Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Vibe Shift (?) Twitter (Also ?) With @anildash

Episode Date: November 20, 2022

The great Anil Dash joined us to talk about... well, what do you think we talked about? But also, a broader discussion about the crazy year that the tech industry has had. 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 everybody to the TechNeme Ride Home Experience for November 19th, 2022. We are actually live today, fucking live. It's amazing.

It is amazing. And we have a special guest in studio, which is even weirder to say since we're never in studio. In fact, we're in Brian's office. But we have Anil Dash here. Hello. An old friend joining us. I feel like this is long overdue. It's been a couple weeks since we've talked.

It's long overdue for Anil to be here. It's long overdue since you and I have. spoken, I've done a show in three weeks. Yes. And I feel like it's been six years since three weeks ago. In the internet time. It's been a long three weeks. So.

Okay, actually, this is, I have an idea for a way in. Okay, great. Okay. When I, I have these two frames in my life in terms of the tech industry, right? So I started writing the book in 2012. By the time it came out in 2018, when I started in 2012, people are like, oh, you're going to explain. how the internet changed our lives.

By the time it came out, 2018, it was, you're going to explain how it ruined our lives. Okay, five years ago, I started this podcast, and lots of things have changed, but what I'm thinking about is from 2012 to now, and especially from 2018 to now. Okay, so 10 years ago. The tech industry, things have changed,

new players on the scene, all sorts of stuff, But basically, kind of the narrative was kind of the same for the last decade. Yeah, the industry matured. If I had told you a year ago today that by the end of this year, crypto would have blown up, the big tech companies would all be laying off people. The 10-year bull run of VC investing was good. And, oh, by the way, Twitter may or may not make it to the end of the year. on a knife's edge.

It's weird how much of the narrative that the tech industry has been in for a decade, all of a sudden this year is chaos. Yeah, it's back up in the air. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I mention crypto at its height a year ago right now? Yeah. So I think a year ago, I don't know. It was November.

But if you just said five years ago that's going to happen in the next five years, I think 100% I would say yes. and not that I have some particular pressures I mean you both know this space as well as anybody but I think it was it's untenable the path that's on right it's just sort of the sense of like you know too big to fail or whatever you want to call it like there's a part where you can only get so big

and grasp so much and also you can only push people so far and this is an interesting thing because I think people want to map it to you know where they are on a political spec and all this kind of things But the interesting thing is no matter how you identify what you think of yourself as politically, you feel like they pushed you too far in the last five years. And that's a really interesting thing. Because even the, take crypto, even the most pro-cry folks were like, well, this is a reaction to big techs overreach. Right? And then the most anti-crypto folks were like, well, this is a reaction to big tech's overreach.

So that's a really, like that to me was like very clear. I remember writing about it like 2016, 27. 17, like on medium, which also feels like of that moment, and saying like, they're going to call this entire industry the new robber barons. I remember saying that very distinctly, and I remember very distinctly people being like you're out of your mind. And I wasn't the only one. Like, I'm talking about this as a voice of like, oh, I'm claiming I knew this. But I think everybody who looked at the pattern was like, yeah, this is not a thing where you can keep pushing this hard, this fast for this long without some pushback. Let me give you another one, and Chris, that I'll tee you up.

You've heard me say over the last two years that the whole generation of companies that were coming up when I started this show, they all went out the door. I'm talking about the Ubers, the Airbnbs, the whomever. And I said, let me say out the door, you mean. Went public, had their liquidity moments, got acquired, et cetera. So like there's also, I feel like this is a general. generational change or like a cohort change where all of the big up and comers, I mean, obviously they haven't won or they're not dead, but you know. But they're established.

They're established. And so I also feel like, and for a time it felt like the crypto companies were going to step into this be the next generation. But now it's like, wow. Like, yeah, I mean, I think the, a couple things have happened. You know, one is that the pattern has been set in terms of what a tech success looks like. And so, especially from a VC perspective,

you know, they tend to be pattern matchers and looking for things that they've seen before. So crypto, and I think SBF is such a great example of this, you know, had all the trappings of the, you know, next Proto Zuckerberg. And the difference was that the fundamentals, like weren't there and the use cases weren't there for the technology.

And the thing that it sought to replace, it is a different, set of concerns and considerations than what Facebook actually offered the world, which was an entirely new way for essentially, you know, dogs to sniff each other's butts. And so the behavior, you know, was there, but the mediums and the access to it wasn't. Whereas when you try to replace the financial industry with just digitization, you end up having to add all the controls that make the financial system trustworthy. And they explicitly rejected all those things. Yeah, it's a tension with the culture of what they were trying to build.

Right. So the irony, and actually I would take some issue with what you said about crypto being kind of I think against like the techno class or whatever. It was a response to the financialization and the financial market and the financial crash in 2008 that crypto was set up against. Yeah, except for the fact that they've been framing themselves as Web 3 is going to write the wrong. Sure, but I guess what I'm saying is it's both, right? So on the one hand it was like we feel screwed by the financial system.

that existed. Yeah. We are going to take tech away from the tech people and build a new and different system, and somehow we're going to be smarter than, and sort of literally like pulling Enron, you know, smarter than everybody else, and create a better new system. Well, I think there's a really interesting thing of this sort of generation. I do think there are generations. I think, and maybe the defining trade of a new generation is everybody has to relearn all the

mistakes to the last generation just figured out, right? And that particular cohort you talk about of Uber, Airbnb, these things were different in kind from the sort of web two ones before them. If you look at actually great examples are YouTube, Twitter, Facebook to some degree, there was actually technical innovation. YouTube at that scale streaming video, it was even, and it was cost prohibitive for them to do it, but certainly before that it was cost prohibitive. But the idea of doing video at that scale, literally there were, you know, Wired Magazine had to,

like the internet is going to break. It's like you can't be done. So it's important to remember the context of like this is a technological breakthrough. Obviously at the same moment iPhone comes out, right? And that is inarguably, a game change. It's just a very clear. The technological breakthrough was mobile being real. Right.

Now take, and this is not being trying to be intentionally reductive or dismissive. Take the technology of Airbnb is a text box, right? Like what you're putting up is some photos and a description and payment system. Right? And so from a, it's not hard to scale the technical underpinnings of the social underpinnings, the reckoning with the, you know, different regulations in every area, what their laws are for housing, like all that kind of stuff. That's a really hard problem. And I'm not diminishing that at all. But it was not primarily a technical innovation. Yeah, I think the thing that's important to think about is that the first wave that Brian was talking about was purely like digital, largely access through a web browser. And so you had some device that connected to the internet and then there was an experience that was delivered to you, whether that was in a large format or a small format. Whereas Airbnb, Uber, that class was much more about how the internet then touched and reached into the real world. And then when we saw Obama get elected, then we saw it actually reach

into politics. Yeah. And I think what, you know, as, as, uh, and Driesen talked about software eating the world, I think we've just continued to see what that actually looks like as it plays out. And the financialization piece is the piece that has happened most recently that was on the one hand the most exciting because so many people were getting access to wealth and money that they'd never seen before, but then we suddenly realized not only how much of a house of cards that was, but how the previous system that had been set up over literally generations and hundreds of years had a number of sort of stop gaps in it so that, you know, as you think about like those, we have them in California where there's the highway and then we have runaway vehicles and then they have like the pullover for like big granite dumps whatever like crypto didn't have that crypto is just like whatever it's a free for all you know it's totally libertarian and as we've seen a crash all those controls now suddenly make a lot more sense so I want to challenge that narrative a little bit because I see with Uber I just want to say that you're talking about crypto in the past tense I want to point that that is an interesting change go ahead there so I think there's a thing to look at with Uber which is is it's a thing to look at with Uber which is it's a

It is part of the same hyperfinancialization pattern that we could ascribe to the market crash in 0809. But also- Sorry, I want to unpack that a little bit because as you're saying, hyperfinancialization I'm also thinking about capital and capitalization. And what I think is interesting also is to think about two effects of efficiency. One is the internet's ability to route over a network and be robust. And that's sort of capitalization in the sense that there's all these latent, all this latent supply. which are vehicles that are not being used and potential drivers.

And then there's the financialization, which is to exploit those resources for perhaps other people's benefit. Yeah. So this story goes. Actually, I think a lot of people bought into there are all these vehicles just sitting around. Clearly there are, right? But conflating that with the pool of labor of people who drive for a living was a, I think in retrospect, a very intentional sleight of hand. These are two different things. There was a story that you were going to pick somebody up in the backseat of your car on the way to work,

and these apps would be helping coordinate that. That is not what happened right from the beginning, right? And I think there's a big thing. And as we record this... See more about that. What do you mean? Well, I'll give you a concrete example. As we record this, we're in New York City. We're not too far from Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens, predominantly South Asian and Chinese.

About a third of families who live in that neighborhood get some of their household income from driving. A third. Right. And so it's a fundamental to the driving are you specifically talking about a right shoe? So it's mostly, well, if you go back 15 years, it was mostly taxis and delivery, you know, taxis. Well, most of all that. Yeah, delivery is right, exactly.

So that was the landscape. And then what we had, and I can speak most specifically to New York. I think this happened in every place that Uber in Lyft, went, but here in New York. The back of the bus would have an ad that said, make $5,000 a month driving for a U.S. hours a month driving for Uber, right? And the, that's aimed at a cap driver. That is not aimed at everybody else who's stuck in traffic. So that already is sort of a shift in the rhetoric of there's an unused resource versus we're trying to capture a market that already exists and turn it into something that is, you know, feel for our hat. And I would argue that at least I bought

into early on that, oh, it would be one of those things where you pick up, four people on the way into the city. Like when you were saying it would organize these things that are unorganized. Right, the ad hoc things would become systematic. Right, exactly. So sort of the crowd sort of whatever thing, of the Web 2 ethos,

I thought was going to manifest. Same, and I think we had that same optimism at the beginning of Web 2 and all this kind of things. Because when you first hear about Airbnb, renting out your house, it feels like the couch surfing thing. Yes. As opposed to what has become is this professionalized sort of...

And you have a capture of housing inventory that is not being used for anything but that. Right, right, right. I mean, I was going to say, like, so it's hard at this point, and I want us to be very, very careful about the degree to which we kind of move into, I don't want to say, like, mis or disinformation or sort of, or sort of ascribing too much intentionality when there wasn't any, because you're talking about, like, this sort of, as we're talking about it, this untapped market of cars that are just sort of lying dormant, which anybody can see, you want to. down the street and they're just parked there, they're not being used, they're an underutilized resource. Then if you're talking about housing stock, it would be hard for me, although maybe some people had this impression at the time, for Airbnb to say, oh, there's this amazing housing stock, which are the houses that people own, but they're just not always occupying them,

so therefore we should turn those into quasi hotels or proto hotels, but not call them that and do some regulatory like arbitrage. That feels far to kind of like telling the story It's a retroactive narrative. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. And also, but I think there's a... So I think that it's very important, though, and I don't want to be either too polyunish or too, like, optimistic or positive or techno positive. But there was an opportunity that many of us did see where it seemed like we could actually make a lot of things more positive, more productive and useful and inclusive in the way that they weren't before.

Right. Getting to the, like, what was the intent, which may or may not matter, right? The impact probably matters even more of the intent. But one of the things is, like, people who own multiple households. enough that they can rent one of them out are not trying to make a couple bucks on Airbnb, right? So there was a mismatch of the rhetoric or the narrative of what would be real. But what would be like they wanted like more than a couple of bucks? No, they're like I own a couple houses because I'm so rich I own a couple houses.

