Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Friday 03.26 Clubhouse Room

Episode Date: March 27, 2021

So, as I said, this is one of the clubhouse rooms we did this week. In fact, it’s the one from last night. Chris convinced me to split the two rooms into two episodes, so I’m releasing this one, from Friday first, and tomorrow I’ll post the one we did Monday night. Topics for this episode: Slack getting into social audio, Microsoft buying Discord, what the heck is BitClout! The great Brady Dale @BradyDale from Coindesk helped us out with that. And more explication of my rant concerning the whole Medium situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. As I said, this is one of the clubhouse rooms that we did this week. In fact, it's the one from last night. What happened is Chris convinced me that I should split the two rooms into their own individual episodes. So I'm releasing this one from Friday first. And tomorrow I'll post the one we did last Monday night. Topics for this episode include Slack getting into social audio, Microsoft, maybe buying Discord and why, what the heck is BitCloud? The great Bradydale from Coin Desk helped us with that one. And more explication of my rant concerning the whole

medium situation. I'm guessing you heard nothing. It's a professional outfit, everybody. Just spare with us. It'll be great as it happens. Oh, I have to do the tweet too also. I'd be like, hey, well, actually, once you get your shit together, Then I'll tweet it out. I got to figure out why that's not working. All right, here's what let's do. While I'm thinking about this, let's,

screw it. Chris, the first thing you want to talk about is... Slack. Yeah. And Slack is having, in theory, a better beta than this. but it's not just that they want to do rooms like Clubhouse

wait you want me to introduce the show I have to introduce the show oh yeah go ahead well I'm gonna tweet it we're gonna do live I'm just gonna say this is happening now that's what I'm gonna say in my tweet this is happening now okay okay well we're just gonna go we're gonna do it fucking live and we may or may not end up getting a recording out of this or not which I forgot oh the recording is happening that's The one thing that I know is working.

So we're just going to have clips. All right, well, we just talk about it. Yeah. And if you have the script, you know, if you want to, you know, I got it. I got it. I got it. You can do that too. Yeah.

Well, anyways, welcome everybody. Today is Friday. And we are here for the tech meme Ryan Home Experience, which you are getting a very raw, uncut version where Brian and I are mostly just shooting the shit about today's top tech headlines, which typically he is covering in his podcast, which of course, you can kind of follow on techmune.com or you can go to tech.com. You can go to tech.supercast.com subscribe, yada, yada. Basically, Brian picks, I think it's, I don't know, five to seven segments and talks about them kind of like at a high level in terms

of what the coverage is, and we go deeper in terms of what these things mean and what's going on with them. We're hoping today to actually, and let's see, I think we'll probably maybe the midway will bring Brady up. Does that sound about right to talk about BitClout? Yeah, if he's willing, if he's willing, if he's willing. If he's willing, yeah. So we might be getting into that in a little bit. But today's general topics, I'll sort of give you like the overview and then Brian kind of recap, you know, we'll go into it.

I might read it live at this point. I know, well, that's what I'm thinking. Like, maybe that's going to be, you know. I got the script up, yeah. All right. Well, okay, so then why don't we just try that? So today I will remind you guys that this is just a big experiment to try to tease out. this interesting dynamic between pre-recorded audio, live audio, conversations, interactivity,

the whole, the whole gamut. And so typically what we'll do is we'll take the clips from the podcast and then we'll play those live and then we'll sort of go into a commentary. The way I think about it is kind of like blog pose, like audio blogs, where the blog is kind of a snippet or segment of the podcast and then we sort of banter and have a conversation about it. But since we can't figure out the recording today, fuck it, we'll do it live and Brian's actually going to just read the segments that he does on his show and we'll go from there. So you want to start with Slack? Yes.

And again, the recording is working well. It's the clips that are not working about. So I'm going to do the clips. So this would have been the story number three from the show today, which is that. Last night on Josh Constine's Clubhouse room, Crespe Club, Stuart Butterfield was on there and he said that number one, Slack would introduce

audio messaging and a clubhouse like feature that would allow users to drop into the room without an invitation. So what I said on the show today was clubhouse features sound completely obvious to me in terms of if you're a workplace chat sort of thing.

It's like you're, hey, let's grab this meeting room over here and let's talk about X, Y, and Z. It's the sort of jump-in sort of obvious collaboration tool that when we've talked about on the show before, could Clubhouse and Audio Rooms be sort of a table stakes for things that any sort of platform could have eventually? This makes a ton of sense to me. the other thing that Stuart said was that Slack was going to get finally stories. I don't know what took them so long, seeing as how, again, these are table stakes for everyone to have stories.

And I don't know. It was interesting that that happened on Clubhouse last night with Josh's show, where apparently his new boss, Brett Taylor at Salesforce, didn't know that this was a product. It was coming down the road. But so, yes, Chris, what do you think about Slack getting clubhouse features? And also, I didn't even mention, like, sort of telegram features where you could, like, just leave, I guess, away messages and things like that.

Oh, interesting. Wait, are you saying that Slack is getting telegram features? I'm confused. There's a whole plot of things that are happening here. Yeah, help me on. Yes. The original function would be, Butterfield said that. feature for leaving audio messages similar to a function available in messaging apps like

Telegram is currently available as a beta test. Then he said that Slack would soon offer the audio drop-in clubhouse feature and coming soon would be the stories feature. Okay. So I take it you didn't actually listen to the show, right? No, I did not. Okay, I actually did. So I did a different type of the homework for this for the show today. And actually, you know, I got to say, I was, I was very impressed. Like, there was a lot of really good stuff in that episode, um, in the press club show. And I mean, the content, you know, in and of itself, just about remote work. I mean, Matt Mullenweg was in there. Um, Zanep was in there. There was a bunch of folks, you know, who were just kind of like talking about the future of work and remote work,

distributed work, what works, what doesn't, you know, are things going back to the way that they were, are, you know, and just lots of like really, really good stuff from people who are on the cusp of bringing people back. And I think the thing that was, I'll just say as a meta commentary about that conversation, the thing that I don't think quite had registered for me yet, even though we're how many, you know, tens of millions of doses into like the vaccine now, is that Salesforce is planning on opening up their offices, like, relatively soon. They may be back at 10% capacity, but, The reality is people are going back to, or at least we'll have the option to go back, sooner than I really kind of felt emotionally prepared for the idea of, you know,

getting back on that highway, you know, that with all the congestion and all the rest. And I've been trying to keep track of that. Like there's been more news today in terms of, I think, Facebook is coming back to a 10% sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. But, right, and it was Microsoft the day before. So, like, yes, it's, you know, it's fun to keep track of these things because it's like, it's like when you see,

um, on Twitter or on whatever message app, like your friends get, announcing that they've gotten a jab. It's sort of like, even if you haven't gotten one, you're like, all right,

it's coming. It's coming. Yep. Yep. Yeah, exactly. So like I think that that was one of the things that was a little bit more, I don't know,

just like, oh, right. Like, you know, like, you know, we're going to be back in this other world very quickly. and there's going to be a whole lot to almost catch up on, and it's going to be a little bit confusing for a little while,

but we are at least, you know, like we used to track the openings and closings of Apple stores as like the bellwether of like how the pandemic was going. And I feel like we're now moving beyond that. And I suppose I can partially say that since I did travel to, you know, Miami. And I was there before the spring break riots broke out. And I sort of like saw what, you know, the shit show was that was happening. But clearly people are like, I'm done with this.

I'm moving on. Like, I don't care about this fucking virus. Like, you know, whatever. And so the fact that, I don't know, all these things are lining up is very interesting. But all of this is in the context of trying to assess what behaviors, technologies, advances are going to stick around, what are going to continue to be built out, what are going to be added to these tools of remote work. And so what Stewart was saying, you know, and I don't know, he has this, what feels like this great sort of just pragmatic wisdom. in the way that he talks about product, and I guess it's funny

because I sort of tweeted about this feature when I saw the mention of it this morning where Slack's version of Clubhouse should be called All Hands because it feels as though the future of so many different companies will be or will have clubhouse style interactions and dynamics

for bringing people together in these remote environments. And so if people are akin to using Zoom and it's a little bit more ritualistic. It feels like some of the things that they were saying was that one that when they've done some surveys with Salesforce employees in particular, there seems to be a preference for being in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays. So Wednesday may be the new Monday, essentially is what they were saying, which I think is an interesting thought.

The other thing that Brett was saying was that there needs to be more intentionality and thought given to virtual meetings or remote meetings. Specifically, and this was something I hadn't heard before, but it seems like maybe it might become a thing, which is whether it's a, what do you say, like one camera or no cameras or multi-camera meeting? In other words, there may be, you know, we used to do phone calls, of course, for meetings, but in this new world, for some people, like having the camera on, it's just like a no-go, you know, whether they've got kids at home, you know, with school or like whatever it is, you know, the return to some sort of normalcy is going to be probably in fits and starts and it's going to not be, you know, the future is here just not

distributed evenly yet. That's going to happen, I think, post-pandemic. And so there will be people who go back to the office or go back to work, and you will have to be very intentional about the time that you schedule with the people around you and the people that you work with to say, what are your needs and what are your capabilities. And in this meeting that I want to hold, I can't just make an assumption or impose what most. my preferences are on this meeting, I actually kind of need to get a sense for the people who are there and what they're able to provide. So that level of thoughtfulness is going to require software, I think, to facilitate that. And so you'll see new types of meetings and emergent

phenomenon occur so that there isn't this. What I'd be worried about is that people fall out of step or out of line with their teammates because they're not able to be as online or as available as other people are, whether that's in the office or not, whether it's asynchronous or not. And so the fact that Slack is moving in this direction to provide for people to provide more, you know, the way that I used to think about this, the way I used to talk about it, was continuous partial attention. And in a similar way, we're moving into a world of sort of continuous partial presence. And so Stories is a way for colleagues to kind of keep each other up to date in terms of what

they're doing or what's going on. So, for example, you know, on a Friday afternoon, your boss wants everyone. to come and meet up or whatever, but you just saw this morning that one of your colleagues decided to take the day off and go to the lake with the kids and they posted up to their stories. That becomes a signifier that allows you to say, actually, boss, like, it doesn't make sense for us to meet because one of our core teammates has decided to go do something else. So that type of communication becomes useful. This is why you're the product guy.

