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- [00:00]
A
You can imagine in the, like, Jared from Subway office, right? Like, because in order to do this for years and years and years, you have to convince yourself some code is law. Like, nonsense of like, it's fine that we're stealing from people all day long because, like, the markets are efficient or whatever the hell you've can. So you've. You have created this false justification around your entire operation to allow you to sleep at night to say, like, this is actually a fine thing for us to be doing. And then something bad happens to you. And everyone's like, amazing y. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not a bad guy. What are you talking about? This is unfair. I'm a good guy. Hey, everyone, I'm Kane Wark, and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make the show possible.
- [00:52]
B
This episode is brought to you by Cape America's Privacy. First mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off. Six months at Cape Co unchained.
- [01:15]
A
Hey, guys. I'm here with my co host, Taylor Monahan, security expert and Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins Slash Apart Blue Inc. So actually, before we get to this EF1, because this just reminded me, there's a new OCAP Games set of cards that's out. That's like Pudgy Penguins and burbs mixed. Mixed together. Is that right?
- [01:43]
C
Yeah. So available in 1800 target. So if you're listening to this in the United States, go to your local Target and go grab some.
- [01:53]
A
Yeah, I think. I think I'm trying to scrounge up a box from somewhere.
- [01:57]
C
I'll just send you some. Send me your address. I got you.
- [01:59]
A
Yeah. First segment, EAT Labs breaks from the ef. What is Eat Labs? You probably thing. So Eat Labs is a new nonprofit R D lab whose state of mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy and accelerate the institutional super cycle. Look, I really hope super cycle was not put into their, like, incorporation documents. We really shouldn't mention super cycle ever. Our good friend Suzu, the guy who coined that. Not the best guy. Not the best dude. And every time anyone ever says super cycle, like, all the prices go down. And I mean, here we are today. So let's strike super cycle from the record. Hopefully.
- [02:54]
C
Let's.
- [02:54]
A
Let's try and find a different. Different term.
- [02:58]
B
So.
- [02:59]
A
So the founders are a Bunch of X EF people, Barnaby, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the anchor funders are bit mine and they, they all put in eth or cash into this thing that wasn't clear to me.
- [03:23]
D
Some form of money for sure.
- [03:26]
A
I hope they put ultrasound money into this thing. I would if they didn't. That seems like a mistake I guess though. The, the only downside in giving people eat to do something is then they sell it and then everyone hates them them. So you're kind of stuck there. So anyway they gave them some money in some form, maybe stables and they're starting off. This is the only like a little bit of a downer for me was they're starting off their research. Target the team is leading with is the so called 15 minute finality problem. That seems like a dumb problem. Start off with I like, I don't know, like I don't think anyone cares about that genuinely. Like what do we. What is, what's the benefit from a institutional super cycle perspective of this 15 minute finality problem? Hey, do you know?
- [04:23]
D
I have no idea.
- [04:25]
A
You have no idea?
- [04:25]
D
Like, so this is my thing is like. And there's a lot of people who think, and they're not wrong to be clear but like it's not the full story. Right? A lot of people think that like Vitalik is the problem with the EF because Vitalik has his own personal goals and way of viewing the world and if you want to do things that are different then it's good luck or whatever. That's like a, like a very consistent narrative out of the ef, especially with like the EF dissenters. However, that is not the full story. And so my, my biggest hesitation, I'm not against Ethlod existing, but my biggest hesitation with it is it is a lot of EF people, like at the end of the day it is. They're X, E F people now so you can say that they were unhappy or whatever. But like in my opinion the biggest problem with the EF is like they, they're not operating at scale and I'm not, I'm not convinced that taking a whole bunch of people who have been
- [05:24]
A
at the subset of people from the EF and like your hot take is everyone at the EF is bad.
- [05:31]
D
It's not that everyone is bad, but I, I think that like you never joined, you never joined the EF if you weren't of a certain, let's say like approach in my mindset.
- [05:42]
A
Yeah, your mindset is so, so slicing off A subset of the people at the ef, even if they're like conscientious objectors left or been fired or whatever happened is not necessarily going to get you a different outcome. I don't know, I don't know about that. That feels a bit unfair to me. Like, you know, there's always people in an org who are like the ones agitating for change or saying like, oh, we should do things differently. Like, you know, this, what, 100. At one point there was like 150 people in the EF or whatever. I'm sure there were people like even Tomas, like, you know, they, I know they kicked him out but, but like there were people that were like commercially minded in there, but also ethereum minded. Like surely if you give them their own vehicle. I want to be a bit more,
- [06:29]
D
I mean, I hope, I hope, I
- [06:31]
A
hope, but I see your point. The risk is you just get a mini EF with the same kind of mindset. Right?
- [06:38]
D
Yeah. And you know, maybe it's better like maybe, maybe you do you take away some of the incentives or some of the culture. That's what was missing. But we will see. We will see. I think that like an org like this needs a strong, I think it really needs strong leadership and I also think it needs a like, strong way of like setting goals and then measuring like success towards those goals. And I think that's, that's like the key thing that the EF is not. It's never taken that approach to like building to what they're shifting to their priorities. And I'm, I'm not like some of these guys have been at the, for seven years. Like, yeah, I'm just not convinced that that's how they, they operate. But we'll see.
- [07:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting. I mean there was, there was a point that was made around like, you know, independence etc, if, if you know, Joe Lubin is one of their like anchor funders, you know, how will they stay independent, etc. Like my, my sense is if the people who are funding you are some of the largest ETH holders, you have to hope that those people want the price of ETH to go up. Right. And they're going to want you to focus on things that will be meaningful. Even the institutional adoption thing, super cycle notwithstanding, being, being in their mandate. Right. Says to me that they're like thinking about this from a more commercially minded standpoint, that that's why it just feels weird, the 15 minute finality thing. Like yeah, maybe I'm, I Mean, I am, but like, I just, that's not on my top 10 list of things that if you suddenly had like the most cracked researchers, you'd be like, let's start with that. Like, maybe someone can convince me as to why that's, that's a good problem to start with. But yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like there's any.
- [08:42]
D
I also just feel weird. It's also the framing of it. This always gets to me and it's like, to me this is the biggest indicator of like, like when I look at founders and stuff and whether I, whether I'm going to bet on them being successful or not. Like, what, what the Frick Is the 15 minute finality problem? Like, what is that? How does that guide you? How does that shape your goals? How do you measure success? Right. It's a research problem. Do you know what I mean?
- [09:09]
A
Whereas, I mean, it is a research lab insurance. Like they've got to research something.
- [09:14]
D
Yeah, but I mean, can we frame it? Like, I don't just some like either institutional facing or user facing or like some, you know, something that you're going
- [09:24]
A
to achieve some benefit to the end user.
