The Pomp Podcast - Wall Street Is ALL-IN On Bitcoin | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Anthony Pompliano and John Pompliano break down what’s really happening with bitcoin and the macro environment, covering inflation, AI-driven deflation, and Wall Street’s growing push into bitcoin through ETFs. They also discuss why bitcoin has held up during global conflict and why its scarcity could make it a long-term winner.====================Consensus Miami is the largest crypto conference in the world — May 5-7, 2026 in Miami. 20,000 attendees. 72% director-level or above. The deals, partnerships, and investments that shape the next cycle get made here. Use code POMPLIANO for 25% off your pass → https://go.coindesk.com/c26pomp====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.====================0:00 - Intro0:44 - Bitcoin back above $75,000 & inflation outlook10:42 - Stock market having one of its best years? 14:56 - How will assets perform rest of the year? 19:16 - AI impact on jobs 25:11 - There is a Wall Street war for bitcoin

In a world of abundance, scarcity becomes very valuable. And so what is more scarce than Bitcoin? Not a lot. And especially when you have Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, all these guys coming in with the ETFs, you have Michael Saylor and Strategy buying up as much Bitcoin as they possibly can. Bitcoin is going to do very well over the next decade. I think a lot of people have been convinced otherwise.

In a weird way, those who stay focused and understand the power of Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin, I think will be rewarded over a long period of time. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with John Pompliano. he turns the tables and he asked me some questions talking about Bitcoin, AI, what's going on in the macro environment, oil prices, gas, PPI, CPI, and what is going on with all these Wall Street banks all of a sudden diving deep into the deep end of Bitcoin. All that and much more in this conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what you got for me?

Big story of the day, Bitcoin back above 75,000. We finally reversed all of the losses that we had since the Iran war started. What do you think about Bitcoin being back up and on the upward trend? There's a couple of things. Celebrating when you're down is really not the smartest thing to do. But I do think that there's a sign of relief here. People are excited because, hey, we're starting to see that maybe we did bottom at $60,000. Now, famous last words, it's a knock on wood. But what I would say is two things. One, Bitcoin has definitely been the shining light among a sea of red during the Iran war. And so there's kind of this weird dynamic where if you said to someone before we went into Iran and started bombing them,

okay, what's going to happen to stocks? People would say probably would rally because you would think that all of these asset prices are going to go up because there's going to be inflation to fund the war, the dollar. And because of all of that, you're going to see, especially defense stocks, energy, et cetera. The second thing is you would expect oil to go up. The third thing is that you would expect bonds in terms of yields and all that. And then the fourth is Bitcoin would go down, kind of a risk type asset. Well, guess what happened? Exactly the opposite of all of that. Stocks and bonds went down, gold went down, oil went up, which you would have expected, and Bitcoin went up, which you would not have expected. And so when I look at that, it says

to me that, one, you can't look at history always as a guide for what's going to happen in the future. But two, is that Bitcoin has transcended. It has officially broken its correlation to all the tech stocks, et cetera. Now, can it hold that broken correlation? Remains to be seen. but I say it has transcended because Bitcoin basically has a couple of different ways to look at it. It is a digital asset. There's some people who like the fact that it's digital and not analog or electronic. It is decentralized. Some people like the fact that it's not controlled by anyone. It is non-sovereign. Some people like the fact that it's outside of their government, no other government controls it. And it is neutral. And I think that's what we're seeing

now is people are saying, wait a second, a neutral, non-sovereign, digital, decentralized asset has value in the world. And a big part of this is, yeah, sure, Iran allegedly wants to get paid in Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Forget all that for a second. If you need right now to move money around the world during conflict, well, you can't even move a barrel of oil around the world in some places because there's a blockade. Gold is pretty heavy. Now you start to say to yourself, wait a second, what if I need a digital store of value? bitcoin becomes interesting now what i do think is interesting is that bitcoin is still sold off so we can claim victory since february 28th to now and be like oh look how great we are okay

it's fine bitcoin's still down it was 126 000 it's down to 75 000 i'm not a mathematician but that's about 50 000 of loss from the all-time high and so from that perspective you say okay well why is it that bitcoin is still down 11 year to date or down you know 50 000 from its all-time high. I believe that a huge part of this is because of deflation. And there's plenty of people who disagree with me. Everyone says higher gas prices are going to lead to inflation, yada, yada, whatever. I do not believe that the short-term impact on oil is going to be nearly as important as the four macro deflationary trends that are swallowing the US economy. Tariffs are deflationary, deportations are deflationary, AI is deflationary,

