This Week in Startups - Is $LIBRA the End of Memecoins? with Coffeezilla | E2086

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

In today's episode: Jason and Alex break down one of the craziest crypto stories yet—a $100M meme coin meltdown, insider trading, and Argentina’s president caught in the middle. Coffeezilla joins the show to explain how meme coins are rigged, why Dave Portnoy got a $5M refund while everyone else got wrecked, and what really went down with the Libra token. Plus, we debate if crypto can be fixed or if the grift is too far gone.Timestamps:(0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show.(2:17) Libra fiasco, crypto scams, and influencer involvement(4:42) The impact of meme coins on politics and ethical considerations(8:02) Trump's involvement in meme coins(10:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(11:30) The Libra coin scandal and its broader implications(18:39) Coffeezilla interview clip with Hayden Davis(20:20) Netsuite. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(21:46) Introduction to Pump.fun and discussion on token launching risks(23:21) Coffeezilla joins Alex and Jason!(24:10) Discussion on Argentinian president and Tech Forum Argentina(27:29) Examination of Hayden Davis and token manipulation(29:29) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup.(31:02) Analysis of the broken crypto system and regulatory issues(35:40) Intentional fraud, regulation, and meme coins in politics(41:21) Potential solutions and regulatory controls under new administration(50:23) Concerns and proposed framework for crypto regulation(54:52) Importance of regulation and combating crypto fraud(58:18) Coffeezilla's perspective on meme coins and future regulations(1:01:22) Advice to potential crypto investors and FTC news implications(1:02:08) Impact of regulation on American innovation and tech giants' growth(1:05:03) Current administration's stance on business combinations(1:06:10) Arguments against large companies acquiring competitors(1:07:23) Risks and potential benefits of hypothetical acquisitions(1:08:29) Debate on market competition dynamics*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Coffeezilla:Patreon: patreon.com/coffeezillaYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_awX: https://x.com/coffeebreak_YT*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(20:20) Netsuite. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(29:29) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup.*Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

For everybody listening, as you know, I am a CoffeeZilla Stan. And this is, in the legacy of CoffeeZillow, the grand legacy of Coffee Zilla, I predict that this video, amongst all the amazing videos, from XRP to Jake, Logan, Paul, scams, I don't know who else in the Hall of Coffee Zillow Hall of Fame. There are so many grifters, so many scammers. But this one feels top, this feels top five. I saw you all live. I said to myself, I got to get up here. I got to set the record straight. This weekend startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should

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initial setup. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It is Tuesday. kind of Monday if you took president's day off. So there's a lot going on. Man, this is such a busy weekend, such a busy life I have, man. I have been so busy. And last week I did three episodes of this week in Startups with you.

And that created some ruckus a little bit on Twitter. Whatever, I had booked Megan Kelly for Valentine's Day. And then, of course, I did it all in. And Megan Kelly didn't just have me on for like a quick hit. It was for the whole episode with Chimov.

So she did like a full Valentine's Day episode with us. Her show went to number four in the rankings over the weekend. All In went to number eight. Hey, not bad. That's crazy. You know, this niche podcast is always ranking in the technology rankings, of course, but, you know, this is not for the general population. But, yeah, you know, it's just general ruckus about whatever I talk about. If I talk about, you know, Trump or meme coins, you know, some of these things get reaggregated. People get a little high, get a little excited about it online. We've got a lot of news to cover today. A lot of people want to hear about my take on this Libra fiasco. As in most crypto things, it's super.

super complex and dramatic. So I think maybe you got to tee it up for people and explain what happened this week now. You know, Jason, I think that's accurate, but also sometimes cutting to the absolute root of something is the best way to go about it. And you and I were both dying over this picture. If you haven't seen this, someone photoshopped Sam Bankman Freed on his head, on to Javier Miele's body. And it is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I've seen it like seven times and I've laughed every single time. And I bring it up because Jason's right. There is a lot that went on here. There's a lot of, we have a TikTok of the timeline and all that. But it's a meme coin. It went up. It went down. Money got taken out.

So we've seen this story before, Jason. Many, many times. Yeah. Not our first time at the Grifter Rodeo. No, not our time at the Rugpole. The Rugpole rodeo. The Rugpole rodeo. Yes, the Crypto Circus.

So I'm going to get people a quick rundown of what happened, Jason. and then we can dive into what we think it means. But in short, there was a new token called Libra. It was launched on fixed float. Tokens were sent out to about 12 wallets. And the Buenas-Iris Herald said that that helped indicate possibly to the market that this was, quote, not a scam. Well, we know what happens next.

Then, Miele tweets, and I have a translation of his tweet. I'm not going to read it out in Spanish, but in English, he tweets out, liberal Argentina grows. This project will be dedicated to investing in the growth of the Argentine economy, funding small Argentine businesses and ventures. The world wants to invest in Argentina, long-lived freedom, dollar sign, Libra. An endorsement from his account, personal, I believe, of a meme coin that was recently created and was majority controlled by a handful of wallets.

What happened next is that, as you can kind of imagine, as these things go, once have your melee, I would say a stalwart of the new right, if you will, economically. I mean, he's my hero. guy. He's like, I'm going to come in. I'm going to get with a waste, waste, fraud, and abuse. I'm going to get rid of regulations. And I'm going to try to make a more, you know, dare I say, libertarian society and have less grief to less spend, balance the budget. He seemed like he was doing a great job, too. And he was loved by the people. And he's an outsider. But if you're a libertarian, your views on rules might be slightly looser. Now, what happened after

the president, Argentina, Mr. Miele, did his tweet. Well, this happened. Jason, this is from the Kobayesi lighter over on Twitter. Love those guys. On screen, we have a chart. This is from that lovely Twitter account. And it shows what happened. Well, Miele tweets, the Libre goes up to about a four and a half billion dollar market cap. Then, as you can see from this arrow here, insiders cash out. And then the market cap eventually goes to zero. And this is, Jason, within like 12 hours. It's making me crazy. It is as bad as it can be.

And I think that people were shocked, surprised, irked, disappointed. You're not alone in being kind of like let down by this moment. So I'll just say this. We can talk about the technical details. I just think it's important to note that when you do have a platform, Jason, you have 970,000 Twitter followers. You could launch dollar signs. and Jason and make a lot of money and cash out and screw your people over.

But even if you're a libertarian ethics. You can do that once, by the way. To influencers listening, you can screw your audience once. Then you lose half. It's probably like a half life. So if you have a million followers, you can screw half of them. And then you second time you get through 500,000 of them. And the third time, I think the half life gets even more severe.

And you then lose like, I don't know, 90% of whatever's remaining and you're done. down to like 10,000 really dumb, loyal people who love it. Well, in this case, it's not just his followers that got kind of host. He's being sued in Argentina over, quote, fraud allegations regarding this. And the blowback was so severe that it actually took a ding out of the Argentinian stock market because people were so, I think, concerned that this is going to topple his administration, ergo the things that you mentioned that are popular with other people in the market, deregulation and so forth, might be.

grind to a halt. So if you had invested in their stocks, expecting more of this, well, you might not get it if he loses out on this. Now, now, he is saying that he didn't make any money, that this was just from his personal account. No, he didn't. Yeah. He just tweets. Why did he do this? That's the, ah, you know, this is the same thing that happened. I'll be totally honest and candid, which I can be here. Other podcasts I'm on, I might not I might get like slight amounts of pushback or censored by people. I don't know, you know, if I'm on another podcast and they find this too, too spicy. But here's a spicy take.