- [09:26]
D
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [09:27]
A
Like, and this is where I say, you know, I really tend to agree with your take of. If you take people out of the ef, you know, are they going to be able to communicate the intent behind their actions? Well, like, have they learned to do that at the EF? They certainly haven't learned to do that at the EF.
- [09:46]
D
Right.
- [09:46]
A
Like, inscrutable communications is definitely one of the EF's up exports to the world. Right. And so, you know, I, like, I, I don't think they learned, I don't think they learned that. So like that, that is a bit, that is a bit on, on brand, I guess. Right? Like for someone who's left the EF that they're like, oh, here's this research problem that we're gonna frame again in like some weird inscrutable way that only we care about, even if there are benefits. Like the fact that we're sitting here going like, what the fuck is this?
- [10:19]
D
Like, that is, that's what I mean. Just frame it. Just, just flip it on its head, tell me what the end. Yeah, and make it, and make it beneficial to someone, please. Like, yeah, we have got to get out of this, like, I call it like the theoretical research mindset where they just, they sit in silos and they research things and it has very little connection to the real world because it's
- [10:45]
A
The, I mean, look at like with, with, with Abstract, right? Like, you gotta, you gotta pitch different people, got a pitch, like, you know, builders, users, whatever. Like, you know, the, the pitch from Abstract has like been consumer adoption. But then you guys are like, all right, we need to pitch builders better because we need some defi. Otherwise, like, consumers are going to, you know, get lose money or whatever, not have any liquidity, not be able to sell stuff, not be able to trade. Like, what's your, what's your sense in terms of like the external eth comms around? Like, okay, we've got a new group of people that are gonna like, really solve some problems. What are the problems that they should be going out and solving and, and telling people they're gonna solve?
- [11:36]
C
It's an interesting one because I think, like, I always felt like Vitalik always had a good finger on the pulse in terms of like, what Ethereum needed to succeed. And I think his problems that I think he's addressed that I think they've been working to solve, I mean, the core foundation's been working to solve are probably the right ones. Obviously this is like a different group. And so when I look at this group, you know, obviously it's like the big treasury holders. I'm kind of with you, Kane. I don't know what 15 minute finality, like, what difference that makes. Clearly it makes a difference to somebody, though. Like, I would probably take the bet and trust, you know, the BMNR team and other of those teams that are having conversations with institutions that like, that is a problem somehow some way. Like, I don't think that's not, I don't think that's just like they picked, you know, the.
- [12:31]
A
No, it's probably not arbitrary. It's probably not. That's fair. It's probably not arbitrary. Like, they probably picked something that they think will be beneficial. It's just like the fact that all three of us are like, is this thing is not amazing.
- [12:48]
C
Yeah. And to that point, like, I think their qualm, I think just Ethereum's qualm has always been communication. Right. Which is actually like a byproduct of, I think the giga brains that work there. Like, I've always found that, like, being a super smart, talented developer and being a communicator is not necessarily synonymous. I've actually found. You guys will find this funny, but I've actually had many problems over the years, probably over the last five, six years, where I do my whole, like, motivational, inspirational thing and the developers, like, in the Group are just like, oh, my God.
- [13:25]
A
No, no, no, no, no, no. This is not good, dude. Oh, trust. Like, I have this problem as well. Yeah. They're like, this is my most crack guys. Sometimes I'll be like, all right, I'm gonna, like, really, like, rev them up. And they're like, I'm now petrified.
- [13:37]
D
Yeah.
- [13:38]
A
Like, oh, man. Yeah, I. I agree, I agree.
- [13:43]
C
It can be.
- [13:44]
A
It can be hard. It can be hard to, like, through on that stuff. So, yeah, I mean, like, I really want to be bullish on this. Like, genuinely, I really want to be bullish on it. I think there is a huge benefit to having even. Even if they're not, like, super independent, like, having different voices with, like, slightly different mandates out there, like competitive pressure, etc. Etc. Whether they can actually deliver something into the, you know, structure that exists for, like, consensus in Ethereum, as in, like, whether they can ship something, you know, do a bunch of research. You still have to turn it into an eip. You still have to get through governance. You'll have to get it to the validator. Like, there's. There's a process here, obviously coming from the ef. They should understand that, I guess. But, you know, whether like, this effort is rejected by the host is. Is kind of remains to be seen. Right? Like, do they just kind of ignore these guys now and go, eh, you know, really care what you guys are doing? We've got our own roadmap. Is. It remains to be seen, but, you know, it does. It does feel like Ethereum waking up a little bit and saying, like, okay, we've got to. Got to invest more money in, like, making the product better. Product is the network. The network has features make better features, improve the existing features.
- [15:17]
C
Like, it's.
- [15:17]
A
It's pretty straightforward.
- [15:18]
C
So.
- [15:23]
B
Cool.
- [15:24]
A
I guess. Let's. Let's move on to our next segment. Unless you guys have anything else to add. So this one caught me by surprise. And you never know with a raise, right? Like, when did it happen? But FOMO announced a raise of $75 million, which, like, was a bit, you know, a bit surprising to me and impressive. It's the biggest raise that we've seen in at least a few months, I think that I can remember. So, yeah, it's. It's of course, again, you know, like, did they raise this a year ago and they're just announcing it now? It's hard to say, but.
- [16:12]
C
But yeah, they raised this recently. I'm an investor in this one, Kate, and I'm real close with the founders So I have, I had an opinion
- [16:19]
A
here, but yeah, let's hear it.
- [16:23]
D
Okay, yeah, tell me what is, what is fomo?
- [16:27]
C
It is easily the most impressive mobile trading on chain trading app out there by like a Texas mile. And these two founders are absolute killers. They're going to take this thing to the finish line. They're going to sell this either to Robinhood for a billion or 2 billion bucks or they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna slam this one out of the park.
- [16:48]
A
I, and I knew that when I
- [16:49]
C
met them a year and some change ago. The guy sat on a call and says, we're gonna take this public for like within like two minutes. And I'm like, what's the outcome? He's like, we're gonna unbelievably delusionally optimistic. I respect that because I'm delusionally optimistic. And so when I hear somebody delusionally optimistic and then like has some brain power behind it, I, so I invested in them and they're just absolute killers. They have probably the most impressive onboarding strategy today. Their marketing guys they're using are, you know, as a marketing guy in Web2 are best in class. Their platform is best in class. If you've actually used it and you appreciate taste. Whoever's doing their front end has unbelievable taste. The back end is just so impressive. I buy Solana and then I buy some Bitcoin and then I buy some zcash and then I go buy some memes and I can do all of that within 60 seconds. Feels great. Gives me like a phantom style dopamine as I trade on the platform. It's well deserved. And, and I think the rate, I think the people who, who led this round are going to make some money. Usually when you see things like this, you're like, those guys are not going to make any money. You know, that was exit liquidity for the venture investors, I don't think that. Or for the team or something. I, I don't think so. I think these guys are going to take it way further. And I think if you look at it on its face, I think people are like, well, it has a lot of volume for trenches and like it had its moments where I think maybe people thought where it was really hot, where I think people thought it was, you know, performing a function that, that, you know, seemed may maybe pretty niche which is like, you know, it's a great trench app, right, because you can go. And the beauty of it is you can buy like a, you know, 20,000.
