EP 17: Benedict Evans on State of Tech, and Alexis Gay on the Risk in Leaving it All Behind for Comedy

0:30 – Traveling 2:51 – Welcome Ben Evans 11:07 – Past and Future of Tech 30:06 – Elon and Twitter 39:43 – What’s Really Regulated 57:52 – Welcome Alexis Gay 59:56 – From Tech to Comedy 1:02:58 – Twitter Experience 1:14:08 – Breaking Into YouTube 1:23:28 – Importance of Structure 1:29:12 – Starting Podcasting 1:33:04 – Redefining Success 1:37:34 – Figuring Out What Works 1:45:24 – Getting a Fund 1:49:23 – The Tech Ecosystem Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 17th episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host Logan Bartlett and I am joined today by a special guest Benedict Evans. Ben, thanks for coming on.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:15Logan Bartlett?

  I appreciate you doing this. So we're recording Eastern time, morning Friday, which is late afternoon, your time in the UK. So yeah, I appreciate you squeezing me in.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  No problem. Always good to chat about this stuff.

• 0:28Logan Bartlett?

  Where in the world, where are we traveling this week?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Uh, Dublin, Hamburg and Marbella.

• 0:36Logan Bartlett?

  Nice.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Of which I would definitely choose Hamburg.

• 0:40Logan Bartlett?

  Is that right? I've actually never been to Hamburg.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  It's a quite a nice city. Lots of canals and rivers and you know, interesting stuff to do. It does have that kind of German element wherein the Italian restaurant is called Italian Restaurant.

• 0:57Logan Bartlett?

  I like that.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  With Italian, with Italian specialities.

• 1:01Logan Bartlett?

  I found Germans to be the most, uh, to be the most welcoming of Americans, uh, like from a, whenever I'd visited, they've, uh, they see, and I don't know what exactly that is. I found if there's a spectrum of like Barce, uh, Spain and Barcelona on one end, and I think Germany's on the other. London's like a little close to Germany, uh, but, or UK in general. But yeah, I found Spain was the most hostile of any city I've ever visited, uh, consistently, right? It's like, oh, you don't speak Catalan? Do you speak Spanish at least? And I'm like, you know, I mean, enough, right? I'm sorry. I don't speak your like language spoken by whatever 500,000 people local to Barcelona, but.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought it's funny you say that. I've been going to, I went to Barcelona every year for like at least 10 years to get in the World Congress and, um, never had that problem. Maybe it's because I, you know, I'm, I'm eager. So I just kind of presume everybody else is inferior, is inferior anyway.

• 1:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  They're all, they're all Spanish. So who cares?

• 2:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Your moral superiority just reigns supreme and 500,000. I lied. I just looked it up. It's nine million people speak Catalan. So I, uh, a little condescending.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  The funny thing about, I mean, this is San Francisco, talking to the West Coast. The funny thing about Barcelona actually is that it's feels like so much more bigger a city than San Francisco, when it's actually roughly the same population.

• 2:22Logan Bartlett?

  Is that, is that a density thing? I didn't realize it was the same population. I, so I'm in New York and I've, I've, I've actually been able to make it, uh, whatever 12 years in tech and eight years in venture without ever living in San Francisco. And so it's funny, people like say very San Francisco centric things, uh, like I, I actually just don't even know the city that well, um, like where to get around and local restaurants and all that or traffic.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  There's not much tonight.

• 2:48Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. So maybe for folks that don't know, you're, you're probably not listening to this podcast if you don't, uh, know Ben, but maybe give a little bit of a primer on, uh, your, your background and what you're up to today.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Sure. So in order, I spent the first sort of five years of my career in equity research, um, Southside Equity Research covering mobile and technology. So I started my job. So I started in 90, spring of 99. So for about nine months, I thought, oh, this is going to be fun. And then it wasn't for three or four years. Um, and then I worked in, um, strategy and BD, sort of media and telecoms companies and did some consulting. And then in beginning of 14, 2014, went out to the valley to work for Andreessen Horowitz, which is a medium sized private equity firm.

• 3:38Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard of them.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Otherwise known as Ben Mark.

• 3:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, and so you were there for six-ish years, five and a half years?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I was there until 2019, end of 2019, and then I moved back to London. I spent a whole of my career otherwise in London, mostly. Moved back to London to do my own thing, um, just as the pandemic started.

• 3:59Logan Bartlett?

  And you, um, I mean, you're, you became known, I guess, uh, from, you have a newsletter, you do weekly, is that right? Like maybe, maybe take through, uh, when you started doing that. And, uh, yeah, I mean, you have whatever.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a content. Yeah. Yeah, there's a comment story here. So I from sort of two thousand, I'm gonna get the dates wrong, but sort of two thousand nine ish, I was working sort of semi independently. So I was spending most of my time with a boutique research firm in London, but I was also sort of independent, which meant that I was free to publish stuff on the internet if I wanted to. Whereas if I'd been working at Bernstein or McKinsey or a big P firm or something, or a VC firm, or tech company, whatever, I wouldn't have been free to publish stuff on the internet, or I would have gone through compliance and marketing and everything else. And so I was sort of relatively unusual in that I was someone from a sort of analysis

• 4:56Speaker 01

  and strategy industry in the smartphone world who was able to talk about this stuff. And so this is at the time when the smartphone wars are in full flood and everyone's like looking at BlackBerry's quarterly results and so on. And most people in tech at that point didn't quite know that like people publish quarterly reports and told you what the unit numbers work as. Normally tech companies didn't do that, but in mobile they did. And so it was basically me and Horace Dediu were posting charts every time Apple had results and talking about what was going on. And so kind of got noticed in that sense because not many other people, like there were plenty of other people who knew about it, but they weren't allowed to publish stuff. And so I was on Twitter, I have a blog. And then

• 5:38Speaker 01

  in early two thousand and thirteen, I started a weekly email newsletter, which is sort of before, obviously, long after people started doing email newsletters, which go back to the, well, eighteenth century or something, if you count newsletters, but before the kind of current Substack wave. And so I started a free weekly newsletter at the beginning of two thousand and thirteen, which has grown in more or less a straight line ever since, and now has about one hundred and seventy five thousand subscribers. And it's sort of, and it's not actually a blog every week. It's actually here are ten or fifteen things I saw this week were interesting in a paragraph about what I thought about them, why they mattered, or why they were dumb, or why they were interesting. And

• 6:20Speaker 01

  so there's a sort of a virtuous circle. There's a Twitter account, there's a blog, and then there's the newsletter that kind of ties it all together. And then I do kind of an annual macro trends presentation that I publish as well, which is sort of charts and storytelling. Yeah. So I try and work out what's interesting and what to talk about, basically.

• 6:38Logan Bartlett?

  It's an interesting story. We've had Ben Thompson on two weeks ago or whatever, sort of talking about his journey. And I feel like you two were kind of taking different paths around the same time of, you know, tech and strategy, right? When there weren't a lot of people. Now, I mean, I feel like there's a near endless number of people that are opining on tech and strategy. But it felt like for a while, it was you plus, I don't know, John Gruber and a handful of other people that were

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like John Gruber, Ben Thompson, Ben Baharun. In fact, Ben Baharun, Ben Thompson, and I did a sort of podcast called Ben Squared, I think, in 2013. Before I joined A16Z and had like the corporate calls team, put a stop to that, and had to do everything under the A16Z umbrella, obviously. But yeah, I mean, there were relatively few people who kind of had some understanding of how this stuff worked and were able to talk in public. That was kind of the crucial point. There were way more people know more about, and particularly anything I talk about, there's way more people know more about semis than I do, or know more about the mechanics of the app store than I do. But most of them work at Apple, or, you know, work at Quark or whatever and can't talk about it. And also, while I'm like, you know, I haven't spent 20 years actually doing analysis and

• 7:47Speaker 01

  thinking about how you would tell a story and how you'd explain stuff. There's a line from a, there was a New Yorker writer in the 30s and 40s called A.J. Liebling, who said that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster and faster than anyone who wrote better. So I think there's a sort of something in that.

• 8:02Logan Bartlett?

  I like that. That's good. And so Andreessen, you were there for six years, kind of doing, what was your role for them when you were there?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  So I suppose a couple of things. So one of them is, a big part of the Andreessen model is everything they do after the investment. You know, I think when I joined, there were sort of 80 people and probably 20 of those were doing deals directly and everyone else was post-investment. And so, and a big piece of that is what they call briefing center, which is, big company comes to the valley, spends an afternoon at the A16Z office, meets a dozen portfolio companies that have been sort of pre-selected by A16Z based on sort of what, sort of mutual interest, where they're usually becoming customers of those companies. And so the idea is obviously for the portfolio companies, it means, you know, it's much more efficient than flying all around the country. And also it's like, we already know

• 8:55Speaker 01

  the Caterpillar CIO, we already know the Citibank CIO, so we can make those introductions and put you in the room. And obviously for those companies, it was sort of pre-selected in that like the companies that they were seeing were at least moderately sensible and that we'd invest in them. And so I would sort of sit in those meetings and talk to them about, well, what's this machine learning thing? Or what's this smartphone thing? And then I sat, obviously, with sort of one seat in the deal, one leg of my chair, sitting in the deal review, looking at products and looking at what was going on and looking at investments and, you know, every now and then saying something in the kind of discussion around a potential investment. And then the third piece, which is sort of also another way of describing a 16Z is it sort of unbubbles the general partner. So, you know, to that old trading model, instead of, does Mark know somebody at Citibank? Does Ben

• 9:39Speaker 01

  know somebody at Caterpillar? It's no, there's a whole team of 20 people whose job is to know that. There's a whole team whose job is to know how to find you a CTO, whose job is to help you think about what your calls are and so on. And so I was sort of somewhere in that model in that, you know, I was going and, you know, explaining stuff instead of Ben and Mark or Alex or whoever having to get on a plane and go and explain stuff.

• 10:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yep, got it. No, it makes sense. Well, good. And so today, you're, so you left in the beginning of the pandemic and today, you're, the newsletter keeps on keeping on. You're a venture partner at a few different funds. You also have a podcast of your own. Is that right?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So I, so there's a newsletter itself, which, where there's now a paid version, which has done okay, it's converted. I met somebody the other day who said, it's amazing, you've got 175,000 paying subscribers to your newsletter. And I'm like, yeah, if I had 175,000 paying subscribers, I would not be in this city today.

• 10:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I would be living in Vegas and community, well, yeah, like, that's a separate conversation. And so there's a percentage of that has converted to paid and then there's sponsorship in the free one. And so that's a business. And then I have a bunch of sort of advisory roles at a bunch of companies. And that's a thing. And then I go and speak at events, which is also sort of an interesting thing to do. Always find like the, um, the, the more, less people know about tech, the more interesting questions they ask.

• 11:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Sort of from a first principle standpoint of like, hey, why does any of this exist? We sort of come from an assumed baseline of like, you know, all right, well, because all of this, we all know, right? And you don't actually poke and prod the questions like added layer deeper.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you get the, you know, the dumb questions, so to speak, actually can, can often be surprisingly hard to answer, which is kind of useful.

• 11:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. Maybe you like, you don't start from a foundational principle of like the app store as a 30% take rate or whatever. It's like, why, you know, why does the app store exist at all, right? And it sort of takes you back to like the primitives of, yeah, all that stuff. That's interesting.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So those are, so I'd sort of do those things. And then there's a sort of, there's a thread running through all of it, which is, I suppose, what's the interesting thing to talk about now? I mean, you always have to sort of climb up the tree rather than actually along one branch. So, you know, if, you know, I'm not still talking about the app store and smartphones because like it happened, you know? That was the center of the tech industry for sort of five to seven years. And now it happened, five billion people, give or take, have got a smartphone. Like it's done. Nice question.

• 12:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  In fact, in fact, the interesting part of, sort of, one of the challenges, both sort of professionally, but also sort of an interesting topic is that like, there isn't a next question. Well, there certainly isn't, there certainly isn't one.

• 12:14Logan Bartlett?

  I, well, certainly, I mean, when you talk very literally, the center of the tech world, uh, we'll get there in a second, but that's obviously Elon Musk. But when you move beyond that, right? Like, what is the next platform or what is the next, um, shift that's occurring? And it's, I don't know. I mean, Ben Thompson and I have talked about like, you can chase down the rabbit hole of ATT and regulation and all that stuff, right? But that's, that's the back nine, to use the golf analogy. Like we're, we're sort of at the end state and we know it's going to play out with different machinations or whatever. But what is the frontier, the new technological shift? And obviously. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's gonna happen, but all that stuff's inevitable, right? It's like cloud, on-prem's gonna move to cloud, or like, you know, whatever.

• 12:58Logan Bartlett?

  All this stuff, the the social apps are gonna get litigated and broken up in part, and there's gonna be new competitors and all that stuff. But it is interesting, like, what is that new frontier that we're gonna chase after from a technological shift? I mean, Bitcoin and crypto and Web 3 is kind of the logical-

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, well, you know, if if if Chris Dixon was all this and hadn't already blocked his both, then he would be saying it's Web 3 dummy.

• 13:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And certainly for kind of crypto people, it is. I mean, there's sort of, so winding back a second. So I think there's certainly kind of, to some extent, there's kind of an enterprise consumer thing here. Because from the enterprise side, the curve isn't smartphone, the curve is cloud, and we're kind of halfway through that curve.

• 13:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, but they're kind of following the same trajectory of inevitability, right? Like, it's gonna happen.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's like, but that's like smartphones in like 2012. It's like, this is the thing, we've got another 10 years of cloud, and then a thrall that many other things flow, which is A, all the kind of, well, what is the infrastructure and the software and the security model and all the all the enterprise IT stuff within that? And then the other is like a kind of a very deterministic way is like, how many different ways can you unbundle Excel and unbundle Salesforce and unbundle email and turn it into some vertical application? And the answer is thousands and thousands of times. Like, doing something inside some department of every big company that it would never occur to you was a thing, and it turns out that's like a $10 billion company.

