CLARITY Failed, Many Stablecoins Debate, Circle Launches Arc & Meta's AI Edge | Weekly Roundup

0:00Welcome to Token 2049. Token 2049 is back October 7th and 8th bringing together 25,000 attendees, 300 speakers and 500 exhibitors for the world's largest crypto event. Token 2049 is happening alongside an in partnership with our own digital asset summit Asia. So you can experience both conferences in Singapore during the same week. Across Token 2049 week there'll be more than 1,000 side events culminating with after 2049 and Formula 1 weekend and the speaker lineup is stacked. Shane Coplin of Polymarket, Jeff Yon of Hyper Liquid, Arthur Hayes, Nasdaq CEO, Adina Friedman and many more. Join us in Singapore October 7th and 8th for Token 2049 and digital asset summit Asia. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. And we're live. What's up folks?

1:00Welcome back to the round up. No, Santi. We got Rob here. Rob, Rob heard me talking talking shit about him the other week. So he where he not only joined this week, but he he booted Santi. Well, I should have booted you. I mean, you're the one talking shit, not him. Sure. Sure. I just like you thought I was gonna listen and then like you know, you're listening. I'm impressed. You listen. So were you an Empire listener before joining? Occasionally, I'm not like an every week listener of any podcast. Like there's no podcast. I'm an every week listener. But occasionally, so like the round up, I, you know, would love to hear Santi and you just mostly talk every week about how to buy more hood. So you know, you've been right about that for many. Right. Yeah. What's been going on, man? I feel like you've been at like there's your New York right now. There's like 400 conferences in New York right now. Yeah, I am in New York at the moment. So yeah, yeah. We got circle. We got a conference. With DC. Yeah. So when are you getting work done? These days? Um, I don't do work. I just do podcasts and meetings. So yeah. Nice.

2:04Nice. Yeah. Someone asked me the other day, I said, who runs the company if you're just podcasting all day? I was like, I it's really unfortunate. You think of me like that. No, that's a sign of like a good good leadership, right? Like you, the place runs itself without you. So yeah, we have an incredible good, incredibly talented set of investors that, you know, do most of the work and I get to come and hang out with you. So there you go. There you go. It's a good dream. You live, Rob. Um, all right, man, we got a long long list this week. We've got um, regulatory stuff, which usually I wouldn't dive too deep into, but there was interesting stuff from the SEC and actually CFTC that it's FTC thing up past over a little bit, but um, SEC, today and then also clarity, you know, got rejected this week. So we should probably start there. There's some other stuff around. Um, Paul the market had some big hires, which I'm sure you'll want to talk about. S&P made it had two big deals this week, big investment into Kiko and then they also S&P acquired a crypto company called Open Zeppelin Circle launched ARC announced

3:07they're token, a lot of ups a lot of downs on on the feed. Um, anyways, got a lot of buzz. So we should talk about that. I was at the Circle ARC launch event, um, yesterday and then some smaller news. Camino got a new CEO column, which is a very interesting kind of Arabore competitor launched stablecoins. Makes you want to call it a Arabore competitor, to be honest, like they're a little bit of different businesses. Um, you're right. That was, that was, you're right. That was an over, over, over simplification, I would call it. Um, Rob's like you know a thing or two about Fintech and then instinct, instinct, my favorite company in the world, instinct other than blockworks, I was, I was, I said, go long instinct, raise a 10 billion Rob as usual, wrong me, right. So anyways, by the way, when I was listening to the podcast last week, you had this segment that you guys treated out that which was like, oh, um, you were very clear. You're like the multi stablecoin thesis is dead. It is a doapply and everything else has been proven wrong. And like you could not have been more wrong in that segment. And like, I don't know. Yeah. And like I, and I wasn't there.

4:11So I felt like you had this topic when I was there. That's why that's why we bring up these topics that we know nothing about when you're not there, Rob. So you can't tell us why we're wrong. It's clearly this, there's clearly a strategy. It's the way it's so tell me, okay, so to, if people didn't listen, I said the, the, the, the, you know, hundreds of stablecoin thesis is dead. There won't be hundreds of stablecoins. And I, you know, I gave an example of, um, open USD, which stripe launch of stripe required bridge. Um, and I said the fact that they are now launching a single stablecoin instead of powering trying to power thousands of stablecoins is an example of why the one example of why this, you know, thesis is dead. You're taking the other side. You think the many stablecoin thesis is well, well, a lot of. I mean, you have so far in Clarenna and Ficer and you have, uh, two bank consortium trying to do it. You have a stripe consortium trying to do it. You've got, uh, you know, USDC USDT, you have, um, I can tell you, uh, there are multi, multi nationals that I know for certain are launching their own stablecoins. You have money

5:14gram and western union. You've got, um, there's other fintechs that are doing it. There are other banks that are doing it right now. You've got the startups that are, a lot of these startups, like, Bridgerton has like an internal stablecoin, uh, that for just for treasury management. There's a, um, uh, I think there's a number of other, uh, they're like you, and probably market has their own sort of like USDC thing right now. Like there's a number of other exchanges. I know looking at doing something, uh, internally. Like I think the, the reality is is like, they're, uh, if you take into account, the fact that there is going to be a lot of people using a white label stablecoin is something separate, right? So like, you know, even if it's powered by, um, Agora or MUSD or bridge or whatever, um, like, you know, a white label stablecoin, there are many, many people are saying, hey, I have a bunch of float and like I want to have my own stablecoin because it's easier for me to let and get the yield versus others. Um, those people aren't trying to make it a payment stablecoin.

6:15They're not trying to go compete with USDC at the, you know, the PSPs, but they are issuing those stablecoins and they will, I think, over time need to be, you know, like, like, you'll need to be able to support those or clear those relative to like, you know, USDC, USDC, USDC impact those, uh, others are the bank stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized treasuries, all the cash equivalents, like there will probably be, I mean, there's, there's several dozen like sizeable, you know, cash equivalents today that will be many more. So by that thesis, then if it's a better product for someone sitting in cash because you can get better yield, anyone with a large balance sheet should have their own stablecoin. A lot of people with large balance sheets will, I think that the biggest companies have really good treasury management solutions with the corresponding banks like JP Morgan, you know, et cetera. But like for everybody who's not those people that want to do, they have complex global, uh, treasury, uh, like treasure operations who want to be able to get yield and moving out of different, uh, different types of, um, cash equivalents or non-cash equivalents,