Okay. I'm not trying to do anything to merchandise one of my homes, right? Like that's like strangers to the room above the garage that maybe you ran out of each other. Which is something we imagined in our head when we heard about it, right? And then to the point about Uber, why I point out those ads. on the buses is absolutely correct criticism of the taxi regime in New York was these immigrant families you know from Bangladesh would have to get together or you know wherever the families are from pool their resources as a community help somebody

pay off get sign up for a million-dollar mortgage on a taxi medallion and the whole community's in and hot to this thing and that guy is usually a guy it's gonna go drive this thing and try and pay that off and pay back this community and it is unfair and it was limited and it is a racket and that's absolutely true and he's like okay guaranteed five grand a month I'm going to go and do it and sign up and what we know now

retroactively is Uber would game the algorithm to give that guy more rides in this first month so he'd make five grand and then great and then month two he's not making that and they're like oh well you just need to upgrade to UberX by the way there's three or four cars you can choose from to do that that's not a mortgage

you can get on your own because you already went all in on the medallion that you've got but we'll give you the money, however, it'll come out of your money from Uber off the top, and we'll help you get that car, right? And that is just company store, right? That is just like worker exploitation from, you know, a coal mine from 150 years ago. So let me reframe it again, because we've stumbled on to talking about two specific cases. Let me reframe in a different way about how it feels like there's a generational shift or turnover happening in tech right now. for 10 years, and you could argue going back to the 90s with a blip in between,

a young kid coming out of college engineer, whatever, she goes to the Valley, she goes to New York, you find a company that, you know, you're higher number 10 or whatever, you work your ass off, and hopefully eight years from now, you know. This was the narrative we were told, and you would cash out and it'd be good. Coming out of college right now, you're looking at layoffs at all of the big companies, And, you know, a third thing that I've, my funds started last October when there were $50 million precedes every day, you know, coming across my transom. So you're a founder now where for the last five years, all you had to do was have a decent

idea and, you know, be in the right place, have the right team. Yeah, know the right people. So reframing it in terms of that, the young people and the industry, things are different all of a sudden than they've been for the last. But I mean like business also and I agree with you like the reset has come largely because of macro conditions that have changed and largely that the cost of capital and money now is much higher. And so I don't know what it was in the 2000s, the interest rate, but as the interest rate has increased and as the cost of that capital has also increased, now capital has to become a lot more efficient. So in other words, there was a lot of

money that was so inexpensive for VCs to get and then put towards not great ideas because the chance that any one of those not great ideas could turn into something amazing and then pay off all the rest was I guess is no longer the case or the condition well I think there's also it may be that way for the next two to three years I think there's also the changing political wins right because if we sort of carry through the the Uber story yes Uber is true Uber has never made money. Right? It's never been... Almost just it, but... But, but...

Sure. Thus far. Right. But still on that weird EBITDA. Sure. Right, yeah, yeah. That's... It's not fully made up EBITDA, but it's like, you know, community based on... It's not as bad as we work. Right, right, exactly. So we have that part. And yet, if you're, you know,

the investors who are on their cap table, they made a lot of money. And from a sort of policy standpoint, regulatory standpoint, they were just front-running regulation and sort of say, if you get far enough ahead of regulation and you make a big enough bet, you can take a lot of wins off the table before the hammer comes down. Arguably, the same thing happened in crypto. The crypto fund that in Drescent is the biggest returning fund that they've ever had in history. And arguably,

one of the biggest returning funds in the history of venture capital. Double their best fund that they had had previously. And I don't think anybody's arguing they created a ton of value or a ton of great jobs for people. Right. And that is a circumstance where rightfully, regulation comes in, policy comes in, political winds shift, and people feel like, hey, that's not fair, that's not the way things ought to work. There ought to be some point where when you're getting this much wealth for yourself, you've created some value for society and done something that has this merit. And the mismatch there is the biggest reason that capital is more expensive right now, because people can see it. Like even if you're not fluent in all the macroeconomic terms or whatever, you're like, hey, a lot of people got screwed and those guys got real, real rich. and some large part of what they did

may not even be illegal within our current rate. So what I'm saying there is like if there is an opportunity to take advantage of a system where money is very cheap then people will find ways to serve themselves. And I think if you look at what happened with the pandemic and the amount of stimulus relief

that was out there and the amount of fraud that was out there, the decision was made and the calculus was made and the risk was accepted that it made sense to get more money out there because of the fact that people were not working or they were staying at home or whatever it was. So to support people, just flood the money with this resource and we'll sort it out after the fact, which seems analogous or similar to what you're describing as happening in the VC world, where again, it was like, let's put a bunch of money out there.

And then the regulations come back afterwards to say, okay, well, actually, we had a bunch of new things that were developed and grown. And I guess my question is, do you, is it then your position? and I think it is a little bit important maybe for you to reveal what I feel like it's sort of maybe it would be useful to hear your maybe it's condonation like of Uber in general because I feel like you have such strong positions on it and I want to separate Uber from the innovation of like ride share and ride handling and the fact that taxi you know the taxi industry was stagnant and corrupt and corrupt absolutely and so I'm not saying I don't want to like

make a clear judgment about Uber in absolute terms, but in terms of a technological innovation, you know, live streaming video generally has enabled lots of other people to get online and to make a living and to do different things like that, whether it's only fans or Twitch. Yeah. And so Uber additionally has brought technology to bear to the market. Oh, I mean, there's a lot of wins, right? There's that, there's, there is, there is, arguably, you know, black passengers in America having access to rides and cars, they would not have access to hailing on the street. I mean, there are inarguable social goods. I think the question, though, when we talk about, like, the large-scale economic impact, and in my mind, also the, how do you create a fair

system, a just system around that, a regulatory framework around that, I want to really interrogate the, like, well, the intent was to do this, because I think there's, the narrative stayed, the intent was to deal with the inefficiency of, you know, all these cars are not being used. that narrative stayed the public rhetoric for a long time after we knew they were gaming the algorithm that sort of in my mind trick these drivers into signing up for a deal that they would never win on I guess like the thing that I'm struggling with to some degree is to the degree that both can be true where there there is a desire to sort of reform the broader situation let's say in this case of transportation and also that the methods by which these companies grow

or figure out gross strategies, not only veer into the realm of being, I want to say, like, evil, but essentially they have an advantage because they know how the system runs, and they can put their finger on the scale of the algorithm to move in one direction or another in a way that is opaque to those who are being controlled by the algorithms. So whether it's content moderation or whether it's, you know, who gets the Uber Trip sent to their app, all of those things are continue to be opaque to the people whose lives are ultimately controlled or manipulated by those systems. And that, like, I guess there's a question as to what degree or how could regulation make some of those things more clear? And then how does that create a feedback loop that perhaps allows them to feel more enfranchised or more in control of how their lives actually unfold?

I think a useful framing is to look at other models that have succeeded at scale, right? So if we imagine, if somebody had the idea for we ought to be able to share, rides in 2004 or 5. Chris, you and I would have been there saying, let's make an open spec for listing car availability. They tried to do that in Austin. Right, right, right. But like, that was going to the thing. And it's not science fiction to imagine that Google would have indexed everybody publishing their car availability. Google even tried to do that. Right. I mean, I was on the Uber developer platform team and, you know, they indexed both Uber and Lyft and we didn't want to be commoditized. Right. Right. Right.

And so that's a thing, and I think the lagging problem is policymakers can't understand or have not historically understood that that's a thing where they can apply the pressure to balance a market to make it more competitive. Or more to change the way in which the market is competitive. Right. And for that example, it's like had that kind of thing succeeded to that point, Uber and Lyft would have been more competitive. But to be fair, though, GPS is the thing that the government standardized and provided access to. And that is the platform. It's an enabling platform. Absolutely.

And so that's what enabled that competition to occur. But we could imagine taxi availability having the same models GPS. I mean, if they're providing the medallions, then they could have also said, you know, here's how we're going to have an auction place. So that's where I get to. How do you have regulation and market pressure from industry to push them to say, why aren't medallions an API with real-time data? So I feel like the big change and the big problem, though, is, well, I'm going to speak outside of my realm here.

But it feels like politics and the government have largely not been as focused on being metrics driven in the way that a lot of Silicon Valley companies prefer to be. So Uber can look, you know, quarter over quarter about what is growing and what is not. And they will do thousands of experiments to learn how to move things, you know, forward. And they'll have lots of different cohorts. Well, you have to have test cases. Whereas the government, at least as I understand it, largely has to do things that are similar. or the same for all citizens at once. So they don't have the ability to do A, B, Z, Q, Y, X,

cohorts of tests subjects. The way that we handle that is through federalism and through the state system. But those are far too large to learn fast enough, at a low enough cost, to actually make the types of changes that we'd like to see, I mean, that we rely on companies to basically do instead. Yeah.

So I mean, at literal level, there are A-B tests going on at federal and state and the local governments, but it is not at the same degree not to the same pervasive. Well, because there's also, like, the privacy concerns from citizens against the government. Well, and I think, yeah, I think there's sort of a couple related concerns.

I think one is just the ability to do a series of variations and say, how is this digital service going to serve people, requires an abundance of resources. Yes. Right. You have to triple and quadruple resources to do that. And there is no government issues. As much people talk about the waste or whatever,

there is not that, right? Well, I mean, but this actually makes a very interesting point, which is that the amount of waste in tech companies, is enormous. Yes. As Elon has recently talked about in terms of like the $400,000, you know, $400,000, you know, a month in lunches or whatever. Yeah, yeah, that would never stand in the government. Right. And yet at the same time, our skepticism of government using funds effectively is the very reason why we don't seem to, or, I mean, we do fund things at a pretty high level, but we don't fund them at the same level that Silicon Valley companies do. And therefore, they don't have the time to actually explore and innovate and try things over a cycle that then produces. It's also like the innovation. The mechanisms of manipulating government are essentially these days about outrage and the sort of media cycle, right? And we have, like, there's an inside joke in our industry about, like, you know, messaging apps at Google. But there is not, like, widespread outrage of how could they have wasted, which they did, hundreds of millions of dollars over now the better part of two decades, throwing systems away over and over and over and over. Right.

That is phenomenal waste on a scale that almost, except for the Pentagon, almost no federal agency has done. It is a world-class waste, like innovation boundary-breaking waste. And so I think that's a thing where we're like, we don't have that lens. We're like, that's what it, you got to break some eggs, you got to make some mistakes, failure. You got to fail often, right? And I'm just like, these are the same thing. And conversely, the success is where I look at the federal loan forgiveness website worked like. a champ. You look at the USPS distribution of COVID tests, worked like a champ. Now, I can quibble,

we should have more tests, we should have more forgiveness, we should like all that kind of stuff. But in terms of like, could you go to the website, sign up, get it done? Maybe because they learned their lesson from the bad Obamacare rollout and it's like, yeah. Right. Well, and that was also procurement capture too, right? That wasn't like there wasn't people that didn't know how to do it because they ended up doing what people they had. The bigger problem was you had to hire some people who are in comedy. I'm going to reframe to get it. into Twitter. Congratulations, boys. We've gone a half an hour and we've not spoken about Twitter yet.

Yes. But before we're a half hour in three weeks I don't want to cut off the conversation if you're not satisfied with its conclusion. I think we made the point, right? We've got the shape of the problem. Yeah. I think what your key point is that we're going through a reset.

Yeah. And I think that's very important. And I think it's one we haven't seen since 2002. Right. And it's very few of us that were there for that and still have a voice. Because even that famous memo batten down the hatches or whatever they said in 2008. It didn't actually happen to tech in the sense that sure, there were layoffs, sure

investments didn't happen that could have happened. But somebody come out of the top school still applied at Google. Exactly. 100%. Okay, so my last framing of this in the list of things... I'll say, sorry, one more thing. You said that it hasn't been this way since 2002, and I got into the tech world really in 2004. So in terms of, when we think about like cultural generations, usually a generation is 30 years. It could be that in the tuck world

is actually 10 years. I'd say it's five. I'm seriously. I think I don't know about generations, but there is, to me, very clearly, a 10-year cycle. Yeah, I mean, if you look at that sort of like how lessons are learned and cohorts of people who they identify with, I think these are very cohorts is probably the better word than generations, I think. And what I remember in 2002 was, and it's funny because like these sound like ancient. You're talking about AOL and YOL and YOP. and these things, but like being somebody that like remembers that era, people stopped saying that's where I'm going to go. Like they retreated from Silicon Valley is the future and tech is where we're going to

make her money. They were like, that is dead for people who were, you know, this is. I think that's what I'm saying. They're like casuals. When I think about generations, I think about how long it takes to sort of, you know, have forgotten everything that happened in the last cycle. Yeah. The complete lack of knowledge is a generation.

So that's why when I say like I was arriving to Silicon Valley and 2004 and I was like oh everyone is left like right they think this is a ghost town like this is not the future I it's hard to overstate how dead it was in 2002 and even as late as 2004 when I remember you you know arriving on the scene I think that part was like people were telling their kids don't go do yes yes right and it was the contrarian thing to do yeah it's very hard for people to imagine and also for me being like one of the nerds on the inside we were celebrating oh the suits are leaving the Wall Street types are leaving now it's just

left us nerds are down yeah so that's why like if crypto is over and the suits are leaving again and the money is yeah oh for sure then hey listen only the pure-hearted when christmasina got to silicon valley in 2004 he thought it was dead when mark and dracon jacicc had got to silicon valley in 1993 he famously thought he had missed it because the PC boom was over yeah yeah um okay so in my framework of things the narrative changing yes let's talk about the the Elon Musk as the great business genius. And I'm not framing it that way because I'm about to argue that, oh my God, he's blowing up Twitter. Maybe we'll get there some of us. I don't know. But that's a narrative that has existed and was extremely strong even four years ago.

