Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) The Top 10 Tech Stories Of 2021 (And The Spatial Pivot)

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

First we talk to the Spatial folks about pivoting in Web3. Then, the top tech stories of the year, as picked by you. Sponsors: Dataiku.com FindYourFidelity.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 tech meme ride home experience for Wednesday, December 15th, 2021. I don't know if this is going to be the last tech meme ride home experience of the year. But certainly it's the one in which we are going to culminate things and give you kind of like an overview of some of the top tech stories as chosen by you and chosen by me and Brian.

But before we get there, let's see, do we want to bring up the special guys first or Brian? Did you want to like chat? I don't have. I don't have any. Do you want to just dive right in? Go. Let's go. Well, you know, one thing that I will say, as many listeners probably know, I've been deeply red-pilled, I think.

I forget the colors at this point. It's so, I'm like weeks in now. I took them all, right? It took multiples of each. And there's been so much happening in the NFT Web3 world. I don't know if everyone is just trying to get everything done before they go on vacation before the end of the year. whatever it is, but we had like the Pepsi mic drop thing, which was kind of a debacle,

and then we've had a few other drops since then. We had Nike acquiring artifact studios, which Brian mentioned. So there's been a lot of, I guess, new stuff coming out. There's been acquisitions for both talent and for tech. There's been new products and new platforms and picks and shovels coming into the space. But one of the things that kind of brings a number of the topics that we've talked about on the show together is the launch of spatial. And spatial, actually, it's sort of funny how this all came together. I forget even, I don't know, I worked with Anand at Google, actually, and he unfortunately is not here right now, but we've got his, I don't know what to call you guys, like his

his shit shooters. His life, exactly. His internet shit shooters to come at his BS to tell us about their recent. launch. So they had reached out to me for their product hunt launch. But meanwhile to me, they were launching this whole sort of like pivot into the metaverse. They've been in the metaverse for a long time, but really shifting towards Web3, towards NFTs, towards all this other stuff. And it's been, I would say, a long time in coming. So we wanted to bring them on here, you know, one, to congratulate you guys about your launch. And then two, to kind of get your

perspective on what has been going on in the space and what you take away, I guess, from like this year. But before we do that, how about you guys introduce yourselves? Tell us who you are, your names, maybe a little bit of background very quickly, and then we'll talk about what you guys launched. I love it. Jake, you want to kick us off? Yeah, let's go. Sorry, everybody. Jake Steinerman, I am the director of Community at Spatial. I've been in the XR space for about 10 years, working actually in enterprise and on AR software for a bit and join the Spatial Team in the last year. So it's to be here talking about NFTs and Web3 is like crazy, exciting and not where I expected to be if you asked me a year ago. So it's like to be here.

I love it. And just to make things even more confusing, I am Jacob Lowenstein, somewhat similar names. So I'm Spatial's head of business. So I run like our marketing partnerships and growth. It was spatial for about three years, was an investor at Samsung before that, and kind of got into the metaversey sort of world when I was a grad student at MIT, founded the hackathon over at the Media Lab and some other cool stuff. Also have the honor of being on a panel with Alex Atala from OpenC in 2018,

where I said something like, quote, I don't understand why collectibles have to be decentralized. NFTs are never going to happen. So, yeah, I was super wrong, and that was three years ago. So you should believe absolutely nothing I say. You know, the best advocates for things are those who have all the haterade

and say no to the thing, and then eventually get into the space and I'd like, this is amazing. It truly was, like, my eyes were open, because I remember, like, thinking about this in 2018, and I was kind of like, oh, it's kind of cool, but this is sort of like, you know, the economics I'm seeing in games,

And then there's blockchain underneath it, but there's so many problems that need to be worked out. And, like, you know, who's not going to trust a big centralized tech company? Like, why does this have to be decentralized? And then apparently a lot can happen in three years, that very big cultural shifts. And then suddenly you wake up and you're like, oh, I kind of, I get it now. It's actually very good that this stuff is decentralized. So, you know, it took me a little time to learn, but we got there. Nice.

And I'm Tyrone Webb. I'm the community evangelist for Spatial. I'm an artist that my life was changed using spatial, and now I'm working with them to bring as many creatives on board as possible. I'd love to have everyone experience some of the same things I did by using spatial to show off my art and what I do. So I like to say I own a global art gallery because of spatial. That's awesome. And how recently did you get involved with these guys? Well, I've been using spatial since March, but as they progressed, the most wonderful thing about it,

It was the fact that every time I as an artist did something in the space before it was meant for artists, I would say to them, hey, you should do this and you should do this. And they were so quick to turn around and give it. And then that's when I started showing it to friends that were artists. And before you know it, you know, it was maybe what October is when I actually officially started working for spatial. But I've been working with them since March. It was a no-brainer. Chris, can I give just a little bit of context here for whenever people are listening? because I might put this out next week or this weekend. I don't know. So just to be clear,

the story that I did about Spatial and their pivot was the Tuesday, December 14th episode, I think the second half of the show. But that's a good way to tee it up. So am I right in understanding? I'm actually reading my words from the script yesterday. That Spatial was originally designed to be an AR or VR or something startup, but targeting the enterprise, right? So the thing that I always say where, well, eventually everybody on the factory floor is going to be wearing headsets. Everyone on a construction site is going to be wearing headsets. Is that what you guys were doing originally? Yes. So it's a funny story. Let me tell you what happened. So spatial kind of started off, you know, and, and Chris

knows Onan for a little while, like, Spatial kind of started off as almost like a little lab. Like, you know, Anin and Jinha are two super dope designers. Onan sold his last company to Google. Jinha was at MIT and then was a lead designer at Samsung. And they were both just trying to figure out, like, if you

remember, like, back in 2015, 2016, like, there was a lot of excitement about VR and AR, but, you know, if people ask the question, like, well, what do you actually use this for? It was like a pretty hard thing to answer. Like, people were excited. They thought it was cool, weren't really sure where the utility was. And so they just did like a ton of experiments trying to figure out like where is this really going to add value to people's lives

relative to like the next best thing, which may not even be in VR and AR. And at the end of 2018, like they basically came out with their first product, which was an enterprise collaboration solution. So this was like before COVID, but the idea was, hey, like really big companies. And If you think about this, this was like the time that like WeWork was getting really popular too. I can't believe I'm talking about this. Like this was so long ago. COVID really messes with like my perception of time.

But 2018 in the land before time, there was this whole big thing where big companies were really struggling because their workforces were getting increasingly distributed and people were miserable when they were remote and having to do all their work over video conference. And so using the original

Microsoft HoloLens Spatial built essentially like an alpha product where people could create lifelike avatars from a selfie using machine learning and then work together as if they were literally in the same room. And it was truly the coolest shit you've ever seen. You would literally be wearing this headset

that was unbelievably uncontrable, but while you were wearing it, you really felt like a bunch of people were in the room with you. And that took us on a pretty wild ride. We ended up getting on stage with Saki and Adela for the long launch of the Microsoft Hollins 2 in 2019, and we really dove in, particularly on the augmented

reality side. And like we closed big deals. You know, we had some really big customers, like Pfizer and Nestle and these kind of like big fortune on thousands that all had distributed workforces. And then COVID hit. And that was when things kind of started to change. Because what basically happened was like the supply chain for headsets got really disrupted. And by that time, we had also launched in VR, but not a lot of people had headsets yet, and a lot of people were really intrigued by the idea of, like, working together and feeling like they were in the same room, but they didn't really want to put on a headset. And so we kind of, as an experiment, put out web and mobile versions of spatial.

So the mobile came out like second half of 2020. Web came out in 2021. and at the beginning of 2021, 60% of our usage was VR, and now 80% of our usage is on web and mobile. So basically, like, once people got the chance to use, you know, have this kind of immersive experience without the headset, they were just like, man, this is so convenient. I really just want to click a link and jump in here on my existing device.

So that was like the first big change. And then the second really big change was once people started really using us in web and mobile, this huge shift happened where, like, It stopped being really like enterprises knocking at our door. And suddenly, like, artists just kind of found them, found their way to the platform organically. We're still not totally sure how. It started with this amazing artist just seen,

and he creates this series, this character, Elex, and he's a big artist. And then Federico Kloppist, this really big NFT sculpture artist, and Harlan Perez were kind of the next two that followed. And they started posting these, like, ateliers they made in Spatial, because you can upload a custom environment. And suddenly, like, we went a little viral, and our usage just like totally swung in the other direction. And like once the swing started, like it just became really obvious that like we had

accidentally invented this thing that was way more useful for this other use case. And so finally, literally two days ago, we like made the, we call it an evolution. We don't use the cough, cough keyword, but our evolution really was to take the platform and broaden it and focus it more on creators because we found that. being able to create really beautiful, immersive experiences around their art and around their content allowed them to build community that was really tight and allowed them to sell their works much more easily. And so that's like the maybe like long and short version of how we went from like helping pharmaceutical companies to being an NFT art platform.

