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

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

FOMO co-founder Paul Erlanger joins Haseeb, Tom, and Tarun to answer last week's unc takes on memecoins: why a fully transparent social graph beats copy trading, how FOMO became the biggest app on Robinhood Chain, Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token, the three-way launchpad war, AMC's fight with Robinhood over tokenized stock, and the AI race to solve Navier-Stokes. Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra are joined by FOMO co-founder Paul Erlanger to chop it up about the latest in crypto. After getting dunked on as uncs for last week's memecoin takes, the crew brings on the founder at the center of it. Paul lays out FOMO's case for a fully transparent trading social graph, Tarun reports back from a holiday weekend in the trenches, and Haseeb holds the line on where memecoin trading actually destroys value. Then: Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP token, the Pons versus Stonk.fun versus Pump launchpad war, AMC's CEO versus Robinhood's tokenized stocks, and the OpenAI versus Anthropic fight over who solved Navier-Stokes. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 Paul explains why FOMO refuses to build copy trading and bets on full transparency instead: trade well and the feed follows you. 🔹 Tarun spent his holiday weekend trenching, finished up a respectable 10 percent thanks to Hunter Biden copycat coins, and says it felt more like a video game than trading. 🔹 FOMO had 94,000 active wallets on Robinhood Chain, three times the next largest app, and its users no longer know which chain they are on. 🔹 Haseeb draws the line: buying Doge is harmless, but the memecoin production function is where retail reliably loses money. 🔹 Paul and Haseeb converge on churn: an app that lets customers incinerate themselves flames out fast, so FOMO rewards holding and theses over launching. 🔹 Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token launches on Base with airdrops to Trump token losers and a scraped Channel 5 subscriber list. 🔹 Pons, Stonk.fun, and Pump fight over launchpad revenue while Paul stays agnostic and pitches Team Tags as the highest-intent distribution channel ever built. 🔹 AMC's CEO calls Robinhood's tokenized stock vile, and the panel debates whether one-to-one backed equity tokens fix the fundraising objection. 🔹 Tarun explains Navier-Stokes and why math academia is depressed after OpenAI's $15 million compute run at a Millennium Prize problem. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Guest ⭐️Paul Erlanger, Co-Founder of FOMO Disclosures Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:06 Paul vs. the uncs 03:37 From dYdX to FOMO 05:14 Tarun's weekend in the trenches 08:40 Transparency vs. copy trading 12:27 FOMO's distribution power on Robinhood Chain 17:52 Where memecoin trading destroys value 21:10 Churn, theses, & traders as the next celebrities 27:08 Shaming, sidewallets, & clans 32:35 Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP token 37:15 Stock coins, bond ETF fees, &  how long the meta lasts 42:52 AMC's CEO vs Robinhood's tokenized stock 47:51 One-to-one backed equity & earnings calls as TV shows 52:20 OpenAI, Anthropic, & the Navier-Stokes drama 58:49 Is math research over? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After getting dunked on a lot for being an unc from the last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two pawn. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unimmedged trading firms who are very involved. Dalek.eat E. is the ultimate puns.

D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. As you got Tarun, the Gigabrain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. Joining us today, we've got special guest, Paul, Prince of Pumps at FOMO. Welcome, Paul. I'm not sure what I think about that title, but great to be here. I have received the head out man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in Cryptofer. I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block for X, Y, Z for more disclosures.

So, Paul, we brought you on the show. You're one of the co-founders of FOMO. And on the last show, we were pretty roundly criticized for being unks slash dinosaurs and having an extremely, call it, antiquated take on what's going on in the meme coin sphere. Now, obviously, FOMO has been at the center of what's happening in the meme coin space, and you told us you had seen some of the clips of us talking in the last show, rolling around on social media. What was your impression hearing what we had to say at our last show?

Yeah, I said this joke before. I was like, we're going to recreate Jurassic Park. We're bringing you guys back to the modern age. But I was actually traveling this weekend, so I wasn't too deep on Twitter. So we can rehash some of the conversation here. But yeah, I think, like, listen, when you're building a product, I think everyone has their own take, especially when that's a consumer product. Everyone has their own take as a user of what this product is. And I think FOMO, our next part of our journey, is to do a lot of deeper discourse around what our brand ethos and future vision is.

Because I don't think it comes across otherwise. And happy to go through it on the show here. I think FOMO is a lot larger than it is now. I think on-chain trading is, or just like on-chain is the largest revolution in the financial industry. since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s. And everyone was trying to build these skeuomorphic applications, like what's built Twitter on chain. But the real main use cases are like global distribution.

And this is why all these apps are building tokenized equities, so you can globally distribute. Second, it's the largest social network ever created. It's fully transparent. And everyone has access to every single transaction has ever been created in the system. But it's just obfuscated by these alphanumeric strings and these like funky block explorers, right?

So if we can create an experience that's super easy to onboard that anyone can use, that you can create an identity through natural language around, whether it's Turunacy, Tom, whether it's, I don't know, some pseudonym, you could be fully anonymous, but I get full transparency into what you're doing. Then hopefully, eventually, as we have stocks and we have fiction markets and we've all these other asset classes, we become the social graph of all the finance. And I just think on Twitter, it's really hard to see that, especially when stanked off fun and all these meme coins are launching. I think it's a really important to position yourself. For example, Robin Hood became huge on options and then kind of pivoted over to these other asset classes as well. And I'm not going to make a normative judgment on these asset classes. Like, I think people should be able to trade whatever they want. I actually think it's really fun and really cool concepts.

But the overall vision of the platform is a lot larger than you might see in some of the public discourse on Twitter. So Paul, okay. Are you yourself a trencher? Were you a trencher when you started a FOMO? Yeah. So I was a wannabe trencher. And my co-founder say, who everyone knows is a much larger. your presence of me on X that we were talking about that before the show. But yeah, X,

Say was like early to every single crypto protocol. And we met in college, actually had a summer internship in Trad 5. He went to Yale and I went to NYU and we're both there. And he was early to every protocol. And one of my friends was working at DoIDX and kind of took the, I'm a builder at heart. Like I've always been a geek for consumer products and I wanted to work for a product. So I joined the first opportunity I did, which is at DoIDX. Say kind of came over there and we built out the institutional book of business there. But the whole time we were there, say we're trading all these crypto protocols and trying to get me involved. And I mean, you need to take three days to onboard from Fiat and you have this EOA wallet and a separate

exchange and you need to have slippage settings and make sure you don't get sandwiched and just a terrible experience. And I've always had this deep empathy for a normal user and what type of product experience would resonate with them. And I think there's this push pull on every single decision saying I make where we can build a product that is the best for the best traders. We pay our routers not to take positive slippage from our users. we just have the best execution.

It's the first truly cross-chain gasless training application. But then it's something that you could onboard in seconds. You have this accessibility layer, not in terms of use, not only in terms of use, but also in terms of discovery. I'm seeing what the best are trading all the time. And it's easy for anyone to onboard. And then you could build the experience for both user groups. So it's funny because the camps are like saves the trencher.