Because all I see is stories and I'm like, yeah, that's dumb. Everyone's doing stories. but right. That makes so much sense to me. And also, all of the products that they had just announced in what you're just saying make so much sense to me in terms of like being the distributed workforce sort of thing. Yeah, and I think like what I took away from, you know, Stuart talking about clubhouse style products or features rather showing up in Slack, you know, is that we need to think

differently about kind of like what the space of clubhouse is. and also what the competition around formats is. I think there was a time when you could get sort of upset with Instagram implementing stories from Snap and kind of be like, oh, they're stealing like, you know, their mojo and like Snap should be the only one that can like have that format. And what I think has happened is that we've moved beyond that point. It's sort of like, you know, if you're an office, maybe you have A14 and A11 and 8.5 by 11 paper. And it's just like, whatever. It's a bunch of different cuts of the same basic source material. but these things are used for slightly different purposes,

and people learn to use those different formats for slightly different applications. And it doesn't really make sense anymore if these social platforms become places that people hang out and they spend their time to be so covetous of these slight variations in interfaces. I mean, I think it's perfectly fine and reasonable to give credit where credit to do

in terms of evolving sort of paradigms and patterns in these spaces. but to suggest that Slack is merely copying Clubhouse, I think undermines the amount of thought that Slack is actually going to have to put into this product to adapt it to a more professional context and environment. Right? Yeah. So I guess like, and I suppose I'm also responding to your point about,

oh, like, you know, Slack adding stories that's dumb. I think there are plenty of dumb implementations of stories without a doubt. You know, I think LinkedIn is probably one of the more, I don't know, just obnoxious places for stories to exist because the interaction between people who are publishing, you know, it's largely a self-promotional, I'm a guru, I'm a ninja kind of environment versus smaller teams where there's a need to kind of stay in touch with each other. And the story's format, because it was an expiring format as opposed to a feed-based format where there is persistence, was all about staying in the moment, staying on the edge of what's

about to happen, and keeping in touch with a smaller group of people. To me, that's what the germ or like the kind of concept of the stories format really was on Snap. And that's why Instagram had to adopt that format because Instagram became, you know, what you did two or three days ago, you know, in your finally posed, you know, gallery and, you know, your life's trophies. And it was losing the resonance of, you know, raw, unvarnished, authentic content. And so that's why they had to go in that direction. So again, like what I think is so interesting about Slack moving away from everything being about text.

I mean, even their other feature that they just launched, you know, somewhat haphazardly for emailing, I'm using the word email, which I'm sure they would hate, but like emailing between different Slack instances, you know, is almost like a pragmatic response that just says, you know what, we're just going to like open up the floodgates and allow people to communicate using a bunch of different formats. and we're going to learn from the best and adopt the ones that work and adapt them to this distributed work context. That's what I think is actually happening. I'm going to do a really gross seg here because I want to do our next segment just so we can get to it quick

and also because I want to see if we can get the audio in right here. So hopefully this will be segment to Microsoft buying Discord, which is another strategy play. Here we go. Nope. Sounds like those segments are not working. But I think, Brian, you're going to have to read this one live.

Come back, Brian. Come back. We need you. Okay. You're back. That did not work. That did not work. Wait.

All right. I just heard myself. Oh, well, I don't think it's working. You know what? You should just read it. Just read it. Let's do this one live today. Well, this is Tuesday.

So, Tuesday would be talking about how, what are we talking about? Well, we're talking about Microsoft possibly acquiring Discord. There was a specific part, though, I believe this was in today's clip, about how Sacha has the view of the future. I thought that part was really useful, if you can find that part. Yes. Okay, so I'm for me again real quick. Yes, because it's from the long reads from today, which is why I'm looking for it.

So, all right. In theory, because the story of Microsoft potentially acquiring Discord came up earlier in the weekend. We're like, what? And then there's been more reporting on it that is like, this could be serious. And then the Bloomberg piece- It seems like it's only amplified. It's become more serious. Exactly.

And so here's the Bloomberg piece, and I'm going to quote from it exactly. The answer in, why would Microsoft do this is the question. The answer in Chief Executive Officer Sachin Adel as might as clear, and this is quoting Sachin, creation, creation, which to me sounds like developers, developers, developers, the next 10 years, this is quoting Sacha again, is going to be as much about creation as it is about consumption and about the community around it, so it's not creating a loan. If the last 10 years have been about consumption, we're shopping more, we're browsing more, we're binging more.

There is creation behind every one of those, but I see that phenomenon being much more democratized, end quote. And so they continue for Nadella. The next decade of growth in cloud computing and internet use will be defined not by people watching and buying, but by those who are generating and exchanging their own content in different thriving groups. Nadella is eager to control some of the means of production, end quote.

That's as good as playing a clip. Honestly, I think you should just do that for the rest of the show. Yeah, for sure. You're more reliable than the technology is at this point. However, I thought that clip was so, I don't know, there was like something deep in that. It's like one of those moments where you realize,

okay, now what has been going on for some period of time with Microsoft is starting to really add up and make sense. Now, I don't know if Sacha has like, you know, a 10 or a 20 year sort of plan or vision, but I do remember a couple years ago where Microsoft had, you know, one of those Nokia style, you know, future vision, like types of things or whatever. And I'm sure the HoloLens was in there and a bunch of weird, esoteric, you know, products that don't really make sense for normal people. But in this case, I think that's one of my that's one of my favorite um

um uh uh uh uh i went to the last one where it was balmer where it was

it was the era when um what was the it was the hollands era or it was the era after yeah and um it was all about how um it was going to be like that sort of virtual reality stuff and things like that

and um uh i'm i'm sorry I'm looking for the tweet but like since Since Satcha took over Microsoft, they're up. It's 500%. Damn. It's almost 600%, and I can't find the tweet,

but it is more than 500%. I trust me. Go on. Wow. Okay. Yes. Well, so I, there was a period, you know, probably early in, you know, Sacha's tenure where I was skeptical about Microsoft future.

I certainly feel like I battled Microsoft in like the mid-aughts. with the launch of Firefox and Microsoft was definitely the evil kind of enemy and I don't know, Sacha, just anyways, the point about acquiring Discord and also their efforts to acquire Pinterest and their efforts, they acquired Bethesda, which is probably different, that's the whole Xbox thing, but the point about groups and the point about groups adjacent to Microsoft teams and the point about the future of work and I would say, you know, young people in particular and digital natives. All of that implies a need to win in curry favor

and to be where that generation lives and hangs out. So Discord is that place. Discord is, oh, GitHub is probably that, okay, so I would say if you put together GitHub, Discord, and Pinterest, and you kind of put them in a blender and put, I don't know, you don't flambay in a blender, but imagine like, you know, something like that. And you mix these things all up together.

you start to have the contours of an interesting, like, strategy around building, creating, and then curating in small groups of sort of conversational, like, interactions. And really, I mean, I guess it's not too similar from like the Facebook playbook, where it's like you're buying attention, you're buying activity, you're buying the real estate that people are spending their time in. And that is unusual for Microsoft, which, you know, used to, I think, sort of be more on the, we're going to buy basic technology. But instead they're buying whole parcels of land, you know, with these ant colonies of humans,

you know, built in them where there's all sorts of behavior and activities that are going on. And they're creating a whole new, I don't know, like Microsoft land that I guess if I just like, you know, sort of zoom out seems way more smart than anything that Google has been doing lately. And I know I'm sort of going out of a left field thinking of like Google here. But having worked on Google's social products, I'm kind of wondering, like, where is Google in the social world in the future? Well, that's interesting that you say that because I'm assuming you heard me question.

I had heard from people that the reason that Google is even doing cloud gaming is to justify their investment in cloud computing, which they're behind on. And I did an open ask this week for people to enlighten me in terms of the, economics of that. But also at the same time, you don't know. You don't know? You don't have any insight on that at all? No, no, no. Sorry. Let me, let me clarify your point and then refute your point, which is, okay, go ahead, go ahead. That I do believe, okay, so there are two, two sets of behaviors that I think you can immediately sort of tie back to economic realities or necessities. one is that Apple being in the silicon business

means that Apple needs to have more products that consume more of Apple Silicon in order for their unit price to go down, right? So Apple needs to figure out how to build more and more products that have more and more CPUs in them that are made by Apple, okay? Like strategically put.

In a similar way, Tesla needs to eventually have more products that require more batteries because of all their battery tech. they need to basically have, you know, their unit price go down. Just like Google sort of like, you know, needs more websites to add on Google Analytics, you know, so they can run, you know, so they can have a better view of like the advertising world and they can have a better auction for that. So once these companies dig into a certain technology stack, then they need to find customers for that.

And the point that you're making about the Google Cloud or Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Cloud and Azure Services, which I think was the point that you were making, is a reasonable one. In other words, Microsoft needs to find more customers to put Azure on. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's true from, again,

they can reduce their costs by having more people taking advantage of it. But if you've bought the company, they're not really paying for Azure, right? Because they're you. So that doesn't really seem to make that much sense to me. Can I tell you what the smart people... Yes, please.

That are smarter than me. That reached out to me after I said that. was that, like, Brian, you're underestimating how much it is when you, uh, you're at a conference or you're the salesperson that shows up to a company that can have this as like a sales, like, look, we're doing this with X, Y, and Z. Right. And so that what, where I was saying this is, you need these number of bites going through to justify your investment on it. They're like, that's not it at all. It's more like this is IBM showing up. at an old school company and being like, look, we did this for this and this and this,

and we can do this for you too. And that is as valuable as anything else. So basically the concept there is that these are marquee products that essentially demonstrate the power of the Microsoft Cloud and prove... And that's enough for anyone. Okay. That's interesting. Since I don't work in software sales, I don't have an intuitive vibe about that. But here's the reason, because it seems to me that I could justify

or come up with sort of like a strategy for Microsoft's future when it comes to, you know, whether it's building out the future of, you know, Bing, let's say, or advertising services or subscription services by buying up these really valuable properties. And again, you know, putting Pinterest in that, you know,

a place, GitHub. Like, I thought it was very interesting, you know, when GitHub ended up with Microsoft. Like, that was something I never, saw coming. I mean, first of all, given that Microsoft shuttle over open source for, you know, a generation, and then clearly Sotcha comes in and says, it's not about Microsoft, it's not about

open source, it's about how software gets built, and it's about buying the place where engineers and developers spend their time. And maybe there's, you know, some, I don't know, some splash that occurs onto the Azure, you know, marketing side, but it just

seemed like Microsoft wanted to be at the center of what was going on there and to buy the team that had built that thing up. Right. And if we're taking such as word, that is creators. Yep. That is literally what I just quoted from. Right, right, exactly. Like, I can see that. I can see that.

