This Week in Startups - Google’s search engine “panic,” AI-generated hits, Coinbase considers leaving US market | E1723

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Rachel is back to help Jason break down the news! First, they cover Google reportedly “panicking” over Samsung potentially switching to Bing as its device-default search engine, how Google can beat OpenAI/Microsoft,” and Project Magi” (1:43). Then, they discuss some recent AI-generated viral hits and what it means for the future of the music industry (21:48) before wrapping up on the possibility that Brian Armstrong may relocate Coinbase outside of the US (49:25). (0:00) Jason and Rachel tee up today’s topics (1:43) Samsung’s possible switch to Bing (10:08) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist  (11:30) Google’s effort to catch OpenAI  (13:24) Google’s Project Magi (20:20) Merge - Integrate up to 3 customers for free today at https://merge.dev/twist (21:48) AI-generated hits: Heart on My Sleeve (33:16) Mercury - Apply in minutes and get up to $5M in FDIC insurance at https://mercury.com (34:45) Real Kanye or Fake Kanye (40:41) AI Jason and a special guest  (49:25) Coinbase considers leaving the US market FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun  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

Hey, everybody, we've got an amazing show for today. Rachel is back joining me to discuss recent reports about Samsung trying to renegotiate its default search deal with Google and maybe move to Bing. So we also discussed how Google can still win the AI race and beat OpenAI and Microsoft. And then we cover some craziness in the AI generated voice space. Yes, there is a fake Drake and the weekend song that went mega viral. It's been taken down since. But I was fooled by it. We're going to play a new game show where Jason is going to guess the real Kanye song.

And then the producers trained a model of Jason and a very special guest joined him. I was very surprised that we were able to lock in this AI guest. And so this could be very big. Briefly, I'm going to talk about my feelings about Brian Armstrong saying he might move Coinbase out of the United States. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as people.

and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Merge. Let your developers get back to their core product. Merge is a single API to add hundreds of integrations to your app. Integrate up to three customers for free today at merge.dev slash twist. And Mercury, where innovation meets peace of mind. Now more than ever, startups need a safe place to put their cash.

Mercury offers a simple way to manage bank risk and protect every dollar with up to $5 million in FDIC insurance and a money market fund. Visit mercury.com to apply in minutes. Hey, everybody, it's Tuesday. A lot of news is backed up. I'm on the road right now. I was at Starbase yesterday for the launch, which got scrubbed. But I'll be there on Thursday, I think.

I might record all in from Starbase, and hopefully, fingers crossed. We have a successful launch on. Thursday. And so if you want to watch all that, go to YouTube or Twitter and follow SpaceX. But exciting times right now. And I thought, God, so much news is backed up. I'd have Rachel back on the program to tee it up for us and to get started. How are you doing, Rachel? I'm doing good. And like before we start, I have to say you are already doing something that's kind of, I don't know if this is like newsworthy, but it's definitely trendy right now. And that's blurring your background. The more meetings I've been on, the more background blur.

have been happening. I think it's like the office. You know what I mean? Yeah, the issue for me now is when I'm on the road and I'm traveling like three different cities this week, sometimes there's no good background. You know, like so if you get a nice hotel room, you know, there's a desk, there's a chair, you can kind of frame it, but nobody wants to see my hotel bedroom or whatever where I'm saying. So I've been going blurred background. But when I'm in Tahoe, dang, it's no, I see the skaters going by. It's a great room at my home studio. It's all good. So I think you've been following this. There's just a lot of news around generative AI and the reaction to it. So let's get started there. Yeah. So there is some big news in the search space. Google is

reportedly in panic mode and working on an entirely new search engine after discovering that Samsung is considering switching to Bing as its default search engine on all of its devices. So on Monday, the New York Times reported that last month, Google learned Samsung was considering replacing its search engine with Bing as the default search on all devices. And according to New York Times sources, Google's deal with Samsung is worth around $3 billion in revenue per year for Google due to traffic. And this is similar to the deal that they had with Apple. In 2021, Google reportedly paid Apple around $15 billion to maintain its status as the default

search engine on all Apple devices. And before that, it was paying Apple around $10 billion a year. So, Jason, can you explain a little bit about? about that like smartphone contracts, especially with Apple. Sure. So when you own the smartphone, you get to set the defaults of the phone.

Samsung is one of the great handset manufacturers in the world along with Apple. When they set search up in Safari or whatever browser they use on the Samsung devices, the default search will result in a large number of searches. Just think, how many people do you think go into the settings and switch their search engine? If it's Google, that's the leading one.

You're not going to switch it out. So years ago, people started realizing, hey, this is worth some money. So Apple, Samsung, and others bid it out. And they said, who would like this search revenue? So it gives you a base of users. Now, what's important about this is this is only 2% of Google's search monopoly. If, you know, it really is a monopoly. People like to pretend that Google doesn't have a search monopoly.

They do. They have 70, 80, 90% of the searches in different regions around the world. Now, of the pie of the overall advertising business, they have much less because you have other players, right? Amazon has a new business, Netflix added ads. You have Bing, of course. You have Uber now has an ad network that they think is going to do a billion dollars this year or maybe next year. So there are other pieces of the pie. LinkedIn has been crushing it obviously with their ad program. But for search, it's critically important to get these default searches for two reasons. One, when you're going to, going to buy ads, it basically means you're going to spend more attention as an ad buyer on the Google ad network because you have larger reach. More reach equals more investment from the advertisers in learning how to use that, setting up the keywords, etc. So it makes it kind of a blocker strategy.

