#1476 Anthony & John Pompliano | This Company Just Crashed Bitcoin & Stocks?!

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss bitcoin, why the price is crashing, why you shouldn’t care, the future outlook for bitcoin, Donald Trump tariff threats, DeepSeek, why investors are scared, and why America needs to compete. ======================= The future is being built today and the future of currency isn’t dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it’s crypto. And Gemini thinks that’s a great thing. Because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that’s a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Go where dollars won’t. With Gemini. ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today we've got a fantastic episode with John Pompliano. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, why the price is crashing, why you shouldn't care, and how I think about the next couple of months playing out for Bitcoin. There's a lot of information packed into that segment that I think you'll really enjoy. On top of

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  that, we talk about Donald Trump and his brand new tariff threats, how he has become the bully in chief, and why there's pros and cons to that approach, and how he gets so many world leaders to immediately fall into his demands and give him what he wants. And then lastly, we talk about DeepSeek, which is the brand new AI model out of China, why investors are selling the stock, why people are scared, and how I think American entrepreneurs and investors should stop crying on the internet and they should start competing. Today's episode is packed with tons of unique ideas, and I'd love to hear feedback from you. Leave comments or message me on Twitter and let me know what you think. Here's the latest conversation with John Pompliano.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini. The future is being built today, and the future of currency isn't dollars, euros, pounds, or yen. It's crypto. And Gemini thinks that's a great thing, because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that's a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Gemini teamed up with futurists, technologists, and designers like award-winning artist Matt Griffin, known for his illustrations for To craft a vision of the future with crypto at its core. The creative theme "Go Where Dollars Won't" emphasizes exploration, growth, and the crypto market's limitless potential. Whether it's going on that Martian safari to capture an unforgettable photo of a herd of woolly mammoths grazing the red planet, or using Bitcoin to pay for your lift pass to go strata skiing down the mountain peak of a breathtaking comet.

• 2:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever adventures we'll be living, one thing is for sure. In a future this fantastic, the limits of traditional currencies simply cannot keep up. Financial innovation will usher in this new frontier. And so, "Go Where Dollars Won't" with Gemini. Go check them out at gemini.com/go-were-dollars-won't. Again, go check it out at gemini.com/go-were-dollars-won't. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappos. Picture this: every time you trade Bitcoin, the spread determines how much value stays with you. That's why securing top-tier Bitcoin trading fees is key to growing your Bitcoin wealth. But what if I told you that there's a platform that lets you save up to 90% on your Bitcoin trading fees? Now, here's the kicker. Not only do they save that money,

• 3:16Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, John, what's the first topic?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  All right, let's talk about Bitcoin's price. Obviously, everyone's waiting on the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. Last week, risk assets have been falling off since then. A bunch of money got wiped out from the stock market as well. Like, what's going on with Bitcoin? Why are we under $100,000?

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  We used to dream the media would be yelling and screaming Bitcoin crashing below $100,000. Wow, we should be so thankful that we get to live in this moment where Bitcoin used to be worth a couple of dollars, then a couple hundred dollars, then a couple thousand dollars. Now, people are freaking out because the magic internet money is dropping below $100,000. Stop the madness. This is insane. We're talking about like a 5% move down. Yes, it's thousands of dollars per coin, but it's still only 5%. Pay attention to percentages. Stop paying attention to the aggregate amount. That's first. Second of all, why is it going down? Because the market got fearful. Why did the market get fearful? DeepSeek, the brand new AI coming out of China.

• 4:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone's like, oh, my God, did we get sold a bill of goods that wasn't what we thought it was in terms of the stock market? Nvidia and many other stocks, they overvalue. Should we go risk off? Should we take our money out of the stock market before these companies light it on fire? So what do they do? They sell stocks, they sell liquid assets, and they try to get cash. In times of uncertainty, investors want cash and they're willing to sell their investable assets in exchange. So those things all go down. But here's the thing that's interesting. In 2017 and in 2020, during those bull markets, we saw multiple drawdowns of over 30% in the Bitcoin price, even though the price went up hundreds of percent throughout the entire bull market. So it run up, it draw down 30% or more. Run up, draw down 30% or more.