Like, that's strategically. Markerberg says the same thing, right? The future of Facebook is about small groups. And I just think that it's really about, I don't know, being the place, you know, owning a lot of that stuff. And so, again, just to be clear what Brian and I are talking about, we're trying to sort of read the T leaves on why Microsoft would want to buy Discord, why Discord would be relevant for their long-term strategy and what it would mean, well, I mean, I can't even say what it would mean for Discord, but trying to understand whether the motivation for this is one that relates to

Azure services or whether it really relates to a product strategy around activity and around social and around being relevant, frankly, in building software for people who are spending more and more their time in virtual environments, right? Like they couldn't buy Slack. Slack was clearly off the table, even though I think Microsoft might have tried to buy them too. And so they took a run at Pinterest, yes. Yeah, well, so, but like in terms of these group, you know, chat contexts, you know, that have huge amounts of engagement, Twitch is off the table because Amazon owns it, right?

And so if Microsoft wants that, you know, they have teams, but teams is largely an enterprise product. you know, they want to go, I don't know, it's not really down market, but more towards the consumer space. And so anyways, that would be interesting. If Discord rebuffs them, I'm not sure exactly what that one of, I don't know if they'll be, this is one of those moments for you, right, where it's like, this is like their Snapchat moment, where they decide not to get bought out by the behemoth, and they stay independent and do their own thing. And frankly, before we leave this, I think I said this, when I introduced the idea earlier this week, doesn't $10 billion to you, given the clubhouse moment, given the fact that audio is one of the hot things right now,

there's no way $10 billion is going to be enough. Don't you think? Like, I think I said something along the lines of like, if they could go public right now, they'd probably go public at $30 billion or something. What do you think about that? Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. I mean, even, you know, to talk about like numbers at that scale is kind of ridiculous. But on the other hand, yes, that is where things are.

And it turns out it's really hard to build things that have value, that have engagement, that are sustainable. And you've got to like pay back the investors and like all that stuff. So there's sort of a cascade of pressures that would suggest that Discord should stay private, or not private, but not be bought out. However, the one or one of the things that might motivate them to do so, which I think is very similar to what, you know, the calculation that Mikey and Kevin made with Instagram was, look, like, do we really want to build out all the same infrastructure that Facebook already has,

or do we want to focus on products and just make use of Facebook's global infrastructure so we can move faster? And from a Discord perspective, they can be like, here's how much it's going to cost to continue to run our services. And I don't know if Discord is built on AWS or on Azure already, but whatever they're built on, I'm sure their bills are pretty expensive. And so they've got to look at, you know, the technology costs of building their own, you know, cloud global infrastructure or partnering with or being acquired by one of the big cloud providers. So that may be a piece of this, especially, you know, depending on what discord, actually, you know what? One thing that I'll point out that sort of just reminded me of something is

the way in which Discord has tried to pivot itself towards broader community appeal. I think if you go to Discord.com slash communities or something, they've really tried to move away from it. I don't think they've done it very successfully, from a marketing perspective, to move towards people using Discord for all sorts of communities. It's kind of like they want to be the live chat conversation platform for what Reddit sort of could become, you know, if it moved away from its asynchronous roots. And that, to me, again, speaks to exactly Satch's vision for the future. And so if they're aligned in that, then it would kind of just make sense economically,

strategically, product-wise, for Discord to take the buyout and just like, you know, sprint ahead. Chris, do you want to reset a little bit, not to use that term, but I'd like to do the Big Cloud next, but just reset if he's willing. And I can set it up. But reset and, yes. Okay, well, so again, it is Friday for all of you have lost track of time. but this is the TechMeme Ride Home experience where Brian and I basically go through a number of the stories that he is covered on his podcast, the TechMeme Ride Home Show, which is a daily podcast covering the most interesting tech news of the day.

We pick a few of the stories that he covered, and then we go real deep and try to put these things into both historical context, product context, and just kind of make sense of what's going on beyond what you're reading in the headlines. And so so far today we've covered Slack and some of their adoption of social audio features. We've just talked about Discord, possibly being acquired by Microsoft. And now we're going to talk about BitClout. And thankfully, Brady is up here. And Brady, Brady, I'm going to introduce it, so you don't have to introduce it. Are you willing to talk about this? Yeah, sure.

Let's do it. Okay. Okay. So I actually didn't do BitClout the whole week. and then I did it as a weekend long read and I referenced something from Axios, something from TechCrunch, but then also a piece of yours was referenced. So I'm going to read a little bit from the Axios piece. And then if Chris wants to talk about it first, because I believe he's already on there.

And now apparently I'm on there too. I bought some of me today. Oh, and I bought some of you. I own you. You ready? You ready? Okay. Let's do it.

this is quoting from Axios. All right, BitClout takes the profiles of popular Twitter personalities and ascribes a dollar value to their output. Participants can then buy and sell various creator coins with Bitcoin and ideally profit. And with Bitcoin, we should come back to that because you can only put it in, can't get it out. At the top of the pack is Elon Musk. Run in the mill, crypto influencer is fetching around $500. is Elon Musk is commanding $70,000 per token. So essentially, you're ascribing a token to each person.

And then it's, we should point out, hugely controversial because certain people are like, well, no one gave anyone permission to put me or Chris or Brady on the blockchain. And let me kick it to Chris first. Because you and I have, like we've done NFTs and stuff together. When did you get on this? Because you didn't tell me about it. I think I did, but it was probably one of the things that was like, oh, there's Messina again, you know, doing whatever.

I, God, how did I find out about it? You know, it's been such a weird journey that, and I was traveling this last week, that there were just like moments where I'd kind of like see something happen or see something on Twitter and then I'd kind of like jump over to like, and it's at bitcloud.com. And in the beginning, like in the early, early part, you'd go and there was just this like red, or sorry, there was a black kind of page, like all black, and then like this cryptic red countdown or something and text.

And then like you had to get like the password from someone. It was all super sketched. But on the other hand, I was like, hey, you know what? Like here's an opportunity to like to get in this thing and to figure out what it is. And the concept is kind of curious. to me. And so the whole, I think, idea and why I was, I don't know, why I'm excited by, or at least excited isn't the right word. There's some sort of exacerbation or perturbation. How about that? I'm perturbed. I'm perturbed by it in some ways. It could be positive or negative. I don't know.

I'm just affected. And it's that, you know, given that the NFT hype is, you know, still ongoing. And there's some really interesting things and dynamics that are happening there. around ascribing artificial scarcity to the digital marketplace. Now we're financializing humans. And of course, we have a horrible history of that long term. But nonetheless, there are a number of efforts that have come out where you can kind of invest in someone's future potential. There are schools, I think, I don't know if it's alt school or one of them,

where essentially they'll give you a free education, but then they take 10% of your earnings for life or whatever. Is that Lambda? Lambda? Thank you. Yes, exactly. So there are some ideas around financializing people and their future potential, but nothing that is so kind of on the nose and so straightforward.

And the other thing about it, of course, is just the story is, God, it's weird. And I'm sure, you know, Brady can dig into this a little bit more and help us understand this. But, you know, you've got a bunch of pretty prominent VCs, you know, who are either in the crypto space or crypto adjacent. I mean, even Sequoia supposedly has invested in this. And I don't know if any of this has been confirmed. but there's a slide deck.

Andresen's crypto. Yeah, listen. Mike Garrington, you know, like, yeah, exactly. So there's a bunch of folks who are in this. But it's not launched yet. It's supposed to launch this coming Tuesday. And again, you can buy, so the thing that's most interesting about it is that if you get in early, you can buy these crater coins, and there's only a certain number that are minted,

and then the price basically goes up on a bond curve. And so if you buy someone early, and then they become, famous later on, then you've actually potentially made a bunch of money because their coins become more in demand, the more successful or prominent they become. And Brady, I want us both to shut up, Brady, because I feel like you're more perturbed than most. So please, Brady, go ahead. Well, a tiny point of clarification is to brag for for CoinDask. I'm pretty sure the Axios story that you write is actually buy CoinDest staff or Zach Seward. So we also do that one. Because we've been doing some, uh,

We've been doing some content partnerships with them. It's been cool. But, yeah, yeah. So my coworker there. But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think you guys captured it pretty well. I think one thing that maybe would be worth clarifying is that like, so it's not like everybody in the world got automatically put on to Clubhouse.

They say it was the 15,000 largest accounts on Twitter. But that definitely isn't quite. You mean Clubhouse or you mean Bit Cloud? Sorry, Bit Cloud. Sorry. It definitely wasn't everybody, you know, it wasn't everyone in the world. They said they put on like roughly 15,000 people and it was the biggest accounts on Twitter is what they said to me. But it definitely wasn't the biggest, just the biggest, right?

I mean, it definitely was the biggest to some degree. But it wasn't just the biggest. There were some other targeting that happened because like I'm on there and I'm not in the top 15,000 Twitter accounts. I'm in, I'm in crypto Twitter, right? So they clearly like targeted like certain groups. And I think in particular crypto Twitter. And so the step that is worth noting here, which is both kind of nice but also sort of creepy is if you were in that group,

you got some of your own token set aside. So like if I'm just random Joe Blow and I go and create a BitCloud account, I have to buy my own token if I believe I'm going to be the next Elon Musk and I want a piece of myself going forward. I got to buy some BitCloud and then buy my own. I signed up today and I don't know if I bought some of my own, but I had to buy some BitCloud. Right. I had to even be live. Right. So you're going to buy some Bitcoin to even exist. And then you've got to pay some BitCloud to have any of your token. But like since I was preloaded, there's a set aside for me if I just verify, right? Which is obviously like a growth hacking thing. But it's just like it's like both nice that like I already have some set aside of my own that I have to pay for, but also feels weird. And also like if they wanted to, I think the other thing probably that some of the people who are objecting to about it are like, are like,

Like, if you wanted to reserve accounts of folks you wanted to be there, you could do that without, like, creating a profile page that scraped all their stuff of a Twitter. It makes it look like they're already there. You know, right? So, like, I think that's the other thing that really bothered people. Like, when I talked to the creator of it, this guy goes by Diamond Hands, you know, he was just like, how do you think this is going to go? And I was honest. I was just like, the launch feels weird. I mean, you guys just did some weird things in the launch, which I feel like it kind of reminds, if you guys remember Google Buzz.

