Will Meta Bounce Back? (with Nikita Bier) | Where It Happens | Bonus Episode

Dude, what's going on? I'm so excited for. So excited for this one mailbag episode.

Yeah, this is. I mean, Nikita, I haven't seen you in years, and I. I follow every tweet you do, so it's. I'm having, like, a celebrity shock situation.

No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you've had to read everything I've said. It must be mentally taxing on you.

Well, the funny thing about Nikita. So we're in a group chat with Nikita. You just said you haven't seen him in years, which I find so funny because we basically talk every single day in this group chat. I've seen Nikita within the last year. Nikita and I had a big night out in LA not too long ago, which was a blast. But the funniest thing about Nikita is that most people have no clue what this man looks like in real life because he is a cartoon avatar shitposter on Twitter.

And I like to keep it that way. I run into people, I tell them my name, they're like, wait a minute, I follow you on Twitter. And, you know, it's. I still get all the benefits of fame without. Without any recognition. I could, smart man. Be walking around a grocery store. No one bothers me. Not. Not that I'm even at that level or anything.

Maybe someday, though. Maybe someday. Well, we're. We're pumped to have you on for at least a little bit of this mailbag episode. I am going to be drinking. I don't know if you guys are drinking. It's probably too early. Nikita's time. Maybe not, but I'm drinking Kentucky Owl Rye. 10 Year Rye. This was actually, you know, I've been doing these, like, whiskey rambling threads on Sundays. I kind of decided that everything had become too performative as I had, like, scaled on Twitter. And so I was just like, kind of fuck it, and I'm just gonna write off the cuff on random stuff and, like, hot takes and things. So I got a little drunk two weekends ago and wrote this thread, and people seem to like it. Like, a lot of cool people followed me. It got shared by, like, this famous cricket player that fired up my Indian family. And so then I decided I was going to do it again, and a bunch of people sent me whiskey. So I got this great bottle of whiskey sent to me, and I did it yesterday again. And, like, some people attacked me for some of the things I said, but for the most part, it was pretty. Can I.

Can I comment on your whiskey thread before we talk to Nikita, Please?

Hit me. You.

I read both your threads. They're amazing. But, like, if I'm gonna drink a bunch of whiskey and write a thread, like, it's not gonna be as well crafted as your thread. Like yours. You're an immaculate threat both times. So, like, how.

Well, first off, two whiskeys, not four, so that helps. It definitely starts to trail off, like, some of the later tweets even I can see, like, I made, like, grammatical errors and things. But you also got to know, like, my baseline is highly crafted, like, pure, like, really immaculate shit. And so that, for me, was, like, pushing the boundaries, a lot of it. But, yes, I agree with you. It still is. Like, in the grand scheme of things, it still looks that way. Probably.

Yeah, I would. I would agree that the quality has certainly degraded.

It's got to Nikita level. It got to Nikita level.

It wasn't quite on shit poster level. I mean, the palpable tension between shitpost Twitter and thread Twitter right now is, you know, you can really feel it. Like you can cut it with a butter knife. For sure.

Yeah, we're definitely. We're. We're. We're rivals in the Twitter sphere.

Well, I like it, so let's dive in.

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You won't regret it. Greg, I know you and I both, you and I both have a little bit of a list of things we wanted to cover. You want to start with mine or. I feel like I've got one to start that I feel like Nikita is going to be great for. So maybe we can start on my list. Cool. So Nikita, I mean Nikita's background, just for anyone that doesn't know, and he can talk a little bit more about it as well, is he's a founder, multi time founder. And other than being an amazing Twitter follow, he founded and built a business called TBH that was sold to Facebook for a bunch of money. And then he proceeded to work at Facebook heroically for several years as his stock vested out from that original deal. He's recently separated from the company and onto bigger and better things beyond just shitposting. He is building something new that's going to be cool. That was memed to death a few weeks ago on Twitter.

Can I interrupt you for one, one clarifying point? So Nikita, and you agree, I think you'll agree with me on this. It wasn't as clean as like, hey, I started a company and it was TBH and I sold it to Facebook.

No, no, it didn't work that way. We built, we did it for five years. We built 15 apps. We were about to shut down. We were very close to it. And the 15th app went straight to number one in the app store right as we were like basically turning off the lights in the office. It was our Hail Mary, but at the same time it was sort of a magnum opus of everything we had learned over the years. And the moment that it dropped, we were seeing exponential growth and it turned into a very competitive bidding process between a bunch of big names in Silicon Valley. And we got the term sheet within six Weeks of launching the app and we sold it was kind of like a dream come true situation. Basically like a movie.

