Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) NFT Struggles, Google Stadia And New Kindles

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

NFT Struggles, Google Stadia And New Kindles with @aidanfitzryan and @ArtSabintsev 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 Ride Home Experience for Thursday, September 29th. We have been absent for a while, a couple weeks. I took a trip to Israel, which was an amazing time.

Brian, I know you had a 10-year wedding anniversary. Is that right? Right. Congratulations. Thank you. Good. And just, you know, otherwise we've kind of been, I think, you know, I don't know, riding at the end of the summer.

But there's been a lot of stuff going on. And today we are joined by Aiden, who writes for the information. And you want to say a little bit about yourself first and kind of like your beat, your focus, you know, what you kind of have been working on? Definitely. Yeah. And thanks so much for having me. As you mentioned, yeah, I reported the information. I cover crypto just really generally. So we, you know, don't have a specific beat within the, you know, covering crypto.

I, you know, kind of tend to cover everything across from startups and VCs to kind of how some of larger exchanges are run and then also, as my story we'll discuss a little bit later, kind of how big tech and the traditional markets intersect with crypto and these new markets.

So yeah. Well, actually, Chris, I want you to tee it off, but I think because of that, could we start broad before we get to that story? Like broadly, in terms of crypto winter NFT stuff. I feel like maybe Brian what you're saying is for one state of play.

Like where are we kind of at with crypto, you know, generally, how's that market? Second, you know, how is NFT fairing or NFT is faring relative to the crypto market? And then how does it all kind of come together in terms of the things that are going on with App Store and App Store policy and antitrust and all that?

That'll kind of bring us into that realm. But I think it's really important to your point to kind of get a sense for how are these different parts of the market actually behaving currently. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. I'm here. Yeah, no, it's, that makes a lot sense. You know, I think we're definitely in a winter. You know, prices are, you know, crypto tokens are down. You know, there's been a lot of stories out there about how NFT trading is down.

And so I think that there's been, you know, there was a lot of excitement in the space. And there still is, I think among people within it. But, you know, I think that, you know, Bitcoin reached a price almost near $70,000 back in November. It's, I haven't the latest prices, but somewhere around 20,000, maybe higher now. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that, you know, just like, I think what's really interesting about this, I mean, let me start maybe broader. You know, if you followed crypto before, there have been a number of different winters in the past, you know, where there's a lot of hype, it gets, you know, a lot of people are introduced to the space, and then there's something that happens and it typically falls off and some, you know, the interest

kind of goes away for a bit. I think this is, a moment in time now where it's really the first winter where you're seeing a broader economic slowdown. And so I think a lot of people, you know, I think that a lot of tokens have traded like traditional tech stocks. They're down just like everything else is. And so, you know, I think what will be interesting to see is how long that lasts. And, you know, if, you know, token prices will take up at some point soon. But I think, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

I've actually been doing the show long enough almost five years. that I kind of covered the tail end of the first winter, where almost the first year that I did the show, we didn't talk about crypto very much, but I had been involved in some crypto projects before that. So I can remember the sort of ICO boom, and then things went away. But what's interesting to me right now,

let's pick the NFT space specifically. Because, like, you're, you know, lots of people have made the analogy that what crypto is at this point is trading exactly like the NASDAQ or exactly like a tech stock. Right. But that's a separate thing because you could argue that, oh, you know, and the last crypto winner, you know, Bitcoin went down to $5,000 or $4,000 or something. But NFTs as a specific sort of lens into the crypto, the most recent crypto bubble, it came on really quick. And actually, Chris, if you think about it, you and I started doing these shows around the time when NFTs started, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, last year.

over it. Well, it was, right. It would have been last year, but in the spring. Yeah, no, I remember it very clearly as it was kicking off. I mean, it was actually very exciting. So it felt like that was like the I'm sorry, I know I'm going along here, but the narrative was okay, there's this new renaissance where we had a winter and then there's these new use cases for crypto and these new markets and these new things like that.

Like everything else in crypto, it seems to have gone quickly. The boom and bust is so fast in Crypto land. It's just like, you know? Do you have a sense covering the space? And this is where I wanted to get to at the beginning. I know this was a long question. But when I remember the ICO boom ending, and people just kind of left the space, right?

But I still see on Twitter NFT folks still talking about holding their bags and believing in things like, as much as I made fun of it, Walmart or whoever, or like a lot of these big brands getting into the NFT space. Do you get the sense that the winter is, people are leaving, or are people still creating and holding

and there's still energy in the space, even if the trading volume and all that stuff has gone down. I do. I think that this is a little bit different, just because I think you've had so many either traditional companies, whether that's maybe some of the bigger banks or some of the traditional financial institutions, if we're talking about crypto,

and then even some of the bigger brands who have announced, you know, NFT or some kind of Web Free initiative. And I haven't seen a lot of, you know, I think that some maybe have kind of dialed down, you know, their marketing about it or, you know, it's definitely not talked about as much now. But I think you've had, you know, I think a lot of traditional companies or financial firms that have made inroads into crypto and Web3. And I think I haven't seen a huge, you know, maybe it just hasn't happened yet, but I haven't seen a huge departure from that. I think that a lot

of these firms have invested, you know, a lot of time and money and efforts into kind of, you know, whether it's NFTs or whether it's, you know, looking at, you know, starting some digital assets division if you're, you know, a private equity firm like, you know, or any of the kind of asset managers, you know, Apollo, they announced they're doing a digital assets division. You know, Goldman Sachs has even kind of been touting some of their their crypto initiatives. And so, you know, I think that there's definitely been a slowdown in terms of the hype. But I think that, you know, I haven't seen a huge, you know, mass exodus maybe of, of the brands and companies that have really gotten into NFTs or have gotten into crypto.

And I've said before, Chris, I'll let you go in a second. I've said before that at least from what I see on the investing space, the investing into crypto and even NFT and even especially marketplaces has not slowed down at all. That's right. Yeah, I think there's definitely been still, you know, I think a lot of investments in the space. I mean, look, even the summer, I think the deal might have happened before the, you know, the crypto winter really set in, and there were these bigger blowups with, you know, three hours capital and some of the crypto lenders. But Magic Eden, which is an NFT marketplace based on Salana, you know, they got, you know, I think it was a 150 plus million dollar deal. I think Series A or Series B round valued at close to $2 billion.

This was announced in May or June. And so there's still, I think, a lot of money, certainly a lot of dry powder among the VCs. And I think a lot of even NFT startups are still getting some funding. I guess one question, you know, from your vantage point, is the degree to which there might be a level of sophistication that might be setting in. And I think one of things that is useful for us to do is to differentiate between kind of some of the underlying technologies that are still very promising, very exciting, and that warrant that level of investment. versus some of the earlier applications and use cases, which were pretty accessible, but as a result of their accessibility,

also drove just a ton of both froth and excitement, but also scams and people like losing their money, et cetera. I think what I'm trying to sort of, and I think this will sort of tease up for the next part of the conversation, is to think about this, you know, kind of, like a lot of the froth that occurred, And it was people exciting, were people excited sort of, you know, about either making money, you know, blowing their stimulus checks on these new asset classes. All that money kind of went away.

These are unsophisticated, you know, folks. So there's that half of the market where a lot of the hype was. And then there's the folks who are building things that are thinking about like the long-term potential for these technologies to really change or disrupt the hegemony of the sort of de facto gatekeeper. in the marketplace, right? So if you are, you know, what is it? Chaos is a ladder. If you are VC, then actually it's really good for people to keep building things and to create new markets and new opportunities.

Whereas stagnation, especially when it comes to, you know, the big kind of tech incumbents is actually bad for you. They make everything more expensive. And so oxygenating the marketplace provides more opportunities for the startups that VC is said to invest in to actually grow and then have their own exits and their own success. So I'm curious to what degree you're seeing that level of maturation in the marketplace actually occur, or if we're still kind of in very, very early innings and we still got several years to go before we're seeing the real,

whether it's industrial or marketplace applications of this stuff. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think it is still early innings for a lot of this. I mean, I think, you know, crypto's been around since, you know, 2008 was when the, you know, the Bitcoin white paper came out. you know, I think that that, the payments aspect of that I think is, you know, returning faster, but NFTs, you know, I think is something that really, you know, as you mentioned before, really only sprung up last year. I mean, they've been around for a little bit longer, but I think the popularity of it really

only increased, you know, to an extent where the general public was really viewing this and interested in it last year. And so I think it really is just very, very early for that. I mean, I think that probably the easiest, you know, I mean, I don't know, I don't, I My crystal ball works as probably as well as yours to kind of look at how some of these things will look going forward. But I think the easiest application to think about going forward is something like gaming, where you have NFTs that you can use in multiple different games that are open source or decentralized. So hold on.

