The Wolf Of All Streets - Democrats Fail To Mention Crypto In Platform | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

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Morning, Ran. How's it going? I'm good, Scott. How are you, sir? I'm good. Watching the boredom and despair and dismal price action with bated breath for when we might actually have an exciting market again, but nothing surprising. I actually just did a show. Actually, I think one of the most fun shows that i've done the one thing is i said i don't believe this pump and the reason why i don't believe this pump is because this pump is leverage driven so i don't really believe it because it's

like all the other seven leverage pumps that we've had in the last less than 60 days anything that's driven by leverage and if it's not driven by real spot buying, it's not going to last. I didn't even know there was a pump. We're at 59.9. We were at 61 this morning. We had a candle to 61, but it was all driven by leverage. So yeah, it wasn't so good. But then, Scott,

I have finally realized which tokens are going to succeed and which tokens ain't going to succeed. Okay, well now I'm listening because I have finally realized which tokens are going to succeed and which tokens ain't going to succeed. Oh, okay. Well, now I'm listening because I have no idea. All right. Okay. I think the best way to do this is you name the token and I'll tell you if it's going to be successful or not.

Is there a metric? It's a general metric then by which you can fit them into a framework, I'm I saw Raoul Powell's uh interesting sort of thread yesterday did you see that I saw that there's not let's not link to that it's not linked to that okay um all right let's start with some like uh should we start with dinosaurs or just skip them you decide bro you decide Matic it will succeed okay When I say it will succeed, higher probability of success, yes. By the way, what's our metric for success?

Price number go up. Like number go up 10% or alt season sanity back to... Number go up more than other token where number not go up as much. Okay. So we're talking about relative price action to the rest of the price action yes yes okay i like name the token name the token

i'll give you the answer uh aptos no no success suey maybe oh are we? Yes, success. Solana. Success. Ethereum. Success. Okay. What about memes? Name the meme, bro.

Does it matter? Like it? Yeah, it does. Okay. Bonk. It's success. Dog with chicken face, fish guts. I never made that one i know

that was my generic name for all the memes i've never paid attention to i have no idea what they are so okay cool has anyone worked out why i think that some are going to succeed and why and why some i'm going to succeed i have literally no idea baby breath all right now i want i want more speakers and i want them speakers and I want them to give me some tokens. We need more downs. We need more no's. What about Monero? No.

Polkadot. No. Dogecoin. Yeah. Dogecoin, definitely. Dogecoin, definitely. Tron. Tron is the most hated rally nobody's talking about tron could be the entire market as much so tron has a a medium chance of success all right let me walk you through this thesis and tell me

well i've just been saying tron because it literally is being used i mean most tether is on tron so there you go but go ahead let me tell you let me tell let me tell you why let me tell you what i worked out i went through all the tokens the best performing tokens of this cycle and i realized that the best performing tokens of this cycle have one thing in common okay so then you ask yourself okay what is that thing that they have in common well why do we all like bitcoin and please don't tell me it's because it's decentralized money and it's about technology well decentralization has got to be part of it ran i mean i think it's got to be

part of it but i mean let's assume that everything is decentralized and let's assume that everything works why do we why does why do we all like bitcoin because there's no founder stake hanging over the because we've all made money because bitcoin started at a low price and the price number went up why do we all like ethereum because the numbers started very low and everyone made money why do we all like salami because i started at one dollar and we all made money why do we all like uh tron? Because some of us like Tron. Because some people made money.

Not a lot of people make money. What I've realized is that people, that tokens that started close to zero, charts that started close to zero and gradually went up, made people money. And as people became wealthier and wealthier and wealthier, they became more attached to the token. That means they're more amenable to buying the dip. They done more research on the token etc etc the stock paradigm to to to that is the new vintage of tokens that aren't performing and the reason why they're not performing is because no one's made money the only people that have made money is a handful of five vcs and that's the only people that have made money is a handful of five VCs. And that's the only people that have made money on these tokens. And therefore, nobody gives a shit about those tokens. Nobody's buying the dip. Nobody, nobody. Let me ask you a question. StockNet, has StockNet made any millionaires other than the VCs? I love this. It's really interesting, though, because it kind of counters

a lot of the popular narrative that in past cycles, it's the new shiny thing. But new shiny things aren't going well this time. Yes, why? Because no one cares about them. Why does no one care about them? Because no one's made money. No one's made money. No, that's not true.

The private markets have made money, right? Yes. Barely. Exactly. The tokens that succeed are the tokens where a big community has made a lot of money. So why are you asking about Tron? The problem with Tron is that one community member, namely Justin Sun, landed up making most of the money. And that's why I say maybe it will work.

But take tokens like, take the best performers of the cycle. Solana, Phantom, Arweave. It's all the old tokens. Why are the old tokens performing so well relative to the new tokens? Because the old tokens all started close to zero. They were either launched close to zero or they did an ICO. An ICO

was a mechanism where the ordinary man in the street could buy at the same price that the VCs and everybody kind of bought in like this one ICO round and it got mass distribution and a lot of people landed up making a lot of money. And therefore, people like these tokens because we have an emotional connection to it because it stimulated all the right neurons and hormones in our brain. Take a token like

StockNet. Five people have made money on StockNet. They're all VCs on paper, by the way, on paper. That token, if StockNet dropped 50%, no one would give a shit and no one would buy the dip because no one cares about the token right you asked about aptos do you know any retail community member that's made a million dollars in aptos no you don't because aptos never made millionaires therefore aptos will not work i thought thought Aptos was a yes. And Siri was a no. That's going to be the lesson of this cycle, is that too much of the

markup happens in the private market and the tokens are down only or more or less down only once they launch. And you can't succeed that way. You can't build a product people are going to use if the token is down only. It's interesting because people used to ask us. Okay, go ahead.

Sorry. Take Pepe. Take meme coin market. You asked me about meme coins. Take Pepe. Take Brett. What do they all have in common? They all started low.