That's, I mean, what a journey. And in somebody, I think what's so interesting about what you guys are doing is how you're both like riding all of these different waves and being able to move so quickly with the development of the technology, whether it's VR or AR or whether it's NFTs or the rest, and trying to sort of, you know, make sense from a product perspective of, you know, what do people actually want in this space? And it feels like you guys are probably trotting on, you know, familiar ground for at least people, let's say, you know, in meta or, you know, certainly in the HoloLens world. And I guess what I'm wondering about, you said something about artists and community. And so I'm curious if you could unpack that and how that is actually going. Because one of things that I've noticed in getting involved in more and more NFT drops, is the need to one either be on Discord constantly,

which on the one hand is efficient, but isn't very engaging or doesn't it leave you with a sense of what VR or those metaverse spaces are supposed to provide is more of a sense of presence. So on the one hand, you're in Discord with all this cacophony going on and all this stuff that's hard to follow, whereas when you bring spatial connection to it, virtual, spatial presence, now suddenly you have a sense for how many people are there, what they're doing, and how they're connecting. So I'd love to understand more about how artists are connecting with their community in spatial. And then, like, is the hard thing really about distribution? Like, why is Facebook, or why does Facebook seem so convinced about Horizon workplaces and where that's going? It just, it feels like you guys would be able to give us some insights about what's going on in the rest of the industry as well.

Jake, Jake, why don't end Tyrone, why don't you speak to the community piece? And then I'll follow up on, like, the Facebook Horizon piece at the end there. Yeah, it's been super interesting. to be in discords. I mean, when we, you know, started our community online, you know, early 2020 was on Slack. And now we're actually, you know, sunsitting our Slack and moving entirely to our Discord. But I think it's, we're trying to, you know, balance this path of having, if you were in our Twitter spaces earlier today, we actually were doing half of it in spatial itself and half of it in Twitter spaces. at the same time, you're having people talking about. It was very disorienting. There was like a periscope thing that popped up and the Twitter mobile app for when I was in the spatial space.

And by the way, for people who still don't have an idea for what spatial looks like, it is very much like sort of a second life experience. You know, with like, well, at least in this case, you have no legs, avatars, and you're in just a virtual world, and you can move around and you can talk and you can clap and you can interact with art pieces and put stuff up. But it's largely in the browser, and it's actually quite performant. So continue. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, we'll try and pin a tweet up there so people can see it. But yeah, it was fascinating. We had, like, people in Spatial itself in our public park, which we just launched, people in Twitter spaces. And we were live streaming out. Also, so people who were in Twitter spaces who didn't jump into the web, you know, to spatial in all the different platforms were on could see what was happening. And then people in the Discord when the drop happened talking about the drop all at the same time.

So from like a community management perspective, like definitely gets like pretty. crazy. But I think what's interesting you don't get out of something like Discord is more of that sense of community. And I feel it's a little less overwhelming when like you can find people in a space. Maybe you're at an art gallery that you find interesting like someone else. And you're talking to someone more on one-on-one versus Discord can definitely feel pretty overwhelming, like crazy overwhelming, especially when you're in a lot of servers. So sometimes, you know, we sometimes see ourselves is almost like a 3D discord of sorts. But with the ability to have like portals to pop between different, you know,

community lobbies and things like that. So even some of these discord communities are starting to pop up with their like spatial lobby, basically. And they can have, you know, people, other artists or whoever in that community can drop in portals to their own galleries and start to build like their own like mini metaverse for like lack of a better term. But it's, it's definitely been. pretty crazy.

And Tyrone, I mean, you're in a lot of the different discords kind of, you've been plugged into these communities for a long time. Yeah. I would definitely break it down as to how community becomes the conversation we have when we talk about NFTs

and we talk about being artists now because it's significantly different than I thought it would be. So I was a traditional gallery artist, right? And I started out doing that work to put in galleries and when I encounter spatial, I had the opportunity to hang my work in infinite wall space, right? What mediums were you using as a traditional?

I used spray paint. Okay, cool. Yes. So what it came down to is I have this infinite wall space that I can hang my art up in. And then I started learning about NFTs. So the idea was, okay, I have all these really great images of my work. Let me put them together in a collection, do the whole open sea thing. But then I was without any community.

It was just an artist trying to navigate the space. And then what I found is that by utilizing spatial, I could go into Twitter spaces and tell other people about the spatial and send them into my gallery. And then at the same time in these Twitter space communities, I was able to tell them my story because they asked. And it was really nice. You know, when we talk about dropping alpha, a lot of times it's positive experiences that people are having. And I just started telling my story. And then I woke up two days later and, you know, one of my pieces that sold. And I was the first person to sell a piece of art out of a spatial gallery.

Then after that, then after that, it was 19 more sold that day. Wow. And it changed my life, right? From that moment, I suddenly didn't have to worry as much. But what I realized is I was be, not necessarily beholden, but I found myself going back into that Twitter space and spending it. And I still hang out with the same people every day if I can. And so from that point, I realized that there was this group that was willing to lift up

creatives and then I was able to point them in the spatial and suddenly everybody's putting together their spots because it isn't just for artists, it's also for collectors. All these people are spending lots of money on these things that they cover greatly. Now they have a space they can go and put them in and invite people in and show off what they got. So that was huge. So as I progressed from that point, it was like, well, let me get into Discord because there's other places where communities happening. And then you realize you're part of an NFT group and you buy into something and boy, People are just going. I'm part of Bears Deluxe.

You can see from my PFP, probably one of the best discords I've ever seen. So community unto itself is just about being able to help each other to progress within this space. I mean, you're going to have all different use cases. But as far as I'm concerned, there are so many creatives out there that could use this extra wall space. So that became my job is reaching out and bringing them in. And the projects as well, too, right? They all have roadmaps. So now we want to add spatial to their roadmaps.

So, okay, we've got a few more minutes, and I want to understand a bit about, I guess, like, the roadmap for spatial. You know, I think it's what you're saying is so useful in kind of understanding, like, the artist's journey as it has changed and morphed in 2021. Like, it just, it feels like this was like a watershed year for, especially like visual artists to be able to find and connect with an internet community that actually wants to buy their work. And so rather than being restricted to, um, you know, a certain geographic coordinate where you can put up your art physically or having to do gallery shows where you're, you know, traipsing your art all over the place or going to museums. Now literally, of course, people all over the world can find your art and can become patrons in a, well, in a way that really the internet, you know, enables and provides. One of the things you said, though, is that you're hoping, or I guess thinking that spatial becomes one of the places where you might want to exhibit. But I'm imagining and starting to see that there are a few different competitive kind of gallery environments that are being created in this moment.

And one of the things that I'm trying to understand is, you know, is the idea that spatial becomes the one and only sort of like Facebook of, you know, are NFTs for this next era? Or will spatial be part of the metaverse, as it's been described, with interoperability and the ability to go from, you know, one spatial portal to, um, uh, like the viviverse or some other place like that that also offers a three-dimensional immersive art gallery experience this is like the question and an amazing question so i'm going to give you a couple of like important and you know you guys might not know but yeah like what are your thoughts about this but what are the things that are blocking this and enabling this so first off like we believe as a like mantra like literally like write it on the wall, get it tattooed, like, in an open and interoperable metaverse.

We think there's a fundamental change happening in the internet that is structurally about moving away from centralization and aggregation and gatekeeping towards a world that is far more creator-owned and creator-friendly. And that, by definition, means that, like, spatial to fulfill its mission needs to be investing resources in being interoperable. and super friendly with other platforms out there. So like when you, you know, we're using the word like competitors, like we don't, we don't see anyone as a competitor. So like if people talk about cyber or crypto voxels or or decentraland, like these are just

amazing other platforms that we also love to spend time on. And we just think everyone does a different piece of this really, really well, right? And so like for us, I think where we're really, really focused is like, you know, we have a pretty pretty good design background. We're really good at UX. like Peter, our head of design Google Hangouts, and I talked about before. So I think that what Spatial is going to be really good at

is being a really, really good entry point into the Metaverse. For people that have no idea what they're doing, the goal for Spatial is that you can get into the metaverse in one click. It should be insanely easy, and then you should be able to start participating in a type of eye-popping or mind-blowing experience

right away and it should all just work like in the browser on mobile because those are the devices people have. And like that's what we're going for. That being said like we are in active conversations with other platforms about enabling things like deep linking to other platforms so you could be in

spatial and create a portal to crypto voxels or Somnium or whatever it is and like that should be really really easy. And if it's not we think that's just bad as like a principle because we want this to be good for users. and good for creators and why would we interfere with what will ultimately be better for your user experience? The second way this has manifested, like very actively in our roadmap is what you see today.

So, for example, today we did our first NFT drop of a 3D environment with utility. This is another area where we differ with some of our other peers. Some of our peers, for example, like sell land. They just sell like plots of land and it's like, you know, there's not inherent utility. to that land up front, you kind of have to like build on it. We don't do that because like, again, like the user we're really focused on are people that, you know, don't want to go and build something from scratch, but want something that have utility built in. And so today we did an auction of a gallery space called Museo that from the get go people could buy and immediately start populating it with

their art and then immediately start inviting people in to, to check it out in exhibition form. And the really cool thing about this drop is that like the 3D file is stored on all. our weave, all the metadata is on chain. So like, if spatial dies tomorrow, like that asset is yours. And even today, you could take that 3D asset and put in whatever platform you want, like, we are not stopping you from doing that. So we are like all in on really making this decentralized and putting the power and the buyer and the creator to go and do what they want with this. And so like, that's the state of things today. Like where things are going, like there are problems to be solved to enable the interoperable metaverse, some very serious ones.