Now, if they were to lose the Samsung one, it wouldn't be like a big deal. They lost the Apple one that would be a big deal. And there were very credible rumors. and I have, let's just say, and I want to say inside information because I don't want bells to go off, but I have a whisper network. Apple was considering maybe going into the search business at some point,

and if you look at their spotlight search, you do a search on your iPhone, it'll tell you if you, you know, here's the apps on your phone, maybe here's looking deep into Yelp, some results, and then it will tell you to search the web. This is a small percentage, and what's really happening here is Samsung.

wants a better price out of Google. And they're doing what any good, you know, owner of traffic and users will do is they're stirring the pot trying to get Google to pay more money. And so maybe Bing and Microsoft will overpay for this, but this is just great for Samsung because it's free money. They get 100% of this goes right to the bottom line. This is not the consequential contract.

The consequential contract is iPhones. again, for not just their reach, but because those are the well-heeled customers. That's the customers with more discretionary spending. Those are the ones who are driving Tesla's Mercedes going on fancier trips. And let's face it, Android phones are a third of the price, a quarter of the price. They may be, their clicks are not as expensive. So this is just Samsung having a great negotiator who leaked this information to the New York Times. Kind of like what you said with Apple users kind of just being like,

like super valuable. Apple sold 232 million iPhones in its fiscal 2022 year. And iPhone sales alone generated around $205 billion in revenue last year. Based on that data, we can see that Samsung consumers spent an average of around $357 per new phone. This is a rough estimate. While Apple users spent around $883 per new phone, again, that's like a rough estimate. But the difference between that is like 2.5 times more on new iPhones as Apple users. Yeah. How much is a Toyota Prius if you were to buy a used one? Oh, I couldn't even tell you.

10 or 20K. That's crazy. How much is a Tesla model Y? 50 or 60. 445, I think, to 65K, depending on how big the battery is. So, you know, the same car will get you from point A to point B. And one of them will be more delightful to use every day. And there is a point in time where people, you know,

You could buy a pair of Levi's jeans for 30 or 40 bucks, old Navy for 20, Uniclo for 20, or you can go buy, I think I buy Lucky Brand and they cost me a buck 50. And then I have friends who buy $400 jeans. And I'm like, okay, whatever. It's so cheap compared to the value you get out of a smartphone. You keep your phone for what, three years, two years, which are average, we just say. I've had my same, I've had the same phone for like five now, but they kind of stop working at around three. Like, I have a pretty slow phone, but I hate getting new phones. Like, I hate, I have

getting the new, uh, getting new phones. Like, I don't like getting, you have to pay for the new phone case and you have to go and you, it's like always more money than you say it will be. So it's more about like the act of the Apple store. But yeah, I think slow at three. Yeah. So this I think is you're, you're, you're, you very much represent the average, uh, millennial gen Z consumer. It could try to get three, four, five years out of these things. And then I think people maybe who are doing it for business, have a little more discretionary income, discretionary income,

they might do it every two or three years. I too now have been skipping a year. I used to just send my assistant back in the day. Whatever they sell, buy me the latest version. I would even buy like the interim plus versions. But now the time it takes to get a new case and to transfer your data, all that stuff,

go to the store, that whatever number of hours to me isn't worth it for the gain in it. but if you take the dollar amount of an iPhone, this is rounded up to 1,000, it's about if you keep it for three years, you're talking about a dollar a day, if you keep it for five years,

maybe you're down to almost 50 cents a day. What other device do you use for five hours a day that costs 10 cents an hour to use it, right? And that doesn't include the resale value. All right, the March to a billion users continues from my friends at LinkedIn. 875 million people are now using the platform, including me.

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Post your job for free terms and conditions, of course, apply. I wouldn't call this a panic. I bet you the Samsung folks said it's a panic or the Bing folks said it's a panic. Google does not need to panic about this. What Google needs to do is just do what they've been doing. They were on 60 minutes. They have been thoughtfully released. updates to their product

and they need to disclose the gap between the product velocity of OpenAI and the product velocity of Google which has not been fast enough. The reason they haven't been fast is because

they're being thoughtful. When you're the incumbent, you have to really think about what you do. If you were Google's barred, if it hallucinates and give you a wrong answer for people like, what? Google's giving me a wrong answer. Now, if something like chat GPT gives hallucinates getting a bad example who cares it's like this is beta software it doesn't have the logo on it so i think this is uh what google will do they'll increase their product velocity they're do more press 60 minutes you saw them send everybody out there was a real diverse group of individuals getting on 60 minutes they're doing the full court press tour this is all by design to slow the momentum of sam waltman doing every podcast in the world lex friedman and then I don't know if you saw, Sam Altman is, he's really enjoying this moment.

And it's hard for it for him. He had a failed company looped back when we met each other in the Sequoia days. We were both Sequoia Scouts, then an incredible run as an investor. And then why Combinator was the president of? But I mean, I think this is something he's always wanted is to have this great, you know, product and team and moment. And he's taking the most of it. He's tweeted he's going on tour to like 20 cities. So Google's looking at that and going, wow, Sam Altman's going to be on 20 different.

cities, a 20 city tour. Yeah, it's time for them to get these new projects out there. And they're going to do that. Magi, I saw. Their new search engine, so maybe we could tee that up for the audience, what Google has said there, because I just saw that in my travels fly by the Twitter stream. And I'm not actually even up to date on it.

Yeah. So via those anonymous New York Times sources, the project is code named Magi. And I'm not sure if it's pronounced like Maggie or Magi. like magic, but it's spelled like magic, like magic without the sea. I'm going to call it Maggie. Maggie, okay. That's honestly, that's when I read it through first. I said Maggie and then producers were like,

Alexa, Maggie, Siri. Okay, I like it. It's got any. I like it. Okay. So Project Maggie has more than 160 people working on full time. It's kind of like a startup. New features.