• 5:42Anthony Pompliano?

  In 2020, people forget, I'm sorry, 2021, we actually got the mining ban and we drew down more than 50% in May of 2021. And so you say to yourself, hold on. Every time the price of Bitcoin is going down now in 2025, there's a really strong bid. Draws down 5%. There's buyers there. They're showing up and they're saying, you're going to give me discounted Bitcoin? I want that. And so what we're seeing is much more muted downside volatility because there are so many buyers. Buyers in the market. And so could the market go down significantly 15, 20, 30%? Sure. Is it likely? Probably not. And I think that's probably the thing that I'm paying attention to the most is not so much is the price going up or, you know, uh, oh no, it's crashing, whatever.

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's what is the severity of these market drawdowns? And what we're seeing is that they're very muted compared to historical trends, which tells me that there's a very strong bid for Bitcoin, which is exciting to see.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  All right. So one of those buyers is Michael Saylor. Obviously he bought another 10,000 plus Bitcoin uh for over a billion dollars with the average price of this purchase being at around 105,000. What are your thoughts? Is he just, you know, he's already doubled down so much. You just continue to, you know, feed the beast that he's been doing or like, where does he go from here? And do you see his buying kind of slowing down over the next, you know, 12, 24 months?

• 6:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if you are dollar cost averaging into any asset, whether you're dollar cost averaging into the S and P 500 index, whether you're doing it into Bitcoin or you're doing it into your favorite stock, you don't look at the price. You are just trying to buy every single week, month, year, whatever your, your kind of frequency is. Michael Saylor seems to buy every week. And so every Monday morning he announces, what did he buy? And some of the purchases have been smaller compared to his past purchases and some of them have been larger. He doesn't care what the prices, he's simply just acquiring Bitcoin and whatever money he can make each uh week, he then takes it and he converts it to Bitcoin just uh over and over and over again. I think he now has something like 470,000 Bitcoin on his balance sheet.

• 7:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So if he buys 10,000 Bitcoin for the next couple of weeks, he's going to be at 500,000 Bitcoin, right? But rather than try to say, hey, how the heck am I going to get to 500,000? Just whatever I can buy this week, I buy and keep doing that. And that's the beauty of dollar cost averaging is you don't care if the price is high or low. You simply just continue to um, you know, acquire the asset. The other thing that I would say, which I think is really important, is that he also is creating new ways for him to raise capital. So he is now coming out with these uh preferred equity uh uh issues that he's going to be able to do. He's going to be able to sell those at the market. Um, on top of that, we're seeing a lot of accounting changes happen. They're going to work in his favor. SAB 121 means that people are going to be able to put Bitcoin in the bank. There's a lot of stuff happening in the market right now.

• 8:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So all the fear from the stock market, those people have lost their minds. They couldn't even tell you. This is my favorite part. There are people in the market today selling stock in some sort of AI related company and they can't even explain to you AI. You shouldn't have bought the stock, probably. All you're doing is momentum investing. But then, why are you selling? Uh, uh, uh, I read somewhere or something. Uh, uh, uh, sell, right? So if you say to yourself, hold on a second here, what you have is you have retail investors who don't actually even know what they own. If you don't understand the underlying technology, if you don't have a point of view as to why is this stock in particular, good or bad? Then of course you panic, right? And if it's going up, you panic buy, and if it's going down, you panic sell.

• 8:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So the timeless investing principles of know what you own, make sure you do the work, stay emotionally disciplined. All those things are being tested right now. And the beauty of a strategy of just dollar cost averaging into an asset, it's very simple. Think of it as a savings account. Hey, every week I put money in my savings account. Every week I put money in my savings account. I don't think about price. I don't think about just savings, savings, savings. You're just choosing with Bitcoin, not to save in dollars, you're choosing to save in Bitcoin, and there's a lot of value to that.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Jack Mahlers has famously said that he does not hold any cash. He buys everything with their credit card, and when his credit card bill comes due, he simply just sells the Bitcoin and pays off his credit card, right? He's like, why would I hold the devaluing fiat versus Bitcoin that obviously has a more upside than the dollar?

