Bankless - 166 - Leaving Web2 with Sriram Krishnan

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Sriram Krishnan is a GP at a16z Crypto and a defector from Web2 to Web3. Formerly a Product Lead at Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, Sriram has seen basically everything there is to see in the world of Web2, and especially Web2 social. He also hosts a podcast with his wife covering tech and internet creators, so he knows a thing or two about the world of creators, internet social platforms, and crypto.  ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode:  https://www.bankless.com/debrief-sriram-krishnan    ------ What’s broken about Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? And how can it be fixed? Can it be fixed? Sriram has many profound ideas.  Growing up in a small town in India with little opportunity, Sriram used the internet to change the course of his life. Now he worries that these same opportunities won’t be available for the next generation. He believes Web3 is the only way to keep the internet full of opportunity for the next generations. In today’s episode, we cover why Sriram defected from Web2 to Web3, why Twitter can topple world governments but can’t sell ads effectively, why every social media network has to start with status, how crypto and AI intersect, and much more.  ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:14 Eliezer Yudkowsky 8:19 Sriram’s Thoughts on A.I. 11:35 Sriram’s Background & North Star 16:10 The Early Internet Explained  19:54 The Permissionless of the Internet Today 22:18 What Are API Keys? 25:55 Towers vs. Townsquares 28:24 TikTok Hearings & Web2 Solutions  36:13 Twitter  43:25 New Age of Twitter  49:29 Web3 Social Tour 1:02:46 Overcoming Web2 Network Effects  1:20:20 How to Crypto-Pill Elon  1:22:38 Web2 Pausing Web3 Adoption  1:26:32 Future of Creators 1:30:25 Web3 & Creators  1:35:06 Crypto & AI  1:40:33 Sriram’s Closing Arguments 1:42:22 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Resources: Sriram & His Wife’s Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@AarthiAndSriram/videos  https://www.aarthiandsriram.com/  Sriram’s Twitter https://twitter.com/sriramk  Eugene Wei’s Status-as-a-Service  https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. What's broken about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and how to fix it with Sri Ram Krishna. This is somebody who's been on the inside. He is an internet optimist. He's a guy who grew up in a small town in India with little opportunity and used the internet to change the course of his life. And now he worries that these same opportunities won't be available for the next generation. Srirram thinks Web 3 is the only way to keep the Internet full of opportunity for future generations.

A few things to take away from this episode. Of course, you know, we're going to talk about Web 3 and the transition from Web 2 to Web 3. But this is number one, why ScriRom defected from Web 2 to Web 3. Whenever there's an API key, something is broken, he says. What does he mean by that? We get into that in that episode. Number two, why Twitter can topple world governments but can't sell an ad. We talk about that. Number three, we ask the question, does Web 2 have to lose in order for Web 3

to win? Number four, we talk about what every social media network has to start with. The cool kids. It has to attract the cool kids, says ThreeRom, and Web3 Social will never take off until it does. And number five, we conclude by talking about crypto and AI, artificial intelligence, that is, how do they intersect? StryRMA has some great ideas about that as well. David, what were the most significant parts of this episode for you? Sri Ram has an arc to him. He was a child of Web 1, and so he, as a tinkerer, as a coder, as an experiencer of the internet, saw what Web 1 did for him and his life. And it's really, really personal. And that arc has taken him through the Web 2 age to where he is now as a GP of Andreson Horowitz focusing on Web 3. And he's made a very big point to say that

he is left Web 2. He calls himself a Web 2 defector and now operates in Web 3, even though he does understand the good and real value that Web 2 has provided and still provides to this world. He is now focusing on Web 3 because he sees the starry-eyed brightness that Web 3 brings to the world that he saw in Web 1 and is worried that Web 2 is not able to provide that same opportunity to the young tinkers that are growing up in this digital age. I think that is a really important lens to view this episode through, a really significant one. If we want to pass the baton of optimism, of internet optimism off to our children, we need what Sri Ram is doing, investing in Web3, building out Web3 structures.

We need these things. We need Web3 to change the paradigm of what social is. And I think that is Sri Ram's call to action. That is his purpose upon this world. And I think the listener of this podcast episode will be able to resonate with that as they listen to this episode. And yeah, David, I think one thing for you and I to explore in the debrief, is if this is actually a winnable battle. It feels like the armies of Web 2 are definitely stacked against Web 3 and want to see if we can overcome Web 2's network effect and actually succeed here.

So we get a lot to unpack in the debrief. Of course, that is our episode after the episode. And you can join as a bankless citizen and get the premium RSS feed and get immediate access to that. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Free ROM. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Cracken, our number one recommended crypto exchange for 2023. Go get started. Cracken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Cracken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Cracken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the Cracken U.S. is simple, intuitive,

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that Cracken does? And if not, sign up with Cracken at Cracken.com slash bankless. Hey, Bankless Nation. If you're listening to this, it's because you're on the free bankless RSS feed. Did you know that there's an ad-free version of Bankless that comes with the bankless premium subscription? No ads, just straight to the content. But that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you. There's also the token report, a monthly, bullish, bearish, neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month. And the regular updates from the token report go into the token Bible. Your first stop shop, for every token worth investigating in crypto.

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But it makes chain management easy, displaying your transactions in a human readable format. automatic warnings for malicious transactions or fishing websites. Phantom has already saved over 20,000 users from getting scammed or hacked. So get on the Phantom waitlist and be one of the first to access the multi-chain beta. There's a link in the show notes or you can go to phantom. dot app slash waitlist to get access in late February. Bankless Nation, we have Sri Ram Christian on the podcast. He's a GP at A16 Z Crypto, whom you know, of course. And he is a self-described defector of Web 2 to Web 3. We're definitely going to talk about that.

that. Formerly a product lead at Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. He's been all over the place. StreamRum has basically seen everything there is to see about the world of Web2 and especially Web2 social. That's going to be a focus of today's conversation. He also hosts a podcast with his wife covering tech, internet creators, all sorts of things like that. So he knows a thing or two about the space we are in. Sri Ram, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm sure you get this a lot. A long time listener, YouTube stalker, first time collar and I spent last night binging a bunch of

episodes as I was preparing for this and God, I feel pressure to deliver. You know what? Okay, so tell us what episode most resonated with you. What did you enjoy hearing? Well, there are a few which are kind of thematic, I think what you're talking about, but for me, the standout one from recent times is the one with the Elisor. Right.

Actually not crypto, but I was riveted and mildly jealous as a sort of a fellow podcast was that you folks actually just knock the ball out of the park on multiple levels. I mean, Elizer, his obvious passion, capturing the zeitgeist of the moment. Ryan, your face, when he says, we're all going to be dead. It's authentic.

Oh, yeah. And my favorite part, and I can't do justice to it. And everyone should probably watch it and listen to it. It was at the very end when you go, what does the takeaway for everyone? And he says, and I'll butcher's like, I don't think it'll help. We're all going to be dead. But maybe somebody has a good idea. And I think it's just, you know, there's a lot to unpack over there.

But I think in terms of a great episode, which captures a moment. you know, gets people talking. You folks knock the ball out of the park there. Sri Rump, do you mind? Because whenever someone brings up that episode, I have to ask. I can't not ask. So what did you think coming out of that episode? Like, I know you're into AI as well.

Like, you kind of dabble. What is he right? What's going on? Who should we talk to? Like, I still feel like a tremendous amount of discordance coming out of that conversation. Like, I don't know if he's right or not. We have some episodes coming up. we're going to more deeply explore that discussion,

have maybe the counterpoint on. But what was your take? I mean, are you just left with desolation? And like, do you think he could be right here? So a few thoughts. First, you know, I'm about to turn 40 soon. And one of the things I've grown to appreciate is people who believe in a cause.

And whether you agree or disagree with the liazer and which we can get into, it is obvious that he is scared about this for a very long period of time. And I just find something very inspiring about somebody who does that and is kind of put his life's work and energy into one thing. So I think that's just impressive. And I think that really comes across.

That's number one. Number two is I would say I think Eliza is raising some important questions. The challenge is it's hard to, and he's obviously a much smarter person than me or a lot of people and spend a lot more time thinking about it for sure. The challenge for me is to reconcile. One, the obvious benefits that AI can bring, which anybody who's writing code using co-pilot now on VAS, code can obviously testify to that. Like, I have done production code in 10 years and I'm no productive. So I've seen people get health diagnosis, which are maybe saving lives. So the obvious benefits that are possible with also reconcile the possibility of a long-tail risk that might kill us all.

So I think he's an important addition to the conversation. I don't know how to disprove what he says to, which always kind of worries me when, you know, it's kind of hard for me to have a discussion where I'm like, well, how do I actually disprove this? Like, what is the evidence that would change somebody's mind? I actually think this also ties into crypto, which we can maybe get into, because I think one question of which Elizer, well, one question which comes out of this is, okay, if AI is going to be such a force, who controls it? You know, is it going to be the domain of a few small companies which can raise hundreds

of millions of dollars, you know, or have access to resources? Or is it going to be something which all of us can, you know, on a MacBook Pro, M2, you know, laptop right now. Can I run some version of it here? Can I partake in it? Can I get credit for the data that goes and switch all ties into the crypto ether? So I would say this. I'm happy that Elizer exists. I think is pushing the conversation forward. But, you know, I don't think this is end of the discussion. I don't think anyone can emerge from that podcast episode in denial that Eliezer believes exactly what he says that he believes to the full extent of that. And I think that's actually what made it such a fun podcast episode is like, man, we are speaking right to the soul of this

man who really cares about, like tunnel vision cares about this one thing in particular. So just from a content and podcasting perspective, it definitely like struck the chord there. And so you're on, I kind of see a little bit of that in you. Nothing to do with AI. But I think when you say you tell me that you have a respect for people that really believe in a cause, I'm guessing that that's because you have a similar cause. And so maybe a question to you is like, what do you feel strongly about that is your equivalent to Eliezer's AI alignment problem? What's your alignment problem in the world. First, we disrespected to Eliza because he's been doing this for 20 years, I think, and I can't claim any such credit. But for me, and just to briefly kind of recap my personal story, because I think

this ties into this. You know, I grew up in a kind of a small part of India, and the internet was basically the only reason, you know, my career and pretty much every good thing in my life exists. I met my now wife, was my co-host online 21 years ago because we were trying to build a website together. We were unknown, and thankfully, before the word unknown was a thing, and we met and we've been together for 20 years. I wrote a random blog post with somebody at Microsoft saw, got me and her hired, flew to the U.S. and set off like a bunch of career opportunities and things,

which honestly, like, we wouldn't be having this conversation if the internet and the technology didn't exist. And my childhood was very much writing random code, right? I would write my own browser, my own email client, and just participating in my dinky bedroom. And fast-forwarding a few years, I spent the last 10 years, as you alluded to, deep in the belly of the beast of the large social media companies.

