The Pomp Podcast - #549 Alex Taub on Digital Horse Racing

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Alex Taub is the co-founder and CEO of Upstream, a new social professional network. He is also an avid investor in, and user of, Zed, a new digital horse racing ecosystem. In this conversation, we discuss digital ecosystems, virtual horse racing, stud farms, various investment strategies, the metaverse, and building a new professional network. ======================= Did you know nearly 338 million dollars worth of NFTs were sent last year? And in 2021 that number is growing faster than ever. Looking to make your first NFT? Check out NEAR’s fast, scalable, low-cost, open-source platform. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at near.org: https://near.org/?utm_campaign=pomp  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Alex Taub is the co-founder and CEO of Upstream, a new social professional network. He is also an avid investor and user of Zed, a new digital horse racing ecosystem. In this conversation, we discuss digital ecosystems, virtual horse racing, stud farms, various investment strategies, the metaverse, and building a new professional network. I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i've got alex here with me what's up man what's going on we're doing it in miami yes we are all right what the hell is zed zed.run has like taken over the world it's digital horse racing yeah so i got into it about a month and a half ago all right that scares everyone immediately when it's only six weeks but that's so in context yeah i've got i got into about a month and a half ago almost two months ago uh some like backstory i have a friend drew drew austin he's a great guy he runs a thing called red beard ventures and um he tried to get me into nba top shot in like early well and try to get me into nba top shot like october

november december time of the past year and that was 2020 yeah and that was really early that would have been a good time to get a top shot all right and then he was in miami actually at the end of the year beginning of beginning of january end of december and we were sitting down at some hotel and he was like showing me he's like i just spent like 1500 bucks and i bought this like zion williamson cosmic hollow like one out of 50 i'm like dude what are you doing like why are you spending just flush 1500 bucks down the toilet and he's like no i bought like a john moran i bought this like vince carter last shot all these like cosmic hollows whatever i was like what's going on he's like just buy a pack experience it took me about a week to buy a pack and when i did

i was like oh this is really cool like the opening of it and uh anyway flash forward about a month later his portfolio is worth about over two million dollars on a fifty thousand dollar investment it's pretty good i'm no mathematician but that's pretty good it's pretty good uh and that that was a really expensive week because that week i could have bought like a few like legendary packs for like you know 200 bucks which anything you got there is worth you know 3k plus um and i was like okay i gotta listen to drew next time drew and i started this like weekly event and there's there's context to this backstory but drew and i started this like weekly event uh on the company i run called upstream uh we have an nft community we meet every friday at

1pm and every week we talk about something different so the first week we talked about top shot the second week i think we talked about genies then the week after we had like akash who's the founder of genies they were launching some nft stuff and then on wednesday i was like hey drew who should we have this this weekend he's like oh i'm getting into this thing called zed um i'm actually buying a bunch of horses for some friends do you want me to buy you a horse uh or a few horses i was like dude what are you talking about like digital horses yeah well first i was like i don't need that horse like and he's like no it's digital horses you race and you breed them he's like i don't have time to explain right now but let me know if you want me to buy

you some horses and i was like all right i didn't listen to you last time like how much eath do i need to send you to get like a nice whatever whatever you're doing so i sent him a little bit of money um how much uh i think it's in like 5k and eath okay and then and then on friday we started talking about this thing called zed um was that for one horse or no he got me like a few this was still early so it wasn't super expensive yet uh so you're like you're like a horse empire no he got me like five horses it was like a few z1 z3 z4 z5 and a few z like nines and tens um which i'll explain all what that means in a minute um and what what he ended up doing is on friday we started talking about it and i was like oh wait drew is this the thing you bought me

earlier this week it's like yeah i was like oh this is actually really cool uh anyway that night was a was a drop uh and they released like 200 horses and drew had said you know a month before that event we did uh it took about like 12 hours or like 24 hours to sell out the horses and then the next week because they were doing drops every friday the next week it took like it was cut in half it was like 12 hours or six hours then it was like six hours or three hours after we did that event on upstream and after after because there was like 50 to 100 people there they sold out the horses in about 10 minutes and then from there on you can barely get a horse in the drop i mean it's really hard um so in terms of that's how i got into it okay um and i bought a bunch of

horses that night i i have at least 27 horses myself my dad's got nine i share a stable with drew we have another seven got like one or two like pretty rare coats and uh early mints and then i share another stable with a friend named narendra and he uh he built this whole algorithm to figure out like rare and super rare coats um so yeah it's so you own like 50 horses about like i own and co-own about 50 horses all right but in terms of what what zed is i mean it's digital horse racing so the idea is what i say that like it's like normal normal thing but uh yeah it's you know i personally believe like 90 of nfts are going to be worth us i think the things that are going to stay are going to be things with strong ip so things like you know the nba top shot mlb

ufc nfl eventually someone will do you know soccer is going to be massive when it comes out because that has that's ip i think when you know movies like uh everything from star wars to marvel to disney they have strong ip well so my whole thing isn't so much just the ip like the ip is important obviously yeah but uh the one that like i saw and i was like oh wow this is really cool is uh there's something called so rare oh yeah which uh benchmark recently invested in and uh what they essentially did was it's like fantasy football for soccer or uh football as people abroad will call it and uh you basically don't get to just draft players and then play like you do you know like yahoo fantasy football or whatever instead you basically have to buy and then you

have the token and then you can trade and you can use certain players and all the stuff and so to me it's not so much just like buying this thing holding it and speculating that the price is going to go up the utility of the only way to play the game is to have so that's the other thing that's Exactly, exactly. So like IP is important. And then the other thing that's going to last, well, I think there's actually three things that are last. It's IP, I think utility.