Let me pause you there. And I don't mean to interrupt you, but I think it's one of those use cases that is brought up a lot. And it feels more speculative than real. In other words, are there major game platforms? that are working on that type of interoperability and where you can take a skin from Fortnite into Cold Duty or something, let's say. It feels like those use cases are easy to imagine,

but they haven't materialized because maybe they don't actually make sense in a marketplace perspective. That's totally right. They have not materialized yet, I don't think. And I think one of the biggest complaints about blockchain gaming right now is that they're not very good games. And I think people haven't really enjoyed playing them or they're too complicated to understand.

And so I do think it really is early innings for that. I think there hasn't been a game that has really taken off. I think people talk about things like Axi Infinity, but I don't think it's taken off to the extent that companies like Activision or not Microsoft or some of the bigger game developers are really investing a lot of their time. And I mean, Microsoft even said that they're, you know, I think shutting down or not pursuing the NFT initiatives

that they had, you know, potentially said before. And so I think that they're, you know, I don't think we really have seen a game yet where that application is. But I agree that it's something that's usually, you know, said that this could, you know, maybe this could work, but we haven't seen it yet. So I have one more question on this and then we'll get into the, I think the second half of the story and we'll bring art up. Like, I guess the other thing that I'm curious, and again, made this like too much, you know, crystal balling. But to what degree do, does the kind of art application of NFTs stand to persist? I guess, I guess, like, you know, is it something that, you know, because of the alignment of artificial scarcity and, you know, digital art, which previously was very hard to, I mean, you could monetize it and there were attempts to control it through DRM and, you know, watermarking and stuff like that, there's like an elegance to applying NFT technology to art. But again, it sort of feels like this facile ready-made use case, obviously it took many years to discover and to come to. for crypto, but that long term, we may look back on that period, you know, as kind of like,

trying to think of a good technology that was like revolutionary for like five seconds and then it was like, oh, that was actually not that interesting. You know what I mean? Like where do we think that there's actually a lot more growth? Maybe this is my question. A lot more growth to be had in selling specifically types of digital artwork as NFTs in the broader marketplace beyond the whatever. It's like, I think OpenC had between one and five million.

users. Obviously, that's a very small subset of the overall internet user base. So what do you think about that in terms of where the market's at? I think what a lot of people who tout NFTs as this real potential use case going forward, it's less about the actual of NFT itself. And I think more about building a community and some kind of membership. And I think that that's some extent that makes sense. I think, you know, if you need some kind of, you know, token or an NFT to be part of of some club where there are some benefits

that are not just owning a line of code that is associated with a JPEG image. I could see that. Again, I don't know if we're at the point where that is so widespread or wide scale that that is something that everyone is going to claim for. But

I think that that's the reason why there are these collections of NFTs. I think, you know, Porteathe is trying to do a lot of this. Obviously, like it's so, you know, expensive for anybody to really get in there. But I think that that's really, I think, the application where there's going to be something connected to it.

I don't think on its own. I mean, because anybody can put anything, you know, in code as a, you know, a JPEG and say that this is, you know, one of the, you know, one of a kind of NFT. But it really doesn't have any value, I think, unless there's some kind of, you know, something else. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Being part of some group or some shared experience or some membership club where, you know, there's, there's an interest beyond just the actual physical. single token. Okay, so let's get into your story then because the real sort of nexus for how we kind of came together and why we have you on is to talk about this connection between NFTs, selling of NFTs and the App Store and policies that may be, you know, not super

friendly to NFT app builders or, you know, website makers. You've talked to a number of those developers. And part of the reason why I was asking, is there a larger audience or market potential for NFTs is because one very direct way, of course, of increasing your market size would be to sell through apps in the App Store. So why don't you sort of walk us through both what you've discovered and found and where the App Store policy sit with regards to NFTs?

Sure, yeah, happened to. And so, yeah, so, you know, did this story last week about how the App Store policies that the way that they're written and the way that Apple has worked with some of these NFT startups that have tried to list certain features within their apps

that are downloaded to the App Store. Apple is insisting that NFTs fall under its in-app purchases policies. So, you know, if you're not familiar with kind of the ongoing case between Epic Games and Apple, it has to do with the in-app purchases where Apple

is trying to take up to a 30% or they insist that they take up a 30% fee on transactions that are done through in-app purchases. And it often, you know, for any kind of digital goods or, you know, something like Kindle e-books or, you know, in the case of Fortnite, like if you're buying skins or like in-game tokens, that has to be done through in-app purchases. And so what... And let me clarify this because I think it's interesting.

Like, you can go on the Amazon app right now and buy toilet paper and you don't have to give 30% to Apple. But if you go on the Audible app, and maybe they cut out audible as a carve out because they carved out like Netflix. You can't actually an Audible. So a better example would be to go into Roblox and buy toilet paper in Roblox and you have to pay 30% on that. Yeah, exactly.

It's digital goods, not physical. So if I'm on Amazon and I want to buy toilet paper, because I'm out, I can do that without any kind of 30% fee. But if I want to go buy an ebook on the Kindle app, that can't be done within the app because Amazon has said, no, Apple's going to charge us a 30% fee on this, so you have to go elsewhere to buy that. And so that's the case with NFTs. And Apple has been insisting that, you know, NFTs are digital goods, it's going to be subject to this 30% fee. Why that doesn't exactly work for a lot of these startups is, for example, these marketplaces, open sea and Magic Eden. They're not, you know, a lot of the cases, a lot of the time, they're not selling.

those NFTs directly. They're facilitating secondary sales. So peer-to-peer transactions, I'm selling my NFT to Chris. And I'm going to use Chris found that via OpenC. And what OpenC is going to do is they're going to help facilitate that transaction. You know, they'll

connect, we'll connect our wallets. They'll take care of the transaction. They'll take a cut. I think they do a 2.5% fee. And then I'll sell my my FD to Chris. Why the 30% fee doesn't work is that Apple is insisting that it wants to, and this is what it's told startups, like the NFT startups that I spoke to with the story, they want to take 30% of the entire transaction. So if I'm selling, and I'll back up to, NFTs are sold typically in denominations of crypto.

But let's just use Fiat for now for an example to kind of show why this doesn't work. If I want to sell an NFT to Chris for $100, Apple's insisting that it should get $30 of that. But what doesn't work is that it wants to take that $30 from OpenC. And so what would happen is that OpenC would have to essentially lose money on every single purchase of an NFT through the app, which is why a lot of these companies don't even bother. That's like, that's so, so interesting. Sorry, Brian. It's just like just conceptually, like, another way to maybe visualize this or imagine this and why this is in some ways like so egregious and yet where these two models are really in conflict is exactly as you said. So OpenC is just providing kind of like a veneer or sort of a, you know, a marketplace front end to, you know, the blockchain, right? So they're sitting in between these things and they are facilitating transactions.

However, and, you know, it's a little bit confusing, I think, for the end user to sort of understand how their fee works and all the rest. But what you're saying is it's almost like, you know, if I, this is going to break down a little bit. But, you know, if you think about the serial numbers that are on dollar bills or whatever and, you know, you want to transact for, this is going to break down. very quickly. I'm trying to sort of make an analogy between, you know, the serial numbers on dollar bills as being their unique identifier, just like NFTs have a unique identifier that makes them, you know, unique. And so when it comes down to it, that peer to peer interaction and transaction would be like, you know, Brian and I sending money back and forth to each other on cash app or Venmo or something like that. And that's more or less, you know, the equivalent

conceptually of what you're doing when you're transacting in NFTs. You know, there's sort of a, you know, a middle person that might be, you know, facilitating the interaction on the transaction But as you said, it's more of a P-to-P interaction ultimately. And what Apple is saying is not a Ler-O, it's actually a shop. And fundamentally, I hadn't thought of this very deeply before, but the App Store does not support crypto payments, right? So if the fundamental way that I would purchase your NFT via ETH isn't supported in the app store, then we're even talking about a whole other layer of how.

But I think what? What Aiden was saying is, like, if we set aside the crypto payment method, right, as not supported in the app store, but just the, like, and I think this is what I'm really kind of like noodling my, I don't know, I feel like I'm a car being wrapped around a telephone pole, but also whatever. So like the problem with this is just conceptually, what is an NFT? And this is why I was kind of asking the question, like, is it a digital good or is it like an underlying, you know, a serial number that is being transacted between, you know, like two peer to peer, you know, participants. in a marketplace and that marketplace is facilitating the interaction of those two. I mean, not to go, you know, too off of script or, you know, a different direction, but I feel like this is similar to what Match Group is talking about when they are getting upset about the App Store pricing on dating apps and how they don't want it to pay 30% for facilitating an interaction between two people who want to date, you know, with their subscription service or whatever it is.

