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The New Gold Rush: Decentralized Mapping, Meme Coins, and the Future of AI with Ariel Seidman
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- [00:00]
Phil
Foreign.
- [00:12]
Howard
Welcome, everybody. We have special guest. Great time. Even though we planned this a few months ago. Ariel Seidman. Am I pronouncing it right, Ariel?
- [00:21]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, you are. Ariel Seidman.
- [00:23]
Howard
That's right. He's in San Francisco. Founder of Hive Mapper and honey is the token. Hivemapper is a decentralized mapping product built on Solana. Great timing here. We got a lot to talk about with Solana and also joining Hoodied out, everybody. I'm wearing my. A winter cycling checkerboard. Jordana, my favorite brand. Phil, you are wearing something from high school. A hoodie, it looks like.
- [00:55]
Phil
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.
- [00:57]
Howard
And Mike, going, going young.
- [01:02]
Mike
It's snowing in Houston. What am I supposed to do?
- [01:04]
Howard
It's snowing in Houston. There's snow on the ground in New York and in San Francisco. There's no snow, but syringes scattered. You have to probably be more careful walking in San Francisco than a st. An ice day in New Jersey. I think is. Is. Is kind of the way we think about it, but we got to dive right into it, guys. This has kind of been. Phil, where do we start? Where do you want to start? The Salana meme coin, Trump, the markets, banks at all time highs. The Visa at all time highs. Where are we starting?
- [01:39]
Phil
It was a crazy weekend.
- [01:42]
Howard
Just to give people some context, it's crazy weekend.
- [01:46]
Phil
I think everybody's aware. It was a crazy weekend in crypto land with Trump basically the day before the inauguration launching a meme coin and Melania launching a meme coin too. And so I don't think the world's ever seen anything like this. I think everybody's got an opinion on it. And I think it, for better or for worse, it probably does. Has. I mean, I think everything's noise in the world except for like 1/10 of 1% of things that occur. And this is probably not noise. Like there's probably. I mean, everybody's pontificating.
- [02:30]
Mike
I had a post I just put up last night, so we'll dig in.
- [02:34]
Howard
I'm going to take first shot. I think Ariel is probably the most technical here because he's built on Solana. He knows decentralized world. But let's just quickly pull up Solana and talk about it because Solana is the most interesting chart in the world.
- [02:52]
Mike
Maybe explain what Solana is as well.
- [02:55]
Howard
Just as a foundation there. Can you explain Solana quickly and the way you see it from a developer standpoint or product standpoint?
- [03:03]
Mike
Yeah.
- [03:04]
Ariel Seidman
So from a product, from a product perspective, if you're going to build on a blockchain. So what that means is that you're storing information about the product or service that you're providing, right? So in our case, we're building a map. So we need to know, or we want to share very openly, very transparently who is mapping. Not specifically like name and email address or anything like that, but like, hey, there's a user that's mapping this area. Here's how much they've mapped, right? Here's how much that's worth, right, in terms of economic value to the overall map. And then on the other side, here's how much of the map is being consumed by various types of customers. Right? And so you want to make that all open and transparent and immutable so that the world can see it. Right. And so we chose Solana primarily for two reasons. One is it's incredibly cost effective, right? Like any business, any project, you don't want to have incredibly high transaction costs. And if you compare this to like Ethereum and many other blockchains, historically, Solana has been by far the most cost effective. Right. So an analogy would be like AWS versus, let's say, you know, Google Cloud. You know, if AWS is providing lower transaction fees to run, you know, computer storage or whatever it may be, you're going to opt in most cases for aws. There's a, there's another aspect of it in terms of just fast, right? You want those transactions to clear very, very quickly. And Salon has also been a leader in that from that perspective as well. So that's why Hive Mapper chose them. They've been great partners with us. I think they've really just helped us from a community perspective as well and just helping get the word out about Hive Mapper. So there's other kind of benefits beyond the core financial and business benefits as to like why a project or meme, coin or whatever would choose Solana.
- [05:01]
Howard
Okay, so let's go back. Run this clip. In October of 23, it was one. It was also my most interesting chart in the world. And sometimes we get it right. I mean, this a show, a trend. So let's just, let's see what you put together. This is October 23rd, doubled in the last week. Right. And ethereum is up 10%. So I just find that interesting because Solana is the only other one that friends of mine who are in the industry talk about all day. And Justin Sassler, who I mightily respect in Fintech at Ribbit Capital, has said in using the Solana system for Payments and money movement. Much like ftx, the scammers they were. But FTX was using Solana for transactions. It's a very fast network. And you can see that Solana, which I'm long through some funds is back to the point. See where that red line started in November of 22. That was when Sam got caught, right? That's when. And everybody knew Sam owned all the Solana. It should have been over. And guess what? It looked over. Solana had seven. This has moved on beyond the Sam joke. And so you can ignore this or you can just say, whoa, there's something going on here. Super interesting. You know, maybe Solana just goes down to zero. I don't know. But from the people I know that actually use the blockchain and test it around sending money. Truly love the product.
- [06:33]
Ariel Seidman
We, we went.
- [06:36]
Howard
So that was so Ariel. That was a 20. I was already long through some funds and we put it on trend, you know, and it was breaking. You can see it there in the char. It was just never look back from that moment. We as traders, investors, we don't, we're not technical. I mean Mike is very technical qualified to talk about these chains, but you are. We were just looking at it like, oh my God, this is, this is recovering. Anybody who wanted out was out and now we were breaking out. So to flash forward and why it's still right now, the most interesting chart is now we have a new propellant. Right, Mike, this is. And the unintended consequences that come with it. It's 12x from there. It now is what, 125 billion. This is a big chain, right? There is a lot of money tied up in this, but we are at this. You see the red line. We peaked above it this weekend when Solana hit 292 but is now right back underneath it. So it's kind of like tried to break out and if it was ever, if it was ever going to move, this will be the next big move. Because the unintended consequence of Trump launching on. On. Well, Ariel, you're an early adopter. You still love it. And now you have Trump who, who created an $80 million billion. $80 billion. Sorry, $80 billion brand or whatever it is distribution on top of Solana. Think about the tens of thousands. If we think about it in a godaddy domain, own your own domain thing. He just Mark Cuban. The unintended consequence of him launching on Solana and pulling this off, right? Like bypassing exchanges just off a tweet and getting everybody this distributed to I don't know to how many wallets and just summing up before I pass it off to you and to the point where if I really wanted to own a piece of Trump, I would buy this over DJT because DJT has regulation, crappy business, all the expenses that go along with like Trump being a bad businessman. Whereas this is just clean. Bet on his mood or bet on, you know, rug pull. Right. Like you're going to get rug pulled. But if you don't get rug pulled, what is this worth? Like if they don't screw you, what is this worth? So I'm going to pass it around, Michael. Like let's talk about the good, the bad, the ugly of this. A Trump and the whole, you know, this whole new meme coin and domain domain.
