Mediapocalypse Now + a16z’s Chris Dixon Defends Crypto + HatGPT

24:57And they actually share all their financials every year, which I think is amazing. And in their most recent report, you can see they're doing pretty well. They share most of the revenue they make with the people who are writing the website. It feels like they have found a path forward. It's not maybe as big as like Pitchfork was. It's probably not as big as Deadspin, but it is bigger than Platformer and it is doing meaningful work. We're seeing other people adopting this model. Some of my favorite reporters from Vice News' old motherboard vertical, which was their vertical that covered tech, they recently started something called 404 Media.

25:30It's the same thing. Very small nucleus of incredibly talented reporters, and they are now just asking people to come support their work directly. They've already broken so much news. So, you know, if you are a journalist and you want to find a sustainable path in this industry, I would be thinking about these collectives. I also am a big believer in the solo creator model or the maybe one, two, three person newsroom model, which I'm trying out myself now. I talk with journalists all the time who are considering making that move. I have been trying to provide the best assistance I can to some folks that are, and some of them have actually thrived.

26:05And the final thing I would say, Kevin, is I would love to see the millionaires and the billionaires take a look at what folks like Defector and 404 are doing. The classic move for a billionaire is to be like, what is some prestigious old property that's losing a lot of money that I could take over and maybe help it lose slightly less money and just sort of bask in the fact that I own the Washington Post or something like that, right? These folks could lose so much less money and could have such a bigger impact on journalism and democracy if they just went to 404, they went to Defector, they went to one of these other collectives and they said, you know what?

26:40I'm just going to give you$5 million a year, right? see what you could do with it. Maybe you decide you want to hire 10 more people. Maybe you want to invest in a really cool website. Maybe you want to launch some really expensive investigations, right? But man, if you are a rich person and you just want to be a patron of some journalism organization, I'm telling you, it is in these small collectives where you are going to get so much more paying for your buck. Yeah, I think there's something to that. I think especially for local and regional news, it makes sense to consider alternative ways of funding yourself.

27:12One of my favorite examples of a local news startup that I really love is CitySide, which is out in the Bay Area where I live. It started with a website called Berkeleyside, which was sort of a hyper-local digital publisher that was just a handful of people who were sort of covering local news in Berkeley, California. There's now a publication called Oaklandside. So they're expanding to other cities in the area. and they really have sort of an interesting mix of funding. You know, some of it comes from grants and foundations. Some of it comes from kind of wealthy benefactors who decide to support this as sort of a quasi-philanthropic exercise.

27:52And I think it's just a really interesting model for local news. I don't know if that works the same way on the kind of national or global scale. And so my recommendation for the news industry when it comes to these bigger national and global publications is to sort of get back to basics, right? There's this famous saying in Silicon Valley, it's sort of the motto of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. They like to say, make something people want. And I think that has to be at the center of what media organizations are trying to do. We cannot have a sustainable news industry if it is dependent on the largesse of billionaires, on the availability of grants.

28:35I've even heard some people talk about, maybe the government should fund news production. Maybe we should have employers bundling subscriptions to offering subscriptions to news publications as part of their employee benefits packages. And I just really think that all of those strategies are sort of missing the fundamental point, which is that in order to succeed, you have to make something that people want to pay for. People should not have to be guilted or pressured or cajoled into subscribing to their favorite publication. It should be something that they want to do. And I think in the last decade or two since I've been in media, journalists have really lost a sense of kind of entrepreneurship and creativity.

29:17It's almost become kind of a dirty word in certain parts of the media industry to care too much or to know too much about how your company or your journalism organization makes money. We've sort of cleaved that off into like a separate part of the industry And look, there are good reasons for that. Like, I don't necessarily want the investigative reporters, you know, covering Congress to be thinking about, like, their web traffic or how many subscriptions their stories are converting. But I do think that we as an industry could benefit from a little more entrepreneurial thinking and just trying stuff and thinking about not only, like, what is the best story to tell here, but what is the thing that people are actually willing to pay for?

29:57Yeah, I want to say something about the make people want point because it is a really important one. For a long time now, when new publications have been started, it is often started around an advertising category, right? Like, I'm not going to name the publications over the past few years that were started by companies thinking like, we need a tech vertical, right? And they would spin something up, they would lavishly fund it for a while. But then once the ads didn't turn out to be there, the plug got pulled on it. Well, that was because there's already a lot of tech coverage. and if you don't show up in the market with some sort of unique editorial insight, the market is probably gonna reject you unless you just happen to have the most talented people in the world working there.

30:36So, you know, and again, this is like, one of the reasons why media is such a hard business is it is not even enough to have a good business model, which is already enough of a challenge on its own. You have to have an existential reason for being and it is just in the nature of media for the existential reason you find to not last that long. You actually have to constantly reinvent yourself. When I started writing a newsletter, it was just about that day's problem at Facebook, and there were a lot of them, and it sustained my newsletter for years. But then one day, that was an old story, and the newsletter had to be about something else, right?

