Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) What IS The Metaverse?

Episode Date: October 16, 2021

What is the Metaverse? Why is everyone talking about it? Why is Mark Zuckerberg talking SO MUCH about it lately? And come to think of it, what is Facebook's play for the future? Sponsors: Betterhelp.com/ridehome 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. Hey, by the way, Chris, might as well start this considerous live, I suppose. I'll set it off. Okay.

Welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience at a very special early time because I am on the East Coast. I am recording from Vermont in New England, enjoying the foliage. But here we are. It is Wednesday, October 13th. And we are here to talk about all things new and exciting in the world of tech and all that stuff. Anyways, let's go. So can I start off with two Mayacalpas from today's show, one of which is neither here nor there, but the other one might lead us to our first topic. And Rapha, if you wanted to say hi, you are a speaker, so you're free to say hi if you want real quick.

Hi. Hey, Rafi. It's Rafe, by the way. Rafe, Rafe. Okay, well, guess what? Look. Okay, I was going to defer to you, Brian. You're the historian.

Well, so way back in 2005, I did a startup called Who to Talk to, which was a job search social network kind of experiment thing. Free LinkedIn. Well, no, I did a different startup called Where Are the Jobs, which launched a month after LinkedIn in 2003. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, the first point, where would you have been writing for then? Anyway, what year was that? 2005. 2005?

Yeah. How was I then? Here, I'm going to find it. I was at CET. I was going to say CET. I think CET. Yeah. Okay.

Ray Feneal, who to talk to. I checked it recently, and it was on. Yes, who to talk to is not a job board on CET. So, right. And I remember emailing you after you wrote it up, you wrote it up. because it was literally like the first time I'd ever tried to get pressed for something. And I was like, oh my God, thank you for spreading the word about it. And you're like, you wrote back and you're just like, that's my job.

Yeah. Sorry. I was a bit of a dick. Sorry about that. Well, Raph, I return the favor by never knowing your name. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, that might have been the one that inspired me to create a spreadsheet of one of the big crash came of all the people who were losing their jobs.

I started this little spreadsheet. And I had like hundreds and hundreds of contributors of, people were losing jobs and people are hiring jobs. It lasted for a couple of months. It was a sad time. By the way, I'm remembering it wrong because the date on this article is November 28th, 2006. Okay. Yeah, anyway. So right, as Chris said, origin stories.

Another thing, talk about getting wrong. Today on the show, I mentioned that G4 is back. Yeah. And I kept referring to it as like the show where you, you know, got your love of tech or whatever. Because I was remembering when it was tech TV, when, like, Leo Laporte was on it. And I knew that it became G4,

but I didn't realize that it became mostly a gaming site. Or gaming, gaming channel, I suppose. So just in case anyone was wondering why I kept referring it to a tech site, even though everything about it is gaming. There was a time. just not the time people might remember. Right.

It was just a rename and rebranding and became G4. And then went away eight years ago because it became, what was that the, what did I say it was, some sort of men's fashion channel or something. Esquire was it? Esquire or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was no pivot left.

All right. So my second Mayacopa might be lead into what one thing interesting to talk about is I did the story about, how Stripe is hiring a crypto team and a very small one but right but also it occurred to me as I was

writing that up that you know I like to pride myself on connecting the dots and I realized I had it Stripe we know is as we've said on the World Cup of Entrepreneurs thing like they're trying to own money And how did it never dawn on me that they have never been a player in crypto? Like, as soon as I wrote that up, I was like, oh, my God, in all these ways that, like, you know, Stripe is maybe the biggest unicorn in the land and it does payments and all this

stuff, but what is crypto, but in theory, payments and money and things like that? And so it just kind of blew my mind that it had never occurred to me before that, oh, my God, yeah, every time we talk about crypto and things, Stripe is. kind of not a player in that space until now, I guess. I mean, that's kind of true about like Visa and MasterCard, you know, although Visa, of course, bought their first NFT. But those guys, it just seemed like they were not going to enter into the space for some reason. And I wonder if, you know, we're not exactly like, you know, well, I work for a fintech now.

But in terms of understanding the fendex space, whether Stripe couldn't get close to that stuff, because of the regulations, because of securities, because of all the things that are just ambiguous or arbitrary or not figured out right now. And given all the licenses that go. into that, Stripe just, you know, was like, we're not going to deal with that right now. It's like if they're, if they're killing it in their lane right now, why take on, I take on that risk. Right. Exactly.

If like suddenly like they get audited, you know, because they're touching crypto, then that's not good for their, their business. That's a good, excellent point. Which then if now we've, we've spun this thing around 360 degrees, then is it interesting that now they're going to dip their toe in the water? I wonder what they're seeing my guess and i i have no insider information just you know reading the tea leaves is that there is a sufficient momentum of uh their international customers who are probably asking for processing of crypto and crypto payments you know whether it's what's going on in um al salvador or elsewhere um it just feels like you know money in the in the u s is just different than everywhere else because we're very well banked we you know have you know good credit card systems and etc um and it just isn't

the case universally globally. So if Stripe has that international presence, then in footprint, they're going to want to do what their customers are asking them to do. And I got to imagine it got to like a fever pitch where it's like, okay, we have to have a crypto solution or some answer because this is clearly happening faster than we're able to say, no, no, sorry, we'll deal with that later. I think I've made that point on the show before that the last 18 months, one of the things that has finally gotten traction for crypto is that every bank, their client, are asking for it. Yes.

So they cut Venmo, PayPal. Yeah. All these digital online, you know, currencies are all moving in that direction. And crypto is just like another offering. So it sort of just, I think, makes sense that if all of those, you know, payment providers are coming online and offering it, that eventually merchants are going to be like, hey, this is what my customers have. They're selling these NFTs for, you know, bolos.

Well, no. I'm not even saying, I'm not even saying that. I'm saying that if you're a fidelity. or a Bank of America or a visa or whoever. Like everybody, even the startups, everybody wants to be that super app that you do all of your financial stuff in. So I think people woke up over the last year

and we're like, so wait, we're trying to have you do everything inside your account with us, except we're going to still allow you to go over there and do your crypto with that Coinbase, right? And so like that's sort of an untenable position going forward just from the simple fact that if people are living, inside some other financial app, then you're kind of losing your base game

if you're a banker. It could be. I don't know. I mean, like, some of Stripe stuff is just so rudimentary, so basic. Like, for example, their iOS app. Like, it sucks.

It's really bad. And I think it's because they expect other third parties to really build the experience on top of it. Like, they really want to be like the rails. They don't want to build the trains. And so in this case, they just need to have the underpinnings of how to support crypto. And their customers will take care of the details

and the implementation. So that's, again, I'm thinking about this from a platform design perspective as opposed to all the consumer stuff into some Stripe experience. Right. Well, because, I mean, Stripe, as far as I can tell, has no aspirations to be a consumer brand. Like, they kind of want, they always want to be the piping in the background on the internet for all payments. So, interesting in the sense that if Stripe's whole thing is APIs all the way down, but theoretically crypto has always been programmable money. I'm wondering where they see their angle that they can fit in there.

