The Pomp Podcast
00:00:01 · S0, S1, Jordi Visser
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00:01:18 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:01:18] S3: What's going on, guys? We had a great conversation with Jordi Visser this week. In this conversation, we talk about the Binance hack and its impact on Bitcoin. We talk about AI and cybersecurity. We go through the Anthropic S1. We talk about Eli Lilly hitting a brand new all time high. What's going on with Meta, Microsoft, SpaceX and many other companies? And then Jordi walks us through what is he looking forward to into the end of the year? How is he thinking about the macro factors like interest rates, oil and other, and how it's impacting his portfolio. And then we even talk about at the end some of the use cases of AI that we discovered this week and how we're putting this technology to work and how it may change your life or your portfolio. Here's my latest conversation with Jordi Visser. Alright, Jordi. Happy Halloween. I thought you were gonna come in here in a costume dressed as Eli Lilly himself, you know? You just came in as a smart, intelligent, economist slash, manager of capital. I appreciate you being here. Here to spread joy. Amazing. Binance got hacked for 6,000,000,000. Let's get right into the really serious stuff. The rumors are that North Korea could be involved. I'm sure that AI cybersecurity concerns are gonna be jacked up. Bitcoin sold off about 5% or so, and Binance is saying that they are going to backstop all losses by users on the platform. What's your general take away from a situation like this?
00:02:34 · Jordi Visser
[00:02:34] S2: This is unfortunately, is a story I've heard multiple times, not of this size, but the amount of hackings that are going on from AI, and this is the the reality of the world we're gonna live in with artificial intelligence for a long long time. I have friends that have told me about their businesses being hacked, where they've had to reboot the business, where it's not it's not just coins, and again, I'm speaking specifically in crypto, but I remember when I did Freedom Tech last month, and when I was originally talking to some of the people there, this has been going on, I I would say really since the June period where we've been having problems. You've seen it with companies too. I mean, I think Revolut had something go on, an apparel company. Yesterday, you've had healthcare companies have gone through this. So rather than focus this on kind of it's crypto related, when you go through the story of what happened and you read it, again, humans are exposed to artificial intelligence and to agents cracking into things. So if this was, as I've seen reported, going through an engineer's laptop, and then kind of going from there, we're just at this point where the attacks are on, and the one thing about crypto that makes it easier than a bank from the application side is that obviously you get in and then the money's just... It's moving. I think the more interesting story with this will be how much got frozen, how much they find, how much law enforcement gets involved, what story is there. But at the end of the day, I don't see this as anything more than another fear factor that starts with AI agents, but most of the things that I've heard from people in the last month are fears on quantum. And so I think when people kind of get into Binance and, well, what's gonna happen with quantum? It obviously is gonna force people to take some risk off in the space for a period of time until we get the next catalyst on the upside.
00:04:39 · Anthony Pompliano, Jordi Visser, S0
[00:04:39] S3: Now, it is definitely spooky season. I have my Halloween sweater here, dad tax, anyone knows. Kids are gonna learn something this weekend. But the reason I call it spooky season is because people are definitely worried about this stuff, right, and the cybersecurity. Now I wanna talk about this from two different angles. The first is if this had happened ten years ago in the crypto industry, Bitcoin would have sold off 20 to 40% in my opinion. It sold off 5%. That actually seems, in a weird way, bullish that you could have a $6,000,000,000 hack, I saw somebody describe it online, as the greatest robbery in human history. When has $6,000,000,000 ever been stolen before? [00:05:18] S2: Mhmm. [00:05:19] S3: And so that is the magnitude of this. It almost gets like washed away. Like, we forget how much money $6,000,000,000 is. Bitcoin only sold off 5%. That seems bullish. The second piece of it though is Binance steps in and says, we are gonna backstop any losses to users. So you immediately reinstall confidence in the platform. And in a weird way, it's a great marketing campaign because people start saying, hey, this is why I wanna use Binance. It's because if there's ever an issue, they're gonna backstop this. But [00:05:44] S0: they're not gonna
00:05:44 · S0, Anthony Pompliano
[00:05:44] S0: they're not gonna [00:05:45] S3: have to cover $6,000,000,000 Mhmm. Because the stablecoin providers almost immediately froze a ton of funds. There's multiple billions of dollars that got frozen by Tether, Circle, World Liberty Financial, etcetera. And so in a weird way, the, like, hardcore crypto ethos of these bearer assets that you control that no one could, you know, kind of take from you or or or do anything, it's changing. When a hack used to happen, it was kinda like, hey, either you got hacked or you didn't. Mhmm. In a pursuit of this, like, safety net and instilling confidence, we're giving up a little bit of the, like, crypto hardcore ethos, which means, like, the ETFs, do they become more popular? Like, what are the ramifications of maybe the the crypto, you know, hardcore becoming a little less... Or a little more soft, and now these backstops being in place?
00:06:36 · Jordi Visser
[00:06:36] S2: So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna take what you said, but I'm gonna take it a little bit of a different direction. So when you make a joke, this is bullish, the reaction is is there. So let's put two things into context. Number one, we had Google down 13%. Okay. Google, much bigger than Bitcoin. Not not not as much bigger, but it is bigger. I only bring that up because when you can have Intel down 25%, when you can have Google down 13, 14%, and especially Google, multi trillion dollar company, I think the move in Bitcoin when you normalize it for what's happening in the biggest assets in the world... Let's go the flip side. I mean, Eli Lilly's up 10% in two days. That's a trillion dollar company. So I I think people are just gonna have to get used to the fact that the reason that Bitcoin isn't moving as much as it did before is because volatility is just much lower, and and it's been lower than than than AI names all year. But let's go back to the general thing. I can remember in 1999, coming back from Brazil. This may sound funny to people, but the Nasdaq had all kinds of issues that were going on, and the Nasdaq was very similar to the crypto market, the electronic trading side. I mean, there was the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange. Now they're both electronic, but back then, it was a very different world. And there were all kinds of issues that would happen on the Nasdaq because it was this new system. It was electronic. If a lot of orders came in in a day, would break the system. There were a whole bunch of things that came on. And I kind of equate this the same way for one element. We need things to happen for the system to be more trusted. My main thing now is the banks are involved with crypto. Like, they're not turning around. They're involved in tokenization. They're involved in supporting Bitcoin. It was a very different world during the hackings when Jamie Dimon was saying this was garbage and you'd never be involved. They all have skin in the game now. They're promoting it to their customers. That means that they care about the security and they care to know what happened. That's the way that in the long term, issues like this become bullish because we... There has to be a plan in place to deal with these types of things and make it clear.