The Pomp Podcast - #1092 Tech Insider Antonio Garcia-Martinez Reveals All The Secrets

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Antonio Garcia-Martinez is an author of best-selling book “Chaos Monkeys”, the Founder of “Spindle”, and was previously a product manager at Facebook. In this conversation, we talk about American states going in opposite directions, why the people of Miami understand capitalism, what the tech industry gets right and what it gets wrong, user growth in the new digital age, going to Ukraine during the war, thoughts Balaji Srinivasan’s “Network State”, and “dying for the DAO”. ======================= The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC.WORLD and SiGMA.WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA! ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem.Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA.They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere.  Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off antonio garcia martinez is the author of best-selling book chaos monkeys and he is the founder of a brand new company called spindle antonio previously was a product manager at facebook and he was a quant analyst at goldman among many other things in this conversation we talk about everything, including how people in Miami tend to appreciate the United States of America, what it was like growing up with two parents that were exiled from Cuba, what the tech industry gets right, what it gets wrong, how to think about user growth and

attribution in the old world and the new digital world we seem to be moving to. We talk about his time going to Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how it fits into the narrative around Balaji Srinivasan's network state, and many other things, including would you die for the Dow? I really enjoyed this conversation with Antonio, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, let Antonio and I know exactly what you think about it on Twitter, where both of us spend way too much time on a daily basis. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions

of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Antonio here with me. I thought it'd be great probably to start this conversation. You recently came to Miami, which you've done many, many times before, and you took a photo. And it's a guy with a American flag draped over him. And he seems to be walking kind of a way. And the tweet was like, Hey, there was no English spoken, but these people obviously appreciate the freedoms that are afforded to them in the United States. And they seem to be

incredibly happy to now be in Miami in the United States. What was the significance of that to you? Why did you one notice it? And to think that, Hey, look, if I share this, like it might sort of conversation. Yeah. So I do come to Miami a lot and I was actually raised here. So I started coming here pretty early, but yeah. So I just came into the airport. Miami airport is always fascinating because Miami is fascinating. Right. And so it's just the amount of people and God knows what else that flows through Miami is just incredible. So I get off and it was like late on a Saturday. So it's pretty quiet. And I see this sort of family ambling through and there's a number of American flags like the one behind you. The guy's kind of wearing it almost

like a shawl. There's a number of balloons. There's a sort of celebratory atmosphere. I'm like, what is going on? And I sort of like follow along, kind of eavesdrop a little bit. It's like fresh off the island, very, you know, Cuban, common Cuban accent. And I think they had just arrived and you know basically they had gotten out somehow that's a lot of the balloons said welcome and uh you know as you know miami's it's interesting because of course it's it's it's this weird venn diagram intersection between like anglo-america and latin america and yet it is super patriotic you see american flags everywhere and uh yeah i think those people had just gotten from cuba and uh you know they're starting their new life in america when a lot of let's call the tech

and finance industry started to rediscover miami which you know people had uh in other generations known about florida in general but over the last two three years a lot of people moved here a lot of people started to visit more often uh one of the things they always talk about is like hey this doesn't feel like america and they're talking specifically about language about culture about kind of uh even the way that people act the thoughts that they have uh how important is it for the united states still to have these pockets of uh areas where like it is the melting pot of so many different cultures so i agree with that on one hand it doesn't feel american on the other hand, it's like the most American city in America, in my opinion, right? It's funny. So I was raised

here. I lived until I was 18. And Miami in the 80s and 90s was very different than what you see today. In some ways, it was similar. In some ways, it was very different. But I remember thinking, oh, I went to the United States for college, right? I went to school in the Midwest. And finally, when I got there, I realized, man, I was not raised in the United States of America. Like, heartland America is very different than Miami, a lot of different cultural assumptions. But on the other hand, there's something so American about Miami, right? Like, no one cares where you're from there's like a super strong hustle culture i mean talk about diversity here you have real diversity so yesterday long story i was here for like a

political conference that i'm doing a thing on and um i i go i'm in aventura which is a very jewish part of miami and i go to a judaica store because i was buying some stuff and then i go to a kosher pita place and the woman greets me in argentinian spanish right and i there were latin american jews that ran a kosher falafel place in miami and it's just this constant weird mix of anything of everything right happening and you know it's very business oriented right as you know um and so yeah i mean aesthetically it feels non-american in that you know good luck getting by without spanish but on the other hand it is so american yeah but it's just capitalism right like capitalism is the dna that runs through this entire place and it feels uh similar to like maybe

when i was growing up people were like uh oh get to new york uh wall street like that whole world uh to some degree was aspirational but it was unreachable whereas it feels like here this whole like hustle culture or whatever uh no man it's it's not about like how do i create an asset management firm it's like i literally might go start a car wash i might start a restaurant i might start you know whatever but like there is a path to the quote-unquote american dream yeah yeah i think so and i have to say i think that hustle culture probably came so my parents were cuban exiles who came uh when they were teens i was born in the united states but they came right after the revolution in the 60s as many did my father walked out of um what's now called freedom

Tower, which you've probably seen, which is this old kind of ornate, it now looks dwarfed by the other buildings in Miami, but it was the original skyscraper in Miami. And he walked out of there, what was then the Cuban Refugee Center, which is now a museum to the Cuban exiles. And, you know, as it would often remind me, he walked in here with three things in his pocket, a bus ticket to Chicago, a Spanish-English dictionary, and a plastic safety razor. That's it. That's what he came to the United States with. And, you know, he worked in real estate, which is like a whole thing here. And yeah, I mean, it's very much that hustle culture, that build that get ahead um that the city has just had for decades did he talk about cuba at

all growing up like uh i think a lot about so a family comes here and uh they're kids so they're first generation american but uh obviously they have a very different perspective of uh what america is what it means the significance of it the whole idea of like draping a flag over yourself walking through the airport uh there are parts of the country who would call you racist right for for the flag kind of becoming this like symbol in some people's eyes. On the other hand, it is a symbol of freedom and it's a single physical item that frankly has no thoughts.

You know, it's not sentient being, it's just being used in these different ways. Like what was it like growing up with Cuban exile parents? Yeah. I mean, somewhat less so now because again, Miami has become so cosmopolitan that there's lots of different influences

that you see here. But back in the, I mean the Cuban part of Miami very much feels like this weird American suburban reboot of like pre-revolutionary Cuba. So one of the weird sort of almost contradictions of the Cubanized dog experience is, on the one hand, they're super patriotic, often tend to vote right of center. But on the other hand, they absolutely maintain, in the most, like, shameless way, their Cuban identity. So I went to Belen Jesuit, which is a prep school, which was the same high school that Fidel Castro went to. When he kicked out the Catholic priest, when he took power, they came to Miami and they set up the exact same school.

And it became the exact same thing that it was in Cuba, which was the sort of, you know, whatever, a very conservative Catholic school. and the same networks the same families are often here as they are on the other side and so they they recreated in many ways pre-revolutionary cubes and then they've maintained a live like they will just shamelessly expect you to drink Cuban coffee like Starbucks what are you talking about of course not like this is just the way the world works there's like everything is suffused by Latin American culture American business culture and rule of law and this is the way the world works but on the other hand American flags everywhere and they definitely don't have the sort of, I think what you're getting at is the sort of fashionable, um,

sort of self-loathing or almost questioning of the meaning of America. It doesn't have any play here because again, here they act, they actually know what the alternative is. The alternative is Cuba. The alternative is Venezuela. The alternative is all sorts of, you know, a world of pain that they left behind. And to, and to them, this place seems magnificent. Yeah. One of the things I've heard people in different ways say over and over again is like, uh, America seems to want to experiment and, uh, we don't need to do that. Like we, we've already seen how those experiments run. And so, like, this is the best any human group of people has figured out so far. Like, let's keep riding this wave.

But what was the big difference when you went to the Midwest? Like, that's fascinating to have Cuban exile parents grow up in Miami and then you go to the Midwest. Like, are you just lost? Well, it was weird. Well, it was probably a mistake in the end for other reasons. But it was weird in the sense that my parents went to the Midwest. So the way the exile thing worked, if you had family here, you would be sent to wherever your family was. Both my parents were sent to Indiana and Illinois.

And then they eventually ended up going to UIUC, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. So in their mind, like regular America was like frozen in amber. It was like post-Eisenhower, madmen, 1960s America where you went to like a Midwestern state school and everything was fine and America just functioned that way. And that was just like the image they had of America. Of course, after college, they went to California in the 70s. So like they experienced some of great – but then they came here and that's it. That's the image that stuck in their head. So to them, going to a big state school in the Midwest is just what one did.

Of course, in reality, that's not kind of the case anymore. But yeah, no, it was, you know, it was one of these rural college town type things. Dated a local girl who was raised on a farm. I mean, the full picture, the full sitcom, right? The full Netflix show. I don't know. It was just, yeah, it was wild. It was different.

And then I went to California. And again, I was still kind of a Miami boy in that I didn't understand, you know, California has a lot of Hispanic culture as well. But it's a very different interaction than it is in Miami. And so, yeah, it was a learning experience. I mean, again, Miami was just very different. It was much more provincial. I mean, there's also pre-internet, right? If you want to read the New York Times, you have to find a copy and buy it.

Otherwise, you wouldn't get it. And so, yeah, in many ways, I did lead a sheltered life until later. Well, it's interesting because when I was in Silicon Valley, I worked with a number of people who had family in Miami. One person I'm thinking in particular is Venezuelan, full Venezuelan experience, has friends who are not so well-liked in the country by the existing political regime. Um, and I remember saying to him at some point, like, yeah, I think I'm going to move to Miami. And he was like, why would you ever do that? Right. Cause he was just like that, like everyone who gets there then wants to leave it.

It's heat. It's this, it's, it's whatever. Uh, and so it does feel like there's almost this rediscovering of some of this to some degree, but it also pits it. And I've seen you talk about this before, uh, where Florida and California seem to be headed in two different directions and like highlighting two different futures. Yeah. Like when you analyze those two things, like how do you break that down?

So for starters, I think your Venezuelan friends thing is a very common experience. I had the same experience when like Deleon did his tweet and everyone got excited about Miami. Like I hadn't been back very often, to be honest. And again, Miami used to be somewhat provincial and a little backwatery. I mean, cosmopolitan in its own way, but also like not part of like the New York SF continuum. Nobody who was ambitious, like super ambitious would stick around. It was usually your more normal friends who stuck around.

Everyone else left. So, but that's, that has radically changed, right? Just yet. I mean, I just came from Panther Coffee in Wynwood, which Wynwood used to be kind of a ghetto, by the way, was not a nice place to live at all. And there's some like somebody yammering in German next to me at this like third wave coffee place that did not exist 15, 20 years ago. Right. It was impossible for that to exist. But yeah, in terms of the futures, it's funny that like I wasn't going to tweet this because I'll get jumped on it. But your followers probably don't care.

But it's funny, like when you used to go from Miami to like the United States, once again, used to feel you're going a little bit developing world to first world a little bit because Miami was a little rough on the edges. and like now going from san francisco to miami it's like the opposite it's like going from third world to first and it's like oh look everything kind of works there's law and order it's not like a disaster i forgot who i saw it but just recently i saw a tweet it was going viral and it was a thread but the first tweet said something to the effect of like uh silicon valley everyone was moving there there was tons of growth uh there was actually quite a bit of uh housing being built in various ways you saw cranes all the time uh like all these things that everyone's like okay things are going well and now they went back three years later and they're like holy shit there's crime

everywhere this is a absolute uh uh declining city uh from an infrastructure standpoint from a safety standpoint all these different things and like people have left and it reminds me i think it was uh keith raboy who talked about like detroit detroit used to be booming now it's not go ahead well i don't quite i mean yeah i don't quite buy keith's line i mean he obviously has very strong views um why do you disagree well because detroit isn't like embedded in the middle of a natural paradise called northern california for one right for as much as trash you might talk about san francisco and it definitely has real problems the surrounding area is basically paradise i mean you can go skiing and surfing on the same day you've got wine country i mean it's

the city itself is still gorgeous in its own weird way yes uh it's not going to be detroit right and and to be honest san francisco has been in a boom bus cycle since 1849 right this is hardly new this is just another downturn um but but i do but i do agree that something has kind of flipped and florida has become much more serious right it's like it's weird because in the outside world you have like the florida man trope and florida man definitely does exist by the way in like northern florida the panhandle like florida man is wheel but guess what in south florida florida man has high-speed rail florida man can afford a house to raise a family in florida man has pretty good public schools right florida man has law and order california man not so much

or at least sf man doesn't right and so like the tropes about like florida's this joke it's like no florida's actually pretty well run um and so yeah i mean things have have um have definitely changed and again you know i don't wish california ill like i have to stay there i have family there so i hope the city sort of recovers but it's it's weird walking around like south park soma which you probably did back in the day 10 years ago like literally the entire consumer internet that you cared about was within like a three by seven block area and you'd walk through south park and there are the founders of airbnb and there's a sequoia partner and it's like there was this vibrant hum of like everything happening in one place and that's no longer the case yeah i i

literally remember when uh i flew out to interview at facebook and uh they were like yeah and then you're gonna stay in mountain view and you're gonna come to the campus and i remember walking on campus and being like holy shit this is literally a different world uh i grew up in north carolina like there's nothing like that right and um when you then saw how many people the other thing that was really interesting was everyone was in person and uh i was recently talking to somebody i worked with at facebook and it was like there was all these people who were there and you kind of sort of knew it was a special moment or special group like no one knew what everyone was going to go do later but like you're like i have never worked with this many

smart people who uh have this velocity and just seem to like get shit done like this right and now those people obviously have gone and done amazing things you worked at facebook you worked a number of different tech companies does it feel like the like in-person high octane group of people all there together like is that changing now and now you've got remote you've got people in different geographic locations like like how do you think about it i mean if you look at the occupancy rates for commercial grossing in san francisco they're super low so like the numbers don't lie that a lot of people have moved out of the city that said i've started so i just raised around for a company hopefully we'll talk about it um one of the investors is this uh thing called

south park commons a bunch of facebook you probably know who it is adithi and rushi and so they've got like a space literally on south park um i think either inside or next to the building where twitter was founded and um you know there's also a lot of like great talent in san francisco that hasn't left because a lot of them still have family or you know real estate and there's a lot of like really smart fang people who've like dealt with global scale infra kind of sitting around waiting to see what's next right and they're not going to move and they're still there and they prefer in-person work and uh i don't know i plan on staying in san francisco for the company again i sort of have to um but i don't think it's a terrible idea either from a recruitment perspective

