Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Variety Special

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

No guest this week (though the great @EvanKirstel does show up at one point) but we covered a wide range of topic, mostly ones that have been under-discussed lately on the show... 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. This time, actually, I think things are going to be way smoother on many fronts. I've now successfully removed the second mic that I had that was causing me all sorts of weird confusion. And now I have piped the Ethernet into my, I have now a router, a Wi-Fi router in my shed.

So no Wi-Fi problems. The peacock and the chickens, I think, are chill right now at turn the time of day. so we'll see how this goes. I'd say cautiously, because these were famous last words, you sound better than last time. Good, good. Yeah, I feel like, I don't know, things are dialed in now. So it's like a professional. The only thing on my end is the kids will get home from school at some point,

and that usually sets Archie off. But maybe I won't be talking when that happens. Between you and the dog and creaky chairs and chickens and peacocks, you know. So I guess you want to be able to. Let me just kick it off. Yeah, do it. All right. Welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for June 23rd, 2022.

Today is a bit of a variety show, I guess. Brian, you didn't even get me your list of topics, but we're just going to kind of wing it. There's a bunch of stuff that's been going on, obviously, in the news, as often happens. And so I think this will just be a chance for you and I and maybe some folks from the audience to, you know, talk about stuff that's happening. Yeah, we always say raise your hand and we'll let you ask whatever, bring up any topic. But we really mean it today. What I have a list of, Chris, is like it's a combination of things that I haven't covered

because maybe it wasn't enough for a segment or just things sort of that I wanted to poke out a bit more, which I'm assuming you have as well. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I'm happy with you actually kicking it off if you want. If you got a few things, you know, you and I riffing is usually the best way to find stuff to go deep on. All right. I got a real.

there was a time when you were the podcast ombudsman. I still feel like I am. I was thinking literally about that yesterday, given this experience you've had with a premium feed, I was like, I'm that guy who still has to like, you know, call him out on stuff. Well, you're,

I mean, you're sort of a co-host, kind of. I know, I'm taking on a little bit more of an insider, you know, role now, but. You're the deputy sheriff or something. I don't know, whatever. So, but this is ombudsman like stuff. So I, I've, I passed on a bunch of stories about stuff that meta has been announcing all around its Metaverse stuff.

Sure. And I'm asking for feedback because I passed on it because my thinking is that no one's really using it. I like to do stories about when products have a new feature, things like that. I try to think, well, is anybody in the audience using this? I've been doing a lot of, you know, with these developer tools things lately. I'm very conscious of like who's in the audience. And my thesis is is that as much, and believe me, behind the scenes, meta is pushing us hard to cover all of these stories.

But it's like... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. When you say that, what behind the scenes? It's like talking to you specifically or the press? Oh, no, no, no. You see sort of in the PR circles and things like that of the stuff that they're pushing and that they and you see the headlines go from the verge to TechCrunch

or whatever. The like the things that that I passed on were there's a new avatars store where you can buy digital clothes for your avatars. I saw that. Super cringe. A sounds boring

and B, but who's doing that? Because there's that one meta thing. I can't even remember the name of it. Is there big hangout sort of app? inside Oculus. I'm still calling an Oculus. And so unless you're in there, you don't get to do this. Horizons. Horizons? Horizons. Yes. Okay. Uh-huh. Right. What was the other thing? I can't even remember, but it was something equally boring. And like they, I don't know, they rebranded Facebook pay to

meta pay and they were trying to push that a lot. You know they want you to do it when they trot Zuckerberg out to be the one to do the post or like is offered for interviews and things like that. So like the meta pay thing is he, his thing was, oh, this is going to be the wallet for the metaverse and stuff. But again, for whom and when? You know, if I thought that there were millions of people that could use a wallet for the metaverse right now, then maybe I'd talk about it. So I'm just curious, am I, do you think my instincts are off on that in terms of like passing on these stories? Do you think that my instinct is right that maybe it's too boring? and also there's not enough people using this sort of stuff to carry it.

Well, let's start with a slightly different angle to this question and then we'll get back to this. Because I actually think like the meta stuff is interesting and or at least what you're pointing out is interesting in that the metaverse feature set that meta is pushing is exactly that. It is push based as opposed to pull based. And so many of the things that, you know, Facebook previously copied in its earlier eras were poll-driven kind of innovations that were largely led by, I think, consumers discovering and using largely iPhones in kind of new ways, right? Whether it was Snapchat and stories or other products. In this case, it's really trying to create a new market for a new set of behaviors that are not common amongst the general population, let alone the, you know, the tech press. or people like that. And so I kind of want to get back to a question about the general sense for who social media or media in general is. And whether the fact that many of those readers or

consumers of that content aren't in the metaverse is actually a growing generational divide where there's a younger generation that actually does spend more time or is more reversed in the metaverse. And yet there aren't reporters old enough or maybe young enough perhaps to report these things in a way that actually makes sense. And that that is actually more of a cataclysmic shift that's going on. But let's just, I want to start by understanding who you think your audience is for the TechMeme podcast. And, you know, what drives you to cover different stories?

Like, is it actually based on demographics of your listeners or is it based on your set of listeners? Well, it's partially the demographics that I can see, which is mostly from Spotify. Because, you know, you can't get demographics. From Apple Podcasts? You know. some but I haven't checked that in a while and not as much but all you know Spotify gives you some Spotify gives you everything it's just that Spotify is less than 10% of my audience so

again that'll tell you something right there okay but you know my my assumption is is that the audience is mostly you know 25 and above have probably more in the 30s in terms of age and based on the feedback that I get from for four years now, it's a lot of, as I always say, devs in the trenches, but people working either at big tech companies or startups or what have you. So it's more of a, yeah, it's not a normie audience

very much at all. But then at the same time, I try to think, like, you know, I don't know how many people use Snapchat, right? But like I covered that recently because it's enough, it's a big enough market. It's a, you know, they have, there's Archie. A hundred million users or more, you know, like, it's that. I'm not really answering your question, but like let's, in my mind, I'm thinking. Yeah. Like I think like, I'm trying to think about like that the, the salience of the different stories that you choose to pluck from the headlines of

tech meme to share with this and distribute with this audience, right? Because what I'm thinking about are, are the blind spots that are not being covered, but that actually affect a lot of people. And the story about meta, to me, is sort of perfectly sort of juxtaposed in this kind of no person's land in the middle. And the reason why I'm thinking about that is because there was a story today about how it appears that Zuckerberg has really, I think, reduced the staff that was focused on elections from 300 to something like 60. And that all of his attention is focused on the metaverse and creating this new computing platform and paradigm, which she wants to own and possess. And it's really hard to get a sense for whether anybody, I don't want to say anybody,

but whether there's sufficient enthusiasm about his level of enthusiasm in that, given the import that, of course, like, you know, the election meddling and all this stuff that's still kind of unraveling that happened all the way back in 2016. Like, he's kind of like, I'm not in that business anymore. I don't really care about fixing elections or those things. I'm going to the metaverse. And that's going to be a completely different place where I suppose it's good for shareholders. It's good for whatever. But, I mean, he's not actually solving or fixing any of the problems that led to the last generation's technology challenges.

