Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Tip Jar, Basecamp And Doge

Episode Date: May 8, 2021

We talk about the Tip Jar and all the other big changes Twitter has been making. We get into the Basecamp brouhaha and also why I didn’t end up covering it this week. We talk about Dogecoin with someone who was there at the beginning of the project. And we even have an actual newsmaker on the show. At the very end, we talk to Tony Haile, founder of Scroll, which, if you’ll remember, just got acquired by Twitter this past week. Sponsor: Cybereason.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Techmeme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough and welcome to another Twitter space, the one we recorded just last night, Friday night. It was a big one. We ended up talking about the tip jar and all the other big changes Twitter has been making recently. We got into the base camp, Bruhaha, and also why I didn't end up covering that this past week. We talk about Dogecoin with someone who was there at the beginning of the project. And we even have an actual newsmaking. on the show. At the very end, we talked to Tony Hale, founder of Scroll, which, if you'll remember, just got acquired by Twitter this past week. Oh, also about halfway through, Twitter Spaces

did the usual thing where it was dropping in and out. I actually go away for a good, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes because I literally can't get back into the space. So if you hear sort of an awkward edit, that's because we had to paste together the audio I recorded and the audio Chris recorded. So if you can hear that, that explains that as well as explains why I was silent for a period of time in the middle. Anyway, enjoy. You got your second jab today? I did. I did.

How are you feeling? So far, so good. You know, it was three hours ago. Yep. Lisa, my wife, got hers. What was that? Tuesday? No.

Yeah, Tuesday. And she felt nothing. like the whole time entirely yeah and and and i did definitely like 12 hours later feel like you know chills like when you get a fever and you want to take a warm bath or whatever but she she entirely nothing so take them for what it's worth hopefully it works which um which job did you get uh Pfizer okay same yeah I don't know what to tell you. Okay, we'll see.

Well, I got a weekend ahead of me and show. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do you know the story? I think I said it on the show that the day after I recorded the show and I wrote it out and I said, oh, I don't feel anything. And so then I record it, go down and have lunch and then come back upstairs and start to edit the show. And as I'm editing the show, I start to feel like shit. And so then I was like, should I re-record this? Am I a liar?

By shit, I mean, you know, I just chills and eggs, not anything terrible. I mean, much better than obviously what it's intended to prevent. Yeah, no, entirely. Cool. You want to get started? Yeah, sure. Kick it off, sir. Okay.

Actually, I'm noticing that I'm hearing myself in my headphones, and it's really distracting. How do I fix that? No, I'm not going to be able to. Okay, let's go with it. Okay, well, welcome. Today is Friday, May 7th. Welcome to the Tech meme ride home experience, where we talk about all things in tech, typically coming out of Brian's Techeme Ride Home podcast. We've got, oh my God, so much stuff this week. We're going to talk about Twitter and their tip jar and all their other big announcements. Hopefully we're going to get into some of the, I don't know, analysis on the base camp. fiasco. I feel like Brian, maybe you didn't want to say too much about that. Well, no, I've got a lot of things to say about that, but I'll tee that up to you.

But you know what? What I would like to do is, I don't know that we ever introduce you. You're Chris Messina. You're the inventor of the hashtag. You're the product hunt Jedi master, your product design guru, which is, I think, important to say if we're going to go into the Twitter stuff, the Twitter tip jar stuff. So let me hand that off to you because let's talk about that. Yeah. Actually, let me see. I'm going to pin a tweet somewhere in my bookmarks about all the things that they

announced this week. And it's actually much more than just the tip jar. But we can start there. Okay. So that's up there. You can go check that out. I mean, Twitter has just been going. on tear. It's pretty remarkable.

You know, they obviously had their event, their analyst event, I think, earlier this year where they previewed a lot of the stuff and they talked about it. We still haven't seen super follows and we're still missing the folders, I think that they're going to launch for bookmarks, but that might be a private test that they're not really sure about.

But certainly they talked about the tip jar, and now that's out, now you can go chip a small subset of people. And obviously this comes in the tales of what Clubhouse has done. And that's, I think, really significant just in terms of the overall creative economy and what's kind of happening there. The way in which people are going to monetize

their activities, which previously the phrase was, you know, if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. And for many of us who were creating the content, we were the, I don't know, raw inputs, the raw materials for a lot of these platforms. And now that dynamic is shifting. And it seems like it may be a reaction, a reaction to whether it's changes from what Apple is doing with their ad tracking. Okay, this reverb on myself is really confusing. How would I fix that? We cannot hear it. And if anyone in the...

No, you can't. Yeah, okay. But it's my ears. So if I turn my mic down, but then that might mean that you can't do the recording. Okay. I'll just turn it down. Can you stand here now? Yes, yes. It's the worse.

Okay. Okay, let me keep going. So anyways, some of the stuff that Apple is changing with their app tracking transparency stuff, the whole advertising model, all the sort of rage baiting that's necessary to attract attention seems to, and I was listening to actually Justin, what's his name, he might actually be on the show. I don't know. He has a podcast called Tech Policy Press, and his most recent episode actually has some great commentary from the social media platforms about how like Tristan Harris's big complaint

you know he was obviously behind like the social dilemma the movie is that the business model of the big tech platforms is about getting people to stay on the platforms more right and either from a narcissism perspective or just an enragedment perspective the more time that people spent on online the more attention that they get the more ads they can put in front of people so There's this just arms race against essentially in terms of like how much attention we can get and how many ads we can put in front of you. So if we switch over to a model where people are actually paying for and patronizing the content that they care about most, then that disrupts the advertising model and the business model of these firms. So as advertising becomes more problematic and more maybe the returns are getting less, then you can keep the price.

right? Like there's less of a commoditization of the content when people are following specific creators and paying to those creators directly at a certain recurring revenue rate. Does it make sense? Yeah. Let me stop you for a second. Yeah. You know, because we just did this week and last week, you know, all of the earnings reports where it's like all of the folks that are ad-supported are not suffering. The huge tech platforms, B-U-Facebook, even Twitter,

had decent earnings, even though Wall Street didn't like it. I'm curious, you're saying that, like, there's diminishing returns for ad stuff. I'm curious whether or not you feel like if you're a Twitter

or you're somebody that's sort of not in the, the big five, if you're looking at this creator economy as an opportunity to go orthogonally and that's what we're seeing, or if everybody, you know, because Facebook is clearly going this way, but then they're just trying to grow beyond the ad stuff. So I'm just curious how you're thinking about it in terms of, is this move to the creator economy that we've talked a ton about in the last few months? Is this an opportunity or is this people just chasing the latest shiny object or what? What do you think? I don't think so.

This seems like a major shift, like a fundamental reconfiguring of the way in which money flows on the internet. And I think what I'm not sure about is actually whether it's an and or an or. In other words, is Facebook and Twitter going to be continuing with their ad business as it exists and also providing this platform for creators and direct monetization basically? And it seems like it's going to be an and for some period of time. And also necessarily what I was tweeting about today, when I drew a comparison to the amount of money that was spent on World War II, you know, is like for the next decade or 15 years of these platforms,

they need to essentially attract the best and most interesting talent and maintain them in order to keep people glued to these services and to continue to build up those brands over time. And for anybody that, like, commodity content, I think is going to be very hard to make appealing for most people. In other words, I mean, I guess, like, you might think of like Nextdoor has a unique dataset or content sent because it's people who live near you. And so therefore, you're going to sort of tune back in because, like,

there's an instant relevance to it. But the more that you get out to, like, just the middle the internet, you know, and sort of like nowhereland, it feels like that's going to be harder to monetize with commodity ads, whereas people going to the high-quality creators, you know, on Twitter or even on Clubhouse or on Facebook, are going to be developing those relationships, especially from a streaming perspective, Twitch, Discord, and so on. And there's going to be a real, I don't know, like, pull, I guess, around that type of monetization behavior, like, where it's normal now for people who use the internet to actually tip and pay money as part of their experience.

One of the other things I was that when someone likes my content now, it's really, really hard for that to build a relationship. There was a time when the amount of likes and retweets and replies and stuff was sort of meaningful, and you could kind of really keep up with it. You could build relationships. It's, I think, much harder to do that now, especially if you are a creator, you know, that frequently gets thousands of retweets or likes to see any of those people. But if those people actually are putting money in your pocket, suddenly you start to notice them a lot more.

And that builds a different type of relationship that I'm not quite sure how it's going to change things. So this is an interesting thought that you just now put into my head. Maybe it's not the ceiling of monetization in terms of ad supported and we're moving towards something else, which it could be that. Because Lord knows that for 30 years it's been hard to get people to pay for stuff on the internet. But what if the ceiling is, we're hitting the ceiling of the algorithms, right? So that what all of these platforms had depended on is content that is very pooled to you, very exciting to you, and the algorithms have tried to, you know, put that front and center to you to ways that have been detrimental to our society.

