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Jul 18, 2023 By Steve King Photography by Generated Using AI Web Exclusive

I never joined Facebook or MySpace because in the early 2000s I was in my late teens and too busy partying and chasing girls to care about what people were saying on the internet. It was a different time. I joined Twitter in 2009 because I was a big M.I.A. fan and she said on her official site (I know…like I said, it was a different time) that Twitter was the best place to keep up with her.

Shortly after joining, I noticed a lot of journalists and writers were there and that it was an excellent resource for following news, which was further hammered home by the content of the Arab Spring that couldn’t always be found on mainstream news sites.

It became an essential utility.

I quickly realized that I had stuff to say and started posting more regularly. I built a modest following, and gained some pretty cool followers, some with that magic checkmark. I connected with a writer I’d always respected, and he published my first article on a site that I’d read for years.

It was simply life-changing. I had realized a goal I’d had my whole life: I was a published writer, and now not just for the school paper or yearbook, but a real-life publication. I made a lane for myself with some other stories and eventually started getting paid for my work; another notch in the goal belt. I was verified and able to write basically whatever I wanted. Verification opened a lot of doors that had until then been closed. I’ve been able to start a rumor about a president, and interview people I admire. Pretty good deal, ngl.

Twitter’s new owner after a hostile takeover has been… disruptive, to say the least. Most power-users spent the better part of 2022 wondering what we would do if he bought the site. Rather than take part in the new owner’s “free speech” social experiment, many of us agreed to migrate to Mastodon, Post, and Spoutible, and use our same usernames and profile and header pictures in order to make it easier to find each other. I took a wait and see approach but quietly started quitting.

When it was announced that the company would be removing legacy checkmarks and replacing them with verification that would cost $8 a month for, well… anyone… I was done. I would not be paying for something I earned through hustle, hard work, and middling talent. Those of us with no other web presence became overnight political refugees, if only on our phones. Disgraced former-General Michael Flynn’s formerly banned Twitter account was reinstated on January 6, 2023. Subtle, right?

I moved over to Post.news first and it has been a breath of fresh air. There’s no dog-piling or shitposting. It has been a relief and refuge. Civility and journalism are the focus. It has been surprisingly fun to start over from scratch. And after watching Twitter descend into a 500% jump in hatespeech, remove protections for child sex crimes, animal torture videos and somehow more porn than ever before, I was gone. This is what Twitter has become. A misinformation and hate site. I was out before the checkmark massacre and was quickly verified on Post and Spoutible, and thank the gods, the new bosses are cool—meaning they’re not crazed libertarian, bug-eyed salamander white dudes living in the clouds out in Silicon Valley. These guys live in the northeast; Spoutible is run by an old Twitter-friend, Chris Bouzy, and Post is run by a new e-friend, Noam Bardin.

Bardin is the former-CEO of Wazes and is generally a total mensch. He has been called “one of Business Insider’s 100 Stars of Silicon Valley.” He holds a B.A. in Economics from the Hebrew University and a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He’s driven, a proven industry trailblazer, and has offered a fast-moving, civil, and decent alternative to Twitter. In the time since we spoke and the publication of this article, Spoutible has launched on Android and Post has launched on iOS. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky (hard pass) and Meta’s Threads (also, hard pass) have blown up as well.

What is happening to Twitter is larger and more important than all of our respective followings. It’s a major online disruption, the likes of which we haven’t seen since… well… 2016. Every facet of online life will be touched by the changes made to Twitter.

Now pay attention.

Steve King (Under the Radar): I’ve been running little tests on Post and Spoutible by posting the same things on both platforms at the same time to see who gets more engagement, and at first it was Spoutible but Post has caught up; they’re both about equal right now, I think, it’s a real competition. Instagram is launching a text-only Twitter alternative [Threads]. What are you guys anticipating when Jack Dorsey launches his Bluesky thing?