So that's sort of why I guess I'm wondering when you think about your audience. It's kind of we're still talking about some of the stuff that, and we're still trying to digest the impact that technology has had on us and is happening to us while people who are sort of building these things are moving off in a completely different direction. It's almost like Zuckerberg's like, you know, I'm leaving the room. Like I don't care about what you guys are talking about anymore. I'm going to go play with my, you know, an indifferent sandbox altogether. I mean, if there was an exact formula for why I go with certain things and why I don't go

with certain things, I can give you that story as a specific example. I saw that this morning and I thought, okay, is this really anything new here? We know that Zuck is all in on the, on the metaverse. idea right now. And it felt like the fact that they've taken warm bodies away from the election integrity team is news. But it's, I don't know, the elections still months away. It just, it didn't feel like there was enough new there. And it felt to me like I would be saying again, hey, by the way, Zuck really wants the metaverse to happen. And so I just didn't feel like that there was anything new enough to say there.

And so that's just one example. And there's nothing scientific about it. I just was like, eh. But on a different day, I might have. Right. So, I mean, like, obviously you're acting as a filter for your audience and what your audience cares about. And so I agree with you that the meta stuff or the like meta's metaverse stuff

is a big kind of meh-toverse, if you will. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, wait. So you've stolen that. So now I can't ever. as a joke in the show. Well, in any case,

it does raise this question as to whether or not, like, Facebook used to be so central to so many conversations. And now, as you said, like, Facebook seems to be trying to push stories into the media to cover the Metaverse. And again, people are just kind of like, meh. Like, why is this, like, the store to buy Avatar clothes? It's sort of like, okay, like Roblox has that. And a lot of these other platforms have those types of in-app purchases.

But one, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of people making money there, or if people are selling virtual clothes for their bitmojis and stuff like that. It's not happening at a level where enough people have day-to-day interactions with it, that it really kind of feels like it impacts their daily lives, right? Yeah, can I commit this in a different way? Because here's a similar story that I passed on, which is we pretty much know a lot of times I pass on rumors, unless I feel like they're really...

And actually, TechMeme generally does that too. We see rumors all the time. And then it's debated in the back channels among the editors. Like, is that a reliable rumor monger or not? So generally people think that we know what the next sort of headset from meta will be the Quest 2 successor, which is internally called Project Cambria. And I'm interested in this because, again,

I do have a Quest 2, and I'm trying to get enthusiasm for VR, although it still isn't taking for me. But, like, for example, we know that it's going to have 16 cameras, 10 on the headset and 3 on each of the controllers. So having cameras on the controllers is new. It's going to lean heavily into AR, just like we think that Apple's sort of thing is going to be AR and VR. And so, and we've seen, and that's another thing that I passed on. I think it was like last weekend or last week that Zuck did a demo with sort of new goggles on. And I passed on that too. But I find, you know, I'm interested in that.

And I'm also interested in this because it's apparently going to launch in the second half of 2022. So it's, it's coming and it's going to be very expensive. Like the rumors are it might cost $800 on the low end, if not more. like up to $1,200. So that's interesting to me in terms of, like, again, boy, how much patience is Zuck asking investors to have. But then at the same time, he really does need, you know, the hardware and stuff and the technology to be more of a wow factor.

So that's an example of one that I was personally interested in. But again, based on the feedback I've gotten from the audience, not a lot of people have, you know, Quest 2s and stuff. So I passed on that for now, but obviously when they announce Project Cambria, I'll for sure cover that. Is there a level of interest that you found from your audience in either VR or the Metaverse or augmented reality in general? Like, are those stories, ones that really resonate? It's low. Okay.

And if you're asking you see, I'm not operating in a very matrix driven thing. Like I can't point to, I don't have polls. I can't point to generally every, every, every, episode gets downloaded equally so I can't say, oh, boy, you know, no one cared about that one. You know, we really talked about this before. We should do like a listener like survey just to get a sense for other topics. Maybe, you know, that have me covered or something. I don't, you know, I don't even know what tech meme does. If they do any like user like surveys or I'm sure their traffic is fine. You know, their ad business is probably fine. But I don't know if they have any sense

for their audience and what their audience cares about. Yeah. I don't know the answer to that either. What I will say is then this gets into what we've talked about before, too. The thing that I've gotten the most feedback on is people yelling at me, just really angry. Stop talking about Web3, stop talking about NFTs, stop talking about crypto. And so then I'll admit that sometimes I have pulled back on that. The people that are angry at me don't think I have. Yeah. But then my pushback to them is like, look, again, like,

That's like telling me in 2008, I'm sick of hearing about social media. Social media is dumb. Don't do stories. Like, it's the biggest news. There was a lot of people, you know, that, yeah, felt that way back then. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, but this, I think this raises the general topic, right?

One, about what people are interested in? And two, what are the things that are going to affect people in the future? And three, what are kind of like the maybe generational gaps in coverage? And is it because of who is reporting on those things or who's spending? money or who, you know, are being targeted by ads. There's a whole broader context that we're sort of on the tension line between what companies want people to start thinking about and focusing on. And I think meta is the most obvious example of this versus what people are previously are already interested in and already familiar with and want to hear more about the

things that, you know, kind of impact them on a day-to-day basis without requiring them to change too much. And so the Web3 stuff, I think, is a really good example where you either, you know, kind of are red-pilled into that world and you really want to go deep and you're into the NFTs and all the wallets and the crypto and stuff like that. Or you're like, this is the worst thing ever. It's a big grift. I never want to hear anything about it. Anything that's negative about it that makes me, like, reaffirms my bias.

