Big Technology Podcast - Can We Still Be Optimistic About The Internet? — With Meetup Founder Scott Heiferman

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Scott Heiferman is the founder of Meetup, a website that connects people online and gets them to meet each other offline. Heiferman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether the internet can still bring people together vs. tear them apart, the latter of which it's done plenty of recently. This wide-ranging conversation gets into people's declining faith in institutions, our friendships and loneliness, Facebook's role in all this, virtual reality's potential, and the new company Heiferman is building today.

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Joining us today is one of my favorite voices and entrepreneurs in the tech world. He's the founder of Meetup, a site that helps people meet online and then get together offline. Now he's working on something new. Scott Iferman, welcome to the show. Thank you, Alex. Good to be here.

It's great to have you. I always love our conversations. I think the listeners are really in for a treat, and I'm thrilled that you agreed to come on. So thanks for being here. Of course. So I or sent you this question in advance, so you have, like, maybe a little bit of a heads-up on what's coming. But I think it's important to get in nonetheless. So you founded Meetup.

I think Meetup, in its essence, is an extremely optimistic site. The idea that you try to get people, you know, who meet online around like interests and bring them together offline, the idea is that's probably a good thing. And I think that, like, when I first learned about Meetup in the early 2000s, you know, it was very exciting. It had all the energy of, like, what the web could do to bring people together. And that was, like, one set of beliefs of where the Internet would go. there was this hope of vision that it would be good and optimistic and actually cause people understand each other more. Now, you know, recently, it seems like the Internet's gone in a different direction, at least

according to many, where it seems to be ripping people apart instead of bringing them together. And so I just thought it would be good to, you know, start with that and ask you what happened. Well, damn, you didn't, you didn't prep me that that was going to be the question. What happened? I think there's, you can read books on that. Yeah, I'm not a, I'm not some grand pundit on like the historical context of how, of, you know, like sort of deconstructing big tech and in, in broadways, you know,

I think, you know, real, real people do real things. And there are so many. many voices better than mine that can sort of deconstruct, you know, what happened. But generally speaking, I think, you know, there's Pierre Omidyar, who was on Meetup's board early on. He was the, you know, founder of eBay. I mean, he put it early on. You know, anything that has the ability to do good also has the ability to do bad when you're bringing people together. And, you know, there might have been a naivete around that. But, and I'm not going to be this sort of blind optimist, but, you know, humans have gone through a lot of stuff through a lot of

millennia and we'll see what happens. Yeah, I don't think, by the way, I don't think it is naive to know or to think that people can come together for good. I just wonder, like, it's, a lot of it is about the structures that we set into place to sort of have them engage online. I would love to go through, it's one of my favorite stories to hear a little bit about like the founding of meetup and the early years. Maybe we just start with that as we sort of dig a little bit deeper here. So I think if I recall correctly that you had the inspiration to start it after seeing people get together in New York after 9-11.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that which was 20 years ago in a couple months, we're hitting that anniversary. And having, you know, having stuck through the pandemic here, you know, with little kids, you know, and school and being in the city straight through, here we are. It's, you know, it's July 2021 here, whatever, how many, you know, 16 months into COVID. Yeah, the start of meetup, you know, there's some, you know, there are parallels here. But, yeah, you know, 9-11 happened. I grew up in Illinois, went to school in Iowa, I came to New York, was in New York for a bunch of years, and didn't really know my neighbors in an apartment building. And, yeah, the story of meetup is being, you know, in that apartment building, being on the roof, just as, you know, 9-11 was unfolding and connecting with my neighbors in a way that I had never before.

and people saying hello to each other and looking after each other in the days and, you know, weeks after that moment and led me to reading the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which I hadn't been aware of. Which is all about the decline in civil society in the U.S. People instead of going to bowling leagues are now watching television, essentially was his argument. Yeah, yeah, and a kind of rising distrust of their – their neighbor and real disconnection and disengagement from other people, you know, locally and increasingly offline in general. And so, yeah, I mean, I just sort of took it as a challenge to how can you use the Internet to get people off the Internet and, you know, just kind of had the crazy idea, which, I mean, I don't think we want to make this conversation

in a, like, retrospective on that, but it's fascinating, you know, how, you know, how unlikely meetup was to succeed, you know, now that I'm doing something new. It's, you know, I was a, I was 29 then. I'm 49 now. And, you know, the naivete, once there's that word again, but also kind of like, the willingness to jump into something that's highly unlikely and maybe not know how unlikely it is to succeed is, you know, a reflection maybe of a 29-year-old. And the questions of, you know, what is possible when you throw into the mix today's, you know, boy, to think that 20 years ago to think that people were, we're not getting along, you know, within the country or that there was, you know, division and, you know, sort of strife between

