TRUST AI

“The thesis that Mike and I had was eventually this really retail-driven asset class will become a big institutional asset class. And those institutions are going to need something that looks and feels more like maybe a Wall Street Journal or a Bloomberg, something that they, and I'd underline this word, trust.”

“So if someone hacks you, for example, if you let it send emails from your personal email, well, the blast radius is really big because then it can just send everyone emails and then ask for information. Right. So you don't want to just let it do whatever it wants. And then you want to limit the blast radius.”

“I realized what's going to differentiate me is when I make it about other people. So the way the story gets told, the way a thing is remembered is much more emotionally impactful if it has something to do with the person watching you.”

“Constraints are not the enemy; they are the catalyst for creativity.”

“Being vulnerable is a huge one. So if you feel nervous, just saying that, it's just allowing people into your head and saying, hey, I've never done this before. I'm actually quite nervous right now, but you seem like a great person. I just want to tell you more about what I'm, like just anything that opens you up that allows you to be human.”

“That's the core of what's happening right now, which is, you know, we'll get into some of the data that backs this up later. But I mean, the average token or the median net return of a token over the last five years is down 80%. That's the problem with the industry. And there's a lot of startup market structure reasons for that.”

“But now I think we're realizing there's no one to blame but us. And we've talked about why are these assets not going up because of, oh, it's a capital access problem, so we've got debts. No, it's not. We have an asset problem, and we have a trust problem. That's the core of what's happening right now.”

“I just added a cloned version of Oracle yesterday and said, hey, go ahead and introduce yourself. I'm yours, the SEO team's own agent. Not sure with other departments. I already have all the existing SEO intelligence from day one. Not starting from scratch. You can customize me, correct me, tell me your preferences.”

“I have six AI agents running inside my business right now. Some of the names right now are Alfred, Cyborg, Flash and Oracle. And they do a whole host of things, such as looking through my Google Search Console, looking through my CRM, saving me 500 grand plus when it comes to my costs, and doing much more than that.”

“And that's why when it comes to businesses, we go on NemoClaw because it's the enterprise-grade version where you might get the ability to do three different things, but you can only do two or three at once. Right. That's one of the key benefits of having something like a NemoClaw.”

“I want the guy or girl who's next to me in a life or death scenario to have made it through that training and found their motivating factor, that they want this so bad that they're willing to do this, because that can't be faked. And so you have to push yourself to the running is one of those things where I like to get to a certain point where I hate it, don't want to do it, feel miserable, body broken.”

“I think knowing how to build rapport, how to establish trust, same things that a hypnotist can do, same thing a good salesperson can do, the same thing that a great con man can do, are very important. If you can't get people to trust you and work with you, it won't work.”

“We did a trade war game where we were trying to play out some of these dynamics with the US trying to make a deal with China as it's imposing tariffs on everyone else and trying to push a de-risking agenda, all these different factors. It was notable that in the course of the game, as soon as the United States started negotiating with China, all the other countries were like, well, we're not doing anything on China de-risking. We're not going to sanction China. We're not going to do more export controls. That's exactly what has played out in the real world.”

“So just to give a couple of examples, right, you've got this long list of bad things that China does economically that we're going to fix. How are we going to fix them? There is no guidance on how we are going to fix them. I mean, you can intuit from other parts of the strategy or just the actions that the Trump administration has taken to date, that a coercive, tariff-led approach would be the way to go, except we've already tried that, and it doesn't seem to be inducing China to change any of its behaviors.”

“I don't know if this was intentional that you used a font metaphor, just after we learned that Secretary Rubio has condemned the use of Calibri in State Department of Correspondence. Yup, that came out. So apparently, we're going back to Times New Roman for official correspondence. What is wrong with Calibri? Is Calibri woke? It's too woke.”

“I have a little thing where I've switched up the instructions on a shampoo bottle, which are normally what lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat three words, every shampoo bottle. Here's what I say. Listen, repeat, reply. So when you meet someone, most people, when they hear a name, they actually didn't forget the name. They actually never knew it in the first place.”

“I think another big one to watch, particularly as we get closer to the midterms, is push back on the tariff and trade agenda. We're starting to see price issues in the United States. That's the kind of thing that really hits home for, you know, most Americans, who knows about the national security strategy, but they're going to go to the grocery store. And if it got really expensive to buy stuff, or if Christmas shopping is really expensive this year, that's the sort of thing that's going to change political sentiment.”

“And I think actually, funnily enough, what's causing the sentiment drift here is that that ideological movement industry blob that is crypto won. And so now that it won, it moved from being a movement which is on the fringe, on the outside and countercultural, to one which is in the mainstream and it's struggling with an identity crisis.”

“I think for the last year, I've been talking about crypto. There's this big line in the sand moment for crypto. You got the first 15 to 16 years, and then I'd say 2025 was this line in the sand moment, and you got everything after 2025. And I would say this rebrand for Blockworks marks that for us.”

“That is all different now, and I think fundamentally, there is a question about whether this administration believes that we are in fact in a strategic competition with China or not. If you look at, for example, the National Security Strategy that came out earlier this week, it clearly emphasizes that there are some concerns with China. We have concerns particularly, and this is where the lens most seems to be, is through the economic lens. So much less emphasis on the security threat that China presents, much less emphasis on the US need to kind of keep China, I hate to say the word contained, but contained, you know, from a regional security perspective, and much more just on, let's figure out how we can make a deal with China.”

“He said, when you use DeepSeq, it has no sense of humor. Like the more advanced Google engines, ChachiBG, OpenAI, and so forth, you can actually joke with them. They're developing a sense of humor, and that his theory was that over time, humans will respond to more human AI. And China is constrained because they literally have people using algorithms for word searches, but policing what's said about Xinjiang or Tibet or democracy.”

“Everything about China's industrial policy for the last decades has been about self-sufficiency getting off of US tech. It is, as you know, a little bit more complicated than that. You've got private sector Chinese firms who are just going to want the best technology available. But look at what the Chinese government's response to this loosening of export controls has been. It's thanks very much for this unilateral concession. We're now going to go tell everybody in China to not buy the Nvidia chips because it runs directly counter to the goals of self-sufficiency.”

“I've gotten better on a couple fronts. One, I've gotten better at realizing that people remember the beginning and the end more than the middle. So how you leave someone is so much more important than what happens before that.”

“Alfred is our chief of staff. So Alfred sits at the very top. And then what happens is you have other agents that report to it... We have a reporting structure here that works out well because you have a chief of staff that has more of the context, and then it can feed that context when the other agents are calling for it.”

“A very similar thing played out more recently when the US released its export controls expanding how it applied the entity list, designations, it applied what's 50% rule, what kind of captures all subsidiaries that have a 50% ownership stake with the listed entity. Inadvertently perhaps, they didn't realize they're going to capture 20,000 to 30,000 additional Chinese companies. China reacted. That's where we saw the rarest export controls. So it's been this period of overreach and then backing down.”

“The lies that can read people's minds. I can't. I wish I could. Well, because I'm giving the illusion of reading people's minds, right? That's the skill. That's really, I'm crafting a narrative which in your mind plays out in such a way, kind of like the way a magic trick works, but the contract is different with the audience.”

“I decided that I was almost two people. And in my brain, I created this like split where I said, they don't actually know me. The people that were just not nice to me, they don't know me, Oz Pearlman. They met Oz the Magician. And I thought the same way that a movie star has an agent, the agent handles the negotiations for contracts.”

“Constraints are not the enemy; they are the catalyst for creativity.”