I'm like the person who wants the trench but doesn't know how. And then you kind of have this push-pull in every decision you make. So I will say I spent after a guest, getting dunked on a lot for being an unc from the last episode. I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way. You know, actually, you know what's amazing? My dear fellow Delaware and Hunter Biden really made my P&L go from negative to positive quite dramatically. Because I feel like the game, the game is like really understanding the news.

News, I'm using broadly speaking, not like, hey, this is the news that's happening. But like, what social thing is like hyped enough for someone to like be making copy cat coins or making, you know, like something that's like, it's a moment? And so I did end up positive, you know, not some crazy, you know, not some. 10,000% positive, but, you know, like, a respectable, like 10% positive. But I really enjoyed the experience, even when I lost money. Like, I had kind of, like, always heard this thing, right? It's like, it's like, you lose money. Well, the social game, the PVP aspect of it, I think you have this, like,

the real unc view of this, which is like, you're just like, I have the real unc view. Casino gambling. It's like the same thing. But there's actually the social dynamic of like trying to be the first one to figure out some new trend or like the feeling that you were there first. It's like, but it's expressed not in you buying the asset, but in you creating the new asset or being very early to some new assets. Did you create assets as well? I indulged in some of the om forks.

But this I didn't do via FOMO, this I did via direct buy. Just I wanted to see, you know, get the full Robin Hood chain experience. But the beauty of FOMO is I deposited, my deposits were available in like three seconds. I don't think I've ever used a crypto app that's been comparable to the speed of that. I didn't think about what chain I was using at all. In fact, there were about 50% of the time I was buying copycat Hunter Biden coins. I thought I was buying them in Robinson chain.

I was buying them to Solana. And I didn't even know what chain I was using. I think something I think I've said on the show, before is it's kind of interesting that the millennial trading apps have survived so long. They obviously have a liquidity advantage, a network advantage of the Coinbase, Robin Hood,

things like, right? If you look at them versus like stockbrokers 10 years ago, 10 years before them, they had this whole U.X difference, they changed the fee model, blah, blah, blah. But somehow the experience hasn't changed in 10 years plus

for Robin Hood, Coinbase, etc. And I think after using FOMO and really seeing the users really write their theses and, like, doxing when they're bought and sold. And the social aspect is a really very different thing. And I know everyone's like, oh, it's been tried 20 times. How could it work this time? But, like, I was like playing a video game.

So it was like more like playing a video game than like trading. And I don't know. Anyway, sorry, that was my long-winded experience of three days in FOMO. I think it's like this fundamental misconception that it's been tried before. Like we did a deep dive on every single social trading app. You look at Etorou and Weebol and they're all riddled with confirmation bias. You don't have full transparency to what people are doing. And the game theoretical optimal thing if you have a private mode is to be private and everyone else to be public.

Right. So then everyone goes private. And if you don't have a full transparency to everything that's happening, two things happen. One is it builds mistrust because people are only talking about their wins and not their losses. and then you have no clue if this is actually what the person's holding or what are they actually holding on the sign if they're just posting that trade. And then the second thing is this is an opt-in system, right?

And you see this on some of these social trading apps today where it's not embedded as the glue to the overall app, but you're just making a post about the thing. But on FOMO, if you just trade, don't write a thesis, don't have to build a following on purpose. Everything automatically follows, right? If you're trading well, it goes to your feed. People follow you.

It goes through notifications. And that's how you bootstrap this spiral, social graph. And it's very similar to what happened on TikTok where it used to be the only people that got distribution were the people who already were famous and had a big audience. But now on TikTok, like anyone in the algorithm could become famous by going viral, right? And similar things happening on FOMO where we have these localized leaderboards. There's like 24 hour, which are like shorter time frame than all time. And we want to do like more categories of leaderboards. But you can see the 24 hour one is less inspirational as obviously the all time one, but it's more aspirational.

And you're seeing new people coming there every day, and people are hitting amazing trades. They're getting famous there. And then they're getting hundreds of thousands of followers on FOMO. They're then building an X account, having 50, 100,000 followers there. And then now we lost creator rewards, which I think will be the most important thing we ever built, which now if you have Theses, you get a boost. And if you trade and people, we attributed to you, and then people are trading after you. And we already did two and a half million dollars there.

So now you can imagine when you have a robust equities product, right? Not only can you trade this from anywhere in the world, but why would I trade a Tesla stock on another brokerage? where I could come to FOMO and do it, build an audience, and then get paid for building that audience. I was going to ask, like, do you think there's something unique about, you know, meme coins that fits this particular format? Because to your point, hey, everything that's been tried before, it's mostly equities, but meme points, obviously, it is inherently like this social contagion kind of thing, which makes like a really good fit for, you know, a social contagion kind of app. Yeah, absolutely. There's two things here. One is cultural and then one of the architecture.

The underlying architecture of the blockchain is the best architecture ever created for a social graph because it's just there. And all you have to do is just create something around it, right? It's not like I have to create a separate bank account for every single user and then expose that through APIs. I literally have a distributed ledger. I have a social layer on top. You create an identity around it.

Social layers proprietary. All the information is there. We generate you embedded wallet. And the second thing is cultural. People are used to trading in crypto and it used to be that you just mark a KOL wallet. And there's no actual visibility of whether that person actually claim that wallet. wallet, et cetera, but now people are claiming wallets. And I think culturally, it's a really important foothold. And you guys talked about these millennial apps. I think you're exactly right.

And I think there's like this talk of this major generational wealth transfer. But I think a lot of people that trade on Robin Hood would have never been trading on a Charles Schwab otherwise. It opened up this new investor class. And I still think like your mom and sister, they're like super, they're like not going to Robin Hood because they're like, I want to buy AI. Sure, I could buy it on Robin Hood, but would why buy? Like, I don't know what the memory stocks are. But there's no accessibility in terms of discovery. And that's exactly what the social graph allows for, because now I can come to this platform really easily. But then I did to discover things in real time, right? See what the top people were talking about, I don't know, like talking about earnings reports

on these AI businesses, etc., what their feces are, interact with them, earn, and then also trade. I think that's kind of the key here. But yeah, I think that the unique thing of the blockchain and the culture there is a really key part of it. One thing, one other thing I think that stands out about this is that if you look at Robin Hood chain pre

a pre all the kind of pairing meme coins with stocks but also B, FOMO moving there there was like quite low usage, right?

It had a like and so there's actually an interesting like distributional difference of like going through the app versus the chain. I think like crypto two years ago

was sort of like bottoms up right like the chain brought the wallet and like here it's like going the other way. And like, I mean, I don't know exactly the stats, but it was something like 70% plus of Robin Hood users came from FOMO.

I mean, that's like kind of incredible if you think about it. Because Robin Hood themselves owns this huge app with a ton of distribution. So I guess like I'm curious how you think about that and when you think about the graph in the sense of like, you now know a lot about people's preferences in multiple environments. Whereas like I think the previous social trading in crypto was really about like kind of boxing you into one, you know, like the Frentecke type thing.

