Antonio Garcia-Martinez

A lot of that hippie, flower-child culture did bleed into the tech scene.

San Francisco used to be a pretty normie, you know, middle-class, working class, you know, Irish and Italian Catholic town, you know, postwar boom, standard stuff. And in the 60s, the summer of love, the druggie culture, the Beats, Allen Ginsberg, all that that now forms part of the essence of nostalgia, came in the 60s and just never went away, right. And some of that led to an, I would say, potentially overly permissive drug culture where people, you know, they think about meth and fentanyl and these absolutely destructive drugs in the same way that you think about pot or something. And they're not obviously not the same, right. 

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But on the other hand, they do allow all sorts of weird trippy experimentation. Like this guy named Stewart Brand who had this Whole Earth Catalog, which was this very hacker-ethos thing, where you go live off grid and hack your stuff together. Steve Jobs claimed he was very influenced by it. And so a lot of that, a lot of that hippie, flower-child culture did bleed into the tech scene. And you see even today, right. And again, I would say, again, SF is a very permissive society in which traditional roles and traditional marriage, a lot of traditional things are just kind of suspended. And everyone lives in this sort of, almost, Peter Pan adolescent life, which again, is kind of abnormal and strange, in many ways, but I think is very fruitful when it comes to technology, right?

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Like, a lot of the things we do on phones now - I remember, I'm old enough to remember 10 years ago was still odd, right? Like, I heard the first Uber pitch and it seemed like a bad idea. It's like why would you do that? Mind you, this is before drivers, you know, it was a black car service. Right? Like it was a very small service. Or Airbnb? It's like, who the hell is gonna let a stranger into their house? This is, dumb, right. Or even Facebook's ad system. When I joined, it didn't work very well. Like Facebook's ad monetization model was actually kind of poor. Right? And so all these things got fixed and became normalized, but it's, at one point they were radical and strange. And there's only one place in the world that would even let you, you know, entertain the notion that things would work that way. Right. And San Francisco had that culture. 

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Michael Eisenberg

This episode of Invested with Antonio Garcia-Martinez was recorded in the summer, before the massacre of October 7th, and the war that has since ensued in Gaza. This war obviously, irrevocably changed our lives. And therefore, we’ve held off on releasing this episode. 

This episode was recorded at the height of the protests in Israel around the judicial reform, and relates to some of the topics of that time. But it’s a super interesting episode. We tackle why Antonio converted to Judaism, the tech scene in San Francisco, and the tension that exists between government and the high tech sector. We think there’s a huge amount of interesting content in this episode, and think you’ll enjoy it, it harkens back to a different time, but we’re now ready to release it after a time period that has literally changed our lives. So, please listen in to my conversation with Antonio Garcia-Martinez, author of “Chaos Monkeys”, founder of Spindl, all around incredible guy. 

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Welcome back to Invested. I am thrilled to have Antonio Garcia Martinez with me. He just landed in Israel not long ago. And it's a pleasure to have you with us. Rather than have me read off your bio and introduce you, would you introduce yourself?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez

Oh, God, where to begin? I've lived a few lives. Let's see, I dropped out of a PhD program in physics at Berkeley, went to Wall Street, did Wall Street as a pricing quant at Goldman for a while, realized that I didn't like Wall Street, went back to the West Coast, worked in tech, did a Y Combinator startup, sold that startup, was early at Facebook on the ads team, built some of their ad tech, later on was an advisor at Twitter, worked in attribution company called Branch Metrics, and then wrote a book called Chaos Monkey. It's sort of a memoir of my time inside tech. Then I came back into tech, and right now I'm CEO and Founder of a crypto company called Spindl. 

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Michael Eisenberg  

Spindl without an 'e'. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  

Without an 'e'. I cheaped out, I didn't want to buy it with 'e,' it was too expensive. And so I got Spindl dot XYZ instead.

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Michael Eisenberg 

It feels like that could be a Wheel of Fortune word at some point, you know, but you're not going to find the vowels. So the thing we always open with is kind of, what is your core personal value?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez

Oh God. Wow, that's a real stumper. And this is a -

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Michael Eisenberg

Right out of the gate, we try hard. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

This is Tyler Cowen-levels of podcast difficulty here. 

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Michael Eisenberg 

Have you done Tyler? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez

No, no, sadly, no, that's probably the one big podcast I haven't done, which is like the one I actually want to do, but haven't done yet. 

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Michael Eisenberg 

Tyler if you're listening, please invite Antonio.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez

Personal value, man. I suppose it's somewhat contextual, whether we're talking a business or a personal context, I guess.

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Michael Eisenberg  

You can give us both.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

I mean, look, I've just outsourced my morality to the Torah, I don't know at this point. I'll just read out something from Exodus or something. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I think courage, intelligence. I can tell you the things that pissed me off, the anti-values. 

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Michael Eisenberg 

Go ahead. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

Yeah, gross incompetence pisses me off. Hypocrisy pisses me off. I don't know, being pretentious pisses me off. 

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Michael Eisenberg 

Boy, if pretentiousness, gross incompetence, I guess a lack of courage or fecklessness pisses you off - these days and ages you must be pretty pissed off.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  

I know, I know a little bit. I try to stay off Twitter.

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Michael Eisenberg 

And politics? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

And politics. 

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Michael Eisenberg   

So I read "Chaos Monkeys" before I knew you, when it first came out, actually, because I know a lot of the players - 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

Right. 

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Michael Eisenberg   

 - in the book. It was courageous to write that book, I think is fair to say.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

I think so. I was definitely a little worried. Actually, it's funny. I wrote it in Europe, because I'm officially a Spanish citizen. And I thought, man, I'm gonna get cancelled for writing this book. Because no one's ever written, like, a tell-all memoir. Not that it was anti-tech necessarily. It was just like, this is actually what it is. And so yeah, I thought I was gonna piss off a lot of people. You know, it was not long ago, and when, I guess, six, seven years ago, but it was kind of unusual to be that open about what you did at a large company back then. Now everyone just Tweets anything. 

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Michael Eisenberg   

Yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez   

But back then, it was kind of a little weird.

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Michael Eisenberg  3:33  

It was groundbreaking -  

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Yeah. 

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- I would say, and no one knew what canceling, I think, was, seven years ago, still early in cancel culture.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  3:40  

Right, it didn't even exist. I wouldn't have used that word then. 

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Michael Eisenberg  3:42  

Right. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  3:43  

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  3:43  

But you were worried about it?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  3:45  

Again, I think it was - again, it's not anti-Facebook, to be clear. And in fact, in retrospect, it comes off as maybe pro-Facebook, or certainly appreciative of certain parts of the company's culture. But you know, it was just an honest, 'this is what it's like to sit in a meeting with, you know, Zuck, or Sheryl Sandberg, this is how big companies work, this is how the real startup ecosystem works.' So yeah, I mean, it pissed off some people moderately.

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Michael Eisenberg  4:07  

Why did you do it? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  4:09  

I mean, a couple of reasons. One, you know, as I detail in the book, there was, you know, there's all sorts of internal political machinations in my, you know, mid-level career inside Facebook. And then two, I thought, you know, that the internet, like I'm old enough to be that bridge - I think we're both the same age roughly - to be that bridge generation that remembers the analog world before the internet. Before, you know, you didn't have the world's knowledge of the world's people in your pocket, in a phone. And I thought 100 years from now, people will look back and say, "What was it like when humans basically virtualized human life into this sort of digital domain?" And they're going to ask and see what, you know - there's going to be like half a dozen books that people still read then - let's make a bid to be one of those books and give, like, an honest insider take of what happens when you intermediate all of human social life through a phone. 

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Michael Eisenberg  4:50  

Yeah, but there were other ways, clearly, to tell that story, right? You could almost have written an Isaac Asimov kind of sci-fi. Or you could have just written a fiction book about that. And you could even have written it more anonymously. But this was like, in the weeds. Just for what it's worth, by the way, I mentioned to my son, who reads a lot, that I was seeing you. He says, "You know, you never let me read 'Chaos Monkeys.'" So I said, "Well, I think now he's 18, he's old enough to read Chaos Monkeys, right?" It was, it was a rated R version of Silicon Valley. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  5:22  

It was a little salty. 

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Michael Eisenberg  5:23  

You didn't have to write it that way. But you did.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  5:26  

Yeah. I mean, not to externalize blame, but to externalize blame - my editor did push me to make it a little saltier than I kind of wanted, because obviously, it's a personal tale. Like it's the human story that makes people read it. And so, and then the narrative voice, like, you know, I love authors like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, these sort of, edgy-gonzo-journalism, you know, make the writer part of the story type thing. So it's not this dry reported nonfiction narrative. It's very much this spicy take of, this kind of out-of-control person that I sort of was, I guess, part of the time, I wouldn't say it's 100%. It's not really 100% me. But yeah, it was a little spicy. But I think the personal was important. I had two kids in there, you know, the personal was important. But, yeah.

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Michael Eisenberg  5:29  

When people read the book, what should be their core takeaway?

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Well it depends who they are, right? If they're getting into tech, I think, people in tech who've read it have said, "You know, I think it correctly represents what that world is like." If you work in the ads and marketing world, which is a key part of Web 2, right, it's how the consumer internet gets paid for. They see the ad industry in there, right? So a lot of the book, you know, sure, there's a lot of personal spiciness in there. But at its core, it explains how does Google make, you know, whatever, hundreds of billions of dollars a year? How does targeting actually work inside Facebook, right? What data is actually valuable? How does the media business actually work? Those are actually some of the core themes in the book.