- [09:21]
Mike
It's like a new land rush now that you know, they had, they had Texas and now there's Oklahoma. So let's go there. So this is the new land rush. Trump, Melania, coins have obviously gotten people's attention and so everyone for the exact reasons Howard, you're talking about the dramatically lower friction costs to launch something that go to direct piece of this. And so the good news, the good, the bad, ugly. The good is folks like Trump and Melania and his family can take advantage of first mover status and take the immense amount of global attention on him and monetize that, liquefy that in terms of something that he owns 80% off. And as long as he holds 80% of it, this thing can keep going up. The moment he or any of his friends want to sell, there is a liquidity event. And my point being is everyone is now seeing the possibilities. So we're going to go from a handful of these kinds of things to millions of them in the blink of an eye in the next year or two. Just like we were talking when domains became commercial and I helped some of the first domain companies go public and in the 95 timeframe we went from a few hundred domains to millions and then gazillions of domains in the next three to four years. So the attention focus on a handful of first movers then gets extraordinarily fragmented. And that's the thing that's coming when there's low friction. There's a lot of people doing the land rush into Oklahoma. Yeah.
- [11:01]
Howard
And who benefits? Maybe even GoDaddy. If we pull up a chart of GoDaddy, it's at all time highs today. So what's fascinating about this gold rush and Ariel will chime in next is that godaddies benefiting all time highs. Goldman Sachs is at all time highs. Visa is at all time highs. Wells fucking Fargo is at all time highs. Solana is at all time highs. Nvidia and Marvell are at all time highs. Google is at all time highs. Right, so this isn't, this is just the markets are speaking here. It's not one or the other. There's just. We live in this multimodal distribution of finance world and I think the most fascinating thing is like I was talking to some friends of mine in the industry, you know, at Jump Capital and whatever, making the calls, and it's just the fact that they didn't have it's all through a dex. They didn't have to use an exchange. Ariel, when you took Hivemapper and Honey and created the Token, how much harder was it for you guys?
- [12:04]
Ariel Seidman
It was definitely, it was definitely challenging, mostly because of the moment that it happened in. Right. I mean, there were some technical things and stuff like that that had to be sorted out, some legal stuff that needed to get sorted out for sure. But when we launched, this was November of 2022, so literally, I think a day or two before we launched, FTX blew up. And we were launching on Solana and so everybody, I mean, I forgot the exact, like Solana basically collapsed, right? Whatever it was trading at, I have no. I don't remember. But it was like 90% down and a whole bunch of people within the community, even some of my own investors were calling us and being like, get the hell off Solana. Like that thing is going to zero. And we stuck with it and we're very happy that we did. It was mostly because I knew Toli and I knew Raj and I knew them and they were, they were professionals, right? Like, they clearly were executing. Yes, there was all this, you know, Sam and all the other type of stuff, like it was around it, which was like a, obviously like a pretty negative narrative. But in terms of just the product and the fundamentals and the team, they just continue to execute. And so I just kind of saw that and I was like, okay, like, you know, it'll be rough riding here for a little bit, but we'll make it through the other side.
- [13:22]
Howard
But for you, you need the exchanges. So you're listening. On how many exchanges? Honey is listed on how many exchanges now?
- [13:29]
Ariel Seidman
I don't know, a lot. There's a whole bunch that is listed on like it's on Coinbase, it's on all the, you know, the bigger European ones. It's on a whole bunch In Asia as well. So, yeah, it has most of the major geographies covered at this point.
- [13:43]
Howard
And Phil, what are you seeing with behavior wise, like, it was a Sunday. I'll tell. I'll give everybody some background. It's the highest traffic day we've ever had. It's so. So no one was prepared. What's interesting is he kind of kept a secret, right? There was a crypto ball going on, Ariel, and no one even there. I mean, obviously some people knew, but all the crypto bros and all the crypto elites and all the crypto glitterati was in a room and they had to react, right? And the best traders thought it might have been Trump getting hacked, right? Because go to his Twitter stream and he's talking about moonshot and like, what does he know about moonshot? Right? And he's talking about. Drops a link in there. So everybody was like, you know, the jump from 1 to 4 billion was kind of like missed by a lot of the early snipers because they flinch, right? Like, is he hacked? So. So, Phil, what do you take away from this Sunday? Like, it was a Sunday too.
- [14:45]
Phil
Yeah. So listen, this is. No, this is not a partisan statement. But, you know, what they're doing is, you know, decrepit, right? I mean, they're just taking advantage of a market that they can take advantage of to make a lot of money.
- [15:05]
Howard
Okay.
- [15:06]
Phil
Just as he's becoming President of the United States. And so that is just criminal, right? And that's just what it is. I mean, Nancy Pelosi, she's criminal in what she did in her investing in, you know, buying with insider congressional information that nobody else knows about. So I'm not. I'm not making a partisan judgment there. I'm just saying what it is. They're making a ton of money with their status as an elected, as you know, in this case, a president, but as an elected official. And Pelosi. And Pelosi's example, it's just in Congress, I don't really care about that. The world's always been that way. It's been a hundred years since Yates said, you know, the center cannot hold. World's always been insane. What I care about is from a viewership point of view, this is Trends with Friends. And there are people out there who are investing their money. And there's a lot of FOMO out there because you see other, you know, you hear these stories about somebody making $5 million, whatever. From my point of view, there are three types of market participants in the meme coin space. Number one is the insider who is aware of the deal as it's happening is doing the deal has the coins to start. I don't know how that shook out with Trump. I don't care. But you're not one of those people unless you've created your own. You know, unless I'm going to do Phil Pearlman coin or whatever, I'm not one of those people. That's number one. Number two, there's a group of people out there, and you could call them noise trader arbitrageurs. That's just a fancy way of saying that they know what the fuck they're doing. They've seen hype cycles a million times before. They're savvy, they're sharks. They trade. We know these types, we've been these types in some situations when we really knew about the space. Well, with Web two and so forth. And those people are out there buying and selling based on whatever their model is. If it's, if it's, if it's a technical model they're buying when it pulls back to a certain level, or whether it breaks through a certain level, they have their risk managed. The third type of participant in this space, and I'm taught, and this is why I'm bringing this up, is the mark. So right when you're sitting at a poker table, there's the mark, the, there's the moose, the moosh, there's the person sitting at the poker table.
- [17:36]
Howard
The most important people in my life, like watching them on stock twitch and Twitter. You got to have the moosh. Got to know they're everywhere.
- [17:43]
Phil
And they're not bad people, and they're not dumb people. They're just emotionally led, right? Since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things? Been there, done that, some poem, some poet said that. And those people are like, oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, I got to get in, I got to get in. And so they're buying Trump coin at 60 or 70, and they're like feeling all of this relief when they buy, oh, I got it. And then it tanks to 30 or 32 or 35. I mean, with this millennia thing, it came out at like 9 practically, and now it's at 4. And so there's all these people who are not the insiders, who are not the noise trading, newest trader arbitrageurs that are the marks that are buying it when it's eight or nine, now it's four. And they're either going to sell at the bottom or they're going to wait forever or they're going to ride it to zero or whatever. So don't be the mark, don't chase, don't be the mark holder, but don't.
- [18:44]
Howard
Be surprised if you are, if you chase. Okay, go ahead, Mike.