So just buying it and selling it, that's great. But if you can make money, if you can earn some sort of benefit. Like a return or a yield off of it. Or an access to a location, digital or physical. If there's some sort of utility to it, I think those things are going to be interesting and last. And then the last, I think, is the art world.

I think, you know, crypto art, digital art, you know it's it's just a mimic of physical i don't personally get a lot of art but i know that there's a market for that the scarcity the rarity etc i think the cash grabs are going to go away i think the people that don't uh take you know time to figure out exactly what makes sense i think i mean this past week was a crazy week for nfts i mean there was everything from i don't know if you saw apimon uh which is like a you're gonna think it's more crazy but it's like a it's like an egg that you can open so there's like six thousand of them and in the egg there's like this creature and some of them are going to be rare some of them are going to be like diamonds

like dinosaurs like yeah yeah exactly like little like it's sort of like lol surprise i don't know if you know lol surprise you don't have a young children nope they did nine billion in revenue last year what is lol surprise it's literally a if you have a young daughter you probably have seen it it's it's um it's a toy and then you get an egg and then you open the egg and in the egg is a surprise and it's one of the characters and there's some rare ones there's some common ones got it uh they did nine billion revenue last year it's a physical toy company if you go to any like cvs walgreens and you go to the toy section you'll see lol surprise everywhere okay um and so now there's a digital version so yeah this thing called appy mom then there's this thing called

um uh the board eight yacht yacht club that launched what is that and it's like you get you buy like this you get a yacht no you get like an ape and the ape is like whatever we don't need to get into the specifics but like that you know that all this sounds crazy it sounds insane uh but the thing that's really interesting about board uh board ape yacht club is that they're giving you if you own an ape you can get access to a virtual place okay this yacht club and only other people who own apes can come so you think about okay if you own a token or you own this nft you can theoretically get access to a digital place or a physical place that nobody else can go to unless you're a token owner or an nft owner i just think that that gets to be really

interesting these things all launched like this week but at the same time they're they seem to be very thoughtful well designed and been in the works for a while but but back to zed so zed is horse racing zed is horse racing digitally digital horse racing and so when you go into the system you can buy a horse uh you can buy a horse during a drop okay and then you can also buy it on i think open c okay and then also how many total horses are there so we don't know yet yeah no we do know but there's it's it's it's important to to understand actually how it works so right now we're still in the midst so it's actually still really early for zed there's going to be 38 000 genesis horses the rumor is they'll probably go through the genesis horses by the end of the

summer maybe the end of the year um i think there's only 13 000 of those 30 37 38 000 that have been released there's a rumor that this friday um there's going to be a uh i mean it's not a rumor it's going to be this friday there's something called a terra drop there's either going to be 5 000 or 7 000 or 10 000 horses that are going to be available directly all at one time all at one time try my one yeah you should but i think you need to own ethan right i think you're you've been on the on the record of not owning any i don't know i can gift you your first horse if you want i can make you a but i only want the best like i want the winner like i want the secretarian of uh of all the horses uh yeah well then you have is that the name of the horse i

i think it's secretariat secretariat yes yeah i'm basically a horse there's sea biscuit there's secretariat there's american faro biscuit is a good one american faro was the most recent one that okay so american faro i want the equivalent of american faro in uh zed how do i get that uh how much would it cost me how much would it cost you i mean i i've heard that like is there one horse that i was like that's the winner yeah there's like there's breathless edge there's ducky mallon there's these these horses are becoming a little famous because there's such a breathless edge breathless edge is one undefeated one no but like a 30 win rate i want an undefeated one there's no undefeated actually there was the reason why breeding is

not available right now is because when they brought breeding back there was a it wasn't i don't know if it was a bug but some horses got four parent dna i didn't get into breeding yet but i'll get into that in a second and these horses were like freaks of nature i think there's one called escobar yeah i want escobar there you go freaking nature named escobar that's the horse who owns that one yeah i don't know but it was the first 10 races the horse was 10 and 0 and we were and but it was like winning you get odds and stuff and it was winning by like like like like multiple seconds escobar sounds like a champion that's what i do yeah i think that when they bring it back they're gonna look they've changed some things and it'll be fixed

are they gonna like take away escobar skills no i i i don't know 100 know how it works but i think that they the things they take into account they're gonna have to change stuff because you can't change escobar's abilities because it's on the blockchain so you have to sort of i'm not 100 sure how it works how they're gonna change the they're gonna rig the game because no no it It's going to be the same. Yes. But no, they're going to have to level it up so that everyone has that same situation. Got it.