And what if, for various reasons, the platforms realize that there's a ceiling to that. And so what they need is they need to find some way to incentivize better content. They can't just have this pull of content and then let the algorithms push things to the surface. They need better things to bubble to the surface. And so what is happening is that if we can incentivize the best people, the best, Chris is the best, the videos and things like that. Brian's. Yes, exactly. And then, and then that's better. And also, you know, it's better for them in terms of, you know, PR, but also maybe that's better than the algorithm method that they've

been using all this time. Yeah, I think that that's a really, like, astute way of thinking about it. And I think it's also, again, both in that for, we don't even know what happens if someone, like, you know, tips me or you, does that mean that their content, or, my content, your content is going to show up in that tipper's feed more frequently because it's such a strong signal of preference. Right. Hadn't even thought of that. Yeah. So from a brand's perspective, like it reverses the entire relationship dynamic where our brand's going to start tipping their followers in order to like have their content show more or like vice versa. Like it's a really interesting dynamic. And it seems like at least what I was reading, I think was that Twitter currently is really only focused on individual. as opposed to brands. But I did see, where was it, Morning Brew. Let me see if I'm

find the tweet and pin it. Morning Brew was asking the question, would you ever tip a brand? And I don't even know what that means, but why not? Right? I saw that they've been doing a regular Twitter space. Shoot, I can't remember any of their names right now. I apologize, guys. And Morning Brew has been one of the, so when they do a Twitter space, there's I'm trying to remember the names. And then Morning Brew is one of the accounts that shows up there. So I wonder if they're experimenting with that, too. That would be interesting.

So just as an FYI, we're talking specifically. I want to get into a little bit of this. But today, the tip jar came in. And I successfully tipped somebody. Have you done, have you tips? someone yet? I have not. I've seen the interface though. Yes. And so, um, uh, I told you who I tipped. And now I'm, I'm not even remembering that either. Um, it's in your DMs. Yes. Uh, I tipped, uh, Evan Kirstell, who, um, retweeted that we were doing this tonight. So I, that's,

that's why I thought to tip him after he did that. Um, but, uh, so I did it over, um, Square cache, I believe. It was definitely square because I don't use any of those other shady things. But it was super simple. And then I don't know how you would turn it on if, you know, you were deigned by Kvon to have it turned on for you. But I did it. I had to go to Evans' profile. What they need to do is they need to make it like right in the the tweet. You see a great tweet and you can, there's the, there's the dollar sign there. No, that wasn't what I had to go to Evans profile. There is a little dollar icon there. And then it was super simple. I didn't have to sign up for anything. It was just like, well, you've already got

cash app on your phone and I gave him a dollar. And that was it. End of story. So, I mean, this is, this is the freaking dream of the 90s alive where you can just, it's micro, it's Micro payments, man. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Yeah. So, but he's going to create all these new dynamics, and it's going to be very confusing and strange.

You know, I enabled tipping on my clubhouse profile, and I think I got one or two tips. You know, maybe it was like a dollar, a total of like $1.50. I don't know if I'd like report taxes on that probably. But, and that was all handled through Stripe, I think Twitter's implementation using those third-party apps makes a ton of sense. So the simplicity of that and it's all it is also following behavior. I think more and more people are using cash app as a general purpose way of sort of just tipping people and providing value. There's a lot of stuff happening in the entertainment space where entertainers are putting out their cash app or asking

their fans to provide their cash app handles and then they're just giving away like $500 and it's great engagement hack. So stuff like that is already happening. And then of course when you get the tip, then you you screenshot it and then you share it, and then a bunch of other people go follow that person who's like giving tips out. And you know what I mean? Like that's just like a huge growth hack.

Which I've said before, Jack has used to great effect at Square already. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So can we do this? Let's cycle back. Do you have at the top of your head all of the things, and I should have had a list of these, that Twitter's done recently.

What was it? Acquiring... Do you know it off the time? Oh, it's at the top. If you look at the space... Yeah, go ahead. The tweets there. But just this week alone, so I don't know,

they did some follow local journalists hashtag thing, which is part of the World Press Freedom Day. They've expanded host access on spaces. They're exploring ticketed spaces, so you can charge for those. So that's interesting. they're supposedly co-hosting is here. Let me see how we can make you a co-host.

I don't know when I can make you a co-host. I don't think so. Scheduled things are coming up, which is great, because I've been using Luma. They should just acquire Luma. Luma's so good. More blocking stuff, captioning. They also acquired scroll.

My buddy, Tony Hale, has sold that. And so that review plus scroll are being combined into a new initiative, called Longform, which to me, I don't know, I think I called this like months ago. It's just like there's this weird dynamic between Medium and Twitter, obviously having been founded by the same people and yet two separate companies. And so there's almost like a battle going on between those two in terms of, and then there's like substack waiting in the wings also like becoming more like medium.

So all these things are echoing each other. Hey, by the way, Ping Tony, I invited him here. Because, you know, now this is his job. You know, he's got to do Twitter stuff. That's true. That's true. Okay, but what I, there's also now, this is going back several weeks. They've got the newsletter component, things like that.

Review. Review. Okay. In your opinion, I sent you a link to Peter Kafka piece about, like, we know that Twitter, is moving towards an all-encompassing subscription product. Do you have a sense? Can you see the outlines or contours of what you think they're going for here? Yeah, I mean, you start to put it all together. And I believe, I don't know if it was last year or on one of the other annuals calls, Jack did specifically say that they were entertaining the idea of like a Twitter Plus or

Twitter premium and like a subscription based Twitter. So it seems like given, I don't know, yes, okay, here's how I would see it happening. You pay $7 a month and you get unlimited access to Twitter paywalled content. So within the Twitter app itself, there's an Apple news like subscription service that would replace Explore and you get access to a bunch of paywall content via scroll where you don't need to sign in, but maybe you sign in with Twitter, and that's a way of essentially bringing your identity into other contexts. There's a bunch of payment mechanisms that are also part of that for creators

so that they can monetize their own behavior, and then they can, I don't know, use it to pay for Twitter Plus or something. I don't know. But whether you're sending out review email newsletters or whether you're publishing to some long-form publishing, publishing platform within Twitter, you're basically captured within those walls, and as long as you're a paying member,

then you get access to that premium content. And then basically, like, you know, then selling tickets to the Twitter spaces, like, in essence, like, it's sort of like this bespoke, but completely all of the spokes of the wheel, creator thing. Is that what you're seeing?

like, are they going in the creator direction or, like, I'm trying to figure out if they're thinking on which side of the pie, right? Like, is it the, is it the audience side or the creator side that they're more interested in right now? Or maybe it doesn't matter. It's one of the things that Ben McHath actually tweeted to me about, I was asking this question, like, for those of us who do use Twitter, and obviously I've been giving away our tweets forever for free for a long time,

does it start to monetize or put our tweets behind a paywall or something, diminish our reach and our ability to influence and to thought lead or whatever? And I think it's a mix. I think that there's a lot of value for people who really want to go deep with these types of relationships, these what are they called, parasympathetic, parasympathetic relationships, where you want to get the behind-the-scenes stuff. You want to talk to the person. You want to have a real relationship with them.

Whereas media and mass media for so long has been about you just being the recipient of mass communications and content. And there's a generation growing up where that just doesn't really make sense. It's not resonant. It's discorded. So the problem then becomes when you are someone who's producing a lot of content and you want to have these deeper relations with people, you need a way to, you know, one, focus on the people that are providing you value and sustenance, literally through like, you know, calories through dollars. And so paywalling this stuff gives you that opportunity, I guess, to enrich those relationships with that additional content and materials.

So it'll be a mix. I don't think it's like the degree to which it cannibalizes the other. In other words, premium content cannibalizes the free content that's on Twitter. I don't think it's going to be an absolute thing. It's going to be a constant mix and a readjustment, just like there's, I'm trying to think other places where there's more behind-the-scenes stuff. But I feel like in the in the streamer world, there's a lot of that. We just haven't, or just not used to it in Twitter. Well, and, and we've said on the show for a good year now that, you know, everyone's chasing the Asian model of, it's, it's, it's, it's not just that people are willing to pay for things now or people are willing to pay creators now or people are willing to microtip or whatever.

It is this idea of, I don't know if it's Netflix or something, like that people just, people are willing to have. subscriptions to things and people are willing people are willing to pay and especially VCs are aware of the fact that that is that is the that is the base level of how things are operating that's the ecosystem in China yeah yeah so yes obviously there's been chasing after like the China model for a long time and that is a piece of this too because we have to remember that all these platforms are global platforms so Twitter has a huge following in Japan and so So live streaming and stuff like that is definitely part of that culture.

And so when you're competing against those platforms that are bringing in real money, and Twitter doesn't offer any of that natively, then people are going to switch. If you remember, like in the early days of Twitter, Twitter didn't even have its own native photo sharing. You have to use TwitPick or something else, right? And that, I don't know if that gave Instagram an opening, but certainly the fact that they sort of refused to take that on for such a long time did provide other parties the ability to grow up in that in that shadow. And so in a similar way, if these mainstream platforms don't figure out a way of competing with these upstarts that are bringing payments in as a core mechanic of the platform, then people will leave.

