Welcome back, everyone. I am Cass PNC.
I'm joined as usual, by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett
Tomlin. How are you today?
I'm. Doing well.
How are you, Cass? I'm doing great.
We're joined by one of our favorite guests of all time,
Molly White. Thank you for coming back and
joining us today. How are you?
Doing well, always happy to come back on the show.
It's always nice to have you, and today we're today we're
talking about a topic near and dear to my heart.
We are. We're discussing a few things
that I think are really fun. We're discussing a book.
The book is read, write, own. The author is Chris Dixon, who,
if you're unfamiliar with him, he has quite a presence on X,
formerly Twitter. I think he has something like
500,000 followers or something like that, maybe 400,000,
something like that. He is a partner for Andreessen
Horowitz, A16Z. They are a venture capital firm
that has made a lot of moves in the cryptocurrency and tech
space in general. They really have pushed Web
Three and this notion of how it's saving the Internet.
And with that, with the just broad explanation of what we're
jumping into here. I have not read that book.
My Co host Bennett has and Molly has.
And the reason we wanted to have Molly on today is because her
review really encapsulated what I expected this book to be.
So we're going to link to her review.
It's review Chris Dixon's read, write own.
Prominent crypto venture capitalist Chris Dixon provides
an unconvincing Bible for blockchain solution.
Molly, you took the time to to get into the weeds of this this,
as you call it, biblical prophecy for blockchain.
Why didn't it convince you? Chris Dixon is doing what, as
you mentioned, Andreessen Horowitz has done for a long
time now, which is they really like to focus, or at least some
of them really like to focus on the idea that blockchains are
the solution to all the problems with the web.
Which has always been something that like, really gets my
interest because I'm also really interested in the web and things
that are wrong with it and ways that it could become better.
And so I was really interested in reading sort of a long form
explanation of things that they've been really saying for a
long time, like in their blog posts, which are prolific.
You know, they go on podcasts and say all this stuff, and it's
always been really unconvincing because they sometimes do
identify actual problems. You know, that, you know, big
tech is taking over the web. And so much of what we see is
filtered through the algorithms of Google and Twitter and
Facebook and all this stuff, which, like there are legitimate
complaints there. But then they just sort of
jumped to this idea that blockchains will solve those
problems with really poor explanations of how they might
solve those problems or how they might not introduce a lot of new
problems. And in this book in particular,
you know, a lot of what they were talking about was in the
sort of 2020-2021 era where things were still a little bit
nascent as far as people building these web products on
Ethereum. But now Dixon has come out with
a book in 2024 after a lot of projects have tried to do the
very things that he is saying blockchains will be well suited
for. And they've failed at it
spectacularly. And he doesn't mention those in
the book. You know, he just talks about
like, oh, someday someone will do these things.
And so, you know, I was really disappointed in the book because
I was hoping for maybe at least an honest reflection on what's
happened and what's gone wrong. And, oh, you know, maybe there
are these problems we didn't think about, but there was
really none of that. It was a lot of the same stuff
they've been saying, you know, as if it was published in 2020
with no sort of benefit of experience.
You mentioned there that he doesn't address the failures,
and one of the almost stranger dynamics to me was how in some
sense failures were passed off as if they were not that right.
Like he had a whole several paragraphs section where he was
talking about how Helium and how helium was.
A good example of how tokens can help you get around the
bootstrap problem. But no one uses helium.
Except for all the poor rubes who bought the the routers, or
whatever they call them the the hotspots.
Like there was some market for that?
I guess his argument there is you can take advantage of
sufficiently stupid people if you make vague promises in front
of them, and that can save you money on infrastructure build.
I guess. This actually brings me to an
act like a. Pretty interesting thought that
I'm having where it's just like okay we know A16Z Bennett, I
hope you link to Bennett wrote this article for Protos.
He went over every A16Z investment and a lot of them
were very, very poor investments and I think and did they invest
in AXI Infinity? They invested in Sky Mavis when
Sky Mavis launched AXI Infinity. If we want to look at the
failures of the companies that they invest in, and I understand
this is a part of venture capital, right?
Like venture capital, most of it's going to be failures.
Most of it is going to be companies that don't succeed in
one way or another. They might not be scams, but
they don't do what they think they're going to do.
It seems like it would be quite valuable actually, to go into
the depths of that if you want. If you want a book that people
are going to read and actually learn from, I guess it seems
like as especially as a venture capitalist who's made I don't
you think that'd be a more interesting book.
Am I sorry? Am I wrong?
I'm just jumping ahead to your conclusion that an interesting
book that people are actually going to read was not the goal
here, right? Molly, you called it essentially
biblical and I I think I I get that.
I'm getting that understanding as well.
Everyone that sort of described it has called it like almost
like religious in in a in a sense.
Even the positive ones are kind of like it's it doesn't sound
like it uses hard data to back up his claims or or anything
like that. What do you think was the goal
of this book ultimately? Well, I really found myself
wondering that when I was reading it, because there are so
many parts in it where it's pretty clear who it's not for.
You know who he's not writing the book for?
He's not writing it for skeptics.
Very clearly he insults them at several points throughout the
book. You know, anyone who tries to
Fact Check some of the claims will easily find errors.
So it's really not meant for like, an adversarial reader.
I don't think it's really meant for even someone who has not
made-up their mind on crypto and is open to.
Maybe there's some possible use cases here, unless they're very
sort of uncritical, because he'll, you know, he'll say
things as though they're fact, as though they are just like
well accepted truths and not bother to back up the argument
or cite any data or anything. He'll just say things and then
move right on. And you're like, wait a minute,
I needed more there. I needed to know, you know, what
you were saying and why I should believe that.
So I ended up feeling like the book is really just written for
people who either already agree with him and are just looking to
sort of be like, yes, this is exactly right.
