Apr 13, 2020 · 57m · top-founders
New podcast: Anthony Pompliano on Price of Bitcoin, Gold, Chinese Power, Corporate Bailouts and 3 Places He's Investing
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In this comprehensive interview, investor Anthony Pompliano analyzes the macroeconomic fallout of pandemic lockdowns, critiques central bank stimulus and corporate bailouts, and outlines the long-term investment case for domestic innovation, artificial intelligence, and Bitcoin.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 21.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 5.0 Guest teaching 3.7 Guest disagreement 1.9 Nathan pushing back 2.1
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 27:26 Pomp condemns corporate executives seeking government bailouts
Pomp aggressively rejects the legitimacy of corporate bailouts, calling out corporate executives for viewing the federal government as the dumbest investor in the room after reckless share buybacks.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 55:15 Nathan challenges whether Bitcoin halving is already priced inNathan directly challenges Pomp's market thesis by drawing an equity buyback analogy and asking why known programmatic supply reductions wouldn't be fully priced in by market participants.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 21:55 Pomp breaks down structural bottlenecks in weekly jobless claimsPomp educates Nathan on why identical consecutive 6.6 million weekly jobless claims figures signal physical state call center capacity limits rather than true stabilization in newly unemployed workers.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 35:49 Nathan details debt-to-GDP metrics to prove de facto socialismNathan showcases strong domain knowledge by breaking down Goldman Sachs GDP contraction estimates against six to eight trillion in emergency stimulus to demonstrate government spending dominating the national economy.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Overview and Key Topics Preview | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Nathan Latka delivers an introductory monologue previewing the interview's core themes before welcoming Anthony Pompliano. The dialogue in this segment is strictly introductory pleasantries and biographical background. | |
| Lockdown Measures and Central Bank Stimulus Response | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Nathan frames the government quarantine mandates and aggressive Fed balance sheet expansion. Pomp explains macro liquidity dynamics, dollar strength in deflationary shocks, and the massive scale of fiscal/monetary stimulus required. | |
| Evaluating Nuanced Strategies for Economic Reopening | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Nathan challenges Pomp with a direct question on whether to immediately end quarantines. Pomp pushes back on binary framing, arguing for nuanced, age-stratified reopening policies rather than an all-or-nothing choice. | |
| Analyzing Data Quality and Mortality Rate Projections | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Nathan cites Sweden's herd immunity strategy and calculates hypothetical US casualty numbers. Pomp critiques the baseline data quality, highlighting selection bias in early testing and pre-existing condition comorbidities. | |
| The Economic Value of Life in Crisis Governance | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Nathan brings concrete market data, calculating capital loss per reported death to ask how society values life. Pomp explores the philosophical and economic trade-offs between socialist and capitalist crisis governance models. | |
| Media Categorization and the Broader Toll of Shutdowns | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Nathan asks whether government crisis messaging is used to justify future surveillance expansions. Pomp illustrates media reporting flaws using a case study of infant COVID mortality and highlights secondary economic mortality factors. | |
| Jobless Claims and Unemployment Systemic Bottlenecks | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Nathan cites historical post-2008 Yale research on the correlation between unemployment spikes and suicide rates. Pomp agrees the unemployment data is undercounting reality and posits that initial claims figures represent administrative processing bottlenecks. | |
| Assessing Direct Stimulus Checks Versus Full Universal Basic Income | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Nathan questions whether one-off stimulus checks will slide into permanent UBI under political pressure. Pomp argues that a single twelve-hundred dollar check is economically insufficient and asserts policy must choose between full UBI or targeted zero-check relief. | |
| Corporate Bailouts, Equity Stakes, and Moral Hazard | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Nathan probes corporate bailouts, specifically asking if the Fed and government should intervene in equity and corporate debt markets. Pomp strongly condemns corporate moral hazard, arguing companies that conducted buybacks should face market repricing rather than government bailouts. | |
| Wealth Inequality and Public Pension Fund Exclusions | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Nathan brings up Bill Ackman's public CNBC appearance and subsequent profitable hedge trade. Pomp contextualizes Ackman's portfolio risk management while explaining why institutional pension funds lose out due to avoiding elite asset managers over FOIA concerns. | |
| Supply Chain Resilience and Strategic Domestic Incentives | 6 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Nathan references Ray Dalio's economic principles to ask whether critical supply chains like PPE should be directly nationalized. Pomp counters that direct nationalization is dangerous and advocates for domestic tax incentives and entrepreneurial resource allocation instead. | |
| Surging Public Debt and the Drift Toward Socialism | 6 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Nathan provides macroeconomic ratios comparing US GDP projections with stimulus spending to argue the country is de facto socialist. Pomp agrees with the technical characterization, discussing how crises systematically break public resistance to government dependency. | |
| Debt Monetization, Inflation, and Reserve Currency Status | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Nathan asks how national debt can be resolved and whether China will exploit European geopolitical fractures. Pomp predicts perpetual debt monetization leading to the eventual loss of global reserve currency status, contrasting US demographics against China's playbook. | |
| Empowering Domestic Innovators Over Corporate Bailouts | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Nathan proposes X-Prize style domestic infrastructure moonshots. Pomp agrees, suggesting government stimulus would create far more net jobs if co-invested with tier-one venture capitalists rather than propping up legacy corporations. | |
| Top Three Strategic Areas for Infrastructure Investment | 6 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Nathan pushes Pomp on Bitcoin halving mechanics, interjecting to clarify 2008 gold drawdowns and questioning whether the upcoming supply cut is already priced into crypto markets. Pomp explains the supply-demand shock dynamics justifying his six-figure price target. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Pompliano: Government over-rotation on health crisis caused economic crisis
“I think what's happening is an over rotation on the health crisis, which causes the economic crisis.”
