Ep. 103: Antonio García Martínez on Crypto, Network States, and Building New Cities

**Niklas** (0:01)
Welcome to the Stranded Technologies Podcast, where we explore how to accelerate the future. Imagine a world of abundance, longer lives, clean energy, transparent markets, robots and AI doing the toiling labor. Why don't we have those things yet? Join us as we explore the biggest problem that holds back frontier tech over regulation. Now we have real solutions, start up cities, network stays and on-chains finance. Please find ways to support us in the show notes. Now enjoy this episode.
Hey, Antonio, can you hear us?

**Antonio García Martínez** (0:34)
I can.

**Niklas** (0:35)
Yes. There you are. Nice. Antonio Garcia Martinez, welcome to Infinita City.
Everyone come closer. How are you doing, Antonio?

**Antonio García Martínez** (0:49)
Good.
Sorry for being a little late. I just got back from New York and my AirPods were dead, so I was trying to charge them. But I guess we'll go with the MacBook Mike. I hope you guys can hear me okay.

**Niklas** (1:02)
Yeah.

**Antonio García Martínez** (1:04)
What is this Thunderdome thing you're in? What is this?

**Niklas** (1:06)
Yeah, the Thunderdome. There's not only a Thunderdome, we also do electric knife fights. So Mad Max, anyone?

**Antonio García Martínez** (1:13)
Dude, if you had told me about the electric knife fights, I would have shown up there in person. You should have let it go.

**Niklas** (1:19)
Well, I think you can show up in June, right?

**Antonio García Martínez** (1:21)
Yeah. Yes, ideally.

**Niklas** (1:24)
Yes.
Good. Hey everyone, let's come closer. Yeah. So Antonio, what's been your interaction with us and with Prosperous so far? What do you know about it so far?

**Antonio García Martínez** (1:36)
Well, I guess the first I heard about it was with Eric. It was two hereticons ago and I ran into Eric at a party and he gave me the whole spiel and I was very impressed. As you know, I've been a little close to Balaji, who's been the spiritual guru for the network state concept. So I've always found the idea of network states fascinating for a bunch of reasons.
So unfortunately, thus far though, that's been my only connection.

**Niklas** (2:01)
Yeah. So Balaji is also a big supporter of us here and has been here before in this stage, where you're also speaking right now.

**Antonio García Martínez** (2:11)
My current super boss, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, I understand is an investor. That's another.

**Niklas** (2:16)
He's also been here on the net stage having a fire set chat with us. That's the dome that we're in right now. So this is called the Infinita Dome. So this is our little temple, our symbolic center of gravity.
But good to have you, Antonio. We're going to have a wide-ranging conversation. So just to say a little bit about you, Raizu, you're like a gonzo journalist, at The Wizards, tech entrepreneur. Anything else you want to say, what people should know about you?

**Antonio García Martínez** (2:45)
I guess that's all true. I've been in the marketing and ad tech space for a long time, sold a company to Twitter, was early at Facebook, wrote a book about it called Chaos Monkeys that some of you may or may not have heard about. It was momentarily a thing.
Like Niklas said, I was a gonzo journalist. I've reported illegally from Cuba, from Gaza, from Ukraine during the war. And then I realized getting shot at or close to it is kind of fun, but I also have to make a living. So I went back and founded a crypto company three years ago called Spindle, raised some money from Dragonfly Multi Coin and Coinbase Ventures, the usual suspects. And then, February of this year, Coinbase acquired the company. So now I am a director at Base, which everyone in this crowd at least probably knows what it is, the leading Ethereum L2 that's part of Coinbase, but also it's own separate team. So we're kind of the ads team or like the marketing team inside. I know ads are a bad word. I can go into why it's not a bad word, but we're kind of the ads team inside Coinbase and Base right now. And I'm a little bit of a effort.

**Niklas** (3:44)
Yeah. So we heard from a bunch of founders today who are starting network states, network city or pop-up city like projects. So I wanted to know, because you've been in this industry for a while, how do you as an entrepreneur or how do you observe other entrepreneurs and peers like to choose or double down on kind of the ventures of startups that they're actually building?

**Antonio García Martínez** (4:06)
How do they pick a startup to actually work on?