Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) SpaceCasts Sampler!

Episode Date: June 5, 2021

A sampler of four different spaces from our new feed SpaceCasts! Search your podcast app for SpaceCasts and subscribe! 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. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Today I'm going to give you a sampler episode, samples of our new Spacecast feed.

I'm going to give you a taste of some of the recent conversations over on the Spacecast feed to hopefully encourage you to subscribe over there so you don't miss out. We'll start with the most recent space from Chris and I, since, you know, this is that show. Then we'll give you a taste of the most recent geeky. week out weekly space from Matt Navarra and Martin SFP Bryant. You'll also get the big tech news from Emil Protolyinsky and a rotating group of his guest hosts. And finally, a delve into different corners of the crypto world with Brady Dale and his lightbulb talks. But as I said, we'll start off with Chris and I. I told you we sort of got right in the middle of the news

with our space this week with this conversation. Remember earlier in the week when I told you about Twitter launching that weather-related subscription product called Tomorrow. Well, we spoke to the man launching tomorrow with Twitter, Eric Holt House, and he actually set us straight about the reporting surrounding all of that. I actually got a lot of things wrong earlier in the week. Then Twitter VP Mike Park just happened by the space and stopped in to tell us more about Twitter's product rollouts. Maybe he was up late that night because they were putting the finishing touches on the Twitter

blue rollout that came out the next morning. Anyway, this is the second half of that space. If you want the first half where Chris lays out his theory, that messaging might be really big at WWDC this year. And I explain my rant about my Windows laptop lemon. You'll have to check out that episode, The Full Thing, over at Spacecast. Search your podcast app for it now and subscribe.

Yeah, so Eric, I just, you know, one, congratulations. You know, two, what, I guess like, the way that we think about this, the way that we've been talking about this, you know, I've been following, you know, Twitter for a very long time. I've been on the platform for a very long time. And I'm very interested in what they're doing to support, you know, both the creator economy and also in terms of where they see themselves going relative to supporting those things with their own, whether it's, you know, proprietary content or building out, you know,

review as a competitor to substack. And one of the things that I found so interesting and irrelevant about this strategy, you know, we were just talking about how it's sort of like, oh, like stack overflow. That's a strange, you know, out of left field kind of acquisition. In this case, meteorology and weather actually makes a lot of sense. In terms of Twitter being the place where you go to find out what's happening, right? I mean, you might not necessarily right away go, oh, weather, but it is the place of what's happening now. And what I understand or read about tomorrow is this new platform, and I think it's at tomorrow on Twitter,

is that you're bringing together a bunch of meteorologists who typically are answering questions that people might have already, you know, through Twitter, whether it's through DMs or app mentions. and you'll be offering kind of membership or super follows or something along those lines to folks that are wanting to send you messages and find out, God, you know, like, is this snowstorm going to blow up my whole, you know, maybe now it's more like, I don't know, like we're entering into fire season here in California soon. So you can imagine the state's going to be in fire soon. So if I have a meteorologist, you know, on call via a Twitter blue subscription or a superfollow, that seems like actually pretty relevant to the platform. So with all that background, I will, I will, I will, step back. I'd love to hear your perspective on this and how Twitter approached you. Yeah, you've got it exactly. And I think the thing that is about weather is weather's kind of boring until it's the only thing anyone cares about, right? It's like when weather makes the news, it becomes, you know, this is a must have necessity information now. So, and that's where, you know, my DMs overflow to the extent where I can't keep up.

Like, during Hurricane Sandy, and this was 2012, I was working 18-hour days for like 10 days straight, just to keep up with messages. And I grew my Twitter following from 5,000 to 150,000. And this was 10 years ago, right? So, like, 150,000 was a lot back then. I mean, it still is a lot. But I think that I think that the way the partnership evolved for us was, I had this kernel of idea of saying we need to have a middle ground between the sort of dying TV and print media industry and social media, which is kind of like a fire hose of information during these moments.

We need to have sort of this curated local climate and justice for work. institution, service, you know, mutual aid organization of meteorologists and creators and journalists to kind of pool resources during those moments. And it just kind of made sense to approach Twitter for this idea because this was where I've, I kind of wouldn't have what I have today if it wasn't for Twitter. I couldn't have done what I've done the last 10 years if it wasn't for for Twitter. It just kind of fits weather kind of fits with Twitter. So you're saying you approach them?

Yeah, yep, I approached them. How long are you? This was three months ago. It was sort of a short thing that happened. I was really intrigued by the review acquisition, and I wanted to sort of figure out if there was a way where everything I wanted to do could live all in one place in one ecosystem. And it kind of felt like they were having the tools.

And I think even still I'm a little bit early, like I think that the kind of stuff that exists on review right now, that exists in spaces, as we've seen tonight, right? Like, um, um, um,

that, you know, they're also, Twitter is also launching, uh, uh, uh, uh,

uh, Twitter communities, which is kind of like a Facebook groups or group chat type thing. Um, and, um, you know, ticketed spaces and super follows and tip jars and all that stuff of monetizing and growth

strategies for delivering necessary content in a curated way that's a little bit more than 240 characters. Yeah, so let me, when I read this, you know, look, this is what Twitter has always been great at, which is it used to be, you know, in 1990, when Gulf War I happened, you ran to your TV and you turned on CNN. You know, we still

see in movies, like when the aliens attack, they show those shots of people like standing outside of television stores or some shit and like watching it happen. It only works in movies now. Right, right now. But, well, but think about like even Twitter's

you know, original, like the miracle on the Hudson thing, like people tweeting those pictures of the plane in the Hudson, right? So this makes so much sense to me. And what I'm curious about is I see the idea of packaging and putting these things together. And you just said that you're trying to figure out the things right away, or you're trying to figure out the things of the various pieces to put together. What I'm curious about is coming in right away as a subscription thing and a subscription thing that's $10 a month. Is that your decision? Is that Twitter's guidance to you that that's what they want you to do? Who's trying to figure out where the product market fit is here?

Okay. Well, I think that there has been some misreporting yesterday about this. Everything is going to be free. The newsletters will be free. Interesting. The spaces will be free. Occasional ticketed spaces for members. We will have the direct Q&A. We will serve as people's, as member, paying members. We will serve as their private weather service, basically. And that's, that's for the $10 a month. So 90% of what we will do will be free. Our goal is to grow. large and quickly, and to spread that, if anything, I feel like I'm more excited about India and Brazil and, and like Ethiopia than the U.S., because there are places where there is not a functioning weather service at all. And I think that, you know, three to five years from now,

we could end up being, you know, a curated weather service for the entire world. That's my goal. And Twitter could serve as a backbone for that. We're not going to get there by charging every single person that shows up. I love that. Chris, let me do one more. And then it's all you. It's all you. So what does that mean?

Am I following you? So, okay, we misunderstood the subscription thing. But like, functionally, if I like this idea, I want to get my weather from you, what am I doing? Am I following your account? Where do I go to make this happen? Sure. We have, under review, we have newsletters for each city that we're operating in right now. We have a meteorologist that will be working, developing a daily written forecast that's, you know, 100 words that's delivered to your inbox every evening.

That will be sort of like the real human behind the service. And we're hoping that that will be compelling enough on its own because I think a lot of people want a little bit more than what you can get on your weather app, which is just kind of like temperature and graphic percent chance of rain. But it's nice to know the context behind that as well as having some climate reporting along with it. So that's just like having daily weather as a news story and as a newsletter is a proven concept. I think the Washington Post Capitol Weather Gang is consistently among the top red posts on the Washington Post every single day. And they write about weather. And, you know, that's behind their $10 a month paywall. So we'll be doing that for free.

and then, you know, if you're a paid subscriber to those newsletters, then that's how you access the ticketed spaces and the private Q&A. Have you, so if you go to, if you go to TMRW.IS, that's our sign-up page. Yeah, I was going to say, I've also pinned a tweet. So if people want to take a look at it. Yeah, you can get there to. Yeah, you can get there. If you go to at tomorrow, well, there's a link to sign up to those cities. And we're in 16 cities right now.

So one of the questions I guess that I have about this, you know, is about, I guess, maybe like the nature of the relationship and whether or not to look at the way in which substack has been sponsoring a number of, you know, writers to join their platform and to do what they do kind of, you know, there. Versus, I guess I don't understand. stand if you were acquired, aqua-hired, or what the nature of the relationship is between Twitter and tomorrow, and whether or not you're then doing, like, product development and helping to flesh that out, or if it's more on the content side? Sure. Yeah. They are helping customize some backend stuff for us at review, some design,

and some functionality in the multiple city signups and in like negotiating the whole multiple newsletters, getting them to work together. And they, but I, this is a completely independent business. I started in LLC earlier this year and the,

this is, you know, I'm a single employee and I'm hiring every, all the meteorologist says contractors right now. I got it. So they're hosting me. And I think that the main, I can't speak for Twitter, but I know that main reason that they were excited to partner with us on this

is kind of like a proof of technology. Like if these folks can do it, then it will show that the potential of all of these product, creator services working together. Right. And that's kind of exactly where I started from, right? Because, you know, one, weather is universal. Literally, if you have nothing to talk about, you will talk about the weather. So great place to start.

Right. Second, it is something that is uniquely of interest and value to a local audience. And again, I encourage folks to go check out TMRW.IS to see the different cities that you can sign up for and get those, you know, alerts. And then it also, I think, does an interesting or provides an interesting opportunity for the review team to be building out, specific functionality that goes beyond perhaps where review has been in the past in terms of what creators need to, you know, both power businesses and also provide value behind a paywall or things like that. For, I mean, I guess like the other piece that that's really valuable about what you're doing is from the community's perspective, which of course Twitter hasn't launched

communities, but it's announced them and we've seen some evidence of those. For people who are in groups in different parts of the world, then people might come together. And it's, you know, actually, I'm curious to hear what you think about this. There's a number of different organizing structures within the Twitter super straight. And I would identify those as, you know, being, of course, hashtags being one, topics being another, communities being another. And then, of course, there's maybe like the newsletters or you can follow a person or you can follow a brand. What do you see as maybe being the most relevant way to organize, especially those audience that you talked about all over the world who, let's say, don't have that weather service and would be

wanting to, you know, get the benefits of tomorrow. Is it that they just, you know, follow the tomorrow account? Is that they, you know, join a community for their specific locality? I know you can't, like speak to, you know, Twitter functionality in the future, but what would be your ideal? Well, I mean, I really think that the drop in audio is, is kind of a, you know, when I'm thinking of how weather works in Ethiopia. I keep coming back to Ethiopia because I work there for five years on a climate change project. But I know what it's

like to be out in the communities there. Almost everyone there has a phone and many of them are smartphones and they are really interested in radio because they don't really have the TV services. So I think the audio component of

Vick could really be universal and you could you know there's no need for translators you can just have someone speaking in whatever language is there and we can

we can kind of meet the moment and that really fits with sort of how weather how weather emergencies have always been you know for the last hundred years we've been

primarily focused on radio. So that's kind of a radio analog there. But I think newsletters also is kind of the way that I've seen, you know, in the last year or two with Substack, I think that there will be a lot of meteorologists that will switch from from TV to newsletters if the local TV ends up continuing to that. Or if you're successful in hiring these files. folks, right? Yeah. No, and this was the conversation that I have had with a couple of funders in the last

week or two. Yeah, do you get to be like a weather VC? Can you go like, you know, sorry, continue. Yeah, maybe. The conversation was like, what's the average salary of a TV meteorologist? And what do you need to offer them to get them to work for you instead of work for the TV station? So if we could replace TV weather, which, you know, if you drive around and almost everyone has this universal experience, like, you remember the name of the TV weather man from the town that you grew up in.