I'm not saying that's social trading exactly, but like it was all about like kind of making a closed enclave versus like moving in different places and driving people to different venues. Like how do you guys think about that in the long run? Yeah, that's exactly right. And you had this experience where it's abstracted chain. And I think that we love all these chain teams,

but I think FOMO kind of leveled the playing field because you don't know what chain you're on anymore, right? And I do think that the infrastructure was all built for one chain, but now you could do that on any chain. And I do think it's an amazing distribution channel. Yeah, you're right. Like, if you think about active wallets today on FOMO, I'm pulling it up on Robin Hood chain,

FOMO had 94,000 active wallets on Robin Hood chain. The second largest app had 30,000, right? So we have three times more than the second largest application there. And I think it's amazing because you're creating great distribution for these new blockchains, and I think the leaders of these blockchains are starting to realize that as well. But yeah, I think, like,

everyone historically has always thought about interoperability only at the infrastructure level, but I think it's starting to get built at the application level, and I think that's something that no one really noticed or never predicted was going to happen. Well, one of the interesting consequences of that, if it is true that more and more of the buyers

are concentrating from FOMO rather than from some kind of unique distribution, is that FOMO kind of will start doing an implicit load balancing across different chains. So right now, one of the things that we've seen that's pretty incredible is the growth of Robin Hood chain. They're now, despite being live for about 70 days, they've made about 42 million in chain revenue. So enormous amount of fees, 600K a day, 90% of that going to Robin Hood.

And like that kind of revenue, you know, it's meaningful even at a company level for Robin Hood. That kind of revenue is really coming from congestion effectively. Like that's why the fees are so high is because there's, you know, there's so much demand and there's only so much block space. So FOMO, if most of the buyers, if most of the users are ultimately coming through FOMO in the first place, then almost you can just start, not you, but sort of the market itself, can start to load balance the different coins launching across different chains. So let's move some to base.

Let's move some to Solana. Let's move some to Ethereum. Let's move some over here. And that should result in some level for the capture to chains going down. and more of the capture going to applications, and of course going to folks like FOMO or PumpDUFUN or whoever. I think it's a bit idealistic because people just want to trade the same coins. I feel like on the same days,

that's whatever the narrative is running. So, for example, like Robin Hood is known as a stock trading app very publicly in public discourse to millennials, et cetera. So something where you're pairing an attention-based asset with an RWA, it makes sense narrative-wise for that to be on Robin Hood chain, right? And I think these different chains have their own narratives. Even if all the buyers are on FOMO, they're going to launch it on Robin Hood chain anyway, even if most of the buyers are on FOMO.

I think that's right. And the goal of the chain is to move all trading there. And we want to be more of this agnostic layer where users can trade whatever they want in any chain. And it's our obligation and job to create a smooth experience no matter what that is. And that's a very difficult job, as you can imagine, because cross-chain trading is a very new thing. Like, this thing didn't even exist six months to a year ago, right? Or like a year ago. And I think that this is something we're building in real time, making sure there's great liquidity across chains.

How do you actually create improvements to the solver, routing, et cetera? And that's something that we're working through right now. We have some really innovative things in the pipeline where I think this will become a solved problem. And I think it'll actually be a competitive advantage for FOMO very soon. But yeah, I mean, load balancing would be amazing. I think there's a bit iduistic because people just follow narratives. Right, right. Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, I'm going to tell you that. I learned that when trading laptop on Seoul and laptop on Robbins. I don't know which 100 fake laptops. We do label them. If you go to the top of the coin page, we do label them. But yeah, I mean, the goal is subtracted away, obviously, because no one understands, like, what a blockchain is, right? Like, I guess there's this group in crypto Twitter that does. And maybe someone who's like, I don't know, like somewhat informed about crypto, but any of the group outside has no clue, right?

And there's going to get scared away if they see that. Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting because I think after the last show's conversation, it seems, Tarun has recanted his unkways. I think between us, I might be the unrepentant one. I think it was fun. You just don't like the fun aspect of it. You're like, oh, they're losing money. They must hate it.

I'm like, actually, it's like playing a video game. Like, yeah, I went to the arcade and I put money in the machine and then I never got it back. Well, I mean, if you talk about like modern mobile games, I think there are maybe some of, maybe some of the game. some analogous kind of dark patterns in modern mobile games. But the point that I want to make is that I actually don't have a problem with most meme coin trading. Most meme coin trading is people just buying and selling Doge or, you know, I don't know, Trump coin or whatever.

I think the phenomenon that I find to be most deleterious are generally speaking like the meme coin production function. I think that's where most of the value gets shredded. And I think that's where it's like most harmful to people. And of course, that's where a lot of FOMO lives, de facto is like a lot of what people are doing in FOMO is doing the new launches and the new stock coin pairings or whatnot.

That's where I think you see all these middlemen, this whole meme coin supply chain stuff that we've learned so much about the internals of and that people reliably lose money when they're doing this. People don't reliably lose money buying Doge. Doge goes up, doge goes down. It's a meme coin. It's just kind of harmless when you buy it.

And using that, using an app that makes your experience better, that's all great. And look, if you're sophisticated and you're buying meme coins, and you're a so young type person and you're like you've got your system and you're and you're crushing it good for you that's awesome you are the 5% right the other 95% of people who are buying mune coins are losing money and I think the um like so so all that is to say like a tool like axiom or like what you guys are building with fomo is great it obviously helps people whatever it is they're going to be better at doing it using a tool like fomo or

like axiom or whatever. What I object to more is the dynamic, right? So what we were talking about last time of these like stock coins getting paired to, or stock tokens getting paired to meme coins. Everybody buying these was losing money because they were just obviously a horrible design and they were almost like comically designed to lose money. These things, I think what really incensed me last time in the show is that I kind of feel like it's important to say that out loud and to not treat all forms of gambling as the same.

I'm okay with most forms of gambling. You go and spin roulette wheel. I have no problem with that. I don't necessarily recommend my kids do it, but do you want to do it, fine. You're an adult. You can do whatever you want. But I think there are forms of gambling

that should genuinely be discouraged. Like, I don't think people should be buying lottery tickets. I think lotteries are like just absolutely destroying people who buy, like they lose so much money per dollar that you put into a lottery ticket compared to playing roulette. I think lotteries are much more attractive than roulette wheels. But, you know, I don't know. Like, it's, there are differences.

between forms of gambling. And I think the sort of the thing we were talking about last week, I don't even know if people are still doing that at this point. I'm sure they're learning quickly. What does and doesn't work? Different forms of this are more and less damaging to retail. And I think it's important to be clear right about that and not to just point and laugh. You actually just hit the nail on the head. And I actually think our views are much more similar than you might have thought before this call because I actually think you're spot on. And I think that's the entire point of FOMO is that it gives you a surface level. to learn. And we talk about this all the time. We hate the idea of copy trading. And we've never built that.