- [18:46]
A
It was very like meme. It was very meme heavy. Right. Originally like memes, social trading, copy trading, following people, etc that was like the, the initial kind of impetus I guess for, for their traction. Right. So yeah, I mean but it, it feels like the, I guess it's not like you know, it feels Solana ish. Right. Like in, in their approach to things. Right. But they've obviously expanded outside of that. But yeah, it definitely was one of the Solana things that, that I was watching and going. Yeah, like these guys are, are very focused on like the, the thing that they, they're trying to achieve this like social trading layer. Then they've just expanded out from that which you know, as you say feels like quite phantom esque. Right. Like just nail the nail the primary use case and then you know, which is trading and then expand out from there. Yeah.
- [19:44]
C
And the social element's great. They would hate me for not mentioning that in my whole little show, but yeah, the, the, the, the social element of it. I think there a lot of people have tried to crack this. To me I think they're the first tracking this across both tradfi and crypto.
- [20:00]
A
Right.
- [20:00]
C
Robin Hood's trying this now killer core feature in Robin Hood as of recent doesn't feel as good as what they got going on. So they figured something out there it's going to be interesting to see.
- [20:13]
D
Okay, so wait, sorry, this might be a stupid question. At its core it's a wallet. Yes.
- [20:22]
A
Like yeah, but it's like this is the thing, right.
- [20:25]
D
Just. But like approach from a completely different,
- [20:28]
A
just a different angle. Right. Like it's not, it's not designed as wallet in that like, hey, I mean there's no wallet.
- [20:36]
D
They don't say wallet literally anywhere. But I'm looking at the UI and I'm looking at. I've never used before.
- [20:41]
A
Yeah. Like it looks like a wallet.
- [20:45]
D
It doesn't say wallet everywhere.
- [20:47]
A
No, exactly. Because it's not about the wallet. It's not about custody. Right. Like wallets start from this like model of we're going to hold your assets and trading is you know, added on. Added on. Right. Like that was, you know, all of the wallet especially coming from Ethereum land. Right. Like all of the wallets in Ethereum were like we will stop you from losing your money.
- [21:08]
D
Yes.
- [21:09]
A
And sometimes that was it. There's no step two. It was just like that's all we're going to do. And, and you know, in salon that's why I say like feel Salana esque.
- [21:17]
D
Right.
- [21:17]
A
Like you know, Solana was like, well no, like people want to trade, right? Like that's their primary thing. Fact that you have to hold assets or you have to deal with custody in order to trade is somewhat orthogonal to the requirement for you wanting to trade. Right. So, you know, start trade first and then, and then expand. You know, when I, when I think back to like some of the things that, that you know, we got really wrong on the infidex side, like this is one of them, right? Like we, we started from this model of, you know, even to the point of like building like on chain vaults as one of like the primary use cases of like, you know, you've got to protect people's assets. Like that's the most important thing, custody, etc. But actually the most important thing is like the, you know, the thing you want to do, the most important thing is the trading. Like people want to trade, right? They don't care necessarily so much about, about how, you know, they're custodying assets. And also this is where I think the most interesting thing to me and Luca, maybe you can validate this is the founders were saying like a lot of their users are non crypto users, which is not something that you hear. You know, like they didn't really go after necessarily a crypto native audience. They went after a more normie audience and like removed the friction, et cetera. And yeah, I just think that like it's, it's a, one of the few cases in the last couple years of like a team actually managing to like bring people into crypto because they want to do the job and kind of getting out of the way and not, not making it like all about crypto.
- [23:01]
C
Yeah, I think they have the best go to market from like all trading app that I've ever seen in crypto. They, they, they've found the right guys
- [23:15]
A
frankly and they've, I mean, right structure. The other thing, the other thing I think, you know, Luffy, you probably could comment on this is like the VCS they raised from it wasn't multi coin. No, like it's like you know, three non crypto VCS that don't do crypto things. Like they're clearly thinking about this as like a finance app, not a, not a, you know, crypto.
- [23:38]
C
It's the Robin Hood story just happens to have on chain assets. If the world is going on chain, like this is the Robinhood on chain with social.
- [23:46]
A
Yeah, that's the story that they're telling.
- [23:49]
D
I mean this, this feels very similar to what we were talking about earlier with the ef, right? And like, yeah, exactly what you said came right? Like you can think of it as a wallet. Like you can enter the game as like a wallet because people need to put their money somewhere and access it of it. Or you can go for the end goal and you say like what do people actually want to do? What do they want to accomplish? What does success look like in this case? Obviously they're all in on trading. That makes total sense, especially this day and age. And then you work backwards from there rather than like then being like okay, so what features do we put in the wallet? Right? No, no. Okay, so people want to trade, people want. What does that look like? Right. And obviously especially today the social element of the meme coin element, like that stuff is, is huge. Like Robin Hood is trying to catch up here as well. Right? You work backwards though and then you kind of end up with a thing that looks like a wallet. But you've actually the way that was built and every single product choice was built in a completely different way which then manifests in a completely different way. And also just you prioritize things differently. Like why, like you don't need to have like 8,000 different seed phrases things, right? Like that's the least important bit of it, right? The most important bit is the trading. And so when you work backwards a lot of times you just get really different and usually like better outcomes. But it also just like, I don't know, it just puts the team in a different mindset from day one. Like this is one thing I learned the hard way is like, yeah, is like when you're always, you're always judging yourself by sort of like how you've defined success from the get go. It's very easy to stay on track and build sort of like the right things. Whereas if you start with like this 15 minute finality problem that you're trying to solve, how do you measure like what is success like solving like okay and then what? Right? Whereas if you're like okay, we want to accomplish this, we want users to be able to do this. Success is one a million users are trading over this amount or our, you know, our 30 day Maus or this or whatever it is like it's just a much easier way to prioritize things to choose the right features. And it also I think definitely helps with the fundraise. Don't be a wallet trying to raise funds. Guys like terrible business model.