They all made millionaires. People love the fucking token. People won't let it go down. They love it so much they won't let it go down. Right? Pepe, Brett, Woof, Bonk, started low, started at zero, went up. I'm going to criticize our own token, Gummy. Gummy started high

because there was so much hype. It started high and then from there it could only go down. And now the problem is that people have to accumulate it and it has to turn around in order for it to work. And that's what I think is going to be the path for all these high FDB tokens. They're going to go to close to zero. When they get to close to zero, retail is going to be the path for all these all these um high fdb tokens they're going to go to close to

zero when they get too close to zero retail is going to actually start buying them at the same price that they would have bought them at a potential ico and only then will the token actually get into its real life cycle and i think that doesn't that doesn't work because of lockup schedules what they're going to go to zero in five years people are going to be paying attention to the new shiny object from a cycle and a half ago after it finally hits rock like they're like i think it's no no no no hold on hold on what are the tokens that people are paying attention to now token tokens for a cycle for a cycle and a half ago it's it's our weave it's rune what are the it's solana it's the tokens from from it's the good just go look at all the best performing

tokens of the cycle but those like you said those launched with different tokenomics and the ones this cycle right the ones that have all of their this cycle i think is especially bad because all the markup is happening in the private markets right they've got much longer unlocks than previous cycles and so this pain will just last a really long time like ironically i really do think like the ico was a better model. What you just described was supposed to be better because people wouldn't get tokens quickly and therefore there wouldn't be selling pressure. But you're saying eventually. Yeah, I think that was a huge mistake.

Interesting. I've seen tokens now going back to the model of launching and just vesting entirely upfront, letting the pain happen in a day and then seeing what happens. So again, I've seen, I don't talk about specific tokens, but I've seen tokens, you know, you might remember at the end of the last cycle, there was this moment when people would just projects were launching, I guess, you know, the bull market was kind of ending and they would just give people 100% of their tokens. Their project, I'm seeing doing that again, that have basically no vesting

schedule, changed it to all investors, private, get their money, get all their tokens immediately. Token goes down 70%, but then all your selling pressure is perpetually gone. For legal reasons, you really do need to have a year for a man, TG. But if I were doing...

Well, even with foreigners under Reg S, you need a year so they don't come to the US market. But after. But if I were doing... Well, even with foreigners under Reg S, you kind of need a year so they don't come to the US market. But after that, if I were doing a token launch, I would have 100% unlock and then do actual price discovery in the public markets. I think the problem is we have this fake price discovery of people bidding up private SAFT and

warrant valuations, and then you're in this just mess that can last for years. So do you... I mean, Rand left, unfortunately, but do you tend to agree then? Because this is the first time I've heard anybody sort of propose the idea that the old coins are the ones that are going to do well, right? Because we've seen effectively anything from previous cycles still down largely 90 plus percent, you know, even after this Bitcoin run. I mean, I think even for the old coins, like those, it's, the old coins have better tokenomics, right?

I think that you can say pretty definitively whether they're going to do well. I think like the demand needs to come from somewhere, right? So are the like projects associated with those tokens going to find product market fit, right? Is there going to be some narrative that leads to actual retail demand if so like i think the old coins are better positioned to pump because they don't have these like ruinous unlocks every you know three to six months uh but like that's oh that's only about the supply side of the equation you also need the demand side yeah dave I mean, I think it would be really

fascinating for somebody to study this that brand has good data on this, because essentially what this is proving is, I don't it's not counterintuitive to me, I think it actually makes sense. But it is completely counter to the entire regulatory structure that came out of the 40s. That, you know, in the US that then got adopted worldwide in terms of, you know, private versus public markets. And what effectively Rand is saying is markets are better off that are public from the jump.

And as long as you have enough information for people to make informed decisions, that is better. And you broaden your base, you find your product market fit, etc. Whereas the entirety of US securities law, which then got replicated into U.K. securities law and Hong Kong securities law, et cetera, et cetera, is no, that's not true. Companies should be private for a long time to be seasoned, should have financials that auditors can look at. And then after all that money has been made, private can come in. And that's the same whether it's a project or a company. It doesn't freaking matter. The simple reality is in the internet age with crowd

information that we have available to us, that old assumption, which is the bedrock principle that I think is flawed with the accredited investor role. I mean, you know, Alex Dantzler and I talk about this all the time on other spaces. But it's a big deal. And I think that the best data is coming out of this market and is going to show that and you know, people may may shrug their shoulders in traditional deal. And I think that the best data is coming out of this market and it's going to show that. And people may shrug their shoulders in traditional finance, but I think it actually matters. If in fact, this is true, then major changes make sense. And it's not just crypto

bros kind of yelling, yeah, man, let us do what we want, because that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is more democratization of finance. Yeah, I think on balance, I agree with you. But if you want to steel man the other side of the argument, like if you go back to the ICO era, there were big ticket scams that sucked in a lot of retail. And I think you see fewer of those now. Can I ask a question, Zach? That is Zach talking, right? I can't tell from my... Yeah. Yeah, Zach. Can I ask you a question uh of those big

ticket scams how many of them fully disclosed everything they were doing what their tokenomics were who had what and told the ones that are scams none of them right because they were scams brilliant so then rules which basically say if you lie if you withhold information that's material you're a scam and we're coming after you. Yeah, a scam regardless of crypto is what you're saying. A scam is a scam. And by the way, that would help clean everything up. I mean, that's the ultimate irony in all of the stupidity. Well, the question is whether that would clear up, right? Like you have to believe that the enforcement would actually work, which I don't know how much good evidence we have of that from the 2017, 2018 era. There's really good evidence that says that enforcement against fraud can work when there's clear scope.

But when the agency that's directed for doing said enforcement is focusing all their resources on something that has nothing to do with fraud, well, obviously it didn't work. But that's called selection bias, right? Saying, well, the SEC didn't get scammed in that era. Well, the SEC didn't give a crap. You know, they basically said, you know what, we're worried about our jurisdiction, and we're gonna go after jurisdictional cases. That's why they didn't go after issuers. That's why we went after Coinbase and KAC and etc. Actually, that is not disproof that a an agency that literally,

where you have a central repository, we have to make forceful so we have to make mandated disclosures that can be independently verified and if and if and there's whistleblowers so people could say you know can prove it uh wouldn't be effective i think that you can make a very strong case that it would be effective but that we haven't even come close to trying it yeah ultimately i think i agree with you on on all of that but i i just want to say like there we would probably see more retail facing scams if we legalized ICOs. And so there would be some cost. Now, is the cost worth it?