I mean, essentially it's a type of polarization that exists in the technology landscape. And so that reification of what you already believe seems to be what the media and different, you know, platforms and websites are about in a way that, I don't know, creates a kind of ossification, I guess, that I worry about. So let me give you some more concrete examples. Some of the things that I would be interested to hear more about, whether it's through TechBeam or just kind of media or news reporting in general, you know, might be related to, I don't want to say like the creator economy, but platforms like Etsy or deeper dives into Shopify business like sellers or into Pinterest or into some of these other platforms that are, you know, maybe like the middle class of the technology, you know, world and that we don't really see what. they're continuing to do and to innovate. We talk about the big players all the time, and it sort of just reconfirms their position and the oxygen that they take up in the room relative to all the

smaller stuff that's going on. And I think Web 3 is the vector by which it gives people an angle to talk about, people who are not part of the Fang kind of conglomerates, right? Yep. I'll cop to Pinterest being a blind spot for me. I tend to not do Pinterest stories very often. And so that's an example of maybe one. I should pay attention to more. Yeah, there's that and there's just like, I mean, I don't know. Like there's, there are stories that are kind of about maybe obviously Instagram as part of meta, but there's a lot of culture that's being produced through, you know, more

visual mediums or even like, you know, snap that could go deeper in terms of media, advertising, fashion culture that we kind of miss. See, I would be more likely to do a TikTok story because my sense is that TikTok is hotter right now. So, right, given two equally weighted stories about new features on TikTok or Instagram, I'd be more likely to do a TikTok thing. Real quick, Evan,

I saw you raise your hand earlier and you took it down. If you want to come up, you're welcome to come up. And by the way, also Chris, if you want to, if he doesn't come up, you can take your turn for bringing up something too. Oh, sure. Yeah, again, if anybody does want to come up and match the conversation, feel free to raise your hand

at this point. Sorry, we missed you. Evan there. Okay, great. What's up, Evan? I just sort of was triggered by the Oculus conversation. As I've wanted VR to work for so long, and I bought every VR headset back to when you could make it out of cardboard that you didn't actually have to buy it. And I just wanted it to work. Every month, I dust it off and try it on again, and I get excited for 45 minutes. and then it just goes back in the bin when I lose interest. Is it just, what is with the usability user experience format?

Is it just doomed? I almost did this as a topic to bring up today, but I have a very strong, a recent example of this, because I, too, you know, try every three months or so, hey, maybe I can get back in this. So there's very recently, my favorite, one of my favorite games is a game called City Skylines, and it's sort of like a modern version of SimCity.

And they, about a month ago, released an VR, a VR version in the Oculus store or whatever they call it. And so I was like, okay. MetaQuest. Right. MetaQuest store or whatever. And so I was super excited because I love this game. And it's like one of the fun things of doing modern city sim games is to be able to build a city and then drive around in it and look around and stuff like that. And I lasted 20 minutes on it because it was making me nauseous.

I was getting fatigued by wearing the headset. And there wasn't functionally much more that I could do. Like being able to zoom through the city with a mouse on a screen was as fun and probably more comfortable and fun. And so that's a very recent example of, again, I was like, okay, here's a vector into becoming a VR addict right up my alley. and it didn't work. And half of it is just that it's not comfortable to do for a very long time. Yeah, that's so true. And I used to really get immersed in the reading content.

You know, swimming in front of an ocean looking around. When I sit in front of my LG 65-inch OLED TV, it feels pretty immersive and involved and amazing. So it has none of the downsides of what you described. So I don't know. I'm just scratching my head. What happened to that story, by the way, of the millions of Oculus that were sold over Christmas? Wasn't there this flash hype? Yes.

I think this is this speaks to my point, like where there might just be a blind spot where there are, maybe it's a younger generation or a lot of people who, you know, whether they're working from home or working with colleagues or coworkers. is, you know, one of the things that Zuckerberg continues to push is around the notion of presence. And, you know, I don't know if you guys, in your personal experiences, mostly focus on your first person experience as solo journeys, or if you do try to play, you know, games with other people and whether that would make the difference, it seems like that's one of the challenges. You know, whereas, you know, now if you want to like play, for example, a good example might be like heads up, which is a very simple, casual iPhone game where you can play with a group of people. You need like one iPhone and it works. Whereas to play a social Metaverse game, typically you're going to have to have people with the right rigs and timing and headset. And the coordination costs feel like it's on an order of magnitude higher.

Have you guys had experiences with games? And do you think that would be the killer app if more people have these devices? Well, people love that beat saver. And so, like, in theory, there are these games where it's sort of half of a workout and half of a, you know, you're using your full body and sort of stuff. those seem to have been the ones that have had the most success so far. That's like one game, right? It's not like there's like a whole cadre.

I mean, you know? I'm with Evan, and I try to be quiet about this and keep it in the back of my mind, but there's still in my mind a question of to whether people will ever, if this is ever a medium that people actually really want. Now, like, if I could wear something that was the weight of normal eyeglasses, that would change a lot of things, But we're still at least a decade out from that. Yeah, I mean, I think the real question is just how do we get there?

And, you know, one of the tweets that I pinned is actually from Twitter business. It's sort of orthogonal. But the tweet is, practice makes progress is greater than practice makes perfect. And the reason why I thought that was kind of relevant is because at least Zuckerberg is not only betting, you know, the company and a lot of resources on getting things out there, you know, sort of publicly in front of everyone else. But I guess the question is, how do you make progress in this realm? Apple is obviously doing everything privately and secretly, whereas like meta is putting it

all out there for people to try and to experiment and is doing kind of more the Microsoft approach to developing this new platform. Two observations, and I feel like I've touched on this before, but number one, when you're, when you are in VR, you have to do it by yourself. Now, in theory, like I've played ping pong and mini golf with my, friends across the country or whatever. But I've said before, like, the kids and I'll sit down and game together on the TV. But when I put the headset on Max, like, I can't help him because I can't see. It's not, right? It's not a social thing in your house to do, right? Like, you have to have a

level of expertise already, right? And so that's puzzling to me because so much of gaming is social, but, you know, they would argue that it's, that's what, you know, um, uh, Fortnite and stuff is. The second point that I would make, and I hesitate to make this point because I don't want to gross people out, but the thing that it's been the most in VR, the thing that is the most impressive is porn. And yet, there's not a lot of VR porn out there. And so, you know, there's that old saw that, like, porn has been the driver for mass adoption of technologies going back to, you know, the VCR and things like that. And so I'm confused, like Evan said, we assume that the install base for the quest is like maybe above 10 million. There should be more VR porn out there because once you see VR porn, it's the best porn you've ever seen. So I don't know, like I'm confused by all the way.

