Clarity Window Closing, Robinhood Eating Ethereum Value & Coinbase's Base Reset

All right, happy Friday. What’s up, folks? Welcome back. Welcome back. Rob, Santi. Yeah, now we’ve got the gang.

Rob, looking dapper today.

Rob looks like he’s on Broadway.

I literally asked before you came on, Santi. I was like, “Is there too much light in this room?” And they’re like, “No, you look great.” But I—

You look great, Rob. You look great.

My forehead is just shining right now.

You look great. Someone told me that the lighting on me was great last week.

By that, you mean your own alt on the Empire Telegram?

Oh my God. I’m still crying from that Rob comment before we started recording. How are you doing, Rob? You’re in D.C. What’s happening in D.C.?

Um—

GENIUS one-year anniversary. Did you go to the Circle event last night?

I didn’t end up going. I was going to go, but I ended up having to do a dinner with some people who I’ve actually been working directly with on CLARITY. That was a really good dinner.

Listen, I think we’re in crunch time right now. There are a lot of people who have been here for that Circle event last night. A lot of people were here to try to figure out ways they can be helpful and continue to work on this bill. I think there are a number of senators and senators’ teams that are working with or meeting with the administration today, actually, to try to hammer out some ethics language. We’re in crunch time.

1. Clarity Act’s Closing Window

More information, please. How’s CLARITY looking? I mean, let’s pull up the—

I think Polymarket’s at 35% today, so it came down. I would say the general vibes are—

You’re going to let me share a Kalshi chart on the screen?

I don’t know why you’re doing that. This is not allowed. Yeah, 36%. There we go.

Listen, I would say the general vibes are not great. I would expect that most people would say—and I’ll have more information today, too, as I have a lot of meetings—but most people would say that we’re unlikely to get CLARITY. So, under 50% is priced appropriately.

2. Content Of The Week

I’ll actually share Kalshi here because they do have it by month. August 1st is at 5%: What is the probability that crypto market structure will become law by August 1st? Five percent. September 1st, 15%. October 1st, 25%. By the end of the year, 36%. So, before January 1st, and then sometime in 2027, it’s 62%. So, whether that happens late this month or the first week of August, whether or not we can get to 60 is another story. A lot of that comes down to how those conversations go with the administration and with a number of different teams that are working on this bill. What’s the conversation like, Rob, in terms of whether this will ever happen? Or is it a 2027 thing? Is it more of a timeline thing, or are we hung up on issues?

We’re hung up—

Those aren’t mutually exclusive, but—

Yeah, we’re hung up on issues. And that seems pretty mispriced to me, to be honest, because I don’t know a single person who thinks that we’re going to get CLARITY in a new Congress. It depends a little bit on what happens.

I thought that, too. Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Yeah. It depends, obviously, on what happens in the election, but I don’t know what Polymarket is today. The vast majority of people believe that the Democrats are going to take the House. There’s a perspective that most likely Republicans keep the Senate, but it’s not a done deal. It’s probably something like 55% to 58% Republican Senate.

If one of those chambers flips over to the Democratic side, I don’t think anybody believes that we’re likely to get anywhere near a version of CLARITY that works for both industry and both sides of the aisle in a new Congress. Which means that it has to happen before the end of the year. And I think most people believe there’s not going to be an appetite for it during a lame duck, meaning that it has to happen before November.

Yeah. You know, we get this August recess. On August 7th, everyone goes out for recess, and when we get into October, a lot of people are campaigning.

I just assumed the August 7th—I mean, we talked on this podcast, I think, in January, February, and March about CLARITY. I was saying, “Look, it absolutely has to get done before August 7th,” the last day before the Senate’s summer recess. That is the deadline. Once people reconvene, you’ve got the midterms. It just feels very unlikely that that happens.

I think if we get a floor debate and a vote—or it doesn’t even have to be a full vote, but a lot of debate—and we get an ag and banking text that comes together and there are a lot of people behind it, especially if you have full Republican support behind it, then it’s just like, okay, how do we get those last few? How do we get to 60 with Democratic support?

We had a number of Democrats vote in the Banking Committee. Two or three did to bring that out of committee, and we expect that there will be a few others who are on the side of this bill. So, how do we get those last few people?

If we get the real debate by the 7th, I think it’s possible it still happens in September. But if we don’t make any progress there, specifically on ethics, I think we’re in a really, really tough spot. We’ve had a couple of law-enforcement agencies come out in favor of this now, too, which was the other sticking point. We’ll see, but I think we need to see a lot of movement over the next few weeks.

And it’s 7 Democrats, but really, I think Rand Paul and Josh Hawley are both likely no. So, there are really 9 Democrats that we need to cross over, it sounds like.

Yeah, and there’s a question around the 2 Republicans, too, on whether or not we can get them on board. So, there’s different math here.

The politics, as one person said to me yesterday—and this is a person who’s worked on the Hill for a long time—he said, “Politics is wild.” He said it in a way that was like, “This specific thing has been more wild than most things.”

Because of the amount of money going into this, or because of the—

I think just the debate and how tough the issues are, and trying to bring so many different constituencies around the table to get to some sort of agreement.

Even on the money side, I don’t actually think there’s been that much money spent yet. That’s one of the factors that’s interesting here: Fairshake has held a lot of its money back. Fairshake, for people who don’t know, is the big crypto PAC that does a lot of the giving to the different campaigns. They’ve held a lot of their money back, but if they’re going to be a big part of the November elections, that has to start to be allocated during this August recess. So, you kind of have to start making those decisions now.

And you think it’s going to pass? Are you buying or selling Polymarket right now?

I think 35% is roughly appropriately valued.

And you think it passes? I don’t—

3. Trump’s Crypto Ethics Roadblock

I think—listen, I hope it passes. I don’t know how to price the likelihood of getting to an agreement on ethics. I think the Senate is probably more steadfast in the way they think about ethics than the administration will be, or than we need the administration to be. It probably needs to give more than they’ve signaled so far. So, I don’t know how to price whether or not they will.

What exactly is ethics, for someone who’s listening? What is being discussed? What is the key issue there?

The key issue is essentially how President Trump and his family can continue to make money from the crypto industry. It’s their business interests, the ownership they have in different types of businesses—Bitcoin miners, World Liberty Financial, very specifically the TRUMP token—and what has happened in terms of their ability to make money on some of those LP pools.

There’s this headline that came out, and I forget what the exact number was, but it said the Trump family had made over $1 billion in crypto-related business over the last year. That has gotten certain members of Congress very focused on this: We’re willing to, and we want to, regulate this industry because we believe in the future of tokenization and stablecoins, and that this has a right to exist, and that on-chain finance has reasons that it is better from a risk perspective, from a counterparty perspective, and better for the consumer.

But we need to believe that this bill is not just a giveaway toward a group of people who are potentially profiting from it as well.

And so we need them to recuse themselves from some of their business interests going forward. The debate seems to be very focused right now on what that actually means in terms of continued ownership in things like World Liberty.

