FOMO Founder Defends Memecoins + AMC vs Robinhood

Transcript

After getting junked on a lot for being an unk from the last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and um probably uh learned some very expensive lessons along the way. >> Not a dividend. >> It's a tale of two coins. >> Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet. >> Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved is the ultimate defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First you got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes.

>> Hello everyone. >> You got Tarun the gigab brain and grand puba at gauntlet. >> Yo >> joining us today we've got special guest Paul prince of pumps at FOMO. Welcome Paul. >> Not sure what I think about that title but great to [laughter] be here. I am a Steve the head man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping blocks at XYZ for more 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/ dinosaurs and having an extremely call it antiquated take on what's going on in the memecoin

sphere. Now, obviously, FOMO has been at the center of what's happening in the Memecoin space, and you told us you had seen some of the clips of us talking in the last show, uh, rolling around in social media. What was your impression [laughter] hearing what 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. We're bringing we're bringing you guys back to the modern age. But I was actually traveling this weekend, so I wasn't too deep on Twitter. Um, so we can rehash some of the conversation here, but but yeah, I think like listen, when you're building a product, I think everyone has their own take, especially one that's a consumer product, everyone has their own take as a user of what this product is. And I think FOMO, our

next part of our journey is to do a lot of deeper discourse around what our brand ethos and future vision 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 onchain trading is we're just like onchain 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 skumorphic 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 numeric strings and these and these like clunky block explorers right 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 terun Tom whether it's I don't know some pseudonym you could be fully anonymous but I get full transparency to what you're doing then hopefully eventually as we have stocks and we have eviction markets and we have all these other asset classes become the social graph of all of finance and I just think on Twitter it's really hard to see that especially when stoned off fun and all these meme coins are launching And I think it's a really important to position yourself. For example, Robin Hood became huge on options and then kind of pivoted over to these other asset classes as well. And I'm not going

to make a 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. Um, but the overall vision of the platform is a lot larger than you might see in some of the public discourse on Twitter. >> So 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 Se who everyone knows has a much larger presence than me on X. So, we were talking about that before the show, but yeah, X say was like early to every single crypto protocol and we met in college actually had a summer internship uh in TRD 5. He went to Yale and I went to NYU and we were both there and he was early to every protocol and

one of my friends was working at DYDX and kind of took the I'm I'm a builder at heart like I've always been a super a geek for consumer products and I wanted to work for a product. So I joined the first opportunity I did which is at DYDX. Se kind of came over there and we built out the institutional book of business there. But the whole time we were there se was trading all these crypto protocols and trying to get me involved and I mean you need to take 3 days to to onboard from fiat and you have this EOA wallet in a 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 type of product experience would resonate with them. And I think there's

this push pull in every single decision say and 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 crosschain gasless trading application. But then it's something that you could onboard in seconds. You have this accessibility layer not in terms of use but all not only in terms of use but also in terms of discovery. I'm seeing with the best of trading all the time and it's easy for anyone to onboard and then you can build the experience for both user groups. though. It's funny cuz the camps are like save the trencher. I'm like the person who wants the trench but doesn't know how.

And then you kind of have this push pull in every decision you make. >> So I I will say I spent after getting dunked on a lot for being an unk [laughter] from the last episode. I uh I spent my holiday weekend trenching and um pro probably uh learned some very expensive lessons along the way. You know, actually, you know what's amazing is uh is uh my dear fellow Delawarian Hunter Biden really made my P&L go from negative to positive quite quite dramatically because I I feel like I I feel like the game the game the game is like really understanding the news news I'm using broadly speaking

not like hey this is the news that's happening but like what social thing is like hyped enough for someone to like be making copy cat coins or making, you know, like something that's like fits a moment. And um so I I did I did end up positive, you know, not not some crazy, you know, not some 10,000% positive, but you know, like a respectable like 10% positive, but I really enjoyed the experience even when I lost money. >> Like I had kind of like always heard this thing, right? It's like it's like you lose money. You're well the social game the PvP aspect of it. I think you seem have this like the real view of this which [laughter] is like you're