- [26:21]
A
Strong, strong. Agree. You know, even though wallets are like you being a wallet is like kind of a hard requirement for getting people to trade. Right. But I, I think this is also the difference. This is the difference is, you know, if you're using Apple pay and people are putting 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever, a thousand bucks, this is not their life savings. The stakes are on some level much lower. Right. And, and again, you know, trying to rebuild wallet infra from the ground up. Which is, which is, you know, what we did at Infinx, like we spent months and months thinking about like all of these like edge cases of custody of like, okay, we've got pass keys. What if someone loses the pass key? How do they deal with that? You know, like, and it was all predicated and this is again probably coming from the wrong direction. It was all predicated on like, you know, a whale is going to put $10 million in this platform.
- [27:17]
D
Yeah, right.
- [27:18]
A
And they did. But that's a different user to someone who's putting 50 bucks in through Apple pay.
- [27:24]
D
Yeah.
- [27:25]
A
And like trying to have a system that manages both of those well is really hard. And, and you know, it's, it's just not the right, not the right focus. And, and so you know, I think that these guys like starting from, and, and you know, like the Moonpay guys did this as well.
- [27:46]
B
Right.
- [27:47]
A
Like they, you know, they built a proof of concept app for like here's how we onboard people really quickly into a mobile, you know, interface. Like it wasn't even the point of it, it was just like to show off their, their Rails. So yeah, so I think there's a, there's a very good lesson in this for like crypto founders of like actually crypto has some really cool stuff, but you need to approach it from first principles of like what is, what is a non crypto user care about? They care about the job, they want to trade, they want to make money, they want to buy meme coins, they want to do social trading, etc. The fact that they have actually, and I hope this is true, you know, the fact that they've onboarded more normie users is super bullish for crypto. Like if we can find ways to do that, that's amazing, right? Like the more, you know, the intersection of crypto and, and normie land happens, the, the, you know, more likely it is that we survive this bear market.
- [28:48]
D
So yeah, I think this approach is just, it's terrifyingly refreshing for crypto. I can see why they raised so much money even in a bear. Right. Because literally.
- [29:00]
A
But again for non crypto VCs, right,
- [29:03]
D
like yeah, because it was like, you know, you can, you can see the story. You can see. I mean, you can also. It doesn't, it definitely doesn't hurt that you can see the exit. You can see multiple exits here. So as an investor, that makes your, your choices a lot easier. But I do think, like, just, I think it's, I think there is market demand for all this new, like, not necessarily crypto stuff, but financial stuff, like the markets and like Robinhood has been leading the way in a lot of this area. Right. But like, there is getting normies, I guess, access to that in a way that appeals to them, I think is, is something that crypto and no token, right? They have a token. There's no token.
- [29:46]
A
There's no token.
- [29:48]
D
I know, Incredible things happening.
- [29:51]
A
Yeah, no token. And so like, these are not people that are like trading on FOMO to the. I haven't seen anything. And Luca, you could maybe tell us, right, but like, these are not people that are like airdrop farmers. No. Yeah, right. Like, they're not like, it's not like, you know, people from West Africa or something that are like pretending to use the thing to farm an airdrop.
- [30:13]
C
Right?
- [30:14]
A
Like, this is, this is like actual users trading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. Well, nice investment, Luca. Good work.
- [30:24]
D
I'm jealous.
- [30:26]
A
Let's go to ads. And Luca, we will see you later if you're dropping off here, we'll give it 10 more. Maybe not. I got 10 more minutes. All right, let's go to ads and come back and. All right, nice.
- [30:41]
B
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- [31:37]
A
All right, we are back. So we've had a similar ish segment before the courts getting mad about crypto stuff and AI slope. I think we were like mashing them up here. Right. So Tay, you can, you can walk us through this one, if, if you don't mind.
- [31:57]
D
Yeah, I mean this is. It's a. It's definitely like a story that flew under the radar, but it just had me laughing quite hard. So I guess the. There's some. I don't actually know what the dispute is, but there's some dispute with CryptoPunks Larva Labs. They're being sued for something. But the person doing the suing, apparently their entire suit has just been like AI slop, like constantly, like non stop. And so obviously this has been annoying the defendants, the crypto funk guys. But I guess also it got to the point where it really got on the nerve of the judge who was overseeing all these. This like back and forth and stuff. And the judge in this case finally like just put their foot down and has basically ordered that if the plaintiff, the person that's doing the suing, if they're going to respond to anything else, if they're going to like pursue this case at all, any like, at all, they have to handwrite all their filings from now on as like a preventative measure to hopefully make them dissuade them from using AI to just like form all these, these arguments and these briefs and stuff. And I've. I've just been laughing. I've been following more broadly. I've been following. There have been a lot more like legitimate lawyers getting caught with like hallucinated filings. But this is definitely one of the more interesting ones because it kind of seems like the plaintiff is not.
- [33:31]
A
Are these guys using sonnet? Like what, like what is going on? Like what. What models are they using? Like, models don't hallucinate like really obvious dumb shit like this anymore.
- [33:42]
D
So there's two things that they do. They. Especially with court filings that they hallucinate. The first is that they. And this is not. This is probably what you're thinking of. This is not so much a pro. A problem anymore. But with the early models it was. They would just make up case numbers.
- [33:58]
A
Oh yeah, like that I get. But that was like 03 mini. Like.
- [34:03]
D
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:03]
A
Like, like gonna make up a case number. I don't think they're.
- [34:09]
D
They're getting. They're. Yeah, it's pretty rare. They. So what's more common these days is that they, they hallucinate the sort of the takeaway of the case like very badly. So if you. Because the whole, the whole thing with these court cases is like you're citing case law, you're citing other cases that have been settled as evidence as to why you're right as like this is the precedent that we're going to rely on and this why you should allow me to sue this person. Whatever it is. The AI will definitely still like cite a case. But then the takeaway meaning like the sort of one liner like this case upheld that XYZ property rights is whatever
- [34:55]
A
the judge is like, no bro, that's.
- [34:57]
D
And then yeah, you look at the actual case and you're like, wait, that's not actually what happened at all. Like at all at all.
- [35:04]
A
Like, look, I, I, I, I hate to do this to whoever these idiots are that are using AI for these things, but this whole thing sounds like skill issue. This is bad prompting. Like, I'm, I'm sorry but it's just bad prompting. Like prompt better and so you're doing a bad job.
- [35:26]
D
And this again, this is a thing that's been happening a lot with the courts and the courts are kind of in a precarious position and I've been. One reason I've been reading these a lot is because it kind of feels similar to like the bug bounty program right now, right? Like people who have bug bounty programs are just like inundated with slob. But you're kind of between. And the courts are the same, right? You're between a rock and a hard place. Because on the one hand you want people to report. You don't want the friction to be that high. And like the courts are, you know, philosophically like they're all these things but people have access to them. You should be able to bring a case against someone who has wronged you. All of this stuff, right? Same thing for bug bounties. Like you want people to report. And so the more friction you add, the less like you basically you remove access and that has bad outcomes.
