SPEAKER_00: Okay, everybody. It's Thursday. Yes, the day after Wednesday. And of course, it's Thursday. So we should have our Wednesday crypto roundtable. We had to publish it today, folks. There's no

SPEAKER_02: easy way to put it unicorn series. It's a thing unicorn series. It's a little we have a little

SPEAKER_00: air traffic issue going on here on the show. But Vinny Lingham and Sonny Madra, Sandeep are back to break down all the biggest news in crypto.

Jason Calacanis: And actually the biggest developments in compute power, we talk about super powerful graphics cards, Vinny's new GPU and how all that compute power is going to change art, gaming, even NFT creation, just like AI, geeky stuff. VR, all of that. These new cards are breaking down. And then of course,

SPEAKER_09: we get into the big news, Molly, that Bloomberg is reporting the SEC is probing the board ape

SPEAKER_07: maker you go labs over, we think our NFTS and the ape coin securities. It is a vibrant, detailed debate on what should happen in terms of crypto regulation from this point forward.

Jason Calacanis: I love the segment. It just is so fun. And then we talked briefly about Google making Coinbase, its main crypto payments processor, it is yet another great show. Yeah, I'm really interested to

SPEAKER_00: see what happens with cloud computing plus crypto plus startups and the payment rails there could be very interesting. Like Molly said, this is going to be a great show. So I need you to stick with us.

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SPEAKER_18: slash this week in startups. All right, everybody, welcome back. It's time for our crypto roundtable.

SPEAKER_20: We do this twice a month with two molly of two besties who are just deep in the crypto game and have been in the crypto game for a long time. We got a full docket today of exciting. And well, let's face it a little bit of scary news. With us again, Sandeep Madra. How are you,

SPEAKER_22: sir? Awesome thing. Good to be back. And Vinny Lingam. Thanks, guys. Great to be back again.

SPEAKER_16: Wow. You guys are coming in hot today. Look at the energy. Does somebody need a liquid IV? Like

SPEAKER_28: what's happening here? I've been up since 530 this morning. So I'm a little tired. Wait,

SPEAKER_16: why are you up so early? Did you hit that tonal? Or did you log into that tonal behind you?

SPEAKER_30: Not today. Not today. But the reason I woke up early were like a lot of people on this chat,

SPEAKER_32: probably, hopefully, trying to buy the new Nvidia RTX 4090 card that came on sale at 6am. And I managed to get one. So I'm really happy about that.

SPEAKER_35: Would you wake up that early for all the cool miners are doing? So I could buy in secondary. Yes, the problem with buying secondary is first of all,

SPEAKER_30: like it just supports the bots that go and attack these sites and buy everything in five seconds. Secondly, you have to wait about a week or two more because when you go through the secondary

SPEAKER_39: exchanges. What is it? Why? Why would you wake up at 5am for a graphic card? The graphic cards out

SPEAKER_41: there are so absurdly powerful. What is this one going to do for you? This time is like, this one's like four times more powerful than the previous generation. It's unbelievable, actually. You know,

SPEAKER_30: so at 4k on Cyberpunk, they had 22 frames per second, everything maxed out on the previous card. This one does something close to like 80 or 90 frames per second, which is insane. So anyway,

SPEAKER_44: I'm a gamer. I play some Fortnite and I wanted to get one of these cards as soon as possible.

SPEAKER_26: Fortnite. That's definitely what you need that for. Sandy plays Fortnite too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_48: I mean, I have no beef with Fortnite. It just seems like maybe you don't need quite that much power

SPEAKER_44: for... Well, you do if you want to run it at 4k, because I play my Fortnite at 4k and I really

SPEAKER_30: enjoy the graphics. Are you doing Overwatch too? Yeah, I stick to Fortnite. Like once you get into the Fortnite universe, you get the mechanics going. It's just, it's hard to switch. I'm too old to switch

SPEAKER_44: between mechanics, different games. So I stick with what I know these days. Yeah. That's why I'm still on

SPEAKER_55: Halo. Thanks, Jacob. I see you in there. I see you. How much does that card cost? I paid

SPEAKER_30: 1800 bucks for it. I mean, they range between 1600 for a graphics card. Yeah. Between 1500 and 2000, depending on which version you get. I got the one for 1800 because of the size that fits in my machine.

SPEAKER_60: And it's pretty powerful. It's amazing. And yeah. So 1800 Molly for a card, which is more

SPEAKER_63: than the cost of like the M2 laptop. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah. Peter, Peter just said the card is bigger than an Xbox Series S.

SPEAKER_30: It is? Yeah. I didn't get the Founder's Edition. I got the Asus,

SPEAKER_58: the overclock edition. So it's a little bit faster, overclocked. It's got 24 gigs of RAM. It's insane.

SPEAKER_72: I'm not judging. I know many, there are many nerds in my life. I'm a geek because I build my own

SPEAKER_74: computers. So that's why I like this stuff. This is fun. Honestly, the only reason that my brother was not doing that is because he works for like a school district. Otherwise, he would have been up there with you buying the same stuff. Like it's a whole, I got these nerds in my life and Homestead Creative ICU. I also love Halo. Yeah. I'm like still stuck on Halo. But I'm also going to

SPEAKER_30: connect this to the render network. So I'd love to talk about AI art today as well. AI art is taking off in a big way and render is doing cool stuff and the ability to, so if you think about how many of these cards Nvidia are shipping worldwide, like millions of these cards over the next year or two, these cards are going to be used for things like Dolly, Midjourney, et cetera, to power these cards

SPEAKER_76: in a distributed network. And I think this is powerful. So RTX 4090. Yeah. Is the name of the card.

SPEAKER_63: This thing looks like a boom box on the website. I've pulled the website up. It's huge. It's huge.

SPEAKER_79: Now, wait, how does that fit into a normal computer? It plugs into one of the slots?

SPEAKER_58: It actually uses up four slots. What? It has to go, it has to go. Get with the times, J. Cal. Yeah. It has to go into an ATX case. You have to have at least a thousand,

SPEAKER_30: a thousand watts of power in your PSU. Wow. Probably 1200 is probably better. I mean, I may have to upgrade my, my thousand watt to 1200. We'll see how everybody can handle it,

SPEAKER_58: but it's insane, but this is where, this is state of the art guys. Like it's at 16,000 CUDA cores in this thing. For where the world's going with NFTs and AI art, this, this is the device that's going to

SPEAKER_74: power it. Is this, is there still competition? I know that Nvidia had, didn't they change their graphics card strategy because they were like, so many of them are getting scooped up by miners?

SPEAKER_30: Well, they actually waited. If you go on the bottom there, Jay, you'll see 22. So this is the test and I'll answer you now in a second. Keep going down. Yeah. 22 frames per second. And I mean, look at the quality difference.

