The Vergecast - Mythical computers and super apps

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of payment processing fees: 04:36 - The Verge's David Pierce travels to meet Keegan McNamara, an artisan who is making unique computers for more purposeful use cases. A visit to the one-man computer factory 27:11 - Liz Lopatto and Alex Heath join the show to discuss the future of "super apps" in the United States — notably the one Elon Musk is trying to build with X, formerly known as Twitter. Everything Elon Musk told Twitter employees in his first company meeting Can Elon Musk turn Twitter into an ‘everything app’? Here’s what Elon Musk wants to do with X, his ‘everything app’ 1:09:54 - Keep listening for this week's Vergecast Hotline question. What is a custom feed and how do I make one? – Reddit Help Email us at [e-mail], we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Payment Processing Fees. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here organizing my entire life in Spotify. I think for the first time ever. I've been using this app for over a decade, and this is the first time I think I've ever done a full reorganization of my life in here. And I'm doing it because there's this one thing that has annoyed me about Spotify for forever, which is that I have the music that I listen to when I'm in the car or, I don't know, at a barbed, or out with friends or just hanging out at home, making dinner. That's the music I would call, like, my music taste.

And then there's the music I listen to all day, every day while I work. That's the, like, feelings-y instrumental music. It's a lot of movie scores. It's a lot of kind of ambient bands that I like. I play it a ton, but I wouldn't call that the music that I like and, like, really want Spotify to tell me more about. And yet, every year at the end of the year, Spotify gives you that playlist with all your favorite songs, and it's like, you listened to the Batman soundtrack, 650,000 times. Maybe you'd

like to hear that again. And I'm just like, that's not really what's going on here. And I kind of always wanted Spotify to separate those things. Then when I had a kid, it got even worse because now I spend, you know, eight hours a day listening to Elmo's song. And I don't really want that in my algorithms either. So I googled around and was like, this has to be a solvable problem. Spotify has to have figured this out. And it turns out they kind of did. There was this feature that Spotify rolled out in February of this year, where you can go into any playlist and you tap or click on the three dots in the menu and you go to exclude from your taste profile. And you click it and it pops up this menu that says, listening to this playlist will have less impact on your taste profile and

recommendations. I don't know what less means, but this is good news. This means I can dump all the stuff that I want to listen to all the time, but don't want Spotify to make recommendations based on into one place. So that's essentially what I've been doing. I now have this monstrous playlist called Music to Work 2 in Spotify that is just several hundred songs so far of all the music that I play on repeat all day, every day while I work. And now I have another one called Kid that is just kids' music. And I can just basically put that on and shuffle it and do the same with my work music

all day. And neither one will get in the way of what's in my on repeat or my Discover Weekly or my Spotify rap every year. this is the dream. I can't believe I didn't know that this sooner. Oh my gosh, it's so much work to move all of my stuff around in playlists, but I think it's going to be worth it. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. I'm going to tell you a story about a guy I met in L.A. who's making a really different kind of computer. And then after that, we're going to talk about super apps because they're kind of lingering in the news all the time. Everybody is trying to build the one app in which you live your entire life. And it turns out it's really hard and really complicated. Elon Musk wants to do it now, and I just don't think it's possible. All that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just realized I have like a decade worth of monthly playlists. I've just been saving songs I like every month, and now I have a chance to actually put all

of those together. I have so many playlists. My Spotify is a disaster. I don't recommend ever actually trying to solve this problem unless you really want to solve this problem, but it's making me feel better already. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Welcome back. I want to tell you about this computer I saw a few months ago, which is unlike any other computer I've ever seen. I first saw it in a picture, on Twitter in March of this year. But a couple of months later, I got to see it in person. The Verges Veren Pavich and I went to L.A., got an Uber up this windy canyon road kind of near the UCLA campus in Westwood, and we went into this cool two-story house right up against a canyon. And we met a guy named Kegan McNamara. I'll tell you more about Kegan in one second, but first, I have to tell you about this computer.

Keegan calls it the mythic one, Roman numeral one. It's all very fancy. And he built this thing himself, like every single part of it. I was pitching it as something that looks very different from a normal computer. It's made out of wood, and it's functionally, like, very limited compared to a MacBook. It's like a limited computational experience. The computer is, in fact, made out of wood. Walnut and Maple, to be specific.

Kegan bought big blocks, then sawed and chiseled them into a shape I can really only describe as a sports car typewriter. You have a slightly inclined tray in the front where there's a mechanical keyboard with some white keys and some beige keys and a brown leather palmress. Then the whole thing slopes dramatically upward, like you're going up a cliff. There's an 8-inch screen in the middle, three little lights on the left side, and a keyhole and an ignition switch, seriously, on the right. The slope goes up to this peak just above the screen and then sort of swooply curves back down in the back. It looks like a retro futuristic design from the 1950s, like in the era when TVs were in those huge wooden cabinets. This would fit right in. What my method was was like just look at a bunch of really pretty things.

You know, things that I find to be beautiful or interesting for aesthetic reasons. read what people think about them, read about how they were designed and the people that designed them, just sort of, you know, take it all in for a while. And then after doing that for like a month, two months, three months, you kind of sit down and try to start doing

the sculptural aspect or the drawing aspect. And like, things just come. It's very weird. You don't, they're just kind of there in the background and you're not thinking about them. Like the unconscious is a very strange domain. You know, like, I had a friend come over and he was like, oh, so you made a car computer.

And I was like, yeah, I kind of made a car computer, but like also it's different in strange ways, you know? Like, it's just kind of a confluence of a bunch of the things that I find to be beautiful. My absolute favorite thing about this computer is how you turn it on. You put a key into that hole next to the screen and turn it to the right. As soon as you do, a red light turns on on the left side. Then you reach up and flip the ignition switch, and the lights on the left blink yellow, and then green, and then the computer turns on. Turning on this computer feels like

launching a missile from a submarine in an all-spy movie. Commence on the water search. It rules. The whole thing is powered by an Intel Nook, which is basically an all-in-one configurable mini-computer. I mean, the easier option would have been

just like a Raspberry Pi. They expose a bunch of pins and, you know, make it super easy to like make stuff. But I've experimented with Raspberry Pi's in the past, and I just in general found them to be like rather underpowered. And this was something, when you're making something that's like luxurious and it feels beautiful, you don't want it to be like stunted by the electronics. You want it to feel like blazing fast. And I think that like modern Intel processors are,

you know, modern like RAM amounts, all this kind of stuff. They are unbelievably whip fast when you're doing something relatively simple. The only reason that they ever get bogged down is by something like Google Chrome, which has just an unfathomable amount of complexity in the software. But yeah, when you're doing like Unix-y stuff, my God. And like an I-7 from 2020 is going to be unreal. There's also 8 gigs of RAM in here and 250 gigs of storage. Both are in a certain sense massive overkill because this computer doesn't run Chrome or games or anything complicated at all. For Kegan, it's pretty much a text editor.

