[upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehr. Daisy Alioto. Daisy, who are we speaking with today? Today we're speaking with Rehan Anwar.
He's a product marketing leader for Web3 Products and Communities, and he was the co-founder of FWB, of FWB Fest fame.
He also has his own fragrance business focusing on incense, but all sorts of fragrance, and he's a huge coffee connoisseur. All things we love talking about on this podcast- [chuckles]...
and we're excited to riff with him. Classic things. I wanna tell you about the TSA funding government partial shutdown stuff going on right now. In New Orleans, particularly bad.
The New Orleans airport, MSY, had the highest call-out rate for TSA in the country, at forty-two point three percent. Oh, yeah. I was in New Orleans this weekend for a bachelor party, my own. I, [laughs]
so my flight was at four forty. I got there at noon. I'm pretty hungover, bachelor party the day before. Right. I'm in line for three and a half hours before I make it through TSA. No. My flight gets delayed an hour.
I make my connection in Houston on my way to LaGuardia, and we're getting close to New York. It's like, "Oh, nice. Almost home. Gonna get home around midnight. This is gonna be great."
And then the pilot's like, "Yeah, so, uh, I'm getting news from the ground on LaGuardia that there's been an incursion on the runway." A little while later, I feel the plane start going up. Goddammit.
He comes back on and he says, "Yeah, we are being diverted to Baltimore. The airport is shutting down." And so I turn on the Wi-Fi, and I look it up, and I see that an Air Canada plane has collided with a fire truck.
Oh my God. Really sad. So sad. You know what I did? So what I did, though, I'm like, "Oh, I wanna get home. I gotta get home."
And so I'm just like, "Great, I'll just book a flight to JFK ASAP at six AM from the Baltimore Airport," and I do it, get there, get out of security, and I realize I've booked it at the DC airport. No. So I call a car.
It's almost an hour drive to the DC Airport. Security opens at four AM. Get through security again. I get on the flight. I get home finally at, like, eight thirty AM. That's how I lost a day of my life.
This sounds like a fucking ordeal though, dude. [laughs] Like... Mm-hmm. Anyways. [laughs] Well, I can tell you some of the stories I've had an eye on from Clone. Hmm.
Did you see a semaphore that Vox Media tried to sell its podcasts and itself? I did. I haven't read that, though. I've only read the, I've only read the headlines. Seems they pulled themselves off the market.
Let's speak about it with our guest, who has just arrived. [upbeat music] Yo. What's up? Hey. Hey. I'm really kind of jealous of the sound of birds chirping that I can hear. Birds are chirping. It's gloomy outside.
There are two dudes yelling at each other about, I think, a flavor of a nitrous tank. Oh. They just keep yelling, "Watermelon sours," at each other. It's nine AM. Watermelon sugar high. [laughs] Exactly. Shout out.
And the name of that man was Harry Styles. [laughs] It's true, but what is he doing outside my apartment? [laughs] He's, he's training for a marathon, obviously.
Wait, so they're trying to do whip-its together, and they're disagreeing on the flavor? [laughs] Yeah. Oh, I guess it's just nitrous.
Wait, didn't you and I go through a period of sending that Kanye screenshot back and forth of, "Can I have the nitrous, please?" [laughs] I actually did see your... You did a quote tweet about Kanye's rollout.
You're deadnaming him. Ye, I'm sorry, Ye's album rollout. You're not excused.
It was a quote tweet of a tweet by Miles Klee sharing a Reddit post somebody had posted in a subreddit for people who've, like, lost loved ones to QAnon about her, maybe n- yeah, I think the poster was maybe a woman.
Black boyfriend, goes down the alt-right pipeline, and then resurfaces a year later as a trans woman, and you thought that that was an interesting concept potentially for a Ye album rollout. A hundred percent.
For reasons that could be obvious to our listeners or not. Look into it. Isn't he rewoking, though? Uh, I think he's walking back some of his more extreme statements, but I wouldn't call it a rewoking. I don't know.
Rehan? [laughs] A rewoke. Mm-hmm. I guess you would call it awakening. Uh, okay. I, I think it could be a rewoking.
What I need is a full Kanye Danny Brown-style arc, where he's like, "Yeah, I'm putting out an album, and the producers are me and a bunch of trans people."
