All right, we're making good progress here. Uh, we've got a quick one here. This one comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, Cal, how did you never get tempted to join any social media platform? You know, I get asked that a lot. I don't completely remember is the honest answer. What I can piece together is 2004.

I was a senior at Dartmouth. Facebook at the time was marching from campus to campus, right? They had a strategy back then of opening it up to specific universities at a time. And it arrived at Dartmouth in 2004. I went back and confirmed this, uh, with various people who were there.

I do remember there was a lot of excitement around it. It might've even been called the Facebook back then. And my vague memory is the two things that turned me off about it was number one, back then your Facebook profile was all about favorite list, favorite books, favorite songs.

Like you had to basically carefully curate these lists of things that your favorites, and it didn't matter if they were favorites or not. This was all about Irving Goffman's presentation of self to others. You were trying to very carefully craft your public persona by selecting, you know, a quirky mix of a little bit indie, but then you throw in like a big genre book, the show that you're of the people, but then you put in a portrait of the artist as a young man, the show you're sophisticated.

It was, it just seemed very artificial. And I hate doing lists. Everyone who knows me knows this. If you say, what's your favorite book, what's your favorite movie? I can't do it. I literally can't do it. I don't know why. Uh, the ordering function of my brain is broken.

So I, I didn't, I really didn't like this idea of having to come up with these lists. It felt artificial and I'm really bad at it. It really does make me feel upset. So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to join. The second reason I vaguely remember, this is such a long time ago, but I'm a contemporary of Zuckerberg, we're both computer science students, both at Ivy, Ivy league universities.

I had had a.com startup that I closed down a couple of years before Facebook got started. And so there was probably some inter Ivy jealousy there. Like, okay, why is this fellow nerd? Who's very similar to me. You know, why is everyone excited about his company? And so there's probably a little bit of jealousy of like, I don't want to pump up this guy's ego.

And you know, that worked and that worked. And no one ever thought about him again. But no, so I don't know. Those are the two things I remember. And then once I had some separation from social media, I begin to observe. Wait a second. People have kind of a weird relationship to this.

So I had that Margaret Mead anthropological separation from what was going on around me. And I was like, this seems a little bit weird. The more I watched this from the outside, the more it seems like I'm looking at a weird tribal ritual here. And I got more and more turned off about it.

Like, I really don't know about this. And over time, my distaste for it kind of grew. The skepticism grew. And then, and again, I always say this. I got very public about my skepticism about it. And everyone said I was crazy until about 2016. And then suddenly everyone was on board.

So that was, it's, that was a weird experience in itself, but that's my vague memory, Ryan. I don't know. There might've been other factors involved. Uh, but that's it. That's what I remember.