I see. I remember at your event in Tokyo—I won't go into specifics—but this was a debate that was had, right? Has the Trump administration hurt the industry, or been positive or negative for it? I guess it's showing up right now.

Yeah, it's interesting because I was having this discussion with somebody yesterday. We were talking a little bit about what happened in the 2024 election and how Bitcoin went from whatever it was, like 66 or 68 that day, to over 80 the day the election happened. Then we went over 100 into the new year.

Everything in the world kind of really changed the day that the Trump token launched. We were theorizing about how different the industry might be right now had everything happened without that token and maybe World Liberty, and whether it would have changed a lot of the way the CLARITY Act conversations have gone. I think there's a general perspective, even though a lot of people wouldn't say this publicly, that we would be much further along in terms of some of these things, like CLARITY.

Now, that said, to your point, we had a couple of people debate at our conference whether, net good or net bad, how good the administration has been for the space. Under the prior regulatory regime and the prior administration, we probably wouldn't even have been having this conversation. We wouldn't be this far along, and we wouldn't have gotten the GENIUS Act. Clearly, we're at the precipice of something that could not have existed in a Gary Gensler era.

Yeah. If it doesn't pass, I go back to the episode we recorded with Rebecca—I think Jake might have been there, too—and she was like, “Look, if it doesn't pass now, it's really detrimental. It just never gets passed.”

I think she had an informed view on the next presidential term and what color that would probably be—a blue term. Is that the sentiment in D.C. right now? Is this the only shot we have as an industry? Compromise is obviously important, and another good saying in politics is that a bill dies 3 times before it gets passed. What's the sentiment out there? What's the read from lobbyists, and what are they telling you?

The sentiment is definitely not, “If it doesn't pass now, it never passes.” But the sentiment is definitely, “If it doesn't pass now, it probably doesn't pass in the next 2 years.” Maybe it comes back up again, and the next Congress brings it up sometime later, but it's not going to be top of mind by February.

I think AI policy is by far and away going to dominate Congress next year in this new Congress, and there's going to be a lot more fighting over AI policy, especially in a divided Congress. I think this is the last bullet we have for a while, but I don't think it's done, no matter what happens in 2028.

I also don't think it's an end-all, be-all. It's not the worst thing in the world for crypto if we don't get CLARITY right now. We still have Chairman Atkins, who's going to push forward with regulating crypto. If we get CLARITY, regulating crypto just gets folded in. If we don't—if CLARITY fails—regulating crypto is just going to come out as a standalone SEC rule for token issuances, right? And a token safe harbor.

I think there's still some good. You have Scott Bessent. I don't know if you guys read or watched his speech. You've got the Treasury Secretary literally saying that the entire world is going to move on-chain and tokenization is going to take over. Like—

Fair enough. Then let's not forget Chair Gensler, who has been—well, who has been, you know, encouraged.

Amazing. He's been fantastic.

4. What Clarity Means For Markets

Should we talk markets on that? If the view is that CLARITY doesn't pass as it is now—say, 33% it doesn't pass in 2 weeks or a month—then let's just assume it doesn't get passed, and that's the view here. Let's entertain that scenario and roll it forward. What does that mean for markets? What does that mean for institutional interest in beta and crypto? How do you re-underwrite your portfolio?

Yeah, I mentioned your guys' perspectives as well. I do think the market feels a little bit on edge to me right now. It feels like it could tip one way or the other. If we got an unexpected CLARITY passage in the next 3 weeks, the market would rip.

On the other side, I think Bitcoin and ETH, et cetera, are probably somewhat appropriately priced at this 33%. These are already commodities anyway, so it matters less for them than it does for the application side of the house. I'm not sure if markets will change that much to the downside because we've had a pretty bad market generally, and sentiment is pretty bad right now anyway. I'm not a trader, so not investment advice, et cetera.

In terms of institutional adoption, I do think it's a bit of a struggle. We hear from a lot of companies that they're heavily leaning into proof-of-concepts and infrastructure right now, but they feel that, to really take that next step, they need something like the CLARITY Act.

Now, to Yano's point, we're going to get a lot of frameworks and a lot of rulings out of the regulatory bodies regardless. They'll just say, “Okay, well, we're going to take this and run with it.” For the more nimble organizations, they're still going to invest heavily because they know they've got a couple of years at a minimum to really create a business around this. Hopefully, it gets far enough along that it doesn't really matter what happens in 2028.

For some of the older, bigger, slower-moving organizations, they're probably just going to continue to say, “Wait and see.” I think it continues to be a little bit of what we've seen with GENIUS, where people have started to enter the space and push forward on the usage of stablecoins, but they haven't gone full port yet because they've still been doing a lot of risk management and trying to understand the space.

Do you remember the view in 2017, when the regulatory environment was very different? At first, it was very unclear. No one really cared, then it became an issue. There was a prevailing view that you didn't want regulatory clarity because that allowed startups to grow and capture market share. If you had regulatory clarity, the big guys would enter the space and crush you.

I don't know if that was cope or real, but it certainly gave way to companies like Tether. Yano and I talked about regulatory arbitrage last episode, and it seems like a couple of people were either triggered or acknowledging that it was a big part of value creation in crypto, which I still think is true. But anyway—

But it's not just crypto. That's startups.

This was my point. Yeah, yeah. Guys, there's some news of the week that I do want to cover. Santi, because Rob got the CLARITY section, I'm going to hand this over to you.

Rob's show—the Rob 16 Minutes of Clarity. That was a lot. I thought it was going to be 3 minutes, but somehow Rob has an uncanny ability to drag us into 16 minutes of politics, ladies and gentlemen. I really apologize.

Well, you know, that's how you know I could be a politician.

If you're still here, we appreciate you. We're a little game show here, Santi. I'm going to give you a couple of options.

Okay.

Option A: Stripe bids for PayPal. Option B: DTCC tokenized assets go live. Option C: Circle becomes a federally regulated trust bank. Option D: Ostium hack, and maybe a debate around instant settlement. Or option E: Robinhood value accrual to ETH.

God, it's so tempting. It's like a kid walking into a candy store, man. There are so many flavors I want to go with. Okay, definitely Robinhood.

5. Robinhood Exposes Ethereum’s Value Problem

I tweeted about this. For context, if you want to pull up that tweet, it's very good. This guy Lorenzo, who's at ARK—shout-out to him—put out some good analysis. I was talking to one of my advisors here, a super-smart guy, and he was like, “What do I do with my ETH?” I said, “Well, look at this tweet.”

Why are people excited about Ethereum? Institutional adoption. You could say the narrative is, “Well, you have Robinhood deploying on Ethereum.” But there's nuance, right? They're deploying on Arbitrum, which is an L2 on Ethereum. If you look at the fee flow—basically, for folks not viewing this—Robinhood is capturing 90% of the fees.

Arbitrum is capturing 9%, and Ethereum is capturing less than 1% of the fees.

So, the numbers that he lays out: Robinhood Chain has grossed $816K in revenue. This is a couple of days outdated: $816K in revenue. Arbitrum takes 10%, so Arbitrum makes $80K off the $800K. And then Arbitrum pays ETH for settlement, right? 15 bips. So, Robinhood: $800K, Arbitrum: $80K, Ethereum: $1,500.

