166 - Leaving Web2 with Sriram Krishnan

Sriram Krishnan is a GP at a16z Crypto and a defector from Web2 to Web3. Formerly a Product Lead at Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, Sriram has seen basically everything there is to see in the world of Web2, and especially Web2 social. He also hosts a podcast with his wife covering tech and internet creators, so he knows a thing or two about the world of creators, internet social platforms, and crypto. ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-sriram-krishnan ------ What’s broken about Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? And how can it be fixed? Can it be fixed? Sriram has many profound ideas. Growing up in a small town in India with little opportunity, Sriram used the internet to change the course of his life. Now he worries that these same opportunities won’t be available for the next generation. He believes Web3 is the only way to keep the internet full of opportunity for the next generations. In today’s episode, we cover why Sriram defected from Web2 to Web3, why Twitter can topple world governments but can’t sell ads effectively, why every social media network has to start with status, how crypto and AI intersect, and much more. ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:14 Eliezer Yudkowsky 8:19 Sriram’s Thoughts on A. I. 11:35 Sriram’s Background & North Star 16:10 The Early Internet Explained 19:54 The Permissionless of the Internet Today 22:18 What Are API Keys? 25:55 Towers vs. Townsquares 28:24 TikTok Hearings & Web2 Solutions 36:13 Twitter 43:25 New Age of Twitter 49:29 Web3 Social Tour 1:02:46 Overcoming Web2 Network Effects 1:20:20 How to Crypto-Pill Elon 1:22:38 Web2 Pausing Web3 Adoption 1:26:32 Future of Creators 1:30:25 Web3 & Creators 1:35:06 Crypto & AI 1:40:33 Sriram’s Closing Arguments 1:42:22 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Sriram & His Wife’s Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@AarthiAndSriram/videos https://www.aarthiandsriram.com/ Sriram’s Twitter https://twitter.com/sriramk Eugene Wei’s Status-as-a-Service https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. What's broken about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and how to fix it with Sriram Krishnan? This is somebody who's been on the inside. He is an internet optimist. He's a guy who grew up in a small town in India with little opportunity and used the internet to change the course of his life. And now he worries that these same opportunities won't be available for the next generation. Sriram thinks Web 3 is the only way to keep the internet full of opportunity for future generations. A few things to take away from this episode. Of course, you know, we're going to talk about Web 3 and the transition

• 0:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  from Web 2 to Web 3. But this is number one, why Sriram defected from Web 2 to Web 3. Whenever there's an API key, something is broken, he says. What does he mean by that? We get into that in the episode. Number two, why Twitter can topple world governments but can't sell an ad? We talk about that. Number three, we ask the question, does Web 2 have to lose in order for Web 3 to win? Number four, we talk about what every social media network has to start with. The cool kids. It has to attract the cool kids, says Sriram. And Web 3 social will never take off until it does. And number five, we conclude by talking about crypto and AI, artificial intelligence, that is. How do they intersect? Sriram has some great ideas about that as well. David, what were the most significant parts of this episode for you?

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  Sriram has an arc to him. He was a child of Web 1, and so he, as a tinkerer, as a coder, as an experiencer of the internet, saw what Web 1 did for him and his life. And it's really, really personal. And that arc has taken him through the Web 2 age to where he is now as a GP of Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on Web 3. And he's made a very big point to say that he has left Web 2. He calls himself a Web 2 defector and now operates in Web 3, even though he does understand the good and real value that Web 2 has provided.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  Still provides to this world. He is now focusing on Web 3 because he sees the starry eyed brightness that Web 3 brings to the world that he saw in Web 1 and is worried that Web 2 is not able to provide that same opportunity to the young tinkers that are growing up in this digital age. And so I think that is a really important lens to view this episode through, a really significant one. If we want to pass the baton of optimism, of internet optimism off to our children, we need what Sriram is doing, investing in Web 3, building out Web 3 structures. We need these things. We need Web 3 to change the paradigm of what social is. And I think that that is Sriram's call to action. That is his purpose upon this world. And I think the listener

• 2:54David Hoffman?

  of this podcast episode will be able to resonate with that as they listen to this episode.

• 2:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  And yeah, David, I think one thing for you and I to explore in the debrief is if this is actually a winnable battle, it feels like the armies of Web 2 are definitely stacked against Web 3 and want to see if we can overcome Web 2's network effect and actually succeed here. So we got a lot to unpack in the debrief. Of course, that is our episode after the episode. And you can join as a Bankless citizen and get the premium RSS feed and get immediate access to that. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Sriram. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Bankless Nation. We have Sriram Krishnan on the podcast. He's a GP at A16Z Crypto, whom you know, of course. And he is a self-described defector of Web 2 to Web 3. We're definitely going to talk about that.

• 3:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Formerly a product lead at Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. He's been all over the place. Sriram has basically seen everything there is to see about the world of Web 2 and especially Web 2 social. That's going to be a focus of today's conversation. He also hosts a podcast with his wife covering tech, internet creators, all sorts of things like that. So he knows a thing or two about the space we are in. Sriram, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  I'm good. I'm sure you get this a lot. A longtime listener, YouTube stalker, first time caller. And I spent last night binging a bunch of episodes as I was preparing for this. And God, I feel pressured to deliver.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? Okay, so tell us, what was, what was your, what episode most resonated with you? What, what did you enjoy hearing?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Well, there are a few which are kind of thematic, I think, what you're talking about. But for me, the standout one from recent times is the one with Eliza.

• 4:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Who is actually not crypto, but I was riveted and mildly jealous as a sort of a fellow podcast host that you folks actually just knocked the ball out of the park on multiple levels. I mean, Eliza, his obvious passion capturing the zeitgeist of the moment. Ryan, your face when he says, we're all going to be dead. And you and, and my favorite part. Oh, yeah. And my favorite part, and I can't do justice to it. And everyone should probably watch it and listen to it. It was at the very end when you go, what is the takeaway for everyone? And he says, and I'll butcher this like, I don't think this will help. We are all going to be dead, but maybe somebody has a good idea. And I think it's just, you know, there's a lot to unpack over there. But I think in terms of have a great episode

• 5:19Speaker 02

  which captures the moment and, you know, gets people talking, you folks knocked the ball out of the park there.

• 5:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sri Ram, do you mind? Because whenever someone brings up that episode, I have to ask, I can't not ask. So what did you think coming out of that episode? Like, I know you're into AI as well. Like, you kind of dabble. What is he right? What's going on? Who should we talk to? Like, I still feel like a tremendous amount of discordance coming out of that conversation. Like, I don't know if he's right or not. We have some episodes coming up, we're going to more deeply explore that, that discussion, have maybe the counterpoint on. But what was your take? I mean, are you just like, left with, with desolation? And like, do you think he could be right here?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So a few thoughts. First, you know, I'm about to turn forty soon. And one of the things I've grown to appreciate is people who believe in a cause. And whether you agree or disagree with Eliezer, and which we can get into, it is obvious that he has cared about this for a very long period of time. And I just find something very inspiring about somebody who does that and has kind of put his life's work and energy into one thing. And so I think that's just impressive, you know, and I think that really comes about. That's number one. Number two is, I would say, I think Eliezer is raising some important questions. The challenge is, it's hard to, and he's obviously a much smarter person than me or a lot of people, spend a lot more time thinking about it for sure.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  The challenge for me is to reconcile, one, the obvious benefits that AI can bring, which anybody who's writing code, who's in Copilot now on VS Code can obviously testify to that. Like, I haven't written production code in ten years and I'm no productive. So I've seen people get health diagnosis, which are maybe saving lives. So the obvious benefits that are possible. With also reconcile the possibility of a long-tailed risk that might kill us all. So I think he's an important addition to the conversation. I don't know how to disprove what he says, too, which always kind of worries me. When, you know, it's kind of hard for me to have a discussion where I'm like, well, how do I actually disprove this? Like, what is the evidence that would change somebody's mind?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  I actually think this also ties into crypto, which we can maybe get into. Because I think one question of which Eliezer, well, one question that comes out of this is, okay, if AI is going to be such a force, who controls it? You know, who, is it going to be the domain of a few small companies which can raise hundreds of millions of dollars or, you know, or have actual resources? Or is it going to be something which all of us can, you know, I'm on a MacBook Pro M2 laptop right now. Can I run some version of it here? Can I partake in it? Can I get credit for the data that goes into it? Which all ties into the crypto ethos. So I think, I would say this, I'm happy that Eliezer exists. I think it's pushing the conversation forward.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  And, but, you know, I don't think this is the end of the discussion.

• 8:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't think anyone can emerge from that podcast episode in denial that Eliezer believes exactly what he says that he believes to the full extent of that. And I think that's actually what made it such a fun podcast episode is like, man, we are speaking right to the soul of this man who really cares about like Tunnel Vision cares about this one thing in particular. So just from a content and podcasting perspective, it definitely like struck the chord there. And so I kind of see a little bit of that in you, nothing to do with AI. But I think I, when you say you tell me that you have a very respect for people that really believe in a cause, I'm guessing that that's because you have a similar cause. And so maybe,

• 9:01David Hoffman?

  maybe a question to you is like, what do you feel strongly about that is your equivalent to Eliezer's AI alignment problem? What's your alignment problem in the world?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  First, we disrespect Eliezer because he's been doing this for 20 years, I think. And I can't claim any such credit. But for me, and just to briefly kind of recap my personal story, because I think this ties into this. You know, I grew up in like a small part of India, and the internet was basically the only reason, you know, my career and pretty much every good thing in my life exists. I met my now wife, who's my co-host, online 21 years ago, because we were trying to build a website together. We were unknown, and thankfully, before the word unknown was a thing. And we met and we've been together for 20 years. I wrote a random blog post which somebody at Microsoft saw, got me and her, hired, flew to the US, and set off like a bunch of career opportunities and things, which honestly, like, we wouldn't be having this

• 9:56Speaker 02

  conversation if the internet and the technology didn't exist. And my childhood was very much writing random code, right? I would write my own browser, my own email client, and just participating in my dinky bedroom. And fast forwarding a few years, I spent the last 10 years, as you alluded to, deep in the belly of the beast of the large social media companies. I'm a nerdy Thanos collecting the infinity gauntlet of social media. I can't repeat, anyway.

• 10:22David Hoffman?

