Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Techmeme Experience On Clubhouse

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

Chris Messina and I go deeper on some of the news of the week. 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 a bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. As I mentioned, Chris Messina and I have been doing post-podcast sort of wrap-up show experiments on Clubhouse these last couple weeks.

The idea is that Clubhouse is supposedly going to let people save recordings of Clubhouse rooms soon, eventually. So we've been throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks in the hopes that maybe eventually we'll do a regular bonus show when the time. comes. Chris and I did a relatively simple hack for this of merely talking into our own microphones and recording locally each of us on our end. So we knew you wouldn't be able to hear people we brought on stage to talk, which is a shame because we did get to talk to some great ride home listeners, including Jane Manchin Wong, who both Chris and I were thrilled to speak to for the very first time beyond the realm of DMs. What you're going to hear is about an hour of just Chris and I kicking around some of the stuff we discussed on the show this week. Then, unfortunately, my audio

cuts off, and Chris was still jamming on an excellent point, so I tried to edit together some of his soliloquies, even if you won't hear some of the things that prompted what he's saying. As I said, this is an experiment, very, very raw stuff, but I figured we do have this audio, so why not share it? Please enjoy. I'm recording on my side. Brian, are you recording on yours? I have garage band going. Okay. Yes. Fabulous.

I think this is going to work. The hope or the thought today is that we may end up turning this into a weekend bonus episode for the TechNeme Rye at Home podcast. And so again, in the spirit of experimentation, that's kind of what we got going on today. Let me see. I've got to find this. Is this the one? This might be the one. Let's see if this is the one or is that the one.

I'll try this one. I'll see what happens here. I'll see this is a do it live. Here we go. Okay, so I would want to ask you, actually, like, where did that come from? Where, like, did you, like, find it on some, like, stocks like? No. No. No, no, no, no.

I have a very dear friend who I don't know if he wants to be his, yeah, but he created about 30 different tracks for me when I started podcasting, and I've been using them for about five years because, like, I was like, you know, like the batch offer, the batch deal. That's what happened there. Yeah, right, right. And so all of the shows that we do on the network are all of that person's songs. And even like the in between, like, you know, the stingers in between moving from one segment to another, the background music and even the ads, it's all from that same person. And God bless. Wow. Okay.

That's, that's, I appreciate that. Actually, I really, I really like it. And, of course, it's also weird for me because I always listen to the show at two or. X. And so whenever I hear it in this mode, I'm like, okay, now we're like, you know, kind of putting the feet up, chilling out. It's going to be chill. Can I give you one more thing about that is that this is timely? The thing that I said was, I want you to make it sound deaf punky. Oh, I'm going to pour one out. And I don't know what, to what degree any of our shows are

deaf punky because then it was like, well, make it, you know, up, make it down. make it, you know, a little NPR, deaf punky. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. Well, that's great. Anyways, I enjoy it and I appreciate that it's, I don't know, it does have a little bit of a New York vibe to it. I don't know, that's sort of how I think about it. But yeah, well, anyways, wow, okay,

so today was quite the day. I would say it was sort of a bunch of fiascos, essentially. I'm going to introduce kind of like, you know, the behind the scenes for this and then we'll get into the first clip. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, like what we've been trying to do with this show is just figure out like, how can we make podcasting and the experience of, you know, the artifacts of podcasting

become a little bit more interactive. How can we go a little bit deeper? And so that's sort of the generation of the tech meme experience. And so today we're like, hey, maybe there's a way for us to actually record the audio from our phones, you know, in this clubhouse room. And again, you know, with the consent of the people who are speaking and so on. And, you know, let's just like try that. So Brian sent me a link to like how to do screen recording and that whole deal. And I was like, okay, cool. So I had the brilliant idea of maybe going

a little bit further and piping the audio from the screen recording into Zoom, which then would go to a cloud recording and then that would sort of merge the audio together. And maybe that would be a way that we could actually get this all together. So I tried that. And, you know, also, sort of happening roughly around the same time is, and I think maybe we'll get into this later in the show, there obviously have been this cottage industry of apps that are being created around Clubhouse. And one of them that launched yesterday, which was a, you know, I think became pretty big, pretty fast. It's called Diarcon. And essentially would take your Clubhouse authentication token to act as you and then would allow you to, you know, manipulate the service, you know, through a

private API. And I didn't use that service yesterday. I didn't sign that. in for it. I was like, I'm not given this third party, whoever they say they are and whatever, how legit they might be access to my clubhouse account because, you know, if I get kicked out, like, that would really suck. And I wouldn't want that to happen. And yet, almost immediately after we did the screen recording and did the testing, right, I left the room, I shut down the room that we were experimenting in, and then I sent you the file. And then I hop back on Clubhouse and suddenly the audio was gone, like completely gone. Nothing was coming into my, my

AirPods, like I turned things. Meaning, meaning when you got back on to Clubhouse, you couldn't hear the audio. Yeah, I'm sorry. So I was like go into rooms and it was like completely silent. Now, when you, and so also I want to point out that when we were doing the screen

recording and piping the audio to Zoom, one of the error messages or warnings that I got was you must kill your other phone call basically because Clubhouse thinks that I'm on a phone. call in order to continue this recording or whatever to join the room. And of course, I didn't do that. And we were in the room.

No one could hear us. But Brian and I could still hear each other because we were already connected. So blah, blah, blah. And the next thing I know, like, I can't hear anything. And I, no one can hear me. And suddenly I'm like, oh, my God, what is going on? So I went through this whole song and dance and rigmarole about trying to, like, get back access.

And anyways, it became very scary because every room that I would go into, I would get this warning at the bottom that said, connection, you know, try to move closer or, you know, something like that. And I've, I've seen this before and I'm like, okay, maybe that's a performance issue. But here's why I really started to like melt down and why I'm a little bit flustered today. Because apps, you know, like on the one hand, there's a whole like shadow banning conspiracy, which may or may not happen and might just be that someone blocked you. But in the case of other apps, they will actually give you kind of false error messages. You know, like, for example, if someone has blocked you on a social network, they, they,

may not want to actually out you or out the other person that has blocked you. And so when you try to interact with them, it'll just kind of like accidentally fail. Like, oh, that operation cannot be you know, completed or, oh, there's like a network error. And they're just kind of like fudge it, you know. And so I'm like, oh, no. Like maybe they saw that I was recording this audio. And, you know, now they've like put the ban hammer, you know, on me and everyone else that might have been associated with like this dire con thing or like around it or something. And so anyways, it took quite a while. And what I will say, and I will report after I tweeted about this, and then a bunch of people

were like, oh, my God, I'm having the same problem too, is that it may be related to the Agora infrastructure, which is what they're using to do and to pipe all the audio around. Agora actually has fairly aggressive and, I guess, advanced kind of both geo-fencing and geo-limiting capabilities. And so it might be that some people are identified either by IP address or something else, because what happened was, as I was debugging this, I switched off the Wi-Fi network that I was on, which has AT&T DNS, and switched it over to my GoogleFi cellular service, and suddenly the audio came back. And then I turned off my cellular audio, and I went back to the other Wi-Fi, and then the audio was gone.