I've been saying this since the end of time. This is the value capture of Ethereum L1: it's broken. I think that's very well established, so I won't go too much into that, but you're seeing it in real time.

And I guess for anyone that's still holding ETH at a $250 billion market cap, you ought to wonder: shouldn't you be buying Robinhood equity at, like, $40 billion or $50 billion? I've always felt that the risk-reward is really, really, really screwed in most of these L1s, including Ethereum.

If you want to pull up the tweet that Joe Lubin had, because there was a lot of debate around this. It got a lot of attention. Joe Lubin was like, "Well, Ethereum—this is a conscious choice that we're making." So, I'll read it.

For folks that have been under a rock, Joe Lubin is very influential. He's one of the, I guess, co-founders of Ethereum. He ran ConsenSys, or still runs it. And he said, "In my opinion, Ethereum L1 fee revenue should stay low to foster growth. Tens of thousands of companies will set up shop over the next 2 to 3 years in some sort of mix of Ethereum L1 or L2."

He says, "The monetary premium will grow very large. Fee revenue to L1s from so much activity will grow significantly from staking and locking away ETH and all this stuff."

I was having this debate with one of my advisors as well, and he's a super well-known tech investor. I was like, "Doesn't this remind you a little bit of tech companies that have a freemium model and then try to raise prices down the road, and then it never really shows up?" We were both laughing about it, but I think there's some truth to that.

I've always felt that if you have a moat, whether it's developers or security or a die-hard community, a religious community of sorts, if you can't monetize the moat, then it's not a moat. It doesn't matter. Upgrading these systems is not like a push of a button, right? So, it takes different factions, and I just find it—I don't think that's the correct policy, if you will, of Ethereum as a system.

I had a similar reaction, Santi, which is that I would disagree with Joe Lubin here, and I think some other folks would, too. To me, it's like: increase—

Increase the prices, see if Robinhood still deploys, and maybe then you can start arguing that Ethereum has monetary premium.

Go to your customer, which is Arbitrum here, and say, "We're going to charge more money." If you're not charging more than $1,500 worth of value, you have to improve your products, right? Maybe that means you have to provide more valuable services to the L2s beyond just settlement and DA, right?

It feels like a product-value and a pricing question to me, but maybe I'm oversimplifying. Would you do that?

Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. I think you have to always understand how much customers are willing to pay for your product. Yano, you know this: founders chronically underprice their product.

Isn't there a private equity firm that buys businesses and increases prices? I mean, again, Martin Shkreli did this in pharma. Don't do that either. Nonetheless, it's like—by the way, how many more Robinhood customers is Ethereum going to have? Robinhood is probably one of the elephants that you want to get as a customer. I would argue it's retail-driven, with a ton of activity, and they're growing like bonkers, right?

There are tons of other fintechs—I mean, there are a lot of fintechs. Maybe we'll talk about the PayPal stuff later, but PayPal has 440 million accounts, right? There are a lot of companies like that that could and are theoretically already doing things around Ethereum.

Yeah. I'm totally with Yano, though, that this feels—to your point, Santi, you and this person were laughing about the freemium model, right? There are tons of companies that have landed and expanded with freemium models, right? They've had very, very good unit economics over time and been able to charge people a lot of money over time.

I think the question here is: if Ethereum were to increase its pricing, would people continue to deploy there? That's a question that I think we don't know the answer to, because there is this glut of block space for the type of usage we have today. People think they would just move, and that might be true.

But I also think this is an incentive problem, because you're in a traditional business that's landing and expanding. They need people to buy their equity, and their equity is directly linked to that cash flow, and that has never been true in—

Totally. Yeah. I'll give you an example. There are tax-free jurisdictions. If Monaco were to all of a sudden start charging 30%, a lot of people wouldn't live here.

I think my argument is probably more cynical. I think the reason why Robinhood is deploying on Ethereum is because they're getting a freebie. It's the best scenario possible. The narrative is super clean: you're deploying on Ethereum, Ethereum alignment, all this jazz that L2s have also said.

Because, of course, if you have a tenant in a rent-controlled building, you're killing it. Of course you're going to go there. I just don't think it's going to hold. I don't know if—

There's also just way more EVM engineers than there are of anything else, right? And it's significantly easier to get talent.

That is way overstated. Wait, and by the way, building on Solidity is a big pain in the ass. Most developers will tell you that.

They won't if they won't use the words "kind of" when they tell you that.

What?

They won't use the words "kind of" when they tell you that.

Yes.

Just say it is a big pain in the ass.

Pain in the ass.

But yet people still build on ETH. So that tells you there's something valuable there, right? There's some reason why Robinhood is building on Arbitrum, which is built on Ethereum.

So, I think Ethereum—the pricing is—I think Lorenzo's pricing is actually wrong. I think it's—

It's marginally off. Yeah, I saw some—

It's marginally off. I think it's more like 60—

Directionally correct.

Directionally correct.

But I think one of the problems here, too, as Gabriel Shapiro laid this out—which I think he's right about—is that he said, "I'm not sure ETH can charge more today. It's not sticky enough. One, most of the L2s aren't actually secured by Ethereum, and two, there's no interop. We haven't solved interop yet." So, is it—

Well, this is the point I just made, right?

Exactly. And I agree with you.

Yeah, because Base is sort of just a rent extractor in some ways, right? The reality is that is what is happening, to Santi's point, in a lot of these other cases.

Especially in the case of Robinhood, where primarily they're getting paid to deploy on these L2s. This is not an Arbitrum-specific point, but all of these chains other than Ethereum—because Ethereum doesn't run itself this way—from Solana to Optimism to Arbitrum, they all pay people to deploy there, right?

The economics of the entire thing breaks down in a bunch of different directions. And this is not an Ethereum-specific point, either. This is a token-for-blockchains point, if you're going to say that the economics should be linked to cash flow. That is just a token point generally.

Yeah, and for the folks saying that Ethereum provides a lot of security, you're deploying, to your point, to Arbitrum. They control the validator, and they're capturing the fees. It's not like you're inheriting the security of these systems. These systems are not fully secure, in my opinion, because you have very centralized control.

So, at the end of the day, why is Robinhood deploying? They're deploying because they can monetize their users, and they're cutting out Citadel on-chain. It's as simple as that. If, at some point, Ethereum charges them and wants to raise the prices, they're going to go elsewhere. Or they're going to build their own chain, like Circle.

I'm not sure that "they're not secure" is the right way to put it. They are secure, but they're not decentralized, maybe.

Yeah, so they're capturing a lot of the fees. You can, I guess, post to the L1. Yes, you can contest it and you can go back to it. So, yeah, I'll give you that.

6. Coinbase Resets Base’s Strategy

Should we use this to get into Base? I didn't actually have this in the agenda, but I don't know if you guys saw that Jesse came out with a statement about Base and Kobe taking over. I don't know if you guys have any takes on this, but I can abbreviate Jesse's long message.