Yeah. Uh, what about the leadership? So obviously DeSantis, I know that, uh, you saw him speak yesterday. Uh, and then Newsom, I saw, uh, he's been running ads in Florida. He gave a speech recently. What is up with that? Why is he running ads in Florida? What is that? Well, I have my theories. I'm curious what you think or what the view is. I don't know, but let me tell you what he said in a recent interview, which, uh, uh, in a very politician way, he was like, uh, I don't like bullies and Abbott and DeSantis are bullies. And therefore, uh, I need, somebody needs to stand up to them and he was like, well, are you going to run for president? And he goes, uh, right now I'm focused on California and like, you know, all the talking points, whatever. Uh, and they're

like, so like, why are you running ads in Florida? And he's like, I don't like bullies. And so it's like, uh, okay. Either you're running for president or like you're wasting money, maybe both. Right. But like, what is going on here? What is your, that's as if DeSantis is like running around wedging people. Like what does he mean by DeSantis is being a bully? Um, yeah. I mean, I, I think I tweeted yesterday that i think sf and miami are kind of like peaks into the future for those respective political philosophies for better and worse and i think yeah i think newsom desantis have come to be the face of those worlds right now that trump is kind of fading to the background and the whole trump machine is kind of falling apart you know i think desantis and newsom are

like the sort of the face of of those different movements and it's it's very different attitudes like desantis's speech yesterday um you know he hits on all his points and he hits on you know he's released campaign ads that more or less hit his talking points and it's a very different message than newsome yeah yeah what's fascinating to me also is obviously people self-select uh into certain political ideologies and and if these two things are going to go in opposite directions they'll go live in certain cities uh but the people in the middle like there's a lot more conversation around inflation around taxes around like like what happens to my personal wallet or pocketbook uh and i have a friend who's lived in california his entire life and he's like

dude when it went over 50 taxes he's like psychologically i was like this sucks right like like like enough he's at 49 i was chill 51 i'm out right like like whatever for whatever reason and i do think that there's a lot of things on both sides of the political aisle that like people are just waking up to it and it's less about like is the difference between 49 51 really that big no psychologically though huge huge difference and obviously it's exasperated by things like uh locking people in their homes and how they treated masks no masks whatever but like you are just watching the polar opposites play out here and i do wonder like do we ever get a return to the center or is it just going to be more and more extreme over time yeah the tax

thing is kind of interesting so i i you know i have a house in northern nevada which is where i officially live and uh the real estate brokers was like yeah we have so many california clients and they just show up saying 13 13 and that's the top state income tax rate in california it's like 13 um so the the tax thing yeah i mean i don't want to go to 18 and i'll do that okay yeah that's what they put forward i don't know if they're going to get it passed but 18 would put it at like people would be paying like 56 57 yeah yeah and i think the weird thing is like people don't necessarily mind high taxes as long as they get something for it but then you look at california's infra and it's like a joke i mean floater's a lot i don't mean to be a dissent but just reporting on

what he said and his thing and kind of stack is like look we have like better roads like better public schools you can go to college for six thousand dollars a year here and no state income tax right and you look at that and you compare it to the california deal it's like well what do you what are you getting for that I mean as a side thing by the way it's just kind of interesting I tried living in Europe I'm one of the few people who actually lived in Europe I have a new passport I can go live there and it's how do you think I actually penciled out the taxes the U.S. is actually not a low tax regime at all like the total taxes you pay in California are comparable to the taxes you'd pay in Spain and Germany but again there you have sort of a national fabric

and infrastructure that you pay for in like in the United States you don't so yeah I think people like yeah I think it's a symbolic thing of like wait you're selling 51 cents of every dollar goes of the state. And like, in addition to that, I'm paying for private schooling and this and that to actually avoid the deteriorating infrastructure of the state while I'm out. Yeah. Well, this idea of like, you are buying something, right? Well, you, you, most people don't think of it that way, but when you start, but you are, you are buying something. Right. And I don't know. I think American federalism is good. And I think different states should run their business, their affairs different ways. And I, yeah. Why is Newsom running ads in Florida? It's like, what do you care? I'm

like, if you don't have to deal with DeSantis in Florida, then don't deal with it. Go run your own state and we'll see. Right. And if you look at the numbers, the numbers don't lie. California has led the leaderboard in like domestic emigration and Florida and Texas have been tied for first and second in domestic immigration. And so California is a great place to leave, to live. Why is everybody leaving? Well, how do you feel about some of these, let's take Florida and Texas as an example, uh, and didn't mean to talk so much about politics, but whatever, uh, how much of like their, uh, interjection into like social issues versus like more of the legislation and business issues, like it's just a natural product of the time that we live in and social media and

And that gets headlines and drives conversation versus like, I don't know, going after Disney or having certain types of policies like those actually keep people or attract people to come move to your state and drive more revenue. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it's funny. Again, I sound like I'm some sort of the Santa show or something, but it's just chill, chill. Definitely not. No, I'm not. Absolutely not chilling for any politician. But he did.

In terms of the thinking, it's interesting. One of the numbers that stuck stuck in my head because he cited a bunch of lists of like Florida victories. and one is and i don't even know where you pull these numbers a total influx of adjusted gross income apparently you can measure that somehow which is interesting which i you know is rather than people it's like dollar signs and i forget the numbers he cited and i have a recording of it but basically he cited that florida has one of the highest influx of adjusted gross income as if he was a growth marketer and like an app developer saying oh the arpoos are really high and the tarpon aov went through the roof right no it was like this hand is giving like a growth

It's like, wow, I guess that's an interesting way to think about it. And I guess Florida does think about it that way. Because, you know, there is a lot of fast money in Florida in the sense of, like, you know, people come here because they like the financial climate. And there's a liquid real estate market and condos and stuff. And a lot of Latin Americans have the same thing, right? And so it's interesting he thinks about it that way. Well, you even see, like, you know, it's important for us to talk about the downsides of this as well. So just in the city of Miami, prices have skyrocketed for real estate rent, even just everyday items.

Some of that is being experienced on a global scale, even a national scale. uh, in terms of the loose monetary policy, like all that type of stuff. But like, there's very much a thing of, uh, how many people made more than, I don't know, $200,000 a year that lived in Miami three years ago. And then now like a lot more, I don't know what the numbers are, but a lot more. Uh, so naturally the average price of a lot of these things goes up and continues to trend upwards. Uh, and so the impact on the people who have been here before that happened is not good, right? They start to feel like, Hey, I can't afford this. Why is everything getting so expensive. My income is not going up at the same rate. And we've seen, uh, uh, that on a national

scale, but, but I think it's exasperated in Miami. And so you start to look at this and you're like, okay, cool. Like, yes, that is a great stat to point out and cheer for, uh, because as a state level, like you're improving, but then there's real impact. And like, how do you deal with that? I don't know if there's States or cities that know how to deal with some of that going on. I mean, build more housing. I don't know one way to do it. Although in South Florida, you're somewhat limited, right? Cause Miami expands to the West of the Everglades and then that's it there's only so much space west you can go um yeah i don't know you know it's funny one of the weird things about like this whole tech thing when delian did his own miami tech

week i guess there was a pre-existing miami tech week that got pissed off that like the founders fun people came in and now you want to interject myself into that drama but i found it interesting that people were assuming the tack of like oh these are like gentrifiers who are coming in it's like and it's odd that people were claiming like oh i'm the real miami when like that is the most un-miami attitude ever right because like people have been coming here and gentrifying or carpetbagging since forever. I mean, that's what my parents did, right? Everybody, everyone, there's always a new generation

that everyone finds obnoxious that shows up and kind of, you know, projects their reality on it. I remember when I was a little kid, it was funny. You know, again, Miami used to be very different than now, but I used to remember there used to be bumper stickers on cars that said, can the last American who leaves Miami please bring down the flag, right? Because Miami was getting totally dominated by human Hispanics.

And again, I, you know, they're completely just unselfconsciously what they are. They're a little obnoxious, frankly, and they just impose like their culture not imposed but they just they don't give a shit they're not going to try to meet they're super american but they're not going to like you know which is american which is american exactly right right it's like in godfather 2 when the italians are having like their san genaro festival and like no one's sitting there trying to integrate with anything they're just like oh of course we're going to carry this festival from naples or

whatever and have it in new york of course we are it's the same thing in miami yeah but i think that this and when i saw your tweet like i almost tweeted and then didn't and we could talk about why but uh i was like man miami seems to be one of the places where like people are still understand the importance of america the uh value of like true freedom not not the bullshit like hey i can go outside whatever but like actually hey i just came from a really bad place this place is way better and i am proud of the fact that i either got here that i live here that these ideals are what i am choosing to go in and live within uh and it does feel like maybe florida and texas specifically but also some other places around the united states like they're trying to amp that back

up because they feel like uh that's being lost on a national scale yeah yeah i mean it's funny i remember one of the sort of boomer phrases my father used to use a lot somebody mentioned this on twitter as well that's like people used to say oh it's a free country right and the idea is typically like you usually say something's like well that sounds kind of dumb but whatever like what do i care no skin off my back and so we don't say that anymore we don't say you know somebody does something dumb but you know it's a free country it's like oh no that person's a bully they need their behavior needs to be corrected it's like why speaking of uh the people that get accused of being a bully whether they are or not you mentioned earlier the trump machine is falling

apart you think he's done he no way he can be president again you know i hate to make political predictions because my ability to make them is bad i don't i don't know i don't know i just um i don't know i'm here to report on political conference so i'm kind of thinking about what the future of the american right wing um i think what i see in the trump movement to the extent i can diagnose anything is a sort of jacksonian populism which has been a strain in american politics what is that that's a smart thing i don't know yeah so you know andrew jackson And obviously, Old Hickory, obviously a colored record when it came to many things. But there was an essay by Walter Russell Mead that came out right when Trump got elected.

It was very good. I wish I could quote it from memory. But basically, the idea behind Jacksonian populism is less – it's definitely not like Yankee New England, that's for sure. It's obviously more southern orientation. And it interprets the United States of America as being less a creedal nation, less defined by a document, and more a nation in almost the European sort of blood and soil sort of way. And it's a very populist sentiment, right? It's kind of what was behind the Tea Party movement and the Trump movement. And it's just this – there's very strains in American political thought, and occasionally they kind of erupt, right?

And arguably Trump was an eruption of that Jacksonian populism. And I think that strain exists. I mean, Trump could get hit by a bus or heal over from a heart attack tomorrow, and that strain will still be there, right? And the question is, what expresses it? And so I think other politicians can look at people like J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, DeSantis. They're all this kind of new generation of politicians who are all very well educated.

They all have a lot of Ivy League degrees and what you would think of as being sort of the elite background. And yet what I find interesting about them is that they've turned their back to some degree on that elite background, right? I mean, you know, Blake Masters is casting himself as the populist and he, you know, he actually is from Arizona, but he's also, you know, Peter Thiel's wealth manager. It's hardly, it doesn't exactly work out at Cabela's, right? So, yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting crop of politicians.

I always think of Cabela's because I used to shop there more than I do now, but I always see it as like, it's like, you know, the United States is divided into either REI people and Cabela's people or Bass Pro Shop people. You're either one or the other, right? and it's funny because you go into those stores and they're supposed to be outdoorsy stores but the products they sell are completely different right and rei is like mountain climbing super expensive mountain climbing gear all these fancy bikes and shit uh and that's it and then you go to cabela's and it's like basically guns and boats and camo and camping equipment that's a lot less fancy right and it's just a different conception of nature basically is what it boils down to that's like great framework i've never heard that before but that is fantastic yeah you either show you

ever i'm actually i have both rei and cabela's loyalty card cards i'm one of the few but i think most americans have one or the other in their wallet when you think about uh this rise of like populism and all this happening uh is it again just a product of like the times we live in and so people are being opportunistic and seeing seeing it or do you think that uh these folks with ivy league degrees and all this stuff and kind of like they're turning their back on on maybe what got them to where they are or whatever uh is it more so like hey i grew up a certain way I see that that's no longer here and, like, I have to go be the one to kind of bring it back or a resurgence of some, like, past component of American politics. I think that's right.

I think if you look at the family bios of people like DeSantis and certainly Vance, whose background has been a whole book, I'm not so sure about Masters' but there is a connection to not that elite class. And so I think something rattling around in their heads is part of that. Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of what's going on in this right is kind of interesting in that, you know, the left is sort of, it's a bizarre inversion of European politics, right? In European politics, the left is typically kind of Marxist and classist in orientation and the right tends to be nationalist or even racist in orientation in the extreme form. And the United States is kind of the reverse, right? The left is kind of weirdly ethnically and racially obsessed. And the right, I would say here, is kind of a class conscious movement, right?

This feeling of the middle class feeling they're getting screwed by the upper class, right? and the weird shaking out of like the left coalition is basically you know i would typify it as like people who live off of doordash and the people who deliver it to them that's the left coalition people who shop at whole foods and then people who get it welfare while those on the right tends to be them in fact peter teal one of the quotes from his speech was you know the republicans are the party for the middle class and the democrats are the party for everybody else right and so that's a that's a strange split in american politics and i think other thinkers of you could people like um burnham samuel francis you know thinkers who sort of framed at some point there

would be a middle american revolt right that the american middle class would revolt against the it's sort of elite overseers um another book that i love is uh lashes the revolt of the elites he describes how again there was this elite class that would turn its back like back in the day right a you had more regional elites every little state had its own little elites and then the sort of consumption and lifestyle patterns of a wealthy person and a middle class person weren't that different in America like everyone kind of shopped at Macy's and it was this very middle class mass market society and at some point that split and now you have an elite that lives very very differently and someone in San Francisco an elite in San Francisco lives very very differently

than my neighbors in the desert highlands outside of Reno right they're kind of they're completely different they live in totally different worlds and that wasn't so much the case um so I think that's causing that is at its core what's causing this friction and I think a lot of this new right as a rebellion against that elite. This episode is brought to you by Sigma. The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology

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redneck rich yes right growing up in north carolina like there was people who they had money but they didn't have i believe degrees or ferraris they had a tricked out truck with a lift and like the whole thing which by the way can be expensive as shit by the way like you see like in reno you see somebody's 100 that's an 80 000 like jeep rubicon like 60k base at least and you've put at least 34k into it you are not poor right redneck rich right like like the whole idea of redneck rich was basically like uh it doesn't mean that you necessarily uh don't have means it just means that you express the wealth in a different way and uh i specifically remember uh there was kids that uh went to like local high schools and stuff like that and uh there was one

area they would take these trucks and they would go like mudding right right and like you're like okay cool got it like you have to have a truck that can actually like go into the mud and come out right because if you just take a stock truck and they're like it's not coming out and so uh to some degree the country feels like the redneck rich now have a voice with the internet whereas maybe they didn't have that before yeah yeah i know i mean when i say elite people often kind of call bullshit and what are you calling elite aren't you an elite this and that it's like there's something different about it right like you know some guy with like you know a dartmouth degree and 150 000 in student loans who writes for an east coast literary thing and lives in

brooklyn that are part of an elite class the guy who has four car dealerships in asheville right and make 600k a year he is not elite even though their incomes are very very different right um yeah it's that's that's the delta what do you like when you look at those two people like what do you think makes up the difference and is it obviously money is not one of the things uh it could be a thing but but isn't the thing um is it education is it like view of the world like yeah view the world politics um you know the whole wokeness thing which i don't typically like getting in the middle of but um yeah there's there's a difference in attitude there somehow you start at the world from the elite pedestal you know you and i have lived inside this world

right and there's a set of sort of moral assumptions about the world and you step outside of it and there's a whole different set of moral assumptions right like the fact you've got the flag behind you right like you wouldn't you probably wouldn't do a zoom at a at a fan company nowadays with like a flag behind you right um and uh you'll hear a crazy story let's hear i never said this before okay let's hear uh uh let me say this in the most unidentifiable way possible uh there is somebody that we work with uh who um not a person an organization okay uh and uh i made a video and the fly was in the back and they're like hey can you not do that again and i thought i was ready to go off like i had the tweet locked and loaded i was gonna fucking go to town like

this was going to be the super bowl it was like draw the line in the sand like fuck you um and then it came out like the company i don't know five percent of the sales or something is in america and this video was going to be put on a website and they didn't want to think it's only for america so like we have no problem like if you want part of it to have it or whatever but just like can you do it in a way so that like they know that it's not just an american thing like it's available globally i was like okay fine like let me you know put the tweet in my drafts and keep it warm in case i need it later i'm kind of like put the gun back in the holster but it's still loaded um but but uh but but it was this like weird thing like my first reaction when i

saw it was like no right and to your point like i don't think if you work at uh some of these companies you can do that or somebody would say something again you can buck the trend whatever uh stand up for what you think is right but uh you might not work there very long uh for the reasons whatever it does feel like this weird thing where that is now uh a contentious point yeah yeah i think for the longest time um the company andrew i'm probably mispronouncing it um on their careers page used to have this massive american flag in it and i theorized that it was like basically not right it's basically a filter and i think i actually tweeted it at palmer lucky and he replied yeah that was intentional or somebody from andrew said yeah that wasn't an

accident because they they have this enormous flag like i'm sure you've seen patent right when george c scott comes out with like a flag the size of a wall yes they had like that hanging in their general area and then they had a photo of that on their careers page yeah and i think that was intentional that was the garlic to the vampire yeah so i i'm fascinated by this whole like how do you communicate uh implicitly um especially when you start uh finding the intersection of technology politics like uh national like all these different things that come together and uh sometimes the best way to understand like what's happening in america is to look elsewhere and so uh i saw a tweet i think two days ago or yesterday uh zalinski from uh