And like, their names and faces are on the billboards. And they tease the weather in between the brakes because they know that that's the only reason people turn on the local news is to get the weather forecast. Weather is the number three, at least a few years ago, weather was the number three mobile activity behind search. and social media. So, and email, so maybe number four. But,

you know, within the top five, people check the weather on our phones. Like, it is a, it is a primary activity of the internet as to check the weather. So if we can find a way to, to kind of create an ecosystem around that and give,

um, meteorologists tools to reach people, um, in lots of different ways that aren't currently possible, then I feel like it's a win. Um, not only, as a business model, but in this moment of climate emergency, it's a need of service.

Do you foresee that the stat you just cited, do you foresee that the weather will become even more important as a result of climate change? Oh, for sure. I think it already has been. I think starting with Sandy. I mean, when Sandy hit New York City, I think that was a moment that really, you know, this is the media capital of the world. And in a lot of people, people's eyes were like when the subway's flooded and then lower Manhattan went dark and it's like this is happening here it's not a future thing it's not a developing country thing it's happening here in new york city so and the same thing last year with the fires in california like when the sky over san francisco goes pitch black dark in the middle of the day like that's not something that should happen like your inner animal instinct to starts to kick in is like what the hell is happening where should i go what should i do and There are only, like, there are only a few thousand meteorologists in the world, you know, right now. Like, I think that in those moments, meteorology becomes extremely valuable. So the goal for me is to build the infrastructure for those moments, which is like trust and community and, you know, familiarity and kind of like courage of the meteorologist to kind of say what needs to be said in those moments.

I was going to ask about that, actually, you know, from a trust perspective. And by the way, Mike Park, who actually heads up, I guess, long for him at Twitter, he's also here, and he's been invited up and happy to have him here. I do want to remind everyone that this is being recorded. It's going to be released as a spacecast tomorrow, so just so that we have that context. But I was interested in the trust part because there is an interesting angle where we haven't really talked too much, I think, culturally, about miss or disinformation around. weather and around the consequences of that. What you're doing, and I was, you know, half joking, if you're creating the weather avengers, but like being out in front of this and giving people trustworthy information about how to respond, right? Because if someone tells you, oh, no, it's okay,

you can stay and there's this like hurricane coming, you know, and you don't leave, and then you run out of food or water or, you know, your house gets flooded or, you know, you end up on the, you know, roof because you can't escape. Like, these are real life and death, you know, decisions. So to what degree, you know, I guess I'm asking both about your personal, given your own experience, in terms of being that trusted voice and also Twitter's role in, you know, kind of delegating deputies of information veracity, you know, given like their verified program. And I don't want to, you know, like, dive too much into that, but given what we've seen in terms of the impact of misinformation in social media, especially around the coronavirus, I got to imagine

that whether misinformation is a whole class of stuff that we haven't even really started to think too much about. Oh, it really is. I mean, the last 20 years we've been fighting climate denial, and that has really been a material setback, not only for this profession of meteorology, but for the world. The original disinformation, right? For the world. Climate change is real.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this started 70 years ago in the oil industry, where they were literally funding PR folks to develop and promote disinformation so that they could keep their business model. And it has worked for 70 years, right? So, like, if you have enough money, you can fund that you can change the truth, which is not,

you know, like, I'm hiring folks that are explicitly willing to talk about climate change and the connection with the weather. I feel like that's where we are as a, world, like we're ready to have that conversation. And there's some social science that says that in the days during and immediately after a major weather event, that's when folks are willing to have the conversation about climate and policy and where do we go from here and how do we restructure society so that we can have a more safer world. So that's really where we're

in terms of, you know, in the, like people, and this is the thing. It's like, like, you know, science is true whether or not you believe it. So, but it's different levels of truth for different people. So, you know, the same heat wave can hit different neighborhoods, you know, neighborhoods that were redlined or, you know, there are like racist aspects of society that manifest onto the weather. So 100 degree heat wave, you need to be paying attention to folks who are most vulnerable and directing your message to them to keep them safe.

And that goes with who you choose as a communicator. Who do you have, how do you foster those conversations before the weather event happens so that they know what they need to do to stay safe? Are you planning to expand or what's the expansion plan beyond the 16 U.S. cities? And is it U.S. only for now? No, it's not U.S. only right now. we have someone in the Dominican Republic. Okay.

Who is kind of like the Al Roker of Latin America, which is cool. And we have, yeah, expansion plans for India and Brazil and Europe, places where that have a high Twitter penetration rate. You know, I'm going to start with places where they're already using Twitter, already familiar with it. and where there is a meteorology infrastructure that we don't have to, like, train our own meteorologists. But I imagine eventually we'll get to the point where we will, you know, maybe one day we'll be, like, substack and, like, funding meteorology degrees for people to be trained and go out there and learn what needs to happen. But I'm also really, really interested in reimagining this idea of expertise and having, community like I I told

I told folks as I was hiring to kind of use weather as the writing prompt rather than a literal description of what the weather is going to be like I would love to have like we hired a person a woman in in San Francisco who is a poet and is going to be kind of

talking about what the weather means for her community not just what the weather is so like anyone can get the 72 and sunny, so we can put that on the top of the page. But if we say, like, what does it mean to be in the East Bay today with this streak of heat wave and, you know, like, try to provide resources for folks, you know, I think that's a little bit more important than just getting the temperature and rainfall. So I want to pop in here real quick. I did pin a tweet to a really, really excellent podcast called Drilled, which goes into the,

the history of mis and disinformation from specifically the oil industry and how so much of the advertising methodologies that were started in the 30s have really persisted into the modern day. So highly recommended listening. We will have Amy Westervelt who does drill on our first week next week. Amazing. I wanted to bring up Mike though real quick here because I think, you know, Mike maybe can help put some of the strategy into broader context. You know, certainly Twitter, obviously.

has been known for its brevity and perhaps, you know, for poetics, I would love to to hear sort of a sense for whether or if, you know, weather is the first, you know, if you will, lightning rod for where this all comes together and it starts to, you know, produce, you know, whether it's different, you know, feature directions or product development or what just like the overall kind of like thinking and strategy is, whether this is, you know, one of many or one that's going to be sort of, you know, dug into for a little while and developed and then to see how the learnings maybe can lateralize into other verticals or other domains. Mike? Sure. Hey, Chris.

Hey. Thanks also for the disclaimer for the Spacecast. It's kind of like the disclaimer when it's like, can I record your screen? Exactly. Is that cool? So we have to do that now. Thank you. I first want to say this was total serendipity. I was just popping open Twitter.

This was not planned. I saw Eric and you chatting. I was like, oh, is this like his boss? Like, oh, no. Did I get him in trouble? It's like, hey, everybody. Yeah, so first I wanted to say, like, to the trust factor you were talking about before, before we talked about long-form things, is Eric, you know, made, his claim to fame was, like,

saving lives on Sandy using Twitter, which I think, I'm not sure if everybody knows that. Like, he was literally calling the storm for New York City days ahead. And what I love about tomorrow is, you know, it's a network of people who are going to do similar things. Actually, can I just like, I want to add a little anecdote there because I think this is really important for people to understand both about the nature of Twitter and also how its job to be done has been there from the beginning. And it just, you know, give me like two minutes. But in the, in the origin story for the hashtag, the reason why the hashtag became powerful and useful was because I had a friend, Nate Ritter, who is down in San Diego during the wildfires that were happening back in 2007. This was in October. So I wrote up and came up with the idea for the hashtag in August, published it.

Twitter said it was stupid. I was like, fine. And then Nate had, you know, basically like this horrible situation going on down there. And the, essentially, the system that was there to give people the information for how and when to evacuate wasn't working. And so he realized that he could use SMS to broadcast messages to his friends and family who were in San Diego about what was going on, because he had access to the television and to the radio and things like that. So all the way back in 2007, we were using Twitter for this purpose. So it's just great to hear kind of like over time, how we've continued to come back to that original and core use case. And now it's a daily newsletter.

Right. No, I think what to frame sort of what we're doing here is what tomorrow's using is this publisher tier of review where basically multiple writers can band together and create a brand and send out those issues as often as they like. there's a incentive model, paid subscription model, you know, any paid money comes in to tomorrow and he distributes it to the writers. And I think it's sort of a fun future to play with where, you know, large, large media organizations kind of squint and look at newsletters, like they have newsletters today, but they're not using them in a way to deliver value directly to readers. And what we hope to

see is more tomorrow's out there. I don't think it's definitely not just weather. It's every topic that's popular on Twitter. Three people can come together, create a writer band, create a newsletter, and immediately start driving revenue, or not just make it free. I mean, honestly, that's what we're doing with Spacecasts. I was going to say that reminds me of a little podcast collective.

This is Brian, Mike, jumping in here real quick. One of the things that I've always been fascinated with, even the earliest days of Substack and things like that, is the local space, the local angle to this. And we're always decrying the death of local journalism, local media. So I'm curious to what degree, and this is also for Eric, too, to what degree you're thinking about this is, no, we're serving a need within a fucking zip code or whatever. You know what I mean? Like this is what we can rush into this sort of vacuum and provide a service that is going away for a lot of people. Yeah, I'll let Eric opine on that. Just briefly from our side, local location has always been an opportunity for Twitter.

You know, you can follow a city now as a topic, but when you do, I think we still have a lot more signal to give you. Yeah, no, it's. It's a hard problem to solve, right? There's so many tweets about a particular location. Do you do that based on geo-code or do you do it based on words? For topic classification. Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole system behind it.

But generally, a majority of tweets are annotated based on keywords and based on, you know, what those types of accounts typically treat about. And I would love to have like the snap map. That would be just be like super rad. But anyways, yeah, okay, continue. A good API implement. right there. Yeah.

But Eric, maybe you can talk a little bit more about the local strategy. Yeah, I mean, weather is always local. So that was, for me, it was more of just like a natural way to break down the workload. And I think that, you know, we going back to trust, you know, like if there's someone, if there's a voice that you've been following specifically, and this is where kind of like the substack model comes in, like people are subscribing to voices and are subscribing to individual creators rather than subscribing to the Washington Post. So, I mean, you can also subscribe to the Washington Post, but I also, you know, I want,

I want voices that I trust. So that works with weather really well, where we have, you know, weather writers that are going to be, you know, living there in the community with the readers that read them. But when the time gets critical or dire, we can amplify those voices around the world. You know, I can push what the writer in Houston is doing out to the entire network if I want to. Or in the reverse, we can use meteorologists from places where the storm is not hitting to help support the folks in Houston. while that storm, you know, to answer reader questions to run the space, to run the, um, the conversation in the Twitter community, you know, to, to do the kind of nuts and bolts

work that needs to be done so that the person who has been, the trusted voice can remain at front and center and kind of focus on the storm and focus on getting the word out or like contextualizing the event. I want to ask one more, I guess, sort of, you know, question in this realm. Specifically in this, you know, I think, Eric, you were here for the beginning of this conversation, Mike, I don't think you were. But specifically around some of Facebook's announcements today around their messenger unification and around businesses and brands being able to get in touch directly with people. And that's kind of what you're talking about here, or at least one of the value props is having kind of, I mean, it's not exactly having a meteorologist on speed dial, but, you know, a speed DM perhaps. And one of the things that I'm just very, very disappointed with and frustrated with on the Twitter side,

and this is not meant to be sort of a rant against Twitter. But in terms of a missed opportunity, you know, DMs, group DMs, all that functionality feels like it's just, you know, stuck in the dark ages relative to where some of your competitors are. And so my question, I guess, you know, Eric, from your perspective is given, you know, that you were spending, you know, 16 hour days trying to DM people, what is your thought on what could happen to evolve Twitter's own, whether it's automated messaging or just kind of that tooling? Because newsletters is one way to do broadcast, but the DM piece feels so valuable and so important and just it's just not there yet. Yeah, I pay attention to DMs in the way that I never pay attention to email. Like I am just living on Twitter during those events. And I think that, you know, I've been approached by no fewer than two startups that are trying to get me to demo, you know, DM plus, like whatever DM add-on that they've come up with to say, like, here, we've, we've fixed Twitter DMs because they weren't fixing it, you know, like, they've neglected it.