[laughs] That's what I need because trans people make the best music. They really do. Rest in peace, Sophie. From your words to, to Ye's ears. Yeah. I mean, he's close.
I mean, if, you know, worked with Arca, like, 10 years ago. Yeah. We'll see. The Danny Brown renaissance, um, has been interesting. I've never listened to his podcast, but quite frequently I see the clips.
Uh, it seems good. I don't know. He's so smart and so funny and so nice. He was on Adam Friedland, like, a couple months ago though, right? Ooh, I didn't know that.
I didn't realize that that was, like, a podcaster-to-podcaster situation. Mm-hmm. Big link-up. Yeah, I remember 'cause the title, exactly two months ago, "Danny Brown Talks Diddy, BBWs, and 50 Cent."
[laughs] They really SEO maxed that one. Yeah.
Um, I sh- I feel like a fake fan for not knowing he had a podcast because I, you know, I have my emotional support Danny Brown lyrics, like, "octopus in a straitjacket," which is one of my big moods.
Feeling like an octopus in a straitjacket? I feel like an octopus in a straitjacket quite often, actually. Real.
Rehan, so happy that you're coming on without an agenda, with nothing to promote, just an open heart and mind to the riff. [laughs] I'm only... Okay, I'm here to promote one thing. World peace. No.
[laughs] No, the exact opposite. World, world chaos. I'm here to promote world chaos- Mm... and, um, holding onto one's self-identity at the detriment of others. Mm. Is this what you were lifting about yesterday?
Rehan tweeted that he got a tweet so upsetting that he had to go lift, and I was like, "Oh, I guess he doesn't really wanna be on the podcast." [laughs] I saw that.
No, it was, it was a, it was a text message, and then the immediate follow-up text message was, "You can stop subtweeting me." [laughs] Mm. Brutal. Caught in the act. Why would you send that, Dizzy? Wasn't me.
I, I, I wish I had upset him that much. Very few people have upset me that much, and also read my Twitter. At least you got a pump out of it. Oh, absolutely, 100%.
You know, you're fasting for Ramadan, like, you know, I'm like, "Okay, cool, I haven't worked out properly in, like, months. It's time. Let's go." Mm. But wait, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You were saying that you came on to promote... Okay, I'm, I'm, I kind of forget exactly what you said. I'm gonna paraphrase. You said hurting others to, to maintain your own sense of self-identity. No.
Can you-- Wait, what did you say? Is that what you said? I think you said something- I don't want to say hurting others. I would never promote hurting other people.
Holding onto one's self-identity at the detriment of others. Mm. Yeah. Wow, Francis, I think you took the wrong message from the podcast already. We might have to start over. We would never hurt others, Francis.
Okay, well- We would only denigrate them ever so slightly and make it about ourselves.
So there's clearly something on your mind where you d- where you, uh, you, you perform such a denigration in, in- She's not gonna share. I might. We'll see. We'll get there. Can you put it in incense terms?
[laughs] No, I told... In the intro, we said you are a small business owner, and I think that's very cool. I don't know if you heard that VCs, they're really into IRL right now.
[chuckles] Except for putting their money behind it. So you have your own business, deep roots in LA, and Francis doesn't know anything about it, so... Except for what you kind of have said online. That's true. Okay.
Yeah. Unbeknownst to everyone who follows me on the internet, I've run a small fragrance studio out of downtown LA's Skid Row for, like, 15 years. I do this for myself and to pay my rent.
Still pays my rent, which is crazy. And I'm really good at it, I think, maybe. I can finally say 15 years in that I'm good at it- Hmm... as opposed to last year when I was like, "Uh, I'm okay. I'm still learning."
What made the difference? Did Claude come up with a new flow for you? Oh, no, absolutely not.
[chuckles] Someone sent me an article about, oh, people are using AI to talk about wine to somms, and I was like, "Yeah, of course. People have been doing that with, like, Wine Spectator.
That's cringe, and it's fucking, 'Yeah, this Wine Spectator score is really high.' It's like, ugh." Very cringe. My somm friend was really upset about that.
He posted, uh, three or four Instagram stories screenshotting it and, and just totally- Mm... denigrating the author and The New York Times itself. That's what Instagram Stories is for. I agree.
