This Week in Startups - FB vs. Apple on AR and Ads, Twitter's Future, Conflict, Crypto Regulation with Antonio Garcia Martinez & Zach Coelius | E1427

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Antonio Garcia Martinez (Chaos Monkeys, The Pull Request) and Zach Coelius (Investor, Coelius Capital) join to discuss a wide range of news topics including Antonio's trip to Ukraine, the one-click company Fast closing down, Elon Musk joining Twitter's board, Apple taking on Facebook in ads (and how it will impact the battle for Ar/VR), crypto regulation and more! (00:00) Intro (01:08) Jason catches up with AGM & Zach Coelius (11:03) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (12:18) AGM on going to Ukraine (23:10) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (24:37) Zach and AGM on if the US would go to war (30:43) Microsoft for Startups Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (32:00) More on Ukraine and America’s feelings towards Putin and Russia (48:38) Fast (one-click checkout startup) closes down (52:24) Thoughts on Elon Musk joining Twitter board (1:02:50) Talking about FB hurt by Apple App tracking transparency update FOLLOW Zach: https://twitter.com/zachcoelius FOLLOW Antonio: https://twitter.com/antoniogm Read the Pull Request: https://thepullrequest.com FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

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And Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. For the challenges you face as a startup founder, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is here to help. The platform provides founders with free resources like Azure Credits, development tools like GitHub, mentorship resources, productivity software, training, and so much more. The program is open to all and takes five minutes to apply with no funding required. Learn more and sign up at aka.m.m.S. slash This Week in Startups. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. Two amazing guests here to go through the news. Molly is on vacation spring break.

I hope you're enjoying it, Molly. Antonio Garcia Martinez is back on the program last on episode 9.51 back in 2019. It's been almost three years. And of course, since that last day, appearance. He was hired by Apple, yada, yada. Then subsequently left. This is his fourth appearance. And his last appearance, paradoxically, was doing a news roundtable with Zach Collius. Since then, Zach has been doing the reoccurring segment on the swing and startups, Ask an Angel. It's now been on 12 times. I think 15 overall. I'm not sure what the difference is. Who's the most besides you and

besides me and Molly at this point? I don't know. You're up there for sure. I think Brian Brian Alvey's been up there but you I think have been on most consistently because of the Ask an Angel segment we should be doing monthly so thank you for doing that You know it's great to have you back on Antonio after your triumphant Joe Rogan

appearance It was actually a really great episode I just listened to it yesterday I think in order to make your ego even bigger You should think about it Rogan open for you That's how you should think about it Yeah Rogan opened for That's right

Well, you know, I do know that a number of the guests here have been appeared there, but I think he probably found out about you more through Twitter because he's a Twitter guy too. And I think he said that on the show that he probably is your Twitter. But just tell us, like being on the number one media property in the world. Like it's not even a podcast. It's bigger than any of the nightly news programs. So what has life been like a week later for you?

Dude, everything is just different. The sky is bluer, sugar, sweeter, women's swooning. my presence. Nothing has changed it. I just get a bunch of random DMs and then like a 20K bump in followers. But it is interesting. Rogan is an amazing nice individual. We've been Twitter mutual follows for a while. We've DMed a couple times. And I sent him a nice note of sympathy after his little travailed with Spotify, given my own experience with Apple. And he just responds and say, hey, well, you know, why don't you just come on the podcast? I'm like, okay, sure. I come on the podcast. And it was supposed to be like an Apple cancellation, this and that or, you know, Spotify, whatever thing. And then I went to

Ukraine. And the weird thing is I was stuck in Ukraine. And as you can imagine, in a conflict region, transport is a little bit iffy and it's hard to get around. And I'm like, dude, I got to be in Austin in like four days. I can't just take around. And I would have stuck around. Like, I kind of regret it now, particularly given the course of the war is taken, that I didn't push it on to Kiev. But, you know, friends were actually telling me the ultimate power move, it's like zoom in from Kiev and say, sorry, bro, I'm in like at a bunker. We got to do it remotely. But he, he refuses to do shows remotely. And so it's like, Kiev, Rogan, Keith Rogan. I kind of went. out, I have to say, and like, I got back on the bus and all the rest of it and, like, got my ass back to

the United States. But it was great. You know, he's, um, he's a shockingly distressingly normal, nice person. I was like hanging in his little set up there with his bros for half an hour for the show, very casual. Like, if you didn't know what he is, you would just think he's like some ripped middle age dude who's into M. M.A. Like, you, you have no idea that that's Joe Rugg. He doesn't carry himself like some major celebrity and anything. He's just a very nice, chatty, intellectually curious guy who runs a very lightweight operation and, you know, makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. All right, Zach, so I don't know, top that, Kiev and Joe Rogan in the same week. How was your week?

What did you do? Did you have made a really, really good espresso this morning? Really nice. How many grams did you do? She got 22 grams, 24 grams, who tapped it down? Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I'm so happy and so proud of Antonio. I've known him now since he was just a little PM.

And like watching him grow up and become the big boy that he is just makes me feel deeply, deeply honored that I get to be in his presence ever. It's kind of like your ability to bull-haping having become a VC has like tripled. It's incredible. Yes. The ability to just like butter somebody's muffin has just increased. You do have to butter the muffin. Absolutely. You're like, you know what, I'm not going to invest in this round, but just to keep my optionality open is the most brilliant product I've ever seen.

I mean, this is the slam dunk of all slam dunks. And the founder's like, so can you put $250K into this from? No. No, no. I talked to my partners. We couldn't get there. Timing issue. I got his capital call.

And, you know, Antonio and I have to have dinner tonight, but he just canceled on me. Some little butt hurt. Like, you know. But it's brilliant. I mean, it's truly, this is really a brilliant idea. I mean, that's what I love. It's like the sugar coating is absolutely amazing during the now. I actually don't do that because having been on the other side of it,

With douchbag VCs, oh God. It's the worst. I hated that as an entrepreneur. I was like, fuck you. Like, go, you yourself. Instead of doing that,

what is your go-to when you're saying no? Because you got to say no more times you say yes, obviously. So what's your go-to? Yeah. So the thing that I found that works really, really, really well is just be super candid about the actual things in the business that they need to improve and take to the next level.

Like, okay, here's what you need to fix. Like, here's what I need to see and be just like, and tell them when they're baby's ugly, like the more aggressive I can be about that. And what I've found is by being candid, creates this awesome filter because the entrepreneurs who don't want to hear

that they're babies ugly, they're like, that guy, I'm never talking to him again. And I never want to talk to them again because they're not my people. Whereas the people who are like, ooh, tell me more.

I'm like, oh, this might be my person. And then, like, over time, we can build a relationship. And so, like,

by actually being candid, it actually is a win-win. So buttering is actually the, I think the wrong approach for picking good thunders. It is. You just have to be careful with certain cohorts of folks. I found when I was super candid in my early days with certain accelerators, where people might have felt that they were, you know, ascendant.

They really took it the wrong way. And then, you know, would write reviews of you, like, you know, was rude. Do you always grind the YCX every episode or just when I'm here? Just when you're here. Just when you're here, sharpen it up. Sharpen it up. That's what I thought. Okay.

That's what I thought. It has level set, though. I think now that there's so many YC founders, it has, I think humility got back into it. Like the, hey, yeah, you know, we're trying to figure this out because there's so many, right? And they're not all clearing. When it was 50 people, they just all cleared market, like, walking off the stage. It was really a weird moment in time. But the two I like best, I think both of them came from Ruloff at Sequoia, which was,

Because not yet. It's not yet for us. You know, and I said, well, that begs the question. Well, what would we need to achieve? So I actually train a lot of the founders. Hey, listen, if you're, don't do this stupid thing, Antonio, where people gave this people's advice. Like, oh, you know, I, you're saying no. Can you tell me three more people who might say yes?

That's the worst. Because like, you want me to email a deal I said no to to three of my friends? Like, it's the worst signal ever. But not yet is great because it's like, well, what would I? I just tell all my founders, asked them like, hey, listen, it's great meeting with you. Can you tell me two or three things that I would need to, you know, notes I would need to hit or achievements or milestones that would make you interested in maybe taking another look, like a revenue number or number of users or growth rate? And man, two out of three people just reply back. Yeah, like if you're growing 10, 20% a month consistently, yeah, that would be a good time for us to talk.

It's really that simple. Like, all of a sudden, the whole thing is unlocked. The other one I like is we have to prioritize other investments at this time. So I see all the kickbacks from folks because founders will forward it to me. Hey, you know, I met with this person. Here's what they said. And I also like that one. We have other investments.

We have to prioritize this moment. It's like, you're not as good as the other folks that we're meeting with. Pretty good rejections. Antonio, tell us about the rejections. You specialized in, obviously, being rejected. Oh. So suddenly tell me the rejections that you've, what are they? That was a low blow.

Blow. My rejection. My rejection rate is surprisingly low, which probably means I'm not trying hard enough. I should my rejection rate should be higher on. I actually, I don't deal with rejection well. It's like many things. Like, I know I have this public persona, but I'm actually not a narcissist. I just like play one online.

I'm also not really this like risk taking swashbuckler. I kind of hate it. And so in life, I actually don't take that many wild wrists, I think. And so I don't know. I don't get rejected that often. When you do get criticism, what happens? Just like you just lose your mind that you want to like. I just lose my mind.

Yeah. I just, that's right. I just load up the air 15 and fire rounds in the air if I'm in the bottom. No, I'm joking. Of course I don't do that. I don't know. I usually just block the person. I just don't want to deal with them.

That's totally avoidant behavior. You got your cheek to Mark and the recent approach, which is just, I, oh, yeah, I don't know. I'm totally with P. Mark on this one. In fact, I wrote a post about the joys of blocking. You should epistemically block whole sections of the world you don't want to pay attention to. There's an appeals process, by the way, I pardon people occasionally.

And I, if another friend says, you know, I think you really misjudge this tweet. I'm happy to lift the, sometimes I actually. Sometimes I actually unilaterally unblocked people. It's like, you've been in the doghouse long enough. I'll take you out because maybe you're interesting enough. But in that one little thread, you were kind of nasty. But I'm super fast on the- Oh, so you open the gate.

You just don't tell them the cell's been opened. You just unlock the cell doors. And then they can just wander out and you see. I won't name names, but I've done it a few times. Yeah. I like that move too. Sometimes I'll go to my block list and I'll just unblock the whole swap of people and just say, like, okay, let's see if they can behave this.

Speaking of suggestions for E-Leylon, now that he's a board member. Oh, yeah, there is the walls of perception. There should be a time limit block. Like, that's it. Your timeout is like three days. Oh, my God. Clip this and send to Elon.

This is the one time I'm going to give you permission to aggregate to my team. What a great suggestion, Antonio. Block for 30 days. And then the person gets a countdown clock on your profile. Yeah. Listen, when you're a founder, it's fun to trade your craziest stories with other founders. Recently, Balloon CEO Amanda Greenberg, one of lunches' awesome portfolio founders told me how Vanta's SOC2 solution helped her.

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VANDA is going to give you $1,000 off right now. So get the $1,000 off at Vanta.com slash twist. once again, Vanta V-A-N-T-A-com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock too. Or they see your tweets, Antonio, to go and buy, and it just said, you'll be able to see this tweet in 29 days. That would be nasty. As much as I'd like that, I don't think that would actually create a good input. Oh, look, they're going on my Twitter stream.