7:18uh, over time, like they are a lot of them are launching their own stablecoin. And we're, like, we're talking like biggest commodities companies in the world, we're like, like, like, we're hearing a lot of this when we look through, like, but doesn't don't all of the, you said, you know, some companies have access to JP Morgan and, you know, Morgan Stanley and they got the FX tax desks and they can get the best yield and they can hedge out all the right, like, all, they got all, they got all that stuff, right? So, um, but for people who don't, then stablecoins make sense, but don't these big companies have, all have access to that? So one, it depends on size of a company and whether or not they get the service they want. Two, it depends on how, um, uh, complex their global operations are and the global treasury management situation is. So like, why did Western Union do what they did? Well, Western Union is like, I don't even know the amount of countries they're in, but you know, there are hundreds of, there are over a hundred countries and like their, JP Morgan does not have good, uh, does not do well in the correspondent banks in Africa, right? Africa is a, there's a much harder

8:20banking setup across a lot of those, uh, a lot of those locations where you have, you see, large corridors for Western Union. Same thing in Latin America, same thing across a lot of these other remittance corridors, same thing across a lot of, um, anything to do with commodities and a lot of the tech companies right now, like all of these guys are very complex, um, supply chains, etc. Like all of them are looking at doing, um, potentially their own stablecoin or white level stablecoin. And so listen, I, I think there's, when you're tether and your circle who are not going to go and share a bunch of yield with people and you see real value add by having and using some sort of tokenized asset, you will probably end up for some reason using a, another form of another stablecoin. Um, or many of these people, instead of doing a rev share agreement, would rather just have a white labeled one or, you know, one of their own. Do you count tokenized money market funds like something like, um, Franklin Templeton's Benji?

9:21Right? Like we, we, we looked at block works at like, should we have some of our treasuries in something like this? Like, because that could make a lot of sense. It's like the Franklin, on Shane, US government money fund, FOBF, XX, which is represented by this Benji token. And there's actually a lot of reasons why we should just move our treasuries into that. Is that a stablecoin in your mind? It is, uh, I would, I sort of like, there's like payment stablecoins. And so like, this is like, like, genius talks a lot about payment stablecoins, specifically. Right. And then there's like a bunch of cash equivalents. I do expect that like what we're, and what we're already seeing this is that a lot of the people who have like a lot of USDC or USDT that they have to hold a lot of them are thinking about swapping into something else that pays like really yield like why they're, why they're holding that versus eventually like before they might, you know, offer amp into, you know, some sort of money market fund. But if I can hold a tokenized version of that and I'm doing a lot of work in stablecoins already, I'm going to do that. So I think in terms of like what do people talk about a lot with stablecoins? They talk a lot about a TVL or issuance mount, right? And those, because

10:25people are going to stop holding the stablecoins that don't provide yield, they are a competitor from that perspective. Okay. That makes sense. Let's get into clarity. We'll come back to that debate. I got to think about that. I'll come back to that. So okay, so like a big fortune 500 who has nothing to do with payments and nothing to do with crypto, you think we'll launch their own stablecoin just to sit in that stablecoin. I know they don't want any adoption. I know for a fact some of them are doing it right now. Yes. Interesting. Very cool. That's cool. It's good info. All right, before getting into clarity, block works had a cool product launch today called agentic detection. So this is the first product launch from our Missouri acquisition. Missouri had a great product called monitoring, which is used by a majority of the, you know, it's used by a lot of exchanges, custodians, brokerages, really anyone who lists crypto assets needs to monitor those assets. And so there's a platform called monitoring that we acquired in the Missouri acquisition.

11:27One of the things that it does is it alerts you when things happen. So, you know, for example, like, you know, Zcash has a, you know, changed to the network like a custodian needs to know that so they can update their smart, the smart contracts for their custody solution. You know, a token gets bought by North, you know, North Korea buys 10% of a token. An exchange needs to de-list that. So there's a monitoring solution. The alerts would take like five to 10 minutes to get out to people because we actually have people internally blockworks analysts who manually verify the alerts. So the exchanges and custodians and brokerages and fintechs came to us and said, we need these alerts in seconds, not in minutes. And so we built a, we basically trained a model on all of our analysts, you know, all of the manual decisions that the analysts have made related to monitoring over the many last couple of years. What when this, when, you know, as Missouri had this product announced, a blockworks blockworks monitoring. And now we can send the, our customers updates in seconds instead of minutes. So just wanted to call this out. People can go to,

12:30um, yeah, if you just go to our website, you'll see a little learn more at the top or I tweeted out, blockworks tweeted out. So yeah, big shout out to unchained, had some great coverage of it. The the defiant had some great coverage of it. So one and two, shut that out. Rob Dragonfly. Should we should, should we get like a part of the podcast every week that is like blockworks update? Now that we're shipping on a weekly basis, we could, Rob, I mean, you guys, you've got some real velocity. So I mean, you already used the podcast for that. Well, we both do it, you know, it's great. All right, let's talk clarity. Let's talk clarity. So all right. Um, all right, unfortunately clarity didn't pass. I mean, some are saying fortunately, I, I think it's unfortunately is what I'd say. So we definitely would prefer it passed. That's my take. I think there's some revisionist history of people saying I never even wanted to pass in the first place. But like, let's, let's be honest here on this podcast, like I think we all wanted to pass or at least I did, I think you did too. So Senate, this was on Tuesday, Senate failed

13:31to advance the clarity act. Um, I think it was it failed 49 to 50. It needed 60 votes. All of the Democrats that we needed. So there were these Republicans, Susan Collins, Josh Holly and um, Jerry Moran voted no. And I think we knew those votes would be no. So we needed, we needed some Dems to vote yes, there are these several Dems who we thought we could kind of get over the the the finish line here. Every single one of them voted no. Um, I think tell us and I'm switching. I wouldn't read too much into that though. Uh, I mean, uh, Kiersten Julebrand came out today and said, hey, she's she's still, um, you know, really focused on trying to get something passed. Uh, and the way, of course, these things work is that, you know, people like Kiersten Julebrand and others have been, uh, very good partners to the industry. Um, and but, you know, obviously being outside of the, you know, call it the core of the way the party is voting

14:31that once you realize it's not going to pass, um, it's, it's not necessarily worth taking the political risk internally to, you know, not vote for it at that point. And so I think some of that commentary has been pretty bad. These people are still, um, many of them, uh, her being being one of them are still big supporters of the industry and will continue to fight for us. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And look, there are many people who say this bill is not dead yet, right? JPMorgan just came out and said, look, it's not fully dead. Um, we've got polymarket up on the screen. Polymarket is pricing it at it. So it actually fell to, I think around six. No, it fell to four percent on polymarket. It's back up to eight percent. So look, it's, it's not dead. There's a one in, you know, 11 chance here, one in 12 chance here that this happens. Uh, market sold off coin-based felt 10% on the news, circled 12%. Um, uh, so yeah, look, that, that's the bad news. I'd say the, the good news is that, um, we have an amazing SEC and an amazing CFTC right now who are very pro making sure these markets are safe and fair and making sure that these markets develop in the US.

