EP 26: Chaos Monkey’s author Antonio García Martínez talks book, Facebook conspiracy theories, and a Web3 debate

In the 26th episode author of Chaos Monkeys and former Facebook PM Antonio García Martínez joins to discuss his experiences visiting Ukraine during the current crisis, debunking the biggest Facebook conspiracy theories, announces his new Web3 company, and then debates Zach about it! (0:00) - Intro (1:27) – Welcoming Antonio García Martínez (AGM) (4:04) – AGM’s greatest hits (7:45) – Ad tech (10:04) – Why AGM wrote Chaos Monkey (14:50) – His character in Chaos Monkey (17:19) – Bringing your whole self to work (19:14) – Politics in social media (26:17) – Converting to Judaism (30:58) – Visiting Ukraine (35:19) – Current thing theory (43:25) – Chamath example (46:45) – What’s something everyone incorrectly believes is true? (51:16) – Facebook isn’t listening to your phone (56:09) – IG vs Twitter ad targeting (57:56) – AGM announces his Web3 company (1:04:28) – Zach agrees in a Web3 debate (1:06:41) – Fundamental business models in Web3 (1:11:44) – Web3 skepticism (1:15:44) – Acquisitions in Web2 vs Web3 (1:22:53) – Web3 macro analysis (1:25:00) – Farcaster (1:31:54) – Will Zach invest? (1:36:02) – Outro Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb... Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0... Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/cartoonavatars 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars About the Show A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise. 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.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 26th episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation that Zach and I had with Antonio Garcia Martinez. We actually got Zach to agree that Antonio's idea was actually pretty interesting for a startup. We also went through Antonio's background for people that don't know. He wrote a book called Chaos Monkeys about his time at Facebook. Then after that, it was a New York Times bestseller. I guess notably after that, he joined Apple to help them build their ads product and was subsequently fired after about 30 days on the job because of some of the stuff that he wrote in Chaos Monkeys five years earlier.

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  So we talk a little bit about that. And then he's also just a really interesting guy. He went over to Ukraine just to see what was going on. So we talked about that. He's from Miami, and I think his parents were Cuban refugees, but now he's converting to Judaism. And then also, he's building a Web3 startup as well. So kind of a sprawling conversation in which we touched on a bunch of different stuff. At times, it was very friendly and then got a little heated for a second in there, but ended nicely enough. So I think people are going to enjoy hearing this conversation.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  One disclaimer, you might have noticed I blinked out for a second. I'm in the middle of nowhere, so I'm on a Starlink, and so sometimes it'll freeze up, and we can just blame Elon Musk for that. But I, so just FYI.

• 1:38Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. Do you carry it with you when you travel?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Um, I have. I carried it with me to Ukraine, speaking of which, and it actually, I actually did kick it up in like at the roof of a random building in Western Ukraine. But, and I did take it to, I went to the Blackrock Desert and hung around for a weekend, and I took it there. And it was hard to get my Jeep to actually power it. It takes a lot of amperage, actually. But, but yes, I have, I have tried carrying it around, and it's kind of miraculous, right? Like you get at least 100 megabit internet basically anywhere in the world. Just imagine the consequences of that.

• 2:13Logan Bartlett?

  Are you like intentionally a fast like, do you, do you do stuff to try to be like a really interesting person like this? Like, no, no, I feel like you're LARPing as like a really interesting, like, you know, going to Ukraine and like going to the desert with like satellite wifi and shit.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Logan and I are like, one time I went outside and I didn't put on sunscreen.

• 2:39Logan Bartlett?

  Exactly. It's like, well, this morning I went on a walk and I went to Washington Square Park in New York and it was hot. And you're like, yeah, I was in the desert and, you know, without seeing civilization for days.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  You know, how, how to define this? Look, really, I'd rather just be in a quiet cabin in the woods, but somehow fate has not made that be my, my life. So.

• 2:59Logan Bartlett?

  Zach and I are like, yeah, we went camping one time in middle school. Uh, and like our, our parents made us do it. It was terrible.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Dude, I'm like allergic to mosquitoes. I get one day.

• 3:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. True city kid. So where in the world are you?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Oh, so this is the high desert outside of San Francisco, obviously. Uh, no, this is, um, I'm in Northern Nevada. So this is what's called the Virginia City Highlands. So if you look kind of east from Lake Tahoe, which I'm sure you've probably been to, Logan, as a VC, you basically have to go ski.

• 3:28Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's actually funny you say that. The first time I ever went was last weekend, uh, which I, I, you know, I feel like you can't look like this and not like have been to Tahoe a lot. So that was, I, I had to do it, uh, cause they were going to actually kick me out of venture capital.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Right. That's what I thought. Yeah. It's obviously a statute of, yeah. Um, so just east of Lake Tahoe, there's kind of mountains on the other side of the valley that Reno's in. And it's really dramatic. You go from like Alpine, Switzerland, skiing to like Mad Max desert in like half an hour. Just literally going 15, 20 miles east. And so I'm in those Highlands, kind of east of town.

• 4:04Logan Bartlett?

  Nice. Well, thanks for doing this. So I'm going to force you, I know I told you before, we were going to make you play some of the hits. And when I told you, you said, aren't people bored of hearing about some of this stuff? And I was like, no, I think this stuff is still interesting. And then as prep to the podcast, I went and listened to all the interviews you did about this. And I get why you would think that people could possibly be bored about this. Because between writing a book and all of that stuff, right? And then like, you know, the whole Apple drama and all that stuff. And then your new world on Substack and all that. You've done quite a few interviews.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  It's true. And just to be clear, I've actually built things in this world. That's the whole equation. That's the whole blue check side of the world. But, but yes, I, it's, I'm this ambiguous online personality. I, I like calling it micro celebrity because of course it's not real celebrity. But within very micro areas, it feels that way. And it's very confusing and strange. And I don't, I don't think I love it that said, I'm happy to, you know, I'm happy to parlay it into other things.

• 5:05Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Zach's, Zach's a micro celebrity in like the anti crypto world these days, uh, which is, you know, he, he has his, we all have our own little micro fandoms, but Population 5,000. Yeah. Which is actually same number of developers as Web3. Um, so, uh, Antonio, maybe just, just level set, uh, your career, uh, to, to date. Um, what, you know, the, the notable parts of the journey along the way. And, and maybe we can, we could stop at chaos monkeys as kind of the, the, you know, the point that I was introduced to you.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the short version is that I dropped out of a PhD in physics at Berkeley after too many years, machining and soldering things in some physics dungeon. And like most, like many lapsed physicists went to work for Wall Street, pricing credit derivatives, uh, right around the ideal time of 2007, 2008, which gave me, so I went from like long haired ponytail, you know, grad student, bohemian dude to being on a Wall Street trading desk, watching the credit world implode. Um, and so I watched that happen. And then probably one of the few good intuitions I've had, well, I've had a few good intuitions, I think. But one of the good intuitions I've had in my career was that, oh my God, tech is going to survive the conventional financial world kind of dying. And so I went west, joined a kind of nightmare of a startup, met some co-founders, went through Y Combinator,

• 6:22Speaker 01

  started a small kind of ad tech startup.

• 6:26Logan Bartlett?

  And this was, this was what year?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  2000. Well, I left when the credit crisis happened, 2008, and then I was YC batch 2010, and the acquisition happened 2011. So, which, you know, chronologically is kind of the beginning of what we'd now call programmatic ad tech. And then, and then, anyhow, the company went to, it's a bunch of drama, which is the first half of the book. Company went to Twitter. I ended up at Facebook as one of the early PMs on the ad system. I built a lot of the weird targeting technology. If you go browse for shit on the internet, and then you see that shit in your Instagram feed, I built the first versions of that, although it's so many iterations now, and I'm sure none of what I built remains. And then, yeah, and then I worked for a bunch of other companies, Rogue Chaos Monkeys in 2016, which is kind

• 7:11Speaker 01

  of, you know, it's a piece of literary nonfiction. It's also a personal memoir about what's it, what's it like to start an early-stage company in the sort of San Francisco boom time from between like 2010 to 2014. And then, what's it like being at a company like Facebook right before the IPO, when the monetization still isn't really working, and everyone's desperate, and you're trying to build things within a company that's becoming increasingly sort of big company. And then also, how does the ad tech world work? How do you trade human attention and data for money? Right? Which is, it's, to this day, is still one of these kind of things that's considered mysterious in the broader discourse.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  I'm gonna be honest, until 12 seconds ago, I did not realize that you and I worked in ad tech at the exact same time.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. That's right.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  At AdComy, I have your little Wikipedia page pulled up here, because that's how much prep I did before this call.

• 8:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Again, if Zach's LPs are listening, as is evidence all the time, I, I send Zach an outline of questions, and sometimes he responds, "Okay, that makes sense." So...

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Well, I was reading Princess Pulverizer and putting my son to sleep, so it was like really high-quality LP work. But I didn't realize, yeah, AdComy, and then AdCrock. It's really funny. We were in ad tech. I was there 2000, not there, but in the industry, 2007, 2010.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I remember the, I remember the Invite Media acquisition and all the rumors in this world about that. Probably the bigger contribution I made was actually building the programmatic ad exchange at Facebook, and what is now called custom audiences and some of the targeting tech, to what later became the non-programmatic version of what the dream was programmatic back in the day when you and I were in ad tech.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember all the rumors. I remember at the time, people wondering, like, is Facebook gonna open up? Are they gonna allow for third-party bidding? It was like this giant... Undercurrent of the market and then it just never really materialized. Probably for, to their credit, right? I think they made the right decision to own and operate effectively themselves in terms of like controlling the flow. But I definitely remember those conversations and it sounds like you were right in the middle of it.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it did materialize. They actually did build an RGB exchange, right? But then they intentionally kind of drowned it in a bathtub by not opening at the mobile inventory. And so when Facebook became majority mobile, the exchange just started dying, but it was a of revenue.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I didn't realize that. They actually opened it up, but just for desktop?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. There was a full RGB Google addict style exchange on Facebook for like three years. Yes.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Wow. They showed, I like immediately sold like checked out, like I, we sold it to Google. I was like, never again. I'm never doing this ad tech shit anymore.

• 9:42Logan Bartlett?

  Does it still say vacation on your LinkedIn for, for your time at Google? Because this would be verifying that it actually was vacation.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Eh, yeah, I was like six months in, not to make this about my stupid ad tech story, but I was six months into Google and seeing like incredibly smart people working on ad tech. And I realized it was just not what I wanted to do. That was it. That's the real story. So.

• 10:04Logan Bartlett?

  Antonio, what, what was the impetus to actually write the book? Like, were you chronic, was this something you were chronicling as you were going along with the intent of ultimately writing a book? I mean, it's a fascinating, you know, for people that are listening that don't know, it's sort of like, uh, I would compare it to like liar's poker for the tech world of, of that time, right? And sort of going through. And so I, was it, was it just, hey, this story needs to be told? Or were you doing it for your own personal edification as you were going and then decided it later on?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So liar's poker is a great reference because it was definitely an inspiration for it. Um, I love liar's poker for those that know, it's Michael Lewis's first book. And it details his life inside Solomon Brothers and like the early days of the bond. You know, I'd like to claim that I was as willful and planned as to like chronicling it while it was happening, thinking I'd do a book. I wouldn't say it was quite as Machiavellian as that. I did think that something would come out of it. My first W2 like issuing job, believe it or not, was actually as a journalist, as a writer. In high school, I interned at Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale Sunset Sentinel. So I was raised in South Florida. And so the writing side of things has always been part of my life. My mother was a librarian. And so that kind of inculcated in you the thought that, you know, life is only real

• 11:18Speaker 01

  if it ends up as a book on the shelf. And if it isn't, it's kind of a waste. It's kind of an ephemeral thing. And, you know, it's, I don't think that my trajectory through Silicon Valley at the time was particularly exceptional. On the contrary, it was pretty standard at the time. You know, YC company, acquihire, find yourself in this ambiguous situation, a large company that's trying to scale. You kind of, there's a unique opportunity to create something big, mostly drafting off the momentum, obviously, of a bigger company. And I don't know, I just, I was in a lot of interesting meetings and a lot of right rooms at the right time. And it seemed like a waste to not document that, particularly given that if you went back, you know, liar's broker is a reference, but it's kind of outside of tech. Probably the only other serious, like insider startup book before Chaos Monkeys, I would say, is,

• 12:02Speaker 01

  I don't know if you remember Startup by Jerry Kaplan. Yeah, sure. 1997. Classic book, still pretty good, I think. It'll make me sound very old, but, or well, I mean, it was way before my time, but it, you know, it was like mobile pen computing before the iPhone was a thing. And, you know, I reread it, actually. So I wrote part of what became Chaos Monkey's book repulse, actually in Berlin. I was living in Berlin. It's a whole nother story. But I reread Jerry Kaplan's book Startup. And what was amazing about that book is that he took very particular details. Again, almost everything of the late 90s venture world is now like, you know, dated and kind of a dinosaur. But he extracted a lot of lessons that I think were generalizable. So did Tony Fadell and his recent book Build, by the way. Like, a lot of his stories are kind of ancient history, but I think they're still generalizable to stuff today, which is, which is what I tried to do with Chaos Monkey.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  When you were writing it, did you know, like, ooh, this is gonna be controversial? Or was it more of like, you knew it going in?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  You know, as you know, I think, again, it wasn't that long ago, but there used to be kind of a code of silence inside tech in which you never really talked about the inner workings. I'm not quite sure why, because it's actually not that embarrassing. Like, I remember in one interview around Chaos Monkeys, it introduced me as a whistleblower. I'm like, excuse me, there's no whistle to blow here, there was no fraud that I saw.

• 13:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you were pretty positive on Facebook, you were like, experiencing, I mean, there were individual people you had problems with, but it wasn't like you were exposing Facebook's fraud or something.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Right, right, there's, there's, there's nothing, there's no actual like negative or egregious behavior in the book. You know what, I, getting back to the Berlin story, uh, you know, I, I'm an EU national in addition to being an American, so I thought, yeah, I would be kind of canceled from tech, but only because I kind of spilled the beans on this very important company, and I thought people wouldn't appreciate that. And so, I actually wrote it in Barcelona and Berlin, thinking, well, if I have to reboot my life in Europe, might as well check out the startup hubs and do like tech life number two in Europe instead. I ended up, I'm one of the few Americans who actually, you know, threatened to move to Europe and did, and then moved back, which I've done more than once, by the way. Um, and then once the book sold here, I'm like, I guess I'll just stick around here. But yeah, no, I did think it would get me into some trouble.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  When, when, and then also, again, Facebook and I are cool now, but at the time, it, there was a little bit of a hostile vibe in the air. And so like, I remember, I went to New York to go edit the book with my editor, and there was only one printed copy that she would keep locked in her cabinet, because they kind of feared that like, Facebook would use its network to get at it, because, idiot, it's a long story, but there's a lot of clicky humor about it, but, but in retrospect, it seems totally silly, but yes, there, there was that in the air at the time.

• 14:33Logan Bartlett?

  There was another book that came out around that time, in which, uh, two, uh, two of my friends were maybe implicated in trying to get a copy of a book, uh, so.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, Dan Lyons, Dan Lyons' book, yes, that, that's why my editor was so freaked out, because, precisely because of that, that's right, that's right.

• 14:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, a book of hub spot. Uh, but, so, I mean, honestly, the story itself isn't, it's not like the most remarkable uh, journey, like, there's probably thousands of people, I think what's interesting is, you just really did not give a fuck in your willingness to talk about all this stuff, right? And I, I think that's what made it so captivating. And you also, this is an interesting segue, but it's not, it's not the guy I know necessarily in the book, right? It is you, but it's a certain version of you, is that fair?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, no, it's heavily stylized, right? It's like, the inspiration might have been Jerry Kaplan's Startup, or, you know, Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, but the tone is more Hunter S. Thompson,

• 15:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Tom Wolfe, a little edgier. And so there's definitely a sort of literary persona in it, which, you know, again, I think our culture's at a point where understanding that you're speaking in a certain narrative voice that isn't the actual person, that subtlety gets a little lost. Um, so, but yeah, yeah.

• 15:49Logan Bartlett?

  You know what it is? I mean, honestly, and I told you this before we hopped on, but I went back and listened to all your interviews, or the ones that I could easily get access to. And it's funny, like, the, the, the passage that ended up being controversial, you actually read it to Kara Swisher on her podcast, which is just like, a funny thing, because five years later, it ended up being this like, aha moment of like, we got you. And it's like, well, I mean, the guy was reading it on the podcast, right? And, you know, has it aged? Uh, the, you know, we, I, I think you've admitted, you wouldn't write those exact words today, certainly with what, what has played out. But it was kind of a character, right? And all that. So maybe, maybe to the extent, we don't need to go into all the details, because I know you don't want to be defined by this singular experience.

• 16:34Logan Bartlett?

  But you did another, you were at Branch for a little while, right? Doing some writing, and then you ended up at Apple?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:41Logan Bartlett?

  And you were there for 30 days?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah. So Branch Metrics is one of the big attribution providers in tech, which, if you know what that is, it's the people who kind of ingest your data and help parse it for the actual developers and the publishers. Um, yeah, no, and I worked at, at Apple briefly. Um, yeah, you know, again, it's, you know, it's reliving the whole drama doesn't seem like the most useful thing in the world. Um, but yeah, they were extraordinarily surprised to hear about a bestselling book that everyone had positively reviewed just a few years before.

• 17:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, and that, that people had to, got calls on references about and all that. But, yeah, one passage in particular, what? Uh, not that, that to litigate, uh, that specific, like, how it played out. And I, I know there's probably NDAs and stuff that you can't speak about. But to some extent, after that, right? Uh, one, I think the people that, it's been publicly reported, the people that were kind of the, uh, the Slack group. Or whatever have since been removed or fired from from the company. I think The Verge reported that. And then two, we've seen this kind of like, you know, there was this mantra of bringing your whole self to work. Uh, or whatever that I think Google kind of was the big one behind and we can debate whether or not it's a

• 17:51Logan Bartlett?

  means of just getting people to work all the time or what it what exactly it is, but it sort of felt like that was the last in my mind, sort of the last time there wasn't really an alternative to this. It was sort of the spiraling out of control of like letting a small portion of your population or your employee base kind of hold executives hostage for things that that they wanted. Uh, without any other course, at least it felt like that.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was I was the guy who first sprinted through the minefield and stepped on the mine. And then after that, everyone knew where the mine was and avoided avoided the mine.

• 18:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  I mean, the timeline is that after that, you know, Coinbase, Brian Armstrong issued his kind of famous statement saying, we're not doing politics at work. We're a mission focused company. If you don't like it, here's a nice package, but out the door you go. You know, even Shopify, again, successful, uh, Canadian e-commerce company. They're, you know, kind of very typically soft spoken nerdy CEO, uh, you know, came out and said, look, this isn't a family. Gave everyone like a very stern talking to and, you know, I think exhibited the sort of moral leadership that a lot of companies had before. And, um, people understand that, you know, it's odd that we have to reteach ourselves what like our 14 year old grandparents knew, right? Yeah. Just that you don't talk about politics and religion at work or at Mc's company unless you want everything to turn into a, you know,

• 19:12Speaker 01

  a fucking soap opera, right?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  There's this really interesting phenomenon and I've talked about it with like buddies of mine and you see it in these examples of like the loudest voice at a company or the the people who speak out in a political party and have like, you know, the most things to say the loudest, or you could even see it inside of, you know, any like small team where people pay attention, probably significantly too much to the loudest voice in the room because it's really not exciting to shout about being like a moderate, to have like a normal opinion and to not like, it's just, and you see it play out over and over and over again. And I feel like what happened over the course of maybe.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Eight or nine years is we forgot that there's like a bigger denominator. Like, yeah, these four people are really angry, but guess what? There's like 30,000 other of them that actually really matter. And the same is happening and happened, I would argue, in politics in particular on the both ends of the extremes. Like, it's the same thing over and over. You listen to the loudest voice and you kind of forget that it's just a non-random, extremely biased sample of the people who are saying things. That's same story.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's odd that I think both the American political system and social media tends to amplify those extreme voices on both left and right, rather than the sort of fat middle that is actually the majority view. And I agree with that. I think people are getting a lot more sophisticated and savvy about it. It's like, again, the classic verge piece of, oh, employer revolt, a company X. And then you look at the number and it's like literally 40 employees in a company of 4,000 people. And it's like, why is this a story? This isn't a company revolt. It's really some microcosm, like, let's get real. And then in our political system, where I think is a little bit more dangerous, right? Like, you know, the political stakes are a lot bigger than the corporate ones. Whether it be, you know, these relatively non-culturesial issues like gun control and abortion, and not to be like the European supremacists, because I hate when Europeans

• 21:05Speaker 01

  lecture Americans, but like somehow in Europe, like somehow laws and public policy converge to what is the polled majority view. And somehow in the United States, it's the opposite. It somehow converges to one of two extremes in which the majority view is probably somewhere in the middle of those two, but that's not the policy you get. And I don't quite understand why that is, but.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  It's like at a company, you know, it's really easy to be the small group of people shouting, I can't believe you don't have a stance on this issue, because it's a little odd to be screaming like, I just want to do my job. You know, it's like not a thing you post on Slack or wherever. And so you only hear the crazies. And the same again is true in politics, right? It's like the people who want to talk about student debt or whatever. And the reality is like the vast majority of human beings in this world do not give two flying fucks about student debt. Like, they don't care. And yet it becomes this like topic of conversation because the loudest voices in the room want to scream about it. It's like the local zoning board, you know, the one guy who doesn't want the building built because the chimney's too high.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  People like I have some friends in DC and and they would claim that it's not necessarily a given that it's it's these. It's first past the post voting in primaries. They they claim is what extremifies everything because only the extreme because. I mean, the equivalent of the like the the zoning board crazy person is who shows up for primary votes. It's typically the extremes of the party and then they like can't and then while in the past, I'm not saying this necessarily better. Primaries were either closed or literally be decided by committee and the committee would often say. Who's going to win the eventual national vote and that's a much more centrist candidate by and look anyhow, that's one theory. I don't know if it's true. It's kind of above my pay grade to really speculate, but.

• 22:41Logan Bartlett?

  I think it manifests itself in a lot of different ways of like if we had a ranked choice system. You know, then it lends itself to a second or third place, you know, I I always say adventure capital now, which I think is true in general. It's like it's much better to be Donald Trump than it is to be Jeb Bush. And what would I mean by that? And it's kind of a crazy analogy, but like it's better to be. Specialized and deeply appealing to a narrow subset than it is broadly, you know, kind of milquetoast to a lot of people. Right? Because we're living in this world of infinite choice. And so if you if you gravitate to an extreme opinion, and I think all, I mean, it's true of cable television.

• 23:20Logan Bartlett?

  And it's true of all the social algorithms, right? Like the extremes get amplified because of. You know, it it drives engagement on both sides, right? It drives people that are zealotly. Are passionately supporting it and then also the people that are passionately against it. And so it leads to comments and clicks and all that stuff.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Used to be you had to be the guy that goes to the town square and like gets on a box and actually like shouts this stuff out loud. And now you can just post a meme.

• 23:48Logan Bartlett?

  Hey, Tony, you had a funny quote that Facebook is the real community as porn is the real sex. Which I feel like is is is, you know, I think that kind of works here. It's not like real community. This isn't, these aren't like real interactions, right?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Well, hold on. So that quote is from like ages ago. I think it's from 2016 or 2017. But.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  What spurred that? Let me tell you what spurred this. You're digging up ancient history. So I'll dig up the ancient history context. At the time, I was living on Orcas Island, which is a tiny little island community. I was not raised in a small community. I was raised in Miami. And so it was my first experience of community life. And real community is different, right? Like, you don't check into a place. You just go to the one bar that's open and everyone who's out is there. Like, it's like, I walked in the door and everyone knows I'm there. You know, privacy kind of doesn't exist in a small community because if, you know, if you're reclusive about things, people treat it with mistrust. Like, what are you hiding? Right? Like, I need to know who you are, who your kids are, what you're doing. But of course, in exchange, everything doesn't turn so negative because you've got to see that person in like the grocery line the next day. Right? So you can't just sit there and troll

• 24:52Speaker 01

  them because there's like a real cost to being an asshole. I mean, there are assholes on Orcas as well. I'm not saying it's a utopia. But it kind of everyone knew who they were and they suffered the penalties of being an asshole. And that's, they didn't, you know, create a media career about being an asshole. Like, being an asshole doesn't work as a long-term strategy. And so just seeing that, I realized that that's kind of fake. Now, fast forward several years, Logan. I don't know. I'm more lukewarm to that sentiment because, like, maybe this is just me as a rootless cosmopolitan, living in my little elite bubble. But it's like, I don't know where half the friends I have live anymore. Like, I don't know where they actually are. We just convene in certain cities in one of three or four neighborhoods in certain cities. Like, I was talking about this with Balaji, because he has this book about the network state, about this whole network federation of urban, whatever. And

• 25:36Speaker 01

  it's like, you know, I kind of already lived that way. And, you know, would you call that fake? I don't know. I feel relatively close to these people. I don't know. I would, I would maybe, I would quibble with my own quote, maybe now, years, years into this.

• 25:49Logan Bartlett?

  It's a, it's an interesting thought on that. And yeah, I guess, I mean, COVID probably accelerated. We've obviously had digital communities in some way, shape, or form for, you know, as long as we've had the internet. But, uh, yeah, I guess COVID and this mobility has, has changed some of our interaction, or accelerated some of these trends. I guess, one question just about community in general, uh, and I didn't have this on my list, but it's an interesting one. So you're, Converting as well to Judaism, or you have converted?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  We haven't done the Mikvah Dunk yet, so it's not official, so to speak. I've been dragassing on the final essays for the Beidin, the Revenable Court. But yeah, yeah, it's been part of my life for the past two, three years.

• 26:32Logan Bartlett?

  How much of that is like religion versus community? And I guess religion is in the sense of ideology versus community in the sense of like, you know, whatever, of belonging and people to be around.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be that obnoxious guy who quotes his own writings. So I wrote this post called "Why Judaism?" on my Substack, came out a few months ago. Was a big deal on Jewish Twitter. I mentioned it because just today, this morning, you know, as a writer, you're often like, "Oh, does writing do anything? Like, what's the point?" And then I got this email from a reader, a Jewish guy who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish life. He'd gone totally secular. I posted the email this morning. He read my piece and went and turned back to religion and saw something in it that he didn't see before, partly based on what I wrote, which I found very touching, by the way. Which is why I shared it with his permission. And I think, yeah, I think, you know, it's funny when you convert, sorry, my cat.

• 27:22Logan Bartlett?

  I honestly can't take you seriously, talking about religion with a cat, like, you know.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  A black cat that just appears out of nowhere.

• 27:31Logan Bartlett?

  You know, with religion and this guy converted and the cat's like attacking your neck, basically.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  This is my little COVID kitty Luna, who I fostered when COVID started. And then it's like, well, I guess, I guess you're sticking around. Because the shelter closed down, and she's been sticking around since then, and she's very attached. In any case, yeah, in the case of Judaism, Judaism and its true religion for a bunch of reasons. We can go down this rabbit hole if you want. One of the interesting things is, for example, the set of questions that the rabbis ask you when you're converting, they don't ask you whether you believe in God or not, right? I think one of the problems with discussing religion in a primarily Christian society or post-Christian society, right? Is that their mental model for religion tends to be Christianity, not just that, you know, evangelical Protestant Christianity, which at least until very recently is the sort of form of Christianity we tend to see in public.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And Judaism is not at all ding it, but it's very different than Judaism as its experience. And so I think Judaism is a lot more, to my experience, about the practice of what it is to be a Jew, the community around it, the history behind it, you know, the intellectual life of it, like. One thing of being a Jew is getting together on Thursday night for the Talmud Zoom and sit there and discuss esoteric texts that were written centuries ago. Right? Um, that's, that's very different than, well, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus? Right? That's a very different question. And so the, the question of what is your relationship with the divine? May not even come up. In terms of your life. So yeah, to me it was more. I mean, partially it's spurred by my kids, right? When you have kids, you start asking yourself questions about life that before were sort of philosophical amusements, but suddenly become very serious. Right?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And raising a child in a world in which, I mean, everyone here is a capitalist and capitalism's all great. But we're basically in a society in which the only functional organizations we have left are companies, which are organized around greed and ego and nothing else. And the reality is the human experience is a lot broader than that. And you can have organizations organized around a lot of different things other than greed. And the fact that my child was being raised in that world kind of irritated me. And I wanted her to be raised in some religious tradition. And I thought I would, you know, help spur that process by her. She's Jewish by, by birth. I would help spur that process by, by joining the tribe as well.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  I will say, the only issue I take with that whole statement is most Jews on Thursday night don't spend their time on Talmud Zoom.

• 29:45Logan Bartlett?

  That's our podcast block, actually.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  The good ones do, Zach, the good ones do.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  We mostly sit around and talk about that, like one single friend who's 38. And you're like, what's wrong with them? Why aren't they? That's really what Jews do. They don't talk about the Talmud that much. Or we host podcasts, I guess. That's the alternative. Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and control the, and control the weather, Zach. We all know the Jews control the weather as well. I, I just, I just got, you know.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Paths of success right there. Weather, media, and then the, the banks. And so at the combination of the three. It's amazing.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  I just got my login to the Nest thermometer that actually controls the weather in my local area. It's amazing. You just log in, I want a sunny day. It just works. It's incredible.

• 30:27Logan Bartlett?

  That's great. No, it's awesome. It's super exciting. So, uh, me.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Logan's like, I'm very uncomfortable with my podcast being about Jews controlling the weather.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Don't worry Logan, don't worry Logan, if Jews actually controlled the weather, New York would have Miami's weather. So this is all, it's all obviously completely untrue.

• 30:46Logan Bartlett?

  Just wait until there's some like mashup of me laughing at those jokes and uh, yeah, that's gonna be, that's gonna be what gets me canceled is me laughing at you guys going on about Jewish jokes, but uh, so wait, another thing, so I guess you went to Ukraine as well, in your attempt to just be, you know, you can actually, you don't need to do all this like interesting shit, right? You could actually just live a normal life, like whatever most people do, but you decided to go to the border of Ukraine. What, what was the impetus for that?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Uh, so this was in the early days of the war. And um, you know, part of it was seeing history with a capital H, right? I mean, Europe, the Western world hasn't seen a true invasion and a war of attrition in a very long time. Two, the media cycle, I mean then and even more so now, I'd say, in the US about Ukraines just seemed biased, something I just, my bullshit detector went off and I felt the need to actually go and see it myself. Um, I had a couple of friends who, who went to Ukraine also. Uh, one guy who was trying to buy military equipment in Saporizha, another guy, former Facebook PM, who actually served with an ambulance crew in Kyiv. And anyhow, and then somebody just, a colleague of mine proposed going and I'm like, yeah, sure, if, if you can line up like the fixers and drivers and whatnot, I'll ship in, let's

• 32:01Speaker 01

  go and check it out, let's see how far we can go, you know, until either the nerve or the money runs out. And so we got to about Lviv, which is at the time was, well, it's, it's still there, but it, at the time was the sort of relatively safe sort of transit city where people were going in or coming out of, of Western Ukraine. And uh, yeah, the border region was really the most interesting thing, cause of course the refugee situation was still in high gear and um, it was really, um, it was really something to see, you know, literally millions of people streaming across the border, typically just, you know, women, like imagine a woman with like two kids and a little rolly bag, like what you take on a, on a carry on, just like literally walking across the border because the, they don't tend to let vehicles through, so they would literally get dropped

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Or abandon their cars and just take off on foot across the border to, you know, an unknown fate. Although of course, there was, there was like a welcome wagon on the other side. Europeans mobilized en masse, the Polish in particular, to actually greet the refugees and actually open their arms in a huge way. That was very, that was very kind of affirming. And then we went in, we were like, ah, it doesn't look that bad, like whatever, let's just cross the border and go ahead and see how far we get. And went to Lviv and then you see there, you know, it's a, it's a society in a state of total war, which we haven't seen except, you know, no one is of our generation has seen, except in the movies of World War II or something. It's a society totally mobilized to repel this invasion and either get refugees out or get weapons and men or, you know, fighters in. And um.

• 33:25Logan Bartlett?

  Did you find anything that the, that was different? Like your bullshit detector was going off and then you walk over there and like, what did you? What, what are some misconceptions that people that are like, I don't know, casually keeping up with what's going on maybe have that's different than what you saw on the ground?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's the misconceptions now and the ones at the time, I mean, I guess they're not that different. I think what everyone misunderstood and was very clear to me after a day there, although to be clear, I know nothing about Ukraine, nothing about the region. I don't speak any Slavic languages, like it's not my part of the world, okay. But it seemed very clear to me after just like a day or two, that the Ukrainians were like, not going to give up. That they, they saw this as this massive national struggle and the thought of surrendering to the Russians was just inconceivable. And at the time, the vibe outside, oh, I mean, this is like Kiev was still encircled, right? The western part of Ukraine could have been part of the war. People thought the Belarusians would invade. Like this was the early days, it was still very uncertain and the Ukrainians looked as if they were losing or were about to lose.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And it, that just did not seem to be the vibe on the ground at all. Of course, as we've shown, the Russians were basically forced to retreat from Kiev. They restarted an assault in the east. They haven't advanced particularly far. It's clearly a bloody stalemate. I think, you know, pro Putin people in the West saying, oh, Ukraine's going to fall tomorrow. It's hopeless. That's gone away.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  But yeah, I don't know. I, one thing I, I think is really kind of, in my opinion, frankly disgusting is how, and I understand why it happens, but it still pisses me off. That what is a very real conflict with people dying on the ground gets turned into the current thing, right? Some sort of. Weird memetic nihilism around this thing that gets mapped to domestic political squabbles and then forgotten the fact that it's actually like a real war happening on the ground. And that kind of does piss me off, but.

• 35:19Logan Bartlett?

  It bothers you, the rhetoric, the, the, the current thing rhetoric for people that don't know is kind of this nihilistic attitude that people just adopt things that make them feel like those are the important things of the day and then they move on as new things come up and that people don't actually have deep rooted views or passion about this stuff. It's just that they're, you know, this is the topical thing de jour for them to care about. Is your problem with it that it's, it's not that this has become a current thing and that people are passively, you know, following it or putting out flags or whatever.

• 36:00Logan Bartlett?

  It's the attitude of judging that people are doing that stuff that bothers you?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  To be clear, I think current thing theory is correct and that there are current things in our media scape.

• 36:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  You do overreact. So I'm not saying the theory is wrong. I just don't think Ukraine is a current thing, right?

• 36:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I got it.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And every attempt to show that it is is wrong. It's like, oh, oh, look, here's, here's a, you know, here's a graph of searches for Ukraine over time. It's disappeared. It's no longer a current thing. It's like, motherfucker, we're still sending billions to Ukraine. You realize we just sent them long range rockets. They're going to start bombing the art, the Russian arsenals behind Russian lines. The war is still ongoing. That, that's like, I agree, we're living in a moment of a medic nihilism where a lot of the problems and things that get worked up over are fake. I totally agree. That's true. I just don't think, you know, the first total war in European history in 80 years is one of those things. It is, it just isn't because if it were, it would have, it would have stopped happening, but it's not stopped happening. We still talk about it. Why? Because it's a real war. And I think we've just grown so disillusioned and, and virtualized in our understanding of the world that we can't imagine.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, I think the beginning of current thing theory, I mean, it's a rehash of other ideas, to be clear. Daniel Borson has this great book called The Image, which is in the 60s. And there was a bunch of media analysis, like we got into TV and radio and things got virtualized. And he said, you know, there's a thing called a pseudo-celebrity, or a thing called like a pseudo-event. What's a pseudo-event? It's an event or a person that's famous for being famous, right? It's talked about because it's being talked about. And as soon as that sort of recursive cycle stops, the thing disappears from view. Well, hasn't happened with Ukraine, has it? Because again, it's not a pseudo-event. It's a very real event. And I think part of the crisis you're seeing from a lot of the sort of Twitter, blue check celebs, whatever, is like not getting their heads around a thing that exists beyond their manipulation of that perception.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  It was very American to like, not care about anything unless it affects you personally.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  I feel like that's half of the culture in this country is like, eh, it doesn't really bother me, and so I don't really care. Like, just that attitude seems to be like fairly pervasive.

• 38:03Logan Bartlett?

  I think that my problem with the current thing rhetoric is, well, to be clear, there are people that are very transitory on what they're gonna make their background on Twitter, or what their hashtags are gonna be, or what they're gonna post on their Instagram story, and just have passion behind for that moment. And so in my mind, not to defend the criticism of current thing, but I think there are people that are very flippant in their passion or adoption of these things that they're gonna care about, right? So I think that's a thing. And I think Ukraine got that group, whoever those people are. I think Ukraine was adopted by those people

• 38:46Logan Bartlett?

  for some period of time. And then they moved on to whatever the next thing that they're gonna kind of passively post on Instagram about. I guess my criticism or agreement with you is, one, this is like a material thing. And I don't know what else has been granted the current thing, but I think those other things, a lot of them were certainly material as well, right? So like, I think both of these things can be true. And also, just like, the cynicism that people have to be negative about people caring. It just feels like such a, you know, a dickish online mentality to criticize that people are passionate about something, or at least voicing some level of activism or something. It just feels like a very cynical mindset.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  I think people like to feel part of a community, right? They want to feel like part of something. It's the reason you have like subreddits and Reddit and you have people pursuing, you know, crazy political stances because they feel like, all right, hey, I'm finally part of something that, you know, makes me feel like I am a piece of a broader community. And I think the current thing ultimately is like a piece of that, right? Everybody's talking about it. I'm talking about it. And as it moves on, you're like, okay, I didn't really care so much about the actual topic at hand. I enjoyed the fact that I was part of like this broader community of people. And that seems to be pretty pervasive. It happens in, you know, politics, it happens in companies. Like it's a human nature to want to be a part of stuff.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  I agree with that. I mean, obviously you're right, Zach, but I still think there are certain, there are certain issues that transcend that. And it's, it's odd to see that so many people who you thought were sort of independent intellects are actually just contrarian assholes, right? Like in other words, going against the current thing, guess what? Doesn't actually make you smarter than going for the current thing. You're, you're the same fucking dumb shit asshole who's just like basically showboating online. Hate to break it to you, you are. And the sign of a true independent mind isn't claiming you're going against the current thing. Everybody claims that now, right or left. It's actually agreeing with people you dislike because you're sure you're right. Right? That's, that's the true side of an independent mind. It's like, oh, somebody I hate from like the wrong tribe actually supports this. I have to hate it. Like, no, guess what? The Ukraine side is still the right side in the war.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  And sure, there's probably people I personally politically dislike who are also on the pro Ukraine side, but it doesn't matter to me because the real issue is more important.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  You know where it pops up, by the way, all the time is in like green energy and kind of alternative energies where, you know, to disagree with, hey, wind and solar are here to save us all is like a very unpopular opinion because the current thing is like recycling your straws or whatever people are doing without actually understanding like how any of this stuff works. And it's the same people who are like, ah, I don't know about this like nuclear plant in my backyard. And I noticed it over and over because nobody asks like the follow-up question where everyone's like, yeah, but let's just use, just to use the wind and solar example, which always cracks me up. And you asked them like, have you ever been to New York on like a cloudy day where it's not windy?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  And you go, yeah, of course. And you have to go like, okay, so can you just explain to me like, how the wind and solar thing works on a cloudy, non-windy day? And you realize very quickly that like, people just haven't actually thought this through. They kind of picked it up because this was the popular thing to, you know, join on to. And nobody actually thinks about the details or how it works. And it's just kind of common. I've noticed it all over the place. And the environmental stuff in particular is the biggest.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's getting back to the religion topic. I think it was, um, it was, um, who was it? It was either, um, Benjamin or it was William James, who, oh yeah, William James, Rise of Religious Experience, who said, you know, the religious, the religious feeling is ultimately one that there's some sort of moral order to which human society should sort of fit itself to. Right? And I, you know, that at its core, it's religious thinking. It's not about your personal relationship with Jesus. And I think, you know, the thought that we're going to save the world, right? I mean, a lot of Christian thinking is really very millenarian, right? Like, things are going to end, repent, and, you know, we'll, we'll try to recreate the new kingdom of God on earth after this apocalyptic event. And a lot of that narrative persists in even supposedly secular thinking.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  You see it with a lot of the climate stuff, um, in which like, just build nuclear power plants. That's it. No apocalypse, but.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  We're gonna save the world. My favorite was like, everyone's like, you must recycle. And then it turns out that at a certain point, like, the Chinese weren't actually buying the recycling. And so this gas guzzling truck was picking up your recycling and essentially throwing it in a dump. But it made you feel really good about yourself when you put the can in the recycling bin. And that's what we teach people matters. Like, that's it. That's just, if you feel good about it, it works.

• 43:25Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's ironic at all, like, this was actually Chomath's point with the Uighurs that got him in so much trouble was like, the below my line thing. What he was, what, what he poorly articulated and with a lack of empathy and compassion for people that were being oppressed in China, he was him saying, hey, I actually have a ton of stuff that I take action on and that I really care about. And those are the issues that are above my line. And there's stuff, there's so much human suffering that exists in the world. And I just can't comprehend, internalize, and act on all the things that are bad in the world. And so that's below my line, right?

• 44:05Logan Bartlett?

  And it does feel like, you know, it's unpopular to say, we all should care about all the atrocities that are happening across the world and at least be empathetic to the people that they're happening to. But there's, you know, you can only act on so much, right? And so I think it's noble of you to actually go over to Ukraine and see this. And also, I mean, you've done debates on the topic, right? You went down to the All In Summit and debated Glenn Greenwald and to some extent David Sacks on this. And, you know, I mean, you actually have the real passion for this topic. And so, I don't know, I feel like the current thing criticism is the people that don't have the passion for it,

• 44:48Logan Bartlett?

  but do it in this transitory state of just like adopting it because it's cool right now to care.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I think there is a counter argument to caring, which is like, well, I mean, or I think the sort of what aboutery, which isn't without some merit, is like, well, why are we worrying about this form of tragedy when there's this other form of tragedy that we should be caring about more? And, you know, often it's just like a cheap rhetorical ploy. But often, you know, you can ask yourself, yeah, am I paying selective attention to things? It's a good point. And like, the reality is, I just looked up because, you know, like the hippie saying used to be, think globally, act globally, right? Which typically meant just worrying about global crises and then letting your own city kind of go to pot.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  I remember when I was at Berkeley, like, the Afghanistan war, 9/11 happened when I was at Berkeley. And Berkeley, which is like a small college town, passed a resolution about the Afghanistan war, right? A city that was not particularly well-run, to be clear, right? And still isn't. Well, I don't know, I haven't lived there in a while. But at the time, it was not an ideally-run city. And they're sitting there issuing, you know, declarations about the Afghanistan war. So I could see how about carrying a rubber remote thing, so it often seemed that way. I think it depends upon whether you think it fits into a greater, into a greater moral struggle that's going on in the world. Also, I would say the Europeans who see this going on in their backyard, don't, obviously don't think it's halfway around the world, right? They think it's very much a local phenomenon, which it is. Because like, you'd go to Warsaw train station and it'd been turned into a refugee camp. It's like, okay, this is not something that we can just offensively check out of.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  But I agree, it's like, you know, how do you? One coping strategy, I've talked to a very smart person, is what they do. It's like, yeah, outside my realm of concern. I think it's what you're saying with Chamath, that he, of course, phrased in the most obnoxious way possible, which is, you know, you know, actually outside my realm of concern, my family, my community, there's just nothing I can do about it, so I'm not going to stress out about it. I don't know, there might be something to that, right? Because at the end of the day, yeah, what can you do? I mean, I have a small platform, so maybe I could do something about the Ukraine thing, but most people frankly can't, and so, whatever.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  What's something that you think everybody believes is true and you know they're wrong?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  You're asking me the Thiel question? Okay.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  I'll bet.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  But that's almost like, you know, the, like when the Google interview questions get out and everyone actually studies them, so they lose their effectiveness. So now everybody knows the Thiel question.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  What do I think is, is, sorry, what do I think is true that everyone thinks is false, or vice versa, everything thinks is true, but I know is false?

• 47:10Speaker 02

  I was going the other way. Everyone thinks is true, but you think is just off and wrong.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Everybody thinks it's true.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Well, there's no everybody, as we've learned this world, but let's call it the common perception, and you can pick a, pick a side.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, is there, is there a common, is there anything that more than 50% Americans would say is true at this point? Other than like, DC is the capital of America? Like, what?

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Just like basic facts you can Wikipedia.

• 47:35Logan Bartlett?

  Even DC's the capital.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, even DC.

• 47:38Logan Bartlett?

  That's like 20% probably.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  You would probably pull out 20%, exactly.

• 47:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. That's what always, it's like, you know, whatever. Hillary Clinton is actually Bill Clinton and, you know, killed MLK or something. And it's like, yeah, yeah, no, no, 20% of Americans believe that.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  I always got, just because it's in your realm, like, for me, I always think about privacy, and how like, when you ask people, like, do you care about your privacy on the internet? Everybody says in isolation, like, of course I care about my privacy, like, it's really important to me. And then when you look at the behaviors that they have, right? Like, it's almost like antithetical to actually caring about your privacy. It's like little things like that where people, I guess it's like lip service to the idea, but then the behaviors underneath are completely opposite.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Well, so I agree with you Zach. I mean, it's definitely the case, and I wrote a lot about this when the whole Facebook backlash was happening. And I put that in air quotes because like, if you look at Facebook's usage graph and you take away like the X axis, like where's the king in the usage that reflects this whole backlash? And of course, there isn't one.

• 48:44Logan Bartlett?

  When was this backlash? Like, what time period are you talking about?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Well, Trump triggered it, 2016.

• 48:49Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, that one, okay, yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, this whole, I mean, it was somewhat engineered backlash against Facebook. I would, I would, maybe, I mean, you're broadly correct Zach, but I would put a little bit of a nuance on it, which I think it's, it's, it's not what the privacy zealots think, that privacy is this absolute good that just has to be maintained in this perfect status. I think most people think of privacy as a commodity that they exchange for other things, right? They trade privacy for a sense of community by living your life online, which is a little invasive, but you get a sense of community from it. Or convenience, like I let, I use Amazon Pay every chance I get. Amazon sees all my transactions, but I'm like, I don't want to enter my credit card. Fuck that, like just use Amazon Pay, I don't care. Or, you know, even security, like the Fourth Amendment says the cops can kick in my door with a warrant and I'm willing to concede that because well, crime is kind of a problem,

• 49:35Speaker 01

  like maybe they should be able to do that. So, you know, I don't think people are like completely hypocritical about it. I think they just perceive it very differently than, once again, the loudest voices in the room perceive privacy.

• 49:44Logan Bartlett?

  You know, I, I actually think the broad platitude of privacy people are behind, but all those little distinct things that you asked, I think people would nod along, like, oh yeah, of course I'm giving that up. And of course, I don't want to, all my cookies, you know, I want, I want them to recognize it's me coming back and I, I don't want to have to individually check out and all that. But I don't think people fully appreciate the, the trade offs and the enablement that have been made for having things free on the internet broadly speaking. And also the number of things that have been enabled through, you know, direct targeted Marketing and all that in terms of like small businesses and all this stuff that like is now with ATT.

• 50:26Logan Bartlett?

  I think people like broad pl- I forget if it was Ben Thompson or Benedict Evans or one of those guys was like, if it was rebranded small business enablement instead of like app tracking transparency or something, everyone would be like, oh my gosh, that's, that's so worth it, right? And I so to some extent, I agree with both of what you're saying, but I, I think it's the broad platitude that people support. And then they don't think through all the implicit enablement that, that comes from it, right?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Well, because it's complicated, right? That's part of the reason why I wrote Chaos Monkeys. It's like ad tech is wonky, it's the plumbing, it's important, but it's kind of boring to most people. How do you explain it in an accessible way that makes them understand exactly what you said? Like every ad tech goon says, well, we helped pay for the internet after like the fifth scotch, after an ad tech conference. And you know, it's, it's kind of a cope, but it's also true. I mean, it did pay for the bulk of, or a lot of web two. And you know, oh, here's one thing Zach, the, the fucking, here's one thing that everyone thinks is true, but I know is absolutely untrue. Facebook is not listening to your phone conversations on your phone. They're absolutely fucking not. I've written the entire Wired pieces, I've lost my shit online about it. There is just no beating this demon. People just keep on fucking thinking it and it's horrible. And it, yeah, I, yeah.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  I have had that screaming match myself of like, I worked in that, trust me, they are not listening. Do you know how many people would have been a whistleblower in four minutes when they built that? You know, like it just, but people don't realize like, you don't realize that people around you search for things that you say out loud. And that's how they know, it's not rocket science. They can see what people around you, whether you're connected to them directly as a friend or indirectly via geography. I've actually had this debate mostly with my mom that like, I swear, I swear like they're not listening in on that convo. That is a good one, yes. Every, every person in, I'm going to be ageist here, every person 60 and up thinks that their phone is listening to them.

• 52:16Logan Bartlett?

  What is it the, the, I mean, explain how it actually works. There's, there's the element of the, what's it called? The Bider Menoff or whatever phenomenon that like you, you also perceive it more. Can you explain just, I know this isn't going to be once and for all to the 12 people that listen to this podcast, but can you, can you, can you run it back in like very specific terms of what's actually happening? And why people think this is the case when in truth it's not?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Right. So I would make two points. One, the technical argument against like, it would be technically difficult to do and then, and also unnecessary. And then two, what Zach is getting into is how is it happening otherwise? Cause clearly something is going on. So if you think about it, right? Like literally imagine my phone were listening to me right now. It's the data equivalent of like a 24 seven phone call. You would see it in the fucking network consumption on the phone, right? Like it takes a non-trivial amount of bandwidth to like encode my voice and send that off into the cloud. Right? And then even then, would it even fucking work? Like think of the past conversation. Is there any easily encoded targeting information? Did I say, oh, by the way, I want to fly to Boston tomorrow at 6:30 PM with one layover? And that, and like this easily portable thing, and then show me a travel app.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  People invent all these just so stories. Like when I was the targeting fan of Facebook, they'd come, they'd come to you with all these like little just so, oh, what if you did this and did this and this, this? It's like, dude, in the scheme of things, that wouldn't move the needle on anything. It'd be hard to implement. It's just not going to fucking happen.

• 53:39Logan Bartlett?

  So that's the practical like packet transfer and you know, this, this, this would require, but I found no one, no one like falls for that one because they have the one time that they said something out loud and then it showed up on Instagram.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  That's because, that's what Zach said, which either, so there's many ways to target you, right? And so either you browsed on the internet and they simply linked your identity on that, on that other browsing experience or on your app with like your device ID or the browser cookie. They can target you well, once you've done a thing. Or the more subtle thing, which is what Zach is getting at. The product is called look alike audiences at Facebook. I didn't work on it, but it was developed when I was there. And what that basically means is if Logan and Zach and I are closely connected in the social graph defined by Twitter or Facebook or whatever, and Logan starts doing a thing because it's like, it's a vibe, it's a thing. In our collective cohort, then like another advertiser can say Logan's a client of mine, target people like Logan, and it's a super successful product that almost nobody talks

• 54:36Speaker 01

  about, and I'm going to get the ad because of something Logan, or potentially my girlfriend or spouse or partner did as a result of the conversation. So I was like, oh no, I didn't look up anything, but I bet your girlfriend did, I bet your mom did, I bet whatever somebody around you absolutely did. And then that ends up getting rolled into the, into the targeting machine. So that's almost always how it happened.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  It's like one of the most powerful ad targeting. It's one of those things where like conceptually like, I don't know, could that work? And then you go on Instagram, you're like, the ads are incredible. The discovery thing is spot on. It knows exactly what I want. And sometimes it knows more than what I want. Like it's showing me things. I'm like, yeah, I definitely want that shirt. How did you know? And it's just, it's that same, like the people around you are fairly predictive of your own personality. It's actually kind of shocking.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like I said, I didn't work on it at all, but I was at Facebook when it was first, I remember the guy who pitched it. He was like a data scientist guy who wanted to move into product. So he cooked up this whole product plan for this thing. I remember I heard the initial pitch because he was trying to get PMs to work on. I'm like, well, I don't know, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. But in retrospect, clearly it worked amazing because like the number one, like I've been in these sales meetings, the number one thing a retailer wants, or like a sophisticated retailer with a sophisticated in-house marketing team knows how to reach their entire audience on every platform that you can mention, like Facebook, Google, whatever. It's like, I've got these, I've got these million whales who spent a pile of money on my shit. Find me 2 million people like them. That's what I need for you to, you know, to do. Like I could reach them there, you know, don't talk to me about custom audiences. Give me another 2 million whales. And then the lookalike audiences

• 56:03Speaker 01

  product basically fills that gap and solves that pain point. So it's, it's a great, it's a great product from the ad tech point of view.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I definitely find myself going on Instagram sometimes just to look at the ads. It's that good. You know?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  And that's every marketer's dream. Ads so good, they seem like organic content. That's always been the holy grail of marketing for the past 15 years. And it's finally sort of happening.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  And then I go on Twitter and they show me ads for like, you know, a vacation in New York City. And I'm like, I live here, guys. Like I'm not, I'm not staying in a New York hotel, you morons. And that- Has always been the bull case for Twitter, which is like the ad content is so bad. And yet, here we are.

• 56:43Logan Bartlett?

  Well, talk about it. What could have been in the book. Antonio, you you almost went to Twitter. Is that right?

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, yeah. So the company, I think we were Twitter's third acquisition or something. This is ancient history, but in 2011, Twitter bought Aggrock, and you know, and it was, you know, to be clear, it was an aqua hire, which if you're not familiar with the term, it used to be more common than it is now. Basically, they would expensively acquire talent in which the company was effectively the job interview. They're like, oh, look, they can build. This seems kind of cool. Okay, we'll just give you like a huge sign on bonus or like a big equity, you know, chunk, and then you just come on board and work on our stuff. The company disappears and that's the end of it. So that that's kind of what happened. And Twitter at the time was maybe 200 some odd people. Very different company. It was not the public forum that it is today, right? Like it was, I mean, Facebook, for that matter, wasn't, you know, that much of an incumbent either. Um,

• 57:34Speaker 01

  yeah. And so I don't know. It's it's one of the dramas of the book. For some reason, I just had this intuition that Facebook would end up being the winner. And um,

• 57:41Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and you you sold your company to one and left to the other, which is interesting. The company went to Twitter and then you went to Facebook, which I've never I've never seen before, or I don't know if that's happening again, but.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was there was some drama there for.

• 57:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  For a while.

• 57:56Logan Bartlett?

  So so let's do, we've somehow managed to make it an hour without doing Web three and what you're up to today. So so you now have a a new company in the the broader ad tech Web three world.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  So you've caught me unprepared because, yes, a round has mostly closed, but I actually haven't publicly announced it. So I guess this is the official.

• 58:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, good.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  This is.

• 58:19Logan Bartlett?

  We are. You went on Rogan, then you came on here, you know, equally big platforms podcasts, you know, yeah, I know you were debating which one to launch the company on, but.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, clearly that. But, you know, I obviously chose Logan for.

• 58:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:33Logan Bartlett?

  However, much you you can talk about, or you're talking about the company specifically, or what led you into Web three, you obviously have a pretty good understanding of of how the Web two world works, at least the social media giants and you guys, the two of you have have had some, I think, good either good sport or snippy depending on, you know, people's view back and forth about some of this stuff. So what what led you down the the path to it? And what do you kind of believe about Web three?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was not an early crypto adopter. I think like everyone in Web 3, there's like the one that got away. There was like a super crypto bullet at Facebook when I was there and he like told me to buy Bitcoin. I think when it was like at 10 bucks or something. And I remember at the time Coinbase limited your purchases like a hundred dollars or something. And so like, and I just didn't want to deal with the hassle of like buying Bitcoin. So I didn't buy as much as I should have. So there's definitely a little bit of a FOMO feeling around.

• 59:29Logan Bartlett?

  You wait long enough, though, it could be back, you know, you could get another $10 opportunity.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  But the market, the market will fluctuate, as Jake was going to say. But no, I guess I got kind of sort of crypto pill by some big names and VCs in crypto today that I just know more personally than anything else. And they got me thinking about it. And I basically asked myself two questions. One, what in Web 2 could actually be defensively rebuilt along sort of crypto blockchain lines? Like what would you, starting from zero, what would you rebuild along those lines? And then two, looking at Web 3, what is completely and totally missing from this world that should exist? And the answer, the answer to both questions was the same, which is attribution, which if you're not familiar, I know it sounds very wonky and almost academic. It's basically the, it's basically this, it's a technology that more or less gets telemetry from the user, user touchpoints like

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  the ad click, the ad view, you installed the app, you did this thing in the app, you didn't do this thing in the app, you disappeared. And you sort of thread it together into a causal chain out of the chaos of data that's hitting you. And you figure out, aha, it turns out, you know, because you know, life on the internet is complicated. You see a YouTube video and you see an eight sleep ad, because I just see eight sleep ads all the time, right? You read an interview with Matteo about it and then at some point you buy the damn thing. And so it's like, okay, phenomenologically, how did causally I get to the point where I bought this like cooled mattress thing? It's like, well, was it the video? Was it this? Was it the billboard or something else? And so attribution is what helps you solve that problem. And if you look at attribution platforms like my former employer, Branch, or other ones like AppFlyer, Adjust, whatever, it's got competitors.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  They effectively function as kind of semi-public, somewhat decentralized ledgers, right? Through a central point, there's sort of a database that says, well, you know what? This got four impression views on Facebook and five video views on YouTube and this other thing, and then this other thing happened, and this is how we think the causal chain held together, at least in theory. In actual practice, it's a lot less subtle and complex than that, for a bunch of reasons that are probably not worth going into here. But that's what I thought was kind of interesting. And so it's probably no secret, I've been publishing on Substack about Web3 ideas and attribution, and what would an ad stack on Web3 look like? Well, big reveal, that's actually what we're working on. So, those two posts are basically the VC pitch that I raised on in essay form.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  Is the idea, as like, people's Web3 interactions, if you will, happen on like different chains and different platforms? And like, how do you find the same human, or what we believe might be the same human across these? Is that kind of like the general theme?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  That's one of the challenges. I mean, identity is fragmented on Web3. I mean, it is on Web2 as well. When we started Facebook Exchange, we discovered that every Facebook user ID had an average of four devices. And now, this was like 2013, it's probably even higher now. And so identity is very fragmented, which makes attribution and targeting very difficult. So that's definitely one of the challenges, Zach. But more broadly, like, let's just think about, what's a basic question a Web3 company would ask themselves, right? Like, Web3 already has ads, by the way, if you define ads loosely enough. So like an NFT drop-

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing I would probably ask myself is, what am I doing here? And is anyone actually going to buy this? But after I get through that question, I can ask myself, there's something here. Go on.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Okay, but what's question number two or three? Question number two or three is, would be, what's my retention rate? What is the ROI on that token drop that I just did, right? Or that liquidity, you know, providing bonus that I gave you for, you know, injecting liquidity into my decentralized exchange, right? What is the ROI on that? What are my CACs? Let's say I have a conventional Web2 ads buy for some Web3 game. What was the acquisition cost? What was the long-term, you know, what was the actual long-term monetization? You can't answer those questions right now with the tooling that, there is no tooling, basically. And so the most basic metrics are basically unanswerable questions.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Is that because the you show an ad in I hate the term web too because it's it's really like the web. You show an app on the web and then somebody comes and has like an interaction in the app. The decentralized game, let's call it as the example. It's a good one. Like I've got to link those two events, if you will, like the history of the events together and do some sort of like data science. C work on I did A did B that that's the theme.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's a total identity. I mean, identity. I mean, you mentioned ATT earlier, right? The example of Apple basically turning off the device ID for third party advertisers on on the iPhone. What is? Why does that matter? Well, identity is the primary key that everyone in this kind of fragmented. Right ecosystem used to refer to each other to calculate things like ROI is right. And if that doesn't exist or that's fragmented, then it's very difficult to do that. And then what? And this isn't by design. It's just it's two different forms of the web interacting with each other. How do you? How do you think that Facebook? You know, campaign ID or that web browser cookie with the wallet that two months later actually bought the NFT. There's no way to actually systematically join that.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  I cannot believe I'm going to say this out loud, but that's actually like a pretty good star startup idea like.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  There's space in the round. There's space in the round. We'll let in a little friends and family check. I'd be proud to have the biggest web three troll in the round.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Ultimate victory.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Let me tell you why I like it because everybody always thinks I hate everything and it's like, I don't, I don't hate everything because I I hate it. Like I am a startup person. All I do is actually like put money in high risk technology stuff. Like if anything, I'm probably one of the people who likes these kind of like cockamamie ideas more than anyone else. I just don't like when they're not based in logic and reality and like human behavior. But here what you've got, which I agree with like with one giant caveat is like common.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Common advertising and usage metrics and dashboards for a company that operates in web three, because like the underlying data that they have in their non-web, normal web environment is different, right? It's a different set of like, interaction points, the way the data is captured is different, the way you have to do analytics on it is different. And most of these companies are too busy trying to figure out a business model to actually do the underlying like analytics work themselves. And so there's your gap. I think that's right. Like, it makes a ton of sense, because it's not, our frame at Operator, when we do investing in technology, in crypto, whatever, is like, does this make sense as an enterprise software company?

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  And it has nothing to do with like, web, you know, if, would this be an enterprise software that a company would buy? And I, it does make sense to me that a web three customer would pay for this, because they are unlikely to be able to build this internally unless they were really, really big.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  That's exactly right, Zach. And I think it's well timed, right? Because crypto winter has shown us that token does not always go up. And a lot of these products were actually sort of Ponzi schemes or speculative vehicles. But, but, you know, and again, who cares about your CAC? If money, money is free, and token always go up. But when suddenly token doesn't always go up, you have to worry about acquisition costs and unit economics. And so, this is an engine to actually measure that, and hopefully create like, an actual legit user acquisition machine for.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think it makes a ton of sense. Obviously, my main concern with the whole business is like, do you have customers in five years? Because the vast majority of them do feel like Ponzi schemes are a race to the, it's not even, I hate the term Ponzi scheme, because it always makes you sound like, you know, Mel Gibson in Conspiracy, or whoever, was it Mel, I think it was Mel Gibson who was in, who was the guy who was in Conspiracy who ended up being right? Not a movie. Anyway, like, you always sound crazy when you say Ponzi scheme, but in reality, I think of it more as like, is there a fundamental, underlying business model that has like, long-term sustainable value? And I think actually, one of the really fascinating questions for a lot of these web three customers is this whole idea of like, are my users actually my users? Right?

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Are they here for the early access to the coin and they jump? How long do they stay? Are they actually just like, in the Philippines, basically like skipping from game to game to be able to be the early ones in action? Yeah, there's a lot of like, fundamental user metric questions that I think.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Don't have the typical like web oriented analytics like is you're used to users who show up because they want to buy the product as opposed to users who show up because they want to speculate on the money.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think that's one of the lessons from the play to earn model, right? If the game isn't actually worth playing, then people are just sticking around for the money.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Shocking. You're telling me if you build a product that people don't actually like to use, it doesn't work. That's so weird. You know, in the long run, it goes to zero.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I mean, the weird thing, the weird thing here is that if you think about web two and web three, right? The reason why it's so mind bending is that so many things about web three are like literally the reverse of web two, right? It's like web two, you would find some viral consumer use case that took off like fucking crazy. And then you'd have to scale infrastructure really quickly and find a business model that actually paid for it, right? Like as late as, as late as like literally at the IPO at Facebook, the ad system at Facebook still kind of sucked, right? And the CPMs that we were driving did not justify the valuation at all. Right? And the only reason some, you know, little dinky product manager like me could raise his hand and say, hey, we should build a real time bid and exchange is because everyone was so desperate to drive revenue that they're like, we'll try anything. Here's three engineers, build it. You've got a year to scale it to a billion dollars.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  But you knew that business model was coming, right? Because we've known that we can monetize eyeballs since we invented the newspaper, basically. I mean, we didn't know exactly how we were going to monetize the eyeballs. That I understand and I totally agree with. But this idea of like, you have people's attention in a consistent way, you know something about them, like, yeah, you're gonna be able to show them that. Now, is it gonna be worth whatever the like average revenue per user with Facebook has today? Like, no, I think everybody got that wrong, myself included. You know, you just assumed it was gonna look something like a display ad and it turns out it's worth way, way more than that. But the like, the simpleness of it of I show an ad to somebody while I have their attention, that I think people understood. I just don't think they understood the magnitude of it.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Maybe. Look, I mean, the CPMs when I joined Facebook were 17 cents.

• 1:09:39Logan Bartlett?

  And so what are they, what are they now? Just order magnitude?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  It's dollars, probably. In the US, it's several dollars.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Which is high.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  But just to contextualize a little bit, Zach, I spent a year, I was basically given a mandate. You own the targeting system, take user data and turn it to money. And we literally took every piece of Facebook, Facebook-owned user data. Getting back to the microphone question, right? And none of it really moved the needle, at least using a very direct way of like, oh, target, what are you, a link a user shared and like shit, like the most simplistic low-level stuff just did, just did not work. It did not increase monetization at all. And so after a year of that, we're like tearing our hair out and not understanding what. And of course, the key was, I think, kind of maybe where you're hinting at, which is it turns out the first-party data from REI or Home Depot or Victoria's Secret or Sephora, that's the valuable stuff that'll, that'll. And then also just remember, Facebook ads used to be that little shitty postage stamp sized thing on the right.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Like News Feed ads were already like a risky, edgy thing that Zuck might've said no to, right? And once you had the targeting, once you had the media experience, then, then yes, then now we're at the ARPUs we have today. But it seemed a little, I mean, dude, even scaling, just to nerd out ad tech-wise for a second. Again, we're running this exchange, like you said, there was so much hubbub around it. And I'd bring in like everyone you know in ad tech, everyone that ran every DSP, every, every everything. And they'd come in expecting it would be this massive, like shut up with their entire teams, 15 people, and it would be like me. And I'd take them to the thing and it's like, all right, you see these fucking three boneheads right here? This is it. This is the real-time media team at Facebook. And they're like, no, no, you're joking. Where's the real time?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  It's like, no, no, no, this is it, bro. This is it. This is where you're working with. And so, you know, that, that's how dicey it was at the time. And the adoption friction was enormous, just changing, now everyone talks about native ad formats. At the time, that was kind of unheard of. If it wasn't a 300 by 250 pixel thing or a 728 by 90, they're like, get the fuck out of here. We're not gonna do that. And so it would, you could not convince them to spend money on Facebook, even with the CPMs on the floor with a billion users. It was hard, it was a hard sell.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  So since I'm always supposed to be the skeptic, I think that's supposed to be my job, right? Uh, I'll ask, I'll ask you what, what I would ask if you were bitching me this business. Cause I understand the like fundamental thesis of, is there a customer problem? Like, yeah, yes. Which customer segment do you start in? Because you have to believe that that customer segment ultimately is big enough to support the underlying business, right?

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:12:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, if we don't get a LaRonde clip out of this, I, you know.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  We've already got it. It's me going like, oh, yeah, it's actually like a decent weapon.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  He's not gonna run that. He's not gonna run that. It's not negative. Well, the Web3 world, it's weird, right? If you look at this, this scaled in quotes, I mean, not scaled by Web2 standards, but whatever. Some level of consumer adoption, whether it be NFT marketplaces, whether it be exchanges, whether it be Web3 gaming, right? They're all kind of very different, right? The users are very different. If you just think about like, do you just, again, to nerd out ad tech wise for a second, Zach? How do you define a conversion event?

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  In an exchange that's trying to like get you to provide liquidity? Or even better, let's say you're an L2 like optimism. They had a, they had a token drop that made a bunch of, you know, created a lot of fuss about a month and a half ago. And, you know, I've talked to them and like, what are you trying to drive, right? And it's like, well, trying to drop adoption of the platform, right? Like, how do you, how do you bake that into an attribution system? It's very difficult. It's very different. The world that you and I know or knew, that you used to know, right? Which is like, oh, a gamer comes in, they spend a hundred bucks on a purple tractor, done. It's a discrete event, a hundred bucks. And then compared to the CAC, and that's my ROI. How do you work that into an exchange model in which, well, I don't know. They provided a million dollars of liquidity. Here's this super fucking complicated payoff diagram for how we're gonna give a bonus to the liquidity. How do you actually bake that into any sort of optimization?

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Right, because you don't know why the user is there.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Which is why, can we, like, that's just like such a ridiculous, like, I've got.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Showing up, I don't know why they're, I don't know if they really are here because of like the thing I build, or if they're really here because of handing out free money.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Well, hold on, in the exchange case, it's very obvious, and it's no different than liquidity providers in any other exchange, right? It's just, the exchanges, we don't need to get into the details, exchanges work differently in Web3 than they do in perk bellies. But at the end of the day, their market, it's automated market making, they're providing liquidity to a pool, and they're getting paid for that liquidity.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. The exchange is like the world's best. I mean, if I could start a crypto exchange and like have it, I would have started it myself. It's an unbelievable business. It's a tax, it's a speculation tax. It's like definitionally going to work. Uh, because humans like to speculate. speculate and then when you tax the speculation where I agree like supporting the the exchanges it's the exchanges will be here the longest for sure right because it's like the most fundamental business model in web three I was thinking more of like once you get outside of uh FTX and you know whatever 900 other exchanges there are that haven't run away with people's money yet like which next customer segment you know

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  well I mean again I think web three gaming will probably wake up and actually realize they actually make like no it this is like a broader statement about crypto and it's funny that Leron's probably gonna clip this because I'm being negative about crypto I'm not really being negative but um it's like and I think I think web three has gotten the memo because you see the chatter on Twitter that it's like I mean early adopters do crypto because they get into coins because they identify with it they all nerd out about that I don't think your average user is going to use web three because it's web three they're gonna use web three to do cool shit that only web three can enable so build things that do cool shit in which the whole crypto side of it is like incidental to the user right and I you know hopefully web three goes in that

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  direction and again if so the data backend is just fundamentally different than web two and so you're gonna need an attribution system that's fundamentally different and so we're betting on web three waking up token no longer goes up you have to build products that are actually compelling to real users who actually want to pay money to use them in some form or another and so we want to enable that user acquisition machinery in some form or another

• 1:15:44Logan Bartlett?

  I'm just gonna say this back because I'm getting Rashad in the in the chat uh you know I think you guys went quickly to the to the deep ad tech nerding out thing but basically there's a whole bunch of uh there's a whole bunch of events that exist in the web three world be it uh token drops be it I don't know whatever else discord communities be it there's there's probably a bunch of them that you can name that I try to ignore and all of those things have some level of of attribution to whatever action ultimately gets taken right and that could be signing up on FTX that could be buying the NFT on OpenSea that could be joining the

• 1:16:27Logan Bartlett?

  Discord server. Do I have that right?

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Yep, that's exactly right.

• 1:16:31Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. And one question I have on this is, and this is just out of my own curiosity. To what extent do you think the acquisition channels are mostly going to be self-contained within the web three ones that I just said versus exist in web two, the same way that, you know, whatever you need it, you need to link back to the, to the terrible Twitter ad that existed in feed. Do you think those end up staying distinct? Do you think you need to bridge the gap between the two?

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. It's one that I often ask myself. Like, as a random note, like, I've talked to some people who are working in web three and they're like cooking up ad schemes. And it's like, dude, where are you going to run the ad, right? Like, there isn't enough web three inventory to actually run the ad.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  It has to start. If anything is to break through into a normal human use case, you have to find normal human people where they spend time and that is in like, normal places. Like, it just has to happen that way. There's no other way.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Right. And then, you know, even looking forward three, three to five years from now, web two and web three are going to coexist, right? So you have to have some way to bridge those two worlds. And it, you know, whether it's as basic as like, oh, I ran a Facebook user acquisition campaign for my web three game, and I have to bridge those two divides and calculate what are my Facebook CACs, right? Like, you can't calculate CACs in web three. What the fuck, right? Like, we have tooling for this. These are solved problems in web two. This shouldn't be like an open question in web three.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Well, part of the reason you can't calculate it is the first C in the CAC is a questionable item here of like, is this a customer? I actually think that's really one of the biggest challenges, which is like, because of the ability for a speculative user to make money very quickly, or theoretically make money, or now potentially lose money very quickly, but in some way, like, have money involved early in the cycle. That's maybe the better way of saying it. Which of those people stick around at all? And which of them don't? It reminds me so much of like, do you remember like, the blue aprons and HelloFreshes and all those of the world where, you know, you're looking at these top line revenue growth numbers of these companies early on, you're like, holy shit, everybody's going to order food

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  and cook it at home through this like frozen meal mechanism. And the numbers look incredible. And then what you don't realize is that like, 85 to 90%, that's probably higher than this now of those users showing up because you gave them like $40 of free food. And then the minute the like $40 of free food ends, they churn. And so you have these metrics internally that look good, but are actually just mostly like cash burning money machines. And it's like, how do you tease out who's going to be the user that actually wants to do Blue Apron over the long run? All five of them? And then like, who wants to do, you know, who's really there for the free food? That actually kind of in a sense is like very similar. Like who's here for the free food and who actually wants the product?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  But but just the side of it's an excellent point Zach, but the side of parallel, right? In web two, you drafted along on one form of speculative capital called venture capital. And in web three, you kind of, you know, you kind of mosey along on another form of speculative capital, which is just like speculative retail investors and hodlers and whatnot.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Well, I wouldn't make the comparison like in the first one, it's marketing dollars. You know, everybody has to spend marketing dollars to try to accumulate users, whatever it is your underlying business is. I don't know if it's like speculative per se, it's like, it's theoretically, it's an investment in a long-term user that pays you back more money than you spent getting them. The challenge is like, the pays you back more money than you spent getting them over time. Like, what is the thing that ultimately keeps them there and keeps them excited? And is it, is it useful? I think it's very core. It's really like, a business is not that complicated. It's like, I make something for X dollars, and I sell it for hopefully more than X dollars, minus like, all the little overhead that I have to actually do the work. That's kind of it. You know, and it's like, the question

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  is, are those people really showing up and consistent over the long run outside of the the trading and the exchanges?

• 1:20:20Logan Bartlett?

  The interesting part, I guess, of how you can be potentially big without it needing to be totally self-contained to the FTXs, or whatever, the the web three first or only quote unquote type people, is if, if there's a world in which these Discord servers and token drops and all of this stuff ends up feeding into, in the same way that, you know, Walmart ultimately became a website, as well, right? Went from a retail store to a website. I don't think that that it's going to be a major part of a big market, right? All these other people, but if there is some loyalty program, and again, all this stuff has existed,

• 1:21:04Logan Bartlett?

  right? It's like in perpetuity, but if there's some semblance of a attribution, even if you don't end up taking over all of Walmart's attribution system, you know, if they end up having a Discord server and a token or whatever, NFT or something, and you can be the attribution that bridges those two, you almost don't need it to be totally self-contained.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  I'll give you a specific example. I thought it'd be interesting and curious to hear your thoughts like, all right, what percentage of the people who are users, and we can define that very loosely here, are also users of like 800 other things in crypto? Right? Because those are, those are the mercenaries, right? Like if I could know that the people coming in over here have done this same like little game before 700 times, like theoretically, I would want to segment those people out. They are unlikely to be long-term customers, as an example.

• 1:21:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, the negative part of the Venn diagram.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  That, well, that's already happening. Again, I keep on using optimism as the example, not for any particular reason, other than I think it's an interesting product and they're smart people. Um, and they've, they've posted publicly about it. So you can read their threads about it. When they did their token drop, um, there not only are there ads in web three, there's already ads fraud. So people create wallets, sign up for the token drop, get the token, sell it for a stablecoin and walk away and never use the product, which obviously totally sucks. That's already going on, but they foiled it. They actually shut down over 10,000 wallets who are trying to do that through the sort of analysis that you just said, okay, did this wallet, was it created yesterday? Is it obviously related to this other wallet, which was also created yesterday? And so exactly the same sort of anti-fraud that is done routinely on the web two side, it will also start to have to be done on the web three side.

• 1:22:41Logan Bartlett?

  Zach, it's similar to one of your only crypto investments in TRM Labs, right? And it's analysis like, you know, keeping people from defrauding you is actually a great use case of web three.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Well, I think the biggest, like one of the most interesting use cases in web three is this like macro analysis of like, what the fuck is going on here? Right? It's really hard. It's like really easy to create a new wallet and spin up a different, you know, move money between chains and move money between different coins and like do a lot of things in a pseudo-privacy compliant way. You know, where you're not a hundred percent sure that that's the same person. You can have multiple accounts for the same person very quickly. It's very low. And so like, these are the problems I think are most interesting to tackle because you're. Whether you're a government, which is why I think like TRM and these other ones are interesting, like law enforcement, police, things like that. Or theoretically, you're an advertiser or an web three company that hasn't run out of money yet.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, you kind of want to know what's going on. There's so much noise, like it's inherently a noisy system because of the speculative nature of it. That's the problem. It's challenging.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Also, the way the data structure in the blockchain, I mean, it's not, doesn't make it easy to actually construct user profiles. It's not, it's not a data structure that's designed to run the sort of tasks that you're talking about.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  It's like the world's worst data structure, to be very clear. Like, if you want anything that's like performant in any way, shape or form, it's like a pretty terrible data structure. I get it, it's decentralized sometimes, it's not controlled by any one person sometimes. But like, yes, it's cool, but it's actually kind of a terrible data structure if you want like fast access to information.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  It's, you said something earlier, I'm like, you know, you have to fundamentally think about like where the architecture of the blockchain like actually makes this better. And by the way, blockchain, meaning like it has to be decentralized for it to be better because a centralized version of this stuff is usually better conceptually in terms of performance.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  I, that's where I get hung up on of like, besides Bitcoin, why do I, you know, anyway, you'll have to answer these questions, obviously, as you think about your customer base, because that's what I would be focused on in, as an investor is like, all right, what's the first market that we're going to rely on as a stable revenue stream for this new attribution company? Like, who are the customers?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, on the decentralized front, right? I think, again, I think people are getting a little bit more sane about it and less ideological. A company I like, and here's an example of a web three consumer use case, although the user numbers are still probably relatively modest. A company called Farcaster, I don't know if you're familiar with it, they just announced a big raise from A6 and C. And, you know, on their, on their landing page, they say, we're sufficiently decentralized social media protocol.

• 1:25:24Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, this is, this is the Coinbase guy, right? Dan Romero?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:25:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  What is this crap? What?

• 1:25:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, be careful. I can snap you in the back. And so many others, like, he's feeling himself a little too much. He, he got, he made it through with his company intact, so now.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna join the social network for the rebuild my entire social network usage because I want to be able to move between them over time. Is that what this is?

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna make the case for another company because I might butcher it and Dan.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  I've never heard of it. I just went on the website and like the second line on farcaster.xyz, which I assume is their homepage, is users will always have the freedom to move their social identity between applications. So it's kind of like, I'm gonna join this thing because I think at some point it's gonna suck so much that I have to leave.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Like, that doesn't make any sense to me.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Okay, well then, then take it up with the EU, because guess what? That data portability is one of the tenants of the GDPR.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I agree. I agree, by the way. Like, actually, regulatory issues are going to push the centralized social networks to force data portability. I agree.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Then why not, excuse me, then why not bake the fucking feature into the data architecture to begin with, such that it doesn't have to be regulated?

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Because users aren't asking for it. Like, they're not making a choice, they're not making a choice about which social network they use based on their ability to get out later. That's just, they're just not. Like, nobody goes like, hmm, I'm gonna spend my time on like Facebook now that I can move my data to future Facebook that doesn't exist. Human beings don't operate that way. That's not how people think. Like, I know engineers think about data portability because they're thinking about like, what do I want to do in the long run? But doesn't that just like make no sense to you that you're gonna choose a social network because at some point you think it sucks so much that you want to move to the next one? Like, you pick a social network because you want to be there.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  You're citing one line from their landing page? I mean, you're right that I think that...

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Well, there's only two lines in the whole landing page. There's only two.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Well, no, there's a set of docs that you haven't looked at. But in any case, you're right that I don't think a consumer is gonna adopt it for that. A normie consumer is not gonna adopt it. It's in a closed beta, by the way, so it's not actually, the collateral isn't actually targeted. Again, I don't want to speak for this company. It's not my company, so.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I know it's not your business, to be clear. I understand that, yeah.

• 1:27:42Logan Bartlett?

  We'll, we'll edit out the name of the company or something here, so that...

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Put it on there. It's farcaster. It's more like never user. That's probably the better name, but like, I, they're, I get, I'm assuming the idea is like, we're gonna build this centralized protocol that people, other people can build the actual application layer on top of. I'm gonna guess that's like the ultimate use case here, or at least that's what they're pitching. But it still kind of goes... Again, the initial piece of this of like, I want to be in a social network ecosystem because it's useful to me, not because I care as a user. I care about portability in the long run.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  So just to generalize the argument a little bit away from this, again, business that I don't feel comfortable speaking for because it's not my business. I think that the functionality you're talking about, to use a little bit of web three jargon is composability, right? And what that means is that you could take, there's one piece over here that exists on chain that exists independently of me. And I can build a thing on top of that, kind of without asking for permission, as long as you abide by the rules of the sort of protocol, right? And that that obviates the need to create, for example, developer API that would actually expose that functionality directly. It's permissionless in the sense that, well, I can just go and do it, assuming I actually follow the rules and the protocol standard of of that protocol.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  I know, I get it. I just kind of go like as a PM myself, I mean, I used to do roadmapping. I used to do all the like user interviews. I did all the, I did the spec writing. I did the UX design crap. I did all of it, just like you did. And usually the feature of like, hey, our users want to like move their data to some other thing.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  You're discussing around the wrong fucking thing. You didn't send anything I said for the past two minutes. The example to cite is not the data portability thing. It's the fact that Twitter shut down its API partners and fucked every power user on Twitter. That was real functionality that completely fucked up. I don't know.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  But that is nothing to do, that's just like a bad business decision from Twitter. What does that have to do?

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Right, but you can't, right, right. But you can't, you can't make that bad business decision in web three because there's, you don't actually control access.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you have to build Twitter first. You have to like have users who want to be there.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  That's what they're doing.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  They're gonna, they're gonna rebuild like one of the most popular social networking platforms in the world. Because somebody won't be able to un, like, remove API access for power users down the road. Like, this isn't just human beings.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  You're like a fucking, you're like a fucking wind up ball that somebody behind you is just pulling and you're saying the exact same thing over and over and over again.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  Well, because I actually understand how like normal people show up to use software. I under, I get, I get that it's not like how we think about the architecture of it, but at the end of the day, like, people have to make a choice with. Their time, right? Like a human being has to make a choice with their time to use a product and they don't really care about the underlying architecture.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  I agree. As I've said before, they're not going to use it because it's some weird crypto wonkery. They're going to use it because it lets them do cool shit. That's

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  What is that cool shit? That's kind of what I guess maybe you might like.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  I can't sell your product. I can't sell your product that I'm not involved in or associated with. I feel like, again, I've already stepped out beyond the bounds here of like speaking for this company. But I just cited as an example of one interesting use case for social media with, I don't know. Go take it up with Dan online.

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  They gotta be your customers at some point. I mean, at some point you have to become an expert in these companies because you have to sell to them, right?

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Uh, I won't comment on that, but I agree with you on that front. Yep. Well, that was good. I, uh, I was, I, I mean, yes, just to answer your question, to sell you this mysterious way, because I've talked about it publicly. Yeah, at some point, I don't know what their business model going forward is going to be, but assuming they actually do run ads or some form of paid monetization. You're going to have to build an ad system that actually that plays ball with the web three that things do things. And I think the bedrock layer for that, part of why, like you might ask the question, again, why do you start with attribution? Because it's kind of nerdy. I mean, it's it's important plumbing, but it's plumbing. If you look at web two, that's not how, that's not how the whole paid media business started. It started with ads and then got to attribution later. I think things are going to be different in web three, right? And you're going to have to build

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  the base ground truth of attribution. And then you can think about, okay, how do we build? How do we build ads on web three? How do we build the equivalent of in mic media? How do we build the DSP? Like where you actually encapsulate the ads by, I want to target this user with this piece of creative and I'm going to pay this much. How do you build on the blockchain? Right?

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  No, I think it's a great idea because in a sense like you have these web three companies who have tons of dollars flowing in, whether it's coming from venture or speculators. They don't really have like fundamentally good product logical thinking because they haven't had to to have users, which is like the backwards way to build a business. And so the first thing they're going to go is like, ah, can somebody help me think through like where to spend my marketing dollars and what's most useful and who's actually using it? And in a sense you act as like a nice, not a tax, I don't mean it in that way, but like you're going to get a little cut of like all the venture dollars that flow into these business. I actually really like the business. I think it's like a clever idea.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  You know, Zach, we have just enough room in the round. If you care to contribute, I'd certainly be happy to that conversation.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  Well, I have to also then think about the long-term sustainability of the underlying customer base. You know, that's the TAM issue, right? That's what everybody would say. Well, like, I don't know what the TAM is. How many customers are there that are sustainable? Are you selling to like a known segment? Are you selling to, you know, like a speculative segment? All that other crap. But that's been that's, that's where maybe my investment would fall down. But I think the underlying like logic behind the business does make sense.

• 1:33:04Logan Bartlett?

  I call that a victory. I

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Victory!

• 1:33:07Logan Bartlett?

  I got everything. I got everything I needed out of this. I got a little bit of spiciness at the end there. I got, you know, I got the

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  I am over time. I know it's a startup. I know you just raised money, but it's over time. You are going to have to defend your customers' underlying business models because they are your customers.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  I get that. Message received.

• 1:33:25Logan Bartlett?

  Well, hey, AGM, thanks for coming on. I'm glad we were able to do this. This was, this was fun. Yeah, I really appreciate you, you hanging in here and going through a bunch of different stuff with us.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  No, thank you, Logan. And, you know, Zach, you're so much nicer in person than you are on Twitter, I have to say. There has to be a term. It's like paragenic, but it's like Twitter genetic. I don't know how you, what you'd call this exactly, but

• 1:33:46Logan Bartlett?

  I, you know, I, I feel like that's a, that's someone that has been accused of that themselves as I have as well. So, yeah, just three of us that play assholes online, but, you know,

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  I just like to poke, you know, just like a little bit, but I, it's funny, before I realized you were even working in any of the web three stuff and then, you know, my opinion of you dropped like a thousand X, I actually like, you know, I really enjoyed some of the stuff that you posted in particular. I think in general, just this idea of like having a independent set of beliefs that you believe something to be true regardless of which party or whatever is behind it. Like, there are just not that many people who have those. And I obviously consider myself one of them. So I do appreciate all that stuff. Like, that's the part that I think is most interesting about. Personalities who are good writers, right? It's like you can make the case for your point.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  Doesn't have to be like the Democrats believe this or Republicans believe like that part to me is really interesting.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  I guess you're probably referring to the tweet that I made recently where like the true test of intellectual integrity is not claiming you're going against the man or the current thing, but rather agreeing with even your political enemies online because you think it's actually true, right? Which I-

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have a core belief system of things you believe to be true. And like, I always think the most interesting stuff is when you follow somebody on Twitter who like, you know, posted it and you can't exactly tell who they'd vote for. I mean, it's a little harder in these today's world where like you're not 100% sure like, ah, where do you sit? And those people are the most interesting because clearly they have a point to be made about like an underlying topic as opposed to, you know, they're selling, uh, culture wars or whatever bullshit it is, so.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  As a corollary, I hope I'm one of those people and as a corollary-

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  As a corollary to it, like I always think the perfect tweet is one that's either equally hated or equally loved by both tribes. Like that to me is like the perfect tweet. And no one can actually figure out-

• 1:35:38Logan Bartlett?

  By the way, my best satire is always like people, it gets engagement because some people believe it and some people get that I'm kidding. And it's just like, it's this concentric circle and then it escapes, by the way, and then people get outraged by it, right?

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:56Logan Bartlett?

  All right, well, thanks for doing this.

• 1:36:02Logan Bartlett?

  So that'll do it for the 26th episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thanks to AGM for joining as well as Zach for, uh, for always being entertaining on, uh, Web 3 topics. Uh, we, I think next week are actually going to release the long awaited episode, uh, that we've been teasing for a while. So, uh, thanks everyone for listening to 26 and, uh, trust that 27 will be, uh, nothing if not entertaining. So definitely tune in for that one as well.