SPEAKER_01: We got a big news show today with many wild topics. This week is not getting quieter, even though everybody's at Burning Man, including Twitter's canceled OnlyFans project. Maybe one of the worst ideas we've ever heard. Oh, no, wait. The worst idea was still getting Eminem and Snoop Dogg to perform as their bored apes.

Jason Calacanis: To validate our critique from yesterday, NFT trading volume is down 99% since May. But Alexis Ohanian's new crypto fund is going to buy up some distressed assets. We also talk about a major FTC lawsuit. It's a great show. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_04: Hey everybody, it's Tuesday and we have a full new show for you today.

SPEAKER_05: Molly, we thought things would slow down. Everybody's favorite social network, Twitter. It doesn't stop.

SPEAKER_11: And you have been worried about product velocity. I'm just saying they have no problem with product velocity.

SPEAKER_14: The entendres in this are going to get, they're going to be fast and they're going to be furious.

SPEAKER_18: Twitter, I kid you not, and I don't even know how to grok this one. This is breaking news, folks. This is breaking news. So we are just coming across this right now.

SPEAKER_25: Twitter, earlier this year, was building an OnlyFans competitor for monetizing adult content. But it canceled it because they're not good at operating a company and getting rid of bad things on their platform. I think that's the best summary. They suck at managing Twitter. They're good at, they're okay to good at building product, but they can't handle bots or spam.

SPEAKER_33: I mean, the headline on this Casey Newton piece is, and I quote, how Twitter's child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor.

SPEAKER_39: That is an explosive headline.

Jason Calacanis: It appears to be that last spring, not that long ago, just a few months ago. Oh, look, the YouTube comments just went crazy with adult dating site spam. What a coincidence.

SPEAKER_43: Okay, all right.

Jason Calacanis: In the spring of 2022, evidently, after quietly allowing adult content on the service, Twitter was thinking, hey, we could probably make some money off of this. And they were proposing to give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans style paid subscriptions with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.

SPEAKER_01: You know, I got to say, I personally have no problem with this.

Jason Calacanis: Like, I think OnlyFans is a safe place for people to monetize sexuality, which is going to get monetized anyway. And so if they, if Twitter was like, yeah, we're going to legitimize this and let this occur safely with adults and consent. And that's not great. However, when they, to your point, went ahead and tried to enact this new project, ACM Adult Content Monetization, they formed this red team to pressure test the decision. This is all according to a scoop at the Burge and Casey Newton and interviews with current and former Twitter employees. And the red team discovered that, in fact, Twitter could not at all safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not and still is not effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform. So basically, they were like, if they launch this, it's going to get filled with child porn, because we still can't root that out at all.

SPEAKER_47: A lot of this doesn't make sense to me.

SPEAKER_49: I, too, think sex work and people selling nude pictures or, you know, adult content, leave it at that. No problem with that. Morally, et cetera. Do have a problem with, obviously, like everybody else, the exploitive nature of some of this stuff. And, you know, the fact that it is user-generated content is not compatible.

SPEAKER_52: An open user-generated platform is not compatible with the adult industry because of exploitation. And you just have to pause for a second and just understand what we're talking about here. On YouTube, if people upload content and they do something illegal, what's the ramification?

SPEAKER_49: Okay, they stole somebody's copyright. Okay, they have a copyright management system in it. You know, you can claim. So if I were to put a song up, you know, somebody else's, you know, Sopranos episode, a clip, HBO can claim that and they get the monetization on it. Or it gets watermarked. They know the signature of it. They can take it down. Okay, but now you get into adult content. You have all different categories from underage, child porn, revenge porn, et cetera, that you don't want to let people upload stuff without knowing who they are.

SPEAKER_25: So user-generated content, anybody can create an account and upload anything they want, and you deal with the ramifications of it afterwards because the ramifications, let's be honest, of stolen IP, stolen content, are not horrific in nature. That's what society, at least in the United States, has come to.

SPEAKER_53: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_25: That's, and I think it's kind of, I'm okay with it. You know, people will steal clips of this show all in or whatever. People will repost episodes, and if it's a fan and they use a small clip, you know, we might put it into fair use. I ask people to use the YouTube clipping service. So you have to understand the nature of these platforms. You cannot run adult content through UGC.

SPEAKER_40: It's too dangerous. And with after-the-fact moderation.