Yeah. Or for people just looking to
have someone tell them what to believe without really putting
much thought into it. And then I think there's also,
as far as the goal of the book, I think there is a strong chance
that he's really just hoping that he can say, look at my best
selling book. I'm clearly so authoritative on
this topic because I, you know, topped the New York Times list
or, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to do.
So clearly everything I said in this book must be true and must
be well accepted and must be well reasoned because it was,
you know, topping the charts and all this kind of stuff.
I think. I think there's a lot of that.
You know, it's more credible to be able to say, look, I
published a book with Penguin Random House than to say look at
my blog posts. Although I think you know, they
they do a fair amount of look at my blog posts as well.
But you know, I think it's really just to sort of lend
credibility to this idea that block chains are the future of
the web. And here is the you know, you
don't even have to read it, but just look at there's this book
here and this is This would explain it if you bothered to
read it. It's a it's a document for
crypto venture firms general partners to send to their
limited partners to convince them it's still worth sending
the general partners more money. That's that's really kind of
feels like what it is. No, no, crypto's still here.
Crypto's still good. Things are still going great.
Just just just look. The book says so.
We'll we'll jump into the New York Times bestseller list
aspect of this shortly but I do I do want to propose that this
because I I similar to you Molly was that was my kind of thought
was that this was AI mean it is a marketing campaign and and a
way to make blockchain and web 3 sound quite viable still
especially during this crazy run during like everyone's talking
about AI and you know large language model like what Like
everyone has other things they're thinking about right now
that aren't cryptocurrency. So reminding everyone that all
these companies exist and have billions of dollars poured into
them. Sure I think that's a huge part
of it but then Wall Street Journal wrote an article in
October of 2022 titled Anderson Horowitz went all in on crypto
at the worst possible time. Chris Dixon a partner who led
the charge says he has a very long term horizon.
Basically this is an article saying that Chris Dixon's
investments suck. I am curious if A16Z said,
listen buddy, your investments are tanking.
Write a book, get some marketing push onto the onto the companies
that you have invested in and try to claw back some of this
cash that you have unwisely spent.
I think there could be truth to that.
Obviously, I'm not going to say that's for sure true, but like
it just feels like a possibility to me I guess.
And from the way you guys are describing the book, I I still
feel that way. It's and also like a morale
booster to all these companies that they've invested in that
they're handing this book out to them and saying like see, we
still care, we still believe in you or whatever.
But yeah, Bennett, you also read the book.
So I'd like to hear some of your thoughts as well.
My thoughts echo many of Molly's in that I think that this was
primarily an exercise in narrative shaping in the way
that Anderson Horowitz loves to do.
They are not the most technical investors.
They don't emphasize due diligence as much as some other
firms. What their focus has been for
much of their existence has been in trying to invest in and shape
narratives to their own financial benefit.
And as we've already established, they have existing
large investments in various cryptocurrency projects and
firms and well, a significant portion of their crypto
portfolio is is now ostensibly AI companies after a series of
pivots that some of them are still at least claiming to be
focused on crypto. And so yes, helping to shape a
narrative return. The focus, especially if you
time it with like Sam Bankman Freed, is somewhat out of the
news cycle right now. ETFs have been approved, there
are certain positive indicators, and there's an election coming
up, which means, one, it is unlikely we get any substantial
crypto legislation passing before January of 2025.
Second, it means that you may feel it is advantageous to force
various candidates to come up with stances about your
Mcguffin, especially if you're worried the current
administration doesn't have very positive feelings towards your
Mcguffin. And so I think primarily the
book and the marketing campaign around it is all about trying to
keep crypto in the narrative because there was this kind of,
we talked about this before in kind of the context of FTX and
SPF. Following that, there's been an
increasing resolve among certain regulators to push crypto away
from like some of the financial centres, right.
The banks started doing it even before FTX, but SESEC and CFTC
both kind of indicated they were pushing crypto further away
following FTX. And so I think the book exists
to help a 16 ZS crypto investments first and foremost.
I would also add, actually one thing about timing that I think
is interesting. I think because we're coming up
into an election year, Trump is going to be a candidate.
There's going to be a lot of conversations about the web is
broken, misinformation, especially AI, deep fakes,
things like that that are going to be used to try to influence
the election. And I think that a big narrative
that we're going to be seeing is that block chains will fix
everything that's wrong with the web that we are seeing so
starkly, you know, just demonstrated by the absolute
nonsense that happens on the web around election years.
So I think the timing is not entirely coincidental because
there's about to be, I think a lot of conversations about, you
know, trustworthiness on the web, social media, big tech,
etcetera. And this will be a good
opportunity for Andreessen Horowitz to continue the
arguments that Dixon makes in the book, which is that
blockchains will fix social media, it will fix
disinformation, it will fix even AI he he really, I didn't go
into this in my review because my review was already getting
pretty long. But he talks about AI a lot in
the book and kind of yeah, he it's in sort of it's in.
It's in the same sort of way that he talks about a lot of
things where he states as fact that like AI is the next big
thing. And you know, it's going to
totally change how art, you know, an artist do business and
all this stuff. But he talks about block chains
as a solution to all the problems that AI will introduce.
So he's, you know, he's really, I think, looking for the timely
conversations to sort of reinsert the argument that block
chains will solve this, even though, you know, history has
not been friendly towards that narrative.
Before we get into the yeah, the other couple aspects of this
book I do. I just wanted to question, like,
I know when I said I made a point, I tweeted out something
about like how funny it was to me, Like in an ironic sense that
they had taken out a full page ad in the Washington Post.
OK. And then also that he's
publishing a book on paper, on physical paper like that.
This is funny to me in some sense regardless.
And a reporter from The Block, I believe Colin.
I believe Colin Willem. I don't know if I'm saying his
name right, but he he said, this doesn't surprise me, that
they're doing this. Think about who they're trying
to reach with this advertising. It is politicians and lobbyists
in Washington, DC And I was like, Oh yeah, that.
I mean like that. It's a good point, even though I
still think it's ironic and funny.