But if anybody can figure it out, it would be them. Yeah. Rath, you got any thoughts on this? On you put me on the spot. I haven't podcast in 20 years. On a Y-Sripe would go into crypto or be hiring for that now. No, I mean, obviously everybody, everybody needs to do those transactions. I could give you more reasons for why they wouldn't because of the regulatory disaster that it is and is going to be.

My bet is they stayed out of it as long as they possibly could. Yeah. Well, that was my thesis. Yeah. Well, it sounds like, Rave, you might be a bit of a crypto skeptic, which is totally fine. the safe space here. I'm just, you're wondering if it's even a decent business to get in, if you've got a safe business on the side to begin with. Like, maybe you don't even want to touch it. Well, I mean, look, if there's financial instruments being transferred and you're in the financial

business, then you would be foolish to avoid those transactions unless there's a giant cost of doing those transactions. And I'm not a skeptic. on the value of crypto, I just think that the regulations are going to be unbelievably onerous for the next couple of years. I was listening to Pete Barrara's podcast. He was interviewing somebody from the All Things D conference. I forget his name. And it was just like, and he basically his message was, you know, we're coming for you, crypto. Yeah.

And because it's valuable, that's why, right? Yep, yep. Another point I've made before is you go to the banks because that's where the money is and government goes after power because they're in the power business. Exactly. Yeah. So somewhat tangentially, we should acknowledge, Chris, you and I haven't actually podcasted together in over three weeks, even though we had some bonus episodes in the bag and then there was that one that I didn't, I wasn't here for. It's true. So you and I haven't talked.

So I might be wrong about this, but I get the sense having not talked to you very much in the last three weeks. Have you been completely NFT-pilled at this point? Oh, how do I put this? There's so much to learn and so much to discover and so much grift and so much fraud and so much excitement and so much creativity. And so in some ways, there's a resurgence of that 2005 energy, you know, when I first got out to Silicon Valley and the dot-com bubblehead burst. And the people who are just really excited about building and about the future and about learning and sharing and doing were there. So there are elements of that that I'm, I guess, you know, re-experiencing. And so in that sense,

I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on. And what I'm experiencing is, in some ways, complete overwhelm. Because when I sort of showed up and, you know, the web and the social web was just getting started, there was literally like a thousand people, maybe in the world, who were really working on this stuff. Some of those folks are actually in this call right now. And now there are tens of thousands of people just, you know, on Twitter talking about NFTs. And the same is true if you head over to Discord or you head over to Reddit or you head over to all these different places. Now, it may still be a relatively small number of people in terms of the overall global population or the four to four or five billion people who are connected

to the internet. But it's still way more people and way more activity than I think I've ever experienced. And the number of projects that are dropping that are similar or related or have, you know, interesting little nuances. Like if you think about, I guess, maybe the number or speed of social apps that happened from the period of, let's say, 2006 to 2008 or nine, when people were really building on like the Facebook Connect API and stuff like that. I would say that the cadence has accelerated by 10 to 50 fold.

So in that sense, I don't know that I feel pilled, but I do feel pelted. And I'm trying to make sense of where this goes and what this is and what are the useful things will come out of this that are not just kind of fattish and new and kind of like, oh, let's like try all the things and all the whack job stuff. I mean, you think about like TV in the 90s and like MTV, like there was a period of experimentation where nothing kind of made sense and everything was like a psychedelic, like, you know, nightmare. we're sort of in that phase, I think, with crypto and NFTs, where enough people have enough of the basic building blocks that they can build some things, try it out. It might not work out. And they move on to like the next thing. And there's no kind of socialization of those learnings. It's just kind of go, go, go, do, do, build, build, launch, launch.

And so I guess that's the phase that I'm observing. Yeah, because if you think about it, what was it, 2017 was that year where there was, ICOs, initial coin offerings all over the place, right? And then you never hear about that anymore. And then there was, you know, that sort of 18-month period where, you know, Bitcoin was under $5,000 and like there was a huge crash and everything. And I'm sure a lot of these alt coins went away and things like that.

But it is, even in NFTs, I think I said this on the show, you know, we had that huge arrival of NFTs on the scene and what was it February and March of this year. And then it went away. And I almost did, you know, segments that's like, okay, I guess NFTs are over. And then it came roaring back. And then, you know, for all we know between now and, you know, Thanksgiving even, we could have another crash where it's like NFTs are dead, man, you know. I think the thing that's a very open-ended question right now is like there's a lot of like belief. There's a lot of shilling. There's a lot of. kind of just weird commercial activity with, you know, selling the JPEGs.

But then there's the whole membership and belonging and long-term building of sort of participatory environments in games. And those are the things that I think are the most interesting, the most unproven and the richest, I don't know, sort of space to dig in, but it's hard to keep track of all of it. I mean, I feel like I'm in 40 or 50 discords. And like the noise is just it's, it's enormous. But you know that something is going to, or at least, I have a sense that something is going to come out of this that does persist in some way. The question is, will it still stay interesting once we move past FOMO as a mechanism for driving participation? And in some ways, I think, you know, there will be some long-term things that come out of it, but I don't know exactly what they look like.

Which, I suppose, you know, if you want to get into this, we can. I mean, this kind of leads into the metaverse and what is that what I was going to say. What is that what I look like? Okay. product man. What is your definition and vision of the Metaverse? And let me begin by saying that the reason that this ties into NFTs is that that's a lot of the smoke and the fire around this NFT. The value of NFTs right now is that if you buy these avatars that are ones of one and then 10 years from now,

you're tooling around the metaverse in your one-of-one corvette and you're driving behind your one-of-one avatar. And like these are, the idea is that a lot of these NFTs will eventually plug into whatever game or whatever larger metaverse there is. And hopefully because it would be, you know, interoperable and there would be some form of standards that, you know, you could transfer things around and things like that, that, okay, the people that have gotten these bored apes now will be big pimping with the real original stuff, you know? Yeah.

I mean, I think so there's an interesting thought experiment, I guess, that I've sort of been, you know, running in the back of my mind, which is to think about Ready Player 1 and to try to figure out what aspects of that world, which, you know, is, of course, a very clear depiction of a metaverse. what could be enabled by current gen technologies or Web3 technologies. You know, as you just said, all of the different, you know, skins or outfits or characters that people could play or the weapons that they are able to get, those could all be identified as NFTs or tracked as NFTs. And so they have value in the game and you can acquire them through either in-game currency or tokens or coins or crypto. And because, and this is the major change, you know, you talk about like,

interoperability, but all that needs to sort of exist, at least for the short term, is the ability to register these NFTs on a world readable ledger, like the Ethereum, you know, blockchain, or something along those lines. And then any of these metiverse platforms that are built up as kind of these environments that you enter into can look up whatever is in your wallet. And if it understands what those things are or can, you know, create a skin for you or a weapon that's based on that stuff, then it can give you that as a portable item between these different metaverses. And so there's actually a great deal of economic activity as well as social activity

that can occur as a result of that type of system. And that is something that really didn't exist, except within single, you know, like World Warcraft or something universes that were owned by a single studio or a single company. And so, for example, like the Nintendo Metaverse may have a bunch of like Nintendo branded characters, but nothing from like, you know, Star Wars or Star Trek. or something or from Marvel, because maybe those are owned by a different company. Whereas in the metaverse that we're talking about, if it is connected and unified,

then you could have different characters from different universes all coming together and all the rights would be managed through smart contracts or something like that. You mentioned Ready Player 1 and I have to do another Mea Koppel, which is I've never read that, nor have I watched the movie. What? Every time I've, every time I've opened up the book, And both times I tried to start the movie, it just rubbed me the wrong way from page one, minute one. I should plow through it.

