SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, welcome back after a long weekend for some, not all of us. It is going to be a short week for us, but a big week here on this week in startups.

SPEAKER_02: Big. It's a lot of news going on and some crazy news in crypto. So we brought on our good friend, Vinny Lingham, who will be on in a moment. He was an early salon investor, early Bitcoin investor, and he runs civic, a startup that encrypts identity information on the blockchain famously.

SPEAKER_04: And he's going to talk to us about it all.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're all. And there is a lot of it we're going to. He's actually coming to us live from NFT NYC, which sounds like a bit of a fiasco itself. We will also talk about the fiasco on the Solana DeFi app called Solend.

Jason Calacanis: And then how somehow through all of this chaos, a Solana NFT marketplace called Magic Eden

SPEAKER_01: still managed to raise $130 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. Why not?

SPEAKER_02: And there's some news that a whale has had their account frozen. They can't liquidate it on Solana. I want to hear about that. And don't forget about our good friend Do Kwon, who was on the pod last year. South Korean prosecutors, I kid you not, have instituted a flight ban for employees

SPEAKER_08: while they investigate the $40 billion terror lapse. So we're going to dig in on that as well.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, there's a lot going on. It's going to be a great conversation. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_16: All right, Molly, you had a good weekend. I take it. Here's your weekend banter.

Jason Calacanis: We always love our weekend banter. I know it was lovely. We had some good Juneteenth conversations around the house. I had a nice Father's Day.

SPEAKER_01: Went to a concert. It was great. Oh, yes. You went to the Indigo Girls.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, I saw they actually surprise opened for Brandi Carlyle. I was going to see Brandi Carlyle at the Greek in Berkeley.

Jason Calacanis: I love Brandi Carlyle. I love I mean, her voice is just amazing, magical. And the Indigo Girls happened to be opening for her as sort of like a bit of a surprise. And she sang with them. And like, look, as a woman of a certain age, my high school and college experience flooded right back. There were tears. It was absolutely the earnestness level was infinity at this concert, which is not my normal thing. But I don't care. I loved it. It was wonderful.

SPEAKER_02: I you know, I when I was in college, I love the Indigo Girls because they had done a cover of a Dire Straits song, Romeo and Juliet.

SPEAKER_29: And so listen to after you told me that it's amazing.

SPEAKER_30: It's like, I think it's their best song. I mean, no offense, you know, whatever that song is, I went to see the doctor of philosophy, whatever that song is. Oh, yeah, closer to closer to closer to closer to find is their big one.

SPEAKER_02: But I didn't know that they had a certain, you know, audience. And I invited a girl on a date to see Indigo Girls because I was so into them. And she was very confused.

SPEAKER_35: But we went and I was the only guy there.

SPEAKER_36: They're very popular amongst the ladies. There were more than I would have thought. At least in the 90s.

SPEAKER_37: There were more men than I would have thought at this event. Oh, that's great. I will say.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my ex husband and his wife were also there.

Jason Calacanis: Like we had all bought tickets to this and didn't know because we were all big Brandi Carlyle fans.

SPEAKER_40: And so Jason and I are texting during this concert. And I'm basically like, oh, so we're having almost the same night. Almost the same night. This is a funny story. I was okay.

SPEAKER_42: You know, I hate to name drop, but I'm friends with, you know,

SPEAKER_02: I'm good friends with Draymond Green of the Warriors. And my friend Chamath, you know, owned a piece of the team. So I got to know everybody and I'm friendly. And Molly and I went to game two, Steph said hi to me.

SPEAKER_46: It's always very nice, like to see the Warriors. And, you know, people always ask me like, aren't you a Nick fan? Yes, I'm diehard Nick fan. But I have adopted the Warriors as my team also because I'm here and they play a style

SPEAKER_02: of basketball I love. And the Knicks are, you know, never going to win a playoff game again in my lifetime until I buy them. So, you know, at least it lets me go to some place opportunistic. So there was a little and I'm not speaking out of turn here because it was all over social media. But, you know, as teams do, they have a little celebration after winning a championship. I was lucky enough to go with my friend David Lee and Andrew Bogut to the first couple of wins in Chamath when they celebrated in Las Vegas. So three of the four years they celebrate in Vegas and three of those three years I went. So yes, on Saturday night, I went to Vegas with the team. And, you know, we hit a couple of nightlife spots and we're having dinner. And as fate would have it, you know, the team and I sat down and who's sitting directly next to me, but Molly's favorite player. So it's 1145.

David Friedberg: And I say, Molly, FaceTime me if you have a moment. And I've never asked Molly to FaceTime me. So I was like, this could be a weird request on Saturday night, 1145. Like, hey, just randomly FaceTime me.

SPEAKER_01: And of course, because I'm the weirdo that I'm, I'm like, is he okay? Is he okay? Yes.

SPEAKER_54: Just an idiot. Just an idiot.

SPEAKER_46: So I happened to be sitting next to Molly's favorite player, Clay Thompson. My favorite. And I was talking to Clay and we have a nice conversation. I said, you know, my friend is like, you know, a huge fan.

SPEAKER_02: She literally got COVID for you. She went to your, she got tickets for your comeback game.

SPEAKER_46: She cried. It's like, oh, well, tell her everything. I was like, well, maybe you could tell her yourself. You know, would you mind if I had her FaceTime? She goes, of course, Jake, whatever you want.

SPEAKER_42: So sure enough, Molly FaceTimed me. I hand the phone to Clay. He goes, and then Molly can take the story from there.

SPEAKER_21: He just pans over and I am in the car. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: In the middle of the, you know, like having just dropped off my sister-in-law, like trying to find the lights and new car. I don't know how the light comes on.

SPEAKER_40: And then he pans over and it takes me a second to even recognize that it's Clay Thompson.

SPEAKER_10: Like, I'm just like, oh, and just being the awkward dumb, dumb that I am. I'm like, you're a little awkward at times. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: Like, no, I mean, not at all. Like, thank God for me. Clay is not going to remember any of this interaction. No, nor do I. No chance. I barely remember it.

SPEAKER_17: Like, I was just like, congratulations. You're so great. I got COVID at your first game back, but I'm not mad.

SPEAKER_65: Because weirdo, like who says that?

SPEAKER_02: Yes. No, it was, it was always with the celebrity. You say stuff, your brain, when you see the celebrity, especially when you love, your brain starts going at like variable speed and the word starts skipping.

SPEAKER_29: It happened to me. It happened to everybody. So my face was like, it was all flush.

SPEAKER_00: But the good news for me again, is that Clay was not even making words, right? Clay was like, it was sort of blowing kisses. Like, and I was like, this is the best.

SPEAKER_71: He loved it. He loved it. He was, this is the best. It was the best. He was really into it. So anyway, congratulations to my worst friends. So I had like maybe 16 hours in Vegas, flew back the next morning.

SPEAKER_30: Because listen, we all have kids. We all had to get back for Father's Day. It's Father's Day. I would say a decent number of the players and I. So a group of us came back, you know, so it was like one of those,

SPEAKER_46: you know, late nights, but I met also, um, a soccer player. Uh, so I, I'm, uh, at the table and my friend's like, I want you to meet my friend. Uh, he's an athlete or whatever. Oh, hey, how you doing?

SPEAKER_06: I'm Jason. So, hey, my name's Neymar. I said, oh, okay. What do you do? You did not. Yeah. And he's like, I play, I play soccer.

David Friedberg: I was like, oh, professionally. He's like, yeah. I was like, oh, are you any good? And how's that working out for you? It's like, it's going okay. And then my friend's like, it's going okay. The number two player in the world.

SPEAKER_79: You didn't even ask him about his CSGO inventory. This was your big chance. I don't even know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_82: I know this is what, I mean, the awkward nerd alert. Yes.

SPEAKER_46: Anyway, he's, he's, I guess he's into crypto himself as well. So anyway, shout out to Neymar and all the other famous people who I really don't know.

David Friedberg: Uh, well, anyway, speaking about things that are confusing, um, my Lord, I don't know what's

SPEAKER_02: going on in crypto except to say, um, that a lot is happening and just like there's a lot happening in growth stocks and the economy in the world writ large. So bringing, uh, I'm going to bring on my good friend, Vinny Lingham, who is an expert in this field. Hey, Vinny. How are you?

SPEAKER_84: Jason and Molly. Great to see you guys.

Jason Calacanis: Vinny. Thanks for your patience. I just want you to know, uh, in, in ongoing awkward comments, I bought $300 of Solana after we talked after the all in summit, so either you owe me $300.

SPEAKER_82: Or this is going to go great. Yeah. I would, uh, stay. I am the whale. Everybody. I'm the whale.

SPEAKER_90: I owe you dinner. You owe you dinner.

SPEAKER_92: Here it goes. All right. So, um, just to give us a background on Vinny, you know, 10 years ago when we were talking

SPEAKER_02: about crypto, he had jumped full in, uh, did civic and, uh, invested in many projects. And I think you were the, you're a partner at, um, or somehow related to.

SPEAKER_97: Yeah, I was, I joined as a GP at Multicoin 2017 when Colin Tushar started up. And, uh, yeah, that's, uh, been a fun run as well.

SPEAKER_46: And that's a firm that had maybe $10 million for their first fund invested in Solana or something to that effect.

SPEAKER_103: When I joined, it was like five and then I brought in Saks, uh, into the fund and we set

SPEAKER_97: up the opportunities fund, which is the, probably the best venture capital fund of all time. Um, yeah, that was early 2018. So, I mean, you know, obviously then 10 million to work.

SPEAKER_106: I understood at the peak. It was 20, it was 20. It was, so that fund, the hedge fund was like five or 10 initially.

SPEAKER_108: Got it. And then we set up the venture fund for, I think it was 20 total, uh, and, uh, and craft anchored that fund for us. Um, and yeah.

