of value accessible from anywhere, contrasting with his sports team investments as scarce, analog alternatives. - The Sacramento Kings arena incorporates a tier-four data center for sustainability and early Ethereum mining, reflecting technologically sophisticated ownership from Facebook, TIBCO, and Qualcomm veterans. - Meta's massive AI and CapEx investments are generating measurable ROI through consumer products like Muse, while token costs continue to fall as competition intensifies across frontier models. - Open-source AI strategy by Meta differs from closed-source approaches; incumbents like Facebook can sustain profitability by monetizing through advertising while supporting community software ecosystems. - Blockchain infrastructure will enable AI agents to operate with immutable audit trails and provenance verification, converging distributed trust networks with artificial intelligence systems. - Sports One democratizes professional sports team ownership through minority stakes bundled into a public equity vehicle and associated token, expanding access beyond wealthy family offices.
Bitcoin Is About To Go Parabolic Because Of AI Agents | Jordi Visser
- Bitcoin and stocks held steady despite Fed rate hikes due to AI agents becoming the new demand driver, not traditional liquidity cycles. Agents are intelligent enough (150+ IQ equivalent) to transact autonomously across crypto rails without human intervention. - The broken liquidity mechanism means M2 money supply no longer predicts asset prices; instead, profit margins and tokenization of dormant assets ($900 trillion) will drive future growth through programmable collateral and faster settlement. - AI agents like Instinct AI, Muse, and Grok are solving historically intractable problems (Navier-Stokes, cancer research) through recursive self-improvement and collaborative intelligence, collapsing timelines for innovation from decades to months. - Crypto infrastructure (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Near, Zcash) serves as the necessary settlement and privacy layer for agent-to-agent transactions, making "ghost rails" viable only when agents become the primary users. - Tokenization of real-world assets is now exempt from regulation for five years, unlocking a macro opportunity to collateralize real estate, receivables, and inventory via programmable tokens, fundamentally reshaping finance. - Visser remains Bitcoin-maxi for 30+ years but acknowledges altcoin and Layer 2 upside if agents drive network effects; he will change his view if Bitcoin remains below $80,000 by end of October as a signal that agent adoption is not occurring.
BlackRock Confirmed Bitcoin Is Here To Stay | Jay Jacobs
- Bitcoin ETF success has dramatically lowered barriers to entry for retail, advisor, and institutional participation by replacing the friction of crypto exchange sign-ups with simple brokerage clicks. - Bitcoin's volatility compression from ~80% to 35–40% reflects a maturing market with more participants, robust derivative markets, and longer-term buy-and-hold investors offsetting short-term traders. - AI has emerged as a **macro factor** influencing US equities and broad markets, comparable to GDP growth and interest rates; supply-side constraints (power, chips, materials) will lag exponential demand growth for years. - BlackRock's AI value chain spans power generation, data centers, chip design, software platforms, and applications—requiring investors to look beyond tech stocks and understand the entire infrastructure ecosystem. - The ETF industry has matured into a technology platform with tax efficiency, custom baskets, rotation strategies, and in-kind creation mechanisms that rival or exceed mutual funds for most investor use cases. - Generational wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials and Gen Z will reshape portfolio composition, as younger investors favor tech and crypto-native instruments while financial advisors must bridge old and new asset classes.
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.