Noam Bardin: I disagree with the idea that we need another Twitter alternative. There will never be another Twitter. Twitter is a unique service that came at a unique time and with all kinds of specific things that happened to create it. So, there are all of these attempts to create alternatives, or clones, and my view is: that’s assuming in many ways that Twitter was a healthy company before. It wasn’t. A lot of the problems they see today were there and have obviously been exacerbated.

When you think about the challenges of a social platform, none of these new platforms actually address the core problems that we saw with Twitter, and that goes for Facebook as well. In that sense, good luck to everyone: Jack Dorsey, Chris Bouzy, and there’s Bluesky and Mastodon and Spoutible, and many many different alternatives. But, for me the question is…what are you trying to achieve? Why are you launching an alternative?

I’d been looking at this for a long time before deciding to take the plunge, and what I saw wrong with Twitter were some core problems. Problem number one: compensation for creators, journalists, publishers, etcetera. Social Media in general has sucked the ad dollars out of the market, and have pushed news publishers to the point where they’re owned by a hedge fund that’s bleeding them dry. They’re struggling in a different way.

I believe that journalism is super important to our democracy and our country. I don’t believe that citizen journalism can replace professional journalism. That being said, I have a plan. And news has evolved a lot in terms of how we get news and how people write, but in general compensation is one big problem that we’re addressing through our micro-payment network. We have a lot of other ideas out there, but we want to make sure that if people create and distribute great content, they get compensated for it.

And the second thing is the toxicity and harassment that we see on Twitter, and Facebook, to me, the two are connected. The toxicity is a function of the business model. The fact that we have all this craziness that we see on social media is by design. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and it was developed because of the advertising business model which requires you to engage users and keep them keep doomscrolling on your platform for as long as possible. And the best way to do that is to promote hateful content, because we as humans react very emotionally to that, and that leads us to the platform.

Those are two of the core issues, that and a million other features and other things we can discuss. But there’s the two core problems that I saw with Twitter and Facebook and the first generation of social media companies. And obviously, a lot of it comes with a great deal of responsibility for your platform and what your intentions are. We love to focus on the salacious side of things, [like] “Musk is doing this and Zuckerberg is doing that…” There are all kinds of flavors on top of the core problems.

And again, the core problems are toxicity by design, and there is no way that ad-supported networks can get out of it, and the second is compensation for creators, which, the platforms have been very clear: we’re not going to help with compensation in any way and more than that, we’re actually going to remove news from our platform.

That’s interesting because what I’ve found and like about Post is that starting over is… it’s refreshing. I can try to be a better person and less of a dick. It’s compelling that we all agreed to kind of find each other and keep our usernames and profile pictures and all that stuff. Or we keep avoiding each other, sometimes… It’s like a community searching for a place to reconvene. What are some examples that you’re seeing as far as rebuilding a community goes?

Society has proven that it wants social media, right? All these ideas of, should we get rid of it or whatever…we want it. It provides tremendous value to all of us. And more than that, specifically when it comes to news, by far, the younger you go, the higher the percentage of people who consume all of their news on social media. Most of Twitter, like, 68% say “This is where I consume my news.” So this is the new newspaper. Like it or not, social media is the new newspaper. And thus, we have to figure out how to play together.

What I find most inspiring on the platform, really, is the vibe that’s created. Communities are one of those things that are very difficult to find. So it’s a little bit like the Supreme Court defining pornography; you know it when you see it. It’s very, very hard to explain what it is, and there is something that’s been emerging on Post, which is kinder and gentler, and more forgiving or accepting… Besides that, we still see all the craziness. Our moderation team has seen it all, from nation states, to racists, to homophobia, to a personal attack, to doxing of people. It’s all there. It goes to intentionality. We, as a platform, do not want it there. And we go to great lengths to remove it, and the community has been great about policing it and finding content as they see it come up, and we’re creating an environment where this can emerge.

You talked at the beginning of who gets more engagement, but to me the engagement is half the question. The other side of it is: who gets more hate and who gets more toxicity? The two are directly connected. And so, for us, that’s the most important thing. It’s to make sure that it’s a safe place. I don’t want it to be a liberal TruthSocial. That’s not the idea of Post. I want and I welcome conservative opinions, and Republicans, and people I may disagree with dramatically on a personal level but that are within the boundaries of the law and the boundaries of liberal values of decency.

