Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Jack Dorsey, Halo Infinite And Foldable Phones

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

Mulling over the whole legacy of Jack Dorsey and name changes for tech companies in general. The weird way gaming is changing right now (see: Halo Infinite). And are foldable phones ready for the big time? With Bloomberg's @vladsavov Sponsors: AltoIra.com/techmeme RadPowerBikes.com 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 everybody to the TechMeme Rite Home Experience for Wednesday, December 1st, 2021. We are joined today by a very special guest. We have Vlad from Bloomberg here.

And we're going to be talking about gaming and free-to-play games and how the gaming economy is changing. But we've got a lot of other news that's been going on in the last couple days that really, really deserve some inspection. And that primarily concerns Jack Dorsey, of course, leaving Twitter as CEO, followed by a fairly epic announcement today that a square is being renamed Blocks. And I don't know, Brian, what's your first take? And then we'll really get into this. How long of a sigh can I do? First, they told me to call Google Alphabet and I said nothing. then they told me to call Facebook meta.

Okay. The thing is, we've already discussed this to a certain degree where I feel like, you know, the easy analogy is the, hey, fellow kids sort of meme thing. But at this point... This is your favorite meme, though.

You really like that one. It is. Well, listen, What's His Face lives in my neighborhood. He throws the big Halloween party every year. Okay. Steve Bouchemy, yes. You literally meant the GIF guy or GIF, whichever, you know.

Steve Bishemi lives down the hill for me. And he did this Halloween dress up as the Hello Fellow Kids. No. Yeah, he did. No, there's pictures online. Look it up. Okay. That's pretty awesome.

What I've been thinking of today was, and this is a way older reference, but do you remember when George H.W. Bush, the father Bush, got in trouble or what people made fun of him for being like, message, I care. You know what I mean? I think so. I might have been seven or eight, but, yeah. He was trying to be like, look, I get it.

I'm hip, you know. I, the thing is, it used to be that when you do a brand change, a name change, it's a sign of desperation. Sure. And I'm not saying that either meta or now Block are in trouble as companies. Clearly, Block is growing, you know, is on the up. But it's like I did that piece today on the show where Kevin Roos was asking, like, you know, is it boring for these founders?

It's no longer fun anymore. It just feels to me it's so thorough. thirsty now, the desire to be cool, the desire to be like a message, I get it, that I'm starting to get tired of it. So you asked me what my impression is, and it is literally that I'm tired of this. But, all right, that's me being grumpy. So what's your thing? Old, old man, Bouchemmy over there. actually I'll let Vlad chime in if you'd like because I have thoughts of course

Yeah I didn't know you guys are going to be so jaded about all of this I'm excited it's me no it's me Chris Yeah it's really Brian Yeah Chris is way more into this To me I mean let me just put my credentials out there I've been covering tech and especially smartphones for over a decade And It was a time over the past

decade where it felt like I was doing the same thing is just the year changed. But now things are dynamic and less predictable. And I will say there are three distinct rebrandings that we've referenced here. First of all, Google and Alphabet was effectively like an accountancy thing where the alphabet parent company umbrella company was more to, I don't know, avoid antitrust considerations and yada, yada, yadda, yada, or present different results to investors. It's one aspect. The meta rebranding is one where it, to me, it's the most explicit acknowledgement from a company that its brand is toxic.

Because the moment they did it, they did WhatsApp by Meta, Instagram by Meta. Now they're running ads and it's all Meta, Meta, Meta. The Facebook name is being pushed way to the background. It's just one of the services of the overall company. So they're whitewashing their brand. Fair enough. Now, this block or blocks rebranding. It's block. I was wrong.

Because it speaks to the fact that it's a bigger company that's just Square, right? Because Square is just one service. But they have title. A few days ago, they announced, well, Tidal announced this initiative of trying to pay or compensate artists more fairly relative to how many people listen to them and so on. And I think overall, he speaks to Jack Dawesley's whole, like the thing that is the thing that's more of a priority, the thing that he's passionate about, which is, as Chris mentioned, developing new sorts of economies. I don't know that he's necessarily focused on gaming,

but he is looking at entertainment, music, how people spend money, exchange money, etc. And I will say for myself, here in Asia, if you want to get any sort of startup funded today, fintech and management of money is effectively the number one way to do it. More than 50% of VC money in Asia is going to that kind of thing.

Agreed. Can I, before Chris jumps in, so because I'm being the grumpy Gus, let me make my case real quick. When I say that this is thirsty to me, it's because what I'm seeing here is like literally

and Kevin Roos said this in the piece that I mentioned on the show today that like all of the piece to the top by the way yeah and these two guys sorry oh no

swipe left and then you'll see it I pinned two tweets so far yeah yeah so the point that Kevin Roos made that I'm arguing for is that because all of the energy because all of the talent

is basically like, what am I going to join a Web 2 company? It feels so transparent to me that it is that hello fellow kids thing of just trying to not only attract the talent to your company. And listen, I believe that Jack does believe it. I'm willing to give Jack the benefit of the doubt in terms of believing this sort of transformational disruption thing more than I'm willing to give it to Zuck. But it just feels so transparent to me that this is like, hey, no, we're still relevant,

we're still here. And this is the thing. All of these companies are approaching 20 years old. They're all at least 15 years old. We're seeing a generational turnover in the executive suite. But it just feels to me so obviously trying to be relevant to the energy of what's going on in the valley. And I don't know that, I don't know that, I don't know that this would fool anybody.

I don't know that just because you change your name to block that all of a sudden people aren't going to go to, you know, a Web3 startup or a crypto startup just because you change your name. Okay. I believe I understand your position. And, you know, it's, it's fair. And I think there's some validity just on the face of that. Like, yes, in terms of winning relevance, if you think about IBM or you think about Xerox or you think about a bunch of other companies, Nokia, you know, that were big in their heyday and then gradually couldn't actually make the shift to the future that a younger generation was expecting or building off of a set of new assumptions about how the world actually would operate, you know, that are not based on the past, the classic innovator's dilemma problem, then sure.

I think that you're more right in that with Zuckerberg than with Jack. I mean, the fact that Jack had sort of, you know, two things going on simultaneously. One was social media, which has turned kind of into a cesspool, and then the future of, you know, money and commerce. And he very clearly has stated that Bitcoin, you know, he believes is the future. And that is something that is not built yet. Whereas Zuckerberg, although he made a big bet on Oculus and VR, you know, many years ago, it feels like that's the one that is the least accessible to build on. Whereas for those who want to build, those who want to create, those who are in developing countries and other places that are not well served by today's

generation of technology or banking, frankly, then crypto provides an avenue to actually bring many, many more people around the world into the fray. So when it comes to being a founder and having a vision for the world that you want to build and you want to participate in and you want to actually support, it feels like one, he had Elliott, management kind of like on his shoulder, you know, telling him, hey, you've got to meet these goals in this amount of time. You've got Congress and the government and everybody else blaming Twitter and social media and Facebook for all the world's problems. And then you've got, you know, there's another thing that you're working on, which is like the future of money,

which is enfranchising small businesses and enabling a new type of and set of behaviors in what Lee Jin calls the ownership economy. And that just feels like. so much more, you know, exciting, like alive, like interesting. Don't get me wrong. If I were Jack, I would, given the choice, I'd move in the square direction as well, in the block direction and the blockchain direction. It is more interesting. It's still new. People don't hate you for it yet, although gamers seemingly, hey, we can get to that. But I get it. I do get that. Maybe if Jack had gone first, Maybe I wouldn't be...

