Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Crossover Ep. With Big Technology Podcast - Meta Gonna Survive The Metaverse?

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

Our friend Alex Kantrowitz returns to my kitchen table for a crossover episode with Big Technology Podcast (subscribe here) to discuss whether or not Meta is going to see its promise land Metaverse? And are we in a recession or just a tech recession? Oh. And tips to survive plane travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for Gullet of the tech world and beyond. I'm Alex Cantruitts and I'm Brian McCullough. Welcome to the TechMeme Right Home Experience, as Chris likes to say, but the TechMeme Right Home podcast in general.

The experiences are bonus episodes. So we're doing this together. We're doing a crossover episode where it's kind of a little bit of big technology podcast, a little bit of TechMeme right home. We're airing it on both feeds in an attempt to give our listeners. A, a fun episode, and B, a little bit of an entry into a show that we like. I'm a big fan of TechMeme Right Home. I've been on it a couple times. Brian, can you tell us a little bit about what TechMeme Right Home is all about?

Yeah, it's literally a daily show, at least weekdays, daily. 15-minute roundup of the tech news, but it's not just reading headlines because you can get a robot to do that. I try to do a tiny bit of analysis, but also bring context. So I'll tell you what the, you know, five or six big stories of the day are. But then here are the tweets around it. Here's what people are saying around it. And it's sort of like if people know TechMeme, it's a thing that people go to multiple times a day to find out what's been happening today. I do the same thing in a 15-minute sort of podcast snippet.

And so the idea is on your ride home, which is why we call it the TechMeme right home. I'll catch you up on what you missed because hopefully you were doing real work and making real things happen. Who are we kidding? Right. But, you know, ride home or not because a lot of us are working from home now, even still. It's a great way to catch up on tech news. You can listen to it every day. And now I'll do a quick intro, big technology podcast for people that don't know it.

We air once or twice a week. It's an interview podcast with tech insiders and outside agitators. Actually, now that we're talking about it, I think the shows are really good compliments to each other. Yeah. Where you can go deep, you know, and catch up on the news if you're listening. you know, to both shows throughout the week. And with my show, what I try to do is get somebody who's in those headlines, whether it's a journalist or someone who's making waves in the industry,

somebody who's been on the outside and is criticizing it. So, for instance, a couple weeks ago I had Jonathan Haidt, who was a professor who wrote a long story about how social media is making us uniquely stupid. Last week I had, or two weeks ago, I had Blake Lemoyne, who was the Google Engineer, who was actually fired almost as we were recording for going out in public and saying that it's chatbot Lambda AI was sentient. And then most recently a couple days ago we had Brendan Nihann on who was another professor and gave the counterpoint to Jonathan Heights. Social media is making a stupid. His perspective is you know what? Maybe it's not all that bad. We still don't

know a lot of things about it. So we try to get nuanced, try to get deep. And we try to give people a beyond what they just read. Well, and your, you know, listeners to my show will know this, hopefully, but if you don't, you know, Alex is a real reporter, whereas I'm a more of a gadfly, you know, I would never call myself a reporter because I'm a founder and now a VC. What I'm trying to say is, is that you do actual reporting and, like, digging into the weeds, you do the stories that I read on my show and summarize. You have Nick Clegg on, you know, I'm not going to get news.

Nick Clegg on my show. So you're doing the sort of work that is sort of beyond me. By the way, if anyone can hear, we're in my kitchen in Brooklyn, so that police helicopters. There will be helicopters. And Brian, you know, I look at you as the pod guide. Actually, I think Big Technology podcast never really would have gotten off the ground. If it wasn't for you, I saw, you know, you had been talking about how the podcast industry was expanding. And even before I launched Big Technology, I wrote to you and said, what's the deal with this podcast? podcast thing. And you're like, oh, yeah, it's good. There's interest. It's a good business. It's fun. You should do it. And I found that that was really helpful and generous of you, of your time

and advice to give me that kick in the butt. I needed to start the podcast. Well, and now I'm trying to get him to start a venture fund like I did. So watch this space in a few years. Yes. If there's a big technology, technology fund, that would be great. Yeah. Well, it's not a great time for VC right now. It's not a great time. I disagree, but you'll think I'm talking about it. We'll get to that in the second half. And we do know, actually, that there's a lot of dry powder out there. So, BCs have a lot of money to deploy, and they are deploying it.

So it's not like funding has entirely dried up. But why don't we start with the public companies in the second half? We can talk about whether we're in a recession, if that's something we want to debate, what's happening in e-commerce, what's happening to startups. But the big story in our neck of the woods, at least over the past, you know a couple weeks couple months maybe has been this very awkward pivot to question mark that meta has been up to what is me meta pivoting to it's pivoting to the metaverse obviously which is still sort of this ill-defined

space which might be VR which might be a R which might be you know playing a video game on a 2D screen that's obviously the future of the company they're no longer Facebook they're meta right now but as they wait in order for that you know, hypothetical reality to potentially take off what they have right now is their existing flagship business, aka Facebook and Instagram, that doesn't seem to quite really know what it is. Because if you look at social media, you have, you know, obviously friends and family, which is the bread and butter of Facebook, you have interests, which has been something that Instagram has been about, something that Twitter is about, Instagram just does a much better job

of it. and you have entertainment, which is what TikTok has been about. Now TikTok is blowing Instagram and Facebook. I wouldn't say completely out of the water, but it's really competing with it in a way that these companies haven't seen before. And in the past few weeks, we've really seen the company stuck saying, you know, we want to emulate TikTok, but we don't quite know exactly how much we can do that without sacrificing.

What's making people use these apps in the first place? So what you read on it, Brian? The users told them that. But that, so this is what I'm trying to figure out here because the users tell Facebook all the time. Every time they're up to. We didn't like the news feed. Facebook went forward with the news feed.

Turns out it was a revolutionary format. We hated the fact that they were copying stories from Snapchat, you know, felt that it was wrong. They did a good job on that. And now we all use stories. What exactly is different, in your opinion, here with the real situation? I actually do think that we're at a different inflection point because what the users are saying now is that the way people use social media has evolved and it's maybe it's not always evolved because why did snapchat become Snapchat it was because a certain demographic

wanted a different thing out of social media than what was existent at the time right and that is well that was the ephemerality that was the stories basically a way to share without broadcasting to everybody you know your parents exactly mom your dad your gym teacher from sixth grade, your cousin that you ate. So now take that and multiply it by five, where I go to TikTok for a certain use case. I go to Instagram for a certain use case. I go to Twitter.

I go to WhatsApp. There's a thing I just read that said, WhatsApp is the biggest messaging platform on the planet that entire countries on the southern half of the globe run their businesses on. And Facebook's only innovation with WhatsApp has been to put stories on top of it, right? So I'm getting to what I think is different now. I think that we're 20 years into social media, if you go all the way back to 6 degrees and Friendster and things like that.