It's kind of a crazy. So I didn't know that first off. So, Greg, I'm glad you paused and asked. I didn't know that it was the 15th out of 15 things. When I read stories about it, when I, like, looked you up when we first connected, it always just, it's like the, you know, the one line clickbait of like, you know, started and sold company for $100 million in 100 days or something. Like is the headline that I'll always read, which is fucking amazing, don't get me wrong. Super dope. It's sort of cooler that this was like your last thing and it was really, you know, took me 10 years to be an overnight success type situation where you pounded your head into a wall for a long time and then this final thing really worked. Yeah.

And I don't even think we'd be able to pull it off if it wasn't our 15th thing. Because when, when it, when it hit, we knew exactly what to do. We knew exactly how to scale it. We knew exactly how to maintain relationships with the press and media. We, we, we knew what we were doing. But if we just struck it on the first try, I think it would have crashed and burned really quickly. So I'm actually kind of glad it built character. And it also made us really hit it out of the park. I mean, 9 million users in I think it was like 90 days. It was a wild ride.

That's so insane. I love it. And now companies come to you to get advice on those things. From the 14 headaches, I'm sure, just as much as the one success. It's awesome. And we have you on for a number of reasons beyond just that one story, which is amazing. But I want the first thing on my list, Greg, is I want to talk about Facebook and the Facebook earnings. I don't know what catastrophe or like apocalypse or whatever I'm going to call it. So to set the stage on this, Facebook announces earnings last week and basically plunges like 26% or something like that. On the back of it, it erased $250 billion of market value in, in a single day. It was the largest single day wipeout of market value in history ever. Point blank. Mark Zuckerberg lost like $30 billion of net worth in the single day Snap. Got pulled down on the back of it that day, only to Whipsaw the other way. 60 up 60% after dropping like 30% on the day of Facebook's announcement. Just like a totally insane set of events. I want to talk about it because it's really interesting to think through what the hell was going on. I am on the record. You could check the tapes on this. I was on CNBC talking about Facebook maybe two months ago when they changed their name to Meta, saying that basically I thought it was like PR101, Crisis Management 101, that they had a fundamental product issue that was going unaddressed and that they were going to be in trouble. So they were grabbing attention, shifting to the metaverse, doing all of those things. They've now come out and said that some of the stuff that Apple has done with the ATT, the App Tracking Transparency, is going to cause a $10 billion hit to their business in 2022. There's so many things happening here and Nikita, having been at Facebook, is a great person to comment on them. So can you just explain a little bit of this position that Facebook is in now and where you see it going?

Yeah. So to set some context on that market cap drop, the last record holder for that drop was also Facebook. This is the second time they've set the record.

What was the first one's number?

What was that?

How much was the first one?

I think it was in like the upper, like hundreds of million, hundreds of billions. But I remember because I worked there when it happened and I remember reading that headline. But, you know, so I, when I joined Facebook, I never had a real job before. And I came in there and I was like, blown away. This company really knows how to grow products. Like, I look through, you know, the workplace social network, which is where all the employees kind of engage and they are treating growth as like an academic discipline. And that's what Facebook has built, is like a machine that can grow products. However, the thing that they really struggle with is 0 to 1 creating new products. And that's. That doesn't only plague Facebook. Many other companies, many, most of big tech has not ever built in house. Zero to one products that have had that have broken out, like the iPhone was truly like a historical example that that happened. But I think if you look across all of big tech, you rarely see that happen. And at this, okay, so setting the stage there that they can't build zero to one really that well. They have huge amounts of competition coming in. Imessage is going after close friends and that's where their high RP ARP users are. The ones that bring in the bulk of the revenue are in the US and iPhone is eating, or imessage is eating their lunch. On the content and entertainment side, TikTok is just growing like a weed. And everybody saw this coming two years ago, just based on the growth trajectories. And the third kind of terrifying thing is they can't acquire. So the regulators, the ftc, they won't sign off on any sort of large acquisition of a user base. So they're losing users from an engagement from these two other competitors at the same time. They can't really buy their way out of it like they did with Instagram in the past or WhatsApp.

So Nikita, it's such a fast, you know, your, your king for the day. You're Nikita Zuckerberg. Does, you know, what do you. What do you do? Do you, like, break up Facebook? Like, what's your plan? Or did you just go home and cry and just. Is this, you know, is this just going to be, you know, a zombie company for the. For the next 20 years?

So it's a tricky situation. Like, I don't think there's an easy answer here. There's no silver bullet, you know, and people ask, like, why can't they just start building in house? It's not easy for them to build in house. Big tech doesn't do that well. The incentives aren't really aligned to get employees to take big swings. You might get a big bonus for making the next Instagram, but I don't know anyone who'd grind it out for that sort of reward. They'd rather just keep it all for themselves and start their own company. So the environment isn't really conducive to founders. They're certainly trying to. They've created the new product Experimentation. Org, which I was a part of the creation of that. But it's tough. Like, I had some crazy ideas and I was like, I don't know if I could build it in this context.