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What I found interesting about the book as a tech insider, and, by the way, as a guy who did what they called "ad tech," up until the early 2010's. And then I wrote a piece saying, "Good Jewish Mothers, or Good Israeli Mothers Don't Let Their Great Engineering Sons Go be Ad-Tech Engineers." You know, what I found really interesting about the book was at massive scale - like Facebook - the decision making, I would say, is even different than it is at smaller scale. Just some of the companies that I was on - why do you think that is? Why does scale impact, kinda, even the ethical decision making, I'd argue in these cases, of ad tech?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  7:29  

I mean, I would almost use like a physics analogy. And like, you know, when you solve a physics problem, there's a notion of a heat bath, right, this thing that has so much energy in it, and you couple your system to that, and that other thing just doesn't change, right? Because it's like the universe or the galaxy or whatever, right? That, you know, if you're a small startup, you have to think of the system as you being a small part of it. And your ability  to influence that macrosystem is basically zero. You're a reactive, you're a reactive entity. When you're Facebook, you are the universe, right? You are the heat bath. And just in the same way that if you change the temperature, to cite a bizarre analogy, of the earth two degrees, it would have these massive, you know, macro consequences. If you change the direction of the Facebook ship, now mixing metaphors, even a few degrees left to right, suddenly, everything shifts. 

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So like, one of the one of the things I detail in the book, but part of what I did at Facebook, was the first time Facebook actually joined outside data and used outside data to target ads and try to monetize the user, you know, was me, right. I pitched - the story opens with me pitching Zuck - with a bunch of people, of course - saying, "Hey, we should do this weird thing where you retarget people inside Facebook, and it's never been done, and you don't quite understand what it is. And we don't really understand how we're gonna build it, but let's do it." Right? 

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That - again, me as like a mid-level product manager, like I wasn't even that senior at Facebook or anything, right? But - and then he said, "Okay, great, go do it. Here's three engineers, go build a programmatic ad exchange." That completely roiled the entire ecosystem, right? I had literally every ads company show up with their entire, you know, senior management staff and walk me through the roadmap and basically say anything I want, even though again, I was just like some little lieutenant in Zuck's empire. And that's the thing, right, and suddenly, we opened up this master amount of inventory - Google had to take notice, right? There's a certain excitement to being inside a large company like Facebook, you can have, if you're in that in-between when it is a giant, but it's not so big, that you're just one of a cast of tens of thousands. And when I joined, I was employee 2000 or something at Facebook; there was maybe 20-some odd PMs, maybe 4- or 500 engineers, it was big, but it wasn't that big, right? You could still have real impact on the company's direction, even though you're a relatively mid-level person. And that small-times Facebook size is huge by you know, outside size. So that's one way that the thinking is different. 

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Facebook kind of creates its own reality. And it's good to think that way, in the sense that you should try to create your own reality, because Facebook creates the frame for its own products. On the other hand, that also means that you can live in kind of Facebook lala land a little bit, and not understand that the outside world - there is an outside world -and that often its rules are very different, which - not anymore, but I think initially did plague Facebook's attempts on monetization. 

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Michael Eisenberg  9:55  

Do you think, like, ethics and morals and values got a seat at those tables?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  10:03  

In Facebook broadly? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's definitely a Facebook set of values, right. And there was all these posters that, there used to be this thing called the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, which like a lot of things that Facebook at the time, was a sort of permissionless bottoms-up thing. It was basically a silk screening factory where you could print stuff, it was a print shop inside Facebook, that just, some of the designers just started. And they'd print these posters, that they'd put on the wall that would embody Facebook values. And some of them have now, I guess, [become] kind of famous, or at least infamous, like "Move fast and break things," which is no longer a company value. You know, "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" "Every day feels like a week," - it's very, sort of, gung-ho sort of values. But you know, the company really did live them, actually, in a way. In fact, I've actually reproduced some of those posters, and I  have them hanging in Spindl's office. I have some of them, my favorite ones that go, yeah, we want to definitely channel the the early Facebook. 

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Michael Eisenberg  10:47  

But those are like ethos, like you said, you outsourced your values to the Torah, right? Were there any kind of timeless principles in there that you think that said - man, because there's an outside world, we need some timeless principles to be able to anchor what we're doing?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  10:47  

I don't know. No, I don't think so. I mean, I think Keith Rabois - I think it was Keith Rabois' comment - that "every successful startup is a cult"? It's probably true. And that's just the reality of it. And the cult of Facebook had those posters and other values as their values. I don't think there was a lot of - there were definitely no 10 commandments, the "eternal truths," that they were following along. No, not really. Which doesn't mean they were unethical to be clear, or amoral. I just, I don't think that there was some outside moral reference standard that was being followed. 

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Michael Eisenberg  11:29  

You're spending more time now in Silicon Valley. And you're kind of back; has anything changed since the time you wrote this book?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  11:34  

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, physically, a lot of things have changed. 

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Michael Eisenberg  11:36  

Well, yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  11:37  

Yeah. I mean, the COVID hit San Francisco in particular pretty hard. The city just emptied out, right, and it still hasn't recovered, to be honest. 

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Michael Eisenberg  11:44  

Yeah. I was just there. Yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  11:47  

A lot of things have gone wrong, with both, like, law and order, local politics. You know, SF, I keep reminding people, or I have to remind  - you know, there's a lot of young people in the startups now, that's like, working with people half my age. I call them the "Zoomers," because they're part of the Zoomer generation, it's fascinating. It's like, you realize, like 10 years ago in San Francisco, this was the center of the universe. Not only was it where all of like, the consumer internet that you know - Facebook, Airbnb, Twitter - like our office is on South Park, literally a stone's throw away from where Twitter was invented in one of the offices there, right. This is where it was all happening, not just technically, but also socially. Like San Francisco was as hopping and booming, as, you know, Soho in New York is now, or Tel Aviv or whatever. Like, it was - you felt like you were in the center of something grand, and big things were afoot, right. And, you know, I think other parts of the Bay Area are fine. But Silicon Valley is not just San Francisco, obviously, it stretches all the way to Menlo Park. It's a big stretch of land, right. I think Menlo Park and Palo Alto are probably doing fine. But San Francisco actually got pretty hard hit. 

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And I think you're seeing a bounce back with AI. People are kind of moving back. I don't know, the way I reconcile myself to San Francisco - because a lot of it frustrates me and I've wanted to move, but I have a kid there and stuff - you just have to think of it, it's America's petri dish in which, you know, it's a fertile medium, the surrounding nature is beautiful. And just wait, they'll sprinkle weird bacteria, and you'll see random stuff will grow out of this thing. And either it's, you know, absolutely destructive urban policies of a very radical, sort of, brand of politics, or it's autonomous vehicles. Like literally you have - so Cruise has gone to, like, main production. I have the app on my phone, there are cars without drivers just zipping around San Francisco, you see them all the time. 

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And I think one of the most representative images of San Francisco in my head is that - this is not like hyperbolic or a joke, you see this all the time - you'll see, like, an autonomous vehicle with no driver weaving its way around, like, a homeless person. And it's like, man, this is such a dystopia. And that's kind of what SF is, like, this is a glimpse at a, sort of - 

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Michael Eisenberg  13:43  

Our future? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  13:44  

- a certain sci-fi, you know, book-movie version of that future. Yes. 

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Michael Eisenberg  13:49  

Well, has anything changed in the ethos of Silicon Valley since you wrote that? I mean, let me, maybe inappropriately, make a couple of observations about the book. There was a large wind-at-all-costs attitude that I think you are talking about at Facebook. At the same time, there is a high value placed on money, despite kind of, let's call it, highfalutin ideals - money talks, people walked - and people recounted, it's kind of how score is kept, I guess, on some level.

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I don't know. I don't know that I'd accept that characterization.

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But that was one of my takeaways from the book. And then there's this kind of whole, both political and social atmosphere on the outside, that is a little unmoored, for lack of a better term. Has anything changed over the last decade?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  14:42  

Yeah, I think the whole quote unquote, "tech backlash" that I'm putting in air quotes because I think it was mostly manufactured - but at some point if you manufacture media things, they become realities - the whole -

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Michael Eisenberg  14:53  

Manufactured by politicians, you mean? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  14:54  

Or journalists, or media in general. The whole 2016 Trump election, right and then the whole anti-Facebook crusade with various trumped up, frankly, stories like the Cambridge Analytica scandal - 

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Michael Eisenberg  15:04  

No pun intended, or pun intended?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  15:06  

What do you mean? 

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Michael Eisenberg  15:07  

Trumped up? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  15:07  

Oh yeah, no pun definitely intended - Cambridge Analytica story, I think changed the view of tech, right? Like, I think at some point in there, in the last gaffes of real tech journalism, I think Recode - Kara Swisher's thing or someone - actually published, like, a negative sentiment study of coverage of tech over time, and you saw a dip negative and in November of 2015. And what happened in November 2015? The Trump election happened. And you know, Facebook was credited with getting Trump elected, and suddenly tech was no longer exciting. People will forget that the tech journalists used to be kind of, like, not exactly cheerleaders, but at least an appreciative audience that would kind of go to the same parties and hang out with the builders, and it would kind of be this - 

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Michael Eisenberg  15:45  

Kara Swisher too, I mean, she put Jobs on stage, Julia Gates, and it was this emotional thing. I was at that conference, I was in the room when that happened. And she was certainly a cheerleader along the way. She's obviously turned negative. And she - 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  15:55  

Well, she and everybody else has turned negative. And so I think, yeah, the there's been a real animus against tech. And I think that's necessarily, I think, if you're, if you're an insider, that necessarily pushes you one of two ways. One, if you're like a normie tech person who, let's face it - not everyone is like a ketamine-doing, Burning-Man going, you know, scooter-riding radical technologist guy, some of them are just like, with a guy who's a director at Google, and he just has a job, like, it's pretty normie. That probably sours you on it, maybe, a little bit and makes you feel slightly embarrassed. And maybe you don't sit there and talk about your Google Drive on Thanksgiving. 