I think people should know less.
When you say people should know less, to me it's like, okay, yeah, like, people shouldn't know that much about wine, and then you should go to a bar or a restaurant, and there should be somebody there who knows about the wine, and they'll tell you what you should drink.
And you, as a consumer, you shouldn't need to know that. Like, you can be somebody who likes drinking wine, but you don't have to know too much about wine. Right.
It's, it's, it's a very gentle negotiation with yourself, right? Like, when someone puts you on, there's that little period of like, "All right, do I accept this? Is this actually something I like- Mm... or not?"
That goes for anything, right? Fashion, music, whatever.
Like, I think all of us have dealt with, like, a personal recommendation from, like, a family member or something where it's like, "Oh, okay, cool, sick," like, "You might really like this track," or like, "Hey, you like this, you might like this."
And sometimes you're like, "Mm-mm, don't rock with it."
And sometimes it changes your life, but you have to allow it, and if you don't allow for that little gap 'cause you filled it in with Wine Spectator or, uh, Shazam or some Condé Nast publication- Hmm... or X.
If you, if you're on VC, VC Twitter, X, the everything app. Sorry, sorry, Elon. VCX. You, you fall prey to the tropes of like, "Oh, okay," like, "I need to talk about being legible to capital and da, da, da, da."
Anyways. This reminds me of a bumper sticker that you have on your car, but I'm, I'm hesitant to quote it directly 'cause- It's... Let's see if you still got it. Okay.
"Too based for San Francisco, too cringe-" No, too, too... So too based for New York, too cringe for LA. Okay. I love that sticker. Shout out to Dylan Owsley.
Do you feel like, is this a confirmation or, I guess, availability bias, or has New York-LA discourse been replaced by New York-SF discourse? I don't think LA people think about other cities, period. Fair enough.
Because San Francisco is now the new LA, where everyone in SF is a transplant. Mm.
It might've been Reggie, it might've been Reggie James who was like, "You know, SF has fairly interesting, like, you know, move to a big city energy now, and everyone is basically just trying to reframe their, like, small town experience in San Francisco," which kinda tracks for me.
San Francisco feels very, like, quotidian Midwest energy in this really strange way. Mm. Milwaukee. Mm. I always thought I would move there.
As somebody from a small town in Northern California, I like, for the most of my life as a child, I thought I would move to San Francisco, and then by the time I was of such an age to do that, it was just totally, completely off the table.
There was, in no world was there any reason for me to move there. Which small town? I'm from Humboldt County. Oh, shout out to Humboldt. Look, why would you move to SF from Humboldt? Exactly. The weed's more expensive.
[chuckles] That's true. Well, wait, wait, wait. So, okay. What we were just talking about, about the, uh, like, people should know less taste thing. Um, there was...
You haven't done that many interviews, but one that you've done is the Desire Paths with Daniel Giacopelli. Shout out, Daniel. You said something in there... Okay, I'm gonna quote.
"I've legitimately had a $50 cup of coffee, and I understand why it was $50. I really wanna start a coffee shop where you're like, 'This is phenomenal coffee. Here's two ounces of it.'" Daniel says, "Just a sip.
There's a place in London called The Sampler that does that with wine. You can get a teeny glass of, of a $500 bottle of wine or whatever," blah, blah, blah.
And you said, "I don't wanna have 12 ounces of a Panamanian geisha coffee. It's like drinking really nice Riesling. You literally can't use your tongue after a while. Your taste buds will be maxed out.
You never want that to happen."
And that to me, like, that's kind of what we're talking about, where it's like, why do I know a little bit about wine, a little bit about different clothing brands, a little bit about books, like, a little bit about music, a little bit about this?
Like, the need as a consumer to be f- sommelier maxing, but, like, with, like, any given consumable. Like, that's what we're talking about.
It's 'cause you're consuming other people's tastes more than you're actually having experiences. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that thing about, um, what's the...
Is it Goodwill Hunting where Robin Williams says to Matt Damon, like- YeahYeah, you know the dimensions of the Sistine Chapel, but you don't know what it smells like in there. Right. Hmm.
I'm actually talking to Tyler Bainbridge of Perfectly Imperfect fame this afternoon, so I'll confront him about this. No, just kidding.