Trump shouldn't have launched meme coins because my belief is we went from a too restrictive crypto space with Gary Gensler to restrictive. I'm going to make two very important points. Okay. Number one, this mess can be easily solved. Number two, the people who are charged with fixing the mess should not watch beam coins in the interim while we're cleaning it up. So there's an easy solution, and I want to walk through that. But then second, if you're a leader like Trump, or I guess maybe Eric Trump is the person doing this inside the family running, there's an organization which is their crypto thing.

And it's fine. You know, if Eric Trump wants to be the crypto king, if he wants to be the crypto prince of the Trump empire, that's totally cool. He's a civilian. He can go do whatever he wants, but he does have the Trump name. Yeah. And you're just becoming president, and you've got a mandate, and there's like a set of things that you were sent to Washington to do. The Trump family was not sent to Washington to launch a meme coin. and they were not sent to Washington

to drop those bags on retail if that's what's happened and there's so much lack of transparency and Millet had it is an important thing he got sent there again with the majority the populist platform stop waste fraud and abuse meet the borders legal

not block the borders you know so I don't I want to you know tell it straight here I don't think the mandate for Trump is to like shut the borders completely it's to organize and have it orderly border and get rid of violent criminals. Like 90% of Americans want those two things.

90% of the Americans want waste foreign rebuse. But there's a technique for doing this. There's a process for doing this. And I think everybody wants crypto to be legalized in some way. Like, or the overwhelming majority would like it to be legalized in control. Since those are the factors under which you're doing your presidency and your terms, both Malay and Trump, launching a meme coin or retweet. tweeting a meme coin is a really bad idea because it ruins your credibility. And then it creates a mess that has to be then cleaned up. And then, as I said earlier, like, why would you want to screw your followers? There are people who voted for Trump who bought the meme coin because they voted for Trump. Oh, absolutely. But Jason, just to add a little bit to this because you asked, why did he share this? Why did me tweet this out? So he said, I didn't promote it. I shared it. I did it because I'm a diehard technical optimist. Any initiative that improves financing for

tech entrepreneurs interest me, I made no mistakes because I acted in good faith. But when I look at the political repercussions, I realize I have something to learn. Okay. Hey founders, you want to build the next great billion dollar business, right? Well, you're going to need two things, a killer idea and a properly set up company. I can't help you pick the idea, but I can help you get your business started the right way with Northwest registered agent. With Northwest registered agent, you can form your business for just $39 plus state fees, one of the most most affordable options out there. No hidden fees, no upsells, just a simple, straightforward process. And here's how it works. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, your LLC is officially formed and ready to

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more convenience, and more peace of mind only with Northwest Registered Agent. Let's get into the story of this specific coin. Okay. Because in this coin, somehow Dave Port and I decided he would get into meme coins. My understanding from watching this interview that Coffee Zilla did, apparently, allegedly, this person who Coffee Zilla interviewed, which will play some clips from, he, I guess he's having a crisis of conscience right now, and he gave an hour-long interview that basically he admits everything

that he did in regard to these coins. And it's very damning, I think, like, it's going to result in him going to jail and or being sued if, you know, definitely civil cases. I don't know what's going to go on with the criminal prosecution of crypto as we're in this interim period. And, you know, Gary Gensler, who would have certainly prosecuted this person. I don't know of who the next SEC, what, how the next SEC chair is going to look at totally grifty stuff like this or allegedly grifty stuff or I guess admittedly grifty stuff. But I think we have to go in to play the clips and just show people what happened with Libra. Because the timeline's important.

You gave us a brief timeline there of like, hey, in 12 hours, like some $100 million were sucked out of the system. But also during that time, Dave Portnoy got $5 million back that he had bet on Libra from this person who ran it. And then there's an incredible discussion about sniping. Yes, which we'll talk about in one second. But on the Dave Portnoy point, I think we'll start there. Okay.

This is a bit of a summary of the hour-long interview from Justin Vogel. I thought it was a better summary than I could do. so I'm just using it. Yeah, and give him credit. And the guy we're talking about is Hayden Davis, and he did the thing criminals or alleged your criminals shouldn't do, which is call into effectively a modern radio show and talk about what they did. So he admitted a couple of things that are important to note.

One, that he's sitting on about $110 million that he's, quote, not sure what to do with, various plans about what to inject it back in. Do you try to hunt people down who lost money, et cetera? he also said that they are sniping these things. Now, in my understanding of the interview, they only discussed sniping the Melania token launch, not the Libra token launch, but it's an hour and a half,

so we'll need to go back through it again. Jason, should we explain what sniping is? Yeah, so people build bots to snipe. If you know eBay, people would build snipers, little scripts that watch an eBay auction, and then at the last minute, we'll put a plus $1 on it. And then sometimes people would do this

across a large body of products and services that were for sale in auctions that they knew were undervalued. So the sophisticated way to do it would be if, you know, X equals under the average selling price or 30% under the average selling price, then snipe it and try to buy it. So if you knew, you know, this dire straits out behind me, on average, in good condition, went for $100 and the auction was at $30, you would snipe it at $32 or up to $50, maybe. maybe even, you know, if under 50%. And then you'd buy it, and then you'd resell it. And so this was like fair game.

It felt like a fair thing to do. But in crypto, what they're doing is when these meme coins come up, people have created, there's an equivalent of this in the stock market. People, there was a book, Flash traders, where people were building high speed, high frequency trading. Yeah. Where they were literally putting fiber optic cables, you know, directly into the stock market, getting closer to it.

and basically by milliseconds getting an advantage over retail. And it felt like, well, that doesn't make a big deal. If you can make a penny or a half a cent on each share that was sold. But if a billion share of it gets sold, the pennies add up. And if it's a sure thing, it's a sure thing. So sniping, people go in, they build bots and they buy the memes first, and they sell them first. They buy these meme coins, and then they watch them start to go up. And then I don't know if they programmatically sell them or they all at once sell them.

But what this does is the people who might retweet it like Millay might not even own coins. And they're told, yeah, you can buy some coins and we're going to gift you a thousand coins, and you can go buy coins in the open market. Then they go buy coins in the market. Guess what? They're the sucker at the table. Absolutely. So people are knowing.

And now, I will say, meme coins are gambling. I believe they're gambling. But I'll get into in a moment why I think they're confusing people. There's like four or five pieces of this that make them very confusing. And some number of people actually think they're investing. most people think they're gambling, but there are some group of suckers who come to the table each time.

And the way they do that is, each dopey influencer who participates in this, and I'll include Millay in this like dopey influencer moment. So he had like a dopey influencer moment. We can all have them where the money gets put out to you and it seems like, you know, I just say yes and pick up the free money on the ground, which is why I don't pick up free money.