Yeah, yeah, new features are being developed by smaller teams working together in sprint rooms, which also kind of. kind of sounds like a startup. And then there's lots of tweaking and iterations that are happening daily. Again, that sounds like a startup. And this new search engine would offer users, quote, a far more personalized experience than the company's current service attempting to anticipate users need.

So we're kind of seeing like that product velocity you were talking about earlier. But before the new search engine launches, Magi will create tools for Google's existing search product. Yeah, this would be a really good idea for them to delineate the existing product from the beta product. This would give them what ChatGPT and Bing has the ability for people to say, you're playing in a sandbox, you're playing with a new thing. Here's disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, and just make it really easy for users. It will also create a hype cycle because now, oh, have you tried Maggie or Magic,

whatever they do? just note to people who are branding things. If there's like four different ways to say something, you kind of failed the branding exercise. So it's a terrible name. I would have just gone with magic. I would have called it the magic search engine or wow or something. You know,

it's just something fun and playful. And then eventually they can bring those features back in. Bing and wow. Well, actually, it's interesting. AOL owned the domain name WOW.com. And when I was leaving to do Mahalo, I was trying to negotiate with them to give me wow, because I was doing a human-powered search engine,

famously, which was kind of like taking the Wikipedia software and making search results that were curated by humans instead of using artificial intelligence. I wanted to use actually human intelligence. And amazing what happens in 15 years. So a lot of lessons there. That's for another episode. But I do think there is something really smart about what they're doing, which is, okay, we'll incorporate features into Google, but we're also going to let this team run fast,

hard, and make different features. the personalization is going to be great. And what's going to happen is what assets do they have that chat GPT does not have? They have everybody's Gmail. And I believe Gmail, your YouTube subscriptions and your Google docs are going to be the foundational elements of why Google, I'd set on all in they're going to roll. I should say they could roll chat GPT if they execute well. So if I was going to say that again, I would say they could roll.

and this feels like they want to roll over chat chpT. How do you do that? I really have been, and you know this because you've seen me like sharing it internally, like I'm trying to get everybody on the team using it. The number one thing I want to do is have chat GPT4 under over my Gmail, but I don't want, I don't trust opening I with my data. I don't want them reading my emails and then spitting them back out as answers to other people's questions. But I do trust Google.

And so if when I open Maggie, I say Maggie, can you tell, me everybody I emailed with in 20 before 2019 and can you give me a top five list by month of who I traded the most emails with but that aren't part of launch or inside or those two organizations and then give me a list of where they currently work and put it into a table and craft a check-in email for each of them that either congratulates them on their new position or just says hey was thinking about you from our conversations back in 2018 that would be like an incredible mind-blown thing. Or, hey, what documents had the most activity for me in 2016, 17, 18, and 19? Show me those documents. Bring them up and then I could start talking to an

interface and do that. Or on YouTube, hey, you know I love Mark Knopfler, you know I love Dyer Straits. Can you make me an agent that makes me a playlist of only new Mark Knopfler and Dyer Shraits concerts that have been released? And don't play me the ones that I already have in my queue. These kind of things that they already have access to, it's just going to start them on third base. This idea of anticipating becomes really interesting. So they know that you did a search, like if I did my travel searches here and I was

searching for flights, they could just put in the side of my Google or my Gmail in the sidebar of Maggie hotels in, you know, this city, top restaurants in the city, restaurants you've been to in the city because they know I've been there. And if I was in Tokyo last year, they could say, hey, are you planning to go to Tokyo next year? So just like it does auto complete, imagine auto complete, but for you personal. And then the agent says, here are new restaurants in Tokyo in case you're going next year. So all of those things are going to give them so many things to brainstorm on with this technology that I'm totally here for this dog fight. I am long Google.

I'm long Google in this fight. I'm also long Microsoft in this fight. I think it would be so sick to have auto complete with your calendar. So how we have calendar now, like, hey, can you meet at this time? have like in your email it auto complete hey why don't we meet at and then have google like fill it in that would be really nice for gmail um to build on that imagine yeah it says hey uh these are people you were talking to you have you know the whole afternoon off on friday here are some meeting suggestions would you like me to book meetings with any of these 20 people you haven't talked to and do a

catch a phone call yeah like oh well that's interesting right who did i have the most meetings with three years ago five years ago 20 years ago in my gmail give me 20 meeting suggestions people i should catch up with. Because I'm literally doing that now. I'm looking back in my Gmail and it is a manual process of finding all the limited partners I talked to for launch, one, two, three, and now we're raising launch fund four and launch.com slash four. I think you can learn more about it. And so I'm going backwards and I'm like, oh yeah, I met with this endowment. I met with this person. I forgot about that meeting. I just need Google to do that for me. Hey, these were the, when did I last email people from these companies? Were there any other people I emailed didn't get back to, whatever? Just all that

is going to be awesome. Yeah, it is. And also on that, by the way, I created a CRM in Notion like years ago, having a Notion AI go off of that CRM and tell me, like, I have as one of the columns, like the last time I emailed somebody, have it being able to send me reminders if anybody from Notions listening, I would like that. Closing big enterprise deals. It's not easy. You all know that the last thing you want to do is slow down your sales team with the lack of integrations. That's table stakes. everybody expects that your people management tool will work seamlessly with your payroll provider. They expect your CRM to work with accounting software. Just think about yourself.

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Merge.dev slash twist, M-E-R-G-E-D-E-V-V-slash-Twist. Again, three linked accounts for free. Merge.com. Well done, merge. A lot of my startups are using this product and love it. In entertainment, speaking of all this AI craziness, AI-generated song featuring Drake in the weekend has gone just crazy, viral over the past few days.

