Is $LIBRA the End of Memecoins? with Coffeezilla | E2086

In today's episode: Jason and Alex break down one of the craziest crypto stories yet—a $100M meme coin meltdown, insider trading, and Argentina's president caught in the middle. Coffeezilla joins the show to explain how meme coins are rigged, why Dave Portnoy got a $5M refund while everyone else got wrecked, and what really went down with the Libra token. Plus, we debate if crypto can be fixed or if the grift is too far gone. Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show.(2:17) Libra fiasco, crypto scams, and influencer involvement(4:42) The impact of meme coins on politics and ethical considerations(8:02) Trump's involvement in meme coins(10:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(11:30) The Libra coin scandal and its broader implications(18:39) Coffeezilla interview clip with Hayden Davis(20:20) Netsuite. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(21:46) Introduction to Pump.fun and discussion on token launching risks(23:21) Coffeezilla joins Alex and Jason!(24:10) Discussion on Argentinian president and Tech Forum Argentina(27:29) Examination of Hayden Davis and token manipulation(29:29) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup.(31:02) Analysis of the broken crypto system and regulatory issues(35:40) Intentional fraud, regulation, and meme coins in politics(41:21) Potential solutions and regulatory controls under new administration(50:23) Concerns and proposed framework for crypto regulation(54:52) Importance of regulation and combating crypto fraud(58:18) Coffeezilla's perspective on meme coins and future regulations(1:01:22) Advice to potential crypto investors and FTC news implications(1:02:08) Impact of regulation on American innovation and tech giants' growth(1:05:03) Current administration's stance on business combinations(1:06:10) Arguments against large companies acquiring competitors(1:07:23) Risks and potential benefits of hypothetical acquisitions(1:08:29) Debate on market competition dynamics * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Coffeezilla: Patreon: patreon.com/coffeezilla YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw X: https://x.com/coffeebreak_YT * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (20:20) Netsuite. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist (29:29) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup.* Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  For everybody listening, as you know, I am a Coffeezilla stan. And this is in the legacy of Coffeezilla, the grand legacy of Coffeezilla. I predict that this video amongst all the amazing videos from XRP to Jake Logan Paul scams. I don't know who else in the, in the Hall of Coffee, Coffeezilla Hall of Fame. It's up there. There are so many grifters, so many scammers, but this one feels top, this feels top five. I saw y'all live. I, I said to myself, I gotta get up here. I gotta, I gotta set the record straight.

• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:21Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It is Tuesday, kind of Monday if you took President's Day off. So there's a lot going on. Man, this is such a busy weekend, such a busy life I have, man. I have been so busy. And last week I did three episodes of This Week in Startups with you. Mm hmm. And that created some ruckus a little bit on Twitter, whatever. I had booked Megyn Kelly for Valentine's Day. And then of course I did All In and Megyn Kelly didn't just have me on for like a quick hit. It was for the whole episode with Chamath. So she did like a full Valentine's Day episode with us. Her show went to number four in the rankings over the weekend. All In went to number eight.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Not bad.

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's crazy. You know, this niche podcast is always ranking in the technology rankings, of course, but you know, it's this is not for the general population. But yeah, you know, it's a general ruckus about whatever I talk about. If I talk about, you know, Trump or meme coins, you know, some of these things get re aggregated, people get a little high, get a little excited about it online. We've got a lot of news to cover today. A lot of people want to hear about my take on this Libra fiasco. As in most crypto things, it's super, super complex and dramatic. So I think maybe you got to tee it up for people and explain what happened this week.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  You know, Jason, I think that's accurate, but also sometimes cutting to the absolute root of something is the best way to go about it. And you and I were both dying over this picture. If you haven't seen this, someone photoshopped Sam Bankman Fried on his head on to Javier Millet's body. And it is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I've seen it like seven times and I've laughed every single time. And I bring it up because Jason's right. There is a lot that went on here. There's a lot of, we have a TikTok of the timeline and all that. But it's a meme coin. It went up, it went down, money got taken out. So we've seen this story before, Jason.

• 3:07Jason Calacanis?

  Many, many times.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  Not, not our first time at the Grifter Rodeo.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  No, not our.

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  Time at the rug pull, the rug pull rodeo.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  The rug pull rodeo. Yes, the crypto circus. So I'm going to give people a quick rundown of what happened, Jason, and then we can dive into what we think it means. But in short, there was a new token called Libra. It was launched on fixed float. Tokens were sent out to about 12 wallets. And the Buenos Aires Herald said that that helped indicate possibly to the market that this was, quote, not a scam. Well, we know what happens next. Then Millet tweets, and I have a translation of his tweet. I'm not going to read it out in Spanish, but in English, he tweets out, liberal Argentina grows. This project will be dedicated to investing in the growth of the Argentine economy, funding small Argentine businesses and ventures. The world wants to invest in Argentina. Long live freedom. Dollar sign Libra.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  An endorsement from his account, personal, I believe, of a meme coin that was recently created and was majority controlled by a handful of wallets. What happened next is that, as you can kind of imagine, as these things go, once Javier Mele, a, I would say, a stalwart of the new right, if you will, economically.

• 4:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he's my hero. I love this guy. He's like, I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna get rid of waste, race, waste, fraud and abuse. I'm gonna get rid of regulations and I'm gonna try to make a more, you know, dare I say libertarian society and have less grift and less spend, balance the budget. He seemed like he was doing a great job, too. And he was loved by the people and he's an outsider.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  But if you're libertarian, your views on rules might be slightly looser. Now, what happened after the president, Argentina, Mr. Mele, did his tweet? Well, this happened. Jason, this is from the Kobayashi Lighter over on Twitter. Love those guys. On screen, we have a chart. This is from the lovely Twitter account and it shows what happened. Well, Mele tweets, the Libra goes up to about a four and a half billion dollar market cap. Then, as you can see from this arrow here, insiders cash out and then the market cap eventually goes to zero. And this is Jason within like 12 hours.

• 5:17Jason Calacanis?

  Making me crazy.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  It is as bad as it can be. And I think that people were shocked, surprised, irked, disappointed. You're not alone in being kind of like let down by this moment. So,

• 5:33Speaker 02

  I'll just say this. We can talk about the technical details. I just think it's important to note that when you do have a platform, Jason, you have 970,000 Twitter followers. You could launch dollar sign Jason and make a lot of money and cash out and screw your people over. But even if you're libertarian.

• 5:50Jason Calacanis?

  You can do that once, by the way. To influencers listening, you could screw your audience once. Then you lose half. It's probably like a half life. So if you have a million followers, you could screw half of them. And then you second time you can screw 500,000 of them. And the third time, I think the half life gets even more severe and you then lose like. I don't know. 90% of whatever's remaining and you're down to like 10,000 really dumb loyal people who love.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Well, in this case, it's not just his followers that got kind of host. He's been sued in Argentina over quote fraud allegations regarding this. And the blowback was so severe that it actually took a ding out of the Argentinian stock market because people were so

• 6:35Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  concerned that this is going to topple his administration, ergo, the things that you mentioned that are popular with other people in the market, deregulation and so forth, might grind to a halt. So if you had invested in their stocks expecting more of this, well, you might not get it if he loses out on this. Now, now he is saying that he didn't make any money, that this was just from his personal account.

• 6:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  He just tweets.

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  Why did he do this? But that's the, ah, you know, this is the same thing that happened. I'll be totally honest and candid, which I can be here. Other podcasts I'm on, I might not do, I might get like slight amounts of pushback or censored by people. I don't know, you know, if I'm on another podcast and they find this too, too spicy. But here's a spicy take. Trump shouldn't have launched meme coins because my belief is we went from a too restrictive crypto space with Gary Gensler to restrict. I'm going to make two very important points.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:33Jason Calacanis?

