Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Making Sense of the FTX Catastrophe and a Reality Check on Twitter Under Musk

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

The implications of a straight-forward case of fraud, what Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX teach us about the dangers of conflation, why and how Twitter is failing under Elon Musk, and responses to emailers who have asked about Meta's ability to develop a Twitter competitor.

Hello and welcome back to Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? Conflicted. Why conflicted? Well, on one hand, the Packers beat the Cowboys, which is always a source of joy. You know, one of the longest running wounds in my sports psyche are the 90s Cowboys just being the Packers again and again.

So any Packers victory over the Cowboys is sweet. But unfortunately, we had the modern. day cowboy and F1, just pull off a terrible move. And somehow the other guy gets penalized. It's ridiculous. Oh, man. Just a very conflicting sporting morning for me. Well, listen, Ben, I'm struggling to all these years I've been looking to Sam Bankman

Freed as a guiding light, a beacon, an example of what a businessman can be when he actually feels a responsibility. to improve the world. And over the last couple days, I've just been reading these exposés about my hero, and it just doesn't feel real, you know? Not SBF.

He was one of the good ones. So I am feeling emotional tonight, too. We're going to get through this together for the next hour. I think this is where we need video for this section. So people can see the absurd look on your face as you are staying there.

I'm not sure if we have enough episodes in the bag for people to pick up on your sarcats. Although maybe it is pretty obvious. Oh, a shit eating grid. That's absolutely right. Yes. Well, we're starting with an absolute mess and what is one of the biggest tech stories of the year. And I should say at the outset, anyone who's looking to understand the mechanics of what

happened with Alameda Research and FTX, go check out the most recent episode of Dithering. Ben provided an excellent explainer. and if you're not subscribed to dithering, there's a link in your show notes that'll allow you to download, a couple clicks, very easy. And it was a great episode. And I feel like I understand what happened,

in part because of your explanation and in part because it's really not much more complicated than like a garden variety Ponzi scheme. But... Is it a Ponzi scheme or is it just like straight up fraud, right? I mean, I think like a Ponzi scheme, the whole idea is, as long as you sort of hand it off to the next guy,

like you have to keep bringing in new people, then it'll stay afloat. In this case, basically they said, our customer assets are in their own box. They're over there. They're safe. And in reality,

they were taking the customer assets and giving them to El Mita research, which, by the way, I want to compliment you in your pronunciation because there's two big problems to the dithering episode. Number one, I kept saying El Meda. It's actually El Mita.

Okay. And number two, I didn't make an offhanded comment. that was wrong, which we'll actually get to in a moment. But yeah, it's actually kind of straightforward. The other, so just long short, like crypto sort of blew up over the summer. Alameda and SBF, Sandmaker-Fried, was just going around buying all these companies that went defunct. In retrospect, it seems clear that Alameda also blew up.

They were buying companies to cover up for their losses. And in the process, taking a whole bunch of customer money out of FTX, their companion sort of, or their SBF's sort of exchange, give it to, Alameda to cover this. And they were papering it over by using FtX's coin. Like they made this big transfer. And then Binance basically induced a run on that coin, which exposed that Al Mita basically did have any real assets to cover all this money that they were supposed to get back to FDX. So it's just fraud. Like it's kind of not really complicated. They weren't supposed to take customer money to do that. And they did. And the other question here is how legitimate actually was Al Mita

and FTX all along, right? Like I talk about in that story, the founding story of SBF is doing this kimchi trade, which always seemed to look weird. Why was he the one that could figure it out and no one else could? And like,

it's so fraudulent what went on. And the guy is just lying constantly. He was on Twitter earlier last week saying, everything's covered with assets. That tweet had to be deleted within 24 hours when they went belly up. Then he comes out to he apologized. Like, oh, we have X, Y, Z in there,

also turned out to be a lot. then there's suddenly a quote unquote hack of FTX where all this money is disappearing. So like everything he says appears to be a lie. So why should we believe the origin story either? It's like almost anything's believable at this point. Well, and there's there are a number of layers to this story too where there's personal rivalries with the finance guy and there's this lobbying effort that was going on in Washington and Sam Bankman Fried apparently. pushing for stricter crypto regulation that a lot of people had crypto didn't like. Well, also his parents being very politically connected. His mom runs this, this, this Democratic

pack. Like, he contributed a massive donor to the Biden campaign. He was the second largest Democratic donor in this election. It's just really, the whole thing is weird. And I agree. It's a huge story. I honestly feel like it hasn't gotten, it's been all over the tech press for sure. But I don't know. Do you feel like that this is. It feels like there should be way more coverage of what's going on here because there are so, like, basically everything about FTX and Alameda research at Sam Baker-Fried that we know from the last six months appears to all be a lie. And so I'm pretty interested about the 18 months before then, the 24 months before then, is that all a lie as well? It's entirely possible. And regardless of the first 18 months, it is pretty clear that there have been, it certainly appears to have.

have been like a pattern of bald-faced lies in the media and in response to this Lula crash. It's not like some complicated Ponzi scheme. It's just literally lying. Yes. And I think it would become a bigger story and penetrate the mainstream more than it has if more people understood exactly what he was lying about. I think some of this is still so arcane to normies of the world, that it's hard to really move the needle. But that's why I'm curious tonight, because I think one of the aspects of this story that will make it one of the biggest stories of the year, the impact this could have on the crypto space more generally, on the way our government approaches crypto regulation. And I understand the mechanics of what Sam Bankman-Fried and FTCs were

involved in and why it was egregiously illegal. But the next steps here, I'm a little bit lost. Like, what could this mean for everyone else? And what are you going to be watching for over the next few weeks and months as this unfolds? Well, I think first and foremost, I would like to understand everything about Almeda and Sam Macon-Fried and FTX, like from the beginning. There's got to be a lot of things to sort of dig into. Like, was the kimchi trade actually legitimate?

Like, where did this guy? Because, I mean, it only, like, it's like, FTCS only started in 2019. Like, how did that go from zero to 25, 30 billion when they came well behind other exchanges? Like, it's just the whole thing in retrospect all seems very weird once you sort of unwrap it. And so that's what I'd like to see first and foremost. As far as the regulatory bid, this is a little bit of a complicated question. And this is where I got some stuff wrong on dithering. So on dithering, I made a reference to defy, which is decentralized finance.