By the way, I just posted another piece on the Ukraine situation about the refugees, which is just that one that you just scroll by as a total plug. Well, yeah, let's go to that. I mean, this is unbelievable. You obviously people know you do the poll request, which is the pull request.com. It's a substack email newsletter. It's exceptional.

And you're part of the substack authors group, I guess. And we're selected for that after Apple disengaged from your services. Yeah. And you decided on your own to go to Ukraine. Explain the decision-making process there. Yeah, it's funny because I got so much guffered online like I was a war tourist. And it was very strange that, well, The whole conversation about Ukraine in the U.S. I think is very strange.

I think the U.S. has this tendency due to its large oceans and the fact that it's an empire to sort of look at outside events as a projection of their own domestic sort of political neuroses. And so Ukraine, not for everyone, of course, but for many people, I think they debate it, not thinking about what is this actual reality in the world called Ukraine, about which I knew remarkably little, by the way. I've traveled through Eastern Europe, but I never got as far as Ukraine. So I'd never been there before. And I thought it was time to just unplug from this whole ridiculous thing, which,

by the way, Dick Kasselow just tweeted that he was going to do this. same two days ago, which I was very supportive of. And so I basically just bought a ticket and flew to Warsaw. And after setting up a few calls, you know, for like fixers and I don't speak any Slavic languages, and it's very difficult, obviously, to navigate without languages. And so I had a translator and getting around. And I just spent time in the border and decided to go into Ukraine because like, I don't know, you had to go in and go see it and got as far as West Ukraine, a city called Leviv, which is sort of like sort of the capital of free Ukraine. It's where a lot of the staging for extractions is, a lot of volunteers coming in.

A lot of stuff is sort of based in the biggest city in Western Ukraine. And, you know, to be clear, it wasn't that dangerous. I mean, it's kind of out of the war zone, although when I left, there were some missile strikes. So, I mean, everything in Ukraine is part of the war. Dangerous in the way that maybe visiting Israel is dangerous. Right, right. The large will go off.

Sirens will go off. Right, right, right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a little probability. All the time. But, I mean, you start ignoring them because there's just so many, you don't do it. But, you know, to be honest, I doubt it's, I doubt it's any more dangerous than walking across

S. of Tenderloin on a Friday night, to be honest. That's probably way more dangerous than entering Ukraine. I was literally having this back. Every time somebody talks about San Francisco now, they see, Zach, myself, whatever, people who've been, you know, discussing it. And like, Kara Smith is like, I don't know what people are talking about. Like, it's delightful here.

And I was like, put a camera around your neck, walk from the Embarcadero, through the Tendeloid and down to the mission. Yeah. And park your car on, you know, with a backpack in it. Yeah. Check back with me in four hours. Like, yeah. Can you imagine what would be more dangerous?

Walking down Turkstreet with a digital SLR around your neck or walking through Ukraine with digital SLR on your neck? I think we... Yeah, depends which part of Ukraine. By the way, the best troll of that Kara tweet was somebody called her Carr-Antoinette, which I thought was kind of funny. I don't love Garum, but... She does play both sides pretty well.

Yeah, yeah, she does. She can play... She works both sides. It's like, oh, Jake, Al, very smart. I mean, I don't know about that guy, but I mean, he's clever, but I'm not so sure about Antonio. He's problematic, but I mean, I do think he's very smart. He just always like two. And she invites me to her conference in her podcast.

Yeah, it's weird. It's a very interesting thing where you're not on the pod, you'll get a couple of daggers. Then you come on and just like, oh, you want espresso? Are you, Phil? We'll get, we'll send out. Yeah. So. So, yeah, so just a wrap up on the Ukraine thing.

Yeah. I've posted two things about it. Some more is on the way, although I think some subs are might be getting a little Ukraine doubt. So don't worry, subs. It's not going to be like the Ukraine channel forever. The point I would love for you to unpack is the disparity between, you know, how we perceive it here in America. I think it's like super important and what's happening on the ground and, you know, how you perceive Americans on either side of the Great Atlantic and Pacific and our worldview and the empire, which people can debate if it's in decline or if we suddenly have been given

the mantle again. Right. So let me, let me comment like my top two observations. Jason, I made that were the two posts and then I'll get to the America thing. So two things. One, on the border region, which is what I just posted about, there's this enormous refugee crisis going on. Over four million Ukrainians have left in about as many weeks about, I think it's something like six or seven million or deplaced internally. Basically, over a quarter of the country is now a refugee of some form, either inside the country or outside of it. It's Europe or hasn't seen anything like this since World War II. Over 40 million people reside or did reside the Ukraine. So you're talking about 10%, 20% of them are just flooding.

Have just left in more or less a month. Yeah, that's, that's right. And the weird thing is, as I describe, you know, you go to these border checkpoints in sort of Eastern Poland. Most people are actually coming on foot. And it's the demographics are interesting. It's mostly women and children because men 18 to 60 can't legally leave. And the Ukrainians are absolutely are rigid about that because everyone, everything is mobilized to the war effort, which is gets to my second point. But you've got all these people leaving, mostly women and children and old people. and they're streaming either to Western Ukraine and populating the city called Leviv, which is whose population is like almost doubled with refugees, or they actually cross the border.

And what you see on the border, and again, this is one of the differences. In the U.S., it's seen as this media phenomenon that's going to get sucked into the existing, like, culture war. In Europe, I think it's perceived as being more of a real thing. They actually have a memory of being a refugee or total war or Russian aggression, particularly Eastern Europeans. And so Europe has just mobilized. You go to the border and the polls have been very much. good about providing basic law enforcement, like basic infrastructure buildings and all the rest of it.

But most of the actual aid, like the housing and food, is being provided by private Europeans and relatively small NGOs who like literally just show up and decide to feed Ukrainians and house them. You know, from, you know, like I literally have a photo. There's these two Polish, you know, grandmas with like a big vat of soup. And I asked him like, are you part of our organization? And it's like, no, we're just from the village and we set up this tent at one of the refiates. And we just feed them. She offered me like a bowl of soup. You've got, I had, there's an American there from Michigan, Virginia, who just flew into Warsaw, rented a car and was just shuddling refugees around. You know, these refugees, they literally, some of them have a lot of trouble getting out. Some of them literally had to avoid, you know, Russian shellfire and whatnot. Internal transport inside Ukraine is kind of a mess. And they literally come across with like those little roly bags that you carry on your carry on. And like the clothes on their back and like a kid with a little toy. And that's it. And there's this endless stream of Ukrainians just crossing the border in that state. And that. And And literally it's like this should be the citizens of Texas accepting people coming across the Mexican border with a bowl of soup and saying, hey, you know, I converted my garage into a two-bedroom. You know, please stay here. Yeah, yeah.

That's the level of like love and, you know, just absolute compassion Europeans have for these people. I mean, it is unbelievable. Yeah, and that's, you know, author Rebecca Solnett wrote this book called A Paradise Built in Hell, which is an amazing phrase. And it's basically about in these crisis situations, rather than things reducing into a Mad Max scenario, which is what people sort of think it is. On the contrary, humans actually come together and actually create the sort of utopia you couldn't imagine otherwise. And that's kind of what's happened there because there's a spirit of volunteerism, of charity. Like, we were helping people out. There were these Germans who had literally just filled the van with medicine to the roof and just drove to the border with customs for us and get them across, but they didn't have it in Ukrainian. And so it was like, they were like stuck.

And so my interpreter helped translate it for them. Like, everyone's trying to help everyone to get either stuff into Ukraine or people out. And so that was just amazing. It's incredible what's going on at the border. And it's funny how, I think, getting back to the point of how Americans misperceive it, sometimes foreign journalists go there and report on the story of interest to their audience rather than what's actually interesting. I won't name other independent journalists and what they've done on the border.

But any case, we'll leave that aside. The other big part of the story is inside Ukraine, the level, I have a post about Total War. Total war was this close with concept of like all the society's resources would be mobilized towards war, civilian, commercial, economic, political, everything, right? And it's a horrifying concept in a way. And we haven't seen it in the West. The wars that the U.S. has fought had not been total wars. If anything, they've been outsourced to a certain class and then kind of forgotten about, unfortunately. But total war, like literally, I was there on a sunny Sunday and there a bunch of like Ukrainian school kids.

You looked there in high school and their sort of weakened activity was filling sandbags to put them around statues because they were awaiting bombardments, right? And like their spirits were up. They were singing songs. Everyone is like doom scrolling telegram for the latest news, but it's just very perverse. Like all the windows are bordered up in the churches. Like literally everybody is either a soldier supporting the soldiers by requisitioning equipment. There's an acquaintance of mine who worked at Uber who is now like a military sorcerer

inside the middle of Ukraine, who I interviewed, I'm going to post his interview this week as well. And, you know, I gave him, I went with a Starlink unit thinking there wouldn't be good internet. And I donate to him. And apparently my Starlink is powering internet in some city hall in central Ukraine. Wow. Everyone and then like the feeling of, I think what everyone has gotten wrong about this. And so many of the sort of, you know, Putin sympathizers or, you know, a lot of the isolationist, like, oh, the Ukrainians should just roll over and lose. They've completely underestimated the Ukrainian national spirit, right? You know, and, and, and, and, The more you read about Ukrainian history, the more it starts becoming clear that, like,

there actually is a viable Ukrainian nationalism. They're dating from 2014 and all these protests that have been in the past. They really have a sense of national, it really is to them a nationalist struggle. I mean, sure, NATO and the EU and all that stuff is into it as well, but to them, it really is an expression of their own nationalism, like the phrase Slavokhāno, which means glory to Ukraine. They almost say like, you would say hello or Aloha in Hawaii. It's almost a greeting. Everyone repeats at all right, glory to the heroes.

I mean, it's this weird feeling of this perpetual pep rally to use kind of a dumb sports analogy, but for this cause and everybody's involved in it. And I was interviewing one of these hacker dudes who's like in the anonymous boards and it's basically dedossing Russian websites, which a lot of them are doing. And, you know, total nerd kid like classic Silicon Valley Central casting tech nerd. And he just describes what he was doing. Zach would find this funny. They were running ads targeted on porn hub against Russians, making fight of the Russian war effort.

He sent me some screenchat to that. And at the end, he just says, we will win, right? And it's funny, that's a phrase that a lot of Ukrainians punctuate their phrases with. My translator, who is this young university student, very pleasant, very charming, her eyes would get sort of steely. And she says, but we will win, right? And it's, it's really quite something to see a nation mobilized in that way. Listen, everybody knows Squarespace is the platform where you can build or sell anything.