just like a casino view >> casino 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. >> Did you create assets as well? >> I I indulged in some of the the M forks and but this I didn't do via FOMO. this I did via direct vi [laughter] just just I wanted to see you know get the full Robin Hood chain experience but the beauty of FOMO is I deposited my deposits were available in like 3 seconds I don't think I've ever used a

crypto app that's been comparable to the speed of that the I didn't think about what chain I was using at all in fact there were about 50 50% of the time I was buying copycat Hunter Biden coins I uh I thought I was buying them on Robin Hane I was buying from Salana. [laughter] I I didn't even know what chain I was using. I 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. Like they obviously have a liquidity advantage, a network advantage of like the Coinbase, Robin Hood, things like right, you know, if you look at them versus like stock brokers 10 years ago, 10 years before them, right? 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 FOMO and really seeing the users really write their thesis and like doxing when they when they're bought and sold and the 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 was like more like playing a video game than like trading. And I I don't know. Anyway, sorry that was my long winded experience of three days in FOMO.

>> 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 E Toro and Weeble 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 what the person's holding or if like what are they actually holding on the side 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 to the overall app, but you're just making a post about the thing. But on FOMO, 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 to your notifications. And that's how you bootstrap this spiral social graph. And it's very similar to what happened on on Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok, like anyone in the algorithm could become famous by going viral, right? And similar things happening on FOMO where we have these localized leaderboards.

There's like more 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 alltime 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 FOMO. They're then building an ex account having 50 to 100,000 followers there. And then now we launched 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 and people we attribute it to you and then people are trading after you and we already did $2 and half million dollars there. So now you can imagine when you have a a robust equities product right

not only can you trade this from anywhere in the world but why would I trade a Tesla stock on another brokerage when I could come to FOMO 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 memecoins that fits this particular format because to your point hey everything that's been tried before it's 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 is 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 have 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 through APIs. I I literally have a distributed ledger. You create I have a social layer on top. You create an identity around it. Social layer is proprietary. All the information is there. We generate you embedded wallet. The second thing is cultural. people were used to trading in crypto and it used to be that you just mark a K 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

Robin Hood 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 Robin Hood because they're like, I want to buy AI. Sure, I could buy it on Robin Hood, 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 could come to this platform really easily, but then I get to discover things in real time, right? See what the the top people who are talking about, I don't know, like talking about earnings reports on these AI businesses, etc., what their thesis are, interact with them, earn, and then also trade. And I think that's kind of the key here. But

yeah, I think that the unique thing of the blockchain and the culture there 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 Robin Hood chain pre a pre all the kind of like pairing meme coins with stocks, but also b FOMO 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 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 I don't know exactly the stats, but it it was

something like 70% plus of Robin Hood users came from FOMO. I mean that that's like kind of incredible if you think about it because Robin Hood 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 like kind of boxing you into one you know like the ftechd 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 [clears throat] like how how do you how do you guys think about that in the long run?

>> Yeah, that's exactly right. And you had this experience where it's abstract to chain. And I think that we we love all these chain teams, but I think FOMO kind of leveled 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 FOMO, I'm pulling it up on Robin Hood chain. FOMO had 94,000 active wallets on Robin Hood 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 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 historically has always 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 FOMO rather than from some kind of unique distribution is that FOMO kind of will start doing an implicit load balancing across different chains. So right now, you know, one of the things that we've seen that's pretty incredible is the growth of Robin Hood 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 Robin Hood. And like that kind of revenue, you know, it's meaningful even at at a company level for Robin Hood. 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 FOMO if if most of the buyers if most of the users are ultimately coming through FOMO in the first place then [snorts] almost you can just start not you but sort of the market itself can start to load balance uh the different coins launching across different chains. So let's move some to Bass, 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 FOMO or Pumped. Fun or whoever. >> I think it's a bit idealistic because people just want to trade the same coins I feel like on the same days and it's whatever the narrative is running. So, for example, like Robin Hood 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 Robin Hood chain, right? And I think these different chains have their own narrative. Most buyers are on FOMO, >> they're going to launch it on Robin Hood chain anyway, even if most of the buyers are on FOMO.

