Tim Hwang: Trade Journal Cooperative, Robot Lawyers, Bubble in Digital Ads, Zuck Being Quantitatively Weird, and Misinformation as Warfare
This week’s podcast guest is Tim Hwang. The most interesting man on the internet. He runs a project called the Trade Journal Cooperative, which I've subscribed to for years.
We talk about how the Trade Journal Cooperative got started, how Tim *secretly* went to law school, and several other projects Tim is working on including an academic journal dedicated to bizarre images of Mark Zuckerberg.
Thought that was all? That’s not all. Using bots to wage information wars on social media, and Tim’s book, which predicts an online advertising bubble. My favorite thing about Tim is the unique ability to sit on the fence between rigorous and whimsical. Please enjoy.
Favorite Quotes from Tim Hwang:
“If you looked back in the 20th century, all of the markers of institutional importance were kind of expensive to get. You get the brass plaque and the diploma. But the cost of all of that stuff has just gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper now that anyone can create any institution they want in some ways because it's so low cost to achieve a minimal viable level of credibility.”
“I think it will be important, but AI will play the role of a supporting character in the Pantheon of technologies that become super important rather than being the thing itself.”
“What's become clear is that we have a significant advancement in the technology, but it [AI] is not necessarily going to become the core technology in and of itself.”
“If social media bots are going to be used to sort of like manipulate the public sphere, then what is our strategy? Like how do we combat this stuff?”
“The problem with liberal democracy is that you want civil society to be mostly responsible for the defense against these things. You want journalists and non-profits and all this stuff to actually be the ones who fight this war.”
“Everybody just wants to believe that the marketplace of ideas is self-regulating over time, but like financial markets, they are not self-regulating. And I think we are now kind of confronting the problem with, okay, so what's the appropriate level of governance? And then that's kind of an interesting challenge that we find ourselves in.”
“If we're going to deal with some of these problems, we have to be very practically minded and a lot of the skills we learn have to be like, okay, if we're worried about conspiracy theories, how do you build one?”
“If web3 is going to make a big difference, it's really more about pulling off that sleight of hand, which is like not much is different, but you're just willing to pay for it now. And I do think that is a potential steppingstone to getting past this bubble, to say, okay, can we actually have an internet that's driven on not just ads but actually paid subscription ultimately.”
Learn more about Tim Hwang:
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Podcast Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Jorgenson Soundbox, the sandbox of sounds. This show is many things, and today it is a little bit of spelunking through interesting people and projects that I've encountered. Tim Hwang is the most interesting man on the internet. He runs a project called the Trade Journal Cooperative, which I've been a subscriber to for years. And curious who was behind it, I looked him up, and as I went through his personal website, I got increasingly giddy about meeting him. And you're about to see why. We talk about just today, in the next 45 minutes, trade journals as industrial anthropology, we talk about using bots to wage information wars on social media, we talk about how Tim went to law school secretly, we talk about legal services for internet creators, we talk about founding academic journals based around images of Mark Zuckerberg, we talk about Tim’s book, which predicts a bubble in targeted advertising and the collapse of web 2.0 giants, and we talk about authoring conspiracy theories. If you enjoy this conversation, all my other work is on ejorgenson.com. Check it out. If you leave a review of this podcast, I will owe you a sandwich. But please focus on enjoying this conversation arriving at your ears in three, two, one.
Tim Hwang, thank you so much for taking the time. I’m very excited to talk to you.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Eric Jorgenson: I have been excited to talk to you since before I knew who you were. I just- there was someone behind a very curious project called the Trade Journal Cooperative that I knew someone interesting had to be running. And so that's where we're going to start, but I want to do an opening question, which kind of helps- I think is an interesting way to get a feel for somebody, which is just to find out who your heroes are.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of my biggest heroes, I'll talk about just off the cuff, is this guy Charles Fort, who is the source of the term Fortean. Basically, he was this guy who I think he was early part of the 20th century, maybe late part of the 19th century, who was really interested in collecting documented anomalous phenomena. And so, he spent years in the British Library basically looking through scientific journals, just looking up things like rains of frogs and just like weird celestial phenomena. And he published these compilations of these books that are just kind of like accounts of this stuff. And I guess he's my hero in some ways just because of his sort of like absolute dedication to what is a really kind of like odd mission and his kind of curation of this like strange body of information, all of which is I think very near and dear to my heart.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that explains many of the projects that you've undertaken.
Tim Hwang: Well, as you said, it's very revealing about people.
Eric Jorgenson: Absolutely, yeah. It's like maximally arcane. Okay so, The Trade Journal Cooperative is how I found you. So, I think that's the right place to start. And then we will just bloom like a flower into all of the various other arcane things that you do. So, the Trade Journal Cooperative describes itself as a subscription service which delivers a niche trade journal to your door once a quarter. I've been a subscriber for a few years now and have received like one-off trade journals from- probably the most memorable one I had was the haunted houses.
Tim Hwang: Oh yeah, Haunt World, that took forever to get. For the listeners, it's basically a trade journal dedicated people who own and operate haunted attractions of various kinds. And so, it's like an amazing journal. That's one of my favorites as well. Like you have a whole article on like the pros and cons of different kinds of fake of blood. And I'm like it's amazing.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Tell me where this project started and how you got into it. And I imagine you just have incredible fun running this thing.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, it's such a good time. So, the origin of it is actually a number of years ago, my friend, because he knows I'm into weird stuff like this, got me a gift of a trade journal called Pasta Professional. And Pasta Professional is the trade journal for people in the pasta industry. And I was reading it and I was like this is so funny because basically like even the pasta industry has these two articles that everybody does. The first article is how is AI going to change the pasta industry? Which blew my mind. And then the second one is are millennials killing pasta? Like do they like fusilli because it’s low carb and all these sorts of things. And so, I was just like this is so incredibly fascinating. It's basically like a document from a parallel universe. And so, I kind of started to call around and being like, okay, what are the other trade journals I can get my hands on? And it's sort of funny, when you call these places up, they're like, “Wait, why are you calling us again?” And they would not sell you like one-off issues. And so, the origin of The Trade Journal Cooperative was just merely the idea like, okay, if we can get enough people together, I can basically go to Haunt World Magazine and say like I want to buy hundreds of your back issues, just sell them to me. Because it's like dead stock to you, and so we'll pay you for it. And it sort of grew out from there, and I sort of lovingly describe the project sometimes as like National Geographic for capitalism because it basically is these kind of like quarterly explorations of just like these industries. And it just turns out every industry is just like its own weird, fascinating microcosm, if not macrocosm, in a lot of ways. And so that's sort of the origin of the project.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh my God, the parallel universe thing is an incredibly I think apt description. Like you open up show pony manager, and you're like, wow, you are seeing this whole cross section of a whole culture and a whole set of people and like all the terminology is crazy.