Okay. But anyway, so going back, so 38,000 Genesis horses. These are minted by Zed, and there's 10 levels. So there's Z1 to Z10. Z standing for Zed. Z1 to Z10. Z1 is the most scarce. Z10 is the most-

Least scarce. The least scarce. um z1 is called nakamoto after it's good it's good name satoshi so that's z1 and z2 are both nakamotos there's a thousand z1 nakamotos there's a thousand z2 nakamotos in the last drop a z1 nakamoto uh was selling directly from zed not like a resale value directly from zed for about sixteen thousand dollars for us okay z three and four are called zabo named after i think nick nick zabo uh there's two thousand z threes two thousand z fours then there's z five six and seven are finney after how finney and then eight nine and ten is buterin or butter in or you know

z10 i think there's going to be about twenty thousand and i may be getting the number off a little bit but i think there's about going to be about 20 000 z10 butyrins okay so that's going to be the most common in the last drop i think a butyrin went for about 100 120 dollars um and those are the most common you'll see now okay so that's 38 000 genesis horses there'll never be more genesis horses and they're still releasing them which means it's still still early and then they all go have sex with each other yeah it's called digitally it's called the stud farm and stud farm yeah it's called okay what explain okay so then then there's breeding i need to get in the horse game yeah yeah no it's it's what it actually so there's male and female horses there's uh it

the un un when you don't have any offspring um it's a filly for a female and then a cult for a male okay and then once you have a child you're a mare for a female and then you're a uh stallion for a male okay now there's a stud farm the other thing that's actually worth noting is there's there's also um there's also coats so there's uh common coats like the color of their their coat then there's rare and then there's uh like super rare or something like that um so there are some really like what does escobar have it's got to be rare i want i want to say i think it was like a fire brick i could begin is that rare red i think it was a rare or a super i'm not sure you got a red horse that's just cleaning the competition yeah yeah it was i think

i i'm i should go buy escobar before we release this before somebody jacks up the price on me if i want to go buy it go ahead yeah well i think escobar came down to earth in terms of the this value so and yeah i mean value also but by the way most of the people who own these like really like champion horses there's really no reason for them to sell it to you why because they can make money without selling it to you yeah but it's i mean it's kind of like cash flow right for example you just buy them out the second horse ever minted was called a horse called wall street it's also a pretty good horse has like a 20 win rate or like between 15 and 20 it's pretty solid wall street can put itself in the stud farm and charge a thousand dollars to breed with wall

street and people will pay a thousand dollars to get an offspring of wall street how much sex can the horse have so that that's a great question um so because i actually i recently looked at my brother was telling me the amount of uh breeding that a champion horse like a kentucky derby champion horse between 100 and 250 times a year and then they also fly them around the world with physical horses uh because they have to be in warm weather i think so they basically go from hemisphere to hemisphere to make sure that it can get extra breeding on a annual basis that's crazy but that's actually randomly similar to how actually uh it works okay so um when the stud farm is currently closed it's going to be hopefully opened up i think they're waiting for the drop to

happen and then they're gonna are they like closing it because it's still kind of like a beta and no they closed it because there was the bug there was like the people were breeding these free courses and like that were escobar yeah escobar and there was another there's like one or two more um by the way this is like the most crypto thing in the world i'm hearing about horses named wall street and escobar basically the same two types of people they're both criminal organizations go ahead yeah but by the way so actually the zed dredis's horses are named by the employees of zed okay and then the offspring is named by the users so like if i like make a baby for you then you can name it if you wanted to if somebody just hears that clip they're gonna

think we're crazy yeah all right okay so if i put wall street okay so how the stud farm works you put males into the stud farm yeah okay so you put the male horses in every two weeks they can have seven offspring okay so you as the owner of that male horse you put it in there and you dictate how much it costs to mate with your horse so if you have a z1 nakamoto named wall street you might charge a thousand bucks to breed with it just because you probably can get seven horses you know seven offspring no i mean so i one night i just wanted to experience it i put i just wanted to experience this stuff um i put i put i have a z1 i put one oh you got like one of the big dogs i have one of i've i have three z1s now three z1s all right how much did

you how much do they cost you uh i uh about 10 to 12k each okay and then so let's say 30 000 you're in on the z ones yeah and you put them in the stud farm all of them so well actually so i own three myself and then i share two with drew so i have a few honestly i've i put some money into this i think sounds like it but i've also so i put are we making money or losing money though well i mean obviously i put out money but for an example i put my z1 into the stud farm and uh within 12 hours i charged six hundred dollars to mate with it or five five hundred or six hundred i just wanted to see if it would go but i went and i did this at like midnight i went to bed woke up i had 3k in my my oh people were trying to mate i was all mated it was all seven it was

done that that that meaning i made three grand off a horse i bought for like 10 grand you made three grand off a digital horse having sex with another digital horse with multiple digital horses yes yeah i did this is why i'm fascinated by this because it feels like it's a recreation of exactly what happened in the analog world and it's going to happen again in the digital world and there is the opportunity

to be the greatest horseman in the world. Yeah. By the way, the other thing is I have a horse called Winter Wonderland. Okay.

It's a rare coat. Did you name that? No, it was a Genesis horse. Winter Wonderland has, is a Z4 or Z5. Okay.

And it's a rare coat Sir Aquamarine and I put it in the stud farm also and winter wonderland has raced in one match and it won that match so it is a hundred percent win rate okay and i put it in there you sound like the finance kids on tiktok that are like i have one stock and the stock went up go ahead but no i i i stopped racing it i stopped i mean like you're not gonna get better than 100 like okay you know okay it's only one for one i put in the

stud farm also seven horses 12 hours it was all gone i put it for like 200 each because it's not a z1 so i put it for 200 each made like done me like a grand easy and i didn't even spend a grant to buy it or maybe i did i don't know i that was one of the ones drew got me originally um so seven seven offspring only raced once i look at i i went back do you get a cut on the yeah and so does that uh no not on the offspring i get a cut to breed yeah so that the person who has the female horse pays you pays um who owns the baby horse the female ah got it so is it better to have the male or the female you can make more money instantly by male but female i mean you could resell the the children yeah sounded really bad this sounds you could you could you could