Be careful picking up free money. Like a bunch of podcasters did that and it came from Russia. It was Putin's money. Although if Putin wants to give us $300,000 per, oh, no, we probably still say no, because we have ethics. Oh, no, actually, if Putin, if RT, if they want to run that scam on us, here's what I'll do. I'll gladly take it and give it to Human Rights Watch and their specific Russia desk to watch human rights in there. So I will fluttle his money right into human rights rights. I believe that's called money laundering for good.

Yeah, I'll watch that for good. Sure. Why not? So that's what sniping is. Two-thirds of the people might know this is gambling and they're just trying to flip it and play this weird guts game, this weird game of like, you know, one-upspinship. The second piece would be the one-third come from whoever the influencer is. So if they got me to do it, y'all listening to this and you're all very smart, wouldn't participate. But, you know, if Millay does it and it's like, whoa, it's Malay or Trump does it or, you know, Melania does it.

Maybe you're like a super Melania fan. She's beautiful and elegant. and stylish and you just love her and you're like the auntie who you know buys the milania plates and cash trays and hats and whatever you want to support her and you're like oh she has coins i've never bought them but my my daughter and my son trade coins and they have the bitcoin so i'll buy the milania coin and now you know milania's you know i don't know moms in texas buy this coin for the first time and then they tell their kids they bought it's like no no no no no that's different than Bitcoin. It's like, is it? Well, Melania, just for everyone knows, shot up as high as $14 per,

and as of the time I was prepping the notes today, $1.22. And Trump coin shot up as high as 74, now down at 16. But Jason, there's another facet to this that we should add, which is that often it's not just the principal, the Jason and Jason coin, for example, often there are what are called KOLs or key opinion leaders. It's a crypto acronym that I recently had to learn. And that's where Dave Portnoy comes into this coffee still interview. We're going to play a clip from an assessment. because he seems to have gotten reimbursed $5 million for his losses in this, which just goes to show in my view. And I'm not taking a stance on Portnoy.

I know he's doing a lot of meme-quint stuff lately. People have lots of opinions about that. I don't want to get sued by anybody. So I'm going to just say, it's interesting. But it does go to show that if you are not a Portnoy-level person in this game, you are not going to come out on top. And actually, Jason, why don't me play one of the coffee solo clips? because they talk about in particular how this is not a fair game.

This is from his chat with Hayden Davis. With Trump or any of these big ones, like this is, it's, it is an insider's game. This is an unregulated casino. Like, if you're a retail trader thinking you're going to go make millions off of mean coins, you better study your fucking ass off. Like that's, how do you think pump fun works? Pump fun, the coin bonds, people put money in. Insiders know about it first.

It rips up and it's who it's who loses last. That's how it's a game. Every single one of these is a game. There's none of them that aren't games. Pump. Got Fun is a website and he explains the insider game of this. While he was doing that, for those of you listening to the pod, not watching it on YouTube,

literally Kloffi Zilla, closes his eyes, clas his hand, and looks up to God and says, praise Jesus. I found Jesus on the ranch this week. by the way, Alex, I'll bring that up later. Praise Jesus. That somebody on the inside has explained and said with their own words that this is a rigged casino.

It's a rigged casino. And if you go to a rigged casino, like let's say you were, I don't know, in some, I can't say third world anymore, have to say frontier market. You're in a frontier market. You're in North Korea,

and there's a casino. And you put $1,000 and you decide to play Blackjack. What are the chances that you're getting a straight game there, straight odds. In North Korea, I'm going to go zero percent chance. Maybe they let you win so you come back. What does the future hold for business? Well, if you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers.

Some people think it's going to be a bull market, other people, a bear market, other people think it's going to be flat. Rates might go up, rates might go down. They might stay higher for longer. Who knows? Okay. At this point, I need one of you founders to invent a crystal ball. If you're building one, email me.

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That's netsuite.com slash twist. Anyway, he just explains that. And then he explains that pump. dot fun, I believe he's talking about pump.com. Yes. Is the website. So if you look at what they tell you,

it says, pump ensures that all created tokens are safe to trade through a secure and battle tested token launching system. Each coin on pump is a fair launch with no pre-sell and no team allocation. Step one, pick a coin you like. Step two, buy the coin on a bonding, on the bonding curve.

Step three, sell anytime. time to lock in your profits or losses. Step four, when enough people buy on the bonding curve, it reaches a market cap of 100K. Step 5, 17K of liquidity is then deposited in radium and burned. So these are the rules. Like, I'm in the industry. I don't exactly understand what's going on here. Bonding curve? Like, I feel like I should know that off top, but I don't, but I know how stocks work. Well, then if you click on the terms of service, like the risk warning is like pretty clear what's going on here. And it's,

introduction is like pretty clear. Pump is a platform designed to assist with the creation, trading of digital assets. The pump group provides users with the platform to create these digital assets. You are entering into a legally binding agreement with us. You must read these terms. Nobody reads them. And you acknowledge that you'll be bound and agree to and comply with this. And, you know,

essentially, anybody who's doing this knows that this is gambling. number one. And number two, there's like tons of conflicts and interests. And, you know, there are all kinds of people involved,

you know, that are, you know, doing the wrong thing here. Anyway. And Jason, because why, why watch YouTube clips

of the man himself when we have Mr. Coffeyzilla right here in the waiting room? Let's welcome him back to the show, our favorite anti-grift workforce. What's up, guys?

I saw you all live. I said to myself, I got to get up here. I got to, I got to set the record straight. I truly appreciate. you're doing this for everybody listening. As you know, I am a CoffeeZilla stand.

And this is in the legacy of Coffee Zilla, the grand legacy of Coffee Zilla, I predict that this video, amongst all the amazing videos, from XRP to Jake, Logan Paul scams, I don't know who else in the Hall of Coffee Zillow Hall of Fame. It's up there. So many grifters.

So many scammers. But this one feels top. This feels top five. It's the moment because obviously you have the Argentinian president facing charges of fraud, possible impeachment, but it's also this kid, a 26-year-old, in the position that he's in, partially because you guys know the backstory, right, where he basically, there was a kind of a pay-to-play event called Tech Form Argentina where all of this happened back in October. The deals got set up, people got in the right rooms.

That's how a lot of this advising to Malay started happening. and then they launched this coin. These people were woefully unprepared. And Hayden has, part of his thing is extracting value from these projects and dumping the coin. So all of a sudden he ends up with $100 million. Everyone else ends down. And everyone's like, how did this kid get all this money?

Turns out he's been doing it with a bunch of coins, including Melania, and admits that not only does he do it from like the main account, he's on the side sniping the project to protect the project. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I robbed the bank to protect the bank. That was, you know, the part of the interview, there were a couple of parts where, you know, and as a fellow broadcaster, and you know, as a broadcaster here, you know, I very much appreciate your broadcasting style and ability.

This broadcaster, broadcast your feedback. Sometimes somebody just tells you the truth. And as a broadcaster, you're thinking, I've got to ask this six different ways to get to the truth. It's going to take me in 90 minutes. I might get 40% of the truth. And there were a couple of moments where he just literally told you he committed the crime and robbed the bank. And you put your hands, you know, there. And I had this happen myself with the CEO famously of what was the car company, this crazy guy who got indicted. Nicola.