Pompliano: Liquidity panics drive all major asset correlations to one
“In times of uncertainty, they want dollars. And so what ends up occurring is all of those other assets end up Going to close to a correlation of one. So they all start going down. And we saw that with Bitcoin, gold, you know, treasuries equities, real estate, …”
Pompliano: Over $5T in stimulus needed to escape pandemic crisis
“I think it's going to end up being five plus trillion dollars needed to get out of this.”
Pompliano: Fed printing trillions will eventually trigger an inflationary environment
“What I think we're seeing right now is the feds fighting a deflation and you just, they're not going to win right until they start printing trillions and trillions of dollars. And when they do that, we will eventually get back into an inflationary environment.”
Pompliano: COVID-19 mortality rates will be much lower in retrospect
“One of the things that I personally think we're not going to get this for probably three to five years, but we're going to look back three to five years from now. We're going to say the death rates that were originally thought are going to be nowhere near wher…”
Pompliano: 99% of early Italian COVID-19 deaths had pre-existing conditions
“99% at one point of all of the deaths in Italy had either some other health concern or a pre-existing condition.”
Pompliano: Economic value cannot treat every life as equal
“Do you, can you put the same quote unquote dollar amount on a life of somebody at the end of life versus somebody who's 25 years old, right? And I tend to think that it's unlikely that you would put the same value, right? Especially economic output standpoint …”
Pompliano: Stimulus must be either zero checks or full UBI
“I'm of the belief of you have to go to one or the other extreme. You can't kind of put one foot in the water here. So either you give everybody zero and you just say, we are not going to give money. We are not even going to go down that path and people need to…”
Pompliano: Corporations seek bailouts because the government is an idiot investor
“And so I think you know, Mark Cuban and I see eye to eye completely on this, which is the reason why corporations are running to the government is because they believe that the government's the idiot in the room.”
Pompliano: Distressed corporations should face market terms over federal bailouts
“And by the way, if you want to shore up your balance sheet, you should have to go to the debt or equity markets and get the capital. Like that's how, that's the cost of doing business. And so I don't think we want to get in this world where like corporations b…”
Pompliano: 2020 Pandemic Bailouts Will Widen US Wealth Inequality Gap
“And I think the same thing's going to happen here. Unfortunately, Is we're just going to continue to see a widening of that wealth inequality gap because the rich, right? And it's not even the top, it's like the top two percent understand how the game is playe…”
Pompliano: Top asset managers reject public pension capital to avoid FOIA requests
“Unfortunately in most of the cases, the best asset management firms have not taken public pension money. Because they're scared of the freedom of information act request. And so therefore they don't have the people who need it the most, the police officers, th…”
Pompliano: Maximizing economic efficiency inherently sacrifices resilience
“So you either can be an efficient economy, right? Or I think what you're describing there kind of lower the cost of production as much as you can. And what you give up is that resilience or that durability.”
Pompliano: Wall Street capitalists become socialists during crises
“All the capitalists on wall street become socialist in times of crisis.”
Pompliano: Crisis bailouts are timed when public desperation allows socialist control
“The whole playbook is during a time of crisis, you wait until the American people's will has been broken. And then once their will has been broken and they absolutely are as desperate as possible, that's when you bail them out. And when you bail them out, it b…”
Pompliano: US Dollar Will Lose Global Reserve Status in His Lifetime
“And ultimately I think in my lifetime, the U S dollar is not going to be the global reserve currency.”
Pompliano: China's demographic trajectory mirrors the US 50 years ago
“Demographically China is basically doing what the U.S. Did, you know, 50 years ago, right? They've got a much younger population and kind of the way that they're growing.”
Pompliano: US shifts to wealth redistribution while China focuses on wealth creation
“Now we're getting more from a capitalist society, switching more to socialist. We're doing more wealth redistribution than wealth creation. And what you're seeing is a lot of wealth creation and not a lot of wealth redistribution happening in China and other c…”
Pompliano: Taxing billionaires transfers capital to notoriously bad government allocators
“You want to take money from the greatest wealth allocators or capital allocators and give it to the people who are notoriously the worst capital allocators in the world. That sounds like wealth destruction to me, right?”
Pompliano predicts net loss of corporate jobs following pandemic layoffs
“My guess is it's going to be less than the number of people they left off. So actually what we're going to see is a net loss of job opportunities over the lifetime of this crisis.”
Pompliano: US Is Not the Global Leader in AI, Ed/Health, or Crypto
“Like average to above average in all three of those buckets today. But there's a lot of room for improvement. And I don't think that we're the best at any of those.”
Pompliano: Gold will crack $2,000 but not exceed $2,500
“My opinion is that it'll probably go, it'll crack 2000, but it won't go past 2500, right? So it'll kind of end up in like a 2020, a hundred dollar gold price point.”
Pompliano: Bitcoin will hit $100,000 by the end of 2021
“I think that from now where we're recording this in April of 2020, I think that by the end of 2021, we'll see Bitcoin hit a 100,000 dollar price point”
Pompliano: Stock-to-flow models are more accurate for Bitcoin than gold
“What you see is a lot of these stock to flow models and co-integration models, et cetera, that are used in gold. Apply to Bitcoin and are actually more accurate in Bitcoin because one side of the equation is transparently known with 100% certainty and all you …”