>> I think that's right. And like the go the goal of the chain is to move all trading there. And we want to be more of this agnostic layer where users can trade whatever they want in any chain. And it's our obligation and job to create a smooth experience no matter what that is. And that's a very difficult job as you can imagine because crosschain trading is a very new thing. Like this thing didn't even exist 6 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 um 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 um I think it'll

actually be a competitive advantage for FOMO very soon. But yeah, I mean load balancing would be amazing. I think it's just a big idea with stickies. People just follow narratives. >> Right. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I >> I mean I I'm going to tell you that I learned that I learned that when trading laptop on soul and laptop on Robin [laughter] >> and 300 fake fake laptops. >> We do label them. If you go to the top of the coin page, we do label them. But yeah, I mean the goal is to abstract it 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 I don't know like somewhat informed about crypto, but any of the group outside has no clue, right? And they're just going to get

scared away if they see that. >> Yeah. So I I mean it's interesting because I think after the last show's conversation, it seems Tun has recanted his ways. I think between us I might be the unrepentant one. >> I think it was fun. >> You just don't like the fun aspect of it. You're like, "Ah, they're losing money. They must hate it." I'm like, "Actually, there's it'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 I mean, if you if you talk about like modern mobile games, I think there are maybe some analogous kind of dark patterns in in modern mobile games. But the point that I want to make is that I actually don't I don't have a problem with most memecoin

trading. Most memecoin trading is people just buying and selling Doge or uh you know I don't know Trumpcoin or whatever. I think the phenomenon that I find to be most delletterious are generally speaking like the memecoin production function. I think that's where most of the value gets shredded and I think that's where it's like most harmful to people and of course that's where a lot of FOMO lives deacto is like a lot of what people are doing in FOMO is doing the new launches and the new uh stockcoin pairings or whatnot. Um that's where I think you see all these middlemen this whole memecoin 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 memecoin. 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 memecoins and you're, you know, a so young 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 memecoins are losing money. And I think the um 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 or whatever. What

I object to more is the dynamic, right? So, what we were talking about last time of these like stock coins getting paired to or stock tokens getting paired to memecoins. 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 insensed 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 if 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 genu that

should genuinely be discouraged. Like I don't think people should be buying lottery tickets. I think lotteryies are like just just absolutely destroying people who buy like they lose so much money per dollar that you put into a lottery ticket compared to playing roulette. I think lotteryies are much more attractive than roulette wheels. But, you know, I don't know like it's there are differences between forms of gambling and I think me the the sort of the thing we were talking about last week. I don't even know if people are still doing that at this point. I'm sure they're learning quickly what does and doesn't work. Different forms of this are more and less damaging to retail.

And I think it's important to be clearey about that and not to just point and 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 whole 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 become better at predicting trends like Chris McMillo etc. 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 out. I want to hold this token longer. We reward people for having creator rewards on the platform which rewards people for holding longer, for putting thesis, etc. We have average hold time as a stat whereas if you're tied to a launchpad, right, your incentive is to create coins as fast as possible because that's how you earn money. So, I actually think FOMO's coming in and trying to like revive the trenches and sweep up the dust a little bit because before we had the launchpad game, you saw Harambe like Se was trying to convince me to buy Harambecoin. It was sitting at 200 million. He's like, I'm going to hold this thing for four years, right? Cuz that thing could sit at like a few

hundred million, go to a billion market cap, right? Cuz there were so few meme coins. You needed deployer teams. You were talking about 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 short or long on maybe like a real world asset. I'm very confident on this because everything built on FOMO is too big to like incentivize people to actually have real thesis 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 going to misuse and use the technology, right? I think as a steward of the technology, our obligation is to

