This Week in Startups - Crypto’s de-platforming and the balkanization of AI with Vinny Lingham | E1710

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Vinny Lingham joins Jason to break down the state of crypto’s de-platforming by the US government. They discuss recent happenings with Coinbase (2:13), Balaji’s Bitcoin bet (20:00), Binance (38:23...), SBF (44:07), and more! Then, they wrap with a discussion about the coming balkanization of AI (52:54). (0:00) Jason tees up today’s topics (2:13) Coinbase’s Wells notice & the state of crypto (8:08) Pilot - Get 20% off the first 6 months at https://pilot.com/twist (9:36) Clarity within the crypto industry (15:06) The future of Bitcoin in the US  (18:29) Orgspace - Get $2000 in credits at http://orgspace.io/twist (20:00) Balaji’s bet and hyperinflation (25:50) A debate on whether to short Coinbase (36:52) Issuu - Sign up for free or get 50% off an annual premium account by using promo code twist at https://issuu.com/podcast (38:23) CFTC sues Binance  (44:07) SBF’s indictment  (49:00) Why is the government clamping down on crypto?  (52:54) The balkanization of AI FOLLOW Vinny: https://twitter.com/vinnylingham FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1 FOUNDERS! Subscribe to the Founder University podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/founder-university/id1648407190

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Okay, everybody, we have a great show for you today. Vitting Linkham joins me for a solo Dolo, crypto roundtable, Sundays out sick, but we chop up all the important news. Coinbase has been issued a Wells notice by the SEC. That leads to a big and final debate about whether or not I should make my first J-trade to short a stock. Should I short Coinbase?
Starting point is 00:00:21 We're going to find out at the end of the segment. And then we dive into the news that CZ and Binance are being sued by the CFTC. and we have a crypto sociopath update. Sam Bankman-Fried is facing over 100 years in jail because the indictments keep coming. He has now been accused of bribing Chinese officials. Wow, shocking. And then we wrap up with an amazing conversation about generative AI, how Vini is building on top of open AI into his awesome startup, waitroom.com. And then we talk about the balkanization of different pools and different territories of data. going to win shopping and AI, who's going to win consumer, who's going to win the enterprise,
Starting point is 00:01:03 etc. And it's actually a pretty interesting discussion. And I talk about who might buy Reddit, Quora, and Stack Overflow. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Pilot. Grow your business more sustainably and operate more effectively. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to Pilot. it.com slash twist and get 20% off the first six months. Orgspace. If you're a startup and you aren't building a performance culture, your competitors will eat your lunch. Get $2,000 of credits on pro plans with a 30-day free trial at orgspace.io slash twist. And issue is the all in one platform for
Starting point is 00:01:50 creating and distributing beautiful digital content. Get started with Issue today for free or sign up for an annual premium account and get 50% off when you go to issue.com slash podcast and use promo code twist. That's I-S-S-U-U-U dot com slash podcast and use promo code twist. All right, everybody, Sunny Madra is out today. So feeling a little sick and under the weather, but I got Vinnie Lingam here and there's so much going on in crypto that the show must go on, Vinny. Of course, Vinny's a co-founder of Civic, startup that in Crips. identity information on the blockchain, and he started Wait Room, which is a one-to-one video conferencing platform. You can go check it out at Waitroom.com.
Starting point is 00:02:38 Sonny, this has been a crazy couple of weeks, huh? I'm sorry. Vinnie. You know, my notes have Sunny at the top. Vinny. It's been a crazy couple of weeks here, and I think we had a week off in between. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be back. It's happening. Yeah, excited. I guess in the crypto community, the SEC legal action, impending legal action, I guess would be the best way say it,
Starting point is 00:03:04 against Coinbase, according to the Wells notice that was issued last week. Is that the biggest news right now? Yeah, I think that, I mean, it's quite surprising for me
Starting point is 00:03:15 for them to, you know, go after, you know, a U.S. regulated, you know, compliant entity in this way.
Starting point is 00:03:23 But to be fair, they're getting off to everyone. So I don't think that, you know, I think Coinbase probably fell deaf out if they didn't go off to Coinbase. All right.
Starting point is 00:03:29 let's just tee up what happened here. The SECC, Securities Exchange Commission sent to Coinbase, which is obviously, as Benny's correctly pointing out here, one of the largest and notable and legit players in the space, they sent a well's notice. And that's typically a notice that precedes a lawsuit. The notice was pretty unclear. According to Coinbase, it mentioned Coinbase Earn Prime, its wallet and certain unnamed digital assets. Coinbase responded with a blog post detailing the U.S. government's uneven enforcement and lack of guidance. That's been a theme Brian Armstrong's been on for a while. Hey, can I come in and talk to you? And they're like, yeah, you can come in, but the meeting never seems to happen.
Starting point is 00:04:12 So who's right, who's wrong in this situation? Is it Coinbase for innovating and taking risks and pushing the envelope? Or is it the SEC for not being clear other than to say, hey, the rules exist for all the rules. Where are you coming down on this in 2023? Look, my take on it's pretty simple. I think that they both have good arguments and good points. I don't think I wouldn't be able to side with either of them right now if I was a judge. I'd have to look at the facts. I think that there's a lot of, there's a lack of regularity clarity, as Brian correctly puts out, you know, points out like the ACC's jurisdiction, what they're going after. And I do know that Coinbase did run a whole bunch of things through the SEC and at some point, someone in the organization, you know, greenlit listings, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:05:06 So there's a lot of back and forth. It's very hard. I mean, you need to look at the facts of the case. And I mean, I think it's actually a healthy thing that this is happening now that the SEC puts together a lawsuit and goes to court and both sides fight it out and it takes a year or two to resolve, whatever. Let's get this done. Let's get to put behind us right now. Got it. And to be clear, there's not a legal filed action yet.
Starting point is 00:05:30 No. There is this imminency that this is coming any moment that both sides are sort of kind of saying. And if you look at Brian's tweet storm, I don't know if you saw that, Vinnie. Yeah, I did. I did. But my point is, my point is this, okay, until there's actually a legal precedent that's been sent by a judge at, like, the highest court level we can get to on this topic, then, you know, like, once that's resolved, it kind of gives us clarity. So the good, the outcome here is we get clarity one way or another and at least it's a judge making the decision based upon the facts versus one agency
Starting point is 00:06:07 saying, we have jurisdiction, this is wrong, versus another agency, if CFTC is going off to Binance. Like, there's all these agencies involved. Who is jurisdiction? What's the clarity? And so I'm, I'm actually looking forward to, I know it's not great for Coinbase in the short term, but I'm looking forward to what the actual ruling is going to be and the substance of that ruling because that basically puts the other agents. I mean, if the SC loses this case, it's going to be a really tough one for them to go after other exchanges and etc. And the XRP case is still ongoing and that's years in.
Starting point is 00:06:43 So now this is going to get resolved. It looks like and mitigated through the courts. And that will force some, yeah, clarity. And if I guess the two possibilities are follow the existing rules, in which case, crypto as we know it is kind of DOA in America, if they say, hey, just the existing rules are what you need to follow? Again, this goes back to the previous point we had on previous talks, or on previous shows. Like, what country in the world runs the global regulations for crypto? There's nothing.
