David Friedberg: okay molly is out again today she got the omicron but she's doing great nothing to worry about there i'm going to break down on today's show the oath keeper indictments from the january 6 insurrection they were caught by having their encrypted signal messages compromised so i'm going to explain how that happened because uh nobody seems to know and is there a backdoor i don't think so i'm going to explain to you my theory and i'm going to read some excerpts from the indictment which are read like a homeland reboot they're insane and then i'm going to talk about google facebook reddit and twitter being subpoenaed by the house committee investigating the capital riots and are they withholding information or is the house committee uh being a little too broad in their requests are they responsible we're going to go uh take a look at that and do a deep dive and then an awesome okay boomer segment stick with us it's a great episode this week in startups is

SPEAKER_01: brought to you by our crowd our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at oh you are crowd dot com twist indochino makes custom fitted suits shirts and casual wear at affordable prices shop for your next best look or book a virtual style consultation at indochino.com right now you can get 50 off any purchase of 399 or more by using code twist at checkout and bubble empowers people to design and launch their own apps marketplaces or tools without needing coding skills or pricey engineers the first 500 listeners will get one month free on any of bubbles paid plans from 29 a month up to 529 a month at bubble dot io slash twist all right everybody in our first story and

David Friedberg: there is a tech angle here on thursday the fbi arrested 11 members of the oath keepers on sedition charges and the indictment is just to use a word insane the new york times reported the leader of the far right organization oath keepers steward rhodes uh was one of the people arrested he's the person with the eye patch who you see all the time at trump rallies or protecting trump etc prosecutors said it was a wide-ranging plot to storm the capital on january 6 to disrupt

SPEAKER_06: the certification of biden's win important note for this story a portion of the oath keepers communication occurred on signal and now of course if you're listening to this being startups you know that's an encrypted chat app that is not supposed to have any backdoors and it's not supposed to keep any user data but according to the indictment just two days after the election rhodes said the following on signal we aren't getting through this without a civil war too late for that prepare your mind body and spirit a month after election day rhodes wrote the following on signal it'll be a bloody and desperate fight we are going to have a fight that can't be avoided so let's pause on this and just digest the oath keepers were caught because somehow the government obtained their encrypted signal messages everybody who is in the press is trying to figure this out and there's hand-wringing it's pretty obvious

David Friedberg: according to the cnbc article it's not clear how investigators actually got access to the encrypted messages so does the government have a backdoor and signal of course they don't right it'd be very

SPEAKER_06: unlikely that they do possible but not probable what really is going on here and you know this because

David Friedberg: you've probably had people do this in your life uh or have thought about it yourself there's a mole inside the oath keepers obviously and they're obviously screen recording or sending screenshots to the feds and according to the indictment oath keepers specifically recruit former military and law enforcement personnel so if you were to recruit somebody in law enforcement or the military

SPEAKER_06: and that was your target it's possible that one of them would have put themselves out there to be recruited in other words i work for the fbi i formally or i'm a cia person whatever i'm a spook you know in whatever context i'm a double agent so i start posting to oath keepers message boards on facebook yada yada i'm active in a subreddit wherever they're hanging out and that person uh is either flip or they set themselves up to be recruited you get the idea so uh through their lawyers members of the oath keepers facing charges are claiming they were part of a security detail hired to protect conservatives like roger stone now i'm going to do a little reading here and again i don't want this to be political left versus right this is just about a group of crazy people full stop these people are nuts and uh you know there have been many left-wing crazy organizations you may be too young to

David Friedberg: remember them but we had uh the black panthers and the weather underground and the bla so all these organizations were violent left organizations they sought change through violence and overthrowing the government in fact was part of the left's agenda in the 60s these radical groups which made it into the 70s and 80s literally had on their agenda we have to fight the government that's how crazy they were uh or inspired if you believe that our government is a tyranny and needs to be stopped i do not think that i think we have a pretty great democracy here that's worth protecting so let me just read you

SPEAKER_12: what is in this essentially homeland season five or six like this is literally the reboot of homeland

David Friedberg: beginning and this is from the indictment uh from the department of justice uh beginning in late december 2020 via encrypted and private communication applications roads and various co-conspirators coordinated and planned to travel to washington dc on or around january 6 2020 the date of the certification of the electoral college vote some members of oath keepers believe that the federal government has been co-opted by a cobble of elites actively trying to strip american citizens of their rights they explicitly focus on recruiting current and former military law enforcement and first responder personnel the organization's name alludes to the oath sworn by members of the military and police to defend the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic they coordinated travel