resell the offspring it also sounds so here's my question but so the reason well the last thing the reason that i brought that up is one of the children is a champion horse so i looked through because you could see all the lineages up yeah i looked there's a there's a i think it's called night queen and it's like a champion horse it's got like 40 plus wins and whoever bred it has just been racing it and it's a good horse see because that's does that mean your horse is good probably because you don't want to race it because then i don't want to race it because i won the 100 i think i could just get an annuity of like a thousand bucks every two weeks just from that like not even thinking about it 24 grand a year so that's math you see that public math

um but that that uh that the z1 that i have is not raced so you don't know like so there's a lot of strategy you never raced it i never raced it and that's how people people think it's a good one but if i have a z well it's sort of like getting imagine you can get an unopened you know nba top shot pack right and it's a cosmic hollow series one so you can get a lebron you can get a zion in there but you also can get like even though they're still i mean if you're a basketball player you're good but like you can get like a cd osman and a lengths and galloway great you know good players serviceable players but they're not lebron or zion so so if you have a z1 and then it loses its first two races then you don't you don't want that that's worthless

immediately lowers the value but if you see that the offspring are good then the value can all right so i gotta give you a piece of context here because i've been sandbagging so uh the reason why i'm so fascinated by this is in 2016 i believe it was i went to nigeria and in nigeria uh i went with uh somebody who's building like a um uh chat app for soccer and uh we had a like local who was a user of that app take us around and i'm when i say when i went to nigeria most people go and they say victoria island which is like where all the tourists stay we stayed in legos like there's dudes with ak-47 standing outside the hotel and like it looks like it's secure but if somebody start shooting they're definitely running so so you're like in legos right uh and it was about

i don't know uh a mile from a place called computer village in nigeria and computer village is uh think of like the busiest you've ever seen times square exactly like that and it is just packed almost like a like a flea market would be there's stalls and stores and all stuff and in some of the places it's two or three stories and it's just people everywhere and what's fascinating about it is they are so in touch with technology it's probably I literally wrote a piece when I came back and I was like I saw the future of consumer technology by looking in this one little place called computer village demographics of Nigeria off the chart population growth incredibly fast very very digital native and then they've now got smartphones internet access all

stuff. So while we're there, we had some time to burn and the local takes us to a equivalent of like, I'll call it a betting house. I don't know what they call it. And while we were there, we had like watched soccer games in people's backyards and like done all this stuff. And like, there's a whole little economy around soccer and viewing, but we go to this bet house and literally think of it almost like the cage at a casino. So people are sitting in chairs. They're watching games on television. They get up, they walk over, they place their bet. They get a little piece of paper. they go sit back down did i win did i lose go back and they just and they're doing this all day long right but then all of a sudden i noticed that everyone at all times was watching one of

the screens on the far right what's going on that screen why is that one not have commercials what what's going on over there and that was also the one that i quickly realized was having the most betting activity it was a simulation it was like you know we play video games and like you're playing like a soccer game or a football game or whatever and you just hit simulate and the game basically plays the game and then it just tells you like oh the green bay packers won right which never really happens in real life the giants of us team uh and so i remember sitting there being like these people are betting on a simulation in a video game that's nuts because as an american guess what my first thing is it's rigged there's no way it's fair right like somehow it is rigged

but they were betting all day every day so when i saw that i remember just putting that in the back of my head like that's an interesting thing went about my day when i saw the digital horse racing that's the first thing i thought of i said oh my god somebody figured out how to do this have no clue is it rigged it's not rigged does it work does not work whatever but somebody figured out how to take that exact same experience and now bring it to a global basis and it's around horse racing and that seems pretty interesting to me so it feels like the only three things you can really do are one you can buy a horse you can race it you can buy a horse you can put it in the stud farm breed it or you can basically create more horses and then go race those horses

fair uh yeah and by the way seven male horses every two weeks when you breed two uh every female horse can have two offspring every two weeks okay so meaning when you originally said they like they could do 150 if you do the math seven every two weeks 14 a month you're getting pretty close to the actual yeah and maybe that's how they actually 100 to 250 is the uh is the numbers so it's like 100 on average versus uh i think it was uh 250 if they move them all around the world you know different hemispheres yeah so uh in terms of in terms of um breeding you know only two from the female which i don't know if that's real life like i don't know how like i don't know what the pregnancy of women uh female horses are yeah off the top of my head neither do

i um i don't think they're one week at a time though yeah it's probably not but uh but in but in terms of yeah so i mean breeding so it's buying and holding breeding uh and um and like making money off that so i've made some money off that and then racing now how does the racing work and how do you know it's not rigged so there's a bunch of white papers that i've read like a few sentences of uh and there's a bunch of there's an article they wrote about like it's called like provably fair now the way that they describe it is there's 10 000 simulations of each race and they there's one that's chosen at random to be that race so when you go up against 11 other horses because there's 12 horses one of those uh like everyone has odds so so if i if i have the odds of winning