Tim Hwang: The slang, the shop talk I think is like a really cool part of it as well. And then the other one is just there's sort of this humbleness where, I don’t know, I've worked in the tech industry for many years. And you're like, oh my God, like Paul Graham, like famous, famous guys, but you kind of get the idea reading a lot of these trade journals that you can get super famous in a space, even a big influential space like technology, and the minute you step outside of it, people are like Paul fucking who? And I do think that that is like actually also a really interesting part about it is that these microcosms also have like their old veterans, and their like upstart newcomers, but it's just like in the weird context of like the sugar industry or something.
Eric Jorgenson: There's like a Paul Graham of magicians somewhere like killer essays that everybody loves.
Tim Hwang: That's right. Yeah, exactly. And I kind of have this like tech theory that a lot of the characters that we're familiar with in the tech industry, they exist in every other industry. Like every industry kind of has to invent these people. Like everybody needs the guru. And so, the guru exists no matter what industry you're talking about. And so, that's also been, I think, another super fun part of the project.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a really cool- one of my favorite things I like- I feel like I can always get joy out of the realization that the economy is like mindbogglingly huge. I can just re-realize that over and over and over again. And every time you like get one of these, it is like, it is definitely re-remembering that.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, totally. Like, I mean, forget about it. Some of the times, like the last journal was in trucking. And trucking is a huge industry. Like I was just looking at some of the numbers and it's just like, yeah, but it's basically a form of infrastructure. Like you don't really think about it because it's so common in every day that you're just sort of like yeah, it's trucking. But then you realize, like you're saying, that the economy is like so vast and unknowable in some ways. And this is kind of like a little way of kind of like getting into that or getting your head around it for sure.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Trucking is a super interesting one because I think it's so big. Like truck driver is the number one most common job in like 17 or 21 states or something like that. Like it's wild. And I do a lot of road trips through the Midwest and it's like truck, truck, truck, 12 hours of driving past trucks. You forget the arteries of America are just like running wild with trucks all the time. And because I think it's on the verge of totally transforming. I like to think about you could basically recreate a railroad level of efficiency with like Tesla skates with shipping containers dropped on them on auto pilot in caravan form, slipstreaming with each other at a hundred miles an hour, running 24 hours a day. And like that maybe totally reasonable in 10 years, 20 years, and will totally transform the whole supply chain of trucking and leave like millions of people with very different employment opportunities.
Tim Hwang: I think that's for sure. Yeah. And I think it's kind of one of the really interesting elements of this. Again, kind of like being around the internet a lot, I think we often kind of forget that there's stuff that just needs to be moved around. Like a big part of the economy is just like I got to get this object from point A to point B. And I think we're a little bit more aware of it now because of COVID, like all the supply chains are so messed up that we're like suddenly aware of this stuff in a way that we maybe a few years ago were not as aware of. But yeah, I think totally, and that's kind of one of the reasons the Trade Journal Cooperative has this kind of obsession particularly with physical industries. Like we haven't done necessarily a lot of journals in like marketing as much. Because at least for me, I think learning about how some of this stuff is built and happens I think is really, really interesting.
Eric Jorgenson: Has this led you into investments of any sort, or are you just kind of like- is this purely just voyeurism?
Tim Hwang: Yeah, I mean, I think, I would be doing this by myself if I could. I think like the Trade Journal Cooperative now gives me this like very convenient place to go knocking on doors, essentially, like gives me an excuse to talk to people, which is great, and also gives me an excuse to acquire these journals, which is also really helpful. It is sort of interesting though, I think the subscriber base for The Trade Journal Cooperative has ended up being like three groups. One is just like nerds like me who are just like, they're just happy to receive this totally like funny thing in the mail once a quarter. And the other two, I think, which have been really fascinating, one of them is journalists who are like always looking for angles on new stories. I think people are fascinated by like, okay, how is Brexit going to the impact the haunted house industry? It's like a whole great way of kind of talking about the stuff that's happening in the economy. And the other one has frankly been, yeah, like hedge funds, investment groups, who I think are using these trade journals as a way of effectively doing research. And I am kind of interested more in that. Like I haven't actually done investments on my own in the space, but I do think it is kind of intriguing that like there's basically a lot of hidden in plain sight knowledge that investors find super valuable in these journals because it is not the kind of thing where- like there's no influencer online tweeting about the finer points of the pasta supply chain, but there's probably money to be made there. And so, I've been kind of thinking about is there like an investor specific version of this service which goes a lot deeper and is a lot more high touch in some ways. But today, no, to answer your original question, I haven't made any investments based on The Trade Journal Cooperative.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That is pretty interesting. I think there's like a- What I appreciate about it is the, I think you were kind of dancing around it, is the randomness that it inflicts on me. Like I know- I don't know what you're going to send to me, but I know that once a quarter, I'm just going to have something hit my face that's completely new, and I'll be learning about like open air fish markets and the economics behind them or the supply chain of salmon or something. And it's actually harder and harder to engineer that randomness. Like it's just all algorithmically driven. Like I don't know how else to ensure, aside from like outsourcing curation to somebody that I'll encounter something truly novel that is outside the echo chamber.
Tim Hwang: That's right. I was joking with a friend recently. I was like my real job is I'm a trade journal sommelier. Like based on the taste of my subscribers, I try to present you something interesting once a quarter. And I think that's right. And I think it does actually speak volumes about kind of like the current media landscape in some ways. Like I think if you were around the internet in the early 2000s, you're like, wow, the internet is like this vast unknowable place where all sorts of weird things are happening all the time. And talking to a lot of friends now, I think they have a similar feeling that you do, which is like, oh yeah, I'm just kind of in this weird algorithmic bubble and I see just like a lot of the same stuff on the internet. And so, it is kind of an interesting irony that like what we wanted out of the internet, we now sometimes get through like weirdo random services like Trade Journal Cooperative, which is like not internet at all. Like I literally sit in my living room and I stuff envelopes and I mail them to people. But I think a lot of people get the same kind of thrill that you do, which is like, oh yeah, the world is really vast and unknowable. It's useful to have that reminder, and hey, while I'm here, maybe I learn something.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It is wonderful. Do you encounter- like how much curation goes into it? Like how many journals do you look at, and you're like this one's shitty, my subscribers deserve better?
