Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) WWDC 2022 Wrap Up

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

WWDC wrap up, @chrismaddern on @floornfts, and Brian talks about his Mac Studio experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome everybody to the TechMean Ride Home Experience for June 9th, 2022. This is the week of WWDC. And so Brian are going to start there.

And then we're going to have a special guest later on in the show to talk about a new raise in the NFT space. Okay, with that. So, Brian, you just mentioned that it sounds like I'm a mile away or at least a foot away from my night. But I'm actually very close to it. I think the difference is that I am now recording from a new thing. shed in my backyard. Oh. Next to the house that I just purchased.

Hey, congratulations. Thank you. I am now a homeowner, which is a terrible, or not terrible, a terrifying idea because now I'm on the hook for 30 years to pay back this massive loan that I just took out. You know, I feel like I finally have grown up enough to commit to something. And that's the first thing. I'm not trying to blow up your spot that much, but in the Oakland area, the area.

Yes. Yeah. Oakland. Just outside of Berkeley, actually, next to Berkeley. Well, you know, congratulations. As I think we've discussed before, that's something that I've not been brave enough to do since... Since the last time? 2008, maybe I sold my house.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. And as I said to you, I was... the definition of, when I bought my house in 2005, I was the definition of a subprime loan taker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't, I literally, I believe I didn't put anything down. Not a dollar down.

Think about that. Wow. I mean, that blows my mind, having gone through what I just went through. That you would, one, there was a deal like that. Like, what an amazing deal. But also, oh, my God. Like, no wonder there was the whole. you know, housing prices.

Yeah. Well, anyways, your wife was very helpful in helping us to ask all the right questions. I did the whole process without a realtor. And so I had to become kind of a, what's it called, like a novice amateur realtor, which probably isn't a thing. But the whole process took a month, man, a month. Like, it was fast. Did you, I know this is totally off topic, but was it,

competitive, like you, were there other people, like, outbidding you and stuff like that, like you hear these days? No, so, well, I got to say, like, this house, it's an amazing house. And we found it actually before it went on the market. And so my partner Joe saw it, and it was on Craigslist. And I guess it had been rented previously. And so the owners, they just were over it. They didn't want to rent anymore.

They wanted to sell it. Also, given market dynamics or whatever. And so we actually reached out before. went on the market and just you liked the seller. The seller was also the list there. And so that actually made things simpler because he was also our fiduciary in the process. Anyways, we don't if I get into the details. But I learned a lot in this process more than I thought I'd ever would know. And it was a lot easier ultimately than I expected. I always thought that buying house would take like six months or six years or just like I would be out there for a long time,

having exactly the kind of like bidding war process that you described. But one of the one Once we got going, we were just like, no, this is the house. Like, let's do it. You know, so that's what happened. Well, I give you credit for wrapping Web 2.0 by finding it on Craigslist, though. So, you know. It's like Web 1.5. You know, Craig Newmark is somebody that I've never had for the Internet History podcast

that has always been there. Like, I've had the opportunity to talk to him. Yes, right. I met him and he used to reply to my tweets and I sent him an email about something and he's not available. Yeah, no, that's the thing is it's sort of been there in the background in the past, but it's not easy to put together. And especially now, I feel like he does not give. There's no more Fs for him to give. So.

Yeah, he's fine. He's done. He's got bigger fish to fry. One of these days, maybe we'll do that, but. So, yeah, go on. Use the week. Yeah, well, it was Dub-Dub, as they say. Before I hit some of the things that I thought were interesting from Dub-Dub, did you watch it?

What were your impressions just generally? Yeah, so I actually re-watched it or I was sort of like watching on Twitter and other places the day I have on Tuesday. And then last night I made myself a nice martini and watched it on 2x speed to get through. And I'm glad I watched it at that rate because it was, you know, it wasn't a showstopper. There's a bunch of like interesting good stuff in there. You can tell this is sort of like almost like a, like it in the middle year between maybe big update cycles. You know, there was no car. there were still no augmented reality glasses.

You know, it's still very much focused on the legacy of, you know, the conventional desktop and tablet and phone form factor, and that's what we're sticking with a little while longer. You know, still getting more juice out of that M2 chip. And so, you know, in that sense, it was fine. Well, it isn't like blown away like I've been recently. Really? Well, you asked me that offline and I gave you a six out of 10. I feel like there's been other Apple events that I was more underwhelmed by, but for sure,

not doing, I don't know, what's the term that it's not AROS or something like that? Not, this would have been, in theory, a good time to get developers ready for this. So it is interesting to me that they didn't at least do a one more thing. I'm not saying that they would have brought the headset out, but you could have prepped developers for what is coming, especially because we have heard a lot behind the scenes that, you know, they're working. Like, I don't know that. Did I do the story about how John Favro has apparently been tasked with creating some sort of content for this sort of thing? Like, this would...

Who's John Febara? The Al-Han guy? No, the guy that does all the Star Wars stuff, the Swingers guy. That John Favre. Yeah, yeah. There's two of them. Okay. There is two John Favros. That is very pertinent.

You're right. Anyway, like, there's a lot of fire or smoke there that says that there's fire in the background. So... It's definitely happening. Well, for sure. The West things, you know, it's there. They're clearly working on it. I just, I wonder if it's supply chain, if it's, you know,

well, that, that's the hardware. That's what I'm saying is that I don't know if we should read anything into the fact that they didn't use this as a little T-Up thing. As I said on the show, you know, when they do announce it, I'm pretty sure in the same way that, you know, the watch was the last new product line that they did. And they would probably, you know, maybe do its own a very. event for a new product line. But still, this is more than the watch for sure. This would be a product that you'd want to prep developers for. I mean, the thing is like it needs to, however they bring it out, both the car and the glasses, they need to actually kind of like present the narrative and the story in a way that

kind of deviates or sort of breaks from, I think a lot of the conventional use cases and expectations, right? I mean, more and more like it seems like Oculus and VR are becoming, you know, enterprise products. Like that's where there's product market fit. Whereas for end users, there's games, but it's trying to be social, but it's not quite there. And I think Apple really wants whatever product they put out there to be something that you would wear in the real world, that, you know, whether it's being together, whether with other people and having shared experiences, there was, if you listen to the language in a lot of the, um, sessions, which you can get in the Apple developer app, they talk a lot about co-presence and being around other people and active consumption versus passive consumption. So there's a whole language around the experience design of these products. And I think Apple is starting to like tee those ideas up. And whatever event they do that releases the glasses, I don't think it can be like a one more thing like a tag on. Like it's going to be like, here's the future of computing as we see it. And here's how you participate in it. And

And in this future, there will be continuous authentication. You know, so, like, the past key thing is kind of relevant and interesting. You know, in this world, you'll be authenticated once and through your biometrics will know who you are and you'll just be able to, like, interact with, you know, a world around you. I talked about this conspiracy theory months ago, but. Right. Put a pin in that real quick.