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And then there's another half. And it's funny, Nadia did a great piece on this in Tablet recently, actually - speaking of Jewish organizations - to have a magazine about the tech Civil War. You've got people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, who, in some sense, I think, become more pro-tech, right, and more rejectionist towards the sort of mainstream (I would count myself among them, by the way) of people who kind of reject - I just don't even talk to conventional journalists anymore. I don't care about them. I have no idea what's going on New York Times tech section. Nor do I care, nor do I think it's politically important. And so I just reject it. I think some of us just retrench into more pro-techness and more accelerationism. Even though, you know, I have reservations about tech that I expressed in the book and stuff. 

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Michael Eisenberg  17:09  

Yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  17:09  

I'm not 100% pro-tech. But I definitely reject the reflexive anti-tech sort of vibe. 

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Michael Eisenberg  17:17  

Let's dig for a second, though - and now that you brought it up - into progressive politics and autonomous vehicles, right? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  17:21  

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  17:22  

It's like, on one hand, kind of, I think there's a notion out there that extreme liberalism, let's call it, or progressiveness, enables creativity. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  17:22  

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  17:39  

But very, very clearly - and the data is very clear on this - the more progressive the mayors in the city, the more the cities deteriorate. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  17:45  

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  17:47  

But like you said, autonomous vehicles are scooting around. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  17:49  

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  17:49  

San Francisco has a lot of young people, and AI growing up there - how do you reconcile that? And what happens?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  17:56  

Yeah, I mean, progressivism, it's like, it's like the gas pedal on a car. And conservatism is like the brake pedal, right? And if you have nothing but one, the car just spins out of control. And if you have no brakes, I mean, how do you reconcile it? I think if you just take the historical perspective, there's this great book called "The Season of the Witch," that's about the history of San Francisco in the 60s and 70s. And the short version of what happened is, San Francisco used to be a pretty normie, you know, middle-class, working class, you know, Irish and Italian Catholic town, you know, postwar boom, standard stuff. And in the 60s, the summer of love, the druggie culture, the Beats, Allen Ginsberg, all that that now forms part of the essence of nostalgia, came in the 60s and just never went away, right. And some of that led to an, I would say, potentially overly permissive drug culture where people, you know, they think about meth and fentanyl and these absolutely destructive drugs in the same way that you think about pot or something. And they're not obviously not the same, right. 

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But on the other hand, they do allow all sorts of weird trippy experimentation. Like this guy named Stewart Brand who had this Whole Earth Catalog, which was this very hacker-ethos thing, where you go live off grid and hack your stuff together. Steve Jobs claimed he was very influenced by it. And so a lot of that, a lot of that hippie, flower-child culture did bleed into the tech scene. And you see even today, right. And again, I would say, again, SF is a very permissive society in which traditional roles and traditional marriage, a lot of traditional things are just kind of suspended. And everyone lives in this sort of, almost, Peter Pan adolescent life, which again, is kind of abnormal and strange, in many ways, but I think is very fruitful when it comes to technology, right?

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Like, a lot of the things we do on phones now - I remember, I'm old enough to remember 10 years ago was still odd, right? Like, I heard the first Uber pitch and it seemed like a bad idea. It's like why would you do that? Mind you, this is before drivers, you know, it was a black car service. Right? Like it was a very small service. Or Airbnb? It's like, who the hell is gonna let a stranger into their house? This is, dumb, right. Or even Facebook's ad system. When I joined, it didn't work very well. Like Facebook's ad monetization model was actually kind of poor. Right? And so all these things got fixed and became normalized, but it's, at one point they were radical and strange. And there's only one place in the world that would even let you, you know, entertain the notion that things would work that way. Right. And San Francisco had that culture. 

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Michael Eisenberg  20:06  

And New York seems to kind of have it now also. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  20:09  

Yeah, it seems that way. 

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Michael Eisenberg  20:10  

Why do you think that is?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  20:12  

Yeah, I wish I knew New York better. But it's funny. The first blog post that I had go viral at AdGrock, which is my YC company, was basically something dumping on New York as a tech hub, because I had been there as a Wall Street guy, right. And I moved back to San Francisco. And the contrast was striking to me. Mind you, this was like 2008, or nine. Or sorry, no, 2010 or 11. And so the New York tech scene hadn't quite taken off yet. Like, basically, they had Foursquare and like nothing else, right. I think it has taken off. 

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I do think it's funny; people ask me about, like, is Miami going to be a tech hub? Because I was raised in Miami. I think that sort of builder culture, like, is it a place where nerds rule? Put it that way, right. Like in San Francisco, you have an AI meetup, and some space is taken over by 200 tech nerds talking about like, large language models. That's a completely normal thing that happens literally almost every day of the week, like that's the way the world works. Not to say that there isn't serious tech being built in New York, but there's just a lot of other things going on. Right. And I think people just aren't quite nerdy enough. They dress too well. I don't know. They're too fancy. They know which fork to use at dinner. It's like, it's kind of different. Right? While that form of tech awkwardness is welcome in San Francisco. The other thing, of course, is that San Francisco has like almost nothing else going on. There's no other serious industry alive in San Francisco, right. So tech can sort of take it over in a way that tech is never going to take over in Miami, or much less in New York.

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Michael Eisenberg  21:25  

And what happens when the city actually grows worst apart. I mean, I grew up in New York in the 70s, in the early 80s, it wasn't a fun place, right? New York - it was a great place to grow up, but it wasn't safe and, you know, homeless people were all over the place, and people getting killed and Central Park slashers, and Bernie Goetz that people have forgotten about. Like - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  21:44  

I remember, yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  21:45  

San Francisco is kind of like that now, right? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  21:47  

It is. I mean, I don't think there's any Giuliani on the horizon to fix it. Yeah, I mean, look, there's been some signs of life, right? They recalled Chessa - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  21:59  

Moody - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  21:59  

- Boudin or Buddhan, however they pronounce his name, who's literally the son of communist cop killers. And, you know, he, you know, he didn't believe in prosecuting criminals, apparently. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  22:10  

Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  22:12  

And then the school board were recalled. The school board basically closed the one high-quality public school that, you know, a lot of SF youth used to have social mobility and get an elite education despite not coming from money, which I think we all say is a good thing. They basically closed it down and made it not be a meritocratic school. So a lot of, they did a lot of things that people disliked. And so they got recalled, but I don't know. It's strange. On the one hand, right, SF has been the scene of the biggest legal wealth creation, possibly in the past 40-50 years, if not human history. And yet, you look at the city, and it's terrible, right? And it just doesn't look like that. And -

‍

Michael Eisenberg  22:47  

Is that a societal problem? Is it a city management problem? Is it the way the world's gonna look going forward? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  22:52  

No, well, SF has been corrupt for a long time, but it has the second largest city budget in the United States after New York, and yet, it's a city of, what, 800,000 people or something, for seven miles on seven miles? It's not very big at all. It has an enormous budget, it's not a money problem. And yet, somehow it all gets siphoned away and nothing gets fixed. 

‍

I have to say, I think tech deserves a little bit of the blame, right? I think, for various cultural reasons that I've speculated on in other podcasts, it's not quite clear to me, but I think tech doesn't, doesn't feel that sense of civic investment of, you know, taking over the town in a good way, right? Like, you go to the Met in New York. And there's the whole list of little logos, with every investment bank, every hedge fund, every, you know, every aggressive hedge fund person has his name on a hospital, or museum, or school or something. And you go to the SF MOMA, and Google isn't sponsoring the exhibit, are they, or anything else. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  23:41  

Why do you think that is? That's actually an interesting observation. What's the civic involvement of tech companies and entrepreneurs?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  23:46  

I think they just don't feel they're part of the of the civic fabric. They just don't. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  23:50  

They did buy the basketball team, the Warriors. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  23:53  

Well, Jamoff did.  