Nicola. Thank you. I had the Nicola founder on here. And he told me that he created a pickup truck because he wanted to attract Robin Hood retail investors. And I was like, you wanted to, like literally your goal in launching a product was to attract retail investment. investors to your stock when that you lied about all your capabilities so we're going to put it all aside when he tells you that yeah that was Trevor Milton shout out to Trevor Milton I think he's had a jail now I'm back on the show Trevor um you had him tell you that he was sniping so like and then he told you it's an insider's rigged casino I mean who's come on the show and told you on committing yeah you're absolutely right there was a moment where I just realized oh I have to shut up and let this guy just go because it was confession time. Just so people know, these interviews don't happen randomly. I spent 48 hours trying to warm this guy up, say,

hey, you know, you should come on. And my intention was, let's get to the truth. But as you said, Jason, it's always a matter of soft playing it, like basically kind of minimizing. And he did a little bit of that, but he really did get to the heart of it and just go like, yeah, I sniped these coins. I did all this stuff. What is amazing is when you look on chain at this stuff, they were trying to hide it. This is not something they were proud of, even though he kind of says like, oh, yeah, everyone kind of does this. They had, you know, hundreds of wallets trying to hide this stuff. So this is not something they were immensely proud of.

And what I want to know is how deep does this go? This guy had a very tight relationship with Meteora, which is the platform where a lot of these coins launch. It's where Trump launched. It's where Melania launched. it's where Libra launch, it's where a lot of his coins launch. And he was close friends with Ben Chow who had to resign later when he, like, he was confronted by this guy that started to come out, where this guy's like, yeah, I think you, you and this guy, Hayden committed fraud together.

And Ben's like, you know, this is SBF, F level. I'm so exposed. I have to resign. So the platforms themselves heads are rolling. So you have to wonder what else is going on. It's not just Hayden Davis. It would be foolish to think, oh, it's just Hayden Davis by himself. Somebody gave him the deal flow for this, right?

Somebody gave him access to these deals. Who are those people? And also, like there's market makers like, I just want to mention them, axiom strategies, which they're plotting, hey, we're going to launch your token, right? We're going to market make your token. Let's snipe it. Here's how much money you need to snipe the token. Here's how much we're going to sell every day.

This is an organization. I want to pause you there. This is an organization. you're saying that their speciality is helping people launch tokens promote the tokens and the way they do that is unique. Yeah, yeah, yeah, unique to say,

yeah, put it lightly. Now, of course, Meteor, I just should be clear, Meteor claims, you know, it was a lack of judgment, it wasn't any kind of systemic financial malfeasance. They're also connected with, like, the largest platform on Solana, which is Jupiter. So they're all right now saying,

hey, we had nothing to do with this. He resigned because he had a error of judgment, a laughs of judgment. I think it goes deeper. I don't think Hayden Davis gets in the position. A 26-year-old gets in the position he does without a little bit of help from people who are also making money, right? Because if you're wondering how a 26-year-old got $100 million in his hands that he's now wondering what to do with, I don't think the answer is as simple as, oh, it was just

an isolated incident of one bad actor. In today's market, your business is judged by your customer service. We all know that. And one bad experience, well, that customer is likely gone for life. And you know what? They're going to take it out on you. They're going to post comments. They're going to get on social media. They're going to go to the review sites. So stop thinking about customer experience as just a department. Don't put it in this little basement downstairs. It's your entire business. Let me say that again. Customer service is your entire business. That's the front line of your business. It's where you talk to your customers in their time of need, and Horatio is the trusted outsourcing partner for hundreds of

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slash twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup. Higherhoratio.com, that's h-I-R-A-T-I-O-O-com slash T-W-R-R-R-R-R-A-R-R-R-R-R-T-S-T-W-T-E. Alex, we had another clip from the program. Maybe we could play it. Here we go. What do you do when there's a broken system and you're trying to fix it and you're trying to sort out different launches, different mechanisms, starting at higher market caps, figuring out who to involve versus not,

how to get, how to keep the CA to yourself, how to market it without telling people. What the fuck should you do? Because nobody, the best people in crypto, don't have an answer. How should we make money cleanly? Is it even possible? I think people in crypto don't have a good answer because the real answer nobody wants to hear, which is that you're sort of like, what's the fair way to make a bunch of money selling like tulip bulbs or something like that? You can structure it a lot of different ways, but anything that is by definition value extracting from the world at large is probably not a great thing. But then every crypto project, whether they're VC funded or it's a moon coin, is value extracted. I think there's a difference between something that has utility, something that does something, a tool that purports to do something, and then things that literally have no intrinsic value at all. Oh, man.

What a moment. But then every crypto project would be, well, yes, that's the downsides to unregulated securities that are traded like they're legit. Just much of sense. Let's move this to positive area. Clearly, consumers want to gamble, right? I like to place a wager now and again. I play poker. I like to do a little sports betting on my knickerbockers. I do like the over-unders. And I'm totally fine with that. People go to Vegas and play some games, maybe some tabletop games. It's all good. But here, I think we have a problem. There is no regulation here. So shenanigans can happen. Okay, that's problem number one. He said it explicitly. It's an insider's game. You're the sucker at the table. It's a rigged ha. Ha, Sina. When he says, there's no way. way to do this. Nobody in Crypto can figure out. Well, crypto is like the biggest geniuses. And they'll tell you all day long how many IQ points they have, coffee zela. They tell you all the

time how brilliant they are. They tell you that, you know, have fun staying poor, that they're the smartest kids in the room. And you know what? I know a lot of them. They do index to be very smart people. A little bit weird in cells on the margins. But anyway, they're smart. So there are ways to do this. It's called regulations. And we have many examples like in Vegas, they have to put their odds on their website. They have to have educational material. You can debate if that's enough or not for somebody to go play blackjack, but that's there. Then prize picks and all these other services, you know, they have plenty of regulations. They operate in some states. They operate not in others. And there's all kinds of rules and regs.

Where the stock market for private market investing, I'm in privates, but some of my companies go public, we have a lockup period. So I couldn't sell my Robin Hood for the first six months. My Robin Hood shares went way down, but I'm an insider because I was an angel investor, and then I sold them, I never sold them. There's so many ways to regulate these things. It was just maddening to hear this answer. The Melania coin, though, just in fairness to that moment, did have lockup periods. And Coffey's ill, I think the Trump coin also had lockup periods associated with it as well for insiders.

That didn't stop the pump and the dump and the grossness and the awfulness in my view. Yeah, well, let's correct the record on that. They had a 30-day lockup on the Melania coin. but only for the team allocation, they had a treasury wallet they were selling from jump. Okay, got it. So there was a bit of a trick

because it was like, oh yeah, we're locked up for 30 days, but our other wallet isn't. And they also sniped on top of that, which is a whole separate pool of money, which is what I was talking to him about, is like, well, are we just supposed to trust as the public that you're going to secretly

snipe these coins and, oh, don't worry, we're doing this for your benefit, guys. We're doing this to protect the chart is what they call it. Oh, we have to take it. But here's my question. They start with all the coins. Why do they need to snipe the coins? Just structure it differently.

