The Chopping Block: FOMO's Co-Founder Defends the Memecoin Trenches, Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP, and AMC vs Robinhood

0:00After getting dunked on a lot for being an unco, from the last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way. Not as dividend. It's a tale of two pawns. Now your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I manage trading firms who are very involved. I like that eat the ultimate pawns. DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello everybody, welcome to the chopping block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the cryptotapics of the day. So quick intro is first you got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes. Hello everyone. I see you got to ruin the gear brain and grandpa ba at gauntlet. Yo. Joining us today, we've got special guest Paul, Prince of pumps at FOMO. Welcome Paul. Master what I think about that title, but great to be here. I have received the head eye man a dragonfly. We're really stage investors in crypto and want to caveat that nothing we say here

1:01is investment advice legal advice or even life advice. Please see chopping block that xyz from our disclosures. So Paul, we brought you on the show. You're one of the co-founders of FOMO. And on the last show, we were pretty roundly criticized for being unks slash dinosaurs and having an extremely call it antiquated take on what's going on in the meme coin sphere. Now obviously FOMO has been at the center of what's happening in the meme coin space. And you told us you had seen some of the clips of us talking in the last show rolling around in social media. What was your impression hearing what we had to say at our last show? Yeah, I said this joke before. I was like, we're going to recreate Jurassic Park or bringing you guys back to the modern age. But I was actually traveling this weekend. So I wasn't too deep on Twitter. So we can rehash some of the conversation here. But yeah, I think like, listen, when you're building a product, I think everyone has their own take, especially when that's a consumer product. Everyone has their own take as a user of what this product is.

2:04And I think FOMO, our next part of our journey, is to do a lot of deeper discourse around what our brand ethos and future mission is. Because I don't think it comes across otherwise. And happy to go through it on the show here. I think FOMO is a lot larger than it is now. I think on-chain trading is, or just like on-chain is the largest revolution in the financial industry since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s. And everyone's trying to build these skew morphic applications, like let's build Twitter on-chain. But the real main use cases are like global distribution. And this is why all these apps are building tokenized equities. So you can globally distribute. Second, it's the largest social network ever created. It's fully transparent. And everyone has access to every single transaction that's ever been created in the system. But it's just obfuscated by these alpha and numeric strings and these, in these funky block explorers. So if we can create an experience that's super easy to onboard, that anyone can use, that you can create an identity through natural language around, whether it's Taurunasi, Tom, whether it's, I don't know, some pseudonym. You could be fully anonymous, but I get full transparency into what you're doing.

3:05Then hopefully eventually as we have stocks, then we have big share markets, and we've all these other asset classes, we come to social graph of all the finance. And I just think on Twitter, it's really hard to see that, especially when stonked off fun. And all these meme coins are launching. I think it's a really important to position yourself. Well, for example, Robinhood became huge on options and then kind of pivoted over to these other asset classes as well. And I'm not going to make an normative judgment on these asset classes. Like I think people should be able to trade whatever they want. I actually think it's really fun and really cool concepts. But the overall vision of the platform is a lot larger than you might see in some of the public discourse on Twitter. Mr. Paul, okay. Are you yourself a trencher? Were you a trencher when you started FOMO? Yeah, so I was a wannabe trencher. And my co-founder say who everyone knows is a much larger presence of me on X that we were talking about before the show. But yeah, X was like early to every single crypto protocol. And we met in college actually at a summer internship in Shrad Phi. He went to Yale and I went to NYU when we were both there. And he was early to every protocol. And one of my friends is working at the UIDX and kind of took the, I'm a builder at

4:07horror. Like I've always been a geek for consumer products. I want to work for a product. So I joined the first opportunity I did, which is at UIDX. Say kind of came over there and we built out the institutional book of business there. But the whole time we were there, say we're trading all these crypto protocols and trying to get me involved. And I mean, you need to take three days to onboard from Fiat and you have this EOA wall that has separate exchange and you need to have slippage settings and make sure you don't get sandwiched and just a terrible experience. And I've always had this deep empathy for a normal user and what kind of type of product experience would resonate with them. And I think there's this push pull on every single decision saying I make where we can build a product that is the best for the best traders. We pay our routers not to take positive slippage from our users. We just have the best execution. It's the first truly cross-chain gas list trading application. But then it's something that you could onboard in seconds. You have the accessibility layer, not in terms of use, but not only in terms of use, but also in terms of discovery. I'm seeing what the best for trading all the time. And it's easy for anyone to onboard. And then you could build the experience for both the user groups. So it's funny because the camps are like saves the trencher. I'm like the person who wants the trench, but doesn't know how.

5:11And then you kind of have this push pull on every decision you make. So I will say I spent after getting dunked on a lot for being an uncle from the last episode. I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way. You know actually it's amazing. My dear fellow Delawareian Hunter Biden really made my PNL go from negative to positive quite dramatically because I feel like the game is really understanding the news. I'm using broadly speaking. Not like hey this is the news that's happened. But what social thing is hyped enough for someone to be making copy cat coins or making something that's hit some moment. And so I did end up positive. Not some crazy, not some 10,000% positive.

6:15But respectable 10% positive. But I really enjoyed the experience even when I lost money. Like I had kind of like always heard this thing. It's like you lose money. Well the social game, the PVP aspect of it. I think you see have this like the real onc view of this. Which is like you're just like. I have the real onc view. Because seeing the gambling it's like the same thing. But there's actually the social dynamic of like trying to be the first one to figure out some new trend or like the feeling that you were there first is like which but it's expressed not in you buying the asset but in you creating the new asset or being very early to some new asset. Do you create assets as well? I indulged in some of the own forks and but this I didn't do via phomo. This I did via direct via just just I wanted to see you know get the full robin chain experience. But the beauty of phomo was I deposited my deposits

7:16were available in like three seconds. I don't think I've ever used a crypto app that's been comparable to the speed of that. But I didn't think about what chain I was using at all. In fact there were about 50 50 percent of the time I was buying copycat hunter Biden coins. I thought I was buying them in robin chain. I was buying them in slana and I didn't even know what chain I was using. I think something I think I've said on the show before is it's kind of interesting that like the millennial trading apps have survived so long. They obviously have a liquidity advantage and network advantage of like the coinbase robin hood things like right. If you look at them versus like stock brokers 10 years ago 10 years before them right they they they they had this whole UX difference. They changed the fee model blah blah blah. But somehow the experience hasn't changed in 10 years plus for robin hood coinbase etc. And I think after using phomo and really seeing the users really write their thesis and like doxing when they when they're bought and sold