And we forget it because we’re all so caught up in hating each other, because these platforms surface all the hate. We’ve forgotten that half of the country doesn’t agree with Democratic agenda, but that doesn’t mean that they’re crazy. It sounds that way when you listen to social media because all you hear is the crazy. But this amplification of extreme views on social media is one of the most damaging things that’s happened to us. And I’m not trying to say that Fox News hasn’t been a big part of that. It’s not the only reason, but when you spend time on traditional social media you will get more and more extremist views, and I personally don’t believe most Americans are like that. Most Americans are decent people and they don’t think that other people deserve less rights than them. They do believe in due process and the law and everything else that we used to take for granted.

If you’re what I called a “regular,” if you’re not a social media culture warrior, right? You’re not out there to “Own the libs” or “Show the MAGA” or whatever it is. You’re just a regular person. Where do you go? Where do you go to get opinions and listen to what other people are saying, share what your thoughts are, read different opinions? Where would you go without getting all that hate pigeon-holding you into picking a side? And, to me, that is what really will be the success of Post; one where we can really have difficult conversations and keep that within the discussion of the issue and not the person. That’s one of the worst things that’s happened in our discourse; everything has become personal and everything is your values and you as a person, and we can’t just debate a concept or idea without turning it into a personal attack.

It’s definitely something that’s been happening more over the last 20 years or so, definitely since the 2000 election.

At the end of the day, let’s not confuse ourselves, there are very big financial interests behind all of that. What happened to cable news is a function of the money in the advertising. That’s what drove everything, and when you think about social media, the advertising model then pushes this concept out there. Companies act according to their business interests. And the idea that companies will act differently from the business interests is very difficult to prove. That being said, we should not have built our society only on business interests. It just doesn’t make sense.

Right. I can say that there have been less than a handful of trolls I’ve interacted with on Post, that’s how great it is. Something else I’ve noticed recently too is what you said, that communities are kind of policing themselves, and they are because someone on Spoutible DM’d me recently and was like, “Hey, you followed this account and it’s total bullshit. You shouldn’t do that” and I was like, “Oh, my bad. I didn’t know. I was not sober on Indictment Night. Good lookin’ out.” And it’s cool because it shows that there is some kind of fundamental conscience there, you know what I mean? I think it’s just very encouraging.

And when you go back to the beginning of social media, it really was around that, right? I hope that we reach a point where everyone on Post is verified, and we want people to be verified under their real name and associate their real name with their account, publically.

That’s why I’ve never really posted under a different name seriously. I don’t understand why people would do that. It’s an alien concept to me.

But many people do, and I’m not saying that if you’re under your real name you won’t do horrible things, but overall, I believe there are many different ways to self-police, and one of them is knowing that it’s your real name, your neighbors can see what you write, your children can see what you write, etcetera. That’s a constraint. We used to have some kind of honor associated with our name that we cared about. That’s been disappearing, but at the same time I do think that being your real person is very different from being an anonymous person out there.

A lot of these trolls are professionals or semi-professional. Professional, meaning they’re staff, they’re a foreign national, they’re companies hired by politicians or others to do this, and they’re just optimizing how they work. The other, what I’d call “semi-professionals,” which are people who are just out there to insult or annoy other people. That’s their goal. We actually had to add a section to our content rules because we found these people who, all they were doing was attacking people.

That’s their hobby. And again, there’s enough platforms. They can go to Twitter. They can go to a lot of other places. We don’t need them on Post and being able to actually remove them from the platform goes back to intentionality. Your goal is to have everyone in the world on your platform. You can allow anyone on the platform to say anything they want to anyone. What’s going to happen? And we say “no,” Post is not for 100% of people. It’s for 85% of the people. It’s not for the culture warriors who are out there to make a point and prove themselves. It’s for regular people who just have more to life than their social media presence.