Gone first and what... Oh, before Zuckerberg, in terms of the rebrand. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess I would wind it back a little bit. You know, one is it does feel like Zuckerberg, the way that I understand the way that he moves in the world and in the business world in particular is he's always watching behavior and trying to find opportunities to either buy it or commoditize it by building it and turning into a first class experience within his own platform and then kind of disabling, you know, the, the enemy or

whatever by basically saying, look, we've more or less got the same thing that they have and it's fine. It's sort of like Microsoft Teams and Slack, you know. That's a really charming way of describing monopoly behavior. True, true, because you can basically, not commoditize, but you can use your success elsewhere to basically give you an advantage in the market that your competitor is in. So let's set aside the monopoly conversation just for a moment because that's also interesting. But when it comes to the moves that I've seen Jack making, like at Twitter but also in Square and acquiring title and cash app and all of those things like that seems like that's actually setting up a big platform that has a number of small, I mean, literally the name makes so much sense, you know, block. Like it's a set of building blocks to build for this new future that's more participatory.

more engaging and interesting. So I guess I feel, maybe it's because I've spent more time around like developers. And so Jack's approach feels more like a system architect, whereas Zuckerberg's is more sort of like a media and behavior, you know, engine where he wants to like capture this new media environment, which is the metaverse.

And Jack is like, let's build the building blocks to enable other people to build cool shit for the next 20 years. I have to almost entirely agree with you there, Chris. I do feel like both of them are dealing with unspecific promises about the future. You can't be precise about these things. But when you looked at what Zuckerberg was presenting, it was boiled down to a repetition of the word experiences. Right. And eight thousand times.

Right? Experiences, hand gestures and somebody reminding him to blink occasionally on the camera. Whereas with Jack Tulsi, I mean, you can believe in his vision or you can believe in his vision. can not, but it does feel like he's trying to do something new. He's trying to use your term architect. No, actually, so this is where I would say no, because this has actually been in some ways the dream all along. And the fact that, you know, Jack spun up blue sky. And now the guy that was in charge of blue sky, which is, of course, Twitter's initiative to decentralize Twitter and to basically create a competitive marketplace for social media

where there can be multiple different algorithms that determine the source. ordering of the feed, which then everyone can have their own decoherence and incoherence in what they perceive or consume in terms of the media landscape. You could have a million parlors that are built off of the same protocols that Twitter supports, and it's a more competitive marketplace because it becomes less interesting to own the firehose of content. From the very beginning, and at least this is my sense, Twitter was a decentralized platform. I was there for it. It was built on Jabber. It was built on XMPP.

And we were trying to build a federated social web. Jack was there for those conversations. The fact that Zuck is now talking about it, like to me, like rings so hollow. So when you say that they're trying to build something new, I actually don't think that's true. I think it's new in this moment is blockchain technology and the world computer. We didn't have that 20 years ago when we were trying to decentralize the social web. So we had to build centralized social platforms to figure out what the patterns were for this type of software. software. Now we have them. Now we can essentially, you know, scatter them to the winds. Those patterns can be repeated. That's what's happening in most Web3 apps. And now they can start building the next generation or era of innovative apps and services without necessarily having to go through a centralized service. Now, that I think is anathema to what Zuck would prefer. I think Zuck still wants all roads to lead to Rome. But I'm not sure that Jack wants that.

And I would say, when I say something new, what I mean is something that doesn't yet exist, right? Something that we don't. not presently have. In terms of maybe philosophy that Dawsey has pursued, we can maybe draw that line. But one more note there is some of the stuff that he's promising with this

open source approach, Twitter first effectively cut off when you had a whole bunch of Twitter clients. And Twitter said, okay, we're going to buy you guys, we're going to cut you guys, we've got to limit the API, etc. Whereas those clients

could have done effectively what is promising today, couldn't I? Chris, yeah. Sorry, I was actually, I was DMing Jack, and I was like, hey, you should come actually join this conversation. Sorry, you were saying, is it possible, run that by me one more time? Well, just because, as you said, Twitter started off to centralize. One of the Charlie things about Twitter was the fact that you could have. Oh, when they cut off the apps, sure. Yeah.

So I can speak to this a little bit because I spoke to, So Ryan Sarver, who used to head up the Twitter platform, I remember very specifically the moment where he was talking about the question of whether Twitter should have its own app in the iOS app store. Because up until whether it was 2008 or 9 or something, and Dick Costello was CEO, Twitter allowed for all sorts of other people to build and innovate on its platform. The problem was that it didn't have a business model. And like any other platform and any other VC founded company, eventually you've got to pay the people that paid you to get to where you are. And so there was a moment where it's like, well, two tensions were coming to pass.

One is that the experiences of Twitter inside the app store as the app store was growing was not controlled or determined by Twitter itself. And so that led to a harder experience and a harder time for people to figure out how to use Twitter when there was essentially no proper client that was built by and maintained by Twitter. Second is that if you had all of these other clients on Twitter, then how would you deal with advertising? How would you build the advertising business that Dick Costello built, having come from, you know, Google, when you don't have control over the end users experience? How do you deal with reporting? How do you deal with, you know, justification or validation that, you know, what the advertisers are paying is actually what they're, you know, getting in terms of eyeballs and impressions? So at that point, I think the platform, which was, you know, part of the, I don't know, the big goal, the big idea. became a liability and Twitter had to claw back what it had built in order to build a sustainable

business and not actually, you know, go away. And so that was the decision that was made then. And of course, I think Jack has been working to try to regain developer credibility with, you know, some lesser or greater degrees of success. Recently, for example, Amir Shavat, who I worked with at Google, recently became head of developer relations at Twitter or maybe developer platform, I forget which, but he's initiated a whole new push behind developer APIs. And so maybe now there's a greater sense for what should be allowed in terms of developer integrations and what shouldn't based on the business that Twitter is in. And given that the CTO is now the CEO, I can imagine that Twitter is going to go back to its roots in some respects.

Can I, I'm going to drift this a little bit towards talking about Jack leaving Twitter. Sure, sure. big picture, but I do kind of bide your argument that if Zuck is doing this to solve a problem strategically, maybe Jack is doing what he's doing because he actually believes in it. And that does bring me to, I don't think I talked about this on the show today, but Mike Solana had a piece up in the last 24 hours about Jack leaving Twitter. And he Chris, you and I, I think, have gone around around a couple times about my, like, I'm a bit jaded about Jack, and I've always felt that he was somewhat buffoonish or whatever. But Mike's piece reminded me that more than anybody else, for some of the ways that I felt like Jack maybe was a dilettante and Jack was maybe flaky, he, more than anybody else that has had a social media platform,

seemed to internalize and take seriously that sort of with great, um, power comes great responsibility. Great responsibility, yes. And so let me quote from the end of Mike's piece where he says, I think we're all about to realize just how much Jack was doing quietly in stewardship over a power. He was wise enough to fear and good enough not to use. Um, and so I'm just curious for Chris or really anybody on the stage here, your take on Jack's, you know, it's only been six years. I didn't realize that he's only been back for that short of a time, but his last six years coming back and being a steward of Twitter in a time when, frankly, like we said at the beginning of this, maybe running a social media platform is a friggin' poison chalice that no one

really once right now. Yeah. I do think in Jeremiah and the audience actually brought this up to me and DM and sort of mentioned that the meta rebrand was really all about Zuckerberg's sort of saving face and putting himself back out there to the world and kind of recharacterizing himself as a leader of the new free metaverse of some sort or whatever. And in this case, it really feels like, and I think the reason why the business world is so confused about this announcement and the way it's being rolled out is because we don't know exactly who Jack is talking to in his announcement, right? Like his first tweet about announcing that he was stepping down as Twitter CEO is basically like, hey, I don't know if you guys heard, but I resigned. Cool.

