Everyone Is Watching AI While Crypto’s Bull Market Builds | Weekly Roundup
Jason YanowitzSantiago Roel Santos
The central paradox is that AI owns the narrative while crypto may already be in a bull market. LPs remain preoccupied with AI, even as Yano says crypto interest has revived after 18 barren months and some tokens have moved dramatically: “No one believes this is a bull market, yet tokens have increased 50 times.” His renewed watchlists show returning appetite, but also the risk that sidelined investors chase after the move.
Anthropic became the proxy for a broader question: can frontier-model revenue ever outrun compute expense and relentless customer switching? The hosts cite reported economics of $1 in revenue per $60 of compute, a recent absence from OpenRouter’s top 10, and possibly flattening ARR—but repeatedly admit they have not seen the full S-1. The disagreement is unresolved: Santiago presents the demand and usage evidence, while Jason attributes the plateau to compute constraints, citing Anthropic’s usage limits, but says capacity may constrain other businesses more than Anthropic itself.
AI infrastructure is attractive only if compute stays scarce long enough to repay an extraordinary fixed-cost buildout. The episode estimates that 1 gigawatt of current-generation AI capacity costs $50–60 billion, roughly half in Nvidia chips, and could generate $10–20 billion annually at $2.50–$3.50 hourly rental rates and 80–90% utilization. A private-credit executive’s harsher verdict was that the projects require “a venture-capital view of private credit” and that lenders underestimate downside protection.
Falling inference costs could strand capacity—or unlock enough usage to validate Jevons’ paradox. Santiago was unsure whether the model discussed was Jev or Type Safe; for Jev, he said it was 238 times cheaper than Fable, 70 times cheaper than Opus, and 38 times cheaper than Sonnet. That threatens forecasts built on today’s expensive workloads. Yet AI penetration remains below 5%, while one Blackstone portfolio reportedly expects token spending to rise from $25 million to $500 million in a year: “You’re starting from a very low level of penetration.”
Crypto’s investable expression has shifted from “long stablecoins” to “how do I go long a token?” The prior answer included Coinbase and Circle; today the hosts point to Backpack and Securitize, with Robinhood potentially offering a cleaner public-market expression. Legal structure and tax treatment matter alongside technology. Yano admits Backpack grew 50x while he watched—“What an idiot I am”—and says he still plans to buy Backpack and Pump, while Santi discloses buying more Zcash.
The hypothetical $200 billion FTX portfolio is an underwriting warning, not evidence of venture skill. Anthropic, SpaceX, Cursor, Solana, and Robinhood might have created one of the top five venture-capital funds of all time, but Santiago rejects the comparison: “If I had an unlimited money faucet” and invested in everyone, a few winners would prove little. The sharper bubble signal was that “the person who did the most due diligence was Taylor Swift and her team.”
LPs are beginning to treat crypto as the countercyclical alternative to crowded AI, particularly in growth-stage fintech. The hosts estimate roughly 60 crypto-related growth companies, many using stablecoins or tokenized assets, versus perhaps 15 suitable targets for Coatue’s new $8 billion fund. Capital looks especially scarce between $500 million and $5 billion valuations, while accessible early-stage AI funds increasingly receive the answer: “It’s too late.”
Financial agents may compress some friction rents without overturning wealth management as quickly as expected. Jason’s framing is that personal agents could move consumers toward cheaper or better financial products, while “by definition LLMs give you mediocre advice”; median advice could still improve outcomes for millions without basic financial literacy. Agents may accelerate active trading and movement toward cheaper products, but younger users appear to trade faster while older, wealthier Americans remain more buy-and-hold, and incumbents still control the available product menu.
1. Frontier-model growth has not resolved the unit-economics question
Jason separates AI’s undeniable product progress from its private-market pricing: some companies could become “literally trillion-dollar companies,” while others are “complete zeros, and we have no idea which one it is.” Unlike crypto in 2020–21, AI has not yet produced a Celsius-like failure that reveals where the weakest underwriting sits.
Anthropic is the test case. The hosts cite reporting that it generated $1 of revenue for every $60 of compute, disappeared from OpenRouter’s top 10 after early August, and may have seen ARR stabilize. They nonetheless emphasize that they have not reviewed the complete S-1 and are “speculating without understanding what’s going on.”
The disagreement is unresolved. Santiago presents the compute-cost, usage-ranking, and ARR evidence, then asks why Jason attributes the plateau to computing power. Jason points to Anthropic actively limiting his usage, while also saying compute may constrain many other businesses more than Anthropic itself. The available data are insufficient to settle the question.
A further concentration risk is offered cautiously: roughly one-quarter of revenue reportedly comes from two customers, “Meta and Alibaba, I think.”
Competition makes the economics harder to defend. Users switch when Codex becomes better than Claude Code, OpenAI appears to catch Anthropic in ARR, and open-source alternatives keep improving. Santi’s valuation discipline is blunt: “I don’t know if Anthropic is worth $2 trillion. I’m not a buyer at that level.”
2. The data-center boom can satisfy real demand and still destroy capital
Santiago recounts that a private-credit executive told him data-center prerequisites, payback periods, and cash-flow profiles “make absolutely no sense” on conventional risk-return terms. His criticism of venture capitalists was sharper: “These guys know absolutely nothing about loans. They know nothing about downside protection,” so he expects much of the financing to blow up.
The hosts’ preferred analogy is the railroad boom: demand can be genuine, forecasts broadly correct, and the eventual infrastructure socially valuable—yet excessive debt-funded construction can still bankrupt operators. The load-bearing questions are: “Will we be limited in computing resources over the next 5 years or not?” and will demand continue growing exponentially?
Their rough build economics put 1 gigawatt of current-generation AI compute at $50–60 billion, about half for Nvidia chips. At rental rates of $2.50–$3.50 per hour and 80–90% utilization, it could generate $10–20 billion annually, implying roughly a 3–5-year payback—but only if pricing, utilization, and chip usefulness hold.
Residual value has so far been better than skeptics expected: aging H100s and Blackwell GPUs can serve open-source models and less demanding workloads, unlike obsolete Bitcoin-mining ASICs. The longer-dated risk is space-based compute; as relayed from a Blackstone investor in CoreWeave, efficient orbital data centers could impair terrestrial assets within a 5–10-year window.
3. Model efficiency cuts both ways for compute demand
As models become cheaper and more workloads shift toward open-source or less advanced models, the hosts question whether demand will remain tied to today’s compute intensity. Santiago was unsure whether the system discussed was “Jev” or “Type Safe”; he said Jev was 238 times cheaper than Fable, 70 times cheaper than Opus, and 38 times cheaper than Sonnet. OpenAI released something similar a week later, though its precise architecture and savings were unclear.