The song is called Heart on My Sleeve, and it was generated and released by a TikTok user named Ghostwriter. And the song gained more than 8.5 million views on TikTok, according to a BBC article. And the song was streamed over 250,000 times on Spotify, which is kind of crazy that it even got on Spotify. The producers checked out both platforms for the original songs, but both of the platforms took it down. I would even got on Spotify is like kind of insane that that was able to happen. Yeah. And you said, have been taken off Spotify, have been taken off TikTok. Oh, wow, that's

interesting. I have some thoughts on that. Okay. Let's listen. I like it. I can't tell the difference. If I played that for you, would you know? totally can't. And I actually, I like, I didn't hear it from the original creator, but I did hear it. Like, everybody still screen recorded and like are using the audio on TikTok. So I've heard the audio a few times. And I, before I realized it was AI generated, I just thought it was like another catchy, like, TikTok sound. So I actually had no idea. This was like an AI thing at all. And Drake and the weekend, by the way, they did not record this song. Like, the vocals are entirely AI. Everybody's freaking out and basically like saying if it was real, it would be such a.

hit, but neither artist responded regarding the new track yet. But Drake recently voiced his concerns over a different song using his AI-generated voice that went viral. The rapper posted an Instagram story with the caption, This is the Final Straw AI. So he's not a huge fan, but... He might have been joking.

I don't know. Ice spice... Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Ice spice is like pretty big right now. Like the girl that was in the... Huge. Yeah, like the women, she has like a really big TikTok sound from like the song, Boys a Liar. I think it's like part two. And I always hear like Obama and Trump remixes, like how if they were like saying her,

her song. So I think a lot of Ice Spice stuff has been, like her lyrics have been used in AI, but I'm not sure if she's said anything. There's so many different ways this can go. When you do these tests and you think about fairness and fair use, there is an area for parity. So if it is Obama, we know Obama's not doing it. You don't even need to tell anybody that this is a parody, right?

We just know it's a parody. And so under parity law and that exemption from copyright, doing Donald Trump or Obama, only using a small portion of the original and not interfering with their ability to make money and to leverage their voice of the future. And if you're making money, these are all kind of the tests for fair use. You can just look at a fair use four-part test on Wikipedia

and you can go through it. And so what's super interesting here is with this set, this is in some cases new lyrics for cover songs. New lyrics that are as good and performances that are as good as the original and they're confusing the user. And in fact, they would be blocking the ability for Drake and the weekend to then go do their collaboration. If they were going to do a collaboration, you just ruined it.

You just, you know, like, I don't know if they've done collaborations before. If somebody was going to do a cover or remix, this actually infringes on their ability. It confuses the user. And if they put it on Spotify and TikTok and they gained users, even if they didn't turn on monetization, if you gain users for your account, like let's say this ghost face person keeps doing it, and they get to 10 million followers. Those 10 million followers are worth $1, $3 each. So they would have generated $10, $20, $30 million in revenue.

and the platforms, YouTube, TikTok, etc., have very granular, deep, important relationships with the music industry where they pay them licensing fees, they allow them to take step down themselves, they allow them to take the monetization. So if somebody uses a sound clip, they can monetize that video themselves or they can have it taken down.

And the music industry does not play games. But this does remind me of sampling. And so in the sampling era, people were attacking the people doing, sampling. And there was a really reasonable argument that, well, they were transforming the work and they said they shouldn't have to pay because these are new works, because it's transformative. But it was infringing on that person who owned the original sample, especially like Kanye West songs or we have seen Key Diddy as supposedly has had to pay. I'm missing you.

The Diddy Tribute, $5,000 a day to sing. You are infringing on their ability to do those kind of remixes. And Elton John has a remix now. We do a leap. I guess and other folks. So you can't just take people's work. You have to pay them. And sampling is going to be, I think, the reasonable thing here. If people create these and they get the blessing of Drake, great. I could see artists like Elvis and the estate of Elvis selling a CD every year of Elvis doing, you know, hit songs and having AI do it.

And I would be there for it. You know, if you told me you could release a new dire straits album. every two years and it was done based on AI and they made new songs and Mark Knopfler, I could be down with that. Why not? The band's not together anymore. And then for bands that, you know, like people who really aren't around like Jimmy Hendricks should be delightful. So there's a big opportunity here. It's going to be messy. And I'm here for it. This is incredible. One of our producers put in, will artists start leasing out models of their own voices to generate extra revenue? Of course. I think this is like such a good idea, but I even

think it's a better idea for people that aren't even like big musicians yet. So if you ever hear people that are like put out samplings like people like I know one of my friends is like a DJ and he's never met this person before but she put up a bunch of like short snippets of her singing like samples up on a website. He was able to buy like those samples. I think it would be really cool for a platform to just like create like an AI version of this. So people can start doing this like before where they're even big. And I think this whole conversation is going to be pretty ongoing because Universal Music Group, aka UMG,

wrote a memo to major streaming services like Apple and Spotify, asking them to prevent AI companies from accessing their libraries. A UMG wrote, quote, we will not hesitate to take a step to protect our rights and those of our artists. And interestingly, Drake is a UMG artist, and they control most of his catalog, at UMG subsidiary re-signed him for as much as like

$400 million last year. And according to seeking alpha, UMG controls 37.5% of the music industry's market share, which means on average, one in every three songs you listen to, will earn UMG some revenue. So that's crazy.

