This Week in Startups - SEC investigates Bored Apes, AI-generated Steve Jobs/Joe Rogan interview & more | E1585

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Vinny Lingham and Sunny Madra are back for another crypto roundtable! The show starts with a discussion on Nvidia's new high-powered graphics cards (2:35) and an AI-generated podcast interview. (15:21) Then, the group breaks down the SEC investigating Yuga Labs over whether or not Bored Apes are securities! (27:07) (0:00) J+M tee up today's crypto roundtable! (2:35) J+M welcome Sunny Madra and Vinny Lingham; Vinny breaks down his new Nvidia purchase and how graphics cards will power the next wave of AI (14:03) Dell for Startups - Apply for Dell for Startups and get an additional 10% off at http://dell.com/twist (15:21) Podcast.ai's AI-generated Steve Jobs/Joe Rogan interview (25:50) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist  (27:07) The SEC is investigating Yuga Labs over its Bored Apes NFT collection, regarding whether or not the NFTs are securities (36:24) Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (37:26) What is this SEC investigation actually about? Why or why not are they securities? What are other similar examples? (50:55) More interesting developments in the NFT space, Google announces it will use Coinbase to accept crypto payments FOLLOW Vinny: https://twitter.com/vinnylingham FOLLOW Sunny: https://twitter.com/sundeep FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Okay, everybody, it's Thursday. Yes. The day after Wednesday. And of course, it's Thursday, so we should have our Wednesday crypto roundtable. We had to publish it today, folks. There's no easy way to put it. We got the unicorn series. It's a thing.

Unicorn series. We have a little air traffic issue going on here on the show. But Vinnie Lingam and Sunny Madra, Sundee are back to break down all the biggest news in crypto. And actually, the biggest developments in compute power, we talk about super powerful graphics cards, Vinny's new GPU, and how all that compute power is going to change. Art, gaming, even NFT creation, just like, just some fun geeky stuff. VR. All of that.

These new cards are breaking down. And then, of course, we get into the big news, Molly, that Bloomberg is reporting. The SEC is probing. The board ape maker, Yuga Labs over, we think, are NFTs and the ape coin securities. It is a vibrant, detailed debate on. what should happen in terms of crypto regulation from this point forward. I love this segment. It just is so fun. And then we talk briefly about Google making Coinbase, its main crypto payments processor.

It is yet another great show. Yeah, I'm really interested to see what happens with cloud computing plus crypto plus startups and the payment rails there could be very interesting. Like Molly said, this is going to be a great show, so I need you to stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Dell for Startups provides key solutions for all your startup needs. A dedicated tech advisor will get to know your business goals and deliver customized solutions for rapid tech enablement with top business class PCs and accessories. Apply for Dell for startups and get 10% off select products during Dell's semi-annual sale at Dell.com

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Sign up today at AKA.m.s slash this week in startups. All right, everybody, welcome back. It's time for our crypto roundtable. We do this twice a month with two Mali of two besties who are just deep in the crypto game and have been in the crypto game for a long time. We got a full docket today of exciting. And, well, let's face it, a little bit of scary news with us again, Sandeep Madra. How are you, sir?

Awesome. Thank. Good to be back. And Vinnie Lingam. Thanks, guys. Great to be back again. Wow. You guys are coming in hot today.

Yeah, you're fired up. Look at the energy. Does somebody need a liquid IV? Like, what's happening here? No, I've been up since 5.30 this morning, so I'm a little tired. Wait, why are you up so early? Do you hitting that tonal or did you dust it? Have you logged into that tonal behind you?

Have you should be gone for the logging? Not today. Not today. But the reason I work up early were, like, a lot of, people on this chat probably, hopefully, trying to buy the new Nvidia, um, RtX 4090 card that came on sale at 6am and I managed to get one. Why? Would you wake up that early for that car?

All the cool miners are doing? So I could buy in secondary. Yes, the problem with buying secondary is, first of all, like, it just supports the, the bots that go and, you know, attack these sites and buy everything in five seconds. Secondly, you have to wait about a week or two more because when you go through the secondary exchanges. What is it? Why would you wake up at 5 am for a graphic card?

The graphic cards out there are so absurdly powerful. What is this one going to do for you? This one is like four times more powerful than the previous generation. It's unbelievable, actually. You know, so at 4K on cyberpunk, they had 22 frames per second and everything maxed out on the previous card. This one does something closer to like 80 or 90 frames per second, which is insane. So anyway, I'm a gamer. I play some Fortnite and I want to get one of these cards as soon as possible.

That's definitely what you need that for Sandy plays Fortnite too I mean I have no beef with Fortnite It just seems like maybe you don't eat quite that much power for Well you do if you want to run it at 4K Because I play my Fortnite at 4K And I really enjoy the graphics Are you doing Overwatch too?

Yeah I stick to Fortnite Like once you get into the Fortnite universe You get the mechanics going It's hard to switch I'm too old to switch between mechanics Different games So I stick with what I know these days Yeah

That's why I'm still on Halo Thanks Jakeo I see you in there. I see you. How much does that card cost? I paid $1,800 for it. I mean, they range between $1,600 for a graphics card. Yeah, between $1,500 and $2,000, depending on which version you get.

I got the one for $1,800 because of the size that fits in my machine. And it's pretty powerful. It's amazing. And, yeah. So, $1,800, Mali, for a card, which is more than the cost of, like, the M2 laptop. Yeah. Yeah. Peter, you just said the card is bigger than an Xbox series S.

It is? Yeah, I didn't get the founders edition. I got the Assuse, the Overshock edition. So it's a little bit faster, overclocked. It's got 24 gigs around. It's insane. I'm not judging. I know many, there are many nerds in my life.

I'm a geek because I build my own computers, so that's why I like this stuff. Honestly, I'm the only reason that my brother was not doing that is because he works for like a school district. Otherwise, he would have been up there with you buying the same stuff. Like, it's a whole. I got these nerds in my life.

And Homestead Creative, I see you. I also love Halo. I'm like still stuck on Halo. But I'm also going to connect this to the render network. So I'd love to talk about AI art today as well. AI arts taking off in a big way and renders doing cool stuff. And the ability to,

so if you think about how many of these cards, uh, Nvidia are shipping worldwide, like millions of these cards over the next year or two, these cards are going to be used for, for things like Dolly. Mid-Journey, et cetera, to power these cards in a distributed network. So, R-TX-4090 is the name of the card.

This thing looks like a boombox on the website. I've pulled the website up. It's huge. Now, wait, how does that fit into a normal computer? It plugs into one of the slots? It actually uses up four slots. What? It has to go into...

