Somebody was making money off the door, the DJ, the well vodka, the whole glittering machine. And somewhere in the middle of all that commerce, the most sacred thing in my life happened: a stranger became my person. An I-thou experience.

A few weeks ago, Sam Pressler published an essay called “What Money Can’t Buy” on his Substack, Connective Tissue. If you care about the loneliness crisis (and if you read this newsletter, you do), go read it. His report Nobody to Call, built on in-depth interviews with working-class men who have almost no one in their corner, is some of the most important and heartbreaking research being done right now. I sincerely admire his work.

I did have a small bone to pick with his essay argues that a “Connection Economy” is forming: a whole category of businesses built to monetize our loneliness. Drawing on the philosopher Michael Sandel, he warns that applying market logic to human connection will do two things. It will deepen the inequality between the social haves and have-nots, and it will corrupt connection itself, dragging something sacred down into the profane.

I agree with maybe 80 percent of it. This post is about the other 20 percent. Because I’m a founder of one of the companies Sam is writing about. I’ve spent two-plus years building MapChat Social, a social discovery app designed to get people off their phones and connect through games and ice breakers in person. When I read an essay that puts builders like me on the commodification side of the ledger, I feel the need to weigh in with something I’ve thought deeply about as a founder in this space.

The myth of free belonging

Sam opens with a quote from a newsletter called Belonging Capital and I’ll be honest, when I first read the line that connection being “unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized” as a market gap, I was taken a back a little bit too.

But then I went deeper. And here’s the thing the essay doesn’t mention. The woman behind that newsletter isn’t building an exclusive social clubs for the rich. Jaclyn Pascocello came up through hospitality, restaurants before startups, and the thing she co-founded, Fabrik, runs social spaces in New York and Chicago that are home to over a hundred communities and clubs: book clubs, fitness groups, sober-curious meetups, people hosting the gatherings they always wished existed. Flexible memberships, guest passes, a mission statement about ending the loneliness epidemic. You can quibble with the framing (I do, and I’ll get there), but the work itself is on the positive side of the ledger.

And there’s a bigger problem with the premise buried in that quote, the idea that institutions “used to deliver belonging for free.”

They never did.

Libraries are not free. They’re paid for with tax dollars. Parks are not free. Neither were the churches, the unions, the Elks lodges, or the bowling leagues that Robert Putnam eulogized in Bowling Alone. Every institution that ever delivered belonging ran on somebody’s money and somebody’s unpaid Saturday. The concept of dues is a part of membership whether league or country club.

Community requires money through dues or donations, but community creation requires multiple currencies. Money, yes. But also time. Baking cookies. Showing up to stack chairs. Teaching Sunday school. This is another type of payment to the community. It’s the unpaid work, but necessary currency.

That’s the thing worth defending. Not the fantasy that connection costs nothing, but the reality that there should be a way to pay in something other than cash and I think that’s what the essay is reflecting.

The real dividing line

So if “does money touch it?” is the wrong test, what’s the right one?

Here’s mine: extraction versus facilitation. Does the money flow toward getting people into rooms together, or does it flow toward standing between people and charging a toll?

As I do competitive research for fun, let me show you the toll booth. MeetUp, the OG of awkward meetup platforms, now locks the ability to see who’s actually attending an event behind a paid subscription. That’s not me being dramatic. It’s their own announcement: viewing full attendee lists, member profiles, even priority position on waitlists for free events are now premium features. For non-subscribers, other members’ names and photos are literally blurred. And it’s not even cheap, it’s $10/week!

That is commodification of connection: 100%. That’s the thing Cory Doctorow calls enshittification: build the network on people’s trust, lock them in, then squeeze. When the product is human connection, enshittification isn’t just annoying. It’s profane.

But now look at the other side of the line. Timeleft seats five strangers at a dinner table every Wednesday in 250+ cities. 222 algorithmically matches strangers for real-life experiences. My friend Kay Rodriguez runs Outerly, which matches small groups of strangers for curated walks around DC, Baltimore, and Philly. These companies charge money. And every dollar goes toward the logistics of getting human beings into the same physical space: the reservations, the routes, the matching, the hosting.

That’s not a toll booth/rent seeking. That’s a bridge. And bridges cost money to build.

The bridges take different shapes, too. My friend Christina is building YourCore, helping people express themselves through fashion, because for a lot of us the hard part isn’t getting through the door. It’s feeling like yourself once you’re inside. Different layer of the connection stack, same mission. What Sam’s essay risks filing under commodification, I file under people trying.

Even the “$200-an-hour friendship coach,” which Sam holds up as a symptom of the disease, deserves a closer look. I was recently on a panel alongside people doing this work and here’s what I learned: some of them are trained therapists. Many use sliding scales. Most of them are not rich. All of them are sitting across from adults whose social skills have atrophied so badly that they need a professional to help them relearn how to make a friend. We don’t call therapy the commodification of feelings. We call it care, delivered by professionals who also need to eat. If someone spends $200 to meaningfully un-stick a lonely person’s life, I struggle to see the corruption.

Money is a permission structure

Here’s the part that took me years of organizing events to understand, and it’s the part I most wish the essay had wrestled with. Sometimes the money is the connection mechanism.

Talk to anyone who organizes community events, and I mean anyone, and they will tell you the same thing: if it’s free, many times people don’t show up. Not because they’re cheap. Because they’re scared or not invested. Flaking on a free event costs nothing, and new social norms makes flaking so, so easy. Outerly charges fees when people cancel late or flake on their walks, not to gouge anyone, but because the fee is what gets a nervous person out the door. The money is a promise you make to your future self: I will actually go.

A big part of building MapChat Social is understanding permission structures, the idea that people need cover, rules, and a shared script before they’ll risk connecting with strangers. It’s why games work. And it turns out a modest ticket price is a permission structure too. It says: this is real, this is organized, other people are committed, your vulnerability is safe here. You are welcome because you participated in commerce.

The Pokémon Go model

So how do you build a connection business that stays on the right side of the line? I think about Pokémon Go constantly.

Pokémon Go is a masterclass in balancing free and paid. You can spend money on upgrades if you want. But you can also park your Pokémon in a gym and earn coins for free, and crucially, paying players can’t buy their way completely past the actual game. That being said, don’t get me started on their monetization of data…that’s another story.

On the other hand, Meetup charges you to see who’s going. I think knowing who’s going to the party should never, ever cost you money. That’s not a revenue stream. That’s a ransom. That being said on the customer side if you are matching people up with friends or potential lovers, that’s again a service or potential membership (which are built on reciprocity) by companies like Outerly. I think the distinction is important.

What we’re building at MapChat is that digital infrastructure for a decentralized world in the style of Pokemon Go (without the data brokers), but the connection need is real and our thesis is that facilitating it is serving a public need through business. Providing this infrastructure comes at a cost of any business just like a bar needs a bartender to serve drinks and companionship. However, to build in a decentralized fashion is harder than ever.

Why the deck is stacked (and it’s not just the market…it’s also civic)

Now, the fair question: if the good version is so obvious, why does the extractive version keep winning?

Two reasons, and only one of them is capitalism.

The first is capital itself. I can tell you what investors want to see: revenue, immediately, before writing a check. The entire funding apparatus is built to reward companies that monetize on day one, which is exactly the pressure that turns connection apps into slot machines. Building the patient version, the version that gets to sustainability without exploiting its users, requires enough (in my case) personal capital, opportunity cost, and time. Or on the other side, enshittification which I’m so tired of and would rather abandon my startup than succumbing to it.

The second reason gets less attention, and it’s the one I really want civic-minded readers to sit with: we have made it absurdly, needlessly hard to operate a third place especially in L.A. I can only imagine other parts of the country.

In California, if a bar wants to host karaoke, it needs a separate permit for events. For karaoke. In the city of L.A., dancing requires its own separate permitting universe. Meanwhile, cracking a beer at a picnic in most LA parks is an infraction, a thing that would baffle basically all of Europe, where a bottle of wine in the park is just called Tuesday evening. Additionally, there are virtually no regulations on commercial rent here in L.A.

We ‘ve effectively regulated the joy out of gathering, priced the loitering out of lingering, and then wrote think pieces asking why everyone is lonely. This is a policy failure and a market failure.

We’re spending all sorts of money on Flock Cameras and corporate subsidies. Imagine flipping that. Imagine “Social Hour, Sponsored by City Hall”: public money making third places radically cheap for one night a week, the way we throw incentives at stadium and corporate interests…and then don’t hold them to account when a beer and hotdog costs $40. We need civic investment in local businesses.

Machers, schmoozers, and the sacred profane

Putnam draws a distinction in Bowling Alone between two kinds of connectors: machers, the doers of civic life, the committee-joiners and institution-builders, and schmoozers, the people whose community lives in the everyday, the regulars, the hosts, the ones who know everybody at the bar.

Connective Tissue folks strike me as machers, and thank G_d for them (I hate committee meetings). But I want to put in a word for the Schmoozers, because the Schmoozer’s world has always run through commerce. The barstool. The barbershop chair. The booth at the diner. The dinner parties. The everyday sacred has always happened in places where money changed hands, and the money never once stopped it from being sacred. Sandel worries about the profane contaminating the sacred. My experience is that it flows the other way. The profane becomes sacred all the time. It happened to me at a bar called the Bullet which is not somewhere you’d expect to find love. IYKYK.

Based on my experience over the past few years, I’ve noticed civic and academic world’s blanket distrust of “business” to make positive change in the world. Granted the skepticism looking at the current slate of technology is somewhat warranted tbh. But nobody distrusts the bar owner who sponsors the local little league. The line was never business versus community. The line is extraction versus service, and it runs straight through both sectors.

Room for everyone to come out and play

The essay ends with a choice between a generational project of membership and a craze of consumption, and asks us to choose the former. I’m in. Signed up. LFG!

I just want us to be honest about what membership costs. Connection isn’t free because connection is investment: of money, of time, of the terrifying vulnerability of showing up somewhere alone. The institutions we mourn never made it free. They made it affordable and facilitated, and that’s the standard I want us to build back, in our budgets and our zoning codes and yes, in our startups/businesses. Public money for parks and libraries and city-sponsored get-togethers. Private builders held to the Pokémon Go rule. Room for all levels of membership, so that everyone can play. (Don’t get me started on their location tracking though…)

Because here’s how I’ll know MapChat worked. Not a revenue chart. It’s the guy sitting alone at the end of the bar, the one from No One to Call’s research, the one with nobody to call, looking down at his phone and seeing that the trivia team two tables over needs a fourth. It’s him being invited to join. It’s the profane turning sacred one connection at a time, the way it did for me.

Money can’t buy that. But somebody has to build the room where it happens, keep the lights on, and pay the bartender.

-Benji

I think about that line a lot, because somewhere along the way we all became Truman. The difference is that Truman never agreed to any of it. We did. One “Allow” tap at a time…because we never read the privacy policy

We’ve been here before

Back in the early aughts, when people still cared about who knew what about them, Facebook won by positioning itself as the careful one. It rose partly on a promise to be a good custodian of our data at a time when the rest of the social web was coming of age. (although MySpace is making a comeback)

Then it took two decades torching that promise so thoroughly that the FTC formally charged it with deceiving users about privacy all the way back in 2011. And it didn’t stop there. Amnesty International concluded that Meta’s engagement-hungry algorithms substantially contributed to the atrocities committed against the Rohingya people. Ask them how good a custodian Meta turned out to be.

Today, that same company sells camera glasses “AI” that “pervert glasses” is now a phrase appearing in Fortune headlines. Walk past someone wearing them and you might be recorded, analyzed, and fed into a training pipeline without ever touching a Meta product in your life.

You are the product now whether you signed up or not. That is a violation of liberty through the act of business. If corporations are people, like Citizens United states, they should be held to the same account.

The balance we need

Here’s the thing. I’m not a privacy absolutist, because absolute privacy is impossible if you want to be connected to world digitally (and I do). Seal yourself off from every digital system and communication becomes functionally impossible. You simply cannot connect. What we need is the middle: a world where data and presence work for the benefit of the person generating them, and where we reward the companies that take stewardship seriously instead of the ones that quietly resell us. I think back to the early days of Facebook ads that were personalized, I didn’t hate this and I get that company needs to make money, but let’s not cause genocide…is that too big of an ask?!