And now, say what you want about all. But like, it doesn't seem like from the beginning of, hey, I'm going to buy this company to overpaying, to try to get out of. it to now, does it look like there was a plan? The genius of Elon Musk as the greatest businessman of his generation, is that blown up? I think it's too soon to really tell. I really want to give, you know, like the Twitter, Elon, at least six months. I think that what we've seen in the last month is the easy. way I think for me to understand it is again to think about the Roman roads that exist underneath many civilizations where they came in and there was you know

the people who was conquered and then a new structure was built on top of the old some of those roads still exist you can see how amazing they were built you know there were aqueducts all sorts of things but the new world order literally was built upon the old and in this case it really feels like Elon's modus operandi to go Latin is to essentially wipe out whatever the peoples are, you know, who are living in, you know, the town or village and replace it with, you know, his own or those who are willing to stay and are willing to essentially abide by a new culture. So to me, like, Twitter as we knew it is dead. Twitter with the

genetics that were contributed by Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey, who are much softer types of leaders, I would say, and who, I mean, like medium itself, like the company medium, I think also has some of the same genetic malformation. And these things survived and thrived almost in spite of themselves because of how little innovation and how much growth kind of happened over time. In the last year, a lot of people like Lament, Twitter's stalling out, but they shipped more shit than they had in like their entire existence. Yeah, for sure.

So the fact that like people sort of missed that, you know, and the fact that that kind of happened after Jack had left the building, it seems to be a little bit confusing. And so if Elon wants to come in and wipe out all the people and start building from a new foundation on top of the bones of the old thing, then I want to give him some time to demonstrate whether that can work in a social context.

The best business case that could be made is that Twitter was bloated. All of tech is bloated, you could argue, in terms of overhire. Well, relating to all the money. We're talking about Google and... This is the impact of the over capitalization. That's the best business case I can make.

Okay. And obviously people in the last 48 hours have been going on and on about, oh, it's going to break because there's not enough people to... Hamsters in the wheel, spinning the wheel. Exactly. Those two things... Whatever, over here. The thing that I find unbelievable is that it is...

in this day and moment in advertising business. And every single thing that has been done and a lot people like to point to the political chaos or whatever, but also if you're, again, a brand manager at General Mills, do you feel confident buying for the next 18

months at Twitter? You don't, if you see this sort of, forget the politics, forget all that stuff, just are you sure it's going to be there? You know, the, and so the and then the move towards, if If this is true, and we don't know yet, that what he sees is the only way out is a subscription-based

business. There's the rumors all the last 48 hours that he wants to go maybe an adult-oriented business or something like that. Fine. But I don't think that you can get there to service the debt that we know he needs to service and to dig out of the hole that seems to be there. So I think there's a couple things to flag. I think the first is we do have 20-plus years of history of understanding how social networks can

work, scale. and be monetized. There's a community of practice and a history, and I don't think there's anybody who would argue he has a fluency in that. So that's actually one of the fundamental questions is he is part of a cohort that believe lack of credentials is your credential. And so I'm sure there are disciplines, again, to your point, that are bloated, overbill, or have too much legacy, whatever in which you're coming in with the brave new fresh new thought is good there's also there's a really interesting thing sort of separate from the public conversation I think which is he belongs to a cohort that believes to

varying degrees of sincerity that Twitter is a political project right it is run a political way it has staff with a political agenda and and it to destructive political, which is bad for, I don't know, for capital or for America, various versions of that story. And interestingly, very clear, even though it's been so chaotic for his tenure, he is running Twitter as a correlating political project. It's inarguable. The way he's talked about it, communicated it, made the decisions, and publicly presented it is, I have an alternate political view, and I'm going to use that to bring to bear on how I make decisions here. That's new, actually. And it is actually a start.

I would just push back a little bit because Jack was very like supportive of a very broad, like he at least showed and I think spoke to a set of concerns from a set of people that previously weren't really in the room or in the minds of leaders for a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies, like non-white dudes basically. There was a point I think where he did that. Yeah. But also we know that he did conspire with Musk to make the transaction happen, indirect contradiction what he told was workers, which is, to me, it indicates a shift. Sure. There was a point where that was true.

I absolutely agree. So I think that was like in the tea leaves, so like beforehand. Yeah. Well, and I think, I think actually it's a good point because, you know, there was the point where Jack was talking about going to live in Africa for a year. Right. And the response from the investor class was, we will destroy your company. Right.

Right? And so I guess he took a lesson from that. I have a new theory that's developing that what you said about this is a political project. And I also believe that that's true for some of his investors as well. To the degree that I'm not sure that for Elon and some of these investors, either outcome is good. Like if they turn Twitter into their dream of what they think it should be, as a social network, as a platform, or if it

fails trying to be that, then they have blown up something that they thought was corrosive and negative. That's right, right. They grew up their, they blew up the enemy encampment at the worst case. And at the best case, they turn the enemy encampment into their new castle. Right, right. And I think

the line I would draw to the thing is very similar as you look at if you go back 10 or certainly 20 years, the venture capital story was we believe in great entrepreneurs and innovators and we invest in them and we provide the resources. And I remember that, you know, I used to be an arms dealer providing blogging tools to people and I helped set up the blog for Mark Andreessen and Fred Wilson and that cohort of VCs. And the narrative they were very strong about, and this was a reaction to the dot-com era, was

we empower founders. This is why we ended up with the dual class shareholders, all that other stuff that happened. And you're the genius. Well, you started with Google. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it was actually a contrast to what had come before. And so there was a really, really strong sense of, you know, we're just, awshucks.

You're geniuses. We're just the people who cut the checks that we want to see you thrive. And there was a really clear narrative that we were never given a, like, that era has ended announcement. Right. However, you look at Indris and Horowitz and like, I bet if you go to their homepage right now, you'll see the American Dynamism document. which is a political platform, right?

Very straightforwardly. So this is what we think is good for America. And if you conform to the precepts of our political platform, then you can have our money, right? Which is, again, the opposite of the stated rhetoric of the prior generation of venture capitalists. Have you noticed that the rhetoric among, I think Elon himself, although I haven't been following that closely,

but definitely people that are curing Elon on, Which I'm not, I want to be clear, I'm not saying I'm not cheering Elon on. But the people that are standing up vociferously to defend him over the last 488 hours have almost taken the tack of, great. He is destroying the bloated, the bloated engineers slash managerial class, the elite. Excess, the least. Now, that is also something that is completely a 180 degree difference between the hunt for talent, the fetishization of talent that includes the engineers.

So what we're saying is these people are now drawing a line between the founders and the capital on one side and the talent being the engineers and the designers and the managerial class. But for the last 15 years, Silicon Valley has not treated the engineers, the designers, as labor. They've treated them as talent. Is that something that is? enough of them. Is that something that is turning right now?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is, like, if you squint at this and you look at 100, 150 years ago, this just looks like union buster. You know what I mean? Like, this isn't, this isn't like, oh wow, you've never seen a tycoon and a robber bear to come in and tell people you aren't that valuable. Like, like, you know, and the rhetoric

from the folks who were cheering him on, and again, like, you can have whatever point of view you want, but like, if you search and replace, like, a Pinkerton statement from a hundred 50 years ago, it's like, that's the same shit. 150 years ago, it was warm bodies that could do manual labor. The thing that I have been led to believe for the last 15 years is that Silicon Valley thought differently in the sense that the talent of the engineer class

was so sophisticated and so unique that they're irreplaceable, that you can't just grab someone off the street and make them a good engineer. There's a magic to it. You guys would know better than me. Is there something that has changed in the way that startups and tech companies function that maybe people believe that now that, hey, we don't, maybe we can run a Twitter with 300 people? Yeah, let me tell you, yes. So the technology has changed and the attitude about what you can do to scale has changed, but also your ability to outsource not in the, you know, social sense, but in the technical sense, to offload. The, some of the layers of your stack has increased.

But I'll tell you a quick story, which is a great sort of argument towards that we're hitting a 20-year cycle repeat, which is, believe it or not, even during the dot-com era, coders were not really valued. And so I ran glitch until we were acquired earlier this year. Glitch came out of a company called Fogg Creek Software that had been around for 20 years. It was started in 2000. One of the two co-founders that faced the company, Joel Spolski, had a blog called Joel on Software, and was one of the first. really sort of coder-centric blogs and helps define early blogging culture. And one of the fundamental statements he made that helped elevate it to that was you ought to take programmers and coders seriously.

You ought to give them good resources. And the funny thing to think about this is how meager the things were that he was advocating for. You should give them a nice monitor. It should be a relatively recent computer with enough RAM memory to be able to work. I mean, it sounds like an absurd thing to say. Upgrade their Dell computer. But that was the stakes. Things were so low in estimation for these folks. And I sort of, you know, teased him one of the most recent times we're talking. It's like, that was the most effective series of blog posts we've ever seen because they went from. You have a bunch of nerds in the back and nobody's listening to them. And even his case of like, listen to them about their business acumen. These are smart people to arguably the most empowered class of workers that the world has ever seen. Right? Right. And so when you have that level of escalation in one generation, 20 years, of.

of a set of workers, again, historically, there's a couple different ways that you sort of go and try to say, like, we're threatened by that, how do we crush it? Right? And in the case of, again, you know, go back to 150 years, like, it was a lot of concern of if we hire people to build railways that are in this country, and that time, was recently immigrants of Irish and Italian and black workers, you know, African Americans, they were going to say, well, they're going to get too wealthy. So the reason I'm here in this country as an Indian American is the first wave of Indian and Chinese immigrants were led in to try and depress wages for the other folks who would have been building the railways. And the minute the railways are done, folks go and say,

okay, close the doors and violently crush these people and don't let them form towns, right? And that's how you get Stanford University. Google Stanford. Find out about that guy. And so there's a really interesting thing of like, and that happened with the highways. So my father came to build the highways and that's why they let him have a special visa to build the highway system. And the highways drove right through the neighborhoods of the people who they didn't want to have profiting from these networks. So like the idea that it would be different this time is like, no, this is a pretty ancient historical pattern now, decades and centuries old. And we sort of say, okay, we were complete with another era of building a network akin to highways and railways

with the internet's construction. We did let in the same Indian and Chinese immigrants to do it that we did before, we had the same backlash of nativism, and what followed then is the same wave of rising authoritarianism and the political project of putting workers back in their place after they got a little too full of their britches. And I'm like, the details are going to be different. The circumstances are different. But in terms of the structure, that pattern is something where we can sort of say, does it fuzzy fits over there something? It does. And then does it look different? Well, yeah, in some meaningful ways. And the question is like what happens after that, I think that's the sort of the big question.

And like coming back to Twitter, was Twitter bloated in some voice? I'm sure. I am sure. There's no doubt about it, right? It's a company that's been around. Most of the companies were as a result of the pandemic. Right. And also because of the approach to how we see innovation happening.

To do A-B testing, you better have enough teams to do an A and a B. Right. And also because they were getting more effective at trying new things. I think from a product standpoint, it is inarguable that Parag Agarwal was the most effective CEO that Twitter ever had. And that may be a low bar. Also, depending on what you're counting on success. Well, here's an example, right? At the moment when the Silicon Valley Conventional Wisdom was Clubhouse is the next big thing.

Twitter pivots from doing fleets, which was sort of middling and not really succeeding, to doing spaces and wins the space crushes even with all. of Andrewsons Firepower where they have you know they're getting their families involved and come start a stream one would be like K-Bahn though I mean like kind of unleashing his ability you can you can describe credit to all kinds of people but I mean if we're gonna sign blame to CEOs then we're gonna sign credit to them too and so say under even if all the proggos get out of the way to let Kvon succeed it would be it would be interesting for some listener to go back remember the day

that I first said we can no longer make fun of Twitter not shipping products like find that day that find how many minutes how long how long how After Parag took over, right. Yeah, but, well, okay, and also to be fair. You haven't spoken at all yet about Twitter, so it's your, you can run. You can run. Wind him up, let him go.