SPEAKER_31: Correct. Yeah. You know, we'll clean it up afterwards. We'll do it in post. Right. Does not work with adult content.

SPEAKER_25: Twitter runs a service that is user-generated, where they freely let bots create gazillions of accounts. You need only have a Twitter account to understand this. They have the lightest hand in terms of account creation because they want to keep their numbers up. It's always been that way. Facebook and LinkedIn are much less permissive in people creating content. I'm sorry, creating accounts. So it's obvious that this is not going to work on Twitter. Now, the other really bonehead stupid thing about this, as a decision, is Twitter is an advertising platform. And who do we see advertising on Twitter, Molly? Who advertises on Twitter? I don't know.

SPEAKER_62: And what do they advertise when you see ads?

SPEAKER_01: I don't see ads on Twitter, like tech stuff, I guess? Like Wall Street Journal? I feel like I see the same Wall Street Journal ad all the time. And then finally, like the one about what Elon Musk is reading that I plan, finally blocked.

Chamath Palihapitiya: If you go to, all roads back to E, if you go to Twitter trends, by the way, what you will see, inevitably, is the latest Marvel movie, the latest car, the latest television show.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, they are selling brand advertising advertisers. Yeah, brand advertisers love Twitter because of buzz and the influence and the digerati literati and other Illuminati on Twitter.

SPEAKER_73: Mm hmm.

SPEAKER_49: Now you cannot sell to Disney. For Miss Marvel, She Hulk, Avengers, and be running OnlyFans, they don't want to be anywhere near that. And now what's happening, Twitter is so incompetent, I don't know if you've had this happen, but you hit a trending topic, and you're scrolling, and oh, you see some crazy porn.

SPEAKER_74: Have you had that happen? Or you've been in like the groups and seen some crazy porn getting posted there?

SPEAKER_75: I feel like I used to see some crazy porn, but I really don't anymore. But yeah, I mean, a couple things are happening here.

Jason Calacanis: Like one, it's advertising supported, this would have been a subscription. And this is like Twitter clearly trying to explore some ways to get additional revenue because being advertising supported is increasingly difficult and doesn't make them a ton of money. Maybe I have safe search on to to next point because everybody else is reporting, like seeing tons of porn on Twitter, which, by the way, would be the end of my time on Twitter. Like if that was that's no amount. But there is, to your point about being advertising supported and not investing in moderation, there is this great paragraph from the article explaining that unlike its larger peers, including Google and Facebook, Twitter has suffered from a history of mismanagement and a generally weak business that has failed to turn a profit for eight of the past 10 years.

SPEAKER_01: As a result, the company has invested far less in content moderation and user safety than its rivals in 2019. Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the amount Facebook spends on safety features exceeds Twitter's entire annual revenue.

Jason Calacanis: So they're in a trap now where they want to find ways to make more money, but they haven't historically made enough money to make a service that is, frankly, good enough, robust enough and safe enough to pitch.

SPEAKER_32: They're just a bad trap.

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SPEAKER_25: There are practical issues here. You remember Tumblr, when it was an independent company, was known for adult content. Reddit, known for adult content to this day. Tumblr and Reddit were independent companies, and they weren't publicly traded.

SPEAKER_49: When you get to publicly traded, independent companies, it gets really hard to be able to manage this adult content issue. Because, again, you know, Sony or Disney or Ford, they don't want to be within a mile of it.

SPEAKER_25: Tumblr, when it got bought by Yahoo, by Marissa Mayer, eventually somebody was like, hey, Marissa, do you know about this? And she was like, yeah, that's gone. And this created a lot of unintended consequences.

SPEAKER_49: Some people believe a lot of OnlyFans success was Tumblr taking adult content down. Absolutely. It's just, these companies need to be independent of advertising. And that's really the beginning and end of it.

SPEAKER_14: And this is a boneheaded decision for Twitter to even go anywhere near it.

Jason Calacanis: That is such a weird, I mean, of all the ways to, like, I understand that they were probably thinking that would be an easy way to make money, although it is not.

SPEAKER_01: It is fraught in a million different ways. Like, you have Visa and all these companies saying, oh, we're not going to process payments. And so we're going to, you know, push women back to pimps. Great job, guys.