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So the question I have is, I don't know if you remember, but you and I once had a very drunken debate at the front porch about like, if the U.S. went to war and like whether or not we would go fight. Yeah. And we were, we both got wasted and were yelling at each other aggressively by the end of it. And at the time, I remember saying, yeah, yeah, like, that's what we have to do. So do you think what would, did you're, now that you've actually seen it, has your position on that changed? You know, it's funny, there was a poll towards the beginning of the Ukraine war that showed that a shocking,

a large fraction of Americans would not in fact fight. And in fact, there was a Republican Democrat split, which the GOP made a lot of, um, I think it's a good question. I think the number is probably higher than the, I think, unlike polls that typically skew like the other way, I think the number is probably higher than the poll reveal. I think if it actually happened, more people would fight than you would think. But I think a lot of people wouldn't actually, yeah. I think, I think actually, like, I think that's the argument I would make is that when you

put people in a place where it's existential crisis and true horrors, it's amazing what happens. People come together in a way that they wouldn't, beforehand. They're fighting over pronouns beforehand, but suddenly it's like, oh, hold on, there's more important things to worry about here. And like, I've always been an optimist when it comes to our country when it comes to people coming together when they need to come together. And so, I know, curious. I think what happens is like what you're seeing in the Ukraine getting back to the American debate, right? It's that you're not going to have voices that say, oh, like, I'm a wimp and I don't want to fight.

Like, nobody would publicly say it. Like, well, we should negotiate a negotiated surrender. like life under whatever this hypothetical enemy is that doesn't exist and it wouldn't exist in our last time. You know, oh, life under them won't be that bad. Like, that would be the sort of rhetoric, right? It wouldn't be just a total wimp out. So, and again, you're seeing that rhetoric play out in very obviously, I think, mishmash

form in the United States over the Ukraine thing. Many people saying that they shouldn't have fought, many people predicting that they would have just rolled over. And again, that's not what happened. Since I was there, the Russians have pulled back from Kiev and effectively retreated. And the war has moved into a second. second phase, which to me at least is very heartening. Absolutely.

Yeah, I've had this debate with Sachs countless times now on All In where he's just like, you know, like these insurrectionists. And I was like, you mean the people who are fighting for the host? Who are defending their land or insurrectionists? He's like, well, eventually they'll be. I'm like, you want to just call them terrorists? Yeah. For defending like Ukraine?

Like, are you crazy, David? And I think the framing is like, oh my God, this could have third order effects on America. or second order effects on America, the economy, whatever. So those people should then just live, you know, under a dictatorship, you know, just absolutely acquiesce. And just so our gas prices go down. And so we don't have this distraction to the supply chain because, you know, chips and cars and self-driving and everything's going to be impacted. Batteries for our electric cars. Like, these people are fighting for their very existence.

And we're worried about, you know, the cost of gasoline. Really? Well, I think the debate about what we should do and to what extent we should get involved, I think it's a legitimate one. I don't think it's a legitimate, yes. But the idea that the people of the Ukraine can't, the people of Ukraine can't decide for themselves. That's the other thing, right?

It's like people saying, oh, that, you know, that, you know, they should just fold. It's like the Ukrainians, there was a poll over 90% are in favor Zelensky in the war effort, right? He's extraordinarily popular internally, although he wasn't before the war. He didn't have universal acclaim before the war, actually. It's only after the fact most people rally around their leader. What I find interesting, I think, I guess, or a shift in tone, I'm, you know, I think we're all old enough to remember at least tail under the Cold War, right? Sure.

Like, a lot of what's, and again, I think the debate is totally legitimate, right? But a lot of what's being debated, you know, funding and backing a proxy war, right? Or some degree of nuclear brinksmanship, because that's always in the background with the Russians being involved, right? Like, this was routinely done during the Cold War, right? Yeah. from backing the actual Afghans against the Russians and their occupation in that country, in the exact same we're doing now with training and sophisticated weaponry, to, again, nuclear brinksmanship around, you know, Cuba and the crisis there.

These are things that in some sense the U.S. used to sign up for, and in some sense doesn't have either the will or the stomach for anymore, which I find surprising. I don't know if that argument is actually wrong. Like, we both have the will and the stomach. Like the level of arms that we're providing to the Ukrainians is significant and increasing dramatically. I think there's certain elements of American political dialogue that made the mistake of supporting Russia over the last decade. And now they're basically just trying to cover their ass for that. Because for a decade, people were saying, look, Russia is dangerous.

So, like, Russia is super dangerous. We can't treat them with kid gloves. And people are like, well, they're okay. and Trump was like, no, they're not scary at all. And then people are like, oh, they're really with Ukraine. We need to do something about that. And they're like, well, they need to help me get some dirt on my political opponents before they give them any weapons.

And then they're like, oh, no, they're not, Russia's not messing with our elections at all. And they're not trying to influence our information at all. And they're totally safe. And like, the whole right wing in this country for the last decade has been doing that. And now they're just covering their ass because now we see. Well, I don't know if it's the whole right way. No, no, no.

No, let me to finish the argument. It's part of the way. see what the truth is. Because like an invasion of a country, the murdering of civilians at massive scale, the bombing, I mean, like the tears that we have shed watching the fucking horrors that are happening, that's truth. You can't deny it anymore. But for the last decade, people have been like, well, that's not so bad.

And like, now they're just covering their ass. So I don't think it's fair to say that we as a country don't have the political will. Like, there's certain political elements in this country that have decided that they don't want to basically address the fact that there is evil in the world, and you can either stand up for that evil, or you can basically be an appeaser, which is what the right has done for a decade. By some estimates, over 90% of startups

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AKA.m.S. slash this week in startups. Once again, aka. dot MS slash this week in startups to get six figures in benefits right now. Where do you stand? Yeah, I mean, I think it's partially true. I don't think it's the entirety of the right. And in fact, there was a poll that showed that asked Americans is Biden being too soft on Russia. And in fact, more Republicans than Democrats agreed.

But I think Zach is correct that there is a section of the right wing. And in fact, I wrote a piece kind of railing against him, a bunch of trouble with them for Barry Weiss's thing. That, you know, a lot of them have been either Putin sympathizers or sort of vaguely pro-Russian in the sort of woke culture war, right? Because, you know, Putin isn't to the whole gender ideology. Putin isn't into pronouns, and therefore we should be somewhat supportive of them, which is funny for a couple of reasons. For starters, how you can actually look at the Ukraine situation and like gender pronouns are the first thing you think of.

It's like, you know, I joke to me to like, Zelensky wishes that his country's biggest problem was pronouns right now. Right. Like, how out of touch do you have to be with like the human reality to actually prioritize that? And then two, like, it's not even true. Like you look at Putin's Russia, it's not some traditionalist Christian redoubt against Western liberal degeneracy.

They have a lower church attendance rate than do. then we do. They have one of the world's highest abortion rates. You know, they have one of, they have a very low birth rate. Like, they're not some sort of Christian vanguard against the degenerate West. They're, they're a shabby country that can't even fight a war well without, you know, resorting to sheer brutality to win. You know, it's, it's just a bizarre, I find it very un-American in many ways. And it also, it's funny, in the piece I made the point that it almost reminds me of like the Berkeley lefties that I used to fight 20 years ago at Berkeley, that like they kind of hate America.

They think America's role in the world is always malign. And then, but as, as, you know, as part of that, by the way, America is responsible for every ill on the world. So if Russia invades Ukraine, it's somehow America's fault. It's like, what are you talking about? How did we convince Putin to do this? What was our culpability in Putin amassing his troops along the border and then deciding to go in?

Like, yeah, we put a gun to his head to invade. It's like, but there's actually a relatively interesting argument we can make here, which is if you look at Putin's support for the Green Movement that shut down the nuclear generators all across Germany. That was some, that was some 3D chess or just chess. So Putin has actively engaged in manipulating the political discussions of every single country on his border and every country in Europe for his strategic and military games. He's done it over and over and over again. We have demonstrable proof. Nobody can argue that basically he has not been doing that, consistently doing that, and doing it successfully.

Getting the Germans to shut down all their nuclear power so that he can sell them more gas and so that he could basically turn the Germans into a weak, effeminate response to his attacks. It worked, right? And so, like, it's just shocking to me that, like, we can say that that's true. We can all agree that that's true. And yet somehow when it comes to our country, we're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, he's had nothing to do with this country. No, no, no, no, no. He didn't really mess with any of our elections. He hasn't actually, like, he hasn't bribed any politicians.

That whole thing with Snowden and Grenad Wingwald, even though Snowden now lives in Russia, that was Snowden doing his own thing. And Grant Greenwald, he's not getting paid by the Russians. Like, it's really weird in this country that, like, we're willing to say that, like, the Russians are actively bribing and manipulating the information. But in our country, we're like, meh, this doesn't happen here. Clearly, they're doing that, but it doesn't seem to be working in this instance. So it is just, it is it working? Is it working? Is it working against the Ukraine?

No, but it is. They seem to be crushing him on the social media manipulation game this time around. But that, but that's actually, that's actually not the point because at the end of the day, you can't, you can't basically convince the world that when you're bobbing children that that's okay. But you can convince the world to have basically politicians saying, oh, Ukrainians need to negotiate, we need to stop giving them weapons. And he successfully, he succeeded in that. And, okay, let me ask Antonio, what, what do you think of Putin's legendary ability to mess with other society, he's, you know, quite effectively and then where he's at now?

Because it does seem like he's kind of lost his magic touch. I don't know. Right. I've always been skeptical of this. I mean, since 2016, I've been deeply skeptical of people that claim that the Russians through the election, because it seems a way of sublimating the fact that. that Trump was actually attractive to many American voters for a bunch of reasons that we don't need to go down that rabbit hole. But I think, you know, Trump probably did win. And if you even look at the numbers, you know, he did win.

If you look at the numbers behind the Russian influence peddling campaigns in terms of ad spend in terms of actual reach numbers, they, you know, they were nothing in the scheme of things. But leaving that aside, let's not relitigate 2016. Even if you believe that somehow the Russians created this like social media death star that could literally throw an election, where did this go? How are they not using it during the Ukraine war when it's, you know, it's in fact their economy at stake, not just a foreign election. It seems to me like they're utterly losing. They're completely losing, in my opinion, the social media. I mean, they might be planning feelers like you're saying, but it seems like most of their Death Star is being pointed internally to massage their internal messaging, which is important for them. But it seems as if outside, you know, Russia, they've utterly lost it, but particularly in Europe. And I think Europeans are actually much more up in arms than the U.S. is in terms of sanctions.