And this is all a matter of, you know, who gets paid and how much. And this is just a great new business model. The character, Darth Vader, James O'L Jones, famously did the voice. And now he's 91 years old. And in the Obi-Wan series, a company called Respeacher at a Ukraine startup has now, you know, voices, AI voices, Darth Vader. So that, but I think Jones got paid for that and he gave the rights to clone the voice.

And he gave, I don't know, who knows what he got paid for it or whatever, but fantastic. know, if I was, if at the end of my life, this week in startups and all in are, you know, these huge franchises and somebody says, hey, can we use your voice and your daughters are going to get this residual for the rest of their lives and their kids will get the residual? I'd be like, heck yes. Yeah, I'm dead. I don't care. Go for it.

Monotize the hell out of it. Keep my legacy alive. It does block, which is kind of a bummer. It does block new artists from coming out. So if the Beatles, it kept releasing albums and John Lennon's estate and Yogo and the Beatles allowed that, well, maybe then Coldplay doesn't get a chance to, you know, or U2 doesn't get a chance to come out. So there is it just, is that just a different artist? Like the person creating the AI and like, there's got to be like some human element to it, right? Like that, maybe the computer scientist,

we're going to start calling as an artist. Like David Getta definitely considers the people using AI. He sees like AI just as like another instrument, like a tool in your toolbox as an artist. Maybe. I don't know. Uh, because it's getting so good that the AI will be able to ingest, you know, all of Eminem's lyrics, all of Bob Dylan's lyrics, and do a better job than a human of not only producing the voice, but probably producing the lyrics and the guitar sounds. And given the pace at which AI is, and this is what I think people who are like, this AI, you could just unplug it or the answer is wrong, it's hallucinating. What they don't get is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the velocity at which this is moving. We study this as investors, product velocity. The product velocity right now is moving so fast that what were goofy, you know, five second clips last year are now full songs with, you know, 8 million views on TikTok,

and next year there will be whole albums. So, you know, five or six second clips that you can easily tell are not real, full tracks that you can't tell or not real. and then next year I think it will be full albums that yeah I would say by this time next year can we put a little calendar item in here we'll do Rachel and I will do a little bit Rachel a full album by an artist that's as good as their previous work which I think that'll happen in a year over a year or under a year I'm setting the line at 12 months from today so you know how gambling works well I say it take longer or not and it doesn't have to be sanctioned it can be sanctioned or unscctioned but a full album under a year. I think I said a good line. Nick, producer Nick likes to gamble.

Nick, where would you take it? A full album of like an Eminem album, a Bob Dylan album. Just by me putting this bet out here, there's plenty of critics who listen to this show, we'll go do it. What would you take? The over there under, a full album, you know, six, seven, eight songs, buy an artist that's as good as

their least favorite album of theirs previously. If you asked me this question last week, probably would have said over, but based on listening to that song, which is probably better than any Drake song that's been out for the past couple of years. And then also my experiences this morning with training a couple of other AI models, I'm going way, I'm going way under. We should jump to those, too. What do you're playing with AI tools now?

I thought you were supposed to be producing this goddamn podcast. Who told you to start fucking around with AI models? We'll see in a couple minutes. Oh, I did. Okay. Listen, as a founder, ensuring your cash is safe. is priority number one. It's been a bit crazy out there. I don't want to put caps locks on right now, but I will if you need me to. The FDIC $250,000 limit is just not enough for most businesses.

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investors to help them raise funds. Head to Mercury.com to join more than 100,000 startups that trust Mercury for banking. And if you're interested in Mercury Raise, applications for both Seed and Series A are open through April 20, right? So you've got to get it in there by April 20th. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Banking. and trust members FDIC. Oh, let's get to it. Stop teasing the audience.

Let's get to it. What do you got for me? Do the Kanye one first because the Kanye one's fun. Okay, so we put together three 10-second samples. One is a real Kanye West song. One is from a totally new AI-generated song with an AI-generated Kanye voice, so custom lyrics. And the third is Kanye's AI vocals over an existing rap song by a different artist. And Jason, you have to pick the real song.

Yeah, you have to guess. Sample one, two or three. So there's two fakes in a reel. Yeah. Like you choose in a lot. All right. Two artificially intelligent generative AI tracks,

just so we're clear with the audience. And one is an actual Kainte track. Now, I know Kanya's library, so I might be able to do this, but let's see what happens. Okay. Clip number one. I'm listening.

Oh, it's got some graphics too. Life like, this is what your life like, try to live the life, right? People really know you. Okay, the fidelity on his voice and the way he's doing the lyrics is not actually Kanye. So I think that that one is AI generated, but don't tell me. Go ahead, next one. I'm going to reserve the right to change my answers here, but that felt AI-ish.

Next. Oh, same graphics. Good. Smart move on the producer's part. Okay. Because of my ignorance. What was I thinking? That was some bitch shit.

I lost Adidas, but I'm so easy. Back in the kitchen, man, I'm a genius. Boys in the hood just like I'm easy. Kanye. Okay. This one had the lyric of he lost Adidas, so it's very modern. It does sound more like Kanye, but not exactly like Kanye. Okay, let me hear it the third, but it has a modern lyric in it.

So I do note that. So that makes it's fresh. Here we go, third one. This is Kanye. This is Kanye. Searching through my memory, my memory. I couldn't find one. Last night, I was getting my feet rub.

By the bed is... Okay. So the first one did not sound like Conier. at all, that's an AI. The second one sounded more like Kanye. Third one sounded exactly like Kanye. How did I do? So the first one was Follow God by Kanye West.

That is a real song. The first one was actually a Kanye song. I got it completely wrong. Yeah. So first one was Follow God. The second one was an AI generated song by R.P. Nixon on Twitter. Sounds AI. When did that come out?