Put a pin in that real quick. I'll come back to it in a second. But it, as I tried to mention in the show, stuff that they're doing with maps, stuff stuff that they're doing with the dictation stuff, which they, you know, think about it. Why would they spend a lot of time talking about dictation and things like that? Well, because what's the interface going to be if you're wearing something on your face? So, I mean, the keyboard has to go away. And Siri was supposed to be kind of the partner in that process.

Siri didn't really get any missions. They talked about Spotlight as, you know, their search engine. and that's something that I think is very important for their advertising model, you know, on desktop. But, yeah, there wasn't a whole lot there. Except for the fact that there, you can see, as I said, some of the things, they're teeing up sort of training users to expect certain apps to work a certain way, which they would want them to work in an AR environment. Do you have a specific example? sort of the translation dictation thing, the maps multi-stop routing thing, like, you know, even the I mean, this is maybe too much Kremlinology, but even the fact that Siri hasn't, you know,

people have made this point for years now that Siri hasn't had a major upgrade. When they come out with the AAR thing, I think you're going to see like, Siri have a friggin generational change in things that it can do and stuff like that. Well, actually,

you know, to that point, one of the things that I was in close attention to is their new shared with you API and they also have essentially activity streams and activity feeds

built into a number of the products across Ventura and it's Ventura, right? iOS 16. Yeah. And you can see the contours

of the Apple's tools network becoming much clearer. And it's very interesting the way that they're doing this, because it's so under the radar, and it's very much focused on kind of small group sharing and collaboration. And that seems, you know, I'm not going to like go to a limb here, but relative to all the complaints about, you know, Facebook being a monopoly, this is a very clear example of how Apple can disrupt and interrupt Facebook's relationship to its customers, obviously meta.

But in the sense that if Apple, builds that social network and social network is based in your contacts in your address book and then you can share or collaborate with people in all of Apple's apps and that those collaboration features are being rolled out and made available to developers you're going to be using people in your context in your address book to connect and to network and you're going to obviate the need for any third-party social network so i find those APIs to be very very important and very relevant especially because when it comes to Siri, you can use those activity streams to understand who you're interacting with to improve the social graph that will live ultimately in your writer's book. This is a joke that three people will get, but you cowards, you should have named it Ventura Highway la the America song from the 70s.

People got that. Yeah. What's the thing I just told you to put a pin in? No, I forgot. Yeah, we both did forget. Okay. All right, let's do a quick thing. What did you think of the MacBook Air, which I will say, for my part, again,

they're discontinuing support for people like me that sat on the last 2015-2016 MacBooks that we held on to because they screwed up MacBooks for so long. So eventually I'll have to get that MacBook Air. But I like the design. I like the M2 chip. Any thoughts there? I mean, I think the thing that I'm still wondering is ultimately, and I think this is a big question,

like what are desktop apps? What are iOS mobile apps? Yeah. You know, the form factor obviously of the air is becoming closer and closer. or two, it kind of, you know, it looks like a sandwich of two iPad errors at this point. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of the future of the Mac and the future of iOS devices and iPad OS, it's still,

obviously they're targeting those things at different, you know, sort of price points and tiers and different use cases. But in terms of the software that runs within it, it seems like there's a coalescing that's happening that feels just, I don't know, makes me a little nervous. So the hardware is great. Wait, the multi-the-maltisking makes you nervous? What do you mean it makes you nervous? Yeah, like the stage manager, right? So now you have this way of managing apps in sort of this preview-style tab system on the left-hand side, and then you also got the dock.

Like those two things don't make sense to sort of coexist. I mean, I'm sure they do kind of make sense, but not really. Not in sort of like the Apple way where it's sort of like, this is the one way to, you know, create this functionality for you. We're talking about Mac OS, right? Because on the Mac... Well, okay, so, okay. On the MacOS side, like, you know,

spaces is still their greatest innovation, and yet they can't help themselves. There's like five different ways to do spaces. Right. Yeah, there's mission control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's all these different ways of, like, doing your app switching and managing when doing.

Right. Which, you know, once you have multiple displays, it makes sense. Well, so let me, so on the iPad OS thing, which is I think what you were talking about, the multitasking and things like this, like, you know, everyone's like Mac OS is moving towards iPad or no, yeah, or moving towards iPad OS. But at this point, like if you can do overlapping windows, which is a funny thing to say, oh, this is an innovation, you can overlap Windows. But I mean, why are we still pretending? the hardware is the same. Like, let's just, like, the fact that at this point, iPadOS and Mac OS should just be identical. And the fact that they're still keeping hands tied behind backs is, I don't know, annoying. That's a little bit of what I'm saying.

Yeah. I think I'm personally apprehensive about that future because I do so much work on my Mac, and I love my Mac, and I love MacOS. And so moving over to a mostly mobile-based platform, you know, like freaks me out. I remember the reason why I was actually very scared to move from Windows to Mac like 2002. I don't know. It was a long time ago was my sense that I would lose control of like the system internals and access to like, you know, configuration files and all this stuff that over time ultimately I should not be touching. You know, I'm not a developer, let's be clear.

And so making that stuff more and more opaque and harder access actually is probably better for users, better for support, you know, simplifying the overall experience, you know, lowering support costs. And by the way, listeners, we will get to talk about my Mac studio experience. We're not going to do it now, but I'm with you in the sense of like that was always my fear of, listen, I'm a command line kid. you know, like so going in... Alfred. Well, I mean, there is Alfred on iOS, but it's not very good. It's a remote app. Yeah.

Well, you know, Terminal is still there and things like that. But, yeah, the thing is, is, I love the people that that are like, I'm going to make the iPad be my daily driver is my main device. and things like that. And at this point, you know, when people would talk about that four or five years ago, it was sort of like, oh, you're a brave pioneer and stuff like that. But at this point, yeah, it's just kind of annoying that you can't do the same thing on an iPad. You know what's annoying about it? I did the story today about the Dell XPS and things like that. Like, the fact that, a MacBook Air is not a detachable device.

You know, we should, we should be there. And you, because you know they're going to do it eventually, it's, it's just one of those things. We think that already with the iPad, you know. Right, right, right, right. So anyways, whether there's going to be a coherent of these different product lines over time, I imagine in, you know, two to three years, perhaps, but maybe by that point we'll be, you know, wearing glasses and, you know, it won't be it. Yeah, there's that.