  Number one, this mess can be easily solved. Number two, the people who are charged with fixing the mess should not launch meme coins in the interim while we're cleaning it up. So there's an easy solution and I'm, I want to walk through that. But then second, if you're a leader like Trump, or I guess maybe Eric Trump is the person doing this inside the family, running, there's an organization which is their crypto thing. And it's fine. You know, if Eric Trump wants to be the crypto king, if he wants to be the crypto prince of the Trump empire, that's totally cool. He's a civilian. He can go do whatever he wants, but he does have the Trump name.

• 8:19Jason Calacanis?

  And you're just becoming president and you've got a mandate and there's like a set of things that you were sent to Washington to do. The Trump family was not sent to Washington to launch a meme coin. And they were not sent to Washington to drop those bags on retail. If that's what's happened and there's so much lack of transparency here and Millet had is an important thing. He got sent there again with the majority, the populist platform. Stop waste, foreign abuse, meet the borders, legal, not block the borders, you know? So I don't, I want to, you know, tell it straight here. I don't think the mandate for Trump is to like, shut the borders completely.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's to organize and have an orderly border and get rid of violent criminals. Like 90% of Americans want those two things. 90% of the Americans want waste foreign abuse, but you, there's a technique for doing this, there's a process for doing this. And I think everybody wants crypto to be legalized in some way, like, or the overwhelming majority would like it to be legalized and controlled. Since those are the factors under which you're doing your presidency and your terms, both Millet and Trump, launching a meme coin or retweeting a meme coin is a really bad idea because it ruins your credibility and then it creates a mess that has to be then cleaned up. And then, as I said earlier, like, why would you want to screw your followers?

• 9:44Jason Calacanis?

  There are people who voted for Trump who bought the meme coin because they voted for Trump.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. But Jason, just to add a little bit to this, because you asked, why did he share this? Why did Millet tweet this out? So he said, I didn't promote it, I shared it, I did it because I'm a diehard techno optimist. Any initiative that improves financing for tech entrepreneurs interests me. I made no mistakes because I acted in good faith. But when I look at the political repercussions, I realize I have something to learn. Okay.

• 10:11Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:53Jason Calacanis?

  Thousands of entrepreneurs trust Northwest Registered Agent because they make business formation affordable, efficient, and stress-free. And with their expert team standing by, you'll always have the support you need. So here's your call to action. Don't let paperwork hold you back from your entrepreneurial dreams. Get started today at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. That's northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. For just $39 plus state fees, your business could be up and running in no time at all. Get more value, more convenience, and more peace of mind only with Northwest Registered Agent. Let's get into the story of this specific coin. Okay. Because in this coin, somehow Dave Portman decided he would get into meme coins.

• 11:35Jason Calacanis?

  My understanding from watching this interview that Coffeezilla did, apparently, allegedly, this person who Coffeezilla interviewed, which we'll play some clips from, he, I guess he's having a crisis of conscience right now. And he gave an hour-long interview that basically he admits everything that he did in regard to these coins. And it's very damning. I think like it's going to result in him going to jail and/or being sued if, you know, definitely civil cases, I don't know what's going to go on with the criminal prosecution of. Crypto, as we're in this interim period and Gary Gensler, who would have certainly prosecuted this person.

• 12:16Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know who the next SEC, what, how the next SEC chair is going to look at totally grifty stuff like this, or allegedly grifty stuff, or I guess admittedly grifty stuff. But I think we have to go in to play the clips and just show people what happened with Libra. Cause the timeline's important. You gave us a brief timeline there of like, hey, in 12 hours, like some $100 million were sucked out of the system, but also during that time, Dave Portnoy got $5 million back that he had bet on Libra from this person who ran it. And then there's an incredible discussion about sniping.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yes, which we will talk about in one second, but on the, on the Dave Portnoy point, I think it's, I think we'll start there.

• 12:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  This is a bit of a summary of the hour long interview from Justin Vogel. I thought it was a better summary than I could do, so I'm just using it.

• 13:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and give him credit.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And the guy we're talking about is Hayden Davis, and he did the thing criminals or alleged criminals shouldn't do, which is call into effectively a modern radio show and talk about what they did. So he admitted a couple of things that are important to note. One, that he's sitting on about $110 million that he's quote, not sure what to do with, various plans about what to inject it back in, you should hunt people down who lost money, et cetera. He also said that they are sniping these things. Now, in my understanding of the interview, they only discussed sniping the Melania token launch, not the Libra token launch, but it's an hour and a half, so we'll need to go back through it again. Jason, should we explain what sniping is?

• 13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so people build bots to snipe. If you know eBay, people would build snipers, little scripts that watch an eBay auction, and then at the last minute, we'll put a plus $1 on it. And then sometimes people would do this across a large body of products and services that were for sale in auctions that they knew were undervalued. So the sophisticated way to do it would be if, you know, X equals under the average selling price, or 30% under the average selling price, then snipe it and try to buy it. So if you knew, you know, this dire straits out behind me, on average, in good condition, went for $100 and. And the auction was at thirty, you would snipe it at thirty two dollars or up to fifty maybe even,

• 14:26Jason Calacanis?

  you know, if under fifty percent. And then you'd buy it and then you'd resell it. And so this was like fair game. It felt like a fair thing to do. But in crypto, what they're doing is when these meme coins come out, people have created, there's an equivalent of this in the stock market. People, there was a book Flash Traders where people were building high speed, high frequency trading. Yeah. Where they were literally putting fiber optic cables, you know, directly into the stock market, getting closer to it. And basically by milliseconds, getting an advantage over retail. And it felt like, well, that doesn't make a big deal if you can make a penny or a half a cent on each share that was sold. But if a billion share gets sold, the pennies add up. And if it's a sure thing, it's a sure thing.

• 15:08Jason Calacanis?

  So sniping, people go in, they build bots and they buy the memes first and they sell them first. They buy these meme coins and then they watch them start to go up. And then I don't know if they programmatically sell them or they all at once sell them. But what this does is the people who might retweet it like Malay, might not even own coins. And they're told, yeah, you can buy some coins and we're going to gift you a thousand coins and you can go buy coins in the open market. And then they go buy coins in the market. Guess what? They're the sucker at the table. Absolutely. People are gnawing. And now I will say meme coins are gambling. I believe they're gambling. But I'll get into in a moment, why I think they're confusing people. There's like four or five pieces of this that make them very confusing. And some number of people actually think they're investing.

• 15:50Jason Calacanis?

  Most people think they're gambling, but there are some group of suckers who come to the table each time. And the way they do that is each dopey influencer who participates in this, and I'll include Malay in this like dopey influencer moment. So he had like a dopey influencer moment, we can all have them, where the money gets put out to you and it seems like, you know, I just say yes and pick up the free money on the ground, which is why I don't pick up free money.

• 16:15Jason Calacanis?

  Be careful picking up free money like a bunch of podcasters did that and it came from Russia like it was Putin's money.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Although if Putin wants to give us $300,000 per, oh no, we still say no because we have ethics.

• 16:25Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no, actually, if Putin, if RT, if they want to run that scam on us, here's what I'll do. I'll gladly take it and give it to Human Rights Watch and their specific Russia desk to watch human rights in there. So I will flood all this money right into Human Rights.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  I believe that's called money laundering for good.

• 16:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll wash that for good.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 16:46Jason Calacanis?