It’s weird. Even when I pitched this story, my editor was hesitant; he said, “We get a lot of traffic to the site from artists on Twitter and we can’t afford to be blacklisted.” Everyone’s afraid of this guy and it’s like, we already lost the verification badge for the magazine that’s existed for 20 years.

For a publication like mine, I can see how Twitter Blue might be kind of a no-brainer. You know, 8 bucks a month to get in front of a wider audience? That seems like a great write-off. But when it has the same value as, like, a neckbeard in nowheresville, then it kind of loses its sheen a bit and it’s financing hate speech and misinformation.

We all have to look at Twitter now and consider, Elon has done the most extreme thing he could do. Trump basically said out loud what many extremists were saying quietly at home. It used to be that if you were a Nazi somewhere in America you didn’t brag about it, you kept it quiet, to yourself, and you knew you’d be attacked by everyone, and you were considered fringe. Today, you’re part of mainstream Republicans, or the MAGA movement. It’s part of their game. We could not have imagined. That Nazi now, friends other Nazis.

But now social media primes many other Nazis and now they feel like they are part of a large movement and they’re not alone in their basement. And all of their content, algorithmically, becomes a Nazi-supporting pocket, so their whole world becomes more emboldened and they believe that they are mainstream. This is, in many ways, what Elon Musk has done on Twitter. He’s just gone and done things that you just didn’t do.

There’s no law that says you cannot censor other platforms, but that’s not how the internet works. Anybody can post any link to anything, and he decided that he was going to change that. It used to be that owners didn’t really get involved in algorithmic promotion of content, and he gone in and said, “No, I want this political agenda. I want it on social media.” It’s very similar to what Fox has done. They have a political agenda and they’ve optimized the whole platform around that political agenda.

The internet used to be better. We all used to agree that everyone had the right to equality, and now that’s gone away, and you see that in terms of engagement on Twitter. A lot of creators have told me that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, they’re just not getting it. We have a major publisher on our platform. When we did a test, they had about 20,000 followers on Post and two or three million followers on Twitter, and they got the same engagement. And this is by design, I could tell you, mathematically, that could not happen, but if you’re by-design doing this, you can reach any output you want.

And it really kind of seems like he’s trying to replace Rupert Murdoch as the hub for right wing media. But this is a different version of reality. A different version of media. It’s…. I don’t know. It’s something else entirely.

You are absolutely right. Something has emerged that Trump has legitimized, right? Politicians used to walk the line of truth. And you can argue about which side, but they always used to walk the line. Now it’s a rounding error if it happens. Somehow people can say what they want and they’ve completely blurred the lines between opinion and journalism, between anything fact-based. Whatever you imagine now, your opinions are worth my expertise and my facts. It doesn’t matter. I have opinions and they have to be legitimate because they’re my opinions. This is the essence of the liberal movement and Enlightenment, right? The idea that facts vs. opinions. And the idea that the government is separate from the people, or the person. The person has a role, but they’re not a king. The basic tenets of our society that have delivered tremendous value to humanity; we all enjoy science and better ways of government.

And now, we’re kind of reverting back to this basic idea of the Absolute King, who can do no wrong. Humanity lived that way for most of our history. For most of our 10,000 years of civilization, the king could do no wrong. And it’s been in the last 100 to 200 years that we started understanding that kings are humans. And, now, they’re going back to them being gods. To me, that’s a terrible thing. And the same thing goes with the direction of Twitter. I am fine with conservative opinions. I wouldn’t consider myself a hyper-progressive person. I consider myself to be liberal in the sense of traditional liberal values.

Same!

The government should not be involved in my personal life. If I’m not hurting anyone, I should be able to do whatever I want. And just like I think that religion is the source of all evil and I’m not going to argue with someone else’s right to worship whatever imaginary thing they want? That’s fine. But those rights which we used to take for granted, are now open for discussion and these tools weaponize opinions and people like Elon Musk… I don’t know what the person has gone through… I’ve met him before… I’ve never assumed or could not imagine that a person who grew up with that kind of background, being part of technology companies, would go so far into this imaginary world.