‍

Michael Eisenberg  23:53  

Well, Jamoff's a tiny guy, but Joe Lacob brought it.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  23:57  

Yeah, and there are some philanthropy, right? There's the Benioff hospitals. It used to be the Zuckerberg hospital, but they took his name off of it, I think.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  24:03  

I didn't realize that they canceled the hospital too.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  24:05  

Yeah, he donated, I forget, what is it, $200 million? But  during the whole post-Trump 2016 thing - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  24:10  

Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  24:10  

- they canceled Zuck, so I think they took his name off the hospital.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  24:14  

Welcome to the club, right. So one of the things I think about is like, the context of Tel Aviv, which I think by the way, the entrepreneurs in the tech companies have actually taken a lot of responsibility in Tel Aviv, and now I'm wondering, as you say that, why that's the case here. By the way, this is an incredibly well-run city - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  24:32  

Right. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  24:32  

- Tel Aviv, incredibly, well-run, with a budget surplus, too. And I'm just, I'm wondering, like, you got all the, kind of, tech thing here -  

‍

Because there's a social fabric, right? In California, it's always been kind of a gold rush tow, right. At 1849, they discovered - for those who aren't familiar with the history - they discovered gold and it was one of the first cities develop because you could get there by ship, even before there was a railroad. And it's always been the town of people showing up and trying to make money, and the land of schemes, and new beginnings, and all the rest of it, but also a disconnectedness. Like you go to San Francisco, you make your bag, and you kind of get out or you move to Marin County or you move to the peninsula, or you just leave and you move to LA or Park City, Utah or in ski, or whatever, right? I don't know. I mean, in Tel Aviv, from what I can tell, I mean, obviously, there's Zionism, right? People are creating the startup nation, they believe deeply in it. And like, you know, when I show up, people, there's always so - they love it when somebody shows up from Silicon Valley and comes to Tel Aviv. And I've had all these lunch invites in my time here, and right, it's just a very different feeling. I guess there's a feeling of ownership, right?

‍

Yeah, one of the things I've been saying actually, is that the big difference between Israel and all these kind of places where the politicians, the leadership, is falling away is that the civic society is actually much stronger here than it is, I think, in most places. Talking about Zoomers, that's a new one. I drive this thesis to someone that one day is gonna write a PhD thesis on people who made investments over Zoom during COVID; it ain't gonna look very pretty. But tell me about Zoomers.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  25:49  

Yeah so Zoomers - I think I'm using the right term, or Generation Z - I mean Zoomers are like the opposite of Boomers, right, in the sense of, it's the youngest generation, which I think now is like teenagers to 25. I don't know, I mean, you can look it up and see if I'm quoting the wrong age. But it's like the youngest employees. 

‍

In theory, I don't actually believe in this generational astrology, to be clear, but I do think that there are differences among, broadly speaking, generations. So I don't know. They're always giving me new drugs, which is great. So there's this drink called Celsius, which has all sorts of weird serotonin precursor chemicals and caffeine which totally makes it trip. Some of them are nicotine; nicotine is a new drug now in Silicon Valley. People intentionally take nicotine. It gives them focus. Yeah, I know. I've gotten pro-nicotine lectures from more than one person, I know it sounds weird. But the nicotine gum they use for people trying to get off smoking? They just take it as like a performance-enhancing drug. I'm not joking. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  26:41  

Okay. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  26:42  

Not to even mention, they've legalized all these drugs in California. Like ketamine is now legal. Elon Tweets about taking ketamine all the time. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  26:47  

I don't know what ketamine is. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  26:49  

Oh, it's, I kid you not, like a horse tranquilizer. And it's - yeah, and it's obviously used as a recreational drug. But it's actually gotten therapeutic approvals. You can actually get prescribed ketamine in California now. I know, I know. It's weird.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  27:02  

Oh my God. Well, I'm not worried about Musk being homeless, but the rest of the homeless people on fentanyl, I'm very worried about.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  27:06  

Yeah, I don't think it's nearly as addictive as that. But there's literally a ketamine startup called Mindbloom. Not to plug it, I have no connection to it. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  27:13  

Yeah.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  27:14  

But it exists - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  27:15  

We wouldn't plug drugs on this podcast. I'm way too conservative with this, mostly, for that. When you said before, you know like, this whole line of drugs - like pot is like this, like, all of those are the same for me. On the other side. But it's okay, keep going.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  27:26  

No, but yeah, the cornucopia here is vast. They legalized mushrooms recently in San Francisco. You can actually buy chocolate with mushrooms on the street, legally, with - by the way, organic, fancy chocolate as the chocolate on the streets of San Francisco. They even have a loyalty card. I will confess to having bought one of these mushroom bars. You get a little loyalty card like you get in the sandwich shop, when they click off the little numbers. You get one of those. I'm serious. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  27:49  

This is what Zoomers are doing?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  27:52  

Yeah, this is what, well, I don't know about Zoomers, but  this is what San Francisco is doing.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  27:57  

How did you handle the backlash to "Chaos Monkeys?"

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  28:00  

Oh, well, I mean, when it came out, I mean, there wasn't much backlash.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  28:03  

But it came later, we'll come to that in a second. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  28:05  

Yeah, well, okay. No, I mean, the reaction was super positive. It was a month on the bestseller list. It was a book of the year, or the summer or whatever, by NPR, at the Atlantic, Wired. It was super positive when it came out. I mean, you know, it was considered a spicy book. But it was still a very positive reception when it came out. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  28:21  

And so later, kind of, you had this thing, this little couple-month stint at Apple, that they canceled you because of a silly thing in the book. Should I quote it, or not even bother?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  28:34  

I'd rather not. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  28:35  

So what - how'd you feel when that whole thing happened?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  28:40  

Oh, I don't know. I mean, you know, I just, I might sound a little bit too blase. But, you know, I've been in the media spotlight before. It wasn't that shocking an experience, I'd have to say. I think to people who, you know, like the joke on Twitter is like, the guy who, like, everyone makes fun of on Twitter - like your goal is to not be that guy, right? So if ever the spotlight of Twitter is cast on you, and you're like, you know, somebody who isn't used to that sort of thing, right, I think it could be, like, a shocking, dramatic encounter. I don't know. For me, it wasn't that big of a deal.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  29:12  

Are you gonna write another book, by the way?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  29:14  

It's tempting. I mean, we'll see where this Web3  thing goes.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  29:18  

That'll be the topic?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  29:18  

I mean, potentially. I mean, someone needs to write a book about it, assumint it, like, takes off and becomes a new internet. So it's not like - there's no fixed plans, to be clear. People ask me this question all the time. There are no plans right now.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  29:27  

It could be called the "Chaos Phoenix," I guess.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  29:31  

Yeah, I have to think about the title of it, yeah.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  29:33  

Okay. So you've been canceled, kind of, from that experience, and you've spoken about this "woke culture,| and wrote that, I'll quote those, it's "optimized-for-virality version of Christianity." Can you explain that? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  29:44  

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, the whole wokeness thing - I mean, this is not an original coinage by any standard, I mean, Matt Iglesias, Andrew Sullivan, lots of people have compared or Noah Smith, more recently, have traced the origins of what we now call, vaguely, "wokeness" - which is admittedly a vague term, but you need a name for it - to sort of, crusading Protestant Christianity, right. If you look at the the original social justice movements, they were originally all religious in origin. That was true for abolition, the women's rights movement, civil rights movement in the 60s. And again, truthfully it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? A lot of these social justice movements were motivated and organized through churches. And so I think, you know, one of the things I definitely think is true: religion is conserved, religion never goes away. It just, it finds new and potentially worse forms of expressing itself. And so religion never goes away. It's, our puratively secular society has all sorts of religious dogma that it adheres to. And I think these days, in the tizzy of COVID, I think, yeah, sort of, at least in the US, which of course, is still a very Protestant nation - they went crazy for this wokeness business. Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  30:49  

And so, you know, you've kind of spoken out against this. And obviously, your book, "Chaos Monkeys," you know, was a tell-all, to use your terms, and you said, at the beginning, that one of your core values is courage, and brave. Where does it come from, to kind of be able to cut against the grain like this, and be able to be so contrarian? We've got this line at Aleph, we just say that "different is better than better." We try to be different, but you've really been out there and contrarian and brave. Where does that come from?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  31:18  

I mean, I'd like to claim that it was some sort of virtue, but I think, you know, disagreeableness is actually - I forget, whatever that framework is for human psychology. There is disagreeableness, and then whatever the opposite is. It's probably telling that I don't even know what the word is. But there's like neuroticism versus this, conscientiousness versus the other thing. So there's various axes, you can rate human personality on. One of those is disagreeableness. I suspect it's either genetic or psychological in origin, right. Some people are just more contrarian. I mean, I don't know, just being raised with certain values, I guess? Yeah. I mean, not wanting to be loved is another thing, right? I think most people want to be liked publicly. Right? And so they're not willing to take that stand? Because they, I don't know. I don't really feel that urge. I don't feel the need to be loved. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  31:57  

Because? What's more important? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  31:59  

Truth maybe? Aesthetics, beauty? A well-written, engaging piece of literary nonfiction, right? Things like that. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  32:07  

Why'd you start writing, by the way? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  32:09  

Oh, it's funny. You know, it's funny, everyone thinks it's shocking, in a way. I guess I've lived so many lives that it's weird when people see the transitions. My first actual paycheck in the United States was in writing. I was a city desk intern at the Miami Herald, which is the paper in Miami, and the Sun Sentinal, which is the paper in Fort Lauderdale, which is a city north of Miami. And so I was raised in Miami - my mother was a librarian, so the house was full of books, and it was a very bookish culture, I was reading since way before school - and I always knew that writing would be part of, I'd written op-eds and stuff. I've done creative writing workshops, though I've never taken them really seriously. I had pieces go viral. So my first YC startup, frankly, the most successful product was the blog. We would be number one on Hacker News, these things that would go viral back when, you know, it was rare for things to go viral on Twitter, a novel, that I'd have things go viral. It's funny, it was in that, that somebody working at the agency that became my literary agency discovered the blog post and sent me an email. But I discovered it only later, it was in my spam filter, actually. But anyhow, that's how I originally met my literary agent. Years later, when the startup had wrapped up, I decided to actually spend serious time on and write the book. But I don't know it was always waiting in the wings, I always knew that there'd be a writing component to my life.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  33:13  

Is writing important for everyone, do you think? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  33:14  

Um, I don't - I think it helps people distill their thoughts clearly. I think it's hard to become a good writer. I think it's, you can probably train to become an adequate writer. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, my girlfriend claims that I wake up mumbling phrases, and like, there's constantly language flowing through my brain in a weird way, that is probably true for most writers. 

