How VCs Cause Layoffs and BlackRock-Barclays on JPMorgan Chain | Roundup

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show all right everyone welcome back to another uh Roundup recording this Thursday afternoon Santi how we doing man doing great we miss you last week we had Casey on talked about the you know everything I didn't know if I was going to get the the look back I didn't people for joking I was not going to get the invite back and it seemed kind of real so a lot of people seem to like that you know I for me it was ey opening because I had you know no idea what goes on to these things and so was we eye opening really fascinating stuff that's transpired since of course we had like key Witnesses we're gonna talk about a little bit of that uh hopefully we have Casey on um you know maybe next week to give us a more of an update but I'm doing great

you know I think um look a lot of stuff is going on in the world uh and it's one of those things where like you know I always tell my my parents I remember once I was like look if if my emotional state was directly impacted by the price of crypto I would be a wreck like I would have already died of a heart attack and so I think one of the things that I've learned in crypto is to kind of Shield what happens in in the crypto world in the volatility and everything like separating like your work environment from your house environment is critical um and like that sometimes has been challenging for people especially as you work from home but nonetheless like yeah like I think one of the things that is

important is just maintaining a level of optimism and just in the because I think like Twitter and the News inherently like skew negative and portraying a lot of the bad things and I always like to remind myself and going back to like there's this great like book um and video as well like YouTube on Hance rosling who is a data sign scientist German data scientist I believe passed away but he was like he has a great book about just talking about quantitatively like the world has become a better place it is a better place today than it was like 100 years ago like in terms of conflict in terms of poverty like across the board but I think like because we're so connected 247 365 and these news and

the algorithms just want to feed us stuff that skews like attention seeking stuff and headline seeking stuff we see this a lot in crypto but we're seeing it a lot in like geop politics and whatnot but I I you know it's important like zoom out just like you know be grateful but also just uh keep your head cool in many way so yeah so longwind way of saying I'm doing okay doing great you know lot lot of things to talk about so uh yeah how are you doing I'm doing all right doing all right it's been a it's been a trouble week I was actually debating and I said I wasn't sure if I wanted to bring up you know everything that's going on in Israel but there's there there is one thing I want to call out which is um there's actually I'm going

to I don't really have anything to say that's outside of you know whatever I'm else is saying on Twitter and stuff but there is actually just one resource I want to call out that's very relevant to um a lot of companies actually in crypto so there's there's a lot of Israeli Founders in crypto and I used to work at I used before founding blockworks I worked uh at an Israeli Tech startup called called cense and uh a lot of people who work at these um uh companies with oftentimes Israeli Founders uh a lot of the employees are in the reserves and a lot of folks are getting called up to the reserves right now so there's actually this resource dock that these uh this couple uh Zoe and Michael buan put together where if you let's say there's a company I think uh chaos Labs

might be one of these companies like half their employees are a good chunk of their employees I I don't know the exact numbers or I saw the CEO of digital asset youall it's going to Israel if you have a lot of employees in the reserves that means you know half your staff is gone and not working so Zoe and Michael put together this resource EST form where you can actually uh put in you know I'm I'm a data analyst or I'm a salesperson I'm willing to allocate 5 hours of my week to to stepping in to basically like fill the the the time gap for these folks in the reserve so we'll put a link in the show notes to that I think it's a I know a lot of crypto companies who have been impacted who have a lot of uh employees who are going

to the reserves right now so that's um who are getting called up so yeah we'll put a link in in the show notes for uh for kind of the volunteer Talent form yes I mean needless to say I was I'm an invest in chaos laes I'm an investor at least I think six or seven of my portfolio companies are either directly based in Israel or half the team because the founders are from Israel um it's a thriving ecosystem cyber security wise like a lot of the intelligence Former Intelligence unit uh like really a lot of talent is there uh and so U you know obviously uh difficult times so yeah that that's great res definitely uh check it out if you guys are interested um all right a couple things to talk about this week we had SPF trial I think we should start there I actually

texted Casey to see if she wanted to come on this week again but no response because you remember you have to lock your phone up in the courthouse so uh that's right no Casey we we'll try to do our best summary but it's funny right after you guys recorded we got a bunch of messages the Empire podcast this podcast was used as uh as a evidence as a document yeah as EV as evidence they actually played this clip of uh of our podcast when I think this was before you were a co-host when when we had Sam on the podcast I was like oh is that my living room and uh yeah well it's pretty interesting because Sam was doing a lot of the circuit right he was going around I I was a lot of podcast with him and he was