15:36And so you've quickly seen, uh, the SEC and CFTC came out with stuff this week, which we can get into, but Rob, I don't know if there's anything else on clarity, uh, that is worth digging into. No, I mean, I think everyone knows kind of where we're at and we've kind of had the discussion. I, you know, bummed that it didn't pass. Um, you know, I think it's worth noting, just like, I mean, there are dozens and dozens of people who worked tirelessly on this for, you know, the last year, essentially. And, you know, we, you know, we talk a lot about the senators and, and the House reps, but they all have, you know, staffs, the, uh, banking committee have staffs, the, the ad committee have staff, and, uh, the regulators and the experts who have weighed in, you know, I've worked tirelessly on this. And so I, I think it's just worth noting that, um, you know, this is was something that a lot of people were, were trying to get done and it's bummer that it didn't, but, um, you know, this is not the end of, uh, I think our support, uh, from DC and also, you know, the, the support that we as an industry should continue to, to try to

16:38give to, uh, pro crypto regulators. Yeah, 100% agree. Well said. So, um, on a more positive note, the SEC and CFCC came out this week. Um, I will share my screen and walk through what the SEC just released. So the tweet that they said is, uh, so this is actually from this morning, we're recording this on Thursday, it's 2 PM Eastern on Thursday, they recorded it, they released this at 9 AM, the SEC issued an order granting temporary conditional exemptive release, uh, relief to tokenize securities venues from the definition of quote exchange in the exchange jack to trade tokenized NMS stock using innovative permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools. So what does this mean? So what they're proposing here is a, um, or what they're issuing is a five year temporary conditional exemption to these tokenized security venues, TSVs, which they're saying can should be allowed to trade tokenized stocks through permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools without needing to

17:40be regulated as, um, as exchanges. So the liquidity providers also get a limited dealer exemption. Um, and I, there's a, there's a couple of key conditions that people who are working in the tokenized equity space should look at, which is one tokenized token holders must get the same rights as the underlying stock, like dividends and voting. Um, two third party tokenizations require written notice and a chance for the issue or to object. So this was an interesting one, right? And the way I read this, Rob, I don't know if you have, I don't know if you've dug into this yet, but the way I read this was the written note, the, the, the chance for the issue or to object breaks down a lot of what tokenized equities look like on chain today, which is like, you'll just throw up AMC on hyperliquid. If you have to give the chance, a chance for the issue or to object, I think this means that AMC can say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't actually want our stock to be tokenized. I'm, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not entirely sure if I'm right there. Yeah, I, so I even dug deep into it yet, because it just came out like, uh, I guess a few hours ago

18:41and, and, um, I, I think we are a couple of things are true. So I think one is true that we are almost certainly likely to get rules that require people to, um, and for, we're likely to get rules that don't allow the current state of tokenization to continue to exist the way it has, because these are creating sort of like weird dislocations, uh, during the off hours and then on the on hours, and especially with the, the Robin Hood, you know, uh, putting a meme coin and pairing it with a, um, tokenized equity. We talked about this a few weeks, I mean, a couple of times over the last couple of weeks. Um, and it's like very clear that like, this is ripe for people to, to not be happy with the way that they're, uh, you know, these things are evolving on chain. Um, but what is also true is that when you look at this, this exemption and you look at what the SEC, um, you know, sort of started talking about a few weeks ago, uh, as they, you know, kind of launched project crypto, um,

19:43there is a lot more coming that is meant to bring on chain markets into the US regulatory structure. Right. And I believe strongly that both Chair Atkins and Chair, uh, CLEG are, they've been working on this, you know, in hand in hand while we've had the, um, the Clarity Act, uh, kind of you're working its way through Congress over the last, you know, six, nine months. And likely what we get over the, you know, from the, the two agencies over the next few months, it's going to be more pro innovation than even Clarity was going to be. And so I guess to the point that we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, like, oh, is this, you know, uh, is this better than Clarity? Well, it is probably going to be more pro innovation than, uh, Clarity would have been for now, right? And but the concern, of course, is like what happens under a new, uh, with there are new directors under a new administration. What is there different types of legislation that gets passed if there's a, you know, if there's

20:43a party switch in both the House and the Senate. But, uh, this is going to be, I think, the most, um, uh, the best time that there's probably ever been for trying to innovate on chain for regulated real businesses across all of capital markets. And people are going to take advantage of that. And if they take advantage of that, we will probably have an industry in a market that is big enough that no matter what happens over the next few years, it will be unkillable. And I mean, it already is. But I am actually very excited about a lot of the innovation that we will see. We, um, I was at the avalanche summit today. And I, and I ran into somebody from a big exchange, who I know pretty well, uh, who's kind of one of the leadership there that's focused on this stuff. And they're full steam ahead. Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter at all that, that clarity didn't pass. They see this as part of the future of their business. And this is a big traditional exchange, right? And a bunch of the banks are like this, a bunch of the asset managers are like this. So, I'm, I'm pretty excited about what's going to happen. And, uh, you know, Chair Hockens and Chair

21:46C, they have been just, um, you know, kind of incredible leaders to, uh, to be, you know, to really be bringing this industry back on shore. Yeah, yeah, agreed. I would also there was the, the post that I was reading from the SEC, there was also a fantastic piece from Hester purse. Let's see if I can pull up some of my favorite lines. It says, uh, this order is not about decentralized finance. Decentralized today, decentralized systems that are driven by automated software do not give rise to the foundational concerns underlying securities regulation, namely that an intermediate, intermediate, intermediate, you trust to act on your behalf. Well, act will be foolish, careless or compromise. This was, uh, I would actually really recommend going to read, uh, Hester purses entire piece. Maybe we can put it in the show notes. I know I say that always and we never actually do, but Austin, let's actually include it in the show notes. Um, this piece called slumber number. That would be great. Um, Rob, who do you think to maybe try to move away from just some of the regulations? So we don't spend too much time on regulation, getting into the companies for a second. Who do you think benefits the moat? Like when you see

22:47something like this, you see clarity not passing, you see the SEC coming out with this, putting on the investor hat for a second. Who do you think benefits the most from something like this? The one thing that we have been trying to figure out has been, I think, quite clearly, where startups fit into the space, right? Because like, I think it's like very obvious. It's a good for issuers. Uh, it's very obvious that it's good and we're talking about, I'm talking about, you know, the people who are issuing their own equity or issuing, you know, commodities, etc. It's assuming that this will depend on what we see from the CFTC. It's also good for the exchanges and for the clearing, the ones that it exists in the clearing houses. It's good for the net new exchanges or, or the crypto exchanges a lot of wanted to enter this space and enter the US. Um, that includes like a calcium and poly and, um, but and also, even like a, like a, probably a lighter in a, in a hyper liquid, uh, as well, and backpack, etc. So it's good for, for those people. Uh, it's, I think good for a lot of the global,