SPEAKER_99: That is the issue, right? I mean, people don't want to talk about it, but that's the issue. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, like, OnlyFans and Tumblr give people a safe space to make money on something that people have been buying since the beginning of time.

SPEAKER_105: Yes.

Jason Calacanis: And every effort, this is a separate issue, but every effort to, like, purify it and shut it down and not process payments and whatever actually leads to more harm. Like, okay, but two or B, Twitter, come on, like, you'd be better off issuing NFTs as a way to try to make money than getting into an OnlyFans type business model. Like, that is so out of the frying pan into the fire. Like, I feel like you in particular and even I could come up with, like, 1,000 other ways for Twitter to monetize things before we would ever land on, hey, you know what you guys should do is only fans clone. Like, what the hell?

SPEAKER_49: Elon's idea, I think, of charging for Twitter, which I've been talking about for 10 years.

SPEAKER_108: I wrote a blog post, let me pay for Twitter Pro.

SPEAKER_109: Yeah, that's not Elon's idea. That's, you know, come on.

SPEAKER_108: Well, it's been around. Exactly. But as a potential new owner of it, his, you know, explicitly saying that's what he wants to do is go pay it around, I think is still the power move.

SPEAKER_49: Because if you think about anybody with any kind of a decent following, they would love to pay for Twitter, because of the value and time they spend on it, if they got something in return, what that something is, you know, who knows? But anybody who's, you know, especially corporations and business accounts, my Lord, if you could run, like we talked about merch, you know, if, if I could pay for an account, and then I could sell merch directly, I'm paying $49 a month. If I could, you know, if I could, you know, put my podcast in my feed automatically and have it on tip.

SPEAKER_01: The unified profile thing that we talked about, like the professional profiles with all the unified media sharing, like, that's an hour is that just too hard to build?

SPEAKER_117: Like, no, this is, you know, it's just desperation.

SPEAKER_01: It feels like desperation. That one.

SPEAKER_49: No, it's just they're not good at making strategic decisions. So they're reasonably good at building product of late, they're not good at strategic thinking, strategic thinking, requires leadership, and it requires saying no to a bunch of things and understanding what the purpose of your services and who your users are. People who use Twitter are very intelligent, very successful people, it's, it's has skim the cream of the social media, it is the intellectual version, as Naval said of TV, like people are addicted. People who are connected to it, who are smart and successful, okay, so what do those people want, and those people are well healed, they'll pay for a subscription or, you know, to have more control over their system, it's just very obvious, really true metrics, the fact that I can actually collect emails now, that's worth paying for, if I can more easily collect emails, if they put an email form,

SPEAKER_118: and allowed me to, you know, understand my CRM of followers, so just a follower CRM, I would pay 10,000 a year for, and I literally pay 1000 a month, and if Twitter CRM.

Jason Calacanis: If Twitter collected, if Twitter collected, and curated, because the thing that I use Twitter for, frankly, is seeing the future. And I would subscribe to feeds that you know how, like, I mean, anytime something happens, there's kind of the running joke now, like, welcome on my epidemiology experts, and all my experts on espionage law and whatever. But that is actually what I use Twitter for. Like, I was one of the people in January of 2020, or whatever, being like, hey, guys, I think this, uh, this pandemic is real, this is going to be a really big deal. And that's not, it was not magic. It's because I have Twitter. So I'm like a time traveler. So if Twitter would let me subscribe to time traveler feeds, give me all the best epidemiologists, give me all the people who actually know about let me pay for that, let me pay for that. So that you curate it, and you make me essentially a futurist. Yeah, like, that's why we're on Twitter. It isn't actually to die.

SPEAKER_25: Why do people? What, what did they tell you is the number one reason to pay for Twitter blue, which I pay three bucks a month for, but what's the number one reason to pay for Twitter blue? I have no idea. Exactly. They literally came out with a pro version and nobody knows what you get. This is how bad they are at Lord. This is how bad the clown car is at value proposition. They made a Franken subscription. There are at least 10 things listed on the Twitter blue subscription. None of us can remember any of them. I'm a paying member. So I can tell you a couple of them. Yeah. One, um, you can change the buttons on the bottom of your app so you can customize the app. I have, as an example, our community and the spaces in my bottom toolbar. It's saves me a click or two. Uh, you can also edit. It also holds your tweet for 30 seconds. So you can edit it. You know, they could have just made the edit button.