It's really the hand tracking that's missing with the VR porn. You really need to see it. Well, it's, yeah, anyway, let's look like just like just. too deep into this. In all serious, it's just anecdotally, I know we all have our own stories. You mentioned your son, my son is 17. He actually just sold his PlayStation, but he's been a gamer on PlayStation for 10 years. And has had the VR headset the entire decade on the PlayStation, which is an optional add-on,

never used it. And I tried to understand why none of the other kids used it. I think even Sony discontinued the VR add-on. there's a new there's a new one coming a new one coming that no one will use either so I don't know are the kids really embracing this at least I haven't seen it I wouldn't expect it like I think this also like just also gets to my my I don't know curiosity in

inquisition around you know what Zuckerberg is exposed to and is seeing and the confirmation bias of being on meda's campus and running meetings ostensibly through VR and believing that this is somehow superior and really drinking your own Kool-Aid. And I wonder if this is going to be sort of a generational sort of mistake on his part where he's so surrounded by, I don't want to say, sink of fence, but people that sort of reinforce his perspective.

I mean, with Cheryl gone and with Shrep leaving, who is the CTO, a lot of the sort of maybe checks on Zuckerberg's own sort of idiosyncrasies and preferences maybe are leaving the company, such that. he now sort of is just fixated on this one thing at the expense of all the rest of the business because of how constrained he feels and sort of hemmed in by Apple's moves and by Google, et cetera. And it's always dangerous to try to psychoanalyze these folks. But again, like, you know, you're one of the richest people in the world. Why are you still doing this? If this is the thing that he, if he still wants to

change the world in a Steve Jobs like way, aside from the fact that, that he also wants to have his own platform that isn't, you know, beholden to Apple or Google or whatever. Like, you know, what if he actually wins? Like, what if he's right? Like, if we were just to play that out, right? But also, what if he's, what if he's not right? And the only reason we're doing this is to keep him interested and keep him coming

into the office every day. I mean, it's a good question, you know? Like, of all the things that he could focus on, he clearly is, you know, bet the farm on this one when he has a lot of other bets that are still working. I mean, there's still a lot of work going on with WhatsApp, with Instagram. You know, messaging is a huge area. I don't know how much this has to do with like, I mean, I don't even know how you get this thing to be affordable from an international perspective. Most of Facebook's business now is a global concern.

And so getting these high-end computing devices to the rest of the world, like the iPhone has been, I think is going to be a real significant challenge, just culturally, like how you make this appropriate. Look, the iPhone, look, how long, how many years, almost a full decade of smartphones. people trying to push smartphones. Smartphones would be the next big thing. The mobile web was the next big thing. And it never was, never was, never was, until one day it was. So it is one of those things where, you know, what we're waiting on is the perfect iteration of this idea, the perfect product. You know, Brian, where are the iterations? Because I've known, you know, every year if we're iterations, I was hoping with Oculus, you'd see like every year a better, faster Oculus until it was, you know, the way the iPhone is and what, there's been two releases.

So I don't see how that's... In theory, we're about to get there because if Apple's going to be releasing a thing, when Apple enters a market, then everybody's going to do it. You'll eventually see Google try their hand at one. Obviously, Meta's going to try to keep up with whatever Apple's doing. Apple has a good track record for mainstreaming certain things. So on the one hand, it sounds like we're being completely negative about this, but I'm straight in the middle here in terms of feeling bullish or bearish on this,

because we're about to enter a period where this is going to be, at least for the next few years, what a lot of the players are going to try to hit at. And so there's going to be a lot of arrows behind this idea, and it could be something that it just needs, like, you know, a tipping point. Or it could be a thing like, look, everybody tried to get us into 3D TVs for four or five years, and then no one wanted it and it went away, you know, so who knows? So, okay, like, I think we've got this one covered.

One thing that I do want to talk about is another kind of adjacent technology realm, which I will admit that I was an early advocate for, which is voice computing. And it feels like, I don't want to say that that kind of direction has run its course, but there are some interesting things that are happening in that realm that I don't want to say are, you know, indicative or providing kind of a, I don't know, maybe sort of a sense of vector in terms of the direction of where this stuff is going to go. But two things, I think that are maybe actually three things that are worth popering.

And then, you know, I'm curious to get your tape, Brian. You know, one is that, and I was hoping to get in front of the show, Brett Kinsella on, to talk about Google's kind of retiring of third-party voice actions in the assistant platform. It feels like, you know, ever since I got involved with conversational commerce and voice computing, you know, in the bot era around 2016, this was going to be, at least to me, sort of a very clear way to deploy artificial intelligence in a way that would make computing more accessible to more people, because rather than having to fiddle with icons and apps and all these

sort of visual metaphors to try to organize a digital space, you could simply talk to your computer and it would do the thing that you essentially wanted to do. And there are many, many reasons for which that experience kind of never really reached its full potential, which you could argue is kind of happening with a lot of consumer-oriented AI experiences, like the breadth and complexity of the way that we, I don't know, kind of create tasks to be done is far more specific and divergent than you might have hoped or expected. I mean, your self-driving car bet, for example, is a good example of how we just haven't really made as significant of progress as we thought we might have because of the billions and billions of edge cases. Like, you're just never going to solve it. So one is

that, right? So Google moving away from third-party voice actions. So is you're overarching, are you saying that you're now sort of turning bearish on the idea of voice as a computing input at least for the near- I'm reflecting on what you guys both said, which is that the 3D space and 3D graphics, et cetera, as a kind of dedicated computing experience is something that has been promised for a very, very long time. And it may be well the case that we are never going to get to place where it is the mainstream dominant form of computing, simply because whether it's the job to be done or the form factor or the things that it

doesn't really do well makes it limited in its actual usefulness. It's not that the technology hasn't improved or hasn't evolved or isn't useful in very specific domains. It is that it is not a generic computing paradigm the way that a two-dimensional screen with a mouse and a keyboard, which was invented in the late 40s, right? Yeah. Like product market fit happened half a century ago. Like we have not gotten there with goggle-based, you know, computing environments that make sense for the common user. So voice computing, I think, is something that is increasingly accessible and used in some contexts, but it is not the generic. But it hasn't taken over.