23:49a lot of the global neo banks and a lot of the, the, you know, people are trying to provide access to these types of markets to a customer set that maybe didn't have them already. Um, and maybe it's good for the net new, uh, you know, transfer agents and some of the like core infrastructure providers out pack, obviously, they're, they've grown tremendously because of the fact that they are the custodian of a lot of these equities, um, for all the big exchanges. So like those types of companies, I think it's good, it's good kind of for everybody. I don't know, it's good for the, it's probably good for the stablecoin issuers, right? Because the stablecoin issuers like now, I've, all of these other things to do with stablecoins grow, the amount of stable coins and the people using stablecoins will grow. So I don't, I think it's sort of, um, an ecosystem rising, which kind of rising tides for everybody versus a like, oh, like all the values going to crew here or all the values going to crew here, there's one specific set of companies that are going to, you know, really, really accelerate because of this. Yeah, I mean, the, the immediate thought in my head, I'm looking at companies like super state and securitize. Yeah, that's a

24:52trend for agents, so I mentioned, right? Yeah, like, you know, let's look at, I bet securitize securitize stock. We can see what the market thinks of it. Um, yeah, there you go. Securitize is up 16% on the day. Um, so yeah, the market definitely likes that. I think there's the, the venues where these trade, I think, yeah, I think you're right on a lot of this. There's the venues where it trades, right? There's backpack. I think we'll do quite backpacks seems to be doing quite well. Robin Hood, um, ondo, we've had a couple calls with the ondo folks recently. They seem to be doing cool things in this area. So, um, I think this is one of those things. And so these as always been in my mind that, um, more and more assets are going to come on chain, right? So that's good for the issuers. Uh, but as more assets come on chain kind of everything on chain gets bigger, right? Because there's just more liquidity. There's more people using it. There's better infrastructure. There's more stablecoin issuance. There's more, etc, etc. And so I think it's really hard to pin point any single one person. Um, what will also be true for like a securitize, right? It will be that

25:55there'll be more competition as well, right? And so, you know, anytime somebody makes money on something, then there's also more people who want to do it. Um, but that is also good for the rest of the ecosystem because the when if, you know, CompuServe comes on chain, right? Then like, you know, they have the vast majority of, uh, uh, they're the vast, they're the transfer agent for the vast majority of things that are, um, listed on NASDAQ, right? And so like as those things get bigger and bigger, like everything gets bigger and bigger. And so I, um, I don't think it's like one single person or the other. I think it is the whole ecosystem will get bigger. But this is what we've been saying for a long period of time. Like the, you know, what we probably had multiple, uh, multiple podcasts now at this point that were titled, it's a bull market. It's not the one you wanted. And like, I sort of continue to think like we keep moving in that direction. Yeah. Yeah. I tend to, okay, wait. So then take that a step further when you're looking at the startups, trying to make, yeah, precede or a seed or series A, like what, what, how do you, how do you think about this? We think about it

26:56on people who are building like big, or who are building to solve big problems. Okay. Like if you think about, um, like we get pitched all the time on like individual asset issuers, like, hey, I'm tokenizing X product, right? Like, you know, that's sort of a small problem. And like, that's a problem where like you don't necessarily want to compete with the actual asset issuer who like might just decide to do it themselves over time. Uh, we get pitched, but we think about, okay, well, could it, like venues can be big, big businesses and they can solve big problems that don't exist. Like there you know, there's a lot of on-chain, you know, spot and, or sorry, a lot of on-chain, like equity and RWA derivatives trading right now. Well, that's been really good for hybrid, good for lighter, it's been really good for variational, right? Um, they're on the spot side, it's been good for backpacks, it's been good for Robinhood, right? But it's very clear to me that, you know, there are better ways to build certain venues for certain types of products. That's the reason that we've seen. That's what maybe we'll see a different venue for commodities. And by the way, commodities specifically is something the CFTC has been focused on on the perps side because they've

28:00been worried about for physically delivered products, how perps might mess up the spot market, right? And so like there's, there's, these things are going to evolve and I think there's going to be a number of different companies that come out of this that serve really big problems, but for not, you know, aren't everything for everyone in the way we like to think about it. We're here at the same thing in the compute market side. Right now, there's a bunch of people who are trying to solve compute market problems. And I think, you know, we'll probably, we'll have to see how clearing kind of evolves over time because clearing across some, like right now, if you look at all of the tokenized, you know, whatever call it tokenized test list docs, like almost none of them are the same in terms of a counterparty risk and in terms of liquidity profile and in terms of, you know, potentially when and how they can be converted back to, you know, call it the non tokenized version. And then which means that like, you know, they're not actually one to one and but the regular consumer thinks that they might be, right? And so like, how do you solve those perps role? So these

29:01are big problems that people are trying to solve and times to be where we're trying to get focused. What do you make of S&P's decent push into digital assets right now? So there's two rounds that were so okay, zooming out, I don't know if people know S&P, everyone knows the S&P 500. So S&P is a 120 billion dollar business. It's not actually, I mean Bloomberg doesn't, doesn't have a valuation on it, but it's, it's on par with a Bloomberg type business in terms of the impact on capital markets. It's a, you would, you're, you're, it's a bit smaller than Bloomberg, but like it's a, it's a very big company, but it's on, but it's a, yeah, it's a 100 billion plus. I think the valuation is roughly 120 billion. It's, um, there's two huge ratings age. I guess you could say three big ratings agencies. There's Fitch is smaller, but then S&P and Moody's are the two big players. So S&P is 120 billion dollar business. They do something like 14 billion in revenue. Moody's a bit smaller. Moody's is like an 80 billion dollar business does something like these are probably very old numbers, but these

30:06are the things floating in my head is like roughly let's call it seven billion in revenue for Moody's could be off by a billion or two there, but these are big, big businesses. S&P started the week by announcing that they had led a series B extension in Kiko. So Kiko raised their series B many years ago. I want to say in 2022, they just announced that they had extended that fundraise from four years ago. So I think they raised probably another, they didn't, it was a little unclear on the announcement, but I think maybe another raised like another 50 million bucks here. I want to say, so the total series B was about 110 million. There's some big brands in there, right? RBC, DRW, Broadridge, BNP Perry-Bah, NASDAQ, and then S&P led the round. And then yesterday the S&P announced that they had acquired a crypto firm called Open Zeppelin. So I don't know how familiar folks are with Open Zeppelin, but yeah, one of the one of the great smart contract security firms that has