  Why not? So that's what sniping is. Two thirds of the people might know this is gambling and they're just trying to flip it and play this like weird guts game, this weird game of like, you know, one upmanship. The second piece would be the one third come from whoever the influencer is. So if they got me to do it, y'all listening to this and you're all very smart, wouldn't participate. But, you know, if Malay does it and it's like, whoa, it's Malay or Trump does it or, you know, Melania does it. Maybe you're like a super Melania fan. She's beautiful and elegant and stylish and you just love her and you're like the auntie who, you know, buys the Melania plates and ashtrays and hats and whatever. You want to support her and you're like, oh, she has coins. I've never bought them, but my, my

• 17:29Jason Calacanis?

  daughter and my son trade coins and they have the Bitcoin. So I'll buy the Melania coin. And now, you know, Melania's, you know, I don't know, moms in Texas buy this coin for the first time and then they tell their kids they bought it and like, no, no, no, no, no, that's different than Bitcoin. It's like, is it?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Well, Melania, just for everyone knows, shot up as high as $14 per and as of the time I was prepping the notes today, $1.22 and Trump coin shot up as high as 74, now down at 16. But Jason, there's another facet to this that we should add, which is that often it's not just the principle, the Jason and Jason coin, for example, often there are what are called KOLs or key opinion leaders. It's a crypto acronym that I recently had to learn. And that's where Dave Portnoy comes into this coffee still interview. We're going to play a clip from in a second because he seems to have gotten reimbursed $5 million for his losses in this, which just goes to show in my view, and I'm not taking a stance on Portnoy. I know he's doing a lot of meme coin stuff lately. People have lots of opinions about that. I don't want to get sued by anybody. So I'm going

• 18:28Speaker 02

  to just say it's interesting, but it does go to show that if you are not a portnoy level person in this game, you are not going to come out on top. And actually, Jason, why don't we play one of the Coffeezilla clips? Because they talk about in particular, how this is not a fair game. This is from his chat with Hayden Davis.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  With Trump or any of these big ones like this is it's it is an insider's game. This is an unregulated casino. Like if you're a retail trader thinking you're going to go make millions off of meme coins, you better study your fucking ass off. Like that's how do you think Pump Fun works? Pump Fun, the coin bonds, people put money in, insiders know about it first, it rips up and it's who it's who loses last. That's how it's a game. Every single one of these is a game. There's none of them that aren't games.

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  Pump Fun is a website and he explains the insider game of this. While he was doing that, for those of you listening to the pod, not watching it on YouTube, literally Coffeezilla closes his eyes, clasps his hand and looks up to God and says, praise Jesus. I found Jesus on the ranch this weekend, by the way, Alex, I'll bring that up later. Praise Jesus. That somebody on the inside has explained and said with their own words that this is a rigged casino. It's a rigged casino. And if you go to a rigged casino, like let's say you were, I don't know, in some, I can't say third world anymore, have to say frontier market. You're in a frontier market. You're in North Korea and there's a casino.

• 20:08Jason Calacanis?

  And you put a thousand dollars and you decide to play blackjack. What are the chances that you're getting a straight game there, straight odds?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  In North Korea, I'm going to go zero percent chance.

• 20:18Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe they let you win so you come back. What does the future hold for business? Well, if you ask nine experts, you're gonna get 10 answers. Some people think it's gonna be a bull market, other people a bear market. Other people think it's gonna be flat. Rates might go up, rates might go down, they might stay higher for longer, who knows? Okay, at this point, I need one of you founders to invent a crystal ball. If you're building one, email me, I'll fund it as a startup. But until we get a crystal ball, you should future-proof your business with NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one ERP tool out there, trusted by over 40,000 businesses. That's unbelievable. Well done, team NetSuite. So what does NetSuite do? You hear about it all the time? Well, it's gonna take all of your accounting, all of your inventory, financial management,

• 21:00Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:44Jason Calacanis?

  That's netsuite.com/twist. Anyway, he just explains that, and then he explains that pump.fon, I believe he's talking about pump.fon is the website. So if you look at what they tell you, it says, "Pump ensures that all created tokens are safe to trade through a secure and battle-tested token launching system. Each coin on Pump is a fair launch with no pre-sale and no team allocation. Step one, pick a coin you like. Step two, buy the coin on the bonding curve. Step three, sell any time to lock in your profits or losses. Step four, when enough people buy on the bonding curve, it reaches a market cap of 100K. Step five, 17K of liquidity is then deposited in radium and burned." So these are the rules. Like, I'm in the industry, I don't exactly understand what's going on here.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Bonding curve? Like, I feel like I should know that off top, but I don't, but I know how stocks work.

• 22:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, then if you click on the Terms of Service, like, the risk warning is like, pretty clear what's going on here. And it's a...

• 22:45Jason Calacanis?

  Introduction is like pretty clear. Pump is a platform designed to assist with the creation, trading of digital assets. The Pump Group provides users with a platform to create these digital assets. You are entering into a legally binding agreement with us. You must read these terms. Nobody reads them. And you acknowledge that you'll be bound and agree to and comply with this. And, you know, essentially, anybody who's doing this knows that this is gambling, number one. And number two, there's like tons of conflicts and interests and, you know, there are all kinds of people involved, you know, that are, you know, doing the wrong thing here.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Anyway, and Jason, because why, why watch YouTube clips of the man himself when we have Mr. Coffeezilla right here in the waiting room? Let's welcome him back to the show, our favorite anti-grift workforce.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  What's up, guys? I saw you all live. I said to myself, I gotta get up here. I gotta, I gotta set the record straight.

• 23:38Jason Calacanis?

  I truly appreciate you doing this. For everybody listening, as you know, I am a Coffeezilla stan. And this is in the legacy of Coffeezilla, the grand legacy of Coffeezilla. I predict that this video amongst all the amazing videos from XRP to Jake Logan Paul scams, I don't know who else in the, in the Hall of Coffee, Coffeezilla Hall of Fame are so many grifters, so many scammers. But this one feels top, this feels top five.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  It's the moment because obviously you have the Argentinian president facing charges of fraud, possible impeachment, but it's also this kid, a 26-year-old in the position that he's in, partially because you guys know the backstory, right? Where he basically, there was a kind of a pay-to-play event called Tech4 Argentina, where all of this happened back in October. The deals got set up, people got in the right rooms. That's how a lot of this advising to Malay started happening. And then they launched this coin. These people were woefully unprepared and

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Part of his thing is extracting value from these projects and dumping the coins. So all of a sudden he ends up with a hundred million. Everyone else ends down and everyone's like, how did this kid get all this money? Turns out he's been doing it with a bunch of coins, including Melania. And admits that not only does he do it from like the main account, he's on the side sniping the project to protect the project. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I robbed the bank to protect the bank.

• 25:09Jason Calacanis?

  That was, you know, the part of the interview, there were a couple of parts where, you know, and as a fellow broadcaster, and you know, as a broadcaster here, uh, you know, I very much appreciate your broadcasting style and ability. This broadcaster, broadcaster feedback. Sometimes somebody just tells you the truth. And as a broadcaster, you're thinking, I gotta ask this six different ways to get to the truth. It's going to take me 90 minutes. I might get 40% of the truth. And there were a couple of moments where he just literally told you he committed the crime of robbed the bank and you put your hands, you know, there. And I had this happen myself with, um, the CEO famously of what was the car company? This crazy guy got indicted.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Nicola.

• 25:53Jason Calacanis?