8:20and the social aspect is a really very different thing. And I know everyone's like oh it's been tried 20 times how could it work this time. But like I it was like playing a video game. So it's like it's like more like playing a video games than like trading. And I I don't know anyway sorry that was my long winded experience of three days in phomo. I think it's like this fundamental misconception that it's been tried before. Like we did a deep dive on every single social trading app you look at eToro and we bowl and they're all riddled with confirmation bias. You don't have full transparency to what people are doing. And the game theoretical optimal thing if you have a private mode is to be private and everyone else to be public right. So then everyone goes private. And if you don't have a full transparency to everything that's happening two things happen. One is it builds mistrust because people are only talking about their wins and not their losses. And then you have no clue if like this is actually with a person's holding or if like what are they actually holding on the side and if they're just posting that trade. And then the second thing is it's an opt-in system right. And you see this on some of these social trading apps today where it's not embedded as the glue

9:21to the overall app but you're just making a post about the thing. But on phomo if you just trade don't write a thesis don't have to build a following on purpose. Everything automatically follows right. If you're trading well it goes to your feed people follow you it goes through notifications. And that's how you boost trap this spiral social graph. And it's very similar to what happened on on TikTok where it used to be the only people that got distribution were the people who already were famous and had a big audience. But now on TikTok like anyone in the algorithm could become famous by going viral right. And similar things happening on phomo where we have these localized leaderboards which is like 24 hour which are like shorter time frame than all time. And we want to do like more categories of leaderboards. But you can see the 24 hour one is less inspirational as obviously the all time one. But it's more aspirational. And you're seeing new people coming there every day and people are hitting amazing trades they're getting famous there and then they're getting hundreds of thousands of followers on phomo. They're then building an ex account having 50-100 thousand followers there. And then now we lost creator rewards which I think will be the most important thing we ever built. Which now if you have these things you get a boost and if you trade

10:24and people we attribute it to you and then people are trading after you and we already did two and a half billion dollars there. So now you can imagine when you have a robust equities product right. Now only can you trade this from anywhere in the world but why would I trade a Tesla stock another brokerage where I could come to phomo and do it build an audience and then get paid for building that audience. I was going to ask like do you think there's something unique about you know meme coins that fits this particular format because your point hey everything that's been tried before. Mostly equities but meme coins obviously it is inherently like this social contagion kind of thing which makes like a really good fit for you a social contagion kind of app. Yeah absolutely there's two things here one is cultural and then one of the architecture the underlying architecture of the blockchain is the best architecture ever created for a social graph because it's just there and all you to do is just create something around it right it's not like I have to create a separate bank account for every single user and then expose that to the APIs I I literally have a distributed ledger you create I have a social layer on top you create an identity around it social layers for proprietary all the information is there we generate you and better ball it

11:25and the second things cultural people are used to trading crypto and it used to be that you just mark a KOL wallet and there's no like actual visibility of whether that person actually claimed that wallet etc but now people are claiming wallets and I think culturally it's a really important foothold and you guys talked about these millennial apps and I think you're exactly right and I think there's like this talk of this major generational wealth transfer but I think a lot of people that trade on Robinhood would have never been trading on a Charles Schwab otherwise it opened up this new investor class and I still think like your mom and sister they're like super they're like not going to Robinhood because they're like I want to buy AI sure I can buy it on Robinhood but what do I buy like I don't know what the memory stocks are but there's no accessibility in terms of discovery and that's exactly what the social graph allows for because now I can come to this platform really easily but then I get to discover things in real time right see what the the top people were talking about I don't know like talking about earnings reports on these AI businesses etc what their fees are interact with them earn and then also trade I think that's kind of the key here but yeah I think that the unique thing of the blockchain and the culture

12:25there is a really key part of it one thing one other thing I think that stands out about this is that you know if you look at Robinhood chain pre a pre all the kind of like pairing meme coins with stocks but also be phomo moving there there was like quite low usage right it had a like and so there's actually an interesting like distributional difference of like going through the app versus the chain I think like crypto two years ago was sort of like bottoms up right like the chain brought the wallet and like here it's like going the other way and like I mean I I don't know exactly the stats but it was something like 70% plus of Robinhood users came from phomo I mean that that's like kind of incredible if you think about it because Robinhood themselves owns this huge app with a ton of distribution so I guess like I'm curious how you think about that and when you think about the graph in the sense of like you you now know a lot about people's preferences in multiple environments whereas like I think the previous social trading in crypto was really about

13:30like kind of boxing you into one you know like the friend tech de type thing I'm not saying that's social trading exactly but like it was all about like kind of making a closed enclave versus like moving in different places and driving people to different venues like how do you how do you guys think about that in the longer yeah that's exactly right and you had this experience where it's abstracted chain and I think that we love all these chain teams but I think phomo kind of level the playing field because you don't know what chain you're on anymore right and I do think that like the infrastructure was all built for one chain but now you could do that on any chain and I do think it's an amazing distribution channel yeah you're right like if you think about active wallets today on phomo I'm pulling it up on Robinhood chain phomo had 94,000 active wallets on Robinhood chain the second largest app had 30,000 right so we have three times more than the the second largest chain the second largest application there and I think it's amazing because you're creating great distribution for these new blockchains and I think like the leaders of these blockchains are starting to realize that as well but yeah I think like everyone is historically as

14:35always thought about interoperability only at the infrastructure level but I think it's starting to get built at the application level and I think that's something that no one really noticed or never predicted was going to happen well one of the interesting consequences of that if it is true that more and more of the buyers are concentrating from phomo rather than from some kind of unique distribution is that phomo kind of will start doing an implicit load balancing across different chains so right now or you know one of the things that we've seen that's pretty incredible is the growth of Robinhood chain they're now despite being live for about 70 days they've made about 42 million in chain revenue so enormous amount of fees 600K a day 90% of that going to Robinhood and like that kind of revenue you know it's meaningful even at a company level for Robinhood that kind of revenue is really coming from congestion effectively like that's what that's why the fees are so high is because there's so much demand and there's only so much block space so phomo if if most of the buyers if most of the users are ultimately coming through phomo in the first place then almost you can just start not you but sort of the market itself can start to load balance