It runs an operating system called Nix OS, which is a version of Linux that's designed to be super modular and configurable. If you want tons of apps and UI stuff, NixOS can do that, but the way Kegan's computer runs, it's much closer to just a command line. Kegan says he just wanted his computer to be a text editor for writing and reading, not a full-fledged computer in the way that we've come to think of it with all the power and options and apps and distractions that come with it. He has a MacBook that is great for MacBook things. With this, he wanted something else. Oh, and in case you're wondering about what kind of keyboard he would put into a computer designed entirely for typing, oh boy, did that ever send Kegan down a rabbit hole. This is a god-tier mechanic with a keyboard.

Like, this is like two different key capsets and they're PBT keys because I like the thawk of that. And like, this is a hot swap PCB underneath. And like, I have like foam padding and an aluminum plate because I like a little bit of panginess but not the panginess of brass. And like, you know, I mean, you're welcome to type on it here. I would very much like to you. Oh, man. The switches are hand-lobed, glorious pandas. I mean, these feel fantastic.

Not wild about the arrow keys, but I'll get you so. I should be clear here. He didn't build this thing to, like, start a computer startup. It was more like a summer project, starting in the summer of 2022. Kegan was a few years out of college and had done a couple of tech jobs, but was kind of disillusioned with the whole space and was trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. And then one day he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and happened upon an exhibit called Arms and Armory.

It's hard for me to explain it this way because it feels weird to say. It feels like it doesn't actually happen to people, but I literally had like a light bulb moment. The main thing that occurred to me was like, these are functional objects. They're guns. They shoot projectiles out of a tube. You know, it doesn't have ornamentation.

It's not made out of like exquisite materials. It doesn't have gold inlay, you know, stuff like this. But there were people three, four, five hundred years ago that thought it was worthwhile to add that additional layer of like I don't know, I think the right word is beauty onto a merely utilitarian object and I was like man nowadays that just doesn't really exist like And especially it doesn't exist for computers I'd been thinking about computers prior in like a philosophical way and so it was just it was very natural for me to be like that's the object that is most tractable for me personally to work on. And you know, I went home and sat down on my MacBook and, you know, I like, you're

like examining every single facet of the MacBook and like how it's machined and what the choices are and one of my gripes always with the Mac is like, when you put it on a table and you rest your wrists on it, there's like this, there's like this sharp edge that like digs into your wrist. Like, okay, there's something off here, you know, like in even just the shape of it. It's like a metal rectangle. Sure, it's like a very well-mached metal rectangle, but it is just a metal rectangle. And compared to the sort of like form experimentation and engraving and all this kind of stuff that that I saw in the guns, I was like, yeah, this is just a completely different design philosophy.

And I really, I think it's the design philosophy of Johnny Ive, right? And, you know, I respect him. Like he's a good industrial designer, but there's something about modern industrial design that feels like very cold and inhuman to me. Whereas working with materials like wood and leather, you know, it can kind of seem like kits up front maybe. But I think that what you end up having in terms of like the felt weight and the, you know, psychological weight of the object after it's created. It's just like it's warmer, it's nicer, it feels more personal, it feels just like better overall. Kegan became kind of obsessed with finding this ornate beauty in these everyday objects.

He got really into learning about Luthiers, the people who make and fix one-of-a-kind guitars in their workshops. He went to the house Ray and Charles Eames used to build the famous Eames furniture in, which is now a museum. When I went in, I was sort of imagining, too, like, what would a computer that actually fits inside of this very eclectic, strange house look like? And, you know, I think that this is perfect. Like, I think that this would match the aesthetic almost perfectly. Like, maybe it's not quite rectangular enough, but it's really close, and the materials are spot on, and I think it would fit really well in there, too.

He also got really into fancy cars, not as a car guy, but as a design guy. What can you learn from the shape of a Bugatti? What does the ultra-high-end leather in a Pagani make you feel that's different from the other things that drive down the highway? All that stuff, all those shapes and materials and feelings swirling around in his brain went into what became the mythic one. This back curve right here, that's like straight out of an Italian sports car. That's like the rear hip is something that you really don't see anywhere except for in Italian sports cars, which, I think that comes from big cats, like tigers and leopards and all these sorts of things. Kegan's other thing is that he only works with hand tools.

He's had some practice in woodworking. He learned a bunch from his dad growing up and took a guitar making class in college. But he also just kind of decided to figure it out as he goes. Again, summer project, not startup founder here. He uses a hand saw to cut the wood into kind of its rough shape and then a mallet and chisel to do the curves, and then a spoke shave and a card scraper to get everything just right. It's super, super, super tedious.

But he says he loves the actual process of woodworking, but also what it means. And this, and our whole time together, is where he got the most philosophical about how he thinks about this stuff. And he revealed, I guess what you might call the unified theory of Keegan McNamara. In Shintoism, there are these spirits called Kami that will come to reside in objects that are made in the right way. And, you know, the right way is a, it's open to interpretation. But my personal interpretation, and just from like using power tools in general, is that you're like marring something. And yeah, that's something that I care about in general is like trying to,

especially when it's in my own hands, crafting objects that a kami could come to dwell in this, in this Shintoistic, spiritual understanding. I asked him right after that if he felt like there was commie in the computer he made. Yes. To me, this feels like it has been crafted correctly. Like, I, you know, if I were Chinto, I would say, yeah, there's a commie in here. Like, for sure, there's a commie in there. It's been crafted with care and undermine understanding of the right way, which even if it's wrong, I think, has some importance. Does all that sound sort of ridiculous and high-minded to you, like a kid who made a computer just trying to tell you some mystical story about it?

If it does, trust me, you're not the only one. When Kegan finished the computer earlier this year, put the key in the ignition, booted it up, everything worked, all the lights. he was very excited. Top 10 key in life moments kind of thing. Then, like you do, he decided to post about this new computer in a bunch of places. He uploaded pictures of the mythic one to Reddit and Twitter, all with the same caption. I wanted a beautiful computer and couldn't find one, so I made my own. The whole thing went kind of viral.

On Twitter and Reddit, most people were really nice. They liked the throwback design and the retro futuristic vibe. They liked the idea of making computers that last, and they loved. They loved the key ignition. Some people actually wanted a mythic computer of their own, but not everyone saw the world the way McNamara did. He pointed me to a hacker news thread, which is the developer-focused site where people talk about stuff, and it was brutal. Let me just read you a few of these. Oh, Lord, another hipster.

I think that's the top-ranked comment here. Another one says, hooray for their four years of instant mastery. One says the pseudo-intellectual trad vibes were overwhelming. And then another one says, it's really cool that this 25-year-old invented PC case modification. There are a bunch like that. Ultimately, Kegan says he figures a lot of the backlash was to his writing style. He'd also posted an essay about how and why he built the mythic one. And to be fair, it does sound kind of pretentious.

Like, here's one section. Despite little improvement in overall user experience quality, there has been a colossal rapid growth of new applications over the last three decades. Modern personal computers are like a thousand and one multi-tools made from plastic. People deserve one-in-one tools made from high-grade steel. A good exercise here is considering the net impact of various types of applications on individuals and societies. I mean, you can see how that might piss off some tech types. You know what I mean?