Jesse basically runs Base. He's on the executive team at Coinbase. He said, “Look, the first quarter of 2026: punch in the face. Spent a lot of the last 2 years, 2024 and 2025, making this big bet that builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption, and adoption would be driven by new on-chain-native social experiences.”

Basically, he says, “Look, I think that was maybe the right call on a long enough time horizon, but the wrong call for Base in the short term.” He said, “Look, the collateral damage was bad. This year has been an exercise in eating crow. We realized how our focus on social meant that Base fell behind in these key areas.” They’re updating their strategy. He’s handing the Base app over to Kobe, and he’s going to focus on Base, the chain.

He’s taking over trading—I mean, not all trading products, but trading. I think some trading products at Coinbase. Maybe all trading products.

I think it’s all the Base trading products, right?

All the Base trading products. He does say right here, “I’m responsible for trading products at Coinbase: the Coinbase app, Coinbase Pro, and the Base app.” So maybe I’m wrong, but—

No, you’re probably right. It does say that. So—

Yeah, so—

No better person in the world—

Yeah.

—to do this, in my opinion. Kobe’s just—he’s always been a trader. He really gets crypto users, and he knows how to play the game. I think it’d be super interesting to see what—what do you think is the first order of business for him? What’s the first thing you’re going to notice on Base?

Make the app better. Oh my God. Got to make the app better.

Can I say one thing before we go?

Turn off the notifications. Turn off the prediction market notifications.

You want the weather notifications?

I literally did get a weather notification today from Coinbase. That’s insane.

I don’t know—

I’m melting, dude. Crypto’s down 50%. I don’t know. It’s too hot my probability.

I do not understand how their notifications are so much worse than the other prediction markets, either. We can debate whether anybody wants to be reminded of what is happening on these prediction markets, and yet somehow Coinbase made them the absolute worst of all the things that existed. I don’t understand.

One take out there was, “Jesse, there are some things that you’ve said that were very questionable.” Some of the meme coins that were launched—it just felt like he was trying to king-make certain coins or projects. One other person said, “I actually thought he would stick around longer.” Some people were expecting this to happen much sooner. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but he’s definitely built a lot of goodwill in the organization. It’s just interesting because I think you could have made this—

There’s something to be said about—you could have done this probably earlier. It’s never too late, but—

Can I say one thing about Jesse? He gets a lot of hate online. People tweet at him all the time. Clearly, to your point, Santi, I think there was, at least in the public discourse, a swell of people who wanted something like this to happen earlier.

For him to come out and write that post, which was, I think, very open kimono—he really bore a lot of his soul, and he clearly is a sensitive guy. He really put it all out there. I appreciated that. I think he deserves a lot of credit for going out and talking very openly about how he feels about the situation, what has happened, and what he was right or wrong about.

You don’t often get that from big public companies. I really appreciated that, and I think we should applaud his openness. He was clearly wrong about a lot of stuff, and people clearly did not give him a lot of goodwill outside of the organization, even though he clearly got a lot inside the organization.

Could not agree more with Rob’s take. Keep in mind, we think of Coinbase as, “Oh, this startup. We use their app; we trade crypto on it.” They’re a publicly traded company. Imagine an executive at Adobe coming out and saying, “I bet the farm on this and I screwed up.” He’d be like, “They would never do that because I’d get fired.”

By the way, I do think it speaks to the culture of Coinbase, too. I’m sure there’s good and bad about the culture of Coinbase, but the fact that an executive of a publicly traded company can go out and say this really points to the culture of Coinbase. I said the same thing, Rob. I tweeted, “Look, strong opinions, loosely held. Respect to this. The only way to win big is to make bold bets. Then you talk to customers, double down if they love it, or pivot if they hate it.”

I think Base is going to keep doing really well. If I had feedback here, it’s that I think they got a lot of strong customer feedback early on that this was the wrong move. Maybe—

That’s what I’m saying. I do appreciate—mad respect for coming out like that and being very public. My only point is, do we think that Coinbase as an organization is very connected with its customers? That’s been an issue when I compare Coinbase versus Robinhood versus Kraken.

For me, it’s felt that Robinhood—I mean, this is part of the critique of Coinbase, I think, because Robinhood is just very—well, I think it really understands the customer here. It’s felt that Coinbase has lost touch with customers over the years. It started as the best place in the US, and it still has the best—it’s synonymous with buying crypto in the US.

I think there’s a lot of room to improve in terms of being really plugged into what customers want. It took longer, is what I’m saying. To your point, Yano, there was strong, strong public feedback that we all saw on the timeline. You’re wondering, “Why is it taking so long?”

Yeah, I agree with that, Santiago. I think it’s very clear they’ve lost touch with a certain type of consumer. But I think part of the internal tension, at least in my mind, is that they have $15 billion of idle USDC sitting on their platform right now. Those people could be earning 7% on their USDC just by putting it into an Ethena vault right now, right?

The customer base that is their actual customer, or the person they’ve really seemed to appeal to—the people who seem to be there regularly—are not the active trading crowd. It’s the people who want to buy Bitcoin and sit on it, right? They’re a little bit more crypto-native. At least, that’s my perspective from the outside in.

They’ve really focused on the institutional side. They’re obviously one of the biggest custodians, or they are the biggest custodian, and they have their institutional desk. They’ve clearly lost touch with the core crypto user who got them to where they are today: the active trader, the person who’s in the timeline, the people who are really on-chain. That’s where it seems like they’ve lost that touch, which is also why so much of the timeline is negative about them, even though they still have all this capital in Bitcoin and USDC sitting on-chain.

Is Ethena really 7%? Maybe I lost touch. I thought it was—

Oh, no, that’s not the point. That’s not the point.

I think there are different things in that Earn thing. So I actually think it’s—

They do have a Morpho integration already. But—

Okay, 2 points. One is—let me defend, I think, the decision to go all in on this. Many of the biggest bets at Coinbase—Rob, you said they have $15 billion of idle USDC—came through their Next Bets program.

Brian’s talked about this. He did a Cheeky Pint episode with John Collison, if you guys have heard that podcast. He originally vetoed USDC. He was like, “USDC? No, we don’t want to do it.”

But they have this Next Bets program where they bet on up-and-coming talent if they want to go do something inside the company. These are venture-style bets. Base came from this. Base was a Next Bet. USDC was a Next Bet that Balaji ran.

So I do think, if you want to say, “Don’t do that,” you also have to recognize that’s how public companies become stale. I do think it’s a challenging position if you’re Brian.

The other thing is, Rob, I actually don't think the Coinbase user is a crypto-native trader.

That's exactly what I'm saying. They've lost touch with that person. They're not with the crypto trader.

I'm not sure their customer was ever the crypto-native trader. I think it was the crypto-native buyer. And, okay, Coinbase versus Robinhood—the difference? I actually think there are a lot of people who are going to go to Robinhood because they want to actively trade crypto assets.