Tim Hwang: Well, yeah, it's kind of funny because so trade journals by and large, they aren't like, hey, if you want to buy a couple hundred back issues, just call us and get it. So, I think, as I mentioned two trade journals ago into memo, often the task of this is like you literally go on the website of the trade journal, you find the phone number of the editor in chief, you cold call them, and you're like, “You don't know me, but I just, I really got to do this thing. Hear me out, hear me.” And it's actually kind of hard because some people are like, “What? No.” or like they're super weirded out by it. And so, I would say the first phase of every quarter is just like a mad dash where like I call 30 to 50 different trade journals trying to get a call back. And then if I'm lucky on a given month, I'll be like, oh okay, we have four or five to choose from, which are the better ones or which are the worst ones. And for example, for trucking, I actually did a fair amount of research on the trucking one. Because it turns out that we could do multiple years’ worth of trucking trade journals and never repeat the same trade journal. Like it's a huge space, and there's different brands in the space. There's like the young, hot brand, there's the kind of like up and coming manager brand. And so, yeah, there's kind of like a little bit more like what will subscribers find interesting essentially. But it is a weird kind of curation because it is just like- it is not like I'm collecting any data about anyone who's subscribing. So, it's just like if I were the kind of person who would subscribe to this, what would I find cool? Luckily, Eric, I guess, I mean, it sounds like you have enjoyed it, which is great.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm in at least two of those buckets that you described. But like in Tim, we trust. Like sommelier is an excellent- it's like just, yeah, give me a 94 Trade journal, like whatever you recommend.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, exactly. And some of those vintage ones are awesome as well, like Elevator World, which is one of the first ones that we did, which is for people in the- The vertical transportation industry is what they call themselves. And they had like a bunch of back issues. And I actually want to go back and maybe see could I get like a lot of ones from like the eighties? Because I think people would just like- I don't know, I'd find that super interesting.
Eric Jorgenson: That is so fantastic. The vertical transportation industry. We're horizontally integrating in the vertical transportation industry. Yes.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, I’m sure they crack that joke all the time at the annual conference.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh yeah. I'm imagining like a lot of pleats, and a lot of- actually probably like extremely meticulous people. Like I want my- I want those Germans, like German elevator companies.
Tim Hwang: German- What is that? I forget, there's a couple of companies that really dominate that are all like German engineering outfits.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I don't want the British- I don't want a lift company. I want a German-
Tim Hwang: A true vertical transportation solutions operation.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, all right. So, Tim, let's do like the man behind the co-op. So, by day, according to your LinkedIn, like where respectable people put on a respectable face, you are a lawyer and general counsel at Substack. And you went to Harvard for undergrad. What was your concentration?
Tim Hwang: Oh, I was government and econ, which is political science basically. They just had to come up with a different name for it.
Eric Jorgenson: But you did some engineering, some software engineering too, right?
Tim Hwang: I did, yeah. Actually, I went to school wanting to do software engineering, but yeah, just like the grind of doing it in undergrad, I was like, eh, not worth it. But after college, I did do software engineering professionally for a little bit but just kind of got pulled in a bunch of other different directions.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. And then your website says you secretly went to Berkeley Law.
Tim Hwang: Oh yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: Secretly from who?
Tim Hwang: Well from everybody basically. So, this is kind of an awkward story, but I'm happy to tell it because it's sort of funny.
Eric Jorgenson: That is the perfect preface, bring it on.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, I basically before law school spent a summer out in San Francisco, loved it, and basically moved back there for law school, went to Berkeley. And as you may hear, law school is pretty expensive. And so, I was like, okay, while I'm in school, I want to just kind of like do some freelance work on the side just to kind of defray some of the expenses here because it's like super expensive. But then I rapidly found that basically no one wants to hire you to do freelance work if they think you're also going to law school because law school has a reputation for being all consuming. And so, for my first few freelance projects, I just didn't mention that I went to law school and this kind of became like a snowball that rolled down a hill for the subsequent three years where like I just didn't tell anyone. I made new friends and didn't tell them because it would be sort of weird at that point. And it's just like became this big awkward thing. So, when I graduated, I was like, guys I have a law degree now. And so, it was this kind of just like weird- I didn't intend for it to be secret, but it kind of came out that way.
Eric Jorgenson: That's amazing. I was like, yeah, secret from- did Berkeley know? Like somebody had to know.
Tim Hwang: Oh yeah. I think my family knew, my partner now wife knew. So, like people knew, but it was not like I was talking about law school all the time on Twitter or whatever.
Eric Jorgenson: That's interesting. Did you find that it was all consuming?
Tim Hwang: No, no, I actually give this advice to a lot of people who are thinking about law school, which is like there's a lot of stuff in law school that tricks you into thinking that it needs to be kind of all consuming. And like there's basically a lot that's in law school which is effectively just kind of like a waste of your time. And so, yeah, no, I don’t know, I don't think so. It doesn't need to be, maybe that's the right answer.
Eric Jorgenson: So, you have like this totally normal career as like a person who studied political science and then did some engineering and then did- What was the transition between software engineering-? And then you did a bunch of really interesting like policy AI stuff for a few years. So, this is what I mean of like you are just absolutely all over the place in the best way possible.
Tim Hwang: I think my parents still want me to get a real job at some point.
Eric Jorgenson: No, please. I will sign the keep Tim weird petition. This is- no like you seriously- like the setup is like by day, you have a normal career, by night, you are the most interesting man on the internet. And there is an endless amount of questions to ask you about these weird and hilarious projects that you have been up to. And I want to get through as many of them as we can. So, okay, the first one is probably the most normal: Rosen, Wolfe and Hwang, lawyers for the extremely online, a boutique law practice that specializes in serving the unique needs of independent creators and small to midsize technology businesses.