ukraine he gave this whole speech and uh it's translated and you know who knows how accurate it is but the general idea was like uh you know fuck you russia uh if you give us the choice between uh gas or you we will take gas uh no gas or you we will take no gas if you give us the choice between you and no water we will take no water like all these things and like by the way history proves that like at the end we will have gas water electricity like all stuff and we will be without you right and and you listen to the speech and the person was like oh he's going full like with Winston Churchill and you're sitting there like, Oh, okay. We have an actor comedian who is now communicating in a way that is obviously

very compelling to a lot of people. He is essentially going in front of the American markets and saying like, you should invest in Ukraine, the middle of a war, like all these things. And he's doing it with like a flag behind them. He's doing it dressed very specifically. Like you're meeting American politicians who they had time to put on their suits and ties, but you look like you literally just got off the battlefield. And like you're,

you're standing inside of the government buildings in Kiev or whatever. how do you like break that down you literally went to ukraine so you have more i spent a little bit of time there yeah i spent a little bit of time in the western part of the country um because at the early part of the war it was kind of exciting and it felt like the image we're having in the united states was um you know was obviously misinterpreted and so okay a colleague of mine at the lincoln network this dc think tank that i'm a part of uh he's reported from conflict zones in the past he's like hey why don't why don't we go i'll set up the fixtures and stuff you just come along and split the cost i'm like okay fine i'll ride with you he ended up he ended up eventually

interviewing Zelensky for Wired Magazine and going all the way to Kyiv um I had to go do a podcast of all things so I had to go do Rogan it's kind of funny I was I was literally in Joe Rogan pulled you out of I know yeah no I was I was in I was in Lviv in in western Ukraine with like a starlink hanging out of my window like like texting the booker guy I'm like dude like I hate to break it to you but I'm like actually in a war is it like I it's gonna be hard for me to get back in time can we just like zoom it in and it might be kind of cool because I'm like zooming from Ukraine he's like no you have to physically be here like we can reschedule but it'll be months ahead so like you decide i'm like fuck and so i'm like pack up the star

and spend the three or four days it took to like get back and again i wasn't that i wasn't that deep into it at all but it's weird like um i mean you served right so you yeah yeah and so you know how your risk threshold kind of changes it's like it's kind of scary when i was like humping my bag with like body armor and the starlink and shit across the because you can't take cars across the border so you're literally walking across the border into like this unknown future i'm like man antonio walked into war zone with starlink on his back right no well it was fucking scary and then it was weird too because like the border checkpoint there's like this line that stretched for miles of refugees to get out yes and you're like walking alone and they're like staring at

you're like are you fucking crazy like what are you doing walking in that direction bro i'm like and like walking across like this this feels really dumb like i don't know what i'm doing was it just you two or yeah it was no it was just us two yeah it was me and no like when you're crossing the border there's literally nobody going in oh no no uh you would see legionnaires at the time they were recruiting the foreign legion and then you would see other media and so you'd see other press with their bulletproof vest with the press tag on it and you'd see young healthy men who had kit from various camo patterns who were clearly from different militaries who were showing up and yeah there's nobody else the the um the the few people

that i've seen go uh their former u.s military defense contractors whatever uh when they're there i'm like looking around i'm like man that looks kind of crazy like you got a bunch of people with guns and kids and they're like running around everything and then uh you see the media which obviously uh when i was in iraq they were there uh very different time like it was kind of like hey get in the vehicle shut up and like you know if you put us in danger like we're gonna fucking freak out um but here like there's like walking down the street and i don't know it just seems kind of different well it was i mean it's a country it's a country it's something i'd never experienced before i expect none of us have ever experienced it's a country in total war right

It's a country, it's a European nation that has gotten invaded and social order is kind of not totally broken down in an anarchic way, but, but most of society is either trying to get out women. So men couldn't get out. So it was like, if you're, if you're at the Polish border, it's just literally like women and children, like a woman with like two kids and a little cat in the bag and a little rollie bag, like basically all they have in the clothes on their back, just like walking across the border to an unknown, like that's it.

And you just see like this endless stream of such people. And what's going on on the other side of the border? Cause I think a lot of people don't realize this. Like once they get over there, are they meeting like family and friends or are they're just like random people trying to help them? Some are having, like, tearful reunions, but usually it's amazing. I mean, it's a little dated now. I'm sure it's quiet now compared to what it used to be.

But there was an enormous number of, like, José Andrés, the Spanish chef, his world, Central Kitchens, I think it's called, was all over the place. I interviewed just a random Polish woman from the village who's like, oh, yeah, the refugees are coming. So, like, she had this big thing of soup that she was feeding them. Doing her best to help. Yeah, so Europe really just mustered in a huge way. I mean, every train station in Poland became a refugee camp basically

because they're all camp. Like, the Warsaw train station was totally taken over by refugees. you know it was it was literally millions of refugees like a quarter of the ukrainian population fled um so it was uh it was a chaotic situation then you got on the inside and there's again more refugees coming out but then also men and material going east right and then all society like there's a scene there it was on a sunday a bunch of high school kids like having fun joshing like you think oh they're having a big it's like no they're filling sandbags and pulling the sandbags around statues because they thought airstrikes were happening and there were a few airstrikes a

little bit later and so they're you know and they're shuttering everything it's just like those scenes you see in black and white from world war ii was kind of the vibe right um even though this is far away from the front lines to be clear um yeah that that was the feeling in it and that's when i kind of realized like man i don't know like i think the russians gonna have a hard time winning because everyone was so mobilized they would literally punctuate said you know sentences with we will win and like these steely eyed gazes and everyone kind of mobilized like i don't know man this ukraine's a big place so when i saw this happening one of the first things i thought about was uh god forbid that this happened in the united states somehow somebody

figured it out and they invade the united states would we have the same response and i don't think we would i think well i think uh i might show my political stripes i i think i think you would have that i think you would have the response you think so i think it wouldn't be the people you'd expect um interesting yeah this is this is where the redneck side of me comes out i think uh i think the people you see at shooting ranges in california uh who tend to those guys are going to the sierra and Red Dawn, the whole fucking thing. I think the people, you know, a lot of people, the urban dwellers absolutely would not,

and they would just go along with whatever the regime is. Yeah, I think, you know, you've probably gone shooting in California back in the day, and it's, you know, mostly rural whites, a lot of Asians, a lot of Hispanics. Like, those guys would hole up and, like, smuggle arms around and, like, muster for a militia, and a lot of people would just get on the first plane

and get the fuck out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating because if you really think about Ukraine, like, again, this is a story as old as time, But like you're there, you've got your family, you've got a business you're running, whatever. And next thing you know, like literally your family's refugees. Right. And it happens in a matter of days.

What was the most surprising thing that you felt like you saw on the ground that maybe wasn't being told in America or was like being misrepresented in America? I guess I think the level of the level of mobilization and sort of national solidarity that there was. Right. I knew nothing about Ukraine. I still don't know very much about Ukraine. Don't speak any Eastern European or Slavic languages. So to me, it was a vastly foreign country. And I guess once I was there, I did start reading about it.

Ukrainian nationalism has been a thing. It's had very much a checkered past, as many movements did during World War II. But there's been this Ukrainian national movement for a couple centuries now. And it's odd that nationalism, we think of countries as having existed forever, because like France has existed forever. But its politics have been very different. Or Spain has existed forever. But its politics have been very different. And the emergence of what we now call the nation state with sort of a secular, mostly secular administrative state with a notion of national unity and you're a citizen of a certain country rather than an empire or dynasty, that's kind of a novelty, right?

And that struck all of Europe. The United States is one of the great experiments in nation state creation. But a lot of countries didn't get their own nation for a while, right? The Poles, the Czechs, the Serbians, the Slovaks, et cetera. And somehow the Ukrainians never got theirs either. And somehow we're seeing the fruition of this nationalist movement. And I think if you talk to Ukrainians, a lot of things changed with the protests against the previous what was considered a Russian stooge. And it's odd to see – well, I'll go fucking angry and crazy and yelling and screaming at your podcast if you go that direction.

But there's a lot of American commenters, particularly on the right, who were remarkably sympathetic to Putin and thought the Ukrainians should just roll over and who have, frankly, shut the fuck up about the war since then, since they got it so completely wrong, clearly. but um you know who wanted to just deny the fact or claim that the 2014 was like a cia op it's like dude look at the photos there's like a million ukrainians in that protest like the cia crisis actor budget must have been pretty goddamn lit if you claim this is a cia ops like no like i hate to break and americans often have this attitude like they think everything is a projection of their own domestic political neuroses right like if the cia lifts a little finger oh then like a million person riot happens and keeps like dude if only like no that's not how it actually works they have their own political processes they have their own political crises and they have their

own thoughts and views about the world that don't line up with american domestic political priorities that's just the reality of it and if you want to understand that world you have to get out of your american attitude understand and see the world from their perspective right and if you talk to them it's like dude we've had democracy for whatever seven or eight years we're not giving it up now we're not going to be under putin's heel that's it i will i will die for this country right yeah and that yeah and that's that's something that i think caught everyone by surprise um funny a friend of mine i won't name names whatever he was a mormon missionary to ukraine he was there before the previous russian invasion and the war in the east and he was

surprised at how much ukrainian nationalism resilience there was so a lot of it clearly was a very recent phenomenon but i think you know zelensky not leaving everyone he's supremely popular there i think zelensky this whole business of like i don't need a ride i need ammo right i think that rallied a nation in a big way and um it was some baller shit that was i think i think yeah i think it's some baller shit yeah yeah the the other piece that uh i saw a lot of people talking about is like dude what are you talking about like he's acting like you know people are dropping bombs on his city and like he's like literally like uh running from uh bunker to bunker like he's you know got politicians coming to visit him he's in this or whatever i was like

i don't think that uh this was like uh hey i'm going to die if i stay or not it was the symbol of like we're not we're not running we're gonna fight and to some degree like the morale of the country seemed to shift and i think that uh part of it also was like he seems to very well understand american culture and like how to kind of pull the strings because when he said that specific line it felt like america was like fuck yeah that guy sounds awesome right oh his marketing is incredible which is a good thing right every every war has propaganda right that's part of the war i mean america did in world war ii and so that's definitely part of it but i i would clarify that i mean he was in bunkers hiding from bombs in the early part of the war kiev was encircled

right the thought that he would survive you know wagner mercenaries were dispatched to try to murder him like i mean nowadays yes you're right i mean vitalik can just go to the kiev blockchain thing and it's not that hard to get to but that was not the case in early march when things were much more sort of loosey goosey so and when that happened like what do you think was the big shift was it literally that they've pushed the forces back i know now we have kind of an advance that's happening that everyone uh believes has a lot of momentum to it but uh i i don't think people quite understand um uh it feels like the story in america has been russia has tried to invade they've had some successes but they're running into resistance and like that's the story not so

much that like no maybe actually they're like losing ground now there's this advance now there's like almost a a counterpunch that's occurring and like if we know anything about military history like that's usually if you can keep that momentum like that's how you end up victorious it's not so much like uh hey we resist in the beginning it's no we resist and then we counterpunch and that seems to be happening now yeah i mean i think yeah the big news there is obviously that the the question was can the ukrainians go on the offensive and recapture territory it's one thing to actually defend territories the other thing to actually take territory um and yeah i think rolling back the russians from buka it's funny did you ever work with uh dwight no you didn't

He probably left. Dwight Crowe, Facebook PM. I did. Yeah, yeah. So I ran into him like a week ago at South Park Commons in South Park. Okay. Last time I talked to him was through a Starling connection. Dude, that guy was actually in the shit.

He was serving – I never published an interview with him. I probably should. He was serving in a volunteer ambulance crew on the front lines actually in Kiev. Shut up. No, absolutely. He would do that. He would do that, and he did that. Like I saw the video.

Dude, he was like losing – he was in a hospital in the front lines. he'd go out volunteer basis and go pull the civilian dead bodies from from the or the injured from the front lines i wish we were having this conversation not on air but uh he always struck me as the type of guy who like he's gonna live life right yeah and uh the one thing i remember about dwight is uh uh i think he posted on facebook he like went and he climbed maybe mount kilimanjaro or something and he did everest like a month ago okay yeah so like he'd been climbing these things or whatever i think it was kilimanjaro when he did it and he was like i got to the top and i couldn't fucking breathe and i like crawled my way to the sign because i was

going to get this fucking photo right and he had like you know selfie or whatever and i remember just being like yep that checks out like that is the type of person he is so to hear this is not shocking oh yeah you know i should go back to him we should probably publish that interview um but yeah no he was he was in the front lines and then um he survived though he came back and um but yeah no getting back to the ukraine thing yeah i mean the business of being on the offensive will they reclaim territory will they take odessa you know there's a lot of questions right because it's clear that attitudes in the ukraine have hardened like they're willing to compromise and more or less give up much of the crimea to the russians um but that's no longer true and part of their

national conception is actually coming it all back um we'll see um i mean i you know i i have no obviously no insight to what they're actually thinking but i have to imagine that they understand that european resolve might waver given their energy costs europe's going to freeze this winter it does not look well um i think i retweeted a pretty harsh joke that said um you know what did the british use to um to uh light their homes before candles electricity electricity right it's like oh um i take no joy in that joke by the way but it is it's one of these jokes that like reveals the greater truth yes yes like oh so and he must understand that resolve for the war has to waver in european politics given the privations the the story that uh from russia and

again i want to be careful i don't get all this uh data points wrong because everyone in the comments will definitely let us know uh but um it does feel like uh there's this thing like there's like been like eight russian uh energy executives oil executives whatever who have mysteriously gone missing died whatever uh and then we get pipeline shut down and like hey we're not turning it back on like there's all this stuff going on and i think that americans are like oh that shit that like we thought actually happens like that does happen like you don't mean you can kind of almost see like oh i thought that was just like in history or i thought that was like in uh fiction books like that's like real stuff and i've talked to a couple of friends and they're like

oh and i'm like yeah it's a fucking war like they're literally trying to kill each other right and and to some degree i think america got so uh blunted to like the realities of war because we were at war for 20 years and it was just kind of like this thing that happens every once in a while there's like a news story or whatever but like if you're you know 18 19 years old like you did not live a single day without america at war in the middle east right now america well technically is not fighting in the war uh well they are it's a proxy war how many millions you said Ukraine you said I mean well the the thing that I saw which uh just blew my mind is like hey we have billions of dollars for uh Ukraine to fight a war but we don't have enough money to solve the

water crisis in Jackson Mississippi right and so like a little bit of like hey why are we so worried about all these other problems around the world uh which uh is up for debate but it does feel like America to some degree like the initial invasion was a big moment and then like we just go back to like kind of being blunted to the realities of it yeah we're right because you're right because that the United States has been continuous like war in fact is involved in what six or seven different regions at least right now and nobody thinks about it because you basically outsource it to a small minority of people since we have a professional army there's no conscription and i think it creates this level of media cynicism about war that it literally is like the current

thing like one of the things that most pissed me off about the ukraine's like oh i don't see ukraine in my feed i guess it's the current thing yeah because a fucking shooting war is just a media cycle to you is that is that what you think it is it's like no it's a little bit more than that and by the way no the war is not over we're still giving them billions there's still people die and there's still this whole thing going on just because you don't see it in your feed it's not it doesn't mean it's not real um and so yeah i mean but of course the media side of it does matter and zelensky understands that which is why he's he's leading the propaganda where that he is um you mentioned uh that a big part of this was like ukrainians were like i'll die for my country