Because the whole point of FOMO is that you get full information and then you can learn by doing, you could follow people, you could take an educated guess and then you could figure out maybe become better at predicting trends like Chris Camillo, et cetera. But everything built on FOMO is built to hold longer. Think of the concept of a thesis. It's like a long term thesis, right? I think like even the idea of like FOMO like fearless or fear of missing out, it's like I don't want to miss it. I want to hold this token longer. We reward people for having creator rewards on the platform, which rewards people for holding longer, for putting feces, et cetera. We have average whole time as a stat. Whereas if you're tied to a launch pad, right, your incentive is to create coins as fast as

possible because that's how you earn money. So I actually think FOMO is coming in and trying to like revive the trenches and sweep up the dust a little bit. Because before we had the launch pad game, you saw Harambe, like, say he was trying to convince me to buy Harambe coin. It was sitting at 200 million. He's like, I'm going to hold this thing for four years, right? Because that thing could sit at like a few hundred million, go to a billion market cap, right? Because there were so few meme coins. You needed deploy your teams. You were talking about Doge, et cetera.

And I think this is why I'm so confident in the translation of this thing to longer hold social graphs, such as equities and these other types of products, whether it's perpetuals and you're trading either short or long on maybe like a real world asset. I'm very confident on this because everything built on FOMO is too big, to incentivize people to actually have real feces and hold longer and really. and really signal out signal from noise. So 100%. I think that's the reason we're building this product. I think, like, as the creator of a technology, technology is usually neutral, and people are going to misuse and use the technology, right?

I think as a steward of the technology, our obligation is to steer that technology in as positive direction as we can. The goal is for the brand ethos to be very positive, to be a beacon of light, to be a joyful experience. I think that you go to a prediction market protocol, you feel a little bit of shame using that thing. I think a large part of it is because you're doing

in solidarity. Sorry, you're doing it in solitude, right? But I think when you're doing something in solidarity with others, it brings this more joyful expense. It's much more joyful trading or like betting on a sports game at the sports game with your friends that is doing it on your couch and you're creating these bad

behaviors, right? So I think like the whole goal of FOMO and the ethos that we're trying to project is to be more healthy and to really create this global financial social graph and to really create something that's more withstanding than this like really short term meme point game. Of course people are going to trade those assets. And I think, like, we are an on-chain application. And if you don't have access to

those assets, then you're just in a really bad place, right? Because people should be able to trade whatever they want. But I don't think you should encourage those behaviors and you should encourage educational experiences through all the content we create through the product decisions we make in the app, et cetera. I really like that take. I think that's a very good take. Because one of the things that anybody who runs one of these kinds of businesses knows is that customer churn is the most important metric to keep an eye on. And if you are just a allowing your customers to just incinerate themselves by making bad decisions, your business is going to flame out very quickly. You're just not going to be able to replace people fast

enough into your funnel. And so one of the important things to do, whether it's a mobile game or whether it's a casino or whether it's a social trading app, you have to make sure that your customers are going to survive, that they're going to stick around, they're going to keep having good experiences. And people, we talked about this concept of financial entertainment before. If you consider FOMO to be financial entertainment, fair enough, make sure people are spending an appropriate amount of money on their financial entertainment and not just going bust with their entire bankroll and becoming a coin fessions post like in the first week. If that's what's happening on your app, your half-life is going to be not very long. And so that really resonates

with me as the right way to approach creating the subtle nudges in an application to get people to do meme coin trading in the right way. Because I do very much agree that like meme coins, meme coins are not going away. They may not be the final. form. There may be other forms of social trading that are going to follow that are more like people just buying regular tokens or even people buying stocks, people buying productive assets, people buying, you know, who knows what the future iterations of this are going to be. But the social aspect of trading is very deeply ingrained. And once upon a time that social graph was on Twitter or it was in group chats, now it's clearly extending into

FOMO and some of these other places where people are starting to pull it into. That feels sticky and almost intrinsic to the behavior to me. Exactly. Yeah, the incentives are lines. And I think you hinted upon this. But think about like other financial media. So Michael Burry didn't become famous right after the big short. He became famous after the big short movie. It's like the same as Warren Buffett. He was famous for his investor letters and for his earnings like podcast, etc. Or like the live streams. And I think that there's never been a platform for these people. Right. People had their own, created their own media networks, either through like feature films, etc. But imagine a platform where traders could actually become famous. We really believe traders the next. celebrity. We think also in the world of AI where it's really easy to have opinion and that's commoditized because you just talk to an LLM, what you're holding is what your actual belief is. And we really believe this is much larger than even like the largest financial consumer app that ever existed because it's global people could earn, et cetera. But I also think this is the next generation social media app. People are going to become the next celebrities. You've seen this happening and like

everyone's kind of known this thing's going to be true, but you need all of these different aspects to be perfect. You need the really robust engineering team. It needs to be on a new, type of architecture like the blockchain. You need someone to have an empathy for a user so a normal person could use it. And yeah, I mean, the goal here is to hopefully be this media platform where kind of like a new type of media is created, a new type of celebrities created, and then people can kind of trade and have access to anything, share opinions and also, yeah, kind of hold things in solidarity. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, one other thing that's interesting is I love the shaming aspect where it's like, you know, you'll see someone who's like, here's why I bought this.

300k in market cap coin and here's my thesis and then like three seconds later you get another notification it's like they sold everything their thesis they don't believe their thesis i really enjoyed the like learning which influencers because like before this i never really paid attention to meme coin influencers if i'm going to be honest and i kind of i'm like which ones are full of shit and which ones are real and i'm not saying it's like a science right there's not there's not some scientific. There's even on chain sluice and people are like,

why don't people just buy on sidewalls? Well, listen, there's like tons of sluice on crypto Twitter. And then you see someone on Fobo buying and then you see someone like selling immediately repeatedly on a side wallet that's maybe not on FOMO but it's all on chain. Then it's like,

people have tried to argue that transparency is bad because people are buying on sidewalls. But that's transparent and just not tied to your FOMO identity. There are people that are calling out those people of reputation. There have been people shamed off our platform. Like literally deleted their accounts because of this social kind of confluence and burning their social identity,

when we launched our Klan's product, which right now is just like a superposition of P&Ls, eventually hopefully you could trade together more deeply, but they're like, oh, well, now, like, the only Chris in my saw is like, oh, now we could see like the groups of people dump you on us. I'm like, well, these people are going to dump on you anyway.

Now you could actually see it, right? Like transparency is just generally a good thing. And I think we're just offering more information to the users. And I think you do with that what you can, but I think it's a very healthy evolution overall. So the other dynamic that's been at the heart of this boom in meme coin trading is these launchpad wars.

So once upon a time, it was basically just Pump. Dot Fun. And I have to imagine, you know, if you rewind six months ago, probably most of your volume was Pump.comfunkn tokens. Today we have now this real kind of all-against-all battle in these... Now it's, what is it? It's basically three. There's Pons. There's Stonk.Fund, which is on Solana, and then there's Pomp, which, of course, has always been on Solana.

Pons is the Robin Hood specific one. It's rallied crazy this month. Huge amount of growth and volume. As of yesterday, they were the number one launchpad by revenue. Stonk.combe was the number two by revenue. And then Pomp was number three, which is surprising given that Pump historically has been the king. How do you think about FOMO's relationship with these launch pads?