It's so interesting because as investors, all three of us do quite a bit of angel investing or investing. And one of the most common questions that new founders get is like, oh, why won't Facebook just come and do this? Or why wouldn't Twitter just go and do this? And you'll be dead. If one of the big companies just decides they want to do this, and then you get the counterpoint to it, which is literally that there are so few examples of an incumbent figuring out innovation and being able to go and do something 0 to 1, that it actually makes you feel better about these startups. Because, like, A laser focus on a single thing will always outperform these big companies that are like trying to hobble over, you know, like a big ogre to, to go and do something and like jankily pull something together within a new market.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I was worried as a founder when I was building social apps. I was like, I don't want to show it to any Facebook employees. They might copy it. But after being on the inside, it takes about a year of collecting data for them to even think about building something like this or building something they see happening in the market. And then it takes three months of like a framing process where you do research, you put together slide decks that you send around to executives, and then you have another year after that to actually build it and get it to pass all the legal sign offs. So you're looking at almost like usually like over two years to respond. Like, I remember I was sounding the alarm bells for Clubhouse. I was like this, this is a new format that's pretty interesting. And you know, it took, it took some time for people to catch on to it. And that's gold, by the way, like

for a startup founder out there to hear that that like the bureaucracy and the absurdity of these big tech, the committees and the layers that it has to go through to actually compete against you. I mean, what a call to arms. If you're a startup founder out there worried about starting something because of, you know, the potential competition from a big tech company, it might actually be a

good thing for them to even know you exist because then, then there's a bigger M and a appetite for them to go after it if, if Facebook could ever acquire things again.

Yeah, that's an interesting point that you raised actually too is like this whole FTC thing has been so confusing to me because you on one hand have, you know, government just going after the like big American tech companies and basically just saying that like any acquisition they do is going to come under, you know, review. And then you have TikTok, which is Chinese owned and de facto controlled by the Chinese government by the way, and

owns the data of literally every single

teenager in the United States. And we're just going to not say anything about that. And everyone like, you know, Trump kind of went on his crusade. Then there was the whole weird thing where he was going to like say that Oracle was going to take over the US business of TikTok, which was weird and bizarre. But we're just not going to talk about TikTok and the fact that like the Chinese government has direct access to the data of millions of teenagers in the U.S. but if Facebook wants to go acquire some tiny company, it's going to get tons of shit for it.

Yeah. And I think the public thinks that Facebook doesn't, can't be trusted to manage sort of the problems that have plagued its platform like misinformation, integrity issues. But one area that I hold a lot of respect for as a founder who is not that excited about working at a place like Facebook, they have some of the best integrity systems, the best spam, the best misinformation detection systems out of any, probably any company in the world. And would we really want to entrust a Chinese company to, to handle sort of those, those problems? Because that's basically the, the, the, the message that the FTC is sending is we're going to kind of control the growth of this other company to let this, to let FTC, to let TikTok continue to grow. So I, I think it's, it's kind of a shame because I would, I would want those controls to be on our shores and they're really not.

I feel like the better branding play would have been if Facebook rebranded to USA instead of Meta. And it was just like this whole rally around, you know, almost like how when I think of Ford. Yeah, American owned.

Yeah, yeah.

I actually think kind of, kind of genius. I think that this last earnings call though, I think, you know, there was some, you know, 4D chess being played to show. I mean, it took a huge hit to the market cap, but I think it showed to the world that this is a competitive market, that the antitrust concerns might be overblown. You know, certainly Facebook dominates in a certain age cohorts, certain localities, but it's getting, it's facing extreme competitive pressures from other areas. So, but I think highlighting that and making it visible and taking a hit financially might be a short run, like a short term cost for a longer term play.

I mean, it also showed the craziness of its reliance, I mean, the impact that Apple's ATT change had on Facebook's business. Yeah, IDFA crazy. I mean the app tracking transparency thing, Apple basically, you know, allowing you to opt out of having apps track your activity, which for people that don't understand it basically limits Facebook's ability to have highly qualified targeted ads. And so that reduces the level of pricing that Facebook is able to pass through to advertisers on the platform, which is basically what Facebook's business is. It's an ad business. And Ben Thompson, I think, talked about it. Basically, this was. It was $10 billion that was going to be the impact to Facebook in 2022 was what they said on the earnings call, which, as he pointed out, is it's a pricing change because it's the level of price you can charge to the advertisers, which is a direct hit to the bottom line of Facebook and is a massive proportion of their annual earnings that are actually going to get hit there. So the market response actually felt like it made sense. I just don't think people. I don't think people fully understood how impactful Apple's one single change could be to the entire ecosystem that existed out there of all these other players that rely on that tracking mechanism.