  Nicola, thank you. I had the Nicola founder on here and he told me that he created a pickup truck because he wanted to attract Robin Hood retail investors. And I was like, you wanted to, like literally your goal in launching a product was to attract retail investors to your stock when, that you lied about all your capabilities. So we're going to put it all aside. When he tells you that, yeah, that was Trevor Milton, shout out to Trevor Milton. I think he's out of jail now. I'm back on the show, Trevor. You had him tell you that he was sniping. So like, and then he told you it's an insider's rigged casino. I mean, who's come on the show and told you I'm committing felonies?

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. There was a moment where I just realized, oh, I have to shut up and let this guy just go because it was confession time. Uh, just, just so people know, these interviews don't happen randomly. I spent 48 hours trying to warm this guy up, say, hey, you know, you should come on. And my intention was let's get to the truth. But as you said, Jason, it's always a matter of soft playing it. Like basically kind of minimizing and he did a little bit of that, but he really did get to the heart of it and just go like, yeah, I sniped these coins. I did all this stuff. What is amazing is when you look on chain at this stuff, they were trying to hide it. This is not something they were proud of, even though he kind of says like, oh yeah, everyone kind of does this.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  They were, they had, you know, hundreds of wallets trying to hide this stuff. So this is not something they're immensely proud of. And what I want to know is how deep does this go? This guy had a very tight relationship with Meteora, which is the platform where a lot of these coins launch. It's where Trump launched. It's where Melania launched. It's where Libra launched. It's where a lot of these coins launched. And he was close friends with Ben Chow, who had to resign later when he like, he was confronted by this guy. It started to come out, um, where this guy's like, yeah, I think you, you and this guy Hayden committed fraud together. And Ben's like, you know, this is SBF level. I'm so exposed. I have to resign.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  So the platforms themselves, heads are rolling. So you have to wonder what, what else is going on? It's not just Hayden Davis. It would be foolish to think, oh, it's just Hayden Davis by himself. Somebody gave him the deal flow for this, right? Somebody gave him access to these deals. Who are those people? And also like there's, there's market makers, like I, I just want to mention them. Axiom Strategies, which they're plotting, hey, we're going to launch your token, right? We're going to market make your token. Let's snipe it. Here's how much money you need to snipe the token. Here's how much we're going to sell every day.

• 28:27Jason Calacanis?

  This is an organization. I want to point you there. This is an organization, you're saying that their speciality is helping people launch tokens, promote the tokens, and the way they do that is unique.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unique to say, yeah, put it lightly. Now, of course Meteor, I just should be clear. Meteor claims, you know, it was a lack of judgment. It wasn't any kind of systemic financial malfeasance. They're also connected with the like, the largest platform on Solana, which is Jupiter. So they're all right now saying, hey, we, we had nothing to do with this. He resigned because he had an error of judgment, a lapse of judgment. I think it goes deeper. I don't think Hayden Davis gets in the position, a 26 year old. Gets in the position he does without a little bit of help from people who are also making money, right? Because if you're wondering how a 26 year old got a hundred million dollars in his hands that he's now wondering what to do with, I don't think the answer is as simple as,

• 29:26Speaker 04

  oh, it was just an isolated incident of one bad actor.

• 29:30Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:15Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:59Jason Calacanis?

  Alex, we had another clip from the program, maybe we could play it. Here we go.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  What do you do when there's a broken system and you're trying to fix it? And you're trying to sort out different launches, different mechanisms, starting at higher market caps, figuring out who to involve versus not, how to get, how to keep the CA to yourself, how to market it without telling people? What the [bleep] should you do? Because- Nobody, the best people in crypto, don't have an answer. How should we make money cleanly? Is it even possible?

• 31:28Speaker 04

  I think people in crypto don't have a good answer because the real answer, nobody wants to hear, which is that it's sort, you're sort of like, what's the fair way to make a bunch of money selling like tulip bulbs? Or something like that. You can structure it a lot of different ways. But anything that is by definition, value extracting from the world at large is probably not a great thing.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  But then every crypto project, whether they they're VC funded or it's a meme coin, is value extracted.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  I think there's a difference between something that is a, has utility, something that does something, a tool that purports to do something. And then things that literally have no intrinsic value at all.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 32:10Jason Calacanis?

  What a moment.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  But then every crypto project would be, well, yes, that's one of the downsides to unregulated securities that are traded like they're legit. Just my two cents.

• 32:20Jason Calacanis?

  Let's move this to positive area. Clearly consumers want to gamble, right? I, I like to place a wager now and again, I play poker, I like to do a little sports betting on my knickerbockers. I do like the over unders. And I'm totally fine with that. And people go to Vegas and play some, some games, some, maybe some tabletop games. It's all good. But here, I think we have a problem. There is no regulation here, so shenanigans can happen. Okay, that's problem number one. He said it explicitly, it's an insider's game, you're the sucker at the table. It's a rigged casino. When he says there's no way to do this, nobody in crypto can figure out, well, crypto is like the biggest geniuses. And they, and they'll tell you all day long, how many IQ points they have, Coffeezilla.

• 33:04Jason Calacanis?

  They tell you all the time how brilliant they are. They tell you that, you know, have fun staying poor, that they're the smartest kids in the room. And you know what? I know a lot of them, they're, they do index to be very smart people. A little bit weird incels on the margins, but anyway, they're, they're smart. So. There are ways to do this. It's called regulations. And we have many examples, like in Vegas, they have to put their odds on their website. They have to have educational material. You can debate if that's enough or not for somebody to go play blackjack, but that's there. Then prize picks and all these other services, they have plenty of regulations. They operate in some states, they operate not in others. And there's all kinds of rules and regs where the stock market for private market investing,

• 33:47Jason Calacanis?

  I'm in privates, but some of my companies go public, we have a lockup period. So I couldn't sell my Robin Hood for the first six months. My Robin Hood shares went way down, but I'm an insider because I was an angel investor. And then I sold them. I never sold them. There's so many ways to regulate these things. It was just mad to hear this answer.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  The Melania coin, though, just in fairness to that moment, did have lockup periods and Coffey's, I think the Trump coin also had lockup periods associated with it as well for insiders. But that didn't stop the pump and the dump and the grossness and the awfulness in my view.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, let's correct the record on that. They had a 30 day lockup on the Melania coin. But only for the team allocation, they had a treasury wallet they were selling from, from jump.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Ah, okay, got it.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  So there was a bit of a trick because it was like, oh yeah, we're locked up for 30 days, but our other wallet isn't. And they also sniped on top of that, which is a whole separate pool of money, which is what I was talking to him about is like, well, are we just supposed to trust as the public that you're going to secretly snipe these coins? And oh, don't worry, we're doing this for your benefit, guys. We're doing this to protect the chart is what they call it. Oh, we have to take, but here's my question. They start with all the coins. Why do they need to snipe the coins, just structure it differently? And actually what they would tell you, Jason, what they would tell you is, oh, we, we just, we, we would hold the coins, but people don't like it when we sell right away.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  So we have to lock up the coins and that leaves us not able to sell coins. We have to secretly snipe the coins so we can sell them early in order to actually get liquidity, because we don't actually want to lock them up as long as people want us to lock them up for. So they play these games where they're pretending to have a lockup and they do legitimately for those tokens and then they're on the side playing insiders games like, like Hayden says, he goes, it's an insider's game, right? And it goes to your point, it's no, there's no regulation.

• 35:44Jason Calacanis?

  This is the tragic part about it. You, what you're describing is even more sinister than just saying, hey, it's gambling. They're trying to head fake the audience. They're trying to head fake their own fans. This is the other thing I find abhorrent about it because some people consider me an influencer. I'm not a broadcaster, but okay, whatever. I have influence, I got a following. When you do this to your following and you tell them, I'm holding all my coins. I've got diamond hands or whatever. And then you are secretly selling from some other account. That to me is, shows the intentional fraud. And part of the test of fraud, and listen, you're getting a lot of legal inbound from time to time, whether it's letters, sometimes an actual case gets thrown at you.