And so, again, looking at long term, think about like the ultimate stickiness. If I'm making, you know, $5,000 a month or $50,000 a month off of my Twitter following, am I going to leave? Probably not. And especially for celebrities or for talent and entertainment. containers, I mean, you look at like a cameo and cameos rise. Camio is very straightforward in terms of it being transactional, but they just raised $100 million. Why? Because they're going after the same opportunity that Facebook and Twitter see to corner the market on relationships with these creators who are used to now having these one-on-one kind of interactions with their fans that were

never possible before, certainly at scale. Well, and that's what's so interesting is that bizarrely, we're back to, and listen, I'm preaching to the literal choir here, that Twitter originally, they were the original ones that had like the sort of celebrity evangelical. The celebrities were the ones that made Twitter happen, right? And so this idea that celebrities first groked about Twitter that this is a way to have a direct relationship with my fan base, it's almost like they're coming back to their roots in a way that they just ignored for a decade, I guess. But Twitter had that in some ways because Twitter was early.

They could. And they could ignore their community. They could ignore the spam and abuse. They could ignore a lot of things and just sort of focus on, you know, growth and not really changing the service that much. And suddenly, in the last year and a half, social is hot again. Money is pouring into social platforms. And there's a recognition that what happens on social platforms creates enormous

amount of stickiness and other platforms want that. You know, look at like the community service, like community, which allows, I guess, celebs to stand up their own SMS number so they can, like, text their fans and their fans can text back, and there's like some subscription fee on a monthly basis. I mean, it's just a worst version of Twitter. But it's like there's an intimacy in that that publishing to the feed on Twitter or to Facebook or Instagram kind of like loses

like you end up like talking to no one in a sense you know so it feels like these other changes on these platforms are about driving new types of relationships between fans and you know creators and again there's so much of the space

that I feel like I'm sort of going through one of those charts that has all these logos on it because we also think about like what Patreon has proved what only fans has proved you know and I mean who someone tweeted about this um it was jack butcher i'm not sure but they were pointing out that only fans takes like 20 percent and twitter takes none so if you're someone on only fans you should

probably switch most of your activities only over to twitter and you're going to make a lot more money well and uh somebody said that uh twitter is one of the uh platforms that allows nudity i think yeah exactly yeah it's not hard to find if you follow some hashtags yeah there you go so talk about eating people's lunch, that's possible. You want to reset and shift topics? Yeah, yeah. Sure. Also, Emil wanted to come up. Do you want to bring them up now? Yeah, go ahead.

Cool. Let's see. And as a speaker, Emil, we're going to bring you up. You have some comments about Twitter. I forgot what I wanted to say because it was a while back. But I think it was around the... No, I forgot. I'll just chime in. Okay, no problem. Sorry about that.

Yeah, no worries. Yeah, so again, everyone welcome. This is the Tech meme ride home experience for Friday, May 7th. We are here talking about the latest and greatest tech news of the week, sort of a deeper dive into what you would normally hear in shorter snippets on the Tech Meem Ride Home podcast, which Brian hosts. The next topic that we wanted to get into was about Basecamp. And I imagine most folks, actually, if you want to just show a,

a moat of some sort, maybe a hondo or piece from the spaces UI, you can let us know. How aware of this situation you are, but I have thoughts, and I'm sure Brian has thoughts. Yeah, let me do something meta real quick, because all week people have been poking me being like, how come you haven't covered the base camp thing? And so I want to address that real quick, but then also I have a couple observations and then I'll kick it to you and then whoever has observations about this. It's a weird thing. Like sometimes things will happen and I'm not sure they'll have legs. And so like it'll as a story, right?

Oh, this is just a one day thing and it's a small company. It'll be over. Yeah. And with Basecamp, it's like, you know, what is it, a less than 50 people company? You know. Now it's far less. Well, I lost a third of their complaint. It's just one of those things where I'm just one guy. I don't have an entire, you know,

there's no morning meeting where we, you know, decide what stories we go with every day. It's just me. So that when something becomes a larger trend, sometimes I miss it. You know, and all, you know, because this is related, like, you know, the whole turmoil at the, at the, Google AI, seem to be, you know, if it's a story where it's like, oh, one person leaves in a huff or someone's fired and it's controversial or whatever, I don't know that that's a trend. Now, clearly, there's a trend here that we can fit all of this into. So this is first to say, I didn't cover it because I missed it. I wasn't sure it had legs. I thought it was a small company or whatever. Now, obviously, this fits into things. Here are my two observations and then take this wherever you want to go with this. Yeah.

Sometimes I feel like an anthropologist of the tech world because I'm not sure where I fit into the tech world. Like I'm not a VC. I have been a founder. I'm sort of in the journalist world. But I don't know that there's any like sort of camp that I fall into. So you're sort of a historian of the tech world. Right, exactly. So I'd like to think of, I would like to think of myself as like floating above.

So again, as an author. Curator and chronicler. There you know. Or just like, you know, yeah, I just put things in order for people. That's literally what I think every day. But so it was fascinating to see as almost an anthropologist, this play out because it did get way more chatter. I should have covered it. So apologies. But the thing that was fascinating to me about it was, again, those sorts of pools of the tech

world that I just described, the people that would have generally applauded the move that Basecamp did. And I'm going to describe it real quick. They just they, I also pin some tweets, But yeah. Yes. They said, no more politics. We're going to heads down. We're only going to do our work. Nothing controversial, et cetera, et cetera.

Something similar that Coinbase did. And actually, that's the thing that was fascinating to me is that the people that applauded Coinbase for doing something similar, very publicly and very loudly applauded, were suddenly like deer in headlights because DHH and Jason have over the years rubbed them the wrong way. So it was one of these weird political things where certain people didn't know what to say. That's just an observation. Number two, I don't know who said this, but this to me is maybe my take on it. and I don't know if this puts me on a side or whatever.

But someone said, you can be outspoken and controversial and political, and that can be your brand. That can be your company culture. That can be your personal brand. That's great. You can do that. You can also be middle of the road. You can be controversy agnostic. You can be heads down, only work, a shooing debate.

And that's fine, too. You can do that. what's probably impossible to do is to shift abruptly from one to the other. Yeah. And I think that maybe that's the biggest thing that happened, but those are my two observations. Let me know your thoughts and people raise your hands. So I have some thoughts about this. And I'm going to hope that this is a safe space because I don't even know.

know how to really, I don't know, formulate these words, but I, I woke up the other night around 1 a.m. I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about this. And I'm going to get into that in a second, but I do want to respond to how you articulated this, which is, I think, right. The problem was kind of like the duality of having, you know, two white dudes who are very outspoken and opinion it is, you know, and basically, like, built the brand of 37 signals and then base camp coming out and then suddenly saying, okay, just kidding, we don't want to be able, we don't want people within our company to have political conversations. But you're free to do whatever you want outside of the company. Now, that's a weird kind of, what is it? It's a double

standard. Well, and to be clear, they've written multiple books telling, espousing their philosophy on how to form a company culture? That's what I mean. Yes. So on the one hand, they are saying what is great for us as the leaders of this company shouldn't actually apply to the people who work for us. And when it comes to the politics of some of the things that we've done in the past,

well, we're going to give ourselves a pass. And specifically, this seemed to be in relationship or in relation to this document that they were circulating internally or had been maintained, maintained for years about names that sounded funny, that they maintained for some reason. I'm not sure if it was for programming purposes or for customer service calls or just because they were silently racist. But it was sort of the conversation that happened around that and around their own initiative around diversity and inclusion where they started the work. And then they didn't like the conversations that resulted from them. And they said, you know what, this isn't for us.

we're going to go back to just heads down doing the work. And I think they were when the spotlight was put back on them. Right. And it was too quick. Maybe if it happened like a year after they started, but it was right away and they didn't like that. So I'm going to breach a very controversial topic. Oh, look, Tony's joined.

What's up, Tony? So, and this could go very poorly for me, but I'm going to try it anyways. Because it seemed to me when I woke up at what I am that the thing that was stuck in my head was that this was a sort of silent, quiet white supremacy that fits into a broader structural narrative. And Casey Newton did some really great reporting and got some really great commentary from people who worked at Base Camp. And I mean, Base Camp is a very selective place that is very restrictive on who it hires. they notoriously talk about and are prideful of how small their organization is relative to how much money they make and all of that.

So to be inside of that little cloistered contingent, you know, it's a very howled place. And so to suddenly come to this realization that the way in which they may have achieved that was through a kind of silent white supremacy was shocking. And I say this because I've had to go through this journey myself for many, many, many years of recognizing the ways in which I benefited from my whiteness and my maleness, especially in tech. And I always thought that I just was somehow just great, but I've had so many experiences that have taught me that I'm not that great. And I'm just above mediocre, or maybe a little bit better than mediocre, but nonetheless, I've still gotten benefits from things that I didn't earn, from just being born in a certain place and looking a certain way. And it seemed that what was finally happening at base camp was that Jason and DHS suddenly were coming to grips with how they arrived at the success that they've achieved.