SPEAKER_58: And for, so you have DLSS off at 20 frames per second, DLSS three and RT ray tracing on at a hundred. I mean, look at the difference. It's insane. And that's just one generation shift from the

SPEAKER_94: previous generation to this one. So in other words, when I'm looking at a video game, it's, it's going to just keep crossing that uncanny valley. It's going to keep looking like, you know, what I find interesting Molly is like a lot of the games when I play them now, the games look like the cut sequences from 20 years ago when I played the games. Yeah. So you remember they used to make, you know, these cut scenes that they would spend like, you know, whatever, you know, two months making a 30 second cut scene between levels. And then you go back dropping down to like, whatever EVGA or

SPEAKER_102: something. I mean, it is kind of extraordinary. It's not even going to be about games. I'm just dropping something in our chat here, but this is a combination of, uh, VR and, um, one of like AI generated art. So this is a real time room, Nick, if you can pull that up. Um, sorry,

SPEAKER_107: I'm just switching. So the idea here is, um, take a look at this. This is a real time room. Nick, I don't know if you're able to pull that tweet up. No, I, I get it. So before it comes up

SPEAKER_109: to describe it. Oh, here we go. So I'll make that like five times bigger. Just make it full screen if you can. So the idea here is with these type of cards, you could speak like, you can speak to

SPEAKER_111: Dolly or that Facebook, uh, text to a room. Yeah. That looks like the Amman hotel in Tokyo. Uh,

SPEAKER_20: and it would go figure that out. Yeah. That's pretty trippy. I, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Molly and I, when we saw that Facebook, it was pretty obvious what they're doing. Yeah. So this

SPEAKER_118: is pretty incredible, right? This is being generated real time. And so you don't get kind of

SPEAKER_119: cheap backgrounds or anything like that. You get an immersive environment. Wow. If you're not

SPEAKER_125: watching this live or watching, you know, basically sketches render into a complete 3d room.

SPEAKER_94: No, it's going to be awesome is, uh, with neural link, uh, when that eventually gets online,

SPEAKER_111: you would be able to sunny, uh, Vinny, uh, plug neural link into your brain, then whatever you're thinking could then manifest itself in a, um, a virtual world that you're inhabiting. And, uh, they call this new feature burning man. It's the new feature.

SPEAKER_94: I mean, it is pretty crazy. This feels like, um, yet another tipping point in terms of

SPEAKER_138: just what's possible. This is all like converging on AI. It's not just about the graphics. I mean, these GPUs power, you know, AI itself. Yeah. Yeah. Like this is, yeah, this is all part of this big

SPEAKER_125: ongoing tech trend about how GPU is the new CPU. Cause they can do this. It can like think it's

SPEAKER_109: not linear. It's simultaneous. Correct. Parallel. Yeah. I mean, you can see, you're saying the characters in some of these video games, if they're AI, if their behavior is driven by machine learning and AI, those tasks would be dropped to this card possibly. Exactly. Well, and beyond

SPEAKER_74: video games, right? Just like generating thinking and scenarios and processing multi, you know, multiple processes in parallel. So you can just get to conclusions faster. Sonny, are we hitting?

SPEAKER_147: I guess we're never getting quantum computing. We're just going to get faster and faster GPUs.

SPEAKER_63: Yeah. I think that's, that's probably right for the next decade or so, but, uh, Vinny, is this going to,

SPEAKER_94: I'm sorry, Sonny, are you getting the sense that AI Molly and I were talking about this the other week after Tesla's AI day, are you getting the sense that AI is starting to compound and the actual results

SPEAKER_63: of, you know, the previous, you know, verticals that have been mastered, whether it's poker or go or, you know, dolly or GPT three, whatever it is, do you feel like those things are, uh, increasing

SPEAKER_94: velocity, perhaps hitting, you know, what we call the industry at tipping point where they're just going to be flowing at a much higher rate. Yeah, definitely. Um, you know, there's some laws

SPEAKER_102: that, you know, people should put out, but for the longest time we had Moore's law with, you know, general purpose CPUs, right? You guys are all familiar with it. Uh, every 18 months that, you know, we'd have twice as much computing power. And I think with, um, the chips behind this, because, you know, Tesla has their own chips, Google has their own chips, and you have general purpose GPUs from like Nvidia. I think we're really seeing all of that same law happen, but the compounding rate is even faster, I believe. And with this, it's not just related to compute, but it's memory, it's cloud, and it's all of that coming together. Uh, cause you know, when you use any of those services and, you know, they talked about this at the Tesla day, much of the power is not just what the core software of the AI, but it's also the infrastructure that they've built, right? What, what do they call their, um, a big AI machine? J. Cal, they have a name for it, right?

SPEAKER_151: I'm slipping me now, but, um, yeah, yeah. A big part of this is getting the data from the cloud,

SPEAKER_94: from storage into memory so that you can run these processes. So they have like a large number of, uh, ethernet people going, you know, uh, from computer to computer. So when they drop a simulation, they're like, Hey, this turn on market street is absurdly hard. Let's just run a gazillion simulations based on everybody who's driven through it as a human, uh, Joe, right. Domo or

SPEAKER_155: dojo, the dojo, dojo, dojo, dojo. It's pretty incredible. So they're building their own sort

SPEAKER_109: of racks to do very, it's really interesting to see hardware being built specifically for certain

SPEAKER_102: tasks. Yeah. And that's, what's really kind of, that's what's exploding this, right? Cause you know, with more as well, you just had like the CPU getting faster. Now you have this combination of cloud infrastructure, network speed and the CPUs. And so we should, we should name it. We should

SPEAKER_163: call it something and then kind of, you brought up the data. I love it. The data. I'm going to start referring to data as data. Oh, fancy. But only when I'm angry. Are you going to refer

SPEAKER_166: to it in the plural too? That's data right there. No, I mean, don't make me pull over and come back

SPEAKER_163: there for your data. Did you? Yeah, exactly. Uh, if you guys don't stop screwing around with all of Dad's data, I'm pulling, I'm turning this car around. Listen, big news right now. Dell has a

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SPEAKER_18: slash twist. That's dell.com slash gwist. Did you guys see the AI podcast of Joe Rogan interviewing

SPEAKER_111: Steve Jobs? Uh, this week that came out? No. Okay. So some maniacs. I don't know if this was

SPEAKER_20: completely hacked. Just to put the setup here very briefly. It's like a 20 minute clip. Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs. Let's just listen to a clip and then I want to get everybody's reaction around

SPEAKER_178: the horn. I've missed this. It's always fun. How's it going? Come on. Tell me about jobs.

SPEAKER_180: It's always good to see you, buddy. I'm so happy you came on, man. Yeah. It's great to be on the show. Your audience is just so different from your normal Apple users. And that's a good thing. It's cool.

SPEAKER_179: Well, you know, I was an Apple user way before I did this show. I've been a fan of yours and

SPEAKER_181: Macintosh since the 1980s. All right. Vinny, what do you think? How close to the uncanny valley?

SPEAKER_30: Compare that to the metaverse stuff that we saw this week. So just to say I'm clear that there was

SPEAKER_183: AI generated? Yes. That's what they're claiming. Joe Rogan did not interview Steve Jobs that we

SPEAKER_30: I mean, it sounds, it sounds like they were kind of clipping pieces of what he said. You know, when they make those fake Obama speeches and stuff like that. Yes. It didn't sound like real.

SPEAKER_109: That was my exact first reaction. So where there's a technique Howard Stern would do this

SPEAKER_63: on a show that somebody would publish their bio and read it. Um, so, you know, Hillary Clinton's bio would come out or whoever was Bob Obama's bio come out and they would take every single word. And then they, if you typed out a sentence, it would just pull those words together. Um, and, uh,

SPEAKER_189: so yeah, I thought that too, like, maybe this is an AI Molly. Maybe this is like a put on.