Let's not get into it because it's just, it's pure, like, it was just too cute for me and like to, I don't know. Can you read the guides? I could, I suppose. But the reason I want to move on is because the point that I want to make is the thing that I'm super familiar with is, of course, Snow Crash. Of course. And Snow Crash, one of the things that is right there from the very beginning when they're describing the metaverse in Snow Crash is, you know, they jack in, as they used to say from the Matrix days, or literally from earliest cyberpunk stuff. And they go to these different parts of like this city. And they mention that, well, this part of the metaverse was the earliest built.

Right. Right, right, right. They got in early, and so now they're trillionaires or whatever because they were the first homesteaders in this thing. And so that's sort of also baked into the idea of the metaverse that is instantly. I feel like this is... I don't know. Like, that's a no. Go ahead.

Yeah, because, so you got to imagine when Neil Stevenson was writing Snow Crash, the metaphors that he had to conjure. to make these concepts relatable to normal people who weren't living in the computer space. And I forget when that novel was written, but it was like, you know, sort of pre-internet or around the... 92 or 93, I think, yeah. Exactly. So, like, super, super early. These concepts were so, you know, sort of far in the future and yet kind of built around almost like a Google Earth-style approach to geography. And it doesn't really feel like that's the way that the metaverse is shaping up.

Like, for example, you know, the company I work for at Republic, we have something called Republic Realm, which sells virtual real estate as NFTs. And you'll be able to buy and sell that real estate as, you know, assets and so forth. And the thing that's interesting is like, I don't know that, I mean, yes, buying that real estate and getting that early and holding it may result in, you know, those properties, you know, going up in value of some sort. But it, I mean, maybe if you're just talking about like the rendering quality or the number of polygons or things like that, like having sort of like a plot of land on a metaverse that is infinite, I don't think there is the same kind of like, okay, that's the center of town sort of experience. Does that make sense? Yeah, in the sense that, I mean, we have seen something similar happen with things like World of Warcraft, even things like Second Life and stuff like that. And it exists to the stage, which by the way, if you want a quick tangent, how familiar are you with? Axi infinity? Somewhat. I've read Paki's stuff on it.

Okay, so I'm going to also share a long read this weekend about it. So when you say that it's not going to feel like a second life or a world of Warcraft where there's like tangible landscape, I'm saying that his model, Stevenson's model was based on scarcity in terms of the amount of like available land. and so being located in certain geographic coordinates was advantageous and economically lucrative. I'm suggesting that there can be an infinite number of infinite spaces that maybe, I don't know, having the real estate that's close to a spawn point or something where all the new characters drop in, that could be valuable.

But maybe that's... I'm saying... There's not one. No, I'm saying it's not land. It's chronology. It is about being the first. the earliest and the, you know what I mean? And so it does feel like a land grab to me, even though it's not land and it's not

approximate, but it is sort of that getting in there first. And I wonder, you know, bringing it back to the conversations about being there for the beginning of Wed 2.0. And, you know, people have been, people have seen the pattern over and over the last 25 years where it's like, oh, man, those first people, that got into blogging or the first people that got on Twitter or the first people that were in this or if I had just bought Bitcoin in 2013 and like so I feel like what everybody's doing is like we've all been trained to be like all right whatever the next big thing is if I can just be 30 seconds earlier that accrues so much more value to me I don't think the same mechanism applies and I say that as

someone who is you know early on a lot of these things and like gets the username and like that was the behavior. It doesn't feel like it works out the same way this time of round. And I say that. So let me try to stack three different concepts. So on the one hand, we have that concept of like the Metaverse, you know, which is sort of, you know, virtual or digital real estate, a place where people have presence and persistence.

And it's always on, never turns off. Then you've got a place like the Snow Crash, you know, Metaverse, which feels, and I guess I'm sort of merging the Ready Player 1 Metaverse with. the snow crash metaverse and that in either of both of these circumstances you're always both online and offline and you do sometimes jack in and become fully immersed in the digital metaverse experience but then there are aspects of augmented reality that you carry with you where you're in partial touch with the metaverse like in some ways i think about discord as a kind of metaverse it's a very text heavy metaverse for now but let me interrupt you real quick to throw some

ideas. This is along the lines you're thinking. So that when you're in that discord, if you can bring your board ape JPEG with you to prove that you're an OG, if in five years from now we're walking around with AAR glasses, and as you walk down the street and you look at somebody on the street and they're wearing that board ape and you're like, oh my God, that's a, so what you're saying, the concept that you're suggesting is that it's not real estate so much as it's, and this is right up your alley, man. It's more forms of identity and ownership that follow you around. I don't know if you're familiar with like the low source attribute on image tags. A little bit, yeah.

It's not that big a deal, but I think it's a useful metaphor in the sense of, or like a progressive optimized JPEG that loads in sort of a low-res version and then adds more pixels over time to create more clarity. I kind of get the sense that that's what this is going to be like over the next several years. So it isn't just about, I mean, yes, maybe it is staking your claim on a board ape and having, you know, one of 888 or one of 10,000 meccaverse NFTs, but it's about how you assemble those different parts as an identity over time and how you assert those identities in different spaces and how those spaces or metaverses allow you to present those artifacts to demonstrate either your superiority or your seniority or your participation or. as participation trophies. So for example, one way to solve this for Twitter, and I know Twitter is at least working on this or thinking about it, and TikTok is working on NFTs, is the ability to, let's say,

connect an NFT to your profile photo. And so that profile photo could be a bored ape. And when I, let's say, click on or right click on your profile photo or long press or whatever, I can actually look up the source of that NFT on Ether scan and see when you got it, how much you got it for? which collection it's from. And as you're saying, maybe in the augmented reality world,

I'm walking down the street and I see someone across the way and they've got a number of these similar NFTs that I have that's instantly showing affinity or group membership that otherwise would be very difficult to sort of ascertain quickly. Now, we'll leave out the privacy stuff for now. That is how this could become interesting. And we can experiment and explore these different ideas

in the digital metaverse context as opposed to immediately bringing it into the augmenting, reality context. One of the things that is definitely different right now, even from like 2017, there was a, and I'm sure there's data to prove this out, but back in like the 2017 ICO days, like there wasn't a ton or at least compared to today of VC money chasing this stuff. Maybe because they didn't have to because you could do an ICO and raise all the money you needed. But there is just a ton of, like, you know, now that I'm sadly in these investing

channels and circles and discords and lists serves and things like that, half the deals are a new kind of, you know, wallet or, you know, put real estate on the blockchain or, you know, function like an NFT and things like that. That's. Everything that's half the energy right now in the investing space. So this is out of your right home fund work, right, right, right, right. Actually paying attention actively. What are you thinking or seeing? Like as you're like noticing this kind of deal flow, like one do you think it's unique to you

and your position in it or is that where all the energy is kind of going? This is, okay, so this is what I'm saying. These and if anybody's listening and wants to let me into more, these sort of like angel communities and angel channels where people, because especially people running syndicates and smaller angels and stuff, like everybody's small enough that they can't do deals on their own. So they're all working together essentially. Syndicates working with syndicates working with angels working with small funds and stuff.