31:10And publications find themselves in that spot all the time, and it is super hard. But if we want to rebuild that middle of media, we need folks that build publications that have a dedicated reason for being, and they need to be able to evolve it over time. Yeah. You know, Casey, I think a point that often goes like underappreciated in these discussions is that news as kind of a standalone product has very rarely been profitable on its own without some kind of adjacent business kind of subsidizing it. So there used to be this saying at the New York Times, I don't know if it was ever true or not, that the crossword puzzle paid for the Baghdad Bureau, right?

31:44You have these like kind of lightweight sections, like games and puzzles and comics that sort of get people in, and then you use the revenue generated by those things to pay for the very expensive, you know, foreign desk. And this is true at a lot of different kinds of publications and media organizations, you know, radio stations hosting music festivals. I remember a few years ago when BuzzFeed's Tasty section, their sort of cooking recipe section of their website got very popular. They sort of started a line of cookware that they would sell in stores. So there have always been these kind of attempts by media organizations to sort of use an adjacent business to subsidize the news gathering one.

32:25Yeah. Which is why we're adding comics to platformers. So look forward to Marmaduke starting next week. So what is an adjacent product that you think could make money for news organizations today? I think pro wrestling obviously comes to mind. Honestly, it could work. People would pay to see David Brooks and Maureen Dowd go at it. I mean, so much of digital media is just people dunking on each other. Why not put it in the squared circle and, you know, see everyone at SummerSlam. I love this. A cage match. That's better than my idea, which was an app that would allow you to tap the expertise of world-class writers to write your dating app profiles and messages for you.

33:10Call this Cyrano. Yes, writers famously good at dating and in relationships. Those are the people you watch writing that for you. when we come back crypto investor chris dixon talks about blockchains web3 and where the industry went wrong

33:39so casey we have talked a lot on this podcast about what's happening in the cryptocurrency world and all of the various scandals and misdeeds and Ponzi schemes and collapses that have befallen big crypto companies over the last few years. We do. In fact, let's do a live update on the price of Dogecoin, Kevin. Right now, as we record this, the price of Dogecoin is 7.9 cents. So I hope that helps you as you make your investment decisions. So we spend a lot of time joking and being glib about what's going on in crypto because there have been just so many disasters over the past few years, especially.

34:13But I think we also have to treat this as a serious subject because there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley still to this day who believe that despite all the scandals, despite the fact that, you know, FTX and Binance have collapsed and Sam Bankman freed in jail and the crypto market, you know, is a fraction of its former self. There are people who are influential in the tech industry who think that all of this is due for a rebound and that crypto will actually be an important part of our technological future. Yeah. And would you say that one of the things that those folks have in common is that they have a lot of money riding on the outcome?

34:49Some of them do, yes. And some of them just believe in kind of the theoretical underpinnings of crypto, the sort of idea of decentralization and taking away the intermediaries of big tech who have been controlling the experiences online of billions of people. So this week, we had an opportunity to talk to one of the sort of enduring crypto optimists in Silicon Valley. And I think he's actually someone who both you and I have respected and relied on as a source of wisdom and information for a long time. And that's Chris Dixon. Chris is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm founded by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who has become one of the biggest investors in crypto and Web3.

35:32The information called him Andreessen Horowitz's Crypto King. In addition to being an investor, Chris is also someone who's been blogging and thinking about the future of the internet for a very long time. And his firm has led investments in a bunch of leading crypto companies, including Coinbase, OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is the company that makes the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. And to this day, he remains optimistic that crypto is not dead. In fact, blockchain networks, which is what he prefers to call it, are going to be an important part of the future of the internet and kind of a way for ordinary people to take back power from some of these centralized tech platforms.

36:13Yeah. And I should say, Kevin, like, I actually just don't share that view at all. I feel burned by everything that I wrote about crypto. And Chris was one of the people who made me take crypto seriously because I thought, look, if this person is serious about it, then I need to assume that something positive is going to come out of this. And I have not had a chance to talk to him since all of this stuff started to shake out in the market. So when we found out that he had a new book coming out, we said, well, maybe this is the chance where we can ask him the hard questions that we've had. Yeah.

36:42So Chris just wrote a new book sort of detailing his vision for the future of crypto and blockchains. It's called Read, Write, Own. And I thought, well, maybe this is our chance to sort of ask a person who's really in some ways responsible for a lot of the big investments that have propped up the crypto world. Maybe this is a chance to understand why he's still optimistic about where crypto is headed, despite all of the evidence that suggests that this industry is in real trouble.

37:11Chris Dixon, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me. So we're going to talk about your new book, Read, Write, Own. But first, I want to recall or recollect a conversation that you and I had about 10 years ago. I don't know if you remember this, but we were, you know, I'd been following. I think we were in SF or something. I remember being on a pier or something. Is that right? Is this correct or no? Yeah, we were getting coffee at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Did I say something that was, I made a bad prediction. Well, you told me that you'd gotten really interested in crypto. And I remember this conversation because this was during the first sort of big Bitcoin boom.