steer that technology in as positive a direction as we can. The goal is for the brand ethos to be very positive, to be a beacon of light, to be a joyful experience. I think that you go to a prediction market protocol, you feel a little bit of shame using that thing. And I think a large part of it is because you're doing it in solidarity, right? Sorry, you're doing it in 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 than it 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 term memecoin game. Of course, people are going to trade those assets and I think like we are an onchain 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 whatever they want. But I don't think you should encourage those behaviors and you should encourage educational experiences through all the content 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 a casino or whether it's a social trading app, um 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 concept of financial entertainment before. If you consider FOMO 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 fessions 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 with me as the right way to approach creating the subtle nudges in an application to get people to do memecoin 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 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 FOMO 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 aligned and I think you hinted upon this. But think about like other financial media. So Michael Bur didn't become famous right after Big Short. He 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 podcasts, etc. or like the 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 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 that 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

celebrities created and then people can kind of trade and have access to anything, share opinions and also yeah kind of hold things in solidarity. So yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, one other thing that's interesting is I love the uh the shaming aspect where it's like, you know, you'll see someone who's like, "Here's why I bought this 300K in market cap coin and here's my thesis and then like 3 seconds later you get another notification that's like they sold everything their thesis. They don't believe their thesis." I really enjoyed the like learning which influencers because like before this I never really paid attention to memecoin influencers if I'm going to be honest and I kind of am like which ones are full of [ __ ] and which which ones are real and I'm not saying

it's like a science right there not this is not some scientific there's even onchain slleuth and people are like why don't people just buy on sidewalls well listen there's like tons of slle on crypto Twitter and then you see someone on fobbo buying and then you see someone like selling immediately repeatedly on a sidewallet that's maybe not on FOMO, but it's all on chain. Then it's like people have tried to argue that transparency is bad because people are buying on sidewalls, but well that's transparent who just not tied to your FOMO identity. There are people that 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 burning their social identity. when we launched our clans product, which right now is just like a superp position of P&Ls. Eventually, hopefully you could

trade together more deeply, but they're like, "Oh, well now," like the only criticism I saw is like, "Oh, now we could see like the groups of people dumping on us." I'm like, "Well, these people are going to dump on you anyway. Now you could actually see it, right?" Like 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 memecoin trading 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 rewind 6 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 uh what is it? It's it's basically three. There's Pawns, there's Stomp. Fund, which is on Salana, and then there's Pump, uh, which of course has always been on Salana. Pawns is the Robin Hood Pacific one. It's it's rallied crazy this month. Huge amount of growth in volume. Uh, as of yesterday, they were the number one launchpad by revenue. Stomp fund 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 FOMO's relationship with these launchpads? And I mean, obviously you guys are agnostic. anything on any launchpad is fair game to trade on on FOMO. Um but uh strategically, you know, as one of the co-founders, how do you think about the like do you want a 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 Well, it depends, right? Because like this new stock pairing is a completely different thing. Like if you were talking about pure memes like oh when was the uh remember when those people got caught in 4K like like cheating at the Coldplay concert, there's a token for that, right? So that's like a canonical event that could be memes and like imagine if you had some like AI launchpad that could like predict these things. But the problem 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 in early and see this tremendous upside, right? So, if you're thinking of the game from that

perspective, then there's always going to be this new meta that people are trading and 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 um it's cool to see new entrance and new metas being created. I think like every time you see a meta, whether it's it was the whole stuff about OpenClaw and the AI meta, you're like, "Okay, like what can possibly come next?" And well, now there's stock token pairing. I think you always it's always like you always think that this is the last one and 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

re recently put out this thing where it's like you can give out like I think it's equity in a business through a token launch if it's up to $5 million and I think like you can even do there's like some situations where you can 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 could have a launchpad team that helps them build alongside this? And FOMO has 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 launch a token will come and hold the supply and give messages. But we've seen pawns, we've seen Solana, we've seen

just like 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 thesis 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 cuz you're have 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 your stockholders, right? That's never existed as a form of distribution.