SPEAKER_06: across the country to enter washington dc this all checks out right we all saw this with our own eyes and we saw them trying to fly home and getting you know de-planed because they didn't want to have terrorists on planes wow what a radical concept equipped themselves with a variety of weapons don combat and tactical gear and were prepared to answer roads call to take up arms at his direction i'm reading literally from this uh indictment some co-conspirators also amassed firearms on the outskirts of washington dc distributing them among qrf quick reaction force teams so these are military people who were amassing firearms putting them outside of washington dc just out the outskirts so they didn't get caught so they were ready to do quick reaction forces like they were basically making their own seal teams their own strike team and plan to use back to quoting and plan to use the firearms in

David Friedberg: support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power now let's read some quotes from the indictment regarding the day of the insurrection around 2 30 pm i'm quoting now members of the oath keepers many of whom were wearing paramilitary clothing and patches with the oath keepers named logos and signet yes we saw that marched in a stack formation called stack one up the east steps of the capitol to the outside of the capitol rotunda doors at the time the doors were closed and guarded by capitol police officers stack one joined the mob of people some of whom attacked officers and tried to enter the capitol as a side note i tweeted these videos like they literally beat cops within inches of their lives the cops did not draw their guns right i'm not quoting here i'm just giving you some color commentary these cops are heroes for not drawing their guns and shooting these people because if they had there would have been dozens of people dead because they had plenty of firearms to to fight this fight and this these brave cops literally let themselves be beaten to not have to shoot americans who were beating them and hitting them with pepper spray and bear spray and all kinds of stuff so let's continue reading um they yelled among other things take their shields and our house attackers assaulted officers using pepper spray flag balls and numerous improvised weapons and projectiles they also disarmed the officers by stealing their shields and pushing them away

SPEAKER_06: from the rotunda doors at 2 30 pm the doors were breached and stack one stormed into the capitol alongside the mob during the attack on the capitol return to doors and surrounding facades suffered damage worth thousands of dollars another quote from the indictment while certain earth keeper members and affiliates outside washington dc breached the capitol grounds and building others remain stationed just outside the city in qrf teams again qrf quick reaction force it is a military term from an armed rapid response unit used in developing situations back to quoting the qrf teams were prepared to rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into washington dc in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power and we've seen uh big tech uh not comply with government requests uh from time to time remember

SPEAKER_17: in 2016 the court case of the fbi wanted to unlock the san bernardinos uh those terrorists iphones and apple declined to do that fbi used a third party i believe it was an israeli company and related big

SPEAKER_21: tech is getting called out by the government over the january 6 attack it's time for another our crowd

Chamath Palihapitiya: deal of the week right now you can join our crowds investment in blue tree according to the deal memo blue tree has developed a process to significantly reduce the sugar in any natural liquid fascinating this lowers health risks while retaining great taste and blue tree has already signed a five-year 100 million liter contract with an industry leader according to their deal memo speaking of investments in amazing startups it's clear that all over the world tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors well our crowd analyzes many of these startups across the entire global private market then they select companies with the greatest growth potential and bring them to you from personalized medicine to cyber security to robotics one of my favorite quantum computing and more in state-of-the-art labs startup garages and anywhere in between our crowd identifies innovators so that you can invest when growth potential is greatest and that's early so here's your cta the old call to action if you're an accredited investor you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist t-w-i-s-t and you can review all the current deals there's no payment involved until you decide to invest so go sign up for free and check out those deal memos at our crowd.com slash twist let me give you my take on this obviously this is all coordinated online and

David Friedberg: they were using signal and a lot of the information from big tech hasn't been given over yet but to just

SPEAKER_06: make this not political we need to assess this as americans and i'll just you know for those of you who care about my position um i think most of the people um who stormed the capital were caught up in basically mob behavior group behavior and they probably did little to no damage so anytime you bring up what happened uh at the capital on january 6th there's like oh it was like a party it was like an out of control party some people say riot other people say insurrection and we have this big debate over terms okay two things could be true the majority of people there were probably just caught up in mob behavior and yes some of them might have walked between the stanchions the velvet ropes and done no damage and some of them might have done silly things like steal a lectern or

SPEAKER_17: you know do very little damage other ones you know were were doing serious damage and it was gross and and then obviously there was a lot of criminal behavior 700 arrests to date and now this uh the

David Friedberg: insurrection charges basically but the second idea that you have to be able to keep in your head

SPEAKER_12: is that there were a group of people who had a very dangerous plan who drove across the country