So I swear to God, if you looked, if I made a spreadsheet of like the hundred deals that I've seen on that channel just in the last week, I'd say half of them are in our crypto related and maybe half of that half is NFT related. But it's it's all of the promise of things like DAOs and smart contracts and things like that. Like those are the things that people are executing on right now. Those are the things that people are writing checks for right now. And this is what I'm what I was going to say was the third part, which is the Dow part. All right.

So we talked about the digital metaverse. We've talked about the identity. piece. We've talked about kind of like the, you know, progressive JPEG rationalization over time. The Dow piece is the part that I think is the least understood and might be the most aligned in terms of new incentive models within the web ecosystem, which is to say that it's one thing to, you know, do an NFT drop and get a bunch of people to, you know, buy first editions or whatever. But it's the ongoing long-term kind of design of your community participation model that will determine whether not your Dow and your NFTs actually, one, maintain value and two, develop into something meaningful

over time. And the design of tokenomics and like behavioral economics and social structures and voting systems that work and that are inclusive and that provide kind of scaffolding for the newest members all the way into like the deepest core members feels like a new approach to, you know, building and understanding social software. And that's going to be, I think, what determines the makeup of a healthier, more vibrant metaverse ecosystem. Because the players who don't get that right or just kind of like take a pump and dump kind of like approach, you know, they may make a bunch of money, but I feel like people are going to get bored of that within six months to a year.

One more question for you on this and then we should probably solicit other topics from folks. So if people, if you've got, if you've got questions, raise your hand now and we'll switch to a different topic. But one of the things that, and I've asked this several times of several different people, everything lives on different chains. And when we're talking about things like interoperability and stuff like that, if it's ever going to work in the end, either all the chains have to work together in some functional way,

or one or two or three are going to have to win for specific use cases. And that's a lot of the debate that I see going on right now is like, you know, the dominance of Ethereum being proved out. There was like a Bloomberg piece about that this week. And then other people like, no, no, no. There's Cardano and what's Salana. Yeah, and all these. And like, you know, so when I see things like that,

I still feel like we're so far away because like the actual land grab battling hasn't even begun yet, you know, much less have the dust settled so that like we know the lay of the land and and can start building or like like what's your take on that in terms of does that matter that we'll have to you can't have one NFT on one chain and then a different NFT on another chain and which is the more respected and stuff like that you know what I mean I do my sense is that it may or may not matter it depends on the project it depends on the token it depends on the side chain and it depends on kind of what the plans for the community are. I know that there are a number of projects that are either attempting to or are working on joining main net

and then creating a compatibility layer between whatever side chain they have and Ethereum. And so at the very least, you can look up the data on a public ledger. And as long as you can reference it in that way, I feel like you can sort of achieve some of the same, I don't know, sort of goals that you're trying to propose. it's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion that only three will win. One way to think about this, I suppose, and maybe I'm getting outside of my skis here, but in the same way that a lot of tech companies went to China and just assumed that they would compete in a lot of the same ways that they did on the U.S. market, I feel like showing up

in the crypto world and expecting to compete in the same way and win in the same way that Web2O companies won is setting yourself up for failure. You know, it's like you're a football player and you step on like the basketball, you know, court and you, you spike the ball and instantly you're kicked out. You know what I mean? Like it's sort of like the machinery doesn't work the same way that it did before because people are solving for a different set of problems in response to the stuff that they didn't like about Web 2.0 in that era of apps. So I guess I wouldn't use the same lens that you'd use to evaluate a conventional Web2 kind of, you know, company or or platform. for thinking about crypto projects in particular. I did see a hand raise and then it went away, but seriously, people,

I want to talk about something else. So ask about something completely out of left field. That's not the stuff that we usually talk about. What conversation or what topics are we missing or haven't covered? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know why I'm doing this. Tell me why. Because the obvious thing to talk about is Facebook.

and once again, as you and I have talked about offline, like, God, I don't want to talk about Facebook. I was about to pivot to that and bring it up, which I only would run away from. So, Chris, we didn't do a show last week, and it was kind of because I was burned out for other things, and I was like, you know, we could afford to take a week off. But also, I said to Chris offline, I was like, the only thing that we have to talk about right now is Facebook stuff. and it's just so exhausting to me that please don't make me do this. Let me give you one thought about this.

Yeah, which is completely relevant to what we just talked about. And I don't have a feeling one way or another about it except to say, huh, which is that the entire conversation right now about Facebook and even about what Francis Hogan has brought up and about the need to make these algorithms,

I don't know, more transparent and et cetera and so forth, And even Section 230, I feel like that conversation is really looking at the social web circa 2016 to 2017. Like we're still litigating like the Trump election. And everything that we just talked about with regards to crypto and the Metaverse, in some ways obviate whatever controls might be put in place by these types of, you know, rules or adjustments or changes. You know, how does Section 230 apply to the Metaverse?

How does it apply to augmented reality? or not just section 230, but like how would changing or improving algorithmic transparency? Like, what determines what objects are shown to you in a 3D space? How do you even bring that to Capitol Hill or to Congress and say, okay, we're going to figure out what stuff to put in front of you to guide you in this virtual world? Like, those are not even conversations that we're able to have right now because the concepts are still somewhat further afield. But that is where this stuff is going next.

That's where the younger generation is growing up. Like, for example, I've been noticing that there's a lot of new ads and, I don't know, sponsored content or something showing up on Google Maps. But the same thing is going to be true on SnapMap and even the Instagram map is now adding a bunch of new features and stuff. So those types of environments, which are not feed-based, right, which are not based on chronology, but maybe based on proximity, are not part of the conversation about optimizing content and deciding what to show people when there are millions of different data

points that could be shown. What do you do when you move into an augmented reality environment inside of your home? What determines which objects appear first as priority objects versus anything else? So I guess the reason why this conversation is on the one hand very interesting and time bound with regards to this Facebook conversation is that probably over the next five to 10 years, these conversations are going to seem relatively quaint to the types of, I don't know, things that we're going to have to defend against and the ways in which we're going to teach and educate people about the risks that are out there in the Metaverse, which are going to be totally different than everything that we've experienced in the last five to ten years of technology.