right uh you also wrote a piece uh would you die for the dow oh yeah i think or something right uh and uh down snarky headlines literally being decentralized autonomous organization and it was somewhat of a a review summary critique whatever you want to call it of uh blashi Srinivasan, the network state. So talk a little bit about, you know, the United States, Ukraine, Russia, like now there's this new idea of like, let's go create like cities in the cloud, right? Which I think Balaji's done a great job of articulating and kind of laying out. What did you kind of take away from that? Yeah, that was a review of Balaji's network state and also Vitalik's response. Vitalik wrote a very long piece about it as well. And I think it's a fascinating

concept and I recommend reading the book, actually. I also interviewed him on my podcast, The Pull Request. You can get an Apple podcast. I had a long conversation with Balaji about it. um and to be clear like you know balaji and i don't really disagree at some fundamental level he understands so let me just frame what the problem is and then what the debate became so balaji's idea i mean there's a lot of balaji in there and if you know balaji i'm sure you've had a lot of interesting conversations as i've had um with balaji he's an interesting character so like the first half is like pure like balaji's brain and view of the world which is fascinating there's literally like seven links in one sentence like very which is why we

all love him okay right no he's amazing he's amazing the guy i don't know how he manages all the tabs but he's got to have some he Balaji Srinivasan has some sort of tab management system that none of us have yet figured out I mean you're right his brain has 200 open tabs at all times that's the reality and his CPU still runs somehow my MacBook Pro can handle it but Balaji's brain can um yeah and then at the end I wish he had spent more I mean he's he's had you can find it online by the way he it's a beautiful website online and he's added chapters to it but in the original book he gets into what he called the network state and the idea here is that um imagine in a sort of federated, I mean, in the same way that like, I made this comment in my critiques,

like imagine Balajistan, let's just give it a name, existed, right? And we're Balajistanis, right? And we literally just move from three or four neighborhoods in San Francisco to the same three or four neighborhoods in Miami, the same in New York. And let's say there's actual borders, passports, the whole deal. Would we even notice? It's like, no, because we'd never cross the border. We would literally just fly from one to the other. And so I think Balaji is absolutely right that like de facto, this is, it's already the case that there's a self sort of selecting set of people who live in this weird disembodied somewhat elite realm to be honest that fly between these various cities and live a different life and they have much more in common than they do

with even people like down the street that right down the street right um and some could say that's a bad thing and maybe it is um i personally one of the things one of the weirdest things i think that's happened in 200 years and you and i are probably roughly the same age so you probably remember the analog era a little bit right it's like you remember getting letters right like information used to move as fast as like physical objects would move and now they don't information is uncoupled from from physical movement which means who you are what you think what you believe is uncoupled from your surroundings and that means the little colored squares on the map called miami florida state of florida united states of america are uncoupled from what who you think

believe talk with etc and i think that's a major change and somehow a lot of the getting back to the whole desantis versus newsom war and everyone moving different states like that's i think apology called it defragmenting a disc like remember back in the in the dos days and or even current windows like the memory is written all over and then at some point you've got to take all the apps memory and take it to one place so that gets too inefficient he's like yeah the network state is basically defragmenting people and putting all the people that actually have common values and are willing to live under the same rules in the same physical place because the physical so to be clear this is not transhumanism this is not vr this is not

uploading your brain it's like no no no we need like physical boots on the ground so to speak place to live seat at the un laws people who take out the garbage but for a self you know sort of selecting set of people um that's his thesis and you know again like i said like i'm i'm partial to it because i think the political crisis that he highlights is very real um the question is would you die for the dow right because not that everything is like in war and fighting these days obviously very little of life is but at some level you have to say even if it's not like i will die for the die it's like i will raise my children inside this environment right that's the real bet you make and are people actually willing to do that because that you know you probably know the

same people dry it in a praxis there's a lot of you know the prosper people like all very interesting i'm like super pro makers and builders and doing cool new stuff i don't want to ding them at all but i do wonder it's like well you need some oomph there and it's funny i i like joke tweeted a few months ago a lot of this charter nation business is like zionism without judaism right and then like literally just yesterday abolished he said oh no no i wasn't inspired renewal steve and i was inspired by theodore herzl the founder of modern zionism right and it's true right and the design for those who aren't familiar with zionism or with judaism for that matter right a lot of zionism getting back to the the national all these nationalist

movements sprung up in late 19th century europe right including a lot of the ukrainian uh nationalist movement and in the case of the jewish one is a little strange because it's not like oh the ground we sit on should become a country rather than the austro-hungarian empire it's like well we're not even on the ground but we are people because we've been living in exile for almost 2 000 years and therefore we should move somewhere else and before the current location of israel was the thing there was plans of argentina uganda all sorts of places where the jews had moved to um but there was always this feeling of like yeah the the dao so to speak was the feeling of jewish identity right and there was you know for again almost 2 000 years drummed into their heads this feeling of

exilic despair right um some of it stemming from previous exiles but like the israeli national anthem um you know says looking to the east towards zion which echoes the psalm which reflects the Jews being exiled to Babylon, you know, 500 BC. And so there's this feeling of, and it's odd because a land that they weren't even a part of, like nobody had been a part of for generations. And so it's like that feeling of like belief, does that exist for these charter nations? And do you even need it? Maybe you don't.

I've talked to some of the Prospera people, which is this thing in Honduras that's like a special economic zone. They're like, you know, you don't really need a whole new country. You just need like special economic terms and the ability to move there, and that's all you need. so i've talked to a lot of people as well uh and when you think it's hilarious that we're talking about charter nation business right uh which is an important part of it as well uh because you do need to make it sustainable um and these i think have gotten a lot of uh attention because they are like planting a flag on the ground like we're going to create a special economics and we're going to create a whole new city or a country or whatever but like there's also kind of watered

down versions i think uh uh there was the mountain uh powder mountain or whatever that uh a whole group of people they went bought a mountain they started cut up all the land they were selling these pieces or plots or whatever and they were gonna like build like basically a neighborhood right like if you kind of think of like the the most watered-down version is like hey we're gonna go create a new neighborhood you can also go try to create a new nation but what i do think we've like seen an example of this kind of play out in front of our eyes which is miami yeah which it actually had almost nothing to do with like the physical uh infrastructure and all this like yes there were some things that were advantageous but i think if you were to ask some of the people who

moved here first uh they were just like no like we just like there's 300 people and if we could get those 300 people wouldn't even like you it was like somebody like you to fill this seat and we get 300 of them then like we have momentum we have like a nucleus and like we're off to the races and it is a higher probability of like escape velocity and like this will be a thing that will stay around for a long time it feels like most of the other folks who are trying these like new nation things it's more about the like physical location it's more about like what are the rules than like just the people. And I don't know if you've thought at all about that in terms of like pros or cons between the difference. I mean, I've thought about Miami, right? Miami is almost its

own little sort of city state. It feels weird. Like for those who don't spend time here, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but it feels very different than like Fort Lauderdale, right? Fort Lauderdale is great, nice airport to fly out of, but there's some sort of border you cross between Dayton and Broward County when you go north. And this is not like Orlando, right? It's nothing wrong with Orlando, but it's different. And like, I don't know, in my ideal world, there would be some like Maritime Republic of Miami and Mayor Suarez's Doja.

And it's like the Northern Italian city-states and it's just like this weird little place with its own laws. And, you know, I don't know. It'd be kind of cool, frankly. I think we need more of those experiments. Like, you know, a lot of these people, like the practice people, it's like,

dude, why don't you just like, why don't you just take over a county in Florida? Just convince DeSantis. Now that he's like, you know, smacked around Disney, convince them to give you some county something or like even these retirement communities like the villages right like you know they have like 200 000 people they have like their own police force it's like a whole city in there yeah it's like you know in florida you can what is the island uh there's um fisher island is it fisher island no there's a uh uh indian creek right is

that it's like super wealthy right you and i've never been there and uh it's got like a golf course on it there's like 30 40 50 homes whatever it is and they have like a 13 person police force and they patrol not by only land but also by sea and they have like a boat and like like the whole thing and it's like of course you know i think uh uh jared kushner and vanka trump bought a place there and there's all these types of people whatever but you're like okay cool it's not 200 000 people but it's like 50 homes and like again they don't have special laws but they sure as hell have an army that'll show up if you try to like you know you try to get on the island right and so like yeah what is the difference between 40 homes and you know 100 000 homes like i don't

know it's not that big a difference yeah yeah but i yeah but we should do these experiments i think it'd be cool what do you think is stopping it or what are the obstacles is it just like that sounds insane to the average person uh i think people have i don't know i mean or it takes hard work and somebody has to believe to be the first to like right right there has to be a sort of generative faith in some future community that you're trying to build there either has to be greed or faith those are the two driving things like you have to believe in some national you know vision or just say you know i'm sick of taxes and these fucked up laws i'm gonna like make common cause with these 500 other rich people and do this thing right um yeah that's that's what

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service available to you 24 7 exodus always has your back run don't walk over to exodus.com slash pomp for your free download today again that's exodus.com slash pomp go check him out for your free download today the uh the thing that also jumps to mind is i remember uh was it clive bundy remember that in uh was it uh nevada or utah it's like oregon the malheur thing though like i think that was uh uh after the original standoff but uh again i don't want to get all the details wrong but uh essentially i think his name's clive bundy he's got like a huge you know geographic uh area i'll call it a farm or a ranch but like basically a city right in terms of size and uh the federal government came and was like you know eminent domain like we're taking some

of this or whatever and he like called his buddies i guess and they like showed up with horses and guns and it was like a standoff does and i remember seeing on the news like you're like holy shit like these are like ranchers and like that looks like a swat sniper set up on the highway like you know with a scope and you're just like is this you know the okay crowd like what is going on here i don't think that anyone generally in the american public is like that's what i'm willing to go do to like set up a new city but like it does become interesting if you go and you get a governor or some sort of uh special treatment and they say hey you can try the experiment in this location i think there's a lot of people who would say yeah i'll opt into

that yeah yeah yeah i mean particularly in the west there's so many open spaces so where my house is in story county outside of reno which is where virginia city is which used to be like the gold rush town and there's uh i forget his name um oh it's the guy who founded jet.com one of these e-commerce mark lore yeah yeah i think he set up a city right yeah he tried to set up a city and which by the way man good luck to him because i live in the high desert it is a harsh environment it gets you're gonna freeze your ass off in the winter and it gets hot as hell in the summer and it's a very harsh environment there is much water and it's hard to live out there but um yeah i mean you know you can buy tens of thousands of acres for not much money and what in the

western americas and if you can convince people to move there um we'll see but again i think and again getting back to the biology conversation he he freely concedes that there needs to be a moral case made for the state and the weird thing that i've always tried to push biology and it's like dude but what is the moral case tell me what is the moral case for your network state and he kind of talks around it doesn't you know i think he just doesn't see himself as that person maybe providing the moral cause what do you think it should be i don't know man it's i don't know i I wrote this piece called, uh, side thing on my experience in Judaism. I had this whole Judaism religious thing.

Um, I think there's kind of like a God shaped hole at the heart of a lot of secular liberalism by God. I don't necessarily mean like, you know, guy with a beard in the sky. I just mean some notion of transcendent good to, you know, I think it was, um, um, I think it was not Walter Benjamin, uh, who's the other guy. Anyhow, um, William James, the, uh, varieties of religious experience. He said, you know, the, at its core religious sentiment is the belief that there's some sort of moral order towards which we should be striving.

right that there's some unseen moral good that we should arrange human affairs according to right and if you frame it that way everything is religion right literally the traffic laws outside that say i can't park for longer than three hours are a form of religion because there's some greater parking good right that again empirically doesn't exist there is no good right there's no good in the microscope we invent these things right and so how how do you invent a moral good that says yes we should have this like modern day hanseatic leagues of federated crypto cities governed by tokens i don't know how do you make that case it might just be a capitalist case of like hey there's lower taxes things work better move here i don't know what what's funny is uh the

intersection of religion and new cities uh i've always thought that actually the better way to try to do this in the united states i don't think internationally uh this uh holds up but in the united states it's actually to take one of the pseudo religions uh take esg and basically use that which we do see companies like i think there's one called um cul-de-sac which is like hey we're gonna build a city but like there's no uh streets for cars it's like walkable only there's no cars allowed like all this stuff and like actually if you went to somebody in the government and was like uh we're anarchists we're gonna like take down you know whatever we're gonna like build our own thing or even a watered down version of like we're building our own city with

our own laws and taxes they're like we're gonna put you on a list somewhere and like we're gonna watch you guys and like that's not allowed but if you show up and you're like hey we're gonna build a new city and uh no cars are allowed they're like oh great how much money do you need Like, what land do you want? You know, and like, there's a conversation. What's the difference? Like, moral good, no cars. It does feel like there's like this whole world.

Carbon zero is the new moral good, man. That is the new moral good towards which we should be striving. There are people who are headed that way. Another thing that's interesting to me is this new world. So you take like network stakes or whatever. A lot of times our critiques on the old world. But we do see in the technology world, Like it seems that some of the new world is just recreating problems of the

old world. So if you look, uh, Dow's crypto is one, by the way, that's exactly where we're going. So Dow's, uh,

somebody recently pitched me, uh, on this like Dow thing. And I was like, I don't know, like what, what, what is your Dow got?

That's so special. And he's like, well, let me explain. One of the problems in Dow's is that, uh, there's a lot of people and there's no like structure. And so nobody really knows what anyone's working on and there's like no

strategy and all this stuff. So we have this concept, uh, we're going to create sub DAOs inside of the DAO. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, well, like all the product people are going to be in one sub DAO to work on product and marketing. And I was like, so divisions in a company. And like, again, I get it. There's tons and tons of people out there. And one anecdote does not necessarily, uh, kind of sentence all of them to like, this is stupid. But I literally was like this, like, where's the hidden camera?

Like, this has got to be a joke that like, you're literally describing a corporation to me just using dao instead and i think that the critics of the uh broad crypto industry uh would say like hey that's just like one example like there's a hundred others of just recreating the problems or recreating some of these things how do you think through like some of the the the naiveness or like the the stupidity that goes well i wouldn't call it stupidity but um yeah some of it is stupid well some of it is not some of it harsh words bomb harsh words come on by the way i've talked to people and been like that sounds kind of crazy like yeah we know it's stupid but right so like it can be a lovable thing as well i mean i think the fact that like for example

defy is speed running a lot of the problems of like conventional 19th and 20th century finance is probably a good sign in a way it's like you've had bank runs you've had a speculative bubble it's like oh like the entire history of the stock market basically for the past century and a half it's like yeah i mean it's kind of dumb to be stepping on the exact same landmines that the previous world did ideally you could kind of avoid that part of what my company hopes to do is like okay let's not do the stupidity of web to attribution again like let's just get to the real answer um on the other hand i don't know man yeah look i so i just got to this party so to speak so it's hard for me to sit here in judgment but it does strike me that there's a lot of interesting

energy and innovation going on in web3 and crypto and a lot of things that are like super naive and like whoa you've never had like a real job before have you you've never been inside like a real tech company and seen how the sausage is made have you um and again that's both good and bad right that can mean that you can invent new stuff and like yeah you don't give a shit how it was built before on the other hand it's like you invented an organization chart it is true but i think it's important also it can be a amazing thing because you're going to get people with new ideas who frankly don't know that they shouldn't try something or whatever and like get breakthroughs yeah but then also the other side is the the crazy stuff yeah i mean

specifically in my example just to cut to it right so just raise money i guess this is my why i've said it before but whatever um raise money for a company that's uh in web3 attribution user acquisition and for those who don't know what that means a lot of people want three don't have had to explain it it's like you know you do a token drop what's the roi on that was it worth let's just go to web two for explain kind of like how uh these web two companies so facebook's twitter's google's holy stuff like many people i think outside of the tech industry will be like oh facebook's amazing like uh i get on their software i connect with people and like they don't realize like no literally somebody is watching did you click or not what color is the

button like uh when i was at facebook i remember uh the create page button on facebook if you go assuming it's still there uh is green every other button on facebook's blue but that one's fucking green right and people there was a huge debate like increase click-through rate 10 yeah can we make it green like does it violate our design standards like all this stuff and like guess what we showed up and we were like look at the click-through rate and like here's data and people were like well fuck the design standard like make that shit green because that's the top of the funnel to make money right and so like explain a little bit as to like attribution like how some of this stuff happens in the in the old world right and so just to be clear when facebook