And I insinuated, I might have said straight out. It was like it was a throwaway line. I definitely messed up that FtX or insiduited FTCS was defy. It's not defy. It's centralized. It was a centralized sort of exchange. Decentralized finance is where there's like you can do the financial stuff on the blockchain. And there is no central entity.

There's like these algorithmic things. There's things called uniswops that are market makers. But it's all code. And there is no centralized sort of thing. And the big question, I think, going forward is there's FtX and FTX U.S. FtX was where you could do all like the margin trading and the lending and stuff, in part because there is no clear regulatory framework in the U.S., but they will definitely get you in trouble if you do stuff they don't like.

And so basically the regulatory environment in the U.S. is kind of unclear. and that's a reason why a lot of the more sort of extravagant stuff was sort of offshore. And so number one, ideally there would be a much clear regulatory framework in the U.S. so that exchanges could be more full feature sort of in the U.S. broadly. That's sort of number one. Okay. Number two is, and that's also, there's a question, how much reach does the U.S. have over FTX, although FTX U.S. ended up going bankrupt, which, by the way, it was another why Bankman

Fried told, he said, oh, this FtX. U.S. is not, is not affected. Well, then why is it going bankrupt? You know, is a reasonable question, one would think to ask. And, and so the question is, number one, there's for sure probably to be regulation around this sort of stuff. Is it going to completely strangle the idea? Very possible. And then, by extension, what impact would that have on the decentralized sort of finance area? Like, the whole challenge of decentralized finance is there is no obvious nexus to regulate. And so do you like, so do you just sort of try to smush the whole thing by saying you have to trace every single transaction? Well, who does the tracing the transactions?

Like the just the paperwork could literally smother the whole thing. And that's where FTX does affect DFI, even though FTCS is not DFI per se. Sorry, that was a whole lot of mush. No, no. It's going to be very difficult because it's going to be super easy to get lost in the weeds on some of this stuff. But as a very basic question, how is our regulatory framework unclear as we sit here today? Like what exactly is the ambiguity that's driving all this stuff offshore? Well, there's no real clear rules around this in the U.S., but there have been enforcement actions in the U.S.

And so it's kind of like this, you don't want to cross the line, but you don't know where the line is. And so the – and I think this is something. something that Coinbase in particular has been very frustrated about because they would lose a lot of business to entities like finance or FTX because they're a U.S. company, U.S. listed on the stock markets, they need to not sort of go over the line. They would ideally fully operate within the lines. They don't know what the lines are. And so that's sort of the frustration, I think, on that side. A reasonable person, I think, could come back after this and say, well, maybe, you know, the whole thing should be switched completely. And that's definitely going to be.

an attitude about this. But, you know, this is where the DeFi part gets really interesting because, again, it's, it, no one is in charge. It is fully sort of decentralized. One of the issues in crypto that I've, I wrote about this at the beginning of this year in the context of OpenC and like the NFT marketplace is, a lot of the rhetoric and narrative around crypto was a lot like the rhetoric and narrative around the internet, which is that it's decentralized. Anyone can go out there, X, Y, Z. And, and two, from a technical perspective that is true. The thing on the internet, though, and this has been the long-running sort of theme on shantuckery, when there's no friction, it becomes very challenging for users to navigate. And companies that solve that, in the case of the internet that solve discovery

that help you find all the stuff on the internet, they actually become tremendously powerful and they become a centralized entity. But that centralized entity isn't because they're controlling stuff. It's because that's where all the customers are. And so Google, is dominant on the internet without directly controlling the internet. They're dominant because consumers go there to help figure out the internet.

And so in the case of NFTs, that was OpenC. It's like, look, NFTs in theory are this completely open sort of marketplace. But in reality, OpenC is totally dominant. And I think that's an issue with crypto generally. Like, yes, in theory, stuff being on the blockchain means anyone can come in and deal in those assets. But the companies that actually accrue power are the ones that make it easy. for customers. And in the case of FTCs, by making it easy, that meant you went to FDX and FTX is the one that actually had your coin, actually had your, you know, your, your assets. And, uh, and now,

well, they don't have your assets anymore. The assets are somewhere, um, which is another question to figure out, where did all the money go? It's, it's going to be, uh, interesting to trace that. Well, to that point, we got this question from Schwetta and he, he said, FTX positioning on crypto is that they are all decentralized. And this may be true for networks, but as you just said, user point of access is centralized. So does the decentralized model

ever actually manifest? Like, can this ever actually work? Was his question. Yeah, it's very, very skeptical, right? I mean, because the user interface matters, convenience matters. It has, like, for these markets to be useful, they need to get scale,

but scale requires, increase convenience, particularly when you get to the marginal customer. And I think one of the fundamental paradoxes facing crypto all long has been you want to get a lot of people on it, but you get a lot of people on it by making it easy and accessible. But if you make it easy and accessible, that requires a centralized entity. And so the theory of Bitcoin, like Bitcoin is in many respects the most decentralized, right? Like at the end of the day, it's pretty straightforward. and there's lots of exchanges for one,

but also there's lots of stuff around the edges to help you manage it yourself. But then you're like, well, how many consumers actually really do want to do the moderate equivalent of putting money under the mattress by having their own sort of hardware wallet? Their wallet, yeah. Yeah, they have to figure out where it is.

You hear the horror stories of someone throwing a hard drive away and they lost millions of dollars or whatever it might be. It's a real fundamental paradox and challenge. with crypto. And this is one of those things where my position on crypto is I've never written really about the financial aspects because I've had a couple issues with it. One is at the end of the day, like Wall Street at the end is ultimately about trading on top of real assets, whether that be, you know, whether that be stocks or real estate.

And that can go sideways, as we saw in the financial crisis, right, where you just got too abstracted away and lost touch with the underlying assets, which when they lost value. Suddenly it filtered through the system. Everyone's getting a crash course about counterparty risk, which, you know, and I think I wrote about this before, like, look, it doesn't matter that your loan is like collateralized 3x. If your counterparty goes bankrupt, you're screw. It goes to zero. Right. It's 3x of zero. Yeah. And so the finance, like, you can understand why the finance bit was a big thing because this is like money. The scarcity is interesting. My interest has always been on blockchain as a product, particularly like the portability,

right? The idea, you know, I think about this with my customers, being able to carry my subscribers two different platforms. But even then when I've articulated what this vision would look like, I've always assumed in practice there's going to be a centralized entity that is a service that anyone can access and see what, you know, what assets does this customer have, what entitlements do they have. And yeah, it's undergirded by a blockchain, but that blockchain allows someone, else to create a different centralized service on top of that data. It's not actually like the service itself. And the user experience bit has always been, has always been a challenge. And I think we're seeing that here. I mean, at the end of the day, the reason why someone

people go screwed by FTX is because this stuff's hard to use and using an exchange is easier. But by using an exchange, you give up control. And you're in an iterated place where someone can lie through their teeth and you're screwed. Well, it's not much different than regular people being told to go use Mastodon. Like, it's just a non-starter for people because it's so confusing and a place like Twitter is always going to have just a massive advantage over that because they make it so easy. And from what I understand, that's true of Coinbase and was true of FTX. But I think now the question is, all right, so if there are going to be these centralized resources that people use to trade, how do you regulate that? them and prevent something like this.