and robotics are deflationary. And I think those four forces are much, much bigger deal than the short-term spike in oil. And as we saw, we announced that, oh, there was a ceasefire, immediately oil drops. Now there's a blockade, there's all the volatility coming back, prices going higher, all this stuff. But if we get to a culmination and an end, like an actual end to the Iran war, and the straight opens up, oil is going to fall off a cliff. A barrel of oil is somewhere around 50 to 60 bucks if there is no funky business going on in the world. Okay, well, if it's trading at 100, that means it could drop 50%. So you say to yourself, a lot of the current price increase in oil is due to these artificial

external shocks to oil. Well, that then trickles through to gas prices being higher. And if all of a sudden you remove those external shocks, sure, is it going to come right back down on a single day? Probably not. But we saw it dropped down to 80 bucks a barrel as soon as we announced the ceasefire. well what if we actually announce a peace deal and it becomes known in the market we are not no longer uh bombing iran i think that you're gonna see oil come down i think you're gonna

see stocks rip higher stocks are back already green on the year so i mean imagine being a panicking what i mean that's just like a loser life right just just think about how crazy that is every time you get a sniff that there could be some sort of bad situation coming you immediately panic that's what a panicking is for those that don't know you just panic all the time emotional investor yeah not even emotional you just you you don't have brain cells right tariffs are coming oh my god the world's gonna end the shelves are gonna be empty inflation is gonna be high the great depression ah remember how crazy everyone was do you remember what i was saying in april of last year we were back to an all-time high stock price by the end of the year we were back

by like August. Why? Because all noise. It is all noise. It is an overreaction from the mainstream media and from investors who have an academic view of the world. Okay. Guess what I've been saying this entire time? Short-term oil prices and gas prices are all noise. How do I know that? Well, we just got the PPI today. The expectation across Wall Street for PPI, headline PPI was 4.6%. That's a massive jump. It was 4%. How do you miss that bad and keep your job? How's that possible?

Imagine if I, on a daily basis, was so wrong that I basically ran around and told everyone, the world's ending, the world's ending, the world's ending. And then we find out, no, it's only 4%. It'll be revised later on too. By the way, the 4% is higher than it was before. So it's not that like the direction of travel was wrong. It's not like they said it was going up and it went down, right? So I'm not claiming that, oh, there's no impact.

What I'm saying though is consensus was 4.6% that came in at four. Well, why is that? Do you remember two weeks ago on April 2nd when I told everyone that trueflation was telling us that higher gas prices in America were not going to lead to higher inflation at the level that everyone was expecting? If you go back, Truflation, for those that forget, on the second day of April or first and second day of April, they basically get updated at the start of each month with a bunch of these data sets. So they go and they revise Truflation. It changes on a day-to-day basis because of the data points, but there's a lot of people who report once a month. Truflation had gone from 0.8% CPI number up to 1.7%, more than doubled since the Iran war. That's a big deal, right? So no one is claiming that inflation was not going higher. Truflation was saying it, people were saying it, all that. But on April 2nd, when I looked at Truflation, it went from 1.7% down to 1.2%. Huge revision down, like abnormal revision down. Why? Well, if you go and you look into the data, there was four major sectors that had negative growth on a month-over-month basis. Food, utilities, transport, and housing. All four sectors, four huge inputs

into inflation measurement were negative. Not like growing slower, they were negative. So when you look at that, you say to yourself, hold on, gas is up, of course. But is gas more important than food, utilities, transport, and housing? No. And so that's how I knew is because actually the true flation number revised down two weeks ago. And so I continue to tell people true flation is the most accurate measurement of inflation in the United States. It has a 98% correlation to CPI, not PPI, but CPI. It's just that CPI has a one month lag. So if you look at what true inflation tells you, a month later, that's what CPI is going to tell you. This is easy. This is like, I'm not a smart person. I'm just merely looking at the data and saying,

okay, well, if this one tells me it's not going to be that bad, then this one's going to tell me that a month later. Why don't I just look at the one that is fresh, the one that's real time? So to me, that's the whole story here is everyone constantly promising us, oh my God, inflation's coming, inflation's coming. Everyone's brain broke during COVID because everyone thought inflation is always going to come back. Like, no, actually the lesson from COVID is how insane that situation was. We literally are bombing Iran. We put a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Oil has gone up over a hundred dollars a barrel. Gas is $4 in America and we don't have high inflation. So the fact that we had over 9% inflation, according to the CPI, tells you