15:42the different coins launching across different chains so let's move some to base let's move some to Salana let's move some to Ethereum let's move some over here and that should result in some level for the capture to chains going down and more of the capture going to applications and of course going to folks like phomo or pumped at fine or whoever I think it's a bit idealistic because people would just want to trade the same coins that feel like on the same days and it's whatever the narrative is running so for example like Robinhood is known as a stock trading app very publicly in public discourse to millennials etc so something where you're pairing an attention-based asset with an RWA it makes sense narrative-wise for that to be on Robinhood chain right and I think these different chains have the road narrative they're going to launch it on Robinhood chain anyway even if most of the buyers are on phomo I think that's right and like the the goal of the chain is to move all trading there and we want to be more of the sagnostic layer where users can trade whatever they want any chain and it's our obligation and job to create a smooth experience no

16:45matter what that is and that's a very difficult job as you can imagine because cross-chain trading is a very new thing like this thing didn't even exist six months to a year ago right or like a year ago and I think that this is something we're building in real time making sure there's great liquidity across chains how do you actually create improvements to the solver routing etc and that's something that we're working through right now we have some really innovative things in the pipeline where I think this will become a solved problem and I think it'll actually be a competitive advantage for phomo very soon but yeah I mean load balancing would be amazing I think there's a bit idea what's sick these people just follow narratives right right yeah it's interesting I mean I'm gonna tell you that I learned that I learned that when trading laptop on sole and laptop on 300 fake not fake laptop if you go to the top of the coin page we do label them but yeah I mean the goal is subtracted away obviously because no one no one understands like what a blockchain is right like I guess there's this group in crypto twitter that does and and maybe someone who's like

17:45I don't know like somewhat informed about crypto but any of the group outside has no right and there's going to get scared away if they see that yeah so I mean it's interesting because I think after the last shows conversation it seems to rune has recanted his unquays I think between us I might be the unrepentant one I think it was fun it's you're just like the fun aspect of it you're like also losing money they must hate it I'm like actually there's like playing a video game like yeah I went to the arcade and I put money in the machine and then I never got it back well I mean I mean if you talk about like modern mobile games I think there are maybe some analogous kind of dark patterns in modern mobile games but the point that I want to make is that I actually don't have I don't have a problem with most meme-quentrating most meme-quentrating is people just buying and selling doge or you know I don't know a trump coin or whatever I think the phenomenon that I find to be most deleterious are generally speaking like the meme-quent production I think that's where most of the value gets shredded and I think that's where it's like most

18:49harmful to people and of course that's where a lot of FOMO leaves de facto is like a lot of what people are doing a FOMO is doing the new launches and the new stock coin pairings or whatnot that's where I think you see all these middlemen this whole meme-quent supply chain stuff that we've learned so much about the internals of and that people reliably lose money when they're doing this people don't reliably lose money buying doge doge goes up doge goes down it's a meme coin it's just kind of harmless when you buy it and using that you know using an app that makes your experience better that's that's all great and look if you're sophisticated and you're buying meme coins and you're you know a so-yong type person and you're like you've got your system and you're and you're crushing it good for you that's awesome you are the 5% right the other 95% of people who are buying meme coins are losing money and I think the like so so all that is to say like a tool like Axiom or like what you guys are building with FOMO is great it obviously helps people whatever it is they're doing they're they're going to be better at doing it using a tool like FOMO or like Axiom or

19:53whatever what I object to more is the dynamic right so when we were talking about last time of these like stock coins getting paired to or stock tokens getting paired to meme coins everybody buying these was losing money because they were just obviously a horrible design and they were almost like comically designed to lose money these things I think what really incensed me last time on the show is that I kind of feel like it's important to say that out loud and to not treat all forms of gambling as the same I'm okay with most forms of gambling you go and you know spin roulette wheel I have no problem with that I don't necessarily recommend my kids do it but do you want to do it fine you're an adult you can do whatever you want but I think there are forms of gambling that are genuine that should genuinely be discouraged like I don't think people should be buying lottery tickets I think lotteries are like just just absolutely destroying people who bought like they lose so much money per dollar that you put into a lottery ticket compared to playing roulette I think lotteries are much more extractive than roulette wheels but you know I don't know like it's there are differences between forms of gambling and I think meme the sort of the thing we were talking

20:57about last week I don't even know if people are still doing that at this point I'm sure they're learning quickly what doesn't doesn't work different forms of this are more and less damaging to retail and I think it's important to be clear right about that and not to just point in laugh you actually just hit the nail on the head and I actually think we're our views are much more similar than you might have thought before this call because I actually think you're spot on and I think that's the entire point of FOMO is that it gives you a surface level to learn and we talk about this all the time we hate the idea of copy trading and we've never built that because the holds point of FOMO is that you get full information and then you can learn by doing you could follow people you could take an educated guess and then you could figure out maybe to come better at predicting trends like chrysanthemum etc but everything built on FOMO is built to hold longer think of the concept of a thesis it's like a long term thesis right I think like even the idea of like FOMO like fearless or fear of missing out it's like I don't want to miss it I want to hold this token longer we reward people for having creator awards on a platform which rewards people for holding longer for putting these these etc we have average full time as a stat whereas if you're

22:00tied to a launch pad right your incentive is to create coins as fast as possible because that's how you earn money so I actually think FOMO is coming in and trying to like revive the trenches and sweep up the dust a little bit because before we had the launch pad game you saw her on bail like say we're trying to convince you to buy her on Baycoin it was sitting at 200 million he's like I'm gonna hold this thing for four years right because that thing could sit at like a few hundred million go to a billion market cap right because there were so few meme coins you needed deploy your teams you were talking about do it doge etc and I think this is why I'm so confident in the translation of this thing to longer hold social graphs such as equities and these other types of products whether it's perpetuals and you're trading either shorter long on maybe like a real asset I'm very confident on this because everything built on FOMO is too big too like incentivize people to actually have real DCs and hold longer and really signal out signal from noise so 100% I think that's the reason we're building this product I think like as the creator of a technology technology is usually neutral and people are gonna misuse and use the technology right I think