Tim Hwang: I think that's right. Yeah. So, the origin of the firm, basically, again, this is after law school, I was basically like, okay, so what now? My original idea for going to law school was that I really want to start a company that essentially automated a lot of what lawyers did. But it turns out that as an industry, that's like a very tall wall to climb. And so, me and my buddy Mike Wolfe, who had just graduated law school around the same time, were like, yeah, let's just start offering legal services on the side. And that basically kind of grew into a pretty cool sort of like law practice over the years where we represented all sorts of people doing kind of interesting things, but largely kind of like people involved in various kind of creative projects being sort of like targeted by nasty lawyers essentially. And yeah, so I've taken a back seat to that while I'm working at Substack, but it was kind of like a practice that we'd been running.
Eric Jorgenson: Was that an outgrowth or a separate track from the other incredible law firm of Robot Robot & Hwang?
Tim Hwang: Yeah. So that was actually- like that was the original notion of kind of creating like a law firm that was like fully, fully automated. It wasn't bad. I did a little bit of contract work after law school in that space. And I do still think there's like a lot of exciting things to be done there. But yeah, this is a separate track for sure.
Eric Jorgenson: You have a black belt at naming things. Amazing.
Tim Hwang: I mean, you’ve got to have a good name.
Eric Jorgenson: It’s great, great branding. Have you watched like the other sort of legal automation space, like what happened with I think it was Atrium, is that Justin Kan’s company?
Tim Hwang: From an industry standpoint, I think it's both business interesting and like technically interesting as well. On the business side, it's this very tricky thing where basically lawyers bill hourly. And so, they have these incredible disincentives to become super, super efficient. And that creates all sorts of problems in terms of your sales pipeline. Which is like where do you sell all these cool technology products that you build? And how do you frame it up in a way that lawyers would actually adopt? So, there's a whole set of problems there. There's a whole other set of problems which are like the technical problems, which I think are also really interesting, which is like, okay, contract automation, can you use NLP to understand what a contract is about? And then can you operate on it programmatically to like say check for risky issues? And yeah, and so I have watched the space for a while and know a couple people who are doing companies in the space. Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, I think some people have tried to do like lawyer marketplaces. Those have kind of not been so great. I think the ones that I'm really excited about- So my buddy Jason runs a company called Iron Clad in the space, which is essentially doing contract automation, but what's interesting is where they started, which was making like the data structured essentially. And so, I think there are people who are like really winning in this space, but this is not like running a social media platform where you hope for a hundred thousand X growth in a short period of time.
Eric Jorgenson: I've seen some that are also in the like arbitration and like settlement prediction space, like they analyze the case load and the case history and sort of like give you a risk factor and a decision factor like from an investment perspective.
Tim Hwang: Yeah. And I think that's actually like, it's an interesting space. It feels a little icky to me, but I think intellectually, it's fascinating. Because you can do- like effectively, the laws have been loosened now, so you can take a stake in a lawsuit.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there are like financial instruments for these things.
Tim Hwang: Exactly. And which kind of like blows my mind because then you're like, okay, well we can do all the normal set of financial instrumentation on top of it. Like let's just tranche a hundred thousand personal injury lawsuits. And then like, I don't know, at some point, you're going to end up with like a subprime crisis or something like that. But yeah, so that space is really, really interesting. I think it's also like incredibly dangerous. You are like literally mixing these two really volatile things, but yeah, there are people working in the space and I do think it's pretty interesting.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It is prone to abuse, perhaps. Like I don't think you want people running expected value calculations on personal injury lawsuits.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, that's right. And of course, I mean, they would argue the other side of it, which I can kind of see, which is basically, well look, lots of people don't have the money to bring the lawsuit. So, to create parity in the legal system, we actually do have to do this funding. So, I don't know. I don't know, it’s clear that I haven't made up my mind about it. It's just like a very confusing space.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's okay. I feel like we're allowed to see nuance on this podcast. This is a place of nuance. And we can say I don't know a lot.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, [inaudible 25:10] gloss on that space. Like I am still waiting for someone to do like the lawsuit DAO essentially.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I did see- I saw a DAO- I don't know if it was a DAO actually, some web3 native thing that was like mediation, sort of like automated mediation. It was like it's supposed to be maybe mediation as a service or settlement as a service where it's kind of like a human layer that can be driven, sort of like on-call, on demand, participants are rewarded, juries are like given tokens for their participation and the amount of time they participate and the decisions that they contribute to. It's kind of like, well, of course there's going to be disputes that require human intervention around smart contracts. And like how do we build some component in the system that addresses that without the whole thing coming to a screeching halt.
Tim Hwang: Right. Absolutely.
Eric Jorgenson: I thought that was a really interesting one. We can move on to the next like large bucket of interestingness that you do, which I have just recently learned, thanks to you, a word, is it Fortean? This is the Fortean bucket. Okay. So, I had previously referred to it as scholarly papers about absurd cultural phenomena, which you have a few projects that fit into this bucket. You have the curated scholarly papers about photos of Mark Zuckerberg.
Tim Hwang: So that's actually a journal, it's not just a series of papers. So the California Review of Images and Mark Zuckerberg is an academic journal, so I'm not the only one publishing. And it’s an attempt to kind of create an academic field focused on not just Mark Zuckerberg but like imagery in which he appears. Because I think unlike a lot of major tech industry leaders, he seems to have been exceptionally good at ending up in these incredibly strange, awkward images. And I feel like that's just like so intriguing to me. Like why is that? Why are they so strange? What does it tell us about the media? And so, we've done two volumes of the California Review of Images and Mark Zuckerberg, and I have a lot of interest in doing a third volume, which I think would be really fascinating. One funny outcome of it though, is that like I'm now- I get calls from journalists looking for comment every time one of these funny images appears. And so, it has become like I'm really working on trying to turn this into a field, like the field of Zuckerberg studies should really grow over time. That's kind of that project.
Eric Jorgenson: I can't wait until you show up as an expert witness in a- some sort of a Zuckerberg-ologist. Like I truly don't know. This just seems like a position I find myself in often when I'm like with really, really smart people, and I just can't tell what you're doing that's totally serious and what you're doing that's totally a joke and dry. And I just love how confused I get, and like the ability to sit perfectly on that fence of like very serious and very whimsical and that no one can tell the difference is absolutely chef's kiss.