• 36:26Jason Calacanis?

  You're learning about these definitions, like if you want to find somebody guilty of fraud or of like libel, these are very high bars in the United States. And one of them is that you intentionally try to do these things. Intentionality matters. And what they've just proven is that they're intentionally doing this. And when he says, you know, it's an insider's game and I don't know how to fix it. Okay, great. You don't know how to fix it, but you're intentionally committing fraud. That's my interpretation of it. I don't know what the ramification of the video you just did, but I think it's going to be in a couple of, I think it's going to be in a court case and I think it'll be, you know, certainly be in civil court cases, but it might be a criminal court case. Because when I had Milton on from Nicola, they took the clip of him talking about trying to bait retail, they put it in the court case.

• 37:11Jason Calacanis?

  He went to jail and one of the pieces of evidence was that clip.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  I have a question for you, Jason. Look, one of my questions is, are regulators going to step up? Because, you know, this administration has a complicated relationship with meme coins, given that the president launched a meme coin and there wasn't, there is a sort of a thing right now where the cryptos are, I don't know if you know him, Jason. Yeah, exactly.

• 37:37Jason Calacanis?

  My bestie for over 20 years. Yes, he's gonna have to clean this all up. Yes.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. The collectibles has been sort of the statement, but the question is, you know, to what extent are meme coins actually like passing a collectibles test versus?

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Some other, when, when a president is endorsing a coin, sort of the implication is the value is somehow tied to what they're gonna do, right? And so that sounds a lot more like a security in actual fact, where you rely on the efforts of other people. Now, I understand Dogecoin, pretty easy to understand why that is not a security, right?

• 38:17Jason Calacanis?

  There's no central person owns it, yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  The guy sold everything, right? Exactly.

• 38:22Jason Calacanis?

  There's no insider trade on that.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Yes, Trump controls 80% of the token. He's incentivized to make the token go up. At the same time, he's got actions that are going to meaningfully drive up. I mean, on the website, it says like, this is not affiliated with any political party. Who in their right mind is actually viewing the Trump coin as not being affiliated with the highest office in the land? The Argentinian coin is the same play. Why do you think everyone made that trade?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  That's where I have a question, because in your interview with Hayden, he said very clearly that Milei did not get any of this money. And that's the thing that I don't understand. What was the incentive for Milei to, to tweet this and blow up so much of his political capital, frankly, for something that he claims to get no money from? Do we just not believe that? Or was he just incredibly stupid?

• 39:09Speaker 04

  It's complicated. I've talked to everyone important in this story, or at least like 80% of them, and everyone says he'd made no money. I just want to be clear about that. I don't know if that's true, but it seems to me like Milei had some friends who were selling access to Milei. And Milei thought, oh, I'm gonna raise some money. These are some tech kids. I'm being told this is all fine. And then everything blows up. He freaks out. He pretends like, oh, I have nothing to do with it, which is also not true. He did endorse the coin, and then he says, oh, I didn't, I didn't publicize it or something like that. I shared it, or like, I didn't, I didn't promote it. I, I shared it, which is like, okay.

• 39:51Jason Calacanis?

  Here's where you nailed it. So I have seen this phenomenon before. People get a chief of staff where they have people around them, and those people vet, they sort their email, they check their DMs, and they vet the offers coming in, and they, in the most cynical... Interpretation, and we saw this with the mayor of San Francisco. There were people around him who were literally getting like brown bags of 10 or 20K, if I remember correctly, and they would get a brown bag with 10K in it, but they would never tell him they got the brown bag with 10K in it, and they would just set up the meeting. This happened to the Duchess and Duke of one of these, you know, English families. Again, people around them selling access. Now, do you believe them that they were selling access? I have speaking gigs. I get speaking gigs.

• 40:36Jason Calacanis?

  I do three or four a year. I get paid a fortune, $75,000. It's an incredible thing, but you know, people are selling tickets to the events. I say no to 20 of them a year that come from, I'll call the genre of like the Grant Cardones, the Ty Lopez, the money-making schemes. I get offers, and I don't know if I've gotten offers from those two people specifically, but you know, that genre of like money-making scheme, you're paid, and then they, they're kind of whales, and they resell them on courses. They always try to get me to keynote that. They'll offer me 50K, 75K, 100K, because they know they're going to get one whale who gives them 100K, and they get to use my clip forever. And that Grant Cardone guy has clips of him with every celebrity. And he jokes about how he buys those celebrities, uses those clips to validate himself.

• 41:21Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm going to put all this on the side for a second and just say, there's a very, there are very simple solutions to this. The new administration and my friend David Sacks, I believe, will solve this. There is a truth that one of the things you can do with crypto, with NFTs or meme coins, is put them under collectibles. However, if you want to put them under collectibles, there's going to be, there's going to need to be more controls in place. Consumers don't understand the differences, is my belief. And one of the reasons they don't understand the differences is because these things have ticker symbols like stocks. So they know dollar sign Uber, they know dollar sign Bitcoin, you know, whatever, and then they see dollar sign Trump or dollar sign Libra. So that confuses people. They're also traded on markets, and the people trading them use charts that look exactly like stocks.

• 42:07Jason Calacanis?

  The design of these things, the packaging of them, if the packaging looks like a stock, then we have to put it in the stock bucket. So these folks doing meme coins are going to have to stop using a ticker symbol, or just in some way, put massive disclaimers on them that they're not. And then people are also confused because when you go to that, whatever pump fun site is, which they kind of tell you in the name, that it's a pump and dump scheme. That's where the pump comes from. It's a pump and dump. They're leaving out the dump part. So you should, if you do it, if you're dumb enough to go to pump and dump and participate, you know what you're doing, I think. But people do lose money buying and selling it. They say on pump and dump that that's what you're doing. And then there are

• 42:48Jason Calacanis?

  some people who do it to make money. So there needs to be regulation. There needs to be regulation. And the coins and the collectibles need to be very clearly defined, that you cannot own 80% of them. And they have to be released maybe over time. And so you could solve this whole problem, Coffeezilla, if everybody who was selling had to have KYC, had to have their name on a website, had to have their social, not the social security, but have the social security on file somewhere, and there was insurance, and it was an incorporated company, you could see the incorporation licenses. You start to put together that framework, and the problem starts to get solved. These folks are doing it specifically to not solve the problem. So all this new administration needs to do is just start

• 43:31Jason Calacanis?

  putting these rules in place. And if they put these rules in place.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  I have to jump in on that. I think you're dead right. I think there's a misunderstanding of what, and a mismatch between what, how the administration views these meme coins, and how the kind of modern era views them. I think part of it does go back to Trump. And if you look at the way he first sold NFTs, it kind of tees up what happened with Trump meme coins. So there's an interview with Bill Zanker, who launched the original NFTs. In it, he says, Trump really was like, not on board with NFTs, until he was pitched on this idea that basically we'll call them trading cards, digital trading cards. All of a sudden, Trump's involved. He goes, I love.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  This, we are not going to call them NFTs. We're going to call them digital trading cards. So he gets this idea in his head and it makes sense. NFTs not, it's too confusing. NFTs, collectibles, right? He's thinking collectibles. When you see the meme coins launch, I think there's probably a lot of things where they try to pitch Trump. Finally, I think someone pitched Trump on, hey, it's just like an NFT, right? Which it's not, but that he thinks of it. So if you actually go on the gettrumpmemes.com, they don't call the memes coins. They call them cards because he's thinking about it like digital trading cards. Still, he's thinking about a meme coin like a digital trading card. So our entire administration has circled itself around this like kind of misunderstanding of meme

• 44:59Speaker 04

  coins is actually NFTs, it's actual collectibles. When you're right, Jason, how most of the public interfaces with it is much more like a stock, albeit a worthless stock. If you just search a card on that website, you should be able to find where they call it a card. He's thinking of it. Yeah. See card allocation.