Or, or it's one of the, you know, it's one of the things. of those things where you wear glasses and you sit in front of a wall and then you type on your desk in front of you because it's all AR, you know, put up in. Yeah, a friend of mine actually worked on that. Okay, I have a few more things, you know, that are a little bit adjacent to this before we bring out a guest that I thought were interesting. So one of the big things, oh, one last thing that I want to say about the Apple Social Network is just the sort of, I don't know, awareness, or again, this is like a little conspiracy, but we talked about the whole CSAM debacle many, many months ago,

which was, of course, when Apple put out a plan to scan everyone's phone for child pornography. And if it found it, then it would be, you know, essentially it would look at signatures of content on your device before you were uploading it to ICloud. And if it was, you know, there was a hit. or a certain number of hits, that eventually that could be reported to the authorities. And what we saw in WWDC was the product in which that feature would have been used, which was the iCloud shared photo libraries. So I thought it was the interesting sort of culmination of that story,

which of course died down months ago because Apple theoretically moved on, or did they not? I don't really know if they're not doing it. Yeah, that's unclear to me, too. know if they are. Yeah. I don't have an answer to that because it is one of those things that got sort of muddled where maybe they, yeah, maybe they backed away. Yeah, it kept evolving in terms of what their response to it was.

So that was one thing. The last thing that I want to point out was that Apple's moving forward with this Apple pay later service. And this is something of really big deal. Like, you know, if Apple is going to become a bank, again, they're not going to call themselves the bank, but they're going to act and provide, you know, the job to be done that a bank does, which is to allow people to buy Apple products and installments that are likely going to be managed through whether it's the Apple Guard or some financial finance.

The big deal is, is it's not Apple products. It is anything that you do with, if you're buying it with Apple Pay, if I went right now and bought a jackery battery with Apple Pay, they could split it into four payments for me. Right. But I want to like unpack that a little bit, right? So there's a couple things going on. You know, the fact that Apple is getting into more and more the like financial services, the fact that they're doing more with biometrics and identity, they can rate your fraud risk very accurately based on all the data that they have about you from how you use your device. Which is what I said, which is what I said today, right. Right? So they lower their threat profile in terms of who they're offering these services to because they are the ones that are actually doing all the biometric authentication.

So that puts them in this amazing position to rejigger the whole way in which I think we relate to money and financial services. Imagine getting, I don't know if I want to say like mint style services, but think about what Apple has done with Apple Health and the Apple Watch. and think about doing the same thing to money. The types of services that Apple could provide of financialization is a whole rich area that really not a lot of companies has mined. You know, like Microsoft makes a money product, but it's not like a good consumer app where there are, you know, family services, like where your, you're literally like your family members are in there.

So the fact that Apple is doing that I think is very interesting. And again, my conspiracy that, conspiracy hat, it's like, what if this is the thing that Apple needs to do to make the Apple car affordable? So you can actually get a loan for the Apple car in your iOS device or whatever. And this will be the thing that allows you to actually obtain one of the most expensive Apple products that will probably ever be released. And the reason why I think this is because Tesla is already offering loans through their app. So it's just a matter of time before Apple might do the same thing with these new financial services. Right. And so, number one, everyone thinks for years Apple focusing on privacy and shiving everybody else in terms of ATT. And we're not going to allow other people to surveil you. Well, that's good PR. That's good branding for Apple and things like that. But, you know, if they're thinking seven-dimensional chess wise, a decade down the road.

Yeah. Yeah. Like being in that Apple ecosystem and having all the money stuff just kind of be taking care of your kind of Apple one membership or whatever, it's very compelling from a business in our case. And the point being that, as I said today, they're never going to trumpet the fact that, oh, they know in the same way that Amazon knows what I buy and things like that. Like, just lead with benefit. Right, right. They're, they're going to know, too. They're going to know where you go.

They're going to know if with the Apple car. By the way, they'll know where you go if you're wearing their glasses on your face. All of it. I mean, any Apple device, right? Yeah. They've so much useful information to evaluate, you know, the risk profile of users. I mean, I remember, you know, at Uber, one of our biggest expenses was the fact that there was so much fraud on the platform. And, of course, you know, trying to do.

get access to that information on the phone, you know, is challenging. And so people can create new accounts and they can, you know, spin up lots of other devices. But Apple has a very different advantage in terms of just the relationship to those accounts and to those devices, to your Apple ID, you know, moving forward with biometrics, this past key thing. Anyways, again, lots of sort of conspiracy thinking. But if you project out a couple of years, this puts Apple in a very different place with regards to having a relationship with users. And if they get used to these installment payment services, you can see how that comfort, that familiarity,

would allow people to take out a much larger purchase for something down the road. And allow Apple to do it in a way that is, they'll have more information than a Goldman Sachs, than a Bank of America, because they have that data directly from you. Apple wants to sell the car and not just make it something that is a service

that's self-driving and it picks you up and drives you around. But anyways, I can see it going both ways. Well, speaking of experiences at Uber, I believe that's what you're leading to. Well, yes, all right, everybody. So I would like to welcome up Chris Maddern, who is now the CEO, co-founder of Floor NFT has a big announcement today. And Chris is someone who I followed for a long time. actually when I was at Uber, we worked together on, I believe, implementing, because I was on the developer platform, the ability to request a ride through Chris's platform, which was called Button. And Chris previously actually worked at Venmo as well, so he's got experience in financial services space. And, you know, I just, I've been following along, like, what he's been doing in the NFT space for many, many months. And it'd be great to actually get him here today on the day that he's announced his new C-DRI.

Yeah, I didn't do this story today, Chris M. But it definitely got a lot of chatter in various circles today. So congrats. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Chris, yeah, it was so fun back in the day, trying to figure out how to wire all of the apps together and just make something that was kind of delightful for users. And that was a really fun.

Actually, for me, like a really awesome opportunity because I'd been a fan of yours for quite a long time before that and all of a sudden you weren't a person I was following on Twitter who invented the hashtag you were someone that I got to have meetings with and do stuff with which is super cool that's awesome well again congrats I mean this is a really big day for you I know you've got some of the floor and a T folks in the audience if you want them to come up and also say hello totally down with that but you know why did they just kind of I guess start understanding like what drew you to the NFT space you know, why are you excited about that?

Why do you want to build there? I mean, again, I remember like in the button space, there was a lot of stuff around conversational commerce and voice controls and moving everything into kind of atomic intents that developers could build for. And so that's kind of where you were before. And I think that was a growing and explosive ecosystem for a while. Now you find yourself here kind of at the cusp of the Web3 revolution as it's happening. Yeah, it's such a privilege to get to work here.