Americans and how would you bring together people who might have different beliefs and put other things aside and have this sense of shared, you know, community. Boy, you know, I mean, it's a whole different level now. Right. And so, I mean, we won't spend the whole time going over what happened with Meetup, but it is pretty amazing. You put this side up and basically just allows people to enter what they're interested in, connects them with people who are around them and encourages them to get together, meet up around it. And it was a pretty wild that there were all manner of different types of meetings. meetups that have emerged and continue to emerge, you know, mom groups and pet groups. And, I mean, you know the list better than me, but, yeah, it's amazing. You know, 100 million, 100 million people signed up and, you know, tens of thousands of

gatherings happen every week, even, you know, and now, you know, I'm not involved in the company at all in any way, but you're seeing that, you're seeing that post, post-COVID rise. of a hunger for that in real life community. I actually went to, with my seven-year-old son, I went to a meetup yesterday. Really? In New Jersey for, you know, we got a cheap little, you know, $200 drone.

And so we went to the New Jersey drone flyers meetup. And it was, it was like, I'm not going to wax too much here, but like, man, it's like you have a whole slew of people from all walks of life, young and old and black and white and they're and they're just like you know they just come together at a farm in uh in in new jersey and and and you know kind of it's a skill share it's a it's a it's a they're teaching each other and they're they're it's so warm and i was like man this like this you know like this happens in the united states people of different you know who doesn't matter who they voted for they were just kind of um having this this really you know and just kind of

this warm experience. I'm thinking, man, the people who created this platform should get an award or something. I mean, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool when that stuff happens. You know, maybe I started with the big question a little too early, but maybe this is a good setup. So I'm curious, like, what do you think is happening, that there is this desire among people of all different races and ages and political orientations to come together around life, like interests in real life. And, you know, coinciding with that, there is. is this other trend where people are starting to see each other as just an other and villainize

people who don't have the same beliefs as them? How do those two things exist in tandem? I mean, there's a glimmer of hope that, you know, the premise of meetup of, you know, that people might have things that, you know, separate them, but they have a bunch of things in common. And if you can focus on the thing they have in common, whether, you know, in this case, it was a drone flying, it really transcends, you know, the other stuff. Now, you know, we've all been through too much to just be kind of Pollyanna and simplistic about it. I don't have the answers for, you know, I don't think that like, I don't think meetup's going to save the country. But there really is something, the fact that even it's happening today at the height of this division,

and is really something to learn from. I don't, and I'm not, you know, I don't have the, you know, I used to have a lot more clear vision of the path from, from where we are to something, to a more clearly bright future. And it's a little, it's bumpy right now. I don't know. What happened to that clear vision? or to change it.

Well, you know, I remember, I mean, I would make it my business just as part of my job as CEO for 16 years to like really go to meetups and be tuned into things. And I mean, I would tell people that it was the greatest travel hack in the world is to basically wherever, whatever city you're in, you go, you know, you go to meetup. You find one of the hiking meetups happening that day because they're happening that day around every city and, you know, or all the other. meetups, but hiking was just something that, you know, you could, you could spend a few hours and you're basically stuck with a dozen or 20 strangers, locals, and you're trapped with them and you talk with them. And, you know, I remember, you know, I went, you know, to Pennsylvania to a meetup days before the 2016 election. And, you know, you could tell that, you know, Despite my story about yesterday, I mean, there's just this, like, there's this, you know, beneath the surface fear that, like, if this, if this roams into political land, or if you see that one person's driving this car and this person's driving a pickup truck or, you know, it's just, it's very, what happened was, is that, I mean, I can't, I can't tell you what happened. The whole country got more sensitive and, and, you know, and for, you know, for, for.