Starting point is 00:07:21 Like, everyone has their own rules. And so you have to play by rules in each. each country, the US has got a set and set of rules governed by the SEC, the CFTC and whoever else, and there's still no clarity there. Switzerland's been the most progressive because they've actually created a set of rules that companies can abide by. I think it's a very dangerous situation we have in the US where we're now not, we're pushing entrepreneurs out, especially in frontier so technologies and not just in, you know, in
Starting point is 00:07:49 crypto, but like, you know, even in banking, right? So why would you bank in the US where you contract? your funds if a bank goes under. Like, we have those issues, right? We had that conversation. So we had to be very careful. America was founded entrepreneurship. That was it.
Starting point is 00:08:02 It was like people coming here for a better life and want to create businesses. In the early days of a startup, you need to be focused on your product and your customers, your customers and how they use your product. But please don't forget about getting your accounting dialed in. As an early stage investor, I've seen so many accounting horror stories that have literally sunk a startup. And these were startups with great founders, great teams, great products, great customers, but their accounting killed them. Why? Because they didn't know the difference between accrual-based accounting and cash.
Starting point is 00:08:32 And if you don't know the difference between that, that's okay. You can learn it. But I've also had different startups forget to do their tax returns, maybe paying without a proper payroll system in place. This is serious stuff that you have to get right. You're going to get it right in the case that your startup is successful. So you might as well get it right from the start. I could literally go on for hours. But when you're a founder, you have to balance not forgetting to set up a proper accounting system while also not getting distracted by trying to hire a CFO. All of these things, right, are on your mind. And there's one simple solution for all of that.
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Starting point is 00:09:21 is here to help you until you get to that point. So Twist listeners can get a 20% discount for the first six months at pilot.com slash twist, p-I-L-O-T dot com slash twist. That's pilot.com slash twist for 20% off your first six months. So with this, yeah, I mean, we get to the overall point. We want entrepreneurship and innovation to happen here. But there are protections for consumers. And a lot of crypto in terms of how fast it moves and, you know, sort of the entire point of
Starting point is 00:09:51 it is that it's available to everybody, that it could be trustless, that it could be decentralized, a lot of like, just even the concept of decentralization. That's rhetoric and narrative, you know that. Like most of crypto's agrift.
Starting point is 00:10:03 Right, but I mean, so just that central, the idea that it needs to be centralized and it needs to follow securities law, and it needs to be accredited investors, and it needs to have certain weight periods. We just need clarity. We just need the,
Starting point is 00:10:14 we need the SEC. But on a practical basis, then these crypto projects would move slower and they wouldn't be able to be distributed. the way they are, so you would take out a whole swath of decentralized tools. That's not true. That's not true.
Starting point is 00:10:28 I don't believe that's true. I believe that you could have a world where, based upon the set of circumstances, like, for example, when a coin is created, what's the mission schedule for founders, investors, what's the minimum requirements, how is the coin mine, what type of model you use, burn, and mid-equilibium. What, you know, because the issue is this, okay? You get these pump and dump groups from all over the world, sending these telegram rooms, they go,
Starting point is 00:10:55 oh, today we're going to pick on coin XYZ, and we're going to pump that coin high, and then we're going to dump it before our followers figure out we're doing this. And everyone else jumping on the train loses. So it's like, this is penny stocks, by the way. This is the 80s and 90s, even early 2000s. This is the penny stock game, and the SECs are clamped down on it and got stricter with it.
Starting point is 00:11:16 We probably need a situation where there are less coins listed in the US. okay so the more legit coins would be here the less legitimate coins would be you know in other exchanges by and so whatever but but we need the regular clarity like my one criticism of coinbase you know I would say I don't have a lot of criticism on coinbase but the one I have is that they do have too many coins listed stuff that's just terrible and they have had
Starting point is 00:11:40 issues with um with uh you know some employees who are doing sort of front running with their cousins and all that stuff so they've got a bit of tarnish there now every company at scale has problems. They've got that problem. I think that like the U.S. consumer, when I look at these coins, I wouldn't, I wouldn't buy, and I'm a sophisticated crypto guy, I wouldn't touch 80% of the coins just on Coinbase. The 20% that's there are really, there's some really good stuff that you should buy and hold in your portfolio. But why are these other 80% there? I don't get it. And I don't see why. I think it was during the boom,
Starting point is 00:12:11 if you don't have a coin that's hot this week, then, and there's 10,000 people in that pump and dump room. Exactly. They want to open an account and they want to trade it and they're going to just pick, you know, Crackin or Binance or some other exchange to, and they'll sign up for that. So it kind of put the gun to Coinbase and said,
Starting point is 00:12:30 if you want, you know, people who want to trade on your platform, they're going to want to trade speculative stuff and they're adults. And I think Brian's Armstrong is a bit of a libertarian. It's like, I think he believes that your money, you can do what you want with it,
Starting point is 00:12:42 which many of us believe to a certain extent. No, that's fair. That's fair. But I think just the audience that they tap into, it's not entirely like, you know, high-end sophisticated crypto people. It's an average man in the street. That word keeps coming up is sophistication.
Starting point is 00:12:59 And I think that's at the core of all this is. And maybe certain coins, you have to have some sort of a license to trade them or something. Maybe like a Series 7 equivalent for crypto. Like you do this simple course and therefore you can evaluate, make your own decisions. And then if you have that certification, you trade whatever you want. look, the guys at Coinbase, there's some super smart people there, they're very thoughtful about what they do, but I do think that, you know, the challenges that they have is they've got to compete with Binance and other exchanges around the world.
Starting point is 00:13:28 And if you don't allow your customers to buy the coins there, they email, they complain, then they go somewhere else and you potentially lose those customers. I get the business risk of not having them. I think you nailed it again. You know, it's obviously the level of sophistication of person has matters in all of this. and that is the clearest, easiest, most American path to resolving all the issues in crypto and in private market investing. We could change the entire system to be instead of limited to be unthroddled for people who have
Starting point is 00:13:58 certain education levels. You can get a license for skydiving or you can get a license for scuba diving. If somebody dies scuba diving and they have licensing, you know what we say? That's a tragedy. but they knew what they were doing. They knew the risks and they jumped out of a plane or they went 100 feet under the water with an air tank with no ability to get to the surface in time
Starting point is 00:14:23 without the use of that tank or somebody else's. And that really is the analogy here. Just make everybody sophisticated. If you want to have a license for a gun, skydiving, scuba diving, whatever it happens to be, diving into crypto, get yourself licensed and then you hold up your license. Listen, I know that this is a Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:14:40 I know that this is a speculative project and I don't even know who the founders of it are. I want to yolo it. Screw it. I'm making a bad bet, you know. Agreed. It's the same as casinos, right? Or playing poker.
Starting point is 00:14:54 Like, no one stops you from going into the aria and slamming down a hundred grand and playing poker with Phil Helmut. No, no. And he's going to get that money at some point. So I was thinking this is the moment that crypto is crashing in America. there was that Operation Chokepoint blog post. 2.0, 2.0. And then there's the, I guess, Katie Hahn did an article that kind of was similar to the 2.0 article in the Wall Street Journal.
