Ghost Engineers, Measuring Productivity, & Memecoin Scams | E2056

28:39They're dumb. They don't know. Therefore, what I'm doing is not criminal. It's their incompetence. You're blaming the other person for stealing. Yeah. If my manager gives me five hours a week of work, I'm not going to go and say, give me 40 hours a week. That's not my job. My job is to do the work I'm given. And so that's a real problem in my mind. It is. But then I'll quickly talk about the second school, which is there is like, like going back to the incentive problem. If you're a software engineer at some level, you're like, say you're like an L5, L6 engineer, senior to staff engineer, you're thinking, what do I get out of this?

29:16Right? Like I can overperform. I get no reward. I get no recognition. I don't really get up the ladder. I get paid one way or the other. why am I going to go out of my way to try to bust my ass for this job where no one's giving me any any any prizes in return so there's those two larger groups um that I would point at hey everybody I want to tell you about an awesome corporate card and spend management software that's designed to help you save money basically it puts money back in your pocket it's called ramp and we use it here at launch my COO Heidi our chief operating officer loves it because ramp gives you visibility into your company's software usage.

29:56And this is going to help you trim your subscription costs. And it allows you to issue cards to every employee and then give them limits and restrictions. So we do this. Sometimes we'll have the whole team go to an offsite. We send everybody a RAMP card. Everybody has a certain amount of money they can spend. And they don't have to worry about using their personal cards or submitting an expense report or any of that drama. No. And RAMP customers save about 5 % on their expenses every year because you can do things like dial up and dial down how much money can be charged to a card. Ramp's offer is so smart, you no longer have to do manual expense reports either.

30:32And they'll even play bad cop for your company, chasing down missing documentation and requesting repayment. Ramp's so easy to use and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes. So join Ramp right now and they'll give you$250 right into your account. Ramp.com slash twist, R-A-M-P.com slash twist. It is the best way to manage expenses for your team. It's elegant, it's dead simple, and it's going to save you money. Disclaimer, cards issued by Sutton Bank. Members, FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. So the idea is if you have a job, Alex, you need to get some candy, some participation trophy, some pat on the head for doing extra work, as opposed to getting paid for hours of work.

31:17And I think there's like a very easy, simple solution here is just put people on hourly. Like you could just move these employees to an hourly consulting job. And like, what are you going to have to do? Like monitor their screen to make sure they're writing code every hour. Like, do people, Didi, know that are in some of these companies, their screens not being recorded? They don't have monitoring software and the developers. They do. Some of them do. I don't think most people look at monitoring. I think, look, it's too simplistic to suggest that, frankly, in my opinion, because engineering is a hard job, right?

31:50It's easy to say no commits in two years. You're probably not doing your job. Agreed. But the middle ground is really hard to iron out. The nuance is really key. I'll give you a quick example. At Google, you have front-end engineers who are working on UI and search. I was on search. And then you have search ranking engineers. Search ranking engineers, for whatever you think of Google search right now, they have a really tough job where maybe in three months, you commit two commits that really change the game for how search works. Whereas if you're a front-end engineer, you can get 10 commits a week and do really meaningfully nothing for the product.

32:27So there is a bit of nuance in like, how do you actually assess what is hours of work here? Because a lot of the work is thinking. Because the way I thought about this is you got hired to do 40 hours of work a week, it's in the contract and like to do five or 10 and not do the other 30 would, to me, feel wrong. Or am I just like an old school cranky old man now? No, I think you're a cranky old venture capitalist and employer, which I think is a very perfect, sorry, specific type of old man. Here's the thing. Companies will often ask you to work more than they pay you for. And you eat that overtime as paying your dues, doing your bit, helping your team.

33:09And the company will give you zero compensation for overtime if you're a salaried employee. Right? We all know this, blah, blah, blah. Didi mentioned 80 hours a week. Okay. Doing that's rational economic activity for a lot of people. But a lot of people also have jobs, apparently, where they can work less and get paid the same. It's rational, I think, as an economic actor to do that. We also give companies a lot of grace. There is a lot of wage theft in this country. We don't complain about that stuff. So to me, I think it's a little simplistic to say these people are stealing. Would I do it? No.

33:41Also, I don't know where these jobs are where you don't have to work. I've never had one. I've always ended up with more work than I can do. But you also have pride. I watch, I work with you now. Like, I watch you work, Alex. Like, you, if you didn't have enough work, you'd say to me, I think, like, hey, am I doing a good job, boss? Is there anything I can do more to help out on the margins? I watch you take on work that I didn't ask you to do. Yeah. And I would think everybody would have that normal and compass. People, people are lazy. I mean, right? like i guess that's what it comes down to dd i okay a message to everybody who's abusing the system you're gonna fuck it up for everybody yeah i'm remote stop making remote work look bad like i mean this is literally what's gonna happen and it's you know i i'm lucky because the people who work for me do meetings and i just know how many meetings they do a day or a week because we have calendars and it's like i mean you can't fake it if your job is to meet with startups three, four, five times a day, the most you could do is screw around in between the meetings, I guess.