And then like a day later, he's like, oh, surprise. By the way, Square is now a block. And now it's like part of this big master plan. And we've been planning in this for a year. And, you know, I'm going to hang out with Jay-Z and all my other friends out there. And it's just, it's like, it's not just like a different style, but the style is very important. It's what it suggests about where they both believe power lies and where they can have the most impact, right? These guys are both billionaires. Like, they can kind of do whatever they want. But in terms of how they want to spend, you know, the rest of their lives or the next 20 or 40 years, like, it feels like Zuckerberg will continue to make the same mistakes.

he sort of has window dressing about building open and interoperable platforms, even though he doesn't actually believe that those work or that that's what he wants to do. Whereas Jack, it feels like not that he's putting his money behind this, but he's like, look, I've been building up a number of these different elements of this strategy, and I'm going to do something that you guys really don't understand. That just it's different. And it feels like, or at least the way that I interpret a lot of people's, you know, criticism or commentary about Jack is like he operates in a way that doesn't,

that defies kind of the conventional sense of what a CEO does or how they behave. And so therefore, you try to evaluate it based on how you see other CEOs behaving, and it doesn't fit. And you're like, oh, he's like, weird. And he is. That's the whole point. That's his genius. So I don't know.

Like, it's, it's, I'm still waiting to see, you know, I think if you're only looking at, you know, the stock performance of these companies, then you're going to be looking for very different signals and different stuff. But if you look at the impact on the world, Twitter is much smaller in usage and adoption than Facebook, or meta, and yet its impact on the world, I would say, is many, many times over, it's sort of weight and heft. So I think it's, you know what I mean? Like, that's how you have to, like, think about Jack as an individual and as a person who's doing his own thing. I have a couple of things to mention here. First of all, I'm enjoying the fact that we're doing

billionaire psychology, women. I think none of us are anywhere close to being billionaire. No, no. But at least, like I hung out with Jack back in the early days, so I at least, you know, have encountered and interacted with him. You've breathed the same air as him. So therefore I know exactly what goes on his mind. I've even seen his mom's tweets. So I have a deep, deep knowledge of, no, I'm totally kidding. Anyways, continue.

Here's the thing. When you look at the way he presents himself, I mean, you say that's his genius. I would say it a bit more soberly and just say that's effectively his brand, his personal brand. He's somebody who wants to associate what he firmly believes in, let's say that as a given with what he's actually doing.

And being weird as a brand, fair enough. I would say as the leader of a crypto company, he fits in so much better than as a leader of a super valuable company like meta. Right? The expectations of the person

who's leading Twitter, the person who's going to congressional hearings, is one set of expectations. And even like his facial hair doesn't match those. His tweets, the cryptic way that he would drop a string of numbers and then people have to interpret them. It's true.

Jack's fashion taste has been very all over the place where it's like, Zuck has gotten more and more, you know, Tim Cookian, you know, if that's worth. Yeah, I think everybody on this, on this, on this, that's what you did. So, whereas if you look at interviews

with, like, leaders of crypto companies, those guys are much more disheveled, whatever his hair or dressants or whatever. So he fits into that crowd much better. That's one aspect. Another is, if you are a billionaire, do you really want to be dealing with congressional hearings? Like my personal theory for why Jeff Bezos is not like stepping down was,

hang on a second, I am the richest person in the world, depending on how stock prices between Amazon and Tesla go. Why am I sitting through the, and sweating through these hearings? which might, you know, it could liabilities to be personally, et cetera, et cetera,

unless somebody else do it. Right. And by the way, the Google guys got out first, saw that first. And like, I mean,

that's the other thing is that, like, like we're saying, there is a certain generational thing. All of these folks are in their

late 40s and 50s, Zuck, notwithstanding. And also, so, and also they've been doing this for, the better part of 20 years. And, right, like, if you're a billionaire, why do you need that hassle?

It's more fun, as Kevin Ruse said, to, you know, go up in rocket ships and try to go to Mars and stuff like that. Like, why do you need this hassle? There are more fun things that you can do while still being entrepreneurial and managerial and whatnot. The best part is how Bezos got a taste of this over Zoom, because there happened to be a pandemic that seriously enriched them. So you didn't even have to go all the way and fly or anything. Just have to get on a call. And he was already like, nope, not doing that again. By the way, this is just for the audience. That's Emil, who you'll recognize from having been on this show lots of times. Also from Spacecasts, hello, Emil. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I just wanted to throw in a second point to back up what Chris was

saying about scale, because this is something that we covered in Bloomberg very recently. It's about Twitter's presence in India. So WhatsApp in India has 530 million users. Half a billion people. It's its biggest single biggest market, predictably enough. Like, you could get everybody in the US to use WhatsApp

and you're getting to like 60% of India. Twitter, its latest reported numbers are 17.5 closer to 20 million users in India. And yet, its situation

in the political discourse in the country mirrors that in the US almost perfectly. Every politician was to be on Twitter, dropped the line, and then all the TV networks pick those up, and that's how the conversation happens. And the Prime Minister and the Rensromodi, he has 73 million users, which is, you know, three times, almost four times as much as the number of users within the country. So the diaspora is closely monitoring Twitter. And I can say the same thing about the UK, tourist huge in Japan, but I can't tell you anything about it

even though I'm here because I'll speak the language. And like Twitter, Japan is like its own little giant thing, cultural thing. So absolutely. I feel like this company cannot be judged by just the sheer number of users it has because it has so much in terms of driving the popular conversation, maybe because of just how easy and quick tweets are to pick up. It's not a multi-paragraph statement.

It's somebody oftentimes slashing out and just kind of shooting from the hip. And yeah, that's really what I'm trying to say. It's like the quantifiable influence that meta products like Facebook and WhatsApp have, it's very different from the influence that Twitter has. Yeah, I think one thing to just build on that, I just checked, and it's true, Narendra Modi has 73.1 million followers on Twitter, and only on Instagram, 63.5, which is pretty interesting and somewhat telling. Well, there are more bots on Twitter.

Okay, fair. Maybe he has a lot more bots there. But still, I think the point is well taken on a number of fronts. You know, it is still the case that I think that, one, connectivity is certainly not, you know, around the world what it is in the United States. So there are a lot of places that are still using basic phones to access the internet or where their electricity is metered or where access just isn't anything like what we're used to. And so these visual, rich mediums, these platforms like Instagram or even, you know, what Oculus is probably going to take, require a great deal more reliability in terms of the technological apparatus around this. Whereas like Twitter, I believe, though I don't know if that's still true, I think you can

still interact with over text message, over SMS. So it's universality in terms of being able to get and receive updates all around the world, I think is still very, very important relative to the way in which the Facebook empire has, you know, ruled out. But anyways, the other topic that we wanted to talk about today was about something else that's changing in the world, not naming, per se, but gaming. Before we do that, can I just? Just a really, really quick thing. Yeah, yeah. The tech name account actually just tweeted that Jack previewed squared 12 years ago today.