Remember how Google Buzz came out and sort of appeared everybody's inboxes and revealed too much information about everybody and everyone felt weird about it. Chris was there. It was never able to get over that, right? It was its first moment kind of colored the whole thing. I actually, Chris, I was actually very into Google Buzz the time. I wasn't bothered. I thought it was great. Well, you probably understood it, though.

And the perception was the problem, which is similar to what you're saying now. And like, I think maybe this is why I'm perturbed in sort of just a shook. shaken kind of way, I don't know exactly where this is going to go because your critique and your criticism is valid. And yet, on the other hand, I don't know that anybody would pay attention if they didn't take the approach that they took. Right. So there's like whenever you're kind of cold priming a new marketplace, you've got to create some type of, you know, buzz or some sort of interest or some sort of perception that the thing that is being essentially put on market is going to be valuable at some point. And, you know, it's interesting because I actually talked to the founder

of a very similar marketplace called Idea Market. You can check it out at ideamarket.io. And it's almost identical in terms of the, I guess, you know, positioning or the offering, but it hasn't quite attracted the same level of interest partially because of the way in which it seems like it's just kind of an index, right? And it's if it's like an index, you know, maybe maybe think about it this way. Like, if you were investing, investing in mutual funds. And again, I'm probably going to misspeak because I'm not so financially literate yet, but I'm learning. Like the companies in that mutual fund or in the, maybe it's an ETF or something, an index, whatever, like don't necessarily participate in

being chosen or selected to be in that mutual fund. They're just kind of, it's like a bundle or a collection and people say, oh, I want to buy that list of shares or stocks and I will, you know, benefit from the upside. In a similar way, it feels like that's what BitClout sort of is aspiring to do. And I don't know, do you remember, I mean, if you were on Google Buzz, you must remember, there was a site called Clout with a K. You remember that? Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it was very into my cloud score. Yeah, I know. I mean, like, it was your self-worth, you know, I mean, like, back then it was like, how many backlinks do I have and what's my Technorati score? And I know I'm like, you know, aging myself. But these ideas have been on the social web for a long

time. And the previous iterations of this were like just completely unaccountable. They weren't always transparent and there was a lot of manipulation and I wouldn't call it fraud, but it was really hard to measure the integrity of the accounts that you were interacting with on social media. I mean, literally, as it was, you know, anybody could be a dog, anybody could be a brand. You know, people, you know, used to claim, you know, random usernames on Twitter and, you know, pretend that they were Coca-Cola or something. Over time, that market, I think, has settled down a little bit. And now, you know, with trademark law and stuff like that, companies can claim their

usernames. So what's happening is with the settling of those identifiers, this adjacent marketplace is being created. Now, you could say, well, this is really bad that BitClout does something interesting, where it allows you as the owner of that account to essentially claim it by proving your ownership of that Twitter account. Or you can just not participate at all. But it does create at least the perception of something that might be extortive. Is extortive a word? I don't know. you're being extorted to participate because you are being bought and sold. And there's a set of tokens that are essentially reserved for you as a like gimme that's like dangling over your head. Like, hey, here's $15,000 if you want it.

But, you know, if you know, that's why fine you have to participate, you know. And so that's the thing that I think is really interesting about what they've done for better or worse. One of my favorite tweets is this guy, he's a big crypto Twitter guy, Crypto Cobain was like signing up for it. And it's like, he's like, I'm signing up for BitClout. And his next tweet was, next tweet is like, did they give me $200,000? What the hell am I looking at here? Right? Like, it's just like, it also does it in these very big numbers.

So it's, it's very eye-catching. So Chris, I think all your points are really good. The only thing that is different, the big difference between clout and bit clout is that like there was nothing about clout that was enticing randoms to throw Bitcoin into a thing, you know? So like that's the thing. It's like, I think people feel weird about the fact that they're. Twitter profile that they didn't give the authorization to use is a part of what's enticing, you know, just random retail buyers to FOMO into this thing and dump their Bitcoin into it. I mean, listen, if you're talking about the idea that all of a sudden you wake up and you have

more money in your account and you, you know, I feel that way with Bitcoin cash and all of these other things that all of a sudden it's like, oh, just because they forked a thing, I did not know Chris explain to me Is it tied to your Twitter account in the sense of that Did you wake up and you're like

All right, this is in theory There's $70,000 or something tied to my Twitter account or something? What's your experience? Because you have probably more clout than either of us. Well, right. So the thing that I worry about with BitClout is the type of popularity contest that it supports or promotes, right? I mean, Elon Musk is no longer at 70K. He's now at $84,000, right, for his coin. And similarly, like my coin is priced at $1,400 or something. But really,

it doesn't, you mean anything because it's in sort of like this virtual space. And there's no way to extract or withdraw funds right now. Now, maybe it'll happen over time. And, you know, I do recommend for folks who are, you know, listening and in this room and hearing about this thing for the first time and be like, what the is going on here, I do recommend reading the white paper because it's maybe two or three pages long. And it does talk about the mechanics. And they're relatively straightforward, which is something that I found to be somewhat

both like refreshing and also made me more excited about it. I am not participating in it because I hope to really, you know, any money. I figure if I'm in it and it all goes away and it goes to zero, fine, no big deal. But if it does work out, it actually could be a really interesting way of valuing the participation of people on these platforms. Now, what a donor is whether or not people are being rewarded for actually generating, you know, interesting and useful content, whereas I would say like substack is a better measure of that. But because substack charges a fixed fee and there's no surge pricing in substack, then you don't really know the value of what someone is actually producing.

Whereas GitHub attempts to put some value over time that increases on the way in which you participate or create value. So I can speak to that. I know the plan is, I don't know there's much there yet, but the idea is this is ostensibly this decentralized database and different nodes can build different instantiations of it. So you could create a node that made it very easy for you to be. like, I make a newsletter that you can only read if you have like $4 worth of my coin. And if you don't have that, it won't load for you.

And so, and the idea is because it's decentralized, they can be all kinds of things like that with a lot of different variations and people can just make them and the network will know how to work with that. And so it's not, it isn't really there on BitClout.com right now, but the idea is that people will be able to do that. And I'm told that people are already working on different offerings, you know, Right. So I think, and thank you for bringing that up because I kind of forget that, because I'm kind of interacting with this in a very bit clout in a very straightforward kind of way. Like I'm just experiencing it as sort of a not Twitter Twitter. It's sort of like when I used mastodon for the first time, I was like, okay.

You know, like it kind of isn't really as performant as Twitter and it is a lot more basic, but it's decentralized. Woohoo. Yeah. But those types of applications, I think, is or are or suggest where this could go, that becomes very interesting. And, you know, for better or worse, I think there was another room actually here in Clubhouse earlier today talking about BitCloud. And one of the things that I was bringing up was my concern about, one, like, how do you, this is a type of social reputation score or marketplace. And if, you know, you have someone just, you know, to use a recent example, like, oh my God, now I think I was thinking of Logan Paul because he's like on the list, but I was thinking David Dobrook, right? So you have someone who has like really good clout and sort of reputation score up until a week ago. And suddenly everybody wants to like, you know, sell his coin. His coin goes down considerably. Now, there is a real financial and significant hit to his, and suddenly. And suddenly everybody wants to like, you know, sell his coin. His coin goes down considerably. Now, there is a real financial and significant hit to his. And so. And so, ability to, I mean, to like fund things or to have access to things because in this marketplace he's actually been punished.

That's really interesting. It's really scary, but it's interesting. And it's something that doesn't really happen. You know, there's like a lot of things that go on with cancel culture and yet people persist or survive it, whereas this puts a value that we haven't been able to measure previously in a public marketplace. And so just looping back to, sorry, I'll give you a second, Brady, your point, where once we have these decentralized identifiers that stick with you and have a dollar figure

attached to them and, you know, I can then access secret or private information or an exclusive, like, I mean, like for example, the perfect example that's actually, Brian, this is for you. I am a paid subscriber to the Tech Beam Ride Home Show. Now, I bought a bunch of your tokens today, Brian. And so that means that you should give me access. and special privilege to your content that other people who have less numbers of coins or no coins can't access. And so the coins become the coin of the realm

in unlocking limited access things. Now, NFTs can also be used in that way, potentially, but this is saying you actually invested in me as a person and you're holding my coin. Therefore, I'm going to continue to reward you individually because I can identify you as a loyalty card holder of the Christmas in a coin. And that's where this does get to.