David Friedberg: acquired weapons set up a military operation um and they were willing like uh ashley uh babbitt is her name she died on january 6th we most of you have seen this video tragically and she was a military person and secret service had their guns drawn on her and were begging her to not reach the capitals like third doors and the rumors are there were uh politicians that the secret server were protecting potentially pence potentially pelosi and they were searching for pelosi and chanting for pence and pelosi's names this woman was so deranged and so had such conviction that she literally took a

SPEAKER_12: bullet in her neck i believe and died and when you have people acting in a mob they uh can get so fermented with rage that they stopped thinking clearly and literally this poor woman ashley jumped through that window and took a bullet and died with the secret service pointing multiple guns at her and you've seen the video uh that's how crazy this was and if you're willing to beat up cops and take a bullet you can be certain that they would have beaten and potentially killed politicians

David Friedberg: and we would be looking at this saying you know what this was you know more than just a riot this was more than just the out of control protest uh and what we have to think about is when did this happen and who are these people this is a terrorist organization earth keepers this is a radical terrorist organization no different than the weather underground on the left no different than al-qaeda we could debate their abilities we debate if black lives matter and the riots we saw during those protests were justified i don't believe they are i don't believe any violence is justified um but this is

SPEAKER_06: serious serious dangerous stuff and uh for me i just look at this and said well they had an option here these individuals could have taken an option to do a peaceful protest in other words the oath keepers who were coordinating all of this and who were obviously protecting roger stone and roger stone his besties with trump this whole group of people could have said you know what we're gonna take a peaceful approach here and we would look at this with a completely different lens had those people said we're going to surround the capitol we're going to sit down we're going to lock arms we're going to handcuff ourselves to each other and we're not leaving and we're going to chant and protest and bang drums just like all the hippie dippies do when they're protesting an oil pipeline where they're protesting uh to save the whales or wrapping themselves around some old growth trees this is what environmentalists do by the way this is what martin luther king did right peaceful protest if you cannot be peaceful do not join the protest stay home that's what martin luther king instructed people to do these people took an opposite approach just like the weather underground takes an opposite approach on the left and this approach is let's go there let's seize the building let's have

David Friedberg: weapons ready and let's beat cops and let's go find these people and uh do physical harm to them and that's really what's disturbing about this and we need to be able to look at this through the lens of what were the options these people had to protest if they really felt passionate about it and what options did they choose and they chose violence and uh that's never acceptable and it really that you don't have to even you could be a republican and say this is shameful you could have voted for trump and say this is shameful uh you could be against the black lives matter protests and the violence we've seen there and still think this is shameful i think you have to be intellectually honest about

SPEAKER_37: this that's what i tried to do and summarize in this speech for all of you which is violence is

David Friedberg: immoral and violent protest is immoral okay uh in related news the house select committee investigating the attacks on the u.s capitalists is different than the criminal charges the doj is pursuing with the fbi they issued subpoenas to tech companies that provided inadequate response to their request for information as i mentioned above uh i believe this is these small group of people the oath keepers which i think there are 30 000 members 40 000 members in this group and who knows how many were there

SPEAKER_17: probably hundreds or thousands uh we'll figure that out over time in a statement the committee said

David Friedberg: youtube meta reddit and twitter did not provide proper information and records on the spread of misinformation efforts to overturn the 2020 election domestic violent extremism and foreign influence in the the 2020 election committee chairman representative thompson a democrat from mississippi said in the statement quote two key questions from the select committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy what steps if any social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence it's this disappointing that after months of engagement we still didn't have the documents and information necessary to answer these basic questions the select committee is working to get answers for the american people and help ensure nothing like january 6 ever happens again we cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further so we really don't have enough information here and we don't know exactly what the platforms didn't give or if the requests from our government and from

SPEAKER_12: this committee are so broad that they're impossible so if you said hey explain to us how people got radicalized online that seems very general now if you said hey here's an oath keepers group and we know these are is an oath keepers group because the doj identified these 10 leaders and six of them are in this