So it was a very clear cause and effect going on there. And so, you know, I've talked to some other people who were having similar issues, and they've reported some similar behavior, for other folks who actually did sign into their diacon service, they have not been able to get their accounts back or to hear audio, basically. So essentially, it sounds like they have been muted from a social audio network, which defeats the purpose. Because of because of, because of direcon, that is my speculation. I do not have confirmation of that, but the number of people who have replied to my tweets, basically saying that they're experiencing this problem, there is a large overlap with the people who did use the DyerCon service. So, you know, we'll see. We'll see.

I was thinking it was the ghost of Steve Jobs. You know what I mean? Anyway, go on. All right. So anyways, with that, let's start it with the first, the first clip here. You know, I was, I was actually going to kind of look at yesterday's stories and today, but I think we'll just do a little bit of commentary coming from both. We will have a guest coming more like around the top of the hour, I guess. So we've got a little bit of time. You know, Brian, you and I can just like jamming a bunch of stuff. I think there's some really interesting things that, that, you know, you've covered in the last couple of days. So let me get started with this very first clip.

Sources are now saying that Havan is looking to raise around $400 million in a series C at a greater than $5 billion pre-money valuation. One source told TechCrunch that the company's ARR has earned to $60 million, implying a valuation multiple of $80 to 100 X if the valuation we're hearing fans out. All right. So this is the story about Hoppin. And Hoppin, I think, is just, I don't know, like I guess what I found really interesting about this story. I mean, first of all, just the money. I mean, it's just like insane. These guys started in 2019. So it's barely even, I mean, maybe it's like a year and a half old. And they are a virtual events platform, right? You know, right. I guess who else is in that space? I mean, you know, event bright, I know wanted to pivot into that

but of course they're much more about real world ticketing and so they've done some virtual things but um i think hopin is the one that has done the best of pulling together you know video and event organizing tools um and they just they're on a tear so the thing that i was thinking about you know in this was was first of all i wonder if this is the kind of money that you can raise during a pandemic because you're clearly solving problems of the pandemic and so when people look around it's really easy to essentially feel the salience of the solution that you're bringing to market. And then the question is, do you have some huge competitive advantage because you're operating in this time period, which is a rarefied time and it's a unique time when everything is sort

of, you know, we're in the upside-down world? And does that even make sense? You know, when we come out of this, will virtual events and all those things continue to persist, which I suppose that's what these bets are on, right? is that virtual events are going to be the standard bearer going forward. And so then Hoppin can sort of become one of the sort of name brands in that space. I don't know. Well, let me ask you this.

I've used, I've bought tickets for, I participated in several live virtual events. Do you know whether or not you've participated in any virtual event that Hoppin facilitated? I think I actually have. I think it's happened at least, I would say, or I've been to maybe one or two. do. But I haven't used all the, all the tooling. I haven't been, you know, I guess like my, my canonical experiences with virtual and online events happened during my on-deck experience last summer. And in On-Dec, they used a bunch of different video apps from Icebreaker to donut to several other ones to kind of facilitate, you know, people kind of coming together in a virtual space. And some

worked better than others. Some used kind of, you know, spatial audio to simulate proximity and, you know, there were sort of like breakout rooms, you know, with Zoom. And then there were sort of like physical desks where you could like walk up to someone and kind of like, you know, listen in. And, you know, lots of like, I would say playfulness kind of in that space. But it feels like Hopin really built a business. And, you know, the last part of that clip there was that, you know, they're at $400,000 in ARR. I mean, arg. Like, that's like really like pretty substantial. you know, in the sound space, right? Let me give you, let me give you the solid numbers. So, um, they, they were founded in, uh, mid 2019. So, uh, you know, I, I, I said on the show that,

um, you know, if, if a, a company like toast, which was a restaurant company that everyone thought was toast, uh, six months ago, um, is about to IPO and they survived. Like, this is the inverse of that where hop in, if they were, you know, founded, in 2019, there's no way that they could have known that like virtual conferences they were, they were made for, this is, and we'll get to how like this is analogous to like the Zoom question of all startups. But so the numbers are their ARR has grown to $60 million. And they're, they're looking to raise $400 million at a greater than $5 billion pre-money evaluation. So that, that that that's a multiple of 80 to 100x you know depending on on what they get and so again like if you

we're talking about if you founded this company 18 months ago there's no way that you could have figured that you would be perfectly positioned for the COVID times right now the question is a la zoom you know depending on I'm not we're not you know wall street people we're not financial people. Like, people are wondering, well, we'll Zoom a year from now. We're wither Zoom, right? So the question is, if you're hopping, is the door closing? Are you getting out Indiana Jones style and you pull your hat out before the door closes?

Or is this a real scenario, as a lot of people are saying, where our entire lives have changed in the sense that maybe we don't go back to the office five days a week. Maybe we don't go to conferences. Maybe we don't have to do those meetings. Maybe you don't have to fly in New York or L.A. once a month because you can do it remotely. And in that scenario, is Hoppin perfectly positioned to be a platform for that new reality. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's going to be, well, I don't know. We don't know, but I think it's going to be both. I think ultimately the fact, or at least what I hear from most analyses is that many, many people that used to believe that you had to go and get on a flight and like go someplace actually turns out you don't really need to anymore. And it's kind of nice to sort of like, you know, be hanging out with your kids most of the time and actually to get that, you know, adult parent time that parents wanted for so long and it seemed that the market would never kind of offer them that chance. And so if these virtual events can actually be quite good and they're a fraction of the cost and it's all software, then the upside for Hoppin is going to be enormous, right? Just like any other software business. So it seems like lightning just struck for them at, you know, the perfect moment. And it's crazy, actually.