A couple things real quick about that is number one. Of course, you know, Zuck is talking about the Metaverse all the time now. Oh, again. Just a quick aside, like I watched on my flight over here the June 20, maybe it was June 2021 Facebook Connect event. And I had to watch the full thing in its entirety before. And it was all about, sorry, I have to like dig into this just for a second. It was all about the metaverse. It was all about Oculus. It was, I mean, they previewed their Luxotica glasses. And they're like, we're going, you know, full into augmented reality. We're not there yet. But, you know, and they launched those, you know, right on cue. So they are moving ahead. The fact that Mike Shrefford

is no longer a CTO at Facebook and Boz has been put in place. And Boz has been put in place. And Baws is a big Metaverse guy, it means the company is pivoting hard towards the Metaverse and towards Roblox and Fortnite and to all those virtual environments where Zuxi is the next generation growing up and having social experiences where you just idle in these 3D spaces. And it's not about the hardware. So I think we're drastically undercovering this because reporters don't really spend time in the metaverse. And so they don't report on it. They report on old shit that like they're familiar with. Like, being obsoleted by social media.

Like, that's what reporters love to talk about. And so that's what they're fixated on. And that's what is taking up all the oxygen in the room. But Facebook is very clearly moving away from that whole world to a world where there are no reporters. And I think that's something that we should really be paying attention to. Okay. You got a second point. I kind of forget what it was.

But I guess it was, it was kind of along the lines of, well, that's why they bought Oculus. And like, they're trying to, you know, the last, the last major acquisitions that could get in before the door was shut on him doing acquisitions. Sort of gives him a toe hold in that, if in theory that works. Yeah, go ahead. What was the other thing I was going to say about that? Oh, so we also have the next Facebook Connect. I don't know if it's the developer event or whatever coming up, I think later this month.

So next week is going to be... Really? Yes. I'm tired of events. Well, next week's going to be a doozy. and then I think it's the end of the month is the Facebook Connect event. And that one I think is going to be a really big deal because it's going to, man, I don't know. This period, like the last three or four weeks where Facebook has just been kind of in the gutter and it's just been one terrible thing after another.

I mean, I can't imagine what it's like to be in the leadership team or to just be like trudging through. I mean, there's got to, it's got to be like fires all over the place. but it's like, let's just make it to this event and we'll be able to, like, lay out the future and talk about where this goes and how this all comes together. And it's just, you know, when I think about like the portal event that Zuck kind of, you know, did, that was the horrible product launch. And he was kind of like, yeah, whatever. Like, here's this stupid thing that we worked on.

But then he talked about the metaverse at the end of it. Like, he's so fired up about it. I just, I can't ignore that. Relative to the other leaders in the space, like, you know, Tim Cook still doing the same song and dance year after year, the same thing, just increment the iPhone. phone product number, launched the MacBook Pro MX1s next week. Great. Sundar, you know, being like, let's not let Google fall into a thousand different fiefdoms or whatever.

Advertising still works. Did I get that right? Sundar and Sacha. Sacha is at Microsoft. Anyways. Yes, yeah. You know, like, Zuck seems to be, he has found his next magnum opus, and it is literally larger than anything the Romans could have built.

And so when you're building a civilization, if you were the first to build the civilization in the metaverse, that is a very juicy target. And I think that's what he sees. Yeah, but another way to look at it would be he's sort of grasping at straws. You know, there was a big push into crypto, and that still may come to fruition, that whole project, but that seems to have sputtered a little bit. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if we never heard much about it again. Okay. Right. Diem. Diem, yes.

What did it used to be called? Whatever. Okay, listen. Dan the yogurt intern, was that what it was? Now it's now it's Squire Daniel. Dan, you're invited to come on stage. Oh, hello. Hello. Are I supposed to say something in particular?

No, you raised your hand. If you have a question, please. Oh, yeah. You guys are really very adamant about not talking about. Facebook. But there is this like Facebook cryptocurrency thing they tried for a while, right? There you go. Or whatever. Exactly. It's Libra and now it's DM or something. Right, right, right. Yeah. Have you guys heard anything about that? I saw like an article like a month or so ago

saying they're in trouble with the government and I just never hear about it at all. I actually did. So I feel like go within the last two or three weeks. I listened to a podcast where I believe it was David Marcus who is heading up that project and David Marcus's DNA in here is very important. So first, he was an exec at PayPal. He went on to lead, I don't know if it was first Messenger, but he was head of Messenger, worked a lot on bots, which is how I was introduced to him. And then he went over into the crypto world because payments is a huge driver of use for Messenger products. And Messenger is one of the key wedges against IMessage and Apple's forays into social networking, namely via SharePlay, which is in iOS 15. Anyways, that's a little bit besides

the point, but it tells you where David Marcus is coming from when he's working on this stuff. And so what I understand in terms of their approach with DM at this point is that because of all the scrutiny and because of all the haterade and because of all the ways in which people are skeptical of anything that Facebook does or touches, and especially if Facebook is coming for the central bank, of course, everyone is like putting up the shields and blocking them from moving forward. So what I understand, at least in terms of his telling of it, is that he's doing everything by the book. He is working closely with regulators. He is trying to make the DM currency completely of high repute relative to all other crypto projects. And so one, that maybe is why it's very

quiet. So there's not a lot of extra scrutiny. And, you know, they're not promoting this thing before it's built and they're not moving fast. They're not, that's what I was going to say. They're not, they're not doing their usual playbook. And they're showing a more maybe level-headed approach. You know, there's a lot of people that come from Facebook and go work at Coinbase or go work at Stripe. So there's a lot of this kind of, you know, genetic soup that's moving around the valley in these fintech spaces. And so when you find an opportunity to build something that could be impactful, you go towards it. And I say that because, you know, you may see people who had previously worked to Facebook show up in Stripe or people who work to Coinbase show up at Facebook and work on this thing. So there's a lot of that talent that moves around with a lot of similar ideas.

And if those ideas get stuck in one place, those folks who worked in it will move to another to try to keep. it going. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more of DMs show up in subtle contexts, whether it is Messenger or whether it's WhatsApp as a way of sending remittances or getting more users in unbanked places to join Facebook in a more subtle context, similar to a PayPal or Venmo or Cash app. Yeah, what I had heard, and this might be complete hearsay, is that it was very much a, they sort of announced this thing, like they usually do. They had the playbook that they usually have. And they hit a brick wall that they'd never

encountered before, which was governments around the world, no, governments around the world were like hell to the no. And to the point where it's like, this could be so this could piss off governments around the world

so much that this could step on their other businesses. Because it occurs to me that if you are a regulator or if you are in another government someplace else and, you know, You don't know a lot about, like, you know, the tech companies in Silicon Valley, but you've heard of Facebook, and you know Facebook has four or five billion users, and most of those people are in your country. Suddenly, the idea of Facebook touching each of those users with money or currency suddenly is getting in between a relationship that used to be owned entirely by the government. And so that may be why.

