The Chopping Block: FOMO's Co-Founder Defends the Memecoin Trenches, Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP, and AMC vs Robinhood

Tarun Chitra (0:00)

After getting dunked on a lot for being an unk from the last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way.

Tom Schmidt (0:13)

Not a dividend.

Tarun Chitra (0:14)

It's a tale of two quants.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:15)

Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

Tom Schmidt (0:18)

Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:21)

Unmanned trading firms who are very involved.

Tarun Chitra (0:24)

I like that eat of the ultimate.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:26)

DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro. First, you got Tom, the DeFi Maven and master of memes.

Tarun Chitra (0:40)

Hello, everyone.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:41)

Next, you got Tarun, the Giga Brain and Granpuba at Gauntlet.

Tarun Chitra (0:44)

Yo.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:46)

Joining us today, we've got special guest Paul, Prince of Pumps at FOMO. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Erlanger (0:52)

Not sure what I think about that title, but great to be here.

Haseeb Qureshi (0:56)

I am Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, and we want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see ChoppingBlocks.xyz for more disclosures.

So Paul, we brought you on the show. You're one of the co-founders of FOMO.

And on the last show, we were pretty roundly criticized for being Uncs slash dinosaurs and having an extremely, call it, antiquated take on what's going on in the meme coin sphere. Now, obviously FOMO has been at the center of what's happening in the meme coin space. And you told us you had seen some of the clips of us talking in the last show, rolling around in social media. What was your impression hearing what we had to say at our last show?

Paul Erlanger (1:40)

Yeah, I said this joke before. I was like, we're going to recreate Jurassic Park. We're bringing you guys back to the modern age. But I was actually traveling this weekend. So I wasn't too deep on Twitter.

So we can rehash some of the conversation here.

But yeah, I think like, listen, when you're building a product, I think everyone has their own take, especially when that's a consumer product, everyone has their own take as a user of what this product is. And I think FOMO, our next part of our journey is to do a lot of deeper discourse around what our brand ethos and future vision is. Because I don't think it comes across otherwise. And happy to go through it on the show here. I think FOMO is a lot larger than it is now. I think on-chain trading is, or just like on-chain is the largest revolution in the financial industry since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s. And everyone's trying to build these skeuomorphic applications like let's build Twitter on-chain. But the real main use cases are like global distribution. And this is why all these apps are building tokenized equities so you can globally distribute. Second is the largest social network ever created. It's fully transparent and everyone has access to every single transaction that's ever been created in the system. But it's just obfuscated by these alphanumeric strings and these like clunky block explorers. So if we can create an experience that's super easy to onboard that anyone can use, that you can create an identity through natural language around, whether it's Tarun, Haseeb, Tom, whether it's, I don't know, some pseudonym, you could be fully anonymous, but I get full transparency into what you're doing, then hopefully, eventually, as we have stocks and we have friction markets and we have all these other asset classes, we become the social graph of all the finance. And I just think on Twitter, it's really hard to see that, especially when Stonk.fun and all these meme coins are launching. I think it's really important to position yourself. For example, Robinhood became huge on options and then kind of pivoted over to these other asset classes as well. And I'm not going to make a normative judgment on these asset classes. I think people should be able to trade whatever they want. I actually think it's really fun and really cool concepts. But the overall vision of the platform is a lot larger than you might see in some of the public discourse on Twitter.

Haseeb Qureshi (3:38)

So Paul, are you yourself a Trencher? Were you a Trencher when you started FOMO?