Say this for Keegan, though. I think he really does believe what he says. I don't think he hates technology per se. He said that to me a few times. It's just that he believes there are better ways, or at least other ways, to do things. And it turns out that at least a few people agreed with him enough to reach out and see if maybe Kegan might make them a mythic computer. One of those people was Max Novenstern, who has been around Silicon Valley Circles for a while and who is probably best known as the co-founder of WorldCoin, the crypto company that wants to scan your irises. And Max had actually been rethinking his own relationship with technology recently.

computers are these like tools for liberation and also like tools for enslavement, you know. It's pretty bifurcated, right? Phones kind of make you feel like shit, right? Computers aren't very productive or it's like hard to do productive work at your computer. It just is. A couple of weeks before Keegan posted about the mythic computer, Max had tweeted about wanting something basically exactly like it. This was his tweet. It says, give me an e-reader with a chatbot and note system and nothing else.

Give me a typewriter with the same. Strip computers of their dopamine faucets leave their crystal balls. Max and Kegan started talking. They knew each other a little bit already, actually, and then reconnected about these shared device dreams. And Max ended up giving that same prompt to Kegan. No dopamine faucets, just crystal balls. So what are the dopamine faucets of a computer?

Well, I think most of the dopamine faucets actually just come from the internet. pragmatically you can get like most of the stripping of the dopamine faucets by just like heavily restricting internet access in this case it's completely gone but in the case of the one that I'm building for him there will be like a couple IP addresses that can get through the firewall namely the ones to like interesting open AI products chat GPT was one of those crystal walls that Max was talking about ultimately he landed on four things that he wanted in a computer he wanted a really good experience for writing and reading text he wanted speech to text transcription with the Whisper AI, so he could just pace around his office and dictate to his computer.

He wanted chat GPT integration, and he wanted a receipt printer, so he could quickly print off a grocery list or a piece of text and take it with him. It's like a typewriter, a secretary you could dictate to, and then a researcher who can, you could ask questions, and that will give you in plain text answers to those questions. And so that's a word processor with the McCarthy board, Whisper transcription, and then chat you to see. At first, Kegan balked at some of this. His mythic one doesn't connect to the internet at all, and that's kind of part of his ethos. Again, this is supposed to be a quiet, serene kind of computer. But talking to Max convinced him that if you could essentially boil the

whole internet down to a interactive text interface, that that felt more right, more in the spirit of what he was trying to do. And in the future, as more and more of the AI power can be run locally without any connection at all, a computer like this could be just as powerful and not ever need to be online. Eventually, Max and Kegan agreed on a design and a price. They didn't want to tell me the price on the record, but think more like used car money rather than MacBook money. Kegan spent the next few months on that computer and he finished it in late July. He ended up calling it the Mythic 2, and he personally drove it up to the Bay Area and delivered it to Max's house. Max is, unfortunately, away on vacation for a while. So he had to be a little bit of a while. So he

hasn't used it yet, so I don't know how he feels, but I know he was very excited to get it. Having built two of these now and talking with folks about more commissions, Kegan told me he's hoping this might be something like his career for a while. He can be a computer luthier in a certain way. And in the process, he seems to hope that he might help change the way we think about computers all together. I can imagine a world where there are like, you know, eight different guys spread out all across the place that like each are very interested in one specific portion of of like the metallurgy basically of a computer. You got the guy who's doing the processors in his garage.

You got the guy who's like figuring out how to do e-ink in his garage. And then you got the guy who's like doing the woodworking. I guess that's me. You know, there's like there are different components that can be figured out in their entirety sort of from scratch at like less capability than what is like industry standard nowadays. But a lot of the time you don't need the modern capabilities. Like you can get away with having worse hardware. I've been thinking about this kind of philosophy.

for months. And personally, I like my backbook a lot, but I like the idea of a computer that by design doesn't do everything, that does a couple of things really well, that feels more like a well-made single-purpose tool than a kind of janky Swiss Army knife. And I especially like the idea of bringing the tech industry back to a place of experimentation and ideas. It's a bummer that everyone converged on metal rectangles for laptops and big candy bar slabs of glass for phones, those can't be the only ideas or the right answers. I don't think there have to be right answers. When I was talking to Max, he compared what Kegan is doing to the whole idea of the resurgence of dumb phones. You know, these devices that make calls and send texts and really don't

do much else. I've been fascinated by these, things like the light phone and the punked for years, because I think it's a really interesting and complicated thing. How do you sell people what is an objectively worse phone. It's weird, right? And what does it actually need in order to be useful? You think about it, right? Phone calls good, texts good. You probably need Google Maps. You want something to play music. But do you add Snapchat? Do you add TikTok? Do you add Instagram? Do you have a web browser? At what point have you just rebuilt the thing only slightly worse? I agree that these do everything all in one devices have tipped a little too far, but it's really hard to figure out where the middle ground is.

Ultimately, the thing I've come around to is that actually maybe the answer is lots of answers. Maybe we need to go back to a time where instead of a smartphone that does everything, we should incorporate a few specific tools back into our lives that do one thing and do it really well. I'm not saying I'm trying to get rid of my laptop or smartphone because I'm not. I'm really not. But I buy the idea that the industry should be big enough to support lots of shapes, lots of sizes, lots of ideas about what these things are supposed to do and how they're supposed to work. And as these components get easier to source and even make from scratch,

and as more people get familiar with how they work and how to use them, I think we might be headed back to that. I don't know that I'd ever want a computer made of wood, but I guess I'm glad somebody's making one. All right, we've got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about a very different, maybe completely opposite way of thinking about interacting with technology. We're going to talk about super apps.

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because it's really not that complicated concept, right? Basically, what if you could do everything you needed in one place instead of needing a million apps for a million different things? And really, there are two flavors of Super App. There's the kind that tries to bundle a bunch of similar stuff into one app like Uber trying to do ride sharing and food delivery and public transit tickets all in one place. That's all, you know, moving things from one place to another. So they sort of make sense to put in one place. That's a semi-super app, I guess.

But imagine if Uber also tried to get you to video chat with your friends in the Uber app or book doctor's appointments in the Uber app or watch your favorite shows in the Uber app and look for. an apartment in the Uber app. Now that would be a true super app. Lots of companies have tried to build a super app like that, and only one has actually succeeded. We'll get to that one in a minute. But more recently, Elon Musk has been talking about how he wants to turn X, the platform and company formerly known as Twitter, into a super app in its own right. Personally, I think that is just straight up impossible for a bunch of different reasons. But I figured I should check that theory with a couple of people who know this space and Elon Musk really well. So I brought in the Verges Liz Lapato and Alex Heath to talk through it all. Alex Heath, hello. Hi. Liz Lapato. Hello. Hello. That's a lot of

energy for the Vergecast. Yeah, Liz really won the hello there. Listen, man, I'm hype. Whenever you tell Liz, she gets to talk about PayPal. It all, it all just falls apart. Which is actually, okay, so I've been trying to figure out where I want to start with this, because as we talk about super apps and Elon Musk and X and all this stuff. There are a lot of places we could go. But Liz, you have a very old book that you were just telling us about that makes me think we should actually start about 25 years ago with the first time Elon Musk tried to make X happen. You are deep in the history of this man and PayPal.