was watching it's not zuck sitting like literally sitting there laughing at the at the dm to your girlfriend just because people see that it's like yes zuck is sitting there and listening to what you're saying right now and making a joke at your expense it's like obviously it's it's much more high level to aggregated there's no individual much of anything going on yeah so so the funnel you said a lot there actually right so like what is the funnel so the funnel obviously wide on top narrow at the bottom and it's the central metaphor for like everything and almost everything web 2 and marketing right seen from a very mercenary point of view every company is actually a marketing company with like a little side hustle like a game company is actually a

mark and this is actually true most game companies are actually marketing companies that happen to just create games to have a thing to sell and how they navigate that funnel what does it mean to navigate the funnel so what's at the top of the funnel top of the funnel is things like facebook posts instagram posts tweets random browsing on the internet the very high level touch surface of of your media experience i mean in the real world it's seeing billboards listening to this podcast whatever it is right then you go further into the funnel right you've you've responded to some call to action you've clicked on a thing you've installed an app right cta to use the the term of art um you install the app right so you're kind of mid-funnel like you might convert right

note the religious language when you buy a thing you convert it's like mormons like trying to save your soul right this is capitalism is transcendence speaking of organizing principles that's that's where we've gotten to the only thing we believe in is capitalism um and then you get deeper into the funnel you're in the app you upgrade to the paid plan you buy the nft you do whatever it is ka-ching the cash register goes off how do you join all that shit right because i've mentioned like three or four different platforms or more than that that it's happening how does the person you running the pages team or whatever at facebook or me with the exchange or like how do you or somebody inside a defi exchange now how does how do you actually think how do i figure all that

all that's and what they're trying to do is they're trying to understand okay we reached at the very top of the funnel somebody somewhere saw something about us and that was a million people right how many of those million people then went to the like uh website then how many of the website clicked the button and then how many people bought and can we then start to tweak well if a million people saw it and only 40 came through can we get it to 50 60 and actually move the metrics right so those are the high level analytics so that and then so there's there's a lot going and then there's like a compute step which is like who do we give credit for the for the conversion and i had like in my pitch deck i had like a joke apocryphal quote actually from stalin that said

you know who votes in an election doesn't matter who counts the votes matters right and an attribution it's also true dangerous in today's day and age well yeah you know who clicks and where kind of doesn't matter who counts the clicks is what matters right so i always cite the example i also had this slide in the deck by the way and jason calacanis who we all know and love not really but um no we do we do love him despite his many personality flaws um i love you jason you can come on anytime and you and antonio i'll gladly sit here and just shut up and let you guys he's gonna come up and give you a hug and then make a tweet at your expense like you did with bomber but anyhow um um in any case um i i just just i just what the fuck was i talking about

just no hold on just know for a second that uh uh jason i know he's in pinks i've seen him tweet like multiple times now uh i don't know if you've seen the all-in uh podcast which is excellently done they uh they continue just to crank out great content uh but now there's been a couple of times where either chamath or david sacks has worn something on the show so like a hat or i think one of them had like a sweater and these are like high-end brands okay and uh because the all-in podcast audience is insane they go and they start buying that thing and they're like selling out like literally there's like some random elite sweater that like is sold out now you can tell me david sacks is wearing like a louis vuitton baseball cap with the symbols and shit on it

like something like that i forget what the brand was and like the hat sold out no one could find it and so of course like somebody goes and they screenshot it and they're like hey you know all uh folks uh you guys are like you know uh driving all these sales and she's just like are you kidding me we created this podcast and now we can't monetize it but yet we're like driving sales all this other shit and so he is in pain right now even though they are having the success of the podcast the fact that they won't let him monetize it is uh him excruciatingly uh sitting there saying like this is a missed opportunity i mean that's such a weird thing i have actually spoken at the all-in summit actually i debated ben greenwald and ukraine at their thing and what

an odd bunch of characters i love it i listen every week and i think that uh uh it is uh exactly the thing that was missing for a lot of people is like they're like okay like what are like some of the people who are not media people uh talking about and most of the time people have tried to create that like there's no trust so then nobody says anything interesting these guys are just like teeing off on each other which i think makes it work it's super amusing but if you got locked in an elevator with all those four you'd like kill yourself but yeah after after enough time all right attribution getting back to attribution sorry i don't know how to fucking see look this is jason laughing see like he's just he's completely derailed your podcast well you

know what he's doing he's counting this as top of funnel marketing so getting back to marketing um right getting back to marketing um so i i actually cited this example in the pitch deck i in nevada i go mountain biking my little e-bike you know i got convinced to buy one of these e-bike things they're super cool by the way i'm part of the e-bike revolution i think e-bikes are amazing e-biking do you pedal at all or yeah no you do but it's like a boost so if you're like not in the most amazing shape like i'm not and you're going up and down hills it makes it like super fun got it and um where i am is super like i basically you couldn't mountain bike this unless you're an exceptional shape got it and so this makes it such that someone who's not an exceptional

shape can actually do it and it's kind of fun and cool and it's like it's a cool gizmo and it anyhow um so i just posted a photo of it and like oh cool like from where i ride or whatever and then jcal pipes in oh that's cool what is that man tell me and someone like tells him the model name with like a review fucker he goes and buys it if you go to jason's like page now he mountain bikes he has my exact same bike specialized turbo levo whatever which is a great bike and if you ask okay do the attribution problem who takes credit like these things cost like by the way like i bought the entry level which is like six or seven k they go up to like 20 25 k these damn things so who knows what model he bought so who gets credit for like the several thousand dollar bike is it

me using presumably my influencer audience is it twitter no no almost certainly it's google because I'm sure Jason, you know, didn't go to specialized.com. He just like specialized TurboLivo and then, you know, Google acts navigationally, but it takes, if there was an attribution system there run by Google, of course, they would take full credit for that attribution, even though causally they didn't actually add that much to the thing. And so that's the magic of attribution. You determine what is the ground truth. Ideally that ground truth, and this is the brave new world of Web3, would be a little bit more tied to like real causality in the world because where we've arrived in web 2 with a lot of this funnel stuff it's very sophisticated a lot of it a lot

of it is also very mythological right a seven day attribution window for app installs why seven days you're telling me if i go seven days and an hour later it's not causally related but six hour you know six days and 23 it is you know it's kind of like a made-up thing that's not really how it should work right and so um at this point it's like congealed into a system the way that web 2 works and it's this machine right you you target people with a message to some level of accuracy they come in you learn new things because they buy things you retarget them there's this whole flywheel right and if you can figure out how to get your ltvs above your cax i.e your lifetime value above your customer acquisition cost to use the terms of art then you've got a positive

fraction and your gold then you've got some roi target and your and if you can't and you run out of money you lose and that that is basically that is the that is literally how that is literally half or more of the technology industry works is like give me money i light it on fire but if i get more back and then it's like a thing that i spend a dollar to get to i'll do that all day long and just light more and more money on fire but if on the outside chance that i like the money on fire and none comes back then i'm fucked right right right and like that's literally the game right well you have to create a marketing and an ad tech is a machine where i put in a dollar and i get out a buck 30 and if that's true then i'll be doing this all day and if it isn't it's just

like oh nothing came out it's just gone and that's it i'm out of money now right like that is how all webtoon. And to be clear, one of the reasons why so many investors have gone and bought Amazon, Google, Facebook stock, et cetera, is because who are you putting the money into the machine? It's usually Facebook, Amazon, Google. And they're sitting there saying like, maybe you get a dollar 30 or maybe you get zero, but like, we're just the machine. And like, it's somewhat on you to be able to figure out how to use our machine correctly to get. And there's this whole stack of technology that sits on top of these players that make sure, tries to make sure that you get a buck 30 out of the machine instead of 80 cents right um and so what's the problem here right

that doesn't exist in crypto web 3 right and like if you want a billion real people actually using web 3 the reality is a you're gonna have to like drink the web 2 user milkshake right and basically take users from web 2 like web 2 and web 3 there's never gonna be like a flip over moment obviously they're gonna coexist for years from now and in fact a lot of i suspect in the future a lot of people will be using crypto not even realizing it yes it's like oh i have some cool new experience you know i don't know how it magically works that like the same shit i bought on this game works on that game but somehow i actually own it and it just works i always ask you i say uh explain to me google's tech stack like what i'm like yeah what protocol does it run on and they have no

clue it's like that's where we have to get to right uh and i actually even think with bitcoin to some degree like there's a number of ones uh strike and these other companies have popped up and it's like uh can i send you dollars across the bitcoin network like you don't know if you're using Visa or MasterCard will be some MasterCard Bitcoin like who cares and so getting there is going to be pretty important for a lot of these technologies yeah I mean again I understand you know tribalism and geekery is what it is but like all this chain love and the tribalism of like Solana versus Ethereum it's like dude it's like caring about um you know whether your favorite tech company uses like Amazon or Google virtual servers like who gives a shit you don't care and

you shouldn't care right only the sales people at those two companies care because they're going to get attribution of the sale and they can get paid right right right and so yeah the idea here is how do we create that system for a blockchain led world which is very different like web 3 in my opinion again i just got to this party so to speak but it's like the inverse of web 2 in all sorts of interesting ways why um well i mean getting to this funnel business right um in web 2 when you when you build these systems and i've built these systems buy side sell side at every level of sophistication and scale from tiny yc startup to facebook right a lot of the complexity the ad ranking the serving the optimization the track all that shit is happening top of funnel like at

the facebook level and the downstream attribution like the event like oh you bought a thing you bought a hundred dollar thing okay great but that's like i mean it's important but it's not that interesting to model like it's literally an event fired from like your facebook app to sdk to facebook saying they bought thing one two three four and it costs five dollars like that's it right web web three and again like as far as i know we're like one of the few companies doing it So, and we're just figuring it out. A lot more of the complexity is down funnel, right? Like modeling Uniswap's ARPU.

It's kind of hard, right? It's like, oh, there's this 0.3% swap rate, but then 0.05% is in this governor's token that they give back, which by the way, whose value is fluctuating like more wildly than the fucking NASDAQ. You know, what is the ARPU? What was the acquisition cost?

What is their total monetization, right? These aren't easy questions to answer, right? And while the upstream side of things, to the extent there even is any, it's like, well, these wallet got the uni drop. like that's it so one of the things uh speaking of like recreating the world right that we were talking about earlier uh is yield farming was massive and and has tapered off a little bit but still exists and uh for those that don't know or kind of the elementary explanation was basically

like somebody like hey cool i'm going to create a coin and uh that coin is associated with a protocol and that protocol call uh has some amazing dream of doing abcd whatever uh but i have a problem i wrote the code i have the protocol usually there's a fork or something or taking some open source code and just copying it uh but nobody knows i exist how do i get people to come use it right and so what a bunch of the people did is like well let's create coins okay we got a bunch of coins what do we do the coins well let's take a portion of those coins and we'll give them to people if they come and they use it yeah and it's like okay so the users are sitting there saying like wait there's free money and so they show up and they're like cool what do you

want me to do and there's always some crazy thing like we'll buy some of our coins and then like stake them say you won't spend them and then you'll like earn a thousand percent apy but there's only so many coins available for people to do this and so the more people who join the lower the uh return gets and so naturally what occurred is well guess who was coming first it's like the mercenaries not the missionaries they don't give a shit about your product they just want the return it gets commoditized down to some level and then they just move on to the next one now a huge piece of that is these projects were essentially doing this which is like that is a customer acquisition cost that they don't know of course yeah they have no clue where those people came from uh and

They have no clue how to remarket to them, like all the problems you're talking about. And there was, I'm going to put in big, big air quotes, billions of dollars here because they sometimes usually almost always were like invented dollars, coins, whatever. But still, it's a big business, whether people think it's sustainable or not. And there was no data around it. Yeah, you know, it's right. When I first started looking at yield farming, it's like I couldn't get my head around. It's like, wait, no, no, I understand it.

There's just very little to understand. like if you've got a diagram in which you're not either creating value or there's an exogenous arrow called money coming in this way then you're kind of in some sort of weird ponzi like uh environment and but i mean it's what it's wild right it's right and and again like put aside for a second uh uh is it a ponzi is not whatever but just like if you were an investor like let's say you're a crypto vc that's like investing in these things uh what do they put in the investor update right like like there's no there's no measurement there's no date like it has to just be about uh well no it but it's like super elementary stuff like here's how many people

are staking right and and it's like so surface level it's an engagement it's like it's like sort of i mean yeah it's weird right like you're basically firing money out of a cannon and hopefully like hoping somebody picks up the ten dollar bill and like walks in the store right and of course almost everyone just walk doesn't even walk in the store but it's basically kind of free money so you don't care right like you know when money is free acquisition costs they're zero, definitely, and you just don't care. Then what happens when money stops being free, right? And you have the crypto crash, and suddenly...

So how do you guys think about, like, the attribution? I guess, like, what is the overlap with kind of legacy world? Like, what are the things from that world that you think you can port over versus, like, what are, like, new things you think you have to figure out? Yeah, I mean, you're right to frame it in two different ways, right? So again, there's the Web2 versus Web3 attribution problem, and then there's, like, the sort of endogenous Web3 problem. Like the native stuff.

The native, right. So if you talk to a lot of Web3 companies, we've talked to lots of Web3 companies, A lot of them are actually doing conventional Web2 user acquisition buys. They buy ads on Facebook and YouTube. They're fairly untargeted. They're using a lot of the ad exchanges targeting. They come to the wallet sign-in page, they sign in, and then that's it.

The trail goes cold. They don't actually join anything from, and for those who don't know, on the Web2 side, there's a whole, and again, it's all privacy, GDPR compliant, et cetera, but there's a whole tracking mechanism there through the click link and cookies and device fingerprinting that basically, if you click on a Facebook ad and arrive on a landing page, they know it's you and that you came from facebook ad one two three four but it doesn't stop there i think there's a key piece to it is like let's say that uh i was running ads to a shopify store right uh then they know that cool you hit the home page you clicked on two products you didn't buy those

you went to a third product page and then you converted and then they realize like okay everyone who clicks on those two product pages and then converts we probably should go show those two product pages at the front of the website to get higher conversion rate and the way that works is those events that were down from the landing page whether they were in app or on a web experience They were firing SDK events, and SDK is just like a tracking package, basically. Back to Facebook saying, this user, in an anonymous way, did this thing. And so Facebook can actually join all those things together. When I was at Facebook, I mean, probably when you were at Facebook was a little bit later.

But when I was at Facebook, most of the time there was no attribution system. You clicked away from Facebook, and Facebook had no idea what the hell was going on. In fact, some of the products they built was the first time that you could actually see outside of Facebook. And that's when Facebook ads started getting good, because you could actually detect that. The problem is that Web3 right now is stuck in like Facebook circa 2012 land, in which there's this basically great wall between the Web2 data trail and the Web3 data trail. And it's really odd because downstream on the blockchain

there's all sorts of data being written, right? A lot of this gets into the whole privacy angle, which is a whole other conversation we can have, which is that Web3 is weird in that everything that actually happens is in a public ledger, hard to query, because the blockchain is fascinating for many things, it's a terrible user data store, it's horrible. So you have to do a lot of re-pivoting and querying of data

to actually get at it, but everything is stored. But of course everything is anonymous and everything upstream of the blockchain is completely unknown. So, you know, one of the first things we're going to work on is actually joining those two things. And it's not that hard to do. It's non-trivial. But you're going to have to have, if Web3 is going to succeed and, again, have a billion real people on it, it's going to have to get into the sort of iterative flywheel of targeting people on Web2.

They come in. They convert on-chain. Things happen. You learn new things. You retarget them on Web2. They come back in. Like, you need that cycle. Without that cycle, Web3 is not going to succeed.