I would say like probably the two most obvious that we're like trying to get on sort of working groups going to help standardize some of this. But I would say like avatars and computing power are two really hot topics or identity in computing power. Identity in the sense that like, you know, if I create an identity, I want to be able to take that identity to whatever metaverse, right? I don't want to have to create like a separate avatar profile, whatever on every different metaverse. I mean, just frankly, it's a really big pain in the ass. And right now, like, some platforms have their own, you know, identity components.

Some use some, like, unified ones. Like, there's a great company out there, Ready Player Me, who we really like that has, they're integrated with a bunch of different platforms. And we have our own right now. But I think we want to move away from that next year to something that's more integrated with other platforms. And then the second thing is just computing power. Like a lot of other platforms use, you know, like voxillated graphics.

everything kind of looks like it's sort of like the Lego movie. We don't. So, like, our approach is that things are really, you know, high-end and, you know, quite beautiful aesthetically. There's nothing wrong with Oxalated Graphics. It's its own really cool aesthetic. But, like, the appeal of oxalated graphics is that, like, it makes it a lot easier to render 3D stuff.

So, like, an environment that you buy that's optimized for spatial, just from a, like, logistical standpoint, may not be able to be uploaded to another platform because it just doesn't support that format or like it's it's not ready to render something of that size. So we got to get unified standards. We need some, I think some middleware that helps convert files and make it really easy to bring one, you know, file into another and we need some type of unified identity.

But I'll say that like spatial is super active on all fronts and trying to push them forward. And that's how we believe the metaverse should be. And one other thing I should note is that the other thing that makes us a little different that some of our peers is that we're social, like synchronously social. So you could hang out with like 50 people in a spatial room that you buy. It's not a single player experience, and that's an area where we're really going to invest moving forward. So I know that was like a speech, I'll shut up, but hopefully that answers. Actually, that was very helpful.

You know, it's funny. One of the things that I was thinking about, you have this, this feels a little bit like legacy from where you guys came from in terms of being like an enterprise tool. And I think this will be the last question that I am curious to get your thoughts on before we shift into the top tech stories. But like the spatial that was targeted at enterprise is either presumed or at least started with the notion that you would create this, you know, kind of version of yourself, this digital doppelganger,

by taking a selfie. And then that selfie would be placed onto a 3D model or 3D mesh. And then you would sort of express your, yourself with a pretty accurate depiction of yourself, or at least, you know, aspirationaly. Mine kind of looks like, you know, a repo man or something. So, you know. No, you look great. You should see it. It's not great. Anyways, my point though is both the kind of, I don't know, Metaverse at large and more broadly

like the NFT community space has a lot more, I think, support for anonymity, pseudonymity, and for alternative ways of expressing yourself through, you know, non kind of IRL, you know, baselines. So I guess my question is kind of about that. You know, you're talking about how you want to be interoperable, and you want people to be able to express themselves and identity and representation and signing in once or having one or multiple wallets to represent all the different both facets of you in your life and your personality and your collections may be important and necessary, but also from an on-ramp perspective, this gets pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. So if you guys were to peer into your 3D crystal ball and think about, you know, 2022, what are you imagining is going to happen from a consumer adoption perspective?

Like, what are the things that are really blocking that and what's going to change in the environment that's going to really open this up, you know, presuming you guys just pivoted your business in this direction, that's going to make it much more accessible to a broader audience. And then we'll get into the big stories of 2021. Oh, man, that is such a good question. I think, like, there are a couple of big trends, I think, happening right now. So I think one is we really do believe the, like, on ramp to the metaverse is on web and mobile. And so I think that, like, VR adoption will continue an evolutionary fashion, but I don't see it as, like, in 2022, a meaningful factor.

Okay. I think that, I think that, like, the adoption of NFTs is going to get broader, not just in terms of art and collectibles and other things it's used for. but we're also starting to see demand, much more demand for things like using NFTs for ticketing and gating of certain spaces. And I think that like the coin-basedification of it, which is I think probably some people think has good aspects of it and some people are more critical of it.

Do you mean specifically about Coinbase or do you mean how Coinbase has made crypto easier for many more people? Awesome. So it's both. So I think literally like the fact that Coinbase has such a huge user base and are getting into this from a marketplace perspective, I think is going to open this up vastly to a much wider audience. Sorry, this is, I think, an important point because OpenC is sort of like the

Coinbase of NFTs currently, but Coinbase is currently or about to launch their own NFT marketplace, as well as incorporate NFTs into their browser extension. So, like, I know like I'm asking sort of broadly about where this goes next, but in terms of competitive energies in the space, I'm curious about your perception, between OpenC and Coinbase, given the need to sort of or have the coinbasification of NFTs and all this Metaverse stuff. I think, I mean, so first off, shout out to OpenC, great partner, but I also, like, I think we'll speak just like thinking out loud. I think like everyone, I think everyone is providing a different utility and kind of coming out this a different way.

I think like undoubtedly Coinbase is going to put competitive pressure on OpenC. And I think they're going to do that in two ways, as my guess. One is because, like, you can already see that they're very aggressively courting some, like, awesome projects onto the platform that I think are going to be very popular. And number two is I think the onboarding process for Coinbase, it will just be easier because people are already on the platform.

Yeah. And they don't need to use that. I mean, again, we, like, love Metamask, but, like, for your average person, it's not necessarily, like, it takes a somewhat savvy person, I would say to like get on to OpenC. It's an amazing platform. But like if I told my parents, hey, go buy an NFT, I'm not sure they'd be able to figure it out.

But I think they could probably figure out Coinbase. Now like that being said, like OpenC is making incredible strides every day with improving their platform. So I think it's just going to be net good for consumers to have them pushing each other. And at the same time, like there are other platforms that look in OpenC and even say like OpenC is like to, you know, they think of OpenC almost like a Coinbase in it of itself. And they think things should be more decentralized. and, you know, more hardcore.

So I think that a lot of these platforms will probably coexist. I think the thing about the metaverse is, like, I very strongly believe that, like, it by definition cannot be like a winner take all because there are like important communities that hold a lot of power that, like, genuinely will resist it. And I think like they're influential and will point people in different directions.

And so I think Coinbase will have a big role to play, but I think OpenC will continue to as well. And I think like our, goal is to sort of, I think, the interoperable with both, which is to say, like, if you're a bit more savvy and you're coming from OpenC, then great, like, use Benamask and, you know, bring your NFTs into Spatial that way. And if, you know, you have your NFTs stored in, like, a custodial wallet, via Coinbase, like, it should be easy to bring those into spatial as well. And I think, like, that will ultimately be good for both companies, and I think good for consumers

who will be able to sort of, like, pick whichever solution fits them the most. Because there are going to be people that don't want to use Coinbase because they ask for too much identifying information, and they don't trust Coinbase to manage their assets. And for all sorts of, I think, justified reasons that motivate decentralization in the first place. So that's why I don't see Coinbase being an open-sea killer, just an alternative. Awesome. Well, Jake, Jacob, is it Taylor? Tyrone. I'm sorry, going by, huh? Tyrone. Tyrone. Because your fine spray paint art currently to me. I want to thank you guys for coming. You're more than welcome to stick around.

I'd actually love to get some of your perspectives on some of the things we're going to talk about. Before I make that transition, though, I just want to, what are the best places for people to both follow you and then also learn more about spatial? Jake, what are the best places? I don't know. What are they? Oh, yeah, the Discord. I mean, we definitely encourage you to join our Discord, like all good projects these days. What's the link?

Discord.g.g slash spatial. You can also just search Spatial within Discord. We're in the directory there. Follow us on Twitter. And we also, if you want to learn more and see visuals of what Spatial looks like, I put a tweet at the top that's got the live stream from earlier, so you can see what was going to do. But we just relaunch your new website, which is awesome.

And then you can just use Spatial for free. So just go to Spatial.io. Yeah, it's actually, it's cool. Like I got in, I set it up. I pinned a tweet where you can see that I'm able to grab my NFTs from my wallet and start putting them into my own little room. And so hopefully I'll set that up and then invite you guys in. You can check it out. Any other resources or places that people should know about?

Yeah, one more super important thing to say, which is, so our second NFT drop is happening tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern. If you go to spatial.com. Scroll down like just a half click. you'll see it's called Bozo Island it is an incredible incredible space you could use it as gallery exhibition space community space only 64 editions are going to be available from Renaud Futterer an incredible artist and so that will go that will start minting tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern and Museo which went out today sold out in 13 minutes so if you're interested definitely try and get on that pretty quickly because there seems to be

be a lot of interest in these spaces, particularly because there's so much utility behind them, and you can use them to host these amazing events. So spatial.io, and you'll find a link on our website to get to Bozo Island, 5 p.m. tomorrow. Awesome. Eastern. 2 p.m. Congrats on the lunch. Congrats on the product on launch.

And for the drop today and all the stuff you guys have going on. As I said, thank you. Thank you so much for the love, man. And thanks for hunting us. You're amazing. And thanks for hosting such a kick-ass Twitter. space. This is going to be super interesting. Definitely going to stick around for a bit. Good. Thank you. All right, Brian, you want to tee this up and bring up our first guest?

Yeah. So I, obviously, we solicited folks for ideas of what the biggest tech story is of the year of 2021, where I've got some ideas. I know Chris has some ideas, but I see at least two people in the room that actually sent in submissions over the air table ahead of time. and in order to mix things up a bit, Chris O'Brien is in the room, and his question was about something on a different topic. So let's start there. I'm sure we will come back to Web3 and NFTs and crypto and all that. But Chris, what do you think was the biggest tech story of the year? Hey, how's it going?