So it's all these ways in which the app store and, you know, the vague that it takes, may be just both unfair, if not punitive, to different types of businesses or business models. And I guess maybe, Aden, you can opine on this, and I suppose this is where, you know, Arthur, if he wants to jump in, can help. Whether Apple is ultimately against these types of transactions and these types of digital goods. Right. You know, I think that's a good question. I think it's, you know, honestly, don't have the direct answer. They might, you know, be very opposed to NFTs.

They might not be. I don't think that this is a specific carve-out for NFTs based on the interviews I did with some of these startups and the people who have worked with Apple. I think it's really just a broad policy, and they're not thinking maybe a lot about some of the different exceptions to this. Because like you said, it applies to Tinder or some of the dating apps where they're charging more and they're existing, you do it through an app purchases if you're buying a subscription within the app. I don't know if they're thinking a lot about the blockchain aspect of this and the fact that these are peer-to-peer transactions of digital goods, as they see it, that the economics of it don't really make sense if you really kind of step back and think about it. Yeah, and I guess I do want to bring up Brian's point about any. I think, I don't know, Brian, if you have tried to like buy a book on Audible, but, you know, Spotify just launched their Audible or their audiobooks solution. And they take the same approach.

for a long time. So like they, and they just changed that, I think the last year. Like if you're a long time subscriber, you now have to buy, but you have to buy an in-app currency, which then it's almost like a token.

Yeah. That's right. It's like a token or basically like an in-game currency, right? So if you think about it from that perspective, it's much easier to wrap your mind around kind of how Apple sees this and how they're trying to apply this blanket policy to any digital good, whatever that might be. Right.

So it's a digital media object that's instantiated. you know, in software, and if you're going to buy it to the app store, then Apple gets their 30%. They don't really care about the underlying technology that enables it or the fact that it's transmissible kind of, you know, through the blockchain, through any different type of marketplace. So that's a complication that they're just like, we don't really care. Like, you know, as we see it, it's a digital good, so therefore we get our 30% cut. Hey, so can I jump in real quick? Arthur, yes.

Please introduce yourself. Yes. Yeah, sorry. My name is Arthur Subensive. I am representing, I guess, two entities right now. So the reason I'm on the call is I provided some of the quotes and information to Aiden because in a past life, I was an iOS engineer in math for 12 years or so. And I on the side run a one-man consultancy, literally called the iOS consultant,

where all I do is App Store Policy Consulting because no one else does it. And as you all are discussing, there's obviously a need here depending on the type of app that you're trying to build. So, you know, at least once or twice a week, I consult with random companies around the world dealing with specific app store policy issues. And some of the ones I've been coming across recently are in the crypto space. On the other side, my full-time job is I work for a blockchain infrastructure company called Pocket Network, where I'm in charge of product and engineering. And one of the comments I wanted to make, quick, quick comment I wanted to make is on our end, we're seeing nothing but upticks and traffic. We are the data layer between applications, decentralized apps, and actual blockchain interactions. And we broke, I think, a billion API requests in our platform this summer.

And I think we just hit 1.2 billion today. So which which token currency, like your network, right? Sure, sure. Yeah, we have a currency as well. It's called POKT or Pock. But I don't want, we can get into that a little later. Yeah, yeah. It is a crypto winter, but we are.

seeing increase in traffic on our end. And we have thousands of applications using our product. So what I wanted to jump in about here, and I'll talk about Pocket later when it makes sense, is that for Spotify, the walls in the Apple's App Store are cracking. So if you've gone through the purchase flow for a book on audible style or an audiobook on Spotify, you can do something now you weren't able to do a year ago because of one of the lawsuits that succeeded, which is you can actually you'll get an email from Spotify saying hey buy this now buy this book here on by clicking this link up until a year ago you would not be able to you were not really allowed to contact Apple I mean you contact your customer through it using an email address if you had

their email address on file if you were trying to have them purchase a good through the mobile app without going through the app store without going through the in-app purchase flow so there's headway being made albeit very very very very, very, very slowly, like molasses. And also one thing that I want to add is that it is unclear how successful that strategy is from user experience perspective. Now, it may be worth it for the companies to not give Apple that 30% in order to recoup the full cost of the digital item, in this case, audiobooks, that's being sold, you know, in terms of the marketplace economics working out. You know, for example, and actually this is the case too, even when you use the desktop Spotify app, if you go to buy an audiobook, you'll be essentially redirected to the web. website or to the web and through the web, a transaction can occur there and then the item will

show up in your app of choice, whether that's a native desktop app or a native iOS app. There's obviously, it's a huge amount of friction, and yet so far it seems like this is important from a creator perspective or creator economy perspective to make the economics work for both Amazon is its own thing, but Audible and Spotify. I agree. I agree. The U.S. is horrible. Also, the price points are horrible if you were.

I think I just tested a couple books and they're the same. Like one book is near equivalent to what you pay for two or two and a half of audibles credits. So it doesn't really make sense from a financial point of view yet, at least for some of those. Well, I'm glad they're experienced. It depends on which side, you know, the creator economy you're on. We would have to like into an argument or debate about this. But it is important to imagine if, let's say, Spotify were to push that extra price down on the consumer and increase their prices by 30%.

Now we're talking about even more money for these books. You're talking, you know, $23, $25, like $30 for, you know, a digital audiobook to recoup the expense that the app store will be charging. And that obviously, if you have, if you're struggling with the current prices, that would definitely be like a non-starter. Sure, sure. I see your point. So, Arthur, maybe you can speak a little bit more to some of these apps that you come in, you've been consulting with.

Obviously, you don't want to like name, you know, names or anything. like that, but in terms of their approach and what they're experiencing and what the conversation is like with Apple, you know, can you identify any of the things that Apple is looking at specifically that, you know, they're not fans of, that they see that, you know, there's transactions and they're like, oh, no, you can't do that? Or, you know, is it just like, look, you've got NFTs, you want to sell them, we're going to take 30 percent, that's the deal. So in general, when people come to me for any, there's like two or three specific problems that people come to me for. One, they, that's always they can't get their app in the store. That's usually the

premise. So these are people who've already spent the money to build a project, but are getting, that last mile is killing them. And it's, you know, it's either one month or upwards of the call I even had this morning was a year of them trying to get an app in the store. Yeah, but that was a crypto company, but it was an exchange. It wasn't even an NFT company. It was a completely different story. So the other, so it's getting in a store. The question is a lot of a lot of these products are targeting a smaller user base. So how do you get your app if you don't target the entire world? That's one. question. The other question is, how do I get into the store without paying Apple the 30% cut?

That is the most common question. There's traditionally only a couple answers, really. It's a rational question, but it's just, you know, it is their store. Right. So in my mind, having worked, and again, I've never worked for Apple. I've never worked with the review team. I think the information that I usually give out is the following. When you're dealing with Apple, especially a customer service or an app store reviewer, the way to view the world is as follows. The app store, is effective, sorry, the App Store Review Guidelines, which essentially explain what you can and cannot do are a Bible. And the App Store reviewers are essentially the most zealous priests in the world that will not stray beyond the word that's written on the guidelines.

So when you're dealing with them, what you're trying to do is effectively find a way to work within their religion. And their religion seems to be, get me my 30%. And then we'll be friends. So the question becomes, what do these companies do? For NFT companies, there is not much I can do. A lot of the information I gave to Aden is what I've seen myself, is you have to build a credit system, like a gamified credit system around the actual in-app purchase, and then use the engineers on your end would build a dynamic pricing

mechanism to buy all these things, buy all these items for those credits. So the example, the way I like to think about it is sometimes if you play a mobile game, they have flash sales for like new customers or for 24 hours where they dynamically reprice or they on the back end they'll reprise certain in-app purchases to be or certain, sorry, they'll dynamic to reprise certain items to be equivalent to a different amount of credits. That you can do in the back end because the purchase, the place at which you do the transaction is at the credit level, not at the item level.

So that's the way you have to think about NFTs. NFTs are effectively in Apple's case, digital goods or digital, you know, knick-knacks that you purchase with the credits and Apple gets its cut on the credits. There's another way around it. Let me bring, let me bring, Aiden. And, you know, in your reporting, is this something that you've seen, you know, a lot of these other NFT, you know, startups, app builders considering? Are they willing to do that or is that where this really breaks down for them just because, you know, from an economic perspective, either it's not advantaged or enough or it doesn't actually make their their business model work?