SPEAKER_30: So this, this is, this is where some of the legal suck stuff is going to come into play. Like Jennifer just commented that this is morbid and disrespectful just because you can, doesn't mean you should. And I actually, I actually agree with that. I think that there's that, you know, especially for

SPEAKER_58: like famous public figures, I mean, their voices, the rights to their voices belong to their state. You'll see what James Earl Jones did with Darth Vader. Now is he licensed his voice to Disney so they can use AI to reproduce his voice legally for all the movies they're going to do with Darth Vader in it. And it's going to sound like James Earl Jones and his estate's going to get some percentage of royalties. And I think that is totally fine. I, there's nothing wrong with that. But I think if you take someone like Steve jobs where you haven't taken it with permission, now I get it, it's a bit of parody here and then that like, you know, whatever, all fun and games, but at some point there is a copyright,

SPEAKER_191: right? Like, I think your voice is like a voice, right? Maybe I'm not so sure. We are going to get to

SPEAKER_74: this point though. I mean, this is like a larger topic about identity ownership of identity, but we are 100% going to get to the point where that is a huge conversation because between like biotech, deep fakes, the ability to manipulate your voice with AI, like, yes, there is going to be a question about who owns your own identity. Wait a second. This might be litigated in the Supreme Court at some

SPEAKER_32: point. Like it, it may go that high, you know, as someone who's coming from the identity world as

SPEAKER_198: well. I got, I got to say, Molly, I think it's the cat's out of the bag on this one, because I just

SPEAKER_94: saw on my Twitter feed trending, Tucker Carlson has Hitler on tonight. So that's coming at 7pm.

SPEAKER_202: My God, Jason. Tucker is interviewing Hitler, but it's in AI, do not worry. It's a double. I'm giving you the double. Get up my God.

SPEAKER_206: I mean, this is what's going to happen. It's the truth. You know, Tucker's like,

SPEAKER_133: anyway, it's a double header, Mussolini and Hitler. It's a round table. Okay. Okay. Pull it back. Pull it back. Sorry.

SPEAKER_208: Our stream just got kicked off YouTube again. I was kind of just thinking, Molly, of like, what's the interview that we're going to be forced to hear that none of us wants to hear? No, we follow the thought process here.

SPEAKER_79: What did you think, Sonny? Did you buy that this was, uh, AI driven? Did you at a minute just get tingly feelings that it was like almost there with Steve jobs being on Joe Rogan?

SPEAKER_102: Yeah. Like, you know, my general thing when I see these things now is, um, the core of it is AI driven and then there's like an editing layer on top. Right. And I think you see a lot of that, even with, um, these AI generators, the really great, great stuff that makes you question.

SPEAKER_118: Someone's taken it and then put it through Photoshop or something like that. So my guess would be like, there was something that came out of a tool and I don't know anything about it as the first time I saw it, but it's something that came out of a tool and then they've done some, some tweaking to it to make it like, imagine like, you know, like we do with the podcast, there's something recorded and then, you know, that your team goes in and edits it. I feel like that's what's happened. I don't think it's like just straight out of the tool

SPEAKER_94: untouched. I felt like this could be faked Molly. I agree. I thought what they might have done is taken some keynotes. You notice how echoey it sounds like he's in a hall. So they, the corpus here may have been taken from the Steve Jobs keynotes. Remember back in the day, they didn't have the same audio fidelity. You know, there wasn't production value at a lot of those early keynotes. It was just him on stage with a lavalier. Um, so it sounded echoey. Joe Rogan, uh, I guess a Joe Rogan impersonation is pretty easy, but what they could have done is taken like audio books or whatever, and then said, have Joe Rogan asked this question, and then make an amalgamation of this answer from the Walter Isaacson bio, right? So they could have

SPEAKER_63: put the Walter Isaacson bio in there. So this really has to do with what data set you're putting in

SPEAKER_74: here, I guess. So are we asking the question? And it sounds like we don't know the answer. They did not generate the voices, right? So we're the question we're having, it sounds like is, did they grab existing audio and just sort of use a machine? No, no, no. They generate really and create a

SPEAKER_220: conversation? Yeah, no, no. This was done by a company sound files. They're saying that they

SPEAKER_74: did generate the voices. Oh, okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. This company. Dot. HT is

SPEAKER_94: them on and see if that's true. They do text to speech. Um, and I don't know, you, you know, some of these programs I use Molly that I'll send you links in sometimes, you know how like the

SPEAKER_149: premium versions have a little bit more refined, the better voices. Yeah. Like they have Gwyneth Paltrow.

SPEAKER_63: Does a voice on one of these. So sometimes I'll have jeep. Oh, you know, when I haven't seen

SPEAKER_228: her in a while, um, yeah, she's obsessed with you. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I'll just say,

SPEAKER_230: I used to send her a wall street journal story and say, Hey, jeep. Oh, can you read this for me? Send me the MP3. Now it's shoes. But the flip side is, you know, ways has this, right? You can have,

SPEAKER_118: but, but, you know, those, I don't think are done with AI yet. And, you know, Google is really great at this. So my guess is like, there's a core thing that came out of a tool, but then there's some editing done on top and even the greatest, uh, AI stuff out of these tools still gets edited on top. Right? So I think that would be my guess. When does the polish kind of

SPEAKER_63: get added? Six months or six years where we don't have to do that polish step that you're talking about?

SPEAKER_118: Oh yeah. Probably like 18 to 36 months. I think we don't have to do the, yeah, because it's, it's kind of, it goes back as growing exponentially. Cause as it sees more of, cause you can also train

SPEAKER_102: it on that. Hey, this is what came out and this is how people did the polish. So the AI will just get better at completing that polish. You know what genre is going to be. That's it for us,

SPEAKER_74: Jason. Like our salad days are almost over here. Robo. Perfect. I want to ski the mornings too.

SPEAKER_156: Um, hi, Molly. What's on the docket for today? Red flag, J Cal. You remember, J Cal,

SPEAKER_243: remember Max Headroom. Max Headroom. Yes. I remember him. Yeah. He was awesome. You know where

SPEAKER_94: this is going. I think there's going to be an entire genre now. Uh, you know about the fan fiction where people would write like their own Star Wars or it started with Star Trek and Star Trek tried to stop it and then Star Wars embraced it. Then people started making short films. Um, and Star Wars said, yeah, you can make short films. Here's actually a kit to use the sounds from a lightsaber.

SPEAKER_20: Here's how to make a lightsaber and after effects or whatever program it was. I think the way this is going, somebody who's a talented screenplay writer could write a screenplay and then have it go to like storyboards and then eventually to like a fully finished version of the film. So yeah, the Mandalorian could have been written by a group of fans. Yeah. And just publish. Yeah.

SPEAKER_102: Wattpad does like some form of this now, right? They do. Wattpad does that. Huh? Yeah. I think, I mean, not to that extent, but like they kind of have, uh, they have fan fiction. Wattpad is for fiction. Yeah. But they've done some relationships with studios now, I believe.

SPEAKER_94: Oh, yeah. I mean, it turns out 50 shades of gray. I met the, uh, the author of that at a party in LA

SPEAKER_63: and my friend introduced me to her and I asked her what her, what the inspiration was. And she said, actually, you know, it's a famous story. I'm surprised you don't know it. Like she was writing twilight fan fiction and it was a twilight erotica that became 50 shades of gray. She changed names back to her own characters. All right. There's a lot in the docket. I like this little AI turn. Thanks. Thanks for buying your card. Vinny. Did you install it yet? Oh, you didn't get it yet.

SPEAKER_252: Oh yeah. Order this morning. Are you going to have an install party? Are you going to have

SPEAKER_230: like an install party where I'm going to come over and watch you install it? I'll do it myself. I'm going to do an unboxing video for our show. Sure. That would be great if instead of doing like

SPEAKER_94: a reveal party for like a boy or a girl, like Vinny did a show where he just like plopped it in. And then we see how many frames he gets. I mean, unboxing is a genre. I'm just saying.