• 14:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  And so first, for on that side, like, the curve is, you know, at a 45-degree angle up, and there's not, like, it's easy. It's more kind of on the consumer side. I think it's harder to say, like, what's the next fundamental shift? Because social has sort of happened, search happened, smartphones have happened. And on the one side, like, you've got, and as I'm sure Ben would say, like, you've got this kind of massive deployment stage. So, you know, whether that's Shopify on the one hand, Shein on the other, I mean, this is, I said, I do an annual presentation, I do this presentation I did, where I basically said the sort of three things going questions. There's all the stuff for 2030, which is basically Web 3, Metaverse, plus like frontier tech, like quantum and satellites and shit.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, everyone in software is building digital transformation, so they're building cloud. And meanwhile, everyone outside of tech is getting messed up by ideas from 2000, like maybe people will buy stuff online, which is basically what Sheeran is. You know, there's nothing in Sheeran that you couldn't have said 10 years ago. It's just, guess what? They did it right and it's now bigger than Zara and H and M combined. So with TikTok, like there's nothing in TikTok that people weren't trying to do 10 years ago with Vine. It's just they did it right and it's whatever it is, a hundred billion dollar company. Um, the other side of that is, you know, does web three is like web three, like the new cloud, the new open source, the new architectural layer where we completely remake the whole of the internet or great half of the internet.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Um, and if it is, that gets complicated because like open source did take over tech, but the iPhone isn't open and Microsoft owns GitHub. So it's probably the more complicated. And then there's a metaverse thing, which is like, hey, what the fuck does metaverse even mean?

• 15:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  So can I swear on your podcast?

• 16:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, no, no. Fuck shit. All that stuff's good.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in Germany, shit show is like a normal word that you can put on the front page of a newspaper. So there's just, that's just on a shit show and it's just like a normal, like mainstream word.

• 16:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, hopefully we can normalize all that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So, so there's metaverse, like metaverse is just like this incredibly, on the one hand, it's super specific. Everyone will have the R and R in 10 years, which is kind of like, and say, well, what does that mean? It's kind of like trying to talk about mobile in 2000, like everyone will have an interconnected phone in 10 years. Okay, but what? Um, and on the other hand, it's just incredibly vague because people start using it to describe, like literally people are using metaverse to describe web two, web 1.0 things.

• 16:43Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Yeah. It's so, I'm sure it's funny for you to have like the perspective of being in mobile as a dedicated focus in 99 or whatever. That's one of the things I always come back to is no idea is new. Like everyone's thought of all of these ideas. It's just like, it is now going to be the time that it actually works. And I had asked Aaron Levy last week about web three and, you know, his view of all that stuff. And he was like, I kind of reject the premise of the question that like web three is a thing, right? He like took it back to the root of like, hey, do I believe in decentralization and protocols and all that stuff? Sure. But like, does it need that everyone's accruing value and the last in should make money because of this appreciation and all that stuff?

• 17:26Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, to some extent, I hope, I mean, it's good for my business, uh, in investing in tech companies if, if like. Web three and crypto proves to be a thing just because we're going to unbundle a lot of the like.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  You'll have a whole wave of company creation.

• 17:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, it's bad that like, you know, I'm I've made enough jokes about like Bitcoin being for drug dealers and I'm blocked by like a lot of the influencers in the crypto world. So that part of it's bad. But in terms of like entrepreneurial opportunity, I think it's great if that happens. It's just like, it's not clear to me that that is a thing or metaverse. I mean, it sort of feels like grasping at straws a little bit. Both of them are kind of problems that like no one totally asked for, right? And it's, I think I could see it actually happening, but we're not, I don't know. We're like, no one's really saying this is a pain point that is acute today and that these are the discreet ways of solving it, other than maybe a store of value from crypto or gaming for metaverse.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I just, there was a moment a few months ago where I felt like every crypto conversation was basically people arguing about how to argue about crypto. So it's like, well, you can't, this is a toy. Yes, but everything looks like a toy. Yes, but stuff that didn't work looked like a toy too. So what are you telling me? This doesn't work yet, but it's been 10 years and it doesn't work yet. Well, look, remember when that, what's that guy, the Ruby and Rails troll, David something, D H A, where he wrote this famous thing saying, you know, Facebook hasn't made money yet, so it never will. This is not, you know, there's an awful lot of like, arguments that aren't useful.

• 18:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's sort of solving for survivorship bias of like.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but, but, but every argument works both ways in this kind of useful. And each of the counter argument is useless too. I mean, there's this great line by a physicist called Wolfgang Pauli, who was, he's one of these guys where there's lots of stories about them. And, you know, it's like mathematicians, it's the same thing.

• 19:17Logan Bartlett?

  You retain quotes pretty well, by the way. I mean, you, you have all these things off the, off the cuff.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the autism that does it. So, so, um, but yeah, there's a, um, the story is that he was asked to look at somebody's, some student's work and the guy's showing it to him and says, it's probably not, I'm afraid it's not very good. And Wolfgang Pauli says it's worse than that. It's not even wrong.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Which meant, which he meant like it wasn't a thesis that you could test. You couldn't show that it was wrong. It didn't like reach the level of being something that you could test and see whether it was right or wrong. And so these kind of arguments like, well, that looks like a toy. Everything looks like a toy. People always say that toys didn't like it's just that you're not adding anything to this. And I think a lot of those sort of it doesn't work yet. It should be working by now. What problem is it solving? Like you could apply all of those to, you know, the internet or to the web or to open source or smartphones. What problem is smartphone solving? Well, now we could tell you.

• 20:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Um, no, no, two thousand and five, not a remotely obvious that like no one knew would not have had a universal agreement that this was a thing that we needed at all. I mean, I think my, and I think it's a struggle. I find it a struggle to talk about crypto, maybe for kind of two ways. The first struggle I have is that it seems sort of like talking about Linux in the late nineties or early nineties. In that all the conversations are either very, very technical, where I have nothing to add. And even if I learnt it all, maybe I wouldn't be able to add anything. And even if I did, no one outside very small number of people would care. So it's not like a good investment in my time as a sort of a single person, single businessman, um, single business person.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Um, so it's like, you're either arguing about what kernel memory management should you use? Or you're saying in thirty years' time, maybe mobile phones will run on Linux.

• 21:05Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Your answer was maybe, but like, like this is not, this is not useful. And it's the same.

• 21:10Logan Bartlett?

  I, I've said that like both the smartest and dumbest people I know are all in on.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should quote you on that.

• 21:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. But so this is, and this is a problem talking in crypto. It's either very, very, very technical. And it's all like, well, which level two chain and do we go to L three? Or it's like in the future, there'll be no countries.

• 21:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Which is, well, maybe, but like, that's 20 years ago. So like, what can we, was there anything useful we can say about that? Um, I mean, the other.

• 21:38Logan Bartlett?

  There's that IQ spectrum graph where in the middle, it's like someone really angry and on either side, it's like, you know, the bell curve of dumb and super.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, there's nothing like this, it's nothing, I mean, I have this conversation with people in other industries that, you know, in there are other industries where in 10 years is sort of the next product cycle. Like if you're in real estate, you know, or if you're building a dam or something, 10 years is like, that's the point. It comes online and we've already booked the party. Whereas in tech, 10 years is right on the edge of science fiction. It's not like 15 years is definitely science fiction.

• 22:10Logan Bartlett?

  I saw a quote that someone or like someone was joking that a VC that's prognosticated about the downturn that's come has been right, has rightly predicted 10 of the last two recessions.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, this is an old joke, it's an old joke about economists. Yes, you know, economists always have, all economists correctly predict 10 of the last five recessions.

• 22:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  I mean, the other, the other, I mean, the, the, the thing that I, you know, I sort of poke away and thinking like, what is the thing that I would write, which is sort of how that would be useful, that would be at the right level of abstraction to think about crypto. The, the thing that, the thing that I keep going back to is thinking about open source. And one has to be kind of cautious of, you know, argument reasoning by metaphor. But the open source people were convinced they were going to transform software and it was this wild, crazy, very, very religious idea. And you still have vestiges of the religion. You're like Richard Stallman refusing to use a computer that doesn't have an open source BIOS. To which the answer is like, yes, but have you audited the mask for the photolithography to make the chip? It's like, you know, where did the sand come from?

• 23:16Speaker 01

  So you've got this very kind of religious idea and they were thought they were going to destroy Microsoft and no one was ever going to buy Office, no one would buy Windows, everyone would write their own code. And here we are 25 years later and the whole tech industry runs on open source and it's absolutely central to the way everything works. And yet the iPhone isn't open. And yet the iPhone has, is full of open source, isn't open, has millions of apps. So what is it? Is it open or not? What do you mean by not open?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  And so I had that sort of question of like. Does Web 3, and it's kind of to your point, like, does everybody have to have money attached to it? Does everyone have to know they're using Web 3? Because with open source, obviously, you don't. It's a way of building software, but it doesn't really fundamentally change what the software is. It just kind of changes what it, how it works and how it got built and what the business model is. But the software, as a consumer, you don't need to know the software is open source. And so with Web, if you were to build Twitter or Instagram or Web 3, and that's like a kind of a crap metaphor, because the stuff you build with a new thing is never the old thing, it's something new.

• 24:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, except for Salesforce, which is just Siebel in the cloud, but for the most part, yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but like, but you know, if you were to build some new thing that really, really worked because it was Web 3, would I, as a consumer, have to know it was Web 3? And would I have, how deeply would I have to dig into all the Web 3 specific stuff? And the problem, in a sense, is probably yes. Because otherwise, it wouldn't be Web 3. And like, what would that mean? And I don't know, I haven't really gotten a good answer to that. I mean, another way of coming at it, though, maybe, might be that if, for example, LVMH, which I think is really one of the most interesting companies in the world right now. If LVMH, for the sake of argument, do an NFT thing, and rather like the kind of microcosm of crypto,

• 25:02Speaker 01

  all the arguments about NFTs are dumb. But, or mostly the arguments about NFTs are dumb. But if LVMH does an NFT thing, and they decide they're going to have a golden share, or they're going to have 51%, well, Bitcoin people would say, this is dumb, this isn't. You could just use SAP for that. But LVMH would say, yes, but you have composability and transparency. So you can see what the, you can see what the contracts are, you can see the transactions, it's composable. We're the only people who can change the rules. But all the other stuff is very crypto-y and very Web 3. You know, what if you were to, you know, encrypt it so that it wasn't composable, making stuff up here?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Like, you know, make your matrix of all the things that define, that you can only do because it's Web 3. Now, what if you would have turned some of those off for some reason? Would it still be Web 3? What if the year is not transparent to the user, but it's one in one layer down? Does that, like? This is sort of how open source evolved, which is like all the business, it all got kind of complicated and interesting.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And the vision, the religion, I mean, I think Eric Raymond kind of wrote a thing saying, you know, we face it, desktop Linux is lost, but actually we kind of won if you look at what happened to open source, which is, you know, legitimate point of view. That's sort of the, the, the open source question, the, sorry, the, the crypto question is when you strip away all the bullshit of like, everyone will move to Singapore and there'll be no more countries anymore and this will change how trade unions work. What will it actually be once it's become absorbed into the tech industry?

• 26:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, will, will you be aware of it? And my hard part with it is asking these questions of stuff ultimately puts you on a, you know, a block list or a cynic list of all this. And I don't know, it's kind of fundamental, like even you, you have to be a hundred percent in and anything less than that is like, you're not going to make it in that latitude. And it's, it's, it's hard to have, you know, good faith conversations with people if, if you can't agree on principles around this kind of.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so there's sort of, there's something of this in conversations about Tesla. Because you can make a point, which is something that Elon has said, and people will say, you're an idiot, you're saying you're no better than Tesla. There are all these Tesla Elon fanboys who actually don't know anything about Tesla or Elon or anything he said or done or anything the company's done. And so you get, which actually makes it quite hard to have a Twitter conversation about Tesla, because you've just got all these reply guys jumping up and down like those little yellow people in Minions movie.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  And I think Bitcoin is kind of the same. I mean, if you just, if you do a logged out search on A16Z on Twitter, it's completely insane. And I say this as somebody who used to work there, but it's like, you know, everything's, and it's like a generalized problem with crypto is it's like the scene in, in Monty Python and the life of Brian, where they're talking about how they hate everyone. You know, the only people we hate more than the DOD in people's front are the people's front of DOD. And, you know, everything in Bitcoin is like this. Everything is a scam. Everything is an idiot. Everyone is a crook. Everything's stupid, except your scheme. And of course, and then of course, people who are all in crypto think everything's stupid and a scam and idiots. And so Bitcoin is like, you know, the George New, like new George Soros

• 28:21Speaker 01

  evil, like mastermind criminal self demon. Like, there's just an enormous amount of bullshit. And one of the reasons I mention that is like, the amount of, the increase in the amount of crap that I got when I joined A16Z, and the way that basically disappeared when I left, was kind of interesting. And some of it was my fault, what I was talking about. But a lot of it was like, you work at A16Z therefore. And so, with all of which is kind of a long-winded, windy way of saying, like, I think if you worked in crypto at A16Z and you were on Twitter, you just, you'd like, you'd just really wear out your blood button.

• 28:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And you really would. And so I have quite a lot of sympathy for Dixon and so on, for like, they get the, you know, yeah, they overblock, and yeah, like, there's a bunch of not very good arguments that come out from there sometimes, but like, it's tough to have a good faith conversation about this stuff on Twitter.

• 29:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, in general, it's hard to have good faith conversations on Twitter, I think. Hard stop. But I, I, I agree with that. Maybe just because you brought it up, it's a good segue to Elon and Twitter. So I, I can't decide if I'm tired about talking about this subject, or, or it's something that we just need to talk about. But just to give a quick primer on the last week here for Elon. So I guess last Friday, a week ago, Musk was questioning the less than 5% bots that existed on the platform, and he said the deal was temporarily on hold. A couple hours later, he came out and said he was committed to the acquisition, which I assume some lawyer forcibly made

• 29:53Logan Bartlett?

  him tweet out. And then, at the All In Conference on Monday, Musk gave that best tepid response to his desire to even go through with the deal. Justin, I don't know if you want to queue up that audio here, and we'll let people listen in.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  The one question, is this Twitter deal gonna get closed, you think? What are the chances here?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it really depends on a lot of factors here. I'm still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of fake or spam accounts on Twitter, and Twitter is refusing to tell us. So, you know, this just seems like a strange thing.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Wait, sorry, are they refusing to tell you, or you don't think they really know? I mean, there's a good chance they may just have no idea.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  They claim that they do know.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  And they claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand.

• 30:55Logan Bartlett?

  So, so obviously not the most glowing endorsement there that he's gonna move forward with the, with the deal. It seems like Twitter's board is gonna move forward, or at least planning to move forward. They're, they said they were committed to completing the transaction on the agreed to prime price and terms. And this is all with a backdrop, I guess, of Tesla's stock is down 25% plus, which has wiped out about $45 billion of value to Musk personally.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Apparently, apparently the stock market has gone down a bit lately. I don't know if you've seen some stories about this.

• 31:27Logan Bartlett?

  I actually lived it in a bunch of different ways, but yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Snapchat's down 28%, which would imply, instead of the 5420 that Musk is paying, that would imply like a $39 price per share. And then, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is in talks to raise at $125 billion valuation. And then the last thing on Musk this week that I don't particularly want to touch is accusations from a masseuse.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a sexual harassment lawsuit.