I think one of, yeah, so in my reporting, you know, one other startup talked about a similar model where, you know, they're going to have in-app tokens or rather in-app currencies. I think when you bring in-a-token, it's a little bit different. But, yeah, in-app currencies that, you know, you pay for from the company. And then I think the way Arthur described actually described to me when we were. chatting before, is the way to think about this is, you know, let's say that you want to buy, you know, you want to buy crypto or NFTs from Coinbase. You know, you do that. You know, you connect a wallet, you buy it. They take care of a lot of the backend solution. This kind of in-app currency solution to, you know, being able to sell NFTs within an app is kind of

the same thing with just one extra layer, where you're buying the tokens from the startup, or these in-up currencies rather, and then you can use those to then buy NFTs, and that work is also done in the back end by the company. Hold on, let me apologize that. I just want to clarify, because obviously, like, tokens often are, well, it's complicated, but I think this bears clarification, which is that obviously tokens typically are thought of as sort of crypto tokens. I guess what I want to clarify with you is whether these are just in-app, you know,

fungible tokens essentially that are non-unique, obviously not in the blockchain, but that are a layer kind of just exactly as Audible and Spotify have approached this with their audiobooks. Essentially, you buy the in-app currency, you know, essentially they're tokens that are held in a kind of digital escrow at the company. And when you want to spend it, you spend from that, you know, collection of your tokens. But those tokens are not necessarily redeemable for cash or able to be, transferred or converted into other crypto? That's exactly right. It's not, it's a non-crypto, like, in app company.

That's the clarification that I want. Okay, perfect. Yes. Exactly. So that's, I think, where, you know, some, some sorts of look at this. I think others just don't really see the need for it. I think at this point, you know, I think anybody who wants an NFT or wants to be part of this, I think can go and do that.

You know, the CEO Rarable, which is an NFT marketplace, he spoke to me for the story. He said that 30% of their traffic comes from mobile browsers. And so they have an NFT app. It's just to browse, view, and look at different NFTs. You can't buy and sell within it. But if users do want to buy an NFT, you know, maybe you have the app, maybe you see something, you can then go to a mobile browser, you know, open up Safari under iPhone or go to your desktop

and connect your wallet and buy it. And he was saying that 30% of that traffic does come from mobile. So people are going on safari on their phones and buying it. Wait, wait. So this is Alexi, Alexi Fallon, right, from Maribel? That's correct. So I just want to strain this because I think also very important. Like the process of both, you know, buying and transacting crypto on a mobile device, like just it sucks.

You know, every now and then I'll try to go through Metamask and their browser and it's, you know, and I know that there are other apps out there that are also working in the space. But it's, you know, it is not nearly as smooth as Apple Pay, as you might expect, given that Apple Pay is built into the operating system. But I thought that that's the promise. of Web 3, Chris, and everyone has a wallet that's very easy to use. I think the promise of Web 3 is to have a substantial amount of friction that makes you really appreciate the centralized products that exist.

But we digress. My question and point, though, is, you know, Alexei is making a business decision to not go down the Apple store or the App Store path to transact or to sell NFTs in the Rarable app. My question is, if 30% of his traffic is coming from a mobile device, and what I think you were going to say was how much of that 30% of his traffic then actually goes through and completes a transaction in a mobile browser? Was that also 30%? So is that 30% of 30% or what percentage do you think actually completes a transaction on the mobile browser? I'm not sure. Okay. That's not like something I was able to confirm, but I do think that it kind of does underscore the point that, you know, this is still largely a, I mean, there is some traffic on the mobile, obviously, but, you know, even looking at, you know, that number or 70% still doing this on desktop. And so I think largely crypto and end of true transactions, it's largely a desktop phenomenon. And so, you know, I think just talking to Alexi and some other founders, you know, I think Sydney Zhang at Magic Eden, you know, the co-founder and chief technology officer there, he said that they had didn't even consider, you know, offering buying and selling an NFTs in the app just because of the Apple commissions.

And, you know, it just was going to be another headache that they didn't need to deal with. And I think they were like, you know, most people do this on desktop right now anyway. And so we're probably just going to focus on that. So I can chime in here. Yeah. It's wild. Just to like, you know, just to point out, like 30% of your traffic comes from mobile. And yet you just decide not to sell it.

Like imagine if Amazon didn't allow you to buy toilet paper, Brian's toilet paper, you know, on the mobile app. Like what? But Chris, what's even more well? about that is what is an average website or an average internet service, what percentage of it is mobile, right? It's got to be over 50%. So in the Web 3 space, you're already sort of circumscribed because- No, I know. It's sort of like it's also the cause and effect, right? The thing that we don't know is if Apple were more, you know, like helpful when it comes to these NFT transactions, let's say, in apps that were distributed through the App Store,

Would his traffic be higher on mobile and would there also be higher transaction volumes? Now, maybe it's okay right now. It's mostly, as you said, a desktop phenomenon. But I do wonder how much larger the market could actually be if Apple weren't sort of, you know, putting a big boot in front of, you know, sort of like the onslaught of this potential, you know, traffic. I think that's the question. I think that, you know, if there is another, you know, run up to a bull market, you know, and if there's a lot more interest in this, you know, is that going to be a real inhibitor of something like NFTs?

where people, you know, as you mentioned, kind of the process of connecting a wallet on a mobile browser, you know, just is not as seamless as using something like Apple Pay. You know, could the user who's maybe just, you know, somewhat curious in this new technology or, you know, owning some kind of digital asset, you know, runs into that problem and it just doesn't go through with it. Yeah. Arthur, you wanted to jump in here. Yeah, yeah. So I think you were all kind of hinting at it, but you didn't say it. The only real way to be successful in the mobile space as an NFT company is to build a wallet. And the only company that's done it is Coinbase. Coinbase has their coinbase wallet. They have a browser built into it.

You can go to nfti.coinbase.com from that wallet. And then it will link up, I'm pretty sure, with the Coinbase wallet app, just like other apps link up with just like when you try to do a purchase within the Metamask browser, which is like the catch-all browser. Wait, what about like glow and like other apps? How are those not the same thing? there. Which one is glow? Sorry. It's fine.

It's hard for me to imagine that coinbase is the only one. I think there's glow. There's no, I'm sure there are others. No, no, no. I'm saying Coinbase is exchange and it's up with its own NFT platform. So what we're saying here is magic Eden or OpenC had built a wallet and then built a browser in there, rather than a native mobile experience, they would have a browser-based mobile experience, which is what MetaMass offers that.

Right. so you become wallet companies, but you need to stand up a different engineering team to take care of that. And I don't think anyone really wants to do that. I don't know if the, I don't know if their ROI in that is big enough because that goes back to the original question. Yeah, I mean, like what's wild is you almost like end up having to reinvent. And maybe this is Apple's point, but almost like you have to reinvent the whole artifice of the app store in order to essentially transact with yourself through an app that you're released in the app store because now you have your own exchange as well as the platform for distributing or listing NFTs. So it's all kind of like in-house at that point. But, you know, Coinbase is one of the few companies, probably that one, you know, has the investment.

And two, has the, at least, you know, until recently, you know, enough engineers to build all sides of the marketplace in a way that, you know, could possibly compete. I mean, nonetheless, like, so one of the things, actually, I want to pause for a second, though. I know either you're more of an expert on the iOS side of things, but I just want to bring up the other marketplaces, the other app marketplace that do exist out there. And you did talk to some folks that are, I suppose, maybe publishing into the Google Play Store. And Google, as at least I understand from your reporting, has been a lot more solicitous of, or at least supportive of, maybe not blocking of NFT apps. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, sure, definitely. I think that people, you know, kind of looking at between Apple and Google, I think just the folks that I spoke to just said that it was much easier to work with Google.

I think there was one example where it took maybe months to get an app listed on the app store with Apple versus a week with Google. And they're just much easier to work with them when it comes to making changes to the app, having updates, and even that first listing on the app, I think it's just much has been much easier with Google. I do think, though, it is important to point out that both do have the V's and app purchases. and so Google does also take up to a 30% fee. But from just the startups that I spoke to, it was just much easier to work with Google and be their debtable. Well, and I've said a thousand times,

I don't understand why Google doesn't do things that Apple won't do just to differentiate themselves, which is kind of where the spirit of this question is going to come from. This discussion has made me realize like, oh my God, look at how far or how, how big the crypto space is, and yet there is no native support on any of the mobile platforms, in the sense that what would, just go with this thought experiment. What if tomorrow Android had its own native wallet or Apple?

This will never happen, it seems like. It seems like this is an impossibility. But if Apple had an event and they said, by the way, we're going to support. crypto natively with our own wallet, with all this stuff, we're going to integrate blockchain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, the fact that that seems impossible has made me realize, oh my God, look at, look at where we are and that's not happened. And then that hasn't happened. And because it's probably not going to happen, isn't that why we are where we are?