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Michael Eisenberg  33:34  

Is writing gonna be as important in this era of AI? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  33:36  

Oh, yeah. Moreso. I think, I mean, AI removes the middling and the mediocre, right. But if anything, I think the people on Substack, who can actually manage to swing, you know, 20,000 subscribers, who pay him five bucks a month, will do even better in the sense that, like, if you automate away the sort of middling human component, the premium human component becomes even more valuable, in a way, not less. And so I think for a subset of writers it will actually do very well.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  34:00  

By the way, why did you start writing for Tablet, of all places? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  34:03  

Well, the whole Jewish thing, the you know. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  34:06  

That's my segue. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  34:09  

Yeah, so the whole Jewish thing - so I converted to Judaism a few months ago, to Conservative or 'Mesorati,' as you would call it here. Yeah, so I have three Jewish kids, the two mothers to my kids are all Jewish. And the third, second mother and third kid, you know, I wanted the kid to go to shul and have a religious upbringing for a bunch of reasons, because I was starting to doubt whether secular liberalism really was the way forward, and she's like, "Well, the kid goes to shul - you have to take her." I'm like, okay. So I sort of called her on the bet. And COVID came, so it became kind of a COVID project to do all the study required for this. It was like getting a master's degree, basically. And of course, being Conservative, some of it could be done over Zoom, right. So like, they'll actually livestream Shabbat services and stuff, which obviously, Orthodox wouldn't do. So that's part of, kind of, why it happened. But yeah, and then the Tablet thing, I guess, I don't know how I met Alana, I can't remember. Alana is the editor. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  35:00  

Alana Newhouse. Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  35:03  

And Tablet, for those who aren't familiar, is, I mean, I would say probably one of the premier ,if not the premier sort of Jewish publications, in the United States. I mean, there are other ones of course, Mosaic and a few other ones. But yeah, and I think it takes - I'm not even sure Alana's denomination - but it, you know, it's definitely not reform. But I think it's very, sort of, ecumenical and the people who write - it's not all Jewish writers, for starters. But you know, I think it's definitely a little heterodox or dissident, I guess you would say. It doesn't line up with the usual 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  35:29  

And not only Jewish topics, obviously. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  35:31  

And not only Jewish topics, either. 

‍

Yeah.

‍

But it is Jewish. 

‍

I mean, brokenness, and yeah.

‍

But it is legitimately Jewish, right. You're not a Jewish organization unless you have the date in the Hebrew calendar, and then you have a PDF version for Shabbat that can be printed out, right. That defines you as a real Jew, so it definitely has that. But yeah, it's not just Jewish topics, actually.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  35:47  

So you mentioned before that, kind of, religion seems to get conserved. It doesn't go away. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  35:51  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  35:51  

And you also said before that wokeness, per se, was kind of a religious ethos run amok - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  35:58  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  35:59  

 - on some level, and yet, you converted to Judaism? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  36:02  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  36:02  

What was it about Judaism - 

‍

Yeah - 

‍

- that attracted you, other than the mother of your children saying, "Hey, they need a babysitter in synagogue"? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  36:13  

Right. I mean, there's a couple reasons, right. The one thing is - the pro is the attractive aspect of Judaism. And then, so I wrote this piece called "Why Judaism?" that should have been in Tablet but ended up not being. I still regret it. It was in my Substack, called The Pull Request. Actually, sorry, they republished it with a second piece. Sorry, now I remember. So you can find it on Tablet. And then I wrote a second piece - somewhat cheekily titled, "The Moses Option," about, also, why I converted, also in Tablet magazine. And so you know, one thing is just secular liberalism, you know, the sort of, it's not even just necessarily wokeness, it's just, it's the blah, globalist, whatever left of center, Western political default, right, is a little empty, and there's sort of a God-shaped hole in the middle of it, right, that's not being filled by much of anything at this stage. And so it's sort of a rejection of that. 

‍

Also, Judaism, obviously is beautiful for a bunch of reasons, right, I get into in the piece. I think that my first piece coincided with Simchat Torah, actually. And so, you know, the joy of this very textual society that conserves its text that is the tree of life, so to speak, like, title of your book. And, yeah, it appealed to me in a deep way, obviously, very scholarly, bookish religion. You know, in orthopraxy, religion about the practice, less about the faith, right? Plus, it's not a personal relationship with God, or Jesus or whatever. A lot of aspects of it were, were interesting. And I think Judaism is very adapted to modernity, in many ways, right? Like - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  37:37  

Explain? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  37:39  

Well, I mean, you know, there's this whole, I don't how much you listen to Balaji, right. But like the whole notion of the network state? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  37:44  

Yes. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  37:44  

The notion that there's this, you know, Federation of loosely associated, you know, kind of elite cities where everyone does their thing, right. Like, the Jews were the original network state, obviously, the diaspora was the network state, right, that the rest of world is only catching up now. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  37:58  

Now like Balaji, there's like an Indian network state as well. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  38:01  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  38:01  

Silicon Valley in India itself. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  38:02  

Yeah. And so like the notion of a very abstract, cosmopolitan, decentralized state is nothing new to Judaism, obviously, that was Judaism for 2000 years. So in that sense, I think it's very suited to modernity. I think the other thing is that, I don't know, this is a more theological question. But you know, Christianity, I was raised Catholic, right? So I first read the Torah although I wouldn't have called it that then, the Old Testament, in translation in a Jesuit school, which had like a scholarly annotated edition, and I just found the, you know, the Old Testament and the Tanakh a lot more interesting than New Testament for a bunch of reasons. And even then, obviously, I mean, Christians acknowledge this as well, there's a huge contrast between the God of the Old Testament in there, the Torah and the Tanakh, and the Gospels. There's a huge difference, in fact, to the point that many Christians call it a New Covenant, right? Like the old contract is null and void, we have a new contract, because clearly, the counterparties are very different. It's a very different God. And so yeah, I think something about - I just started seeing the world in a more Jewish way. It seemed as if my personal Bible ended at, you know, with Chronicles at the end of the Tanakh, and that's it. It didn't begin with, I can't even remember anymore, Matthew, or Luke, whoever the first Gospel is. So yeah, I sort of ripped out the Gospels from my personal Bible. And I don't know if we want to go into the details of what I find objectionable about Christianity or not, but I don't know, I can. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  38:02  

Sure, I mean, if you want to. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  38:49  

I mean, yeah, Christianity is interesting, right? I've often joked that Christianity is Judaism with product-market fit and a growth team, right. That's basically it, right. They basically managed to popularize, you know, it's like Mac OS 10 versus Linux, right. Linux is unusable and never became a desktop, but you had a very, you put a nicer UI on it and suddenly it becomes a Mac, and everyone uses it right? 

‍

And so that's kind of what Christianity did with Judaism, right, which is basically this unauthorized religious offshoot. And it takes a lot of Jewish ideas, and in many ways over-expresses them, in many ways, the Messianism and all that. But then it has new ideas that don't have a lot of precedents in Judaism. So for example, the victim as divinity, right? It's very strange when you walk into a Christian church, and here is this tortured criminal on an instrument of torture, just hanging there dying a gory death. That is, that is the vision of divinity, right? Again, as a Christian, you're so used to it or even the West, you're so used to it. It's strange, right? Most religions don't have that as a symbol, right. And the unique thing that Christianity did was elevate, was reverse the moral order, right. Traditional religions - not Judaism, but just broadly - worship the beautiful, the strong, the wealthy, the powerful, right, they worship the superlative. And Christianity has in some sense, inverted that and said that, actually, no, the sick, the ill, the ugly, that that is where divinity lies. It's in victimhood in some sense that we, and we uplift that into divinity. And I think that sounds very noble in a way. But it can also go off the rails in a big way, right, which I think is a lot of what you're seeing now. 