And, I mean, obviously, you guys are agnostic. Anything on any launch pad is fair game to trade on FOMO. But strategically, you know, as one of the co-founders, How do you think about the, like, do you want a world with more launch pads? Is that good for FOMO or do you not care? How do you think about it? Yeah, I think like if you were very, very idealistic, that, well, it depends, right? Because like this new stock pairing is a completely different thing.

Like if you were talking about pure memes, like, oh, when was the, remember when those people got caught in 4K, like cheating at the cold play concert? There's a token for that, right? So that's like a canonical event that can be memes. And imagine if you had some AI launch pad that could like predict these things. But the problem is, is like, no one really wants a fair launch because then like the whole point is that you're buying and having this chance to get in early and see this tremendous upside, right? So if you're thinking of the game from that perspective, then there's always going to be this new meta that people are trading. I think it's very healthy to have new launch pads. Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it for me.

We're pretty agnostic to this. And it's cool to see new entrants and new meta is being created. I think like every time you see a meta, whether it's, it was the whole stuff about OpenClawn, the AI meta, you're like, okay, like, what can possibly come next? And well, now there's stock token pairing. And I think you always, it's always like, you always think that this is the last one. There's always people creating new things. And there will always be new things created. So I think that's kind of exciting. I think that there is this world where these things kind of transfer to more rear world events. You saw the SEC recently put out this thing where it's like, you can give out. I think it's equity in a business through a token launch if it's up to $5 million. And I think like you could even do, there's like some situations where you can go even higher. Well, imagine if you had like a Kickstarter project, right? And instead of like people funding the Kickstarter project and coming in and then just like

getting one of the projects, what if you could like launch a token? And you actually can have a launch pad team that helps them build alongside this. And BOMO has this new product. I don't know if you guys have seen it, but it's called team tags. And a lot of this is like developers who launch a token will come and hold the supply and get messages. But we've seen pawns. We've seen Solana, we've seen just like layer zero. We've seen Monad.

Like a tons of teams are now holding treasury supply on FOMO. And the teams are able to give updates in the thesis as a notification to everyone who's holding their tokens. So think about this. It's the highest intent distribution channel that's ever existed for a financial product. Because you're having a direct line of communication with the exact people that's holding your financial asset, right? And like obviously this is a huge stretch.

But imagine in the future you have like public company CEOs coming into the platform, be able to instead of just in earnings reports, but you could just like in real time, just communicate with all your sock holders, right? That's never existed as a form of distribution. So we're really excited about what that looks like. And I guess I'm kind of digressing from the initial point, which is just like we're pretty agnostic to launch pads,

but I do think there's going to be new things constantly created. And this is not always cats and dogs, right? I think there will be utility tokens and new real world events that will be created from like these on-chain assets. Okay. Well, speaking of real world events, we've alluded a little bit to the launch of this laptop token. So for those of you who don't know, Hunter Biden, yes, that Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden, that is the son of former president, Joe Biden, who was part of a, you know,

obviously the laptop scandal in Burisma and blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff was never really in the public eye until after. You should remind the audience, because Hunter Biden had many scandals. He did have many scandals. There was the poop, what was it, the poop paintings? scandal. There was a bunch of... Ukrainian bribes. Ukrainian... That was Burisma. That's Burisma. Yeah. Was it not? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so kind of a scandal-ridden fellow. He also

used to be a crack addict, which he... That's not a slur. That is actually true. He has acknowledged that and it was in rehab. And of course, he was indicted for tax evasion, I believe it was. And a... Unless it's firearm. Okay, nice. Anyway, he is back in the public eye and started becoming very vociferous

in politics. And he has launched, he's announced it, he's launching a meme coin called laptop. Of course, this is a reference to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. So he's launching this meme coin called laptop on September 9th on base. He has teased the laptop saying, or so he's a laptop token saying that he is going to air drop some of the laptop token to people who lost money on Trump token, as well as to some subscribers to his substack and some other random people, as well as keeping some of the proceeds for himself, as one does. So this is like kind of the left Trump token.

I feel you glossed over, I have to say, I'm not really a meme coin fan, but this was one of the more thoughtful or like clever meme coin proposals out there. So it was like, you know, he has this whole sort of burn mechanism thing of like, oh, if these, you know, predictions come true, I commit to burning, you know, some percentage of the supply, like, you know, if Denswood midterms or Bitcoin hits 100K. And I think the other thing that was, um, And this was sort of a whole scandal was, he's kind of become more popular recently because he did this interview with Andrew, what's his name, from Channel 5? You probably saw those clips. And so Channel 5 subscribers also were supposed to get an air drop. And apparently he just used Channel 5's subscriber list. I got their emails. And then Channel 5 put up their statements, like, don't, you know, I didn't know how they got her email list if you don't endorse this this meme coin. And I guess like, I mean, this is something I want to ask Paul about, which is, I mean, how do you square, I guess whenever I hear people talking about meme. coins and kind of mainstream media or like non-trenchers, there's just like universal disdain and

groaning. And I think when this Hunter Biden thing came out, it was the exact same reaction. I mean, maybe part of it is political, but part of it is like there's just such negative sentiment around meme coins. And then I look at the FOMO numbers and like, you know, user numbers are growing and look quite healthy. And so like, how do you, I don't know, like, how do you think about meme coins in sort of culture more broadly? Well, celeb tokens in particular, I should say, get a very particular treatment almost every time. Listen, we'll do everything we can to protect our users. If we don't know teams well, like, we're not going to ever condone a token.

I think, like, I mean, we never condone tokens. Even the verification symbol on FOMO is just meant as a representation that this is the canonical one that you are thinking of. It's not that this token is any, yeah, it's never like financial advice or anything like that. It's just like another form of protection for the user. in the sense of just knowing the one that people are talking about. But listen, I think, like, as the founder of this project that has much larger ambitions, I think FOMO is a lot larger than this, you know? And I think we want to be an open platform where if you want to launch a token,

it's going to be on chain and you want distribution. Like, it's your job to do everything on the go-to-market and all the side there. Like, we're not going to do anything there. We'll be an open platform where you could trade these tokens when they're on chain. but I'm focused on a much larger vision than any of these celebrities or politicians launching tokens on the platform. I just think it's honestly noise, to be honest. Yeah, I would say, I mean, we've been pretty critical in the past of, I mean, there were ones called social tokens now. I think they're just celeb coins.

I think we have a pretty good track record of calling all of them bad ideas, whether it was Trump slash Melania or there was Igiazalia's coin or, I don't know, there's definitely, there's a number of other ones that we've talked about on the show. They do seem uniquely bad. Oh, of course, Kanye. That's right. I forgot about it. They do seem uniquely bad among all kind of... Like the menagerie of meme coins, it's like at the bottom is like celeb coins. Look, I think the interesting thing to me about the stock coin thing,

even though I would say I certainly mainly lost money in the stock coin world over the weekend. Obviously, so... You were hearing them over the weekend? Yeah. Okay, nice. No, no, no, that's actually the fun part, right? It's like, what news exists for the stock coin stuff? But I think an interesting aspect of some of the stock coins is I was basically some of the meme coins.