SPEAKER_112: How did that wind up at the peak on a multiple of cash?

SPEAKER_108: I, I don't know. At the peak, I think it's like 150, 200 times returns on a fund, which is, which is crazy. 4 billion or something.

SPEAKER_114: Yeah, it's, it's still, it's still pretty big right now. It's still like, uh, in the tens.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course. Yeah. And, you know, listen, uh, crypto has had these incredibly volatile moments. I want to unpack it with you. Uh, I think the place to start is you're at NFT New York. People on Twitter are saying like, I'm not going to do my, so somebody said, I'm not going to do my speaking gig. This thing is so terrible. It's the, the fire festival.

SPEAKER_98: What exactly is everybody complaining about there? And what is NFT Fest?

SPEAKER_119: I wouldn't call, I wouldn't call it the fire festival. That's a little extreme.

SPEAKER_120: Um, yeah. So, so, I mean, you, you just ran the all in summit, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's hard doing a conference and that was a thousand people. I think, you know, it was executed really well. Um, but when these guys are trying to put, I think it's 20,000 people a year. Um, the, the, the venue selection is, is terrible. It's the merit marquee. I don't think you can handle that many people.

SPEAKER_122: The lines are around the lines go down multiple floors to get, to get your pass. The, the pass security is terrible. I mean, like if I look at my pass here somewhere, it's, it's literally just a printout. There's no security stickers. I can go and photocopy it and give you, you know, there'll be 20 venues walking around.

SPEAKER_120: Uh, you just have a lanyard. Um, so the lines are super long. Um, the, you know, and when you go into the venues, the speakers aren't even there. I was in a session this morning, two speakers are not there. Presumably they're stuck in line trying to get a pass to get in, uh, there's no, there's no,

SPEAKER_122: there's no VIP pass the line. Like I've been to money 20, 20, many times in Vegas and it's like 30, 40, 50,000 people or whatever.

SPEAKER_123: And it's, that's an incredible show. Like that is an incredible show. At scale.

SPEAKER_129: You can run conferences like this at scale. You just can't do it in Marriott marquee times square.

SPEAKER_130: And then, and then it also sounds like they don't know how to run registry. I mean, compare it to all in summit we had, uh, you know, tickets,

SPEAKER_02: tickets with your photo on them custom printed for you, you with a QR code on it. Like this is like just a modest amount of additional work.

SPEAKER_134: Um, and yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_135: For a, for a sophisticated NFT thing, like show, you should maybe even have NFTs or something. Like, Hey, uh, you know, it should be so simple. Like every person who buys a ticket gets an NFT in their wallet and you scan when you go through the door and you need to make sure you have it with you using token proof and, and, you know, token proof has a QR code that changes.

SPEAKER_122: So you can't even screenshot and give it to someone else. You have to have the NFT on you, just things like that. Right. Uh, moon birds is doing that tonight, by the way, Kevin Rose's, uh, party.

SPEAKER_120: You have to own one of these moon birds, which is worth 20 ETH right now at the minimum, uh, which is what 25, $30,000 and to get in. And you have to have registered a few weeks ago to get in.

SPEAKER_135: And then you get a NFT effectively on, you know, the, the moon bird is the NFT.

SPEAKER_122: And then you use a token token proof to get a pass, but you cannot screenshot that pass. Cause the QR codes only value. It's like an, like an authentication app, right? Like that sort of thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_139: Constantly changes like Google authentic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: And then what about these complaints? The, the sort of anonymous account that did the long tweet thread about how they weren't

SPEAKER_00: going to speak today was, was also just saying like, in addition to the logistics, it just feels like the whole thing is sort of a big salesy grifty vibe.

SPEAKER_108: A total grifty vibe. I mean, you go in there, the booths are all over the place. It's like badly set up people like there's no like auto, no structure to it. And then you're in the worst possible place. Like if you're sitting in a session and you've got fire trucks and ambulance running down times, this is New York. It's really like, I didn't, I just didn't think that they, they, they thought through, you know, the logistics for a conference, that size of this scale, it should have been done in a different place. Now I get that it's attractive to do it where they did it.

SPEAKER_147: Um, and maybe they got a really good deal, but it's, it wasn't a great deal for us.

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SPEAKER_46: So there's so much to talk about and just, this is against the backdrop of Bitcoin bottoming out. I think it hit like 18 K or 17 and change.

SPEAKER_152: Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_46: Amazing. Um, and Ethereum coming massively down, but you've been through this before.

SPEAKER_02: Um, just broadly speaking, um, how does this drawdown feel qualitatively to you versus the others?

SPEAKER_30: Uh, is it different and could it get much worse or does it feel analogous to, I think there's been four big drawdowns if I'm correct and this is the fifth or is this the fourth?

SPEAKER_134: You know, when I say big drawdowns over 50, 60%. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: Yeah, I think this is the fifth, maybe even the sixth, uh, who knows, but in percentage terms, right?

SPEAKER_156: So, uh, in absolute terms, this has been the biggest in absolute value terms, but in terms of percentages, I think it's, uh, it's not the biggest yet, but I, I do think that,

SPEAKER_108: um, there was a massive deal leveraging that happened on the way down and you had a lot of positions that are sold out and we'll get into that now with what happened with Solana. Uh, was with Solend. Um, but you know, it's, it's, it's kind of normal, right? So you had this like crazy deal leveraging because everyone went on to Celsius and Luna and anchor and whatever else and borrowed money to buy more crypto. And that whole sort of, that whole system got unwound. And you know, I'm a big fan of DeFi, but a certain flavor of DeFi. And let me give a very simple example. Um, I think when, you know, if, if Jason, if I need to borrow money and I have one Bitcoin

SPEAKER_122: that's worth 20 K and Jason wants to lend $10,000 against that, knowing that if a price drops to

SPEAKER_108: 15, he's going to sell me out or do a margin call. And at, you know, at 14 or 13, like I get liquidated and he's guaranteed his money and I'm paying him 8% interest on that. That's kind of a good deal, right? And that's dollar on dollar interest. So I borrow $10,000 USDC and I'm going to pay him back 800 bucks interest over a year.

SPEAKER_122: And he has my Bitcoin and security and he knows that if a price drops, he sells it. That's actually a very good legitimate use for DeFi. I think we can all agree there. That's basically taking out the banks, taking out the middlemen and having a peer to peer transaction for a borrower and a lender to, to put up collateral and not use credits and credits a whole different game. This is collateralized lending. The problem with DeFi is that it evolved from that to guys thinking like, oh, how do I juice these returns? So how about it's 8% right now? And if you lend on my platform, I'll give you some of these tokens for the platform and then your effective yield is, you know, 20%, Jason, because, so you lend on my platform, you're going to get some cash or you're going to get all these tokens. And, but these tokens are worthless because it becomes like a Ponzi because the more people,

SPEAKER_108: you know, and this is what's really happened with, with Luna, right? Luna became some, somewhat of a Ponzi. Um, and it totally collapsed because they couldn't sustain it.

SPEAKER_46: Let me reflect it back to you in, in plain English as best I can for the audience. Okay. You have the Bitcoin. It's worth 20,000.

SPEAKER_30: I loan it out. I get $10,000. I can go spend my money without selling my crypto. I get to HODL my Bitcoin, but I get to use that 10,000 to live my life. And listen, if it's always going up every year, um, and it goes to 40, I can, you know, uh, now I've only got 25% of the value of it loan. So it's pretty cool. If you were thinking about it, like a mortgage on your house, the value of the house goes up and you're paying down your mortgage over time. You know, the amount of equity you have in your home just keeps increasing and it's all good. And, and what's beautiful about this is I don't need to have a middle man. There's no broker in the middle. Now, I guess the criticism would be if you were to get margin called, there would be somebody to call to say, Hey, give me 48 hours or whatever. There might be like a little grace period or something, but here it's all programmatic. It just happens naturally, which keeps everybody honest, but people were not, in addition to doing this, to get you to put your Bitcoin on some of these exchanges or these DeFi, I guess would be the better term. These DeFi exchanges or these DeFi services, DeFi platforms. So these DeFi platforms said, Hey, we'll sweeten the pot. You get the 8%, but we'll, we'll throw in some of our, you know, name our DeFi platform tokens.

SPEAKER_02: And yeah, maybe they'll be worth something at some point, but they basically gave people Chuck E. Cheese tokens, so people were like, Oh, I'm getting even more, which then incentivize them to put more on these. And then essentially the system, am I correct? Worked the way it's supposed to, which is, it's a smart contract. When it hit a certain level, it sold it out. And the problem there is nobody really knew how much leverage or margin was in the system.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So when it goes down, it just cascades until the breaking point.

SPEAKER_171: Yes, except, except. So we were conflating two different scenarios here, uh, on a, on a totally transparent

SPEAKER_108: system like Solen, you know exactly how much is in the account, how much is being lent out. And, and that's very transparent.

SPEAKER_122: When it comes to Celsius and Luna, it's a, it's basically back to centralized banking because these platforms have gotten, you know, Celsius has their own token, et cetera. And it's, it's black box. So you don't know what's the, what their books look like. You don't know how much collateral damage there's going to be when they sell. So we went from, Hey, this is a great way to wrap a Bitcoin, you know, onto an Ethereum tokens called WBTC, lend it out, borrow money against it and get, you know, like you think about it, you're taking two relatively hard assets. You take Bitcoin and you take us dollars and, and that actually makes sense. There's a trade that happens and you can do it in full transparency of everyone out there. But now, now you start bringing in third party tokens and well, you know, instead of using Bitcoin, let's use some other, you know, crap coin asset with a low market cap. Let's do, let's start borrowing against like coins, right? Like really low down the, the, the, the, the stack, low market caps. And then the volatility increases like Bitcoin's volatility in a single day. You don't get a 90% drop in Bitcoin in one day. It just doesn't happen, but you can get that on, on, on a low market cap coin. If someone decides to just dump it, right. Um, and, and, and so you went from two high quality assets doing a trade to a multitude of high to low and then borrowing dollars and then interest being paid in, you know, dollars

SPEAKER_172: and a multitude of other currencies, which it's just very opaque.