You've got the Danes, the Danes, or even the Spanish, who I'm Spanish, like, historically are not big into the war fighting and get me anymore. Donating, like, lethal A to the Ukrainians and promising more, right? Like, it seems to me that his, whatever influence campaign he's had has lost. Although, I mean, I think what Zach might be hinting at is that in terms of shaping German energy policy for the past 15 years, he definitely has. And I think they're probably regretting and rethinking a lot, or hopefully they are. So, to bring it to things that we care about, when we talk about, technology, and we talk about free speech, which is a debate we're all having. We're like, okay, like, what is allowed and what is not allowed? And how are we going to, how are we going

to engage with free speech in this country on technology platforms, on Twitter, on Facebook? And there's a movement in this country that said, no, no, no, no, no, no, free speech is free speech. Anything goes, can go. And we're just going to let everything flock. But the problem is, is if we accept the fact that we have a geopolitical adversary who's using billions of dollars and all of the resources of a state to basically impact the information environment in our country and in other countries, if we accept that that's true, which we all do. And we say that, like, Antonio and I, we both spend a lot of time basically in manipulating the way people think using advertising successfully. And we're very, very good at that. And we know,

know that if you give me enough computers and you give me enough money and you give me enough smart people and you let me go use these open information environments like Twitter is, I can influence the way that the world thinks about things. I can basically move the needle successfully. And Putin has shown that he's done that. And so I think we have this really interesting question about like the free speech absolutists are like, no, no, no, free speech is free speech. Whereas people like me are like, look, when computers are the ones that are writing the speech, when we don't know if it's humans anymore and it's done at massive scale. And we have an adversary who has real reasons to use those computers to impact our information environment. We can't just say

free speech is free speech because we're no longer in the pen and paper days. We're no longer in the printing press days. It's now computers who are basically manipulating our population and information are thinking. Don't we think that people are kind of leveling up in their ability to interpret stuff. I know when like the ghost of Kiev, you know, video started populating. I was just, I retweeted it and I was like, you know, the chances of this being true are incredibly low, but boy, do I wish that there was a ghost of Kiev,

you know, killing every... It's just like I don't assume anything is true in real time. And people are starting to inoculate themselves against it. Well, so like, that's just a question of judgment. My judgment is, is for the average information

consumer, they do a pretty job. Like, so if you look at the anti-Vax movement in this country, it's largely people who have been brainwashed by, like, garbage information, by garbage, absolute garbage. And so, like, and you can go down the list of, like, the various debates we have in this country. And, like, there's garbage information that's brainwashing people.

And if I was Putin, I would actively be engaging in that, like, over and over again. Because, like, with enough computers and enough money, you can move the needle really aggressively. Putin is going to be able to do this or not? I disagree. I mean, Zach, as you know, I mean, ads targeting does. work, but the click-through rate on ads is still single-digit percentages, right? But it works. That's the problem.

Like, at the end of the day, so we both know. To help you buy a pair of shoes, not the change of the computer philosophy. We both know. We both know that like, that advertising at the end of the day is a dollar in equals revenue to the end advertiser out. So you put in a dollar and you get X dollars of revenue back, right? We both know that that's true. And so we both know that the trillions of dollars, or not trillion dollars roughly,

that's spent on advertising in the world has a net positive. game. We know that's true. We both know that that's true. And so you can't make the argument that like, oh, we have like trillions of dollars of value that's generated by advertising. But you can't make the argument that trillions of dollars of value

is generated by advertising, but that someone who wants to use the same tools to manipulate the way that we think about things, it isn't going to get a positive result. You can't make that argument. Because you can't make that argument. Our ROI positive advertising doesn't necessarily

translate into mass persuasion tax. that can throw the election in a country with over 100 million voters, right? We both know that Cambridge and Lindica was total garbage. It was made up by the left, and it was like, it was absolute garbage. We both know that. So let's not, let's not use that. But we also both know that if you and I were in Russia and you gave us a bunch of money, we and we had a lot of smart people, we could manipulate the way that people in this country

thought about things. We could. If that were true, we wouldn't go to Russia because we'd make a fortune in D.C., right? We would. And they do. This is active. This is real. Let me wrap up with this one question about Ukraine.

Oh, come on. I told you that I want to keep fighting. No, no, no. I don't think they don't want to hear it's fighting. Well, no, no, it's interesting discussion, I think, and we've had it a couple of times, but just wrapping up here, the Russia was supposed to be able to do all these cyber attacks. They were going to shut down the West. And now it feels like Putin is ineffective at manipulating, you know, Western Europe on energy anymore.

They're all saying, hey, we're going to, I mean, the Germans are saying we're going to ration. It's too late. We're going to get out of here. So that seems like his superpower's gone. He obviously couldn't fight a ground war. And, you know, what's left here in terms of an exit ramp for him? And then cyber hasn't happened. So the three things he's supposed to be able to just crush on, a ground war, cyber, and manipulating people.

All three of those are coming up zero. But those are false pioneers. It's like saying he's bad at fighting a ground war, but we shouldn't give weapons to these countries to protect themselves. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, what's the future? You know, what do you, Antonio, since he's been there, what do you think's going to happen if, and specifically in cyber, why hasn't, haven't we seen anything? Is he saving that bullet?

I mean, I think he has shown, yeah, he has shown the Putin regime to be kind of a sham, right? I mean, he can't keep tanks fueled 50 kilometers from his own border, right? Right. Which is not to say that he can't be deployed further afield. If you look at, for example, Syria, part of the reason why Israel has been a little bit middling when it comes to Ukraine is because they've got Russia on their border. It's all separate thing. But yeah, no, I think it's been an interesting revelation.

I mean, almost every Western analyst called it wrong, including and especially the Putin stands, who are the ones saying, oh, this is going to be over in two days. The Ukrainian should just roll over. I mean, they've all now switched back to like cultural topics. And they're going to remember the whole thing, because of course, they got it completely wrong. What about cyber? Is he just not, that was maybe we overestimated his ability to shut down every water, an electrical plant in the West? Like, he was supposed to be able to press a. button and we would all lose our power.

I'm not a cyber guy. I don't know. I'm not a cyber guy. I mean, you have real attacks, right? You have like real ransomware attacks. I don't think cyber is totally fake. But the thought that you can just do it systematically and then turn off power on the East coast.

I don't know. It's always seemed a little white UK to me like, you know, yeah. Anyhow. Any prediction on how this all wraps up in. Oh, yeah. And what do people think in the Ukraine of how this is going to wrap up? Well, I mean, as I said, they think they're going to win. Depends me by winning, right?

And then it's, and again, they love, particularly like in the pro Russian people love redefining what winning means. It's like, well, the Ukrainians didn't take Moscow. Well, guess what? The Taliban didn't take D.C. either. And I'd say the Americans lost in Afghanistan and Vietnam, right? The question is if you're fighting a war of invasion, if you're not losing, you're winning, actually, right? If you're the underdog and you're not losing, you've won, right? And so, and if you look at the bigger picture of strategically, I mean, the Russian economy has contracted something like 15 to 20 percent in a month. It's wiped out like 10 years of economic growth in the course of a month, right? You know, the sort of Putin brand in terms

that we can actually do has been severely damaged. They're not going to topple the Ukrainian government, right? The thrust on Kiev has been in total retreat. The best he can do now is try to gain ground in the east and in the south, which is where the war had been for the, has been for the past, you know, eight years or whatever, however long it's been since, since the start in 2014. And so he's going to try to negotiate before peace to get more ground in the east as part of what seems to be his big mystical crusade for a greater Russia or whatever, right? The Russians, to the extent I seem to understand, you know, can understand their thinking, they think of the Ukraine and Belarus. If you listen to Putin's kind of terrifying speech before the war, it's clear that he thinks

of Belarus and Ukraine and Russia as one people that he's reuniting, right? And the Ukrainians, and this isn't the first time. If you go back and you read more Ukrainian history, there has been Ukrainian nationalism in the past, often very violent, to be clear, that wanted to create an independent Ukrainian nation. And that's switching into high gear. So, That is a discrepancy. It's an empire trying to basically eat part of the world and that part of the world saying, no, we're a separate, we're a separate thing. He literally believes in reunification.

It's so obvious, like that he is going. And then Sachs is arguing with me like, oh, it's not reunification. It's like, well, he's willing to retreat if you give him land. So, yeah. I think that's for him, the prize is getting more land. Land and actually demographics. So there's this. Yeah, he wants to reunify portions of the former Soviet Union.

But it's so obvious what he wants, right? I mean, do you doubt that, Antonio? No, no. And also energy is gas fields in the east, though. But yeah, I mean, part of what's going unsaid here is that, you know, there is an interesting ethnic split in Russia, right? The eastern part is more Russian. The western part is more Ukrainian.

If you look at that part of the world, the city I was in Leviv used to be called Lavov and used to be part of Poland. I mean, borders have moved there a lot. It's a dynamic environment. And it's funny. a lot of these right wingers early on as part of their general calling it wrong. It's like, oh, Ukraine is a fake country. They have fought more for their national existence than any Western European country has in 70 to 80 years. If Ukraine is fake, what does that make,

you know, spayed my country in which I suspect a very small fraction people would actually fight for the nation. Right. And so, you know, it's out of such fires that nations are forged, right? We're witnessing the birth of a nation. One of the ministers whose speech I listened to said just that. This is what it is to birth a nation. That's what we're witnessing. And And this is what when we went on our, you know, adventures in the Middle East and other places to try to do regime change or create democracies and have people fight for their own existence did not work. And in this case, it's actually working. These people actually, I think in the case of Ukraine and Taiwan, they are actually proud people who will fight and want to be their own state and want to be their own democracy. Yeah, the Iraq thing, what irritates me about that is that to many American commenters, like the Iraq war is the preface and parallel to every drummond.

human history. That's it. Every conversation of American from policy, you go through the Iraq. And, you know, I'm having trouble seeing the parallels between Ukraine and Iraq for a bunch of reasons. And again, I think there's other parallels in the greater Cold War that you could point at that I think a little bit more representative of how things went down than Iraq. Well, we hope this wraps up and, you know, thinking about all these refugees. And I think that's one of the great things you can do is go to Flexport and you can actually just pay and donate to send aid right to Poland.

Chimov did it and I did it and we'll put it in the show notes. Let's go to a quick breaking news story. Fast.com, the one-click checkout company, which has been in the news a whole bunch of late, has just shut down. This after trying to raise it a billion dollar valuation after making general great strides on our mission of making, buying, and selling frictionless for everyone.

We have made the difficult decision to close our journals while you'll no longer see the fast button at checkout. We are incredibly proud of the team. We assembled yada, yada, yada. be ever for grateful to the team. Sometimes trailblazers don't make it all the way to the mountain top. Interesting.

But even in those situations they have, they paved the way for others. All others will follow. Fast has done this. Bring in one click and headless checkout into the mainstream. Buying online has forever been changed. This is delusional.

By the incredible team at Fast, the dedication, brilliance, and spirit is remarkable team is unparalleled and forever be the legacy of fast? Oh my God. The mountaintop. Is he evoking Martin Luther King in this?

Is that the most delusional statement you've ever read in terms of a company shutdown? This guy is. The startups are the new religion. This is what it is. It's a cult. There you go. Yeah. Also, like, when you shut down a company as someone has done it, the emotional experience

is so befuddling. Like, you're, you really, you really feel like, like not yourself in a way that like you're just totally out of your mind in a way that no drug has ever made me feel the level of stupidness that that having gone through that that process so like whatever they look they got their ass handed to them god bless them for trying good luck on their next endeavor and maybe hire a PR person to write that next time but you know it's it happens this is part of the game it's a hard game and Tony are The meetings are so hard.

This is when I know, Antonio, people are like lost their minds when they're running a startup is when they name their employees, like, you know, Amazonians or Googlers.

Like, if that happens organically and the Googlers start calling each other Googlers, okay, that's one thing. But when the CEO is like, oh, fastronauts. These are the fastronauts who are going to.