SPEAKER_118: You can, you know, you can edit your tweets. If you're pro you can, um, I'm just mad right now. What's that?

SPEAKER_133: I'm just mad. Like, that's absurd.

SPEAKER_135: They're very bad at what they do in terms of strategy, in terms of strategy, right? Like there's such a magical opportunity to use the

SPEAKER_18: audience that you've been given, you know? If only they had new leadership, somebody who could run this and steer it in the proper direction, who has other experience building world class products.

Jason Calacanis: I bet he's gonna do a great job when he doesn't want it anymore. It's gonna be awesome. I can't wait to have another checked out CEO with another company or two to run. That's gonna be great for Twitter. Yeah, that there's a description. Nobody ever had Elon Musk checked out. He's gonna be checked out of running a company that he didn't, they lost interest in buying.

SPEAKER_96: If he gets forced to buy it, I'm not red line, red line. Oh, yeah. Sorry. You can make me dazzle on the line. No comment. No comment. Okay. Anyway, Twitter, speaking of NFTs. Yeah, Twitter, just issue an NFT. It'll do better than board apes are doing these days.

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SPEAKER_14: I mean, this is shaping up to be a complete and utter wash. Nuclear.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, so we went pretty hard on NFTs at the end of yesterday's show. And it turns out we were 100% correct. Okay. OpenSea daily volume of NFT transactions has dropped 99% since its May 1st peak. That peak, by the way, was $406 million in a single day.

SPEAKER_124: So that was- Wow. $406 million in trading cards. One day. In one day.

Jason Calacanis: On August 28th, volume dropped to $5 million, according to the Decentralized App Tracker Dapp Radar. On a monthly basis, that is, again, a 99% drop in volume. On a monthly basis, OpenSea's volume has dropped about 90% according to Dune Analytics and the price, the floor price of Bored Apes. If you want to know why somebody's out here trying to buy off M&M and Snoop to get any sucker in the door you possibly can, it's because the floor price of a Bored Ape has dropped by 53% from May to August.

SPEAKER_49: Important to say here, we believe that NFT technology is unique and there could be some great applications for it, like memberships and the ability to, you know, sell them and fractionalize them. I think the technology is sound and interesting, the permissionlessness of it.

SPEAKER_118: I like, uh, and I said, I like this, uh, fried fish club, whatever thing that Gary's doing, or, you know, some other NFTs for, uh,

SPEAKER_33: We've said it a million times and none of us can ever remember the name, but anyway, yeah, the fish thing.

SPEAKER_163: The fish club. I think it's a good idea. Like if you're buying into a club and, you know, great.

SPEAKER_164: I mean, I don't know why it can't be accomplished by a QR code, but whatever.

SPEAKER_163: Well, I mean, it could just be a membership that, but the fact that it permissionlessly trades is super fascinating, super interesting, you can rationalize it and you can rationalize it.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, there's a lot, there's something there and that thing will develop right now. What we're seeing is the first wave collapsing hard. Every surfboard out there is dead in the water right now.

SPEAKER_47: Well, and the other thing that I've seen some statistics on and I don't have them at my fingertips here is that it turns out the majority of the NFT volume was a small number of people who had very large

SPEAKER_49: collections and were very much into flipping them. So you had a trader class for these assets and then you had the public. And so that to me speaks to maybe what's happening here is that the public, the retail market is no longer here. So like stonks, like AMC and all that stuff that was going on, you know, and GameStop, if you remove the retail portion and you have the traders and the people kind of running the desks. Maybe there's not that much here without the retail folks buying these. And just to pause for a second and think about how much money 400 million is in one day in 10 days, that'd be 4 billion 100 days. That would be $40 billion.

SPEAKER_112: I mean, seriously, triple or quadruple 40 billion, you're getting 120, 150 million, 150 billion. This is an extraordinary amount of revenue.

SPEAKER_118: So I'm sure people who are open sea investors or people inside of open sea were like, well, that's an incredible GMV. And I if they take but 5% of that, does that mean they made $20 million in a day? I think their take rates probably three, four or 5%. I don't, I don't know their exact take rate probably.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, in February, December of last year, 2021 open sea raised $300 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, which you could a hundred percent understand if they were making $400 million in a day.

SPEAKER_49: Yes, if they were making, but 5%, that means they would be making $5 billion on that hundred billion in, you know, going through it. Okay, 13 billion, only three times, or whatever, whatever that number is, but there must have been 2.5% take rate.