Starting point is 00:15:28 So when we're looking at this choke point, do you think it's going to be hard or very hard or impossible, possibly, for Americans to buy Bitcoin and other coins? It's going to get harder and harder, isn't it? Here in the U.S. It's got harder. This is the whole, like, wrench in the spanner for Bellagie, okay? Rinch and spanner, a spanner in the works for Bilagi. It's like, the problem you have is if Bitcoin rises too quickly and becomes a threat to the U.S. dollar hegem, they're going to cut off the, they're going to cut off the ramps.
Starting point is 00:16:03 It'll be some simple. It's like any bank touching, any exchange, you're going to know. Like, the price of Bitcoin in the U.S. rises and falls with the demand for selling and buying based upon U.S. dollar to Bitcoin conversion rates. That's it. And so if all of a sudden Bitcoin rose to $100,000, $200,000, but the banks cut you off, it'll collapse. Because people will try and sell, get a dollars out. Now, yes, there's some hyperinflation sort of argument there, but I'm not, you know, I think the 90-day period for Bellagie was, you know, maybe a little bit too ambitious. I think he's going to lose his
Starting point is 00:16:34 two million bucks that he's put up. Well, obviously, yeah, I mean, we're, I think, I don't know how many days into the bet we are. I'm sure somebody met a two weeks, I think, maybe. We'll probably have this. Probably like Apology loses 2 million.com counter or stoutio counter. Yeah. But somebody made. It's sideways, basically.
Starting point is 00:16:50 I think he made the bet at 26 is 28. So he's got a long way to go. He's going to lose the 2 million. I don't see it, Jason. I don't see how the government is going to allow Bitcoin to sort of a million dollars. Right. And so the U.S. government has been shutting down or taking these legal...
Starting point is 00:17:04 Not just the U.S. government. Hold on. Not just the U.S. government. So let me tell you what happens. The bankers, so basically there's a correspondent network of banks across the world. You have Swift codes, you have I ban numbers, whatever. If the U.S. decides to ban Bitcoin and you have a bank in whatever, Portugal, Europe somewhere that touches Bitcoin or to Bitcoin transactions, they catch you off from the
Starting point is 00:17:29 corresponding banking network. So then you will be isolated. You won't be able to send wires to U.S. bank accounts. You will be able to move money around. And so the U.S. is very powerful in the banking world, obviously. And so they can cut off, they can cut off-Rams like this. Do you believe this is already started? Do you believe the actions by the SEC is because the U.S. specifically does not want consumers,
Starting point is 00:17:53 especially in a panicked jittery market like this during a recession, rising interest rates, bank runs of certain flavors going on? Do you think the U.S. government actually now is saying, let's not have an off-ramp, let's let's you know uh put a let's not let's not let people off the off ramp let's start to unwind the off ramps because that's part of bollogy's argument is like the clock's ticking and you have a certain amount of time to get to singapore or wherever like is the most the zug or whatever yeah no look it's kind of reinforces what he's saying okay running a startup it's like being a small market baseball team right you're trying to compete against the yankees or the dodgers and if you
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Starting point is 00:19:56 TryorgSpace.com.I.O. slash twist today and get $2,000 in credits. There's a lot of convexity in this whole process. You don't have a situation where it's going to run up to a million dollars because everyone's trying to get it. And it's going to stay there because the ramps are cut off. I mean, the argument would be that there's extreme hyperinflation in the US dollar. So if Bitcoin's up 50x, gold should be up, you know, some number, multiple in that as well. Maybe gold is like 4,000, 5,000.
Starting point is 00:20:23 But hyperinflation is 50% month over month. That's what he's expecting. That's insane. Year over year was single digits, right? At the piece. I think, actually, I think hyperinflation is 10%, I think it's a little lower. The definition I saw online. Well, what is Bellaghi's definition of hyperinflation?
Starting point is 00:20:42 I mean, if you're betting, you're going to a million dollars from 26,000, 40x in 90 days. It's like 300% a month. It's pretty, it's pretty, but yeah, here it is. Hyperinflation, simple definition from World Economic Forum. It refers to a situation where the price of goods and services rise uncontrollably over a defined period of time, In general, the term is used when the rate of inflation increases more than 50% a month. Okay. So even if it did that, Bellagy's bet would be good because the price of Bitcoin would increase
Starting point is 00:21:13 disproportionately due the rate of inflation. So what he's saying is hyperinflation would trigger a run on Bitcoin. Well, we could do this right now, 26,000 hyperinflation, 50%. No, no, no, no, no, no. 50% would be increasing the money supply in the U.S. of the dollar by 50%, which is, I think, $80 trillion worldwide. So that would be like $120, so you go from... You know, but that's, I think, that's M2 money supply.
Starting point is 00:21:36 Even if you look at a smaller measure of money supply, a 50% increase could easily push Bitcoin from $500 billion to a couple of trillion dollars. Do I think it have got 50x to 10? But I use basically saying Bitcoin goes from $500 billion to $10 trillion, which is gold, which is gold, not the price. Market cap, market cap. No, no, but that means the price has gone up 20x as well. Of course.
Starting point is 00:21:59 Yeah, you're saying the market cap of 500 billion. 40x, 40x, 40. Yeah, $500 billion to be $40. I mean, it's crazy. But then you have to believe that gold is going to run at the same rate. First of all, the money printed needs to come from somewhere. We've got a whole bunch of debt. We've got a whole bunch of free-flowing money out there.
Starting point is 00:22:18 We've got high interest rates right now. They would have to turn on the money print. So, Bel Lange's bet, if I understand this correctly, it's this. He's basically saying the government is going to have to turn on the money printers in an absolute emergency crisis and bail out. trillions of dollars in the banking system in the U.S. and globally, which would contribute to 50% plus inflation in a given month, which would then basically push the price of Bitcoin up to a million dollars.
Starting point is 00:22:45 It's an intelligent and plausible argument. Is it realistic? I'm not sure. I love the fact that he actually makes an argument and that he makes a detailed argument and he makes a bet. It's got us all talking about it. If the money printers go brer, he's not wrong. It's a stupid bet if you do to look at it because you can always hedge it, right?
Starting point is 00:23:07 You can buy a couple of Bitcoin and hedge it. So it's a dumb bet. Here's what I did. I bought some Bitcoin call options for end of June. I'm like, look, if Bellagie is right, by the end of June, a 50K strike price will be nothing. So I bought 50K strikes. It cost me, I think, $300 per Bitcoin option. If Bitcoin goes to $100,000, my $300 becomes $50,000 becomes $50,000.
Starting point is 00:23:32 Because my strikes for $300. So like that's a way better pay off than anything else. I bought a couple of those. I'm like, okay, let's sell these who want and see what happens. Was it $300 per Bitcoin? Yeah. So for $300 you have the option to buy a Bitcoin for $50K. Yes.
Starting point is 00:23:45 At the end of his bet. Exactly. So if it's over, if it's 51K, you buy it, you make $1,000. I make $3,000 my money. If he's right and it's a million dollars, it's insane. Okay. But even if he's wrong and it's $100,000, I'm still making $50k on a $300,000. all a bit, which is, that's how I play the market.