Purpose, exactly, that you'd expect, you know, a lot of the early proponents, again, including myself, would have thought it would have turned into, even though it's somewhat more accessible. I always like to joke that, you know, we're talking about VR and everybody's trying to make snow crash happen, but also the canonical example is anything that was on Star Trek, eventually nerds are going to try to make. And so, right, you think that the end evolutionary step of computer interaction is, well, I guess it's plugging into your brain, but is, you know, Captain Picard saying, computer, do this or do

that. And yet I'd point out that even in the 24th century or 23rd century or whatever, Worf was still back there with that weird sort of touchscreen sort of, like input sort of thing. And so I think that one of the problems is that in the quest for the next big thing, Benedict Evans is a great writer on this all the time, is people assume that the next big thing will take over everything. But like Steve Jobs said, there are cars and there are trucks, and it just takes a while to shake out. And I don't think there's anything that's ever going to take over. The vast majority of computing is done on smartphones now, and yet there are still laptops.

and desktops and web. Yeah, and differentiate between enterprise and business use cases and the consumer. A lot of what you're describing, even VR, there are tons of interesting and real business use cases and training and other kinds of learning that companies are very successful in now. And with voice and NLP, you can't call a call center, you know, contact center without a bot of some kind these days. Exactly. Right. In some ways, that was the original.

It was the original product market fit. And a lot of people, you know, I will say, told me, you know, back in the early days of bots and voice assistance that customer service was going to be the place where this was largely deployed and successful. And I just felt that it was so boring and uninteresting relative to what, you know, you could do with kind of a personal voice assistant that knew things about you. And I mean, I started a whole, you know, company based on this concept. And so, and it turns out that it was right from the beginning. It's almost like maybe the point that I'm trying to make is that a lot of these technologies sort of found their product market fit a long, long time ago. And that new and divergent product opportunities kind of comes along generationally.

And that if you are able to be like a really good, I don't know, the metaphor that I'm imagining as a surfer, kind of riding the wave of generational change and shift, that it creates new opportunities because there has been a reset in expectations and norms. So Snapchat is a really good example where there was a move away from the public sharing on social networks and social media of kind of Web2O to more private, directed sharing, where the camera became a means of communication as opposed to a means of just capturing and expressing. That was a big shift. Web 3 and Web 2 is interesting, I'm sorry, Web 3 is interesting because it changed it. If you want to get ahead today and building a startup, up, it's really, really hard to imagine how you're going to do that unless you change the

underlying paradigm and sort of start over. And so Web3 kind of provides that by changing the nature of the economic competition that's occurring. So again, coming back to voice computing, the shift away from third-party voice actions because discovery was just too hard and promotion was too hard is interesting. Then I think like what Amazon showed today, and I just, I pin the tweet about, you know, using their voice assistant, which I won't say because I have one in the room, to imitate your grandmother's voice, your deceased grandmother's voice. You know, to read a story is an example of AI being used in this consumer domain that I think is interesting and also creepy and also probably the subject of some Black Mirror episode, but is an example of how another generation is going to come up and use that to synthesize personalities people. I did the story also about in real time changing somebody's accent.

In real time, we already have real time translation. Google has demoed that with various AR things. That is from Star Trek, the Universal Translator, where in real time someone can be talking and you can hear your native language theoretically come in. But I had Chris in my notes, almost the inverse of what you're saying, are we approaching an AI tipping point? are we reaching the point now where this stuff is becoming mainstream,

like the Dolly stuff that we talked about last week and things like that. So you just brought Chris up, and it looks, based on his bio, it looked like he might have. Yeah, Chris Hopp, do you want to introduce yourself and just share your thoughts? Yeah, I can't stay long because I got an interview in a little bit, but I basically have worked at the intersection of like middleware systems integration, feature set building, eye tracking, gestures, emotion detection, all of those kinds of things.

Is that bigger or smaller company? Smaller. And I'm based in your area, by the way. I'm in Oakland, too. I read on. And also, like, on the other side of, like, it's confusing when you're talking to larger companies because they're like, how do you do all of that? But it's a small, like, R&D lab studio called FS Studios, who I've been working with

the last six years. and they're amazing. And they basically are just applying gamification to enterprise B2B. So, you know, like Evan was talking about, you know, the use case portion is really to differentiate it. It's really important, but there's a lot of intersection between game engines and like digital twins and perception and retracing and all of those kinds of things that apply to like everything, which is hard for different industry people to understand,

whether I'm talking to an Accenture person or a Deloy person or I'm talking to somebody that does field service, for example, like I think of like Carey R is an example that that's owned by Xerox, and they are really good at selling the value versus like discussing the underlying technology of camera vision and feature sets and machine learning and the data that's entered into it, you know, etc. I am probably, well, how can I say this? I'm really interested in seeing use cases where people don't wait for permission to build it,

and they just go out and build it. Because it seems like when you're selling this stuff, and I'm on the sales side if you can't tell, when you're selling this, people don't care what kind of technology you can do. They only care about what they need. and one thing. And then B, they may not know what they need,

but they do want to remain competitive. And so I kind of wish, like, there was an organization that focused more on sales and, like, partnerships because you've got VRARARA, you've got A-I-X-R, you've got A-I-X-R, and digital twin and all that kind of stuff. Can you, can you impact some of those acronyms? I'm sorry?

Can I turn my fan off? because I'm burning up in my apartment talking to you. Sure. I have my fan off too and I'm hot. Sorry. You know, he's more about the acronyms. Yeah, yeah, you're good. It's more like the acronyms.

Just like I don't actually know what those things are. So VR-A-R-A is the virtual reality augmented reality association. It's the V-R-A-R-A.com. Got it. And it's headed by a guy named Chris Kolo. And then there's AW-R-A-W. which is Augmented World Expo or Augmented World Night. If you look up AWE Night on Google,

you can see tons of sessions of people talking about different use cases across the board. And we just had AWE 2022, which had over 250 exhibitors. When I say we, I mean, I attended Ori-N-Barr is the guy who heads it. And it was also headed up by, you know, Tom Emmerich, he's a friend of mine, used to be a part of that. Now he's focused on eighth wall, which does Slam and WebA.R, which is making a lot of these types of applications more accessible because there's nothing to download. So what I'm hearing you say is one, kind of allowing for permissionless innovation and letting people just like, you know, start to build stuff and do stuff. And obviously one of the challenges is getting the hardware in the hands of people, specifically developers, right?