I think I was looking up, I don't know, what was his name, Jonathan? the CEO basically graduated from school, like, not too long ago. So he's like, you know, pretty young guy, you know, probably a relatively small team. And I just like, the money just kind of makes me think, wow, like there is something a little bit different here or they've just got product market fit at the exact moment where they should have. Now, there are a couple other angles. Well, okay, go for it. I was going to say they also recently acquired, like if we're talking about like a nascent market,

if you're talking about like an Uber Lyft sort of situation. Their main competitor was Steam Yard and they just acquired them for $250 million. Interesting. Yes. So, like, apparently

according to what I'm reading right now, going back and reading this thing, both companies had solid stats and both of them felt like that they were maybe a year away from IPO scale, which says to, me that maybe they were both killing it in terms of, like, you know, their month over month

numbers, and they did the smart thing, which, you know, 10 years ago Uber and Lyft should have done, which is like, all right, we're going to both come out of the space and we're going to kill each other and it's going to be hugely expensive, or we can just combine forces now. So like that's an interesting thing to me that if this is a space that's going to be very interesting, then the playing field is already leveled because they've combined forces. You know, so I'm really glad that you brought that up. I think on the one hand, so I actually encountered Stream Yard like independently just because I've been paying a lot of attention to the live streaming space. And if those two came together, right, then you have sort of event. digital virtual event production on the one hand, and you have live streaming on the other,

and you have a set of people and teams who have been designing and solving problems in that space for at least some period of time. You know, it's not like, I don't know, it feels like the spackification of something where you're just like, okay, let's put a bunch of money into like this other company, which then sort of obtains the other company. They sort of merge together. And then that becomes the competitor against maybe it is event bright. Maybe it's someone else.

I'm not quite sure exactly who they're competitive with. But I do think one of the other things that I saw recently, and I would highly recommend folks to check this out, is that Peter Kafka did a great interview with Tim Westergren from live sessions. Tim Westergrin, of course, famously had built Pandora previously. And that company, well, like radio and all the rest, it's a tough business. The business model is a little, you know, fucked. But what he's doing is a new product called Sessions, I believe. And I think if you check it out, it's at, let me find the link here. I think it's like live sessions or sessions live or something.

Sessions live.com. I just, I think like what they're doing for musicians is super interesting. And there's an opportunity to do something in the non like musical act space where there are just kind of virtual events that are going on constantly. And there's like programming and, you know, maybe it's drafting off of the same kind of momentum that something like clubhouse has. You know, there's another product out there called Luma. which is really well designed.

And they seem to be another sort of competitor in the space. I've seen a lot more of their events. They actually spun up a clubhouse room page, like a landing page for clubhouse rooms. So I guess the other thing that I want to point out, and I saw this tweet actually in the Hopin Twitter account, where their cadence of launches is like super significant. So they're moving fast, they're exploring, they're building, they're learning, all during this, you know, remote period.

And so the fact that they haven't slowed down, I think, is super significant. And that's true, I think, for any tech company, you know, so I'm looking at that. And then, you know, the other thing that, that I guess, like, at a high, okay, two more things. One is that this is a company out of London. And so what's going on, you know, in London? Is this, like, is this the biggest raise that's happened sort of like in that community for some time? Like, is, you know, finally like that scene picking up?

We've talked a lot about the, let's say, the fragmentation, kind of like the deatomization of the Silicon Valley scene. So like there's more of these tech hubs that are actually popping up. Is this, you know, London sort of big entree into the scene? That's interesting. And then the last thing that I'm curious to get your take on is just the way in which video is rapidly becoming the new basic unit of digital media. I think it's just sort of obvious.

But whether it's, you know, streaming audio is like sort of in one end of the the spectrum, but video itself is becoming a platform that so many people are building on. And I think that's really important. Says a man on an entirely audio platform right now. Sure, but I'm talking about like, like, anyways, you get what I'm saying. Yeah, I do. I mean, again, my question about all of these virtual things is it depends on, and I'm, I'm trying to read up more as we're talking about this.

it's unclear to me talking about things that we've been talking about lately. Like, you can see how this sort of virtual space could serve a creator economy, or is it replacing the conference industrial complex, right? And one of the things that I remain skeptical about, and I remain skeptical about to what degree we will be all working virtually, I think we are, but to the degree, I remain skeptical. I still am not sure that you can, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, they're building a platform for doing virtual things like, I get it. Understand they're, they're perfectly positioned. But, um, you know, as soon as, uh, the next, uh, web conference in Portugal is, like, I'm, as soon as I'm vaccinated, I'm going to go, right? Right. Right. And. And so I don't know, I'm so skeptical, and I've participated in virtual conferences all year, and you have too. But I don't know that you, I think that I'm the most skeptical about the fact that you can replace the conference.

Because what people go for in the same way that I have participated in virtual stand-up shows, virtual concerts. but if you told me tomorrow I could go to a real concert or a real stand-up show, I'm fucking there. Right. So in that same. So here's my pushback. Because I think the exact energy that you're bringing to this question is will persist. And I don't think that live events in person are going away, you know, post-vaccine. However, and I think this is the big lift that Hoppin stands to capitalize on, if every event that previous,

required you to be there has an online component. In other words, if hybrid becomes the default, right? Then essentially all the content, and this is, let me put it this way. When we would produce events, you know, for Google or like developer events and things like that, so many of, in so much of the content that we would sort of put online and stream online would get this kind of long tail audience that would sort of persist over time. And so I do think that there's obviously going to be an importance of, you know, coming together, breaking bread, seeing each other face to face, you know, kind of like sniffing around each other like, you know, animals do. Like, that's kind of our jam.

But there is also a long-tail value prop for this content where you can either put a paywall on it or you can do membership. And so the whole structure of the way in which content is sort of massively produced where you had to be there to experience it, I think is gone. I think Apple demonstrated the quality of execution that you can get, you know, with their developer event this year. And although not everyone else is going to have that, I mean, I did attend, you know, a good portion of Spotify stream on event. And it was, you know, the production value was was quite high and quite good. And it was all virtual. So I think it's going to be both. I think for people that want to get together, that want to see each other's faces, cool, that'll happen, that'll be part of it. And the good news for Hopin is that they can

actually do both. So, They are a hybrid platform, and I think they're much better positioned to build for that than it seems like Eventbrite because it seems like Eventbrite was caught a little bit flat-footed in terms of having a platform that can move quickly to take advantage of this moment. And clearly Hopin is smart enough to know that. And, you know, the argument that I'd make is similar to the literally the Clubhouse skeptical argument, which is clubhouse is like a conference, but you, you can. can't, when you leave the room to like, you know, network and chit chat with people, like,

there is no, there is no hallway, right? And so, like, that's the magic of conferences where it's like, oh my God, I haven't seen you in five years now. I know that the hop and people are smart enough to be thinking about it. And they're trying to build that in. I mean, I've got to build that. you actually have that. You know, I really, yeah, 100%. If you go to their solutions, like, they've got a bunch of things. And like, they've got all the way from the casual up to like the sort of buttoned up corporate event where people are not ready for the future. Like, you know, so I think that's fine. All right. I think we've dug a big hole and we've plop this thing in it. We're going to put this one to bed. I'm going to reset the room. Let everyone know, by the way, that this is the tech

meme experience. This is me and Brian jamming on the top news stories, mostly the tech news stories of the day, trying to put these things into some historical context to just jam it out, talk it out. What does this mean, you know, what are the things that didn't fit into his daily podcast show? And with that, let's get to the next segment. Let me load this up here. Where the hell is my player? There it is. Okay.

Great. Here we go. This is a big one. You get ready to rumble in this one. You can think that the FTC's case against Facebook is weak. And also believe that the period from 2016 to 2021 saw remarkably little innovation among American social networks, at least in terms of the basic user behaviors they inspire. The market for social products became incredibly concentrated.

Facebook and Google built a duopoly in digital advertising, and their vast size and unpredictable effects helped to trigger a global backlash against American tech giants. Okay. So this one was just, I don't know, this one and the next one are actually related, but we're going to dig into this one because basically what Casey Newton put out in his newsletter, performer, which of course is his business now. Platformer.

God damn it. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for that. I feel corrected and I feel triggered. Anyways, so this quick, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this. Like, there's a lot of conversation around, you know, monopoly and around single player

control or domination of markets. We've talked about this when it comes to Facebook and Australia. We've talked about it in general. Like what types of innovation have been inhibited by virtue of there being, you know, sort of monopolists or oligarchs kind of in power. And it's a good question. One of the things that I think was brought up in this segment was about how that period from 2016 on essentially so... Yeah, can I contextualize it a little bit?

The argument that Casey is making is essentially this. And I agree with this, a thousand percent. Isn't it funny that social has gotten really competitive again? So in the midst of the antitrust stuff on Facebook and whoever, But, you know, let's talk about social networks. All of a sudden, there is TikTok, there is Clubhouse, there is substack, there is all of these things. And, you know, I said today, like, yeah, it did kind of feel like for about a half a decade. Like, let's say roughly between the time that, you know, Snapchat came out.

He basically says, you know, once Facebook copied Snapchat, it was like, okay, well, this is what's going to happen. tries to do anything novel or unique, basically, Facebook is going to copy them and cut them off of the knees. That was the thesis. So the basis argument is, is all the sudden social networking is super hot and thus super competitive. So if everyone's pointing their guns at Facebook and I competitively, it's like Facebook could say, hey, look, this is a crazy exciting ecosystem right now. And thus, go ahead and make your point because I think there's a lot to poke. get in here. Yeah. Wow. Sorry. Something very strange is happening on my phone. And I don't know if it's because I've been hacked or because this is just the nature of Clubhouse these days, but literally my- Oh, no.

No, no, it's fine, I think. My profile, like the little slider thing when you tap on someone's face, like is coming up. And I'm not at all touching my phone. It's super weird. So just if I disappear, you'll know. That's what happens. Okay. I'll carry on. Okay. So I, like, one of the questions that I have, though, is, and I guess I, okay, to start from the top, what is a social network and what does competition in the social network landscape actually look like? And you can point to, of course, growing and, you know, semi-healthy platforms like, you know, Clubhouse, TikTok, to some degree Snapchat. But there are thousands or tens of thousands of smaller social apps that are all out there, right? And I don't know if, I don't.

know what competition is supposed to look like, essentially, that we think is okay, right? Like, I suppose maybe the anti-argument is to say, well, if Instagram had stayed independent and if WhatsApp had stayed independent, then essentially we would have multiplayers involved, and they would all be competing and they would all have different advertising models. Or, you know what, when people say that, I think that the implicit thing that they're saying is that Facebook would be an also-ran at this point. Like, when people say that I always take that to mean Zuckerberg would get his comeuppance. I don't understand.

What does that mean? Like Facebook would, you know, because... Because... Because... Because... Because... When people say that to me,

what I hear is that Facebook, the big blue app, has never been able to iterate and be innovative. The only reason that they're still so dominant is because they absorbed other people or they copied other people. That's what I hear when people say that. I'm going to call bullshit. Because I just...

don't think. Oh, I'm not saying I agree. I'm just saying that's what I hear when people say that. I'm not saying I'm calling bullshit on you. I'm just saying I'm calling bullshit. Like, the problem is the way in which we, I think, conceptualize what Facebook is. And if you want to say that, you know, Facebook's one innovation was the news feed, which pissed everyone off, but gave everybody what they wanted. That is the basic fostian deal that we have struck with that platform. We both want to like smell each other's butts, but we don't want our own butt smelt. Like that's just like the thing. That's just like, you know, human nature, dog nature, whatever it is.

Like, and so as a result, Facebook won social for so long because they were the best at doing maybe two or three things. One was getting people to share information on the platform so that other people would see it. And then the second thing was putting it in front of the people that wanted to see it and making it somewhat accessible. The problem was, was that it's actually very, very hard to, to, you know, translate people's preferences about who sees what about them into way that gives them control that also works the way the computers work. And so that dynamic is, you know, it's actually

the relationship between humans and their computers that's been unhealthy. And Facebook is just kind of a progenitor of all sorts of new ways to experience a negative, semi-abusive, sort of like, I'm not listening to you kind of like relationship between computers and humans because we don't know how to communicate between these two contexts. That sort of makes sense. Like, yes, give Facebook, you know, as much shit as you want to. But I don't think that it's fair to say that they only copied and that's the only way that they actually got better. Like, they've done a lot of things with groups. They did a lot of things with bots and messenger. They, of course, have learned from and they copy. They fast follow like no one else. But they're actually really good at it. Google is not good at it.

Google has a hard time coming up with another act as well. I mean, they spend building. billions of dollars in their moonshots and, and to what end? Like, so I'm just trying to look at this and say, well, what does a healthy, competitive technology environment look like? Okay. Where humans are involved in that innovation cycle. Okay. Let me, let me play devil's advocate and make the argument for what I believe is Casey's

argument. In terms of you're asking, what is the innovation that hadn't happened? Yeah. Well, TikTok is a functionally different social. platform, then anything that came before it, it doesn't, their algorithms don't work in the same way that Facebook's algorithms work or Twitter's algorithms work, et cetera, et cetera. And so when you talk about things like a substack, that's text, which apparently Facebook wasn't paying attention to. When you talk about things like Clubhouse. There's so much text on Facebook. But hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on,

give me a second. Give me a second. They weren't, they weren't prioritizing. that. They weren't making that, like, the thrust of their new thing. They were going into blockchain. They were going into e-commerce and things. They were trying to monetize friggin' WhatsApp and Instagram. And so in the sense that, in the classical sort of sense of disruption from below, they took their eye off the ball and these other things that are doing the things that are making interesting plays in areas that Facebook wasn't prioritized. in terms of product, right? I do think that Casey has the point, and I think that the key point to his essay, and this is what I 100% agree with him on, is if this, if you had a substack, if you had a clubhouse,

if you had a TikTok, and this was 2012, 2014, they would all have been bought. And not just by Facebook, I'm not saying Facebook would be the only acquirer, but his point in this essay is that we have kind of a sort of a beautiful period here, where, and I've made this point on the podcast before, where the thing that I always worried about in terms of, if you have these oligarchs at the top, is that they kneecap innovation as soon as it rears its head, and they add it to their utility belt of features, right? And so the fact, and in Casey's, and I'm sorry, I know I'm going on and on, but he references. periscope. Like, perfect goddamn example, right? Or Vine. Or Vine or something, anything that got in a five years ago or eight years ago era would have been immediately absorbed into someone else's utility belt and kneecapped before it could even. It's not just that that company didn't have a chance to become the company that it could have become, but that idea, that iteration didn't have the chance to be as innovative.

as it could have become. Because it's immediately absorbed into the mothership. And you and I just did last week a clubhouse talking about what happens when you get absorbed into a mothership. And okay, I've gone on for too long. Sorry. No, I think this is important and this is good. Because what I hope to do sort of in this conversation is to illuminate these somewhat

divergent perspectives. Because on the one hand, yes, I'm trying to imagine an alternative world. And maybe I am, you know, I, I, I check myself all the time to make sure that I'm not kind of like a get off my lawn, you know, kids kind of, you know, like I'm not turning into that person because I've gone through so much of this where we tried to and we're building competitive ecosystems and no one gave a chat and or shit. And the other thing that seems to happen too, like who is to blame for this? Because the economics of this model are that you either, you know, grow as fast as you can and get sucked. up and that is the exit state or you are in an insane person that's, you know, quasi narcissistic or, you know, somehow, I don't know exactly how to like position these people like in society, but, you know, you decide to go it alone and to stay independent and to build out your own thing,

you know, with your own resources. And then you have to raise $400 million at a $6 million evaluation in order to have a shot at anything. Or you have to have multi-billions of dollars of advertising to sort of triage into Facebook feeds and Snapchat feeds and all the other feeds. So what I'm I guess like in that in that sense is it the investors that are to blame? Is it the economic model that's to blame? Because it feels like there were a bunch of if not sort of semi innovative like sort of you know interesting little apps that got out there. But no one would pay attention to them. It's like no one pays attention to these things until they get to a certain level of like until they get that escape velocity.

And I think that that's the thing that I'm really struggling with. It's like there were people that were trying to build things back then. And either they were shut down or they didn't get funding or they were forced to sell because you had to pay off the previous investors that had given you the jet fuel to like, you know, get into outer orbit. And then the only thing that you can do, you know, is join that space station because that's the next stop. Right. And listen, you know, you had experience in that era and and maybe some war wounds from that era. But that could be another thing. Okay, maybe there are two things that are true right now, which is number one, Facebook can't buy shit. They know that, and every single startup knows that, and every single investor knows that, right?

Well, let's be clear. They can't buy shit because of the antitrust concerns. And because if they do buy things, the FTC now might actually step in and say, no, no, no, you can't. However, let me suggest this. What we also don't know is the number of firms, whether it's, you know, Clubhouse or, you know, I mean, TikTok was going to be acquired by a number of very strange, you know, bedfellows. But like, well, yeah, that's another story. It's another story.

So set that aside, right? Like, I mean, the government in that case actually wanted to interrupt, what, like a, like a Chinese success story. So let's just talk about Clubhouse. Like, Clubhouse maybe could have been acquired by any number of different parties. You know, Microsoft has been sniffing around Pinterest. But instead, you know, they've decided to go it alone. And the only way that Clubhouse can do what they want to do, is essentially raise $100 million so that they have the war chest to compete.

But Chris, that's what I'm saying, is that if you're an investor in any of these hot startups, and we're talking about two that are Andreessen Horowitz investments, but any other thing, like the Dispo or whatever, like you have to assume, if you're an investor in Dispo right now, you have to assume that you can't rely on Facebook to take you out in six months. You can't rely on Google to take you out in six months. I mean, maybe Microsoft could do it. But again, what you just said from your war wounds from a decade ago, if you're an investor in anything that's hot right now, number one, you know that that route is maybe not closed, but it's difficult. And then number two, and I think we talked about this today a little bit on the show is, by the way, if you're anywhere close that you can sniff a public market, then you don't even need to be absorbed into any other mothership right now because, God damn it, the public markets want you. And you can be spacked. You can do an IPO after a series C. Like, like, right now, anybody can go public. So what I'm, what I'm suggesting is, it is a more beautiful scenario if you

believe in a robust startup ecosystem philosophically where you want companies to find what their true metier is, as opposed to being a company like a periscope or whomever that just gets absorbed into someone else. So you can never find what your metier is. And your metier is not just like what your true calling in life is. It's also, how are you actually supposed to make money? And that's not just, you know, a business model. That's also like, there's innovation there for like a different way to make money. So when we're talking about these new social networks that are trying things like TikTok is, these new ways of monetizing creators and, you know, if you get absorbed into Facebook five years ago,

that's not a problem because they just eventually turn on the ads like they're doing to WhatsApp and Instagram, right? So I think it's a beautiful time because, A, I don't think it's so easy to be absorbed by any of the oligarchs. And B, like, there are much more avenues for you to find your true calling as a company right now. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that we've come to a place where, I mean, and I think like the show that we did last week, right, where selling out, seven years ago used to be a thing that seemed like the thing to do because, you know, one, you get like, you know, a billion dollars, which is its own thing. And then you would also be working at a company that cared about social. Like social was never a guaranteed thing. Social was

something that people looked at with disdain. They were skeptical of it. They were against it. Right. Look at the, look at the experience of Snapchat at Snap. Like, yeah, totally. Yeah, go on. Yeah. Sorry. And so I feel like now, that there are these creators, makers, you know, from, I think Kevin and Mikey at Instagram are probably like the best kind of representation overall of, you know, what you just don't want to have happened to you. Because creating something that, you know, where you strike lightning twice is really, really hard to do. And so if you shoot your shot and then you get absorbed by, you know, one of these giants and then, you know, you end up leaving after,

you know, seven to ten years and you've got the rest of your life ahead of you, but you've got to figure out like, what are you going to devote yourself to? And you're like, well, the problem that I wanted to solve is the one that I was solving when I was at, you know, Facebook, then that puts you in this existential mode. I mean, you know, like, for example, like Dennis Crowley, like, I love that he's been solving the same problem for like the last 20 years. Perfect example. You know? Perfect example. And he is a really great example where he actually was able to sell the same company and the same concept multiple times because he was so committed to it. And just, you know, for everyone in the room who, you know, doesn't have the context, like Dennis Crowley started out with Dodgeball

back in, I think it was like 2005. And it was an SMS tool for checking into your location, which would then kind of propagate wherever you checked in to your friends. So you could find out, you know, where your friends were. You know, now there's things like, like, I think Zenly, no one talks about Zenley, but like, Zenly is like huge with like the youths. There's a snap map, you know, where people are finding each other, those, a lot of those concepts and ideas were pioneered a long time ago with really shoot of user interfaces, but it was what was available to us at the time. And so Dennis sold Dodgeball to Google before Google cared about social. And he went in there and he's like, cool, I can use Google Maps. I can use Google Infra. Like, it's going to accelerate everything

that I'm doing. And what he found was basically like crickets. And it was like, you know, pushing up a wall of molasses. Like, I'm not going to get anything done here. I can't make my movement forward on my vision. He leaves. and starts Foursquare. And then, you know, through Swarm and other apps, basically gets a chance, a second shot at building the thing that he wanted to build. And like, I don't like the story of Foursquare, I don't know, like there's never been a movie or book sort of written about it.

And, you know, like to me, it's very interesting because I spent a lot of time training their machine learning models with all my check-ins over the years, you know? And then it became a data company. Then it became an advertising company. and so I just don't know where these things end up because what you're talking about is like finding this core purpose of what your company is. And it seems like when you get to be an adult, you turn out to be kind of boring. And it's like you're like ad tech or your fin tech. You lose your soul.

So what possibilities are there for young people to be like, oh, when I grow up, I want to build an amazing social platform that brings everyone together in kumbaya. People are nice there. They don't treat each other like shit. you know? The counter argument to that, and I get you because, right, 4Square is essentially sort of a gross data company now. Data advertising platform.

Yes, yes, yes. Okay, no offense to anyone. But all right. So bringing it back to Casey's essay, I'm going to use Snap as an example. Because Snap is founded in 2011, right? And goes public in 2017. and in Casey's essay, he points out that, like, when stories gets copied, that sort of like freezes social in the sense of, well, no one wants to invest in.

Yeah, because it was a game of chicken, right? Yes. It was a game of chicken. Right. And snap lost. Now, now, now, now, except for the fact that when I said earlier that they had to, they turned down the $3 billion offer. They survived their stock going almost to $5, right? And where are they now?

Because when I said earlier, finding your METI, finding your way to make money, what your company is supposed to be, because they turned down the $3 billion, because they stayed independent, because they survived. Again, if you have a good idea that someone comes in and takes you out for a couple billion dollars, you're only a good idea and a feature and you don't, you're not allowed the opportunity to become a good business. Because a good idea and a good feature is great, and that can become a good business, but you have to, you kind of have to go through the Valley of Darkness to find that. I mean, and so as a perfect example, as a perfect example, think of WhatsApp.

And Facebook is now monetizing WhatsApp. But at some point, let's say WhatsApp had remained independent and they were charging the $1 a year or whatever. At some point, they were going to have to do better than that $1 a year. But one question we'll never know is would they have, right? Like that... No, but I'm saying it's more healthy. I love to see companies. I love to see companies find that.

And so I hate the idea that companies get kneecapped as soon as they have a good. good idea, have a good feature, and then they become part of somebody's utility belt. I'd rather see nine of those companies try it and fail and see the one that figures out that goes through the Valley of Darkness and figures out how to become a good company. The biggest arguments against what you're saying is literally Facebook and Google, because both of them turn down acquisition offers, and they decided to go it and do it alone. the number of companies that were acquired and were absorbed, they chose their own fate. I'm going to, you know what? I'm going to cut you off because there's a funny thing about that.

I've made this argument multiple times before. Do you know who the big acquirer is that would have come in and taken out Amazon at a $5 stock? That would have come in and taken out Google in, let's call it 2001, 2002, that would have, you know, that would have gone into social and tried to, on social, it was Microsoft. And I've made this point so many times that people always push. It was Yahoo. Yes. But Yahoo suffered a bit from the dot-com bus. But, you know, my point is, people push back on me this all the time.

If Microsoft hadn't been fighting the antitrust stuff, if they weren't in a similar position that Facebook is in right now. So you're saying the fact that they were in a potato sack that was made by the Justice Department. That is why Google. That is why Google was able to go beyond being a feature and become a good company. That's why Facebook and social as an entire category wasn't absorbed into the Borg. Because Facebook and Apple and the iPhone, right? Right. Because Microsoft knew functionally it couldn't buy anybody from 1998 to 2008.

They couldn't. I mean, and they bought ad tech companies and things like that. but there was no way that the government would have let them buy Amazon or Facebook or anybody like that. And so I'm saying, again, if that's the scenario, and I think Casey's making that argument, too, if that's the scenario today, I love it. It's healthier. Not that I want companies not to be able to make acquisitions, but for an ecosystem of the next generation, like, that's healthy to me, is that you can get beyond having a good idea and get, get taken out for five or ten billion dollars. You know, it's, it's so, I think, I think we're both, we're both right and we're probably

both wrong. I think what comes to mind is this great Kurt Vonnegut novella, uh, called Harrison Bergeron. And in this story, this, this character Harrison Bergeron, basically he lives in the society where there can be nobody that is exceptional. And essentially what happens is for those people who are super bright and super intelligent, they essentially have to wear these, you know, headbands, maybe they're Oculus quests, I'm not sure. And every hour or so, there's this massive gong that goes off that gives, you know, this Harrison-Karrison character, this massive headache. And so essentially he can't have long-term, like thought or memory creation.

And so essentially becomes average like everybody else. And one of the questions that I think we're kind of like dancing, well, not dancing around, but like sort of investigating is this question of when does the potato sack go on a company that has become so successful and so powerful and so strong? I mean, it's a little bit like, you know, whether you're putting the kryptonite, you know, into Superman's, you know, underwear or, you know, you're sort of feeding Hulk. What did he need? I don't know. There was some way to defeat Hulk on or whatever. Like, you know, sort of like the Marvel sort of universe thing. Like where essentially they get so powerful and so strong. You like, you guys are sort of like, you know, fucking everything up now. And we need to like open it up and oxygenate, as, as profscied you likes to say, the marketplace and allow other little like shoots to grow because you guys have become so. dominant that you're restricting the creative space for what's possible. And so look, I would not want anyone to come away from this conversation thinking that I am not in favor of competition. I think what I'm trying to ask about is what do we put up as being the thing that people aspire to become like?

What does a successful company look like? You know, for the last two or three years, I would say I was like Slack is kind of like the shining example. of a company that hopefully can stay independent and also deliver a great product and have a great voice. Chris, again, Chris, again, I'm going to give you Snap. Snap is now just past $100 billion market cap, okay? And it was it was less than two years ago that people were wondering if Snap was going to be So do you think that Snap is ultimately going to, so I guess my question then is, and I'm not

saying that that size has to be a determinant or the thing that you strive for? not saying that either. Well, I understand, but my, my question is more like, Snap seems to have carved out like a pretty good business for itself, as has Twitter, you know, and... Because they had to, because they had to, because no one was going to come in and take them out. Now, maybe there's been rumors about people maybe coming in and to take out Twitter, but, but, but, um, I think, I think, yeah, that's another story. But, okay, I'm saying Snap is the perfect example. And maybe you can put this on good entrepreneurs, people that are like, fuck it, I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to do it. Fuck it. I'm going to do it. But at the same time, this is a company that is now 10 years old and was not taken out for $3 billion, four years into it.

And so Snap has had to find its way, its path in life. And again, not everyone can do that. And I hear what you're saying about. that, but like, I'd rather, I'd rather there be the opportunity, and not just the opportunity, I'd rather be, I'd rather companies be forced into that sort of thing, rather than always have the easy out of like, okay, we're going to come in and take you out for a couple of billion dollars. All right. This is the point where my audio cuts out, and like I said, your mileage may vary on this, but here is a one-sided conversation about a topic that Chris, I thought, was.

is really on fire about. So here's Chris's end of that. Hopefully it makes sense. I mean, I think, yeah, I'm going to be fascinated to see where all these companies are at by the end of this year. I think this is like a pivotal year for Twitter, for Snap. You know, TikTok will figure out exactly what kind of company it is, you know, behind the scenes and what it wants to become and where it sort of fits in the market. You know, we didn't even mention YouTube and there's a bunch of others. So, you know, we could obviously, you know, continue on this indefinitely. But, you know, But we do have one more segment and one more topic. And so I'm going to kick that one off now.

I wanted to speak for myself. Thank you very much. Let me reset the room first, just so you guys all know where we're at. So this is the TechMeme experience. This is a, at least it's been a somewhat regular show where Brian and I basically dissect the news of the day, the stuff that's interesting and compelling to either of us. We go a little bit deeper, provide a little more context, both historical as well as personal, to the stuff that is happening out there on the interesting.

interwebs and that is controlling our lives and our consciousness. We are, that's right. So basically if you are a listener and you did happen to already listen to today's show, then some of these things will be familiar to you. For those who are either not subscribers or didn't listen yet, we are basically excerpting parts of the show and bringing it into this context. I do want to point out that Brian and I are recording our part of the show. And then we are going to open it up later.

I don't know. We haven't decided if we're recording that part or not. actually I don't think we can so we will not record that part we we did not plan for that so you'll be able to hear this our conversation again later in a weekend bonus episode but that is all to say that we will be opening it up to conversation after we we dig into this this topic quite a bit I did actually invite Josh who writes for the information and wrote this story to join us. He's on kid duty, so he may or may not be here. But I just, you know, so first of all, this tweet and this comment where this person was like, hey, you know, what's the big deal?

Like, you know, so let me, let me back up before I even get into like what he's saying, where it's like, oh, there's no, you know, monopolistic concern here. Okay. Yeah. So. So here's why I like, you know, I'm all sort of up in arms about this. I, like, on the one hand, I live in and, you know, love the Apple ecosystem. Like, it's, there's so many things that are great about it in terms of providing just, you know, a sense of, if you're going to live a semi-carefree, like, digital existence, there are aspects of the Apple universe that I feel like, you know, kind of protect you. from the nefarious actors that are out there. Now, there are plenty of people that will say that that's bullshit or whatever, but that's

fine. I think for the most part, when I got my parents over to a Mac, you know, my tech support calls diminished greatly, you know, et cetera. So what I've been watching with what Apple's been doing over the last several iterations of both MacOS and iOS and their just developer story in general is that they stayed out of the social game for a long time. You know, I don't know who it was. that built iTunes Ping or, you know, game center, but all of their social products just kind of

feel like they're kind of like add-ons and they're not really core to their strategy. However, more recently, Apple has started to move more intently towards, you know, authentication, you know, whether it's touch ID, face ID, other types of biometrics. They're doing things with payments. They have, you know, hardware that has, you know, that's isolated from the operating system so that it's secure. So they are creating this world that you live in, side of.

And the way that you authenticate into that is really, really important. And the way in which it's built into the operating system is incredibly important. So you'll notice, for example, that you don't sign into, you know,

oh, look, there's Josh. Let's bring Josh up. Perfect timing. I had you, what's the word? It's like a snake charmer. I had you,

it's an M word. Okay, thank you. It's an M word. Okay, great. Josh, welcome. Hi. We have literally just started talking about your segment. I was, you know, about to start ranting about,

or I was actually sort of in full rant mode, about the, essentially like the Apple universe and the way in which it has been building this warm, cushy, cocoon-like environment for people over the last several years. And that identity is a piece. that unifies a lot of these things and that the reason why I am looking at this and honestly I don't know if I have an opinion one way or the other like I kind of you know like sign in with Apple is a good product but the reason why it's a good

product and a good experience is because it's baked in the operating system it's not sign in with Google and then a native UI pops up and I sign in with my Google account if I sign in with Google or if I sign in with Facebook I'm being brought to these web browsers where especially if I have two-factor turned on not only do I have to use some kind of password manager, which is probably built by Apple if you're a normal person or it's built by one password if you are not as normal. And then you have to go and get your secondary token, which maybe comes in from the messages app, which is not super secure. Or you have it generated by the Google Authenticator or again, like one password or last pass or something else.

And that experience is, look, I authenticate myself so many times. I know for sure who I I am, but my computer doesn't always know. And that friction grates on you after a while. So the fact that I can just push a button with my fingerprint, or I can just look at my phone and give it an ugly face and it like knows who I am. But Google and Facebook and no one else can do that through my device to me feels like the crux of this conversation. And so the reason why this story like spoke to me so much was because back in September of 2019, you know, I tweeted about how Apple was making a change to its developer program guidelines that essentially said that if you allow any other third party or social login service on your app or website or whatever and you wanted to be in the app store,

you also had to add support for basically Apple ID. And to me, that is at least that smells like, seems like, you know, farts like monopoly power, if I've ever seen it. And yet no one really seemed to give a shit at the time. And now we find out that perhaps the DOJ is like, oh, actually, that's signing with Apple button. Actually, that's kind of important. Anyways, that's some of the background from my perspective. Josh, do you want to tell us a little more about the story? Yeah, I mean, like, my real concern here is like twofold. One, it's just the market power, right? So if you're a developer and you run a foul of Apple, for example, let's say you call your your app amphetamine, you know, just to make up something totally random. And then they boot you

out of the app store. You lose access to all of your, you know, customers, to your ability to meet the market, you know, that you want to play in. And of course, you know, like, I mean, if you think about any store owner, a store owner could choose to, you know, boot a product out, but that presumes that, you know, if you're, let's say on, you know, Main Street or something, there are multiple stores that could sell the same items. But there's only one store that can sell iOS apps. Yeah, actually, I think that's true. And so, well, okay, hold on. But like the identity piece, though, the sign-in piece, this is, this is to me like

where it becomes significant because there are two aspects of sign-in with Apple that are really important. And, you know, again, I'm just, I'm trying to sort of, I guess, understand and on the one hand, not draw too heavily on previous examples in the marketplace. Like, for example, credit cards. You know, credit card is one form. where my transaction data is kind of stored with one company. Yes, I can get like a PDF out or something or maybe like a CSV file,

but I can't just kind of like take my MasterCard and swap it over to be a visa card. You know, like that doesn't work, right? However, and I think this is where it becomes interesting. And one way that Apple could solve this problem in a sense is to provide identity portability. Any of the players could. In fact, the DOJ could come in and say, you know, we want identity portability for the web. We can talk about Web 3 later. but where the challenges is that one of the ways in which sign-in with Apple is architected

is that I could choose to basically provide fake email addresses in order to have a kind of anonymity or pseudonymity when signing into third-party services. In other words, a unique email address is generated every time I use sign-in with Apple and therefore it can't be commingled or traced across multiple apps. That's one of the privacy-preserving aspects. However, that positions Apple. in a central role of maintaining, you know, kind of essentially like a tree structure where there's like, okay, this is like, you know, Chris's actual Apple ID. And then here are all the

other email addresses that are associated with it. And I may have dozens or hundreds of accounts over time in multiple different providers. And so I become locked into Apple because I don't actually have control over the email addresses that are being generated to create those third party accounts. Now, yes. So my big concern here, right, so I think I made clear my concern about Apple kind of aggregating all of your kind of pseudo identities and the essentially the key chain model that they have extends to all other apps. And so every app maker becomes dependent on, you know, the grace of Apple as well as, you know, the sort of, you know, positive behavior of those, those customers in order to exist. They have no relationship to the customer unless Apple says

that that relationship can exist. And so the problem that I have with any antitrust sort of regulation, is that it seems to me that it's always backward looking. And the world that we are going to move into over the next five to ten years is one in which we are continuously partially authenticated through all sorts of different biometrics. And each company is trying to find a way to whether it's gate tracking or eye tracking or face tracking or voice tracking to develop a kind of probabilistic likelihood that we know who this person is and we know that they have, you know, the promoting.

mission or authorization to access, you know, certain services out in the world. Like, we're still in this, you know, very early kind of, you know, you know, clunker, uh, uh, model three era of the web. But as ubiquitous computing becomes the norm and we use our identity to sign into an autonomous vehicle, you know, that's, you know, just on the street. And app clips become a way for us to walk up to a store and get the things that we want and just walk out. Identity is the thing that unlocks all of that. And so, I mean, this is a huge, like, unlock for Apple, for sure. But the fact that if I'm locked into Apple and I can't kind of leave and move to another

provider because that's not built into the nature of the service, that leaves me with a deep deal of concern over the nature and the future of competition on the Internet. I mean, it's completely rational that, you know, Apple is going to go down this path. What it does, though, is it completely interrupts the Facebook Connect. model of app building that, you know, Facebook pioneered in many respects. And in some ways, it interrupts what, you know, Google has been building with their sign and authentication offerings. And maybe that's okay. And because I'm not in the Android world, I don't know how deeply the Google identity is baked into their devices. And I'm sure it is. I know for, for example, you know,

my Google home devices and like, you know, televisions, like all these different devices that I have require me to authenticate against some service. I think the challenge and the issue is in figuring out what level of self-sovereignty individuals should have over these digital identities and whether they should be portable if, for example, you decide that you want to end your relationship with Apple. And, you know, I just don't, like, to me, this is a boiling the frog kind of moment where we're going to wake up and our legs are boiled off and we're not going to be able to get out of the pot and suddenly we're going to look backwards and be like, oh, let's undo this.

And it's going to be too late. Right. You know, it does, like, it's an interesting point, right? Like, basically if you, this is the funny thing. And maybe, you know, this is the old man coming out. Or maybe it's sort of a grandfather of thing or something at this point. I don't know. Like, whatever.

But like, where if you are a person who has decided to take Apple up on their offer of offering you and granting you privacy and you use features of Apple sign in, which protect your privacy, that that means that you're willing to let go of all those accounts if you ever sever your relationship with Apple. And so I suppose if Apple just came out and said that and let people know, then I really wouldn't have that much of a problem with it because it's actually like a fairly well-articulated system. And I think they're actually like they are bringing some privacy, you know, to the world and to

the web and enabling payments and all sorts of other transactions that previously were really, really insecure to do. But if people are going into this relationship without a sense for how it could actually go poorly, and then they find themselves locked in, and I guess I say this because, you know, I've had my Instagram account hacked. And when I lost that account, I, you know, really felt like I had lost a piece of me. I mean, not just there's, there's an economic cost, but there's also just an aspect of, you know, feeling like violated in a sense. In other cases, you know, for people who have, let's say, shut down their Facebook accounts. but they use their Facebook account to sign in to lots of third-party services that they relied on interests on,

it became very difficult, I think, for them to reestablish their, you know, digital footprint. So I just like, maybe it's just a matter of education and these things will be figured out over time. But the sign-in piece, just, it's one of those very seductive things that tech companies do where, yeah, they can tell you, but most people don't care and they don't really understand anyway. So what's the big deal? Like, just use it because it's convenient and it's there. and then you wake up, you know, five or ten years down the road, you're like, oh my God, antitrust. How do we unravel this thing? And it's like, well, it's kind of too late.