Get with the times, J-KAL. Yeah, yeah. It has to go into an ATX case. You have to have at least a thousand... a thousand watts of power in your PSU, probably 1200 is probably better. I mean, I may have to upgrade my 1,000 watt to 1,200. We'll see how everybody can handle it.

But it's insane. But this is a state of the art, guys. It's like, it's at 16,000 kuda cores in this thing. For where the world's going with NFTs and AI art, this is the device that's going to power it. Is there still competition? I know that in video had, didn't they change their graphics card strategy because they were like so many of them

are getting scooped up by minors? Well, they actually waited. If you're on the bottom there, Jay, you'll see 22. So this is the test, and I'll answer you now in the second morning. Keep going down. Keep going down. Yeah, 22 frames per second. And, I mean, look at the quality difference.

And so you have DLSS off at 20 frames per second, DLS3 and RT ray tracing on at 100. I mean, look at the difference. It's insane. And that's just one generation. shift from the previous generation to this one. So in other words, when I'm looking at a video game, it's going to just keep crossing that uncanny valley.

It's going to keep looking like, you know what I find interesting, Molly? It's like a lot of the games when I play them now, the games look like the cut sequences from 20 years ago when I played the games. So you remember they used to make, you know, these cut scenes that they would spend like, you know, whatever, you know, two months,

making a 30 second cutscene between levels, and then you go back dropping down to like, whatever, EVGA or something. I mean, it is kind of extraordinary. It's not even to be about games. I'm just dropping something in our chat here, but this is a combination of VR and one of like AI generated art.

So this is a real-time room, Nick, if you can pull that up. Sorry, I'm just switching windows here. So the idea here is. Take a look at this. This is a real-time room, Nick, I don't know if you're able to pull that tweet. No, I get it. So before it comes up, to describe it, oh, here we go. So I'll make that like five times bigger. Or just make it full screen if you can. So the idea here is with these type of cards, you could speak, like you can speak to Dolly or that Facebook text to a room. You'd say, I would like a room. That looks like the Amman Hotel in Tokyo. And it would go figure that out. That's pretty trippy. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Molly and I, when we saw that Facebook. It was pretty obvious what they're doing. Yeah. So this is pretty incredible, right? This is being generated real time. And so you don't get kind of cheap backgrounds

or anything like that. You get an immersive environment. Wow. If you're not watching this live or watching, you know, basically sketches render into a complete 3D room. No, it's going to be awesome is with Neurrelink when that eventually gets online, you would be able to, Sunny, Vinny, plug neuralink into your brain, then whatever you're thinking could then manifest itself in a virtual world that you're inhabiting.

And they call this new feature Burning Man. It's the new feature. But I'm like you. There you go. I mean, it is pretty crazy. This feels like yet another tipping point in terms of just what

This is all like converging on AI. It's not just about the graphics. I mean, these GPUs power, you know, AI. Yeah, the AI itself, yeah. Yeah, this is all part of this big ongoing tech trend about how GPU is the new CPU because they can do this. It can like think it's not linear. It's simultaneous.

Correct. Parallel. Yeah. I mean, you can say you're saying the characters in some of these video games, if their AI, if their behavior is driven by machine learning and AI, those tasks would be dropped to this card possibly. Exactly. Beyond video games.

Right, just like generating thinking and scenarios and processing multiple processes in parallel so you can just get to conclusions faster. Sonny, are we- I guess we're never getting quantum computing. We're just going to get faster and faster DPS. Yeah, I think that's probably right for the next decade or so. But Vinnie, is this going to, I'm sorry, Sunny, are you getting the sense that AI,

Molly and I were talking about this the other week after Tesla's AI day, are you getting the sense that AI is starting to compound and the actual results of, you know, the previous, you know, verticals that have been mastered, whether it's poker or go or, you know, Dolly or GPT3, whatever it is? Do you feel like those things are increasing velocity,

perhaps hitting, you know, what we call in the industry at tipping point, where they're just going to be flowing at a much higher rate? Yeah, definitely. There's some laws that people should put out, but for the longest time, we had Moore's law with general purpose CPUs, right? You guys are all familiar with it. Every 18 months, we'd have twice as much computing power. And I think with the chips behind this, because Tesla has their own chips, Google has their own chips, and you have general purpose GPUs from like Nvidia. I think we're really seeing all of that same law happen, but the compounding rate is even faster, I believe. And with this, It's not just related to compute, but it's memory, it's cloud, and it's all of that coming together. Because, you know, when you use any of those services, and they talked about this at the Tesla day, much of the power is not just what the core software of the AI, but it's also the infrastructure that they've built, right?

What do they call their big AI machine? J-Cal, they have a name for it, right, at Tesla. I'm slipping me now, but yeah, a big part of this is getting the data from the cloud, from storage, into memory, so that you can run these processes. So they have like a large number of Ethernet people going, you know, from computer to computer. So when they drop a simulation, they're like, hey, this turn on Market Street is absurdly hard. Let's just run a gazillion simulations based on everybody who's driven through it as a human. Dojo, right?

Domo or Dojo? The Dojo. Dojo. But somebody's a domo also. It's Dojo. It's pretty incredible. So they're building their own sort of racks to do very, it's really interesting to see hardware being built specifically for certain tasks.

Yeah. And that's what's really kind of, that's what's exploding this, right? Because, you know, with Moore's law, you just had like the CPU getting faster now. You have this combination of cloud, infrastructure, network speed, and the CPUs. And so we should name it.

We should call it something. And then kind of everyone talk about it. You brought up the data. 11. The data. I'm going to start referring to data as data. Oh, fancy. Are you also going to...

But only when I'm angry. Are you going to refer to it in the plural, too? That's data right there. No, I mean, don't make me pull over and come back there for your data. Did you... Yeah, exactly. If you guys don't stop screwing around with all of Dad's Data, I'm pulling... I'm turning this car around.

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So some maniacs. I don't know if this was completely hacked. Just to put the setup here very briefly, it's like a 20-minute clip. Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs. Let's just listen to a clip and then I want to get everybody's reaction around the horn. I've missed this. It's always fun. How's it going? Come on. Tell me about jobs.

It's always good to see you, buddy. I'm so happy you came on, man. Yeah, it's great to be on the show. Your audience is just so different from your normal Apple users, and that's a good thing. It's cool. Well, you know, I was an Apple user way before I did this show. I've been a fan of yours of Macintosh since the 1980s. All right, Vin, what do you think? How close to the Uncanny Valley? Compare that to the Metaverse stuff that we saw this week. So just to say, I'm clear, there was AI generally. Yes. That's what they're claiming. So Rogan did not interview Steve Jobs that we are aware.

