Mythical computers and super apps
01:14:24 Share

Welcome to the verge cast, the flagship podcast of payment processing fees. I am a friend, David piers, 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 what a barbecue e 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 lake feeling, the 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 play list with all your favorite songs. And it's like you listens to the batman soundtrack six hundred and fifty thousand 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, he got even worse because now I spent, you know, eight hours a day listening to almost song. And I don't really want that in my algorithms either. So I google LED around like this has to be a solvable problem. Spotify has to have figure this out. And IT turns out they kind of did.

There is the 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 tests, profile and recommendations. I don't know, 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 to 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 suffer 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 wrapped every year.

This is the dream. I can't say I didn't know that this sooner. Oh my god, shit.

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 mean, I tell you a story about a guy I met in L.

A. Who is 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 must 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 players. 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 verge cast. We'll be right back.

Support for the verge cast comes from strike. Strike is a payment and billion platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like uber, bmw and door dash. Stripe has help countless startups and establish companies alike reach their groth calls, make progress on their missions and reach more customers globally.

The platform offers a sweet of specialized features and tools to bash track growth like stripe billing, which makes IT easy to handle subscription base charges in voices and all reactions ring revenue management needs. You can learn how stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at striped up com that striped out com to learn more, strike, make progress. Support for the show comes from service.

Now the A I platform for business transformation. You've heard the big hype around A I, and the truth is A I is only as powerful as the platform is built into service. Now is the platform that puts A I to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees, super charging productivity for developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agent to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can use right now.

And that's why the world works with service now. This is service now. Outcome flash A I for people to learn more.

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 see IT in person the virtuous vean pages.

And I went to L. A, got a uber of this windy kenyon road, kind of near the U. C, L.

A. Campus in westwood. And we went into this cool two stories house right up against canyon. And we met a guy named key gen. magna.

I'll tell you more about kigin in one second, but first I have to tell you about this computer. Kigin calls IT the mystic one. Roman numeral one is all very fanning. And he built this thing himself, like every single part of IT.

I was pushing IT as like something that looks very different from an oral computer is made out of wood, and it's functionally like very limited compared to a macbook k. It's like a limited computational experience.

The computer is in fact made out of wood wit and able to be specific. Hegan bought big blocks, then sod and chisel them into a shape I can really only describe as a sports car type writer. You have a slightly inclined tray in the front where there is a mechanical keyboard with some White keys and some bage keys and a Brown leather palm press.

Then the whole thing slows dramatically upward, like you're going up a Cliff. There's an eighteen screen in the middle, three little left 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 sweeping curves back down in the back.

IT looks like a retroactive truism. Design from the one thousand nine hundred and fifties, like in the era when tvs were in those huge wooden cabinet. Ts, this would fit right .

in what my mother was like. Just look at a bunch of really pretty things, things that I find to be beautiful or interesting for esthetic reasons. Read what people think about them, read about how they were designed.

And like the people that design them, just sort of, you take IT all in for a while. And then after doing that village, a months, two months, three months, you can sit down and try to start doing the the sculptural for the drawing aspect and like things just come it's very weird. You know there just kind of there in the background you're not thinking about them.

Unconscious is a very strange domain. You know like I had a Frank over and he was like, oh, so you made a car computer. I was like, yeah, I can.

I kind of made a car computer. But I also is different in strange ways. You know, like it's just kind of a confluence of a bunch, 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 hall 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 flit 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 mission from a submarine in an all spy movie. IT rules. The whole thing is powered by an intel l. Duck, which is basically an all in one configurable mini computer.

I mean, the easier option would have, just like a raspe, they expose a bunch of pins, super easy to like, make stuff. But i've experimented with rasper pipes in the past, and in general found to be like rather under powered. And this was something when you're making something that's like luxuries and IT feels beautiful, you don't want that to be like unit by the electronics.

You wanted to feel like blazing fast. And I think that like modern, until processors are, you know, modern, like rain amounts, all this kind of stuff, they are unbelievably with fast. When you're doing something relatively simple, the only reason that they ever get bogged down is buy something like google crime, which has just an unfair amount of complexity in the software. But yeah, when you're doing like unique stuff, my god, and like an I seven from twenty twenty is gonna be unreal.

There's also eight gigs of rain here and two hundred and fifty gigs of storage. Both are in a certain sense, massive because this computer doesn't run chrome or games or anything complicated at all for kigin is pretty much a text editor. IT runs an Operating system called nix O S, which is a version of linux that's designed to be super modulate and configurable.

If you want tons of apps and U S. Stuff, nix OS can do that. But the way given computer runs, it's much closer to just a command line.

Kigin says he just want to 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 wondering about what kind of keyboard he would put into a computer designed entirely for typing a boy to dad, ever send kids down a rabbit? Le.

this is a god tear mechanical. We like. This is like two different key upsets in their pbt keys because I like the thought of that. And like this is a hot swap pcb underneath. Like I have like phone padding and an illusion plate because I like a little .

bit Better of, oh, man, the .

switches are hand loved glorious pandas.