David Friedberg: group and four of them are in this group and we know they're involved in these groups give us that information that's a pretty easy request for information here the path to radicalization seems like very broad right and then what do they do to prevent it i'm not sure uh people talking about the fact that they believe the election was stolen or there might be voting irregularities i don't think you can police that because that's a valid discussion like we probably have had the discussion here on this week and started as many times of are these voting machines uh hackable like that's a completely valid discussion so i'm going to give the um tech companies a little bit of the benefit of the doubt here because we don't know exactly how broad these are uh but in the statement uh the committee reported youtube had live streams of the attack along with conversations pertaining to the planning of the attack so those should be public there were live streams they should be publicly available all you have to do is say give us everything on this ip address on this day january 6 from this hour to this hour in this geolocation very simple uh meta platforms uh that's facebook uh were used to share messages of hate violence incitement misinformation disinformation conspiracy theories were used to coordinate stop the steal movement stop the seal as you know is a far right or maybe conservative movement supporting the conspiracy theory that there was massive vote of fraud in the 2020 election uh reddits are the donald community was the origin for the website the donald.win which hosted discussions and plans for the attack so you know it's it's pretty hard to talk to these platforms just like it'd be very hard to go to verizon you know or to moleskin if people were taking notes in their books and say hey can we get the notes on how these people were radicalized it's like we're a verizon or we make you know journals this is like one step more detailed so in the example of youtube as i explained they could find the information but it's kind of hard to find a discussion in people's gmail or on a message group about this twitter of course was used to communicate about plans for the attacks that's no surprise everybody coordinates on twitter um and to amplify all these things so in looking at this i think the framing by the committee or these democrats i think the framing is probably to make tech look like bad guys here

SPEAKER_12: but the truth is it might just be hard to give them what they're asking for it's very easy to give them very specific things give us all the activity and dms between this group of people on these dates

David Friedberg: that's easy give us everybody whose ip addresses and we're posting from the capitol building pretty easy and they did and that's why 700 people have been arrested or have had charges against them i

Chamath Palihapitiya: think they settled a lot of those before they got to the earth keepers in 2022 let indochino take care of your new wardrobe with indochino you can customize everything from your suits to your shirts to your chinos and bomber jackets and you can do it all at surprisingly affordable prices i have a number of indochino suits i love them and the process is amazing you can go to the store and they will do a perfect fitting with you they put all your measurements in you can change every little detail you can do the liners and pockets everything is customizable so you look like a million bucks but you don't got to spend a million bucks i love it and then when you want to order more you just go online they got all your measurements okay you're all set and what happens if you're like me you'll lose 25 pounds but you go back in they tighten things up for you they can do alterations it's very simple they offer completely custom fitted suits shirts casual wear and more so you can get a wardrobe personalized to your style and taste without spending that fortune every piece is made to your exact measurements so you can customize every detail everything about your suit the fabric the lapel the monogram and those statement linings that i love so much that nobody notices until you take your jacket off and you fold it inside out which is the power move to protect your suit and then they see that beautiful lining it's a statement lining and people go where'd you get that suit you give them a wink it's custom indochino so you know you can create a suit that fits you and your style perfectly and it really is about that fit when you have a perfect fit your confidence goes up everybody notices hey that suit looks great because it fits so well the suit started just 4 49 i kid you not and shirts 79 all the customizations are included so give yourself a style edit that sets the tone for the rest of the year at indochino get 50 off any purchase of 3.99 or more by using my promo code twist at indochino.com that's 50 off a purchase of 3.99 or more that's more than 10 off at indochino.com

SPEAKER_06: and use the promo code twist uh next up on the program uh we have an okay boomer segment uh with alex maz mesh he is a french entrepreneur who raised twenty thousand dollars in a personal token sale back in 2020 he sold 10 of the dollar sign alex token supply against twenty thousand dollars and he allows

David Friedberg: token owners to vote on major life decision and is giving them 15 percent of his salary for three years fascinating so if he were to make a hundred thousand a year that would be 45 000 they paid in for 20 000 i guess they would double their money uh so he's basically selling his future income like an income sharing arrangement which we've seen before ices like lambda school does and other nursing schools do now you can get a free degree or a discounted degree and then pay it back from your salary the price of the alex token as of january 13th was 11 cents the total market cap is unknown since the token is unlisted he raised 20 000 in about four days so i think this is fascinating rachel uh what was the conversation like the conversation went extremely well this

SPEAKER_53: actually has to be probably my favorite favorite conversation i've had thus far i found alex from twitter after asking everyone who's the best gen z in the nft community and he was recommended time and time again he was recommended quite a few times overall he was just really well spoken absolutely knew his stuff and was able to explain everything to me in really simple details which i loved because

SPEAKER_57: i think some of this stuff was a little over my head so i hope everybody enjoys this amazing what a great

SPEAKER_12: idea i for one love the idea of young people maybe not selling in perpetuity uh their future earnings but

David Friedberg: what a clever way to pay for school and uh or pay for expenses i think people want to take the risk of betting on a young person and being involved in their mentorship through voting uh what a great experiment um and uh person could always just go work at doordash and make sixty thousand dollars a year and pay down their 20 000 advance pretty quickly so uh great job getting this one and uh congratulations you have now moved out of your parents basement don't say where you live don't say where you live but congratulations we can hear the horns blaring uh so you're not in the boondocks anymore you're in a major city and congratulations on a new look and feel for your studio no more