SPEAKER_109: Created by a gadget. I mean, how much joy will you get when you fire up a fortnight for the first

SPEAKER_110: time and put it in 4k? It's not gonna make any difference. It won't make any difference to fortnight.

SPEAKER_262: Well, no, no, no, no, no. Actually, actually, are you running DLSS?

SPEAKER_102: Oh, dude, I play it off like a Nintendo Switch. Oh, oh, you're playing again. I play on a PC. No,

SPEAKER_30: no, it makes it, it actually makes a big deal because I can't run ray tracing on, on, on fortnight right now because the graphics card is too slow. So, so the ray tracing is a cool feature in fortnight,

SPEAKER_263: but you can't do it because you, you can't get the frames per second you need.

SPEAKER_184: Nick, uh, by the way, uh, Vinny, you should know Nick is accusing you of using aimbot, but that's why you need all that compute. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just the messenger.

SPEAKER_267: Wait, oh, you got this car. Oh, wait, you bought two of these cards once for your aimbot and once

SPEAKER_58: to run the game. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I just have one. I just have one. Nick, I'll, I'll 1v1 in fortnight. Let's see who wins. We should, we should live stream that.

SPEAKER_274: I can't wait to watch like some 12 year old be like, take that VB word.

SPEAKER_276: I'm pretty decent. I'm pretty decent. I mean, I can, I do. I think we need a stream. Okay. Founders.

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SPEAKER_06: slash twist for $1,000 off your sock two and such a great company. I made an angel investment as well. Congratulations to the Vanta team. Well done.

SPEAKER_63: Well, it was big news this week. The, uh, the enforcement era of crypto is, uh, we're deep in it. People have lost a bunch of money. And this one to me, uh, I had wondered if this one would happen.

SPEAKER_214: I'm on the fence about this one. I, I don't know exactly how I think about this one. So can you tell us about what happened with the SEC and Bored Ips?

SPEAKER_99: Yes. Yeah. Go for it guys. Not a shot. Yeah. So I, I believe in, and we, we should probably just maybe get into the definitions,

SPEAKER_118: but like, well, the article that came out exactly this one is that they've started some type of investigation, which we don't know any of the details around, but like really, you know, what may be a good discussion. And, uh, I've actually pushed back to Jake and Molly, cause you guys spent a lot more time on this is like, what is the definition of a security? And then, cause that's what this all comes back to. And I sent something in the chat and maybe we can pull it up. And if we start there, I think it really will help frame the discussion. So sure. Let's cause a lot of times it gets lost cause people throw it around, but people fully don't really always understand what a security is. So Nick, I pulled that up. Um, if you want to pull it up as a screenshot or whatever, like, so what is a security and, um, and you know, when we kind of look at it from this perspective, right? Okay. It's fungible. It's a tradable financial instruments used to raise capital, right? Um, you know, there's equities, there's debt, um, there's payments, right? And, and so we have to really start asking ourselves, like what aspect of what they've done falls into this. And so maybe let's, let's use that to frame our discussion. Great. Yeah. I mean, equities, uh, in the United

SPEAKER_94: States we know are regulated by the sec, um, and they provide ownership in an entity, common interest in,

SPEAKER_63: uh, a company and, uh, there's a series of laws around it. Right. And these are driven by the

SPEAKER_137: Securities Act of 1933. And, and you have sort of, yeah. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just saying a lot of

SPEAKER_111: this dates back to the great depression when people lost a lot of money and they wanted to protect

SPEAKER_218: consumers. That's where accreditation comes from private. And of course there's the Howie test.

SPEAKER_74: Uh, I think that's important to point out, right? It's like, um, you have two things happening. One, you have the definition of a security, a fungible negotiation. I mean, an NFT can't be a security then it's literally in the name, non fungible. Anyway, security refers to a fungible negotiable financial, financial instrument that holds some type of monetary value. A security can

SPEAKER_125: represent ownership in a corporation in the form of stock, a creditor relationship with a government body or a corporation represented by owning that entity's bond or rights to ownership as represented

SPEAKER_74: by an option. But then. Yeah. So by that, I see what you're saying, Sonny, right? By that definition, an NFT would not seem to qualify as a security, but layered on top of that is the Howie test.

SPEAKER_299: Right. That's where they actually put all this to work because people didn't need clarity on that.

SPEAKER_111: And an investment contract exists. If there is an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others, which really does sound

SPEAKER_301: like NFTs and the Bored Apes project. So let's dive into some of the things. Okay. First of all,

SPEAKER_30: like, you know, Bored Apes, um, you know, Google labs, they've got five of something like the top eight entity collections, which is an account for like more than 25% of the entire NFT market cap. Okay. So over $5 billion in sales, they've raised over $450 million in VC money. And I'm getting some of this data from the milk road. This is directionally correct. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the milk road, um, newsletter, which I subscribe to is very good. Um, and then, you know, they've got

SPEAKER_58: big celebrity holders, Snoop Dogg, Justin Bieber, Neymar, et cetera. So I guess the real, the real issue here is, and this is the problem with crypto. Crypto has an issue where there's a lack of transparency on who the counterparties are to a trade. Okay. So this is the big issue with all of crypto. When you're buying something, who's on the other side? Are they pumping and dumping it? Like in the SEC. And if you look at, uh, the way, you know, NASDAQ, the stock markets track, like they know who's on the back end, who the counterparties to every trade is. If you're, if you're using a social profile to pump the price and on the other side selling stuff, then they know what they knew, you've done it and you can go to jail or you can find or whatever the case is. In crypto, it's very different. In crypto, anyone can go, this crypto is going to the moon, use the influence, Kim Kardashian got fined 1.2 million bucks just because she was promoting. Like, anyone can promote something. Now the people, this is like the penny stock days, the people who pay Kim or the people who pay all these celebrity influences, they pay them so they can drive demand for these coins. So the prices go up. When the prices go up, they dump their coins in the

SPEAKER_308: backend and no one knows. And this is the problem with crypto is that no one knows who's dumping

SPEAKER_94: when the pumps happen. Right. So that is what happens when you have a security. We have something that's freely tradable market manipulation can happen. So what's really happening here is Bloomberg is reporting that the SEC, uh, is investigating or asking for information, um, on what is going on over at you go labs. And I believe they also bought crypto punks. They, they pulled together a bunch of these NFT assets. Um, now I have been through this myself one or two

SPEAKER_111: times with the SEC, they will ask you for information about a private company you've invested in or a public company. They just asked for a document up. So in one case, there was a

SPEAKER_94: private company that went out of business. I got an SEC thing that said, can you give us all the information on your investment in this company? I, you know, hire lawyers who cost $2,000 an hour. And they're like, I'm like, well, what, what's going on? They're like, yeah, what is going on? And I'm like, why am I? And they're like, like, well, are they going to depose me? Or like, am I in trouble? Or is this founder in trouble? And they're like, yeah, good questions. I'm like, well, when do we find out? He's like, good question. I'm like, how does the SEC work?

SPEAKER_111: Good question. They just, they get, they request information. They look into stuff. They never tell you if you're good, you're bad or why they're doing it. So I would just caution people that this doesn't mean that there's an action coming necessarily. They could be getting information.