So they can go off and create interesting experiences. Then you have a second order problem, which is once those things have actually been built and developed, getting those kind of experiential delivery systems into the hands of regular consumers, such that then they can actually consume those products that have been built by those developers. And we kind of find ourselves in this, like, if you think, one of the things that used to be, I think a principle or, premise behind a lot of the computing innovation that was occurring was one to lower the cost,

you know, per megabyte, like, you know, to improve power, obviously is still an issue. But you could have fairly generic computers and be able to contribute, let's say, or publish to the web. Or, for example, you've got a really old shitty phone and still tweet. And so more and more, we've been building up the kind of necessary equipment that you need to run these things. I mean, a lot of what Apple's been doing with their processors lately is, you know, with M2 and so on, is to increase their ability to run AI efficiently, power efficiently on ship so that more of these experiences are available to consumers in a broader, you know, sense. I mean, this is, I think, one of the things that is fascinating about this moment.

So that sounds like part of it. And it sounds like you're calling for maybe more trade groups or trade organizations to be able to promote more of these use cases to more. Well, I'm saying that there needs to. to be, and I'm considering on how to do this myself personally, but there needs to be a group around how do you tell a story.

Because a lot of people just want to stick the key in the car and go. And that's what's needed, I think, desperately on the consumer side of things. Because as soon as you start talking about technology, this and that, people's eyeballs roll when you're in a consumer space.

I mean, in terms of boredom? In terms of, like, they don't, pardon my French, they don't give us shit how the technology works. You know, but on the other side of things, you know, like, there are places like Qualcomm spaces that have just opened up. And I think that's been

pretty warmly received. I mean, they've got, for enterprise side of things, they've got, you know, Ross and Unity platform for robotics. They've got VR gaming. You know, this is multiplayer, and it was like, a lot of this

was invented or, you know, brought about so developers would have an open platform to submit their work and that's what they're encouraging. As far as like getting it into the hands of regular consumers

I mean the Quest device is you know they're selling it for 300 bucks but it costs more to make it right? Yeah. So okay. Facebook is losing a lot of money there. Or or trying to spin it up and get things off the ground.

But, okay, so I think we've gone deep on the VR thing again. Chris, thank you for coming up and sharing your thoughts as well as Evan. I want to make sure that we get at least one more topic in before we close. Brian? I got two more that I made notes of. This is another example of something that I passed on, but rumor, like I don't talk a lot about Kindle because, again, I'm trying to make a judgment call. Are people excited about new Kindle things?

But let's see if this pans out the rumors are that we might get the first interesting new Kindle in a while because remember how I told you I got that remarkable tablet that I used to explain a little bit about that because the remarkable is as you well as the name implies it is remarkable in a way that actually is quite delightful it's basically um a thinner Kindle and larger it's the size of a regular piece of paper and it's e-ink and it's got a pen and I take all my notes on it and I send Chris when Chris and I talk about certain stories like I I say Chris, little PDFs from where I've marked up. I've highlighted things.

I write notes in the margin or whatever. So, you know, I haven't been able to do a story on this yet because it's all rumors, but the rumors are that the next Kindle that we might get could be sort of like a remarkable, like the ability to take notes on it using some form of stylus. So that would be interesting. That would make the Kindle interesting to me again. Okay. One of the reasons why this could be interesting, and again, whether it's jobs to

done framework or thinking about Amazon's lack of a real killer kind of mobile device, you know, I wonder if that is their way to stay relevant and to continue to kind of support their broader ecosystem. Obviously, Zuckerberg is looking for, you know, their equivalent of a phone in the VR space. If Amazon is thinking that the Kindle, which I think is, you know, still a hugely popular device. And again, it's a very good example of a device like we were talking about before, cars and trucks. You know, one of Steve Jobs's great quotes is about how computing is, or the application and the design of certain computing devices is a matter of emphasis. And so what the Kindle emphasizes is the experience of reading, portability, you know, the ability to use it in direct

sunlight. And if it adds in some of these more interactive elements, you know, writing notes and things like that, that expands its capabilities in a way that you would, you might typically get like a Microsoft device, like a tablet, you know, with a notepad or the Apple pencil for. And so this might be, you know, one of Amazon's, you know, kind of next efforts to expand its middle-world computing platform. My theory is that the Kindle lineup does exactly what they want it to do, you know. It's another thing where, like, why haven't I talked about Kindle over the last few years? Because basically they iterate every year, but it's like, you know, more backlighting or like, you know, better DPI, you know, better... Different color hues.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, despite the fact that, again, what device do I use every day more than the Kindle? Basically only my smartphone, I suppose. So, yeah, I don't know. If that comes to pass, I'll definitely cover it. But related to that, this is sort of you and I talking shop on the air,

but you heard me say earlier this week, and I've been hinting around about this for a while, that I've been hearing things that, again, that now that Andy Jassy has taken over from Bezos, that they've been pulling back on a lot of things. Like, I've seen people say that, boy, they're really cleaning up. Someone even made the analogy that the last few years of the Bezos reign might be looked back on like the last few years of GE under Jack Welsh.

Like, you know, like a real legend of his time, but, you know, he stayed a little too long. The mess that he left, you know, GE still is not the GE it was or whatever. So, you know, we should reach out to Jason Delray, who I think covers Amazon better than anybody, get him to come on in. I have in my notes, Amazon at an inflection point question mark. So, yeah. It is interesting, right, because we are sort of living through a series of founder exits, if you will, or stepping aside, right? I mean, I don't know the last time that we heard from Larry Page or Sergey Brin, you know. Oh, they're gone.

long ago. That is my point. They exited, you know, quite, like, sort of really out the back door. You know, the party was still going. And, like, you know, it went until 3 a.m. and they left at 11 p.m. and they were in bed and sleeping, right? Cheryl Sandberg, obviously, has also left. And so that tag team duo over at Facebook meta is over. Amazon. Bezos has gone. Yeah. Bezos is gone. You know, Google and Microsoft are probably the ones that have the, the leaders that are going to stick around the longest. And they also made those changes earlier in a way that I think is, is interesting and important. So there's a question kind of about maybe ascendant leaders, you know, from other platforms and companies and where they might come from. I think it's interesting, for example, I actually spend quite a bit of attention,

just sort of paying attention to what Adam Aseri is doing over at Instagram, you know, and what he's been trying to do to take on TikTok. And, you know, he's kind of one of those execs that, strangely enough, is, you know, one uses the product, you know, whereas Parag from Twitter doesn't really use the product, at least not as much as Elon Musk. And you kind of wonder, like, how they're going to sort of continue their reign in those worlds. And so this Amazon thing is super interesting. I mean, in some ways, what Bezos built and did, and then coming up through the pandemic,

and it's sort of having this amazing supply network built out, sort of met that moment perfectly. And yet through that largesse, and this seems to occur. This is also, like, Facebook's challenge. It's almost like when you do turn into, like, the fat cats, then you don't have the discipline to kind of build for, you know, the moment in a very disciplined, concise, like, way. The nature of your organization changes and you just spread your money around, you know, like, Yahoo had their development studios and Google had theirs and, you know, those moonshots and the big bets. Like, many of them didn't really pan out relative to their first, you know, like product sets.