  So how many, how many do you have now on your gauntlet?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I have three, right, like right here, three. But then I stopped, didn't finish the gauntlet. But I spent a few years at Meta, what was called Facebook. I ran a lot of their ad products. I spent a year at Snap and maybe most interesting, I spent a few years at Twitter where I ran home timeline, search trends, explore a lot of things which has algorithms and pixels, which I think really ties into it. And no, I want to be clear, I liked a lot of my time there. I think there are a lot of amazing, smart people who work there. I'm still close friends with a lot of them. But when I left Twitter and I was trying to think of like, one of the reasons I think I wound up leaving was I was not thrilled with what was happening and the state of development and the state of product.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  And there are a few things which I didn't, couldn't clearly articulate. And one in the last two years, spending time with crypto, I've now kind of totally articulated. So I left here and I was trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I met a few folks at A60Z, the firm I work for, Mark, Chris, Chris Dixon, and who heads up the crypto fund here, and Ben. They got me here. And I think a lot of credit goes to Chris Dixon, who I think you've had on the show before. Chris really crypto-pilled me. And this kind of goes into the heart of, you know, why I call myself a defector. Now, my day job is to find work with amazing founders, you know, who build amazing companies.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  That's my day job. But I do think for crypto, everyone has a bit of an ideological calling. I like to think of it as a church, right? Where you have different paths to it. And if you look at crypto, there are very different people who can have different paths. I talked to Balaji, who's a friend, he's been here for eight years. That's not me. Chris Dixon, been here for nine, 10 years. He's involved in Coinbase and Last Minute. That's not me. Others, you know, but hang out in the Cypherpunk mailing list like 15 years ago, right? Like, that's not me either. But my path was I saw, you know, the challenges that centralization of social media can cause. And I was a part of it, right? Like, I worked on a lot of these systems. I have developed a lot of these systems. I was in the, to misquote Hamilton, room where it happens for a bunch of these.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  And, and I saw a bunch of things where I was like, oh, there's some real downsides here. And with crypto, for the first time, I was like, well, there is an Alternate path and and if we don't do something as a technology community, really, the childhood version of me couldn't exist, right? The person who was just writing code. And by the way, I wrote code in 15 years old. I didn't have to get an API key. I didn't have to call up a BD team. I just wrote it on my shitty little computer in in nowhere town in India and like that person couldn't exist. So so I think like a lot of things when we can get into like decentralized social, etc., etc., like are really critical and important for to preserve the future of the internet. So that's my cause and you know, I'm very lucky to have a day job which ties to it.

• 13:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Srinivam, that's really profound. I guess like what you're saying is the internet that of your childhood, the internet that spawned all of this opportunity for you personally and you know, thousands of others, hundreds of thousands of others, this podcast even would not be possible. You're saying that that permissionless internet that you grew up on no longer exists or maybe exists as a shadow of what it once was. And your cause, your L E S R level conviction is to bring about that internet, the internet that you grew up on and pass it to future generations is is that that's kind of what I'm the the spirit of what I'm catching from you. Is that is that right?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And again, by the way, L E S R much smarter, much deeper than me. So I wouldn't want to insult him by claiming to be similar, but I do think my cause is quasi-religious. I'll give you an example, like the very piece of first piece of code I wrote when I was 14 years old was I looked at the HTTP spec and I was like, I'm going to write a web browser, right? And it was a terrible web browser, but guess what? Nobody stopped me. There were like no API keys, no BD team, nothing.

• 14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just like open source tech that you kind of adapted.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, before, I don't think it opened to the word then, right? Like, I think it was like Linux was there. I think free software was a thing. Thanks to Richard Stallman and Erica Sreman and a bunch of those people. But it's the way things work, right? Like, you know, if you wanted an email client, like I used to write GNU email extensions and talk to SMTP and IMAT servers. And that was my email address, right? Like, and I just very bad code. And so that was just the way the internet worked. Uh, I hung out a lot on like Usenet um and so on. And by the way, for me, you know, I didn't speak English very well then. I had really no access to resources. That was very important, like to actually get exposure to Western culture and the internet. Now, fast forward now, um, there is absolutely no way like you can build, uh, let us say, an alternative Instagram client or an alternative TikTok client.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  There is no way you can say, well, I want to modify TikTok and I want to use my own algorithm um and learn something that way. You can't do that. And whether it is for just to play with it, which I think is super important, or whether it because you want to have a choice, whether it is because I think there's an upside and downside discussion. On the upside, uh, it is about like, can you bring in new innovative ideas, right? Like with SMTP, by the way, right? Like Gmail didn't need to go ask someone for permission when Paul Buchheit launched Gmail on April 1st, 2004. They just built it and Gmail changed the world. I mean, I'm very dating myself here, like Gmail changed email that day, right? But didn't ask somebody for permission, right? And then that caused everyone else kind of build cool new things. So imagine if we could take any one of these centralized social media platforms and say, you know what?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  We're going to innovate on top, right? And we don't need to call up, uh, you know, the CEO of TikTok or the CCP or Zuckerberg or Elon or whoever for permission. That's on the upside. The downside, I would say, is uh not getting rugged. You know, when I was, you know, on like, when I was a kid, I didn't have to worry about somebody taking my web browser access, right? But I bet like you folks have experiences, you were kicked off YouTube. And I think if you weren't popular and if you hadn't been able to kind of kick up a shitstorm on Twitter, you would not be able to get back. And even my wife and I, who, you know, I mean, not saying we are like powerful or famous, but we have some say, we worry when we have somebody on the show who talks about COVID lab leaks. And we're like, is this going to get de-ranked somehow? Like, don't really know for sure, right? Um, and are we going to get removed?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  And there is this kind of this fear which happens all the time. So I kind of think it was both the upside, limiting innovation, which used to happen a lot. On the downside, you know, you could get rugged, deplatformed, canceled, removed, banned, suspended, shadow banned, that's a zillion words, any point in time. So that's what, you know, I think that's what I want to fix.

• 16:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ryan called this the uh, the permissionless internet is no longer available to uh your, your child self. If your child self was around today, the, the words that came to my mind are um. DeFi and NFTs and blockchains are these like, it's a sandbox. It's a sandbox for developers that, you know, a strapping young imaginative kid could come in and start to build, build a sandcastle. And that's really why, why this world of crypto is so cool is that it's just this endless canvas for people with imaginations to start to, to paint upon. And especially young folk who have like the imaginations and are no longer bounded by adulthood, have the best like opportunities to, to create something new.

• 17:43David Hoffman?

  And so the, what I'm hearing from, from this part of the story is that just, there is no, there's not much canvas left in the world of Twitter or Instagram or, or Facebook. You're kind of already given your confined box of what you can paint and how you can paint and what, what your tools are. And I think what I'm hearing, Sri Ram, from you is that if you were a kid these days, you just don't have as much creative outlet in the world of developing something or just being present online. How do these words resonate with you?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I think it's profound. I think whenever there is an API key, something is broken. It because it means that somebody can, you need to ask someone's permission. I think the word kids and playing with it may undersell how important it is for just kind of harnessing the collective human creative spirit, right? Like you want, you know, young people anywhere to go play on stuff, play on it. You never know what's going to break out. You never know what's going to be a hit. But that's sort of the magic of the internet and computer science and we all kind of grown with that. So for me, right, like some of the questions I get, and I'm sure you get like as a crypto person now is, what is the use case of crypto, right? And I always try and split this into two parts that I'm like, well, these things are busted

• 18:59Speaker 02

  in the way centralized platforms work today. And we can talk about like, for example, even last week, the whole TikTok hearing was a kind of an example of this, right? And I think crypto, and there may be other solutions which we can talk about, but I think crypto is an ideal answer to these problems. But let's just kind of agree on where the problem exists because I think the problem is profound. And maybe if I can't even sell you on crypto, that's fine. But I just want like people everywhere to be able to write code on their laptop. You thought you need to ask for people. Let's just agree on that.

• 19:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, just for, I remember in my early days of my crypto journey, I actually didn't understand what an API key was. And, and understanding what it is now, I do, I do get what you mean when you say if something turns into an API key, we've lost something. But can you just really unpack that one, just to make it like an explain like I'm five metaphor?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So, so kind of history lesson here. Like, if you look at the way the 90s, the original internet worked. And by the way, a lot of this is still from Chris Dixon, his episode and other podcasts, he's great about this. So credit to him. A lot of the internet was protocols, right? HTTP, SMTP, IMAP. And the way it kind of worked is, you know, there was a protocol spec, there were a bunch of servers, and as long as you kind of adhere to the spec, anybody could issue a request over TCP IP over the network and talk to it and just kind of make it work. Sometimes they need payment, you know, sometimes you need, I remember once paying for a Usenet server, which was kind of a big deal when I was kind of a random person, kid in India. But like, you know, usually anybody could go ping a server. Now, somewhere along the last 15 years, that changed.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  And you had the world where, well, a lot more of these things are going to stay behind a walled garden. And, and to get access, you need to get an API key, which basically means that you can now issue a request to the server using the key, and you have to play within a certain sandbox. Now, I don't want to, my choice of language to somehow say that these people are evil or doing bad things. It's just that the world moved to the cloud, the world moved to, like, the few things that happened. One, the cloud happened. So you had a lot of things happening behind data centers. Two was, a lot of these services started competing with each other. And I was at this, I was some of these large social media companies, and you know, well, if I have a network effect, I don't want

• 21:07Speaker 02

  my competitor to steal my network effect, right? So if you were, for example, in the early days of Twitter and Instagram, they could both log into each other's service using each other's ID. And you could say like, I want to follow all of my Instagram friends on Twitter and vice versa. And definitely the vice versa was true. But then people like, well, we compete with these folks, we don't want that. So you started having like more restrictions. The third part of it was, you know, a lot of people are searching for business models for a long period of time. And Business model which a lot of these internet companies want upon. And one I know, I think you folks are not fans of, but I am a fan of because I used to work on this was ads. And but if you, and I, by the way, I have a whole other theory about why actually ads is not as maybe as awful as some people think they are.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  But if you go on, if your business model is ads, you need to control the pixels on which people experience your product. Because that's where the ad shows up. So you can't actually let someone build an alternative client. Because the first thing they'll do is have a product where you can have ads. The next time you talk to Nike or Procter and Gamble, you'll be like, hey, I paid a lot of money, but a lot of people there are not seeing my ads like WhatsApp, right? Like, so it just breaks the system itself. So a bunch of these things happen. None of these folks were evil. It's just like, you know, they're all amazing smart people. It's just the way the internet got built out. But as over time, you know, the sandbox that you could play got really restricted. Like, I remember like F8, the Facebook conference, maybe the first one, maybe 2008, 2009. You could do a lot of things with Facebook at the time. You could publish things on anyone's feed. You could read their friends' contact.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  If you go try today, it's much more locked down, right? There's a bunch of reasons. There were privacy controversies, there were competitive issues, the ads issues. It's very limited and you really can't build an alternative Facebook client today. And I don't think TikTok even has an API which lets you do that. So that's what I mean by an API key, where you had this pattern where what used to be, hey, let me just go ping a server, I can do whatever I want. It's now like, well, I'm going to have this particular rails on which I can play, which is a lot more controlled than it used to be.

• 23:01David Hoffman?