And actually what they would tell you, Jason. What they would tell you is, oh, we would hold the coins, but people don't like it when we sell right away. So we have to lock up the coins. And that leaves us not able to sell coins. We have to secretly snipe the coins so we can sell them early in order to actually get liquidity. because we don't actually want to lock them up as long as people want us to lock them up for. So they play these games where they're pretending to have a lockup, and they do legitimately for those tokens. And then they're on the side playing insider's games, like Hayden says.

He goes, it's an insider's game, right? And it goes to your point, there's no regulation. This is the tragic part about it. What you're describing is even more sinister than just saying, hey, it's gambling. they're trying to head-fake the audience. They're trying to head-fake their own fans. This is the other thing I find abhorrent about it, because some people consider me an influencer.

I'm not a broadcaster, but okay, whatever, I have influence, I got a following. When you do this to your following and you tell them, I'm holding all my coins, I've got diamond hands or whatever, and then you are secretly selling from some other account. That to me shows the intentional fraud. And part of the test of fraud,

and listen, coffee zilli, you're getting a lot of leads, legal inbound from time to time, whether it's letters, sometimes an actual case gets thrown at you. You're learning about these definitions. Like, if you want to find somebody guilty of fraud or of, like, libel, these are very high bars in the United States. And one of them is that you intentionally try to do these things. Intentionality matters. And what they've just proven is that they're intentionally doing this. And when he says, you know, it's an insider's game and I don't know how to fix it, okay, great, you don't know how to fix it, but you're intentionally committing fraud.

That's my interpretation of it. I don't know what the ramification of the video you just did, but I think it's going to be in a couple of, I think it's going to be in a court case, and I think it will be certainly be in civil court cases, but it might be a criminal court case. Because when I had Milton on from Nicola, they took the clip of him talking about trying to bait retail.

They put it in the court case. He went to jail, and one of the pieces of evidence was that clip. I have a question for you, Jason. Look, one of my questions is, are regulators going to step up? because, you know, this administration has a complicated relationship with meme coins, given that the president launched a meme coin. And there was, there is a sort of a thing right now where the cryptos are.

I don't know if you know. I don't know if you know him, Jason. Yeah, exactly. My bestie for over 20 years. Yes. He's going to have to clean this all up. Yes. Yeah.

The collectibles has been sort of the statement. But the question is, you know, to what extent are, meme coins actually like passing a collectibles test versus some other, when a president is endorsing a coin, sort of the implication is the value is somehow tied to what they're going to do, right? And so that sounds a lot more like a security in actual fact where you rely on the efforts of other people. Now, I understand Dogecoin, pretty easy to understand why that is not a security, right? If it's not a central person on its, yeah. The guy sold everything right, exactly.

There's no insider trade on that. Yes. Trump controls 80% of the token. He's incentivized to make the token go up. At the same time, he's got actions that are going to meaningfully drive up. I mean, on the website, it says like, this is not affiliated with any political party. Who in their right mind is actually viewing the Trump coin as not being affiliated with the highest office in the land? The Argentinian coin is the same play.

Why do you think everyone who made that trade? That's where I have a question. because in your interview with Hayden, he said very clearly that Milay did not get any of this money. And that's the thing that I don't understand. What was the incentive for Milet to tweet this and blow up so much of his political capital, frankly, for something that he claims to get no money from? Do we just not believe that?

Or was he just incredibly stupid? It's complicated. I've talked to everyone important in this story, or at least like 80% of them. And everyone says he'd made no money. I just want to be clear about that. I don't know if that's true. But it seems to me like Milay had some friends who were selling access to Milay. And Milay thought, oh, I'm going to raise some money.

These are some tech kids. I'm being told this is all fine. And then everything blows up. He freaks out. He pretends like, oh, I have nothing to do with it, which is also not true. He did endorse the coin. And then he says, oh, I didn't publicize it or something like that. I shared it.

or like I didn't, I didn't promote it. I shared it, which is like, okay. Here's where you nailed it. So I have seen this phenomenon before. People get a chief of staff where they have people around them. And those people vet, they sort their email, they check their DMs, and they vet the offers coming in. And they, in the most cynical interpretation, and we saw this with the mayor of San Francisco, there were people around him who were literally getting like brown bags of 10 or 20K, if I remember.

correct. And they would get a brown bag with 10K in it, but they would never tell them they got the brown bag with 10K and then. They would just set up the meeting. This happened to the Duchess and Duke of one of these, you know, English families. Again, people around them selling access. Now, do you believe them that they were selling access? I have speaking gigs. I get speaking gigs. I do three or four a year. I get paid a fortune. $75,000. It's an incredible thing. But, you know, people are selling tickets to the events. I say no to 20 of them a year that come from, I'll call the genre of like the Grant Cardones, the Thai Lopez, the money-making schemes. I get offers, and I don't know if I've gotten offers from those two people specifically,

but you know, that genre of like money-making scheme, you're paid, and then they're kind of whales and they resell them on courses. They always try to get me to keynote that. They'll offer me 50K, 75K, 100K, because they know they're going to get one whale who gives them 100K and they get to use my clip forever. And that Grand Cardone guy has clips of him with every celebrity. And he jokes about how he buys those celebrities, uses those clips to validate himself.

So I'm going to put all this on the side for you. And just say, there's a very, there are very simple solutions to this. The new administration of my friend David Sachs, I believe we'll solve this. There is a truth that one of the things you can do with crypto with NFTs or meme coins is put them under collectibles. However, if you want to put them under collectibles,

there's going to be, there's going to need to be more controls in place. Consumers don't understand the differences is my belief. And one of the reasons they don't understand the differences is because these things have ticker symbols like stocks. So they know dollar sign Uber, they know dollar sign Bitcoin, you know, whatever, and then they see dollar sign Trump or dollar sign Libra. So that confuses people.

They're also traded on markets, and the people trading them use charts that look exactly like stocks. The design of these things, the packaging of them. the package if the packaging looks like a stock, then we have to put it in the stock bucket. So these folks doing meme coins are going to have to stop using a ticker symbol or just in some way put massive disclaimers on them

that they're not. And then people are also confused because when you go to that whatever pump fun site is, which they kind of tell you in the name that it's a pump and dump scheme. That's where the pump comes from. It's a pump and dump. They're leaving out the dump part.

So you should, if you do it, if you're dumb enough to go to pump, pump and dump and participate, you know what you're doing, I think. But people do lose money buying and selling it. They say on pumping dump that that's what you're doing. And then there are some people who do it to make money. So there needs to be regulation. There needs to be regulation. And the coins and the collectibles need to be very clearly defined that you cannot own 80% of them. And they have to be released maybe over time. And so you could solve this whole problem, CoffeeZilla, if everybody who was selling had to have KYC, had to have their name on a website, had to have

their social, not the social security, but have the social security, but have the social security on file somewhere, and there was insurance, and it was an incorporated company, and you could see the incorporation license. You start to put together that framework, and the problem starts to get solved. These folks are doing it specifically to not solve the problem. So all this new administration needs to do is just start putting these rules in place. And if they put these rules in place... I have to jump in. I think you're, I think you're dead right. I think there's a misunderstanding of what, and a mismatch between how the administration views these meme coins and how the kind of modern era views them.