That efficiency threatens capacity forecasts built on today’s compute intensity, but Santiago invokes the blockchain analogy: gas prices fall, and Jevons’ paradox requires believing that usage will expand enough to offset cheaper computation. With “less than 5% of the population” connected to AI, cheaper inference might grow total consumption from a very low base.
One Blackstone allocator reportedly expects token spending across portfolio companies to jump from $25 million last year to $500 million this year, a 20x increase. Much of that workload is migrating to cheaper open-source models—the tension in one statistic: explosive enterprise adoption alongside relentless substitution toward lower-cost compute.
4. Crypto’s bull market is moving faster than its participants
Yano says nobody wanted tokens for 18 months; now he has watchlists and says he has 10 potential purchases. Santi’s pushback is the cycle in miniature: making a list is not buying. Yano concedes he ignored the Druckenmiller lesson that fast markets reward stating a thesis first and revising it later.
Backpack is his painful specimen: Blockworks’ research analysts, Armani Ferrante, and the show’s own conversations repeatedly surfaced it, yet Yano watched it grow 50x. He now intends to buy “for 10 times more than I should have,” while timestamping that he owned none during recording. He also plans to capitulate on Pump; Santi discloses adding Zcash and having venture exposure to both Pump and Backpack.
The thematic trade has evolved. Last cycle’s question—“How do I open a long position in stablecoins?”—led toward Coinbase, Circle, and perhaps Tether exposure. Today outsiders ask how to go long a token, with the hosts naming Backpack and Securitize; for tokenized stocks, Santi says Robinhood may be the cleaner public-market expression. Backpack’s appeal is framed as technology plus a legal framework that Armani focused on from day one.
Market plumbing is opening too. Robinhood’s U.S.-regulated perpetuals use Bitstamp and the foreign-board-of-trade route rather than Lighter. SEC guidance also appears to say token redemptions under “functional protocols” are not management efforts. The hosts discuss liquid staking and whether staking commissions might be viable, but admit they do not understand the boundaries and want Miles Jennings and Gabe Shapiro to explain the updates.
5. FTX turns a spectacular paper portfolio into an underwriting warning
The producer calculates that FTX’s early positions in Anthropic, SpaceX, Cursor, Solana, and Robinhood could now be worth about $200 billion, potentially making it one of the five largest venture-capital funds of all time in absolute dollars. The statistic is striking, but Santiago says it answers the wrong question.
His rebuttal is that a venture fund must compound a fixed pool through sizing, selection, and accountability. FTX instead had an effectively unlimited pool of customer money and invested across nearly everything it encountered. Jason sharpens the point: “If you give me all your money” and one of many indiscriminate checks succeeds, does that make him a good venture capitalist?
Jason notes that FTX’s access itself was extraordinary. FTX became so prestigious that declining to invest made institutions look eccentric, while its backers relaxed underwriting despite available financial and biographical checks. The hosts see an AI echo when rounds rise from $1 billion to $5 billion—or $10 billion—within three months as funds scramble to compensate for missing SpaceX, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
6. Capital is rotating toward crypto’s neglected growth-stage middle
Santiago says he began hearing LP doubts about AI froth in late July or August, and that the conversation accelerated over the past month. Support in major crypto assets, continued stablecoin growth, and rapid expansion at Rain and prediction-market companies are encouraging allocators to consider a countercyclical move while AI rounds look increasingly difficult to justify.
The opening is primarily late-stage. The hosts expect larger funds aimed at Series B through D and pre-IPO rounds, but stress that only a few crypto managers “have earned the right” after the disastrous 2021 vintage. Then, growth was rapid but customer quality, spending, and fundamentals were weak; today they argue that the fundamentals are substantially better.
Their internal map contains about 60 crypto-adjacent growth companies, mostly fintechs built around stablecoins or tokenized assets. Examples include Rain, companies building on prediction-market infrastructure, Jeeves—which announced another $10 million—and neobanks Flex and Slash. By comparison, Coatue may have only about 15 targets for its new $8 billion fund.
The capital shortage appears most acute between roughly $500 million and $5 billion of valuation, below the scale where enormous generalist funds concentrate. One unnamed company reportedly grew 55% in the third quarter, accelerated above $80 million in revenue, and still struggles for attention because investors are asking, “Should we do more Anthropic?”
7. Financial agents improve the median before they dismantle incumbents
Jason expects personal agents to move consumers toward cheaper or better financial products, making them “probably really bad” for some incumbent economics. Yet he thinks agent-to-agent settlement may favor stablecoins while ordinary user transactions remain less affected, limiting how directly the change accrues to crypto.
His deliberately unglamorous claim is that “by definition LLMs give you mediocre advice.” That can still be transformative when the baseline is poor financial literacy, but it also produces clusters of people receiving similar recommendations. A large private-fintech COO questioned whether conversational advice improves on pre-filled direct-indexing products that already deliver essentially the same portfolio.
Agents could stimulate more active trading, but the hosts distinguish younger behavior from the wealth-owning population: Santiago first says people over roughly 35 are buy-and-hold, then qualifies that younger segments trade faster and that the precise age split is uncertain. Wealth managers will still curate restricted asset menus, agents may only optimize movement among Treasury and money-market products, and checking or savings yields may rise over time—making disruption real, but less sweeping than advertised.
Full transcript
1. Silicon Valley’s AI Drama
Okay, everyone. Welcome back to the review. How are you guys?
Good. Big week.
Man, what is it? Ladies and gentlemen?
We are no longer “ladies and gentlemen.”
Let’s not run with this anymore, shall we? This is a Tim Ferriss podcast. How’s the West Coast? Do you like the Vinod Khosla–Sean Maguire fight over Cognition, a drama that concerns 500 people in the world?
This is a drama that concerns 500 people in the world, and they’re all with me in Palo Alto. Literally all of them. I was at an event last night, at dinner with these venture capitalists, and everyone was like, “Oh my God, did you see what he tweeted? Did you see what Vinod tweeted? Incredible.”
“I saw Keith Rabois’s tweet.” I’m like, “Guys, what are we doing here?”
This is so funny. There’s Twitter, and then there’s your Twitter, which is currently filled with Palo Alto science fiction that nobody cares about, right? I think I saw someone tweet about it today. I was asking my friends back home about Instinct, and there wasn’t a single person who had ever heard of Instinct except for his friends. It’s the same thing over and over again.
I’ll say this about Vinod: I’ve always really admired him because he would say things like, “Anything goes,” and it’s like he doesn’t care. I really admire that. Keith Rabois is kind of the same way, but this drama with Cognition, and then the big investors in Cognition and Factory AI—he’s just really harshly mocking the guy at Factory AI. Sean says, “Oh, you don’t have checks,” but Sean won’t provide checks either. I don’t know. The world could be a better place if venture capitalists didn’t tweet so much.