And one of the questions I have is like, I don't know that we would need new laws to prevent something like this at FTX. Like, I mean, SBF was breaking the law. Yeah. I don't know. I'm pretty positive. There's plenty of evidence to put him in prison for a very long time just based on the laws that we have. Like, it's straight up fraud.

Like it's wire fraud. You do it whatever you want to do. At the end of day, it's not that complicated. It's so much of the stuff around it is interesting, right? Your, I actually think the most interesting bit in many respects was your sarcastic bit at the beginning. One of the great ironies of this whole thing is the guy who was the good guy and this whole thing was CZ of Binance, right? Like who everyone was like a little skeptical of and he's like, you know, he's ruthless and, you know, all these sorts of thing.

Chong Peng Zawa is his name. But like, ruthless is in some respects better than being a liar, right, being honestly or whatever it might be. And to me, that's one of the biggest wake up calls here. You've had this in the broad strokes. You've had this sort of tech backlash or, you know, a lot of mockery of changing the world, X, Y, Z. And it's interesting that in this case, the one who did want to change the world, you know,

in a way that was like approved by the media and sort of the commentary and the one who got a magazine covers. He was a darling. Look, we're not going to do it on this show, but you could go back over the last year and a half of media and cherry pick all kinds of overwrought language describing Sam Bankman Fried, his mission, his ambitions over the long term. And it would be too mean to those writers, but like it would be a very entertaining coffee table. book. Would it be? I mean, this is, I've, it's funny because, you know, I never wrote about Theranos and Holmes. It just never, it never added up for me. And I never wrote about Bankman Freed for the same reason. Like, it just, as I put it on dithering, one of the things that bugged me is his political actions weren't very creative in my mind. It was just like, it seemed very sort of, okay, very obvious sort of things to do. Yeah, I was being this effective altruism thing,

but that's like been, you know, it's a pretty straightforward utilitarian sort of argument, and he supported Boggs standards sort of democratic politicians. And it's like there was this disconnect between this person who's being held as very innovative and thinking differently versus like the way it actually manifested in his outcomes. It seemed just like by the line Democratic, which again, I'm not judging him because there were democratic moves. I'm saying they were so uncreative. It always seemed weird to me. And so I don't know, I just, I wasn't, I by no means was writing about or alleging fraud or thought any of this was the case. That's not what I'm saying at all.

I'm just saying he as a character always struck me as. It didn't quite add up. Yeah. There was something that wasn't right. Yeah. And now, of course, you know, it's easy to look back in retrospect. But I think I talk a lot about the temptation of sort of confirmation bias. And one of the risks and dangers, I think, of politicizing everything and saying that companies need to be about more than making money or journalists need to be about more than just asserting facts is the opportunity, number one, for confirmation bias becomes very large.

And number two, the internal justification for lying and fraud becomes very large as well. I mean, if the ends justify the means, then like you're on the road. a perdition. Yeah. Well, and that's my read on what happened here without having any real basis in fact. But as I speculate, I don't think that Bankman Fried was pursuing all of that altruism and all of the political donations as a way to like proactively launder this ongoing fraud that he was conducting. I think he probably really believed that he was going to make the world a better place and and believed in all those missions. And then he became so high on his own supply that he was able to justify

shuffling the deck chairs at Alameda Research and FTX and taking customer funds and convincing himself that in the long run, it would be best for everybody. And that's just like a very typical human blind spot, particularly when you're surrounded by people telling you how amazing and revolutionary you are. Like, it's not surprising to me that he could convince himself to, to try to pull something like this off, given his own self-regard.

Yeah, I think that is the correct read, which I agree with. I do, I would really like to see some investigation into like, like, I think there's going to be an investigation, right? Like, he was, he was generally, uh, a fine operator that created Almeader research to solve this arbitrage trade, then when the arbitrator is closed, they need something to do. They start FTX. I'll meet as a market maker on FTX. And then it all goes sideways this summer and then he commits fraud and then tries to fix it.

And then it gets worse and worse. Honestly, the fraud is so bald and the lying is so consistent. I do question everything. I don't know. Again, I don't want to be conspiracy ben here. I'm usually the one, you know, you're the conspiracy guy. But it does make me question absolutely everything about this whole thing. Yeah.

And for anyone keeping score at home, the story has gotten crazier and crazier with each passing day for about seven days straight right now. So God only knows what's in store for us this week. And as we look at the bigger picture, it does seem as though FTX and Alameda were entangled in all sorts of other crypto investments and even investments in sponsorships outside of crypto. So the ripple effects here are going to be pretty meaningful. No surprise that Mercedes was sponsored by FDX. Oh, it was a tough break for Toto Wolf and Lewis Hamilton. I mean, look, we are not going to get into like the way.

And the Miami Heat for that matter. I know. The sports world was very much on the teeth here. Teams that I hate sponsored by FDX. Very convenient for me. Look, red flags went up for me watching Sam Bankman Free. have like a sort of sponsored content type phone call, like a video phone call with Tom Brady.

And the exchange back and forth was very stilted. And I was watching those guys. I mean, like, Tom Brady is like the Manchurian candidate of celebrities. And Bankman Freed is there in like a t-shirt looking totally disheveled. And I was just like, I don't know what's going on here, but I don't trust it. And so I feel validated. But big picture. This is the problem with, we've sort of praised and lauded the idea that sort of the idealized social network interaction is group chats with disappearing messages.

But this is one time I root it because I like, oh well, like I don't have receipts. But yes, I have shared your skepticism to say the least. So what could this change beyond just FTX and the hundreds of thousands? it's unclear exactly how many people are going to suffer as a result of this fraud. But beyond that isolated case, it does seem like this could reverberate for years to come. And I mean, it's certainly going to become a political issue in Washington. Yeah, I mean, I don't, there may be a user regulation bit here where people just sort of abandon crypto-based finance sort of in general.