  The metaphor of a hierarchy or a tower versus a town square comes to mind. Where in the early days of Web 2, all of these Web 2 protocols were talking to each other. Just, you know, sending around messages, they were integrating with each other. But the, what you, the story that you described kind of progresses from a collaborative and open environment where Twitter and Instagram can share their social graphs. But then all of a sudden, the, the, the forces set in, the forces that, you know, control the world, the competitive forces, capitalistic forces, uh, set in. And all of a sudden, the town square goes into a hierarchy, goes into the, the tower. Uh, and all of a sudden, that's kind of where we find ourselves today, where each of one of these, uh, Web 2 gargantuan is a siloed tower

• 23:43David Hoffman?

  that doesn't want you to transcend across the town square to a different tower.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Which is why I think when we talk about anything to fix this, like the incentive structure from day zero is super important, which is how do you align incentives to stop centralization, to stop the tower? Like, for example, I was watching the TikTok hearings, the TikTok CEO last week, and we can even get into, one thing which struck me was how similar the hearings are when every social media CEO shows up for one of these. It is always, and by the way, obviously, the issues of CCP in China are very different from, say, what Zuckerberg had to do, but it's very similar, like, hey, what are you doing with my data? How do I know who got censored or deplatformed? Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. How do I trust you, right?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  And then, you know, you can't, they usually say a bunch of things, but there is really no easy way to validate, to prove, or disprove it. Like, for example, right, like, I, I don't think there's any data which comes out where you can prove definitely, or disprove definitely, whether the CCP is actually having influence. And so one of the things I, you know, I'm hoping that we can fix as a technology community, and, you know, spoiler, I think crypto has a answer to this, is how do you have things which are verifiable, where we don't have to take someone's word for it, or we don't need to send, you know, like a legal team in, but anybody sitting at home can prove, oh, you know what? I can see how the algorithm works. I can see what the levers that were pulled. I can see who was shadow banned, banned,

• 25:17Speaker 02

  and I can now make up my own mind whether that was valid or not. And by the way, if I don't like it, maybe I can build my own algorithm or my own client in an ideal world. So I'm kind of struck by how similar these testimonies and hearings are.

• 25:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, you know, I was thinking we could start with Twitter, but actually, I want to reverse that and maybe start with TikTok as a case study of this, because I think we're, you know, bankless listeners, having heard some content in the past and being in crypto, I mean, we believe you, Sriram, right? Like, somehow the internet has taken a wrong turn. We've, we've got a whole bunch of API keys that can be rugged instead of like rugless protocols that the original internet was, was really built on. I want to go to the TikTok hearings, though, because I do think that is a...

• 26:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is such a good example of what's going on. And I did see, I don't know anybody who listened to the entire hearings. That's a lot, but I got clips, I got snippets. And every time I listen to something where it's kind of Congress or leaders of the US government grilling some sort of social media CEO, you're right, it's the exact same conversation. I feel like pulling my hair out every time I listen to it because it's always a, how can we trust you, right? That's what Congress says. And then the CEO says, you could trust us because XYZ. And they say, but how? You've failed in like all of these ways. And the CEO says, no, we're not really failing. You can trust us because of all of these things and here's what we'll do differently.

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just, I just want to go back and just say to them like, guys, why don't we solve this at the protocol level, right? Like rather than this like, I don't trust you, you know, you don't trust us type of relationship where you've got the incentives completely aligned. Why don't we do something like decentralized identity? Imagine that. Like imagine we could bake in like privacy at sort of the protocol, the root layer. We didn't even have to worry about these types of conversations. I feel like regulators always want to hit this with regulatory cudgel. Like even the example of, I don't know if you've seen the Restrict Act, for example, right? So this is sort of the answer to TikTok and there's this idea, I don't know if it's

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  going to pass actually, but it seems probable, maybe likely, that the US is actually going to ban TikTok, right? Whether you think that's a good idea or a bad idea, or where you sit on kind of whether CCP is surveilling our data or not, like no company should have, not domestic companies shouldn't have the ability to do this. So I guess I want to get your kind of take. What do you think? Why are these social media CEOs always on the hot seat, right? How can we actually solve this problem at the protocol or the root level? If you want to use TikTok as an example, or you know, something like Twitter, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and what's going on with Cambridge Analytica and all of that? I mean, it's the same example over and over again, but how do we get out of this?

• 28:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do we solve this at the protocol level?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so there's a lot to unpack there. First of all, I think if there's anybody regulator watching this, you know, my forward running sort of frustrating thing I want to say is like, hey, let us make up our own minds for ourselves, right? Because every testimony is a version of We think you did things to people that we don't agree with, right? Whether it's the Chinese government impacting us, whether it is Twitter maybe disproportionately going after people on the right or on the left, or Facebook was similar. It's always some version of the same conversation. And the first thing I want to come, and you can, by the way, smart people can, reasonable people can disagree based on evidence on each of these, but that's besides the point.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  The first thing I want to say, well, let's start with help letting us make up our minds for ourselves, right? So what if there was a world where, and let's, I think the protocol, let's imagine sort of a sliding scale of verifiability and decentralized trust, right? Let us start with, let's even set aside protocols for a second. Imagine if you are Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok right now, by starting tomorrow, we said that you have to publish a few things. Number one, you have to make your algorithm open source, which I think is very doable, because I've seen it on the inside, it's very doable. So, and a lot of smart people on the internet who can break it apart and poke at it.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Number two, every single time you make an account action change, right, either explicit or implicit, you are going to say somehow commit that you're going to make it public. So for example, when Bankless was taken off YouTube, that was easy because that was explicit, you knew. I think the more insidious ones are when you're subtly de-ranked, shadow banned, if you want to use that phrase, because you don't even know what happened. You just think, maybe my episode was shitty, but actually turns out it was triggering something and you don't know, right? I think, so having every one of those actions published publicly, kind of like a court of record, I think is super difficult. Third is a right to recourse. What you folks did and what I do, if something happens, is like we are on Twitter or we call up a friend and we're all lucky sometimes, I have influential friends who can help us.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  A lot of people don't, but a recourse where you can say, hey, I want to see the evidence against me and I want to appeal it. And I think if you just get these, and these are, by the way, very possible with low amounts of work by everybody, like that's kind of just a good first step. And sometimes, by the way, when I talk to people, they don't I don't actually understand why this is necessary. They're like, well, isn't this for like the crazy people on the left or the right who are saying very provocative things? Like, this won't matter to me. It's kind of like one response I often get. Like, I have a fun story from inside Twitter, um, which is, uh, you know, uh, when I was at Twitter, I ran, uh, you know, I headed up the product team for like trends, moments, a bunch of stuff on Twitter.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  And, uh, one day I woke up and I saw a news story which had, uh, I mean, I like the details, like a popular Hollywood actor. And he was, he was just cast in the movie. And the story was, well, there was a controversy about why is this person getting cast in this movie? And maybe he shouldn't get casted, right? Now, you might be wondering what does this do to Twitter? Now, the thing which struck me was a bunch of publications cover the same story and they all had the same two tweets embedded. And none of those two tweets were from interesting people on Twitter. And I was like, that's odd. Like, how did that happen, right? Like, you know, uh, why is this same two tweets showing up every publication? So I did some digging. It turns out that Twitter has a trending algorithm. The trending algorithm basically tries to figure out like when treats, uh, when popular tweets break out, spot it and make it trend.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Uh, but if there's not enough of popular tweet, there was a bug where even an unpopular tweet could actually trend, um, in, um, at the middle of the night, kind of a random bug. Now that happened at, say, four AM New York time. By five AM New York time, there was a moments team editor who basically promoted that into a moment, which makes league, shows up as a big square on, uh, on Twitter. By seven AM, eight AM, a bunch of, you know, um, people in the media industry woke up and they were like, hey, that's the thing. We should talk about it. And sort of just given that Twitter was in the memetic landscape, you mean this story into existence. I know it is actually a real story or real thing, right? And, you know, and I, I always kind of bring up this example because kind of a funny example, it's not very serious. But you can imagine much more serious versions of this in political discourse, all right? So it's kind of trivial, but also important.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  And I saw, which is why I think like whenever we have algorithms, publishing how these algorithms work, publishing how these decisions work is super important. So if nothing else, even if nobody buys into crypto or protocol, if any, if a big tech company was saying, hey, I want to publish this option public tomorrow. That's a good first step, right? Now, ultimately, and I mean, I work on crypto as a spoiler, what I think the right long-term path is to have this. Actually be decentralized and you know, and I know there are there are kind of a lot of midpoints. I think things like Mastodon or other projects are in a mid kind of a midpoint there. But you know, I'm a you know, crypto maximalist and I'm like a big and by the way, full disclosure. We are investors in a company called Farcaster, who you had on the show. So I think crypto and doing things on change is the right answer.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  But I think there's a lot of steps intermediate which should help build up trust and legitimacy.

• 33:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think one thing I would add to your three point list, which which I totally agree with is a some ability to exit the existing system.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if I could like if an algorithm or or a client or say that a platform that I was locked into, say a Twitter or something wasn't working for me. There's no ability for me to kind of leave with my social graph, with my followers, with kind of all of the the work that I've invested inside of that platform. And it really does begin to feel like, oh, I'm just a surf working on somebody else's feudal land. It's like, I don't actually own any property here. And this is what what what crypto and I think digital property rights purports to to help solve. And I think we'll talk more about that. We'll get to that story later, but I want to park on Twitter because you have some unique experiences around that. And of course, Twitter has, you know, has it ever not been in the news? It's always been in the news.

• 34:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  In fact, it's been in the news a little bit more than usual. Crazy, right?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  It's like you're in the eye of a hurricane and you are somehow causing the hurricane every single day.

• 34:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're causing it.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  And and the weird thing about working at Twitter is the most important people in the world yell at you, but using your own product, right?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  People hated Bankless, but they use your own show to hate you.

• 34:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  They started creating podcasts on the Bankless feed about how much they hate Bankless. That'd be amazing.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's super weird. Like, I remember like five years ago, when Twitter launched the algorithm for the first time, which actually really saved the company. Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame wrote a poem and made R I P Twitter trend all on Twitter, right? And you know, and there's a part of us who are like, great, you know, like, that's good feedback and maybe not. Part of it like, dude, like you're using your own platform. Like, come on here, like, give us a break. So anyway, yes, you're always.

• 35:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, okay, so I want to get your take on then Twitter specifically because you're right, it not only is in the news, but it makes the news. It's like the meme layer, the narrative layer of like being on Twitter and seeing how this kind of works. I just feel like Twitter sort of starts the story and starts the narrative and then the rest of media, it kind of picks it up. So it's almost at the base layer. It's like the layer zero of all of this. But what's your take on Twitter right now? So is Twitter broken? Do you think Elon is on a path to fix it? Is this going to require some sort of deeper revision? How does Web 3 fit into all of this? And if it's broken, how? I just unloaded a whole bunch of questions on you. So like, pick that up wherever you'd like. But maybe

• 35:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  the question of is Twitter broken and how do we fix it is what I'm asking?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  So first of all, so let's get brass, basic facts, right? So I worked at Twitter for two years. I had like a bunch of product leadership type roles. And I think what you're alluding to is about four months ago, when Elon bought Twitter, not that he needs some help, but I was briefly involved, helping him, you know, I knew where the bodies were buried. And you know, kind of hung out at the office for a couple of weeks. By the way, I think people think it's because Asics invested. That's not totally the case. It's actually because I just wanted to help Twitter. I've always been a fan of the product. So that's number one. I think your point about layer zero is interesting because I always say Twitter is a memetic battleground. It is upstream of culture. One of the running jokes inside Twitter was Twitter can topple world governments but can't sell an ad. And

• 36:39Speaker 02

  so I think there's some truth to it because if you can win the memetic war on Twitter, by which I mean you start off a conversation and have people discuss it, right? And what happens is when you start off a conversation, there are a lot of opinion makers, right? It could be journalists, it could be politicians, it could be athletes, it could be notable people like you, you know, all now latch on to it and you mean something into existence, which by the way, folks in crypto kind of really understand the memetic landscape there. But I think it's true in pretty much every domain. And it is truly a battleground. There is bloodshed, people get like deeply hurt and you know.