- [36:15]
A
So yeah, I mean the bug bounty thing is like don't put, you know, make it easy, right? Like, yeah, so few people will, you know, the premise being like so few people will bother to report bugs that like making it harder for them is just going to get like worse outcomes because you'll end up having a genuine reporter that's like, ah, these guys, I'm not going to report this.
- [36:34]
C
Right.
- [36:34]
A
Right now it's like you have to hand write your bug report and mail it. Like that's not going to happen. No one's doing that. Right?
- [36:43]
D
So yeah, well, and it's so it's, it's just interesting because the courts are basically like, okay, we're not. It's also, it's different when you have a plaintiff who isn't actually a lawyer. Like they're representing themselves. The lawyers, they just, they find them, they sanction them, they do all sorts
- [36:57]
A
of things, but pro se, they just,
- [37:00]
D
they go, yeah, like, what are you going to.
- [37:02]
A
Because you're allowed to turn on the court, right? Like, you're allowed to be like, just be like, hey, I'm suing.
- [37:09]
D
This is a fundamental right of yours is you can get justice. So. But yeah, the courts are like, yeah, we want you to get justice, but like, stop wasting our time with this AI slob, please.
- [37:22]
A
What's the solution to that?
- [37:24]
D
Well, so now that they're making them hand right there. Hand right there.
- [37:28]
A
Really a solution that's not a real solution.
- [37:34]
D
I mean, they've been throwing out cases, they've been sanctioning, they've been fining. There have been lawyers that have like, basically like, are going through like dismowerment processes because they refute. Well, usually it's when they like, they ship a bunch of AI slop, they deny that it's AI slop, they do it again, they denied again. And. But yeah, I mean, you get disbarred for this. Like, it's, there are rules. Yeah, but you can't, yeah, pro se lawyer or pro se plaintiff. You can't.
- [38:01]
A
Like, they're not like, okay, there's a couple, there's a couple of things that are like, interesting because like I'm sure if you went back to the 80s or something, right. You know, there was, there would be some similar debate of like, you're not allowed to use Microsoft Word at my core because you're just copy pasting things and getting things wrong or whatever. I don't know, I don't know about like, I don't know what the. Like, I, with all of these things I always like, think, okay, what's the end state? Right? Like there's tension at the moment, but what is the end state here in the.
- [38:35]
D
Oh, you want a real solution?
- [38:37]
A
Well, like in the, in the, in the market for law, right? There must be a solution which is. Now the cost of producing frivolous things is, is much lower than the cost of like processing it. Right? Like you got a judge that has to process. Like the judge needs their own AI slop cannon. Yeah, that's the only, like they have. You're going to have to build a thing where the judge can, you know, process all these things. And the A is just like, it's slop don't, like, find them.
- [39:14]
D
Yeah.
- [39:14]
A
I mean, that's the only way.
- [39:16]
D
Yeah.
- [39:16]
A
Otherwise, just.
- [39:18]
D
And I think also making the AI as the AI gets better and more nuanced will help a lot. Like the early. Especially, like, we've already seen it actually a bit. But there were. There was a. Like the 4o days were just. Oh, my God. The number of people that were just coming in convinced that they had a critical vulnerability on a billion dollar protocol and that, like, they needed to sound like they had just been. Their brain was just taken over. That has actually decreased. But not necessarily because there's like, less stupid people. It's more that the models have just gotten that one. They're better at, like, finding things. They're better at self checking. They're also better at not like they used to shout at the user like, oh, yeah, you did. You found. You found it. You did it, you did it.
- [40:10]
A
Yeah.
- [40:12]
D
And so now they're better at temple opening.
- [40:14]
A
I was really bad at this. They were really bad.
- [40:17]
D
I mean, yeah, we'd come in and they. It would just be like, you guys can't even imagine this. It would be a. Like this. You just scroll. And the whole thing is like, I found this critical vulnerability in the emergency, like, sound the alarms. I needed contact. Like, the TBL is this. It's gonna drain. And then you'd have like the little emojis and little like. And you're just like, all right, let's.
- [40:45]
A
Let's go. Let's see if we can.
- [40:46]
D
I would say if I could make those handwrite their shit, you would have saved us a lot of time. I'm just thinking it would have.
- [40:57]
A
All right, let's. Let's move on to our next story. The sandwich bot that got owned got wrecked. Jared from Subway. So for. For the audience, who is. Who or what is Jared from Subway?
- [41:13]
D
Hey, Jerry from Subway. He's a sandwich bot. So, you know. Okay, so sandwiching is when you. Okay, so before transactions are finalized on the blockchain, there's a period of time where they go into the mempool. And this is. It's a very brief period of time before they get, like, finalized. And so these bots go in and they look for opportunities and there's different strategies or making money. One of them is called sandwiching. And sandwiching is actually a bit high risk because what it means is that let's say you see a transaction for like a very large buy or sell of, like a low liquid asset. What they can do is they can actually put their own transaction in front of yours that will move the market a bit like on Uniswap, right? It'll move the market, it'll move the price a little bit. They know that you're not as sophisticated and so you're, you're just like looking to buy this money, like this token or whatever. So yours will then go through and then on the other end they reverse out of it sort of. And so basically there's like this period of time they get into the position because they know that you're going to do something that's going to have an impact on the market. And then they get out of the position and they, they get to keep that difference. The issue why it's a bit controversial is because they see what you're about to do and they cut in line and they move the market, which means that you actually get a worse.
- [42:49]
A
They pay higher fees, right? They pay higher fees to extract some value from the trade you're trying to do.
- [42:55]
D
Because if, if they weren't there, then you would say get whatever a hundred token X for one token Y, but because they are there, you only get 99 or whatever. And then they, they keep the one or two or whatever. So that's what a sandwich attack is. It's. It's just something that sort of happens. There's a lot of, over the last couple years, a lot of like the infrastructure system has decreased the like prevalence of this. There's a lot of things like the wallets and the users can do to like just not get completely raped by this stuff. But anyways, Jared from Subway is like sort of one of the most famous sandwich attack people, so.
- [43:37]
A
Because it has the dot F. Yeah. As well. Which is.
- [43:42]
D
He's also. He's been, he's been doing it for like a very long amount of time.
- [43:45]
A
He has a long time, right?
- [43:47]
D
Yeah, like probably like five or six years now. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah. And his strategies are also like. He's just. Because he's been doing this for so long, his strategies are he makes a lot of money doing this, which obviously impacts a lot more users. So, okay, that's the landscape.
- [44:07]
A
As simple as like including Sanduching Vitalik, right? Like a few months ago.