We are currently living in the opposite world. Your weather app (yes, really, your weather app) can feed your location into a broker ecosystem that has sold access to ICE, CBP, the IRS, the FBI, and the DEA. The government has figured out that what it can’t legally seize, it can simply purchase. Every phone, even an old one, can be triangulated; the modern ones can be profiled down to Bluetooth signals. I don’t think the founding fathers conceived of a world where commerce itself would build a tracking dragnet around every citizen, and I’m quite sure they wouldn’t have liked it. Our legislation has not caught up. This is where the line between public and private life gets blurred and then wiped out.

When the Truman Cameras became personal

Which brings me to my neighborhood. I live in a quiet corner of Los Angeles called Studio City. Back in January, some of those neighbors (No HOA by the way) started raising money for Flock cameras, the license plate readers, on the argument that they would make us all safer. Flock’s promotional materials made the rounds. There had been a couple of break-ins. It sounded on the surface like a good idea, but there are more snakes here than Taylor Swift’s Twitter feed post Kim K’s feud.

So, I wrote a letter explaining why it wasn’t, hand-delivered it around the neighborhood, and posted it here. The short version: we were being asked to contribute financially to feed a private surveillance database, enrich its shareholders, and hand a searchable record of everyone’s comings and goings to thousands of agencies, in exchange for protection from a crime wave that does not exist. This was sold as “safety.”

Let’s note: California property crime is at its lowest rate since 1985. Across major cities, residential burglaries have fallen by nearly half since 2019. We were being sold an emergency that had anecdotal evidence, but ignored trends.

Thankfully, after some conversation, the momentum died down. (I was/am genuinely prepared to litigate over this one.) I have the Cease and Desist and Demand Letters sitting in my drafts just in case. :-P

I keep coming back to that Benjamin Franklin quote about trading liberty for safety, the one everyone fights over the true meaning of. I’ll grant that the historical context is messier than the bumper sticker. But when a surveillance company feels compelled to publish its own essay reinterpreting Franklin, you know exactly which side is LARPing.

I know this world from personal experience

Let me tell you why I take this personally. I spent a large chunk of my career in marketing technology (MarTech). I led the building of a customer data platform (CDP) at a Fortune 500 company. I’ve worked with data management platforms, identity resolution, the whole stack. I have literally been the person deciding which data sources get tied together into a single profile of a human being. At one company I could see complete histories, down to background checks, and we had to make judgment calls like “no, we probably shouldn’t merge that into the unified customer profile.” Decisions like that get made inside companies every single day (see McDonalds), quietly, by people you will never meet. I was one of those people. So, when I tell you what becomes possible once your data is copied into enough places, I am not speculating. And once data is copied, it can be copied again, forever, by anyone who holds it. That alone should give us pause, given how we’ve watched these folks use it.

I’ve also been on the other side of the ledger. When GDPR deletion requests (and later CCPA) came in at my international employer, I personally chased records through every system we had and proved the deletion, because being a good tenant of other people’s data is the whole job. Do I believe most American data brokers will do that work responsibly? I do not. But California just handed us a lever anyway. Under the Delete Act, you can now file a single request through the state’s new DROP platform telling every registered data broker, all 500 plus of them, to delete you. And as of August 1, they are legally on the clock to process it, at $200 per request per day if they sit on it. Go register. It takes minutes, and the legal fallout for the laggards is going to be a joy to watch.

What Flock actually is

Now, about those cameras, because I think most people genuinely don’t understand what they are. Flock is not a security camera on your neighbor’s porch. It’s one networked dragnet: roughly 120,000 cameras, with contracts covering 40 percent of American police departments, running more than 20 billion vehicle scans a month, searchable (FlockNOVA) across city and state lines at any time, by attributes as loose as a bumper sticker.

And don’t let anyone tell you they’re “just license plate readers.” Flock’s own product page advertises video cameras, drones, and audio detection, and the company only backed off a plan to have its street microphones flag “human distress” after public pressure. In Texas, doing what Flock does legally requires a private investigator license, which Flock operated without for five years until the state issued a cease and desist. Sit with that irony. A private investigator investigates a suspect. Flock investigates everybody, permanently, in advance. That’s how everyone becomes a suspect while no one has done anything. And Flock isn’t alone; Axon and others sell the same dragnet under different logos. In Florida, a deputy used a rival product called Guardian to put a young actress on a watchlist, then nearly caused a head-on collision speeding to pull her over.

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What does this look like in practice? In Wisconsin, sheriff’s deputies used Flock to establish that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where cannabis is legal, then used that travel pattern as pretext to intercept and search his car when he came home. Not a warrant. A vibe, backed by a database. That is pre-crime. In Texas, a deputy searched 83,000 cameras across the country hunting for a woman over a self-administered abortion. CNN counted more than two dozen officers who resigned or were arrested for using Flock to stalk exes and romantic interests. Senator Wyden’s office found that federal agencies, including ICE’s investigative arm, had access, and that Flock’s protective filters are trivially easy to circumvent. Oh, and these cameras now sit in the parking lots of Lowe’s and Home Depot, quietly folding your lumber run into the same searchable network. (By the way, they use facial recognition in stores too, for YOUR safety /s).

The courts just moved

Here’s some genuinely good news. In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Chatrie v. United States that when police vacuumed up a man’s Google location history through a geofence, that was a search under the Fourth Amendment, because you keep a reasonable expectation of privacy in your movements even when a company holds the data. It’s the Court’s first major digital surveillance ruling since Carpenter in 2018, and it puts a real dent in the doctrine this entire industry is built on, the one that says whatever you “shared” with a third party is fair game.

Flock’s response? Within days, a blog post arguing the ruling doesn’t apply to them, leaning on the same public-roads logic they’ve long borrowed from United States v. Knotts, a 1983 case about a single radio beeper tracking one suspect on one trip. I heard someone on the news say it’s no different from a person snapping a photo of a license plate. Respectfully: we are not talking about gumshoes doing police work anymore, where you request specific information about a specific suspect with a thing called a warrant. We are talking about a permanent, retroactive, nationwide time machine of everyone’s movements, searchable at will. Knotts was an analog answer to an analog question. The question in front of us now is whether a private company can build what no warrant would ever authorize, then rent it to the state. I say no. I say this is a Fourth Amendment violation with a subscription model, and the courts are finally catching up.

It’s not just the government

Even if the state never looked at you sideways, the commercial side should scare you too, because the same tracking decides what you pay. The FTC’s surveillance pricing study found firms using your precise location, your browsing history, even your mouse movements to set individualized prices. If a system can watch you drive from Kroger (Ralph’s here) to Costco comparing prices, it can price you accordingly, and you’ll never know. That’s not a market. That’s an algorithm you never chose deciding what your dollar is worth.

Meanwhile, as the cameras multiplied at street level, federal prosecutions of white collar crime fell to the lowest levels since the government started counting, less than half the 1990s rate, with no evidence that the underlying crime declined. Funny how the cameras only ever point down.

San Francisco is the Future, in a ironic way

Two gay bars in San Francisco’s Castro, Badlands and Toad Hall, installed PatronScan face-scanning kiosks at their doors, sold as a safety measure. As a gay man, I struggle to express how badly this corrupts the purity of community that a gay bar is. These are supposed to be the safe rooms. “It’s really not great to have lists of gay people,” one patron told reporters, and they’re right. Not everyone loves gay people. Imagine that database existing in the Stonewall era, when the entire point of those doors was that nobody wrote down who walked through them. If a bar in my neighborhood tried this, I would be outside with a sign. And I’m VERY pro bar. MapChat Social is starting with bars as our first thirdspace category!

Here’s the hopeful part: the community was outside with signs. Patrons organized, artists joined a boycott, and just days ago both bars paused the face scanners. Pressure works.

San Francisco is also the cautionary tale in miniature. In 2019 it became the first American city to ban government facial recognition. Five years later, voters passed Prop E and swung toward police cameras and drones with barely any oversight, and today the drones fly hundreds of missions a month. Practically overnight, the anti-surveillance city became the surveillance city. Is crime down there? Yes. It’s also down almost everywhere, including places without the dragnet, and the researchers themselves say untangling the cause is genuinely hard. What I can tell you is that my co-working social club up there, Ground Floor, just posted about its mailbox getting broken into. Again. All that surveillance, and the mail still isn’t safe.

Because surveillance doesn’t repair the thing that’s actually broken, which is the social fabric itself. Since COVID, people go out less, connect less, talk to their neighbors less. You can drive crime statistics down by emptying the sidewalks, but that’s not safety, that’s absence. And the panopticon accelerates the emptying: between being tracked and being priced, we’re quietly getting opted out of public life. Do I want to go out as much knowing every trip is logged? I haven’t done anything wrong, and the world still feels smaller. That feeling of constriction is the exact opposite of what freedom is. Medicine figured this out decades ago and wrote it into law with HIPAA: some information is so sensitive that protecting it is the precondition for people showing up at all. Your movements throughout the world deserve the same respect.

Why this is a MapChat essay

Now for the irony you’ve been waiting for: I’m building a location-based app. MapChat Social exists to help you find places to go and people to meet through games. We’re tiny and early (a few weeks post-launch, roughly 250 users, and I love every one of you). And today my cofounder and I had exactly the conversation this essay is about. We wanted to understand how people actually use the app, which means analytics, which means updating our privacy policy. So I asked the only question that matters: does the analytics provider share data with third parties? Answer: no. We use Amplitude, which acts strictly as a service provider and does not sell or share customer data. Read privacy policies, friends! I’m dead serious. It’s the new reading the label.

Location on MapChat is opt-in, and it will stay that way, because sharing where you are should be a trade that benefits you, not a toll you pay for existing. Compare that to Pokémon Go nagging me not to turn off Adventure Sync so my virtual Pokemon (named MapChat…and he’s a Dratini soon to evolve) can earn candy. Those cheerful little location scans from players ended up as a 30 billion image map that is now training delivery robots. The candy was the bait. The map was the product. (The only app I still let track me everywhere is QuickBooks, for logging business mileage, and honestly, after writing this essay, that one’s on notice too.)

The uncomfortable truth about the AI era is that this gets worse before it gets better. AI is a data-starved machine, and the real world is the last untapped dataset. That’s why the glasses, the wearables, the always-listening apps: Meta’s smart-glasses footage, including profoundly intimate moments, has already ended up in front of human AI contractors. A world where no conversation is private isn’t a bug of that business model. It’s the roadmap. Which means the companies we choose to reward right now matter enormously.

To be clear too, I don’t hate AI. I used AI in the editing of this essay.

Green Bamboo Shoots in a Sea of Flocks

So here’s where I land, and I promise it’s hopeful. My neighbors chose not to buy the cameras. Santa Cruz canceled its Flock contract entirely. The Castro boycott worked in a matter of weeks. The Supreme Court just re-armed the Fourth Amendment for the digital age. California built a delete button (we’ll see if it works). The FTC banned Venntel and Gravy Analytics from selling our sensitive location data. None of that came from these companies growing a conscience. All of it came from people deciding collectively that just because something can be built doesn’t mean it has a right to exist. Flock is a private company. It does not have a constitutional right to exist. We can pressure it, refuse it, out-legislate it, and yes, take the cameras down through the gloriously boring machinery of city councils and ballots and flyers hand-delivered by neighbors who care like me.

And then we do the harder thing, which is rebuild the reason we didn’t used to need any of this: trust, community, and enough economic fairness that your neighbor isn’t a stranger and a stranger isn’t a threat. That is the actual crime prevention plan. It is also, not coincidentally, the entire reason MapChat exists. We are committed to helping you find your places, your people, and maybe even someone to love, without exploiting you or selling one byte of your life to a third party, because it’s clear how few companies can be trusted with that right now. In a world where the default business model is a camera pointed at your front door, the radical act is a map that works for you.

The Fourth Amendment still exists. So does the sidewalk. Let’s go use both.

In case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

-Benji

P.S. I did finally turn off Adventure Sync. My Pokémon can earn their candy the old-fashioned way, like the rest of us: by going outside.

The assignment would come in as three weeks of work. Data entry, some spreadsheet nightmare nobody in the building wanted to touch. And I would get in there, find the pattern, write a little Visual Basic macro (this is genuinely how I got my start in programming, out of pure boredom), and finish the whole thing in a week.

And then they would let me go. Every time. Thanks, we no longer need you.