SPEAKER_112: So that means on that one day, they made $10 million a day, you know, you start to put in $10 million a day in profits.

SPEAKER_75: So we're just on that day, all those investors at KOTU and Paradigm were just pretty smart. They felt pretty smart.

SPEAKER_112: But yeah, just to think about the velocity of this, that was only nine months ago, nine months ago, it's so crazy change quick, I don't think it's coming back, I'll be totally honest with you, I think it's going to keep dropping, because it's I think this is a debt spiral of a realization that there's not value here.

SPEAKER_49: And if people have other things because of inflation, that they need to pay for, then discretionary spending comes out, whether it was stimmy checks, or people not going out during, you know, there's like five different income sources that were here. And some of it was also like dark money. Remember, there was a lot of dark money and flipping going on here, and that'll all come out.

SPEAKER_25: We've already started to see the beginnings of it of people front running NFTs. But if you wanted to wash $100 million in, you know, some Breaking Bad methamphetamine sale, I buy a $10,000 NFT for other accounts running up to $70,000 in bidding, I sell it for 70, I pay my taxes.

SPEAKER_122: Now I get $40,000, $50,000 in profit, $40,000 in profit.

SPEAKER_25: Okay, yeah, I didn't sell methamphetamine and do this on the dark web with a bunch of different accounts. I'm an NFT collector, slash, you know, dark money flipper. Yeah, and I think there was a lot of that going on that people don't understand the scale of the gray and black markets in the world. And these places became a great place to wash it, just like it used to be dry cleaners, you know, Chinese food restaurants, cafes, anywhere you could have a cash-based business. People used to make those fronts. And, you know, they would say, oh, I made $100,000 this month. They made $10,000. And then they pay tax, and then they clean money. I mean, you see them, sorry.

Jason Calacanis: Oh, I mean, what's kind of sad, actually, is the number of, like, I assume there were some true believers in here who were just overrun by the majority of people who were, who correctly saw this as the simplest and fastest way to make a buck that exists right this second. Because there's always a new way, and this is the way. And that, I think, only bolsters what you're saying about how this is probably the end. It's because the reputation of NFTs now is going to be, is inextricably linked with scam and cringe. Like, I, you know, I mean, if, if, if yesterday, if the VMAs were the, the, the, like.

SPEAKER_11: Jumping the shark? The, the first tap in a double tap. Oh. You know, the OpenSea thing. Check shot and then two to the head?

SPEAKER_126: The double tap. The check, yes, that. What is it?

SPEAKER_181: Two to the head?

SPEAKER_49: What is it? Two to the body, one to the head? Yeah, double top, some of that, that's a triple tap, but yeah, triple tap. I think that was the, I think this is the jumping on the shark moment was what we saw with Eminem and Snoop.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And then these numbers are like, that's it.

SPEAKER_49: Well, there's another shoe to drop to, uh, which is a lot of people who owned NFTs, who had done well, did a fractionalization of their ownership. And some people who bought in, bought in to those fractions. So, okay, I own a board ape, I pay 10k for it, it's now worth 110k, picking a number. So I got a hundred thousand in profit. I want to put that to work. Okay. What do I do?

SPEAKER_25: I take a margin loan against it, right? So somebody says, okay, it's worth this many ETH and the ETH price collapses. Okay. I took out 50k against mine. The ETH collapses 70%. Now I have to liquidate. Oh, who's buying?

SPEAKER_49: Who's buying the NFTs? And that's what you're going to see next is there's a lot of these, uh, fractionalized margin loan, you know, NFTs out there. And if there's no buyers, just like when there's no buyers for a stock and you've got to liquidate it, oh my God, the price orders might be very low, which is what we saw when Bitcoin went from 70 to maybe 18,000. That was quite a drop, right? And there was a lot of forced selling, the forced selling that could happen in NFTs, from what I understand, uh, could be the next shoe to drop.

SPEAKER_05: And then, you know, who's, who's gonna buy these? Is there somebody crazy enough to say, I want to buy distressed crypto assets?

SPEAKER_11: Who in their right mind? Isn't there always?

SPEAKER_75: Credible audacity, I believe, is the term. Oh, okay. That you have used, yes.