Starting point is 00:24:05 Well, I mean, it is long odds. This is going to happen. And I did it because Bellagy, he called COVID. He's smarter than most people I've ever met, you know, and he's smarter than me, in my opinion as well. So he's like, I think he's a super smart guy. I do think there is something for people who are super smart that they can see the improbable event.
Starting point is 00:24:23 And then highlighting an improbable event is a great way to get a massive amount of attention. Now, I'm not saying this is his intent. Sure. But the cynical person would say, hey, if you took the long bet that like, hey, there's aliens, and you say there's aliens, and you're right, and Area 51 has aliens at it and it comes out. The CIA killed, you know, Kennedy and, you know, it was the Russians and the CIA or whatever, and you turn out to be right. Wow, it's a big payoff. The non, which is the non-consensus bet.
Starting point is 00:24:53 You bet on Uber or Airbnb or Coinbase. As an angel investor, you get the non-consensus returns. So I get that. And I didn't like the part about his bet where he didn't disclose his percentage net worth exposure because I have a feeling he has so much exposure to Bitcoin that if it goes up, you know, 10%, it covers his bet. That's possible. I don't think that's, I mean, knowing Bellagie and I know him, I like, I don't think that way he would, I don't think he would do it for that. I don't think he would do it for that, but it would be a nice way to have the bet be meaningless. Potentially.
Starting point is 00:25:26 Yeah. Yeah. Would net out bet. Just like if I was taking the bet with him, I would buy three bick. Bitcoin. Yeah. So if it does hit a million, I'm covered. Everyone, everyone can participate in the Belagie side of the bet.
Starting point is 00:25:36 Yeah. Like, I did. I'm like, you know, for an insignificant amount of money per Bitcoin, I can basically ride on what Belaghi is telling me. And if I lose, if he's wrong and it doesn't even go over, if it doesn't even break 50K, you know, there you go. Would you short Coinbase right now? Just their revenue had dropped.
Starting point is 00:25:54 Okay. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I, like, at these levels, I think it's come down enough. I think Brian Armstrong is extremely talented smart guy. I think the guy, there's a lot of people of Coinbase who are really smart and and I would rather
Starting point is 00:26:06 not invest at these rates than short. I mean, when they came out, I had bankers calling me from Goldman Sachs, everything else, do you want your Coinbase shares? These price, I'm at 200 and something, I'm like, no. I'm not buying it. I say to them, I'd rather buy Bitcoin of those prices because I feel it's a safer
Starting point is 00:26:22 sort of risk-adjusted bed. Because if Coinbase goes up, it's because Bitcoin's rising, anything's going crazy and then I make money there. But if it tanks, Bitcoin will still have some value, and Bitcoin I'll perform Coinbase since IPO. Yeah, but I mean, if you look at, the company's got $3.4 billion in long-term debt. They have $5 billion in cash, I believe,
Starting point is 00:26:40 or $4.5 billion in cash. Again, if Bellagie's right, the shit goes through the, like, it basically goes crazy, right? And everyone starts going to Coinbase and trading and buying Bitcoin and stuff, and the next thing you know, Coinbase market cap is up 5x.
Starting point is 00:26:53 So I wouldn't take the short on this. Well, then, but if you look, their transaction revenue down $8, 25% year over year. So the revenue is massively down. We're in a bare market, and these bare markets turn, you're 12 months away from Bitcoin halving. Okay, I get that.
Starting point is 00:27:06 But Bitcoin halving is in 12 months. If you look at the historical numbers, 12 months before having Bitcoin basically doubles in price almost every single time. And then reading up to the having, it keeps moving. And then after having it goes to the roof. So on a 12-month view, I think you're going to see renewed interest in Bitcoin at the very least, maybe other cryptos as well, but Bitcoin is here. You think people will be, there'll be a renaissance for crypto in the next year.
Starting point is 00:27:27 People are buying, have you looked at, have you looked at like jmbillion.com recently? No. Okay. So J.M. Bullion.com basically is a place you can go to buy gold, silver, platinum physically, okay? And you can basically, you know, you can stock up on this stuff. Go try buying some 10 ounce gold bars, which are reasonably expensive, $22,000. And go and look at the, we can go there.
Starting point is 00:27:52 Go to the gold, gold box. There's a gold bar. Yeah, yeah. They're sold out. Pretty much. So you can click on the 10-ounce gold bars. Okay. They got these ones in stock.
Starting point is 00:28:06 It's like varied ones. Pre-sale, pre-sale, out of stock, out of stock, out of stock. Like literally, you can't get this stuff. So people, after the runs of the bank, just to say, you know what? I need to have 100 grand of gold in my safe or my safety deposit box. Exactly. Exactly. And I don't care of that.
Starting point is 00:28:24 It's, you know, not going to earn interest. you know, it's, if it rises, it rises. But yeah, I mean, people are scared. Yeah. And they are, this always resets people's brains to say, what's my backup to the dollar? What's the backup to my bank account? You know, do I have gasoline? You know, it's like, it basically, this triggers the prepper in everybody.
Starting point is 00:28:44 And the prepper mindset is, I think, an archetype that's been like put into our brains because of popular media, popular culture, and also history. So there have been times when society's, have collapsed and whatever you could put in a backpack, that's what you got out, right? If you owned a real estate and you were fleeing, your real estate's right zero. But if you had bought some diamonds and you could swallow them, you can at least have those. This is what's happened. People are in this crazy, you know, catastrophizing survivalist mode.
Starting point is 00:29:15 And Hollywood glamorizes as well. We watched last of us and you're like, all of a sudden, you watch the show is great, right? Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, but get some guns. Get some guns. Get some gold. Like, you know, things to trade with. But, you know, it probably won't matter much.
Starting point is 00:29:30 But here's the other thing, by the way, I think that the more likelihood is not Bitcoin, I think it's actually gold. And I'm a crypto-Bitkoing guy. Like, I think that gold becomes, if the U.S. dollar goes through some sort of hyper-inflationary period or something happens any part of the world, governments are going to start having to buy gold to back their currencies, because if America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, like it does. And so you can imagine if other currencies are starting to collapse.
Starting point is 00:29:54 The global debt to GDP ratio is 350% plus. I want to answer this question, though, about Coinbase. They are also burning net loss of in Q4, net loss 557, Q3, 545 million. So their cash position was down almost 40% year over year from the end of 2021. They've got some debt, a lot of debt, and they have a $4.5 billion in cash. So this seems to me like there could be a cash crunch here. They do hold $861 million in USC as well. So you don't think shorting it's a good idea because of the jockey, because of how good Brian Armstrong is,
Starting point is 00:30:39 and because Bitcoin having and because it's already been beaten down so much. That's your anti-easus, if I can summarize it back to you. I think, I mean, it's got the brand, it's got the distribution. They can cut costs pretty easily. They just need to kill some of the projects. working on. They're trying to do too much. They were just focused on being a Bitcoin, crypto buying service, and maybe a couple of other basics. But you don't think the AWS stuff, like building a platform for people to build crypto on top of is a good idea for them.