And it wasn't completely just based on the merit of their ideas and their practices. But they actually diminished or avoided taking responsibility for some aspects of their culture. And that suddenly when there was a group that was targeted at that problem, they actually didn't want to go down the path of. of recognizing it and making changes. And one of the quotes, and I'll have to find it, it was so good. It was just like, you know, white supremacy doesn't have to look like, you know, hoods and fire and marching down, you know, the middle of Skokie for it to be effective and chilling. And I think it's the moment and the intersectionalization of what is happening in the broader world,

what is happening through social media and technology, what is happening with Black Lives Matter, and what happened previously with Coinbase now happening in a different way with Basecamp. Like Coinbase has never sort of aspired to tell people what type of cultures to build for their companies or how to like do things better, right? They're more like saying, look, things have gotten a little out of hand internally in terms of our conversations, and we think that that's not really helpful for us. And that's, you know, that's fine. That's for them to do. And if people don't like that, they can leave.

but for a company like Basecamp to be writing books, you know, writing the canon of how to build companies that work, and there's subtle white supremacy built into their practices that are unacknowledged because they didn't, they weren't aware, to me feels like the thing that I took away from this, and I'm like, oh, shit, like, this is how deep this goes. Well, and it's also about the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the power dynamics of the voice, right? Again, yes, exactly, where you, where you,

have leaders of the company and founders of the company that are very outspoken and are willing to constantly share their opinions and to be controversial. And like I said, piss off a lot of the tech universe. They don't care. That was the thing that stood out to me. Sorry to cut you off. But I thought about what if I replaced those, like, David and Jason with two other humans that had different physical attributes, you know, race, gender, et cetera. And what would the response have been? Would people who don't look like them actually have been able to make all the statements over the years the way that they have? Well, and that's entirely the point of the sort of, that's why the people that have reacted to like, this is hypocritical, is like, so wait, you have a voice, but then when you, when other people have voices, you shut them down.

like for whatever wherever you side on the politics of this like that makes no sense that like you're allowed to be outspoken but then your employees and whatever you're not allowed to speak you know

right the other thing too that came out later and is in one of the pin tweets was how Ryan Singer who has been there for 20 years and his chief of strategy basically oh my God like if you it's sort of a trans

of the the internal call that essentially when the aspect I think of white supremacy was brought up like he shut it down which I think is along the lines of what you're saying but is a specific example of this and then you look at how I mean granted you know I don't know how to bring this into it but the fact that he was a he would donate to the Trump you know campaign and stuff like that it just you see what the leadership is supportive of and you see that they actually don't want to have these conversations. And you see that when they just blasted up to the world, like, hey, this is how you guys should run your companies, right, as like a form of leadership.

And then instead, like, there's blowback because they're so surrounded by people who think like themselves and look like themselves that they can't even see it. They, like, they were just, it was, it was just like fish suddenly realizing when they were telling everyone to take off their, you know, their helmets because, like, you know, they can swim underwater. they realized that not everyone else has the same experience that they do. And it was like shocking.

Can I reframe it slightly? And I'm not trying to reduce or whatever. But there was a, Ezra Klein had Trustee Macmill and Cotton on his podcast, I don't know, last month, six weeks ago. And they were talking about a lot of the things in terms of like, it wasn't just about like politics and the woke wars or whatever. They settled on this sort of thing that has really stayed with me for the last few weeks about how there's, there's like a generation gap happening now.

And it almost comes, it's almost like we're in the 60s again. Like when you watched Mad Men and you saw Don Draper go from the, you know, the suits and the thin ties to all the sudden, you know, having to drop acid and deal with hippies and things like that. that, like, I almost feel like they were making the point in this podcast that a lot of our politics and a lot of our culture wars right now can be brought down to not just young people, but also people that hadn't had voices being in the mix now, right? And so that's a generation gap. That's a change in culture, a change in voices that almost can explain. So many things that are going on right now. And I wonder to what degree, to try to bring this into tech, to what degree that is happening in tech where, now, you can say that it was, you know, white males from certain colleges in the early 2000s that founded all of these companies and things like that. To what degree, it's a generational thing now where the people,

it's also about power where the people that have made their money, the people that have the power, the DHS is the Jason Freeds of the world. They founded companies with people that look like them, thought like them, but then now it's 20 years on, and the 26-year-old they hire doesn't look like them, doesn't think like them,

and they're not prepared for that? Yeah, actually, I think that's 100% on point. There was a great, another podcast, that I listen to today with our friend Peter Kafka. The second part is really good. There's a section or a segment with Jill Lepore, who has The Truth Out in History podcast. And she was saying that one of the major things that's really changed

is exactly that. We are now living in a post-broadcast media environment where through the iPhone and Android and through all these mobile devices, there are so many more voices that are part of the mix of the conversations. And it's impossible for us not to recognize how much we've been insulated and in our own bubbles for a long time. And when I say us, I mean white men specifically, and I include myself in that. And we don't really know how to have those conversations and to recognize our own blindness and our own bias. And it's been really hard for me to look at my own life and how I've benefited from these systems and structures that have existed for so long.

and I just thought we were all equal because that's the story that we're told. And it's uncomfortable even if you recognize that. Even if you're... So uncomfortable. Even if you're willing to look at that. It's not comfortable.

And that's because of the risk. And I mean, I have anxiety and fear like talking about this right now, you know, because I don't have the words. I don't know how to acknowledge my privilege and take responsibility and yet also not feel guilty and ashamed.

You know? And so that balance, I think, it's the hubris and the arrogance that it just feels like Jason and DHS that put out this blog post and literally walked right into a wall because they did not,

not only like not read the room, but they didn't have the ability to self-reflect and say, oh my God, like, I'm part of the problem. Can I... One other point again, slightly reframing. I hope I

I hope you won't think that I'm trying to neuter this conversation. But no, no, no. Reframing it to think about culture of startups and if you're in a company, if you're starting a company, one of the things when you think about

generation gaps and getting older and oh, you know, we've been making fun of millennials are different for however many years. But, but, but, One of the things that you have to think about is, you know, you get older and the music doesn't sound as good. And, you know, to me, to my dad, I've said this on the show before, to my dad, the best music ended in 1975. To me, the best music ended in 1998. And it's gotten progressively shittier from then.

One of the things that you have to understand is that the music, it's not that the music is bad. The thing that the trap people fall into when they get old is that it's like, oh, things have gotten bad. It was better before and it's all gotten ruined. That's not true. I don't know what the great music is now. I don't know what the great comedians are now. I knew Dave Chappelle when he was coming up was going to be the greatest comedian of his generation. I don't know who the Dave Chappelle is today, right?

It's not for me. If you are a founder, if you're creating a call, culture at a company, I don't think that it ever behooves you to stand a stride, especially if you're hiring young people that are the most talented people. Don't be, you know, Gandalf on the bridge and say, and say stop, right? Do not stand astride that. That will never work for you, right? because if you, if you're 20 years into your company, you're not going to be there for another 20 years. You're going to hope your company is going to be there for another 20 years, but some other person's going to come along and take that company that way. Like, I don't know. I'm not saying that you have to always be like, whatever the, whatever the kids are into, I've got to get. But you don't want to be Don Draper. Do you know what I mean?

Like, there has to be some way if you're creating a culture and a company, you don't want to do what Basecamp did, which is say, you shall not pass Gandalf style, right? That's just not going to work long term. Yeah, I think what you're saying, and the way in which this applies to tech and tech culture, maybe is to think about the role of leadership. And maybe that's shifting and changing. You know, like at one point it was kind of being like literally like, you know, those icebreaker boats where you're sort of like ramming through like ossified cultures of the office world. And what DHS and Jason did for 15, 20 years was they defined a certain way of working in opposition to something else. And now they have become the incumbents. And the switch which you're suggesting is not to be the one who's, you know, up on the bridge and Gullendolph and sort of, you know, now shall not pass.

but instead to say, how do we create a healthy and safe environment where we can get the best out of the people who are working with us, recognizing that the enormous pressures that are on all of these people who are working with us now need to have space to air those things out. And maybe we need to create a better separation or delineation for where it's okay to have those conversations and where it's not. But to shut it down altogether is to deny a huge part of humanity that is finally being acknowledged. that is the wholeness of a person. And it just seems like the internet never turns off. And so it's like the idea that you can separate yourself from yourself in order to just do the fucking job isn't what a younger generation I think is up for anymore.

They look at us or they look at like their parents and they're like, you guys are all fucked up. You guys can't talk about your feelings. You guys don't know what's going on. You guys have put all the stressed on us. You guys are super stressed out. Why do you want us to emulate you? And so that's the blindness and this like, I don't, like, I pinned to tweet again because like, neuroplasticity will save us all.