• 31:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, yes, and we'll leave it, we'll leave it at that. What's your perspective on this whole thing in general, like the last week, as well as the whole saga?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  So there's a securities conversation here. It was a long time ago. I actually was an equity analyst, which is that Elon doesn't act like a public company CEO, doesn't really care what the rules are, and mostly gets away with it. And you could argue like the whole funding secured thing, in the end, the price went up so much afterwards that shareholders didn't really suffer for that. But there's kind of reasons why you're not supposed to just fuck with people.

• 32:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  And you're not supposed to fuck with the shareholders, and you're not supposed to lie. Those rules are kind of there for a reason, and it's kind of not okay to just pick and choose which ones you feel like obeying, and you know, and mess about, mess around with it. So I think that's, you know, that's kind of maybe a political opinion.

• 32:53Logan Bartlett?

  No, no, I mean, Matt Levine had a really good thing this week about like, you know, calling it what it was. He's like Musk is lying about this stuff, right?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's very kind of Trumpian in a sense, in that he's just ignoring what the norms are and daring the regulator to do something about it and kind of dancing all over the edge of the line between, you know, what you're not supposed to do and actual securities fraud, or whatever you want to call it. So that's the whole, and that's nothing to do with Techprotest or Twitter. It's just, you know, how he, how he's behaved and a bunch of other issues here. I mean, I had a tweet about it, where I said, you know, basically, the problem with Elon is he's a bullshitter who delivers. So he says all this stuff, and he does all this stuff, and there's a self landing rocket ship, and there's a scale, first scale company, it's a second world war.

• 33:38Logan Bartlett?

  It's not MLM, or it's not a Ponzi scheme, if you actually make good on what you promised.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Well, except that half of it is. The other half doesn't turn up.

• 33:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  You know, we're still waiting for the self driving girl. And we, you know, he's, you know, he says a bunch of stuff, and then there's the self flying, there's the rocket ship.

• 33:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And so that's, and that's the kind of the generalized problem with it, with, with, because I mean, that kind of breaks people's pattern recognition, because you've got to understand that both of those are true. He is full of shit, and there's the rocket ship.

• 34:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And so that's a kind of sort of second sort of Elon point. I think, you know, Tesla, Twitter, I mean, you know, the challenge with Twitter has always been.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  So maybe this is the two points here. The first point is like Twitter has always been known as this place where good people would go and they would fail to get anything done. And they would leave and they would get something done. So somebody I knew worked there and he had a child, his father and his wife had a baby and he left and he had twins. And I said, Kevin, you doubled your productivity, which is kind of the archetype of the Twitter experience. And you hear all these like amazing stories of what a shambles it was sort of 15 years ago and 10 years ago. And you hear these stories, but I'm also here to hear these stories like now of what a mess it is. And so there's certainly an argument. Now, you could argue, like, is the contrast with Instagram? So let's say, can we wind back? Like, there's always been this kind

• 35:02Speaker 01

  of problem. And it's actually really hard to define what it is, what the new experience should be. You have to spend months working on it in order to build value and build a followers. You join, you've got an empty screen, you tweet, no one sees it, you're shouting into the void.

• 35:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  It's a really hard experience relative to something like Instagram. You could argue, is it such a mess because it's so hard? Or does it just look hard because it's such a mess?

• 35:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's hard to know.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Is it probably both?

• 35:28Logan Bartlett?

  TikTok has figured this out in an onboarding funnel way.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:31Logan Bartlett?

  Where, you know, it is an interest graph as well, but they figured out that funnel in a much more meaningful way.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  But it's easier, it's a much easier kind of content to look at.

• 35:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, much more.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  You see this.

• 35:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  It's easier to look at videos and pictures than to scan a bunch of people's tweets and work out whether you would want to follow them. It's just, there is this kind of chicken and egg. Is, does it look so hard because the company's never really been any good at working it out? Or vice versa? And I think the answer is probably a bit of both.

• 35:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  But whatever it is, the company's always been a mess. And you see this with like product now. I mean, what was it, like Matthew Ball the other day tweeted that someone tried to fish him with a DM from a verified account that obviously been hacked. And he hits the report button and it goes to a 404. And they're like,

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 36:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  This is 5,000 people work there. This is a 15 year old company. You report fishing goes to a 404. Like, come on.

• 36:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  And yeah, there's a story why. Yeah, there's always a story why. So, and so there's a, you know, I think that Elon, I hate Steve Jobs metaphors, they're sort of massively overused. But, you know, there's a sort of, you know, the Steve Jobs going back to Apple is on the first hand. On one first hand, it's a massively badly run company, chaotic company. And so the first thing you have to do is fix it and not have like too many models in the wrong inventory and stuff be out of stock and stuff be screwed up. But the second thing is, yes, but you've still lost. Apple's still lost, even if you were running it properly. So then what?

• 36:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  And it takes them a while to work out the then what, which they think for a while is going to be video. And then of course it's the iPod and then music and then the iPhone comes like a decade after we went back. And so the same thing for Apple, for Tesla, there's certainly like a fixing the company story. And then, but then there's a why is this 200 million dollars and $5 billion of revenue? And is fixing it make it 250 and 10 billion? Or is fixing it making it a billion? Is this just fundamentally something with a small TAM? Is looking at cool pictures on Instagram naturally something that has a massive TAM? And arguing with strangers on the internet, I'm kind of answering my own question. You'd think that would be a huge TAM.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  But like, I suppose the question is, yes, it's a fucked up kind of a company. But if it wasn't fucked up, would that make it a $100 billion business? Probably, but well, $100 billion, $100 billion market cap maybe. But would it make that like, why is it a $5 billion revenue company? Could it be a $10 billion revenue company? You know, is it that the ad product is terrible? Or is it they fundamentally don't know what I'm interested in because that's not what I talk about?

• 38:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It is an interesting thing that the good, I mean, clearly the impact is disconnected from the from the value that's been created, which is just like an interesting concept in general. And also the people that are influential and cover it are also very active on it. And so it's this self fulfilling sort of thing. I guess one thing that you touched on that I think is interesting, just to back up a little bit. And it segues to another thing I, I wanted to talk about with you, but was obviously Gabe Plotkin this week shut down Melvin, which was left kind of reeling.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Very New York tweet. I'd literally never heard of him till he emailed me.

• 38:39Logan Bartlett?

  It's so funny that well,

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Circles of circles of interest. Yeah, I know the story. Yeah.

• 38:44Logan Bartlett?

  You know the whole

• 38:46Speaker 01

  He got caught in the GameStop short squeeze. Yeah.

• 38:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And so this goes back to, I guess, what's interesting here. I mean, there's a lot of finance related stuff that I think is interesting of like, why he's doing this and, you know, where they are, right? But the zooming out to the part that I think it ties back to this Elon thing is, what is the role of the retail investor, right, in all of this stuff where you're getting caught in the crosshairs to some extent of Elon's machinations that are going on on a daily basis with Tesla stock and Twitter stock. And there is this populist sentiment of pushing back on these billionaires, right, that obviously manifested itself in GameStop. And so I'm curious,

• 39:28Logan Bartlett?

  like, who, from your equity research lens on the Elon thing, like, who is, who do you think gets hurt? Obviously, there's pension plans and all of that that are exposed to, you know, the daily price swings that are going on because of their ownership in Twitter. But like, if you just view it from a fundamental standpoint, why, why do these laws need to be in place? And why is Elon at odds with the SEC, you know, pushing back on all these things that are going on?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  So, um, so I heard this sort of joke that Jeff Bezos has a safe behind his desk with an encyclopedia of retail from 1980 that he's working through page by page, kind of like Biff Tannen in Back to the Future 2. You know, it's like, private label products? Can you imagine such a thing? Yeah. But this hilarious, there's this hilarious Twitter thing of people discovering that Apple has private label. These people have like never been in a store. Yeah. I have no idea that this has been part of retail for

• 40:33Logan Bartlett?

  Shipping away at problems that have been solved in different generations.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like Amazon's a retailer, like, good go figure. And there's a sort of similar point here, like, a lot of crypto is working its way through confessions of a stock operator.

• 40:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, the 1920s banking regulation.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like you can corner a market.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Insider trade and so, you know, we used to have a model in which basically nothing was illegal except actual fraud and fraud was pretty narrowly defined even then. And in fact, you know, I believe technically insider trading isn't legal in the USA now. It's only illegal under certain situations, which is why Mark Cuban got off. Yeah. You know, so it's not you trade on non-material, non-public information, you go to jail. No, it has to be, well, why did you have it and did they know? And well, like, there's a whole bunch of get out clauses around that. And so there's a sort of, there's a sort of general point here, which is that if you have basically, there's a whole bunch of laws around, like, let's go kind of, kind of a super macro view here.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  We have laws around food safety because we decided that you should not ask everybody in the developed world to actually have to do their own due diligence on that bottle of milk when they buy it in the supermarket. They should not have to, and, you know, oh, so you put the list of ingredients on the back. Okay, they shouldn't have to go and look up on Wikipedia what that chemical is on the back of the food to know if it's safe. There's a degree to which, you know, actually, it's not reasonable just to leave it to the market, you know, you should actually, you know, society in general should sort of intervene and say, no, there's certain things you're not allowed to do. You know, it's like we, we have a law that says you have to have fire escapes in the building and nobody says, well, it's as a consumer, it's my choice whether I decide to take that risk and live in a building that has no fire escapes.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Like, no, we just decided to set a baseline of, no, you have to have fire escapes in the building, you have to have fireproofing, you have to have sprinklers.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  You have to have a seatbelt in the car, you have to have airbags. And so you have that, you know, there's a sort of very basic general principle that there are certain regulations around consumer protection, safety and so on.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  We have a police department. We just don't expect everybody to own their own gun. Well, obviously, sorry, I'm talking in America.

• 42:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  But like.

• 42:49Logan Bartlett?

  In the UK, you don't. We do.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But there's like, there's a very basic printed agreement in principle that you have government rules around some stuff that you can have products can work. And if you can lose your house or die, then those rules get kind of serious. And so that applies to, I mean, a couple of years ago, I did a presentation on regulation. And there's a study that somebody did on like, what are all the regulated industries? And it's not just finance. In fact, finance is sort of, and it was basically a scoring of how many rules are there. And it's like, there's industrial fishing and oil refineries and aviation and so on. Because, um, how can I put it? And this is also like a tech regulation conversation, like every company is subject to what you might call general legislation. Like if, if, you know, if, if, if, um, you

• 43:36Speaker 01

  know, one venture capitalist shoots another one, you don't get arrested by the NBCA. You know, it's not a securities law issue. That's just murder. But then, you know, everyone is subject to accounting law. Everyone's subject to health and safety law, occupational safety law and so on. But then there's some law industries that are kind of specific enough and the problems are specific and important that you get kind of your own set of laws. So there's laws for cars and laws for oil refineries and laws for fishing and laws for food safety. And there's laws for finance. Because if shit goes wrong, you lose your house. And we made a kind of collective decision that when we decided we weren't going to have any rules, we got the Great Depression. And that kind of sucked. So maybe we want to make sure that doesn't happen again.

• 44:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  So that's what gets you all this called consumer protection stuff. And I get that there are people only in America who are the idea that you shouldn't have any of these laws at all. And everyone should be sort of free to make their own decision as to what investing products they buy. And there's certainly areas where there's some lack of logic in like. Why is it that anybody can buy a stock but can't buy this?

• 44:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And there's certainly kind of places where you can poke away and said, well, I get the principle, but you're not applying it properly. And, you know, you know, securities laws experts can argue about like where there are weird stuff in the American securities laws that doesn't make sense, fine. But the principle that like, actually, no, you don't let people bet this, you know, you don't, you do what Jordan Belfort did was illegal and we didn't rely on the people who lost their savings to go and do their due diligence on this product. That was illegal and I didn't have a problem with that.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  There's the challenge with cryptocurrencies, which is it's

• 45:14Speaker 01

  with tokens, I should say, really, not cryptocurrencies, which is it is it's sort of a security and sort of not, and it's sort of investment and sort of not. And so it sort of breaks your assumptions around public market, private market, it's policy is certain threshold of risk that makes it okay. And so it gets kind of challenging as to think, well, how do you reconcile your public policy objective, which you don't have a bunch of, that Jordan Belfort goes to jail,

• 45:45Speaker 01

  with the desire not to just make a crypto based, web three based product just kind of impossible? I'll, I'll, I'll sort of stop talking there, but like, that's, that's a kind of, it's a challenge there in like, yes, you want the regulation in principle, but how do you align the policy objective of the regulation with this new thing? When it does seem to kind of conflict with some of the ideas that you had within it?

• 46:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, Sam Bankman Fried, the CEO of FTX wants crypto to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, right? Rather than the SEC, just because of the level of scrutiny that the SEC would have on all of this stuff. And I think, I mean, you'd have to be pretty ignorant and that's sort of what, there is this populist sentiment in the US in general, and it's this libertarian mindset of like, you shouldn't tell me what to do, right? And it manifests itself in the vaccine and it manifests itself.

• 46:44Logan Bartlett?

  In retail, trading and crypto and all of that. And it's this sort of idealism that, hey, I should be able to.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  I'm allowed to lose my own money.

• 46:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I should be allowed to lose my own money, which, but even, or I should be allowed to do with my body what I want to do, right? And but we, we, we were able to agree on principles back to your point that like a seatbelt probably were saving people from themselves, right?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Well, seatbelts, seatbelts are interesting because seatbelts argued, people argued about seatbelts for a long time. And there are still people who would say, well, it's my choice.

• 47:17Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Drink, drink, driving is a bigger one because then it's other people's lives.

• 47:22Logan Bartlett?

  Involving other people, which, which, which, which side does the vaccine sit on, right? Is a debate. Is it seatbelt or drunk driving?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Well, but, but, but pushing that further, I would say this is more like saying impact standards for cars.

• 47:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Because it is only you, but it's a choice that's sort of not been taken away from you. You now can't buy a car that doesn't meet those standards or it's food safety standards. You know, you can't choose to buy food that contains that chemical. It's just not available or it's illegal to sell it. Or, you know, it's like a licensed doctor. Why do you have to go to a licensed doctor? Why did I, why shouldn't I be allowed to just make my own judge of decision around that? Well, because let's talk about what would actually happen in that environment. You'd have huge numbers of four dillit doctors and lots more people would die because people would make, you know, most people would, you know, people, people would be tricked and conned and there would be idiots and charlatans. Lots of people would die and that wouldn't be actually be a good outcome collectively.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  So there was always this kind of, as you say, there's this tension between sort of libertarianism on the one hand and the fact that, well, actually, you know, there, well, we do agree that there are some places where you have those protections. But, you know, people argued about this a lot in the 19th century. People argued about food safety and why should there be laws? People should be free to choose.