It usurps 100%. Right. And I think I even made that point when this first all surfaced. So anyway, what I've heard anecdotally is that that's why it's gone. silent is that they realized, A, our normal playbook is not going to work. And then B, one of the things is, is that they were essentially, as I understood it, proposing originally a stable coin-like thing that would basically usurp, again, the role of sovereign governments to create sovereign monetary systems and things like that.

it was almost like it was almost too nakedly a power grab like that. And so, but in a way, that wasn't really what they wanted. No. And so they can still achieve their ends by scaling it back and having it be like maybe a PayPal, as you would understand it from the early 2000s, but like with more social juice and things like that. And that can still achieve what is probably their ultimate end. Like, whether you're doing messaging and you're sending text or you're doing messaging and you're sending currency, like the mechanisms are actually nearly identical.

So once you have those rails and you have people communicating, the logical sort of next step is to bring money into it. And the, as I understand it, and this may or may not be, you know, the truthful reason or motivation for this is that the costs for processing those exchanges of currency cross, you know, border was so high that by the time the currency was exchanged, there was almost like nothing less. for the people that were sending, you know, let's say three or four dollars because of the high fees that were incurred through those transactions. And so Facebook's like, look, we can do this basically for free if we have our own, you know, currency in this realm. And that's, that's my understanding of why they went in that direction because of the adoption that they had for messenger and messenger payments. Matt Wilde, I am going to invite you to speak as well. And if you have a question that's completely unrelated to what we were just talking about, that's fine.

Or if you want to pile on something we've already talked about, shoot, Matt. I jumped in late, so sorry if you already talked about this. No worries. But jumping back to crypto. So I was listening to, I think the founder Solano was on a podcast with Jason Calicanis or whatever. And he asked a variant of this question. One value that many of these blockchain founders present is, is that they want their technology to be censorship resistant.

And one downside of that is that we're starting to see more and more fun scams pop up in the crypto space. Is there a way to square that circle, or are we going to just do what we seem to always do and find a centralized store of trust? Do you have an example of one of these scams? I mean, for any given NFT, they'll, like, they'll launch. And then someone will complain that there's a rugpole and they've actually had technical difficulties. And sometimes they, in fact, have just run off with the money. And sometimes they have not. I guess if you're a question, like, is there a solution to this problem?

I would say no. I would say the solution, you know, is like the problem in a way. Like one of the conversations that I was having recently was about how so much of what happened in the original depression resulted in financial regulations, which control. so much of how the market and the stock market work to prevent things like rodpoles. And so we are sort of reliving, like essentially we are two or three generations removed from the generation that grew up and had direct relations with those rules when they were instantiated and created. And so we've sort of forgotten why they're there and we're angry that they're there

when we try to do certain financial maneuvers. And so suddenly, you know, once the fraudsters show up again and they realize that, you know, crypto doesn't have the same rules, at least currently, applied in a way that is robust, because there's so much anonymity in the space, you end up with people who get taken advantage of, and you end up with these rugpoles. And that's the system working as some intended to work. So will there be more trustworthy contexts to transact crypto? Maybe, but I worry that we, or those who created the system, were responding to different threats in a different moment, but we been here before. Can I make a point on that in the sense that, and I'm not speaking to anybody

specifically here, but when I see the debates about in crypto circles about things like, oh, the government's going to come in and regulate and things like this. Regulation sometimes is things like, oh, you can't pollute a river or, oh, you know, when people talk about breaking up companies because they're too big or too powerful, this is like the heavy hand of regulation. But another form of regulation is the idea, and there weren't laws about this at one point, that if you are an executive at a company, you can't insider trade, right? And so one of the functions of good markets, of good capitalism is you set up a system where it's a level playing field where theoretically everybody is competing with the same sort of tools, the same sort of tools, the same

sort of knowledge in theory. Obviously, this is not functional. But so what made me think of this was saying, you know, can, I think that Crypto-maximaists believe that, well, we can do everything decentralized. We can do, we can program it. That's what the concept of programmable money is and Dow's and things like this,

is we can make enough rules that are baked into the system that, that you don't need someone centralized or from above to come in and say, okay, no insider trading. And if you do insider trade, here are the, but you still, but even if that is, first of all, I don't see that we're anywhere close to that functionally happening yet. And even if you did, you still need some sort of a mechanism to enforce. There's a thing about regulation that is enforceability. There's one thing about contracts.

And if it's built in to the blockchain that these contracts are, you know, it's a binary thing. Yes or no. Either this threshold has been passed, this thing has been proven X, Y, and Z. But you still have the problem of enforcement. And so I don't know necessarily how crypto and decentralizing gets around that. I haven't heard an argument that that makes me convinced on that angle. Again, I mean, so many things, so many human systems have a certain, amount of overall complexity.

And that complexity is either just, you know, innate to the structure or sort of emerges over time as the system sort of self-learns or adapts or evolves or realizes ways in which it's vulnerable. And so it creates adjustments to prevent that type of vulnerability going forward into the future. But newcomers sort of ignore the past and, you know, want to do things over again or haven't learned the lessons from the past or they weren't told or. brought down for them to learn in a way that was relatable. And so they, I don't know, I'm getting

very abstract, but move around it. To your point, the desire to move fast, the desire to not have to ask permission from regulators to do things, the desire to not have to check in with the parents, you know, to go out, you know, at night or something is sort of a constant, I don't know, behavioral norm within, I think, the human species. Like, there's just this desire to have that free will. The problem, though, is. that some of these systems are, at least intended or set up, to prevent disaster, to prevent damage, to prevent one person impinging on other people's rights to sort of create some safety. And the point that I was trying to underline is to have a functioning capitalistic market.

Like, people forget that. Like, capitalism cannot function without rules. Capitalism is not a pure libertarian ideal. It does. require frameworks. Otherwise, you don't have, you can't have creativity or creative destruction unless there are guardrails in place to prevent fraud. That's the bottom line. Yep. Yep. Well, but again, it's also like once you've been burned a number of times, or once you are a person who has had the rug pulled from you, then you become passionate about putting in those enforcement mechanisms. But I feel like we're so early in the cycle that enough of those things haven't happened where we have figured out the patterns to prevent against

this type of abuse. Some people might say, oh, it's just a matter of transparency and the fact that it's all open source or you can go and expect the contracts to see how they will function and what they will do. Well, that requires a level of education and literacy in what those contracts do and how they work. And that is a very small overall percentage of our population in general. So on the one hand, we have a legal system, which is quite opaque, even though it's transparent. You know, you can read the laws and they don't make a whole lot of sense in terms of human terms. You can do the same thing with smart contracts and making sense of them may also be quite opaque, even though they are transparent. So there are these distortions or these information advantages that continue to persist and exist that will lead to people having bad experiences or the rug pulled from them or just people picking up with the crypto that they brought in from an NFT drop or a sale.

