What's up, guys? On today's episode of Full Signal, we have Pomp — Anthony Pompliano, the CEO of Professional Capital Management. He joins me to talk about Bitcoin, why it did not do well in 2025, and what he thinks it'll do this year, and AI, how he's thinking about it, how people should be building on it, what young people should be doing in their corporate jobs with AI. This is a fantastic primer on the new technology and how investors should be approaching it. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Pomp, we are coming off the year that was supposed to be the biggest year for Bitcoin. We had so many tailwinds going into it. That did not happen. Tell us why.
Well, I think there's a lot of different things, right? I think if you look at economic policy shifted, I think that sentiment shifted in the market. And I also think that there are a lot of these changes that hit the market at different times. But if you look at Bitcoin in particular, there's always this difference between expectations and reality. And Bitcoin going into the year had really high expectations. And so naturally, if you don't live up to those expectations, then people are disappointed even if it does okay. And so if you go back and you actually started January 1, Bitcoin was down on the year a little bit. But if you go back to November 1st, just the difference of 60 days, Bitcoin was up. It started November 1st at 69,000, right? It obviously ended up higher than that at the end of 2025. And so you always got to be careful of some of the misleading data, you know, the difference between 60 days. But at the same time, it was down in 2025 and people thought it was going to be up a lot more. I think that's where a lot of the disappointment comes from.
If you ask me why it didn't go up, you know, you also have to remember it did go up and then it came down. And so there's always this kind of element of, okay, well, what happened over a 12-month period? First thing is, there is global stability coming back, right? Bitcoin is supposed to be a chaos hedge. Well, if there's less chaos, then people change the way they view the chaos hedge. I don't need that as much right now, right? And so I think that stability — if you look, obviously the Israel-Hamas stuff ending. I think that Ukraine-Russia is probably closer than ever to signing a peace deal. There are all these kind of components that have really come into the market. And a lot of that is because the US has basically stood up and said we are going to go back to being the world police. We're going to go enforce this stuff. We are going to go and, you know, decrease Iran's nuclear capabilities, like all this stuff. So that ends up leading to maybe the people who are buying Bitcoin as a chaos hedge not necessarily needing it.
The second thing is that Wall Street entered the game, and when Wall Street enters the game, they play a very different game than, you know, kind of maybe the Bitcoin system was before. They introduced things like ETFs, like treasury companies, like options, etc. And so if you just look at the idea of covered call strategies, which have exploded over the last couple of months, that provides a ton of sell pressure against Bitcoin. So it is a way to kind of suppress the volatility, suppress the price of Bitcoin. Not done in a nefarious or malicious way. It's just the structure of a market. Bitcoin historically was a very free market asset. There was only kind of long-only. It's the only way to play it. That has changed. And so I think that's another component.
The third thing I would say is that Bitcoin is not the only girl at the party anymore. You know, it used to be if you wanted asymmetry and you wanted something that was really volatile, you went and you found Bitcoin. But now there's a lot of stuff. Artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, robotics, you know, Palantir, all these different things that have come out into the market where people are saying, I want something that's asymmetric. Well, there's a lot of things I can choose from. And so it fragments capital, it fragments attention, and it fragments mental energy. And I think that that, you know, plays a part as well.
And then lastly, I would, you know, kind of tie a bow on all this and say ultimately you get paid the return for the risk you take. And Bitcoin is less risky today than it's ever been in the history of Bitcoin. A decade ago, people were talking about is Bitcoin going to make it. Two years ago, people were talking about is the government going to shut it down? And many people thought depending on who won the election of the president of the United States was going to determine what was going to happen. Now, nobody thinks the government's going to shut it down. Nobody thinks Bitcoin's going to zero. And nobody thinks that it's going to end up not being around 20 years from now. So the lower risk means you should expect a lower return. Doesn't mean you won't get any return. Just means it should be lower. And so I think that compounding growth rate will continue to kind of tick down over time. And, you know, I think Bitcoin is still a great long-term asset. I still have Bitcoin in my portfolio. But last year, you know, a little bit of disappointment maybe is a good thing. It kind of keeps people alive and on their toes.
Well, it's also if we got a negative Bitcoin year after back-to-back 100%, 100% gains, you're still doing almost better than every single asset class that you're competing with. And it's also interesting that you say that it's less risky than ever before because I talked to so many investors still that they lump Bitcoin into the boom and gambling, prediction markets, memecoins, they see Bitcoin as part of all of that, which I disagree with. I think that's the wrong category. So all of that being said, where do you see things going for Bitcoin in the next 12 months?
The fact that there are investors who think that is actually a positive sign. That means that there is still much more to go. When everyone believes that Bitcoin is valuable, Bitcoin's returns are going to be probably unattractive at that point. But the fact that you're talking to very sophisticated, very smart, usually very successful people who control a lot of capital, the fact that they are doing this and they think that Bitcoin is like that, Bitcoin is going to be just fine.