• 48:35Logan Bartlett?

  And so where do you think, where do you think all this Elon stuff nets out now? I mean, obviously, it'll be interesting to see that there's kind of the nuclear option for him, which is the SEC saying, hey, you can't be on the board of a public company, right? And that's like, I don't think that's a practical gun that they're going to fire, right? I just don't.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Well, the problem is, it's back to my point about, you know, the, you know, the funding security thing.

• 49:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  What's, you know, they have this, the problem is, the, the, the people who try to protect from harm of shareholders, and so, but if you, you know, if you can Elon, that's not good for shareholders.

• 49:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  And so this is the kind of the thing he's, you know, the, the thing he dances with is like, he's daring them to, he's daring them to do something, because if they do something, that would actually be against, ultimately also be against their remit. I don't know. I mean, there's, there's a generalized Elon securities law, like what happens next? And there's a horse thing and so on. I think there's a more specific Twitter thing, which is, you know, there's a break clause, and he'd have to pay a billion dollars or whatever it is, or get sued for more, versus, you know, he could get it for 20 billion less, for the sake of argument. So, you know, that's how real estate developers work, you know? That's how, you know, you go, you retrade it. And I, in a sense, I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for, you know, Twitter's board, like, they're adults, and they've run this thing for 10 years.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And the person I have least sympathy for at all is Jack, who seems to have no awareness at all that he was actually the CEO of that company.

• 50:00Logan Bartlett?

  I think he's forgotten, like, it's, it's funny how he's, he's both been Prague's biggest advocate and Elon's biggest advocate at the same time, and he's both the CEO that resided over the banning of Trump, but also thinks he should be back on the platform because, you know, that was a business decision or something. He, he does have a unique ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth on this.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the, you know, when he finds out who was chief executive credit, he's going to be really surprised.

• 50:25Logan Bartlett?

  It's going to be, when he walks past the mirror, the next time he walks past a mirror, he's going to be very shocked to find out what's, what's there. But I do think it's interesting, I mean, I, I don't think I crystallized that the thread through all of these things is, be it crypto, be it Elon, be it Platin and GameStop, the thread through all of this, not to mention public Market bloodbath that we're sort of living through is where regulation exists. Like the tension, especially in the US, and I guess talking to someone from the UK is helpful in this, is what is the tension that exists between regulation and liberty or whatever, like a freedom of choice, right?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you see this, what we haven't mentioned is freedom of speech, which is also kind of a fascinating one. But this is particular thing that sort of drives me crazy is Americans who are under the impression that freedom of speech is invented in the American Constitution and defined by it. And the only way, the only answer to any question is, well, this is what the Constitution says, as though like, as though there's no other kinds of speech and no other ways it can be constrained and no other countries who might have their own opinions about this.

• 51:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's why.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  In a world in which like 95% of people on the internet are not in America.

• 51:36Logan Bartlett?

  The literal interpretation of the Constitution is something that I'm sure this is blasphemous to say to 50% of America, but the literal interpretation of that as the standard by which international private companies should govern is just like a pretty, it's a very myopic American worldview about like how things are done in general. But it is a fascinating tension to see it playing out on the world stage with all of this stuff. And I assume the end state of all this is going to be more regulation for crypto, more regulation for Elon, more regulation for, you know, retail investors protecting themselves against some of these things.

• 52:19Logan Bartlett?

  But it's interesting to see people try to push for like margin trading for retail investors, right? And it's like, gosh, I feel like we've seen this movie and it didn't end particularly well for the people involved. And so I just think this populist sentiment is when it ultimately turns as the public market has, I don't think it ends well for the, for the people that have lots of money today and have done well surviving in the existing construct, right?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  So while we're talking, I'm just kind of Googling a kind of something that I'm curious about is what percentage of ownership in different countries' stock markets are retail investors?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Because I would be willing to bet that it's much higher in the US than most of the rest of the world. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly markets where the proportion of the economy that's a public company is smaller than the US. Indeed. And so the, I mean, this is sort of an observation, but you know, the S and P 500 is down, whatever it is, year to date, down 20%. 20% was my guess, yeah. The FTSE 100 is down 1.5%. So some of this is a sort of a US thing and the retail thing, particularly the ideology

• 53:47Speaker 01

  you're talking about is a US thing. The retail investing frenzy is sort of a US thing, I think. I mean, I don't have the data in front of me, I'm willing for somebody to tell me this is wrong. But it is kind of a US specific story, I think. Of course, some of that is that so many of the big tech companies that get all the memes behind them are American companies. But it's also just a sort of the generalized, you know, the idea that everyone should own stocks is kind of a US, much more US thing than in many other countries. I mean, there's a sort of, there's a divergence here in the sort of two different regulatory conversations, there's three different regulatory conversations, because there's a sort of an Elon regulatory conversation. And then there's a sort of retail investing regulatory conversation where I'm afraid the answer is probably, look, if the market goes down by half and then goes sideways

• 54:29Speaker 01

  for three years, like, stop worrying about retail investors. Because the reason, it's been, everyone's been rushing to the party because everything's fucking tripled in the last three years. Yeah. That's why there's a retail investing story. Like, if that doesn't happen for the next three years, guess what, everyone will go in. There's a much more kind of generalized conversation, which is sort of regulation of technology more generally, where in fact, is actually, most of the drivers comes from outside the USA. And so US, it just comes another kind of, another conversation. The US tends to have a model of regulation by litigation and by crime. Did you break Sherman Antitrust Act? Yes or no? And this is what we saw in the Apple Epic lawsuit. Like, did they break this law? Yes or no?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Whereas the UK and Europe have a model of a regulator that can write laws. So the regulator can say, do we think this market's anti-competitive? Do we dislike the market structure of this market? Is this bad for consumers? Yes, therefore we will just change stuff. So you know, the EU will, you know, the EU is passing a law at the moment called the the Digital Markets Act, which will basically require everything from, you know, this is an argument about how broad it is, but they will just require Apple to open up the App Store. And it's not because Apple will go to court and lose a court case. They'll just pass a new, they just create a new set of regulations. They say, no, no, no, that we're just going to change how that market works. And so there's, whereas in the US, what you

• 55:55Speaker 01

  what you have at the moment is this law that Ted Cruz and somebody has introduced yesterday about, we're going to ban any company from having more than $20 billion of advertising in the US. Like something, I forget what the details are. You get these sort of press release laws that are really hard to, it's hard to understand how much potential you should pay to it because it's, most of them never happen. Whereas in Europe, there's a, this giant law that takes five years and then rather like GDPR, it just lands and they're like, oh shit, it's real, it's here. And we don't have any choice about it. And we don't get to go to court and argue about it. It's there, like you're tough shit. You've got to, you've got to obey that law. And we're kind of going through that process now, whatever the regulatory model is in the US, the UK, Europe and so on, of kind of bringing great chunks of tech inside the sort of regulatory envelope in a way that it never was before.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  And it's very different from what happened to Microsoft 25 years ago, which was just one company and just one thing. This is a Digital Markets Act, which applies to the Amazon Marketplace and applies to Airbnb and applies to the App Store and applies to digital advertising and applies to a whole bunch of stuff. And then there's a Digital Services Act, which is a call, basically a law that says everyone has to do content moderation.

• 57:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Kind of the way Facebook is already doing it. And if you, you don't get to argue, like, that's the law. It's all right.

• 57:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Well, it's a, it's an interesting, I mean, so I guess the net of all this is, I think we're going to be facing litigation and regulation and, and a bunch of stuff here in the coming, coming months. So I, I guess we'll have to press pause there. But thanks, Ben, thanks for making the time to go through all this. This is fascinating. You uh, you clearly, yeah, yeah. This is clearly a, an insightful topic or conversation that you have a lot of opinions about. So I really appreciate you making it.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I have, I have, I have opinions. Yes.

• 57:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, that's right. Well, good. Well, thanks. Thanks for doing this.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Good to chat.

• 57:44Logan Bartlett?

  Just want to interject here and thank everyone for listening. And a call out to if you are enjoying this, please do like, subscribe, leave a review, share with friends, all that stuff. Everything is super appreciated. So what you're going to hear next is a conversation between me and my friend Alexis Gay. I'm sure a number of you follow her online, her tweets and her videos. We go into her background, how she got into comedy, how she started a podcast, how we met, all that stuff. So excited for you to hear the conversation with me and Alexis. I am here today with my friend Alexis Gay. Alexis, thanks for doing this.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Of course. I'm so happy to be here.

• 58:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So maybe you'll give a little bit of background on our relationship. So we met over the internet over COVID.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:28Logan Bartlett?

  I, I think you had gone viral for a video.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 58:33Logan Bartlett?

  Which in this context was humor related. That sounds worse than, so there was a, so you, you were doing content for a while.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:41Logan Bartlett?

  And you had a big video that broke through.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  That's right. That was in April of 2020.

• 58:46Logan Bartlett?

  Beginning of the pandemic.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  That's right. Really early on.

• 58:49Logan Bartlett?

  And it got thousands and thousands of likes and views?

• 58:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was, it was anomalous for me in that I'd been creating stuff for a while while working full time in tech, but this particular video got in order of magnitude more attention.

• 59:05Logan Bartlett?

  So, so it was about a party in San Francisco, like what people say?

• 59:10Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. It was called Every Single Party in San Francisco. And at the beginning of the week, before I posted that video, I had 950 followers on Twitter and the most views any video I'd gotten on Twitter was about a thousand. And by the end of that week, when I posted that video, I had 15,000 Twitter followers and it had 3.1 million views.

• 59:29Logan Bartlett?

  Jeez.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  So when I say in order of magnitude.

• 59:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, very literally. That is actually what order of magnitude means. And so, so that went viral. So maybe your work career at that point, you were working at Patreon?

• 59:42Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 59:43Logan Bartlett?

  And so you had had a, maybe take through your, your tech career a little bit there? And yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's a tale as old as time tech to comedy, obviously.

• 59:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. A very natural.

• 59:53Speaker 04

  Well trodden fact.

• 59:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'm aspiring. It's not going as well.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  I see you're on your way.

• 59:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yours is going better than mine is. Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  So I was working in tech right out of college and I worked at a small startup here in New York. I wanted to go further into tech, so I moved out to San Francisco. I worked at Twilio, API company for God Communications.

• 1:00:10Logan Bartlett?

  We were investors, happy former investors. Yes, it worked out well for us.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Same.

• 1:00:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  And then after Twilio, I worked at a company called Patreon for three years.

• 1:00:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  And Patreon was, when I joined, Patreon had about 120 people. And I was so lucky. I feel like I joined at exactly the right time because

• 1:00:29Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  This was 2016.

• 1:00:31Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. I joined Patreon in 2018, March of 2018.

• 1:00:36Logan Bartlett?

  So Twilio was 2016 to 18. Yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  And so Patreon was an opportunity for me to come in and do stuff I really loved. So I was joined to do strategic biz dev and build out operations on the partnerships team. And then by the time I left, three years later, I was running the partnerships team and had gotten to build out biz ops on the go to market side. And so I went from being an IC, originally hired to help people that had big, big audiences, understand how they could use Patreon, to running that team and having seven direct reports, which was such an unbelievable, like everything I could ever want from my tech career for the perfect company.

• 1:01:14Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Yeah, exactly. It was a nice, I guess you probably learned a lot interacting with all those people

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  100%.

• 1:01:19Logan Bartlett?

  for what you're doing today, which we'll talk a little bit more about. But so on the relationship side, so that video went viral and then it was that weird period in COVID where like people were all like interacting online only because we were actually like very nervous about COVID at that point in time.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:01:37Logan Bartlett?

  And like Clubhouse was a big thing.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  Clubhouse was huge at that time.

• 1:01:40Logan Bartlett?

  We were in a Clubhouse room together at one point and I was a, in earnest, I didn't really start posting on Twitter until the beginning of the pandemic was when I

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:01:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, my former employer was in RIA.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:53Logan Bartlett?

  And so the amount of stuff I could post and like how unencumbered I could be with what I would say.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  You didn't want to get called into the principal's office.

• 1:02:00Logan Bartlett?

  I, well, I did get called into the principal's office at times. And so then I joined Redpoint and were not registered with the same like considerations.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:02:10Logan Bartlett?

  And also it was the pandemic when we were, I was bored.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I get that.

• 1:02:15Logan Bartlett?

  And so I started tweeting in earnest and yeah, and so, so we got to be friends through that, right?

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Logan Bartlett?

  And then we finally met in real life sometime that fall, maybe?

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  Maybe? My am? No.

• 1:02:30Logan Bartlett?

  No, no, no.

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Logan Bartlett?

  Really? No, no, no, we met in New York before then.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  I don't think so.

• 1:02:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  No. When?

• 1:02:35Logan Bartlett?

  That, that bar that like is high up in the...

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  I forget.

• 1:02:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know what it is. It was like in town.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Why did I repress that memory?

• 1:02:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  That was, oh my god, that's, you're right.

• 1:02:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, overlooking Central Park. So we met there and then, and then hung out. Well, uh...

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  You know what I recently found, I think? Your first tweet to me.

• 1:02:54Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  Do you know that you tweeted to me?

• 1:02:55Logan Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Before we met?

• 1:02:56Logan Bartlett?

  No. It sounds, uh, it sounds ominous. Hopefully it was a very normal, uh, what?

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  I waited to tell you that until I started recording.

• 1:03:06Logan Bartlett?

  We'll need to pull this up and have this on screen as we're talking.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  It's nothing bad. I think you just said like, "You're very funny," or something like that.

• 1:03:12Logan Bartlett?

  That's nice.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  And I was like, "Oh, wow."

• 1:03:14Logan Bartlett?

  That's a positive energy bringing to Twitter.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  I was really surprised, but I thought you were funny too. So I'm surprised to learn you just started, um...

• 1:03:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I did a little bit. I, I don't know. I could probably go back and, yeah, I dabbled. I, uh, I could probably go back and look, but I, I think I probably had a, I don't know, a thousand or 2,000 followers or something at the time. And I was doing like very serious like software valuation posts, which...

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  When did you start your Twitter account?

• 1:03:37Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, 2010.

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:03:39Logan Bartlett?

  But, but it was, you know, whatever. I, I remember I was sitting in my college, uh, it was my senior year of college and I was sitting there and enough people were talking about it that I was like, "I, I need to figure out what this thing is."

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  100%.

• 1:03:50Logan Bartlett?

  Right. Uh, but, but I probably...

• 1:03:51Speaker 04

  I taught mine in high school.