I mean, these fields, fanta asic, not wild about the arches, but i'll get you. I should be clear here. He didn't build this thing to, like, start a computer, start up. IT was more like a summer project starting in the summer of twenty two. Kigin was a few years out of college and had done a couple of tech jobs, but was kind of disillusion 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 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 that feels like IT doesn't actually happen to people. But I literally had like a liberal moment. The main thing that occurred to me was like, these are functional objects, their guns.

They should project eyes out of the tube. IT doesn't mentation is not made out of like exquisiteness. IT does go in that.

But there were people three, four, five hundred years ago that thought he was worthwhile to add that additional layer of lake. I don't know. I think the right word is beauty onto a merely utilitarian object.

And I was like, man nowaday, that just doesn't really exist, like, and especially doesn't exist for computers. I've been thinking about computers prior and like A A philosophical way. And so that I was very natural for me to be like, that's the object that is most tractable for me personally to work on.

No, I went home and set down on my macbook. And I know you like examining every single facet of the macbook. And like, how is machine and what the choices are in one of my grapes, always with the matter is like when you put IT on the table, when you rest your rest on IT, there's like this.

There's like this sharp edge digs into your risk like, okay, there's something off here, you know like and even just a shape of IT. It's like a metal rectangle. Sure, it's like a very well machined metal rectangle.

But IT is just a metal rectangle. And compared to the sort of like form, experimental and engraving and all this kind of stuff that that I saw the guns, I was like, yeah, this is just a completely different design philosopher. And I really, I think, is the design philosopher of john Y.

I right? I respect tly. He's a good industrial designer. But there is something about modern industrial design that feels like very cold and inhuman to me, whether working with materials like wood and leather, you know, can kind of seem like kitch up front, maybe.

But I think that what you end up having in terms of, look, the felt weight in the psychological weight of the object after after it's created is just like it's warmer, it's nicer. IT feels more persons. IT feels like Better overall.

Kigin became kind of obsessed with finding this ornate beauty in these everyday objects. He got really into learning about luthers the people who make and fix one of a kind guitars in their workshops. He went to the house. Ray and Charles ims used to build the famous iams furniture in which is now a museum.

When I went in, I was sort of imagining, too, like what what would a computer that actually fits inside of this very, a collective, strange house look like? And, you know, I think that this is perfect, like I think that this this would match the aesthetic almost perfectly, like maybe it's not quite rectangular enough, but it's really close and the materials are spotted on, and I think you would .

fit really well on there too. He also got really in a fancy cars, not as a car guy, but as a design guy. What can you learn from the shape of A D, what does the ultra high and leather in a page? I 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 domestic one.

This back car right here, that's like straight out of an italian sports car that's like the rear hit, is something that you that you really don't see anywhere suffering italian ports, which I think that comes from big cats like tigers and lepper. And, you know, all these sorts of things.

Higg's other thing is that he only works with hand tools. He 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 a, decided to figure that out as he goes again. Summer, the project not start up founder here.

He uses a handsaw to cut the woods into kind of its rough shape, and then a mallet and chisel to do curves, and then a spokeshave in a CD scrapper to get everything just right. It's super, super, super tedious. But he says he loves the actual process of what working, but also what that means. And this in our whole time together, is where he got the most physical ho about how he thinks about this stuff. And he revealed that, I guess, what you might call the unified theory of kigin .

accra in chinois m. There these spirits called comi that will come to reside in objects that are made in the right way. And you know, the right way is its open dual interpretation. But my personal interpretation, and just like using power tls in general, is that you're like marrying something and yeah, that's something that I care about in general, like trying to especially minutes in my own hands crafting objects that I can you could come to dwelling in genoa, spiritual understanding.

I ask him right after that if he felt like there was coming in the computer image.

Yes, to me, this feels like that has been crafted correctly. Like, like, you know, if I if I watch into, I would say, yeah, there's a come here like first there's coming there that has been crafted with with care and undermind standing of the railway, which even if it's wrong, I think has some importance.

Does all that sounds sort of ridiculous? And I minded 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 he gen finished ed the computer earlier this year put the key in a mission, booted IT up, everything worked, all the lads, he was very excited.

top ten he in life moments then.

like you do, he decided to post about this new computer in a bunch places. He uploaded pictures of the mystic one to read IT 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 read IT.

Most people were really nice. They liked the throw back design in 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 mac mini did. He pointed me to a hacker news thread, which is the developer focused site.

People talk about stuff, and IT was brutal. Let me just really a few days. O lord, another hipster.

R, I think that's the top ranked comment here. Another one says, hurry for their four years of mastery. A one says, the su du intellectual trade vives were overwhelming.

And then another one says, it's really cool. That is, twenty five 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 effec 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 ls made from plastic. People deserve one and one tools made from high grade de deal.

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 pz off some take types. You say this for giga though, I think he really does believe what he says.

I don't think he hates technology, per says. 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 key gen might make them a ethic computer.

One of those people with max newland stern, who has been around silicon valley circles for a while and who is probably best known as the cofounder of world coin, the crypto company that wants to and that had actually been rethinking his own relationship with technology recently. Computers are these like tools for liberation, and also like tools for and slave. Many, you know, it's pretty bifocal, right? Phones kind of make you feel like a shit, right? Those are very productive.