• 9:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that is one way to live your life.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Interesting way for sure. All right, let's talk about Trump and his tariffs that he is putting out there on what seems to be every country in the world. The latest, I would call victim of his tariff is Colombia. He's gonna put a 25% tariff on Colombia and says it's gonna be raised 50% next week on any goods imported into the US.

• 10:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, hold on a second. This is important detail here. We gotta remember that the United States of America is the most powerful nation in the world. And when you have that position, you have two options. You can weaken yourself by running around the world and operating from a position of weakness. So naturally, people start to say you're weak and they put you in the weakness bucket. Or you operate from a position of strength and you use the fact that you are the most powerful nation in the world to your advantage to get your agenda done. Donald Trump, he's basically the bully in chief. And being a bully in these cases is a good thing. So what happened? The United States of America decided that we are going to deport people who broke the law and are here illegally.

• 10:49Anthony Pompliano?

  This is not a new idea. There are videos of Hillary Clinton and many Republicans and many Democrats all saying, if they broke the law, they gotta go back. It's pretty simple. So take the politics out and say, these are people who broke the law. Get them back to the country. The United States put them on planes and sent them back to Columbia. And the president said, we ain't accepting the plane. Okay. Well, I talked to somebody from Columbia. You know what he told me? That guy's not very popular. That guy's got a bunch of nonsense going on in the country. And so he is not exactly the quote, quote, leader of majority of the people because his

• 11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  approval rating is in the dumpster. So Trump hears about this. Trump was golfing, went to his little golf cart, got his phone. Okay, big dog.

• 11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Typed out his little true social message. Said, effective immediately, we are putting a 25% tariff. We're going to increase that to 50% in one week. We also are going to go after the diplomats. We are going to go after visas. We just basically like scorched earth. We're sending these people back to you and you're not going to accept them? Watch what we can do. Within two hours, the president of Columbia came out and said, not only will we accept those people, I'll send my personal presidential plane to pick up more of them if you would like. That is where dealing from a position of strength works. And so you may not like the mean tweets. You may not like the aggressive behavior. You may not like somebody running the country that is the bully in chief.

• 12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you look at the A B test that we ran over the last eight years, it is definitely better for the United States to operate from a position of strength than a position of weakness. And so this is not that hard. We are deporting people who are breaking the law, who are sexually assaulting children, who are raping people, who are committing violent crimes. We don't want them in our society. Send them back to where they came. They are here illegally. On top of that, it's not that difficult. When somebody says, I'm not going to do something. Do you have a position of strength and leverage or not? And in this case, Trump has immense leverage. So use it. Why are we going to be held hostage by the country of Colombia?

• 13:13Anthony Pompliano?

  For their people who are here in our country illegally? Send them back. It's not that hard. And so I think that it's just a return to common sense. It's a return back to we want a safe and prosperous America. We are a country of immigrants. There are people who come to this country that are vetted, that are approved and that are legal. Great. Let's get as many of those people as we can. But if you're coming here illegally, especially if you're committing crimes, your stay is probably not going to be that welcome or that long.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Do you see it as a negotiation tactic of what he's doing?

• 13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. Every president in the world is scared of the United States putting 25, 50% tariffs on their country. These are like weapons of mass economic destruction. If you go to especially smaller countries and you say, if you don't do what we want you to do, dealing with our country, right? We're not going and saying, hey, you got to do something in your country. We're saying that we're just simply trying to do something in our country. You're trying to prevent us from doing that. Okay. Let's see how that game gets played.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Do you worry about the effect on the average American consumer? Getting prices raised in the short term or long term because of tariffs imposed?

• 14:32Anthony Pompliano?

  No. I think that the actual percentage of tariffs that are implemented is going to be very low. It's very much a threat, right? It's kind of like, um, you know, if you are, uh, the person who has the monopoly on violence, you actually never want to have to fire the gun. Right? Can you?