We're not as a society, we're not new to this anymore. We are mature users of social media as a platform. And so we have our use cases. And what the users are saying right now to Zuck is, Don't make Instagram TikTok because I go to TikTok for TikTok stuff for what it serves in my life. And if you are going to just TikTokify Instagram like you snapped Instagram, stories to Instagram, you're only going to make me abandon Instagram because I have a use case for Instagram that you're obviating, that you're making worse.

And so... That's the friends and family stuff. Well, or whatever, you know, if it is the celebrities or whatever, right? But the point is, is that I think, I think it's a great tagline for Instagram, Instagram, the celebrities or whatever. For celebrities or whatever. For a billion people. Exactly. But I do think that the problem is, I want to get into what I think the real motivation of all of this is.

But I think the problem is that Zuckerberg. and meta slash Facebook writ large were able to continue to stay ahead of the curve by absorbing, sometimes literally acquiring companies, sometimes copying what they do. And that can't work in a world where they were basically existing in sort of a monopolistic ecosystem that they created of their own. And because Snap still extant, because there's no way they're going to be able to buy ByteDance, Like these, you have these different flavors. You have Pepsi's to Cokes.

You can no longer say there's Coke and there's Cherry Coke and there's Coke 1 and Coke Zero. People are going to go for a Mountain Dew every now and again. And if you shove Mountain Dew in my Coke, why am I buying Coke? That's literally what people are saying to them. And I don't know that this is a problem that they can't, that they philosophically really want to face. Well, okay. So let's talk about the evolutions.

because you mentioned that social media is 20 years old. Yeah. True. And so the way that we have found content on the Internet has actually gone through a series of evolutions, and I think this is kind of leading us to where we are today. So at first used to be that there were websites that you would go to. Okay, then maybe you would search for different topics

and you'd find interesting content that way. The revolution that Facebook ushered in was that you would find stuff based off of what your friends and family were sharing. and you use those people as curators for the content that you would find online. It turns out that actually the content that we like to watch, a lot of it is gossipy, a lot of it is, you know, what's going on in my hometown, what's going on with the people that I know. And Facebook exploded because it really filled that curiosity in an amazing way. So the natural way that you would think is if you want to follow people, you follow, you know, symmetrically based off of people you know.

Twitter, okay, now Twitter said what if you follow the people that you are interested in? Right. You follow what you want and you do the work to curate what you want to see. Yeah. And that would be Twitter. And it didn't work. It's an amazing product. Right.

No doubt about it. It has its flaws. It's an amazing product. But that one innovation could only get Twitter so far. Instagram copied them, brought some friends and family. And still went visual, but it still made you do the work. It was just a lot easier. and you could figure out the Instagram experience much more because you were picking the pictures.

Well, and I just want to finish this one apart. So up until TikTok, we had been sorting our feeds on our own based off of people that we followed. And the algorithm was a second layer on that. TikTok flipped that on its head. TikTok basically said it doesn't matter who you follow. We're going to via our algorithm, show you the content that we think you're going to like the most. and that follow will just be one data input into our feed. It won't be the whole feed.

And that changed the game. And now I think the issue is that you have with Facebook and Instagram and even Twitter to some extent is that they're still playing that old game where the content that you find to them primarily is based on who you follow. So it doesn't matter if they're trying to prioritize their reels more often until they either fully say, we're going to be what we were in the past and you're still going to like that, it might not be as popular, but there's a use case for that. Or we're giving up on that completely and saying we're going to go the TikTok style algorithms recommend, maybe we do a tab

to show you friends and family. But until Facebook decides, we want either column A or column B, you know, it's not, I don't think it's a matter of mixing sodas. I think it's a matter of making a clear decision one way or the other of what their strategy is. And they're stuck in the middle right now. They don't have a vision. And that's why we're seeing them go back and forth. It's so funny because on my show, we keep falling into this thing of doing the history of how social media has evolved. So I've had this conversation a couple times now. You missed one important ingredient, I also think, from Snap, which is that Snap made entertainment inside an app. How many times did Facebook try to pivot to video and make watching videos and watching TV shows,

and we're going to spend however many millions of dollars to create these shows and things like that? That's what TikTok learned or perfected from Snap, which is I know that TikTok is a social network in the sense that users also create the content that's on there. But nine times out of ten, when you go to TikTok, you're just scrolling to watch stuff. It's a lean back medium. Zuck has always wanted that. And so that's the other thing that I feel like philosophically they're halfway across the river and the oars have fallen underwater, you know? Right. And so they're stuck because this is kind of where he's always wanted to go. So hold on. Before we move on on that, I think that I think you're giving Snap a little too much credit on this.

They do have their Discover part of the app, but they monetize per user at a lower rate than Twitter does. And the reason is, in my opinion, is because most people stay in the chat part of Snapchat. So it's less about the Snap. It's more about the chat. and the entertainment, they do have a successful entertainment tab. Obviously, that's where a lot of the revenue is coming from. But I would say I'll make an even more extreme statement here and say that TikTok is the first social company, maybe outside of YouTube if you want to account YouTube,

but they're the first social company that actually made this lean-back experience. That's what I was saying. But popular. Yeah. But I don't think, I would almost say that YouTube is the pretender of that. Well, that's true. That's true. But also in my sort of historical discussions of this, you know, talking about be real, I'm always like, it doesn't matter what the gimmick is that makes you rise to the top

and get popular. In the end, the way that you last is if you hook a certain generation in the chat part of it, like you said, or of, you know, if a certain generation, if that's how they communicate with their friend's circle, then that's how you last. And that's what happened with Snapchat. And that's what happened with Instagram for a certain generation. That's what happened to Facebook. That's what happened to Friendster and Myspace. They capture certain generations where the social graph, that's how you communicate. Let me ask you this then.

Do you think, I never thought about this before, but do you think TikTok might be a little bit vulnerable then? Oh, for sure. Because it doesn't have a chat function. Yes, but you've seen the rumors like I have that they're, you know, thinking of doing a music app. They're more, they get to benefit from standing on 20 years of experience is they're going to do a fully, I'm sure, integrated. They're going to have a Spotify competitor. They're going to have,

you know, a Facebook marketplace competitor. They may probably already do. I don't know. I mean, if you're TikTok, you have this one thing that you do better than anyone else, which is a, yes. This amazing algorithm and easy creation flow. And as soon as you start, you know, with Instagram, the thing that they, we talked about this on the past of my show, Kevin, we'll lose the former, had a product for Instagram was on. And we talked about a little bit how Instagram didn't, and I think this is from Sarah Fryer's book, No Filter, never wanted that hamburger menu, you know, those three bars on top

because it became too crowded, and then you sort of lost the elegance of using the app. The appeal of using that app goes away a little bit. And right now, after adding all these features, Instagram has the hamburger menu. And I think even before the TikTok competition ramped up to the way that it is. At this point, you started to see Instagram start to fall a little bit in the way that it was appealing to people. One more question about this.