‍

And in fact, some of Christianity's biggest fans, Rene Girard, who, you know, Peter Thiel is a big reader of him, I think, Girard was a genius in a way - the way that he understood the myth of Christianity and what it did for a lot of these pagan religions, and even in his own book actually, he describes that yeah, Christianity has created a level of victim worship unprecedented in human history, right. And I don't know, I think I just, I reject that worldview. And I think the other thing is, Christian and Jewish notions of justice, I think are very different. And, to me, I mean, you're seeing a lot of it now, right, like in a lot of the traditionalist right, and a lot of it exists only online to be honest, of reverting to paganism, or like rejecting the Christian message. It's like, it's as if the Christian world goes between two poles - the weird, overweening victim worship of Christianity, and then the bizarre pagan revolt against that. And I don't know, there's a middle road, which is sort of Judaism. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  41:39  

And what do you think is the role of religion in the future democratic states? David Brooks had this piece I forget the title of - I think it was in the Atlantic - about the, kind of, overly liberal order, you know, that's after, of course, he wrote about the, no need for the nuclear family. And, you know, he's kind of talked about how liberalism quote unquote, with the small 'l', I guess, has gone over the line, and it's devolving society and become devoid of religion. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  42:09  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  42:09  

By the way, he made the opposite conversion than you did. He went from Judaism to Christianity.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  42:13  

I know. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  42:15  

What is the role of religion in this kind of increasingly secular world? By the way, it's a question I get asked a lot when I give speeches.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  42:20  

Again, I think religion is just there. It doesn't exist as such. I think one of the reasons for religious education - I'm glad I was sort of raised Catholic with the Jesuits who took a very scholarly approach to it - is that you can you can recognize religious thinking, right, when you see it, and it doesn't always come wearing literally, you know, priests robe or a kipa. It's religious thinking, right. I think it was William James who said, in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," that at its core, religion is the thought that there's some moral order to which human society should converge, right, that there's some unseen abstract order, which of course, is, if you take a totally materialist, physicalist view of the world, is insane, like, why would there be, right? Like, I believe in science as much as the next guy. I think to me, they just, they're just orthogonal spheres of life -

‍

Michael Eisenberg  43:02  

Yeah.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  43:02  

- science and religion. But it is irrational. Why, I mean, even the secularists. Why - what is human rights? Show me human rights in a microscope. Doesn't exist, right? It's a human construct. And to the extent that you revere it, and that you inject it into your society, and you claim that this is the good to which we should all be converging, you're talking like someone who believes in religion, right? This is an abstraction that doesn't really exist. And so I don't know, I think what David Brooks is saying is that at the end of day, he, you know, he likes formal religion, right. So I think that's what he's objecting to, that there aren't structured forms of religious thought. And that, if anything, that's the bulwark against unstructured and kind of random and potentially bad forms of religious thought.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  43:37  

Right. He also seems to say that a society devoid of religion will inevitably spiral downward. This seems to be his latest argument. Do you agree with that?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  43:47  

I think a society needs some metaphysical language to talk about the world, right? If you don't, just asking the question, what is good in life? Right? How should I live as a person in this society? To what, to what ends should society be striving? To what ends should we sacrifice for, either when it comes to human life, or money, or anything else? If you can't ask those questions about yourself and come up with some sort of answer, you're not going to function as a society. 

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Michael Eisenberg  44:11  

Let me ask it of you. What is good in life? What would you sacrifice for? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  44:14  

Well, again, I think it depends a lot on the context. I mean, I don't know depends on the context. I mean, I think one of Israel's strengths is that Zionism answers that question, right. The Israeli, the Jewish state is a good -

‍

Michael Eisenberg  44:27  

Yeah.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  44:27  

- thing to which we should all be upholding, although clearly people disagree about, as to how to build it. I was at the protest yesterday. And obviously, there's a lot of disagreement about how to build that. But at some sense, the the end state is kind of in mind. I'm not sure that in the US, for example, most Americans would have a clear answer as to what is the good that we're trying to build? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  44:44  

What's yours? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  44:45  

Me personally? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  44:46  

Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  44:47  

Well, I mean, I don't know. At a personal level, who cares, right? But I don't know. At the societal level, again - Israel to me is interesting, because it was, like the US, founded as, like, a startup - it was an inventive nation in a way, right. And - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  44:59  

I call them both call "covenantal nations." 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  45:00  

Right, exactly, they're both convenantal nations. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  45:02  

Yeah.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  45:04  

Although in the US, again, what - I don't know that most people will even accept the document anymore, or even accept what the details of the convenant are. So yeah, no, I mean, the US is obviously a reboot - in many ways, a securalized form of Judaism, right. Here you have, it's a sacred document handed down by prophetic founders and interpreted by this rabbinical court. You're right. It's the most kind of Jewish thing ever, right. And that's why, that's why politics seem like religion in the United States, because they become almost theological disputes. 

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Michael Eisenberg  45:26  

Yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  45:27  

And something like, you know, abortion or gun control assumes the proportions of like Sunnis versus Shiites, or like, literally a religious splinter group, right.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  45:38  

You mentioned before that Judaism is the original network state. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  45:42  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  45:43  

But when you converted, you were asked, "Will you support all those who seek to re-establish and revitalize our Jewish homeland - 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

- by making the State of Israel part of your life and the life of your family," and you said, "I do." 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  45:52  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  45:52  

Isn't that the anti-network state?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  45:54  

Yes, yes, yes. So the question you're asking, just for context, that was literally the questions in the Beit Din that the Rabbis asked me, which is part of the standard Conservative script I think. My Rabbi just plucked it out of a book. And it's funny, the editor who edited it at Tablet, who I think is Orthodo,  was shocked that they would still even ask that in this day and age in the United States, given that Zionism these days is somewhat more controversial in the United States. But you know, I agree with you. But yeah, of course, but you know, that's the - I mean, come on, that's, that's the struggle between diaspora Judaism and Israeli culture, right. It's like - and you've seen this forever, right? I was just reading back a book by, I forget who it was, either Michael Goodman or somebody, and just about, you know, when Zionism or, no, I think it was Walter Russell Mead's book about The Arc o of a Covenant about Israel and the United States, before Israel was founded. Zionism was not popular in the United States. On the contrary, there was, it was very anti-popular. New York Times, Sulzberger, to not support Israel at all - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  46:48  

Right, and by the way, in Europe, also, even with many Orthodox Jews, most of Orthodox Jews, it wasn't popular. Yeah.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  46:53  

Right. Because in the US case, they felt, well our new homeland is the United States = like that we're submitted citizens here. There was still anti-semitism, but not nearly as much as Europe. This is our home; Israel doesn't speak for us. And in fact, I remember, I was reading too much Israeli books and media as it is. But during the Eichmann thing, when the Mossad nabbed Eichmann and dragged him back, many Jews in America actually objected. They're like, what, how, who appointed Israel as the great avenger of the Jewish people? And why are they doing this? And obviously, at the time it was actually judicial and whatever. Yeah, there's a real tension there between - I mean, look, we're gonna see it next week; it's Tisha B'av, and we're gonna go to the Kotel, and we're gonna see the Temple Mount, and we're gonna lament the destruction of the temple and "Oh, can't we go back to Jerusalem?? And yet, there's gonna be an Israeli policeman standing there in the Temple Mount, what are you talking about? The Jews control Temple Mount now, what are we lamenting, right. In some sense that is - is the diaspora over? Or is it not? Who really speaks for Judaism? Is it the rabbis on the Upper West Side? Or is the people right here in Israel? I don't know. It's -

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Michael Eisenberg  47:53  

I grew up on the Upper West Side, I have a very clear answer to that question.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  47:56  

But what is the answer? Let's turn it around - 

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Michael Eisenberg  47:59  

Actually, I'm not sure it's the Rabbis at all. How's that? I think it's the people. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  48:02  

Okay. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  48:03  

By the way, I don't know, just a side point - did you ever read the book "The Great Partnership" by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, where he talks about, kind of, the marriage or partnership of science and religion? I guess you wouldn't subscribe to that necessarily. You think they're orthogonal?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  48:16  

I just think they address different questions. It's just, I'm literally as pro-science and math as the next guy, possibly more. I just think there's a metaphysical plane, you're not going to get the answers to "What is a good life?" or - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  48:29  

Biology doesn't answer all our questions.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  48:30  

It doesn't at all, yeah. And the problem is that somebody who thinks that actually becomes frankly, dumb about metaphysics, or morality, or philosophy. Because if there's nothing in your epistemology, and how you discern truth is only an empirical exercise, then you have to warp reality to make the fundamental metaphysical argument that you're making. Right?

‍

Michael Eisenberg  48:49  

And by the way, since science is evolving, right, there's a thesis and you have to prove it out, etc. right, it's kind of consistently evolving, there's nothing that's a truth quote, unquote.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  48:58  

I mean, science is like an intellectual dialectic. It's not like a book with the answers. And so yeah, I think they're just very different. Science is not, you know - was it Carl Sagan who wrote that book, you know, "The Demon-Haunted World," right, that in some sense, the God of the Gaps, you know, religion exists in the gaps that science has. And I'm like, I think those gaps will always exist, right? It's not - if we had a more powerful microscope or a higher energy, you know, particle collider then religion shrinks, like, no, no, it won't actually.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  49:25  

Yeah, actually, it gets bigger. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  49:27  

Yeah. If anything, it might get bigger. Yeah.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  49:29  

So talk to me about Spindl. Let's shift gears entirely. Tell us what Spindl is and why you decided to take your talents, to use a Lebron James line, from the world of Web2 to the world of Web3.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  49:40  

Yeah, some people might be asking like, "What the hell is Web3?" So this is this whole world of the blockchain, which if you talk to a normie they think of - if they know about blockchain, they think about it in the context of cryptocurrencies - 

‍

I love that you use the word "normie" like this, you know - 

‍

It's like the non-tech people, the civilians, civilians, civilians. Yeah, so this is all happening on this thing called the blockchain, which is a very different way of building Information Technology, right. And what's different about it is that something like the blockchain, it's not just about Bitcoin, it's not just about value transfer (although that can be part of it), it's the fact that it's the, one of the main blockchains is called Ethereum. And it's known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine. What that means is, you have a network of world machines that do the computation of the network. And that code, and that data lives on this thing called the blockchain, which is basically just a chain of state that all these computers keep in memory. And you write a thing called a Smart Contract, which is literally a piece of logical code similar to computer code that runs in other places, except it's running on this global computer on the blockchain. And that, smart contracts makes claims about the world, such that - Mike Eisenberg owes me 1000 ETH, right. Or, I went to a decentralized exchange, and bought a thing that represents the value of Google shares - something called a 'synthetic,' that you mimic an equity on chain or something, right? And that is a claim in the world that the network of computers will say, "Yes, this is truth." And if I sell it for 1000 ETH, which is a large sum of money, actually, then I get that in my wallet - there's this thing called a 'wallet,' which is my representation on this chain. 