And the shaky part of this is there are no foundations, right? I mean, I think that Bitcoin is established and not going anywhere. It certainly has not really held up its bargain as a store value in an inflationary environment, to say the least. But it is like the longest lasting. It has the group of dedicated adherents. Those are folks, the Bitcoin maximalists who think all the other stuff is BS and Bitcoin is the only one true currency. They're looking pretty good right now. Even though Bitcoin's down, they were definitely right to all this alt-coin stuff and the crazy speculation.

I mean, all of this stuff, I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist by any means, but looking at all the alternatives to Bitcoin, like, absolutely. I think Bitcoin's a lot more stable and dependable than all of these coins that just seem like schemes. I don't know how to put it. And maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure we've got a lot of listeners who believe in the power of, you know, minting all of these random coins. But first of all, seems like a market that's going to be impossible to ever effectively regulate. And second of all, it's not surprising that there's all sorts of underhanded dealing in this world right now. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely like just financial markets, new financial markets do generally

have a lot of fraud, right? And that's like that was the case of the stock market. It's been the case in general. And regulation does end up coming in. And one of the challenges, just backing up and looking at that like myself from a meta perspective, I can sit here after the fraud was established and say, yeah, I was always kind of suspicious to this guy. It never really added up. And people are like, why didn't you write that? It's like, well, because it was just like a feeling, right? Like, the fact

I didn't write about him or about it is my only receipt, right? The fact that there aren't receipts is my only sort of evidence here. And that applies to Defi generally, right? Like, the reason why I didn't write, or sorry, now I'm confusing them again, defy and CFI,

uh, generally is because just like, at the end of day, what's the underlying asset? If it's only the belief of the people under it, well, that's subject to like preference cascades, where everyone suddenly changes their mind all once, and then everyone's sort of screwed. And you have things like counterparty risk.

Like if your counterparty, like there's all sorts of things that go into it, I have written in favor of Bitcoin saying that, look, I think this one is a real thing. It's established. And I think that's probably still the case. again, the way that Bitcoin has lost has actually been highly correlated with the stock market, I was wrong. Like the, I thought it would retain value better than it did.

But at the end of the day, I still don't think it's going anywhere. It's just a much sort of weaker asset than, then I sort of once thought it was. My real interest all along in this stuff has been products. Like there is a, you talk about the Twitter or Masterdom thing. There is a blockchain-based Twitter type app called Farcaster that, has spent tons and tons of time completely abstracting away the blockchain. Like where you go and sign up and yes, there's like a key you have to, you know, multi-word password that you have to keep in store.

But they're starting from the premise. This has to be as easy to use as a sort of Web2 app if this is going to ever going to manifest. And that's definitely much more in line with my views and my belief sort of about this. Like that aspect matters. And in the long run, if Farcaster is something that becomes. you know, a big thing, then you have a real asset, which is people using this network and that's valuable upon which value can be minted or whatever. And the other big thing about crypto that I've always had a problem with, this conflation, I have written this, this conflation, sorry, I know I keep

saying I wrote or didn't write this. It's because I want to be accountable for what I did or didn't say about this sort of stuff and what I got wrong and what I didn't get wrong. And I'm working on a bigger article today, sort of touching on this. I just want to be honest with myself about where I was with this bit. And one of the issues I've had with crypto is this conflation of ownership with usage. And people say, oh, you spend all this time on these social networks and you don't own any of it. It's like, well, yeah, because that's a completely different function. Like ownership is something different than usage.

You pay for usage. You might pay with your attention when it comes to ads. You might pay money. Like, you pay me money to subscribe to checkery. you pay us money to listen to Sharp Tech. And then ownership is a different thing where you put in capital and you take risk and maybe you get a return on that and maybe you don't. Why should those be the same thing?

Like people have asked me, oh, why don't you create a checkery coin? Why don't you like let your members only upside? I don't want to do that. Why would I want to give that away? The entire point is I took huge risks to get this started and I get to keep the reward. and that's not screwing my customers. They are free individuals buying a product that I have for sale. And their value that they're getting for their money is they get content that they like and want to pay for.

Like it's a much cleaner straightforward relationship. And there's just this conflation gets you in trouble. I think that conflation on the crypto side doesn't make sense and is wrong. I think the conflation of good political actions with good business similarly gets you in trouble, right? Like the clarity about what you're doing and why is better than we should be demanding companies to be more political. Oh, but only the right politics. And then everyone takes their eye off the ball. The people holding them accountable take their eye off the ball.

The people in charge take their eye off the ball. Your incentives get screwed up. And in the worst case scenario, like FTX, you actually commit crimes and you feel justified because you're doing it for the good of the world. Yeah. Well, I think. Sorry. I think I'm talking about you to ravely a lot just because. Well, look, it's an impossible story to wrap our arms around right now because, A, it's unfolding in real time.

And B, there are just so many different threads and potential implications of what we've just learned over the last week or so. I mean, number one, there's probably going to be a great movie to come out of all this at the end of everything. I actually think this is legitimately, and we mentioned this on dithering. It's a phenomenal movie, in part because you can mess with audience. assumptions and expectations, which we saw happen. That's what happened to journalists who covered FtX, is they just assumed he was the good guy because he did things they agreed with. And it turned out he was the villain all along.

I think a lot of regular people looked at Bankman Freed and FtX and A, were confused by everything that's happening in this space, and B, were suspicious of everything that's happening in this space. So it's not like this is some dramatic twist for most people who have been watching from afar. They assumed everyone was like corrupt and fraudulent. Yeah, it's a fair point. I mean, what do you think? I mean, what do you think is you don't have to lay out a regulatory plan or we should do XYZ?

But what would you support? Well, I'm not sure how much the government can actually do to regulate a lot of what's happening offshore. So I think that is problem number one. And number two, it's not even clear whether the CFTC has control or the SECC. Like, there's competition over who has jurisdiction over this space. And so there are just a lot of decisions that are going to have to be made. And are governments not terribly fluent in some of this, like, dense technology? So that's a challenge in its own right.