- [44:12]
D
Yeah, yeah. I mean he sandwiches everyone. Like it's. And by the way, we're talking about this, we talk about this as like this person who's like going around like chasing metallic. It's a bot. These are automated strategies. He has a bot who's looking for certain market conditions, certain things and if there's opportunities to make money, then he. The bot does that. We like, he's anonymous. I'm pretty. I don't, I don't think anyone knows.
- [44:37]
A
No, yeah, he's not doxed.
- [44:39]
D
And it's probably a lot. I don't, I don't actually know this, but in a lot of cases, these like MeV bots are actually like trading firms or like groups of people who are all working sort of together. It's not necessarily even just like one person behind the screen. But yeah, they're automated strategies. So that's where we're at.
- [45:04]
C
I'll see you guys.
- [45:05]
A
All right, thanks, Luca. See you soon. So, yeah, so. So that's the situation. And then some enterprising young counter, MEV activist, let's call them, decided that they were going to teach Jared from Subway a lesson. And so
- [45:29]
D
like I said, he's. This Jared guy is running around the blockchain always trying to find these opportunities to sandwich and make money. And so he saw an opportunity and it was sort of like a new one, I guess, because this attacker activist person has apparently like they, they actually went and they deployed a whole bunch of contracts and tokens and all sorts of stuff in order to like really kind of trap Jared. It wasn't like a one off, like, thing. It was like a, it was like a dedicated plot to get this guy. But so I guess they. Yeah, so they deployed these things. These things made it look like the, like there was an opera, a very great opportunity to make money, and Jared sort of tested the waters. So like, he was like, oh, yeah, there's a, like, basically there's, there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff. But like these MEV bots, like, they'll, they'll see opportunities, but they won't take them. And then they'll sort of evaluate them and they'll write new rules and strategies to pick those up. And so basically he sees this opportunity that he wasn't taking, but he was like, if I had done that, I would have made money, so why don't I start doing this? And so over, I guess over time, because it says there were like over 66 fake token contracts.
- [46:59]
A
Yeah.
- [47:00]
D
So over time, Jared, I guess, because
- [47:02]
A
I think it's worth calling out. Right. Like when you're looking at on chain stuff, you look at things and like a lot of it doesn't make any sense. You have no idea what the intent is on the other side of this trade. You're just like, what are these guys doing? But there's some reason behind it and you can kind of infer it, but sometimes it's hard to figure out what's going on. And so as a MEV operator, a mev bot operator, I would imagine you see a lot of weird, inscrutable things that happen on chain and you're like, do I want to get involved in this? And this person has like slow played them and been like, yeah, you do. You really want to get involved. There's money on the table here, bro. Like, let's go. And just like slowly escalated what it was doing and then eventually hooked him.
- [47:50]
D
Yeah, exactly. And so then I guess, and this, this makes sense because like the, the ultimate way that they got it was via these approvals. So basically, which is a super common pattern. Ethereum, we can have that debate on whether that's a good pattern or not later. But basically you approve router contracts, you approve wrappers, you approve all these different things and you let that first interaction contract control your tokens for the moment so that it can then go on and interact with like five other things to get you the best execution or the best whatever. It lets you do the thing. Because otherwise you as the human user would have to like go individually and like initiate all these different transfers to say like move into a position or move out of it. So rappers, routers, like these sorts of things are super common. Giving approval, superhuman. It seems like he, for whatever reason this didn't throw any red flags. So he was like, yeah, I'll approve it. And then they basically harvested these approvals over time so that he had these open ended approvals that weren't like, that hadn't been used up. Because typically an approval you approve it for, you can approve it for like $2 or a million dollars. It gets eaten up though. But if the trade never settles, it doesn't get eaten up. And so then it's just like an open thing.
- [49:15]
A
Yeah.
- [49:16]
D
And so that's what the, that's what this guy did basically is like he harvested these, he collected them over time and then once it got to a certain size, he just took all the money for himself. Which is wild.
- [49:32]
A
Which is wild. So I mean a, it's very impressive as as many of these hacks are. This is like, you know, you're stealing from the bad guys realistically. Right. So everyone was very happy about this. And like, while we shouldn't probably endorse theft, we definitely can endorse bad things happening to bad people. And I think it's fair to say that Jared from Subway is A bad guy. And so the funniest part of this to me is that Jared's operators, if we're, you know, personifying Jared the boss, right. Jared's owners or. Or whatever are like, we're going to horse. I hope that they, They're. I hope that their legal documents are AI slop.
- [50:21]
D
I mean, but.
- [50:23]
A
But like, it seems crazy to me. You're not doxed. You're running this thing, Right. Hopefully for their sake, not in the U.S. right. And now you're going to court, you're going to dox yourself. That seems dumb. Like, there's no way you're not doing that, guys.
- [50:43]
D
I mean, there's a few problems with this strategy. It's like they also threaten Computer Fraud and Abuse act, which is like. I've had this discussion before. There are a lot of crypto crime things where we call it hacking, we call it like an exploit, a hack. But by definition, it's not like computer fraud and abuse. It's just like. And even though we call it a hack, it's. It's technically, by definition, it's the furthest thing from that specific crime, which is why you get a lot more charges like market manipulation or wire fraud or just straight fraud. Right. Deception, those sorts of things. The fact that he threatened that one specifically, I was like, that's a novel legal theory that we've never seen done in this sort of case. The other thing is that we had a case the brothers the MEV bought. Brothers who?
- [51:40]
A
The brothers.
- [51:41]
D
That last one where this is like one of. One of my favorite stories from last year, where the jury tried because it was such a complex case and they didn't want to hear about Transaction Memphis anymore, that they end up crying, You
- [52:01]
A
tortured the poor jury.
- [52:04]
D
And I mean, it just goes to show just how complex these things are, but also just how, like, the courts are just not especially in like a super PvP environment.
- [52:14]
A
Yeah.
- [52:15]
D
With these. That one was actually a little bit more clear, in my opinion, because they had. They had actually done an exploit of, I think like the Flashbots. They'd found a weakness somewhere in Flashbots or whatever. And then they use that to steal from the MeV bots. In this case, I mean, it is,
- [52:36]
A
I guess this is the bot. Like, this is. This seems fair game to me. I don't know.
- [52:41]
D
Because in order for it to be like, it feels fraudulent. It feels like it's fraud. Because this person set out to deceive Jared in order to take their money, which is like, literally, by definition, fraud. But you do actually have to have. This is an interesting thing. In order for it to be fraud, you do actually have to deceive the person. And so then. Meaning that, like, I have to tell you, Kane, that like, I have a billion dollar company and if you give me your money, like, right, I have
- [53:09]
A
to tell you that he told the bot through breadcrumbs on chain, right? Like, he didn't send a letter to the bot being like, hey, bro, come into this like crazy honey pot that I've built.