Probably, compared to the current market, which I think is like... To me, the biggest downside of what's happening now is I think it is ruining the ability to have real innovation in crypto. I think it's ruining the ability to build products that actually get product market fit, and then people actually use and that actually solve problems in the real world, because the products are not going to work well, if they have a down only broken token attached to them.

I mean, you and I are about 95% in agreement, Zach, I mean, but I will point out to the audience who doesn't know what you and I do know, which is that securities laws don't stop this. If you watch the movie boiler room, the the wolf of wall street any of these places where you're talking about the otc markets there are still many many retail facing scams that are quote securities there's a different type of securities that you could access your most most people have access to their brokerage account so it's kind of a non-sequitur to me to make the argument that legalizing ip icos what you would do be doing here is effectively

Treating tokens as the same as OTC But with standardized disclosures that are are understood so that things like what Masari puts out on their terminal some of it at least is public and Has to is verifiable and you know, but we talked about this million times. The thing that drives me nuts is no serious person on the, you know, in power acknowledges the counterproductive nature of just a ban without actually trying to provide information to people. That's what drives me kind of crazy. I was trying to change the title in mid speech. And when you're alone up here and you try to change the title, I was going to have to leave a broken, left a broken title. Can I ask a question?

Go ahead. Not to me because I'm trying to multitask and look at the title now. It's a fucking disaster. Okay, go ahead i don't know if you guys can hear me dave did you have a question yeah i had a question just that's closer to the title i mean we saw this bullshit news report that obviously i i didn't think it was real which is why when i posted about the densely thing i said i phrased it in terms of a question because i figured that it's complete you know just recycled but the the simple question is is there anybody out there

who sees any indication of anything other than probably softening toward bitcoin and ethereum any change in what the democrats are likely to do i I mean, you know, I've seen apologists say not putting in the platform is okay, because it gives them wiggle room. But I think that's bullshit 90 days before the election. I think a sentence, you know, or two would have been easy to do in a month. I mean, maybe their productivity is pretty bad, but it can't be that bad. I'm just curious. Yeah, I don't know. I think, no, I don't't i i think to your point i don't think we've seen anything to indicate there's going to be any change except for the fact that i think it's very clear that like being outright anti-cryptos become politically uh a bit unpalatable um the flip side and guys listen i don't like it this is not a reflection of my politics i talked about

this on youtube this morning. Our job here is to dig into topics regardless of our own beliefs. I think it's very clear that one party is likely much better for crypto than the other. But if we're going to dissect what the Democrats are doing, I think, Dave, it's also important to remember and I'm glad Ron, you jumped up because I invited you and you know this stuff. But Dave, I think it's important that we at least be honest that maybe for us, crypto is this huge deal. And we, because of our depth

in this industry, believe it should be part of the platform. And there is arguably the fact that the Democrats just literally like, Harris just isn't even thinking about it and doesn't care. It just didn't end up in the platform. Well well let me bring this back to bring the two conversations together and i'd love to get ron's take on this so here's some facts the fact is in equities retail

uh has zero commission and spreads that are in it very rarely get beyond double digit basis points generally are less than five so most for most what they're buying and in crypto retail is paying on average somewhere over 1% to buy in which is 10 to 20 times the cost to buy similar market capped equities, the reason for this is because there is literally no path towards a brokerage industry for crypto. You know, forget what it's called, security, not security. I don't give a crap. Just objectively, retail is treated poorly in crypto compared to institutions, and in equities, they're treated better. And the market allowed to operate would treat retail better because there's lots of good reasons for that.

And we were just talking this other conversation. So the real question in my mind is to get to a regime where that would change. Obviously, what's interesting about that, and just I'm going to be a little bit devil's advocate here, is if I'm sitting in Brian Armstrong's shoes, I don't want to create a political action committee that's going to help retail get treated better because my margins will come down. So it's, you know, we have this kind of really interesting dynamic going on. But the core of it is that whatever, for whatever reason, and there's lots of them, the CFTC, FCC, etc, has had a zero interest

whatsoever, in creating and allowing companies to create retail brokerages that can operate without having to worry about massive legal costs in the world of crypto. Yeah, I want to hear Ron's take. Yeah, Scott, you can hear me okay. I know I'm not in a good place way, Scott, you can hear me okay? I know I'm not in a good place right now, but you can hear me okay? Yeah, we got double Mario. I love it. Okay, yeah, I thought double Echo. I don't know if you're talking about the rumors

regarding Gensler becoming the River to the Treasure. Dave just mentioned it. We didn't even dig into it because it's false. I mean, there's always been rumors that that was the job that Gensler wanted, but apparently there's zero indication that Harris is the one. Yeah, but it hasn't been confirmed yet. But how do you know it's false?

Has there been anyone who's come out and said, like, this is absolutely true? Well, I mean, Kay Ben Long, who I trust, I mean, went very publicly very quickly and said she spoke to a number of Democrats who reached out directly saying this is, like, patently false. There's no reason to believe this. Nobody has seen this. So I would take it with a And do you think Gensler will still be in this position right now if Kamala is president? Maybe. Yeah. Like I said, I don't think that... I think so. Because I don't think that crypto is really on their radar. It is to us. But the Democrats clearly think Gensler's doing a great job or he wouldn't

be doing his job, right? I mean, and if Elizabeth Warren remains in power, I don't see much changing, but Ron might have much more insight on this being in Washington. Yeah, I can happily talk about that, and right now I'm in Miami for the August recess here, but

everyone I'm talking to, look, when it comes to the Gensler stuff, these rumors have been percolating on the Republican side for quite some time. And again, it's kind of a natural speculation when you're seeing Kamala pick up a lot of the staff, and it's kind of expected that maybe agency heads would likely stay. But you pointed earlier that they haven't made a statement not saying it or pro saying that gensler is going to stay or move to another agency or not be around uh if harris president it's not hard to kind of at least on their end maybe kind of shoot down these rumors

or maybe to show that hey you know we support gensler but that has not happened at all here and so you know they're letting the republicans candidly run with the narrative but the last thing i'll say too, before stopping, is just a lot of folks got a little myth from the source of the news. I forgot what it was, the Washington Reporter or something like that. There's a lot of organizations like

this, and these aren't really news organizations. These are more partisan political outlooks or publications out there. And they really start picking it up on the stories when it comes to close to the election time frame. So again, for the Republican side, we'll have this article, for example. But on the Democrat side and progressive side, you have the American prospect.