• 45:18Jason Calacanis?

  My debit card.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  No, no, no. But not, yeah, it says see card allocation. So they're thinking of it like you're buying the art. They're thinking of the meme coin is like you're buying the art, but people aren't buying, if that was true, people would buy one Trump meme. People aren't buying one Trump meme.

• 45:34Jason Calacanis?

  You might buy a half dozen, right? They're buying a dollar amount of it like it's a stock. They're not buying an individual and saying, I want to own three of these baseball cards and these are the three designs I want to know. See, I think this is the nefariousness going on. I've always believed that the majority of people in crypto are bad actors. I only base this on having met them, you know, and spent time with them. The more time I spend with the crypto people, they believe in their souls that they are really smart and that there are fish and pigs in the world and the fish are there to be filleted and enjoyed and the pigs are there to be fattened and slaughtered. How do I know that they have this perception? Because they say it. They describe

• 46:16Jason Calacanis?

  their customers. They describe their participants as pigs who get fattened and slaughtered. And in fact, the name of like the, the big scam in the world is pig slaughters, right? Pig butchering.

• 46:30Jason Calacanis?

  Pig butchering. And the concept is fatten up the pig, just and let them get fat. And when they're nice and fat and juicy, that's when you slice them up and you butcher them. And if that is the case, what we saw with Malay and what we saw with Trump and what you described there, I think tracks, you go to the influencer, the celebrity, the person who's going to bring the pigs to the slaughter and to get the fish to come into the net. And they do it under their own free will. They they walk into the slaughterhouse, they walk into the fishnet. They use the trust in that relationship to bring the fish and the pigs to their demise. And the group of people who are doing this are telling them that they're doing it for a good reason. And they're tricking these folks into doing it. And then they're laughing.

• 47:15Jason Calacanis?

  They laugh, they laugh when they snipe this stuff. These are bad actors. The way you deal with bad actors is the law.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Ah, but Jason.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  So there's bad actors in the world. And the way we deal with them is with cops. And we deal with, we have regulations. The regulations are not for the good people. None of us here would launch a coin and trying to dump it on our family and friends. We're not the bad people. 2% of the world is filled filled with bad people. 1%, 2% who would do this kind of stuff. And those are the people the laws have to be made for. Sorry for all the good people in crypto. But there are bad people in crypto. I say four out of five people I meet in crypto are literally either criminals or they believe the philosophy that the stupid people deserve to lose their money to the smart people.

• 48:05Jason Calacanis?

  I also know this Coffeezilla, the great Coffeezilla. I know this from playing poker.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:10Jason Calacanis?

  Because it's very similar. As you go up the ladder, I was invited to all the games. I got invited to the games with Leo. And Ben Affleck and Toby that are chronicled in Molly's game. And I had dinner with Molly two years ago. A friend brought her to a dinner. I was having a Carbone in Miami at the All In Summit when we had it down there. Or no, it was iConnections. It was at the iConnections event. She was speaking and she says, Hey, Jake Al, I don't know if you remember. And I said, that you invited me to play with Leo and Toby at your game at the Four Seasons and I never came. She says, Exactly. I said, You know why I never came, right? She goes, No, why? I said, Cause I knew I was the dumb money at that time in my life.

• 48:55Jason Calacanis?

  I made a bunch of money and I was just getting started in poker. And you, and you would tell me Leo and Ben and Toby were asking, Where's Jake Al? Where's Jake Al? Cause I had played with them at other games, which weren't her game. And those folks in chronicled in the book, specifically Toby, had a sadistic joy in taking people's money. I have other poker friends who just love to beat people. Now, if you're beating and it's rich people playing rich people, it's okay. But when you're coming up the hierarchy, I was so popular being invited to so many games because I was the mark. I was the ninth best player at a game of nine people. Actually, I was the ninth best player at a game of eight people. You know why I was ninth? Cause the dealer was much better than me as well. Right?

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  I was probably 11 because the two cocktail waitresses were better than me. True. There's people who just look at dumb people as the marks and they think they deserve this shit yet. That's actually the, the role of government and law is to protect the weak from the people who are evil. The end. Sorry. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Okay. But here's my question.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  So we all agree, the three of us put our heads together. We look at this, we go, Hmm, not so good. Jason talking about regulation, talking about what the SEC should do, but we just as a nation elected an administration that is opposed to regulation in favor of crypto writ large, launched their own meme coins and then put David Sacks in charge of it. That does not seem to me like a recipe for regulation. It seems to me like a recipe for more of the same on, actually the same on steroids.

• 50:23Jason Calacanis?

  Nah, David's gonna clean it up.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  How does he do that without indicting the president for doing the same thing?

• 50:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's so easy right now. Obviously I don't think the president should have done this. I think that they will very easily create a rule set, as I described, and then tell everybody who did it in the past. Okay, you got a mulligan and, you know, we're going to move everybody to this new system. Please follow these new rules.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  I also think there's an opportunity to demarcate out, even if you're saying you like, I don't, by the way, I hate meme coins. I'm, I'm, I, I think if you want to do it, that's fine, but I just think it leads to these kinds of bad incentives. But that is different from fraud, right? So when the president launched the coin, as much as I loathe it, and I think it sets a bad precedent, whatever, they locked up their coins.

• 51:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  They said they were gonna do it, they locked it up, right?

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  Whereas what we're talking about with Hayden Davis is fraud is when there's deception involved, right? You said one thing and there's something else going on that the public doesn't know about that is materially harming them. That is like the sniping. That's a, that stuff should still be illegal and prosecuted heavily. What I want to see, if it was my dream, is that, look, even if they want to be ant, like, pro crypto innovation, right? Meaning we want some rules of the road, that's fine. Still go after the fraud, because fraud has never been legal, it never should be legal, but because some of these agencies are being gutted, because I think there's this feeling of like, we want to, we want to throw out the guys who are, you know, who are clogging the wheels before, you're

• 52:01Speaker 04

  gonna get a lot less of that, unfortunately, which we need, we still need the fraud guys taking down the fraud. If you want XRP to do its thing and you want Ripple to be able to innovate, okay, whatever, you can make that case. But leave the fraud guys in place to still take down the bad guys, so there isn't a feeling at large that, oh, there's like, kind of like crimes legal for the next four years.

• 52:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that is a valid concern, and I think it's good to call it out now, so the administration understands, hey, somebody like Coffeezilla is sitting there watching this. I did a little tweet here fixing crypto and how to do it. It's very simple. I put some numbers in here, they're just placeholders. All crypto projects in the USA need to be registered with the SEC. Okay, you just fill out a form. I'm launching a crypto project, it's done online. Super easy. You have to be incorporated in a specific state. Pick the state. That you like their rules most. Some people like Delaware, some people like Nevada. There's a big move into Texas, I hear. Then you have to have a board of directors. It has to have at least three people and it has, you have to have basic insurance. I'm talking like maybe a million dollar liability insurance, which would be, you know, I don't know.

• 53:06Jason Calacanis?