I'll tell you the kind of ending, and then I'll tell you a little bit about how we got there. But I think it ties back to what you said, which is the reason we started Button, like, foundationally, was that we saw mobile as a moment in time where it might be possible to challenge some of the prevailing market dynamics, which were basically sell eyeballs, take money, consumerist product. And we thought that in the explosion of mobile commerce and the phone is the remote control for your life, that we could tie all that together in a way that could make contextual commerce kind of a prevailing business model. And in particular, make all of the apps on your phone composable. And make them be able to interact with each other and build layers on top of them that make them do more for you together than they would do individually. And we all kind of know how it played out. that didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of business models. It didn't happen because

inside of Web 2, it was in the best interest of everyone to kind of silo their customers, keep them in, build world gardens. And so the business of Button survived and thrived. But a lot of the original kind of ethos, I think, ended up, you know, not being what we ended up being able to see through. And today in NFTs, you know, what I see is not pictures. of apes that people sell for tens of thousands of dollars, but rather new foundational constructs of identity and ownership that are truly composable. And an ecosystem that's in a stage that is actually interested in building in the open and together in a way that we may have a chance of stacking a few of these things

on top of each other in a way that proves valuable before anyone basically tells you that you can't. And then on top of that, we have, you know, an imperfect but very powerful kind of customer including business model of tokenization that has proven that it is possible to do things that don't just sell your customers and let them participate. I think when you put those things together, the version of the internet that we wanted to create for mobile, I feel like we're in a very similar moment today for Web3 with kind of composable tokenization identity and ownership in the form of NFTs. But I think this time the deck is stacked,

kind of more in our favor, where previously, because it was the same companies, the same business models, the deck was incredibly stacked against us in terms of being able to do. And that's why I'm excited about NFTs. That's why I'm building NFTs. It's an amazing privilege. I definitely appreciate that whole art. It's obviously something that we had maybe hopes and dreams that would have turned out slightly differently. and now here we are and there's a lot of like handwringing and kind of wanting to, I don't know, reset the stage to some degree. Can you just tell us a little bit about like where floor is now in terms of it being a product? You know, I'd also love to hear you talk a little bit about your community engagement and how you've, you know, issued NFTs. And I don't know if you've funded some of the development, but certainly I should disclose, purchased some of your early community NFTs. so I'm already in, I've aped in, so to speak.

But we just let's just sort of like, you know, level set with the listeners. What is for? Like, what problem are you trying to solve? And how are you using your community to kind of co-developer, co-design what we're doing? Yeah. And we were really excited. I remember when you bought your token. And I was like, yeah, Chris, I'm the token.

So I think there's a few foundational things. So starting at the very beginning. The problem is, I'm a decently smart guy. I come from technology. I have a degree in computer science, and I've been deeply involved in crypto since 15, 16. And when it came to getting into NFTs,

which was really just a thing I did out of FOMO, because I saw a ton of folks getting into it. It's like, oh, man, I should really go check this out. I found it really hard. First to, like, truly just get onboarded, then to kind of get deeper, then to understand the value of my assets, and then honestly to understand just like,

what the heck is going on? And so Floor was my response, kind of as a builder to, hey, maybe I'm going to like try and see if I can make this a little bit better for myself in a way that maybe you can make it better for some other people too. And so I posted back in September of last year,

hey, I'm thinking about building something that solves this problem. And I think just got really, really lucky. And this original tweet set us kind of on a direction that we've lent into and taken advantage of. But if we'd have posted about it or I'd have posted about it and no one care, I think that would have led to one path. But the internet was really excited about the idea of this problem, or particularly like crypto Twitter and NFT Twitter, was really excited about it. And so over the next two, three, sorry, I have a lingering cough from COVID a few weeks ago.

And so over the next two and three weeks, as we started building the very first thing, we just started building in public. We started talking in the community, talking to the time, what were my Twitter followers, about, hey, like, here's kind of the features we're thinking, and here's a screenshot of something that's like half done. And people responded really, really well. And at that point, we had a few thousand people who wanted access to the base. and we weren't ready for a few thousand testers.

And so I decided kind of on a whim. And honestly, I wish I could say it was a really well-thought-out plan. It kind of just happened and, you know, a happy accident came together. Decided that we'd issue a small set of NFTs. They'd be relatively inexpensive. But, you know, side benefit. We could fund the project a little bit. And anyone who bought the NFT would be able to come in and be a tester.

And while I was definitely building in public and excited about the engagement, I still had a very web-to mindset as I was thinking about this, which is like, these people are going to be my testers. I'm going to make software. They're going to tell me how I'm doing. So we welcomed 500 people, yourself included, in that first set of testers. We were thinking about them at the time. And they came in and we built a Discord and we started building together. And it literally took two days for us to realize that what we had was not a group of testers. It was a group of partners in building this thing. And they weren't just taking software and saying like, hey, this is broken, this is good, this is bad. They were sharing their ideas. And they had ideas of things that they wanted to do to help kind of progress the project.

And so very quickly, we moved from being. you know, a thing I was making and other people were using to a thing that we were doing together. And so over the six months, seven months-ish, kind of since that happened, we released several other generations of tokens, have welcomed about 3,500 people into that community that has funded kind of the earliest part of the project. Obviously, you know, building large-scale software to attack large problems is expensive. And so, you know, that's why today we're we announced for $8 million seed round. But those first $1.5 to $2 million, which really led us in a position where we could bring people in and we could accelerate development

and we could reinvest back in the community. And honestly, I had originally never intended to force me anything but a side project, but between kind of moving from a thing I was doing to a movement that a group of people were doing and I just like kind of happened to be there with them, as well as getting deeper into the space and seeing kind of the depth of some of the trust and safety problems, but also the opportunity. And honestly, as I started this, I originally gone into NFTs because I was FOMO and I was interested in speculation. And it was somewhere along this journey that I realized that what we were really looking at was a new internet, was a new way of tokenizing, representing ownership, identity, all of those things.

And that the things that we were going to be building infrastructure for and floor were not pictures of animals in time, but we're going to be those really important foundational constructs. And so when we realized that both people were really excited, we were really excited, and the space and the opportunity is big, we decided to go and make it our real jobs. And again, that's been a real crazy fun journey. So one of the things that's obviously very interesting about Web3 and these composable units that are out there in public, and available thanks to the blockchain as an evolutionary, I guess, you know, construct within building apps. I guess what I'm wondering about is ultimately when it comes to your community,

what you're describing sounds a lot like kind of like an open source project. And, I mean, one, I don't think floor is open source. And two, I suppose there's sort of an interesting dynamic here where you are providing a type of equity to the token buyers, or is it not equity, it's access? Like, help me understand how you ultimately think about those first 3,500 people or so who are brought in, who are helping out, who are contributing ideas. you know if you didn't have the same structure at button how do you make sure that your incentives are aligned with your community considering you've now you know taken in some you know venture capital you know I realize I'm jumping head a little bit but I think it's very no no this is it's it's super interesting

something obviously we think about a lot and so you know you think about the way of VC thinks about a future VC essentially you know future funding sets the value and like reinforces and validates the bet that you made earlier. And so the real kind of question is just what's the unit of consideration? In this case, you know, these folks have come in and joined and the NFT is, you know, it's membership, it's access, and interestingly it's liquid. So, you know, there's been a ton of people that came in, used the app, decided they wanted the liquidity more than the app, and so they sold the NFT and they got their liquidity back.

Today, every single person who's ever bought a token could sell their token for certainly more, in most cases, somewhere between 2x and 10x, what they bought it for, depending on which token and when. And so the first thing kind of most simple is the proven behavior that we've started to see is that the market prices NFTs as kind of some function of success and interest in the project. So, you know, the Gen 1 token, which is the first set that we sent out, they think Chris is the one that you have. That token has kind of almost become a tracker on people's interest and the success of the projects. Oh, I hope not. Can you hear me? I can still hear him, Chris.

