Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Listener Call In III - Son Of The Call-in-a-ning

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

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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. It was kind enough to help me get set up here. And Brett, let's consider ourselves going. And I'll keep letting people in as we go here.

But Brett also was someone that was kind enough to pop up a question on the subreddit. And it's something that I actually wanted an excuse to talk about, which is the iPhone lineup. So Brent, go ahead and hit me with you. your question and let's start talking about iPhones. So it's kind of three pretty random trends, but one of them is iPhone thickness. And this is more of an observation. I'm necessarily expect you to have any answers. But we hit the point where it was down to 6.9 millimeters with the iPhone 6. And that was bend gate, right? And most of those gates are the kind of thing

where you expect it to just kind of go away. It's not really that big of a deal. People are stress testing it, they find these limitations to make a big deal out of it, and then it goes away. But you saw Apple over the next four generations of iPhone increase the thickness all the way up to 8.3 with the 10R and the 11. So what was the thinnest that they ever achieved? Or which version was the thinest? The 6 was 6.9 millimeters. And then they increased it a little bit, every generation up to the 10R, and then the 11 were both 8.3. And now with the 12, we're back down to 7.4. And I understand there's the design change from

the rounded sides to straight sides. And so it feels larger than it does because of the flat sides. But I feel like at some point, Apple was admitting like, oh, yeah, we did make these things too thin. And it was a bit of a problem. Widespread enough. I don't know that that's it. Because we know that the reason is, is when they change the screens, like they need more battery. And we know, because they've told us multiple times that, you know, the 5G modem is a huge power suck. I mean, that's why we're anticipating that the, you're going to get less of a battery life from these phones anyway. But it's so funny that you said that because I, because, you know, you do the trade in, right? So I had a good 72 hours with both phones that you can put in your hand. This, I have the 12

max and I know that it's slightly bigger but it was noticeably heavier and like that's that's my tipping or my launching off point to talk about this is like this is starting to approach like more than I want in terms of size in my pocket and like this is starting to feel like a serious brick um I don't know if that's going along to your question I don't know that I want a thinner phone though Like, I do like the design better. It feels better in the hand. It doesn't feel like a soap bar that, you know, will just slip right out or anything.

But I don't know. What are your impression? I'm assuming you have a new one. Well, I just ordered the max last night. So, or this morning, I guess, very early. But yeah, and I'm, like, I don't, the thing I'm thinking about is, like, I fix it tear downs are not revealing some sort of internal structure

that's going to keep these things from bending. And like the physics aren't really changing. Like, are they just, I'm just wondering, like, are they running towards the problem that they had before that they seemed to admit that was a problem and they made it thicker? But yeah, I mean, the weight is an issue. Like, as you said, like, it is heavier.

And I think the stainless steel perhaps gives it a little more structure. But now, see, I'm going to, I'm hedging on it's maybe, getting to be too heavy or too big to me. At the same time, I'm more satisfied with this. This feels more substantial like it's rugged, right? And that's actually what I wanted to talk about is, so I'm one of those people that does an upgrade every two years. And I always upgrade, like, you know, if I never got the 10, I got the 10 S, right? Because whatever they introduce in that first year, I wait for the second. iteration of it for whatever reason. I don't know, because it's not like these things are ever

horribly bad. Like, the worst we ever got was, you know, you're holding it wrong, right? But what that allows me to have the sensation of is that, you know, when I go from, when I have this two-year jump, like every time, so how many iPhones would that mean that I've had in my life? What is that? Six-ish, maybe? Right, six. So, a thing. Thank you for the fingers there. This is the first time that I've done an upgrade where it's like, oh, that is a noticeable difference. And I'm saying even when I did that went up to the 10S, so that's the first time that I got portrait mode. That's the first time that I got the modern versions of the cameras.

And my leap in photography was so significant that I was like, okay, this is the first time where I'm like, I really can't tell the difference in my day-to-day usage between my old phone and my new phone. And because it feels substantial to me and because it's got 5G, I'm saying that I think that this is the first time where this might be a phone that will last me four years. The only thing, because, and this is what we did the story on today, is you saw that upgrade. They're saying, well, the upgrade next year, and this is super early to be speculating about this stuff. oh, you're just going to get a slightly better third camera, right?

And I'm sure Apple will say all sorts of great things that you can do with that camera, but that won't be enough for me or for anybody. Like the only thing, does anyone know is it, we don't have the millimeter wave on any of these, right? So if that becomes more ubiquitous, maybe to get the better 5G, I would maybe want to upgrade, but I just can't see any. I'm literally, we've been saying it for decades, peak phone, there's nothing more they can do to these.

I really think that I would have this thing for four years and not care, and that's the first time I felt that way. The 12s do support millimeter wave, US only though. Right, that's right. I did that. See, it's funny. I remember now that I said that. I can't remember what I say from day to day. So, yeah, what do you think about the idea that maybe peak phone has finally arrived? I can't think of anything substantial that they could give me that would be like, oh, I'm going to miss, I have FOMO. What do you think they could possibly do that would make you think FOMO within two years? I mean, honestly, I was on the two-year cycle until the seven,

and the year that it came out, my son, my first son had just been born a month ahead of time, and I just, like, everything was crazy, and I just didn't even bother upgrading. and so I'm upgrading from the seven this year. And the seven's been fine. Yeah. This whole time. I mean, and that's enough of a leap that you would certainly notice a huge difference. But yeah, I mean, it doesn't feel faster.

And I know that the photographs I've taken so far look better. But again, it's not like the jump to portrait that was so significant, you know. I am. So I'm curious about this. because Apple never mentioned it as far as the lens. On the Pro Max, the wide camera, the 26 millimeter camera, has the larger sensor, but what they didn't mention is what that means is the lens itself is different.

Now, the lens has the same seven-element design, and it has the same 1.6 aperture. But the lens itself, to get that same 26-millimeter perspective, the lens itself has to be larger. than it is on the 12 Pro. So I'm curious what that's going to actually come out in day-to-day as far as like vignetting on the lens, sharpness around the edges.