So I think the thing that's going to be sending ripples for not just this year, but at least a year to 18, 24 months out is got to be supply chain stuff. And, you know, like the whole like ever given getting stuck and us all nihilistically laughing at it until it bit us in the butt. Until your stuff didn't show up. Yeah. And yeah. So like I work in enterprise slash carrier IT. I'm a network engineer.

And we, you know, I've been in the industry for 20-ish years. So I've seen a couple of waves of, I lived through the dot com crash and like the fallout from that. And I lived through the fallout of the 0809 crash. So I've like, you know, I've experienced these waves of, of, you know, like deferred maintenance on, you know, on running these gigantic networks. And we were, where I work currently, we were, you know, suffering from that. And we were like just about to like make a serious push. We we did a round of of equipment renewal during the pandemic when we had the opportunity to. And we were about to do another serious round and come to find out now we can't get any equipment.

And it's it's going to be a serious issue for, you know, carrier grade networks, enterprise networks for some time to come. There's just the chip shortages are so. so backed up now that it's it's it's going to be uh i think it's going to seriously hamper a lot of uh innovation potentially even even for large scale networks there's just so little product out there no one can get their hands on anything yeah see one way to look at this is that this is you know a story that goes beyond tech you know the fact that oh certainly you know there's book shortages and things like that um but i think to frame it from a tech perspective is one of the things that this does is, you know, for the last

20 years, the idea that, I mean, you know, things like Moore's Law and, you know, once things reach scale, any product reaches scale, especially a hardware product, eventually the prices come down and things like that. That's all built on this idea of the abundance of gadgetry and all of the, you know, fundamental things that go into making gadgets. And that's something that at least for the last 20 years, especially since, you know, Tim Cook invented the modern supply chain, especially when it comes to electronics and tech stuff, that it was always available. And so when you see things like, well, of course, you know, self-driving cars are going to become a thing. But if, you know, Ford can't get chips to make

your average sedan right now, right? Well, they don't make sedans, but yeah. Well, there you go. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That shows my ignorance about it. Yeah, exactly. But the idea being that, and you know these discussions are happening at all levels where it's not just that countries are like, well, we need to have manufacturing on our shores, especially when it comes to the silicon industry and things like that. But also, you know that anybody and Apple, you know, all the way down to like you're saying, you know, telecom companies and carriers and even startups or whatever, you is, the question is, is this the new normal, right? Was the last 20 years sort of a thing that was too good to last? Should we assume? Yeah, I definitely think so. Okay, you know what? I've been,

I've been fompering for a lot. So tell me, just based on that, do you think that this is the new normal that we can no longer assume that, I mean, okay, one more thing, and then my fomfering's done. You know, we've talked on the show about, like, what happens if China invades Taiwan or whatever, like, we wouldn't have new smartphones for years or something. But that doesn't even have to happen. You could have a bad typhoon, and you wouldn't have smartphones for a couple years, right? It happened with RAM and early 2010 or something, right? So, okay, to that question, how are people like you thinking about it? Like, is it a question of we have to reframe our expectations of what normal is now? Yeah, I mean, we're at the, you know, I deal with like enterprise-grade hardware, and we're completely at the whim of whatever they can produce. I think I've been of the mindset of the belief that the whole just-in-time ordering thing, while it made some economic sense for the bottom line of these companies

that do everything they do to scratch out every last cent on the bottom line, never made from a technological perspective any sense. Like, you know, if I have a project that I need to scale up, you know, a lot of it is just project planning in the end and, you know, you build into your timelines of any project that you're going to roll out, you know, okay, well, it's going to take me X amount of week,

to even dream about getting equipment in which you know in the past was could could be honestly a couple of months and you start to build those into your time scales of like okay you plan out your year in advance or whatever and you know plan out when you need to order stuff but I think you know I think there's going to be a huge shift in the way equipment's going to be manufactured quite honestly I I this this exposed so much You know, like, you know, like this, there's going to be a point where, like, you know, someone has like a real issue in like a carrier grade network.

And they only stock so much of their own, you know, only spare so much of their own equipment out, you know, because you can't carry equipment that's not being realized on the bottom line in an enterprise network necessarily. Right. So, you know, you can, you can have some stock, you know, backlogged somewhere. There's like real issues that I think, like, even bigger networks than that I run are going to start realizing, like, we can't operate this way. If I, you know, if I can't get new equipment to build out, you know, a new data center that, like, I have to build something out. And I can't get equipment for half a year. It's not going to be tenable.

And I think as we start to see, you know, these new talk about new chip fabs popping up. onshore, I think we're going to start hearing about, I'm hoping, I don't know, you know, I don't know anything, but I'm hoping we're going to start to hear that, you know, maybe this idea of just in time manufacturing was, you know, maybe too good to be true. Right. Or, or designed for a different world, and that's what we're realizing. Because what I would point out is, you know, this isn't June of last year. This isn't even 12 months ago. You know, we're approaching two years into the pandemic. and it's really biting now, and it's still biting, and it's almost biting the hardest right now. And when you talk to people about this, oh, this isn't going to get fixed for another two years or more, right?

So it's not just that a pandemic happened. It's just that the pandemic sort of revealed sort of the fragility in the system. Yeah, and then like the wave is really crashing now with a lot of this stuff. you know in the last couple of months you've been hearing you know about chip shortages and you know the automotive industry in the last couple of months and and and you know in the tech world too and it's like really like the crunch is really on now which is kind of interesting that you know there's been all these waves of of different you know there was toilet paper and there was you know soap and there was you know hands sanitizer and masks and it was interesting that

they all hit in different times and for whatever reason we must have just fully exhausted whatever chip fabs had kind of backlogged in recent times because it's gotten really bad now and the timelines are just pushing out out and out at this point. Like if I order

stuff right now, it's like it almost doesn't make sense because like there's a possibility I won't receive it in the same fiscal year that I bought it in which is like, you know, an accounting nightmare, right? So it's like it's going to cause havoc not just on

not being able to receive equipment, but like it's going to start causing even accounting issues, which it's going to be a headache for someone else, you know. It sounds like 2022 is not going to be great when it comes to, like, it feels like there's been a lot of, um, kind of like optimism, you know, especially when it comes to talking about inflation and stuff like that, that it's going to just like get better or these are temporary things. It's like, oh, you know, the pandemic is like almost over. It's like, hmm, these things are all on their own timelines. And it feels like the supply chain thing,

it is like an EMP that's like gone off. And we're still feeling kind of like the waves. Shock waves of it. Yeah, the shock waves afterwards. So it sounds like it's not going to get that much better in 2022. I wanted to bring up Jeremy, actually, to talk about another thing that's going on as well, that's been disruptive, I suppose, or maybe it's adjusting. I'm not quite sure.

You know, there are a number of R words that have been used to describe what's going on in the labor economy this year, whether it's the resignation, the reconsideration, whatever other words there might be. But there's also kind of like the re-articulation of the relationship between labor and, you know, the bosses or the companies when it comes to Amazon, when it comes to Starbucks, et cetera. And so Jeremy submitted this suggestion that one of the bigger stories this year was actually about that. Jeremy, you want to tell us about that? Yeah, you touched on the Amazon and Starbucks pieces, which I think Amazon has certainly been stewing for a while, but over the course of the past couple of years, especially as people's financial situations changed significantly

thanks to pandemic-driven stimulus, is we've seen just a significant rise in labor organizing activity. And the ones that are getting a lot of attention, yes, Amazon, but not like the tech side of Amazon that we typically talk about on this show. It's, you know, it's been, it's been brewing at, you know, at old line manufacturing businesses. But at the very start of this year, the, like, the first thing out of the gate was the alphabet workers union. And I think people are getting, starting to get a lot more comfortable with talking, talking about labor issues at work, especially in tech where there's a highly valued,

highly educated workforce that is starting to take this seriously and see labor issues as important in that context. And Jeremy, do you have any personal exposure to this, or do you know people who work at these companies? Because I will agree with you that there has been kind of a sea change in terms of attitudes of tech workers towards their tech employers. And in some ways, that may be just a function of largesse. Now that Google and Amazon and the rest are employing hundreds of thousands of people,

you start to see some of these fissures change because it's no longer five or 10,000 people trying to change the world. Now it's actually a significant number of people who are dependent upon these firms that are maybe feeling either left out or disenfranchised or that something ultimately needs to change from the management level. So what is your take on this or your exposure personally to it? So I don't have a lot of personal exposure. I do have a ton of friends who work for Amazon.

I do know someone who is very early in the organizing for Amazon for climate, which was one of the early efforts that came a couple of years ago. And I'm also close with businesses that have actually benefited from the labor shortage in, like, in terms of people who were previously, like, sort of lukewarm on automation, whatever that might mean. Like, yeah. And so, like, there are businesses where, like, hey, this product clearly has value, but, like, sort of took a while to get people off the sidelines, you know, to actually

buy the thing. Now they can't keep up with demand. Like, it's because that is, like, the singular issue is, like, can I open the store today? Is my business still going to be operating? And so I think about the stuff that my friends went through. like in the Amazon for Climate example, how, like, maybe Amazon is the wrong example here, but how much would they, how much would these big companies be willing to tolerate in terms of organizing activity a few years ago and how much are they willing to tolerate now?