37:51And, you know, there was a lot of exuberance. People were making tons of money. And I remember you telling me, like, you guys in the tech media, you need to pay attention to crypto because it's a really fascinating story. And it's a lot bigger than just Bitcoin. Like these blockchain things, they're going to be a really big deal. A lot of the smartest programmers in Silicon Valley are working on this stuff. And it's going to turn into real valuable products that will sort of revolutionize the tech industry. And I remember that conversation for me was a moment where I started to kind of look at crypto more seriously and cover it in a more serious way.

38:29And fast forward a decade, I think you were right that crypto has been a very interesting story, but I think not for the reasons that you and I would have predicted a decade ago. You know, we've got these massive scams, exchanges collapsing, executives going to jail, you know, billions of dollars being made and lost overnight. And meanwhile, as I kind of look around, I can't actually see any tangible examples of where blockchains have transformed much of anything. And a lot of the really smart programmers that you were talking about have left crypto and are pivoting to building AI. So my first question to you is just what happened?

39:11Yeah, like, I do think it went off. I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think it went, it did not go the way that I wanted it to go. To the extent you want to get into it, I would describe the last kind of 2020 to 2023 as starting off very promising for somebody like me who was interested in applications and utility. I thought there were some really interesting things built. And then I think it went off the rails. And honestly, like that, like part of writing this book, like I started writing this book after that, I was like, reflecting on, do I want to keep doing this? Like, I don't want to be part of the, this sort of casino culture, you know, is, does that, is that something fundamental to the technology or is it just so far the wrong people, the wrong products have been built?

39:50You know, like, I believe it's the second, it's the latter of those. And that, and like, I'll just also put it in the context of like, there are many millions of people who are very excited about the idea that you can have a financial service that's that the way there is no company behind it, where it's truly owned and operated by a community. Like, I think the one thing I was right about, Kevin, is that idea has resonated deeply. And if there's another proposal for how to fight consolidation of the internet, like I'm open to it, you know, but this is my proposal, I guess. Yeah. And, you know, we'll get into, could blockchain still realize the vision that you had back then?

40:25But I just want to say, Chris, I've known you for a long time. You invested in a lot of stuff before crypto that I thought was super interesting. And when you got into crypto, to me, this was one of the big signals for me, as it was for Kevin. It's like, it's time to take this seriously. And over the next few years, I think what happened is I tried to be one of the journalists keeping an open mind about stuff and not assuming that everything was a fraud or a scam. But when I look back on what I wrote in 21 and 22, the stuff that I covered was at best irrelevant. And at worst was stuff that people lost a whole lot of money on.

40:55So when you're coming back around with a book and saying, like, let's take the blockchain seriously, I just have this lingering hangover of like, I tried it and I like deeply regret what I were about before. Yeah, but Casey, I mean, like, in fairness, like I started an AI company in 2008. It's called Hunch and I sold it to eBay in 2011. And frankly, it wasn't the success that I would hope it was. And if you'd asked me in 2012, I would have given you a list of reasons why it didn't work. And in reality, it was timing. It was timing. And like the first neural network paper was 1943. Right. It was McCulloch and Pitts.

41:26And then there was Turing and his paper was in 1950. I think he predicted in 20 years we'd have, you know, intelligent machines to pass a Turing test. There was a there was a so-called AI bubble in the 80s. And then it worked. And why did it work? Because, you know, there's a lot of smart people, everything else. But a lot of it was because of video games, because video games drove GPUs and it got better. I think that from the outside, I mean, you guys are tech journalists and you know this, but from the outside view, sometimes these things look like they're sort of immaculate conception. In reality, there's these messy background stories.

41:55So, look, I agree with you. Again, you're right. It hasn't realized its potential. Does that mean it will never realize its potential? I don't think that's the case. So, Chris, this book, Read, Write, Own, is sort of a collection of your sort of thoughts about crypto and blockchains and what you think the future of decentralization might be. What is the main argument in a couple of sentences of this book? So the main argument is that the original promise of the internet was to be a democratically controlled system where creators, entrepreneurs, companies could build direct relationships with their audiences.

42:33In the meantime, a set of large companies stepped in the middle and became intermediaries. And that's, you know, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. And that has made, been incredibly beneficial to those companies, and I think has significantly hurt the rest of the participants of the internet. And so, I am very concerned that the internet is going to become like old broadcast TV, where you have sort of ABC, CBS, and NBC. And that's it. And I think that is a bad outcome for creators, for entrepreneurs. By the way, for venture capitalists, we are in the business of funding startups and having a dynamic internet.

43:12And I think we're headed there. And then we have this technology come along, which I think with blockchains as the kind of core argument of the book is there, if web one protocols like email are sort of thesis and web two systems like Facebook or antithesis, I see blockchains as sort of synthesis. They're kind of the best of both worlds. I use the phrase, the societal benefits of protocol networks of early kind of web and email protocols, but some of the competitive advantages of the Web2 networks. That's my argument. And so I think you could build. So, for example, I think a very critical moment that led to the consolidation of the internet was the fall of RSS, was the fact that, so in 2007 or 8, for those who don't know, RSS is an open protocol, kind of like email and the web, which allows for social networking features.