for reasons we all we all see yeah have your so when we started talking one of the things that was exciting to point out was that how meetup really took off uh on the Howard dean campaign it was in 2004 something like that where the organizers of that campaign were very digital oriented and they used meetup to uh spark a lot of organizing uh and you know it's interesting like when i also like I mean, I obviously think Facebook went in a totally different direction, but there was a lot of early political organizing on Facebook, like David Kirkpatrick's book talks about how people in Columbia were organizing against the government. I'm kind of curious if you're, if you ever anticipated that technology would be used in sort of this, you know, tear apart political context

and whether your views, and this is a bigger question, but I'm just going to throw it out there and see what you think. Like, have your views on human nature changed at all over the years? we all we all grow up uh we all you know you you go through things in your life your eyes are open i think you'd be um you know sometimes i'm i'm curious when i listen to mark zuckabberg you know whether the you know what is a some kind of a head in the sand what is a you know needing up needing to keep up political you know a corporate you know messaging um but i also I also love the actual, you know, the actual vision and optimism there. Yeah.

Which I believe is, I must be mostly heartfelt. Your question was, did my view of human nature change? You know, like, I, the same, I feel more, I believe more than ever in the power of people, together to find meaning, find power, find connection, find, you know, purpose and just a, you know, a basic, I think that, yeah, people need each other more than ever now. Yeah. So what do you think is happening? I mean, you initially, you read the Putnam book about the decline in institutions. Now it's like institutions continue to decline across the board. I just went through your Twitter feed.

you had tweets about the decline in religious participation among Gen Z and then one about how well this isn't going to be news to folks but people are lonelier than ever and you tweeted a little bit about this study about decline in friendships particularly among men where friendships are much less common and people are feeling lonelier than ever so do you have any thoughts about you know what might be behind that and how that could be reversed or addressed or is it sort of kind of hopeless at this point I mean, I don't know where to start this. There's so much to get into there.

I mean, I'm fascinated by the role that religion plays and played in people's lives to not having nothing to do with, you know, God or spirituality, but the way in which it was almost, you know, for some, you could say, an excuse for togetherness and community building and people. And by the way, I'm trying not to use words. I don't even try not to use even the word community anymore because it's so meaningless. The, the, you know, we're talking about, why do you think it's meaningless?

Well, I tend to be hyperbolic, so I say, don't quote me on this shit, but, no, because we are recording, so anyway, okay, we're rolling. You listeners, don't quote them. No, it's a word that means, that's just, you know, I'm one of the people responsible for the, you know, kind of broadening use of that word. I thought I was using it in a very simple and pure form, which is community is what happens when people, you know, come to lean on each other. And, you know, and now you can say, well, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg will refer to, you know, the Facebook community as if like three billion people is a community. I want to stay

point. What was your question again? We're talking about the decline in friendships and religion and sort of why that might be happening, whether it's reversible. Yeah, no. And so I'm actually really optimistic because, at least on that level, on the sort of, you know, I don't know how you heal the widening division between, you know, a MAGA hat wear and perhaps someone else. that's, and or the, you know, some of the anti-vax world and these things, I don't know about that. What I do know, though, is that the opportunity to have people be in situations where, and by this needs,

this needs serious turning around because the idea that people don't have people they can confide in or turn to, They might have a faux sense of that on Instagram. They might have a faux sense of togetherness, a faux sense of a feeling that like, well, you know, I have my people on, you know, in a Facebook group or or Instagram or what have you. But when, you know, but can they, can they really turn to people that are going to be supportive and caring, you know, the basis is just like basic human stuff? And all the numbers look bad on that right now. And the reason why I'm optimistic is because I believe that there's, you know, as soon as I over the past few years said, like, you know what, I'm just going to like turn off social media more and even lose the idea. And I realize, you know, a lot of people don't, a lot of people don't have this.

But like, you know, you can also live a life if like you'd say, well, yeah, I got friends in this city and friends in this city. and friends in this city and friends in this city. And that's, I realize there's a certain class of people who say stuff like that. But I basically, like, you know, like more than less, like broke up with my non-local friends. Really? And, and I'm sorry, Alex. I wish you were tired. That explains it.