David Friedberg: If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, then you need to be SOC2 verified from a third party if you're gonna close big deals.

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Jason Calacanis: Not a mere, let me look at the date here.

SPEAKER_01: A mere few months after, March, April, May, June, July, August.

SPEAKER_102: A mere five to six months after offering young co-founders $100,000 to work on climate solutions.

Jason Calacanis: Alexis Ohanian, who yesterday I was like, come on the show, climate guy. Ah, yeah, come on the show. Yeah, he has now announced that his venture firm, 776, is planning to raise $177 million to invest in distressed crypto tokens.

SPEAKER_193: Ah, this is a mistake, I think. But Alexis is smart. But I think this could be a mistake.

SPEAKER_102: Well, some will come back around, presumably.

Jason Calacanis: Like we're saying, the technology, if you acquire the users, you acquire some underlying technology, maybe some IP, you're poised for round two, I guess.

SPEAKER_14: You know, I just, I don't know.

SPEAKER_49: I think the phase we're in right now is the fundamental value of crypto has become the discussion, or it's going to quickly become the discussion, along with regulation. These are two things that are long overdue. A discussion about what's the regulatory framework here.

SPEAKER_25: Okay. Gary Gensler spoke up, and he said, we have a regulatory framework. He's like, well, we already have rules. Yes. Here they are. If you need a refresher, and if you'd like to do something innovative, like, come talk to us.

SPEAKER_49: But the rule set still applies. So, okay, that conversation has now manifested in the last, what, 90 days, in a very strong way, because of all this lost money. A lot of that regulation means that if you were going to buy distressed assets, you're buying the lawsuits and the regulatory and the legal issues associated with them. So that's my problem, number one, with what Alexis is doing here is, okay, you're buying some token project that's distressed. Okay, is that going to fund the lawsuit, you know, I mean, not that you're buying the equity in the companies, I don't know if his plan is to buy the equity or just buy the tokens, but maybe that project is going to be sanctioned in some way. And essentially, that could be downward pressure and or headwinds. And then number two, you know, past regulatory is, do any of these have value?

SPEAKER_112: I thought one of the most constructive discussions we had with Vinny and, and Sandeep on our crypto roundtable, which we're gonna do every other Wednesday. So I guess we'll have one maybe next Wednesday.

SPEAKER_49: The big issue is, what's the core value? And I thought Filecoin was a great discussion that got me excited about crypto. Again, I was like, Oh, wow, Filecoin makes sense to me. You know, there's coins in the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_36: And people are actually, you know, putting content, distributed storage, right, there's value, there's real utility here, people need storage, but then that's not distressed. And it's not going to get bought.

SPEAKER_212: So it's down some amount.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah, yeah, some amount, but I don't know if it's as distressed. But anyway, fundamental value, where is the fundamental value in any of this?

Jason Calacanis: The goal of the new fund, which will be called Kriptos with a K Greek style, and an accent on O, 776 registered as an investment advisor in April, so they can up their investments specifically in tokens. Like to your point, they're talking about investing in tokens. 776 gave up its VC exemption, which limits a firm's ability to make investments other than direct stakes in private startups to 20% of a fund.

SPEAKER_49: And here's, this is a wonky law, by the way, that people know, what is that, basically, there's a venture exemption for form, to build a fund. And if you you have to invest in private companies to get that exemption. If not, you have to be an investment advisor. And that's what they're talking about here.

SPEAKER_01: Got it. Here's a quote from 776 founding partner, Caitlin Holloway saying, quote, This is the best time to buy if you're really long on the industry, it's on sale, everything is on sale. And of course, to tie it all together, seven, seven, six was an investor in yoga labs, $450 million seed round, back in March of this year.

SPEAKER_34: Yeah, so.

SPEAKER_138: Okay.

SPEAKER_34: Hey, man, like, it's a long game, but we could be wrong. These seem like crazy bats, and it could be bad money after good. But maybe, you know, Alexa smart cat.

SPEAKER_49: So maybe it's a great bet. I, I would be very concerned here about the bad money after good. You know, sometimes you make a bad bet. And then you want to keep betting, right? And it's sometimes it's time to go home and leave the table. I think for crypto, I would be leaving the table right now. With the rare exception of something that is buttoned up on regulatory, and very clear value proposition, which is what I've always said, bring me something that's buttoned up on a regulatory basis.