So there are plenty of these on both sides of the aisle that have these really scandalous headlines to stir reaction. It can't be that it worked, at least for this one publication on Gunzler, because now people are talking about it. And the best way to negate a lot of these rumors is just to have something publicly said on that front, especially of the DNC being this week. But I do agree. We're kind of

a little farther down the totem pole in terms of importance, given everything happening right now, or at least for the Democrats at the moment. Yeah, I'm just going through that i think it's too early she hasn't really set up her policy ron um i think we still don't understand her macro policy she came out with the first speech a few days ago and she got a lot of criticism from it for the socialist stances according to some but i think it's a bit too early for her to start

talking about crypto um when she hasn't talked about most of her policy positions yet. Would you agree? This is where I get a little, and again, I am a little partisan here because I have worked for Republicans in the past. I do mostly lobby Republicans. I have a Democrat colleague who does the exact opposite at the Blockchain Association, Dave Grimaldi. But I will say, again, we had the Crypt for harris event that happened uh you know last week and you know senator schumer the number one senator democrat in the senate uh and all of congress was in attendance several other senators and house members were there as well there was a letter from 14 uh democrats to their own party the dnc saying please include crypto into your party platform and they could include even just copy and paste from the 2021 executive order. These guys said some good things, said some bad things.

You know, there's a lot of potential, but there's a lot of risk. And we should move forward, you know, promoting innovation. And we didn't get that. AI got that. AI got their own section. Crypto didn't get anything, which, again, I think is more of a slap to the face to those Democrats and to those who participated in the Crypto for Harris event recently because there's a lot of folks, very senior folks engaged in their party. And they have been met with deaf ears.

And I think it's a kind of a microcosm of what we're seeing in Democrat politics when it comes solely to crypto is you can have a lot of base support, but it can take a few unnamed folks within the administration or within the DNC that can really put all this to a hold. And let's not forget, too, crypto is the number one industry package, to my knowledge, at least right now, again, by industry sector. And you want to court that money as much as you can. And they've been getting a lot of it for some of their down ballot races. But it just seems kind of a major missed opportunity. Even if you said, again, you don't have to be overtly positive, but like you just said you know pros and cons like they did in 2021 that'd been enough for a lot of folks to say hey look at least they're listening to us and right now the dnc is has been ignoring not just the industry but several of their own members

and some of them are very very senior and that is the problem and i think it's a major missed opportunity here yeah but dave i want want Dave to jump in on that one. You seem to agree with Ron, but I think it's just I still stand by my position. I know that could have taken a stance or at least mentioned crypto earlier. But I think the DNC hasn't even finished. We're still at day one. Kamala hasn't given her speech yet. Do you expect any mention of crypto over the next couple of days? Probably should have asked a few. We've had a few guests, Senator Lee as well, on stage yesterday in our speech. Do you expect any mention of crypto over the next couple of days? Probably should have asked a few. We've had a few guests, Senator Lee as well on stage yesterday in our space. Probably should have asked them that question. I think Ron's right. I think it's

completely telling that they don't want a public fight with Elizabeth Warren. And her staffers and her devotees are throughout the administration, throughout the Harris team. And we can say that she's being isolated as much as we can say, but you're in power until you're not. And to me, this is a smoking gun clear proof that she still has a power base inside the Democratic Party, full stop. I mean, Ron, you and I have talked, and David and I have talked about where the purse strings are coming from in the DNC in terms of races from the DNC money.

And we know that Elizabeth Warren has her fingers all over that. And honestly, money talks and bullshit walks. So, you know, it would have been exceedingly easy for them to include something in there. But if she didn't want it in there, she would have fought it. And they probably didn't want to have that sort of fight before in a time when they want unity. And I think it's as simple as that. And that doesn't mean that she's going to win, but it does mean they're afraid to fight with her right now. And if they're afraid to fight with her now, why would they fight for her after they won an election?

That makes no sense. She can lose. Well, that's right. And it's a large. Trust me. I mean, she's still out there defending price controls and saying the government should be controlling the economy. I mean, that's pretty much every single tweet she says is something about government control of the economy. And I think that's a vulnerable issue, because then people understand that every single time that's ever been tried in 5000 years of human history, outside of wartime, it's always failed. And it's not just failed, but created much more misery than it was attempting to solve. And that's her policy position. So, you know, her policy position on

crypto is tiny compared to that. Ron, are you seeing any frustration with the more pro-crypto Democrats? I mean, we've seen it pretty outwardly. I've spoken with Ro Khanna, obviously, he's trying to do the roundtables and such. They've got to be frustrated that they're pushing hard for some sort of position and not even seeing a mention. There is a lot of frustration there. At the same time, it also took a lot of political capital. I want to stress, as someone who used to organize these roundtables as a Hill staffer years ago know, years ago to get the senior level of industry, as well as White House senior staff buy-in, as well as, you know, folks from Capitol Hill coming in. Like, that takes a lot of political capital. And we've seen a lot of that being used by the individual members of Congress, like Ro Khanna and Wiley Nickel, who are, you know,

in the House, not as seniors like Chuck Schumer, but they're getting some big name ticket items, folks. And again, I just want to, like, I used to be on the campaign side years, years ago before I got into more of the federal politics. But when the money's there and you have a very significant portion of your members, you know, taking a lot of that, you know, industry support, you would, again, think they would at least just give you a bone or something, whether even just going to be even applied to just, like, protect innovation innovation and we haven't gotten that which is very frustrating and again i want to point to again ai got its own individual section it wasn't great for ai but it's still like said hey pros and cons of ai we're looking at this didn't get