You're coming back to New York. But, you know, realizing, you know, again, as you get older, you know, you realize like, wow, there's 24 hours in the day and and yeah you might have you got a few decades left and and that's it and so i um you know i've set up the rituals of like okay these are these friends i'm i'm like having uh breakfast with once a month and these guys i'm having lunch with every thursday most of the time and this person um you know i'm going to see most days because we're in the neighborhood and let's let's actually make the effort to get to take a walk or get coffee i mean these are You know, I remember Alain de Bhutan, the writer, he talked about this story where he saw Eric Schmidt give a speech.

And he's talking about the, you know, the moonshots of, you know, of Google. And then he asked him, like, what about, you know, what about pointing those, all that energy, like Google, you know, energy to invent and point it towards figuring out how people can forgive each other more? And Eric Schmidt just laughed it off and said, like, laughed it off and said, no, no, no, no, we can colonize the moon easier than we can do that. And that's a real, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's kind of funny story, but it's actually a really, it's, I think that's everything right there. Like the, you know, the opportunity to, you know, really think about some of the just basic human needs. and how to re- ritualize or, you know, there's just, there's a lot of people doing a lot of interesting work around that. Yeah. I think what you talk about, breaking up with friends from out of town and focusing in on deeper connection is super important. I think that's also something

that I've realized as I've gotten older. It's, it's all about quality of friendships and not quantity of them. And that deeper connection makes all the difference. And I think it's interesting because like us Facebook generation right like taught to collect friends like oh how many what's your number of friends is it going to be on your profile but it really has that number you know doesn't make any difference in terms of your quality of life you could have five and if those connections are deep that's what matters like there's um speaking of i'll just say one more thing speaking of like the loneliness stuff right like while i was doing research about this for always day one we were thinking about the downside of technology and where facebook was going in particular and where facebook was going in particular and particular. And one of the measures of loneliness is when people say that, like, they're surrounded by people, but they're not with them. And I think that's like such a thing that happens right now, especially, you know, people are on their phones when they're with friends. They don't really, they're never really present. And there's just this crisis of connection that's taking place. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I'm, you know, and I don't want to fall into the trap of the old guy who's saying, you know, phones bad. Oh, they came. By the way, I think that's the purpose of this conversation. Like, well, one of them, right? It's not that phones are necessarily bad or good. It's that there's a certain level of you can put stuff on the phones that can either solve for these problems or make them worse. And the question is what to build. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's always the, you know, I think anyone who's watching or listening here, you know, I think we all have this opportunity to ask ourselves, you know, all right, you get, you know, you get a few decades of work. What do you want to work on? And, you know, the good news is that there's opportunity to do, you know, to put food on the table doing work that that can be net positive. And there's really just so many challenges out there, you know, whether that's climate change or, you know, poverty or anything. I mean, yeah, there's just like there's important work to do. Yeah, so we've danced around it.

But do you think this decline in institutions like religion and friendship is a product of the wrong? rise of, I mean, I know it was already happening when television came out, but do you think it's a product of the rise of the internet? But it seems like as internet usage has gone up, these institutions have gone down. You know, I want to be clear that I, you know, the net positive of Facebook groups is huge. It's way more positive than negative. And there's, and, you know, I mean, gosh, the power of the way our messaging, group messaging works. And it's all, you know, there's so much to beat up on. And I'm happy to beat up on, you know.

Oh, I'm not even saying Facebook necessarily. Yeah. You're saying, you're saying, you're saying internet usage because I do. Internet usage technology in general. Sure. I think, I don't have the answer to this either. So, but I'm kind of curious what you think, yeah. I'm very curious what you think.