Coinbase's unique advantage is that they have tens of millions of people on that platform who are sitting on crazy long-term capital gains on their Bitcoin. That is a thing. I wouldn't call them traders. They're like buy-and-hold BTC, ETH, SOL.

So, maybe I was unclear. You and I are agreeing.

We're agreeing. Okay.

Yeah, which is that—

Focus on your customer. Focus on your customer. Yeah.

But you and I are agreeing, and maybe what we're disagreeing on is that I'm saying everyone was at Coinbase before, including the active traders, right? So in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, the active traders and non-active traders, everybody was there.

And then they've lost touch with the active-trading, more crypto-native crowd over time as they've built the other parts of their business. And now it feels like it is the buy-and-hold crowd that is primarily there. That was the point I was trying to make.

They lost the active trader. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Anyway, I'm excited to see what Kobe does with that. I wouldn't underestimate what one senior person can do inside of an organization when they're given power and money. And it seems like Kobe's just been given this.

I talk about Kraken a lot, right? Because I saw what Kraken did when Arjun took the reins. And the platform is significantly better in the last year. So I just wouldn't—I know it's hard to move a bloated or big organization, but one person with power and money can do a lot. So I'm looking.

And maybe an interesting thing to look at is the stock, too. Like Robinhood stock versus Coinbase. Robinhood is drastically outperforming Coinbase. And maybe this is an interesting buy. This is something that Wall Street is definitely not looking at.

This guy named Kobe on Twitter just took the reins. That's definitely not priced into Coinbase stock. So I'm also upset, candidly. I have a lot of Coinbase stock that is not performing well.

[Laughter]

Let me just make that disclosure—

Very, very, very clearly before something—

Should we? Do you own Robinhood? You do own Robinhood, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

What is your take on Ostium?

7. Ostium Hack Challenges Instant Settlement

Yeah, we should talk about Ostium.

So Ostium was—what is Ostium? It's not a perp DEX, or they are a perp DEX?

I mean, they are. The easy way to think about it is that they have a little bit of a different way they think about the model, but they're essentially an RWA perp DEX.

RWA perp DEX. Great founders, great team. Very good at executing. They got exploited for $18 million. I haven't looked into the hack or the exploit at all. Rob, Santi, I don't know if you guys have.

But I think the interesting conversation to be had here is not, “Oh, there's another DeFi hack or another crypto hack.” It's: are we at the stage where, for instant settlement, we can finally say the pros of instant settlement do not outweigh the cons of instant settlement?

Armani from Backpack just tweeted this today or yesterday, and I'll read it. He said, “You want to stop getting hacked? Kill instant settlement. It's just not worth it. Every exchange and protocol should add mandatory withdrawal relays. People will hate it. People will dunk on me for saying this, but these people don't care about you or the safety of your funds. At what point is enough enough? Sending nothing but love to the Ostium team.”

So, yeah, I think this is a decent debate to be had. Rob, Santi, I'm not sure if you have thoughts here.

Well, just to lend a little bit more color, I think it was an oracle manipulation attack, which is one of, if not the most common way that DeFi protocols have historically been compromised. I can get into a little bit more specifics, but I think that was sort of the gist of it. If you manipulate the oracle, then I think they changed the price, and then they were able to compromise these vaults.

The Ostium team responded fairly quickly. They halted activity and whatnot, but, yeah, I'll pause there. I have views on instant settlement. I think I'm aligned with Armani's position.

You remember that episode? I think we talked about it here on Invest Like the Best with the Column founder. He talks a little bit about this. Crypto's trying to go faster in financial rails, and that's this ability in traditional finance to go faster, but it's an intentional design choice not to go faster because we prioritize and value security.

If a scammer's calling your grandma, you want to go slow. There's a whole part of the population that you shouldn't be going as fast with. And I thought that was a very interesting, refreshing take from someone who I think is super in the weeds of finance and what is capable, what is possible or not. I mean, this is just another reason to be in that camp.

Yeah, the—what's his name? William Hockey?

William Hockey, yeah.

Hockey, yeah, something like that.

So, Rob, any take? Are you guys an investor in Ostium?

We're not an investor. We know the team well, spent time with them in the past. I have a lot of respect for them. It's sad to see this happen.

The point around, okay, well, the oracle attack would have happened whether or not there were delayed withdrawals. So the delayed withdrawals wouldn't have stopped this attack, the P&L from updating, or these malicious, false prices that were written to be there.

I'm not sure that solves some of the problem, because oracle issues are just going to continue to exist, and we're going to have to get better oracles. This is not a crypto-specific thing. Any reference asset that references an oracle has potential for oracle attacks. We're seeing this outside of on-chain markets as well right now, okay?

Now, the point that Armani's making, which is the same point people essentially made in the LayerZero hack, was that if you require a cooling-off period to actually pull capital out, then the systems we have in place today are actually very good at understanding that these hacks happen. Then you can figure out what to do next, and you can react appropriately.

And Blockaid, I mean, it's almost like the source of truth now on these hacks because they tweet out these things so quickly. They're so good at seeing these things happening.

But oftentimes, I do wonder—and this might not be true; I haven't looked into this—but I think what happened here, which is often the way that these things are noticed, is that the withdrawals are the things that look off. And so then Blockaid and other detection systems notice the withdrawals.

So it's actually unclear to me that if you were to put a bump in this ability to withdraw, whether or not people would actually find the issue during that period of time. Maybe in this case they would have, but maybe in other cases they wouldn't. So it's not an end-all, be-all solution anyway, but I think it is something that people should be thinking about.

Here, look, I'm not an engineer. Here's how I would architect it, right? What happened was they posted a price that was totally off, and that allowed them to—so you walk into the casino and convince the dealer that you have a royal flush. You don't have a royal flush, but the dealer automatically assumes it's true and pays you out. You walk out of the casino, no questions asked.

And I think, similar to what happened in Aave, it's like, Korea—there's a lot of volatility in the Korean market, in memecoins and all that other stuff. There are circuit breakers. They've had more circuit breakers this year than—

[Laughter]

—in its entire history. Markets are really volatile, I get it. But I think sometimes we should just study markets and understand: hey, what would happen if we introduced circuit breakers? Would that really be the worst of times? Or delayed withdrawals?

So if you don't want to have a circuit breaker because there's a lot of volatility in crypto, then a workaround would be to escrow the withdrawal. Like, you know—

Yeah, like, oh, 2 days. That's Armani's point, I think. Yeah.

Exactly right. 2 days, or have an approval to open the gate. So you have an internal system, and we're getting really good at detection. Okay, wow, someone posted an oracle that—by the way, if you're referencing another market that has the—say it was a—I forget which market it was. It was the price of gold.

If they're using one oracle, maybe for latency reasons, fine. Okay, you should never use one oracle. You should use a weighted average, or whatever, of 3 or what have you.

But say all oracles, in a worst-case scenario, get compromised. You still can use a reference price from another market, like Uniswap, Hyperliquid, or TradingView. If there's a massive deviation, it flags that this withdrawal needs to enter a cooldown, and you can't withdraw. You know what I mean?