I'm a nerdy Thanos collecting the infinity gauntlet of social media. So how many do you have now on your gauntlet? I have three. Right here, three. But then I stopped. Didn't finish the gauntlet. But I spent a few years at meta, what was called Facebook. I run a lot of their ad products.

I spent a year at Snap and maybe most interesting, I spent a few years at Twitter, where I ran home timeline, search, trends, explore, a lot of things which has algorithms and pixels, which I think really ties into it. And now, I want to be clear, I liked a lot of my time there. I think that a lot of amazing smart people who work there. I'm still close friends with a lot of them. But when I left Twitter, and I was trying to think of, like, one of the reasons I think I wound up leaving was I was not thrilled with what was happening in the state

of development and the state of product. And there are a few things which I couldn't really articulate. And one in the last two years, spending time with crypto, I've now kind of totally articulated. So I left to her and I was trying to figure what I want to do with my life. I met a few folks at A16 Z, the firm I work for. Mark, Chris Dixon, who heads up the crypto fund here and Ben, they got me here. And I think a lot of credit goes to Chris Dixon, who I think you've had on the show before. Chris really crypto-pilled me. And this kind of goes into the heart of, you know, why I call it a defector. Now, my day job is to find work with amazing founders, you know,

who build amazing companies. That's my day job. But, I do think for crypto, everyone has a bit of an ideological calling. I like to think of it as a church, right, where you have different paths to it. And if you look at crypto, there are very different people have different paths. I talked to Balaji who's a friend. He's been here for eight years. That's not me. Chris Dixon, been here for nine, ten years. He's involved in Coinbase and last year. That's not me. Others, you know, but hang out in the cypherpunk mailing list like 15 years ago, right? Like, that's not me either. But my path was I saw, you know, the challenges that centralization of social media can cause. And I was a part of it, right? Like, I worked a lot of these systems.

I have developed a lot of these systems. I wasn't the, to misquote Hamilton, room where it happens for a bunch of these. And I saw a bunch of things where I was like, oh, there's some real downsides here. And with crypto, for the first time, I was like, well, there is an alternate path. And if we don't do something as a technology community, really, the childhood version of me couldn't exist, right? The person who was just writing code. And by the way, when I wrote code in 15 years old, I didn't have to get an API key. I didn't have to call up a B. team, I just wrote it on my shitty little computer in nowhere town in India. And like that person couldn't exist. So I think like a lot of things when we can get into like decent social,

etc., etc., like are really critical and important for to preserve the future of the internet. So that's my cause. And, you know, I'm very lucky to have a day job which ties to it. Sviram, that's really profound. I guess like what you're saying is the internet of your childhood, the internet that spawned all of this opportunity for you personally and, you know, thousands of others, hundreds of thousands of others, this podcast even would not be possible, you're saying that that permissionless internet that you grew up on no longer exists or maybe exists as a shadow of what it once was. And your cause, your elezer level conviction is to bring about that internet, the internet that you grew up on and pass it to future generations. That's kind of the spirit of what I'm

catching for you. Is that right? Absolutely. And again, by the way, LA's are much smarter, much deeper than me. So I wouldn't want to insult him by claiming it to be similar. But I do think my cause is quasi-religious. I'll give you an example. Like the very first piece of code I wrote when I was 14 years old

was I looked at the HTTP spec and I was like, I'm going to write a web browser, right? And it was a terrible web browser. But guess what? Nobody stopped me. There were like no API keys, no BD team, nothing required. Just like open source tech

that you kind of adapted. I don't think open source is even a word then, I think it was like Linux was there. I think free software was a thing thanks to Richard Stalman and Ericus Raymond and a bunch of those people. But just the way things work, right? Like, you know, if you want to write an email client, like I used to write GUNU email extensions and talk to SMTP and IMAP servers, and that was my email address, right? And that was very bad code.

And so on and so forth. That was just the way the internet worked. I hung out a lot on like Usenet and so on. And by the way, for me, you know, I didn't speak English very well then. I had really no access to resources. that was very important, like, to actually get exposure to Western culture and the internet. Now, fast-powered now, there is absolutely no way, like, you can build, let us say, an alternative Instagram client or an alternative TikTok client.

That is no way you can say, well, I want to modify TikTok and I want to use my own algorithm and learn something that way. You can't do that. And whether it is for just to play with it, which I think is super important, or whether it because you want to have a choice, whether it is because, I think there's an upside and a downside discussion. On the upside, it is about, like, can you bring in new innovative ideas, right? Like, with SMTP, by the way, right, like Gmail didn't need to go ask someone for permission

when Paul Buchite launched Gmail on April 1st, 2004. They just built it. And Gmail changed, I mean, I'm very dating myself here. Like, Gmail changed email that day, right? We didn't ask somebody for permission, right? And then that caused everyone else kind of build cool new things. So imagine if we could take anyone to use centralized social media platforms and say, you know what, we're going to innovate on top. And we don't need to call up, you know, the CEO of TikTok for the CCP or Zuckerberg or Elon or whoever for permission.

That's on the upside. The downside, I would say, is not getting rugged. You know, when I was a kid, I didn't have to worry about somebody taking on my web browser access, right? But I bet, like, you folks have experiences, you are kicked off YouTube. And I think if you weren't popular and if you hadn't been able to kind of kick up a shitstorm on Twitter, you would not be able to get back. And even my wife and I, who, you know, I mean, not saying we are like powerful or famous, but we have some say, we worry when we have somebody on the show who talks about COVID lab leaks. And we're like, is this going to get deranged somehow?

Like, don't really know for sure, right? And are we going to get removed? And there is this kind of this fear which happens all the time. So I kind of think of it's both in the upside, limiting innovation, which used to happen a lot. On the downside, you know, you could get rugged, deep platform, cancelled, removed, banned, suspended, shadow band, the zillion words, any point in time. So, you know, I think that's what I want to fix. Yeah, Ryan called this the permissionless internet is no longer available to your child's self if your child self was around today. The words that came to my mind are defy and NFTs and blockchains are these like, it's a sandbox. It's a sandbox for developers that a strapping young imaginative kid could come in and start to build a sandcastle. And that's really why this world of crypto is so cool is that it's just this endless canvas for people with imaginations to start to paint upon. And especially young,

folk who have like the imaginations and are no longer bounded by adulthood have the best opportunities to create something new. So what I'm hearing from this part of the story is that there's not much canvas left in the world of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. You're kind of already given your confined box of what you can paint and how you can paint and what your tools are. And I think what I'm hearing from you is that if you were a kid these days, you just don't have as much creative outlet in the world of developing something. or just being present online. How do these words resonate with you?

I think it's profound. I think whenever there is an API key, something is broken because it means you need to ask someone's permission. I think the word kids and playing with it may undersell how important it is for just kind of harnessing the collective human creative spirit, right? Like you want young people anywhere to go play on it. You never know what's going to break out.

You never know what's going to be a hit. But that's sort of the magic of the internet and computer science and we all kind of grown with that. So for me, right, like some of the questions I get, and I'm sure you get, like, as a crypto person now, is what is the use case of crypto, right? And I always try and split this into two parts. And I'm like, well, these things are busted

in the way centralized platforms work today. And we can talk about, like, for example, even last week, the whole TikTok hearing was kind of an example of this, right? And I think crypto, and there will be other solutions which we can talk about, but I think crypto is an ideal answer to these problems. But let's just kind of agree on where the problem exists,

because I think the problem is profound. And maybe if I can't even sell you on crypto, that's fine. But I just want people everywhere to be able to write code on their laptop without you need to ask for people. Let's just agree on that. Yeah. Just for, I remember in my early days of my crypto journey, I actually didn't understand what an API key was.

And understanding what it is now, I do get what you mean when you say if something turns into an API key, we've lost something. But can you just really unpack that one just to make it like an explain like I'm five metaphor? Yeah, sure. So kind of history lesson here. Like if you look at the way the 90s, the old. originally internet work. And by the way, a lot of this has steeled from Chris Dixon, his episode

and other podcasts. He's great about this. So credit to him. A lot of the internet was protocols, right? HDP, SMTP, IMAP. And the way it kind of worked is, you know, there was a protocol spec. There were a bunch of servers. And as long as you kind of adhere to the spec, anybody could issue a request over TCP IP or the network and talk to it and just kind of make it work. Sometimes they need payments. I remember once paying for a Usenet server, which was kind of a big deal when I was kind of a random person kid in India. But like, you know, usually anybody could go ping a server. Now, somewhere along the last 15 years, that changed. And you had the world where, well, a lot more of these things are going to stay behind a walled garden. And to get access, you need to

get an API key, which basically means that you can now issue a request to the server using the key, and you have to play within a certain sandbox. Now, I don't want my choice of language to somehow say that these people are evil or doing bad things. It's just that the world moved to the cloud. The world moved to, like the few things that happened. One, the cloud happened. So you had a lot of things happening behind data centers. Two, was a lot of these services started competing with each other.