very critical of Defi and of course I was on the other side and debating with him um you know Defi and and uh so there's yeah that's uh it's pretty interesting all right so this so big big thing from this week was that Caroline Ellison Tuesday and and Wednesday so maybe I'll do I'll do a little bit of a a recap of Tuesday get into Wednesday we can we can talk through some of this stuff so Tuesday some of the highlights Ellison said that she didn't really feel qualified to be alam's co-ceo but is no Big E she reported to SPF her salary and compensation came out she was making 200k a year but had this nice $20 million annual bonus that came at least in 20121 uh she said that SPF really pushed her in the team to borrow as much

money as they could which led to roughly 10 billion in outstanding thirdparty loans by the middle half of 2022 uh he also SF told Caroline that political donations were a really good use of their money um and that relatively small amounts of money could be used for influence so when we saw things like that I think is five or 10 million donated to now President Biden this is you know it's interesting to hear him talking about talking to Caroline about this stuff kind of early on uh he we also learned that SPF believed that he had a 5% chance of becoming president so that he wanted to buy Snapchat and also wanted to be president I mean the man wanted to do it all okay so this was uh you mentioned Snapchat so there's this list that was

called things SPF really just things Sam is freaking out about list here were here were the things that Sam was freaking out about this is bulleted list hedging bad PR in the next six months user experience broken down into sub bullets VIPs API throughput and click Traders front end being laggy another bullet getting Regulators to crack down on binance raising from MBS getting capital from blockfi Alam modulo relationship I don't know what modulo is Willie being happy I don't know who Willie is uh insto stock onboarding Reddit buying snap I'm not sure if that's buying the stock snap or buying the compan he wanted to buy he wanted to

buy out of snap trading uh jgbs what is that Japanese government bonds um I think the 10 years bad English language content and making bonus process better for next semester so he's got some big things on his list here um if we start to look at yeah go ahead no I was gonna say first and foremost hedging well hedging there's not a lot of that going on yeah um raising money so there's nothing there's nothing in this list that talks about security and as we've learned of course like they just had terrible opsi like they just and uh I think there there's another tweet that

we can look at on the show notes it talks about all the different hiccups that they had uh really just like negligent in terms of like running a secure infrastructure and managing keys that led to losses across like uh they were yield farming aggressively in like unvetted unverified contract protocols they had they lost a ton of money there they then um also had money Frozen uh in China uh in an Chinese exchange which we'll talk about that later they also had um um I believe that they were held hostage by like this other D5 protocol that that wanted didn't want to release their funds and then they they lost a ton of funds there then of course like

there was during the whole um insolvency you know process I think the the famous FDX hacker which is apparently now linked to Russia believes like you know hacked a bunch of eth right it was like in the order of like a couple hundred like 100 200 million or so so anyways a lot of losses in their operations which is um crazy you know so yeah there was um so the lead prosecutor Danielle Sasson uh prompted Ellison to kind of elaborate on one of those losses and she ended up talking about this $800 million loss that FTX sustained in 20121 while trading btmx which I don't know what that is H and they said that the massive she said the massive loss was due to a margin system

malfunction and the kicker is that when this happened SBF told Alam uh said that Alam needed to take the loss because he didn't want it on ftxs balance sheet so even back in 2021 he was kind of kicking These funds over um other thing I'm trying to kind of figure out and what like what trying to tr trace this money and I know some folks at blockworks are looking into this is there's this whole thing around thae sex workers and bribes of Chinese government officials um so if you actually look at what so it's it sounds like SPF sent 100 million between 100 to 150 million to different crypto addresses that they believe to be tied to Chinese officials with the hopes of gaining uh access to about a billion in Alam funds that were frozen by