The only thing that will save like old people from like becoming old is by maintaining the child's mind. And that isn't what happened here. Like DHS and like Jason just like took that, you know, bold, aggressive stance with a, you know, is their signature a thing. And they rammed right into the fucking wall of the future. And it's like it's not going to work anymore. That's so funny. I saw you do that neuroplasticity.

plasticity tweet today, and I didn't know what you were referring to, but were you literally referring to this? Yes. You're not wrong. Yeah, so I guess I have a lot of feelings about this because on the one hand, I feel compassion for them. And on the other hand, maybe the other hand is a face palm, because it's just like, how could you go for this long? Granted, you had a lot of success. And so it just propelled you into the future. But, you know, I was calling out what I called the future of white boys clubs back in 2006

because so many conferences that Jason would speak at, and this is not about Jason, this is about the organizers, would be a bunch of white dudes. And I was like, this is not the future of the Internet. The future of the Internet doesn't look like a bunch of white guys. And so if you have a bunch of white guys telling us what the future is going to be, you're going to be wrong. And if I feel like this has been a battle and an awakening that has been a long time, I'm in the making. And I just, I hope that something comes out of this where they realize and like,

oh shit, like, and they take the role in the position that they have in the tech world, which they are somewhat actually anti-Silken Valley. They say, actually, we've learned that there's a whole different calling that needs to be answered in this moment when it comes to building cultures that are inclusive and supportive of the people who are doing this work because the pressures are new and they are different. And they're ones that we just never had to deal with because of all of our white privilege. Agreed. Agreed.

Great. Thomas has a comment. Bring him up real quick. Sure. All right. All right, Thomas, we're going to bring you up. Let's see if this goes. And if anybody else wants to also co-modify or adjust or help inform me, I feel a little bit vulnerable and exposed here,

but I don't know how else to have this conversation. It definitely needs to be open and definitely doesn't need to be technically the podcast. format as you guys are speaking about so I'm glad to be a part of it and listen but here's the thing right like we got a whole stage and we're just preaching to the choir we're just in this old echo chamber and it's your brain and we've already heard this shit before right you have a podcast no offense it's great I like technique mean but yeah no some of this stuff tilts me when I just hear this stuff over and over again, especially coming from your mouth, right? Mine.

Thomas. What's just happening? He's on mute. Yeah. I didn't do it again. And now you're on mute. Now, why are all this people on mute? You may have hit the mute.

I think it might be just coincidental. I think it's the thing that happens, like, around an hour in when Twitter spaces freaks out and starts to just, like, fall apart. Yeah, I mean, my Twitter just completely crashed. That's why it was silent. But from what I did. did hear Chris, I completely agree with where it's coming from. I do want to address the fact that it's a bunch of white guys up on stage right now.

So we are kind of, you know, doing the best we can, I guess. But I completely agree with you. And I do also, you know, acknowledge that I've gotten to as far as I've gotten to in life, largely because of where I was born and the way I look. And then just a bunch of luck. Am I the only one that can't hear? Can anyone hear me? Raise your hand. I got you.

we can hear you Brian but maybe you can't hear us Brian I sudden noticed at one point went to like it said it was he was connecting again which means he may have lost connection so maybe he's not reconnected correctly but if Brian leaves and comes back he might be able to refix it Thomas is back I did ask Randy to speak so I don't know oh Randy Hi, hi, Chris. Thank you for putting me on. But no, I completely agree with what you're saying in the generational gap as well. I myself as an immigrant who's working in the tech space. I think there's not enough information and there's not enough resources for how to manage employees who come from that background and how to support employees who have different, not just family, but economic circumstances and back. backgrounds and and I there's the argument of should work be separate from you know your lifestyle and should or should work be very connected to you know how you live at home and your traumas and all of that and I personally believe or I have experienced that when your work life is connected to your personal life your work life becomes a lot more committed and your productivity increases and your motivation and your loyalty to the company as well and it becomes a lot harder to, you know, not do a good job at the company. But in terms of like building communities

and, you know, building spaces for, for employees, there really aren't enough books or enough resources on how to build those communities for marginal communities, for people who come from very difficult backgrounds, people who struggled. And unfortunately, I think that's, that's the missing gap over there. It's how do we build communities for everyone? Yeah, I completely agree. It's like a lot of these companies opened up and, you know, said, bring your whole self to work. And then they're surprised when people actually did that.

Well, that's actually quite diverse. Yeah, exactly. And they, you know, they bit off more than they could chew almost. But had they just kept chewing, and many companies are doing this, like they would have ended up, you know, actually. It's not a quick fix, right? Of course, but if you keep at it, you will create a better environment. And technology is changing so quickly.

I think that's another thing that's happening here is you have technology changing how we work on such a fast clip. Yeah, many of these old white guys, frankly, don't want to change because they think that, you know, what they did the last few decades worked out. and so they'll all be fine. It's the concept of if it's not broken, don't fix it, right? And it's, I don't think that they see their ways as broken. And maybe in their eyes and in their experience, it's not, right? And so it's like, how do we begin to create a better system if what we created was already a good system and it worked for us? And it made us money and it made our companies bigger.

So it's that, I guess, in association of if I did it right and I was successful, at it, then it must work again. Yeah, and I would tie it to like, you know, like, oh, what do we have to do do to make this go away? Who do we donate to what diversity port do we write up? And it'll be all over. But the problem is that the employees are like, no, no, we're

going to call you out on, if you're saying you're going to actually work on this issue, like, we'll do it. We're not even going to ask you to do it for us. We're going to form a committee and start working at it. And leadership is freaking out because progress is being made and they can't, and they just don't like it, frankly.

I mean, I wonder which companies are doing this well and are starting from this foundation as opposed to attacking it on or trying to, you know, reform things. I think you answered that, right? They're starting from, it's the ones that are actually starting from the foundation as opposed to trying to reinvent themselves later. I was going to say, this comes back to the generational thing. There are companies that are being started by 23, 24-year-olds right now that are doing this differently.

It's just we're too old, perhaps to know. know about that. Randy, what have you seen? Or is there anything that you think is working? Or are we sort of just in this crisis phase? So I've definitely seen, I think, both sides of the coin where, you know, when I, leadership, I feel is surprised when they learn that their employees have gone through terrible things in their life.

And then they expect that everybody has had the nice life that they've had. And so when they see that someone has struggled, it's scary. It's very scary. And to address that and to begin to try and support them is even scarier because it also puts you, and I've had this conversation a lot with many of my white friends where it's like if they announce their privilege, it's almost like they're announcing that they've done something wrong personally. But it's not that way. It's not like Hugh being white.

It means that you've done something wrong in your lifetime, right? And that entire concept is scary. But I've also seen, you know, young entrepreneurs who like myself are immigrant and trying to build up companies and who I've already put foundations in work for their entire workplace where, you know, now we're working all remotely where I have, you know, five employees from different parts of the world. We have, we all speak different languages. We all have different cultures.

And we all find that commonality of tech. And we all want to build tech and really good, really good platforms. And I think it's the remote working that is going to be changing tech. And I think it's our ability to be working from different time zones, different cultures, different backgrounds, and building through that. I do think it's not that it's too late for bigger companies, but it's a lot different, more difficult for bigger companies to even begin and tackle those. I'm not saying that they shouldn't. I'm just saying that, of course, they're going to get scared. Of course, they're going to back down.

Of course, they're going to say, okay, we don't want to talk about politics. because when you're leading a team of a thousand people who all come from diverse background, how do you begin to address that? And I think that's very difficult and I feel for those teams as well. The funny thing is that Basecamp was a largely distributed remote team. So I agree with you also. And yet there still is, as you said, a lack of resources, a lack of awareness, a lack of kind of just, I don't want to call them like best practices because I think it's going to

constantly be about emerging and adapting and responding to just different attitudes and expectations but I think I think you're right like like whether it's the white fragility and not just even knowing how to engage in these conversations and I feel very stumbling about it personally but it's not really my discomfort is actually not the problem I have had a very comfortable experience because of the privileges that I've had that I didn't earn. And that I think is a major mindset shift that needs to happen where taking on some of that discomfort doesn't necessarily mean reducing your power. You can find power in mutuality in a way that I just don't think we've

had that conversation before. I think there's, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, go ahead, please. I think a very big part of it is also the whole imposter dilemma where a lot of entrepreneurs have feel like they're imposters and they've you know they've all done it and they somehow faked it or they done it wrong and I think adding to the fact that you know their white privilege helped them I think it adds to that imposter syndrome so I think there's also a very deep psychological trauma when it comes to oh like because I I had it easy because I was white and I had the resources so if I hadn't had the resources would I have been a successful entrepreneur so I also think there's a lot of personal psychology there that that needs to

to be addressed, you know, for them personally to be even to be able to solve that problem on a leadership level. And then, yeah, go ahead. No, no, I don't want to get you off. Go, please. No, that was pretty much it. So I was just going to add to that really that I think as leaders, they feel like they have to say something. And to what you were saying, Chris and Randy, both of you, actually, they don't want to acknowledge and say that, you know, I don't know the answer or that makes me uncomfortable, whereas that they don't, they can't grasp that that is true leadership. If someone brings up on, you know, an issue and that you know nothing about, just saying,

listen, I know nothing about this, I don't understand, I'm just going to listen. That's okay for a leader to say. That's in many ways better than just trying to bulldoze, like, okay, cool, like, we heard you, but we're not going to do anything about it, right? Or just trying to zoom out and say, you know, we're not going to discuss this anymore at the workplace or whatever they end up deciding. They feel like they need to take action. And sometimes the action of just, you know, we're going to listen to what are more diverse or our employees or our workers or really anyone that's not me has to say.