31:08now started doing things around building frameworks and there was a security stack and yeah, I don't know fully exactly what the business is today, but S&P clearly starting to position, I think, to buy the data and the security stack for what looks like this massive explosion of tokenized markets. Yeah, I mean, they've been very thoughtful. They also did a couple indices that they've been kind of working and can't end with people to try to put them on Jane. They did one with hyper liquid or trade XYZ, I believe that was on hyper liquid. And then they also did one I think Pantera and Artemis as well. And so they've been thinking about this space for a while. I actually did a RWA summit a year ago July, so 14 months ago or so. I actually did the announcement with the woman who runs their innovation team over there. And so it's been really cool to see them kind of get heavily involved. I was surprised by the Open Zeppelin deal. I

32:17guess the idea here is that because they give ratings that they can go and use Open Zeppelin to have real-time risk benchmarks and data and ability to assess what's happening in the protocol and they can then provide that to their clients. Clearly, that tells us a lot about the thing we were talking about before, which was there is real demand for doing things and innovating on chain. And so that's a very, very bullish line. It surprised me though. That wouldn't have seemed like a natural buyer to me. Same. Yeah, same. Same. I mean, so what is that? What's the we go a little deeper? What do you think about? Like, how does the deal like this come to be? What do you think about this? I mean, I'm interested in how it came to be. I hadn't heard of Open Zeppelin running a process. So I don't think that they were, you know, call it, you know, trying to sell it to. Which is interesting because it feels like everyone's running a process right now. Yeah, I mean, on the data side, that's happening a lot. Obviously, you know, to your point

33:17around, obviously, on Kiko, like, Kiko is kind of in a, you know, the kind of the last man standing a little bit on the product that they have, which is like the very the core infrastructure or blockchain data, right? Which I assume you guys are probably customers of them. And we were customers of Amber data, who they acquired, yeah, which Kiko acquired. Yeah, exactly. So they basically sit less on the on-chain data side more on the like exchange data. They have really good like tech data pricing, yeah, tech pricing data. Yeah, but the Amber data was more on chain, correct? Amber data was also more like exchange data, derivatives data, exchange data, stuff like that. So so they so they bought Amber data and now that students together, the really the only one who has this kind of like real-time data that can be that's like institutional grade and level and speed. And so, you know, it makes sense that us people come in because like they, what does SAP at the end of the day? They're, you know, a data provider and a ratings provider, which depends on a lot of data. So that made sense to me. For Open Zeppelin, you know, I wonder if their Corp. Dev team

34:18reached out, like started reaching out to all the auditors. They kind of determined internally that this was something that they wanted to put as part of their ratings criteria. And they, you know, went and talked to a few of them and they decided Open Zeppelin was the best company, either the best product or the, you know, some sort of variation of the best price in the best product together. So super interesting, you know, congrats to the Open Zeppelin guys, but that one did, that one did surprise me. Yeah, I have heard in the rumor mill that this is the first of, I think, I think if you look at the big data and analytics, traditional capital markets players, the, you know, whether it's LSEG or Bloomberg, actually Bloomberg is not very inquisitive in the crypto space, but if you look at the Moody's nest, I think there will be many more deals like this. I'm sure. Yeah. There's a lot of companies out there that raise a lot of venture capital money that are good, very good products, but they're probably not very good standalone businesses as, as, as by themselves. And if you look

35:20at the history of, you know, S&P and FACSET and, you know, Bloomberg and all of these companies, like, what have they done a really good job of is they've grown into these conglomerates by the fact that they keep buying like really good niche products over time. And they brought into these really big glimmers and they kind of sell you this whole thing through the terminal. And so it makes complete sense that that is what would, you know, it was likely to happen here. You know, there's a lot of companies for many years that have raised a bunch of Moody's and now we're going to be the Bloomberg of crypto. But, you know, that's again, like that's a smaller product, usually relative to, you know, and is often included as part of a bigger team, like, and a bigger product, like S&P can offer. Yeah. Yeah. I did just speaking of our agentech alerts. I've just been alerted. The stable, the Athena dat is absolutely. Why is it? Why is this of 50% today? Now it's up like 35. It seems to be. Yeah, 34% looks like on Bloomberg. I mean, I listen, I think everything's up today

36:22from a token perspective. Yeah, not 35% though. No, I mean, Ena is up on about 7% today. That said, like all of these deaths have traded, you know, I debate discount to NAF, right? And so my guess is, I haven't looked at it, but my guess is that that USDDAT is still probably 40 or 50% of NAF right now. And so there's a lot more reflexivity into these deaths, I think, as the market gets better, that gap to NAF should close. Right? I think also like Athena as a continues to be a project that people are very bullish on, the initial readout on the Neobank has been actually quite good. They've done, I think over like a little over two or two to three million dollars worth of transaction, transaction volume in the first two weeks that they've been lying with only 400 customers. They haven't, they've had over 10,000 people on the wait list. Yeah, I think we got some invite codes and some people on our team demoed it and trialed it instead of as a great product.

37:24Yeah, it's great product. They've been working on it for a long time. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of cool stuff that they're doing. And so, you know, I expect that some of these deaths will continue to trade really reflexively as color of the markets continue to come back. Yeah. Let's talk circle. So circle launch arc. What say you, my friend? What say you? I mean, they've been working on a long time. So, congratulations to them on getting it out. They had a bunch of good, a bunch of good kind of partners that came on on day one. I think it was over 190. If I if I read that right, they add a bunch of, I think, pre-determined or pre-negotiated TVL into the morph of vaults. I think they're over 220 on like day one. You know, they, I, you know, clearly from a circle perspective, I understand why they built this. It makes a lot of sense. They've got a lot of interesting things that they're talking about in terms of, you know,

38:24kind of this trying to be quite quick from a from a, from a, just to, you know, call it a finale perspective. They're also doing a lot. They're trying to do a lot on the privacy side. They're trying to do a lot on the FX side. And then they came out and they seemed to mostly promote memes on day one. When I had previously been sort of talked about as a, you know, kind of of a payments first chain, I don't know why they decided to do that, frankly. And clearly, it was, it's in the success of what had happened on Robin Hood, which had Robin Hood chain, which had gone incredibly quickly. But I honestly was super baffling to me. And, you know, it's not like a thing they can't recover from, but it's certainly something that I don't, which part, which part was baffling? That they came out and promoted a bunch of memes on day one. I, yeah. And because like I just, it just goes kind of antithetical to like the business they've been trying to build like the way they've been trying to position arc for a longer time, the way