So I'm not terribly bullish on, like, next steps here, but there is going to be a user regulation, which is people are just not going to mess with this crap, right? And maybe that is where I am. Maybe that is one of the, one of the better outcomes. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, full disclosure. And I disclosed this on my site. I was not involved in any of the sort of the defy or C-fi stuff, however you want to define it, uh, personally at all. Again, like my interest is the product bit and where I hope this goes for crypto generally is, uh, I don't know the, I, I'm not super deep on like, Farcaster or whatever. But what I would, what I'm interested in is, I don't want Farcaster coins

for ownership. I want those for product purposes. And let's have normal shares for ownership. I think like I think the SEC, people in crypto hate the SEC. They take the current SEC chair. But I think this bit about like, I have a hard time seeing where coins aren't securities. Like the idea that if the goal is your, have a coin for usage, but that coin's also supposed to increase in value as the value of the service goes up. Like that's that sounds like a security to me, right? Like I mean, it's kind of in that perspective, it's like weird that you would use stock. Like imagine you can use Apple stock to use Apple services. It's like, oh, you get a month of I cloud if you contribute like one stock certificate, right? It doesn't make any sense. I think this

conflation has never made sense. And I think from my perspective, this might be a good thing from my view of crypto, which is I'm interested in it from a product perspective. And the financial aspects getting smushed is like, great. Let's get people who actually are interested in see this potential value here to work on that. But that's like that means that crypto is just a feature with other stuff. And I think that's probably where it will end up. It doesn't fit up to all the visions and grandeur of the space, you know, particularly like a year ago. But I think that's, that seems fine to me.

This conflation bit has always bugged me and now more than ever. Okay. So final thought before we. move on, applying my expertise as a normie. We've talked a lot about how AI is this new and exciting technology. And then by the time it's applied, you're not talking about AI. You're talking about algorithms or, you know, in a couple of years, you're just going to be talking about mid-jurney and how we get art for different articles and stuff. And I think some of that will probably be true on the product side and with blockchain. Like, blockchain,

is such an impenetrable concept to normal people. It can work if you take steps to just make it really user-friendly and remove it from some of the jargon that's thrown around by the blockchain evangelist. I'm curious what you think of that. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, this is where I go, just, I want to read the introduction for the docs for Farcaster.

It says, quote, Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network. It is an open protocol that. can support many clients just like email. Users will always have the freedom to move their social identity between applications and developers will always have the freedom to build applications with new features on the network. Doesn't say blockchain, right?

Like the idea, now, of course, they are creating an app. They're creating a user interface. They want to make it as easy to use as possible. And the idea should be you sign up and use Farcaster and you don't know that at the end of the day, your data and your social network is being written to a blockchain. Exactly. But another developer could come along and say, I don't like Farcaster.

I don't like the way they're managing their network. I'm going to build an alternative. And because it's on the blockchain, I instantly get that user's network, all their connections, all those sorts of things. And I can build my version. I think it's going to be better.

And I can try to win, win those folks over. And again, very much in line where I think your point is very well made, right? If your marketing involves the word blockchain, you're like it's a developer battle. It's a developer technology, right? Like, people don't need to know what language they're,

they're kosering. They don't need to know which database. Like at the end of the day, it's a database, right? Like, is this service using MySQL or is using Postgres? What, like, imagine if you went to, you came to passport, right? Or Cicheree. It's like, sign up for CERTECRI, which is written on Postgres. And it's like, what? What does that have to do as to decorate?

Exactly. I just want to read some content. Well, and look, the utility you're describing with Farcaster and blockchain more generally does make a ton of sense as everyone's life starts to exist at least 50-50 on the internet. And you have all sorts of personal information that it would be useful to port over whenever you want to switch service X and go to service Y, like all of that. seems like a good thing. And it's just going to be a question of making it user friendly and

bringing it to market in a coherent way for Normies. So I hope whoever goes forward, just ask me. And I could help guide you down that path. But it might not work. It just might not be possible for their, like maybe you always have to have some sort of centralized entity at the end of day. It's very possible. But you can at least, I mean, this is a, this is a challenge in general.

And this is where I want to hold myself accountable. The narrative of having a blockchain where you could have your data in one place and then it's accessible, you could take it somewhere else. It's very appealing. Just like the overall narrative of crypto about decentralization is very appealing. And there's a real sort of trade-off. I don't know what's not a trade-off. It gets you in trouble. Narrative can get you in trouble.

I think people can both underrate and overrate the power of narrative. at the end of the day, narrative is only useful to the extent it actually results in building something. And I mean, this is where, you know, just to sort of transition to Twitter, I think there's one of the issues is I've said on this podcast, I've said on other podcasts, I've said on Schegeri. Well, Twitter was not a very well-managed company. There's tons of low-hane fruit. They needed to cut employees, like just not even beyond servicing the debt, Twitter was going to do huge layoffs because. like it's it was just something that sort of needed to happen. But at the end of the day, like though this whole verification zoo,

the thing that has struck me is Elon Musk and David Sachs and folks talking about, oh, the only reason why media cared about this is sort of status and we're giving power to the people. I think that's something, there is some shred of truth there. I mean, I think for someone who's very popular, the people who actually need verification, probably don't care about verification, right? Right. But there is some aspect where you're just some small little journalist. No one knows who you are, but hey, you got a black journal. Like, that's pretty cool.

It's nice. And but this narrative took hold in their heads about the media, which again, I just spent 30 minutes criticizing the media. Like, I think that's a valid thing to do. But it became overwhelming in their heads where they're. making these very rapid, what's the, what's the pejorative term I'm looking for? Rash, very rash decisions about this without doing any thinking through it, right? It's like they were just as captured by the narrative they had in their heads about why verification exists.

Yeah. Yeah. And my defense of Elon Musk, we, like, we had that podcast in person, right? And we were sitting, you know, sitting on the couch talking about it. And I'm like, look, you have to look at him, you can look at him from a relative basis or an absolute basis. The relative amount of, you know, just on an absolute term of stuff he says, most of it's BS. A lot of nonsense, yes. If you look at it from an absolute basis, Tesla exists.

Space S exists. And, you know, and his role in that is very, very large. And if you, so from that, I will give him the benefit of the doubt for that reason. But those exist because they were built. There's something you, there's substantive things in the real world that exist. and if Musk is going to succeed with Twitter, and I've, I think, become fairly pessimistic. Lots of people are like, oh, look, the media is overstating it.