  Five, 10, $15,000 a year. All the project founders, number two, investors and directors, they have to hold their shares for four years. Or maybe they can sell 5% of their holdings a year for the first seven years. These numbers are placeholders, but this is a similar thing to what we do in private companies. This has always existed. And then anyone owning more than 5% of a project has to be disclosed in real time on the blockchain. Hey, you talk about how great the blockchain is? Let's put all those in there in a running tally. Whoever breaks 5% of entities and you know, you gotta put some rules in there that an entity can't create multiple wallets or else you know, you're breaking the law. So there, there's some rules to the road here. Not accredited investors can only participate in this, and that's 95% of the country.

• 53:44Jason Calacanis?

  If they pass a sophisticated investor test, 50 question test, you can take it in two hours and maybe the course is a hundred page book. And you have to read the book and anybody with an IQ over 80, 90 can read the book and get it. Kind of like a driver's license or a scuba, a scuba license. Have you ever taken those? I think about it in that sort of range. Number five, anyone buying into the project who's offshore and is putting in over 250K, you gotta be KYC, you gotta know your customer. And then finally, we put a, a tax on all transactions of 0.01%. It's a crypto tax. All of that tax goes into our new sovereign month fund. That's just a tweet.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  But that would ruin all the fun. That would be reasonable and regulated and full of less grift, Jason. What's the point then?

• 54:28Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, but it does, I don't think it kills crypto. I don't think it kills crypto. It only kills the grift in crypto. What do you think?

• 54:34Speaker 04

  I, I think, I think it's, it's definitely, look, regulation is better than no regulation. One of the things that really was interesting in my conversation with Hayden is he kind of said like, oh, well, what's the point of rules? Because all markets are rigged. He goes, equities are rigged. And I was like, that's not an argument against regulation though. It's an argument that our regulation is imperfect, but it's not like, oh, throw out all the rules because there is, you know, there's some insider trading here and there. There's a lot less insider trading in the capital markets. I don't know if I would go that far, but there's, there's, uh, it's less easy to insider trade. We make it hard. The point is make crime as hard as possible. Make it as cumbersome as possible. Make it as difficult as possible. That is like the goal. You're never going to eliminate it entirely. So I think that's a good start.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Look, just get regulation in the works. Get it moving so people can act accordingly. But at the same time, like the answer is not, oh, we just throw everyone out of the SEC and DOJ. Because, oh, it's all rigged. It's all rigged anyway, so let's just not have any rules at all. I think that is a recipe for disaster.

• 55:36Jason Calacanis?

  So well said. When people don't have a good argument, they'll say one of two things. This person doesn't get it. Have fun staying poor, which some people in the comments are doing right now about us. And it's like, okay, this is silly argument. Like actually be more granular. What don't we understand? Which part of it are we missing? Like make an actual argument as opposed to the at home. You know, and then the second piece is, is the dystopian, nothing matters. You know, um, what's the word for people who are nihilism? It's the nihilistic approach. Thank you, Alex. The nihilistic approach is, hey, everything's anyway. Everybody's a criminal anyway. You know, everybody's getting robbed anyway. Therefore, nothing matters. The truth is, even with the regulation we have with IPOs, you can lose your money and it can go to zero.

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  But it doesn't happen all that often. And when it does happen, when insider trading happens, somebody goes to jail for 10 years. So these snipers and these insiders, they're doing insider trading. And he basically, I think, admitted that during your discussion. He basically admitted to doing insider trading. And I think at some point you said, yeah, we have a term for that. It's trading. You will have people break the law. And the idea that you can get sharp on Wall Street or embedding, even though there's regulations, is proof positive that you need regulations, not that you need, don't need them. Now, somebody said in these comments, Coffeezilla.

• 56:59Jason Calacanis?

  That who gets to determine how people spend their money? The libertarian argument, it's my money, I should be able to do it, what I do with it, what I want. And I guess they're opposed to my simple test. What do you think of that sort of response?

• 57:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:15Jason Calacanis?

  My money, I should be able to lose.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, I agree that like, yeah, okay, people should invest wherever they want. I don't think most of those people actually want to be fooled and scammed. So what we're proposing is not that we're trying to limit, limit your, what, do what you want with your money. It's kind of like somebody even saying like, I, I want to do drugs. And you go, okay, I want to clean the dirty drugs off the street. Nobody wants to do, even if they want to do drugs, they don't want to do dirty drugs mixed with fentanyl that might kill them. Right? So I think it's kind of the same analogy here. Even, I'm not even saying outlaw meme coins, even though I personally don't like them. I think they are kind of predatory on most people who engage with them. But at the same time, it's like, okay, well, let's at least clean up the space. If you want to go to Vegas, regulate Vegas.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  Make sure there's no, it's not like tilted, tilted in a way that the person doesn't understand. Everyone knows at least that Vegas is the house always wins. And they know the odds that the house is always going to win. You get fair odds. And so if you're going to engage in meme coins, you should have a fair shake at those meme coins.

• 58:18Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. All right. Everybody go subscribe to Coffeezilla.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's Patreon where they can actually pay to subscribe and support your incredible work.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you so much. I appreciate the support as always, Jason.

• 58:27Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. And please, Matty, make sure that I am subscribed at the highest tier. Coffeezilla, I don't know what the highest tier is. I think he just added.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Five bucks. No, it's five bucks. That's it.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  Put me on a hundred bucks.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  There's only one, there's only one tier. This man is not.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  Give me a hundred dollar one. I want a hundred dollar tier. Please put a hundred dollar tier, Matty.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  All right. Appreciate you guys.

• 58:47Jason Calacanis?

  I think you can do that. Just because he's making a living doing this is great. And the fact that like, this is one of the great things, right?

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Also, I just want to say that I think that the point about the difference between Molonya coin and the Libra coin was actually useful because I was, I think, conflating them a little bit too much. But I will be curious to see how much regulation can be put In place without the crypto folks crying uncle Jason because they have been as you said earlier they're pretty opposed against her for a while and I think they're looking forward to free reign.

• 59:17Jason Calacanis?

  They're not going to get free reign. I can tell you, listen, without saying I have inside information, I think we're going to see specific, detailed, granular crypto regulation that addresses each of these items we brought up today. And I think unlike Gary Gensler, it'll be very clear and it will take the bad stuff and push it offshore and the good stuff will be located here. And then you'll have a very simple choice to make as an American because Americans right now are playing in poker rooms with IP with, you know, VPNs and they're on other people's offshore blackjack, you know, people playing offshore blackjack as we speak.

• 1:00:00Jason Calacanis?

  Once we get the good actors onshore, then what's going to be left is the bad actors, if they do onshore stuff will get pinched and the ones who are offshore will be out of the range here and they will, if they do participate like Tether did, they could get banned in New York. I think Tether was banned in New York and then, and I don't know if that ban still exists. So even if it's an offshore thing, it can be banned and that's what we're going to see. Things like USDC will be given, you know, be heavily regulated and clearly delineated how you can operate. Insurance will come into play and all this stuff. So the fact that they put David in charge of it makes me feel great. But in

• 1:00:42Jason Calacanis?

  this interim period, chaos, it's my job here to call balls and strikes and to tell you the truth about what's going on here. The truth is, we are now in a transitional position that is kind of like the early days of crypto, which is to say, you should not participate in it. If 100 of my friends said, should I participate in this stuff? I'd say, only if you don't like money.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  If you hate money, here's a great way to spend your time.

• 1:01:05Jason Calacanis?