39:25they position it during the fundraise. And, you know, it's been a lot about, okay, well, like, how can we be the right chain where agenteic finance happens? How can we provide ingrained privacy? Like, how can we have, you know, day one FX that has actually real liquidity and is able to do effects? How can we be this sort of place where economic activity happens for like real businesses? And then the whole team came out and just pumped a bunch of memes on day one. And I just, I, I truly don't don't understand why they did that. And I think it put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouth, honestly, at least in the people that I've heard talk about it. Not something they can't recover from, but like, go back to the thing you were trying to do, which is, you know, the thing that you've been talking about for many, many years on what you want circle and USDC to be. So, I'm pulling up my notes. So, I went to the circle launch event for about an hour yesterday. I will say what was in the room, first what was on Twitter could not have been a bigger difference. Like, incredible group of people. Yeah, I met with yesterday in a one hour period at

40:28this event, BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Visa, what else I mean, moneygram. And this is all like, it's all in like one room. Like, circle has an unbelievable job of convening. I think some of the best people who are building in the industry. And I think the chain, I think they did a, I actually think how they built ARC and how what the decisions they optimized for are really, they really are actually many of the right decisions. And I think if they had just stuck with that, it would have been a better launch. But there was so much probably, I think they probably saw what happened on Robinhood. But the difference is Robinhood is a trading platform. And ARC is, and circle is an, you know, agentic. I mean, they're trying to become a payments company. They've been, I mean, they bought Taza pay, which was a free action. So this is just like getting out of, getting out of your lane, like stick, stick in your lane, what would we might take? There's also an interesting thing that so I was actually was speaking with someone who's one of the biggest

41:30YouTubers in crypto. And I said, it's like, what insights do you have from your analytics right now? And he said the air drop farmers are back after many years of being gone, the air drop farmers are back. Yeah, which was a really interesting insight. And I think if you look at what happened with the ARC launch, the ins, like, I would keep in mind that the air drop farmers are back. And there are very, very ruthless. If you remember from many years ago, like, it's just a ruthless, kind of zero, some audience and group of people. And so, yeah, I don't know, I actually wouldn't, I'm very, I'm not, I don't own circle stock. But like, I think the number of times people have bet against Jeremy is like, once a year, it's like, circle is cooked. It's like, I don't know. I was in that room. I was in that room. I, yeah, I'm, I spoke with many people in circle yesterday. Like, I would be very long circle, very long arc. I think they'll be very successful here. Yeah. I mean, I, I agree with you. Like, I think they've been able to get like a lot of the best people on the lot of people, not around the table. They've really focused on trying to, I mean,

42:32for a longer time, like, they've really been focused on trying to make it a payments company. Right. So it's very clear. Well, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's not clear. But I don't expect that we will have four to four and a half percent rates forever. And I expect that the rates will come and normalize somewhere between two to three percent over time, which means that, you know, if they're, this is a business that is just interesting, come like their revenue will get halved on their current, you know, amount of TVL. It is also, I think, very clear that as a payment stablecoin, the thing we talked about earlier, that there's not a lot of need to own or to hold like a lot of a payment stablecoin if they can't share yield with the end customer. And, you know, they have this deal with, with Coinbase, which obviously prohibits them. The circles have been, they've been cut in some specific deals with some of the big service providers to share yield with them. But because they have to give 50% to Coinbase, you know, they're hampered rather relative to like call it net new, you know, people who are trying to do that or a USD or, you know, et cetera.

43:35And so, you know, they, they see that right in on the wall, they're various smart people. And so they've been trying to figure out how to become more of a payments company and get a payments multiple and get make money in a bunch of different ways. And so, you know, ARC is obviously a part of that, CPI and the Circle Payment Network is a part of that. And, you know, clearly that that is where they're, they're the story they've been telling the market. And that's the story that seems like they've been building for. And then, you know, they came out and there was a lot of like pushing memes. And I think there was a, a tweet that came out that like ARC did, you know, did about 400 ish million of Dex volume on day one across 400,000 active wallets. And there was 97,000 new tokens that were launched on day one on the launch pad, right? And like that's like, it's crazy. And so it's obviously the air job farm, as you mentioned, who, you know, ARC hasn't the token itself hasn't gotten priced yet. And they have to be like, I think, really thoughtful around that because even like in the token economics of ARC, by the way, one of the things

44:37that I thought they did that was really smart is they're giving rebates on CPN and on payments and on Mint and Redeem. If you hold the token, that was very smart. Yeah, yeah, you got it. This is obviously meant for like real users of this thing. And then they went out and pushed a bunch of meme coin launch pads and, you know, FOMO and which, you know, no, no, you know, not down on the FOMO guys, but like that wasn't the way ARC had pitched itself before. And I just didn't think it made any sense. And I think it created a really mixed messaging and created mixed reactions and emotions to this like on the timeline. Yeah, yeah. The good thing about the timeline, people will forget about this. Yeah, I mean, already already, I'm sure. So I don't know, I think this will be very successful. People, you know, it's actually all kind of tied up in the same conversation we were having earlier stable coins like people overestimated how important chains were, I would say. And underestimate how the people overestimated the network effects of a chain.

45:38And underestimate, I think frequently, the network effects of money. And I wouldn't underestimate the network effects of USDC. So yes, the obvious counter to circle businesses like rates come down, their business gets hurt, but like, I don't know, I've, you know, as you do many friends who are building in DeFi and like, there's only one thing that matters for liquidity in DeFi right now in its USDC. You can have all these other stable coins, but like if you're a founder, you need USDC on your platform. So that's on chain, but you know, obviously the USDT is much bigger on the exchanges and a lot of the yeah, but for DeFi builders, it's yeah, or DeFi builders. So yeah, it was Rob McBoy, you want a debate about instinct or do you want to, you tell me, are you, your bullish instinct to 10 bill? No, I actually don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the polymers. That's why you're not bullish. You're like, you back down that quickly. Dude, dude, every company goes through a reckoning and companies are just getting built faster and

46:39scaling faster and raising more money faster than ever. And so, venture capital as a market structure is like, is broken. So like, it's very clear that like venture capital as you thought about it before is very different in the future. And like, this is part of that. Right? Like the the price ups for like the hottest stuff, regardless of fundamentals are happening quicker and quicker. And there's just so much capital at the biggest funds. And we're having this kind of dislocation that there's this going to keep happening. Right? Yeah. I mean, even in our space, right, you know, the hottest companies, rain, rain raised three rounds last year, right? Like, you know, it's happening to these to the biggest companies. Now, they were growing incredibly quickly. And they had, you know, actual revenue on like instinct. But, you know, there's a this is going to you're going to see this more and more where like the valley tries to crown the winners before there's ever actual like PMF or there's ever actual like data that says that those people are the winners. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so anyways, tying this into instinct, I think, you know, companies get bigger faster than ever, they raise more than ever. They also have,