And I was somebody's large social media companies. And if I have a network effect, I don't want my competitor to steal my network effect, right? So if you were, for example, in the early days of Twitter and Instagram, they could both log into each other's service using each other's ID. And you could say, like, I want to follow. all of my Instagram friends on Twitter and vice versa. And definitely the vice versa was true. But then people are like, well, we compete with these folks. We don't want that. So you started having like more restrictions. The third part of it was, you know, a lot of people are

searching for business models for a long period of time. And the business model which a lot of these intent companies want upon. And one, I know I think you folks are not fans of, but I am a fan of because I have to work on this was ads. By the way, I have a whole doubt theory about why ads is not as maybe as awful as some people think they are. But if your business model is ads, you need to control the pixels on which people experience your product because that's where the ad shows up. So you can't actually let someone build an alternative client because the first thing they'll do is have a product where you can have ads. The next time you talk to Nike or Procter & Gamble, you be like, hey, I paid a lot of money, but a lot of people there are

not seeing my ads like WhatsApp, right? So it just breaks the system itself. So a bunch of these things happen. None of these folks were evil. It's just like, you know, they're all smart people. It's just the way the internet got built out. But as over time, you know, the sandbox that you could play got really. restricted. Like I remember like F8, the Facebook conference, maybe the first one, maybe 2008, 2009. You could do a lot of things with Facebook at the time. You could publish things on anyone's feed. You could read their friends contact. If you go try today, it's much more locked down, right? And it's a bunch of reasons. There were privacy controversies. There were

competitive issues, the ads issues. It's very limited. And you really can't build an alternative Facebook client today. And I don't think TikTok even has an API which lets you do that. So that's what I mean by an API key where you had this pattern where what used to be, hey, let me just go ping a server, I can do whatever I want. It's now like, well, I'm going to have this particular rails on which I can play, which is a lot more control than it used to be. The metaphor of a hierarchy or tower versus a town square comes to mind, where in the early days of Web 2, all of these Web 2 protocols were talking to each other, just, you know, sending around messages, they were integrating with each other. But the story that you described

kind of progresses from a collaborative and open environment where Twitter and Instagram can share their social graphs. But then all of a sudden, the forces set in, the forces that control the world, the competitive forces, capitalistic forces, set in. And all of a sudden, the town square goes into a hierarchy, goes into the tower. And all of a sudden, that's kind of where we find ourselves today, where each of one of these Web 2 gargantuan is a siloed tower that doesn't want you to transcend across the town square to a different tower. Yeah, absolutely, which is why I think when we talk about anything to fix this, like the incentive structure from day zero is super important,

which is how do you align incentives to stop centralization to stop the tower? Like, for example, I was watching the TikTok hearings, the TikTok CEO last week, which we can even get into. One thing which struck me was how similar the hearings are when every social media CEO shows up for one of these. It is always, and by the way, obviously the issues of the CCP in China are very different from, say, what Zuckerberg had to do.

but it's very similar like hey what are you doing with my data how do I know who got censored or deep platform sometimes explicitly sometimes implicitly how do I trust you right and then you know they usually say a bunch of things but there's really no easy way to validate to prove or disprove it like for example right like I don't think there's any data which comes out where you can prove definitely or disprove definitely whether the CCP is actually having influence and so one of I'm hoping that we can fix as a technology community, and, you know, spoiler it. I think crypto has advanced to this, is how do you have things which are verifiable where we don't have to take someone's word for it or we don't need to send, you know, like a legal team in, but anybody

sitting at home can prove, oh, you know what? I can see how the algorithm works. I can see what the levers at Redmond. I can see who is shadow band, banned, and I can now make up my own mind whether that was valid or not. And by the way, if I don't like it, maybe I can build my own algorithm or my own client in an ideal world. So I've kind of struck by how similar these testimonies and hearings are. Yeah, you know, I was thinking we could start with Twitter, but actually I want to reverse that and maybe start with TikTok as a case study of this, because I think we're, you know, bankless listeners, having heard some content in the past and being in crypto, I mean, we believe you, Sri Ram, right? Like somehow the internet has taken

a wrong term. We've got a whole bunch of API keys that can be rugged instead of like rugless protocols that the original internet was really built on. I want to go to the TikTok hearings, though, because I do think that is a, that is such a good example of what's going on. And I did see, I don't know anybody who listened to the entire hearings, that's a lot, but I got clips, I got snippets. And every time I listen to something where it's kind of, you know, Congress or leaders of the U.S. government grilling some sort of social media CEO, you're right. It's the exact same conversation. I feel like pulling my hair out every time I listen to it because it's always a, how can we trust you, right? That's what Congress says. And then the CEO says, you could trust us because

XYZ. And they say, but how? You've failed in like all of these ways. And the CEO says, no, we're not really failing. You can trust us because of all of these things. And here's what we'll do differently. It's just, I just want to go back and just say to them like, guys, why don't we solve this at the protocol level? Right? Like, rather than this, like, I don't trust you, you know, you don't trust us type of relationship where you've got the incentives completely aligned, why don't we do something like decentralized identity. Imagine that. Imagine we could bake in privacy at sort of the protocol of the root layer. We didn't even have to worry about these types of conversations. I feel like regulators always want to hit this with a regulatory cudgel. Like even the example of,

I don't know if you've seen the Restrict Act, for example, right? So this is sort of the answer to TikTok and there's this idea. I don't know if it's going to pass actually, but it seems probable, maybe likely, that the U.S. is actually going to ban TikTok, right? Whether you think that's a good idea or a bad idea or where you sit on kind of whether CCP is surveilling our data or not. Like, no company should have, domestic companies shouldn't have the ability to do this. So I guess I want to get your kind of take. What do you think?

Why are these social media CEOs always on the hot seat, right? How can we actually solve this problem at the protocol or their root level? If you want to use TikTok as an example or, you know, something like Twitter, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and what's going on with Cambridge Analytica and all of that? I mean, it's the same example over and over again, but how do we get out of this? How do we solve this at the protocol level? Well, okay, so there's a lot to unpack that.

First of all, I think if there's any bit regulator watching this, you know, my overwhelming sort of frustrating thing I want to say is like, hey, let us make up our own minds for ourselves, right? Because every testimony is a version of we think you did things to people that we don't agree with, right? Whether it's the Chinese government, you know, impacting us, whether it is Twitter, maybe disproportionately going after people on the right or on the left or Facebook was similar. It's always some version of the same conversation.

And by the way, smart people can reasonable people can disagree based on evidence on each of these. But that's besides the point. The first thing I want to say, well, let's start with helping us make up our minds for ourselves, right? So what if there was a world where, you know, I think the protocol, let's imagine sort of a sliding scale of verifiability and, you know, decentralized trust, right? Let us start with, let's even set aside protocols for a second. Imagine, you know, if you are Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok right now, by starting tomorrow, we said that you have to publish a few things. Number one, you have to make your algorithm open source, which I think is very doable because I've seen it on the inside. It's very doable. So, and a lot of smart

people on the internet who can break it apart, you know, and poke at it. Number two, every single time you make account action change, right, either explicit or implicit, you are going to to say, you know, somehow commit that you're going to make it public. So for example, when, you know, bankless was taken off YouTube, that was easy because that was explicit. You knew. I think the more insidious ones are when you're subtly deranged, shadow band, if you want to use that phrase, because you don't even know what happened. You just think maybe my episode was shitty, but actually turns out it was triggering something and you don't know, right? I think so having every one of those actions published publicly, kind of like a court of record,

I think is super critical. Third is a right to recourse. What you folks did and what I do, if something happens, it's like we are on Twitter or we call up a friend and we're all lucky sometimes I have influential friends who can help us. A lot of people don't. But a recourse where you can say, hey, I want to see the evidence against me and I want to appeal it. And I think if you just get these, and these are why they're very possible with low amounts of work by everybody. Like that's kind of just a good first step. And sometimes when I talk to people, they don't actually understand why this is necessary. They're like, well, isn't this for like the crazy people on the left or the right who are saying very provocative things? Like this won't matter

to me. It's kind of like one response I often get. Like, I have fun story from inside Twitter, which is, you know, when I was a Twitter, I ran, you know, I head up with the product team for like trends, moments, a bunch of stuff on Twitter. And one day I woke up and I saw a new story which had, I mean, I like the details, like a popular Hollywood actor and he was just cast in the movie. And the story was, well, there was a controversy about why is this person getting cast in this movie and maybe he shouldn't get casted, right? Now, you might be wondering what is that to do at Twitter. Now, the thing which struck me was a bunch of publications cover the same story and they all

had the same two tweets embedded. And none of those two tweets were from interesting people on Twitter. And I was like, that's odd. Like, how did that happen? Right? Like, why is this same two tweets showing up every publication? So I did some digging. It turns out that Twitter has a trending algorithm. The trending algorithm basically tries to figure out like when treats, when popular tweets break out, spot it and make it trend. But if there's not enough of a popular tweet, there was a bug where even an unpopular treat could actually trend at the middle of the night, kind of a random bug. Now, that happened at say 4 a.m. New York time. By 5 a.m. New York time, there was a moment's team editor who basically promoted that into a moment, which makesle, shows up as a big square

on Twitter. By 7 a.8 a.m. a bunch of people in the media industry woke up, and they're like, hey, that's a thing. We should talk about it. And sort of just given where Twitter was in the memetic landscape, you meme the story into existence. I know it's actually a real story or real thing, right? And I always kind of bring up this example, because kind of a funny example, it's not very serious. But you can imagine much more serious versions of this in political discourse, So it's kind of trivial but also important. And so just why I think whenever we have algorithms, publishing how these algorithms work, publishing how these decisions work is super important.

So if nothing else, even if nobody buys into crypto protocol, if a big tech company was saying, hey, I want to publish this option public tomorrow. That's a good first step, right? Now, ultimately, and I mean, I work on crypto, so spoiler, what I think the right long-term path is to have this actually be decentralized. And I know there are kind of a lot of midpoints. I think things like Mastodon or other projects. are kind of a midpoint there. But, you know, I'm a, you know, crypto maximalist. And by the way, full

disclosure, we are investors in a company called Farcaster, who you had on the show. So I think crypto and doing things on chains the right answer. But I think there's a lot of steps intermediate which should help build up trust and legitimacy. I think one thing I would add to your three-point list, which I totally agree with, is some ability to exit the existing system. So if I could, like, if an algorithm or a client or say that a platform that I was locked into, say, a Twitter or something wasn't working for me. There's no ability for me to kind of leave with my social graph, with my followers, with kind of all of the work that I've invested inside of that platform. And it really does begin to feel like, oh, I'm just a surf working on somebody else's feudal land.

It's like I don't actually own any property here. And this is what crypto and I think digital property rights purports to help solve. And I think we'll talk more about that. We'll get to that story later. but I want to park on Twitter because you have some unique experiences around that and of course Twitter has has it ever not been in the news it's always been in the news in fact it's been in the news a little bit more than usual

Twitter is crazy right for folks who are somehow causing the hurricane every single day and the weird thing about working at Twitter is the most important people in the world yell at you but using your own product right? People hit it bankless

But they use your own show to hate you. They started creating podcasts on the bankless feed about how much they hate bankless. It's super weird. I remember like five years ago when Twitter launched the algorithm for the first time, which actually really saved the company, Lynn Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame, wrote a poem and made RIP Twitter trend all on Twitter, right? And there's a part of the first you're like, you know, there's good feedback and maybe not.

But I'm like, dude, like you're using your own platform. Like, come on here. So anyway, yes, you're always in that. So I want to get your take on then Twitter specifically because you're right. It not only is in the news, but it makes the news. It's like the meme layer, the narrative layer of like being on Twitter and seeing how this kind of works. I just feel like Twitter sort of starts the story and starts the narrative. And then the rest of media, it kind of picks it up. So it's almost at the base layer. It's like the layer zero of all of this. But what's your take on Twitter right now? So is Twitter broken? Do you think Elon is on a path to fix it? Is this going to require some sort of deeper revision? How does this? web 3 fit into all of this? And if it's broken, how? I just unloaded a whole bunch of questions on you. So like, pick that up wherever you'd like. But maybe the question of, is Twitter broken? And how do we fix it is what I'm asking. So first of all, let's get brass basic facts. Right. So I worked at Twitter for two years. I had like a bunch of product leadership type roles.