Um, 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 onchain assets. >> Okay. Interesting. Well, 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 a, you know, obviously the laptop scandal and Berisma and blah blah blah, all this stuff was never really in the public eye. You should find the

audience because Hunter Biden had many scandals. So, it was kind of >> He did have many scandals. There was the poop uh what was it? The poop painting scandal. There was a bunch of >> Ukrainian bribes. >> Ukrainian that was Brisma. That's Brisma, was it not? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Anyway, so kind of a scandalridden fellow. He also used to be a crack addict in which he uh he that's not a slur. That is actually true. He has acknowledged that and was in rehab. And of course, he was indicted for tax evasion, I believe it was. and uh his firearm.

>> Okay, nice. Anyway, he uh is back in the public eye has started becoming very viferous in uh politics and he has launched he's announced that he's launching a memecoin called laptop. Of course, this is a reference to the laptop Hunter Biden laptop scandal. So, he's launching this memecoin called laptop on September 9th on base. He has teased the laptop saying or so teased laptop token saying that he is going to airdrop some of the laptop token to people who lost money on Trump token as well as to some uh subscribers to his Substack 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. I feel like you you glossed over. I I have to

say I'm not really a memecoin fan, but this was one of the more thoughtful or like clever memecoin proposals out there. So, it was like, you know, he has this whole sort of burn mechanism thing of like, oh, if these, you know, predictions come true, I'll commit to burning, you know, some percentage of the supply, like, you know, if Dems win midterms or Bitcoin hits 100K. And um I think the other thing that that was um interesting and this was sort of a whole scandal was he's kind of become more popular recently because he did this interview with um Andrew what's his name from channel 5 um you probably saw those clips and so channel 5 subscribers also were supposed to get an airdrop and apparently just used channel 5's subscriber list I got their emails and then channel 5 put those statements like don't you know I don't know how they got

our email list we don't endorse this this memecoin and I I I guess like I mean this is something I want to ask Paul about which is um I mean how do square. I I guess whenever I hear people talking about memecoins in kind of mainstream media or like non trenchers, there's just like universal disdain and groaning. And I think when when this Hunter Biden thing came out, it was the exact same reaction. I mean, maybe part of it is is political, but part of it is like there's just such negative sentiment around memecoins. And then I look at the FOMO numbers and like, you know, user numbers are are growing and look quite healthy. And so like how do you I don't know like like how do you think about meme coins in sort of culture more broadly?

>> Well, celeb tokens in particular, I should say, get a get a very particular treatment 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 um 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 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 every all the side there. Like we're not going to do anything there. We'll 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 were ones called social tokens now I think they're just celebcoins. I think we have a pretty good track record of calling all of them bad ideas. Whether it was Trump Melania or there was

Igazelia's coin or I don't know there's there's definitely there's a number of other ones that we've talked about on the show. >> They do seem uniquely bad. Oh, of course. Kanye, that's right. I forgot about Kanye. 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 stockcoin thing, even though I would say I certainly mainly lost money in the stock coin [laughter] world over the weekend, obviously. So, yeah, weekend.

>> Okay, nice. >> No, no, no. That's actually the fun part, right? It's like >> what what what news exists for the Stockcoin stuff? But I think an interesting aspect of the some of the stock coins is I I was basically some some of the um meme coins. So like some of the laptop clones were pairing with like short US bond ETFs. So you like buy laptop and you get airdrop 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 memecoin but I'm getting aird 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 this sounds boring right? It's like okay I rebased a 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 crazier about the fact that it's like a real like the real asset, right? somehow I'm getting some short 30-year Treasury bonds out out of this and I don't even really totally understand why. And so so there's something very more relatable I think about the 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 going to last? uh >> stock token stock token pairing meta. So I I've seen some people try to make some constructive versions of it where they're like we're the memecoin is a reward token for your stock stock where like you basically so so you know there was like this whole thing about like how the him CEO is like started following the uh the boner >> the boner guy >> and like is like very into the kind of thing like people suspect he's like some some some person who's trading it.