Tim Hwang: I appreciate that. Again, I think it is funny. I think it's also genuinely really interesting.
Eric Jorgenson: I totally agree. It's like, yeah, you're like oh, that's a funny idea. And then you look at some of these things, like there was one I was reading this morning, like Tamora Shepherd wrote Neo-colonial Intimacies, and I think, I believe your subtitle, which is editorializing about the geopolitics of an awkward hug. Mark Zuckerberg just like very awkward like bro hug of various world leaders. And you're like there is actually something really interesting in there.
Tim Hwang: What's going on here? Yeah, exactly. I do genuinely believe that- So there's the people of these like tech leaders, like there's the person of Elon Musk. And then, there is the media phenomena of which he represents. And I think those two are actually quite distinct things. And I think we can actually think about like the ladder as its own kind of independent thing. Like Elon Musk could be someone totally different from his public persona, but his public persona really matters in that it like clearly hits a chord and it clearly says something about culture. And so, I think it is actually worth investigating what do these symbols mean in the same way that you would think about what does a celebrity mean? Or what does a really popular movie say about culture?
Eric Jorgenson: We create a shared narrative around a fictional person that may or may not- is inspired by a real person that may or may not represent the real person.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, exactly. And in some ways, those representations become bigger than the person themselves. One of the most fascinating things about Zuck is that you often get the feeling that he's sort of like subject to it. He's like not fully in control of just like his media universe, which I think is really interesting because I think we have a lot of CEOs that are a lot more, like everything is very curated, like the kind of Tim Cook universe, where it's just like everything is just like staged in a certain way.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, if you look at- I was thinking- I was comparing Zuckerberg to Elon Musk. I was watching that Metaverse presentation. I was like why is he so much weirder and more awkward to watch than like Elon- like they're both, Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, they're both like super nerds and not like uniquely charismatic, not polished, not well presented. But like Zuckerberg is trying so hard to be that smooth, the charismatic, well presented like Tim Cook, he just can't do it. If he would just be weird and himself like Elon Musk is-
Tim Hwang: That would be the advice.
Eric Jorgenson: It would be so much better. It'd be so much better.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, and I think that's kind of like a lot of people have written about that in the review, just like that the snake eats its own tail, where this like attempt at normalcy creates this like incredible uncanny persona.
Eric Jorgenson: It is uncanny valley. He's a person, he's a real person in the uncanny valley, and it is terribly awkward. Okay, and you have similar- I'm not sure if there are papers or journals about the Venture Brothers cartoons and the Adventure Time cartoon.
Tim Hwang: Right. And in some ways the California Review of Mark Zuckerberg kind of comes out of this kind of like series of projects where the first one I did was with my friend Darby Smith. We're just basically like Adventure Time, it's an incredible show and there’s like a lot of really super interesting things to write about it. Like what would happen if we got a bunch of people to think about it and do like a proper collection of essays? And it was like really fun to do, really successful. And it just turns out there's like a lot of people who really want to put a lot of brain energy into talking about this stuff. And so, I was like, wow, okay, the cost of activation to creating your own academic journal is like incredibly low, way lower than I ever thought it would be. And so, you now have this like template where you can be like let's just have a journal about that and a journal about that, a journal- And so, after Adventure Time, I was like, oh, I've been watching a lot of Venture Brothers, which is just like a funny and absurd show, and we were like, okay, let's do a journal on that. And then a few years later, I was like I have this Mark Zuckerberg thing. I was at this bar comparing a bunch of saved photos of Mark Zuckerberg I had with a friend of mine, and I was like we should do an academic journal about this. And this is kind of like how that came to be.
Eric Jorgenson: I have a template to spin up projects like this, that's good.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, exactly. And then you see on the website, it's just like me doing my own terrible HTML. There's like nothing fancy to it at all. But people seem to find it interesting. So again, I'm happy to do it.
Eric Jorgenson: This is kind of the same feeling I had when I realized for the first time that big fancy like institutes and think tanks are just like, oh, that's just like one or two nerds that are paid to think about a thing.
Tim Hwang: Like you are just a bunch of guys.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm here on behalf of the AI Contemplation Institute. And I'm like what is that? And five times you ask what is that, it turns out it's like that guy writing papers that somebody paid him to do. And you're like, oh, okay, okay.
Tim Hwang: This idea that like if you looked back in the 20th century, like all of the markers of institutional importance were kind of expensive to get. You like get the brass plaque and like the diploma. But the cost of all of that stuff has just gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper now that like anyone can create any institution they want in some ways because it's like so low cost to achieve a minimal viable level of credibility that like why not? You can spin up these institutes and dissolve these institutes. It's kind of just very fluid in that way.
Eric Jorgenson: And then it sets it up for these perfect like semi-serious tongue in cheek institutes that are- that will become your legacy if I have anything to say about it.
Tim Hwang: Totally. Like yeah, exactly. I don't know, as a believer in like many absurd jokes becoming like really serious changes of history over time, you kind of just like, yeah, let's launch a bunch of these things and kind of see what happens.
Eric Jorgenson: And you also- I would be remiss if that's your only legacy because you also do a lot of actually like really serious, important work, probably especially around AI. I know that's not probably your focus now because you’re general counsel at Substack.
Tim Hwang: But I’m happy to talk about it. I still keep an eye on the space pretty closely and all that.
Eric Jorgenson: Cool. Yeah, I'd love to, because I think- do you have a sense of what the most high-impact technology will be over the next decade?
Tim Hwang: I mean, that's a super tough bet.
Eric Jorgenson: Super tough, yeah. I mean, it's a very thumb in the air kind of thing.
Tim Hwang: I’m almost kind of- but yeah, totally. Go ahead.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm curious if the answer is AI to someone who is really close to that space, or if you feel like it's still kind of in the perpetual horizon mode?