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Jason Calacanis: Okay, well, since you brought up Solend, which is supposed to be better, at least around transparency, there has been and we're hoping that you can help us understand this. Solend is this DeFi protocol built on Solana. And it sounds like the Dow that built it voted on Sunday to take over this whale account that accounts for 95 about percent of the platform's total deposits. Can you help us understand what happened here and why and how it could happen that effectively

SPEAKER_21: the Dow that controls this protocol or app layer could say like, you can have your money, investor. Sure.

SPEAKER_119: So let's start with like understanding.

SPEAKER_108: I want to just like set the ground here. So first of all, Solend is an application, right?

SPEAKER_122: It's a protocol. It sits on top of a blockchain. It happens to be Solana, right? And they call themselves Solend. They could have been built on Ethereum. They could have been built on Bitcoin or whatever. But they chose obviously Solana. Now, they could also choose a multitude of assets to hold. They could say, we will take wrapped Bitcoin, we'll take wrapped Ethereum, we'll take USDC, whatever it is. But in this case, it was a Solana contract. So the person who put the Solana on, that was their collateral. That's the asset that they want to borrow against. And on the other side of the trade, there are people who are willing to lend dollars against that asset with enough margin between what the price was and what it could be in case of a drop, and then the liquidation event occurs. So at the very, very basic level, this is a very fair transaction because the people lending the money out believe that Solana was a hard enough asset at the time to allocate their funds to it. And there's always risk, right? And they took the risk of going with this platform and this governance structure that they had. Now, what happened was, as the market totally delivered and unwound and the Solana price dropped closer and closer to a liquidation point, the risk at that point was that people would lose their money if they sold 100 million. So if the spot price of Solana hit 22, for example, and now you start having cascading liquidations, if you try and dump 100 million, the average price you may get for that 100 million is going

SPEAKER_180: to be 15 bucks or whatever, some number much lower.

SPEAKER_105: Because there's not that many buyers, especially in a down market like this,

SPEAKER_30: you might not have as many retail people, as many people speculating. So to fill that order could be disastrous?

SPEAKER_123: Well, if you do that on open exchange, remember the open exchange order books are very thin, relatively, the OTC desks are very different, right?

SPEAKER_122: So if you have an OTC desk that, you know, if you want to go move $25 million with a Solana, they know who the buyers are, they contact them, you do a spot price. And this is the same as it works in stock exchanges as well. If you're doing a very large deal, you're not going to put it through the order books, you're going to do a book trade, right? And so you're going to buy and sell. So what the protocol said is, look, we're going to vote to do that. And if it drops to a certain point, or we're going to take ownership of it now to prevent this thing being automatically sold into the market, into a thin order book, and dumping the price below what the real market price is. Now, by the way, I'm explaining the logic here. I'm not expressing an opinion here.

SPEAKER_114: I'm trying to explain the logic behind this. So don't take anything I say as my opinion on what should or shouldn't have happened.

SPEAKER_183: Well, but you're saying like, this is why a vote like this would occur. And in this case, that vote happened to affect a single holder.

SPEAKER_122: Yes. So that's the other thing. There was concentration risk on the platform where one single holder had 90% of all the Solana on that platform, all the lending contracts on the platform. So I want to finish off by saying that the vote that happened was reversed, I think yesterday, and $25 million of the book was moved to a different marketplace to spread it around. So the community is figuring out how to do this. We are very early days in DAOs and whatever else. But I do believe at the core that the operators of this protocol are trying to act in a responsible way and resolve the issue without taking damage to the people who are holding the debt. So then what happens? You get a whole bunch of attacks from everyone else. You get attacks from other chains, other protocols saying, oh, look what's happening at Solana. Let's be clear. This is not a Solana issue. This is a protocol designed on Solana where they're making the decisions for what they do with their DAO and stuff. So it's not about decentralization of Solana. It's about, do you trust protocols built on certain blockchains or not?

SPEAKER_171: Do you trust who's running them?

SPEAKER_02: This would be the equivalent of, you know, there might be an app in the Google Play Store. Exactly. But Google didn't write it. And people who bought into that Google Play app, if it wound up having some problems, or crashed your phone or was hacked or whatever, but that's not a reflection on Android as necessarily. It's a reflection on the app that was built by some third party. But in fact, in this case, it seems like both parties are being served well here because if, and this goes back to what I was saying before, which is like, hey, it's programmatic.

SPEAKER_30: Most of the time when people set up this leverage or do these, you know, DeFi loans, it's programmatic. If, if Bitcoin falls to 15 bucks, everything gets sold and you get your money. So your loan is not washed. The person who loses in that is maybe the person who loaned it, who would rather have pulled old and kept it. And they took this risk to take a margin loan and get a margin call basically. But in this case, this was a Dow, a decentralized autonomous organization. They had a voting structure. People bought into that voting structure and the voting structure said, hey, listen, we're the ones who made the loan. We gave the money. We would like to see this happen in an orderly fashion so we can get back as much as possible. Because if it did flood and it's sold, they might be underwater. Is that what I'm reading into it?

SPEAKER_119: Yeah. So, and that would be, okay. So it's bad for a number of parties, but it's bad for the collateral.

SPEAKER_122: So, so the underlying collateral being Bitcoin, if this was a hundred dollars worth of, sorry, Solana, if this was a hundred million dollars worth of Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other coin, and you know, over this past weekend with low liquidity, everyone in that, anyone who owns those, like for example, it was Bitcoin, Bitcoin price would tank. If you, if you sell a hundred million bucks, markets sell a hundred million dollars on Bitcoin on a, you know, on a low liquidity weekend, it's going to break the price of Bitcoin. It's going to go drop it, you know, a significant percentage. Um, and so, you know, the, the, the, I think the way to look at this was the DAO said, what is the greater good? Yeah. And this is, this kind of goes back to Ethereum as well. They had the whole DAO hack back in 2000 and I think 16 where, you know, the Ethereum DAO was hacked and they did a 97% of all Ethereum holders decided, you know, go with a hard fork. And then you have Ethereum Classic, which was formed out of it, that whole thing. And everyone kind of disagreed. And at the time I thought it was, I thought like people should just lose their money. But you know what, if you look at the, if you look back right now with hindsight, it was the right decision to preserve and, you know, and do the hard fork. Because like from a Bitcoiner sort of early view, you should never hard fork for that reason. It's like everyone takes risks to their own money and that's fine. But Ethereum was just too young and too early on where they, they had to, they had to self-correct. And that's kind of what Celend is doing right now. They're saying, look, we're still learning. The space is new. We don't know how to deal with some of these things, but what is the, what is the greater good? Is it better just to dump the Solana in the market? All the lenders who lent against it, lose money. Everyone who holds Solana suffers because this thing got market sold. Or do we try and just make sure that we can get out clean? And the guy who borrowed the hundred million dollars, well, you know, he put up his collateral and he's lost it because the market tanked. Like there's nothing we can do about it. And so they try to basically arrange an, you know, an organized sale of it. I think it's a, I think it's a really hard thing to give a, um, an opinion on because you, it's one of those things where if you're not in the seat of the CEO of the team of people running it, it's like, it's hard to understand what, what it feels like having to make those decisions. And Jason, you know this, you've, you've been there before. So I think that no one's did anything dishonorable in my opinion. I think they made, they try to make the best of a bad situation, which was largely driven by exogenous

SPEAKER_172: forces in the market. And people had to figure out how to, how to deal with it.

SPEAKER_199: This whale had deposited 5.7 million Solana tokens. Those were worth a couple of hundred million at the time.

SPEAKER_02: They took a hundred and eight million dollar loan. Those 5.7 billion are still worth like 150. So I guess the people who loaned out that money are going to get their money back in all likelihood

SPEAKER_30: as they liquidate this, it's just a matter of it happens instantly or not. I mean, that is what this comes down to is an instant liquidation rocks the market

SPEAKER_202: and could create fear and panic selling.

SPEAKER_204: But it's been reversed. It's been reversed. So the, the Dow decision, so the, the Dow is basically, you know,

SPEAKER_172: owners of the protocol, the people who owned enough votes to decide on what it is, it's kind of a collective force.

SPEAKER_108: They've decided that they had a re-vote and they basically said, okay, we're not going to do this. And if it, if it gets down to 22 bucks, we're going to just, you know,

SPEAKER_122: let the market decide what it does with this. And because I think at this point, before this happened, the market was probably not well aware of the situation.

SPEAKER_120: And now the market's kind of priced it in. And I think, look, Solana is up right now. I'm hoping, you know, it doesn't get down to 22 bucks. And they, and they now moving the, you know, they already moved 25 million off. So they're spreading the risk around. And quite frankly, I think that we, I think we hit the bottom at 17 K. And I think we're on our way up right now. Unless the Fred nukes the economy even more. So I'm cautiously optimistic at the moment.

Jason Calacanis: I think, I think there may be more nukes in the barrel, but before we get there, um, what does, what are the sort of like learnings that will come out of this? Because it seems we've talked a lot about on the show about how one of the things that seems to have happened in the absence of like product is a more and more and more financialization of these assets that, you know, like what you're describing is effectively like, oh, well, mortgages existed. And then we realized that we could trade, you know, package up mortgages and sell them. And then we realized that some of them were risky. And so we could package those up and sell them. And there would be a different kind of collateral and leverage. And that increasingly, there have been all these sort of financial tools employed to get value out of these assets that look and walk a lot like regulated banking activities, but aren't. And so like, at what point are we saying this is all something that's existed before and should be regulated thusly, or even maybe you can't build a defy app on top of a layer one protocol that could crush the entire underlying token because it's not managed properly.

