Valuing crypto projects, Rivian worth $100B+, inflation: causes and corrections and more

The episode begins with the usual scat-singing and joshing rather than any content: riffs on one host being a robot, jokes about another's weight, and a mock introduction of the regulars. One host is welcomed back from Portugal and the Solana conference, which draws a crack about heroin and prostitution being legal there. He deflects the drug joke and says he was only drinking the Kool-Aid at the event.

Asked about the conference itself, he says thousands of people attended and it felt like a madhouse, with latecomers unable to get in because it had sold out. The crowd was mostly crypto developers and people with projects. He suggests Portugal hosts many conferences right now because its COVID restrictions are looser than other countries', making events easier to run. A stretch of chatter follows about whether masks or vaccination were required, and about getting booster shots.

The booster talk turns into a digression on mixing vaccine brands, including a "Swiss cheese" theory that two different shots cover each other's gaps, and a side comment that an athlete named Kyrie allegedly lied about being vaccinated while the NFL did nothing. The group then drifts into praising the Warriors and Steph. None of this is analysis; it sets the loose, self-mocking tone before the show turns serious.

The hosts decide to address what one calls the elephant in the room. They explain their editing agreement: the four of them each hold a veto, and anything one of them regrets saying can be cut after recording, so no one damages themselves or others. The previous week, two of them had vetoed a passage, and now they are reversing that choice because the topic kept coming up.

Sacks lays out the backstory. An offhand reference between him and Chamath about Solana had led some internet theorists to accuse the two of engineering a pump and dump. He says their firm is a beneficiary of roughly $1 billion of Solana because they were early, senior investors in Multicoin, having put in something like 40% of the money for a special opportunity fund that invested in Solana. He credits Multicoin for the position.

He says that at the time he texted Chamath, distributions had not really begun and he did not know how deep the market was. Having heard Chamath might be long Solana and wanting to accumulate, he floated a possible over-the-counter deal once they received their tokens. They exchanged a few words, it surfaced on the pod, and that was the extent of it. He later learned the Solana market is very deep, with about $3.5 billion notional traded daily, so there would be no need for an OTC deal even if they wanted to exit, which he says they do not, since Multicoin still holds most of it.

Asked to define the term, a host explains that over-the-counter simply means dealing through a trading desk or directly between parties rather than on an exchange. Sacks says his conversation with Chamath lasted about two minutes and came up on the pod for roughly twenty seconds before someone clipped it into a pump-and-dump accusation. He notes that talking about selling is by definition not a pump, and says they cut it the prior week only to avoid feeding a baseless conspiracy theory, but enough people at the conference mentioned it had become a meme that he decided it was worth answering.

A host frames the broader crypto dynamic: every coin like Solana has haters invested in a rival, everyone is talking their own book, and armies of anonymous Twitter accounts coordinate attacks and memes. The rumor in this case is that VCs holding large positions are about to dump. He says the reality is that Multicoin holds a large position but is slowly distributing the tokens themselves to its limited partners rather than selling and handing over cash, leaving each LP to decide what to do.

Sacks says his firm wants to do the same but is still working through the mechanics, which are complicated for a VC firm distributing in kind through tokens; a host notes Coinbase is offering this as a service. Chamath adds that he has only ever been a buyer and has never sold a single Solana token, and that they are net buyers. He says he dislikes admitting this, which is why his tone on the earlier pod was noncommittal: he objects to a culture, spread mostly via Twitter, that demands you be a maximalist who never sells to be seen as legitimate.

Asked why that culture is dangerous, Chamath zooms out to place Solana within crypto and crypto within the markets as of November 2021, after Q3 earnings. He lists stocks, crypto, and the art markets all at record highs, citing recent auction results at Phillips, Christie's and Sotheby's. He cites inflation at a 30-year high, 10-year breakevens at a 25-year high, a roughly trillion-dollar package just approved and another stimulus near $1.8 trillion still being negotiated. These figures are his own framing and are not independently verified here.

His key point is that the two founders he calls the smartest of the generation, Elon and Bezos, have collectively sold more than $11 billion of their holdings this year. He argues that if the smartest people are now selling core holdings they once said they would never sell, anyone who refuses to reconsider their own position is either smarter than them or being reckless. He says he will not be forced to disclose whether he is buying or selling except when it matters, and he calls it naive to think derisively of people who manage risk. The source breaks off as the segment ends on his point about missed opportunity.

Picking up the Solana thread, a host says he did not realize he needed to clear the air until enough people at the conference raised it. Chamath observes that much of crypto Twitter spends its time on tribal taunts like "have fun staying poor" rather than first-principles analysis. He argues many participants got exceptionally lucky, and some of that has gone to their heads, making them hostile toward anyone whose views might hurt their position, while missing the point that these are deep, liquid markets where a single opinion cannot do much.