I would s- I think Tyler would agree, um, you shouldn't consume other people's taste more than you- Right... have experiences. Nothing's cool anymore. Everything is on, on some, uh, spectrum.
I was there when cool people liked cool things. [scoffs] I don't even hear the word cool anymore. Sub Stack it. Okay. Well, wait, wait, wait.
So okay, some-something concrete that we were talking about, Daisy, right before Ryan came on, was the Vox sale. I've been curious about that. I haven't had time to read it.
I've not had time to read anything in the past week and a half. What happened with this Vox podcast sale that never happened? Okay, I'll tell you right now, courtesy of Max Tani.
So bankers on behalf of Vox started approaching media companies and investors with a series of offers. They could take over the podcast business, or potentially they could buy all of Vox.
And the podcast option, it sounds like, had the most legs, but they said that Vox has appeared to change its mind, and they said it was no longer for sale.
Okay, I'm, I'm not, I'm not gonna, like, read through Max's take. I'm just gonna tell you my take, which is like, I think they... There's no such thing as changing your mind once you start shopping around your company.
There's only, "I didn't get the offer I wanted." But- Mm-hmm... Rehan, you're nodding. True. Yeah.
Also, like, I mean, in a different era, like, I guess The Ringer had layoffs yesterday, and The Ringer is part of Spotify now, right? Mm-hmm. Because of the podcast business.
And so maybe Vox is just too late to capitalize on the moment that saw, like, Spotify buying The Ringer, 'cause now it seems like they're contracting, and th- they're playing in, like, a very similar pool from my perspective.
Wait, wait, when you say contracting too, you mean, like, the company or, like, the podcast listenership? No, I believe the podcast business is contracting.
Do you think that's because there are too many podcasts, case in point, that... And, and now there's, like, less people-- There's more people listening to podcasts, but they're listening to more podcasts.
Yeah, maybe that. I don't even know. I don't think, think it's necessarily that... Well, the video market, yes, has cut, maybe cut in- Mm-hmm... but it might not even be that another market has cut in.
It might just be the economy's worse, and it was never a great margin business to begin with. Hmm.
I think that there was a period where there was, like, real ad dollars, there's real syndication, et cetera, behind podcasts, and now it's just fragmented and could be just, like, someone's passion project. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Um, I think, like, the Anchor Spotify deal probably repriced it for a lot of folks, where they were like, "Okay, cool. We're, like, losing some level of consolidation, some level of, like, market power." Mm-hmm.
And I bet that, you know, for a lot of folks, they look at someone like, I don't know, Bezos buying, like, Washington Post and being like, "Maybe we should just buy more small to medium to large news outlets entirely instead of buying podcast networks or podcasts."
Although I wouldn't say that, at least at this moment in time, it doesn't really look like The Washington Post, like, that that really panned out well for Bezos or The Washington Post- Hmm... since he's lost money on it.
But, like, who can say what he's won in, uh, political manipulation? Right. Exactly. It's like all, you know... People, people are buying megaphones for a very specific reason. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And the new emerging megaphone is to go work in the media arm of a16z, it would seem. Have they tried recruiting you yet? Yeah, man. I'm proud to announce that I have joined the new media arm of a16z.
Nah, I just need to get that out of my system. [laughing] Yeah, no. Have they tried recruiting you, Daisy? Hell no. Imagine, imagine dropping that on this podcast. Um, no, they have not.
Um, I am the new media, so that's fine. I've actually decided to create the old media arm of a16z. Is that just investing in profitable companies? [scoffs] Wait, can you guys edit those? Yeah, wait, if, if, if...
Do you want that ed-edited out? No, no. I just basically just wanna say that part of it is using a bowling ball polisher on Mark Andreessen's head. You can edit that part out. It doesn't ma- you can't hurt his feelings.
He won't introspect about it. [laughing] Wait, this reminds me. I was scrolling through your Twitter and re- I guess, are we cutting this? Are we cutting this part of the conversation? No, you can keep it.
I don't, I don't care. Okay. I was scrolling your Twitter, and I saw that you posted a picture of, I believe, a cop in Boston.
It's quite clear, it's quite clear the joke you were making 'cause he had a very specific, um, bald head shape. Yeah, I know. It's really funny how sometimes pattern recognition works out that way.