interesting. And it was me, as always, that was trying to interrupt you because that's how we do. Okay. This is really old school, but there was a thing that might still exist called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. From the beginning of the internet, because I played it in 1996 when I was a freshman in college. And like, it felt like a game where you would like the movies that were coming out, you could buy stock in them and to judge what their box office returns would be. And you could buy stock. Hs.x.com. Okay. All right. So there you go. And also, I believe, I don't know if this is still true, but there was a time when Hollywood was like really bullish on it where it's like, well, this will help us gauge the interest in various properties. Demand Gen, right? It's like how many

people want to see this movie made? And if they put money down behind it, then they must really want to see it. And it always felt like a game, right? which was a game that was fun to play, but then, you know, gamifying things can also be very valuable in certain senses. So to what degree are we talking about, you're talking about market manipulation and how, like, you know,

reputations could rise and fall and things like that. So, like, it's almost like, to what degree would any person's value rise and rise and fall independently of what is ever happening, like, not to go too far down this road, but like, what if someone gets in trouble, but they're not fired by their employer, right? But their stock falls or their clout score falls or something like that. Am I going too crazy down this road in the sense that I mean, go ahead. This was like, I think, the best thing that someone said in the story that I did, you know,

this was a part that really blew my mind when you said it. I mean, this is Christmas hinting. this, but just to say it outright, he was like, I'm objecting to this and I'm trying to get people to stay away from it because I feel like this will basically incentivize cancel culture. You know, you can, you can see someone who's got a weakness. You can take out a short on them, exploit it, and then profit. And we've already seen this in crypto. There's already some, you know, person coins out there. There was a drama last summer that happened. One of the people involved in it has a personal coin and like, you know, the guy's not wrecked, but you could see the hit in the price on his

coin during this drama that went down. So we already know that that's feasible to do. So it does seem weird kind of giving people a financial incentive to take people down, you know, and that could be. Do you mean, at the same time, do you think that it might be possible? And again, like, I want to be realistic and not naive about, you know, people and how they behave, but that maybe there is a possible pro-social beneficial aspect that if you do behave in a certain way that you will be rewarded and you'll also have a certain number of fans. I mean, I think the Dobrook thing is really interesting. And unfortunately, he's not, at least as far as I can tell, on BitClout in a way that's tradable. And because it's not public, his fans haven't bought his coin. But they did buy into what he was

selling. And now, you know, Peter Kafka had a great story about, you know, what happened there. You know, he's lost a lot of credibility. He's lost a lot of sponsors. So I guess maybe the thing maybe to think about in this moment is that Dobrick loses a lot of his corporate sponsors, but his fans still stick with him, whereas BitCloud actually allows your sponsors to be the actual people who are consuming

your content as opposed to commercial entities that are drafting off of the attention that you're assembling. And that direct relationship makes you much more accountable to the people who own your coin. Now, that isn't to say that there won't be distortions. And if someone comes along and, like, you know, buys on my coins and I'm like, beholden to them.

And again, you know, it can be very, very nasty. There's going to be financialization that occurs between creators and their fans and their community. And the question is, how do creators maintain their own sense of self and their own autonomy to make the right choices for themselves that are ideally healthy and good, whatever good is, when fans may increasingly have, I mean, like, I don't participate in the only fans universe, but to me, this feels somewhat similar or adjacent, where there's a direct monetization relationship between people who are essentially only fan coin owners, which are just the subscribers, and the people that are providing the services through only fans. So how is,

how is this different and how is this the same? I don't know. Okay. Yeah, that's a tough one. Well, I do, go ahead. The short answer is I think you're right that there'll be some cool things that come out of it. I, you know, look, my initial reaction to it was like, like, I think the automated market makers they have built in are cool. I like the idea of all the different And if you're like you said, read the white paper, the ideas that they were throwing out there. I think there's a lot of cool stuff there. Fun thing on only fans, I was, I don't know this for sure, but I was talking to a scholar who's done some work in that area today. And she happened to tell me that apparently the biggest way you make money on only fans, really, like once you're big is you basically help smaller people become bigger and they pay you for it.

Oh, wow. Yep. And so it feels like that. Shoutouts. Also. Yeah, you're selling shoutouts. Yeah. That could also, you know, sort of spread beyond that world, you know.

Just to be clear, like that behavior, right, a shoutout on OnlyFans is the same exact thing as someone who has a lot of followers on Instagram, putting a brand in their stories and doing a shout out. Right. Or it's, it's all the affiliate. It's affiliate marketing. Well, this is a little bit more direct to where it's like. Sure, sure, sure. Right. But you're ratcheting or scaffolding off of other people's notoriety and then people are paying to gain access to your audience.

Okay. So we've been going an hour, and Brady, I'd love for you to stick around. If anybody from the audience has something to say or want to contribute to this conversation, if you've got questions, I would like to invite you to raise your hands when you come up. Ideally, keep your, any introduction to be super, super minuscule. And then if you've got a question, make it a question, not a statement. And can I jump in here real quick to say because we didn't put it on the title? we are recording this and we would like to use this for a TechMe right home podcast.

So if you do jump in, please understand it's being recorded and we'd like to use it at some point. But yes, go ahead, Chris. Yeah. Well, let's see. In terms of, I guess I'm trying to like imagine. So supposedly the password that is necessary to get into this site is coming down on Tuesday. And so that'll be the day when everyone can join and who knows what's going to happen. You know, like I'm in a telegram group that's basically hyping and pumping a bunch of these BitClout accounts.

And in that sense, it's purely speculative. So wait, so the only reason that I got on there today is because you sent me the link. I was not aware. Okay. Okay. Sorry. All right. So I sent you the link with a password so you can create an account.

And I have tried to actually claim my account by posting my public key to Twitter. And again, this gets a little convoluted. But I have not so far been verified. So again, there is a pecking order. It's not automated. I'm not quite sure why there's been some technical glitches and issues along the way. But I'm imagining that some of those are being dealt with. And that by Tuesday, you know, I don't know.

It's going to open up and we'll see. We'll see what happens. Colin, welcome. How are you guys doing, man? Thank you for having such a great room. And I listen to all you, Brian, as well. No, thank you, God. So what I was thinking, and I don't know how this will work,

like say, for instance, when I work around a lot of celebrities, work on them and politicians as well, with celebrities, would it be a conflict of interest because it's going to be a point where someone has an investment on certain celebrities, and the media can portray certain artists a different way when they want most of the time. And if you have a Justin Bieber that you invested in and the stories coming out and you're like, you know, it sways a different way or you don't go as hard as you want where, you know, it just seems like it's going to be geared toward that way now.

Do you think it's going to, you know, change a lot even in the media? I mean, we're so early into this. Like, I never even thought of that conflict of interest in terms of like if you have personal investments. Like, you know, it's traditional for journalists to divest themselves of any holdings and any companies that they would cover. So, yeah, I mean, and we're talking about people right now, but like, you know, you could, in theory, this could expand to, I don't know, anything, like to major league baseball could be something that you would buy into or Ford could be something that you buy into. So, you know, forget about stocks. Like these could be, you know, third level investment, things like that.

So I never even thought about that. Yeah, I mean, probably it's possible. Probably it will happen. there are no rules, no regulations. We are in a very uncharted open territory, but we also have a sense for how humans behave over time. And so my message, I just want to be clear, because I don't think said this,

you know, is like buyer beware, realize that if you participate in this type of system, whatever you put into it could absolutely go away tomorrow. Like there might be nothing left, and, you know, it's like anything else. These are very early days, and these are interesting ideas and concepts. What I like about it is that it exists,

and you can play with it, and you can kind of, like, get a sense for what a marketplace of this nature might look like, especially before we see a lot more financialization happening on Twitter directly. For example, I know, and Twitter has talked about how they're going to be adding tips to Twitter spaces. How does that manipulate or change the dynamic of how people interact? already one of the things that I'm noticing is I'm getting spam on BitClout for other people who have coins asking me to buy their coin and then they'll buy mine. And then that will create a pump between both of us and then we'll make more money. And so that lack of, at least as far as I can see, even though there's something called the BitClout Explorer, which allows you to go in and look at the transactions that are occurring, is going to require a type of data journalism to intersect with this context to try. try to make sense of the financial machinery that's sort of underlying all of this.

So there's going to absolutely be weird shit that goes on. It's going to be a little bit different than the players who are doing the stuff before. Can I jump in just two contextual things that might be helpful for folks who are listening who aren't super crypto. One thing that's worth knowing about BitCloud is like, and this is true for lots of things in the cryptocurrency world, is there's not really a company. Like, well, there explicitly is no company that's doing BitCloud. It's run on this blockchain.

It's distributed. It's controlled by people who have the BitCloud token, which is obviously right now, mostly the people who made it. But, like, that's going to be distributed over time and they want to, you know, fade out into the background like Satoshi did. So one of the things you have to shift your thinking of about these things is it's not like there's a BitCloud CEO that you can go to or like BitCloud HQ that you can visit. It's just different in that way. So that's just a worthwhile thing for people. know, and just a really quick thing I want to say, following up on your point, Chris, is the thing that the other concern I had about BitClout is really a concern. It's just that like every time we've seen a social network that enabled its users to profit, it's just like that's become the obsession and it isn't really that fun because everyone's just trying to make money. You know, we saw that on like Tao or Sue. I think it's called Sue and like Steam. And just like a bunch of these is just like when it's about money, it just gets very focused on the money and it isn't really about like fun interaction.

So we haven't even brought this up. Brady, what do you think about the notion that people can get Bitcoin in right now and no one can get it out? That's raising some red flags for people. What do you think about that at all? So I don't think BitClout is a scam, like sort of in the sense that they're just want to take everyone's Bitcoin and run. I don't buy that. I just, I think the people who are involved are, you know, credible enough that that's not what they're doing. I understand why that's freaking people out and the optics are weird, you know, that, you know, like, I confirmed that coin-based venture is invested for sure.

So I know that that's the case. So that's a major exchange that, you know, they're probably not going to add big out tomorrow. But like, you know, if they invested, it's probably on their radar to do. So, and they've got Hobie in there, they say, I think they do. so that's another exchange people could get to. So I think it'll happen. And it's hard for exchanges to add things before they have any track record, too. So I don't think that's a big concern, but I can understand why it freaks people out optically.

Yeah. I mean, if all of this works out, it'll be very interesting. If you can actually go to like Coinbase and, you know, buy these coins or buy the BitClout coin and then buy some creators. And again, like it's important to note that you don't need to buy a whole coin. to be an owner. It's similar to like Ethereum. And if you've had any experience with that, you know that like, you know, one ether or one Bitcoin can actually be fractionalized down to like a very, very low or high decimal number. So in that sense, it would be interesting.