And that's okay. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's just bringing more people of color and people of experiences to the table like you guys have done with me right now. And just sharing those experiences is better than just being silent and doing nothing. Yeah, I'm going to bring up Thomas one more time because he had something I wanted to say, and it sounded like he was going to give me some of his mind. Thomas? Yes, I got a direct message from a friend that it sounded like I was trashing you.

I was trying to come mutually. I love that word as well at this topic. Because, like, yeah, like one, like we're at an even playing field all the time. Like we're all human beings. We're all going to look at the mirror at the end of the day. Well, maybe not. Like, you know, like some people don't want to look at themselves, right? We're all dealing with our inner demons.

So sometimes voicing it out, maybe we'll come off as like an echo chamber, right? I said this before. But I'm glad you guys are acknowledging it. I'm glad you guys are bringing up other speakers like Randy. But I find that one of the things that we have to look at, is the past, right? Retrospective. And hindsight is 2020. We've been a whole year through this.

So it's hard to listen sometimes when like maybe you guys should just look in a mirror and fix yourselves before we start talking like we know what we're talking about. So I take that, I guess, invitation constructively. I'm not going to say that like my work is done. But I feel like it is the journey that I'm on. And part of this, part of your criticism is that we didn't do a good job of actually having a diverse set of voices up on stage. Totally guilty is charged. That's not the intention.

And I think Brian and I can do a better job of actually expanding the folks who we do bring up. Certainly it's not an intention. In terms of looking at myself and having this conversation, part of it, I suppose, like the hope is that for other folks, Like, if I think about myself three or four years ago, I would not be able to talk about these things the way I'm talking about them now. And I would run the other way and I would probably close the space and I'd just go along with my life. So I hope that being a voice that's out there and talking about these things gives people some permission. Yeah.

You know? So I appreciate the critique and I also want to see more diverse voices. So I'm with you. Okay. So thank you. So we're going to switch topics to something a little bit later. I appreciate everyone being here. And if you guys want to give me some, you know, or Brian, some feedback about this, you know, we're open to it. These are really hard conversations to have. And I don't feel equipped. And I'm kind of angry at the education system that I grew up in that didn't help me with this stuff. But yet here I am. And I'm doing the best I can. So the easiest way to explain it is it's gaming culture. Think of our kids. Think of disc. The whole name is, like, I'm not backing this, right? I don't like Discord. Some of the stuff needs to really get cleaned up.

I think Twitter is on the right path. So I think you just being on this, yeah, you're killing it. But the kids, right, education system, I'm so glad you brought that up. Because we went a whole year where there was an average of, what, seven kids getting two hours, it was seven out of ten getting two hours of education from a teacher for a whole week. It was just ridiculous numbers. And this is just North America, right? And then we have Fortnite. Fortnite versus Apple. They're both opening up their education platforms. And these things are not, they're not, they're not joking around, right? Like maybe it seems. So Thomas, I'm just going to ask that we're going to

pause this conversation and maybe bringing up another context. But thank you for your contributions, just in the interest of time. We are going to switch over to a – Brian, you can take this one on. Yeah, basically what we wanted to end with today, because since the whole base camp thing was a story that I hadn't covered, another story that I haven't covered this week, although I did, we hit on it today, was the whole Dogecoin phenomenon this week, which to a certain degree, as I said on the show today, I don't know how to cover or to cover. But here, funny enough, the reason we wanted to end with this is we're going to bring up Adam Cornelius, who none of you have heard that name before, but it turns out that you have heard his work for the last several weeks because he's been editing the show for the last few weeks.

It's the first time in three years that I've had someone edit the show for me. Adam and I go way back to literally high school. Adam is a filmmaker. And the reason that this is germane to bring Adam up is the whole reason that I know about crypto that I got into crypto, and I think 2012 was because of Adam. Adam, I'm going to stop fomfering in a second, but I think it was 2013 that you and Chris came to New York to film that documentary. And it was, we went to, again, I'm going to let Adam speak in a second before. We went to downtown Manhattan. We went right at the end of Wall Street, and there was a crypto meetup.

And I swear to God, this was 2013. it was right when the Doge phenomenon was happening, because I remember there was literal, what are those dogs called Shiba Inus or whatever? Oh, yeah, Shiba Inus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Adam, to put this all, the reason that I first got into crypto was because of Adam. And I helped him with this documentary. I believe, Adam, you even interviewed the guy that started Dogecoin.

Is that right? Is he up here? I've invited him up, and he is not up here. Ah! And I can't speak on his behalf. So, yeah. I thought I saw. I saw the invite.

Please accept. Otherwise, maybe Tony will join us. Now I have an excuse to fump for some more. Keep going. The thing was is that there are so many names in crypto that I now know them. their big names, and these were just folks hanging out at this space, like this pop-up space in downtown Manhattan. And then it was late at night. It was super fucking cold. It was a winter night. And what happened at the end of the event is everybody ran around to the charging

bull and put a Shiba-inu mask. It was either a Shiba-Ino mask. It was either a Shiba-Ino mask. or was a what is the mask from that that movie The Anonymous? The anonymous mask on the hospital or whatever. Anyway.

Hey Adam, go ahead. Take it from here. Oh no, you're not. It's Tony. Tony. Tony, take it from here. Tony, congrats, by the way. Yeah, yeah.

Very exciting. Hey, do you want to... This is Adam, you guys. Sorry, I just figured. This is my first time using Twitter spaces, so thanks for your patience. Did you hear all that background, or did you just sort of decide to show up now? No, I did. Yeah, Brian's right.

He's close. Did you know he was talking about you this whole time? I did. I'm very flattered. Thanks for having me on to sort of fill in the gaps. Yes, it was early 2014. And we had already started. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it was, the fun part of the story is I had built a little crypto mining rig. For those who've done it, it's the milk crate with the graphic cards in it in fall of 13. And so I had just, I got the crypto fever. That was sort of the first time that Bitcoin kind of spiked and everyone was talking about it. And I was like, oh, I got to get in on this. quickly realized that graphics cards don't work on Bitcoin and then went to a Bitcoin Meetup, which I don't know if that's still a thing, but like Meetup.com.

And that was just at a local bar in Portland. And it was all these kind of young guys, these young nerdy guys who basically there's whispers, oh, that guy's a millionaire now, that guy's a millionaire now. And it was really weird because there's really normal-looking young guys who were supposedly all millionaires. And at the very first Bitcoin meetup I went to, I met the guy who created Doge a week after he created it.

Wow. And so it was just, so I'm not really a tech guy. I'm a filmmaker, but I just so happen to be at ground zero of Dogecoin in person and immediately sensed that it was really exciting and convinced it was me and Chris Higgins, who also is sort of part of the ride home group. And he and I just said, this has got to be a documentary. The next thing we knew, we were interviewing the creator of Doge. And within a few weeks, it had a market cap of $6 million,

which seemed crazy at the time. Now I think it's at like, what, $80 billion? Yeah, it's insane. So it was right away, we were off and running. And there was this Doge party in Manhattan. and Brian was one of my only friends in New York. So I said, hey, you know, you should hang out with us or, you know, I think I just wanted to visit. And then Brian ended up helping out with the camera crew and everything.

And this doge party was really strange. It was actually the commitment level of the doge people way back in early 2014 was kind of inspiring slash scary. So had all the makings of a cool documentary topic. See, that's what I'm interested in. And that's funny that I don't remember that it was specifically a doge of that. But that's so specific. What was that community like? Because, look, as far as I remember it and as far as I know of it to this day, everyone knows it's a joke.

So, like, when you're mining doge, you're talking to other people in the community, like, it's just for lulls and stuff, like entirely. Like, when it was a $6 million market cap, like, people thought that's insane, right? Oh, yeah, but that's the irony of the Dosh coin. There's lots of paradoxes in crypto. One that you hit on a lot in the podcast is that the whole original idea of crypto is that it's decentralized. And yet all of the successful platforms are pretty much just mimicking the very things that Bitcoin was trying to subvert in the first place. So that's a standing paradox that I think most people are aware of. But the other thing with Dogecoin was that it is the frivolousness of it and the jokingness of it that maybe made it actually more what crypto is supposed to be.