Yeah, it goes to show that the monopoly might not be Facebook. It might very well be Apple. The fact that they could just hobble a bunch of small businesses overnight by hurting the performance of ads. I think a lot of people say, oh, we're really sticking it to Facebook. But realistically, the people that are impacted the most are these are the owners of small businesses. So I think the FTC might be better to realign their whole probe against the company that controls our phones.

Facebook is just such a fun enemy. I mean, even since the early days, right? Like, Mark Zuckerberg has been so fun to hate for all of these regulators, for the government, ever since the days of social network when he was kind of like painted as this weird evil genius villain. And I actually don't think any of it is fair, but he was painted that way. And that was the image you had of him. And the whole thing with the Winklevosses and this whole story about Zuckerberg and who he was, right or wrong, it's like been the image that's been painted of him that I think has been implanted into the American mind. And honestly, my take on privacy, too is like people don't actually really care to the point where they're not really willing to pay extra money to have more privacy. That's like one of my hot takes that exists out there.

And so I just think part of

it is just imagery and figuring out how to shift that perception again for them. Because it's. I think it's like 10 plus years in the making. How it's.

Yeah, my. Here's my take on that. My take is a lot of people feel like Mark Zuckerberg is punchable. And if Mark Zucker. Okay, a couple things, actually. If Mark Zuckerberg wasn't the founder and CEO of Facebook, I don't think the stock would have dropped as, you know, as much. I feel like it's so polarizing because, like, people have this image of him and they want. They want. So many people want to see him lose, and they see it as one person. I don't know how if, you know, Facebook must have, like a hundred thousand employees, but they, you know, they see it as one person. And the second thing is, if the social network didn't come out, I feel like it also wouldn't have, you know, it wouldn't be that polarizing. I feel like so many people saw the social network and because of that, we have this, like, image of, like, Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg. The whole, like, Silicon Valley, like, shaped the whole, like, generation. It shaped our generation of entrepreneurs totally, 100%.

I think a lot of this hatred is totally misplaced. I mean, I don't think, like, people think, oh, it's Facebook's trying to make more money off of us. At the end of the day, like, this is. This is my kind of polarizing opinion. Companies exist, like, big tech companies exist for the egos of the founders. And at the end of the day, he just wants to be liked. He just wants to build something that helps people. I mean, he's made enough money, so it's not like making another $20 billion is really going to change anything for him. So I think, like, the public's kind of animosity is a little bit misplaced here. But yeah, I. I know if I say that out loud, and I am right now, I'm gonna get on on Twitter because everyone.

That's okay. Everyone will be the first or last time all of us get on on Twitter. I, like, you guys, probably get on on Twitter more than I do to date, but now I'm starting to come into it now that I've got these, like, got the drunk threads going. So I'm gonna join you guys in. In the getting hate on Twitter land. Dude.

Wait, before. Before Indikita leaves. Oh, I need to know because, you know, I bought some shares of Facebook literally right before this call. That's why I was late. I'm sorry, are you.

Call your shot? Yeah.

You know, this isn't financial advice, but, like, you know, are you bullish or bearish on Facebook at these current prices?

I mean, they're facing some serious. Some serious issues here, and I don't think there's an easy way out. I think the metaverse is many years away. At least that strategy. I. I don't see us Wearing face computers anytime in the short term. So I, you know, there has to be some Hail Mary here, I think, for them to. To climb out of this. At the same time, though, like a 16 XP ratio for that amount of talent at that company, there's. There's some value there. So this is not financial advice.

So wait, so wait, are you bullish or bearish?

I. I don't know.

It's.

It's. I. I think they have a ton. Bottom line is they have a ton of talent for that PE ratio. I think it's. It's a. It's a very good value buy right now. But where's Scott Galloway on it? I. I just don't know. I can't see where the route out is right now for them. So that's what gives me pause.

I just follow. I go anti portfolio of Turner Novak. Turner shout out banana cap.

Although Turner was proven right.

You tweeted against him. Nikita on Snapchat. And then the next day it was up 60%.

I made a 500% trade off of Snap on that day.

I saw that. You'll have a lot. Nice. Nice. I'm impressed. Well, dude, thank you so much for joining to jam on this one. Appreciate you and look forward to bringing you back on for a proper episode as well.

Yeah, thanks for having me and good luck, guys.

Thank you.

I wanted to drop my app, by the way.

Oh, hit us.

All right, so what I'm building is. And you can cut me off right there.