The media's anti-Musk, you know, they really care about Twitter. All that's true, but that is a narrative that is true that exists. The narrative has power, yeah. But I actually, I think people get too hung up on it. The way that Elon Musk proves people wrong about Twitter is by building a better Twitter. And too many of the decisions to date seem driven by proving his narratives right, as opposed to building a better Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, well, I look at it. And to the extent the narrative is driving away advertisers and making everyone unhappy and pessimistic about what's next for the company,

that then creates more urgency to seek out some of these quick fix solutions. And the way they've rolled out the verification stuff in particular has been an absolute mess. And it's tricky for me because a lot of the media coverage has framed everything in the most negative light possible and made this seem so much more dramatic and problematic than it necessarily was, depending on what exactly we're talking about here. But just in general, as a reflex, I got a little bit skeptical of the story that was being told about Twitter in the first few weeks of Musk's tenure. At the same time, I look up now, and I'm not sure Twitter has done anything that's worked over the last couple of weeks. And I do think they got weirdly preoccupied with the idea that people want to

level the playing field and have a blue check and just like the politics around all of that and the messaging was so strange and it turned Twitter into like a really chaotic landscape for the last 10 days or so. And so looking ahead, you mentioned that you're not bullish on what this turns into. Why is that? Because I am starting to feel the same way based solely on like the level of daily chaos and the lack of any sort of measurable progress in the last couple of weeks. Well, to must credit, like, it sounds stupid, but at least something's happening, right?

Yeah. There was a criticism that Twitter just couldn't do anything. But it's one of those things where you can be right in your critique, but it doesn't mean you agree with the solution that ended up presenting itself. And this is where, like I said on this podcast, I said on another podcast, Twitter needed someone to move fast and break things, right? And so it's very fair for people to turn around and say, look, look, look, what's going to do. on this is not working out well you were wrong and it's like well granted i'm trying like i'm trying to take a middle road here where yes stuff need to be broken but you didn't need to do this right and maybe the answer is like maybe maybe you're seeking perfection where perfection was not to be

found my pushback to that though is it seems pretty clear that you know must spent the last several months trying to fight to not buy twitter right that time could have been spent actually formulating a plan. And then coming in, I think there's a world where you come in, you do lay off half the company, you have a much better idea of what parts of the company you're going to focus on, which part's not you'll be doing due diligence. And you have a clear route for sort of, like, yes, I get the bit about throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks.

But ideally, you're just still sort of aiming for a certain part of the wall. Right. And what worries me, though, is the degree to which Musk and the people advising him seem so gripped by their narrative view of the world, right? This is where they have a view that Twitter is just, and this whole thing is about blue checks and, and, like, that's not the problem with Twitter. The problem with Twitter, like, I think, for example, verification could be, like, very useful. I think a subscription product could be useful. I think, like, what are the ironies is, I actually found some of the Twitter blue. features pretty useful, particularly the part where they absorb

Nuzzle, which was this service that that shows you all the links that people you followed were tweeting. But why do I have to have a check to access that, right? Like, why is that all getting completed together? I don't have a check. And as someone who unfortunately continues to use Twitter every waking day of my life and we'll have to continue using it for NBA news and tech news and China news and who knows what other.

podcast will launch over the next couple of months, but I'm going to be using it every day. And I would pay a premium for features that improve my experience and give me more ability to sort of calibrate what I'm seeing on there every day. And it just seems like they haven't really thrown their weight behind any of those ideas and instead chose to focus on the checks, which has turned into like a complete disaster. I'll read this note we got from Ryan. He said, you guys revisit that emailers take that paying for verification is like buying a backstage pass to a concert seems like that one may have been misjudged a bit and it's certainly not the way it played out over the last week or so i will say that email he's referencing what made sense to me is

the the emailer explained twitter's value as the one social media platform that allows you to interact with celebrities and public officials and intellectuals. Like, it is a meeting ground. I think Mark Cuban had a point on this one where he's like, look, Elon, like, you're focused on what people who want to write tweets, right? They want to be able to write tweets that Mark Cuban can see. But at the end of the day, most people on Twitter are consuming stuff. And like, what about my experience?

It's like there's this view of Twitter, it feels like, where. it's it's this status hungers games and that's absolutely a part of it it's certainly the part that Elon Musk is exposed to the most like like you know insults and bots but is that like is that all that the business is right there seems to be no we we were carping for a long time can we get a CEO or you know a director that uses Twitter and uses Twitter regularly and wow you know must use Twitter all the time and it was probably a fair criticism say like how does he use Twitter what value is he getting out of Twitter. Is Elon Musk getting information from Twitter? Yeah. That seems doubtful, right? And that is what worries me is his beliefs about what Twitter is and what Twitter

isn't doesn't seem aligned to what I think Twitter is or isn't. And, you know, this is what, again, I criticize people in Sam Bankman-Fried who's like, well, his political views align with me. So I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. in this case it's not that my political views aligned with Elon Musk I mean who knows is political views that are also all over the place I'm not going to let you make that mistake of a blanket statement of agreement with Elon no no no absolutely what I agreed with what I agreed with

is I agreed that Twitter needed changes yeah and that in that case I probably gave too much birth to Musk in general when it was sitting right there to say look has a guy who's been fighting to not acquire Twitter for the past few months and supposedly is also running these other companies, is he actually in any sort of position to come in and start making wild changes in the first week? And I should have said that.

I should have raised that criticism, but I fell into the exact same trap where, hey, I agree stuff needs to change on Twitter. So let's give this guy the benefit of the doubt when there were very valid reasons to question him earlier. And I take accountability for that. So what are the immediate challenges for Twitter going forward other than advertisers and no, that is the challenge. Okay.

No, the challenge is I put a link to something, you know, is this advertising thing? Is there an activist thing here? Like, like, because the, I've, one of my little hobby horses has been, uh, I said spot. One of the reason Spotify got themselves in trouble with the Joe Rogan thing is Spotify first like, hey, free speech. And I'm like, look, I, you know, I appreciate you, Scandinavian folks. But in the U.S., in the popular media, you're not getting a free pass for that. This is just a pure analysis, not saying good or bad. It used to be, you know, Twitter a decade ago, come and say, look, where the free speech

swing or the free speech party? And everyone's like, oh, back off. Like, once you drop that, it's like, no, you can't challenge a company because you're anti-free speech. That has flipped, right? Like, where just saying blanket free speech, that brings an assumption of your pro trolls, your pro, you know, people acting badly online, abuse, all these sorts of things. And so when I said that in context of Spotify, it was just analysis.