So, like, some of the laptop clones were pairing with like short US bond ETFs. So you'd like buy laptop and you get air dropped LP fees in short, U.S. bond token. And I thought that was actually just kind of amazing because it's like, I'm buying this meme coin, but I'm getting airdropped LP fees in like the stock token basis. And it's like

over the weekend. Like I, you know, it's like, okay, everyone in crypto knows that this sounds boring. It's like, okay, I rebased the staking coin and gave you the fees, LP fees of like trading the underlying versus the LST. It's like the same thing. But there's something crazier about the fact that it's

like a real, it's like the real asset, right? Like, somehow I'm getting some short 30-year treasury bonds out of this, and I don't even really totally understand why. So there's something very more relatable, I think, about

the stock versions of the crypto stuff we've already known. That I didn't even think I would feel like, I mean, I've been doing this for forever. How long do you think this meta is going to last? Stock token pairing meta. So I've seen some people try to make

some constructive versions of it where the meme coin is a reward token for your stock where you basically so you know there was like this whole thing about how the Hymn CEO is like started following the Bona account. He followed the

Bona guy and like is like very into the kind of thing like people suspect he's like some some person who's trading I have a take that I haven't heard before yeah go for it. By take is that meme coins would stock tokens, I think are great community building aspects for these companies, right?

You saw what happened with GameStop, right? So now if you have this community around this meme coin, finally, people are actually caring about your company, right? It might not be like the type of care you want, but maybe you use it as a funnel. The same way as these chains are using these token pairs as a funnel to promoting RWAs on their chains. Because most of the volumes on RWAs on these chains is actually through the meme coins paired RWA. It's not actually trading of the RWAs themselves. And I think it's like two sides of the same

coin. But yeah, I do think like it's good for community building. And I mean, there's public company CEOs that have joined FOMO in the past weekend. Now like they're following the coins on FOMO and they're seeing the holders of those coins and we'll probably come up with creative ways to help distribute it for some kind of distribution around their actual company. You were shaking your head a little bit, Haseeb. I don't know. You might think it's far stretched. I think I'm thinking about a lot. I'm thinking about a lot. I mean, part of the reason why I, after all buying this, is that right now we're in part one of the cycle, right? Part one of the cycle is the fun part. That's the part where numbers go up. It's part

where everyone feels good. It's like, okay, if I lost money here, there'll be another thing next week. When the cycle ends is when everybody's down bad. Everybody's upset. Everybody starts talking to, what's that Berwick law or whatever? You know, that's like, that's when the knives come out. That's when, like, people will start hounding your Twitter on unrelated tweets, calling you a scammer. That's, like, every cycle goes through that. And if you're a public company CEO, even if you're a public company that's doing poorly, you're mostly left alone online. People don't go after random CEOs who stock is down like 80% and just be like,

you fucking scammer, you blah, blah, blah. People will absolutely do that for just like a $10 million meme coin rugpole. So that's why I don't know that like community is the thing that you want. Like if you're McDonald's and somebody like pairs something to a McDonald's stock. But they're not launching the token. It's a wholly community. But that's the difference. Well, they're not endorsing it.

They're not endorsing it. They're interacting with it. And I actually think that's a pretty big difference. Well, yeah, because none of these guys are like, you should buy this token, right? It's just like, oh, we see you, right? And it's like they acknowledge them. And then they can use it as a funnel for people to actually like carrying about their equity, right? Right.

Yeah. Yeah. The difference is they're not launching the token and rugging it. It's like the token is already created. Yes, yes, totally. Totally. That I completely agree with. But a lot of it is like guilt by association is that, you know, if you think about Ansem and all these celebrity coins, right?

Like Ansem didn't launch any of these coins. He didn't, you know, he didn't create any of these coins. But there's so much a program toward Ansem for having just been affiliate, just, I don't know, just kind of being in the room or something or just being around them. Yeah, the prices went up and people forgot about that. Right, right, right. For now, for now, for now, they will remember again when prices go back down. And so I think like, But there's like a spectrum of endorsement, right?

I think like, glad following a meme coin, like the AMC paired one. I don't think that's, I think that's like the lowest level. And it's like people see it, right? And then like maybe if the AMC CEO, obviously he was not too happy, but if the AMC CEO were to like tweet something positive, like I don't think this is an endorsement of the coin,

but like the community enjoys it interacting, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We should, we should cover the story. This is on our agenda. So AMC notorious meme stock. The AMC CEO came out in a blistering rebuke of Robin Hood. So, of course, it's one of the stocks that is tokenized on Robin Hood.

He said on Robin Hood that, or sorry, he said on Twitter that Robin Hood tokenizing their stock without their permission, without their consent was contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, in excusable, and vile. Vlad responded in the replies, what's the concern? And then he went on to say that this is some kind of fictitious synthetic equity market. He demanded a voluntary cease and desist and also said that these tokens were totally decoupled

from demand for their underlying stock. It didn't give AMC any ability to raise capital or the holders of it had no connection to voting or their registry entries. This led to the ex- chief legal officer of Gallagher who was an ex-SEC commissioner

to say, send your lawyers and we will educate them. Basically saying, yeah, this is totally legal. We know our shit. We know exactly why you can't do this, and basically, we don't care if you're going to come crying to us. If you remember, Robin Hood had a similar tip they got into with Open AI when they were tokenizing some of Open AI's pre-IPO stock, of course, Open AAS so private company. So it seems like Robin Hood has been through the ringer already once before with this kind of conflict. But this is kind of

the, this is sort of the reality is that these companies, they don't really have a say in how their stocks are getting tokenized today. I don't know. Thoughts on how we see that dynamic playing out, Tom? I think the opening eye thing and the AMC thing are very different. The opening eye thing was like this like, you know, maybe uncollateralized, naked forward. And they were marketing it basically as, no, you actually own opening eye shares, which is obviously wrong. This was, you know, AMC. Oh, no, you actually own shares of AMC. And this is like, you know, you're buying sort of this, this, this, um, that instrument basically around this like sort of SPV type rapper. I thought they owned, I thought they had ownership in an SPV that had.

It may or may not. The, the, the language was very, vague on it. So maybe they probably had a bunch, but there's no guarantee and you obviously couldn't redeem it. And so different. I think AMC, I think actually is weirdly very sensitive about this because they have this very strong like stockholder

outreach and sort of loyalty program. Like, I don't know if you go to AMC, but there's a whole program where you can sign up and they like give you rewards if you're like a verified stockholder. And obviously they like whip up their whole angry army of, you know, AMC holders to go and like vote and do these like wacky corporate governance things. And so I think

I think, you know, this guy probably saw this as, oh, no, you're, like, severing this lifeline between, you know, me and my, like, hoard of, you know, retail investors who own AMC and are, like, loyal to me. And I think that's maybe specifically his, like, kind of concern versus, oh, like, there's some feasence with, like, the instrument itself or something like that. If I had to be generous with it, I mean, it's weird that AMC, of all companies would be upset about it, given that they are, you know, one of the few U.S. companies that is, like, very strong, you know, stockholder relationship program.