Is that what it is? Fastenots, man. I think that's what they named themselves. You know, like when, when they actually name their own tribe, and, yeah,

that's not a good sign. That is the most delusional statement I've ever read. You were literally trying to make people make rash quick decisions in buying stuff quicker commerce. Give them a break, Jason. Just give them a break. I guess I should be a little I mean, you know, the thing is it's after all of this founders, they just lost. Of like they were going to change the world and they blew through a lot of money too. They lost. The pain that they're going through will know no bounds. The last thing

they need is you telling them that they're bad at writing there. We just lost like PRPs. Well, I think they'll do better than the people in Kiev. So I think they're going to be okay. It's not a, yeah, they'll be fine. All right. Moving on. By the way, it's pronounced Kiv in Ukrainian. Oh, did I say Kiev? Kiev is a Russian and there's a Russian pronunciation. Oh, is that right? You know, there's so many pronunciation issues here, like the, the Ukraine versus Ukraine. I got that one. But Kiv versus Kiev. Explain again the, I'm obviously, again, not a Slavic language expert.

But the spelling, the transliteration in English that the Ukrainians use, which has now become like a cultural war thing, is K-Y-I-V. And in my best Ukrainian accent, which is total garbage, it is kind of a longer eye, it's not, but it doesn't turn into an E. It's Kiv. Kiv. Kiv is how they pronounce it. Keeve. I got it.

I like that. So Elon is joining the board after buying 9% of Twitter. Parag, Twitter's new CEO Seems excited about it And Why should be me? Someone posted this A maze

Actually, Dev on Twitter posted a picture of Steve Jobs And who was a guy that brought Steve Jobs in? And it was a picture of Steve Jobs joining the board What? No, no, was it Scully?

No, I thought No, I thought Jobs brought in Scully But there was a guy that was no, Skull got fired and there was another CEO, maybe another CEO, but whoever brought Steve back in after they bought Steve's company, and the picture is like amazing. Like the look on this guy's face is, I'm, like, and Steve is just smiling like the Chester Cat, like, I'm about to fucking takeover.

Go, Emilio? That sounds right, maybe. Yeah, I think he might have been the, he might have been the one who was there when they brought him back. Yeah. Just general thoughts on the future of Twitter with Elon. Amazing. Having some influence. I mean, look, Twitter has been such a show.

There we go. That's it. That's a great picture. Twitter has been such a show for so long in terms of their ability to ship product. Like having Elon there to break some heads and fire some people should be awesome. Super fired up. Antonio, your thoughts on? You know, aside from being a genius,

I think Elon is like one of the most amusing people in the world. It's amazing what he's willing to do. And how did he even manage to buy almost 15% without the market seeing it? That must have been a whole probably one story. It was 9.2% right, I think? Yeah. Or is it a higher number now? No, no, okay, sorry.

No, it's under the 10% limit. Right. Yeah. No, you know, I don't know. It sounds. I'm guessing there was a private, there must have been a couple of private buyers who wanted to clear part of their position and they thought that he would be a, I'm taking a total guess here.

And that he would be a creative. So if he said to, if Goldman Sachs or somebody like that said to a bunch of the institutional holders, hey, we've got a high profile investor who would like to buy a portion here, would you like to sell a piece to them? They might say, you know what? Even Vanguard owns like less than 5%. Like BlackRock owns less than 5%. Like to buy that much, like that, wow, that's well done.

My favorite part is he filed with the SEC that this was a passive investment as a total you to the SEC. right before he joins the board, which is clearly not passive. So he's going to go back to like a lawsuit with the SEC again. Well, they invited him to the board. I mean, that is,

he doesn't get a guaranteed seat, I think was the concept year. So I don't know. I mean, if I was running it, I'd be kind of stoked to have somebody that high profile talking about it. It must be getting the troops,

must be really excited at Twitter. Jack is excited. I would think the right people would be excited, right, Antonio? Yeah, I think we should go even longer, Elon. I hold a poll. Maybe we should have liked Elon, like temporary Roman tyrant and just like dictator of America.

Can we just put them in, just like put them in the game, just get biting out of the picture? Maybe, maybe only six months. We know that doesn't work, Antonio. That tyrant idea was a good idea that didn't work at all. What did the Romans? It was on pain of death. If the tyrant stuck around. Uh-huh.

Yeah. That worked really well. Uh-huh. Yeah. Look, hey. Yeah. The poll doesn't, Twitter polls don't lie. That is the social truth.

Yeah. You're right. I guess everybody wants the edit button. Yeah, so two thirds of people want the, or 75% of people want the edit button. I don't know why this has become such a religious issue. I mean, I kind of understand that. Dude, it's the typo.

It's the typo tweet with engagement. And then you're sitting there, it's like Sophie's choice. Do I kill my little baby with all the engagement? Or do I do it again? As you're just sitting there sweating bullets. It's infuriating. It's infuriating. It's infuriating.

I think it should be a three-minute limit. You should have a count on clock of three minutes to change it. And when you change it, it should just say edited version 2 and see previous version. And when you click that, it just gives you the red line of what words change. So if you said, like, I love Biden and then you switch the word love to hate and everybody retweeted it, like, at least people know. And then if you did retweet some, maybe that's what should happen is the retweets and the like should go away if you edit it. No, but always always choice goes back. Right, right.

You lose the engagement. It just needs to say it. Facebook solved this problem 10 years ago. It just says edited on the post, right? Which even if you don't see it, it creates a deterrent effect. Like, the, you know, midwet a-whet who's going to, like, try to pull that game. It's just not going to pull it anymore because it's so easy to get caught. And then you've got an edits button on the upper right so you can see what the actual edit record is.

It's very easy to solve this problem. That's not a problem. Very, very easy to solve, yes. Yeah. I don't know why they don't. Because they're incompetence. I guess. Twitter has been, like, you still can't search, you still can't, like, search your,

your old tweets way back in a really good way. You do like, the DMs are still. If you can't get advanced search right, the list of pretty incompetence on that platform is just mind bending. I would say if you can't, this is my indication of if your service is terrible or not, if you can't get advanced search right, like in 2022,

like you should have advanced search. Like it should just work. It's like they're making you put in operators if you want to like do search. It's like, can you just make a comprehensive search box like Google and make it work? Or you know what actually is assigned DM. The fact that DMs, you can't search your DMs really well

and they just, the DM product would be one of the top 10 apps in the world if they just got DMs right. The same ideological the same ideological bullshit. The same ideological bullshit that is currently driving San Francisco into the hole that it's going into,

deeply, deeply, deeply infects Twitter. And instead of basically saying, what's the problem, let's fix it and shut the fuck up and get it done. And like, instead we're going to basically have a struggle session about it. We're going to,

like, we're all going to sit down and we're going to cry it out. and we're going to feel each other's feelings and nothing's ever going to get done. And Twitter is deeply, deeply infected by that. Is that because historically, geographically, where Twitter was located as a headquarters? I mean, the culture started the way it is. And that culture built the culture. That's the Twitter's culture.

It's always been that way. Whereas Elon basically is famous for having the opposite culture, which is, you got COVID, come to work. Like, you know, we can have a debate about what's okay and what's not okay, but he has a very opposite culture. So he's going to be the. wrecking ball inside that company. All right.

Yeah, I don't know if it'll be a wrecking ball inside of it, but I do think it's going to create a lot of discussion. Like, every day, every day that he is talking about the product, it's going to be front and center on CNBC or, you know, in different publications. And he's pissed off all the right people, which is what I like about it. Everyone I hate is pissed off about this, which means it's a good thing. just reflexively. Yeah, well, I mean, there's this, I guess there's some people are making some connection

with freedom of speech and I guess Trump and the concept that Trump is being, I don't know, that's a big jump to make to Trump, that this is about Trump not being on the platform. Let me ask you guys just very simple question, quick answer. Should Trump be, you know, if let's say January 6th, he's cleared. He didn't incite the whole thing. Should he be allowed back on the platform two years later? Would you, if you were running it, bring him back? Antonio, bring Trump back or not?

I mean, if he's president of the United States, it seems it seems like there's a case for him being brought back merely as an official. I don't know. You can engage in what about this argument. It's like, well, why is Trump off if the head Mullah and Iran is on who's called for the fire destruction of Israel constantly? But I find those to be kind of weak arguments. I don't know.

I don't have a strong feeling on it. I mean, look, my feeling on free speech is one that doesn't play anymore, which is the U.S. has a First Amendment, which is incredible. It's one of the most amazing things about this country. And I think the free speech standard around imminent lawless action, Brandon Merck v. Ohio, which has been sort of the reigning free speech. Basically, if you call for somebody to be killed, that's it. You're out.

You get yanked. But anything short of that, no matter how stupid it is, is allowed. And I think, and again, obviously, yes, I get it. You know, eighth grade civics know it all that the First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies. But it's still the case. Like, I think Coinbase had a blog post out that like morally, we as a nation believe in First Amendment free speech.

as like the public moral standard, even if technically speaking, it doesn't apply to private company. And in general, our action should be guided by that moral value in my opinion. Seems realistic. What do you think, Zach? What would you do if you're CEO? Trump comes back. Trump doesn't.

One year penalty, two year penalty, four year penalty. I think one of the reasons why countries, empires fail is that they write a set of rules and they create a culture that works at one period of time and then times change. and then they're so locked into their thinking, they become so static and so ossified that they're unable to innovate and they're unable to accept new realities and a new dynamic. And so in the same way that basically like gun ownership in this country is largely or completely basically dominated by a law that was written when you had muskets that you literally had to hand load. And it took like a couple minutes to do that. And now basically you can buy

automatic weapon and mow down 50 people in, you know, 35 seconds, that requires us to say, okay, the facts on the ground have changed. We need to change the way that we think about this. The long way of saying you keep them off the platform. No, it's one way of me saying that like, like we need to, we need to rethink, and I don't know what the right answer is here. This is a hard question. We need to rethink how we think about the First Amendment in a world where technology has changed the game. I kind of like the idea of like a down vote button. It's like if people can give feedback on it or you have a reply case. So if somebody is spouting some bull-b- there's the law.

Like, what's going to happen to this guy, Alex Jones now? He's destroyed because of all the lies. It took a while for the legal system to catch up, of course. It's not like an instant snap reaction. But we do have libel laws and, you know, maybe they're not perfect. But, you know, if you do jump the fence and go completely crazy like he did, you're going to be held accountable. Okay, let's end on this. Facebook absolutely got demolished because of the Apple

changing of the ad rules. You two gentlemen have built some of the largest ad systems on the planet and contributed to this entire discipline of ads and targeting. Can Facebook ever recover from what Apple's done to them and how serious is this movement to not track people? I mean, so just as a, should we do like a 30 second summary of what the this AT&T thing is Jason for most of your viewers. Because I think ad tech is one of these things where people can be very tech savvy,

but not know how ads work. So the underlying reality to all of mobile ads for the past, or all ads with 10, 15 years is the personalization of ads. And whether it be a cookie ID or a device ID or an email or whatever, the fact that you know an individual identity, I know that Zach Koli is maybe an anonymous form, but whatever, look at these shoes, bought this thing, did, whatever, has been the input to all of this. And what Apple basically said was, look, we're going to have to make it such that if you have an app on our app store, the user has to opt in to giving that level of disclosure to the entire machinery.

What does that mean? It means at the end, the code running inside the Apple ecosystem can't pull the device ID from the actual device and say, this user did this thing. So it's like, well, then like how does any of this work? What Apple has said is basically there's a certain number of buckets. I think it's, there's eight bits. So it's like two to the eight buckets, which isn't that big a number. Or maybe it's two to 16, but still not that big a number. that you can now bucketize people in.

