Paul says fomo is a lot larger than it looks on Twitter because the real vision is becoming the social graph of all finance: "When you're building a product, especially a consumer product, everyone has their own take as a user of what this product is. 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." "I think fomo is a lot larger than it is now. I think on-chain is the largest revolution in the financial industry since the 1970s. Everyone's trying to build these humorous applications, like let's build Twitter on chain, but the real main use cases are global distribution. That's why all these apps are building tokenized equities so you can globally distribute." "Second, it's 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 clunky block explorers." "So if we can create an experience that's super easy to onboard, that anyone can create an identity through natural language, whether it's a name or 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 prediction markets and we have all these other asset classes, we become the social graph of all the finance." "On Twitter it's really hard to see that, especially when and all these meme coins are launching. 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 on why letting users blow up is bad business, and why social trading is here to stay "Anybody who runs one of these businesses knows that customer churn is the most important metric to keep an eye on. If you're just allowing your customers to incinerate themselves by making bad decisions, your business is going to flame out very quickly. You're not going to be able to replace people fast enough into your funnel." "Whether it's a mobile game or a casino or a social trading app, you have to make sure your customers are going to survive, stick around and keep having good experiences. If you consider fomo to be financial entertainment, fair enough. Make sure people are spending an appropriate amount of money on their financial entertainment and not going bust with their entire bankroll in the first week. If that's what's happening on your app, your half-life is going to be not very long." "I do very much agree that memecoins are not going away. They may not be the final form. There may be other forms of social trading that follow, people buying regular tokens or stocks or productive assets, who knows what the future iterations are." "But the social aspect of trading is very deeply ingrained. Once upon a time that social graph was on Twitter or in group chats. Now it's clearly extending into fomo and some of these other places. That feels sticky and almost intrinsic to the behavior."

Last episode we got called uncs. Then Tarun spent the weekend trenching and came back converted. (I remain unrepentant.) We needed a true believer to explain what was going on, so FOMO CEO @paulerlanger joined us to make the case for social trading reviving the trenches ⤵️

@tarunchitra on what an AI Millennium Prize does to academia. Haseeb: "How do you feel as a math Twitter person seeing all this drama break out?" Tarun: "Everyone I know in academia is very depressed. Because it's like everyone's career hierarchy was determined on trying to solve these problems. But now it's kind of like actually just have more compute." "My guess is math will turn into a place like a lot of humanities where there's a very small number of tenured professors. 90% of people are just teaching calculus to pre-med morons." "It's not going away. I think it's just going to be like the bar goes up so much." "It's going to be like being a monk."

Paul Erlanger says traders are the new celebrities and fomo is their platform "Michael Burry didn't become famous right after the big short. He became famous after The Big Short movie. It's the same as Warren Buffett. He was famous for his investor letters and his earnings podcasts, the live streams." "There's never been a platform for these people. People have created their own media networks or been in feature films. But imagine a platform where traders could actually become famous. We really believe traders are the next celebrity." "We think also in the world of AI, where it's really easy to have an opinion and that's commoditized because you just talk to an LLM, what you're holding is what your actual belief is." "This is much larger than even the largest financial consumer app that ever existed because it's global, people could earn. But I also think this is the next generation social media app. People are going to become the next celebrities." "You need all of these different aspects to be perfect. You need the really robust engineering team. It needs to be on a new type of architecture like the blockchain. You need someone to have empathy for a user so a normal person could use it."

@tarunchitra on what an AI Millennium Prize does to academia. Haseeb: "How do you feel as a math Twitter person seeing all this drama break out?" Tarun: "Everyone I know in academia is very depressed. Because it's like everyone's career hierarchy was determined on trying to solve these problems. But now it's kind of like actually just have more compute." "My guess is math will turn into a place like a lot of humanities where there's a very small number of tenured professors. 90% of people are just teaching calculus to pre-med morons." "It's not going away. I think it's just going to be like the bar goes up so much." "It's going to be like being a monk."