Perfect. What a legend. What an exit. What an exit. All right, man.

All right. That was fun.

All right. That was really fun. I'm glad we brought him on to talk about that. I still am not sure whether he's bullish or bearish on Facebook, but we can take it.

Are you bullish or bearish on Facebook? At these levels, I'd buy Facebook here.

I mean, I, I'm not. I don't buy individual stocks. I've talked to you about this. I only buy ETFs, like, you know, market tracking things. And I was. I've been buying big tech stuff on this, on this, like, drop over the last several weeks. I mean, there are some names that are just that feel under the surface, really undervalued here. So, dude, I'm a buyer.

What is this 16P8PE ratio on Facebook? That's. That's absurdities. That's literally absurd.

But I don't. I like, I don't know what that means, bro. I'm not a hedge funder. I know what it Means, and I get it, but it's not like everyone throws these numbers around and they're like, oh, 16. Well, like, five years ago, that was probably high. Right? It's just multiples have expanded. So I. I don't know, but it does just seem like it's not like Facebook's not going to be a future. So I personally, I like betting on mega stuff and things I'm never going to sell. I don't trade. Like, I. My active strategy in markets is I literally buy with never intending to sell, and I intend to take loans against holdings and never sell so that I can not have to pay taxes in the future. Pro tip. But I don't intend to ever sell. And I am perfectly happy owning big US tech over the next 20.

I mean, Apple included, by the way,

given what they were able to do to this entire market with that one change. I love Apple.

Couple of things. What the world runs on. WhatsApp literally runs on it. So, you know, that is really the crown jewel of Facebook, in my opinion. So big believer in WhatsApp, even though it's hard to monetize messaging apps. So, like, that's the counterpoint to what I just said is just, like, it's just harder to monetize. But, like, who's to say they can't turn WhatsApp into more of a social network? So that's number one. Number two, like, I feel like they needed this, like, compression, and Nikita kind of talked about it, but, like, they needed this compression to. To basically be an underdog. And I feel like, I don't know, a year, two, three years from now. Like, I feel like they're gonna. They're gonna ship some stuff, and. And. And some of it's gonna work. So I'm. I think. I think the stock will outperform. That's. That's what I think.

Yeah, that's a good bet. I think it's a good bet, though. He pointed it out. The level of talent there is hard to bet against at these prices. So I'm. I'm. I'm with it. I totally get it. You want to jump to. Want to jump to. The next thing I know, we've got a handful of other things to get through. You want to hit one from your list? You want to do another?

I'll kick it off. So are you familiar with the nouns project?

The red glasses?

Yeah, red glasses, blue glasses, yellow guesses. So basically, what it is for context is if you go to nouns, wtf, you can pull it up right now. I am it's an NFT project where they sell these characters, they're called Nouns, and they wear these glasses, kind of like what I'm wearing, that kind of vibe. And every day it's an auction forever. And there's a new one every single day. And these things go for hundreds of thousands of dollars every single day, huh? One per day.

And

the founding team of which Dom, who's the co founder of vine, is on the founding team and this, you know, this guy Gremplin, who's a well known NFT artist on the founding team. These like, well known people don't take a cut of the actual sales because they've raised, you know, millions of dollars. They actually just get. I think it's like one in every ten, I think of the actual Nouns goes to their, their wallet. And the big innovation around Nouns is this thing called cco, which is create a common zero, which is this idea that. The artwork is in the public domain. So even if you sahil, you go and buy this like, you know, eight bit character with these like blue glasses, you actually don't own it. The whole world owns it. So I can actually, you can go spend $400,000 on this little Nouns guy and I can actually go down like right click, save as a jpeg, go to a screen printer and actually like, you know, wear, you know, sell hats. Jack Butcher, our friend Jack Butcher is doing that. Like I bought last night for $69, obviously, a hoodie with the blue nouns. Glasses,

obviously, by the way, on $69. Great.

And you know, a lot of people look at that and they're like, wow, I'm gonna spend $300,000 on this like NFT and I don't even own the rights. That's crazy. But because it's in the Create, you know, Creative Commons, you know, your meme spreads a lot quicker, which is the bet. And it's this whole, you know, it's kind of interesting.

So.

Oh, you got, you, you want to say something?

Yeah. So it's interesting because I've written about this stuff in the past. Like I've written about Disney's IP coming into public domain and how Disney will fight to the death to maintain their. They've actually changed IP law in the US on like seven or eight occasions to avoid Mickey Mouse coming into the public domain. And yet now you have this company in Nouns, or entity that is actively leaving things into the public domain immediately. So I'm trying to wrestle, you know, I'm trying like the juxtaposition of old World and new world here is very, very.