I mean, it sounds like they were kind of clipping pieces of what he said. You know, when they make those fake Obama speeches and stuff of that? It didn't sound like real. That was my exact first reaction. So there's a technique. How would Stern would do this on a show. Somebody would publish their bio and read it. So, you know, Hillary Clinton's bio would come out or whoever.

Obama's Bible come out and they would take every single word and then if you typed out a sentence it would just pull those words together and so yes I thought that too maybe this isn't AI Molly maybe this is like a put on

so this is this is where some of the legal stuff is going to come into play like Jennifer just commented that this is morbid and disrespectful just because you can doesn't mean you should and I actually agree with that I think that there's

you know especially for like famous public figure I mean, their voices, the rights to their voices belong to their estate. You'll see what James Old Jones did with Darth Vader now is he licensed his voice to Disney so they can use AI to reproduce his voice legally for all the movies they're going to do with Darth Vader in it. And it's going to sound like James Old Jones and his estate's going to get some percentage of royalties. And I think that is totally fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. But I think if you take someone like Steve Jobs where you haven't taken it with permission, No, I get it's a bit of parody year and then. That's like, you know, whatever, all funny games. But at some point, there is a copyright, right? Like, I think your voice is like a voice right, maybe. I'm not so sure. We are going to get to this point, though.

I mean, this is like a larger topic about identity, ownership of identity, but we are 100% going to get to the point where that is a huge conversation. Because between like biotech, deep fakes, the ability to manipulate your voice with AI, like, yes, there is going to be a question about who owns your own identity. This might be litigated in the Supreme Court at some point. Like, it may go that high. You know, someone's coming from the identity world as well. I got to say, Molly, I think it's a thing.

It's the cat's out of the bag on this one because I just saw on my Twitter feed trending. Tucker Carlson has Hitler on tonight. So that's coming at 7 p.m. Jason. Tucker is interviewing Hillary. But it's a double, right. Do not worry. The double. I'm giving you the double.

Thank you. Get out to try. I mean, this is what's going to have. It's the truth. You know, Tucker's like, anyway, it's a double header. Mussolini and Hitler. It's a round table. Okay.

Pull it back. Pull it back. Sorry. Our stream just got kicked off YouTube again. I'm kind of just thinking, Molly, of like, what's the interview that we're going to be forced to hear that none of us wants to hear? Now, we follow the thought process here. What do you think, Sonny?

Did you buy that this was AI driven? Did you, at a minute, just get tingly feeling? that it was like almost there with Steve Jobs being on Joe Rogan? Yeah, like, you know, my general thing when I see these things now is the core of it is AI driven and then there's like an editing layer on top, right? And I think you see a lot of that even with these AI generators. The really great, great stuff that makes you question, someone's taken it and then put it through Photoshop or something like that.

So my guess would be like there was something that came out of a tool, and I don't know anything about it as the first time I saw it. But it's something that came out of a tool and then they've done some tweaking to it to make it. Imagine like we do with the podcast. There's something recorded and then your team goes in and edits it. I feel like that's what's happened. I don't think it's like just straight out of the tool untouched. I felt like this could be faked, Molly. I agree. I thought what they might have done is taken some keynotes. You notice how echoey, it sounds like he's in a hall. So the corpus here may have been taken from the Steve Jobs keynotes. Remember back in the day, they didn't have the same audio fidelity. You know,

there wasn't production value at a lot of those early keynotes. He was just him on stage with a lavalier. So it sound echoey. Joe Rogan, I guess a Joe Rogan impersonation is pretty easy, but what they could have done is taking like audio books or whatever and then said, have Joe Rogan asked this question and then make an amalgamation of this answer from the Walter Isaacson bio, right?

So they could have put the Walter Isaacson bio in there. So it really has to do with what data set you're putting in here, I guess. So are we asking the question? And it sounds like we don't know the answer. they did not generate the voices, right? So the question we're having, it sounds like, is did they grab existing audio and just sort of use a machine

and place it together quite cleverly and create a conversation? Yeah, not cast out. No, no, this was done by a company called Play. H.T. Sound files. They're saying that they did generate the voices.

Okay, got it, got it. This company, play. Dot H.T. You should have them on and see if that's true. They do text to speech. And I don't know. You know some of these. programs I use, Molly, that I'll send you links in sometimes.

You know how, like, the premium versions have a little bit more refined. The better voices, yeah. Like they have Guadeth Paltrow does a voice on one of these. So sometimes I'll have Gpo, you know, when I haven't seen her in a while. Do you new favesies. Yeah. She's obsessed with you. Yeah.

Sometimes I'll just send her a Wall Street Journal story and say, hey, GPO, can you read this for me? Send me the MP3. Now I just use speech. But the flip side is, you know, Waze has this, right? you can have a lot of, you know, those I don't think are done with AI yet. And, you know, Google is really great at this.

So my guess is like there's a core thing that came out of a tool, but then there's some editing done on top. And even the greatest AI stuff out of these tools still gets edited on top, right? So I think that would be my guess. When does the polish kind of get added six months or six years? Where we don't have to do that polish step that you're talking about. Oh, yeah. Probably like 18 to 36 months. I think we don't have to.

Yeah, because it's kind of, it goes back as growing exponentially. Because as it sees more of, because you can also train it on that. Hey, this is what came out and this is how people did the polish. So the AI will just get better at completing that polish. You know what genre is going to be that's it for us, Jason. Like our salad days are almost over here. Robo hosts. Perfect.

I want to ski the mornings too. Hi, Molly. What's on the docket for today? Red flag. J-Cal. You remember a J-Cal? Remember Max Headroom? Max, Hedron.

Yes, I remember him. Yeah. He was awesome. You know where this is going? I think there's going to be an entire genre now. You know about the fan fiction where people would write like their own Star Wars or he started with Star Trek and Star Trek tried to stop it and then Star Wars embraced it. Then people started making short films.

And Star Wars said, yeah, you can make short films. Here's actually a kit to use the sounds from a lightsaber. here's how to make a lightsaber and after effects or whatever program it was. I think the way this is going, somebody who's a talented screenplay writer could write a screenplay and then have it go to

like storyboards and then eventually to like a fully finished version of the film. So the Mandalorian could have been written by a group of fans and just publish. Yeah. Wattpad does like some form of this now, right? They do? Watpad does that?

Yeah, I think, I mean, not to that extent, but like they kind of have a... Well, they have fan fiction. Wattpad is for fiction. Yeah. but they've done some relationships with studios now, I believe. Ah. Yeah.

I mean, it turns out 50 Shades of Grey. I met the author of that at a party in L.A. And my friend introduced me to her, and I asked her what the inspiration was. And she said, actually, you know, it's a famous story. I'm surprised you don't know it. Like, she was writing Twilight fan fiction. And it was Twilight erotica that became 50 Shades of Grey. She changed names back to her own characters.