• 14:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Get, you know, the, the mission successful by never having to firing the gun. And so there is this, um, yeah, there's this concept in the military. It's, uh, using surprise and violence of action. So for example, if, uh, you're gonna go and you're gonna go kick in the door of a house. You're trying to capture a high value target. The whole goal is to get onto the site without being detected. To swiftly kick the door in and to immediately appear like you have hundreds of people and you swallow them immediately. You're in every room as fast and as safely as possible. And you are there with a moment of surprise and a violence of action.

• 15:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you kick that door in, what do you do? You move quickly. You're very well trained. You're loud. You want them to feel like, oh my God, there's a hundred of them here.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Chaos.

• 15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It's controlled chaos. And guess what? That violence of action and that surprise leads to success most times. The same idea is here. Think about what happened. We're not going to accept those people. Phone call to the president. Oh yeah. Violence of action, surprise, immediately throws the other negotiating party completely off of the position that they're on. To the point where they're like, I showed up with a garden hose. You showed up with a bomb. I, I can't, I can't compete with you. There, there, there's just no competition. Fine, have it your way.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  What about the idea of like negotiating in public? Right? So like he essentially proposed these tariffs through a truth tweet or whatever. Is that a good thing that he's kind of negotiating so openly in public versus like talking to another country or another nation? Um, and what you're gonna do there? Obviously, there's a lot of conversations in rooms that are not public. But like, is it a good thing that he's willing to go out on such a whim and just like, kind of make these, uh, bold and aggressive moves just out in the open?

• 16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think he's negotiating. I think he's threatening them. It's a completely different, uh, mentality. If you're negotiating, you want to meet in the middle. There is no negotiating. He's telling them, you're gonna do this, or I'm gonna do that. Take it or leave it. Right? And so it's a threat. Now, there's a lot of people, and it's not lost to me. A lot of people don't like that approach, but it's a very effective approach. And again, you have to kind of go back to, and you know, it's very generalized, but there's a lot of people who like, oh, the mean tweets. Like dude, yeah, he tweets stuff sometimes, and I think everyone is just like, come on, stop, right? Please, like, just, you know, do the effective stuff. But it's similar to, I don't know if you remember when Elon Musk went on SNL?

• 17:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And one of the opening lines was like, I'm trying to like conquer Mars. Did you think I'd be normal? Right? Same thing here is if you want somebody who's highly effective, is threatening, is kind of the bully in chief in moments like this. You gotta kind of deal with on the other side, like the mean tweets and the, you know, the things that maybe other people are like, all right, like that's, you know, not necessarily conducive to the agenda. And so one of the things I think people could really benefit from is remember that all of these individuals are complicated figures. Right? Elon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, I just got along with all the people that you see in the business world and in politics. They're all complicated figures. And so there's no one box to put them in. Right?

• 18:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you can say Donald Trump is excellent at geopolitical negotiations and getting what he wants. He also tweets sometimes and says things that, you know, even he, I think would say like, ah, you know, maybe I shouldn't have said that one. Right? Um, but you're kind of looking at the overall package. Right? And I think that that's really important. The other point that I would, uh, really, you know, kind of highlight is, uh, sunlight is the best disinfectant. And so a lot of times this stuff happens in private. Well, do you know why the guy caved in two hours? Because Donald Trump didn't just tweet at him. Donald Trump tweeted to the entire world. And every Colombian was like, wait a minute, what? What's gonna happen?

• 19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so immediately the president, not only has the president of the United States attacking him, he has his people who are going to get very upset. And there's this like bottoms up pressure as well. And so, you know, I think that Donald Trump is a natural communicator. He's probably one of the best communicators in the United States. That's why he became the president.