So it's like hard to do productive work. Your computer, which just is a couple of weeks before key gen posted about the effec computer, max had wait about wanting something basically exactly like that. This was history.

IT has 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 in facets leave their Christal balls. magazine.

Hegan started talking. They knew each other a little bit already, actually, and then reconnected about these shared boy dreams. And max ended up giving that same prompt to egan, no, dopamine is just Christal balls.

So the doping forces of computer, well, I think most of the doping forces actually just come from the internet. Pragmatically, you can get like most of the stripping of the dope mean false by just like heavily restricting. And internet is, in this case, is completely gone. But in the case of the one that i'm building for him, there will be like a couple I P addresses that can get through the firewall, namely the ones to like interesting OpenAI products.

ChatGPT was one of those cristal 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 A I so he could just pace around his office and dictate his computer. He wanted ChatGPT integration, and he wanted a receive printer so he could quickly print off a goal 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 research.

Cher, who can you can ask questions, and we'll give you in playing tax answers to those questions. And so that word before them of the board, whisper transcription and then to the. At first, kigin 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 a 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 A I 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 egan agreed on a design and the Price. They didn't want to tell me the Price on the record, but think more like used car money rather than macbook money.

Kigin spent the next few months on that computer, and he finished IT in late july. He ended up calling IT the mythic too, and he personally drove up up to the bay area and delivered IT to maxus house. Max is unfortunately away on vacation for 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, kigin told me he's hoping this might be something like his career. For a while, he can be a computer luthor in a certain way. And in the process, he seems to hope that he might help change the way we think about computers altogether.

I can imagine a world rather like, you know, eight different guys spread out all across the place that, like each, are very interested in one specific portion of, like the metal logy, basically of a computer. You got the guy is doing the processors in his ground, and you ve got the guys like seeing you how to do, even in his Grace. And then you got the guy, he's like doing the world working.

I guess that's me. You know this 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 now is. But a lot of the time you don't need the modern capability so you can get away with having worse, worse hardware.

I've been thinking about this kind of philosophy for months. And personally, i'd like my head book 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 kinder jackie swiss army knife.

And I especially like the idea of bringing the tech industry back to a place of experimental and ideas. It's a bomb 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. They have to be right answers. When I was talking to max, he compared what key gen is doing to the whole idea of the recurrence of dumb funds.

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 in the punk 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 is that 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. What do you add? Snap chat.

Do you at tiktok, do you at 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 and is. Ultimately, the thing i've come around you is that actually maybe the answer is lots of answers.

Maybe we need to go back to a time where in of a smart phone 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 smart phone 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 he's making one.

right? We're going 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. I'll be right back.

With m max platinum, you can really be in the now access to rey priority notify yes or pm checked with fine hotels and resorts book through mx travel.

We needed this .

and dedicated .

card member entrances after the .

election event. S, you can focus on the present moment. That's the powerful backing of american express terms apply, learn more at american express by com sex with amx card member entrance access not limited to AMC platting card support for the show comes from the crucible moments of podcast for the coia capital.

We've all had turning points in our lives where the decisions we make end up having lasting consequences. No one knows this Better than the founders of some of today's most influential in critical moments. Let's listeners in on the maker break events that defined major companies like dropbox, youtube, rob hood and Moore told by the founders themselves tune to season two of crucial moments. Today you can listen a crucible moment stop com, or will .

listen to podcasts.

Welcome back. The idea of a super APP has been around and take for a really long time because it's really not that complicated a 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 is the kind that tries to bundle a bunch of similar stuff into one up, 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 you were also tried to get you to video chat with your friends in the uba or book doctors appointments in the uber p or watch your favorite shows in the uber APP A M. 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 will get to that one in a minute. But more recently, elan musk has been talking about how he wants to turn x, the platform company, formally known as twitter, into a super APP in its own right personably.

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 on mask really well. So I brought in the virtuous liza poto and alex health to talk to at all. Alex health, hello, hi. Liza poto, hello.

hello. That's a lot of .

energy for the verge cast.

Really want to help the list, man.

I'm hipe whatever you .

tell this SHE gets to talk about paypal l which is actually okay. So I i've been trying to figure where I want to start with this because as we talk about super apps and elon musk and x all this there a lot of this week ago. But this is, you have a very old book that you are just telling us about that makes me think we should actually start about twenty five years ago with the first time elan musk tried to make x happen. You are like deep in the history of this man and paypal. And if you go back to the nineties, 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, and then, right, like build this sort of one APP that runs the universe.

yes. So I guess one of the things that I just wanted, like, you know, if you can think back into, like, the mists of time, if you will, back to ninety, ninety nine IT was a very, very different time on the internet.

Um as all of us who are online recall and those of you who are not online due to not yet being born sorry, musk is one of the sort of original internet per nurse and he founded this business called x dot com in thousand nine hundred ninety nine, which was when he thought I would be like a really cool idea to do electronic payments, checking accounts, stock trading, neutral 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 email address, which is something that like we all do now, right? And so part of what what went on there was there was this unbelievable cash burn.