SPEAKER_212: So we're, we're learning about concentration risk, which I think a lot of people know about, but, um, you know, we, we kind of ignore and when things are going well and everything's in a

SPEAKER_120: boom cycle, I mean, Jason, you, you, you're always the first to call this out, right? Like, you know, when we, when we go into like a silly money era, everyone loses their sense of sensibility and like, it goes out the window. Yeah. Um, and, and that's the problem we had right now. And I'm hoping we had a wake up call and we're going to rebuild from 20K back up to 69,000

SPEAKER_122: again with Bitcoin. But, um, the, the bottom line is this, I, the more we try and recreate the banking system, the more we're going to fail because the banking system is a true, is a tried and tested model

SPEAKER_123: that works. Okay. It's, it really does work for the bank.

SPEAKER_176: But isn't that what's, but isn't that what's happening? I guess that's what I'm asking. Cause it feels like we're recreating parts of the banking system, but with less rules.

SPEAKER_218: So, so no, yes or no.

SPEAKER_122: The banking system is largely based on credit. Credit is an asset, um, but it's, it's an intangible asset. Your credit score is an intangible asset. It belongs to you. You can use it. You can leverage. But at the end of the day, if your credit score goes down, you devalue your asset. If it goes up, you value your asset. So the entire banking system works on credit and trust. Bitcoin was built to be a trustless system. Okay. With no counterparty risk. You should know who you, you have to know who you're dealing with. There's a decentralized ledger and it's a, it's a native asset. Now, what we're doing now is the closer and closer we try and turn crypto into the banking system, the more we're going to fail. The closer we get to the sort of trusted decentralized compute platforms, I mean, Ethereum, Bitcoin, I think the better. I think the point of crypto is to remove middlemen from all the transactions. And it just basically becomes trusted, trusted transactions and get to the point where you, you know, there's just full transparency of what's going on. But, and the moment we use centralized companies like Luna and, and, and Celsius and even

SPEAKER_123: BlockFi and whoever else, the more we're basically just rebuilding banking.

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SPEAKER_02: And so where do you stand on the because this is I guess if we were to bring all these decisions down to um first principle, it would be should you live and die by what happens programmatically what happens automatically with the software or should humans be able to intervene on these or should crypto have both flavors or some combination because you could build systems that things happen automatically. But with some smart contracts that say in the case of, you know, uh, a disagreement, here's what happens. So where do you stand? You know, having been doing having done this for 10 years and built a lot of the infrastructure and participated in it. What do you think is best for, you know, crypto and for humanity writ large, in terms of these things? Should there be middlemen who can intermediaries who can step in and say, hey, you know what? This was not the intention or I hear some crypto people say this is how it's supposed to work.

SPEAKER_30: I think they're kind of absolutists in that they don't want an intermediary to intervene. If you lose your money, you played a game in a system that you do not get your money back.

SPEAKER_02: So, so how do you, you know, at this point fall on that spectrum?

SPEAKER_108: So, so, okay, let me, let me start with, with, I go back to Bitcoin because Bitcoin for me is first principles of crypto. So in Bitcoin, Bitcoin was basically designed as a system where, um, I can send you money, Jason. And if I said to the wrong person or I said to you, you don't deliver the goods.

SPEAKER_122: I'm out of pocket. It's not like the credit card system where I can go to Visa and say, hey, I need a chargeback. I'll go to my bank and say, Jason to deliver. So, so, so it's a cash system. If you think about it, like it's a bear, it's a bearer system. Um, and that was, that was like the, the, I guess the genesis for the whole industry is you can use this non repudiable system of moving value around.

SPEAKER_120: And now we've got to the point where, you know, it's looking a lot more like banking with, oh, this is who the person is. This is, um, you know, this is the risk you're taking through centralized and decentralized players.

SPEAKER_122: Um, but to answer your question more specifically, I think there is a spectrum that we need to look at and the spectrum would be from on the sort of far left side being Bitcoin to the far right side being, I don't know, Celsius or Luna or whatever. And there's a spectrum of decentralization to centralization. In fact, I don't even go, if you go further, right, it's probably banking, right? So the banking system, so you've got this like spectrum from Bitcoin to banking,

SPEAKER_123: and you have all this white space in between.

SPEAKER_122: And what's happening right now is we're testing a bunch of stuff in between right now. And on a long enough timeframe, the winners will emerge and you'll find maybe it's a hybrid, maybe it's an 80, 20, maybe it's a 50, 50, maybe it's a 70, 30.

SPEAKER_123: But I think we need to run lots and lots of experiments in this industry and ecosystem to see what stands the test of time.

SPEAKER_122: I know for, I know for a fact that Bitcoin will stand the test of time and banking will stand the test of time because, you know, to some extent they both have. On the banking on the far right, it's been around for hundreds of years and we know that that works. And on the other side, Bitcoin's been around for a decade and crypto, that's actually a long time and it works. But all the stuff in the middle, we're still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And the reason is, like, the reason this is difficult is because the moment you try and hybridize something, because like, what we're trying to do is we're trying to hybridize Bitcoin and move it closer to what consumers are used to, what consumers understand.

SPEAKER_142: Because when you tell the consumer they've just lost their money on a transaction, they don't understand it. Like, how do you just lose my money? How do, how can I not get it back?

SPEAKER_194: They're comparing it to the fiat system, which has existed for a long time,

SPEAKER_06: and the government has regulated for a long time. And because it looks like that, increasingly.

Jason Calacanis: It looks increasingly like that, which I think is, you know, a problem for the ecosystem at some point, right? It's a comms problem. Like people are out here on Reddit forums talking about the Celsius freeze being like, wait, they can't just keep, there's like FDIC or something, right? And it's like, peanut, no, there isn't.

SPEAKER_237: Yeah, you did something very risky.

SPEAKER_02: They just said, give us your money. We'll be custodians of, I mean, custodians of it. You didn't do this in your wallet. You let somebody else, you know, do these transactions for you at Celsius. They're like a hedge fund. They, they, they attracted the whole process from you. You did not play by the actual crypto rules. So they wrapped.

SPEAKER_240: Not your keys, not your coins. Not your keys, not your coins. Not your coins, exactly. You didn't.

SPEAKER_02: And the same thing is for Coinbase, except for the more, uh, custodial service they offer,

SPEAKER_30: correct? Like on Coinbase, if you're a rank and file Coinbase person, they abstracted the Bitcoin. You don't have the keys. If something happens to Coinbase, which I think is a very small percentage, but they've had to talk about this. You don't have the keys to your coins. Whereas if you had the custodial account, I think at Coinbase and other places, you pay for them to custodial, but you still have your keys and they're in storage.

SPEAKER_244: I think. It's like a trust, it's like a trust account.

SPEAKER_122: It's, it's in your benefits. So, so then here's the difference, right? Coinbase, we know, we know Brian and Coinbase, they're not going to take your funds and use it in a way which is risky, right? Right. And this is, and by the way, banking has been through this already. You know, in 2008, in the great financial crisis, the reality about banking is that they privatize their losses because they privatize, they socialize their losses and they privatize their profits in the previous era. So the banks just took a lot of risk with your money. And when they made profits, they got big bonuses. And when they made losses, the government had to bail them out. And so it kind of happened with Celsius already and others in the space. They taking, these guys have been taking ridiculous amounts of risks to juice their profits because they basically rehypothecate the money.

SPEAKER_123: So you put the Bitcoin with them as collect. Yeah. So, you know, here's an example.

SPEAKER_135: I, you know, this is like basic banking. Um, you put a Bitcoin with them and you want to earn interest, uh, and someone puts dollars with them and, and they give you the, you know, they, they, they, they give the dollars to you if you want to borrow against your Bitcoin,

SPEAKER_122: but then they take your Bitcoin and they go lend it out to someone else to get a higher interest on it. Uh, or they, or they come up with some fancy way, you know, using options and puts and whatever else.

SPEAKER_123: They, they find like, because it's centralized, it's not transparent. You don't know what they're doing with your coins when it's there. And that's basically, we're going back to the banking world and we've learned all these mistakes and banking already over decades and centuries. And so the only thing I think that works in DeFi is transparent transactions on smart contracts, using, using these like centralized third parties where there's a CEO that can take your money and lend it out to his buddies or like, I mean, there's the same problem with Tether, right? Tether, we don't know what's in Tether. Nobody knows. Okay. I think they probably have the money they claim they do in assets and treasuries and bills and whatever else, but we don't know what the liquidity reserves are. We don't know whether they're sitting at 5% or 20% reserves. If, if, if we don't know what, we, we don't know how much money, how much cash withdrawal from Tether is required to break Tether.

SPEAKER_122: And by the way, it's probably a good thing we don't know, Jason, because if we knew, then the hedge funds could go and do a run in Tether. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_123: So, so, so, so I, I get, I get why they're keeping it sort of opaque. Uh, but again, we're still, now we're trading into the banking world again.

SPEAKER_122: And so I, I, I, I personally hate banking. I think the banking world sucks and I think we have to reinvent it, but I don't think reinventing it means copying it into crypto. I think that's the mistake we're going to make. So I love all these experiments as playing out in, in DeFi. I think it's, it's healthy. We have to tolerate a lot of failure that we tolerate the dot com era. I mean, you remember there was a ton of, sure.

SPEAKER_247: There was a ton of, uh, companies that failed. I mean, like 98% of the companies failed, 99% of the companies failed.

SPEAKER_250: I mean, to this day, angel investing is a pursuit where 90% fail. One out of 10, you know, are the bulk of your return.

SPEAKER_02: So the best advice Vinnie and Molly, correct me if I'm wrong here, is if people who are civilians choose to play in this, um, only invest money, you can afford to lose, uh, make small bets and learn as you go and don't be concentrated. Um, this is a, a very experimental space, even in its second decade.