I'm, I'm sorry that you feel that way, Francis. That cop could go on Joe Rogan, but Mark Andreessen could never go down that metal slide. Could never ship up to Boston. [laughing] Not the slide. Classic. Yeah.
I'm just imagining Mark Andreessen going down a slide now. I just... Ugh. The cop slide specifically. That was truly one of the great moments of the internet 'cause everyone was just like, "Oh, this is easy.
We'll just flip it." And people did the thing where, like, they reversed the video and the cop is going up. It's phenomenal.
Again, in that interview with, with Daniel, you said that in the '90s your parents were running kind of a nascent Web 0.5 startup. What does- Yes... any of that mean? Okay. Uh, do you want me to get nerdy with it or no?
I would love- Yeah... I would love that. All right. So basically- Right off the clock...
my, my parents made, my parents made me immune to all the, the Claude code hucksters out there because in the '90s they were like, "If you're a local business and you're in the Yellow Pages, we're gonna make you a website."
And it was a really sick FileMaker Pro automation that I learned when I was very young, and it was very cool.
And that's, that was part of it, and they had full call centers just reaching out to people and being like, "Yeah, we made you a website." And, like, at that point, that was kind of new, interesting, and groundbreaking.
So yeah, Web 0.5. This is, like, pre the SEO-ification of everything. What were the, the URLs? They're like- You could grab a dot com in those days, right? For cheap. Yeah, exactly.
So it's like they had full deals with, like, Network Solutions and all these other, like, high-level domain companies, and just, like, they bought domains in bulk.
And that's how you made your money, 'cause you made your money on margin there. Is it just me or is Daisy frozen? Daisy's frozen. Can you guys hear me? Frozen Daisy sounds like something you'd get at a really nice bar.
You get, like, two of them. You get two of... Only two? Um- Probably only two. But yes, I hope that, that answered the question, Francis. That did. That's very much what the flow was like.
Sorry, we got, we got very derailed. Look, I didn't know what Web 0.5 meant, to be honest with you. Yeah. No, that's fine. I'm someone who loves coining weird new terms that make no sense. Mm-hmm.
What's your latest coinage? I don't have one. I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's somewhere- Pathetic... like on my, on my... It's on my Twitter somewhere. Mm-hmmI feel like I wrote clodification the other day. Mm.
I don't know if that's a good coinage. Um- Yeah, it's okay. I've been using hashtag men's hobbies a lot to describe a bunch of things. Mm, that's a good one.
We can call men's hobbies a sort of de-incelification accelerant.
Kind of there, where it's just like, you know, there's a point in any given, like niche or subgenre where like a kind of like really nerdy guy gets into it. It's like, "No, I'm not just cooking.
No, I'm like using a sous vide and like, you know, we're using eight hundred grams of whatever, you know, gelatin in this dish." I got this hundred dollar miso. It's a hundred dollars an ounce.
It's a hund- Yeah, exactly. It's a hundred dollars an ounce. No, bro, you don't understand, bro. Like this, you know, it's like almost everything I've done professionally has had like a little tinge of this, right?
Mm-hmm. Like maybe in that interview I mentioned, like working at Breville and like- Mm-hmm...
being the dude who like kind of made sous vide a thing, and like sous vide bros are kind of still annoyingly a thing, and they can't cook. I'm not a sous vide bro. I don't have one.
But I did go to college in Portland, where I was friends with people who... I, I myself was an aspiring cook, and I had at least one friend who was a sous vide bro.
But another term I found on your Twitter that you were, you know, coining a little bit, I guess you were stealing it from somebody else.
You say, "GTM Boiler Room has been attempted by many a crypto startup, and almost every time it has failed." Oh. "With some exceptions, like a certain gathering in the mountains overlooking Palm Springs."
But when you say GTM Boiler Room, do you just mean like a like DJ event as a go-to-market function for a company?
As, as someone who has spent God knows how many years in and around the music industry, someone who is probably a half-decent DJ, whatever- Yeah... eh, I don't wanna talk about it.
A, people should feel shame about what they're good at. B, yes, that, because you can't network with someone at the rave. Yeah. Whenever people try doing... Like, you can't really hold a conversation at the rave, period.
If it's done well, you should just either be blitzed out of your mind or you can't hear. Yeah. Mm. You know, like, I don't want someone's phone in my face.