Customers got like a twenty dollar bonus on a cash card when they signed up, and like ten dollars for everybody they referred. And 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 ten thousand dollar credit limit. And musk sort of idea was just to on board as many people as possible, because 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 teals retelling of this, the million people. And so there were a lot of bad checks. There were you banks that wouldn't allow people to have checking accounts.

Who are you signing up for this card? They had something like a fifty percent charge back rate, which is completely wild. There was just like a lot going on.

And there was a second started called confines, that was Peter teals ended up merging with x doc com because they were both burning money really fast. And the VS involved 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 infinity had this very popular products, uh, called paypal. Part of what went on there is there is a conflict around paypal. Most 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 elan must went on his honeymoon and there was a palace coup, and he was thrown out of astok com, which became known as paypal and is still successful today, sort of despite these sort of rocky beginnings.

And if I remember, even they had this this that like we wanted do all this money stuff. And we think that if we can be sort, they can do IT 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 crp, du, that they're like if we can fix internet money, we can we can change everything about how everybody does everything just through the money like we're they talking about that in the name users, everybody just like red counting that back into elon musk history of exactly M. I mean.

I think that 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, they're 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 muscular when I came to pay pal. And like if you you know we're listening to sort of my description of x dot com IT does sound a lot like what is called the quote and quote super APP. That seems to be ambition now with twitter.

And I do think that there is something pretty powerful about the idea of having sort of a unified money for the call. But the other thing that maybe is worth mentioning is that here in the us, banks got involved. And so you know, I have my banking APP on my phone.

I can um upload paper checks to my checking account if I so choose by you, taking photos and things. And so there I already have that particular offering. And then on top of that, you know there's paypal, there's vo, there's all of this competition around ways that you can send money in, ways that you can transmit IT money online. And then you you think another layer you think about cyp to if you're involved in the crypto world there, while its all sorts of other ways to send money. So it's it's a highly competitive space, much more so than IT was in nineteen ninety nine.

right, which I think is why. Alex, i'm curious how you in this space over the years, because I think you and I have both been covering the consumer internet for a long time. And I think I was like the mid 2 tens， I think where somewhere along the way, everybody who made any kind of successful 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 this just described, which was basically like money on the internet got like pretty easy and there were a lots of ways to do. And something is like, okay, how what is our lock? And IT was like, okay, this is what people hang out with each other.

What else can we build on top of that? And I feel like twenty, like fifteen. And everyone I know was telling me that they were building a super APP. Was that your experience?

Yeah we're you in the audience. When facebook had its annual conference in twenty sixteen, you remember the messenger chatbot craze.

Oh yeah, I do remember that.

So that was actually David markets at the time who was the former president of paypal, was trying to bring this very superadd vision that will get more into that elon wants to do to to messenger. And messenger had one hundred million monthly actives already at this point. I was huge.

And they made this big. You concerned an effort to get developers to build these chat bots inside messager. And the thinking was that, uh, you would do all kinds of things besides talking to your friends, you to businesses.

You would do customer support that way. And IT bombed, I mean, IT IT totally bombed. And, you know, we can go many directions here, but many years later, WhatsApp, that as 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 come that in countries that are not the U. S. Or western europe for very important reasons as well.

Yeah no, I think they say well and I think we should before we get to watch up, I think we should talk about we had just briefly and i'm i'm curious at from both of your perspectives how you think about witch hat because we ch chat as we talk about superadds, the one piece of software in which you live your entire life, which chat is the absolute smashing success story.

IT is like every APP you can think of all shoved into one APP called we chat. That is also, where do you talk to your friends? And I feel like everybody i've talked to you for the last ten years is just trying to do what we had is doing. And that is like everybody y's and go is what every VC wants to fund IT what everybody wants to build, like this is the future of everything.

Liz, do you see a line between those things? Like, is the thing that paper was trying to do what we cha t managed to pull off, obviously, in china, a very different country with a very different evolution of the internet, like, did they kind of get IT right? Did we cha t 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 we chat is actually bigger than what the sort of vision originally for x stock com was because ext com didn't have the sort of social media. Where you can like post status, there is no idea of finances being a kind of social media even though I think as everyone whose used the mo nose IT is. And in fact, you know if you think about the dollar bill, that is actually media and there's literally a photo on, not a photo like I ve been a print.

What 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 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 as to like pull lines out of that into let's let people send each other money and talk about IT and lets have them by stuff. What do we bring the store in here? Like you can see how you arrive at the same place even from the exact of opposite direction.

That's exactly right. And so one of the things that I think is worth mentioning about we chat is specifically the chinese communist party, which engages in a great deal of surveilLance, so which that is a very good way for chinese to keep an iron. What people are doing, where they're sending money, who they're talking to and 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 the U. S.

Government isn't surveilling us because, as we all know from Edwards, no IT is. But it's a little of a pain to put together all of our various social media streams and like the stuff 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 the super apps and it's one way of thinking about ec hat, like 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 may be interesting here is that in a lot of places where these super apps have traction, there are conditions that are very different. And 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 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 we chat because that would be very powerful. You know, I make you a lot of money and you there's all sorts of 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 um 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 was just saying about which had in china, I mean, we chat literally is an extension of the government in china. You can have your government ID manage and accessible inside we chat. IT is a sensor apparatus for the government.