- [18:48]
Mike
I just wanted to add this notion on the mark. We're talking about a very specific thing here in crypto and memes and so on, but this is a broad phenomenon of humans. We all have been marks and it goes back centuries, from tulips to today. In this post, I did on this meme coin with Trump thing I just did yesterday, 607, number 607, there was a fascinating article that has no connection to meme coins in China. There's a casino environment of ordinary Chinese investing in Chinese stocks, even though it is extraordinarily controlled by the Chinese government. You cannot short the markets. It's all controlled. You cannot say anything negative stocks only are put on guardrails to go up. And millions of people are participating in China in this casino. And the thing is, they are the marks. The fascinating thing in that article, and I'd encourage people to read it, is that number of people talk to the reporters and they said, you know what we understand. You know, basically they're saying, we know where the marks, but we're doing it because it's one of the few places where we think we have control about whether we are making a right decision or wrong decision. The emotions that go into people following a fear of missing out trend, a FOMO trend, whether it's meme coins or the Chinese stock market, et cetera, there is some rationality to it. It's just that when you're in there, if you are playing the role of a mark, know that you're a mark and, and, and play accordingly. And most people don't, but it's, it's a. I just wanted to point out that this is a fascinating global phenomenon. Goes through all markets around the world today. It has gone back for centuries and it'll go on forever.
- [20:37]
Howard
Okay, I'm going to take the final word, then we'll go to Hive Mapper. Let's pull up Balaji's. So again, this is the most interesting chart in the world. The funniest chart in the world. Phil, did you see this? If we can pull it. Classic. Fucking classic. Look at this. This is an actual chart. Someone took the time to find. Guys, do you have the funniest chart? Everybody go to sleep. Oh. So, world's funniest chart. This is if you really look at the volume and the price chart. That is Trump's face. That's just someone took the time. There's enough people on the Internet to do that. I mean, it really does look like Trump's profile. So that not only is Solana the most interested here, Trump's token chart is the funniest chart in the world. Okay. So knowing where Solana's at, it is definitely the most interesting chart because he's put a stamp on squads, he's put a stamp on meme coins, he's put a stamp on Solana. But let's go to Balaji, who's early crypto. You know, I just think at certain times it's worth reading him. Let's pull up a couple of his quotes because this is about the flipping, right? Like this, this one about the. He's easy to find on Twitter. This is just a great. Phil, I don't know if you read it or just take a quick read. This just changes finance, right? Like he is Goldman Sachs right now, as Michael said, what he does with the shoe here with his 80% is going to decide, you know, this is why you can't with 90% certainty say this is a zero. It's distributed enough and they control enough that if they can, you know, it's, it's interesting. Okay. And then the next thing is another good point by Balaji. He's the first crypto president, right? Like his net worth from crypto, like flippant. It's happened to me a few times with multi coin investment where I own more in, you know, before Rob, I own more in the digital world even though I don't even know how to use it. Then my equity in the digital world is worth more than now. That's changed again. But we're getting to the point where more people are going to be crypto have more crypto net worth than they have. This is going to be a new phenomenon. They're going to have more crypto net worth than they do fiat net worth, or however we're going to call it. And the president, if you really back it out, assuming he owns the 80%, he's the first crypto president and he has more money on a weekend in the digital world than he ever has accumulated in the physical world in his 78 years. In his 78 years. Now there was that point. And this goes to two things. I was saying Buffett didn't make 90% of his money until he was post 60, compounding, you know, and wow. And so Ariel, anything does this Ring true to you at all, what Balaji is saying?
- [23:34]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, I mean, 100% rings true to me. I think the other thing that Balaji said that rings true to me is that there's nothing inherently wrong with meme coins. Right. What is problematic is that that there's a lot of people, I think you guys alluded to this, that are don't really understand the nature of how meme coins trade.
- [23:53]
Howard
Okay.
- [23:54]
Ariel Seidman
Just kind of FOMO into them at the worst time, and then they're left with a bad taste, not just specifically related to the meme coins, but crypto as a whole. Right. And I think that is a problem for the industry is that we want people's first experience to be a generally positive one, or at least a neutral one, not a negative one. And so that's my issue, is, like, if people understood, like, hey, meme coins, you know, here's what they do. They grab a whole bunch of attention. You know, they skyrocket and then they slowly decline. Like, you look at almost every single meme coin that's.
- [24:29]
Howard
It's the opposite of stocks, which take a staircase up, elevator down. These are elevator up, staircase down.
- [24:35]
Mike
It's like a complete bungee jump down.
- [24:37]
Howard
Yeah, it's a complete without the bungee so far. But, but, but. And then we could pull up. People need to understand what he could be doing. Pull up the World Liberty, where this money might be going. Because the other thing, Ariel, you're saying the money had to come from somewhere, right? So people were selling their legitimate coins. This is a pretty interesting take. They had to go sell their Bitcoin because of liquidity drains and Ethereum and Solana to go buy Trump. Right. They're using stable coins. They're using Moon. Whatever they're doing to. Right. Like whatever these early adopters are doing. What the bag holder and the FOMO needs to know is really take the time and understand what just went on. So then World Liberty Financial, his other scam, and again, I say scam lovingly because maybe it isn't, but odds are it is. They went sold their tokens because they knew they were inflated, and then went and bought the main chains again because those had been sold off. So you got to understand, you. If you don't know how to trade and you don't know how liquidity is made, you are definitely the sucker in the room is what Phil was talking about. What I think what Arielle you're talking about and what Michael's talking about doesn't mean it's going to go away. It just means if you really want to take this seriously, you better know this is a rethinking of how distribution works and how marketing works and how incentives works and how scams work and how the just really blows my mind. But they went theoretically and just put their real money into regular coins through World Liberty Financial. And I don't know how taxes and all this works, but boy, I mean, the good news is Wall Street Journal can't even cover this. This is all happening on stock, Twitch, Twitter, Reddit. Everybody's sleuthing this through wallets. Like none of this is being done in mainstream media. So that's another cool aspect of this. You know, Trump overnight is worth more than the New York Times, so really fascinating. I'll give you guys last comments and we'll go to Hive member.
- [26:37]
Phil
Hey Ariel, I have a, I have a ridiculous question you might not have an answer to about this, but you know, you know the most about this. So. And have been like, you know, actually in the sandbox. How, how, how long will it take until we get. And the reason I'm asking this question is because I used to think that we were becoming, that all crypto was becoming more centralized, right? So there's ETFs, that sort of a whiff of centralization. But with what's happening now with meme coins, it's almost like a re. Decentralized centralization because anybody can sort of start their own currency in a way. And so my question is, how long do you think it will take for us to get to a place? So my kids, you know, I'm so I'm, I'm a doofus and I'm old and I have no idea how to do anything. And I like, I pay with a credit card or whatever, but my kids are using, they use Apple pay. They don't even think about it, you know, so they have, they have, they pay on their phone. Boom. Everywhere they go, they don't even think about it. So how long before we get to a place where any type of coin or currency that is tradable can be filtered through some type of, you know, some type of filter and be spendable anywhere, like at the Exxon station or the 711 or the, the Piggly Wiggly or the Wawa?
- [28:02]
Howard
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:04]
Ariel Seidman
Well, in the United States. Well, I'd answer that question a little differently in terms of, you know, within the United States or maybe a couple other countries and then outside the United States, funny enough, and this relates a little bit specifically to hivemapper. We Started off as a non crypto project, right? We were actually paying people who were contributing to this map in cash. And we were paying people through US dollars through PayPal and all these other tools like that. And the people in the Philippines, the people in Lagos, Nigeria, the people in Brazil, not the people in the United States, said, hey, this sucks. In other words, you know, you guys paying us through PayPal, you pay us on a Monday, we're not actually paid out until the following week. Instead, can you use crypto? And I said, this is like 2019. And I was like, really? They're like, yeah, yeah, I can actually, like, if you pay me with crypto today, you know, within an hour I can go and pay for my gases. I was talking like an Uber driver and he, like, was FaceTiming with me while showing me the app that he would then use to get gas. And so that was kind of like a wake up call to us in terms of, like, there's something really here that's interesting. And then that was one of the triggers that led kind of a deep dive that I decided to do. In terms of crypto, in terms of the blockchains, in terms of you're relatively.