And I think what, you know, you're alluding to is about four months ago when Elon bought Twitter, not that he needs some help, but I was briefly involved, helping him, you know, I knew where the bodies were butted, and I kind of hung out at the office for a couple of weeks. By the way, I think people think it's because A6 and Z invested. That's not totally the case. It's actually because I just wanted to help Twitter. I've always been a fan of the product.

So that's number one. I think your point about layer zero is interesting because I always say Twitter is the memetic battleground. It is upstream of culture. One of the running jokes inside Twitter was Twitter can topple world governments but can't sell an ad. I think there's some true to it because, you know, if you can win the memetic war on Twitter,

by which I mean you... start off a conversation and have people discuss it, right? And what happens is where you start off a conversation, there are a lot of opinion makers, right? It could be journalists. It could be politicians. It could be athletes. It could be notable people like you. You know, all now latch on to it and you mean something into existence, which, by the way, folks in crypto kind of really understand the memetic landscape there. But I think it's true in pretty much every domain. And it is truly a battleground, right? There is bloodshed. People get like deeply hurt. And, you know, Which is why.

It hurts sometimes. Because the stakes are high. It hurts. Because the stakes are really high. Like, you know, for example, you know, I'm sure that I've been entire elections, which have been decided because of Twitter. And people often go, well, see, I'm, you need to get out more. But I say, listen, you know, what happens on Twitter sets the narrative.

And I go back to my story where I was like, this actor almost lost this movie within a few hours due to sort of a random confluence of people and algorithms, right? So there was actual real world impact. And that's why, like, foreign governments, and there have been a lot of interesting stories of trying to battle on Twitter to kind of control the memetic landscape. So it is a battleground and it is at the head of the landscape. So that's just Twitter. And it's a service I love.

I've been, it has given me so much personally. Forget the fact that I worked there. I met so many people. I think Ryan, I probably slid into your DMs like a year ago and you responded to me and you're kind enough. And I made so many acquaintances. I wouldn't have my job now if it'd rather than for Twitter. And I just want to see it do well. So I'm a fan.

Is Twitter broken? Absolutely not. And I'll tell you how all of us. including me, are probably spending as much time on Twitter as we used to. Anyone who said they're going to leave Twitter hasn't. They're probably still on Twitter. I'll just kind of like point that out there. And it is still the place that I see, you know, influencing the conversation.

Now, I think I'm also, you know, like this is not a little secret. I'm a fan of Elon. I think one of the things Elon doesn't credit for is in a very short period of time. He has done two things that a lot of other people in tech industry have followed. I'll give you two examples. Number one, right? he has pushed Twitter towards more transparency, right? And more, let's call it egalitarianism. He made Twitter verification, the blue check, which used to be sort of this opaque process.

And I'm sure all of us have, you know, DM'd a Twitter employee or an Instagram employee, be like, dude, like, I'm famous. Like, get me a blue check. And he said, it's everyone has to pay eight bucks. And when that first happened, there was a lot of uproar, right? There's a lot of people who are really unhappy with it. Because honestly, I think there are some legit criticisms, but also because they just didn't like Elon. But now, let's look at it last month. Meta just did the exact same thing on Instagram. Right? You know, so Elon, I think, shifted the overturn window on what is possible with verification,

which kind of was like an opaque process of like, hey, are you somehow notable as determined by the mainstream media? To be like, anybody can get it. It just meant to show that you are who you say you are. That's number one. The second one is doing more with less. Elon is the first person. Like, hey, let's go hardcore.

We need less engineers, et cetera. And he has a very certain style of how he does it. but then look at every news from every tech company in the last, I'd say, three, four months, everybody is trying to do more with less. Now, they may not do in the same style. They may not be doing it on Twitter, but they're all, I think he shifted the overturned window for people to follow. Now, are there challenges?

Yes, right? Like, I think, you know, I see them as much as this, but long term, you know, the guy lands rocket. So I'm a fan of, like, what he's doing Twitter. The future of Silicon Valley is like social media towers. We'll call him towers. One of the reasons why I was cautiously optimistic when Elon Musk bought Twitter is, more or less for the reasons that you just left us with. Like, the guy can land rockets. The guy's

a pretty smart guy. Maybe he's delving into a new part of the world that he doesn't really have the same skill set for, but he's still a problem solver. Simultaneously, we're exploring the frontier of Web3 social. And so I kind of few, there's three different things. There's Facebook, Instagram, the towers of old, if you will. Instagram is 13 years old. Facebook, I think, is almost 20 years old. Twitter is almost 20 years old. Twitter. And the reason why it's in a different categories because Elon Musk's just bought it. And so, you know, fresh eyes, fresh leadership, fresh philosophy. And then there's the Web 3 social media frontier, brand new innovators, brand new leaders, brand new founders with a brand new user base. And so

we have like three different categories of social media platforms. And one of the reasons I'm, again, cautiously optimistic about Twitter. It was kind of a disaster in the first few months after Elon bought it, but it's been on the uptrend ever since, is that like somebody with fresh eyes can come and re-architect an old archaic social media. platform, again, archaic, 15 years old, an old archaic social media platform into the modern age, at least by just injecting new energy with it, which is the same thing that Web3 is doing. Yes. And so, Sri Ram, I don't know how well you can feel comfortable trying to put yourself into the shoes of Elon Musk.

Those are very uniquely shaped shoes to fill. What, if he's trying to turn an old ship into a rocket ship with Twitter, what do you think he's trying to do? What is this new age of Twitter or new age of social media platforms if we're taking the old ones and trying to make them new again. What do you think he should do? A few thoughts. First of all, I can't speak for Elon, but one of the good things about Elon is he tweets and he says pretty much everything in public. So pretty much what you see is what you get with him. So a lot of this is very public. I think he's trying to do a few things, right? You know, one, you know, he's trying to, you know,

ship stuff again. Twitter was a company, which we can get rid for a lot of reasons, wasn't shipping product. And, you know, one thing you have to get to Elon is he's shipped a bunch of features. Maybe, you know, you can agree, disagree of how good they are or where they work, but he's got some stuff out of the door and he's just trying to get product momentum going. And some of these are new, right? Like, you know, and some of these shift to the over-term window, like I said, the verification feature, the 4U tab, etc. And again, you may not agree with them, but they are new. I think second part is he's trying to build a stable business out of it. And one that is just not totally supported by ads. So if you look at, say, I can forget the official term for it, but the

LO badges for companies or the way API access work, he's just trying to, you know, make sure Twitter captures the value. That's not. on one side. The other side is I think he's trying to make Twitter more open. And this has nothing to it being just a good business, but I think he believes in the way it should be run, which is that's why the Twitter files happen. That's why, you know, he's said that he's going to open source the algorithms that run Twitter. And that, I think, really pushes into some the discussions on Web 3, which I want to kind of get a little bit. So one of the most maybe underappreciated things about Elon and Twitter is for the last two years, if somebody

complained about censorship and big tech, you generally assume they were on the right, right? Like, pre-Elon and Twitter, right? And there was kind of this whole cluster of apps. I think Parlor was one. There's a bunch of others, you know, which is all of the idea like, hey, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have no place for us. And we want to get, let's just call it, like, maybe right-leaning folks out there.

One thing I saw Elon Twitter is a lot of people on the left are now like, hey, we don't like centralized controls either. So that is now like bipartisan agreement that maybe we don't want one set of people to run things. said, I just find it like very amusing. And one of the profound things about Web3 and decentralized social is, which I hope people realize is like, you don't have to like the guy running it. And, you know, there is nothing about Ethereum where you have to like Vitalik personally or what he says or what he stands for because the legitimacy of Etrium

comes from what is approvable. So one of the things I hope people take away from this move to decentralization is a world where you know what your rights are and they are provable. And it's not about whether the people running it agree with your point of view or not, which I think sounds like a profound shift. But I do want to point out like the bipartisan thing is kind of amusing. Now, what has happened, I think post-Elon is people want less centralized control. But I would say it's been a Cambrian explosion of people trying out different ideas, which I love, by the way. I'm a technologist at heart. Like I'm a VC, but I'm really a nerd. So I'm all in favor of like people trying out different things and writing code and building stuff. That's great.

more of it, right? So I think one class of people, one, you know, set of people are like, mastered on, for example, has gotten, you know, a lot of usage or, you know, a lot of, like, you know, attention over the last few months, which, you know, I like, I think, you know, I'm obviously a crypto maximalist and, you know, but I just like that if people are getting used to, hey, maybe, you know, I don't want one centralized set of people making all my decisions. I want to control my own destiny and maybe the group around me should set my own policy. So that's one. There are others, for example, like, you know, Jack Darcy has been talking about Noster quite a bit.

I haven't played with it, but that's the thing. But on the more like kind of blockchain decentralized side, there have been lots of projects, right? Like there's Lens led by Stani. And then the one which I'm just full disclosure, the one I'm probably most familiar with because we invested is Dan Romero's forecaster, which I actually think is, you know,

I'm biased, but it's kind of the right long-term reason. But honestly, I'm just happy that people are kind of like going down this path because I think if you go down this idea maze, eventually you land at crypto. So I'm just kind of happy they're kind of being nudged down this maze. Can you give folks like a quick tour of the maze of what's happening in Web3 social? I mean, we can loop this back to Twitter a little bit later. But I'm just, you mentioned some different, I would call these like decentralized social media types of projects.

Macedon is one, Jack Dorsey's project. And I can't recall the name of the top of my head, but you can give us that. And then also something like a lens or a farcaster, walk us through these. What are the most interesting projects? what angle is each of them taking on it? And why haven't they hit critical mass yet? They haven't really taken off, even though they're sort of in this maybe early phases

and some people listening will have heard of them. Just give us a tour here. Good question. So I think they all have some elements in common, right? Which is, you know, they're all kind of a reaction to, hey, we don't want one set of people making all the decisions for an entire billion-plus people network, right? And one set of people could be Elon, could be the CCP, could be Zuckerberg.

It really doesn't matter. I just don't want one set of people. I want to control my own destiny. Sri Ram, what are those decisions too? It's like moderation, like content moderation decisions or what other types of decisions are social media centralized controllers making? Good question. Let's start with the basics.