• 37:21David Hoffman?

  It hurts sometimes.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  It does because the stakes are high, because the stakes are really high, like you know, if and for example, there, you know, I'm sure that I've been into our elections, which have been decided because of Twitter. And when I say that people like, people often go, well, Steve, I'm here to get out more. But I say, listen, you know, what happens on Twitter sets the narrative. And I go back to my story where I was like this actor almost lost this movie within a few hours due to sort of a random confluence of people and algorithms, right? So there was actual real world impact. Uh, and so, uh, and I, that's why like foreign governments, there have been a lot of interesting stories of trying to battle on Twitter to kind of control the memetic landscape. So it is a battleground and it is at the head of the, the landscape. So, so that's just Twitter, um, and, uh, and it's a service I love.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Uh, I've been, it's given me so much personally. Forget the fact that I worked there, I've met so many people. I think, Brian, I probably slid into your DMs like a year ago and you responded to me and you're kind enough. And I've met so many acquaintances, I wouldn't have my job now if it weren't for Twitter. And I just want to see it do well, so I'm a fan. Is Twitter broken? Absolutely not. And I'll tell you how all of us, including me, are probably spending as much time on Twitter as we used to. Anyone, uh, who said they're going to leave Twitter hasn't. They're probably still on Twitter, uh, that's kind of like point that out there. And, uh, it is still the place that I see, uh, setting up, uh, you know, influencing the conversation. Now, uh, either, uh, I think I'm also, you know, uh, you know, like, uh, this is not like a secret. I'm a fan of Elon.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I think one of the things Elon doesn't credit for is in a very short period of time, he has done two things that a lot of other people in the tech industry have followed. I'll give you two examples. Number one, right, um, you know, he has pushed Twitter towards more transparency, right? And more, let's call it egalitarianism. He made Twitter verification, the blue check, uh, which used to be sort of this opaque process. And I'm sure all of us have, you know, DM'd a Twitter employee or an Instagram employee, be like, dude, like, I'm famous, like, get me a blue check. Uh, and he said, it's, everyone has to pay eight bucks. And when that first happened, there was a lot of uproar, right? There are a lot of people who are deeply unhappy, who are really unhappy with it. Because honestly, I think there are some legit criticisms, but also because they just didn't like Elon.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  But now, let's look at last month, Meta just did the exact same thing on Instagram, right? So Elon, I think, shifted the overturn window on what is possible with verification. It was kind of like an opaque process of like, hey, are you somehow notable as determined by the mainstream media? To like, anybody can get it, it just meant to show that you are who you say you are. That's number one. The second one is doing more with less. Elon is the first person kind of like, hey, let's go hardcore, we need less engineers, etc. And he has a very certain style of how he does it. But then, look at every news from every tech company in the last, I'd say, three, four months. Everybody is trying to do more with less. Now, they may not do the same style, they may not be doing it on Twitter. But they're all, I think he shifted the overturn window for people to follow. Now, are there challenges?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yes, right? Like, I think, you know, I see them as much as this, but long term, you know, the guy lands rockets. So I'm a fan of what he can do on Twitter. So that's on Twitter. But, so anyway, let's just kind of leave it there. So I'm a fan of like what he's doing on Twitter.

• 40:31David Hoffman?

  The future of Silicon Valley is like social media towers, we'll call them towers. One of the reasons why I was cautiously optimistic when Elon Musk bought Twitter is more or less for the reasons that you just left us with. Like, the guy can land rockets, the guy's a pretty smart guy. Maybe he's delving into a new part of the world that he doesn't really have the same skill set for, but he's still a problem solver.

• 40:55David Hoffman?

  Simultaneously, we're exploring the frontier of Web3 social. And so I kind of few, there's three different things. There's Facebook, Instagram, the towers of old, if you will. Instagram is 13 years old, Facebook, I think, is almost 20 years old, Twitter is almost 20 years old. And then there's Twitter, and the reason why it's in a different category is because Elon Musk just bought it. And so, you know, fresh eyes, fresh leadership, fresh, fresh philosophy. And then there's the Web3 social media frontier, brand new innovators, brand new leaders, brand new founders with a brand new user base. And so we have like three different categories of social media platforms. And one of the reasons I'm, again, cautiously optimistic about Twitter, it was kind of a disaster in the first few months after Elon bought it,

• 41:39David Hoffman?

  but it's been on the uptrend ever since, is that like... Somebody with fresh eyes can come and re-architect an old archaic social media platform, again, archaic, 15 years old, an old archaic social media platform into the modern age, at least by just injecting new energy with it, which is the same thing that Web 3 is doing. And so, Srinivast, I don't know if, how well you can feel comfortable trying to put yourself into the shoes of Elon Musk. Those are very uniquely shaped shoes to feel, to fill. What if he's trying to turn an old ship into a rocket ship with Twitter? What do you think he's trying to do? What is this new age of Twitter? Or new age of social media platforms? If we're taking the old ones and trying to make them new again? What do you think he should do?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  A few thoughts. First of all, I can't speak for Elon, but one of the good things about Elon is he tweets and he says pretty much everything in public. So pretty much what you see is what you get with him. So a lot of this is very public. I think he's trying to do a few things, right? You know, one, you know, he's trying to, you know, ship stuff again. Twitter was a company, which we can get it for a lot of reasons, wasn't shipping product. And, you know, one thing you have to get to Elon is he's shipped a bunch of features. Maybe, you know, you can agree, disagree of how good they are or where they work, but he's got some stuff out of there and he's just trying to get product momentum going. And some of these are new, right? Like, you know, and some of these shift to the over 10 window. Like, like I said, the verification feature, the for you tab, et cetera. And again, you may not agree with him, but they are new.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  I think second part is he's trying to build a stable business out of it. And one that is just not totally supported by ads. So if you look at, say, I forget the official term for it, but the yellow badges for companies or the way API access work. He's just trying to, you know, make sure Twitter captures the value. That's on one side. The other side is I think he's trying to make Twitter more open. And this has nothing to do with it being a good, just a good business. But I think he believes in the way it should be run, which is that's why the Twitter files happen. That's why, you know, he said that he's going to open source the algorithms that run Twitter. And that, I think, really pushes into some of the discussions on Web 3, which I want to kind of get to a little bit. So one of the most maybe underappreciated things about Elon and Twitter is

• 43:48Speaker 02

  for the last two years, if somebody complained about censorship and big tech. You generally assume they were on the right, right? Like, you know, pre Elon and Twitter, right? And you know, there's kind of this whole cluster of apps. I think what is called Parler was one. There's a bunch of others, you know, which is all of the idea like, hey, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera, have no place for us. And we want to get, let's just call it, maybe right-leaning folks out there. One thing I saw Elon Twitter is a lot of people on the left are now like, hey, we don't like centralized controls either. So that is now like bipartisan agreement that maybe we don't want one set of people to run things. And I just find that like very amusing.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  And one of the profound things about Web three and decentralized social is, which I hope people realize is like, you don't have to like the guy running it. And you know, you know, there is nothing about Ethereum where you have to like Vitalik personally, or what he says, or what he stands for, because the legitimacy of Ethereum comes from what is provable. So one of the things I hope people take away from this move to decentralization is a world where you know what your rights are and they are provable. And it's not about whether the people running it agree with your point of view or not, which I think is kind of like a profound shift. But I do want to point out like the bipartisan thing is kind of amusing.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Now, what has happened, I think, post Elon is people want less centralized control. But I would say this can be an explosion of people trying out different ideas, which I love, by the way. I'm a technologist at heart, like I'm a VC, but I'm really a nerd. So I'm all in favor, like people trying out different things and writing code and building stuff. That's great, one of it, right? So I think one class of people, one, you know, set of people are like Mastodon, for example, has gotten, you know, a lot of usage or in a lot of like, you know, attention over the last few months, which, you know, I like, I think, you know, I'm obviously a crypto maximalist and, you know, but I just like that people are getting used to, hey, maybe, you know, I don't want one centralized set of people making all my decisions.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  I want to control my own destiny and maybe the group around me should set my own policies. So that's one. There are others, for example, like, you know, Jack Dorsey has been talking about Noster quite a bit. I haven't played with it, but. That's the thing. And but on the, you know, more like kind of blockchain decentralized side, there have been lots of projects, right? Like there's Lens led by Stani. And then the one which I know just, you know, full disclosure, the one I'm probably most familiar with, because we invested is Dan Romero's Farcaster, which I actually think is, you know, I'm biased, but it's kind of the right long-term reason. But honestly, I'm just happy that people are kind of like going down this path. Because I think if you go down this idea maze, eventually you land at crypto. So I'm just kind of happy they're kind of being nudged down this maze.

• 46:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you give folks like a quick tour of the maze of what's what's happening in Web three social? I mean, we can we can loop this back to Twitter a little bit later. But I'm just you mentioned some different, I would call these like decentralized social media types of of projects. Mastodon is one, Jack Dorsey's project. And I can't recall the name off the top of my head, but you can give us that. And then also something like a Lens or a Farcaster. Walk us through these. What are the most interesting projects? What angle is each of them them taking on it? And why haven't they hit like critical mass yet? They haven't really taken off, even though they're sort of in this maybe early phases. And some people listening will have heard of them. Just give us give us a tour here.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Good question. So I think they all have some elements in common, right? Which is, you know, they're all kind of a reaction to, hey, we don't want one set of people making all the decisions for an entire billion plus people network, right? And one set of people could be Elon, could be the CCP, could be Zuckerberg. It doesn't matter. I just don't want like one set of people. I want to control my own destiny.

• 47:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sri Ram, what are those decisions too? It's like moderation, like content moderation decisions? Or what other types of decisions are our social media, you know, centralized controllers making?