And if you go back to the 90s, all the stuff Elon is trying to do now, he was kind of trying to do, or at least thinking about trying to do back then, right? like build the sort of one app that runs the universe. Yeah. So I guess one of the things that I just want to, like, you know, if you can think back into like the mists of time, if you will, back to 1999, it was a very, very different time on the internet. As all of us who are online recall, and those of you who are not online due to not yet being born, I'm sorry. Musk is one of the sort of original internet entrepreneurs. And he founded this business called X.com in 1999, which was when he thought it would be like a

really cool idea to do electronic payments, checking accounts, stock trading, mutual funds. And like, I want to be real, a lot of these ideas seem pretty ahead of their time. At that point, nobody had really figured out how to use an email address for payments, which is something that like we all do now, right? And so part of what went on there was there was this unbelievable cash burn. Customers got like a $20 bonus on a cash card when they signed up and like $10 for everybody they referred. And then there were also all of these problems around verification where they would give credit cards to just anybody who wanted them up to like a $10,000 credit limit. And, you know, Musk's sort of idea was just to onboard as many people as possible because he wanted to have like a million people using the new credit card by the end of the year.

And like, this is like, by the way, Peter Teal's retelling of this, the million people. And so there were a lot of bad checks. There were, you know, banks that wouldn't allow people to have checking accounts who were you signing up for this card. They had something like a 50% chargeback rate, which is completely wild. There was just like a lot going on. And there was a second startup called Confinity that was Peter Teals that ended up merging with X.com because they were both burning money really fast.

and the VCs involved were like, these are similar businesses. Let's like see if we put them together if something good happens. Let's burn money together. Let's burn money together. And Confinity had this very popular product called PayPal. Part of what went on there is there was a conflict around PayPal. Musk wanted to rename it to X and use a different kind of software to run it or a different kind of code, rather.

And nobody else wanted that. And so Elon Musk went on his honeymoon. And there was a palace coup, and he was thrown out of X.com, which became known as PayPal and is still successful today, sort of despite these sort of rocky beginnings. Right. And if I remember right, even then they had this thesis that like, we want to do all this money stuff and we think that if we can be sort of the conduit through which money flows on the internet, we can solve everything. It's like there's a little bit of like what people talked about with crypto that they're like, if we can fix internet money, we can change everything about how everybody does everything just through the money. Like were they talking about that in the 90s or is everybody just like retconning that back into. on Musk's history of X.com. I mean, I think that that was sort of the primary goal, because if you think about how the internet works, it does seem to be missing a protocol and that protocol is money. And so, you know, there have been a lot of attempts to create a money protocol online,

and crypto is one of them. But I think that was part of what these guys were thinking about. And when I say these guys, I mean both Musk and Teal when it came to PayPal. And like, if you, you know, we're listening to sort of my description of X.com, It does sound a lot like what is called the quote unquote super app that seems to be Musk's ambition now with Twitter. And I do think that there is something pretty powerful about the idea of having sort of a unified money protocol. But the other thing that maybe is worth mentioning is that here in the U.S. banks got involved. And so, you know, I have my banking app on my phone. I can upload paper checks to my checking account if I so choose by taking photos and things.

And so there are, I already have that particular offering. And then on top of that, you know, there's PayPal, there's Venmo. There's all of this competition around ways that you can send money and ways that you can transmit money online. And then, you know, you think another layer, you think about crypto. If you're involved in the crypto world, there's, you know, wallets, all sorts of other ways to send money. So it's, it's a highly competitive space much more so than it was in 1999. Right. Which I think is why, Alex, I'm curious how you have seen this space over there's because I think you and I have both been covering the internet for a long time. And I think it was like the mid-20 teens, I think, where somewhere along the way, everybody who made any kind of successful messaging or social networking app started talking to me about wanting to be a super app in which you could do everything. And I think it's for the reason Liz just described, which was basically like money on the internet got like pretty easy and there were lots of ways to do it. And so everybody was like, okay, what are, what is our lock in? And it was like, okay, this is where people hang out with each other. What else can can we build on top of that? And I feel like 2015, everyone I know was telling me that they

were building a super app. Was that your experience, too? Yeah. Were you in the audience when Facebook had its annual conference in 2016? Do you remember the messenger chatbot craze? Oh, yeah. I do remember that. So that was actually David Marcus at the time, who was the former president of PayPal, was trying to bring this very superab vision that we'll get more into that Elon wants to do. to Messenger. And Messenger had 900 million monthly active already at this point. It was huge. And they made this big, you know, concerted effort to get developers to build these chatbots

inside Messenger. And the thinking was that you would do all kinds of things besides talking to your friends. You would talk to businesses. You would do customer support that way. And it bombed. I mean, it totally bombed. And, you know, we can go many directions here. But many years later, WhatsApp, Metazone,

other app is actually probably the closest thing to what is a true global super app. But that's been a much longer road. And it's become that in countries that are not the U.S. or Western Europe for very important reasons as well. Yeah. No, I think that's right. Well, and I think we should, before we get to WhatsApp, I think we should talk about WeChat just briefly. And I'm curious from both of your perspectives, how you think about WeChat. Because We chat, as we talk about super apps, the like one piece of software in which you live your entire life, we chat is the absolute smashing success story. It is like every app you can think of all shoved into one app called WeChat that is also

where you talk to your friends. And I feel like everybody I've talked to for the last 10 years is just trying to do what WeChat is doing. And that is like everybody's end goal. It's every, what every VC wants to fund. It's what everybody wants to build. Like, this is the future of everything. Liz, do you see a line between those things?

Is the thing that PayPal was trying to do what WeChat managed to pull off? Obviously, in China, it's a very different country with a very different evolution of the internet. Like, did they kind of get it right? Did WeChat finish the job there? So I think it's worth lingering on the differences between China and the United States for a moment. For sure. Because WeChat is actually bigger than what the sort of vision originally for X.com was because X.com didn't have the sort of social media component where you, you can post statuses.

There was no idea of finances being a kind of social media, even though I think as everyone who's used Venmo knows, it is. And in fact, you know, if you think about the dollar bill, that is actually media. Right. You know, there's literally a photo on it, or not a photo, I guess, but a print. Well, and in the same way that all these other apps have started with something else and sort of worked their way down to buying stuff,

I think realistically, like, if this had worked the way they wanted it to, you get to the point where all of your money is moving around and then they start to look. And it's pretty easy to like pull lines out of that into let's let people send each other money and talk about it and let's let them buy stuff. Why don't we bring the store in here? Like you can see how you would arrive at the same place even from the exact opposite direction. That's exactly right. And so one of the things that I think is worth mentioning about WeChat is specifically the Chinese Communist Party, which engages in a great deal of surveillance. So WeChat is a very good way for Chinese authorities to keep an eye on what people are doing where they're sending money.

who they're talking to and what they're reading. Okay. And this is, by the way, the downside of every super app is that it is a one-stop shop for surveillance. And I don't mean to suggest that the U.S. government isn't surveilling us because, as we all know from Edward Snowden, it is. Sure. But it's a little bit of a pain to put together all of our various social media streams and, like, the stuff that they're getting from wherever else.