You call it digital property rights, right? Like, can you create an account? Can you keep your account? And Vitalik had a good phrase. I'm stealing this from him. Who can betray you? Right? Like, you know, who can have an agenda against you and betray you, which I thought was like a profound way of putting it. So that's the basics, right? Like, you know, today if, you know,

the new YouTube CEO, Neil Mohan, who's an amazing, wonderful human being, I generally mean that. If he really decides he doesn't like you, he can probably get bankless removed of YouTube, right? So that is just basic power, right? And we can call it rock pulling if you want. Then on top of that, I think there is, you know, control over what can be said and not said. one upside on the downside. So on the downside, I would say things like, are you going to get, a coin gets suspended for saying something, right? And some of these are obviously bad things. Like if I say, like, hey, I'm going to come to your house and do some terrible thing to you, I should obviously get suspended. Sometimes it gets much diced here. Like if I say, hey, you know,

this is where I think the COVID virus came from. There was a period time and everything got suspended. So that's no downside where people get suspended. The more insidious ones are, which I think is in the broad category of content moderation, like controlling what people can't say. The more tricky one is what gets amplified, right? Like, which is, you know, like, for example, something that shows up in YouTube trending or Twitter trending or TikTok has a version of that, inject something into the memes where everyone reacts to it. They create reaction videos. It becomes a thing. People write press about it.

You can subtly change who gets more amplification and less amplification, right? And it's very much a gray area. So those kinds of decisions are also run by a central team. By the way, all these are usually done by smart people with very noble intention. But these are the kind of decisions that a centralized company, it does every single day. Like this is happening every single day at Facebook, at Google, at TikTok. It's just the nature of the beast. And when you kind of push into decent-like social, I think every one of these elements, there's a level of democratization which comes in, which is instead of a centralized set of people in San Francisco, maybe there are others.

Maybe it is you, the individual, or some set of people that you're trusting or delegating legitimacy to has control over these decisions. So let's set aside crypto for a second. And if you look at MasterDon, the way it works is you sign up for a server, and the server admin kind of has power over who gets to create an account, who can say things or not say things, and they run the server. And then there is a protocol by which different servers can talk to each other, right? So in some ways, this is kind of like one step from, say, the Facebook or Twitter, because the server owners really control what can be said, can't be said.

So, you know, that is the answer to the MasterDone CEO deciding things. for example, it can be the server owners, right? And I think there's a lot of good things here. And, you know, look, I'm a fan of people crying things. But I think, like, you know, a couple of challenges which arise are, you can still get drug pulled by the server owners at some point in time. There is really no incentive for the server owners to talk to each other. One of them could just become large and, you know, become a great product by themselves,

but if they do, more power to them. But that kind of goes against the spirit of decentralization. And the way I understand it, like, you really can't take your username with you. Like, if your server kicks you out, you're gone from MasterDon. It doesn't solve your, hey, can I take my graph and go keep it with me as a sovereign entity everywhere, right? So it does have some issues, but you know what? Like, I'm a fan of people trying things because you get some elements and you're asking right questions. And so that's MasterDon.

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onboarded into the world of Web3. And who are the server owners in Mastodon? Can anyone sort of spin up a server? Is it at least a permissionless to become a server in Mastod? Yeah, anybody can spin up a server. It's like a kind of like lampstack thing that anybody can. can run. And I believe there are a few which are really popular. Like the Master's company itself runs a really popular one. Some people have famously tried to run servers and had bad experiences. Like for example, the financial times tried it on a server and they had, I think, like a, some bunch of bad behavior and they spun it down. Server owners can also decide, you know, which servers can talk to each other. Like, and they're, hey, I don't want people from this

server because I don't like them or whatever. And you can kind of like figure out like how somebody federates. But the sovereignty of MasterDon usually lies in the realm of the server owners, which I think is kind of an interesting point to make. Now, I would contrast this with, let's take Farcaster, right, because that's the example, which I think I'm more familiar with. In Farcester, first of all, I just want to put out of this disclaimer one more time. I'm an investor in Farcaster, so I am conflicted. But the way it works is your username on Farcester belongs to you, right? It's kind of a sovereign thing. It's, you know, an NFT on chain. So it belongs to you. Like, you know, Dan Romero, you know, if you really hates you, like, can't really take it away.

the primitives of Farcaster. It's like the basic bare bones thing. Like, this is where Farkaster starts. You get an NFT. That is your username. And then the rest of Farkaster grows from there. Absolutely. Right. It's kind of like really the first step. It's not a main net yet, but it will be. And, you know, but that's really the thing. And once it's yours, it's yours, right? Like, and all of the properties of Ethereum, et cetera, right, make sure that nobody can take it away from you, you know, unless you lose your wallet or some such thing. So that's, that just kind of the basic fact. So that kind of solves the, you know, like, you know, if I piss off Neil Mohan or Elon Musk, like, if you piss off Dan, he really can't do anything to you. So that's number

one. The second part of it is the one way I think I think about it is how much choice do you have an innovation, right? Like right now there's a whole ecosystem. And they all, by the way, super early because Farcaster is still invite only. You ping Dan, you get some invites, etc. And I highly recommend people go try it out. But anybody can go build an app on top of Farcaster. And a lot of other interesting clients, which now exists. And they can do anything they want, right? Like, you know, some try to change a forecaster experience. Some try and do, you know, stories on forecaster. Others try and change up the algorithm. I don't think about how profound that is. Like, imagine you could say, the TikTok CEO last week,

imagine if that's the world, he said, listen, I know that you folks don't trust that the CCP doesn't influence me. But guess what? You can use this alternative TikTok client, which has his own algorithm, which has its like own set of content moderation. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Imagine a world where he could have said that, right? So that exists from, you know, day zero on Forecaster by all the properties of ETH, which we can sort of know it out on, obviously, but the bankless folks probably know it super well. But that exists from day zero. And so the lot of things around content moderation, a lot of things around control, now happens at the app level. So forecast is the protocol. It has an app. It's called Warpcast. So the way to think about it is your mail.com on your phone or Safari on your phone talking to email protocol, or or talking to HTTP. So HTTP, in this case, would be forecaster, your browser, Safari, Chrome, etc. would be workcast. Now, that's just one of many. And I think, like, you know, if you talk to the team, they would love to see many, many of these out there. And, you know, the thing is, like, every one of these clients can pick the rules of engagement. So one client can be like,

hey, you know what? We only want to talk crypto here. Anybody doesn't talk crypto? We kick you out. One can be around political lines. It could be around communities. You can be around countries. You can imagine various kinds of bonding boxes. But you always have a chance. choice, right? Because you can always go somewhere else and you will never lose like your graph. No, there is such a profound thing where if say like two years ago when, you know, any one of these social media CEOs were testifying, they could say, you know what, I know you don't like my client. That's an alternative client which has the political leanings that you want in the algorithm. Go use that, right? And go have fun with it. So that is, I think, one of the

profound things about parkastery, which is one, the upside, the innovation, people building cool new things in a way that is literally not possible today on social media. And then the downside, which is, you know, if Dan gets replaced by an evil twin who really, he really hates you, doesn't matter. You know, they can't really, you know, hurt you. And that FARCaster models is similar to Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky and also Lens, they sort of work in a similar way. Is that right? I'm a little less familiar with Blue Sky, and I haven't played with it too much. I think I've spent a little bit more time on Noster, which I also think is from Jack Dorsey. I'm not terribly sure how they all work together yet. But they do have similar

elements. I think the big difference, I would say, between, and Lens, by the way, is also like, you know, money, you know, works on it. It's another decent, like, social product. For me, I want to just see people building more of these. Lens is on the crypto side of things, right? Lens works on polygon. It works on chain. And so it is much closer to the Farkaster world. One difference between Lens and Farkaster is, Farkaster wants to build a reference client, like, off the get-go, which is kind of like, you know, they want people, you know, so you kind of know how the product looks like. But Lens is still very much the crypto side of the world. Noster, you know, from my understanding, And by the way, I'm very familiar with the crypto side of things, less to the non-crypto side of things.

Noster doesn't use a blockchain at all, which, you know, I don't want, well, we can go into like, white jack things that way, but, you know, I- That's why Bitcoiners love it. Yeah, well, you said it. I do think, like, you know, if you go down the intellectual maze of how do you get legitimacy, provable decentralization, you know, all the good things that we take for granted, you will wind up somewhere with ETH or somewhere with the blockchain and not trying to recreate a bunch of that. Like, for example,

like, how do you rotate your public key? How do you make sure, like, every server has all copies of data? How do you have sovereign rights? Like, these are all things that I've kind of been solved with things like E&S and ETH and NFTs and so on. And anyway, but again, I'm a fan of people trying out

different things in decentralization. Let me ask you this, though. So this is the challenge I think these Web3 decentralized social products have, which is how do you build network effects? There's part of me that wonders if the centralization of the algorithm and the centralized nature of the platform itself makes a social network more conducive to building network effects.

And so right now, I think mainstream probably sees the projects that you listed. And they're like, ah, these are just, you know, sideshow projects. They're just a small niche to ensure some, you know, crypto, early adopters are on them. But like, we're never going to get mainstream appeal. They're kind of too small. is there some way we can beat the network effect that these Web 2 social media juggernauts have and actually supercharge Web 3? Because my worry is, or the failure mode, is we build all of these great protocols that are decentralized and people can take their social graph wherever and they

have digital property rights and all the things we care about. And we're the only people who actually care, Sri Ram. Do people value this enough? And can we overcome these network effects? So there's a bunch of great questions in there. First of all, I think there's an underlying question which I think you asked, which is it would be a failure if we only get people who think they're going to get deplatformed, right? They're not enough human beings in the world who care about that to build an alternative social media company, right? That's just number one. If we only get the extremes, only the margins come to crypto social networks. Well, if that always stays the case, we would have failed.

Yeah. Because that would be a very small set of people. And also, those people also sometimes really want the big audiences, the mainstream platforms have. That's just number one. That'd be a failure case. I think the other failure case is I don't think we can nerdsnipe people. Like, you know, tens of millions of people who are going to hopefully use these products will never listen to this podcast. They will never care about the things I say and they shouldn't. But that's going to be the cascassies. And so the way I think we win is a couple of ways. So I think all social networks win in one of two ways. One is, you know, I'm going to steal this from Eugene Way's status as a service, which I think is the best ever blog post written.

on social media companies. Please link to it in the show notes, etc. It's one of the best things I've written. I'm very jealous that he wrote it and not me. But all social media companies grow in one of two ways. One is you get high status people

who have been underserved by an existing platform and you get them to a new place and they start building a small network there. So I've seen this at three different companies, right? When I was at Snapchat, the high status people were high school kids in L.A. who were cool

and people wanted to hang out with them, they came to Snap. When they came to Snap, other people wanted to be where they were. They didn't want to be where the old people were, which was Facebook. And then the advertisers wanted them. And when I was a snap, by the way, we deliberately tried to build it so it was confusing for old people. Right?