2. What Could Pop AI’s Bubble?
That’s all I can say. This is TMZ now, man. I swear. San Francisco is becoming more like Los Angeles.
For those who missed it, there’s a company called Factory. They compete with a company called Cognition. We’ve talked about Cognition before because Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s general counsel, moved to Cognition. They’re one of the fastest-growing companies in the world right now. They just raised, I think, 40 billion, 42 billion, something like that.
In any case, Factory had a board member who had been the first salesperson at Snowflake. He rose through the company to become chief revenue officer at Snowflake. Cognition just hired him. Well, he was a board member at another company. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
What we haven’t seen is what we saw in crypto in 2020 and 2021: how many really hot, amazing companies there were, and how many of them had catastrophic failures. There hasn’t been a single pin that popped in the AI bubble. Some of these companies are incredible—world-class. These will literally be trillion-dollar companies, and some of them are complete zeros. We have no idea which is which.
A bunch of them also received multibillion-dollar valuations. I’m less interested in the drama with Vinod and Sean. I’m curious about what exactly is going to burst this bubble, dare I say it—or maybe I should say which companies will fail. What kind of company is this? Just tell me who the Celsius is.
Well, can we do that? It’s also a good transition to what’s happening, or at least to talking about Anthropic, right? The S-1 is out for a few people already, but none of us have seen it in its entirety yet. The Financial Times was talking about last year’s revenue and unit economics, which were essentially this: they’re getting $1 of revenue for every $60 of computing.
So even Anthropic’s unit economics—not to mention all the other costs of training new models and so on—were very, very negative. At the same time, if you look at OpenRouter, since the beginning of August there hasn’t been an Anthropic model in OpenRouter’s top 10. Before that, there was always an Anthropic model in the top 10.
If you look at a bunch of other information, maybe their ARR has stabilized a bit over the last few months. When you put all of this together, the question is: Are the economics of these businesses simply terrible because of the capital expenditures and computing power required? Are we living in a period where, until we get much more—and much cheaper—computing online, these companies won’t be able to generate profits and will have to continue to be funded by venture capital?
Of course, Anthropic will be fine, although perhaps not very well at a valuation of $2 trillion. But there are all these other companies building on foundational models that probably also have deeply negative economics, where the venture capital tap will definitely turn off much faster.
Yes, I saw the Anthropic revenue graph you’re talking about. It first grew, then stopped. I don’t think it’s because of a lack of demand for Anthropic. I think it’s because of computing power.
Why do you think so?
Because Anthropic keeps telling me to stop using it. It’s like, “Sam, no.” I recorded an episode yesterday—or Tuesday—that’s coming out on Monday with Andraves [?]. I don’t know his last name. He was on the GPU infrastructure team at Meta, and he now runs a company called Compute Desk.
There are companies like Silicon Data, Compute Desk, and Oram. Have you considered any of those? I’m not sure. He and Brett Harrison run Architect.
The whole episode was about computing, so I don’t want to talk too much about that right now because we have this episode coming out on Monday. It’s a very deep dive into what’s happening in the computing markets today. My conclusion is that compute capacity isn’t always going to be a limitation, but right now it’s still very, very, very limited.
I don’t think this is a limitation on Anthropic’s revenue. I believe it’s a limitation for many other businesses. Apparently, there isn’t much data on this, but I don’t have it. I haven’t seen the S-1, so we’ll see when it comes out. A lot of what we’re doing now is speculating without understanding what’s going on.
You see, in the S-1, a quarter of Anthropic’s revenue comes from 2 customers, which are Meta and Alibaba, I think.
Dude, this is artificial intelligence. Let’s put this into perspective. Look at the Fear and Greed Index in crypto. Crypto is currently at something like all-time euphoria. Fear is low. People are making money again. Crypto will cure cancer. Everything is great. Everyone is thriving. We should talk about this, right?
In my opinion, there’s a lot of enthusiasm on the timeline. As for AI, it’s leaning more toward P(doom) now. It’s more like fear. Although you see these valuations in the private markets, that’s not the case in the venture capital market. Venture capital markets are still booming, but let’s put this in perspective.
Micron reported earnings last night, and they blew out earnings. Its shares fell slightly; today they fell. There’s a lot of skepticism about AI in general. There’s also Michael Burry’s thesis that all of this is overstated. Nvidia acts like it’s backing everything because it has to, and it’s doing all this off-balance-sheet financing, investing in all these different players, and creating things.
3. AI’s Boom Vs The Debt Markets
I think it’s probably the case that when the market goes down, these kinds of narratives resurface. I don’t think there’s any single person, other than Michael Burry, who would say that this is all about supported off-balance-sheet deals. Pat Grady at Sequoia described the state of artificial intelligence very well.
He mentioned something that I think is nuanced: Most of these hyperscalers have run out of cash flow to fund this development. They’re turning to the debt markets, which may or may not be available. I think that’s the biggest open question.
Yes, but what about the return on investment? Can I point this out specifically about the debt markets?
I was at dinner a few weeks ago. It was a football-related dinner with a lot of donors to the United States Soccer Federation. One of the guys I was sitting across from was the head of private credit at one of the largest private-credit firms in the world.
We started talking about a bunch of different things, but one of the things he told me was this: These data-center developments—the capex, the payback periods, and the cash-flow profiles—make absolutely no sense from a risk-and-return perspective. You need to have essentially a venture-capital view of private credit to be able to continue funding this.
Well, this guy’s skill set is definitely conservative.
One of the things we started talking about was how venture capitalists get involved in this. There are a lot of equity investments or off-balance-sheet investments, like hyperscalers, and different types of derivative compute—or new versions of how to use computing. But he said he was essentially humiliating all venture capitalists. He said something like, “These guys know absolutely nothing about loans. They know nothing about downside protection. If you ask me, it’s all going to blow up.”
It’s a view that’s, of course, very conservative and doomerist. He has a certain perspective, but it’s a view that I’m hearing more and more often from private credit officers. Then I come here to Palo Alto, and there’s some guy who’s just been hired by one of the big venture funds to start doing lending, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s obvious—big paybacks and stuff.”
I think the key metric here is the payback period in the calculations. That, by the way, was a problem when Anthropic held back from ramping up its capacity fully and OpenAI didn’t. It looks like there was a lot happening in the timeline, including emergency funding. Then SoftBank came to the rescue.
Looking back, this seems like a very drastic move by OpenAI, because nobody has the computing capacity right now. Data centers are hard to get built, and it’s going to be even harder to get them built in the medium term. Politically, it’s become very difficult, too. Oracle, for example, has delayed construction of its data center in New Mexico, and if you have spare capacity now, your utilization rates are going up.