So the whole idea here, in the most primitive sense, is get people into this new world, understand who they are, either retarget them or people who look like them, Facebook lookalike audiences. That'd be amazing. Imagine lookalikes in the blockchain, right? Yeah. I mean, people, until you understand how the ad systems work, I don't think people quite realize, like, Facebook lookalike audiences is a great example. you can take a email list and you can feed it into facebook and you can say to facebook do you know who the people who use these email addresses are on facebook and there's a whole bunch of reasons how they may know or what their facebook profiles are or whatever and they say

cool we have put a hundred thousand emails in we've now identified 30 000 of of the users those 30 000 people can you go through and strip all the similarities so uh mail location income job high school all this stuff cool now can you find a bunch of other people that look like those people on the internet based on those priorities and you come up with you started with an email list now you come up with a whole different set of people that you can go target that likely are similar to those folks you can go do that there's none of that going on here yeah but in some ways there's more data right and just to stress your point even more lookalikes are probably one of the most underreported underrated but most successful facebook ads products ever i didn't work on it

when i was there but i remember the guy who first pitched it and at first i'm like oh i don't know sounds kind of cool. It could work. It works amazingly well because one of the biggest pain points, and Web3 isn't there yet, but it will get there, is that if you talk to Web2, if you go to the QBR business meeting as the PM and you go talk to the big retailer who gets the PM FaceTime, they're like, we're smart. We have an in-house marketing team. We know how to reach all of our audience at whatever the actual match rate is at every outlet, including you, Google, everybody else. I've got this million, this set of million golden whales. Find me another million just like them that's the one thing you can uniquely solve and if you ask the questions like oh how is

facebook monetizing my data they're not fucking listening to your phone they don't give a shit about what you wrote to your girl they don't give any about any of that fucking shit right that's it's just ridiculous i don't give a fuck about if you got cash though they're interested in you buying what they care about is like you're the guy who just you're like the guy who just dropped 400 on an rei tent and you guys chat all the time you know each other that's important right then you can be foreign part of look or it turns out your politics are very like similar somebody else or whatever the case might be. That's where your Facebook data actually gets used

in terms of the similarity metric between users. And so, yeah, at some point in the blockchain, hopefully sooner rather than later. So you think that that will definitely be a thing that happens? Look, I've got audience with a similarity metric among wallets. I'm shocked if there isn't somebody working on it. We're probably going to end up working on it at some point, yeah. And so let's just go through a very elementary example here, right?

So let's say that person A has a wallet. They've got certain types of NFTs in there. They've done certain on-chain activities, and maybe they have a bunch of Bitcoin and other assets, whatever. You can basically go look at that and then almost score it to some degree and then compare it to other wallets and then find, okay, what other wallet has the same NFT, same kind of balance between certain types of assets

and has certain activity trail. And then, okay, these two wallets are different people, we believe, but they actually are very similar. And so if this person did something with you, maybe this person's interested. That's right. How do you then go and find who that person is or communicate or market to them?

Well, I mean, if you're using the Web3 tools, a few that exist, it's like, oh, let's hit them with an NFT or a token rep, which again, like, I know a lot of people just airdrop them. Yeah, airdrop, like, which it's funny, I talk about ads and Web3, people get shocked. It's like, dude, you've already got ads in Web3, like NFT is an ad. Like we define an ad as a piece of paid media that prompts a user action, which include lots of things. We already have ads in Web3. And so like in Web3, that's the only targeting mechanism you have to this weirdness that you can send things to random wallets. But again, if you were to join Web2 with Web3, you could hit them on Web2 as well. Right.

I mean, I'm curious how creepy people would find this. We're going to float the idea. You buy a thing on-chain, and you get retargeted for that inside your Instagram feed. Imagine that, which happens commonly in Web2 as it is. Instagram ads have sky-high click-through rates because the ads are actually really well-targeted. Imagine doing that with blockchain data. That would change the game. And again, it would be good for new user acquisition, what's called prospecting, like new users coming in to use your thing, and also re-engagement.

One of the biggest problems you have is someone comes in, uses the app, they get bored, they churn out. right like the end of the funnel is usually a terminus like they turned out and they're gone you've got to re-engage them you know they like your product to a certain degree maybe you have to hit them with a different offer maybe they just forgot and they have a new device and they didn't download your app you have to re-hit them right like again this is just like the bread and butter of how web 2 growth works and web 3 has very very little of it right now what do you think are the the downsides of the risks here like is it just is everyone's privacy they're just going to get fucking spammed with a million airdrops and like yeah but then they'll be yeah but there'll be a

tool that basically scrubs all that shit from your wallet automatically and you'll be fine with it right like that that's just the arms race of how these things go i mean i think privacy is interesting so it's privacy is one thing we thought about i've actually i did a sub stack post about it um that's another place where like web 2 and web 3 are totally inverted right in web 2 it's mostly the real unless you're like in a non-account it's the real you online but then what you do financially and commercially everything else is kind of private and it's actually heavily regulated web 3 it's the opposite right everything you do is public which is odd but the real you is at least pseudonymous right um you know if amazon went and published on a public ledger

everything you bought there you would have a fucking meltdown right and yet somehow by default that's how web3 works and everybody is cool with it weirdos it's like what and i've always thought that as amazon have like a weirdo score right like like just sure if you buy groceries if you buy you know books whatever like you're you're in one category and then they're just like oh these people listen look what they're fucking buying i mean i'm sure they i'm sure they had one but they renamed it in the same way that facebook used to have the stalker coefficient which was a simulator and now that you guys like no no it's just coefficient it's not soccer coefficient how many times someone looked at your page.

So yeah, I mean, it's weird. How do you merge those worlds, right? And if you look at, to get wonky for a second, if you look at things like GDPR and CSBA and privacy regulation, I mean, it's very difficult to comply with that and the blockchain just basically flies in the face of GDPR.

So how do you actually reconcile those two worlds as you will? Is that a risk for some of these networks where GDPR is weaponized to basically call the bluff on like, are you decentralized? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people will like doubt it, but I will be saying I told you so in five years, like crypto and privacy are like these two trains that are headed on the same track towards each other. And the only question is how far apart they are before they collide.

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LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra low latency technology means that LMAX digital is the market leading solution for institutions across crypto trading and custodial services lmax digital secure liquid and trusted go learn more at lmax digital.com slash pomp again that's lmax digital.com slash pomp i've thought about this a lot from the bitcoin perspective of like it again let's hold the assumption which i think 99.9 percent of people agree uh bitcoin is decentralized all of these things that uh are like oh you can't do that or this is the rules or this or whatever like at the end of the day it's just a decentralized thing that there is nobody who runs it and like the uh fact that the founder is unknown walked away and

there's you have a decentralized network like kind of checks the boxes a lot of question marks on everything else and i think that gdpr like i hadn't thought about that being one of the things that kind of sniffs out like what is actually decentralized and what isn't yeah because at a high level gdpr is surprisingly readable you can just go read the thing although it's very vague there's two key points to gdpr one is who owns the data right and like basically who takes the liability bullet who gets dragged to brussels when you fucked up basically and there's two positions there's a controller and a processor and there's different terminology in ccpa but it's the same thing it's basically first party and third party so if if you know if again i don't know why i keep

on citing rei but if you're rei and you buy there they have a first party relationship with you if i'm their attribution system or google analytics i'm a i'm a i'm a processor not a controller and so the rules are slightly different you can't get away with murder just because you're the processor but it's a little bit different you want to be a processor rather than a controller by and large and then there's also the sort of deletion immutability side of it there's a bunch there but basically at the end of the day if you want your data gone module has some restrictions and there are some restrictions you can have a go away right so does that mean that every single blockchain is violating gdpr oh a lot of them probably are yeah without well it's just every

single one of them probably uh if you can't delete your data if well if personal data is on the chain to begin with like the so step one is don't put personal data on the on the chain right and so what does it mean to delete could it be the case that you encrypt it and burn the private key is that deleting could be um for my reading on it in the in some jurisdictions that would count as deleting and some wouldn't the problem with gdpr is that it's a it's worded very vaguely and so it's basically left sure that wasn't i'm sure that wasn't intentional and then it has to be decided by legal precedent and there's very little there's no precedent almost no precedent in case of blockchain but yeah if you've got personal data on the blockchain you're basically in violation

then not only that there's restrictions around moving data you know overseas obviously and if it is decentralized you've got these nodes all over the place um and this is not even going into content moderation things like see sam i eat kitty porn you know violent material i the news came out that uh isis put an nft on i forget what chain i think it was a theorem um and there's no way to get rid of it now or no no it was uh ipfs i think wait what did they do i didn't see this wall street i have no direct experience it was just the wall street journal thing that i read but apparently isis put some sort of recruitment nft whatever that means on i think was ipfs yeah i mean i'm scared to uh even think about this but like what do they got like a fucking image of like you know

it gets worse so i was talking i was in a debate with uh alex stamos who's the head of the stanford internet observatory former head of security at our former employer um and i kind of floated the thoughts like yeah what if someone puts um like child sexual abuse material which is obviously horrible on chain what would you do and he's like oh no it's already happened then i forget i i don't know i didn't check his references but he's a pretty informed guy so i'm sure he wasn't talking under his ass someone apparently has put like horrible stuff on chain so there was a story i think it was the on ethereum uh hopefully i get these details right uh there was a woman who was involved in some sort of sexual assault or sexual harassment case in china or it was the woman's

friend i can't remember which one but somebody that had uh understanding the details uh and it was basically getting kind of quieted wasn't a lot of coverage of it whatever they took the details they put it on the blockchain as like an immutable ledger and so like you know censor me now uh type uh kind of calling the bluff um when i saw that i was shocked that we hadn't seen that over and over and over again since and i'm sure there's been some cases but people don't talk about it or whatever uh but yeah you can extend this to like way more extreme things than just like hey i have words that nobody uh wants to get out um and if you're running a node that material is on your machine right think about that and so like yeah like what happens then you're not a lawyer

neither am i i don't know neither one of us slept at uh uh hampton inn but like all right i i assume if you are a politician or in law enforcement and you want to make a dent you probably go towards the notes right i guess so but how do you track them down and uh yeah there's a bunch of complexity jurisdictions are in yeah of course right so like decentralization again becomes really fucking important here um and i guess it also begs the question of like gdpr uh i think a lot of people are like oh this is annoying i have to collect you know hit uh accept all cookies every single time i go to a website in europe or whatever but at the same time like gdpr is probably like the watered-down version of like some of this other stuff and so could they then start to shut down

all these blockchains uh or a lot of them because you only need one violation for the entire thing to be kind of out of step yeah i mean i'm a little bit in the policy world through the lincoln network which is this dc thing what is lincoln network oh so lincoln network which by the way is not the lincoln project just to get that out of the way it's a completely different organization just to be clear unrelated unrelated organizations let's just get that i'm assuming there's been some accusations given the uh the need to clarify um when when someone mistakes the two i i see the director's soul kind of shrivel and die every single time um so it's uh it's basically a think tank um non-partisan um although obviously pro-business pro-tech

that tries to bring together actual tech practitioners with policy in D.C., which is like this yawning lacuna that exists that should be reconciled. And so, yeah, I help them out because I think, look, D.C. is going to exist. Regulation is going to come in some form or another. At this point, GDPR is real, and so better to inform it rather than have it off in la-la land. And so it's weird that they're still fighting the Facebook fight to the shit we worked on 10 years ago.

right becomes like the media thing five years after and then becomes a dc thing like 10 years so they're still fighting over the shit that we built put it that way and so they're not gonna fight about the thing we're building now for another 10 years or maybe five years so we've got some time okay but at some point yes they will they will catch up and but what's what's fascinating about the conversation though is uh it seems like the crazy thing like no they'll never weaponize gdpr to go after like centralized blockchains but like fuck yes they are like that That's a layup. If you don't like a certain industry or a certain piece of technology,

all you have to do is literally find one instance. And what also is unique here is that in order to figure out did Facebook do something wrong, whatever wrong ends up being, you essentially have to either have a whistleblower, you have to have somebody who shows up and is like, I was a Facebook user, this, this, this, and this, whatever, here's the information. Or you have to somehow subpoena the information from Facebook. It's not like, oh, let me just go on my computer and do a block explorer and start, you know, screwing around

and then finding something and then, you know, there you go. And obviously this is why law enforcement likes people transacting on an open ledger that they can fucking look at. But yeah, it feels like this is like such a no brainer that of course they're going to weaponize this stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, I don't know how much to overstress it.

GDPR is real. When you develop product these days, you know, back in the day at Facebook, they thought about it. There was privacy counsel, but it was kind of like the last check mark before you shipped, right? Now, like you don't want to do something egregious

that was obviously not in the interest of the user. Now it seems like people are designing products with privacy at the heart of it. On day one, you don't want to build yourself into a corner where like, oh shit, now we can't comply, we can't ship. It's like building a thing that won't run. I cannot stress enough to Web3 people, privacy is real, it will come to your house at some point soon.

You have to take it seriously. You're not going to just talk around it. I'm sure you've seen the XKCD cartoon around the wrench thing where it's like how crypto people think it works oh it's like encrypted with so it's like no no no here's this little five dollar wrench just hit the guy until he gives you your password guess what you're dealing with people with the wrenches and the guns and the and the jails and all the rest of it the crypto can only shield you to a certain extent um and so yeah i mean i yeah that that that's going to happen at some point what else do you think is a threat or in the privacy

area it's like gdpr with like just the blockchain being open and cantilever data all that is one piece of it are there other privacy things that you guys are thinking about no i mean i there's the whole defy kyc side of things right like which i'm somewhat less familiar with in the privacy side um no i don't i don't see any deep existential risks i mean i i do think there's gonna i mean there obviously is some like organ rejection around like the culture of crypto and like unfettered freedom and movement that just doesn't jibe with our current globalized world but everyone knows that um i do find it absolutely hilarious that everyone's is uh attacking the thing and i spend all my time thinking about bitcoin um but like it is probably the most american ethos

like based technology that we have of just like you can do whatever you want to do and uh uh you don't even have to tell people who you are right like that to me just screams american ethos of like freedom yeah and yet america seems to be one of the most uh cautiously abrasive like they're not china well then i would say they're not not china but but they definitely uh the default is like we don't like this thing yeah and now there's some education happening and there's some politicians who maybe you know are kind of on the pro side but like it would feel like if they understood it to you know the absolute minute details they would be like man we should do everything we can to make this successful now there's downside and potentially risk some of

the the benefits that they already enjoy but like it does feel very weird yeah i mean there's that viral thread from uh who is it uh punk um i forget the number actually 659 maybe 6159 yeah maybe um who said you know if i got it wrong i i was talking about somebody i'm sure we're gonna get pounded on it that's it we got canceled we're done because you forgot the number um but yeah you're trying to remember ip addresses rather than human readable domains like uh one two one point six nines i still remember some of those actually back in the day really yeah well because you know you had like earth link and you had your stable ip you'd have to enter in the dns table it's like uh uh you ever try to think about how many phone numbers that are in your phone book

do you actually know by heart i've got nine at this point zero like zero there are people who Like, I absolutely should know them, and I don't. And it's kind of scary, right? Right. If you're in jail and, like, call your wife, it's like, uh. Can I have my phone? Exactly. I promise I won't go on the internet.