SPEAKER_64: dogs unfortunately in my background anymore i know everybody absolutely loved seeing the dogs and hearing the dogs bark but now you get car horns now you're going to get car horns ambulances and people deranged people yeah yeah you will get the others we get one we have one local yeller down below

SPEAKER_66: somebody who spent time in the city where you're now living uh noise cancelling headphones sound

David Friedberg: machine air purifier you put two or three of these things together and you get a good night's sleep

SPEAKER_70: that's all blackout curtains uh you'll get there all right thank you great job rachel and enjoy the

David Friedberg: ok boomer section as we have on friday okay everybody quick plug of something we like to do to help the founder community uh both of our founder dot university iterations are coming up in february we do two types of founder universities one is a two-day intensive course this one is for female founders only women founders only you'll get lessons on running and optimizing your startup free legal advice from our friends at wilson cincini candid feed pitch back for me and more it's february 14th and 15th and you can apply at intensive dot founder dot university apply at intensive dot founder dot universities our two-day intensive again we're trying to meet more female founders so we can invest in them and by having a dedicated event just for women we do other ones for underrepresented founders and just for everybody we want to see a little more change in the ecosystem and this is how we are able to find and recruit more women uh to invest in then we're going to have our 12 week cohort number two you may have heard me talk about we created a 12-week course it's essentially free i'll explain that in a moment we just finished our first founder you cohort and i've invested in some of the companies so now we're doing cohort two the first core cohort we had 100 people start i think 94 finished or 95 will finish this time we're going to try to double it to 200 cohort one had a company accepted into launch accelerator before even completing the course which means we put a hundred thousand dollars into that company the deadline to apply is february 14th it kicks off two weeks later on february 28th you can apply for the 12-week course which happens at night um it's twice a week you can do it if you have a full-time job is course dot founder dot university course dot founder university you can find out more about both programs at founder dot university and please follow twitter.com slash founder uni and we're really starting to up our social game founder uni is pretty active and for the 12-week course we charge people 700 to reserve their spot and if they come to all 12 weeks we're having excused absence for a week or two we just charge them back their 700 happy to report i

SPEAKER_17: think in this last class 96 out of 100 people completed the course so i think or something like that so we'll charge like five people for uh burning the spot on the course and not completing it and so if you complete it it's free it's on me if not we charge you it's just basically a way for

SPEAKER_74: us to make sure people don't apply and uh not show up okay great job to the team at founder university

SPEAKER_76: good job uh charlie and jackie thank you so much alex for coming on the show so i first met alex

SPEAKER_77: massmash after doing some research on twitter asking people for the best gen z who knows about the nft space and your name came up time and time again and similarly to a previous guest we had irafili gunari he's an international founder and he also lives in london and originally he's from france where you are right now currently right um and that is awesome you've done quite a lot of things and i want to dive into a ton of them because i think they are all very relevant i went to art basel and everybody was talking about nfts there and i met a bunch of young people interested in the space so i thought it'd be really fun to have someone on our age talk about it i actually saw you when you were in the media for raising twenty thousand dollars on ethereum by tokenizing yourself and the catch was that investors could vote on your life choices and i thought that was so crazy but i also saw that you are the co-founder and ceo of the web 3 social network showtime i guess let's start off with your social token so gen z is all over monetizing their lives now more commonly by like vlogging or tick tocking not necessarily by making a token of themselves you're just doing it in a really different and cool way can you explain to everybody what it means to tokenize yourself i guess first sure thanks

SPEAKER_82: for having me rachel so yeah um i guess uh a year and a half ago i was in this bedroom in paris that

SPEAKER_83: i am right now and kobe just had happened and like most of my savings in crypto went down and i had basically no money to fulfill my dream of being a gen z founder uh especially in san francisco raising money finding a co-founder launching a startup like all of those things i felt like were taken away from me because of covid and my little savings and so what i did is i was part of the ethereum community for maybe six months at that time and i met a lot of people and i had learned so that was in 2019 i had learned about daos nfts uh defy basically two years before this massive moon that we're saying this year uh and so i was like cool it seems like i could try to do something innovative and um i originally had created like a token for someone to fly me out to a conference uh a year earlier it was kind of crazy uh like a stranger sent me money because of a tweet oh my gosh yeah that was that was so crazy okay