And a lot of that stuff you can sort of correct in software. So I don't necessarily think you're going to see a huge difference out of the stock camera app. So I'm curious to see like Austin Mann's review will probably be out next week. The Hallide review will be out at, at some point. So I'm curious to see what the difference is in the lens, because the lens itself has to be different. And Apple's not talking about it like it's different. They're listing the same

specs, but it could potentially, there could be some factors there other than the larger sensor. By the way, just to jump in because I'm trying to parse like the depth of this conversation because like it's interesting. On the one hand, you know, they're always going to make more Porsches and BMWs. and there's always going to be, you know, little angles that maybe are a little bit more interesting or fashionable and we'll get bell bottoms again and et cetera and so forth. So there's, on the one hand, there's just kind of recycling, you know, a site. Like there's only so many things you can do with this workhole, you know, in those shapes. My question, and maybe it's more interesting to me, is I think, you know, in the four years that it'll take for you to upgrade again, Brian, what is it that the phone has become? because at least with this iteration,

what is interesting is the direction of bringing, charging, you know, like the phone itself becomes a hub for your other devices. And so that's true for AirPods. That's true for maybe the watch. And so what other, that'll be true for the, whatever their tiles are going to be called? And what is the point of those tiles, right?

Like, I feel like, yes, like tile exists as a separate company and as a product to, like, find the things that you might lose. But I feel like Apple House. to have a much bigger, more interesting consumer play where there's a story about, you know, having things in your environment or something and that the phone interacts with those things from an augmented reality perspective. And while, yes, like making static photos or live photos with a better camera is sort of interesting, LiDR and 5G, meaning that you interact with the world through your phone and through

your device and through like the glasses eventually in a way that is different than it is today. So I feel like we could keep talking about how the phones have been used for the last 10 years and presume that things are just going to persist, just like we've had cars for the last 100 years. And so we'll just presume that cars will be the same for the next 100 years. But I feel like that's not the way that this is actually going to go. By the way, people on the Zoom call can see that that's Chris Messina,

but we didn't introduce you, Chris. But see, that's why you're Chris Messina, because you're thinking of product in a much more sophisticated way than I ever do. Okay, so you've already talked to me into it. The argument that you're making is that they're... You may have bought the last phone phone of the phone generation of phones. Exactly. So you're saying that it's, didn't we talk about this once about how this, this goes back to the whole Steve Jobs idea of a hub for all of your devices that used to be the Mac and now it's the phone?

And you're saying that they're positioning, what will get me to upgrade in two years is if it's, you know, the charging connected to my watch. Maybe it's battery, maybe it's storage, maybe it's speed of, of transfers. So the reason why I bring this up, and for at least the people who are here, I'm going to share a blog post that I wrote, where I named the iPad, the iPad before it was named. Oh, it was November 5, 2007. So there you go. Anyways, the reason why I bring this up is more the way that I was thinking about the iPad, right? So imagine designing the iPad before the iPad exists. That's what I tried to do with this post.

And basically I said, let's get rid of a bunch of assumptions about what computers are. and move a bunch of the hardware, i.e. the mouse and the keyboard, into the software, which is basically what happened. And it was sort of like, let's take the phone form factor and stretch it out a little bit. And so I'm trying to imagine a similar transition that's that we are about to go through where macOS starts to dissipate in a kind of iOSified, like, concept. The iPad is the bridge between those two worlds. And so four to five years from now and the future, we're dealing with and interacting with the operating systems in a very different way, where maybe we're interacting with a world in a more, I don't know,

where computing basically is everything around us, as opposed to going through this device and then getting sucked into it. Right. And the LiDAR, as people have hinted at, despite my sort of poo-pooing it, like that's leading us in that direction where, yes, okay, a potential FOMO for me is if there is real utility for doing serious AR in the real world and that LIDAR sensor is the first step in that. Well, because so the other reason why I bring this up is because of the way in which identity plays a role in what you just described as like the phone being the hub. The phone is kind of what you authenticate into.

And that gives you access to all of your sort of rundles across all of your Apple services and entertainment and so on. So if you carry that device and it's constantly, exactly like as Peter said, clips. Basically, you're streaming everything around you in partial components of functionality. So if I want an Uber, I just kind of ask Siri to get me a ride. And there's a bidding process that happens where there's a bunch of service providers. And then I get the app clip when the car arrives and I do the Apple payments. And then I get in and I go. And it all happens sort of seamlessly. But as opposed to the concept now where in order to use some software, I have to download it first,

and then it's to set up an account and go through all that ritualistic process, I feel like what Apple is moving towards. And I've said this with regards to, you know, if Apple comes out with his own search engine, we shouldn't assume that the Apple search engine would be like Google. Essentially what the Apple search engine would be, would be more like the App Store, where it's an authenticated environment where every website you go to essentially can know who you are potentially if you want using Apple Sign-in

and you get instant personalization for all of that stuff. The social stuff, obviously, Apple doesn't really care that much about. That's not really their game. But I do think that an authenticated, secure environment is the future that they want to provide people. And all transactions sort of happen within that computing paradigm. Peter, I unmuted you. Jump in here. Yeah, so I think Chris did service to the app clips comment.

But I also have this feeling that society and phone users are starting to recognize the value, the daily value of having the best. iPhone. So say more about that. What is the more ecosystem. The bigger the ecosystem app clips, the new magsafe stuff, NFC actually I think there are two NFC readers on the phone, the latest iPhone. iPhones cost about a dollar or two per day to have the best iPhone. You end upgrading like every year, every other year. So I think it's It's possible that people will be willing to spend a dollar or two per day when they already spent $4 a day on coffee.

And Chris is right to make the point to come back to the sort of reductive way I was looking at it initially was that Apple's ammo is not to like telegraph the thing that, especially a year out, that would make me have FOMO. they because whatever that thing is like they you know they've been developing it for six years and they'll bring it out when the time is right and so he's right to say that you know it's it's often when you know they get accused of not being able to innovate my ass you know like that sort of thing that's because they're they're holding their fire until they can bring they don't just do like unnamed other companies do

where it's, bam, new feature as soon as we can do it. Bam, new feature as soon as we can do it without any sort of overall. Chris is right to say they think, and Peter, they think of the overall ecosystem in a holistic way. And so whatever that next, if Chris is right that this is the last phone phone, whatever the next thing that an iPhone is going to be beyond just a phone, they're not going to bring it out until they can bring out five or six bells and whistles at once instead of just, okay, here's the next iterative feature. And I think night mode photography is a really good example of that.