Like, look, if you're a tech CEO, you can't, this isn't a get out of jail free card. And so when I wrote about Elon Musk, a couple weeks ago, I'm like, look, this makes sense. I went to his thread that maybe advertisers were already pulling back before he even got there. And a few people did push back to me an email. And I think they were probably right. They look, no, like it, I don't know there's anything. And I actually heard reporting. from, I think, Peter Kafka that there wasn't some activist group.

Like, this really happened in the last couple of weeks where advertisers is like, holy cow, what's going on here? Yeah. You know, and the problem is no one needs Twitter. The advertisers don't need Twitter. It's a crappy advertising platform. And by the way, right now, ads are pretty cheap on meta. Ads are pretty cheap on Snap.

Right. Like, just let's back off. Let's see what happens. Let's let it settle. Let's Twitter ads somewhere else for now. The problem is that Twitter needs to pay. its bills. Like Twitter needs to pay its bills. They need to pay its debt. And like, I don't understand why if you're an advertiser, you would want to be on Twitter right now. Yeah. But I can definitely

understand why Twitter needs advertisers to be on Twitter right now. That's a big problem. Yeah. Well, and this is why the narrative is powerful. If you're in an ad supported field, it doesn't matter what you are. What you are perceived to be is more important to your bottom line. And what Twitter is perceived to be right now is like a place full of chaos. Yeah. I think that that's a, it's not just narrative though. And this is the point. I wrote about the advertising thing in context of narrative.

We're like, hey, the narrative is that Elon must be bad for things. Like, we're not in narrative land anymore. We're in factual land. It is factually bad over the last week to have been a brand on Twitter. Because why? Because people could come on with blue checks, imitate your brand and say stupid stuff, right? Like everyone's passing around the picture. of Mario giving people the finger, right?

Right. It's not even that. It's fact. It is fact, but also Twitter's brand right now has become so toxic that some of these companies can score points by saying we're taking our ads off Twitter and to your point. They're not really losing that much utility from the Twitter advertising business. So all around, things are not looking great about three weeks into Musk's time as, you know, Twitter owner and I don't know. Maybe they can pull off a miracle here, but I've been shocked by how incompetent this has looked at various points.

No, I have been, I've been to. And like I said, I'm going to write an article today. It's always risky to pre-announced it, but it should come up before this where I really want to go back and examine myself because I should have been, like you said, it was an easy thing to write to say, this guy is not. is going to come in is not going to have a plan. I should have stated that advertiser case more clearly, where if chaos happens,

they have no motivation to say XYZ. And I feel like I've been hanging out in narrative land a little bit too much personally. So what I want to write is like, look, one of my problems with Musk is he's too much in narrative land and not enough in building land. And that's,

and I recognize that. I'm going to critique that because I've been making the same mistake. And like, and I think the advertising thing is, is a perfect example. Like, it's just a fact that being an advertiser

on Twitter this week is bad. And like, yes, people are losing their minds and people go too far. But just because people flip out lose their minds doesn't mean there's not

directional truth there. And there is facts to sort of back it up. And yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think the,

the meta angle is kind of the, the other piece here. Did we, was like, if meta owned Twitter, like things, would be much better. That was going to be my final question, because this take is out there every day on my new

tech Twitter that I follow. And Matthew asks, wouldn't now be a great time for meta to go after Twitter and the more public slash broadcast social media market? There are some people who want meta to spin up its own alternative to Twitter. It sounds like Matthew is maybe asking whether they should just go by Twitter. But I mean, do you think that's at all feasible over the next couple of years? Like, I'm not sure whether the juice is worth the squeeze with meta. I mean, they're also spending like $12 to $15 billion a year on VR.

So who knows where their priorities are. But what's your reaction to that general talking point? So I don't think they'll ever be allowed to buy Twitter for antitrust reasons. Good points. Which is honestly a shame because meta owning Twitter would be great. Like Twitter, in Twitter, it would be valuable for harvesting signal. And then you could use that signal in, like, Instagram, right? So meta could use Twitter to know that Andrew is very interested in MBA and increasingly

interested in tech. And then in Instagram, when you're in a different frame of mind, it's a better medium for advertising, then they could monetize that signal by showing you ads that are interesting to you. It would be a very sort of natural pairing. I mean, way back when Twitter bought Mopopal, I was very excited about this idea. look, Twitter needs, Twitter is a, I've been arguing for years. Twitter is a very poor place to put advertisements, but it's a very great place to harvest

signal about what people are interested in. And so my hope with the Mopop acquisition, which is an ad network that was in apps, is that Twitter could get signal from Twitter and then show relevant ads in other apps. And that never really worked out well. I think Twitter is not very good at executing. And also now ATT would have killed that opportunity because it's a third, you know, third party sort of thing. But Facebook has the inventory with Instagram, right?

So that, but again, I don't think it would ever be allowed to happen. Now, what Facebook does have is they do have a network to get you bootstrapped, right? So you can start with knowing who you're following. But the question is where would that manifest they want to build up to an alternative? Like David, like, who do you want, you know, like, this is my whole point. No one wants to actually make another Twitter. Like, do you want responsibility for that mess? Like, do you really?

That said, there's one interesting bit about meta's layoffs. VR, lots of layoffs, Facebook, lots of layoffs, Instagram, lots of layoffs, WhatsApp, almost no layoffs. Now, WhatsApp is very interesting in general. They talked about on the last call that WhatsApp usage in the U.S. is growing a ton, which has always been the one market WhatsApp has not penetrated. You know, I think the group chat thing probably has something to do with it. It's by far the best group chat app, you know, and I think it's very compelling in that regard.

what's interesting about WhatsApp, at least in the U.S., is you open that and you spend all your time on the chat app. There is this status thing, right? Like, which I think in other countries is used more often. Like you can post stuff there. I think that would be an interesting play for meta is to real, it is like, again, WhatsApp is most, it's a textual app. That's like the sort of frame of mind.