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Good question. Let's start with the basics. You call it digital property rights, right? Like, can you create an account? Can you keep your account? And Vitalik had a good phrase, I'm stealing this from him. Who can betray you, right? Like, you know, who can have an agenda against you and betray you? Which I thought was like a profound way of putting it. And so that's the basics, right? Like, you know, today, if, you know, the new YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, who's an amazing, wonderful human being, I generally mean that, if he really decides he doesn't like you, he can probably get bankless removed of YouTube, right? So that is just basic power, right? And we can call it rug pulling if you want. Then, on top of that, I think there is, you know,

• 48:40Speaker 02

  control over what can be said and not said, one upside and the downside. So on the downside, I would say things like, are you going to get cancelled? Sorry, a coin gets suspended for saying something, right? And some of these are obviously bad things. Like, if I say like, hey, I'm going to come to your house and do some terrible thing to you, I should obviously get suspended. Sometimes it gets much dicey. Like, if I say, hey, you know, this is where I think the COVID virus came from. There was a pandemic and everyone got suspended. So that's the downside where people get suspended. The more insidious ones are, which I think is in the broad category of content moderation, like controlling what people can't say. The more tricky one is what gets amplified, right? Like, which is, you know, like, for example, something that shows up in YouTube trending,

• 49:24Speaker 02

  or Twitter trending, or TikTok has a version of that, injects something into the memes where everyone reacts to it. They create reaction videos, it becomes a thing, people write press about it. You can subtly change who gets more amplification and less amplification, right? And it's very much a gray area. So those kinds of decisions are also run by a central team. By the way, all these are usually done by smart people with very noble intentions. But these are the kind of decisions that a centralized company does every single day. Like, this is happening every single day at Facebook, at Google, at TikTok. It's just the nature of the beast. And when you kind of push into decentralized social, I think every one of these elements, there's a level of democratization which comes in, which is instead of a centralized set of people in San Francisco, maybe there are others.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Maybe it is you, the individual, or some set of people that you're trusting or delegating legitimacy to has control over these decisions, right? So let's set aside crypto for a second. And if you look at Mastodon, the way it works is you sign up for a server and the server admin kind of has power over who gets to create an account, who can say things or not say things, and they run the server. And then there is a protocol by which different servers can talk to each other, right? So in some ways, this is kind of like one step from, say, the Facebook or Twitter, because the server owners really control what can be said, can't be said. So instead of the Mastodon CEO deciding things, for example,

• 50:51Speaker 02

  it can be the server owners, right? And I think there's a lot of good things there. And, you know, look, I'm a fan of people trying things. But I think like one couple of challenges which arise are you can still get drugged pulled by the server owners at some point in time.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  There is really no incentive for the server owners to talk to each other. One of them could just become large and, you know, become a great product by themselves. But if they do, more power to them. But that kind of goes against the spirit of decentralization. And the way I understand it, like, you really can't take your username with you. Like, if your server kicks you out, you're gone from Mastodon. It doesn't solve your, hey, can I take my graph and go keep it with me as a sovereign entity everywhere, right? So it does have some issues, but you know what? Like, I'm a fan of people trying things because you get some elements and you're asking the right questions. And so I think, you know, so that's Mastodon.

• 51:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  And who are the server owners in Mastodon? Can anyone sort of spin up a server? Is at least a permissionless to become a server in Mastodon?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, anybody can spin up a server. It's like a kind of like Lampstack thing that anybody can run. And I believe there are a few which are really popular, like the Mastodon company itself runs a really popular one. Some people have famously tried to run servers and had bad experiences. Like, for example, the Financial Times tried on a server and they had, I think, like a some bunch of bad behavior and they spun it down. Server owners can also decide, you know, which servers can talk to each other. Like, hey, I don't want people from this server because I don't like them or whatever. And they can kind of like figure out like How somebody federates, but the sovereignty of Mastodon usually lies in the realm of the server owners, which I think is kind of an interesting point to make. Now, I would contrast this with, let's take, let's take Farcaster, right? Like, because that's the example which, you know, I think I'm most familiar with.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  In Farcaster, first of all, your, I just want to put out this disclaimer one more time. I'm an investor in Farcaster, so I am conflicted. But the way it works is your username on Farcaster belongs to you, right? It's kind of a sovereign thing. It's a, you know, an NFT on chain, so it belongs to you. Like, you know, Dan Romero, you know, if he really hates you, like, can't really take it away. And I think-

• 52:58David Hoffman?

  It's one of the primitives of Farcaster. It's like the basic bare bones thing. Like, this is where Farcaster starts. You get an NFT that is your username, and then the rest of Farcaster grows from there.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely, right? Like, it's kind of clearly the first step. It's not a mainnet yet, but it will be, and, you know, but that's really the thing. And once it's yours, it's yours, right? Like, and all of the properties of Ethereum, et cetera, right? Make sure that nobody can take it away from you, you know, unless you lose your wallet or some such thing. So that's, that's just kind of the basic fact. So that kind of solves the, you know, like, you know, if I piss off Neil Mohan or Elon Musk, like, if you piss off Dan, he really can't do anything to you. So that's number one. You know, the second part of it is, the one way I think, I think about it is, how much choice do you have in innovation, right? Like, right now, there's a whole ecosystem, and they're all, by the way, the super early, because Farcaster is still invite only. You ping Dan, you get some invites, et cetera. And, you know, I highly recommend people go try it out.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  But anybody can go build an app on top of Farcaster. And a lot of, by the way, other interesting clients which now exist. And they can do anything they want, right? Like, you know, some try to change the Farcaster experience, some try and do, you know, stories on Farcaster, others try and change up the algorithm. I just want to think about like how profound that is. Like, imagine you could say, the TikTok CEO last week, imagine if that's the world, he said, "Listen, I know that you folks don't trust that the CCP doesn't influence me, but guess what? You can use his alternative TikTok client, which has his own algorithm, which- Has its like own set of content moderation.

• 54:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Imagine a world where he could have said that, right? So that exists from, you know, day zero on Farcaster by all the properties of ETH, which we can sort of nerd out on, obviously, but the backlist folks probably know it super well. But that exists from day zero. And so the lot of things around content moderation, a lot of things around control now happens at the app level. So Farcaster is a protocol. It has an app, it's called Warp Cast. So the way to think about it is your mail dot app on your phone or Safari on your phone, talking to email protocol or talking to HTTP. So HTTP in this case would be Farcaster. Your browser Safari Chrome, et cetera, would be Warp Cast. Now, that is one of many. And I think like, you know, if you talk to the team, they would love to see many, many of these out there.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  And, you know, the thing is like every one of these clients can pick the rules of engagement. So one client can be like, hey, you know what? We only want to talk crypto here. Anybody doesn't talk crypto, we kick you out. One can, it can be around political lines. It could be around communities, you can be around countries, you can imagine various kinds of bonding boxes. But you always have a choice, right? Because you can always go somewhere else and you will all never lose like your graph. No, that is such a profound thing where if say like two years ago, when, you know, any one of these social media CEOs were testifying, they could say, you know what? I know you don't like my client, there's an alternative client which has the political leanings that you want in the algorithm. Go use that, right? Like, and go have fun with it. So, so that is, I think, one of the profound things about Farcaster, which is one, the upside,

• 55:56Speaker 02

  the innovation, people building cool new things in a way that is literally not possible today on social media. And then the downside, which is, you know, if Dan gets replaced by an evil twin who really, really hates you, doesn't matter, you know, they can't really, you know, hurt you.

• 56:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that Farcaster models is similar to Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky and also Lens. They, they sort of work in a similar way, is that right?

• 56:18Speaker 02

  I'm a little less familiar with Blue Sky and I haven't played with it too much. I think I've spent a little bit of time on Noster, which I also think is from Jack Dorsey. I'm not terribly sure how they all work together yet, but they do have similar elements. I think the big difference, I would say, between, and Lens, by the way, is also like, you know, Stani works on it. It's another decentralized social product. For me, I want to just see people building more of these. Lens is on the crypto side of things, right? Lens works on Polygon, it works on Chain, and so it is much closer to the Farcaster world. One difference, I think, between Lens and Farcaster is Farcaster wants to build a reference client, like off the get go, which is kind of like, you know, they want people, you know,

• 57:02Speaker 02

  so you kind of know how the product looks like, but Lens is still very much the crypto side of the world. Noster, you know, from my understanding, and by the way, I'm very familiar with the crypto side of things, less with the non-crypto side of things, Noster doesn't use a blockchain at all. And which, you know, I don't want, well, we can go into like white jack things that way, but you know.

• 57:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why Bitcoiners love it.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you said it, not me, but, you know, I do think like, you know, if you go down the intellectual maze of how do you get legitimacy, provable decentralization, you know, all the good things that we take for granted, you will wind up somewhere with ETH or somewhere with a blockchain and not trying to recreate a bunch of that. Like, for example, like, how do you rotate your public key? How do you make sure like every server has all copies of data? How do you have sovereign rights? Like, these are all things that have kind of been solved with things like ENS and ETH and NFTs and so on. And anyway, but again, I'm a fan of people trying out different things in decentralization.

• 58:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you this, though. So this is the challenge, I think, these Web3 decentralized social projects have, which is how do you build network effects? There's part of me that wonders if the centralization of the algorithm and the centralized nature of the platform itself makes a social network more conducive to building network effects. And so, right now, I think mainstream probably sees the projects that you listed. And they're like, ah, these are just sideshow projects. They're just a small niche. And sure, some crypto, early adopters are on them, but like, we're never going to get mainstream appeal. They're kind of too small. Is there some way we can like, beat the network effect?

• 58:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  That these web two, social media juggernauts have? And actually, supercharge web three? Because my worry is, or the failure mode is, we build all of these great protocols that are decentralized. And people can take their social graph wherever, and they have digital property rights and all of the things we care about. And we're the only people who actually care, Sriram. Like, do people value this enough? And can we overcome these network effects?

• 59:16Speaker 02

  So there's a bunch of great questions in there. First of all, I think there's an underlying question, which I think you asked, which is, it would be a failure if we only get people who think they're going to get deplatformed. Right? If there are not enough human beings in the world who care about that to build an alternative social media company. Right? That's just number one.

• 59:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  If we only get the extremes, only the margins come to crypto social networks?

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Well, if that's always stays the case, we would have failed.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Because that'd be a very small set of people. And also, those people also sometimes really want the big audiences the mainstream platforms have. So that's just number one. That'd be a failure case. I think the other failure case is, I don't think we can nerd snipe people. Like, you know, tens of millions of people who are going to hopefully use these products will never listen to this podcast. They will never care about the things I say, and they shouldn't. And, you know, but that's going to be the case. And so the way I think we win is a couple of ways. So I think all social networks win in one of two ways. One is, you know, I'm going to steal this from Eugene Way's Status as a Service, which I think is the best ever blog post written on social media companies. Please link to it in the show notes, etc. It's one of the best things ever written.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  I'm very jealous that he wrote it and not me. But all social media companies grow in one of two ways. One is, you get high status people who have been under Served by an existing platform and you get them to a new place and they start building a small network there. So I've seen this at three different companies, right? When I was at Snapchat, the high status people were high school kids in L A who were cool. And people wanted to hang out with them, they came to Snap, right? When they came to Snap, other people wanted to be where they were. They didn't want to be where the old people were, which was Facebook. And then the advertisers wanted them. And when I was at Snap, by the way, we deliberately tried to build it so it was confusing for old people, right? I'll give you a story, right? Oh, my God, are you serious? Oh, yeah, totally. Like, make it confusing for parents and explicit design. I'll give you a story. You know, the original Snapchat lens face filters, right?