I'll give you a story. Oh, my God. Are you serious? Oh, yeah, totally. Like, make it confusing for patterns in explicit design. I'll give you a story. You know the original Snapchat lens, face filters, right? Yeah.

So if you look at it, there was no tutorial on the screen. There was nothing which taught you how to use it. Which seemed kind of weird as a prodigion because nobody had ever built that before. Why was it? Well, you know, number one, if nobody thought it, old people couldn't figure it, and old people being anybody over the age of 25, and number two is the best way you learned how to use a lens was somebody in your class, maybe somebody good looking, you had a crush on, showed it to you in person and all of a sudden you had a bonding moment.

You're like, oh, I know learned this in person and it means something to me. As opposed to, here's a 10-part tutorial on how to use this feature, right? And the other thing that Lens did, by the which is very cool, was it gave you a social license to post a selfie. Like before that, if you post a selfie, you just kind of consider it a little weird. You did MySpace duckface. But with lens, you're like, I'm just posting a lens for her and just accidentally makes me look good, right? And it gave us, so you kind of craft a lot of these things. But it was really meant to get, you know, high status people, right?

And high start in a particular way, using the product and then everything else happens, right? TikTok did the same thing. So one of the interesting patterns you will see is like every platform has a star who emerges. But the stars are always new and homegrown and they're not the same from one platform to the other. So for example, on Snapchat, it was Kylie Jenner, right, who first broke out. On Instagram, it was The Rock and Kendall Jenner, who were not on Facebook, by the way. But even again, TikTok, it was Charlie DeMelio. So why is that, right?

There are a few reasons. Number one, and Eugene Way has a great way of saying this, right? When the Europeans, you know, the pioneers came to the East Coast of the United States, it's not the rich Europeans, it's not the folks living in fancy houses. They only had good stuff over there. You know, the people are kind of like struggling and they didn't have like much. They wanted to get out here to the new world, right? So it's always an underserved high status person.

So with TikTok came on, what did do really well? It was like, well, musically, but then TikTok, it was like, if you had dancing skills and if you were funny, that was a great format for you, right? So Charlie DeMelier, amazing skills, amazing talent, relatable, but couldn't create the perfectly manufactured Instagram photo, but TikTok was fantastic, right? TikTok also did something really profound, which I think is underappreciated, where because it didn't use the follow graph, it removed a genie coefficient problem for every network. Every network you have to follow somebody and somebody gets really rich and, you know, it's really hard to, you know, get other people to be rich.

TikTok says, we will decide who gets rich and anybody can become rich on any single day. So it really kind of like act as UBI plus removing the genie coefficient. So anyway, so there's kind of this pattern across all the platforms. Sorry, sorry for kind of nerding out for a few minutes there. Now, this is awesome. So if you believe this pattern, which I really do, by the way, I'm sort of a product of the clubhouse era, by the way, where I kind of, my podcast became famous because of clubhouse. So for forecasts, or anyone's social networks to succeed, they need cool people. And we can define cool names. number of ways. It can be the folks you hang out on Slate Star Codex and less wrong. It can be folks for popular and culture, but probably the former. It's probably defined by every single protocol. Every single platform has its own definition of what cool is. Yes, very much and it should, right? Like, you know, so for example, if you hang out on Forecaster today, it's a lot of crypto people, but crypto people also really smart. And, you know, it's a lot of very

intellectually dense conversations. And my hope, and I think Dan's hope is that that brings in more people who want to be a part of it. Just like if you look at, say, something like Substac, which is centralized platform, but When Substract gets these kind of like these stars, right, like the bari vices or the no opinions, other people want to be where the stars are. And you get like, you know, like high status people pull different people. But I want to be very clear. High status can be anything, right? It can be LeBron James.

It can be a cool artist. It can be amazingly smart person. You can different numbers. But you need high status people first. So that's number one. That's how a lot of social networks grow, right? The second part of it, I think the ideal magic for social network is you capture high status people. and a format that makes sense for them.

So Charlie DiMello, who was an amazing dancer, and it's just amazingly relatable, you know, a girl next door, right? Like, wouldn't be great on substact. I mean, she might be, but I don't think, you know, like, if you look at her, she's so good on, like, TikTok. So she had a format which really worked for her, which I think the second part of the protocol is, like, can somebody build an app experience, right?

Maybe it's video, maybe it's live streaming, maybe it's written text. Maybe it's something that I can't even imagine right now. Hopefully that's probably the best case, which then unlocks the... talent of this high status people in a way that nobody has seen before, right? So you need both, but if you get this, right? And I think, you know, you're off to the races. And I think you can destroy the network effect of any centralized social media company. This is so awesome. And I think

one of the reasons why I love this conversation the most is that the internet, all the phases of the internet, web one, web two, web three is all about facilitating human relationships, human connections. Like, the internet didn't take off until we had social reasons to be on it. And I think the kernel of insight that I think we just got from you is that every single social media platform that's arisen has unlocked some sort of expression and perhaps allowed for that unlock that new form of self-expression to come from a new crop of people who have different and diverse skill sets from the other platforms that already exist. And so I think the learning lesson for the bankless nation to really just take note of is that Farcaster, Macedon, Lens Protocol,

these are all new protocols to express ourselves and they're going to, in this, certain new types of people who maybe Instagram wasn't for you, maybe Snapchat wasn't for you, but maybe Farcaster does unlock a certain behavior set, a certain way of expressing yourself that the Farcaster community really enjoys. And you, bankless listener, could be the first ever Farcaster influencer if that is for you. Or maybe it's lens. Or maybe it's, you know, insert your Web 3 social media protocol here. I think one of the reasons why so many of us are in this space, why I came to this space, why Ryan came to the space, is that we saw such a fertile ground for growth. It was easy to inject yourself into here and to build something new

and to tap into that world. And I think that is probably what we're saying with this world of Web3 social. So I think the big takeaway that I think everyone should have is that maybe try out some of these Web3 protocols and see if your seeds can grow in this fertile ground. Maybe you are the first farcaster superstar. I'm sure there's people already competing in this field. But I think that's really just the actionable insight, the alpha here is that for Web3 social media developers, you need a superstar, a homegrown superstar. That is your KPI. And then also for the people out there, the users of these apps, the way to get ahead in this world is that these social media apps, these brand new ones are fertile and easy to penetrate and there's not much competition

there. And maybe you're the one that this brand new protocol, this brand new decentralized social media platform, maybe you really resonate with that. Sir ReWam, do you have any just any thoughts and reflections on this? somebody a lot better than I could. So plus one to everything

you've said. I think there are two layers, right? One is you become a superstar. But I think the other profound thing

is you can do something on this thing which you can't do on a centralized social, which is you can build the app that produces superstars. You can't do that

on TikTok. You can't do that on Facebook, right? You can't be like, hey, you know what? I have an idea for Instagram which is going to create a new

experience. You just can't do that. So if you're a developer writing code, like, you know, you don't need to call up anybody for ambition,

Just go to any one of these sites, look at the developer docs, spin up VS code, write something, right? And then maybe you can be the superstar manufacturing factory, which I think is super interesting too. And that is something which is completely not possible in centralized web to today. Yeah, I really want to double down on that because the thing that really got my juices going when we interviewed Dan Romero from Farcaster is the idea that Farcaster is the protocol and it's up to the world to build clients upon it. And so that was something that Twitter almost was in the early days of Twitter. it almost was like that. And then early in this conversation, we talked about how all these Web2 apps

were open town squares and slowly they closed their walls into centralized towers. Now we have protocols that are town squares that because in their nature they will stay town squares. And I think what you're saying, free ROM is that developers can come build

more reasons to be in the town square. And so we could actually turn this into a Cambrian explosion of like, all right, Farcaster and this one client can create this one flavor of superstars. But developers can come and create infinite number of superstars, infinite flavors of reasons to being on

Farkaster that grow different kinds of superstars because the room for clients on Farkaster, where in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, there's only one client for each one of those protocols. But with Farkaster, there can be hundreds or thousands of clients. Absolutely. Let me give somebody

like kind of an idea right off the get-go. It's maybe a trivial idea, right? So every social media company right now has a large machine learning team and they put a lot of work into ranking. It's a very complex technical thing, a lot of effort, lots of complexity. But what has overtaken the world of ranking

and machine learning in the last few months is GPT, right? So, you know, an idea for just somebody out there, go out, you know, and go build a forecaster client and then replace all things ranking and trending by just piping into GPT and saying, hey, these are kind of things which I like, give me more stuff which I like, see what happens, right? So just the fact that, you know, I'm pretty sure,

and by the you can probably ask GPT to kind of write the code for you to do a lot, of this, I actually think, so you can actually speed it up. So the fact that you can probably try one of these things and change the way forecasters, what, well, warpcast algorithm works or do your own thing. That's super profound. So I really want to encourage people to go build things and, you know, try out things because I really want to fire up people's imagination and go ask questions of like, why can't I do that on Instagram? Like, why can't I change the trending algorithm on TikTok? Like, as opposed to going back to my story of how this actor lost

this movie. Like imagine you had like five different apps and you go, well, you know, I have a different algorithm here, which is actually the trending algorithm that I want to see. So, which also, by the way, kind of a good way to bring together crypto and AI, which I think is always fun. Yeah, I do kind of wonder who the cool kids of some Farcaster or Web3 protocol are going to be. Like, I guess part of my theory is that's probably going to come from something in crypto. Like maybe the closest candidate is probably like the NFT creator type community. Because, you know, anything built on top of a Web3 stack is going to enshrine digital property rights and NFTs. And you can already see kind of the creator communities, Web3 creator communities blossoming in things like lens and things

like Farcaster. And they're going to be like specially attuned for that. So I wonder if it's going to come from the NFT community, right? We saw glimmers of that sort of NFTs reaching like cool kid status in 2020, the first part of 2022, let's say, before everything kind of crashed down completely. but like this isn't the end of NFTs, certainly. It's not the end of the story. I wonder if that's where it emerges. Do you have any thoughts in where the cool kids might come from, Shriam? It could be. I think, you know, if you look at Farkaster today, a lot of like intellectually dense conversations, they're all, you know, very affiliated to crypto, obviously, just because those kinds of people are originally in it. One of the interesting things I'll find out is the cool kids

change. So I'm not sure, like, who do you think of for an example right now as the top people on Twitter, the last few years? Just give me a few names. I'm inside of the crypto bubble. So my top people on Twitter are all crypto people. I'm not sure. It's definitely Elon Musk with the obviously top of every list. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, he bought the thing. Well, there's Elon. You know, back when Trump was on, some people would say Trump, you know, Kanye, you know,

a lot of sports stars. But if you go back a few years before that, there was a time and I'm really dating myself here. One of Twitter's breakout moments was when Ashton Coucher and CNN had a race to get to a million followers, right? I remember this. Yeah. There's a bunch of people in bank listening, like, what if is you talking about? Other people going like, God, I feel so old. But that was a thing.