And I wonder if did this book have like did it feel like
politics was being breached or was it just vaguely like in the
background? He does talk about legislation
and the ways that he thinks legislation could, you know,
hurt the crypto industry in the future of blockchains that he's,
you know, talking about. I think more than anything he
is. I think he's hoping that the
existence of the book will influence regulators,
politicians, etcetera. I don't think he's actually
hoping that politicians and lobby or that regulators will
read the book because there's not actually that much in there
about regulation and stuff. So, you know, maybe he would
hope that they would buy into his idea that, you know, in
order to do all these wonderful things, we need to have, you
know, light touch regulation, which is sort of briefly what he
says, although he doesn't actually really illustrate what
he thinks regulation should look like.
He says it should exist, but it shouldn't be securities
regulations. And that's kind of as far as he
goes. But yeah, I think, I think it's
really just he wants me to be able to point at the book and
say this, you know, again, if you were to read this, you would
be so convinced about everything I have to say.
And I know you don't have the time, you know, don't worry
about it, but it's there. If you were to to, you know, to
care to look is, I think, I think that the goal really.
Yeah, I think that's actually a really excellent point.
It almost feels at times like apolitical, like divorced from
searching like political things, and like trying to avoid making
certain political stances so that it says this kind of
everything for anyone who reads it right.
And A16Z talking about their blog posts does have relatively
detailed blog posts and how they feel about certain specific
pieces of legislation you can look up.
And none of that kind of substance makes it into the
book. It is, like Molly mentioned, all
just like don't regulate this out of existence or you'll
regret it. Can't use laws from the 1930s on
our tokens, and our tokens aren't currencies.
They're tokens, we insist. And so, yeah, it felt almost
like kind of trying to avoid being political and acting just
as a legitimizing exercise. We're not all Sam Bankman freed.
Some of us are best selling authors.
And some of us don't even like Sam Bankman Freed, actually, you
know, and we don't like the casinos and all the stuff that
we can sort of say is bad crypto.
But also don't try to regulate the casino out of existence
because the casino needs to exist for our very serious
things like let me check my list here.
Investments in NFT cock fighting to pay off.
God, that was just one of my favorite ones.
Mecca cock fighting, actually. Sure, sure.
The chickens are robots. That makes they're robots, yeah.
No, I think that's super true. I think also it's very clear
throughout the book that he's, it's like there are points where
you can see him really carefully not pissing people off.
Like, there are so many points where he's being so careful to
not make Bitcoiners mad, even though it's pretty clear that he
doesn't love Bitcoin all that much.
And he's he's he's very clearly an Ethereum guy.
And he still trips up in a couple times by like crossing
the Bitcoin mythos by like saying that yes, miners are the
ones responsible for validating instead of like pointing to
nodes, which is a thing that any bitcoiners who actually bothered
to read the book, which won't be many of them, would immediately
be upset edited him with. Yeah, there are a couple of
things that I think would piss off bit coiners, but like you
can see him very carefully trying to like tread the line to
make the book as acceptable to like the widest audience
possible. And and we're talking about in a
lot of this, how much of the book is light and abstract.
And that is true even when he's talking about, like, the book's
primary topic, like when he's talking about block chains and
what they are and what they're supposed to do.
He's like, wrong in weird ways. Like when he talks about things
like he he assumes block chains are always forward compatible,
which is not true. Bitcoin has removed a bunch of
app codes, so if you built something relying on those app
codes, your program breaks. Ethereum has done a variety of
breaking changes over it's time that have caused smart contracts
to stop functioning. There are further future
breaking changes planned for Ethereum, like state rent and
things like that that will invalidate how a bunch of smart
contracts work. But he just says you can build
something now, confident it will continue to run that way into
the future and it's just objectively not.
True, right? And that he he argues that that
like, blockchains can't be changed, basically that the code
of a blockchain can't be changed.
And like it's again, just that's just not true and it's not clear
necessarily if he's saying that. It can't be changed.
Like hard stop. Or if it can't be changed
without community consensus, and he's just making these really
like broad assumptions about what that consensus would be,
and that would it would always favor his particular interests,
which are not necessarily aligned with every person's
interests. I would argue that Andreessen
Horowitz's interests are often very opposed to the interests of
other people in the crypto world, and that there is a very
strong possibility that, you know, a blockchain could change
in a way that would disadvantage their interests.
But, you know, there's just no discussion of that.
He just makes these like, bold statements.
They're like blockchains can't change and then moves right on.
And does like a similar thing with other fundamental things
for blockchains, like security. Like just hand waves away the
issue of like all of blockchain security and he's like you may
sometimes hear about things being attacked but that's
Ethereum Classic in Bitcoin SV and never the top chains
Ignoring like finance proposing a rollback on Bitcoin or the
infinite minting bug on finance where the fucking Dow hack in
the resulting hard fork a massive irregular state
transition. Infinite minting bug on on
Bitcoin. Just so people don't.
Yeah, yeah, we've and I think we've talked about that before.
Sorry, I just wanted to clarify. That or like there was a point
in a bitcoins history where like 1/3 of the miners upgraded to
like one version but the rest didn't.
And there was like a chain split for a while with because there
was some minor incompatibility in the way the two versions
work. Which caused like one of the
minor who was running like 1/4 to 1/3 of the hash rate to have
to roll back to an older version to rejoin the majority chain
which was on the older client. And like none of that counts.
I guess none of that happened. It's funny because I've we
there's been so many books that we've looked into.
I still think Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold is a great
resource. I we've talked about David
Gerard's attack of the 50 foot blockchain, which I think is a
fun read and and provides a lot of great resources actually if
you're. And holds up really well given
that it was written in like 2017.
Yeah, yeah. And just the idea of like
actually going on Bitcoin talk forums and and stuff like that,
and like actually listing these websites and these forum pages
where people could actually go back and look at the history of
this stuff as it's happening if they were so inclined to.
I think stuff like that is great.