And it's hard to wrap your brain around, but it was more in the spirit of fun and community and doing something wacky and even a little subversive and off the beaten path. it was the closest thing I've ever seen to crypto realizing its potential as an actual sort of revolutionary tool where it's like this is our money, this is our thing, it's not a rich guy's thing or a government's thing. And we witnessed that firsthand. I mean, you were there, Brian. I mean, there was people selling kombucha and just all kinds of... I use the term this week, adjut prop, you know, for some.

something, was it for this or something else? But like, it's, it's sort of the punk rock ethos of like, fuck everybody. And so, in a way, you're right that like, it's very punk rock. It's very punk rock to just be like, it's very crypto to be like, yeah, this is a worthless thing. But then it's only, it's only worthless until we make it the most worthwhile thing. You know, like, I, I, I do love the punk rock, uh, ethos of that. Well, that's the problem is that sort of innocent time, you can't sustain that because eventually now it actually has a massive value and so that you can't take the greed out of the equation. I mean, now it is just like any other crypto where it's basically like an asset class and

there's people trying to like game the system to make money off it. But there really was this period with Doge where it wasn't about that at all. The creator did not pre-mine. He had no stake in it other than what he naturally mined, which even back then, mining became really competitive, really fast whenever a coin caught on. And it was just, yeah, it was really innocent and fun and kind of showed that people could really, you know, like there was the tip bot on Reddit where you could actually tip someone 50 Doge, which at the time was, you know, a fraction of a penny. but he enjoyed it and got something out of it. It was a really interesting thing to witness firsthand. What I find interesting is that by the nature of how it came to be,

it's actually more spread. I mean, maybe it isn't, but I think it might be more spread out amongst individuals as opposed to Bitcoin, which technically Satoshi still has a large holding in, regardless of whether that's an individual or whether he's even alive anymore. And then Ethereum number two, you have,

Vitalik has a huge chunk, of course. And still, because he's active, he has a huge say in what happens with the currency. But by the nature of because Doshanan was created as a joke, and the creator, I don't know if it's one creator or two, I've been to tweet about how apparently he sold. I don't know if this is the person you interviewed at him or if they're, well, it says co-creator,

so there must have been two. at least. Yeah, there was, my understanding as a guy in Australia originally tweeted the image of, we should make a doge coin

and made the graph. And then randomly, the guy who I interviewed, who goes by Billy Marcus, he just answered the call and just made the coin. And that's what's hilarious. He did it in a span of a few hours.

He just took the light coin. I mean, this sounds like one of the stories of the best about the internet. Yeah, So if he's out, it's just like, if he's out, or at least, I mean, that's, that's the claim is that he sold all his crypto holdings to buy a Honda Civic back in 2015. And now Doge's worth more than Honda itself. He can buy three, three, right. But the point there, I think, what I'm trying to get is, therefore, Doge coin is more spread out of it. And there isn't a single, you know, person that has a large sway. Right. Because in theory, I'm not saying this is ever going to happen. But if Satoshi, you were to reappear and just sell all his Bitcoin holding holdings or even sell 1% or 10% that would, you know, move market. I mean, you could definitely make the case that Elon Musk is moving to the disc coin market. So in that sense, you know, he's called himself the Dutrojan father and all that. So I guess there is kind of a figurehead. Although apparently he's backpedaling a little bit. I saw some interview today. But nonetheless, it's certainly, it's certainly interesting that, yeah, the nation. sure of how Doge claim was created is impacting how spread out it is.

If I could real quick, Brady, since you're on stage, do you have a thought? Can you add something to this Doge conversation? Yeah, I think the thing that, like, the thing about Doge is it has many lives, right? By the way, this is Brady, Brady from Coin Desk. He's been on the show many times. Go on. Yeah, I'm a reporter on Crypto. So Doge has had many lives, and it's And it's the one token you can always guarantee will really perk up in a bull run. Like, it's virtually guaranteed that during a bull run, which we're in right now in crypto, that not too deep in, Doge will become the thing that everyone's minds wrap around again.

But like, but Doge also never quite disappears, right? Like, so there was a big DogeCon in, in Canada. I think it was like 2019 or 2018 right after the last big bull run. You know, a bunch of people who just like loved Doge got together. Vitalik, who is the inventor of Ethereum, he's always thought Dogecoin is great. And what's been interesting in this cycle is this idea has coalesced, which Dogecoin speaks to really powerfully, but other tokens do as well. And it's this notion of, and I don't think I understand this as well as I'd like, but it's

this notion of what people call reflexivity, which is that like, and it's kind of about the power of memes, which on a lot of levels, Bitcoin itself is a meme. But like because people get excited, other people get more excited. And that's something that people are getting more and more sophisticated about sort of making plans around and investing around. And which also relates to other ideas that get people excited in Dogecoin in crypto. But Dogecoin is like the pure manifestation of this. It's like the reflexive token. And so like it speaks to something that is fundamental about the cryptocurrency industry,

which isn't to say it's the future. It isn't to say it's more important than Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, but it is kind of one of the archetypal elements. It's like the standard of that meme idea, just a pure idea, you know? That's fascinating. We're going to cut for time here shortly, but to do a hard, terrible seg. But we have Tony Hale here. And we started the show talking about Twitter.

Tony this week sold his company to Twitter. Chris, I don't know what question to ask Tony. Do you have one? Because I don't know that we could just tee it up and say Tony Talk. But Tony, congratulations. Thank you. You can ask me why I lived with a Shiba Ine for 16 years and yet still missed Dogecoin. Well, there you go.

Well, you haven't yet missed it. You can still get in. That's true. Yeah, I don't know if you could sell your dog for Doge. That would be a little recursive. Well, so, and we do have one more speaker who might come up named David. Hey, guys. Real quick.

Okay, real quick, I was just going to say that Doge was the thing when I was in high school and I'm almost 30. So culturally, that's very crazy. Wow. Also, I mean, the thing that I would ask, Tony Hale, is somehow I miss this, being a media nerd, chartbeat to scroll is, good, that's got to be a great story. And while they got me downvoted on hacker news, the Twitter Tipsjar is literally just a link, a list of hyperlinks right now, and they don't even have meta in them, except for the Venmo link, which has meta that Venma doesn't support. So, but yeah, that's it. Thanks for that. Thanks for that.

Perfect. Sweet. Tony, what do you want to say about your journey along the way and how you find yourself now inside of the big Bluebird? Yeah, well, it's, in my mind, it's not quite as weird a journey as I think. I mean, like, as you know, Chris, like, there's always a string of idealism. like Chris and I met in like open ID conferences back in the day and data portability. The claim ID.

Why is that? Yeah. Wow. It's like all of that, all of that stuff back before everyone went to work for Facebook and Google. And so whilst I was at Chartbeat, I spent many, many years trying to work out like, how can we create a business model that actually lets journalists eat and pay rent? And I try to do this whole thing where I try to change the currency of advertising. advertising so that it would be done on kind of engaged time, which would lead to more quality

content and all this kind of stuff. And it was complete failure. And it was brutal. And I spent millions of dollars trying to get it to work and it didn't. I want to get into just a little bit because we talk about the stuff so much. And you hear regulators talking about, like, you know, media is like inflammatory and enraging and all this stuff. And I just kind of like, that is the, the, the,

that is like the sort of human condition and so there are products and platforms and people that try to like enrich the mind with like deep knowledge and to reward it and it all failed so can you just like give us a little bit of like a little bit more taste you know of the tear wire of the earth that you churned and that you know proved not to be fertile so the challenge i saw kind of two challenges uh for media one was that like the way that our business model was at least a at the time I was the first thinking about. So I first read up the original white paper in like 2012 almost. You're a white paper about Chartbeat?

I wrote a white paper about within Chartbeat for investors and a few others about why we try and go down this crazy path to try to create a new advertising currency. And the challenge was that... Before bat, which is... Yes, yes. Yeah, I'm very fond of Brendan,

and I hope he does very well with that. The, what we were trying to, well, what I saw was two things. One was that the, the advertising model was predicated on, the monetizable act happened before you read a single piece, a single word of the content, yeah? As soon as you click, click the link,

that was the monetizable act. And whilst that was the case, you saw the, driving the car up a lot. Yeah, exactly. You saw the impact of that. So you saw clickbait, you saw slideshows, you saw stories split between three things that didn't need to be, like, because the click was the monetizable act. But also you saw a thing, which was the platforms were way, way better at that. And I saw a consistent kind of trajectory towards that. So what I wanted to understand was, was there a different kind of model where the impression would have a variable price based upon the level of engagement that was created by the content around that app. And I thought that that was something where, like, the kind of journalism that I really cared about would have a kind of better shot. And so I looked at a bunch of different stuff.