everything you need to know about how insane an outlier event that was. But outlier events are outliers. They don't constantly repeat themselves over and over and over again. And so from that perspective, I think that there's this, you know, kind of like mental psychosis that is happening in finance, where it's almost like people want there to be bad things going on. And maybe some of it's like the Trump derangement syndrome stuff. But I think there's plenty of these people around when Biden was president, right? So I don't actually think it's like as political, maybe as people want it to be i just think there's a bunch of people who they have equal access to a megaphone now you can get on social media you can say whatever you want and guess what pessimists

they're able to attract an audience because they sound smart but show us your returns how many times you've been right right if you were predicting the next great recession you sold your stocks on february 28th or on march 1st and you were waiting for the 25 drop in the stock market that you claimed was coming? When'd you buy back in? When'd you wave the white flag? When did you give up? Cry uncle. Because you definitely didn't get a 25% drop in the stock market. And so it just goes back to, I could make the argument that the stock market is having one of its best years ever so far. Why? The intra-year drawdown average, average across years, the intra-year drawdown is 14 we didn't get 14 down the s&p so we're doing better than average year

so far year's not over year's not over of course i mean look could we get another huge right on sure but like i don't know whatever the s&p ended up going down nine ten percent didn't go down 14 and we're back to positive so if i told you the start of the year all right here's the deal ready we're gonna go we're gonna get the panama canal stuff going we're gonna go put a bag over maduro's head we're gonna use the discombobulator then trump's gonna really get on one i think he's got the hot hand he's gonna go start bombing iran we're gonna have them firing off drones and rockets and missiles and stuff all over the middle east hitting random countries and civilians and uh energy depots and all this stuff then we're gonna announce a ceasefire and then we're gonna go to

negotiations and not get the ceasefire oh by the way russia ukraine's still happening by the way China is over there trying to figure out what they're going to do because they're actually under a lot of pain right now. That's why they want Iran to settle this so they can start getting oil again. Oh, did you know that the United States has gone and bombed Ecuador? Ooh, that's going to, let's have that conversation. We literally are doing so many things in the Western hemisphere that most people don't even know that stuff is true. In Ecuador over the last, I don't know, eight weeks, we have bombed narco-terrorist organizations. A lot of people don't know that we dropped a bomb there, or a missile, or a strike, whatever you want to call

it. So if I told you all that was going on, and I told you the S&P was positive, would you have believed me? Probably not. If I told you that Bitcoin was one of the best performing assets during the conflict with Iran, most people probably wouldn't have believed that, right? so it just goes back to listen think long term it's all noise the best performing people just have a thesis that is going to last decades they stay disciplined you can be intellectually stimulated by the public conversation but just don't make emotional decisions off of it today's episode is brought to you by consensus miami i'm going to be speaking there on the main stage in a couple of weeks this is the event the entire industry shows up for wall street the white

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Sign up today at archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch, no hidden fees, just smarter trading. Your crypto, your exchange, your profits. ArchPublic. Go to archpublic.com and tell them I sent you. People care about returns. What do you expect leading into the rest of this year? it seems like there's been a little bit of flip-flopping from inflation to deflation to kind of where does this stuff go and how do you see assets reacting to-

Higher. Higher. Why do you think that? You didn't even ask me what asset, just higher. Bitcoin's going higher. Gold's going higher. Stocks are going higher. Because ultimately, we are going to get asset inflation. See, one of the weird things is people want to have a black and white world. So if I tell you, deflation is likely to happen, or it's the bigger risk, then people say, well, if there's deflation, then asset prices actually usually go down. Okay. But then if I tell you, but the government is going to be incentivized to print more money

and that money is going to find its way into assets because now people are convinced I shouldn't hold this cash. I'm not predicting this necessarily, but I think that there are higher odds that we could get asset inflation while consumer inflation does not get out of control? Very nuanced. Could we get asset inflation without high consumer inflation? Does the Fed or like who would be the main driver to ensure that that is a path to a possibility? Well, one way to think about this is could we have a low inflation, high growth economy? it's like a central banker's dream right is i don't have to juice the economy that much because we're getting high uh high growth already and inflation is staying you know low and

manageable okay well how could we get that well could we drive growth from artificial intelligence robotics crypto you know name your space right name all these uh kind of edited technologies at the same time that those technologies are deflationary from a consumer standpoint, 100% we could. And so guess what is starting to happen? We're seeing that play out. Sharpie, the maker of your favorite marker, they somehow reshored their manufacturing, used robotics.

They are paying their employees more money. They didn't fire people and they have better margins. That sounds- How is that even possible? Well, it goes back to, let's just use a simple example. If you have a factory and you have 100 employees at that factory, and those 100 people are, you're working them to the bone. You got to get it worked on.