Because the pendulum has swung significantly towards labor in terms of who has the power here. Let me, let me hold my hand up and admit that on this show, I tend to, to talk about these things more from the, you know, sort of the white collar aspect of it, the engineers, because I know who's listening, and I'm not saying that only engineers listen and things like that. But like, I tend to cover, like, you know, the walkouts at Google and other places like that. But yeah, yeah. One of the things that you're, you're also, you know, hinting at it and even you bring it up in your original submission is that, you know, there's a lot of the actual labor organizing is going on in Amazon fulfillment centers, is the people that are

the grocery delivery app, you know, delivers and whatnot. What do you think of something that I brought up on the show a couple times, which is for, especially if we put it in the terms of like the gig economy, the idea that maybe that, that, to use this phrase that I use all the time again, was an accident of history of about 10 years after the Great Recession, where a lot of businesses, their business models were built on the idea of cheap labor, the idea of, I'm doing this as a side gig, and maybe that's no longer tenable anymore? I mean, what comes to mind is that the, like, the, quote-unquote gig economy folks are in some ways sort of caught in the middle here.

Like, should there be another category of employee that is like for gig, for people who specifically work part-time and turn the app on and off. I think so, but the company seemed to be foreclosing the ability to do that. But to the extent that they're still an active part of this conversation, there's sort of being, a lot of these employees are sort of being used against the folks who are trying to organize full-time laborers because, one, they represent flexible labor. and to, to, like, it's hard to say how many people who are in that gig economy workforce

are there because they actually value the flexibility, and how many are there because it's the only thing they can get. And to some extent, and in both cases, they're, like, both, both of those groups would have some reason to worry, like, okay, is this lifeline, like, this, this survival level lifeline possibly going to go away if, I am dragged into a union vote and I vote for the union, even though, like, it might be good. I don't, like, there is that uncertainty there. Right. We've seen that over and over where union votes go down and are not successful. And so, on the one hand, I think you're right that there's a ton of energy around unionization and labor right now.

And then at the same time, it's sort of, it is bucking a trend or bucking the status quo, which has not been, you know, very labor-friendly for the last 20 years, too. So either that is the sea change that we're starting to see happen right now, or I don't know, it's, it's swimming industry. The conversation for the last couple of years, I think, in tech about this, was more about, like, ownership as a part of the culture. Like, equity ownership is a key part of the culture in tech companies. And over the past couple of years, people are like,

like, okay, what is equity really? Like, is it a lottery ticket? Is it actual compensation? Like, especially if you're at an early stage startup, where your ownership can actually be meaningful and can actually have a real significant impact on changing the fortunes of your life. The,

and then like over the past, over the past year, the power swung back to labor, but suddenly a lot of that ownership is probably a lot more valuable than we were previously thinking about in the last couple of years that these markets have grown so large that I'm thinking of the New York, I think it was the New York Times story. It might have been another

publication about someone who became an overnight millionaire. They were not, and they were not expecting it was probably in the Coinbase IPO, but it's not certain. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it, between those two. Well, and I think, again, like the supply chain shortage, I don't see the labor market suddenly loosening up any time over the next 12 to 18 months or whatever. So in a tight labor market, this is going to continue to be an issue. Thank you, Jeremy. You can stick around as well, but I am going to move to one more thing. I want to bring up another topic, Chris, and then if you want to bring up one after this, but I wanted to suggest because a couple people,

suggested this. Lanny suggested the Colonial Pipeline ransomware hack, to which I would say, you know, there was a time when ransomware over the summer was like, you know, the story we were covering every day. But then a lot of people also brought up this week's news, the Log 4J thing. So they're not exactly the same because one's a bug and the other is sort of the structural change of all of a sudden ransomware being everywhere, although we're seeing all of the usual folks taking advantage of the bug. So I'll throw this to you, Chris, unless someone wants to raise their hand about this. But what do you think about our year of, and I've only been doing the show for four years, but this was the biggest year that I can remember for this sort of thing where there

was a hack a day and ransomware and all that stuff. So what do you think about like the security being the story of the year? I don't know if like security itself is one of the, I mean, let me put it a different way. I think one of the things that we're talking about, the broad thing that weaves a lot of this together is insecurity, actually. And the ways in which we either thought that we were secure or ways that we were complacent or complicit in making assumptions about the durability of the reality that existed. And if I learned anything by being in the tech world, it's that, you know, things seem like they might sort of be plateauing or getting to a certain place of stasis.

And then something will come along and sort of, you know, shake your, you know, your tree. And you'll realize, oh, wow, like, things either are not quite as they seem or there was all this, you know, stuff going on behind the scenes that I was not aware of that suddenly now is very relevant to a lot of other people. And there was like this kind of kind of like, what do they call them? It's like a sort of invisible sea swell that, I don't know, I'm just thinking about like when you. you wade out into like the ocean and you get sucked under or something. Anyways, you know, that kind of thing. It's, it is, it is reminiscent of the supply chain thing where we kind of knew that there were these fragilities in the system.

And so things like the fact that, uh, with log 4j, like this, this is a, an open source thing that was, you know, very lightly maintained by a couple people doing it in their spare time and things like that. We've, we've known that that could come to bite us, uh, eventually. Um, it, I think that it is similar to the supply chain thing in the sense that we knew that these issues were baked into the system and could potentially come at some point. It just seems like everything's happening all at once. Well, it's also like the incentives.

It's the distribution of these systems. And it's the increasing level of complexity. We want them to take on more and more responsibilities for us. We want them to be smarter and smarter. you know, like Apple, you know, finally is putting sort of smart home stuff into their, you know, their keynotes and their films or whatever we want to call them. And that is a very insecure area, largely because we've been privileging, you know, ease of use and the ability to connect one device to another, et cetera. Like, we don't even know how exposed these things are in the name of, you know,

kind of accessibility. What you're saying is there's so many more vectors of exposure now. And there The surface area has increased. Yes, yes. And our expectations of these tools, because of all the things that we were just talking about, whether it's the supply chain or whether it's like the need for automation or whether it's the great reconsideration and people just aren't available for work, we're having to create more systems that are much more self-servisable. I was thinking about this the other day.

I had to go charge my partner's Tesla. And in Oregon, there is a, and forgive me if I'm wrong, I don't live in Oregon, but I've traveled through Oregon. And when you drive in Oregon, there are essentially there are gas station attendants that have to pump your car. Pump your car, pump the gas into the car. Like in New Jersey. Yes. In New Jersey, yes.

Okay, great. So there are some places where there were laws that were created that, as I understand it, were designed to create more employment by having gas station attendance. But in the electronic, the electric car world, I don't know how, or if you're, you know, or if, that applies. Like if you go to a Tesla supercharger station, can you pump your own electrons or not? I thought you were going to tell me that there was someone that did that, like when you stopped in Oregon. Please, please someone let us know if that's the case. Or New Jersey, I guess. Right, right. But the point remains that if we can't hire people to do a bunch of these jobs that used to be kind of available because either people don't want them or because they're finding better things to do, suddenly now

each of us becomes a lot more responsible for a lot more just, you know, tasks, everyday types of things. You know, like I was also listening to another story about self-checkout and how that's sort of this, you know, now there's more labor that is being expected of us when we check out, even though the savings aren't really passed on to us. And it's leading to a lot more shoplifting because people kind of explain to themselves that, well, if I'm the one who's bagging my own groceries now, well, I should be able to take a cut of that. And so people are just kind of like, you know, stealing as a right of passage. So that may seem like, I don't know, where am I going this? Well, that may seem like in terms of the law or in terms of the rules, like that is clearly like,

you know, breaking those. But the shift in the relationship hasn't really been made explicit in that context, right? Like there was no sort of consent granted to say, yes, actually, I want, you know, I'm a libertarian and I want the ability to like do self-checkout from my grocery store. That isn't a conversation that we've had. It just was imposed upon us. And that's happening in lots of different places. And it's also true or happening in, I think, the context of security. So, you know, I think that we're being exposed to more and more, I guess,

insecurities across the system because we didn't quite even maybe think about or realize or anticipate what would happen if the fundamentals of the economy shifted without us taking the time to sort of redesign those systems that had been put in place for generations, let's say. without human participation or involvement. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been a crazy couple years all around.

Hey, do you want to, before we, because we're inevitably going to get to back to crypto and NFTs and stuff, do you have a topic that you think would be a candidate for a big story of the year before we get back to it? Yeah. And I'm trying to get Jorge back here so we can come talk about the board apes. There are a couple things that I thought were pretty interesting this year, and it sort of does link to some of these things that we've been talking about. One, I think, and this is actually brought up by Rob Tanner, he pointed out that Apple's chip silicon system on a chip is a game changer. And I think in a lot of ways it is.

You know, this is a, I believe the strategy was sort of announced or sort of put into motion, I don't know, five, ten years ago for Apple to move onto its own silicon. And at least now, as the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon, that process has kind of happened. And so now Apple really is kind of unleashed in what they can do and what they can sell into and creating this entire vertical stack of products that I think we've only just barely begun to see the fruits of. So I think that moment is a really big deal. And it's going to change the nature of who is competitive in the tech ecosystem at large.