Look at CoreWeave and maybe compare it with Crusoe. These guys, as far as I can see, are tight on capacity and utilization. Well, no, they’re both deeply involved in it. CoreWeave has real scale, while Crusoe is like a newer company; it’s still very early there. The multiples are really big, and this applies to all non-leading hyperscalers.
Yeah, I mean, for every $1 billion you invest in building a data center, I think we can pull up the numbers, but I’m basically saying that what you’re saying is there’s no payback.
4. Will Compute Demand Keep Growing?
I don’t think that’s the case. I think he means that, yes, there is a payback now, but this is a classic example of a railroad boom. In the United States, over a century ago, there was a lot of demand and a lot of unmet demand, so a lot of people started investing, and it was financed mostly by debt.
It turned out that people built too much and invested too much, the debt was impaired, and a bunch of companies went bankrupt. A bunch of those companies went bankrupt because of overinvestment, not because of a lack of good demand forecasting.
It requires a belief—which I think is a common, mainstream belief among a lot of people in the technologically progressive community—that we’re going to be limited in computing resources for many years to come. That’s what it all comes down to. Will we be limited in computing resources over the next 5 years or not? Will the demand for computing continue to grow exponentially or not? Those are 2 questions that you need to answer, and no one knows the answer to them.
The other key to this—I heard it from Blackstone, an investor in CoreWeave—was at the same conference, and this is public information. They said the main argument is for ground-based data centers. If you build space-based data centers within a reasonable period of time, it could seriously undermine the economics of data centers on Earth, because data centers in space can be much more efficient, using energy from the sun and so on.
I think there was a pretty significant event this week where SpaceX installed a data center in space—or one of the payloads, or something like that. I think that’s the most important risk if you’re investing in all these facilities and places on Earth. But that’s probably a 5-to-10-year timeframe.
I also see a bunch of deals involving small, mobile computing for edge computing. We were talking about Crusoe, of course, where they’re doing something like shipping containers in oil fields and burning natural gas. There are many people trying to create similar models where you can place multiple racks in different locations and meet this demand.
There’s a real issue here, and these things are being funded by venture capital everywhere. I think Spark backed one company, the name of which I forgot, and there are a bunch of others. We have a little experience with one that is still operating in stealth mode.
The question is whether these companies also compete with the big hyperscalers. For example, how do unit economics work for hyperscalers compared with these companies? There are a lot of questions about the huge amount of money being invested by equity providers in products and businesses that are not like traditional venture capital, and how that’s evolving over time. That’s what people are trying to figure out now.
I think there’s a really good risk-reward payoff for early investors in these things, but as it’s moved from equity to debt—or for late-stage equity investors—it feels like a disaster.
What happens in terms of profitability? For me, it’s not like that at all.
5. The Economics Behind AI Compute
Yes. Just to wrap up this conversation, I was waiting for my computational-constraints bot to provide an answer. These are roughly Jensen Huang’s numbers on this. I like most of them, so here are some rough numbers, and then we’ll stop.
A gigawatt of current-generation AI computing costs between $50 billion and $60 billion. About half of that is Nvidia chips. So, building a 1-gigawatt data center costs between $50 billion and $60 billion. At current rental prices of $2.50 to $3.50 per hour and a utilization rate of 80% to 90%, this brings in $10 billion to $20 billion per year.
So, to your point, the payback is 3 to 5 years, but it all depends on rental prices and the useful life of these chips. That’s a constant concern, although I think the useful life of these chips is actually longer than people thought a few years ago.
But the residual value has increased, which is what people are talking about. Bitcoin miners had the same problem. What was the useful life of the H100? What eventually happened to Bitcoin miners was that the ASICs became so obsolete that they were practically impossible to sell after their useful life ended.
What’s happening now, at least with GPUs, is that as they become less useful or less advanced for computing, they still have pretty good residual value. Blackwell GPUs and H100s have surprised people in that regard. The depreciation was lower.
By the way, just to add a nuance, I think there’s a lot of discussion about how not everything will go to advanced markets. A lot of things are open source. You still need, for example, a computer to run these models, and that’s where I think a lot of the demand for these aging chips is going to go.
You don’t need the most powerful rack to run most tasks. Right now, less than 5% of the population is connected to AI, and it’s very concentrated among a few people.
Another thing to note is that I don’t know if we were talking about Jev or Type Safe when it came out a few weeks ago. Jev is 238 times cheaper than Fable. It’s 70 times cheaper than Opus and 38 times cheaper than Sonnet. A week later, OpenAI came out with something similar, although I’m unclear how much cheaper it would be. They didn’t talk about it because it’s unclear whether they’re just changing some of the current models or creating a completely new one.
It also seems obvious to me that a significant part of the expectations around demand for computing is based on the fact that people don’t properly understand that, over time, demand will decrease for models that require much less computing resources. That’s a risk.
Blockchains, by the way, have the same problem with paying for gas. Gas prices are going down, and that’s Jevons’ paradox. You need to believe that there will be more demand, and you’re starting from a very low level of penetration.
I heard this at breakfast: the guy who runs the public-markets fund at Blackstone, which allocates funds across all the different Blackstone funds, was saying that token spend in their portfolio companies was $25 million last year. This year, it will be $500 million—a 20-times increase in token spending across their portfolio, which I think is a pretty representative measure of enterprise token adoption.
He said, “Yes, most of our workloads are moving to open-source projects and cheaper models.” So, again, you want to be where the demand is. It’s funny, because both of these big companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are postponing their IPOs. I don’t think they’re front-running it. I think they just—
Wait, Anthropic wasn’t postponing its IPO, was it? I heard—I don’t think they’re still going to try to go public. They’ve pushed it a little bit. It was originally sometime in October, and now it’s November. I don’t know what it’s going to be like. I thought they were still going to launch in October.
Yes, but okay. I think it might be a little more difficult for them, but in general, I don’t know if Anthropic is worth $2 trillion. I’m not a buyer at that level, to be honest.
No, no. Another truth is that people are constantly switching between these products. For example, Codex is now better than Claude Code, and people are switching. OpenAI seems to have almost caught up with Anthropic in terms of ARR, right? They keep changing direction.
6. Is Crypto’s Bull Market Back?
This ongoing competition between them, as well as between open-source models and new models that are coming out, like Jev and so on, is going to continue to have an impact on the unit economics of these things, which, at least as far as we know at the moment, is very, very negative. Is this a bull market, Yano?
For those who can’t see us, what are we talking about here? The background was, “Why are we talking about AI when all the crypto tokens are—” What are we doing? We’ve been waiting for this for 2 damn years.
“Hey, Yano, what do you want to talk about?”
“This is a crypto podcast.”
“I’d like to know Santiago’s opinion about AI.”
This is how I feel, seriously. I have a feeling that no one in the world has wanted to buy tokens for the last 18 months, and now I’m making watchlists again. I want to buy. I have 10 tokens that I want to buy.
