Um, what are you, what are your high-level thoughts on perp DEXs? And then I wanna talk specifically about like, uh, hype versus lighter variational things, things of that nature.

Yeah.

I, I, um, I, I think I, I think I see a lot of what you're, you're seeing in the sense that, um, hey, it feels like this sort of, uh...

The, the, the race to be a sort of a core venue is, is maybe closing a little bit, the same way I think the, the race to be a kind of core spot AMM kind of close at a, at a certain point.

Um, and I think we're kind of seeing kind of the, you know, select winners kind of, kind of bubble up to the top.

Um, I think as a VC and, and, you know, as a founder, that doesn't mean there aren't areas to, to play.

It just means you're gonna be playing at a different part of the stack.

Do perp DEXs really benefit from being offered onshore in the US?

You guys are definitely on to something, yet something that's so fundamentally simple, too, I think.

So no, no question.

This is something that came from Hunter Thompson giving us advice on how to tweak some of the things we're doing.

So we made the tweak and then we learned some stuff from it.

And so now we've kind of shifted gears and have a new strategy.

So what Hunter said was we were talking about the fact that historically we have lots of people attend these events and then they kind of go silent or ghost us, right? They don't answer their emails or their text messages.

So we were talking to Hunter about how do we improve sort of the closing rate after we get them to come to an event? And Hunter said, well, the first thing is that that's not a thing.

Lunch in Baltimore

See app for details.

Jewish culture, we see it in Christian culture, we see it in basically every culture we have evidence of.

So another factor, complicating factor in this is that it's just very possible that people are noticing the same thing and independently marking these dates, uh, p- in parallel.

Um, and, and we have to-- we know that, uh, for instance, Jews did do this.

The vernal equinox was important for Jews, it was important for Christians.

And if the vernal equinox is important, the spring equinox, then the solstices and the, uh, autumnal equinox are also important.

Yeah, that's a really good point, and I think lends, um, ex- explains somewhat why the history of religion theory was so popular because the solstice and the vernal equinox do seem to be part of the story here.

You know, Christians r- living around Antioch in 370 would've been like, "What? What? Why December 25th?"

Uh, can you w- can you walk us through this argument and how you counter this argument in your book?

Eusebius, uh, i- I think I mentioned earlier, he, he's one of the first historical writers, um, in, in Christian history.

He wrote in 311 to 335 or so, a little bit after that.

Uh, he's sometimes called the father of history.

I mean, this guy invented the bibliographic method, you could argue.

He, he's one of the first ancient writers to give specific citations of sources, where he won't just do a hand wave and say so-and-so said this.

He'll give the title of, of their work.

Based on your reading of the Testimonium and your reading of Josephus as a historical figure, what do you think Josephus actually believed about Jesus? 'Cause we're not saying, like, he was this, you know, c- convert to Christianity and was subtly trying to say, "Oh, Jesus was the Christ, and he did rise again from the dead." If he's r- if we're reading it more negatively, like he was being more negative about Jesus, what, what was Josephus's opinion then about Jesus?

So give them the importance as to why you need to diversify.

Yeah, so we, we talk about this a lot, and you can, you know, find stuff about this on our website as well.

Um, people have a very narrow view of what it means to be diversified in your portfolio.

Uh, I don't know if y'all know, uh, Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." He does a little game, am I diversified? And the person names five stocks, and he says, "Yes, you're diversified." And I'm like, "Oh my God, no." Um, n-number one, all your audience, I'm guessing, has already figured out that the, one of the biggest things that an American can do is diversify away from the publicly traded markets, right? We all have our 401k with some stocks and bonds in it, and, and that's okay, but we need significant diversification away from that to private equity deals.

We use that term very loosely to include companies and investing in companies, but also real estate when you're taking an ownership stake in some business or piece of land.

And so one of the things we talk about is, look, look at your stocks portfolio.

That portfolio needs to be diversified among itself.

Five years down the line, the classic five-year plan, where are we gonna see you at, Tom?

Mm-hmm.

But I think it, it seems like this is always gonna be a looming issue.

It's a little bit like a, you know, token, like a long-dated token vest of, um, this is just always gonna be this thing dangling over your head.

Um, and so he needs to find a long-term plan for it.

I think people discussed, hey, maybe just selling a larger amount of Bitcoin now so you have, you know, a year plus worth of, of, of cash to be able to pay dividends.

Um, but if anything, I think we're also just int- interesting instrument to trade, right? We're coming up- Towards the end of the month, when the first dividend, you know, should be, should be coming out.

Uh, funding has been going crazy.

Shouldn't companies be traded on their fundamentals? But like I think it's a question of like, is it, is it hot air or is it just smart financial engineering? And I'm in the latter camp.

Of course

... him be a, a true actual partner.

You know, for the first 15 years I was in the industry, I didn't really have that partner where his skill at organization and workflow on the kitchen side of things was better than mine.

You know, so we'd be executing these large-scale events, and I would plan everything out.

And, you know, a couple into it, Haley's like, "Hey, let me do this." I'm like, "No, I, I do this.

You know, I've been doing this for 15 years.

I know how to do this." He's like, "Well, if we do it this way, this way, this way, and this way, it's gonna be faster.

Yeah

We like

to play on hard mode.

How did you do it? How did you do it? I think this is like a little bit of a misconception or misnomer in that, yes, you know, obviously VC fundraising has been going down, crypto fundraising has been going down.

But in practice, it's really just consolidating into, you know, the best performing funds that are winning, I mean, both across crypto venture and more traditional venture.

To your point, LPs are very pro cyclical.

And when you're looking at the public market, when you're looking at something like Bitcoin sentiment tends to kind of track that.

But when we look at crypto, I think really like the aperture of what we invest into with our fund three and increasingly our fund four is is broad.

But I have been hearing that these agentic protocols that are coming up, I mean, you know, one possible way to navigate the payments issue here is with blockchain and look i don't know if it's the same group of people that were working in crypto that have now come to ai that are saying this or if there's actually potential here but have you seen startups that are working on this is there a real intersection

So the stablecoin bill, who wins here?

Yeah, the Genius Act is something I think people in crypto have been asking for for a long time.

Obviously, as with anything political, you're not going to get all the wishes that you want.

I think some of the things that were left out were things like yield bearing stablecoins, which are not permitted in the bill.

There's a moratorium on some new types of stablecoins.

So use it to your block for that.

And foreign issuers have sort of a window where they can come into compliance with sort of onshore issuers.

Why are we seeing so much M&A right now in crypto?

[laughs]

No.

I, um, I think we, we've been maybe a little bit contrarian when it comes to AI crypto in being more bearish on this category.

I think m-m- a lot of sort of what AI crypto has broken down into is people trying to do decentralized inference, um, sort of this, you know, GPU marketplace.

Um, and y- this is sort of an, again, an old idea in crypto.

This was something that, um, Golem way back in the day was trying to offer for, for video rendering.

Now kind of coming back.

So you're sitting in the investor seat being like, "Please take my money," versus, you know, maybe ten years ago it would've been reversed.