34:45But at least I'm getting those three meetings or four meetings with founders a day out of you. I mean, this is like super disturbing. Where does this all end up, Didi? Yeah, wait, Jason, I want to clarify that question because we only have them for one more. Didi, if Google fired 80 % of its engineers tomorrow on the search team, on the search ads team, just across the company, did what you said, kind of the mux, sorry, the Musk X strategy, What would happen? I think 80 % is tough for Google specifically because they're split into so many products that don't make revenue. But I would say you could probably get away with 50 % and it would be fine.

35:20I'll tell you a quick story. When I left Google, I was talking to a Google veteran who'd been there for like 20 plus years. And I said, you were having like banter. And I was like, you know, I knew this guy at Google, you know, who hadn't done anything for the last year and a half. Isn't that crazy? and he looks at me and goes like, I've known people who haven't done anything for 10 years. Well, here's the thing about Google specifically. When Google came in, I remember talking to like Larry and Sergey in the early days and Marissa and the whole crew over there. And their philosophy was, if you're smart and you're in Silicon Valley and you want to be in tech, we're hiring you.

35:56We'll figure out later what you're going to do here because we have a money printing machine and we can afford to do so. And for every smart person we hire, that reduces the chances of a competitor. And they literally were hiring talented people in Silicon Valley at 2x the rate and giving them 10 times the perks, which everybody else followed, in order to pursue this strategy of removing talent from the playing field and then having the optionality of just having great players in case somebody gets injured or to do a skunk works project. And they literally had a 20%. They had so much talent there.

36:31They said, take 20 % time. Every Friday, work on whatever project you want, let us know. And so they created this culture. And then I think the culture now, because of the lack of loyalty from employers to employees, employees feel very valid. I can understand it. I don't feel that way myself, but I could understand somebody who's watched them, their friends get laid off and them get laid off to say, F this company, I'm going to get mine. Here's what companies need to do and employees need to do in order to end this standoff. And keep remote work alive if you care to do that. because i put monitoring software on everybody's goddamn computer and do not shop on your work computer do not work on your side hustle on your work computer and they're just going to have to spot check employees that's what's going to happen and that's what is happening and that's what needs to happen in our government too if you work for our government and doge if you're not on your computer for eight hours a day 40 hours a week if you're not in the office for eight hours a day um yeah no job for you sorry the american taxpayers we're in massive debt we have to cut that's it and you know what i'm here for it uh we're in so much in debt just overcut and then let people reapply for their jobs that's how much debt we're in as a country hey didi thanks for doing your work and taking all the arrows for man thank you on behalf of management everywhere thanks for being a little rat rat and everybody yeah i appreciate it no thanks for taking the arrows i was sorry you ruined my dismount i was gonna ask didi what percentage of menlo could be fire and have it still work as well as it does today?

38:01No, I think none of them actually. And then there's an honest answer, not both in the firm and in the portfolio. Startups just don't work that way. You know, you can't run a resource constraint. No, my point was everyone thinks that their team is the one that doesn't deserve to get cut. That's fair. No, there's nowhere to hide. I'll tell you something. When you're an under 50 person, under 30 person team. Yes. There's generally nowhere to hide. Yes. And if you create a culture where you as the leaders put in effort, that's the number one way to manage this issue. There's nobody on my team who looks at me and says, hey, Jason doesn't work hard.

38:35Jason's f***ing off, whatever. So, you know, then I have the high ground. If I'm working on the weekends and responding to founders on Saturday and Sunday and my team sees me saying over the weekend, hey, here's stories I want to do on Monday show, I set the tone. I'll tell you the problem is, when you're running one of these big companies, and you're Zuckerberg, and you're out in your place in Maui, and then you're at your place in Lake Tahoe, I can tell you, I know the rank and file people at Facebook, who when he said, get back in the office, we're going back to the office, they were like, hey boss, you're in Maui.

39:04We know you're in Maui. You're sharing photos. So people know that, right? They look at their bosses f***ing off, and then they just say, it's okay for me to do it. Also, people give over-employed a whole lot of crap, but I think David Sachs is now the leader of having more than seven jobs. True. He's got a couple of jobs now. All right. Didi, thank you so much. We appreciate you. Do more of my will to that. Love you back on the show. Have a good one. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. It's a spicy issue, is it not? No, I love it because people want to come at this with a single thing, no more remote work or do this, but it's a lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of different structures.