And so what it has effectively done is has made the granularity of targeting a lot more coarse than it used to be, kind of resembling what used to exist in late odds before personalized advertising. Why does that matter? Well, Facebook's biggest fear, and I mentioned this in my memoir at the time, right? I think it's pretty open now. Facebook was working on some version of a phone. It shipped what was like an Android skin, which was totally lame.

But their big fear was exactly this, right? At the end of the day, seen from the view of Google and Facebook, Facebook for all its power is just another app in the app store, right? Subject to its rules. They don't control the handset. They don't control the user. From Apple's point of view,

their users, they have a first party relationship and everybody else is a third party. And so they finally pulled the trigger. Apple, no secret, right, is building an ad system. That's part of what I was hired to help build. And they,

I don't think that's the only reason for doing it. I think they legitimately care about privacy to be clear. Oh, yeah. Certainly that is their but that's the impact of it fit. now. Right. But they're selling, they're selling basically a strategic, like, actual imperative for them, which is the next platform is AR and VR. And the number one competitor for Apple owning the next platform is Facebook. Facebook is investing in that next platform. They

will be the number one competitor for that next platform. Apple knows this, Facebook knows this, everyone else knows. So if you're Tim Cook, you're like, ah, so my number one competitor needs money. And if I just change one thing, they lose a lot of that money. And they can invest, then, like, boom. Like, so it's, it's, it's a very clean fight between the two of them. It's just basically being argued about, like, it's privacy. But the thing, the thing that is bull-h-hift about this is Apple's like, privacy, privacy, privacy, except us.

So Apple's ad system does not have that limitation. So Apple has the ability to use that information however it wants. It's everyone else that it's basically like, oh, you guys, you guys have the privacy, but us, no, no, we have first-party relationship. The only Apple ads I ever see is the App Store. So is that the beginning and end of their advertising forays, or are they also going to put it in, like, news and other places? And maybe they do have it in news. They have it in news already.

They have it in news already. It's in news. There's ads in news. I didn't even notice them. They're going for search. So if you think about basically on your phone, when you use spotlight search, which right now is total garbage and doesn't do anything, like, that is the next big rabbit opportunity for Apple to move over into services. And by bringing a really good as platform into that with good personalization, which they still need to build. they have the ability to become directly competitive with Google and that.

I can tell the story. Now, when I built Mahalo and I had the first version, I'd literally emailed it to Steve Jobs. And I said, Steve, you know, we met blah, blah, blah, weblogs, Inc and gadget. I said, I'm building a search engine. It's combining Wikipedia content with the top 10 search results. So it'll be like search result pages with images and news and content mixed with 10 links.

I sent it to him within 15 minutes. He logged in. And we spent like half an hour on the site checking things out. It didn't never reply to me, but I've always felt that that spotlight search, when you search that and it's like, here's ads, here's web results, that's comprehensive search. If you ever seen Naver or Down in Korea, they were the first to do this, which was like, here's news, here's images, here's MP3s, here's apps, you know, because now they have news stories and they have the app store. They don't have a shopping yet. They don't have shopping yet, but if they were to buy a shopping engine, oh my lord, now they're battling Amazon and Google at the same time. But do you think they can, based on, you know, the sort of chess board of advertising,

do you think they can become a major player in advertising? Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, that's what they're doing. I mean, that's part of, well, Zach knows the story. That's part of, there's a company called Branch and's a founder's company that is building. I mean, they've launched in Asia, so it's hardly private anymore, but they're effectively that for Android. So, yeah, that search window, that pull down search spotlight search could be improved in a big way, right? Like, think about it.

Everything is shifted from, like, web, mobile web, to on device, right? So when you search, you need to search for experiences inside those apps that DeepLink can go directly to them, right? And that's what really matters. What's an example of that? I search for a restaurant in the intermission in San Francisco, and it takes me direct to the Yelp, like, experience. It's not some B.mobile web thing that goes through Google or whatever, through the actual deep link thing where I'm already logged in and can actually replace the order on DoorDash or whatever. It is the natural extension of all of us moving to an app for a sort of environment. So if I were to type Maui hotels.

and I had Expedia, and I had my Bonvoy by Marriott program, and I had the Rich Carlton app, and they all had search results. It would give me the deep link into the app of those pages. So think about now, when you go search those things on your phone, all you get is web search. It takes you to the crappy web apps, and then you're like, oh, I have the bomb way. Open an app. And then you have to, like, if there's a deep link, maybe it takes you to the app on the store,

but it's just a really crap user experience. So the three legs to the stool for search is web search, wow, app search, and then your personal data. So all the data that's in all of your emails, on your calendar, in your contacts, all that data that's currently locked up in the phone, that's like not really available in that search experience, but it should be because if it's like, oh, I'm searching for a restaurant nearby, well, if I happen to go to front porch on a regular basis,

that should be the number one result because I have been the information that's on the phone. I'm starting to see that. I don't know if you guys noticed, but when you pull down the spotlight search to search for an app, the four apps that it shows you, and Apple is terrible at, like, software,

generally speaking, where they're getting better. Those four apps are somehow geo and time coded now in terms of their recommendation. So when I am in Tahoe, it shows me slopes, the ski app. And when I'm near a Starbucks,

it shows me Starbucks, and I'm noticing more and more. And I, that would be, do we think that's, Apple doing that on the phone, where they know you've loaded the apps before in this location, so therefore the time? The data side of the story is actually really important.

And I've written about this for pull request before. This is part of what I did a branch. It's part of if you're between the lines what Apple is doing, right? Like all this talk of distributed learning, federated learning, differential privacy. What all those fancy terms mean is that a lot of the user data will stay on the phone itself, which is actually a better way of doing it. If you think about 20 years of web architecture, you've got a fairly thin, client and then everything talks to the cloud, weird

happens, and then you get shown an ad or an experience, that's all going away. There's no reason these phones are as powerful as desktop machines were, whatever, 10 or 15 years ago. There's no reason why you should be hitting the cloud as fast as networks are to do all this computation. You could be doing on the phone itself, particularly when all the interaction is with

on-device native code, right? Again, why are you hitting the cloud when you're actually running like arbitrary code that actually has local database, local logic? And then that plays into the privacy story, right? And again, and Apple has made lots of public savings about this. Here's real privacy for you. Real privacy is not, oh, I have an opt-out button that maybe

deletes your own links date in the cloud and you don't really have good accountability for it. Here's an opt-out in Apple land. You take this phone and you throw it into the bay, right? The data is gone. It doesn't exist anywhere else. I mean, a lot of it is self-serving, but a lot of Apple's PR is true, right? It is better, actually, to have a lot of the data on the phone or nowhere else because you are in total control of it.

And so that's, which, by the way, also happens to improve their strategic position versus Facebook for the reasons we just discussed. Basically, the algorithm is on your phone made from your behavior and data there. Right. And nobody has access to it. And I think that is I think one of the main, I think where we've come to in analyzing

what's happening in the world and how we're being manipulated by the machine is that there's an algorithm that some group of people build and maintain and then the rest of us suffer through and we don't have any insight into it. We don't have any controls over it. I think

Jack's saying bring your own algorithm to Twitter is like a really interesting concept and what I would love to see is if I'm going to be algorithmally programmed to I would love and if we did do some legislation imagine you open TikTok and they were forced to say every 30 days here is what we think you want here's how your algorithm is programmed

you know pop music rap music you know male female straight, gay, bind, non-binary, whatever. And they just had to disclose to you the metrics of your thing. And then you could either say, don't track these, remove these from my algorithm. The good news is as incompetent as legislation has been in solving these problems. Apple and the private market is actively aggressively attacking this.

And like the great thing is that the genius of Apple has always been to recognize the real, true, clean idea. and then to make a boatload of money basically implementing it. And they appear to be going in that direction in this. And at the same time, kneecapping their competitors, which is, I mean, there's a reason why Apple's the biggest, most valuable company in the world.

I think that was an insight you had that went by very quick, but just to unpack it and restate it, so I have it clearly, Apple is making Apple goggles. This is going to be an AR experience. You're going to see through it. You're going to be able to see multiple desktops around your MacBook Pro floating in the air.

they want to own that. They see AR as the next platform. I think we all agree, A.R. has got a shot at being the next platform. It is. Oculus is pursuing VR and then ultimately AR. They've already announced they'll have passed through. In other words,

you'll look through the goggles. And they obviously are pursuing an advertising-based model. So by Apple knee-capping, Facebook's ability to monetize users in the previous paradigm of social media and the web, that limits their ability to have the cash to compete with the goggles in the next platform shift. I mean, what do you think of this as a deliberate strategy, Antonio?

I think I think I don't know. I think, you know, the whole investment in VR is because to the extent that I understand the man and the company having worked there briefly a while ago, you know, it's his whole goal in life is intermediating human social life via Facebook via whatever form that is, right? And it just so happens that this has been the sort of prism through which we've refracted life for the past 10 years. And if in the future. I hold up the black mirror or the blue mirror in the case of Facebook.

And, you know, if it becomes VR, then he wants to be there as well. So, yeah, no, I think that's that's the battle of the future. And to control the platform because he doesn't like, he currently is like deeply, deeply, deeply infeble because of Facebook's dependence on Apple. And the next platform, if he can control the platform, then he will be the multi-trillion dollar business. And everyone else will be his. Who will win the ARXR race?

Let's rank them. Obviously, Microsoft has HoloLens. Google has announced they've been working on something secretly. Can't count out Google. You got Facebook and you got Apple.

I think those are the four big players. Obviously, Sony did a little bit with their PlayStation at some point. They had an VR. Don't forget back China. China is a real player. And I'm sure there's countless people in China. And they have magically,

I guess, theoretically doing something. Although that seems like a little bit Fugazi. One, two, and three. We're sitting here 10 years from now. Now, we're doing this with AR goggles. I think we all agree that's a possibility that we might be doing this with XR goggles on, do we? Yeah, absolutely.

There's no reason why this screen that you look at has to be like an LCD in front of you. Like, you can be an LCD that projects on your elbow. You buy it, Antonio? I'm wondering if you buy it. 10 years from now, we might be wearing goggles now, some of us, XR goggles. You know, the only VR have tried is actually Facebook's Oculus. They sent me a free headset or whatever, which in free disclosure, like I didn't pay for it, but our full disclosure. dude, I don't even watch TV.

Like, I'm so young. You're like, I don't know. I'm not going to bolt a VR headset to my head. I've already spent too much time online, but, but I do think it is, it's going to be the future for lots of people. Okay, perfect. So we all think that. One, two, and three.

But what were you going to say? Antonio, you want to say something? It's, it's tangential. But to your earlier thing, I just wanted to, your business about like algorithmic choice, I think is an interesting one, actually. And I think I'm going to unironically say, just to throw a bomb into the conversation, Web3 fixes this or at least makes, Enable.

Web 3 totally saw this. So I put all my preferences on the blockchain and then people read my blockchain wallet and suck in my preferences and then makes my... Dan Romero, DWR and Twitter had a good thread today in which he resurrected a thread from two years ago for reasons I know about but I can't say about. And he describes exactly what I'm describing,

which is imagine you had a Web 3 version of Twitter, which I think is what Jack wanted to create with his project but never actually got to, in which you actually do have the sort of data layer existing at a blockchain level. And then at the sort of what's called level two or the application layer, you choose, if you want a Twitter in which Donald Trump doesn't exist, you can pick that. If you want one where it's optimized for rage, you can pick that.