SPEAKER_252: Would you think that is good financial advice, Molly and Vinnie? $300, man.

SPEAKER_256: Molly makes her little bets. She's like, Molly's like your aunt who goes to Vegas and she has like a little, she's like, I'm going to Vegas. I'm a pea shooter.

Jason Calacanis: I'm going to go see. $1,500. Well, because Vinnie, everybody else in the world has heard the story. I don't know if you have, but I bought, I bought, uh, 300 Bitcoin at $1.

SPEAKER_260: Yeah.

SPEAKER_188: Wow. And then on, on empty gox. Oh, shoot.

SPEAKER_10: And it's gone now, which is why I'm sitting here on this show. Yeah, exactly. So now.

SPEAKER_263: Well, actually, did you file a claim? Yeah.

SPEAKER_265: You know, it's a whole, it's a whole, it's a whole thing.

Jason Calacanis: It was the first one, not the second one. So then by the time those claims came, it was like too late and Dwala was involved. And so. All right.

SPEAKER_46: Let's go to Luna here. Cause I'm interested in your position on this. There was a breaking start. I'm sure Vinnie, um, yeah, but as of this morning,

SPEAKER_02: South Korea has instituted a flight ban for all Terra employees. In other words, this isn't, does it mean that they're guilty? Obviously. So let's be clear.

SPEAKER_46: Um, but South Korean prosecutors have placed travel ban on dozens of current and former Terraform Labs employees. The country is conducting an investigation as they should into the company and its founder, Do Kwon. Do Kwon was on episode 1251 in July last year, uh, which is now, yeah, just on a year ago. Uh, this is after Terra, the algorithmic stable coin, and it's a company token Luna collapsed

SPEAKER_250: in May. Here's the quote from the article. South Korea's no fly ban on Terraform Labs came after a special financial crimes unit in the prosecutor's office launched an investigation last month into two complaints filed on behalf

SPEAKER_46: of 81 investors. This is typically how this stuff goes down, folks. Um, you know, the, the investigators, uh, somebody loses money and then the investigations happen when everything's going up. The investigator, nobody calls the investigators because they're making money. The investigators alleged that Terraform founders and the company deceived investors with their flawed algorithmic coins. According to the documents, Do Kwon has been ordered by a U S court to comply with subpoenas from the sec regarding the sale of potential unregistered tokens.

SPEAKER_21: So this seems to be sort of a near as we can tell related to the collapse, but also maybe

Jason Calacanis: suspicions of some insider trading that might've happened right before the collapse.

SPEAKER_274: So I, I don't know the details around this. I, I don't know the details around this, but let me get Terra. Yeah. Yeah. General.

SPEAKER_123: So, so, so I managed to dodge the bullets on these things. Cause I, I never, I mean, as someone who's been in crypto for a long time, people thought I was crazy for not buying Luna, for not putting money in anchor for not to. And I'm like, I don't, I do it because I've been around crypto for a long time and I see how these things go bad. Right.

SPEAKER_122: So, so I, I'm, you know, and, and I actually want people, I think I was on run show like two weeks before Luna even started to dip below the, you know, the $1 range and, and before things started going bad, I said, look, at some point this doesn't, you know, end well. And, um, you know, so, so my take is that this is part of the learning experience. People just need to learn the hard way.

SPEAKER_120: Uh, it's sad. Um, I feel sorry if everyone has lost money, but you shouldn't be putting money in places where the returns are being promised to you are way, way, way in excess, in excess of market returns. Firstly, I think that the, the authorities in South Korea are actually being pretty reasonable

SPEAKER_122: about this ban. I think we don't know what happened at Terra. They need to do an investigation and the flight risk is really high. If there are employees there that ran away with, you know, hundreds of millions or tens of millions of whatever, of, of, of ill gotten gains, it may not be stolen. It may have been like, they're shorting their own coin because they know it's going to collapse and things like that.

SPEAKER_120: You, you actually have to investigate everyone and, and, you know, maybe there's some way, you know, recover some funds from the, for the victims of this. So I'm kind of on the side of like, I, I, you know, they're not putting everyone in jail.

SPEAKER_122: It's just, you cannot leave the country until we've figured out what the hell happened. Um, and I, I think that's actually kind of reasonable.

SPEAKER_252: Seems reasonable. Yeah. Uh, there's also trades that could have been made on these.

SPEAKER_46: So as a crypto expert, you, you could have played a little game here, put some money into them knowing the hype cycle, but you just choose to focus on the ones you think are most important. Yeah.

SPEAKER_280: Yeah. My, my portfolio is very focused on high quality, long-term buy and hold projects

SPEAKER_120: where I think that, you know, these guys are going to do well. Um, you know, I, I really, really trade. Sometimes I trade off because I'm wrong for a period and I want to take a, you know, a tax loss or something, but that's the only time. And normally it's just buy and hold. And then sometimes, you know, you become overweight in certain projects, whatever, and you have to take some cash to the table, rebalance your portfolio. But as a long-term sort of investor in crypto, I, I think that's, you know, speculating and I, I've made these mistakes, right? I've bought all these like crappy coins and this and that, and you wind up speculating, you know, some money here and then you lose money. But those are always small bets relative to the portfolio. It's the same as Jason. Like how many times you come across a, um, you know, a project where you just say,

SPEAKER_282: I'll give the guy 25k just because, you know, let's see where it goes.

SPEAKER_198: Yeah. You make a feeler bet as we'd say in the poker business.

SPEAKER_194: Exactly. You know, you put out a little bet, see where you're at. The flop comes down. You missed it. You put out a, uh, you know, a small pot sized bet and, you know,

SPEAKER_199: you put $200 into a thousand dollar pot. You never know. Some people may not have anything. They don't want to fight it. Uh, well, I like, I really like though,

SPEAKER_21: the principles that you've sort of laid out in the form of, in, in this conversation, right?

Jason Calacanis: Which is that if it looks like banking, as we have discussed, if it looks like the kind of financialization, money-making grab without transparency behind it, don't do it.

SPEAKER_123: Right? Because, because, stay away from that. Yeah, exactly. You're going to make the same mistakes the bankers have made for hundreds of years, and there's no way you can make all those mistakes in a couple of years and get it right. Right? So it's, it's the, like, you have to, if we're going to reinvent banking, it has to be reinvented. You got to change the way the game is played.

SPEAKER_292: You cannot do it the same way.

Jason Calacanis: All right. So then what do you think about, are you going to this next, this fundraise? I was going to. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. You take it. So then I would be curious to know. So we, there was also news today. Solana based NFT marketplace, Magic Eden raised $130 million series B at a $1.6 billion valuation. It's a secondary marketplace for NFTs with over 7,000 collections. It is evidently responsible for 92% of all Solana based NFT volume. And as of June 1st, made up almost 97% of the market share for daily Solana NFT transactions.

SPEAKER_183: What do you think about this part of the ecosystem right now?

SPEAKER_108: It's probably a pretty, it's probably a pretty good deal. And the reason is, I mean,

SPEAKER_296: It seems outrageous in terms of valuation. Why would that be a good deal? Is there a ton of volume? We're trying to making money?

SPEAKER_120: We're trying to make money for some days than OpenSea. OpenSea was valued at $14 billion a few, few months ago. OpenSea and Magic Eden are the two sort of juggernauts going head to head. OpenSea is native Ethereum, but they've added Solana support. Magic Eden is native Solana. And I don't know, but I don't think that they're adding Ethereum support to this. Maybe they will, but I think they probably just doubling down Solana.

SPEAKER_123: I think if, if you look at the spectrum of what's happening in the NFT space, there are only two blockchains or maybe three that can compete in NFTs right now. And that is Ethereum number one. Solana is number two. And number three is probably Flow, you know, CryptoKitties, etc.

SPEAKER_120: So those are the three top blockchains out there right now for NFTs. And Magic Eden is the number one player on Solana. I think a valuation of 1.6 billion is probably reasonable for what they're busy building.

SPEAKER_282: And it's a great product. It's a great service. I use it.

SPEAKER_300: How do these services make money?

SPEAKER_120: They get transaction fees on every single NFT sale. So, you know, Magic Eden, I think takes two and a half, OpenSea takes two and a half percent. I'm not sure Magic Eden might be two and a half percent as well on a transaction fee basis. And then you obviously, the creators get something. Now, the difference between Ethereum and Solana is obviously Ethereum still got the upcoming merge,

SPEAKER_122: which we know how that goes. And Ethereum does have a history of having high gas fees. And so that eats away at the profits for, you know, both the exchanges as well as the creators and

SPEAKER_282: participants in the ecosystem. And Solana has got a good, you know, I think, you know, track record of being really, really cheap. And they're actually trying to increase the price right now to reduce spam, you know, using a new,

SPEAKER_120: some new changes to the protocol. But the point is like, well, these are all experiments. Let's see how they play out over the long term. But I don't think it's unreasonable to give Magic Eden a high valuation given the sheer volume that

SPEAKER_282: they're doing right now. And on some days, as I said, they've eclipsed OpenSea.

SPEAKER_303: Let's talk about NFTs just writ large. There was this collectible concept to them.

SPEAKER_02: They were kind of becoming a store of value for people. And there was obviously a lot of speculation in them. People buying them not because they love the art, but because they thought they would appreciate in value. Then there's this new thing like Fry Fish Club that Gary Vee did, where you're buying a membership. It's kind of Soho House. You don't own the Soho House, but you have a membership. And you can flip it and sell it. And then Kevin Rose is doing his project, which is called Moonbirds and Moonbirds.