So Brendan Carr, another former guest to Big Technology podcast, FCC Commissioner is pushing hard. I don't know if it's for the U.S. to ban TikTok or whatever it might be. Now, when this happened during the Trump administration, it sort of felt like a bit of a side show. And it ended up being one where this deal was brought to Microsoft. It fizzled. It was brought to Oracle. It fizzled. Nothing really came of it in the end.

But I think that the U.S., Europe are going to start eventually having some serious issues with TikTok being owned and operated in China for all intents and purposes. and it not being, you know, fully transparent. Because in the past weeks, we have seen, you know, a number of stories about how Bite Dance, for instance, which is TikTok's parent company, has pushed, you know, pro-Chinese government propaganda in one of its apps. And, you know, there's every now and again these flares of rumors that some of the same stuff is happening within TikTok,

whether it's trying to influence or a lack of data privacy, or data security that we thought existed there. Brian, how big of an issue do you think this is going to be as we look forward? Depends on if China invades Taiwan in the next 18 months? I mean, yeah, like, I was actually thinking about that. Like, imagine, I mean, it's sort of a, I mean, let's say TicTac was owned by Russia. Yeah, and Russia. It'd be already shipped.

So what happened? I mean, if China invades, we don't, let's, you know, set the ground here. we don't know if China's going to invade. Is it possible? Sure. But is there a moment where it becomes impossible because impossible for the United States to have TikTok? I'm not saying it's likely, but it's not out of the pale of possibility. There is a moment, and I actually would posit that it wouldn't require China invading Taiwan

for that moment to come. And I also do believe that they would do some intermediary step, like forcing a divestment like they attempt. the TRIP administration. But, yeah, for sure. I don't know, I don't know, as we've seen now, at least, you know, 6 degrees, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, Snap. Now, TikTok?

Am I missing one? I feel like I'm missing somebody. Twitter, Twitter in there in the middle. Very easy. What I'm saying is that some of them go away. TikTok is probably one of those that is, you know, maybe more likely to be a, as Randolph said, a trivia question 10 years from now, than others. Yeah, it's pretty vulnerable. And you look at the companies that are coming for, YouTube, for instance,

I think I's a billion people using shorts every day or a month or something like that. And Facebook, which is obviously making this a priority. Facebook, I think in its earnings call last week said, Reels volume is up 30%. Now, everyone looked at the fact that its revenue declined for the first time ever, which is a big problem. But a lot of that is because they're moving to this new format, and it takes time for them to set up the sales team and monetize the way that they could their traditional ad formats. Before we move on from,

because we originally started this to talk about meta, and I have two big things I want to talk about meta before we move on from it. This leads to something that you said maybe 10 minutes ago. Scott Rosenberg and Axios this week said, quote, the era in which social networking served as most users' primary experience of the internet is moving behind us. This leaves a vacuum in the middle. The space of forums, ad hoc group formation, and small communities that first drove

excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era. Things like Discord. This is me now. But this is also Ryan Broderick in Garbage Day. He goes on to say, Rosenberg said that the internet is separating into messages, messengers, and discovery engines with a golf in the middle for genuine social networking. So what if what we're seeing, and this is why meta seems adrift, is the monopoly era of social networking is ending. And this is what I'm hinting at by saying it's now splintering into multiple different competitors that no one competitor can gobble up.

No one competitor can copy sufficiently. No one. And so in that sense, I don't know that Zuckerberg, and I'm using Zuckerberg specifically because this is going to be my second point. knows how to grok. So my perspective on this monopoly era question is that there's never been a monopoly in social media. I don't think it's possible, and this is not a popular perspective, but I'm just going to say what I believe. I don't think it's possible to be a monopoly with one notification on the iPhone, you lose $10 billion in a year, which is what's happening to matter, probably more, the fact that Apple cut off their tracking.

Yeah. If you don't own the operating system, if you are an app on an operating system that's controlled by your direct competitors, it is a very tough argument to make that you are a monopoly. Now, I know people will say social networking is its own category, Facebook is a monopoly, but you can't just look at the one moment if it's a dominant company. TikTok today has people using it more time on average than Facebook ever had ever had. And it's history. That's astonishing. And I think that's like really important context when it comes to this monopoly question. I also think that Facebook did see this movement into smaller communities come and really pushed. You know, there was two groups, exactly.

Groups had two moments in Facebook. It had that first moment where like it was Facebook 1.0 and everybody was hanging out in groups and like showing that as a way to display their identity. And then people are like, I don't really need groups. I have the news feed. And then groups made a big comeback because the problem we described in the beginning, this idea of not wanting to share in front of your everybody you know, you'd much rather share with a smaller group that are interest-based, and that actually revitalized the newsfeed

in a way that's like totally underappreciated. And this is kind of funny because when Facebook did this whole pivot to privacy thing a couple of years ago, I guess they've done it four or five times at this point. But when it pivoted to privacy, what it really meant was pivot to smaller groups because they knew people didn't want to broadcast on the news feed. So I think that this idea that there's a gap that Scott brings up. You know, I'll just say to that maybe. I mean, it does seem to be like a very like tech insider centric, US-centric point of view where like you look at the fact that Facebook still has, and the latest numbers, what, 3.7 billion people using it every month? What's discord numbers? I mean, I'm sure that they have like pretty

engaged communities and these chat apps are certainly, you know, starting to rise. But I think that with the pivots that Facebook did, the focus on groups, the acquisition of WhatsApp, which I think will probably go down as an all-timer, even better than the Instagram. For sure. For sure. The building out of Messenger and then, you know, the work that they did with Instagram messaging, it does seem to me that a lot of that activity that we look at as a gap, if we sort of discount, you know, some of the coastal locations in the U.S. is still happening.