So maybe the timing of this was, you know, maybe this was pre-for-dained. No, pre-ordained. I feel like it was planned a little bit. I don't know if that's like a week or a month or, you know, a few years. But I thought I was telling. The other really, really small point I want to make is that the confusion that I feel is going to keep happening between block and blocks. Yeah.

Is that they have the blocks Twitter account. Yeah. Not the block Twitter account, which is just hilarious given that just a day ago, right? The CEO of Twitter couldn't get the block account. He could have used eminent domain to get it. Why did he not? Exactly.

And that's just surprising. It's not even used. It's like an account that was that. Yeah, it's a private account from, that was joined in 21st. I mean, maybe it's used, but that's private. We don't know. But yeah, joined in May 12. But yeah, that was just a small tidbit.

That was hilarious. That is pretty funny. And to be fair, someone at tech name actually earlier today was pointing out that blocks as a parent company makes kind of a little bit more sense. And there's both like each division of block. Oh, yeah. Like it's so good, right? Like you start with square and what is like a three-dimensional square?

It's like a block, right? And in the block blockchain, like, really, like, I tweeted about how this is like sort of Chia Day level kind of rebranding. That's just like, it goes so deep and you're like satisfied by like figuring out the puzzle of it. Anyways, I thought it was very good. Is it too late to rename to Blocks? It makes a lot of sense to me.

Well, I think they, they registered a very web three kind of crypto domain, which is blocks. X, Y, Z, which, by the way, is beautiful and was done by, I guess, the Cash Apps motion designer, who apparently follows me. And so really, really well done there. But, you know, they're moving off of the dot-com era anyways, so probably, they could probably, you know, be blocks, block, whatever they want to be. Well, they also did their crypto service, Spiro is now Spiro, is now, XYZ. Are they starting a trend here? We had an ABC.com, XYZ. Now all the generalities are that way? I mean, I would say that, uh,

Like the XYZ thing has been going on for a little while. It is kind of like the crypto domain, whether it's like islands.xyZ, which just launched, or Mirror, which has been around for a while, or just a bunch. I don't know how they... It's also like the new I.O. Yes, yes. Specifically for crypto, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You kind of know if that'sy Z is available. Block. Dot XYZ is? No, blocks. That's not exactly. Oh, no, you might want to grab that. It doesn't resolve.

I was going to say, not anymore. Is blocks. Is blocks. That e. Available? Those are all now being squattered on OpenC. Jeremiah knows about this. Jeremiah was one of the first to sort of warn me that I needed to get my .eaf address, and so I did.

And anyways, it's a whole different story. Okay. Let me grab. Let me grab. Because Vlad, we sold you on coming on the show to talk about games. Although, I'm glad that you had so much to say about Jack because Chris and I would have been fist-fighting at this point. That's right, old man. Right, exactly.

So we want to talk about games broadly, and as I said to you offline, that I've been feeling like there's some stuff going on that's like in gaming that's structural, obviously moving to cloud gaming, but also, you know, moving. Basically, the way gaming is functioning is changing, and this is part of, the move towards a Metaverse type thing and things like that. But the way that I wanted to get into this, it's a story that I've wanted to do, but I haven't felt like it was broad enough to do for the tech meme show. But there's been a lot of controversy about the new Halo Infinite game. And I don't know, if you could summarize what the controversy is around that.

If not, I mean, I'll do my best to do it. But can you, especially vis-a-vis the thing that Halo Infinite is trying to do that's sort of new in terms of like aping where gaming is going and like, you know, kind of aping what, you know, Fortnite and stuff is doing, like, and what that whole controversy is all about? Yeah, there's, I'm not intimately familiar with the Halo Infinite situation, but the gist of it is that they introduced the multiple. player aspect of the game as a free to play. And then there are internal perks and things that you can earn and so on. And the players can play seems to be that the ramp up of effectively grinding through the game isn't particularly enticing. There's a battle pass, which is the fighting games version of a subscription.

You buy the battle pass because you do, you play through the game, you earn things, you earn rewards, you own cosmetics, et cetera, et cetera. To me, that particular example isn't so important as the broader context and the thing that Microsoft is trying to tap into, which is what you're mentioning. I think the best examples of how this is done right, Dota 2 and League of Legends, the two multiplayer online battle arenas on PC and then also on the mobile front. What about Fortnite?

It just doesn't count because that's the... whole, anyways. Of course. I guess in my mind, Fortnite is just so prominent. I see. It's just error.

We just, okay. Okay, let me jump in here. Let me jump in here. Because you mentioned grinding. All right. So what we're talking about is,

as opposed to paying $60 to get the new Halo. If you're on Game Pass, you can just play it for free, if you're a subscriber, right? Except for the fact that you have to, the game isn't really fully not functional is the right word

but you have to jump through these hoops to earn sort of right and and a lot of modern games like you're saying like Dota and other things like that have been like that and so is this a case of them

is this again a generational thing where people that are returning to Halo are like well look I just want to play the stupid game and have fun and I don't want to jump through these hoops and or I don't know like is this sort of like grafting on a business model that maybe this

game wasn't the right one to try it with what do you think's going on here well I wouldn't call it generational so let me describe this with the thing that I'm really intimately familiar with which is a game called AFK Arena it's a mobile game made by Lilith games

over here in Asia now the way that it works is the point is reward really so you have dozens maybe hundreds by this point of characters Dota and League of Legends have the same thing they call them heroes

and in AFK arena you get diamonds once you get diamonds you can unlock like a set of cards you pull the cards and then you get the more exclusive heroes right

you hope for them anyway right and there's like a small percentage likelihood that you'll get them. Now, what it says is, to your point, you're not getting the full game. You're not getting the full set of heroes. You have to keep playing. You have to keep burning diamonds, blah, blah, blah, blah. And AFK Arena kind of gives you a hint.

You have to go away from the game. Literal time needs to pass in order for your characters to earn more experience, in order for them to progress in the game, in order for you to get the diamonds, to get the cars, to get the heroes. Now, I'm going through this entire process and it sounds like, oh my God, who wants to play this? It's a chore. It's a nightmare. But it's kind of like playing slots, right?

You pull, you don't get anything. You pull, you don't get anything. And people have done research on this. And what people enjoy about it is the unpredictability. And they enjoy being in that, okay, I'm pulling 10 times. I get nothing. And then the 11th time, I get like a little bit. And that's a simulation to keep going.

Dota 2 kind of has the same situation I mean I've played like getting personally here more than 3,000 hours of Dota 2 I'm happy of not doing that anymore and it is the simulation of failing like you fail so often that when you get the one little bit

that's the point about why grinding as a game element works when you get that one little bit is so much more rewarding because the number of times you failed and in AOK arena this is the monetization aspect if you get impatient if you're like

oh dude screw this I can't wait another week to get the upgrades to the hero in order to progress in the game you can buy diamonds and that's where you know money starts splurging out

because you can buy diamonds for like $3, $5 there's multi-packs they're crazy amounts of like $90 and yeah so if you want to buy

so yeah they have a battle pass which is over a period of time but if you just want diamonds today right now and treasure troas them you can get that. And the point is, if you do that and you get enough of an engaged audience, which is actually a much smaller number than the number of sales that you would want to do with a massive game like Halo, you can make more money out of it.