I guess I care less about the Parag thing, because obviously he was in and out, and, you know, he was like CTO before, and there was a project to rewrite, this is the most interesting thing probably about this Elon moment, is that one of the big projects that have been holding Twitter back for years was all the technical debt that it accrued,

that made it impossible for them to, build chip and launch things and do so as experiments. That work came to a close and I don't know, I presume Jack, at least as CEO sort of presided over that. Prague was CTO and so he oversaw maybe the implementation of it. And they were both very involved in its mind. Exactly. Yeah. And it was like a major undertaking and finally it happened. And then you did see like the damn burst and all of a sudden they were shipping a lot of stuff. Now granted they were, you know, geo-restricted and they were doing experiments and it was like very slow going and it was like hard to say you know if they had moved like facebook moves where facebook just kind of like i mean granted facebook does it their own experimentation but

had launched things internationally and globally if twitter actually would have been changing as a business because there was a lot of for example creator modernization things right twitter blue i mean twitter existence and had a good set of features and i'm paid for it right because i was like these are things i want as a power user and i had literally asked for 10 straight years sure hey i'm a power user this platform i know I'm not a celebrity, but I use it for my work. And there's a set of tools that out. And I tried to do a goddamn startup to give those features. And that got killed.

And I'm like, I'll pay you for it to do the thing I was trying to do if you let me do. And they got to like, you know, maybe 30% of what I wanted, but they got a thing and talking to that team. I was like, this is a smart thing to do. And I can believe you will do the other things that I would want. And that was the first time, literally in the history of Twitter, where I was like, I'm paying you for what I want out of the platform. After 15 years.

Allowing me to. Right. So anyways, my point is that there was a lot of work that had gone on before. They finally get to the place where they're shipping things. Now Elon comes in, fires an number of people, gets them, you know, out, swear, or gets people to swear, you know, OLDOs or whatever. And the platform is actually probably in its most mature as it's ever been. And so possibly it's most healthy in theory. Perhaps, I mean, like, we'll see how it does with the World Cup, you know, this weekend. But like if it actually handles it and there's not all these hamsters running around. then there was a question like and it's just that sort of thing where like I think it's a strong argument that like when Saita Nadella stepped into Microsoft Balmer had kind of set up a lot of the organization for success in a way right

and the canonical example on that was they shipped office on the iPad like two minutes after you know Scythea step in and CEO and he's like look what I did you know I mean that's what you do like you hold it's a CEO and your chance to succeed but you know and I do think there's a chance that they thread the needle on like the platform stays out because they made those investments I think there is zero chance that there would be an intellectually honest reckoning where they say they did a good job and that's why we're still here and that's the thing i take issue to which is it it should matter that you do the work and tell the truth in building what's next even if you say

we were bloated and efficient these ways and i take the example of like what all these guys are chasing musk and all of them is the kind of legacy cultural weight that a steep jobs has right and And you take jobs coming into Apple and I have a million quibbles and disagreements or whatever criticisms you can offer, but a couple things are clear. One, from the moment that he comes into when he's like, ICEO, and they do the IMac and all that kind of stuff, he shut up, kept his head down, sort of said what's there. Two, he found the talent, right? Like Johnny Ib and all those guys were there.

Johnny Ives is a backbencher that wasn't being appreciated at all in that design team. But that is actually, and this is a shocking thing to say about Steve Jobs, a form of humility to say let me go and find this person and come in and do it. And also, they didn't, like, they threw away having 85 different models and all the different business plans and licensees and all the other crap that they did. But in terms of, like, the tech, they were able to do it with what they had. They didn't have to be like, we got to, you know, they didn't rewrite the OS immediately. Right, but there's all those famous stories of the four quadrant, and we're only going to do these four things.

We're going to simplify our product. Clarity vision. They did do layoffs. They did those things. The how matters because the aspiration of this industry is that there is a rationality and a logic to it because it is software, because it is technology. I'm sorry, when you say the how, what part of the how are you talking to? Well, the how you, so Musk would argue he's doing a turnaround of Twitter as a failing business. Inarguably, Jobs is coming under a turnaround of Apple as a failing business.

And the how of how you do a turnaround from a social, ethical, cultural, political standpoint, in addition to the technological and you know business standpoint I think it matters it matters on what you are in the world it matters in what the industry I'm gonna push on this because I feel like there's there's and this is because I know you and I know your values like I don't know I'm glad you do I just I the thing that I'm struggling with is I don't know if there's another way that in terms of what Musk is doing I know you know Karras Swisher is not happy with him and a lot of us are disappointed in the way in which he's treating

people, but I have not really seen a sort of softer, gentler way to gut a company and, you know, turn it into a pirate company. And that's what Jobs did before. And that is what Musk is doing now. And Musk has done a couple times. And that approach is almost necessary to send a very clear signal and a message. And it's not like he's like killing people. You go and then I'll push back. Yeah, I think really quickly, um, well, let me finish my point. Yeah. Because this, the decision to come in, and like you said, to simplify what Apple was doing to a very small surface area of products. Yeah. To allow teams to just focus on solving important and necessary and crucial, if not essential, problems to define what Apple would become, feels similar to the thing that Twitter now needs to do, which is that Twitter not only had become bloated in terms of, you know, people and processes and they couldn't show.

things and what have you. But in terms of what Twitter actually is, I don't know or believe that Parag actually has an opinion. He's a manager and he is someone who will sort of put processes in place, but in terms of at least what it seems to be that Elon has, whether we agree with it or not, is for Twitter 2.0, it is a set of things and it is many more things than it is not. Yeah. So I disagree. And I think there's a couple reasons why. I think the first is I can fully buy into the idea that Twitter or any company that is similarly mature and been around for a while could use a simplification on the scale of what Apple did when it went back to the four quadrant product model. I think that's a very straightforward argument to make.

One, I don't think there's any evidence that that is the strategy, that was laid out as a strategy for Twitter and now they're executing it. I think it's impossible to believe that a competent leadership team would come in and do that. I don't. I don't think that Jason Calcanus and David Sacks are sitting in a white room, a whiteboard room, a conference room, and have that kind of thing. And then what we're going to do is accidentally lock some people out and maybe secretly let some people back in and begged the head of sales to come back. Remember that this has been lost now. Earlier in the week, the back and forth between what the blue product was going to be and whether we're going to have official verification. And the back and forth so many times that none of us remember that.

None of us remember where it's at at this moment. I don't know. I don't know. It's launching on November 29th. Right. But more importantly, coming back from that, I can't end to my profile. Yeah.

Right. It broke things that weren't broken. Also, if you had that strategy, you wouldn't start with the blue check. It is nowhere near to the most broken thing that's there. Right? So you started, like the signifier, the tell, is you started with the thing that is important

to the political context of the cohort you're in. And that is brain poisoning by being inside a bubble. The other thing I'd say is, product was a good CEO for a number of reasons, I think. One of them was, if you were going to transform this thing, even if, one, I don't know if he had a plan that he was going to do some big cotton, some vacation, whatever. What I do know is they did ship blue and it did have a consumer subscription model,

and it was aligned with the most engaged use. And what were the numbers, like $200,000? It wasn't bad. It wasn't, I mean, for a subscription business, for social media, it was phenomenal. Two, he was one of the primary instigators of Blue Sky, which now since spun out independently. and it's technically pretty good. Like as an open protocol, like, who knows that these things would,

but we're seeing with Mastodon's rise where, like, Mastodon has signed up more users in the last two weeks than Twitter ever has in any two-week period in its history. Right?

Now, who knows if they'll stay and what their experiences, right? All those kinds of things. All the caveats are there. But it is inarguable. It's hard to get people to download an app

and sign up for it with zero paid installs and be ahead of Facebook Messenger in Apple's App Store. Even though there's 10 different clients and none of them are very times. Especially if an app like Mastodon is as difficult as it is.

That's right, that's right. The experience is kind of crap. So I come back to, like, and if you're going to say, if you're going to start from first principles and build an activity pub style protocol for something like Mastod, it would look a lot like Blue Sky. And again, because you and I have spent more time

tilting at this windmill than most folks in the world, and you're like, that's not bad. And that's the highest praise you can offer it. That's not shitty, right? Right. And so you sort of say, okay, the technical competence is there. the product's direction broadly is there.

Were they aggressive enough and maybe refactoring it? Probably not, but is it within the realm of what works? It probably could be. And so you sort of say it is a non-radical version of evolving into that or. Now, could they have put pressure as a board and said you should move more quickly? Absolutely. Twitter's bored as shit show, always has been, always will be. Still is, by the way, even though it doesn't have a board.

And so I think that's the thing I'd sort of say is like, I don't believe it. I don't believe it is this. I'm coming in to simplify things like Jobs did when you went back to Apple. Because you wouldn't start with the blue check. Let me, yeah, but let me clarify. Like, I think the blue check is symbolic. And it is a thing that at least if you want to fuck up a lot of people's experience, it's going to tweak a lot of people and get them to pay attention and focus.

And so, like, I don't want to give him too much credit, and I recognize that it may sound like I am. However, one, it seems like the plan is to come in and, like, clear the deck. He bought this thing for $44 billion. He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. It's like a car dealership, and he could, you know, decide to sell tanks, you know, whatever. Like, it's his now. He bought it.

He can break it. So as a first principal's concept, start there. Then second, he's like, okay, let's see how fast I can actually, like, ship and deploy something. So let's do the blue check. I don't really, like, it feels like he's sort of in this, like, nihilistic mode where he's just like, I'm just going to, like, pull things out and see what happens and see what breaks. Well, wait. Hold on.

Sorry, hold on. No. No. Yeah. Hold on it. And this sets up sort of a symbolic gesture to say, this is how fast I will move, and this is how I operate in this space. So if he's just going, you disagree. Yeah, but finish.

And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Yeah, I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just observing what I'm seeing. Yeah. And I'm trying to sort of parse this set of actions, not as though they are a sense of, like, I agree with you. There was no strategy. Mm-hmm. However, the behavior is setting a ton of.

for how things will change. When I don't know if I were to go back to when Jobs came back is how he treated people or what he said or how he got people to get out of whatever the John Scully mindset was that was causing them to behave in the way that was leading to Apple like slide sideways and to miss the opportunity. So at least in terms of coming in and like, you know, throwing up the desk chairs and the table and making a big fucking mess

and saying, all the Legos are on the ground. What do we want to build? that tweet storm that I read on the show yesterday, the guy said, well, give us a roadmap, give us a plan, and none of that has been communicating. Correct. I come back to what I said when we started this conversation on Twitter, which is I'm coming at it from the business angle. And if I'm a bank that has given him this debt, if I'm one of the investors that pointing up to do the second half of this deal, all I care about is making Twitter a business that makes money, right? And yes, cutting some of the fat, including people, is something you would do. But not like this.

The first thing you would do, the only way that this is going to work, okay, let's set aside the bots, let's set aside the harassment, all terrible things. Why was Twitter failing? Because it wasn't making money at the level that it should have given what it is. It's important. Even its cultural importance. Especially as an advertising. If you really cared about earning back that $44 billion, the thing to do is to make Twitter, make money better. I don't know.

You could have said, like, what's the best advertising product in the world that we can make? TikTok. Okay. But this is my point. This is my point. I don't see, I can see the argument that some of these things and some of this, like, we got to get hardcore, is a way to get there. but he's not telling anyone, including the advertisers that he needs to keep on board to get to there, to get the runway to get to there. He's not telling the people that he is trying to get to stay on the team to allow him to build the products to get to there.

Yeah, I mean, if I came in and had the same landscape and the same mandate, first thing I do is like there's only four or five really big ad agencies left, right? And you can call them. If you're the richest guy in the world, you can call them. and you can say, what would it take for you to make the biggest commit you've ever made to digital media purchasing? Right? And so I'll come out and I'll show for you and we'll do the tap dancing thing and I'll get all my friends in line up. What would you want to see? What do we have to ship? And then you tell the whole company, everybody shipped this thing and this is what we're doing.

And guess what? All of a sudden you're in a different place. Now, let's assume he's decided, you know what? Advertising is a chump's game. I don't want to play it. I want to move towards something else, be it's subscription or whatever. Okay, fine. I think that that's a mistake because you still need the cash coming in as you get there. It's an order of operations thing. But also, it fundamentally misunderstands what, and you said this at the beginning of the conversation, people understand what can and can work in social media. Social media is not a new industry. It's 20 years old.

And there is nothing subscription based thus far that has been able to succeed at the scale required. So let's, just to steal arm this or steal in this, because I agree with what you guys are generally saying. However, this is why I'm like, I'll give it six months before I really have a sense for what direction this is going in. If this is to be the first subscription-based social media platform that people are willing to pay for, one, because most of the other stuff is shit, right? Mastodon is hard, it's confusing. Decentralization is slow. So in terms of like feature evolution and all that stuff, it's very improving. And it's basically the cultural brand.