All right. There's a lot in the docket. I like this little AI, Taryn. Thanks. Thanks for buying your card, Vinnie. Did you install it yet? Oh, wait, you didn't get it yet? Oh, yeah, ordered this morning.

Are you going to have an install party? Are you going to have, like, an install party where I'm going to come over and watch you install it? I was doing myself. You do an unboxing video for our show? Sure. That would be great. Instead of doing, like, a reveal party for like a boy or a girl, like Vinny did a show where he just, like, plopped it in. And then, so we see how many frames he gets.

I mean, unboxing is a genre. I'm just saying. created buying gadget? I mean, how much joy will you get when you fire up a Fortnite for the first time and put it in 4K? It's not going to make any difference. It won't make any difference to Fortnite.

No, no, no, actually, actually, Sunny, I'll enjoy this. Are you running DLSS? Oh, dude, I play it off like Nintendo Switch. Oh, oh, you're playing I get it. I play on a PC. No, no, it makes it, it actually makes a big deal because I can't run rate tracing on on Fortnite right now because the graphics

card is too slow. So, So the ray tracing is a cool feature in Fortnite, but you can't do it because you can't get the frames per second you need. Nick, by the way, Vinny, you should know Nick is accusing you of using AimBot. But that's why you need all that compute. I'm just, I'm just the messenger. Wait, oh, you got this card? Wait, you bought two of these cards, once for your Aimbot and once to run the game?

No, no, no, no. That's not right. Nick, I'll 1B1 in Fortnite. Let's see you wins. We should live stream that. I can't wait to watch like some 12-year-old be like, Take that VB word. I'm pretty decent, Jekyll.

I'm pretty decent. I mean, I really do. I think we need a stream. Okay, founders, if you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, and you need to be SOC2 compliant from a third party if you want to close big deals. And I don't want to close big deals. You want those lighthouse customers. Well, our friends at Vanta make it incredibly easy for you to get and renew your sock too.

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People have lost a bunch of money. And this one, to me, I had wondered if this one would happen. I'm on the fence about this one. I don't know exactly how I think about this one. So can you tell us about what happened with the SEC and Bored Ips? Yes. Yeah, go for it, guys. Not a shock.

Yeah, so I believe in, and we should probably just maybe get into the definitions. But like, well, the article that came out exactly this, one is that they've started some type of investigation, which we don't know any of the details around. But like, really, you know, what may be a good discussion. And I've actually pushed back to Jay Kalamale, because you guys spend a lot more time on this, is like, what is the definition of a security? And then, because that's what this all comes back to. And I sent something in the chat, maybe we can pull it up. And if we start there, I think it really will help frame the discussion. So sure, that's, because a lot of times it gets lost because people throw it around, but people

fully don't really always understand what a security is. So Nick, I, I pulled. I, I pulled that up, if you want to pull it up as a screenshot or whatever. Like, so what is a security? And, and, you know, when we kind of look at it from this perspective, right, okay, it's fungible, it's a tradable financial instrument used to raise capital, right? You know, there's equities, there's debt, there's payments, right? And so we have to really start asking ourselves, like, what aspect of what they've done falls into this. And so maybe let's use that to frame our discussion. Great.

Yeah. I mean, equities in the United States, we know, are regulated by the SEC. And they provide ownership in an entity, common interest in

a company. And there's a series of laws around it. Right. And these are driven by the Securities Act of 1933.

And this happened. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I was just saying a lot of this dates back to the Great Depression when people lost a lot of money and they wanted to protect consumers. That's where accreditation comes from private. And of course, there's the Howie test. I think, and that's important to point out, right? It's like you have two things happening.

One, you have the definition of a security, a fungible negotiable, I mean, an NFT can't be a security then. It's literally in the name, non-fundable. Anyway, security refers to a fungible, negotiable financial financial financial. financial instrument that holds some type of monetary value. A security can represent ownership and a corporation in the form of stock, a creditor relationship with a government body, or a corporation represented by owning that entity's bond or rights to ownership as represented by an option. But then, so by that, I see what you're saying, Sonny, right, by that definition, an NFT

would not seem to qualify as a security. But layered on top of that is the Howey test. right, that's where they actually put all this to work, because people did need clarity on that. And an investment contract exists if there is an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others,

which really does sound like NFTs and the Bored Apes project. So... Let's dive into some of the things. First of all, like, you know, Bored Apes, you know, Google Labs, they've got five of the, of some, like the top eight NFT collections,

which is in the account for like more than 25% of the entire NFT market cap. Okay. So over $5 billion in sales, they've raised over $450 million in VC money. And I'm getting some of this data

from the Milk Road. This is a directionally correct, yes. Yeah, yeah. So this is the Milk Road newslet which I subscribe to. It's very good. And then, you know, they've got big celebrity holders,

suit dog, Justin Bue and Namar, etc. So I guess the real, the real, issue here is, and this is the problem with crypto. Crypto has an issue where there's a lack of transparency on who the counterparties are to a trade. Okay?

So this is the big issue with all of crypto. When you're buying something, who's on the other side, are they pumping and dumping it? Like in the SEC and if you look at the way NASDAQ, the stock markets track, like, they know who's on the back on who the kind of parties every trade is. If you're using a social profile to pump the price and then, other side selling stuff, then they knew you've done it and you can go to jail or you can find or whatever the case is. In crypto, it's very different. In crypto, anyone can go, this crypto is going to the moon, use the influence. Kim Kardashian got to find $1.2 million just because she was promoting.

Like anyone can promote something. Now, the people, this is like the penny stock days. The people who pay Kim or the people who pay all these celebrity influences, they pay them so they can drive demand for these coins so the prices go up. When the prices go up, they dump their coins in the back end and no one knows. And this is the problem with crypto, is that no one knows who's dumping when the pumps happen. Right. So that is what happens when you have a security. We have something that's freely tradable, market manipulation can happen.

So what's really happening here is Bloomberg is reporting that the SEC is investigating or asking for information on what is going on. over at Ugal Labs. Now, I believe they also bought Cryptopunks. They pulled together a bunch of these NFT assets. Now, I have been through this myself, one or two times with the SEC. They will ask you for information

about a private company you've invested in or a public company. They just asked for a document up. So in one case, there was a private company that went out of business. I got an SEC thing that said, can you give us all the information on your investment in this company?

I hire lawyers, who cost $2,000 an hour. And they're like, I'm like, well, what, what's going on? They're like, yeah, what is going on? And I'm like, why am I? And they're like, well, are they going to depose me or like, am I in trouble or is this founder in trouble? And they're like, yeah, good questions.