SPEAKER_305: Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_02: And Kevin's pretty legit founder, obviously. His concept is he's going to just keep adding interesting benefits to it. We bought two NFTs for after party and invested in the company. Again, a very small bet for us. Likewise. But we thought, hey, okay, and we know the founders there are pretty legit. I shouldn't say very legit. They're super legit. And their concept was to kind of make a music arts festival, I would think along the lines of Coachella or Burning Man. And the NFTs become access. And in fact, they gave us, I think, four VIP tickets with, you know, each NFT. And that's in perpetuity, I believe.

SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: And it's in perpetuity, right? So then if these things increase in value, I could sell that NFT that we bought for maybe 10K or 9K. And it'd be like having season tickets to the Warriors except to be season tickets to Coachella.

SPEAKER_30: So these are two very different use cases. One is access to real world events and being part of a club. The other one is art. And I guess you're somehow part of a club, but the club is just you get to own part of the art. Is that what this is going to turn into club memberships? Um, because that seems to be the only part that's actual real world value.

SPEAKER_21: I will say I wouldn't write off the art. Art does have real world value. I'm like, I'm advising an NFT project that is all about art right now.

SPEAKER_02: Okay. I kind of, the reason I write it off is because it seems like they're flooding it with commodity slash art.

SPEAKER_30: So it's hard to determine, like, I know people's real, a real artist, but like,

SPEAKER_02: anybody can hire like, you know, and make 10,000 of these, it seems through third parties in Manila or Korea or whatever. And that's what people are doing.

SPEAKER_199: They just make, and I think some of these are auto generated art, like where like a computer is making it or something. So like when Dolly can make a million of these, who cares?

SPEAKER_122: There's a spectrum. There's a spectrum here, right? So you get, you get one of one art pieces. So you got unique, like a beatball every day that he puts out the, you know, one of one, you can own it or not own it. And that's a unique art. And in the future, I already have these, by the way, I have these like NFT, um, art frames at home where I can actually put a verified NFT bar. So it's the same as, you know, a fake Mona Lisa versus real Mona Lisa. I actually own the NFT and I got proof of ownership and I, it's on the blockchain. And here's the art displayed in my home versus, um, you know, a copy. Okay. And I, on a digital frame. So that's the one thing. So you get the one over one. Then you've got the, you get the generative art, which I think is, uh, part of what you're talking about infinite. You can just create lots of this stuff. It doesn't matter. Um, you can, but then you get high quality generative art. I'm involved with a project called explorers and it's, we, we, you know, you create the pieces and then you kind of generate the rarities and everything else. And you put it together. And that's, you know, we work at the concept art house on that. That's actually a legit way of doing it. Um, then you get, you get, um, I mean, this is a whole spectrum. I go, I probably go through a whole bunch of other examples, but, oh, you get AI art as well. Um, my wife's working on AI art right now, and it's actually incredible. Um, and what artists can do there.

SPEAKER_135: And then the question is how many prints, how many, what, what is AI art? Describe. Um, so AI art is basically using artificial intelligence to take, um, you know, scenes,

SPEAKER_317: uh, objects, et cetera, and, and basically creates, it's, it's hard to explain. Um, I'll show, I'll show it to you.

SPEAKER_02: Describe to the AI what you want and it makes something interesting, uh, that maybe you didn't intend. So it's a collaboration between the AI and the actual art human. Exactly. Exactly. Is that my understanding of it?

SPEAKER_122: Yes. Or you take objects that, that take objects that you want to put together and say, you know, maybe it's, uh, um, you know, a chess piece and water and whatever else you just create this, this combative art, but it requires, it requires a good eye. It gives like the AI has no idea what it's doing, right? It just, it just kind of combines it. So you have to give instruction. Um, you know, and, and so that like, there's this whole spectrum of different types of art that you can create. Um, and I think digital art and NFTs are just the, the canvas. It's the canvas for, for artists, right?

SPEAKER_323: It's like the same as, you know, it's the same as a regular canvas, you know, and art just needs paints and oils and whatever else. What do you think, Molly?

SPEAKER_183: Like, I was very surprised to find myself agreeing with that, that, that there was, there is a,

SPEAKER_21: there is a goal behind this art project that there's, you know, a layer, a base layer that's

Jason Calacanis: been created specifically by the artists and then the rest is generated. It's sort of like you're describing, like there's, you, you know, you generate permeations out of these base pieces that are original, that are beautiful, that have been created with purpose, that have a philosophy behind them. And that are purely driven out of like, I mean, I think what you are seeing when you talk to artists who are, you know, in this case, this woman is like, not that techie. It's the last person you would think is genuinely an artist who was like, huh, there's a way to experiment with expression and the concept of identity and the way we present ourselves online here and to make something beautiful out of that. And I was like, yeah, okay, that's art. That has value.

SPEAKER_108: Oh, no, and I looked, this would be very clear here. There's different types of generative art. You get the cookie cutter generative art, which is, I think what I'm talking about is like the stuff that you get outsourced at, you know, five bucks an hour and like, that's junk. I think we all know that, but like, but, but you can create generative pieces of art.

SPEAKER_129: Like I said, I have a project for a hundred thousand pieces of art. We're busy creating. It's high quality. It's generative, but it's high quality. And it's limited in scope. It's generative.

SPEAKER_331: It's high quality. It's limited, right? It's the difference between. I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

SPEAKER_07: I think it's great. I'm doing it too. We should totally talk.

SPEAKER_333: I'm fascinated by it, but I just, it feels like there's a difference between right.

SPEAKER_17: There are a million artists everywhere making like drawings on the beach.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, there's like a story over the weekend about somebody who was selling like pieces for, you know, 50 bucks in Times Square or whatever. Now they're going for a million dollars. Like that's how art works.

SPEAKER_335: Here's a lot of, yeah, it's hard to understand how art works. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: It's like, it's almost like you're doing that. It's like, there's this opaque, really weird thing. And there's also a lot of, you know, like how something becomes a hit is part like manipulation because there's like people actually manipulating the art market, you know, like collectors and galleries and they like have insiders and like they sell to five insiders at a low price and they get the other 50 pieces to be bought by the public at a higher price and everybody's getting is flipping in between and there's arbitrage going on. But then there's also like the actual art is pleasing to people. And the problem I have with the whole thing is because it is unlimited. Then it's hard to have scarcity. So it's just hard to navigate through it.

SPEAKER_134: Like what actually things are working.

SPEAKER_122: Um, but yeah, let's go back to the, again, the spectrum of NFTs, right? So on the one end, you start with like one of one art, small collections, large, large, low quality collections, large, high quality collections.

SPEAKER_156: And then you go into what else can you do with entities? Uh, well, what memberships, memberships. I love the membership idea.

SPEAKER_196: To me, that's the biggest win I've seen in crypto besides store of value.

SPEAKER_123: Well, so memberships and ticketing are the two big wins for me. Yeah. If you can create tickets that are NFTs. Which I consider the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, memberships are more permanent and ticketing is you, you can transfer it, you can sell it, you can do all sorts of things with it. And I think those are great use cases for NFTs right now.

SPEAKER_345: And we're going to see more and more of that evolve.

SPEAKER_196: And the concept here is when does the Apple wallet support NFTs?

SPEAKER_30: I mean, for me, the Apple wallet, when you go to a warriors game, Ticketmaster gives you like a very specific essential NFT. It is one of one, I guess. Uh, and you can't screenshot it anymore. By the way, I bought the Knicks playoff tickets last year and on SeatGeek and they did the whole,

SPEAKER_02: like, you know, send the PDF thing and they wouldn't accept it last year. And literally I bought like thousands of dollars worth of tickets. And they stopped me at the door and said, your tickets are not valid. Super embarrassing, right? I'm with like three guests and I'm like, hold on. I went to the ticket window. I said, what's available? Because they have the resale value there. And I just bought another set of tickets. And then I tweeted it. And then SeatGeek got back to me. We're sorry. We'll refund your money.

SPEAKER_46: But they're doing something with those that are QR coded or have like some uniqueness to it. So that's already coming. But do you have a prediction of when Apple wallet will support NFTs?

SPEAKER_171: I would say knowing Apple, probably 24 to 36 months from now. Because they're always like, they're not the first movers in the space. Pick a number.

SPEAKER_352: Pick a month. We'll do an over under bet.

SPEAKER_171: Pick a month. Set the line.

SPEAKER_353: I'll say 36 months.

SPEAKER_02: Okay. 36.5. You want to pick a specific number so that we can not have this thing where it's a push. You know, if it happens to happen around 36.5 or 35.5?

SPEAKER_356: Oh, 35.5. Okay.

SPEAKER_358: Molly, you take the over or the under? I'll tell you. On Apple wallet supporting crypto? NFT specific.

SPEAKER_362: So your NFT is in your Apple wallet. So when you go or anything. As an entry mechanism. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_363: Or just to prove your membership, you know?

SPEAKER_365: I'm just telling Molly, I try to think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 35.5 is the line. 35.5. So almost three years. Yeah. You go over or under?

SPEAKER_367: Over or under? I'm going to go over because it's Apple. I'm going to go under.

SPEAKER_221: So are we in for a hundy Molly? What are we in for? Are we in for? I'm in for a Warriors game. I told you.

SPEAKER_01: How much do you want to bet against checkout? I bet in $2 increments. $2 bills. All right. Let's go with the sushi dinner.

SPEAKER_06: You always get a sushi dinner.

SPEAKER_199: Sushi dinner with Vinny capped off at 500 bucks. Can't go too crazy.

SPEAKER_371: But we won't know for three years if we. I know, but that's the fun of it. Okay. That's the fun of it. We're going to put these.

SPEAKER_372: I want all the long bet producers on a notion page.

SPEAKER_374: I'm going to take the under Nick.

SPEAKER_30: Let's make this week in startups.com slash bets. And we're just going to chronicle all the bets on a notion page, please.

SPEAKER_378: I love it.

SPEAKER_30: And I texted. I've been doing this for years. We got to find all the old bets. Somebody needs to make an archive that we can search the whole transcripts.