SPEAKER_20: And, uh, this is an important quote. Yuga hasn't been accused of wrongdoing in the opening of an SEC probe doesn't mean the agency will suit the firm. That's just, I guess, Bloomberg saying that, but I do want to point out one thing to your point. And this is to

SPEAKER_18: me, the duck test walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck. Maybe it's a duck. When you, uh,

SPEAKER_111: put something on an open C page like this one, pull up the whole page. And when you look at an open C page

SPEAKER_20: for, uh, you know, an NFT, you start to see the life of this over time. And the life over time, based on price and the trading activity, if we were to pull up that page on open C, you know,

SPEAKER_111: this looks and is designed like a stock. It isn't, this looks more like a stock than an eBay page.

SPEAKER_20: Right. And so because of the, uh, ease at which these are traded to Vinny's point, the market manipulation

SPEAKER_111: that has occurred. And these marketplaces that are trading them smells like a duck quacks like a duck.

SPEAKER_20: And you don't, you need only look at masterworks as a comparison. If it's art masterworks.com, which is a sponsor of this show. And I I've bought art on there. They do each of their art offerings as a security as like a basic mini IPO and they follow the rules. So if this is similar to art, which is how some people look at it, it should follow the rules. I believe.

SPEAKER_95: So, so let me, let me just like caveat something and make sure this is clear. Like I think out of all the NFT projects and companies, you guys probably one of the better ones, right? They're

SPEAKER_30: probably like the. Better how? No, like it's a real company. They've got real investors. They're probably, they're not, you know, I don't know for certain, but they're probably not running any

SPEAKER_58: scams in the background, et cetera. So I have no information, you know, to the contrary. They would not be a good, they shouldn't be a good candidate for the SEC probe. If you want to prove out some case law, because here's the problem in, you know, from my perspective, the SEC takes them on, they might actually lose this case and it might be deemed not to be. They haven't found the case, to be clear. Well, the probe. So the probe may go on. It may, it may, they may not go with the case or they may not like succeed. And then the precedent's been set. And then all the scammy projects are going to basically fall under that bucket, right? So that's one outcome. The other one, if you went after one that was clearly fraudulent and you win that, you can build a case on top of that, on top of that, on top of that. So they've, I mean, I think it's kind of interesting that they decided to go for the big guys first, who are definitely more legitimate than most of the other players in the market. Well, because it's a high stakes gamble. I mean, if the SEC doesn't, if they, if they push forward, I mean, if they push forward, so maybe they just walk away from the probe and they go, it's art or whatever. If they go forward and they lose,

SPEAKER_111: I think they're going to be in a tough spot. All right, everybody. I am here with Obi Akpuda. He is a program manager over at Microsoft for startups. You've heard me talk about the ridiculous Founders Hub benefits before. So Obi, you also are giving people Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and of course,

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SPEAKER_111: from productivity and onwards. All right, thanks so much, Obi. Microsoft for startups founders hub has no fundraising requirements. As we discussed, it's open to anybody takes only five minutes to apply and startups get six figures in benefits right away. Sign up for Microsoft for startup founders hub today at aka.ms slash this week in startups. My guy, Obi is going to take care of you. They don't

SPEAKER_74: seem to be investigating whether there's fraud. Right? They just seem to be investigating which definition of a duck we should use. Yeah, whether it's the original, what is a security definition

SPEAKER_94: of a duck or the how we test version. I also just want to know what is the is do we know what they're investigating where they just asked for information? They're probing. I don't know that we

SPEAKER_102: know. We don't know if they're front running. Well, one thing, Nick, you know, you pulled up the OpenSea page for an ape. Nick, I sent you a link for a stock X page for a sneaker.

SPEAKER_118: Yeah. Right. And you can quickly pull it up if you want. But and you know, Molly,

SPEAKER_102: we were just talking about this before we started. This is almost the same thing. Now, is this a secure? Is this a duck? Right? And so because it's running the same way, you can look at the past sales, the current, you know, and so it's really that's what I'm saying. I think there's a lot more clarification required because it has all the same kind of charts,

SPEAKER_100: right? You can look at the price over time, you can look at the trades, you can look at all those type of things. And so this is okay. This is where though,

Jason Calacanis: I really do want to read the Howey test. Okay. Definitions, because we have not gotten there yet.

SPEAKER_74: So we have one definition of a duck. What is the security? Then we have the Howey test, which I think will help us differentiate a little bit from sneakers, for example. Okay. So one, you, do you have an investment of money that can be sneakers or apes to in a common enterprise? So assuming you're not also putting your money in Nike, then you don't necessarily apply to sneakers with the expectation of profit to be derived from the efforts of others.

SPEAKER_346: Yeah. I don't think, I don't think this actually applies, to be honest.

SPEAKER_221: It doesn't apply to the sneakers. No. The sneakers also provide real world value.

SPEAKER_123: I suspect Vinny is saying he doesn't think it applies to the apes either.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. I don't think it applies to the apes either. I don't think it applies to the apes. I'll tell you why. Oh, it completely implies. No, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. If I buy a Bored Ape and I haven't bought one, if I bought a Bored Ape, I'd be investing money. Sure. Okay. I'm not buying the enterprise. I want the Ape. I like the picture. It's very interesting. And do I care about the profit? Well, it may be long-term you sell it, but you buy a piece of art, you buy something else, you know, hopefully it's worth something in the future. But, I mean, I have digital photo frames in my house. If I want to put a Bored Ape in my house, I don't really care about what it's worth tomorrow or not. There's utility for me showing a NFC Bored Ape in the house. And to be derived from the efforts of others, I don't think it applies

SPEAKER_58: it either. Like, I think what is, this is my point. What is interesting about Bored Apes is that they're iconic. There's enough like visuals, information. I've been to some of the parties. I'm not an Ape owner, but if I had to buy one, I believe I'd buy one because it's an iconic piece of art that I can display in my home or place.

SPEAKER_350: If the art, I'll tell you where they might wind up getting tripped up here.

SPEAKER_111: In a common enterprise and to be derived from the efforts of others, correct me if I'm wrong here, but when you own one of these Apes, they will give you the serum, you get other drops, you get other benefits from it, right? So that is the common enterprise of the Ape ecosystem. Well, if I care about that, if I care about that.

SPEAKER_94: No, but it exists. It doesn't matter. Your opinion doesn't matter. It exists. So it exists that there's a common enterprise here. Doesn't matter if you care about it. That's not the test. And is that coming from others? It is. So that's where they have specifically, and I'm only

SPEAKER_20: talking about the Bored Apes. I don't know if that equivalency of serums and drops and all this stuff exists in other NFTs. I know it doesn't exist in all of them.

SPEAKER_354: They do. No, they do. They do.

SPEAKER_196: But not all. There's also the coins, right? There's also ApeCoin.

SPEAKER_58: But at that point, there's utility, right? There's a utility thing and owning it. The question really is, Jason, like if you own, here's an example. There's a wine farm in Napa where you can buy a piece of the land, co-op, own the land, and every year you pay a small fee and you can buy production that comes off the land, but you can only buy the production if you own a piece of that land. And it's probably got like 200 owners or something like that. How is this any different? Is that limited to accredited investors?

SPEAKER_359: I don't think so. Anyone can go buy a piece of land.