If you want one that it's ordered by time, you can pick that. And so it's one way to decompose the data from the application layer. It's a great idea. Bring your own algorithm. I would love to have to swipe through algorithms. And if I had one, that was like, make me laugh or entertain. me and fill me with joy, you know, and I could have different people, you know, who are just world positive.

I could do that. Or just do one that's like marauding capitalists or do one that's incredibly cynical and memes. You could kind of just swipe through the algorithms to program you based on mood that you want it to feel. Yeah. I mean, I think it's an interesting idea and it would give you that decomposibility you're talking about.

So I think it's, I know that blockchain can be very conflicted. And I think there's probably lots of wild opinions here, but there's one thing I think it would be good at, which is, which is this, among other things. I think it'd be an amazing ads attribution system. That's a whole separate. That's a whole separate topic. This whole debate has been the best example of Antonio talking his own book I've seen yet. Like he literally has inserted.

Is he placing bats? Is he placing angel bats? No, no, no, no, no. It's talking his book. I mean, he literally is like, okay. Oh, the literal book post this. Buy my book post this. Blog posts this.

Subscribe my stuff. Oh, by the way, let's talk about my Twitter. Oh, and then now, um, uh, this is an idea. This is not my literal book. It's not a chaos monkey. Just, but that. How much are you paying for this? Is this a paid?

Is this a paid? Jason couldn't even tell. Jason couldn't even tell. I couldn't even tell us so subtle. I do legitimately, I'm taking an interesting web three, and I do think it's, there's a lot of interesting applications for it in the paid media and the monetization space. You're pitching 10-year-old BC's on what?

What are you pitching into you? So, Jason, there's this thing called Web3. There's this thing called the blockchain. It's going great. Web3 is going great, I hear. Yes. It's the future. Well, the consumer side's a little weak, but we're getting there.

Well, I mean, it's just impossible to use as a consumer, but the idea. but the idea that you could say, here are all the tweets on the blockchain and then my client goes to a blockchain, pulls those down and creates my reality, and nobody has to pay for the storage of them, and they're always there. I mean, then there's really no edit key.

I mean, you're going to have every... I mean, it's immutable, right? And so the idea is if somebody were to dock somebody on Twitter, they will remove that forever. I mean, the issues of privacy and the blockchain, yeah, the issues of privacy and the blockchain are actually quite interesting. there hasn't been that much written about it.

I mean, certainly if you look at like basic blockchain, it's completely, you know, irreconcilable with like GDPR and right to be forgotten and data deletion things. I mean, I'm sure there's people who are clever about Web3 programming than I am would say, well, you could write a smart contract that would be an edit feature, such that NetNet, you see, whatever. I'm sure there's ways to hack around it. But I think there are challenges there.

And I think there's probably, it seems to me like it's two big trains about to crash into each other, eventually Web3 in privacy. And it hasn't quite happened yet, but they're getting close from closer. I've never heard anybody actually bring that up, but there is legislation in the world where if somebody has the right to be forgotten, a story can be forced to be removed under certain circumstances, if it was a false story, for example, or if time period went by, and if it's a user on a blockchain and nobody's in charge, there's nobody to send the legal letter to. Like, who do you send the legal letter to? like the anonymous open source GitHub repository, like please take this down, write code. The thousands of network nodes that have copies of the blockchain all over the world.

Yeah, you're like, okay, we're going to go find out these thousand nodes and take them each down while you take one down, seven more pop up. I mean, it's going to be pretty hard. I think that'll be the regulation moment, wouldn't it? Like if people start posting. At some point we're going to get there. But, you know, the reply from somebody like Chris Dix and A16Z, who's obviously a crypto book, is, you know, can't be evil is better than don't be evil, right? If you make it impossible to actually censor and take down,

then the company will never fall into the temptation to actually do it. There could be, though, a consensus tool built. If somebody were, if the nodes were to agree in some voting, that this content should be taken down because it's damaging for these reasons. They could have a consensus, which means you would just be building a new arbiter based on a bunch of crypto hackers or opportunities. But it'll be more democratic than a closed door conference room at Facebook, say.

Right. Like, you've had these debates for Dow's, like for E&S, which is the Ethereum names. I did a piece for it in Polarrest. The Ethereum name service, it wasn't about censorship, but it was about canceling somebody, a court member of their team, posted some stuff that people didn't like. And he was fired from the sort of real world organizations that ran it. But there was a delegate vote, i.e. you delegate your tokens to delegate to then vote on certain issues. And he did not lose his position inside the team.

because, yeah, yeah, well, these, I've written about this as well. You know, these cancellation coups work because they give the appearance of sort of popular will and popular someroyalry and everybody being in favor of this. In fact, not all, but a lot of the politics are actually very unpopular, right? Sure. I think all of, what, 1% of Apple employees signed the whole petition against me, for example. And so if you actually held things to a vote, most of these cases wouldn't play out like they do, right? And the good thing about crypto is that you can actually hold these votes, which not a perfect

mechanism, but again, it's better than a panic management deciding something behind those doors. I can't disagree with you because if these dows that are being formed, these decentralized autonomous organizations, each dollar of crypto you own in it, each token, is a vote. You can give

your votes to somebody else as a proxy for you. And if all, there's no employee at company where somebody's being canceled in your case, whatever Apple, who's going to say, I would like to go on record and say, I support, you know, what Antonio said in chapter 7 of his book, but they might very much support freedom of speech and your ability to write a book and not be able to make a living,

even though they disagree with what you wrote in your book, or maybe disagree with the 5%. It's not enough to end your career and make you a pariah and not be able to work at a company again in your chosen profession. Right. Yeah, that's the hard part. It's like it's, it's become so challenging to speak out about things that are like maybe be on the borderline. As we see in San Francisco,

like those of us who speak out about the fact that like our city is covered with addicts, like are vilified. We're like, oh, no, you're a bad person to be to say that this is not okay. Gary Tan is a radical Republican operative. Exactly.

Gary Tan. Yes. Gary Tan, the nicest person in the world who just wants our city to be safe so you can walk around it and not have to worry about stepping on needles is being vilified and attacked by like hundreds or thousands of people. And so it's like it's sad. That's one of the many scary things

about our current dialogue that freaks me out. Let's wrap on this. Regulation of crypto in the United States. Obviously, the United States wants to create their own, you know, digital currency. Where do you think this all winds up? What is, because we're not giving away the power of the dollar to a big anonymous system of nodes.

That's not happening. So the end result is super simple. The argument that I make, and it's, you know, like I'm the guy who basically when Bitcoin was 50 cents looked at it and was like, this is not going to work. This is a dumb idea. And these people are all stupid. And as we both know, sitting at the poker table listening to our friends, be like,

this is a good idea. And I was like, no, no, it's a terrible idea. And they become billionaires on it. And I'm not. So don't trust the single thing I have to say about this. But the argument I make is that the Chinese are rolling out a centralized cryptocurrency that will work all over the world. CBBC.

And at the end of the day, it's, It's brilliant because they can say, oh, you want to use our currency to buy drugs? No problem. If it's in other countries, we don't care. You want to buy arms? No problem. If you want to do money or laundering, no problem. And so they can directly attack basically the control over a currency movement that the dollar

system puts in place that the U.S. uses to extend its political power. They can attack that. And at the same time as that, and that truly is product market fit. Like that will be a killer app for many, many people in the world, whether it's remittances or buying arms. Kind of what U.S. dollars are used for. I mean, if you're going to buy arms or sell drugs, you're getting bricks of $100 bills,

but you're saying the digital rem and B will be the digital. And that gives them an attack on the dollar as a reserve currency. Because suddenly you're like, look, I need a cryptocurrency that I can use as the same way that I currently wire money, but without all the restrictions, boom, they have that. And suddenly the Chinese can become, have a vet. You can also pop and skate it in 10 seconds if they don't like what you wrote on your Twitter. So they have full visibility into everything. And so what do you think in their own country as they force all their citizens to use it?

They're like, oh, we have full visibility into all your money, everywhere it goes, everyone who touches it. Like the control that they get as a result of this is like amazing. It's truly a killer app. And so the U.S. government will have to respond to that. They'll have to roll their own central bank digital currency. And all these crypto maximists are like, oh, well, we'll just adopt crypto. And that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. because the U.S. government is not going to adopt a decentralized thing

that enriches all these nerds who got into this 10 years ago. Like, oh, by the way, everyone in the U.S., we're going to move over to this thing, but we're going to go make the Winklevosses more rich. Like, that. That's not going to happen. And so when that happens, that's the next chapter. Treasury is obviously going to create their own version of, yeah, digital currency. How do you think regulation winds up in the U.S.? Antonio, I'm curious?

Well, so I mean, I think Zach is putting his figuring out a good thing, right? I mean, I think this misperception that, you know, Bitcoin is anonymous cash and used by malefactors is kind of wrong and that it's the most traceable thing in the world. The FBI bust people all the time, including these YC founders a few weeks ago who were laundering billions of dollars in crypto. It's the easiest thing in the world to track. And to his point about the, you know, the Chinese government, I mean, believe it not that it matters much economically, but the Cuban government is starting with a digital

currency as well, because they, of course, they want a level of control in which they basically Hoover and dollars, they turn it into this digital funny money. then you use it to buy, whatever. And so, you know, it's not necessarily this, it's not necessarily this limitless, you know, weapon of economic liberation that it can be in some sense co-opted. So I think you have to be very careful, right? Because at some point that crypto world touches the Fiat world, which is where all these know your customer rules kick in, which is where all this defy regulation is kicked in.

And it just becomes the conventional banking system, right? Like, it's not actually this unfettered world. That said, you know, take the example of Ukraine. A lot of people actually who had crypto. managed to get money out because they literally walked out of Ukraine with a USB stick, and it'll be hard to do that with cash otherwise. And so, I mean, again, it can serve that way. I didn't know.

I tend to be an optimist about it. I think it was Punk 6529, who's this prominent Web 3 and on account. He had this viral threat about how crypto is perfect for the United States, right? In the sense that the United States is willing to put up with freedoms like the First Amendment or the Second Amendment that other countries are simply not, right? Like, I think crypto and its full mode is, I mean, the Chinese shut down, mining from one day to the next, right? There's no way you can actually operate the vision of crypto inside China. And, and, you know, we'll, like, we'll see. Perhaps, perhaps the U.S.

will crack down. But I think it's one area where the West can actually dominate because they're, they're willing to put up with that level of freedom that most economies are not. There we go. There we go. Exactly. That's the one. Yeah. I mean, it's, we'd really have to implement this with a terms of service. Like, we're literally going to have a terms of service for money. and the idea that the government has every transaction I've ever done in my wallet with my social security number attached to it and they know where I'm buying coffee and they know what hotel I'm in at all times. I mean, this is insane. Like, are they going to be able to subpoena that data? So if, I don't know, if somebody does a terrorist act in Vegas this weekend, are they going to be able to just go, you know what?