I mean, it's an AI song. Two weeks ago. That did not sound very good. You kind of caught it. I think he had like, you said like the modern lyric. I was like, okay, that's true. Kanye hasn't recorded a song since he lost his mind. So yeah.

And the third one is an AI generated remix of Kanye West rapping no role models by Jake Paul. So that one I'll give you. That's very interesting. Yeah, that's a pretty popular song. So that one, that one sounded really good. That sounded really good. Nick, what do you think of my assessment of these?

So the reason we threw in a song that was already real with Kanye's voice masked over it was because I kind of thought that the pacing of the way that he raps when it's fake is very bad. But when it's a real song and they mask his voice over it, it sounds like real cadence. That's why I thought it was real. It's actually his enunciation is cadence. It's another rapper's cadence, but it's a real person. cadence, right? So we kind of threw that one in there to mess you up.

But yeah, the first song was real and you were like, no way. What's interesting about Kanye, though, specifically is he does so many vocal distortions on his music. Yes. Which is going to bring that up. Right. Which almost makes it sound more like AI. So he's an artist where, you know, unlike someone like Amy Winehouse or Adele where you

really want like crisp vocals, Kanye is always masking his voice. So he's a pretty easy one to trick. Yeah, he's pretty easy to trick. But I mean, I think what we saw here today in this guess the fake, guess the real two fakes is it's hard. It's really hard. We are, it passed the Turing test, basically, where you can't tell if it's a human or not. It feels all human, except for the second one. It was a little, wasn't a great job.

But, I mean, I'm sure the software coming out next week, make it better. Okay, let's keep going. My favorite song, though, by AI Kanye is when they, do like songs that are like traditionally like a little bit more girly like he had a uh he sent it to the producers it's like a video where he sings bubbly so i'm going to throw in this as my my ad to society right now it's been a late for a while now this is crazy you got me feeling like time now oh vibes i like that a lot and that cracked me up i was like wait that this is not bad i got feels I guess that doesn't sound bad.

I mean, I think it should open up Kanye to learning how to play acoustic guitar because Or we don't even have to, he doesn't even have to be in the picture anymore. So you know how it's like, can you separate the art from the artist? If the artist is like really controversial or bad or like whatever they did, you hate them and then somebody makes music using their AI voice, do we still, like, do you still hate the music of the AI? I wonder. Yeah, a millie vanilla-vanelli situation or.

Michael Jackson. Yeah, a lot of, it's going to be complicated. I mean, at the end of the day, if, if the track slaps, it slaps, right? And that's it. And I think nobody cares. Like, nobody cared about sampling. Nobody cares about auto tune except for like maybe some online debate. But the fact is, if it slaps and people dance and makes people feel emotions when they're

driving down the road, it's a good road song, it's a good road song. It's a good dance track. It's a good dance track. That's it. Okay. We also trained some A models of you. on about a 30 minute of high-quality audio using 11labs.io, by the way.

Okay, I didn't know this. We can show you like a 15-minute, excuse me, a 15-second snippet. Okay, this is Jason A-I. Okay, here we go. Hey, everybody, hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. We have an awesome show for you today.

First up on the show, we have producer Rachel back on to read the news. There's a ton of stuff we have to cover in the AI space. It's getting crazy out there, folks. soon you'll probably be hearing an AI version of me. I mean, if I lose my voice one week and you need an intro, I give my permission to do AI intro, and I just want you to say it's AI JCal. What impressed me about that was your voice is very, I don't think it got the tone right,

exactly. No, it did. But your inflections, it actually nailed. Yes, it got the inflections. Which is usually the opposite. Yeah, usually the inflections are harder and the tone is easier. But it didn't really get your tone, but it did nail your inflections. But I did another one.

I gave you a little AI interview, which I should pull up right now. Yeah, where it actually, this is going to, I think this is going to blow your face off with the guests I have on here. It better not be a margin. It's not a fan. No, it's not him. It's way better than that. All right. You ready?

Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. It's your boy, J. Cal. And today we have a very special guest for you. It's been a long time coming. and today I'm thrilled to introduce Dr. Jordan Peterson. You know, it's really great to be here with you, Jason.

Today, I want to talk about the war against young men in the Western Hemisphere. Ooh, boy, that's a loaded topic, JP. Can I call you JP? I feel like I've known you for years. Oh, God. You can call me whatever you like, Jason. Just don't call me woke. These young men and boys are being discriminated against from all angles right now.

Someone needs to think about them. Nobody is protecting them in our society. Okay, let's take a pause for a second before we start talking about young dudes. Jordan, I have to ask, it's been an insane last few years for you, has it not? It felt like a very select few intellectuals were familiar with your work, but just a few years ago. And now you're a total lightning rod on Twitter. Jason, I have to tell you, the last few years have been utterly transformative for me. I was a different person in 2018 than I am today.

I wept live on air. I got banned from Twitter. Then I got let back on Twitter. I don't even know what the hell is going on half the time. You're right. I want to double click on something you just mentioned. You did weep like a child on camera a few months ago. What was that about? I wept like a little baby that went poopy in its pants. You did? Yeah. Why did you do that? I just could not stop thinking about all these young men and how hard of a time they're all having. And I don't know, I just turned into Jordan poopie pants. Jordan poopie pants. That has a pretty nice ring to it, huh? I think that's going to stick, JP.

Okay, that was so good neck. I mean, does Jordan Peterson's voice not sound almost perfect? Like, that's crazy. I mean, JPs. Come on, Nick, you know, these men. Jordan Boopy pants, do you like that? I mean, if you want to call me Jordan Proopypants because I care about young men, Rachel, that's okay with me.