39:37There's no single answer to it. But now, Jason, we have today, everyone you're welcome we have an amazing second guest on the live news show we are cooking i get to say the following words on twist hayley welch the woman who went viral for the hawk tour phenomena you do launched a meme coin and guess what jason it has not turned out to be a blue chip investment what i know you're saying a viral star who launched launched a shit coin it didn't go well and it hasn't replaced reserve currency or been an alternative to buying the qqq or low uh load fidelity fund like you're so uh interested no it's it hasn't outperformed real estate in a major booming city oh wow this is crazy it might have if you flip it upside down look at the chart backwards but to help us understand this we have from youtube it is coffee zilla himself hey how you doing my guy i love coffee zilla coffee zilla is my roman empire i love coffee zilla so much if you don't know who coffee zilla is he has a youtube channel yes where he looks for scams and i was just talking about this michael saylor stuff i'm not saying that's a scam but you know my ocd alex when i get my hooks in something it doesn't make sense to me my investigative journalist comes out well coffeezilla is a detective right and he has the same dna as i do when it comes to this stuff he sniffs something he figures out maybe something's going on that's not right and then he gets the receipts and then he makes his you know little coffeezilla videos on them and they go super viral and millions of views he is the backstop against fraud ladies and gentlemen the one the only coffeezilla how's that for way too nice way too nice.

41:24I'm the backstop against the Hawk Tua meme coin. Nobody was going to stop it except for, you know, if I, no, I think this thing was a pretty transparent con from the get-go. You know, 3 % of the tokens got allocated to the public. 17 % unlocked day one. Insiders sold for millions of dollars and I just want to know, where did that money go? Somebody had to make that money, right? It wasn't retail that made that money. It was a lot of This is the problem, Jason, with a lot of this stuff is there's very little understanding about how the tokenomics can affect, they can kind of rig a launch to favor insiders as opposed to regular people who are jumping in.

42:09The most unfortunate thing about this, and the reason I kind of beat my drum on it, because there are influencer drops seemingly every day now, especially as the bull markets kind of come back. The real problem is they kind of targeted what they called normies in their debt, right? And one of the guys, Doc Hollywood, who I think is the son-in-law of Howie Mandel or something, he was saying in our Twitter spaces that, oh, our audience, and I don't want to misquote him, but you can go find it in the space. It was something to the effect of our audience is like, they don't even know what market caps are.

42:41They don't even know what the price is. And actually, that actually matters a lot, right? You know the difference between a sophisticated investor and someone who's just jumping in for the first time. And there's a different expectation of the protection we give to those people. Okay. So let's step back here for a second, Alex. There is a concept of a token in the world. You buy a token and it's supposed to have some value. Sometimes those are utility-based tokens and they help power something. Like there's Filecoin that theoretically powers the utility of a cloud-based storage system that would compete against S3, you know, Amazon Web Services story.

43:18And so, and then there are people buying what's called the meme coin, which means they're just speculating or maybe even trying to play the game of pumping and dumping coins. So now this has become like a gambling game of like poker or risk or guts. So what were they stating was the purpose of this coin coffee Zilla? Was there ever a stated purpose to the coin? Like it's going to do X in the world. I think in the call, I think he said like the great thing about meme coins is there are no promises, but we're going to build like a great community around this or something like that. That was Doc Hollywood, who seems to be more of the crypto connector between Haley Welch.

43:59I don't know how much the hawk to a girl has like knows about crypto. and I guess he was the connect of a few months ago. He posted that he's giving a mean coin class or whatever. So you have all these guys who they see these influencers with huge audiences and they tell them like, hey, we're going to monetize your fandom. Even though they said they're not going to, you know, we're not making any promises. Really, it's like, I think the pitch is we're going to build a community around this. Haley wants to like benefit the community. This is for her fans. I know they wanted to give away some free tokens to people who have interacted with her in the past.

44:34The problem is when you sell to insiders and those people are looking for a return on their investment, when this coin launches with all that hype and this girl, unfortunately, is using her influence to be the front man, right? The brand. She's the face of the brand. Yeah. It's a huge cautionary tale because she made$125 ,000, which is a lot of money. I think she has some backend when it unlocks and stuff like that. And maybe 50 % of net proceeds if you believe her entertainment lawyer. But at the end of the day, the person taking going to get torched in this whole thing is going to be her and the guys who run this stuff.