Sit with how stupid that is for a second. A company found a person who could compress three weeks into one, and its response was to remove that person from the building. Not “what else you got.” Not “come show the accounting team how you did that.” Just: congratulations, you have made yourself unnecessary, please return your badge.

I was a kid. Twenty-something. (Which at 41 now reads as basically a fetus.) And I remember doing the math and landing on the only rational conclusion available to me: go slower.

That is the exact lesson corporate America is teaching its entire workforce right now, at scale, with AI. And then it is acting shocked when people learn it.

The 29%

You have probably seen the headlines about how almost every corporate AI initiative is failing. The number that gets thrown around comes out of MIT’s NANDA study, which found that roughly 95% of enterprise AI pilots delivered no measurable return despite tens of billions in spend.

The postmortems all say the same things. Bad data. Poor integration. Fuzzy definitions of success. Executive sponsorship that evaporated by Q3. All of that is real and none of it is the interesting part.

Here is the interesting part. A survey of 2,400 knowledge workers by Writer and Workplace Intelligence found that 29% of employees admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy. Among Gen Z, it is 44%.

And this is not people being grumpy in Slack. The reported forms of sabotage include deliberately producing bad output to make the tool look ineffective, refusing to touch mandated platforms, running unapproved tools on the side, and tampering with the metrics that would prove the thing works.

Nobody is putting that variable in the model. Every consultant deck on AI failure treats the workforce as a change-management problem, a training gap, a communications challenge. Almost none of them will say the quiet part: a meaningful chunk of your people do not want this to succeed, and they have truly excellent (and rationale) reasons.

Why wouldn’t they?

Look at what these companies actually said out loud.

In the same survey, 60% of executives said they plan to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI. Meanwhile only 16% of workers believe their employer is adopting AI for real business value rather than hype and competitive panic. And Apollo’s data found that at companies aggressively integrating AI, pay increases have actually slipped about 6.7% since 2023.

So let me summarize the offer on the table. We are giving you a tool. Using it well is now a loyalty test. Refusing it gets you cut. Mastering it gets you slightly less of a raise than you used to get. Also, we are on record saying this tool means we need fewer of you.

Now please train it thoroughly on everything you know.

That is not a change management problem. That is a deal nobody sane would take.

And here is the tell that proves it is about trust and not about technology: the same people slow-walking the corporate rollout are using AI constantly on their own time (at least people in my network). On the other side, you have 13% admitted to faking AI use, pretending to use the company tool while quietly doing the task by hand. Only 6% think their manager has any accurate idea how much AI their team actually uses. I know a dozen people personally who are running circles around their job with AI and would never tell their boss.

They are not anti-AI. They are anti-you.

The moment I had to make the call

I have been on the other side of this, which is the only reason I feel like I get to write about it.

MapChat runs on a stupid amount of information about bars and restaurants (collect about 300 variables). Specials, events, happy hour windows, what the vibe actually is on a Tuesday…categories of nightlife, cuisine, and the list goes on and on. When I started, AI was not good enough to get that, so the process was manual and miserable. Go to each bar’s Instagram (which is the real primary source, not their website), read the website anyway, dig through Yelp, build the digital footprint by hand, categorize it.

I do not regret one hour of that. Doing it myself is how I learned the industry. That plus interviews with owners and bartenders is where I got my actual understanding of what these businesses are up against. It gave me taste.

But it was brutal, tedious work, so I contracted someone to help. Part of the job was picking up the phone and confirming reality. Hey, is karaoke still Tuesdays? Is comedy still Thursdays? Are beers still five bucks from five to seven? Because those things change constantly, especially at newer venues.

Then Cowork showed up. I tested it over a weekend and it did the whole cataloging job, pretty successfully, and it has only gotten better since. I took everything I had learned, all that hard-won taste about how bars and events and specials actually work, and wrote it into a playbook. Now the AI follows that playbook to onboard entire new cities. I have even wired it into public sources like state liquor licensing boards.

Which left me standing in front of a very specific choice: do I keep paying a guy whose job I just automated? (and I am deeply bootstrapped)

I felt that one in my stomach, because I have been that guy. I am the temp who worked himself out of an assignment.

So I moved him. He had prior concierge experience, so he went to the part that is genuinely hard and genuinely human: calling these places, talking to owners, explaining who we are and why they should care. He also turned out to have deep gaming experience, which is now baked into how MapChat’s games work.

His worth was never the task. It was the insight, the judgment, the ingenuity, the ability to get a skeptical bar owner on the phone to actually listen. The tasks were just the container it came in.

Taste is the whole thing

Note the order of operations in that story, because it matters. The playbook only exists because I did the tedious version first. The AI is executing my taste. It did not generate it.

This is the part the “just train it on the existing work” crowd gets wrong. It is the Excel problem again. Visual Basic could have automated a huge share of accounting work decades ago, and in a lot of ways it did. But the value of an accountant was never the arithmetic. It was a human being looking at the output and saying, hmm, that number does not look right. Due diligence. Somebody’s gut, built over years, catching the thing the system was confident about.

AI can get maybe halfway to real creativity, which I define as taking two things that have no business being next to each other and merging them. And even at that halfway point, it feels hollow. You can tell. It lacks the lived-experience underneath. I look at competitors apps in my sector and wonder sometimes if they’ve ever been out to a bar or party…

Two companies, two roads

IKEA rolled out a customer service bot named Billie in 2021. Within a couple years it was handling about 47% of inquiries, and that figure is now 74%. Textbook setup for a layoff announcement.

Instead, they looked at what Billie couldn’t resolve and found a pattern: people wanted help with design. So they retrained roughly 8,500 call center workers into remote interior design advisors. That channel now runs about €1.3 billion a year, and they are targeting 10% of total revenue from it by 2028.

They did not find savings. They found a business. The unresolved tickets were a map.

Then there is Block. In February, Jack Dorsey cut more than 4,000 people, about 40% of the company, in a single day, and pinned it on AI tooling. He was explicit that the company was not in trouble. Gross profit was growing. The stock went up 22%. He told other CEOs they were late.

One of those companies asked what its people could do that the machine cannot. The other asked what the machine could do instead of its people. Both were profitable when they decided. Only one of them had to devastate four thousand households to get there.

And IKEA is the exception. That is the part that keeps me up. We have a genuine leadership vacuum in American business right now, where the ethical move and the profitable move are sitting in the same spot and almost nobody is picking it up.

The loneliest billion dollars ever made

You keep hearing Sam Altman talk about the coming one-person billion-dollar company. His tech CEO group chat apparently has a betting pool on the year it happens.

And look, as a technical achievement, sure. Wild. But I have to be honest about my reaction, which is that it sounds miserable.

I have way more fun doing this with other people. The work is better and the journey turns into something you can actually share. I am building an app whose entire purpose is community and finding your people and joy, so a version of me that builds it in total isolation is a walking contradiction. I would rather make significantly less money personally and have people to make it with and share in the joy of creation. That is not martyrdom, it is just my honest preference.

And I think it compounds. When you invest in people, and I mean actually invest, the AI gets more powerful, not less, because you have humans feeding it judgment it could never generate on its own. IKEA did not succeed despite keeping those 8,500 people. It succeeded because it kept them.

One last thing, aimed at the people doing the cutting

You are automating and laying off your future customers.

I do not know how else to say it. The person you cut this quarter is the person who was going to buy the thing next quarter. There is no version of this economy where everybody strips out labor costs simultaneously and consumer demand politely stays where it was.

I say all this as a bootstrapping founder who counts literal cents. I use AI for an enormous amount of what I build. What I do not use it for is taste, and what I will not use it for is deciding a person is disposable.

As MapChat Social grows this year, I want to hire people full time rather than contract them, in a high-trust setup where the pitch is let’s figure out these tools together and both get better. I think that is going to be a hiring advantage, and honestly a competitive one, because the alternative offer on the market right now is come work here, we will monitor everything you do, and we will use what we learn to remove you. Who wants that job? I used to desperately want to work at Facebook. That is thoroughly over.

To anyone currently slow-walking their company’s AI rollout: I understand exactly why, and I would gently point out that the same surveys show resisters are the ones getting cut first. Do not set yourself on fire to prove a point to people who are not watching. Learn the tools. Get good. Then take that skill somewhere that deserves it, and let your leaving be the data point.

Above all: humans are more than the tasks they perform. Large language models are, at bottom, an accumulation of collective human work. The least we could do is not use that accumulation as a reason to discard the people who made it.

Companies: please grow a pair of ethics.

-Benji

P.S. Yes, I even used AI for this article to structure and clean it up…but all of the thoughts, stories, and experiences are mine. AI is tool. It can’t do real thinking for you.

And every single time, without fail, it started the same way. A circle of kids who didn’t know each other, doing that thing where you look at your shoes and hope someone else talks first.

Then the counselors would start a game or two.

Duck Duck Gray Duck. (Yes, Gray Duck. I didn’t learn until college that the rest of the country calls it Duck Duck Goose. I’m still not over it. It will always be Gray Duck.) Some strategic games like Mafia. And of course, capture the flag (the ultimate cooperative game).

And something would happen. Not immediately, but faster than it had any right to. Within a day, sometimes within an hour, these strangers became your people, your friends. The kid you were too shy to talk to at breakfast is now your capture-the-flag co-strategist and you’re trying to figure out which counselors are dating. By the end of a week, two weeks tops, you had friendships that felt deeper than ones you’d spent months building back home.

That always stuck with me. Not just as a nice memory, but as a question: why? What was it about those games that made connection happen so fast?

The answer, I think, is that games do something conversations can’t. They give you a reason to cooperate with someone before you have a reason to like them. They create competition that’s low-stakes enough to be fun and high-stakes enough to actually care. They manufacture shared experience (inside jokes, small victories, that moment where you lock eyes with a stranger and just know you’re on the same page) in compressed time.

Games give people permission structure. Permission to talk to someone you don’t know. Permission to be silly. If everyone is acting like a silly puppet, then it must be ok. Permission to give a shit about something that doesn’t matter, which turns out to be the fastest way to start caring about the people around you.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. And now I’m building parts in the app form.

Welcome to Chat Behind the Map

Before I get into the crawl, I want to properly introduce this series, because it’s going to be a regular thing.

Every Tuesday, I’m publishing Chat Behind the Map, my build-in-public series. A behind-the-scenes look at what I’m building, why I’m building it, and how it’s actually going. The traction strategies. The product decisions. The implementation logic. The stuff that founders usually don’t talk about until they’ve already succeeded and can retroactively make it all sound like a plan.

I don’t have that luxury. I’m building in public, which means you’re getting it in real time. The wins, the dead ends, the moments where I’m staring at a whiteboard at 1am wondering if any of this is going to work. No revisionist history, no polished founder narrative. Just the actual process, as it happens.

So what am I building?

MapChat is a community-first social app designed around local connection. The short version: it’s a map-based platform where you discover what’s happening around you, not through an algorithm, but through the people and places in your actual neighborhood. Think of it as the social layer your city is missing.

And why?

Because we’re in a loneliness epidemic and nobody with the power to fix it seems interested in fixing it. The Surgeon General called it a public health crisis. The research backs it up: social isolation carries health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And yet every social app on your phone is engineered to keep you on your phone. Scrolling, not connecting. Consuming, not participating. The business model is your attention, not your wellbeing.

I spent a long time researching this (over a year of researching and travelling...my time in the proverbial desert) before I built anything. The data on the connection crisis. The extraction economics baked into every major social platform, the way they monetize loneliness while pretending to solve it. The work of people like Ray Oldenburg, Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), and the researchers actually studying what happens to communities when the third places disappear and the screens fill the void. As well as the social conditions that are required to build these third places.

MapChat is my answer to that research. Not the whole answer (I’m one person with a scrappy budget and a lot of conviction) but an answer. A social product that’s designed to get you off the app and into the world. Into bars, parks, coffee shops, neighborhood spots. Into conversations with people who live three blocks away that you’ve never met.

What to expect from this series:

Every (let’s be honest though, I’ll miss some) Tuesday, I’ll pull back the curtain on a different piece of the process. Some weeks it’ll be product: how I’m designing features, what I’m testing, what I’ve killed. Some weeks it’ll be traction: how I’m trying to get my first 100 users without a sizable marketing budget. Some weeks it’ll be philosophy: the ethical questions I’m wrestling with about what it means to build a social product that doesn’t extract from the people using it.