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  So if you look at it, there was no tutorial on the screen. There was nothing which taught you how to use it, which is kind of weird as a presentation because nobody had ever built that before. Why was it? Well, you know, number one, if nobody taught it, old people couldn't figure it out. And old people being anybody over the age of twenty five. And number two is the best way you learned how to use a lens was somebody in your class, maybe somebody good looking you had a crush on, showed it to you in person and all of a sudden you had a bonding moment. You're like, oh, I now learned this in person and it means something to me. As opposed to here's a ten part tutorial on how to use this feature, right? And it and the other thing that Lens did, by the way, which was very cool, was it gave you a social license to post a selfie. Like before that, if you post a selfie, it was kind of considered a little weird.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  You did MySpace duck face, but with Lens, you're like, I'm just posting a Lens photo and just accidentally makes me look good, right? And it gave you so you kind of craft a lot of these things, but it was really meant to get, you know, high status people, right? And high start in a particular way, using the product and then everything else happens, right? TikTok did the same thing. So if you one of the interesting patterns you will see is like every platform has a star who emerges. But the stars are always new and homegrown and they're not the same from one platform to the other, right? So for example, on Snapchat, it was Kylie Jenner, right? Who first broke out on Instagram, it was The Rock and Kendall Jenner, who were not on Facebook, by the way. But even again, TikTok, it was Charli D'Amelio. So why is that, right? There are a few reasons. Number one, and Eugene Way has a great way of saying this, right?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  When the Europeans, I know the pioneers came to the new, you know, to to the east coast of the United States, it's not that rich European. You know, the folks living in fancy houses, they already had that, you know, they already had good stuff over there. You know, the people are kind of like struggling and they didn't have like much. They wanted to get out here to the new world, right? So it's always an underserved, high-status person. So when TikTok came on, what did do really well? It was like, well, musically, but then TikTok, it was like, if you had dancing skills and if you were funny, that was a great format for you, right? So Charlie Demelie, amazing skills, amazing talent, relatable, but couldn't create the perfectly manufactured Instagram photo. But TikTok was fantastic, right? TikTok also did something really profound, which I think is underappreciated, where because it didn't use the follow graph, it removed the Gini coefficient problem for every network.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Every network, you have to follow somebody and somebody gets really rich and, you know, it's really hard to, you know, get other people to be rich. TikTok was that we will decide who gets rich and anybody can become rich on any single day. So it really kind of like act as UBI plus removing the Gini coefficient. So anyway, so there's kind of this pattern across all the platforms. Sorry, sorry for kind of nerding out for a few minutes there. Now, I think, so I think, so if you believe this pattern, which I really do, by the way, I'm sort of a product of the Clubhouse era, by the way, where I kind of, my podcast became famous because of Clubhouse. So for Forcast or anyone who's social networks to succeed, they need cool people. And we can define cool in a number of ways. It can be the folks who hang out on Slate, Start, Codex and Less Wrong. It can be folks, you know, who are popular in culture, but probably the former.

• 1:04:08David Hoffman?

  It's probably defined by every single protocol. Every single platform has its own definition of what cool is.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  Yes, very much, and it should, right? Like, you know, so for example, if you hang out on Forcaster today, it's a lot of crypto people, but crypto people are also really smart. And it's, you know, it's a lot of very intellectually dense conversations. And my hope, and I think Dan's hope, is that that brings in more people who want to be a part of it. Just like if you look at, say, something like Substack, which is centralized platform, but when Substack gets these kind of like these stars, right? Like the, the, the, the Barry Weisses or the No Opinions, other people want to be where the stars are. And you get like, you know, like high-status people pull different people. But I want to be very clear, high-status can be anything, right? It can be LeBron James, it can be the cool artist, it can be amazingly smart person, you can define it. But you need high-status people first. So that's number one. That's how a lot of social networks grow, right?

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Second part of it, I think, is the ideal magic for social network is you capture high status people and a format that makes sense for them. So Charlie DiMillo, who is an amazing dancer and is just amazingly relatable, you know, a girl next door, right? Like, wouldn't be great on Substack. I mean, she might be, but I don't think, you know, like, if you look at her, she's so good on, like, TikTok. So she had a format which really worked for her, which I think the second part of the protocol is like, can somebody build an app experience, right? Maybe it's video, maybe it's live streaming, maybe it's written text, maybe it's something that I can't even imagine right now. Hopefully, that's probably the best case, which then unlocks the talent of this high status people in a way that nobody has seen before, right?

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  So you need both, but if you get this, right, like, and I think, you know, you're off to the races. And I think you can destroy the network effect of any centralized social media company.

• 1:05:50David Hoffman?

  Mr. Rom, this is, this is so awesome. And I think one of the reasons why I love this conversation the most is that the internet, all the phases of the internet, web two, web two, web one, web two, web three, is all about facilitating human relationships, human connections. Like, the internet didn't take off until we had social reasons to be on it. And I think that the kernel of insight that I think we just got from you is that every single social media platform that's arisen has unlocked some sort of expression and perhaps allowed for that unlock, that new form of self-expression to come from a new crop of people who have different and diverse skillsets from the other platforms that already exist. And so I think the learning lesson for the Bankless Nation to really just take note of is that

• 1:06:31David Hoffman?

  Farcaster, Mastodon, Lens Protocol, these are all new protocols to express ourselves and they're going to enable certain new types of people who maybe Instagram wasn't for you, maybe Snapchat wasn't for you, but maybe Farcaster does unlock a certain behavior set, a certain way of expressing yourself that the Farcaster community really enjoys. And you, Bankless listener, could be the first ever Farcaster influencer if that is for you. Or maybe it's Lens, or maybe it's, you know, so insert your web three social media protocol here. I think one of the reasons why so many of us are in this space, why I came to this space, why Ryan came to this space is that We saw such a fertile ground for growth.

• 1:07:13David Hoffman?

  It was easy to inject yourself into it and to build something new and to tap into that world. And I think that is probably what we're seeing with this world of Web three social. So I think the big takeaway that I think everyone should have is that maybe try out some of these Web three protocols and see if this fertile ground, if your seeds can grow in this fertile ground, and maybe, maybe you are the first Farcaster superstar. I'm sure there's already some, I'm sure there's people already competing in this field. But, but I think that's really just the actionable insight, the alpha here is that for Web three social media developers, you need a superstar, a homegrown superstar. That is your KPI. And then also for the, for the people out there, the users of these apps, the way to

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  get ahead in this world is that these social media apps, these brand new ones are fertile and easy to penetrate and there's not much, much competition there. And maybe you're the one that this brand new protocol, this brand new decentralized social media platform, maybe you really resonate with that. Sriram, do you have any just any thoughts and reflections on this?

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Well, you said a lot better than I could. So plus one to everything you said. I think there are two layers, right? One is you become a superstar. But I think the other profound thing is you can do something on this thing which you can't do in centralized social, which is you can build the app that produces superstars. You can't do that on TikTok. You can't do that on Facebook, right? You can't be like, hey, you know what? I have an idea for Instagram, which is going to create a new experience. You just can't do that. So if you're a developer writing code, like, you know, you don't need to call up anybody for ambition, right? Just go to any one of these sites, look at the developer docs, spin up VS code, write something, right? And then maybe you can be the superstar manufacturing factory, which I think is super interesting too. And that is something which is completely not possible in centralized Web two today.

• 1:08:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I really want to, I really want to double down on that because the thing that really got my juices going when we interviewed Dan Romero from Farcaster is the idea that Farcaster is the protocol and it's up to the world to build clients upon it. And so that was something that Twitter almost was in the early days of Twitter. It almost was like that. And then early in this conversation, we talked about how all these Web two Were open town squares and slowly they closed their walls into into centralized towers. Now we have protocols that are town squares that because in their nature, they will stay town squares. And I think what you're saying, Sri Ram, is that developers can come build more reasons to be in the town square.

• 1:09:38David Hoffman?

  And so we could actually turn this into a Cambrian explosion of like, all right, Farcaster and this one client can create this one flavor of superstars. But developers can come and create infinite number of superstars, infinite flavors of reasons to being on Farcaster that grow different kinds of superstars. Because the room for clients on Farcaster, where in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, there's only one client for each one of those protocols. But with Farcaster, there can be hundreds or thousands of clients.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Let me give somebody like an idea right off the get go. It's maybe a trivial idea, right? So every social media company right now has a large machine learning team and they put a lot of work into ranking. It's a very complex, technical thing, a lot of effort, lots of complexity. But what has overtaken the world of ranking and machine learning in the last few months is GPT, right? So, you know, idea for just somebody out there, go out, eat up and go build a Farcaster client. And then replace all things ranking and trending by just piping into GPT and saying, hey, these are kind of things which I like. Give me more stuff which I like, see what happens, right? So like, you know, it just the fact that, you know, I'm pretty sure, and whether you can probably ask GPT to kind of write the code for you to do a lot of this. I actually think so you can actually speed it up.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  So the fact that you can probably try one of these things and change the way Farcaster's, what, well, what cast algorithm works or, you know, or do your own thing. That's super profound. So I really want to encourage people to go build things and, you know, try out things. Because I really want to fire up people's imagination and go ask questions of like, why can't I do that on Instagram? Like, why can't I change the trending algorithm on TikTok? Like, as opposed to going back to my story of how this actor lost his movie, like, imagine like five different apps. And you go, well, you know, I have a different algorithm here, which is actually the trending algorithm that I want to see. So which also by also, by the way, kind of a good way to bring together crypto and AI, which I think is always fun.

• 1:11:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I do kind of wonder who the cool kids of some Farcaster or Web3 protocol are going to be. Like, I guess part of my theory is that's probably going to come from something in crypto. Like, maybe the closest candidate is probably like the NFT creator type community. Because you know, anything built on top of a Web3 stack is going to enshrine digital property rights and NFTs. And you can already see kind of the creator communities, Web3 creator communities blossoming in things like Lens and things like Farcaster. And they're going to be like specially attuned for that. So I wonder if it's going to come from the NFT community, right?

• 1:12:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  We saw glimmers of that sort of NFTs reaching like cool kid status in 2020, the first part of 2022, let's say, before everything kind of crashed down completely. But like, this isn't the end of NFTs, certainly. It's not the end of the story. I wonder if that's where it emerges. Do you have any thoughts on where the cool kids might come from, Sriram?

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  It could be. I think, you know, if you look at Farcaster today, a lot of like intellectually dense conversations, they're all, you know, very affiliated to crypto, obviously, just because those are the kinds of people who are originally in it. One of the interesting things I'll point out is the cool kids change. So I'm not sure, like, who do you think of as an example right now as the top people on Twitter the last few years? Just give me a few names.

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  I'm inside of the crypto bubble. So my top crypto people on Twitter, my top people on Twitter are all crypto people.

• 1:12:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely Elon Musk would be obviously top of them.

• 1:13:00David Hoffman?

  Now, he's like stacking the deck, though.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, he bought the thing. Well, there's Elon, you know, back when Trump was on, some people would say Trump, you know, Kanye, you know, a lot of sports stars. But if you go back like a few years before that, there was a time, and I'm really dating myself here, one of Twitter's breakout moments was when Ashton Kutcher and CNN had a race to get to a million followers.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah, like, there's a bunch of people in bankruptcy, like, what the f is he talking about? Other people going like, God, I feel so awesome. But that was a big, that was a real thing.