That was the real thing. The first one, I don't remember this at all. God, I hate you. But that was a real thing. It was raised to a million followers, right? And it was Anderson Cooper for CNN versus Ashton Coucher. They were the stars of Twitter. And they were active participants.

This wasn't people watching them. They actually were playing the game, right? Oh, yeah. They wanted to get to the first million followers, which seems like a crazy low number now, like given, you know, what he's on Twitter or on Mr. Beast or so on. But that was a game. But if you go back, even before. that, the original set of people on Twitter were all people in San Francisco, right?

It was all the tech people, right? So one of the interesting things about these networks is that it constantly keeps changing, which actually thinks actually kind of healthy. One of the Twitter's failures, I think, is failure to elevate new stars. Because once, I'm going to sidetrack. Twitter's biggest sin in a lot of ways, I think, was a follow graph. Because once you have a follow graph, you have a lot of interesting people on Twitter, but the only way to get them discovered is you have to get other people to follow them.

So you always being like, hey, please follow this person. and he's really good for you, he or she, just trust me. And so you kind of had these people who had a million plus followers, and they got locked in. So they were like the genie coefficient, the wealth inequality of Twitter started like expanding more and more. So a lot of product efforts on Twitter always like, please follow this person,

and we really wanted to follow this person, right? And I think if Twitter had figured out, which I think hopefully we'll see with the 4U tab, to constantly bring in new stars, because one, you're bringing new talent toward, you have a frustrating to say. Second, you're keeping the older folks on their toes. You're like, hey, listen, you're not going to get the reach

because if you're not participating, you're gone, right? Like, one of my ideas for Twitter when I was there was like, people should not show the number of followers at all, and you should just show their account, and we should start showing people all to your follow their photographs. So I think every healthy social network constantly needs to bring in, elevate new people and new talent to stay fresh. And so my hope is who is the start of Farcaster today

is different from the forecaster two years from now and five years from now, and there's a bunch of apps which all have their own stars. Maybe there's an Indian Forecaster client, which only has like, you know, Tamil and Hindi and Telugu, ecosystem people, one for every country. You can just kind of really go run wild with this. Let me ask you round-tripping on Elon then. So we've just extolled the virtues of Web3 social and decentralization.

Part of me was hoping, like a small part of me was hoping because it was a faint hope that Elon would come into Twitter and he would be like, Web 3 and crypto. You know, like we know he tracks crypto, maybe not sort of in depth, not the level that we do, of course. but he knows a thing or two about crypto. He's certainly on the Doge train. So part of my hope was that he would start to incorporate more Web3 features into Twitter,

whether it's sort of, you know, decentralized identity of some sort or property rights, other things. What would it take to Cryptopil, Elon, and get him to not necessarily pivot the entire company of Twitter towards decentralized social media, but at least start to incorporate some of these features? Well, I don't want to speak for him or reveal private conversations. I definitely tried. And as you can imagine, I would say a few things, right? Like, I think Elon has his hands full of Twitter of just making the basics work right now, right? Let's build a product.

Everyone uses. Let's build a thriving business. So I would say, you know, what the broad crypto community would need to, not do just for Elon, right? This can be for Adam Mosserite Instagram. This can be for Zuckerberg. This can be for Neil Mohan. Look at me literally anybody is to convince them how crypto brings value. to them. And I think it's often a challenge where if you say like, hey, your service is messed up

and we need to have people just leave to a competitor that often becomes challenging. I think the challenge for the crypto world is how do you make an argument that says like this is going to benefit you, this is going to bring in features, make your community happy in ways that they're not happy today, right? I think that's going to be the thing. I know Elon's a fan of some elements of crypto, maybe not a fan of other elements. I let him kind of speak about that himself. But I think that's the value prop. I would say you had to paint a value proposition, not just for him, but for any CEO, right? Like what is in it for you to crypto enable your services?

I think that's the challenge for all of us. I felt like we were making some headway in Web2 for a while there, where we started to see Web2 companies, established social media companies, start to integrate Web3 features. And then more recently, I think after 2022, really, we've seen a pullback of that. So, meta, for example, Instagram. I remember what did this launch last year in 2022 over the spring or summer. I was so excited to see Instagram start to add some NFT features into their product. And this felt like, oh, this is a huge mainstream moment for crypto.

This is going to be huge. And then more recently, it was like two weeks ago, Sri Rom. They decided to, you know, remove that feature. Sunset it, yeah. Not even a year later. Not even a year later. So definitely not staying in the game for the marathon, but there seems to be something in the air with Web 2 where they've started to pull away

from Web 3. I'm wondering if you think that will be reversed or if that's just the way it's going to be for a while and we'll just have to, on the Web 3 social side, kind of build the proof here. And as you just said, paint the value proposition for Web 2 before they get onboarded again. Yeah, it's definitely frustrating. I will say one thing. There's a great Steve Jobs line from the mid-90s, I think, when Steve Jobs had just come back. And he told the Mac community, Microsoft doesn't have to lose for Apple to win. That's kind of a great video of him saying this somewhere. So I don't think Web2 has to disappear or lose. And I think Dan Romero is always very good about this. He was like, Web2 is great, brought a lot of great things. Like my career wouldn't

exist without Twitter. Like, you know, I was very happy at Facebook. A lot of great smart people. Like, it doesn't have to lose for crypto to win. So it's not like, you know, like us versus them thing. I think what has happened, like, and I've sort of tried towards some people to go the other way and maybe unsuccessfully so at times is there's a confidence of few things, right? Number one is there's a broad market pullback, which I think is like no secret. Like every large tech company is having layoffs. They are like, let's just focus on what is actually hardcore to what we do. So that's just like a factor. Like they're like, if you kind of stack rank things and you're like, hey, we need to do this thing, which is existential, which makes money for the company and we go compete on viewers,

like this is thing and everything else. Let's kind of cut it or lay off those people. Sometimes crypto, I think, winds up on the chopping block. So I think that's definitely a factor. Another factor, I think, is the market pullback, just obviously. So because the market pullback means maybe sometimes perceived less interest inside these companies. And then they're like when they're trying to stack rank features, this thing on the wines are chopping back. I would say there might be a deeper question, which I hope is not true, which is crypto at its very nature needs people to hand over power. Right. Like you can't make decisions in a centralized conference room.

You need to let the community make the decision. And there is a part of me which wonders whether that is maybe a bridge too far for some companies to embrace. I sincerely hope that's not the case. I've seen rumors, for example, of meta launching a decentralized thing. I don't know. I haven't seen the details yet. And there are other rumors. But there may be a world where it may be a step too far.

And you may need to be decentralized from day zero to really, really buy in. I really don't think that's it. Hope this is not the case. I've talked to a lot of very smart people in these companies who have much more practical issues. practical issues like, hey, we want to build this thing, but gas fees are too high, right? Like, I want speed, I want performance, I want security. It's just the basics. And I think we as a crypto community, we're like, hey, they just want the basics, right?

They want somebody just understand it, not spend like, you know, 20, 30 bucks for a transaction, just the basic. They often want that. A second is, you know, they want access to large community of people. So there's a lot in there. I wouldn't attribute, you know, negative motivation, like malnoticed, some sort of terrible motivations to them. And I sincerely just hope it's not, you know, they come back to crypto. Sri Ram, one thing I want to ask you about is just the future of creators in the social media platforms. And you are a GP to A16C crypto, which has got to be one of the most busy jobs

in the world, yet you still find yourself doing a podcast, which begs the question, what about the podcast is so valuable to you that you take time out of your very busy life to actually be a creator in this world of social platforms? And I think this conversation will eventually bleed into the conversation of how AI can help creators, but I want to hear from you first. And again, very busy job. You still find the motivation and the desire to be a creator. So what's the future for creators in this crazy world of the internet in 2023? And why do you do it?

First of well, thank you. I often tell people that the job of a founder is 100x more busy than the job of a VC. But thank you for saying that. I think there's a few things. And folks, listen, can I plug my show? Like, you know, my wife and I do a podcast, you know, it's on YouTube, everywhere you can listen to a podcast. There's a few reasons. There'll be a link in the show notes.

Oh, thank you, thank you. Smash, like, subscribe, you know, ping everything, you know, do all the things. But all those web teams. We're also on podcasts with no audio on podcasts. I can subscribe. That's probably a web three thing too. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Giving somebody your attention is definitely a universal notion, I think. So there's a few reasons. One is, it's very personal. Like, I wouldn't genuinely be here if I didn't have access to the open internet. And my wife and I, you know, we met on Yahoo Messenger 21 years ago, right, to build a website. We've been together for 21 years since that evening we met, actually. So our lives have been tied to tech optimism and positivity. And we have been very dismayed personally about the rhetoric against tech, right, and founders and entrepreneurship by a lot of different parties.

And this is in our way, you know, a way of giving back where we are like, hey, can we, you know, if you listen to our episodes, it's just a way where we highlight. people have just kind of made it from the outside of tech to the inside. Often tech, sometimes it's not tech. But it's like, you know, and we want to like, and hopefully some kid somewhere is watching and he goes like, oh, you know, I'm like that person when they start off. Maybe I can go open my laptop and do something cool. That's the ideal scenario. So there's kind of an altruistic thing of just kind of giving back.

And I do think like if you want to do these podcasts because it's long term, it has to come from something ideological, right? It can't be like, I just want to do it for the views. Like you'll just burn out like over time. And, you know, and people can sense it. By the way, your viewers are not dumb. Now, the non-altruistic view is if that kid at some point in time builds an amazing company, they think, hey, maybe I can go ask a weird Indian guy who I saw on a podcast for some money, right?

And they built something amazing. That's great. But it doesn't happen. That's also fine. I would say that the other version I think about it is in the memetic battleground that we find ourselves today in, having an online army, which I think is Balaji's phrase, he does have an army. Like, you know, ours are more like people who kind of maybe like us and find us nice. but having an online army and a following bankless nation is one of the most important things you can have

because there are so many forces that are coming at us like forces in government forces in the press and the ability to have a message and get it out there and battle it out on Twitter or on YouTube is super super important now everyone has their own way of doing it balaji does this one million dollar bet you know which is a whole other thing but i think our way is to spread positivity and optimism and yeah so that's why we do it And do you think that the Web 3 technology really supercharge a creator's ability to harness and leverage that army? Oh yeah, so this is great.

