Markets Sending, Just Buy Consensus, Meta's AI Moment & Who Wins Tokenization? | Weekly Roundup

Jason Yanowitz (0:00)

Welcome to Token 2049

Santiago Roel (0:02)

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 and 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 AFTR, 2049 and Formula One Weekend. And the speaker lineup is stacked. Shane Copland of Polymarket, Jeff Yon of Hyperliquid, 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.

Ladies and Germs, happy Friday, happy Saturday, happy Sunday whenever you're listening to this. The vibes are high, the market is up. Santi, Rob actually both showed up for a weekly roundup. And I'm here too. Rob, Santi, how you guys doing?

Jason Yanowitz (1:12)

Good man. We're supposed to just jump into the meat of the conversation.

And I don't know what that was, but I love that. Ladies and Germs.

Santiago Roel (1:19)

Ladies and Germs.

You know where I think it's from? Is it the Tim Ferriss podcast used to say that? Like 10 years ago? Like the OG podcaster. Like Tim Ferriss is the reason. Actually, Tim Ferriss is very influential in Blockworks. People don't know this, which is, Tim Ferriss had an episode in 2017 with Naval Ravikant and Nick Szabo.

So Nick Szabo and Naval Ravikant in 2017, and Mike and I were living together at the time. And we would listen to this episode, and we'd like listen for five minutes, be like, did you understand that? No. Did you understand that? No. And then we'd go Google it. And that's how we started learning about smart contracts. And this was kind of the ICO era. And we fell in love with podcasting then. And that's why Blockworks has a podcasting business, is because we realized podcasts are an amazing way to consume content and learn things. Thank you, Tim Ferriss. Ladies and germs, Rob, how are you doing?

Rob Hadick (2:11)

That is a great origin story. I love that.

Santiago Roel (2:13)

Yeah, that's why we have a pod. That's why. And the reason we have an events business is we went and heard none other than Alex Machinsky at an event.

Jason Yanowitz (2:24)

I was at that event in New York.

Santiago Roel (2:26)

Yeah, in New York, exactly. And we paid like $200 each. And at the time, we were 23, which was like an ungodly amount of money for us. And we're like, oh my god, there's 200 people here. Wait, $200 a piece times 200 people. Oh my god, that's pretty good money.

Jason Yanowitz (2:42)

40K.

Santiago Roel (2:43)

We could make some money doing this to get the business. And then anyways, that's why we have an events business.

Jason Yanowitz (2:48)

So you know, like the value of going to a conference here in London. And when I went to that event and saw Machinsky, he gave me the heebie-jeebies. I'm like, something's off.

And my radar on that, I think if you're a venture or just investing in general, you can't really outsource that to the machine. It's like it really pays to do on-site diligence. I was just like serial acquirer conferences, a small group of people in there. Every single person is saying the same thing. The biggest mistakes we've done is not doing enough in-person diligence. And yeah, that was like, I felt it with a number of cats in Crypto.

Santiago Roel (3:24)

Yeah, he would always say, why has every founder in Crypto been on your podcast except for me? And I can't tell him because I think you're a fraudster, but yeah, we did dodge a bullet. Though we had many others on. We had a great, our most listened to episode ever, Doh, Doh Kwan. Nope, is SPF.

Jason Yanowitz (3:42)

All right, yeah, yeah.

Santiago Roel (3:43)

Yeah, when that happened, we were getting like every hour, we were getting news stations around the world. Like it was like a Japanese news station being like, can we license your content from this podcast? Like a German publication. Anyways, we did have Doh Kwan on too. Though you challenged him a lot and he said, why is your co-host such a dick?

Jason Yanowitz (4:03)

Not to make this an episode about this, we should do like a full diagnosis. Doh had an uncanny ability to make you feel incredibly stupid. And I've just stopped trying to be clever in how I make my money. Like if you can't answer my basic questions.