• 1:13:32David Hoffman?

  I'm the first one. I don't remember this at all.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  God, I hate you, right? Again, it was a race to a million followers, right? And it was Anderson Cooper for CNN versus Ashton Kutcher. They were the stars of Twitter.

• 1:13:45David Hoffman?

  But if you go back. And they were active participants. This wasn't people watching them. They actually were playing the game, right?

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they wanted to get to the first million followers, which seems like a crazy low number now, like, given like, you know, what he's in Twitter or Mr. Beast or someone. But that was a game. But if you go back even before that, the original set of people on Twitter were all people in San Francisco, right? It was all the tech people, right? Like, so one of the interesting things about these networks is that it constantly keeps changing, which actually thinks actually kind of healthy. One of Twitter's failures, I think, is failure to elevate new stars. Because once, I'm just going to sidetrack. Twitter's biggest sin in a lot of ways, I think, was a follow graph. Because once you have a follow graph, you have a lot of interesting people on Twitter, but the only way to get them discovered is you have to get other people to follow them. So you're always being like, hey, please follow this person. He's really good for you. He or she, just trust me. And so you kind of had these people who had a million plus followers and they got locked in.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  So they were like, the genie coefficient, the wealth inequality of Twitter, started like expanding more and more. So a lot of product efforts on Twitter are always like, please follow this person. I really wanted to follow this person, right? And if I think if Twitter had figured out, which I think hopefully we'll see with the for you tab, to constantly bring in new stars, because one, you're bringing in new talent toward, as I was trying to say. Second, you're keeping the older folks on their toes. You're like, hey, listen, you don't want to get the reach because if you're not participating, you're gone, right? Like, one of my ideas for Twitter, when I was there, was like, people should not show the number of followers at all, and you should just show their account. And, you know, we should start showing people lots of your follow graph. So I think every healthy social network constantly needs to bring in, elevate new people and new talent to stay fresh.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  And so my hope is, who was the star of Farcaster today is different than the Farcaster two years from now and five years from now. And there's a bunch of apps which all have their own stars. Maybe there's a Indian Farcaster client, which only has like, you know, Tamil and Hindi and Telugu ecosystem people, one for every country. You can just kind of really go run wild with this.

• 1:15:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you, round tripping on Elon then. So we've just extolled the virtues of Web3 social and decentralization. Part of me was hoping, like a small part of me was hoping, because it was a faint hope, that Elon would come into Twitter and he would be like, "Web3 and crypto." You know, like, we know he tracks crypto, maybe not sort of in-depth, not the layer, the level that we do, of course, but he knows a thing or two about crypto. He's certainly on the Doge train. So, part of my hope was that he would start to incorporate more Web3 features into crypto, whether it's sort of, you know, decentralized identity of some sort, or property rights, other things.

• 1:16:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  What would it take to crypto-pill Elon and get him to, not necessarily pivot the entire company of Twitter towards decentralized social media, but at least start to incorporate some of these features?

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  Well, I don't want to speak for him or reveal private conversation. I've definitely tried, and as you can imagine. And so, I would say a few things, right? Like, I think Elon has his hands full at Twitter of just making the basics work right now, right? Let's build a product everyone uses, let's build a thriving business. So I would say, you know, what the broad crypto community would need to, not just for Elon, right? This can be for Adam Mosser at Instagram, this can be for Zuckerberg, this can be for Neil Mohan, literally anybody, is to convince them how crypto brings value to them. And I think it's often a challenge where if you say like, "Hey, your service is messed

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  up and we need to have people just leave to a competitor," that's often becomes challenging. I think the challenge for the crypto world is, how do you make an argument that says like, "This is going to benefit you, this is going to bring in features, make your community happy in ways that they're not happy today," right? I think that's going to be the thing. I know Elon's a fan of some elements of crypto, maybe not a fan of other elements. I'll let him kind of speak about that himself, but I think that's the value prop. I would say like, you had to paint a value proposition, not just for him. But for any CEO, right? Like, what is in it for you to crypto enable your services? I think that's the challenge where all of us.

• 1:17:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I felt like we were making some headway in Web 2 for a while there, where we started to see Web 2 companies, established social media companies, start to integrate Web 3 features. And then more recently, I think after 2022, really, we've seen a pullback of that. So Meta, for example, Instagram, I remember, when did this launch? Last year in 2022, over the spring or summer? I was so excited to see Instagram start to add some NFT features into their product. And this felt like, oh, this is a huge mainstream moment for crypto. This is going to be huge. And then more recently, it was like two weeks ago, Sriram, they decided to, you know, remove that feature. Sunset it, yeah, not even a year later. Not even a year later. So definitely not staying in the game for the marathon.

• 1:18:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  But there seems to be something in the air with Web 2 where they've started to pull away from Web 3. And I'm wondering if you think that will be reversed? Or if that's just the way it's going to be for a while? And we'll just have to, on the Web 3 social side, kind of build the proof here? And as you just said, paint the value proposition for Web 2 before they get on boarded again.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's definitely frustrating. I will say one thing, there's a great Steve Jobs line from, you know, the mid 90s, I think, when Steve Jobs had just come back. And he said, he told the Mac community, "Microsoft doesn't have to lose for Apple to win." There's kind of a great video of him saying this somewhere. So I don't think Web 2 has to disappear or lose. And I think Dan Romero was always very good about this, right? He was like, you know, Web 2 is great, brought a lot of great things. Like, my career wouldn't exist without Twitter. Like, you know, I was very happy at Facebook, a lot of great smart people. Like, it doesn't have to lose for crypto to win. So it's not like, you know, like us versus them thing. I think what has happened And I've sort of tried to urge some people to go the other way and maybe unsuccessfully. So at times is there's a confidence of few things, right?

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Number one is there's a broad market pullback, which I think is like no secret. Like every large tech company is having layoffs. They are like, let's just focus on what is actually hardcore to what we do. So that's like a, that's just like a factor. Like they're like, if you kind of stack rank things and you're like, hey, we need to do this thing, which is existential, which makes money for the company. And we go compete on viewers like this is thing and everything else, let's kind of, you know, cut it or lay off those people. You know, sometimes crypto, I think winds up on the chopping block. So I think that's definitely a factor. Another factor I think is the market pullback, just obviously. So because the market pullback means maybe sometimes perceived less interest inside these companies. And then they're like, when they're trying to stack rank features, this thing winds up chopping block.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  I would say there might be a deeper question, which I hope is not true, which is crypto at its very nature needs people to hand over power, right? Like you can't make decisions in a centralized conference room. You need to let the community make the decision. And there is a part of me which wonders whether that is maybe a bridge too far for some companies to embrace. I sincerely hope that's not the case. I've seen rumors, for example, of Meta launching a decentralized thing. I don't know. I haven't seen the details yet. And there are other rumors, but there may be a world where it may be a step too far and you may need to be decentralized from day zero to really, really buy in. I really don't think that's, hope it's not the case. I've talked to a lot of very smart people in these companies who have much more practical

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  issues, practical issues like, hey, we want to build this thing, but gas fees are too high, right? Like I want speed, I want performance, I want security. It's just the basics. And I think we as a crypto community, we're like, you know, we're like, hey, they just want the basics, right? They want somebody to just understand it, not spend like, you know, 20, 30 bucks for a transaction, just the basic. They often want that. A second is, you know, they, you know, they want access to a large community of people. So there's a lot in there. I wouldn't attribute, you know, negative motivation, like malnoted some terrible motivations to them. And I sincerely just hope it's not, you know, they come back to crypto.

• 1:21:49David Hoffman?

  Sir, one thing I want to ask you about is just the the future of creators in the social media platforms. And you are a GP to A16Z crypto, which has got to be one of the most busy jobs in the world. Yet you still find yourself doing a podcast, which begs the question, what about the podcast is so valuable to you that you take time out of your very busy life to actually be a creator in the in this world of of social platforms? And I think this this conversation will eventually be getting bleed into the conversation of how AI can help creators. But I want to hear from you first. Like, well, and again, very busy job, you still find the motivation and the desire

• 1:22:32David Hoffman?

  to be a creator. So what's what's the future for creators in this in this crazy world of the Internet in 2023? And why do you do it?

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  First of all, thank you. You know, I often tell people that the job of a founder is 100x more busy than the job of a VC. But thank you for saying that. And I think there's a few things. And if folks listen, can I plug my show, like, you know, my wife and I do a podcast, it's got, you know, it's on YouTube, everywhere you can listen to podcasts. There's a few reasons.

• 1:23:02David Hoffman?

  There'll be a link in the show notes.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. Smash like, subscribe, you know, ping everything, you know, do all the

• 1:23:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  All those Web 2 things, do those things.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  All those Web 2 things. We're also on Podcast

• 1:23:11David Hoffman?

  Like and subscribe, that's probably a Web 3 thing, too.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Giving somebody your attention is definitely a universal notion, I think. And so there's a few reasons. One is, it's very personal. Like, I wouldn't genuinely be here if I didn't have access to the open Internet. And I have been sort of, my wife and I, you know, we met on Yahoo Messenger 21 years ago, right, to build a website. We've been together for 22, 21 years since that evening we met, actually. And so our lives have been tied to tech optimism and positivity. And it's, and I've been, we have been very dismayed personally about the rhetoric against tech, right, and founders and entrepreneurship by a lot of different parties. And this is in our way, you know, a way

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Of giving back, where we are like, hey, can we, you know, if you listen to our episodes, it's just a way where we highlight, people just kind of made it from the outside of tech to the inside. Often say sometimes it's not tech, but it's like, you know, and we want like, and hopefully some kid somewhere is watching and he goes like, oh, you know, I'm like that person when they start off, maybe I can go open my laptop and do something cool. That's the ideal scenario. So there's kind of an altruistic thing of just kind of giving back. And I do think like, if you want to do these podcasts, these things long term, it has to come from something ideological, right? It can't be like, I just want to do it for the views. Like you'll just burn out like over time and, you know, and people can sense it. By the way, your viewers are not dumb. No, the non altruistic view is if that kid at some point in time builds an amazing company,

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  they think, hey, maybe I can go ask that weird Indian guy who I saw on a podcast to for some money, right? And they built something amazing. That's great. But it doesn't happen. That's also fine. I would say that, you know, in the, the other version, I think about it is in the memetic battleground that we find ourselves today in, having an online army, which I think is Balaji's phrase, he does have an army, like, you know, ours are more like people who kind of maybe like us and find us nice. But having an online army and a following, backless nation, is one of the most important things you can have. Because there are so many forces that are coming at us, like forces in government, forces in the press,

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  and the ability to have a message and get it out there and battle it out on Twitter or on YouTube is super, super important. Now, everyone has their own way of doing it. Balaji does his one million dollar bet, which we could, you know, which is a whole other thing. Or, you know, but I think our way is to spread positivity and optimism. And yeah, so that's why we do it.

• 1:25:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And do you think that the web three technologies really supercharge a creator's ability to harness and leverage that army?

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. So this is great. So I have a fun story, which is, you know, Vin Diesel was one of the most hated people at Facebook.