Tim Hwang: I think it's in a perpetual horizon mode. Yeah. I think it will be important, but I think it will play the role of like a supporting character in like the Pantheon of technologies that become super important rather than being the thing itself. So, I think when deep mind cracked go and all this stuff, people were like, oh God, yeah, we're going to build the AGI and then it's going to become the technology that does everything else. And I think what's become clear is that, and I think a lot of people even pointed it out at the time, which is like we have a significant advancement in the technology, but it is not necessarily going to become the core technology in and of itself. And so, what I mean by that is like, look, we're going to use machine learning to help aid and accelerate drug discovery. And the core technology there's going to be drug discovery, not necessarily AI. And so, I kind of feel like that's kind of how I size it up. Now, like again, to our earlier discussion, I do think that big corporate battles and even national battles will be fought over AI. But to your question of just like what's going to be the most significant technology, I guess I'm a little bit more bearish on sort of AI at large.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. So, you're not in the kind of like Eliezer Yudkowsky camp where you're like AI alignment is the most important problem facing humanity and like it's not even close.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, to my mind, I'm I guess a little bit more apocalyptic. I'm like do we even- does society survive to the point where we even get to confront that question I think it's more where we're at. Like maybe it would be the most important technology if we had solved a bunch of other really pressing stuff that we’ve got to deal with.
Eric Jorgenson: So, what's on that list for you?
Tim Hwang: I mean, I do think stuff like climate change is huge. I do think like societal inequality is an enormous problem. I do think that there's all of these kinds of issues that just strike at like a much lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy that we’ve kind of got to get fixed up I think before we talk about like is alignment the most critical problem.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. So, what does- you wrote a paper in 2019 that I intend to read because it looks very interesting – “Maneuver and Manipulation: On the Military Strategy of Online Information Warfare.” Did that have to do with AI or was that just kind of like happened to be a similar thing and this is more about the media piece?
Tim Hwang: Totally. Yes, so this is actually kind of a separate thread of work. So basically, about over a decade now – wow, it's wild – over a decade ago, basically me and a couple of collaborators were like part of the group that demonstrated that you could use bots to sort of shape discussion online. So, at the time, I had just graduated college and we were basically like- We're running these competitions that we thought of as basically like Battle Bots but social. So, the idea was that people would write bots that go on Twitter, and you would win points based on how many reactions you could get. And we just do a race, which is like over a month, which bot is able to generate the most social engagement. And what was scary at the time was basically like oh yeah, these like really simple scripts can generate really powerful social interactions in people. And it might amuse you, and I've told this anecdote a couple of times before, but it's worth reiterating here in light of what happened next. It was basically like at the time we were like, oh, this is awesome, like what if you could use bots to help people communicate across polarized political boundaries? Or what if you could use bots to kind of fight disinformation on the internet? And so obviously, in the next decade that didn't happen at all.
Eric Jorgenson: Quite the opposite.
Tim Hwang: Quite the opposite, totally the opposite. Like 180 degrees the other direction. And so, I ended up basically over the last decade kind of like watching this space and thinking a little bit about like, okay, if this technology is going to be used to sort of like manipulate the public sphere, then what is our strategy? Like how do we combat this stuff? Like if we're worried about Russians manipulating an election, how do you actually go about creating a strategy to deal with this stuff? And there's basically this like line of literature that was written during the Cold War about information warfare, which is like very hand wavy. It's basically like how do we fight communism? Well, we need inspiring messages about democracy, and you're like, I can't, I don't know what you are supposed to do with that. And part of the thesis of the paper though is that basically because social activity is a lot more data-driven than it used to be, information warfare is also potentially a lot more data-driven than it used to be as well. And it kind of talks about the implications of that.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. What is the modern Rocky for? How do you combat communism? So, your thesis in that paper was like data-driven responses and reactions. Do you think that like it's the responsibility of the social media platforms to police and remove bots? Or is this about sort of counteractive bots that attack the same way or defend the same way they're being attacked?
Tim Hwang: Totally. So, I think there's two answers to that question. So, the first one is basically like you have a question about sort of like solutions, so like what are you supposed to do here? And I'm really intrigued by the notion of robust, what you call sort of robust social typologies. So, the way to think about this basically is like, okay, imagine everybody in society, now imagine all of the relationships between them mapped. And now imagine for a moment that you could color code which one of these people- which people are just more inherently skeptical than others. And I think what you would find is that the distribution of skeptical people in society is like unevenly distributed. And that actually creates certain interesting things about where in society may be vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, which is okay. Maybe I target places where there actually aren't this like large group of skeptics. But if you could imagine for a moment that you could take these skeptics and move them around and sort of like rewire the set of relationships in society, we could create sort of a typology that says if you are trying to influence any one person, you are never further than two links away from someone who's just like a huge tool, like an enormous skeptic about everything. And that might be actually a way to think about what societies are more robust against these attacks than others, which is like what are the kinds of configurations or relationships between people that are like inherently just a lot more robust against manipulation, essentially. So that's kind of like the first block. You had a second part of your question, which is like, okay, so who's responsible for this? And the paper also talks about that a little bit as well, because the problem was basically – the “problem” – in liberal democracies is that you can't necessarily be like, okay, you know what we're going to do, we're going to just have the government have this ministry of truth and it will evaluate every tweet, and it will tell you what's good or not. And so the problem with liberal democracy is that you want civil society to be mostly responsible for the defense against these things. You want journalists and non-profits and all this stuff to actually be the ones who fight this war. And so the interesting thing for me is like basically, I talk about it in the paper, is the challenge is where do you draw the red line? When does an influenced campaign become so pervasive and so dangerous that you want the government stepping in, but it feels like part of the policy development here is to like draw that line and have that be a clear set of lines which is being worked on here and there, but I think it's like a big part of the intellectual work in the space.
Eric Jorgenson: That is very interesting. So, you've got like there's the ministry of truth government solution, and then there's kind of the like platform sort of reaction solution. And then there's the fully decentralized sort of organic solution that is like people just being- filtering the truth for themselves.
Tim Hwang: Yeah. And I think it's kind of like, it's almost like, I mean, again, like everything is a COVID metaphor right now, but like using a vaccine metaphor, which is like, okay, what's the level of infection that actually helps like decentralized like society get stronger at dealing with this stuff? At what point is that virus so big that we then want the platforms to step in? But also, because it builds resilience for those platforms. And then what's the point at which it gets even bigger than that that we actually want the government to step in. But in each case, you're basically trying to say what's the maximum level of danger that we want because we think low level manipulation is probably like a good thing to build up the robustness society. And so, it's kind of like you're allowing a certain background level of this to occur essentially. Because you feel like it builds like a stronger polity effectively.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I actually think- I've been thinking about this a little bit, because I think it's actually- I think it would be a dangerous sort of monoculture for all of humanity to ever believe like one thing super deeply, like from an evolutionary perspective, if you just wanted to like some guarantee of species survival, you always want some sort of dissenting group to be like opting into their own trial with conviction of whatever sort of the minority behavior is, even though it's socially unpopular and that's the skeptics that you talk about. I think that's really interesting.