I don't know—maybe as a nontechnical person, the team would say, “Well, yeah, and then that defeats the whole purpose of predicting, you know, perps, and you're introducing latency.” But that logic needs to be introduced, because I think you work backward from: no matter how good the private-key management was, this was a social-engineering attack. They haven't put out a postmortem, but I'm pretty sure the key got leaked somehow through social engineering.

There wasn't a multisig, most likely. Even if there was, you have to wonder what the flow was. The attacker got access to the private key and was able to manipulate the oracle. There was likely 1 oracle. There are a couple of things here that, in hindsight, look like, okay, you probably should have architected this differently.

The Ostium team—I’ve met both of them—is very smart and very capable. I'm just wondering how much of this was a design choice to compete, push it to the limit, and make it as fast as possible. I think, yeah, you've got to slow down to go fast, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah, I think it would be pretty hard for people to compete if they started putting circuit breakers on the exchanges themselves. Traders really do not like circuit breakers. I actually expect we'll see circuit breakers change in traditional markets over time, too.

Even with the fact that we have trillion-dollar equities that are 100 vol right now, I actually—

You're having fun, Rob. I have 10 days. [Laughter.] I think this is the worst day for IBM in the history of IBM.

Yeah.

It was wild.

I actually think these circuit breakers, over time, are going to get eased up. So I actually think this is an equity—

An entire degen population—like 5% of Korea's population—that was trading meme coins now traded memory. They got blown out.

[Gasps.]

It was a double whammy, anyway.

Well, the same thing's happening. I actually think this is a good thing, because now the market makers are getting blown out, too, right? Susquehanna's just getting blown out in these exchanges.

You thought that—

IBM was bad. [Laughter.]

IBM lost like $60 billion of value in 1 day. They lost a Coinbase.

Yeah. Maybe we should have—I mean, markets are just... Anyway.

Yeah, but I do think delayed withdrawals are very clearly something that, for the big platforms—for people who have a lot to lose—like, I think Hyperliquid could put delayed withdrawals in there and people would still use it.

I think for the startups, though, it becomes tougher. This is an incentive problem, right? There are basically 2 perp DEXes that have the vast majority of the volume, which are Hyperliquid and Lighter. After you get beyond that, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of others trying to figure out how to compete. That's the incentive problem.

So much in crypto is just surviving.

Yeah.

I mean, now you've—yeah, I know. Maybe we should have the Ostium team come on once they clean up the house and give us their take. I would personally love to understand what the product choices and the decision choices were, as much as they'd be willing to share, for the benefit of other founders, to be honest.

Yeah.

Hopefully they're okay. Hopefully they clean it up. I heard they seemed to be on the right track and getting some good traction on more commodity-like markets before the hack, like oil and gold and stuff like that. So I wish them well. It sucks to see a hack, but onwards, I guess. All right, markets—or Brian Chesky tweeting about tokenization?

Was it him or his ghostwriter? I don't know, man.

His ghostwriter, Grok.

Horrendous tweet. Horrendous. I'll spend a minute there, spend a minute there, and then Stripe, and then we just—

8. Stripe’s Bid To Reinvent PayPal

Rob, I do want your take on PayPal. Stripe and this private-equity firm called Advent made a joint offer to acquire PayPal. It's not necessarily directly tied to crypto, but obviously there's a very strong overlap. I think it was $60 a share; the valuation was $53 billion, which was a 28% premium over where the stock was trading. Give me your take, sir.

Yeah, this one's super interesting to me because Stripe and PayPal do about the same amount of volume, actually. They've done approximately $500 billion or so of trailing-12-month processing volume, or payment volume—a little less than that. Sorry, that's Q1 volume. I think it's approximately $1.7–$1.8 trillion of annual volume right now for each of them.

Interestingly, Stripe is worth, call it, 4 times as much as PayPal, despite the fact that Stripe's revenue is about the same as PayPal's cash flow, right? So you have this interesting thing where, when you talk about M&A generally, you always want to buy something else when you have a more valuable currency. When your stock is trading at a much higher multiple than someone else's stock, you want to buy that other company.

AOL Time Warner, baby.

Yeah. So we're in this interesting moment where people believe—there are a lot of people who will tell you Stripe will be the first trillion-dollar fintech—and they're monetizing at 25% the rate that PayPal is, while doing the same amount of volume. I think they're now not cash-flow positive, but that's unclear. Maybe last year was the first year they were.

I think it's an interesting thing in M&A dynamics, and to think through growth rates and multiples. But maybe the more interesting point here is that, from a Stripe perspective, they're on the merchant-processing side. Merchant processing is probably getting commoditized more quickly than the consumer side.

The consumer side is a nice fight, but when you have a sticky customer base, you can monetize them in a bunch of different ways. They don't tend to go off-platform as easily as a merchant might. There's also a lot of ways to think through what their data looks like and how you cross-sell financial products, nonfinancial products, et cetera.

You've got PayPal on one side, with over 400 million—about 460 million—consumer accounts right now. Then you've got a bunch of data and a bunch of different under-monetized assets, like Venmo, and the ability for Stripe to potentially create a network out of that that can be monetized in ways that you don't really see today other than through a Visa or a Mastercard.

I actually think it's probably some of what they're thinking, especially when you think back through all of the investment they've made into crypto and stablecoins. So I think it's super interesting from a story perspective, and obviously very interesting from an M&A math perspective.

I do wonder if the behemoth that is PayPal could be integrated into Stripe, or if it would just be a huge distraction that would drag them down for years. There's a long history of payments M&A and legacy systems being unable to be integrated in meaningful ways. Worldpay famously has been bought and sold 4 times in the last decade, right? People just cannot figure that out.

Would you buy PayPal or Stripe at $150 billion, or—

$180?

$180 billion.

Listen, Stripe is growing very quickly. It's a great company, and I don't want to bet against John and Patrick. Despite all of that, and despite all of their investment in the space and how great they are, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that they're worth $180 billion and Adyen is worth $30 billion.

We can talk a little bit about public versus private multiples—what's real and what's not, and how things would be valued in the public market. I think, in some sense, the public market is also more mimetic, at least in the beginning, at least in short bursts.

Over time, obviously, SpaceX is up to almost $190, or over $200, a share now; it's back down to $135 a share. And so, I would think you would be hard-pressed, in my mind, to have Stripe go public today, completely open the kimono, and have it trade at $100 billion.

Affirm—I mean, obviously different, with BNPL and quality there, but yeah, isn't that the feature of not going public? I love when you start with the word “listen.” You know he's not going to answer the question, so we never really get told whether we wanted to buy this goddamn thing or not. I'll read between the lines, ladies and gentlemen: he's not.

So, are you buying Adyen? Adyen, the payment processor—I guess, is that a better—is that a buy? Are you—

I think generally payment processing today, especially merchant processing and acquiring, is not a place where I'm probably a buyer. I think these places are going to get disrupted by stablecoins, and so I'm a buyer of things like—we announced a deal with a company called Velocity earlier this week that's actively working to modernize acquiring and merchant settlement.