20 out of 100 times you just extrapolate that out to 10 000 simulations and then basically that's the odds and then they run each simulation and then they literally just pick okay simulation 7 432 is the one is the one everyone's gonna see and that's somehow randomly selected and when that occurs based on the odds that my horse has of winning out of every hundred or thousand or ten thousand races then that's the odds for that specific race yeah um exactly that's how i understand it um that seems complex enough where like that would be pretty hard to gain yes the thing is that every horse so every horse the way i've i've come to understand it is every horse is like uh minted with like a base number and the only thing that right now is taken into account

is distance preference so it doesn't matter what gate they are in it does not matter what time of day it doesn't matter how many races that they've had there's no fatigue the horses currently live forever there's so there's no like there's no like the horse is getting old right now the only thing that gets taken into account is distance preference so there's a thousand meter races all the way up to 2600 meter races and you have to if that's why i haven't raced in my z1 my z1s is because if i race it i need to dedicate time to figure out if it's any good at anything and then when i know what it's good at or if by the way some of these horses are donkeys like you don't want to yeah go races how much money can i win racing i've seen horses that have that have uh

made uh close to six figures already with just one race no oh uh oh the biggest actually no so that it used to be like five dollar entry up to fifty dollar entry but now there's like i think i saw like a five thousand dollar entry so it's going up the most i've won in a race is like 200 bucks 200 bucks all right so far but that was when it was only to 50 so it sounds like it's way better have the horses have digital sex than to raise the horses currently so my thesis around this and a lot of people think is that the genesis game of zed is around breeding so find the good horses and then breed them you know and by the way you you take someone like a breathless edge if breathless edge i don't know if breathless is a male or a female but imagine it's a male and it goes into

the stud farm that person could charge you know five grand per horse ten grand per horse and they will sell all seven of them no question because it's that good of a horse when you're placing 50 of the time and you're winning 30 of the time like you know or ducky mallon which is another one like they're going to charge they're going to be able to command a premium so that's why the way you think about the the breeding so i think the breeding part well i think the genesis horses is a breeding game and i think the offspring is a racing game so i think like the best horse is going to because because there's genesis horses when you breed two genesis horses you create a legendary horse okay when you when you breed legendary horses you create i think either elite

or exclusive and then there's like two or three so there's like all these things but genesis are the best ones genesis are the original ones they're the the original ones minted but does original mean best not necessarily okay i've seen z5s beat z1s in races just because you're a z1 doesn't mean you're 100 gonna win so because probability yeah but also like i i have a horse that is really good at 1600 meter races. So I get really good odds. Dagnabbit.

Dagnabbit, did you name it? No. That's not a name I would name. I don't know. I bred some horses for my daughter. She's five. Does she like watching the... Oh, we watch the games together. She comes home from school, she wants to race it. So the original horse that I race... Oh, by the way,

when you breed Nakamotos together, you create another Nakamoto. but if you do like a nakamoto and a zabo it creates a zabo if you do a nakamoto and a philly a finny it creates a finny but whatever the lesser like one is is what the offspring is okay um but i i i brought her a nakamoto uh so she is a z2 by the way when you do z1 and z1 you create a z2 if you do a z1 and a z5 you create a z6 got it okay um just simple math yeah yeah it's just you have to add up the numbers to z10 z20 i think you go up to like z100 200 something it was a crazy crazy number um but anyway so the i've read her she has a z2 i think a z2 or z3 nakamoto she named it

gemstone and then it's great gemstone's a girl so we had two two offspring uh sparkles and rainbows both mentioned in the new york times article and which i think your daughter is five she's five okay does your daughter go to school and say i own three horses she does tell people she owns horses uh like she's like it's like not my dad like i own the horses yeah but she doesn't say like it's a digital horse she says like i own a horse yeah for her it's there's no difference yeah um but it's funny because they're mentioned in the new york times article that was just this past week on zed and someone mentioned to me he's like good job getting the the horse name in new york times if you go and you put it on discord or if you put it in the stud farm you'd be like

you know rainbows mentioned in the new york times come breed with it or you know you can like the value goes up for horses that are like publicly mentioned i don't know if that's true why don't the horses die uh i think they or get i think i think they're debating it yeah but right now like i i've heard that they're gonna eventually add gate preference i've heard that they're gonna eventually add weather uh and i imagine they'll add fatigue so you can't just go race because right now you could essentially take your horse i could take escobar which i need to own and then And I could basically race Escobar 20 times in a day and it doesn't matter.

So right now you can be in three races at one time, meaning three, like there's a bunch of- Oh, I don't even do 20 in a day. I could literally like three races all at the same time simultaneously in my horse. Yes, that's the most you can- They don't have to be simultaneously running, but the most you can enter is three horses at a given time.

So once one of those races ends, you can enter another one. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So you could, I mean, people, they're- Are there horse millionaires? they're degenerate people sitting there all day racing their horses but they're making money sometimes sometimes they're losing money you have to i like the breeding game the breeding game

sounds a lot more up my alley but the horse the the racing game there is a bit of skill to it because you have to figure out you can't just like blindly race it you have to look at the data um you have to figure out okay when is this horse is this horse doing really well like okay it's going 1400 meter races but it's not winning um but it's in but it's in first place when it when you hit a thousand meters so should i be you know only entering into a thousand meter races you have to figure out a lot of that stuff but once once you start looking at the data like there's a lot of like saber metrics type of data once you start looking at the data it's it's a game changer i i had two horses that i knew were decent but i didn't know how decent they were and

then i looked at the odds and and like the detailed data and i was like oh i have to race this only 1800 meters and above and this one only 1800 meters below and i'm gonna make i'm gonna actually make money um if you enter enough races for five ten fifteen dollars can you race while you're in the stud farm uh no i think you're not i think you're not allowed to race while you're in the stud farm yeah i mean that would make sense you're you can't be racing and and breeding okay uh if i'm thinking of this game it feels like the people who own the horses are a step below the people who own zed right but then there's this like middle ground i want to own a track how do i do that so i've heard so they did a they announced a partnership with atari