SPEAKER_63: Yeah. So it depends on if it's like, they might be only offering that to accredited investors,

SPEAKER_74: but I think in the story there. That gets to expectation of profit. If they're just buying that land so they get like a piece of the wine, it might be a little different. Sunny, what do you think about this? The addition of the ApeCoin

SPEAKER_107: part of this as a slightly complicated. Yeah. So that's a little bit more of like, you know, all these things we're looking at starts to make it look a little bit more challenging. Now,

SPEAKER_102: sort of the entire common enterprise of ApeCoin hasn't been fully disclosed yet, so we don't understand what it's, and it's all early, right? And so I think that's the one that could be a little bit more, you know, I guess, gray area than the, you know, sort of the Bored Ape NFTs, especially because that looks more like a currency than a NFT does, right? And so, but Vinny, like, you know, what, what's your thought there?

SPEAKER_30: We, none of us know, we're all surmising it, right? So we all got, like, I use an example, like, Sunny, we had, we had a bottle of Chateau Latour like a few weeks ago. I went to go buy,

SPEAKER_58: like, three or four bottles of that stuff, okay? It's expensive. You know, and I'm, I'm storing it, and I'm keeping it for, maybe I sell it because it goes up in value. Maybe I drink it. You know, this, like, is, is not, is the wine now, is that now a security?

SPEAKER_94: If you were selling a fractional ownership of it to people, and it was a common enterprise in that bottle of wine, yes. But I'm not fractionalizing my Bored Ape if I buy one. So if I buy a Bored Ape,

SPEAKER_111: I'm not fractionalizing it. Yeah. I mean, I, it does seem like in, in the story,

SPEAKER_149: there's, they seem to be implying in the story, or they explicit that the coin is, the SEC is also examining the distribution of Ape coin. Also. Yeah. Also. That's a different,

SPEAKER_58: that's a different play altogether. So let's just separate the two. The coin is not an NFT. It's a token, right? The, the, the Bored Ape itself is an NFT. This is my point. If you're going to pick someone to go after and do, and take a probe to a case, this is probably not the one you want to go after because the Bored Ape is so iconic. It's part of pop culture. It's in the front cover of magazines.

Jason Calacanis: Justin Bieber owns one. Oh yeah. Isn't that why you, you, you find Kim Kardashian though? I mean, they're trying to, they're trying to send warning shots. It seems like she, she got fined for

SPEAKER_32: something else. She got fined for promoting, um, what was it? Um, I'm just saying, if you're the

SPEAKER_123: SEC and you're like, I'm trying to issue some warnings to this entire industry about multiple aspects. But this is different. Of course you start with the biggest names. This is different.

SPEAKER_375: Remember the, the, the, the, the stature of Bored Apes, I think. I understand what you're saying.

SPEAKER_111: You're saying it makes it like a Warhol. So that, that would argue more towards people are buying it for the artistic value. Exactly. And the intrinsic joy of owning the tiny little image. I get what

SPEAKER_74: you're saying. I get what you're saying. And I would say that the SEC's question is how many people bought it with the expectation of profit versus for the appreciation of the art? Bingo. We don't know.

SPEAKER_58: We don't know. And you can't go back in time two years and ask people, why did you buy it? I thought it was cool. I mean, they, you know, they kind of like people are buying 10, 20 of these things and like, wow, this is great. Just cause someone buys it for profit. Like, so it's about the same token when I'm on the wine websites and Reddit wine, whatever, you know, Cabernet wine, uh, Reddit. Oh, you should buy this bottle of, you know, Chateau Latour 2001 because it's going to go up in value this much. And they're going to be three times the price in five years, but I buy it because I want to

SPEAKER_20: drink it. Is that a security? There was an easy solution for them to actually make this, um, have a better argument. It's not a security because it does trade because it's a common enterprise because people buy with the expectation of value. They could have

SPEAKER_111: solved this whole problem. They should have made a print with a number on it. One of, you know, 10,000 and made a, like a formal print of each board eight. And when you buy it, the NFT represents your interest in that piece of physical art in the world, then this would have literally changed the entire dynamic of it. Cause it would have been a man when you buy the NFT, you get that piece of art. And they could have just said, we're storing these 10,000 paintings or prints in this locker library for you, or you can pull them down yourself if you want to, um, that would have actually probably

SPEAKER_74: changed the dynamic here. That's what this guy, Damien Hearst should do. There was a story this week about this artist, Damien Hearst, who burned a thousand of his paintings and then is going to burn like a couple hundred more because it's part of this NFT project called the currency where it's clearly

Jason Calacanis: quite specifically art. And that is a great idea to like label them just to be like, this is all,

SPEAKER_310: this only exists for art. I think that's going to be a heck of it. And if that's going to be a heck

SPEAKER_301: of a one for the sec, they're like, here's the ashes. You bought some questions. Well, look,

SPEAKER_74: I think that's, that's all what we're sorting out right now, right? Like we're all sorting out at what point were these projects meant to be art versus investments? Did the investment side just get away from people because nobody thought they would go up in value like they did. Were they always securities disguised as art? We don't know. Right. But like, we're literally in that kind of growing pains phase of this entire economy right now where, and again, this is Bloomberg reporting based on an anonymous source that the sec is looking into some stuff. Like I, we don't know, but I do know that it seems like we're at the point in this economy where people are starting to just send

SPEAKER_35: up flares. Hmm. So let's ask the other question. So why is it an issue if it is a security?

SPEAKER_125: Because of the rules around trading securities. Okay. And so these, these rules exist for what

SPEAKER_18: reason to avoid money laundering down. That's a whole other show to avoid fraud and consumer harm. It's a consumer protection law, also money laundering. So if people can pop up NFTs and use them

SPEAKER_111: essentially as currency, then you could have all of the front running dumping pump and dumping all of those things that can happen in a security. You could have fraud. All of those things that occur require some protections. They require insurance. They require an accounting firm, an audit. That's why going public is a pain in the neck and it requires continued audits. And that's why the

SPEAKER_20: SEC exists. It's, it's, literally its mandate is to protect consumers from harm. It's consumer harm.

SPEAKER_58: So the real issue fundamentally, Jason, is this lack of identity in crypto.

SPEAKER_111: That would solve a lot of it. If you knew who was buying it and you limited it to accredited

SPEAKER_20: investors, you had it tied to a bank account. You could at least say, hey, only accredited investors can participate in this, you know, and- So this exists already, like Civics built this.

SPEAKER_58: We've got on-chain identity. We're working with a number of companies to do this. Here's the issue. In, in the industry we're seeing is there isn't enough demand for this because there is, there are no regulations in place that say you have to run on-chain identity. So it's really, really good for digital identity providers and blockchain providers. If the SEC says, look, we're not going to take away the ability to trade these NFTs and buy these, but there needs to be a, it needs to be a trace of who bought what, and there needs to be some record of it from the issuer. So if you buy it from, you know, Yuga, you have to be identified. And then there's an on-chain identity, you know, you can use Civic or anyone who supports the DID standard, which we, we helped write. Like this is, this is something which exists today, but there is no- It creates friction. We have to go after people who are voluntarily willing to adopt the standard right now because there are no regulations in place. So like, why don't the regulars come to the front and say, look, at the minimum, let's just add identity in every way. So we have the same playing field as we have in other regulated entities and everyone knows who's doing what, and there's no money laundering

SPEAKER_384: happening and there is, we can detect who it is. Let's just start there before we start going on to figuring out whether or not it was a security or not.

SPEAKER_123: Well, one of the regulations they could potentially contemplate is not to say it's a security,

SPEAKER_74: but I was looking up your question about like, why isn't wine a security? If you invest in wine through, you know, some professional brokerage or similar, it is unregulated, but it is, it can be considered in this alternative investment bucket. You could imagine a scenario in which NFTs, the art as issued by an entity that obviously is dependent on the price of that art in the associated utility coins starts to fall into that alternative investment bucket and is regulated in that way. And we're probably moving towards some version of that. We're just like pretty early. Sonny, you haven't said anything in a while. What are you thinking?