- [29:22]
Howard
Late, you were building your business relatively late to crypto, or not early, but like earlier about building companies. So let's dive into it. So, Phil, I mean, there's no answer, but let's dive into hivemapper. This is a really. When I got. I learned this about through multicoin. So, guys, pull up the site. Let's walk us through Hive Mapper and bmaps and how this all works. Perhaps mind's going to be blown if he hasn't heard about this.
- [29:46]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah. Okay. So very simply, what we do is we built this piece of hardware. It's like a camera system that goes into your vehicle. It looks and smells like a dash cam, but inside of it, it's actually ideal for the purposes of mapping. And we'll get a little bit more into that. So, and once you deploy the device into your vehicle, you just drive, right? You're not, you know, you're not asked to do anything specifically, like go to this road or that road. And what you see over here, what you're looking at is the global coverage that we have, right? So the lighter the color, the more frequently that we're actually updating those roads. We've mapped around 18 million road kilometers, so that's roughly 30% of the global road network. We've done very well in the United States, many parts of Asia, basically. Eu certain parts of the Middle east you'll probably see in Russia and China it's dark. And that's kind of by design because China threw us out and Russia there is a little bit more complicated than we can get into. And then on the other side we take all the. So the map is being built on this device, right? And it's just uploading the relevant parts that it wants, right? So it's saying, okay, this road over here has three lanes. The road width is, you know, X number of feet. There's a speed limit sign of 35 miles an hour. There's a construction zone. The toll road price is this. The truck waste station over here is open and there's 15 trucks lined up. So it really can see and understand the world, which is fundamentally different than the way that Google operates in real time. So Google Maps and Waze in real time, what all they have is motion. So what that means is they can say, okay, yeah, this car over here was going 40 miles an hour and on this road and now all of a sudden I see all the cars are going 10 miles an hour. So there's some sort of traffic backup. But they don't understand or see why. Right. And so we can actually be like, okay, there's a massive four car pile up, right? Or there's, you know what, it's just a little bit of police activity and that will clear pretty quickly, right? Or just understanding construction, right? Like hey, this construction work zone that's been here for the last three days and that thing's not going anywhere because the number of trucks over there indicate that that thing is going to be there for a long time. So the advantage of actually having eyes that have intelligence behind them that is kind of the key unlock or the key differentiator versus Google.
- [32:24]
Mike
How many cameras?
- [32:25]
Ariel Seidman
So far there's tens of thousands of daily active cameras. Our new device that started to ship in the last couple of weeks here, called the Bee, that has tens of thousands of pre orders on it. We're starting to kind of scale up the production of that. So in, you know, the, probably by the mid summer timeframe we'll have more than doubled the entire fleet.
- [32:50]
Mike
So all of this is via a few tens of thousands of cameras?
- [32:55]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, yeah. You got to realize like the people who are participating in this network are not like, hey, I drive to the grocery store and a couple of places. These are like Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, you know, truckers, you know, FedEx drivers. So these are people who are generally speaking they're on the road a ton.
- [33:18]
Howard
And to that. Go ahead, Phil.
- [33:20]
Phil
You get paid more. Same question that Howie has. You get paid more if you drive more.
- [33:27]
Ariel Seidman
Yes. In general, like if you, if all you do is go to the airport, you know, 100 times a day, you're not going to do as well as somebody like a FedEx driver who's going into like many different parts of a city. You know, what we call, like the nooks and crannies of a city. So like the back of a hospital or a warehouse delivery location, or even certain residential roads that don't get a lot of coverage. I mean, like the 405 in LA, you know, we see that, you know, thousands upon thousands of times per day. The incremental value of adding an additional one at this point is pretty limited. So it does depend on kind of like the types of roads that you.
- [34:08]
Howard
That you travel and quickly around the horn. I use Apple Marts more than Google. Michael, what are you using these days?
- [34:15]
Mike
Waze.
- [34:16]
Howard
Waze, Phil.
- [34:18]
Phil
So I have a question about that. Why does Google Maps now suck? I use Google Maps. I've used it forever.
- [34:24]
Howard
I use it much less. I agree. Why do you have to be unbelievable? What's the problem?
- [34:29]
Phil
Is it bloatware? I mean, is that all it is? Or it's more?
- [34:32]
Ariel Seidman
Well, there's a couple problems here. One is, you know, they quite let me back up for a second. The first big innovation in the world of mapping was satellite, or I should say in the digital age. The first big innovation was satellite imagery. Right. It was a huge unlock.
- [34:50]
Howard
Keyhole. They bought Keyhole.
- [34:52]
Ariel Seidman
Exactly. They bought Keyhole. They turned that into Google Earth.
- [34:54]
Howard
There's a Phoenix company. Yep.
- [34:56]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah. And so, so that was one that was like early 2000s. Then they did Google Street View. That started, you know, very low cadence, high resolution imagery. That was like 2006, 2007, a huge unlock. Not just terms of, you know, allowing humans to understand what's going on or like, see the location they're going to, but they extracted just ridiculous amounts of information from that. Right. So like, hey, what's the name of the business? What's the street address here? What's the name of the street? All that kind of information, really, really valuable, but it's very low cadence. Right. They're only doing it maybe once every two years. Then the next big innovation was effectively what Waze did, which was crowdsourcing kind of this traffic layer utilizing GPS on your phone. But since then, that was 2012, 2013 timeframe, there has not been any Sort of new large scale innovation in mapping that Google has done, or for that matter, for the most players have done. Right. And so that's been. The big issue is like, it's just been a lot of iteration, a lot of tweaking. You know, we'll add reviews to places and stuff like that. So I think that's one big issue. Like no one has taken a big swing. The second big issue I think comes back to talent. Right. I mean, let's just be really blunt. In the case of Google specifically, you know, you're no longer attracting the type of innovator that is pushing really fundamentally new ways of thinking about maps inside of Google. Right. Or Google Maps, I should say. And so it's very, very challenging for them to kind of just get off of this like iteration cycle. What do I need to get to do to get promoted, all that type of stuff to basically be like, you know what, we're going to tear up our existing mapping pipeline because it was built in 2006 and it's really no longer relevant for the age of 2024 or 2025, I guess now.
- [36:52]
Howard
Yeah, this is like this again, like. And so Tesla, but Tesla is doing the same. They're basically a car that's a camera. So how do they think about it versus you?
- [37:04]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, I mean like if you look at the end to end mapping pipeline, you know, I would say it's us and Tesla, right. Obviously Tesla has incredible technical capabilities. They have cameras and stuff like that. So our job now is, okay, how do we take all this technology and integrate it much more deeply into the vehicles? And so you'll see some stuff coming out over the next 3, 612 months around that vein. Right. How do you take this technology that we've built and then integrate it such that it's on like every Ford Transit van, right? Every delivery van in the world is integrated deeply into the, into those types of vehicles. That is very much where this is all headed in our case.