okay that atari is going to be doing like branded a few branded horses like atari horses that are going to be like rare and then i've heard that there's like i mean you could think about like the central land and things like that where why not why not buy a track and and be a bookie you know like zed won't be the bookie zed won't be draft kings zed's the nba zed's the nfl we're the owners we're we're mark cuban you know we're we're the we're the team owners and then mark owns any horses i don't know i feel he'd say it yeah no i don't think he owns any horses sorry who owns the most horses it's a great question funny story which is sort of uh about this uh i was i caught up with a friend recently and i was we were talking about like crypto and zed

in nfts and he's like you know my um my my sister married this guy and he has been obsessed with zed for like a few months and like the family is about to have this interview like he's just racing digital horses all day and the family's about to have like an intervention with him and i was like send me the stable link like send me like i want to see the stable and um he sends me it's like 13 z1s like oh like 40 z2s and he co-owns the stable with a bunch of people i'm like dude this guy has like a multi-million dollar stable like really do not intervene with it like let him let him do his thing yeah um so there's a bunch of those out there there's a bunch of people who have stocked up early you know i think i think a few months ago a z1 was going for like 5k not

16k so you know you could surprise appreciation yeah so and and each drop the it goes up about 20 in terms of like the the floor value uh someone offered me 40k for one of my z1s i said no i think i think that'll be worth once the genesis horses are done i think z1s it's only a thousand of them genesis z1s i mean they're gonna go for 100k each minimum 100 on a million 100k i think like the worst z1 will be worth 100k like you can barely buy one for you know 30 40k right now wow all right because there's not that many so how do i own a track is that available so no currently not available uh i don't know if it will ever be but it seems like there's a lot they want to do i mean the way that drew has always described it to me was that like they're building like the metaverse

and like horse racing is just like the popular sport but like i don't know why don't why don't why can't they do like dog racing why can they do dragon racing like they could do anything so it's just like okay horses are like why don't they do human racing we just all put our avatars in there and just have foot races yeah i mean the question is you know can you make these horses better or do you or like are they are what they are like a training process can i buy a shitty horse and then like you know like so i get stronger you could theoretically buy a shitty horse that was incorrectly ran so like if you see a horse that has really bad odds at 2 000 meters and the owner was only running at 2 000 meters and then you start racing on others

and you realize oh this horse actually does really well at 1200 meters but you don't know that until it runs those yeah so you've got you so that there's like a process to figure out which is like you should probably race the horse three to five times at every single level at the cheapest way you can and then and then okay look at the data where am i getting good odds it's also you get odds depending on who you're going up against so if you go up against escobar and breathless edge and ducky malone like you're gonna have pretty bad odds yeah well espoir's undefeated uh i don't know i don't know if that's true anymore okay we could look it up all right well i'm gonna own escobar and it's gonna be undefeated all right so uh what's the end game

here like are people just gonna own the horses forever do they sell them and like cash out like i don't know listen if i can get uh if i can get two three k every two weeks from one horse um now now maybe eventually like the demand goes down but again z1s only a thousand of them you know nakamotos not many nakamotos in general so if you can make that that's the whole utility thing if i can make money racing and breeding i'm not gonna sell my horses why would i sell them i'll make all my money back that i spent just by doing those things and then let just continue to sort of and then grow it from there so do you reinvest or do you take the money out i i've currently it's all just an eth just reinvested so i don't reinvest it in ether and more horses so like

you have a an eth account in zed and then there's a w eth account which i don't know what w stands wrapped well yeah so that that's where you buy that's where you could buy the horse just for you all you ethereum people that's where you could buy the horses uh you can uh breed the horses and you can um uh race the horses you have to use a w uh eth so um yeah i just it goes in there and And I don't like, the funny thing is this joke I've been saying with a bunch of people is that like you go on your race, right? Every night before I go to bed, I just, I know the odds. I know which horse is like, I look for the right race and I just put my horses in those

races and I go to bed and I wake up and I look at if I won anything. The funny thing is because ETH has been blowing up, I put $5 into a race. I lose, I have 50 more dollars in my account. So it's like, it's like, it's really bad for like degenerate gamblers. because like it's just going up right now so because it's tied to it yeah so uh can you like outfit the horse to look the way you want like no it's like a saddle or anything there's no jockeys there's no saddle it's you you have a coat that's about it but they're all 3d i don't know if you've seen a race go but like it's beautiful it's pretty cool and they got like the cool camera angle and

yeah it looks kind of futuristic little ready player one-esque right and they're ready to rock and roll yeah so i mean i i don't know where zed 100 is going is it only ever going to be horses are they going to do other things but there's a lot of just value and utility of just the horse stuff so i've been having fun um and like i think yeah you can make a lot of money off it i think um owning a track or or you know like like zed i don't think is ever going to get into the gambling side of it the draft kings in the in the fan duels of the world are gonna go and and offer that uh the bookies of the world and like can you buy a track and then charge get a fee for everyone who races on your track i think probably why not like what do you what do you do on a day-to-day

basis we sat here and we talked about digital horses tell us about the company oh yeah no so i have a company called upstream we're building like you know linkedin groups 2.0 we're going after professional networks basically linkedin has had a monopoly for the past like 18 years and you know people like dunk on them all the time linkedin sucks this that i have a lot of respect for them i think the core product is really strong the digital resume i mean there's a reason why you know they have a monopoly it's it it's a great product you know i can look you up and see your past history etc but they've dropped the ball on a few things uh the biggest i think you know being who do you know and how well do you know them they killed their api a few