Everybody knows the bird. All that stuff. All that stuff. Right. So one. Let's say that we're, you know, he gets some percentage of people to pay for Twitter. Right. Now, if you think about what value iOS and iPhone, et cetera, devices in those customers have, being in the app store, the fact that Apple is moving into advertising, et cetera,

there is a premium, which I imagine you might be able to get for your ads. If you are selling your ads to people who are already confirmed or paid or have some verification, right? that now this is actually a more valuable cohort than other platforms that don't have verification or don't require payment. Okay, so that's one thing. Highly engaged users are worth more for ads. Highly engaged users, but I'm also, the other thing though, is the, whatever, these large CPG brands that just want to kind of like put their thing out there to whatever and previously they were advertising to bots and all sorts of other, you know, fraudulent things or whatever.

If in Elon's mind, he imagines ads that are incredibly relevant now, maybe he doesn't use Instagram very much because my ads are actually pretty good. Like, moving to a world where people are paying to be on the platform, they're verifying their account, the ads that they're seeing, one, they've followed and opted into seeing those brands, and two, it's a matter of boosting that content to be seen by the people that you already have a relationship with. That actually is a pretty valuable advertising offering in the marketplace. It's somewhat different and unique.

And then in terms of just creating a different, I guess the question is, like, what does Twitter kind of want to become? What does it turn into when it is only subscribed users? that are interacting with each other. Is it a walled garden type experience that actually elevates everything? Now, the one thing that I'll say before you go, Brian, is, and again, this is where I think

generationally we might be at that inflection point where it is possible to have a subscription-based social network. When we were working on Google Plus, we had to make it free because, and this is actually, I think, one of the big reasons why we failed was that every time we would do designs, we'd bring it into the execs,

and they would be looking at it at these enormous, monitors and displays that were fucking gorgeous in 4K that most of the people who were using Google Plus around the world and in India and everywhere else, they did not have. So our product sucked when it got to mobile, whereas exactly at that moment, Facebook was in lockdown mode, building Facebook for mobile. That became the next big computing platform because they were focused on less well-off poorer users, frankly.

So if Twitter loses the poor user faction, I don't know what that actually ultimately means for advertising into the platform because that is where a lot of activity and engagement actually comes from. The other problem that I have, and I said on the show this week, I would never, ever suggest that advertising is a noble industry. But I don't think that Elon, number one, understands advertising or believes in it as a business. Actually, sorry, I want to say one more thing here, which is that. Sure. Or believes in it. But the reason is also because Elon is the best advertiser in the world in the sense of using Twitter. He doesn't need to buy ads. He has 116 million followers.

He doesn't pay anything. This ties into the second point. But to finish his thought, if he imagines that brands need to become more like him in the way that they engage, so that brands are now people. Trump is an amazing brand advertiser in that sense. In that Trump is the brand. Trump is the advertiser. Okay. He is engaging directly to the people.

That is the world in which maybe Elon wants people to move. Yeah, but there's not where most of the dollars live. I'm right. There's no insurance company. also, we're going to antagonize you on social media, but maybe that's why he hates those brands. I don't know. That's the, that's the, that's the, Elon is an 11th dimensional chest. Right, right, right.

The galaxy brain argument. Okay, look. You and I have talked about this offline. Like, it's very clear. And again, maybe he says things like this because he is tweaking people and he is a Jedi, you know, Meelearn or whatever. Sometimes he's a dick. But you want I have talked offline about, I also think that he doesn't have a constant.

of how other people use Twitter and experience Twitter. That's right. And like... Let me build on that point. So when you have 116 million followers and you tweet, not only like the level of engagement that you get, but the insanity. And by the way, you two have way bigger follower numbers. Like I never get a butt.

I never, and I only occasionally get a troll. And I'm sure you guys get way more. And also, like, he doesn't get, and it actually even would not. he actually wouldn't matter if he did. He doesn't get people doxing his home address, threatening his kids. I mean, they docks his plane, but not all of us have planes. Well, also, so why?

They're not shooting your plane down, right? You know what you mean? And the threat is not the same. And also, even if it were, he could resource it. Sure, sure. He could scramble some jets. The point that Brian is making, though, is that the experience that Elon has,

which he may extrapolate into being the experience that other people have. I don't know how many fake accounts he might have to test the service as someone who has 10 followers, 100 followers, or 10,000 followers. But like, imagine that he has that level of rigor about a person. We know he doesn't. I know.

And so that also doesn't matter because fundamentally, it's the, you know, 90-10 principle. Fundamentally, for Twitter to succeed, the 90% of people that just go on there because they want to feel like they're in the room with a celebrity, a smart person. like what's happening with the basketball game. The reason the World Cup's going to be a big deal. I always talk about the soccer, the Twitter. Like, I experience Arsenal games through 200 people that live in Britain that I've never met. I do too and I don't even follow football. Right. So the point is, is that the thing, he, from day one, his concerns about the Twitter platform were from the point of view of a power user who, yes, power users contribute and make the platform happen. but the 90% of people that have to stay there,

their experience has to be. I think World Cup is the perfect epitomization of what his closed circle doesn't get in that war room, right? Which is very global. 80% of Twitter users are outside of North America, outside of U.S., I think, right? And it is ordinary people cheering on their team, just like it's ordinary people watching an awards show,

just like ordinary people do all these things. The Oscars. Right. And I say it too, we're like, I have a disproportionately, large network considering I'm not a famous person but what I I get a glimpse of both because I try to use it like everybody else uses it and I'm like I'm talking about the stuff I like but I'm mostly reading not posting I'm browsing trending topics the trending topics had been until

very recently pretty good right so I would get oh this is a musician that I like and I'm seeing them in trending and I know everybody's not because they're not that popular but I'm going to see this thing and that's really good and already we're certain to see because the moderation teams are gone there's more spam tags and things going up we're going to start to see see more kind of hate tags and things where they had a, you know, teams just moderating like, oh, that's a really hateful trend. We're going to curate that out. They can see it as it's happening.

And if that happens and things get worse, the 90% of people go away. And the brands have already gone away because they're going to be a freak. So again, the fundamental misunderstanding of what the product is to be successful as a business, I see zero evidence. And there's an example I really want to hit, which is where we started. There is a 20 plus year history of these things doing. And I know he's in a bubble of people like, well, that's all the, that's all the wokes,

and that's the people who don't get it, and that's right. Like, we know, and I know because they say it to me, right? And I'm like, I have a non-zero amount of knowledge here. And one example I would give you is like his starting point, back in April, when he was talking about content policy, which is where the conversation all starts because it's very visible to people was,

anything that's legal to say you should be able to say on Twitter. And he sort of has done even a variation of that this week, right? And I always come to a very concrete, clear example, a real one, not a contrived one, which is in Saudi Arabia, you can be persecuted for being gay. And there are LGBT teens there who have been outed and were persecuted for it, right, thrown in prison, and they can potentially be executed. That speech is completely legal, both there and here. Right. So in the U.S. jurisdiction, as well as in their local jurisdiction. And it's wrong. It is not a thing that you should enable on your platform.

And Twitter, to its great credit, one of the things they did when they turned around content moderation five or six years ago, they got really good at it. All those people who were in charge of that are gone. 100% of people with domain knowledge about that are gone. That is not galaxy brain thinking and that is not advertiser safe and that is not the product people want to pay for. That is not how you grow your audience. It's not how you grow your engagement. It is a bad business decision. So that's the thing around, like, the clarifying argument is like, and he started with a public assertion of a contradiction to the policy that was protecting those kids.

And that is not a thing I made up. And so I think that's a part. Like, he's not thinking about Saudi Arabia. Well, he's taking their money. But other than that, he's not thinking about him, right? And so I think that's the part we sort of have to get to, like, you know, I love Christy's sort of stealing the argument and being intellectually honest about, like, what could be their approach. I think those are the conversations they're having.

I think the things I'm pointing out right now are the things they don't know to talk about. They don't know what they don't know. And the people in the room with you know, the funny thing is like this is almost exactly where we started when we were talking about crypto and the mistakes of crypto made. Right. Which is that essentially after the financial crisis, people were upset reasonably and angry about that. Right. They wanted to create an alternative financialization system that, you know, got rid of all the guardrails and all the things like that because, man, those other people, they really screwed things up. Yeah.

And now we're in the exact same place where there is a lot of. belief by some set of people on the internet that think that Twitter and free speech and all the rest is in peril and so therefore we need to throw out the previous people who are doing it one way recreate a new system which is a lot more inclusive and allows all sorts of speech and what they'll find to your point is that there are reasons why those things were the way that they were and there will be some big crash that eventually happens as a result of removing those guardrails which have been finally developed in tune but it won't hurt them first and that's

that's actually why I get strident about it is like I have had people that saw these kids being targeted. They're like, they don't mean they're visible, and we know you know somebody at Twitter. Can you connect this to whoever can work on this? And, you know, I didn't know about the problem. Like, I don't follow policy in Saudi Arabia. There wasn't something where like, I'm an expert on this.

I was like, I can find. This pattern also repeats. Right, right, right. There's a million other communities. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. And what's going on Iran right now.

Right, exactly. But this was one where I was like, I can connect you to who you need to talk to. And they were able to have that impact. And so I feel that was six years ago. And I think about it all the time. Because I'm like, I'm not the API for that, right? Like I shouldn't be the point of contact for that.

But that was all they had and they were in the process of getting things right. And that capability doesn't exist anymore. And the harm will not befall Musk or anybody in the room with it. I think this is like why I'm trying to meet this point that I don't know what Elon Musk thinks Twitter is. And so if he fires everybody and he gets down to a skeleton crew of mostly engineers. Which he's headed towards. Which, you know, he might be there right now. Correct.

And, you know, he has said, and he has tweeted that he prefers creating teams of 150 engineers and that's all I needs. And he can, like, you know, launch rockets and he can, like, build self-driving cars and he can build a Twitter that is what. And the what is the thing, obviously, as you guys are saying, there's no roadmap, there's no plan. We don't know what that is. But he's driving towards it, and he will give those 150 engineers a mission to go

build that thing for getting all the other things that have been done in the meantime to build up Twitter as this sprawling kind of very important cultural series of tubes that connects lots of conversations around the world and I just don't know that he cares that much about all those other the harms he doesn't care yeah and they're not visible to him well yeah and I think that's sort of it is the accountability is going to come if you're the richest person in the world and you don't even care to be curious about the harms you're causing, history is shown, like, accountability is going to come. I just like, and I'm like, I'm his best friend in the world right now, right? I don't think he

thinks so. And, and, yeah, but see, the problem is that he wants to move fast. He wants to feel the bleed of, you know, being on the edge of something and, you know, creating something whole cloth that is new that didn't exist before. Yeah. And the problem is that you're, as you're bringing these things up, it creates these vagaries. Yeah. These great complexities of the real world. I mean, this is, I think you sent me the tweet about clocks and clouds

and it's very well stated. This is a cloud problem. And he wants to engineer the shit out of this clock. And that's what you know how to do. Yeah, and I come back to that too because I'm, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for a while. I've done a couple platforms

that have gotten to millions of users, maybe tens of millions. But not, you know, that's not scale anymore. Right, only having raised tens of millions of dollars and have tens of millions of customers. Small business. Yeah.

You know, but I come from an era when that was a big platform. It was, yeah. And I'm fine. Like, I like being where I am. But I think there's a part of, like, the industry at that level cannot conceive that there being domain knowledge from people they haven't heard of that might know what they're talking about. And so there's a big part of this is about, well, who's really in charge here? And where is this power dynamic?

And those who think, like, maybe devolve some power to your workers and to the people on your platform and share with them agency and building what you're building is not a radical concept. I'm not a radical. I think that's one of the things I always come back to. It's like, I am like a middle-aged dad who's been in the industry for a hundred years. I have gray hair in my beard. I have done a bunch of companies. I've raised money. Like I'm not a radical. Like I'm a really moderate person. And if you say these basic things, you ought to take care of your workers, you ought to consider the harms about the platform you're building, the industry leaders, the tycoons, have radicalized themselves so much

that you're seen as an extremist for saying these basic things that are middle of the road and all those were, and are globally middle of the road too. And I think that's the thing that is like the big takeaway, like Twitter, whatever, it survives, it doesn't, like, we'll muddle through either way. But the fact that this handful of people have so radicalized themselves at the top to where I haven't changed, you know, in that regard, in 20 years.