- [37:50]
Mike
So would a deal with Waymo make sense for you guys?
- [37:53]
Howard
Or a logistics company? Waymo or a logistics truck?
- [37:57]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah. I think what you're starting to see is like the car companies and other players, right, Upfitters. So the upfitters are people who take a Ford Transit van and basically deploy a whole bunch of technology, deploy branding to it so that a FedEx can deploy it or somebody else like that can deploy it. Right. So we're very interested in those types of folks as well. So there's a whole kind of supply chain of, you know, where our technology can get into. So that is much more where we're going to head than trying to go with a Waymo. I mean, Waymo is owned by Google, so the likelihood that they're going to do a deal with me is, like, really low. But yes, like, other players, you know, not specifically Waymo, but others in that same vein. Absolutely.
- [38:43]
Howard
So, Mike, quickly, with Goldman banker hat on, like, how much money have you raised, Eric, if you're allowed to say.
- [38:49]
Ariel Seidman
Like, about 30, $35 million.
- [38:52]
Howard
So very lean for this big ambition. And is that why you did the token? Just because. To get the incentives Right. So let's just. Let's walk because if we can convince Mike of this, I get excited. How do we participate? This is like a startup, but the world is the startup here. Right? That was kind of the promise of like, tokens and whatever is like, participate in the upside of all this. So, yeah, so get us excited about how to think about this as both investors and as just people who like new toys.
- [39:21]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah. So look, Waze obviously innovated in terms of, like, there were two parts of Waze in terms of how you contributed, Right. There was a, hey, just use our app, right? And we're just going to like, grab all your GPS traces. And then there was a different set of people, much smaller, obviously about 30,000 people, who were effectively sitting behind a computer and editing a map. Right. Without their data, without the data of us driving and without the data of all these map editors sitting behind a computer and tediously editing a map and spending a lot of time doing that, there is no Waze, like, full stop. And you know, Waze, to their credit, you know, did a really good job, sold it to Google for, I don't know, like, $1.2 billion or whatever.
- [40:04]
Howard
Should they have sold, Mike? Should they have sold? Is that what's changed the course of history? These are the things that are like, can't believe Facebook. Sorry to interrupt. But like, man, if Facebook bought that company, Facebook would be a much different company. If they'd paid a 2 billion, that would have Facebook be in a much better position in this global war. They don't have a phone and they don't have maps. Like, I think that was a huge mistake, maybe the biggest one.
- [40:27]
Mike
And Google has a surplus of driving riches. They've got Google Maps, they got Waze over there, they got Waymo over there. To Ariel, your point, you know, you're almost indicating that, hey, Google is one monolithic entity and in the world, no.
- [40:41]
Howard
Ftc, I'm way Off topic, shouldn't Google, just, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, buy all of Hivemapper and to shut it down? Like, in a world where Trump doesn't care about anything?
- [40:51]
Mike
And I don't remember, Google started all this with Keyhole. That was Larry and Sergey getting fascinated with CIA spy technology. And that thing came over the Transom. I was. I was involved. I was. I know the story in the early days and Keyhole, My point was that there was a lot of innovation in a crazy world that you're talking about. Howard. Yeah. Today Google would buy all of this. Google did the same thing in robotics. They bought every robotics company on the planet that had anything that turned into Boston Dynamics. Then they got tired of it because they got Ruth Peratt as a cfo, who said, wall street is listening. We gotta pare this back. And then they sold the damn thing to Masa, and then the Masa sold it at a discount to Hyundai. Anyway, I'm going off the chart, but to your point, where Google basically buys up the world's court. Cool technologies. They did it in Maps. They started with Keyhole, they did it with Google Maps. They owned. They own today, Waze, they own Waymo. But they can't consolidate because the regulations in each country, Europe, et cetera, say you can't merge these things. So the scale that was required in Europe, they were not allowed. They were not allowed to merge it. So these things stayed independent fiefdoms within Google. Utterly, utterly not utilized.
- [42:10]
Howard
And.
- [42:11]
Mike
And so if I was a owner of Waze or a shareholder in Waze, I had big aspirations why I sold to Google, it was like the Instagram selling it to Meta and saying it was just too.
- [42:23]
Howard
It was too good enough. Facebook's mistake is not just coming over the top and paying 2 billion. So, Arielle, how does this all. Like, you wouldn't be around if that all happened. So how do you stay alive here? What's. What do you need? How can we help? Like, how is the average person who's reading listening today or investor help here? Like, what? Why is it important?
- [42:42]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, look, I think it's really important to have an independent mapping organization entity that is not owned, you know, by any of the big majors. I think that's incredibly important, Mike.
- [42:53]
Howard
Can we all agree on that? That just makes sense. Do we agree, Phil? Do we agree?
- [42:58]
Phil
The idea from the user point of view and the. What do you call the guy? What do you call the Uber driver who puts a. Puts a. Puts a camera in the car?
- [43:08]
Howard
The moosh.
- [43:09]
Ariel Seidman
The moosh They're a mapper. They're contributors.
- [43:13]
Mike
The.
- [43:14]
Phil
The benefit for them. So I. I imagine they get paid in Solana, like, sort of like.
- [43:19]
Howard
Okay, so the. Walk us through how they get paid or how they.
- [43:22]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, so they're. They're reward. I mean, there's two primary rewards there. There's a. Let's call it a financial reward in the form of a honey token. Right? That's our token.
- [43:33]
Howard
I own some honey tokens. Full disclosure, I'm down, but so far, I'm the mark.
- [43:37]
Ariel Seidman
So they, you know, they definitely. You know, there's definitely a set of people that are interested in that. Then there's also people who just want the device from a security perspective, Right. They get into an accident, they have an issue, they want the recording of exactly what happened.
- [43:55]
Howard
A great sales boy, man. We should get Axon. I got to get you partnered with Axon.
- [43:59]
Mike
Yeah.
- [44:00]
Howard
So, you know the guys at Axon, have they called you?
- [44:02]
Ariel Seidman
I don't know those guys.
- [44:03]
Howard
Oh, my God, dude, back channel. They're the. They're the body armor. This is a security partner.
- [44:08]
Ariel Seidman
Yes, Yes, I do.
- [44:09]
Howard
This is. They could be a huge partner. Okay. Just their branding. All right, That's a side discussion. Keep going.
- [44:16]
Ariel Seidman
You know, there's some people who, like, that's. They're in the market for this device or a device like ours, right? And then they say to themselves, okay, it has all these capabilities and I can contribute to a map. And there's this honey token reward aspect of it. This is fun. And by the way, I think that, like, don't underrate the fact that there's a lot of people out there who are driving a ton. And this is a community. This is a form of entertainment, right? There's little things you can do. And so that has actually been, to me, one of the more interesting things. Like, yes, the financial rewards are exciting. They're cool. Kind of plugging yourself into this economic ecosystem, that's really cool as well. But there's other kind of value pieces that people are making a decision in terms of entertainment, in terms of if I, you know, my car gets wrecked or somebody hits me or whatever it is.
- [45:02]
Howard
Or stolen, I guess.
- [45:03]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, or stolen. Exactly.
- [45:04]
Howard
So kind of like LoJack 2.0, I guess they would throw the camera out.
- [45:08]
Ariel Seidman
Of the car, but some of them would for sure.
- [45:11]
Howard
Yeah. Okay. Very fucking. So what do you need? So what's next?