I, and obviously Zeke Fox with his recent book, I think that
was also excellent as well. So I think there's plenty of
examples out there. And there's Laura Shin's book
about the Etherians was good too.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of good books out there about
block chains or crypto or whatever.
And then there's going infinite. And then there's going infinite.
And yes, me as well. Yes, Molly and I both reviewed
that in our chapter. 5. Yeah, you're stuck there still.
There's a couple things I kind of want to interject on.
There's this very strange dynamic for me reading this
book, Molly. And I think, and I think you
might have experienced the same, Chris Dixon is older than the
two of us. But like, the way he talks about
the Internet feels strange to me because he talks about like,
things being dead that I remember experience and still
experience. Like RSS is dead and blogs are
dead and websites are dead and all these many, many things are
dead. And like, I can see the shadow
of what his argument could be like.
He's trying to point to the centralization in these
gatekeepers in these things. But then, like, I go and I
listen to Chris Dixon on a podcast distributed on RSS, and
I'm like, this feels like someone building on a protocol
network. But what would I know?
I'm not a venture capitalist. Did you have any of that kind of
tension where, like Chris Dixon's perspective on the web
feels like it's coming from some very strange place?
Yeah, I actually wrote like basically a full length blog
post that I ended up cutting from the review just about how
sort of a historical his view of the web and the Internet and
other sort of protocols is. There's a lot in there.
He spends the first one to two parts of the book reviewing the
early Internet, some of the technology that's involved in
the Internet snack. He actually gets kind of
technical in there, like more than I expected him to given the
what I thought the audience would be, you know, talking
about what things were like in the early Internet and you know,
he was presumably there. You know, he's older like than I
was. I was not really in the early
Internet per SE, but it's incredibly like warped his sort
of view of the early Internet. And I think I was actually
having a conversation on Mastinon ironically, which he
says his dad so. Did.
Yeah, yeah. With someone about this, someone
who is also, you know, is closer to Chris Dixon's age and was
saying that, you know, they were around too in that time period
and saw things very differently. And I think honestly what
happened is that Chris Dixon remembers a version of the early
Internet and didn't really because of that.
He just sort of assumes that's how it was for everyone and
doesn't really go into researching more than that.
And so he describes this very rose colored glasses view of the
early Internet where anyone could just dial up and, you
know, search whatever they wanted.
Which. No.
First of all, it was hard to find things back then.
You know, and he they could write, you know, in the later
days of the Internet, they could just like buy a URL and you
know, spin up a web server and write whatever they wanted.
And Google wasn't the intermediary where search was
making it so that you were getting DE ranked and you know
Facebook's algorithm wasn't there.
And like all this stuff about how it was this beautiful early
days of the Internet which like I and I know a lot of people who
have these rose colored sort of views on the early days of the
Internet. And there is some truth there.
Like there were some really cool things about the early days of
the Internet and this sort of hacker ethos and it was this
sort of adversarial time with some regulators and all this
stuff. But also like a lot of people
didn't have access to that. Like so many people couldn't get
on the Internet back then. It wasn't that anyone could log
on and make a search and and do whatever I I was looking up the
numbers on this he he so he defines web one as ending in
2005 which is kind of arbitrary but like that's a fairly
acceptable statement to make. He's like 1990 to 2005 is is web
One in 2515% of people were online.
That's it. He's saying anyone could log on.
Even today two 2/3 of people are online there's a whole third of
the the globe that does not have Internet access.
So stating that the, you know that in 2005 anyone had access
to the web and didn't have to deal with all this stuff, that
big tech is dating and all that stuff is just completely a
historical. And even today, like there's so
many people who just don't have access to that.
But I would argue that it's actually a good thing that today
many more people have access to the web than they did in 2005.
And so we've actually made some strides since then.
It's not all bad. And I'll even argue that, like
self, hosting, A reasonably full-featured website is easier
in 2024 and 2005 I. Was writing about this like two
years ago where I was saying that, like, actually the web's
pretty cool. Like people.
I actually have a blog post in the works on this.
It's like, yes, the web is broken.
I think most people will agree with that.
Also, the web is better than it's ever been, right?
Like, those two things are both true.
And, you know, there are ways that I think we could clearly
improve the web. I don't think that the web will
ever be fixed because fixed means something totally
different to every person. And what I think is fixed is
very different from what Andreessen Horowitz thinks is
fixed. But you know, there are actually
really cool things that you can do today that allow you to have
total ownership over what you are doing on the web.
That's another blog post that I have in the works.
But the idea of like ownership is very different and we could,
I don't know if you want to go into that or not.
I mean we might that I we might as well just jump right into
that because I think that one of the things I was talking about I
would I tweeted something out about like I love these property
rights on the blockchain people because they talk about it like
there wasn't property rights before the it's like you guys
understand we've managed property rights and ownership
for thousands and thousands of years like this.
The concept isn't new and being able to deal with it.
We don't need a block we don't need a blockchain to do it And I
think Chris Dixon would hard argue that I'm wrong in that
sense because the title of his book is read write own.
For anyone who's unfamiliar, I think like read write is that
it's like a common like common parlance in tech where it's like
about, you know, read, read and write capabilities for when
you're when you're publishing and doing stuff.
Yeah, in. The context of the book, he
divides like web one into your reading and Web two your writing
and interacting, and in Web three you get to own the assets,
the property. Yeah.
But one note that I made when I was reading was that I realized
at some point that Chris Dixon's view of ownership is, like,
really different than mine. Like, I own a lot of things.
In theory, Chris Dixon, it seems like, only really believes you
own something if you can resell that thing.
And so, like, like, I own my dog, right?
Technically, I don't love that, like that term.
But it's, you know, it's how people talk about it.
I'm not going to resell my dog, right?
I own the milk in my fridge. I'm not going to resell the milk
in my fridge. You know, I own the content that
I publish on Wikipedia. I'm not going to sell that.