43:59And people forget this now, but in like 2008 or so, RSS was a legitimate competitor to Twitter and Facebook. So RSS is now, you know, it's using podcasting, it's using kind of niche things, but it's clearly not like a dominant, you know, it has no user base that's a fraction of the size of Twitter and Facebook and things like this. And look, the aggregate revenue of the top social networks last year was$150 billion. That money went to those companies. Had RSS won, I believe the vast majority of that money would have gone to the edges of the network. That has huge economic. So these these topics of like, how do you architect these networks has profound economic consequences?

44:37It has profound cultural consequences, political consequences. Who gets to decide who has a platform? Who gets to decide with how the algorithms work? Who gets verified? Like, should it be a eight dollar thing? Should it be because, you know, a friend at Twitter? I think all of these systems. I don't think that because you happen to build a popular social network, you should get to decide how global economics, culture and politics works, which is the system that we have today and we're heading towards. Right. So the core argument is there is a there is a new technology, which is admittedly has a has a sullied name because of the casino and other kinds of things.

45:10But there's another side of the coin. He asked for a couple of sentences and you really took that challenge. Yeah, those were sentences in like the William Faulkner sense of the word. Yeah.

45:24I think maybe something that could help make this discussion a little less abstract is talking about sort of particular projects or particular companies. And I want to ask you about a company and a project in crypto that I wrote about a few years ago called Helium. This is also a company that your firm invested in. This was a company, they were making these essentially wireless routers that you could put in your house or on your roof or at your office. And these things would basically provide connectivity to devices around you. And at the same time, they would also mine a cryptocurrency token.

46:04And so the idea was kind of that you would, instead of, you know, Comcast or whoever, like spending billions of dollars to build out a new wireless network, you could essentially incentivize ordinary people to do this by giving them some crypto in exchange for providing these routers to the network. And at the time, I thought, like, that sounds like kind of a cool idea. It's kind of an original way to bootstrap a kind of big, expensive infrastructure project. So I wrote about it, and I was pretty positive about it. And then afterwards, like, it became clear that this whole thing was essentially a house of cards, that no one, barely anyone was actually using the network.

46:41The company insiders and executives had, like, secretly given themselves a big percentage of the tokens. I don't agree with the criticism. Well, let me just finish the question. And, you know, essentially, this company had made itself look more successful than it really was. The token price crashed, and the subreddits and places where people who were big, you know, proponents of Helium started to fill with just people complaining that they had lost all this money or spent all this money on routers that weren't giving them back anything in return. People write to me all the time, even today, who feel burned by helium and are mad at me for writing about it.

47:16But you actually write in your book that helium is a good example of crypto's usefulness. So I'm curious, what in your mind did helium prove? Yeah. And so, and I think in the book, I say helium solved half of the problem. And let me explain that. So this, there's been an, this has been an idea that I've heard about for 20 years, which is the idea of, wouldn't it be an interesting entrepreneurial idea if we could create kind of a grassroots Verizon? But the challenge is, is the chicken and egg problem, which is the challenge with a lot of tech businesses, right? It's like, how do you, you got to do two sides of the market.

47:48And so, so the insight that helium had is that you can use financial incentives to help with one side of the market, the supply side of the market. They did a good job on the supply side, which is farther than any other attempt got. They had not built out the demand side. They are building it out now, and I believe they're making progress. I'm not personally deeply involved, but I just idea that it was going to happen overnight. It's a really big, ambitious idea. These things take time. I understand the supply and the demand sides of that market, but I think another way to describe what happened with Helium is that they used casino-like economics to build an infrastructure project that no one wanted or that very few people actually had real use cases for.

48:33So I don't... Well, so they... Yeah. Well, they started off with this... I forgot the name of it. It was Laura something. It was some weird... Laura Wan, of course. That's the famous Laura Wan. Which was a mistake, and they switched it to 5G. So that was the first thing. And now they have... You can go get it. You can go, there's a service where you can go sign up and I think it backhauls, it backfills with T-Mobile or something and it uses Helium wherever it can. And then it backfills with, if it doesn't have coverage in that area, it backfills with T-Mobile and they're building that out. And so, and that just simply takes time.

49:10um you know i guess i don't understand the criticism that look i mean one of the points i make in the book is that subsidization is a very very old tactic among um among internet company this why do all these companies have to raise many many many billions in venture capital because they said a lot of their proposal pitches they subsidize i see helium as okay now the forces of openness have financial tools but someone did subsidize the building of the helium network it It was the people who thought that they could get rich on helium tokens and bought a bunch of these useless routers and like hooked them up to the Internet.

49:47Like we can move on from helium. But I think that is a very clear example of how something that looks to people in crypto, like a successful example of bootstrapping some project that wouldn't have gotten funding otherwise or would need venture capital otherwise. If you drill down one layer, it actually is just spreading the risk and the subsidies around to a bunch of normal people who just got like snookered into participating. Wait a second. I think for a couple of things I'll say, first of all, there has we have not ever been involved with a project that sold tokens to the public. Okay, just to be clear, like, I don't know what these people are referring to, but like Helium never, I guarantee you, because no company we're involved with, nor would we ever, would we, you know, allow them to do this, sells tokens to the public.