• 19:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Do I think that he sits down and he's like, well, the strategy here is whatever. He's not like playing Battleship, right? He's just going with his gut and he happens to have a really good gut. And so there's probably things that he's doing that he knows will work, but he probably couldn't even explain to you all the detail. And so people externally are trying to break this stuff down. He tweeted on two social, this, how many characters and this word? And he's doing this and he's playing 3D chess, whatever. I think Donald Trump is probably just like,

• 19:53Anthony Pompliano?

  dude, you're taking these people back. What's the craziest things I could come up with that would decimate your country? You don't take them back. Tweet it. And again, pros and cons to that approach, but uh, I don't know if there's been a president in the last 15, 20 years, they got a country to reverse course in two hours. That's pretty quick. And then offer to send their own planes, right? I mean, just think about that. It's like, you know, Mexico is going to pay for the border. No, we're not. Okay. So I think that that is, it's just a very different approach to governing than what we, you know, had for the last four years. Um, and it'll take people get some getting used to. But I do think that there's been kind of this vibe shift in America where a lot of people are like, you know what? I'm cool with it.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  There's definitely been a vibe, vibe shift for sure. Uh, let's talk about deep sea or deep seek that just got announced by China. Um, sub less than $6 million to build it, less than 200 employees, took them two months, um, and it is cheaper, better, faster than open AI. Um, obviously we just saw that SoftBank is going to put in 500 billion into the US for AI infrastructure. Is China winning this game? Are we, are we now behind? Like, how do you think about the relationship there, uh, between the AI models? And then also like, you know, the countries as a whole and where they're going.

• 21:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, first of all, this entire conversation, we need to use the word allegedly. First of all, deep seek allegedly has 200 employees, allegedly created this for less than $6 million. Masa and SoftBank allegedly are going to invest $500 billion, right? There, there's a lot of, uh, promises. There's misleading statements, there's a lot of bombastic claims, all that. So what you have to do is in these moments, I always say to people, understand what is being said by the players and then think for yourself. Is it likely that deep sea created a better model for one one hundredth of the cost?

• 21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  With something like one two hundredth of the number of employees. Possible? Sure. Likely? Absolutely not. So is it more likely that we are being misled by the cost or the number of people working on it? Or is it likely that somehow this company figured out something that the smartest people in America couldn't figure out? Probably the truth's in between. It probably cost more, probably took more people, probably took more time than we're being told. But also, it's a wake up call to American companies. Get your ass and get it together, right? And so if you go and you look at this, uh, let's start with just deep seek in general. There's a lot of investors that are crying on the internet. Boo hoo hoo.

• 22:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Stocks are going down. I'm selling my Nvidia because this came out. People are wondering, I saw investors in Anthropic and perplexity and OpenAI. They're all crying all over the internet. Dude, this is cutthroat competition. This is literally the competition for future technology supremacy. And you guys want to complain on the internet about, oh, they're cheating. Oh, they violated the export law. Oh, they, they trained their model on our model. What?

• 23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What are y'all talking about? It's like, again, go back to the, the military analogy. It's like going to war and saying, oh, we said they couldn't use that weapon. And now that we're trying to kill each other, they're using that weapon. Referee, throw the flag. Looking for the Kansas City Chiefs best player. Throw the flag, right?

• 23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  That's not how it works. Somebody wins and somebody dies. Now, this isn't war. There's not, you know, literally death, uh, as kind of like the, the end judge. But there's a lot of ramifications and possibly there are military ramifications. And so if there's a cutthroat competition for AI supremacy, all bets are off. All the rules that you think the other side's going to play by?

• 23:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe, hopefully, but what you need to focus on what you can control. You can't control whether they violate the export laws or not. You can't control whether they train their models on your models. You can't control whether they're taking your data and bringing it to China. By the way, what do you think OpenAI is doing? They're taking everyone else's data, bringing it to the US, right? So all you can control, build better models, build better products. Figure out how we put AI into as many companies as we possibly can to get efficiency to increase. Get AI in the hands of as many of our citizens as possible so they can get, uh, become more productive. That is what we can control. Be better. Stop complaining, start competing. Now, the reason why that's not popular is because what it means is that it's our fault

• 24:38Anthony Pompliano?

  that a Chinese company is winning. Why is it our fault? Cause we haven't done enough. We haven't built a good enough model. We haven't built a good enough product. We didn't create a moat. We didn't figure out the chips. We didn't do all this stuff. And so what it comes back to is there's a lot of people who they want to point fingers and it's easier to complain or to kind of lay blame somewhere. But at the end of the day, this battle, this competition is going to get won in a free market and a very meritocracy, uh, you know, kind of system. Either we build the best products and models or we don't. It's that, that's really how simple it is. And so DeepSeek is cheaper for people to use. It's open in terms of open source.

