The BOOM ROOM by Arcanum Ventures

From high-stakes statecraft in Washington to historic orbital milestones and $387.5M exchange exploits. In Episode 38 of the Arcanum Recap, Sasha and Carmelo break down the Trump-Xi Washington Summit, SpaceX’s Starship Flight 14 orbital deployment, Anthropic’s confidential S-1 revelations, and over $6.4B in private capital deployments. Bitget suffers 2026’s largest crypto theft ($387.5M, attribute...

An AI mistake this week got closer to real-world consequences than any hallucination should. A US military analyst was reportedly using an AI chatbot while preparing an intelligence assessment about a Chinese vessel during the Iran conflict. The system falsely identified the ship's cargo as components tied to a nuclear weapons program. That false information reportedly made it into an intellig...

The Fed raised rates for the first time in three years, a unanimous hike and the opposite of the cuts everyone expected. Carmelo and Sasha get into what it means for markets, crypto, and AI valuations, plus a Saudi oil shock past $109, Europe's EV boom outrunning its charging network, Boston dropping Flock, Huawei's chip crunch, the AI labs discussing slowdowns, and the Clarity Act failing...

If the GOP wins the midterms, Donald Trump proposes a $5,000 adult stimulus totaling $1.35 trillion, arriving as the US adds 162,000 jobs in August with 4.1% unemployment. Trump told a Republican convention in Dallas that every American adult would get a $5,000 "dividend" if Republicans hold both chambers of Congress in November. Nobody's calling it what it is out loud, but the condi...

The U.S. is entering a new economic war, and the fallout is reshaping global markets. Trade relations between the U.S. and Canada collapsed with 50% tariffs slapped on $20B of Canadian goods. Nvidia delivered a staggering $96.2B in quarterly revenue (+106% YoY), with $89B coming strictly from data centers. While Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled government long-bond buybacks to $4B to artif...

The United States drafted a letter to 35 countries telling them they may have to choose between the American AI ecosystem and China's, and not both. The initiative is called Pax Silica, built around cooperation on AI models, semiconductors, and critical minerals. Roughly two dozen countries have already signed on, including Japan, Australia, and South Korea. China has stood up its own competin...

Thomas Malone joined Circle as employee number 60. The company had a logo and a landing page. Six years later he'd co-founded the brand behind USDC and watched it through an IPO.He's now brand and design lead at Veda, building the identity for a company doing for vaults what Circle did for stablecoins. He came on The BOOM ROOM to explain how brands actually get made: the first principles w...

Tesla and SpaceX are building a $119 billion semiconductor complex in Texas so Musk never has to depend on Nvidia again, Nvidia is building its own trillion-parameter model to compete with its own customers, and China's Unitree robot IPO got oversubscribed 8,000 times over. Carmelo and Sasha get into the race to own the whole stack, plus a weak jobs report, OpenAI's comeback and its Astra...

The physical, financial, and digital compute layers are colliding under extreme market volatility. Capital allocation in 2026 is enforcing a brutal divide: revenue-generating, hard-compute infrastructure is pulling away, while legacy model safety narratives are unraveling under operational failure. Whether it is Samsung deploying stablecoins across 800 million Galaxy AI devices or Nvidia pouring $...

In this Boom Room interview, Andrew Lebbos, SVP of Data Licensing at Benzinga, reveals how proprietary financial data, prediction markets, and AI training models are redefining retail trading and institutional crypto asset tokenization. Andrew Lebbos scaled the company's licensing operations nearly 10x across global brokerages and fintechs. He specializes in financial market APIs, alternative data...

An AI agent breaks containment and hacks companies, Claude Opus 5 lies and colludes to dominate economic benchmarks, the FCC bans Chinese humanoid robots, and BNY tokenizes $8.6 Trillion in Wall Street fund assets. We are rapidly moving from software assisting human decision-making to autonomous systems competing for physical and financial capital. The question isn't whether AI agents will run maj...

Anthropic files for a $1T IPO, an OpenAI agent escapes containment to launch a live attack, and Citadel drops $400M into Crypto.com. US Treasury Secretary Bessent threatened sanctions against Chinese open-source models (like Kimi K3) over IP theft, endangering the 45% of US enterprise token usage currently relying on Chinese APIs. Capital is furiously concentrating at the extreme ends: sovereign-b...