47:43you know, usually it's like the the first big reckoning of a company comes in year four. First big company reckoning for instinct will come in month four here when two of the biggest companies in the world roll out direct competitors, AKA Grockbot and Facebook, you know, Meta Muse. And you know, if there's one founder in this world, I wouldn't want to compete against. It's Mark Zuckerberg. And, uh, have you used Muse? I actually have not used Muse. No. Um, have you? Yeah, I think Muse is something like six to eight times better than instinct right now. Yeah, I mean, I just saw I was with a friend who runs a big book at a hedge fund and he's hit Meta's now his largest position. I just actually bought a bunch of Meta's, I just bought a bunch of Meta this week. When I saw, I mean, this is the retail investor in me. This is like, don't follow this, but like, you got all these guys tweeting out, you know, slow down AI and Zucker's like faster, faster. I'm like, okay. He's going into Zuck mode. So, well, when I, when I loved about what he said too, was like,

48:44he sort of clowned on Daria and he was like, yeah, like we, you know, we could have launched Muse like three months earlier, but we were a little bit concerned about, you know, some of the, the way that it was, uh, behaving and so we were a little bit concerned about security. And so we delayed it for two to three months. And you know what? We didn't go and tell the world that this was like a huge issue. We just did it, right? And he's like, I don't understand why these guys are like talking so much, right? He's like, we're going to move faster. We don't need to talk so much. You got it. You can do the right thing. The FTC and the rest of the regulators already have an ability to regulate us. And so then we launched it. And by the way, we launched it at a time when everyone was talking about instinct and we completely marred them. And like we completely just created a product that was significantly significantly better. And, uh, you know, now I was done with an incredible amount of fanfare. And I, you know, I don't mean to say this like obviously the instinct factor I've never met is, you know, built a great product as well. And as it ships very quickly, I saw he shipped, um, uh, kind of phone calls today too, which was one of the things that I was, I was thinking about. But like, you know, I was playing with the two over the weekend. And,

49:48you know, you're talking clearly what's happening is instinct is compute, um, compute constraint. Because you, you asked them to do the same thing and muses responding sometimes like, you know, 10, 15 minutes quicker for the same exact thing. And there's happening, uh, not only that, it's failing and it's able to reason around problems where, because you're already seeing it, by the way, like, Rezi is already putting up a bunch of roadblocks for people using these products to be able to get, get reservations and stuff. And muses are just better at solving those problems. And so, um, I think this space is going to get incredibly, incredibly crowded. I do not know how a, how a growth investor at these types of evaluations can get comfortable with what is happening here and for something like that. But, you know, these people are, you know, obviously people at index have been incredibly successful in the past. The only thing that would mean make you wrong is if they're sprinting to build their own model. Instead of, um, you know, relying on just chat and, you know, and drop again, Kim and stuff like that. Maybe that's I can imagine they would do that.

50:51You can't train you're a model. You, maybe you can train, um, you can do like, you can train on top of those models and you have your own, um, like small model, right? And we have seen, like, obviously for, it's not going to be a foundational model, right? But like, we have seen some of the performance of small models for specific tasks have outperformed the models, right? And so, maybe, but it sort of seems to me that they raised so much money that they're just, they're, they're obviously trying to build out their own compute. Like that is probably what's happening. You need a billion dollars. You need a billion dollars to go build your own data center. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so let's talk to Pauli Market here. Um, this will be a fun section. Rob, if you tell me the behind the scenes here in a boring section, if you just say, uh, congrats to Shane. So, there's no line. There's no line. I can say, like, let's come on. Rob, come on. Come on. All right. So anyways, Rob said he's going to spill the tea. So Shane, um, so Pauli Market has made four great hires. Uh, they announced that Travis, um, who is, who's this man? Travis Von Dosteadin, uh, who started bird is now the chief growth officer

51:57at Pauli Market. Great hire. Move on next day. No, excuse me. A month later, they announced that Warren Jensen is joining Pauli Market for CFO. Used to be a CFO of Amazon, CFO of EA, CFO of Delta, then announces that Colin McKinney Hill has joined as the VP of ops. Used to be a GM at DoorDash. And last but not least, the best hire of them all announced that Jacob Horn, who, uh, used to be the founder of Zora until very recently, who's founded CEO Zora. He is now joining as, um, I believe had a defy at Pauli Market. So four great hires. Yeah, I mean, I, um, what's very clear in the prediction market space is there is a war for talent, right? Uh, in this has, this has happened. These are two of the fastest growing companies that have ever existed. Like people do, I tell us people a time I talked about about prediction markets. I think I said this on this podcast. Well, like people have to remember when they talk about the

52:57prediction markets that both Kalshi and Pauli Market had basically zero revenue 14 months ago. I had very, very little revenue 14 months ago, right? It was diminimous. And now we're talking about companies that are doing billions of dollars of revenue each, right? 14 months later. The growth has been absolutely tremendous. But with that has been growing pains, right? We've seen for both of them. And so going and bringing in a really professional, um, sort of executive team around Shane has been a big, it's not that they've been talking about for a long period of time because, you know, Shane is an incredible visionary. He built an incredible business. He's done, has got a bunch of people that have been there was since early on who are, um, are awesome, who shout out to many, many of them. And he, you know, he's, he's an able to kind of connect with people in a way that like very, very few entrepreneurs are and to be sort of this motivator in this visionary that people want to follow into battle. But like running a big,

53:58regulated exchange is really hard. And so bringing in like all of these great hires is, is, you know, it was a no-brainer and it was, it was going to happen one way or the other. They've, you know, these are not the first either too. There's guys like Neil Kumar who they had hired as G.C. a while ago from, I believe, Wokey Far, I think in Rome, oh, I might have his firm wrong, but it has been a huge, a huge hire for them. They had a bought a acquired or hired another guy, RE, who I'm going to blank on his last name, but who had run the fanatics, the fanatics kind of gambling business, who's been really good for them on the sports side. So like, there's a bunch of these like really, really just seasoned exact so you'll come in and like, you know, it makes sense because like these businesses, I think are going to be, we think they're big now. I think they're going to be five times bigger in three years. For your bags, Rob, I hope you're right. I got it. I listen, I mean, you know, I do know, I was looking at the data from the first week of it, Dana fell on, you know,

55:00looking at not just prediction markets, but all betting companies. And I believe Polymarket grew, had more downloads in the first week of the NFL than CalShe fan dual draft kings. A lot of those. So, yeah, they were, they grew a lot. I mean, they've been, I mean, they've launched a US business. They announced it in November of last year, right around the same time, Rothera, which is the Robin Hood Susquehanna, GV. You know, they built it throughout the year, both them and now it's the second biggest US exchange behind CalShe bigger than Rothera, which was announced and started to be built at the same time, right? And so like, I think people forget that it takes a while to build these things. Open interest was back up a lot in the first week. So, and now for the last few weeks, the US business has been bigger than the international business. And that was the first time that's kind of happened in consecutive weeks ever. So, you know, and they launched a very cool ad with LeBron James, which I don't know if you saw.