You know, somebody has to think about them. And if I have to wear it depends and do podcasts till I'm 90, I'm still going to be there for these young boys. I don't know. Who's better at impressions? Like, this is how it can have to be the audience can gas. And I were Jason. funnier. Well, mine's funnier because you know I'm doing it. But I do think...

I don't know. The poopie pants ad was pretty good. I'm going to... We're going to do a new segment, Nick. And I do not get to hear it ahead of time. The AI J-Cal interviews blank. So when there's a newsmaker who doesn't like me or we can't get on the show, permission granted to do what you just did, up to like two or three minutes. And we'll just play it at the end. AI, unauthorized AI, Jake Adam Newman is next. Oh my God. Just do it. I want to one more time. I want to play back this one clip. Listen to the inflection in your voice here.

It's not so much the tone because your tone's a little, I mean, Jordan Peterson's almost perfect. Listen to your inflection in your voice when you asked this question. You did weep like a child on camera a few months ago. What was that about? You hear you say that? What was that about? Isn't that like almost?

Yeah, no, I always answer. When I ask a question, I like to sometimes use my inflection to get the everybody, queue it up and I just put it right off. I was like blown away. Did weep like a child on camera a few months ago. What was that about? I wept like a little baby that went poopy in its pants. You did. Yeah. I mean, why did you do that? I just could not stop thinking about all these young men and how hard of a time they're all having. And I don't know, I just turned into Jordan poopie pants. I have to say, this is going to open up a whole new segment on the show. When we can't get a newsmaker or somebody does something insane.

We just completely can make the show go. Howard Stern, whatever. Puppets, you know, doing inappropriate prank prank callers, whatever. Like, you could have me prank call people at home. That would be hilarious as a bit. Yeah, go have fun. Have me like, hello. Hey, Mark.

Mark, Andreessen. Do you have a family password? No, no, no. To make sure your family doesn't get, like, scammed with AI? Oh, that's an interesting. A safe word. A safe word, right? My family's like always had one since I was little for like, I don't know, my parents, I guess are really afraid of kidnapping or something.

But we've always had one when I was little. I mean, now, even more than ever, feel like that's an important thing to have. So if you say the word, yeah, you know, I'm looking forward to going to Paris. Paris might be your word that everybody's like, whoa, or whatever. Yeah, see you in Tokyo. Right. Exactly, exactly. So I'm just throwing it out there.

Yeah, my parents were ahead of the game. I give them kudos. Ours is like something we never say. And yeah, I think that's really good. Good idea. Well, I mean, this is, I think, a very educational. Thank you to the producers and to the folks at 11labs.io. 11labs.io, we're able to do all that for us.

And by the way, there's a business called Splice, which has monetized people's collections of, clips, right? And a lot of people use Splice. We had the CEO on episode 1265. So if you just type in this, we can start up as 1265, you can go find that. It's interesting. I wanted to make this notion or CODA instance of like every

episode, summarized, and I'm glad we didn't finish that project because it seems like AI is able to do it right now. So I think we're going to be able to just fire, just take the entire corpus of MP3, is put it on notion, and there should be the ability with software to

just make these pages and make the transcript and make the summaries. What I do is I go into my Descript, which I already used to transcribe like meetings and stuff, and I just throw it in like explainpaper.com or notion right now to transcribe stuff. What was the other one? Explainpaper.com. I don't know that.

It's what kids use to. They're in college. Right. I mean, I think kids in college should be able to use all these tools, but then they should be forced to write their papers and essays in person. I really hate to. I know this is like, right now every college kid is like STFU. If I'm a teacher, I said, listen, you can use whatever tools you want.

But, you know, when we give her tests or whatever and you do an essay, you have to write it on paper. So we're going to check your penmanship, your ability to write without the tools and your ability to think without the tools. Can you imagine how people would lose their minds if they were required to write but a 500. word essay on a piece of paper with a pen. That would be kind of crazy with pen and paper. I remember though. So this, that's how I did it. Like chat GPT was out when I was in college. And I remember the first time I ever used it was my senior year 2020. And one of my friends got like, my friend Rick got the beta of it. Reg, you mean GPT, right? Like GPT too?

Yeah, yeah, of GPT. Excuse me. We put in like our resumes to make our cover letters like come out. And I feel like there needs to be a class on. more so use cases. Because I think, like, that was a good start, but looking back on it, like, I don't even think, like, people are even realizing of what these tools can be used for in the educational setting. Like, yeah, obviously, like, writing papers is great, but, like, what else could they be doing? Like, that should be a whole class on its own.

Yeah, just briefly wanted to touch on what an amazing CEO, Brian Armstrong is from Coinbase before we wrap here. I know we're wrapping. We've got a full hour more of show. But I saw he said, you know, everything's on the table, including possibly relocating the company. When a CEO says something like that, that means they're actually planning it and doing it.

So I would be surprised if Coinbase wasn't based in another country by the end of the year. He should move it because if he's got to go to court with the SEC, he could really prove his point by just saying, you know what? Okay, fine. I'm taking all the jobs. I'm taking everybody. I'm moving myself. I'm going to go to Portugal or whoever, go to the Zieg,

in wherever, go to Singapore, whoever wants him, whoever wants a $10 billion or $20 billion company, I'm not sure what coin basis market cabinet is right now. He should literally do an RFP. Who wants a $10 billion company to be based in their country? I'm looking for a 20-year deal. And he should put that in the face of the United States and the SEC

and say, listen, you did not regulate properly in his mind. And he's got a solid argument. You didn't tell us the rules of the road. Now, the counter argument that the rules didn't change is also valid. So, and I might lean 70% towards that and 30% towards they've done a better job. He might be 7030 the other way or whatever. Intelligent people can disagree on this. But I do think he should write an RFP, put up a notion page and just say, which country would like us, just like Amazon did for their headquarters too?