And the reason which had became so successful inside china when I did is because not only does the government their sensor from within IT also sensors things from other countries. And so there was a vacuum where there were not any other you know, social networks that most of which we're getting created in the western world allowed to even exist in china officially. So which had became, you know, the blast service by the ccp continues to be to this day and to lose as other point about money and about IT being incredibly lucrative.

IT is. But historically, and you can look at which had as perfect examples on by tencent, which is a mega cap tech oma, kind of similar to an apple and amazon in china. We had as a business actually doesn't make tents, the majority of its money, uh, the majority of tensor money comes from its gaming business.

They have a cloud division. They started to a bunch of A I stuff. These supermarket PS by themselves are not wildly profitable. It's when you attach them to these conglomerate that also have a historically the blessing of of the government that that they Operate in the country they Operate in. So IT is a very unique situation for which, right?

And so given that all of what you will 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 act like that to work somewhere like the united states. And yet every tech company of a given size has this exact ambition. Alex, you rote story a couple years ago, looking particularly at snap, what you thought right was kind of headed down this road and had a real shot at pulling off some, if definitely not all but some of that like um why did everyone get so obsess with this if it's not a particularly good business and there are a million really good reasons it's never gonna anyway? Well.

facebook, meta has basically cornered the ads market for these social access incredibly hard. And snap is living proof of this with stock Price still is today to compete with a scale digital business like that. It's really matter in google and that no one has been able to take a meaningful ll share out of that.

And so if you a snapper, you're a disco or you're one of these kind of up and coming growing social networks, you're looking at other ways to to build a business. And the super thing is it's uh it's a sexy idea, right? It's it's also about time spent if you are social media that you want as much time to spend in your rap as possible on a supermarket p as something that people use all day, every day.

And so the thinking is, can we bring more activity? So like, for example, snaps tried a whole gaming platform, snapp mines inside the APP, and they shut down because they could not make money from IT. And you know why they could not make money from IT?

Apple, this is a thing that we not 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 this road if you're building a super APP where you're a store within a store who kind of a and the only APP really at scale that is allowed to get away with this is reach out. And there's been some reporting on this over the years that basically, I believe this to be true. Apple knows that IT will not sell iphones in china without witch hat.

And so it's let we chat, do things that I will not let any other APP of that scale do. And that's why snaps kind of many stuff failed. That's why, you know, facebook has never been able to build its own kind of store within facebook.

They tried many times. This is starting the lucent with some of the irregular tions specifically that will allow competing at stores soon. But apple is 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, is just payment fees, like if we can if we can get shopping in our APP, if we can get people send 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 add money, which you can't, that's one way to potentially make a lot of money here.

I don't know. I would be cursed to hear let's talk about this because my understanding is that payments businesses are not wildly profitable businesses. They're actually pretty commoditized.

The attack is fairly standardized at this point. There's many competitors. They're stripe. There's alien in europe. The banks will have their own competing rails at this point. The big ones, i'm not actually sure payments is in enough itself a big business like this. I would actually we could just get into actually right now kind of what you wants to do with X.

I was just going to say this is a perfect segway into, this is a bad idea and no one we'll ever do IT. There's no reason to do IT and so on. Musk is trying.

actually, guys, I, I, I want to position 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 won to talk about that went live on july twenty fifth of this year called fed now. And that 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 lying to me. Like I thought this was something elaborate bit you were doing. I just google this. This is real. Sorry.

I keep going. Yeah, it's from the federal reserve. They've been working on up for several years now and it's potentially very, very powerful.

It's a brand news set of payment rails that we just we haven't seen how it's going to be used, 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 maybe also worth keeping in mind.

Yes, I would look react to this. So so elon held his first meeting when he took over twitter in november. I got an audio, a recording of the entire conversation, 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 the payments ideas that he wants simple at twitter. H before I 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 transaction 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 transaction on twitter? I I don't think so, but he seems to think IT is.

If IT doesn't sound similar.

does IT like is that even anything what he's .

saying like are going to come and you write about this on the site all the time is like he's saying they're onna compete like so much goes back to interest rates and he's saying we're onna focus on Better interest. It's on the positive and negative. And so that were the compelling place to store your money. Can he actually do that? I don't think so.

Well know. There have been a number of people who have been trying, most notably ld men, 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 is no debate. You can't withdraw at 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 counts, 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 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 to be an expert. You know, I certainly don't haven't e on degree or anything like that, but I do I am interested and I talk about interest rates with friends and family and they don't understand them, 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 I do remember during the era of low interest rates, I had people who were telling me to get certificate of deposit which didn't make any sense given know that the interest was almost nothing um and I would have been earning less on a CD. I was losing an inflation. So there there just seems to be like A 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, that sounds pretty complex. So if he's saying, you know, if your baLance is positive, you get a Better interest and if your baLance is negative, you get a worst interest's, that's a lot more complexity than just having one fixed interest that you can sort of rely on and do math around.