And some weeks, like this one, it’ll be all three at once.

Let’s get into it.

* * *

The Strategy: Throw a Party, Call It a Product

Here’s the thing about launching a social app: you can’t just ship it and hope people show up. Social products are only as good as the people using them, which means your launch has a cold start problem. You need a critical mass of real humans, in the same place, actually engaging with each other, or the whole thing feels like a ghost town.

So I’m doing something that might sound stupid or might sound genius, and honestly it’s probably both: I’m throwing a bar crawl.

Not a bar crawl sponsored by MapChat. Not a bar crawl with MapChat branding on some napkins. A bar crawl that is the product. The crawl itself is the first real experience of what MapChat does. It just happens to take place across a handful of bars in Ktown instead of inside an app store.

The event is free. Attendees pay for their own drinks (going to try to get specials and deals...and will have prizes). But I’m providing the social infrastructure, point system, and also giving folks a chance to kick the tires on the Beta version of MapChat.

* * *

The Game Design (Without Giving Away All My Secrets)

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where I have to be a little cagey, because some of the people reading this are going to be at this crawl, and I don’t want to spoil the experience.

What I will tell you is this: the crawl is gamified. Not in the “check in on Foursquare” way that felt novel in 2011 and feels exhausting now. Gamified in the sense that the structure of the evening is designed, intentionally, obsessively, to make you meet people.

There are points. There are teams. There are challenges, some you do alone, some you do with strangers. There’s a leaderboard. There are prizes (modest ones, my budget is, let’s say, bootstrapped).

But the points aren’t the point. The game mechanics exist to do one thing: lower the activation energy of talking to someone you don’t know. That’s it. That’s the whole product thesis, compressed into one night.

Think about how a board game works at a party. Nobody walks into a room full of strangers and says “tell me about yourself.” That’s terrifying. But sit those same strangers around a game of Codenames and suddenly everyone’s arguing, laughing, making inside jokes within fifteen minutes. The game is the excuse. The connection is the outcome.

That’s what I’m building. Not just for one night, that’s what MapChat is. But the crawl is the proof of concept. The live beta. The first time this thing exists outside my head and Bubble concepts. The first time I ask for people to sign up.

* * *

Why a Bar Crawl (And Not, Like, a Normal Launch)

A few reasons, and I’ll be honest about all of them:

One: I need my first 100 users (and let’s be frank…most of them will probably be friends), and I need them to experience the product, not just download it. A bar crawl is a contained, time-bound, high-energy environment where I can actually observe how people interact with the mechanics. It’s a user research session disguised as a good time, actually probably more a good time with a little user research...the app is supposed to be fun.

Two: The economics are anti-extractive by design. This isn’t a $50 ticketed event where I profit off the door. It’s free. People buy their own drinks. The bars benefit from the foot traffic. I benefit from the data and the signups. Everyone’s incentives are aligned. Nobody’s getting extracted from.

Three: It could become something bigger. I’m not going to get too far ahead of myself here, but the format, gamified social events layered over real-world venues, is not just a launch strategy. It’s a potential product line. It’s a potential revenue stream. It’s a potential reason for bars and restaurants to want to be on MapChat. But first, I need to prove it works at the smallest possible scale. One crawl. One neighborhood. One Friday night.

* * *

The Vulnerability Part

I’ll be real with you for a second: this is terrifying.

Not in a “what if nobody comes” way, although yeah, that too. Terrifying in a I’ve-never-done-this-before way. Then I remember I used to organize corporate scavenger hunts for my departments and everyone went in suspicious but ended up having the best time.

I’ve been staring at game mechanics and routing logic and point thresholds for weeks. I’ve been debating whether 45 minutes per bar is enough time. I’ve been thinking about what happens if the hyper-competitive 10% ruin it for the 90% who are just there to hang out. I’ve been mapping out how to route people so they meet the maximum number of new faces possible.

And at the end of all that planning, it still comes down to: will people show up? Will they play? Will they leave feeling like they connected with someone?

I don’t know. I’ve had plenty of successful, complex events...nothing quite like this though. So I’m about to find out.

* * *

Come Find Out With Us

If you’re in the LA area and any of this sounds like your kind of weird (or enjoy trainwrecks), I’d love to have you there. The crawl is happening soon in Ktown. Details and RSVP below. It’ll be on April 17^th, starting at 7 (this time may be modified slightly).

RSVP on Partiful →

It’s free. It’s going to be fun. And you’ll be one of the first people to experience what MapChat actually feels like, not as an app, but as a night out.

-Benji

P.S. Originally, I was going to do the Valley, but after cataloging a few places in Ktown and a friend of mine talking about wanting to do a crawl...this seemed like the natural next step.

If you’ve ever been to Disneyland’s Tomorrowland or Epcot at Disney World, these are artifacts of the world’s fairs of the past. One of my favorites used to be Figment’s Journey Into Imagination (which they destroyed with the update…must be the Bob Iger era). Full of people who are dreaming big…back through the 90s at least. Where dreamers imagined a world that used technology to benefit everyone.

However, my favorite Disney ride of all time is not at Epcot, but rather in Tomorrowland at Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress.

For those who haven’t been or need a refresher: it’s a rotating theater show, originally designed by Walt Disney himself for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. You sit in a theater that literally revolves around a series of stages, following the same American family across four generations. In the first act, it’s the turn of the century: gas lamps, hand-cranked washing machines, a gramophone. Then the theater rotates, and you’re in the 1920s with electricity, the radio, the iron. Rotate again: the 1940s bring automatic dishwashers and television. And the final rotation takes you to a vision of “today” (last updated in 1994, so think voice-activated ovens and virtual reality headsets, which honestly turned out to be pretty prescient…of 2014). You can watch it here (and not pay $200 for a DisneyWorld ticket).

Between every act, the Sherman Brothers’ song “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” plays as the theater turns. It’s corny. It’s dated. It’s earnest as hell. And it makes me emotional every time, because it captures something we’ve almost completely lost: the belief that technology exists to make regular people’s lives better. Not richer. Not more productive. Better. The whole ride is about a family getting more time together, more comfort, more joy, and each generation being excited for what’s next instead of terrified of it. Kids on their smartphones is missing from the last act. Technology was used in positive ways.

(Also, this song weirdly shows up in a live feed on my TikTok when I’m stalled as a founder. Like a prompt from the universe. I swear TikTok is the actual MetaVerse)

Walt Disney built that ride because he believed the point of progress was to give ordinary families more time, more comfort, more joy. Somewhere between 1994 and now, those in power decided the point of progress was to give shareholders more returns and to say “fuck you” to progress. The theater keeps rotating but the family stopped benefiting.

The Modern Merchants of Death

So American Fortune 500 CEOs are destroying lives through mass, indiscriminate firings (while profitable), and with their remaining employees, forcing AI adoption or using it as an excuse to increase workload. I’m pretty sure they’re all vying for Worst Leader of the Year or the newly minted Fortune 50 Worst Companies to Work For.

Even while, they try to shove crap AI down our throats…I’ll argue that most technology is inherently neutral. Hear me out on this.

Remember that Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the Nobel Prize because he was horrified by how his invention was being used. The story goes that in 1888, Nobel’s brother Ludvig died, and a French newspaper accidentally published Alfred’s obituary instead. The headline? “Le marchand de la mort est mort” — “The merchant of death is dead.” The paper went on to describe Nobel as a man “who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”

Nobel read his own obituary. He was alive, reading what the world would say about him when he was gone. And it broke something in him.

He had invented dynamite for civilian use: mining, canal building, railroad construction. He genuinely believed it would make dangerous work safer (nitroglycerin, the alternative, was wildly unstable and had already killed his own younger brother in a factory explosion). He even told a prominent peace activist that his explosives would be so devastating they’d make war itself unthinkable. He was wrong about that, obviously. Wars didn’t stop. They got worse.

So in 1895, a year before he died, Nobel rewrote his will. He left the bulk of his enormous fortune, earned from 355 patents and nearly 100 factories, to establish annual prizes for those who “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind.” Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901. Even Albert Einstein later said Nobel created the prizes “to atone” for his accomplishments in destruction.

Nobel didn’t live to see the prizes awarded. But he saw his obituary, and he decided that wasn’t going to be the story.

We are at that same crossroads with AI. And it’s not too late to act.

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (But We Must Build It)

The current landscape looks kind of like a hellscape in and of itself: all of the major players backing off of responsible development, CEOs doubling down, jettisoning employees with little to no regard for the hellish job market, and offering no safety net.

What concerns me is not the technology. The technology itself is quite impressive, especially over the past few months. What concerns me is that those who have been given leadership positions, whether through capital, power, or prestige, seemingly have little interest or regard for anyone but themselves and lack compassion and vision in equal measure. We need to call that out at every step.

At best, they’re unimaginative. But in reality, they are followers of each other in some delusional state, ignorant of humankind and country. And by and large ignorant of the capabilities of not just technology but also of their own people.

Tech CEOs have given up on building useful things for people. They’ve replaced vision with vibes, imagination with efficiency metrics, and dreams with dashboards.

In order to build the world of tomorrow, we must start by imagining it, and not letting folks get away with “this will destroy a bunch of jobs…and I have no idea what to do.” We need universal health care now. We need some universal safety net and the ability to contribute meaningful work toward something great. We need fun, creativity, and joy. We need to end the companies of exploitation like Ticketmaster, whose only value is monopoly.

Speaking of which: literally yesterday, Bloomberg reported that two Live Nation regional directors were caught in unsealed Slack messages bragging about gouging fans. One wrote, “These people are so stupid,” after jacking VIP parking to $250. The other responded by raising prices at his venue to match. They called it “robbing them blind, baby, that’s how we do it.” When the messages went public, Live Nation issued the classic corporate deflection: “This absolutely doesn’t reflect our values.” Yeah, except it literally does. It’s how your people talk when they think no one’s watching. That’s the definition of your values.

This is the economy we’re supposed to be grateful for? A monopoly where executives laugh about exploiting you on Slack and then get a $300 million settlement slap on the wrist? That’s not capitalism. That’s extraction with a logo.

I don’t agree with Sam Altman’s assessment that “we have no idea” what to do about the displacement AI will cause. We must create. Most of the use cases I’ve seen for AI are about automating processes, speeding up work, all noble in theory, but what I don’t see a lot of is how this makes lives fundamentally better beyond enriching shareholders.

Am I some sort of crazy Marxist? I’m not. I have benefited from shareholder returns. But I believe that people, as people, should be guaranteed a minimum standard of living, just as we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s what’s been missing. It’s almost impossible to escape this system without a lot of money. Even if you’re doing everything “right.” We have had the right to the pursuit of happiness extracted by greedy CEOs who, I will argue, have lost their moral authority to be in charge of anything.

Moreover, it’s utterly idiotic from a business perspective. These CEOs miss not only the human families they’ve ruined, the institutional knowledge capital they’ve destroyed, and the shards of their souls sacrificed for their next horcrux. The day-to-day of the modern CEO can be summed up as follows: How can I charge my “customers” more while offering less, and how can I extract every ounce of time from my employees while scaring the shit out of them?

Great wealth comes from sharing, not hoarding. There’s a concept in ergodicity economics that illustrates this perfectly: imagine a coin toss where heads adds 50% to your wealth and tails takes away 40%. On paper, the average across many players grows 5% per round. Sounds great, right? But here’s the catch: any individual player, over time, loses about 5% per round and trends toward zero. The math that looks good for the collective on a spreadsheet destroys the individual in practice. That’s the modern economy in a nutshell. The aggregate numbers look fine. GDP is up. Productivity is up. But the actual humans inside the system are getting ground down. The only way to beat the house is to share the risk: to pool resources, cooperate, and build systems where the gains are distributed. CEOs optimizing for the ensemble average while ignoring the individual trajectory is exactly how you end up with a country where the economy is “great” and everyone is miserable.

If you think I’m just waxing poetic here or preaching from a place where I can’t practice, I understand your skepticism. It’s easy to be high and mighty when you’re small. But last month, I was presented with a clear example that tested my own morals around this. I’ll be writing next week about how this impacted me directly as a startup founder.

We’re at a critical juncture where we can decide if the next stage of the Carousel of Progress resembles Terminator or if we can use our imagination to use AI to expand opportunities, develop clean energy, cure cancer, reduce poverty, and in MapChat’s case…make the world a little more fun and connected (AI is a part, but it’s not the core product).