Starting point is 00:31:07 I think they've got too much R&D costs in a market that doesn't have enough adoption. So the money they're spending on engineers and stuff. And, and all, you know, Coinbase, Coinbase doesn't seem to want to partner with other companies as much to do stuff. They want to build it all themselves. They're very apt. Apple-esque in their way, and they're burning cash. And like, if I was a Coinbase, I'd be like, look, just go back to basics. First of all, you can't time these bare markets. You don't know when they end.
Starting point is 00:31:36 But when they do end, they end violently. And there's a lot of revenue coming to the system. But you can also argue that they just want to invest for the future. But the problem of that is when the sentiment's down, adoption is low. When adoption is low, it's hard to build products because if people aren't using your products, how do you actually build great products? So you got it's a very fine line. I would probably cut if I was at Coinbase and things were getting tough,
Starting point is 00:32:00 I would cut some percentage of the workforce, 20, 30, 40 percent, a lot of it from R&D and just focus on basics, focus on customer experience, focuses on the core business, and wait, wait for the market to turn. And when the market turns, you can argue while it's too late. I'm like, not really. If you're lean and nimble as an organizer, and by the way, I'd be pulling in AI everywhere.
Starting point is 00:32:22 into Coinbase. AI could save them so much money on contract auditing, smart contract auditing. Open AI is fantastic. And maybe it's not perfect, but you can actually reduce the workforce. I think because they've got such a high burn in terms of labor, they're actually in a good position to preserve themselves. All right, Nick. I'm going to bring producer Nick on here because I was talking to him with him about it yesterday.
Starting point is 00:32:44 You can just do Audrey if you want producer Nick. But you've heard my floating the idea because I've been seeing so many people talking about it should you short Coinbase as Operation Chokepoint becomes like acute or not. You heard Vinny maybe not a good idea. What do you think, Nick? You're looking at this. Do you think it's got, there's some short strategy here? Or do you think Brian Armstrong is just so transcendent as an entrepreneur?
Starting point is 00:33:08 I think Brian's incredible. Where I would see the biggest risk factor is with them is, you know, if you just want to be in exchange, Vinny, I'm curious what you think about this, but transaction-based revenue. is low quality revenue. It's completely spiky. It's totally dependent on what the market sentiment is at current time. And just like Robin Hood, since Robin Hood went public, they've basically been trying to diversify away from transaction-based revenue, away from payment for order flow. Obviously, Coinbase doesn't have that kind of revenue. But don't you think that they need to find somewhere else? Like, I thought the Coinbase Cloud idea was a good upsell to investors,
Starting point is 00:33:46 like, hey, we're trying to do something better here that can be a little bit more lasting long term. it can be a little bit more resilient in the downturn. Vinnie? I mean, right now, literally my entire thesis is based upon the fact that we're on the verge of a crypto melt up. Melt up. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. Bulogy is not wrong.
Starting point is 00:34:13 We're peaking at the end of the interest rate cycle. There's not much more up. How much more the figure is rate? It's 25 max. So the rate cycles peaked. The quantitative tightening is not working. clearly. Okay, banks are under strain. The money print is probably going to go on again at some point, probably soon, whether it will get us to a million dollar bitcoins remains to be seen.
Starting point is 00:34:36 But any movement by the Fed in the next month or two to loosen monetary conditions, even not through interest rate drops, just through, you know, quantitative easing on some level, is going to push the price of crypto up. Absolutely. But in a meltup, what's the incentive to buy? Coinbase if you know that they have no downside protection against people stopping, people getting uninterested in crypto again. Like where, where does an institutional investor ever want to buy Coinbase I go back to, I go back to Bitcoin and fewer coins. I think fewer coins on Coinbase lists would be, would improve liquidity, would improve. And give some downside protection for transaction. Yeah, exactly. I honestly, I don't think they make much money on all the other coins
Starting point is 00:35:18 anyway. I don't think it's like, I think if you do the math, they probably don't make as much. Like Bitcoin, they trade $500 million a day in Bitcoin on Coinbase. Let's say they're taking 1% of that. They're making $5 million a day on just Bitcoin trades right now. Now, that could easy become, I mean, just for comparison, finance does $4 billion a day. Yeah. Now, you know, so my view would be like, how do you get more Bitcoin training going? How do you get more Ethereum training going?
Starting point is 00:35:44 Right. How do you get, you know, like how do you get people to focus on the stuff that's actually going to have some long-term value? I guess this is like instead of shorting, you just, buy some puts, Nick, for 90 days or 100 days out from here. I don't want a short point base, by the way. That was your thesis. That's not my thesis. No, no, I know.
Starting point is 00:35:58 But if you were, you could buy a series of puts, 90 days, 120 days, 100, 80. Look, the market cap right now looks like it's like 14 billion. Yeah. You may have downside to, it may drop to like, let's say, below 10, 7, exactly. So it's called it 7 to 10 million. But on the other end of it, this thing can get squeezed up. They can go double, and go back to 120 bucks, 150 bucks, 200 bucks a share. You know, I don't like the risk asymmetry.
Starting point is 00:36:24 I will short something where I think it's got 80 to 90% to drop. I won't short something where it's maybe 30 to 50%. It's just the asymmetric risk doesn't make sense to me generally. Right. See, this is the thing. If you have a qualified CEO, this has been a good discussion. If you have a qualified CEO, they're going to figure something out. That's the problem, you know, in this shorting.
Starting point is 00:36:42 If you short somebody who's a qualified CEO who got the company to hear and they're good, like he'll figure something out. So I think the shorts off. If you are running a sales team, a design agency, or a media business of any kind, you know what a hassle one-pagers can be? You know what I'm talking about. They never format correctly. People are pigeoning, zooming on their phones.
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Starting point is 00:38:01 Or you can get 50% off an annual premium account at issue.com slash podcast and use the promo code twist. Those two things you need to remember. First is the URL, I-S-S-U-U-com slash podcast, and then I need you to remember that promo code twist. Thanks again to Issue for supporting this weekend startups. and our mission here to inspire innovation and to support founders. All right, speaking of Binance, they were sued by the CFTC, Commodity Futures Trading Commission. So this is on Monday. So now we have two of the major exchanges, both having legal action taken against them,
Starting point is 00:38:36 or a saber rattling with the Wells notice, I guess would be better way to say it. So the CFTC filed a lawsuit against Binance. Seeking a permanent ban on Binance and its CEO, CZ, famously on the Twitter, from U.S. markets. This is important because finance is the largest crypto company in the world, even bigger than Coinbase itself. Finance trades, $4 billion worth of Bitcoin per day. Coinbase does around $500 million.
Starting point is 00:39:02 So it is significantly larger. So that would be about eight times, right? Just that one currency alone. So who knows if that's representative of the whole business, but it's probably indicative of that. Quote, finance has instructed its employees and customers to circumvent compliance controls in order to maximize corporate profits, according to the allegation,
Starting point is 00:39:19 specifically the suit claims finance instructed its US VIP customers on the best methods for evading compliance controls. And then they claim Binance covered it up. How, by communicating with customers through, quote, a messaging application that was set to automatically delete written communications, signal probably.