Let's just pull up USDC, the digital dollar. Let's track every dollar. Okay, let's now let's narrow it down. Okay, zoom in on everybody at the Bellagio, zoom in on everybody who came in on this day, zoom in on everybody who bought ammunition at that. They're literally going to be able to use this as like a paper trail, but it's going to be in a server at the government somewhere,

every transaction in the world? Like, where are they going to roll the transactions disappear after 30 days? So I think in the pre-US actually has competition world, which is what we've been in for the last 20 years. It's where the U.S. has felt 30 years, really, effectively invulnerable, and we had all these luxury beliefs about, like, oh, we can make our world however we want, and we can do whatever we want, and there's nothing threatening anymore. I think that argument might have worked. People might have said, oh, no, no, no, we don't want a currency that we don't have control, that we, that the government has visibility into. But I suspect in the next decade, as China uses the ERMB to attack the dollar, And as we basically face more significant global competitive strategic threats, I suspect the willingness to basically accept luxury beliefs are falling away quickly.

And I think what you'll end up seeing is that the only answer for a government, which is about power to have control of, is money is basically centralized control over that money and centralized control over that ledger. I don't imagine we're going to go to a world where we say, oh, we're competing with the Chinese, but like, let's just go to decentralize. and like, let's just push it out. How do we deal with the privacy issues, Antonio, of like a central currency? Well, well, that's easy, though.

I mean, the standard crypto response is that you use private blockchains, right? You use zero knowledge proofs and there's ways of constructing blockchain such that every transaction is not in fact public. It seems like there's been adoption hurdles with that. Like, I think people, I mean, I think this is globally true. People are not as personally interested in privacy as many privacy commenters would have you believe, right? No one.

I mean, Facebook is facing usage headwinds, but it's not. It's not because of privacy issues, right? And I think that's also been true in crypto. But at some point, it'll get to the point where, like, if you're actually getting your income in crypto or you're getting your mortgage in crypto, you're not going to want to have that be public, right? Right. It doesn't have to be public.

It can be a centralized server. Well, I'm even just talking about a centralized server, the government having access to it. That's what I'm concerned about. It's encrypted and we have a court system. So right now, basically, all this information that flows through the internet is on a computer that the government can get access to whenever the fuck it wants, as we know. And they already do. So the courts basically are the only limit on the government's access to that information.

And so the only difference is which server is it on? Is it on AT&T server who functionally is an arm of the government when it comes to surveillance? Or is it on the Fed server? Like the courts can basically say, I'd argue there's a big difference between those. But that's the, again, you don't believe in the Web3 vision. So you're not considering it in your set of use cases. But that's the whole point of Web, it's all architected to be trustless, right?

And I admit, it's a little madman. max and a little paranoid, but in a world in which you trust nobody, not the feds, not the courts of law, not AT&T, how do you actually codify law and the fact that I owe you 100 bucks without relying on those things that you just mentioned? It's a continued extension of a way. It's a dystopian, actually. It's a continued extension of the nerds basically believing in utopia and they love to believe in their libertarian utopias because those are really clean and they're ideologically pure and they're like, I want it to be that way. But my argument is it in the next 20 years, as we face real strategic threats as a nation, there's no

fucking way that we're going to say, oh, by the way, one of the most powerful tools of the government, we're going to basically decentralize that and not have control and visibility into that. And the courts, no one can get access to it. The courts can't get access to it. Nobody can get access to it. I guarantee, I bet you money that will not happen. All right, folks, we'll leave it at that.

What an amazing episode. Thanks so much to Zach Goliaths and Antonio. Garcia Martinez. You can follow Antonio GM on the Twitter. Zach Collius, C-O-E-L-I-U-S, Coelius Capital. Check out the pull request.com by Chaos Monkeys and listen to it and read it if you haven't. It's hilarious and insightful. And stay safe, Antonio. Are you going to go, are you planning on going back or is this a one-time thing? It's tempting. I mean, the party after the Russians are finally defeated is going to be off the hook, I imagine.

I'll go with that. I'm with you for sure. for that. That would be amazing. I think the next questionable place to travel might have to be Israel and the West Bank, actually. That's going to be the next pull request in the field. Oh, yeah.

I mean, you are living your best life. You went from optimizing advertising on Facebook and eating $27 Neiman Ranch hamburgers for free and getting your laundry done. And now you've opted into going to war zones to experience humanity in its most intense spot and buying, I don't know if you talk about living on an island somewhere. Antonio is nothing, if not consistent.

You have talked about this. You live on an island now? Yeah, well, this is obviously a big upgrade to my cushy, you know, tech life that I was hoping to lead at Apple. But, you know, anything for the subscriber curve. Anything for the subscriber curve? But wait. I'll do anything for the growth curve.

You don't live there anymore. You are on an island. Oh, the island. No, no, I sold it. That's what I saw. Literally the day that the whole thing bloop with Apple, I literally closed the sale on the property. Everything I had built and everything for two years is just gone.

That was part of the tragedy of it. All right. There you have it, folks. But that's such a down note. That's such a down note. We should end on an up note, Jason. There was a lot less yelling than I thought than there usually is, by the way, for those. I, you know, I think we actually, you know, getting to the, going, covering a war on a tech podcast is rife with issues.

But I think the, the second, which was still interesting, obviously, since you got the first-hand experience. and then looking at the advertising stuff and the Oculus and that whole chess board, I think, is super fascinating. So people got both here. They got current events and they got deep, deep tech inside. But I think the good news is we have a dictator who has proven that this could be the end of sociopathic dictators. And this cannot be inspiring for the people of China or the management over in the communist Chinese party, the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, they must be looking at what happened with Putin saying, like, do we want to have the West disengage? I mean, it would be harder for the West to disengage from China, obviously.

But every company in America must be looking at what happened just now with Russia and having to shut down their companies in Russia and saying, okay, well, what's the contingency of something happened with China? Okay, how do we make iPhones? How do we, you know, just how much of a hit and revenue does the NBA take? Okay, what happens to Chinese movies, you know, a Hollywood movie is going to China. it's got to be on everybody's mind, right, Antonio? And the Taiwanese, right? Like, how do you fight a war against this massive? What is the public perception of it?

I think this is, I mean, you know, I hope that war doesn't happen, but it does seem like a trial run for that, that sort of situation. And the trial run would be... The invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan will fight and will be supported by the West with a bunch of incredible weapons. And, yeah, I don't know if China is going to get humiliated like Russia. Or the story, the story of the story of.

this war is the power of drones and technology against basically traditional warfare. That's one of the most fascinating parts about the Ukrainians is they've really effectively leveraged like really basic off-the-shelf drones and like really low

power Turkish drones to inflect incredible damage. And so if the Chinese are basically want to go have an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, I mean, boom, you put up a couple thousand drones and like suddenly that becomes really hard in this new

like a warfare environment. So commoditized tech, low cost commoditized tech empowers the guerrillas. The guerrilla warfare folks defending their land. Think of what Taiwan is good at. Taiwan is good at basically building technology. What is Ukraine showing us?

Technology can defeat basically a traditional army intent on invasion. So if I'm Taiwan, I'm like, I'm going to invest every spare dollar I have into drone defense technology to basically defend against drones and to use drones to attack those ships that would like,

an amphibious landing is very hard in the first place. So I think, I think Taiwan's good. I think they're going to... What are you going to think, Antonio, about this? Yeah, no, I mean,

I think it's definitely changed the nature of defensive war. I think, I think you still need conventional weapons in the case of offensive war, and that's why the Ukrainians are begging and pleading for tanks and planes because you have to have a counteroffensive at some point.

You can't just admire the Russians, but I just saw the news today that there's this new, it's a funny name, it's called a Switching, blade system. It's basically a backpack-sized drone, like literally like this big, that you can use to try to take down a tank because it's autonomous and, you know, it's smart and it goes up and hits the turret, much like the javelin anti-tank guided missile does. And so I think it does change

the nature of sort of asymmetric defensive warfare. Yeah, you can literally give people a hundred backpacks and just wipe out a percentage of the tanks owned by the adversary. And you don't need... Yeah, these things are absolutely flying shotgun. They basically will circle and then just drop down on a tank and decimate it. Totally. And so you do the same thing with anti-ship weapons. You basically build a drone that is the same sort of like drone is missile.

and it's not expensive. You could build a ton of them. Like, it becomes very hard to have an amphibious landing if you have thousands of those circling your island because, like, ships are not very strong. So literally the future of warfare is going to look like a Star Wars battle scene

or like a thousand droids or fighting a thousand droids just in the air, knocking each other down. Exactly. But much better aimed, right? The flaw in the Star Wars uniform is that the aiming technology was always really, right? Yeah.

The aiming technology is worse than we have now. And but this is going to totally change them. We can warp across the galaxy, but we can't hit somebody with a lightsaber six feet in front of us. Right. Yeah. Pretty, pretty epic. Wow, look at that switchblade. And the Ukrainians have been amazingly adaptable.

They actually fired an anti-tank guided missile at a ship and actually hit it according to a video. And just today, they fired an anti-tank weapon against a helicopter. They make a Stubna, an actual, a remotely fired guided missile that they can actually, they make these great videos. It looks like a video game. It kind of looks like that. And they actually shot down a helicopter. with an anti-tank missile because they managed to keep a laser on it while I was moving. Just like, yeah.

This is the sort of thing you're, yeah, yeah. I mean, think about just a regular drone, like a DGI drone, hitting a Black Hawk helicopter in the right spot could take it down or going into an engine, could compromise an engine. Like, that's the fear of people flying commercial drones around airports is that, you know, a well-timed $600 commercial retail consumer drone could, could damage a plane. There's funny, one of the deals that I did actually with Chris Dixon is an anti-drone

company called SkySafe. And it's like exactly that, which is like basically like you can use drones to do a ton of damage and you actually need to defend against them as you need to attack. But one of the great articles you should find is there's like this group of Ukrainian hackers who are building DGI drones that will literally carry a bomb and they literally just fly them over and drop them on top of basically trucks. and tanks, and they're successfully wiping out trucks and tanks with DGI drones and, like, a relative, I think I use a mortar shell.

No, imagine you're like a couple of Russian guys who have just been told to go, you know, into Ukraine, and all of a sudden you're sitting there and you see like a drone coming at set, because those things can go 60, 70 miles an hour, and this thing go and they just start smashing into your windshield with a grenade in it. Like, that's terrifying. They drop a mortar. They literally will fly over the top of these trucks with a mortar shell, and they'll, basically will drop it. And there's a whole bunch of really good articles that are coming out about

what the, what the Ukrainians are doing. It's like next generation warfare here. It's pretty cool. Well, let's hope that this resolves and, you know, we can, we can have, you know, dare I say, this one of the few remaining dictators. Maybe he can retire at some point and the people of Russia and Ukraine can be free. We'll be retired. Decisions in life. Yeah. It'd be nice to be retired. I'm using a colloquialism. I'm not saying we should whack anybody, but... The Russians will handle that. They're good at handling these problems.

I mean, that is the one hope. I mean, you got to think Putin is terrified of getting whacked at this point, right? Why does he sit at a table? The table's getting longer and longer? Dude, the guy's going to be behind plexiglass at his dinner table. General is going to be on one side of the plexiglass, and he's going to be like an Uber driver behind plexiglass. Like, what?

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