There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow. But only if we have the courage and the imagination to build it for everyone, not just the people who can afford the VIP parking.

-Benji

P.S. If you’re a Live Nation exec reading this on your $250 parking-funded lunch break: I hope your $20 Chipotle burrito was at least good.

This essay is the company version of that.

So my parents were visiting from Hilton Head last week and my dad asks me: if someone offered you twenty million dollars for the company, would you take it?

I said no before he finished the sentence.

He looked at me quizically. And look - nobody’s offered me twenty million dollars. This was purely hypothetical. But that’s almost the point. I’ve already made up my mind about an offer nobody has made. Either that makes me delusional or it means something. I’ll let you decide.

I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I’m going to need to raise money at some point. You can’t build what I’m building on stubbornness alone. But that doesn’t weaken the point - it sharpens it. Because if I’m going to let someone’s money into this thing, it better be someone who gets what this thing is. Someone who sees the mission and says that’s why I’m writing the check, not someone who sees the mission and says that’s cute, now here’s what we’re actually going to do. Raising isn’t the compromise. Raising from the wrong people is.

My dad thought it a little impractical to turn down life changing money for a product that doesn’t even have users (we’re about to though 😊)…but it’s about more than that. I think who you are before it matters is who you’ll be after it does. This is my chance to not just make money but build a company that makes a true impact.

Back to Facebook. We’ve all seen the Social Network. Saverin put up the money when Facebook was nothing. The person who believed in the thing before anyone else did. And Zuck diluted him out, cut him off, and lawyered up to make sure it stuck. That wasn’t a mistake made under pressure from a board or a late-stage investor forcing his hand. That was a 19-year-old showing you exactly who he was before anyone was watching.

Mark Zuckerberg’s founding act was screwing Eduardo Saverin.

And then everything that came after made perfect sense. The privacy gutting. Cambridge Analytica. Rolling over for every government that asked. The pivot to Meta. The guy who called his earliest users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data built exactly the company you’d expect from someone who said that. The seed was the tree.

Hell, the platform those Facebook groups lived on - the same place where college kids once declared who they were with their whole chest - became the machine that sold those kids’ data to the highest bidder. That’s what happens when the foundation is rotten.

Dario Amodei’s founding act was the opposite.

He left Google (and eventually Open AI) because he didn’t trust them to build AI safely. Walking away from some of the most powerful companies on Earth because he believed the work was too important to be done without guardrails. He started Anthropic - the company behind Claude, one of the most powerful AI systems on the planet - and wrote the limits into the foundation. Not mass surveillance of Americans. Not fully autonomous weapons that kill without a human being involved. These are the lines. They don’t move.

This week, the Pentagon tested those lines. A deadline. Friday, 5:01 PM. Loosen your guardrails or we cancel your $200 million contract. We invoke the Defense Production Act. We label you a supply chain risk - a designation that’s usually reserved for hostile foreign companies like Huawei. The full weight of the American military apparatus pointed at a tech company from San Francisco because that company had the audacity to say we have limits.

And Amodei’s answer, published for the whole world to read: we cannot in good conscience accede to your request.

The guy who left Google because he believed in guardrails refused to remove them when the most powerful military in human history told him to. The seed was the tree.

The Pentagon says they’d never actually use AI for mass surveillance or autonomous killing. Maybe that’s true today. But that’s exactly the point - you don’t build guardrails for today. You build them for the version of today you can’t predict. You build them because the whole point of a principle is that it holds when it’s inconvenient.

I didn’t just admire this from the sidelines. I went and got myself and a team member on Anthropic’s Max plan the same week. Two subscriptions. $200 a month each. Anthropic is willing to lose $200 million. I’m putting up $400 a month. I know the math isn’t exactly comparable. But that’s how this works - you support the companies you believe in at whatever scale you’ve got. You vote with your money for the kind of companies you want to exist.

Am I really comparing my hypothetical ‘no’ over a kitchen table in LA to Amodei staring down the Pentagon? Yeah. I am. Because how you start and what you stand for in your foundation defines who you are. The number doesn’t matter. The instinct does.

I’m building something that I believe can change how people connect with each other. Not in a Silicon Valley “connect the world” way that actually means “monetize loneliness.” In a real way. In a way that starts with a bar on a Tuesday night and a stranger you wouldn’t have talked to otherwise. In a way that treats the people who build it and the people who use it like actual human beings.

I’ve had people offer to work for free because they believe in it. I said no. Because if the mission is about treating people like people, you can’t build it on the backs of people you’re not treating like people. The how is the what. You don’t get to cut corners on your foundation and then act surprised when the building falls down. That was my founding act. That’s my seed.

While my parents were just here, we’ve been watching The Bear together and these themes have come up that resonate with how I want to build. Investing in your people. Letting them grow. Giving them ownership over their craft. It’s slower. It’s more expensive. It’s way harder than just grinding people down and replacing them. But it’s the only way to build something that’s still standing in ten years. That’s the company I want to run.

And I’m not just saying that. I’m building the structure to make sure it stays that way. Stockholder ownership. Employee ownership. A membership hybrid. Three stakeholder classes with real power, so no single group can hijack the mission. This will take some time to figure out how to do well and be agile, but believe companies should serve a greater good while making money.

The guardrails aren’t aspirational. They’re structural. Because Zuck didn’t have guardrails and Amodei did, and look where they both ended up.

I totally get the reaction of my $20 million dollar hypothetical from my Dad. I was shocked myself with how quickly I said no.

But here’s what I don’t think he sees yet. Everything I’m doing - every instinct I have about how to build this thing - came from him. He’s the one who taught me that how you do something matters as much as what you do. He’s the one who showed me what it looks like to give a shit about the people around you. To show up for your community. To look someone in the eye and mean what you say. He was a parish pastor who went onto serve important leadership roles in the church. That man’s whole life was showing up for people. (Mother did this in her own very significant way, but focused on my Dad for this piece)

So yeah. Someone asks me if I’d sell for twenty million and I say no without blinking - that’s on him (and my mom). The stubbornness? His (and hers). The conviction that the work matters more than the check? He put that there. Every value I’m building into this thing, every line I refuse to cross, every shortcut I won’t take - that’s my upbringing from my Mom and Dad.

We’re not just a private company. We’re building differently, bitch.

-Benji

P.S. My parents are going to hate the fact I used bitch in this publication. We’ve come to an understanding regarding my frequent use of profanity :-P

Invitations have fallen out of fashion. We as a society are invited to less than we used to be, and we’re inviting less in return. This quiet retreat has created a kind of lock in our social lives, a state where the simple act of getting together carries more weight, more risk, and more friction than it should.

I feel this tension personally. Depending on the season, I’m either drowning in plans or staring at an empty calendar, and sometimes that fluctuation is the point (I, too, occasionally need quiet time even being the extrovert’s extrovert). But for too many people, the dry spells stretch on without end. So when I can, I try to offer invitations to the people who haven’t gotten a lot of them lately.

But today, I want to talk about Mike. Someone who never waited for an invitation. He made one every Sunday.

Two Dollars for a Bulletin

He was a greeter at our church. Not assigned to the role, but drawn to it, preferring to be the very first person you’d interact with when you walked through the door. He’d hand you a bulletin with a grin and tell you, “That’ll be two dollars.” If you were a regular, you knew the bit. “Put it on our tab,” we’d say. Every week, without fail. It was a small, silly thing, and it made you feel like you were supposed to be there.

Mike had just turned 84 and had lived a colorful life. He’d worked in retail, then as a hairstylist, and for years as a drag queen named Michelle Lee. He used to perform at a bar called The GoodNite, which was formerly a gay bar like many bars in North Hollywood. They had a drag queen karaoke night, and his home was within walking distance, which made it all the more his place. I loved the fullness of that picture: a man who spent Sunday mornings welcoming people into a church and had spent countless nights welcoming people into a performance. Both acts of hospitality. Both invitations.

This past Christmas Eve, we invited Mike to dinner at our home. We’d been doing this for a few years running, a quiet tradition of food and a movie. That night, we were finishing up It’s a Wonderful Life, and Mike was settled in with us like he always was, unhurried and warm. Over dinner, we talked about taking him to drag karaoke. The GoodNite still did it, and it wasn’t far (literally within walking distance of his house). We’d go early in the new year.

The Sunday after New Year’s, we arrived at church and were greeted not by Mike, but by Tim, a fellow congregant, filling in at the door. My husband said, “You look much younger than Mike.” That’s when we learned Mike had passed away over the weekend, on New Year’s Day.

We never got to take him to drag karaoke. As it turned out, the bar stopped doing karaoke nights shortly after. The window had closed in more ways than one. (Update, apparently it’s back and I’m going to organize an outing!)

Why We Stopped Asking

I’ve been thinking about Mike a lot since then. Not just about the loss, but about what he did so effortlessly that most of us find so hard.

The word invitation comes from the Latin invitare: to entertain, to treat with kindness, to be gracious toward. That’s exactly what Mike did with a two-dollar bulletin. He didn’t wait for you to prove you belonged. He just treated you like you did. It’s a kind of hospitality that made intuitive sense in a village, where everyone was known. But we don’t live in villages anymore. Our social worlds are far more complex, more fragmented, and the stakes of a simple “want to come?” feel correspondingly higher.

Some of the reluctance is sensitivity to someone else’s schedule. Some of it is wondering whether the thing you’re suggesting is even going to be a good time. But I think the biggest part is that extending an invitation is an inherently vulnerable act. To invite someone to something is to face possible rejection. And by the nature of the invite, you’re also making yourself visible to others who may not be invited, which carries its own discomfort.

Here’s something I’ve noticed, though: the anxiety of a personal invitation is significantly higher than the anxiety of a group one. Think about the difference between texting one person “want to get drinks Friday?”… where the silence of a delayed reply can feel deafening… versus dropping a message in a group chat: “I’ll be at this bar Thursday if anyone wants to come through.” The first is a question that demands an answer. The second is a door left open. One requires courage; the other just requires showing up. And when there are other strangers present, even better. Everyone’s navigating the newness together, and no one person bears the weight of being the reason the night was planned. The problem with the group chat is it’s a different part of vulnerability. What if no one shows up at all?

Open Doors

This is something I think about constantly while building MapChat. Not just as a product question, but as a human one. People aren’t only struggling to find things to do. They’re not being invited out much at all. And the solution isn’t to somehow make individual invitations less scary. It’s to create more open doors.

Third places have traditionally served this function. A bar, a café, a park: these are essentially standing invitations, subject only to the natural rules of the space: dress code, hours, commerce, the etiquette of the room. And those rules aren’t so different from what any invitation includes: what to wear, what to expect, how to behave (we actually have a section for this in MapChat). Mike understood this instinctively. The church door was a third place threshold, and he made himself the open door.

The question I keep returning to with MapChat is: how do you build that digitally? How do you create a system where people can safely join something that’s already happening, without it feeling like an imposition, without requiring someone to stick their neck out and ask? How do you make the invitation ambient rather than pointed? How do you take what Mike did at that church door and extend it to a whole city?

I don’t have all the answers yet. But I know the instinct is right, because I saw it work every Sunday for years.

* * *

The Guest List as Generosity

I throw a fair number of parties, and one thing I’ve learned is that the guest list is its own form of generosity. I hosted a pool party last year, about 50 people, and I deliberately mixed the list. Old friends alongside people I’d only recently met. It would have been easier to keep the circle familiar. But I’d been thinking about who in my life hadn’t been invited to much lately, and I made the call. It ended up being one of the better days. The new people brought energy the regulars didn’t expect, and the regulars made the new people feel held. The alchemy only worked because someone made the invitation.

That’s the thing about invitations: they’re not just logistics. They’re a statement about who you think deserves to be in the room, and we need to refill more rooms.

Just Open the Door

Mike made that statement every Sunday with a joke and a bulletin. He didn’t overthink it. He didn’t wonder if you’d have a good time or if the timing was right. He just opened the door.

So here’s what I’ll leave you with: just make the invitation. Text that friend. Make the call. Invite someone to dinner on Christmas Eve, even if it’s a tradition you’re only just starting. Take them to karaoke before the bar stops doing it.

And if you’re not sure where to start, keep an eye on MapChat. We’re building a place where the invitation is always open.

Following tech super closely, I naturally had some serious concerns. Here is the letter in case your neighborhood wants to do the same.