Chamath Palihapitiya: everybody i want to tell you about one of the original innovators in the no code space and that's bubble bubble empowers anyone to design and launch their own apps marketplaces or tools without any coding skills or pricey engineers mary fox is a launch portfolio founder she's amazing and she quit her six-figure job after she discovered bubble to build her professional coaching startup and that's called marlo bubble offers a digital editor and cloud hosting platform starting at just 29 a month can you believe it users can build almost any complex web app from a sas tool to social networks and they could spend way less time building out their mvp the minimum viable product that you need to raise money bubble utilizes drag and drop elements in their visual editor so you can go from an idea to a launchable product in just days or weeks not months or quarters or even years and they handle all the boring stuff like deployment and hosting so you can focus on your product and your customers which is really what's important bubble has over 1 million users for a reason and they enable over 1 billion in business volume so here's a simple call to action bubble is offering you one month free on any of their paid plans and that ranges from the entry level 29 a month plan all the way up to the 529 a month plan but act fast because they're only offering this deal for the first 500 redemption so

SPEAKER_51: head to bubble.io twist and snag one of those 500 coupons bubble.io twist and so after that like a

SPEAKER_83: company called roll which is the og social token company which is out to me and say wow like you created your own cryptocurrency for like sending you to the us that's crazy because we're pitching this to creators every day and you're doing it yourself way before anyone and they were like why don't you create your own token called alex and make it more general and so you know i thought about this but to me it was never necessary until i have no money it is covered and like there is no other opportunity right now unless i create my own and so that's when in march 2020 basically the last ever conference before covet shuts down is luckily in paris it's called ecc paris and i'm given main stage because you know i'm french i know the organizers and like maybe it was too much for my presence at the time but i got main stage and so i was very excited and i was like okay this is now or never i have to do a splash with social tokens and be the first person to raise a tiny bit of money so i can afford lawyer and visa and also go to san francisco start a company and so i did uh and it went viral which was super cool um we went on like bars tool sports and oh my goodness i got an article in forbes and like it was very funny to be like a public figure for like a few months going on tons of podcasts and stuff so anyway yeah the initial pitch is 20 000 against a tiny bit of my future salary so i think it's 15 of my future salary dispersed in the next three years so i'm still doing this right now it's like i think halfway in at this point and i was like yeah like help me get into the us this is the alex token and i'll do a ton more of experiments later on and the other one that kind of got viral was basically um a very famous influencer in the ethereum community is austin griffiths who's like a famous developer and he was like let's do like you know voting based on a token and why don't you be the example alex like a lightweight example and he was like let's do something kind of fun and crazy and i thought of controlling my life for one month you can pick one habit of mine so this was july 2020 and i let people choose between like eating red meat no sorry uh being vegan for a month or waking up at 6 a.m or running three miles a day uh like most of the week like five times a week and then or solely living off cryptocurrencies like i can only spend money in cryptocurrencies and people picked running three miles so i was literally running almost every day like five times a week uh three miles for the entire month of july 2020 that was kind of a crazy uh month and i guess

SPEAKER_95: they kind of people chose the most painful thing anyway so that's that's what the alex token and then

SPEAKER_83: like it helped me get uh unique insights that i think i'm applying to short time today my startup and so i think it was super helpful for me and life-changing really i guess that's a good way to hold

SPEAKER_97: yourself accountable because having other people inside that for you is that overall experience i guess still going on are you still having to spend all your money in crypto and run three miles a day

SPEAKER_83: or is that project kind of that was just like once for one month but i think because it kind of went viral and this was like the other use case after the income sharing agreement of twenty thousand dollars i think people still like poked at it i think i was inspired by mike merrill who is the original person who did this with fiat with dollars 10 years ago and now he has his own show on amazon prime

SPEAKER_104: uh but like i just got inspired this was a one month gimmick nothing more that is actually crazy

SPEAKER_77: so congratulations that sounds really really cool i actually did listen to a podcast that you were on after this i think it was pomps podcast while you were on this whole media run so everybody else gets there what is that they're five minutes of fame and you get your your feels like six months of fame i feel like you were all over the news when that first happened which is very cool and you mentioned that they would get part of your salary so first off that is a pretty big chunk of your salary right 15 is what you said do people just have to like trust that you're giving them the accurate salary or do you have to like put out your own financial information for people to see because i feel like that is very not um intrusive but um i don't know how much i would feel how comfortable i would necessarily feel putting information like that out there so this is the number one question i got