SPEAKER_242: No, you know what? Honestly, like what would be really awesome, I think for all the listeners and

SPEAKER_102: just for ourselves is from our network, let's find like a, you know, a securities lawyer that's looking into crypto and maybe just have them on as a guest or something like that. I think be really

SPEAKER_118: helpful for everyone because it's just so gray, you know, we're obviously looking at Investopedia and Wikipedia and trying to figure this stuff out. It'd just be really helpful. I don't think it's gray. I think it's super gray. I think it's super gray. You know, I'll tell you the tokens,

SPEAKER_20: you know, they should have all been, I don't think that's going to wind up being gray. Um, and then I, when they're a common enterprise, all those tokens, I think are going to get

SPEAKER_407: regulated. And I, you know, with wine. But even Gary Gensler doesn't make it easy,

SPEAKER_239: Jake, how he very clearly says that Bitcoin is not a Bitcoin is not a security. It's not a common

SPEAKER_408: enterprise because it doesn't have like a central authority in it. But yeah, I agree that they

SPEAKER_20: could have done a better job of being more upfront about this. I think their position has always been here's the rule set. You guys didn't follow it. Now you pay the price. But when you do buy into there's a bunch of investment platforms for alternative alternative assets. Uh, we're an investment in one called Vincent. And, uh, yeah, they only take accredited and qualified purchases for this reason because they want sophisticated investors who understand the risk that's sort of occurring

SPEAKER_170: when you're buying wine as an investment. I do think this Damien, uh, Hearst thing is pretty interesting. I just sent the, um, Instagram. To be totally honest, I think he's doing like an art

SPEAKER_20: project to kind of poke the tiger here. This is what he says. Tomorrow I will be burning my 1000, the currency artworks and calls them literally the currency, which I kept as NFTs. A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art, but I'm not. I'm completely, I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions, the value of digital of art, digital or physical, which is hard to define at the best of times will not be lost. This is a long run on sentence will not be lost. It will be transferred to the NFT as soon as

SPEAKER_214: they are burnt and I will be live streaming the full burn here on Instagram. Tune in tomorrow. So I mean,

SPEAKER_24: he's kind of poking the tiger here with this concept, but I think he's also just a giant grift.

SPEAKER_417: Um, this is just performance art. This is the pure art. This is $2 million from a laser. Yeah. From

Jason Calacanis: it's performance art, right? Like kind of, I mean, we should end, we have to wrap soon, but we should end on this, this kind of happier note, which is like NFTs clearly whatever they end up being

SPEAKER_74: alternative assets, alternative investment assets, maybe securities, maybe art or some combination of all three. Yeah. All of them. Yeah. They're here. Katie Han, the founder of Han ventures, uh, still believes is the other story that you guys had in the docket today that NFTs are the future. She says, just like Damien, we are going to live increasingly in a digital world. And I happen to think that if you live in a digital world, you're going to want to own digital goods in that world. You won't be satisfied simply renting them, which is what we do now. We buy our content from walled gardens without digital scarcity, which is what NFTs unlock. You don't really own anything. You're subject to the whims of a platform. And I think NFTs and digitally scarce goods fundamentally change that.

SPEAKER_102: I think she took that all from our last episode. Right. Boom. Just transcribed it. Yeah. You're welcome, Katie. No, that that's exactly it. Right. You know, we talked about iTunes and when you have a movie there and if you decide to switch to another platform, well, what happens to all your stuff, you can't move it. Did you just rent it from Apple? That wasn't very clear. So I think, yeah, she's, she's spot on. She's spot on there.

SPEAKER_74: I mean, we all wanted that to be fair. We almost had that. Yeah. Remember like we, when we had our digital downloads and they would all be trapped on like an iPod and then we tried to

SPEAKER_147: figure out, and then the market was like, it'll be more convenient. And we were like, it is more

SPEAKER_170: convenient. So then what happens? I had friends who specifically were in, you know, the movie

SPEAKER_63: industry and they would buy Blu-rays or laser discs previously and collect them specifically because

SPEAKER_20: they knew that these things would switch every, you know, 10 years, five to 10 years. And they just wanted to own those physical copies and never have to rebuy them. And that's what everybody has to do now. You have to rebuy them and then you rebuy them and they've changed them. So I have friends who just collect Blu-rays, uh, like even use ones because they're perfect copies, but you can't even make a copy of those. And I remember covering this as a journalist, Molly, you probably did too. You, you were allowed to make a backup of your Blu-rays, but they were allowed to put protection on it. So you had to buy copyright protection software to rip those off of the Blu-rays onto your media server. And that is technically allowed, but the movie industry took some sort of position at some one point that you're breaking copyright. So you're allowed to make a copy of your stuff, but you're not allowed to break the copyright and it's like, or the copyright protection scheme. I was like, which is it? I mean, make it

SPEAKER_147: easy for us. Remember when Sony literally put root kits on people's computers when you ripped a CD,

SPEAKER_74: literally root kits. I mean, it was bananas. So, I mean, I guess the, the only thing that's going to make us all feel, I think okay about digital ownership is complete decentralization. So the question is, will we get that with NFTs? I know I see you, I see you acting like this is a victory, Sonny,

Jason Calacanis: but are we going to get that with NFTs? Are we really going to get complete decentralization?

SPEAKER_107: Maybe just like one more quick, small segue, but there was another big news yesterday that Google

SPEAKER_102: announced at their cloud next, which is their conference related to Google cloud, which is in partnership with Coinbase, they are going to start accepting crypto payments. And so this is pretty huge from a perspective of, you know, if you are building something in and around and on the cloud, they're going to make that quite easy for you to accept crypto payments. And so this kind

SPEAKER_118: of pushes on the other side, right? You know, obviously even Google, huge company, giant legal, um, you know, probably, uh, department there. And so I found, I found this really, really awesome for the ecosystem and to kind of drive innovation. Cause the more of that happens, I think it also drives the utility of what, what we see. So I thought that was really, you know, really great.

SPEAKER_63: Think of an example of what a developer would do in this regard. Like maybe, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_94: if you were drop, if you put drop box into Google cloud and you accepted coins then, or if you had like a general S three layer storage layer or a podcast platform, like how would this all work?

SPEAKER_107: So I think there's like, there's a couple of different ways this manifest one, let's just say

SPEAKER_118: I'm building a crypto related service. Uh, and that service is, uh, you know, people are interacting with that service purely with crypto, no fiat. I can now pay GCP with crypto. Okay. Right. So that's, you know, so I don't have to kind of convert to fiat and do all that. I can just pay them with that crypto, which, you know, I think is pretty powerful, um, from, from the growth of their platform perspective. Um, so that's like at the infrastructure layer, right? I think then, you know, take that app example, right? If I'm living in an ecosystem and that ecosystem is powered by, um, you know, like, uh, and you know, we see this in different places, like look at a, um, an airline reward system, right? That's an entire economy that has value and everything associated with it. And so now that's not a closed system anymore when you move it to blockchain, right? It's composable. People can build on it. It's permissionless, right? Again, we talked about this last time. So I think enabling all of that to then interact with sort of the rest of the world via kind of GCP is really powerful as well. Now today, all you can really do with your Delta miles is using that example is by Delta, uh, tickets, or, you know, sometimes you can trade them in for like headphones and things like that. Imagine in this, you know, kind of the world that we're heading towards those. Um, and it, you know, kind of ties back to a first conversation. Why aren't Delta miles, uh, you know, a security or a currency, right? And so, um, I think all of that just starts coming together. And I think these things help push the boundary of getting