Hi,

I’m Benji and I’m the guy who stopped both of you on my way to church (my car, at my address) It’s nice to meet you and I hope I didn’t throw you off with my direct inquiry this morning.

I understand that there was a recommendation by local police and believe that yes higher resolution cameras on the streets would not be a bad thing, my main objection is with the vendor.

This is a company that I have been following for about the last 6 months closely as I’ve had major concerns about them (I work in tech) and was a bit surprised to see that what was proposed was a Flock system.

I would feel less safe with Flock cameras in the neighborhood. I am asking for a neighborhood meeting that fully discusses this before any contracts are signed or these cameras are installed.

Here’s my rationale:

ICE: Flock has cooperated with ICE without a contract through engaging local police; this means an active investigation could be any of our friends, anyone who attends a protest, or any contractor or employee that works on Sarah St.

a. Even with data segregation, what legal protection do we have from ICE saying there’s a “lawful” investigation? The lines aren’t exactly there. Same with the LAPD, who has as recently as yesterday done nothing to enforce mask requirements for DHS/ICE officials among other evidence of collaboration (as recently as yesterday SB 627 was not being enforced)

b. Federal officials have leaned onto all sorts of companies to get whatever they want without a warrant. If the LAPD has any access to this data, what controls are in place? On their site, they don’t have a “contract” but it was been used multiple times without a warrant or contract.

c. This information was recently shared way outside of it’s “intended” audience in CA.

Data Security: Flock has had multiple recent hacks, including one of municipal systems in Oakland, CA (this is in the few past weeks). This is not exactly a company I feel safe with my data. This ups the chances of being doxed for any of us in the neighborhood by providing a centralized way of monitoring the neighborhood. Moreover, license plate data is consistently enriched so it quickly becomes PII as that data is enriched.

Video Capability is on all of the recent LPRs: Flock has shown pictures of people and more than just being an LPR (License Plate Reader); this information can be hacked. You say they won’t track people, but they advertise that all LPRs can be video cameras (from their own site). This is also hackable and subject to enforcement of TOS, Privacy Policies, et cetera which can be updated as most cloud-based companies do.

Say there was a “national emergency” and part of it was to turn on the video capabilities of all of these cameras. It’s not that far-fetched after what we’ve seen here and recently in Minnesota.

Participation: Participation is not voluntary because, we, our neighbors you are being tracked. How is this voluntary? I understand cameras on a private property and yes, these may be “better”, but I’m failing to see how a porch pirate who could be tracked with individual cameras rises to this level.

Politics and funding of Flock: The CEO has quoted “ANTIFA” multiple times with any criticism of the company, Company is backed by Peter Thiel, a16z (Andreesen Horowitz). A TX Sherrif used IL license plate data to track down a woman who had an abortion.

Other municipalities: Multiple other municipalities have rolled back their agreements with Flock technologies. Most neighborhoods are less sophisticated than these municipalities. When, they’ve cancelled their contracts after some of these breaches, Flock reinstalled the cameras because they are property of Flock Safety. This happened recently in Evanston, IL.

Overview: This video goes into all of these pieces in depth, it’s a bit long at 45 minutes and somewhat technical but it summarizes my concerns with Flock, in particular. You can also check out the site here which even more articles.

Bottom line:

When I heard of a neighborhood camera system, I was not upset. The second I learned it was Flock, my guard went up. I’ve been watching this company with great suspicion along with Penlink. In my view, Flock cameras make us, our contractors, and our visitors less safe.

I hope we can address these concerns, however most of these articles are within the past few months so I’m not really sure my concerns go away with this vendor.

-Benji

George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

Building Bedford Falls in Pottersville’s World

So this is a bit late. I got hacked, along with some other personal updates, so Merry Christmas, belatedly. With that said, let’s take a moment as we head into the New Year to think about what kind of world we actually want to build and how I plan to start as I roll out MapChat.

Almost all of my favorite Christmas movies are, in some way, tied to business ethics. I do not know what that says about me, but let’s talk about one I have watched a few times this year with MapChat very much in mind: It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie that, despite starring Jimmy Stewart, was never a commercial success. Debuting post-World War II, it was characterized by critics as not being upbeat enough to reflect the joy of the moment. In many ways, they were right. And yet, it speaks to us now more than ever.

Why? Because we are seeing the results of what happens when good people in business are snuffed out, when private equity and billionaires suck the fun and joy out of the economy. We are living in Pottersville.

For those who have not seen the film, first of all, watch it! It takes some setup time, but it is worth it. It tells the story of George Bailey, a small-town banker. His family does well for themselves, but they are not super rich. Because of a series of good deeds and obligations, George gets “stuck” in Bedford Falls. When he is about to travel the world, he stays to save the bank. When he is about to go on his honeymoon, he is trapped again.

Despite all of this, George remains focused on doing the right thing, not just for himself, but for the community. There is a particularly poignant scene, at least for me, during the bank runs of the 1930s, where he is able to keep the bank solvent with just two dollars. He pleads with the community not to take more than what they need, and they rally around him.

The final straw comes when his uncle loses, or more accurately when Potter steals, an $8,000 deposit, roughly $144,000 in today’s money, while the bank is being audited. This causes George to completely lose it and attempt suicide. He is saved by Clarence, a guardian angel, who shows him an alternative universe where George was never born.

A Real-World Bedford Falls

One of my role models was my grandpa, who passed away last year. He contributed to his own “Bedford Falls” in the small town of Fremont, Ohio. Like George Bailey, he was a banker who took real risks to give people the opportunity to buy a home, including Black Americans, which at the time was a bold act. His bank was eventually bought out, and he lasted a few more years before quitting once the suits took over.

I recently saw a clip of Ben Shapiro, a right-wing podcaster, characterizing acts like this as similar to the subprime mortgage crisis. What he misses is that these were people my grandfather knew through the community…making Mr. Potter the hero. Also, Ben, wtf?

That ethos is embodied in a quote from George Bailey’s father:

“You know, George, I feel that in a small way we are doing something important. Satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.”

Homeownership has been one of the greatest wealth builders for millions of people. It creates stability, pride, and long-term investment in a community. That idea sits at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life, and it is something we have steadily moved away from.

Later in the film, after his father dies, George fights fiercely against Potter in one of the movie’s most famous scenes (quote at the top). He calls out the false logic that treats people as risks instead of neighbors, and profit as the only measure of value. George makes it clear that his father’s work was not about maximizing returns, but about helping people escape slums, build dignity, and become better citizens and customers in the process.

Through the Building and Loan, George creates Bailey Park, which provides value both to the institution and to the homeowners themselves. These homeowners are not just customers, they are members and shareholders, simultaneously borrowing from and participating in the bank. There is a scene where the Baileys gift bread, salt, and wine to new homeowners. This simple act enrages Potter, who stands to lose money because of the opportunities the Baileys are creating. Membership in the Building and Loan means shared upside, dividends, and a network where people are invested in one another.

When wealth becomes overly concentrated, we end up with a nation of renters who have less stake in their communities. That leads to disconnection, more crime (locked up toothpaste anyone…), and general misery. I see it every day. The top of the K, especially the top ten percent, is doing just fine. The bottom ninety percent is struggling, particularly now. That, more than anything, is what the so-called vibecession has been about.

Yes, people may be making more money on paper, but housing has nearly doubled as a percentage of earnings over the past thirty years. The same is true for medical care, childcare, education, and transportation. Almost everything essential has gone up except electronics. Is it any surprise that so many people feel miserable?

Our Current World Resembles Pottersville

George is shown what a world without him, and without the Bailey Building and Loan, would look like if it had never existed. There are moments where he literally saves lives, but what struck me most was the business side of that alternate reality.

Potter has effectively bought the entire town and drained it of joy. This mirrors modern America, driven by tech billionaires and private equity. One particularly striking scene shows everyone renting shacks in Pottersville, whereas before, under George Bailey’s leadership, people owned their homes and had real investment in their community. What were once thriving neighborhoods became places of desperation, with people reduced to tenants in a company town.

I recently encountered a real-world version of this through a close relative in South Carolina. She lives in a three-bedroom house in the Lowcountry and pays $3,000 a month in rent. She works harder than almost anyone I know, is smart, and earns good money. The entire neighborhood is newly built rental housing. The homes are nice, but how is anyone supposed to participate in the American dream when rents are this high and ownership is so far out of reach? Add student loan debt, rising medical premiums, and increased transportation costs, and the picture becomes even bleaker.

Potter-style monopolies are everywhere, and they are fundamentally anti-free market. We have only a handful of real options for air travel, insurance, or even food. Entire sectors of the American economy are dominated by conglomerates that use their size to crush competition. This is not capitalism functioning well, it is extraction at scale.

Beyond economics, we are also experiencing what I think of as the “Great Connection Crisis.” It has been labeled the loneliness epidemic, or the male loneliness epidemic, but in my own research over the past few years, it is happening across age groups, demographics, and across the world. It is driven by social content machines, isolation, and a growing sense of economic hopelessness.

Building Bedford Falls

Ironically, MapChat works with bars, and Pottersville has plenty of them. But in the movie, those bars are depicted as places of exploitation and excess, not connection. Girls, girls, girls. I see that as a stand-in for our digital lives today, where an OnlyFans and betting crisis is unfolding in plain sight, optimized for extraction rather than human connection.

So what is the way out? We have to build differently, and we have to build intentionally.

Unlike George and his father, my ambition is much larger. I want to help build a network of a million Bailey Parks, places rooted in kindness, community, and shared ownership. But every meaningful system starts with one, and for me, that begins in my own backyard.

Building something lasting requires sacrifice. Doing things the right way rarely comes with immediate gratification. Bedford Falls takes time because trust takes time. Extraction does not. This kind of work requires social proof, multiple leaders, and people willing to commit before outcomes are guaranteed. What it offers in return is hope that we do not have to accept a dystopian future that benefits only a few.

MapChat is not about extracting value. It is about providing value to its members, who will have a seat at table, and about creating modern Bailey Parks. I would rather build a business that meaningfully improves people’s lives than one that simply maximizes profit. There is a moment in the movie where the power of membership becomes clear during the bank run, when George reminds people that their money, the bank, and the community are deeply intertwined.

That does not mean I am anti-profit. I want MapChat to be extremely profitable, and I want the people doing the work to share in that success. The goal is to grow networks strong enough to compete with the soul-sucking technologies that dominate today. There is much more to say about governance, structure, and safeguards against moral rot, but that is for another time.

The Great Connection Crisis requires a reset in how we think about both business and community. We have gone too far into a monopolistic, extractive model. The alternative requires two things: membership, which implies reciprocity, and an ethical core. Membership is not the same as subscriptions or the Silicon Valley mantra of move fast and break things. It requires patience, care, and the deliberate building of strong, interconnected networks.

Early this year, I am starting hyperlocal in the East San Fernando Valley, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, and greater North Hollywood. The goal is to build a real community first, with the app as a tool, not the star. I plan to host repeating events aimed at groups like movie lovers, singles, couples, and others. These events will be affordable, provide real value, and focus on facilitating genuine connection. I will be doing much of that facilitation myself, with the hope that friendships form and local businesses benefit.

Along the way, I will bring in as many people as I can. I have already partnered with a local influencer to help launch an event series. From there, the plan is to scale what works, grow both the app and the community together, and iterate based on real-world feedback. This is how I hope to tackle the problems I see plaguing our world.

This app is not about me. It is about a broader movement toward a more connected, happier life. One of the biggest challenges will be culture. MapChat Social is meant to be a space rooted in curiosity, fun, and kindness, a space without bullies or billionaires. It starts not with investment, but with membership in a shared goal of chipping away at the Connection Crisis.

Throughout the movie, George Bailey sacrifices his own dreams for his family, friends, and community. In doing so, he creates buy-in and shared responsibility. During the bank run, he and his wife even use their own wedding money to keep the bank afloat.

The ending of It’s a Wonderful Life is especially powerful. Once George sees the impact of his life, he realizes how much he had lost the plot by focusing solely on money. The community rallies and gives what they can, more than covering the missing $8,000.

Money matters, but money as the sole pursuit is hollow. My grandpa knew that. George Bailey knew that. It ignores what actually makes a life wonderful. People, community, and compassion.

My approach carries risk, but I believe deeply in this truth: all that you can truly take with you is what you give. And most importantly, no man who has friends is a failure.