And so that's a missed opportunity. Here's a way to reach the people who follow you in very, very. very smart ways. And, you know, this is a built-in audience. These are your super fans. And right now, there's not even a reliable way to search your DMs right now. So I agree. But it's-

Preach, preach. I don't know if Mike has anything to say to offer. The only thing I could say is it's understood and appreciated and we are working on it. Great. You know, I hope folks I've felt the pace of feature building. But for sure, just not in DMs. DM is one of those things. Everyone knows.

I'm sure it's like a well-known. I just like, I wish there is much, you know, hustle there as there's been on, you know, spaces and tipping and all that. So I'll just leave it at that. I understand you guys understand. Are we making a request? Eric, have you used review? I just, I'm just going to throw that out there.

Have you used it and then Mike can fix it for us? Go for it. Yeah. No, I think review is awesome. And review is kind of what I wanted when, because I also have a substack and I'm going to maintain the substack. And you have my primary personal climate writing on the substack because I feel like that works for an individual in the way that review works for groups. Interesting.

So I think that, at least for me, having review and having the ability to kind of like collectively brand and also, you know, the team at review has been amazing to work with and sort of like, co-build some of the stuff with, you know, like talking back and forth a little bit about what I'm the bugs that I'm finding, the feature requests that I have in trying to see, you know, using me as the test case for what a big public picture might want. So, yeah, it's been, it's been a really good experience. And I'll chime in to say that a lot of what Eric is doing, he is very early. I think in leveraging a lot of the things we want to build around review. So, for example, a simple card or button on your profile page to help drive new subscribers.

There's some really basic low-hanging through things that we're going to be doing. And also, you know, I think as a writer, you put so much effort into an issue or publishing, you should have a notification for that. So your followers should be notified when the new issue is available, right? We have notification for tweets, but a newsletter, an article, full of thread, these longer things that you put more effort in deserve better discovery surface areas. Yeah, 100%.

So I have both a substack newsletter and a review newsletter, and the reason I wanted to diversify for my personal one is because I wanted, I was hoping that, you know, because Twitter required review, there would be some synergies there. I just haven't seen them yet, so I'm really excited once those start trickling in. The synergy will come. Real quick. I hate myself for using that word now. I don't know. I understand.

Real quick, Mike, you're suggesting, and to that end, you're suggesting that, like, there's so many things to come. If you're on the product team at Twitter right now, is it a thousand flowers blooming? Let's try all the things. Or do you, well, you wouldn't be able to answer this. Like, are you rowing in a specific direction, or are you trying to, Are you throwing things against the wall and see what sticks right now? Yeah, I think, so backing way up, we had a three-year plan that we are about halfway through. And those objectives haven't changed. It's around interests.

It's around conversation and health. And making Twitter easier to use, like around the world, just making it more performant. And then there are areas, which I'll say, like, Longform is one, which is Greenfield. It's something, frankly, that we probably should have done years ago, which is, like, make it easier to read articles. make threads easier to create and read, elevate things like newsletters throughout the platform. So in those types of buckets, we want to move quickly. You don't want to overthink things. We want to try it.

We want to move quickly. So you've got sort of longer-term investments, and then you've got areas that we're trying to be a little bit more nimble and move faster. You know, I know this is going to be like a crazy stupid idea, but like in some ways, it just sort of seems like just in the way that Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, are kind of like all one thing now. It's sort of like Twitter needs to reabsorb medium and just bring these things together

because honestly I can't tell which one I should be publishing on and they kind of have similar overlapping features at this point. And they're kind of owned by the same people. So it's just kind of like, given what you just said, that would almost like make more sense. Just come together. I mean, medium, the experience of writing and medium is a lot better than the experience in writing and review.

And it's kind of like review has to reinvent that. And it would save a lot for sure. If only that were the way it was. All right, guys, we've been going for an hour and a half. This is really great, despite, you know, my getting stuck into a black hole someplace. I guess I'll offer Eric and Mike any last parting thoughts before we wrap today. I would just say, yeah, thanks for having this conversation. And it's really exciting for me as kind of like a super user of Twitter to like to be,

out there and trying to be, you know, like, I just turned 40 this year. Like, I'm mid-career now. I have to realize that I don't, I don't have to pull 18-hour days anymore. Like, I have, I can, I can change the system that I've been working in this entire time. So that's kind of what I'm doing, like, to see the weather ecosystem and the Twitter ecosystem as it exists right now and kind of imagine what I would want it to be ideally, and then go out there and do it. That's really kind of what I'm trying to be. And I'm just grateful for Twitter's help so far. The only thing I'll add is I always wanted to be a meteorologist.

I couldn't hack the calculus. I'm a secret weather nerd. Jess is on here. She knows that. She is too. So I'm stoked to be partnering with Eric. And also just happy you all had me on here for a second and are interested in what we're up to. Yeah.

And I'm also glad that we got to talk about a whole different angle of the Twitter story, which I think has not only been, I don't know if it's been undercovered, but it's a different nature of this conversation, which I think is great, as opposed to just sort of being broad-based about the greater economy in general. It's sort of like, let's talk about how this actually meets, you know, a need that people have. So I'm super excited with that. Awesome. All right. Like we said at the beginning, this is going to be put out in the new, brand-new Spacecasts podcast. We were on Prat-a-Ton yesterday. We did pretty well. If you guys want to go check it out and offer some support, that would be lovely. We also

have a very nice short link if you want to subscribe to the podcast at pod.com. So super simple, super easy. That's where you can find the whole kind of... Or just search wherever you're listening right now. Your fine podcasts are purveyed. But if you're listening after the date, search for spacecast. Yeah, anyone listening to this, it'll be live tomorrow morning. And I also want to point out that Amil is one of our spacecast's contributors

to this collective. He does the big tech news. If you search Spacecasts right now, you'll hear his first contribution to the collective talking about Amazon acquiring MGM, Facebook suing India, a whole bunch of stuff. And I'm sure he'll have another- India? Oh, I'm sorry, Amazon, yes, wait. Facebook can sue a country? What? You know what? That was last week. That was last week. A lot's happened. Okay, so just go find that episode. Now I've got to go Yes, yes. Okay. Got it. Anyway, so yes, Spacecast, great. We love all of our contributors. Join us if you are doing Twitter spaces and contribute as well. Thank you, Chris.

Awesome. All right. Thanks, guys. We'll be back here probably next week. Thanks, all back. I'll like it for kids. Bye. Okay, next up, Matt Navarra is a well-known social media consultant, and Martin SFP Bryant does comms and strategy for startups. And every week, the pair have a Twitter space. that they call Geek Out Weekly, where they talk about the latest news in the social media world. Once again, I'm just going to give you a sampling of the show, the second half of their most recent episode. This week, they talked about Twitter Blue, being sort of a work in progress. And what does TikTok want with Americans' biometric data? A story that I didn't even get to cover this week, but I'm super interested in. So here's a taste, but be sure to head over to Spacecast to

hear the whole thing and subscribe to hear more of geek out weekly every week. Let's have a quick look at some of the other bits of pieces that were in the newsletter and happening in news this week. So Facebook had its F8 developer kind of conference called Refresh this year F8 Refresh. And it was really kind of less of a big affair than maybe in previous ones, but this was probably just like a smaller one for some key updates. And the main things was one of them was the Messenger API, which we talked about earlier, which has now been in beta, but it's now open to all developers. So third-party platforms, who's seen the others, as we say, can now build Instagram messaging into the kind of tools that gives social media managers and others.

But there's also some stuff to integrate Instagram into other things, other workflows. There's some new AR features being opened up through its Spark AR program and a few other bits and pieces to do with WhatsApp for business as well to kind of improve the ability to build your presence of this business on WhatsApp. So lots of dev stuff, not so much directly, you know, first-hand consumer bits and pieces at this stage. But there's been some news in the last couple

of hours about Facebook, so there's been another case put against them in Europe, hasn't there? Yes, actually, the EU and UK are both opening US word antitrust we probably call them competition inquiries into

Facebook and the Wall Street Journal reporting that it's into the classified ad service marketplace and Facebook's use of advertiser data. So, yeah, we'll have to see how this will go, but it's just interesting that both UK and EU investigations both coming through on the same day. And yeah, it feels a bit like that day a couple of weeks ago where both Amazon and Apple both announced lossless music offerings for free on the same day. It's like, you know, everyone's now competing to to investigate Facebook.

But yeah, we'll have to see how this is only the start of the investigation. So we'll have to see how it unfolds. But yet more headaches for Mark Zuckerberg and his team to wrap the head around. And again, talking off, talking of Mark Zuckerberg, for the people who are into all like new features and find, you know, what the latest platforms updates are, which is me and a few other geeks out there, one of the people that just posts this information is a Twitter account

and a telegram group and a whole load of other things by W-A-B-Ta-Info. So if you're on Twitter and you look up W-A-B-A-I-Nfo. There's an account from a guy that I've known for some time who does all this stuff, but only for WhatsApp updates. And he got buzzed this week because I think I assume WhatsApp wanted to have a word and source. So I'll say, you know, here's some updates for you because they finally realized that actually these leaker account people are quite a useful way to kind of get things out there

when they want to strategically get a message out. So anyway, they did a thing with him this week, which is the first time they've done it. And he had a group chat call with WhatsApp's head of CEO. I'm not sure what role. They call him head, I assume. And then also Mark Zuckerberg dropped into the group chat as well with him. So this guy who's just been leaking bits and bombs

to doing some similar but different to things to what I've been doing for years. Suddenly he's in this group chat where Mark Zuckerberg talking away, or at least someone who's saying they are. but there's some good updates actually they were talking about updates for WhatsApp for iPad and a disappearing messages feature updates so you get a chance to have a look at all of that you're all far as and useful

I love what you're saying like someone who's claiming they are like because it was audio messages from Mark Zuckerberg was too busy and so they got a Mark Zuckerberg impersonator that was good no I didn't actually know he had a voice message I was thinking it was more a case of

he had a message. It was just text back and forwards and photos and stuff. It could have just been his PA, admin, whoever person. But I didn't realize it was voice. Oh, in that case, yeah. I don't think it really got to that much trouble. What else have we got here that was going on this week? There's lots of stuff to do with, you know, there's releases about disinformation campaigns. You know, we saw, you know, Russia being accused again of being the main source for a lot of this stuff. But then there was another bit of reporting come out that was saying, you know, the US, again, maybe unsurprisingly,

is the top target for people doing these campaigns of disinformation. So not a lot there that was new, really. What else have we got around here? Let's have a look. Yeah, so there's a bunch of Instagram stars, reality TV stars from Jordy Shaw, MTV's program, and X on the beach and all that kind of stuff. They've been posting stuff for kind of loan,

you know, save yourself thousands of pounds right off all your debt now kind of adverts, but not labeling them as adverts. and they got a ticking off and the post will pull down, but I don't think they've got fine running. I'm just going to give it another warning. Birdwatch, have you seen anyone, or do you know anyone who's got Twitter Birdwatch? Because I haven't.