- [53:20]
D
Right? And he didn't necessarily. It's just like, I mean, even if we personify all the contracts on chain, he. The, the onchain contracts did not necessarily deceive Jared the Bot or Jared the Human, because they, they actually said exactly what they were going to do, which is we're going to collect these open approvals and try to execute your trade. It never said that if the trade wasn't executed, the approval would be closed like that. Do you know what I'm saying?
- [53:49]
A
Like, there's, I think like the, the bleeding edge of this though is like, okay, you know, you have approved a thing to do a thing. We've accumulated all of those and now we're going to use that approval to do something else that you weren't necessarily expecting, right? That's like, that's where it gets, that's where it's probably hard. I'm sure my AI Slop can and lawyer could, can prosecute that case fairly well. But.
- [54:15]
D
Yeah, and there's also, there's another but
- [54:17]
A
they're never going to court. They're never going, like, if you're, if you get on Twitter and in all caps, type official legal update in all caps, you're never going to court. I'm sorry, you're just not.
- [54:29]
C
Yeah.
- [54:29]
D
You also offered a 50% bounty coming out the gate.
- [54:32]
A
Like, yeah, like, you're, yeah, you're, you're, you're. How much do you, do you know how much Jared has made here?
- [54:44]
D
Like, I mean, he had whatever, 15 million, 7 million to lose sitting in this account.
- [54:50]
A
Like, it's got to be like, this isn't like, you know, the most poetic thing would be like, if this is all of his profits ever.
- [54:57]
D
No, no.
- [54:58]
A
But it's not, it's not like maybe like 100 mil of profits, 200 mil of profits, something like that. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [55:10]
D
So it's, I mean, part of me was just like, is he just trolling and like, because it just seems like so he's been doing this PvP for so long, like he can't be serious, right? Or does he just Hail Mary? You know, it just seems like so.
- [55:25]
C
But.
- [55:25]
A
But hey, you know, you know, the most piece of people, the worst people, the worst possible person that you can have on the other side of a like loss making trade or exploit or something like that is an exploiter.
- [55:45]
D
Yes.
- [55:46]
A
The level of like audacity and like outrage that you will get from them that something bad happened to them is beyond anything that you could imagine. Like, like if you went in and stole some money from like one of our like Korean friends, right? One of our.
- [56:06]
D
They would be.
- [56:06]
A
They're all. They would lose their mind. They'd be so there. This is so unfair. How could this happen to me? How could you do this to me? I thought I trusted you, like so genuinely.
- [56:21]
C
They.
- [56:21]
D
They done. They've literally done that. When I've been able. The rare times that I've been able to help the victim cover the telegram or the Twitter. Yeah. Where did it? You evil. I'm like, you just stole it.
- [56:35]
A
You just stole it. It's not yours.
- [56:38]
D
Out of pure luck. Shut your face.
- [56:42]
A
I know, but they can't help themselves. So, so like they're. You can imagine in the like Jared from subway office. Right? Like, because in order to do this for years and years and years, you have to convince yourself some code is law. Like nonsense of like it's fine that we're stealing from people all day long because like the markets are efficient or whatever the hell you've can. So you've. You have created this false justification around your entire operation to allow you to sleep at night. To say like, this is actually a fine thing for us to be doing. And then something bad happens to you. It challenges all your. And everyone's like, amazing.
- [57:23]
D
Yeah.
- [57:24]
A
And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not a bad guy. What are you talking about? This is unfair. I'm a good guy. Yeah.
- [57:31]
D
Yeah. And for the record, I actually, I do think that. What the. What are we calling him? An activist? We're not calling it the attacker. Okay. I think they also, let's be clear.
- [57:43]
A
I think Anti meb activist. It's an anti meb activist. That's. That's what we're calling them.
- [57:48]
D
Like, what they did was wrong. Like whether or not they can be legally held accountable civilly or criminally. A totally different question. At the end of the day, what they did was wrong. They went on this huge plan to steal this guy's money for themselves. Okay. Like, that's wrong. However, when you're operating in this, like, the depths of. Of meb Land, like, then just, like, rapidly rising to the courts. Like, you're in the trenches, guys. You can battle it out in the trenches, but then don't. The second that people start, then escalating it to the courts, like, immediately is just the most bizarre phenomenon to me. You know, if Jared and him want to, like, go have, like, get in the ring in Dubai and duke it
- [58:34]
A
out, like, like Coliseum, like, put him in the Coliseum with a sword and, like, a fucking bow and arrow and, yeah, let's see what happens.
- [58:43]
D
Or if they want to have, like, a moral debate, that's fine. But I just think once you start talking about suing people and, like, theorizing about the legal crimes in jurisdictions like that. No, no, you guys were in the trenches. You were doing your thing one for a long time. Somebody was able to one up you. Like, you can binge about it, but don't. Don't pretend that, like, you're not going
- [59:07]
A
to go to the courts. Like, justice, baby. Like, I'm sorry. Like. Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. All right, our final story. This Poly Market Polymarket thing, I'll call it. And again, I will point out that I am Poly Market seed investor, so I'm contractually obligated to not believe anything bad about Polymarket that anyone says it's actually crazy. So. So the story is Wall Street Journal reported, alleged, whatever. Who knows where they got this information from? I think we all know that Polymarket paid creators to stage fake bets in promotional videos. Again, like, right?
- [59:59]
D
Yeah, that's a headline. So Wall Street. Yeah, Wall Street Journal says that Polymarket hired a bunch of content creators influencers and paid them to make fake videos in which they lied explicitly about how much they want on Polymarket. And polymarket did this in order to promote Polymarket. And then there's like, a little side story where they paid content creators with the US Audience more because they were US audience, even though Polymarker is not allowed to operate.
- [60:34]
A
So look, look, look, look. Here's the thing.
- [60:37]
D
That's Wall Street Journal.
- [60:41]
A
Here's the thing, though, right? Like, you know, anyone who's running a crypto project on a daily basis, you get these, like, outreaches, right? Like, if you saw my mentions and. And my Telegram, because unfortunately, I have the @kane handle that I bought on Telegram, which was somewhat of a mistake, is anyone who pays like, the 10 cents a month or whatever that it costs to have, like, Telegram Premium gets to send me DMs. So. So they they will send you messages and they're like, hey, bro, you really need to, like, boost your, you know, signal. In Latvia, I've got a bunch of Latvian influencers that can help you and, you know, whatever. Right, right. And like, these are all somewhere between scams and like, they're trying to steal your money and get you on a zoom call, right? And. And it's just like, constant, right? You know, the other one you get is like, oh, I've got an OTC buyer. What? Like, it's just like, you get these constant dms, right?