• 1:03:51Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Literally in the computer lab of our library in high school.

• 1:03:55Logan Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  Me and a couple of my friends.

• 1:03:57Logan Bartlett?

  We're like, "Hey, let's get this Twitter."

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  Let's get on Twitter.

• 1:03:59Logan Bartlett?

  Has your, has your handle stayed the same?

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  No, I changed it.

• 1:04:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  My first handle was, okay, this is gonna date the moment when I got Twitter.

• 1:04:07Logan Bartlett?

  Was it like lax DMB or something? Cause that, cause that was like my AOL thing.

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say, that sounds like yours. No, at the time that that song that was like, "Abebe, Abebe," it was popular and my last name is Gay, so my first Twitter handle was A Gay Gay.

• 1:04:19Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, that's good.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:20Logan Bartlett?

  That's clever.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It probably doesn't, uh, hasn't aged as well for like professionalism and, yeah. You probably had to evolve a little bit, you know?

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  I, yes, I've evolved.

• 1:04:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Um, so, so you did Patreon and you left when?

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  I left in December of 2020.

• 1:04:37Logan Bartlett?

  December of 2020, okay.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Logan Bartlett?

  So in the middle of the pandemic. And, and so you had that breakthrough in April of 2020. You had been making videos and stuff before then.

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:04:47Logan Bartlett?

  So was that kind of a side hustle thing that you were doing? And then it broke through and then it continued. I assume the videos after that did well. If you go from whatever, 950 followers.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  So, okay, also, I love how hobbies got rebranded as a side hustle. There was a time.

• 1:05:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, hustle culture.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Right, well, there was a time when people did things because they enjoyed it.

• 1:05:08Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I guess that's an interesting question of how much of it was a hobby that you were just entertaining yourself with, which versus, hey, I think that this can be something at some point, right? Cause like, I think of side hustle as maybe an ambition that is going to ultimately, maybe if it works out, translate to something versus hobby, you're just spending your time.

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Well, that's why I point out the distinction.

• 1:05:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  Because this was never my intention to do this professionally, to leave my job, to leave tech and pursue comedy of all things, or podcasting of all things. I genuinely just, in 2017, while I was working at Twilio, I had moved from New York to San Francisco. New York, which has different career paths and different types of people and different things. And I moved to San Francisco, which has one thing, and it is tech.

• 1:05:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  And I worked at a tech company and all my friends worked in tech. Person I was dating worked in tech. Everything I did all the time was tech.

• 1:06:02Logan Bartlett?

  I make a joke, by the way, of like, New York, famous people walk into a bar and it's like Derek Jeter or like Lorne Michaels or whatever, right? Michael Bloomberg. And in San Francisco, like famous person walks into the bar and it's like Reid Hoffman.

• 1:06:18Logan Bartlett?

  It's like, nothing against Reid, he seems like a great guy, but like.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  That is so funny.

• 1:06:21Logan Bartlett?

  He's not like a celebrity.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  It's so true.

• 1:06:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  100%. And that, you know, that sort of like one note vibe was something that started to feel kind of overwhelming, especially because I had come from New York, which had felt so rich culturally. And so going to San Francisco, I decided that a way to shake up my life would be to take improv classes. It was like this escape. I thought, okay, well, after work, I'll just do this. Excite grown up acting. And that was always something I'd really loved. And so improv was a way to kind of like act as a hobby. It had never occurred to me that. That choice would then become like doing comedy full time.

• 1:06:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  But improv classes is what led to making YouTube videos, which is what led to doing stand up, which is what led to all of the comedy stuff culminating into what I do now.

• 1:07:08Logan Bartlett?

  Did you ever think about doing, like, acting professionally?

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, this is a fun fact. My, my plan was to be an actress growing up.

• 1:07:18Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  That was always the plan, but there's a flaw in the plan, which was that I was always intensely academic as well.

• 1:07:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 04

  So I was never just like, I'm a theater kid and that's all I want to be. I was always like, yeah, I'm gonna be an actress. I'm also gonna like work really hard to get good grades because I need that gold star.

• 1:07:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  But I was like, but ultimately you won't really matter because I'll be an actress. And then I went to, I went to NYU where I got to design my own major. And I made sure to take lots of classes that were in the arts, acting, et cetera. But I paired it with a business minor called the Business of Entertainment, Media and Tech.

• 1:07:50Logan Bartlett?

  Was that something they actually offered or did you?

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  And so that was a way for me to feel like I'm gonna get a great education, a liberal arts education humanities, but have a nice business minor to round it out. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because I'm gonna be an actress. But then when I graduated and it was like, hey, guess what? It's time to act. I was like, cool. I'm gonna get a job at a tech startup.

• 1:08:12Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Well, it's interesting. It's interesting. The, like, the people I always, historically, a lot of the people that pursued like creative endeavors are either, this is something I've, I've thought about. I'm not sure if this actually proves out, but like, you know, Anderson Cooper came from the Vanderbilts, right? Or Nick Kroll's family are billionaires. Julie Louis-Dreyfus family billionaires. Like you go through Rashida Jones, Quincy Jones, you sort of go through Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Logan Bartlett?

  It's kind of like people that grew up with a lot of money and were kind of exposed, willing to take that risk. Or people that had nothing to lose, right? And so like Brad Pitt came from, you know, whatever, a small Midwestern town. And it was kind of like in the middle where there's not really a soft landing if you go for acting and fame. It's not like, oh, the gradient of curve of like what you make or your professional success is like pretty harsh, right? It's either you make it and you're amazingly successful.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Logan Bartlett?

  Or then there's like a bunch of small stuff in the middle, but you're still kind of living paycheck to paycheck.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Logan Bartlett?

  Or you're like totally struggling, right?

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:09:15Logan Bartlett?

  And it's hard, I'm sure, when you're faced with the option of like having a comfortable tech job versus going to move to LA or whatever. It's probably pretty daunting.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  There's so much there to talk about. So one thing is that this was in 2013 when I was facing this decision. And at the time, you know, making stuff on the internet wasn't a career.

• 1:09:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  And it was barely a thing. It was, some people, you know, had been on YouTube really early on, but if you were interested in the arts, like in acting or whatever, music, I don't think that at that time, you immediately looked at the internet as a way to develop independent success and fame.

• 1:09:51Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  And so that wasn't even in my brain, the idea that that could be a path for me. And acting felt so powerless because you would always, I felt like I would always be waiting for somebody to say, oh, it's your turn. Waiting for somebody to pick me, to cast me, to bring me on as a client.

• 1:10:09Logan Bartlett?

  It's outside of your control. And also, it's not like a linear career path.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 1:10:13Logan Bartlett?

  Where you can always be talking yourself into, I'm just my big breakaway, right?

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:17Logan Bartlett?

  And it's like, oh, you hear about Jon Hamm or George Clooney, or like people that got to be successful at 35, 40. But how many people delude themselves into thinking that like, oh, well, if this works out, right? But it's totally outside of your control versus most jobs are like,

• 1:10:30Speaker 04

  Totally outside of your control.

• 1:10:30Logan Bartlett?

  At least somewhat linear, that you're putting one foot in front of the other and you know, like, okay, I'm going to be a manager, then a senior manager, then maybe a VP or whatever it is, right?

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  And also you can work really hard and not have that correlate with your success.

• 1:10:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  And so let's contrast that with tech, working at a 17-person tech startup in 2013? Come on. All I had to do was show up on time, be nice and say yes to everything. And that was my career strategy for three years and it worked great.

• 1:10:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. And it's a much more normal distribution of like, you know, at the very top of acting, it's amazingly successful, right? You go down like 5% and you're like scraping to get by, right? Versus tech, if you're the very top, you're doing super well, but 5% down is, and so, so the creative element of it, so you were doing, you were surrounded by all tech people in San Francisco and you started to think about like, I need some outlet.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Logan Bartlett?

  And so you started doing improv as a, now was comedy, when you were acting, was that like a thread that you thought about going down?

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  Never. There was one moment when I thought about comedy as a way to act and it was after I read Tina Fey's book Bossy Pants. And I was just like, I think it was 2010, I think I was a sophomore in college and I was like, oh. I want to do this. I want to do what she did. And then I just didn't.

• 1:11:48Logan Bartlett?

  What was her career path? I actually don't know.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  She came up through Second City.

• 1:11:51Logan Bartlett?

  She did, okay.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Doing improv.

• 1:11:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, then SNL and writing and all that. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then SNL and then 30 Rock. And now she obviously writes and produces a lot and stuff like that. But I, that was the only time when it ever like occurred to me that that was a thing somebody could do. Something about reading her book and I love, she's such a role model.

• 1:12:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, she's amazing.

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  But that was 2010 and I didn't end up doing it till 2020. So it took 10 years for that to actually come true.

• 1:12:15Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and even then, like Second City is the one, right? You know, it's like, that's the, you know, and SNL is the one, right? And it's not like there's another, you know, there's, there's Twilio and there's Stripe and there's Page, you know, there's a bunch of like successful companies.

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:12:28Logan Bartlett?

  It's not like there's one that like is a stamp on the resume to, to make it. And so, so you're doing improv classes. You're enjoying it presumably?

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  I remember the moment, the first time our team got a laugh. When you take improv classes, often there's like a grad show at the end, which is, it's like making your adult friends come to a dance recital, but whatever.

• 1:12:46Logan Bartlett?

  My exposure to improv is like, like Barry, basically. I, yeah, that's like, that's where I get most of my information about improv and acting classes, but yes.

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  I get it. I get it. Um, you should, have you ever done improv?

• 1:12:56Logan Bartlett?

  No, never. Yeah. I, maybe in high school, I, maybe my freshman year of high school, I took a drama class and I had to do like improv. Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Was that enjoyable?

• 1:13:04Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, yeah, I guess so. I mean, not, not so much that I never took another class again, but, uh, but yeah, I guess.

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  All right. I would come, just so you know, I would come to your improv show.

• 1:13:13Logan Bartlett?

  You would.

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  If you ever, yes, if you ever text me and you were like, hey Alexis, I have an improv show, I would come.

• 1:13:20Logan Bartlett?

  I don't know if that's a text you're getting, but.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  I would come to that. I just want you to know, if you need just one person to support you, I'll be in the front row.

• 1:13:26Logan Bartlett?

  One fan.

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  One fan. All it takes is one true, one true fan, actually. We thought it was 10,000, then it was 100. It's actually one true fan.

• 1:13:34Logan Bartlett?

  Only fan.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  If it's me, only fan. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:36Logan Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 1:13:37Speaker 04

  Um, but anyway, so. The thing about improv, you have these grad shows and I literally remember the first laugh we got and it was like a lightning bolt through my body. Like, I remember just getting offstage and just being like, wow, I want to feel that one million times.

• 1:13:53Logan Bartlett?

  And you're at Twilio now. And so you're doing this and you're like, that's amazing. I want to keep doing this.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:14:01Logan Bartlett?

  And so what did that, so you started doing YouTube? Like, were there people you'd look to at that point? I don't even remember what YouTube, like, were there people that you could look at and be like, alright, I want to internalize like that video style a little bit? Because you have a signature video style, at least the way that I think about it. The Alexis Gay branded video. Were there people that you sort of looked at and it's like, okay, I'm going to port over like this version and make it tech or San Francisco centric?

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  I would love to say yes. It would make it sound like there was a plan, but no. I will also clarify that even though I loved improv immediately, I still, there was no part of me that wanted to do it full-time.

• 1:14:41Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  0%. I just loved how it felt.

• 1:14:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  And I also loved working in tech and I still love tech as an industry. Obviously, it's flawed in many ways, but I just have a lot of appreciation for it. And so comedy and sort of developing like what kind of comedy I wanted to do came out of like true love and joy from creating it. And so I didn't set out to build a following and I didn't set out to leave my job. I just like wanted more. So it was more like, okay, improv classes, that led, you know, five rounds of improv classes led to co-founding and it also, I love how I, can we curse on this?

• 1:15:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  I was going to say, I love how I fucking say founding an improv team.

• 1:15:22Logan Bartlett?

  I know, I know. Oh, you founded an improv team, yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  Oh, god, yes. I was a co-founder, co-founder and COO of our improv team and that led to...

• 1:15:30Logan Bartlett?

  Co-founder and COO.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  I'm joking.

• 1:15:31Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, okay. I was going to say, were there executive levels at this improv team?

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  I just brought the vibe of a COO to our improv team.

• 1:15:38Logan Bartlett?

  That's good, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  That's probably a true fact. You could interview some of my teammates and they'd be like, the spreadsheets are a little much Alexis. But I actually did have spreadsheets because we'd put on shows in San Francisco and we would ticket them. And then that sort of led to YouTube videos because when I started working at Patreon, I had less time to do improv and perform live. And so I thought that YouTube would be a way for me to do it on my time and my terms. And in terms of an influence... My early YouTube videos are vlog style videos that have humor, but they are not what I now make. And that style is basically just my friend Jarvis Johnson's style, um, but my version. And that's because he was a new friend of mine at the time. And he also, he referred me to Patreon and he was really into YouTube.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  And so he taught me like, just through watching him and his style, that's how I developed like my first style, which by the way is very common, I think in comedy is to say, okay, I like this person and what they do. I'm going to do my version of that. And it feels like you do that enough times and you find your own style.

• 1:16:38Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. No, I, I agree a hundred percent with that. Wait, uh, what is vlog style? Like what was it?

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  So it was like holding my DSLR camera on like a tripod, like talking direct to camera. But what I would do is I would script out my video and then I would tell a story to camera and go back and edit it with the quick cuts that are probably more closely associated with me now. But I would put in like production elements, like little sounds or I'd have a lot of little visuals and it would be telling a specific story. They were usually like four to seven minutes long. So one was like the worst part about moving in with my boyfriend. And it was how he left his bike in the hallway of our studio apartment, which is truly one of the worst things that's ever happened to me. Um, and it was just about like telling that story or the story of what it's been like for my last name to be gay.

• 1:17:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  For my whole life, you know, like those little things that are specific to my experience, but told in like this direct to camera format with lots of cuts and production.

• 1:17:35Logan Bartlett?

  What, uh, by the way, I, I'm glad you overcame that bike in the, uh,

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:17:39Logan Bartlett?

  hallway thing.

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  That was my struggle.

• 1:17:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. In your memoir, that's going to be a really overcoming obstacle.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  Three to five chapters.

• 1:17:45Logan Bartlett?

  So, uh, okay. So, so you're now doing these videos. You have one go super viral, uh, and you're like, hey, did it, did it fulfill the same thing that you got from improv? I assume different, right? Cause you're not getting the immediate feedback in the same way.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  Different, but similar, honestly. That's a great question, you know? And I will add that in this moment in time, so it was April 2020 and I was, I had been making these short little videos for a few weeks at that point. Um, though I had at different points in my life, I had done them different. You know, well, this wasn't like the first time I ever made a short video.