If you, if everybody that you followed on Twitter was actually someone whose coin you bought and maybe it costs you three cents, you know, to buy that, but then you kind of own it. And then if that person accrues a huge number of followers over time, then you'd also benefit in that upside. I, Brady, I totally agree with what you're saying. saying, though, about introducing financialization into social media, that it hasn't worked, and it creates a whole bunch of distortions or possible distortions in the behavior of the network. But I also feel like we're moving into a world and a younger generation where there's an assumption that, you know, they learn the lesson that if you are not paying, then you are

the product. And I think they're kind of done with that arrangement. You know, there's been enough YouTube influencers who are like, you know, fuck you pay. me where they're tired of, you know, Google making all this money off the content they're producing. And so they want a different arrangement. And these types of experiments seem to be moving in that direction of financialization. I mean, I think we're going to see it here on Clubhouse when you're able to charge for rooms. In fact, today on Protiton, I launched something, was it today or was yesterday? I don't know. It doesn't matter. I launched something, which,

you know, and Paul's here, so he'll probably, you know, sick the Clubhouse, you know, Gestapo on this or whatever. But basically it allows people to charge for private route, to access to private rooms. And it's going to happen. It's going to be here. And so if it becomes normal for people to spend money on things, that is going to cause more currency to flow. And so the preoccupation with money being the core of a social media platform maybe becomes less of a thing because it's just so much more common and so much more normal. And I think that to me is a major generational shift that we're going to go through where it hasn't worked in the past. But it's because we also didn't have the same movement of money and currency that crypto allows us to have.

Well, let's see. How else have we got here? I guess I'll bring, uh, well, let's see. Well, I don't know. Any other, any other thoughts, questions or, you know, Brady, what are, what are the other, in terms of, you know, you talk to Diamond Hands, which, you know, is sort of like the, the Tom of MySpace, I suppose. Yeah.

You know, what, when it comes to, so it's, you know, the other thing that you were saying that I thought was interesting, which I can relate to a little bit, is their desire to remain anonymous and sort of almost like put this message in a bottle and like toss it out into the ocean and kind of see where it goes. And I can say that because the first five or six years after I wrote up, you know, the proposal for the hashtag, I really stepped away from trying to associate myself with it. You know, my blog post was still out there. But for the most part, I was like, cool, like, this is being used. on social media, I don't want to be identified with it because I want this to be an idea that is of and for and by people who are on the social web. And it was only when Twitter threatened to trademark the term hashtag and to prevent other social media platforms from using it that I decided to sort of step out of the shadows and say, uh-uh, you can't do that. Like, this is something

that is bigger than Twitter. And so in a similar way, I think it's really hard to launch essentially what could be like a, I don't know, either an autonomous or decentralized organization or not even an organization, but a format or a protocol, and allow it to grow into something without a central body that's like, you know, controlling it or is accountable in the way that we think of corporations as necessarily being accountable for the things that they produce. So what is your sense in terms of what, I guess, Diamond Hands or like his crew, ultimately wants to achieve? Why are they doing this? I think they're really, and I was,

impressed by this part. I think they feel like they had an insight about all the prior attempts to do monetize social media, that they were all monetizing the wrong thing, that they were monetizing like a great post. Whereas as opposed to what you were

saying earlier, right? They feel like that was their big insight. And this was an exciting thing to bring to folks and could make all of this feel quite different. So I think that's what they're excited about. And I think, yeah, they want to build it out to the point that it can kind of have a community that can carry it on. They want to see other nodes, other websites get spun up. And then, you know, they probably want to move on to other projects. At least that's what they say. And I can only take them at their word. You know, for folks who aren't following crypto, if that sounds weird that, you know, someone could like to spin the thing up, just put it out in the either and other people would

run it. You know, we have that. You know, we have that. to a certain degree in open source, but we're also really starting to see that for like real crypto-based companies that's happening. There's this thing called urine, for example, which to me is the leading one, and they just help you make money on Ethereum. That's a urine.com finance, right? Is that what that is? Yeah, urine.com finance. Yeah, and that's a really cool project that started with one guy, just putting this smart contract together that people got excited about, and he was like, hey, send me your ideas, and a lot of people send ideas, and now it's a real behemoth.

And it's just a true decentralized autonomous organization. So, so far, this kind of thing isn't impossible. You know, you raise something really important. I feel like we're kind of at an intersectionality. And I feel, I don't know, I feel a little bit weird bringing this up, but so many conversations on Clubhouse end up talking about crypto, but for people who feel like they're in the crypto space. And to me, I guess I feel like that opportunity that we have,

and you know that Brian and I have, is to be hopefully kind of like bridge builders, because like I'm not deep in the space, but I will say that, you know, when I was working in open source, one of the perceptions of open source, and this is back in like 2004 and 5, was that it was like a communist plot to take over the capitalist system. You know, that sounds like a crazy idea, but you think about crypto, and crypto sort of has like the same kind of, you know, pirate vibe to it. And so it's somewhat off-putting. But when you get to these fundamentals and you start to understand like what some of these things mean and what it, you know, kind of like ultimately means when it comes to software eating the world,

autonomous pieces of code, you know, that are built into the blockchain as smart contracts where they execute if certain conditions in the real world happen, become super interesting as a, I don't know, a basic unit of chaos, I guess, but in like a positive way. They're like, you know, seeds from dandelions that spring forth and, you know, cause new growth to occur. We don't know exactly how it's going to work out. So this feels like one of those things that's just on the cusp and brings together a bunch of different things that are happening all at once that allows us to tell a story about what's happening now in the world that, you know, may or may not turn out to be true or whatever, but gives us a moment to reflect. And I think in that sense,

there's some value in it. It's something new under the sun. Yeah. Yeah, or an alternative sort of perspective. John, welcome, welcome on stage here. I think is this, no, we've had a phone call before. So I just brought up John. John is building the pro-social design network. He and I have had a number of conversations kind of about how to build social technology that is sort of pro-social and humanistic. But anyways, John, what would you like to contribute?

Yeah, this is my first time on a clubhouse call. You're welcome. Maybe some hiccups, but we'll see what happens. I guess I just want to chime in. It's sort of a thought I've had before. I've raised it with Chris before, of there being, I guess, some sort of blockchain cryptocurrency where just through using, in the case of social networks, using a social network to have that fund the operations of the social network. It's something I've sort of thought about every now

and again in terms of a possible application, but it seems like the technology has sort of moved beyond that to now, I guess, individual people have it. I'm, I joined it a little late, so I think I miss the first bit of things there. Sorry, can you repeat your question real quick? Oh, my question. I guess is that a feasible application of the technology where, of this blockchain stuff, where through using, I guess, some sort of Ethereum cryptocurrency, you're able to have a social network fund its operations instead of using ads?

Sort of like, I think Brave kind of does this. I see. Yep. So I'm wondering if that could possibly apply to social networks or at large, so they're not relying on ad dollars. Again, since there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes on with, you know, social media companies getting ads and how that. Yeah.

It's an interesting question. And I guess to try to attempt an answer to your question because I don't understand. And maybe this goes to my previous point about Dow's or decentralized, what are they called? Decentralized something organizations. Autonomous. Autonomous. Yeah. Decentralized autonomous organizations.

There's this great book called Damon, D-A-E-M-O-N. It's from a few years back. And essentially there's this future where there are autonomous cars that just like roam the streets as like kind of rabid packs of dogs. And they like attack people from time to time. Anyways, it's super interesting. I sort of visualize these DAOs in that sense where there's a bunch of smart contracts or rules or just, you know, code that's written and says when this happens, do this and when that happens to do that. And it just kind of runs in the blockchain. And there's not really, you know, a company.

I mean, maybe there's a company or people that are contributing to it. But it's a little bit like, you know, Wikipedia or Firefox or something where there's kind of, you know, contributions made to the underlying, you know, code that runs it. But more or less, it's leaderless. It's like a leaderless organization, which again is super interesting and cool. But yes? There is, I mean, there is a social network that supports itself and is all decentralized. I mean, that does exist. It started as Steam.

Steam still exists. And now it's called Hive. And it was started with, I think, some venture funding, a guy named Dan Larimer, who's big in crypto, was one of the key founders of it. But it's now has spun off. It's all on its own. You know, it runs. It's basically like,

medium but on blockchains. And, you know, people do make money off of running it. It keeps going and it isn't ad supported. It's supported by making its own cryptocurrency valuable by people using it on there. So it's happened. Yeah. And I guess to answer John's question, it is possible. And the machinery is different.

And I think the reason why I had kind of a thought stutter was because it's like, wow, I don't really know how BitClout, you know, makes much. money per se. I know that they're they're obviously selling big cloud coins and they're creating this marketplace and there's going to be, I don't know if there's, there are like some transaction fees and stuff like that that happen, but it's different. You know, it's not so much about monetizing attention as it is about trying to create a kind of a friction layer, which is the coin between the creator and the consumer of that content. And so it's a direct relationship. I mean, it's not, you know, I mean, honestly, like, again, the metaphors are pretty, I think, easy to come up with.

you can imagine if you're a subscriber to Disney Plus. You know, you have a direct relationship with Disney, and you're basically buying access to their content. And if you stop paying or you stop owning their quote-unquote coin, then you lose access to that content. And so that's the type of dynamic and relationship that's being created here, but it's at a much smaller, almost microscopic level, relative to the types of subscription businesses that used to exist

where, you know, you're a magazine and you have millions of subscribers and you really don't have a relationship with any of them. So that's one of the things I think that's new in this dynamic. Well, actually, go ahead. Well, where profit comes from is so if you are, I mean, if you're a minor, you get the emissions of new BitClout that comes. And if you're a BitCloud holder or you're earning BitClout somewhere in the system, the BitClout value goes up the more people join it because they can only,

that I can only buy the Chris Messina token with BitCloud. I can't buy it with any other coin. So if more people want to buy more people's, token, then more BitClout needs to be acquired. That drives up the value of BitClout. And so everyone who's been earning BitClout by helping to run the system is getting richer. So that's, that's where the money comes from. It's not through any sort of like subpayments. Got it. Yeah. Okay. That's that's yeah. So I mean, basically by making the currency more valuable, by having more of it in circulation, the economy overall for BitClout like rises. There is,

there's another platform called voice.com, which is, it's very strange. I signed up a long time ago and it's, I don't really like it so much. But they do. do have their own sort of internal currency where instead of or maybe in addition to likes you can also what they call it it's like you can voice a product or something it's very it's like steam it but it's not decentralized and it's weird so there are efforts you know down this path where likes are a type of currency but you have infinite of them so like the inflation rate is like a bajillion it's like infinite whereas you know if you put a you know there's another one I think in Reddit where you have like karma and you can give posts or people, you know, good vibes or I think, I don't know, I got a teddy bear.