45:11They're going to go to the next guy and they're going to make the next guy, the next influencer do it. And so, you know, as much as I like to get the word out, I don't like when people pump this stuff. I do also like to give a cautionary tale to influencers. You have to know what you're getting into. It's a totally different game to shill a VPN. Fine. God bless you. You know, whatever you want to use a vpn whatever you want to do yeah you use a vpn but if you want to sell people a financial instrument especially one that is essentially gambling would people lose their money they're gonna come for the head of the person who sold it to them understandably so i think that's incredibly valid but jason's question earlier was made in good faith about what was the token for but i think the problem is that by definition a meme coin is or a shitcoin can't have value.

46:01Like, who thought that Hawk Tua coin was going to be worth anything apart from a vehicle for near-term speculation? Right? I mean, what is it going to do? What is community? That is the most weaselly word in crypto because people always talk about it, but mostly it just means speculative pump and dumps. Yeah, it means I don't want to actually give you a real thing. And especially when they say, oh, we want to decentralize our community. That's just the word for we want you to provide all the value. We want you to generate all the value for our community. We don't actually want to have to do anything.

46:33We want to decentralize our responsibility here. That's a great model, though. Yeah, it's a great model. Actually, you see a lot of people when they made promises and they want to abdicate the responsibility. They say, we want to decentralize the promise of this community. And that's just code for we're never going to work on this again. We're going to decentralize it. I mean, fan clubs have existed. If you wanted to start a fan club, you could power up a newsletter, charge a hundred bucks a year for it, and people could be part of the newsletter. Plenty of people do that. And sometimes the newsletter's value is a community where people chat.

47:10Sometimes it's actual content and research done in the newsletter, or it's somebody's opinion or art. You could do all. Patreon exists. So the way I know that this is a scam when I see these things is there are vehicles. coffeezilla i don't know if you do subscriptions on your youtube channel or you take donations but people can do that on youtube like if people are watching live right now you could give me a hundred dollars if you wanted to and i guess youtube takes some percentage of it whatever it is there are tipping built into these systems and streaming platforms there's patreon there's sub stack you could use beehive as an excellent uh way to do this and it looks like you have one here.

47:48So this is like legit real stuff in the world. And so why do the coin? If you're doing the coin, you know, it's a red flag, red flag, red flag. Yeah, 100%. I mean, the other problem is, is that with all those other things you mentioned, there isn't this element of like, hey, maybe we're going to make you rich in this process. Maybe there's like this big upside for you because that is sometimes how they pitch it. Oh, this is just a fan community, but we're going going to market it a bunch. What does market my coin a bunch mean? That's code for maybe a bunch of people are going to go up. It's going to go up.

48:22So that is the problem in a lot of this. Like you said, there are traditional ways to do this stuff. It is weird. We've had this blend between finance and mainstream culture, and the lines have been really blurred as far as what is, And we haven't had a lot of good regulatory direction as far as what is the security? What are the rules of the road? A lot of times the rules of the road are either not enforced or they're not there at all. And it leads people to like be in this weird gray zone or they'll just go, they'll do it. This team did. They'll go offshore. These guys said, hey, we wanted to do everything right.

49:04So we went to the Cayman Islands. instead of a foundation when you go to panama or the grand caymans to do business what could go wrong no red flags there that's the strange thing i was trying to figure out where is this money going so i said you know where where is this you guys made like over a million dollars in fees you guys are making all this in the pre-sale where's it go oh it all goes to the foundation well who benefits from the foundation does hayley welch own it no no she doesn't own it okay do you own it who's on the board of the foundation here's a good question who's the beneficial owner of the foundation also a good question so it's like the that's the problem they hide behind this kind of stuff and then then he's like you know we have 18 employees working on the hawk to a meme coin okay yeah who are they who are they also do we need 18 people working on the hawk to a meme i have 21 people working here at this firm you go on linkedin you search for launch and this we can search you find the employees you could actually coffee zillow could contact like them and say, what do you do for Jason?

49:58Maybe some of them would talk to you. It is so obviously that there are scams going on here. But part of your cautionary tale is you have confronted these. You've gotten into them early. You've investigated them. You know how to do the on-chain research. And so for other influencers who are thinking this is a way to make a quick buck, maybe you could just chronicle briefly a couple of people who've gotten pinched, have gotten fines, whether it's Fyre Festival, whether it's Jake Paul's coin, or was it Logan impulse coin i can't remember who you got into um a back and forth with that i'm in a defamation lawsuit about that right now so i can't speak about that one okay i can't speak about we covered safe moon um safe moon was a coin which promised you know uh to automagically lock up the tokens and you'd have this unruggable lp and that turned out to not be true john caroni and two of his founders have been indicted there are people in jail for that coin i mean there are real consequences that come from this stuff.