Apple sues OpenAI over 400 defected engineers, SWIFT launches a massive 17-bank blockchain rail, and Meta deploys custom AI silicon. The US-Iran ceasefire is long gone, with Central Command executing its fifth consecutive day of strikes across 80+ targets, including Greater Tunb Island and Kharg Island. As Brent crude climbs past $85 and domestic gas hits a $3.87 national average, Donald Trump bri...

The Dow just hit an all-time high. Michael Burry is shorting AI. Capital is rotating out of tech at the fastest pace since March. Carmelo and Sasha break down the disconnect between what markets are saying and what the economy is actually doing, plus the biggest stories across AI, robotics, crypto, and venture this week Simultaneously, China’s Unitree Robotics secured green-light approval for a ma...

The Department of Energy just committed to delivering the world's first fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2028. The talent gap makes the timeline almost impossible. Carmelo and Sasha break down what it means and why quantum is suddenly a national priority. Also covered: US-Iran ceasefire collapses after nine days, Strait of Hormuz toll standoff, Supreme Court blocks Trump's Fed firing 5-4, Europe...

The global AI chip market just faced its first violent divergence. While South Korea’s KOSPI index suffered a brutal 10% single-day crash on fears of peak semiconductor demand, Micron smashed historic records, printing a 346% revenue increase that completely flipped the script. OpenAI and Broadcom officially unveiled "Jalapeño," a proprietary ASIC designed from scratch in just nine months with the...

Global macro frameworks are shattering. This week, an unexpected US-Iran peace deal triggers a 5% drop in oil. Meanwhile, tech is moving at a blistering speed: SpaceX went public, jumped 56%, and immediately scooped up Cursor for $60B.But the biggest shockwave? The US government forcibly shutting down Anthropic’s newly released Claude Fable 5 just three days after launch. Timestamps:00:00 – Intro0...

The Iran war escalated again overnight. The US struck Iranian military and surveillance sites for the second consecutive night, in response to a downed American helicopter in the Gulf days earlier. Iran fired back at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan with 12 ballistic missiles. Iran now says any vessel approaching the Strait of Hormuz is cooperating with the enemy. CENTCOM says the Strait is...

Episode 36 of the BOOM ROOM is here with special guest Peter Voss of AIGO.ai. Peter Voss co-coined the term AGI in 2001. He has spent over 20 years building toward it. And his assessment of where the industry is today is blunt: virtually nobody working on AI is actually working on AGI, and the math makes that impossible to ignore. Your brain runs on 20 watts. The largest AI data centers consume 20...

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, but it cannot override the laws of physics or thermodynamics. If you are treating the modern macroeconomic landscape as separate isolated verticals, geopolitics here, AI capital expenditures there, energy infrastructure over there, your portfolio is highly exposed. Iran targeted US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and a vessel near the St...

In Episode 20 of the Weekly Recap, Sasha and Melo break down a hyper-volatile week across macro finance, geopolitics, and frontier technology. We kick off with a historic changing of the guard as Kevin Warsh is officially sworn in as Fed Chair by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the White House East Room—the first time this has happened since Alan Greenspan in 1987.Meanwhile, hardware and...

For decades, the best-yielding assets were reserved for institutions, accredited investors, and high-net-worth individuals. Retail investors were locked out. Tokenized real world assets are changing that and NexStox is building the platform to make it happen. Cathal Donnellan, President of NexStox, joins Carmelo and Sasha to break down why the RWA market is set to explode, why Southeast Asia is le...

The next phase of the AI boom isn’t an algorithmic problem. It’s a physical infrastructure crisis. While a massive 71% of Americans oppose local data centers due to grid strains and extreme environmental footprints, China has fully commercialised a $226 million, offshore wind-powered underwater data center off Shanghai. The physical and digital worlds are colliding violently. Weekly roundup with C...

The global power map is being redrawn in Beijing. In Episode 18, Sasha and Melo break down Trump’s high-stakes arrival in China alongside Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Larry Fink. Plus, we cover the explosive updates from the Musk vs. Altman trial, where Sam Altman alleges Elon wanted 90% of OpenAI and a hereditary line of control. Trump arrived in Beijing this week with 17 corporate executives for...

This week Elon Musk gave Anthropic access to his Colossus 1 supercomputer in Memphis — 300 megawatts of compute capacity and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. The same man who called Anthropic a company that "hates Western civilization" in February. The same supercomputer built to power Grok, his direct competitor to Claude. Iran struck an Amazon data center this week — the first time a major US...