So Birdwatch being the fact-checking feature that they're testing in the US for Twitter. No, no. Yeah, it was something you actually had to apply for, I think, wasn't it? So they want people who are actively going to make notes about tweets and things, and they want to kind of very engaged people to take part in it. But no, I've not spoken to anyone who's, actually used it, but overall it's quite an interesting idea. So what they're doing now,

aren't they, is attaching some of these notes that the users of Birdwatch have made, kind of fact-checking notes and supplementary info about what's in these popular tweets. They're actually attaching them to the tweets themselves. So at the moment only visible to people who are in the Birdwatch test, so it's a very limited thing. But I think that's quite an interesting way of approaching fact-checking. I'm not certain it or were. because the more you open up Birdwatch, the more likely it is that it will be abused by people fact-checking in their own... They're always going to have to be a vetted thing, isn't it?

It's never going to be able to be a... Everybody can add a Birdwatch comment to it because it just wouldn't work. So I'm assuming that there's going to be a continual application vetting thing. A bit like the translation, and you can add that little globe sort of sticker thing to your profile if you say you're a translator of languages and stuff. But either way, yeah, I think you're right. It could be heavily abused, but I think it seems so obvious that that would be the case

that it must be part of their way that they're going to do it, so they won't become that way. TikTok is not doing, hasn't done itself any favours here in the sense of Americans or people in general who felt that TikTok could be sort of sending its data to China and all the sorts of information it might be collecting and then potentially sending to its Chinese bosses. There's been an update today in the new.

on lots of outlets, but tech crunch copies in the newsletter, where it's just given itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including face prints and voice prints, and that's a quote directly from the terms. There's a bit more to it than that, but yeah, this isn't going to help them at all

in terms of people thinking what they're up to now. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, it could very much be, as it says here, while despite out and creepy, other social networks do object recognition on images. So it could very well be to do with AR and things like that. So doing voice effects and face recognition, you know, turning your face into something else and all that kind of thing could require biometric data. So it's kind of like when people get upset in the terms and

conditions of social networks where it says like you reserve the right for us to include your image in advertising and they go, oh, they're going to use my personal photos on billboards and things. And it's not that at all. Or, you know, we, want to, we'll have to copy all your data and send it to some far-flung country or something. And that's just the way cloud computing works. And people don't necessarily understand. And lawyers don't necessarily understand how to write these things in ways that make sense to people. So it feels like something that they could have just got around by wording it maybe slightly differently, unless they really are collecting all this stuff to send and do.

Maybe they're just an evil bad thing. Maybe they just really are evil. And this is just a genius. Just like, no, they're not going to do that. There we are. But there is a bit in the TechCrunch article does point out the fact that the policy also notes

that part of the data collection is for enabling special video effects, content moderation, demographic classification, ad recommendations, content recommendations. So it does feel like

it's a bit of one of those catch-all kind of terms to cover their asses because everyone gets upset when something happens once and then it's like they didn't know that they were allowed to do it.

But because of the type of thing it is, you know, it does make you kind of wonder well, do you want to have a catch-all with that particular sort of bit of your data? Always get, always get comms people involved with any kind of communication. That's why I say, including the terms of service. You want to get some really easy to read plain English terms of service that explain very clearly

what things do because otherwise things like this will happen. Yeah, we've heard this one, we've heard this story before, haven't we, somewhere? So what else have we got that's going on to do with? So TikTok, this is quite interesting, longer read. There's a couple of stories of it, but there was a story that I spotted about that TikTok was knocked off of the top of the US App Store chart for the first time in, you know, however many years, the last couple of years or 18 months or whatever. And but interestingly, more interestingly in the fact that TikTok was finally been

dethroned for a bit was that the app that knocked it off was a really basic simple keyboard app. And for a day or so, when I first saw the story, he just said, you know, some simple keyboard app. not no one seems to put care and batter an islander so well why is the key what happened to thrown titherto well the reason i think it was dug up by uh got the author name now but maybe martin you've got it there but gizmodo shoshana wadinski that's right yeah and she and looked it up and figured out that actually it was to do with a sort of viral trend uh thing going on on ticot where people were using it to spam other people in comments with uh with a very simple copy paste trick that this app is particularly adept at doing.

And so it's quite amusing that that's the feature, the app that is now led to dethroning TikTok because it went viral on TikTok in other places as well. But anyway, a very good read. If you get a chance to read it, the story as to how that came to be. What else we got? So Clubhouse, they've just come out this week

and give us some details about there's more than 2 million users on Android. And I think they've just recently said that the invite mechanism that they've got in place should be dropped by the summer. we're in June, so I'm guessing that's pretty soon. So for those that fed up with that, that's going to come down. I still don't hear many people in the circles that I'm kind of chatting to people in that are using Clubhouse. There are a certain type of friend or connection I have that does use Clubhouse,

but in general terms, most people are saying to me they're going in and coming back out again and it's just not sticking with it. You know, something that actually slipped through the net in terms of actually appearing in the newsletter this week. was news this week, was that Clubhouse has hired the person who used to book people for the TED conferences to kind of curate speakers and things for content for Clubhouse. It was in the Tech Revolution newsletter, actually. So if you subscribe to the other geek out newsletter on Wednesday, it was in there.

But, yeah, that's quite interesting and shows the way they're thinking about this as more a, maybe a premium destination for big name interviews. perhaps interactive interviews, but big name kind of highbrow stuff, not highbrow, but you know, high profile stuff, rather than so much of the kind of user-generated stuff. Something we didn't, whilst we're talking about Clubhouse and social audio stuff, is the news this week about the button. So they've added a new tab on, I think it's just iOS, isn't it, for Twitter, but it's only for the people that were in this original early beta

of spaces are going to get this new tab because it's a special new spaces discovery tab. And I didn't think I was going to get it on my version of the app because I wasn't one of the original beta testers. I was kind of maybe the second or third tranche or whatever. But I did open it this morning and now I have instead of the four icons, which is usually the house, the magnifying glass, the bell and the envelope. You now have one squeeze in the middle, which is the symbol for spaces, the forward circles. So I've had a look at it. I'm actually going to look at it now where we're here to see or what stuff is on there.

I'm assuming it's showing me that it can't, maybe it doesn't show everything, but the top item is the one that's got the most people in the space. And it's something that's being hosted by Tara Bull 808 on Twitter. And it's, it looks like some sort of financial thing. AMC to the moon or a TV show maybe, 365 people in that space.

And then the next one's 1602. The AMC stock, it's, it's, uh, this, um, stock price. Mean, mean stock stuff, yeah. And then the next one's,

there's one called Lovers, 162. I don't know who's in that space, but there's 162 people enjoying lovers, and then the numbers go down, 26, 41, 31, 29, 8, 11. So I don't know if that's a snapshot. I'd like to... Well, it's not everything. Are we being in that?

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, but excluding that. But anyway, interesting that that's... But the more... The interesting thing about all of that is, though, is that the fact that so quickly and so forcefully, you know, Twitter has put that into the app, you know, front and center, staking its claim,

we believe that spaces and audio is going to be a big enough deal that we're going to change a significant way of how you use the app, adding another tab, and we're going to put it front and centre. Clubhouse and Facebook will now see their commitments and intentions to it. I guess they're pretty much going all in on audio, wouldn't you say? Yeah, absolutely. And it's clearly their big priority for this year spaces. And yeah, they're going all in on it. And I think with some something like this, you have to really push it and push it and make it a big thing, or otherwise it just becomes another one of those kind of forgotten features. So will it still be such a big thing in the year's time? Let's see. But all they can do is try, and they're certainly

going to try. And so that's good to see. Going on to further down in the newsletters, I've got a section in the DMs. I get quite a lot of stuff that comes into my inbox, which is sometimes quite interesting gossip or things that can't be attributed to somebody or just stuff that's just weird and I just thought you might like to know a bit about it. And this week, the two things that are kind of partly from DMs but also from other stuff that I've had,

there seems to be Instagram testing a replacement for this swipe-up links, but it's hard to tell whether it's going to be either or or you have one or the other or both can be used. But at the moment, if you want to add a link to a story, you have to have 10,000 followers or be verified, whatever. and then you can do the usual add the link for swipe up. But there has been a link sticker that's been sort of seen in the last few weeks. And it's now been spotted kind of in the while.

Of all people, for those in the UK, know Chris Moyles, ex-BBC breakfast DJ, he's got his own shop and he flogged gear off it on Instagram. And he was using the link sticker. I noticed it because the sticker was there, showed the link image. And then it said Chris Moyles dot shop or something and tapped it in. You went shop. There was no swipe up. and a friend contacted me and said, yeah, well, I've got the, I haven't got the ability to add swipe up links anymore.

I thought I'd lost the ability, but actually it just replaced it and given me the link sticker. So I don't know whether that means it's testing which one works best, which people prefer, who knows. I don't think it changes the fact that you still have to have verified all 10,000 plus followers to get the link. So, you know, that's the main thing. I think a lot of people are more concerned about. another thing this for me feels like a bug but someone was a couple of people more than two or three reported

the fact that earlier this week they could upload a video into their story on Instagram and then instead of it's being split into chunks as you'd expected to over multiple frames of the story it was allowing it to be a lengthy chunk of it in one bit of the story like a couple of minutes worth

that doesn't sound like a good user experience to me having story sections that could be minutes and length maybe for some it is but she said she can reproduce it. So if you have had that experience, I'd be interested to know whether you think that's a glitch or future. Glitch is my guess.

What else have we got this week before we had in there to scroll down a bit? Also, there was a report, I think it was in the Drum, which did a thing with LinkedIn, saying about the digital marketing skills that are kind of in the last 12 months or so in LinkedIn data that shows a massive rise. And some of the top ones in the recent months

been Instagram skills up 72%, content marketing up 63%, and HootSuite skills up 39%. And then other ones where Adobe Premier Pro skills, marketing automation and Facebook marketing. So if you're in that space, which a lot of people, I guess, in this room probably are, then that's pretty good news, isn't it? I would say. I think there's also a lot to be said there about the whole fact of creator space opening up in the last six to 12 months more than it's ever done. forgetting the pandemic, the knock on effect of this growth towards the creator economy is probably playing into a lot of this where people think, Christ, you know, I can make a bit money here. I just need to upskill in some of these key areas. I'm not going to go through

all of the quick hits today. There's loads of stuff in there that was spotted over the last seven days and all sorts of stuff to do, tiny little features that only have the people have got and some other things that are in tests. So if you're into all that stuff, there's a whole long list of them in the newsletter. But I'm going to jump right. down to the bottom area for the weekend reading, because there's loads of bits in there. Martin, what this week has caught your eye? What's British bits did you read? Yeah, so this LA Times thing, hashtags are full out of style, but not for influencers.

Yeah, so looking at why influencers are using hashtags. And, yeah, so I just thought it was interesting because hashtags are one of those things that I think are so ugly, and I try not to use them. And sometimes you feel kind of prompted to and you kind of almost feel forced to on LinkedIn still. And it's like, I don't like using hashtags. They look ugly. But they're still a thing and they're still being used.

I still see people on Twitter that put and write a tweet and then at the end put like seven hashtags like it's on Instagram. And I just feel like I want to grab them and say, no, no. I just people who ask me to retweet things for them. And they've got like every third word. is a hashtag and I'm like, why are you doing that? You know, it's not 2008 or whatever. Well, Facebook in the last couple of years

got back into hashtags. So they're big on the hashtag stuff. And we should really have invited Chris Messina into the space to talk about it because feeling that he invented the hashtag. But we did an episode, didn't we, talking about it. So on the geek out podcast, I think season two, we had Chris on talking about hashtags.

So if you get a chance of go and search up the podcast, you'll find that quite fun. But there's an article in the LA Times. search out LA Times, hashtags, or scroll to the bottom of the newsletter that's pinned in this space. Look for the weekend reads. You'll find this article there. It's really good. There's also TikTok accidentally detected my ADHD, which is an article, opinion piece, but in the Guardian, I think. And some of this rang true to me and also rang bells because I, I've said many a time, I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 27 and I didn't believe a word in the fact that I had ADHD or

or anything I just thought was, you know, not a thing for me. And then after doing a lot of testing and going through all the sort of processes that realized actually it was. But I didn't actively remember or consciously remember going through TikTok when I first started using TikTok and picking bits that were saying stuff about or TikTok videos that were to do with ADHD at all. But I remember slowly over time, suddenly they started appearing more and more. So my hunch would be that maybe I liked one.

And then once I watched one, maybe I'd watch one and two. and it kind of flooded it. Now my feed is full of them. But I think TikTok actually encourages the ADHD anyway with the speed that you rattle through these videos. But if you hadn't had a chance to have a look at this particular article, you should because it's quite fun, and it's in The Guardian.

TikTok accidentally detecting my ADHD. Nick Clegg has done another essay. Thank you to Alex at Facebook for flagging to me that Nick Clegg has done another essay. It's linked to the bottom of the newsletter. It talks a lot about the... kind of internet economy and what the next 20 years for Europe and all that kind of stuff. Any other ones that was there? Oh, Alex Cantowitz's piece that he's done about Twitter's

certainty problem. I don't think I'm going to go into much more detail in that because that was what captured my interest in the first place, but it is a really good read if you get a chance to search that one else. The one, two, three, fifth one is it there down in the list, Twitter's certainty problem. Anything else from you, Martin, that we've missed? No, I don't think so. I think And no news has broken while we've been live, as far as I can see. So nothing to suddenly jump in with. Jack Dorsey has broken news while we've been saying that Square is considering making a hardware wallet for Bitcoin. But that's not social media.

That's his other company Square. I just don't get excited by Bitcoin. As soon as I hear the word cryptocurrency, I glaze over and start on board it. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. I have no time for all the excitement over what the current Bitcoin prices and all that kind of thing. But I think that there's lots of potential in decentralized tech. And so on that side of things, I think it's quite interesting. And certainly what Square is doing around it and the kind of way Jack Dorsey is thinking about decentralized money, but also decentralized social media.

And it would be interesting to see when something comes of that whole project that Twitter kicked off, hopefully sometime soon. But yeah, if you look at Jack's Twitter account at Jack, of course, he's just published a thread about a hardware, a hardware Bitcoin wallet. Interesting. The top three things that bore me on Twitter right now, number one, NFTs, number two, cryptocurrencies, and then three, as soon as I see the buzzword, the creator economy, as soon as I see any of those three things, they just kind of spin on by, if it wasn't for the fact that it's good to keep up with all that bits of information for things. like this, I would probably put them on a mute, which I actually don't use, before we get,

do you actually, do you use extensively any of the features for moderation, self-moderation within Twitter, like the mute function or any of the filters that you can do? Because I just have it, show me everything, filter nothing, and then I'll decide if I don't want to see anything, you know, as in when. Yeah, I don't either. I don't mute anything. I've got literally no mute. I don't like the idea of missing out things, and even if it's something I don't like to

hear about. I at least want to see it at my feed. And I know that's quite a, quite a privileged thing to say, because many people don't want to see things that actually impact their lives in a negative way and bring them down and affect their mental health or whatever. And so I totally understand why people use mute. Or there are people they don't want to see in the feed. And so they maybe don't want to block them and create drama, so they mute them. You know, I barely block anywhere either. I only block spammers. And I can't think of anyone I've blocked because they annoyed me. most they'll unfollow them or maybe, you know, I might mute them, but like I say, I don't use mute.

So, so yeah, I just, but again, that's quite a privileged position to be in to not have that many trolls. Well, but yeah. To round up things, I'll just tell a quick story to do with them, a tweet that went out this week I posted that ended up getting the most attention of any of the other tweets that went out. And unsurprisingly, it was the one to do with, I think the tweet just reads, Facebook is, trying out or testing prayer posts for groups or something. That's all the texts and the tweets said, if you have a look. Posted and it's gone everywhere.

And then as I predicted, I've got quite a lot of spam DMs and mostly I just ignored. But then one somehow creaked into my main inbox. It wasn't someone I followed. I don't know if they follow me. And it just said, bear in mind what I'd said in my tweet, the DM was, what's your effing problem with religion?

Why don't you, why are you having such an issue with it? Prick. in a DM to me. I was like, the DM just says that they've got a feature. Where does, where has he managed to get the inference from me? He's very good if he has that I think, you know, that I hate religion or something, which I don't. I don't have really any strong opinions away on it. But anyway, that's the sort of stuff I get. Never tweet. Never tweet about religion. And I replied and said, but I haven't said that. Or I think I said, where did I say that? And then they disappeared and they did say anything after that. So, you know,

It's still not as bad as the time when they stuck my information in an article in Info Wars about me thinking that the Home Alone scene in Home Alone scene where Trump is in it. I didn't ever say that they should remove that scene because Trump was in it. I was making a reference that people would be talking about that scene being in Hemowome. Somehow Info Wars and others construed that I was such a snowflake that I was demanding on Twitter because I'm a diva with a blue tick that they removed the scene of Trump. I had so much abuse. There's an Instagram story on my Instagram account now and highlights. The last highlights I did,

which is just all of the abuse because of that one incident. But I find it quite amusing, so it's all good fact. Every innocent tweet is a potential porn in the tedious, tedious culture war. What's the other tweet that I shared a few weeks back again. It does the rounds every few years. Every day there's a main character on Twitter, the game is not to be it. That's pretty much it.

On that note, I've got nothing else to say. So I will say goodbye and thanks for tuning in. And yeah, we'll be back here the same time next week. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye-bye. Next up, Amil Proto-Linski is the former executive editor of Venture Beat, a publication we quote from on this show all the time. He's in the newsletter game now, and in aid of that,

he does a Twitter space every week or so, named after one of his newsletters, Big Tech News. For the spaces, he has a rotating guest host policy, and this week it was John Coatsier. They got deeper than I did this week into the coming of Windows 11, Android 12 privacy changes, Amazon's sidewalk rollout, and thoughts ahead of WWDC. Again, I'm going to give you a sample of the second half of Amel's most recent space, but if you want the whole thing and more episodes to come, go to Spacecast and subscribe, and look for the big tech news episodes in that feed.

I will say this. I don't know if you have an Oculus Quest or not. I own an Oculus Quest. I bought version one. I bought version two. I have it upstairs. I love it. I think it's amazing.

I think it's incredible. I think it's the first headset that has made VR really quite accessible to people and fairly easy to use. I will say this. It still sits in its box way the heck more. more than it should because VR is a physically active thing to do, right? And so I need to shove some furniture around in my living room to have enough space to play some games or do certain things that I want to do.

And also, after a full day of talking to people like you, I'm dead tired and I want to just like, like, zone or something like that. So VR is pretty active. And so it stays in the box more than it should. I mean, have you dabbled your toes into VR? are only a little bit. I have actually thought of getting a quest too. I don't own either either I don't own a headset right now. I have thought of getting a quest too, but only from the perspective of exercise. Yes. You know, because I've heard it's good for that and you can, you know, if you're immersed, you basically exercise for longer. Dude, that is a good, very good point. I've, I've had a couple different apps that I've used for exercise, including one where you attach a cycle. And there's a thing, there's a little sensory attached to the pedal so it knows how fast. you're going and you cycle around and I've burned hundreds of calories without even thinking of it.

That's a pretty cool way doing it. And Beat Saber. I mean, I've had it. I use an Apple Watch pretty religiously and I track my calories expended per day and it's got to hit a certain number. And I've made up my budget of calories burned by playing Beat Saber at night, you know, for 20, 30 minutes and burning 150 calories or something like that. Yeah. So that's kind of the use case for VR right now. I mean, obviously there's, you know, porn and other games,

but I feel like fitness is kind of the use case for VR. But to be clear, for the, you know, for the Apple headset, it's not just going to be VR. It's going to be mainly AR with some VR parts, I believe. I mean, the rumors are all over the place for that, but the long-term Apple is clearly betting on AR, right? That's why they have phone AR, and they're kind of hoping for that phone AR to VR transition.

Yeah. I'm just interested. I'm watching the live transcription on Twitter spaces right here, and you said, you know, there's porn on VR. It put four stars in there. Didn't actually put me at the word there. So it translated what I just said as corn. It's trying. John, it's trying. First time it did asterisk. Second time, it just threw in a different word. You can't blame it. It's doing the best as can, keeping this PG. I want open source algorithms. I don't object to you applying them, but I want to know what they do. Well, I mean, yeah, we can talk, we can talk censorship.

There's, I feel like a censorship story every week. I mean, so actually I believe there was one this week. We want to go all the way back to Facebook for a sec. Instagram said that they would change their algorithm to rank original and reposted content equally. Yes. Because of the suppression of pro-Palestinian voices. Now, I've no problem with supporting, you know, Palestinian voices, which are clearly being silenced,

given what's happening in Israel. But the approach here kind of threw me off, right? This seems super counterintuitive. Like, if they're making original and reposted content equal, isn't that just going to cause a whole, like, open a whole other set of kind of worms for them in terms of disinformation, misinformation, fake news,

you name it. That is taking a very big hammer to a certain challenge. Yeah. It's an odd solution. Yeah, I was, I mean, my reaction was just, hey, fix the censorship problem,

you know, figure out why your algorithm is censoring this group of people. Don't just, you know, make all the content the same. That's going to, anyway,

we'll see. Maybe that was, maybe that's a temporary thing and they'll revert it. But again, And that also doesn't address the problem. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Cool.

I've got to run pretty soon, Emil. I don't know if you want to keep running or if you're going to end your call. I think we can end it here. I don't know. Is that anything else that you want to go over this week from this week? You know, I think we hit everything. We think we hit everything. You know, we didn't, you know, here's one thing that we should really hit on a little bit.

And nothing much happened this week, but Apple versus Epic. That is a big, big deal. The case basically went to judgment, I guess, late last week, and we haven't yet heard what, and we don't know, I don't know when we're going to get a ruling on that. They said not before August. I think they're aiming for, I think the judge said she's aiming for August, but no promises. Seriously. Holy cow. I mean, justice delayed is justice rejected or whatever that phrase is? So that's, you know, I was actually shocked that this case is going to, you know, did go as quickly as it did, right?

Because I feel like the news that Epic is suing came out and then soon after the case was actually going on, which usually it's more drawn out. Now, to be fair, it's going to, it's going to be appealed, right? Regardless of what the ruling is, both sides are going to, whichever side is worse off is going to appeal. And it's going to get appealed again. It's going to get appealed again. I think what's interesting is whether Apple will make changes while the lawsuit is still ongoing, right? Because they already did a little bit, but certainly not enough. You probably know the exact details better than I do, right? They cut their 30% cut to 15 for certain developers under whatever, I remember how much revenue was.

Yeah, so they did that. But it clearly doesn't address the majority of the problems. No, it doesn't. It is really interesting, right? Because you can see Apple's point, hey, we made this and we made it available. If you choose to be on it, great, there you go. But when it becomes such a massive platform, I mean, imagine if you could only buy desktop software from Apple or from Microsoft, right? That is just not how the world has worked. So I think Apple's going to have to open it up to some degree. The reality is, look, they're very scared to do this, but the reality is, look, if you have a guaranteed safe way of doing things and it's the easy, way and it's the obvious way. And guess what is the default way? Ninety-five percent people are probably going to still keep doing that. And most of your revenue that you're getting already by being the gatekeeper to the app store, you're probably going to keep. But it's just a bad look to, you know, nail that down so tight that there's really, you know, no way for somebody to come and say, hey, here's a platform. I can innovate on top of it. And it's that kind of anti-the-history of

computing if you look at it. I totally understand the safety argument. I totally understand that it just works argument. I totally understand one company that you really trust holding your credit card data and not 15,000 different little app companies fly by night. You know, who knows where they are, who knows who their founders are. I totally get all that stuff, but they just can't keep it the way that it has been for forever. Yeah, I mean, many people have said that it's too late now to make changes. They have to just wait for the rulings. But I disagree. They have plenty of time to win over developers.

And actually we'll be curious. I suspect they won't talk about this at WWDC, right, because it's controversial, so they'll stay away from it. But, I mean, that would be a smart, savvy move on their part if they announced, hey, you know, we heard you. Here's, I don't know what change they would

want to start with, but they could certainly use WWDC. Here's one. Here's one. I mean, I just noticed that Rinkie Sethi is joined hey, Rinky, how's it going? She's a C-So at Twitter. Well, Twitter just released a variety of things where you can do a subscription, right? Twitter Blue, right? That's in Ken. I'm in Ken. I can try Twitter Blue if I want to do. But also paid spaces and stuff like that is coming, right?

So, but if you do that, you know, there was a, I forget the exact breakdown, but let's say you got $3 and Apple got its cut and Twitter got its cut and then you got a cut, right? And it was just like, it's really challenging. because Apple gets its cut. So there's not much left over for Twitter or for the actual person who is releasing the product that somebody wants to buy. So, yeah, there are some challenges there. So you're suggesting, so actually I have the, I tweeted this out. If someone holds a ticketed space, which hasn't been released it, I don't believe, but you can charge for spaces. And you charge $10 per ticket, Apple or Google,

get $3 out of that time. Twitter gets $1.40 and the host is left with $5.60. So Apple Google are getting more because Twitter is taking its 20% cut after Apple and Google's 30% app store taxes. Which you've got to argue is unfair to Twitter, right?

I mean, and so there needs to be better ways of dealing with these things. And I'm sure we'll get there, but I'm sure it'll also be painful. So do you think they'll actually announce something like that WDC, they'll say, hey, we're changing the cut for, I don't know, some portion of

the apps in some way. I don't expect that at WWDC. I hope it'd be nice and proven wrong. Yeah, I think so. I think they won't touch it. But I think, I mean, yeah, I'm on the fence. I feel like they won't do anything. But I think it would be smart

for them to do something to throw developers a bone. Like, listen, we've heard your criticism. Because this is the most I've seen developers criticize Apple. They're not scared anymore, right? I think Marco Armant did a blistering take, I believe it was this week, where he just...

Yes, he is. And that type of thing would happen every once in a while, but now it's consistent. It's common. It's very consistent. It's funny, I'm right at Marco.org. June 3, he released it, and he says, Apple's leaders continue to deny developers of two obvious truths. One, that our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple,

and two, that any portion of our customers come to our apps from our own marketing reputation rather than the App Store. And he says for Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting. So, yeah, it's a blistering attack. Yeah, that's not, you would know, like in a typical, if anyone ever criticized Apple, it used to be the case, right? If they criticize Apple, there would be a whole slew of blog posts defending them. And now it's like the opposite, right? And just consistently so. Yes, but Apple's not the underdog anymore.

When you become the empire, then everybody's... Sure, but I would argue even when they were the empire, they were very much defend it, right? They were very much like, no, no, this is, this is, you know, we love this company. And it's almost like the people who were unhappy just kept quiet because they were scared. and now, frankly, thanks to that, they're no longer scared anymore of getting punished because they know that, you know, if they get punished,

it'll just become part of the new cycle, I guess. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Okay. I don't know if there's anyone in the audience that has questions. A few people requested, but those requests disappear because that's how Twitter spaces works. I'm not seeing any right now. So we can certainly end it here.

Let me think what else. I mean, I have a great week on everyone. Actually, John, is there anything you want to plug before we finish? No, everybody knows where they can find me, and I'm just super happy. This has been a lot of fun, Emil. It's been a long time since we've chatted. You're a super smart person, and you've got really interesting perspective. You come more from the window side of the world.

I come more from the Mac's side of the world, so it's really cool. you know, sometimes the two meet in the middle. Awesome. Okay, so you can find John on Twitter. Let's do that. At John gets here. You can find myself also on Twitter at E-Pro. And everything from there, you know, our newsletters, our links are on all there.

I'm changing my handle to J-Pro or something like that. Something that people can spell and say. I mean, there's a long story behind that handle, but yes, that's exactly why it changed. Just to make it shorter. All right. I don't see any requests, so no questions here. So perfect. We ended before the hour.

Have a great weekend, everyone. And yeah, just a reminder, this will be on Spacecast. So I'll tweet out a link and subscribe on all your favor. Oh, we got a request last minute from a Robert. Let's see what Chill Rob wants to contribute right at the end. Hey, Jill Rob. Can you hear us? Apparently not.

He's unmuted, so. Well, it's time for somebody to knock on something, say, does this thing work? Well, we can't hear you, unfortunately, uh, Rob, but, uh, but we hear you, but we hear you. We value your voice. Wait, can I get it yet?

Oh, there we go. There we can hear me. There we go. Hey. Did you say anything about Windows 11 today that I would like? Uh, I just like, we, we did. I am convinced that savage. I'm convinced as being announced on June 24th. What it is exactly is not 100% clear,

but I believe that they are going to, if you follow Windows, there's a refresh for Windows 10, like a redesign and in process. So I think that's the same thing, essentially. There's a bunch of store improvements that they're going to make, which actually was very much related to the conversation we had

with Apple and, you know, Epic and that app store tax war that's happening. So I think they're going to roll all that together, brand it Windows 11, and announce it on the 24th, but probably not make it available right away. And I suspect they'll start pushing people from Windows 10 to Windows 11 slowly, because, you know, of all the enterprises that they have to bring over. That's cool. I like it. Thank you very much. No problem.

Okay. Rock and roll. That's it. It's been a great day. Have a good weekend, everyone. And thanks for joining. Last in our sampler, but certainly not least, this podcast's favorite guide into the world of crypto, Brady Dale does regular Twitter spaces, which he calls lightbulb talks. This week, he spoke with crypto influencer Loomi, discussing his viewpoint of crypto markets as a game and how it's been transformational for him and why he believes it is still extremely early for crypto. Again, this is the second half of the most recent episode for more. What are you waiting for?

Go subscribe to Spacecasts. Can you remember what your moment was when crypto kicked in? You know, you were curious, you were curious, and then you were like, okay, no, I buy it now. Can you remember, like, what it was then? Yeah, man, I'm not sure that I can. I remember the struggle, though. I remember trying to resist crypto and to not kind of cross whatever that line is, wherever it was. At the time, you know, when I was getting into crypto, I was working in nursing full-time.

I was a full-time student. Oh, you were a nurse? A nurse's assistant, yeah. That's interesting. But yeah, I was working in nursing. I was in school for nursing. And I was also, you know, at the start of my 30s here and kind of like kind of playing catch up. Like I didn't, you know, run fresh out of high school and take care of my whole career, etc. So I was taking care of some really important things here. And I tried so hard to resist crypto because I needed to, you know, just get some things done here on how that career, et cetera, like taking care of for that part of my life. And the last thing I wanted to do was sort of like get distracted, right? And unfortunately, you know, crypto was just out there and it caught my eye.

And I couldn't, I couldn't look away from it. And, you know, originally it was brought up to me my idea of crypto. It wasn't super, super appealing. And I didn't have the light switch moment right away. Like I think somebody, a Doge maximalist who I worked with in nursing, brought it up to me. and he was trying to get me to get Doge. And I actually felt like, okay, I kind of understand Doge. Like, it doesn't have to, you know, make sense.

It's a meme. It could do some stuff. And I was looking at cheap coins like XLM and XRP. And I was reading about these use cases and thinking, okay, it moves faster. This money is faster. And like, you know, kind of just trying to understand, like, what's the point of like any of this stuff, right? Like, what is it? What's actually going on here?

And like, why are there thousands of cryptocurrencies? Like, what do they all do that's so different? So it took a while for me to like really trip over that switch. But I think maybe if there was a moment that I really got kind of ignited and sent forever down this path into crypto, it was probably, and hopefully I've got this right in my memory here. I think it was really early 2019. Maybe like first quarter of 2019. I think Bitcoin was around the 3,000s, 4,000s or something. and some Chad at the time

just shoved in like a huge amount and ultimately ignited sort of what's been a bull run ever since if you will and sent Bitcoin like jumping from like 3 to 4K or 3 to 5K very quickly and this was kind of like that was kind of like

the end of the 2018 bull run in my opinion I mean at least in terms of the charts that certainly was it and for me as somebody who was kind of like being introduced to cryptocurrencies, but I was coming in, like, during this crypto winner at the very end of it, I still had this very general sense of like, all right, you know, crypto, it's out here. But like, I don't know. Like, you know, it's kind of esoteric stuff. And then for me, I think when Bitcoin jumped like that and kind of awakened and that bear run really ended, just from like the 3 to 5K price action range, for me, that was kind of like the heartbeat of crypto.

And that was kind of like, I think for me in my mind, it was like an awareness of like, it's alive, you know? And I was like, all right, screw, we're doing it. Let's go to crypto. I, yeah, the 3,000 number is funny on Bitcoin. You know, I had a bit of a personal experience with that number. I very occasionally, very, very occasionally, not probably like four times. I used to get invited on to Cheddar, you know, the sort of millennial TV station to talk about crypto. things I'd write about they'd invite me to come in and, you know, explain it. And one day I came on

and talked about, I have no idea what. And Tone Vase was after me. I don't know if you know Tone. He's kind of a Bitcoin OG. It's sort of a traitor OG. He's done really well. Yeah. And Tone was right after me. And I had met Tone, you know, early on before he kind of became sort of a big deal. And, and he spoke next. And, you know, that was when kind of the, I think, think when that happened is, you know, definitely the big numbers of late 2017 were coming off. And we were deep in crypto winter. And it was still falling, though. It hadn't hit 3,000.

And they were like, and I remember the shutter folks were like, you know, what's going to happen? Is it going to recover? You know, where do you see happening? And tone was very clear. He was like, it's going to hit 3,000. Like, that is where. it's going to go and then it'll recover and it's all going to be fine over time but there's a lot more bleeding ahead and i i just it really struck me that he said that i was just like it was i remember i don't

remember what the number was at the time but it was a lot lower i mean that was going much further down is one and two it was just like there was such a specific number and i just stayed with me and i don't remember what the lowest it got then was but he got close enough to that that like he was right and um it was just like crazy it was like how did he know that you know um um Which I still don't know the answer to that question, but it was a really interesting thing for me to see. Some of these OGs have like a spider sense that is just, it's beyond anything I can come up with within myself and my own so-called expertise. Well, we're all supercomputers, right? I mean, that's my, that is a little bit kind of my thesis.

If we can just figure out how to access it right, there's things we can take in and know, we don't know how we know. We don't want to get in our own ways unknowing them, you know. Oh, 100%. So we're definitely computers. Sarah killed her request to come up and speak, and I've re-invited her. But if anyone else wants to come and join us, I do have a couple more sort of moments in which I've crossed paths with Lumi that I want to ask them about. But, you know, we're at a point where it'd be fine for folks to come in and talk about other things. So if folks do, you just go to that, I think it's that little three dot thing and request to speak.

Oh, no, actually, when you're, no, no, you can just, you can just, you can just, you can just, hit the microphone button. At the button. Yeah. Oh, and Lummi, you should know, actually, I don't know if this is something you want to mess with. I forgot this time. I usually get a few of these ready to go, but I forgot.

You can share tweets if you want that everyone will see up at the top because you're a speaker. Oh, really? Yeah. So that's, if there's things you want to illuminate the folks here, that's a thing you can do. And I encourage you to do it. Anyone else becomes a speaker can also do that. So if anyone wants to join us, let us know. Okay, so let's, let me, I'm going to ramble here for a second.

So if you want to look for tweets, you can. the next time you and I kind of cross paths, we've never met, but I don't think we have, but we cross pass on the internet and talk some was when BitClout happened a little while back. And I was kind of surly about BitClout because I didn't want to write about it. And my editors really wanted me to write about it. And you were surly about it for other reasons. We'll get to that in a second. But the thing that I'm interested in you sort of exploring this with me a little bit,

I'm not entirely clear on why I was surly about BitClout or even why I still am surly about BitClout. I don't think it was quite the same reasons as you, but I think it was close and maybe it's related. But there was just something about it that like it felt a little icky to me. You know, I think maybe it was the fact that they made accounts for a bunch of people. And actually, I went and looked at my BitClout profile recently and I don't know what's up with this. But it says on my BitClout, because I, you know, I'm not a Twitter giant, but I'm big enough within Crypto Twitter that they made me an account. And so I have free BitClout tokens that I can claim in there. And I went and looked at mine other day on a whim because I just wasn't doing work and saw they gone up a price a little bit, you know, if I claim my tokens to be worth X amount.

But then I was like, but it said that like this user has claimed some of their tokens. And I was like, no, I haven't. I did at one point. I never connected to the accounts. I did send it some Bitcoin to try to get some things to futs around a little bit in there, but I didn't send enough when I did it. I screwed it up somehow. And I was like, well, I'm not doing it anymore.

So I didn't even get to the point where I ever linked anything up. So that felt weird to me. I was just like, well, either I got hacked or they're just telling people that I've accessed it to make it look more credible. You know, I don't know. I don't know which one it is. But so, yeah, there was something that bothered me about it that I can't. I also just don't. I just don't think crypto is ready to make a social media network.

I think I just always get annoyed by that a little bit. But I don't know. I know you didn't like it. So what was your thing on it? Sure. To start, I'll probably X2. I think, if I'm understanding you, right, I don't really believe that we're at an intersection where it's time for whatever this vague fusion of, you know, blockchain technology and social media is that we sort of sometimes act like we really want as a space.

And sort of most of the time always never are actually building or getting together and having productive conversations about, okay, well, how does this actually work and how do we overcome, you know, certain problems that are intrinsic to such a goal as that, you know, but when I, when I first came across Big Cloud myself, I think what offended me most about it, It was just something, to me, I thought, okay, so this is a game, right? And this is a money game. And this is a money game that some people want to play with other people, but not necessarily with other people in terms of like, so they kind of automatically populated all these profiles on their new social media website using just sort of copy pasting people's existing profiles off of Twitter.

And it didn't really, of course, like ask anybody about that, which like for me personally would kind of be like, all right, well, that that raises a question mark. And maybe it's really nice that like, just as soon as I hear about it and I'm kind of wondering about it and the next breath, you're like, but here's like $40,000. And then I'm like, all right, all right, it's cool that you did that. I think that's how it goes over with like, you know, most people. But there is something under there for some people prior to the $40,000 before and after that that definitely wrinkles their nose a bit. And I just, I think ultimately the thing that bothered me the most about the whole design of BitClout, I think it's ultimately, it's not very different than things we've seen like with Auger so far in terms of just it being like a betting market. I just think it's like an almost like a more narrow auger, right? Where the only thing we're betting on is it's really just the popularity of these people who have been sort of involuntarily imported into the system, which then you kind of chain the fact that they, some of these people didn't even like volunteer to be a part of the system. And now you've got all these other people on the planet who you are incentivizing to potentially like malign the reputation of somebody who's on this platform, right? And then open up a short position and say, all right, you know, like I knew this guy was going to tank because I was filing the lawsuit against them today.

Or, you know, I put a bomb under his car today or, you know, maybe even worse things, you know, like someone might genuinely harm somebody in one way or another. because for them, within this sort of project that the Cloud is like, I mean, that's just, that's making money. So for me, the way that incentives were kind of aligned or how humans were predisposed towards one another within this thing was very dystopian in a way that I don't like. I'm not sure there are any dystopian things I really do like, but it definitely reminded a lot of people of a particular Black Mirror episode where we all get kind of social scores. and you can be canceled if you don't ultimately conform to whatever is a sort of one-size-fits-all of whatever is the truth or what's popular in society, et cetera, the type of thing. So, you know, it had all those vibes, and I think it shook up everybody in the space. It was a really polarizing event because they, you know, their whole approach to marketing was getting all of these influencers in the space to potentially wait in and use their own clout to validate and promote the project, etc. and so

it just it was hard to not have an opinion about BitClout, right? Because it was just such a noisy thing that everybody knew that it was going on in the space, like whatever your opinion was or whatever distance you were from it. Like I think people heard about BitClot like that.

That kind of was an event that took place in our space, right? But then kind of also equally, weirdly, is that just as quickly as that was this huge, like, outrageously polarizing event within our space, it's sort of mostly only died down in terms of

noise since its inception and the initial problems that it stirred or attention that it got. They didn't know what that means or where they're going. Because as far as I understand, I want to say, like, the market cap for BitClout was like something over like a billion dollars.

So even the things have like really died down and more quiet and really nobody cares like one way or the other. It's sort of like, right, BitClout, whatever. That was earlier in the year. I feel like we haven't heard the last bit clouds. No way. You asked me, and it's like, nobody wants to talk about it right now. We all got out of our systems.

But, like, there's a lot of money still on top of that table. And there's been all kinds of interesting things we've seen. I'm a huge fan of James Press, which is content and coverage of Big Cloud. Meanwhile, the last some months, kind of just really, like, picking into, looking behind the scenes or lifting up the rug in the corner on that project. I'm trying to help people in the space to see kind of what's really going on there, whether it is really decentralized, whether it's not. Even like noticing like infrastructure pointing to where they, for example, might exit. It's finance.

It's like particulars in there. So, yeah, that was a really interesting thing that happened to our space. It's caused a lot of reflection within me because that was polarizing kind of for me and with some of my own relationships within the space and kind of wondering like, you know, and having that kind of change the way I look at. some people and in changing their reputation on file for me, so to speak. So, I don't know. It was quite the thing. And I'm just waiting for part two, I guess. I feel like I've been a little bit of a bad journalist here.

I sort of didn't define what it was ahead of time because there's a decent chance people will listen. Not know we're talking about this, but we sort of, we've sort of said it. But Big Cloud is this sort of crypto-native social network, but whose big innovation is that it creates a token to represent each profile. The person whose profile is created can buy the token and they'll get the best price for the token early on when they buy it, but other people can buy it too. And the idea is if you have a bright future, you can buy your own token early and

then it'll go up a lot in value and then you can trade on your own value in the world. And some of us, you know, they said it was the biggest people on Twitter that isn't true. It's the biggest people on crypto Twitter got sort of accounts made for us ahead of time. So we had some pretokens that we could take. If we joined, you know, I was one of those. I haven't taken mine. But just so anyone who didn't know what it was, that's what it was. I think you're 100% right that like this BitCloud story isn't over. And man, for a second there, I really had a handle on I think what made me sort of a little bit icked out by it, but I lost it. I mean, I don't think anything you said was wrong. Oh,

well, but I will say, just so you know, I mean, just some flattery, some flattery for you or whatever, but when I wrote the big long bit clown story that I was, you know, made to write, um, I will say my editor who edited that, you know, really felt like your point that like, this thing creates an incentive to look for ways to cancel people. You know, he moved that way up from wherever I had it in the post. He was like, this nails the concern, you know, so he like, he elevated that really high. So, you know, go you. I think that was a correct move on his part, too. So I don't disagree with that edit. So, yeah. So and I think, yeah, I think there's still more to come. Oh, I do know one thing I do want to say about crypto, about BitCloud. And then let's do one more ask if anyone wants to come up.

And then if not, you know, we can maybe wrap it up. But I'm happy to talk some more. If you have things you want to talk about, that's cool. But I think one thing I do want to say about BitCloud, which I do think is really important. And I hope that people who are listening, like hear me on this is one thing that did really bother me about the discourse about BitCloud, and this is a complaint I frequently have, is a lot of people who didn't like BitCloud called it a scam. And I don't think that's right. And I think people often use scam when they shouldn't use scam. Like a scam is a time in which people do something disingenuous to take something from people. And I don't think that's right. I mean, I think there is a level of on which BitClout knew it had powerful backers and that they could kind of generate value

in an accelerated fashion that would make them all rich. So you could kind of say that's a scam, but it's not like really a scam. You know, like, I don't think they were, I don't think there was ever a rug pull that was on the table there, you know, when you look at the folks who were involved. And it just, you know, you can have concerns about it. You can be annoyed about it. You can hate it. You can not like it's optics. But like, I just think we've really diluted this concept of a scam in crypto, which sucks because there's so many things that are actually scammed, we can just, like, critique things sort of appropriately and not make our critiques worthless. So that was a little bit of a frustration I had within the context of that thing. No, it's true. And I think when BitClout first

emerged, like, the whole space was really heavy on that. And basically, like, day one, day two, the first few days of BitCloud was basically just this space-wide conversation of, like, BitCloud scam, yes or no. And there wasn't a lot of gray, and there weren't really other takes, really. And there wasn't a lot of other language either. So it was good. And I found, like, personally, through interacting with you,

and just sort of observing that the journalists are the ones who really did the best job to kind of push back some on that, on that language, the rhetoric of it, and kind of as like, okay, I see the things look a little sketchy here. Like, is it really a scam? And I think that was integral for the space to kind of really kind of ask that question to themselves, right? Like, okay, well, this is sort of a sketchy thing. I see some things I don't like, but like is it a scam, right?

And I feel like we kind of, Big Cloud was almost like a lesson for the space on this topic of like, but is it a scam though, right? Because everyone is kind of like, okay, I get it, I see it, right? You know, whatever. But in the answer to that question was, we used to care a lot about that, right? think now everyone's kind of like over it and we're waiting on you know the next chapter in the story with bit cloud but for weeks uh even you know a month or two there uh that was a really hot topic in the space and people really cared about the answer to that question of like is this a scam though and if not like what what would or would not make it a scam or or maybe more importantly underneath that question i think is you know we're kind of arguing like is something moral or immoral happening here right like are we being you know are we going to get rugged by all these vCs or or not And sort of the answer to that question is still sort of out there, right? Like, I don't think anyone's going to get, like, rugged or anything, like, scammy is, you know, going to happen. But how this all winds down is definitely still something that's still unfolding, right?

Now, personally, I'm sort of, like, bearish on the project and the idea of the network and the whole thing itself, right? Like, ethics and complaints like that, totally aside, right? Like, it just as a, we'll say, like, as an investor, right? Like, looking at the project and seeing, like, where it's at now and how it's evolved. I don't know. I don't really see it taking off. If it does, if that was going to happen, they would have to still undergo some sort of like really huge paradigm shift

and watershed moment of like growth hacking that they haven't achieved so far. And I don't think, I don't think you can take your BitClough. I don't think you can claim your winnings yet. There's people who've done really well in terms of like trading within the system, but I don't think you can take it out yet. I could be wrong. I haven't double-checked that. So folks, if I'm wrong.

But, okay, so we do have one person who has joined the speaker's queue, so Man in Black, what's up? Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is a great talk so far. Well, two-part question for Loomi here. First, tying it back to the beginning of the conversation talking about games. I know this is slightly not what money is a game is about, but, you know, what got me into crypto back in 2017. My first big investment was engine. I really bought into the owning your in-game assets and being able to profit off of them. And I think, you know, obviously given where we are just technologically and every, you know, adoption-wise, it's taken a little while to get off the ground, but they do have major integrations with World Warcraft and other games. I mean, I guess, Lumy, how far do you see, like, how far away do you think we are from actually being able to do that?

you know, if you have a sword in World of Warcraft, being able to either easily sell it or use it to pay for something or stake it or to bring a meme in this scenario, I mean, they are NFTs at the end of the day. Like, when are we going to be able to farm these things? Can you use them as collateral in a compound sensor? That would be part one. And then just part two more open-ended. What are you most looking forward to or excited about that you think will be the next big defy? theme, you know, we saw lending, borrowing, and kind of the standard financial instruments take off first. But what are you most excited looking forward to in DFI coming up that you see in this kind of game sense and being able to really play around with and maximize yield? And, yeah, open-ended, looking for your thoughts here.

Yeah, I appreciate the questions. On the NFT one at first for kind of NFTs and gaming and if or when we'll see that and kind of at scale, I do think about that a lot. It's something that I, I guess as a lifetime gaming, like really, really wants to come about. And even just a few days ago, I was talking to some old buddies who I used to play Diablo 3 with like years ago now. I was saying, boys, like get ready. One day there's going to be a Diablo 4. And if we're really lucky, like maybe the items will even be NFTs, right? So personally, I really, like, really, really want that.

And I really want it to happen in real time so that games like a Diablo or say like a World of Warcraft where you're playing in real time and items are dropping in real time. I really want in my fantasy world, which maybe doesn't really make sense technically and logistically here. In my fantasy world, we all play these games and they're all on layer twos for Ethereum. And because of that, you can have things. maybe drop, if not instantly, closer to instantly. I think there's a lot of, I'm personally on kind of sitting back and waiting to see how some of these giants actually approach exactly this task. Are they all going to homebrew their own kind of layer two standbox, which is their own little, you know, arbitrary thing that their whole game subsists within.

And because it subsists within that, then this is how you unlock, you know, real time, you know, item drops, etc. And then maybe you resolve the friction of, you know, confirmations on the blockchain and things like that at some other stage. Like when you're doing like account management or maybe there's a, you know, you want to separately interact with the marketplace and you've got to wait until your items have fully resolved before you can, you know, trade them and do things like that with them. So with gaming and NFTs, I think what people most often overlook, like it's definitely like that's a direction to be excited for.

But logistically and technically, some of the things that really slow that down, I mean, you can take some of the particular things that I just said and then just kind of stack on top of that. Like what we already know about what generalized NFT adoption faces in terms of challenges right now. So like being on top of a layer one Ethereum right now as they all are and the fees that come with that, that's like that's a big problem. So it's like you kind of have to look at it from the other direction of like, okay, so we're minting these NFTs. Well, are they, you know, is Blizzard going to mint a new NFT, like every time an item drops? And then they're going to like pay to mint that and pay the gas fee, et cetera. So let me have to have a layer too.

Yeah. Let me jump in on this one because I have strong opinions about this, even though I'm not a gamer. But I'm, let's like, mark this down. I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. This is a thing. And then I have a second thought about it that is just sort of amusing. But here's the thing that I believe is true. I will, I firmly believe this.

is that like this will happen and it'll be really cool when it does. But I don't think any of the big shops are going to do it except for maybe Ubisoft, but they're not going to actually do it because it's just not in their business model. And what the problem with crypto on this topic is, is they get very excited about this idea of owning and trading and they are failing. Even though many of them are gamers, they're thinking crypto. They're not thinking gamers. fundamentally, it's only going to click when it's done with a great game that people genuinely want to play, whether it has the NFTs or not.

And so what I think will happen eventually, and I kind of don't understand why it hasn't already, is we have, you know, tons of people who've made piles of money. Many of them are great gamers. Someone needs to spin up a new AAA studio, which obviously you can't do overnight even with piles of money. But with piles of money, you can eventually get there. but an extremely large amount of talent needs to be put into a room. A lot of money needs to be spent and a great idea needs to be put in the table. And a fantastic game needs to be built. And at the end of building that game, throw the NFT mechanics on it.

That's the only way it's going to happen. It's got to be a new company. It's got to come from crypto, but it's got to be game-oriented first. Those are all things that I believe. The other thing that I'll just say really quickly here that I love about what's happened with NFTs this year, it reflects what I love about technology is a lot of smart people. people, most notably Ariana Simpson, who I think is great. I'm not saying this is a critique of her at all. I think she'd probably agree that this is funny and interesting. But Ariana, who was a investor

herself, she's now at A16. Z, you know, she really beat this drum for a long time that she was a believer in NFTs because they were so obviously valuable to gaming. And that's what I love about technology in general is it always, it just never works out the way that makes sense. And that's part of why I love being a journalist covering technology is that like, you know, who would have thought that when NFTs kicked in finally, it would be like weird art that would do it, you know? And that's like what it was. Like, Ariana's right. Games make more sense, but that wasn't what did it. It was weird art. And I love that. Anyway, sorry. I don't know if you want to go more on that. Let me, I definitely want to get the second question to you,

but I wanted to hop in on that first one. No, I like that too. What was you pointed that out? The, what was the second question from Manum Black? What are you jazzed about in defense? Yeah, and which is kind of what I wanted to go with you is just sort of like, what are you? I was going to ask that question as well, so I'm glad he did it. Like, what are, what are you feeling good about in the space right now? Yeah, so right now, we're like, in my mind, we're still totally like knee deep in the bull run here. Like we're correcting, but nothing in the overarching story has really changed here at all for me. We're just down for the moment, right?

So for me, we're in this, we're in this huge, like in. Prince Bull Run and it's been like, like what have I experienced in crypto or crypto Twitter so far in 2021? It's basically like it's almost like just bull run sentiment and feels and stuff, right? Like it's it's noticeably harder for me to get on my feed and kind of feel the pulse of, say, for example, just like building like quiet heads down building or like and then seeing that coming about through like big project updates and developments, etc. For me, I feel like it's not biddle season, if you will.

Like, it's definitely bull run season. And I mean, you know, this time around, it's dog coins, I guess. So last summer it was like food farms. And right now we're into dog coins, right? So that's what's going on. And for me, that kind of, it's actually a frustrating thing. I'll notice, like, you know, days and days we'll start to track on. I'm kind of like, of course, I'm on crypto Twitter all the time.

And I'm like, man, I'm just not getting the same. educational yield out of my Twitter feed as I normally am. And it's because we're in this euphoric and distracted state, which really makes it hard for me to kind of answer this question because every day I wake up. And what I want to do is I want to throw myself at crypto and I just want to stay in touch with like, okay, but what's new and what's next and what's coming.

And so that's constantly my goal. And I'm faced with this question right now. And I feel like my first inclination is to just speak to some of the struggle I've felt so far here as an independent researcher trying to be constantly in touch with what's going on in the space, but having the space itself just overwhelmed with the noise of Boland and absolutely nonsense. It's like we're at like Mardi Gras. You wake up and like you're still at Mardi Gras. Like the streets are still filled with like beads and Cheba Akita dog coins, right?

and you're just like, if you're me anyway, you're just sort of like, man, I wish that all this would sort of go away. I can have a better idea of like what we're actually making right now. Not that like some of that stuff can't be fun. But yeah,

so for me, I feel like I kind of want to say that I'm not 100% sure of like what the next big thing is. Like sometimes I have like explicit definite ideas of that. But right now I feel I don't have anything really concrete on deck for like what's, you know, sort of the next big thing. And I think this has all been my big excuse for that. Of course, I'll plug that, you know, Flexit did just release the spend SDK.

So we literally did finally just turn in a corner where now within Defi, any wallet or any app has the ability to integrate the SDK, which gives all of their users the ability to spend their assets. Now, something about spending is, and I think forever will be, you know, the opposite, the antithesis of making money. Right. And so it's hard to just imagine saying something like, but I think like spending is the next thing. You know, like we've done a bunch of lending. Lending is clearly going to be hot. I don't know that spending itself as a thing in a comparable sense is going to be hot because it's probably, it's not going to stir those ideas in people's minds where they're like, yeah, spending is the latest way within crypto in which I make money. And therefore, it's the hot thing within crypto, right? like spending is like super vital. I don't know, man.

If you can't spend it, is it money? Yeah, a bunch of, if like a bunch of, you know, like D-Gen teenagers start showing up at their school with like the sweetest possible kicks, you know, because they were able to like spend in the cash register, I think that could start to get people interested. Well, this has been a great conversation for folks who are listening. I just want to say this will be rebat broadcast on Spacecast. If you want to listen to it again, that's cool. There's a lot of other cool stuff on SpaceCast,

conversations about design, new tech, social media, things like that. So you should look for it in your podcast player and subscribe. And then also if you miss future fantastic light bulb talks with me, you can hear them there. So that will make your life better. Thanks, thanks everyone for being here. Thanks a time for Loomi to talking to me.

And good night, supercomputers. And there you go. See lots of good content over on SpaceCast. It's like Tech Talk Radio that you can keep on in the background all week to keep yourself inspired and informed. If you haven't subscribed to SpaceCass yet, what are you waiting for? However, you are listening to me right now. Search for SpaceCass in that device, all one word, SpaceCass, and subscribe. Talk to you on Monday for WWDC.