‍

So that is the world of blockchain, right. And you can do lots of stuff with it. And it goes way beyond Bitcoin, which again, is just like sending money. It's like, no, this is this is literally a contract about the world. I'm saying a thing, right? What can you do with that? Well, you can run financial exchanges, you can run things like banks, things that look like banks, or things that look like exchanges. You can also do things like NFT's - digital ownership, right? Like I own this beautiful painting, and the rights to it, literally, I own - the digital rights to this thing exist on chain, and I can sell it or buy it, which sounds very strange, but it's really not that different than the disembodied form of the fine art world.

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Michael Eisenberg  51:42  

I have a certificate of ownership, except this time, it's proven digitally.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  51:46  

Right, right, exactly. And you can also build things like games, right? So I have games, virtual goods are a big part of many games, and you trade things inside a World of Warcraft, or as the case may be, and that exists on chain. And I can actually own that in a way that I can sell it to you outside of the scope of the game, right? Even if the game shuts down or whatever. And so that's what Web3 is, right? There's a notion - Chris Dixon, who's a partner at a16Z has a book coming out, and it's called "Read, Write, Own." And that's how he traces the history of the web. 

‍

So Web1 was read. You publish a thing, that's like the basic internet, I go to a site, I read it. Then there's write. That's Web2, it's Twitter, it's Facebook. Like, I'm a little guy, but I, you know, I've got my following, and I publish my thing, and people follow me. Then there's own, which is, I actually own digital assets. The way I see it is, if you imagine a world, if you imagine an economy, meaning banking, equity, financial instruments, NFTs, ownership - if you're to reengineer that for a fully online virtualized economy, one that didn't start with, you know, fax machines and checking, all the rest of it, what would it look like? It would look like crypto looks now, right. We need a programmable way to assert things about the world in a decentralized way and exchange value. And that's what the blockchain world does. Anyhow, long story short, that's this whole Web3 thing. And the idea there is that you can build a consumer web on top of that. So I can build a game in which I own the gun or the sheath or the helmet or whatever. And that's actually mine, and I can sell it, or I can rent to somebody else. There could be a whole, you could lease your NFTs and make revenue on your NFTs; there's a whole banking sector around in-game virtual goods that all just sprouts up around the blockchain, right. And it's a different way of building the internet. 

‍

So I got kind of crypto pilled, I had lots of friends in crypto. And you know, what have I done for 10 plus years, ad systems, data, human attention, turning all that into money, and measuring it. You know, measurement on the internet is super important. One of the early promises of internet advertising is that you can actually see who saw every ad, and then eventually converted - religious pun intended, I think, from the marketers perspective - and actually bought the thing or did the thing, and you can actually tie all that together. And that whole world is called 'attribution,' and it feeds a lot of what happens on the advertising in the media side. 

‍

So I started talking to crypto companies, I got some intro to gaming companies, and nobody knows what's going on. They literally have no clue. Where are users coming from? I have no idea. Well, how are they monetizing inside your experience? No idea. We can't even calculate our revenue. How long are they sticking around? Are you retaining users? These are all very basic growth metrics that everybody in Web2 knows - we have no idea. How much did it cost to acquire them? I don't know. But we did this thing called a token drop, where we basically give money away to get people to use the product. And it costs us this much, but we have no idea if it was actually effective or not. And it drove me crazy. I just, I could not understand how this world could be run in such a dumb way. 

‍

And so I set out to fix it. How do you, how do you build and measure things? Like how do you know if you click on a thing, and then you go to that protocol, and you spend money inside their product two weeks later - how do you tie it all together and know that yeah, actually, this Twitter influencer tweeted a thing and that's what actually drove this user, so therefore, you know, we should pay that influencer something. 

‍

Like, we basically built the technology that does that. And it sounds kind of boring, but it's very important plumbing. And it's the foundation for any sort of real media ecosystem that will ever get built in blockchain.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  54:51  

Every media ecosystem has attribution and measurement. And this is attribution and measurement for blockchain or crypto as the case may be. I remember back in the '80s - you said we're both about the same age - in the old dot com days, it was the same thing. And basically, venture capital money covered up for sloppiness in this business, in the late '90s in the dot com, and call it in the 1920-21 era of crypto. Now you get to the other side of it, and somebody actually needs to measure this. And it ain't gonna be Nielsen, and it's not going to be DoubleClick or Google Ad - it needs a whole new system for it. By the way, if you had to explain blockchain to my mother-in-law, what's the one-sentence description of blockchain? 

‍

Oh, man. It'd be hard to explain to a grandmother. 

‍

My mother-in-law, if she's listening, is very intelligent. But still.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  55:42  

Yeah, I mean, the one metaphor people often use is that it's a global ledger. People understand a ledger, like a system of accounts. It's a system of accounts that everyone can read and write to, for a fee, for a network fee. And that's the basis for how various entities collaborate, I guess. I would use a ledger analogy.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  56:00  

It's kind of - the hard part about blockchain is that it's part collaboration, part proof of ownership, and then it's also composable. Right? So you can kind of constantly change it, yet it's immutable at the ownership level. And -

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  56:14  

Yeah, well, that composable thing is worth lingering on for a second. So that's one of the, that one's a little harder to explain. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  56:19  

Right. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  56:20  

Yeah. What composability means is that I can put one of these pieces of code called a smart contract that does a thing, right, it's literally a set of function calls that do a thing. And if I'm willing to pay what are called the 'gas fees,' the fees -

‍

Michael Eisenberg  56:32  

On Ethereum it's called 'gas' and on other networks it's called something else, yeah.

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  56:35  

Basically if I pay the fees that get the nodes to do the thing, I can then write to the chain or read to the - well, it's easy to read, cheap to read, but hard to write. I can do things on chain. The cool thing is that it's composable, in the sense that, it's like Legos. I can build something on that smart contract. So for example, in the decentralized finance world, there's a lot of, again, protocols that are kind of wonky, low-level things that let you buy this derivative or whatever - I can create, with no permit - like, again, 'permissionlessness' is another term of art in this world - I can take those smart contracts, and build a user-facing product that actually trades on those protocols without even talking to the company, right? I can, as long as I'm willing to actually pay the gas fees - and those will, of course, get passed on to the user - I can build a better UI on whatever that underlying protocol is. And they're actually fine with it, like fine, you want to build on us? Go ahead and do it. 

‍

As part of what we do, we have a reward system, so if you come in and do a thing, we will pay the person who drove the action. That's part of the product that we offer. People can take that smart contract and build on it if they wanted to, if they wanted to build the publisher network that drove traffic to our smart contracts, in theory they could, right. And so that's kind of part of the magic of the blockchain. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  57:40  

I try sometimes to describe to people in what's called decentralized finance, or defi - try creating your own derivatives, financial product, on top of Goldman Sachs's, you know, mainframe or service system. You can't do it.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  57:53  

 You can't do it, right. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  57:54  

And so gas, or ether, is just a different way to pay for the infrastructure - 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  58:00  

Right. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  58:00  

 -and you don't have to be Goldman Sachs in order to do it, anybody can do it. And so it's democratized the ability to get access to those great compute systems, and to be able to just kind of, one layer on top of the other, build on other people's work, also, to go do that. 

‍

I want to ask you another question about Spindl. Like, why'd you go back and start a company?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  58:24  

Well, I mean, somebody was gonna get rich doing this, might as well be me. I mean, I don't know. That's the reality of it. I mean, it's just like, it's so obvious that this needs to exis. Like there's no question that, in five years, there will be attribution on Web3, and it will be a billion dollar business. Still open question whether it's gonna be Spindl or not, but there's no question - assuming Web3 takes off, and maybe it all goes away and this was like the biggest, you know, failure in tech history, but I don't think so. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  58:47  

Are you in the office or remote? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  58:49  

Kind of half and half. I don't believe in full remote, to be honest. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  58:51  

Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  58:52  

I believe in working in person. So about half the team is remote. But, you know, we have a live-work crash-pad thing with bedrooms and stuff, so often the remote people come in on a regular - in fact, next week, it's gonna happen they're gonna come back in.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  59:01  

So you transitioned from, you know, Facebook social media attribution now to Web3 - you think we're gonna, we're at the end of the era of social media?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  59:10  

Well, I mean, look, what's going on with Threads, right. So Facebook started with the biggest social network in history, launched Rhreads, which is like, kind of an okay product. It peaked at whatever, 70 to 100 million active accounts, and now it's crashing, right, like it's dying. No, I think there is not like large Web3 social media yet. But I think some - look, humans are never going to stop talking about and to each other. That's never going to end. That will never end. And I think Facebook itself, Facebook.com is getting a little old. I think WhatsApp is hard to beat. I mean, I was at these marches in Jerusalem yesterday, I was with one of the organizers. It all got spun up in like a few days on WhatsApp. So there was literally no planning except WhatsApp. It was incredible. It was this huge mass of people, it was nuts. So I think WhatsApp is gonna be hard to beat. I don't know. I think something on block - in something in Web3, some  decentralized version of social media will definitely take off, I think. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  59:59  

Long-term: Twitter or Facebook, who wins? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:01  

Define winning.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:00:03  

Who's the bigger company?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:04  

Oh, Facebook without any question. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:00:05  