• 1:18:17Logan Bartlett?

  This was which, which number short video you published to Twitter?

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  Um, I think like maybe four.

• 1:18:26Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, so fairly early.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  Fairly early, but in between working at Twilio and Patreon, I took time off. And the way that I filled that time was I decided I would make a short video every day for 30 days. Because I'd never done it before. I'd made videos when I was little with my friends.

• 1:18:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  But I hadn't done it as an adult, and I knew I loved the feeling of video editing. And that was a way while I was unemployed for me to not just like plow through a season of Netflix.

• 1:18:51Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  And making those videos one a day for 30 days taught me something very important. One, it helped me ramp up my skills way faster than if I had taken my time. And two, at that time, before I joined Patreon, it taught me, oh, I do not want to do this full time. My biggest takeaway from making those videos and really working hard every day at it was I extremely do not want this to be my job.

• 1:19:14Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  And that's what led me to Patreon.

• 1:19:16Logan Bartlett?

  And so why was that the case? Why was it that you didn't want to do it?

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  Because at the time, I didn't see a path to doing it independently. I didn't see a path to monetization and just creating short video content. And I missed tech. I missed doing biz dev. I missed having coworkers. And what I realized was it would be shitty to do it full time. And also, I would have someone, if I worked for a company and made content for them, I feared that I would have someone telling me how to do it. Which sounds really obnoxious that I'm like, I don't want feedback.

• 1:19:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  I don't. It was a thing I did for joy. I don't want to know what someone else thinks of it. I just want to do it for fun.

• 1:19:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, interesting. So now you, this goes viral. And you're like, okay, I need to capitalize on that moment and put more content out there? Or what was the reaction?

• 1:20:03Speaker 04

  Okay, so a lot of feelings. Because like I said, I'd been making stuff online for several years, but not for an audience of that size. And then suddenly, my audience was not only so much larger, literally 1,000 to 15,000, as I said, but it was also full of people I respected. It was tech CEOs, people whose names I knew, investors I was familiar with, Logan Bartlett.

• 1:20:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I think, I, yeah, I was waiting for you to, if you weren't gonna work me in, I was.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Huge, people who I knew and who I, I should say who I knew of.

• 1:20:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  And suddenly they're following me?

• 1:20:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  And I was like, okay, I mean, sure, but it was like I had been doing stand up for an intimate group of people. And I'm holding the mic and then 15,000 people walk in.

• 1:20:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  And I had to keep telling jokes.

• 1:20:49Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  And it was such a bizarre feeling.

• 1:20:51Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and, and they're there because of a momentary video and now you need to recreate that. You're like, so was there, was there, like, were you paralyzed to make the next one? Or did you just rip the Band-Aid and you're like, I gotta, I gotta just keep at it?

• 1:21:03Speaker 04

  Love that question.

• 1:21:04Logan Bartlett?

  I might as well keep shooting, cause if they don't like me at this next shitty video that I'm gonna put out there, like they're, you know, they don't get the good ones that are gonna come to.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you don't like me in my video of trying on jeans, then you don't deserve to be at my every single party in San Francisco. That's a real video I made. Um, uh, okay, so the thing is, one, yes, I immediately was like, I have to rip the Band-Aid off. And so I forced myself on that day that it went viral to write and publish, I think, two or three jokes. Cause I was like, the longer I go without saying anything, the more pressure I'm personally going to feel.

• 1:21:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you're building up the.

• 1:21:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also if they're gonna leave, they'll leave. And I, I think that's okay. And I wanna come back to that point, actually, cause it's something I learned at Patreon that I think is really valuable. But on top of that, you know, I, there was a moment where it was like, oh, the first video that's ever, quote, done well, was about tech and about San Francisco. And I even had a friend kinda say to me like, oh my God, what are you gonna do next? You should just make part two. You should make every single party in San Francisco part two. And I consciously chose not to do that. And instead I put out a video that had nothing to do with tech intentionally, because I was afraid that if I started going down a path of only creating one type of content, it would be so hard to break out of that later.

• 1:22:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, people follow you for, for one reason. It's like, you gotta be careful the followers you get, right? It's like, if you do one thing and they're gonna keep coming back, the, here are the hits, right? And you're not gonna get an opportunity to have your Bob Dylan electric. Or whatever it is. I don't know. They write analogy, but yeah. But you're, you're, if they want you acoustic, then they're gonna ask you for to play the San Francisco Tech video.

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  And that was a fear of mine because tech has been a big, big part of my life, ironically, a big part of my comedy life as well. But it's not the only thing about me. And so the next video I put out was um, my reaction to watching season three of Westworld, which was a very confusing show to me.

• 1:22:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  And so that's

• 1:22:55Logan Bartlett?

  I think a lot of people.

• 1:22:55Speaker 04

  Thing to a lot of people. And uh, and so that was, that was an intentional choice. The thing that I really committed to was I'm gonna put this out every week. And even then, it was not because I want to do it professionally. It was because I was living in a studio apartment alone in San Francisco during the pandemic. And I was sad. And I was like, this is a thing I can do that brings people joy, including myself. I'm gonna do it every week while working full time.

• 1:23:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It is amazing, uh, the, the consistency, forcing yourself to, to just keep doing something, like even setting deadlines, even if artificial.

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:31Logan Bartlett?

  For yourself. Hey, I'm gonna push this out every, like, that's one of the things we've done is just, hey, midnight on Friday, Eastern time, this is going out. Or, you know, eh, with whatever, however done it is or not, we're gonna get it out there. And I don't know, people build habits around it, right? It keeps discipline for yourself to, you know, force and to some extent, I think constraints can breed creativity, right?

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  I love having creative constraints.

• 1:23:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 04

  That's, you know, my videos are one minute because I, all of them are one minute. They're, they're 59 seconds max. Initially, that was because Instagram used to only allow you to upload one minute. The first video I ever tried to make was two minutes long. And then Instagram was like, nope. And I was like, oh, okay. And so I just recut it to be a minute. And that was in, I don't know, 2017 or 2018 or something. And I've just done it ever since because I love having that constraint.

• 1:24:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, you do a good job even of the jokes you make. I, I, I feel like you, you're never snarky or like punching down or like you're sort of building around like a positive sort of optimistic, which I think is even a harder type of humor to do, right? Easy for me to be like a sarcastic asshole, right? But like, I, I, I think that is, you know, I, I've always respected Seinfeld and Larry David and, you know, people that can just be clean and funny, right? Versus raunchy and all that. And so I feel like you've, you've been able to, I don't know, not punch down in the jokes you make.

• 1:24:56Speaker 04

  Thanks, I'm so glad that you feel that way because it's very important to me. I, I hate being mean.

• 1:25:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 04

  And I hate making people feel bad and I want to make people feel good. So I don't want to make fun of them.

• 1:25:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  Even when I am make, making fun of people, like people in tech, people in San Francisco, I'm always just making fun of myself. I, I, this is kind of a joke, but not really, that most of my videos are just me taking a part of myself and just turning it up to 11.

• 1:25:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  Like, what if I was worse?

• 1:25:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's interesting. It's one of the things I, I might, I have a few like rules or lines that I won't really touch. And one of them's like, not really making fun of founders, for example. Like, my job is only beholden on founders and there's, you know, oftentimes very ridiculous things that founders will

• 1:25:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:41Logan Bartlett?

  do, and I try not to specifically call out, you know,

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:25:44Logan Bartlett?

  that behavior. Now, if it's Elon or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, I sort of feel like that's within realm of like, you know, that's fair, but for the most part, staying away from, from specific founder examples just because, I don't know, my job's totally beholden on them continuing to do what they're doing. And a lot of people are going to fail and a lot of people aren't going to be able to be successful in what they're doing.

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Logan Bartlett?

  I am more willing to toe the, the snarky asshole line, I think, than you are.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  I don't want someone to read something I write and be like, oh no, that hurts.

• 1:26:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I've made my bed with that one. So, so in terms of, uh, and so, so now you're pumping out these videos. It's going well. You're at Patreon, which I assume is empowering for all this stuff, right?

• 1:26:26Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Speaker 04

  Well, this is the point that I wanted to, that I wanted, there were two points here that I want to come back to.

• 1:26:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Speaker 04

  One is around building for your audience. Oh my God, did I say building? I literally meant creating.

• 1:26:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Speaker 04

  That's so embarrassing.

• 1:26:37Logan Bartlett?

  Time to build. You're totally been indoctrinated. Yeah, building in public. Yeah. Mark Andreessen just warped your brain. Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  Wow, that was truly tragic for everybody involved. Okay, so I think there's like creating for the audience, creating for your audience, then creating for an audience. And the difference here is something I used to talk about a lot of Patreon. So you kind of said earlier, like, oh, I'm sure working at Patreon, you were exposed to a lot of things that maybe helped you later on.

• 1:27:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  This is absolutely true. One of the strongest things that I learned at Patreon was simply that this path was possible. Because I saw creators do it. What I learned is it was unbelievably hard, but not impossible. There's no one roadmap to do, there's no one roadmap to become an independent content creator.

• 1:27:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  But all I needed was to know that people could do it. I was like, oh, it's just really hard, but you can do it. Great. Okay, so that was a big takeaway. And then two, because my job was running the Creator Partnerships team, I would often speak at conferences about building membership and building an audience as a creator. And so I would present on what you can do to build your audience. And I was always careful to differentiate between building and audience, which you can do pretty quickly, and you can do with growth hacks, and you can do by capitalizing on trends. But you may grow so fast that you attracted people who are not going to be along for the ride, when you want to make something different. What if you want to make something different?

• 1:28:07Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. That's one of the things I found is if I, if I, because so many people have come along for jokes or making fun of the venture industry, if I do some thoughtful analysis or something, I've started to do it enough that people like have stopped doing this. But for a long time, my entire feed was like, you know, make me a bicycle clown. It was like, it was like, hey, can you do the jokes? I didn't come here for your like weighing in on the market machinations.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  I like your, I like when you're earnest on main.

• 1:28:37Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I, uh, yeah, well, it's good. I, I, I think I've started to get people used to, hey, I'm not only a jester, I can, I can also, but that would be a pretty tough. I don't think I would get to, I think my partnership would be pretty annoyed with me if I was just like cracking jokes, walking into meetings.

• 1:28:53Speaker 04

  I know. It's kind of funny.

• 1:28:54Logan Bartlett?

  I, I try to keep that hidden. I don't, I don't tell a lot of people. I don't tell a lot of people that I,

• 1:28:58Speaker 04

  Nobody's listening.

• 1:28:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hopefully, that may be the case. We'll see. I'll, I'll report back on that, but,

• 1:29:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, please let me know.

• 1:29:05Logan Bartlett?

  So you're having, uh, so you're having success and when did it start to enter your mind, hey, I might be able to do this actually?

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  Who, well,

• 1:29:14Logan Bartlett?

  When did you start thinking about that sweet, sweet drug that our podcasts? Yeah, the nectar that is the podcasting life.

• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  You know, I had wanted to start a podcast for a long time.

• 1:29:23Logan Bartlett?

  Did you actually?

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  I really did. Honestly, you did. I know you didn't.

• 1:29:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  Um, I wanted to start a podcast because I was doing and still do scripted content. The videos I write are, are scripted. I write a script and then I shoot them and then I edit them. And it's also my face, so much of my face.

• 1:29:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Speaker 04

  And editing takes a long time. It's a lot of looking at my own face, saying words that I wrote. And so that is kind of exhausting in a specific way. And a podcast was so attractive because I was like, I wouldn't have to look at my face when I edited it. And then also it's improvised, depending on the type of podcast you do.

• 1:29:58Logan Bartlett?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 04

  And so when I, once I, it started occurring to me, and this was probably, let's say, mm, mm, mm, I'm going to say like, late fall 2020, I wanted to start a podcast. So before I left, but I was like, it would be so great to have a way to put something out regularly that didn't rely on scripted and me being like the actor in it or whatever. And I knew that I wanted something repeatable because I knew I would want it to come out weekly. Because as we just discussed, like putting stuff out regularly is important for growth. Getting your audience prepared and used to what you're going to deliver and then delivering on it is really key for engagement. And I knew that I didn't want to script it or do something heavily produced or narrative. So I settled on, okay, I know I want to interview someone every week.

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  And then I went through like a thousand concepts of what this podcast could be. And I backed into the show that I have today, which is non-technical, where I interview people from tech and business, but about everything except their resume. That took so long. I have docs that I've, I've shared with you that are like all my different ideas, all my different name ideas, the cover art I designed and how I picked it and all that stuff. But I started thinking about it so much longer before I actually started it. Because I knew I needed the time to make it good and I didn't think I could do that without leaving my job.

• 1:31:13Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting. And so what gave you the, the confidence to leap in that? Was there someone that you looked at that said, hey, this person has been able to make it? And so I think that I can do it. Like, I mean, does just take no salary to go from having a salary to no salary is a, is a big jump, right?

• 1:31:31Speaker 04

  That part sucked. Like buying stuff is dope. You know what I mean?

• 1:31:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, having things.

• 1:31:35Speaker 04

  Having things? I'm a fan, frankly.

• 1:31:37Logan Bartlett?

  Meals.

• 1:31:38Speaker 04

  Hot take, health insurance?

• 1:31:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, health insurance. That's a big one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pro health insurance.

• 1:31:43Speaker 04

  I know. Hot take, Lexis Kay famously pro health insurance.

• 1:31:46Logan Bartlett?

  Famously pro health.

• 1:31:47Speaker 04

  Um, okay. So how did I decide? Well, there's a couple of things here. One, macro context. Um, it was the pandemic and it was December 2020. Like I said, when I officially left, I made the decision in October 2020. So we've been.

• 1:32:00Logan Bartlett?

  And you've had a few podcast episodes out at that point or no?

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:32:03Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  I didn't start the podcast until I had already resigned from Patreon. Actually, like, I think my first episode came out, my first episode came out December 9th. My last day of Patreon was like the 31st of, of the year. So I launched it already as like my exit thing. Yeah. But you know, honestly, one of the big reasons that I felt empowered to leave was the world felt so unpredictable. I was like, I have no idea what's coming next, just truly no concept of, obviously no one saw the pandemic coming. I certainly didn't see it lasting as long as it did. And I just kept feeling like, I don't know. And I certainly didn't see that video going viral coming.