SPEAKER_214: clarification around everything we're saying. Yeah, they are very careful with airline miles

SPEAKER_20: to make sure they don't trigger securities. And part of it is you don't actually ever own them. So you get them, but they can be taken away at any time. They can, you can change the rules on them. If you die, you cannot give them to your kids. There's no inheritance of airline miles, but you can trade them, right? So they're really, I remember going through this back in the day, because on Mahalo hadn't back in the day had Mahalo answers and we did Mahalo dollars. And if people answered a question, and they got like 10 votes up there, we get a Mahalo dollar and then you could trade it in for, you know, like a swag. It was actually pretty amazing. But then of course, we had people, we put a gift card up there. And we said if you know, you could trade 100 Mahalo dollars for a $10 gift card 10 to one. And then that just the economy went bonkers. And we got all these answer their own question and voted up. And so we literally had groups of people. And when they went to cash out, we found that it was the same one person had done this for like 10 hours a day.

SPEAKER_109: They had created multiple accounts, and they were taking questions, answering them from Yahoo Answers, and we killed their account, and they went crazy.

Jason Calacanis: It's funny, though, like, when I think about to bring this all the way full circle, this is kind of

SPEAKER_74: the conversations we're having now are the conversations, you know, I pulled up the column I wrote in 2005 about Sony putting rootkits on our computers to prevent CD ripping. And, you know, we're talking about gaming search engines, or we're talking about deciding which how this product is ultimately going to shake out and be consumed by individuals. But really, I think what we're coming down to is like, clearly, this is all this is all web three in action. It's all an evolving ecosystem. Fun fact, I was nominated for a digital magazine, a national magazine award for this piece,

Jason Calacanis: alongside Matt Taibbi in 2005. And I've never been more proud in my life. And I was at the award ceremony, and he was so rude to me. Oh, sorry, you wrote it with Matt Taibbi?

SPEAKER_74: No, I was he and I were nominated for the same award. I was nominated for this piece for this. Did he win or? No, this really legendary old man one whose name I can't remember, but he was everybody was like,

SPEAKER_125: this is his last like chance. And so I think he died shortly after. Anyway,

Jason Calacanis: what I'm saying is, this is clearly the new internet, right? We're just figuring it's the

SPEAKER_123: exact same thing as when Jason and I were covering the early days of the web, like we're figuring out what the use cases are going to be, what the regulations are going to be, what the rules are going to be, what the adoption is going to look like, which is why this roundtable is so great.

SPEAKER_111: So great. Thanks, guys. It's so good. What coin should I buy? What coin is going to rip? What should we pump and dump? No, we don't do that. We don't do that.

SPEAKER_465: We don't do it. I don't do it. I'll use the market outlook here. I actually think that the best risk adjuster play in the

SPEAKER_30: market right now is Bitcoin. You know, I'll tell you why, like, with all the sort of-

SPEAKER_468: In the crypto market or the entire market?

SPEAKER_30: Well, no, globally. It's probably the most- Of all assets. Yeah. I'll tell you why. So I think the Fed meeting's coming up now on 1st, 2nd November.

SPEAKER_58: We're going to see the market's pricing 80% chance of 75 bps. It's probably going to be 50 bps,

SPEAKER_30: I think. But let's assume it's 75, which is what the market's predicting. You're going to see massive capital outflows in the rest of the world because they have to service US dollar debt at higher prices. You're going to see foreign currencies collapsing, like we saw with England on the last rate hike.

SPEAKER_58: The contagion is going to spread to more countries. What you're also going to see is people living

SPEAKER_30: in these other countries, they don't always price Bitcoin in dollars. So if you live in South Africa, you look at Bitcoin in rands. If you look in the UK, you look at Bitcoin in pounds. As long as the

SPEAKER_58: Bitcoin price is staying stable in dollars, which it has been, you're going to see the price rise in those currencies. And if people are now fleeing their local fiat currencies, they're going to move into Bitcoin or dollars. And even if they're moving in a ratio of 90% dollars and 10% Bitcoin, it's enough fund flows for Bitcoin to rip substantially higher. And I think Bitcoin has, you look at the on-chain metrics and you look at where Bitcoin is today, there isn't enough

SPEAKER_30: Bitcoin out there. I mean, we have like diminishing supplies of Bitcoin on-chain. And a lot of it's going to people, you know, they're using it as, as like, you know, like a, a hedge against, against

SPEAKER_58: a fiat system collapse. So I really think Bitcoin is the single best play right now. You agree, Sonny? Hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_475: I'm not like a finance guy in that kind of, you know, economics guy. So I, I don't want to either want to chime in on that.

SPEAKER_20: So you're not adding to your Bitcoin position. What's really interesting is, I remember five years ago at Thanksgiving, a bunch of family members had this Bitcoin and remember it rocketed up over Thanksgiving to like, you know, whatever it was, $20,000. And I had given the keynote in Santa Monica at this like thing. And I said, listen, I know some of you like, this is the most life-changing wealth you ever have. You have 99.59s in this. Just please sell half and let the other half roll.

SPEAKER_111: Fascinatingly, if you had held for five years, you are exactly even, literally was trading at 1920. And here we are five years later, bananas. And that is bananas. It pull up the five-year

SPEAKER_07: chart on Google. If you just can do it real quick. It's so insane. Bitcoin price five years.

SPEAKER_30: Like to me, like the current price being at where it was five years ago, just, just tells me that it's

SPEAKER_95: undervalued. Like I just don't see how Bitcoin in five years as make that bigger and then hit five

SPEAKER_94: years. Yeah. Yeah. There's that. Like if you go back to that, like December 15, 19,000, I remember

SPEAKER_170: this Thanksgiving Christmas and everybody was losing their minds. And I was like, man, you know, we bought this for a hundred bucks. We need to sell half our position. And there it is, folks. Boom. You just can take out all the lows for four, three years of lows and two years of highs. It's exactly the same. It's a stable coin.

SPEAKER_58: Jason, if you look back, if you look back at the past two years, go back to the chart for a second, like that price movement was a dollar based price movement with a lot of printing of money, right? Yeah. So the price went up. What you may see in the next run is the price move up because other countries are printing money. Yeah. So, so what happens is, you know, the, the US printed a lot, a lot more money than anyone else in the past couple of years. We printed trillions and trillions of dollars. All these other countries right now are struggling because they have, they have budget deficits. They have to pay for energy. They have to pay for a lot of, you know, balance of payments issues that they've got. They're going to print money in mass. And Bitcoin is not only a, it's, it's not a singularly traded asset. It's not just in the US. It's traded globally. So if the price of Bitcoin against the Rand starts falling and the other, the Rand becomes more expensive in rands, people are, and they printing more money in that country, the inflation goes up. People are going to be buying. Bitcoin just needs to be flat in US dollars for it to run up.

SPEAKER_496: Amazing. This is not investment advice. Not investment advice.

SPEAKER_74: Sunny Madra, co-founder of Definitive Intelligence. Vinny Lingam, co-founder of Civic and Weight Room. Guys, this is the best. This is increasingly becoming my favorite part of every month. All right.

SPEAKER_502: Awesome. Thanks for having us again.

SPEAKER_504: Enjoy your video card, Vinny. Enjoy that video card.

SPEAKER_503: I will. I will. Thanks for having us again.