50:54There's a guy, Jay Mazzini, who said he was going to buy Bitcoin from you at elevated prices that we covered extensively. He's now in jail. So there are real consequences to this stuff. It does take a while. And the problem is it does feel a little bit like the lottery, whether you get pinched or not. Like it feels like, but you do need to, so this is my one problem with regulators is there's a bit, like the cases take too long, you know, and I know these guys are overworked or whatever, but just objectively, the cases take too long. And the enforcement is just sporadic. It's more like getting a speeding ticket.

51:29You can see a lot of people speed. Not everyone gets caught. Eventually, some people do. But instead of facing a small fine, you may, you know, go to jail for this. So and a lot of times, you know, to be honest, Jason, these people, they get promised a lot. But a lot of the people who make the money are the like your crypto dev. You're the guys who've been in it and spun up like eight different coins. Yes. A lot of times they know the right way to do it. Like if what Haley's entertainment lawyer said is true and she's locked up for a year. Well, all the pre-sale guys already have sold. Yes, they've cleared it.

52:04It's kind of, you know, she's a mark for them. Theoretically here. I don't know the details, but I think she's the mark. If my Brooklyn in me guesses, she's the mark. I've been asking for this agreement, though, and they won't give me the agreement. So I'm not going to say one way or the other definitively until I see that contract. Yes. But if it's true that she, you know, she made$125 ,000, I think she should either donate that she should completely divest from that. That could be a speaking fee for her personality appearance fee, right? And celebrities get those all the time. You know, this is where Gary Gensler leaving the administration and they're going to have a new person who's, I think, committed to making a clear set of new rules for crypto.

52:48And that's really what needs to happen here. As somebody who's pro-technology, and I'm actually pro-crypto legally, crypto does behave slightly differently. And what would be really interesting here is to give a path to people to register these. And it would be very simple. You register it. If your project is under a certain dollar amount, you get like an experimental license. You register and you have to have KYC, you know, know your customer and maybe a framework for how much each American is allowed to invest in these. So each American is allowed to invest up to 1 % of their yearly salary or whatever was on their tax return.

53:22If you had some common sense there, you could sandbox some of this innovation, allow people to do it and lower the chances of people getting hurt. Or as I've said over and over again, and I've been saying to the new people in the new administration, just have a test for sophistication. And if people took a test, Coffezilla, I wonder if this would make you feel better about it. You had to take a two or three hour test. You had to understand what a market cap is. You have to understand what a safe note is. or a safe note for tokens. It's called a SAFT, I believe. You had to know what diversification in your portfolio is.

53:51In other words, took a four or five hour course, you answered a 50 to 100 person, 100 questions on how to make investments. You became sophisticated as an investor, like having a driver's license. Would you be okay with something like that, that made it so you were at least educated? So if you did participate in some lunacy like this, my belief, this is lunacy, to sell a token that has no value, you would feel safer about it? I wonder what you think. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, like, I think the heart of what you're getting at is if you know what you're getting yourself into, you should be able to, if you want to gamble and you know the risks, it's fine.

54:28And if you ultimately lose money, we feel very differently about that. Yes. Then right now, anyone can just buy a little bit of Salada on Coinbase, send it to their phantom wallet, and they're investing in Hawk to a coin five seconds later. And they aren't, you know, maybe they've just been marketed to on Twitter. They have like no idea what's going on or, you know, the insiders and all that kind of stuff. So I do think there should be some framework. I don't know the exact. I haven't thought through. I'm more on the side of investigating when it goes wrong. I'm not like I've actually had there was like this this like House of Representatives, like a team that reached out to me.

55:03Like we're thinking about some like rules of the road. What do you think? And I go, guys, we're in the wrong path. If you're asking a YouTuber, like I only go when things go wrong. I hope you guys are the experts on how to make things go more right. But right now, I think the heart of what you're getting at is there is no clear path and rules of the road for how this stuff works. And I think that's where everyone's getting into trouble because you do have marketers, not only to the retail investors, you've marketed marketers to these influencers. I just had a guy, not even in crypto, not even in finance, just a regular YouTuber, he comes to me, hey, I was offered like$100 ,000 to promote this dog coin.

55:43Should I do it? And he has no idea what even he's promoting. He's just being offered$100 ,000 when I can guarantee you most of his deals are probably in the range of$20 ,000. So that 5X, all of a sudden he's thinking, well, this could be a big upside for my career, big upside for whatever. So I think there's marketing on both sides. That's a problem. There's no clear rules of the road. People don't know when they're breaking the law and not to give them any cover or whatever. I'm just saying, I think there's accountability on all sides here. I think there needs to be clear rules of the road. Personally, I'm a little bit like, do we need meme coins?