>> I have a take that I haven't heard before. >> Yeah, go for it. My take is that meme coins with stock tokens I think are great communitybuilding aspects for these companies, right? You saw what happened with GameStop, right? So now if you have this community around this memecoin, finally people are actually caring about your company, right? And it might not be like the type of caring 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 RWAS on their chains cuz most of the volumes on RWA on these chains is actually through the memecoins paired RWA, not actually trading of the RWA themselves. And I think it's like two sides of the same coin. But um yeah, I do think like it's good for community

building. And I mean there's public company CEOs that have joined FOMO in the past week and now like they're following the coins on FOMO and they're seeing the holders of those coins and we'll 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. I don't know. You might think it's far. >> I'm shaking my head a lot. I'm shaking my head a lot. I mean part of the reason why I after 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. the part where everyone feels good. It's like, okay, if 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 uh what's that burwick law or whatever. You know, that's like that's when the knives come out. That's when like people will startounding 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 whose stock is down like 80% and just be like, "You [ __ ] scammer, you blah blah blah." People will absolutely do that for just like a $10 million memecoin 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 endorse, >> that's the difference. >> Well, they're not endorsing 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 are like, "You should buy this token, right?" It's just like, "Oh, we see you." Right. And like they acknowledge them and then they can use that as a funnel for people actually like caring about their equity, right? >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Uh >> the difference is they're not launching the token and rugging it. It's like the token is already created. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Totally. Totally. That I completely agree with that. But a lot of it is like guilt by association is that >> you know if you think about Anom and all these celebrity coins right like Anom didn't launch any of these coins he

didn't you know he didn't create any of these coins but there's so much approprium toward Ansom for having just been affiliate just I don't know just kind of being in the room or something or just being around you >> yeah prices went up and people forgot about that >> right right for now for now for now they will remember again when prices go back down and so I I think like >> but there's like a spectrum Right. I think like Vlad following a memecoin 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 is an endorsement of the coin enjoys it interacting, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We should we should we should cover the story. This is on our agenda. So, uh, AMC, notorious, uh, meme stock. The AMC CEO came out in a blistering rebuke of Robin Hood. So, of course, it's one of the stocks that is tokenized on Robin Hood. He, uh, said on Robin Hood that, or sorry, he said on Twitter that Robin Hood tokenizing their stock without their permission, without their consent, was contemptable, outrageous disgusting detestable inexcusable, and vile. 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 uh also said that uh you know these tokens were totally decoupled

from demand for their 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 uh sorry the the chief legal officer of Gallagher who was an ex SEC commissioner to say send your lawyers and we will educate them. Basically saying yeah this is totally legal. Uh we know our [ __ ] We know exactly why you can do this and basically we don't care if you're going to come crying to us. If you remember Robin Hood had a similar tiff they got into with OpenAI when they were tokenizing some of OpenAI's pre-IPO uh stock. Of course Open AAI is still a private company. So, it seems like Robin Hood 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 uh the OpenAI thing and the AMC thing are very different, right? The OpenAI thing was like this like you maybe unclutateralized naked forward and they were marketing it basically as no you actually own OpenAI shares which is obviously wrong. This was you know AMC oh no you actually own shares of AMC and this is like you know you're buying sort of this this um that instrument basically around this like sort of SPV type type.

>> I thought they owned I thought they had ownership in an SPV that had >> it may or may 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 obviously couldn't couldn't redeem it. And so different. I think um AMC I think actually is is weirdly 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 ever go to AMC, but they have this whole program where you can sign up and they like give you rewards if you're like a verified stockholder. And obviously they 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 horde 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 presence with like the instrument itself or something like that if I had to be be generous with it. It's weird that AMC of all companies would be upset about it given that they are, you know, one of the few US companies that is like very strong, you know, stockholder relationship program. >> Yeah, it would seem very odd. Ton, do you have a take?