And, like, this is like a one-stop shop for the Chinese surveillance state. So that's one way of thinking about these super apps. and it's one way of thinking about WeChat. It's very, very powerful, both for the users and in terms of social control. And so one of the things that I think is maybe interesting here is that in a lot of places where these super apps have traction, there are conditions that are very different than the conditions in the United States. Either the banking industry isn't as developed there and didn't get online as quickly,

or there is a level of social control from the government that there isn't here in the U.S. And so I can see why Silicon Valley VCs would love to have something like WeChat because that would be very powerful. You know, it would make you a lot of money and there's all sorts of things you can do with all that data. But I don't know from a user perspective why that's necessarily something you would want, especially knowing that it really could ramp up surveillance. It really could do things that are maybe not in your interests. And again, like this is just a basic difference. between China and the U.S. besides the fact that there is a lot more competition here because the U.S. government allows a lot more competition around financial services.

And to put a finer point on what Liz is saying about WeChat and China, I mean, WiiChat literally is an extension of the government in China. You can have your government ID managed and accessible inside WeChat. It is a sensor apparatus for the government. And the reason WeChat became so successful inside China when it did is because, not only does the government there sensor from within, it also censors out things from other countries. And so there was a vacuum where there were not any other, you know, social networks, the most of which were getting created in the Western world, allowed to even exist in China officially. So WeChat became, you know, the blessed service by the CCP, continues to be to this day. And to Liz's other point about money and about it being incredibly lucrative, it is.

But historically, and you can look at WeChat as a perfect example, it's owned by Tencent, which is a mega-cap tech conglomerate, kind of similar to an Apple or an Amazon in China. We-Chat as a business actually doesn't make Tencent the majority of its money. The majority of Tencent's money comes from its gaming business. They have a cloud division. They're starting to do a bunch of AI stuff. These super apps by themselves are not wildly profitable. It's when you attach them to these conglomerates that also have, you know, historically the blessing of the government that they operate in, the country they operate in.

So it's a very unique situation for WeChat. Right. And so given that, all of what you both just said, which is basically there are like these giant systemic differences between these two countries that would allow an app like that to work in China, that would almost certainly not allow an app like that to work somewhere like the United States. And yet, every tech company of a given size has this exact ambition. Alex, you wrote a story a couple years ago looking particularly at Snap, which you thought was kind of headed down this road and had a real shot at pulling off some, definitely not all, but some of that. Like, why did everyone get so obsessed with this if it's not a particularly good business and

there are a million really good reasons it's never going to work anyway? Well, you know, Facebook meta has basically cornered the ads market for these social apps. It's incredibly hard and Snap is living proof of this with where their stock price still is today to compete with a scaled digital ads business like that. It's really meta in Google, and that's it. No one's been able to take a meaningful share out of that. And so if you're a Snap or you're a Discord or you're one of these kind of up-and-coming, growing social networks, you're looking at other ways to build a business.

And the super app thing is it's a sexy idea, right? It's also about time spent. If your social media site, you want as much time spent in your app as possible, and a super app is something that people use all day, every day. And so the thinking is, can we bring more activities? So, like, for example, Snapchat, a whole gaming platform, Snapminis inside the app. And they shut it down because they couldn't make money from it. And you know why they couldn't make money from it?

Apple. This is a thing that we don't talk about, really, as it relates to these digital apps, the power that Apple as the distributor of these apps to the App Store and the way the App Store rules work is extremely powerful. And guess what Apple doesn't like? They don't like app stores that compete with their own. And so eventually you get down this road, if you're building a super app where you're a store within a store kind of idea. And the only app really at scale that is allowed to get away with this is WeChat.

And there's been some reporting on this over the years that basically, and I believe this to be true, Apple knows that it will not sell iPhones in China without WeChat. And so it's let WeChat do things that it will not let any other app of that scale do. And that's why Snap's kind of mini stuff failed. It's why Facebook has never been able to build its own kind of store within Facebook. They've tried many times. This is starting to loosen with some of the EU regulations specifically that will allow competing app stores soon. But Apple is the main hindrance, I would say, actually, to building a super app outside of China right now. And is that just because a huge part of the business case there is just payment fees?

Like if we can get shopping in our app, if we can get people sending each other money in the app, and we can take even a relatively small percentage of it, that there's a whole lot of money to be made doing that. And if you can't get any ad money, which you can't, that's one way to potentially make a lot of money here. I don't know. I would be curious to hear Liz talk about this because my understanding is that payments, businesses are not wildly profitable businesses. They're actually pretty commoditized.

The tech is fairly standardized at this point. There's many competitors. There's Stripe. there's Aidian in Europe. The banks all have their own competing rails at this point. The big ones. I'm not actually sure payments is in and of itself a big business. Like, Liz, we could just get into actually right now, kind of what Elon wants to do with X.

I was just going to say, this is a perfect segue into this is a bad idea. No one will ever do it. There's no reason to do it. And so Elon Musk is trying. Actually, guys, I want to pause here because everything Alex is saying is true. Payments is like not the most lucrative thing on earth. But there is a brand new competitor that I do want to talk about that went live on July 20th of this year called Fed Now. And it lets you as an individual or businesses, if they so choose, send instant payments through your depository institution account, which is like usually a bank.

Liz, I straight up thought you were just lying to me. Like I thought this was like an elaborate bit you were doing. I just Googled this. This is real. Sorry, keep going. Yeah, it's from the Federal Reserve. They've been working on it for several years now. And it's potentially very, very powerful.

It's a brand new set of payment rails that we just, we haven't seen how it's going to be used yet. You know, there's we have the first release of it. There's like fraud prevention tools. There's a number of support capabilities. And I think that if you're thinking about payments in a very serious way, the U.S. federal government has just given you some competition. So that's maybe also worth keeping in mind. Liz, I would love for you to just react to this.

So Elon held his first meeting when he took over Twitter in November. I got an audio recording of the entire conversation and put the full transcript on the verge at the time. And there's a section kind of in the middle of the meeting where he gets into the payments ideas that he wants to implement at Twitter before it was X. And there's this one line that I think really gets to the heart of what he thinks the reason people will want to transact through Twitter will be. And he says, if you can simply have one balance on Twitter that can simply go positive or negative, and when it goes positive, the interest rate is better than you could receive elsewhere. And when it goes negative, the interest rate is lower than you see elsewhere. Now you have a much simpler system. Is that actually a compelling reason to do any of this?

And is this something that is going to get people to transact on Twitter? I don't think so, but he seems to think it is. That doesn't sound simpler, does it? Is that even anything? Well, he's saying, like, they're going to come, and you write about this on the site all the time, Liz. Like, he's saying they're going to compete. Like, so much goes back to interest rates. And he's saying we're going to focus on better interest rates on the positive and negative end so that we're the

compelling place to store your money. Can he actually do that? I don't think so. Well, you know, there have been a number of people who have been trying, most notably Goldman, which has been offering a product both with Apple and also on its own. It's just a savings account. You can't, like, there's no debit. you can't withdraw. It's all electronic. So you have to withdraw to another bank account in order

to get cash out. But the idea of like high interest savings accounts, like those are not especially new either. And it's something that we've seen a lot of banking institutions move into with mixed results. So, you know, I understand wanting to compete on interest rates. But the other thing that I'm going to say is that like I think about this stuff on a pretty regular basis. And I don't pretend to be an expert. You know, I certainly don't have an econ degree or anything like that. But I do. I am interested. And I talk about interest rates with, you know, friends and family, and they don't understand them. And they don't think about them. And so, like, if you are offering a consumer product, as many institutions, by the way, do, it needs to be simple enough to be understood by most consumers.