So that 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 talking about some of these kinds of payment apps like like then mo or paypal, which mostly make money on the float, what you're thinking about is a consumer audience. What you thinking is people need to transact without thinking too hard.

They need to you know, they they go out to dinner, one person pays the bill and everybody else sends them some of the money for the bill. That's what they are thinking about. And so you know, that sounds 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're not the same people I see in everyday life. You know, with all I love to my internet friends like David and alex, because we don't live the same cities, you know, the people who I am going to be sending payments to because we split dinner um are not the same .

people as the people who are talking to on twitter all day.

I N IT turns out that friends who like have jobs that mean that they're not .

on the internet all day means that is not that doesn't tract to me, but I just 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 like two point of about the apple goldman x thing, like goldman access by all accounts, trying 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 to telling me to pay my apple card. Turns out that time you can go and sex any money, which is alabama for goldman sex. 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 devils advocate just for one second. For most of you know how many apps people download .

per month on average, take a oud guess is the case that the whole so you know.

if you're in the U S, though, the apps on your phone are to 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 social media platforms.

Uh, we know hundreds of millions of monthly users, at least at least some portion of those are real users. Were 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 sticker product for the people who are using that.

You can see you kind of him putting the pieces together with the creator payments that they have started doing, right? So if you're verified, you're starting to get like, I think it's actually now by 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, like they're building at all on the flight and one of us like in house yet, so he's using stripe.

But you know say you're creator, you're getting these payments, which are basically some undescribed rev share of the ads that run against tweet after certain million plus impression that baLance. What if that just starts earning interest for you in your x account and that's that feeds into the the money that you can sump through the system. And he's talked in, in internal hands about now we have to be backwards compatible with financial system.

So they're going to have credit cards and debit cards for x as as well as that says as well as that sounds, that's going to happen. He's gonna offer lending, so it's gonna come this full kind of bank thing and he's been warned to do IT forever. And it's just it's remarkable that it's like so similar to the early vision, like the late ninety vision that started this conversation 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 T, P, T, if that that will work. But that's 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 you make you know what's up or or uber, which is kind of trying to do this or any number other companies is like occur. We have this one core competency.

People are spending their time inside of our APP doing a thing. What if we do this? Like slavery, a jacon thing. And that starts to work. If you do this other slightly adjust and thing, and over and over and over, you can talk yourself into every company has to be some kind of like financial jog or not 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 ChatApp 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 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 fifteen years, and it's so funny and so bizarre every single time. And now we're just watching you on musk do the same thing but at like record speed.

you know, David, I also wanted just point out something we have. We've been dancing around industries from minute. I understand I sound like a broken record, but post two thousand eight, there was a very long period of very low interest rates. And that was part of the reason why we wounded up with people trying to do blitz scaling IT was part of the reason why we found people, you know, moving into related businesses that didn't totally always make we .

work over a pre school. Will will forever be my favorite .

example that that's right. And so you know, if you think about IT in a way that was easier to experiment with this kind of thing because there weren't a lot of places to park money that would turn your interest. And so that meant that there is a lot more money available for investing.

And if you think about what's been going on over the last two each 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 bombs are pretty high right now, relatively high. There is also just A A variety of financial instruments that have suddenly become much more attractive than they've done for about a decade.

And that problem for VC generally because all of that VC scaling, like blood scaling stuff, know tip fied princess by uber that relied on there being a lot of 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 you on ask, and it's an open question, is that a lot of his success happened in the slow interest rate era.

A lot of know what we think of is being tested. Success, for instance, happens when I was easy to get a hold of money and even then, a IT has IT almost went out of business a couple times. You think about space ex um you know it's still private.

It's very much venture backed um 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 know smoking mirrors or anything like that. But again, conditions have changed.

You think about some of the other projects that musk been working on, the sort of a more far fetch stuff, like the boring company in neural link, and you wonder how far they're gonna go in this new environment. And you think about twitter, which twitter has never been an especially successful business. Ue, uh, even though it's been a particularly.

Influential one. And you think about all of the debt that must loaded IT up with in order to buy IT, and you think about the new environment we're in, which we haven't seen quite some time. And you just wonder if elon muck is prepared for this era of Normal interest strates, 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 it's 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 years? Because I think like I agree with you almost one hundred percent. 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 I 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 these sort of core competency of our APP. But alex, and curious what you seem like, have folks pulled back on this ambition because of sort of like larger economic changes here we're talking about from .

a product perspective? No, I actually wrote a piece in the origin twenty twenty one protecting that there we're onna be more of these supermarket PS attempts around the world 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 uh, big independent upset 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. A 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 uh activity inside their world garden, so to speak. So you have like a tiktok doing shopping, right, where you can like buy A A, A thing you seen in the video without ever leaving tiktok. That one of happens five years ago because you didn't need to because you could still track who made the purchase wear if they went somewhere else.