• 1:32:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  And all these things, good and bad, were just happening. And I thought, well, I would like to know what it feels like to have all of my time spent, uh, all of my time self-directed towards what I want to be doing. And the thing that really pushed me over the edge was redefining success. Because a lot of people, when I said, I'm gonna leave and do this, they were like, oh, you're gonna try to make it? You're gonna try to make it as a comedian or whatever? And I was like, not really, because I don't believe in that. What happens when you make it? What do you, what do you get up and do the next day? You're just done? Like, I will never be satisfied by that. But I wanted to know what it would feel like. The thing that I compare it to is going on a hike. No one is like, hey, was that a successful hike? You're like, how was it? Was it hard? What did you see?

• 1:33:29Speaker 04

  How was the weather? And so, once I changed my perspective from, I need to leave and crush it.

• 1:33:34Logan Bartlett?

  Get to the top versus the journey that you enjoy along the way.

• 1:33:37Speaker 04

  I just wanted to know what this would feel like. And I'm so grateful that was a year and a half ago. I love it. I still love it. I want to keep doing it. But if a year from now, you and I are having dinner, because I'm like, Logan, I'm ready to go back to tech. Fire up, fire up the portcove. Who wants me?

• 1:33:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  That would be a great outcome. How cool would that be?

• 1:33:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:33:57Speaker 04

  If then I go back, I've learned so much.

• 1:33:59Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and it's, yeah, it's a two-way door, right? Like, Jeff Bezos often talks about like, decisions that can be undone versus the ones that can't be undone. And like, this is, you can enjoy the journey along the way and then go back. Like, there will be even more people that want to hire you than before, right? Because now you have this experience and you have a breadth of resume. And you could go do the community job at Patreon that you once did, or incorporate all these things that you've learned along the way to help companies out. Yeah, no, that's super interesting. And so, so the, what are all the things you're doing today?

• 1:34:35Speaker 04

  What do I do today? So today, I continue to put short videos out on the internet. I write a bunch of tweets.

• 1:34:41Logan Bartlett?

  Which is, is that, that's not your, that's not a business? That's like a awareness thing for you? Like, are some of them sponsored?

• 1:34:49Speaker 04

  Every once in a while, I take on a very limited number of sponsored videos. And I, I'm very selective about when and how and who I do that with. Because literally, like, I am so humbled by the opportunity to have an audience.

• 1:35:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 04

  I respect my audience so much that I never want anyone to feel like it's a cash pinata.

• 1:35:07Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  Where, oh, I'm just gonna use them to make a bunch of money. Now, my podcast is unapologetically sponsored.

• 1:35:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  And I'm certainly not sitting here apologizing for the sponsored opportunities that I do take on. Because I, I too need health insurance.

• 1:35:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:24Logan Bartlett?

  As we mentioned, we're pro, so, yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  But I think there's a way to take on sponsorship and there's a way to monetize your content. That it makes sure that your audience still gets to feel respected and that you're still putting out stuff that brings a lot of joy. And so that's how I make all my decisions, all my decisions around how I take money.

• 1:35:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's interesting, you, you made the point about you need to be comfortable with losing people along the way earlier.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:35:48Logan Bartlett?

  And said you wanted to come back to that. Was that part of this? That like if people are gonna get upset about, you're like, hey, I'm doing this. For the most part, it's free content for everyone, right?

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Logan Bartlett?

  Is anything behind a paywall that you do?

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:35:59Logan Bartlett?

  So it's kinda like, hey, if you don't like it.

• 1:36:02Speaker 04

  You can leave.

• 1:36:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, you can unfollow, right?

• 1:36:04Speaker 04

  Right, and I don't mean that in a mean way.

• 1:36:06Logan Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:36:06Speaker 04

  Like, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. But I'm also sort of like, that's totally fine.

• 1:36:11Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  If it's not for you, you may leave. Cause there are comedians that are super successful that are not for me.

• 1:36:17Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:36:18Speaker 04

  I don't have to follow them.

• 1:36:19Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and, and on the internet, there's not like a finite amount of shelf space that exists. It's not like you're stealing someone else's spot.

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:26Logan Bartlett?

  You know, I mean, maybe very literally on a timeline, like you might be showing up above someone else. But like, you know, there's an infinite, I don't know how many podcasts there are, but there's hundreds of thousands of them out there.

• 1:36:36Speaker 04

  At least one trillion, I think.

• 1:36:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  Intact, sorry.

• 1:36:38Logan Bartlett?

  Intact, that's right. And, and so it's like, hey, if it, if you wanna hear it, great. And if you don't, there's other.

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  Also totally fine.

• 1:36:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally fine.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and so both, the reason I wanted to come back to that point is that I don't know what kind of stuff I will wanna make in six months or a year. I have some general ideas, but I wanna make sure that the audience I'm building, that the people who are along for the ride are gonna be just as stoked about that as they have been about everything else I've been making.

• 1:37:04Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  And so that has been a very intentional choice to sometimes push myself to put stuff out that I'm like. I don't, uh, I don't think this is going to get a lot of views, but I'm going to put it out anyway.

• 1:37:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  And that's important because I feel like having a, uh, being able to, uh, put stuff out that's authentic to me, even if it isn't just like jokes about APIs and working from home is super important.

• 1:37:27Logan Bartlett?

  You know, I mean, you know what, you know, the hits, like you know what's going to work.

• 1:37:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:37:32Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, and I guess it's continuing to feel challenged by doing other stuff. That was sort of what I felt in even doing this was like, I sort of, uh, not got bored with Twitter. That's, uh, that's, that's wrong because I still enjoy it, but like, I sort of figured out plus or minus what I could do to continue to grow. And the style of jokes that people liked and all that. And this was a much more, um, uh, you're exposed in a very different way. Like the level of, uh, depth that you need to have, you're not, uh, constrained to 140 or 280 characters. And like one thing, there's intonation, there's nuance, there's, uh, you're, you're just much more exposed and it's different.

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:12Logan Bartlett?

  So that's what I think's been interesting, uh, for me as an exercise of doing this and, and it evolves. I think people like seeing things evolve over time. Obviously I, I, uh, murdered my two co-hosts and you know, that, that was a, you know, Game of Thrones kind of Machiavellian decision.

• 1:38:29Speaker 04

  And when you called me to say, I need to dispose of two bodies, I mean, I was there for you.

• 1:38:32Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, totally. It's amazing, uh, when you anchor, they don't float to Hudson. Yeah. No, the top.

• 1:38:37Speaker 04

  By the way, can we talk about how you literally wouldn't even come on my podcast for almost a year? And now you have your own podcast?

• 1:38:44Logan Bartlett?

  I know. Well, you know, it is interesting. It's back to that, that point where I felt, uh, I felt like I had become something of a character within what I, what I was known for on Twitter.

• 1:38:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:55Logan Bartlett?

  And I wasn't yet comfortable with what being fully exposed to the nuance of the intonation of my voice and, uh, like what I, what, what I say. And I mean, a tweet you can delete, right?

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, or you can, whatever, you can check with four friends and say, hey, is this funny or not?

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, but once you press publish. On this or a video or whatever it is, a podcast, you're totally exposed, right?

• 1:39:25Speaker 04

  Oh, it's out there, baby.

• 1:39:26Logan Bartlett?

  It's out there. And if you misspoke, it's not like you don't get to go back and edit that word, that word out in the same way, right? And, uh, and so I was uncomfortable with what that was gonna look like.

• 1:39:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, especially when it's someone else doing the editing.

• 1:39:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  I'm so much more comfortable recording on my show than on someone else's.

• 1:39:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:39:45Speaker 04

  Because ultimately I have control over the edit. And if I say something where I'm like, oh, I should not have said that.

• 1:39:51Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  That I can cut it out.

• 1:39:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Speaker 04

  Whereas you are making yourself more vulnerable when you're, you're putting, you're putting your trust in someone else's hands.

• 1:39:58Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Yeah, it's amazing how much you-

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  And I want you to think about that.

• 1:40:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 1:40:01Speaker 04

  I want you to really, I want you to let that sink in.

• 1:40:03Logan Bartlett?

  A lot of, a lot of power that I, that I will wield once the, once we stop recording here. I, uh, no, I do think that's an interesting, it's an interesting point that, um, yeah, you're, I mean, it is amazing the amount of editing that you can do. I, whatever I see now, it sort of makes you aware to how television or how, you know, media or whatever can manipulate. Even you could be saying something, right? And I'm not even talking deep fakes. I'm talking like, you could, you could like slightly edit the cut to make someone sound smarter or dumber based on what was actually said, right?

• 1:40:35Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. And with great, with, to just to quote Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. You know, I think like with my show, it's super important that the integrity and the intention of what someone is trying to say is always maintained if I'm gonna make a cut. And that's super important because that's what I would want someone-

• 1:40:52Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  To do for me.

• 1:40:53Logan Bartlett?

  Do unto others. Yeah.

• 1:40:55Speaker 04

  The golden rule of podcasting.

• 1:40:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. What, uh, so how has the experience of actually starting a podcast been? You've gotten a lot of interesting guests on and, yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  I really, I really am astounded and also humbled. How many times can I say humbled on this podcast?

• 1:41:10Logan Bartlett?

  A lot.

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  A lot. Okay.

• 1:41:11Logan Bartlett?

  You're, you're among VCs, so we're used to being humbled.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, I'm super humbled by how many incredible guests I've been able to have on, um, you know, obviously people like Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca. Those were Kara Swisher. These are like big guests for me.

• 1:41:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, amazing. Yeah.

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  Logan Bartlett, et cetera.

• 1:41:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:41:29Speaker 04

  Um, but- You know, the process of doing it has been so rewarding. Like, I love tech and business. It's just, I really enjoy it. My brain feels like it's split in half. I've got half of my brain that just wants to make people laugh and have fun and bring joy. And then the other half of my brain loves looking at spreadsheets and growth metrics and figuring out what else I can do to run my business more efficiently.

• 1:41:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  I have a beautiful notion, you know what I mean?

• 1:41:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 1:41:56Speaker 04

  And so the podcast gets to tickle both sides of that, where I'm fully independent, I'm not with a network. I do my own sponsorship deals, I book my own guests. I have a team that helps me with some op stuff and I have some support, obviously, on the engineering and production side. But I get to run that like it's its own little business.

• 1:42:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  And that is so satisfying. And, and I get to sit down and have 45-minute-long chats with people that I wouldn't have dreamed I would get down, get to sit down and talk to. And I don't have to ask them about their job.

• 1:42:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, what a treat.

• 1:42:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Speaker 04

  I mean, it's so joyful to sit down with somebody, even if it's, even if I know them because I admire their career. I get to sit down and actually talk to them about them. And no joke, I have legit, I've made like good friends who were guests on my podcast are now good friends of mine.

• 1:42:42Logan Bartlett?

  That's funny.

• 1:42:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, like Alexia Benatsas is a great example.

• 1:42:45Logan Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:42:45Speaker 04

  Yes, she and I connected on, what, Clubhouse Twitter? Something like that. I thought she was cool, I knew her work, I knew, you know, former TechCrunch, now she's an investor and stuff. And she came on my podcast and we just immediately clicked. And now she's a good friend of mine.

• 1:42:58Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, that's funny. Yeah, it is, it's interesting, the amount of, um, like, depth that you get to have in a different format, right? That's one of the things. I, I've, for the most part, I, I've pushed back on things being like off limits, not because I really want to press like into different subject areas, but, uh, I don't know. It sort of feels like a free-flowing conversation that I want to have. And to some extent, I feel I'm not a journalist, right? And so I don't feel like an obligation to get to the root of a matter.

• 1:43:28Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:43:29Logan Bartlett?

  But at the same time, I do want to be able to ask about interesting stuff. And if I get someone that's interesting to sit down with me.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36Logan Bartlett?

  I sort of feel an obligation to ask some of those things because it's not, my pretense isn't everything that's not to do with their job, right? Mine is, hey, let's have an easy conversation about all this stuff. And I don't know, if you're known for something, then I've got to be able to ask about it, right? Or if it's something that someone's going to say, hey, why did you sit there? I don't care if like my journalist friends are going to say, hey, you don't have like the integrity of our institution or whatever. But I do feel that I can't pull punches if I'm sitting across from someone.

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. Even I feel that way.

• 1:44:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 04

  I feel that way even though I don't ask about work. And in some ways, I feel it more so because I don't. When I think about who I bring on the podcast, I am very afraid of being Jimmy Fallon ruffling Trump's hair before the election, where I don't want to bring someone on who either has done things that are damaging to people and not be able to ask them about it.

• 1:44:34Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:44:34Speaker 04

  Like Kara Swisher can sit down with somebody who has, we could call it like a controversial persona or whatever, because she's going to ask them about it directly. Whereas I'm like, do you believe in ghosts?

• 1:44:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I, no, no, by the way. I, no, I feel, I a hundred percent feel that, that tension and that, that line.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Logan Bartlett?

  And there's been people that have been suggested to me of like, oh, you should bring them on. And either because, hey, I don't want to do a full deep dive into oppo research to like push back on the views, right? Especially if you're talking to someone that has like really deep nuanced views of like controversial topics. And I'm like, hey, I just, I can't spend the next two weeks learning about like all the counterpoints to like, yeah. And so it is an interesting dichotomy with all of that. Now you're doing, so you have the podcast.

• 1:45:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:45:20Logan Bartlett?

  You're, you're doing some sponsor videos. You're doing some like advisory or what's the business? You don't have a fund, which seems to be the thing that, that a lot of people do. I have a fund. I'm doing the reverse. I think it's an easier path that I'm taking, which is having a fund and then doing this on the side, versus a lot of people are doing the reverse now where they're doing the hard part of the job and then doing the fund.

• 1:45:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:46Logan Bartlett?

  Is that something you've been asked about? Like, hey, could I give you money to invest in some of the startups that you get exposed to?

• 1:45:52Speaker 04

  Totally. And how flattering.

• 1:45:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:45:54Speaker 04

  You know that people would trust my judgment on that. And I do think that I have a perspective that could be valuable in making some of those early check decisions.

• 1:46:02Logan Bartlett?

  And ability to bend, be helpful, like actually bend the curve for some of these companies.

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  Add value. Love to add value.

• 1:46:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I've heard about that.

• 1:46:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. You should try it.

• 1:46:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  Um, the thing is, I, it would not be shocking for me to one day have a fund. Am I gonna regret saying that?

• 1:46:20Logan Bartlett?

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:46:20Speaker 04

  But honestly, like, that wouldn't be a crazy surprise, right?

• 1:46:23Logan Bartlett?

  What's the downside of you saying that? It's like, more people are gonna ask to give you money? You know? Oh, no.

• 1:46:28Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:46:28Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:46:30Speaker 04

  All these LPs.

• 1:46:31Logan Bartlett?

  I can't believe I said that. Now everyone's trying to give me money.