I think that people just made fun of him too much. You know, I think he’s got no sense of humor and everyone just made fun of him to the point where he bought the place and turned it into Pottersville. I think I said something like that at some point on Post.

There’s a group of these Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve gone down this path, and my thesis is that these people were obviously awkward socially when they were growing up. They were teased terribly in high school, and instead of taking empathy from that, what they took from it was, “I want to be the bully. I want the tools to bully people and not to be bullied.” The first thing I want to protect is the victim of something else. Bullying has become the goal. The goal is to make yourself feel better by putting people down. There’s no logic to what’s going on here. Nothing logical can explain these ideas and this movement towards hate or the promotion of hate. And people wonder “what are you trying to achieve?” That’s not the issue. The issue is; you want to be the bully

We’ve got a little creeping fascism problem, you know, in America…?

It’s not just creeping, it’s sitting at the table and saying it, and not ashamed to say it anymore. What’s going on in America is going on in Israel. It’s going on in countries all over the world. Poland, Hungary, and many, many countries. We could be at the end of the Democratic arc. It’s much easier to explain what’s going on in that sense. The Second World War shook everyone up a little bit and we spent 80 years being nice to each other, and now we’re going back to the barbarian, Realpolitik, of how humans interact. I hope that’s not the case. But one thing that really bothers me about social media is that everyone is complaining about social media. We have enough studies to know about the damage that it’s doing, whether it’s Instagram for young girls or Facebook for Nazis, etc. Twitter and anti-vaxxers or whatever you want to call it. We know it’s there, everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about it. Our governments are not passing legislation. It’s a political problem; governments need to legislate.

No. They are too concerned with TikTok. It’s ridiculous.

And AI. Really? We’re going to legislate AI when we haven’t managed to legislate social media, which is the most obvious problem that we’d had for 20 years? It’s crazy that we’ve reached this situation. That’s kind of what drove me to start Post. I was like, “Screw this shit. I’ve gotta do something…” We can’t just continue to complain about it on Twitter. Complain about Twitter on Twitter.

That is one thing I would really recommend for everyone. We have to try to do things differently. We are so good at expressing our emotions on social media platforms and complaining, but complaining doesn’t actually change things. We have to build things, start things, build communities, and really try to change what’s going on through action.

I would equate many of us leaving Twitter to the Great Resignation. I’m just done. I’m not going to do this anymore. We made it through a plague just to have some asshole tell us whether we have to pay to be verified? Are you kidding? Fuck you! I see no need to go back, and not only that, I see an imperative to move forward into a different kind of post-Twitter age, I don’t know…

We’ve all got a craving for old Twitter and that’s why people keep going back there. And they tried other things, but they go back. They’re trying to live up to something that doesn’t exist anymore. The world has moved on. Twitter is not what it was. It never will be, and so we’ve got to start thinking differently. But I think there really is a defeatism, and when I liberal, and I don’t mean Democratic, I mean, liberal in the basic liberal idea of separation between church and state, all the basics, right? The liberals have kind of given up or moved away and the fascists are really good at what they do. They are networked together. They learn from each other. They are very technical in how they manipulate systems.

And when you remove facts, it really makes the theories much better, right? You don’t have to strain yourself with facts. You can come up with some really great theories and they’re doing a phenomenal job. We are the ones who are screwing up. We are the majority. We are the ones who actually build things and created things. Think about any kind of progress. It comes from liberal people. It doesn’t come from fascist or authoritarian regimes. We built this and we should not give it up. We should not cede this to the crazies, no matter how much money they have.

I’ve stayed signed in to Twitter on one of my laptops just to check it every weekend, just to unfollow ppl who Paid the Eight. It’s a real headfuck, if you think about it: Are you willing to pay for the clout that you had already received before? And we get to see who folds first. I think the first weekend I did it, it was like 80 people. It’s been frightening and sad because sometimes it’s not always the people you would expect. This is an easy personality test. Okay, you are willing to pay for the clout you had before but you’re going to be financing values that are the antithesis of what you believe? It’s kind of a devil’s bargain…

We’re focusing on Elon, but before Elon came, the Twitter Blue program had already started, and it was a subscription that provided no value whatsoever to the user, really. They held back features from everyone so they could create an artificial value. And these are the problems when the business models don’t align with the vision.