Chinese government officials as part of this money laundering investigation and the money was frozen on wobe and I think okx so one of my questions becomes is there still a billion of customer funds on okx and wobe are those still there I'm I'm not entirely sure I'm not sure either yeah um yeah apparently there was an employee um at FTX that had her dad was a Chinese government official and she warned them against not doing this and then she got promptly fired and they still went ahead and kind of you know

try to bribe them and send this money uh to various officials I don't actually know the you know the outcome of this but of course it's pretty damning in terms of not only is this the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act I believe that is in violation of and the implications are you know people that are within in in this signal chat are all implicated Caroline Sam Ryan uh Salam and also truko was on that and so now he is implicated and everyone is wondering well where the hell is truko and that's like the that's the biggest question in all of this is like where is this guy and at what point is

he gonna show up um yeah and I gotta think he's under witness protection or whatnot but we haven't heard at all from him and and he is obviously a big player in all of this yeah there was one more key thing that Caroline talked about which is that at one point in the summer of 2022 uh the Genesis request Ed a return of 500 million right due to starting like they start to get really concerned and uh let me just read I'll read the quote from the from the from the testimony Ellison says Genesis was getting recalls from retail lending platforms so they asked us for 500 million uh other side says what did the def defendant tell you about his call with Matt Balin swag of Genesis Ellison says that Genesis might go under so we

should send it to them sasoon said the prosecutor says when you sent this balance sheet to Genesis did you consider it to be dishonest Ellison said yes so this is interesting I don't know there were a lot of people asking FTX back for money and they said no to a lot of people but they said yes to Genesis so it makes me wonder kind of like why why that happened yeah importantly I think uh Sam made a statement in there that said he wanted to prioritize repaying Genesis and holding off on repaying uh blockfi we'll have to understand why that was and what his thinking was around there um that would be good to know and the other thing is um you know all as as I'm reading all of this I gotta like I was thinking about that

scene there's a great documentary of made off on Netflix um there was this particular guy that was a longtime investor in mid offs funds that knew that mof was running a Ponzi and instead of sounding the alarm he tried to extort maid off and wanted to get his money out before others and so he went to M off and said hey I'll call you out I'll write you out or unless you like just give me back my money and and you know all the returns that are on paper and then that came out during the whole investigation afterwards and so in a similar manner like I gotta think like obviously CZ really tripped all of this out because he at some point real because you know FDX was sending a bunch of money to Alam Alam was in like doing

this ARB across exchanges right if there's a price Delta between FDX and binance it would send so there were like interacting with a lot of exchanges and counterparties you know maybe not a single counterparty was able to understand the entire flow of their operations but I think from there was a lot of people that were looking on chain these wallets I think at some point zezy realized what was going on and then he sold all his ftt but it also raises the question like at what point did these counterparties Genesis blockfi um Gemini kind of knew that they were in a very precarious spot of course they were getting fed these

spreadsheets uh which is part of the testimony of Caroline these like fabricated spreadsheets um that just had erroneous numbers on them emitted numbers um of loans of a number like of of positions and whatnot and so at what point do you just not like do you look at that at what point did they realize that was the case so yeah I mean of course this is something that if I'm the prosecutor I would really want to go deep on just understanding all the other different counterparties and their relationship um maybe to salvage themselves they didn't want to sound the alarm and they wanted to get the capital back um but when you have this priority if you know you're insolvent and you

prioritize one creditor over another then then you have to peel all that back I think because in the made off case you rem Yana you know this better probably than I do but a lot of the people that got money ahead of others like this priority they had to give it back um right so anyways this exactly just just very interesting all I mean is Caroline over I think she's gonna maybe there's another day or two but she's been very revealing every I mean we're just covering like probably scratching the surface I mean there's a ton of stuff there's people that have done great threads um documenting all the kind of the testimony but this some really interesting um you know tidbits here and there all

right let's move on to another piece of news so big black rock barklay trade on JP JP Morgan's uh blockchain system that they've kind of set up here um if you guys remember the episode we did with uh Tyron um he started talking about kind of hinting that something big was coming and I think this might have been it so this was the first ever the way I understand it is this is the first use of tokenized so basically Black Rock tokenized money market fund shares and sent those as collateral to barlay and um basically to be used as derivatives margin so they posted this tokenized MMF collateral for a live trade using the kind of new Onyx digital assets dap uh called TCN and so so Tyron sent this to me he's like this is

actually a really good use of blockchain uh like more people should talk about this the kicker here is that something like this to uh using using this kind of collateral to post would usually take at at least a day it's one it's you know there's t t plus one basically for for this collateral to post this collateral in this case took one second to post so uh as as Tyron put it he said we believe that Ultra fast collateral will will bring huge value to what is a25 trillion dollar collateral industry oh yeah yeah I mean people complain on chain right when there's like high gas that you need to refill your collateral and I but look folks I mean yeah of course like the problem is onchain you can get