How are you guys feeling? I already know your answer, bro, so I’m not addressing you; I’m addressing Santi.
You just said that. You created a watchlist to buy, but you didn’t buy anything. So, do you want to know everything you need to know about the cycle? There are a lot of people who are traumatized and pushed to the sidelines. No one believes this is a bull market, yet tokens have increased 50x.
No, I think this is a bull market. I just didn’t take Stanley Druckenmiller’s advice, which you’ve been giving me for a long time: cryptocurrency markets move incredibly fast—and really, all markets do that now—so when you have a thesis, state it and revise it later.
That was me with Backpack. Backpack has grown 50x since I mentioned it on this podcast. I’m not going to be a financial commentator, but you even told me about Backpack when I mentioned 3 names. It was one of them.
No, no, I know you did it. I know you had a nice conversation. We had conversations with Armani, and our research analysts here were saying, “Backpack, Backpack.” I was like, “Put Backpack on your watchlist.” What an idiot I am.
What an idiot. And, by the way, I’m still going to buy Backpack. I’m going to buy it, but I’m such a boomer.
What is the FDV on Backpack?
I’m going to—but I’m actually still— I said I have 5 tokens. We talked about this. I have 5 tokens. Now I’m going to buy Backpack. I’m going to buy it for 10 times more than I should have, but I still think Backpack—
Let’s just say that last cycle, 3 years ago, the main question was, “How do I go long stablecoins?” There were a few key winners. If you backed that thesis and blindly followed it, you could say, “Okay, I can buy Coinbase, I can buy Circle. Maybe you bought Tether shares; I don’t know.”
We did a pretty good job with that thesis. Maybe you mean Robinhood on the venture side, but if you had a thesis about going long stablecoins, it was a little confusing. Still, you had a few names you could buy.
Today, the main question I get asked by people who aren’t in crypto but are quite experienced is, “How do I go long a token?” We asked this question in a previous podcast. For example, who are Backpack and Securitize? It’s like these two. You’re not telling me who has the best technology?
Kyle had a great idea, which is a way to understand whether you actually own something and whether it has tax implications. We had the same problem in DeFi, where if you wrapped it or didn’t wrap it, there was a key difference. Then you had that surprise at the end of the year when your accountant said, “No, you actually sold that token for another token in the pool.”
I think that was an idea that Kyle and Armani were pushing. I tell people that if you’re passionate about tokenized stocks, the best way to express that trade is to open a long position in Robinhood, maybe. But Backpack is an interesting company because I feel like they have the best technology, and since day 1, Armani has been extremely focused on creating the best legal framework.
To tie this to tokens, because I don’t want to make this a Backpack scam fest. By the way, do you want to know how cool I am? How long have we been doing Empire? I should already know the game.
You sell Polymarket and Ethena; Santi, you run Backpack. I don’t even have a Backpack. I should have bought Backpack before talking about this. How cool I am.
So, just to tell people, I’m coming in when you’re coming in. We record this on Thursdays at 12:50 p.m. Eastern Time. At that time, I do not own Backpack. I’ll probably buy it in the next day or 2. I am a commoner. I am just like you. I am a pleb. I am Santi’s exit liquidity.
I said I was for Santi—
No, I mean, that’s what—
And, by the way, Pump.fun. I’m going to buy Pump.fun. I’m going to capitulate and buy Pump.fun.
I was on a podcast the other day and said, “Listen, I don’t usually address people who have criticized me on the timeline, but let’s just say people have told me that I’m off the rails.” They forget that I have a fairly substantial venture fund, of which Pump.fun and Backpack are a part, so you can all go away.
Austin, I just found out from the Spotify team that we get scolded when Santi swears. Maybe we can tone it down a little bit and censor it there.
Wait a minute. You know what I noticed? There are children. There are kids who listen to this. I actually know there are kids who listen to it because there are 2 listeners I know who listen to it when they’re traveling with their kids.
I sincerely, sincerely do not apologize.
You know what? Founders, damn it. You know David Senra, the host of Founders? He swears so much. He’s swearing now, and there’s an evolution there. I’m like, “Wait a minute.” Last time, he swore a lot.
I swear a lot.
And he’s like, “Yes, up here.” But wait, wait, wait. We have 1 more week left where we’re not allowed to talk about this show.
Good. We can’t talk about him swearing. We can’t talk about this show. We can’t talk about Invest Like the Best.
Can the whole Patrick O’Shaughnessy—
Listen, anyway, you—
No, go on. Are you buying any tokens right now or not?
Yes. I bought some Zcash. I had some before, and then I just bought some more. But no, I don’t have time to do that, you know? I have a venture capital portfolio. I scattered the seeds, and I’m going to let them sprout. I feel good about some of the positions.
7. Content Of The Week
Did you just write your most popular tweet, with the highest engagement of all time, this week?
I got that retweet from Elon. It was beautiful. I was sitting on the sofa.
Good. Did we talk about this last week, or was it this week?
I thought it was this week.
That was a tweet about Apollo, right?
Yes, I think you’re right. Anyway, I was sitting on the couch, and Elon retweeted it. It broke.
Speaking of shilling tokens, Blockworks has an incredible product to deliver. We have shipped four products that help you with tokens. Speaking of tokens. We just—When can I buy a Blockworks token?
You know, this isn’t the craziest idea.
This is not the craziest idea. I’m saying, you know, we’re in a bull market.
Perhaps.
When I got on this podcast before we started recording, you thought, “You know what’s the best company?” At that time, it was Blockworks. So I said, “You know who is such a great company? Probably the second-best company after Blockworks is Rain.”
I just heard about some new deals that Rain has in the works, which I think are confidential at the moment, but I think Rain is delivering at great prices. I don’t think some of your portfolio companies will be very successful, bro, but I will say that some of them, like Rain, will be quite successful.
Anyway, Pump.fun. And what happened to the other one we were just talking about?
Backpack.
Backpack. You have it. You create watchlists.
I sleep for about 3 hours. We’ve shipped more in 60 days than in the last 2 years.
But you’re podcasting, like some other people, like Mike, who like to ship.
Yes, Mike is in Korea now, meeting with Korean exchanges. Someone has to manage the portfolio. He does real things. I do what I do.
Listen, your business—regardless, all business—comes down to 1 thing, which is attention. What Yanni does, like Mark Zuckerberg tweets and Paul Tudor Jones tweets, is play his part here and publicize Blockworks MCP.
Sometimes I say that doing this podcast is a net negative for Blockworks in terms of—
I don’t know about a net negative for Blockworks. I think it helps us a lot, but during fundraising, and when we were fundraising—
Oh.
Do you remember about a year ago? We asked 2 people, “Can’t you just do a podcast?” I received one of the biggest slaps I’ve ever been given. But, Yanni, you don’t want to take money from people like that.