50:33No, you would earn tokens by plugging in your router. Everyone else earns them through airdrops. Okay, like, so that's just to be clear. So like this idea that they're like somehow, you know, selling these things to retail investors, that's simply not true. I mean, I'm on these sub, I can show you the posts on these subreddits if you want, but there are people who spent thousands of dollars because someone told them that you plug in this router and it makes you crypto and you get rich off this. And I mean, people shouldn't, I don't think the company said that. No, no, no. But in an environment where you have a token, that's sort of, anyway, we can move on.

51:08But Casey, I want to let you jump in. Well, I mean, so let's like, yeah, like shift away from Helium. But I do think that there is an idea here worth exploring, which is what happens when you financialize a network? You know, as I've observed some of these networks rise and fall, it seems to me that when you at least plant the seed with people that they can make good, maybe not get rich, but just get paid by doing something, you wind up attracting a different kind of person than if you're just like YouTube and you just say, hey, like show up here and upload your videos. I mean, the thing that I'm thinking of is Axie Infinity, which is a company, an Andreessen Horowitz company that I wrote about.

51:45If you haven't heard of it, it was a game reminiscent of Pokemon. It let players earn cryptocurrency from battling their little monsters, which are called Axies. Those Axies are also NFTs. You have to buy one to play the game, or you can rent them from their owners. When I wrote about it in 2021, it was taking off in the Philippines. People were earning more than the minimum wage by playing it. I thought that's pretty interesting, and I wrote about it. But the financial nature of it essentially required that new investors would come in to prop up the price just like you would find in a traditional Ponzi scheme.

52:15And then eventually$625 million worth of tokens were stolen, the game's whole economy collapsed. So I'm trying to understand, while obviously we would wish that the hack hadn't happened and maybe we learned some lessons about the network. But like, as far as I can understand it, like Axie is your dream of a blockchain-based future where people have skin in the game. They have a piece of the action. And it just seems like it is not doing good things. So, okay. So, look, the way I view it is, and I think the Axie team would say this, the focus is way too much on the financial aspects. One of the lessons from things like Axie is that the primary goal needs to be a fun game outside of the financial aspects, right?

53:01So you need something, let's just say, like Roblox or EVE Online. And I think there needs to be policy approaches. By the way, like I say this in the book and we say this publicly, like I think, for example, having much, much longer lockups on all tokens would be a significant improvement because I think you would just remove a whole class of kind of mercenary behavior. Like I don't think we should be against people having a profit motive. I think the real harm is in the short-term profit motive. And I think some of that probably has to be achieved through policy. Some of it has to be achieved through better products.

53:31But to me, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say that because some early attempts over-financialized things, there should never be digital services where you can have peer-to-peer economies where the users can earn financial rewards. I don't think it means we have to kill blockchains. I do think it means we have to be thoughtful about how we incorporate those legitimate criticisms into better designs. Well, my view isn't that this stuff should be banned forever. It's not even that people should stop noodling on this thing. That is fine to me. I just feel like until someone makes one cool thing that is not just remittances with a blockchain, I'm just kind of inclined to ignore it.

54:12Because when I look at the amount of talent, capital, and time that has gone into it, there's basically never been a technology in the history of Silicon Valley, as far as I can tell, where more time, money, and talent went into it and produced as little as we have so far gotten out of the blockchain. I don't know. I mean, like when I started my career in the early 2000s, people would have said that about telecom equipment. And I don't know. I feel like I've gone through my whole career with these ups and downs. And people say we overinvested in something. And, you know, cryptos, I think, I don't know.

54:43I don't know the exact percentages, but I don't think it's a huge percentage of total venture investment these days. Yeah. We talked recently on the show about the Bitcoin ETFs that have just been approved for trading, basically letting people buy and sell, you know, things that sort of track the price of Bitcoin in their retirement funds or whatever. And that's something that a lot of people in the Bitcoin world have been optimistic about. I know you're not a Bitcoin laser eyes guy, but as you look out across the crypto landscape today, like what are the projects that make you optimistic? A lot of my career has been focused on creative people.

55:23You know, the most disliked area I'm still the most excited about, which is NFTs. I think NFTs are a really powerful way for creative people like to take musicians as an example. Like, so, you know, music is an area where users love music. Users love to pay for music. There's lots of talented musicians. The problem today is these intermediaries and it's labels, it's Spotify, it's a whole bunch of different layers of intermediaries. So we have like two companies, for example, doing music related NFTs. And it's like you get an NFT and it's a digital collectible and it's a backstage pass and it's proof that you were the first one that liked the musician and you can go to a special event.

55:58And like, there's just a whole bunch of experiments happening. but I think that this is a very powerful tool, you know, blockchains and NFTs and these things for thinking about new business models for creative people. And I mean, I guess I should say, it's like, I should be rooting for that idea. And I guess I am. Like, I mean, if what you just described comes to pass, then hopefully that's something I would be able to take advantage of, right? Like I'm doing a lot of the things that you say. I do run my own business. I am a solo creator. I have been able to forge a direct relationship with an audience using email.