- [61:41]
D
So by the way, can I get these? And I'm not an influencer or in the trenches whatsoever, and people will still come in me and they're like, yo, we'll get you. We'll get you set up on this betting site if you tweet about it.
- [61:52]
A
Yeah. If you do 100. Yeah. I think you got more influence than you realized. Hey, I reckon. I reckon if you came out and did some betting site ads, I would. That would pop. You should think about it. So, so, so, so anyway, there. There are all these groups like, my, my. And again, I don't know anything about this. I don't know what happened here, but I know the mechanism and I know the market for. Right? And there are these influencer wranglers, right? And now these days, it's like they don't even wrangle influencers. They just make AI slop canon videos, right? And so these people have like, AI and. And normal human influencers that they coordinate, they pay them. So you go to them, you say, hey, I want to do a campaign or whatever. They. They go to you and say, hey, we'll do a campaign. We'll get a bunch of people, whatever. And you don't have much control over these things. We tried this once with Infinix and it was like a clippers thing. We were like, oh, let's see what happens. We'll try this clippers thing. I had a few people that said they'd had good experience with it. It's fucking terrible. It was so bad. I was like, no, never again. Not least of which, then there's Kaito.
- [63:12]
C
So.
- [63:13]
A
So let's not even talk about that one. But the, like, you know, my. My expectation here is that someone in Poly market was approached by someone that was like, hey, we can get you a bunch of, you know, exciting footage of people winning or whatever. And they're like, oh, cool. Yeah, like, let's get some influencers and. And do it. And then the downstream person then Created all of this fake content or whatever, you know. AI what? Like even to the point of like the, the sites being misspelled or whatever. Yeah. So to me this just really kind of strikes me as like a you know, influencer campaign gone wrong. That someone who's maybe a little too credulous has been approached by an influencer marketing thing. And the idea that like this is
- [64:13]
D
all brands today, right? Because. Oh yeah, yeah, you have ad spend, you have marketing spend. You have to put it somewhere where you're going to put on fucking Google search results like Facebook. Like no, no, you do influencers because. Well, mostly because so much of the digital IOD spend is just fraud. So if you're doing like pay per click stuff like you're. Most of that is like just completely fraudulent at this point. And so it'll look like you're getting clicks but when you actually look at the conversions and the pays per like click or pays per convert, you're not getting that. And so over the last gosh, I mean since I got out of that show, so it's been like a decade, it's. It's shifted to this influencer type marketing and then now you have, yeah, you have these clippers, you have all, you have all this. But you're seeing the same evolution happen with that industry as you saw in like pay per clicks and SEO and that industry before. Like it, it was good. You could get value out of it
- [65:18]
A
and then it just falls and then people extract. Right.
- [65:20]
D
Like they, because you, yeah. And you have the net the second the networks emerge. So there was like.
- [65:26]
A
Yeah, that's what the, the incentives here are so fucked up. So like the lesson is like genuinely for anyone who is approached by these guys, like do not even. And probably there's going to be some fucking bud campaign on me now in the next week because I'm hopefully none of these influencer wranglers see this because there'll be a bunch of influencers saying crazy shit about me. But like just do not engage with this. It is negative ev. You do not have control over the content, et cetera, et cetera. And like the. It's lowest common denominator like, like the worst flop content you're going to get. It's. They're going to sell you the dream that you're going to get all this amazing user generated content. The incentives are all messed up here and you will not get that. It's not worth it. So.
- [66:18]
D
Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, I do, I think the most. Okay, so the most disappointing thing about the Wall Street Journal article, like, honestly, if they want to give polymarket some shit for their marketing, like, it's okay. Like, there's probably stuff there. I think the most disappointing thing for me about this investigation is that they were so clearly all bent on going after polymarket when this is actually a really interesting story in a broader context because it's not just like it is. Literally every brand out there is spending hundreds of millions, billions probably at this point on these influencer campaigns. There's a whole like gray, black, white market for this. And it's not just polymarket who's like, Polymarket might be playing with some of the dirtier networks or whatever, but also they might not be. And I think that, that there's an interesting story on how, what the relationship is and how this actually works. And it applies to literally like, yeah, billions of dollars in ad spend. They're just like, instead they're like, let's just do an easy piece on how shitty polymarket is.
- [67:27]
A
And I think, yeah, but like, why do you have to ask yourself Incentives, right? Like, where did that come from? Like, what a weird crazy coincidence that, you know, one of Poly Market's competitors, like, it's just, it's, it's endless, right? The, the funniest part was though that so, so I've had, I think like three or four different journalists reach out to me about polymarket related things. Like, I can always tell that there's like a FUD campaign on, on, you know, in the works. Right? And sometimes I'm like tempted to be like, let me see if I can, you know, try and, but like you're, you're being quoted as an investor. No one's ever going to take you seriously or believe you. Like, it's just negative ev.
- [68:11]
D
Yeah.
- [68:12]
A
And, and so I usually just say like, look, no comment, right? Like I, you know, I'm an investor, I'm not gonna, not gonna talk about it. You know, there's, there's really interesting like market structural things that you could, you could talk about. And, and you know, I think that that's an interesting story about like prediction markets generally and how they work and like, whatever, but it's just like negative EV to like, you know.
- [68:38]
D
Yeah.
- [68:39]
A
Go on the record or whatever. Anyway, so then the other day I got, I got DM'd and it's like a journalist that I've spoken to quite a few times, right? And he was like, hey, I've got this thing that I'm working on and I just Responded to the post with the, like, wojack like, face. Like, the, like, the, like, nice face. And then lifting up with, like, the blood tears, right? And I was like. And I was like, where? Then I like. Because I. It's telegram, right? Like, you just do stuff. I wasn't even thinking about, like, who the counterparty to this, like, response was, right? And so I responded with the wojack meme. And then I was like, hey, just clarifying. That Wojak meme is off the record.
- [69:26]
D
Off the record.
- [69:26]
A
Because I was like, I do not want to get quoted in some news article as, like, you know, polymarket investor. Responded with, like, wojack face meme. And it's like the. The little, like, wojack emoji. I was like, I don't want any po. So I was like, that. That meme reaction is off the ra. All right.
- [69:52]
D
I can imagine it, though, dude. No favorite. My favorite thing. I've been doing this for years. Yeah. I like, insta respond to the journos in my DMs, and then immediately I'm like, oh, yeah. And I'm like, that was. I'm like, that's off the right. Or like, that's background every once in a while.
- [70:12]
A
Imagine they imagine they're like the back. We had an unattributed expert respond with a poop emoji, like, right. Awesome. All right, that's it. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember, what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. We back next week. Until then, do your own research before aping in. You guys.
- [70:37]
D
Bye.
- [70:38]
A
Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on Chain. And we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com. uneasy money. Sam. Sa.