Now it's like Nvidia and Apple and others. And let me bring up a point that Rob makes in his question that he's submitted, where he's making the point that obviously, you know, Apple historically wins markets, you know, by coming in with better design, higher end, that sort of thing, but also better experience. And so he specifically mentions, like, we assume an AR headset is coming maybe as soon as next year. And then there's, you know, the Apple car and things like that. And one of the points that he makes is that to what degree Apple having this silicon sort of dominance that seems to be generations ahead of other folks? Will that allow them to do, like when they, you know, when they came out with the iPhone and it was like, you know, so completely different than anything else that was on the market, like, would they, when they come out with their AR glasses, will it be like, oh my God, that that really is. a game changer, that really is different. Will it be thin enough that people would actually, you know, want to wear it all day? Would the battery life be good enough that you could wear it all day?

Like, could potentially this sort of chip dominance that they have or this head start in their, in their silicon, allow them to do that again like they did with the iPhone and the iPad and things like that, where it's like when they come out with their product first, it's going to blow away all of the other experiments, as I called it this week, especially with headsets and things like that. Yeah. I didn't mean to say yes to cut you off. But it is a good question. I think that there still is a question about the actual use cases

for augmented reality, vision, goggles, glasses, whatever you want to call them. And is it universal enough? I don't know what the percentage of people who wear glasses are around the world, but it's probably less than the number of people who have. a bare wrist to put a device around, you know? And so if you think about the progression of the Apple Watch, you know, I was thinking about this and, you know, you're going to hate me because, you know, of your line of work and your business. But I find that my Apple Watch, although it's a great,

you know, health tool, it also kind of saves me from like the podcast tax where I can skip ads. And so I'm paying a premium to essentially remove an interruption or content that is not relevant to me. What happens when you put glasses on, now you're moving through your day with whether it's the notification system or the identity system or whatever it is that's only exclusive to Apple? Is that sufficient?

Will it be good enough? Will it interoperate with the Metaverse? With all these things that we're talking about that people want to build for where there's new assumptions based on a much more cooperative model of interoperability and creating abundance in space versus what Apple tends to do,

which is to try to own the entire stack and keep people within those universes. What are the other big stories that I think has been undercovered? And I don't know if it's because of salience or because of, you know, we're just not in those worlds. But I think Tesla is a fascinating company, not just because of their cars and because of the interface of the cars, but because of the connection to the overall Tesla power grid and to the power wall units that they're also selling.

You know, and I might have mentioned this before, but I've sort of done some sleuthing in the Tesla iOS app. And there's a lot of stuff being built in there related to just being inside of a power, I don't know, environment or context. And I guess what I'm trying to say or what I mean by that is that Tesla is building out this network of charging stations. And they're building these batteries, essentially, that go into your house. And so if there's interruptions in power accessibility, now you have your own power

that's off the grid and you can put power back on the grid. And that strategy, that piece is in some ways almost, I don't want to like overstate this, but could be parallel to Apple Silicon in terms of why that company is so, you know, I don't know, uniquely positioned in the marketplace to persist. So if you're evaluating an Apple car, you might just evaluate it based on, you know, car stuff. You know, does it drive well? Like, you know, does it even have a steering wheel? Is it an entertainment place?

you know, those kind of, when you sit in the device and you, you have that experience from that perspective. But the Tesla approach seems to be more about the network and about building out this, you know, system of superchargers as well as homes that have these power bricks in them. And so battery technology is one of the other big undersold stories, I think, of 2021, that I think is very important to this mix, you know, and the supply chain thing sort of leads into that because of the just-in-time nature of that. And now we're saying, no, actually, put more intelligence back into, I mean, just distribute it, decentralize it, move it away from what Apple has been doing for like the last 20 years.

But by the way, I think I'm going to do a story about battery tech tomorrow, because there's one I've been sitting on that we might be on the verge of some new great battery tech. But just to wrap this question up, because Rob does say that. By the way, Rob, Rob, Tanner is actually here. Oh, Rob, Rob, we can bring him up. Yeah. So, Rob, one more point. Oh, Rob, you're here.

Oh, you've been here the whole time. I'm sorry. Yeah, okay, well, then I'm going to say one thing and then you rip. But one more point that you made is that what Chris is describing also is about owning the full stack. And, you know, like, you make the point that one of the reasons that, you know, the Apple Watch won is because competitors are reliant on other folks like Qualcomm that maybe can't come through with the components that make a competitive product and things like that. So that again, if Apple controls their destiny, Apple can control their product and they're not reliant on Intel anymore or people like that. They can do the product exactly the way they want. And that could be, again, a big differentiator that's more meaningful than anything.

Yeah, so I add a slightly different point to the way you mostly got what I was saying. But if you think about where Apple is going on the part with their big innovations, they were always early. and they had better industrial design and amazing UI innovations, the click wheel, the iPhone touchscreen, but it was never really about the internal. In the early days of smartphones, they had essentially slightly different, but essentially the same arm shifts as Android was used,

hardened by a different band of CPU engineers, but essentially the same. It was never about better performance. But what we've seen in the last year, which is a little mystifying to a lot of tech watches, because the performance they've added to their iOS devices, is almost not needed in those devices. It's a bit more profound on the Mac, where they now have this new kind of, you know,

they've historically had, you wanted Mac OS or Windows, but now they have Mac OS and better performance, vastly better performance. But if you think about that better performance, and especially performance per watt, which is, if you're really enjoying your battery life on your, on your M1 Mac, kind of what it's all about. When you think about moving to glasses, now I have to, as a disclaimer, I'm not really sold on glasses as a mass market, phone replacing, displacing technology, but contingent on the fact that I might be wrong, if you think that is going to be a mass market thing, Apple's performance for what, which has kind of come out of nowhere, whether it's streaming from the phone to the

glasses, or whether it's on the glasses, with the limited battery space, is going to be kind of profound. And I think maybe for the first time we're going to see Apple, I'm sure all their traditional design and technology software integrations will be there, but actually have a new advantage that they historically haven't had, which is just vastly superior performance. in a device where battery life and performance for what will be absolutely fundamental. That's what I was saying at the beginning of this question. And by the way, I, if I accuse Chris of being pilled into things, I totally believe that 10 years from now, wearables will replace smartphones.

I don't know what the wearables will end up looking like and things like that. But yeah, and I do think that you're right that, like, aside from, you know, you know, the software and the hardware going together because we make both. But that concept that they can do greater efficiency, that's going to be the key for something that you're going to theoretically wear on your... I mean, I think this is exactly the right point. And it's similar to what I was saying about Tesla and it's battery prowess. Like, I don't know enough about battery tech either,

but I know it's very, very important to unlocking the types of products that people actually want to build and design and create. And actually, I think, Brian, you had mentioned one of the experimental I don't know if it was a glasses product by Opo. Yeah, Opo came out with one this week. It's the NREL is the one that I've always been talking about for a couple years now. They're the closest because even though it was still a wired product that you had to attach to an Android smartphone, it felt like you were wearing regular glasses on your face.

Right, but the reason why I brought it up is because if I recall correctly, it has like a two or three hour battery life. Right. Yeah. Okay. So like this is what I think, you know, Rob is suggesting and that I think is so important to think about the future of these things.

And that actually influenced like how I customized my MacBook Pro. You know, I spent a lot more than I really wanted to. But I was thinking, okay, are the applications over the next three to four years when I'm owning this computer more or less likely to become more compute intensive? You know,

when we're talking about the metaverse, We're talking about 3D environments. We're talking about game-like experiences. We're talking about lots of stuff constantly sinking and talking to other peripherals and stuff like that. All of that's going to require more power, more CPU, more powerful GPU, and power management to go along with it. So I think Rob is totally on point, that it's going to enable as a, let's say, rather than trying to only design for the thermals and for battery power, Apple will have a huge advantage because they're kind of by being verticalized, able to ignore some of the restrictions that other design teams will have to deal with because they're not vertically integrated. Right. If you believe that glasses they get the next big thing, which I don't, but I'm probably wrong, then I think you should be buying Apple stock because what we've seen the last year is there's been this jump, this prodigious jump they've made, which doesn't even seem to be necessary really for their current product. A little bit it is, but not really.

But for the glasses, it's really going to be key. So if you do believe that, I would suggest... Well, for any augmented reality application, you need a lot of compute. And actually, the spatial guys, if you guys want to, you know, jump in here, like all that stuff takes an order of magnitude more computation than current 2D web browsing capabilities. You know, like, I don't know if you've used the... What is it called?

I don't if it's like the lookup or something. Google Maps has a mode where... you can go into augmented reality mode and kind of overlay that view, you know, onto the surface of what you're seeing, essentially, you know, through your phone. You got to imagine that Apple Maps is a key part of Apple's plans, you know, both for the headsets, like, you know, for walking around and sort of interacting with the world, as well as in the car. And that those two things are probably going to work together in a, you know, in a way that, at least to me, seems like it's going to need to be seamless. You know, as it is now, it's interesting.

I will be listening to, you know, music or a podcast or whatever in Spotify. I get into the Tesla and instantly my music sort of transfers and does that whole thing. But then I don't have car play. And so there's kind of a loss of continuity between those things. And I think what Apple is building for is a world in which you live inside of essentially this Apple metaverse, but is actually like the real world. And there are just slivers of the digital that sort of feed into it. but you need the right sort of a compute and battery efficiency.

Okay. So one of the things I would say to that point is, is when you, if you look back on a certain time in technology and say what was the antiquated version of that? So for example, in the VR portion, when I was first using the Oculus Quest 2 to do spatial stuff, I'd put it on my head and go into spatial, and I would get two hours from startup to battery debt, right?