56:30Like, it's awesome. Like everything that you're describing is beyond my wildest dreams. I have a community on Discord that gives me ideas and pushes back on me when I'm wrong. Like all that stuff is amazing. I just keep coming back to the fact it's like, I do it using today's internet and I've even been able to do it with a pretty low take rate. So I'll just be curious to see like what winds up being on the blockchain that enables me to accelerate that. I'm still open to the idea. Yeah. Yeah. I think making money would be one, and that's NFTs and other kinds of new, interesting experiments. I assume, Casey, you're still dependent on these big social networks for distribution and things, too.

57:08Like, you can't, right? I mean, email lets you deliver the thing, but how do you acquire new users, right? And, like, Discord at some point, look, maybe they deprioritize links the way that Twitter is, and maybe, I don't know. And I think in that world, do you want people, entrepreneurs, building alternative sets of tools that might provide an outlet? That's my argument, right? Yeah. Chris, before we let you go, I think there will be people who listen to you talking about this stuff and think that makes a lot of sense to me. I think there will be other people who say this is just someone who has invested billions of dollars into crypto companies, who is sort of talking his own book and going on this press tour to essentially do marketing for the blockchain and Web3 investments of Andreessen Horowitz crypto.

57:54dough. I'm curious, like, if you didn't have money on the line, if you didn't have skin in the game, both your own personal capital and your investors money, would you still be this optimistic? Um, I don't know. I mean, I like I've, I've spent been optimistic kind of my whole career. I mean, I started in the internet downturn, you know, and so I started my first company 2003, four. and that, you know, that was not a popular time to be doing internet startups. It really wasn't. It was quite hard to raise money. And so, look, I've just seen my whole career every time there's been a bunch of smart people, it doesn't work for a while, and then eventually it does.

58:36And I have yet to see the really smart people eventually not get it to work. Okay. So I don't know, Kevin, like also I would say like, if you read this book, I think a lot of people are surprised when they read this book. It's not like seven cool things written by fund manager kind of book. Like I try to be, you know, give pros and cons. And as I said, it was sort of a test for myself. Right. And so, look, I mean, look, I obviously I have an interest in this. I mean, you could go, you could argue the causality goes the other way. Like I also work in this business because I am optimistic and I believe in it.

59:03And the firm is, you know, so you could argue either way, but yes, we have skin in the game. I also think we have a bigger skin in the game, which is, I do think that like, if we don't have blockchains, like I think it really, really will hurt tech startup activity. So there's this, like, you know, the whole venture industry is sort of based on this cyclical new companies, you know, the daddy lion dies and the baby lion's born. And like, if we just have a bunch of like daddy lions forever, like that's not good for venture capital. So yes, I'm self-interested, but I would argue the causality goes the other way.

59:32I'm in the business because I do believe in tech. I've also like, I grew up on Unix. I grew up on the web. I am a like open source maximalist. I would like to see everything open source and I see blockchain is an extension of that. But I would hope people could read the book and if they have a critique, critique the book and not sort of the, you know, the motives behind it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll end there. Chris Dixon, thank you for coming on. The book is Read, Write, Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet. And you've been a good sport here while we grilled you. So thanks for coming on. Thanks, Chris.

1:00:03You guys are, those are tougher questions, but they were good. They were good. And you guys were fair. Thank you. All right. Thanks for coming, Chris. Okay. All right. Take care.

1:00:14When we come back, it's time to play a round of Hat GPT.

1:00:33Casey, it's time to pass the hat. We're playing a game of Hat GPT.

1:00:41our segment on the show where we take news headlines from the week out of a hat and generate some plausible sounding language about them until one of us tells the other one to stop generating and this week we actually have in our possession a brand new hat gpt hat that's right we had a wonderful listener who went and sent this to us now if you are not watching the youtube show This is a cloth bucket hat that I think started as a plain white bucket hat, but was tie-dyed with blue and yellow and says hat GPT in the hard fork font is frankly a beautiful hat. It's a beautiful hat. It was sent to us by listener Guan Yip, who said that he designed it using generative AI.

1:01:24So thank you, Guan. And we will use this hat today. And hopefully more hats will keep pouring in. We'll just develop a little bit of a hat collection. Now, if it was designed using generative AI, does that mean that there's potentially a hidden code in this? I don't know. Check the brim. Yeah. Well, oh, actually, it does say the future is already here on the inside of the hat. So there is a bit. And if you flip it around, it does say stop generating. Wow. Wonderful hat. Hats off to Guan. Yep. Thank you. All right. So here are news stories for the week. Put them in the hat. All right. And you can mix them up.

1:01:59And let me pull out the first one. Yeah, you pull the first one. Okay. Let's see. Google employees blast profoundly boring management, which lacks visionary leader among layoffs. This is from the New York Post, and it is a story about a post on LinkedIn from a Google employee named Diane Hirsch Theroux. And she wrote on her LinkedIn page, quote, from the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed. The full post really is worth reading in its entirety. She goes off and basically says this company lacks all vision. So this post was very long, and it basically outlined a lot of the problems that this Google employee sees with the kind of sclerotic bureaucracy at Google.