I absolutely don't have the answer. I'm not like going to pretend like I'm some. sage on a mountain who's figured it all that. What I know, what I know is that the, I'm scared as hell of my kids. I'm not going to give like the standard screen addiction speech. Anyone can give that. What I'm, what I realized recently was that my, you know, a job as a parent of young kids is to sell them on the wonders of the of the, of the, of the, physical world because the competition is rising yes like the the you know if you think that all the content and and if you think if you think YouTube and everything is not like you know addictive right now

I mean it's just you know and the amount of incredibly wonderful content you know the streaming services the podcast the you know TikTok everything it's just it becomes so so good so awesome And then you, you know, take that to like the metaverse level that, you know, and, and VR and all that. And you have to, like, real life is in for some serious competition. And so, Dan, my, which is my, I'm saying that as an answer to your question because the, the draw is, you know, it's like this question of presence. there's no there you know nothing will trump the nothing is better than the than that than that sort of in real life um driven bond of friend of friendship and connection i i believe and um you can get close to it and in some ways you can like surpass it on some levels that

aren't on some measures that aren't as important uh but um the answer that the question is I think that we're at risk of the net the net being negative on technology and the internet but you know but but but not yet yeah yeah I agree and I think that um again to just go back to like why we want to have these conversations is because it's so easy to go through life and not think about uh you know what the effect is going to be what the impact is going to be and how to actually optimize these tools for good instead of, you know, just scrolling through a TikTok feed and being stuck on your bed for two hours, not able to move, which has happened to me, which is why I had to delete it.

It happens to me regularly. Yeah. And, you know, who's going to do something about it? Yeah. And I don't think, and the answer, you know, there's a multi-pronged answer, but one of the answers is I think there's an enormous opportunity to work on things on, you know, social software, on, you know, all kinds of things that can have a counter effect. You're not going to ban, you know, you're not going to make, TikTok's not

going to become illegal and it's only going to get more appealing. Totally. Okay, so we've talked about Facebook groups, Facebook messaging. We've talked about TikTok. After the break, I want to speak with you about the blending of the online and the offline, speaking specifically about augmented and virtual reality, which you have some thoughts on. So why don't we take a quick pause here on the Big Technology podcast? We'll be back right after this. And we're back here on the Big Technology podcast with Scott Haferman, founder of Meetup, founder of a new thing, which we'll get to at a certain point in this conversation.

But let's start this segment with a conversation of augmented and virtual reality. So, Scott, you know, it's interesting. First of all, it was interesting to hear you today and see some of your tweets saying that you're optimistic about what Mark Zuckerberg is building. Honestly, I think that's oftentimes you tweet that and, you know, there are a thousand people that are yelling at you so brave of you to say that. I think with you that there's a lot of good things that Facebook does as well. We've talked about the negative on this show, you know, a thousand times. So, but putting that aside, you talked about VR and this was a little bit of a different tune.

So you wrote, Mark Zuckerberg today, you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet where instead of just viewing content, you are it. And then you wrote, this is not good, all caps. Your body matters. You are not media. So do you want to elaborate on that and talk a little bit about what you see as the dangers of people finding themselves in VR and imagining that's reality? You know, again, there are some, there's some bigger, more articulate thinkers on this than me, but I, but having, having lived in the chair of like those, you know, meetup CEO for 16 years, I can, you know, and, and seeing a kind of indescribable thing that happens when people, you know, people connect in, in real life and, you know, what happens there, I think

that, um, there's a real threat. There's a real, real threat. I mean, the, uh, the, um, the, the, um, the train is not stopping toward a, you know, towards a, uh, towards a, uh, towards a, uh, towards a, uh, towards a, uh, towards us living in, um, increasingly digital virtual world. And, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of like, it's wonderfully astonishing to me that, uh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is not shy about that. It's not, is, I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, what I see is like a secret devious strategy of basically having people live, you know, more and more, you know, now we're, think of how many hours you spend a day attached to your screen, you know, your phone, your computer, in Zoom, and Instagram and here and here and

here and here and FaceTime, you know, like, that's not going to go down, that's going to go up and it's going to be, and it's going to encompass our, you know, our whole reality. And I'm not denying the, you know, the virtue and the value of, of, of, and all the good that comes of that. Um, you know, it's, uh, but the, like, um, what is the, what is the, the, um, you know, meat space in real life will increasingly lose out. Uh, it'll be less appealing. It'll be less fun. Watch a five-year-old or a four-year-old or an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old in a, you know, wonderful virtual world. And you'll say, why would they bother going back to the, to physical space? And losing that, you know, ability to have eye contact or losing that ability