• 1:25:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Vin Diesel, the actor?

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  Yes. And I don't think the story has been told before in public. Maybe he'll get in trouble, maybe not, I don't know. So, but, so the story. Around this is, you know, about ten years ago, Vin Diesel was super popular, had a super popular Facebook page. And he had like millions of followers, etcetera, right? I don't know whether celebrities still have like large pieces of their stick. And he also, and Zuckerberg was a huge personal fan of Vin Diesel. Actually, exactly very well documented. He actually, there's a story how Vin Diesel made triple X two, just because Mark actually asked him to do so, right? He was actually a very big fan. But at the time, you know, the way the social contract of Facebook or any social media company worked was, you bring in, you bring in as a creator, which is not even a word at the time, influencer is not a word.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  You bring in your energy, your creativity, you bring, you post content. And the trade was that we will give you eyeballs. We will give you views, we will give you attention. There's no money involved. And the connection to Vin Diesel was that every time there'd been internal discussion about like, hey, can we start paying people? The rebuttal would be like, well, then Vin Diesel will ask us for money and we don't want that. He's doing it for free, right? Like, so, anyway, so, and, but that was kind of the social contract of the internet for several years. But a few years ago, and this has nothing to do with Web three, that contract shifted, right? I think of companies like Cameo, where you're like, hey, you know what? I want to kind of like make a living with my product, but also just the rise of influencers and creators. Like, think, you know, I think like the original YouTube folks, like PewDiePie, etcetera.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  To then to, you know, the Paul brothers, to now like obviously Mr. Beast. People are building these entire companies and, you know, and they're making a living, you know, online. So now the contract of eyeballs and kind of sneaking ad for, you know, attention just doesn't work anymore. And so you show a rise of companies. So Cameo in the NSFW world, OnlyFans is kind of the obvious example, which is like people making an actual living. And the core atomic unit of these companies, like there's a financial, you know, transaction involved, right? So now you kind of have a sort of a conflict of interest, because if you're a big tech company, right? You have a very high margin business, right? You have to give zero money to the people who are creating content from you, right? But you're spending a lot of money on data centers, the R and D, etcetera, right? And you're making a lot of money from ads, right?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  But if you're creators. Are suddenly saying like, hey, I am making money for you. And if I walk away, it's bad for you and you have to give me money. That, you know, seriously high margin business, you're going to start eating into the margin, right? So I, you know, I used to say that when I was at Twitter, we should build an algorithm of who's valuable to Twitter. And you could make an argument that Elon Musk is one of the most valuable users to Twitter. Because if he went away, there might be some sort of people like, I find Twitter less interesting. Maybe I'll, you know, go elsewhere. So, and I think, you know, about a few years ago, creators started realizing their power, right? And they've been pushing for basically like, hey, I want my share of what I'm giving you, right? And that's kind of active conversation. So every company tries to, there are all these creator funds, or I will give you like a bonus,

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  or I'll give you a little rev share. And the internal discussion is always like, well, how can we kind of do this without eating to our margins, but also incentivizing content? And maybe the top people won't go away, right? Now this, now web three, just kind of finish this, is the ultimate expression of this. Because you're giving two things. One is you're aligning, hopefully, over the long-term economic incentives. But also, I think you're aligning ownership, right? Like, so for example, like right now, you know, you folks are stuck to YouTube, right? Well, I mean, you have a newsletter and you're on Twitter, et cetera. But if YouTube takes you down, right? It's probably not going to be, I mean, you will do fantastic, but probably you're going to have like an unfun few days, I'm sure, right?

• 1:29:39David Hoffman?

  You don't want to do it again.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right? And, and so, but you know, so first thing is web three is this, it just gives you control over your own property, right? So you can't get rug pulled and you, you know, and you can maybe go to an alternative, which I think is very powerful. The longer term expression of all of this is obviously, you know, governance, right? Which is how do you have a say? And a say can be in many different ways. I think a token is one way, but the right to go to a different person or use a different client is another way. Where you say, look, I want to pick a different path for this company. Maybe it's a different algorithm, maybe it's a different color in the UI, whatever it is. I want to have a say instead of centralized people. So I think web three in some ways kind of the ultimate expression of the creator control journey.

• 1:30:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sri Ram, this has been a lot of fun. I have one other question for you that's unrelated to Web3 and then maybe we summarize this and conclude here. But this is a question unrelated to Web3, but something I wanted to briefly pick your brain on. Crypto and AI. This topic has come up a few times. Of course, we've had, you know, one AI podcast, it was more the doomer side of things. We haven't actually explored- We weren't able to get to crypto and AI in that conversation.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  I'm concerned that nobody will see this episode because we'll all be dead by then.

• 1:30:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's possible. But, okay, is there some sort of intersection between crypto and AI? Are they complete orthogonal technologies? How do you think that crypto and AI play a role together in the future? And really, what should we be exploring on bankless as it relates to AI?

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  I love this question. Okay, you know, first of all, the meme that makes me most laugh is the one where the girl is looking at the guy looking at the other girl and it's like, you know, crypto PCs and then AI. I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the accurate meme for crypto and AI is the guy with the news from Pirates going like first time, right? Like, you know, because I think we in crypto, you know, look at some of the trends in AI and we see some of the patterns that we have been through and we're like, oh yeah, this whole thing kind of could be happening again. So what do I mean, right? And first of all, look, AI could be one of the most profound things that we see in our lifetimes, right? Like, you know, it could be bigger than the mobile phone, it could be bigger than the

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  invention of the internet, it could be like invention of the steam engine or something worse. Like, I don't know how this all plays out, right? I don't think anybody really knows, but I think we all can sense that there is something profound here happening. And I think the intersection of crypto and AI is in a few places, right? The first one is the risk of centralization. Like, I think the folks at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, et cetera, are all really smart. I know a lot of them. I think they're super well incentivized. But I do think over time, you know, AI, you know, is too important- A technology change for humanity to lie within a few people's hands. Like, I wouldn't trust myself. If somebody made me the god king of AI, like, I wouldn't trust Sriram Krishnan to make the decisions

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  of what gets launched, who has access, who doesn't have access. And AI, by the way, we're still in the age of API keys, right? So I think just on that level, you know, I think AI, you know, be over to the world for AI to be decentralized. And that means running it on a MacBook laptop. That means an Indian kid being able to train an LLM or inference something without asking for permission. And by the way, I think it's probably inevitably going to happen whether we like it or not. So that's kind of it's a very broad philosophical kind of a statement. But if you kind of break it down, I think at every layer of the current stack of LLMs today, which I've been spending some time on, is there's a crypto element to it. And there are a lot of interesting people are working on it, and some of them have not unknown stuff in public, so I want to be kind of careful. Like, one is just on the training side, right?

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  The way you train AI LLMs today is you, you know, you raise a lot of money and you basically get access to a bunch of like, you know, A100s or hedge 100s or whatever, and then it runs for a long time and you train these, right? So imagine a world where you decentralize that and you can do it, you know, not just in a data center that, you know, like a large tech company or somebody with a large venture capital runs, but a lot of different pieces. So that's one way. That's kind of one theme which I think is very interesting. A lot of interesting people working on this. The other problem, I would say, is going back to your creator's theme, is one great existential question is the, and by the way, I really want to give credit to Chris Dixon. He's kind of the origin of a lot of these ideas. The contract of the internet was, you know, hey, I give you content and you send traffic to me.

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  And one of the things Chris often like points out is that AI could actually break that contract, right? Like, so for example, I could create this content, like you creating this content on Bankless right now, right? And the hope is, you know, somebody subscribes and your sponsors, you know, see their ad impressions, they give you more money, etc. That's all good. That's the way the internet works, right? But imagine, you know, if LLMs are trained by you and when somebody says like, hey, what did Srinam Krishnan say on Bankless? And, you know, and it shows up on this other UI and you've played no part in it, like, that's not the way the internet is really supposed to work. So, and I think there's going to be this great, interesting Discussion is already happening, right? You know, for stuff like people like artists, etc. Which is how do you think about, I think, one attribution, which is how much of my work is showing up in the final output when you type it something in ChatGPT

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  or look at DALL-E or Stable Diffusion or Midjourney or whatever. And the other is how do I get rewarded for it, right? And I think this is actually kind of important also, which is it's not just about rewarding existing work. It's also about like, how do you spur new innovation and new content to, you know, to show up? So, and I think these are all unsolved problems. It's very, very, very early days. But I think it would be a tragedy if LLMs just stay in the realm of API keys and there's a few people who have access to billions of dollars and that's, you know, that's all it is. And even though I like those people, I think they're really amazing. I think it'd be a tragedy for all the reasons I like Zuckerberg and, you know, I like the Adam Mosseri, but I still don't think they should call all the shots.

• 1:35:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what's going to be more transformational, crypto or AI, if you had to pick?

• 1:35:44Speaker 02

  Crypto meets AI.

• 1:35:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good answer. Combination of both. So, Rama, this has been a lot of fun. Maybe, maybe just summarize this, this for us. I think the theme of this episode is Web 2, broken. Web 3 fixes this, or at least fixes some part of it. What are kind of your, your closing arguments for why Web 3 is, is the future of, of social on the internet?

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  I would say, look, the backless nation are huge fans of crypto, but I hope this reaches folks who are not crypto. And I would say, listen, even if you just don't buy into crypto, just think about, why do things have to be this way? Like, why can't a 15-year-old kid in India write code without asking people for permission? Or write, you know, go on an app without being worried about who is controlling what he or she can't say? It doesn't have to be this way. And what do we need to do to make it happen? So, and I think one, there's people asking themselves a question. I think will lead them down like a very interesting track. And the second is, I, look, I, my life, my dad spent 40 years in the same company in a small town in India and he worked here and he was, and he never had an opportunity at all, like, you know,

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  He was happy, but you know, he didn't have an opportunity to do anything else outside of his job. And he passed away in like, you know, in 2006. And I always think about if he had access to the internet, he was brilliant, right? But he had no opportunity. He was just, there's nothing he could do, right? He wanted to write, but he had access to the internet. He could have done something, right? Like he could have actually, you know, gone out there and, you know, participated in the global economy, in the marketplace of ideas. In a way, he just had no access to. And I'm sort of a big believer in the human spirit, creativity and unleashing that. And I think unless we have some version of this layout, right? Like future versions of my dad won't get a shot in the marketplace of ideas. And I think that would be a deep, deep tragedy. So I'll leave it at that.

• 1:37:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the theme. Great closing argument. This technology, the reason we're here is to unlock human potential, certainly at the individual level, at the collective level, at the societal level. Sriram, we are looking for big things from, from Web 3. We're hoping it can make the internet fun again and interesting and more free, more democratic. So thank you for walking us through this.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:38:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items, Bankless Nation, we will include a link to Sriram's podcast with his wife, which is absolutely fantastic, as well as their Substack. You can access that in the show notes. Also, there was an article that was mentioned that I'm going to go flag and read after this episode. I haven't read it yet, called "Status as a Service." We'll include a link in the show notes to that, too. Risks and disclaimers, Bankless Nation, of course, crypto is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.