liquidated without notice like if you don't meet uh you know that if your health Factor drops below one you you don't want to pay the super high gas fees like as we've seen in these like High Vol environments you get liquidated right but in the real world like you still need to meet margin calls and the settlement is just like super Antiquated like t plus as you said one or two and just having inst the ability to instantaneously meet your Margin Call by tokenizing the this collateral uh very liquid collateral and money market fund is hugely valuable um yeah both from like we I mean at one point and I think in the episode you know we we wanted to dive deeper and we're going to have to have him on again

talking about this is really quantifying the cost saves on just the recordkeeping of like just doing instantaneous like Atomic settlement I got to think that that alone involves a a pretty significant um cost save on the operation side people might be listening saying okay cool you know a test what's next like how big can this get how real is it going to be um any in like any sense of like what's next year like um you know yeah is this going to now be the norm can everyone adopt this is Goldman and other investment banks that

are competitors to JP Morgan want to play ball um in Onyx or uh does this move to ethereum you know I'm just kind of curious if you have an opinion on that so I think the I think the kicker here is that it was Black Rock that's that's what I would say is the is the most important part of this uh without saying too much I do so Black Rock has their Bitcoin ETF right that that's black Rock's now in the game basically um and I think this is the first I would call there's kind of three elements when I think of a bank getting into crypto there's like three elements there's uh do you let your private do you let your private clients hold Bitcoin do you if you're a private client of Goldman or JP Morgan or

someone like that are you able to hold are you able to hold uh crypto Bitcoin and eth and things like that second is like uh do you partake in the infrastructure play basically which is what JP Morgan's leading on here the third one is um do you do you tra like do you trade in it and do you do you do you make markets and things like that right now so a lot of people used to do the third one right now Goldman is the only bulge bracket that is making Market gets in crypto so Goldman's the only one who's doing that everyone else backed out JP Morgan's kind of leading the way on the on the infrastructure side of things and a lot of them still are not allowing their customers to hold crypto like if you're a private client of uh of JP

Morgan you you can't you can't hold your Bitcoin with them yet I would say so what else we got layoffs well we have uh I don't really want to talk about layoffs you had War you had War I feel like a lot of this stuff is depressing you had layoffs at a couple companies we'll talk about because you know putting emotions aside I mean we are seeing a bunch of layoffs at ulabs Ledger chainalysis um what's the other one that I'm blanking on here uh web 3 Foundation polka dot polka dot yeah they they fired a bunch of their staff um yeah look I mean I think it's one of those things where people you know coming to the realization that uh they

need a prioritize Runway and surviving and it's it's a tough fundraising environment out there I do think that um you know the good companies are still getting access to Capital it's very concentrated very selective these rounds are still happening but um but yeah certainly it's it's tough right I mean I what is still very shocking to me is how some teams were just able to blow through 15 30 million in one year even more my guys like they just threw body Pro you know bodies of problems and the it is like a lot of teams come to me and say hey we want to raise another five 10 million because we want to hire uh head of marketing and be I'm like are you there

like why you gonna like you don't even have a product like why don't you just double down on the product so I think the the here's my rubric the really good teams are very technical and that and it's really lean teams Founders are very competent and Technical and I was just uh right before this podcast I was late because uh I just just got a test a demo from one of the teams that I was an investor in and they've just been incredibly lean they're very technical and they don't have it's just a very skeleton organization like just barebones like just building the product and they've identified an niche in the market and they're going after it and it's you know those are the teams that are getting

funded and they like on the other hand there's just the majority unfortunately are those teams that just went out and said I guess we have to bloat an organization because everyone needs to have a chief of staff and a head of marketing and a go to all these conferences I'm like well wait on like hold on here build a product you know find product Market fit so um yeah and then the other of course is there's uh probably 80% of the companies that raise money just should just uh you know uh you know return it because they're just milking it at this point yeah so I think that what's happening with some of these layoffs is uh a lot of the later stage companies right chainalysis Ledger yugal