All right. Last point on this, and this is sort of the bigger one, which is why I'm talking about Zuck. Which is, last week, there were a couple stories about the Zuckerberg internal meeting or whatever where he says certain people shouldn't be here and I'm okay with that and stuff like that and sort of like wartime CEO sort of talk and stuff. When we're talking about social networking, this was actually, people forget this, but before Facebook's IPO, one of the reasons that people were bearish on social networking is like it's it's so fad based sure there's you have a hundred million users now but talk to me in three years right um i do think that it's it's it's not fattish in the sense that people completely abandon it like they did my space what i think happens and zuck knows this is that it's faddish in terms of you hook a certain generation and that's their jam and then somebody else hooks the next generation coming

up unless you get there first, right? And in those articles, there was one in the Times and one, I can't remember, The Verge, the Verge. What he's talking about is relevancy, not only with the audience, but with the talent that Meta can hire, the employees that he can attract to Meta. Here's my question to you, and this is a harsh one. No one is ever going to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure Zuck was going to run for president. That's why he was doing that tour around the country in 2016. Didn't work out. That would have been one campaign to watch. They obviously wanted to do crypto, you know. We know that. Didn't work out. And now the Metaverse. If you are a young, talented, 25-year-old engineer and you have your choice of companies to work for,

for, how can you look at meta and not see anything other than a giant project to keep Mark Zuckerberg relevant and interested in coming to work? The problem with meta right now, I would posit, is it is the most in need of its founder stepping aside. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So I will, for the sake of argument, try to articulate the meta position. I think that you still come in to work with the ability to potentially influence a product that 3 billion people use. Indeed. That will always be a big appeal. Then you look at like, so let's say you're deciding between tech giants, there are drawbacks everywhere. You know, Apple tends to hire overqualified people and make them pull their hair out for a number of years and sort of hate their jobs.

They make pretty stuff, but it's a very top-down culture. You probably won't be listened to at Apple. And so if someone wants to, you know, someone's a little bit more ambitious, you know, maybe met as a good place. Amazon, I've wrote about this in my book, always day one, fascinating place to work. Four years at Amazon and you're trained in a way that no other company will train you. There's a ton of autonomy there.

The only downside is that you work like crazy. and it's for some people and not for others. So that does sort of say, okay, a segment of the workforce is not going to go Amazon. I remember one of the most interesting conversations that stood out to me, because obviously they have a lot of holiday volume at Amazon, where I spoke with one ex-employee from the retail organization. He got the job. He tells his family, Daddy's going to war, and he didn't see Thanksgiving for six years.

Yes. You know, Google is interesting, but is there really that big of a difference between Google and Meta, okay, a couple hundred billion dollars on the market cap. You know, but it's still, it's a search, search company. But this is what I'm saying to you. And Microsoft is born. Yes. So a good company.

What I'm saying to you, and this is true of a lot of companies, like if you go to Tesla, you're working for the god Elon Musk. Yeah. At Meta right now, you are working for the god Mark Zuckerberg. As he flails, it feels obvious to everyone. everyone watching that he is grasping at straws, that he's looking around for things. Someday, Ready Player 1 is going to be real. Do we want that?

Doesn't matter. Mark wants it because he wants... Remember, the thing, when people cycle analyze Zuckerberg, remember, he loves civilization, he loves Roman emperors. He cuts his hair like Caesar. He cuts his hair like Caesar. I'm not going to say the kids. He named his kids, yes, you know, after...

Anyway, he, I think cycle analyzing billionaires is something that I try to avoid, but I do it more than I should. I think Zuckerberg realized that what am I going to do? Take over half the world like Angus Khan? No, in the modern era, the thing that is the most power is all of the planet plays in my sandbox, right? And so he's feeling that start to, the sandbox is starting to lose sand slowly. and he's trying to grasp for the next thing to keep everyone playing in my sandbox, playing my game of civilization.

Yeah, but, you know, sorry, go ahead, finish the thought. I feel like that that's transparently what is happening here. The old ideas of we're connecting the world. There's lots of things that are connecting the world. Like, this is not, social network is not new. It's 20 years old. If I'm young and I want to put a debt in the universe, Do I want to do it just to keep a middle-aged man feeling relevant and feeling like coming into work tomorrow?

Well, I would say that if you're a CEO of a company, your job is to grow that company. And if you're working in social media, you are going to deal with existential challenges all the time. This question of like, are we going to be relevant tomorrow has always been with Facebook. And I think that like this idea of like, you know, are you going to be in it for, you know, something exciting or to help, you know, aggrandize a CEO. I mean, it's kind of, it's one of the features of capitalism is when you take a job. That's, that's what you're doing. So, but, you know, I think people can find, listen, it's definitely, I'm not going to, you know, I'm just trying to round out this conversation. Yeah. I don't think it's in a good place. I think it is flailing a little

bit. And let me come back. I'll see, I'll say we'll see what happens when, uh, when, you know, all these crypto jobs start to drive. up or many of them start to dry up. Yes, that's true. Because all the talent was going to crypto. Now that it's not going to go to crypto in the way that it was before, because there's just what it was $3 trillion yesterday and now it's $1 trillion and we'll see how far it will fall. Then we start to see what jobs people are interested in.

And I don't know, just saying, maybe working on Instagram, all your friend choose Instagram, if you find a way to get in there, take on that challenge and write the ship, that's going be something that you can brag about. Except that they seem to be willing to sacrifice Instagram in the hope of staying relevant, as I'm saying. Let's put a bow on it by highlighting, underlining the other thing you said, which is if you're on someone else's platform and they can change a thing and you lose $10 billion worth of revenue.

Yeah. Did you really have a good business model? But to his credit, that's what Zuck has known all along. And why do you think he wants to make the metaphors? Well, I remember, so I sat with him for my book, and the last end of that chapter is all about operating systems. And I was like, what do you feel about the fact that you're the most vulnerable of all tech giants? And you could see him sort of, you know, grimace when he talked about Apple

and, you know, very proudly hold up an Android phone because it's, you know, not Tim Cook trying to constrain him. And obviously the metaverse is the idea to try to get beyond this. However, it seems like it's going to be, you know, quite some time. Okay, I know we want to speak about regulation. We want to speak about Amazon and Shopify, this idea of, you know, the recession, quote, unquote, or maybe, you know, bold print that we're in the travel world and then your thoughts on virtual reality. So why don't we take a break and come back right after this?

Cool, except for the fact that on my show, we don't take breaks. Okay. Well, you'll have to do an edit point right here or leave this in. Okay. So for Big Technology podcast listeners, we'll be back after this. Back on the Big Technology Podcasts and the TechMean Riot Home. Collab crossover episode, this is fun. Yes.

It's nice getting a chance to hang and talk with you, Brian. Just two neighbors, you know, hanging out in the hood. That's right. We don't live far away at all. So I took a shot at the coast, you know, in the first half, but here we are in Brooklyn. Yes, exactly. Obviously, I'm in a glass house and I'm throwing rocks. what do you want to tackle next? Let's do Amazon real quick, because I specifically don't have a lot to say about it other than I want your opinion on what you think of Andy Jassy's first, is it a year or six months at this point?

Somewhere in the middle. Yeah, I feel like he's pulling back, obviously, from certain Bezos things. Is that more personality difference, would you say? Or is it one of those things where if somebody's been in charge for two decades, you have a change of regime, like new ideas are going to flood in because the dam has been broken. Yeah, I think it's area of expertise. So Bezos has always been a retail guy. He started the bookstore.

You know, he started the Everything store. AWS was a side project. Right. The web hosting thing was something that he effectively. So Andy Jassy, for folks who don't know, was the first person to shadow Bezzi. Bezos as his technical advisor, Bezos thought it would be a good idea to have him take every meeting that he took and watch how he used to do. Exactly. Watch how he ran the company. And then the idea was that once Jesse was done after a year and a half or so, he'd be able to go run

something influential within the company. And eventually what he did was, you know, take this product that they were building and run AWS and obviously built it into an extremely successful business. That, to me clearly is, if not the future of the company, at least the future of the companies profits, right? The retail organization operates basically at break-even. It has this advertising business that's doing well and making it look profitable, which it is when you add in the advertising. But it is interesting that JASC is coming from AWS. And I think the challenges, there will be serious challenges for this company, obviously when he started in the pandemic. You know, they ramped, I think it was what, in 24 months, they doubled their capacity, their

fulfillment capacity. And let me tell you something. In 2019, they had a lot of a fulfillment capacity. So the fact that they, they, you know, built these fulfillment centers, hired so many people, you know, and operated in the method where as if the pandemic was perpetual and now they have to pull back. I mean, that is a very, very difficult problem to manage. And that's the, you know, AWS, you know, seems to be trucking quite well. The real question is still growing 40% of it. Yeah, yeah. It's crushing. So the retail, the retail organization is now the question mark at Amazon, which is wild. And I think this is compounded by the fact that Jeff Wilkie, who was the CEO of worldwide consumer Amazon, left the company pretty much as soon as Andy

Jassy was named CEO. Because Wilkie was hoping it was going to take. I think there's a story there. I've heard some chirps, but I'd like to get a little bit more reporting before I nail that one down. and then Dave Clark, who also ran retail, is now on his way to flexport. I'm hoping to have on the show at some point. So what do you do if you're the AWS guy, which JASC is you have the biggest challenge for your company is retail, and those two pillars of the company that your company leaned on to make that retail business run smoothly? Not there anymore. Let me ask you an unfair question that I asked on my show recently.

This is completely unfair. What are the odds at the end of this decade? Amazon has not spun out AWS. So I guess, to frame it properly, by the end of this decade, is AWS inside of Amazon one big tent? Or are they separate companies? I think that it will hold on to AWS as long as it possibly can, unless it's forced, and I don't think it's going to get forced.

I have two reasons for this. Okay. One is spinning off a company sucks. Even if it's, even if it's Jesse's baby. Yes. And because if you think about it, if you go into fulfillment centers, all these fulfillment centers are powered by AWS. If you look at the, you know, things like the Echo and, you know,

that's a run on AWS. When AWS goes down, this stuff goes down. So I think it would be really difficult to extract, you know, these or to delink these two businesses. they're actually more linked than many of us imagined. And yeah, I don't know. I also think that, like, AWS does pump out a lot of cash, which will always make it.

It's almost like this one plus one equals three type of thing where it makes the retail business look better. What do you think? It seems like you think that this is going to break out. I do. Why is that? Just because I think that the consumer business, I understand what you're saying.

that AWS powers all the things. It'll power them going into health care, you know. But I think that the consumer business makes more sense as a consumer business that focuses on consumer things, even consumer health care. And that AWS makes more sense as an arms dealer serving everyone. And I think that also, Jassy being the CEO makes that more likely. But this is one of those things where no one's going to really hate us if we're wrong either way. It's impossible to prognesticate on.

But this does lead me into, I do want to hit Shopify real quick, because Shopify is the, no, Albanian Army, that was the Netflix analogy. Shopify was the Rebel Alliance taking on Amazon. And they haven't

round-tripped all the way back to their IPO valuation because they went public and no one knew who the fuck they were, but they have really round-tripped from their heights. And so, do you have any sense of what's going on there? Like, the glib thing to say is that this is another pandemic casualty, but that can't explain. Their market, gross market, whatever GMV stands for, I can never remember, is still growing.

Right. Why all of a sudden are people so bearish on Shopify? Well, it's a great question. I think there's been this great meme going around where it's like you never want to be Canada's most valuable company. Right. Like, you'll talk about research in motion and BlackBerry and it's like that didn't work out. And Nortel.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is a thing. So welcome the club, Shopify. Yeah. You haven't broken the curse. I mean, it is still worth $43 billion, but it's trading, it's been trading in the 30s. And let's see, last November it was at 157. So that's one heck of a decline.

A couple of things that come to mind. One is that I think investors were largely trading Shopify and belief that it had a future value to bring. And when the rate goes up, then all of a sudden that goes by the wayside. And you've seen Shopify and lots of e-commerce get hit. I also think there was this belief that during the pandemic that we would just stay in that e-commerce world, we haven't. I would also posit that Shopify had more than just the storefronts

that it wanted to make work. It wanted to do its own fulfillment network. They bought a fulfillment company, yeah. What's going on with that? It's gone nowhere. And then, like, I, one last thing. And we talked about, you know, is your business going to be vulnerable

if Tim Cook makes a decision? But it seems clear to me that the fact that companies using Shopify can no longer, you know, optimize their ad campaigns. The cost of acquiring customers has gone up. It's gone up. And if you're on razor-thin margins, which a lot of retail companies are.

And all of a sudden, you know, Apple says, all right, people, if you don't want to be tracked, you don't have to be tracked. Everyone's like, I don't want to be tracked by Facebook anymore. But meanwhile, it does end up hurting a lot of these shops, which in turn hurts Shopify. Yeah. That's dumb of me. I had forgotten the ATT angle. And one more thing.

The supply chain. Can you imagine being, can you imagine, let's take this one example. You are a small business owner that, you know, you got laid off or you got fed up with your in let's say May or June 2020 and you said all right it's time for me to create you know everyone's at home I'm going to create finally my dream company so online you know we'll do stuff pigeons and your stuffed pigeons start flying off the shelves the virtual shelves that is and with Facebook guides you have very low cost to reach people right and the business seems to be doing great and then all of a sudden you can't get your

shipments of yeah you know crates of stuffed pigeons in from China because what used to cost two thousand dollars to ship that container Now it costs 2025. Now the cost is coming down. But when you get hit by this on all angles, you might shut down. And that is something that Shopify will either get hit by or at the very least, the growth that they expected to continue when conditions were good is much harder to come by with all these factors. Or we're in a recession. Look at my segue power here.

That's pretty good. Last week's earnings, you know, everybody in tech reported last week. And there were some bad reports, meta maybe, one of them, you know, shrunk for the first time. Except for the fact that it wasn't disastrous and no one, like Tim Cook said, we see weakness here and there. Google was an interesting one, Alphabet. Because if anybody has a sense of the global advertising market and thus what you're talking about, customer acquisition, and they didn't really sound the alarm that, boy, we're seeing cutbacks everywhere. recession is coming. I'm not going to ask you, no one, there's no one on this planet,

even Warren Buffett, that can predict if we're in a recession, predict when recessions come. But what is your thought in terms of if tech was, tech ballooned during COVID because tech was the first to say, hey, listen, we're still doing pretty good over here. I know everybody's been laid off, but if they're saying it's not that bad, and you're seeing weakness, but it's not that bad, Is that tech being exceptional, and maybe there still will be a recession, but tech will be fine, or maybe we're not having a recession. Yeah, I think tech will generally do better than most sectors in a recession. We talk about Amazon Web Services, which we were just talking about. It's not like enterprise companies are going to shut down their websites because, you know, the economy is contracting a little bit.

That business will still do strong. I saw some analysts talk about how they expected to go down 10%. You know, that seems ridiculous to me. But I also think that a lot of the not too bad moment that we saw was largely because we were expecting really bad. But it was still bad. Like with Apple, for instance, they were expected to take a $4 to $8 billion hit because of supply chain and shutdowns in China. But iPhone still grew 3%. Yeah, a group of MacBooks didn't grow as much as they wanted.

And they said, okay, we came in a little bit under than the $4 billion that we expected. and everyone's like, hot damn, Apple, you crushed it. They still took this three-plus billion-dollar hit. So, I don't know, what's your take? What do you think, do you think we're in a recession? Here's the interesting thing. Recessions are, at least in our lifetimes and at least going back to the 20th century, a binary thing.

Like, you either, it's all or nothing. Like, everything's down. And, like, there's this weird thing where we have inflation right now, but jobs, everybody's, well, not everybody's employed, take this in the spirit. We're close to full employment. Full employment and wages still going up.

You have, I guess what I'm trying to say is, what if we had like a spotty recession? I guarantee you for certain sectors of the tech economy right now, full on recession, full on we've seen layoffs. You're in a depression. But that's my point is that, like, maybe it doesn't matter because if depending on where you are in the economy you're going to be

experiencing one thing or another yeah do you remember after the pandemic they were talking or mid-pandemic they were talking about this K recovery yes where half of the you know half of folks do well have to right right right right right so what if what if like in aggregate everything muddles along and says not that bad just like we said with the tech but if you look at certain areas of the elephant, they're bleeding out, and other areas of the elephant are perfectly fine. It just depends on what part of the elephant you're looking at. That might be what we're doing right now. And it's, it's interesting. I mean, the stock market last week had a very nice. I think the stock market was up something like 7% in July. This month was the best month since 2020. Right. For the stock market.

And people said, I mean, the S&P is still down. By this month, I mean July. Yes. Yeah, the S&P is still, is still down significantly on the year. It's definitely in correction territory. But there were people predicting it was going to be 38%. And it's definitely not there yet. You keep talking about crypto. And so again, I'm saying my thesis is it depends on where you look. Because last week there was another story of Katie Juan. Somebody raised another $500 million crypto fund, right? So if you're saying to me, oh, well, you said sort of obliquely that, well, all those people that were attracted to crypto startups, they're not going to, the crypto startups are going to be gone. I don't know. They're still a freaking, Andreessen has a $5 billion

crypto fund. So you see what I'm saying? Like I get it and I see it in the startups, like, you know, companies that a year ago we'd be looking at to invest in and they'd ask for a $30 million valuation are coming and very happy to get 10, you know. So are you still investing in crypto companies? Um, I've only done two or three. three. When was the last one you did? Not last quarter. So it would have been in the spring. Yeah, I think they will still see action in crypto, but... But this is my point. This is my point.

Right. Okay. Valuations have come down. Yeah. People have been writing, VCs have been writing notes about, you know, hunker down and, you know, and yes, I had an investment blow up in three weeks. Wait, wait, tell that story. How much can you share about that? Well, very good founder who, and literally calls me on the phone three weeks after the check clears and says, listen, the $2 million that I needed from, there's a million dollars from one other investor to close this round, they walked. They're literally ghosting me and not returning their calls, my calls. And so, listen, I'm going to return your money. The check cleared three weeks ago. Okay. Now, at the same time, like, I've seen. rounds where not me but the lead investor said to the company your valuation is

absurd and it got cut in half in two days okay so everybody's in flux right but my point that I'm trying to make here is that like you said about dry powder there's still tons of money the biggest rounds that I've seen this summer right continue to be crypto so you're saying that crypto is whatever but the what we million dollar a rounds, 50 million dollar seed rounds were common six months ago across the spectrum. You only see those in crypto right now. Do you think that crypto is still going to be that hot place to work like it has been over the past couple years? Maybe it is. If that money is coming in,

maybe it is. Yes. I'm looking at the blowups of like, and I want to say to you, Three Arrows Capital and this, Teriluna. But this is based on founders that I'm talking to, young people believe in this. Okay. So I'll admit, maybe I'm wrong about the extent of the damage in crypto. I do look at the big blowups and say... You asked me, am I investing in crypto? Yeah.

I'm not. So that must mean I'm a skeptic on some level if I'm not putting my money where my mouth is. But I'm also saying that I'm seeing the energy, the energy hasn't left. And also, I was involved in the crypto space during the crypto winner in 2017, 2018, after the ICU boom went bust. And those people disappeared for a certain amount of that. Now listen, Brian, you weren't plugged into the circles where I get it. I get it. It's not like that where a wind swept the plane and it was clear. People are still working.

People are still churning. People are still raising big rounds. But there is, yeah, it is interesting. You know, it's this balance because, like, I don't doubt that that's true. I also know that we're seeing a lot of, a lot less NFT profile pictures. pictures on Twitter where it has been and this this is the optimist case we gave the optimist case for Facebook you know let's give the optimist case for crypto and I spoke about this with Gavin Wood on my show a little bit ago he's the co-founder

of Ethereum it could be that a lot of these bad actors you know do get swept out of the system and you know it has its mini financial crisis and actually starts to build based off of that base learning those hard lessons and be useful in a way that people hoped however though I would say the one One issue with that is that it's deregulated by default. And so when the mainstream baking system goes down, it learns lessons that writes on laws, maybe weak laws, but laws that are good enough to keep it out of that same trouble again. And that's how it evolves and gets better.

I wonder if that happens with crypto. I want to say this last thing about crypto and stress again that I don't have any skin in this game. I'm not like a crypto maximalist. I'm not a crypto pessimist. But let me play the devil's advocate of crypto pessimist right here. And Jason Calacanis has sort of been banging the spell for a while, and he's clearly a pessimist. Although not, Jason once told me that he thought he was going to put 5% of – everyone should put 5% of their money into Ethereum just as a hedge for the future or whatever. Here's the cynics take that I've heard of crypto, and it's a cynic bull case.

We need one more pump to happen. The big pulls of money do. So there's a lot of people that have told me, oh, I guarantee you crypto will go back to its highs at some point over the next three years because all of this money needs it to happen. And the reason is because in the coin tokenization economy, you don't need 10 years for your investment to pay off. You just need your investment to get hot, have an ICO, and have a liquid coin that you. And so there's so much money going into crypto that they're going to need to pump those bags one more time to get out clean. But who's going to put that money in? Is it going to be the retail?

It's the $5 billion. Oh, when the pump happens, oh, yeah, right. No, retail is going to be left holding the bag like it has in the past. I wonder if people are learning their lesson now. The only fly in that ointment is if the SEC or FTC does crack down, let's say tomorrow the SEC goes to Coinbase and, says, by the way, 90 of these coins on your exchange are, what's the word I'm looking for? Securities. That's going to put a crimp in a lot of things.

You mean we're not going to be able to trade bullshit the coin anymore? Yeah, right, right, right. So there's a race between can we pump the bags? This is the cynics take. This is not Brian's take. Right. One more time. And then we'll get out.

Yeah. It's sort of, it's like every bubble. Can you get out Indiana Jump Style, pull your hat out before the door crashes down? I think it might be over, but I can be proven wrong. I do think that there is potentially interesting applications of this. Positive take is tons of smart people believe in this. There's tons of energy. That to me is just, it's not enough.

I need more than that. Okay. Let me give you, this is adjacent. This is at the end of our show running notes here. But I felt that way about VR. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about... And so this gets to the metaverse because crypto plugs into the metaverse as sort of like your...

Doesn't really have to, though. Digital property. But this is the bull case. Okay. Okay. I love this example that you're about to cite. Okay. On whatever the app is, it's one of the...

VR chat. VR chat. I think it might be on by meta. I can't remember. Somebody has created a virtual Kmart that thousands of people play in all the time. And you do essentially role-playing games in the same way. Right. You work as a cashier in VR.

Right. And you go and you buy something and you check out and whatever. Listen, Alex, in 1990, I was the captain of a starship in a text-based Star Trek role-playing game on the prodigy message boards. Okay. This is the sort of grassroots from the bottom up sort of creativity that says to me there's energy in a space. Okay. It doesn't say to me there's energy in a space if people create a coin that its whole purpose is to just get a $10 billion market cap and then all of a sudden rug pool and go to wherever. People with no monetary incentive, nothing other than this is just cool, I want to do this. That, and I've been skeptical on VR since I've been an adult because since I've been an adult, VR was always the next big thing and it never has been.

You see things like that happen where there's no goddamn good reason for this. It's just it's fun and people want to do that. That's where then eventually accidentally someone creates a business out of it later on. So your skepticism about crypto is, and I agree with you, that it's been a lot of the pretty people doing a lot of just get rich quick stuff. But in a winter, people in crypto, in VR do things like, hey, let's create a virtual Kmart. Yeah. And play in it, thousands of us every day. Yeah.

And I think that really goes to the size of the market question, right? Which is, is the size of the market in VR going to be more than gaming? There was an article that we both read before. And I think it was by Ryan Broderick or Casey Newton about how Facebook is actually selling an amazing number of Oculus headsets compared to the Xbox or the PlayStation. But if that's the comp, you're looking at it. it in the gaming world, right? So there is, you know, a ceiling there. It is a great gaming service that people might really like, but it's not this new verse, no, new universe of interaction. Right, because you're not hearing of someone playing the Red Dead redemption of VR or the

Fortnite of VR. You're not hearing that because it's not happening. Yeah, but even, but even that is, it is a gaming use case. And if it is great, it's a good business for them. But it's a gaming business, which means that it's total addressable market is much smaller. And now I think we're the same place with crypto where we know there's going to be something, I think. And the question is, is it the change the world use case like the Web 3 evangelists want it to be, which their parallel would be Zuckerberg and change the company in the meta? Or is it going to be something smaller? Maybe it can to gaming for the Oculus.

And if it gets into like Xbox territory, great. You know, that's pretty good. But we'll see what happens. You know, real quick, and then we'll do our last one, which we should do the travel one. problems. Yes. See, you and I have similar hosting instincts. You know Bobby Goodlottie?

Yes. He's done Twitter threads and he did a Twitter space and I've tried to get him to come on my show to talk about this. But here's my biggest problem with crypto right now as an investor and as just an observer of the space is that Bobby's thing was like, can we just get the religion out of this? Like, why does it have to be? It's almost like crypto as a space is hamström. by the fact that it has to adhere to the dream of Satoshi or whatever the fuck, right?

And so it is, I never ask you if I could curse on your show. I'm sorry. If you have to go back and... You can now. If you've got to go back and edit, I apologize. Yeah, yeah. That's my problem where in this space there are good ideas that I see happening, even in things like Dow's, which seem crazy to people and stuff like that. But good idea, good idea, good idea.

And then we're going to do it on the blockchain. to do a token. And half the time I'm like, but why? Yeah. What is the point of, well, because we have to adhere to this religion that we've come up in. And on top of that, like, the point that I've made on my show is the number one thing to get a company successful is to delight a customer. And if every time you try to delight a customer, you make them jump over this hurdle that you have imposed because of your religion that complicates it and makes it less delightful to them, then you're not going to have a successful product. Ryan, I think that's spot on.

I think that there's a difference between building technology that's useful to people, which I think a lot of people in crypto are trying to do, and running a religion. And I think that it has become a religion for a lot of people who do see, you know, these messianic use cases for it. And so, you know, Bobby and I, we've gone back and forth. Maybe I can tell you off the air about it. I don't know, we got into some spat, but I think everything's good now. But his idea of taking the religion out of crypto, there's only one reaction to that.

I'm doing a stand ovation here. I'm standing up and applauding, take the religion out of it. And you might be able to... And by the way, the blockchain can have use cases. But that's my point, is that you're bending over backwards to fit everything into this blockchain mold that you have. Exactly. And we've seen that on like the three avatar show where like people come in and try to give use cases

for Twitter and they're just absolutely destroyed. Okay, travel? Yes. So I read this great story on Curbd about how you can no longer flight hack. Yes. And even like, you know, the people who are like airline, you know, status members or... Mile runners? Can I tell you a story? This is why I wanted to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I once flew. I've only been to Hawaii once in my life. I flew to Hawaii for 24 hours because I was doing a status run because, Delta was doing this insane deal that I would, it was like a, it was like a $1,200 ticket, right? And so it's like a, I was living in Detroit at the time. So I can't remember it was like a 15-hour flight each way. Where did you connect in the Philippines or something? No, it was direct. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. But that was the point. No, no, no. I had to drive to Pittsburgh from Detroit,

fly out of Pittsburgh. I knew it couldn't have been that easy. Exactly. But it was a $1,200 ticket. So it was, okay, wait, I can either try to do all this with the credit cards or do these many flights. I'd have to do like four or five flights. This one flight, it'll be over in three days. I'll get to see Waikiki Beach and I'll turn around and come back. Yeah. Right. So I am...

So you did that to get status. To get status because I ended up getting like 70,000 miles or some shit and they were MQMs. Yeah. So listen, I'm a points guy and a flight runner from way back. so I get this. Yeah, but like all this stuff that's happening is basically the article says that you can't really hack flights. It's just going to be miserable, you know, for you or, you know, basically there's not

much you can do. And the kicker is amazing. It says if it's less than seven hours drive. Just drive. And, you know, this is another great line. Airlines will laugh in your face as you scroll the points guy while maybe getting your third round of COVID in the airport. Like, it has become such a disaster.

I'm saying this as I'm about to get a flight. So, you know, pray for me, everyone. But I do think that the state of travel right now, it's a pain that, you know, a lot of us are traveling over the summer. You know who you should have on your show? Do you know Rafat Ali who runs sketch? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah. Although I'm happy to have him.

I don't mind. I feel like every time I see Rafat tweeting one of my stories, like he's always saying something negative about it. So you and your media beefs. I think, yeah, I got a lot of haters out there. I think Rafat might be among them. But if he wants to come on the show, you know, he's welcome. And people who don't like what I'm doing, like, I'm happy to have them on. The point of what's happening with travel right now is forget mileage runs and points.

I didn't even know there are such things as a mileage. Hackers. Oh, there's entire websites that used to exist. And I did this more than a decade ago, so I haven't done it recently. But, like, that will tell you, that will scan the things and be like, If you fly to Tauos and then down to Fort Lauderdale and do this, you'll get the maximum. It's all about getting the maximum amount to get the status and get them, whatever. And the airlines know that, and that's how they fill.

Look, the point of this travel stuff is, forget that. You can't even do connecting flights. Don't do a trip that requires you to have, forget, a 50-minute layover in Detroit. A three-hour layover in Detroit might not work for you. Like, that's the point. And the interesting thing to me is, like, it's sort of like how people in America don't realize that inflation as a problem is global. Like, I first started hearing about this from my friends in Britain when, like, Heathrow was, like, lines for 12 hours and people's bags getting lost or whatever. Like, this is, to me, and you're closer to this than I am, this is the whole, this is the globalization.

infrastructure that has existed since the 90s, COVID broke it. Now, either it's reconstituting itself and rebuilding or it's not, but right now it is not functioning as a healthy system. Yeah, I think this is definitely a COVID outgrowth where people were at home for so long and are now doing what's called revenge travel. And I've done it and it's awesome, but it just stinks being in the airport. So, look, my advice here, so why don't we end with our number one? tip. Yes. And then my advice to everyone is if you're flying this, this is a hilarious segment

to end on. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're flying this summer, buy one piece of advice. It's obvious, but it served me well, is if you can help it at all, just go carry on. And there's a form of backpack that I just discovered. It's called the MCL, which just means the maximum, no, MLC, the maximum legal carry on. And you can get it as like a 45-liter backpack, go out, make the investment, I'm trying to fly with it now. I'm not checking that thing. And then you won't worry about your badge. You're just got to worry about the delays and stuff like that in the crowded airports and the

cancellations. But I will take one big issue off of your plate. And if you can roll your clothes up and fit it in that carry-on, you can be a happy camper. Well, I don't know about your MCU backpack, because I haven't even thought of losing the bag stuff. but I would say no connecting flights. No connections. Pay the extra money to go direct or fly at 5 a.m. to go direct

because that lessens the odds of stuff going bad. Can I tell one more story before? So I was flying from New York to Vegas doing a bachelor party for one of my friends, not in Vegas in Utah. It was clean, wholesome fun, you know, hanging out in Zion National Park, which was awesome. and we there was a storm on the way to Nevada and that would have added about an hour of flight time and the co-pilot that was coming in you know with that extra hour was now illegal to fly because he would

be in the air too long right right and so like we were just sitting there and just waiting you know to be deplaneed and then some guy sitting in like row 15 raises his hand he's like I'm a pilot I work for Delta just put me in the co-pilot seat and I'll get you there And he apparently hadn't started drinking yet. So they're like, they told us this all over the intercom. They're like, all right, well, we're going to log him in and away we go. And it was a miracle. And we got there.

So your travel tip is fly with a pilot. Get your pilot's license. Yeah. And pray for the best. This has been fun. Yeah, Alex, listen, again, you've been on the show a couple times so people know big technology podcast, big technology newsletter. Yeah.

If someone listening right now, what would you rather than do, listen to the podcast or subscribe the newsletter? I think the podcast is where folks who, especially if you're here to this point of the show, you enjoy the audio format. I work hard on both. But if you want to check out the podcast, like I said, I think it's a nice compliment to TechMine right home. And if you're a big technology podcast listener and you're here with us to this point, I recommend TechMine right home. You're going to like it. And it's a nice compliment to my show. and I think for listening to both of them, you know,

we'll just make the experience much richer, you know, for each episode. Well, and you'll hear Alex on it, even when he's not verbally on it. Are you reading my dumb tweets? When he has a scoop, I will do the story on my show and read his dumb tweets. Yeah, absolutely. So apologies for the tweets. I'll work hard to reel those in, but it's just the impulse. I don't think of you as a dumb tweeter at all.

Thank you, man. Thank you. Brian, this has been fun. Yep. How do you usually sign off your show? When I do the thing with Christmas Sina, I stumbled on to my closing catchphrases. I love everybody. That's a great one.

Do you want to know why? Why? Because we usually do them late at night, like 9 p.m. on a Thursday. And so to get to sleep afterwards, I have to take gummies. Oh, okay. So I'm stoned half the time when we enter our show at like 10.30 at night. And so just one night, I'm like, I don't know, man. I love everybody.

That's a great way. So now I say I love everything. So I love everybody. Okay. Well, just a quick thank you to the team that helped me with Big Technology Podcast, LinkedIn, for having me as part of the podcast network, Nick Watney, the master of audio and all of you, the listeners. And to all tech me right home listeners that have stuck around would love to have you on the feed.

We do our show every Wednesday with a tech insider, our outside agitator. And with that, I just want to say, I love everybody. I love Alex. Thanks, man. Thank you.