There's no robotics, there's no machines, there's no anything. Okay. Well, let's say that those 100 people can produce, I don't know, use easy numbers. They can produce 20 units of your good every single day, all right? If you start to actually introduce machines, guess what happens? You first start machines augment the people. So now those 100 people can produce not 20 units. Maybe they can produce 22 or 25 units.

Well, your cost in terms of running day-to-day labor is a big input. Maybe the biggest input stayed the same. You still have 100 people working there. But now you're producing 25 units instead of 20. Well, if you have healthy margins, then you're likely to make more money. And you know you have healthy margins because the machines are making the same number of people more productive. Now, are there CapEx expenses?

And there's nuance, right? But generally, that's the idea. But what we're seeing is, well, what if you don't go from 20 to 25? What if the machines help you go from 20 to 50? Well, now you have more profits. You didn't fire anyone. so you as a business owner can make more money and pay the employees more money

because you have more money to work with and you're more productive. So what you've done essentially is you've increased or held your profit margin. You've got more profits as a business owner and your employees are better paid. You think people want to work at those types of businesses? But why does that happen now?

Like technology is, it's not something new, right? Especially in the logistics. Yes and no, yes and no, right? Um, how is it that Elon is able to pump out as many cars as he does? Robotics, right? So you look at it like Sharpie is a good example that that is pretty much the story of Sharpie is they invested in technology and they were able to do this, right? And it didn't have a negative impact on employees.

See, one of the things that I've changed my mind on is, um, one of the things I've changed my mind on is the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. or there are a lot of people who are going to have to retrain themselves and get new jobs 100 but there will be more jobs in the economy not less what do i mean by that well let's look at software engineers as an example basically ai came out we saw software job openings crater well guess what now they're up and they're growing rapidly there's more job openings today than there was when chat gbt came out why is that well if i can take this technology and i can hand it to an engineer and that engineer is now more productive. As a business owner, I'm incentivized. How do I

get as many of these people here as possible so that I can make them more productive so I can grow faster and accelerate and drive more profits and become more valuable? In a weird way, what we're doing is we're actually opening up the pool for a company and we're saying, look, for every dollar you invest in talent, you're actually getting more units of productivity from that dollar invested. You're incentivized to invest more, not less. I think that the AI job loss narrative is real in certain industries, but ProCap Insights, the research firm that we recently announced, what they're doing is they're using artificial intelligence to sift through mountains of data, find these insights, and then AI is actually writing the report. So it's the

first agentic research firm on Wall Street that we're aware of. Full bore AI writes the whole thing. One of those reports talks about the fact that actually, there's a lot of job loss for people between the ages of like 22 and like 28, but there is job increase, job growth for people over the age of 30. And so if you want to read that report, you can go to procapinsights.com. But in that report, you know what I took away from that? Experience just became more valuable. So now it is not only, hey, do you understand the technology, but do you have experience? And so if you put this stuff together, you realize like artificial intelligence is going to be a productivity boom but there is going to be deflation because the cost structure changes

but just because cost structure changes doesn't mean all of a sudden companies stop growing actually the opposite they accelerate you know one of the industries i'm very interested in data labeling i know i don't know i could probably rattle off eight or nine companies that either started going after this or were like defunct bad companies there's a company called handshake i don't know if you know this no there's a company called handshake they've been around for 12 or 13 years um it was going like okay i think last january they did like a million dollars of revenue or something like they were on pace to a million dollars of revenue uh then a couple months later there were five million i think they ended last year doing like

100 then 100 million in arr then uh they're up to um i think 500 million like a month or two ago and now i think they're doing a billion or something like that like whatever it is some crazy ramp right they're helping people do data labeling linkedin is now offering 150 an hour for people to label data in different sectors so if you think about that for a second like okay so let's say that you are i don't know an accountant and or let's even go uh less kind of professional training and licensing let's just say that you are um the front desk receptionist at a uh medical um facility and you've spent most of your time you know answering calls emails greeting people but also on the side uh you've been having to categorize and organize uh

pharmaceutical drugs maybe right there's increasing odds that a place whether it is a linkedin or some other service will pay you to do the exact same thing but label data so that the machines can learn how to do that and they'll pay you 150 200 bucks an hour so if you lose your job because all of a sudden you know your boss becomes some genius who wants to put like a computer screen there and he's gonna have somebody in the philippines you know answer the calls or whatever or he's gonna have somebody you know greet them on a computer screen in a weird way if you can reposition yourself and use the knowledge you have in data labeling you actually may make more money i'm not saying that's everybody i'm not saying it's easy i'm not saying that it's likely but i think those