1:02:46And it's quite a thing to write in LinkedIn about your bosses and your bosses' bosses. Well, it's very good writing, too. You know, I mean, this is a post that comes in response to Google's recent layoffs. And I think, you know, the point that this employee is making is it really seems like these layoffs are being done at random. Like this employee did not feel like there is a grand strategy that is being executed. And so now this person, like so many other people at Google are just like, how secure is my job here? You know, they feel like they don't know where things are going. So, you know, look, in an organization of tens of thousands of employees, you're always going to have some folks there that think that the company doesn't have a vision or whatever.

1:03:21I don't work at Google. I don't know how true I would find this if I worked there. But what I will say is that in the meantime, Diane Thoreau has done the impossible. She has made LinkedIn seem interesting. So thank you, Diane. This was an incredible post and we would love to see more posts like this. Yeah. More sounding off on your bosses on LinkedIn, please. Go off, Queens. Stop generating. Okay, my turn. All right. Pass the hat. Here's that.

1:03:46YouTube and Spotify won't launch Apple Vision Pro apps joining Netflix. This story is from Bloomberg. Basically, YouTube, Spotify, and a few other major developers like Netflix have said that they are not going to make versions of their apps for the Apple Vision Pro, which is, of course, what they're calling a spatial computing headset that comes out from Apple in just a few days. Yeah, that's right. And this is a surprise because for the past decade plus when Apple would come out with a new device, whether it would be the iPad, the watch, developers were racing to be on this thing because they thought there's going to be a big new market there.

1:04:26And if we can be the first movers, we can guarantee that we will reap the rewards. And now you have two of the biggest companies that exist. You just sort of take for as a given that there's going to be a Netflix app or a YouTube app. And these companies have said, you know what, we're going to pass on this one for right now. Yeah, it's really surprising in part because part of what spatial computing headsets might be really good for is like watching a movie or watching a video in kind of like an IMAX-like experience with your headset. So I don't know. Do you think this signals that developers don't think this product is going to be a success?

1:04:58Or there's another theory that was advanced by Ben Thompson this week that this is actually kind of developers sort of getting back at Apple for the kind of drama around some of their app store decisions over the past few years and saying, well, if you guys are going to insist on taking, you know, a 30 % cut of our revenue, we're going to fight back by refusing to make these apps that might convince people to buy your$3 ,500 face computer. Yeah, look, developers don't build apps out of goodwill. They build apps to make money. And Apple has instituted a lot of rules that ensure that some percentage of the revenue generated goes to Apple and not these developers.

1:05:36And so if you are a Google thinking about the YouTube app or your Netflix, you might just think, you know what, first of all, Apple's not even gonna sell that many of these things. You know, it's like the estimates are maybe it sells a half a million of them in the first year. How much incremental revenue can a YouTube or Netflix generate from there being a half a million of these new devices. So, you know, in the end, if there wind up being tons and tons of these Vision Pro headsets everywhere, I'm sure that YouTube and Netflix will come around. But in the meantime, I do think it's interesting that they are needling Apple a little bit and saying, hmm, let's wait and see.

1:06:07Yeah. Now, we should say you will be able to look at video in the web browser if you buy one of these things. So you can still access YouTube. You can still access Netflix, but you're not going to be able to do it via the App Store. Yeah. Wait, now it's my turn. Yeah, your turn. All right. New Hampshire investigating fake Biden robocall meant to discourage voters ahead of the primary. This is from the AP. The New Hampshire Attorney General's office Monday said it was investigating reports of an apparent robocall that used artificial intelligence to mimic President Joe Biden's voice and discourage voters in the state from coming to the polls during Tuesday's primary election.

1:06:42One of the quotes here was apparently fake AI. Biden said, quote, save your vote for the November election, as if we are only allowed to vote in one of the two, which is not true. Also, this happened in New York. So there was AI-generated audio of a Manhattan Democratic boss, Keith Wright. This is according to Politico. Keith Wright was apparently talking smack about another assembly member in this audio, but the audio itself, which was this 10-second clip, was apparently a fake. and so here Kevin we've talked about the threat of deep fakes to elections and I think we've talked a lot about images and video but here it is already showing up in national and local elections and it is audio yeah well what's interesting to me is like it doesn't sound like this deep fake that was played for voters in New Hampshire of Joe Biden telling them not to go to the polls like no one actually was fooled that this was actually Joe Biden calling that we've just become so accustomed to like these sort of pre-taped robocalls.

1:07:40But I confess like this arrived faster than I thought it would. Yeah, I would agree with that. What I would say, if you're wondering, you know, how do I protect myself against robocalls in this election? I would just suggest not answering your phone until January. Yeah, that was my question. It's like, who is picking up the phone in the year 2024? Don't pick up the, if you don't recognize the number, it's nothing good for you, okay? Nobody whose number is not already in your phone has anything good to tell you on the phone. It's true. Yeah, let them maybe send you an email. Yeah. All right, stop generating.