Because I do remember during the era of low interest rates, I had people who were telling me to get certificates of deposit, which didn't make any sense, given, you know, that the interest rate was almost nothing, and I would have been earning less on a CD than I was losing an inflation. So there just seems to be like a basic lack of, I would say, financial literacy that would preclude something like that making intuitive sense to a consumer. So that's problem one. Problem two is that it sounds pretty complex. So if he's saying, you know, if your balance is positive, you get a better interest rate. And if your balance is negative, you get a worst interest rate. that's a lot more complexity than just having one fixed interest rate that you can sort of rely on and do math around.

So it sounds like he has some ideas that don't translate easily to a consumer audience. And if you're thinking about a super app, if you're thinking about some of these kinds of payment apps like Venmo or PayPal, which mostly make money on the float, what you're thinking about is a consumer audience. What you're thinking about is people need to transact without thinking too hard. They need to, you know, they go out to dinner, one person pays the bill, and everybody else sends them, you know, some amount of money for the bill. That's what they're thinking about. And so, you know, in that sense, like maybe social media can be useful because, you know, you have your connections with friends. But I also think about the people who I talk to online most often. And they are not the same people I see in everyday life. You know, with all love to my internet friends like David and Alex, because we don't live in the same cities. You know, the people who I'm going to be sending payments to, because I'm going to be sending payments to, because we split dinner, are not the same people as the people who I'm talking to on Twitter all day. You're saying your friends at dinner, they're not all on X all the time?

No, it turns out that I have a bunch of friends who, like, have jobs that mean that they're not on the internet all day. I genuinely don't even know what that means. That doesn't, that does not. That doesn't track to me at all. But I just want to say one more thing about the consumer business side of this. Like, this is also not been a good business. It turns out that, like, to your point about the Apple Goldman Sachs thing, like,

Goldman Sachs is by all accounts trying desperately to get out of that business because providing simple, understandable ways for people to make sure they pay their credit card bills actually turns out to be a really crappy business. And when you're Apple, that's all fine and good. And I get a notification every month telling me to pay my Apple card. Turns out that's not making Goldman Sachs any money, which is a real bummer for Goldman Sachs. So yet again, this is the kind of thing that seems like it ought to be a good business because you get to be in the middle of people moving their money around between each other,

and it just might not be. I'll play devil's advocate just for one second for a muscle. You know how many apps people download per month on average? Take a wild guess. Zero. Zero. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is the case for the super app, right? That's the whole thing. So, you know, if you're in the U.S., though, the apps on your phone already do all the things he's trying to build. So that's obviously the thing that wouldn't support his vision here. But he's got one of the last scaled, you know, know, social media platforms with, you know, hundreds of millions of monthly users, at least some portion of those are real users.

We're not sure how many, but it's got a sizable, you know, user base of real people, we think. There is something to be said for, like, make it a stickier product for the people who are using it. You can see kind of him putting the pieces together with the creator payments that they've started doing, right? So if you're verified, you're starting to get, like, I think it's actually now bi-monthly just payments to your Stripe account.

I think it's deeply funny, by the way, that he's using Stripe for all this right now. They're building it all on the fly. They have none of this in-house yet, so he's using Stripe. But, you know, say you're a creator, you're getting these payments, which are basically some undescribed rev share of the ads that run against your tweet after certain million-plus impressions. That balance, what if that just starts earning interest for you in your X account? And that feeds into the money that you can send through the system. And he's talked in internal all hands about, you know, we have to be backwards compatible with the existing financial system. So they're going to have credit cards and debit cards for X as wild as that says. As wild as that sounds, that's going to happen. He's going to offer lending. So it's going to become this full kind of bank thing. And he's been wanting to do it forever. And it's just kind of, it's remarkable that it's like so similar to the early vision, like the late 90s vision that Liz started this conversation, talking.

talking about. And he seems to just not care that the world has changed and think that I've got a big enough user base that I can make something interesting here. And TBD, if that will work, but that's what he's doing. You also just perfectly described why I think the super app discussion is so fascinating, because it just makes logical sense every single time, right? No matter which company you are, whether you make, you know, WhatsApp or Snap or Uber, which is kind of trying to do this or any number of other companies. It's like, okay, well, we have this one core competency. People are spending their time inside of our app doing a thing. What if we do this like slightly adjacent thing? And then if that starts to work, what if we do this other slightly adjacent

thing? And over and over and over, you can talk yourself into every company has to be some kind of like financial juggernaut because that's what powers a lot of the rest of this. And then you talk yourself into not only do we want to be a social media app, we also want to be a chat app and then we have to do some entertainment stuff. But then people are going to want to like get around. So we should probably be a ride share company. And it's like you can talk yourself into trying to be all things to all people, which is a terrible idea in perfectly rational ways, one step at a time. And I feel like we've watched these companies do this for like 15 years. And it's so funny and so bizarre every single time.

And now we're just watching Elon Musk do the same thing, but at like record speed. You know, David, I also want to just point out something because we've been dancing around interest rates for a minute. I understand I sound like a broken record. But post 2008, there was a very long period of very low interest rates. And that was part of the reason why we wound up with people trying to do blitzscaling. It was part of the reason why we found people, you know, moving into related businesses that didn't totally always make sense. We work opening a preschool will forever be my favorite example of that. That's right. And so, you know, if you think about it in a way, it was easier to experiment with this kind of thing because there weren't a lot of places to park money that would earn you interest. And so that meant that there was a lot more money available for investing. And if you think about what's been going on over the last twoish years, the Fed has been raising interest rates. And so that is no longer true. Separately from the fact that, you know, the yields on bonds are pretty high right now, relatively high. There's also just a variety of financial instruments that have suddenly become much more attractive than they've been for about a decade. And that's a problem for VCs generally because all of that VC scaling, like blitzscaling stuff, you know, typified, for instance, by Uber, that relied on there being a lot of cash available so that you could pour it all into the market, corner the market, and then, you know, jack up the prices, which is essentially what Uber has done. Again, we may not be in conditions for that to continue to occur anymore. And one of the things that has been a real question for me when it comes to Elon Musk, and it's an open question, is that a lot of his success happened in this low interest rate era. A lot of what we think of as being Tesla's success, for instance, happened when it was easy to get a hold of money. And even then, Tesla almost went out of business a couple times. You think about SpaceX, you know, it's still private. It's very much venture. backed. And it's a valuable company. You know, it does a lot of important things for the U.S. government. I don't mean to suggest that it's, you know, smoke and mirrors or anything like that.