to, you know, appreciate the imperfections and, you know, the imperfections of the imperfections of real world and real people in real life. I don't know. What am I trying to say here? What about what are you trying to say? Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

sometimes I feel like I get lost in a, in a, you know, it's obvious. Yeah. But I'm like cognizant of the fact that it's completely not obvious. I've got, I've had debates with like people who are building bots. Yeah. I mean, really like I remember I had a dinner with a Stanford AI researcher who. he's like yeah we're building we're building a we're building virtual friends you can really be

a friend a friend with a with a virtual but will ultimately be you know C3PO or what and and he was like this is amazing yeah and I'm like well wait a minute if people don't have you know what I what I um is it healthy for some for people to um really kind of lose touch with what's real and what's not. Because basically, a computer can't love you. A computer can't care for you. A computer can say the way some bots do today, they can say, I care about you, or I care what you're saying, but they can't. And the ultimate, like, kind of meaning of life is to be cared about and to be loved. And for someone to care about you being well, someone to care about you not being, I mean, that's basically, that's like the whole deal.

And so are we headed toward a world where no one really cares about you because computers have been programmed to. And I know you can say, no, no, no, no, the VR is about connecting real people, almost present. like through technology, it's still two people, or, you know, a group of people and they care about each other and they love each other. But it's a, so I'm not, you know, I'm not talking about like the need to hug a tree. Right. I'm talking about the way in which hugging a person is kind of necessary. And as we kind of step further and further, more and more kind of like, you know, well, we could just virtualize it. It's fine. That's a problem. That's an issue. But, okay, let me ask you this then. You said that part of the meaning of life is having

people care about you, caring about others. Can you do that through VR goggles? I think it can be additive. I do. My problem is that, and I really don't want to make this about, you know, I have a lot of like empathy for whatever. for, you know, Mark Zuckerberg deals with on a day-to-day basis. What is a little scary to me is that the march toward and the path, the march toward like living, living in the metaverse, you know, without a sense of like, wait, hold up, hold up, hold up here. Is this like a little spice?

Is this like an additive part of life or is this life? Right. Yeah. How would you define the metaverse? Is it sort of like a bunch of different. programs that your digital avatar could go between and interact with digital friends. Like I guess it's happening in gaming right now. Also, we've talked on this show about how on Fortnite people spend more time hanging out than they do actually fighting because you can be together with your friends.

And I guess VR could be VR could be on a 2D screen. And I think that's what people are referring to as this metaverse where it's essentially life transposed onto the internet. is that is that a fair definition and sort of what what about that concerns you sure sure that yeah that uh that seems to fit that seems to fit and i and i and i don't know what that line is again i think it's additive and positive right um i i'm you know i'm i'm looking forward to a future where my relationship with friends is like it you know has a has a has the occasional dimension of like virtual presence and whatever whatever form that means um the problem is you know some companies have proven have like proven themselves as not knowing what enough

means enough screen time enough engagement yeah and I don't just mean like oh add in some little features to say you know you're you're you're now up to date or whatever I just mean like well I don't know I'm saying you know defend IRL like who's who's um you know and no one gives a crap about some, you know, I'm not talking about some Defend IRL hashtag movement. I just, I just mean that like, there's a lot to build.

Like, yeah. Why hasn't someone built a better meetup? It's a good question. Why hasn't someone built a better meetup? Yeah. Like, why isn't someone built the 50 other versions of people connecting,

you know, things that like, you know, that I can think of and that are obvious, you know, so there's a lot of things, you know, so,

you know, It's great there are all these venture capitalists and marketers and people building, you know, and building the perfect ad systems and building the, you know, the 10,000 people at Facebook working on VR and all of this. But, you know, I think that, I think there's exciting things to build that can be, that can, that can connect people in real life. And I hope people, I hope some people quit their jobs and work on that. Yeah. Maybe it's too cynical to say it, but I think a good portion of why people haven't built a better meetup yet is because you just can't, you can't track. You don't have the engagement data that you would on an online platform. And that becomes less exciting to people building. And I'm going to use that word community.