23:01as a steward of the technology or obligation is to steer that technology in as positive direction as we can the goals for the brandy those to be very positive to be a beacon of light to be a joyful experience I think that you go to prediction market protocol you feel a little bit of shame using that thing I think a large part of it is because you're doing in solidarity right sorry you're doing it in in solitude right but I think when you're doing something in solidarity with others it brings this more joyful expense like it's like much more joyful trading or like betting on a sports game at the sports game with your friends that is doing it on your couch and you're creating these bad behaviors right so I think like the whole goal of FOMO and the ethos that we're trying to project is to be more healthy and to really create this global financial social graph and to really create something that's more withstanding than this like really short tour to our meme point game of course people are gonna trade those assets and I think like we are an on chain application and if you don't have access to those assets then you're just in a really bad place right because people should be able to trade whenever they want but I don't think you should encourage those behaviors and you should encourage educational experiences through all the

24:02content we create through the product decisions we make in the app etc I really like that take I think that's a very good take because one of the things that anybody who runs one of these kinds of businesses knows is that customer churn is the most important metric to keep an eye on and if you are just allowing your customers to just incinerate themselves by making bad decisions your business is going to flame out very quickly you're just not going to be able to replace people fast enough into your funnel and so one of the important things to do whether you're whether it's a mobile game or whether it's a casino or whether it's a social trading app you have to make sure that your customers are going to survive that they're going to stick around they're going to keep having good experiences and people we talked about this concert financial entertainment before if you consider phomo to be financial entertainment fair enough make sure people are spending like an appropriate amount of money on their financial entertainment and not just going bust with their entire bankroll and becoming a coin fashion post like in the first week if that's what's happening on your app your your half-life is going to be not very long and so I that that that really resonates

25:02with me as the right way to approach creating the subtle nudges in an application to get people to do meme-quaint trading the right way because I do very much agree that like meme coins meme coins are not going away they may not be the final form there may be other forms of social trading that are going to follow that are more like people just buying regular tokens or even people buying stocks people buying productive assets people buying you know who knows what the future iterations of this are going to be but the social aspect of trading is very deeply ingrained and once upon a time that social graph was on Twitter or it was in group chats now it's clearly extending into phomo and some of these other places where people are starting to pull it into that feels sticky and almost intrinsic to the to the behavior to me exactly yeah the incentives are lines and I think you hinted upon this to think about like other financial media so Michael Burrie didn't become famous right after the big short you became famous after the big short movie it's like the same as Warren Buffett he was famous for his investor letters and for his earnings like

26:02podcasts etc or like the live streams and I think that there's never been a platform for these people right people had their own created their own media networks either through like feature films etc but imagine a platform where traders could actually become famous we really believe traders the next celebrity we think like also in the world of AI where it's really easy to have a opinion and that's commoditized because you just talk to an LLM what you're holding is what your actual belief is and we really believe this is much larger than even like the largest financial consumer app that ever existed because it's global people could earn etc but I also think this is the next generation social media app people are going to become the next celebrities you've seen this happening and like everyone's kind of known this thing's going to be true but you need all of these different aspects to be perfect you need the really robust engineering team it needs to be on a new type of architecture like the blockchain you need someone to have an empathy for a user so a normal person could use it and yeah I mean the goal here is to hopefully be this media platform where kind of like a new type of media is created a new type of celebrity is created and then people can kind of trade and have access to anything share opinions and also yeah kind of hold things in

27:05solidarity so yeah yeah I mean one other thing that's interesting is I love the the shaming aspect where it's like you know you'll see someone who's like here's why I bought this 300k and market cap coin and here's my thesis and then like three seconds later you get another notification it's like they sold everything their thesis they don't believe their thesis I really enjoy the like learning which influencers because like before this I never really paid attention to meme clean influencers for gonna be honest and I kind of like which ones are full of shit and which ones are real and I'm not saying it's like a science right there's not there's not some scientific there's even on-chain sluice and people are like why don't people just buy on sidewalks will listen there's like tons of sluice on crypto twitter and then you see someone on phobobying and then you see someone like selling immediately repeatedly on a sidewall that that's maybe not on phobobies all on chain then it's like people have tried to argue that transparency is bad because people are buying on sidewalks but well that's transparent you just not tied to your phomo identity they're people

28:08that are calling out those people reputation there have been people shamed off our platform like literally deleted their accounts because of this social kind of confluence and burying their social identity when we launched our clients product which right now is just like a superposition of pnls eventually hopefully you could trade together more deeply but they're like oh well now like you only Chris in my saw is like oh now we could see like the groups of people don't be honest I'm like well these people are gonna jump on you anyway now you could actually see it right like it transparency is just generally a good thing and I think we're just offering more information to the users and I think you do with that what what you can but I think it's a very healthy evolution overall so the other dynamic that's been at the heart of this this boom in meme-quantrating is these launchpad wars so once upon a time it was basically just pumped out fun and I have to imagine you know if you're a wine six months ago probably most of your volume was pumped out fun tokens today we have now this real kind of all against all battle in these these and now it's what is it it's basically three there's pons there's stocked out fun which is on

29:09salana and then there's pump which of course has always been on salana pons is the Robin Hood specific one it's it's rallyed crazy this month huge amount of growth and volume as of yesterday they were the number one launch pad by revenue stonks out fun was the number two by revenue and then pump was number three which is surprising given that pump historically has been the king how do you think about foamless relationship with these launch pads and I mean obviously you guys are agnostic anything on any launch pad is fair game to trade on on FOMO but strategically you know as one of the co-founders how do you think about the like you want to world with more launch pads is that good for FOMO or do you not care how do you think about it yeah I think like if you were very very idealistic that will depends right because like this new stock pair is a completely different thing like if you're talking about pure memes like oh when was the uh remember when those people got caught in 4k like like cheating at the cold play concert there's a token for that right so that's

30:09like a canonical event that can be means and like a magic you had some like AI launch pad that could like predict these things but the problem is is like no one really wants a fair launch because then like the whole point is that you're buying and having this chance to get an early and see this tremendous upside right so you're thinking of the game from that perspective then there's always going to be this new meta that people are trading I think it's very healthy to have new launch pads yeah I think you kind of nailed it for me I we're pretty agnostic to this and it's cool to see new entrance and new meta is being created I think like every time you see a meta whether it's it was the whole stuff about open-clon the AI meta you're like okay like what can possibly come next and well now there's stock token pairing and I think you always it's always like you always think if this is the last one there's always people creating new things and there will always be new things created so I think that's kind of exciting I think that there is this world where these these things kind of transfer to more real world events you saw the SEC reset recently put out this thing where it's like you can give out like I think it's equity in a business through