Like, a DJ doesn't like a phone in their face when they're getting requests. Oh, you don't wanna, you don't wanna do the, the phone-to-phone let's exchange numbers thing? I always loved doing that.
I love doing that, actually. I, I kind of love that. I'm so against that idea. That makes me uncomfortable because it's so weird. Is it meant to be that literal- It's really intimate...
or is it more just like, "Hey, sign up for our product and you can come to the location"? No, I think he was that literal. Your quote, so what you say is- Yeah... "Dinners can't be the only GTM move for enterprise teams.
Invite prospects, try to shill your startup, get faded 99% of the time because most people are only there for free food. We need some moves. Why has nobody hosted a GTM Boiler Room yet?"
Actually, friend of the pod, Ariel Rubin, my ex-employer, Air, they hosted a GTM block party on Sunday. I wasn't here, I was, I was going through airport hell.
[static] A little while later, I feel the plane start going up. Goddammit. [static] But that was, that was an interesting one where they, they had a block party on Howard Street where their office is in SoHo.
They, they did have a DJ, um, this one does, but I don't think that's quite the point. But they were giving out free food, coffee, crosswords.
They had their w- full-page ad in the, in The New York Times, which I have to say- Hand-written... I really respect Shane for putting his actual phone number in the ad.
[static] Having worked for this man, he's like, "No, it has to be my actual... It doesn't work if it's not my actual phone number." I can imagine that conversation- Do we have an update on that?...
with Ari being like, "Dude, that's a horrible idea." But that's like, that's not, uh, the Boiler Room because yeah, again- I'm gonna text him later... if the raves don't write. You're gonna text, huh?
You're gonna text the number? [laughs] I'm gonna text him later. Yeah. Be like, "Yo." But that's a little different. That's just, that's just an event. Yeah. That's just kind of a normal event. But the GTM...
I mean, Boiler Room itself, they monetize through these partnerships now, right? And it, it didn't get sold, so Boiler Room itself is sort of a GTM Boiler Room. Yeah.
I mean, look, I will say this, I think that a lot of people's interface with club culture, especially tech bros' interface with club culture, is through two very morally compromised doors.
One being Boiler Room, the other one being Berghain.
Maybe that's my hot take for here, which is anyone who's still worshiping at the altar of Berghain in 2026 is maybe old and washed, and maybe you should listen to more music and meet more people in general. I agree.
Yeah. Unless you're worshiping at the altar of the Dirt Books title, Total Depravity by Jeffrey Mack. Yes. Shout out to Dirt Books. I think that... How do I say this?
The idea of, again, like a club being a business function and is hard, difficult, and annoying. You're not gonna close a deal because of that. Mm-hmm. The classic East Asian way of doing business is not the go-to-market.
It's pushing a dinner so late until everyone has to drink multiple shots, and then you start talking about work. 'Cause if you can hold your liquor, you can hold a deal. Yeah. True.
It's the only reason I drink, you know? [laughs] So, like, that makes sense to me, that part. I don't think doing it at a rave is a good idea.
I think a block party is a good idea, where people know what they're getting into. You're supposed to talk at block parties. You are, you know? And you can talk at a block party. Like, that's not a very...
Like, it's a soc- A, it's a social place, and B, it's not particularly loud. Like, if someone is haranguing you while you have a hot dog in your hand or something, you're just like, "Fuck it, I'll talk to this person."
Yeah. I think the Silicon Valley dinner party thing is really cynical.
Unless you're really putting in effort to have a good dinner party, like I've always seen it as something a fund will do if they don't have money to invest, but they need to seem like they're active.
'Cause dinner for, you know, whatever, 10 people that are gonna post about it is a lot cheaper than even like an angel check. Almost like a negative signal to me now, 'cause it's like you...
That's all you have the money to do? That's all you could think to do? And it sucks. Oh yeah, it absolutely sucks.
I think so much of, of the go-to-markety thing right now is like, "Okay, we're gonna do something that's unique, fun, and interesting," and I think at this point, like the curated dinner has probably like jumped the shark- Mm...
in terms of being fun, interesting, whatever. 'Cause again, all right, this is autistic mode right here. I'm gonna go in. That's what a podcast is, baby. I don't like dinner parties.