laabs they need big Capital they're raising maybe series B series C Series D what's happening is they're going to raise capital and the VCS are saying look I actually like your company but your burn is too high so you need to first cut your burn then we'll allocate so I think that's where a lot of I think that's almost the why behind a lot of these layoffs is think be yeah and it's funny I was looking at defi llama like a raises tracker shows you like how much Venture money has gone into the space every month the numbers are way off the num the numbers are just wrong and I think the reason for that is because uh a lot of companies are not announcing their raises right now so if you if you if you raised at a you know 1.5 a year and a half ago now you need

to raise again you're raising at like a 500 now you're down 66% there's no way you're announcing a big down round so you try to you you do everything in your power to keep that that fundra as POS uh quiet this episode is brought to you by Chronicle protocol the best onchain source for cost efficient verifiable data for anyone who listens to Empire a lot you know that we talk a lot about maker Dow well Chronicle protocol is this novel Oracle solution that has exclusively secured over 10 billion in assets for maker and its ecosystem since 2017 and for the first time ever super excited to share here that Chronicles or or Le service is now publicly available

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episode to get started um let's let's take this into the usdr stable coin so there's the there's something called uh real USD which is usdr it's a stable coin it deeg this week price crashed by like 50% uh it is a stable coin that is backed by real estate a uh assets and it pegged price went down 50% it was issued by this company uh protocol tangible Dow um they had it was small it was a market cap of like 50 million before the price started spiraling the asset was supposed to be as they put I went to their website new type of money backed by real estate yields 8 to 15% a year and it looks like they lost their Peg due to this big rush of redemptions but I mean it was fairly small 45 million 50

million market cap I'm I'm honestly surprised Stables like this still are still around yeah I mean guys again the biggest problem here is there's a mismatch of assets and liabilities real estate not very liquid so it it listed 62 62,000 of the US uh I was looking at the collateral there was 62 or 63,000 usdr as the collateral so they were collateralizing the stable with their own stable so you start to see the problem here look uh this works in the real world because you believe in the in the faith I mean if you look at it fiat currency it says you you believe in faith of the US government or whatever

respective government doesn't work on chain folks like you know you can't fabricate Trust on chain out a thin air you need to have real collateral um backed by some form of demand now you could think demand in Block space is real there's people that want to there's competition there um whether you believe it to to be valuable or not that's your particular opinion but the market says it's valuable at any given point in time so it's backed by something there's compute in a proof of work system uh proof of stake then you know um there is valuable currency there but just using your own coin as collateral folks please don't do it it doesn't work it will fail thank you that's all I have to

say people should go to the stablecoin podcast we just recorded last week with uh nick uh and uh this other gentleman uh what is it um Martin I'm Ling on the name yeah with Martin yeah yeah so anyways uh you know it's uh it's even though it's crazy you just said like 40 million is not a lot but like I I still think that's a lot like we as an industry I think it's not so much the quantum although some of these hacks are and losses are pretty you know real it's more so like just from a like why do we keep doing this um yeah you know we ought to move on and just like uh so anyways it's a bit uh

it's a bit discouraging I think just to see these I do think that there are more stable coins coming I do think we'll see a lot more stable coins coming in 24 and I think a lot of people are going to make the mistake of calling them saying hey look this is just like you know Tera Luna basically but they will be better yeah look in that episode I asked nick uh Hey if you were to wave a w how would you design a better stable coin you know what I mean like um algorithmics I think are out off the table I think you know you could argue all you want but I think time and time again and even in the in the um blockchain cap episode we talk about these things that just don't work um and so

yeah I I think I do agree with you the design space and the category itself stable coins is going to be huge I think there is an opportunity to build better versions of existing stable coins or complimentary versions of existing stable coins just from A diversity standpoint resiliency standpoint like why couldn't there be another Consortium um backed by Major Banks or whatever that do a similar usdc version like PayPal is doing it well you know PX is Whit list they stable coin Solutions like I think we could credibly see multiple flavors of a fully backed stable coin like whether you like that or not because it's not censorship resistant then well you might have other options but you're taking different kind of risks right so yeah um yeah but but I think it's important to be vigilant

around certain experiments uh and faulty kind of economic or financial assumptions of mechanisms that just don't really work on chain yeah yeah last but not least man scroll scroll launch midet this week uh seemed like kind of a soft launch I don't know if the M if the news like leaked orated around it on Twitter yeah I think I think uh they were sensitive around everything that's going on obviously in the world um right so I think but but yeah they they did kind of launch main net of sorts uh which is encouraging you know this is a team that we were I think