What are they doing? I saw you guys—I saw you just join, or you led this round, $38 million into Velocity. What are they doing, Rob?

They do a couple of different things, but one of the things that they are doing is trying to—So, if we think about Rain, which I've talked about a bunch, it essentially allows for stablecoin-backed cards and then settles with Visa on the issuer side of the transaction with stablecoins. Well, in the traditional 4-party payment model, on the other side of the issuer is the acquirer and the merchant bank.

One of the things that they're working with several of the card networks on—and you might have seen that Capital One came into this round—is modernizing settlement on the merchant side and on the acquiring side. What needs to happen there is that you need to get merchants to accept stablecoins, but there's a—We talked about this before, going all the way back to the Circle USDC conversation. I think a lot of these fintechs, and Stripe might be one of those fintechs, will work to abstract away what it means to take settlement in stablecoins because you can just now spend that U.S. dollar.

And so, when those merchants start getting comfortable with these U.S. dollar accounts that are backed by stablecoins, you're going to need the legacy acquirers and the legacy acquiring banks to be able to settle in stablecoins as well. So, that's one of the things that Velocity is doing.

To take that all the way back to the question about what's happening here, or whether or not I'm a buyer of Adyen and these other companies, I'm not sure I'm a buyer of merchant processing or acquiring in general, because I think it is broadly being disrupted. But I am probably—I would probably be long Adyen, short Stripe, at these current valuations, if that was a pair trade that I would do.

My quant is telling me Stripe derives higher revenue per dollar of volume compared to pure processors. But you're then simultaneously also saying Stripe is not cash-flow positive.

I think they are cash-flow positive as of last year, but they're just recently cash-flow positive, yeah.

Is that true, though? When you compare them against Adyen and some others, there's this idea that not all volume is created equal. If they're doing $100 billion of volume, their take rate, or the total fees on that volume, is much, much higher. I don't know what that figure is, but that's what—

Yeah, I mean, I haven't spent a ton of time looking at Adyen's financials recently and others. I'm sure somebody who's spent more time on that will tweet at me, but what they've done a very, very good job of is taking what's like the core merchant processing side of what they do and monetizing their customers across a bunch of different sectors.

They have the software stack, they have the capital stack, and they have the lending stack. And so, that's allowed them to create a higher LTV per customer. They definitely monetize better than traditional scaled acquirers.

But listen, these markets are humongous, but it's not clear to me that these markets are going to grow enough. For Stripe to go from $180 billion to $1 trillion, they're taking a ton of market share, not just because the market grows. Taking that market share is not going to be, “Oh, we're just able to go and monetize more appropriately across a bunch of different sectors,” because they're just going to have to take more processing share.

And those processors, those acquirers, are getting credit from elsewhere, right? They have a specific customer stack where they are better at giving credit than a bank is.

Yeah, yeah.

That's going to be true of the next phase of customers.

Yeah. We looked at that in a lot of ISOs and these acquirers. I kind of do spend so much time on blogs, talking to all these folks, and going to conferences. Obviously, the elephant in the room was Stripe and Stripe Credit, and they're just bundling—they're just capturing more economics there. Whereas historically, it was disaggregated.

I think that's part of why Stripe commands a higher valuation. But yeah, maybe the answer is just don't touch any of this.

[Laughter]

I think Stripe's a great company, and I think it'll be bigger than $180 billion in the future. I just don't. I think there has to be multiple compression.

I'll take the other side of it, by the way. I think the call—I mean, it's just like, what do you pay for the brand of Stripe? Imagine you're a Fortune 500 executive in America and you're redoing your whole payment processor system. What are you going to do, buy Adyen or Stripe? You're going to buy Stripe.

No, they do not care. Nobody cares about the brand name. These are treasurers—

Yes, they do. But the bundling is right. We did talk to, in fairness, we did talk to a lot of—

The Fortune 500 exec does know, Rob. I know what he's buying or selling.

But you know this to be true. Bundling has worked very well in cable and in TV, and it's working here with Stripe. They have really good visibility into the health of the businesses, and their credit piece—I think they've underwritten $1 billion in loans. That, I think, is real. You're solving a real pain point.

And just with stablecoins and working capital, again, I think the credit piece is much larger. I was at your event, Rob, actually, in Tokyo. Tarun, you remember that dinner? He's like, “Payments are deeply uninteresting,” and I'm like, “I agree, but the way to credit is through payments.” Stripe is doing it, and Toast has done it, and Parfin, I think, is a company that powered a lot of—

So, I think credit is the real golden goose here, and Stripe's in a better position to extend credit to all—

Yeah, well, if we think about Stripe—and not to keep going down this path—or Toast, you brought up, right? What is happening in these companies is they're getting payments revenue, but they're selling software, right? What did Toast do? Toast gave hardware away for free. They sold you software. Eventually, they monetized the payments. Eventually, they monetized credit, right?

And this kind of goes back to, I think, the broader thesis. I've said this a bunch recently to a bunch of people, but there was this story around how every company would try to monetize financially and every company would try to become its own fintech. And there were things like Synapse that blew up, and there was the credit cycle that really, I think, killed a few of these—a certain segment of fintechs.

But that is true. In a world where we have stablecoins, in a world where agents and AI are able to more easily manage compliance and customer relationships in the customer journey, there are going to be more and more companies that are going to monetize payments. There are going to be more and more full-stack software platforms that are doing all of this if they can figure out the compliance side, but I think that will happen.

And so, I firmly, firmly believe that legacy payments infrastructure is outdated and that it is getting upended by stablecoins and by more digitally native platforms like Stripe. But let's not forget, Stripe is a 15-year-old company, too, right? They're no longer the startup. They are an incumbent.

They've done an incredible job of convincing the market that they're still the startup, but when I talk to people in and around that organization, it is clear there are also people who go in there being like, “Oh, this is a great new startup I'm going to work at,” and then they come out being like, “Oh, this is too big of an organization,” right? That is happening.

All right, let's get into the content of the week, yeah?

Yes, sir. Although we didn't talk markets, but it's okay, ladies and gentlemen. If you're in Korea, be well.

9. AI Trades And Biohacking

I have one markets question for you.

Yes.

Rapid fire. Are you still holding Micron and SanDisk?

All of it, sir. I'm buying more right now.

That's all I needed to know.

I'm actually more—

I mean, blindly—

Look at—

Blindly follow you into a trade.

I—

[laughter]

I'll tell you. Earnings are coming in really strong with TSMC. TSMC reported really good earnings, and my conviction is stronger because I think TSMC really has a good— the biggest thing I'm monitoring is CapEx. That has been why markets are so jittery. Meta's cutting CapEx, and it's like, holy—the ROI on this stuff.

But if you look at some of the earnings that are coming in, it's very clear to me that CapEx is not going to slow down. The game theory is, if you're the CEO of Meta or Google or some of these places, CapEx will continue.

From that standpoint, I saw a really good clip of the guy who oversees the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. He said one of the biggest mistakes they've made is that when they go into the year, they have a thesis, and then somehow along the way they change it. If they had done nothing, it would have been way better most of the time—9 out of 10 times.