31:09a token launch if it's up to five million dollars and I think like you can even do there's like some situations where you go even higher well imagine if you had like a Kickstarter project right and instead of like people funding the Kickstarter project and coming in and then just like getting one of the projects what if you could like launch a token and you actually can have a launchpad team that helps them build alongside this and but more as this new product I don't know if you guys have seen it but it's called team tags and a lot of this is like developers who'd launch a token will come and hold the supply and get messages but we've seen ponds we've seen Solana we've seen just like the layer zero we've seen Monad like a tons of teams are now holding treasury supply on FOMO and the teams are able to give updates in the feces as a notification to everyone who's holding their tokens so think about this it's the highest intent distribution channel that's ever existed for a financial product because you're having a direct line of communication with the exact people that's holding your financial asset right and like obviously this is a huge stretch but imagine in the future you have like public company CEOs coming into the platform being able to instead of just in earnings reports but you could just like in real time just communicate with all

32:12your stockholders right that's never existed as a form of distribution so we're really excited about what that looks like and I guess I'm kind of digressing from the initial point which is just like we're pretty agnostic to launchpads but I do think there's going to be new things constantly created and this is not always cats and dogs right I think there will be utility tokens and new real world events that will be created from like these on chain assets okay and just we're speaking of real world events we've alluded a little bit to the launch of this laptop token so for those of you who don't know hunter Biden uh yes that hunter Biden the hunter Biden that is the son of former president Joe Biden who was part of us you know obviously the laptop scandal in barisma and blah blah blah all the stuff was never really in the public eye you should remind the audience because hunter Biden had many scandals so he did have many scandals there was the poop what was it the poop painting scandal there was a bunch of Ukrainian bribes you Ukrainian that was barisma that's barisma yeah wasn't that yeah yeah anyway so kind of a scandal written fellow he also

33:16used to be a crack addict which he he that's not a slur that is actually true he has acknowledged that and it was in rehab and of course he was indicted for taxi vision I believe it was and uh my fire arm okay nice anyway he is back in the public eye has started becoming very vociferous in politics and he has launched he's announced that he's launching a meme coin called laptop of course this is a reference to the laptop hunter Biden laptop scandal so he's launching this meme coin called laptop on September 9th on base he has teased the laptop saying or so he's laptop token saying that he is going to air drop some of the laptop token to people who lost money on trump token as well as to some subscribers to his sub stack and some other random people as well as keeping some of the proceeds for himself as one does so this is like kind of the left trump token you glossed over I have to say I'm not really a meme coin fan but this was one of the more thoughtful or like clever meme coin proposals out there so it was like you know he

34:20has this whole sort of burn mechanism thing of like oh if these you know predictions come true I commit to burning you know some percentage of the supply like you have dens with midterms or pick one hits under K and I think the other thing that was interesting and this was sort of a whole scandal is he's kind of become more popular recently because he did this interview with Andrew with his name from channel five I mean probably saw those clips and so channel five subscribers also were supposed to get an air drop and apparently just used channel five's subscriber list I get the get got their emails and then channel five put up the statements like don't you know I don't know how they got our email list we don't endorse this this meme coin and I I guess like I mean this is something I want to ask Paul about which is I mean how do you square I I guess whenever I hear people talking about meme coins and kind of mainstream media or like non trenches there was just like universal disdain and groaning and I think when when this hundred Biden thing came out it was the exact same reaction I mean maybe part of it is political but part of it is like there's just such negative sentiment around meme coins and then I look at the phone numbers and

35:24like you know user numbers are growing and look quite healthy and so like how do you I don't know like how do you think about meme coins in sort of culture more broadly well it's a lab tokens in particular I should say get a get a very particular treat and almost every time listen we'll do everything we can to protect our users if we don't know teams well like we're not going to ever condone a token I think like I mean we never condone tokens even the verification symbol on FOMO is just meant as a representation that this is the canonical one that you are thinking of it's not that this token is any yeah it's never like financial advice or anything like that it's just so it's just like another form of protection for the user in the sense of like just knowing the one that people are talking about but listen I think like as the founder of this project that has a much larger ambitions I think FOMO is a lot larger than this you know and I think we want to be an open platform where if you want to launch a token it's going to be on chain and you want distribution like it's your job to do everything on the go to market and everything all the side there like

36:26we're not going to do anything there will be an open platform where you could trade these tokens when they're on chain but I'm focused on a much larger vision than any of these like celebrities or politicians launching tokens on the platform I I just think it's honestly noise to be honest yeah I would say I mean we've been pretty critical in the past of I mean there are ones called social tokens now I think they're just celeb coins I think we have a pretty good track record of calling all of them bad ideas whether it was Trump slash Melania or there's Ike Zalia's coin or I don't know there's definitely there's a number of other ones that we've talked about on the show they do yeah uniquely bad oh of course Kanye that's right yeah they do seem uniquely bad among all kind of like the menagerie of meme coins it's like at the bottom is like celeb coins look I I think the interesting thing to me about the stock coin thing even though I would say I certainly mainly lost money in the stock coin world over the weekend obviously

37:30you know that's actually the fun part right it's like what what news exists for the stock coin stuff but I think an interesting aspect of the some of the stock coins is I I was basically some of the meme coins so like some of the laptop clones were pairing with like short us bond ETFs so you'd like buy laptop and you get air dropped LP fees in short us bond token and I thought that was actually just kind of amazing because it's like I'm buying this meme coin but I'm getting air dropped LP fees in like the stock token basis and it's like over the weekend like I you know it's like okay everyone in crypto knows that the sounds boring right it's like okay I rebased the staking coin and gave you the fees LP fees of like trading the underlying versus the LST it's like the same thing but there's something crazy or about the fact that it's like a real like the real asset right like somehow I'm getting some short