Yes. Oh, I just went on. All right. Chris M. Keep going. Yeah. Yeah. So I think one piece is the token price.

Basically, project does good. Token price goes up is not proven or guaranteed in any way. And certainly we don't guarantee it. But the market dynamic has sort of proved that that plays out. The next broader question is, you know, what does it mean to be a token holder versus what does it mean to be an app user? And so right now we're at this kind of fork in the road where we want. to onboard a million people, 10 million people. And so that means not having a $1,000, $2,000, $10,000 price of admission at the front door,

but then we have this token holder community that has obviously paid to be there. And so we run these surveys pretty often around how are you finding value in this? What's the most important thing about floor today? What we found over time is at the beginning, the primary value was the app, the only value is the app. And over time, that started to transition, and today it's actually transitioned to over more than half, of people find the primary value in the access to alpha opportunity, trust and safety, discovery, and the partnerships that we drive inside of today, our Discord, but ultimately inside of the product. And so as I kind of think about the future of these things, using the reach that we have from having a consumer product that has hundreds of thousands to millions of people, we use that leverage to go and make sure that we are in all the places that matter inside of NFTs.

And we use that to drive value for the original token holders. And that can create a flywheel between those things where our app users actually get additional access. because of the weight of the token holders. Token holders get early access because anyone who's building wants the distribution of the platform. And then we layer our trust and safety infrastructure on top of that to make sure that it's safe and no one's getting rugged and all of that kind of stuff. So are you ultimately just like kind of competitive with OpenC or how do you position yourself in the market? Like are you ultimately serving the NFT creators, generators, and sellers or the buyers?

So fundamentally, our first purpose is to create the home for NFTs and a way for them to be understandable and accessible to consumers. So our first customer is the consumer. I think in order to do that, that does mean discovery and trust and safety, both of those things involve project creators. We don't want to be a marketplace. And importantly, I think marketplaces are going to fragment massively inside of 2022 and certainly, in terms of. and certainly into 2023, and I think that the role of aggregator

and kind of de-multiplexer of those things will be a really, really valuable place to be. And so just to see like Coinbase and Luxorair and X2 and all those things kind of pop up, it's still kind of true that you can basically just care about OpenC, but it's less true every day. I think as that happens,

any of those players, individual ability to kind of create the home for NFTs gets degraded. And the home actually has to be multi-chain, multi-market place, as well as providing that kind of on-ramp on that understandability. To what degree though, you know, we've just mentioned, or you mentioned, Coinbase and we're thinking about, you know, you're saying you want a million users and things like that. To what degree are you thinking in terms of the widespread adoption of NFTs? I've been sitting in my head on an essay that maybe I'll do at some point about my mom problem of the crypto and Web3 space.

And to what degree are you thinking in terms of, for whatever you might think of, Coinbase, it was a lot of people's sort of on ramp to crypto. Are you thinking in terms of this being sort of a mainstreaming of NFTs for Normies and folks like that? Yeah, the interesting thing about where we are right now is that you can onboard a whole lot of people before you have to start thinking about people's mothers and grandmothers. Like we're so, so, so inaccessible today. And I actually think personally more about crossing, you know, the representation boundaries and the wealth boundaries than I think about crossing, you know, the age and kind of tech sabbiness boundaries at some level. But I think what Coinbase did is Coinbase realized product market fit for crypto, which was the custodian stored buying all crypto assets for pure speculation. And I think when you have product market fit, you can create terminology and you can create user experiences and paradigms that make sense to that set of users to onboard them to that pretty simple concept.

Coinbase is a marvel of user experience, but it's actually quite a simple thing. There's a list of coins and you can buy them and you can sell them. I think the challenge that NFTs have today is NFTs have product market fit for nothing except pretty rich people, like buying expensive. things and like signaling their wealth or in the better cases, signaling their associations and their interests and their identity to the rest of the internet. And there are lots of things that are emerging and show promise. But NFTs have no product market fit. And really because NFT is a technology, it's not a product. And I think we'll see lots and lots and lots of products emerge on top of it. And I think the first one that I've really seen, or certainly the most

someone that I think has a compelling argument for, okay, this is a use case that people can understand and therefore they might want it and therefore you can onboard them to it is Steppen. I think Steppen had an explosion of onboarding because people understood what you were asking them to do and why they might want to do it. And so I'm actually... Brian, are you familiar with Steppen? Yeah, I am actually, yes. Okay. You might want to just provide a little context for that. Oh, yeah, go ahead, go ahead, Chris. So stephen was, they coined themselves as kind of moved to earn. So the idea was you bought an NFT and then very much like any other kind of step tracker.

As you moved within some rules of the game, you'd earn tokens as you walked in the real world. And we did a whole segment on it on the show. I think it was last week, both Chris's, but keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I love Steppen. And, you know, I don't know if Stepan wins or succeeds.

But I do know that that concept was simple enough, understandable enough, offered enough consumer benefit and slaughtered into people's lives in a way that they were like, yeah, maybe I'll do that. And essentially, it was creating an NFT as kind of a yield instrument, but then creating some rules and like some real world telemetry that turned that into a game that people actually wanted to play. And so as we think about making NFTs mainstream, there's a bunch of systematic problems that I think we can be part of solving,

like trust and safety, discovery, onboarding, how does one self-custody, does one self-custody, all of those things. But then I think we're also just looking for and waiting for and going to lean heavily into people making compelling use cases that actually matter to people. And as of right now, it's not our goal to build those. We believe and trust that those things are happening.

And I can think of a half dozen I think show potential. It's possible that they don't happen in the time frame that we want. And who knows, maybe we even think about going and building some of those. But I think that kind of starts to address what you were saying, which is there's a lot that has to happen in order for this thing to become compelling to a mainstream audience from where we are. So given, you know, if Step in is one of the early examples, of a application of NFTs that you think might have some broader appeal, what is it that Floor would do to support that project or to promote it or would you not?

Yeah, so I think there's a kind of two ways of thinking about that. So one is for a floor user, like how do you help them discover new things that they might be excited about? And I think that's like a pure kind of discovery, algorithm recommendation kind of problem. The other that I think about a lot is I think there's a lot of people who are curious and a lot of people who dip their toe into Web 3, into NFTs, but get immediately bitten and don't know what to do right away. And so I think Stefan gives you one step in. Oh, maybe that's a good name. And then I think for someone like that, our goal would be, okay, how do we take a platform that's onboarded, call it 250,000?

users to the space and help them take that next step of exploration. Like how do we be there branching out point in a way that's safe so that they can explore without getting their hands bitten and then run away and never come back? Because I think that happens a lot today or people get so afraid that's going to happen because they hear about it happening to others that they never even try. Totally, Brian? Yeah. Listen, forgive me, Chris.