one of the first if not the first to have them on the Pod I mean of course I'm I'm seed investor there um and um and I know Sandy and the rest of the team there so but we had them on very very early on people should go and listen to that podcast but to me it's really um to be fair like it wasn't as obvious back then for me and I think it I will give credit to folus Jason who's good friend and I invested in his fund and he was the one who who's based out there in China and so my thesis was I'm not going to be the one to be able to identify these teams clearly there is Talent statistically like there ought to be really high

really really quality teams uh um that are going to build and continue to build out there um and and that was he brought that deal to me and so that was uh yeah I'll give him credit for that I mean obviously you know along way to go still I think ZK VMS are are very you know ambitious proposition but and and really encouraging but works and I think uh these guys are you know doing U um really good work so uh yeah go listen to the podcast that we recorded with um Sandy uh way back I think it was over a year ago right yeah early cool man we can keep it light light this week quick 30 minute app anything else on your

mind no I'm just thinking of well as we always like to wrap episodes of things you're reading or watching I have I have recommendations for both reading and watching because you know all right hit me but I want to ask you first uh I'm watching David Beckham documentary on Netflix why you steal my was that yours that was I I didn't watch it all I mean David Beckham was like a it was a hero mine I would wake up uh early early Saturday and Sundays like 6:00 a.m. to watch English Premier League games specifically Manu like oh God like that team like amazing uh I I I have fond memories but to be fair I didn't know a

lot of the things in the documentary were like eye opening to me the fact that he was like vilified when he like got um a red card during a World Cup match I think that I I did not know the level of he got a lot of lot of from you know in months and months at a time and then like the English fans are just had no mercy but um fascinating fascinating um I love these type of documentaries really really good uh that was mine as well so so I saw the tiger one maybe a year and a half ago then Serena and Venus semi- recently and then David Beckham I'm convinced now to have an athlete at this level you need a

parent who is an absolute nut like that was that's been one of my takeaways from this is like you think like David's dad was was like dav's dad's a nut he goes he goes the the interviewer goes would you um would you punch your dad in the face if you had the opportunity and the and David goes no because he'd punched me back in the face hard like he that was all he thought about he didn't have friends as a kid like he was just soccer so and that guy drill and his dad his dad was just a Manu guy and was like my kid will play from menu so I think yeah I I didn't think it was portrayed as like that much of a obsessive par I mean maybe it's not like tiger parents Ser

Venus's I think there's like levels of that right like I've heard Max restrapping the Formula One driver who just won the championship again again this year three three times in a row um that his dad also a Formula One driver not a successful was incredibly incredibly harsh there's a story where he left him behind in a gas station after a race because he didn't come first as a like a a 12-year-old or whatever I mean you got to think that that traumatized the kid up to this day he's probably thinking every race if he doesn't win you know that you know that anyways um I didn't think it was that I mean of course the dad is passionate as a lot of Brits are around around

football um but uh but yeah it was certainly uh yeah so what are you reading uh there's this great book uh I have it open here my Kindle it's by Rick Rubin called the creative act ah yeah I've heard of that Rick Rubin the creative act a way of being and it's sort of I think he's uh he's an artist and he it's sort of like a contemporary version of meditations by Marcus aelius this just very short almost like haou like poem like but it just uh really uh really refreshing actually yeah yeah he's a legend he's worked with all the

greats yeah yeah yeah big music I don't know much about him but yeah he's this music producer who's basically figured out a way to like get the best out of all the the you know the con and the bers of the world so that's just clim to fame I have a f i have a fun fact for you ACT scores just hit their lowest level in 32 years and I think we're just starting to if you see if you look at the chart of ACT scores it's just like it's kind of flat or up for like you know last 40 years and then it just falls off a cliff last couple years and like 20 the top score is what 30 if I remember uh top score is 36 36 um the average used to be it was 20 20 and a

half it looks like in 1990 then went up to 21 in 2000 then in 2010 it went up to 21 and a half now it's down to 19 and a half uh good Lord yeah so I think you're starting to see the ramifications of coid on students which is a real bummer coid plus everyone being addicted to Tik Tok I mean that's just in the US right because uh I think it's more of a reflection there's some really interesting studies around the US actually ranks very very low and has been for a while on these like standardized tests for even younger kids at the elementary level and Middle School uh like primary level they they