Right, because it's sort of a whale economy. It's that idea that... Exactly. Like 5% of your audience is paying $900 a month or whatever to play, right? Well, Epic Games is lawsuit against Apple. reveal this. So it was a case where 70% of App Store revenues were coming from gamers, and then 10% of those were coming, well, hang on, 80%

of those payments were coming from 10% of users. So to your point, it's exactly that. Some people get really, really engaged, and then they spend serious amounts of money of those things. So this is interesting to me because there's two things going on.

So it's a different economic model, but you're also saying, that functionally, the gaming mechanism is different in the sense that it's not just leveling up. There's this grinding aspect. There's this random aspect. There's this, like, there's the slot machine aspect. And is that part of what's controversial? It is, and not to suggest that it's generational again, like, are some, is there some section of, the gaming community that's like, well, that's not the sort of gaming that we want to do?

Is that part of the controversy? Yeah, that'll be perfectly fair to say. I do feel like it's exploiting human psychology. For myself, with AFK Arena, because I'm playing it right now, I have just said,

I am not spending money on this. Because I know if I start spending money, it will start small, and then escalates. Like, you never go into a game and say, okay, I'm spending $200 of this because I'm not a patient person. you always escalate these things and it's addictive

in a way that is just not healthy economically for the people but I will say again coming back to Dota and League of Legends I think that's where they've struck

a really nice balance so with Dota for example you don't need to spend money to succeed in the game it's all about skill the thing that you spend money on is cosmetics

but then people really like them because as I say you spent thousands of hours playing the game you will get attached to your heroes and to the skills that you've developed with each hero and so on. And then there's the other thing, which is the feedback mechanism the valve is invented, sorry, not invented, but really just perfected as far as I'm concerned,

which is you buy the battle pass every year, and a proportion of that money goes towards the price pool for the flagship, so-called the international tournament for Dota II. And this, it happens, I think in October, it was $40 million. others. So it's a bit of context. That's war reward money for the winners of the finals than the NBA has, than, you know, tournaments like Wimbledon have. Granted, the players don't get the same salaries as NBA players, but it speaks to the scale of this. And it's, okay, I'm spending money and I know it's indulgent. I'm just buying cosmetics for a game, but then I'm supporting

the game and the professional players who can make a career out of it because I'm part of it. So there is that participatory element as well. I think Halo Infinite, the backlash that is getting is probably because Microsoft is only just getting started. And things there can improve because there are so many examples on the mobile and the PCC that they can take lessons from. I think one of the areas of friction and tension with Halo Infinite, and I think this is to Brian's point about generational divide.

And I would say that less about from an aged perspective and more from an experience or set of expectations perspective, where I grew up playing Halo on a PC, of course, or actually it was a Mac and it was very slow. But regardless, like I was there with like Halo 1 and, you know, was it red versus blue and that era of Halo. And that was, I'm very much dating myself. I don't play that many games. But point being, I would have the expectation that if I bought the game from, you know, Microsoft, or whoever was that owned it at that time, that I would be able to have and play the entire game. And it was also the case that I would download the game from the internet

and sort of run it locally. And there would be servers that you could connect to, of course, to play online games. But for the most part, you could have your first-person shooter experience all by your lonesome. And increasingly, again, I think a lot of our conversation is about what are the new assumptions or changes in the marketplace that lead to a new set of norms or habits

or, you know, set of expectations from, you know, players, whether it's on social media or whether it's in games. And that's that one, you're always connected. You always have a device with you. Two, like, you just can't stand to be bored. And so you want to play all the time. Three, like, flaunting and emoting and showing off, like, your character as a representation of yourself is something that is, you know, quite common and normal.

And so, I mean, and there's many other things that I can probably, yes? I'm just saying, not just normal, but important. Okay, thank you. Important. Well, and that's the point. So there was a time where, like, you didn't have really that many skins, right, throughout the game. And now, like, as you said, that's like a core part of the experience. Like, that's what you're actually buying into, whether it's, you know, grinding to earn the currency so that you can, like, buy and unlock those things, or whether you're, you know, buying NFTs to then outfit your characters in some other, you know, world that doesn't exist yet. These are all part of a new set of norms and behaviors and expression. that is part of a different type of social layer or social experience on the internet. And what's interesting, given this whole conversation about rebranding and about big tech companies and about, you know, execs kind of getting bored and moving on to other things, is Halo as a franchise is having to go through a similar type of transformation, where it's no longer the type of game that it used to be with a set of assumptions in the environment

that determined how people could access and play. But now it's trying into a, enter into a different world, largely defined by what, Fortnite has built and it's trying to catch up and it's finding itself kind of caught in between these two modes where it hasn't quite really figured it out yet and it's pissing off both camps from both generations. And just to back up that point, SoftBank just invested in a South Korea startup and I think it was $150 million. And the point of that startup was they literally selling luxury.

brand goods, but just 3D versions of them for people's avatars. And this is apparently really popular with young women. And that's where we bring in the whole metaverse thing, which I love being skeptical about the metaverse because it's so, you know, airy-fairy premises. But this is a concrete example of that where... It's called Zepetto, which is, of course, a great little play on Pinocchio. And indeed, it is a metaverse platform where people are, as you say, dressing themselves up in this virtual space.

Continue. Yeah. And that's really it. We're talking about branding and naming and so on. It happens at a personal level as well. It's the way that we present ourselves to the world and going back to your point about always being connected, always being bored and wanting stimulation.

Well, we do that at the most basic level with our Twitter avatars is the way we present ourselves to people. But then the more interactive, the more 3D, to use Zuckerberg's word, experiences there are out there, apps that we have, the more we want to plug into them. Well, this is what the whole PFP phenomenon is about, right? In the context of Twitter, where people are buying NFTs, whether they're apes or lions or, you know, dicks,

and they're using them as avatars to express affiliation. It's no different than sports teams before, except now there's artificial scarcity that's applied to these objects. And you can say how much you care about it based on how much you spent or whatever it is. And so it is a new type of gesturing in the digital environment. It's totally true. It's totally there. Exactly.

And the thing is, I mean, there is like this epic rant in me about IP rights and how misplaced they are in terms of compensating people for creativity, especially in the digital world, right? but the thing that I've noticed with the NFT community is I mean I did an article about NFTs and then I got like a few dozen people with lion and ape avatars following me and the lion the lion people everyone that they refer to they're like

hey King how's it going and it's super optimistic all the time right I mean we've got a few of those folks in the audience right now actually and listen I don't know if this is a Ponzi scheme I'm not putting any of my money into it but just engaging with those people and everybody being so positive as an online community, just in a very particular new way. I'm enjoying that.