See, I haven't, yeah, I haven't played around with that enough yet. Go ahead. Everyone, like Google was ahead on the night mode stuff, but it just, it didn't quite have that natural feeling. And to think that Apple hadn't been working on it up to that point is nonsense. Like, they were absolutely working on it and they just weren't happy with it until last year. And now that now that they have it, they're continuing, the software isn't enough. So they're continuing to push their hardware so that they can make their night mode software better. And it's that complete package. It's the integrated design that Apple is known for.

But the software isn't enough. But they use the software to great effect. So two other things that I would add to this. One is what is the significance of Apple Silicon over time for the phone, for the iPads, and so forth? Like, what does that allow them to do in terms of size, heat, efficiency, security? And then, what was the thing you just said? Oh, you're talking about night mode. Oh, and then I was going to say, and what is the sort of long-term consequence of Apple's privacy stance towards its ability to create better machine learning models that actually can rival, let's say, what Google does, right?

So Google's night mode would be so good because they train it on everyone's Google photos. Apple ostensibly can't do that. I don't know what training sets they use or that they get, but I would imagine that it's harder for them to do some things, especially search, if they restrict themselves from accessing information. So those are two other things that I would add into this or ask about. Like, what does Apple Silicon do for them in terms of unblocking stuff?

And then what is their AI ambitions? How is that impacted by their approach to data privacy? Can I, Peter, I want to, we'll stay on phones, but we'll jump over because in the chat you had asked a, about Google phones and the pixels. And was it you that asked last time if we? Yeah. Yeah.

So what do you think based on what we've seen now from the pixels this year? Yeah. So I think it was kind of obvious that this is the way it was going. The pixel four was not really that much better than the pixel three. And it seems like Google has either given up on the high end or has just given up on being a taste

maker in phones or at least trying to compete with Apple. So I'm wondering what you all think if they're just tailoring off or if this is their new spot in the market. This is another one where Chris would be closer to knowing people who would know the answer to that. My more outsidery take is that, yeah, it's totally obvious that the main and one overriding reason for, oh, sorry, Chris, I'll unmute you in a second. The overrising reason for the pixel was to essentially shame the entire Android ecosystem

into being good, right? Now, you don't have to do that by making a $1,500 phone necessarily. You don't always have to knock it out of the park. But if you're not going to produce a phone that says this is the best of what Android can be, then what are you doing? Because, you know, okay, someone says somewhere that, okay, we need to have volume sales, otherwise we can't justify this entire project. But you're not going to, I mean, you can get volume by producing the best $600 phone, but is that really going to move the needle enough to justify all of the research that they're doing to try to make the best Android phones possible?

I don't know. Chris, what do you think without, you know, naming names or anything? Do you think this is just the case of another one of like Google's going to board of it and they're done. Well, again, I think this has to, to me the way I think about it is, like, are we talking about phones or are we talking about essentially a flagship into a relationship that somebody has in the company? I'm actually, I'm full stop talking about Google still doing hardware for anything, you know.

No, but I'm saying something a little bit different, which is it is not clear to me, and I don't know the economics of it, that the economics of producing a phone are as expensive. as it used to be. So in other words, like, maybe it was costly before for Google to basically put out sort of like a best-and-breed phone, and it was very important for them to lead the industry to establish a beachhead for Android to basically say, okay, the phones don't suck. You know, the software doesn't suck. Like, it's actually usable, right?

So maybe that mission has been accomplished, you know, not in the George Bush sense, but in actually kind of like getting like Google services out there. And it's like, yes, it's good. And so it's less important. about the phones, because as we were just talking about, it's sort of whittling away and putting bell bottoms on the thing, and it's like, okay, it's just coming around in stylistic terms. What I think is interesting is to think about the subscriptions

that we're going to pay to each of these companies and whether or not that sort of there's enough value in those subscriptions, right? And it's interesting, one more thing. If you, I don't, I assume, yeah, so the Google said the Pixel 5 is the most current phone. If you actually Google for iPhone 12 or, pixel 5, the ads that come up are very interesting. So Apple owns all the iPhone ads at the top, but for the pixel 5, it's like the carriers. It's like Verizon and 18T, and I don't even know what

visible is, but I presume it's, I don't know what that is, but point being that these devices are a means to get into a subscription relationship with some other company. And Apple wants to own that relationship. And what's interesting about Google and what they're doing with GoogleFi is that Google is also providing the connectivity. And I don't know exactly how that plays out for Apple. So essentially what you're saying, in the same way that it doesn't make sense to anybody

but the players for everyone to have a play in smart speaker, for everyone to have a play in smart screen, for everyone to have a play in home security, except for the fact that, coming back to what you said at the very beginning, this is all connected completely where if you're getting, into, we've talked forever about ecosystem lock-in,

but essentially what we're talking about is lifestyle lock-in. I think, so, but it's exactly that, that we are finally getting to the point where the panzer tanks, you know, metaphorically, are sort of in position, and the battle lines are being drawn, and we're actually now seeing what it looks like for Monopoly players to start really, like, competing and fighting on a different set of battles.