8. Was SBF Actually A Great Investor?
Don’t put me in a box. In any case, there are a lot of really good topics that we have to talk about. One of them—we can’t end this podcast without mentioning this crazy statistic about FTX.
We can’t finish. We haven’t even started. We haven’t discussed any news this entire week. That’s just an interesting fact, isn’t it?
Austin, our producer, left this note here. It says, “If FTX hadn’t sold its portfolio—and they invested in Anthropic very early on, SpaceX, Cursor, Solana, obviously, and Robinhood—that portfolio would be worth approximately $200 billion. This would probably be one of the top 5 venture capital funds of all time.”
What? Just pure dollars returned. I hate it when people point that out.
Why aren’t we surprised? The point is that venture capitalists raise a certain pool of dollars, and then I have to create a profit from that established pool of dollars, right? I have to be very thoughtful about how I use it, what size I choose, what my responsibilities are, and what I’m being asked to do.
If I had an unlimited money faucet that was free, that I stole from other people’s piles, and I could invest it in the businesses of every person I ever met—which is basically what they did—then of course the returns would look incredible. They invested in everything. They were the most active investor among many because they didn’t do underwriting. They put money into everything that came their way in Silicon Valley and all over the place.
That’s the crazy part. It’s a point that doesn’t matter because this wasn’t a venture business. He took a bunch of stolen money and showered it on a bunch of founders he wanted to flatter because he was insecure about himself.
Let’s put it this way: he gave the CEO of The Block, who we were competing with, $16 million in essentially free money.
Or some amount of money. It was a loan.
It was a loan, yes.
It was a loan he kept for himself.
Dude, this is a loan.
This is a loan. A loan is something that you have to pay back.
A loan is something you have to pay back. It was just a loan.
If you give me all your money and I just give it to anyone else for free, and then anyone who knocks on my door happens to have a good return, am I then a good venture capitalist?
The thing is, I think venture capital is just a game of averages. You invest more capital, more in the free markets.
The only thing I’m interested in is his access, which is a little crazy when you think about it. It’s not as simple as having billions and billions of dollars and just throwing money at people. You still want to say he was the most famous entrepreneur in the U.S. in 2021.
This is what I am. Do you want to talk about how the bubble bursts?
This is a bubble that’s bursting. People didn’t do due diligence, even though they could have checked his biographical data. They could have asked for financial information.
It’s a little crazy to me that this guy raised money from some of the most experienced people who were actively achieving success. You had Sequoia, Tiger, athletes—it’s crazy that the person who did the most due diligence was Taylor Swift and her team.
What the hell? Do you mean that Taylor Swift actually turned down her sponsorship deal with FTX?
It’s always been the case for me that the more money other funds make, the faster they loosen their underwriting standards and become too loose. I think we’re in that phase of the cycle right now, more than ever in AI.
If you’re a VC or growth fund and you haven’t had experience with something like SpaceX, your LPs are asking really tough questions and you’re trying to make up for these huge losses. Or, like most venture capital funds, you’re missing out until the very end. Many people didn’t invest in OpenAI, and now they’re trying to compensate for that.
I think that psychological implication—there’s a lot of foam there—is what I’m trying to say.
Yes. But I also like that you said it seemed like it was Sequoia, Andreessen, and athletes. Those were your 3 names. You were like, “Sequoia, Andreessen, and all the athletes.”
A lot of athletes invested, too. FTX and Tiger also invested money.
Well, yeah, I know. I just said it differently.
Here’s another one: if you weren’t an investor in FTX, you were an oddball. You were like, “You guys are idiots. You’re not investing?” It was really hard not to be an investor.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in AI now, but it’s starting to seem like if you’re not working with the key companies, it must be very stressful and difficult.
It’s not a criticism of any particular company, but when you see a round increase from $1 billion to $5 billion, or even $10 billion, in about 3 months, it begs the question: what’s going on?
We turned down FTX every time. I’ve been on other exchanges, but our general view was that the finances didn’t make sense when it happened later. We just thought he was a weird guy.
I think that, from an artificial intelligence perspective, I was actually spot-on with your point. I’m an LP in a number of other funds because I want to diversify my exposure. The vast majority of my wealth is in Dragonfly.
You play both sides. You’re like a snowflake seller.
I don’t play both sides because I’m not in crypto funds. I’m mostly in other things. I’m in some early-stage crypto funds because they provide good deal flow for me, but I’m mostly in other areas.
I asked my friend, who is also an LP in a bunch of funds, “Do you know of any really good early-stage AI funds that would be open to a small check from someone like me?”
He replied, “I think it’s all over. You can’t put money into this right now. You need to find something else. It’s too late.”
This is a very, very successful LP.
Too late in what sense? Is artificial intelligence already too late, or are the funds too overcrowded? Would they not take your money now because it’s too crowded to generate excess returns in pre-seed and seed AI funds?
I’m sure that if you’re in Sarah Guo’s fund, Conviction, or something like that, you obviously want to be in it. But for the vast majority of funds that people have access to, they say, “It’s too late.” There are no more excess profits flowing throughout the market.
9. Crypto’s Regulatory And Funding Shift
Yes. Conviction. This is your fund, right?
Conviction?
Yes, Conviction, I think.
Some news of the week: Coinbase—sorry, Robinhood—launched a whole bunch of things. They launched perps in the U.S. and announced they were doing it with Bitstamp, not with Lighter.
I mean, they’re U.S.-regulated perps. Lighter apparently isn’t regulated in the U.S. today, right?
They use what they call an FBOT, which is a Foreign Board of Trade—the same thing Coinbase originally used to offer perps in the U.S. Essentially, the CFTC is saying, “Since you’re regulated elsewhere, we don’t mind you offering the product through that regulated entity in another location or geographic region that we agree to for U.S. customers,” right?
They wouldn’t be able to offer Lighter perps to anyone in the U.S., whether they wanted to or not.
Of course.
Any other news this week? I feel like something was supposed to happen.
This random stuff, I think, was pretty interesting. The SEC guidance on buybacks—
Yes, yes, yes.
The SEC said that token redemptions under functional protocols are not management efforts, right?
Yes.
And also liquid staking. I read that staking commissions might be possible—viable.
Yes, it looks like that. Emphasis on “functional protocols,” whatever that means. I wish someone would read it and explain, “The way we define it is as this protocol or as this project.”
I mostly like it, but I don’t really understand it. When they released it, it seemed like all the securities laws had been thrown out the door. Then they put out FAQs and additional guidance that clarified things, which I think made it clear that the securities laws were still there.
To be honest, I don’t have all the details. I read it on Twitter like everyone else, but I basically just follow what Miles Jennings from a16z and Gabe Shapiro are saying. I tend to agree with those guys, and that’s my opinion.