that with crypto let's also not forget the first people who put crypto on the presidential platform from the democrat party was four years ago with and Yang, Mike Bloomberg. So there's precedent for the Democrat presidential nominees for doing crypto in their policy platform before. We haven't seen that from the DNC yet. So the last thing, we've given Trump plenty of options to do a pivot in a 180. And we've seen that come to fruition this year. And many folks, including myself, really didn't see that happening. So, you know, I want to, let's not, you know, blast them because, you know, your point earlier, like the team is just getting started up here. But there have been several very public attempts in all branch approaches from the industry and those supporters of the industry in Congress to the campaign and the admin, and we just haven't seen

them give them a bone at all, which is very, very frustrating. Do you think that I've sort of been kicking this around in my mind? I think we had this sort of explosive moment, obviously, where Trump pivoted and Bitcoin and crypto became a major, I think, you know, lightning rod in the campaigns. But wouldn't rationally now that Trump is somewhat established as a position, and we're seeing that Democrats are going to basically not address it, wouldn't it be likely that over the coming months, we just stop hearing about crypto in the election cycle as the bigger issues come to the forefront in general, and we'll kind of just be like, screaming to the echo chamber again? You know, we say that, and then we have like the echo chamber again you know we say that and then we have uh like the rumor

article that you mentioned yesterday like that goes viral on on twitter so like you know there is a lot of people paying attention to this not just in our you know small bubble uh and people in dc they they are very very well aware of just uh how engaged like the crypto audience is on social media especially so um i i just don't every time I thought it would subside, it has not happened yet. And I thought the SEC would be slowing down a little bit. That has not seemed to happen yet, especially from the VCs getting some of those subpoenas recently. So we'll see. But at this point, crypto is pretty ingrained.

And I think there's a lot of emotion on crypto Twitter that it's been frustrating to watch a lot of the horrible takes on both sides here. Because we are involved in the mix in terms of presidential campaign and politics, but we're just not the number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 issue. We're still on the list, but probably the number 12. But we're still in the middle of it, and that's where a lot of emotion is coming out of here. Action in Congress, too. It's still very active, so we've got to watch for that. middle of it and that's where a lot of emotion is coming out of here uh action in congress too but still very active so we got to watch for that ron i know i know you you work mainly with republicans but just moving on the political question now your force on the dnc in general it just seems to be a lot more energized not compared to the rnc but since camilla took over

it seems that the swap is working pretty damn well i mean call it swap call it um you just more, you know, more of the Democrat base being energized with a new face here. There was, you know, a lot of folks were talking before Biden dropped out that there was just a lot of folks unhappy with both choices. And I think we're just kind of seeing a fresh face. And that's what a lot of folks are going for. Regardless of how you feel about the swamp going for or not, the vibe is very much apparent, at least on the Republican side, that they got to step it up. They had a call last week from all the members of Congress, a political reporter, basically tell them, like, hey, it's time to get back out there. We have, this is not assured by any means. I think Pauli Market and other polls are showing that they're losing day by day.

Mr. Weinstein, I didn't know you're on stage. It's glitching for me, but the team told me you're up. It worked. How are you, sir? Doing well. Yourself, Mario? Very well. Very well. It's been a long time. for me but the team told me you're up it worked how are you sir doing well yourself mario very well very well it's been a long time since we last since we last spoke there's been i'm not sure if you heard there's been an assassination attempt uh we have a new uh nominee for the democratic

party the polls have been all over the place it's been a lot eric geez news to me um but we'd love to get your few words of wisdom on on um you know we had glenn back on the show yesterday i wish you could make it um and you know he's been in in u.s politics for decades now and um it's pretty reasonable voice whether you agree with him or not and his his level of concern was uh was pretty alarming to me um i'm not sure if you're in that same camp but things are you know my biggest concern is that no matter who wins the election, my biggest question is, will the other party believe the polls? Well, I don't – I mean, do any of us believe almost anything at all anymore? We're having only meta-con meta conversations, which I find fascinating.

The thing that I wanted to address about the issue of crypto is that if you abstract away from cryptocurrencies and think about fiat as a way of life, what I found interesting listening to the panel was this idea that there are short-term opportunities to embrace crypto, to get an energized community, to weigh in, maybe contribute. But as the fiat candidate, she was fiat-ed upon us as if there were a primary. And the entire concept of fiat as a way of life is this self-reinforcing, self-healing perspective of the Democratic Party. I have fiat news where narratives that are clearly not meaningful or true are foisted upon me. Other narratives are suppressed. So if you think about central banking just as a metaphor and bringing it to central medicine central news

central politics i don't see an easy accommodation for the crypto world within a structure that presupposes that fiat is not only better but actually necessary for the running of the world, that you can't trust what will emerge from a system like free speech or free markets. And again, I don't mean in the dumbest sense of perfect freedom. I mean in the sense that we have free speech or free markets within a world of regulations, free minus epsilon. And I think that, to my way of thinking, how would you expect a party coalescing around a bizarre candidacy to embrace a little crypto and move away from fiat

a little bit? I just don't see how that's possible easily eric can i ask a question yeah it's a it's i agree with you a hundred percent i sort of went off on a raging soliloquy about this earlier it's party versus party in that regard but bitcoin obviously was created to opt out of this entirely. And it makes me very hesitant and uncomfortable to see this widespread, I guess, support of any political candidates or the political system in general, because it feels like a setup for disappointment or failure once again, and Bitcoin was supposed to be the opt out of this entirely. I 100% agree that one party is obviously the fiat party, but I don't think either side can claim fiscal responsibility. Neither is going to address the national debt. Both are going to print, you know, sort of the idea of this uniparty