Right. Like, there's a lot of stuff
that I think I own that Chris Dixon would be like, oh, no, you
don't own your dog. You know, you don't own the milk
in your fridge, which is like, he very much believes that until
you can, like, wrap something that you have created into a
token, you don't truly own it. This is also something that
comes up with his top talk of like ownership in terms of
content creation, which I think is really interesting where he
talks about how you don't own the stuff that you post on
Twitter and he talks about how Twitter takes like a Facebook,
Twitter, couple different platforms, he says takes like a
99% take rate, which is just completely fiction.
Like he this is actually something that they make.
Andreessen Horowitz makes the same claim in those state of
crypto reports. So I'd already addressed this a
long time ago. But like when he talks about
take rates, he's talking about several different things and he
just calls them all take rates. One of them is like the take
rate of you know, you publish something on sub stack, sub
stack takes 10% of your subscription revenue.
That's like a normal way to look at a take rate.
But then he talks about like 99% take rates on Twitter or maybe
bad example. Now that Twitter is like
monetizing some things, but he's really just talking about like
platforms where people publish stuff with no expectation of
return. And then he says that the
advertising money that the company is making is like the
take rate. And it allows him to really
juice the numbers, to like, make it sound like current web
platforms have this like astronomical take rate.
But when he's talking about ownership, he's really only
saying that, like, if you can't make money off of it, you don't
own it, which I think is just like kind of an offensive way to
talk about creation because it's so financialized.
And even in that same vein, he seems OK with not really owning
it as long as you can profit from it.
Like in the section about NFTS, when he's talking about like the
rights and like the individual prints themselves.
He has some understanding that the NFT itself is like just the
NFT and doesn't necessarily represent ownership of some
other thing. But he still seems to think it's
valuable purely because it can be, like bought and resold and
valued in that way. And so even when the thing you
own isn't actually like a thing you own, he thinks you own it if
you can potentially profit from it in the future.
Right. And he he also makes a lot of
assumptions I think that are really interesting around how
block chains would enable ownership somehow like
out-of-the-box that are not really true and it conversely
about how you can't do those things today.
I was, I was literally just talking to someone about this
about the idea of like owning your audience, which I also
think is a really weird term, like owning your relationship
with your readers or whatever. It's like weird to call that
ownership, but that's kind of a side point.
But like I recently just moved my blog from Sub Stack onto my
own self hosted thing. And I was able to do that
without having to get every single person who subscribed to
my writing to resubscribe because the payments are made to
me. And then like Sub Stack takes a
cut of that, but it's still a relationship that is sort of
with me directly. And so I was able to like move
to a different platform because that's how that's set up and
that's a really good way of setting things up.
I have a lot of complaints about Sub Stack, but like, that is
really good that they do that and I think lots of places
should do that so that if you want to start writing somewhere
else, you can just switch out the platform and nothing really
changes for your readers, for your payment relationships,
anything like that, that's awesome.
And that's what Chris Dixon is really envisioning when he's
talking about these creator audience relationships.
And he talks about how blockchains will enable this.
Somehow, as though there's not like, as though it's impossible
to set up a relationship that is more traditional big tech where
it's the platform that owns those relationships and they
don't come with you because it is possible to have that kind of
platform built on a blockchain. Like there's nothing about block
chains that stops you from doing that.
He just sort of makes these assumptions that all block chain
platforms will be set up in a way where there is a more
advantageous relationship between subscribers and
creators. I think there's like existing
counter examples like I don't think Bit Cloud D so you can
like easily and automatically port your following from Bit
cloud over to some other platform just because it's
recorded on the blockchain. Yeah, exactly.
Like it's it's super. There's nothing about this like
sort of network level technology that prevents platforms, as he
says, that prevents platforms from building on it in a way
that is sort of a walled garden. And there's nothing about
current, you know, non blockchain technologies that
prevent people from not doing that.
And so I just find that really disingenuous because I like, I,
I totally agree with him that the model should be improved in
a lot of ways. So that you, you know, so that
people are not so dependent on these platforms.
And so that there isn't this sort of control there that keeps
people locked in to using some of these platforms.
But the blockchain question is is sort of a side thing, like
that's not really an important part of it in my opinion.
In that vein, as a Wikipedian, how did you feel about the way
he handled, addressed, and almost dismissed the Wikipedia
model? So Chris Dixon actually likes
Wikipedia more than a lot of these types of folks do.
A lot of them just hate Wikipedia, and he's not one of
them, which like credit to him on that one.
But he does talk about Wikipedia in really weird ways where he
like, he talks about it as though it is this completely
unique edge case that like could never be replicated, which is, I
mean, I understand where he's coming from.
It is pretty unique and people really haven't replicated it in
ways that they've certainly tried to.
But he attributes the success of Wikipedia to like, oh, but it's
because it's an encyclopedia. And you know, because of that it
didn't have to have big, I don't know, infrastructure cost or
platform cost. He, like, totally glosses over
the fact that, well, also because people volunteer to
write the content that's big, you know, like there's stuff
like that where he just sort of he he talks about Wikipedia's
success in a very strange way. You know, as though it's just
because for some reason encyclopedias are different from
things that people are trying to do on the web, which like I
would argue it's not that different from like journalism
or, you know, other types of things.
So yeah, it was it was strange to see Wikipedia come up it it
only came up in sort of side mentions, I think.
But it was, it was always treated as sort of like the oh,
but this could never work type of thing.
And the same thing actually was true of nonprofit models around
web services where he just like he's like, oh, you could
hypothetically fix a lot of problems that we see with big
tech by having a more like nonprofit type of model or you
know other types of models where the incentives are different.
But that could never work, and he just, like, keeps going.
I was reminded of the the, the remember.
I don't know if you guys remember there was a thing
called Scent that allowed people to purchase tweets.
Yeah. As like, as like NFTS.
Yeah, yeah. And I got.
I think they shut it down, but like.
And they they shut it down with like a pretty brutal
condemnation of of Crypto and Web 3.