Yeah, I I think it's because like if I remember correct, do you remember AMC themselves tried to give some of their stock as like a rewards program and so this sort of was like kind of in my mind they've actually tried to do this and it 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 to dump their shares because like last time this happened they did an at 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 I I think long term I think Paul's vision makes a lot of sense. Like I I actually do think like you're already seeing this with how earnings calls are like having to be more of a like kind of accessible to retail audiences. Um you you don't see as much of these like kind of stayed 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 are now instead these like internet dens. And like I 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 [ __ ] easy. But I kind of can see that. I I like I'm a believer in this now. I I 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 UX look better, but it's the same dog [ __ ] infrastructure and it's the same read this read this [ __ ] 5,000word report by a banking analyst who like couldn't compute XA 5 in their head correctly, you know? It's like >> it's not accessible to the normal person.

>> Yeah, 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. So, first of all, on the AMC thing, I think like first of all, the AMC AMC CEO just didn't know about onchain culture and didn't know what he said was just going to spur like more fury in the opposite direction that he wanted. And I just think that's what it did. I think Armani 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 fund raise in public markets, but if you have this synthetic debt type instrument like how and people are holding that, then like they're not going to buy stock directly from us. How do we fund raise in 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 onetoone backed with a mint redeem 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 that someone's holding is onetoone backed by an equity and I think that's the direction we're moving this infrastructure is very nent 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 5 years we're just in the early end of this Yeah, >> this argument doesn't make any sense, right? Because for somebody to be willing to offer you this debt instrument, they're holding underlying

on the back end that they're hedged, right? They're not just going to hold some naked exposure as as debt. So, somebody is holding, >> but you don't know like you 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, >> it's a pretty good bet that somebody is hedged doing this otherwise like that's just the cheapest way to do it. >> Yeah. I guess that's it's like the risk-free way to do it, but maybe someone's holding. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah, buy a derivative, right? If you buy a derivative, you also push up the spot price because whoever's selling you the derivative is hedging it. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Spot.

>> But but anyway, I also think like largely there is this shift and it's kind of what Tun was saying onchain 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 hyperlquid doing preipo or even some of these like I guess like private equities on chain which I think have their own problems because like anthropic said you can't trade these secondaries and then all of them went to to to nothing but the the per was fine right because the per you're just betting on a price so you actually don't need the underlying to 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 in private market returns whether that's preipo and per or that's like even buying a prediction market that this is what this company will IPO at right and then you get all these different creative mechanisms to actually see those returns so I think that's an exciting part of it as well >> yeah I like the take of investor communication or so I should say um 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 and anybody who's like doing really sophisticated trading just Okay, you ingest that all immediately in 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, and it's like entertaining and it's colorful and it's whatever. And like we're moving to a world where there like the the old school like literal conference call like that's going away because like who is that for? Like professional 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 I 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 will become an artifact of 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 GameStop Mania time this didn't change right so it it it was a little bit slow but I kind of I think the way onchain equities end up being more accessible to like users

is like this type of stuff becomes like parsed AI parsed for them or like 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. It actually started breaking last night that OpenAI has solved the Navier Stokes problem which is one of the 13 Millennium prizes that are available um or the 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. Uh basically it was rumored that Enthropic had actually solved the Navier Stokes

problem and was currently getting their proofs checked. Um this was eventually disseminated online around September 3rd. And apparently OpenAI heard about this. They saw the rumor uh circulating online and uh according to OpenAI that's when they started working on the problem to see if their newest generation of models, a new model that is stronger than Astra, an unreleased model, uh started working on this problem. OpenAI apparently spent about $15 million worth of compute on trying to solve this problem. Now there's all of this drama around the folks at Anthropic who are working on this problem. Apparently it was a team of this guy Alge as well as another researcher named Buckmaster. And uh Buckmaster apparently was using