I think part of it does go back to Trump. And if you look at the way he first sold NFTs, it kind of teased up what happened with Trump meme coins. So there's an interview with Bill Zanker who launched the original NFTs. In it, he says, Trump really was like not on board. with NFTs until he was pitched on this idea that basically will call them trading cards, digital trading cards. All of a sudden, Trump's involved. He goes, I love this. We are not going to call them NFTs. We're going to call them digital trading cards. So he gets this idea in his head. And it makes sense. NFTs, not, it's too confusing NFTs, collectibles, right? He's thinking collectibles. When you see the meme coins launch, I think there's probably a lot of things where

they try to pitch Trump. Finally, I think someone pitched Trump on, hey, it's just like an NFT, right? Which it's not, but that he thinks of it. So if you actually go on the get Trump memes.com, they don't call the memes coins. They call them cards because he's thinking about it like digital trading cards still. He's thinking about a meme coin like a digital trading card. So our entire administration has circled itself around this like kind of misunderstanding of meme coins as actually NFTs, as actual collectibles. When you're right, Jason, how most of the public interfaces with it is much more like a stock, albeit a worthless stock. If you just search a card on that website, you should be able to find where they call it a card. He's thinking of it. Yeah, see,

card allocation. Well, that's buying out with my debit card. No, no, but not, yeah, yeah, it says C card allocation. So they're thinking of it, like, you're buying the art. They're thinking of the meme coin is like, you're buying the art. But people aren't buying, if that was true, people would buy one Trump meme. People aren't buying one Trump meme. Yeah, you might buy a half dozen, right? They're buying a dollar amount of it like it's a stock. They're not buying an individual and saying, I want to own three of these baseball cards. And these are the three designs I want to know.

See, I think this is the nefariousness going on. I've always believed that the majority of people in crypto are bad actors. I only base this on having met them, you know, and spent time with them. The more time I spend with the crypto people, they believe in their souls that they are really smart and that there are fish and pigs in the world. And the fish are there to be filleted and enjoyed. And the pigs are there to be fattened and slaughtered.

How do I know that they have this perception? Because they say it. They describe their customers. They describe their participants as pigs who get fattened and slaughtered. And in fact, the name of like the big scam in the world is pig slaughters, right? Pig butchering. Pig butchering. And the concept is fatten up the pig just and let them get fed.

fat and when they're nice and fat and juicy, that's when you slice them up and you butcher him. And if that is the case, what we saw with Malay and what we saw with Trump and what you described there, I think tracks, you go to the influencer, the celebrity, the person who's going to bring the pigs to the slaughter and to get the fish to come into the net, and they do it under their own free will. They walk into the slaughterhouse. They walk into the fish in it. They use the trust in that relationship to bring the fish and the pigs to their demise. And the group of people who are doing this are telling them that they're doing it for a good reason and they're tricking these folks into doing it. And then they're laughing. They laugh. They laugh when they snipe this stuff.

These are bad actors. The way you deal with bad actors is the law. So there's bad actors in the world. And the way we deal with them is with cops. And we deal with, we have regulations. The regulations are not for the good people. None of us here would launch a coin and trying to dump it on our family and friends. We're not the bad people. Two percent of the world is filled filled with bad people, one two percent who would do this kind of stuff. And those are the people the laws have to be made for it. Sorry for all the good people in crypto, but there are bad people in crypto. I say four out of five people I meet in crypto are literally either criminals

or they believe the philosophy that the stupid people deserve to lose their money to the smart people. I also know this coffee zilla, the great coffee zala.

I know this from playing poker. Right. Because it's very similar. As you go up the ladder, I was invited to all the games. I got invited to the games with Leo and Ben Affleck and Toby

that are chronicled in Molly's game. And I had dinner with Molly two years ago. A friend brought her to a dinner. I was having a carbone in Miami at the All In Summit when we had it down there. Or no, it was eye connections. It was at the I connections event. She was speaking. And she says, hey, Jake Al, I don't know if you remember. And I said that you invited me to play with Leo and Toby at your game at the four seasons that I never came. She says, exactly. I said, you know why I never came, right? She goes, no, why? I said, because I knew I was the dumb money at that time in my life.

I made a bunch of money, and I was just getting started in poker. And you would tell me, Leo and Ben and Kobe were asking, where's Jake Out? Where's Jake out? Because I had played with them at other games, which weren't her game.

And those folks, in Chronoth in the book, specifically Toby, had a sadistic joy in taking people's money. I have other poker friends who just love to beat people. Now, if you're beating and it's rich people playing rich people, it's okay. But when you're,

you're coming up the hierarchy, I was so popular being invited to so many games because I was the mark. I was the ninth best player at a game of nine people. Actually, I was the ninth best player at a game of eight people. You know, I was ninth? Because the dealer was much better than me as well. Right? I was probably 11th because the two cocktail waitresses were better than me. There's people who just look at dumb people as the marks and they think they deserve the issue yet. That's actually the role of government and law is to protect the weak from the people. people who are evil. The end. Sorry. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Okay, but here's my question. Okay. So we all agree. The three of us put our heads together. We look at this. We go, mm, not so good. Jason talking about regulation, talking about what the SEC should do. But we just, as a nation, elected an administration that is opposed to regulation in favor of crypto writ large, launch their own meme coins and then put David Sachs in charge of it. That does not seem to me like a recipe for regulation. It seems to me like a recipe for more of the same on, actually the same on steroids. No, David's going to clean it up.

How does he do that without indicting the president for doing the same thing? It's so easy right now. Obviously, I don't think the president should have done this. I think that they will very easily create a rule set, as I described, and then tell everybody who did it in the past, okay, you got a mulligan and, you know, we're going to move everybody to this new system. Please follow these new rules. I also think there's an opportunity to demarcate out even if you're going to beaulgated out,

even if you're saying you like, by the, I hate meme coins. I think if you want to do it, that's fine, but I just think it leads to these kinds of bad incentives. But that is different from fraud, right?

So when the president launched the coin, as much as I loathe it, and I think it sets a bad precedent, whatever, they locked up their coins. Yes. They said they were going to do it. They locked it up, right? Yeah.

Whereas what we're talking about with Hayden Davis is fraud is when there's deception involved, right? You said one thing and there's something else going on that the public doesn't know about that is materially harming them. That is like the sniping. That stuff should still be illegal and prosecuted heavily. What I want to see if it was my dream is that, look, even if they want to be pro-crypto innovation, right, meaning we want some rules of the road, that's fine. Still go after the fraud because fraud has never been legal. It never should be legal. but because some of these agencies are being gutted,

because I think there's this feeling of like, we want to throw out the guys who are, you know, who are clogging the wheels before, you're going to get a lot less of that, unfortunately, which we need to, we still need the fraud guys,

taking down the fraud. If you want XRP to do its thing and you want Ripple to be able to innovate, okay, whatever, you can make that case, but leave the fraud guys in place to still take down the bad guys, so there isn't a feeling at large that,

oh, there's like kind of like crimes legal for the next four years. Yeah, that is a valid concern. And I think it's good to call it out now. So the administration understands, hey, somebody like Coffeyzilla is sitting there watching this. I did a little tweet here fixing crypto and how to do it. It's very simple. I put some numbers in here. They're just placeholders. All crypto projects in the USA need to be registered with the SEC. Okay, you just fill out a form. I'm launching a crypto project. It's done online. Super easy. You have to be incorporated in a specific state. Pick the state that you like their rules most. Some people like Delaware, some people like Nevada. There's a big move into