And now all of a sudden, I'm an extremist for saying the same shit I was saying 20 years ago. I just think, but like, when we go back to, like, the purchase price of this thing and how Twitter was losing money, I guess the thing that I sort of was making money. I mean, not consistently and reliably and not. But it has the ability to make money. I'm saying something a little bit different, which is, you know, at that purchase price, which was an inflated purchase price. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like, and Brian, as you've been saying.

how does this thing end up making the right amount of money that it should be able to make? It can't. It can't. The math doesn't work. You're saying that there is a ceiling to how much money Twitter could ever make. Yes. The only way... He bought at the top of a platform...

Okay. And in fact, the only way he can win is if five years from now, they can take it public again above a $100 billion valuation, okay? Yes. This is... I'm going to transition because... We got to shift gears to bring this conversation down. But let me say this.

If he does that, hats off to him, because as I said on the show this week, if Twitter dies, my job is infinitely harder. I am rooting for Twitter to win. It's a huge cultural loss. I'm rooting for him to succeed. Hats off to him if he does it. I'll eat my hat. I'm rooting for Twitter to succeed. I want what it is culturally to the many communities that serves to persist.

Well, the function of Twitter is. Okay, okay. This is my gear shift. I have two people with incredible knowledge in this domain, and I've said to you obliquely a couple times over the last couple weeks, and I haven't said on the show a lot. But why can't someone just do a straight Twitter clone right now? And you're going to give me all the reasons why this is impossible. But there is, again, let me get to my Arsenal podcasts,

and all my soccer podcasts, all they talked about this week before the World Cup was they also talked about shit, are we going to have to find an alternative to Twitter? There is a hunger. Yeah. And not just for political reasons. Every time I've talked to millions in the last three weeks, they've asked me about this. Where do I go? Yeah. Why can you not just spin up an exact

Twitter clone that does everything that Twitter did, say, two months ago, and why couldn't that succeed? You can and people are, and it's a hard problem. And there's a couple reasons why. The first First thing is to start with, think about when you signed up for Instagram.

Did you go to the app store, search for photo sharing app, and then evaluate all the available apps based on which had the best filters, or did you sign up for whether or one of your friends were wrong? Actually, I kind of did, but that's another story. And I know Chris did. So we know you're an anti-indicator. But the other billion people, the other billion people who showed up were like, that's where my friends are, or family or whatever.

Correct. And so this is the challenge of baking the, not the Twitter killer, the Twitter successor. There's a set of criteria. So first is like technologically you do it. I actually think it's easier than ever, right? This is a little bit talking my book. Literally like I feel like like five or ten people already done it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So like I work in Fastly and it's an edge platform and I'm like I could see people putting together. Well, because a lot of the hard problems of one Twitter was created 15 years ago. So global distribution and real-time communication, like you, you, you, you can see, you, you, you effectively have to build a decentralized architecture even though it's centralized service, mobile clients, like all those things, those answers are one million times better than they were 15 years ago. Almost just pull it off the shelf.

Yeah, I mean, like literally they're like GitHub repose. Yes, exactly. Twitter clones in them. Exactly. It's just like, in all the languages. Right. This is not me like talking my book, but like Oregon and Fasti, I see what people build there. So like the lens I have is like, that is hello world.

That is where you start by the element. So, so and like with that scale to 250 million users? No, but could you get millions of users? Could you get the scale of what MasterDon has had in the last couple of weeks? 100%. Yeah. 100% you could do that with off-the-shelf stuff. And, like, your mobile app wouldn't be as polished, but it would be pretty good.

And also, you know, maybe you pick green instead of blue, right? But, like, the trade dress wouldn't be the same. But could you duplicate the experience? Yes. Now, there's a couple things. First is you're duplicating a company that has consistently lost lots and lots of money for a long time, except for the rare cases when it's made money. So that's a scary thing to do.

The second part... You're just talking about the business side of that. Right, right. But then there's also a really hard part, which a lot of people who are maintaining Mastodon communities are seeing, which is, okay, how do I handle DMCA take down requests? How do I handle global coverage? You're talking about the regulations that now exists.

And not even regulations, but... Well, let's include... Right. Even if we, like, hand wave away, you've got a lawyer in every country in the world, which is a non-trivial problem. You get to the complexities of separate from law practice and policy. Like what do we have to do about this? Because we talk about regulators, but you care as much about the NPAA and the RIAA as you care about regulators.

And so like the complexity of that service area, there's a community practice of people that do trust and safety around the world. Just trust and safety, right? It's great, really incredible community, very thoughtful in sharing. Clearly none of those people who do that are still at Twitter and also nobody who runs Twitter. And also nobody who runs Twitter knows about that stuff. So if you're doing new Twitter, you have to go from zero to fluent in that. Wait, I want to get some clarity on Brian's point, though, because I agree with it. Yeah.

And then anyway, there's 10 more of those things. Yeah, you could go down that list. I could also say that a lot of those people are looking for a job right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, go on. So then you need some money. But my specific question to you, though, Brian, is like when you say clone Twitter, it implies so much. I understand.

If we were to go back to 2006 and clone Twitter, okay, maybe. Do you want me to be specific? Because I will in a second. Because there were several clones. There was pounced. There was bright kite. There was any number of these that had more features, more functionality. You can import your friends, et cetera, and so forth.

So there was even an era. You know, when Twitter was shit and was going down all the time. It was part of a market. Yeah. Yeah. No. I remember. So there were several of these things.

I remember. And so when you say clone Twitter and you say there's an opportunity, I want you to unpack that a little bit more, to be a little bit more precise, both about the job to be done, and whether you're thinking about this just from a product perspective, from a platform perspective, or from a business perspective. The creators want to rebuild their followings somewhere where they can do that, where they can post and accumulate followers that will see what they post. The 90% want to follow celebrities, want to follow probably the exact same people that they're following on Twitter.

Or culture makers, if not celebrities, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or smart guys. I want to follow this nuclear physicists. Or a public intellectual or an athlete or whatever. The 90 great people that I have accumulated that I think know about Arsenal in the right way

when a game's happening. Yeah. Okay. The fandoms, all that sense. The 10% of the people are nervous, are looking for a place. Maybe they're not ready to jump ship, but they're looking for a place to hedge their bets. So in the past, that ecosystem of other Twitter clones,

there wasn't that incentive for those people. to go. There is now. Okay. And then as long as they can do the same things and replicate, and I'm talking post, post pictures, have replies. That's it. The poor from Shawty. I do believe that they would evangelize and get a huge chunk of their followers. I'm over here now. And it might not... It's possible. So I think there's a couple...

Let me be specific. And I'm not saying that would kill Twitter. But I'm saying it would be a competitor. Right. Yeah. So technologically, it's 100% over. There's no argument about that. And interestingly, because the barriers that come down on doing that stuff, there are probably thousands of people in the industry who could build a workable.

It would be the center of a team building a workable way of that. I think you layer around that, all the other concerns that talk about, the regulatory, social, you know, and related concerns. That is a thing that you have to invest millions of dollars in. And so you have to have some source for those millions of dollars and you get back into the business model question, right? And part of what is interesting about why is Mastod de facto taking place for this for some audience, especially the folks that we talk to, is it distributes that burden. And that is actually closer to the nature of how the Internet and the web works to work. And so there are some advantages.

Now they're disadvantaged because you're going to have like 50 people that are managing big instances now that have never dealt with any of those problems we just listed. So, you know, I don't, I think people are underestimating how rough it's going to be if Macedon continues to scale. Wait, wait, wait. I want to like unpack that, though, because like there's some aspects of this that I think are interesting and worth considering. And Mastodon is worth talking about because it is, you know, one, it has a six-year head start on anybody else. Yeah. Two, it's like open source and out there. You know, three, there is some use. good and it's fine like let's say that you get you know five or six there so my understanding is that

twitter's design team has gone from 90 down to two so if you take those 88 designers or some small percentage of them and you throw them at mastodon for let's say a sprint or two yeah five you know some of those weeks they could make a transform yeah they could really like make the product like that much better and you know if you've got like several hundred thousand dollars lying around and you you know want to give you on the finger maybe that would be the thing you should do so presuming that all happens. My question to you is about the likelihood of that style of abuse, given the size of these servers. Now, if you have servers that are multi-millions of people, maybe those become targets. But the whole aspect of an intention behind decentralization is to create more surface

area than you can possibly police. This is like the neighborhood model. And so if those servers, you know, just like in Reddit forums or other contexts, create the mechanisms by which people do self-police and the problem becomes diffuse as opposed to concentrate it. as it has been on Twitter and Facebook, then does that actually negate some of the concerns you can bring you up? So we're already seeing targeted harassing and are black women on Macedon.

Right? And by the same actors who were kicked off at Twitter for it. So what we don't, I don't know that we've seen yet is the hardening of Massadon to create defenses. That's what I'm saying.

That might allow those servers. Right. There's sort of two layers. One is the like the practice teaching people who use Massadon and who maintain Massadon. you know, servers, how do all this people learn about the one, this is anti-pattern behavior, the bad behavior that exists, this is how you deal with it.

Like, there's people, you know, there's a new instance for journalists that stood up by a bunch journalist. It's great. I'm glad they're doing it. Right. And none of them ever had been into community before, which I'm like, this is not the time or the place. I'm already seeing the fights and people that are pushed.

And they're going to hit, you know, every red flag. It's actually funny because it parallels the crypto world in a lot of ways where you're like, you know, there's a reason people have been doing this for a long time. Right, learn, but whatever, they're going to learn, or they won't, one of those. But to that point, somebody whose primary job is not maintaining online communities, this is sort of this deep bomber quote. They're not just going to walk in here with the eye from. But I look at this, we're like, so, you know, my day job is, among other things,

I lead the team that does glitch, and it's a community for building apps, right? and we have millions of developers in the platform and many, many millions of apps. Do you guys have a trust in the entity? Yeah, yeah. How big is it? On Glitch itself, it's a handful of people. It's only one or two people,

but we leverage Fastly, which can look at the entire internet. Okay, I just want to point out, like one to two people for millions of users. Right. Whereas in the case of... So let me tell you the example, though. The reason why it's only a handful,

one, and it's also been different sizes of the years, the reason why it's a handful of people is what we did proactively to prevent harms based on knowing how networks work. Sure. So if you were starting a Twitter style network, which is very open, and also, you know, to your point, if you're like straight cloning Twitter, you're allowing quote tweets, you're allowing amplification, you're allowing trending topics. Those are massive vectors for abuse. You have to have a team. We're also very pointedly English only on Glitch because we have a high degree of fluency in the way English is used globally so we can understand what an attack is in the track. As opposed to Facebook, which, yeah. Exactly. Upendaps is no idea.

Right, exactly. Like, they don't have staff that could speak your language, right? And so we know what happens. And so we've been very intentional about where we do and don't scale. Also, our, like, we are a foreign audience. We're for coders. And so English isn't really very globally there. So anyway, but that's stuff where, like, we did a lot of proactive work of, like,

there's audiences we chase off just by the design or the preemption. People are not thinking about Mastod on that way. So people that are running a new Mastodon server because they were excited and heady with the new days of a new platform are not like, here's the way we put up a barrier because what we learned from like a 20-year-old community like Metafilter was if you have this barrier in the way, you cut off certain vectors of abuse. And that community of practice, like the people where the trust and safety professionals have not had the time or the bandwidth to go and write it all down and hear what to learn,

even if they did, they wouldn't because then the bad actors would see it. And then the people who are running the new things are going to go headlong into the same problems and be burnt out by it. 90% of people that ever do this work get burnout by it because the platforms are not designed to reduce the abuse. And the big platforms,

you deal with far worse to burn out. There's self-harm and really... So I mean, I think this... It just circles me back to this question, though, like, to Brian's point. You know, what is the investable idea, perhaps, if that is the idea

in this realm? And, you know, I think to all the things that you're saying, I think Mili Patel, you know, had a really useful observation, which is that these centralized social platforms now, their product is content moderation. Yes.

It is, you know, the... Curation and management. It's the fancy mall versus sort of like the sort of strip mall. And which experience do you want and how much investment you want to put into that? And the differentiation of that experience is content moderation. So the thing that I... When it comes to Macedon and understanding it as a technology,

I don't think the benefit of what Macedon offers is necessarily content moderation in so much as it is, about creating a separate space, which then you can decide to what degree you want to do the moderation and how big do you want to grow it. And I agree with you that at some point, if you scale to the right level or if you have ambitions for having trending topics and for having a large mass of people, suddenly the gameplay of being there changes and it becomes more performance than interaction. And this is the thing that I think is funny in the sort of musk contingent where they're like, well, why are all these people that are not engineers here?