It's a communication app. always wanted Twitter to shift from sort of like being the broadcast to having a really fleshed out DM product because that would be very valuable. Instead, DMs move to IMessage or move to WhatsApp where it might be. Could WhatsApp go from a really fleshed out DM product like direct message chat product to having a sort of public broadcast timeline bit? probably not, but if I were meta wanting to sort of capitalize on this, that's, that's where I would, what I would be thinking about. Very interesting. I will say for my part, I begrudgingly joined WhatsApp when you and I started working together and I did not expect to like it nearly as much as I have. It's a really

useful messaging service. I was on Signal as a lawyer, which itself is pretty useful. But WhatsApp, there's just a bunch of different things you can do on there that makes it really easy to create groups and communicate all day in a very clean sort of frictionless way. So I am all for any sort of expansion of that particular universe. It's one of the few tech products in modern life that is just like all good. Like I haven't experienced any downside from WhatsApp. Yeah, I mean, there has been a lot of controversies around misinformation, spreading on WhatsApp and it's because it's encrypted so like you can't you don't know what's

necessarily you know no one can see what's being seen XYZ and you know there's been like especially in India and Brazil there have been controversies about this so just to sort of you know disclose that and the thing to remember is you know Elon Musk keeps tweeting that Twitter usage is way up and I believe him like like you know that's there's a reason why people drive really slowly by a car crash because it's really

compelling and interesting what's going to be interesting is is he going to go on the you have to subscribe like like to access Twitter period and it's a lower price and you just have to pay like if he feels besieged by advertisers well the way

to not need advertisers is to pump up subscription volume but I don't think you're going to pump up subscriptions just by adding features like it you need to put an actual pay wall in front of it but then do you just kill Twitter by doing that right like so to the extent

an alternative takes off I think the order of operations here is, you know, I think Twitter has to sort of die. And as long as Twitter is around, it's going to retain the Twitter use cases that may involve, you know, the back end may go through restructuring, you know, bankruptcy. I don't know. We'll see. Well, and look, we're never signing up as a society for a second Twitter. It's just not going to happen. We all wound up on Twitter like the frog in boiling water and it's turned into when.

it's turned into and we've all come too far to turn back now. But if Twitter dies, no company is going to develop like an identical product that everyone feels great about using because we all will just use our time better in that scenario. Yeah, I mean, honestly, this is one of the things I've been thinking about. Like, have I been relatively cavalier about Twitter in part because I'm so, I think it's been bad, right? Like I think most of tech, like, regardless tech exists. I think, you know, first and foremost, that's my view of things.

We need to figure out a way forward. We're never going back. But I do think that Twitter, and I'm very conflicted because for me, it's the most valuable service. Like I get so much information from it. But there's, it's, Twitter's like crack cocaine or something, right? Or like meth, right? It is like a drug.

Yeah. And there's a couple, we'll put these in the show notes. There's a couple of good articles. one both by General Neer in the New York Times and another one in the Financial Times, really talking about what Twitter does to people and this very sort of like ironic detachment and sarcasm and mockery. Like that's the currency. That's the currency of the realm. And I think people who love Twitter like you, like me, it's also an unbelievable information source. It really is.

There's nothing that has ever compared to it. Like what you can get, what you can learn. I know all the Twitter search operators inside and out because I can unearth stuff like crazy. There's stuff on Twitter that is not anywhere else. And when I'm optimistic about someone taking over Twitter and fixing it, I'm thinking about that part of it and thinking like, you know, there's so much here to leverage and unlock and be cool to see someone do it. Unfortunately, I think Elon Musk is an adoptee of the other side of Twitter, the cynical part of Twitter. the hunger games part of Twitter. And that's, I think that's bad.

I think it's been bad for society. I do think it's been bad for the media. And it's bad for the media, not because the media has blue check marks. It's bad for the media because there's no allowance for questioning stuff, right? If you're on Twitter, you have to step to your position and you have to step to your position of being completely anti-Eon or completely pro-Eon or whatever the issue de Zure is. And I think that's bad. Like we've talked about the context of COVID, right? Like there's so much uncertainty and Twitter is terrible for uncertainty.

I would say it's not correct to say there's no allowance for questioning stuff. But for most people, the potential costs of that questioning outweigh any potential benefits. And so the public square tends to take on a bunch of uniform opinions and it just becomes sort of exhausting. And there's less diversity of opinion and, and, thought. And I mean, you go back to like the blogosphere in 2008 versus where we are now. There were so many more perspectives expressed throughout media than what we have now. And I do think Twitter and that sort of echo chamber plays a role in catalyzing that uniformity. Yeah. And this is another reason why I need to do some self-reflection because it always

bothered me that Musk talked about Twitter as the town square. It's like, no. that's the internet, right? The internet is what gives everyone a voice. Twitter is a service on the internet. And to say that Twitter is the only place you can have a voice is like people saying that, you know, company XYZ is a monopolist because you have, you like, that's where customers are. No, like, it's not, you can get your voice out there through ways other than Twitter. Like I don't tweet about tech stuff basically hardly ever, but I still get my voice out there

about tech stuff via my site, via my podcast, because it's the internet. You can hang out a single. People can type a URL to the browser and they can go somewhere else. Just like, like now, is it the case that Twitter is dominant if you want more reach, if you want more sort of like retweets and like, can you have more influence potentially if you're, if you're putting that on Twitter? That's definitely, that's probable. I would say that that's probably the case.

I decided it's not worth it for me from a mental health perspective. And I don't think it's worth it for me. from a business perspective. Like, why would I give away my stuff on Twitter? When I could charge for it, you know, somewhere else. But he has that same mindset that I push back on, on some of the sort of antitrust folks that are like, no, you know, Google is the only place.

Well, no, it's not the only place. Are they dominant? Yes. But you need to understand that dominance comes from user choice, not from them controlling, you know, the internet wires, like a cable company. And saying Twitter is the town square, that was a red flag that I missed.

Like that's, I mean, one of those things, it kind of occurred to me, but I should have, I should have been, I should have jumped on that sooner. Well, a lot of challenges lay ahead for Elon Musk. I'm rooting for a WhatsApp centric future, even though you roasted me a week ago for being on WhatsApp for six months and still not having a profile picture. Not clear to me why anyone needs a profile picture on WhatsApp, but we can address that. Do you have a profile? I mean, oh, you do have one on Twitter? So I guess, uh, exactly. Look, we'll tackle this in a future episode.

We've already gone long. Uh, I hope everyone enjoyed the meandering conversation through two ongoing disasters between Twitter and FTX. And we got a lot of questions that will hit later in the week. But for now, Ben, um, I'm sorry about the Red Bull loss tonight, but the first Mercedes victory of the season. The first time God saved the king has ever. been played on an F1 podium. What a day. What a weekend in Brazil. So I hope you go back and watch

some highlights and just savor everything we got to experience with the Brazilian Grand Prix. Yeah. Well, I don't want to run this episode off a track. So I don't leave it at that. Again, you need the video. A lot of disgust in Ben's eyes there. All right. We'll be back later this week.