I like that. I'm totally with you. I mean, it seems like a very bright spot of the internet. And while there are plenty of rugpoles and there's like all sorts of other bad stuff going on, relative to the crap that, you know, we're all assuming that Zuckerberg and Dorsey are trying to escape. Like, there is, look, I think what we're trying to unpack here a little bit, and using Halo Infinite as a way of maybe thinking about this transition and how uncomfortable it is for some people is because the products, the digital products that allow people to build

to express themselves, to contribute, to gather around and do things in like an internet generative way, there's a generation growing up that really like that. You know, like actually, is he still here? I was talking to my friend Will earlier today on Twitter about the good old days when we were building something called the Dezo Project, which was trying to decentralize the social web. And what was so exciting and fun about that time was the creativity in it, like trying to solve problems for lots of other people and trying to get more people involved and to see why this stuff was interesting and why it was good. And of course, the forces of evil came in and kind of fucked

everything's up for us. But still, some of that energy is or feels like it's coming back in the Web 3 space. Now, it's very easy to be cynical or skeptical, especially having gone through the last 20 years, you're like, fuck this stuff, I'm out. Like, it's boring. But actually, there's a generation that, again, and we talked to some of these folks, my, my brother and my nephews couple episodes ago about how they are, like, really feeling like this is a new opportunity for them to get involved and to contribute and to build stuff that other people can enjoy. So I guess I think that that angle of the creator economy, as relates to games and to, you know, actually, I would be interested in your rant about IP, is something for us to be talking.

talking about because these are some of the new assumptions that people are building into the companies that they're pursuing. And I do, we mentioned it before, but what Jack is doing with title and there, I forget what's called the creator monetization or artist monetization piece, like there is a whole different conversation going on about downstream, what are they called? When you get paid for your songs when they get played? Brian? Royalties. Thank you. Royalties. Exactly. Well, like royal.io, for example, which is Blouse's new company, that's 3LAU, not to go down this path too far, but just announced that he's working with Christie's to put out another song where the royalties are, again, sort of shared with the fans or whatever it is, just like he did before. So there are new ways that I think artists and creatives are thinking about how they can both compensate their early fans while also sort of getting compensated directly. through blockchain technology without having to go through these middle layers that are no longer providing the value that they used to provide through distribution.

And I think that's super interesting, and that is where I think gaming is going to go, and it's already starting to go there. Yeah, and I will say, gaming has been at the forefront of a whole bunch of things. Like, if you think about, for example, autonomous driving, I don't want to go in a big digression,

but the things that are powering that are invidia chips. if you talk about blockchain mining a Bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency mining before you had specific optimized chips designed for it and video graphics chips again

parallel processing that's on the hardware side of things and then Fortnite becoming a metaverse in development becoming more than just a game becoming a place where people socialize and shoot debris and so on and things like Twitch

Twitch had it's just talking section or whatever it was called where the same people you followed because of their personality inside games you're like well actually I just want to listen to this person talk right whatever's happening in their life so

we are seeking and finding new ways to be social online and because gaming is one of the things that has brought us online and attracted us to come on it's kind of a natural conduit and maybe bringing it back to Jack Tulsi

and him being more weird and experimental and so on, gaming encourages that too. But I will say on a more serious side of things, credentialing ourselves online is a thing that we haven't really sold, right? I would love, for example, to have all of my successful eBay transactions speak to me being a trustworthy person on some other platform. I would love to have the fact that I contributed to artists, let's say on title if Jack wants to bring all of these things together

be something that I can present about myself elsewhere. You know, just the fact that, you know, I've been a trustworthy, a good citizen online for so many, so many years, but there is no place where I can present all those things. So breaking down walls between, for starters, games, and that's one of the things that I covered with Tim Sweeney coming over to Korea and talking about how, hey, there should be one app store, you buy the game on one place,

and you should be able to play it everywhere. That is the trend overall for games because so many of them are turning to free-to-play, monetize inside the game anyway, right? So if it's free to play, you're not paying an upfront fee anyway. But the thrust of his point, I think, is also where collectively

our experience of being online together is heading, where why is, this app and this service standalone and at this one standalone, I need to build my credentials on every single one fresh every single time. So this is, Chris,

go ahead and drop Vlad's piece into the room about this. So essentially Vlad wrote about, you know, on a very basic level, if you can play games on any

device that's at hand, why do you have to pay over and over again for, you know, to get it on Xbox, to get it on your phone, to get it on wherever. But when I read that, the thing that occurred to me, because I've made the point before many times that, like, well, the thing that's going to crack open the app stores is gaming. And your piece made me think that the deeper level to that is that in the sort of Web 3 sense where, you know, a game is sort of agnostic IP. like it should be able to function on any platform.

Like, whereas, you know, again, the very basic cynical take on what Epic is trying to do is, oh, they're trying to break up in the app store to improve their margins or whatever. If we're taking the galaxy brain view of it, what Tim Sweeney is doing is seeing that going forward, this is absurd in the same way that you should be able to get email on. any device, you should be able to game, a specific game on any device. And in the Web 3 sense,

this sort of IP and these sort of experiences should be interoperable, should travel with you as you're saying, where, like, your personality is the thing that follows you around the internet for everything you do, and it doesn't stop when you leave

Nintendo to jump over to Xbox or something like that. I mean, in general, what we're talking about are the different types of incentive structures that can and should exist now that we have this, you know, a mutable ledger of things that have happened, whether they're your eBay sales or your tweets or something like that. And the fact that the internet is just getting to a place now where there's kind of... I don't want an immutable ledger of my tweets. Please. I believe them. That could be perishable. Thank you very much. Well, that'll have to be written into the smart contract, I guess, for your publishing platform of choice. But nonetheless, actually, I mean, you bring up a very important point because those who write or control the algorithms, one, for how this content gets distributed, and two, who decides what gets shown and what doesn't get shown. So, for example, OpenC now has a section on your profile that has hidden NFTs that have been dropped into your wallet. because, of course, anybody can essentially mint NFTs, attach it to your wallet, and previously, all of them would just show up.

And so you had lots of dickpicks and all this other stuff. And that became a problem because even though... I just learned that. I didn't know about this. Yeah. Even though it costs money to mint an NFT, there's still, you know, especially if you want to get something on Steph Curry's profile, essentially like his NFT wall, if you will, anybody could do that. And so OpenC realized, okay, that's a, you know, vector for harassment. and so now it has to be fixed.

Anyways, point being, you bring up a very relevant and important point about these things. And when we're talking about the people who are going to be designing and building these platforms, some of them will have the same set of values that determine the last 15 to 20 years of social media and the same set of experiences, lived experiences, and their same sensibilities. And so those who are figuring out how the sort of, you know, blockchain of reputation should work, need to be thinking holistically about this stuff, and it gets very, very tricky very quickly. So it will be interesting to see how the game world maybe moves faster because your in-game reputation may or may not make sense in other games, for example.

Like the fact that I'm really good at Halo shouldn't necessarily mean that I, you know, get a, I don't know, a free upgrade on Axi Infinity or something else. But maybe it should. We don't know yet, right? And so part of it is figuring out how to establish the interoperability of these platforms. and then to see where it actually benefits gameplay and makes for improvements. I'm glad you guys agree. There is a much to add to that, but let me give you like a really, really condensed version of my IPRA.

Okay, great. It also becomes super, super complex on how you're supposed to compensate the people who come up with the content, the people who come up with the games, because if you look at the different, actual game industry, the physical blood and flesh industry, it is fueled by people being overworked. Like, crunch as the

final few days or weeks before the release of a game is a term that has come out of the games industry. So, as much as we love games, and as much as me personally, I'm super excited about being able to support this

publisher and developer because they're doing something right. A really good example is company behind Hades and Bastion and so on. That's a team of like a dozen or 20 people originally who've been together for like a decade, an indie and so on and so on. But the point is, should I just be buying their game like seven times over? I want to support them in some way, but we don't have a clear idea on how we compensate and support those companies that we like.