So it does raise this question about what Amazon is going to do and what they're going to pull back and how that's going to look in the future. Hey, this is neither here nor there. But again, I feel like I'm just pulling out my notebook and like I'm trying one more for you, but go for it. I'm trying a stand-up set. Yeah, this is real quick because you're not going to have an answer for it. But do you find it interesting that there's no face of TikTok? Yes.

And the question, I suppose, is whether one, that is intentional or two, if it's cultural. Oh, yeah, probably both. Yeah. Yeah. Cultural I hadn't thought of, yeah. Yeah. I, because I actually, I listen to a bunch of reporting about TikTok and about its business model, or roughly, you know, speaking, and about, you know, its founder. And its founder, you know, is, I don't want to, like, speaking correctly. But I believe he's, you know, sort of Chinese national and, like, has connections to that world. And so bite dance has a lot more exposure to the Chinese, you know, government and economy than a lot of other tech startups, you know, or not even tech startups anymore, just tech, companies. And so that makes it harder, I think, to get access. And they probably don't have the same

type of relationships with the press and the media that other, you know, more conventional U.S.-based tech companies do. And so I like, it's such a strange story. And it's so hard, I think, to wrap our minds around how different that company in its background is. I mean, I don't really have any friends that I know of actually that work at TikTok. And yet I've got a lot of other folks who work at other big tech companies, you know? There's that, but then also, like, it's, it was such an amazing playbook. And I think that the Acquired Boys podcast might have done a couple of things on this. But, like, the fact that they've taken over and they ran an obvious playbook, the way that they

came to market, the way they grew buying ads on other people's platforms and things like that. Because, you know, there's that famous Eugene Way piece about, like, how the algorithm was different. stuff like that's been that has been sliced and diced but if this was a western company you'd have had a billion magazine cover pieces about the genius strategy behind tick-tok and the lack of that come up and you know where there is sort of like you know founder genius you know sprayed all over the magazines or whatever because the press you know department you know that's their job right means that we don't have the same I don't like name recognition for that founder. And so you can't even sort of ask questions and be like, where is, you know, the founder?

What is the founder doing? You're like, I don't even know who that person is. And so that creates a different like ambiguity. And because it's so big and so powerful in a way that we don't understand because there's not enough reporting about what it is and how it works and it's not public means that it's this real crazy Trojan horse that uses AI to a degree that I don't, well, I mean, a lot of other companies do, but that doesn't have the same level of scrutiny that other platforms have. And every now and then, there's sort of something that breaks through.

You know, there's something about, you know, privacy or teens or, you know, things like that. But not to the level of bringing the founder into Congress, you know, and testifying, you know, for example. Or Senate, I should say the Senate hearings. So anyways, really good, you know, call out and point. It is so powerful and so important. And yet it just, it's, we don't have enough coverage of it. Okay. So the last thing that I want to bring up a little more self-congratulatory, I suppose. But, you know, one of the things that I like to do is just sort of like take apart apps and try to understand what they're doing and what they're up to.

And one of the apps that I like to focus on the most is Spotify because I'm just a huge Spotify user. I've been there from the very, very beginning before it was even launched in the U.S. I somehow secretly got an account. And anyways, like I just find what they're doing to be interesting because they are one of the independent you know, voices out there in the world that obviously are trying to figure out, like, how to, they're controversial in their own right, and yet they still do some really interesting things. And one of the things that I discovered recently is that there's this new community tab that is available. And I will, I will tell you my secret, because Sarah Perez from TechCrunch

published it, that if you type, if you go into, let's say you have the latest version of the Spotify app and you go into Safari on iOS and you type in all lower. lowercase, Spotify colon community, no spaces. That will open up this community tab. And you can see if you happen to have connected your Facebook account some time ago, what your friends are listening to as well as, and this is actually a very key, important one, any playlists that have been updated recently. And that is actually like a really cool feature because one of the real big benefits and values of Spotify are the shared playlists.

And people and brands and companies and all sorts of different individuals publish these playlists. And they're amazing. It's where and how Spotify trains its algorithm and presents you with personalized recommendations like Discover Weekly and things like that. The reason why I think this is also interesting is because it is a layer of social discovery that up until now, Spotify, I think, has largely stayed away from. I mean, yes, there is the sort of Facebook thing, but it hasn't been touched in a very, very long time. But there is a new person with a new role at Spotify that I discovered, I think, by listening to their, they do sort of an investor day, and this person's work was discussed. And this person is their head of freemium or something.

Like, that's even a thing. But the person who is in charge of their freemium subscriptions is the person, of course, who drives a lot of revenue because they get people onto the platform to then convert. And so social discovery and social collaboration with joint listening sessions and things or that are going to be a very, very important way for Spotify to continue to grow in an economic fashion where they don't have to necessarily pay for or buy ads that are probably decreasingly effective given all the changes to app track tracking transparency, etc. And this also tees up other types of social discovery for podcasts or for audiobooks,

which are coming soon and for another feature, which was just announced today, live concerts and events. So this is a case where you follow a certain set of artists and now you'll be notified when concerts are coming to town that are around you and related to acts that you follow. And I don't know, but I have a hunch that Spotify may launch their own ticketing brand at some point where they will sell merch and tickets, essentially to take on Ticketmaster. So that's my big thought.

By the way, I'm glad you did that because those are two stories that, again, I passed on. Oh, you passed on my story. I know. I didn't read close enough to discover that you were behind it. It felt like, oh. That means that you're not biased in your presentation. That's true, because I would have done it if I had known. But it's also, now that you explained it to me.

Like I looked at it, you know, skimmed it and was like, oh, more sharing stuff. But I see how it's more, it's a deeper integration. And obviously, if they get into ticketing, like that that would be, you know, something that I would 100% have done. or will do if they do that. You remember Last FM and Scrobling? I still have an account there. I still, I mean, I still, as far as I know, syndicate my listens there.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I still have an account there too somewhere. But yeah, yeah. They're owned by CBS, I think, right? I mean, they're sort of like the, what is the company that watches TV or like sees what people watch it? Nielsen, Neilson. Nielsen.