How do you create a subscription business without providing subscription value? And you see that with many publishers, who are now all about subscriptions. If I read an article a month from someone, I’m not going to subscribe. It doesn’t matter how great the author is, I’m not going to subscribe. It makes no sense. And the fact that it’s good for you, the publisher, doesn’t mean that it’s good for me, the consumer. So we have to find that balance between what’s good for the consumer and good for the publisher and makes sense for the platform and for our society. We can’t go for easy solutions as a way out when things get difficult.

I love the idea of: less ads, more kinds of mini subscriptions, so to speak. I personally think Reuters kind of overcharges for some of their points. Fortune does, but they’re Fortune; you expect them to. I think it’s a fascinating model that until now, I’ve had no interaction with…

This is bigger than Post, in that sense, and the way we view things. The internet today is built on two business models. There is advertising, which is the lowest common denominator; cat videos or whatever you can do, and you get hundreds of millions of people to watch it. And then there are subscriptions, which is a very niche product. We produce a tremendous amount of high quality unique product that is worth that subscription, but the world lives in between. The world is not just those two extremes. And so many types of content services just don’t fit any model. If you have 10, 20, 30,000 people a month, come to your platform, and love your product, there’s no model there. It’s not advertising, and it’s probably not subscriptions only. What do you do?

I believe it’s constraining a lot of the voices that we should be hearing. And a diversity of voices. When you subscribe to a publisher, you end up reading most of the content from that one publisher, and they end up writing that content for the subscriber. So you’re caught in this loop. The New York Times used to write for all cultures. Now, they’re writing for their subscribers, who are 2% of their audience. So they become more extreme and more partisan. If you’re trying to write for them, the people who subscribe to your platform are probably the more politically oriented and connected. To your liberals, to your conservatives…and so you end up writing more and more extreme content. The New York Times has gone through over the last 10 to 15 years; the types of things being written now would never have been written years ago, but that’s what the subscribers want to read. That’s what you write. It’s the business model. It’s always the business model.

You’ve spoken about this a little bit, how back in the day, there was no such thing as a work/life balance. And I totally agree with that. If I’m awake, I’m working. I never stop. I’ve got two different numbers and three different emails on my phone. I have no off switch. We’re only here for like 70ish years, so you better be productive. If each day had like three to four more hours, I’d get so much more done. Do you think we’re going a little soft as a society by insisting on the work/life balance?

I think that every generation looks at the younger generation and thinks they’re going soft, and thinks that, “Oh, we had it much worse. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it.” It’s kind of a challenge. My father was going to get destroyed by radio. Radio was going to destroy all those young minds. And then I was going to get destroyed by TV, and my daughters are going to get destroyed by social media. There’s always been this kind of idea there… I have two daughters who are 18 and 19. They are both in college right now. So, I see their generation and on one hand, I’m super hopeful for it. These kids don’t believe the marketing crap. They don’t believe in all the shit we used to believe in. They understand when they’re being manipulated. And they look for it and they care about things that we didn’t even understand existed. I think there’s a lot of that.

I do believe there’s this idea and I believe it’s false that there’s this idea of entitlement. If you want a great job where you can be home every day at 5 p.m. and not do much, that’s great, but don’t expect to also be paid a tremendous amount of money and to be promoted every year. We have to live up to our decisions. It doesn’t mean that working 18 hour days is the right thing for everyone, and it’s not right for every job. But if you want to get ahead, the harder you work, the faster you are going to get ahead. Not always, not necessarily, but that’s a lot of it.

Entitlement is what really bothers me. This idea that I can come to work at 10 a.m. and leave at 4 p.m., and do yoga in the middle, and I also want to get paid a tremendous salary, and I want to be promoted every year, I want to be told how wonderful I am. And I want all these things… No. There are prices for things and we have to pay a price for what we do. We decide what the balance is.