• 25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw somebody recently talking about, well, a hedge fund created this. Is there a world where they open sourced it and had a short on Nvidia?

• 25:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the stuff you're talking about now. This is a competition. Winners focus on winners.

• 25:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Second place losers focus on what number one is doing. Who cares what the competition is doing? We can learn from them, right? We can pay attention to how they do the inference, how they do the training, how many GB, all that stuff. But who cares what they built in terms of focus on us building the best? And what ends up happening in innovation competitions? The competition makes both sides better. And so if we want to be a winner, focus on building better models, build better products, build this technology. The United States can, and I believe should be the winner.

• 26:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's make sure we have capital. Let's make sure we have the right entrepreneurs. Let's make sure we have the right talent, focus 100% of their effort, make it a national priority, and get as much of the kind of bureaucracy out of their way. Because we just saw the opening shot from one of our friendly adversaries.

• 26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And that was a pretty good shot, right? It's like coming out in a prize fight and they just hit us for the first time. We're like, oh damn, they hit hard.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  But this has real world ramifications, right? Novideo, for example, down 11% on the day. The stock market is down a lot. But there's the Fed meeting this week and there's like a bunch of things that kind of go outside. How do you think about from an investor's standpoint? Like, is tech really where people should be focusing, given Mag7's rise over the last, you know, 12, 18 months compared to the rest of the S and P 500? Should they be going a little bit more conservative? Obviously, you're a big fan of Bitcoin as well in your portfolio. Like, how should they start thinking about all these tech stocks? And then, you know, everything else in their portfolio?

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, every person is different, right? You know, the way I invest is I look at the edges of innovation and I'm looking for two things. I want things that check the boxes of timeless investing principles, and I want things that will be highly resilient over time. Bitcoin is a quintessential example, right? You can dollar cost average into it. You can buy a great asset, you can hold it for a long time. It checks all these boxes around. Nobody can create more stock, right? There's actually a buying back of the stock via lost Bitcoin. There's, you know, a bunch of different things you can go through that end up being these timeless investing principles. But it's on the edge of innovation, which I like as well. And then I think that it is one of the most resilient pieces of technology that exist. So it checks all the boxes, bam.

• 27:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I put a lot of money into it, right? And so then you say, so what else checks those boxes? And what I think people are figuring out is these AI models, you are one model release away from a competitor to yours being heavily, heavily discounted. So if you are in a hyper competitive environment, what is the mote? What is the thing that defends you from everybody else? Unclear. And so that's why you see them starting to build kind of consumer products, right? Perplexity, Arvind, the CEO and founder, he came out and he said, hey, we're going to use DeepSeek as part of our models. You start to now use all the different models and you say our product is actually

• 28:39Anthony Pompliano?