I will not tweet. I just need the phone. Yeah, but getting back to his tweet thing, it's like, his point was, like, you know, crypto is so American in so many ways. Like, if there is a crypto century, America should dominate it, right? Because it's, like, the most American thing ever. And I agree. It's true, right? Like, I mean, yeah, China just will never accept a truly crypto reality.

it's odd that uh this is a free country man like that we should be able to say that more right around crypto but uh that's weird this need for control i don't get it you know and how much of this is uh a misunderstanding or like lack of education versus like no they actually do understand and i'll give you a uh two examples so like brad sherman uh one of the politicians in california uh he was one of the first ones to be like we should ban uh bitcoin and crypto like like get rid of this stuff it's a threat to the american dollar and like i mean he was just went like full extreme on the, on the other end. And then you have people, uh, like you've got Warren Davidson, uh, you've got Senator Lummis, uh, up in Wyoming. Uh, you've even seen, uh,

mayors, uh, you got Suarez, you got governors, like all these other people who are like, no, actually like we either want to embrace it or like I'm agnostic. Like, I don't, I don't want to ban it, but like, uh, I also don't, don't want to run headfirst. It feels like the Brad Shermans of the world are like, uh, very well educated. It's not that he doesn't understand it's like almost that he understands it so well that he's trying to play chess like three four five steps ahead and he sounds insane right and people are just like that's stupid you're just like an old man yelling and screaming uh but it seems like everyone just gets labeled with like oh you don't understand congress doesn't understand politicians don't understand but like the more i

listen to them talk like more of them seem to understand than maybe they let on maybe so um yeah it's unfortunate i haven't actually followed that politician's uh trajectory His biggest donors are credit card companies. Oh, wow. So a lot of people are – Yeah. I like the idea of actually politicians should dress up like NASCAR drivers with like all their donors as like little logos. So every time he goes in front of a camera, he's got a little Visa logo like he's a fucking point of sale system.

That would be an idea. Do you think they would change their actions? Oh, of course they would because it would look so ridiculous sitting there like shitting on crypto with like a Visa logo. Like a little square checkup. I've always thought that they should have to take like a super elementary test before they go to these hearings. And like, remember the guy who was like, uh, uh, you need to shut down Finsta, like the fake Instagram. And they were like, uh, sir, like, that's not a thing, whatever.

Like they should have to take like a five question, multiple choice question, uh, test. If you don't get four out of five, right. Like you're not allowed to question the people because you just literally don't have the basic understanding of like, what is Instagram? Yeah. I mean, one of the things I learned, so I have gone to DC again in the context of Lincoln network and talk to some of these staff. I wouldn't name the staff.

It doesn't matter. But you know, people who's senators who make loud pronouncements about the internet and you know, they're not as dumb as you might think. Great. to be honest like a lot of their staff so by the way dc so like the figurehead is whoever but their staff are like 23 right and just got out of american university and it's like their first job and they're a staffer and they've been told to go figure out crypto and then like lincoln network shows up with like oh here's antonio who came from the industry talk to him and like yeah

explain to us what three like oh okay where do i start and so like they're not necessarily dumb and they're not necessarily anti but yeah i don't know somehow between that 23 year old getting the memo and reading on the internet whatever and what comes out of the mouth of whoever josh hawley or whatever um there's a lot of steps in there um and obviously that politician knows that you know he needs to sing for his supper so to speak to keep his job um i don't i think one of the other things that's happened in american life i love zooming out to 30 000 feet it's like at some point in the 60s we decided that we're no longer a frontier society right what do you mean like so there's this uh there's this famous essay by i forget his name written uh

in the early 20th century, about the frontier in American life, right? The notion of there being some untrammeled frontier where a man and a woman and a family can go out and create their new reality and stake a new home. And, like, we had the Homestead Act in Alaska until the 60s and 70s where the government would literally give you land and say, as long as you live there for five years, it's yours, right? Like, the United States had that.

Right? I mean, think about that. When I was buying land up in the Northwest, I was thinking of buying in Alaska. They don't have the Homestead Act anymore, but the state does basically raffle out, like, land, basically, way cheaper than it should cost. 1870s i'm reading a book right now and uh basically as people pushed west like you just got to get it put into the land deed right that like that's yours that's yours uh yeah that's how you got it

right i mean the football team the oklahoma sooners were the ones who got there soon sooner who like jumped the federal like date to actually claim land or whatever because there were stake jumpers as they're called anyhow um at some point in the 60s after the apollo program we decided that's it we're no longer a frontier society that pushes into the unknown and everything's about control and safety and security. And I think those things have just gotten worse in time. And, uh, I think web three is an interesting new frontier. One of the things that draws me to it makes me think of, uh, I had a bit of a bust up with, uh, our, our, our friend Keith Raboy and, uh, Max Levchin, uh, a week ago over the differences between web two and web three.

And, uh, what, what, what did you say? What did I say? What did I say? I'm such an asshole. What did I say? I didn't try being an asshole, but I did say it was a sentiment I actually honestly did feel which is that web again using web 3 this kind of hazy term just to refer to this thing um feels kind of like what web 2 felt like 10 years ago right okay like when you were walking around south park and soma which now is just empty by the way it's like oh there's the founders of like this weird airbnb thing and there's uber and then there's this part like there was this thrilling bracing feeling of like lots of weird shit is going on right like we're replacing every service and like it's part of what led to chaos monkeys right where like these chaos monkeys that

run around and completely rejigger everything and there's this tremendous feeling of energy and enthusiasm and forward looking and and there was a lot of to be honest i wouldn't say religiosity but a lot of ideology around like things are worth disrupting for the sake of disrupting and even if it isn't obviously clear why this is better now it's still worth doing right and somehow web 2 for a bunch of reasons i can speculate about just no longer has that feeling and it's like well a lot of it was like the anti-tech turn i think of media in 2016 with the trump election that there was this tech backlash which i think is a lot is very inventive you look at most polls most americans like the tech that they use they don't actually hate facebook

um and certainly if you look at facebook's usage chart they don't seem to hate it um part of it was i don't know maybe something gets tapped out right like dude how many services can you put on this phone like how many things can i buy on this like how many people can i make appear with shit on this phone at some point it's like a new user flow and you sign in process and you sharing button like it's all the same shit you need to refactor things like to me like literally i said this in the thread even if web3 ends up being and i suspect it will converge to that like yeah it'll be an interesting new set of infrastructure and like a new way like it'll enable some new interesting use cases but to be honest it could end up being something somewhat

similar to web2 but as long as we get rid of the fan companies it'll be good right like because It's just like any company that starts now is literally like a little dwarf, a little miniature person kind of jumping in between the legs of these elephants. And the moment you get any level of traction, Apple's going to show up and expect it's 30% on the App Store. And by the way, you have to use its ad because they nuked attribution through its ATT thing, fucking it up for everybody else. All in the name of privacy.

All in the name of privacy. Probably one of the craziest business strategy moves that we've seen in a long time and it appears to be working and no one seems to be talking about it outside of like a very small group of people who pay attention to the server. Yeah, I mean, I'll say it again

because I say it everywhere. It's like, dude, it's like privacy is one of those things like security. Like if you turn the knob that says privacy on the other side of the knob, it says competition, right? And like there are no solutions in this world. There are only trade-offs, right?

There is no perfect privacy solution. You have to find a trade-off. And if you can crank up the knob to 11, but that means there's only be two games in town, Google and Apple, and that's it if we go for a max privacy world. So think about it if you want a max privacy world or not, because I think it's not going to be a good world. But that's also one of the things, right, that we're in a max privacy world.

Like, I had this conversation with the Stanford people, Rene and Alex, last week at a Lincoln Network event. It's like, you realize this regime of, like, content moderation, combating misinformation, privacy, all that does is, like, super fucking raise the bar such that only in the Googles and Facebooks can actually comply with it. Can you imagine starting an Instagram now? Impossible. And having to field a content moderation team with like the expected standard of everyone feeling nice and cuddly and safe all day would be impossible. It would be impossible. There's no way to do it. Right.

The other – I've always thought of this or these are borrowed ideas. Bitcoin was started in a way where no one was paying attention for five, six years until like crypto showed up or however you want to think about it. Now you can never recreate that. Like there's too many people. there's literally venture capitalists running around the world right trying to find the next thing like whatever like it just would be nearly impossible to do um same thing with a lot of these companies right is instagram nobody cared about content moderation for like almost a decade right and then all of a sudden it was like hey why is this person on here hey what about this what about

this and like you see it now like uh we i mean this is uh crazy we had a interview with andrew tate in person live whole thing is up for a whole month 1.4 million views or so on it all of a sudden get an email take it down by youtube why misinformation no other details no anything uh i see him saying the same thing on other channels on other videos like all the stuff and all i could think to myself was like who gets to decide that right yeah and like by the way there's things that you and i probably were tweeting two years ago that like people are like that sounds crazy and now they're like duh right like it's all changing i don't know it's just a weird world that we're moving towards yeah misinformation it's funny you know there's a crack

about like you know people don't believe in god anymore but there's certainly a lot of devils and misinformation is like this catch-all it's like oh it's just it's evil it's just misinformation i mean it sounds bad right like i don't want to share misinformation i mean you don't either it's like you ever seen the comedian uh i think it's chris rock i think does it uh either chris or cat williams can't remember uh he talked about insurgents in war he's like the greatest marketing thing ever was we called him insurgents like they were like uh hey we're gonna go kill the insurgents everyone's like i'm not an insurgent i don't know any insurgents like kill them all right but if they're like hey we're gonna go kill humans people like whoa time out like who

who are they what they do like why are we gonna do this same thing with misinformation like you just label it misinformation and everyone just walks away and says yeah those people are bad they spread misinformation misinformation yeah exactly when you think about the censorship how much of that is going to come as well except about gdpr and like the privacy like do you think that that i mean ideally right like will come isn't wasn't it chris dixon who said um can't be evil is better than don't be evil right and that you know don't be evil was obviously google's mantra for a long time and obviously i don't think they're living up to it now and even they themselves would probably concede that they don't use that they don't even use right yeah that's a

good reason why they don't use it anymore um and so if you design systems that are kind of uncensorable of course like uncensorable in reality is often not uncensorable in theory to be honest um but um yeah i don't know i mean it's so another divide i've seen in society i talk to lots of people with weird ideas and you hang out with weirdos long enough you hear a lot stuff but um it's interesting one of the divisions that you see like i i do think there's this notion in like statistics and machine learning of like latent variables and what that means is you've got a model that's got like features a b and c and then they're behaving in weird ways but in fact there's this latent variable that is actually the thing driving the phenomenon that are highly

correlated and maybe actually lead to a and b but you're looking at like the wrong thing right or you're looking at the it's almost like being in plato's cave you're looking at the shadow of reality you're not looking at the reality so i think one of the sort of latent variables in society is what is your orientation towards institutions? You're either an institutionalist or you're like an anti-institutionalist. And it doesn't necessarily mean against institutions in general. We're not in an anarchist book collective in Portland or whatever. It just means like the current set of institutions. Do you think there's a salvageable middle that like we have to preserve? Because you talk to a lot of people who, again, some of them have even like chewed up and spit

out by institutions and you can tell like they still believe in them. They just wish they were running them which is different than saying well kind of burn it all down or actually i have like a completely different institutional model that i actually want to realize this is my problem with like the hardcore uh extreme anarchist view that uh just naturally shows up with uh with some crypto bitcoin whatever is like uh no we want some sort of order again we can have different order we can agree on different rules we can do like all these things and everything but like I don't think we want to go back to again go to like the 1800s

where like literally your defense system was essentially like could you pull your gun faster than whoever showed up to your house in the middle of the night right like that doesn't seem like a world we want to live in and then also like there's a number of different things that especially local governments do that make life easier again you can

argue should they exist should they not whatever but like it does make life easier but institutions are the kind of same thing like it goes back to like the Dow thing like okay we're gonna have this thing we're all gonna like work on something but like there's no organization there's no anything like what do you end up getting like oh we should get sub daos we should get divisions of companies whatever and then you get also like bill gates he's the pirate in the garage but lives long enough and now like he is the man right everyone is like this guy you know the evil

billionaire or whatever by the way i think that's a common thing by the way i think years ago he wasn't right i think that's a common thing it's funny i so we have job listings that are gonna go out that hopefully will be live by the time this episode goes out but one of the taglines is like you know uh come be a pirate now that web 2 is the navy right it's kind of a spin on the steve jobs line right because and again getting back to my debate with keith and max levchin and some of these what i call web 2 boomers right where it's like you used to and i'm like their same age or even younger or older but it's like dude like you used to be the crazy pirate in the garage and now you're like fat and happy and sitting at the top of like the web 2 pile and

you think you still are that rebel but it's like no you're not right and it's like what i wanted to ask them it's like think about the younger version of you like literally the 18 year old version of you are they working at the companies that you're running now or are they working in a completely different ecosystem where you know the but i but i do think that it's um it's split so like i i i agree with the sentiment what i would say though is there it's not just exclusively like bitcoin crypto world is like where all of the quote-unquote pirates are going i think a lot of them are i talked to uh i guess it doesn't sound as weird with tech people but like the average person like i talked a lot of 18 to 22 year olds but like yeah they're super excited

about this but you know what else they're really excited about like the whole like american dynamism are they okay cool and they want to go work on uh defense stuff or space or like whatever and like there's probably two or three other industries if we sat down and like i really thought about like hey where are some of these people going but they're not going to work at facebook they're not going to work at google they're not going to work at these places and in some way the people who are going to work there who are young are like uh the people who historically would have gone to ibm or wherever it's just like now these new companies are like a little bit shinier but it's the same thing right and so i do wonder how many like fintech

is really interesting right like fintech not crypto stuff is that still seen as like cutting edge or are young people saying i don't want to go work at another banking you know like legacy banking type thing i don't care if it has a digital kind of skin around it or are they saying no like fuck it i'm gonna go do the crazy defy thing that like you know has a one percent chance of working yeah i don't know obviously i'm not in that age bracket but i would speculate that they're probably not they're not going i mean i i don't think i don't think the world's most aggressive ambitious talent is going into fan companies no i said that is not my vibe yeah But I think most venture capitalists would agree with that.

Why did they push back? Well, because Web2 has become the man, right? Like I often think of John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of EFF back in the day, back when it was EFF and not what it is today, wrote – EFF has kind of gone the way of ACLU. It's like, wait, you used to defend all these crazy people in the name of free speech and now you're actually part of the man. And so, like, anyhow, but back in the day, right, when EFF was a thing, he wrote this famous cyberspace manifesto that I think was very impactful. I mean, even earlier than me, but it was written in the 90s. And, you know, he railed against these weary giants of flesh and steel, right, of, like, the industrial world. And that cyberspace and tech was going to be the antithesis of that.

It's going to be the reaction against that. Like, they're the Navy, we're the pirates, and we're this new world. And the reality is that companies like Facebook and Google have become the weary giants of not necessarily flesh and steel, but whatever. and they've become part of that Borg. They're no longer the response to the Borg. They're part of it. And, you know. Will that happen at crypto?

At some point. If it lives long enough. That's probably the natural life cycle of everything. But that's a long way. We're a long way to go from that. 30, 40 years. 30, 40 years. Yeah, probably a long way.

I do think a lot about in some ways this specific industry has retaught so much about economics, technology, but also just like, how did America become America? You go back and you read and you're like, oh, wow. A tax revolt. Yeah, like, oh, shit, right? Like, wow, okay. And then like, oh, I don't know, the Federalist Papers.

Like you go and you like read it and you're like, hmm. Published anonymously. They're all anonymous shit posters. All the Founding Fathers were anonymous. They'd all get content moderated now. I wasn't going to go down that rabbit hole, but like, again, it goes back to if you really- George III would have worked at Facebook.

No, I'm joking. If you really start to look at a lot of American history, Like there are things that I think today's kind of pro-America elite incumbent believes that is in direct violation of kind of the original ideals of what America was supposed to be. And I would argue still in many places is. But that bifurcation is wild because like go read the documents. Go do the work. It's just like, no, I take this idea. Now I have a different idea of where we should go.

Yeah, I know. I mean there were radical ideas. I wrote a piece for Wired in like 2017 that was like argued, you know, we're not this change in model of journalism from like fact-checked reportage coming from the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, dude, the Founding Fathers didn't live like that at all. For starters. They all had newspapers. They all had newspapers. They're all pamphleteers.