- [45:16]
Ariel Seidman
So, look, I think the. Getting more BE devices out there in the world so that we can continue to kind of move up this. The. The Layers of the map. Today we do a phenomenal job. You know, we have big, large customers that are paying us a lot of money to basically consume all of this data integrated into their V, into their products, into their vehicles and so forth right now. Okay, so we, you know, we can see all the things that we refer to as like, relatively static, right. The road width, the number of lanes, the speed limit signs, the turn restriction signs. Now we're focused on road construction, things that are changing very, very frequently. And so for that, we just need more devices. Right. So if you're interested, you know, check us out. That. That's obviously really exciting and very huge. We will at the end of this year also start to introduce a consumer navigation product. Right. So kind of going more head to head with the likes of a ways. And so if you're interested in checking that out, that will probably come in the latter half of this year.
- [46:19]
Howard
And to follow along, you go to hivemapper.com, but where do you go get a camera? What's the.
- [46:24]
Ariel Seidman
Just if. Yeah, if you go to hivemapper.com or bmaps.com and then you just scroll down and you'll be able to see like, boom, right there. B device. We should add like a little shop button. That's the feedback that we've gotten. So we'll do that.
- [46:36]
Mike
What's the cost of a camera, roughly?
- [46:38]
Ariel Seidman
It's about 550 bucks.
- [46:41]
Howard
Is it made in China or U.S. no, it's made.
- [46:43]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, it's made outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So, yeah, we build it and we design it.
- [46:49]
Mike
So this is 589 is what the FedEx driver pays.
- [46:53]
Ariel Seidman
Yes. So there's a couple. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, like, you know, some.
- [46:57]
Mike
That's a big ticket.
- [46:58]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah. For. For some folks, it is for. Okay, so a couple things. One is sometimes it's the commercial fleet owner who's buying it. Right. So you have a guy, he has a pest control business. He has 50 F150s. Each of them are, you know, $60,000 to $80,000. He's buying them for the entire fleet. Right. And so for him, it's protection. It's like, hey, I bought these $60,000 F150s. That's a very valuable asset to my business. And I want to keep my driver safe. So 580 bucks in the grand scheme of things isn't that much. There's another type of folks that these are kind of. We refer to them as map builders. Right. What they're doing is they have capital. So they say, okay, I'm going to go buy 30, 50, 100 of these devices and I'm going to distribute them to the right kind of driver, right. The delivery driver, the Uber driver, the doordash driver, and then I'll split the tokens with them. Right. So they get not only the safety aspects of this, but they also get a little bit of tokens, right. To just make sure that it's mounted properly and all that type of stuff. And so for them, that's another way. And that's been very, very effective for us, especially for outside the United States. Right. So you have these people inside the United States or Europe or whatever it is, buying a whole bunch and deploying them to Brazil or Mexico or other parts of the world.
- [48:21]
Mike
But Ariel, this must have a lot more enterprise features because my understanding was just a regular security dashcam for a car is far less. I thought they were in the $100, $200 range, that if I as a consumer wanted a dash cam for my car for protection, it's not over a $200 item.
- [48:40]
Ariel Seidman
Yes, you're right. If you're just looking for, like, you can go to Amazon and just like you can get a disconnected, you know, dash cam, super low resolution imagery, you're right. For hundreds of 200 bucks.
- [48:51]
Mike
So 600, I'm getting a super resolution.
- [48:53]
Phil
Yeah.
- [48:54]
Mike
But the way I look at this.
- [48:55]
Phil
The way I look at this, Michael, is like this. So here's, here's what I imagine is going to happen. So you drive around and you accumulate honey tokens. And then whether it's tomorrow and you saw, and you know, this reminds me of helium. And I know that they're, you know, I know that you're already aware of that. I'm not saying anything people don't know. But with helium, if you look at like the helium chart, helium had huge, a small number of huge days. And I'm just talking about this from a trader's point of view, Michael, and you know, like a noise arbitrage trader. At some point, Hive Mapper is going to have, is going to make news. I mean, this is such an interesting product. Somebody's going to get a hold of it. Some, some large company is going to be circling something. There's going to be moments where the price of the honey token is going to go crazy. Whether it holds and gets sold or whether it spikes and then comes back down, I have no idea. I don't care as a trader. But I will say this, that you spend 5, 600 bucks, you get the camera that you need and then you patient, you drive around and you patiently accumulate honey tokens. And then when the day comes that there's a big news story about what you guys are doing or, you know, Google or Apple or somebody's circling around you guys and the thing goes up by 300% or 500%, boom. Then you sell it and you make back much more money than the five or six hundred dollars that you, that you spent on buying the, buying the, the hardware.
- [50:37]
Howard
Well, my question is, how does some. So in a world that's, I mean, yeah, if you have a kid. So again, you go like a lot of my friends, their kids get a doordash job and they ride the ted, drove with the sun around and there was a way to make money. These are all these new passive ways for kids to have get, learn how to trade, learn how to accumulate, learn how to dollar cost advantage, you know, participate in the economy without really having to do a lot of work. Right. So it's a very interesting model. How does someone, if someone wanted to buy the company, they have to buy the token or the company. How does that complication work? I know, it's a good question.
- [51:18]
Ariel Seidman
So, so the hivemapper is the protocol. They own all the data. Okay. BMaps is a application or a product that is sitting on top of hivemapper that is licensing the data from the Hive Mapper network. Right. So technically speaking, you would buy bmaps unless you bought like 100% of the hive Mapper Honey tokens. You technically couldn't buy the Hive Mapper network. Right. And that's the way, that's the way it should be, right? Is like we want this thing to be decentralized, we want this thing to be distributed. You know, we don't want any single entity to own 100% of the data and then use it in all these kind of weird, inappropriate ways. And what it also means is that other businesses can build on top of the hivemapper network. Right? So you could have a, a company, let's say, servicing the real estate market or the local government market. Those aren't markets that we're super, super dialed in and focused on. But building specific products for those, you know, those verticals utilizing the HiveMapper network. And BMaps doesn't get any preferential treatment. So we're really, it is very much a platform and you're going to see some stuff from us in terms of, you know, turning more and more of hivemapper into a true Platform in the coming weeks and months ahead.
- [52:39]
Howard
Well, I mean, I'm about. Phil, you gotta buy one and show us in the next week or two.
- [52:44]
Phil
My kids will go crazy.
- [52:46]
Howard
My kids will go crazy. Like, I don't know if you drive a lot, but let's. Let's help out here and chip in. This is true new. This is web three. Can you agree, Michael? This is like a web three idea.
- [52:58]
Mike
No, it's cool. I need to understand the technology and the. And what, What?
- [53:03]
Howard
Yeah, we got to have you back on Ariel. We want to. We want.
- [53:06]
Mike
It's very cool.
- [53:07]
Howard
Stay on. Let's. Let's wrap up with TikTok maybe Phil or whatever.
- [53:10]
Phil
Let's talk about TikTok before we talk about TikTok. I just want to mention though, and I'm full disclosure, I'm a shareholder in the company Rechares has filed for a truck. I swear to God. This is real.
- [53:24]
Howard
I just saw.
- [53:24]
Phil
I saw. Eric. Eric Balconis tweeted this earlier this morning and I just saw it a little while ago. REC Shares, which is a leverage ETF, an ETN company, exchange traded products. They have the MicroStrategy 2x which is going ballistic. And they filed for a Trump etf, Trump Trump coin ETF this morning.