Maybe two and a half hours depending on what I was doing. But then that was because there was a 2,300 mill-a-amp battery, I guess it is what you would say it is. But then I went and I bought an anchor 10,000-mph, a little battery pack, right? And then I just attached it to the back of the headset with a magnet. And they have the thing for it. Suddenly I went from two hours to five and a half hours that I could spend in the headstand. So there was the point where I actually had exceeded my ability to tolerate being in there. So over time, you'll be able to get to a point where you can spend that much time in it.

So are we going to be willing to plug something into the glasses? You know what I mean? Just to wear them to have that full day experience. Because when you realize it's just a battery pack on your hip, you think to yourself it's not a big deal, thin little wire running right up, whatever it may be, right? That's when we're going to look back and say when the battery technology took off, remember when we used to have wires connected to our glasses, you know. But we're going to evolve to that. But I think you make great points talking about whether or not we'll have the chips to do it. It's really interesting.

What, like in terms of, so one of things that I think is just worthwhile to think about when it comes to these classes is like the use case. And whether or not we can assume that in the future, you know, I wear glasses, you know, for vision, if everyone is going to wear glasses all the time and it's just sort of like normal, it's like, you know, many of us have adopted or adapted to wearing masks all the time as a necessity, will it become the kind of thing where we just make an assumption that everyone's wearing glasses all the time, even if you don't use them for vision. or is it more like VR where you sort of augment your, you know, your vision for a run or for going and, you know, for driving someplace or something like that? And it's something where you wear for two or three hours and then you do the recharge, the fast recharge and then you go on. Right. Yeah, I got a good one comeback on that one. So I just recently went up to New York City. I live in Pennsylvania, so I go up to New York City often enough, but I'm not there enough to really completely navigate the city well, right? So there's still that moment where I walk out of a door of a building and I'm turned around, right?

I don't know where to go. So I pull my phone out. Right. I pull my phone out and I go to AR mode on my Google Maps and it's telling me where to go. And I can look at it and I get exactly where I need to be. If I have those glasses on my face and I walk out that door, it doesn't even stop you in your tracks. You just start walking and realize, oh, I got to turn around and go the other way and start walking. So you're going to have that.

So now what happens? I have those glasses on and I'm walking through the city and it's telling me where I want to go and I'm talking to it. it's Google Assistant, right? And I'm saying where I want to go. Now you get to the point where you walk into somebody's building. Well, they've programmed an experience when you come into their building. Now they've mapped out their entire room. You walk into the Nike room.

Let's say you have your virtual pet that's following you the whole time. Because whenever you look over and down to your right, who doesn't have a virtual pet, exactly. Right, right. So then you have your virtual dragon next to you. But now you walk into the Nike store. And when you get into the Nike store, it's been mapped out. And now all of a sudden, your little dragon jumps up onto the table and runs across it.

in your eyes looking through it. So you start having those experiences, those moments in places, that's what's going to compel people to wear the glasses all the time. And not only that, and I'm going to use two examples I think that I've used before on the show. But okay, so number one, right now if I'm, you know, in line or I'm on the train or I'm doing whatever where I've got time to kill, I'm reaching in my pocket, I'm swiping up and I'm going through. But what if you didn't have to do that? What if at all times you could scroll through Instagram as you're doing whatever, as you're talking to someone boring and they never know that you're doing something else why they do it? Like I said to Chris last week where why would foldable phones ever become a thing? It's because, well, you don't always need the screen as big as it is. It's just that that's the only way that we can get screens right now is to have it be, you know, fully the full screen size. So that's number one, that there will come a time where it's like, oh, God, I had to reach into my pocket and do whatever to, like, relieve boredom where I can just, like,

literally, like, my eye twitches and I can relieve boredom. Number two, you're talking about coming to New York. This is the story that I've told before. In 2002 was the first time I ever came out to Brooklyn, and I got completely lost, and I couldn't find the train station. And I walked around for an hour and a half before I found the train station, because this is before smartphones, there is no Google Maps. And I literally remember having the thought that someday I'll have GPS.

GPS in my pocket, and this will never happen again. In your pocket. So think about how you can't imagine not knowing where you are on the planet Earth these days because you have a supercomputer in your pocket. In that same way, there will come a day when it's like, I don't know anything. It's impossible for me not to know anything. And also, I don't have to reach into my pocket to find out. It's already in a heads-up display in front of me at all times, you know?

Right. Yeah. So I did just notice there was a story in The Verge from yesterday about IBM and Samsung, essentially claiming that their new chip design could lead to a week-long battery life on phones. So I think this is going to be a bigger topic. Yes, hopefully. Efficiency, whether it's specific systems on a chip or chips that allow for different types of processing to be done much more efficiently, because now we know what some of the AI models are going to look like and what they need to be is certainly an area to watch for.

Oh, that's nice. I worked for IBM for 14 years. Oh, amazing. So that's a pin tweet if you guys want to check that out. I'm glad. Chris, we should end with Web 3 because that has to be the biggest story of the year, right? I mean, personally for me, it's got to be the most transformational area that I think at the beginning of the year, I was like, what is the end? Okay, wait, I have a timeline for you. Okay, because remember 18 months ago, like when the pandemic struck, I remember doing a story where I was like, hey, isn't this when crypto was supposed to take over? And it was like down at, yes, Bitcoin was down at like $4,000 a coin or whatever. And so I remember thinking, oh, is that fad over? And then I checked the timeline on this. I minted that that podcast NFT in February, which means that I must have been worth millions by now. I must have.

started hearing about NFTs in a major way, a couple months before from the coin talk guys and whatever, whatever, because it was a couple months where it was starting to bubble to the surface. But then, you know, and the way things work now, so then early in the year, February, March, was the first big NFT wave, at least to Normies like me. And then it sort of died down and it was like, oh, fad again, but no, it came roaring back. So NFTs is what I'm talking about. But then, obviously what we're talking about is the whole Web 3 idea and how that's evolved this year. And it's seemingly unstoppable at this point. I mean, it seems to be.

And it's not just, I guess I want to be careful about overprescribing success in a certain way that's going to be only about the way things are right now. Like, it's a mistake to over-emphasize the selling of JPEGs and that trope that's an accessible story that the media knows how to tell. because it's replicating something that already exists in the world. The things that are going to be interesting are the things that are sort of known adjacent. So membership NFTs are like, okay, there has been membership and loyalty programs for a long time. But what happens when you can actually weave in programming of, let's say, gamification models into an NFT such that when you reach certain levels, that unlocks other, you know, whether it's metaverse worlds or other doors or, you know, things in the real world or whatever it is. that's a creative space that I think we need to be really thinking about and anticipating for 2022. I think that's where it gets very interesting, and there's just so much stuff going.

It really is literally like a Cambrian explosion of different ideas and people trying things, throwing stuff up at the wall. There's a lot of, I don't know, things that look similar, that feel similar, but are slightly different. And I think it's those folks who are going to stay focused, who build great user experiences and products, who stay connected to their community, who are in dialogue. and sharing what they're doing constantly are probably going to benefit the most. This year, I think, I don't know, was like Web 3 in some ways was such a saving grace because there's so much shit going on in the world.

And yet the positivity of the Web 3 community, the NFT community, the art world, and developer ecosystems coming together, that's something that needed to happen for a long time. And I'm very excited, I guess, to see sort of where that goes from here. Yeah, it's going to be huge. I mean, the access to opportunity is something that people, want the day they leave, you know, their parents' home. You know, do I have access to opportunity, the nature of going to college and getting an education and learning things to gain access to opportunity?

So I feel like Web 3 is opening up the doors taking away some of those silos that we've grown so accustomed to and saying, listen, here's a space where you can move wherever you want and you can be early enough because I was around for the dot-com boom. So when I was there, I mean, I was babysitting servers for Y2K. So for me, it was one of those things where I understood that when you're really early to something, the differences is just knowing more than the majority of the population around you. And then getting in and then seeing where you could do it. I saw people do startups.

I went the route of getting the corporate job and finding security. But I think that Web3 is really, as everyone adopts it, I mean, we're really early. I mean, this isn't getting in at the ground floor. This is getting in while the blueprints being drawn out. Seriously. We're still figuring out where we're going to put the building. Right, right. Yes, exactly.

I want a secret room over there and you get to draw it in. And let me address some of the skepticism because I feel like, you know, we've talked about this too, about the sort of culture war that's going on around this. And one of the things that I think, no matter what, where you come down on that, is someone made the point recently that it really doesn't matter because all of the things that, you this is too big to fail at this point, so that even if individual things don't work out, individual ideas, some things are fads, some things, you know, don't make it or something, there are enough people and enough energy and enough smart people interested in this, that it doesn't matter

because somehow this energy is going to create something new and go in some direction. And it might not be in the shape that we're seeing now. But that's the point. It doesn't have to be. So just to build on your point, Brian, like one of the things that feels different and that feels, I don't know if it's like an imperative or sort of an inevitability, but there are certain assumptions that went into Web2 business models, you know, one of which was just that there wasn't transparency. It wasn't like enforced. And so things were happening to you as a user of these systems, you know, and this is, I think, why there's so much angst. And, you know, we didn't even talk about one of the bigger stories this year is,

all the threats of regulation and laws against social media and social networks and all of that. It's almost like, oh my God, I'm so bored of that. But it's important because of what people feel has been done to them or done in their names on these platforms that they contributed so much to. And they really have been exploited. And so there is a shift and a change. We talked about this when it comes to labor and work and what the economy should be about and for and what it should do for people versus two people.