I think while it sounds like CCO is just like so simple and small, it's actually such a game changer. And I think brands in 2022 or in 2023, you know, are going to leverage CCO and it's going to be. It's going to be huge. But what I wanted to talk about, now that you understand a little of the stage in the context of nouns, is nouns just published or, sorry, Bud Light just partnered with nouns and they released a Super bowl commercial. It's going to be on the Super Bowl. The super bowl is this Sunday, February, whatever Sunday is, and they just did the release of it. And in the Bud Light commercial, there's the character walks into this museum and there's this massive nouns glasses, aka nouns are mainstream. Aka NFTs are mainstream. Aka CC0 is mainstream.

So I have a handful of questions. I mean, it does seem like a big deal. And I'm not shocked that there is like web3 influence in Super bowl ads, by the way, just because of how it's captured public attention. But I will say there's a lot of interesting features here that, you know, just as like a curious observer that I'm looking at, number one, talk to me about this whole idea of the nouns DAO treasury. So all of the proceeds, if I'm reading it correctly, from these auctions are going into this treasury. Is the treasury. What are they using the treasury for? And like this partnership with Budweiser, is it like related to the treasury? Do you know anything about how they're.

Yeah.

So nouns, the way it works is you buy a noun, and if you're lucky enough to spend $300,000 and you get this noun, what you get is one vote in the DAO. For those of you who don't know DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. Basically a fancy way of saying it's like a crypto company, let's put it that way, and they vote on ways to spend that treasury. So I actually think that I haven't looked into it, but I'm pretty sure that they. This Bud Light deal came from a vote that the community did to. To get the nouns word out there.

This is pretty fascinating. I pulled up the Bud Light super bowl ad and the imagery around it. First off, it's super cool and it looks like it's going to be a cool ad. So I'm excited to actually see it on Sunday during the game. But it does feel. I mean, this public domain thing is what I'm Wrestling with. And that I think is so interesting because I've seen nouns, the glasses, which are very distinct looking. We'll include a, we'll include an image or something when we post the episode. But you and I were both in the crypto project and you owned a. You owned a crypto that had nouns glasses, and those were considered more rare. So is that part of the IP that we're talking about that's in public domain? Like, can other NFT projects use nouns glasses, or do they have to be related to nouns to use?

Yeah, so great question. So Cryptodes was a project that was started by Gremlin, one of the artists of nouns. And so he went and used the nouns glasses. And a lot of cryptos have nouns glasses. That being said, there's another project, for example, called the Littles, and it's completely unrelated from cryptos or nouns or any project to do with that team. And a lot of those NFTs have nouns classes and they're able to do it because it's CC0. It's completely in the public domain.

Okay, so here's my take on this that I'm just formulating while you're explaining all of this to me. This is fascinating because what you have is this collision of Old World IP management, which is Disney, and they're the pillar of that. And you have Disney, who has protected with weapons, going out and fighting people to the death over their ip. Over the course of their history, ever since releasing the Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse back In the early 1900s, they have fought and spent millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to fight US copyright, trademark regulations in order to keep their IP out of public domain. Now you have these New World companies and entities that are actually doing the exact opposite. They want their content and their IP in the public domain. Why? Because as we talked about with Billy, the founder of Dogecoin a few weeks ago, memes control the universe. He who controls the memes controls the world. And that is such a fascinating shift because how do you drive enterprise value in this day and age? Is it now that you drive it via virality and memes? Maybe. And it's a really interesting live experiment and laboratory to see whether it works. I actually don't know the answer of whether it's going to work or not, but it's a pretty fascinating case study to see the collision of the two worlds. Honestly, Mickey Mouse is actually coming up into public domain apparently, I think in 18 months or so or at the end of 2023. So it's interesting to See whether that world will prevail or whether this new world that's being created by things like nouns will be the one that prevails and that will ultimately generate the most value going forward.

Yeah, I think, to me it's very clear who's going to win that battle. And, you know, I think, you know, here's the thesis of CC0. The thesis is that if you see, I'll call it, actually, I'll call it the wordle thesis. You know, that game that you've been seeing on Twitter and places like that, like, you play that game, or you'll see that game so often that you might play it and it might be a part of your, you know, your ritual and your habit and your morning coffee. The same thing is true with nouns glasses. You might see nouns glasses, you know, on a billboard, you might see it on your friend's profile picture, you might see it on a Super bowl ad, you might see it in a coffee mug, you might see it in a, you know, you go into a store and they're selling nouns Gears. And that might make you want to, you know, buy an NFT of nouns or, you know, maybe they make games in the future and you want to buy that game or access that game. So the thesis is the more touch points that you have of ip, the more likely you are, assuming it's good ip, the more likely you are to be connected to that ip, the more likely you are to buy products and services, the more likely you are to join that community, etc. Etc.