SPEAKER_183: I bet the noties would do that for us.

SPEAKER_379: I bet they would do that on a Coda. Yeah.

SPEAKER_380: Do it on Coda, please. Yes. That's our sponsor Coda. Well, we're both. Oh, they are both sponsors. Okay. Let's do Coda for this one.

SPEAKER_46: Coda for this. I did the, I did notion on the last one. We both love notion and code, but make, make me a Coda page. Okay.

SPEAKER_384: Uh, I'm going to like shamelessly. Here's my idea. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_378: Let me know if you like this grift. Rate my grift. I'm going to, I'm going to make, I'm going to, I'm going to pay a developer

SPEAKER_30: to create, uh, a portal between Dolly, the new AI that makes images. I'm going to have it take keywords that are trending on, uh, Twitter. I'm going to make a word cloud of trending stuff. And I'm going to make a million NFTs a day. Based on the trending topics on Twitter, just randomly put it just of the warriors are trending at the same time. I don't know. God, I don't want to say that. Cause that's dark. Um, the warriors are trending at the same time as Obi Wan. And it just does a dolly photo, Obi Wan and warriors. Obi Wan with the warriors, whatever. And then you all of a sudden have Steph and Obi Wan and Darth Vader together in a dolly photo. We NFT the out of this.

SPEAKER_378: And then we just flood the system with NFTs. What do you think? Rate my grift.

SPEAKER_389: Uh, well, I think, I think you'll have, you'll struggle. So would it work? Yes. It would. Yeah. Sure.

SPEAKER_08: What does it cost to mint an NFT on Solana now? Cause that's the key.

SPEAKER_392: If I do a million of these, if I did it on Ethereum, wouldn't it cost like 10 bucks each? Fraction of a penny.

SPEAKER_30: Fraction of a penny. If they flooded the system with that many NFTs, would that break the system? And why are people flooding? No, no, no, not at all.

SPEAKER_108: I mean, Solana can handle 6,000 transactions a second at the moment. So that's pretty good. I mean, I'll do a quick, uh, a quick, uh, shout out to civic.

SPEAKER_120: We've got civic.me, which we, you know, it's kind of in soft release this week. And civic.me is basically a way for you to, um, connect your, your, all your different wallets to a single identity. Perfect. And, and then you, you, you can do proof of uniqueness and get a civic pass. And so when you're doing a mint or whatever else, you can say it's, you know, unique for a certain person.

SPEAKER_135: So, you know, Jason, if you have 20 wallets, you can link it to the same person. So you aggregate, curate, uh, it's basically, it's decentralized.

SPEAKER_199: How do you know the person at civic.me? Do you actually use a third party system to verify it's me or ask me to send my passport or a driver's license? Cause now on Instagram, I want to get verified.

SPEAKER_30: They're like, take a picture of your passport or driver's license. I'm like, okay. So they're manually checking to try to figure this out.

SPEAKER_02: I mean, of course, somebody could have stolen a picture of my credit card or my, uh, driver's license or something, I guess, and try to do that. It'd be a lot of work.

SPEAKER_134: Um, but how do we actually know who is, is anybody doing that work?

SPEAKER_156: We, we are.

SPEAKER_108: So civic's been building all this stuff for years. We've got all this infrastructure to do verification. Pretty much, I'd say 99% automated, 95%. Obviously we throw out exceptions.

SPEAKER_120: We have to review those.

SPEAKER_135: But, uh, what we do more, more like importantly for NFTs is we do uniqueness.

SPEAKER_122: And so what uniqueness is basically is your face, um, without having to do identity and who you are, your face is used to create a 3d kind of map, a topographic map. So we know what your face looks like. We don't store your images. We just have this, this map. And, uh, with that facial recognition, you can link multiple accounts to that. And now when someone wants to know that it's the same person or it's unique to you, you have to produce your 3d face. No one can go in there with the picture and try and pretend to be you. And so that's how we do it. We, we're trying to create this uniqueness infrastructure. Um, now if someone requires that you're a U S citizen, then you have to produce some documentation, scan it, scan your ID, those sorts of things. But for, for general NFT usage, if it's just, is the person unique and not a bot? We do that with uniqueness testing in civic. And so a lot of, uh, NFT mints are using us because what Kevin Rose did really well, it's worth noting is when he did the, the drop for moon birds and proof, et cetera, it was like one, one per person. And he had the raffle system and a whole bunch of other things built into it,

SPEAKER_120: but he was trying to make sure it was the most well distributed NFT, uh, product, you know, in the world. And he did a really good job.

SPEAKER_122: I think, um, at the time, given the resource they had, we want to make it a step better where we, we can do a drop to a hundred thousand people. And 99% of them are just unique individuals.

SPEAKER_123: Um, because of the problem. And Elon talks about this all the time. I mean, the problem, the problem with Twitter right now is, is that the bot problem is real. I mean, Elon is not kidding. People think Elon is like, you know, it's, it's actually real. We have a major bot problem in Twitter. And we, you, the only way you solve this problem is by having.

SPEAKER_406: What percentage do you think it is? What percentage?

SPEAKER_123: I, I think it's, I think it depends how you define it. Right. Cause they, I think they probably like look at band accounts as being not there.

SPEAKER_122: And so like as a percentage of new accounts, I don't know, but I can tell you now, I'm pretty sure that on, on most Twitter profiles, 15 to 25% of the followers are fake.

SPEAKER_114: The 5% number is BS. Ridiculous.

SPEAKER_410: I don't, but it was ridiculous.

SPEAKER_114: So what, I mean, what gymnastics do you.

SPEAKER_26: Way more probably.

SPEAKER_46: What gymnastics do you think mental gymnastics Twitter has done to justify less, way less than 5%, I think is what they said.

SPEAKER_412: There's just lots of ways to, there's lots of ways to mask the numbers.

SPEAKER_122: You could say, you know, if we catch it, that it's not fake, et cetera, et cetera. You know, like there's ways that they can exclude, you know, locked accounts and ban accounts. It's like, Jason, let me, I spent years going to talk to Twitter executives and, and trying to

SPEAKER_123: get them to do identity and they won't do it. And they didn't want to do it for a reason. Why? Okay. It's a very simple reason.

SPEAKER_417: Cynical reason, honest reason.

SPEAKER_123: No, no, it's very simple. Like they did not, they did not want to catch the floor because they then got to tell advertisers

SPEAKER_122: that the impressions are fake and give refunds or whatever else. As an advertiser previously on Twitter, I know that just a lot of the views are bots. They're not real views. We know this for a fact. The engagement levels don't make sense. But the ad people and the sales people have been trying to sell ads on Twitter forever. Like this is, there was no willingness to solve the bot problem.

SPEAKER_123: You can solve, the way Twitter should work, in my opinion, is it should be one, one human, multiple accounts. You can have a hundred accounts linked to the same human. And that way you can analyze the system better because all we have in Twitter right now is like echo chamber and fake amplification. So what happens in Twitter is someone has 50 or a hundred accounts or 500 accounts. And Twitter goes and says, are you a real human? And the guy goes, yes, I'm a real human. Yes, I'm a real human. Like on multiple accounts. So because they, and their argument is when we check these accounts, there's a real person behind it. Obviously there's a real person behind it. What do you think? There's always someone behind the bot and he can always respond and tell you he's real and message you back and say, hey, why are you blocking my account?

SPEAKER_419: I happen to have 500 of these, but who cares? So there's always a real scammer.

SPEAKER_06: A bot is every additional account that you don't actually need. Yeah, there should be. Yes, exactly. Molly, if. And mass accounts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_423: Molly, what Vinny is describing is true. And Twitter allowed the bot problem. And Facebook. And Google. Well, Facebook. Anybody who's selling digital apps.

SPEAKER_46: Facebook has done a really much different level of job because of the real name policy. So I think it's much different, right?

SPEAKER_188: It may be a lower number, but Facebook every single year has had some report come out to

Jason Calacanis: advertisers that was like, hey, we dramatically over counted the number of accounts and users and views and, you know, I mean, everybody who sells digital advertising on a big social media platform is benefiting from this, including Twitter. Well, I mean, one of the things that I just makes it easier to create more like maybe their volume,

SPEAKER_135: not as a percentage, but as created by Twitter has a Twitter has a lower bar because that you can go and comment on everyone else's feeds and whatever else.

SPEAKER_123: So it's easier to generate fake content or amplify, you know, fake opinions on Twitter, Facebook, I have to be a friend of Jason's to see his feed and jump in there. Right. So Twitter is an open platform and Facebook is closed. So the amount of bot fraud and spam they're going to get there is very, very different to Twitter. And when I try talking to these Twitter execs, they refuse to do this. They don't, we don't want identity. We don't want, we want to give people their privacy. Like they, they, they convince themselves that privacy and anonymity is, is the same thing. It's not, it's not the same thing. You can, people have a, Jason can have his own private Twitter account and he can have 20 bot accounts, but the algorithm could then, if it knew that Jason owns all these accounts, it could then not be gained. Because what happens is when, when they want to amplify a certain tweet, they have like 25, 30 responses on it. And it starts rising up in the rankings. Oh, there's a lot of activity on this tweet. People are talking about this. This is a big deal. But it's the same guy. It's just typing multiple messages. And Twitter's argument is when we message those, each of those 30 accounts, someone responds to us.

SPEAKER_40: All right.

SPEAKER_435: And it looks like activity and they love it. Like, look, they have benefited from it from years.

Jason Calacanis: And, you know, bad actors on the platform have used it for brigading and harassment and political campaigning for years and Twitter ignored it. And now they have a problem.

SPEAKER_237: And I don't, I'm sorry. I don't feel bad for anybody. And here's the thing.

SPEAKER_438: It's solvable. It's solvable. Do you just do it? That's the main mess.