Right. And and but I don't know if you
guys remember the reason that was such a big deal is because
it like the first tweet got sold for like $2,000,000 or something
like that. I just looked up the guy who
bought the first tweet ever and I found out that he fled Iran on
embezzlement charges of $20 million in an Interpol Red
Notice. Now I don't know.
I am just like shocked by like how everything I think of when
it comes to how NFTS were presented initially, it's mostly
just bad news. And then to, yeah, to just hear
all of this from you guys about this book.
I think even the nicest review I read about it was David C
Morris's, who's a friend of the show and he, he called it an
optimistic, like, take on the future of Web 3.
Which like, but yeah, to like ignore all of the bad things,
all the bad investments that Anderson Horowitz has made, that
Chris Dixon has made, and pretend like they didn't happen
instead of saying like, here's what I learned from these
experiences actually is pretty compelling reason to not read
this book for as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, There was also a pretty positive review in I think it
was Fortune by Jeff, John Roberts who he he was pretty
positive about it. But he also very much called out
the fact that like throughout the whole book, Andreessen or
Chris Dixon is talking up Andreessen Horowitz investments
without disclosing that they had invested in the companies.
Like they talk about Helium, they talk about Open C, they
talk about all these different companies that Andreessen
Horowitz had like major investments in as though they
are sort of not related, you know, as though it's just like,
oh, I'm just picking an example, but it just so happens to be one
that they invested in. And there is like at the very
end of the book, if you go to the like about the author
section, it says, you know, Chris Dixon is a general partner
for Andreessen Horowitz. Some of the companies in this
book may have been, you know, investments.
And that's it. There's no list.
There's nothing like there's no disclosure.
I'm not saying that's illegal, but it kind of sounds illegal.
But anyway, But yeah, probably not.
You're probably not ethical. Like I have no problem.
There you go. Matt.
That's the perfect segue. There we go.
That's the segue I needed. We're talking about unethical,
so let's let's bring up how Anderson Horowitz and Chris
Dixon got this book onto the New York Times bestseller list,
which has been kind of the talk of the town for a couple days
now. If anyone is unfamiliar, the New
York Times Best Seller Seller List, it's the stalwarts of like
everyone turns to that to see what's popping off in fiction
and nonfiction. And it's known as being this,
this great source of knowing what is the most popular stuff
right now in bookselling. I know this because my mom was a
bookseller, and I think the store that she worked for at the
time was part of this. But they do a pretty thorough
auditing. Like, they they reach out to I
don't know if it's hundreds or thousands but tons of bookstores
across the nation and say, like, hey, we got to talk to you, What
are what are the numbers you're getting?
Anything weird going on? And if the booksellers say yes,
something weird is going on. Actually, we got.
Say 1000 requests for this book, and we don't usually get
anything like that. They tell the New York Times and
the New York Times kind of jots that down and says, well, that's
weird. And when they publish their
their bestseller list, if they think that something weird
happened and a book did something strange and suspicious
to get on the list, they put a little dagger underneath the
title and lo and behold, read, write, own it had a little
dagger underneath it. And it seems to, at least
according to a Motherboard article, it seems to look like
thousands of these books were bulk purchased and essentially
Anderson Horowitz and Chris Dixon manipulated markets so so
that they could get their book to the top of a best seller
list. As a marketing scheme, I would
imagine. But also because I I think these
a lot of these guys are really obsessed with putting New York
Times bestseller into their their name.
It's almost like a knighthood or something.
So I assume that Chris Dixon's ego played a role in that as
well. I think what's really funny to
me about this kind of blowing up, there's two things that I
think are funny. Everyone in finance already
knows that A16Z does weird things when they invest in
companies. I I'm not going to call it
anything else. I'll just say weird.
Take from that what you will and that the time that the public
actually goes, oh that's crazy is when it's just book sales.
Like there's no way they lost that much money, maybe you know
$100,000 or whatever it cost right, to buy these books.
I think Chris, ultimately Chris Dixon's time is probably quite
valuable, at least to him. And so that has probably been
quite expensive to put him on the book, the book tour circuit
and the podcast circuit. But yeah, the public I think is
kind of loving to see venture capitalists make such an obvious
mistake and think that no one would care.
It just makes me reflect on like how they operate in general.
I don't know. Do either of you have have
thoughts on on that on like this book as a metaphor and how it
was published as a metaphor for a 16 ZI?
Think it's really instructive quite how much Andreessen
Horowitz, the company is putting behind a book ostensibly just
written by an individual general partner.
Like they it's like they view it as sort of their book and they
have been putting enormous resources behind it, including,
you know, full page print ads in the Washington Post which are
not cheap. You know, they were able to get
a op-ed written by Dixon published in the Financial
Times. You know, he was appearing on
some of these very, you know, some of the most popular tech
podcasts, at least in the US They were clearly going, you
know, pedal to the metal on the marketing for this book and of
course what they did, you know, as far as trying to game the
book sales. And I think that's really
instructive that like, OK, this is really important not just to
Chris Dixon and to his perhaps genuinely held beliefs about the
future of the web, but also to Andreessen Horowitz, the
company. You know, they stand to benefit
not just because name recognition of one of their
general partners, but because the book is itself sort of in
furtherance of the goals of Andreessen Horowitz.
But yeah, I mean, I think there is some irony that they were
sort of doing this manipulation to do with a book that is about,
you know, an industry that is known for manipulation like
this. You know, this type of thing.
You know, that type of behavior, like buying all of something
that you've released to try to make it look like there's so
much demand. It's like, Oh yeah, crypto watch
trading. Like that's they do that all the
time. It's not even unusual.
Sometimes I forget it's illegal because it's so common in the
crypto world. So do they?
That's true. That's to it way too often for.
You know, I think, I think there's a lot of irony there.
I also thought there was a lot of irony around Chris Dixons own
description of crypto marketing in the book where he talks about
how crypto tokens and sort of the economics behind them
incentivize this, like organic marketing that people find
really genuine. And you know, it brings in all
this interest which like first of all, genuine organic is not
something I associate with crypto marketing at all.