Yeah, it's really interesting because to me, it's a question of like, indirect and direct value attribution. Traditional companies rely on direct value attribution. If someone is out there producing T shirts with Mickey Mouse on it and Disney isn't earning the money from that, their traditional mindset is, that's bad for me. That's money that I should have been earning. They should have been buying a Disney T shirt that had that printed and I just lost money. A new way of thinking about that would be. That is a great thing because now there are more people that are out there wearing Mickey Mouse shirts that are then thinking about Mickey Mouse, because everyone that sees them sees it and might feel a connection to that piece of IP or might know what that is and then will rise the tide overall that will allow me to earn more money in the long term. And so that's where my head goes to. On it is like, I actually don't know. It's a math question to me of which model works and which one wins in the market in the long term. Because if the market determines that this new way works, which is let everyone use it, share it, expand upon it, build it in different ways, use it like Lego blocks to create new things, my gut tells me that model actually works better in the long run because more cool things get created with it in this, like, weird laboratory that we're building up in the future.

I feel like the model of I create IP and I need to protect my IP is very much coming from a place of fear. You're leading with fear and it's, you know, versus this new world that we're entering, which is like, actually I'm not fearful at all. I'm going to go and like open source, basically, my ip and I'm so confident that the experience that, you know, the core experience that I've created is so compelling that the more touch points, the better. So for Disney, and actually I was at Disney World in Orlando this past weekend. That place isn't cheap. No, it is not cheap. You know, it's, you know, if you're

going as ticket prices have gone way more than inflation over the course of history. I researched this recently for a piece that I wrote.

It's wild. Like, you can easily spend, you know, you can either you can go to Aspen or you can go to Orlando. Basically, that's the vibe. But it's a fantastic experience and I recommend people do it, especially product people. This is a side note. Product people go to Disney World and just see how much attention to detail, the roads, the sounds, the smells, the whole thing is immaculate. But the point is it's super expensive and they're making high margin. So Disney, be confident.

Yeah. The analog to it that keeps coming to mind for me is this whole build in public movement. I feel like 10 years ago it was like blasphemy to tell a founder that they should talk about what they're doing and their numbers or their metrics or product releases, whatever. And now you see founders tweeting out their ARR every month, products. They're working on things. They're growing. Our friend Josh Fabian at Metafy, he literally, like, he sends out his investor updates publicly every month. And that, I mean, 10 years ago, that's literal blasphemy because you'd just be terrified that some competitor would come steal it. But it's interesting. It's all part of the same, like, open movement within the digital world. I actually, I don't know. I don't know. My gut tells me that more Open leads to more memes which will continue to drive growth of the ecosystem and I think that that will win in the long run. But I'm curious, I'm really, really curious to see. I love this one. This was a great topic.

I'm glad you what do you got?

Anthony Levandowski. Do you know who that is?

I do, but tell, tell the listeners who that is.

I, I love this man. Anthony Levandowski. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Anthony Levandowski was a or is a self driving car engineer, founder, entrepreneur. Most people would know him for the fact that he ran Google's self driving car business which became called Waymo for a long time, left in 2016 and started this business called Otto that was doing self driving trucks. Otto was acquired by Uber shortly after founding and Google did not like that that someone that was recently at Google started a different business, got acquired by Uber who had aspirations to build a large self driving car business. Given its, given its business model. It turned into a massive lawsuit. Criminal Investigation into Levandowski, 33 counts I believe he was charged with trade secret theft, all of these scary things. Pled guilty to one count and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for, for that charge, but was then pardoned by our former president Donald Trump and ended up getting getting out of it. Anthony Levandowski is back in the public sphere. He started a business, I think it's called Pronto AI which is also self driving vehicles. But most interestingly he is now starting something called Pollen Mobile which I saw in the news recently. There was a TechCrunch article about it, which is basically a peer to peer open source wireless network. And I want to talk about it because I think it's pretty fascinating. Basically what they're doing is it's crypto enabled and it is something that they started because the cars that he was building at Pronto AI actually needed good wireless mobile connectivity. And so what they found was that it was hard to find in the Bay Area. They were having issues with it. So Pollen Mobile is a system that creates incentives via cryptocurrency called pollen tokens for people to put up basically little mini cell towers that are going to create wireless connectivity around the area. So you go and spend money upfront to buy these systems. I think they're calling them something funny like sparrows or hummingbirds or bees or something like that. There's some kitschy name to go along with Pollen and you put one of these up, you pay 10,000 bucks or something to set One of these up and you get incentivized for providing connectivity to the network via pollen tokens, which then provide this system with capacity. People use it, the tokens become more valuable as people are trading in them, et cetera. I think it's pretty fascinating. Helium is the other one that I've seen doing this that was doing the WI fi connectivity. I'm curious for your takes on it.