He should do Coinbase HQ and have people bid and say, whoever gives us the best tax deal, the best relocation deal. I'm looking for 100,000s for a office. You might find a country like a Portugal and Italy, a Spain, whoever, or South American country, you know, Sri Lanka, who knows? Like somebody might just say, you know what? We want to get jobs there. And if he says, listen, I'll live there some number of months a year.

And I think this is an extraordinary turn of events. We're monitoring that. Coinbase CEO, I'm sure I'm saying, anything is on the table, including relocating if crypto regulatory clarity is not a reality here in the United States. That's big news. Big big news.

It is. It's crazy. So do you think over, it's over under a year, when do you think they could be out of the States? Oh, I think he's already decided to do it. I think it's already decisions made. I think he's already made his decision. A lot of times when people float stuff like that,

it's kind of like when a CEO floats that stuff, it means they have the plans already underway. They're executing and they're kind of, I'm going to say, I told you so. You know, and I gave you fair warning, but I bet you he has, my guess is for the past year, or since this Wells notice came, I bet you other countries said, why are you dealing with this nonsense? We'd love to have you here. I'm sure Obology is over wherever, I don't want to docks him, but whatever, you know, free market he's in, I think it's public, but I wouldn't say it here, but I know it's not in the United States anymore. A lot of these crypto people left to other places, Puerto Rico, Singapore, or Zug, whatever.

And so I bet you, people called him, said, why don't just move here and just stop servicing U.S. citizens and just put it in the face of, and you'll get more customers. You know, we might already know the place he's doing this because Brian Armstrong kind of talked about this a lot when he was at the UK based fintech event or a fintech event based in the UK. So maybe it's somewhere for there. Well, I remember I said the program that data was the new oil and that Reddit and Kora and all of these places would start charging. Reddit's going to charge people for API access to train systems, which means open AI, which has been using it, is going to have to pay a retroactive bill and or settle or rip out all that learning. And that lawsuit

I believe could result in an injunction that turns off chat GPT. So just to let people know exactly what a powerful position Reddit is in, Reddit could file a lawsuit. They could ask for an injunction, essentially a restraining order, against chat GPT opening AI and Bing, that could result in them having to suspend access to chat GPT because they stole that data and training data from Reddit. They stole it without permission is, I think, what happened.

I think, I'm just going to put a couple qualifiers on this, because we don't know the conversations like that. Maybe they gave them temporary access to it. But, you know, if you trained on other people's data and they filed that lawsuit in the right jurisdiction that is friendly towards IP holders, it could result in an injunction. And you could say, I want them to have to turn it off,

which then means, I mean, if you're, raise $10 billion if you're open AI, how do you not give $100 million to Reddit? I think Reddit's probably worth $100 million a year. A billion dollars. I think they'll make more money, Reddit, ultimately, from their data than they will from their advertising. So good on Reddit. And I would file a lawsuit if I was Reddit immediately against anybody who trained on their

data. And I would put that in the terms of services. If you scrape any of our data, you've got to pass for a license of me. It's going to be a lot of lawsuits dropping, is my prediction. Well, it's going to be interesting, I guess, to see all that happen. All right, everybody. I think that's a wrap. Rachel, you did great.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Of course. Of course. I think you're going to be here weekly. I'm going to try to get you in the weekly rotation. Excited to be here. All right.

All right. All right, of course, of course. Do you give me your socials? Give you a little plug here at there. I'm at underscore Rachel Braun. So I wasn't cool enough to drop the understs. I don't know if I ever will be, but now I've kept it up on, I made a, I have a pro Instagram because everybody has a professional Instagram that's underscore.

I mean, that's a different friend there, regular Instagram. So I have an Instagram now. Still can't get the at Rachel Braun. It's okay. Don't worry about it. Wait, wait. What did you call it? What was the term?

A pro-stagram, yeah. Nothing's on it yet, but I kind of want to. Proostagram? Nick asked if I paid for Insta verified. I have not. I kind of want to on my. I would do it. It sounds weird because on my, I've only been faked, like had fake accounts happen a few times on Twitter, but I've had a lot of fake accounts of me on Instagram because I wasn't super public.

Like I have a personal one. And so people are making like fake Instagram accounts of me and trying to sell Bitcoin for a while. So maybe I will pay for Instagram verified. I just want to warn people, somebody just sent me a whole signal or telegram, telegram thread that they had with an impersonator of mine. I will never ask you to invest. in a deal over signal. Any deal we do will come from my company. TheSindicate.com, Jason at Calacanus.com. If you're concerned, hit reply. We do like one deal every week on the syndicate.com. I do not operate in crypto. You do not wire me money. Do not send me Bitcoin.

I do not have wallets in any of those things. If you are contacted by me, it would be through one of the people who work at our company. You can DM me, open DMs on all the platforms. and to check where you can ever, if you ever have anybody doing this kind of stuff, just email Jason at Kalakannis.com. I'll go right back to you and just send me the screenshots. And of course, report it. I will never ask you to do a deal over SMS.

And I'll never ask you to do it to anonymous wallet. I'll never ask you for your bank account information. This is crazy. People are so dumb. But I guess, like, they only need to get one person who's excited. And then I saw the text stream. And the person told me,

I feel stupid, but I was just excited to talk to you because I'm a fan. And I was like, aw, thank you for letting me know. And by the way, if you do have a Bitcoin laying around, you know, could use a Bitcoin if you want to go to the Knicks game, I'm right. Everybody, we'll see you next time.