38:3530 year treasury bonds out of this and I don't even under really totally understand why and so so there's something very more relatable I think about the stock versions of the crypto stuff we've already known that I I didn't even think I would feel like I mean I've been doing this for forever how long do you think this meta is gonna last stock token stock token pairing meta so I've seen some people try to make some constructive versions of it where they're like where the meme coin is a reward token for your stock stock where like you basically so you know there was like this whole thing about like how the him see you it was like it started following the the power guy and like it's like very into the kind of thing like people suspect he's like some some some person who's trading I would take that I haven't heard before yeah go for it by take is that meme coins with stock tokens I think are great community building aspects for these companies right you saw what

39:40happened with games stop right so now if you have this community around this meme coin finally people are actually caring about your company right it might not be like the type of carry you want but maybe you use it as a funnel the same way as these chains are using these token pairs as a funnel to promoting rw a's on their chains because most of the volumes on rw a's on these chains is actually through the meme coins paired rw a's not actually trading of the rw a's themselves and I think it's like two sides of the same coin but yeah I do think like it's good for community building and I mean there's public companies CEOs that have joins FOMO in the past week ends now like they're following the coins on FOMO and they're seeing the holders of those coins and will probably come up with creative ways to help distribute it for some kind of distribution around their actual company you were shaking your head a little bit has to you I don't know you might think it's far strad. I had a lot I'm thinking about a lot yeah I mean part of the reason why I have to all buying this is that right now we're in part one of the cycle right part one of the cycle is the fun part that's the part where numbers go up it's part where everyone feels good it's like okay

40:42if I lost money here there'll be another thing next week when the cycle ends is when everybody's down bad everybody's upset everybody starts talking to what's that a burwick law or whatever you know that's like that's when the knives come out that's when like people will start hounding your Twitter on unrelated tweets calling you a scammer that's like every cycle goes through that and if you're a public company CEO even if you're a public company that's doing poorly you're mostly left alone online people don't go after you know random CEOs who stock is down like 80 percent and just be like you fucking scammer you blah blah blah people will absolutely do that for just like a $10 million mean coin rug pull so that's why I don't know that like community is the is the thing that you want like if you're McDonald's and somebody like pairs something to a McDonald's stock but they're not launching the token it's right if they end up with that's the difference well they're not dorsing it they're not endorsing it they're interacting with it and I actually think that's a pretty big difference well yeah because none of these guys like you should buy this token right it's just like oh we

41:47see you right and like they acknowledge them and then they can use as a funnel for people to actually like carry about their equity right right yeah the difference is they're not launching the token and rugged it's like that I completely agree with that I could but a lot of it is like guilt by association is that you know if you think about handsome and all these celebrity coins right like handsome didn't launch any these coins you didn't you didn't create any of these coins but there's so much appropriation toward handsome for having just been affiliate just I don't just kind of being in the room or something or just being around yeah the prices went up and people forgot about right right right for now for now for now they will remember again when prices go back down and so I think like but there's like a spectrum is just right right I think like glad following a meme coin like the AMC paired one I don't think that's I think that's like the lowest level and it's like people see it right and then like maybe if the AMC CEO obviously he was not too happy but if the AMC CEO were to like tweet something positive like I don't think this

42:49is an endorsement of the coin so like this really enjoys it interacting right yeah yeah yeah we should we should we should cover the story this is on our agenda so AMC notorious meme stock the AMC CEO came out in a blistering review of Robinhood so of course it's one of the stocks that is tokenized on Robinhood he said on Robinhood that or sorry he said on Twitter that Robinhood tokenizing their stock without their permission without their consent was contemptible outrageous disgusting detestable inexcusable and vial Vlad responded in the replies what's the concern and then he went on to say that this is some kind of fictitious synthetic equity market he demanded a voluntary cease and desist and also said that you know these tokens were totally decoupled from demand for the underlying stock it didn't give AMC any ability to raise capital or you know the the holders of it had no connection to voting or their their registry entries this led to the ex sorry the this chief legal officer of Gallagher who's an ex-SEC commissioner

43:51to say send your lawyers and we will educate them basically saying yeah this is totally legal we know our shit we know exactly why you can't do this and basically we don't care if you're gonna come right to us if you remember Robinhood had a similar tip they got into with open AI when they were tokenizing some of open AI's pre IPO stock of course open AI's so private company so it seems like Robinhood has been through the ringer already once before with this kind of conflict but this is kind of the this is sort of the reality is that these companies they don't really have a say in how their stocks are getting tokenized today I don't know thoughts on how we see that dynamic playing out Tom I think the opening AI thing and the AMC think are very different like the opening AI thing was like this like you know maybe uncladeralized naked forward and they were marketing it basically as no you actually own open AI shares which is obviously wrong this was you know AMC oh you know you actually own shares of AMC and this is like you know you're buying sort of this this that instrument basically around this like sort of SPV type type rappers I thought they owned

44:53I thought they had ownership in an SPV that had it it made or not the the the language was very vague on it so maybe they probably had a bunch but like there's no guarantee and you come as you couldn't couldn't redeem it and so different I think um AMC I think actually is is we really very sensitive about this because they have this like very strong like stockholder outreach and sort of loyalty program like I don't know if you could go to AMC but there's a whole program where you can sign up and they like give you rewards if you're like a verified stockholder and obviously they'd like whip up their whole angry army of uh you know AMC holders to go and like vote and do these like wacky corporate governance things and so I think you know this guy probably saw this as oh no you're like severing this lifeline between you know me and my like hoard of uh you know retail investors who uh own AMC and are like loyal to me and I think that's maybe specifically his like kind of concern versus oh like there's some reasons with like the instrument itself or something like that if I had to be generous with that I mean it's weird that AMC of all companies would be upset about it given that they are you know when the few US companies that it's like very strong you know stockholder

45:55the relationship program yeah it seemed very odd true and you have a take yeah I think it's because like if I remember correct do you remember AMC themselves tried to give some of their stock as like our rewards program and so this sort of was like kind of in my mind they've actually tried to do this and it would it when they had like the huge hype with their stock and were unable to convert it to a first party version and the community seems to have basically been able to do the same thing themselves better and my impression is like they want control over that because then they know when the dumps are shares because like last time this happened they didn't have the money issuance they did this huge at the money issuance when the right and like dumped a bunch of shares I think this is a way of replicating that without having to do that but I think long term I think Paul's vision makes a lot of sense like I actually do think like you're already seeing this without earnings calls are like having to be more of a like kind of accessible to retail audiences