- [53:52]
Howard
I mean, they're serious guys. They're first movers and everything. Rex is a partner of ours. We have all this data that they don't have, but we share with them because their marketing part, they're just so creative. Right. But again, be careful, you know, when you use these products. But this is just such innovative stuff that they're doing. So the innovation's coming everywhere at speeds that are insane. Let's switch. Go ahead.
- [54:18]
Ariel Seidman
Can we briefly touch on the. The Helium news that came out over the week?
- [54:23]
Phil
Yeah.
- [54:23]
Howard
So you're right. So Helium's getting sued on the way up by Gensler. This. This bothers me only because he's a dick. We all know he's a dick. He knows he's a dick. Biden has now made any centrist like me, they screwed any centrist like me by fucking blanket pardon like guys like us who didn't like Trump but also weren't committed to Kamala Biden get screwed here. We wanted it and they just created norms that now Trump can commit crimes and pardon his family on the last day. The precedent has now been set. So Gensler on his way, took a shit on the industry as we're on a just picked on one company. Helium is another very cool use case. I don't own it, but it's like JC was mining with it. It's a mobile network on like it's like your version but for mobile. Building a mobile network. They were sued as what? So good question. So what can we say about this?
- [55:25]
Ariel Seidman
There's a couple of things. One is, look, this is a. Helium is a American company. It is created here, it's building hardware here, it's deploying technology here, it's introducing competition into the mobile wireless industry. Something that we haven't had in a really long time. And the SEC kind of on their way out, you know, kind of like a. You get dumped by your girlfriend and then you go ahead and key your car. That's exactly what happened here. Right? Like they just wanted to poke the industry on their way out.
- [55:59]
Howard
Do you think it was an industry poke? There's not.
- [56:01]
Ariel Seidman
Okay, yeah, I think it was a. How can we just continue to poke them? I mean this was so, in my view, so illegitimate and so corrupt because if it wasn't, they would have done it, you know, a year ago, two years ago.
- [56:16]
Howard
They had the same information a year ago is what they're.
- [56:18]
Ariel Seidman
They absolutely did. I know a little bit about how this all kind of unfolded and they had this information a year.
- [56:23]
Howard
This is, this all just gives Trump cover and it gives the crime, the fresh crimers cover to just point fingers and say it's not me, it's you. It's like Pelosi. The Democrats could have cleared up this trading issue. There's so many Pelosi bots. People knew this was a fucking problem. Elizabeth missed Elizabeth Warren and all these people, they knew there's a problem, no changes. Aoc they're bitching about all this stuff and they could have fucking made this Trump coin a lot more difficult if they had just said, nancy, stop trading stocks. You can buy a fucking. So again, we live. These are the unintended circumstances of bad decisions by people we've trusted and you know, as trust agents. And again, I'm not perfect and Michael and Phil aren't perfect. You were not perfect. But man, we try and hold, we try and set an example for how to talk to people about this stuff. And we just got. You didn't just get shit on. We all got shit on. And it's just. I've never seen anything like this. This is this. We are going to be paying for this for a very long time and we're probably going to have to get re regulated because the Wild West, I don't want to get killed by. I live A good life. I don't need to go west into crypto first because I know what a bow and air. I just have seen enough video of the natives killing the settlers that and scalping them.
- [57:45]
Mike
Don't. Don't get scalping. That was pretty horrible stuff.
- [57:48]
Howard
Go watch American Primeval and that is crypto right now. If you don't watch American Primeval on Netflix, you do not know what crypto is like. And that is what crypto is like. I do not want to be the moosh or the scalped. But anyways, anything we can do to help. This is a great idea. I met you and I'm an indirect owner in this small but like whoa, big vision balls. Great product balls. The execution. This is the shit that it's fun to trade and talk about tokens. This is like a serious project. So in a land of noise and lack of patience, kudos to you. We'll follow along here. Let's talk about TikTok because it's a joke, the whole thing. But Mike, what's your take? Quick and then we'll go to Phil. I don't have a take. I don't need it. My kids are even laughing about it. My daughter quickly is like, fuck, she has life hacks on there. So I get why she likes it. That's their time killer. And I'm like, hey honey, that's your vaping and it's not healthy for you. But I feel bad for her because that's where she gets her restaurants and life hacks. But Mike, where's your take on this?
- [58:54]
Mike
I put up a TikTok a few hours before it went down with a song. It's an illusion. This whole thing is a kabuki dance that's going on. The song it's an Illusion is perfect for what's going on here. TikTok is still, even though it's quote back is living on borrowed time. 90 days. There's some very complicated business and geopolitical deals that are going on in the background that we all know about. Generally speaking, China, US Elon and China and Tesla Gigafactories in China, fsd full self driving permits in China. Quid pro quo for 50% ownership of TikTok US. TikTok we're talking about in the US that has to go to US hands. 15% of ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok, is owned by Susquehanna. The founder of that is worth over 50 billion. He's a close mar a lago friend of Donald Trump. So there are deals within Deals, wheels within wheels that are going on. Those transactions could not be consummated by this Sunday. Biden, even though we criticize him and praise him, he did say, look, I won't enforce this until Trump comes on. Yet TikTok ByteDance decided to take it down for 12 hours. That was pure theater. The Oracle service went down. Google and Apple did take TikTok the app off their app stores. So today, if you want to download TikTok, you cannot do that, you know, until. Until they are absolved with a liability of $5,000 per user, which could happen once Trump settles into the White House. So very complicated moves within rules, all, everything I've described. But at a high level. What this is, what's going on is TikTok has basically done what they needed to do. They got targeted as a ban target by Trump four years ago. They were under the threat of ban. They're now paying up. They were one of the big sponsors of the biggest party for at the inauguration in dc. You can look it up. They had all the MAGA, merch, etc. They shoe the CEO was right there around Trump when he got sworn in. Deal is in, the fix is in. And TikTok is now going to be on. We don't know what the algorithm is going to look like. In the back, there were rumors that Facebook had bought all this, all of the TikTok assets and moved it to his servers. Not true yet. But the point is that there are probably about half a dozen bids being built. 20 to 30, $40 billion. There's a lot of the usual suspects. Elon is at the front of that line. There are other billionaires that are putting together bids and, you know, number of them have been leaked, number of them are not. But as and when those bids come out, they'll all be people we're very familiar with on the US side who are going to represent 50% of this stake that has to be moved to US hands. Part of the deal is going to be some of that goes in the form of tokens. I don't know if it's crypto, whatever. To the U.S. meaning Trump, there is a deal that the U.S. government will probably have some stake in U.S. tikTok as part of this transaction.
- [62:27]
Howard
All of this has to be like the US Government.
- [62:30]
Mike
Yes, US Government. No different than the US Government taking warrants in Ford in general, not Ford.
- [62:36]
Howard
I love that.
- [62:36]
Mike
But you know, the auto companies, you know, when they were going under, I mean, that's smart.
- [62:41]
Howard
Fucking tax. It's a tax That's a better tariff to me. That's a better tariff than just fucking blanket. Mexico and Canada.
- [62:49]
Mike
Yeah.
- [62:49]
Howard
So.
- [62:49]
Mike
But the thing is this.
