OUT OF SCOPE, Ep. 1: Hot Takes Roundtable with Tori Pastore (Soup) and Austin Campbell (Zero Knowledge)

**Austin Federa** (0:04)
Welcome back to Validated. Today we are joined first off, special guest, Tori. Tori, welcome.

**Tori Pastore** (0:11)
Hi, thank you for having me.

**Austin Federa** (0:13)
Thanks for joining us today. I should say, for those tuning in and saw the episode title, this is a little different.
Tori is co-hosting today, and we're going to be chatting with Austin Campbell in a little bit, but also chatting about just tech, news, crypto, the world. Bigfoot, we'll see where it goes.

**Tori Pastore** (0:32)
I've told Austin that Validated needs to be less technical and more fun.

**Austin Federa** (0:36)
So we brought Tori to have fun. Tell the people a little bit about yourself, besides the fact that you are Chairman Birb Bernake on Twitter.

**Tori Pastore** (0:44)
That's true. I am Chairman Birb Bernake on the internet, and one of the things I can say about that is people come up to me all the time and go, you're Birb, and I go, yes, and I don't know what to do with that.
So I think I'm going to use this as my platform to say, you have to give me more information than that, and people should be way cooler about that than they are. I've been in and out of crypto since 2013, and I have had every single job in crypto that you can have except for developer. I've done everything that you could call non-technical. I've been a marketer, I've been a BD person, I've been ops. I've been everything other than the technical person in the room.

**Austin Federa** (1:25)
And you are also known as, I believe, the originator of the term Chinese peptides?

**Tori Pastore** (1:32)
I don't want to take full credit for it, but I think I will take full credit for exploding it in some very interesting ways. A lot of what I like to do is around memetic R&D, if you will, and how to make ideas spread, and how to insect an idea into someone else's mind. And a lot of my best work is actually things that were other people's ideas originally, and I magnified in a different or interesting way, and everyone kind of caught on from that. So the full term was actually originally gray market Chinese peptides. And that was the term that was going around crypto for a while and going around Twitter, and the AI guys that got in on it, especially my friend Atlas, who is Creatine Cycle. He's the other person that I will shout out as being a really big part of this one. He and I have had many debates about it.
He is also much more on the anti side, I'm on the pro side of the peptide debate. But one of the things that specifically pushed the gray market Chinese peptides into the zeitgeist was that I threw the Chinese peptide rave back in December. A lot of my branding for it was really just what the heck is a Chinese peptide rave? To that, I have to say you have to read the New York Times article about it.

**Austin Federa** (2:45)
Do you think the peptide cycle is like, where are we in the peptide cycle? Because I feel like there was this thing that happened maybe two and a half years ago where people were using uniris and GLP-1s. These are the most incredible class of drugs since mRNA things have come on the market. But then we started to see all these fairly credible theories that to me seem like they never quite played out.
GLP-1s are going to kill the fast food industry, they're going to kill casinos, they're going to kill free to play games, where it's like anything where like 10% of your users are responsible for 90% of your revenue is like, you're kind of just like, you know, gambling hacking someone or some type of mental illness is stepping in to provide a profit margin. And it feels like none of that happened. And I'm not sure if like, are we just too early on the peptide thing? Is this kind of like how chat GPT-4 was not transformative, but five and a half was? Or is the peptide thing a little overblown?

**Tori Pastore** (3:45)
I don't think it's overblown. I think it's actually just still very early.
I've thought it's early for a while. And I think the GLP ones, you're right, they were the first ones that came out that people were like, oh my God, this is incredible. This is life-changing medicine. And as someone that took them and lost 33 percent of my body weight in a year and a half, yeah, they are life-changing technology. But what they've also really done is explode out this other class of what we're calling peptides as like a catch-all term. And I want to be specific about something here actually. Peptides doesn't really mean anything. That's like a catch-all term for like multiple types of-