But again, conditions have changed. You think about some of the other projects that Musk has been working on, the sort of more far-fetched stuff like the boring company in Neerlink. And you wonder how far they're going to go in this new environment. And you think about Twitter, which, you know, Twitter has never been an especially successful business. even though it's been a particularly influential one. And you think about all of the debt that Musk loaded it up with in order to buy it. And you think about the new environment we're in, which we haven't seen, you know, quite some time. And you just wonder if Elon Musk is prepared for this era of normal interest rates.

Like there just seems like a lot of the things that he has done has been to spend as much money as possible and worry about the risk later. And I'm kind of wondering if we've reached the moment where it's later and you should be worrying. Yeah, Alex, what have you heard from folks over the last couple of years? Because I think, like, Liz, I agree with you almost 100%, but also the other thing that is happening is that all these companies tried this when there was unlimited money to throw at it. And it kept not working still, right? Like, Facebook couldn't make dating happen. And all these companies have tried to expand into this, like do more things with your life outside of just the sort of core competency of our app. But, Alex, I'm curious what you've seen.

Like, have folks pulled back on this ambition because of sort of the larger economic changes here that we're talking about? From a product perspective, no. I actually wrote a piece in The Virgin 2021 predicting that there were going to be more of these super apps attempts around the world. I wasn't specifically talking about the U.S., but just broadly, for a number of reasons. But because a lot of the kind of scaled, big independent apps that do one or two things, Like, they worked as a business in a model where you could track people across the internet, and that increasingly is not happening anymore, thanks to Apple and regulation. And so you have this incentive for all of these companies that make money by how much time

people spend in their services to bring more of that activity inside their walled garden, so to speak. So you have, like, TikTok doing shopping, right, where you can, like, buy a thing you see in a video without ever leaving TikTok. That wouldn't have happened five years ago because you didn't need to because you could still track who made the purchase where if they went somewhere else. It just wasn't worth the effort. So I do think there's a natural kind of business incentive at play here for all of these

kind of time spent based companies to become more like super apps. And the TikTok shopping thing is actually a great kind of very, very fresh example. They're testing like a storefront that looks like Amazon right next to the video feed. TikTok. So to Liz's point about, you know, the broader kind of macroeconomic climate here and the fact that it is, you know, capital is more expensive. You can't just like, you know, Tesla's not going to become a trillion dollar company on pure mania anymore, right? Like that era has that's definitely true. Yeah. Sure. But like, I mean, from everything Musk has been saying since he bought Twitter, he seems to be painfully aware that things are changing. Like every time he talks to people internally,

It's like we have got to prepare for a recession. You know, I reported on meetings, like when he first bought the company where he was talking about the fact that he thinks a very bad recession is coming. Looks like that may not be the case now. But he's definitely been thinking, you know, things are shifting. I don't think he's totally oblivious to it. I mean, he is the richest person in the world. Like, I think he probably has pretty good data.

He's very focused on cutting costs on, you know, I think SpaceX just had its first profitable quarter. I just saw in a media story in like Q1. So he is actually kind of like leading the charge, so to speak, in Silicon Valley of like cutting companies down to the bone to try to make them profitable and get away from this kind of hypergrowth era. So I don't know. I don't know if the things are, I don't know if that's, that means that he's going to succeed here. But I do think he seems to be at least aware that things are changing. Yeah, I do think to go back to WeChat for a second. One of the things we chat was able to do that worked so well was essentially just poor money and energy and effort into getting people into the app like liz what you were talking about with the early days of

paypal where they're essentially just heaving money at people to use PayPal or x.com or whatever the heck it was we chat was able to do that kind of thing for a long time and just work so hard and grow so much that it kind of had won the market before anybody really noticed and then you get into that sort of escape velocity and it becomes very hard to lose because people decide it's smarter to just build inside of Wii chat than build their own thing because they don't have the money to compete with it and like on and on and that's who you win and that in this era becomes much harder to do right because there's no free money to just throw it growing. David it becomes easier to win when you have the full backing of the CCP. I mean like to get to our early point like

and and this can maybe kind of bring it full circle a little bit like to what Liz was talking about earlier Like, do we really want Elon Musk who already has a ton of power, especially through like Starlink and how that relates to how physical wars are playing out in Ukraine? Do we really want someone with all these different businesses and power to have something like a Wii chat? And he has a business in China that is very important strategically to Tesla. He's got a lot of pressure points that can be pushed around the world by different governments. and do we want something like a super app where we transact and do all these things to be managed by one person who, let's be clear, controls his companies completely, right? So it's like this isn't like a normal governance situation. So there's a lot to be concerned about there.

Liz, I have a strange feeling. I know your answer to Alex's question. There are a lot of reasons I don't want Elon Musk's super app managing my money. And all of the things that you guys have mentioned are part of it. Part of it is also, you know, I'm a reporter who reports on Elon Musk and like, do I necessarily want him to be able to like look into my bank account from God view? Do I? I feel like it is though. Like you like you a little bit just like root for chaos at all times and like that is chaos.

It's true. And like honestly, he's going to find out that I spend far too much money on my cat. But, you know, like, as you think about these things, the other thing to think about is Elon Musk's history of implementation, and it's sloppy. And, you know, some of that is like the panel problems that we saw with Tesla, you know, and various other sort of implementation problems. But even if you just narrow your focus to Twitter slash X, there's just been a lot of sloppiness there from the X sign to not getting the X handle until after the name had already been changed to. the various sort of problems that we've had around the service where we were being rate limited abruptly for a while. And like this kind of like slap dash mentality is an old Silicon Valley mentality. It's, you know, usually thought of as like move fast and break things. And that

does make sense in certain contexts. You know, like the Twitter fail fail whale was a thing because sometimes the service went out because there are too many people on it. But, you know, if you think about the things that you don't want from banks. I'm just going to list some of them. Abrupt frequent service changes, regular service outages, new fees added at random, white supremacists, difficulty with verification, spam and fraud. You know, like, these are all things I don't want anywhere near my money. Yeah. And if you just look at how Twitter is operating right now and you think about it, is like, do I trust Elon Musk to actually handle my money in a way that makes sense? It's like all these crypto scam ads that I see in my feet every day.

It's like, oh, all I want is to be able to actually send money to those ads. Right, with one click, they just have your bank account now. That's what everybody's looking for, right? Yeah. So, okay, last thing, and then we should go, is I think if you imagine somebody, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or somebody, from a product perspective, manages to build this thing. They accrue all of the value, all of the user data, all the everything to, like, be the, the Wii chat of America. Could anyone pull that off from a regulatory standpoint?

Like, would Lena Kahn and the FTC just throw their bodies in front of one company having this much? This is an argument I've heard, and I genuinely don't know where I land on, like, could you even, in theory, pull this off under the U.S. government's nose? No. There's no chance. I mean, Facebook, are we old enough now to where we don't remember in just 2019, Facebook tried to create. a global currency. Libra! I remember Libra.