Where we go from here, I think it's actually going to be much of the same given the last, you know, decade or so. Now again, it's not going to appreciate at the rate that it did previously, but look, gold went up 70% last year. Everyone thought gold, you know, doesn't work. Gold is, you know, flat. All this seems to be working. So I do think that Bitcoin can deliver, I don't know, 25 to 40% compound growth rate for the next decade or so. If it did that, that would be a fantastic outcome I think for Bitcoiners. But it is going to really depend on what happens in the US economy, in the global economy, what happens with, you know, geopolitics, what happens in technology, right? All these things play into it. But I'm fairly bullish on Bitcoin moving forward, and I think that Bitcoin hasn't changed, the world has changed, and so Bitcoin will continue to be something that people seek out given its kind of decentralized nature.
I've seen you talk about how Bitcoin is more decentralized than ever as it gets less and less risky and maybe less and less volatile. Now you have institutions adopting it, you have countries adopting it, and more and more mainstream investors, retail, everyone's in it. So that's for people that are long-term Bitcoin, it's very good, but your asymmetrical returns will shrink. So I want to pivot to AI. You're doing a lot of work in AI. You're writing about it a lot. You're building Sylvia, which is a fantastic AI tool. I use it every day. Something that you've been pointing out is that you see AI as something that will combat inflation in the coming years. Can you walk us through how you see that?
Well, if you think about artificial intelligence, what people really should think about is artificial intelligence describes the technology. Automation describes the impact of the technology. So if you are going to use artificial intelligence, superhuman intelligence, and you are going to apply it in different tasks or applications, then you are going to get efficiency via that automation. And so I continue to say that there are nerds in the labs building super athletes. You have people who are building artificial intelligence agents and models. They're going after the knowledge workers. They're trying to do your job better than you. You may not like it. I'm not even saying that it's good for society. I'm just saying that that is what they're doing. They are creating synthetic intelligence and they are applying it to all kinds of jobs. So they are building super athletes to come after your job. Can you beat the super athlete? We're going to see some industries might be easier than others.
At the same time, there's other nerds. I love all the nerds. The nerds are amazing. But there's other nerds that are sitting in a lab somewhere and they're trying to build super athletes using machines and hardware, and they want those people to go into the blue-collar industries and go replace those jobs. And this is not new. I mean, if you go look at a Tesla factory and how they make the car, there's a ton of robotics everywhere. If you go to Amazon, Amazon has something like 1.5 million employees that are human. There's 750,000 robots that are actually working at Amazon. Eventually, that number is going to shift. And so over time, automation is the ultimate economic incentive because if you automate things, you make them more efficient. If you make them more efficient, you make them more productive. If you make them more productive, it means companies get more profit. If they get more profit, they're more valuable. So if you go all the way back to first principles thinking, automate, automate, automate.
And now we have nerds who are sitting in labs who are building super athletes to automate everything. And if you look at that, that means that you have this deflationary force hitting the economy because these super athletes, the models, agents, and robotics can do things that are more productive and at a lower cost. So when you start to get an extra unit of productivity for one less unit of cost, and then you put that on steroids, well, that becomes pretty powerful. And then people haven't even yet started to think exponentially. And I think this is actually one of the biggest misunderstandings. If you take the person who is likely in your circle of friends that is most bullish on AI, it is likely that they're underestimating what's going to happen. What the timeline is is very hard to hit. But what we know today is that a gentleman named Boris at Anthropic sat down for a side project, wrote some code, and he created something called Claude Code. Now anyone in the world can go to Claude Code and they can write in English, plain language: I would like something that does A, B, C, and D. It should look like X, Y, and Z. It should do this, this, this, this. Claude Code, which is artificial intelligence, writes code for you. So now we have code that writes code.
Well, guess what? As that software becomes more and more autonomous, it's going to bang out more and more code, and there becomes an exponential curve of software creation. Humanoid robots — it's cute today when they're picking up boxes. It's cute when they're assembling cars. What happens when they're assembling other humanoid robots? That's going to happen. And so you have another exponential curve. And so the world thinks in linear fashion. It thinks in static snapshots of where we are. But what you have to do is you have to be able to look at the exponential growth of these technologies and realize there is going to be autonomous software writing software code. It is going to be happening 24/7 around the world. There is going to be an explosion of software and automation in our lives. Humanoids are going to do the exact same thing. And so when you start to understand that, you then say to yourself, wait a minute, we are all underestimating what is about to happen.
Now, does that happen in one year or 10 years? I'm not here to try to predict exactly what year is going to happen. All I know is that directionally, I can see where this is going. And when I look at the people who are critics, I think they've lost their marbles. When I look at the people who are bullish, I think that they're being kind. And I actually think that most of them are probably even more bullish. They don't want to sound crazy though. And so when you go and you just look at this thing, I don't know, man, two years from now, that superintelligence, what's it going to be doing? Think about two years ago, almost every single AI product that you're using today did not exist. In two years, all of the popular apps, all of the popular things, they didn't exist. I think just over two years ago, ChatGPT came out. So think about how much progress we made in two years. And think about that with we did it with old technology, way less attention, way less capital, and way less people working on it. So if we have increased the technology, if we increased the capital, the attention, and the human capital working on this, we should be able to go faster, right? And now we're augmenting it with the synthetic intelligence we already have. It's the great acceleration, baby.