Yeah, it seemed very odd. Trune, do you have a take? Yeah, I think it's because, like, if I remember correct, do you remember AMC themselves tried to give some of their stock as like a rewards program? And so this sort of was like kind of, in my mind, they've actually tried to do this when they had like the huge hype with their stock

and were unable to convert it to a first party version. And the community seems to have basically been able to do the same thing themselves better. and my impression is like they want control over that because then they know when to dump their shares. Because last time this happened, they did an at-the-money issuance. They did this huge at-the-money issuance, right?

And, like, dumped a bunch of shares. I think this is a way of replicating that without having to do that. But I think long-term, I think Paul's vision makes a lot of sense. I actually do think, like, you're already seeing this with how earnings calls are having to be more of a, like, kind of accessible to retail audiences. You don't see as much of these

kind of state earnings calls anymore. A lot of companies are really putting in the performative aspects, making it entertaining, etc. And like the natural limit of that is like, you know, you have the community of people who participate in the call somehow or now instead

these like internet degenes. And like, I think like, look, you're going to have to have a lot of bumps in the roof. I'm not, it's not going to be fucking easy. But I kind of can see that. I, like, I'm a believer in this now. I think, like, the millennial mind is still too stuck in the kind of old school nonsense. Right?

The millennial mind was like lipstick on a pig. We made the U-X look better, but it's the same dog-shit infrastructure. And it's the same, read this, read this fucking 5,000 word report by a banking analyst who, like, couldn't compute Expa 5 in their head correctly. You know, it's like, I, it's not accessible to the normal version. Yeah, even once you're on the app, you just have no clue what to do. But I think there's a few different things here. So first of all, on the AMC thing, I think, like, first of all, the AMC CEO just didn't know about on-chain culture and didn't know what he said. We're just going to spur more fury in the opposite direction than he wanted.

I just think that's what it did. I think Armani from Backpack actually had a really good take here, though, which is I think the main argument from him is, like, we want to be able to fundraise in public markets. But if you have this synthetic debt type instrument, like, and people are holding that, then, like, they're not going to buy stock. directly from us. How do we fundraise in the public markets and actually hurts our ability to do that, which is the entire, well, most of the reason why most companies go public, right? But if you can move to a model that actually is one-to-one backed with a mint-rudean model, and it actually is the actual representation of the equity, then you can actually do this much better, right? Because then you know that every single stock with someone's holding is one-to-one

backed by an equity. And I think that's the direction we're moving. This infrastructure is very nascent, right? And I think, like, we're in the very early innings of what this happens, but I do think this will be a solved issue in the next five years. We're just in the early ends in this. This argument doesn't make any sense, right? Because for somebody to be willing to offer you this debt instrument, they're holding underlying on the back end so that they're hedged, right? They're not just going to hold some naked exposure as debt.

So somebody is holding that stuff. But you don't know. You don't have any understanding of whether that's happening or not, right? Whether it's a pretty good bet that somebody is hedged doing this. Otherwise, that's just the cheapest way to do it. Yeah, I guess it's like the risk-free way to do it, but maybe someone's holding. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah.

It's like a derivative, right? If you buy a derivative, you also push up the spot price because whoever selling you the derivative is hedging it. That's right. Yeah, that's right. But anyway, I also think, like, largely there is this shift. And it's kind of what Tarun was saying, on-chain, it allows for better distribution. It allows for the social layer.

But I also think it allows for public market, private market participants to act or like public market participants to access, like, private market returns much earlier, right? And you see this kind of moving up in cycles, whether it's hyper liquid doing pre-IPO or even some of these like, I guess, like private equities on chain, which I think have their own problems because like Anthropics said, you can't trade these secondaries and then all of them went to nothing. But the perps was fine, right? Because the purpose is bending on a price.

So you actually don't need the underlying to transfer. But I think like the point I'm trying to make is that what the blockchain allows for is these new issuance of these new creative assets, and then these public market participants are able to actually see upside in private market returns, whether that's pre-IPO on perps, or that's like even buying a prediction market, that this is what this company will IPO at, right? And then you get all these different creative mechanisms to actually see those returns. So I think that's an exciting part of it as well. Yeah, I like the take of investor communication, or sorry, as you say, stockholder communication,

bifurcating. So like the moment of your earnings release, there's like, okay, a document dump for the agents. And that's like for all the trading firms and the hedge funds and anybody who's like doing really sophisticated trading. She's like, okay, you ingest that all immediately in like some PDFs. And then for the humans, it's like a TV show, you know, you like, you get on your Twitch stream and you start, you know, it's like entertaining and it's colorful and it's whatever. And like we're moving to a world where they're like the old school like literal conference

call like that's going away because like who is that for? Like professional traders are not going to be using that anymore. basically it's either for financial entertainment and for people who are kind of vibe trading of like yeah I think it's time to buy I like the CEO's confidence and then you've got the agents that are making all of the actual high frequency large money financial decisions

so there's nothing in the middle anymore for like these kind of stayed you know I don't know like very serious conference calls like these basically will become an artifact of the past pretty soon. Yeah and I think a lot of it is I mean, a lot of calls now have like explicit time for like non-institutional questions, right? Like they reserve 10%, 20% of calls for anyone can dial in. And like, that's just like the tip of the iceberg.

That's only even changed in the last two years. Like even at the GameStop mania time just didn't change, right? So it was a little bit slow, but I kind of, I think the way on-chain equities end up being more accessible to like users is like, this type of stuff becomes like parsed, AI parsed for them or like they participate in the type of stuff. It seems like that has to be the direction that we're going.

Right. Okay. One last story that I do want to cover before we wrap. Speaking of AI parsing, story just broke earlier today. I actually started breaking last night. That Open AI has solved the Navier Stokes problem, which is one of the 13 Millennium Prizes

that are available, or the clay prize, which gives you a million dollars for solving some of the most important problems in mathematics. Now, there's a lot of drama behind the Navier-Stokes problem. Basically, it was rumored that Anthropic had actually solved the Navier-Stokes problem, and it was currently getting their proofs checked. This was eventually disseminated online around September 3rd, and apparently opening, I heard about this.

They saw the rumor circulating online, and according to Open AI, that's when they started working on the problem to see if their newest generation of models, a new model that is stronger than Astra, an unreleased model, started working on this problem. Opening Eye apparently spent about $15 million worth of compute on trying to solve this problem. Now, there's all of this drama around the folks at Anthropic who are working on this problem. Apparently, it was a team of this guy Alpoge, as well as another researcher named Buckmaster. And Buckmaster apparently was using Open AI models to examine some of the papers that they were working on.

And supposedly he believes that Open AI saw some of the intermediate work that they were done in solving a sort of prerequisite to the Navier-Stokes problem. And apparently use this intermediate result in order to solve Navier-Stokes without giving them any credit. There was this kind of crazy set of conversations where they told them, hey, if you disavow the anthropic guy you're working with, we will tell the Millennium Prize to be awarded to you instead of being awarded to Open AI because you were the quote, were closest human to solving the problem. He denied this and then went public with the story, which now has gone super viral as like a sort of, you know, I don't know, succession level drama seems to be going on with the awarding of the prize.