SPEAKER_83: every time i hopped on podcasts etc and this is so fascinating because this is where this is why i started showtime because it was like wait there is no way i have to give out my tax returns yeah also like full disclosure at the time when i created my token i had zero jobs i only had worked at dow's who gave me grants okay so i was literally living in like the crypto web3 native bubble before anyone else showtime is my first job basically it is so funny that essentially i was just getting some tokens and when i cashed out to fiat 15 would go to my shareholders and i would just airdrop that in crypto so it was a very clunky message system now i have i'm a ceo i have a salary and so it's much easier to disforce my income and tell them how much i'm making but it is not on chain it is not something that i cannot cheat on like it is a smart contract that i cannot cheat on this would be the ideal way and this is when after i did the alex token i was like wait a minute nfts are booming and this is a way to be sure as a shareholder in someone that this is the money they're making and that this is my fair share out of that money they're making and so this is why nfts are so fascinating and why i'm starting short time because it was like nft solved this problem nfts is a traceable source of income for creators that i could not do myself and i had to like do this like awkward thing it's okay for me because it was just 20 000 it was a very tiny amount and this was filled by 30 people most of them i know and others were just like twitter fans i guess that was a question that was kind of hard and so my answer is like a fiat this poor thing saying but it was not perfect but nfts make it way better

SPEAKER_97: so i guess at first i thought this was like an insane idea but the more and more i think about it the more i can kind of put this to what gen z's are already doing i kind of i think i mentioned like

SPEAKER_77: tick tock a few minutes ago so you know how tick tock you get um that monetization platform i kind of feel like it's very similar where the audience is controlling their lives in sense of the content that performs the best is the stuff that will probably go viral and in turn give them money so i don't think what you did was very far off than what's already happening and i think yours is a way better way of transparency like you said with being able to track and see where everything is coming from and going to i think that's a very very interesting place to be and i've seen a bunch of other people definitely after you i think you were the first person i saw who did a token with like the dollar sign in their name in their bio now you see a ton of people doing that i think nick cho was the one after your korean dad is his name on twitter but i saw he did it after you so i can see this catching on especially in the influencer space and in the content creation space i saw you mentioned a web 3 social network which is what you call your startup i want to pivot over there because as you said that is your first job being a ceo which is not very common that definitely was not my first job out of college and in the description it says a web 3 social network what is a web 3 social network and how does it differ than the social networking that we're doing currently for sure so i guess i call this

SPEAKER_83: because you know my audience on twitter is like tech savvy and so this is what like web 3 is like this common word uh to differentiate i guess a web 3 social network is a social network where you are financially independent and i think like social tokens play a part in that because you know as you said like on tick tock and other platforms like you are basically like subject to the platform's discretion to you know monetize on your behalf and so it's very funeral it's kind of like a monarchy where you don't own anything and as weird as it sounds creating your own token means like you are owning your micro economy in a way and so to me a web 3 social network is a social network that's based on things that you actually own and what you actually own you can sell online and you can profit from and actually getting the fair share of the work that you put online so in a web 3 social network your profile id is your ethereum address your content that you put out is nfts and maybe some sort of rewards to your fans is social tokens so the entire social graph that we know is getting replaced by blockchain primitives by web 3 primitives but to me that's extremely exciting because it means that now you are economically independent you are free to do and monetize your work as you wish without a platform taking 20 the same way that in real life you own a pair of shoe if you sell it to your friend or to a stranger like you don't have to give like you know a private company a massive amount of money like online this is not the case everything that you do either is monetized on your behalf or you have to pay massive fees you cannot exit the system it's hard to give to people so you don't have this sense of ownership and ownership is everything in the world it's it's how you know investors get wealthy it's how you actually get rights on governing or profiting of anything and so excited to bring that concept online i think nfts is an awesome way of owning content so to me all social media content in the future will be nfts and i guess short time is trying to play a little part in spearheading that new movement so you know we don't have social tokens yet at short time but time is starting with nfts as the content and so every nft on short time you can like comment share you can follow creators and follow all the nfts on all blockchains that is the primary value proposition today but lots of exciting things to come very soon that's awesome because

SPEAKER_77: we're already kind of seeing that how you said owning something physical in real life and then also see it over on the web so the first thing that comes to mind is that recent news with nike so just imagine like owning a pair of jordans in real life and then having something digital kind of almost represents a not only like a cool asset to have like in the nft world but like an authentication portion of it um and even going previous to this i feel like this is going to get really big because not only have we grown up necessarily in a digital world but a lot of things i feel like secretively are were already like this so obviously you didn't grow up in the states but there used to be these things called webkins and the first thing i think about when i think about having something digital versus having something um in the real world and having them kind of be connected is a webkins it was this toy that you had when you were little you bought a stuffed animal right had a qr code or um like a bunch of letters right on the tag you got to upload those letters on the tag and like your stuffed animal would come to life over on the computer and it's funny because that existed back when i was a kid i was in elementary school and now that we're seeing things like this it's kind of like it's just going bigger and bigger and bigger so i definitely see the growth in this space i think my problem with nfts initially was seeing like that utility aspect of it i'm sure a bunch of people come with come to you and say okay like nfcs are really sexy right now but what will the longevity be of them and what is the actual utility can you speak to that it