and they'll just leave with their $2.7 million and never be heard from again because everyone is using their, you know, fake board apes avatar, which isn't verified yet. And you can pretend to be someone from the crypto community and pull off an elaborate, you know, heist because of the embrace of anonymity and pseudonymity in a way that really hasn't had money attached to it before. And so I guess what I wonder is if, and I actually have been asking questions about this, because I was in the mechaverse drop the other day. and I was in there for the raffle and, you know, saw the whole thing get sold out in a matter of minutes. And when I was in the discord, the sort of anger and vitriol and all the people complaining about how clearly like this thing didn't work and, you know, they got robbed and I don't know, all this stuff. It's so hard to tell like what is real and what's not. It just seems like you almost have to set aside, I don't know, 20 to 30 percent for breakage or for fraud if you're going to play in this game because you can't prevent against all the ways in which people figure out how to social engineer. access. You know, I, for example, a number of people I heard in the Meccaverse world were setting up multiple accounts to be able to mint multiple mechas, which are now, you know, 10 to $12,000 each. So that in the drop, they, you know, got a whole bunch of value out of it and they took away from

the community. They tried to do some things to prevent that behavior, but clearly that behavior happened quite a bit. What's the term for in physical retail? Is it breakage for, what's the term? When someone steal stuff, it's a breakage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then... So you just assume that some portion of your products are going to be stolen, and the cost of enforcement, let's say,

to hire security or bringing police, is too high relative to the value of the good. So they'll just, like, you know, assume that some percentage will be stolen. Now, if you allow that to go indefinitely, and there is no, you know, kind of, let's say, it's just like the inverse of random or variable rewards, variable enforcement, then people will obviously take advantage of that,

and they'll just walk in the store and steal everything. But if you bring in surveillance like the Amazon stores and stuff like that, it may inhibit some behaviors, especially if you create a sense of community or commonality or connectedness in the economic activity. But here to four, that's somewhat been missing from some of these environments. That's why the Dow thing I think is important. If you feel connected to a space and you have voting shares over the future of the thing,

You know, it's like I say, like when you build social software, if you don't create a space where people, you know, kind of come through and feel some ownership and take some pride in the place, you're going to have people come through and pee in the corner and just, like, leave because they're like, this isn't my place. Like, I don't care. So designing these social behaviors and behavioral economics, I think, is why I keep harping on this as being another piece of the metaverse that's really, really important to get right. Maybe one last topic to end with because, you know, we'll put this out on Saturday. know, as we mentioned, everybody's having a friggin' event next week, which is good for you. It's your business. Awesome for me. Yeah. But I've been joking for six months about how all I care about is a new MacBook Pro.

And now that it's really real and it's happening, I thought I was kind of overdoing the joke or whatever. But, man, people have been coming out of the woodwork and have been revealing that they've been like me, they haven't updated their laptop in five years. Like the fan, I literally have like jet blast coming out of the back of my like MacBook Pro. I've posted a photo of it. I have melted part of my aluminum stand. My fan runs so hot. And we've all been sitting on our hands because of the stupid goddamn keyboards and then the stupid,

like the keyboard was is one thing. I mean, that is just insanity that no one will ever believe we had to live through that. But the other thing is if, and I still, you know, I hope my fingers are crossed, but I still am worried that this isn't going to come through. But if we're going to get some ports back, like, you know, again, I keep saying it's finally that the ghost of Johnny Ive has been exercised. Like, oh, wait, you're going to give me more than one port. You're going to maybe give me an SD card reader back.

You're going to make, I don't know that I need an HD. am I, but look, give it to me. Give me anything. Give me a functional thing because it is a pro machine for God's sake. Right. So pros need these things, more than just one port that's also your power port. Indeed. By the way, I tried to pin my tweet to the top of the space with the afterburner marks. And so you can see, like, I am definitely in need of a new one. But yeah, there is new ports or, you know, one thing that I'm worried about, though, is this chip shortage. And, you know, if the iPhone 13 models are having, and granted they may not use the same components, but if the iPhones are having shortages, do you think that's going to impact the Mechro? Well, but no, because think about it. Think about what we've heard specifically today was it was, you know, the wireless stuff from Broadcom, whatever that chip was that Texas Instruments is doing. If we're talking about the M1X, then we're talking about something that has that Apple's designed itself.

And we know that Apple does their contracts years down the road. You know, like there's multiple chips. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. So you're not just talking about the M1X. Like the M1X may be fine. I'm talking about the other components. And going especially into the holiday season, like this could really have a big damper on all sorts of different electronic devices.

I mean, you know, I can't imagine what Black Friday is going to look like this year. Oh, I funny enough have heard a lot about that. By the friend of the show, Chris Mims, has a great book out about. the supply chain that I've been reading that's very good. And in fact, I want to have them on one of these weeks to talk about the book once I get done with it. But also, I met, you know, as you do now when you have kids in school, I met a father of a friend of Max's that does supply chain stuff literally for a fashion brand, a big name fashion brand that you would know. And he was giving me the lowdown on stuff like that. And he was saying stuff like, yeah, if you're thinking of buying any presents for people,

you might want to buy them now and keep them on your shelf. Yes. Because if you think you're going to be able to do what you did last year, which is, oh, my God, it's two days before Christmas or Hanuk or whatever, what have you, and you think you're going to be able to get that present. Oh, no, you could be three weeks ahead of time and you won't be able to get it to your person. I will say just like the supply chain, totally separate from the chip shortage, is so slow.

You know, I've ordered some furniture and stuff like that, and it's like literally taking like a month and a half. And what I understand, I mean, there are container ships that are, I think, 45 that are backed up in the port of L.A. Right, right, right, right. Going on in the port of Oakland, which is, you know, where I live. And there's just,

and there's weird things going on with gas, you know, in the UK and the Brexit thing is taking effect. Right. There's a lot of macroeconomic stuff that's, you know, taking whole. One thought that I had was that, there were some things that were affected by COVID and the pandemic, like almost immediately. You know, there was a bunch of like reverberations that occurred throughout society over the first

eight to 12 months. And I feel like now we're starting to see like the low, almost like aftershock rumblings in the supply chain and elsewhere, you know, whether it's the great resignation or other things with jobs or fuel shortages. Like there's some weird stuff that feels like it's still very much pandemic related, that we're still working through the system. Not only that, I would say conversely, everybody, because I remember doing shows, you know, in March and April of last year and being like, oh, my God, I feel like the economy is really screwed. How come no one's panicking? And then the fact that the stock market basically made it all back. And that, that, you know, unemployment, while not back to where

it was really bounced back, right? So everyone thought, oh man, we are, yeah, but what if the reality is, is you can't have a crazy impact like a frigging global pandemic and not have, you know, deep, deep changes or impacts on society. And so what if we got head faked and what if everyone's like, oh, well, we'll just go back. And what, what's actually happening is now we're seeing the deep impacts of like, that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. You know, and this holiday season, maybe the first where we're really seeing like a real post-pandemic kind of, you know, consequence, circumstance. Just, I don't know.