I feel like LastFM is sort of like the Nielsen of music. Yeah, possibly. But yeah, so I'm glad you did that because you're right to, if I had dug deeper, there's more interesting wrinkles to that than I. If you want to check out the new concerts tab, by the way, you can go to open.spotify.com slash concerts, and that's where you'll be able to see this new feature. It's pretty interesting, actually, to take a look at. Well, thank you, Chris, for you're essentially picking up the mistakes.

Like you're going through my trash bin and unfolding all the coupled up pieces of paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, one last thing. This is related back to my, you know, getting on setting up my Mac studio and this is the computer for my next decade. What cloud storage provider is your go-to? You're a Dropbox person, aren't you? I am. Yeah.

I mean, I've got, you know, stuff and drive, you know, and I have EyeCloud now, so actually all of them. Yeah, actually. So, okay, the thing that I was going to tell you is I feel like I have made the decision to go all in on Microsoft. Is it OneDrive? No. What? Yes. You're going to be getting links.

When I send you files, you're going to be getting... Well, because... Explain yourself. I still, well, okay, two things. I still run my other business on a Windows laptop that, you know, the OneDrive integration is there. Like, you know, it automatically backs up your desktop and things like. like that. And so I get that free terabyte with my office 365. I see.

I, you know, I've always used, ICloud, you know, the one terabyte that I cloud. No, I have, I pay for two terabytes, actually, to sync folders and things like that. But I'm also moving over to OneNote, and then in preparation for try, I'm in preparation for when I buy a, the low-end MacBook Air where everything's going to be synced together. I've decided to go with the Microsoft ecosystem because, Chris, again, I'm trying to future proof. And who do I feel like I can trust to still have this product 20 years from now is Microsoft, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that that you don't think Google would actually like get rid of drive or just like charge an enormous amount or something. Well, as you know, I'm skeptical. I know. He's just like waiting for like, yeah.

that Google's like raised their rates or something. And even, you know, Apple, I don't know, you know, things that Apple, like, that Apple, like, I've always thought Apple should go all in on just, you know, gobs of free storage as a sort of lock-in. Especially for photos. I mean, that is one of Google's big drivers. Yeah. So the fact that they've never taken that seriously is like, well, I can't trust Apple to, like, you know, if I'm going to, you know, try to future proof for 20 years.

And Dropbox, again, like, look, I love Dropbox. I've used them since the day they showed up on TechCrunch when Mike Errington first told me about them all those years ago. But I can't, I don't want to, in the same way that like I extricated all of my booknotes from Evernote because I can't depend on that Evernote. You know, Dropbox is a company in good standing. Seems healthy right now, but, you know, I want a future proof. So that's why I went with Microsoft. You know, it's funny. I do not have a really, well, I mean, implicitly.

I think if you touch a computer, you have a relationship with Microsoft, but I basically do not have a relationship with Microsoft. I do not rely on any of their products. You know, anytime someone sends me a Word doc, you know, I sort of impishly open it and like pages and it, you know, messes up formatting. But I just like, I can't bring myself to like install any Microsoft products. I just, I mean, we talked about it last time, you know, like my whole Firefox thing, you know, like it just. I still, I should point out that the other reason is, is that I write the show every day on Word and then bring it up on Word on my phone when I go into. chord. So then again, that's essentially I've been using OneDrive all this time. This is a blind spot for me, you know, and I recognize it, you know, just like we were talking

at the beginning of the show. You reminded me of the point that I wanted to make is what I didn't realize, and again, this is me being naive, but maybe you didn't know this either. You know how, like your ICloud is sort of like a native sort of, it's, it feels like it's integrated completely into your OS's file system. Yes. And how Dropbox has had that all these years, and that's why it feels so easy to use because it's just okay so apparently that's table stakes now because one drive does the same thing yes so this is this is also it's been a big problem um but they're like behind the scenes what it seems to be is that one apple wants people to move away from kernel extensions which essentially require the like the moderation moderation modification of the

underlying um you know operating system and how it functions to do what it does and obviously that's a huge security risk. And if people are installing products, let's say like Dropbox that modify the kernel, that can lead to a lot of bad things down the road. Whether it's, you know, Dropbox's fault or someone else's, it just opens up vulnerability. Is that what also like Zoom does and kind of people added them for that? Yeah. Similar. Okay. Yeah. That tactic, you know, they've been essentially hardening the kernel and making it harder for people to write extensions at that level and creating more APIs to support the same kind of end case. but in a way that's more secure. And so they've been opening up more, whether they're iCloud or they're, I think it's like an NTFS, which is a file system extension,

so that macOS can interact with those cloud hosting providers in a more native friendly way. And so I know Google Drive now has something that does this. And they had something before, but it was sort of this weird sync down like, you know, online offline thing. Dropbox. I still get lots of warnings because Dropbox clearly is still

rewriting some of their systems and platforms, but OneDrive probably took the, what's called, sort of like the compliant way of integrating into the OS, because I think Apple just realizes that they need to work with all these providers in a way that's both secure and also sensible when it comes to how people store and share stuff. Yeah, I was just delighted that my OneDrive, it just fits into my workflow because it's just another folder that lives where I want it to live. So now the assumption is you should have like lots of those different places out there. suppose, right?

Yeah, yeah. One last thing, and you're going to love this because of what you were just talking about. So I was thinking over my ads, right? So that, like, because I'm going to go to Michigan for the fourth. And like so I wanted to make sure that I had all of the ads that I needed. When I save the ad name, like I save it as like, you know, athletic greens, the date. What your ad name looks like. But then I also put the sort of.

URL for the show notes, right? So it's like, you know, this one is Athletic Greens 4 slash ride. This one is whatever, forward slash tech meme or whatever. So when I tried to sync it on One Drive, it wouldn't do it because of the forward slash. Yep, which is, of course, the very special thing in the Windows world. So there you go. Yeah, that's, and I hadn't thought of that as a thing since I've been mostly a Mac person for the last 15 years. It was like, oh, right, I remember that. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, I remember those days too.

Yeah. All right, well, that's a good place to end, probably. It was on slashes. Totally. If you know, you know. Well, Brian, you want to read us out? I love everybody. What do I say?

I love everybody. I got to remember what my actual catchphrases.