  the consumer interface and the relationship with the customer, not just the model. And so I think that is how this world is going to change. But for me in AI in particular, there's two areas I'm most interested in. I'm looking for companies that use AI, not companies that necessarily make AI. And so what I use, I use a metric. I want to see the revenue per employee increasing over time. So if you have $500,000 per employee today, two years from now, I'd like to see 1.2 million dollars. Right. And whatever the numbers end up being, but I want to see that number continuing to increase because AI is supposed to increase efficiency and increase productivity. So how do you measure that? Well, can we make more money and revenue per each employee we employ? That would suggest that we're understand efficiency and productivity.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  The second thing is I'm very interested in the intersection of AI and crypto. And so as one example, I have a small position in something called AI 16Z. The reason why I'm interested in that is an open source project. They use the Eliza framework, one of the most popular frameworks for a lot of this stuff in the world. And usually an open source project would be released and there's no way to make money from it. But what these guys have done is they've created a crypto coin that is related. And they're starting to work on tokenomics and various things that can help derive value into that coin from the project. And so then it becomes really interesting. You have open source software, which is objectively open source. But then there is an economic incentive component. So you can actually attract capital to fund future development.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But you also can attract intellectual capital because people are going to hold this token. They're going to be interested in your success. And so they start to help, you know, on the fringes, et cetera. Where does it go? Is it going to be sustainable resilient? I don't know. It's a very small position, but it's interesting. Right. And if it ends up working, that'd be pretty cool. And so I think that's the types of stuff that I'm interested in, right? Is as AI kind of proliferates Bitcoin and crypto will as well. And these technologies, they're on a collision course. They're all the same thing. It's the, it's an automation age. It's not, oh, AI is over here and crypto is over here. This is all part of one huge big trade that is going to change what our day to day lives are over the next 20 years.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Do you think that having a small position in something out of curiosity to become more interested in it is a good idea? Or is it, hey, look, like only really invest in things that you actually know and understand? You mentioned, you know, AI investing earlier. Some people are buying Nvidia because it's in the news and it's on, you know, CNBC.com, Bloomberg, whatever. But is there a world where it's like, okay, I want to know about this more? AI agents is probably one of the better examples. Like, should I put a little bit of my portfolio in there?

• 31:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that you should never buy something you don't understand. But I do think that, take Bitcoin as an example, I always tell people, get $5 of Bitcoin and send it to somebody. Have them send it back to you. Use the product, right? Part of your diligence, if you were going to go buy, I don't know, Nestle, you know, the company, stock, you probably want to try some of the products, right? You probably want to, you know, do some research. You probably want to understand. There's a lot of people who, you know, they buy Nike stock. Why? Why? I wear the shoes. I like the shoes. Okay. Well, you know, I did some diligence. And so same thing here is you may want to be a user of the product, but not necessarily just, oh, I'm buying some Bitcoin because then it's going to make me pay attention. Now, the thing is, once you buy it, you do pay attention, right? But I

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  think being a user and doing research and really understanding what you're buying is much more important than, oh, let me just go YOLO into, you know, a stock or crypto or whatever, and then hope that that's going to help me pay attention. You know, it's kind of like, if you can't pay attention without putting your money in, we may have other, you know, conversations as to, maybe you shouldn't be, you know, actively investing.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Maybe use a fund manager or something.

• 32:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, or just go buy an index, right? You know, look, you always go back to this idea that,

• 32:31Anthony Pompliano?

  do some hedge funds beat the S and P 500 each year? Of course. Do a lot of hedge funds beat them every year for a long period of time? Of course not. And so,

• 32:42Anthony Pompliano?

  can you juice returns by participating in areas where there's asymmetric opportunity? Yes. AI, crypto, etc.

• 32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  But most people, it's going to be 1% of their portfolio. And so it can help you on the fringes, but still the bulk of your money, you got to make a decision as to what to do with that. And for majority of people, buy an index and, you know, waiting is probably the smart decision.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  It's pretty crazy with all of the resource, what seems like all the resources in the world, all of the money in the world, hedge funds still can't beat the S and P.

• 33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Some hedge funds don't want to beat the S and P, right? That's the other kind of like secret to all this is a lot of funds, especially these like pod shops. They say, look, we're not trying to beat the S and P. What we're trying to do is we're trying to deliver, you know, 12 to 14% returns consistently year after year after year, regardless of whether the market's up or down. And we want to do it with a very low variance in terms of risk and volatility. And so they have a very specific product that they are, you know, kind of selling to their clients. And so when the market's down, if you're still up 12 or 13, that's great. If the market's at 24%, you do 12, you know, 14%.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  And you got a 2% management fee.

• 33:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So, you know, it's like, what are you ultimately trying to accomplish? And then you're judged on what you told investors you're going to be able to do.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Makes a lot of sense. All right. That's it for today.

• 34:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks for doing this.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.