Starting point is 00:39:39 According to the complaint, the reason Binance used that communication method was to avoid leaving any evidence of their efforts to retain U.S. based customers. There are other allegations, including not requiring customers to provide any identity verifying information before allowing them to trade and facilitating derivatives transactions without registering with the CFTC.
Starting point is 00:39:59 Finance argues it made efforts to operate legal in US by setting up Binance.U.S. an affiliate that offers fewer crypto products for American users to collide regulators. This is similar to FTX, set up FTX.US as a separate US focused entity. All right. Post-lawsuit, unconfirmed reports. of upwards of $2 billion in outflows from Binance. We're checking that,
Starting point is 00:40:21 but that's the back channel. So what do you think about this one? Vinnie. This is another one where I think, you know, I actually like the fact that the regulators are getting involved and taking this to court
Starting point is 00:40:33 and let's see how it plays out. The reality is that if they've got evidence that there was wrongdoing, they have a right to prosecute and, you know, the courts will look at it. Like,
Starting point is 00:40:45 I'm a big fan of like letting the process take, you know, like let the process run itself out. You can make accusations all day, but if you have proof and you have testimonies, you have it looks like they have proof. And so just looking at, let's assume they wouldn't take this on if they didn't have what they thought was a 90 plus chance. Like usually these folks do not take these things on, whether it's a Southern District of New York or any of these places. They don't take it on unless they have a slam dunk case because they have so many cases
Starting point is 00:41:13 they could take on. They start with the slam dunks. and then they work backwards. So this is probably like a 99, 98% I would put it at, like they have the goods here on them. Because they're even talking about how they, in this complaint, they're basically explaining how they did this communication
Starting point is 00:41:30 to get U.S. customers to circumvent, you know, who knows if that's VPNs or offshore accounts. But if they did do that, that's exactly what the U.S. government is trying to avoid is people circumventing KYC, circumventing the rules. So this would be disastrous. This could result in a ban. If you're trying to explicitly break the rules and then cover it up, cover up worse than the crime,
Starting point is 00:41:52 that means the government will assume you're a bad actor and that you're actually trying to circumvent the law because you tried to cover it up and they have you trying to do it. It wasn't like a one-off thing. It was a conspiracy in other words. So how could this affect finance business? Where do you think all the bad traders from FTX went? And we say bad traders Do you mean not good at their job traders Or bad actor traders
Starting point is 00:42:18 Bad actor traders They went to all the other exchanges Outside the US They didn't go to Coinbase And so they didn't go to Coinbase They went to Binance And Binance I guess It's fast and loose with these things
Starting point is 00:42:33 So we're back to the F around find out kind of moment Is that what's happening I don't want to make any accusations To Bynance or anyone else I'm just saying I think it's true. This feels like
Starting point is 00:42:44 Yeah, I mean, it's a really stupid thing to do. No one condones No one condones criminal activity in crypto. Like no one is like legit condones it. Right. So I think that all criminal activity should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Starting point is 00:42:58 And just so to pick up, you know, like the outflows, a little bit of web research. Basically lawsuit made public Monday. And by Monday night there had been around $2 billion plus in outflows. just on the Ethereum blockchain,
Starting point is 00:43:13 according to the Wall Street Journal. Finance has $63 billion in the exchange is probably disclosed wallet, so not a de minimis amount of money here, a couple of cents. I mean, I think finance and Tether kind of exist outside the U.S.
Starting point is 00:43:26 per view, and so they can do whatever they want, until the U.S. actually steps up to go off to them, they're going to continue to operate. So, you know, I've seen this what happened with Tether for nearly a decade now. And so I'm just used to, to the idea that the U.S. has got a limited range in terms of what it can do. Jurisdiction, yeah.
Starting point is 00:43:45 Jurisdictionally, and therefore, you know, it's the world we live in. Now, if obviously that changes, then, you know, great. But we got to be, I'm just trying to be practical. I also just kind of lost patience in a lot of things and just saying it takes. It would be great to just get all this behind us. So I kind of like your approach of like, let's take the medicine, anybody doing anything wrong, let's figure out what's wrong. And then let's set the standard.
Starting point is 00:44:06 Speaking of jurisdictions, Sam, bank run, fraud received a third indictment. This time. This is my favorite segment. This week in Sam Bankrun frauds, frauds. He received a third indictment. I think they call these superseding indictments, you know, indictments that come after the original one.
Starting point is 00:44:26 This time for allegedly bribing Chinese officials. It just, really? There was a crime. Come on, come on. A guy of his, his prestige. Really, of his moral and ethical compass, he would literally drop the bag and kick it across the floor.
Starting point is 00:44:40 Yeah, he put the bag on the lazy Susan and spin it around in the Chinese banquet table with the gun under the table. I mean, this guy's like a Bond villain. It's like it's Indiana Jones, you know, in the Temple of Doom opening scene. He tries to act so innocent the whole time. I've never seen a guy put on such a, it's a fuss. It's like the whole effective altruism thing. I heard that effective altruism thing where they're like, is it better to stop the suffering of a billion worms versus one human? and if we could have less birds eating worms
Starting point is 00:45:11 and we could make hawks into vegans, they wouldn't eat our puppies and chipmunks. I was just like, this effective altruism seems like such a load of bullshit for dorky guys to try to be impressive. And I was just like, and I'm sure they have good intent. I'm sure that it started effective altruism in some good way.
Starting point is 00:45:28 But when someone like, someone as conniving and as Lex Luthor as Sam, bank run fraud. Sociopathic. I mean, the guy is nuts. When the sociopath gets their hands on something like, effective altruism. It's like Hannibal Lecter getting his hands on like, I don't know, a cooking school. And it's like, oh, yeah, go to cooking school and eat my fellow, you know. Christian Bell from American Psycho. It's like, it's literally like getting him a high five stereo.
Starting point is 00:45:56 He's like, poor, hi-fi stereo. Oh, this could be fun for a year. No, anyway, it was crazy. It reads. Okay. Here's what happened. prosecutors accused him of conspiracy to bribe Chinese government officials. I'm shocked that Chinese government officials could be bribed to regain access to a billion dollars in frozen crypto. So he kept trying to release this crypto
Starting point is 00:46:21 according to the accounts. And he authorized Alameda employees to pay the bribes and two installments to free up their accounts in addition to this charge And the fraud charges from before he's also under suspicion of violating U.S. campaign finance laws. Yeah, that's not good either. In total, he faces 13 charges.
Starting point is 00:46:44 So I guess this will be like his 15th and 16th life sentence. I've been saying it from the beginning, this kid's getting life. Period, full stop. People tell me that I'm crazy. But he is going to be the, he's the crypto Jesus now. He's going to, yeah, he's crucified. It's over for him. I mean, like I said, like these, you know, like I said,
Starting point is 00:47:04 in the chat with you, how many more life sentences can this guy possibly serve? I mean, he's going to go to prison for a long time. People thought he was going to get off. I don't. Like, for me, the biggest, like, travesty is he's sitting, chilling out on his parents home in Palo Alto wedding trial.