Yeah, my take is anywhere where there's incentives, human incentives, crypto can play a role there. It's a really great way to incentivize people to do stuff. So what I like about this idea is it feels very natural to crypto. So it makes a lot of sense to me. I think it's a great idea.

Yeah. First off, you're a design geek. Website is one of the most beautiful websites I've seen. PollenMobile IO is the website. P O L L E N Mobile IO website is gorgeous. And it lays out the whole thing. The names, they're calling them hummingbirds, bumblebees and flowers, which, like, we're going to have to talk to them about the naming because that's a lot.

But I do think it's really interesting,

like this whole idea of incentivizing people to create these kind of decentralized pillars that create capacity for a network. It's a pretty interesting use case. Helium has obviously been quite successful with what they've done on the WI fi side. But I thought this was kind of a neat, a neat angle. I was actually thinking about, I'm not in the Bay Area, they're launching in the Bay Area, but I was thinking about going and buying one of these things and just participating in it to learn because I find it to be a pretty interesting project.

Yeah, this website is gorgeous. What I do like about this website, there's something I like about it and something I don't like about it. What I like about it is

you

scroll down a little bit and it says mine, crypto from your phone. And I think like, that concept is just really compelling. Like, I feel like, you know, a lot of crypto projects and lake checkout. Our firm is involved in a bunch where we'll see, like, it's basically just like too complicated. Like, just like get it down to like five words that anyone, you know.

It's the Feynman technique. So explain it to M5.

Exactly. So I love that, you know, that's cool. What I don't like about it, and it's the opposite of explaining me like I'm five is I'M going, you know, I went to like the how it works section, I think, and it basically they have a bunch of kind of words that are. Here, let me pull it up. Like earn bumblebees, earn flowers, earn hummingbirds. It's like, yeah, no, no, go back to earning crypto from your phone, you know.

Yeah, yeah, they're definitely going pretty far with the whole pollen analogy. A little further than I think. But the concept itself, people hate their wireless networks, like people hate their phone companies. Nobody likes it. And so the idea of like the centralized phone companies and in these little pockets you could create a decentralized version where basically if you're using the network, you pay in pollen tokens and the providers of the capacity get paid in pollen tokens and pollen tokens appreciate as people speculate in them or as people buy them to invest in them to potentially use later, etc. It's sort of a little interesting microcosm experiment, helium, I think Andreessen Horowitz backed and several others. There's, there's something interesting here. I, and I don't know anything about Anthony Levandowski. I just thought it was fascinating that he was back in the news because I remember reading all about him when he had the whole self driving car thing happen. So anyway, I think this is an interesting one to follow. I'm personally going to poke around a bit. If I was in the Bay Area, I really do think I would buy one of these little systems because I think it's fascinating.

My advice for him is find a new name. The website Pollenmobile IO. I feel like what he needs to do and the team needs to do is like generate a lot of credibility and like maybe there's a, like an old telecommunication darling company that he can go and buy the name, the rights for. That's like shut down or a brand that's like shut down by the name. And then you know, you know who did this actually. But like bad example is Tai Lopez. So he bought Radio Shack. I don't know if you saw that.

Oh yeah, I remember that. I did see that.

So Tai Lopez, you know, famous YouTuber has been buying up old brands and love him or hate him, he's done a good job at buying a lot of these brands. And he's turned Radio Shack into a Uniswap competitor, which is Uniswap for those who don't know, is basically a crypto exchange competitor, decentralized crypto exchange. But you'll go to Radio Shack because you're like, I remember Radio Shack. I have good. You know.

Yeah.

And I think Radio Shack. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Radio Shack is one of those places that like people remember a distinct smell from Radio Shacks across the world. I know I talked about smells with Disney World, but it matters because it triggers your memory.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just don't know what he wants, you know, like the pollen mobile thing, is it really going to be a core business or is it just that it's a spin off, you know, they needed it for the pronto AI thing. Like I saw a quote in one of the articles. He said, the reason why we did this is simple. We needed reliable, affordable mobile connectivity for our AVs, our autonomous vehicles, and we couldn't find it. So we built our own and realized it could be something others want. Necessity is the mother of invention. So there's a couple lessons in there. I mean, I think first off, kind of cool that he's just an enterprising founder and they needed something that was functioning for their actual core startup and they went and built something else that's functioning that other people might want. That's pretty cool. And the whole concept of necessity is the mother of agree hard.

I really like that. It's the classic Slack story. I'm sure you know that story where no.