And I don't know that it will necessarily work out with like microtransaction or micro-tracking where it's like with streaming I mean I think the streaming business model is broken and nobody has really fixed it yet like oh you stream this song X number of times therefore that person gets that number of pennies and so on it doesn't seem to make sense to me

so that is a really big question how do we compensate creativity without trying to commodify it and you know like selling units because we're not selling units anymore so many of these things are fluid and if we have fluid experiences, if we're going from like Fortnite

into League of Legends, like League of Legends just did an anime on Netflix in partnership with Twitch, which also got a character in the same time in Fortnite to promote their anime and League of Legends overall.

So if I'm jumping in between all of these things, how does Riot Games get compensated for doing something that is on a whole bunch of different islands, let's say, which we're now becoming a unified experience for the user.

That's a good question. I mean, I think that this is what some of the smart contract stuff is actually being set up to do. I was going to say, that's what people think the solution is on the blockchain, right? Yeah, I mean, when it's centralized, right, like, it's essentially one company that's managing the ledger of transactions and it's virtual goods and something is bought, something sold. I mean, I agree when you get into maybe, you know, I don't even know how to think about it, but like the Metaverse itself, and you're moving through that, you know, who conducts the transaction? How does the transaction actually occur?

And do you have to pull up essentially like an in-medaverse kind of a Metamask extension where you sort of sign things? I mean, I suppose that would be how it would technically work. But the interface for that is purely speculative at this point. Like we just, I don't think we know. And that's what I'm trying to suggest. Maybe transactions are just fundamentally at odds with what we're trying to, well, I'm not building anything here, but what we collectively, as humanity, are trying to build online, which is this fluid, unified experience.

Like, how does it make any sense for blockchain technology or anything else? And I'm here to learn, guys. So maybe it does. If something gets streamed on Netflix and I brought you there via my game, how am I being compensated? How is that being tracked? How do we make sense of that? Like to me, the more sensible solution would be some sort of, gosh, I don't even know, but it's got to be separate. Like, the economy of it has to be separate from the experience because it would be so many minor things and nudges towards, hey, you should stream this.

Hey, you like this game. Go and check out the anime on Netflix. And then I'm creating business for Netflix. How much is Netflix going to pay me? How do we figure that out if it's going to be a transaction? Maybe one way to think about this is to expect that we're going to live in a hybrid future. And we will conduct a number of transactions kind of in the 2D, like, IRL space, the meat space. And then we'll spend time in different flavors of the Mideverse, some that are super immersive and some that are less immersive.

Someone you're in a self-driving car and someone you're at home trying to be entertained or, you know, using gloves and body suits and all the rest. Who knows? But that would suggest then you can actually conduct a number of the transactions to, you know, buy skins or by artwork or by other objects. in the environments or using technology where it actually makes sense. And then when you enter into a more immersive context, then you're using the same identity, the same wallet, to authenticate yourself. And so therefore, those environments can actually look into your wallet

with your permission, see what's there, and then decorate or provide those objects and assets to you. So it feels like we don't need to necessarily presume a monolithic approach to the future of, computing and technology, that it's actually going to be many, many hybrid modes, and that some people will actually feel much more comfortable in some environments, and some people will operate in others. I mean, even as it is now, you can go for, well, you have to install this NFT extension.

And if you go to my Twitter profile, you can actually see my NFTs on my profile. But the same thing should be true if I go into a 3D environment, those same NFTs, those same artifacts, will be visible and present as long as I'm there, as long as I'm sort of designated that space as being an extension of me. And I think that's the thing that's new and different. That one, there's artificial scarcity enabled by the blockchain. And two, you have now the ability of persistence to take aspects of your identity and assert them in different environments and contexts.

And we are probably at the 2005 era of the social web in the metaverse. So we still have to figure out all these things and figure out the experience and it's still far too hard. And I guess like that's why I'm looking at what Zuck is doing, you know, as, you know, if it is his 2.0 sort of moment for Facebook, that's really interesting and that's very important to pay attention to. And then what Jack is doing now going into Square, he's focusing on money. Like that's it. But not money as we've known it. Like digital internet money. It's a completely different concept. And so we have to be very careful about applying the ways in which we think about these things to how they're actually going to be used in those environments. Okay. So let's wrap this up. Any other final thoughts, Vlad, that we should be thinking about or any ways that I'm thinking about this that you think I should adjust or rethink? Like, I'm learning too. But like, yeah, educate me. Well, first of all, let me say that this has been an extremely stimulated conversation. Like I said at the beginning, I'm excited because of the unpredictability of what's happening right now. People are spending time figuring this whole thing out. I would say if you go on LinkedIn and you find people listing themselves as Metaverse or NFT experts, I mean, come on. I'm sure there's like a hockey stick up with the number of mentions of Metaverse and NFT.

Well, you had to replace Ninja with something, you know? Yeah. Well, I think it's also a beautiful time in terms of opportunity for young people. we were having this discussion with a colleague of mine she was saying what are the tips for young people should they be getting into doing 3D graphic design because the better versus going to need so much of it and that's one aspect of it

that's kind of more predictable but then it just opens up so much opportunities to my mind exactly as you say this is the 2005 of the social web just in a whole new environment well then we're talking about like the early days of YouTube. We're talking about people like Marcus Brownlee starting off as a teenager reviewing,

what was it, HP accessories and stuff? Yeah, exactly. So the opportunity for young people to get into this and experiment with it, it comes from gaming, it comes from free-de-design. I mean, when I was a teenager, I was doing all of these things. I'm not going to tell you where I got my software from, but whatever. It's graphic design, it's videos. You mean torrenting?

being creative. No comment. No comment. But it's just about that whole, let's use a term that's very familiar to people in crypto world, permissionless, right? It just permissionless creativity and innovation and experimenting. And because there are no fixed roots for this, it creates so much more opportunity. And to me, as an observer, it's just so much more exciting.

So I think that's a good thought to close on. Let me bring it back to my grumpiness at the beginning because I want to make clear that one of the things that annoys me about these rebrandings is that it annoys me that the old folks are trying to co-opt this energy that's coming up from below. Like, I love the energy that's coming up from below. And so I do find it annoying that people are trying to commodify that. And maybe in good faith, so maybe I shouldn't be that grumpy about it. But one of the things that I do see is that there is so much energy here. And I don't like the idea that, oh, oh, oh, shiny new thing. Let's quickly, you know, send that to the moon like everything else.

Like let it happen. And maybe it's not for you. Maybe it's for the kids to do. But, you know, so that was my grumpy news. Hey, Vlad, before we jump off, can I do one more thing that's completely, and this can be two minutes, and then we all should go home? Of course. I did a story today about foldable phones being up, like, shipments being up like something like 200% year over year or whatever. And you did a story on this a couple days ago about Samsung's foldables, maybe being healthy and things like that, is.