Starting point is 00:47:19 It seems so unfair, but okay. And he had a $250 million bail, which no one actually posted. I don't get it. You know, this is one of the great things about, you know, when we have a high-profile case like this, or Theranos, it can stress test our faith in the justice system. And I was delighted, delighted to see what happened to Elizabeth Holmes and Balwani because they thought they could just run amok, move fast and break things, and take like this
Starting point is 00:47:52 philosophy of speed matters and, you know, like, listen, if your app crashes, it's no big deal. And then they could apply that to blood tests. And this guy thought it could apply it to people's 401ks. this is deranged sociopathic behavior. You're taking a product testing experimentation phase for non-critical apps and you're applying it to the most critical things in people's lives. Their money and their health. Go to jail forever.
Starting point is 00:48:19 I guess he can't use his parents' devices anymore and he can only use his phone without internet access. And I think... I mean, and he was deleting signal messages as well. Like, I mean, after he, like, a few weeks ago, like, the guy is incorrigible. Like, he, he's moral fiber is, it's like some combination of Lex Luka Luther plus the Joker. Like, you just literally have to think of him as a sociopath.
Starting point is 00:48:46 And then it frees your mind from trying to understand what he's doing. There's no rhyme or reason to this. It's just how much, you know, crazy shit can I do in reaction to what happens in the world. And, you know, I'm going to solve the problems by any means necessary. Speaking of sociopathic criminals on the lamb, Doe Kwan was arrested in Montenegro as well. I mean, who's left? Are there, is it just tether left?
Starting point is 00:49:11 Yeah, it's tether. It's just tethered that's left that we have a question about. Now, we don't know that tether has done anything untethered. No, I mean, my take in tether has been very, I've been very frank about it for years. They were insolvent at one point. They were illiquid. They probably not anymore because they keyed up the act,
Starting point is 00:49:28 and Bitcoin went through the roof, and they were holding some Bitcoin. So it's like one of those things where, you know, they played with house money. They nearly lost it all, but they made it back. But, you know, it went on a good run. Yeah. That's our thesis. That's our theory is that the tether guys went on a good run.
Starting point is 00:49:43 They were just out in the news talking about how they, you know, because they're just holding dollar for dollar, whatever they make on the money, they get to sweep. And supposedly they said they made like hundreds of millions of dollars last quarter, which is, you know, it's completely plausible. If you're betting with, it's kind of like Silicon Valley Bank taking people's money and then going buying T-bells or whatever. They get whatever spread on top of it. And Tether, I guess, claims they had a good quarter. We'll see with these attestations.
Starting point is 00:50:15 But man, yeah, congrats to them. How many people are investigating them right now, you think? Tether, how many open investigations are there? It's the Southern District of New York plus a whole bunch of others. Look, Jason, it's really clear that the government's trying to clamp down on crypto. I mean, you have to ask yourself, why now? Why now? Well, China did it already, right?
Starting point is 00:50:41 China did it years ago. But look at signature bank being taken out, right? They weren't in liquid. They weren't insolvent. And the FDIC is basically covering the losses because they can't touch the crypto business. I think Nick Carter posted a good tweet yesterday saying, you know, it's the responsibility to the FDIC to minimize losses to shareholders and taxpayers. Taxpayers are losing money because the banking system doesn't want them to sell or FTSC doesn't want them to sell the crypto banking side of the business.
Starting point is 00:51:08 So taxpayers have to put the bill now. So that side of the business, just like we saw a Silicon Valley Bank or Bridge Bank was sold, like all the loans were sold. You're saying the crypto part of signature has not been sold. It can't be sold. It can't be sold because. They didn't allow the buyers to buy it. So there might be a buyer for it and they're just going to eat the losses on it. Yeah, because they don't want it to be banked in the U.S. right now.
Starting point is 00:51:34 And so at the same time that there has... So why? The question is why? Well, the theory that you're alluding to is... They're trying to stop crypto. They're trying to start crypto, but at this time is your question. Yes. And this is a time when crypto could be seen as attractive by a large populace of people who are looking at a banking system that they don't have faith in, the fractional one,
Starting point is 00:51:56 and saying, well, fractional is fragile. What's anti-fragile? You know, Bitcoin. Shout out to Nassim Thalab from this psychotic. I don't know what he called me, psychotic something. Social bad. Interesting. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:12 I mean, it's kind of, I'm not, I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to think the U.S. is saying we have to clean up our own systems and make sure they're anti-fragile and they're, you know, solid. And we have to make sure that people don't run and we have a bank run to Bitcoin. So they're blocking Bologies back. I mean, do you think the FDIC and the Fed and all of these organizations are watching the Bology bet and listening to these podcasts talk about it and thinking, probably not. You think they're not aware of it. They may have been flagged. They're not taking it seriously.
Starting point is 00:52:46 Gensler, you think Gensler's listened to the pods with, you know? Maybe. I don't think he's listening to us right now. You've been playing with Open AI since I have here. I have. Yeah. I had everybody on my team. expense a GPT4 account.
Starting point is 00:53:03 Just so I'm like, you know, all 20 of you, go spend 20 bucks each, spend the 400 bucks a month, playing with chat GPT, and then take screenshots and put it back in our Slack. And then we're going to connect each person. This is my plan, is that each person in the organization have like Jason GPT and then connect it Zapier into a Slack room. And then everybody in the company can watch each other's GPT instances and watch us use it to get inspired by the things we do with it. That's pretty cool.
Starting point is 00:53:29 which would be pretty cool, right? So I want to have a multiplayer chat chippy T for my organization. I would pay $100 per person. I would pay $2,000 a month, $24,000 a year. So if Open AI or Microsoft are listening, to just put that all on Slack, or if it was in teams natively or if somebody can build this for me, I want to watch my team do these things and then have the AI aware of what each other are doing to inform them of it.
Starting point is 00:53:52 So I could do a Slack message and say, hey, who would be great guests to have on our crypto roundtable to talk about these things? topics. And then Nick, producer, Nick could see it, producer Brian could see it, the sales team could see it and say, hey, maybe we should do a series on this and get a sponsor specifically for it. Whatever. So what are you doing with it? So with Waitrum, which is my company, we actually is launched on Monday and product we got third place for a new product. Thank you. We've decided to, we've been using GPT3 for about a year now, a year and a half actually to do transcriptions, summaries of meetings,
Starting point is 00:54:25 etc. And thanks. And then you click on the Waiter, AI, Nick. So, we basically, I wouldn't call it a full pivot, but we basically move the entire video conferencing platform into, it's effectively an AI-based assistant. So if you go to, you know, so we have the basic conferencing, you can chat, you know, person on person, but imagine you've got this assistant in the background
Starting point is 00:54:47 and scroll down a bit more. Yep. And so now you're getting like bite-sized chunks, automatic, note-taking, AI-generated titles, summaries, tasks. So the system's always listening to you. So you can say, hey, we should set up a follow-up meeting next week, Wednesday,
Starting point is 00:55:03 and it automatically has access to your calendar, it sets it up, and makes sure both people are available, these sorts of things. You can do summaries. Catch up, is it a good feature we're busy building? When you go late into a team meeting where you're like the 10th person joining, has been going over 10 minutes. It gives you the bullet points of the meeting today, yeah.