I think the problem there is how, you know, just that going down that line of thought, I'm sorry to interrupt, is sure, you could definitely do that and you could definitely store the keys and the secure enclave, which is probably what would end up happening is. But one of the initial issues is which derivation mechanism are you going to use to generate your keys? There's a lot that exists. How are you going to be able to recover it if you lose your iPhone, right? You could do it through iCloud if you turn that on. But what if you change to Android and this and that?

You'd have to have some standards in place and not really in place yet to do this like they are with other protocols, right? There's a, the whole thing about blockchains is they're all protocols. No one has really won out. there's obviously some clear winners at the moment. If you were to look at things either by market cap or by usage or by volume or by total volume. Right. And if somebody picked one of the protocols that would be picking a winner, that would be. Exactly.

Crazy. Yeah. Well, so two. I think it's more waiting it out. Two good things. So wild. One, I've been to tweet to the Solana, like, mobile phone, which is called Saga and might be, you know, Brian's or directionally what you're talking about.

But I also brought up, I think it's Nick, although you're, display name is gotu.eith. You pointed out something in a reply that I thought was pretty interesting. Do you want to just share what you noticed, or maybe you had this experience yourself? Yeah, sure, sure. Actually, first introduce yourself. Introduce yourself. Yes, sure.

So I'm Nick. I'm the co-founder of basement. And basically, we're building tools for developers to get data off-chain. And now we're building this little app, which is basically Eaterscan, but on mobile. So usable for normal people. not just developers. And yesterday we tried to submit our app to test flight. And I got into this huge fight with like episode review because they said,

look, a user can view their own wallet. So basically you're displaying previously bought content. And you have to have an in-up purchase for that. So I bought up like this reader guideline like, look, newspapers can do this, everyone can do this, wallace can do this, why can't we do it? And I said, we don't really care what you think about the reader app guideline. You're not a reader app. Make it available to the app, sir.

Got it. Okay. So the question there is because I haven't heard of this one yet, right? Because there's all these other apps that. Yeah, I pinned the tweet that Nick shared with us. So you can take a look at that. Yeah, I'll take a look. So yeah, you want to read out loud?

So everyone... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead, verbatim. All right. So for Nick, it's from the App Store review team. Hello. Thank you for your research. regardless of whether you consider your app to be a reader app or not.

If it is allowing users to view or access previously purchased NFTs and is considered to be allowing access to previously purchase digital content and as such This content must be offered within the app via in app purchases Otherwise access to digital content must be removed from the app once the appropriate revisions have been made please resubmit your revised binary for review So that begs the question What else are you doing in there because there are apps like Xerian and but hell even Coinbase and Metamask and all the other walls, Rainbow, they let you view your NFT. Some of them do it in a beautiful fashion. So what else do you have in there that is having Apple, like, peak, you know, hiring?

Or do you have something else in there that they're considering to be digital goods? Yeah, so I actually like went back and forth with them and they sent me a screen to specific screen that was a problem. And it was like, follow your own wallet. And they considered that to be like sort of an account. And then I brought up like a rainbow, cereal. open C wearable they all allow you to add your own wallet to see what's happening there and actually they got back to me with like um yeah you're gonna get all them kicked out

the store so we can start an investigation through that and I was like no yeah so I'll just jump in too I think you know I think that you know one of you know maybe what this highlights a little bit it's something that I that I did hear from some folks that I spoke to that you know maybe I'm not sure but ended up in the final story but you know there is some inconsistency among who you work with. And so if you submit an app, you know, you might be dealing with a, you know,

a worker at Apple that's different than another NFT startup that's maybe similar to your product or your business. And there might be different ways that they are dealing with that and interpreting some of these policies. And I think, you know, one of the things I just want to point out too is, you know, from my understanding, you know, based on the conversations that I had, there's not a specific policy about NFTs. It's how Apple and its employees are interpreting the

policies that they have for digital goods. And so, you know, the experience of working with, you know, one employee who's reviewing an app might be different than someone else. Yeah. And I mean, to that point, like, there are over 500 reviewers, right? So, you know, although there might be, you know, canon in the App Store guidelines and there may be a very strong sect of the religious who follow it, you know, and it is, you know, the book of Steve, so to speak, I mean, there is still going to be some variation and interpretation based on, you know, maybe the familiarity of the reviewer or based on, you know, I'm feeling that day and what have you. But it is very interesting.

This is the slippery slope and why that sort of the canon of the app store guidelines is so important is because with what is it, two million, like whatever, some large number of multi millions of apps in the app store, as, you know, Arthur, your business is helping people to, one, sort of interpret and then two, kind of work around or work with those guidelines to be able to get their apps into the store. So the consistency is very important. And I think what Nick is bringing up, it raises an incredible interesting and complex question, because if I can follow my own profile in one of these

NFT viewer apps, and that suddenly turns that app into viewing digital content, which I could have bought through the app store, then that means that that whole swath of apps that are similar will have to be rejected. And that's, I think, where this tension and the rubber really meets the road. Okay, we've got to come to a close here. I guess, you know, any parting thoughts or any sort of like next steps, what you're expecting. Do you think this is going to bubble up in terms of a broader conversation and question about NFTs in the app store and crypto in general? Is that sort of like what's happening here? Or do you think this is just kind of like, is there something new and something we should be watching for in the coming weeks and months? I really don't know.

Go ahead. Arthur, do you want to go first? Yeah, I mean, I just don't think we know. I think a lot of it is, you know, I think as I mentioned before, and as we talked about, you know, a lot of this is still very much early innings. I do think, though, you know, kind of thinking about Apple and even Google, you know, if this space continues to, you know, have the same, you know, level of hype or, you know, excitement from people, you know, I don't think, I think it totally makes sense for, you know, them to maybe look at how they can get into it and how they can make money from it. I think that's one thing.

And the other thing I just want to mention, too, I think, you know, maybe going back to Brian, and your kind of question about, you know, how to think about maybe some of these, you know, why has this happened yet or why are Apple and Google, you know, paving the way for some of these things? Is that I think a lot of this goes kind of maybe, you know, against what Apple has always stood for. I mean, they, you know, they started as this really closed system and really kind of touting that. And this maybe goes against what they, you know, are all about and kind of having their own hardware and their closed software and all. that and so you know it just kind of maybe maybe ending with a question mark about what's coming next but you know I'm not sure I think we'll watch on for the wait

and see so my my two cents here is my crystal ball is as good as anyone else is here I think I think it's too early for them to really come to an answer here because I mean they look at everything else that they've done they've they've starting to do things no one ever thought they would like giving Amazon or giving Amazon's audible product the ability to use credits with within the actual app, right? That was a huge win. And I thought, I was shocked that that was going to happen.

But that took, what, like a decade? Same. So the other thing is they, you know, they helped develop the USBC's what's it called standard, but they haven't really been using it on their flagship device yet. Obviously, I'm assuming they're just trying to milk it as much as they can until, like, in the European law is now in place. So the last thing here is there's standards have not been like, No standard has won yet.

If you were to ask me, from my experience, based on all the information I have from, you know, the dashboards and data that we have at Pocket Network, I think Ethereum is going to win. I think all the EV because it has the virtual machine, the EVM, and there's a lot of things that work with EVMs. Like Avalanche, for instance, is a blockchain network that is really big, has a really fast finality, meaning the transactions complete under a second. and they have a smart contract chain that works called the C chain that works with Ethereum. It's portable. Things are interoperable. There are other projects that are doing the same thing. All of the interesting stuff going on is on layer two and on which are on EVMs or EVMs themselves.

So if we were to go back to what is Apple going to do, I think they're just waiting for things to shake out. And if I am reading the tea leaves the right way, I personally believe that Ethereum or EVMs are going to win. and then it's just what are the standards, the U.S. standards about generating a wallet keys and whatever else. What are the ones that are going to win out and what is going to be the proper way to move forward? Or is Apple just going to support all of them out of the gate? I don't know, but I think that is still, I think it'll be decided this decade. I just don't think it's going to be the first half of the decade. Thank you. Brian?

Yes. Yes. So we need to shift topics before we close the show. but let's go in order, reverse order real quick. Go-to, if there's anything you want us to know or get in touch, you go first, and then we'll go in reverse chronologically. Links, etc. Links, yes. And go-to's not there. So then, Arthur, how about you?

Sure. Yeah, I work for a Web3 decentralized company known as Pocket Network. We offer decentralized blockchain access. We have 27,000 notes. So if you are ever building a decentralized application or any application that needs to just access data on chain from 40 plus different blockchains, we have a very generous free tier and a very generous paid tier.