Maybe we should bring both of them on and just listen, because there have been so many updates from the SEC that I need to get a good overview of everything.
Before we discuss this any further, are we getting more incoming inquiries from people who are interested in cryptocurrency, or is it still crickets?
Most people are still focused on AI. It’s definitely continuing to gain momentum.
I think I mentioned on this podcast a few times that, in August—maybe late July—we started hearing from some of the LPs: “AI is mostly bubbles and froth. A lot of the investments have already been made, and there’s no point in continuing to chase them.”
By the way, I don’t know if you listen to the Instinct podcast. It seemed like it was some Chinese artist, although we’re not talking about a Chinese podcast.
What can we say? Yes, sorry. Sorry, but I just mentioned it because I couldn't have walked away from this podcast feeling more justified in my thoughts on Instinct, but that's a separate topic.
So, it was a conversation that started with LPs sometime in July and August. To be honest, it has only gained momentum over the last month. I think the LP community is increasingly believing that maybe it's a good time to be countercyclical and invest in this space, especially as we've gained support for a lot of the top coins, like Bitcoin and so on.
As we've seen, stablecoins continue to grow quite rapidly. We continue to see companies like Rain and prediction-market companies growing quite rapidly, so it seems to me that the window is open for people to move a little bit away from AI in the LP community. People just think these rounds make very little sense at this point.
10. Is Crypto Growth Different This Time?
I think one of the interesting topics is venture-capital investing in late-stage crypto. I think it's going to get really hot right now, and I think that's where a lot of the capital that new funds raise will go, particularly at the later stages.
Omar, who used to work at Dragonfly, just moved to Brevan Howard, and the job title I saw on Twitter was Head of Growth Investments. I think there will be more of them. I think we're going to start seeing some of the big VCs raise very significant funds, mostly for late-stage growth investments: Series C, Series B, Series D, pre-IPO, that sort of thing.
I think there is definitely interest in things at later stages. I don't know if there's a lot of interest outside of a few crypto funds in investing in crypto funds that do this, because there are going to be pure or quantitative, large-capital investments in a very small number of funds.
Here's what I would say: There are only a few funds that have earned the right to go to late stage.
Okay, but can you explain to me who they are?
Last cycle, we had OpenSea. You had—what else? Bit by bit, you had— So, I know the question you're going to ask is: Who are they? Are there enough companies to attract?
If you're an LP and you say, "Show me the data, for example, of some of the larger rounds that have been done over the last few cycles, and what was their performance?" there are only a few names that are not underwater.
I discuss this a lot with LPs because we've been doing growth-stage investments, and this is a question I'm constantly asked. The reality is that crypto growth in 2021 was terrible. Everything people did was mostly terrible. What was also true was that the fundamentals were bad, and there was a lot of foam, just like we're talking about in the AI market today.
There were maybe 6 or 9 months of rapid growth because there was so much madness in that space. But the fundamentals, if you start looking at how companies were growing, who the customers were, and how they were spending, were not very good. Now everything is completely the opposite. The fundamentals are good.
We looked at this internally, and we think there are about 60 names that could be called crypto in some sense and that are growth-stage companies today. This is a pretty good target market for growth-stage investing.
For example, if you talk to Coatue today, they'll tell you that there are about 15 names they can invest in with their new $8 billion fund. I actually think that's pretty fast. Most of these companies are, in fact, fintech companies—fintech companies that use stablecoins or tokenized assets.
If you're investing at the growth stage right now, you need to be someone who has proven that you know how to invest in fintech. I think there are about 3 of us, maybe more, in the crypto space who have done it successfully at later stages.
What are these 60 names? Just name about 10.
What is Rain?
Prediction markets—there are a bunch of companies building on top of Rain and using stablecoins now, right? There's a company called Jeeves that announced earlier this week that it had raised another $10 million. It's kind of like a Ramp for a Latin American company.
There's a neobank called Flex. There's another neobank called Slash. There are probably 15 companies like that because a bunch of others are thriving. There are a bunch of other companies I could list, but honestly, I'd rather not do that.
No, no, of course not.
It's kind of like an alpha. Sorry.
I remember sharing one fintech deal with you. It was Omar, and fintech outside of cryptocurrency isn't that popular, except for Ramp. I feel like this is a good time. It seems like there has been less fraud, and I think a lot of people left the space a little disappointed.
Anecdotally, I shared a few deals with a few funds that asked, "What do you think about this?" They said, "I'm hesitant," whereas before they would have invested in the deal.
I invested one of my biggest venture checks last year and then doubled it this year. It's the biggest and fastest-growing fintech company by TPV. I think it went from about $1 million to $80 million. It was madness.
Many people refused. Many, for example, thought, "What am I missing?" They said, "No, we'd rather not," because the Klarna IPO wasn't a great outcome, and some of the fintech IPOs weren't as popular.
I feel like that matters, right? You have to have DPI to be able to do that.
Yeah. I actually think that when I look at these fintech companies that are now repurposing their entire infrastructure into tokenized assets in the form of stablecoins, a lot of them are growing incredibly quickly and serving new users.
The fundamentals of these companies are pretty good, and at the same time, there's such a belief in AI right now that it's hard for people to pay attention to them. I actually think there's a lot of opportunity right now for some of the more fintech-oriented or crypto-focused funds.
I think that's consistent with Jason's point about the growth stage, and the multiples are much better than they were in 2021 and 2020. You can get much better entry prices.
Ramp is a whole different story, and Stripe is a whole different story. That's because Coatue is raising $8 billion, and they're not going to do anything less than a $10 billion valuation.
But in the $500 million to $5 billion range, there's a certain capital shortage. Right now, we have companies in this space that are fintech companies. There's one that's coming up that grew 55% in the third quarter and has already accelerated growth to more than $80 million in revenue.
It's a little hard to get people's attention right now because they're saying, "Hey, we're looking at Anthropic." They're asking, "Should we do this instead?" So I think there's a lot of opportunity.
11. Will AI Agents Disrupt Finance?
In terms of the fintech business, it goes back to your tweet, Yano, about these kinds of agents. I think a lot of the value capture in financial services in general has been confusing and frictional.
In a world where that's changing, do you believe that's really going to go away? If that's the case, do you feel like a lot of fintech investors are supportive of that when they're making additional investments? It's like, "Wait a minute."
I was talking to someone today, and this came up. We jokingly brought up the traditional RIA model, where the commission goes to the consultant. What happens when the agent gets more and more control and just walks away? Do you think that's a real threat?
How do you think about that? Are you actively thinking about whether it helps the brand? Does it not help the brand? Does it actually bode well for crypto, or not? What do you think about that? Or are people still going to be lazy and not fully optimized?