Like I just, I was like, oh, shilling, yeah, people love
that. But also he's talking, he's sort
of in the book condemning the, you know, big marketing teams
doing all this spending on something.
And it's so inorganic and inauthentic.
And then, like, here they are buying crates of his own book or
whatever it is. So, you know, I think there's a
lot of irony there too, where it's like, oh, maybe you should
have put the book on the blockchain and then you would
have had people just chilling it for you.
I also find it a little ironic that they, like these guys, are
always talking about needing freedom and all of this in in
tech and in on the Internet. And then when you look at who's
getting these books on, when you look at who's like publicly
posting about how much they love the book and how like several
executives have posted on Twitter and been like, yeah, I'm
making this required reading from my employees and I'm like,
well, so that's cool, great. And like Jeremy Alaire at
Circle, like, yeah, I'm giving this to all my employees like,
OK, so they gifted your, their, their investor, their
investments like 500 copies. And the executives were like,
yes, we have to make our, make our employees read this, make
them write a book report about it, which is just not freedom at
all. It's horrible.
Yeah, I mean, I will say it's not like super unusual for
companies to like encourage people to buy the book that, oh,
this executive just published this book.
You should write it or you should go read it.
You know, go buy it, expense it, even, you know, read it in your
own. Time, which is like on Amazon.
Yeah, that's right. Because there's nothing that
employees love to do then and go spend their free time reading a
book about whatever it is they do for work.
I do sort of wonder how many people who, if you were to
survey every person who read this book, how many of them were
reading it? Kind of like under duress.
Because it seems like a lot of the target market is like your
company that Andreessen Horowitz invested in and your boss just
told you you have to read this book, which is like, oh great,
changing hearts and minds out there, Chris Dixon.
To me, the book in its marketing reminds me of the long American
tradition of politicians writing books.
And politicians don't generally actually write books.
They hire someone to write a book for them and then they put
their name on it and then they have their foundation like the
National Party and a few other people do a bunch of book
purchases. Then it ends up on the New York
Times list and they get to take advantage of the book tour of
the book tour is basically a extra earned media appearances
that are campaign but not campaign to help get your name
out there. I don't think Chris Dixon is
running for office. To be very clear, I think Chris
Dixon and A16Z is taking advantage of the the fact that
they've realized book publishers have long standing relationships
with publicists and bookers that make it easy if you have a book
to get a bunch of earned media and if that book is going to be
a best seller, people feel a lot more comfortable having you on
because you immediately have a credibility marker on it.
You're not just author of new book, you are New York Times
best selling author of whatever you know and so having you on,
you're immediately more legitimate.
It makes everything look more legitimate.
And so I think what we're seeing as we can mentioned before, this
is a legitimizing effort. It's making sure crypto is still
seen as as a thing serious people can take seriously.
I. Think that's a really good
point. Like it would be really hard for
Kara Schwisher to Swisher to be like here's Chris Dixon in 2024.
He's gonna tell you all about how blockchain are the future.
Like just to say that you'd be like what?
Why? Like who cares.
But now she can be like, he's got a book coming out.
We're going to have him talk about this book that he's
published, you know, and then it's like, oh, yeah, OK, I get
it. You know, he's, he's got
something to talk about. And so, you know, he has this
sort of excuse to show up on these podcasts and talk his
literally talk his book. This is a digression, but some
of those podcast appearances have been illuminating for me.
And the hard I don't think they all went how he wanted them to.
The hard fork one especially, yes, took me back because I've
had criticisms for the hosts and some of the things that have
been said on that podcast. All of us have, for what it's
worth, I believe. Or Chris Dixon was even
introduced. Both hosts were basically like,
man, we said some things we regret during that oh, we
shouldn't. Have written that.
Shouldn't have been, you know, just taking things straight from
people's mouths. And then one of them was like,
yeah, I was really listening a lot to Chris Dixon when I was
saying some of those things I regret.
Anyways, here's Chris Dixon. And it was this like hard pivot
that and and it was a relatively adversarial interview, more than
I imagine Chris Dixon was expecting from hard fork.
So that was just a striking moment for me in like how even
as a legitimizing effort, this is not succeeding as well as I
think he hoped. Yeah, I have to give those guys
a lot of credit for that. Like when I first saw like, oh,
Chris Dixon went on hard fork, I was like, Oh my God, you've got
to be kidding me. Like these guys.
Like, no way. Like, I have had some very
strong criticisms of some work by one of the hosts of that
podcast, which I think we've talked about in this in this
podcast before. It's it's Kevin Roose, the, the
guy who wrote the New York Times Late Comers Guide to Crypto.
Yeah. But I actually have to give him
a lot of credit for his handling of that interview because he was
very frank about, you know, he feels burned about some of what
he, you know, he he regrets writing some of the stuff that
he wrote. He wrote a piece about helium
that he talks about like he's still gets calls from people who
bought those helium hotspots. And they're pretty mad because
there is a nice New York Times piece about it, you know, and I
think they, you know, they didn't completely flogged Chris
Dixon. I don't think they could have.
It's, you know, that's I think a little bit uncouth to do that on
your podcast. But they held his feet to the
fire on some stuff, You know, they tried to get him to explain
how helium was not a total disaster and he really couldn't.
They ended up just being like, OK, let's move on.
Wait, it's uncouth to have a whole podcast episode dedicated
to yelling about Chris Dixon? Well, I think to have him.
Here. Yeah, He would be different if
he was here. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Good.
But I mean, if you can get him on, go for.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not an invite for Chris
Dixon. For what it's worth, I think
we're OK without having him on and berating.
Him might not. Accept it anyway.
Yeah, for what it's worth, I think he has all three of us
blocked on Twitter. I like yeah, this is not someone
who is a big fan of ours. I think this is a two way St.
when it comes to our feelings about Chris Dixon and his
feelings about us. I might have got blocked the
same day that he said he wished crypto had better critics,
better critics. I remember that.