So I would just go to pokt.network. And if you want to find me, I'm sure it'll be in your show notes, but it's A-R-T-S-A-B-I-N-T-S-E-V on any social platform under the sun. You can't assume it'll be in the show. notes because I forget all that shit. Let's get these smells out.

Yes. Yes. Aiden, go ahead. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the time. It's great to chat about this. My work is all right now at theinformation.com.

And if you have any follow-ups or want to reach out to me about any story ideas you have or just, yeah, anything. Aidan at the information, A-I-D-A-N at the information.com. Awesome. Wonderful. Thanks everyone for coming on. And by the way, you can stick around. I'll keep you on stage. if you're interested in these topics.

But Chris and I are going to hit two more things before we go tonight. Chris, the first one is I'm going to step on, I guess, what I would have talked about tomorrow. But tomorrow's a Friday show, so we have the long reads anyway. Google shutting down stadium. And I think I said this week or last week that I don't know how much snark is left to do about Google sunsetsing things, except for this is the most important one, because I'm pretty sure that I framed the launch of Stadia in this way where it is. Yes.

You should really go back and get that recording, by the way, but go ahead. If you shut down shit all the time, who's going to believe you? And so one of the reasons why people from day one were like Stadia's not going to last is because the gaming industry didn't believe that Google was going to. Right. It's like, why would we bet on you when your track record is to just like pull the plug after you're not getting, you know, Google scale, search scale adoption? Like, why switch? Why made that investment? So there's that. That's the point that I would have made if I was going to, you know, do a rant on a segment tomorrow. But the second thing I would say is I also heard constantly that one of the reasons that Google did Stadia, aside from the fact that everyone was doing similar. things was that it justified their cloud computing business in the sense that like it it proves it out it's a proof of concept it also you know I know it's both sides of the

same company but it does provide a P&L for their cloud computing division and things like that oh no go ahead but yeah go ahead so I guess like I would have build on that because I I have my own little, you know, conspiracy theory brewing, which, you know, you always know, I have. Which is that, you know, increasingly, you know, as Apple, and I'm talking about Apple, but this applies to any, you know, cloud company, especially that has, like, hardware devices and charges largely for storage, you know, is that over time, these devices are getting more and more powerful, which on that one hand, like, is great. It actually creates, you know, a better experience. But, you know, the conspiracy would be that Apple invented live photos to make the photos that you know, store. or your device take up more space, which means that you have to upgrade more often

and or you have to convert to an iCloud paying member in order to store all this stuff. So essentially, they have figured out, you know, the economics where it just makes sense to store everybody's everything because they can do it for, you know, pennies on the dollar and it ultimately like drives their business, you know, more effectively.

And so when it comes to Stadia, you know, I do think that there is an element of this where, you know, yeah, okay, maybe you want to build a game in platform, but it also really increases your drive to make your hardware more efficient. I mean, they were streaming games. You know, they're doing what effectively I think Netflix is doing and what others are doing. By the way, I was a customer. I, I was it.

How was it? It was great. Interesting. Huh. Huh. What, like why? Like, what? I mean, obviously, it didn't meet the numbers, but there were certain games that, uh,

were on Xbox that I, I'm a PlayStation and, and, sorry, that's not what I mean. I don't mean why. Why did you play? I mean, like, You know, why did they shut it down if it was good? Like, how do they not just have, you know what I feel like if they're going to be selling Android devices, they need gaming. Like Apple Arcade feels like a necessary part of the app store. Chris, the point.

That's the other. Tell me, tell me. What am I missing? How do you really believe, what do you think that their conviction is in their hardware business? Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Because like, look, They're going to do the pixel event.

I think it's next week. Yeah. And the pixels are fantastic. If I was in the Android ecosystem, I'd only have a pixel. Of course. Right. But they're not lighting the world on fire. Right.

The visuals are so, like, I'm just thinking from like a marketing perspective. You know, like games are the thing that just break down barriers and get people like excited about devices. I mean, Facebook did it first with the end of FarmVell. That was like one of the big breakout moments for social media. This is my larger point. Yeah, go ahead. And you've been listening long enough, you know that I've also said before. I've been like a chicken little like Google's in trouble.

Sure. Google's never in trouble, but maybe they're gaming efforts. Okay. The narrative for Amazon is cloud and e-competal. consumer e-commerce, right? Yeah, I mean, Cloud is even bigger than e-commerce at this point, but yeah. The narrative for Apple is consumer, consumer, consumer, hardware and software and services. Yeah.

The narrative for Facebook, for better or worse, meta, is social. It's only worse. Friends. It used to be about friends. Now it's like, how can we build a mall faster than anybody else, you know? Who else have we got? Who am I not thinking of right now? Microsoft.

Oh, Microsoft is the enterprise and productivity. And by the way, and cloud, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, what's the narrative for Google? Does Google know? Yeah, no, I mean, it's unfortunate when you have such good product market fit so earlier in your career that everything else, obviously, just is subservient to that one higher thing. And that one higher thing is just like, hey, I have a question about something, you know, show me the way.

Let me tell you a story that I haven't been able to, fit into the show. Remember how I did that TV show? I went into Manhattan to record that second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever happened with that? It's just like going to be there? Oh, no. It's happening? It's how they always, oh, yeah, you'll see it on the history channel or something. Anytime someone does a documentary about the 90s, they call me to talk about the internet stuff. I go into the studio and I talk for three hours and they use three seconds of it. They, they, one of the things that, you know, they always ask about, like, AOL and the dial-up. Sorry, sorry.

On the hashtag's 15th anniversary, which was this year, I did like these, I did like three or four or 15-minute interviews. And literally, in all of the clips they showed, I was, I was B-roll. I was like literally in the background. Like, they didn't even like use any of my content. No. And it's great. Because also I, as we know, I'm so verbose that, like, I can't talk in sound bites like they need. So.

Yeah. But anyway, so they asked me about Google, and I gave them 30 minutes on this tree of Google. But the thing that I came back to was, you know, you look at certain people. Like, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg was a good entrepreneur, and then he learned how to be one. I maintain that Larry and Sergey are, and always were engineers. and they accidentally became entrepreneurs and they weren't good at it that's why Eric Schmidt had to come in

okay right and they tried and there were times when they wanted to be good entrepreneurs right but they're not okay and in the same way that we can talk about different companies cultures

Twitter I might say some more shit about Jack Dorsey tomorrow but the problem with Google is is that, like you just said, they landed upon one of the greatest business models of all time. And

no one, there's no one's fault, but they've never been able to go beyond that. Now, they tried to, in the best way, because fucking Larry wanted to do self-driving cars when he was at the University of Michigan and shit, you know? That's true. Yeah, it goes back.

And so, and so there was a time when they were like, look, We've got this great money machine, and we're going to do all these moonshots because we have this great money machine. But it hasn't worked out. And so Google, we should be saying alphabet, I guess. But that's the fucking problem. Come on, guys. Okay.

My point is, and as I said, I've been hearing people be bearish on alphabet for our years, and it's never really panned out. but I still maintain that I don't know what Alphabet's mission statement is right now. I don't know, and I don't know that anyone there knows. It may not even matter, you know. It might not. Some of these companies are so successful. And listen, there is start taking off dividends. You don't have to be a gross stock forever, you know.

Yeah, but I don't know. I guess I wonder, one in this market and this economy and also with the expectation of growth, whether or not, if this happened to face it to Meta recently, where they started to, or they lost that growth narrative, and now the stock is like totally off. So in terms of the ability to attract new talent and to hire people and get them in and, you know, reward them with, you know, equity or, you know, stock grants. I think that ship has sailed for some of these companies. That's kind of where my thinking is. Yeah. Come around too recently. But go ahead.

Finish your point. No, well, I mean, it might be, I guess my question is, or my point is, that, like,

for these big tech companies, that one sort of metric and rubric, like growth at all costs, and growth, infinite growth forever, is the thing that, you know, continues to motivate and drive everybody.

So even if they do a thousand, you know, million bets or whatever, and, you know, none of them really pay off as long as, in general, they continue to grow and hire more people.

And, I mean, Amazon has what, like a million people working for it now. Like, it's just like, it's insane. That is the, the organizing function of these, you know, massive organizations now. And that they can't take the, you know, their foot off the gas or else, you know, they sort of like, you know, lose momentum. They lose speed. They lose direction. They lose focus.

So to your point, these, I mean, it's sort of actually, think about a lot of the companies from like the 2000s that had these grandiose abstract, you know, gobbled. mission statements, you know, that didn't mean anything. Yeah, but Google set the template for that, and that's another thing that I said on that. No, you're saying that Google didn't have a mission statement that was clear? Oh, it was clear, but grandiose. You said grandiose. No, I'm saying, I'm saying like Accenture style, you know, kind of like, putting the world better, you know, clarity through, you know.