with one more extreme face on one side. But I mean, in my mind, it feels like Bitcoin was created to opt out of this entirely and starting to cheer for either is a trap. It's an interesting point, I guess. I don't want to say push back, but just to engage that from a different perspective. The weak point to me about Bitcoin as a hedge against central control is that in order to hold Bitcoin in a meaningful way, you have to go against the law. So in other words, if you imagine that fiat is currency backed by violence, you can use the barrel of a gun to enforce the fact that green pieces of paper mean something and should be taken as legal tender. Violence versus math is sort of the idea that you had a currency that didn't stem from,

let's say, physics like gold. It didn't stem from violence like fiat. It stemmed from the integrity of cryptography. How does violence intercede? And again, violence in the sense of Max Weber's theory that a government is a monopoly on violence, full stop. It intercedes by saying, well, you can hold it, but if we catch you and you don't report and you don't actually integrate into the world

that we've already built, the penalties could be sky high. So I think that there's still a lot of fantasy on both sides. I think that the establishment fantasizes about controlling crypto to a level that's probably not possible. But I also think that many of the people in the crypto industry didn't actually go for the pirate lifestyle where they were on the wrong side of the law and embraced the normalization. They sort of had this idea that they wanted to be part of the bigger thing. You're still looking for legitimacy. I still hear on this panel this idea of why won't she look at me? She's so pretty and I'm so worthy. And in part, I see the concern with acceptance as the downfall of the original vision of crypto. Now, you could say that maybe it was always a pipe dream, but I think that that's a lot of what's going on.

With respect to just the larger issue, I do think this thing is in its death throes. The distance from World War II and the order that was imposed with a clean victory has gotten to the point that we're, we don't really make sense. If you think about all of the discussions we have in these spaces, everybody is meta to the discussion that you would be nominally having. So for example, you'll have a bunch of people talking about a narrative being effective rather than a narrative, whether or not a narrative is true. Everyone has moved on from the early versions of these things.

And I do believe that with crypto, in part, if you go to a crypto conference where people are talking about custody issues and which forms need to be filed and tax strategies, you've already moved so far away from pirate crypto, which was the original, I believe, dream that this was a hedge against fiat. I don't know what your thoughts are. I agree with that entirely. And I think, you know, it's a sliding scale. It's not bipolar, like you're either a pirate or you've entirely accepted the system. And I think rationally, you want, unless you believe there's

going to be no government, you want a government that at least will put in basic protections. And I think that's what the Republican platform has said. I just think, theoretically, it gives me cause for concern. Put it put it this way, if you believe maybe the Bitcoin wasn't created necessarily as pirate money, per se, or to hide from the system, but it was created as a way to protect value in a broken system and to opt out of it financially. It's very hard to believe in my mind that either party is quote unquote pro crypto or pro Bitcoin without addressing the underlying problem that Bitcoin was created to fix, which is obviously irresponsible fiscal, monetary, economic policy, and the money printer. So when you have a party that says, we're pro-Bitcoin, but they're going to use that printed money to buy it and put it on the balance sheet. Listen, I think that's better than not, but it still has a hint of irony to me and makes me

skeptical. That's all. I'm very skeptical of politicians. I already was. I'm registered, unaffiliated, and it makes me more skeptical when they come into the thing I like. So if I can just give you a model that I don't hear much discussed, maybe I've never heard it discussed. One of the things about equities is that equities gives you a story about hedging the problem of seniorage. So if seniorage is the tax extracted by a printing press and you're in equities, the reason that equities might go up without, let's say, requisite innovation in the sector. So maybe you own like a car company's stock and the car company isn't very innovative and it's not really doing much in new markets. At least it's a hedge against central banking and the printing press. And so you have a story which says, oh, I'm invested in said car company Z because I think that they've got great new management and they're going to be introducing new product lines when really what you're doing is saying I'm terrified of the Fed.

So the problem with crypto is the fact that it doesn't wish to offer a narrative like that. It says, basically, I am a pure play, that this thing that should have, in a certain sense, zero value, gets value because of the distrust of the system. There's nowhere to hide. The old story with, let's say, Playboy and Penthouse is that they did investigative reporting so that you could say, well, I'm subscribed because they broke these stories or they have lively prose of John Updike. And by bundling something that you're uncomfortable with together with something that anybody can defend, who's to say why you're buying the bundle? And I think that that's what's going on with equities. Equities are like pornography with high quality pros and investigative journalism thrown in. And even if the reason that you're in them is just for the

naughty stuff, the idea is that you don't have to confront that. You can say, well, no, I'm invested in that company because I like its product line. I think that with, what do you say about Bitcoin? And this is, by the way, much more true of Bitcoin than something like Ethereum. The less Bitcoin promises, it's just trying to be money. The more pure the play is. And I think that that's why there's a particular hatred of Bitcoin, because the community has been resolute in saying, no, Bitcoin is stupid as hell, and it's still smarter than you are.

And the reason that it's smart has to do with the management of the printing presses and the tax of seniorage. I agree with that entirely. And anecdotally, since I'm a kid of the 80s, I remember all the dads getting together and telling the moms how they read Playboy for the articles. So I do have a comment. I do have a comment on that.

Eric, got to keep your eyes on the road there. You don't want to get some close encounter Tesla beeps going on. But, you know, I think also a way that you can think about this market is the type of person that's kind of grown up investing in cryptocurrencies and kind of has grown up in this Wall Street bets era. You know, it's the same way you kind of think about brands and people went from you know having a bunch of conviction about a brand to saying hey i just want the best product what i think the younger generation is is actually doing is they're they're opting out and they're okay investing in something that they just have conviction in in in the digital era where their

friends are invested in it and it becomes part of who they are, right. It's, you know, even though NFTs are where they are today, you know, when you go back and you look at some of the interviews of these kids holding a crypto punk, you know, and someone offering $10 million to a, you know, a 16 year old kid, you know, he's like, well, then I'm going to lose my identity. I don't have my identity if I don't have this crypto punk. And that's kind of, you know, it's an abrupt thought process to kind of get back to cryptocurrency. But it's the same kind of feel where this is now a religion for people, you know, just like it's insane. But if you go to a Bitcoin conference, you've got the same guy kind of holding the sign up, you know, that you would see normally at a college that says, you know, if you masturbate, you're going to hell, you know, you've got that same guy, you know, holding a sign saying like Satoshi is our savior. And I think that, you know,