56:15Do we need, is it important to our economy that we are investing in the hat coins? Okay. No, I actually think it's better if we lift up things with value and we're not just always promoting an economy of speculative assets. I think that's actually bad for most people's financial literacy. So I take it you will not be buying dog with hat or whatever else is popping today. Here's Stephen, here's the thing that I'm stuck on. One of the best parts of your video on this and also a lot of the reporting that I read about HawkCoin is that people can go to the blockchain and see what's going on and call BS on them not selling and the pre-sale and so forth.

56:56The information is there. So at once, it seems that the blockchain and crypto are a great place to do fraud or scams. And at the same time that you leave such a paper trail behind you, people can kind of like vet it more so than they can other things in the private market so is is it actually a bad place to do scams and fraud because it seems that you get caught if you do this like there's no way to like obfuscate your actions absolutely the crypto is such an interesting thing because it's all pseudo anonymous so on the one hand it's in some ways easier and in some ways more traceable i don't know exactly how to explain that to most people i think because you're you You just did.

57:34Pseudonymity means like, you know, there's an account or a wallet because it has permanence and there's provenance to it and there's tracked on this blockchain. So you know that wallet, but you don't know exactly whose wallet it is. And so then it becomes a little bit of investigation. Whose wallet is that? Did they run it through a Tumblr and they have a hundred other wallets? So you can obscurify it, but there is a record. So, you know, it's fascinating. I think in many ways, what I will say for influencers, you have to be thoughtful about where money comes from. And when you become micro famous to actually legitimately famous and everything in between, you will get offers.

58:10I get speaking gigs all the time. I would say about a third of the speaking gigs I get offered are for scams or things that I consider uncouth, like predatory. Let me put it in the predatory. And what people do is they will have a webinar or a seminar and they'll pay somebody like me or like the guys from Shark Tank do these all the time. you get paid 50 grand 100 grand 150 grand you show up for conference they talk to you about angel investing hey you invested in uber you invested in com robin hood you're a legit angel investor let's have a conversation i go to that i get paid 75 grand i spare the bag 100 grand who wouldn't do that and it's a it's a fine trade of services people are selling tickets to conferences or corporations want a high profile speaker they'll pay an author of a book totally fine there's other group comes in and i then see what they're doing they take pictures of themselves with celebrities, with business celebrities, then they go and say, hey, don't you want to be part of this?

59:04And then some mom or some dad from San Diego, you know, or from middle America thinks they want to be like me or another influencer or the Shark Tank guys, and they want to be great at angel vested and they pay for a$5 ,000 course. And then they pay for a$25 ,000 mastermind group. And then I hear about the back channel. You know how easy it is to figure these out? When people send me the speaking gig, I tape the name of the person scam. I type the name of the person complaint. And boom, there's a gazillion complaints. They're all there. Just like these dopey guys who took money from the Russians.

59:37They were like, I'm getting$100 ,000 per podcast episode. You have to look at, especially when it's a lot of money, the more money, the more you have to ask the question of where, like you said, where is it coming from? Ultimately, they're not just buying like a little bit of time with you. They're buying your credibility. They're buying your association. And that's what you have to watch out for. What I always tell people, because I have friends in the YouTuber space or associates who they enjoy the jokes of it. They enjoy the silliness of it. And all I say is there's nothing wrong if you want to go trade on your own private account, whatever.

1:00:12I don't care. You can be as degenerate as you want. Thank you. Just don't promote it as this sound. Nobody cares if you smoke cigarettes, but the second you start promoting it, everyone has a question, right? So it's like, nobody cares if you want to be stupid with your money. If you want to gamble with your money, I don't care. I just like do whatever you want. God bless. But the second you put your stamp of a... Right. But it's a whole different thing if you're going on there and going, hey, this different thing or whatever, this offshore shady gambling company. And so that's where the problem is, is that people need to understand the credibility is huge and that's why they're paying you it's the money doesn't come from nowhere they know that with everybody they there's like a calculation of they have this many influencers this some of them i've even heard of it like this many this is the size of their wallet we estimate that the size of jason's fans wallets are like you know a hundred dollars i'm not never selling out my fans everything i do is for free for the fans or for founders i just always have that as a rule i don't ever like charge people for stuff it's just it's like even cameos i do them for free People will be like, oh, can you say hi to my grandma?

1:01:17She's a big fan. I just do it on my phone. I send it to them. I'm like, oh, can I pay? I'm like, give a donation to charity. It's fine. And you can tweet that I did it for you and that you did. Give a donation to charity and then encourage other people to do it. Two things. Number one, everybody listening, go follow CoffeeZilla's YouTube channel. It's amazing. It's important that people expose these things. And I really appreciate the work you do. Please don't ever do anything yourself because I don't want to have egg on my face that you ran some scam, okay? Because you are the good guys. I need you to be pure.