It's like, because engineering has the hard problem. Exactly. And I more. And, you know, sort of different from the, if you're doing rocket ships, they're all this is at rocket science. And it's like, well, nobody's trying to knock the rocket down. Right, what do you like? And you're only doing one rocket at a time. Yeah. And it's like, if you were launching a million rockets

and there are a million people that want to stop the rockets, and you get a different problem. But I do think, you know, the good news is we're in a moment of flourishing. And it does feel a little bit like the transition from Web 1-0 to Web 2-0. We're in a moment of withering a little bit. Well, in terms of social media,

this is the most, potentially vibrant moment for new exploration, new approaches. There are multiple players. Right. Facebook having lost the plot

and gone wandered and be a real. The leaders are in the first to fall up the game. So what I look at, like, I want to think the things was most promising to me was looking at like,

you know, Matt Mullenweg in automatic, asking questions about what would Tumblr do if it was going to integrate with the Fediverse, right? Like, we've never had ever...

It's so mind-blowing. It is like, we have... like where some of our efforts started. Exactly. With Matt. Right. And with WordPress. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is stuff that, and what Chris is alluding to is like banging our heads against the wall with the same people 10 and 15 years ago. To try to solve some of these problems. With the hope that we were going to preempt these problems from our horizon, right? And, and, but, but, you know, whatever. We live and we learn.

People are good at fixing things as the thing is on fire, not, you know, adding fire retardants. Well, also they have different goals at different points. But part of the reason I was optimistic about that was, one, we've never seen ever. scale social network come back that's a really interesting thing I would love to see Tumblr yeah you Tumblr I can you but a Tumblr I know I mean I knew David before Tumblr existed is he still there he's still in orbit I don't know what he does but like he you know he's he cares about it okay and and but the point is like I had that affinity for like I'm glad this thing exists right and and so like the idea of something coming back is really interesting the other thing is like they have the

trust and safety infrastructure they have the legal infrastructure they have the scaling infrastructure. They have all these kinds of things. So that's part of what makes we excited. What are the places that already have that infrastructure and they could build a network? And I think about unexpected challengers arising, right? Wikipedia or internet archive or other places that are doing scale content moderation, scale community management, scale legal infrastructure to which we could add social. Again, forgive me for always coming at it from this angle. But what would stop Facebook from doing a Twitter clone? What would stop Microsoft from doing a Twitter clone?

The hardest part, which is people have to want to be at your party. And nobody wants to party with Facebook. And it's a wild thing. You see it even with the metaverse stuff that they're doing. They're throwing a lot of money. Still, even after all the downsizing and shaked out and all that stuff, they're throwing a lot of money at creators. And it's just like flop sweat.

And it's like you can just see the desperation. and you're like, nobody cool wants to be there. One more thing that I want to bring up before you on Slap, you know, is in terms of the training that people went through during the pandemic to become better with some of these moderation tasks, I think Discord has been a really good training ground for a lot of people. And to the degree that Discord and Slack have, you know, created these spaces that people have some ownership and control of

and then they kind of make these bespoke, you know, taught people how to be admin. People have been educated at how to do. So in terms of a non-professional class, developing those skills. That's so funny. Well, it is the sense of like in the 90s we had this, and in the early 2000s we had this, where even people that had blogs in the era of peak blogs would have like, I'm going to moderate my community and managing that kind of thing.

And there was folk knowledge that would come from that of like, well, this is, oh, you can deal with this. And this is going back to BBSs. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the term shadow banning came from that community practice in the early 2000. It's funny, it's like the boogeyman for the folks who were building conspiracy theories around this stuff. But it came from, or hell-banning, like all these different concepts, came from different approaches to dealing with these things because we have decades of history in doing this.

Now, the thing I say to the people I talked about this all the time is those of us who did that work then are lousy elders. We did a horrible job of passing on the practice. I think there was a lot of paranoia and also a lot of fatigue. But also that not. that knowledge got sort of stripped-lined by the people that built these well there was also you know trillion dollars newness like desire to build thing again like the crypto thing yeah building new and building fresh is so much more fun and so much more exciting so much more exhilarating until you run up against

the realities that the elders would have taught you and yeah it's so funny because I get this where like to glitches you know five years in now and people are like oh well you got acquired and what are you doing I was like this is what I'm doing you know what I mean like we're just getting started like we're five years and I feel like we're doing this thing and they're like what are you talking about I was like, all these communities I love took five years to get, you know, like even, forget, like Reddit, like, oh, the front page of the internet, whatever, was dead dead after five years. That was the one that probably didn't come back. Was coasting away at Akkad Nass.

Dig was dominant, like all that kind of stuff. And it's like the neglect of the mainstream, let it kind of evolve. And also they did a million mistakes about content moderation, a million mistakes around advance. Like, I'm not dismissing all that, but it is a valuable resource. built Twitter and Reddit went through that reckoning and Facebook to some degree in terms of turning on the content moderation skill set yeah and it didn't exist before and I also look at this where like part of my experience on this is informed by I was on the board of stack overflow from the beginning until what it was required last year and this is the you know largest community developers that's ever existed yeah

in the world and uh I think it's still a top hundred website and it is a big website right and it's mostly based around sharing accurate information with each other which is again Neu-patic-al idea. It's basically the community knows it as a product. Right. And the thing the evolution they had to make was like, how do you make the admins and mods not be such timers, right? They're kind of dicks about it, but you want to be nicer.

Of all the problems to have? Yeah. That's probably the one you want versus they're letting it be a free-for-all, or there's a bunch of Nazis answering my question about how do I write this in JavaScript, or, you know, like that kind of thing that could have arisen. And so we have examples. We have examples that have been around for years. We have examples of how to do this stuff.

None of those folks have tried to be generalized social media and for good reason because you want to have a community that's a purpose. But that idea of there's a new flourishing, I would not have guessed. I mean, like, you know, again, Chris, you and I had Mastodon account six years ago, right? And I was still posting, right? I was, you know, it's like, like, tumbleweeds and crickets, right? But it was like, you can't stop me. I don't need an audience.

I just need to post. But that idea that, like, what I saw three weeks ago, we had a guy, Luca Hammer, went on glitch over the weekend, built an app that lets you find your Twitter friends on Glick. Yeah. And two weeks straight this has been the most popular app on Glitch out of millions and millions of apps on Glitch. And I think last I heard from him like three quarters of a million people

had used it to go and find their connections on Mastodon. Right? And it's like there's so many stacked layers to what's interesting there. One is Mastodon was just their lying, dormant waiting, you know, like for all those nerds who were like, I'm going to do this because they hadn't got as burnout as I think Chris you and I

had on open stuff, right? We're like cynical. Yeah, you know, I was like, Well, honestly, I'd sort of lost faith. I was like, you know, the open shit, I believe in it, but man, maybe that moment has passed, right? So there's one part. The other part was, I'm old-fashioned, but I still am amazed at, like, a guy, a person on a weekend can make a thing, and then people use it. And the only thing that had given me any hope on that, literally in the last five years, other than, like, my day job working on glitch, was Wharton. At the beginning of this year, this is a really important thread to type of time.

together. The beginning of this year, the hottest app in the world that everybody was talking about was Wordle. It's made by one guy here in Brooklyn for his partner as an act of love. And people forget. And it's a web page. It's a web page. He made a web page. And his partner's like, that's a good web page. And then everybody in the world, like my mom is texting me about wordle, right? And it doesn't have any login and it doesn't have any social networking. And it won. And the idea that you could make internet, you can make internet, and people will use it. That's the beginning of this year, and this year it's going to end with, you can make internet. And this is the first time in 20 years where the beginning and the end of the story is,

some person made a thing and you can use it, and it's not owned by a trillion-dollar company, and you can have some agency and some control and some consent over what happens, and you will find happiness there on the other side of it, and Wordle is not going to shoot back hate at you and stress you out. And the same is true for a lot of people's experience in this sort of new flourishing. I mean, I think what will be interesting to see, to tie it into Bryant one, I think you're going to bring up. Yeah. Will I do this, yeah.

Is whether or not that is the case where it is individuals creating little apps, serving themselves and their own communities, and sort of like the very kind of lowercase internet that used to be. Yeah. A network of networks. A network, if you will. You know, we used to write the HTML by hand. Yeah.

You know, and then send little links around. Yeah. Or will it be someone that does have funding? Will it be the person that hires all the ex-Twitterati? Will it be someone that has been at Google and, you know, has exited or whatever? And they bring to this, you know, ostensibly some big guns to build something that is, you know, quite monolithic and large. I just, I want to say, you know, that I love the idea that, you know,

OGs like us like to say, you know, you can run your own server. You can run your own domain. You can run your own. Right. But maybe we have taught enough people to be mods and admins.

Yeah. That may be... That might be the skill set that's actually needed. Right. Maybe that will allow the Cambridge explosion or the... Right. Okay. I want to end with this because I want to specifically thank the audience. The reason that I'm on post is because the audience...

got me to number one on the sign-up list. And also, I want to be very clear. I'm not an investor. Noam, if you're listening, I'm willing to be. But so this is post.net news. Yeah, I keep seeing links to it. Tell me that.

And it is, obviously, I'd love you guys to look at it, but that wouldn't be good for an audio show. But if you can see right here, it's, so Noam was... It was very pouncy. Was the founder of Ways. and, but so it has all... We've had them on the show, which is why yes, and he and I have been DNA.

He's a lot of cats, which suggests that the genetic material is familiar. So the basis is here in terms of the likes. Oh, we've got some microbandments in there. And the replies, and, like, so, for example, Reuters has been on here, Politico got on here today. So...

The vibe feels a little bit like... Oh, look, Colin got on. He didn't even need me to... Okay, the vibe feels a little bit like Tumblr, to me. Okay. little bit of that. You get, you get the replies, though. I can't find one with a reply as I'm scrolling down right here. So it's a bare bones basis of what Twitter is, where there's a lot of posts of stories, a lot of posts of pictures. Are the hashtags even linked? Hashtags don't exist yet.

Oh, fuck this. Search doesn't exist. Yeah, exactly. You've lost Chris. You've lost Chris. What's up? I'm out. That's my whole thing, man. I'm going to have to buy it and then make it So let me tell you, Nome's update 20 hours ago was search we don't have yet, so that's one of the biggest problems right now. That you can't find people. See, if you just has hashtags. Right now, there is no personalized feed. It's just a bugger feature. It's a fire hose of everybody posting.

Notifications is coming and publishers are coming. Right now, there are 500 people in as of the time that he posted this. But next week, we hope to open up much more aggressively as we release the core missing functionality. I'm curious why, I mean, I'm glad he's doing it and it's cool. I'm admittedly somewhat jaded about this stuff. It feels like another blogging tool. So if I have a medium and a tumbler and a WordPress. You've been talked to him, right?

Okay, so first of all, we've been DMing and I told him, give me 30 minutes notice, day or night, come on the show and tell me what you want to do. Tell me what the plan is. He said when I get my head above water. I have a theory because if you see in here, tips is part of it. What happens when you click on that button? So everybody, when you sign up, you get 50 points. And then you can spend it.

So let's be clear, these are points, not tokens. These are internet points. I don't believe it's on the blockchain. But this is what I want to talk to him about. My theory is that, so this is a reply that he did that I saw early today. Any newsroom or creator will eventually be able to set a price, a micro-payment paywall or ask for donations.

100% of the revenue goes to them. So imagine you integrate the substack, you integrate the publishers onto the platform, allowing them to... I think that he had this idea six months ago a year ago to do this, the micropayments and the integrating of the tip jars and things like that. But I would say to him, if he's listening right now,

what we said 30 minutes ago or what I said 30 minutes ago. Don't worry about that right now. Spin up a functional Twitter as fast as you can because I think people are hungry for it. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things is like the question with any startup, any platform is the what do you have to believe, right? And like, you know, if you're talking about building a blogging tool, you're pushing to the choir. I don't know. That's all they've been doing is making text boxes for 20 years, right? So, so, so, plus.

I mean, so, just so the audience knows, like, do you want to just say a little bit of about six apart? Yeah, sure. So, um, what was it? Yeah, I mean, well, I'll just sort of start my story. I started blogging in 99. And right after, I was writing HTML by hand, right after that blogger launched, which was the first really sort of consumerized tool and around the same time, live journal launched, which was

was the first social network to reach 10 million users at that time was an enormous scale. And invented the technology's just so used. So I was doing that happily for a while. And then my friends made the first sort of professional blog tool, a public tool type. And I was, you know, the first employee and wrote the business plan. And we went from, wouldn't it be cool if we made something people would use to publish to being the tools powering, you know, Gawker and Huffington Post and the sort of first whole wave of, you know, serious blogs, quote unquote, serious blogs. and catalyzed that media

and that, you know, like, really set the stage for, like, the market that now WordPress, you know, really runs and a lot of that sort of space. And eventually we acquired Live Journal. So it was really one platform that at its peak was probably 20 million people blogging across this different platforms.