I'm like, well, when do we find out? It's like, good question. I'm like, how does the SEC work? Good question. They just, they get, they request information. They look into stuff. They never tell you if you're good, you're bad or why they're doing it. So I would just caution people that this does.

it mean that there's an action coming necessarily. They could be getting information. And this is an important quote. Yuga hasn't been accused of wrongdoing and the opening of an SEC probe doesn't mean the agency will sue the firm. That's just, I guess, Bloomberg saying that. But I do want to point out one thing, to your point. And this is to me the duck test. Walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck. Maybe it's a duck. When you put something on an open C page like this one, pull up the whole page. And we you look at an OpenC page for, you know, an NFT, you start to see the life of this over time. And the life over time, based on price and the trading activity, if we were to pull up that page on OpenC,

you know, this looks and is designed like a stock. It isn't, this looks more like a stock than an eBay page, right? And so because of the ease at which these are traded, to Vinny's point, the market manipulation that has occurred and these marketplaces that are trading them, smells like a duck, quacks like a duck. And you need only look at Masterworks as a comparison. If it's art, masterworks.com, which is a sponsor of this show,

and I've bought art on there, they do each of their art offerings as a security, as like a basic mini-IPO, and they follow the rules. So if this is similar to art, which is how some people look at it, it should follow the rules, I believe. So let me just, like caveat something, make sure this is clear.

I think out of all the entity projects and companies, you guess probably one of the better ones, right? They're probably like the... Better how? No, like, it's a real company. They've got real investors. They're probably, you know, I don't know for certain, but they're probably not running any scams in the background, etc.

So I have no information, you know, to the contrary. They would not be a good, they shouldn't be a good candidate for the SEC probe if you want to prove out some case law. Because here's the problem in, you know, from my perspective, the SEC takes him on, they might actually lose this case. And it might be deemed not to be secure. Well, the probe.

So the probe may go on. It may, they may not go with a case or they may not like succeed. And then the precedent's been set. And then all the scammy projects are going to basically fall under that bucket, right? So that's one outcome. The other one, if you went after one that was clearly fraudulent and you win that, you can build a case on top of that, on top of that, on top of that. So I mean, I think it's kind of interesting that they decided to go for the big guys first,

who are definitely more legitimate than most of the players in the market. Well, I don't know that. It's a high-stakes gamble. I mean, if the SC doesn't, if they push forward, I mean, if they push forward, so maybe they just walk away from the probe and they go, you know, it's art or whatever. If they go forward and they lose, I think they're going to be in a tough spot. All right, everybody, I am here with Pobie Akuta. He is a program manager over at Microsoft.

for startups. You've heard me talk about the ridiculous Founders Hub benefits before. So, Obie, you also are giving people Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and of course GitHub enterprise. People may not know Microsoft owns GitHub. 1,000 percent. Like you mentioned, we have, you know, a plethora, a smorgue, if you will, of first-party offerings in terms of what we can provide to the founders. And again, we're just trying to go from anywhere from the back office type of thing in terms of from MS office and from a DevOps perspective. We want to be able to get you squared away with GitHub and so many other resources as well from productivity and onwards. All right. Thanks so much, Obie. Microsoft for startups founders hub has no

fundraising requirements as we discussed. It's open to anybody. Takes only five minutes to apply and startups get six figures in benefits right away. Sign up for Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub today at aka.m.m. slash this week in startups. My guy, Obi's going to take care of you. They don't seem to be investigating whether there's fraud, right? They just seem to be investigating which definition of a duck we should use. Whether it's the original, what is a security definition of a duck or the Howie Test version. I also just want to know what is the, do we know what they're investigating where they just ask for information? They're probing.

I don't know that we know. We don't know. If they're front running or if it's celebrity endorsements. Well, one thing, Nick, you know, you pulled up the OpenC page for an ape. Nick, I sent you a link for a stock X page for a sneaker. Yeah. Right? And you can quickly pull that up if you want.

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

charts, right? You can look at the price over time. You can look at the trades. You can look at all those type of things. And so this is, okay. This is where, though, I really do want to read the Howie Test definitions, because we have not gotten there yet. So we have one definition of a duck. What is the security?

Then we have the Howie test, which I think will help us differentiate a little bit from sneakers, for example. Okay. So, one, do you have an investment of money that can be sneakers or apes? Two, in a common enterprise, so assuming you're not also putting your money in Nike, then you don't necessarily apply to sneakers with the expectation of profit to be derived from the efforts. of others. Yeah. I don't think this actually applies,

to be honest. It doesn't apply to the sneakers, no. The sneakers also provide real world value. I suspect Vinnie is saying he doesn't think it applies to the apes either.

Yeah. I don't think it's supposed to each. I'll tell you why. Completely implies. Hold on. Hold on. When I, if I buy a board ape

and I haven't bought one, if I bought a board ape, I'd be investing money, sure. Okay. I'm not buying the enterprise. I want the ape. I like the picture. It's very interesting.

And do I care about the profit? Well, maybe long term you sell it, but you buy a piece. of art, you buy something else, you know, hopefully it's worth something in the future. But if I mean, I have digital photo frames in my house. If I want to put a board ape in my house, I don't really care about what it's worth tomorrow or not. There's utility for me showing a NFC of board ape in the house. And to be derived from efforts or others, I don't

think it applies either. Like, I think what is, this is my point. What is interesting about board apes is that they're iconic. There's enough like visuals, information. I've been to some of the parties. I'm not an ape owner. But if I had to buy one, I believe I'd buy one. because it's an iconic piece of art that I can display in my home or place. If the art, I'll tell you where they might wind up getting tripped up here, in a common enterprise and to be derived from the efforts of other, correct me if I'm wrong here, but when you own one of these apes, they will give you the serum, you get other drops, you get other benefits from it, right?

So that is the common enterprise of the ape ecosystem, which they promote all that. No, but it exists. It doesn't matter. Your opinion doesn't matter. It just if it exists. So it exists that there's a common enterprise here. Doesn't matter if you care about it. That's not the test.

And is that coming from others, it is. So that's where they have specifically, and I'm only talking about the board apes, I don't know if that equivalency of serums and drops and all this stuff exists in other NFTs. I know it doesn't exist in all of them. No, they do. But not all. There's also a coin.

But at that point, at that point, there's utility, right? There's a utility thing and owning it. The question really is, Jason, like, if you own, you, you, you, Here's an example. There's a wine farm in Napa where you can buy a piece of the land, co-op, own the land, and every year you pay a small fee and you can buy production that comes off the land, but you can only buy the production if you own a piece of that land, and it's probably got like 200 owners or something like that. How is this any different? Is that limited to accredited investors? I don't think so. Anyone can go buy a piece of land.