That just was on the effort. So I do think there's a natural kind of business and set of at play here for all of these kind of time spent based companies to become more like super haps. And the tiktok shopping thing is actually a great kind of very, very fresh example. They're testing like a store front that looks like amazon right next to the video feed in tiktok. So till this this point about you know the broader kind of macroeconomic climate here in the fact that there is no capital is more expensive, you can't just like your test is not going to become a trillion dollar company on p mania anymore .

like that set.

sure. But like I mean, from everything mask has been saying since he bought twitter, he seems to be painfully aware that things are changing like every he talks to people eternally. It's like we have got to prepare for recession.

You know, I reported on meetings like when he first bought the company where he was talking about the fact that he thinks of very bad recession is coming. Looks like that may not be the case now, but he's definitely thinking, you know things are shifting. I don't think he's totally a oblivious to I mean, he he's the richest person in the world.

Like I think he probably has pretty good data. He's very focused on cutting costs. I think a space acx just had the first uh, profitable quarter I just saw in a media story in in like q one. 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 trying to make them profitable and get away from this kind of hyper growth era. So I don't know I don't know if the things are uh, I don't know if that 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 reach hat for second. One of the things WeChat was able to do that worked so well was essentially just pour money and energy and effort into getting people into the application is what you are talking about with.

There is a payout where there essentially just heaving money at people to use paypal, uh or X A comor whatever behavior was which I was able to do that kind of thing for a long time and just work so hard and grow so much that is kind of had won the market before and nobody really noticed. And then you get into that sort of escape velocity. And IT becomes very hard to lose because people decided smarter to just build inside of reach, T, T, and build their own thing because they don't have the money to compute that.

And like honor on. And that he went. And that in this era becomes more charger to do right, because there's no free money is to just throw IT growing.

David becomes easier to win when you have the full backing of the ccp. I mean, like that's shots to get to our early point like and and this can may be kind of bring a full circle little bit like to what love is talking about earlier. Like do we really want elon moscow? R T.

Has a ton of power, especially through like star link, how that relates to how physical wars are playing out in in ukraine. Do we really want something with all these different businesses and power to have something like a wee chat? And uh, he has a business in china that is very important strategical 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, uh, a super APP where we transact and do all these things to be managed by one person? Do IT, let's be clear, controls his companies completely, right? So it's like this isn't like A A Normal governance situation. So there's there's a lot to be concerned about there.

please. I have a strange feeling. I know your answer to alex s question.

There are a lot of reasons I don't want elon mosques suba managing my money and all of the things that you guys have 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 bad is chaos. It's true. And like, honestly, he's going to find out that I spend far too much money, my cat. But you know, like as you think about these things, the other thing to think about is elan musk, history of implementation and sloppy. And you know that some of that is like the panel problems that we saw with with tesla, you, in various others, ort of implementation problems, even if you just narrow your focus to twitter slash x, there is just been a lot of sloppiness there.

From the x sign to not getting the ex 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 great, limited raptly for a and like this kind of like slap dash mentality is an old silicon valley mentality. It's you usually thought of it's like move fast and break things and that doesn't make sense in certain context. Um you know like the twitter fail fail whale was a thing because because sometimes the service one out because there are too many people that but you know, if you think about the things that you don't want from banks, i'm just gonna list some of them.

Abrupt, frequent service changes, regular service outages, new fees added at random, Whites premises, difficulty with verification, spam and fraud. You know, like these are all things I don't want and 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 you on musk to actually handle my money in a way that makes sense.

right? It's like all these crypto sand adds 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.

great. With one click, they just have your bank account. Now that's whatever that is looking for. yeah. So okay, last thing and then we should go is I I think if you imagine somebody in on musk or mark oc work or somebody from a product perspective, man, to build this thing, they they actually w all of the value, all of the user data, all the everything to, like be the the witch at of america.

Could anyone pull that off from a regulatory standpoint, like woods, lin economy, ftc, just throw their bodies in front of one company having this much? This is an argue 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 is no chance. I mean, facebook, are we old enough now to where we don't remember? In just twenty nineteen, facebook tried to create a global currency.

like, 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 gonna managed by a trusted sea, like they thought through a lot of the potential blow back. Guess what? They still got shutt down. I would say there's next to zero chance that anything like this happens in the U S.

Um for all the reasons you just said, David, I mean, if facebook can't buy giffin, do you really think like the congress, uh, especially all the members of congress have strong feelings about muss already, you're going to let him build a financial superpower, the potential ally like has more power than the U. S. government. No, like no.

actually I not I want to pile on to this because IT isn't just an anti attests issue, although a IT is a very sexy anti trust 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 an anti trust issue, you're looking at dealing with other major um government agencies. And you know there are people out there circle is one of that are interested in being the pervy or of the digital dollar that are interested in doing that kind of work that you've 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 the 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 um 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 transacted in around the world is a really, really important part of the U. S. A.

soft. And wherever the dollar goes, A 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 elan musk ari has a lot of way in the federal government because of starlink is very important because he sends A A lot of satellites up for various us. 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 feel like the answer.

probably not to real, like no one man should have all that power kind of situation is just where I land yeah I don't know. I can 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 you on musk is gonna even get close, but it's it's gonna fascinating to see if someone can get well enough down the road that we actually have to have this fight for real.

But i'm not comments forever when I see IT. Alex, who would do you bet on? Do you still think could snap, snap, do IT?