46:56you don't see as much of these like kind of state earnings calls anymore like a lot of companies are like really putting in the like performative aspects making it entertaining etc and like the natural limit of that is like you know you have the community of people who participate in the call somehow or now instead these like internet dj and like I think like look you're going to have to make have a lot of bumps in the road I'm not it's not going to be fucking easy but I kind of can see that I like I'm a believer in this now I think like the millennial mind is still too stuck in the kind of old school nonsense right the millennial mind was like lipstick on a pig we made the you actually better but it's the same dog shit infrastructure and it's the same read this read this fucking 5,000 word report by a banking analyst who like couldn't compute x of 5 in their head correctly you know it's like it's not accessible to the normal person yeah but even once you're on the app you just have no clue what to do but I think there's like a few different things here

47:56so first of all the AMC thing I think like first of all the AMC AMC CEO just didn't know about on chain culture and didn't know what he said we're just going to spur like more fury in the opposite direction than he wanted and I just think that's what it did I think our money from backpack actually had a really good take here though which is I think the main argument from him is like we want to be able to fundraise in public markets but if you have this synthetic debt type instrument like and people are holding that then like they're not going to buy stock directly from us how do we fund raising the public markets and actually hurts our ability to do that which is the entire well most of the reason why most companies go public right but if you can move to a model that actually is one to one backed with a mid-radi model and it actually is the actual representation of the equity then you can actually do this much better right because then you know that every single stock with someone's holding is once one backed by an equity and I think that's the direction we're moving this infrastructure is very nascent right and I think like we're in the very early innings of what this happens but I do think this will be a solved issue in the next five years we're just in the early ends of this yeah this argument doesn't make any sense right because for somebody willing to offer you this debt instrument they're holding underlying on the back ends that

49:00they're hedged right they're not just going to hold some naked exposure as as debt so somebody is holding you don't know like you don't have any you don't have any understanding of whether that's happening or not right whether it but if you're holding stock it's a pretty good bet that somebody is hedged doing this otherwise it's like that's just the cheapest way to do it yeah I guess it's like the risk free way to do it but maybe someone's holding yeah I guess that's true yeah right if you buy it really if you also push up the spot price because whoever's selling you the derivative is hedging it that's right yeah that's right but but anyway I also think like largely there is this shift and it's kind of what Tarun was saying on chain allows for better distribution it allows for the social layer but I also think it allows for public market private market participants to act or like public market participants to access like private market returns much earlier right and you see this kind of moving up in cycles whether it's hyper liquid doing pre IPO or even some of these like I guess like private equities on chain which I think have their own problems because like anthropics said you can trade these secondaries and then all of them went

50:03to to nothing but the perps was fine right because the perps are just betting on a price so you actually don't need to underlying to transfer but I think like the point I'm trying to make is that what the blockchain allows for is these new issuance of these new creative assets and then these public market participants are able to actually see upside and private market returns whether that's pre IPO on perps or that's like even buying a prediction market that this is what this company why PO at right and then you get all these different creative mechanisms to actually see those returns so I think that's an exciting part a bit as well yeah I like the take of investor communication or so I should say stockholder communication bifurcating so like the moment of your earnings release there's like okay a document dump for the agents and that's like for all the trading firms and the hedge funds and anybody who's like doing really sophisticated trading she's like okay you ingest that all immediately and like some PDFs and then for the humans it's like a TV show you know you like you get on your twitch stream and you start you know it's like entertaining and it's colorful and it's whatever and like we're moving to a world where they're like the old school like literal conference call like that's going away because like who is that for like

51:09professional traders are not going to be using that anymore so basically it's either for financial entertainment and for people who are kind of vibe trading of like yeah I think it's time to buy I like the CEO's confidence and then you've got the agents that are making all of the actual like high frequency large money financial decisions so there's there's nothing in the middle anymore for like these kind of stayed you know I don't know like very serious conference calls like these these basically come in artifact to the past pretty soon yeah and I think a lot of it is I mean a lot of calls now have like explicit time for like non institutional questions right like they reserve 10% 20% of calls for anyone can dial in and like that's just like the tip of the iceberg that's only even changed in the last two years like even at the games of mania time just didn't change right so it it it was a little bit slow but I kind of I think the way on chain equities end up being more accessible to like users is like this type of stuff becomes like parsed AI parsed for them

52:13like they participate in the type of stuff it seems like that has to be the direction that we're going right okay one one last story that I that I do want to cover before we wrap so speaking of AI parsing story just broke earlier today actually started breaking last night that open AI has solved the Navier Stokes problem which is one of the 13 millennium prizes that are available or the the clay prize which gives you a million dollars for solving some of the most important problems in mathematics now there's a lot of drama behind the Navier Stokes problem basically it was rumored that entropic had actually solved the Navier Stokes problem and it was currently getting their proofs checked this was eventually disseminated online around September 3rd and apparently opening I heard about this they saw the rumor circulating online and a court in open AI that's when they started working on the problem to see if they're newest generation of models a new model that is stronger than astra an unreleased model started working on this problem opening I

53:13apparently spent about 15 million dollars worth of compute on trying to solve this problem now there's all of this drama around the folks at entropic who are working on this problem apparently it was a team of this guy Al Pouge as well as another researcher named Buckmaster and Buckmaster apparently was using open AI models to examine some of the papers that they were working on and supposedly he believes that open AI saw some of the intermediate work that they were done in solving a sort of prerequisite to the Navier Stokes problem and apparently use this intermediate result in order to solve Navier Stokes without giving them any credit there was this kind of crazy set of conversations where they told them hey if you disavow the entropic guy you're working with we will tell the the Millennium Prize to be awarded to you instead of being awarded to open AI and because you were the quote closest human to solving the problem he denied this and then when public with the story which now has gone super viral as like a sort of you know I don't know succession

54:16level drama seems to be going on with the awarding of the prize to run you are the resident mathematician what's your take on that story did I get the court details right there also explain what Navier Stokes is yeah so yes you you kind of I think you got most of the details correct all I know is there's just a very big work going on over this and I think like all the people who are like oh the million dollar prize I spend 15 million in compute come on that's a dionic the point of this is like to first of all no one the only person who's ever won this prize turned down the money it's not about the money this is like a respect slash can you be humans thing I think the so Navier Stokes is probably the most so the of the millennium prizes is probably the most easy to explain to a layperson who has no math background because it's something you've experienced you've been in a plane and you felt turbulence it's it's sort of a fluid dynamics things are happening where like