• 1:46:34Speaker 04

  So embarrassing. Um, okay, but the thing is, like, I, like anything, like what I'm doing right now, I wanna do like a really, really good job. And I already feel that my focus is split between all those different things that I mentioned I do. I didn't even mention the fact that I do stand-up comedy. That's a whole other thing. That takes a lot of time. And it's hard.

• 1:46:52Logan Bartlett?

  It's really hard. What do your stand-up comedian friends, by the way, think about like your tech world?

• 1:46:58Speaker 04

  They're definitely like, I think they're aware that I'm like built a little different.

• 1:47:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 1:47:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and shown up in a blazer to the club.

• 1:47:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Reference back, thankfully, Mark Cuban has done a good job of like democratizing information about venture. That's always my shortcut when I'm explaining to someone that like doesn't, I'm like, you've seen Shark Tank, right?

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:47:20Logan Bartlett?

  I'm a shark.

• 1:47:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:23Logan Bartlett?

  So what's their perspective on the tech ecosystem, though? You have to get a lot of people that are like far on the outside in the stand-up world, right?

• 1:47:31Speaker 04

  It's super interesting because, you know, I think like the, the middle of this Venn diagram, though, is like building a persona or building like a public brand. And so oftentimes the people that I'm comedy friends with, they don't necessarily know why I have a following of people in tech or why my content is focused on tech. They just know that like I have a following or like I do comedy. And so it's fun because when I meet comedians, they have no idea sometimes that I spent seven years in the tech world, you know? They just know like, oh yeah, you make those videos and I see you around sometimes. And so it's kind of fun because then in the tech world, I get to, I just get to, I'm like a utility player. I can go back and forth and it's, I feel so satisfied by having both worlds as a part

• 1:48:12Speaker 04

  of my life because I really don't think if I was just in one, I would feel fully satisfied.

• 1:48:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I've lived in the tri-state area now for like 25 years, but my family's all from the South. So yeah, I'm like selectively Southern, I would say, you know? You're selectively tech at this point.

• 1:48:27Speaker 04

  I, yeah, exactly. Um, but the one, the, the reason, the thing about the fund that I, I also feel is like, if I started a fund, it would be a secret, I think.

• 1:48:36Logan Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:48:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I don't know that I can bring myself to make a some personal news tweet.

• 1:48:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 04

  I really think it would be like a secret fund. And I think that in order, like all my comms would go down on like Signal or like text.

• 1:48:49Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, disappearing.

• 1:48:50Speaker 04

  It would just be super easy. It would be simple. You could put a check in, I would send updates, but I would be, I, I'm hopeful that my ultimate, my final form is not like a some personal news tweet.

• 1:49:03Speaker 04

  God, I'm saying that now.

• 1:49:04Logan Bartlett?

  I know. Famous last words.

• 1:49:06Speaker 04

  It's literally like, I can see the smash cut now.

• 1:49:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, yeah, how it started, how it's going.

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  Dear future Alexis, I'm sorry.

• 1:49:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, some personal news. Now, what's your perspective, having been on the outside, but also on the inside a little bit over the course of the last, whatever, 18 months? What's your perspective on the state of the tech ecosystem, the rhetoric around it? You've moved from San Francisco to New York.

• 1:49:29Speaker 04

  Yes, I'm back, baby.

• 1:49:31Logan Bartlett?

  And like what's your, yeah, what, what are, what are your feelings to tech? You mentioned loving it, which is not something a ton of people admit publicly these days, I think.

• 1:49:39Speaker 04

  Isn't it? I know.

• 1:49:41Logan Bartlett?

  Weird.

• 1:49:42Speaker 04

  It's a controversial, I'm a contrarian.

• 1:49:43Logan Bartlett?

  I was gonna say, yeah, yeah. Pro tech.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  Pro tech, pro health insurance, famously controversial comedian Alexis Gay. Well, here's the thing, you know, we're recording this in, in, in May 2022. Wow, I forgot when, what time it is. But the reason I bring that up is that something I say about the tech ecosystem now, it's gonna be like very different over the next year, few years, because we are, of course, at the end of. I don't want to be pessimistic, of course, and say like, oh.

• 1:50:15Logan Bartlett?

  I think it's safe to say.

• 1:50:16Speaker 04

  But the, I would say the consequences of some of our more laissez faire attitude towards funding and investing and starting companies and valuations is certainly coming to a close, or at least coming to a bit of a downturn. And so I don't know what the tech culture and what the tech dialogue and rhetoric is gonna sound like. My ears are certainly, my antennas are up, my antenna, antennae?

• 1:50:37Logan Bartlett?

  Antenna.

• 1:50:37Speaker 04

  I'm listening, is the point, because we are moving away, I think we will see it moving away from some of the bravado around funding announcements. It's not gonna be, it's not gonna be as easy, right? To make some of those big impressive claims and stuff like that. And so I'm curious to see how people in tech are going to still hype themselves up, you know?

• 1:50:58Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  I wonder if it'll be like, just hyper humility. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:51:02Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:51:03Speaker 04

  Because that's the thing in tech too, is to just be like, I'm failing in public.

• 1:51:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you know, I, I mean, I think that is, it's a good point. I, I think a lot of the like more cringey things over the course of the last couple of years were a function of the exuberance, right? And, uh, and just that do no wrong that existed. And so it's, it'll be interesting now that there's going to be, there, there is this pullback happening. It'll be interesting to see how tech gets covered, right? Because we're also going through this period of time where tech is being covered in a way that was historically reserved for Hollywood or sports or.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:51:40Logan Bartlett?

  Politics, right?

• 1:51:41Speaker 04

  Seriously.

• 1:51:42Logan Bartlett?

  You know, rightfully so, because you have these people that are insanely wealthy and influential. And so it seems like.

• 1:51:48Speaker 04

  And the platforms that they've created and the services they've created.

• 1:51:51Logan Bartlett?

  The impact on the world is just crazy.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  Integral to our lives instead of like some silly, silly little thing in a garage.

• 1:51:56Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:51:57Speaker 04

  No, it's Uber, the thing that. Millions of Americans use every day to get around.

• 1:52:00Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. And like, how many employees are made on it?

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:52:03Logan Bartlett?

  And so I think it's, but it'll be interesting as those two things are happening with the rhetoric and all of that. Yeah, I don't know exactly how you could see those two things coming together and having it be really negative and dark. Or you could see like more of a reset to...

• 1:52:17Speaker 04

  I don't think it's going to go negative and dark.

• 1:52:19Logan Bartlett?

  From a coverage standpoint?

• 1:52:20Speaker 04

  Well, from a coverage standpoint, that's a, that's actually a great question. I, I don't, I think it will be hard to keep kicking tech when it's down from a coverage standpoint. Like, I think that lots of layoffs are happening right now, right? And Equity Pod, I think the title of their episode last week was like, layoffs don't happen to companies, they happen to people.

• 1:52:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39Speaker 04

  Like, you have to remember that there are real people on the end of some of these decisions.

• 1:52:42Logan Bartlett?

  100%.

• 1:52:43Speaker 04

  So I think the coverage will respect that. But it, my perspective is always more from like, how are tech people talking about this? How are tech people talking about themselves and their companies? And something that I'm very curious to see is actually the relationship between VCs and founders. Cause it kind of feels like we're in for a bit of a reckoning.

• 1:53:00Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, well, I'm interested in, in what way you mean that. I agree, but I'm interested in what way.

• 1:53:05Speaker 04

  Okay, so what I mean is, this is not referring to anyone in particular, but I feel that the culture, of course, from like the founder perspective, has been very like, which VC will take the honor of investing $20 million in my company?

• 1:53:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  And now...

• 1:53:22Logan Bartlett?

  These are things you can say that I can't, what you're about to say right now.

• 1:53:25Speaker 04

  Yes, okay. Well, and now I'm just a little bit curious, when the funding climate is not so friendly to founders, what the, are we going to go back to the flip of founders really having to hustle to prove that they are the right founder? Instead of what I'm seeing now, which is VCs, you know, present company included, having to find ways to differentiate themselves and build brands so that founders will graciously accept their funding?

• 1:53:48Logan Bartlett?

  I, you know, I think we went from 100% on one side to 100% of the other side. And I, I think it's going to reach a little bit of an equilibrium that's healthy on, on both sides where there is mutual respect. Some of the stories that I had heard of, you know, just the last year, it's been pretty wild.

• 1:54:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I've heard, I hear that stuff too, right?

• 1:54:09Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Like, like, like private plane flights to, to, you know, different islands and like different celebrities.

• 1:54:15Speaker 04

  Or just like the hubris of being like, coming out of demo day, being like, here are the terms I'm not negotiating, send me a ducky sign.

• 1:54:21Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:54:22Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:54:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  That's a re, that's a thing.

• 1:54:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's gonna, the pendulum is gonna keep sweeping. I think it's been good and healthy for VCs to get a dose of, you know, whatever humble pie dealt to them by founders over the course of the last year. I do think it probably went too far one way and so hopefully.

• 1:54:38Speaker 04

  How's your bicycle, clown?

• 1:54:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's right. That's right. What about New York? How's it been to be back?

• 1:54:45Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. Oh, I'm so happy to be back in New York. You know, people, I will say this, I don't hate San Francisco. I would like to go publicly on the record.

• 1:54:54Logan Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:54:54Speaker 04

  Because often people, I meet people and they're like, oh, man, you, so you really don't, you don't like San Francisco? That's not true at all.

• 1:55:01Logan Bartlett?

  People seem to view it as a zero sum kind of thing. Like, you can't, you can't respect one geo and another. You have to pick one and dunk on San Francisco.

• 1:55:10Speaker 04

  Which I, there's plenty to dunk on in SF. There's plenty to dunk on in New York as well. And then also, I think the, I think tech becoming so, oh, my God, I'm gonna say decentralized, but whatever.

• 1:55:21Logan Bartlett?

  No, it works.

• 1:55:21Speaker 04

  Tech becoming decentralized outside of the major hubs. I think also there's a lot of, you know, opportunity there for, for levity as well. But the thing is, like, in, the difference for me personally between San Francisco and New York is that in San Francisco, I never felt like I fit. And in New York, I'm from Connecticut, I'm from the East Coast, I went to NYU, I've lived in New York for several years before. Like, this feels more like my city where I fit in.

• 1:55:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's great. I, well, I'm glad we were able to do this. Anything I didn't hit in, in all the stuff, I mean, I quite literally wouldn't be doing this without you sort of helping me initially figuring out what software to use and how to go into this. And so I, yeah, if anyone's listening, they're not only listening to you, but this wouldn't be a thing without you telling me, like, what tools to figure out and all that stuff. So, thank you for, thank you for all the help in getting this going.

• 1:56:13Speaker 04

  You're so welcome, Logan. Wow, earnest on main once again.

• 1:56:16Logan Bartlett?

  You know, we'll, we'll see if ultimately I thank you when all is said and done here.

• 1:56:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:22Logan Bartlett?

  Like, right now, I'm feeling pretty good, but it could be six months and I, it's just a really dark hole. No one will come on. I'm canceled for some reason. I say something on the, you know, this is my line about the-

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  You made it through my show without getting canceled, which I thought was pretty good.

• 1:56:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was nice.

• 1:56:36Logan Bartlett?

  You gave me, you gave me, you gave me some editorial control, though we didn't ultimately use, but you at least checked in with me.

• 1:56:43Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:56:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, as long as I stay away from like the Uyghurs, I think, you know, that was what got Chamath canceled for a little bit. So as long as I don't weigh in on like humanitarian crises.

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  That does seem like a good, maybe just.

• 1:56:56Logan Bartlett?

  I think that's right.

• 1:56:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I think that's the one that has gotten people in trouble thus far.

• 1:57:01Speaker 04

  So what you're saying is that you don't care about humanitarian crises.

• 1:57:04Logan Bartlett?

  That is below my line.

• 1:57:05Speaker 04

  What I heard was that Logan Bartlett famously doesn't care about humanitarian issues.

• 1:57:10Logan Bartlett?

  That's right. That's right. If it doesn't benefit the pod, then yeah.

• 1:57:13Speaker 04

  I am so appreciative to have come on. This was such a treat.

• 1:57:16Logan Bartlett?

  This is fun.

• 1:57:16Speaker 04

  And I feel like honored that anything I did or anything I shared with you has helped you do this because I'm a fan and I'm super excited. And every time I see you're doing well, I'm like, yes, I love that. I literally love seeing my friends do well.

• 1:57:28Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's, it's fun. I think some people that don't do this stuff view it as zero sum that like, hey, I can't, that we're competing for spots.

• 1:57:40Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:41Logan Bartlett?

  And it's just not that, right?

• 1:57:43Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:57:44Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, I guess it's some, some extent people will choose what they want to listen to.

• 1:57:47Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 1:57:47Logan Bartlett?

  But I, I have offered, no one's taken me up on it, but like if someone wants to get a podcast going, I've offered to like help.

• 1:57:53Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:57:53Logan Bartlett?

  Come out with a little primer of like what to do. It's actually not that easy, right?

• 1:57:57Speaker 04

  No, no, it's not easy.

• 1:57:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And, uh, but I think the more people doing this, the better. So.

• 1:58:02Speaker 04

  There will not, no one is going to do a better job at being you and creating stuff from your perspective than you are. And so in that way, there is no such thing as true competition. You might be creating a similar show to someone else, talking about similar topics, having similar guests, but ultimately like you're the only one that can do the best job at like your perspective. And I think about that all the time in comedy and in whatever else I do in my podcasts and stuff. Because if I take too much time to look around and compare myself, who does that benefit?

• 1:58:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:31Speaker 04

  Nobody. Um, so we'll all, I, I look upon you and I'm very, very excited about everything you're doing.

• 1:58:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, thank you.

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  But again, don't, um, forget where you came from.

• 1:58:39Logan Bartlett?

  I know, I know, I know. I, uh, I will not. I, I, you certainly deserve a lot of credit.

• 1:58:43Speaker 04

  When I come back for a job in tech, I just want you to remember.

• 1:58:45Logan Bartlett?

  I a hundred percent will. Again, be careful what you say out here.

• 1:58:48Speaker 04

  And the first LP check.

• 1:58:50Logan Bartlett?

  And the first LP check. I'll do both of that.

• 1:58:52Speaker 04

  Okay, cool.

• 1:58:53Logan Bartlett?

  Well, thanks for doing this.

• 1:58:54Speaker 04

  Thanks, Logan. This is so fun.

• 1:59:00Logan Bartlett?

  That concludes the 17th episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thanks everyone for joining us. Next week, we have another really exciting guest, someone that I've wanted to have a conversation with for a long time. So excited for you to hear that, as well as two really good co-hosts that have been fan favorites. So excited for everyone to hear. Thanks everyone for joining.