they score very poorly I think the lowest among developed countries oecd countries the highest are like I think Finland and Sweden I think Finland is number one there's a fascinating documentary by Michael Moore that that uh I think it's where to invade next um that he goes deep into this and and goes and and goes to these like schools in in Scandinavia to understand how radically different their system is it begs the question like the US and again I don't want to go again in this topic but like across healthc care if you plot it number of expenditures but outcomes are terrible like on the research side on the Innovation side fantastic Baran number one in the world maybe Israel you

know per capita but but like the US is still leading in terms of innovation but in terms of outcomes the amount of expenditure per Life uh per like per capita and and the life expectancy has just gone down in the US that's not true for other countries um this is a huge outlier in negative way in education and so it's uh clearly it's like it's not a spend uh question it's really just rethinking hey systemically clearly something's going wrong here um so yeah and then of course you see uh you know I'm not surprised actually ACT score has gone down like I mean this is kind of a joke these standard like these like the SAT and the AC is basically uh another great documentary

about like uh these parents at like there's this guy talk about frauders like SPF like this guy that goes around and like promises kids that they're gonna you know they can pay their way into these like top schools um but yeah I mean there's there's the my I went to Harvard summer school when I was like in middle school or high school I guess and one of the biggest realizations for me was like obviously you go to like it's Harvard right it's like oh my God like right uh and then you're like it was just like really interesting for me because and then you go to like it I think it's if you have the chance it is very um kind of like eye opening to put yourself in the most competitive of environments now I'm not saying Harvard

is the most competitive but like like you can think it's it's elite right it's like in your mind it's like if you go to like JP Morgan or like Wall Street well the finance environment if you want to go to the most competitive well go to New York right I think it's just like it's just a different level and category and I think it's really nice if you have the opportunity to put yourself in like your feet in the fire and say okay what is the most competitive environment and it can be daunting like there's all these stories like there's a great book of um um Malcolm Gladwell of what the dogs saw of like how these students like uh they're the top of their class in high school and they go to Harvard or like an ivy league and then they're the worst right because you put the and so

like you know small fish in a in a big pond or big fish in a small pond what what would you prefer what I'm trying to say is like I think I would always like want to be want to at least understand what does the most competitive environment look like to then say okay at least I know what it looks like but some people deprive themselves of even like going there uh and then of course the last thing I'll say is you hear stories of uh Harvard uh student associations which are just uh no accountability and just say oh we couldn't read a statement I'm like well yeah what's your ACT score I don't care I don't care was 36 there's no accountability and owners like what are you teaching these kids so the last last movie I'll recommend I'm cheating here just bonus content bonus content

the last last probably the best scene of all time Scent of a Woman alucino when he's uh defending Charlie uh fantastic fantastic scene people should go watch that movie because it's so relevant to what I think is happening in today's society we're just what are we valuing what are we teaching our kids like what values I think that movie is uh just hits a soft spot to me it's just one of the best movies of all time so anyways guys you came here for crypto and we're giving you like half half non- crypto content don't kill us back to crypto crypto conversation no all right we're

we're just gonna stop talking about crypto because it's just like so boring no I'm kidding uh we love crypto here we'll we'll we'll keep talking about crypto but every Mark round pod we have go can we go an entire Pod without seeing the word hold on challenge can we go an entire Pod without saying bare Market that is the challenge and whoever says it from now on will be like the swear jar and if you say bare Market every time you say bare market like you're gonna have to shave your head or something which you haven't clearly so I told I told I told Brian said Brian you you come on the Pod I'm shaving my head so that's like saying yeah I'm gonna do this Ife the president shows up to the Pod I mean come on man

like be realistic here we need to sh think Brian's coming no Brian said he's coming on the pot a bunch please he's El Presidente of crypto man my Presidente all right Brian if you hear this join us my friend Brian come on the Pod we want to hear from you all right I'm too congested to keep going with this pod I I gotta get some tea or something yeah I think that's our time uh that's our queue all right everyone thanks for listening Short Round up here if you have uh anything that we didn't talk about you want us to talk about drop us a comment uh tweet at us uh and we'll try to cover it next week and of course hopefully we'll have uh Casey back on um to talk about U more of the stuff that's happening uh in the sound District of

New York see folks have a good weekend everyone [Music] n