SPEAKER_83: is true because the original utility of nft right now is just that it's beautiful and it's art just like traditional art so sure you may think that if you're not a fan of traditional art you would not see value in digital art but i think even if you're not a fan of of art and like you don't buy it just because it's beautiful at least what's objectively true is that the nft space created digital art as a viable industry before digital artists would just not make money they had to either do prints or like sell to a company but they could not live off their digital art and that changed however yes it is true that like there is no utility behind besides being beautiful to look at and like to showcase it to your friends but to me it's a little adjacent to the attention economy of web 2 because if you have you know a famous digital artist that's raising uh to their fans and if their fans understand web 3 they can actually sell for a high price meaning that the more popular you are the more likelihood of selling your nft it is so it is kind of similar to like the advertising model of web 2 where it's like the more impressions the more valued it is by advertisers so this is the current system but it is true that there are a lot of startups currently starting that are about rewarding people for earning an nft because the nft is sort of a password basically like i own this thing and i can prove it that it is mine so i can access a bunch of different things and to me like the three big things that nft can access is a discount an exclusive community so like a discord group chat or a telegram group chat that is only for those holders and if you sell your nft a bot will kick you out of that group chat so it is very exclusive and the other thing is exclusive content so maybe like you get a vip video a high resolution photo or accessing a website or something that is very new but to me yeah it's like the utility of nft is is as wide as websites so like i'm not sure what will be the next killer utility i think there will be millions but to me accessing like you know community content or a discount or a coupon

SPEAKER_119: to me is like probably most of those use cases totally totally i think the digital art aspect

SPEAKER_121: that you put to it how difficult it was for artists um to make money off of their digital art is a good

SPEAKER_77: point to make i have been seeing that a lot of people have been saying that nfts right now are just at hype mania and like you're you're too late to break and break into the game basically like if you buy one now like you're it's gonna be useless like you just you just put money down the drain do you think that like nfts have a more promising future or do you think right now we're just in absolute mania mode and this is as good as it's gonna get well to me it's funny to to say this because

SPEAKER_83: i feel like the entire planet will use nfts the same way that everyone on earth is engaging with social media content so right now i think at most really at the most there might be five to ten million people using nfts and i still think that it's more than the reality so it is a mania like for the tiny amount of people who know how to use minimask which is basically no one on earth so yeah there is a micro micro bubble for those people because they're like oh my god like if i create an nft i can say for a much higher price than in 10 years when it's mainstream because i'm one of the few early ones so those are kind of like the vinyl vinyl finial era where like the it's like the ogs nfts from like normal ethereum from like the 2020s like it will be a memory in the future and so maybe that's why they will be so expensive but yeah i don't shorter maybe like maybe in a month or two crypto will crash because it's quite cyclical and way more way too much money have been spent there uh but long term i think if we zoom out nfts are in a constant growth trajectory and this is not ending anytime soon so yeah maybe for now if your nft has no value but the fact that it's very early in crypto i think as time goes on it will be less and less valuable and you actually have to have either a very beautiful nft or a very useful hence utility is interesting to think about nft so yeah definitely there's maybe a mania for useless nfts but i think that's the case for anything in life if there's no really utility or no one likes it it won't be valuable that's very very true i like

SPEAKER_77: i said before definitely the utility aspect of nfts is just something i'm really excited to see in the future and thank you so much for being able to talk so in depth about all of these and again thank you so much for coming along and talking with us especially when you're on home uh visiting your parents that means a lot do you have any advice for those young people that are looking to break

SPEAKER_114: into the nft space i would say try to come up with something that is new and original i feel like that

SPEAKER_83: was my process for the alex to goodness like okay i'm pretty sure i'm the first ever person in the world to do this and because web3 is so new it's a blank canvas right now besides buying and selling there's almost nothing that was done in nft space so try to do something new and then maybe research a little bit the technology because we're very early so if you're willing to do it now probably you should learn about the technology and basically know a few steps ahead of like okay like i probably should not do it on layer one because it's very expensive and slow so like what are some new kinds of blockchain on top of ethereum and others that i can do that will be like more future proof awesome so be

SPEAKER_98: forward looking plus also like do something original awesome thank you so much so i've i've

SPEAKER_77: i uh i thought for an nft so i'm gonna have to i'm gonna take it offline it's gonna be seals my idea but i want to talk to you about it thank you so much again for speaking with us really excited for jason to listen to this episode you you you