You don't like dinner- I don't like dinner parties. What? I don't like dinner parties. I love dinner parties. I don't like dinner parties for one very specific reason.
I don't like long oval tablesIf you're anywhere in the middle of that table, you are being overwhelmed with eight different conversations, and you can't talk to anyone.
It was-- Here's a classic coinage, Larry David's middling. Mm. Yeah. You would call that the middling section of the table? Well, you-- There's like a whole...
It's a whole Curb Your Enthusiasm bit where they're talking about, like, are you a good middler?
Like, you wanna-- When you're throwing a dinner party, you need people in the middle who are good middlers, who can kind of be the conduit for multiple conversations and connect different sides of the table and bring people in.
It's kind of an exhausting thing. I'd li- I would like to think of myself as a good middler, 'cause you're, you're a ho- even if you're not the host of the dinner, you're basically a proxy host.
You're being asked- Right... to proxy host a dinner as, as the person in one of the middle seats. Exactly. It's a responsibility, you know? Yeah. And to quote, uh, Skepta, "That's not me."
[chuckles] "I'm not that person." Rehan, you-- So you're, like, what people would know you for online is not necessarily, like you said, the small business. It's, you know, being a product marketer and leader in Web3.
And I- For the listener, for the listener, he's dropping a lot of air quotes. Rehan is. Well, so I mean, I don't really wanna do, like, what is the state of Web3?
But I did see a really interesting tweet a bit ago, I can't remember if I brought it up on this podcast before, basically saying, like, the millennial optimism of e-era of Web3 and to s- you know, by extension cryptocurrency is over.
Meaning that, like, a lot of these, like, Web3-adjacent startups, I mean, FWB included, that seemed to have the most traction with people who actually understood and could make culture.
Like, a lot of them have gone belly up or had to pivot in a way that, like, culture is now really back on the back seat.
And primary, like, use cases for cryptocurrency that caught on are DeFi, decentralized finance still has use cases.
People who are trading cryptocurrency still has use cases coming from traditional finance institutions, and then grifts. And like, you know, with some exceptions. So- We love grifts...
there was this era of, like, millennial-coded optimism of, like, this could be a great way to distribute your art. This could be a great way to get a group of people to coordinate.
This could be a great way to, like, sell fragments of your portfolio and let it appreciate. And all of that was, like, happening at the same time as, like, the cringier NFT stuff was happening. But it just didn't have...
It didn't seem to have legs. And so the end of that era obviously portends the beginning of another one.
But I just-- You don't hear a lot of conversations about any sort of values other than, like, money, making money more accessible to people. Right. I don't know.
I, I think cryptocurrency has also fallen into the, the pile of, of #guyhobbies in this way. [laughs] The same way that, like, OpenClaw is also #guyhobbies, right?
Like, you're always gonna have this tension of talking about what it does versus what it is, and I think a lot of people over-index on the what it does, and they talk about spec sheets- Mm...
more so than, like, what does this actually allow you to do?
You know, it's much more interesting if someone talks about crypto as, you know, stateless, censorship-free money movement in that way and what that unlocks for so many people, as opposed to, like, you know, JPEGs that are overvalued or whatever.
Like, all those things kind of work in tandem with each other, and I, I think it's very rare for someone to hit, like, a kinda gestalt talking point for, for that technology.
The same way that people are, you know, as of this week, really grasping for straws and being like, "How do we talk about agentic commerce?" You know? It's like, "This is gonna change the world." Mm-hmm.
And it's like, you know, give me five weeks. Stripe, hit me up. Like, we can make sure Stripe's a winner, and no one-- and everyone else gets shut out. [chuckles] It's not that hard, right?
Like, the same issue happens with any kinda incumbent versus startup tech, which is like, at which point do you wake the incumbent and the incumbent eats your lunch? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right?
When people, for example, talk about music NFTs, I was like, it just takes Spotify a week and a half and, and like, you know, half a sprint to say, "All right. We're gonna find a way to do micropayments in-app," right?
Mm-hmm. And they did it for three weeks, and then they killed it, which is very funny to me. Uh, so what happened?
You know, same thing for, you know, if you look at the integration of crypto into Venmo, PayPal, et cetera, like, all of these incumbent money, money movement apps have fulfilled the promise of crypto, and they have, you know, really defined that promise.