Tarun reveals he started trenching on fomo: "After getting dunked on for being an unc last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way." "Hunter Biden really made my PnL go from negative to positive quite dramatically. Because the game is really understanding the news. Not like, hey, this is the news that's happening, but what social thing is hyped enough for someone to be making copycat coins or making something that fits a moment." "I did end up positive. Not some crazy 10,000% positive, but a respectable 10% positive. But I really enjoyed the experience even when I lost money." "There's actually the social dynamic of trying to be the first one to figure out some new trend or the feeling that you were there first. But it's expressed not in you buying the asset, but in you creating the new asset or being very early to some new asset." "But the beauty of fomo is I deposited and my deposits were available in three seconds. I don't think I've ever used a crypto app that's been comparable to the speed of that." "50% of the time I was buying Copycat Hunter Biden coins. I thought I was buying them on Robinhood Chain. I was buying them on Solana and I didn't even know what chain I was using. It was more like playing a video game than trading.”

Tarun says AI will make math research like becoming a monk "Everyone I know in academia is very depressed. Your career hierarchy was determined on trying to solve these problems. But now it's like, actually just have more compute." "My guess is math will turn into a place like a lot of humanities where there's a very small number of tenured professors. 90% of people are just teaching calculus to pre-med morons." "Math research isn't going away. I think the bar goes up so much that it's just going to be like being a monk." "I agree with the Peter Thiel thing. Wordcels are going to be more successful in the next century than STEMcels."

Tom on why the meme stock with the loyalty program hates tokenization. Tom: "The OpenAI thing and the AMC thing are very different." "AMC is weirdly very sensitive about this because they have this very strong stockholder outreach and loyalty program." "There's a whole program where you can sign up and they give you rewards if you're a verified stockholder." "They whip up their whole angry army of AMC holders to go and vote and do these wacky corporate governance things." "This guy probably saw this as, oh, no, you're severing this lifeline between me and my horde of retail investors who own AMC and are loyal to me." "It's weird that AMC, of all companies, would be upset about it, given that they are one of the few US companies that has a very strong stockholder relationship program."

Paul on the fundamental misconception that social trading has been tried before. Paul: "We did a deep dive on every single social trading app. You look at eToro and Webull and they're all riddled with confirmation bias." "The game theoretical optimal thing, if you have a private mode, is to be private and everyone else be public. So then everyone goes private." "It builds mistrust because people are only talking about their wins and not their losses." "On FOMO, if you just trade, don't write a thesis, don't have to build a following on purpose, everything automatically follows." "If you're trading well, it goes to your feed, people follow you, it goes through notifications." "Why would I trade a Tesla stock on another brokerage where I could come to FOMO and do it, build an audience and then get paid for building that audience?"

Haseeb says earnings calls are bifurcating, a document dump for the agents and entertainment for everyone else "I like the take of stockholder communication bifurcating. At the moment of your earnings release, there's a document dump for the agents, for all the trading firms and hedge funds and anybody doing really sophisticated trading. You ingest that all immediately in some PDFs." "And then for the humans it's like a TV show. You get on your Twitch stream and it's entertaining and it's colorful." "We're moving to a world where the old school literal conference call is going away, because who is that for? Professional traders are not going to be using that anymore. So it's either financial entertainment for people who are vibe trading, like, I think it's time to buy, I like the CEO's confidence. And then you've got the agents making all the actual high frequency, large money financial decisions." "There's nothing in the middle anymore for these very serious conference calls. They'll basically become an artifact of the past pretty soon."

Paul sees stock-paired memecoins as community. Haseeb sees what happens when the cycle turns. Paul: "Memecoins with stock tokens, I think are great community building aspects for these companies." "You saw what happened with GameStop. So now if you have this community around this memecoin, finally, people are actually caring about your company." "There's public company CEOs that have joined FOMO in the past week and now they're following the coins on FOMO." Haseeb: "Right now we're in part one of the cycle. Part one of the cycle is the fun part. That's the part where numbers go up." "When the cycle ends is when everybody's down bad. Everybody's upset. Everybody starts talking to, what's that, Burwick Law or whatever. That's when the knives come out." "People will absolutely do that for just a $10 million memecoin rug pull." Paul: "The difference is they're not launching the token and rugging it. It's like the token's already created."