1:01:45number two i have an assignment for you if you're willing to take a coffee zilla there is um this influencer who is on tiktok called joshua block i i emailed you a link about it he just released a block coin this kid has he's on the spectrum or something according to the reports and he's being i believe taken advantage of around by sycophants around him who got him to launch a mean coin this block coin anyway this guy joshua block i feel like he's being abused he's drinking alcohol to all hours of the night, like in a really degenerate way. He's only a cup 23 years old or whatever, but he started as like a young kid on TikTok.

1:02:19He's got a big following. Please take a look at, into this case of the block coin and what he's doing. Cause I think he also is getting pulled into this, but I believe he's a victim because he might not know what's going on here. And it might be having, you know, even more, I don't know if you've heard of this case or looked into it yet yeah well there's another guy behind it that was uh well i'm just watching it i watch a lot of stuff and if it right then rises to the you know level of me needing to make a video about it i will but i've watched it and there's a guy who is a former uh pimp of women who now his name is jason eitzler i believe or mr based is what he goes by but he seems to be like you know kind of for lack of a better word sort of pimping out joshua block to do he tells him to like to do all these different things i think he was one of the guys behind this coin he's the one promoting this doing live so it's a very sad situation that you bring up i'm definitely monitoring as i'm monitoring a lot of these coins listen when the bull run happens my life gets a lot busier um yeah because we'll run time it's back all right everybody follow coffeezilla thanks so much for coming i salute you sir great show great show yeah oh yeah great show everything he does is magic but i i knew about coffeezilla because he did a a series of videos on the rabbit the ai device that everyone was talking about earlier this year and i thought his his reporting was fantastic and so when we started to talk to him to come on the show today i was like yes but we had the rabbit on here i like the founder of the rabbit he seemed like he was a good guy.

1:03:53I don't know the background here, but I need to look into that. And we need to, I think, they just emailed us and said, hey, can you come on again and show you the progress of the product? So we're going to have him on again, that founder, I hope. Well, I guess we should get the David Sachs thing out of the way. I'm obviously great friends with David Sachs. We do the All-In Podcast together. We've been friends for 20 years. I'll just say off the top, I don't know any of the details of this. It was breaking news. I found out about it when everybody else did, when President Trump or president-elect Donald Trump, you know, gave his tweet about David now becoming the czar for AI and for crypto.

1:04:28I have to say, David's one of the smartest, hardest working, honest, ethical people I've ever met. I think he'll do an amazing job here. Don't agree with him on a lot of opinions. We fight about it, battle about it every week when we have a difference of opinion. but he is just it makes me feel great to have him uh advising the president on these two issues specifically because as we just discussed crypto has a lot of bad stuff going on and a lot of potential and this is a really hard one to balance and then ai as well needs to be a free market in my opinion and we don't want to have over regulated so and the memes are coming in hot and heavy so my first thought about this one i thought your um your tweet here's funny i'm bringing this up not because it's humorous but because just to remind everybody jason has said emphatically on the show he's not going to go work for the government so i'm not going to worry about that yes here's here's a very kind of ticky tacky question why is it ai and crypto in one job that strikes me as a very yeah well one that's a big portfolio for one person given how much is going on.

1:05:32And also, I wonder what he's going to do because there are people in government who work on areas of policy and Trump has nominated the new head of the SEC is going to be pro-crypto. How much does he want David telling him what to do or how much influence will David have? Yeah. I mean, these are great questions. I will say David has a lot of experience in both of these. Obviously, PayPal was the first digital money for consumers, the one that hit scale, I think, before anything. So a lot of experience there. Crypto is kind of like the extension of PayPal and digital cash. So he's more than qualified there.

1:06:10And then as an investor in Kraft, he's done a ton of AI investing and is involved in that. So he's smart. And having a smart person as an advisor, and this seems to be an advisory role, I actually don't know the details of it. So we'll find out in the coming weeks. Which is why I'm asking. But here's the thing, Jason. So I saw this and I'm not going to lie. I was not shocked. I was not like, oh my God, what an enormous surprise. I was going to go right here, Jason, because Sam Mullen of OpenAI after David Sachs got the Tsar job. By the way, Tsar is Russian for Caesar, I believe. Essentially it means a person who's handed a portfolio of things to chief.

1:06:44Yeah. The person in charge of it. There is a lot of divisions inside of Silicon Valley that are not, I think super visible outside of it. For example, there was a brouhaha earlier this year between the folks who believe in Parker Conrad more than David Sachs and the folks who believe in David Sachs more than Parker Conrad. And I think that that's very occluded outside of those relationships and rooms. And the tweet that I just pulled up for us, or I'm sorry, the post on X, was Sam Aldman congratulating David Sachs and then several people who are high-profile X users laughing at it. Yeah, you long put a laughing emoji.