But also, you know, the other things wrapped around it. In 2003, we built a consumer pay model explicitly so we wouldn't have to do ads, right? Because AdWords and AdSense didn't exist was one reason. I remember this is one of the things I think, you know, because I was poor and whatever, and I got to Silicon Valley, and, like, movable type was, like, expensive. Yeah. Oh, we got shellacked for it.

People hated it. Yeah. And the expensive was $90, right? Like the, the month or? No. You could buy the software. You would buy the software. This is like before there were labels and subscriptions.

Right, right. And then, and then we did a hosted service was just type pad. But it's basically like what WordPress is now. And that was five bucks a month. But the key thing about it was. We chat blog. It's like Twitter blue. Yeah, exactly.

We said five bucks a month. month and the key things were well one it was the first I think it was the conferred first consumer service that used AWS and it was explicitly that we didn't want to require ad to put ads on your blog we need a tool you could put ads in your blog and take money for it and then we did tip jars for pay-com right and so and none of this is like oh I think all of this was like all of us were talking about this right and and and and and and and and Williams and his team of blogger were talking about it we were talking about it we were

were talking about it doing mobile type you know you know Matt Mullen like was taking notes he was 18 years old then right so he sort of it was a little while until he could do WordPress and make it you know into what automatics become but there was a whole community people talking about these things and there is again 20 years of practice talking about how do you build a site and how do you put these things together and how do you enable people to publish and what are the problems you're going to encounter and also on live journal then the people who were leading the attacks and the and the harm and the raids on people are still the people animating this now.

Right? The bad actors are still the bad actors. You got older. Yeah, yeah. And they found another people. I have to interject you a quick. My third startup might have done a little bit of spamming as our of Live Journal as our sort of growth hack. Thanks for that, man. This was in late 2004. I didn't know you were my opponent.

My manager. But I mean, that's the sort of thing. It's like there was the point of learning, right? That, you know, the antagonism of the market teaches you things where you... So, like, one of the reasons that Glitch has less of a burden in maintaining some of the harm, you know, preventing some of the harms, is we just anticipated entire vectors of abuse. And also, the thing that we learned, I think one of the most instructive things, is this is a really good example of the, like, unexpected dynamics is...

MobleType was really the first large-scale social media platform that allowed to comments. and a couple key things. One is when we change the size of the comments box, the length of comments changed. Right? And you think about like nowadays, the majority of photos that have ever been taking by humans are now square. And that's really only changed in the last couple of years

it's because of Instagram's default. Yep. Right? And the same goes where comments essentially basically had no links in them until after AdWords was released by Google. And links started to have monetary value and page rank. link spam started. So Google was able to inflict a cost in the entire ecosystem by not anticipating the harm of a design decision that they made. Later on they just sort of said, well, we don't

care because we've become the most successful startup in history. But at the time, you know, they were very well intentioned. They were sort of talking about it. And we had a techno-idealist vision that we were going to get together. Well, we'll just label the comment box and say, links in here don't count to Google. Turns out the spammers don't really obey to like, let me flag I'm spamming here. The place in the box still just, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And so, you know, in 2004 is when that conversation happened. And we were like, oh, it turns out you can't tech your way out of a social problem or an economic problem. So we took that to heart. And Matt Mullenweg took that to heart. And David Karp, when building Tumblr, anticipated that and took that to heart. And Eve Williams took that to heart and building me to him. And so you have, you know, many, many others.

But, like, that cohort of people, one, we would all sit in a room together and talk. about what are the problems you're having, what are we encountering, we're all trying to enable the same thing. That is not happening. There's not community to practice around this stuff. And frankly, there was also a real big lag in the degrees and timing of which everybody brought on that trust and safety team and did those things. That's the part where I get to despair and where I do get antagonistic is, you know how many people have to put so much time in, how many people had to suffer, how much harm had to happen for, you know, and if all of that is going to have been worth something, the only reason why,

would be if we can prevent it for happening again. And to see a backslide on that makes me furious still. On the other hand, if we have a flourishing of this open Internet of that idealistic view of like human-scale communities with people who actually care to engage and they might have to relearn these lessons but they want to, and they're going to ask, hey, has anybody seen this kind of problem come up before? You know, that makes me really idealistic and optimistic.

And I'm hopeful again that, you know, at the very least, the surface area is so reduced that, you know, you don't get the large scale, I could piss off a million people if I go and do this. I mean, I think that's the ultimate kind of question of this moment, which is should the power that has been built up in the last decade through mass social media actually exist in human experience? Right. Or should we actually kind of disaggregate and decentralize and push that power back

into individual communities of practice or interest or what have you, that, you know, allow you to know the 150 people who are in that community and you interact with them. Because the one thing that I see, and I had this thought, when I'm thinking about post.com news, you know, with the tip jar, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on this, but it creates financialization and monetization, which is the very thing we decried when we started this conversation. And so when you bring that type of incentive into a platform, people are smart, people are savvy, people evolve, they will find a way of gaming it. And if this doesn't turn into another only fans or something like that, I'll be somewhat surprised. Because when you were dealing with financialization within a local community

where everyone kind of knows each other and there are systems that diminish bad behavior like shame, then you might actually be able to financialize it. But when you remove shame as being a controlling factor and you're shameless, then that leads to bad behavior. Shame only exists within a community that has a shared set of values. Exactly. Right. And this is what We used to have boundaries on the American presidency that were only defined by sure and right and defiled and as that that shared set of values. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm looking at this is like if post on news intends to become a mass market phenomenon then the financialization at the start will be something that is a

well I want to go as far as to say that it'll be a corrupting influence but I'll just say that it puts spin on the ball where the outcomes are unknown. I've seen a number of these different platforms in the crypto space. and in the token space, and even in the Fiat space, that have tried to put coins and tokens and whatever into the space, and it creates a different set of incentives that, for example, young people who are going to determine the next era of culture are going to see and gain and use in ways

that are going to create different vectors of abuse that the current trust and safety teams are not even prepared for. And Noam, let me reiterate, get in touch because I want to invest, and Chris and Anil have a lot of ideas. ideas, but my original idea is just do Twitter now and that was my point. Where about the tipping later? I hope it's one of the folks who does it, but I'll tell you a couple things.

I think the first is the technological mind wants to think that every time you make a text box for people to type in, you've made the same tool, and you have not. And the motivation of a person who wants to get attention and engagement is very different from the motivation of a person that wants to make a living doing something. Yes. And sometimes they overlap and some of the desires are the same and also people have a little degree of both But like I have been a paid you know professional magazine columnist for Wired magazine and I've been a person who writes a shitload of stuff for free on my blog And I've written literally one thousand times as much stuff on my blog and my social media as I've written for pay in my life

Right and even though there was more prestige attached to the the publications that I wrote for and that's so I have a really sort of clear view of the value of those different systems. And yet the experience of writing, the same keyboard, same monitor, same size box, same kind of, you know, same vibes when I was doing the writing. And so I think that part, it's easy to conflate one for the other. And also the social dynamics of what motivates people to share. The highest motivator over time is do the people I care about or care to connect with, Are they going to engage with me and respond to me here?

Some people find that through the institution of a well-respected publication that gives them that imprimatur. Some people get that through a follower count. Some people get that through trolling somebody, all those different ways. And those dynamics are complicated and not obvious, and also very often only legible if you've done the work. And you have to have a respect for those things. And what happens is the technology reduces and flattensis.

A great example is coming all the way back to blue checkmarks. Blue check marks mean all of those things. You are who you say you are, you are somebody who's affiliated with an institution, you are somebody who gets impersonated, or somebody who needed tools to manage abuse online. There's all these different reasons you might get a blue checkmark on Twitter. And all those things get conflated because it was created by technologists that sort of say, like, let's put all these in that bucket. And then people on the outside come in and sort of say, one of those scenarios is really

triggering to me. It really, it makes me angry. And I want to go at it and you sort of ignore the kind of. inflation that's happened. That thing, we're going to keep repeating that pattern if we don't break out of it. And so that's where I sort of look at like, I hope post wins. I hope all these different things win. But it is in arguable to me that we are at a moment of splintering again. There will never be the concentration into one or two platforms that we've had these recent years. And that splintering, I think, is good over time. And we have to figure out how to make that work.

Yeah. The one last thing that I'll say, and I suppose this is, you know, my tip to know him or to anybody else that wants to take Brian's money to go build another tool. You know, and I did a TEDx talk about this, is just that the culture of the founder tends to inform what actually happens on their platform. Yeah. So essentially what happens in a space is downstream of the beliefs, the values, the ideals. And frankly, what it is that a platform is being designed in response or in reaction. too. And so I don't know what Nome's ultimate purpose or goal is. I don't know what culture he hopes to build or instill on this place. But I would hope that just as we've talked about content moderation as being part of the service, that culture is another aspect, another vector to consider as people are building these things. And if you bring in financialization,

if you bring on retweeting or spreading or amplification, or you bring on likes or dislikes, all of those things imply a certain type of value system and the ability for people to judge or reward what people are doing on the platform. So it's these are all the things that are the hard-won lessons. And when I was thinking about this, I was, I was sort of thinking about that, you know, the intention of the hashtag was to create something that was open, that was free, that didn't have anything to do with me being the person who would choose who could use or not or not. And that means that people used it for both good and bad.

And that is like the easiest thing for me to see, you know, I dropped the pebble into a large ocean and the ripples that emanated from that were caused by me. And so I think that's sort of where we are and I, anyways, we'll see if there are many more pebbles dropping right now.

Like I said, there are ads, I believe, but not hashtag. Yeah, so also that that pebble is not yeah. Okay, please allow Anil to All right, well, amazing. So, by the way, before he does, because he's going to wrap, because he's technically the host. Right.

I'm so glad that you did that stuff at the end because you never came on the Internet History Podcast when I was doing it. So thank you for giving us a good 10 minutes of what I would have wanted you to do on that one. I thought you were just giving me a hard time for not coming out of the show. No, because I never asked you as far as I know, so it's my fault. The next one you can go to his office to report it, too. Listen, I can still always bring it out of retirement at any point. So anyway, thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing this.

And now Chris, yeah. Well, you know, I don't have much more to say, but thanks everybody for listening. Wait, Anil. Anil. Neil, if you have anything that you would like to share, any links. Oh, yeah, I got a plug. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Please do. I think two things actually that are real pertinent to them. We talked a little bit about Blitch. It is a community that's amazing. It lets you go in your browser and build an app or build a website. and we're talking a lot about the old internet but I think the thing I get most excited about is what looks forward is people sort of saying like what's the new you know I want to hack on the Fediverse I want to do something or I want to build

does glitch have support for the Fediverse yeah yeah on platform I can either confirm or deny but but Fediverse development coming soon wouldn't that be interesting that would be interesting and then the other thing I sort of say we we got acquired by Fastly earlier this year and Fast is one of this like it's a you know, it's a sort of infrastructure company. And geeks know it, but hooks don't really think about, you know, what does that mean day to day? But we were, you've been able to, we're not even there six months,

and we were able to launch this program called Fast Forward that is pouring resources into open source projects at every level, like programming languages. And one of the ones I love is Scratch. I've got my team. It's a brilliant tool. It's how my son first learned to love coding. That thing of getting to, like, give resources to connect with the people who make the open Internet,

has been like one of those bright lights for me for 20 years. It's reconnected me with like, God, I do you love this stuff. And I can still be optimistic. Even when I've been so cynical or critical of the industry, I've gotten to get back into talking to people that have the purest motivations of doing the best work and say, all right, we're going to help you deliver that.

And we're going to help you, you know, build that. That's like a really special thing. So, yeah, those are the things that are sort of animating my days and getting to work with amazing people. So that's really my... What's the website? What's the address? You get a fastly.com slash forward.

Great. So it's fast forward. And glitch. And glitch is glitch.com. Amazing. All right. That's perfect. Thank you everybody for listening and tuning in. Thanks, Chris, for coming to me again. One of these days, I told you, I might be out in January for the sketch fest.

Yeah. All right. Thanks. Sounds good. I love everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.