Well, I don't know. I mean, you know, meetup. Yeah. It's a business that, you know, tens of millions of dollars of revenue and was profitable. I didn't say this is not a good business. I'm just saying that, you know, there is an indebted. I think among developers in many cases to live in a world of optimization. You know, TikTok is, you know, think about the most rising social media app, which is TikTok. It's a perfect example. They, you know, they look at everything you do, how long you're on a video, whether you like it, whether you comment it, you know, how quickly you scroll up, whether you watch it on a loop

and they use that to optimize. It's much more difficult and I think it's a more worthy challenge to optimize in real life. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, you know, I just want to, you know, my like, you know, annoying high horse here isn't just about real life. It's also about, it's most fundamentally about going back to what I said about like people, you know, you being cared about and cared for and someone caring and you caring about someone. And, and I think that, you know, you can even have, you know, virtual group platforms. I mean, messaging, messaging apps are are wonderful for bringing, you know,

a positive effect that has on groups of friends and such. But I also feel like there's, you know, such a missing opportunity to, you know, to connect people one on, you know, one on one that they already know, how people

just, yeah, it's what you said, the deeper, the deepening of relationships and the deepening, you know, more quant quality, not quantity. Right. So I guess this is a good moment to bring up what you're working on. I saw you posted a job listing for someone to come work at the company that you're working on now and give some examples of what you want to do, like maybe connect people who are the one-on-one connections, have like

maybe someone who's a nurse, connect with someone who's considering going to nursing school, some other forms of coaching. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you're up to now, what you're up to next? How much can you say about it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, whatever. This isn't like This isn't the top secret defense department stuff, but we're, but we're, but yeah, it's nine of us and we're like in this kind of crazy experimentation mode for the past few months. And we're, yeah, we decided we're going to, we'll come out when it's when it's time to, when it's time to come out. But yeah, like you said, I'm, you know, I always think in turn, you know, one of the fascinating things about, you know, this industry is this ability, you know, that the internet is a network of people. and that network of computers, and this, you know, it's always fascinating when there's this, like, kind of excess capacity where, you know, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay realized that, you know, there was all this stuff that people had that other people wanted or, you know, Airbnb where people had, you know, extra rooms or extra homes that other people wanted or people had time to drive an Uber and other people wanted a ride. I believe that the biggest untapped, like, excess capacity out there is the simple

sort of inventory of people's life experience and their empathy, basically. People are, people can be really caring and good listeners and empathetic and just wonderful people if they're put in the right situation. And they have this life experience with going through whatever they've gone through and other people, you know, would really benefit from it. So, so yeah, we're hitting this broad challenge of how do you, you know, take this world's most excess capacity of experience and empathy and put it to work, put it to use to help people. Yeah, and you asked earlier, you know, in the middle of this conversation about the metaverse, what am I saying? And maybe it really is that, you know, we are running the risk of falling further and further into.

these digital worlds without realizing how the physical worlds and our connections with others, which are key to a functioning society, are eroding. And it seems like this is another swing at trying to use technology to address that and potentially fix it. Yeah, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. And at the end of the day, it's about, you know, you can have a bunch of people lathering on clubhouse or spouting off in some media form. But, um, For people to be heard, like one-on-one, the person to be heard is a, it's quite rare to, you know, and to enable not the loud mouths who might be on a stage on Clubhouse. But, you know, for the average person to have an opportunity to be heard, and it not be therapy and it not be, you know, whatever, whatever expensive forms. of being heard are definitely okay so let's take one more break and then uh we'll just wrap up here

with another about 10 minute segment we'll be back right after this and we're back here for one final segment with scott hyfman founder of meetup in a new company he's just told us a little bit about uh on our third segment i always like to have a little bit of fun sort of do some rapid fire stuff i get at some bigger questions we've gone philosophical so uh let's just start concrete on one. For listeners, Scott, you got like two squares tape behind you. What's going on there with the blue tape? Oh, oh, oh. There are empty, empty blue squares in the background. Yes, yes, yes. They are a pending painting experiment that one of my kids decided to, I said, tape where we're going to paint. And that's part of it. That's going to be part of it.

Cool. And then a bunch of people sitting, standing on us like some sort of sandbar. Sorry. It's a cool background. That's awesome. I stole this picture online and somehow it appealed to me. So I put it and I somehow kept record of whose picture it was and where. But I, you know, I don't know if it's right or wrong, but I tend to, I'll print pictures that I find off the internet. And like, voila, it's art. Super cool.