No, I don't think this is happening. Not in the U. S. I do you think that will happen in other parts of the world where countries are kind of more willing to embrace something like this. But I think the us. Is so um against big tech right now and there's so many establish players doing things really well 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 create 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 I free market whatever. Like I love having apps competing for my my in my attention and to have options is a good thing. Like we shouldn't be like necessarily wanting one company doing everything totally right.

We got to take a break, but thank you both for for doing this. I appreciated. And I will, I will expose you some money for being here. Thank you.

那 一望 而且。

Support for the show comes from cavo you're building a business cb o helps you grow IT clavius A I powered marketing platform puts all your customer data plus S S and analytics in one place with cvo tend fish fee on fishwife delivers real time, personalized experiences that keeps their customers hooked. They've grown seventy times revenue in just four years with clivia. Now that's scale. Visit K L A B I Y O dot com to learn how brand like fish wife build smarter digital relationships with clavier. The tag presents the ins and outs of caring for your home out in decision, over thinking, second guessing every .

choice you make in plans and guides that .

make IT easy to get home projects done out beige on based on bage, in knowing what to do, when to do IT and who hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download contact today.

right? We're back. Let's get to the virtue line. As a reminder, the hot line number is eight, six, six, verge, one, one.

You can call and ask us absolutely anything about tech, anything on your mind we want to hear at all. You can also email us verge cast to the version that com if you don't want to call this week. Voice mail comes from Daniel. Hey, bird, does this is Daniel.

I always said 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 separates for each of my like corton quote modes? Like sometimes i'm in productivity mode where I just want to see, you know how to be optimal product productive, I guess, and do spread sheet and that kind of stuff. And then sometimes i'm into my hobby interest mode, and I just wanted see stuff ff out, 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 didn't any social media recognized that? That's a thing that pretty lunch er every person has anyway, tell me your thoughts by, okay, I have answers to this question for once.

I have I have a small thought in a big duck. The small thought is that for redit, this is actually a thing you can do, reddit, sort of barriers, this, but that does actually exist, used to be called multi redit, and now it's called custom feeds. And basically, the idea is you can pull a bunch of different sub credits into one thing that you see, all as a single edit timely.

So like I have one, ironically for productivity, that's all of my like productivity nerd secret. Its and then I have won for all the sports teams I care about. So like I have the arsenal sub ddt and you are giant submit and the active substance all in one place.

This is a great thing that red IT does. I don't know why they don't share IT more. It's kind of awwad to find.

I'll put a link in the showut 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 na 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, like open sourcing the algorithm so that you can get different versions of the same experience depending on what you wants. You could show up and say, i'm in the mood to just go on tiktok and watch blue bers from T, V.

Shows that I like. And that actually an instruction you might be able to give an up like that over time or to 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 are also means making users do more, which most of these apps don't like to do. But I do think that 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 redit, 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 in service, anything does this Better than almost anybody make IT easy to switch from account to account. But I am a big fan of having multiple counts. I have a 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 redit that I go to when i'm just looking for sports stuff and want to like gale about sports that is separate from where I comment is like a person who people know on the internet is really useful. And if you want to ship post, you should have an account just for shit posting is my personal and professional opinion. So the point animals, I think we're headed somewhat towards the world, deep described, but also custom feeds on redit will instantly make your life Better.

I hope that helps. All right, that is IT for the verge cast today. Thank you to everyone who is 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 the verge, t com. We also made a cool video. We have some really fund stuff on the website. Go check IT all out.

Good that if you've thought questions, feelings or sick custom computers that you made and want to tell me about, you can always email us at verge cast to the verge shock com, or called the hot line eight six verge one one we ve hearing from you. And speaking of the hot line, one thing we're going to do at some point in the very near the future is an entire verge cast episode, all about the verge. We're calling IT the meta verge cast episode.

So a few of questions about how we make the verge, how we make the verge cast. What 你 lize favorite food is， why alex con has so much weird stuff on her walls. Send all other questions and with other questions we're going to do.

The whole of so of this show is produced by Angel marino and liam James. Broke matters is our editorial director of audio verge cast is a verge production in part of the vox media podcast network. Me alex now will be back on friday to talk about the connect, the drama about open a web color, all of your computer rooms, which has been so fun to see and lots more, we'll see that rocks and roll.

Support for this episode de comes from A W S. A W S, generate A, A, I gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. Support for the show comes from a new york magazines. The strategist, the strategist helps people who want to shop the internet smartly. Its editors are reporters, testers and obsessives.

You can think of them as your shop holic friends who Carry equally about function, value, innovation and good taste, and their new feature that gives out, takes the best of their reporting and recommendations, and uses that to surface, give for the most hard to shop for a people on your list. All you have to do is typing a description of that person like you are a parent who's where they don't win anything, or your brother in love, who's in a tech junky or with a sweet of and the gift scot was can through all of the products they think about and come up with some relevant suggestions. The more specific you make your request, the Better even down to the age range. Every single product you'll see is something they're written about. So you can be confident that your gift has a strategist silly of approval, visit the strategist outcome sash gives out to try IT out yourself.