I forget if it was either John or Sam Adams that he was actually at the Boston Tea Party, like literally throwing the tea. And then he reported about it as if he wasn't there. He totally lied about it. And then he held a meeting for it in his office, in the printer's office, before it actually happened. he was completely engaged there was no neutrality there's no anything right it was like a total joke benjamin franklin wrote on there at least whatever it was 10 or 15 different pen names um they all attacked each other i did read that recently actually i'm like that is wild that ben franklin literally had like it's kind of like having a message board and having a bunch

of pseudonyms and then just talking to each other exactly until all of a sudden oh shit there's a community which by the way a lot of crypto companies are doing as well and and uh also if you kind of think about it like uh there's nothing new like this is all human nature shit Like how do you solve the cold start problem in, you know, 1850? Like, I don't know, just fucking just get out my feather and just start writing from different names. And I see, you know, people will come show up. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, I think we're maybe a bolder people back then. We were willing to put up with just confronting. I don't know. It's hard to say. On the one hand, I think one of the bad things about social media is that you're constantly forced to defend like your basic moral foundations. Like it's like you go to Twitter and it's like getting kicked in the face.

Right. And it's like, I've kind of gotten used to it a little bit and we probably both have, but it kind of sucks. Like your average normal person would never do this. Right. And like at some point it's like, you know, it's like running a company, right? If you have debates about foundational everything in a company, your company goes nowhere. Like there's some things you have to say, look, these things are beyond debate.

We're just not going to address these things anymore. That's it. We talk about these things, which is where we think the alpha is. And somehow, yeah, we've lost it as a society. It's weird because on the one hand, they put up with an enormous amount of disagreement. Everyone thinks, oh, everyone just agreed on everything. But it's like, are you kidding? Absolutely not.

I mean, literally, we had a sitting vice president. Fucking American Revolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, Aaron Burr, literally a sitting vice president shot a former secretary of the treasury and then just went back to work as if nothing had happened. He like laid low in Georgia for a while and then just went back and said, well, sorry, oops, I killed Alexander Madison, Hamilton, sorry. And it's, yeah. So, but, yeah. Do you feel like things like Substack and kind of like the rise of the individual whatever, like what is going to be the impact?

Is it just like, no, we have coexistence. There's like kind of like college. Everyone's like, oh, let's disrupt college. and it's like dude harvard's not going anywhere right i don't care what you say harvard yale mit whatever and so like sure you might disrupt like the uh third or second tier you know colleges same thing here with media is like you'll get the independent voices and you'll get the concentration of like two to four really big organizations they survive and everyone else is fucked yeah i mean when you yeah when i've had this debate about institutionalists versus anti-institutionalists

with institutionalists they're like okay mr anarchist so what are you going to replace new york times with right like i still need to know what's going on in the world and it's a good point right like again obviously i'm on substack they've they've done very well by me like i'm very pro the company i know the founders you know that said are they going to fill the whole of conventional media fully not necessarily i don't know if they want to right like probably don't want to yeah i've never specifically asked them that but like i i get the sense that there's like no we just want individual people to write and uh there's a lot of value to that i mean look the msm does do some good like occasionally you read a piece in the atlantic and the new york

times like wow that was actually pretty good like i remember like the afghanistan pullout which was a total disaster and when they like vaporize an entire family and killed a bunch of people which no one had any accountability for which was a complete you know disgrace uh new york times actually this amazing reporting and like okay no here's the shot here's the thing here's where it happened we interviewed the families like oh this felt like an actual like on the ground report it was like clarissa ward uh the cnn uh journalist she's on the ground and uh she's surrounded by taliban members right and she's like reporting and and you could tell you're like yo that's fucking dangerous that shit right and and i remember people just like taking pictures being

like this woman is risking her life to tell this story right now and like i don't care what you think about that organization or whatever you just got to tip your hat and say hey that woman's doing work that is important and uh should be blasted out by everyone possible uh because there's not very very many people willing to go do that yeah yeah no i agree i mean of course the counter argument's like well you know like in ukraine they use telegram a lot like when i was in ukraine i was just like listen to like you see a lot of these videos come along so you have the close reward experience you don't feel like it's a disembodied voice telling you a coherent narrative it's like this blurry video of some weird shit that happened in some random town um yeah but

hard to say hard to say right because yeah i mean if we return to that previous journalistic model of basically advocacy journalism things are very different right the notion of there being some objective truth in a national narrative kind of goes away and things get very fragmented and again to the extent that like your regional newspaper had like i'm sure southern newspapers were very different than northern newspapers and like miami herald in the 80s was very different than new york times the la times but there was still a cohesion around it and like your area of concern was relatively limited and now that your area of concern is global it's odd that we don't actually have a global reality in which to discuss it i think that's part of what you see

when like red and blue just to give them two broad labels for debating online they're talking about different realities right and it's the clearest proof of that i think this started in like the Beto cruise race. I don't know if it started, but at least I noticed it is when like, remember what I forgot, which it's funny. They've blurred in my mind. I forget which was which, but like literally one's like actual ad was the attack ad for the other side. Like literally it's like our moral foundations are so different. What you consider to be like the sumum bonum, like political good is this person's absolute evil. And like literally he just ran like the Beto ad is like, this is what Beto is like. That's my, my attack ad is his ad. That's how different we are. Um, that seems

untenable i do uh i do believe that uh american politics is on the precipice of absolute uh full plunge into like what i call meme warfare so like everything that we've seen so far has been like the extremes of kind of like a web to fiat world or whatever you want to call it uh i think that trump was the first to kind of break uh he was selling the hats and he was you know saying all the bombastic shit and and uh the debates he was uh more so an entertainer uh to some degree and And like you can start to see it happening. Yeah. But I think within the next two to three presidential elections,

we're just going to see a level of in the trenches, internet native like warfare. Yeah. And like information kind of battle that will blow the 2015 versions of ourselves out of the water and be like, how is this happening? Yeah. And part of what I think is fascinating about it is like,

so like that is pretty simple. But I think a lot about like Coinbase ran that super kind of, genius ad where they just had the QR code bouncing around. Like what is the political equivalent of that? And like, somebody is going to figure out what it is and they're going to start doing that stuff. And then you're going to see all this stuff on Twitter.

And what you realize in some way is like, now everyone's an actor. Like everyone on the internet has something when the politicians like figure out the game, we're going to want to get off the internet. Like, like it's going to get to the point where we're just like, Holy shit.

You know that. I mean, that's a deep step. So a couple, a couple of reactions to that one to steal man it for a second. Right. It might be a good thing that, like, we're never going to have a civil war because the civil war is going to be on Twitter. And to be honest, we're all, like, too fat and happy and lazy to actually, like, run a mile and fire a rifle anymore.

Like, Antietam is not happening ever again, right? And so it's going to be like Twitter Antietam, which obviously has a lower body count. So maybe arguably it's a good thing that we're creating this virtual reality, although it means that I think when reality does intrude in the form of pandemic or the Ukraine war, we just, like, can't grok. Like, we just don't understand it. And again, this— Full-on meltdown. Right, right, right. And again, I think it's real.

like current thing theory is real and that there is like this pseudo event thing on the other hand if you think everything is a current thing then reality becomes but you know i don't know if you know the thinker bruno masais he's this portuguese um he wrote an issue i i interviewed him on my podcast a couple years ago he wrote a book uh called history has begun and it's it's the thought is that the u.s has decided to wrap itself inside virtual mean warfare basically what you're saying and make reality kind of optional but then of course when reality becomes non-optional the problems begin like with a pandemic or a war so again i i i suspect you're right um yeah um but yeah um the other thing i would say i lost my train of thought what was the other thing um

anyhow uh but yeah i i agree with you that um in some sense that's uh that's gonna be the problem yeah the the piece uh that i think is concerning about it is like right now all the politicians are like a gazillion years old and like they use flip phones and don't have email or like well you know whatever like we like to like make fun of them uh what happens when like the 30 year olds are uh rampant and they're now like 40 or 50 and they understand the internet really well um because i actually think that a lot of times what we're seeing so like i have this theory that like trump and aoc are the same person right right like they both understand the internet they understand how to entertain they understand how to get attention and all stuff uh and um i

had uh mike solana uh on and we were talking about uh the arrest i'll put that in air quotes of the congress people did you see this oh the business of yeah yeah and they like they like had their hands behind their back, but they weren't arrested, but they were arrested. Oh, I remembered. Okay. I remember what I was thinking. Sorry. But yeah, no. So, okay. Sorry. Um, so I get excited as you can tell, case in the pump. Um, that's why I'm excited. There is this really overlooked and underrated book, uh, called mediated by an anthropologist named Thomas, uh, kind of a weird last name. Dizonga Tita is his last name. And, um, came out in like the early odds kind of ignored now. Um, and he, he just talks about exactly what you

just said, that everyone being an act, the thought of being mediated is a weird thought. And we've all taken it as normal but it's strange and it's only when you pull yourself out of the matrix again to kind of repel yourself that you sort of that you sort of realize it um the example he cites uh which is interesting it's a couple examples one is you notice that back in the day nobody asked themselves the question where were you when you heard about pearl harbor right because the notion of you almost on a phantom limb way experiencing something at a distance and your personal experience of being a thing wasn't a thing yet people heard about pearl harbor because they literally was like a rumor on a radio two days later like it was not a thing they directly

witnessed however the jfk shooting was the first time similar to the 9-11 things like where were you when that happened because there was this feeling like you saw the towers go down or you saw jfk get shot and you felt you were sort of physically enmeshed in it even though you weren't right so something has happened there the other example he cited which is interesting um he was at one of these act i guess he was interested in acting when he was younger when he's acting studios in new york one of these method acting things in which you've probably never done acting or stand-up neither of i i'd be too embarrassed what are you talking about doing stand-up right Well, yeah, I know, but unfortunately I have to do it.

But he's like, you know, it's one of these things where they give you an assignment like, oh, you've just been shot or you just heard that your uncle died. And then you're supposed to channel the emotion and do it. And like literally, as I understand it, everybody in the acting school starts acting as if their uncle just died, right? Which sounds very weird and fake, but I guess in acting, that's what you have to do. And so anyhow, it was, I guess, what, November 22nd, 1962 or 61 or whatever it was. And someone opens the door and says, the president has been shot. And everyone starts acting with the grief of it, right, for like 10 minutes. And the guy comes in and is like, no, no, no, no.

The president actually got shot right now. Like it's on TV. And then everyone just like freaked out because they realized they were supposed to be acting about the thing. But then they had the real flood of emotions of actually being the thing. And the guy said he was so freaked out about it, he like ran out the room and never did acting again. Because it was such – he realized that the media had made us all actors. We're all kind of on TV all the time, right, whether it be for like a selfie or a TikTok or this podcast or whatever. and it's it's a very different mode to be the real you and act in a very unselfconscious way

versus the thought that there's the external other looking in that there is this fourth wall that you're addressing all the time there's a very different reference frames and humanity didn't used to think they were on stage all the time and yet now we do i i see the biggest place is the self-censorship like yes exactly it happens to all of us yeah we're all victims of it uh i've been talking to a couple of people uh mutual friends of yours and i's that uh it's like becoming so prevalent where we've even in this podcast probably multiple times said like oh i didn't say this right i was going to tweet it but then i didn't know uh you know can i add let's steer away from this or whatever and like it's not necessarily like quote bad like in the

sense of oh if you would have said it it's just like i don't want to deal with the headache of that i don't want to actually have to defend uh why i believe something and so self-censorship uh is like a huge fucking problem that is only going to get worse and worse over time to the point where like does 90 of the society just say the same things over and over again not because they actually believe it but just because they just don't want to deal with it like yes yeah i mean this is all about like hovel's green grocer thing in which for those who aren't familiar with it um i think it was hovel buckler hovel the czech president or uh anyhow it was an essay about a green grocer who basically hangs a sign with solidarity for whatever the communist cause was

not because he deeply cared about it he just didn't want to deal with the hassle um speaking of communists you know who's really good at the self-sumptuoship uh people who live in dictatorships So one of the stories I did for Wired, actual reported story, was in Cuba. So I went to Cuba. As you might know, Miami Cubans typically don't tend to go back, by and large, unless they have family there or something. But I went back for the sake of Wired Magazine in 2017 to talk about Cuban internet, which is a whole other story, how they get internet and mostly don't get internet. But one thing, I was in Havana in El Vidal, which is kind of like the nice part. And there's kind of a media, very small media and tech scene there.

And there's just starting to be like bloggers and, you know, the equivalent of, you know, Matty Glacius, to draw a random example, of people who have like an online presence. And they sort of do reporting, right? Which, again, in Cuba is big news because officially you can't do journalism. You have to be part of the guild and it's super censored. And I was sitting in a cafe, like a reasonably fancy cafe, and the guy was going on about how he had done reporting from the eastern part of the country. There had recently been a hurricane. The government's response was obviously terrible because the government's kind of incompetent.

Shocking. Shocking. but of course saying that is like you can't say it in public and so you know i was trying to get at the guy i was interviewing for the piece it's like so what do you know what do you hope to get out of it by reporting on this thing it's like well um you know by by highlighting the government's you know lack of of response to it we hope to impact um you know the the cuban democracy and the cuban election that i'm like and of course i did not self-censor because i had not been raised inside it's like what are you talking about cuba isn't a democracy this is tyranny and i just

blurted out in the cafe and everyone just stops and stares at me and it's as if i had like ripped a fart in the elevator and everyone just like pretends it didn't happen and the guy just kept on talking as if i hadn't said anything and it's just like uh i'm like oh fuck i'm sorry i forgot i forgot this is not how this works here i have to like shut the fuck up and then you realize as i got there and i hated the place it was terrible i i mean the cubans are great but the the situation is terrible i don't understand how a tourist could go there unless you're a total moron and like just shield yourself from the reality of what's there because everyone is living a lie right like when you're in a dictatorship everyone lives a lie there is no truth right and like the

sort of lie and world of lies i tell you is different than the world i lies i tell somebody else and then somebody else and there's these running realities you have to remember it all and keep it all straight in your head to make sure that you don't step on the landmine in fact one of my sources who i was pretty open with and i was reporting a piece like i didn't lie to them the piece came out and i wasn't that anti-government but you know i said this is what it is they had to like denounce me on a facebook post and they said oh i had no idea that when this journalist I'd work with them and gave them a quote that this would happen. And so they had to like denounce me because I had like violated like the,

the, the matrix of lies that is living in Cuba. And so that's the reality. And again, we're not, this isn't Cuba by any stretch, but it's kind of a taste of that feeling of, Oh, I have to worry about what I say. And yeah. Have you ever seen the vice documentary with Dennis Rodman in North Korea? I mean, it sounds pretty lit. I want to see it. Dennis Rodman goes to North Korea. I'm pretty sure it's vice does it. And this is like when vice was like real vice, not like corporate vice.

um and in it i just remember this one scene where uh they walk into a computer lab and uh they have a bunch of people on the computers and they're like but nothing's happening on the computer and like they like call it out i can't remember if rodman says that or like the the you know voiceover or whatever but like it is like very obvious that like they are trying to put forward a view that like we have the internet and it's like let's put some people into a computer but it almost looks like they don't know how to use the computers right and they're just like doing this action and so that's kind of how i think of some of these places of just like yeah it's a play and by the way like if you were that person ordered to go do that like you go and you do it

right like of course i want to be a good soldier like you know let me just type away on the computer and not it's not even turned on right because if you because if you don't you're not going to get your ration card if you don't you might lose your job not that anyone ever loses their job in america for what they thought or wrote no that never happens yeah that is a great place that is a great place to end this i will let everyone use their imagination on that uh go to wikipedia um where can we find people to find you on the internet or find out more about spindle yeah so i spend way too much time on twitter as as we all do uh antonio gm twitter um i've got a sub stack at the pool request.com and then fantastic highly suggest people thank you thank you and then uh

yeah the company spindle without the e with the e was too expensive i don't know i was like i was gonna pay a tesla 3 for a fucking domain no way we're dropping the e and now it sounds like a german metal band i might even add the umlaut to have the motorhead effect uh but in any case it's spindle without the e.xyz is where it's at awesome listen thank you so much i could talk to you literally forever uh hopefully we both don't get canceled uh for like the 19th time but i'm sure we'll do it again in the future okay thanks mom thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player.

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