It feels like the things that some of us didn't really maybe experience like, you know, firsthand and supply chain stuff is really making it through. Like, I'll put it another way. If the supply chain were sort of shored up for the next two to three years, right, at any given point that the, the pandemic is actually a body blow to all of that preparation and that things are, you know, kind of way off kilter because so many things are, I just, I can only envision kind of like an earthquake, you know, causing these rippling effects in all these different, I don't know, ways. And so that's, that's what we're saying. You know, let's, let me, let me work on getting Chris Mims for next Wednesday or.

To his, um, if you guys want to check it out. I do highly recommend it because it literally, I just bought a copy from my dad because it's a very dad book where it's like he goes to Vietnam, he follows a USB charger every step of the way until it gets to your front door, right? So I'm only at the point where he's on a ship with, you know, this, this Bosen's mate or whatever that like, you know, spends his whole life on the seas, you know, in these big. And so he takes you around it step by step. Here's how containers work. Here's how they're loaded on the ships. Here's how ships are so big that no storm can really affect them anymore. And now the ships are so big that they can't get through the Panama Canal and it's on and up.

Right. So I haven't even gotten to when it arrives in the Port of Oakland. And then it gets put on a, you know. So like, yeah, if you want that sort of. of dad level. Here's how physical packet switching works in the 21st century. You know how dads love to know that sort of trivia. Like this is a great dad book.

So yeah, I, um, we'll, Chris is a good friend. So we'll talk in time for the highlights. There have been book shortages recently. Have you heard that? What? Yeah, I didn't. You know what?

I haven't read the articles, but, um, there have been problems with, um, there's, there's been shortages in the publishing industry. So I, since I haven't read the articles. I can't speak to it. You know, what I really wonder, sorry, this will be the last point, is just how this affects

things on a macroeconomic scale. We're seeing a lot of inflation, like insane amounts. Gas is up over a dollar from a year ago, just prices across the board, you know, a burger costs 20 bucks now, wherever you go. I really wonder how that's, you know, typically from a supply and demand perspective, if you have less supply, prices are going to go up. So if there are all those shortages, our price is going to continue to rise, you know, relative to everything else.

And especially with people not going back to work, I don't know how people are going to afford to live. So there's this big, I don't know, looming, feels like a crisis coming up in like the next six months that, not to end on a dire note, but gives you some pause. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not that scared about that. This calls for having Noah Smith back on, you know, get an actual economist. An actual economist, yeah. One thing that I remember someone said about a year ago, and then let's say. Let's go ahead and end it. To the notion, I don't know if there's going to be a problem with inflation and things like that.

But one of the things that really resonated with me is about a year ago, someone said to me, if you got laid off last year when the pandemic hit and you were out of work for three months, six months or whatever, one of the things that you've learned as you've seen the stock market come back and basically a certain part of society basically continue as if nothing happened is that your job, does not matter to society. Yes. And so the reason that's resonated with me is when I see these things like people leaving the workforce or companies can't find people to hire for fast food joints or whatever,

is that I think one of the things, in the same way that when the housing bubble happened and there was an entire generation, the millennials that were taught about, like, you know, this money stuff is fucked. Like there's a certain segment of the population that is like, you know what? That lifestyle, it's not fuck it. It's not I'm going to go to a commune or something and drop out of society. It's more, I actually think this is, that's a dead end. Society didn't need me.

I need to do something else that is valuable. Do you see what I'm saying? I do, but what is it? I don't know, but the creator economy for sure, but that many people? For sure, but also I, I, and again, Noah would be someone that could comment on this more. I kind of feel like that that might be what's happening is there are millions of people that were like, okay, I couldn't work for six months. I'm going to go back now to that hotel job that pays barely over minimum wage.

I've been saying that now that I'm in Vermont, you know, the first place that I got to in Medford, Massachusetts, like there was like two people working this restaurant where normally there'd be like 10 or 12. And the first thing they said was, I'm sorry, we're short-staffed. It's going to be a really long wait before you get your food. And we're like, okay, well, we're traveling. We have no place else to go. Fine.

And then now I'm staying at this lodge in Vermont. Same thing. There are like two groundspeople for this enormous place that we're staying in because none of the people want to come back. So I know these are just like anecdotal stories, but I totally resonate with what you're saying because as I'm going out in the world, I'm experiencing that. And I just don't know where people are. Well, I'm trying to be hopeful about it in the sense that for these people, if you are someone like, that, that you're like, you know what, this was a dead end. I'm going to do something else, and I don't know what the something else is, and it's going to be different for every other

person. But the optimistic part about it is that people are, this thing shocked them out of being on that treadmill of a dead end job or a dead end lifestyle. Or, and so like, hopefully all of these people can find something that not only will be better for them, but then better for all of society because it is going to create something new and something else. I mean, who or what will end up doing this work in these places that still need, you know, labor of some sort? I mean, this is, I feel like this is where automation is going to go because you can't find enough people. Okay, but then being optimistic is we've been afraid of robots stealing everyone's jobs. So, like, what if people jumped before they got pushed off of the plank on the pirate ship?

Okay. And so that's the optimistic thing is that now this clears the space. And by the way, and I swear to God we're done after this. That is the story. I keep talking about toast as being my favorite survivor story, startup story of the thing that I've heard is that, you know, restaurants during the pandemic had to pivot hard because they couldn't have in restaurant dining and they all pivoted towards pickup and delivery and things like that.

And that's made them all embrace software and automation. Right. And so it was like, again, this is that in action where, okay, the delivery person, people and the, the wait staff are not coming back. But then it's coincidental that also that entire industry is shifting towards automation and software and things like that. Yeah. Okay. So I'm with you and I really hope people are, I know when they say like, you know, find your passion, you know, only risk people can say that. But if that is true and if people are moving into the types of work and careers and like, lifestyles that they really want and they'd been putting it off because they're like, oh, I'll do it next year and it never happens. Great. Awesome. You know, what I will say or what I've noticed, you know, is that the greater economy

really is not paying the bills for anybody. I mean, you talked about it today with. Oh, say that for next time. Yeah, let's talk about that next time. Yeah. There's that. There's the Twitter thing with spaces. There, you know, you know what?

Let's get no on. Let's talk about the economics of this new world and the great resignation. And let's like figure this out. Not next week. And we'll get a lot of events. We'll get Chris on to talk about the supply chain. Okay. We've got our marching orders.

And Chris, at some point, we will get to. That was a great point that we should have thought about, which is the creator economy being a halves and have knots and 1% sort of thing. Inequality in the creator space. Okay. Everyone, we love you. Chris, enjoy the East Coast. Thank you.

I am and I love the foliage. So thanks everybody for joining us. another episode of the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. We will be back here next week. Hopefully, Brian and I will have ordered our new MacBook M1Xs and they'll come in time for the holidays, if not immediately. Anyways, we will be here then. Talk you later. Bye, everybody.