I can give someone or whatever. There's just lots of different ways that these platforms are experimenting with rewarding different behaviors that I think is interesting. Speaking of rewarding different people, I do want to do one last segment here, which we haven't gotten to, but we did sort of tease it in my tweet. And Brian, I don't know if you want to read this one, but I do think that it's really, really relevant in this whole space of monetizing and creators and publishers because we want to talk about this recent, the 24th pivot, I think, that Medium has gone through. Yeah, and Brady might have some thoughts on this as well.

But so, yes, because I'm not even going to attempt to do another clip. Let me summarize the story, which is that earlier this week, the Medium offered buyouts to everyone on its editorial staff because it was shifting its focus. from having its own publications on Medium to essentially trying to pivot to a substack-like model. The reason that this is noteworthy is because Medium has shifted many times, and they've had essentially their own magazines on their platform, their own whatever, and then they go away from that, and they go to, oh, no, we're just a blogging platform, or just a writing platform.

I will quote the part that people talked about this week. And then I do want to say that I want to comment on it. So I said on Wednesday that Ev Williams, who is the founder of Medium and also one of the co-founders of Twitter and blogger back in the day, Ev Williams has been trying to find a business model for writing for 20 years, going back to founding blogger, and in all this time, he still hasn't found a way. I'm not saying that that's an easy thing to do, but I am saying that maybe no one that should

ever put their trust in Ev to ever do it again. In the meantime, thanks to Twitter, Ev, has become a billionaire, so either he has to do the billionaire thing and just start subsidizing writers and journalists, or he should stop this experimentation because it's getting ridiculous at this point. The word dilettante is considered a pejorative because it implies, yet you are unsurious, and what you're unsurious about can be harmful to others, and basically that's what I'm saying here. I think I said that to you. Yeah. It's so good. I think, Chris, I said that to you the night before, because I was pissed off. And I burn hot and I felt bad about saying that to that degree subsequently.

In this degree, which is it's not like anyone else has all of a sudden made a unicorn out of getting writers paid. So it is a hard thing to do. But what I think the key thing here is is that, yeah, like medium has raised, oh shit, I just brought it up. $132 million in venture capital over its life, it's been around for a decade. Can we stop this? That's the point. Can we just stop this?

Because every time that they pivot this way and that way, it's in the same way that people get pissed about the arbitrary rules in an app store and developers are hurt. Look, writers, journalists are the equivalent here of developers that get jerked around because some platform decides they're going to change the rules. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I feel like, you know, your burning hotness was warranted, you know? Like, I, it just feels it's, it's, it's maybe the, the, the hard part is, I don't know how else you can do this, right?

Like, if he's looking at some stats and the stats, like, aren't promising, you've got to make a change or a shift. is it the type of communication? Is it the ambivalence? Is it the wishy-washiness? Is it jerking people around and saying, well, I want this, but oh, that's not good enough. Let's do this. And then, you know what I mean?

I do feel like they've tried every single model, you know, that was under the sun. They've returned back to, like, email-based subscribers. It's sort of like, what is this thing trying to be? And I guess, like, that's what made me feel bad about it, which was it is a hard. not to crack. It's not like anyone else has cracked it, but at the same time, because this is the 10th attempt, like, again, if it is, and so, all right, look, there are different billionaires

that have bought things like, you know, the New Republic or the Atlantic or the Washington Post and things like that. And every one of them, in theory, wants to, or, or, or, you know, magazine to use a more recent one every one of them is like well we're going to turn this into a self-sustaining business it's not like billionaires just always go in and subsidize things but um you know ev has always run this as a venture-backed uh sort of entity and so it's always been this sort of profit and loss thing so i'm just questioning what his motivation is. If his motivation is, we've got to fund voices. We've got to fund writers. We've got to, we've got to have, then clearly after 10 years, this hasn't worked. So either you've got to walk away from it,

or you've got to just be like, forget that $132 million that we raised. I'll just fund this for as long as it goes, and I will fund those voices. I feel like it's that half and half thing. that I feel like is jerking people around that is unfair to folks. I mean, it's the ambivalence, right? And part of it, I suppose, is not having insight or a way of really evaluating or relating to the way in which he's making decisions.

And like you said, I mean, it's tough. And I think one of the questions would be, to your point, if you just stepped away, what would be, what would the internet be like without medium? Like, would it matter? like is it a significant force? Is it a force for good? Or is it a force for, you know, like I'm a medium plus subscriber or whatever, you know,

and it's not that expensive. And the whole idea, I think, at that time, was that medium was going to offer a model that was similar to Spotify, where it would aggregate a whole bunch of subscribers, money, and then distribute it to the writers in a way that was somehow equitable based on it in the early days. You remember, like, you would be paid and compensated by the number of claps you got. and that led to clap inflation. And then eventually they're like, okay, we're going to come up with some, you know, sort of, oh, that's interesting.

I hadn't thought about that. Some creepy way of observing the amount of time spent where people are actually reading your content, right? And so I'm sure that they created something for capturing like the scroll port and seeing how much of the page was visible and how much time people spent reading an article. And then that was how they created the algorithm for paying people. But now, in the privacy world, and on mobile especially, maybe it becomes impossible to measure in that way. And so they realize, oh, God, our model is fucked. Well, the only way for this to really work is to move towards the substack thing where

readers are paying the writers directly because we can't use the surveillance equipment that we established to make that model work anymore. Brady, go ahead. There's, I mean, there's nothing that I like about Medium. I really don't like that company. I've had it out for it for a long time. And when they started hiring journalists again, I was really upset that people started going because I was just like, guys, they're going to do the same thing again. Like, what are you doing?

But I think one of the things about I want to give a specific complaint about Medium that really bothers me about it is, you know, it is the preferred venue for whatever reason for crypto people to post their think pieces. You know, for whatever reason, they like a centralized place to do it. You know, pie and the team are right there, but whatever. It is their preferred spot to be smart on the internet, right? And so I look at medium posts all the time, and I don't pay, because I won't pay it, because I don't like them. But they're constantly being paywalled. And like, look, I know these people. They make a lot of money.

These are well-off people, that $3 a month or whatever that they might give off of people reading their think pieces. That's not why they're posting them. And, like, I think that Medium is, you know, using, like, weird little design things to make folks not notice that they're opting into the pay program. And so, like, that also really bothers me because I just think, you know, a part of the story that Casey Newton explored in his platformer newsletter is that they were finding that they were getting most of their revenue from just random people writing compelling posts on there that they didn't commission. And that's all, that's all fine. but I think a bunch of those are probably, you know, some number of those are like the crypto stuff that I was trying to see that were just accidentally paywalled, which I also think is just kind of like, you know, just kind of easy behavior that I don't love. I mean, there's other things here, which is in theory this might have gone down because there was a failed unionization attempt that might have, even though it failed it might have been coming forward. you're talking about the fact that, again, it's almost like

the Huff Post or what was it, Forbes thing of like, well, you know, it's much cheaper for us to just like grab the crowdsource this and like, as opposed to paying actual journalists. And then there's one more thing, and this is the thing that I've always had against it. It's almost like the Dave, Dave Weiner argument about this is like, I'm so old school that's like, if I have a thought, why am I giving it to a platform?

Like, I can still create my own website. I can still have my own blog, even if it's on Facebook, even if it's on Twitter. Like, why am I going to a platform to then build my presence on that other thing? So it was always like, I didn't understand why people, and there's, you know, like, people have done it very successfully. I'm thinking of like M.G. Siegler is on there. But it's like, just throw up a blog, man. It's not that hard. I would, I would, I want to push back on that just a little bit.

Okay. Because, you know, we're living in the era of so many different things. I mean, from, you know, just different screen sizes and designing like an actual responsive design, which, you know, granted, if you're only doing plain text, not a big deal. But in the, and I would say sort of mediums heyday, the design that they brought. you know, to the world of reading online really did, I think, transcend the form. And they, they made it pleasurable, you know, for so long, especially, you know, once web fonts became available, and that wasn't the case for a long time. Medium, I think, embraced them rather quickly. They had some really amazing web programmers that they, you know, hired to work on that stuff.

And so relative to WordPress, you know, your site actually looked quite good and it was quite clean. and it had some elements of distribution that if you only self-hosted, again, this is presuming that you're trying to publish an era that's post-RSS readers and post-the-a-demeanor. There was some social discovery elements that they had. I agree. I got you. Yeah.

So to me, one of the reasons that I moved my blog over there was because the writing experience was really nice. It didn't feel like you were writing into a text box. it felt like you were writing onto like a blank canvas. And then you did have some of that distribution part. Now, I agree with, like, you know, Brady's critiques that once it got into the business of content and it was no longer just, hey, we're, you know, everything's free, everything's great, that's when things got a little bit weird.

And so this whole, like, dynamic, I think to Brady's earlier point, which applied to any social platform that introduced, you know, money and financial compensation becomes problematic. Now, one thing that, here's my conspiracy hat. if I were, and I don't know what the cost to actually do this would be, but I can imagine generating a whole bunch of posts for Medium that's written by GPT3 and putting them behind the paywall. And I would probably start to generate a reasonable amount of money, especially if I'm creating multiple accounts that all look somewhat plausible

and essentially are like the deep fakes of text content. And then I'm just hoovering up content without actually doing any of the work and because people accidentally click through these articles or because they have, you know, GPD3 optimized headlines. I literally just hunted a product last week that looks at $250 million worth of Facebook ad spend to optimize ads for people. And it'll rate you on the likelihood of conversion. So rather than you doing the testing with multiple ads, they'll just be like, well, we've already got the AI. We already know what's going to work. And so we'll just give it to you.

Now, imagine applying that to writing medium posts and then using GPD3 to generate the content. and suddenly the lack of relationship between author and reader becomes a real existential threat to mediums business model, while, as you said, their staff writers are trying to unionize, which is going to make them more expensive. So that arbitrage becomes, I think, really problematic to sustain over, let's say, the next two to three years, which has got to be what EBS is looking at in terms of the relationships that Substack is able to create between the writers and the readers, which in some cases, as we've just learned through the spreadsheet that was going around, you know, you have substack writers that are making a million dollars a year, right?

Right. So how do they compete with that? Well, listen, but that's on EVE for like, for substack coming around and being like, oh, shit, this is what I should have done. Yeah, okay. But there's two things. Number one, I don't, I don't shed any tears. at least until GPT3 takes over and there are no human writers.