I love Libra. Yeah. And honestly, Libra was a pretty smart idea for a global currency that had a lot of benefits and was going to be managed by a trust, et cetera. Like, they thought through a lot of the potential blowback. Guess what? It still got shut down. I would say there's next to zero chance that anything like this happens in the U.S.

for all the reasons you just said, David. I mean, if Facebook can't buy Giffy, do you really think, like the Congress, especially all the members of Congress who have strong feelings about Musk already, are going to let him build a financial superpower that potentially has more power than the U.S. government? No. I'm like, no, absolutely not. I want to pile on to this because it isn't just an antitrust issue, although it is a very sexy antitrust issue. What you're talking about is essentially somebody who's managing the digital dollar. And I feel like the Fed and the Treasury both want to be involved with that. And so not only are you looking at.

at an antitrust issue, you're looking at dealing with other major government agencies. And, you know, there are people out there, Circle is one of them, that are interested in being the purveyor of the digital dollar, that are interested in doing that kind of work that have talked publicly about wanting to work with the Fed, with the Treasury, to have a digital dollar. And that's a very, very different proposition than what we're hearing about with these super apps. And, like, again, if you go back to something like Fed now, there is. like a reality where it turns out like maybe your competition is the United States because it turns out the dollar is a really, really important part of why the U.S. is so powerful. The dollar is something

that a lot of people transact in around the world. It's a really, really important part of the U.S. is soft power. And wherever the dollar goes, U.S. law goes as well. So whenever you're talking about this kind of like super app, when you're talking about these kinds of big payment companies, you are inevitably also talking about something much more powerful. And Elon Musk already has a lot of sway in the federal government because Starlink is very important because he sends a lot of satellites up for various U.S. military missions. And so there is like this question of how much more power we as, you know, the United States want to hand over to him. Like he's already like doing all of these things for the military. Do you want him handling the U.S. dollar as well? And I,

I feel like the answer is probably not. It's a real like no one man should have all that power kind of situation. It's just where I land. Yeah, I don't know. I kind of hope somebody gets further down this road and we can actually have this fight in a real way. Because I think meta never had a chance because of all the other stuff going on with meta. The FTC was just like the whole U.S. government would have stopped Libra if it came to it. I don't think Elon Musk is going to even get close.

But it's going to be fascinating to see if someone can get well enough to. down the road that we actually have to have this fight for real, but I'm not convinced forever going to see it. Alex, who would you bet on? Do you still think it's snap? Could snap do it? No, I don't think this is happening. Not in the U.S.

I do think it will happen in other parts of the world where countries are kind of more willing to embrace something like this, but I think the U.S. is so against big tech right now, and there's so many established players doing things really well at scale, like banking, that I just don't see how this happens, but, you know, could be my famous last words. No, I tend to agree. I think instead of a super app, we got like the whole internet, and I think that's probably a better trade. And like, that's okay. Like it's actually, I love, it's capitalism. Like, free market, whatever. Like, I love having apps competing for my, my services and my attention. And to have options is a good thing. Like, we shouldn't be like necessarily wanting one company doing everything. Totally. All right. Well, we got to take a break. But thank you both for doing this. I appreciate it. And I will, I will X both of you some money for being here. Thank you. No, you won't. All right, see you guys. Bye.

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Anything on your mind, we want to hear it all. You can also email us, Virchcast.com, if you don't want to call. This week's voicemail comes from Daniel. Hey, Virgast, this is Daniel. I always had this question of why. social media doesn't recognize the fact that, like, people are more than just one thing. Like, why can't I have a whole collection of subreddits for each of my, like, quote-unquote modes? Like, sometimes I'm in productivity mode where I just want to see, you know, how to be optimally

productive, I guess, and do spreadsheets and that kind of stuff. And then sometimes I'm into my hobby interest mode, and I just want to see stuff about, like, video games or whatever. The only way I've ever found to do this is to actually have totally separate social media profiles, which is just super annoying to maintain. But why doesn't any social media recognize that that's a thing that pretty much every person has? Anyway, tell me your thoughts. Bye. Okay. I have answers to this question for once.

I have a small thought and a big thought. The small thought is that for Reddit, this is actually a thing you can do. Reddit sort of buries this, but it does actually exist. It used to be called multi-reddits, and now it's called custom feeds. And basically the idea is you can pull a bunch of different subredits into one thing that you see all as a single Reddit timeline. So, like, I have one ironically for productivity. That's all of my like productivity nerd subredits. And then I have one for all the sports teams I care about.

So like I have the Arsenal subreddit and the New York Giants subreddit and the Yankees subreddit all in one place. This is a great thing that Reddit does. I don't know why they don't share it more. It's kind of awkward to find. I'll put a link in the show notes on how to set up a custom feed on the web and in the apps. But it is possible and you should do it and it's great. The bigger picture thing here is I think this is a good idea and I think we're going to get towards it. I think one of the things we've talked about a lot with the social web and activity pub is this idea that there are going to be lots of new ways to sort and filter and display the same kinds of content.

So you've heard Elon Musk and others talk about this idea of like open sourcing the internet. algorithm so that you can get different versions of the same experience depending on what you want. So you could show up and say, I'm in the mood to just go on TikTok and watch bloopers from TV shows that I like. And that's actually an instruction you might be able to give an app like that over time. Or to say, I'm in work mode or I'm in school mode or whatever and actually have these things work separately. It's hard work.

And it means having different algorithms and systems. And it also means making users do more, which most of the way. of these apps don't like to do, but I do think that's actually a place that we're headed with some of these tools. The other thing is that I wouldn't underrate how useful it is to have multiple accounts, because the other thing is when you're interacting on these, when you're liking stuff and you're commenting and you're posting, having all of that stuff kind of live together in a separate account works really well. So even if we get to the point where you can customize your algorithms or like I have custom feeds on Reddit, I'm still posting as me. And so kind of my interactions

in my life all live in the same place. And a lot of these companies, Instagram, I think, does this better than almost anybody, make it really easy to switch from account to account. But I'm a big fan of having multiple accounts. I have lots of accounts on lots of different services. And it occasionally gets, like, awkwardly cross-pollinated because you forget we are logged into. But having a Reddit that I go to when I'm just looking for sports stuff and want to, like, yell about sports that is separate from where I comment as like a person who people know on the internet is really useful.

And if you want to shitpost, you should have an account just for shit posting, is my personal and professional opinion. So the point, Daniel, is I think we're headed somewhat towards the world that you described, but also custom feeds on Reddit will instantly make your life better. I hope that helps. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show. And thank you so much for listening, as always. There's lots more from everything we talked about, including Mythic Computer at theBurge.com. We also made a cool video.

We have some really fun stuff on the website. Go check it all out. It's good stuff. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or sick custom computers that you made and want to tell me about, you can always email us at vergecast to the verge.com or call the hotline. 866 verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. And speaking of the hotline, one thing we're going to do at some point in the very near

future is an entire Vergecast episode all about the Verge. We're calling it the meta-vergecast episode. So if you have questions about how we make the Verge, how we make the Verge cast, what Neela's favorite food is, why Alex Kranz has so much. weird stuff on her walls. Send us all of your questions. Call in with all of your questions. We're going to do a whole episode about it. It's going to be awesome. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Mili, Alex, and I will be back on

Friday to talk about the Connect, the drama about OpenAI's web crawler, all of your computer rooms, which has been so fun to see, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.