- [62:51]
Phil
On our own people, instead of.
- [62:52]
Mike
Yeah.
- [62:53]
Howard
Have you seen Verizon? Have you seen Hive Mapper?
- [62:56]
Mike
Yeah, so Verizon, ATT. I had a post. Verizon, ATT, Facebook, AOL, all of those companies have done more spying on U.S. citizens than any foreign entity out there. Not Airbnb is right up there. Every US Company has. Even Apple. Even Apple. As amazingly pure they say they are. Everyone makes money off people's data. I mean, we are the mark. We are the moosh. But that aside. But that aside, yes, the US Is likely probably going to get a stake here, but it is not a stake. Like in the auto company bailouts. In the auto company bailouts, the US Government took risk putting dollars into those companies. Here, there is no risk. TikTok, if it were allowed to be a standard, it's just an extraction of value. It's a shakedown. Because TikTok doesn't need the money to be bailed out. They're making over $10 billion a year this year, which is equal to slightly less than what Meta is making out of a product called reels. That is 70% as good, because Zuckerberg has better algorithms. Anyway, the point is, this is a business deal. It's on borrowed time. It will get fixed. The business transaction will be in. One of these parties will end up constructing a deal. We'll see announcements in the next few days. And TikTok will be back for 170 million American users, 17% of TikTok's overall base, almost half of TikTok's overall global revenue. Because America is the richest market. And that's the prize. Howard, we don't. Can't hear you. Just so you know, it may have gone mute. Sorry. Okay. We might have lost our old. Sorry. It's not Riverside. I would let you go. Okay.
- [64:55]
Phil
This is the most peace and quiet we've had in months over here.
- [64:59]
Mike
No. So I can see those expletives over his head.
- [65:05]
Phil
Okay, so I'm going to take us out. I'm going to take us out.
- [65:08]
Mike
Thank you. Thank you.
- [65:09]
Phil
Thank you, Michael.
- [65:09]
Mike
So, TikTok, just so you know, it's a show. Enjoy it. It will be back. We just don't know, as and when the dust settles, how the algorithms in the back change for TikTok users. For my money, TikTok is the single best AI application for hundreds of millions of users in the US after ChatGPT the algorithms are what makes it special and whoever buys it. The core question is going to be what is who's going to control the algorithms? Who gets piece of the algorithms and how do they change? That's the key question that I'll be watching for after the transactions are announced.
- [65:45]
Phil
How's YouTube on the short, short, short take algorithms? Are they getting better?
- [65:50]
Mike
They're good. They're good. The problem for YouTube which is owned by Google and for the reels which is owned by Meta, is that they have existing very profitable businesses. And so they have to shoehorn shorts into YouTube which is YouTube long and YouTube TV which is a cable business.
- [66:09]
Howard
Can you hear me now?
- [66:10]
Mike
Yeah, we can. So when you went for YouTube they have many.
- [66:14]
Howard
The stock idea I gave out while you muted me. My memo coin idea that I shared while you're muted is what the Ariel gets us Ariel could be so. So quick question, Mike.
- [66:26]
Mike
Yeah.
- [66:26]
Howard
Why can't and why can't we get together and say why shouldn't the negotiation being hive mapper Facebook stock twits gets to go in China? Why can't we have that negotiation instead of just the money grab? Is it just because that could never happen? But why shouldn't that be on the table if we really help America? Yeah, you could probably get both in this negotiation.
- [66:49]
Mike
Yeah. So China for the reasons of control for CCP has basically not allowed any US social media company.
- [66:57]
Howard
Shouldn't that what be on the table?
- [67:00]
Mike
It is a non starter. Right. Because their government. This is what I did a thing up a podcast. I've said this before. China will probably win the supply chain war around AI in terms of chips. We can talk a lot about that. But I think they will lose the market for AI in China because they cannot allow clean data to go into their AI models. So the reason it's a non negotiable for US social media companies to go into China is that fundamental changes the Chinese government just totally okay. So that they can.
- [67:34]
Howard
I just feel like hungry for Chinese food. We've talked about China, now I got.
- [67:38]
Mike
No, no, exactly. So what I'm saying is yeah, we can ask for a lot of other things from China and probably get some of that in exchange for what's going on. That that is those are the negotiations that are going on. But the notion of hey, allow Facebook to go in, Google to go in that battle has been lost until there's a fundamental change like it was in South Korea where there were two or three autocratic governments that controlled South Korea and then it really became a democracy until we see that kind of a change in China, that those bids are off the table. And that is a. Who knows? You know, it's an earthquake. It's like the Russian revolution. We don't know when that might happen, if that happens, et cetera.
- [68:20]
Howard
In the meantime.
- [68:21]
Mike
In the meantime, China is the world's manufacturing basket. Their only salvation, with their debt and so on, is to sell the world goods. And so they want a deal to sell goods. And we in the general, we want to buy those goods, because if we buy those goods, we can build services in our economy that are on top of everybody else's with none of the pollution that comes from making these hoodies in America. These hoodies create huge pollution, which is what the average Chinese life is 10 to 15 years lower than ours because they're eating the pollution. So my point is there's a big deal to be done, and the question is, what are the chips being negotiated? Very exciting, and it's very, very interesting and complicated, but it will get done. In the meantime, TikTok is a great kabuki theater dance, and it's fun to watch.
- [69:16]
Howard
It's been my favorite episode just because the chips are falling in place. You know, we have a 12 bagger in Solana that we talked about and have stuck with. Ariel, are you long Solana? Like, look, forgetting charts. Are you just long Solana or is there something else that you see? If you had one idea. If you had one idea.
- [69:37]
Ariel Seidman
Yeah, is it own a little bit of Solana, like, okay, very little bit. I don't know, like maybe a thousand dollars? Like that? Very.
- [69:44]
Howard
You're not speculating. You're busy building. All right, boys, Ariel, you're welcome back anytime. Update us. And we're.
- [69:52]
Mike
We're hive mipers.
- [69:55]
Phil
Just quick last word. If you're watching this and you're not a shark and you don't really. You have FOMO because you see and you hear about it everywhere. We're talking about it. They're talking about it basically everywhere online. Just be dumb. Just be dumb and patient and boring. Yeah, go buy a little bitcoin, maybe if you're fancy, go buy a little Solana and just hold it forever. And it could go to zero. Who knows? But there's asymmetric risk profile. It could also quadruple, quintuple, 10 times, 100 times.
- [70:29]
Howard
And when the market's red, when the market's read by QQQ and Google, like, listen, we can make fun of Google and all the things, but in the end, you clear your. You know, FOMO is solved by yourself by doing smart things. Whenever you have fomo, it's like, so go buy yourself some QQQ and some. And some goog.
- [70:46]
Mike
And if you're a politician or in Congress, just stop trading.
- [70:50]
Howard
Stop doing.
- [70:50]
Mike
Just buy qqq. Just buy Solana. I don't care. Yeah, think. Think of. Think of yourself like a Singaporean. Yeah, you're for. You're there for public service. Singapore has the best public service signed.
- [71:04]
Howard
Up for public service. You know, it's good enough for Vanguard. It's good enough for you. All right, boys, either party.
- [71:11]
Mike
I don't care. Okay.
- [71:12]
Howard
All right. Thank you, guys.
- [71:14]
Phil
Thank you so much.
- [71:15]
Howard
Appreciate it.