Okay, cool. All right, continuing on, I had to just get that out. I'm like, what are these blank squares? What message are they sending? So you said before we started recording that it's cool. If I ask you a WeWork question, you can answer whether you want or not, but I'm got to ask. I'm curious whether you would still choose to sell Meetup to WeWork if you had the chance to do it again. And yeah, well, why don't we just start with that?

I don't know. I'm not going to be cagey. I mean, the way it played out, no. Yeah. But no, I mean, no, I mean, there was a specific vision there of what I thought that company was. And no, if I could see the future, I don't think so. But the good news is that meetups in really great hands. Because I think this is public information. You know, it was bought from WeWork by. by the, you know, probably the best, you know, internet entrepreneur in New York City. And he, Kevin Ryan, who started many things, you know, MongoDB and Double Click and lots of things. And he, so all I know is it's in good hand, someone who's a really phenomenal business person and really cares about the mission. And so I'm, that's great. Yeah. Yeah, we just had Elliot Brown and Marine Farrell who wrote the cult of Wee book. And so this will be the last question I ask about it, but I'm fascinated by the story.

How soon into the experience did you realize that Adam Newman wasn't the real deal? You know, I didn't participate in any of the, you know, I got asked left and write to every journalist to, I'm not, you know, I'm. I'm not going to waste my time. Yeah, and I'm not going to get into it. Okay. All right. Let's wrap with some positivity. I'm kind of curious what, you know, I do think that one of the things that's cool to hear from you is your optimism about people and about what the Internet could be used for in terms of good.

And I'm curious, like, what you're optimistic about now if there's any specific types of technology or, applications of tech that you're particularly optimistic about? Let me go a little broad, and then I'll try to get specific. It's funny. I had an experience last week where I, in the same day, I finally got around to reading that Mark Andreessen, Andreasen post where, you know, no, the post-pandemic one. Yeah, there was the follow-up to that.

Yeah, the we built. He wrote a, yeah, basically, what we built. And, you know, I mean, that is a, it was really well written and hard to argue with it, not that we, not that I would want to. And it was, you know, basically what it says was, you know, man, look at, look at all the ways we navigated a pandemic, how human beings navigate a pandemic thanks to the crazy myriad of all the things that have been put in place thanks to, you know, thanks to technology and the market and all these things. And at the same very day, I saw Bruce Springsteen's, you know, one of his return to Broadway shows

where, you know, the kind of inner Bernie Sanders, Bruce Springsteen, AOC, part of me who, like, I couldn't have seen a more touching reflection of Bruce Springsteen on stage and expressing what it means to, you know, care and love for America as a place of, you know, of opportunity and, and, you know, understanding the struggle and the strife and the difficulty of just getting on in the world and, you know, and wanting, wanting opportunity. of these things. And I know, I know this is not, seems like it's not answering your question, but it hit me that I was like, wow, you know, so many of like the, the Bernie AOC Springsteen crowd just hates on Mark and what Mark Andreasen is saying. And the Andreessen crowd is just like just pissing on,

you know, the AOCs and the Berners of the world. And to me, it's like they're, there's, there's so much there's so much incredible overlap in these in these views and visions um and it's really it's a shame and i you know so i'm not sure what i'm saying of like oh you know i'm not just saying okay magically these things are going to um uh going to blend but i i'm hopeful that there are and i know i see a lot of people who do really get both sides of that of that world, a sort of techno-utopianism and a deep caring for people's struggle. Yeah. Scott Heiferman, always a good time to talk to you.

I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thank you, Alex. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's great. I hope we can get you on as a regular guest, and especially as you have news to announce around your new thing. It would be great to get you back. Great. Thank you.

All right. Well, thanks, everybody for listening. Thank you, Nick Guadani for doing the editing Red Circle for the hosting and the ad sales. And again, appreciate you all for hanging out with us here on the internet. Maybe get together with some of your friends in real life and see what it's all about. It might be cool. All right. We'll do this again next Wednesday with the tech insider or outside agitator.

And until then, take care.