I would ask this of basically any startup right now. now, but specifically today I did a story about NFTs sales volume being down 75% or whatever. So like I would ask any startup in this current environment, but specifically anyone working in the crypto and web 3 space, if you're launching into a crypto winter, how are you thinking about that? I mean, you know, the crypto winter could last, and it could be over by July 4th or so. But what are you thinking about the current market environment that you guys are launching into? Yeah.

Like, don't be right. I feel pretty lucky to have closed around relatively soon before that happened. And I think the, you know, selfishly, I think the dream of anyone, dreams is wrong word. I think in an advantageous situation for anyone who's building on a new, you know, a real, you know, disruptive but open-ended technology is to get the opportunity to raise in a bull market and get the ability to build in a bear market. So for us, speaking from a purely selfish kind of floor standpoint, we have the runway to last through, you know, if we need to almost anything that a reasonable bear market and a winter could look like, you know, that's a couple of years. like we can make that. You know, I have and the team has the resolution that we think that this thing is important enough,

that it is going to make it out the other side. You know, don't get me wrong, it's always more fun to build an environment where every day the numbers are going up, but, you know, that's awesome. And it does affect our engagement. The way that we think about that is how is our engagement changing compared to the baseline of something like how is open-sea sales states are changing. And so what we see is the aspect of community that's built into the product and into kind of the overall offering means that our diminishment of engagement

is like 30% of what the diminishment of engagement might be for an open sea because there's other reasons to stick around. There are other aspects to the culture other than just kind of pure transactionality and the ability to make money there. I think that, you know, the historical rhetoric is some of the most important things get built during the winter. And I hope that makes sense. I mean an example of that. But no, it could be a month.

It could be a year prepared for either. And one more for you, Chris. And thanks so much for sharing your time, given, you know, this day. I know that you did a Twitter space earlier. You're getting over COVID, all the rest. What have you sort of noticed about the New York tech scene in this moment? You know, I think there's a lot of conversations about the center or the nucleus of tech kind of moving around and maybe not being, you know, based out of the Bay Area or Silicon Valley anymore. You're building what ostensibly could be a media technology platform or startup out of New York.

What thoughts do you have about how that ecosystem has changed or evolved in the last several years and sort of how does being in New York give you a advantage of. going forward. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I get this a lot right now with kind of the counter angle of, you know, how does it feel that Miami is becoming this major tech hub and in particular a crypto hub.

And there definitely is an aspect of, you know, people seem to like working in crypto and living in places with warm weather, particularly if there's kind of beneficial facts and crypto consideration benefits of being there. I think what we can all say is

the Bay Area has no particular ownership or leadership in Web3, and that Web2 companies are still largely based there, largely out of legacy reasons. I think as workforces get more distributed and people get to live where they want to, not where they have to. I think all cities will lose some of their ownership of that, but certainly some of the Bay Area is, honestly, like I've been building companies in New York for,

eight years, nine years now. And I think, you know, what I will say is two-thirds of, maybe two-thirds-ish of our investors over half are either East Coast-based or kind of distributed remote. And so, like I remember back in the day, fundraising for Button, you go make your pilgrimage to Sand Hill Road, and you, like, walk up and down, like, drop by all the venture firm, And I think that is very different today than it was seven or eight years ago. Like, firstly, it's all remote.

But secondly, I think a lot of those folks are distributed. There's a really great, strong crypto Web3 culture here. And I think it's because when you think about the two things that New York has always been strong at, finance and technology, and where those two things meet, I think there's a pretty powerful opportunity. So right now in Web 3, it feels like New York and Miami are the two places. And no one's asked me to go to San Francisco in quite something. Yeah. And with, you know, with like consensus and others, like oddly, Brooklyn specifically can, I'm speaking

to you from Brooklyn right now, but make a case for Web 3 sort of, I don't know, what's what's the way, being the capital right now. But yeah, love to hear that. Totally. Well, Chris, once again, thanks so much for coming out for joining us here. Brian and I are going to talk about his Mac Studio experience, but before you go, I mean, you're free to hang out as well. Where can people find floor? Where can people follow you?

Anything else you want to share to the TechBeam right home audience? Yeah. Thanks for having me. You can find me at Chris Madden on Twitter. And you can find Floor at Floor NFTs on Twitter. This is both a pleasure and honestly quite an honor to join you guys. I listen. So it's always cool to join things that you actually listen.

Thank you. Amazing. Thanks for us. So, well, exciting stuff. I always get to sort of hear from the founders for, like, you know, building new apps, getting out there. And what I think is actually very interesting, having been part of that floor communities, you know, sort of as a floater, perhaps,

is just the approach with Web3 community building does feel different. It feels like it's more inclusive, more participatory. And also, I think customers just have a different idea about what they can ask for out of founders. So, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see that pattern play out. And speaking to the New York thing, I've told the story before about how, I went to several early crypto meetups and things like that here in New York. I'm thinking specific. I think I told the story of the Doge one that we went to.

And I feel like it was like 2013 or something. Because again, early on in crypto, you know, New York is where the money is, like the money capital. And so I think the story that I told. is that, you know, at the end of the event, it was down literally like three doors down from the stock exchange. And then the whole crew went and put a doge sort of mask on the bull, the charging bulls thing on Wall Street or whatever. But I do think that that's an interesting case to be made that, especially because now with NFTs, you know, media is also here. So I do think that, yeah, I think that New York is a natural place for, for Web3 stuff.

Should we wrap by talking about the people? Yeah, I feel like you've taken on this journey. Yeah. You've been waiting for this next studio. And people have been yelling. You know, you've been excited about. People have been yelling at me about not following through on that. So we can do that.

But before I do, did you say, I think. thought I heard you say offhand recently. Do you have a Mac Studio display? I have an Apple Pro XDR display. OK. So it's not the most recent one. OK. OK.

The webcam or whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so first of all, what I will say is the real thing that is the most applicable thing that's changed is because, you know, since the Macs doesn't come with a display unless you buy the Macs Studio display. I ended up getting a 38-inch wrap-around LG monitor that Casey Newton recommended, by the way, shout out to him for recommending this one. So that's kind of really what in my day-to-day driving, what has changed is that now I have this 38-inch display over here, and then I have

one of my old I guess it's a 28 inch are you dual wielding then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so by the way, what I'm doing now because I kind of have to is I'm wearing blue blockers all the time because otherwise, you know, I'm just staring

into the abyss. Well, just a blast I'm staring into the sun. Blue light. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, And, okay, so the Mac Studio is, I got the one with the Ultra or whatever it is chip. So it's the heavier one. It's the bigger one, the one with the extra cooling and all that.