I've been made fun of for years for like I've not been pumping foldable phones I've just been excited that there was something new in the space Should we be are you bullish on on foldable as a form factor all the sudden? Yeah, well let me answer both of your questions Chris was like what should I take away from this? I think If you wanted to think about gaming you have to think mobile first because it's already the biggest driver of revenue for gaming is mobile devices. These are the things that, as Chris will say, we're having our hands and in our pockets and about us all the time. It's the first thing we pick up in the morning, which isn't particularly healthy,

but it is what it is. So mobile first, cloud first, as Microsoft Satchin and Della has been saying since 2014, and it's completely right. Now, about foldables, I think the case. category is absolutely ripe for growth. Samsung is leading it. Samsung made a decision this summer to not do a Galaxy Note device, which is its second flagship for the year,

and just put all of its effort in the latter half of the year behind fordibles. It has been paying off. You have two distinct categories. One is the one that opens and closes kind of like a book. Let's call it Bible-sized. And then you have the one that's effectively a regular smartphone, but closes down like a little pocket mirror. into a square shape. I like both of those. I think the technology, especially in terms of having

cameras that are as good as a regular smartphone, needs to catch up. But I think, obviously, well, I don't know about obviously, but next year, affordable iPhone is super unlikely. But the year after that, and the year after that, there's going to be a lot of pressure for Apple to get on board. I think the coming year, we're going to see a whole bunch of other Android manufacturers, Whereas, especially those from China, using Samsung displays most likely, rolling out their own foldable devices. So the excitement for that category is only going to grow and grow. We had a couple of years where it was like, they're coming and they're not there. They're coming.

They're not there. But a lot like 5G photoables, especially next year, are going to be a big deal. So, Brian, you know, I heard that story today. And I just, I wanted to put it in perspective because I guess I remain somewhat skeptical about the foldable thing. you know, because as the article, which I penned mentions, it says that I guess unit sales are going to go up to maybe 3.8 million units. Right. It's 2.3 or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, sub 4 million, whereas like the iPhone 12 as of June had sold 100 million units. So, you know, we're talking like a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of these devices.

And I understand, I think, you know, Vlad, you make a very savvy point that these might be more, like gaming devices than real, you know, common everyday, you know, popular use. Like, I don't know that you're going to get to 100 million foldable phones sold. But, like, is there a specific driving use case that you think is, you know, going to make sense here? Like, maybe the camera is not that important because people are mostly playing games on them or taking notes or something. Sure. Well, here's the thing. I think you're completely right. And to your point about iPhone sales, Apple gets 70 to 80 million iPhone sold in the first quarter after their release, so by the end of the year. But the distinction here is you had affordable under $1,000 since August, which was Samsung's latest galaxy's Z-flip or Z-flip.

This is the first time you've had won some $1,000. That is a really important threshold for pricing. and I do think we're going to get to 100 billion fold probably faster than you think, which is fair enough, because unlike, let's say, the Google Pixel,

which has been, as you say, a rounding error in terms of sales every single year and going to keep saying, we're going to be serious for it. This is the year. Linux on the desktop.

The way that foldables are going to ramp up is going to be super super super fast. So it's going to be Opo, Vo, Xiaomi, the free-headed Hydra that is succeeding, Huawei, the moment they adopt it, they're likely to either match or go below Samsung's pricing,

and the moment China adopts it is the moment it just kind of explodes. So like I say, we had a long time. Okay, but why? Like, what is it about the product that people want more than the standard dollar-sized, you know, dollar-shaped phone? It's different than what's been every single phone for the last decade. It's smaller in your pocket. Also, a point that Vlad made in the piece.

was, you know, Samsung made its bones by going in the opposite direction and doing fabblets with the note when going bigger was something that was zinging when everyone else was zagging. And, Chris, I'll make one more point. You said, oh, it's a rounding error, 2.3 million units, but you know as well as anybody. Like, all anyone cares about is growth. And this is a category. I mean, the charts look good in terms of growth. So in that sense, it's true. I guess I'm just like it's interesting now, now that I have my new MacBook Pro, just to think about the different form factors and shapes and sizes. Like it just feels like Apple continues to make, you know, the iPhone in different shapes. Like my MacBook Pro is kind of like an iPhone that has a really big screen and like a full size keyboard built in.

You know, and they have an iPad that's sort of like one step down. It's a lot of the same stuff behind the scenes. So I guess I'm just trying to like think about like what is the use case that this device, you know, what's its purpose? And I think that a smaller phone is reasonable. Go ahead. It's really easy to understand if you just imagine your regular smartphone and then just imagine folding off. Yeah.

And then putting it into a pocket that you couldn't do before. I mean, back when I was at the verge, a colleague of mine, she wrote a piece about just the fact that women's pockets are not designed for any sort of modern smartphone. Yeah. So if you made the point from a fashion perspective, and then the fashion is driving the utility of a product like this, then that is quite compelling. Because I agree.

Like, in terms of women's pockets, forget it. You can barely fit, like, you know, a knuckle or two in there. It just doesn't make any sense. Well, that's one aspect, but it's also much easier to fit into a shirt pocket. It's much easier to fit into a backpack pocket, whatever. And thinking about the larger ones, I mean, I have never been a person who carries around a full-sized tablet, whether it's seven inches or above. but if you let me fold it and be the size of a regular phone and again like we're talking about

if I'm going to be spending my time playing Fortnite if I'm going to be spending my time playing PopG etc I'm actually really surprised that these fighting games have translated so quickly so well to mobile platforms Call of Duty as well right I want a bigger screen but I don't want the big tablet from PubG so and the moment this crosses below $1,000 as I say

it becomes compelling enough to where a whole bunch of people are going to get into it. I think, and then we really are going to wrap it now, and then I'm going to, I'm going to say, Vlad, plug away in a second. I think, Chris, one way to look at it is 10 years from now, you could be like, it could be one of those things like, you know, gene styles and things like that. Can you believe we carried around those giant bricks in our pockets when 90% of the time we didn't need a screen that big, But to get the screen that big, we had to always have it 100% of the time.

Versus you could see a use case in a form factor where it's like, when I need the big screen, I unfold it. When I don't need the bid screen, I don't have to have it, right? And so, like, it's one of those things where you could look back on it in 10 years and be like, I can't believe we endured having. You know, if you think about like the Walkman, like that would probably be a better way to convince me that the form factors can drastically change. you know, with like a similar use case, but with additional functionality or something, you know, because obviously that was like the music player and then we went to like the iPod and then the iPod sort of like led its way into like the iPhone. And now it's like let's get back to like those smaller tiny sizes because frankly you've got the watch or you've got like the headglasses or, you know,

you've got a bunch of different computing devices on you, including voice assistance. Perhaps you don't actually need the big, you know, screen as often in your day to day experience. unless when you want it, it's there because you unfold it. Okay. Vlad, thank you for being such a mensch and putting up with our scattershot approach in different topics. Please, plug whatever you want, tell people where to find you,

tell us the best movie you've seen, whatever you want. Well, first of all, I love the scattershot approach. This is beautiful. If there's one thing to plug, we do, on Bloomberg, we have the quick take. video series that we do on Twitter as well. We have a section called Tech Unscripted, which, hey,

he's got a short approach. I participate in. That's really it. Besides that, get a subscription to Bloomberg.com. That helps pay my salary. If you're a billionaire, get yourself a terminal subscription. That's what you find

most of my work. It's amazing. I work much more than before, and I get my byline, like, a tenth of the time because that's the because you're writing for the people who have the big bucks yeah and let me say of lot I was just going to say I've been a fan of yours

going back to the verge days so you've always been one of the people that I trust on anything tech so I'm glad to have finally spoken to you thank you and I will say your jaidiness is charming and I carry a whole bunch of topics.

And I love this conversation. So thank you for inviting me, guys. Love it. Love it. All right, guys. Well, thank you once again for tuning into the TechMeme Rite Home Experience. This is Chris Messina. And, of course, we have Brian McCullough, as always.

This episode should be out this weekend. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, guys. Bye.