Texas, I hear. Then you have to have a board of directors. It has to have at least three people, and you have to have basic insurance. I'm talking like maybe a million dollar liability insurance, which would be, you know, I don't know, five, ten, $15,000 a year. All the project founders, number two, investors and directors, they have to hold their shares for four years, or maybe they can sell five percent of their holdings a year for the first seven years. These numbers are placeholders, but this is a similar thing to what we do in private companies. This has always existed. And then anyone owning more than 5% of a project has to be disclosed in real time on the blockchain. Hey, you talk about how great the blockchain is. Let's put all those in there

in a running tally. Whoever breaks 5% of entities. And you know, you've got to put some rules in there that an entity can't create multiple wallets or else, you know, you're breaking the law. So there's some rules of the road here. Not accredited investors can only participate in this, and that's 95% of the country. If they pass a sophisticated investor test, 50 question test, you can take it in two hours, and maybe the course is a 100-page book, and you have to read the book, and anybody with an IQ over 80-90 can read the book and get it. Kind of like a driver's license or a scuba license,

if you've ever taken those. I think about it in that sort of rain. Number five, anyone buying into the project who's offshore and is putting in over 250K, you've got to be KYC, you've got to know your customer, and then finally we put a tax on all transactions of 0.01% it's a crypto tax. All of that tax goes into our new sovereign model.

fun. That's just to tweak that. But that would ruin all the fun. That would be reasonable and regulated and full of less grift, Jason. What's the point then? I mean, but it does, I don't think it kills crypto. I don't think it kills crypto. It only kills the grift in crypto. What do you think? I think it's definitely, look,

regulation is better than no regulation. One of the things that really was interesting in my conversation with Hayden is he kind of said like, oh, well, what's the point of rules because all markets are rigged? He goes, equities are rigged. And I was like, that's not an argument against regulation, though. It's an argument that our regulation is imperfect, but it's not like, oh, throw out all the rules

because there is some insider trading here and there. There's a lot less insider trading in the capital markets. I don't know if I would go that far, but it's less easy to insider trade. We make it hard. The point is make crime as hard as possible, make it as cumbersome as possible, make it as difficult as possible.

That is like the goal. You're never going to eliminate it entirely. So I think that's a good start. Look, just get regulation. in the works. Get it moving so people can act accordingly, but at the same time, but the answer is not, oh, we just throw everyone out of the SEC and DOJ because, oh, it's all rigged. It's all rigged anyway, so let's just not have any rules at all. I think that is a recipe for disaster. So well said, when people don't have a good argument, they'll say one of two things. This person

doesn't get it, have fun staying poor, which some people in the comments are doing right now about us. And it's like, okay, it's a silly argument. Like actually, be more granular. What don't we understand? Which part of it are we missing? Like make an actual argument as opposed to the ad homin. You know, and then the second piece is it's the dystopian, nothing matters, you know, what's the word for people who are? Nialism. It's the nihilistic approach. Thank you, Alex. The nihilistic approach is, hey, everything's f***ed anyway. Everybody's a criminal anyway. You know, everybody's getting robbed anyway. Therefore, nothing matters. The truth is, even with the regulation we have with IPOs,

you can lose your money and it can go to zero. But it doesn't happen all that often. And when it does happen, when insider trading happens, somebody goes to jail for 10 years. So these snipers and these insiders, they're doing insider trading. And he basically, I think admitted that during your discussion. He basically admitted to doing insider trading.

And I think at some point you said, yeah, we have a term for that. You will have people break the law. and the idea that you can get sharped on Wall Street or embedding, even though there's regulations, is proof positive that you need regulations, not that you don't need them. Now, somebody said in these comments,

Coffeezilla, that who gets to determine how people spend their money? The libertarian argument. It's my money I should be able to do with it what I want. And I guess they're opposed to my simple test. What do you think of that? sort of response. Yeah.

I mean, I should be able to lose. Well, first of all, I agree that like, yeah, okay, people should invest wherever they want.

I don't think most of those people actually want to be fooled and scam. So what we're proposing is not that we're trying to limit, limit your, do what you want with your money. It's kind of like somebody even saying, like,

I want to do drugs. And you go, okay, I want to clean the dirty drugs off the street. Nobody wants to do, even if they want to do drugs, they don't want to do dirty drugs mixed with fentanyl

that might kill. them right. So I think it's kind of the same analogy here. I'm not even saying outlaw meme coins, even though I personally don't like them. I think they are kind of predatory on most people who engage with them. But at the same time, it's like, okay, well, let's at least clean up the space. If you want to go to Vegas, regulate Vegas. Make sure there's no, it's not like tilted, tilted in a way that the person doesn't understand. Everyone knows at least that Vegas is the house always wins. And I know the odds that the house is always going to win. You get fair odds. And so if you're going to engage in meme coins, you should have a fair shake at those meme points. Perfect. All right. Everybody

go subscribe to coffeezilla. It's Patreon where they can actually pay to subscribe and support your incredible work. Yes, thank you so much. I appreciate the support as always, Jason. Absolutely. And please, Maddie, make sure that I am subscribed at the highest tier. Coffee Zella. I don't know what the highest tier is. I think it just added. It's five bucks. No, it's five bucks. Okay, put me on a hundred bucks. There's only one, there's only one tier. This man is not a $100 one. I won a $100 tier. Please put $100 tier, Maddie.

I appreciate you guys. Just because he's making a living doing this is great. The fact that this is one of the great things, right? Also, I just want to say that I think the point about the difference between Melania coin and the Libra coin was actually useful. Because I was, I think, conflating them a little bit too much. But I will be curious to see how much regulation can be put in place without the crypto folks. crying uncle, Jason, because they have been, as you said earlier, they're pretty opposed to Gensler for a while, and I think they're looking forward to

free reign. They're not going to get free rent. I can tell you, listen, without saying I have inside information, I think we're going to see specific, detailed, granular crypto regulation that addresses each of these items we brought up today. And I think unlike Gary Gensler, it'll be very clear. And it will take the best, stuff and push it offshore and the good stuff will be located here. And then you'll have a very simple choice to me as an American. Because Americans right now are playing in poker rooms with IP, with, you know, VPNs, and they're on other people's offshore blackjack. You know, people are playing offshore blackjack as we speak. Once we get the good actors onshore,

then what's going to be left is the bad actors, if they do onshore stuff, will get pinched. and the ones who are offshore will be out of the range here. And they will, if they do participate like Tether did, they could get banned in New York. I think Tether was banned in New York. And then I don't know if that ban still exists. So even if it's an offshore thing, it can be banned. And that's what we're going to see.

Things like USDC will be given, you know, be heavily regulated and clearly delineated how you can operate. Insurance will come into play. and all this stuff. So the fact that they put David in charge of it makes me feel great. But in this interim period, chaos, it's my job here to call balls and strikes and to tell you the truth about what's going on here. The truth is we are now in a transitional position that is kind of like the early days of crypto, which is to say, you should not participate in it. If a hundred of my friends said, should I participate in this stuff, I'd say only if you don't like money. If you hate money, here's a great way to spend your time. If you hate money and you want to burn your money, participate in this. The end, just like I would tell you, if you've never played poker and you come to my poker game or, you know, you play in a high-stakes game with people who've been playing for over 10 years and who read books on poker and use solvers online, you will lose all your money. So if you can afford to lose that money, you're going to enjoy it. Great. If not.