Everyone wants to know, okay, does the show process faster? Does it actually live up to the hype? Well, so it does, but it's not in a meaningful way, which you got, everyone has to understand. So what are you going from? Right. Okay. This is what I wanted to say. In the same way that we mentioned earlier with the, eventually I'll get a new MacBook Air is all of my devices, all of my Macs were, you know, pre-Apple fucking up the Macs.

So I'm coming from essentially 2015 and 2016 machines. So when it used to take, you know, the show is only a 15-minute show. So when it used to take garage band, let's call it two, two and a half minutes to process, it now does it in 30 seconds. So that doesn't... That's pretty good. Yeah, it did. Improving.

Right. But it's not like, oh, shit. It does it in three seconds. I don't know if I expected that. I think your expectations might have been a little, too? No, that's what I'm saying. I don't think I expected that. Essentially, the thing that is amazing and great is, well, actually, so think about the two things coming from a 2015 and 2016 device that are the biggest things are, I have an 8-terabyte SSD hard drive, right?

So I'm coming from a fusion drive where it was an SSD mixed with a platter hard drive. And then, well, but also the biggest thing is coming to USBC and Thunderbolt as opposed to USBA, where, so Lisa and I both, because, you know, Lisa has, you know, her account on my Macs and things like that. So we would install, we would plug in the, the hard drives, the external hard drives that we bought to do this transition into the old machine. And it would take four or five hours to put your files on there. Oh, my God. And then it takes less than five minutes when you plug it into it, to this thing with the USBC. The first time I switched over to an SSD on my M1. and transferred like a, you know, five-gigabyte file or something.

Yeah, yeah. It was so fast. It was like, oh, my God, what I've been doing with my life. And more ports. Because, again, I'm coming from an IMAQ where there were four USBA ports. So there are six USBC slash Thunderbolt ports plus two USBA ports, plus an SD card reader, and you've got the ports on the front. So it is, I've obliquely, you know, made these jokes slash sort of dragged Apple for this.

But, oh, my God, they gave us ports back. They, you know, it's so much better. They fix the things. So, okay, so it sounds like what I'm essentially saying is that, oh, I just got a modern computer, which I am kind of saying. It does. It does kind of sound like that. But here's what I'd say is I was trying to future proof, which is what I did with these 2015 and 2016 things.

When Apple started to fuck up their computers, I was like, I souped them both up, and I was like, this is going to last until Apple comes to their senses again. And that 100% worked out to the point where apparently MacOS is not going to support the old devices anymore. So my goal here with this machine is to last the better part of this decade. I'm going to throw something out there. I don't know if anyone can help me with this. But what I've also realized in consolidating my files. And then I do have a larger sort of philosophical point about this. In theory, if I did get a MacBook Pro or something, I could clone this machine if I got a big

enough hard drive on the MacBook Pro. So my laptop and my desktop could be identical machines. And if anyone is listening, I don't know if you can make Time Machine make that work. Do you know what I mean? So that obviously if I... You're going to clone it? Wait. Runs by me again?

Okay, so right now I'm sitting here at my desktop and I have everything set up beautifully. If I were to buy a MacBook Pro that, say, had a 3 terabyte hard drive, is it possible? This is what I'm asking. Does time machine work in the way that every time I plugged in? I think the answer is going to be no. Yeah. And that to do what you want to do probably requires you to go all in in Cloud. And anything that you want across your machines should be synced through iCloud or topbox or something like that.

Because what I'm dreaming of is, okay, if I need to use my laptop, I can just quickly plug it into time machine and it it duplicates my desk. Okay. One that won't be fast. And two, that's really not the way to do it. Because it's essentially kind of a record of your machine as the machine state is with the ability to roll back. using the journaling function of the drive. And so the way that it does it is by saving diffs of the file. So it's not sort of like you're syncing everything and it's just mirroying across both places.

It's, yeah, that's not how it works. Well, so here's what I'm really going to do. Basically, the whole time I was writing the book and the whole time I had, I started podcasting with the Internet History podcast. My daily driver, my main machine was my laptop. and now that I'm mostly working from home, my main machine is this Mac studio that I'm looking at. So what I think I'm probably going to do is just get the cheapest MacBook Air. I mean, yeah, I think this is to the point that we were making earlier,

where there's now these different products, you know, different price points, but there's starting to be some like seam removal, which, you know, maybe this is just Apple doing their self-cambolization thing that they like to do, you will find that you'll start using these devices for specific purposes. And you'll have a bunch of them based on weight or based in form factor or based in pencil usage. And that is kind of how you will live in the Apple ICloud world, as opposed to try to sync, you know, one desktop computer to a portable laptop, you know, and keeping things in sync that way.

Like, once you embrace sort of cloud living, it becomes literally like all your stuff is kind of just in a cloud and it kind of opportunistically sinks. And you just have to like lean into it. It's a very weird, uncomfortable feeling. But I think that's in your future, based on what you're describing. Yeah. So, I mean, this is part of my thinking, which is why did I get an 8 terabyte hard drive? As we've discussed before, you know, I'm 1,200 episodes. into the TechMeme Right Home podcast.

And raw garage band files are large. Oh, yeah. Which again, you know, you can buy a $50 external drive and back that stuff up and save that stuff. But I, you know, basically with this machine, all of our photos, all of my music, everything's on here now. And so the idea is that, again, hopefully by 2028, I can still have enough space and be using this machine.

And that's also the super-proofing. Because I got the ultra where probably the max was really all I needed. But I'm hoping that all of those graphics cores and all of those cores, full-stop, will future-proof me for... Well, how much are you really using this course? I'm not right now, but that's my... Generating the show. But see, that's what I'm saying.

is that I'm not right now. I'm hoping that... So that you add to the augmented reality... Exactly. Exactly. Hopefully, I got enough cores and enough juice that it'll take me as far into this decade as we can get.

It sounds like the biggest improvement in your workflow is just getting a bigger display. Well, essentially that... And by the way, I got to tell you, this is a great display. Again, it's designed for gaming, so it has a high refresh rate. But it is, you know, after having used an iMac that has whatever the Apple branding is now, I can tell that it's not a retina display anymore. Not that I can see pixels necessarily, but. Yeah. I don't go back.

definitely tell the difference. So here's my philosophical take on this, which is, and this is sort of what you're alluding to, and we're sort of both chiding me about, is I've told the story before about living in Detroit in the early 2000s and being the tech guy at a time when people were like, you know, oh, but that's Brian the tech guy, right, as opposed to today when, you know, Detroit is theoretically a tech town now. But one of the, like, we had this real cultural difference when we talk about things like Brian was the tech guy. And I knew a lot of folks that like, oh, they bought a new Mustang.

And they're like, Brian, come over and take a ride in my Mustang and see how amazing it is. And I would do it and it would mean nothing to me. But the thing that I learned was the way that certain types of people think of cars where I get a new car and I feel different about my life, look at what I can do now. I can go anywhere. I can do anything. I've realized that that is how I've always been about gadgets and computers, where we're making fun of me because nothing's really changed. But I get this machine. And I'm like, oh, Lisa, come in here, look at what I can do now. And she's like, yeah, you could do that before. But it feels like, that's my nerdery. And I'm not disparaging car nerds. I mean, I'm not disparaging nerds of any stripe.