years ago for some good reasons but i think there's a platform that could be built on a professional network and then what we're starting with is professional groups like nobody uses linkedin groups right you know nobody actually even knows linkedin groups is a thing i was just gonna say don't even know what that is yeah exactly anyone who's building a professional community is doing it on slack they're doing it on whatsapp they're doing it on telegram doing on discord and i love all those products i use them all they're just not really meant for professional community so that's where we started and then when covet hit we you know like when you think of there's like two pieces to top stream one is the professional and like sorry the the community

and group side the other is the professional side in that professional side there's like a life cycle meeting new people socializing following up with people reaching out to people reconnecting with people that's all part of like the professional life cycle we're playing right now in the meeting new people socializing so we do this event uh we have this product called upstream events they're virtual events they're usually 20 to 30 minutes we typically have a guest speaker the first 10-15 minutes and then the second half of it is matchmaking and it's been really popular during covid uh we've got you know um you know thousands of people coming and meeting each other every week and it's just been it's been really popular it's like that like during covid it was

really hard to meet people unless you're like in miami um but uh yeah no it's just like you know so he he didn't say it but what he meant was because miami was open everyone else was closed yeah i mean it was it yeah the joke is like everyone in miami already had covet so uh so that's why i could you know it's a herd immunity already here no uh there's definitely some some good stuff and bad stuff being here we i moved my family i have a wife and two daughters we moved down here in july it's been really nice but anyway so this company upstream started it in the beginning of 2020 being my co-founder before that i had a company called social rank social media analytics company we sold it at the end of 2019 uh we just started uh upstream we uh we

haven't uh announced yet but we raised a little bit of money and you know we've got a team of nine awesome people and trying to build the the next professional network so you basically you took your family your company and your digital horses you moved to miami i bought the digital horses down here but yes i i was born and raised in new york lived there my whole life uh grew up in Manhattan. If you're successful with Upstream, what does this turn into, right? Like in terms of is it literally LinkedIn, but a platform where people can come and build on top of the social graph and it's all for professionals and there's events and kind of like you just like rebuild it for the modern age or like today? Yeah. So we started on mobile. So it was like a mobile first

play, but yeah, no. What does success mean? I mean, building a professional network, building a platform so like events are really cool and events are really popular but it's just a piece of the puzzle and it's uh it's a big piece like every successful community should have events virtual events in-person events etc um but it's just a little piece of the puzzle i mean you know i have a roadmap for the next five ten years in my brain to be honest i want to do this for the rest of my life i'm not uh like you know we only met each other a few months ago but we sort of prioritize me like this this is a big piece of it is around giving and getting help meeting new people professionally i love that that's what i do every day so if someone like a linkedin came

along and they're like hey we want you to run linkedin groups and make it something that people actually know what it is uh i'd rather just do this i'd rather just go out and raise more money and and try to build a bigger company the a lot of the the ways i think about it is there's there's three pieces there's live and synchronous which is like these events then there's like asynchronous which is like posting asks and eventually there'll be more like asynchronous things on upstream and then the third is utility so one of the things that we're thinking about right now a lot is like what type of utility can you provide people maybe it's not directly tied to community but like who do you know and how well you know them like how many times do people hit you up and like hey i

saw that you're connected to this person at on linkedin like can you make an intro and you're like i don't even know who that person is like i have to go look back figure out how i met that person and there's a bunch of really easy ways to figure that out um a lot of people have gone after that problem have gone about it in the in the wrong ways they they try to build like new address books or they try to build like these souped up things that take like a week for it to load and it just never really works the closest probably is like affinity crm they've done a decent job at the the digital sort of um uh connection like who do you know frequency of connection but uh we're working on some stuff now that hopefully will be available in the summer

around like you know strength of relationship and who you know how well you know that and i think that just balloons into a much bigger opportunity completely agree i think it's a smart idea thanks man all right i got three questions before i let you go uh most important book you've ever read oh man most important book i've been i've been i've been slacking on the books i mean i i read this book uh uh back in i wrote my college i don't even remember what it was what it was called but it was uh it was like the seamstress i'm gonna have to edit this because i'm not remembering the name of the book i wrote my college essay about it but it had a profound impact on me at the time but the fact that i can't even remember it i guess means something yeah um let me think uh

what's the second question let me think second question sleep so our friends over at eight sleep i got this bed uh it's freezing cold right it's a thermoregulated bed i sleep like five or six hours my wife really wanted like murder me uh now i sleep like eight or nine hours and it's been like the most life-changing thing ever um and hopefully they're gonna be able to make it so you feel same way after seven hours or six hours of sleep uh what is your sleep schedule it is really two young kids right yeah it is very bad okay i need it i need like what i do like like how bad it's over under five hours a night around five oh all right but i so i that's like borderline horrendous yeah no i go to bed late but i wake up late i go to bed late but i wake up late

okay so i typically go to bed between it'll be really nice if i get to bed at one i usually go to bed two three oh wow so like really like a night owl but then yeah i do my best work between 10 and 2 i mean i you know okay i feel like that's you know you're not supposed to say that type of stuff anymore like building companies but like it's true like i just that's how i okay that's how i function what time do you wake up usually eight nine all right so like five to six i trained my two daughters to wake up at eight or later that was the best thing i ever did yeah um so it's not that bad but i know i need more sleep i usually catch up on the weekends got it all right third question aliens are you a believer or non-believer i think statistically something