SPEAKER_112: You know, that's just makes legal sense, you know, that doesn't have those risk factors. And I have a couple of investments in crypto that we have a couple that are are good.

SPEAKER_134: And show me the fundamental value.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you can wait it out and raise $177 million fund for climate tech investment. Like, I just don't, I don't understand. I do think that good money after bad feels like it feels like part of the bailout process. You know what it feels like, too, is like SBF FOMO, like it's Sam Bankman freed FOMO, it's somebody seeing what he is doing in the industry where he's buying up everything and being like, wait a second, we don't want this to all get owned by this one dude. We better we better get in there if we want to have anything left, which is kind of an interesting like monopoly side.

SPEAKER_118: All right, we got an option, what's this FTC lawsuit as we wrap here, this data broker is selling the geolocation data for people going to reproductive clinics and other sensitive areas, I guess Planned Parenthood would be the one and Lena Kahn is not having it.

SPEAKER_01: This is abortion data. Yep, 100%. So we have talked about the absolute horror that is abortion bans, which are going to into effect in more and more states occurring in an environment of near total digital surveillance and the FTC in a pretty aggressive and surprising move is suing a data broker called Kochava for selling geolocation data on people who are visiting reproductive clinics and other sensitive areas.

Jason Calacanis: So she Lena Kahn announced the lawsuit on Twitter.

SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting is that, I mean, everything about it is absolutely disgusting, right? She was like, this data can be used to track people, they actually went through an example. So the FTC actually got itself a free trial of this software, right, they weren't even paying and they were able to get a person's information and de anonymize it and say, we could 100% tie this person back to their house. Gross. There were a couple interesting things about this one is that how gross that is just absolutely gross. The other is that the FTC evidently doesn't seem to be going after this, they're going after the business model of this company, they're suing under their doctrine of unfairness. And according to one legal scholar, Jessica Lee, who I follow on Twitter, who studies privacy law, it's not, they're not saying like, you can't sell abortion data. They're saying, if you're promising that you're collecting data that's anonymous, and you're not we're going to come after you meaning that if they win this case, way bigger precedent in terms of privacy.

SPEAKER_112: We really have to just really rethink our privacy laws around location and consumers need to start thinking about their phone settings.

SPEAKER_49: You know, Apple does a pretty good job of this, like only allow you to use the app and location data and they constantly make you aware of it. So I think if you're in the Apple ecosystem, you're a bit more protected.

SPEAKER_159: Not from your carrier. I want to be super crystal clear on this.

SPEAKER_100: You are not protected from your carrier. Right. Even just because they got the data here from an app. They got the data here from an app. Yeah.

SPEAKER_61: So one of the but our carriers sell our data to data brokers. So just like, yeah, so I wonder if that data can be tracked back.

SPEAKER_159: So, you know, the fact that listen, we're in the industry, and we're even perplexed at how this is working, tells you something.

SPEAKER_49: I think a lot of this just to be clear, if you're using an app, that's not a top app.

SPEAKER_241: And you're not using it specifically for location, just do not put location on the only thing you need location for is Uber, you know, or DoorDash and your GPS. Everything else do not allow any use of your location.

SPEAKER_135: And that includes Apple like turn off the advertising ID in your Apple settings, which I think is maybe still on by default, but I don't think this is an app.

Jason Calacanis: This isn't like a thing that consumers are opting into.

SPEAKER_102: This is a data broker, they're buying data from all kinds of sources.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, I think the data brokers are using like flashlight apps and like kind of single purpose apps. And then those apps, when they get installs, then ask for your location, people turn on location. And then those apps that are free that are giving you something of, you know, some value like a, you know, a gift keyboard or something like that. Those have been selling to the data brokers. So that's how they monetize. So these data brokers go to those apps and say, Hey, if you put this in, we'll give you X amount per thousand users, you know, every month for their data. So there's this whole, this all has to be exposed. So we'll, we'll, we'll get back to you on what your settings are. But I think we should just do a little primer here of how to turn your settings off. And we'll just go through it step by step, how to make yourself more private, just as like a little big thing we'll do here on the pod.

SPEAKER_01: Also, I'm never letting carriers off the hook, not for even a minute, because every time they say they're going to stop selling our data to, there's no more sensitive data than what Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have on it. They sell it. They sell it.

SPEAKER_249: All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye.