Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook exec and author of Chaos Monkeys, traveled to Ukraine and Poland to document the Jewish refugee crisis—300,000+ Jews in Ukraine, 10M displaced—revealing stark contrasts: Poland’s NGO-driven aid vs. Ukraine’s unified war mobilization, where civilians defy Russian encirclement despite U.S. media distortions like "bioweapons labs" or "ghost of Kiev." He critiques Silicon Valley’s ideological rigidity, comparing it to inauthentic "hustle porn," and warns about private companies like Facebook overstepping moral boundaries through subjective censorship, while Apple’s ATT policy disrupts ad tracking but reduces risks like CSAM misuse. Their discussion underscores how fame warps perspectives and decentralized platforms may struggle to compete without radical change or a major censorship catalyst. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the gigs I have, I have a gig at a DC think tank, and one of my colleagues who's done like real in-the-field correspondent work before proposed a trip, and a bunch of people expressed interest, and I'm basically the only one who didn't wimp out and went with them.
And we had, you know, drivers and fixers and stuff, because I don't speak any Slavic languages, and you basically need it to sort of navigate that world.
And also in a wartime economy, regular transport doesn't work.
So you need to get around somehow.
And so we did have, we tended to have a driver usually.
I mean, we can get into this, but I think the view that you see of Ukraine from the United States, I think, is so blinded by both American domestic political priorities and the whole kaleidoscope that is the Twitter experience.
I felt you have to go there to see the real thing.
And it's history with a capital H in the sort of Francis Fukuyama sense of, this is a real invasion, the likes of which we haven't seen in Europe in whatever, 70 plus years.
And it's just something that I've lived in Europe.
I have an EU passport, so I feel a little bit European in that regard.
So I think I engage with the story a little bit differently maybe than Americans do.
And so I felt I just had to go there and see it for myself.
But your producer, like, I emailed him from Ukraine.
He's like, dude, like, I'm here.
Like, it's hard to get out.
Like, can we do this during Zoom?
And he's like, no, absolutely not.
And I briefly considered, I wasn't really going to do it, but I briefly considered just going to Kyiv and then pulling the power move of like, I'm in Kyiv.
And most of them are crossing the border with Poland, which is the country to the west of it, or Romania or Slovakia, some of the other countries, mostly Poland.
And so the trip actually, so I flew to Warsaw, and my first experience of like, this is not normal little Disneyland Europe.
You go to the Warsaw train station, which tends to be the terminus for a lot of the refugees that come across the border.
And, you know, it's basically a refugee camp.
The upper floor of the train station is taken over by families.
And, you know, every family has like a blanket, maybe half the size of this table.
And one of the interesting things about the Ukrainian refugee situation is that it's almost all, like, I'm talking like 80, 90%, women and children.
The Ukrainian government doesn't allow any male from the age of, I think, 18 to 60 to leave.
And also many Ukrainian males are just volunteering.
They don't want to leave.
They want to fight for their country.
And so whether you're in the Warsaw train station or whether you're standing, as I was standing many times, at the actual border watching them walk across, it's literally a mother in her 20s and 30s with like two or three kids in tow, maybe a cat in a carrier with like a little roly bag, and that's it.
Just picture an unending stream of that walking across the border.
They're walking because usually they don't, well, some of them probably did walk to the border, the most desperate ones.
They usually don't walk.
They take some conveyance, either a train or bus, but getting those through the border is basically impossible.
So they literally abandon however they got there and just walk across.
There's a good number of journalists, particularly in the western part of Ukraine, which is relatively safe.
It wasn't like I was there with bullets flying around me or anything like that.
I was joking with friends like, I don't know that this is any more dangerous than walking across San Francisco's tenderloin, to be honest, in the scheme of things.
So it wasn't like that dangerous.
But there's a lot of journalists in the western part.
There are some journalists who are in the dangerous parts.
As a side thread, to me, I'm converting to Judaism.
So there's a Jewish side to my life.
And what the Israelis are doing.
So Ukraine has something like over 300,000 Jews.
And then, you know, the plight of what the Jews are going on there, I think, was one specific intent.
But you're right that broadly, I didn't have a specific intent.
What surprised me the most, two things I would say.
One is, again, the scale of it.
Like, it's literally millions of people leaving.
And I think, again, coming from the U.S., Europe has reacted to this crisis in a unified, just like all-consuming way that I think, obviously, you don't see here because we're not next door to it.
But if you go to this, again, let me paint you a picture.
And I've got a bunch of photos that I'll be posting on my substack this week and next week.
You go to a borders checkpoint.
The Polish police will only let you go so far, unless you're actually crossing, which I did eventually.
You've got this constant stream of, again, mothers with Olybags and kids.
And then you've got basically a refugee camp there of everything from Polish Boy Scouts to Jose Andres, that Spanish chef who has all these food programs.
He has a major presence there.
Every stop, there was basically his world food kitchens, whatever it's called, serving up food.
And then those who are ill get tended to, and then they have buses going to another larger refugee camp.
And then there, they try to find rides for them and sort of sort it out.
And what's fascinating is that, you know, the Polish state has pretty good state capacity.
There's a lot of firefighters, police, soldiers, like there's a lot of, but the actual care for refugees, like the food, the chocolate bar the kid gets, is mostly or almost exclusively volunteers and NGOs.
And there isn't that much top-down organization.
Like you go there and it's like every little NGO or every little tribe that has some refugees that are coming out.
Like for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses are there.
So you walk across and there's somebody holding a sign that says jw.org.
They're not proselytizing.
I interviewed them.
They're not proselytizing.
They're just there for other Jehovah's Witnesses that are coming across and hoping to help them.
Once again, you've got some Jewish charities that are helping the Jews that are coming across.
Everyone, I talked to somebody whose child had cystic fibrosis and they have a foundation and they're helping, because a lot of the, you know, people are infirmed and those are the ones hardest hit by war because you've got a 24-hour train ride, you've got someone who's ill and needs medical care, how do they get out?
That can often be difficult.
So I think that's one big surprising thing.
And then the other surprising thing was in Ukraine itself.
Like I've been in conflict zones before, like the West Bank, North Ireland, the Indian-Pakistani border, you know, places where things are a little bit spicy, but never in a country at war.
And I think war in the United States, certainly in my life here, has not been a direct experience.
The U.S. has wars.
We're involved in a bunch of conflicts now.
Your life and my life don't really change.
We don't know what that is.
We've never had that experience.
Ukraine is having what Klauswitz would call total war.
All the resources of the society are motivated towards one goal, which is kicking out the Russian invaders.
And that means that everybody in that society is either fighting at the front lines, every male has volunteered, basically, supporting those fighters somehow trying to source war material and stuff, which is very difficult to source, is volunteering in some capacity, or is a refugee.
Again, a quarter of the population is displaced.
And so all of society has one goal in mind, and it's literally fighting the war.
There's very little normal commercial activity.
And again, I've never experienced that except through history books or films about World War II.
It's such a strange time because it's a time where you are seeing history play out in a way that we didn't think was going to happen again.
We didn't think there was going to be a country that, like a large superpower that invades another country, and you're seeing it on 4K cell phone video broadcast from thousands of phones and all these different viral clips that you can view online.
I just saw a piece came out that in Kharkov, which is a city in the east that's, I think, Ukraine's second largest city.
It's been encircled and besieged and shot at for weeks now.
Civilians are basically living in the subways taking shelter and they've been there for weeks and they're just living in the subway.
It's too dangerous to go up top.
Or, I mean, the real, if we're rattling off the set of atrocities that are basically happening, there's a city called Mariopol, which is on the Sea of Azov, it's on the coast, and it's strategically important because it's in between two Russian fronts.
And the Russians are literally destroying the city.
They've shelled a drama theater where people had taken refuge in.
They've bombed a maternity hospital.
A lot of photos of that came out.
People are experiencing hell.
I mean, there's literally dead bodies in the street, and they don't bury them because it's too dangerous to go up top and try to bury them.
So they just let them rot on the streets.
It is hell on earth that's happening there.
And again, as you said, it's happening, you know, it's the first Twitter war in which you can actually see these videos in real time.
Like, I didn't go, unfortunately, for the reasons I mentioned, but like I understand that in Kyiv, which is much closer to the front lines and is much more in the shit, people have also settled into some sort of routine, right?
You know, it's funny.
One of the first scenes I saw when I got to Lviv, and I was still a little freaked out, right?
Because I was like scared to go to Ukraine.
Because once you cross that border, again, it's like, who knows what's going to happen?
I don't speak the language, different currency, transport is broken down.
You're just like there with your little backpack in the western edge of a war zone.
I get there and there's like a couple making out on the street.
And it's funny, coming back at like, it really pisses me off.
I told myself I wouldn't get angry on your show about it because a lot of the Twitter rhetoric around the supposed bioweapons labs or the ghost of Kiev or some of the early memes that happened in the war that were proven to be, like many online memes, not true or exaggerated or whatever.
Or like, you know, what would have Trump done or not done?
Or how does Hunter Biden's laptop play into all this?
And I know those are terribly important signifiers in the American political conversation.
They're completely meaningless on the crowd in Ukraine.
Nobody cares about bioweapons labs.
No one cares about people get obsessed about what the State Department did or didn't do in the revolution that happened in 2000 early on in Ukraine.
And again, I think one of the luxuries that we have here in the United States, and, you know, and it is a luxury, and it's good in some sense that we have it, is that we take the outside world and we project it onto our own domestic political neuroses, right?
And we almost think that the outside world is downstream of our domestic political process.
And that's just not true.
I mean, it's true in some cases, right?
And certainly the U.S. has impact on the world overseas, but it's just not the case that a lot of the Twitter rhetoric you see is remotely meaningful.
That's at a high level.
Another thing I think it missed is the level, like the surprise that met everybody.
And I'll admit, I knew very little to nothing about Ukraine before this.
It's just not a region of the world that I know much about.
I don't speak a Slavic language.
I speak other languages and been in other parts of the world.
So to me, it was very novel to go there.
And I have to say, I went there with a good helping of ignorance.
But one thing, once I got there, I realized, man, the Ukrainians are super nationalistic.
They see this as their national project, right?
This is this to them is like a nationhood birthing moment.
Like they are committed to remaining free of Russia.
And I'm not a military guy.
I'm not going to make predictions about the war.
I just don't see how the Russians can hold such a country.
It's huge, by the way.
It's like the size of Texas.
And east to west, it's longer because it's kind of a flat country.
So it's a big country.
I don't think the Russians came with enough guys to actually control most of this country.
And I think most of the country, it's funny, I was talking to a hacker dude, like a nerd dude who is like denial of service attacking a lot of Russian websites and trying to knock them down.
There's a whole cyber war going on, right?
You know, he's just like this nerdy kid who's like on the anonymous chat channels and like doing all this stuff.
And he's telling me this whole nerdy walkthrough of how he does it.
And at the end, he just looks at me with a steely glance and goes, we will win.
My six or my translator, Lviv, who, young gal, you know, university student, studying computer science, like a college student, right?
Very carefree, very charming, very positive.
She would end her conversations the same way.
We will win, right?
There's a level of commitment there that I think the rest of the world, certainly Putin, has underestimated in terms of the Ukrainians.
When you see the trucks rolling in, very obviously on these roads, and then you see these guys with missile launchers standing on the sides of the road shooting at the trucks, you're like, who planned this?
This is a terrible place.
Like, did you think that they were just going to see the trucks and go, well, we don't want any part of this.
Let's just get out of here.
It seems like a crazy plan.
Like, if you're expecting any sort of resistance, that seems like suicide.
Just drive on a very obvious, straight path where there's things to hide behind, where people are hiding behind it, launching missiles at armed carriers.
I had Mike Baker on, who was a former CIA operative the other day, and he was trying to lay out what he knows about it from a foreign policy perspective from his years of service.
And he was the way he was laying it out was not pretty.
When he was talking about the possibilities and the options, like how it could possibly play out, what do they think on the ground?
Like, do they have an idea of what could happen or how it could happen?
Do they think there's going to come a point in time where there's enough losses where Russia has to decide to either escalate to a nuclear option or leave?
I think the Ukrainian on the street just thinks that they're going to hold out forever and that the entire nation is unified and they're just not going to give in.
I think that's what the thought is.
And by the way, who came up with the genius idea?
The whole Ukrainian mud thing, by the way, having traipsed around Western Ukraine is real.
What is that?
There's actually a Russian name for it that I won't try to pronounce it because I'll mispronounce it.
But there's actually a Russian name for mud season in Ukraine because it's a very fertile place.
Like it produces an enormous amount of wheat and other crops.
And it's just very muddy.
And so when you have the winter thaw, right, the ground is this like completely consuming mud that if you step in it, you're sucked into your ankle.
And if you might wonder like, why are the Russians on the road?
It seems like totally dangerous because they'll get stuck in the mud otherwise.
There's all these videos of like a column of like four T-72s up to their tank tracks in mud and they just can't get them out because the mud is that thick and it's going to be mud season for months now, right?
Up until summer until it dries out.
It's a very gray, like at night it gets super fucking cold, but then it heats up during the day and the mud just turns into ooze and so you can't get off the road.
I think their original strike force was like 200,000 soldiers.
So they need a lot more people.
I think what they're probably going to do, and again, I'm not a military guy, but they're clearly trying to consolidate in the East and join some of their thrusts on what they already control between Crimea and the Donbass, which has had a separatist movement for a long time.
They're obviously trying to coalesce that.
And I think they're less obsessed with taking Kyiv in which they've made no progress.
I've stared at the map every day now for weeks, and that seems to be what's going on.
But like you said, there's always the odd chance they use either chemical or nuclear weapons.
I think Biden yesterday publicly said that the Russians are considering chemical weapons.
I mean, that could be a propaganda ploy or whatever, but it's in the air.
You get there's a strange sense that the government is about to throw our administration under the bus.
I get this weird sense that as more things come out and More ridiculous Kamala Harris videos where she's saying things that make no sense and Biden, the laptops coming out and all this stuff.
You almost get this weird sense where they're trying to just recalibrate and come up with a new strategy for running things.
Internally, what I can say is that the peace, you know, the sort of conversations that have been happening between the Ukraine and the Russian government is something that's followed a lot.
Israel has tried mediating there.
And so the fact that the Russians are even at the negotiating table, again, I think that the Ukrainians are very pragmatic.
They're not foolhardy.
But they're definitely thinking, well, we could come to an agreement at the end of this.
So I'm doing a piece for her based on a Twitter thread that's coming out tomorrow.
One thing I've, I don't know how much politics you want to talk about, Joe, but one thing I've been disappointed by is that in the right in the United States, right, much like the left, right, historically, really thinks the U.S. can do no good overseas.
And at the same time, the U.S. is responsible for everything that happens overseas.
And so the thought that, and, you know, it could be like metaphorical or literal PTSD about the more recent wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, but the thought that the U.S. shouldn't get involved at all and literally can have no positive impact on affairs on the ground in Ukraine, I find to be very, very disappointing and disheartening.
It's weird that the right wing is the one that's turning kind of anti-U.S.
Well, I hate naming names because I hate getting into these flame wars.
But the new right is like, I don't know, are you familiar with the National Conservatives or the NATCON Conference?
People like Sarab Amari, Patrick Dineen.
Oh, you know, you should have one of them on your show one of these days.
I'm sure they'd be happy to come on.
The New Right, I think, is various things.
It's deeply conservative, typically Christian, right?
They're super anti-woke, right?
Because woke is like what the whole battle is about.
And they had a conference last year, the National Conservative Conference that I went to.
People like Rod Dreher speak there, again, Sarab Amari, et cetera.
They look to a traditionalist mode of thought, and they feel that much of modern wokeless, CRT, the pronouns, gender, all that stuff, they think is just dangerous to generacy and we need to abandon it.
And some of them, and I don't want to speak for them or pretend to speak for them, but some of them seem to have at least sympathies for Putin's Russia, right?
And the fact that he seems to, he's anti-woke in some sense that he stands against much of what they dislike about the liberal West.
And I was definitely that when I was there, even now to a certain degree.
You know, and they go on about Cuban health care and this and that.
And they're living in Berkeley in some like hillside home that's worth a million dollars and eating in an Alice Water restaurant.
It's like, bro, plane Tavana's right there, buddy.
If you want to go live in Cuba, like off you go.
And I would say the same for those who lionize, you know, Putin's Russia is like, bro, plane to Moscow is right there.
But of course, they're not talking about the reality of it.
It's a symbol, it's a signifier, and a domestic, you know, it's like all these Hollywood stars that threaten to move to Canada but never did Trump but elected.
It's like it's a romantic narrative that's just kind of fake.
And normally I'd be like, who cares?
But again, if you realize the level of human catastrophe that's going on in Ukraine, in my opinion, polluting the discourse around that in a country that could impact that, I'm disappointed by it.
Well, there's a thing that happens with the right and with the left where they look at whatever position that the opposite is taking, whatever the opposition is taking, and they find some way to justify the opposition of that.
It's blind faith in the ideology.
And they use it to just, and they have these narratives that they all stick to that they know aren't accurate.
And to say that the other side has a point about anything is to concede some ground to what they think is the enemy.
And it's fucking wild tribalism.
It's so strange to watch play out because it's not as soon as you withhold information or distort information because it doesn't suit your narrative, then you're living in fantasy land.
And this is one thing that I've seen from both parties, from the far left and the far right.
And it's bizarre to behold because we live in a day where there's unprecedented access to information.
And yet people are willing to put themselves inside these narrow blinders and adhere to whatever these ideologies subscribe, whatever these ideologies prescribe, and whatever the thing is that you have to say in order to signal to the tribe that you are one of the absolutists.
You're there on board.
You're an asset.
You're a part of the right team.
It's bizarre to see because it's really just an advanced form of tribalism enhanced by echo chambers.
So there's this whole meme about the current thing being Ukraine because a lot of the people who are part of the kind of liberal Borg that supported CRT or BLM or choose your woke thing that you hate, right?
Are now flying the Ukrainian flags and being pro-Ukraine.
I think it's a little bit, it's a little bit of projection.
Like, I don't think it's as in your face as a lot of the woke stuff was in the past, but sure, it is the case that some people have swapped their one cause for this cause.
But it doesn't matter, man.
Look, Ukrainians are still in the right.
Are you actually an independent thinker?
Are you really just a contrarian asshole?
And I think it turns out a lot of voices were not independent thinkers.
They were just contrarian assholes.
And so now they've just contrarianed themselves into another position without really thinking about it.
And again, like it wouldn't matter if it's just Twitter bullshit, but it's actually like a real war going on.
And but yeah, I mean, the Nazi thing in the eastern part of the country is real.
I mean, it's not, it's not an invention.
But again, I think it's one of those sub-memes in the Ukraine thing that gets played up for internal purposes that isn't terribly impactful on the ground.
Like I said, it's like debating hippies about Cuba 20 years ago in Berkeley.
It's like, dude, you're talking about an invention, like an illusion that you have has nothing to do with reality.
Like, that's the weird thing.
Both on left and right, the people who actually shit on America the most and think that it's like the shittiest place on earth, in my opinion, are typically the ones that could never live outside of it.
Are the ones that literally you cannot imagine anywhere else except the American construct.
And if you want to have the freedom to be incredibly creative and innovative and be a groundbreaking person in whatever industry you choose to advance in, you also have to have the freedom to just follow stupid ideas to their fucking event horizon.
So, I mean, how much has this changed your thoughts about, I mean, you know, people have priorities in life, and you have things that you think are important, and you have this view of the world, and then this breaks out, and then you go over there.
And that seems like one of those things that would be just a complete paradigm-shifting moment for someone to experience the horrors of what's actually going on there on the ground.
So what is that like when you come back, and how do you sort of integrate that into this?
I mean, you're a guy who's been a part of startups and tech, and you're a part of Facebook, and you wrote this crazy book sort of like burning it all down.
Like, I think I tweet joked that, like, Zelensky wished that pronouns were his country's biggest problem, or that college swimmers were like the burning issue of the day rather than how to source enough tourniquets so that his soldiers don't lose their limbs.
Yeah, it's weird.
I came back and like, I know it's weird to say, but getting to your point, I'm glad you cited Sebastian Younger and Tribes.
I almost missed it because it's so, I was like, I almost want to go back.
Funny, I interviewed two people from my SEP stack.
One guy, Andrei Liskovich, who's a former Uber guy, he's Ukrainian, and he went back when the war started.
And as many people are, he's now like a sorcer for the Ukrainian military.
Not weapons, but everything else, basically.
Night vision goggles, body armor.
And he's living in, I won't say where he lives, doesn't matter, a town close to the action.
And he's sourcing stuff for the military.
Another friend of mine, actually, former Facebook product manager, another tech startup dude, is in an ambulance crew outside of Kyiv.
And I think that's why a lot of these countries are helping out the Ukrainians, right?
Because Russia was the big bully that dominated that part of the world for many decades.
And here they are trying to crush another country.
Or in Miami, for example, downtown, a lot of the buildings have the Ukrainian flag colors.
And it's like, what the hell does Miami have to do with Ukraine?
Well, a lot of Cubans whose country was behind the Iron Curtain and was kind of crushed behind the Soviet or Russian boot.
And they're like, what the hell?
I think you're definitely onto something.
There's something about people that come have some sort of tragic history to their family, either directly experienced or subconsciously through their family.
My family's had three sets of passports in three generations.
There were Spanish immigrants to Cuba, the revolution came, they all fled to the United States.
This business of leaving with nothing.
Like my father used to lecture me about coming to this country with literally nothing but three things in his pocket.
And so I think that marks you, even though I didn't directly experience that, to be clear.
I was born in this country.
But I think that that marks you in a way.
And you understand it could all, like, all we have are like faded photographs of life in Cuba.
And a lot of these Ukrainian refugees, they're going to go through that exact same experience.
I'm in the middle of rereading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers.
And there's a part of that about conflicts in the South and honor cultures.
There's a part about these people that came over from Europe and from the UK that were herders.
And there are these herding families and tribes who established these communities in Appalachia and all these sort of mountain areas who murdered each other at a scale.
He was talking about there's this one area where there was no more than 15,000 people.
They recorded a thousand homicides.
I'm like, this is wild shit.
And how this mother was saying to this son who was involved in this family feud with this other family, they had been murdering each other back and forth.
He was screaming in agony and she said, shut up and die like a man like your brother did.
And so the guy closes his mouth and just winds up bleeding out and dying in silence because his mother was screaming at him because she wasn't so accustomed to people dying from gunshots that her own son dying in front of her.
The real problem was him being a bitch, which is fucking wild.
And Sebastian, I mean, what Sebastian Younger talks about in tribes, in these people that develop these intense bonds with people that they're in conflict with, you know, that these states of humanity that occasionally exist when people are in extreme situations where life and death is a daily experience.
It changes everything.
It changes the fabric of reality.
And when it doesn't have, when we don't have that, for whatever reason, is this is the grossest part about humans.
There's a certain section of society that seeks conflict in the most preposterous ways.
And as our societies become softer and softer, we get angry and upset about some of the dumbest things possible, whether it's pronouns or whether whatever it is, that's the current outrage du jour.
We're fucking weird.
Like human beings are very weird that we almost exist at our best state when we are in some sort of life or death scenario.
Yeah, I don't know if you've read Fukuyama's book, End of History, which is very mischaracterized generally, but he has a final chapter in which he has a quote that I think about that more or less expresses what you're saying, which is, you know, humans will struggle for the sake of struggle.
And if, you know, democracy and liberalism won in the previous generation, then they'll fight against democracy and against liberalism, if nothing else for the sake of struggle, because they refuse to live in a world in which heroism of some form is impossible.
And that was people mischaracterized that book because they thought he predicted some sort of liberal democratic utopia.
It didn't at all.
In fact, he warned that we would tend to revert to non-liberal and non-democratic ways of being just to recapture that feeling.
And I do think that there's something about liberal, and I mean like little L liberalism, not like the left of the political spectrum, to be clear.
I think there's something about liberalism that needs an illiberal antagonist to keep it in check.
It's only when you're fighting against some outside illiberal force that in some sense you can maintain the discipline that it takes.
And without that, it tends to degenerate into fights over pronouns or whatever.
I have a good friend of mine who is my kickboxing coach back in the day.
His name is Shuki.
Shout out to Shuki.
He lives in Israel now.
And he was in America for a while.
He's an Israeli.
He was coaching at Majiro Gym.
It was in where were we?
In the valley, Tarzan, I think it was.
And he, I went to dinner over his house once, and his wife and his kid are there, and he's playing bongos and they're cooking.
And he's like, everyone's dancing.
I go, you're so happy.
And I go, I meet so many Israelis that are like so, they love to like sing and dance and party.
It's like a real live version of the Zohan, you know?
I go, what is it?
And he goes, when you're in Israel, he goes, every day you could die.
He goes, you don't know what's going to happen.
Like, Palestine and Israel have been this constant conflict.
You're surrounded by all these Arab states.
And he's like, any day you can die, everybody just party, party, party.
He just, when you're alive, you're happy.
And I'm like, that's a strange state that seems like we have this yin and yang of life.
And it sounds so cliche to say, but without some sort of antagonist, without some sort of problem, some sort of real thing to rise against, people find nonsense to squabble over.
Correct.
And his thing was like, this is all bullshit.
Fucking party, party, party.
Like, life and death is the real issue.
And his thoughts about Israel was, when you're over there, man, it's real life and real death.
And this shit you're dealing with here is traffic.
It's all of like a lack of con, like with an absence of, you know, idle hands are the devil's playground.
That's a real thing.
And it's not just simply, you know, oh, like boys who are bored find a way to light buildings on fire.
That's part of it, too.
But it's like there's something about not having a real problem to fight.
You need fucking problems.
You need conflict.
And you either create your own bullshit or you're going to find something out there in the world that pisses you off and it's going to represent what the enemy is because it's ingrained in our DNA.
We have this sort of pattern where we seek out opposition.
Yeah, there's a German philosopher named Carl Schmidt who was a Nazi, unfortunately, but his political theory was that the friend-enemy distinction is the core distinction in human political life and defining what is the friend and what is the enemy.
And if we don't understand that or recognize that in some sense, we're fooling around.
And we have some tools that'll allow us to recognize that, but they're not widely distributed.
You know, whether it's psychedelics or whether it's people that recognize physical culture and having like a strenuous activity schedule in terms of like physical exercise is really important to alleviate anxiety and keep people calm and relaxed.
And I mean, that's one, we were talking about this recently.
That's one of the reasons why they invented football.
They invented football to give people something to do that was a facsimile of war.
I think that's, there's definitely a God-shaped hole in the middle of liberalism.
And I think a lot of people, I think there's a conservation of religion.
Religion never goes away.
Taboos never go away.
They just change.
And the thought that there's some over, I think it was Walter Benjamin, or no, it was William James, who defined religion as the thought that there's some overarching order to which human society should converge, right?
There's some sort of abstract thick order to the world that we should be sort of building towards.
And that just in its coarsest in the most high-level way is religion.
And that never goes away, I think, for most humans.
I was thinking of wearing a kibo, but I decided not to.
A Yamaka like Ben Shapiro.
I would have been like the only other guest that ever did.
I'm not that observant, actually.
Yeah, so people ask about that.
I've got three Jewish kids, and I think religion is kind of like chicken pox.
You have to get a case of it when you're a kid.
Otherwise, you're going to get this life-threatening case of it later.
And so I wanted them to be raised with some sort of religious tradition, particularly in a society.
I think this is particularly bad in San Francisco and like California, which is where I've spent my life for the past 15, 20 years.
Particularly in a world in which corporations are the only functional organizations that you see anymore.
Like everyone lives, not all over America, to be clear, but in some parts, live completely atomized and dissociated from any organizing thing other than a company.
And I just don't think it's normal.
Even though I've spent my entire professional life inside these organizations, I don't think it's normal.
And I wanted them to see something else.
And the baby mama to my third kid, who's Jewish, basically said, look, if this kid goes to synagogue, you're taking him, so you convert.
And so I called her bluff, and I converted.
And I think what I figured out now, and oh man, I hope she doesn't see this.
She's probably not going to see it.
I figured out that their level of religious practice is like the average of zero and me.
And so as long as I keep on going up, they're going to be more or less the midpoint.
And so now they're like, they went to like Purim.
Purim is this kind of very holiday kids holiday that was last weekend.
They actually celebrated that, which is good.
And so, yeah.
And then aside from that, I think it's intellectually interesting.
Judaism is a very bookish.
To be a Jew is to sit around on a Thursday and discuss dense texts and come up with arguments about what they mean, which to me sounds like a good time.
I know it's a little strange, but that's what being a Jew is.
So yeah, that kind of signed up for, and it's been interesting so far.
And what that means is it's kind of like what Trump's son-in-law was.
He's hardcore, full-on Jewish, but he's, you know, obviously he's integrated with modern society.
He's not living in a separate society.
But the Shabbat thing, yeah, there's this restriction.
And as soon as I mention anything Jewish, there's going to be like 100 rabbis in my mentions commenting on this, but that's the nature of Judaism.
There's a restriction around lighting a fire on Saturday.
And electricity has been mapped to the fire restriction.
And so you've probably never had this experience.
I don't know if you've lived in New York, but if you go to a hospital in New York after sundown on Friday, you'll get in the elevator and it's like you push the buttons.
They don't do shit.
The thing stops at every floor because you can't, you can use a thing that's been left on that would work even if you did nothing, but you can't make it work.
Well, in Miami, like real estate for the lower floor condos is more expensive if it's like a Jewish building because you have to go up to the higher stories.
People talk, it's like, what the fuck is this, like, this religion thing?
They think it's crazy.
The one thing that's weird about talking about religion to secular people is that the model for religion in this country, right, is Christianity typically.
Not just Christianity, Protestant Christianity.
Not just Protestant Christianity, evangelical Protestant Christianity.
Like if you're not a practicing Christian and you've got like Christianity thrust in your face, it's like some televangelist or somebody or somebody wants to ban a book in Texas.
And so like somehow that becomes the expression of religion in society.
And for obvious reasons, Judaism is very different, right?
In Judaism, like the wonky term would be orthopraxic.
Like a Jew is as a Jew does.
So if you're like Ben Shapiro and you don't fucking flip the light switch on Saturdays and you follow the kosher laws and you do all this, that is being a Jew.
Like you don't necessarily need to believe in God or have like a deep faith relationship.
There's no Jesus, obviously, right?
And so it's more a practice, a lifestyle, and a community more than anything else.
And it's less about your personal relationship with somebody.
I think you're picking up on, that's exactly right.
I mean, I think I've been in Silicon Valley for over a decade now.
It's saturated with religion, actually.
And, you know, they'll laugh at you trying to keep kosher or whatever, and then they'll go on for six fucking hours about their weird little keto diet or whatever that they're following religiously.
You know, it's funny.
I interviewed a Berkeley professor, sociologist named Carolyn Chen, who wrote a book called Work Pray Code.
That's kind of a sociological take on this.
And she mentions how so many people come to startup life and are formerly religious, but then adopt this new religion.
And it's very much one of self-actualization, a lot of sort of, you know, white person Buddhism layered on top of it.
You know, a lot of LinkedIn posting about hustle porn, about you getting more productive.
I guess sometimes I talk about motivation and what's necessary to achieve success.
But I think I do it based on my personal experiences and what I've learned that I think that you could tell people.
I think there's a lot of hustle porn that's just like people saying things because they think that it's going to resonate with folks and it's going to get them a lot of likes.
And it's going to, you know, like they haven't really done anything.
There's a lot of, I haven't done anything, but I'm going to show you how to do things, people.
People who have done very well in their field, I asked this question to Mark and Dreessen about the web, the guy who basically invented the browser and the web as we know it.
So I'll ask you the same question.
Did you think this, the Joe Rogan experience, would get as big as it has?
Because you have like over 10 million downloads, which and I'd love to address this if you want to talk about your show and stuff too, but that's more down.
That's greater viewership than all the big network shows put together, right?
Like it's, you have an enormous audience, Joe.
But you never thought that would happen when you started this.
I've never gone on another show and said, please watch my show.
I've never taken the ads out anywhere.
I've never done anything.
We've existed, like Jamie and I have existed in a strange vacuum while this show has sort of propagated and it's spread its way through the world.
And we haven't done anything different.
And I haven't done anything different in terms of the way I do it other than get better at it, get better at communicating, get better at listening, get better at you know, researching topics and asking questions.
And, you know, I think generally it's a skill.
I think it doesn't seem like it's a skill because it's something that everybody does.
We all have conversations.
But there's a skill to having conversations that are pleasing to the ear and that it's similar to a lot of other art forms.
That once you start sort of unpeeling it, you get a better sense of what it is.
And over the many, many, many hours that I've done this, you've gotten better at it.
But I don't understand.
We've had this conversation too recently.
Why the fuck hasn't anybody else done it?
Like this.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Like what I'm doing is not that crazy.
Like, why is it so popular?
I don't, I really don't know.
I genuinely don't know.
And it's shocking to me.
Like when back in the day when we first started, when it first started getting big, I remember me and I think it was Brian Redband.
He goes, do you know how many downloads that last episode got?
And I'm like, how many?
And he's like, it's just two million.
And there was like this pause in the room.
I go, what?
I go, two million?
What the fuck?
And we were laughing because we were basically at the time, especially the early days, we would fill this volcano bag up with pot vapor.
You know what a volcano is?
Do you know what a volcano is?
A volcano is this machine.
Jamie, show them a volcano.
A volcano is a machine for people who think joints are too mild.
And it's this preposterous machine that fills up this giant plastic bag with THC mist.
And then, you know, started having conversations with different people.
Like, I had Graham Hancock on, and I was like, this is great.
Me and Duncan were talking to Graham Hancock.
I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
I can't believe I'm meeting him.
We're talking about ancient civilizations and all of his research.
And then once it became more popular, people started seeking it out in terms of like, I'd like to be a guest.
Like, okay.
You know, but it was totally organic.
Like, the whole thing happened organic.
Like, there's no way I would have ever said, I know one day this is going to be something that like Fox News supports and CNN hates and the fucking the world talks about the nonsense ramblings of a comedian slash cage fighting commentator.
Like this is going to be a real fucking cog in the wheel.
Well, I do have this thing where I'd like to keep doing things and get better at them.
I get obsessed with stuff.
And in a sense, I've sort of applied a lot of that that I've done to other aspects of my life, whether it's martial arts or comedy, and I've sort of applied that to this thing in some weird way.
So it naturally fits within my personality because I've always been curious as to why I think the way I think, why I behave the way I behave, and what I can optimize, what I can make better about who I am and how I make my way through life.
And then when that gets applied to this, I sort of just sort of took the same pattern of thinking about the way I think about all kinds of things and applied it to conversations and applied it to like, why do people think the way they think?
Like what, like you, like, what's it like for you and Ukraine?
I'm a genuinely curious person.
So when I have these conversations with people, I think that's one thing that does help the listener out is that they really do understand that I'm not asking you this question because it's my job.
You know, who you are right now is there's so many factors that are outside of your control.
You know, just your genetics.
You know, I came from a creative family.
You know, my uncle that I told you converted to Judaism, he's an artist.
His brother is an artist.
You know, there's a lot of people in my family that are like these very outside the box thinking people.
My parents were hippies.
So there's a lot of that in my past that sort of helped me think about things as someone who really not willing to subscribe to these patterns of behavior and thinking and just activities that everybody else thought were either significant or mandatory.
I was just not interested in that for whatever reason.
I felt like there's other ways.
Like this is, these people are miserables.
Like I remember thinking that when I was a kid, like looking at people living their lives, doing things they didn't want to do constantly.
And I'm like, there's got to be someone out there that's doing what they want to do.
Like, where are those folks?
How come I don't know any of them?
Like, where are they?
You see them in an interview or you read about them in a book.
Like, oh, okay, they exist.
You know, you read a biography of someone who sort of navigated their way through the river of life and avoided the rocks and made their way to the waterfall.
Like, okay, so it's possible.
How do you do it?
Who's that guy?
How did he do it?
How many people told him no?
How many people told him to fuck off?
How many people told him he's a loser?
There has to be a lot.
And this small percentage of people that do find a way to be happy and do something for a living that they really enjoy doing.
To me, that was exciting.
Like, okay, there are folks out there that are doing something that they really enjoy.
And the difference between that, and I think there's really, there's a lot of value in doing something you don't like doing.
Because like you, I had a lot of jobs that I fucking hated when I was a kid.
And I think those were really important to me.
I think doing construction, I drove limos, I did a lot of shit that I delivered pizzas, did a lot of shit that I didn't enjoy doing.
And I think there's something in doing those things that builds up like a muscle of not just of discipline, but of like the ability to find a way to keep going when you don't want to do stuff.
And then you can apply that sort of disk of a disciplined thing, but it's just a grind, a grind mentality.
If you think about a person who would be like a champion rower or a champion cyclist, cyclists may be even more so because you're doing it on your own.
Like you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing.
Left, right, left, right.
You're literally attached to a wheel, right?
So it's not like you can be creative in how you optimize the wheel or use your body in some sort of expressive way that's unique to your personality.
Well, first of all, he's got a point in some ways because the whole goddamn sport was dirty.
But what they found in Lance was a poster boy for a dirty sport.
Like, if you took away all of his accomplishments and you said, hey, you know, you won the Tour de France, but since you've admitted that you took performance-enhancing drugs, and by the way, they never caught him.
You know that?
They never caught him.
So he made his way through this all, but he had teammates that got caught and the teammates ratted him out.
And then he had lawsuits against the teammates, and it was very messy business.
But if you took away him being first place and you say, okay, we're going to give first place to the next person who didn't test positive ever for performance enhancing drugs.
Like, if you look at the Mr. Olympia guys, if they took away steroids, there's no one on that Mr. Olympia stage.
No one.
You got to go way down the, like, I mean, maybe there's some freak of nature that's like 32nd place or something like that who just eats oats and fucking does squats, but most likely not.
If you want to be like that giant butterball turkey looking ultra vein muscle dude, you have to take steroids.
That's what they do.
So if you want to pretend that these guys are all taking, you know, fucking creatine and some shit that you could buy in muscle and fitness, okay, go ahead, pretend.
Pretend whatever you want.
But that's not real.
So if you want to pretend that Lance Armstrong, he won Tour de France because he was cheating, go ahead and pretend.
Because that's not why.
He won, because Bill Burr has a great bit about it.
He's like, he was the best psycho.
They're all fucking psychos, but he was our psycho.
He was the best out of all the psychos.
And they're all doing drugs.
But he was just, with that said, he won while they were all cheating.
Maybe he was better funded.
Maybe the people that he was involved with are more scientific about their application.
I mean, they, yeah, that's that's fucking insanity.
If that's true, I don't know if that's true because there's narratives that get distributed after a horrific event that oftentimes aren't accurate because they sell good and it's good clickbait.
I don't know if that's true.
You know, it's a hard company in terms of like what I've heard about if you're one of those people working on the floor and someone orders a French press and you have like 35 seconds to get that into a box or you got a strike.
But you know, I mean, if you're paid well and you understand that that's the job when you go into it and it's a really competitive environment, it's a good job in terms of like health care and how much compensation you get.
I don't know.
I don't know.
So I can't comment on the business as a whole.
But when I look at billionaires and how I like billionaires to behave, there's two I really love.
I love Elon because he's fucking crazy and he lives in a $50,000 house and he has people drive him around everywhere.
He doesn't own anything, doesn't own any houses, and he's one of the richest men on earth.
And then Jeff Bezos, who's balling out of control, they have to take a fucking bridge apart because he wants to get his giant yacht through it.
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He makes a yacht so big that they can't get it through a bridge.
So they have to dismantle a bridge to get his yacht.
I'm like, the option to dismantle a bridge is not available for very many people.
I just think it's hilarious.
I think if there's a guy who's a super baller, out of control guy, who used to be a nerdy dude who drove a tiny Honda, like there's a video of him from 1999 where he's worth already worth a couple billion dollars.
And he's driving this Honda around.
And the interviewer asks him, like, you're worth billions of dollars.
I don't know how much physical activity he's involved with.
I do know he enjoys martial arts.
He had a match with a sumo player at one point in time.
He's crazy.
He's a wild dude.
But he's so fucking smart that I feel like if you could get him training, he would pick things up very quickly.
He would probably have like a few moves that he would focus in on and dial them in very quickly and probably get very good.
I don't know.
We haven't had very many martial arts conversations.
So I don't know the full extent of how because sometimes when people learn some things when they're a kid, those things surprisingly apply very well as they get older.
They don't forget some things.
You know, like if you have some jiu-jitsu experience when you're younger and some guy grabs you in a bar, there's certain instinctive things that are going to happen because of your training.
I don't know how much he's got of that.
But I do know that if he had training, he's younger.
Three months ago, we were worried about vaccines and whether or not you'd have to wear a mask on an airplane.
And now we're literally on the verge of a nuclear war.
And one of the things that Mike Baker was saying to me was that you're dealing with hypersonic weapons now that can change paths very quickly in the middle of the air.
And it's not something like, oh, you see the missile being launched, you see where it's headed, it's headed to San Francisco, it'll be there in 15 minutes or whatever it is.
It's not that anymore.
Now they're moving faster than the speed of sound and they can take like hard angles in the middle of the sky and you can't predict where they're going.
They claimed they used a super hypersonic missile.
Wow.
That's crazy.
That's terrifying.
That kind of thing is terrifying.
And then you apply a nuclear warhead to something like that, and it's really terrifying.
And the thing that he was saying is that we used to have this concept of mutually assured destruction, that we would know that the Russians are launching at us, and we would have a certain amount of time to decide to counterattack, and then the world would be fucked.
He's like, that's not the case anymore.
A missile would launch so quickly and would hit us before we had any option to retaliate.
And that's something that needs to be understood.
Russia launched hypersonic missiles due to a low stockpile, sources say.
The leading theory in Western assessments of the hypersonic missile attack is that Russia's number of precision-guided munitions are dwindling fast.
Well, the theory is that their actual internal production of it is very poor.
I mean, just recently, the only tank manufacturer, just today, the only tank manufacturer in Russia announced that it's stopping production because it can't source components.
Kinzal hypersonic missiles at a weapons depot in Western Ukraine on Friday, though it remains unclear if it was actually the target.
Still, President Joe Biden confirmed Russia's use of the weapons on Monday, stating that Russia's military launched them.
Oh, so this is Biden saying that because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty.
Who knows?
The fog of propaganda is thick.
Who knows?
But if he really did use that and they showed that it's not just a concept, that it's a real thing that they have and they have access to and they could arm with a nuclear warhead.
My fear is that they launch one nuclear warhead and say, go, okay, now what?
The move would not be launch nuclear warheads at China or rather at the United States and China does the same thing and we just fucking get blown to smithereens.
The move would be one nuclear warhead and go to Ukrainian cities and go, now what are you going to do?
You know, and everybody go, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
You know, if you're in a gang war and one person gets shot, you might be able to have a ceasefire.
Like, this was the discussion that Malcolm Gloudwell was having in Outliers about these Appalachian cultures where they were just constantly the Hatfields and the McCoys, these people that were constantly feuding and killing each other.
Like there were certain times where they had tried to come to the negotiating table and that at a certain point, too much blood spilled.
Yeah, although what people forget there is that the firebombing campaign of Japanese cities was caused more death actually than the although obviously nuclear weapons are from a symbolic perspective huge.
But they were basically incinerating Japanese city after Japanese city.
Well, I mean, look at what's going on in America between the left and the right.
I mean, there were some times in the struggle in America, like when Trump was president, that was really concerned that we could conceivably get to a point where people would justify a war against the opposite party.
And it was weird that a lot of people on the Red State side would almost be looking forward to it because, oh, we've got all the guns and we're the tough guys.
I'm like, societies that have actually gone through real civil wars, like Spain or like Yugoslavia, nobody comes out.
That said, I do wonder when I get in Silicon Valley bold prediction mode, I think the nation state as we know it, which is a relatively recent invention, by the way.
What we call a nation state is a definite post-enlightenment, post-printing press sort of thing.
I'm not so bullish on it.
I don't know if we can, not just the U.S., but just broadly, the notion of a nation-state.
I think the internet demolishes a lot of consensus.
And the amount of consensus necessary to keep a nation state in a country of 330 million spanning four time zones is very, very difficult.
I mean, if you look at the way China is able to control its population with social credit scores and just overwhelming surveillance and totalitarian government, we're terrified that that could be applied globally.
It seems like it could be, especially if you have digital currency that is centralized.
It's like if the government has the ability to veto purchases or decide that your social credit doesn't allow you to do certain things because you've done the wrong thing or you said the wrong thing.
Well, it's interesting, too, the attack on the oligarchs or the sanctioning the oligarchs.
That's interesting to me because that's really the first time in our lifetime that we've ever seen some of the richest men in the world terrified to lose everything.
You should have that guy on here, but he used to live at sea because he claimed that he would get extradited because he's considered a pirate in some countries.
And so he would be 12 miles off at sea all the time.
Again, I don't think it invalidates the Ukrainian cause, but it's true that there's a certain type of person who just switches their little thing that they're obsessed about.
I thought about it last night before bed, and I had to meditate to get it out of my head because I'm like, there's nothing I'm going to do about this right now.
I'm about to go to bed, and I'm thinking about what does it look like if we legitimately have World War III?
Like, am I prepared?
You know, will my family be safe?
What do we do?
You know, those thoughts, like, for whatever reason at night time, those are when I have to fight those off the most.
It's weird because I think there's something about when you know you're going to be your most vulnerable, because you're literally unconscious, that during that time is when you start assessing all the possible risks.
You know, that's when you check the locks and the door.
You always think that someone's going to come into the house while you're asleep.
You don't think someone's going to come in the house while you're awake and it's sunny out.
You know?
It's like when people smoke marijuana during the daytime, most of the time, even if you're paranoid, it's not that bad.
But if you're paranoid at night, there's something about at night.
Being high at night is fucking scary because the paranoia is accentuated by the natural paranoia that you have from the fact that it's dark out.
There's a thing that human beings have about the dark that I think is related to being in our past being preyed upon by big cats.
Like we're worried about things we can't see.
We're worried about losing one of our senses.
Even in my own fucking yard, if I let my dogs out at night, and I'm out there with them, I'm like looking around.
Like you never know.
You never know what's out there.
You know, could be some fucking predator that made its way through my fence and it's in my yard.
So one of the islands, Orchestra Island, I bought a few acres of land, not that many, just random land, nothing beautiful or gorgeous or anything, and started homesteading it, like chopping down trees, laying it out, putting up a teepee, a yurt, solar system, all that fucking MacGyver shit.
And I did that for off and on a couple years after the thing.
I remember when I first got there, the book thing came out.
It was a bestseller for a month.
It was like a big deal, a lot of media for like a month or two.
I'm disgusted by it after a month or two.
And so I literally showed up at this place.
Like the first advanced check, I'm like, I bought this land, right?
So I show up with like a backpack and like, I guess this is me now.
Like I just showed up with a tent and like I'm in the fucking woods and this is it now.
And I remember those first couple nights, like you started firing the whole thing and like the fringes of like what you can see on the fire and the light.
It's like, I don't know.
Like I had a gun with me.
And like this island is not dangerous.
Like there's really not much to fear.
But you're, yeah, you're there in the sticks and it's like you're alone.
You know, I should have brought a copy of it, Damon.
I didn't think of it.
It's available where all fine books are sold.
The book was called Chaos Monkeys, which I can explain the title if you want me to explain it.
But basically, long story short, PhD student, drop out of the PhD, go to work at Wall Street.
Wall Street blows up.
I come back to tech, right?
Or back to tech.
I never worked in tech, but I'd gone to school in Berkeley and I had seen kind of the first tech bubble.
So I was kind of vaguely aware of it.
Join tech, join ad tech, do my own startup, tiny little company, not a big success.
Get sold to Twitter.
I end up at Facebook a year before the IPO as one of the early members of the ads team.
So if you go like browse for shit on the internet and you see that same pair of shoes inside your Instagram feed or whatever, I created the very first versions, initial, not what's there now, versions of that.
So a lot of the, I was the first like product manager for ads targeting.
So like how user data gets turned into a successful ads campaign is what I was responsible for in a very formative period in the company's history.
And so I was there, again, not that terribly long, but it was a lot happened.
The company went, grew in size enormously and figured out how to make money.
Like it didn't know how to fucking make money.
The ads, as everyone remembers, used to suck.
And now everyone's like, ads are either creepy or crappy.
There's no in between.
So I went from crappy to creepy.
It was a big team.
A lot of people did stuff to make that happen.
So the book is about that.
Like, how do you start a company?
How do you raise money?
The inner workings of Silicon Valley.
I went through this famous incubator thing called White Combinator.
It's funny, there's a Planet Money show about this in which they talked to various people who had this experience, try to figure out how it actually happened.
I was a guest on it, but let me address the problem.
So imagine, let's say Marcus Luckerberg is listening to your conversations and gets a live stream of your phone all the time.
What fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something commercially interesting that would be worth targeting against?
How often do you say, hey, I'm flying to Boston next week and I need to flight in a hotel on a taxi?
And you say it in some structured way that would be easy.
It's pretty rare, right?
And the amount of, I mean, think about it, the amount of data, you'd be on a constant phone call basically to Zuck.
It would eat up your network like crazy.
And then the fraction of the times versus you just going to fucking kayak and like entering Boston and using that data.
And so I'm not saying it's technically impossible.
And in some future world, who knows?
But it would be difficult.
And even if you manage to do it, there isn't.
One of the things, one of the chapters in my book, I understand you're listening to have a chapter called The Narcissism of Privacy, which comes off maybe more snarky than I mean, but privacy is a right and people have a right to it, obviously.
But I think one of the sort of misleading things when you think about companies like Facebook is that like Facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know, which is like your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever.
When it comes to commercial data that actually helps target ads, there's very little, very little of what you do, or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want, not necessarily what you would like what you would not want Facebook to know.
And if that's connected to the same account that's connected to your Gmail or your Google search or Amazon or Amazon, then they would show you the ads.
Interesting is that it became one of the most valuable commodities in the world and people just sort of gave up access to it because they didn't understand it was valuable.
When it first started being implemented, when people first started using Gmail or they first started searching for things on Google or using Facebook, they never thought that they were giving up access to something that's insanely valuable that would create not just some of the biggest companies in the world like Facebook and Apple and Google, but also some of the most influential companies that have ever existed.
I mean if you go back to the world of ElectroCon Kite and like three TV networks and creating consensus around things like Vietnam or other events, I think there's precedence.
It may not have been within one software company in the sort of way that you were talking about, but was there a media establishment that manufactured consent around certain social issues?
You're obviously a very bright guy who's been very thoughtful about this.
But one of the things that's hardest to convey to people who are on the outside looking in is like you open any dashboard at a company like that and every number is in the billions, like billions of posts, billions of people, billions of photos.
Even if they were trying to be like best effort, it would be very difficult to police a lot of what people want them to police.
So one of the things I did at Facebook, and I'll get into it in the book a little bit, I was briefly the product manager for the team that policed ads.
So it's a smaller problem, the big problem you're talking about.
But people who run ads, there's also like an ads creative policy.
Like you can't run ads with like naked women and stuff in it, right?
And it's not as big as Facebook posts, but it was still a scale problem.
What you do is you have a certain set of humans to do like the things that only humans can do well, and then you scale their efforts with software.
So if the guy tries to upload the exact same ad twice or the exact same video twice, even if he changes the contour slightly or he changes the shading, so it's not like literally the same file, you have smart software that actually picks it out and like prevents him from doing it.
And so, I mean, that's how they do it.
Because even Facebook and Google can't afford to hire millions of people to review these ads or the videos.
That fucking standard head-exploding GIF that everybody's been using from the beginning of time, that's enough to get you blocked from fucking Twitter now.
My view has always been that Facebook and all these companies should not be in the business of actually judging truth for people.
And that they're, in my opinion, they're over-policing.
And I've written a lot about this after the election 2016.
It eventually burned me out so much I went back to tech because it just drove me crazy.
But I just don't think, you know, there's hate speech standards in the United States, which are pretty narrow relative to other countries' free speech norms.
And some people might not like that, but that's the nature of the First Amendment in this country.
And I think it's a well-defined standard that has done us very well for decades.
And I don't see why, obviously, legally, the First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies, but at least morally or spiritually, I think it should apply.
But one of the things that drives me crazy about the left is that so many people on the left seem to want them to take a stand of being the moral police.
And they say, well, you know, you are allowing these extremist groups to thrive, and they're recruiting people, and they're this and they're that.
And so they use it as a justification.
But the problem is, once you do justify banning people because of an ideology that you don't agree with, it's going to move further and further down the line to the point where things that you do agree with and you think should be fine are now worthy of getting banned for.
Like the bridge between that kind of thing and the NDAA is not that far.
Like this ability to criticize someone is very important.
And as soon as you restrict that ability or restrict people's ability to communicate or say controversial things or say things that you don't agree with, you're getting close.
You're bringing those things together and it's fucking dangerous.
It's really dangerous when you start doing that because it's just, it keeps moving.
It doesn't stop.
If you don't have an absolute line of free speech, then you decide what should and shouldn't be censored.
And as soon as you do that, then it becomes subjective.
And it becomes, you could apply all sorts of logic and reasons why someone who you don't agree with should be removed from the conversation.
And you could do so in bad faith.
You could do so because it's going to cost you financially, or it's politically uncomfortable.
Yeah, it needs to be something that both sides espouse.
That's something that both sides talk about openly and agree to because we are a community.
Whether we disagree about certain aspects of our laws and the way we communicate or whatever, that's fine.
But we should have some rigid, rock-solid, fundamental principles that we apply to communication and to rights.
And if we don't do that, we're just losing our perspective.
We're losing the thing that made this country so exceptional, this exercise in self-government.
It's a unique place.
And as soon as you start fucking with that and limiting freedom, you see knuckleheads on television say that they think that maybe the First Amendment and the Second Amendment need revision.
I became like a media talking head, wrote for Wired magazine and other outlets.
And I did the whole media thing, blue check thing.
Drove me completely crazy because I don't really think I'm suited to it.
I went back to tech.
I worked for a big founders fund company called Ranchmetrics, building a new ads platform.
That was interesting for a year and a half, two years.
And then I went to Apple because Apple is also building an ads platform.
My career, for better or worse, has been turning human eyeballs and data into money in various forms.
It's what I do.
It's what I know how to do.
I know how to create an ad system.
There aren't that many people who know how to do that.
Apple is creating an ad system.
It's not a secret anymore.
You'll see ads if you scroll down on your search on your iPhone.
And, you know, so I was working at Apple.
And like, you know, in some sense, I'm getting a little older.
I wasn't doing other startup.
It's not retirement exactly, but you're working for a big company, right?
And I changed my LinkedIn to reflect the fact that I worked at Apple, which I did.
And then what happened, which we've now seen in many companies, and I was the first of this at Apple, there was like a Slack mob that kind of conjured itself and objected to the fact that I wrote this book, you know, what, five, six years ago now, that at the time, again, to be clear, was hardly a secret.
Best seller list, NPR book of the year, Wired Book of the Year, not to like toot my own horn, but like it's about a secret as Christmas fucking day at this point.
Like it's not a secret.
They knew about it.
Like they, my references, they asked about it because it's a little unusual to hire like a writer in a place that's very discreet like Apple, whatever.
So yeah, and they hired me, whatever.
And then, yeah, there was a Slack mob.
I can't talk too much about it because a lot of it's under NDA, but like I can talk about what's public.
You know, Apple management panicked.
And as a result of the whole mob thing, they kind of fired me.
So Slack, for those who aren't familiar, it's like this tool that it's almost like a version of like in-house corporate Facebook that you post, there's message threads.
Which, you know, as I've described, what pisses me off most about it is that in some sense, they, among all the rest of it, they mischaracterize the book because, you know, there's a couple passages in there that are a little salty, right?
It's like, it's a work of literary nonfiction told in the voice of like a Michael Lewis or a Hunter S. Thompson or a Tom Wolfe.
So it's not like a dry business book.
It's like, oh, look at crazy tech guy doing this crazy thing.
But it was told in a certain literary voice.
And, you know, fast forward five years, some of the jokes, yeah, were a little crude and were a little salty.
Nothing crazy salty, in my opinion.
I was trying to be entertaining because the book's got to fucking sell.
And so, but to be clear, 99.9% of the book is about entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley works, the internal culture at these companies, how the ads world works.
Like we talked about targeting, like it's about that.
It's not about one of the salty jokes is about dating in San Francisco and what's that like.
Like literally, it's like a one-paragraph comment on it that's quoted out of context.
I was actually praising the mother of my first kid saying, oh, this woman's amazing, unlike these other women that I went dating with, which is a conversation we've all had.
Like, oh, dating in this city is so hard, whatever.
It was that sort of joke, basically.
But of course, it misses the context that I'm like, I'm like pro, like, I'm pro this woman that I'm in love with, and it's so great that I'm not like dating these other women or whatever, right?
Like that, that was the statement.
But they took that out of context and a few other little comments here and there, ignored all the rest of the book, which again, most of it's about life inside Facebook and startups and whatever has nothing to do with.
And I think, you know, we can talk about this cancellation thing if you want to, but one of the key aspects of this cancellation mobs, right, or these cancellation coups, as I call them, is that the politics are often deeply unpopular.
I think something like 1% or less of Apple employees signed whatever petition it was to fire me.
Like nobody, like this mob was a very vocal but small minority inside the company.
And yeah, Apple just freaked out and, you know, this is publicly known, freaked out and fired me, like within a day.
But I mean, about the firing the other employees, that's publicly.
That's been reported on, so that's public.
Other companies have shown a lot more moral leadership than Apple has.
One example is Coinbase that you're probably familiar with, a crypto company led by Brian Armstrong.
And not too long, I guess a year and a half ago, right before the RPO, he basically said, too much politics, Slack mobs are happening, all this bullshit's happening.
Look, if you don't like it, we're here to do work.
You don't like it, here's a nice little severance package.
Doors over there.
5% of the company took it, and the company's doing fine.
And part of being an activist is if someone says something that you don't agree with, you can get them fired.
And it's a weird kind of activism because it's not necessarily act.
It's mob mentality.
You're deciding that you want someone to suffer because they have an opinion that's different than yours or that they say something that you think is a practical thing.
You are doing something with, I mean, you're doing something with language where you're attacking someone.
And it's one thing if you're going after someone, you're exposing a criminal who's like stealing money from people and you found, you know, you're a journalist.
You found this loophole where someone's like robbing old ladies out of their retirement fund.
But if you're just trying to cancel someone because you don't like the jokes they wrote in a book about tech, about their own life, and you want to get them fired from a job that has literally nothing to do with it.
Like whether it's Facebook or any sort of tech company.
For someone on the outside, we look at it and we say, like, how are those fucking places run?
Because it's like, I've had a good friend who was a big executive at Google.
And now she works at another large tech company.
And the way she described it to me, she's like, it is utter madness.
It's utter madness.
And the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent because there's a lot of people, the company that she works for now, there's a lot of people that are inside the company that legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists.
And they have to placate them because it's a certain percentage of the population of the people that work for the company.
And they're the loudest.
And they oftentimes don't get work done.
And when confronted, they talk about their activism.
And she's like, listen, you are here for X amount of hours a day.
This is your fucking job.
You're not an activist.
And don't think that if you're complaining about other things that this company does, that you doing that is a part of your job because it is not.
There's this philosophy among like the HR there that like and if you're being cynical about it, it's engineered to get the most productivity out of you.
Like the real, the real self to you, like if you work at some of these companies, particularly, again, to answer your question, I think it depends what stage of the company you join.
But if you're talking about big companies like Apple, Google, Facebook Now, it's a campus, it's a lifestyle.
Like some of the most impactful professional work I did was there, like it or not.
Taking Facebook ads from like the shitty, stupid little iPad offer ads on the right to like literally the thing you just looked at or bought, which I know sounds cringy, whatever.
That changed everything.
I was one of many, to be clear.
It wasn't just me, but that changed everything about that company and was super impactful inside the industry.
You're talking about ATT, which is like the ads transparency thing.
For those who don't know, if you've got an iPhone, like you download an app and suddenly there's like this opt-in that Apple is showing you saying, hey, do you want to share your data with these people?
That's hugely impactful.
What that does is, so why does that matter?
So Apple controls this.
They create the hardware and the software and all of it, right?
At the end of the day, seen from Apple's point of view, Facebook, as powerful as it seems, is just another app in the app store, right?
Which was always Zuck's fear, which is why he wanted to build a phone.
Apple can say, look, Facebook, you don't get to track users as well as you used to.
You can't track Joe Rogan down or like anonymously your device ID.
One of the many misconceptions that I try to address in the book about how Facebook works is it's often not Facebook data that's being used to target you.
Because if you think about Facebook, right, it's like you're posting random photos, you're engaging with content, but a lot of your commercial activity, like booking airplane flights, shopping for shit, doesn't happen on Facebook.
Facebook doesn't know about that, strictly speaking.
So how do they solve that problem that like we got to show him fucking shoe ads and Facebook doesn't know shit about what shoes you like?
So part of this is what I described in the book and what I helped build in the early stages.
There's a way of joining you, Joe Rogan, Facebook you to Cabelis you in some relatively data-safe way that lets Cabela show you an ad for those shoes.
Facebook doesn't necessarily know all the Cabela shit because Cabelis doesn't want to let Facebook know that shit because they don't trust Facebook.
And so a lot of the stuff that's going on isn't like, oh, Facebook knows everything about you.
It's like, no, Facebook knows who you are on every device because you tend to use Facebook everywhere.
Maybe not you, but other people.
And so that means that they can join you very well to all the other commercial activity you do.
And you use Facebook a lot.
So they have lots of opportunities to maybe show you an ad.
So that's really Facebook's strength.
But getting back to your original question, how does Apple fuck that up?
Well, it fucks it up because it doesn't know who you are on that device at the individual granular level anymore.
And so it can't talk to Cabelis and say, oh, that guy who will look for these weird things, like show them this ad, that can't happen anymore.
Well, if you're a person who's, you know, you have full control over your urges.
You're not a person who's just like, you know, you can't afford something, but you buy it anyway because you're fucking crazy and you saw the ad and you can't help yourself because we know that there are people like that out there, right?
But the model that Google and Apple have are somewhat different.
Apple is a fully vertically integrated thing.
They create literally the chips and the software you're looking at.
Google's a little bit different.
You can buy Android phones made by all sorts of manufacturers.
Their model in general tends to be a little bit more open to third parties.
And so there's a whole ads ecosystem in Google where I could fucking fill this wall or a whiteboard with all the little boxes of all the little companies that like get together to show you a single ad.
And so Google is a little bit better about being more open to the outside.
Mind you, they still use monopoly power in various ways, like they're not saints.
But Apple has a more closed moat approach to it.
I mean, that's why they're building an ad system because they want to make money in ads, but they're not going to go the Google route.
They're going to build more than likely.
I mean, not that I have deep insight into it anymore.
But more than likely, they're going to build it themselves because they have a more closed vision of it.
How they think about data privacy.
Here's another thing.
If you want to geek out, one direction Apple is going that's kind of interesting is that a lot of the data for your iPhone is going to live on device.
Like, in other words, for the past 20-plus years of Internet, we've had this model where, like, you do shit on a phone, data goes into the cloud, weird shit happens, and you get shown a page or an experience.
A lot of that's changing, right?
Like, probably most of what you do on a phone is through an app.
It's not a browser anymore.
It's like the code is running on your phone.
You're producing data on that phone.
Like, why shouldn't the computation and all the shit that happens happen on the phone?
These phones are actually pretty powerful.
Right.
And so a lot of things are moving in that direction for a bunch of reasons.
One of the reasons actually is privacy.
And, you know, Apple and other companies have made public statements about this.
I lived on Orcus Island, this idyllic little island.
The guy who ran the bagel shop got arrested in an FBI sting.
They were in some either Telegram or signal group passing around the sort of material.
And the FBI fucking showed up on some island in the Northwest arrested dude in the middle of this business.
And, you know, I was curious because it's like a local case.
So I went and read the federal indictment, which is public record.
You can go read it.
I would not advise reading it, by the way, because I think part of what they do is they include details and materials in the indictment to make the person look as guilty as possible.
And so they describe the images, which are disgusting, obviously.
I know.
It's worse than you can imagine.
I wouldn't advise anybody going and seeing it or even reading about it.
It's the most revolting thing you can possibly imagine.
It's like, yeah, that motherfucker should go to jail, should absolutely go to jail.
Yeah, and there's a very bizarre argument that somehow or another seeing those images keeps people from actually performing acts of violence on children.
But that is a fucking shifty argument.
And there's another even shiftier argument that CGI versions of child pornography should be acceptable because it's like a, you know, a way that they can get it out of their system or whatever.
It's, yeah, it's, it's just fucked that it's real.
It's just fucked that that's a real like hidden sort of secret part of our society that there are people out there.
Dude, when you start talking about child exploitation, that's some of the scariest shit in our society.
The fact that we have this first world, super advanced, like the most progressive society on earth, essentially.
You know, the most freedom, the most, and that there's still with our, you know, our moral foundation, our ethics, or 21st century, like as advanced as we can in terms of the way we feel about people's rights.
And that's still, still, there's people out there that want to do that to children.
We were talking once, he said, I now understand murder.
He goes, I'd never understood murder.
Like, why would anybody want to kill somebody?
But if you want to harm my kid, I get murder.
He goes, I understand it.
And he's a very peaceful guy.
That's a part of, you know, you're always going to have, when you have a spectrum of behavior, you're always going to have the worst on some end of the spectrum.
It's going to be the worst possible scenario of what kind of human exists.
And that's when someone will step in and say, well, you want that censored, right?
I mean, I think the free speech standard in the U.S., that like, you know, imminent lawless action, like if you're actually like browsing a crowd to like go kill somebody or do something illegal, that's where the state should step in.
I mean, from the privacy perspective, I'd probably say Apple is probably a better phone if you're totally paranoid about it.
For example, Google still, for most advertisers, makes available that unique device that I was talking about.
Like they don't have the ATT thing.
And so if you're really paranoid about that, Apple's probably.
As much as, you know, I've had a rough history with that company.
What if you're using something like WhatsApp or Signal or something like that that has I'm not a crypto expert, but WhatsApp in theory is end-to-end encrypted.
That means that literally from your phone to their phone, it's encrypted.
And even Facebook, they can see the traffic, certainly, but they supposedly can't actually read what you're writing.
Like, think about how the Apple employees targeted you for things taken out of context in your book.
What if someone takes things out of context in your emails and uses that as evidence that you're a piece of shit in a trial where they're trying to convict you and they're trying to sway the jury?
But at the end of the day, you have to believe in rule of law and honest courts.
And that's the real solution to it.
I think one thing you can criticize, I think, tech for is that they have, it's a solutionist mentality that thinks that there's literally a technical solution to everything.
I mean, there's a bunch of reasons for doing it, right?
From the vibe that I got in my brief time there, like I think people like Tim Cook and Senior Management care about privacy.
It's not just a bullshit line.
That said, strategically, it totally benefits them, the fact that they have tighter control of the data on that phone that only they make, right?
So it happens to line up very nicely.
And yeah, I think part of the reason why I joined why would you join a big, slow company when you're like this tech entrepreneur guy or whatever?
Google and Apple are going to define that future in mobile.
And I think people like players like Facebook are going to be second fiddle.
They're just going to be apps in their ecosystems.
And so, yeah, I think it's going to change the way the, and this business, if this on-device thing takes off, that's going to change the way a lot of things work.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of complicated tricks about it, like what's called differential privacy, federated learning.
There's a lot of little clever hacks.
Because you might ask, like, well, but then how do you train models?
Like, how do you know, like, how do you train from like a million phones to know that like a guy who does this should see that ad?
Like, how do you collectively learn it?
Because an individual is not going to generate enough data on one phone.
There's clever hacks around that that try to collect that information in relatively privacy-safe ways, come up with a model that says, oh, if he's looking for X, show them why.
But then have your data never leave, never really leave the phone and do it that way.
And it's so superior that they've set up cops in certain areas in New Jersey where they don't allow people to drive through the neighborhood that don't live there.
Because so many people were routing traffic through there via Waze that it was causing these traffic jams in these sleepy communities because people figured out you can fucking speed right through this neighborhood.
And so people were violating speed limits.
And so then they just started implementing cops and putting these stops where they're like, you can't drive here unless you live here, which is kind of sketchy because you're supposed to be able to just drive wherever the fuck you want if it's an open neighborhood.
There's probably fewer people talking about it than you would get at Twitter.
And there's probably even fewer people who actually know how it works.
But I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't think people are that dumb.
And I think, you know, one of the interesting things about the whole anti-Facebook media cycle from 2016 is that if you were to look at the usage data for Facebook, you wouldn't be able to see where that backlash happened.
People didn't actually stop using Facebook.
Or they might have stopped using it for other reasons because they got bored of it and they moved to Instagram or whatever.
But was there an actual, for all this tech backlash, did people actually use Amazon less or Facebook less?
Particularly after COVID with people being locked in and all the rest of it.
Did people actually revolt against tech, or is that just an impression in some journalists in some commenters' mind?
But the book opens in the meeting where I'm pitching a lot of this crazy targeting stuff in a Zuck meeting because he had to approve it because it was a big step.
You know, he seemed to me very somewhat cold and aloof, but definitely in charge.
Like the wimpy dweeby character in like the social network or that movie or whatever, that wasn't the vibe I got from him in the meetings I was in.
Well, no, he quoted, I think it's Cato the Elder, a famous Roman senator, and he would end all his speeches with, Cartago de Linda est, Carthage must be destroyed.
It's in the context of the Punic Wars.
And so he just randomly cited that, and the implication was clear.
And just to give you an idea of how crazy Facebook was, like the same day, there was a printing, like a silk screening poster lab in the company.
They literally printed that phrase with like a Roman helmet, and it appeared all over Facebook.
And then everyone stole the fucking posters.
They're all gone.
I had to struggle to find a photo because Vanity Fair wanted a photo of it and I couldn't find it because I didn't manage to steal one of the posters.
A friend sent me a photo before it got stolen to the fucking thing.
Like how early you are in the company defines your wealth and what fraction of the equity you get.
Because the real money's in the equity.
The salaries actually aren't that high.
I mean, they're healthy, but they're not crazy.
It's the equity where you really make the real money, right?
And the fraction you get, frankly, of like the cap table, of like the pie, changes by orders of magnitude, like literally within like, and the value of it, a year or two of joining.
So if I had joined Facebook like two or three years before, it would have changed the entire picture.
So what does that mean?
Like say we're at Facebook, you're my boss, right?
You could even have, you could be my boss and maybe you joined later because you're just a more senior person.
You came laterally, right?
I'm worth whatever, X million, like a shit ton of money because I've been here since like the very founding.
And I'm doing the same job as you, maybe even a more junior job.
And I'm worth like a fortune and you're not.
So like, what is that conversation like?
You know, I go to, I go, you know, scuba diving in Honduras on the weekend on a private jet and you went and saw a movie in Mountain View and we come back, hey, so Joe, what'd you do on Monday?
And it's like, how's that combo go?
Right.
Because this guy is living in a different world than you.
And everyone kind of knows it, but you can't talk about it because obviously it's like super corrosive to morale.
I mean, there's websites you can go at, like, like for big companies, see what the comp levels are so you can sort of get an idea.
But if you're talking about the early stage of a company, and it's so variable, right?
Like I came in what's called an aqua hire.
What that means is like they acquire a company, but really they're just buying you.
So it's just like a nice hiring offer.
And the numbers there can vary by a lot.
And if you just get hired via like a college fucking recruitment fair, it's totally different.
And then again, as time goes on and Facebook shares go from five bucks to 50, suddenly a 2x different in stock has a major, or even more, has a major difference.
How come no one has figured out an alternative to Twitter?
I mean, I know Getter existed, but then when I got on Getter, one of the first things that I noticed is that Getter imported all of my Twitter followers and tried to pretend I had 9 million followers on Getter.
Because of network effects, like all these Twitter alternatives are always some like right-wing thing where it's like unfettered conversations, whatever.
But it's like, dude, like, A, I don't think the censorship on Twitter is that bad for most people.
That's such that they would actually switch because of that.
If you're somebody really on the edge, maybe.
And also, like, you want the opposing side there to make fun of.
Like, that creates the spark that creates the tension.
And they won't even take it down, which I salute them.
I mean, that's a fucking ballsy move because they're going to lose their Twitter account because they're saying, you know, like it's true.
But it's not true that she's the man of the year.
I mean, it's true that it's a biological male, but the fact that they have the balls to say, we're not deleting this, you know, I'm like, I support that, but I don't support them getting banned for that.
Like, as you can tell, I don't talk about things that I don't feel I'm a domain expert.
I always feel like I'm on thin ice, but I'll do it and possibly run the risk of crypto bro rage.
So Web3 is interesting.
I'm sure your listeners have heard of Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum and stuff.
And those are interesting financial applications of it, which is totally valid and cool.
But if you can imagine a bigger vision of that, of decentralization, as you're describing, why is it called, one way I get it, it's like, what is Web3?
Like, why is it called Web3?
Like, what the fuck is Web 2?
Like, what is Web 1, right?
So Web 2 is like everything we know.
It's like Facebook, Twitter.
It's like these gated platforms in which if Babylon B pisses off the fucking Twitter people, then they just get thrown off the platform.
They don't own anything.
In many ways, what the Web3 people want to recreate is Web 1, which we're both old enough, and some of your listeners, I'm sure, old enough to remember email, FTP, Telnet, like core protocol, HTTP, like the web, right?
These are core protocols that aren't defined by Facebook or Twitter saying, this is the way the world works.
Like, no, we agree that this is the prototype, when you send an email, this is what the actual document needs to look like for you to receive a valid email.
And there's no way to kick anybody off email.
You can't be, I mean, Gmail might say, we don't want to give you a Gmail account anymore, but email as such is not shut down for you.
You can still send email.
And so Web3, in a trustless environment, like with not people necessarily agreeing in direct ways, coming up with a way to recreate a way to say, hey, I want to, I own this thing, like an NFT, like a picture of an ape, say, I own this thing.
And like the world thinks I own this thing, and it's not a function of Suthby's or an auction house or whatever saying that I own this thing.
In theory, that's how it should work.
So that's the idea.
So you imagine like a Web3 version of Twitter.
How does it work?
You post a fucking thing.
It exists in the blockchain, this thing called a blockchain, which is basically a public database that we all agree on.
Everyone maintains via various mechanisms we have to get into.
And that's it.
And then I can have, in the same way that email just works, I have an app that sits on top of it that like reads that and renders it to me in some Twitter-like way.
But there's no Twitter that can just say, Babylon B, you don't exist anymore.
And you think that that's possible to implement large scale, like to have the whole country adopt it?
What would it take?
Do you think it would take some sort of egregious censorship thing?
I think Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter was a step in that direction, where so many people were so furious at the idea that you could take a sitting president and remove him from your social media platform that this could like you needed something along those lines, maybe even more egregious.
Like you said about privacy, I think those aspects to your average person who isn't living on the edge and posting like weird, crazy shit, isn't that convincing?
I think for Web3 to take off, and to be clear, my career has not been in consumer internet.
It's been on the back end, like monetizing the usage.
But if I were to bet on this, there has to be something new and cool that Web3 enables that just doesn't exist that's going to drive that adoption.
You're not going to convince people to leave Twitter for like the new Web3 version of Twitter just because, oh, there's less censorship going on, right?
I don't think that it's really like top of mind issue for most users.
I mean, that's a lot of what motivates Web3 is that like that crypto-libertarian aspect of tech that just wants to like total freedom, the most minimalist thing, which, you know, I think it's powerful.
I don't give a fuck about Gen Z, but the people who are alive are not just Gen Z. There's a lot of people that aren't Gen Z that are, you know, millennials and even Gen X that are aware of the problems and the pitfalls of allowing social media companies to dictate discourse to decide what's acceptable and not acceptable to say.