we just haven't really digested the psychology around the generation that's investing in this. And yes, you know, it's supposed to be this asymmetric hedge, right? And I think what we found out is it just kind of trades like a big tech stock right now. But in the future, the thought process is, yes, it will be this asymmetric hedge, and we're just still a little early. So just some food for thought. I think that there's very much a generational thing. I am the oldest Xer possible. Kamala is the youngest boomer possible. I believe that one

way of looking at Kamala is that she's the last gasp of the silent older boomer generation. We had three boomer presidents born in the summer of 1946. And then we just had a silent generation president who apparently is still president. And the fact that the country is on full self-driving mode with no one at the wheel is vaguely interesting, but it doesn't obsess you. I mean, I think that what's going on with particularly millennials and Gen Z is that they were offered not even the hope that Gen X was offered of inheriting something. So Gen X has been eating boomer silent jet wash its entire life. And by the time the millennials saw the workplace, they saw Gen X being screwed with so that they didn't really buy in. Part of the myth of millennial slackers is they realized that they were never going to inherit the system. As long as these people in their old ways, like why are we still talking about CNN?

It's kind of amusing. We are waiting for a generational shift where in essence, the younger generation isn't referenced to the older generation. The older generation is still coherent and that's why they win. The reason that they win is that even if the New York Times prints something that is manifestly misleading,

if everybody agrees in a group that they will pretend to believe it, that's incredibly powerful. Yeah, I think he's dropped out yeah i think he uh just lost signal there for a moment hopefully he'll be back momentarily all right you're back eric you're back you're back you're back you're back yeah so so i think that the the way to think about why these very old people are still successful as their numbers decline is that they're coherent. They are centralized. And to a certain extent, crypto did a little bit of centralization in generations below it in the sense that they were centralized on the idea of crypto. But the odd thing, of course is is that crypto is intrinsically decentralized so part of this battle is at some level there's a freshness for me and said, I'm really excited about Kamala.

And I said, how could that possibly be? And she said, well, she's brown. She's female. I don't really know what her policies are, but that's enough. Now, this is a very smart person. It's not an idiot. This is a person I've known for decades, very highly educated. And what she was in fact saying was, I am at this point so alienated from any kind of policy-driven process that brown and female is sufficient for me.

And she was looking metacognitively at that. I think that one of the things that I'm terrified of is that the millennials and Gen Z believe in almost nothing. And the little bit that they do believe in is in some sense that which is decentralized. It's going to be very difficult to run a world when finally you inherit it and you realize that you have to be earnest and you have to care and you have to try. And there are pockets of people who still do those things. But I think most of us are just punch drunk from being lied to every day in the morning when we get up in the morning until we put ourselves to sleep at night. It's just too bizarre. I promise you that this was not the world of the 1970s.

I will say, though, that there is a sector, a pocket of this community that doesn't necessarily want to completely opt out and say, hey, I'm going to go take my Bitcoin and I'm going to eat steak only in the forest. Joe, that's 99.9% of this community. It's one in a thousand that actually do, I think. But what I think that there is a certain percentage that understands the innovation around what decentralization brings, and they want to change the system and have that system adopt something, right? I think when you see more millennials get into office, right, you're going to see those people adopting some of these policies and start to change and create innovation. The thing I get scared about just as an operator

in the industry, and we have a launchpad and you've got young founders coming up is that they're seriously saying, maybe I just... I have to go start this thing in Singapore because it's not right. Because if you launch something and you say it has value, it's illegal. If you launch something and say it has no value, then it's legal. And right now, that just does not make sense for a lot of 21, 22-year-olds that are just saying, hey, I just want to create some change. I found this, there's this algorithm and there's this thing and I can change this and I'm obsessed with it. And I'm going to like Bill Gates it where I'm just going to like lick Tang

off my hand for a year and a half because it like the waters in my body. And I'm just going to code my life away. Like those kids are, are looking at the market and people are advising them like, Hey, you might not want to build that here. Right. And that's what scares me. If anybody's speaking, I can't hear you. Yeah, I think you could. Eric, essentially Joe's comments were the concern.

He just finished literally when you spoke, Eric. But his comments were his concerns about the brain drain that we're seeing out of the U.S., obviously focusing on crypto, but it goes beyond that as well. I think the best part is when he said that it just starts to feel like it's legal when you launch something that you try to make it seem like it has no value, but it's illegal as soon as that asset starts to have value. And just that dichotomy is causing a lot of these founders, the founders that will make Bitcoin decentralized, that will bring innovation to move away from the US.

You can link it to a bigger trend that many are concerned about that the US has become, you know, very complacent. Well, you know, it's a very strange thing. The thing that's happening in AI, I mean, if you think about elliptic curves versus basic linear algebra as the parent subjects of crypto and AI respectively, it's very hard to ban math. And the power of this math to... I mean, look, Satoshi, in my opinion, is basically the greatest economist of our time. It's such a brilliant idea. And the fact that it's worked and been up and been under

attack and had so much value in that system. Who can compete with this? I don't know anybody. And I know a lot of the world's top economists. With respect to innovation, we are about to wake up from how deeply asleep we've been for, depending upon how you count, 50 plus or 80 years. A lot is about to happen, and none of us have ever seen a lot happen in our lives. So I think that what's odd is that you can see a giant wave that hasn't crashed on the shore yet. And what just happened with the Biden being rotated out, I mean, I don't even know how to say it. This is so bizarre. I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime.

Joe Biden has been showing signs of dementia and senility for his entire term. And by simply repeating over and over again that he's doing great, that only conspiracy theorists traffic in such things, we've been told that our own eyes aren't functioning for four years. I remember he was at a town hall and he said, I'm a transitional president. You are the future. And I thought, why are we the first generation in history that requires a transitional president? Just get out of the effing way. just rotated in Kamala Harris that makes us not really feel how crazy the assassination attempt on Donald Trump is, we're numb to it. We're in the middle of a completely insane election.