Here’s to you, Grandpa, up in heaven.

Last week was L.A. Tech Week. I went to one event because these things are usually all hype and no depth, and I already had a packed social schedule. It’s clear I need to start involving more people to get MapChat off the ground, but I’m not going to find them in the frenzy of speed networking.

Of course though, it’s fun to network, so I picked one event hosted by an accelerator I’d applied to, just to see what other founders were building and also to determine whether I’d want to work with that crew (you are who you surround yourself with).

“I Want to Be a Trillionaire”

Tech people can be a little extra. One event was enough. I saw another meetup pop up on Instagram (yes, I rejoined for MapChat because every bar uses it to market), this one for founders who care. It was run by a restaurant chain owner, which sounded promising. Maybe I’d meet people in hospitality, my initial target market.

It was $35 to attend, not bad for a shot at new connections and maybe a meal. Getting out of your bubble matters.

I met some interesting folks: a music therapist, an artist, a face painter, a car broker, a real estate investor (who demanded to know which side of the boulevard I live on — very L.A.), and more.

Then came the main talk. The restaurant owner told a classic rags-to-riches story from sleeping in the back of a competitor’s van to running a $300 million revenue company with many locations across the country. Impressive. The plan was to build community meetups. Cool. But then came the line about competing with Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire, and I started thinking maybe I was in the wrong room.

Then shit got weirder. The restaurant owner pivoted into full sales pitch mode: $69/month (discounted from $199) for access to weekly Zoom calls, a free meal, a “normally $5K” leadership class, and some “extra perks.” Then came the classic manipulative closer: anyone who didn’t sign up on the spot wouldn’t get those extra benefits. Three people raised their hands. The rest of us sat there like, what the fuck just happened?

Why Do You Want to Be a Trillionaire?

When Q&A opened, I was first. I asked, “Why do you want to become the world’s first trillionaire and is that ethical?”

You know those moments when time freezes? The room gasped. The speaker locked eyes with me, lightning flashing behind them, and said something like, “Money is about creating value in the world. I want to create that much value.”

Which, sure…but you can generate trillions in value without hoarding the cash.

They turned it back to me, looking for validation. I said, “So I don’t think we’re aligned morally here. I want to make a ton of money too, but it’s not my defining trait. If my company isn’t sharing it with the people who make it great, what’s the point? Personally, I’d cap out at $500 million. That’s plenty to throw weight around in these circles. But you do you.”

We went back and forth briefly, and I let it go. It was their event, not mine.

But something shifted. As others asked questions, the restaurant founder started reflecting on the people who’d helped along the way: friends who offered support early on, a partner who provided a place to live rent-free, a parent, and how giving away meals spread kindness. The “trillionaire” ego faded, and light came back into their eyes. Maybe I imagined it, but I’d like to think something landed. I didn’t stay for more networking.

What I Want

Je veux d’l’amour, d’la joie, de la bonne humeur
(I want love, joy, good vibes)
C’n’est pas votre argent qui f’ra mon bonheur
(It’s not your money that will make me happy)
Moi, j’veux crever la main sur le cœur
(I want to die with my hand on my heart)
Allons ensemble, découvrir ma liberté
(Let’s go together, discover my freedom)
Oubliez donc tous vos clichés
(Forget what you thought you knew)
Bienvenue dans ma réalité
(Welcome to my reality)
— Zaz, “Je Veux” (I Want)

Scott Galloway said on TikTok/Youtube Shorts that you should spend money “like a fucking gangster in the 50s’ with ass cancer.” Thanks for the visual, Scott. But he’s right. You hit your number and then you give it away, invest, spread it around. You can’t take it with you.

I think of MacKenzie Scott, who never lost touch with who she was and how she got there, trying to deploy capital faster than she can make it. She’s proof that wealth doesn’t have to rot your soul. Still, it’s a gilded cage. Anyone chasing billionaire status should stop and ask what that really means — not just morally but practically.

I want to live in a world where millionaires are admired for generosity, not greed. Where billionaires understand that their fortunes wouldn’t exist without the communities that made them.

Ironically, when asked about past failures, the restaurant founder admitted that their first business collapsed because they weren’t generous and ended up homeless. Their current success came when they built a culture of generosity. I hope they remember that.

So to my fellow founders, build with generosity. And fuck anyone who says they want to be the world’s first trillionaire.

Benji

P.S.
I’m not as bohemian as Zaz. I’d still take that suite at the Ritz. It’s not that I don’t value money, I just value people more. I want MapChat’s structure to reflect that, with incentive systems that reward everyone who makes it great. I can’t enjoy the ride if I’m not bringing good people with me.

I didn’t actually watch the full Star Wars series until I was 25. It never really spoke to me. When I finally did (because my husband’s really into it) I found myself liking the prequels more than the originals. I could see the social parallels playing out in real life and, foolishly, I still believed the better angels would prevail. That institutions, businesses, and people with power would keep darkness in check.

I was wrong. And naïve.

The Current Dark Days

These feel like dark days, at least for me. People I’ve admired, like Marc Benioff, are suddenly supporting ideas like bringing National Guard troops into SF. I keep wondering: what the hell is going on with the billionaire class?

Then there’s Apple, now blocking ICE apps. A VC influencer I once semi-admired posted a promo for Andreessen Horowitz’s accelerator while pretending it was “hard to get into.” TikTok might soon be bought by Andreessen and Oracle, tightening control over speech even more.

Across tech, finance, and other industries, leaders talk flippantly about AI as if inevitable job destruction were a badge of progress…with no regard for the people whose lives, families, and dreams are on the other side of those “efficiencies.” Meanwhile, energy use soars, surveillance grows, and life gets, frankly, shittier.

And ICE, our real-world Stormtroopers, are terrorizing major cities again.

The Risk of Speaking Out

I’m a Christian, though not the gross kind. The failing, human, gay guy who likes to party kind. (My friend Danny recently remarked “you are a bit hedonistic, no?” He’s not wrong.) My faith’s been tested more in the past couple of years than ever before.

I like nice things. I have a good life. But I’m doing this, MapChat, because I believe in it and the good it can do in the world. More money won’t add much to my quality of life. I’m willing to put part of my net worth behind the dream, even though I know how far the app still has to go and how impossible it feels to challenge Big Tech alone.

As a recovering corporate employee, I sometimes wonder if being this outspoken will hurt my career prospects if MapChat doesn’t make it. Then I remember the world’s already crazy enough that traditional paths don’t guarantee safety anyway. I’m not taking my position for granted, but I’m also not going to silence myself for the illusion of stability.

Speaking truth to power doesn’t help in the short term (my TikToks frequently get flooded with negative remarks), but I have faith that the right people, partners, and opportunities will find me when the time’s right. That’s a kind of faith every founder needs.

I’m in a unique position: no dependents besides a ridiculously cute dog named Scout and enough earmarked for this to go another year, while slowly.

In game theory there’s something called “transgression,” the idea that breaking social norms can quietly reveal who’s aligned with you. That’s where I am now: shouting my vision for a better world and listening for alignment in the void, like Murph in Interstellar catching taps from across time. And I am starting hear the taps.

Glimmers of Hope

I’ve met so many unexpected allies through TikTok, LinkedIn, and Substack, small connections that remind me I’m not the only “Jedi” left fighting while the Empire takes hold. Here are just a few examples. There are more that I’ll share in subsequent update posts about those who have offered to help on the business itself.

A former colleague messaged me on LinkedIn, thanking me for speaking up when he can’t talk about politics when he’s looking for a new job. We ended up talking about some challenges and opportunities that MapChat will eventually face and was an energizing conversation.

I met Christina, a fashion-tech founder I discovered on TikTok. Her startup’s totally different, but her mission to build something good resonated deeply. Now I’m planning an event to gather other mission-driven founders in L.A. If you’re one, reach out—we need each other.

Then there’s Tim, a guy in Ohio who found MapChat through LinkedIn. The app’s still MVP, not even meant for his region yet (or even most parts of L.A.), but he tried checking into a campground and messaged me about a bug. We ended up trading life updates—his son had just learned to ride without training wheels. Stuff like that makes it all worth it.

Makeda, a friend, mentor, and fellow entrepreneur…randomly texts me perfectly timed Bible verses and support throughout the week.

The “movie bros” group chat brightens my days with absurd yet heartfelt nonsense. (Looking at you, Tony.)

And Lindsay, an organizational-design expert I connected with on LinkedIn, just blew my mind with her thesis about how narcissism spreads like a virus inside organizations. We’re meeting next week. Our values align and it was so refreshing reading about someone who believes in the power of corporations to work for the betterment of the world as opposed to profit sucking machines that leave lives destroyed in their wake.

Oh, and I have the best husband in the world. Without his support, I’d probably forget to dress myself.

All these glimmers remind me that the Force really is all around us. We just have to be glimmers for each other.

I just need to trust it. We need to trust it.

And in time, a new hope will emerge.

May the Force be with you, always.

-Benji

This is the opposite of everything drilled into you in corporate training. Corporations preach ethics but their leadership will not stand for what is right. Not even on LinkedIn, one of the safest and most powerful platforms to do so.

LinkedIn is often mocked as the politest social network, the one where HR is always looking over your shoulder where you should honor “civility” over everything else. That is exactly why it matters.

Why LinkedIn Matters

One of my recent comments got over 117k impressions with just 26 reactions. On TikTok that would be a viral post. LinkedIn is shy by design, so when you do speak up, it lands. It reaches people who don’t share your views, and that’s why it’s important.

That post sparked a conversation where someone challenged me for being unkind. They said, “Humankindness is your business.” I replied, “Yes. The paradox of tolerance.”

They pressed me: “How does this demonstrate kindness?”

It’s a fair question. I was poking fun at Kristi Noem’s lack of morals, calling out Forbes for its obsession with wealth, and yes, plugging MapChat. But I was also calling a spade a spade. And I stand by that.

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We Are Not Returning to Civility Anytime Soon

For years the right has been louder and more aggressive. The far left has its critics too, but moderates have largely chosen civility. Trump’s re-election has accelerated the collapse of that norm. Elites in law firms, universities, and corporations are bending to him. Moderates need to step up on platforms like LinkedIn in the name of decency and democracy.

Other platforms are no longer safe. People get doxxed or fired for not mourning Charlie Kirk’s death. This is cancel culture at its ugliest. Before, you had to go full Nazi salute to risk your job. Now the line is thinner and businesses are acting like scared cowards.

Here’s the thing. Trump needs normalcy and big business to survive. Bob Iger learned that last week when the ghost of lost Disney+ and Hulu subscribers visited him. I would have cheered if he defended free speech instead of issuing another hollow press release. If you are standing on business, stand on business.

My Own Line in the Sand

I’ll admit, back when I worked in corporate America, I would have hesitated before posting something like this on LinkedIn. Not because I didn’t believe it, but because I feared the consequences.

That’s why LinkedIn is the place where it matters. This is where silence dominates. This is where your defiance actually cuts through.

My first post of this type came after Elon Musk’s double Nazi salute at the inauguration. I asked LinkedIn: can we agree this is not ok? Out of nearly 4,000 connections and followers, I got fewer than 40 reactions. That silence spoke volumes, but I still feel it reached people where it would be seen in a less echo chambery place than other platforms.

A Call to Be Courageous on LinkedIn

So here is my challenge: say something. Call out what is morally wrong. Nazi salutes. Arresting people without due process. Abusing power for profit. Crushing speech. Unfair competitive practices. Ripping people off through algorithmic pricing. Call out companies that are profiting by making all of our lives collectively shittier. Call out politicians that are profiting from dividing us.

If you think Elon Musk’s salute was ok, then I do not want to do business with you. I do not want you on MapChat. The same goes for Kristi Noem.

Customers no longer want silence. They want us to stand for something. Gen Z calls it “standing on business.” Oh, the many things I have learned from TikTok. This one has always been a silent battle cry to something we all should strive for: do the right thing.

This is my call to leaders: have courage. You can afford it. In fact, it many cases it might be better for business.

True leadership means calling a spade a spade. It means defending the common welfare. And on LinkedIn, of all places, it means breaking the silence.

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Samsung just announced a “pilot” program where they’re adding ads to smart fridges when idle. These are fridges people already bought, installed, and live with in their homes (2-4k cost at that!). The switch comes through something called an over-the-air update. This should infuriate everyone. It is a test of boundaries, and if we don’t call it out now, they will keep pushing.