are the types of opportunities now people are starting to realize is you can use the knowledge you have again, the experience, and you can apply it to these new industries. And so I think that there's a lot of folks who are saying to themselves, why am I doing the thing I'm doing? Why don't I take the knowledge and apply it to this new industry? And if I do that right, I can make more money, maybe work less and end up in a much better position. And so I think that's pretty exciting. Yeah. I didn't know this conversation was going to go this way, but it's an interesting topic on the idea of one, the experience side is, you know, if you have, instead of a pool of 10 entry level employees, you have five, obviously, you know, some employees

leave over the years, but you just have a smaller pool to pick from on the executive side of things. That's one thing. But the second thing is, I feel like a lot of people when they are, you know, hey, I'm data labeling, they feel like they're training the AI to take their job almost. How do you, how should people think about the difference between, hey, I am helping to increase productivity in my company, but I'm also maybe replacing, you know, work that I will have to do in the future. And there is no guarantee that there is, you know, other work for me to go do and be productive elsewhere. The number one thing you can do inside of a company to have job security right now is

become the AI guy or the AI girl. If you understand AI, if you understand how to implement it, you are not going to lose your job. These companies are going to ask you, can you do this? You do it. They're going to say, okay, that's great. Here's more responsibility. Here's more responsibility.

And it is a, you know, there's a difference between elevators and stairs. You know, people usually say that you take the stairs up and the elevator down. not if you know ai and a corporation you take the elevator up baby right because as soon as you become known as the ai guy or the ai girl you up and i think that that's going to be a a huge thing and you got to show results right but but that that's big and look this all comes back to bitcoin as well right i think a lot of folks are saying to themselves okay well bitcoin has this really weird relationship very sensitive relationship to global liquidity right like the u.s government's national debt, it continues to skyrocket. Bitcoin is going to recover. On top of that,

in a world of abundance, scarcity becomes very valuable. And so what is more scarce than Bitcoin? Not a lot. And especially when you have Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, all these guys coming in with the ETFs. You have Michael Saylor and Strategy buying up as much Bitcoin as they possibly can. Bitcoin is going to do very well over the next decade. I think a lot of people have been convinced otherwise. And in a weird way, those who stay focused and understand the power of Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin, I think will be rewarded over a long period of time. Morgan Stanley, good point. They just launched their ETF, most successful launch for them ever in the ETF space. How do you think about a lot of these players? Are they just,

they're looking to make transaction fees, looking to make custody fees, etc. Or is there something else that they're thinking about more long term? War going on on Wall Street and they all compete over who can get more assets into their ETF. And I love it. This is why America is great, right? If you look at what has happened is BlackRock came out, they broke the seal. They had a banger of a fund, right? I mean, the most successful product launch in the history of Wall Street. Kudos to Robbie, Larry Fink, all those guys over at BlackRock, right? They don't get nearly enough credit for what they did. Fidelity, right there alongside them. Then you get the Bitwises, you get the VanEcks, you get the 21 shares, the ARK Invest, right? And we just

rattle off fund after fund, after fund, after fund. Okay. Morgan Stanley wasn't playing. Now I got a story for you. I went and saw Morgan Stanley, I think in 2018, me and Mark Yusko went in and said, Hey, we got this fund. It's a venture capital fund, this Bitcoin thing. Would you guys consider putting this on your platform? And I'll never forget two older people in the room, two younger people in the room the two older people in the room they might might as well been snoozing they are you guys are idiots right one of the younger uh people was a guy and he was yo this is this gonna fly this is like he was like coattail on the way out he's like hey let me get your email you know let's talk right like this thing yeah i'm buying right you know like i'm in

the bitcoin and then uh there's a woman um who was probably like mid to late 20s if i remember correctly and um she was kind of agnostic she was like well i don't think that the old guys are right and i think this guy's a little too enthusiastic so like she was kind of in the middle and i think that that was pretty eye-opening because that was probably where most people were right was like there was this stratification of some people really excited a lot of people were not and uh they were not interested in putting the fund on their platform but they said you know keep following along whatever now they're offering funds but look it took eight years right amy who's the head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley went on Bloomberg. She said it's the best launch

they've ever had at Morgan Stanley. You telling me that every bank on Wall Street, every asset manager on Wall Street is not paying attention? BlackRock now just announced they're going to do an income Bitcoin fund. You telling me they ain't going to go deeper? They're not going to try to get more assets? It's game on. And so Wall Street's here. Wall Street's going to keep feeding the ducks. They're going to keep coming out with products as long as people keep investing in them. And I think it's only going to get bigger from here. And that's going to be a persistent bid for Bitcoin over time. Awesome. All right. Thank you. All right, guys. Thank you so much. Go check out ProCapInsights.com. We'll see you guys next time.