Mm. And the people who have tried on the margins are still doing it, but those are, like, experimental scenes, right? Like, some of the on-chain art folks, Art Blocks, ob- you know, Object, all that. It's kinda sick.
It's super fun. It's really interesting. Is that the core? No, it's not. The same way that, like, you know, someone building a synthesizer in their home is not the future of pop music. It's guy hobbies. Right.
Right, guy hobbies. You know, both can exist. Mm-hmm. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I think a lot of people do take their energy, enthusiasm, and over-index on like, "Oh, I care about this, ergo, a lot of people will." No, you care about it, and it's very fine that a lot of people won't.
But it's cool that you care. You shouldn't stop. But, like, don't... How do you say? Don't proselytize so hard about it. I think a lot of people are doing that.
The, the guy hobby is sort of like a site of, like, of, like, doodling and potential innovation, out of which can come scaled businesses and technologies, but the guy hobby itself is more of this eddy. Yeah, right.
Mm-hmm. Exactly. I think guy hobbies are a very big load-bearing part of modern society. My one, like, kind of weird interpersonal relationship thing is, ladies, if you find a guy with a guy hobby, just let him do it.
[laughs] Um, it's probably really healthy that a guy has a guy hobby, you know? His little squad of friends that he can guy hobby it up with.
Like, "Oh, bro, I'm going to this OpenClaw meetup, and we're gonna talk about, you know, schedule tasks on Claw." Like, okay, sick, you know? Go, go do that. It's socially healthy.
Is fantasy-- Would you include fantasy sports in this category? No, fantasy sports are not in that category 'cause fantasy sports are a form of gambling and degeneracy. What? Isn't that the original guy hobby?
Guy hobby is degeneracy. [chuckles] Gambling and degeneracy? Yeah. You guys love that. No. No, degeneracy is the ultimate guy hobby.
Like, if I wanna go out with the boys and crush, like, three Soylents, two Insurs, and five Monster Energies, and three shots of Fireball- Shit... that's a guy hobby. Based on true story. Based on true story.
Wait, we're talking about dirt bikes, and we're talking about GTM Boiler Room. I don't know if we've ever talked about Stripe PressOn this podcast, which is really interesting to me Shout out to Stripe Press.
They actually do really good work. Shout out to Tammy. Shout out to all them. Okay. It's really interesting stuff for a payments megalith to be like, "We're, we're doing books."
And, uh, I think maybe all three of us are familiar with the pittance that, you know, large brands throw culture projects. Mm-hmm. It's fun to see one that works for more than a year and a half. Oh my gosh.
Stripe Press sold a million books. Yeah, a million. That's crazy. I think so. And also, the books are not that bad, and also, they are so smart in differentiating themselves from, like, regular, like, airport drivel.
I don't know who or when they were like, "We're gonna go up against, I don't know, like Bloomberg Press or, like, Harvard," but they have, like, nailed it.
They've done a really good job at being just smart and interesting enough compared to those incumbents.
So as of February, Tammy Tamra Winter tweeted on Xed, I don't know what you call it now, on February 24th that Stripe Press had sold 1.1 million books. That's really impressive. Books? It's a great website, by the way.
They're good books. I think it's- It is... stripe.press. Let me see. It is. Press dot Stripe. Devin, who works on the stripe.press website, is one of my favorite follows. Absolute beast mode of a front-end developer.
It's like I'm a real big craft boy in this way. I love reading liner notes. I love reading source code. That is extremely my thing, and so whenever I see a new Devin website, I get excited. Mm.
What would it take for you to leave X, Twitter? Honestly- A nuclear bomb... I think you know this, Daisy. Mm. I spend more time on iMessage than I do on X. You are on iMessage a lot. So, like- Yeah...
X is a, X is a top of funnel for you to get iMessages. [laughs] I can't send people a laser react on other platforms. That's really what it is. Nikita, if you're listening. [laughs] I'm texting him right now, by the way.
He just sent me a laser. If you're listening, my number is six two six [beep]. Hit him up. Thank you so much for coming on Tasteland. We'll see you guys next week. [laughs] Are we really ending it there?
[laughs] Goddammit. [upbeat music]