has to exist out there you're like it's just like when you ever if you ever look at like where earth is compared to the whole solar system and galaxy i mean it's like just seems it just seems impossible that we're not like that we're the only people ever i don't know if anyone else is still alive i don't know if we can actually get to them at a time like you know because the distance might be too far away they may be too far away but i think it's probabilistically really low i think what what likely the chance is there's a lot of other earths out there and they can't see beyond their galaxy yeah that's probably true and we can't so we can't see them they can't see us it's just too far away we sort of know that there's a lot of stuff out there but we can't we don't have means

of communication uh you're gonna get to ask me one question to finish but uh my favorite statistic or uh data point on all of space is that when i was in high school there was nine planets including pluto now there's over a thousand yeah where did the rest of them come from like my only guess is that technology got way better so like we can have better surveillance you know of the solar system or whatever but like that's a pretty big jump yeah no like from nine to a thousand yeah i i'm i it seems unlikely that we're alone the question is if they get to us before we get to them are we in trouble you know so how do you know they haven't been here yeah i mean there's there's a there's a pretty senior person from i think it was either israel or ken or whatever

that you you probably if you ask this question the intergalactic federation i don't know how you know that that sounds a little bit for those that don't know there's a guy i think it's from israel he uh was like in charge of space or whatever yeah like basically the equivalent with the space force and he's like oh yeah we are all are in the intergalactic federation and we just don't want to tell anyone yet yeah and like but he's a little bit older maybe a little he might he may be a little going a little crazy uh but then then he said some things that were like well yeah why did trump like launch space force out of nowhere like you know what i mean that was like really a random thing like maybe there is something to it maybe maybe there is i

don't know i don't i don't know and like i feel like if there was like they would try to be hidden but it's so hard to hide things these days yeah you know but like the ufo stuff has been crazy with like them releasing like we don't know what this was we don't know what that was so like maybe i i i won't i will i'm not on the side of saying like no yeah i'm saying why but i'm not on like i love to see it yeah you're not on the like i met one yeah but like you know that blink 182 guy like how like vindicated must he feel like he stopped making music and then like went all in on aliens and like like he's not wrong yeah it's pretty cool by the way back to the first question i wouldn't say a book um i would say the best thing that i've read is uh

the old mark andreessen posts from from his blog i'm more of a blog sort of tweet reader uh but um his his his old stuff still holds up like just like just his thoughts on building a company and networks and all that stuff it's just it's timeless i mean it's archived somewhere the the market blog but that that's probably the best thing i've read um that's actually a great suggestion yeah all right where can uh well first of all what question do you have for me um so something we ask every time on upstream when we have a guest speaker we ask what do you need help with usually there's like a handful of people there and we say like you could be hiring somebody you could want to help we're gonna hang a 65 inch screen television but i got a guy coming

today but that's what i need help with right now because i'm scared that i'm gonna screw it up okay you need help with that anything anything you need help with that maybe someone can help you uh no send me the best investment deals okay no that's a good one send the best companies yeah i mean that's like the easiest thing uh where can we send people to find you on the internet on twitter i'm at ajt how did you get that that's a whole other story so i had a friend i'll tell a quick version of it i friend at twitter she was leaving um and she uh she hit me up and she had it was still back in the day when you could like grab handles if you like it was inactive so she's like i'm leaving my last day like next week make a list of handles

you want and uh and and send them to me and and just have a handle i could swap it with and if i can get it i'll get it um that's not how i got ajt i got it i got that from her early on but that hall i got uh i own at truth on twitter i'm just sitting on it and i gave it to like the biden campaign a little bit they played with it during the election they got it up to like 250,000 followers and then i thought i was getting it back with 250,000 followers and then they worked with twitter to wipe it and gave me back with zero followers i was like guys i gave it to you because i thought i like come on wow that was that was a big disappointment i mean i didn't ask them not to wipe it but like the expectation was i was giving them to get back a big account um but i i

And I would understand how they wouldn't want like, let's say I became crazy and I started posting like, you know, QAnon stuff or whatever. From at truth. Yeah. Yeah. They don't want to be associated with that. Yep. So I understand. I was just upset.

I own a bunch of random ones. My daughters have at Kira. She's her name's Kira and then at JD and her name's Jade. So I have I've got a bunch. Oh, I have at NYK. The Knicks are NY Knicks. I'm NY record this year, right? Yeah.

I'm a little nervous. we've got eight games to go it looks good but i didn't i'm just like i'm so fearful of like a collapse at like a eight game losing streak out of the playoffs we haven't clinched yet or anything so and it's hard teams i mean going up against tonight denver then uh phoenix uh clippers lakers boston like that's not it's i mean i'm really happy how they're playing but i'm just you know it would be such a nick thing it would be a nick thing so it was the last eight games and just you know whoops yeah yeah all right where can we see people to find you other than at ajt ajt uh on upstream uh at upstream app.com where you can download in the app store where else am i on the

internet um linkedin you can by the way i have respect for linkedin i i'm not we're not trying to replace them today but tomorrow you know what i mean like we want to get big um before we really go after anything they do that's core but yeah no i'm on linkedin i'm on uh i'm on i think i'm on i'm on everything but uh twitter is where i spend most of my time awesome man listen thank you so much for doing this i'll see you again in the future yeah anytime