Tarun, you are the resident mathematician. What's your take on that story? Did I get the core details right there? Also, explain what Navier Stokes is. Yeah, so, so yes, you kind of, I think you got most of the details correct. All I know is there's just a very big war going on over this. And I think like all the people who are like, oh, the million dollar prize,

they spend $15 million in compute. Come on, that's idiotic. The point of this is like to, first of all, no one, the only person who's ever won this prize turned down the money. It's not about the money. This is like a respect slash can you beat humans thing. I think the, so Navier Stokes is probably the most, so of the Millennium Prizes,

it's probably the most easy to explain to a, a layperson who has no math background, because it's something you've experienced. You've been in a plane and you've felt turbulence. It's sort of a fluid dynamics thing that happening where the plane's going through. There's a ton of, you know, you can think of the interacting atmosphere as like a fluid that the plane is kind of traveling through. And when you have turbulence, it's very chaotic. So it's like it's unable to fluid flow in one direction. It's sort of flowing in a bunch of different directions. So, you know, starting probably Bernoulli in the 1700s until the early 20th century, people had been trying to describe different things as fluids, whether it's water in your glass,

gas in the atmosphere, different things along those lines. And there came to be one sort of master equation that represented all the different types of ways fluids seem to move in the world. And that equation is called Navaristice. Now, in practice, real fluid dynamics is much more complicated, but this is like the simplest ideal equation you can write that describes like 90% of situations. It won't describe the edge cases perfectly. But one question about it that's been troubling people forever is, suppose I have a smooth fluid, like a pouring water down a rock. Is it possible to take something that's a smooth fluid and make it turbulent in a short amount of time? Can I create turbulence from something

that's not turbulent at all. And in practice, we kind of know that seems to happen, right? Like, in theory, like a big enough airplane can cause, change the weather in some ways locally that. But it's not something that you can kind of show has to exist. Like, those things might not be perfect. And going from this kind of like smooth thing to like chaotic in a sort of fixed amount of time is sort of something that is sort of a fundamental instability of this

equation, which sort of says something on nature, right? Like nature has this instability always. There's like turbulence sitting around somewhere. And so basically, there's been many, finding examples is easy, but actually proving that such a solution exists or doesn't exist is like hard. Because you just say over all the set of solutions, such a thing can ever happen. Or here's a very concrete, explicit example that solves us. And so the solution today is basically an example showing this can happen, which sort of says the equation has this defect. Now, most people believe this was true, but like proving is very hard. But the other interesting thing about it was that there's two mathematicians, two Spanish mathematicians, Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez Zoroa, apologies for

the mispronunciation probably, who basically came up with the solution method for this, for a subset of equations, like fluids that are not super viscous, or fluids that are, like molasses versus water, you can think of like their solutions. They're like, for water, we solve the Navarroostrox problem. But for something that looks more like molasses, it's not true. And then the original anthropic result generalized that to something slightly broader,

almost all viscosity. And the open AI thing is like, hey, we can cover any fluid, whether it's like atmospheric gas or like super, super viscous, like something like a super cool liquid that might take 10,000 years to move one millimeter. And so the interesting thing is, like, humans found the answer. They just didn't realize the same solution generalized. And then the AI was like, we're going to search and like generalize as much as possible.

Okay, that was my like very trying to distill it as simply as possible. I don't know if that was understandable. But how do you, okay, but how do you feel as, you know, math, Twitter person, seeing all this drama breakout? Because part of it, like, normally you'd want to say, wow, amazing, another AI discovery. I mean, everyone I know in academia is very depressed, right? Because it's like everyone's like your career hierarchy was determined on like trying to solve these problems.

But now it's kind of like actually just have more compute. And my guess is math will turn into like a place like a lot of humanities where there's like a very small number of tenure professors. 90% of people are just like teaching calculus to premed morons. And like that's what happens. Do you think math research is going away? It's not going away. I think it's just going to be like the bar

goes up so much that it's just going to be very few. It's going to be like being a monk. It's like, I mean, I studied physics in college, and I dropped out of fluid dynamics because I had enough with differential equations and I took GR instead. Well, hey, you still have some different options. Yeah, yeah, I think you nailed it. I think you nailed that one.

I think I agree with the Peter Thiel thing, right? Of like, word cells are going to be more successful in the next century than stem cells. I think he said something like a lot of life. Stem cells? Like S-T-E-M in caps, not stem cell in your body. Okay. Was that his line?

Yeah, he had something like that. I'm probably misphrasing it exactly, but I never heard the phrase stem cell until he said that. So in this drama, Turun, do you subscribe? So Sebastian Brubek, who is the guy at Open AI, who is the head of this project, he has come out and claimed that this was all a big misunderstanding, opening AI, they independently arrived at these answers,

and there was just conversion evolution, essentially, is that, like, look, this answer was in the air, and we found it the same time that they did. A lot of people are doubting that. Where do you land? Do you believe Open AI, or do you believe that they were Wiley Coyotes, and they nicked this from the training data, so to speak, which in their statement, they said,

we cannot rule out that we did not train on some of the information that they gave into codex during the time they were working on the paper? I think the one cone of wisdom is clearly that this other solution that's been known, like the fact that it generalizes, like the same, it's sort of interesting. Like they didn't really discover like a new solution path. They took an existing solution and showed, hey, it actually works in this other setting. And obviously they made a lot of modifications, right? But the core ideas, I think, really came from these two.

So that part clearly, I think the anthropic people seem to have. as far as I can tell, have to have provenance to realizing that. Like this, the NYU professor, not Levant Alpoche, who works at that topic, but the other guy, Buck, Buck, whatever. I forget his last name, but the thing that starts with Buck that you said. Buckmaster. Buckmaster, yeah. He clearly is the one who understood that there's a chance that this existing solution with a little, with the little bells and whistles out there will generalize.

but so it's like hard to not believe the anthropic account. On the other hand, the opening, I think, really flam the door on like, how do you generalize it? Like, I think the direction the Anthropic thing did is correct, but it doesn't fully solve it. So actually, there's a very good blog by Terence Tao about like the three steps. So you do need the third thing. The third thing does actually add some real stuff. The question is like a matter of street credit. And maybe if this was on FOMO and there was a coin

and you got to look at their thesis, you would have known if you got the real answer. No, no, I'm just saying in terms of like academia is all about credit, right? It's like, oh, like who gets credit for being the first to invent this thing? It feels like a game of egos. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I think that my three days of meme coin slash whatever, stock coin trading,

makes me think that there's a very similar, like, I want to be first. You know, it's like I found this band before they were. cool aspect is like a very real, real thing. Right. I know you don't listen to music or entertainment, see, so maybe that's why you're not getting that. Obviously, obviously. I think that's the takeaway we can all come away with from this episode. I had a whole take about why this underscores a need for private AI, but I think we're

already over time, so I'll can that. Paul, where can people find you? And I'm guessing that the answer is on FOMO. Yeah, at Paul on FOMO. It's the only place you need to follow me. But also Paul Erlanger on X. Yeah, it was great. Thanks for having me.

It was great to be on. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for joining us. Hope to see more spicy takes. Great. That's it for now. We'll be back next week. Thanks, everybody.

Yeah.