Don't be evil and organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible is grandiose. Okay, well, I'm saying something a little bit different, which is just that it feels like some of these companies reach a certain scale of success. I mean, you know, I guess I'm here about like Bosch or something. You know, they make anything from like, I don't know, military equipment to like washing machines or something.

Like they just kind of like have... I've been rewatching Michael Clayton recently. And so the U.Norse video where it's like, you Norse. I don't know if people know that movie, but anyway, yeah. A company that is changing the world by killing people with their weed killer or something. Right. Or like Nokia or something. Anyways, it does feel like companies get to a certain scale and size,

and then they become more amorphous, like a country or whatever. And they just have to kind of keep things moving and going. It's the way that we build kind of sports and games. It's like an infinite game. And so Google is engaged in the infinite game of organizing, the world's information and trying to index it. And part of the exhaust of that is that they do have periodically, pretty good products that come out,

whether it's YouTube, whether it's Google Maps. I mean, I do think that the services that they provide, what? Yes. No, they're fantastic. So I mean, I guess like what I think about it, and I don't know that this happened, but I would think that there would be some tech transfer between like what Stadia was doing

with AI or maybe not computer vision, but like the TPU usage. Because I'm trying to evaluate your original statement about what Stadia was for, which was to justify their cloud ambitions and their investment in all those, you know, basically building their own chips, right? So they have to have a sufficient amount of throughput to justify that investment. And so gaming is a great place to do that because it's super expensive to run those high-intensity games. Also now you're seeing more game-like interactions show up in places like Google Maps. So, for example, I think on the show today, you talked about how there's like this. this flyover view now where, you know, through this simulation that they run, they will show you what areas are likely to be crowded on a certain day that you're traveling or visiting some new

city. I mean, that's amazing. But the amount of math that's needed for that is the kind of stuff that you'd expect in video games. So it may be that Stadia ran its course, you know, provided its function. Again, I'm totally speculating and maybe these teams are completely separated. But to your original point about justifying the expense for cloud computing, gaming is a really, really good. good foundation for that. Yes, except for the fact that you're going to run away from it. And that's the knock-on effect. So then do you as an enterprise go to Google Cloud?

Do you as an enterprise go to Google Docs? Do you as a user do Google whatever? To finally step on the last thing that I would have used tomorrow is a friend of the show, Daniel Dash tweeted they needed the stadium name for a new messaging service. But that's the point. That's really good. So, okay, two things to wrap. I forgot to make the point that I was going to make about real quick.

And I'm going to say this and you don't have to comment unless you want to. When we started doing these shows, there was a whole bunch of, VC energy behind the creator economy. We're old enough to remember that. And then it got upended by Web 3 and crypto in what we now know is the bubble era. And to the degree that people hate what I do on this show, they hate the fact that it's like,

oh, you're just reporting on the way the winds are blowing in terms of where the energy is and investing. Starters and things like that. Isn't that your job? You have a daily show. That is my job. I want to make this point real quick. Don't you feel like AI is taking over?

Yes. And by that, I mean the folks, the folks that blow the wind in the sales of this is where, this is what's hot. This is where you should be doing startups. I swear to God, Chris. in the last month. Not to be cynical about it, but those folks,

man, are all of a sudden not talking about Web 3 as much anymore. Wait, wait, wait. Okay, when you say those folks, you'd be a little bit more specific. Who are the people who are no longer talking about Web 3 and are now talking about AI?

It's not been a full transition in the same way that fall isn't here yet in the Northeast. But the winds are changing. Okay. So, I can feel it. I'll flesh out. I'm talking about VCs. I'm talking about VC.

VC Twitter. Yeah, got it. So I will, I will, yes, I will support your premise and what you're observing. And the T leaves that, well, maybe the leaves are blowing. They haven't turned into T just yet. But certainly with OpenAI, you know, putting out, you know, obviously GPT3 has been out for a while. But now there's a number of nominal use cases and applications that are real. They're in the wild.

And the trading data, or just like the. the models just keep getting better. So, you know, whether it's like GitHub and autopilot or co-pilot, rather, you know, writing code for you. I mean, that is an amazing, amazing industrial application, you know, especially for like developers, right? So that's one very real thing. And can I jump on you real quick? Yeah. People in the Web 3 space would be like, well, you said people that are skeptical of our space would be like, well, there's no real use case yet.

There's no real use case yet for these things. They're just making pictures and stuff like that, except for the fact that I feel like there's tangible things. And startups are being founded right now. So let me keep going because I'm seeing more than what you're saying possibly, or at least things that are in this realm. Yes. Yeah. And I review. Like I would, I think that's a couple things, you know, happen here.

First, there's just, you know, the VC industry is very sort of fashion oriented, fashion driven. Like, whatever the thing that is. is fashionable that the big company, you know, or the like the Andrews and Horowitz's or whatever, you know, are investing in. Suddenly they're very excited, right? So Clubhouse, I think probably started the whole craze in the greater economy, you know, $400 million or whatever it was like some, you know, billion dollar valuation, you know, let's go chase and hunt some unicorns. Cool. You know, and now we're like, oh, actually the creator economy really doesn't pay that well. And, you know, yeah, there's a few people making some money, but it's, you know, power law

distribution. And so therefore, eh, it's never going to work out. Let's go, you know, do Web3 stuff because now we're going to like, you know, great new getkeepers. we control and that we own and we're going to have, you know, 90% board seats or whatever. And then, oh, the crypto thing. Oh, winter. He's here. Okay. Let's screw that. Let's go to something else. Oh, now it's like AI art. Now, this is actually very interesting for a number of reasons. You know, and we had, we had, is it, Jack on the show from Adobe, you know, talking about mid-journey, talking about Dolly, talking about number of those platforms. Like, the use of those applications, I mean, we started out with Deep Dream several years ago, which was actually a Google

like project and that got us to think differently about computer vision because now we're starting to see how the AI is actually interpreting the world. I need to share tomorrow on a long read. There's an article that I sent you that's like 10 years ago, the transition to the modern AI era happen and there's like a nice sort of history of how we got to here, which is very important. Well, yeah, just like with crypto, right? I mean, everything happened 10 years ago, and then now it's happening all at once.

So all of these kind of strands are coming together, and they're forming into something that I think is going to be completely transformational. And absolutely, people have been talking about this for a long time, but it takes a long time for people to build things that are tangible and that help people to understand what the reality of this is. So, for example, today, Meta put out this tool, I think you had it on the show, that allows you to essentially write a sentence, just like you would with, you know, know, mid-journey or Dolly or whatever and generate art, this is now generating, like, movies. So you just tell it what you want, and essentially it synthesizes all of the key frames, you know, that, like, creates, I mean, it's not a very good movie, but nonetheless, it's good enough that it's passable. And from a human perception perspective, it gets by. And this, like, it is terrifying because, you know, like last week, we also had the first case where someone

copyrighted, AI generated artwork. Now, granted, there was some transformation involved or whatever, and so the Copyright Office has said, look, we're not going to give copyright to an artificial intelligence algorithm, but if you take that work and then you modify it or you add some, you know, interpretation to it or something, that's cool. That's copyrightable.

Well, think about what that is going to do to the stock art industry. This is something that I believe Getty Images has just said that they're not going to allow AI art to be sold. All of these things have been on the show. Okay, so I'm just, I'm just synthesizing what you've been saying. Yes. And trying to put that together to say, look, you know, Adobe buying Figma for $20 billion is a significant look at the future of creativity.

And yet, we don't even know what's going to happen when you can take something like what Facebook launched today for creating videos and movies, and you apply that to the app space. Why can't I launch Figma? and pull up sort of a series-style interface and tell it what the screen is that I want it to design and then actually program it for me. Why do I have to do that work? We have the patterns.

The App Store is this amazing database of all these different variations and permutations of the types of apps that could exist that could be automatically written by software. So that is, I think, where we're going to go. And the type of thing that you're talking about means that the sort of high priestesses and priests of this era who know things about how to build software

suddenly become normal people because AI will actually do the work that those experts should do. And that's what we're not really ready for. As we, I think we said recently, or maybe the last time we actually did a space, like the idea is, and this might not bear out, but these are new instruments, and you need new artists that know how to get the sound out of that strativarius, right? So we shouldn't be, I mean, when I use the word terrifying, I just mean that it's, it is a brave new world that we were about to enter into. And we don't quite know how it's going to go. And there's going to be some people that are very afraid of those changes and who will, you know, reject them or fight back.