  If you hate money and you want to burn your money, participate in this. The end. Just like I would tell you, if you've never played poker and you come to my poker game or, you know, and you play in a high stakes game with people who've been playing for over 10 years and who read books on poker and use solvers online, you will lose all your money. So if you can afford to lose that money, you're going to enjoy it. Great. If not.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And to close off the show, Jason, I have a gift for you in return. News from the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, former commissioner, now chairman. He has reported, and you're going to scream.

• 1:01:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Um, some tweets that came out before the show. He says, today I informed staff at the FTC that the 2023 FTC and DOJ joint 2023 merger guidelines are in effect and will serve as the framework for our agency's merger review analysis, which I believe says that he's going to continue the underlying blueprint of the wrath of Khan.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  And I am surprised by this. And I just wanted to share.

• 1:02:06Jason Calacanis?

  I don't buy it.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  You don't buy it?

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Yeah. If you're the president of the United States and you want to win, that means America's top companies need to win and venture capital, private equity need to win. These three forces, the LPs who put money into private equity and VC and the publicly traded companies that are out there, they drive American innovation. They drive American innovation to the point at which when you make a list of the top 20 companies by market cap, you're going to see Apple and Tesla and Microsoft and Nvidia and a long list of companies that were made possible by mergers and acquisitions and private equity and venture capital.

• 1:02:51Jason Calacanis?

  Do you want to have more Googles, Metas, Microsofts, Apples, Teslas, Ubers, Airbnbs, Coinbase's, or do you want to have less of them? All of those companies did tuck in acquisitions that became extraordinary. Google without YouTube would be a third smaller, I think. Without Android and YouTube, it would be a third smaller, maybe half as big, you know? And Apple's done ton of tuck in acquisitions that have driven innovation for their smartphone. If they didn't do those, their smartphone would not be as competitive. Microsoft, everything from PowerPoint, I believe, was acquired to Minecraft. I mean, just tons of stuff have been acquired by them, Twitch, et cetera.

• 1:03:34Jason Calacanis?

  Amazon with Whole Foods, the list goes on and on. Obviously Meadow with Instagram and WhatsApp. Do you want to have for as imperfect as those companies are and as critical as we can be? Do you want to have another 10 of those? If you want another 10 of those, let the mid-sized companies merge and compete with them. I'm talking my own book here. Nothing would please me more than Robinhood and another company in that genre to merge and go big. If Amazon bought Robinhood, if Apple bought Robinhood, if Google bought Robinhood, none of these really make sense. They don't, they don't seem to make sense. You would have us become even more competitive. Why? Robinhood could get another 50 million accounts on it and

• 1:04:16Jason Calacanis?

  it would be a juggernaut. If Uber and Tesla merge, they win self-driving globally. If Uber and Amazon merge, they win self-driving globally. If Uber, DoorDash merge, they win globally. Just those two coming together, which would be something people would want to block. I'm saying don't block it. More, it's the chances of like prices rising with Uber and DoorDash coming together, that cost is less than the gain for America of owning delivery and moving of stuff globally around the world. So you have to pick your poison. You want to have the biggest companies in the world and dominate the world or not? That's what M and A is going to do for these

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  companies. I know this is a controversial thing.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it's not. Well, I mean, Jason, I mean, we've gone over this in the past. I'm not trying to make an argument that the 2023 merger rules were the right ones per se. It's just, it surprised me, given the, the tenor of expectation coming into this administration, which is very much kind of what you're outlining here. Business friendly combinations, fine. I'm just surprised at the, at the tone that's been struck thus far, because I, I think you hold what I would call the standard business perspective on where the FTC should have gone post-LinaCon. And to see this signal to me is a little surprising. I'm just mixing it in with the HPE, Juniper thing. There seems to be a couple of notes that hint at the music coming from this administration being slightly different

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  than the tune that some people expected. That's all I'm trying to point out. I'm just watching this going, huh.

• 1:05:52Jason Calacanis?

  What would be the best argument against what I'm saying?

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  The best argument that goes against what you're saying, in my view, is that-

• 1:05:59Jason Calacanis?

  Is this your view or what you think another person's view? This is actually your position? Or you're steel manning? Steel manning means you're just coming up with the best argument? Your view is obviously your belief system.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Jason Calacanis?

  Which one are we doing here?

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  I think my, my belief system is that if we allow- Every company to buy, well, so I think I'd have to phrase this as a steel, as a steel man point, or like making the hyperbolic case. My, my general perspective is that if we allow large companies to snap up potential competitors at will, we will constrain the ability of the market to disrupt itself. And my example of this is Adobe Figma. I think that Figma is going to tear down Adobe, and I think the market will be better for that long term than if we had allowed that acquisition and allowed an incumbent to continue preying on the market thanks to their size.

• 1:06:47Jason Calacanis?

  And my thinking on that specific one, I'll, I'll go the other way, is if they were combined, they become the global dominant player, clearly. And then Canva, an Australian company, can't beat either of them, uh, because they're so dominant. And then there will be other competitors who come along, offering open source, free, you know, AI based, and they'll still be able to chip away at it. And by the way, most acquisitions don't work out. So maybe they would screw that acquisition up, right? It's well known that four to five acquisitions just don't work. They don't accrete. So there's so much risk taken here. Who knows if that one and one, but those are two great American companies. Why not let them dominate even more? That's my high order bet. We need to

• 1:07:30Jason Calacanis?

  have the American companies become such globally dominant players that we accrue all that, all those taxes, all that wealth, all those individuals and their stock options, well, trickling down into our economy, not others. But I understand that this is, you know, uh, not a perfect thing. I mean, what, what if Apple bought Spotify? What if Google bought Spotify? Now we're taking a Nordic country. I think they're Swedish, uh, you know, and you get a Swedish company now owned. What if Klarna gets bought by PayPal or somebody, you know, uh, that would be good for America. So getting these companies to buy, we could buy up all these other companies in the world. So.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  So that I'm fine with. I'm, I'm fine for going, I'm, I'm fine for waiting, you know, the European cookie jar. But, you know, it's, it's interesting. When you say that Adobe plus Figma crushes the world and crushes Canva, that's, I think, where we run into the disagreement. I think that Figma is going to crush Adobe and Canva.

• 1:08:29Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Sure. I mean, it's a it's an open playing field, right? And so the question is, do you want your gladiator to absorb the superpowers of the other up and coming gladiators? Or do you want to have more gladiators? I think at this moment in history, we want to have the the super gladiators. We want the ones who absorb the other ones and just crush them.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Keep in mind that Jason and Alex talk on the podcast and Andrew runs the FTC. So we'll see what he does. I just thought it was interesting notes to strike at this moment in time. So.

• 1:08:56Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. If you don't tune in live, this show was like almost two hours of live. So if you want to get an hour and 45 minutes of show where we're kind of chopping it up and we got a lot of guests coming in, go to youtube.com, search for this week in startups, subscribe, hit the bell so you get notifications for all. And then we'll say hi to you in the comments and we'll take your questions and we'll reference you, etc. And you get probably, you know, some days 20% more show, some days 50% more show than the podcast, which gets edited down. And you don't get to see us pulling up graphics or discussing the show in the background. So you can go behind the scenes. You can also do that on X. Follow TWI startups, follow Alex, A L E X is how you spell that, Jason,

• 1:09:37Jason Calacanis?

  J A S O N. And we also live stream, I understand, to Instagram. We have TWI startups on Instagram. So if you could all go check that out. I see that we're doing that now. Please post some comments. Please follow that account because it's we really haven't invested in it much. My email for life, [email protected] and Founder University, applications coming in for the new cohort, founder.university. And you'll, if you do well in that program, you get to come to Texas and hang out with me and eat barbecue. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.