Yeah, so it depends on if it's like they might be only offering that to accredited investors, But I think in the story there That gets to expectation of profit. If they're just buying that land so they get like a piece of the wine. Yeah. It might be a little different. Sonny, you were going to jump.

Sonny, what do you think about this, the addition of the ape coin part of this as a slightly complicated. Yeah. So that's a little bit more of like, you know, all these things we're looking at starts to make it look a little bit more challenging.

Now, sort of the entire common enterprise of ape coin hasn't been fully disclosed yet. So we don't understand what it's kind. And it's all early, right? And so I think that's, the one that could be a little bit more, you know, I guess gray area than the, you know, sort of the board ape NFTs, especially because that looks more like a currency than a

NFT does, right? And so, but Vinnie, like, you know, what's your thought there? We none of us know. We're all surmising it, right? So we'll like, I use an example. Like, sunny, we had a bottle of Chateau-la tour like a few weeks ago. I went to go buy like three or four bottles of their stuff, okay? It's expensive. You know, and I'm storing it and I'm keeping it for maybe I sell it because it goes up in value, maybe I drink it. You know, this like is, is the wine now, is that now a security? If you were selling a fractional ownership of it to people and it was a common enterprise in that bottle of wine, yes.

But I'm not fractionalizing my board eight, people I buy one. So if I buy a board eight, but I'm not fractionalizing. Yeah. I mean, it does seem like in, in the story, there's, they seem to be implying in the story or they explicit that the coin is, the SEC is also examining. the distribution of ab coin. Also. Yeah.

Also. That's a different play altogether. So let's just separate the two. The coin is not an NFT. It's a token, right? The board ape itself is an NFT. This is my point. If you're going to pick someone to go after and take a probe to a case,

this is probably not the one you want to go after because the board ape is so iconic. It's part of pop culture. It's in the front cover of magazines. Justin Bieber owns one. Isn't that why you find Kim Kardashian though? I mean, they're trying to, they're trying to send warning shots it seems like. She got fine for something else. She got fine for promoting, what was it?

I'm just saying if you're the SEC and you're like, I'm trying to issue some warnings to this entire industry about multiple aspects. But this is different. Of course you start with the biggest names. This is different. Remember, the stature of board apes, I think. I understand what you're saying. You're saying it makes it like a war hall. So that would argue more towards people are buying it for the artistic value. and the intrinsic joy of owning the tiny little image.

I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying. And I would say that the SEC's question is, how many people bought it with the expectation of profit versus for the appreciation of the art? We don't know. We don't know. And you can't go back in time two years and ask people,

why did you buy it? I thought it was cool. I mean, they kind of, like, people buy 10, 20 of these things and like, wow, this is great. Just because someone buys it for profit. Like, by the same token, when I'm on the wine websites and Reddit Wine, whatever, you know, Cabinay wine, uh, Reddit.

Oh, you should buy this bottle of, you know, Chateau-Oteau-2001 because it's going to go up in value this much and they're going to be three times of price in five years, but I buy because I want to drink it. Is that a security? There was an easy solution for them to actually make this, um, have a better argument. It's not a security because it does trade, because it's a common enterprise, because people buy the expectation of value. They could have solved this whole problem.

they should have made a print with a number on it, one of, you know, 10,000, and made like a formal print of each board eight. And when you buy it, the NFT represents your interest in that piece of physical art in the world. Then this would have literally changed the entire dynamic of it because it would be a man, when you buy the NFT, you get that piece of art. And they could have just said, we're storing these 10,000 paintings or prints in this locker library for you. or you can pull them down yourself if you want to. That would have actually probably changed the dynamic here. That's what this guy,

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

quite specifically art. And that is a great idea to, like, label them, just to be like, this only exists for art. I think... That's going to be a heck of it. And if... That's going to be a heck of it.

for the SEC, they're like, here's the ashes. You bought those. There are lots of questions. Well, look, I think that's all what we're sorting out right now, right? Like, we're all sorting out at what point were these projects meant to be art versus investments? Did the investment side just get away from people? Because nobody thought they would go up in value like they did. Were they always securities disguised as art?

We don't know, right? But like, we're literally in that kind of growing pains phase of this entire economy right now. where, and again, this is Bloomberg reporting based on an anonymous source that the SEC is looking into some stuff. Like, we don't know, but I do know that it seems like we're at the point in this economy where people are starting to just send up flares. So let's ask the other question. So why is it an issue if it is a security? Because of the rules around security. Okay. And so these rules exist for what reason?

To avoid money laundering and down. That's a whole other show. No, no, no, no. To avoid fraud and consumer harm, it's a consumer protection law, also money laundering. So if people can pop up NFTs and use them essentially as currency, then you could have all of the front running, dumping, pumping, dumping, all of those things that can happen in a security. You could have fraud. All of those things that occur require some protections. They require insurance.

They require an accounting firm and audit. That's why going public is a pain in that. neck and it requires continued audits and that's why the SEC exists. It's literally its mandate is to protect consumers from harm. It's consumer harm. So the real issue of fundamentally, Jason, is this lack of identity in crypto. That would solve a lot of it. If you knew who was buying it and you limited it to accredited investors, you had it tied

to a bank account, you could at least say, hey, only accredited investors can participate in this, you know, and- So this exists already, like civics built this. We've got on-chain identity. We're working with a number of companies to do this. here's the issue. In the industry we're seeing is there isn't enough demand for this because there are no regulations in place that say you have to run an on-chain identity. So it's really, really good for digital identity providers and blockchain any providers if the SEC says,

look, we're not going to take away the ability to trade these NFTs and buy these, but there needs to be a trace of who bought what and there needs to be some record of it from the issuer. So if you buy it from, you know, Yuga, you have to be identified. And then there's an on-jerk. identity, you can use Civic or anyone who supports the did standard, which we help write. Like, this is something which exists today. But there is no... It creates friction. We have to go after people who are voluntarily willing to adopt the standard right now

because there are no regulations in place. So like, why don't the regulators come to the front and say, look, at the minimum, let's just add identity in everywhere. So we have the same playing field as we have in other regulated entities. And everyone knows who's doing what. And there's no money laundering happening. and it is we can detect who it is. Let's just start there before we start going on to figuring out whether or not it was a security or not.

Well, one of the regulations they could potentially contemplate is not to say it's a security, but I was looking up your question about like why isn't wine a security. If you invest in wine through some professional brokerage or similar, it is unregulated, but it can be considered in this alternative investment bucket. You could imagine a scenario in which NFTs, the art, as issued by an entity that obviously is dependent on the price of that art and the associated utility coins starts to fall into that alternative investment bucket and is regulated in that way. And we're probably moving towards some version of that.