Then in other cases, there will be people who are very excited about those changes and will embrace them. And as you suggest, become the new artists or artisans that can dynamically work with these, you know, radically new systems to create amazing things that we haven't been able to see before. I mean, one example of this. And I didn't go to Burning Man this year, but a friend did. Everyone can cringe, you know, if they want to. But like, it's, it's, it's, anyways, the, the drone show this year apparently was like, you know, something that they'd never seen before. And now you're, you're mapping or matching kind of, you know, real world, you know, drone coordination, like drone swarm stuff, you know, with AI algorithms that are able to create these, you know, magnificent, enormous 3D structures without having to blow anything up. I mean, that's, that's the type of thing that I think we can be optimistic about seeing perhaps more of, um, where.

Whereas the other end of the spectrum could be quite dire. So we just don't know, but I think there's inevitability that people have really learned how to deploy these technologies in a way that's subtle and profound, and as the technology has also done, much better, more powerful, and easier for people to use. There's a prepper VC that I know that is like, we're on the cusp of three or four different things

that could completely upend society. and any one of them, I don't know what it means. But in this particular case, to bring it back to my original point of bringing up this topic is, I'm not being skeptical, crypto folks, but I am saying that I feel the wind's blowing in terms of, If you believe that what the VC Twitter blowing wind in your sales, I think they're changing to AI because they're getting a sense that there's... Are you suggesting then that people who used to maybe count on VC investment to run or power their crypto things? Okay, that'll be drying up, is what you're saying.

That's what I'm saying. Okay. Okay, last one real quick. Kindle, you and I, you don't have... have a remarkable two, but you, I do. I do actually. Oh, you bought one. I have one.

Yeah. Okay. Well, so, but you and I have used that, especially to share articles. Yes, you share me your notes and your, um, your scribbles and all those things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The new Kindle, um, the Kindle scribe. Kindle scribe is identical size. Yeah. Identical weight. Um, and listen, I'll say straight up and no, no one's paying me for this, but I, the remarkable, especially for doing the VC fund stuff that I've been doing, has been on, I couldn't live without it because otherwise I'd be walking around with different notebooks and different things that I scroll about it. Because if you think about it, even on a Zoom call, if you're typing, it's not, you're not engaged.

Especially if you're in person and you're typing on a laptop, you're not engaged. writing down on a thing, you can still be in the moment with someone and making notes and be like this and that and the other thing. Oh, this and that. I couldn't live without my Remarkable. I will say that what I don't like about the Remarkable is that it's not very integrated with things like Dropbox, one note, things like that. and also I have put books on The Remarkable, and I've read them, but the fact that now all the sudden I can put all of my Kindle library on there, like, it's crazy.

So I did pre-order. What are you thinking? I mean, this is, so I think this is a broader topic, and I think, you know, we can have this conversation next week. Like, just is about the degree to which it's almost impossible. it seems for like the tech ecosystem to to work properly from a competitive perspective. Because if Amazon is able to put out this scribe and essentially wipe out Remarkable, you know, Remarkable kind of had like two options.

Now, I don't know anything about, you know, their business or what they're going through and maybe they have a very strong user base. But like, how does Remarkable really like struggle through this? Like, you know what I mean? Their whole reason for being has just been co-opening. by Amazon putting out a competitive product that is only going to get better. And doing the one thing that I'm missing from their products. Right. Now, obviously, I don't know how good the Scribe technology will be,

and you'll have to report on that for us. And maybe it'll still be the case that the remarkable is still remarkable when it comes to making marks. But if it doesn't have that integration with your Kindle library, your book reading library, then that feels like that's a major loss. And so if you want to be writing on the same surface in which you're reading books, which, you know, I know Apple was hoping people would do with their iPads, but I just, I don't know, it hasn't really worked for me in that case. You know, it makes it really hard for a hardware startup, I think, to, you know,

succeed, you know, when someone like that is just going to come up and eat your lunch. And I'm thinking a lot about that, because I'll pre-hear the conversation a little bit, but, you know, about that when it comes to Peloton, you know, and what Apple is doing with Apple Fitness. and also like Apple Music. You know, I did. I went for the new AirPods Pro, brilliant, you know, solid upgrade. Wait, how much better is the noise canceling?

So I got to imagine for people who are in private places like New York, it's got to be amazing. I mean, I'm mostly right now, like around my home and house, but definitely, I would say it's at least 15 to 20 percent better, which is actually significant. It was good before, and now they've improved the algorithm so that it kind of cuts out. like shark noises or loud sounds i gotta say like you know when i grind my coffee in the morning when i'm listening to you know podcast now i can actually continue to listen while the grinder is going on so it's it's definitely improved that way um and also you know they have a feature that i thought should have been there from the beginning which is just the swipe to control volume you know that's what

this is the thing like in the same way i'm going to say this about the um the kindle uh scribe is well they're not going to this is a great device for um comic books, but it's not in color. Well, they'll give that to you two years from now. That's right. They can give it to you right now. They have comicsology. They have one of the major distribution platforms for digital comics.

But to the point of what you're saying is the ability to, with your finger, turn down the volume. Yes. Yes. Anyway, so AirPods Pro, you know, good. But my point, though, is actually that when you do the pairing of your AirPods Pro for the first time, you know, with your iPhone and your iOS device, it offers. you a six-month trial of Apple Music. And, you know, like, I'm sure a lot of people already have their music platform of choice, but I was thinking about it from, you know, like a young person's perspective.

Like, if I'm, you know, 15 or something and I've, you know, got my new AirPods or something, I may actually sign up for Apple Music in that moment. And that's the thing that's going to essentially hook me for life. So that integration into the operating system is an enormous competitive advantage that just over time, kind of gradually squeezes out companies like Spotify in a way that can be, you know, really deleterious to competition. So that's another angle of this that I'm looking at that's like, hmm, like, you know, if Amazon can come out and, you know, I don't know, completely undercut the remarkable, if Apple can come out and undercut Spotify, you know, this rich ecosystem, which, you know, we're always kind of lamenting is not as rich as it could be. I feel it could get a lot worse if we're not mindful of the way in which these platforms and companies are using their dominance to essentially takeover spaces that are in adjacency to what they're currently doing. Well, to end tonight, I think I've said this before, but I recently switched from Spotify to Apple Music for various reasons.

But one of the reasons why I'm probably locked in now is because my Spotify listening profile was killed by having kids. And so I was able to start fresh. And so I'm loving the fact that Apple's new music algorithm is trained on the fact that I love the jam and I love super furry animals and stuff like that. And like, uh, it's such an unfair advantage. You know, I'm totally with you.

I actually, and I don't know if you know this or if I've got to put it before, but I actually had to create a new. So I do subscribe to, uh, Spotify premium and I have a family account. And so there's, there's five of us and it's all under one plan.

And so because there's four of us, I created one more additional account to, because I use Sonos to play back music. Um, I use that fifth account as my sleep music account. Because essentially, all of my recommendations on Spotify were getting destroyed by listening to so much sleep music.

So I'm totally with you. And if you were to start a Spotify account fresh, you might find that actually it's quite, you know, quite good and quite delightful. One last thing that I don't know when this is going to happen. I think this is actually also a very big problem, is that especially Apple is moving towards like high-fi

and high-quality streaming like Dolby Atmos. And actually you had a comment on your show about how Google is developing a new codec that's meant to be essentially like the open source equivalent or something of the Dolby's format, the Atmos format. And that too becomes a form of lock-in because from a power dynamics perspective, if the AirPods Pro can deliver the Dolby Atmos sound from Apple Music more efficiently than, say, Spotify, and if Spotify never, I don't know when they're going to come out with their Spotify, hi-fi, it's supposedly in the product, but it hasn't really been out there.

And Sonos has it too, because there's all this remastering that's going on behind the scenes to essentially level up the quality of music that's being streamed. that also will become a differentiator for these platforms. It's like that, what is it? HED, what's the Apple format? Yeah, HEVC is one of them. And then HEIC is for, yeah, this video. And yeah, so anyway, like all of those proprietary formats, you know, same as it ever was.

Same as it ever was. All right, we got to wrap. But good to be back. Yes, I love everybody. I especially love people in Lee County and Charlotte County, Florida right now. My peeps where I grew up. I also, you know, I'm going to give a shout out to, you know, our friends on the right side of history in Russia. I've got some colleagues over there who have had to escape, you know, because it's real.

Good. So. Yeah. Glad you got out. Yeah. I love everyone. God bless everyone. Chris, it's been a long time since we've spoken.

The longest we've done in two years. Cheers, yeah. All right. I'm happy to be back. All right, guys. Later. Thanks. Bye.