Like, again, this idea that the phone is this precious idea that we need to keep thinking of as a phone, I think is missing the point where these companies are, which is four to five years in the future. And they're building in an assumption about building a relationship with a person from cradle to grave and, of course, from children on, that you will have a relationship with one of those companies and you will pass down the hardware and you'll just have a relationship with them eternally. Like, it would be hard enough for me to exit the Apple ecosystem now. But if like, you know, you have young kids and you give them an Android device,

they may learn all of the mechanics of the Android operating system such that they can't actually easily switch in the future and all their photos are stored with Google and and and like even though sorry just to add this in even the fact that I think Facebook has been advertising either on your show or other shows about how they're like sponsoring and working on data portability it's almost like it's like too late it doesn't matter like you can get your data out you can't take it anywhere but even then it's like our relationships are so deeply wound into some of these companies for a large number people, that moving doesn't really even make sense. So I feel like that lock-in has happened. And so for Google, the phone is like a necessary piece to have. It's sort of like a steering wheel

in a car, but it's not the car. So they'll never, they'll never completely do away with it, right? Exactly. And then that's sort of also the argument for what people have been saying, there's an entire generation of kids that have been trained on Chromebooks. And so in the same way that our generation was trained on Apple 2 E's. That didn't work out for Apple the first time, maybe it'll work out for Google or whoever this time. Yeah, Brett. So I feel like I used Android for a little while,

and the biggest downside, and it seems that it continues today, is the lack of OS software updates. And I think that's a huge factor in what allowed me to use my iPhone 7 for four years is I've been getting consistent software updates. And so, like, in some senses, it might be better. Like Peter was saying, like, having the latest hardware does give you advantages. And so if you want the latest software, you are kind of forced to get the latest hardware. So it's kind of a weird way of thinking about it, but it could be an advantage for the Android ecosystem.

But I'm just wondering, like, what you guys might think the factors are there. Why does this continue to be a problem for Android so many years? later that they can't keep their phones getting software updates. Well, but then that was also what the whole pixel was supposed to nudge people in the direction of doing, and it just, it hasn't worked. It also was a way for Google to try to get a relationship with the carriers. And back to what Chris was talking about, like, the carriers don't seem to want the pixels. They're not pushing the pixels.

So, I don't know, now I'm arguing myself back to let me. It seems like Google has enough money, though. If they really wanted that relationship to happen, they could make it happen. They could incentivize the carriers to do that. You would think that, although in the current environment, I don't know how heavy-handed they could be with that. Mike, I unmuted you because you had a question in the chat from a while ago. So if you have any thing you'd like to add to this conversation, jump in. Oh, sure.

Well, Chris just mentioned like that. I thought that point was interesting about, like, using apps and not going through the App Store. But I was just, like, curious about how that fits in the context of this discussion. Like, maybe LiDAR is a better way of identifying who you are. But, like, in principle, you could do that interaction with the tech that exists now. So what is it about the new phone that makes that more appealing? Chris, yeah, because I'm not sure. Okay, let me try to like parse that a little bit or maybe rephrase some of the things that I was saying.

You know, one thing that is interesting and this question about, well, I'm sorry, I'm going to like jump around a little bit, but there is an interesting like sequence or period of time that Apple bakes into the products that you buy. So it's interesting. Like, you know, unlike Tesla, like when you buy a phone from Apple, like you actually own it unless you're, let's just go with that, right? And it gives you a certain number of years of, you know, performance and use. And then even a couple, well, recently, obviously we find that after a couple of years, the battery starts to like die off or whatever and it's problematic. And then Apple basically just end of life's, their operating system updates for previous

products, right? Like I have an iPad mini and basically it's stuck at iOS 12. It's basically a piece of junk now. It doesn't do a bunch of the authentication things that I would expect it to do. And so those conveniences that are brought about by some of the security chips, you know, whether it's Apple Silicon or not, that are part of the newer devices that encourage you to sort of decide that the inconvenience of, you know, the thumb press or whatever, the touch ID, you know, is worth the upgrade or something. It just sort of like rates on you. I think what I was saying about like LIDAR and authentication and continuous authentication and stuff like that and new devices is that there is that there is. is actually a lot of machine learning that goes into deciding whether a person is likely to be who they say they are and whether they're likely to be a real person. And that the capabilities

of modern processors are such that they need to be very performance, very efficient with power, and yet constantly calculating the likelihood that you are who you say you are. And I can say this because having worked at Uber, one of their biggest cost centers, at least when I was there back in 2016, you know, was fraud from the thousands and thousands of devices that people would buy in China and attached to dogs to sort of walk around neighborhoods to basically, you know, get fares. And if we are able to move to a world where authentication just sort of happens and you get access to everything in the app store, sort of for your one low price for your Apple subscription on an annualized basis, that becomes very interesting and very compelling. That specific thing is probably

not going to happen, but it should start to open our eyes to the possibility of what it means to live in the Apple universe in a very deep, like, committed way. Well, and also on a fundamental level, remember there was that fad, boy, it was a decade ago now or something for the idea that maybe what will happen is that the smartphone will get so smart that it'll be the thing that we inject into the computer. There was a, I was at a CES one year where there were all these computers where it's like, you put it in the dock, and then you use your phone as the computer. or that's not never happened, but it's almost where the phone does become sort of not just the key card.

Well, it unlocks so much, right? Not the mothership of your entire digital daily life, but maybe closer to the key card. Well, it's sort of tethered, and then, you know, it's sort of like phones home to the server and make sure things are still good. And again, it's already becoming your key car. Your key car. No, your car key. Your car key. Right. So there are elements of that where we're starting to live inside of an authenticated

secure enclave, and that is opening up new types of experiences on these devices, specifically payments and access to services. I want to wrap up phones after this last question, but Peter, go ahead and make your comment because this is coming back to now, how much longer will Google do Android, but this is a good point, too. So, yeah. Not Android, but hardware. Sorry.

Go ahead. Yeah, I guess just to add on to my previous question. question about the pixel Google giving up on pixel. I also feel like they're signaling that they're not caring about the Android ecosystem when they haven't really made a good competitor to the iPad, whether that's hardware or Android tablet OS. But they're not alone in that because that continues to be one of the more mysterious things to me is the tablet somehow continues to be essentially an Apple-only category. I mean, I know that probably if you look at volume, maybe the Amazon version of the forked Android tablets maybe has sold a shit ton, but, you know, how far into

the iPad era are we? And there is no, at least Android is a Pepsi to iOS code. there is absolutely nobody that is even within striking. No one even, so I wouldn't blame Google for that. Like no one, even Samsung, anybody is like there's no, you don't see tablets out there that are not iPads. That doesn't start from Android basically just making their iPad-like interface just blown up Android apps. Yeah, but then that gets into the developer tools.

The whole, that does get into the, well, so then now this is making, your point. That does get into the whole fracturing of the Android ecosystem, and thus the original argument for Google doing hardware so that they would all... So, right, you've made your point. Okay. I want to just return to some core assumptions about this marketplace because Apple, I'm sorry, Apple and Coke. Coke and Pepsi are basically like serving the same job to be done, which I'm not sure what that job is. It's horrible for humanity. But regardless, like, they're both liquid form of a sugary beverage great. In the case of Apple and Google, I think it's so important to take the analysis of what each of their business models is, right? Apple is a jewelry manufacturer, you know, that makes products that are

connected to the internet. And Google and Facebook are advertising companies that make money by selling your attention to other people. So why would they bother spending money creating an amazing tablet when the whole iPad concept is around creativity and brilliance and about expressivity. And I mean, if you think about even like the fumble that Microsoft made when they basically built their first tablet or something and it essentially took a mouse-based interface and just threw it onto a screen and removed the keyboard, it was like you totally missed the point. But that's because you're in like an operating system, Microsoft Office paradigm of a business model.

And so you don't really care if people can't, you know, do brilliant things and write things with a pencil that looks beautiful, right? And by the way, as someone that still regularly buys digital ad campaigns, we always tell every time we have our agency do a buy, like we don't want to buy on tablets, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. So why would Google invest in that? You never get a decent ROI on it.

Everybody in advertising knows that. And so, right. So basically, it's a way to keep you in the Apple ecosystem. It provides you a great tool for kids to watch TV on or movies or whatever, you know, Disney Plus Apple bundle, whatever it is. What you're on by Google? That's probably the one case where there are ads. And since Apple's never going to do video ads like that, then that's an interesting,

maybe it drives adoption. Actually, that's a good point. So for parents, and I don't want to speak for parents because I'm not one, but I know some, and I had some, like the iPad provides a great viewing device or a pacifier for children, and Google provides free content for it. If you want to get content from the Apple universe or that isn't the universe, you're going to pay a lot more and children are very expensive. So basically, Google is sort of supplementing the rearing of children through iPads. I am going to, we're going to jump off the phones here because there's a couple of other things that I want to.

Stuart, I'm asking you to unmute. I feel like, I even had this argument with the TechMeem editors this week that that Visa and Plaid story was not getting enough attention. and I tried to make the case for why it should get more attention. Stuart, what do you think about that? I think DOJ seems to be stepping up and saying this is a problem, and they know they're going to have problems downstream. They are trying. What was the comment you made today, taking them out right before they blossom?

Well, it's more the argument that I read between the lines of what the DOJ was saying, was that essentially we have this whole fintech sector, that is exploding and blossoming. And the whole idea is we're trying to have these new companies disrupt the credit card companies and the banks and cut down the fees and whatever. So what I recognized was that they recognized for the first time, oh, we can't allow right when this whole new sector starts to flower,

the incumbents to do what the tech platforms have done for the last 20 years, which is immediately incorporate those innovations into their utility belts so that they essentially absorb all of the innovation. We want to try to allow the market to do the innovation for us. And so that's the point that people like Tim Wu and others have been making for years. And I'm just saying that I saw them recognize that for the first time. Now, they're talking about it specifically in this space of fintech. They don't want fintech to die before it can do its full flowering

and let the chips fall where they may. They are essentially saying, we want to see this play out more before it gets put on ice. And I'm saying that everyone in tech should recognize that because it's fintech right now, but it can be any space going forward. Especially if we are going to have a Democratic administration for at least four years, I would expect that to happen a ton and in every sector. 70s and 80s it was oil. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right? And then doing the same thing. You were solar, you were wind, you got swallowed up. You had something interesting, you got swallowed up. Cisco did it for years, right? You had something that was competitive with their offering. They absorbed you and found a way to have paid out. One of the reasons why we have this issue where the U.S. can't create its own telecoms network anymore is because you had so much absorption and stuff like that,

that then when certain big players got out innovated and essentially went bankrupt, and I'm thinking of Nortel, which isn't a U.S. company, but like, you know, Canadian. But the point being made here is that because you allowed a certain sector, specifically telecoms networking, to so conglomerize that when the true innovation came from overseas, which the government couldn't, you know, there wasn't enough nimbleness because the market had become so ossified into two or three players. And so that's another argument again.

And speaking of China, you also were asking me about TikTok and whatever happened with that, And let me tell you something. It was getting shut down and now it's everywhere and everybody's great with it. And literally, that was a month ago that it looked like it was going to happen. It was going to be shut down in 24 hours. Right. So, I mean, look, and you guys here, I tried to bend over backwards not to be political, but I'm going to be political in this sense because in just the business sense,

it seems to me that the people in the U.S. government that were making all of this hay about TikTok we're only doing it to score points, and that's it. And when the utility of looking tough on China kind of petered out, they don't care. And so unless someone can give me a better argument, it looks 100% like all smoking mirrors to me. And do we think it's going to be any different with Google? For the DHA case? Yeah. I mean, granted, they're two very different worlds, Chris, but how, what was the,

the government really ready to make their best case against Google? You don't think that he had him push the edge and bring that up way earlier than they were ready to make their play? From what I read, what I listened to, and so on, I think that they were close, and I feel like, and actually, I don't know if this is Brian's assessment or someone else's, but the case, as I understand it, against Google is very narrow and about a specific type of exploitation. that could actually be successful. And so the more narrow it is and the more exploitation they can show,

then the more likely that they might actually have some sort of resolution where an action can actually occur. Now, so we'll take lots of time, but if, you know, you try to go after them with all the kind of insane stuff that, like, right when people think about, like censorship and so on,

these media platforms, which, you know, doesn't really seem to be happening, then that becomes, I think, much harder to prove and to demonstrate harm, in which case, that could just go on forever, and the case just gets dismissed, right? Whereas focusing on a very, very small sliver of Google's business is more likely, I think, to be an effective outcome. When it comes to the TikTok case, what I'm wondering is if, first of all, these things

are very complex and very challenging. I think, like, I don't know, my assessment, given the way I understand the previous president, was you need very simple ideas that go well on like Fox News. And so you associate COVID with China, TikTok with China, and you just say shut it down and boom, you're done. And what you sort of forget is this is sort of a globally innovative company that's produced some competition to Instagram and others. And essentially, if you shut it down,

you're actually stifling the very free speech that you say these platforms are, like it's like it's like not only a cell phone but it's sort of like shooting your your left foot and then suddenly you know you're startled and so you shoot your right foot too like I just don't so they kind of like just and they were playing a game of soccer so you know what it's like game over can I can I say this though I would not be surprised at all to that end I would not be surprised at all if again assuming six months into a Biden administration we didn't see this revisited where they're trying to do something something about TikTok. But as you're alluding to, Chris, maybe they do it in a smarter way. Because my understanding is that there are very serious concerns inside the apparatus or the community that is the national security infrastructure.

And they were the ones that were initially pushing hard for this because they feel that it is insecure. And they're the ones that were behind the whole, you know, get all the Huawei stuff out of the telehealth. Al-Com stuff. So I wouldn't be surprised if this is revisited because those same people are going to be inside a Biden administration. And if they can just, you know, get it, whisper in the ears of people that can say something more coherently and do another argument more coherently, I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is revisited. I don't know that they could, you know, do something so far as force a sale. But something I, something could come back on this. So, like, one of the things that I would, I would, like, put to this group and in general is sort of, what is the world that we imagine we'd be living in in four to five years if any of the remedies that no one has defined yet, but let's say they magically occurred, have happened. So we're five years in the future, and TikTok has been shut down. Okay. So what does that media landscape look like and what has actually been solved? How we actually solved the problem of deep fakes or media manipulation? Is the population any more inoculated against disinformation, and, and, you know, information that's coming from parlor or like whatever other platforms may exist out there. Like, ultimately, it seems like we're trying to solve problems that are of the industrial era,

but they make no sense in the internet era. And so I've been trying to sort of think more about us being in the middle of an information war that probably started 10 years ago, but, you know, was the, you know, there was skunk works or something like that. And we are seeing like the consequences of it. And we are seeing the language weaponized in such a way that we're kind of not actually really realizing, like, what we're talking about. So when it comes to like the idea of like breaking up Google, we could. I mean, there's a theory that, you know, maybe that would oxygenate the market, so to speak, to provide more players, the ability to compete and so on and so forth.

But I don't know that we've thought about what the marketplace should actually look like in a world where in order for many of these things to work, one, again, users have to be authenticated. You have to know who the user is. If you're going to ban them from one platform, do they, can they just go to any other platform? Is the ability to create infinite numbers of accounts or bought accounts or fake accounts or whatever? Should that be enshrine in the Constitution? Is that part of the exercise of privacy? You know, what is free speech in these environments when one, you can weaponize it. And two, I can basically take my free speech, multiply it by a million bond accounts, and then have them all follow each other and then simulate

something that doesn't, like, this has never happened before. This never existed before. And so we're taking Civil War era type approaches to solving these problems that I just don't think makes sense. The only- You don't think when they shut down Silk Road, it solved that whole problem of illicit buying in the group. Oh, my desire for illicit drugs after Silk Road shut down was totally gone. Right. That's the old...

It killed my demand all together for sure. That whole old whack-a-mole situation like in terms of piracy and crime and stuff like that. One thing that I would say, though, is that, yes, I agree with you, Chris, that like, just breaking things up without having an idea of what that would do to the marketplace

and how the marketplace would reform and what sort of way you'd want it to reform it into is short-sighted, except for the fact that on a base level, the argument could be made that you have an ossified marketplace with four or five oligarchs at the top, and any sort of stirring up of the pot is healthy to a pot that is stagnated. Now, we don't know that. It's a good idea. The countervailing are. is sort of the historical one of breaking up AT&T, and that goes both ways.

Because we know that you broke up AT&T, you had all of these baby bells. There was like a dozen of them at one point, and they all essentially reformed into AT&T, with Verizon being the lone baby bell that grew into its own behemoth. But what did happen during that whole 25-year period, you had a brief flowering that allowed the cellular and mobile markets to develop, as opposed to the classic example is that we didn't have, we could have had answering machines 25 years before we did, but because we only had one company that refused to give us the technology, we never got it. And so there is an argument to be made that I'm not saying that the cellular and mobile revolution wouldn't have happened

had you not broken up AT&T, but because serendipitously you did, right at the time that this market was coming, the technology was coming, it allowed innovation to flower for a period of time. Great. But then at the same time, the argument against this sort of stuff is governments and politics on a timeline that big, you're going to have Republican and then Democrat and then. So there's no coherent strategy over the course of time it would require for you to create the sort of market change that you would want to actually happen because it's so schizophrenic from one administration to the other. But all right. So, but one thing to add to that, sorry, just like, because it occurs to me that the post office like exists,

and it's existed for a long time. And regardless of its current performance, it has lasted, you know, blue and red and whoever else ideological, you know, differences because it's a basic fundamental service. And in a similar way, it feels like, I don't know that social media is quite the same, but there is a sort of notion of a common carrier where the, the point about interrupt does become more interesting. So, you know, when I was working on decentralizing social networks back in 2006 through 10, like the thought was like, if I'm a Twitter user and you're a Facebook user, why can't we sort of subscribe to each other's feeds or why can't we, you know, be friends across platforms and networks? And from a competitive perspective, I think this is why

I struggle with the notion of bringing like the AT&T, you know, let's break them up concept to this paradigm where really what you want is the ability if you're a Verizon customer and I'm an AT&T customer for us to call each other. So if there were the ability to interrupt, that level, maybe that would lead to some sort of new entrance, you know, for smaller players, right, where they're little, you know, saplings or whatever growing up, that would allow for new types of things to happen. So if the platforms were more open in that respect, granted there's problems with spam and abuse and all these other things, but let's see you solve for identity, then maybe that would be a different approach that's more about building sort of an interconnected

rail system in the country than saying, let's have a bunch of different companies where you basically now as a user have to have accounts on all of them, and you don't know where your friends are anymore. And it's like a completely, it's a cluster fuck in terms of knowing where your data is. Rachel, jump in here real quick, because this is coming back to the idea of, you know, politics and muting people and things like that. But your question in the chat is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. So go ahead and ask it.

And then I bet Chris has a lot to say about this. Oh, well, I mean, unfortunately, my feeling has just been, you know, being here in D.C. and being a kind of long-time policy wonk and also just early tech adopter. You know, I was on social media way back in the day, and it was totally different. But we've all seen the place that we're coming to, right? Like in some levels, it's just the same as what happened with regular print media and stuff, traditional media. And I am concerned that, but because of the technology and how quickly you can have someone like President Trump saying, oh, this is BS. And yes, it's great that Twitter labels it, but, I mean, color has been growing so rapidly. And then there was that whole deal with Discord and blah, blah, blah.

I am just afraid that, you know, the filter bubble is just going to get worse. If you, to what you're saying, if there's not an integrated framework, I just see us fluttering off into these different sides. And just this divide that is kind of killing us right now is. just getting worse. So what you said in the chat that's right along the lines of what I've been thinking about lately is will we

just have a left internet and a right internet? And the funny thing is and this is what I've been thinking about lately is, you know, there's been all this back and forth about, you know, tweets being taken down, accounts being shut down and stuff like that. But what that really has

shown us is that for all of this talk of, you know, there's media bubbles, there's two sides, we've all been playing on the same platforms, and that's why this is happening, right? Like, there hasn't been a right Twitter and a left Twitter. It's starting to happen with things like Parlor. By the way, is it pronounced Parlor, not Parlay? I mean...

I'm not sure. Yeah, okay. I don't know. Or GAF, whatever. Yeah, I think... I think the French is, yeah. I was going to say, it's not very French. Parlay, Parlay.

From where I'm from, you know. Yeah, but Parlay makes more sense if you're talking about talking about. Anyway, but so the point that I'm... Like if you're a pirate. Right, right, right. The point that I'm making is that it's... People have missed the point. Even though that like, oh, Facebook is maybe more generous to right wing,

but everyone's still on these same platforms. And I'm wondering if that's about to end. The reason we're having these fights is because everyone is on Twitter, where everyone is still on Facebook, everyone is on Instagram, but if you get this splintering where, well, no one goes, no one from Red States goes to Instagram because they think it's a left platform. Or they all abandoned Twitter and create their own Twitter. And no one on the left goes to Facebook because they think all it does is enraged their fathers and grandfathers, whatever. So that maybe we might look back on this a few years from now and be like, yeah, but at least during the Trump era, we were all arguing in the same place.

Same says poor. Yeah, but I mean there's value to that, being in the same place where we can all hear each other. And that gets into the idea of like, how could you have a country, if people are saying now, you have a country where people have different realities from one another, where citizens have fundamentally different views of what reality is, well, imagine if there's an entire ecosystem that never overlaps at all. And so you don't know what is enraging your. neighbor or your neighbor cares about because you can't even see the outrage. At least we can see the outrage now. I have thoughts. If anybody else wants to jump in, though. All right, but just,

I don't want to, I don't want to end on this one. So do it, do it short. Do it short and brilliant and succinct and solve it in two minutes. I'll do my best. Obviously, like this, this sort of just bringing the concepts of terrestrial geography to the internet feels like the wrong direction to go in. However, one of the reasons why we are so polarized and why we believe there's a right and a left way to do things seems to be because we think that there has to be one true way of solving problems. If this election and the resulting red-blue map that you see says anything, it's actually that the solutions that are needed across the United States are much more specific and they are geographic and regional such that if you are living in a rural community,

then conservatism probably serves you well. Whereas if you're living in an urban environment, then more liberalism because you're running up against all these people who are unlike you and are different from you and it's more of a diverse community. So therefore it is necessary just to live to be more inclusive. the way that you approach the world, then I think it's useful then to think about the structure of society and culture in those places and then to deliver very specifically personalized and customized solutions to those different areas.

So in other words, if we are arguing about things at the national level, and we're saying there's one way to do things in either you're super woke or your unwoke or whatever, that actually ignores the general cultural evolution that we're going through. But we're having that conversation all in the same place, all of the same place, all of the way. at the same tenor without being able to have any compassion or empathy for how other people are actually sorting out how to live their lives. And I think that that's the problem is that we're having arguments about things that make no fucking difference to us individually. And we seem like we're so sure of it because in our own little world, we are sure of it and we are probably right.

And so that separation is, I think, the thing needs to be represented in our politics. It's just actually what happens on the coasts and in the places where there's schools and where there's lots of people coming and going, they can have a different set of rules and ways of being that are different from other places in the world. And that's not wrong. Rachel, another brilliant one playing off of what Chris tipped on urban versus rural. In a scenario where maybe at least for tech workers, we can work wherever we want, I mean, show of hands. Maybe I should ask this on the show. If you didn't have to live in a city and you could do your tech job for,

from a mountain top somewhere. Would you go? Rachel, go ahead. Yes, so I'm in this weird position. I'm originally from this teeny tiny town in rural Appalachia. You know, my grandfather worked for the mail service, was rural mail carrier for 40 years, retired with something like five years worth of sick days

and vacation he hadn't taken because he was just so damn glad to not be, working in the mines. And I see this terrible, I've lived in D.C. for 20 years. I consider myself a kind of urban person. But at the same time, I think sometimes people in urban areas don't appreciate that, at some point in your life, you were sitting here typing away on your laptop

and it was probably fueled by some coal, which was fueled by some miners that are now back, there dying of black lung and there was not reinvestment into the area into a lot of these areas that are the fucking the flyover countries the areas that we're seeing are are going for Trump and when you have poor education poorly funded education and it's all cyclical so I'm really upset about how we've handled COVID I'm also really upset about how my landlord has refused to go

down even $75 on my rent in downtown D.C. And so I have this crazy idea to, this might be the one time in our history where I can maybe say to people like you all come to this beautiful place that I'm from. The rents are so much

cheaper. Maybe if we actually interacted together in a real way versus possibly spinning off into these alternative social media universes, we could better appreciate where people are coming from. And I don't know what I think about cities in the future of cities. I personally want to return to D.C., but I can see a lot of people maybe coming to a place like where I'm from,

getting out on a kayak and saying, wow, that's pretty cool. Like, why was I paying that much to live in San Francisco? Well, and the, the thing that I, like, uniformly, all of my friends that live in San Francisco are the people that are insane bikers, hikers. They love San Francisco because they can live in a city, but there's mountains, like, you know, an hour or two away. And so I'm, I'm just wondering if a trend is not necessarily just chasing the cheaper rent. It's just that, you know, not everyone is made for city living.

Like J.C. Pennings, I've almost had you ask a question a couple of times now. You're in Kansas right now. Like, if I could come to Kansas, maybe there's not mountains, but, you know, there's probably a lot more outdoors activities than are easy for me to get to in New York City. Yes, sir.

That's totally correct. And I lived in Denver, downtown Denver, work downtown Denver for three years. And I feel like I kind of just got priced out. I have a college degree, but, you know, I don't know. I couldn't translate that into a better paying gig. And, you know, after three years, I eventually had to come home here to Western Kansas. But I hear what you're saying, you know, a lot of people live, you know, San Francisco, Denver, because like the mountains and the outdoor recreation is close, you know,

and there may not be mountains in western Kansas, but we've got, you know, lakes, hunting. Yeah, hunting fishing. Yeah, right. What I'm saying is it's weird that tech people seem to self-select. Like the tech people here in New York City are the people that are in the yoga classes and the CrossFit classes. and I'm not saying those don't exist in San Francisco,

but man, my San Francisco people, Chris, you're a Bay Area person. You love your outdoor stuff. And so, right, like, you know, like, I've been talking to the, like, what if we moved to Vermont? You know, it's not that far away from a big city, and, like, we could live out in the woods somewhere, you know? I think, like, one addition to this is, again, thinking about what would be common, I don't know if it's, like,

services or just a standard of living that is necessary in all these different environments. And I say that because, you know, I've, me, my partner have also been talking about where we might, you know, move or live or whatever. And I, one of the benefits of living in Oakland is one, I have pretty good network connectivity. And I know that like in some places based on the quality of the Zoom calls that I have, like that is not true everywhere else. And second, that sometimes my Amazon orders, which say they're going to arrive in seven days, come in five days because I'm so close to the port. So I guess my question is to what degree are we able to, I guess, kind of lateralize or spread some of the benefits that technology has brought in terms of

new types of services that are more responsive, more personalized, more on demand than what I think used to be the assumption about living in more rural places or less urban places that you just wouldn't have access to the same level of service. It seems like that's becoming more of the case. I don't watch too much TV, but I see ads. from time to time on Hulu, and I see more and more of them for postmates and for Walmart and things like that. And I'm wondering if those companies are able to bring more of that to more of the country or more of the world, then maybe that does provide more choices, which then allows there to be more of that interaction that Rachel's talking about.

Because we've just hit an hour, I'm about to wrap it up. The very first question was from Thomas. I don't see Thomas on there, but I wish he was if he was somehow there, because I would love to have delved into what he was exactly asking, but the question in chat was, what happens with IP when a startup closes, especially when it's been VC funded? And Chris, you can speak to this too. But the answer is, is that, you know, IP gets bought all the time, even when you, when you sell a company for parts, that's often the only parts that people care about. I've actually never sold a startup in my life, but I have sold IP from startups that I've created. And I got more money for that IP than, you know, probably the company was worth. So essentially the deal was,

yeah, go ahead and wind yourself down, but before you do, we'll cut you a check for that stuff. So that sort of stuff happens all the time. But I'd love to know if there was a deeper question or vein that he was trying to get into for that. But right, Chris, like, Often with startups, the idea is the only thing because we don't have factories anymore. And it's often the only thing that matters, right? I mean, it's hard. It's the people and the idea. Those are the two most valuable things in modern companies.

But I also think it's, maybe this is harder to quantify to some degree because the switching costs are relatively quite low, but it is also the relationships that you develop over the course of offering the service. Right. So I feel like one of Facebook's biggest powers is the relationship that it has with its customers over a period of time. Right. And all that it knows about you, right? I mean, there are a number of new social networks that start up all the time.

But the amount of friction and energy that you have to put in to get to a similar place in terms of personalization or content or seeing your friend. Like it'll be interesting to see what I think is, is it telegraph or whatever that new social network is that sort of, you know, all about being nice or something. like how they do because again I guess what I'm saying from a from a startup perspective is that one of the values that you do create is in the relationships that you have with your customers IP certainly is one but it's not the only well and if the question was do the VCs get that IP no they do not because they're not in the business of holding IP for any period of time the what let's end with is one of the questions that came up in the the subreddit, which was, where does the phrase something, something before leading into some topic means? So, which Chris, I think you said, that it's such a classic Brianism, where I'll say something, something, modern startup life or whatever. And I tried to Google around on that before if someone, if someone in here knows what the answer is, I don't, I think that it's just a version of yada yada that I've been hearing a lot lately where it's like, A, B, C, D, yada, yada.

to F, you know, like, or the thing that I saw was, and this is probably would have stuck in my head, there's the, the Simpsons Halloween horror episode where they do the, the shining parody. There's that classic line where Homer says, no TV and no beer makes Homer something, something. I don't think that that's what did it because it's in the reverse order for that to make sense in the sentence. But yeah, I don't know where that came from. And I saw an urban dictionary thing on that that was more about like, oh, something, something is, you know, that's sex or, you know, drugs or something, but I think it's just yada yada. It's like the equivalent of like the ellipses, you know, it's like, it's the Brian equivalent

of three periods. Right. Something, something, something. Like it's really trying to like jog your memory and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever. Right, right. It's just like all of the, it's more, I guess what I'm functionally doing is all of the things that I could run down that would be like, I'm reminding you that I made this point. I'm reminding you we talked about this.

But yeah, something, something, it's the time for something, something, does anyone remember what happened to the whole TikTok thing? Right, yeah. It's just like, I want to break down the whole, oh, my God, we talked about this mess a million times, but here it is again and a different thing. Anyway, thank you all for showing up for this. Great conversation.

I'll put this out tomorrow at the usual time and appreciate it. And when we do this again, all y'all come back and give us your two cents again.