If you are in the media business, you have to pay humans and in the media business, those humans will unionize. And if anyone gets into the media business that thinks otherwise, then you're being naive and that includes founders and VCs. In the media business, you will be dealing with unions. and that's just the long and short of it. So I'm sorry, I don't know, man.

And I say this because, again, one of the benefits of being on product the way I am is that I get to see what people are building and what's out there. And I think that there's now 30 to 45 to maybe 50 products that are GP3 marketing tools that will write your content for you. And all you got to do is push a button and, you know, like recycle until you get something you like. And I'm not saying that that's like the final step, but that tech is coming for a lot of those jobs that we're producing that content.

And so those who are good and are creative and have a good voice and, you know, write effectively are the ones who are going to get the lion's share of the subscribers' money because what they're producing is like the Disney Plus of written content. So naturally the spoils will go to them because everything else in between is, you know, fairly mediocre or not that interesting. And I'm not saying that's good. I'm just looking at what's happening in the marketplace, and technology is changing this dynamic again.

I am not going to say you're wrong, and maybe we are at that inflection point where that is true. I'm just saying that I think you're wrong. And that in the way that... Do you hope that I'm wrong, or do you think that... No, no, no. I think in the way that I've said this in... I think I said this in my book,

I've said in many essays, that there is a longer time that people think where it's like, oh, the computers are, going to take over and they're going to think for us and they're going to work for us. There is a longer interim interregnum period where the computers and the humans have to coexist. And so you might be right. You might be, this is the exact tipping point where five years from now, there will be no writers. There will be no editors and things like that.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if you're, if you are the CEO, if you're the captain of medium, like, you know, let's leave Ev out of this. leave all the pivots in the past out of it, right? Yeah, sorry. By the way, I have nothing against you, but... Right. But you're sitting on top of that platform, right? Yeah. And you've got to figure out the future of it.

I guess my question would be looking across all the things you know and all the movement that you're seeing and all the investment insight that you have because, you know, not only are you an investor, but you, of course, see a lot of deal flow from other places and you see where the money's going. What do you do? Do you persist on? Do you support the unionization? of your staff, which you may not be able to support very long, because frankly, they're writing

the hits that The New York Times is or that The Atlantic is or like these other, you know, people who are not aspiring to build a platform as well. It's like, I can't go and create on the Atlantic and start publishing on the Atlantic. But I'm not sure, I'm not sure what sort of, we might not be talking about the same sort of businesses. Okay, sure. In the sense that, like, okay, like, look at, look at the athletic and Axios, which in theory are combining today or soon to with a spec and etc. etc. Those are growth businesses that have nothing to do with bots writing the headlines and

things like that, at least for the foreseeable future. And there are, there's big money behind them that is believing there's a growth future ahead of them. I understand the fact that like if you look at the idea of like the buzz feeds and the boxes and like 10 years ago. Capital got way ahead of itself and thought that there was scale to the tune of billions of readers that they could monetize and things like that. I do not believe, and, you know, Chris, what are we doing right here? Like, in theory, we could in five years have GPT bots that could be you and me on here.

I do not believe to a certain degree. Yes, you can already, to this day, there are things on Bloomberg that write, the stock headlines and things like that. I do not believe that we are within let's say 10 years. I'm asking a different question. I'm asking a different question, right? And just to try to like, you know, clarify the point of this, right,

which is a critique of medium. Now, I mean, maybe Brady doesn't like medium at all and it's just, you know, whatever. I can accept that. But I guess I'm trying to think if you are, again, at the helm of medium, making a decision about where medium should be in three to five years time. My question is, where do you sort of steer the ship and what are you betting on and what are

you counting on? I hear you, and that GPT3 is not going to be creating amazing, brilliant content that, you know, wins the hearts and minds of people and does a better job than amazing writers. But what I'm asking is, how do you attract the best writers if your business model is predicated on having them on your platform? But we're talking. cross purposes here because number one, Medium has, at least if we take Evan as word, always been trying to find a way to get writers paid, to provide either a platform or to be

an actual venue for writers, for professional rights, for real people, right? Right. Totally. Yep. Exactly. So if that's the case, then, you know, you either have to throw in the towel and be like, well, I'm not the one that can do that. Other people can do that. If what you're saying is, is, well, he can't do that because the robots are coming. I don't think that that's even what he's saying. Because again, like, Substack is not making that argument. Substack is like, no, it's actually the person behind the writing that is the most valuable. It's the opposite of the button. That's what I'm saying. Okay. I understand we're misunderstanding each other. But I think this is a very important point. Like, I think this is core to what is about to happen.

it relates entirely to the whole BitClout conversation, which is, you know, are the creators going to remain self-sovereign? And actually, I think Ben Thompson has a podcast about the sovereign, self-sovereign writers, right? His sovereign point is like, that's such a great term for it, too. Yeah. So that's what I'm asking. I'm asking, like, does medium need to be a publisher and pay staff, to produce content. Or will self-sovereign writers use Medium as a platform tool to monetize their audience?

See, that's a different question, because what we're talking about is, are writers defunct or our publishers defunct? Let me make it clear. Okay, what I'm saying is, I do, but what I'm saying is if I am a GPD3 bot and I create an account on Medium, you know, presuming this is all happening by some, puppeteer, or I create thousands of accounts, it seems highly unlikely to me that any rational human that has a wallet and money to spend on content will subscribe and pay for a GPD3 bot. And so that behavior, which may be coming to medium in the not too distant future, suddenly becomes irrelevant because those bots are unable to actually build enduring relationships with a reader or with their audience.

Like Casey Newton, right? Like, as an example, Casey is able to not only exist in multiple platforms, he is, as Hunter Walk calls him, calls them, like a multi-skew creator, right? He's on Clubhouse, he's on Substack, he's on The Verge, or, you know, he's got a bunch of different ways in which he's present.

And Kara, Kara is a better example of that because not only, and she has podcast, she has newsletters, right, you're right. Right. So what I'm saying is, it seems to me that increasingly creators are going to need to be sort of, you know, of the internet, very online people and that they will charge a subscription to access them. I don't know if, you know, you sell a caracoyne and, you know, I buy that and now I get access to, you know, send her DMs and she responds to me, you know, because my postal stamp, you know, is worth more than yours or something. Or it gives me, again, like just like where you put out a podcast that's of limit. minute addition to, you know, your paying subscribers, my question again is about what medium turns into. What does it become? Now that we're moving into a world where individuals seem to want to have relationships with individual writers in a way where having sort of, you know, open signups for anybody to, you know, join Medium, I mean, medium can like persist that, but having their

own paid staff where those staff are evaluated based on the stories that they write and based on the views that they draw and the attention that they bring to the site. I guess my question is that becomes like a cost center that maybe, you know, M just doesn't see the necessity of in a world where self-solven writers can choose their own platforms and build their own relationship with their readers. Well, let me jump in here and sort of bridge these two stories. I feel like the original story and kind of where we're at, because it's been interesting.

So I think one of the things like journalists like me, one of the things that bothered us about what happened, too, is just if you're going to spin up a journalistic organization, you don't have to do it forever, but he didn't give it like that much time, you know? And so I think that is one of the things that bothers this. But I think your point is really interesting, Chris, but if like what he did really want was this, okay, self-sovereignty is the future, it would have been cool if what he would have said to his folks was like, look, I'm sorry, this isn't working out like I thought. But how about this for a deal? Not a buyout. But like your salary starts to fall down a little bit over time, but you also own a piece of like.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, and like, and it'll grow. And so if you're awesome and you can keep building it, eventually you're going to own like 90% of what you generate here and we'll help you get there. Some of you won't get there. Sorry about that. But like, we're going to transition to that. And because you're already in the family, we're going to put a little bit more time into helping you be one of those stars.

Right. Like that would have been cool. Love it. That's interesting. Cooler. Yes. and cooler. Such a missed opportunity.

And the fact that apparently the decks have been cleared, like everyone is seemingly out. I've been seeing everyone say they're taking the bids all day. So that then that lends people to think that maybe this was more of the union thing or to a larger degree the union thing than anything else. Yeah. I mean, if he's willing to burn all those relationships like burning tokens, then, yeah, it does seem like there was some impasse.

and he was just unwilling to play ball and was like, nope, you know what, I'm just going to do this myself and I don't need you guys anymore. Which in that case, I don't know. I totally, I love Brady what you said. I think that if it had come out that way, that would have been super interesting, would have been paving the way towards the future. And it would not have been sort of, you know, Mr. Burns, you know, release the hounds, you know, type of thing. I do too, Brady. I love that too. And you know what?

I'm going to say this. I want to call this room because I feel like, maybe. maybe I didn't argue it well enough because I'm fucking tired. It's almost 11 o'clock on a Friday. Yeah. But Brady, thanks for jumping on to talk about all this. I know you were a little skeptical about even doing this. So I much appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, this is really great. Really appreciate it hearing from you and getting your... Colin, John, everyone that's been listening, Chris, for doing this. Yeah. Thank everyone. Yeah. Awesome. Oh, wait. I don't know if you'll, okay, I'm going to let him up because he raises him before.

Yes. John Cohen, who according to his bio, was the producer of Dispickable Me, Angry Birds Movie 2, a bunch of great stuff. He's got a lot of emojis in his bio. John, you had something to say earlier, and right before we closed the room, if you want to jump in, now's your chance. Oh, I don't want to stop you. It was just, it was great listening in earlier. Thank you so much for doing this. It was awesome. There go. Okay, you cut out a little bit. Did you just want to throw it in there real quick? No, no.

Okay. Well, can you guys hear me now? Yes, yes, yes. Oh, I was just, all I was saying earlier is this was a fascinating conversation, and thank you guys so much for doing it. I enjoy listening in. Wow. Okay.

Well, perfect. And that's a great way to end the show. Yeah, and John, by the way, my kids love your whole thing. Despicill me. is right at the top of our list. So, you know, I know that's a... I love any of the love fest. So, again, you've all been listening

to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience where Brian and I go deeper on the day's tech news, try to provide a little context, a little banter and discussion. Today I thought was super great. I'm also exhausted, Brian. So thank you for showing up for this. And we will pick this up again sometime next week.

Thanks, everybody. and have a great weekend.