But work/life balance means a balance. Part of that balance is work and part of that balance is life at different times, as things happen. We can’t just be on the life side, expecting everything to happen for us. I was very skeptical of the Google culture, when I was there, because I think a lot of Ivy League people left their universities and went directly into Google. They never met the real world. They never met someone who earns less than $200,000 a year. They never met someone who does not have an IQ of whatever, and so they kind of gauge this environment and the entitlement that comes with it. They don’t understand how lucky they are. And that’s materialistic. Where you’re born is 90% of what’s going to happen. So a lot of what happens is luck and they have to be grateful for it. When I see people in their 20s, who are amazing engineers, or whatever, complaining that “Oh, I can’t go to my yoga class,” or “I can’t come to the meeting…” That is not how you build successful companies.

Right? I’m not one of those time fighters. I honestly think every generation is better than the last. The newer generation coming up now is a little cold, but that’s only what we’ve taught them, you know? Whatever problem you see with the younger generation is just a problem that you refuse to see in yourself, kind of thing. I was literally just having this conversation with someone else. As well-intentioned as Post is, the Surgeon General recently warned about the dangers of social media. The country has this, you know, Loneliness Epidemic thing, and everyone blames social media. I’ve always found great value in it. I’ve only been on one platform until this year but I’ve just made the best of it. Where do you think socials can draw the line between helping and hurting?

If you look at academic studies about social media, they’re conflicted. You can find whatever answer you want to fit your thesis. Because you really see conflicting things. For some people, social media has actually brought them together. To create communities and find themselves; especially introverted people who would not have done well going to a football game. It looks like some people, especially young girls or teenagers, it has driven a tremendous epidemic of self harm and low self-esteem, and everything else. It has created terrorist organizations and extremist organizations, but it has also created amazing things for sane people. So social media is a reflection of us. It just accelerates the best and the worst. The algorithm accelerates. And they accelerate so fast that humans have a hard time trying to keep up with it.

I’m a big skeptic of the Metaverse, as it’s called. And when I look at my daughters and their generation, they crave for the analog world. It’s funny. They are really into the ’80s. The ’80s, now, are retro, but then the ’80s, was, in my view, yesterday. The ’80s was the ugliest generation ever. There was the clothing, the hairstyles. Everything was terrible, right? But, for them, that’s cool. That’s analog.

Just today, my daughter wanted to borrow an old digital camera and I started saying, “No, your phone is like 100 times better than this camera.” And she said “No, we want that not-so-great view of the previous generation.” That’s what they’re looking for. I think there has to be a resurgence of physical contact, human-to-human contact. It has to happen.

We’ve had hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. That made us really good social creatures and we get along really well. That redneck in Alabama and that liberal kid in New York, when you put them together; they’ll be best friends. Put a computer screen between them, and they’ll hate each other. How can that be and where did that come from? Finding a way to physically interact with other people is something that we’ve got to figure out because we’ve gone the other way. We’ve pushed the suburban houses as far away from everyone, Zoom calls, working from home, all of those things in life that might make sense, for our generation, do not make sense to young people.

One of the venture capitalist firms that invested in Post also took part in Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, this is one of the things that kind of makes me question the nature of our reality, and you’ve mentioned it in the past and you said the rest of the money is all yours. But it does seem like that firm kind of helped to create the problem and a possible solution. This makes regular people like me question the whole thing. Are there any protocols in place to kind of, you know, to keep any craziness from going on?

So we’re talking about Andreessen Horowitz as a firm. A lot of the criticism has been about Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of the firm, where his political views. I would probably disagree with most of them, to put it that way, but he’s definitely entitled to his opinion. He himself is not involved with Post in any way, and that was by design. Anyone involved in the Twitter deal cannot be involved with Post. And Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Twitter, Substack, and Post. They’re one of the largest venture capital firms. They have hundreds of employees and they invest in thousands of start-ups.

They are playing the field, basically.

