Michael Rinko and Kevin Kelly: The Liquidity of Attention Drives Markets & Dictates Winners

Speaker 0: You're now plugged in to the Delphi podcast. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Tommy, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Michael Rinko, who's a senior markets analyst at Delphi, and my partner, Kevin Kelly. We're gonna talk at length about Mike's report called Attention is All You Need. It's one of the most interesting reports we've ever published.

It's a totally different way to think about markets, valuations, attention, where things are going, meme coins. It's a it's a phenomenal report, so I'm excited to chat about it. Mike, why don't we start with you about the inspiration in Genesys for for why you even wanted to write this?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Tommy. The inspiration for this report was really just watching, meme coins take off this cycle, and, you know, comparing that to past cycles, I guess. You know, last cycle, the l one trade was huge. We had the birth of DeFi, and then we had kind of, NFTs, pop off at at the top of last cycle.

And so far this cycle, it's really just been all means. So obviously, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, the the majors have done pretty well. But, you know, so much of the, activity trading and and really just, like, attention has been focused on meme coins. And from my perspective as, you know, watching and and writing about markets, I've noticed that people kind of have, like, a visceral reaction to meme coins. Like, you either love them or hate them.

And regardless of whether you love or hate, just the the broader trend has kind of, like, provoked some pretty, like, existential, like, questions and angst within the space. So there's a lot of people asking, like, you know, is everything a meme? Is it all worthless? Does this mean that the market's topping? Because clear you know, if everyone's trading memes, that must be very frothy.

So those were kind of the questions that I, you know, had as I sat down to to start to write this piece.

Speaker 0: Kev, what about you? I have some questions for Mike, but I wanna know your your kinda inspiration in Genesys as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think one of the reasons why I really gravitated towards this idea and and love the piece that Rico and the team put out is I mean, you know me. I'm more of a macro, kinda big picture type thinker. And when I take a step back and think about from a very kind of primitive level, we think about just markets in general. Right?

Markets and asset prices. They're really, at the end of the day, all driven by a function of supply and demand. And so this concept of attention becomes really important because, as I'm sure we'll get into, attention really does sit up stream of a lot of things. Importantly, it sits upstream of demand. Right?