Starting point is 00:55:20 Before you jump in, like this is what, you know, Jason said this, when he said this, Nick said this, and you can go in. And then we email you all the meeting updates, It's the afterwards, the summary of the meetings, the, there are clips that you can share. So, is wait room for business or for, like, business to consumer? We're focusing on business now. We started off on consumer a year ago, like nine months ago, and then we realized it just
Starting point is 00:55:43 wasn't, we actually, a lot of people coming to us wanting to use of a business. So we've been pivoting towards the business space. And now- I like this idea of doing the office hours, because I want to start doing this. I'll try that. And then we do daily stand-ups right now with huddles. Oh, yeah, you should use this. And we have Slack integration as well.
Starting point is 00:55:58 You can share the clips back to the huddles into Slack. You should really try using this internally, Jay. I think it's a great product. The AI stuff is in the next 30 days, we'll have more and more stuff out. We just launched. We're adding more more all the time. But basically, we want to be an all-in-one AI-assisted meeting tool. So that's powerful because the existing meeting problems out there, Zoom, everyone else.
Starting point is 00:56:20 You have to go to a marketplace. You have to find the right app to plug in. We're building everything in natively. It's going to know you and your life inside out and all your meetings that you have. It's amazing. Yeah, I'm going to sign up right now. So everybody go to Waitroom.com and check that out.
Starting point is 00:56:33 Really cool. So easy to sign up one click with your Google, your Apple. And I'm going to do a, you know, I want to do this office hours thing. And so I'll just do it in here and see how it works. And I'll make it public and people can just ask me questions. We had an investment in a company doing something like that.
Starting point is 00:56:52 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. GPT4 is a huge step up. I mean, we started on GPD3 like 18 months ago. Yeah. It was good.
Starting point is 00:56:58 But it wasn't like, you know, amazing. GPT4 is incredible. What would you say is the best part of it, just better results? I mean, noticeably better? Yeah, noticeably better. I think the thing about GPT, so like if you go through GPD3.5, the reasoning wasn't as good. Now it's insane. It is slower and GPD4 is way more concise.
Starting point is 00:57:20 So, you know, we've been doing stuff like real-time translation now. So, you know, you can, I can be speaking. Japanese to you, you can speak English, and we'll subtitle real-time the conversation. So you can actually have calls there in any language. As long as you read the subtitles, you can handle it. In the future, we'll build a lot more. But I think the world's moving quickly to using AI for everything. So like, Sachs has been going on about this as well on Twitter. I agree that the plugins, this open AI is going to change the world in so many ways. What do you think of the plugin architecture and how quickly that's sort of forming?
Starting point is 00:57:59 I have mixed feelings on plugins. I'll tell you why, because I think that native integrations work really well. So maybe the term plug-ins a bad word. If companies are taking Open AI and they're building natively like we are at Waitroom on it, I think it's going to be amazing. If you're building like, and I've seen this already like plug in marketplaces and download this app and that app, you know, I mean, it's always been a struggle. Even the biggest companies have struggled to get adoption and market.
Starting point is 00:58:26 marketplaces for apps and extensions and plugins and stuff because compatibility is hard. But I think that the plug-in nature, like what Microsoft's doing with Open AI is game-changing, right? It's clipy on steroids. Yeah, I mean, it's literally what we thought Siri would be able to do or Alexa, and you could ask it to weave things together and, you know, hey, take this meeting that I just had and send the summary to this person and then ask them for their feedback on. the discussion and come up with five questions to ask them, and then vet that email from me first before you send it.
Starting point is 00:59:02 And then I would see the email with the five bullet points in it. Exactly. Get to know who you are. You can even get to a point where you could run the, for example, you get a meeting in person and just run like a waitroom app on your phone to record the meeting face to face or someone, send you guys both a summary of what happened,
Starting point is 00:59:18 action items, follow up items, everything else. Like, we're going to get to a point where what Siri was supposed to be doing is it going to be done through open AI and third-party applications. Now, never write off Apple. I'm pretty sure Apple's going to be coming in with some AI-assisted something, Siri, whatever else. They've got their own AI internally, I'm sure. But I think Siri is going to be getting an AI boost at some point.
Starting point is 00:59:40 It's pretty clear that this is going to be, you know, a situation where there's five or six of these chat GPT competitors. And, you know, chat GPT is the first and they're racing out ahead. but I don't know that they've run away with it. You know, it could be like Lotus 1,2, 3 versus Excel. You know, who knows? No, but the resources that Microsoft's given these guys and the 100 million users they've got and the revenue curve and trajectory that they're on. I'm not saying they're not off to a great start, but I was playing with Google Bard.
Starting point is 01:00:11 And it gave me chat GPT 3.5 vibes as opposed to four. And then Google has a lot more data than chat GPT. So I'm super interested to see like what the data. advantage, like just having YouTube only available in Google Bard and making it not available in chat GPT, just think about the corpus of data there where I could ask it to make video clips or pull any videos that mentioned dire straits, you know, and the finger-picking style of Mark Knopfler, what makes it unique, and write me a video essay about that. And it gave me a video essay of Mark Knopfler's style, right? And it could pull all of that data just from YouTube. Then it
Starting point is 01:00:50 did the Play Store, and then anybody who's in the Play Store, and, you know, it's just, it feels to me like this is going to be such a great competition, then Amazon, the same thing with all their data on products. And if Chat CheapT and Google can't use that product data, now you have Amazon and you're going to be like... You're 100% right. This is going to split up into different segments. So let's talk about the segments right now. Who's going to own business to business? I think it's open AI in Microsoft. I don't think... Business to business, like enterprise. Enterprise, Plugins, Slack, you know, Waitroom, all those applications. It would seem like Microsoft would be number one.
Starting point is 01:01:23 Microsoft is going to win that in my opinion. Who's going to own consumer? Probably Google. Yeah, Google would be likely case. If Facebook did something, maybe they have some more data there, but who knows? Facebook would be amazing because if you think about news and you think about trends and you think about fashion. Shopping? Amazon's going to own shopping.
Starting point is 01:01:40 Amazon, they win that. So you're right. It's going to split up into different. Vulcanization. Vulcanization. And then you're going to need to have some glue between them to say, hit the FARD API, I need YouTube data. I need, I think Cora's got a chance to be a big business to business.
Starting point is 01:01:58 If I'm Microsoft, I'm buying Cora right now. If I'm Google, I'm buying Cora for a billion dollars right now. If I could buy Cora stock right now in the secondary market, I might actually buy it. I don't know what their valuation revenue is. It's very close to the best company. But I think Cora's dataset and Stack Overflow's datasets, those two datasets are suddenly going to, if I'm Microsoft, I'm buying those two companies. If I'm Google, I'm buying those two companies and I'm blocking any competitor from indexing them. And then Reddit needs to get taken
Starting point is 01:02:27 out. So if you're Microsoft, Google, if you're Facebook, how do you not buy Reddit right now? You buy Reddit and you just have all that data and you block everybody else from having it in their AI models. No brainer. You can probably get some, you can probably get some core stock on Ford. Maybe. All right, listen, it's been an amazing episode. Vinny, thanks for coming in. Sunny, feel better. and we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Thanks, Jason. Cheers.

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