Whatever you are doing, if it’s successful, there’s a very good chance that Andreessen Horowitz is in it, and when we talk about the rules of corporate governance, it still has rules in terms of what a shareholder can and cannot do. No matter where you are in the process. They do not have control of the company. In general, even if they did have control, which they don’t, which they don’t, I have not seen many cases where the investors of the top firms get really involved in something. That’s not how “venture” works. The founder has tremendous power in any company that they found, but in our case they’re a minority investor, they don’t have control of any way of forcing anything beyond the official rights of businessmen.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack for raising money from venture capital. I believe in capitalism, not Cronyism but capitalism. And I believe that the markets do have positive aspects to them as well, but more than that I don’t think that nonprofits do not have big challenges. Donors vs. investors? We have the same problems that nonprofits have. They start optimizing for the donor because that’s where the money comes from. We can’t escape it. The business model will always drive the company, whether it’s a nonprofit, the military, or a government organization, a bunch of profits; it drives everything. Last quarter you spent a lot, so you’ve got a lot of money left over. You don’t want to leave it out there. All of these types of things happen. They’re all a function of the business model, and every organization has it. In my experience, I think, the venture and private companies have the most flexibility in terms of what they do, compared to any other governing infrastructure.

Social media has become how we consume and process news as we’ve talked about, and it’s turned into how people have begun to interpret and define their realities. Zuckerberg, Musk, you guys, Chris Bouzy, Jack. This is kind of like God-level shit, you know? Musk wants to put literal chips in people’s brains. Is that the end goal for millionaires and billionaires? You own everything else, so the last thing to conquer is people’s minds?

That’s a big problem, in general; we can all agree that inequality in our society is destroyed. Now, America was strongest when the middle class was strong and when people could actually raise a family on one salary. And if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would have been $21 or $25 right now. Without doubt, what’s really happened over the last 50 years is the screwing over of the middle class. It’s focused on shareholder value above everything else and leveraged buyouts. The whole kind of cut-throat capitalism has become cronyism—because we’re talking about very large companies that are too big to fail, run by monopolies or billionaires—are the human version of monopolies, right?

And there’s the human version of it, and it’s just been like the government. But they bought the government, which is an even bigger problem we have. Citizens United and allowing money, corporate money, into the political system has totally destroyed any sense of responsibility. Everything now is a transaction. I think Donald Trump is an extreme case of that. Everything’s a transaction. And it’s built that way. But we have no one to blame but ourselves. We try to blame the politicians but we voted them in, we the people, voted them in. And were the majority, a vast majority, have voted them in.

About 30% or 40% of Americans don’t vote. And on top of that most Americans don’t really vote according to their beliefs or interests. 80% of Americans support gun control legislation. But obviously, they don’t vote according to that. Abortion: 80% support abortion, they don’t vote according to that. So we have no one to blame for the situation but ourselves. We voted in people who we would not hire to, I don’t know, work on our cars. We’ve voted in some of the dumbiest kind of people we can imagine and given them the power, the keys to the kingdom. So, we need to wake up as a society. In fact, we need to demand more from our politicians. How can a politician start and join the government with a networth of $400,000 and leave with a net worth of $50 million? How can that happen? We should be burning down buildings in the street, but we accept it. And I hope that if we can have a better dialogue, maybe we can start taking responsibility.

Just like when we like to say that the younger generation doesn’t like to take responsibility. We’re not taking responsibility for the mess we created for them. And we created this mess. It was the hippies of the ’60s and they ended up being the leveraged buy-out lawyers, and ended up destroying the world, right? If we’re not going to live by any type of moral fabric then there’s nothing.

It’s sad that we’re in this situation. We’ve just got to all wake up and yes, there are a lot of challenges and there are billionaires who are going to space, or whatever. If we can have governments that function, most of the challenges America faces today are… invented.

They’re imaginary challenges that we spend our time and resources on, but we have real challenges, look at our health care system. We spend 22% of GDP on health care, and we get the worst of both worlds. Our life expectancy is going down. It’s on us to change it. I have no idea how it happens but we have to change and really demand more from our politicians. We like to say that billionaires have all the power, well, the politicians have the power and billionaires have been buying them and that’s on us. We’re the ones who are voting.

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