I think so. I think personal agents are probably really bad. We haven't talked about it, but Apollo Bank was having a conversation about agents.
It's probably true that there will be more movement between financial products that are cheaper or better for the end consumer. I don't think most people are leaning toward that idea now, although a year ago it wasn't common.
Most people are leaning toward the idea that the way agents who buy things for people are going to continue to get paid is probably still traditional. Stablecoins maybe make more sense for transactions between agents, but not for the vast majority of user transactions.
On the asset-management side, the reality is that, by definition, LLMs give you mediocre advice. If you ask an LLM, "What should I invest in? What should I do?" and it makes a bunch of suggestions, and you say, "This is what I want to do," it's going to give you mediocre advice.
But the baseline for a lot of people is so different, and the vast majority of people don't even have basic financial literacy. So even mediocre—even median—is actually a pretty good improvement for a very large segment of the population.
I'll give you an example, and you're right: that's going to be better advice than what a lot of people are getting.
I totally agree with that, especially when you're broke. But then there's also going to be a bunch of groups, right? You're going to give the same advice to a bunch of people.
I spoke to the COO of one of the largest private fintech companies in the world that does direct sales to consumers. I had this exact discussion with him because that's what I was interested in as we were thinking about investing in this area.
Here's what he told me. First of all, he said exactly what I just told you: by definition, we think they're giving people very mediocre advice. His point was that we're not sure that's any better than just offering them products like direct indexing, which are exactly the same as the products they would get from an SMA, right?
So do people want to have a conversation rather than doing direct indexing—things that are prefilled—which are exactly the same things as an agent?
I think for active trading, absolutely. We're probably going to get more active trading with agents. But I think for a lot of financial products, especially in the U.S., Americans are culturally buy-and-hold investors. That's what they do culturally.
For the vast majority—for everyone over 35, actually.
Yeah. Is that right?
Yeah, well, I've seen statistics where the average holding period has dropped dramatically. That probably means that the younger segments are much faster. But I think it's the 20-to-40 crowd, and the older audience, no.
So who has the most wealth?
Yeah. So you said that there's still going to be a finite amount of deposits and assets under management, and that whether it's agents or cryptocurrency, it removes a lot of this friction and confusion that might not be there.
I think it's going to be more of an internal—
On the wealth management side, there's going to be inconsistencies between the different products that the wealth manager offers. But each wealth manager offers a subset of assets, right? They don't give the whole world access because that's annoying, right? And I don't think that's going to change.
Maybe there's going to be more movement from a Treasury fund to a money market fund, to something else where the yield is going to change a little bit. But I don't think it's going to be as disruptive as people think. I think deposits in checking or savings accounts should probably offer a higher yield over time, but the banks will figure that out themselves.
A little bit of a transition period before we launch more cryptocurrency. There's a BSC hack, apparently, for almost $5 million. I just wanted to mention those two so people are aware.
Thank you for your service.
What?
I said, “Thank you for your service.”
Okay. Content of the week.
Content of the week. Rob, what do you have?
Ari Emanuel has released this new memoir called The Call List. It was also written by J.R. Moehringer, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's such a good time, and it's just a crazy story. Ari is someone who, like you, just loves to listen to him talk. I've met him in person a few times, and I think he's that type of character, so it's a great book. Just read it.
By the way, J.R. Moehringer—if you all know Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, or Open by Andre Agassi—I'm actually reading Open right now. I'm almost done with it, and Shoe Dog is one of my favorite books. Moehringer is the ghostwriter for both of those. He seems to be the best memoir writer out there right now.
I really want to read that, Rob. It looks great.
My content of the week is Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson published an article called “You’re Not Being Invited to Dinner Anymore.” There’s a chart that shows the percentage of Americans who participated in each activity at least once a month over the past year.
For people who aren’t looking, it shows going to church, entertaining at home, having dinner, and having a picnic. The percentage of Americans who host friends or family at least once a month has fallen from 42% in 1975 to 19% today.
A lot of people are talking about how people don’t go to church anymore. The number of people hosting people in their homes has decreased much more than the number of people going to church. So I remind people to invite others over, do things, and get away from the computer. There was a great article by Derek Thompson called “You’re Not Being Invited to Dinner Anymore.”
When was the last time you hosted people at your place? I don’t want to embarrass you.
I host people all the time. I was at a friend’s house for dinner yesterday.
Oh, you did? Honestly, that’s great.
Yeah. Where you live is actually a lot less important than who you live with. What’s the real difference between living in Williamsburg, Prospect Heights, SoHo, and the Upper East Side? It’s all the same because you just work all day. But if you live next door to 3 of your best friends, you can go for a walk with them or meet them for dinner once a week.
I actually do agree with that. I don’t think that’s good, whatever. But yeah, we can talk about the New York neighborhoods later.
Santi, what do you have for the week? Santi is like, “Monaco—just come to Monaco.” I mean, I’ll say it: Santi hosted us. Remember? Santi hosted us.
I love hosting. It’s my passion, and Monaco is a great place to host.
You were a good host. That was good.
I appreciate that. A great host.
Thank you.
God, you’re getting cocky.
It’s a nice newsletter called Google Trends. It’s basically from Google, and it gives you information every week about what people are searching for—the top trends. It’s pretty cool. I love it.
It gives you an idea of what people are doing online. For example, the top trends this week are “patient zero,” the Wonka TV show, “coffee or dessert,” and coffee syrups. It’s all kinds of random curiosities, like the trending latte flavors of 2026. Since the beginning of the year, it’s been banana bread, butter cookies, and pistachio latte. It’s just the most random, but it’s a nice thing to look at.
Can I show you the hilarious smile I saw on Santi in the content room? It’s incredible.
Yeah, it’s literally people expecting, like, “Oh, a whole book about gorillas from someone—”
No, no. Santi, let me show you this. This is a website you’re going to like more than Google Trends. It’s called Explosive Topics.
Yeah.
It’s so cool. It’s so good.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
What’s a fun fact? Favorite TV show? Do you have one? A game show, like Jeopardy! or Family Feud? Did you ever watch them growing up?
Yeah, I mean, I love Jeopardy!
Jeopardy! is incredible. I love it.
Mike was religious about it. I think Mike watched every episode of Jeopardy! ever.
Would he ever want to compete?
He could compete. Mike could compete.
Mike is probably one of the biggest podcast consumers in the world, like on Spotify.
I guess.
I think he listens to 3 or 4 podcasts a day.
Yeah, that’s incredible.
He listens at 3× speed. I listen to music sometimes when I’m working, but he just listens to podcasts.
That’s it. You’ve never talked to Mike without him multitasking. If you’re talking to Mike, he can literally be in the middle of the biggest pitch of his life while he’s playing Tetris.
SBF played World of Warcraft, so let’s not compare these two anymore.