I remember that and I remember just I yeah, I he, he just
really doesn't like critics. I think the last thing before we
go that we should talk about is the NFT collection.
So this book came with an NFT collection it in physical
copies. There was a bookmark that was
given to you and they had AQR code or whatever that you could
scan and then you would get a an an NFT that you could get on
Open C, which you mentioned is one of their investments.
I think that's very funny. So it's basically just a way to
get them on on on board people to Open C and then yeah, they
would get this. It's basically the cover of the
book, and then it changes colors when you redeem it.
And so far this New York Times bestseller out of 5000, NFTS,
has sold 281. And I think everyone should just
think about what that means for for Chris Dixon's thesis of his
bestseller, which is that this is the future that everyone
should, you know, get into this. It's still very important, and
there's two ways to look at this.
Either he really did organically sell thousands and thousands and
thousands of physical copies of this book, which I doubt that.
But OK, If he did organically sell those physical copies, you
would expect that there would be more NFTS that have been
redeemed by now. I think you would also.
You would also expect that to mean that the public seriously
cares about the topic of cryptocurrency and blockchain
and Web 3 still. But instead we've seen none of
that in in accordance to these NFTS themselves.
Or yeah, none of these sales were organic, and why would
anyone redeem them? They're all in an in AA16Z
warehouse somewhere. But either way, that tells me
that there isn't actually a lot of organic interest in what
Chris Dixon is writing. And I think largely outside of
like Michael Lewis writing Going Infinite, which is more so about
a character in cryptocurrency than about cryptocurrency,
people don't really care. And I think the really cool
thing is, the only way I can say that without feeling weird about
it is because he put it on the blockchain and everyone can
check and see how many of his NF TS have moved.
And there are. There are very, very, very few
of them. Yeah, it's a win for a
blockchain transparency, I guess.
In Chris Dixon's defense, it's possible that even the people
most excited about cryptocurrency and his
optimistic view of the future still look at getting a picture
of a sunset that changes colors. That's the same as everyone
else, basically, And think this isn't worth the 12 minutes it
would take me to figure out how to get my meta mask set up and
log into open sea and redeem it like even the biggest fans of
crypto might be like, you know what?
That's too much of A hurdle for this specific prize.
It's just kind of like a gimmick.
I think there's no secondary market for them.
So I don't think people, I don't think people are like, here's
this whole thing with Gary Vee's book.
A long time ago he tried to sell a book and he was like, if you
buy 12 copies, I'll give you an NFT.
And people started like mass buying the book because they
wanted to speculate on the price of the NFT.
I don't think that's a dynamic in play here because I don't
think anyone's like, oh, if I buy this book and get this NFT,
then I can sell it for $100,000 in three years or something like
that. So I I wonder if it's maybe just
not that compelling or maybe all the sales were ebooks because
you don't get one with the ebook, as I discovered.
Well, I know that you so you have to sell a certain amount of
physical copies to get on to the New York Times bestseller list,
basically, as far as far as I understand it.
I might be wrong and if someone knows more about that than me,
yeah. But like at least the VICE
article quoted saying, like you sometimes need as little as 2000
copies to make the list. And what Electric cares?
About that I never knew that before.
Yeah, books don't sell. No one reads books.
What? Electric Capital loan bought
1401 copies of the book and so that gets you a big chunk of the
way there. Add in couple 100 circle
employees. I think all of these things
illustrate there's not a lot of people who are interested in
reading 150 or 200 pages about an optimistic view about what
blockchains maybe, possibly, could, might, maybe do.
I do want to add that this, this NFT took five companies to come
up with. These are like and these are
like relatively large. So we're talking A16Z, which is
massive in and of itself, like this is a multibillion dollar
fund. Then we're talking IYK,
manifold, dynamic and optimism. And these for anyone who's not
in crypto that they don't, they don't matter, they don't matter.
But for anyone who is involved in this space, these are like,
oh, these are the big companies and what they came up with was a
color changing picture and I think that just it speaks
volumes to the actual usefulness of this.
Agree with you that I do. It is very funny that somehow
this took five companies to do, although I do think that it was
maybe some over selling on Dixon's part where like they
listed optimism which is just the chain that they use and I
doubt like optimism Labs or whoever runs that would probably
deeply involved you think so optimism.
Has a tendency to send out lots of, like their technical team
members, or at least money, to anyone who wants to build on
optimism or do anything on optimism.
Well, but Andreessen Horowitz also invests in optimism, so I
assumed that they were just like shilling one of their companies.
Absolutely Shills to name the companies that they specifically
had. And I'm 100% you're right,
Molly. Yeah, Regardless, this whole
thing has been hilarious to watch.
It's it's like watching the richest guy you've ever seen
just slipping and falling in the mud in his new white press suit
and it's just lovely and I love it and I'm happy it's happening
and I'm happy you reviewed the book and gave it a wonderful
review. Everyone read her very kind to
Chris Dixon review and lovely towards a 16.
ZI just want all the venture capitalists at like you'll have
to raise your camera. Who made it to Mini's minute 60
of this interview? Yeah, that's right.
You're adoring fans in the venture capital world.
A man can dream. All right.
Yeah. Molly, is there anything that
you, before we, you know, let you go?
Is there anything that you, I don't know, that you want to
talk about in terms of your blog or anything that you're working
on or anything like that? So if you want to read my
writing citation needed dot news you can sign up for a
subscription free or pay as you want.
And then I also run the website web3isgoingjustgreat.com which
is you can just go look at that, it's you don't have to pay for
it. Yeah, that's going to do it, I
guess, everyone. I'm writing the new read, write
cast coin is coming out very soon and it I'm going to be
doing a book tour for it and you're going to see it at #1 on
the New York Times. But it's I'm not going for #9.
Screw that. Next podcast is just going to be
like crates and crates of books behind you.