And when you're working with blockchain technology, the fact that it's transparent and the fact that you can inspect these things, and it is scrutable, it's not inscrutable, changes the nature or potentially changes the nature of behavior in a way that for those who embrace it, you can't behave in the way that sort of got you successful in the Web 2 space or context. I don't know how else to put it,

but just there's so much machines. Go ahead. That's right. You can't click the books. Yeah, I agree. I've seen... No, sorry, go ahead. And then I'll jump back. What I was going to say is I've already seen a change that's fundamental shifts. So I myself as an artist, when I'm selling NFTs, it's different than selling it in the real world as a painting. But because I can get royalties, because I can get all these things down the line that change everything for me, I don't have to give up 50% to a gallery. I can just sell it myself.

But the best part about it is the fact that the growth opportunities, are all on you to achieve. So if you find yourself in a situation where you can't make it out here in this spot, you can reach out into a space where it's being led by artists. And that's the thing that I'm most impressed with right now. It's almost like another renaissance.

We are in a situation where we're seeing efforts being led by creatives rather than the old school way of doing things. And I think that's profound. And that's maybe why people are so willing to reward it and keep it going, because they know who's benefiting from it. Well, and the point I was going to make is sort of similar to the point I was making earlier,

which is that, like, I think one of the reasons people push back on Web 3 maximalism is that certain people in the community are like, well, this is going to change everything, this is going to replace everything. And it might, but it doesn't have to. Like, you know, when the web came around, we all knew it was going to eventually change TV and movies. We didn't know that it would take the form of Netflix and apps in a smartphone and things like that. It did eventually change things. It just maybe didn't change things in the way that people thought 25 years ago.

Benedict Evans, who we've talked about a lot recently, was on Alex Cantorwitz's podcast, the most recent episode. And he was like, he made the point that, like, I think cannabis is going to be a huge business. Do I think cannabis is going to replace the alcohol industry? No, but it doesn't have to. That's not the point, right? So that, you know, there's so much energy here and a lot of people are like, well, it's going to replace this and it's going to completely transform that. And some of those things it will. Some things will be completely transformed or maybe even killed by Web3. But that doesn't mean that that has to be the way it's going to evolve. We don't know it's so early is the point that everyone's making. Yeah, you can make your own contracts now. When I would sell a piece of art, no one knew what to do with the original on the backside. Here's the NFT. What do I do with the original?

Well, how about this? How about I write a contract on what happens to the original? I sign it and then I scan it. Send it to you. You print it out. You sign it, you scan it. You send it back to me and then I mint it on the blockchain. There it is.

A contract that's out there. We're talking about societal utility that also takes form. The instant that we can vote on the blockchain, there'll never be a rich. election ever again, period. I love the enthusiasm, and I am so curious to see how we get there. One thing that I wanted to build on what you just said, and I think this is also very important in terms of how, I don't want to use the expression, the rubber meets the road, but in some ways, that's sort of what I'm thinking.

I've purchased several NFTs related to spirits, specifically like whiskey or wine or things like that. And, you know, when I bought it, you know, there's a, there's an NFT, there's a piece of artwork, which is part of the NFT, and then there's like a physical product in the real world. And of course, some of the questions that I get from people, because we're thinking about this purely from a digital perspective is, well, if you drink the whiskey or you drink the wine, you know, does that mean that the NFT is like not valuable anymore? And I'm like, well, kind of, like, just think about the NFT as a kind of receipt, as a kind of evidence that's publicly tracked,

that as opposed to getting some piece of paper that you throw out or you lose or get burned in some house fire, it's part of this immutable ledger that you can always refer to and go back to. And if I ever choose to sell or pass on this spirit or whiskey that I've acquired, I have some providence for that.

And I can point to it and I can show you because it's in my wallet that I actually, in fact, own it. And the thing that I'm selling you is more likely to be the real thing as opposed to some not-real thing. Very true. It's those moments where it's not absolutism.

It's not saying that because I have this NFT, this product that I'm giving you is absolutely guaranteed to be real, but at least I at one point really did buy the thing that that NFT represents. And so when I sell you this, you have a higher likelihood of trust than in the previous world, which to your point, and the reason why I bring this up, is because it relates directly to this question of voting, and whether that voting happens in Daos or whether it happens in Congress Dow or whatever type of U.S. voting system you want, there is a record that we've all agreed to look to for the source of the truth of an election of sorts that just happened.

Some decision that required collective action or collective choice, and we can go and we can look at the receipts, essentially, because they're all there. So that creates a new set of assumptions for how we can actually operate and function. totally agree that totally makes sense and that's actually it's it's going from the pfps to then it's going to go to traditional art and then the store of value then it's going to go to now like the defy tokenomics and it's brands then it's going to go to societal utility and i think that's the evolution of the nfts is how can we incorporate it to legitimize things to yank out the control that people can exert on things by throwing money by

lobbying by doing all these things. You can't do that anymore. And I think that's what's exciting about it. And that's probably the only resistance it's going to get is from those who won't benefit from it, right? It's the equivalent of the petroleum, the fossil fuel company, buying up the patent for the water engine. You know what I mean? Like you're going to have people trying to stop it. I want to be clear. I want to be careful. Just because we have NFT in the blockchain doesn't mean that human behavior is going to change overnight. Correct. There's still going to be a lot of really bad stuff. So I think we can modulate

the enthusiasm and suggest that look, there are these systems that if we understand them and we teach people about how they're intended to work and we create more digital literacy, then it can actually lead to some of those more positive outcomes. But okay, we're sort of on

that web three. That's not too much what I want to do. So, Brian, you want to wrap this up? Yes. So, actually, okay, I'll wrap it up. Yeah, sorry. And then you can be. Okay.

Yeah, go ahead. Okay. So one thing that I wanted to share with this group here, primarily the live group, because we're not quite sure when this is going to go out. But if you watch for in the New York Times, which just is a centralized, you know, it's not a Dow of any sort, but, you know, is a paper of record of sorts. There is going to be a story, as we understand it, that Brian and I will be in covering social audio. So watch for that in the print and online edition. Literally talking about these Twitter

spaces that we're doing right now. Yes, exactly. So it's a little meta. So look, yeah, look for that. But I'm trying to reclaim the meta handle. Anyways, so that's coming out. And I don't know, I guess, you know, Brian, is this our last space for the year? Yeah, for sure. Because, yeah, we're going to take some time off. Taking some time off. But I, and I probably will release this next week and use it as like the last show I do before Christmas or something like that. So I want to take the opportunity to treat this as the end of the year show, even though I'll be doing shows all next week and all the way up to New Year's. But number one, I want to say this.

This show, the TechMeme Experience, is something that evolved this year that Chris and I didn't plan to do. And it just sort of has become this thing that we very much enjoy and very much value. And so number one, one of the things that I want to say, Chris, I said to you not too long ago that, like, I end up talking to you more than basically any of my friends now. And so I want to thank you personally for making the TechMeme right home experience happen. Like, I think this show would be nothing without you. By doing this show with you, I feel like you've become one of the. of my best friends. So I just want to thank you for having, like, for being really good at it and helping me hopefully make a good show when we, when we do this every week. So I'm not going to

pause because that will give you an opportunity to reciprocate. I don't want you to do that. I also want to say to everybody listening that, you know, we're coming up on the four-year anniversary in March of the TechMeme Right Home podcast in general. On average now, 60,000, people listen to this show every day. And I always want to, I try hard to remind myself of that, because that blows my mind. So I always want to take the opportunity when I have it to thank you all for putting me in your head every day. And it's unbelievable, and I'm incredibly privileged that you all do that. And so I'm just saying at the end of 2021, thank you all for listening every day. I love you all. Well, thank you, Brian. And because you did pause, I'm going to

thank you on behalf of those 60,000 listeners because I too was one of those 60,000 listeners for a long time. And through the entire pandemic, I was listening to you every day. And that is what got me through that time. Of course, when I had disagreements, I wanted to talk to you, and that is what led to this show. So in some ways, this is my own catharsis. And so I appreciate you being a good sport, putting up with me and going on this journey. And as well, thanks to everybody who has turned it. Yes. Since, I don't know, when would we start this? Was it March or was it February, I think?

It was February-ish and, yeah, or January, February. Because we were on Clubhouse for at least four or five or six of those before we moved on Twitter. All the way through the demise of Clubhouse and now back to Twitter. Too soon? Too soon? Anyways, all right, everybody. Thank you once again. We're going to get you to do this in Spatial.

We're going to get you to do this in Spatial, too. Well, next year, 100%. Let's do it. Let's do it. Fifty people. I do want to also thank I want to thank Chris O'Brien who's here Christian Hernandez Gage Milton Jeremy Diamond who's here John Colchuk Jorge Vidal Clay

Lanny Zering and Rob Tanner Amil Proto Liszti as well in the room I'm always here Yes for submitting ideas and suggestions for the show JCPenny's I always like to shout out JCP. Yes let's see Morgan I mean like you know Remy we got a whole bunch of great folks who tune up, turn in, or the opposite, whatever. Anyways, thanks everybody. We will talk to you in 2022.

Thanks. Take care, guys. Happy holidays.