SPEAKER_439: Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_122: So at Civic.me, it's, it's the face map, right? If we just do a face map, you don't have to store the image of the person. You don't have to store the video. You don't have to store anything. You just link every single Twitter account to a real face. And there's no privacy concerns or issues. You don't know the identity of the person.

SPEAKER_135: But if you see that face maps being used on 50 different accounts, it gives you, it's a lot easier to filter it out.

SPEAKER_02: A face map's a great idea. I mean, this is just, when we use face ID and you, you roll your head around, like you're rolling your neck. Exactly. Exactly. It's really hard to fake. That is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_199: So they could do that without you having to release your photo. It would just be done in your settings. It wouldn't be a public thing.

SPEAKER_135: Well, no, I mean, there's ways to do it. You'd probably just have to use some sort of SDK in Twitter or use a third party decentralized at any provider like Civic to do it.

SPEAKER_122: It could be done. But my point is there's no willingness to do it right now. They don't want to solve the problem because then they have to go back to the street and report that, oh, we actually only have 50 million unique users, not the hundreds of millions we say we have. And that's the issue.

SPEAKER_199: I have a counter view on this.

SPEAKER_02: If they actually had the real number and the real number was dramatically lower, then it would be like this huge opportunity. We only have this amount of penetration. Look at how many we can add in the future. Yes.

SPEAKER_199: If we get this right. So there's a, there's a crucible moment for this company to use Roloff's term at Sequoia. And the crucible moment is admit the reality of the situation and then explain the opportunity.

SPEAKER_02: If we get rid of these boxes, then more people will want to participate because a lot of people are not participating because of brigading because of these vile conversations that go off the rails and you see in the advertising every time we advertise on Facebook or Instagram or Google search or you advertise on Twitter, what you'll see is Google search is like, you know, the, the most crisp in terms of like people typed in a word and went to your

SPEAKER_403: page and then, you know, Facebook and Instagram come next.

SPEAKER_02: And then a distant third in terms of click through rate and your actual cost for the acquisition of customers and the ability for this to actually move the needle is Twitter.

SPEAKER_46: And it's a distant, distant, you know, uh, fifth or sixth, I think in terms of advertising, it's just really pathetic. The, the returns you get on Twitter. So, all right, Vinny, you're awesome. We'll have you on again. You're awesome.

SPEAKER_459: Thanks for your, and you're not. Thanks guys. You're not the crypto.

SPEAKER_199: No, no, it's on me.

SPEAKER_463: There's a lot of speculation that you put a hundred million in Solana in there.

SPEAKER_464: Like just as a semi-serious question, is there any chance that Vinny is the whale?

SPEAKER_466: No, so, so, so I would never, I would never, I would never borrow more than like one or

SPEAKER_120: 2% of my assets against any crypto. Oh, what a flex there.

SPEAKER_471: Yeah.

SPEAKER_469: And so at a hundred, at a hundred, do the math.

SPEAKER_473: No, not quite. It's not, it's not me. Close, but not me. We believe you. We believe you.

SPEAKER_479: Look at Vinny.

SPEAKER_478: Close.

SPEAKER_479: Three common Vinny for a moment.

SPEAKER_480: I'm totally, I'm totally joking. It's not me.

SPEAKER_208: I really want to compare notes on our, um, who do we think it is? On our projects too, on our NFT art projects.

SPEAKER_171: You should guys, I could probably guess who it is. I could probably put together a short list. Who the whale is. Yeah, but I would never say publicly.

SPEAKER_199: Well, before we, we won't go there, but in terms of profiling the person, they would

SPEAKER_02: have to have been very early to Solana to have that big of a position in all likelihood. Um, this is probably only a portion of their Solana. They, so they probably have, you would guess if they put 5 million into this thing, which is

SPEAKER_30: speculative, they probably would have 10 times that amount of Solana. Five times.

SPEAKER_230: At least I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure. I, I don't think.

SPEAKER_172: Or you think somebody might want to clear the whole position? Well, it could be someone like, this is all my Solana. Maybe I'm going to look, I want to speculate too much, but I think it's, it's someone who's

SPEAKER_135: at least I'm hoping responsible, but, um, you know, uh, and I think that they're moving,

SPEAKER_122: moving the funds around, but I think probably responsible and reasonably illiquid because, you know, at these levels, they would have paid down the stuff not to get liquidated. So there's probably a liquidity issue there. So there's probably, there's probably a short list of people. It could be, I can almost guarantee you that the Solan guys know who it is because, you know, like they have to, you're not gonna, you're not gonna take 90% of your, of a book on a platform you don't trust, et cetera, et cetera. So they, they probably know. So that's something in privacy and anonymity. Privacy is that, you know, someone knows who you are and anonymity is nobody knows. And I think this case, it's just a privacy issue. Yeah.

SPEAKER_46: The interesting thing with this is anybody who was in that, um, that venture fund, uh, coin that you were GP in and the name of it is again. Multicoin? Multicoin. Multicoin. Multicoin decides when they distribute. So it can't be those folks in all likelihood because they're locked up.

SPEAKER_493: It's not, no, it's not multicoin. It's not multicoin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_494: It can't be because they were locked up. Multicoin, but multicoin doesn't use leverage either.

SPEAKER_122: So we, you know, I mean, Tushar has been public about this. We don't like, we don't do this stuff for like three hours and like,

SPEAKER_497: we just, we just don't do that. We, we, we, we know better.

SPEAKER_08: All right. Everybody follow Vinny Langham on, uh, the Twitter.

SPEAKER_413: Great, great asset to the entrepreneurial community. We'll talk soon. Vinny. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for the time.

SPEAKER_499: Appreciate it. Thanks everyone.

SPEAKER_502: Take care. Talk soon. Really great guest, huh? Molly.

Jason Calacanis: He's so good. He's so good. I mean, that was like really understandable. And I think we're all it's interesting because the more we talk about it, I think we end up circling the same truth, which is like, there are parts of this that are really real. It's really early days. It's going to be a hot mess and a lot of people are going to get robbed,

SPEAKER_21: but there are some fundamentals that you can employ to do this the right way. Maybe.

SPEAKER_504: I think the way you're doing it, which is like dabble. Yeah.

SPEAKER_46: Learn, dabble, learn, dabble, learn. It's the same thing I teach people in Angel University or in the book. Like make the smallest bets possible as you're learning. Just like in poker, if you want to learn to gamble, play at the smallest tournaments, the $20 buy-in tournament at your local casino card room. And if you blow through three buy-ins and you blow 60 bucks on a Sunday

SPEAKER_250: afternoon and I get a free grilled cheese in the process.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Look at it like free grilled cheese. I'm going, I want to do that. Well, you know, the place I used to play Hollywood park was super degenerate, but I played at the big table, which was like a $500 buy-in minimum. Yeah. Which is kind of hilarious, but you know, you get all the free food you want.

SPEAKER_08: You just tip the waiters and they actually had some pretty good food there. Because it was such a Asian base of users. They had a Korean food section, a Vietnamese section, a Chinese section. It was awesome. So you can get like foe or you can get like galbi or you could get just,

SPEAKER_46: I would just get a grilled cheese on sourdough with two different cheeses.

SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've done that move, but that's the J Cal special.

SPEAKER_511: The grilled cheese on sourdough for sure.

SPEAKER_02: Grilled cheese on sourdough, but you go a slice of Swiss and two slices of cheddar. Boom. Just delightful. Amazing. Amazing. All that good stuff. All right. Listen, tomorrow on the show, Molly, you may have seen this, uh, over the last couple of days, Buzzfeed, which has some great reporting as you often correct me when I say they're about

SPEAKER_46: listicles, uh, they did some really intense reporting on tick tock and the idea that I have said over and over again, you cannot trust, uh, that tick tock is not sharing information back with a Chinese communist party, but maybe you could preview it for folks.

SPEAKER_512: Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_267: There were some, um, and, and I will be honest. I have some questions about the reporting. Okay.

Jason Calacanis: I'm excited to talk about this. So we have a story that, uh, uh, detailed some leaked audio from within tick tock about the attempts of the U S team to try to make sure that data was not being accessed in China and some of the concerns, uh, that it is. And of course, times when that data has been shared and, and, you know, that's been, of course, the big question about tick tock is like, they say that all the data on us users is stored in the U S, but is that credible at all? And it's, it sounds like during attempts to really crack down on tick tock and maybe, uh, present former president Trump's attempts to ban it, that that really kicked up some serious internal efforts to make sure, or at least figure out if that data was being shared. It's a really interesting story. The author of that story is Emily Baker white. And then of course, there have been lots of reports from the New York times this week too, about all the ways that China spies on its own citizens.

SPEAKER_267: And ideally.

SPEAKER_46: If you want to join us live youtube.com slash this weekend, we're live every day, 10 AM PT Pacific time. And, uh, we have reporters jump in or experts jump into the live stream live streams get you about 25% more content than the podcast. Cause we do a little bantering Molly and I, uh, but this is a really important story. And dare I say a victory lap for me, my position has been very clear, you know, like this is an issue of reciprocity and it's very just straight up too dangerous for a communist country to have this level, this level of insight into our citizens. And, uh, these 80 internal TikTok meetings were recorded by somebody. And, uh, you, you have questions about the reporting. So do I Molly. This seems to me like a heroic effort by somebody. And I think it's a developer because developers are incredibly principled. And, uh, in my experience, um, whether they're whether you agree with their principles or not, they tend to be incredibly principled and thoughtful people. And, uh, I think this is a developer who has grave concerns. And that's why this was leaked. And I'm telling you, if, um, uh, Emily has this at Buzzfeed, you know, who else has it? CIA FBI. This is going down. This story is underreported and we're going to do a deep dive tomorrow on this week and

SPEAKER_271: startups on Wednesday. So join us tomorrow, everybody. It's gonna be great. See you there.

SPEAKER_518: See you then. Bye bye. Bye bye.