55:17the planes going through there's a ton of you know you can think of the interacting atmosphere is like a fluid that's that the plane is kind of traveling through and when you have turbulence it's very chaotic so it's like it's unable to fluid flow in one direction it's sort of flowing in a bunch of different directions so you know starting probably Bernoulli in the 1700s until the early 20th century people had been trying to describe different things as fluids whether it's water in your glass gas in the atmosphere different things along those lines and there came to be one sort of master equation that represented all the different types of ways fluids seem to move in the world and that equation is called Navier Stokes now in practice real fluid dynamics is much more complicated but this is like the simplest ideal equation you can write describes like 90% of situations so we'll describe the edge cases perfectly but one question about it that's been troubling people forever is suppose I have a smooth fluid like a pouring water down a rock

56:23is it possible to take something that's a smooth fluid and make it turbulent in a short amount of time can I create turbulence from something that's not turbulent at all right and in practice you know we kind of know that seems to happen right like in theory like a big enough airplane can cause change the weather in some ways locally though but it's not something that you can kind of show has to exist like those things might not be perfect and going from this kind of like smooth thing to like chaotic in a sort of fixed amount of time is sort of something that it's sort of a fundamental instability of this equation which sort of says something on nature right like nature has this instability always there's like turbulence sitting around somewhere and so basically there's been many finding examples is easy but actually proving that such a solution exists or doesn't exist is like hard because you just say over all the set of solutions such a thing can ever happen or here's a very concrete explicit example that it solves and so the solution today is

57:28is basically an example showing this can happen which sort of says the equation has a defect now most people believe this was true but like proving is very hard but the other interesting thing about it was that there's two mathematicians two Spanish mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martinez Zoroah apologies for the mispronunciation probably who basically came up with the solution method for this for the subset of equations like fluids that are not super viscous or fluids that like like molasses for water you can think of like their solutions like they're like for water we solve Navi the Navi research problem but for something that looks more like molasses it's not true and then the original anthropic result generalized that to something slightly broader almost all of the schocities and the open AI thing is like hey we can cover any fluid whether it's like atmospheric gas or like super super viscous like all you know something like a super cooled liquid that might take 10,000

58:29years to move one millimeter and so the interesting thing is like humans found the answer they just didn't realize the same solution generalized and then the AI was like we're going to search and like generalize as much as possible okay that was my like very trying to distill it as simply as possible I don't know if that was understandable but how do you okay but how do you feel as you know math Twitter person seeing all this drama breakout because because part of it like normally you'd want to say wow amazing another AI discovery I mean everyone everyone I know and acting is very depressed right because it's like everyone's like your your career hierarchy was determined on like trying to solve these problems but now it's kind of like actually just have more compute and my guess is math will turn into like a place like a lot of humanities where there's like a very small number of 10 year professors 90% of people are just like teaching calculus to pre-med morons and like that's that's what happens do you think you think math research is going away it's not going away I think it's just going to be like the bar goes up so much that it's just going to be very it's

59:33going to be like being a monk I mean I said he's a college and I dropped out of fluids dynamics because I had enough with differential equations and I took GR instead so well hey you still have the right choice so the French or the French or the French yeah yeah I think you nailed it I think you nailed that one I think I agree with the Peter Teal thing right of like word cells are going to be more successful in the next century than stem cells I think he said something like a lot of stem cells like tm and caps not stem cell in your body okay was that his line I'd know yeah he had something like that I'm probably misphrasing it exactly but I never heard the phrase stem cell until he said that like so in in this drama to ruin are do you do you subscribe so Sebastian Bruebeck who is the guy at OpenAI who is the head of this project he has come out and claimed that this was all a big misunderstanding OpenAI they independently arrived at these answers and there was just conversion evolution essentially is that like look the answer was in the air and we found

1:00:34that same time that they did a lot of people are doubting that through and where do you land do you believe OpenAI or do you believe that they were Wiley coyotes and they knicked this from the training data so to speak which in their statement they said we cannot rule out that we did not train on some of the information that they you know gave into into code extra the time they're working on the paper I think the one coin of wisdom is clearly that this this other solution that's been known like the fact that it generalizes like the same it's sort of interesting like they didn't really discover like a new solution path they took an existing solution and showed hey it actually works in this other setting and and obviously they made some modifications right like but it the core ideas I think really came from from these two so that part clearly I think the anthropic people seem to as far as I can tell have to have provenance to realizing that like this the NYU professor not Levant Alpoche who works at anthropic but it's the other guy Buck Buck whatever I forget

1:01:38his last name but the thing that starts with Buck that you said Buck that's right yeah he he clearly is the one who understood that there's a chance that this existing solution with a little with a little bells and whistles added will generalize but I so it's like hard to not believe the anthropic account on the other hand the opening I think really flams the door on like how do you generalize it like I think the the direction the anthropic thing did is correct but it doesn't fully solve it so actually there's a very good blog by Terence Tao about like the step three steps so you do need the third thing the third thing does actually add some real stuff the question is is like a matter of street cred and you know maybe if this was on FOMO and there was a coin and you got to look at therthesis you would have known oh my god the reliance did I'm just saying in terms of like academia is all about credit right it's like oh like who gets credit for being the first invent this thing it feels like a game of egos that's what I was gonna say yeah yeah yeah and like I

1:02:41think that my my three days of meme meme coin slash whatever stock coin trading makes me think that that this there's a very similar like I want to be first you know it's like I found this band before they were cool aspect is like a very real real thing right I know you don't listen to music or entertainment see obviously obviously I mean that's the takeaway we can all come away with from this from this episode I had a whole take about why this underscores the need for private AI but I think we're already over time so I'll I'll can that Paul where can people find you and I'm guessing that you the answer is on FOMO yeah I'd pull on FOMO it's the only place to need a follow-up but also Paul or Linger on X yeah it was great thanks for having me it was great to be on day up thanks for joining us hope to see more spicy takes great for next time next week thanks everybody yeah