Stonks Go Moon

Is AI actually in a bubble… or are we looking in the wrong place?In this episode of the Stonks Go Moon Podcast, Rocco Strydom sits down with Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner at Recursive Ventures, operator, investor, and one of the early minds behind scaling companies from startup to IPO. The discussion dives deep into the current AI landscape, separating hype from reality and asking where the real opportunities are emerging.While everyone is slapping “AI-powered” onto products, Itamar argues the real bubble isn't AI applications — it's AI infrastructure. Data centers, energy, large language models, and the underlying stack are attracting enormous attention, while the real application layer may still be early.⚡ Topics covered:Are we in an AI bubble or an infrastructure bubble?Why vibe coding may be one of AI's first real winnersWill white-collar jobs disappear?AI and the future of reskilling the workforceWhy governments, VCs, and big AI companies all share responsibilityAI in sales, content creation, and autonomous agentsAdvice for founders raising capital in the AI eraWhy VCs no longer fund ideas — they fund tractionThe rules for startups are changing. The barrier to building has dropped dramatically, but standing out may be harder than ever.

What if Bitcoin wasn’t just something you hold… but something you actually use every day?In this episode of the Stonks Go Moon Podcast, Rocco Strydom sits down with Ben Blaine from MoneyBadger to unpack a quiet shift happening in South Africa right now:You can walk into a store, scan a QR code, and pay with Bitcoin - instantly.No banks. No selling. No friction.We break down:How Bitcoin payments actually work in real-world retailThe role of Lightning wallets and QR paymentsWhy major retailers like Pick'n Pay are already liveThe surprising adoption is happening across thousands of storesWhy this could completely change how people think about moneyFrom surf towns using Bitcoin to pay kids...to grocery stores accepting crypto at checkout.

Quantum computing just went from “sci-fi” to “this might break things sooner than we thought.”

In this episode of the Stonks Go Moon Podcast, Rocco Strydom sits down with Ian Smith (Quantum EVM) to unpack Google’s latest research and why it’s not just a crypto problem, but a global systems problem.

Google’s findings suggest modern encryption could be broken within the next decade, potentially as early as 2029.

That impacts far more than Bitcoin.

We’re talking about:

Financial systems
Military infrastructure
AI acceleration
Global data security

Crypto just happens to be the canary in the coal mine.

In this episode:

What Google actually revealed about quantum computing
Why current encryption across industries is vulnerable
The real timeline to “Q-Day”
US vs China in the quantum race
Why crypto communities are underestimating the risk
What needs to happen before impact

Cars sit parked about 95% of the time, while people struggle with rising mobility costs. EV prices are volatile, and cities are trying to reduce emissions without building more infrastructure. So a new question is emerging: What if mobility isn't about owning bigger fleets, but unlocking the ones that already exist?In this episode, Rei Vardi, founder of Eon, shares how he built a national virtual fleet of premium electric vehicles without raising venture capital. Eon is like Airbnb for EVs, a peer-to-peer platform combined with advanced tech that makes renting shockingly easy and fully contactless.Book exactly the car you want, verify via facial scan and ID in the app, and use your phone as a Bluetooth key. No counters, no paperwork, no talking to the owner - just walk up, unlock, and drive.Rei dives deep into:• His origin story: Taking over his dad's 2015 Tesla Model S in college, trying to rent it out manually, and facing disasters (scratches, smoking, dents, late returns, and even one renter using the car in a bank robbery).• Why raw peer-to-peer car sharing is risky (like "handing someone a gun") and how Eon automates handoffs, insurance, education, and support to make it safe and passive for owners.• Why Eon focuses exclusively on EVs: to accelerate adoption, increase utilization for greater carbon impact, and leverage the most advanced in-car tech.• Bootstrapping through near-shutdowns, VC pitching struggles (wrong timing in mobility, burned investors, profitability vs. hypergrowth), living in a van in San Francisco, and why going solo allowed sustainable building.• Real impact: Thousands of cars in the network, major customers like Netflix and Four Seasons, owners earning passive income from idle cars, and renters converting to EV buyers.

DeFi was supposed to make capital more efficient. Instead, it created a new kind of fragmentation.In this episode of the Stonks Go Moon Podcast, Rocco Strydom sits down with MacBrennan Peet, founder of Project 0, to talk about why DeFi users still get stuck with scattered collateral, disconnected venues, poor capital efficiency, and unnecessary liquidation risk. Project 0 is building a prime brokerage layer on Solana designed to unify portfolio management across venues like Kamino, Drift, and Jupiter Lend.MacBrennan’s background is unusually deep for someone still so young. He started trading biotech and pharma names as a teenager, later worked on projects with Morgan Stanley and in private equity, helped build marginfi, and has spent years inside Solana DeFi infrastructure. That background shows up in this conversation because this is not a hype-driven crypto interview. It is a practical discussion about market structure, fragmented liquidity, basis trades, unified margin, and what DeFi still gets wrong.We get into:why DeFi became more fragmented even though blockchains were supposed to unify everythinghow users lose yield and capital efficiency when assets sit across multiple venueswhy “unified margin” matters more than most retail users realizehow Project 0 is approaching Kamino, Drift, and Jupiter integrationsthe difference between DeFi-native opportunities and simply rebuilding TradFi onchainwhy Solana is becoming a serious environment for more advanced trading infrastructurewhat comes next once lending and perps are tied together more efficientlyOne of the most interesting ideas in this episode is that DeFi may not win by copying traditional finance feature for feature. It may win by leaning harder into what only onchain systems can do well: composability, speed, transparency, and new forms of capital efficiency. That is where Project 0 is aiming.