But I feel about a new, clean device the same way that people feel like about a new car where it's like, well, the sky's the limit now. I can do anything. My horizons have exploded when really they haven't. You know, at the same time, though, I mean, going from an Intel chip to the M1 was revelatory. You know, I'm sitting in my new shed now, and so the sun is beating in on my laptop. And this is the first time that I've heard the fan go off in like a year and a half or so. So the fact that it used to be just like de rigour, you know,

the machine would get so hot, and it would just, like, forked stuff out all the time. And now I don't have to worry about that. Oh, we should. Listen, I should, I should be clear. I was getting the beach ball all the time recently with that old machine. I don't get that anymore. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it was necessary.

But here's the other thing, because I do this every three or four years with my phone, too, where you just start from scratch. and that was purposely Do you do a clean? Exactly. That was 100% also the point of this because I'm pretty sure I had been installing from a time machine backup every time for this desktop, for the IMAC.

So essentially, I was using the same machine that was my first iMac back in 2008, right? Oh, my God. Right, because... So much craft. Well, that's the point, is that also makes you feel like... Listen, this is what I'm copying to. The comedian Pete Holmes has a bit where he's like, I love it when a new iPhone comes out because I know I can't die until I get mine. Like, he's making sort of like a existential point of like, well, I'm not going to get hit by a bus tomorrow because I don't have my new iPhone yet. You know what I mean? Like, that's, you know, that's part of what I've been

experiencing, which is, all right, I'm making sure that I have every file that I need. I haven't traded in my old IMac yet. It's been sitting here for two weeks because I want to, you know, give myself the chance to be like, oh, I forgot that file or whatever. But yes, starting fresh, having a bigger hard drive than I could possibly need right now, and feeling, like, well, this chip can handle anything that I'll throw at it for the next five years is part of that feeling of like my life is sort of like not a clean slate, but like I'm starting fresh and new and like people think when they get a new Mustang or something. It's like, well, I know you haven't moved it a while, but the fact that I just moved into a new

house. It's like the same thing. It's like, you know. Oh, it's totally that. Oh, it's totally that. Yeah. Stuff I can install. Yeah. But, you know. Yeah. adult roadblocks. I tried to rationalize, you know, my document file system and all that good stuff. So I would say I'm not, this is not me coming here to be like, oh, the Mac studio will change your life. You should get one immediately. But maybe just, it is a fun and healthy thing to do to just get a clean computer. now and again and feeling like you've put all your ducks in a row and your total life in order.

Can I give you one big complaint, again, if anyone's listening, that can help me with this? You want to know, and this is, people are going to think I'm a giant asshole more than they already do, that I spend all this money and I'm going to have this problem. So think about it. It's not an integrated display anymore. I can't control where the sound is coming from? Because I don't know... What do you mean? Okay.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Apple doesn't conform to that sort of whatever the standard is that allows you to control the sound on a different device. So, okay, by default, the sound comes out of the crappy... I didn't even know the Mac Studio has speakers, but it does, right? So then I try to shift the sound to my 38-inch screen. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But also, I can't control, I can't mute or control the volume on the keyboard. I have to literally reach under the screen to control the volume.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No way. Now, and then the thing that I've been encountering is that then I have this side monitor over here. And even if I mute everything that I can think of, this morning messages, the little chimes from You got a new message from Chris Messina or from your wife. It was coming in on my side monitor, and I couldn't turn that off. So, okay, I spent all this money, and because I don't have an integrated display with this machine,

I'm having a hard time controlling where the sound is coming from. I think it's possible. You know, I don't want to speak on term because, you know, LG is a totally different thing. But there are some controls. If you hold down often, maybe, and you click on the speaker, you might be able to make some changes. Like, I will agree with you, though. There are some problems, and control the sound is hard, especially because Airplay wants to be able to play your audio. Oh, yeah.

And wants me to play it on the Apple TV downstairs. Yeah, right. Yeah, so they've changed a lot of that plumbing, and I think as a result, that's possibly why you're struggling. a little bit. I also, there's before people at me, there are apps to control this sort of thing. The problem is that most of them are not

updated for Apple Silicon. So, but I can't think of offhand the name that the app that everyone uses to handle this problem. Oh, it's it's a rogue, Roga. They have a bunch of products

in the space. In fact, that's what I'm using to record this episode. I'm using audio hijack. They have a number of tools, or at least one, that will allow you to control your audio and set up how you want. That, I think, is actually updated to Apple Silicon. Definitely check it out. Okay. Well, so see, there you go.

This is why I have a podcast so that people can tell me how to fix things. Yeah, that's it. I'm happy with it. And it's been fun to do it. And my daughter wants the old IMAC off of her desk. So I hopefully will get my Apple trade-in giant box. I've done that a couple times. Have you ever done that where...

I only done it with the phone. Oh, no. See, I've done this twice with IMAX where they will send you a gigantic box. And then the last time I did it, I was already living in Brooklyn. And I had to walk down the slope to the post office down on Fifth Avenue with my giant IMAQ in a box. So I walked the better part of a mile down there. Yeah. But hey, you can do it.

It's not like I have to put a giant. 28-inch screen in the trash, but... Sure. Okay, well, I sent you the link to an app that you should try. It's called SoundSource, and that one might be the one that you want. I'll actually pin to the space as well. I also pinned the animation of the speed of how fast what I actually got an external SSD with a comparison with what it was before, and you'll even take a look.

You'll see how much better it is. Yeah, well, anything that'll solve my problem would be great. Actually, you know what, weirdly, the solution is, is if you just wear your AirPods all day long, that takes over the sound and then it doesn't even matter. Yeah. Yeah. But whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so thank you for listening to my Mac Studio journey. I'm sorry if it was not as, I feel like everyone was like, oh, you're going to tell us that it's cut a half an hour out of your podcast production time, and it hasn't. But I don't know. Like I said, this is why we're geeks. It makes us feel good to do weird things like this. Well, so, I mean, you know, save yourself two to five minutes a day, you know, over the next thousand episodes, it'll save you a good amount of time.

That's true. When you're doing a thousand of anything, it does make a difference. That's so. Yeah. Okay. Well, awesome. I'm looking forward to other people's reactions to WWT as the stuff comes out. I'm very curious if my, of course, conspiracy theories play out.

We'll see. But this show is going to come out on Saturday. Indeed. And thank you to our other Chris guests. We're having too many Chris's on recently. I know. It's like a circular problem. It keeps coming back around. Yeah. All right. Thanks, everybody. I think I've gotten in the habit of saying I love everyone recently. So I'm going to say that again. I did see that once. I love everybody. Thanks for listening.

All right. Thanks, Brian. Later. Thanks, everybody. See you guys next time.