OpenAI models to examine some of the papers that they were working on. And supposedly he believes that OpenAI saw some of the intermediate work that they were done in solving a sort of prerequisite to the Navier Stokes problem and apparently used 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 anthropic guy you're working with, we will tell the the Millennium Prize to be awarded to you instead of being rewarded to OpenAI and because you were the quote closest human to solving the problem. He denied this and then went public with a story which now has gone super viral as like a sort of you know I don't know succession

level drama that seems to be going on with the awarding of the of the prize. Tun you are the resident mathematician. What's your take on that story and did I get the core details right there? Also explain what Navia Stokes is. >> Yeah. So so yes you you kind of uh I think you got most of the details correct. All I know is there's just a very big war going on over this. And uh I think like all the people who are like, "Oh, the million-dollar prize. I spent 15 million to compute." Come on, that's idiotic. 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 beat 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 lay person who has no math background because it's something you've experienced. You've been in a plane and you've felt turbulence is is sort of a fluid dynamics thing happening where like the plane's going through there's a ton of you know you can think of the the interacting atmosphere as 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 Bernoli 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, uh 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 navvers. Now in practice real fluid dynamics is much more complicated but this is like the simplest ideal equation you can write that describes like 90% of situations. It won't 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. Is 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 that 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 is is 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 have to say over all the set of solutions such a thing can never happen or here's a very concrete explicit example that ex solves this. And so the solution today is is a is basically an example showing this can happen which sort of says the equation has this 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 Cordova and Luis Martinez Zoroa apologies for the misprononunciation probably who

basically came up with the solution method for this for a subset of of equations like fluids that are not super viscous or fluids that like like molasses versus water you could think of like their solutions like they're like for water we solve nav the nav problem but for something that looks more like molasses it's not true and then the original anthropic result generalized that to to something slightly broader almost all viscosities 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 you know something like a super cool liquid that might take 10,000 years 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 break out? Because because part of it like normally you'd want to say wow amazing another AI discovery. I mean everyone everyone I know in academia 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 tenure professors 90% of people are just like teaching calculus to premed 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 going to be like being a monk. It's like I [laughter] mean >> I studied physics in college and I dropped out of fluid dynamics because I had enough with differential equations and I took GR instead. So >> well hey you still had the right choice. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think you nailed it. I think you nailed that one. Um >> 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 along [laughter] those lines. >> Stem cells >> like S T E M in caps, not stem cell in your body. >> Okay. Was that his line? I 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 >> in in this drama, Terun, are are do you do you subscribe? So Sebastian Breubck who is the guy at OpenAI who was 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 it was just conversion evolution essentially is that like look this answer was in the air and we found it same time that they did. A lot of people are doubting that through and where where do you land? Do you believe open

AAI or do you believe that they were wy coyotes? And they nicked 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 uh uh you know gave into into codeex during the time they worked on the paper. I think the one cone of wisdom is clearly that this this other solution that's been known like the fact that it generalizes like the same it it's it's sort of interesting like it 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 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 as far as I can tell have to have provenence to realizing that like this the NYU professor not Leavant Alpo who works at Anthropic but the other guy Buck Buck whatever I forget his last name but the thing that starts with Buck that you said uh he >> Buckmaster yeah he he clearly is the one who understood that there's a chance that this existing [snorts] solution with the little with the little bells and whistles added will generalize but So it's like hard to not believe the anthropic account. On the other hand, the OpenAI thing really slammed the door on like how do you generalize it? Like I

think the the 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 Terrence 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 credit. And you know, maybe if this was on FOMO and there was a coin and you got to look at their thesis, you would have known you got the real [laughter] answer. >> No, no, 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 to invent this thing?

>> It feels like a game of egos. That's what I was going to say. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like I think the my my three days of meme memecoin slash whatever stockcoin trading makes me think that that there there's a very similar like I want to be first, you know? It's like I 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 h so maybe [laughter] that's why you're not getting >> obviously obviously I think that's I think that's the takeaway we can all come away with from this uh from this episode u 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 uh I'll I'll can that Paul where can people find you and I'm guessing

that The answers on FOMO. >> Yeah. Paul on FOMO. It's the only place you need to follow me. But also Paul Erlanger on X. Yeah. It was great. Thanks for having me. It was great to be on. >> Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Hope to see more spicy takes. [sighs and gasps] >> Great. That's it for now. We'll be back next week. Thanks everybody. >> Yeah. [music]