We're just like pretty early. Sonny, you haven't said anything in a while. What are you thinking? No, you know what? Honestly, like what would be really awesome, I think, for all the listeners and just for ourselves is from our network, let's find like a, you know, a securities lawyer that's looking into crypto and maybe just have them on as a guest or something like that. I think it'd be really helpful for everyone because

it's just so gray, you know, we're obviously looking at Investopedia and Wikipedia and trying to figure this stuff out. It just be really helpful. I don't think it's gray. I think it's gray. I think it's super gray. I'll tell you, the tokens, you know, they should have all been.

I don't think that's going to wind up being gray. And then I, when they're a common enterprise, all those tokens, I think, are going to get regulated. And, you know, with one. But even Gary Gensler doesn't make it easy, Jekal. He very clearly says that Bitcoin Bitcoin is not a Bitcoin is not a security.

It's not a common enterprise because it doesn't have like a central authority in it. But I agree that they could have done a better job of being more upfront about this. I think their position has always been. Here's the rule set. You guys didn't follow it. Now you pay the price. But when you do buy into, there's a bunch of investment platforms for alternative assets. We're an investment in one called Vincent.

And yeah, they only take accredits and qualified purchases for this reason because they want sophisticated investors who understand the risk that's occurring when you're buying wine as an investment. I do think this Damien Hearst thing is pretty interesting. I just sent the Instagram. To be totally honest, I think he's doing like an art project to kind of poke the tiger here. This is what he says.

Tomorrow I will be burning my 1000, the currency artworks, and calls them literally the currency, which I capped as NFTs. A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art, but I'm not. I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks

into NFTs by burning the physical versions the value of digital of art digital or physical which is hard to define at the best of times will not be lost this is a run on sentence will not be lost it will be transferred to the NFT

as soon as they are burnt and I will be live streaming the full burn here on Instagram tune in tomorrow so I mean he's kind of poking the tiger here with this concept but I think he's also just a giant grift this is just a giant grift

this is just performance art this is the pure art this is $2 million from a laser yeah from just it's performance art right like kind of I mean we should end we have to wrap soon but we should end on this this kind of happier note which is like NFTs clearly

whatever they end up being alternative assets alternative investment assets maybe securities maybe art or some combination of all three yeah all of them yeah they're here Katie Hahn the founder of Hahn ventures still believes is the other story that you guys had in the docket today,

that NFTs are the future. She says, just like Damien, we are going to live increasingly in a digital world. And I happen to think that if you live in a digital world, you're going to want to own digital goods in that world. You won't be satisfied simply renting them, which is what we do now. We buy our content from Wild Gardens.

Without digital scarcity, which is what NFTs unlock, you don't really own anything. You're subject to the whims of a platform. And I think NFTs and digitally scarce goods fundamentally change that. I think she took that all from our last episode. Right.

Boom. Just transcribed it. Yeah. You're welcome, Katie. No, I think. No, that's exactly it, right? You know, we talked about iTunes and when you have a movie there and if you decide to switch to another platform, well, what happens? So all your stuff, you can't move it.

Did you just rent it from Apple? That wasn't very clear. So I think, yeah, she's spot on. She's spot on there. I mean, we all wanted that. That's fair, we almost had that. Remember, like, we had our digital downloads and they would all be trapped on, like, an iPod. And then we tried to figure out.

And then the market was like, it'll be more convenient. And we were like, it is more convenient. So then what happens? I had friends who specifically were in, you know, the movie industry. And they would buy Blu-rays or laser discs previously collect them, specifically because they knew that these things would switch every, you know, 10 years, five to 10 years. And they just wanted to own those physical copies and never have to re-buy them.

That's what everybody has to do now. You have rebuy them, and then you rebuy them, and they've changed them. So I have friends who just collect Blu-rays, like, even use ones because they're perfect copies. But you can't even make a copy of those. And I remember covering this as a journalist, Molly, you probably did too. You were allowed to make a backup of your Blu-rays, but they were allowed to put protection on it. So you had to buy copyright protection software to rip those off of the Blurays onto your media server. And that is technically allowed, but the movie industry took some sort of.

sort of position at one point that you're breaking copyright, so you're allowed to make a copy of your stuff, but you're not allowed to break the copyright, and it's like, or the copyright protection scheme. It's like, which is it? I mean, make it easy for us. Remember when Sony literally put root kits on people's computers when you ripped a CD? Literally, root kits.

I mean, it was bananas. So, I mean, I guess the only thing that's going to make us all feel, I think, okay about digital ownership is complete decentralization. So the question is, will we get that with NFD? I know, I see you acting like this is a victory sunny. But are we going to get that with NFTs? Are we really going to get complete decentralization? Maybe just like one more quick small segue,

but there was another big news yesterday that Google announced at their Cloud Next, which is their conference related to Google Cloud, which is in partnership with Coinbase, they are going to start accepting crypto payments. And so this is pretty huge from a perspective of, you know, If you are building something in and around and on the cloud, they're going to make that quite easy for you to accept crypto payments. And so this kind of pushes on the other side, right?

You know, obviously Google, huge company, giant legal, you know, probably department there. And so I found this really, really awesome for the ecosystem and to kind of drive innovation. Because the more of that happens, I think it also drives the utility of what we see. So I thought that was really great. Think of an example of what a developer would do in this regard. Like maybe a, you know, if you were drop, if you put Dropbox into Google Cloud. Yeah.

And you accepted coins, then, or if you had like a general S3 layer, storage layer or a podcast platform, like, how would this all work? So I think there's like, there's a couple of different ways this manifest. One, let's just say I'm building a crypto related service. And that service is, you know, people are interacting with that service purely with crypto, no fiat. I can now pay GCP with crypto. Okay. Right. So that's, you know, so I don't have to kind of convert to Fiat and do all that.

I can just pay them with that crypto, which, you know, I think is pretty powerful from the growth of their platform perspective. So that's like at the infrastructure layer, right? I think then, you know, take that app example, right? If I'm living in an ecosystem and that ecosystem is powered by, you know, like, and, you know, we see this in different places. is like look at an airline reward system, right? That's an entire economy that has value and everything associated with it. And so now that's not a closed system anymore when you move it to blockchain, right? It's composable.

People can build on it. It's permissionless, right? Again, we talked about this last time. So I think enabling all of that to then interact with sort of the rest of the world via kind of GCP is really powerful as well. Now, today, all you can really do with your Delta miles is using that example is buy Delta tickets or, you know, sometimes you can trade them in for like headphones. and things like that, imagine in this, you know, kind of world that we're heading towards, those, and it, you know, kind of ties back to a first conversation. Why aren't Delta Miles, you know, a security or a currency, right?