Tim Hwang: That's right. Yeah. And I think it is kind of like- and this is part of the challenge I think that a lot of tech people deal with, but I think it's just part of our discourse around free expression is like, okay, so we have a marketplace of ideas. Everybody just wants to believe that the marketplace of ideas is self-regulating over time, but like financial markets, they are not self-regulating. And I think we are now kind of like confronting the problem with, okay, so what's the appropriate level of governance? And then that's kind of an interesting challenge that we find ourselves in.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. So, a few branches off of this kind of really interesting like information warfare piece, we are rapidly running out of time, as I knew we would, because we have a long list of exciting things. But so, bite on any of these if you want, but I think there's sort of three really interesting sort of branches that are projects that you've done on this theme. So, the National Conspiracy Writing Month, which is like inspired by National Novel Writing Month and is like asking participants to complete a “Daunting, but straightforward challenge to develop a deep, viable and complete conspiracy theory during the 30 days of November.” The Hype Up Weekend, a weekend long project devoted to launching fake startups and attempting to obtain press coverage, which is like clearly a play on Startup Weekend. And then a conference which looks much more serious, a conference on the real-world practice of countering online influence operations called COGSEC. So, all of those seem like also on the fence of like perfectly wonderfully nerdy and fun and challenging and interesting sort of riffs on the information warfare piece.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, totally. Well, let me talk a little bit about NaCoWriMo and COGSEC because they sort of come out of the same place in some ways. And this goes back to the story that I was talking about, which is like a lot of people who are worried about the influence of bots on social media have `never tried to just create a bot and like breakthrough Twitter's account verification system.
Eric Jorgenson: Is it as easy as it was when you were doing this 10 years ago? Could you still have done that?
Tim Hwang: Yeah. They definitely better, but you can definitely get through still. And so, I'm a big believer that like a hands-on experience in this space is incredibly, incredibly valuable. And so, the notion of COGSEC was exactly that, which is like we have lots of conferences where people kind of like stroke their beards and they're like how do we improve media literacy over the next 30 years? And my response is, again, a little bit like the Eliezer response, basically like, look, I don't even know if we're going to have a democracy by that point. Like we’ve really got to be solving these problems faster than what you guys are talking about. And so COGSEC was basically let's get people who have been online, who have been targeted by these campaigns, who have fought these campaigns just giving seminars about like here's how you do it. And so, we had like people give these incredible presentations. One was like here's how I infiltrate white supremacist groups online, and here's how you can do it too and just like walking people through here's my OPSEC here's- and I think that's like, again, so valuable in that like these super practical skills is really where it happens. And so similarly, NaCoWriMo kind of came out of the same place, which is like you can think about conspiracy theories, not necessarily as their own little weird exotic thing, but essentially just like a really good story. Like it's basically just fan fiction about reality, like really great fan fiction that becomes all-consuming essentially. And so, we should be able to learn how to write conspiracy theories like we're learning how to write poetry or short story or something like that. It's just like a medium like anything else. And so again, the notion of NaCoWriMo was what would it mean for us to actually play with this as a medium? And, again, could it tell us something about how do we deal with the problems that we have today? And so again, both of them kind of are inspired by this idea that if we're going to deal with some of these problems, we have to be very practically minded and a lot of the skills we learn have to be like, okay, if we're worried about conspiracy theories, how do you build one? And just having like a learned experience of that I think is probably a lot more valuable than like a million white papers that various think tanks put out.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. We could do a whole other hour on this topic. I feel like I want to hear all about your actual practical thoughts about what's truly happening in the trenches of that war sometime. But we're running out of time, and I want to do a little bit about your book too, which I also had no idea you had written a book until- It's still amazing to me that all of this just kind of like exploded out from me being like I wonder who's behind this Trade Journal Cooperative. It's like I don't know, but he's the most interesting guy ever, and you just wrote a book called The Subprime Attention Crisis. And I don’t know, will you like throw out the premise for us? Because it is super, super interesting, and I've never heard this theory even like whispered before which makes it particularly kind of, I don't know, you are a true surprise contrarian. And is this or is this not a conspiracy theory, your submission for NaCoWriMo?
Tim Hwang: Yeah, surprise. No, I actually- so I totally believe this one. Depending on what you think, you might think about it as a conspiracy theory. So, the premise is really simple, basically that our everyday experience of the web is shaped by online advertising. And online advertising is done online in a very specific way, something that's known as programmatic advertising, which is basically where you have algorithms that are buying and selling attention at a huge scale. And this is how Google, Facebook, Twitter, like all of these kinds of big companies that have really represented the modern web are funded, like on the order of like 90% of their revenue.
Eric Jorgenson: Does that imply like targeted by demographics too?
Tim Hwang: Yeah, targeted by demographics ultimately. It's sort of the dream that like look online advertising is like better than all forms of advertising because you can use all this data to target an ad to you. And the book sort of makes the argument that like we have all become convinced that the system really works really well. Like Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, has like a mind control ray, like he can go into your brain and be like you're going to buy this thing and you do. But once you start looking at the data, it's clear that large segments of this economy are just like garbage, between ad fraud and the effectiveness of ads, like all of this kind of stuff. And so, the book kind of raises the question which is like what if the primary funding mechanism for the internet is just like a lot more fragile than it looks, and what does that actually sort of like mean in practice? And I'm sure some of your listeners will be like that's a ridiculous thesis, but I'll give you kind of one anecdote that hopefully will get you interested enough to read the book. A few years ago, Proctor and Gamble, one of the most sophisticated, biggest online advertisers in the world, they cut their online advertising by about $200 million. And then a little while later, they actually reported to the public, they were like we could identify no change to our bottom line or anything, no change at all resulting from this enormous change in our strategy. And I think, I don't know, even if you are convinced about the value of the ads, you have to be able to answer the question so what's going on there? And this book is kind of an attempt to answer that.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And yeah, I mean, I have listened to other podcasts that are like a whole hour dedicated to you talking about this book and kind of debating it, which is really interesting. And I encourage people to go listen to it if you want the full kind of exploration of that. I think it's really interesting that the truism around marketing of like half your budget is wasted, but you don't know which half is like as true, despite the modern tooling, as it has ever been. And in your contention here- so the metaphor you use is the subprime mortgage crisis to kind of talk about this, implying that there may be some sort of future collapse or rapid decompression.