Facebook. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:06  

But the most influential company? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:00:07  

Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:09  

I think it already is Twitter.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:00:10  

And you think it has staying power, too? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:13  

Yeah.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:00:14  

Yeah. What does the Web3 version of social media looks like, by the way?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:19  

There's a couple of examples. So I'm a tiny investor in a company called Farcaster, which is an A16z-backed company. They're basically Twitter on the blockchain. Just, I guess, the simplest way to explain it. It's a microblogging service, if you can still use that term, and it exists on the blockchain. It's an open protocol, you can build a viewer on top of it. There's another one called Lens, which is a similar concept. There is some social media out there. But you know, the adoption has not been great. I mean, it's solid adoption, to be clear, 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:00:46  

Yeah. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:00:47  

It's not Twitter-scale yet. I don't know. I suspect when Web3 consumer really takes off in a big way, we're talking 10 million plus users, it'll probably look a lot like Web2. It'll just have fascinating functionality that you couldn't generate in Web2, and - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:01:02  

And maybe differentiate ownership, right? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:01:04  

Oh, yeah, sure, probably. But it'll do magical things that you couldn't engineer in Web2, and yet just work naturally, and it'll actually be super appealing to consumers.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:01:13  

The question I have to ask you, as someone who writes and somebody who opines on religion, and somebody you know, who is part of the Lincoln Project, right? So politics, so you're - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:01:23  

Lincoln Network - 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:01:23  

Lincoln Network, sorry - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:01:25  

Which, by the way, and they rebranded, actually, they're no longer even called Lincoln Network. 

‍

Okay. 

‍

But yeah, it's, for explanation, it's a DC policy org that's like, about technology and stuff. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:01:33  

And somebody who's kind of, what I would call, long tech, short mainstream media, and kinda full into the acceleration. So we're in this moment of, kind of, clash between tech and DC, or tech and politics, right. AI is one topic of it. Crypto was a big topic, although - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:01:33  

A little of it. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:01:49  

Well, the FTC took a beating, I think, recently, appropriately so, in my opinion. And, you know, and the SEC is also kind of teetering on this topic. Where, where does this go? Like, you know, Silicon Valley is like the whipping boy of many people in Washington,, on the one hand, on the other hand, it's now by the way, by market cap, the most important industry on the planet. How does this work itself out over time? And what happens over the next year or two?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:02:21  

Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is inevitable, right? I think technology is inherently destabilizing, destabilizing. I think crypto particularly so, right, like decentralization is literally a value in crypto, like DC is bad, right? Isn't that what we're saying? I think this has always been the case. I think tech is really bad at making a case for itself. Like I was part of this, like DC, like sort of lobbying, think-tank thing. But like, a running joke in DC - I'm a little bit in that world, and I'm still in a couple groups with DC people - is that the tech lobby groups are terrible. Like literally, Google and Facebook, some of the smartest, most well-funded people in the world, are less effective than some, like, no-name healthcare company in Pennsylvania you've never heard of, who has got their boy in the House and gets whatever bills they want passed, and do not get pushback, and get treated like royalty, right? And like, why can't tech do that? I don't know. I think tech is bad at selling itself to non-tech people, I think, is part of the problem. And then part of it is just a huge target. Right? Like you said, the top whatever, four or five, by market cap, companies are tech companies. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:03:18  

But believe this. Cambridge Analytica changed the face of politics in America and Facebook did too. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:03:23  

By perception alone. But yes.

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:03:24  

No, come on. Every new change in media changes the way politics is done, right. America started with pamphlets, ended up, you know - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:03:24  

Oh, political advertising, you mean. Yeah, of course. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:03:33  

Right. That's changed. And those are powerful places to be. And by the way, controlling the narratives on Twitter, which is what every news, mainstream media anchor starts with in the morning - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:03:42  

Yeah -

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:03:42  

- is, what did so-and-so say on Twitter, right, on Twitter, is a big deal. And these are privately owned companies by, you know, tech titans right now. And, you know, we've got autonomous vehicles, which is going to need regulation, and you've got crypto, which is decentralized and threatens decentralized financial systems. I mean, we're headed for an even larger clash over time. And - 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:02  

Yeah, yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:04:02  

You know, by the way, technology used to destabilize religion. Now, it's destabilizing politics faster than its stabilizing religion, as best I can tell. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:08  

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:04:09  

In fact, I'd say there's something of a religious revival, now, around technology, but politics and DC is threatened. So are we just going to be in, like, these wars between DC and tech for the next year? 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:20  

Yeah, yeah. But we just need to accelerate. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:04:22  

And they're gonna get worse. 

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:24  

Yeah, probably. But yeah, it's fine. Just move faster. And then they're just slow to react, and by the time they catch up -

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:04:30  

Will that impair democracy, though, for example?

‍

Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:32  

Nah, I don't think so. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg  1:04:33  

You don't think so? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:34  

It would improve it, if anything. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:04:35  

By the way, is democracy the best system for governance in this accelerated age? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:38  

Ah, hard to say. I think it depends, obviously, depends on local context. Not every country is a democracy, right? You know, I don't think every country can be a democracy.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:04:47  

Would you move to a different country if it's not a democracy? To accelerate tech?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:04:52  

Probably - no, no, no, I would not make the China trade, no.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:04:56  

Not just China. There are other countries that aren't democracies, or lessdemocratic, right?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:00  

Yeah, no, no, I think - so, you know, democracy has come to mean a lot of things in the West, right. And often what it really means is sort of secular liberal universalism is what it's come to mean.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:13  

Yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:13  

Right. You can have all sorts of democracies that are not necessarily the most liberal state in the world. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:20  

Yeah. But democracy, I think, at a basic level - Natan Sharansky, who's the great refusenik, right, hero of mine, said that it's the ability to stand up in the central square and say whatever you want.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:32  

Yeah. Yeah, of course.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:33  

It's a reasonable definition, right? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:35  

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:38  

So you wouldn't leave that behind for anything? For acceleration.

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:40  

No, no, no - well, to be clear what we're talking about - well, but even they're, you're conflating a little bit. What he means is human rights, the right to actually, the right to free speech.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:47  

Freedom. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:48  

Right. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:49  

Samuelson famously said that, "free markets create free societies." I think it's the opposite, by the way. So free societies enable free markets. Where do you come out on that? 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:57  

Oh, it's probably a little conjoined. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:05:58  

Conjoined, alright. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:05:59  

Yeah. But yeah, the democracy thing is kind of interesting. I mean, well anyhow, it's too much local politics. I won't, I won't say the thing that comes to mind. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:06:06  

Come on, say it! 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:06:07  

Well, it's funny. I was at this demonstration in Jerusalem yesterday, and these are the pro-democracy protesters, but they're actually protesting a democratic process, the breaking of a parliamentary vote. I don't understand, if you're pro democracy, this is democracy. Is it only democracy when you win? I mean, if anything, it's an anti-democratic measure, having a Supreme Court would nullify parliamentary measures, right? 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:06:23  

Yeah. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:06:23  

But it's strange. They don't really mean pro-democracy in the sense of voting. They mean pro-democracy in the set, of a set of values that they think, that they're using the banner of democracy to sort of flog their own beliefs. But it's, it's - you know, I remember there was a headline somewhere in there I saw that "Pro-Democracy Protesters are Dragged Out of the Knesset." It's like, do you not see the irony? The pro-democracy protesters interrupting literally the democratic process, right. And so, but of course, they don't literally take it to mean democracy. They take it to mean a set of values, that they think that they're sort of fighting for, and maybe they are. But yeah, anyhow, democracy can mean a lot of things. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:06:53  

A lot of things. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:06:53  

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:06:54  

What motivates you get out of bed every morning? We've come to the rapid-fire questions. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:06:57  

Oh, probably the nine o'clock stand up, which is gonna happen in half an hour that I have to go to.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:07:03  

What makes you human and vulnerable?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:07:04  

Oh, human and vulnerable. I mean, the same thing that makes everybody human - flawed, flawed reasoning, being overly emotional, being stuck in some rut of psychology. I mean, that's the human condition.

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Michael Eisenberg  1:07:17  

So you probably won't write your own biography or autobiography, would you?

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:07:21  

Ah, no, no, I always joke I'm not really a narcissist. I just play one on the internet. I'm not nearly self-absorbed enough to actually do it. I mean, I mean, Chaos Monkeys is arguably what, I guess, kind of an autobiography? But it was really more of a - the focus wasn't really on me, the person. It was on, like, everything else going around me. 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:07:34  

And it's a timepiece. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  1:07:35  

Right, right. Exactly. It's using me as a mirror to a reality but it wasn't really about like - my individual story didn't matter that much. It was, I was emblematic of a time and a period and a thing going on. So, would I write another one of those, maybe, about crypto? I mean, who knows? Potentially, but - 

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Michael Eisenberg  1:07:49  

I'm an author also. But if I wrote your biography, what should it be titled? 

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Oh, God, I, you know, I don't know - "Mistakes Were Made."

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Mistakes Were Made. Well, this was great. Thank you, Antonio, for doing this. You can learn more about Antonio Garcia Martinez on Twitter. He is @antoniogm. His book "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us five stars on Spotify, and Apple podcasts, and wherever else you listen. And not just that, please tag Tyler Cowen and tell him that Antonio wants to go on his podcast. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez  

Yes! Absolutely do that.

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Michael Eisenberg 

Thank you Antonio. 

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Antonio Garcia Martinez 

Thanks Michael. 

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