56:05I genuinely did not enjoy that ad. You really didn't enjoy it? I, I hate ads that are just throwing money at celebrities. It's like, like, you know what ad, I love, I'm not anti-ad. I love their Rick Rubin ad. The Rick Rubin ad was amazing. I thought the Rick Rubin ad was, was brilliant, but I'm, I'm like, don't just throw money at celebrities, there's like 45 celebrities in that ad. I was like, it's just like, it's not the way to do advertisement. I mean, I'm a huge cab fan. So, like, you know, I was like, yeah, I was like, whatever. Did you like the Novig ad? You were really into that one? Rob sit down, sit down. I didn't like that ad actually. You don't like that one either? I didn't like that ad. Or did you like the, the Calche Timothy Shalame one? I didn't even see that ad. That was during the, during the NBA finals. So it was, I didn't see that ad. I liked the Calche ad where they were sitting at the, at the US Open one. It's like, Cal, she, Cal, she, did you see the Marie, Maria Sherapova one that Polymarket did?

57:09I missed that one too. Yeah, okay. You're, you're, you're just grinding too hard. So, you're not seeing all the ads. I got, I got like 30% hit right on the ads. All right, content of the week. I'll kick us off with the content of the week. I have been very impressed by a publication called Colossus. And I think all of their, they do these profiles of people and they did a profile of Mark Zuckerberg and they sat down with him. Yeah. We, isn't this all the, uh, investment. I'm cheating. We're not allowed to talk about investing like the best on this podcast. Yeah. This is a, this is a, I had to get into it. I had to mention it. No, no, we're, we're, it's a, we're banned in September from talking about invest like the best. So I will not mention an investment like the best. Nor will I mention a show that talks about founders. Both of those are not allowed to be content of the week. But I will mention that this, you will mention their print publication by the same people called Colossus that I found on the internet has done a fantastic job of profiling Zuck and they sat down with his parents. It's quite a long article. It's like a weekend read. But, um, I don't know, it's, uh,

58:15it's, it's good. Has anyone had a better glow up than Zuck? Dude, look, look at this man. Like, like, I'm freaking terrified of, look at that. I mean, I wouldn't want to be the instinct founder. I can't believe that that's the picture they use. They just like had him, like put him behind himself. This looks like a Photoshop. Like, it's actually pasted into his garden. What does it, does it say that it's Photoshop? What has it gone on? I mean, I don't think they would use Photoshop photo photo by Chase Milt middle 10. Yeah. It is actually insane. Oh wait, oh no, no, it is Photoshop. Wait, look at this. Okay. Okay. Okay. Anyways, what is insane? But it is actually insane how he went from, you know, kind of who he was to then people like really hated on him to then like getting into MMA, like getting rich, like, what is the picture? What is the picture of him fully suited up for jujitsu, probably. For jujitsu, yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, and he's, and he's, and he's wearing the gold chain. He's, you know, got the, he's out there wakeboarding or, or it wasn't

59:19wakeboarding. It was something else with the, with the US flag like, he's had a real glow up. Here from this to this, I think, I think they went too far though. I think they're pulling back on it. Yeah, that he looks a little bit like a 90s boy band in some of these pictures. Yeah, the boy band, I'm saying, he's taken whatever basis is taken. He reminds me a little bit of, and some of these pictures reminds me of like JC Shazay, who is like the second guy at in sync, you know. If you think I know who the second guy in sync is, you can I have the same age. What do you mean? JC Shazay. Yeah, from the back then. I can't believe you don't know this. This guy? Well, that's how he looks now. But if you look back then, he had like a, he had a, a little bit of like a chain he would wear all the time. You have to like look at his like actual pictures from in sync, you know. This. Yeah, yeah. He's back then. Like this. How he looks, you know, he's got a little bit of

1:00:23interesting. Interesting. All right. Noted. Noted. Noted. I mean, he just looks like Eminem to me. Well, that's not a picture. Anyways, Rob, what's your content of the week? Content of the week. Zach Kregger, his new resident evil movie. So Zach Kregger resident evil. What's your view? So Zach Kregger, who is one of the first in a long time, directors and writers to have his movie win an Oscar for horror and with weapons, launched his new movie, Resident Evil. He had a lot of success with weapons, obviously, being nominated for Oscars. He had a lot of sessions with Barbarian before that. He decided that he loved Resident Evil and he sort of he's like trying not to be necessarily true to the game. It's more like a sort of his own kind of version of what he wants it to be. He's like honestly the single best horror filmmaker right now. And I have not actually seen the movie yet,

1:01:28but I have tickets to it later tomorrow. And I'm like so excited about it. I still had to go and call it out. Did Resident Evil start as a video game and became a movie or became a video game? Yeah, it's right. Yeah, okay. Interesting. Noted. So you're going to the theaters. Are you going going with wifey? Yeah. Which theater you're going to? We go to a lot. So we go to two theaters. We go either the IMAX and the cons- and the cons- because that's the only IMAX, like a mature IMAX in the city. Or we go to the place called Nighthawk in Brooklyn. Oh yeah. Which is a great, great, great. But I mean, you you probably go to the one near Prospect Park, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I go to the one in Williamsburgs usually. But like you know, small at all kind of like indie theater, but like good food. Right on a we're on grand. I think it is. It's a good. Yeah. Metropolitan. Yeah. Yeah. It's so much for all of them. That's right. And the Williamsburg. Rob, good chat.

1:02:30Good blog. Great week. It's been a great week. Some vibes are high in New York. For anyone who's not in New York, I just I'm really sorry. I'll say that for another month and then I'll be envious of wherever you guys live. But anyways, thanks. Are we going to Singapore? Dasting a port two weeks? Dasting a port. I keep forgetting to plug it for the four people who are still listening, you know, an hour in Dasting a port baby. It's actually going to be an electric event. Yeah. Three weeks, three weeks, right? Three weeks, October 9th. I believe we're going to do a live pod. No. Oh, okay. No, no time for that. It's a one day event. Okay. Das London will do a live pod. Great. That's like eight weeks, six weeks. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So all right folks, thanks for listening. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week.