When you buy a product, physical or digital, you expect what you paid for. You buy the features you liked, maybe the ability to put photos of your kids on your fridge, maybe the novelty of spherical ice. Maybe you just liked Samsung’s approach to design and technology. An update that degrades that product is a slap in the face to every consumer. We own a Samsung TV, so what’s to stop them from doing it to us next? Why do corporations think it’s fine to mess with us after we’ve already bought the thing?

This is software and advertising eating the world. With Google Homes or Amazon Alexas, we always knew there might be ads, but even those don’t sit idle with them on display. With streaming, we choose between ad-supported and ad-free. Even Facebook in Europe lets you pay to avoid ads. People would never have bought these fridges if ads had been part of the deal upfront. Samsung is deliberately enshittifying its own products, and this should piss everyone off because it is a test to see how passive we are willing to be.

Too many companies rely on the assumption that consumers will just shrug. I’m fucking done shrugging.

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The Implications

And this is not just about inconvenience. Advertising networks are tied to browsing history, profiles, and sensitive data. Imagine an ad for Grindr popping up in a married household. Imagine Christmas spoiled when a fridge ad tips off little Johnny about a gift his parents couldn’t find. Ads like these reveal things about our lives and choices. They are invasive, out of place, and serve no one but Samsung.

Samsung should pay users for the ads and they should only appear with explicit opt-in. Otherwise, consumers should sue. I will if it happens on our Samsung TV. And I will think very carefully before buying anything Samsung again.

The Alternative

If Samsung insists on running ads, are they going to give fridge owners a rebate? Will they share some of that ad revenue? Otherwise, this looks like grounds for a legal challenge. The fridge people bought is now fundamentally different than the one that was advertised. Returning a fridge is not easy, and Samsung knows it. That is why they did it anyway.

Why I’m Outraged

Enshittification—the intentional degrading of products after a company has captured its customers—wears us down. Life is already more exhausting than it used to be, and greedy companies pile on by squeezing us for more.

I’m determined to build MapChat differently. The benefit will flow to the locals who use it and to the local businesses that might advertise on it. Value should be mutual, not extracted after the fact.

This is lazy corporate extraction. It must be called out, and we must not accept it.

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Why am I writing this? One of the main reasons I’m building MapChat is that I’m sick and tired of companies doing the wrong thing for everyone but their shareholders. I think it’s time we stand up against bad behavior. Fascism cannot exist without the help of the elite class. I will also be highlighting companies that are trying to make this world a better place.

We, at MapChat, believe in free speech and discourse. That’s something Sinclair has been against since forcing local TV anchors to repeat the same message. You can see John Oliver’s insightful take here. So let’s do our best to exercise our rights while we have them. The best way to do that is through a blend of the modern (social media) and the classic review and regulatory red tape created by the Greatest Generation. (Thanks Grandpa!)

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Sinclair has not 38 stations but 300. Nexstar has 116, and Tegna has 68. We have an opportunity to act. You can find a link to the affiliates here.

Disney, Sinclair, and Nexstar (and Tegna) own a wide range of properties across many markets. The question is what to do with such decentralized networks. You focus on the nodes and you act locally. You can find a link to the affiliates here.

It’s important to hold all networks accountable, not just ABC. These companies have massive reach. I’ve also included a list of Tegna stations that have remained silent, but mergers take two partners and silence is its own form of speech.

Sinclair owns:

• Digital multicast networks: Comet, Charge!, Roar, TBD, The Nest

• The Tennis Channel

Nexstar owns or operates:

• Major networks/content: The CW (75% ownership), The CW Plus, NewsNation

• Multicast networks: Antenna TV, Rewind TV

• Digital/online assets: The Hill (political news site), BestReviews, Zap2it, Lakana, Yashi, and station websites

Tegna owns:

• True Crime Network

• Quest

What to Do

1. Social media comments on all properties
   Each time Sinclair, Nexstar, or Tegna affiliate posts on social media, drop a comment. Keep it about free speech, accountability, and fairness. Remember: comments are what get surfaced to other viewers, not silence. Blocking them only removes your voice; visible feedback is what algorithms pick up. Even a simple “I care about free speech” under a post can make people pause. Also make sure they know you’re local by referencing things locals would only know. You don’t want your comments thrown out as spam.

   And while you’re at it, unsubscribe from their emails. Every signal matters in cutting back their reach.

2. Attention blackouts and boycotts
   These companies thrive on attention. If you’re subscribed to The Hill (owned by Nexstar), cancel. Don’t visit their sites, don’t click their articles, don’t give them ad revenue. If you watch Tegna’s true crime shows, tune out. But here’s the important part: don’t just walk away quietly. Say why. Post something like, “I used to follow this, but I can’t support Nexstar/Sinclair silencing voices.” A silent boycott is invisible. A public one sends a signal others can join.

3. Contact advertisers and comment on their social media
   Advertising is the lifeblood of these networks. Many of their ads are from local businesses—plumbers, electricians, dealerships. If you’ve used one of these businesses, you have even more influence. Call them, email them, or post publicly on their pages. Small marketing departments are especially responsive when customers connect their brand to controversy. They don’t want to be caught in the crossfire, and pressure from even a few people can make them rethink where their ad dollars go.

4. File FCC complaints when there are real issues
   This is something a friend of mine who works in the industry told me, and it’s worth sharing: every FCC complaint, no matter how small, creates a chain reaction inside these companies. They are legally required to respond within 30 days, which means the issue gets logged, routed across departments (legal, programming, engineering, customer service), reviewed by attorneys, and then formally answered to the FCC. That’s time, money, and pressure.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying you should file bogus complaints. Don’t do that. But if you’ve experienced a real issue: like inadequate closed captions (heard from an industry friend this is one of the most common complaints), poor transmission quality, billing problems, or indecency then you should absolutely file.

Closed captioning in particular is one area where these companies have historically cut corners, and where viewers have a right to expect better. By flagging legitimate problems, you’re both helping improve accessibility and putting responsibility where it belongs.

Link to file a complaint is here

5. Challenge mergers through public comment
   Consolidation makes it harder for local voices to be heard. The Nexstar–Tegna merger isn’t finalized, and the FTC allows for public comment. Each one has to be read, logged, and considered. Enough comments slow things down and force regulators to take a harder look. This is one of the most direct ways to keep these corporations in check. You can make a comment here:
   https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review/comment-on-a-proposed-merger

It’s only by using our voices, economic power, and regulatory systems in place can we create the world we wish to see.

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– Mahatma Gandhi

Hi, I’m Benji. Founder of MapChat and now on Substack building it live in Chat the Planet.

This first post is the history and context as to why I’m doing this, my rationale, and more broadly, what I hope we can achieve together.

Diagnosing the Problem(s)

When I was laid off in August of 2023, I had a choice. Continue work where I felt stymied by corporate politics or have the ultimate mid-life crisis and start a company with a high chance of failure.

So…what problem to work on?

After talking to people, reading countless Reddit threads, reading thousands of articles, the trends came clear:

· Technology:

o Social media was dividing us more and more into boxes and resulting in less conversations.

o Dating apps monetizing love and creating separation, crazy standards, and not love.

· Commerce

o Businesses continuing to make their products shittier, more addictive, harmful, and more expensive.

o Businesses treat employees and customers like objects. Taking stakeholder capitalism to an extreme

· Societal/Social Trends

o Individuals (especially men) are having a harder time making and keeping friends. Individuals are lonelier than ever.

o Parasocial relationships have created numerous cult like groups like the “manosphere” which thrive on victimhood

o Political polarization perceived and real is increasing at a rapid clip

o Life doesn’t seem as fun as it used to (anecdotal, but true)

What’s astonishing about these trends, is at their core, they’re so interconnected to each other in one way or another. I’ll dive more into that in later posts.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

I hear people bitch about these problems like they’re intractable, impossible to solve.

Remember though:

· There was a world before Facebook radicalized your parents. It was a fun place to see updates, and plan meetups with your friends

· Dating apps once helped broaden the dating pool, not diminish it

· Businesses treated employees as the last thing to be cut, shared profits more broadly, and prided themselves (and competed) on product quality

· Profit-above- all-else capitalism (will be talking about this later) extracted every last dollar from poor and middle-class families

· We were able to have discussions about policy using the same language.

I don’t believe there was a truly golden age, but we sure aren’t living in it now.

The Cabaret emcee was right when he sang, “Money makes the world go round.” But money alone isn’t enough. Lasting change requires powerful cultural movements to guide where that money flows. Capital may drive the machinery of our world, but it’s culture that sets its direction. To truly reshape our future, we need bold, interconnected systems which are technological and cultural alike. Counterbalancing the forces currently at play. In the end, money will always follow what society values most, and right now, our culture is in deep need of healing.

This is why I concluded that the best way forward was to build a company unlike any other out there and show a better way.

Where my 10k hours lie, my Ikigai, and the Germination of MapChat

So doing a deep dive into these societal problems, I pondered how I fit in and what I could offer that others couldn’t.

I’ve come to realize that I have a combination of skills I hadn’t really considered valuable before. I know how to bring people together through parties, games, and networking in a way that not many people do. Most who are good at connecting people don’t also think (or understand) deeply about the technical architecture behind modern digital tools. And among the few who can blend social experiences with technology, even fewer also have a background in digital marketing, advertising, and marketing technology. It’s a strange mix, but it’s uniquely positioned for what I feel called to build.

This was what ultimately called me to imagine a social app, not focused on “media” but on breaking down the barriers to connection.

The primary problems I’m trying to solve:

· How could my company help get people chatting again?

· How could my company get others out of the house and lessen social anxiety of engaging with strangers?

· How could my company help singles find love outside of the dehumanizing swipe culture?

· How could my company help local third place businesses buried by the algorithm?

· How could I build my company without relying on short-term focused investment?

MapChat Social was born.

Why a Company? – Vehicle and North Star

The companies we support through our dollars are votes for the world we want to see. I like shopping at CostCo because it offers great value, treats their employees well, and has great products which they consistently rotate. I like Vuori for their design and their use of recyclable fabrics. I admire (although can’t afford right now though) Tom Ford for its understated luxury and quality of fabrics. Trader Joe’s for their unbeatable quality for price of flowers, cheeses, and wines.

Admittedly too, I have my darker impulses, I can’t shake Amazon because it has something else I value: convenience, speed, and reliability. I like TikTok because it’s fun, but it also sucks up my time. I have voted with my dollars with each of these companies and when others do the same, their value increases.

Companies have the power to transform our lives. Think about how world-shifting iPhone-style smartphones, social networks, and dating apps felt when they first appeared. Now think about what they’ve become.

To ignite a real movement, you need two things: a vehicle that delivers true value and a North Star that gives it meaning. The vehicle gets people in the door. The North Star tells them why it matters.

The problem is that most companies don’t have a North Star anymore. Beyond rare outliers like Costco and Arizona Iced Tea, almost every brand has quietly traded purpose for profit. Their guiding principle is simple: extract more money.

(Side note: I can laugh now at Facebook’s original mission to “connect the planet.” I once believed it. That was naïve.)

MapChat’s Vehicle: The best destination to find places to go where you can meet people for interesting conversations, fun events, and terrific specials on demand and nearby.

MapChat’s North Star: MapChat seeks to build a world where no one has to be alone unless they want to be.

These are fully crazily audacious aims, I recognize. But no one ever changed the world without picturing what at the time seemed impossible.

Moving Forward And What I Will be Doing Differently

I’m not so naïve as to think that I can solve the world’s ills with MapChat. But I also know that I’ve been able to make changes that have snowballed in organizations I’ve been involved with. A small man/company can cast a large shadow (thanks Varys!).

Movements compound in their effects and I’m hoping to demonstrate that it’s possible to build a company that:

· Makes people’s lives better without extracting every possible dollar to do so

· Shares profits in what makes the company (employees, community, and creators) alongside shareholders

· Makes a profit

I also realize that to build something like this without relying on existing financial systems (like Venture Capital) and with an incredibly limited bootstrapping budget, has a huge cold start problem (getting enough people on the platform for it to be useful). That’s why I’m starting this SubStack. I simply cannot do this alone.

Let’s build MapChat together.

Let’s build a company that we wish to see in the world.

Let’s ChatThePlanet.

-Benji

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