And in the end, it came down to, and what we did a bunch of work with, like, the Yahoo research people, it became Microsoft research, and just an amazing thing. And we tried to build out a model based upon Ty spent because time is, you know, viscosity, we found accurate ways of measuring time that we had to develop because time spent in the kind of traditional kind of like Google Analytics way is a lot of bullshit. Have you talked to the reedocracy guys? No, I haven't. Ah, okay, well, just put aside, but they're they're going down your plot of land. So, okay. Anyways, continue. So I did all that. Then I had to go like, fuck it, I need to build a, sorry, British, I had to build an infrastructure that could support it because there was no ad server that could support it. So we had to build basically a layer on top of being able to like

plan, pace campaigns based upon an ad being served and its value being defined by how much time it actually had someone actually looking at it. We did that with VFT and the economists and it won't a bunch of awards, but it never got off the ground. It was never able to get to kind of scale because if you were in advertising, you say, like, this is great, I want to do it across every publisher, and you say, well, we have these three publishers, and on the publishing side, they'd be like,

well, this is great, but no advertisers is asking for it because they need to be able to, like, have it across the other. So it was like classic kind of different side of marketplace thing. So I utterly failed at that and started trying to think through. And so basically what scroll was, was my kind of like opening up a second front in the same. war. I was trying to think about

how do I try and create a business model that improves the user experience, aligns with quality of journalism, and actually makes it so that journalists can make a decent living during this thing. And I

took, and we've seen great and interesting examples right now. There's like substack obviously, which is a topic of regular conversation. I try to think of it in a more of a kind of networked or community-oriented way. because a lot of the journalism that I cared about wasn't necessarily the stuff that would work well as an individual entity,

but as something that was more collaborative or connected. So that's what kind of took me down to scroll. I'm sorry, what is that I actually? So like right, sorry, you said networked and collaborative or something, and I don't know how that actually made sense in the product. Because as I recall, like scroll was essentially kind of like a subscription that you'd pay into, and then you did some funky, neat things with cookies, which may be hard to deal with now with the apples stuff and the demise of cookies,

but let's ignore that for a second. The idea is that you pay once and essentially the ads would just sort of be removed without doing an ad block thing and it got people paid who needed to be paid. Yeah. Yeah. So if you think about what the core of scroll is, it's network monetization. So you have a bunch of publishers who've come together and who've said, we all agree to adopt a similar set of rules, in this case around kind of like ad-free.

And in return for that, we're going to accept this kind of distribution based on this kind of model from a subscriber. And so we started with ad-free. It could be unarbitrously. It's sort of like applying the medium paywall model to the rest of the web. Actually, in a bizarre thing, my first thinking about this, I went to, I went to Evan and I sat down years ago I was like I was like let's let's put

chopbeat and medium together to do this thing and we just we just he was he hadn't gone down the subscription path for that time it was chart beat would have been the wrong thing for it it would have been too wrenching in a pivot for me to just follow that particular thing

and so he was completely right and thinking this was it would be too hot But we eventually came over, like he and I often find ourselves kind of like thinking in very similar ways. Yeah. So yeah. I just like, I still have a love of the open web. And I like the idea of people being able to own their own sites and have stuff on their own sites and take a choose about all this thing. So let's talk about this in terms of like the Twitter thing, right?

So Twitter picked up review. You are now, it sounds like working on something called Longform. And, you know, we were sort of gesticulating at what could come out of this. But, you know, if you can share anything about, like, how soon is Twitter Plus going to launch? And how does this relate to TikTok? So how do I get a free premium access? Yeah. See, Chris, Chris, you're better at being a journalist than I am.

Please. Go on. So I'm going to humbly point out that my first day is on Monday. And so there are better people to answer those questions. What I can say is that the conversations and the planning that we've done are with Kaborne, with Mike Parker's the VP of Publish the Products, and the people who have been kind of already driving this around this, is trying to think through what makes a sustainable ecosystem. And the ecosystem means a few different things.

It means like how do we like make sure that we're supporting direct relationships between creators and audiences? We're not dismediating those relationships. And how do we make sure of the economics work in, anyway, like it's been one of the kind of my obsessions. Like when I first met Kavan, I was like, what, why are you talking to me? And he said, I want to build a better internet. And he kind of had me at hello at that point.

And so he, he, Actually, that's a terrifying idea unless you specify whether the open web is part of that internet. Yeah, so to be clear, the way that scroll is built is very much the way that we're thinking about this. The notion that people have their content on their own sites which they control, and if they choose to integrate, they can just as they can choose to integrate anything in the open web. And if they do that, they can benefit from the connection they're creating, which is like, okay, I'm going to deliver a differentiated experience instead of audience A, who gets ads, audience B, get this kind of clean, fast private app. Does the Twitter platform help with distribution for you?

Yeah. I mean, if you think about the kind of challenge that Scroll had, like, we had been able to get a kind of unprecedented number of, premium publishers into the network. For some people. The problem for you really is scale. Yeah, exactly. You take Twitter's user base, you charge them seven bucks a month, and you hook it up with the squirrel tech, suddenly publishers are like, oh, that's actually a lot more users.

Sure, we'll add your little cookie-tracking thing and also maybe Twitter sign on. And now when I'm signed into Twitter on my mobile app or I'm using Twitter and I'm following these brands anyways, well, now I have a great way of actually getting that exclusive content through the Twitter service and maybe it even happens on you know the economists.com and Ft.com and there's a huge amount of sort of subscriber benefit to a Twitter subscriber that then is shared with those publishers. Yeah I mean I think the way the thing that's exciting to us is like over the last year that kind of scrolls been up and out there in the world we like we proved that we could on a per user

economic basis this was a great model we just didn't have enough users yeah And Twitter has 200 million of the most news hungry users on the planet. So that was the other thing. And there's also kind of, we started to think about how we can kind of help in other ways. Like, one of the things that's most frustrating is if you do happen to be a subscriber to a publisher, like often when you come in through Twitter, you're often logged out. Yeah, you're often hit that, hit that, hit that pill and you're like, God damn it, I subscribed you. Why am I logged out? And you have those kinds of things.

So these are all things which to me speak to the experience and whether it's a Twitter user on Twitter or whether they're on desktop out there. I don't know. There's still a Twitter user. And my job is to try and make the internet feel as beautiful as the possibility to be competitive with an app and do so in a way that enables journalists to get paid. And that's the deal. Chris, Chris was, again, as a better journalist, a little more skeptical than me.

But, like, I have faith. We said at the beginning of this that, you know, maybe it's just that people are willing to pay for things. Now, you know, like Tim Bernersley always said he wanted to do backlinks. He just never got around to it. And he always swore that he wanted to do. He wanted to do micro payments. He just never got around to it. is when you say make a better web, is that the larger vision of just this?

It's always, we're talking about decentralization. Like, everybody should just be able to make a living no matter how small, no matter how niche. Is that what you mean by saying building a better web? Yeah. I mean, like, say, it's funny you bring up to inventories. I think, I often think about, like, what's the missing infrastructure of the web? And it's interesting as well. And we've got a good crowd on tonight for this.

One of the things that I guess, like, why are you doing this in a kind of crypto way? And I think the answer, the answer for me is that, like, when I was trying to look at all the different people that I would have to persuade. Because, like, to get something like this happening is not the layers of convincing for that. Yeah, it's not just technical. It's also kind of, it's also political. You know, it's like you're trying to, you're having to try and balance a lot of people's competing interests. And it was just another layer of difficulty on that thing. So the way that I try to do this was I was like, okay, how do I build things in a web two way

that would then, could then be easily ripped out in a kind of web three way when like that part of the world was ready. And so, because I don't know what's going to happen on the cryptocurrency. So I'm building, I'm building what I can in the kind of proximate now that kind of gets, gets us closer to the internet that I want to see, which has that kind of freedom where, like, you don't have to be the big, huge company to win. You can be an individual. You can exist on your own.

You can try and keep that direct relationship, and you can, like, pay rent. And, like, if we can do all of those things, and if those pieces then get replaced over time by more sophisticated, more decentralized components, then I will be the first person to not be able to look down. Well, I applaud the fact that one of the things that Twitter, well, no, you're starting on Monday,

but Twitter is happy to, let you jump on their spaces. I saw you, you mentioned that you said to your wife that you were scrolling through Twitter because it's work now. So I guess staying on with us for an hour, this is work now, right? I don't know if I'm going to get paid extra full there, so whether they're going to find me before I test the product. Right. Yeah. It's good. It's good. And I love spaces to be absolutely honest. I'm not even paid to say that yet. It's super fun. It's been great listening to you guys. I love the conversation. I love the vulnerability and the way you wrote to kind of bring different voices up. It was fabulous.

Well, you know what? There's there's no better way to end than people kissing our ass. Amen. Because it's almost been two hours. So Chris, why don't you, why don't you do the do the honors. This is great. Well, thank you, everyone for tuning in for the TechBeam Ride Home Experience.

We do this periodically, sometimes Wednesdays, sometimes Fridays. Who knows, whenever the fancy strikes us. But appreciate you guys listening. We're always open from feedback. And feel free to follow us

to find out when we're going to do the next one. Talk to you guys soon. Thanks, thanks everyone that contributed. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.