1:08:10hp ceo evokes james bond style hack via ink cartridges this is from ars technica last thursday hp ceo enrique lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink he said we have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges this is um apparently supposed to justify why you have to buy their ink cartridges instead of ordering one from like a third party on amazon or something which would probably be cheaper and just as good you know there was a time kevin when you could put like a lot of different cartridges into your printers but then the printer companies wised up and they said well why don't we lock them down and create essentially like these you know keurig machine style things where only keurig pods work in your keurig coffee maker well same thing for the printer but instead of just saying we're incredibly greedy and we'll stop at nothing to take all of your money for printer ink, they said, if you use another cartridge, people could literally die.

1:09:08That's what they said. It could infect your computer with a virus. Now, I'm not a security expert, but that doesn't seem very plausible to me. Do you think there's any way that a virus could actually infect you through your printer cartridge? I, let me just say, there's never been anything I've been less scared of than a virus in my printer. Like, I truly am not scared. Wait, do you have a printer? I actually don't have a printer and I need one. Wow. Yeah. Why do you need a printer? I have a laser printer, but it doesn't take ink cartridges. It takes, like, toner cartridges. And what's the difference between toner and ink?

1:09:40I have no idea. Okay, great. I couldn't tell you. All right, stop generating. Okay.

1:09:50Now, this one is an activity. Oh, boy. Kevin, your colleague Stuart Thompson published a quiz where you have to guess which faces in this quiz were made by AI, and we are invited to try it out and see how we do. If you'd like to play along at home, we're going to put a link to it in our show notes. Okay, so it's a 10-question quiz. For each question, it shows you a face and asks you if the face was made by AI. So should we take it together? Let's take it together. I'm going to share my screen. Okay, number one, this is a man I'm going to say fake. That one looks like AI to me. His eyes are too close together.

1:10:22All right. And that's a real person. I apologize to whoever's eye distance. I accidentally just insulted. Okay, this one kind of looks like a high school gym teacher. I'm going to say real. Totally real. And we're wrong again. That is an AI image. Okay, we're at zero for two. So I did hear once that the way to tell on an AI face is by looking at the earlobes, because AI is not good at doing earlobes that look like real people's earlobes. So how do these earlobes look? Well, let's see. I'm going to say fake. They look a little too connected to me. Fake lobes. Yay! Yes, we got it. Okay, this one, what do you think about this one?

1:11:03I think this one is fake because before we started, I said it was real and it was fake. So you cheated? I thought we were going to take the test separately. Okay. Correct, that is an AI image. Okay, let's try another one. Okay. All right, now we've got a young lady. She is sort of blonde, blue eyes. I would say can't really see the earlobes I'm gonna say real real no it's AI this is so hard there's another woman this has a lot of bokeh in the background what's bokeh? that's sort of blurring in the background and like look at you Ansel Adams I think this is real like there's like some I don't know the eyebrow looks kind of weird to me I'm gonna say AI I'm gonna say real oh you were right so here's a person who I would say respectfully has a head shaped like a trapezoid in a way that makes me feel like he's fake I'm gonna say fake too just cause the hairline is like either this is a fake image or this person's barber owes them an apology oh my god oh no I love how this like AI quiz has turned into us just like insulting the real faces and appearances of real people.

1:12:24I want to say this, man. While I did say you have a head shape like a trapezoid, I think I say it was in a hot way. It's like a hot, it's a hot shape for your head. And this, look, that's a beautiful man. That's a beautiful man. Okay. Okay. We're trying another. There's a woman wearing glasses. And I mean, at this point, I have completely lost any sense of what is real and fake. And I truly am just flipping the coin. Yeah. I'm saying real to me I'm gonna say real too oh my god it's AI oh Jesus okay um this has gotta be real I don't know I like don't trust my own I don't either instincts anymore so I'm gonna say fake even though I think it looks realistic I'm saying real alright it's a real person we got another one got another one I think this is the last one this is the last one okay uh AI nope that was real person wonderful okay so we're four out of ten 40 i'm not great at math but that's not a passing grade no we have failed out of ai facial recognition school so i've taken a few of these kinds of like is this thing ai generated or not tests uh and quizzes over the years and this is definitely the hardest one you know look if you just want to do some like shenanigans in the world and like and that those shenanigans are going to start with you creating like a fake linkedin profile, like you're in heaven because that's one of these images would get you anywhere you needed to go.

1:13:52So I think this is like just a sign that we just cannot, we just cannot reliably tell. Like if you and I, students of AI cannot score higher than a four out of 10 on this quiz, no one can. Oh, we're hosed. All right. Stop generating. All right. That's it for this week on Hat GPT. We'll close up the old hat, put it back on its pedestal where it belongs.

1:14:25Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We had help this week from Kate Lopresti. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Corey Shreppel. Original music by Alicia Baetup, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogli. video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergeson. If you haven't already, you can check us out on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Kate Lepresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com.

1:15:15Thank you.