Because you do all the work.

You do all the work. You do all the work, yeah. And so I'm obviously paying attention to memory being down. Micron and SanDisk are down about 30% from the peak, 35% from the peak. It's super volatile.

A lot of that is—look at what happened. Koreans were taking out margin loans, and it just liquidated. Then the Korean central bank raised rates for the first time in the last 10 years. It's a double whammy.

Also, just to your point, I think you said earlier that markets are incredibly volatile. Just don't use leverage. So, no, I'm—as they say—unbothered, moisturized, in my lane. But you see some wrinkles.

[laughter]

You're just sitting in the hot tub. I love it.

I'm just sitting in the hot tub—a cold plunge. I'm in the cold plunge to cool down from this market. It's really hot out here, but, yeah, I'm not doing anything. You're getting another bite at the apple.

So did you think all of your best thinking in the cold plunge? I just feel like I hear a lot of stories about you in the cold plunge.

Yes. I want to install a sauna because the health data on saunas is amazing. I was at the retreat with the team, at the off-site, and there was a sauna there. I think I prefer a sauna.

Cold plunge, I can't be there for more than—I got frostbite skiing once, and so I can't really be there for longer. Otherwise, my foot turns purple. It's not really good.

Do you do it? I hear there are these places in New York. Pranav has been a repeat customer. He was investing in some of these places in New York with—

Dude, there's so many of them. I think I've been pitched three of these in the last month. They're like, “Bathhouse. We're going to dominate Bathhouse.” There are like 17 Bathhouse competitors now.

It's like, yeah, the new age club is going to one of these bathhouse-type places, and they're going to play padel. So that's it: invest in padel, health, and the bathhouse.

I love health care, as you guys know, and biohacking stuff is a topic for a later conversation. There was this round—not crypto-related—that I found interesting because I've done Prenuvo and Function Health and all this stuff.

Prenuvo is really amazing. They really lowered their price. If you get the chance to do it, it's probably the best thing you can give to your parents. They have centers all over the U.S.

But there's this startup that started in Stockholm and London. It's coming to the U.S. They raised a massive $300 million round, I think, from—I forget who—but apparently I saw people raving about this.

What's it called?

It starts with an N. I'll get you the name—Neko Health. Yeah, there it is.

Yeah, they raised $700 million.

They raised $700 million from Lightspeed, O.G. Venture Partners, and a bunch of people. Apparently, they're opening in New York. I'm really interested to try it out.

I will say, for anyone who's critical of AI, I have a huge repository of unstructured data—blood panels and lipids, pretty much anything I've done over the years. I really just pointed it at a Claude instance. I have a health passport now.

I just went to my doctor here, and he was like, “How do you know?” Honestly, the amount of stuff that I've been able to do just with my own data alone is groundbreaking. It truly is amazing.

I have a friend whose wife was pregnant, and the doctor gave him a misdiagnosis about something that was wrong with the fetus.

Yeah, and they were—what?

No, he took the scan picture and put it into ChatGPT, and it gave him the answer. Then he took it back to the doctor and said, “I think you're wrong. This is what ChatGPT is telling me.”

The doctor was like, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. That is correct.”

I've heard a couple of doctors say that the diagnosis you get from Claude or ChatGPT is better than a normal doctor's because it's not fatigued, it's not limited to 20 minutes of your time, and it can make connections across all these different inputs. It is unlike any doctor out there.

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.

Highly recommend.

Content of the week.

Rob, go.

I mean, The Odyssey. How can you not? There are 2 things this weekend: The Odyssey and the World Cup final.

Yeah, I have an IMAX ticket.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. I already have my IMAX ticket for Dune: Part Three in December, just to be clear. By the way, the new Dune: Part Three trailer came out this week, and that movie is going to be incredible. I'm just saying, go watch that. Go watch The Odyssey in IMAX this weekend.

Can you even get an IMAX ticket for The Odyssey, or am I just out of luck here? I'm so late.

You're out of luck now, yeah, probably for a few weeks. That thing went on pre-sale 2 months ago, and the first weekend sold out in about 10 minutes.

Mhm.

For the true IMAX—the only true IMAX in the city is the one at Lincoln Center. You can go to all those fake ones and—

Is that the one you're going to?

Yeah.

Wow, Rob. Very good. Very good.

You know how it is. The only things I know are crypto and movies.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. World Cup Sunday, 3:00 p.m. Crazy Argentina game.

Are you putting money on that?

No. I don't like sports betting.

I'm all in on Spain.

Argentina. I'm Spanish-Mexican. I think Argentina is going to win it. Messi is just a destabilizing player. It's just sad to see England lose, to be honest. I was rooting for them.

[snorts]

Argentina crushed Mexico in the last World Cup, I think, and it was like overtime. Then you just had one guy throw from way behind the goalpost, and that's what Argentina has. I think they're going to win it.

I was shocked to see France play the way they did against Spain. I really thought France was going to come in and play well.

Yeah. For me, I'm going to cheat. I don't have a good one, but I have this thing bookmarked that I want to read. This guy Dan Koe has been putting out some pretty good content on X, and his latest article is called “How to Articulate Yourself Intelligently.”

I've heard your feedback, ladies and gentlemen, so I'm trying to level up. I'm going to read that, and I promise I'm going to come on Thursday super sharp, super precise. As Rob says, you have to listen, listen, listen. So I'm going to read that. I don't know if it's good or not.

I'm a sucker for some personal development content.

Personal development.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe he'll find his—

Insert all the comments on the—what was that?

I said maybe somebody will find your microphone for next week.

That's right. Yeah. I'm still raw-dogging this.

[laughter] [gasps]

All right, Rickson Gracie. You guys ever heard of the Gracie family?

Negative.

Thank you for responding. The Gracie family basically created jiu-jitsu. I knew none of this until I just read this book. It was recommended by a friend. He said it changed his life.

Rickson Gracie's family basically created jiu-jitsu. Rickson Gracie's brother created the UFC. Brazilian jiu-jitsu—they created the whole sport. Rickson Gracie was undefeated, the best jiu-jitsu fighter of all time.

Unlike everyone else who trained their ass off—I mean, he trained his ass off—but he did all these breathing techniques. So it was half an amazing story about his son dying, gangs, drugs, and creating the UFC.

It's like half a story about that and then half a story about how he became the best fighter. Some people say he's the best fighter in the history of fighting, since we've gone to the mat. It was all breathwork and meditation. It's very much a story of mind over matter. Good book. It's 6 hours on Audible; I ripped through it on a walk. Good one.

Sounds like you're cheating, but we'll take the recommendation.

I'm cheating because I'm doing Audible? Dude, Audible's not cheating.

I know.

You have to. When do you have time to sit down? Ain't nobody got time for that.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

All right, folks. Rob, enjoy the rest of your trip in DC. Santi, Godspeed to you. Memory longs.

Yes, sir. Thank you.

Cheers, folks.

Appreciate you guys. Have a good weekend.