This isn't a normal... Look, I don't know how to use my voice to communicate how crazy this is. And I do think that one of the things about crypto is that it's going to go pirate at some point where people are going to do a lot of institutional crypto. But then the system is going to start to break down. And I do think that with the millennials and the Gen Z, part of the problem is going to be that none of you know how to coordinate action. You don't know how to follow a leader who's mostly telling you the truth and slightly lying to you without taking the lies and picking them apart or saying that anybody who wants to lead is Hitler. It's sort of this, I don't know, this hipster, I'm too cool to believe in anything nihilism that is to the bone, but you're actually riding on a substrate that is

in part administered by the silent and boomer generations. So it's easy to be hipster when you're not responsible for what's going on. But I have to say that I think Kamala is a very transitional passing phenomenon. And what we're going to see is that this is going to pass to people who have zero concept of a coherent world that makes sense because they grew up in the madness that is the last 15 years. Eric, it sounds like Atlas shrugged the way you describe it no sure if he can hear did he scott eric hey eric can you hear me i can't scott do you want to say your comment again see if eric i'm not sure you can hear me but i said he's describing a world that sounds like the fountainhead or atlas shrugged yeah no sure if you heard that eric but he but I said he's describing a world that sounds like the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

Yeah, not sure if you heard that, Eric, but he essentially said you're describing a world that sounds like Atlas Shrugged, which I have no idea what that is. Well, you know, I believe that in part functional people want to gulch right now. I just don't want to, I don't know how many of you guys know this, but I've been attacked over the last several days as somebody who wants to enslave post-menopausal females to provide nanny-level care to grandchildren and sees no value in human life. And why?

It's just, well, I'm collateral damage because the same news outlets that report on something called the grandmother hypothesis from evolutionary theory, which builds on the work of George C. Williams, only our most important evolutionary biologist, with senescence and pleiotropy, the same outfits suddenly forget that they did a story on the mystery of long life after reproductive viability in orcas in order to go after J.D. Vance. And they play an audio clip clip and I'm in the middle of some nightmare narrative that can't be stopped because of the sheer number of people repeating it. This is going to drive people crazy. All smart people want is to be away from the system one intuitive, stupid thinking where the mob is constantly riled up by rumor and by coordination. But that coordination is very, very powerful. At least

you have to give the silent generation and the boomers their due. They still know how to march in lockstep while the rest of us are trying to find out the truth or locate ourselves, grow, build something. And I think that it's going to be a real question whether these companies can be easily built once that coherence is lost. So right now, I think that we do have Gen Z and we do have millennials that are building companies along with Gen X. But really, the entrepreneurship is one of the last things that's still half functional and it may be that we're about to lose that i don't know going back to something you said earlier is is the the the gravity you kind of described the gravity of the assassination attempt something i i was asking

glenn the same question yesterday because you know as i said earlier he's had that same concern is that the unfathomable we're getting complacent with it when the assassination attempt happened and elon and others endorsed trump pretty much instantly afterwards i think bill ackman as well um i think a lot of people just kind of concluded that trump will be the president yet today barely anyone's talking about it even with new revelations coming regarding the assassination it's just not gaining attention not sure if you're going to link that to what you said earlier, that coordination that we're seeing with different narratives. And I think you're referring to the coordination

between the media and social media. I thought those days are starting to unravel. We saw that most obviously with COVID and what Elon's doing with X. Yet we're seeing that in effect today, the way they've portrayed Kamala's presidency, some of the claims they've made, the way they've moved away from her being the border czar,

as an example. My concern, and would love to get your thoughts on it, is that that coordination is still as strong as it was a few years ago. And the theory that is starting to unravel, people are starting to wake up to the risks of censorship. It's not really true. The majority of people still don't care. And an example of that is what we've seen over the last two months and what we're seeing now in the polls. Yeah, I think, well, it's a really interesting topic. Nobody likes it. My take on it is we say things like nobody watches you know, people ask me, how are you canceled? You won't shut up. You're on the largest podcast on earth. Well, that's not what cancellation is.

Cancellation is a mark against you so that no institutional media has to platform you because you have some mark against you. And then the question is, well, why does institutional media matter? Nobody's watching it. Well, the institutions are. It's a service that is provided, a fig leaf, if you will, to explain institutional actions that would be transparent otherwise. We're still looking to the institutional narratives and these institutional structures, even though we feel that we're free. So you, okay, great. You do open source intelligence to cover the Ukraine war. Your portfolio is dominated by crypto assets. You use social media rather than regular media, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And yet they're still getting

to you, but you don't realize that you can't free yourself from this yet. You're not actually unplugged. You're just two layers of indirection removed from these narratives. And this thing that happened with Trump and the assassination attempt, people don't feel things. I have an image that I keep talking about, about the father backing up his child on the side of a bridge to get a great photo of a little boy. And the boy backs over the railing and starts falling off of this high bridge. And the father says, don't worry, I've got video on. on you know and the phone disconnects us viscerally from ourselves i mean as you can tell i'm driving but i'm really in a conversation with what four thousand people um we're not leading lives that our brains are set up for and in part um we've declared victory so many times prematurely that we don't realize uh we're not free in the slightest. CNN still really matters. And for reasons that many of us can't figure out why, all I do is I say, look, I can see that it still matters or they're not discussing us nearly as much as we're discussing them. And you have to realize that that comes from the coherence. Guys, it's been great, but I've got a golden retriever to feed.

So thanks very much. Thanks, Eric. Pleasure to have you. And for everybody, appreciate you all joining the space. It was a pleasure having Eric. He used to do this a lot out of nowhere. When we invite him, he never joins. But when we do a space, he loves to pop in and make it a pretty fascinating space.

Eric, always a pleasure. And for everyone else, we'll see you again tomorrow, I guess. Thanks, Eric. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much. All right. Scott, I think it's glitching a lot, by the way, the spaces today. I'm not sure why.

Let me see if we're not able to end it. So everyone who's listening to us doing the space, because we're not able to end it. So everyone is listening to us doing the space because we're not able to end it. I'm not sure why we're not able to end it. Let me see if I can end it through.