So I have a fun story, which is, you know, Vin Diesel was one of the most hated people at Facebook. And the reason... Vin Diesel? Yes. The actor? Yes. And I don't think the story has been told before in public.

Maybe it'll get in trouble. Maybe not. I don't know. So the story around this is, you know, about 10 years ago, Vin Diesel was super popular, had a super popular Facebook page. And he had like millions of followers,

etc. Right? I don't know whether celebrities will have, like, large base, where does this thing. And Zuckerberg was a huge personal fan of Vin Diesel. Exactly, very well documented. He actually, there's a story how Vin Diesel made Triplex 2 just because Mark actually asked him to do so, right? He was actually a very big fan. But at the time, you know, the way the social contract of Facebook or any social media company worked was you bring in,

you bring in as a creator, which is not even a word at the time, influencer is not a word, you bring in your energy, your creativity, you post content. And the trade was that we will give you eyeballs. We will give you views. We'll give you attention. There's no money involved. And the connection to a wind diesel was that every time there'd be an internal discussion about like, hey, can we start paying people? The rebuttal would be like, well, then Vin Diesel would ask us for money and we don't want that. He's doing it for free. But that was kind of the social contract of the internet for several years. But a few years ago, and this has nothing to do with Web3, that contract shifted, right? I think of companies like Cameo, where you're like, hey, you know

what? I want to kind of like make a living with my product, but also just the rise of influencers and creators. You know, I think like the original YouTube folks like PewDiePie, etc. Then to, you know, the Paul brothers to now like obviously Mr. Bees, people are building these entire companies and, you know, and they're making a living, you know, online. So now the contract of eyeballs and kind of sneak an ad for, you know, attention just doesn't work anymore. And she showed a rise of company. So a cameo in the NSFW world, OnlyFans is kind of the obvious example, which is like people make an actual living and the core atomic unit of these companies, like there's a financial, you know, transaction involved, right?

So now you kind of have sort of a conflict of interest because if you're a big tech company, right, you have a very high margin business, right? You have to give zero money to the people who are creating content from you, right? But you're spending a lot of money on data centers, the R&D, etc. And you're making a lot of money from ads, right? But if your creators are suddenly saying like, hey, I am making money for you. And if I walk away, it's bad for you and you have to give me money that, you know, seriously high margin business, you're going to start eating into the market. You know, I used to say that when I was at Twitter, we should build an algorithm of who's valuable to Twitter. And you could make an argument that Elon Musk is one of the most valuable users to Twitter. Because if he went away, there might be some sort of people like, I find Twitter less interesting. Maybe I'll go elsewhere. So, and I think, you know, about a few years ago, creators started realizing their power, right? And they've been pushing for basically like, hey, I want my share of what I'm giving you, right? And that's kind of an active conversation.

And so every company tries to do it. There are all these creator funds or I will give you like a book. or I'll give you a little rev share. And the internal discussion is always like, well, how can we kind of do this without eating our margins, but also incentivizing content and maybe the top people won't go away, right? Now, Web3, I just kind of finish this, is the ultimate expression of this because you're giving two things. One is you're aligning, hopefully, over the long-term economic incentives, but also I think

you're aligning ownership, right? Like, so for example, like right now, you know, you folks are stuck to YouTube, right? Well, I mean, you have a newsletter and you're on Twitter, et cetera. But if YouTube takes you down, right, it's probably not going to be, I mean, you'll do fantastic, but you're going to have like an unfun few days, I'm sure, right? We don't want to do it again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, so first thing is whether it just gives you control over your own property, right?

So you can't get rock-pulled, you know, and you can maybe go to an alternative, which I think is very powerful. The longer-term expression, all of this is obviously, you know, governance, right? Which is how do you have a say? And a say can be in many different ways. I think a token is one way. But the right to go to a different person or use. a different client is another way, where you say, look, I want to pick a different path for this

company. Maybe it's a different algorithm. Maybe it's a different color in the UI. Whatever it is, I want to have a say instead of centralized people. So I think Web3 in some ways, kind of the ultimate expression of the creator control journey. Sri Ram, this has been a lot of fun. I have one other question for you that's unrelated to Web3, and then maybe we summarize this and conclude here. But this is a question unrelated to Web3. But something I wanted to briefly pick your brain on, crypto and AI. This topic has come up a few times. Of course, we've had, you know, one AI podcast. It's more the domer side of things. We weren't able to get to crypto and AI.

Yeah, we haven't explored these cases. Nobody will see this episode because we'll all be dead by them. It's possible. But, okay, is there some sort of intersection between crypto and AI, or are they complete orthogonal technologies? How do you think that crypto and AI play a role together in the future? And really, what should we be exploring on? bankless as it relates to AI. I love this question. Okay. You know, first of all, the meme that makes me most laugh is the one where the girl is looking

at the guy, looking at the other girl, and it's like, you know, crypto pieces and then AI. Yeah. I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the accurate meme for crypto and AI is the guy with the news from pirates going like, first time, right? Like, you know, because I think we in crypto, you know, look at some of the trends in AI and we see some of the patterns that we have been through.

And we're like, oh, yeah. this whole thing kind of could be happening again. So what do I mean? Right? And first of all, look, AI could be one of the most profound things that we see in our lifetimes, right? Like, you know, it could be bigger than the mobile phone. It could be bigger than the invention of the internet. It could be like invention of the steam engine or something worse. Like, I don't know how this all plays out, right? I don't think anybody really knows. But I think we all can sense that there is something profound here happening. And I think the intersection of crypto and AI is in a few places, right? The first one is the risk of

centralization. Like, I think the folks at Open AI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, etc., are all really smart. I know a lot of them. I think they're super well incentivized. But I do think over time, you know, AI, you know, is too important a technology change for humanity to lie within a few people's hands. Like, I wouldn't trust myself. If somebody made me the God king of AI, like I wouldn't trust Friedram Kristin to make the decisions of what gets launched, who has access, who doesn't have access. And AI, by the way, we're still in the age of API keys, right? So I think just on that level, you know, I think AI, you know, be over to the world for

AI to be decentralized. And that means running it on a MacBook laptop, that means an Indian kid being able to train an LLM or inference something without asking for permission. And by the way, I think it's probably inevitably going to happen whether we like it or not. So that's kind of a very broad, philosophical kind of a statement. But if you kind of break it down, I think at every layer of the current stack of LLMs today, which I've been spending some time on, is there's a crypto element to it. And there are a lot of interesting people are working on it,

and some of them have not announced stuff in public, so on we be kind of careful. Like, one, it's just in the training side, right? The way you train AI LLMs today is, you know, you raise a lot of money and you basically get access to a bunch of, like, you know, A100s or hedge 100s or whatever, and they didn't earn for a long time and you train these, right? So imaginable where you decentralize that and you can do it,

you know, not just in a data center that, you know, like a large tech company or somebody with a large venture capital round, runs, but a lot of different pieces. So that's one way. that's kind of one theme which I think is very interesting. A lot of interesting people working on this. The other problem, I would say, is going back to your creator's theme is one great existential question is the – and by the I really want to give credit to Chris Dixon.

He's kind of the originate a lot of these ideas. The contract of the internet was, you know, hey, I give you content and you send traffic to me. And one of the things Chris often, like, points out is that AI could actually break that contract, right? So, for example, I could create this content – like you creating this content on bankless right now, right? And the hope is, you know, somebody subscribes and your sponsors, you know, see their ad impressions, they give you more money, etc. That's all good. That's the way the internet works, right? But imagine, you know, if LMs are trained by you and when somebody says like, hey, what did Shredam Christian say on bankless and, you know, and it shows up on this other UI and you play no part in it, like that's not the way the internet is really supposed to work. So I think there's going to be this great interesting discussion. It's already happening, right, you know, for stuff like people like artists, etc., which is how do you think about, I think one, attribution, which. which is how much of my work is showing up in the final output when you type it something in chat GPT or look at Dali or stable diffusion or mid-jurney or whatever. And the other is how do I get rewarded for it, right? And I think this is actually kind of important also, which is it's not just about rewarding existing work.

It's also about like how do you spur new innovation and new content to show up. So I think these are all unsolved problems. It's very, very, very early days. But I think it would be a tragedy if LLMs just stay in the realm of. API keys and there's a few people have access to billions of dollars and that's all it is. And even though I like those people, I think they're really amazing. I think it would be tragedy for all the reasons

I like Zuckerberg and, you know, I like the Adam Osseri, but I still don't think they should call all the shots. So what's going to be more transformational? Crypto or AI if you had to pick? Crypto meets AI. Good answer. A combination of both. Yeah, right.

This has been a lot of fun. Maybe just summarize this for us. I think the theme of this episode is Web 2, broken. Web 3. fixes this, or at least fixes some part of it. What are kind of your closing arguments for why Web3 is the future of social on the internet? I would say, look, the bankless nation are huge fans of crypto, but I hope this reaches folks who are not crypto.

And I would say, listen, even if you just don't buy into crypto, just think about why do things have to be this way? Like, why can't a 15-year-old kid in India write code without asking people for permission or write, you know, go on an app without being worried about who is controlling what he or she can't say. It doesn't have to be this way. And what do we need to do to make it happen? So I think one, there's people asking them to the question. I think will lead them down like a very interesting track. And the second is, look, my dad spent 40 years in the same company in a small town in India. And he worked to see and he was, and he never had an

opportunity at all. Like, you know, he was happy, but, you know, he never had an opportunity to kind of do anything else outside of his job. And he passed away in like, you know, in 2006. And I always think about if he had access to the internet, he was brilliant, right? But he had no opportunity. He was just, there's nothing he could do. Right. He won't write. But if he had access to the internet, he could have done something, right?

Like, he could have actually, you know, gone out there and, you know, participated in the global economy, in the marketplace of ideas. In a way, he just had no access to. And I'm sort of a big believer in the human spirit, creativity and unleashing that. And I think unless we have some version of this play out, right? like future versions of my dad won't get a shot in the marketplace of ideas. And I think there'll be a deep, deep tragedy. So I'll leave it to that. This is the theme. Great closing argument. This technology, the reason we're here is to unlock human potential, certainly at the individual level, at the collective level, at the societal level. Sri Ram, we are looking for big things from Web 3.

We're hoping it can make the internet fun again and interesting and more free, more democratic. So thank you for walking us through this. Thank you so much for having me. Action items, Bankless Nation. We will include a link to Sri Ram's podcast. with his wife, which is absolutely fantastic as well as their substack. You can access that in the show notes. Also, there was an article that was mentioned that I'm going to go flag and read after this episode. I haven't read it yet called Status as a Service. We'll include a link in the show notes to that too. Risk and disclaimers, Bankless Nation, of course, crypto is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone,

but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.