Tim Hwang: Yeah. I mean, I do see it as ultimately, and this is kind of the argument that the book makes, is that like it's a bubble. And while I think companies like Google and Facebook may fare pretty well, like everybody else that's kind of reliant on this marketplace is like in a world of hurt. And so, yeah, it's kind of the argument that this is a lot less stable than it looks and that we should be concerned about that.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So, who is- I mean, that's a big ecosystem. So, who all is affected by it? So certainly, like Google and Facebook, the companies offering it, the main advertisers. I mean, how will it affect users, shareholders?
Tim Hwang: That's right. Publishers certainly. Like journalism is by and large kind of funded by this. I think users are super impacted. You think about all the services that are free largely because it's like advertising subsidized. I think the final one that you might find interesting actually given what we were talking about earlier is like a lot of these companies are also doing cutting edge research in various fields like AI, and like DeepMind is not a moneymaker for Google. Like that should be no surprise. And the only reason it can run at such loss is because of advertising. So, I think like what else is at stake? Like even stuff like basic research.
Eric Jorgenson: R&D in the tech sector is driven a lot by this.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, totally. And again, this is sort of like the comparison to the subprime crisis is that it's sort of like tentacles are like all over the economy in some ways. And so, I think even if you don't believe it's a bubble, I think it's worth learning about because the fluctuations in this ad industry have like all of these large ramifications.
Eric Jorgenson: That is super interesting. And I mean, I think a lot of people have been like, oh, we're in a bubble, are we in a bubble, valuations are high, and you kind of look around and you're like but what could the bubble be? And this is actually one of the first things that I've heard, first and certainly most novel sort of theories about show me the thing that's going to pop that's going to make everybody go like, wait a minute, the emperor has no clothes, and by the way, neither does anybody else. So that's really interesting. Okay. So, do you have thoughts about like how this connects to web3? Is that the transition between like web2 and 3, that like the free model driven by ads, we realize it's not, but we have this new technology that lets us kind of- Is micro-transactions like the solution that you see to this?
Tim Hwang: Right. I sort of have a weird take on this because I definitely don't end up being like- some people that you talk to, their conclusion is like …And like everything will be solved by micropayments on the blockchain. And I just am not ultimately a believer in that. I do think they like, and sort of I'll end on this kind of like quick take about web3, is like I do think that one of the most interesting things about web3 is actually not the technology itself in my mind, but instead its attempt to sort of change the norms around content. And so, I actually in some ways I'm kind of like, eh, blockchain, I could do without that. But essentially what you're doing is you're changing the psychological price of what people are willing to pay for certain things. Where it doesn't seem absurd for you to pay X number of dollars for like a JPEG on the internet. And I think that's potentially a really big deal because it does flip a lot of the economics of the web. And the question is whether or not those norms can scale over time. Because again, I think we've all been trained on an area that which the psychological price of everything is zero. And I think that's like if web3 is going to make a big difference, it's really more about pulling off that slight of hand, which is like not much is different, but you're just willing to pay for it now. And I do think that is a potential steppingstone to getting past this bubble, to say, okay, can we actually have an internet that's driven on not just ads but actually paid subscription ultimately.
Eric Jorgenson: Direct transactions, yeah. Super, super interesting. If you have time for one more question, I would love to know of any books that you're just like really excited to be talking about right now, or recommendations that you make super frequently. And if not, you can just hang up on me and the podcast can be over.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, happy to answer that question. So, the book I just finished reading is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything, which is like super, super fun and interesting. So Graeber wrote Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He's basically this kind of like lefty economist guy who passed away this year, last year. And so, this is like final book essentially. And it's a fascinating book. It's basically about the idea that like we have this idea when we talk about societies, which is that like we moved from these like egalitarian tribal bands and then we created civilization which is like incredibly productive and technologically advanced but is also kind of like hierarchical and has all of these problems. And he sort of makes the argument looking in prehistory, which is basically that like, actually, this is kind of like a total fairytale essentially. And he basically is trying to blow up the idea that essentially pre-modern societies had to be organized in a particular fashion and in doing so, trying to make the argument that we can also reorganize society today, ultimately. And it's a fun book if you're interested in learning about like ancient societies and stuff, it's a super cool read.
Eric Jorgenson: Awesome, I appreciate it. I know we're over time. Thank you so much for taking the time that you did and the bonus time that I stole from you. I appreciate it, man. I hope we get to do this again because I seriously could do this all day, and there's many more rabbit holes to go down. But thank you for the time.
Tim Hwang: Yeah, this was great. So yeah, keep me posted and I'm happy to step in another the time. Thanks Eric, we’ll talk soon.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you so much for listening. Tim Hwang is in a fierce SEO battle for his own name with a K pop star and the founder of Fiscal Note, so be sure you get the right Tim Hwang. Go to timhwang.org to see all of his projects or find him at his Twitter @TimHwang, that's Hwang spelled H W A N G. And I encourage you to subscribe to the Trade Journal Cooperative. We'll link in the show notes, put that in there, but give that a look. It's a super interesting way to get a broad view of industry. No kickback, no affiliation, just a fan. Love that thing and love Tim. And I hope you do too now. If you want to get my weekly essays, learn more about my course about leverage, or see the other random projects that I'm up to, go to ejorgenson.com. If you love this episode, you will probably also love my episode with Sean O'Connor. We talk a lot about the blockchain in that one, but these dudes have similar vibes. And I hope you're inspired by Tim's energy and curiosity, and you find it in yourself to create some wonderful Fortean project of your own, perhaps an institute, an academic journal, or a conference that tickles and titillates you, and that other people can't tell whether you're joking or serious. Take a few quiet moments for yourself, breathe deep, and be well.