Paul Erlanger explains how fomo is the TikTok for trading "If you're trading well, it goes to your feed. People follow you. It goes to your notifications. That's how you bootstrap this spiral social graph. Everything automatically follows." "It's very similar to what happened on TikTok, where it used to be the only people that got distribution were the people who already were famous and had a big audience. But now on TikTok, anyone in the algorithm could become famous by going viral." "Similar things are happening on fomo, where we have these localized leaderboards. There's 24-hour, which are a shorter timeframe than all-time. You're seeing new people coming there every day. People are hitting amazing trades. They're getting famous there." "Then they're getting hundreds of thousands of followers on fomo. They're then building an X account, having 50-100,000 followers there." "Now we launched creator rewards, which I think will be the most important thing we ever built. If you have theses, you get a boost. We attribute it to you, and then people are trading after you. We already did $2.5 million there." "Now you can imagine when you have a robust equities product, not only can you trade this from anywhere in the world, but why would I trade a Tesla stock on another brokerage where I could come to FOMO and do it, build an audience, and then get paid for building that audience?"

fomo cofounder Paul says onchain is the largest financial revolution since the 70s “I think onchain is the largest revolution in the financial industry since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s. Everyone's trying to build these skeuomorphic applications, like let's build Twitter onchain. But the real main use cases are global distribution." "[Onchain] 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 clunky block explorers." "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, I get full transparency into what you're doing." "Eventually, as we have stocks, and we have prediction markets, and we have all these other asset classes, we become the social graph of all of finance.” “Robinhood became huge on options and then pivoted to these other asset classes as well. The overall vision of the platform is a lot larger than you might see in the public discourse on Twitter."

fomo co-founder Paul says they hate copy trading, and everything on fomo is built to hold longer "We hate the idea of copy trading, and we've never built that. The whole point of fomo is that you get full information, and then you can learn by doing. You could follow people, take an educated guess, and figure out how to become better at predicting trends." "Everything built on fomo is built to hold longer. Think of the concept of a thesis, a long-term thesis. We reward people for holding longer, for putting theses out. We have average hold time as a stat. Whereas if you're tied to a launchpad, your incentive is to create coins as fast as possible, because that's how you earn money." "Before we had the launchpad game, you saw Harambe. Say someone was trying to convince me to buy Harambe coin sitting at 200 million. He's like, I'm going to hold this thing for four years, because that thing could sit at a few hundred million and go to a billion market cap. There were so few memecoins, you needed deployer teams." "This is why I'm so confident in the translation of this to longer hold social graphs, such as equities and other types of products, whether it's perpetuals on a real world asset. Everything built on fomo is built to incentivize people to actually have real theses, hold longer, and separate signal from noise."

Last week the boys got dunked on, so this week they brought on the FOMO co-founder. @paulerlanger says a fully transparent social graph is why FOMO became Robinhood Chain's biggest app. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:06 Paul vs. the uncs 03:37 From dYdX to FOMO 05:14 Tarun's weekend in the trenches 08:40 Transparency vs. copy trading 12:27 FOMO's distribution power on Robinhood Chain 17:52 Where memecoin trading destroys value 21:10 Churn, theses, & traders as the next celebrities 27:08 Shaming, sidewallets, & clans 32:35 Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP token 37:15 Stock coins, bond ETF fees, & how long the meta lasts 42:52 AMC's CEO vs Robinhood's tokenized stock 47:51 One-to-one backed equity & earnings calls as TV shows 52:20 OpenAI, Anthropic, & the Navier-Stokes drama 58:49 Is math research over? 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: 🎧 Spotify: 🍎 Apple: 🎙 Podcast Home: