Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) 2022 Year End Review And Look Ahead To 2023

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

What were the biggest stories of 2022? What will be the biggest tech stories of 2023? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the program. Just putting on my headset. How you doing? Good, good. I suppose, since we're doing this at an earlier time, you're able to join us today, huh? I just saw it pop up. I thought, ooh, there's Chris. I've been spoken to him in a while.

Why not speak to him in front of loads of other people tuning in? That would be a way to catch up with Chris. How do you do? Good, good. You know, funny enough, actually, this might be kind of appropriate, you know, given that, you know, Brian and I were, of course, going to talk about just, like, things that have been going on lately. like, I mean, the end of this year has been kind of insane, but the year, you know, as a whole

in terms of like the big stories and then some prognostication about the year coming. So, you know, you'd be the perfect person actually to throw some ideas around with. Yes, absolutely. Matt, feel free to stay as long as you want and dip out quietly if you want. But yeah, let's take it off, Chris. Great. Welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Thursday, December 8th. Once again, it's been a little bit quiet from us lately, but we are back. I am back in my cold shed in Oakland, California. It was raining and kind of miserable for a while. Yesterday was beautiful.

Now it's gray again. But this is certainly the end of the season and the end of the year. And this is a show for us to, I think, talk about obviously some of the things that have been happening over the year that we've been discussing and analyzing and then also putting some thoughts together about where next year might take us. Of course, it's very difficult given this year so far. But, Ryan? Yeah, exactly.

let's frame it that way. Let's do the first half will be what the biggest stories of 2022 were, which by the way, anyone in the audience, we want to solicit ideas. And then the second half, do a similar thing for prognostications for 2023. But to kick off the year in review, 2022, I thought instead of me picking up the first big story of the year, I thought I could say definitively what I think the theme of the year is. And I kind of touched on this when we were talking last time with a Neil Dash.

But the theme of 2022, in my opinion, is line also goes down. Because think about all the things that that means. Obviously, crypto line going down, but also our 401K is going down, especially if you have a lot of tech stocks in your portfolio. you have, I mean, you know, what's the market cap loss at Amazon? Line goes down in terms of the narrative has been that the tech industry is dominant, you know, rules the world, look at meta. Lots of sort of balloons have been burst this year. Line going down.

Line going down with no IPOs, no unicorns. line going down, going down the funnel with, it's not easy to immediately raise a series B around six months after you raised your A, line going down with the soft banks and others of the world no longer writing just obscene checks. And line going down with, you know, the tech industry is legit in a recession,

and so line going down with layoffs, right? So that's the theme of 2022, is line also goes down, which that's the new. narrative that has been broken this year for the last 10 years, line only went up for everything basically in the tech industry. You know, I think it's as opposed to, well, separate from being a little bit depressing, I think it's also very accurate. And obviously, the big question kind of is perhaps how far down will that line decline and what will it look like when it comes back?

And when it comes back, you know, if you do think about a little bit back to what we were talking about with Anil last time. And Matt, I'm curious to get your perspective on this, given your work. You know, will there be kind of this, you know, Web 1.0 where it was a lot of just excitement and frothiness and money, you know, going after all sorts of ideas and people who could just throw jargon, you know, around as though they understood what they were talking about. And then Web 2 kind of came along.

And there was a lot more technical underpinnings and a foundation that you could actually build on. And that would actually radically transform the industry. And although there was a lot of background chatter about digital transformation, finally there was actually, you know, methods and mechanisms to enable that. Now we're sort of in this like Web 3 space, which, you know, there's been a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense in that space. There was also a lot of money injected into the market, thanks to COVID and to the whole pandemic. And that was sort of an anomalous shock.

And now we're in this decline. That decline will wipe out a lot of stuff. It'll cause a lot of companies to, you know, trim the sales. and really focus on the things that are working. And then I don't know, you know, if we get to like Web 4 or Web 5 or whatever, you know, it's not really about reversioning per se, but a new set of baseline assumptions about the environment that allows people to build things differently than, let's say, they were able to before.

And I think that's the thing that I'm really curious about. You know, and Matt, like, what are you seeing, I guess, sort of in your space? How would you define the area that you mostly focus on? Would you say it's mostly social media or do you have a broad? Also, yeah, Matt, Matt, introduce yourself first. Thank you. Yeah, sure. So, well, I'm, Manavar, I do a lot of stuff with geeky social media stuff.

That's all I care about most of the time, sharing what's new, what's changed, why is it important in the world of social media? And I consult for different brands and clients and individuals. And I do a weekly newsletter on it as well. Yeah, line down. When I have to see my mind with social media, straight down to like, hey, I missed that story. Lying the app's gone down. What happened? Well, where's that?

I missed that story. Not yet. Not yet. And I'm thinking that's not a big deal, surely. But no, I think, yeah, I think the point you were making, yeah, about, you know, things kind of like going down in terms of, you know, money being so available to some of these companies and people wanted to cut back quite a lot has meant that things got a little bit more boring.

Like, you know, meta has pulled back on lots of the kind of fun, more fun things. If Meta does fund things, it tends to kind of just copy lots of people. and imitate and replicate. But it did throw out quite a lot of stuff in the years previously. And this year it's been a year where it said, we're not going to do that. We're not going to do that. And we're going to pull back on that.

And we're going to focus on this. Because they've got the double challenge, of course, because they're focusing all their billions on this big goal of the metaverse, which are unsure as to where it will end up, as well as the recession and the repercussions of everything else that's going on in the economy. And that's led them to be super safe. And then, of course, Twitter, much the same, but for different reasons, you know, with Elon Musk, you know, although they've got richest or was it, it's not the richest man in the world anymore, is he, has dropped off the list, I think. One of the richest, but still saddled with billions of debt and then chaotic in terms of the management style, but equally kind of having to be cautious with what it invests its time on.

And, you know, if you go through all of the platforms, that seems to be the tail of the year. So in the first half of the year, there was far more interesting things going on in terms of features and products and development of the platforms. Then the second half of the year, this felt a lot more about what they're not going to do rather than what they are trying or are going to do. And back to typical behavior of copying and imitation, you know, be real and stuff. So that's certainly from the social media point of view. That's how I've seen. Let's stay on that for a second because, I mean, if you're asking me, what was the story this year that I have. couldn't escape even when I wanted to.

It was Elon and Twitter, you know, going back to, what was it, April when he first said he was going to buy it or March even I don't even remember. Yeah. You know, so there was that whole back and forth. But I'm curious, Matt, because, you know, Chris and I have argued on the show about whether or not there's a chance for Twitter clones out there to be successful at this moment in time. But you do have, for the first time, that any of us can remember. a major social media platform sort of in turmoil, well, sort of, completely in turmoil in some ways.

Twitter's always been in turmoil to something. That's true, right? That's another way to think about it too. But the sense that, okay, somebody can be gotten at, maybe somebody could do a Twitter clone that would get traction is something that feels possible now. But also think of, you know, the TikTokization and the feelings about meta no longer, being this, you know, monster company that can do no wrong in terms of, you know, business-wise. Do you feel, Matt, that the social space without me putting words in your mouth is in more turmoil

than you can remember in recent years? Yeah, I think it's been mixed up a lot more with all the things that have gone on. You know, all of these things have come at one time. You'd expect in a year that the story might be we've had a recession. Tech industries have issues there or that, that, some of it. some of the, like Elon Musk has kind of done something dramatic and it's become the character of the year, or one of the other many threads of stories to do with maybe regulation or anything else. But it does seem like a lot of shit happened in one year.

It's been, you know, we thought that COVID and the years of the pandemic were crazy, but for the tech industry, it's been equally kind of traumatic in the last 12 months. So, yeah, I think that there has been a lot gone on. And it has, therefore, kind of mixed up the pack a little bit, but I don't think it's going to greatly change. the kind of pecking order or the power order of things. You know, meta is still as rich and is kind of all-encompassing on social as it ever was dominant. And most of the other platforms in terms of where they were in the last year or so haven't dramatically changed.

I think Twitter's the exception in many ways because of what's gone on with Musk. But I think that, you know, as much as I find a guy really irritating, I equally can see that it could still go one. of two ways. It's either going to go really bad or it's going to be the coming in the making of Twitter that we kind of hoped the platform it could become in terms of, you know, it's scaling up a bit more. But I think whatever happens with Twitter, I don't think it's going to be the same platform. And I think that's the crux of it, isn't it? It's what, what is, he might be successful in getting lots more people on there and more engagement and more revenue for the company. But for the people that I've used Twitter for years and like a lot of what it has done in the past,

they might not like the new Twitter 2.0, I think that's the dialogue of 2020. Staying on this thread real quickly with meta, then, because you know, you said there's still, meta is still dominant, still makes gobs of money. But, you know, if there's one thing that, you know, we should always give Zuckerberg credit for is looking at the user data, looking at the usage data, and knowing where things are going. So considering that, you know, It's been a year now since he basically signaled that, you know, they would never say, oh, social media is our legacy business, but they change the name to meta and are embracing the metaverse.

When you think of it in those terms, when the leader, the 800-pound gorilla, is basically saying, we've got to go in other directions to find the next thing. Does that make sort of social, at least the way they do it and have done it? sort of feel like the internet is moving on from social as Mark Zuckerberg, you know, understood it. I think broadly that, yeah, you can't argue with the kind of success of meta in terms of the dominance on social. And we could probably spend a whole hour or two deciding whether they did it in a fair and reasonable way by holding any successful, big multinational, whatever company has ever been fair and decent and honest in any sort of way really and so they've just

played a better game than the most and at times broken broken the rules but that's probably a discussion another time but in terms of the um the bets that they've placed you know most often they've been pretty good and when they have realized it's not going the right way they've been quite quick to call the plug which i think has also been a problem for people who use their products you know, particularly if you speak with people like news publishers and journalism, in general, that relationship has been fraught because of

things that they've started and stopped and started and stopped and that's been a nightmare. And I think for creators, I think that's an area at the moment for them, they're particularly badder and I don't think they, I think they can do a lot more with in terms of their relationship and partnerships with creators and

the monetisation strategies that they're putting out there, you know, they're not particularly strong. I mean, you'd like, rank them up with others. None of the platforms have been up until very recently. I think YouTube's more recent deal. It's a time of strike with people. YouTube shorts is a bit better.

But generally, you know, the creator economy stuff has been tricky for all the platforms to figure out what will work. But meta just seem to be kind of like, as always, throwing shit loads of shit at the wall and hoping something was sticking, and most of it just being very kind of bland. But I think in terms of the metaverse stuff

and the future of the sort of bets that Zuckerberg's placing, you know, yeah, companies need to place big bets. All of them have got kind of their Google and Microsoft. They've all kind of done something that kind of you can see is their long-term goal where they're pointing towards their North Star. And then for meta, they've been far more public and kind of vocal about the metaverse. And I do think that, you know, there is going to be a big paradigm shift in computing.

And there's lots of bits that come into that, whether it's NFTs and stuff to do with Web3 and other bits. And I think it's a good bet. reasonable bet. And I think it will be, they will pull it off. But well, I just don't think it will look anything like anyone's predicting it will look like now. And I don't think it will probably be quite like the way that they envisage it. But I think the main thing for Zuckerberg is I don't want to be in a position where I have to rely on Apple and Google and everybody else to be able to dominate this industry. And that's why it's such a focus for him. And we'll see what happens. You hit most of my primary topics probably for the 2022 bingo card.

And so when I think about the core of what you just said, there are a number of tensions that, you know, if Facebook and Zuckerberg kind of are, you know, one, really good at reading the tea leaves through the data just because of the enormous amount of data that they have. And they can kind of predict and see human behavior or social behavior and social sentiment ahead of most other people. clearly Zuckerberg was seeing that Apple, I mean, I've been talking about this for several years, how Apple has been building more or less social networking capabilities into the operating system in a very subtle and very strategic and kind of very discrete way so that regulators won't actually be able to see how Apple is slowly strangling like Facebook. And so that motivates Zuckerberg, of course, to realize the platform dependency challenge, you know, given his mentorship, tutorship from Bill Gates,

of course, the original nemesis of Steve Jobs. And so we're sort of seeing the continuation of the same platform wars that have been defining the computing landscape, you know, for, I mean, several generations now. I think what's interesting about it is, to your point, you know, Zuckerberg has had to make several bets. And one of them is, of course, on owning a major hardware-based computing platform that defines the nature of how people will compute in the future. And what seems to be different is that he took a huge leap towards behavior that didn't already exist, as opposed to designing for behavior that already existed. I mean, one of the things that I've observed in my own efforts, of course, to design social

products is being downstream of behavior or observing a behavior that people want to engage in and that find, that they find difficult to do, and then building, you know, technology or solutions to make that less frictionful is oftentimes a really good way, you know, to grease the wheels of building, you know, new behaviors or new products. I think a really good example of this. There's probably two for 2022 that are the most standout examples. One, you have, of course, TikTok, which, you know, got its start during the pandemic. People's attitudes and content consumption behaviors changed. It was sort of, I don't know, we were stuck at home and information waterboarding, you know, was kind of like the new thing that gave us a way to escape from all.

was happening. But the other thing that's happening, I think post-pandemic, is the rise of Be Real. And Be Real is sort of Apple's new darling, as well as actually Google Play's. Be Real apparently is in both app stores. It was chosen as app of the year in both places. And it represents a new type of behavior that probably was happening largely through messaging. And now is something that I think there's a cohort of people who are looking for that type of very short, specific, you know, semi-random, I guess prompts to, you know, share with other people with what they're doing without any filtering. And so that also was a rejection and resistance to the professionalization that has been

happening on social media for the last 10 years. So, sorry, to try to bring this around. What I'm trying to say is three things. What is that apple and the apple tax and the apple garden is a very dangerous place for a lot of companies that connect to people or their customers through the internet and through mobile devices. Two is that behaviors, I think, are starting to change with a generation that's coming up in social media today, where they look at the way that me, you and Brian, kind of all use social media, and they're like, eh, that seems like you guys are weird and it's like boring and,

you know, why are you guys taking it so seriously? We don't want that. Not to mention looking at, like, Elon Musk and like all the, I don't know, free speech, absolutism and everything. And they're just like, that's too political for them. I'm thinking mostly like, you know, teenagers, maybe people in college. And then there's the aspect of regulation. And so I'm very curious to see how regulation in these environments from advertising to privacy to digital identity, not to mention geopolitics,

is going to affect the things that people are able to build and do in 2023. Hey, timely, Chris. The FTC just sued to Block Microsoft from acquiring Activision. Just now, yes. Wow. Okay. So here you go. Yeah. Matt, did you have a comment on that? I didn't mean to cut you off. No, I think that it's good just to briefly talk about Be Real because it kind of one of things converse on the story of the year in terms of social.

You know, it certainly is one of the kind of the darlings of social. Is that a good phrase? Or certainly one of the success stories. Yeah. also, I think it tells a story of social media as it is right now. I think Chris was kind of leaning into that with his comments a minute ago is that there's definitely a craving from social media users, particularly younger users. I try and avoid using the Gen Z words, but certainly the younger audience is even

Generation Alper as well, which is even younger, that they don't use social in the same way that we do and they don't have the same expectations and they don't want that they're not engaged by the same things and the mechanics of the platforms that the things that they want from it are very different and be real really kind of landed on something that kind of tapped into that but the problem for be real is as has been well covered in the news is kind of like is it a feature or is it a platform they think it's a platform but most people think it's a feature and therefore it has been very quickly imitated, copied and replicated by TikTok now and similar versions on Instagram. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and it's not likely that it would have been, it would have

taken long to do that. We expect them to do that. And now there's a big question mark of, so what's your next trick, be real, what are you going to do? But it has been named as, as you mentioned, you know, app of the year on both of the, you know, the major app stores and, you know, seeing younger users my own children who are young teens who are fascinated by it and you know you can see the popularity but I think

there's also a bit in there about kind of the idea of kind of like how likely is it that in 2023 that we're going to see another be real. I think it's likely in the sense that there is somewhat a lack of innovation in social media and platforms in general which was

well talking about an article today about and how there's still a lot of copycat behavior and playing safe, and particularly at the moment when their platforms are trying to kind of, kind of what are the bets that are going to cost at least in terms of time and resource, but going to deliver the most growth and engagement in the time when we're cutting back. So that's going to clearly, you know, lend itself to copycats. And what does that mean in terms of startups, like Be Real,

in terms of their ability and their motivation to kind of innovate in this space and come out with something because they know that they're going to have to scale really clicking quickly and they're going to have to have a good kind of way of deep pockets to kind of buy the way into the market like bike dance did in terms of acquisition of new users and they're going to have to kind of iterate quickly to kind of counterat the likelihood that it's something really good it's going to be copied so be real has been fascinating to watch it play out and i'm just disappointed that we've come to the year end and i'm not not particularly optimistic about it being something that this time next year in a similar kind of Twitter space, if Twitter is still here,

that we'll be talking about because it just still feels like they haven't really done a lot. So, yeah, Be Real is very interesting. Wait, so just to put a point on that, because I do think that understanding Be Real and looking at it is important, is it just that you think that it's a one-trick pony and so therefore there's not a lot of room for growth, or why do you think it won't be as relevant next year? I think that a combination of both, which is a bit of copper answer, but I think it is a bit of both. I think that I haven't seen anything coming out of the company. They're pretty quiet.

I've done if you noticed they really don't like talking to the media. They're very resistant. They don't have any one at the top, that's for sure. Yeah. And, you know, so it's a bit mysterious. And you could argue as because they haven't got anything to say, but it equally could be they've got bigger plan and they don't want to reveal it because they know it to be copied.

But, yeah, I think that I'm unsure, I'm not confident that they've got enough to come back with that's going to keep people engaged and interested and take their time away, pull people's attention away from the platforms that are investing in all manner and other features and things that people want to spend time on. So I think that there's that and I think that we will see other quirky platforms. We've seen it, you know, Chris, you've been in this space longer than I have probably and we've seen so many things like Peach and a camera, but you know what, all the names escape, but there's a long list. All of these platforms, that have come and gone and dispo and the few others.

I feel that there'll probably be two or three, four, five of those that are significant next year. And there'll be one that will be the one would a bit like be real. But very few of them stick. You know, TikTok, if you think back to social media in the last five years of platforms that have been significant major platforms, bike dance who spend billions and buying their way into the market is the only one that did it. And that's because I think they have the money and the technological know-how. Okay, just a reminder to the audience that if folks want to raise their hands and offer other candidates for Biggest Story of the Year, please feel free to do that.

And we'll bring up. But before we bring someone else up, Chris, I wanted to offer you the opportunity to pitch what you think the biggest story in the tech universe was this year. What I would consider to be the biggest tech story has to weave together a number of different things that are going on. and that I think will provide some momentum into 2023. And I just got to say, like, I think that generative AI is probably the biggest story. That's the most interesting. That is the most likely candidate for the top story. And the reason I would posit that is a couple things. One is that, you know, I remember all the way back in 2016 when I left Uber to go work on conversational software on a conversational startup.

But we saw that the new AI-focused silicon was starting to come out and was being developed, but it wasn't yet available at scale, nor was it really readily available to consumers. And I think what Open AI has been doing in particular in bringing things like Dolly and chat GPT to the mainstream is, I mean, it is to some degree sort of like an iPhone moment, I think, in the sense of what it unlocks and what type of power suddenly everyone has at their disposal in a way that they didn't before. You know, I was and have been following the AI generated avatar thing for quite some time. I've been following the speech synthesis for a while and, you know, Descript bought Liarbird

and now the new Descript platform can literally write your podcast for you. and if you imagine combining that with chat GPT, like this whole podcast could almost be done, you know, purely through AI. And where this goes, I think it's super interesting because as we're sort of like pushing on two different threads when it comes to understanding media and technology in this moment. One is the professionalization of rote junk that kind of gets out there.

I mean, if, I don't know, most of my email inbox now is, apologies, Matt, to all the people that you consult with. But it's a lot of just stuff that's like constantly being produced and regurgitated. And there's all these little tools now that will generate headlines for you and we'll write the stuff for you. And it's almost like for what purpose. Like it's just sort of emitting stuff that, you know, the open rates are probably infinitesimal, super small. And yet they have to keep omitting in order to be part of just the sort of, you know, marketplace in the information economy. And I think that that just creates a sense of isolation and loneliness because there's so much, you know, fakeness.

out there. Be Real is actually a attempt, I think, to bring more humanity and connection back into this environment that's become very artificial, very false. And at the same time, now we're letting anybody create complete

artificially but interesting and compelling works of art or expression or just to synthesize the, I don't know, it's not the sunk cost, but you know, I sort of been thinking about how training data is the new fossil fuel that is going to power a whole new industrial era where

individuals get to create whatever they want, however they want. And the problem, to some degree, will be about distribution and audience. But you'll be able to, I think, produce, I don't know, work in a way that you were never able to do before by taking advantage of hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity. And that is, like, I just don't know what we're going to do with that. But it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. it's going to be terrifying and it's going to be very problematic. And so I just look at that and I think that that's super interesting. And I think if we think about that from the lens of augmentation as opposed to adversarial, an adversarial relationship with our technology, then there's a lot of hope

and promise. But I know that there's going to be a lot of exploitation. There already, I mean, if you saw or just look at what happened when Twitter blue verification was made available to everybody and instantly you had all sorts of fraud and all sorts of bad behavior. You know that there's going to be so much bad behavior that comes out of the ability to use these new tools. That's true of all technological revolutions and improvements. And so fighting back against some of those things to maintain some positivity is going to be something that's going to constantly have to be something that trusted agents in the space, like think about it. Whether that's Apple or Google, you know, meta's maybe there's an amazing redemption story.

there. I don't know. But I just see like AI and it's in the accessibility at the consumer level to be the thing that is probably the most interesting story for 2022. So I brought Martin on stage because in his bio he says illustrator. So in case he might have something to say about this AI stuff, go ahead, Martin. Or if not, again, you can just bring up whatever topic you wanted to bring up. Hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I just want to talk about some things that happened in last 83 days. You know, I just want to first of all thank to everyone here and a very special thing to Chris Messina because of creating hashtag because, you know, in September 16, a 22-year-old. young woman passed away by morality police in Iran who couldn't, she was arrested because her hijab wasn't in a proper way that they said. And after that, we all, you know, forget what is our profession, like an illustrator, doctor, musician, everyone.

We all tried to write her name. And we started hashtag and say her name. and some hashtags were in English. And I think for like 80 million people who, unfortunately, they're in a bad situation in Iran, Twitter and it was a big help. And, you know, there were some sad parts, some people, they tried to create different hashtags that, you know, try to take over this name.

And the thing is just I made, I created this Twitter. I'm not on it since, you know, 2015. But you know, we all suddenly everybody, I live in upstate New York, but I came to United States eight years ago. I was in Iran since I was 30 and suddenly everybody's tired of what's happening in Iran. And these hashtags were a big help for, you know, and today, we start today all read news from execution, a young person who was just protesting a lot of children. I've been following the story of what's going on in Iran, and it's truly something.

I mean, and, you know, one, thank you for those comments. Obviously, we've seen, you know, maybe one thing that you could help to share a little bit about from your perspective is whether or not it feels like there might actually be something that breaks through here. because we've recently heard that the morality police has been, I guess, either shut down or something in response to some of these protests. But it's hard to get a sense for whether or not that actually will persist and whether it's an effective change. You know, just as with the Arab Spring in 2015, you know, hashtags and social media more broadly, you know, played a role in bringing people together and starting up conversations that needed to happen at the world needed here. This feels like one of those moments.

but now the kind of attention span is even shorter. So what is your sense of how this might actually take shape in 2023? Yes, thank you for this opportunity. The thing I just want to say, you know, everybody, you know, there was a many, many news about who's going to go to Mars first. And after that, we all, like a lot of people, they thought that, you know, we cannot use social media and we cannot use Internet. because the government shuts internet over there.

So it was some news that somebody might help to bring internet because, you know, internet is like our eyes. And, you know, we're absolutely blind from our, we're deaf without internet. And my question, can you just like maybe give us a little bit more sense for where you think this might go? Or just so that we have a time for other folks to also contribute? Yes. My question was, is there any opportunity to, what do you think? Is there going to be any news in future that everybody can use internet or like, because of some dictatorships, they close the internet and you see, you absolutely hear nothing from what's going on over there. Got it. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, I think this is actually a really good topic to bring up. Just in terms of the sense of like the splinternet that may be happening. and the fragmentation.

And I was actually going to bring this up as, and Matt, I'm curious to hear your perspective. Oh, do we lose Matt? It looks like we did. Okay. Well, Brian, maybe I'll get your perspective, which is it feels like, and I can only speak, of course,

to my own experience on Twitter, but that there's a smaller number of people who are now posting more, that there actually has or there is something to the exodus and the migration, and that that seems to be happening, I think, more broadly, that people are moving into smaller groups, maybe smaller chat groups, whether it's on, you know,

Telegram or WhatsApp or elsewhere like that, there's that that's happening. And then globally, internationally, there's also, it seems to be a fragmentation where parts of the internet are kind of either, you know, going dark or being disconnected from, you know, the main thing. So even though, I think this is very hard for humans to understand, and I will include myself in that list, to get a sense for how many people are actually involved in the conversations that you're having. And it may seem like just because there are hundreds or thousands of people, of people around you that are all, you know, sharing, posting, tweeting, sharing photos on Instagram, you know, sharing photos to Facebook that everyone is all part of the same conversations,

but in fact, we're not. There are so many people out there in the world. There's so many conversations that are going on that achieving a type of coherence across the networks, across these different pockets of interaction and communication is really hard to make sense of. I mean, I will say that I've been the, let's see, the Mastodon iOS client, of course, Mastodon being one of those sort of Twitter competitors that's now gaining some steam, added support for following hashtags last week, I would say. Now, why is that important? You're like, oh, it's like a Twitter clone.

Of course, they should have following hashtags. But think about it from a different perspective. Think about what Mastodon is built on the concept of the Fediverse, which essentially is a decentralized social network where there are many different servers. And you can imagine that each of those servers is kind of like its own little mini blog site where people are posting content. Well, if you want to be able to aggregate conversations around certain hashtags from the Fediverse, well, it actually is quite a big deal.

Like, that's actually both technologically challenging and you have to figure out how to filter the content that's being published so that it actually gets aggregated into a single person's feet. It's not sort of like, you know, an email address that everyone is sending messages to. It's quite the opposite. It's sort of more like a search function. And so searching across the Fediverse is actually, I think, you know, quite an interesting I don't want to say innovation, but technological challenge and boundary your barrier for the Fediverse picking up.

And so the fact that that's happening now means that there are bridges being built between these different social islands that is critical, I think, to the Fediverse actually having some either legitimacy but also usage for the types of things that Martin's talking about. Yeah, and also you've seen, and again, we should stress, of course, we're not geopolitical experts or anything like that. In the places that we've seen strife this year, Iran, China recently, but also think of Ukraine. Like the Internet's never gone down in Ukraine. You have in China, you know, obviously the censors are attempting to police social media, and you keep seeing this whack-a-mole thing of protesters going around it. Same thing in Iran. So in a way, it's interesting that

when it was just one thing, when it was just like, okay, turn off Twitter inside this country or turn off the internet full stop. Now that things are so every, like if you chase people, even in Russia you hear about like there are telegram channels where people are talking freely

about what they really think about how the war is going and things like that. Like there are all these little nooks and crannies now where people can go sort of like, you know, in the book 1984, Winston Smith had that little corner behind the TV where the big brother couldn't see him. But also, users are more sophisticated now so that even if you don't find those corners, you can still operate in the larger web and sort of evade, you know? Like you saw those scenes of people holding up the blank pieces of paper.

So I don't know. I guess in a way the internet still remains undefeated for not being entirely killable. I'm sure there are examples that people can bring up about, you know, shutting down the internet entirely and it worked to stifle dissent. But I don't know. It's funny, like, as you're bringing this up, you know, I was thinking about this with regards to Elon Musk, you know, purchasing Twitter, believing that, you know, preserving the town square, you know, is essential for free speech. And it occurred to me that, of course, Twitter is centralized. And in the cases where Twitter is blocked around the world, I realize that the U.S. is unique in its preference for having free speech,

that actually that assumption is not built into all cultures all over the world. And if I just, I don't, I'm having a hard time thinking about how, if Elon Musk truly believes this and thinks about things from a, if not civilizational, perspective, but from a, you know, a species perspective, if he wants to take humanity to Mars, will free speech exist on Mars? And if it does, then what was the process by which free speech, as an absolute right, was disseminated on Earth through social media and technology? And the Internet, as an adaptive, generative, sort of emerging system, is almost like the sort of step zero to achieving that.

Because without the Internet, then it's much harder for people to actually be able to raise their voice in unison. and find and connect and collaborate with each other. Right? So like free speech, I think, you know, as, what was it? What was the thing about something dying in, or sunlight is the best disinfectant or something like that? Yeah, I think that's the phrase. Metaphores. But something like that where you essentially have to have the network first in order to enable free speech to be experienced by everybody who currently does not have that right or that ability.

And so that would be the first order of, of. of business. Now, granted, he's doing that with Starlink and, you know, the satellite system, but nonetheless, in cases where the internet is suppressed, it's much harder for people to have the experience of that ability. I'm going to, I'm going to do a $5 segue here because there's one more topic that I want to propose for the biggest story of the year. And it will also give us a way to seg into our predictions for next year. We're talking about centralization versus decentralization. What does that make you think of.

Crypto. Now, here's the point. Obviously, if we were a more crypto-focused show, you know, there would be huge stories we'd be talking about it. But what I think I would say generally is that

is the lens that I think is important for crypto this year. I wasn't there when like Mount Gox and like, you know, some of the first blowups and rug pools and, you know, the first 90% drop in coin prices and stuff. I was there during the ICO boom, and the point that I would make is that there's been

several boom bus cycles in crypto, and people like to say, you know, the boom bus cycle that could take a decade and another space could take three months in crypto. I do not remember previous times when crypto had a boom bus cycle that the general media and the general public was aware of it. To the degree that they are now. Well, FTX is a name that everyone knows. Sam, Sam-Ring-Mudfried is a name that everyone knows. Like, the football.

During the Super Bowl in January, they actually bought out the ads. They were sponsoring stadiums, right? There was so much money and so much money being splashed around. Again, during the pandemic, all those pandemic relief funds were being funneled into crypto, where people were seeing returns like they'd never seen before. And for those, you know, who had been on the sidelines of the web, to kind of rise and all the, you know, multi-millionaires that were minted thanks to their early investments in platforms like Facebook, like Google, like to some degree Twitter, etc. Suddenly,

retail investors had exposure to those types of gains that they never had before. And so that fueled so, like it gave so much momentum. Whereas the Mount Gox era, like you had to be very technical. You had to, like there wasn't sort of friendly front ends like Coinbase, you know, where you could invest in crypto and sort of see your portfolio. rise. So the fact that, you know, all that work had been done to, one, centralized, two, to make it easier for people to get in. And then three, for all this media and advertising hype, to be part of it, I think is the thing that makes this so much more salient to the audience that you're speaking to or speaking of. Yeah. And so obviously there was more participation. There was also, you know,

celebrities involved this time. And it was, it was like we were just saying, maybe in 2017, it was still corners of the internet that people didn't care about. Whereas, you know, there's been a lot of main characters every day on Twitter and in the media this year. And, you know, Sam Beckman-Fried's been one of them. But like even when, you know, I visited relatives this summer and they know what I do for the show. But what they asked me about, this was around the time that this was what, July or late June, when the first blowups were happening, right? I can't remember Tara, Luna, all that stuff.

And that's what they wanted to know about. They didn't ask me about any other tech stories. That was the thing, well, because somebody did have money on one of these or people had money on maybe FTX at the time, and they were asking, like, should we be worrying about that? So it is interesting the degree to which, despite the fact that there's a certain segment of the audience that always yells at me for talking about crypto. Crypto was the main tech stories this year. was for these sorts of blowups and with some of these outlandish characters. I mean, that's even forgetting who's the duo that allegedly stole all that money and they got arrested here in New York.

So many crypto stories like that. The rappers. Yeah, right. That are tailor made for that sort of thing. Somebody's going to do a nice Netflix series about them something. So that's interesting for crypto, because. Because then people, the true believers in crypto for years have been like mainstreaming it, mainstreaming it.

That's what we have to do. Okay, that's happened for you. And now the problem is that... What was mainstreamed is actually the complete wrong story that you want to have mainstreamed? Was the mainstreaming experience that everyone had horrific and sort of the lesson of, oh my God, I'm never going to touch that again with a 10-foot pole? obviously a lot of people in crypto spaces are talking about that. I want to pause you though and ask maybe to clarify a little bit because you started out kind of with your proposal for story of the year being about, you know, decentralization and centralization.

And I guess what I wonder is if this story actually has very little to do with crypto, but that crypto was an ablabor of a type of grift that we just haven't seen since Enron. And that every decade or so, there needs to be a grift-like story like this. Last time it was about energy markets and blackouts. Or Bernie Madoff. Ironically, right, like thinking about all the energy that is used to actually mine, Bitcoin, and all the other cryptos, like, same thing back then. It's all just energy and power and just the way in which it's exploited to make people lots and lots of money, whether it's, you know, oil or energy, et cetera.

Now it's the same thing. And so I guess I wonder if this is truly a story of crypto or a story of, you know, human behavior that just continues to repeat itself. Right, and certainly crypto true believers have been making that point. If Brady Dale were here, he would make that point for us more eloquently than me, which is that the problem here was you still had venal people in charge that saw bags of money and couldn't resist grabbing it. And so the solution to that is to return to the original vision of Satoshi,

which is true defy, this would not have been allowed to happen, et cetera, et cetera. And the points have been made, I think I've mentioned on the show, a couple of times that some of the decentralized exchanges have not blown up. That a lot of the blowups have been because there are actually human beings behind them that make greedy, venal

decisions. And one of the promises of crypto, you know, it's always like about is trustless and things like that. And so yeah. You can make the average pay for, right? Yeah, yeah.

What I was going to say then to transition to predictions because you and I, I'm actually going through our chats over the last two weeks because we've been kicking around ideas that I've said like, oh, let's bring that up. This is not a prediction because I'm not deep enough in the crypto space to make an informed prediction, but I'm going to pose a what if, which is along the lines of what we just said, is if crypto finally had its mainstreaming moment and all people saw was grift and, you know, blood on the dance floor, what if that's bullish for Bitcoin for the original crypto?

Because what if the people, obviously, look, there's too many people that are in the space and are interested in developing in the space for crypto to go away completely. So a possible case is what we just said, that true defy will rise from the ashes. But one of the things that I remember saying this on the show a couple years ago, when all of a sudden we were talking about crypto again, and it was defy and yield farming and things like that.

And there was true energy and innovation. If everybody's burned off of that, this is my what if. But people still are like, you know, I've been pilled enough to believe that I should put a certain percentage of my whatever into crypto, just as you would put a certain percentage into gold or real estate whatever. So if that were to happen, then this is Bitcoin's chance to come roaring back in the sense that it's the best brand in terms of crypto. It's the oldest brand. It's the most well-known. It hasn't blown up. Think of all of the things that have blown up. Crypto still is, again,

to use the term undefeated in terms of like no one's really been able to break it. So my what if for 2023 is what if Bitcoin comes roaring back for the Normies to fulfill the promise that some people had for it, which was store of value digital gold? What do you think about that? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question from a slightly different angle, which is one, the media environment, as it is now, is almost antithetical or, again, oppositional to the types of success that are enduring. And when I think about that, it's sort of the things that are boring and that continue to chug along and that continue to kind of like, you know, make consistent, steady progress

like year over year. And honestly, like, when I was thinking about Apple today, you know, it occurs to me that, like, they really have just continued to operate with a level of consistency and execution to the point where, I mean, they kind of was like dial it in. I mean, their events now are, you know, they try to be fun and exciting and whatever. I mean, there really hasn't been that much innovation when it comes to like MacOS. There is underlying and under the hood a lot of things that have changed. But for the most part, I mean, the dock is more or less the same.

You know, the file structure has been the same since, you know, like the late 80s. So to your point about Bitcoin being stable and undefeated, the thought that I had is what happens when we move to an era and a generation where the concept of internet money is redundant. In the same way that you say, oh, I have like a mobile device. You're like, no, you have a device. And of course, now it can be untethered. It doesn't need to be plugged in all the time. It can connect to, you know, 5G, you know, and it works as well as your, you know, desktop used to. So we're moving away from those types of, like definitions. They become less meaningful. There is still a lot of people that think of, you know, money and fiat currency as like, you know, dollars and

checks and things like that from the old world of money that relies on centralized trust-built institutions that were established over hundreds of years. We might be able to compress that time factor and that timeframe with crypto and Bitcoin in particular to a decade or so. I mean, we're coming up on a decade. I think if not, have we already passed a decade? We might have already passed a decade. Of Bitcoin, I think it was 2008 or 2009, right?

That's what I want to say. Yeah, 2008. Yeah, where's a Brady deal? Yeah, we're still early innings. We're approaching 15 years, yes. Go up. Okay. Well, yeah, this is hard. I missed up megabytes and my gigabytes yesterday.

Oh, don't get me started on that. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes you say MbPS and you say, Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say, though, in supporting your point, but also adding to it, is so one, this year was all about kind of like the speculation and the speculation and the tool of bloom or whatever kind of like, you know, coming off the rails for the crypto store. but if it persists and all the people that, as you say, are building for it, they have not only been red-pilled, but they are operating from a different logic. Their logic is that there is internet money and internet money is useful for transactions in commerce and it's both more efficient and has, on the longer time horizon, less fees than let's say just paying to Stripe or

paying to, you know, Visa and Amex and MasterCard or whatever. And that it allows them to innovate faster. they will be able to take advantage of this moment and the education that people have gone through such that the next cohort coming up will actually feel like they actually understand some of the pitfalls and they'll know, well, I don't want to say they'll know to avoid the FTXs of the world, but they'll be using it for different purposes. What could be very interesting and I don't think it's going to happen, although if it did, it could be game-changing. You know, there's already a lot of crypto underpinnings built into Twitter.

And if, you know, Elon wanted to make, like, it's so insane to me that, he's talking about increasing the price of Twitter Blue to $11 for iPhone users and having a second lesser price on the web. I actually don't think that it's allowed by the App Store policies, but regardless, if he were to just move to crypto for payments, he could avoid this whole thing. Maybe it would cut off a lot of his potential audience in market. But it feels like that moment where if you really wanted to change things up, he would move to Dogecoin or Bitcoin or something else rather than having to go through the Fiat App Store process. for the transactions.

So I don't know why he doesn't do that with Twitter 2.0. I think the conversation you and I had in our DMs was I said, well, why chain? Like if, because there's a story I haven't done about like, you know, the economy of Roblox and things like that. And you and I were talking about having these sorts of, you know, it's essentially micro payments. It's the same thing. And the argument would be, okay, well, crypto is there to solve that. problem, but the reason I'm asking why chain is, like, in theory, like, you don't need a blockchain to do any of this stuff, but, you know, what you just said.

The point was about Lerop, right? Right, right, right. And so this is why I think it's interesting, you know, one that Twitter already supports lightning and sats, and so you can tip people using crypto. It's interesting, you know, going back to the first story that you wanted to, that we were talking about with the Twitter alternatives, post news, or I don't know if it's just Post has its own microtipping feature, but it's all Fiat. And so the problem with what Nome is doing is that he'll never get into the app store

if he wants to actually make a business because Apple will instantly take 30%. So right now, he has a progressive web app of PWA for Post that you can sort of install as a shortcut. But as much as the web has come along, it is nowhere near as good as having a native app. I mean, notifications don't really work. I tried uploading a video, it doesn't support video. There's a bunch of things that just aren't really there yet, as good as it is. However, you know, the crypto piece and the decentralization piece and the interoperability piece,

I mean, for example, if Mastodon wanted to add tipping, crypto would be the obvious way to do it, because then you could just have your crypto wallet address, and no matter what server someone uses, they'd be able to tip you. Like, that is the, I think, the thing that's really important to understand about how this could actually usher in a new set of behaviors and a new set of ways of supporting, you know, creators that at least 2022 did not produce. Like the Twitter creator tools didn't seem to work. A lot of the creator programs from Pinterest to Instagram to several others have kind of either shut down or been, you know, largely shrunk.

So it's just, it's not clear when the economics are going to get there for a lot of people, I suppose, besides substack. I'm going to pivot one more time and give you a, a solid prediction for next year and then offer you the opportunity to do the same thing. If anybody also in the audience has a prediction, feel free to raise your hand, and I see you there. But he declined, so maybe he's working. But I already said this on the show this week.

It's going to be very interesting to me that the whole ARVR headset sort of movement is, it's, you know, we're going to hit the ground next year. and we're going to find out, we won't know next year if this is really the next big thing or not. It's going to be a decade-long thing, but we're going to learn some really interesting things next year. Obviously, when, as we expect, Apple enters the market and then, as they've done before, possibly prove the market. But the PlayStation VR is out there. Meta's next headsets are out there. As I said before, everybody and their mother is the same way that, you know, when Apple

a watch. Everybody briefly did a watch. And, you know, so... Right, right, right. The... It's about a product perspective. Are you excited about that at all? Let's call it the XR space. Let's call it AR or VR or whatever.

I actually would argue that I think AR has the best chance of being successful before VR in a mainstream, meaningful way. But from a product perspective, are you excited by potentially this ecosystem or is this something that you're still agnostic? I don't feel agnostic, as in like I'm unconvinced. I would say one of my great concerns about a lot of the technology that's being developed right now and why I think the generative AI story is such a big deal for 2023 simply comes down to cost and cost as a determinant of accessibility. So my brother runs an XR stage in southern New Hampshire, and I visited him over the holidays. And man, the stuff that he is building in unreal, it is unreal. Like the direction of media is incredible.

And once you layer in, and we actually had my nephews and my brother on, if you remember, a long time ago, to talk about his exas stage. Right, right. Right. And the nature of generative AI being brought into that environment and creating these immersive worlds. I mean, imagine like chat Chb-T scripted characters. Now, granted, it may not be great, but it can improve. It's going to get better. Being avatars that you can actually interact with.

And in fact, I hunted an avatar generation service called InWorld recently that does this, where they essentially can create characters like, you or I, for example, we could live in one of these metaverses. People could come up to us and everything that we say would be trained, let's say in all of our podcast interviews or all of other, you know, things that we've written, et cetera. And that creates a passable experience in those environments. So on the one hand, very excited about that. And I think it's going to be hugely transformational for those who can afford it and those who can access it. I mean, the stage my brother set up was

not inexpensive to build. And so I think that's going to be a real headwind for these technologies becoming more common. I mean, I just don't know how many people want to go to the mall and hang out in like a VR, you know, headset like space or something. It's just it's fine if you're a teenage boy, I think, but for everyone else, I'm just having a hard time seeing the modality by which most people will adopt and use these technologies.

By the way, Anil Dash just DM to me. He says he's on the web listening, so he can't join it, of course. But he wanted to make the point that he says we're seeing big uptick in Fediverse plus AR. And he mentioned

web.m.m.E.R.S. dot space, which I'm checking out right now. But we'll have plenty of time in the ramp up to Apple announcing whatever it's going to do. One more thing that I want to add to your point, though. And I think it's worth pointing out and considering that Apple doesn't always win and they don't always get right. I think the HomePod is a great example of this where, you know, one series isn't that good. So Apple and AI, like, they do some things, but they're a little.

bit, I don't want to say, like, shy. I just don't know, like, they haven't, their prowess there isn't at the level of, you know, honestly, I think, you know, meta is actually pretty far advanced when it comes to AI. Obviously, Open AI has some of the best, smartest people. They're building amazing things that are accessible. Google, you know, seems to, I don't know why, like, they seem to be a little bit scared about going too heavy with what they probably could do based on regulations that are coming out. I don't, I don't really know, but I think that whatever Apple builds in this space is going to be, probably somewhat underwhelming to start.

I think it'll be like magical, but it might just be, I don't know, like Apple Maps directions overlaid on the real world. It is going to be expensive too. It's going to be expensive.

So this is what I mean, right? Like, you know, the iPhone, the first iPhone was also pretty expensive, but for many people, it was almost the first kind of personal computer that kind of opened up, you know,

the web and entertainment and communication all in one product. And I don't know that these augmented reality or XR devices will replace something or give you a whole new set of behaviors that you really need to have. Right. What you're grasping for is sort of that

aha moment, which is what the iPhone was, you know, par excellence. It will never be repeated the, oh my God, you can do that first. I just don't think so. Yeah. Well, and okay, again, I want to stress that we'll probably

revisit this in a few months. Like the watch is an example of wearables existed, you know, Fitbit was what, five years before. So here's an important thing to understand about these devices and these products. And I don't want to do my horn too much. But in 2007, I predicted like the name for the iPad and I wrote up a blog post about what I thought the iPad could be, which was essentially sort of an extended wider iPhone.

And, you know, I kind of got some of the parts wrong, but I actually I think did a pretty good job predicting it. You know, because I saw what the iPhone did. Now, if you know the history of the iPhone, it actually started out as the iPad. And they shrunk it down to my phone. And that is what got released. And so if you kind of continue the progression from iPad to iPhone to Apple Watch, all you're doing, and Steve Jobs famously said in, I think, 1981 or something when I was born,

that, you know, someone was asking him whether they'll be a different version, I think, of the Apple II or something that comes up. And what he said was, look, you know, it's just a matter of emphasis in terms of the form factor that computer is, occupy and take on. And so with the iPad, it's one type of computing experience. With the iPhone, it's another very personal type of computing experience. And then the watch we've figured out is kind of an augmentation for notifications and for fitness for those types of use cases. So when it comes to...

Okay. Wasn't it you that made the argument on the show several months ago that when you add in AirPods, the watch, like the phone. this is the next logical step and that when you put all those things together, if you take any one part of the elephant that you don't know what you're holding, but when you start to put them all together, wasn't it you that was making the argument that you can see a direction they're going on? So this is not against my point.

Like, so if you extend it, right, as I was saying, like, iPad to iPhone to watch, and then you add in the glasses or goggles. That's not kind of a linear progression in terms of proportion. proportion of experience. It's a completely new modality. Now, granted, yes, like you have the screen, and the screen suddenly is overlaid on your eyes. But the way in which that screen will interact with your AirPods and your watch is yet to be seen and is a little bit unclear. So is this a product that you're going to wear out in the world, or is it a product that you're going to use in your private space or for work? Is it going to be a product that's focused on fitness or for gaming,

for example, Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness are very important entrance into the space. So if this is an entertainment product. That's one thing. Zuckerberg is trying desperately to find out what the use case or application is for the Quest, the Quest Pro, and they're focusing on work, which is where Microsoft was like a decade ago with a HoloLens. And it's great for military use cases, but none of those products have really seemed to

take off in anywhere else, except in those environments. So see, here's why I'm excited because you're right to say that Apple doesn't always win, or get it right. But this is the first time since the iPhone that, as you're saying, other people are trying to shoehorn use cases into it. And we don't know what Apple's is yet.

Just like, you know, remember all the mockups of what the iPhone was supposed to look like. People didn't see the paradigm shift that the iPhone was because they couldn't conceive of it. So I'm excited about this because you're right. Will they announce essentially sort of what that N-real thing is, which is just, oh, you could watch TV on the wall in front of you in the same room as someone. Or, so is it entertainment? Is it, I don't know, just sort of FaceTime on

steroids? Is it going out in the world and having your notifications pop up? We don't know it could be all of those things. It could be one of those things. It could be something that we, but that's the point is we, I do trust Apple enough to, at least have a compelling thesis that they're going to try to sell us. Do you remember when the first time the rumors of the goggles came out? I don't know if it was like 2018? Like I guess what I'm asking, I feel like it's been pushed back and push back and push back. And that feels a little bit different.

No? I wouldn't argue that. And in fact, I think it's been within the life of the show, which is about to turn five years old. So that would be 2018. Okay. So the reason why I say that, though, is because it feels like. I mean, one, Apple can take their sweet time, right? Their main job right now is to sell Apple Silicon,

and these goggles will do that as well as whatever car they might come out with in the future. They're doing fine, selling, you know, MacBook Pros and iPhones, you know, in the short term. I guess what I'm curious about is, like, what is the, because I think we just heard that they're pushing back the car, but. No, the car, but also the goggles, I think, due to either. Oh, yeah, to the second half of the year. software issue, right? Now, is that because of actual software and performance issues, or is it because of a set of features that need to come out? Is it new telemetry? Is it, you know, if you remember, one of the things that Apple had announced, I feel like one or two WDCs ago,

was, I think, adopting the matter standard for in-home, you know, communication. There is some technology like that that probably needs to surpass Bluetooth in terms of its performance capabilities, that if they go fully wireless, that'll be, I think, the game changer. Whereas it feels like so many of the other devices, I know that the Quest Pro is wireless, but it's still bulky. If Apple is able to really shrink down their components and provide performance with better battery life, et cetera, that could be the type of accessible form factor that needs to happen

in order to get the mainstream a lot more excited about this stuff. Well, the bottom line point that I would make is, and again, whatever they come up with might not. not be right and might not excite me. But this is the first sort of green field wide open. I have no idea what they think the use case is for this, but I'm

fascinated to find out what they think that is. And I will say just the juxtaposition with all the AI stuff that is going on. I think that is where it could be super magical, depending on how open they're willing to make their platform. We should probably wrap soon, but obviously

have you got a prediction for next year and it doesn't have to be a prediction like I by this time this exact date next year this X or Y will have happened but just what where you think something's going to go that maybe excites you or something like that well you know and we we talked about possibly you know going down this this direction so I might as I'll just bring it up now because it does fit into a prediction based on the conditions of the environment so I was I was laid off on on Tuesday from Republic. So my job at Republic was to be a product lead and a product manager on founder experience. And so that meant that I helped design the system that onboarded founders to

raise crowdfunding rounds on our platform. And I was part of an 18% staff across the company layoffs. And I've had many jobs in my career, so I'm not like super stressed out or worried about it. But, you know, I also have like a privilege place, I think, in. I don't know, like being in a good enough place personally, et cetera. So like, that's fine. Not everyone has the same privileges that I do currently or in the past. And so when I think about 23 and I think about, you know, my own kind of moment to sort of stop and reflect and step back, there's a lot of other people, you know, actually like 100,000 or more who are coming out of the tech world who find themselves in the same place that I'm finding myself in now, which is to say,

looking at the landscape, thinking about where the opportunities exist, thinking about whether this market downturn, as you started the show, I was sort of talking about this line down. Well, I'm now in that line down, whether that will continue and for how long it will continue. It seems to me that, you know, and I have no real scientific basis for this, but, you know, maybe by this time next year we might be starting to see like the shoots of things that are being planted and built now from a lot of the people that have been laid off and are finding new opportunities and we'll start to sprout. And that, I think, might lead to a whole new and interesting and perhaps, at least I hope,

exciting period, you know, in 2024 and beyond. It doesn't say that 23 is going to be a down year. You know, I'm sure there's lots of crazy things that are going to happen. Well, hopefully we'll see the end of this war. But in terms of the talent that now is available and in terms of the reset in cultural company expectations, you know, to some degree, like brought on by Elon Musk, like installing beds you know, in Twitter headquarters, there's a different sense for what it will take to, I think, you know, build, grow and thrive in this environment.

You know, as you said, it's a lot harder to get those series B checks now. And so that discipline needs to be brought back into the marketplace. And I think we'll see a lot less, I don't know, silly products and silly apps because, I mean, frankly, AI will be able to generate apps. It'll be able to generate designs. It will be able to generate lots of things that currently a lot of people do with their time. that really isn't the most creative or strategic use of their intellect or intelligence. So, you know, like to try to put a point on it, I guess what I'm thinking is by next year,

there's going to be a sobering. I think that's happening to some degree. And in that decompression, that seriousness means that people will take less risks and be, you know, less, I don't know, willing to try stuff. For those who maintain their sense of, you know, child's mind, optimism, hope, fun, playfulness and build really great products that people want to use that also take advantage and weave in some of the great collaborative aspects of generative AI. I think we're going to start to see really, really fun and interesting stuff actually come out of that. So I guess that's maybe more of a hopeful, optimistic take as opposed to a prediction.

I mean, you know, neither of us should make solid predictions. But like what I'm doing investing-wise and even what I'm doing with the show, I do not feel that there's any percent chance that like the dot-com bubble burst thing the entire industry went away and had to be reconstructed from the ground up. I don't think we're in a situation like that. I think we're in a situation where, unfortunately,

very real people like you are going to be casualties of some form of reorganizing, belt tightening, restructuring, but it's not going to be, without making a prediction, I feel fairly confident that at some point, maybe even a year from now, it'll feel like, oh, yeah, there was a tough couple months, bad things happened, but generally the industry has kind of picked up and

started off in the direction it was going in anyway, right? So this would feel like a speed bump more than like a complete, we've got to change course, right? The businesses that are failing right now, the people that are looking for work right now, I think that there's a very high likelihood that ideas and people will just flow in another channel, like water going downhill and a stream, as opposed to being completely damned up for a lengthy period of time. I'm the worst at mixing metaphors, but that's what I'm saying is I have a high degree of confidence, and it might not be in any year, maybe it'll be two years, three years, but I think that this is a speed bump that we're going to shift gears, and it's not a way.

wall that we've hit, you know. In some ways it does a little bit in the sense that it feels like the car has been just sort of like pedal to the metal, racing as fast as it could, you know, making a lot of sloppy, you know, decisions in turns and seemingly, you know, was unscathed for a while and suddenly just, you know, turned a corner and, like, did, you know, crash half into the wall and the car is like spinning around. You're like, and we don't know quite when it's going to stop. And once it does, it is going to be on a different track in a different direction.

I think that a lot of the things that we've taken for granted for the last decade, so, as we were talking about with Anil last time, I don't know that we're going to be able to take them for granted going forward. I also don't know that there's another generation that's coming into the workforce and where they have a different set of assumptions and a different set of values. And they're looking at all the things that are going on around there. And like, this is kind of messed up. And, you know, I think they're going to take a different approach to it, perhaps. And so, you know, I know that we have some skepticism about be real, but it's a young team. And, you know, like, whether it's like Snapchat,

or B-Rail or other products like that that have a different way of building products and a different value structure and a different way of seeing the world. I imagine that we're going to see people that come out next year that grew up with, you know, AI art and, you know, generative AI and, you know, synthetic media. And they will feel so comfortable and so natural building, you know, products, experiences, media entertainment with those tools that a lot of the people that are still, you know, almost like using hand chisels, you know, to make, to make our products are going to seem antiquated when we think about it. Like, I'll give you just two examples. You know, one is a product that I

hunted recently called kive.aii, and I think I talked about it on the show before, but they have an AI canvas that essentially, if you remember when we talked to John Mack from, from Photoshop, the creator of photo aware or context aware Phil, you know, I showed this to him and he, He was super stoked about it. Essentially, what it allows you to do is imagine like a Figma multiplayer environment where you start with some, you know, currently it's a square shaped image. And then you remove parts of the image that you don't like. And then you create a square.

And then you provide some prompts, some AI prompts. And it'll give you four or five different variants of a scene or of the image that you want in various styles. And it will match and blend this new. tile, essentially, with the art that you had before. And I made this amazing tapestry for Joe for her birthday in November. And it's something that I could not have done like two months before. And she was like blown away, you know, to sort of one, I was using Astria AI to generate these facial like profiles, which we were sort of going to talk about.

And then, but I brought it into this creative space that was multiplayer that allowed me to kind of, you know, create something new. Anyways, that type of tool is the type of thing. that a whole new generation of things is going to be built from. Additionally, I'm seeing a lot of stuff happening in the Figma world with a lot of the plugins that are being created are actually taking advantage of AI, such that you can just say, you know,

create an interface that's for a banking app, give me five different variants of a home screen, I'll choose the ones that I want, and then, you know, create the second screens that kind of look like this. And it becomes a probabilistic way of designing and creating products that creates so much more accessibility than currently, where you have to know all the code and you have to like write it yourself and you have to like know all the different platform dependencies. All that stuff will be taken care of by a system.

You know, and so anyways, that changes the nature of the relationship of how we're using technology. And it'll disrupt a lot of the kinds of work and jobs. I think that people take for granted currently. You know, maybe the more interesting thing to do and then we can wrap up on this is like leave little time capsules. Like I'm saying right now in December, 8th, 2022, December 8th, 2020. Like, if I say the statement now, um, the crypto winter is over.

Like on December 8th, 2023, will that seem absurd or will that be spot on? Well, um, will all of these AI things have created a flowering of, of a whole new industry or was it just a bunch of games and gimmicks? Will that sound absurd or right on a year from now, you know? Elon Musk is still in charge day to day at Twitter. this scene absurd or, you know, like, those are the things that maybe if we keep these in mind, we can do a year from now, boy, can you believe, boy, Apple really knocked it out of the park.

Forget the iPhone. Look at what Apple has done now. So, yes, Brett Taylor and Stewart Butterfield have both left Salesforce. They are among, you know, some of the best entrepreneurs and product builders out there. So they have left, you know, the confines of sales. Salesforce and Stewart has left Slack. You know, you know those guys are going to go back out there and build again. That's another sort of dark horse aspect, you know, where something totally new, you know, could come to light that, you know, we're not even considering, you know, currently. So this is what I mean where there's just a lot of talent that is going out into the marketplace with a whole new set of tools and assumptions that will build new things that are going to be very hard for us to predict based on what we currently see in the marketplace currently.

Do you know, is there, you know how there's like competitive debate teams and things like that? Is there a competitive metaphor-murring, mixing metaphor competition? Because you and I- Murdering metaphors? I like that. Yeah, we should enter that because I think you and I are both really good at that. We are. So, well, first of all, happy New Year, happy holidays to everyone, to you, especially Chris.

Obviously, Chris, if people have ideas for what Chris should do in the new year. Yeah, true. If you got something interesting, you hear me up. You know what if you're trying. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thanks to everybody for another year.

We're coming on the fifth year. I need to talk about this in a couple months. I didn't realize that it's already been five years of this show. But as ever, thank you. What is the anniversary? It's March 5th, I believe. March 5th. Okay.

I'll know. I'll know when it's coming up. But whatever. But anyway, as ever, I'm eternally grateful for everyone listening. I'm grateful for you, Chris, for doing these shows with me. Happy New Year to everyone. Right on. Thanks, Brian.

You too. Later.