1:07:19I saw that on CNBC this morning. I mean, up to interpretation. I guess up to interpretation. I love that CNBC has to look at Elon Musk emoji tweets. That's the world right. But clearly, Sam Altman is trying to engender some good vibes with David Sachs. Yeah. And they're on very different sides of this issue. I mean, listen, people compete. Some people want more regulation. Sam has been super pro-regulation. I mean, if you're in the lead, you pro-regulation. If you're behind, you maybe want less regulation. Historically, incumbents, it's called regulatory capture. You have Bill Gurley talking about all the time.

1:07:57And Bill Gurley has been very public about this in regard to AI. Like all these people who have a year or two year lead want regulatory capture and that's wrong, right? And this has been the Vinod perspective to some degree, Vinod Khosla. He's been arguing for a more closed approach, keep it secure, keep it out of China's hands. What is he an investor in? Which company? I think he's an investor in open AI. if i remember what it serves so once again one of the two well when you're in the lead you're closed and you want regulation when you're not boom or people who have an investment talk their book and that's very sure yeah so uh you know what would be great is if everyone who's going to go work for doge or anything else in the government um put all their assets and interests into a separate trust and left it alone for four years i think that would be lovely because otherwise i think we're gonna have to play you know who had who was in which spv that had capital and which company that didn't influence it's gonna get messy like uh there will be all kind i would think that smart people like really smart people will be hyper aware of these issues and i'll just leave it at that no i know what you're saying i i hope that your optimism and my my slightly tempered optimism are both exceeded by performance because if you're working with the public purse.

1:09:14Yeah. There are different rules. And I think the people who are involved want to see less of the public funding the purse. I think they want the purse smaller. They want the regulations less. So if you just think about what's in the best interest of a free market, the people who are in my circles and who are now surrounding Donald Trump, the group we're talking about here, they're all free market, they're all less regulation, and they're all for smaller government. So if you're aligned with that and to have less regulation and more competition and having consumers win, that's the vibe that you're seeing right now.

1:09:52And trust me, the second anybody is benefiting in some personal way, it is going to be the height of the focus of the media, of the public, of the competitors, of the adversaries. So I think it's kind of baked into the system that if anybody is trying to do something nefarious, it would come up real quick. It would be highlighted very fast. Well, I hope that the people of free market power who have congregated in Texas have the ability to make weed legal in Texas. So that way all bother to show up. It's been an amazing episode. Do we want to close with a Twist 500? Let's do one quick one and we'll save the other ones for Monday.

1:10:28So everyone might recall that we had a founder on from a company called Dune. And I am adding Dune to Ye Olde Twist 500 because they are an excellent, excellent company. This is Dune. It is a blockchain data search company, two types of monetization, SaaS and usage-based. Raised$180 million. USV and CO2 are in there. But a small company, as we know from the show, Jason, and one that I think is well-positioned to capture upside from the current moment in the bull market that I've talked about with CoffeeZilla. And so I'm incredibly excited about this company. I love their data. I could not live without it.

1:11:01So I think they are going to be a big success. Okay. So it's Dune, and it's a blockchain data analysis platform that allows users to query and visualize public blockchain data. As we talked about, you were looking at the Haktua data. For that coin, you might be able to find patterns, et cetera. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And Union Square Ventures, my good friend, Fred Wilson, the founder of it, is an investor in this. And when he invests in something, it tends to be a really legit, great company that has a chance to be very successful. If you look at the returns that Union Square Ventures have, it's extraordinary.

1:11:34So when we do these and we add somebody to us 500, really looking at who the investors are is a critical part because they tend to follow a certain pattern. When companies become successful, a firm like Union Square Ventures might have been in early or might be coming in and competing for that Series A and competing successfully because they did Twitter and other great companies. So shout out to that team over there. Yes. Shout out to them. Also, we need to have Fred Wilson on the show because I've never met him. And that would be a great excuse for me to get him with annoying questions. Anyways, this has been yet another busy, busy week here at Twist.

1:12:10We are back next week with even more. We have interviews scheduled, Jason. We have news to get through. Charts, earnings, IPOs, the whole thing. I think we're four days a week next week, too. And I'm hoping that we get our weekly AI with Sonny back on track on Tuesday. So I'm hoping for that. Yes, because then I can sleep on Tuesday and it's going to be lovely. There you go. So we're Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday next week, right around 12 Texas time, 1 p.m. East Coast time. I'm on the West Coast now, so we started an hour later. So we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.