And so I think all of that just starts coming together. And I think these things help push the boundary of getting clarification around everything we're saying. Yeah, they are very careful with airline miles to make sure they don't trigger securities. And part of it is you don't actually ever own them. So you get them, but they can. be taken away at any time. You can change the rules on them. If you die, you cannot give them to your kids. There's no inheritance of airline miles, but you can trade them, right? So they're really,

I remember going through this back in the day because on Mahalo had, back in the day, had Mahalo answers, and we did Mahalo dollars. And if people answered a question and they got like 10 votes up, they would get a Mahalo dollar and then you could trade it in for, you know, like a swag. It was actually pretty amazing. But then, of course, we had people, we put a gift card up there and we said if you know you could trade a hundred Mahalo dollars for a $10 gift card 10 to 1

and then that just the economy went bonkers and we got all these groups that would ask a question answer their own question and vote it up and so we literally had groups of people and when they went to cash out we found that it was the same one person had done this for like 10 hours a day

they had created multiple accounts and they were taking questions answering them from Yahoo answers and we killed their account and they went crazy. It's funny though, like when I think about to bring this all the way full circle, this is kind of the conversations we're having now are the conversations, you know, I pulled up the column I wrote in 2005 about Sony putting root kits on our computers to prevent CD ripping. And, you know, we're talking about gaming search engines or we're talking about deciding

how this product is ultimately going to shake out and be consumed by individuals. But really, I think what we're coming down to is like, clearly, this is all web three in action. It's all an evolving ecosystem. Fun fact, I was nominated for a digital magazine, a national magazine award for this piece alongside Matt Taibi in 2005. And I've never been more proud in my life. And I was at the award ceremony. And he was so rude to me.

Oh, sorry. But you wrote it with Matt Taibi? No, he and I were nominated for the same award. I was nominated for this piece for this big writing award. No, this really legendary old man one whose name I can't remember, but everybody was like, this is his last like chance. And so I think he died shortly after. Anyway, what I'm saying is this is clearly the new internet, right? We're just figuring it's the exact same thing as when Jason and I were covering the early days of the web.

Like we're figuring out what the use cases are going to be, what the regulations are going to be, what the rules are going to be, what the adoption is going to look like, which is why this roundtable is so great. So great. Thanks, guys. good. What coin should I buy? What coin's going to rip? What should we pump and down? No, we don't do that. We don't do it. We don't do it. I don't do it. I'll do it. I'll do some market outlook here. I actually think that the best risk adjust to play in the market right now is Bitcoin. I'll tell you why. Like, with all the sort of panic. In the crypto market or the entire market? Well, no, globally. It's probably the most of all assets. I'll tell you why. So I think

The Fed meeting is coming up now on 1st 2nd November. We're going to see the market's pricing 80% chance of 75 bups. It's probably going to be 50 bups, I think. But let's assume it's 75, which is what the market's predicting. You're going to see massive capital outflows in the rest of the world because they have to service US dollar debt at higher prices. You're going to see foreign currencies collapsing like we saw with England on the last rate hike. The contagion is going to spread to more countries.

What you're also going to see is people are living in these other countries, they don't always price Bitcoin in dollars. So if you live in South Africa, you look at Bitcoin in Rans, if you look in the UK, look at Bitcoin in pounds. As long as the Bitcoin price is staying stable in dollars, which it has been, you're going to see the price rise in those currencies. And if people are now fleeing their local fiat currencies, they're going to move into Bitcoin or dollars. And even if they're moving in a ratio of 90% dollars and 10% Bitcoin, it's enough fleeting. fund flows for Bitcoin to rip substantially higher. And I think Bitcoin has, you look at the on-chain metrics, you look at where Bitcoin is today,

there isn't enough Bitcoin out there. I mean, we have, we have like diminishing suppliers of Bitcoin on-chain. And a lot of it's going to, people are, you know, they're using it as like, you know, like a hedge against, against Fiat system collapse. So I really think Bitcoin is the single best play right now. You agree, Sonny? Yeah, I'm not like a finance guy in that kind of, you know,

economics guy. So I don't want to... So you're not adding to your Bitcoin position. What's really interesting is, I remember five years ago with Thanksgiving, a bunch of family members had this Bitcoin. Remember it rocketed up over Thanksgiving to like, you know, whatever it was, $20,000.

And I had given the keynote in Santa Monica at this, like, thing. And I said, listen, I know some of you, like, this is the most life-changing wealth you ever have. You have 99.5-9s in this. Just please sell half and let the other half roll. Fascinatingly, if you had held for five years, you are exactly even

it literally was trading at 1920 and here we are five years later and that is bananas pull up the five year chart on Google if you just can do it real quick it's so insane to contemplate five year whatever almost 70,000

doesn't like to me like the current price being at where it was five years ago it just just tells me that it's undervalued like I just don't see how Bitcoin in five years as make that bigger and then hit five years yeah

Yeah. There's that, like, if you go back to that, like, December 15th, 19,000, I remember this Thanksgiving Christmas, and everybody was losing their minds. And I was like, man, you know, we bought this for a hundred bucks. We need to sell half our position. And there it is, folks. Boom. You just can take out all the lows for three years of lows and two years of highs.

It's exactly the same. It's a stable coin. But it's turning into a stable coin. Jason. If you look back at the past two years, go back the chart for a second. Like that price movement was a dollar-based price movement with a lot of printing of money, right? Yeah. So the price went up.

What you may see in the next run is the price move up because other countries are printing money. Yes. So what happens is... And scarcity. You know, the U.S. printed a lot more money than anywhere else in the past couple of years. We printed trillions and trillion dollars. All these other countries right now are struggling because they have budget deficits. They have to pay for energy.

they have to pay for a lot of balance of payments issues that they've got, they're going to print money en masse. And Bitcoin is not only, it's not a singly traded asset. It's not just in the US. It's traded globally. So if the price of Bitcoin against the RAND starts falling and it becomes more expensive in Rans, people are, and they're printing more money in that country, the inflation goes up.

People are going to be buying, Bitcoin just needs to be flat in U.S. dollars for it to run up. Amazing. This is not investment advice. Not even this is right. Sunny Madra, co-founder of definitive intelligence. Vinnie Lingam, co-founder of Civic and Wait Room.

Guys, this is the best. This is increasingly becoming my favorite part of every month. All right. Awesome. Thanks for having us again. Enjoy your video card, Vinnie. Enjoy that video card.

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