Yeah. And to close off the show, Jason, I have a gift for you in return. News from the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, former commissioner now chairman. He has reported, and you're going to scream. Okay. Some tweets that came out before the show. He says, today I informed staff of the FTC that the 2023 FTC and DOJ joint 2003 merger guidelines are in effect and will serve as the framework for our agency's merger review analysis, which I believe says that he's going to continue the underlying blueprint of the wrath of con.

And I am surprised by this. that I just wanted to share. I don't buy it. You don't buy it. All right. No. Yeah. If you're the president of the United States and you want to win, that means America's top

companies need to win and venture capital, private equity need to win. These three forces, the LPs who put money into private equity and VC and the publicly traded companies that are out there, they drive American innovation. They drive American innovation to the point at which, when you make a list of the top 20 companies by market cap, you're going to see Apple and Tesla and Microsoft and Invita and a long list of companies that were made possible by mergers and acquisitions and private equity and venture capital. Do you want to have more Google's, Metas, Microsofts, Apple, Tesla's, Uber's, Airbnbs, Coinbases, or do you want to have less of them? All of those companies did tuck in acquisitions? That's

became extraordinary. Google without YouTube would be a third smaller, I think. Without Android and YouTube, it would be a third smaller, maybe half as big. You know, and Apple's done a ton of tuck-in acquisitions that have driven innovation for their smartphone. If they didn't do those, their smartphone would not be as competitive. Microsoft, everything from PowerPoint, I believe, was acquired to Minecraft. I mean, just tons of stuff have been acquired by them, Twitch, etc. Amazon with Whole Foods.

The list goes on and on, obviously, meta with Instagram and WhatsApp. Do you want to have, for as imperfect as those companies are and as critical as we can be, do you want to have another 10 of those? If you want another 10 of those, let the mid-sized companies merge and compete with them. I'm talking my own book here.

Nothing would please me more than Robin Hood and another company in that genre to merge and go big. If Amazon bought Robin Hood, if Apple bought Robin Hood, if Google bought Robin Hood, none of these really makes sense. They don't seem to make sense. You would have us become even more competitive. Why?

Robin Hood could get another 50 million accounts on it and it would be a juggernaut. If Uber and Tesla merge, they win self-driving globally. If Uber and Amazon merged, they win self-driving globally. If Uber DoorDash merged, they win globally. Just those two coming together, which would be something. people would want to block. I'm saying don't block. The chances of like prices rising with Uber and DoorDash coming together,

that cost is less than the gain for America of owning delivery and moving of stuff globally around the world. So you have to pick your poison. Do you want to have the biggest companies in the world and dominate the world or not? That's what M&A is going to do for these companies. I know this is a controversial thing. No, I mean, it's not, well, I mean, Jason, I mean, we've gone over this in the past. I'm not trying to make an argument that the 2023 merger rules were the right ones per se.

It's just, it surprised me, given the tenor of expectation coming into this administration, which is very much kind of what you're outlining here, business-friendly, combinations. Fine. I'm just surprised at the tone that's been struck thus far, because I think you hold what I would called the standard business perspective on where the FTC should have gone post-LenaCon. And to see this signal, to me, is a little surprising. I'm just mixing it in with the HPE Juniper thing. There seems to be a couple of notes that hint at the music coming from this administration

being slightly different than the tune that some people expected. That's all I'm trying to point out. I'm just watching this going, huh. What would be the best argument against what I'm saying? The best argument that goes against what you're saying, in my view, is, Is this your review or what you think another person's view? This is actually your position? Or your steel manning?

Steel manning means you're just coming up with the best argument. Your view is obviously your belief system. Yeah. Which one are we doing here? I think my belief system is that if we allow every company to buy, well, so I think I'd have to phrase this as a steel man point or like making the hyperbolic case. My general perspective is that if we allow large companies to snap up potential competitors at will, we will constrain the ability of the market to disrupt itself. And my example of this is

Adobe Figma. I think that Figma is going to tear down Adobe. And I think the market will be better for that long term than if we had allowed that acquisition and allowed an incumbent to continue preying on the market thanks to their size. And my thinking on that specific one, I'll go the other way, is if they were combined, they become the global dominant player clearly. And then Canva, an Australian company can't beat either of them because they're so dominant. And then there will be other competitors who come along offering open source free,

you know, AI based, and they'll still be able to chip away at it. And by the way, most acquisitions don't work out. So maybe they would screw that acquisition up, right? It's well known that four to five acquisitions just don't work. They don't accrete. So there's so much risk taken here.

Who knows if that one or one? But those are two great American companies. Why not let them dominate even more? more. That's my high order bit. We need to have the American companies become such globally dominant players that we accrue all those taxes, all that wealth, all those individuals and their stock options wealth trickling down into our economy, not others. But I understand that this is, you know, not a perfect thing. I mean, what if Apple bought Spotify? What if Google bought Spotify? Now we're taking a Nordic country, I think they're Swedish, you know, and you get a Swedish

company now owned. What if Klarna gets bought by PayPal or somebody, you know, that would be good for America. So getting these companies to buy, we could buy up all these other companies in the world. So that I'm fine with. I'm fine for going, I'm fine for waiting, you know, the European cookie jar. But, you know, it's interesting. When you say that Adobe plus Figma crushes the world and and crush this Conva. That's, I think, where we run into the disagreement. I think that Figma is going to crush Adobe and Canva. Got it, sure.

I mean, it's an open playing field, right? And so the question is, do you want your gladiator to absorb the superpowers of the other up-and-coming gladiators or do you want to have more gladiators? I think at this moment in history, we want to have the super gladiator. We want the ones who absorb the other ones and just crush them. Keep in mind that Jason and Alex talk on the podcast and Andrew runs the FTC. so we'll see what he does. I just thought it was an interesting notes to strike at this moment in time. So perfect. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in. If you don't tune in live,

this show was like almost two hours of live. So if you want to get an hour and 45 minutes of show where we're kind of chopping it up and we got a lot of guests coming in, go to YouTube.com, search for this week at startups, subscribe, hit the bell so you get notifications for all. And then we'll say, Heidi in the comments and we'll take your questions and we'll reference you, et cetera. And you get probably, you know, some days, 20% more shows, 50% more show than the podcast, which gets edited down. And you don't get to see us

pulling up graphics or discussing the show and the background. So you can go behind the scenes. You can also do that on X. Follow TWI startups. Follow Alex. A-L-E-X is how you spell that.

Jason, J-A-S-O-N. And we also live stream, I understand, to Instagram. We have T-WI startups on Instagram. So if you could all go check that out. I see that we're doing that now. Please post some comments. Please follow that account

because we really haven't invested in it much. My email for life, Jason at calicanus.com and Founder University. Applications coming in for the new cohort, founder.com. And you'll, if you do well in that program, you get to come to Texas and hang out with me and eat barbecue. We'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.