VISIONS Live: Blurred Lines: The False Dichotomy of Physical vs. Digital Spaces

Phillip: [00:00:08] Welcome [00:00:30] to VISIONS, a podcast by Future Commerce, exploring the intersection of culture and commerce. Hi. I'm Phillip. Today, [00:01:00] we go live for our 2nd annual VISIONS Summit New York City event that took place on June 11th at the Celeste Bartos Theatre at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Today, we sit down with futurists panel, with Ruby Thelot, with Reggie James, and with Paul Canetti, three people with incredible insight, with incredible intellect, and a vision for what will power a future that is both more physical and more digital, and how we [00:01:30] are creating non-digital physical spaces that will create more exclusive and more offline experiences for people like you and me, the futurists who are building commerce and culture. Let's go live in our session to the Celeste Bartos Theatre for VISIONS Summit, New York.

Announcer: [00:01:53] VISIONS is proud to welcome the Founder of Eternal, Reggie James, and artist, activist, and cyber ethnographer, [00:02:00] Ruby Thelot. And please welcome entrepreneur, educator, and futurist, Paul Canetti.

Paul Canetti: [00:02:08] Hi, everybody. We're in physical reality. This is cool. You know? We're not just little avatars floating around. We're real humans, most of us. Welcome. How are you both?

Ruby Thelot: [00:02:24] Doing great. Thank you so much.

Paul Canetti: [00:02:26] Maybe we'll just kick it off with, like, you know, 30 seconds, s [00:02:30]ummarize your whole life.

Ruby Thelot: [00:02:33] I teach at NYU. I teach design and video theory. I run a design studio called 131 and we focus on the impact of being online. I write. My new book is out right now if you're interested.

Reggie James: [00:02:46] Yeah. Nice. I was born in New York but raised in the Poconos. My parents were short term missionaries, so I also spent some time abroad, mostly in Zambia. Then I have an AI gaming company [00:03:00] called Eternal. I also write and talk at things like these sometimes. And I leave for my wedding tomorrow.

Paul Canetti: [00:03:08] Woah. Alright. Okay. We were, like, excited about the book, then we heard about the wedding. Yeah.

Reggie James: [00:03:16] Ruby is... I'm trying to live up to Ruby. So I will try to, like, you know, just 1 up every time. It's like a tennis match. It's challengers. This is challengers.

Paul Canetti: [00:03:28] So a wedding [00:03:30] is a good example of something I think we all consider part of real life. We spend a lot of time online. You've heard this term already today, like, so online, too online. Do either of you think there is such a thing as too online? This is right on the nose. But is it a false dichotomy, or is it a real dichotomy between digital and physical? Is it all just part of our life at this point? Is the distinction even worth it in [00:04:00] 2024?

Reggie James: [00:04:01] Yeah. No. For sure. I there. I'm building an AI gaming company, and there's 100% being too online. The Succession meme when Kendall's saying, "Listen. You've lost the plot. You're too online." Our friend, Toby Shorin, said this thing during the pandemic that was something to the effect of things are changing in the pace of our mind far faster than they are in the real world. [00:04:30] And I think that we tend to hit these just accelerated Internet superhighway vibes mentally, and then you step outside and you realize, actually, the pace of this environment is significantly slower, and the culture hasn't changed that much. People's opinions haven't changed that much. And then I think that's also how you get some political extremism, Joshua Citarella type research vibes. And [00:05:00] I think that's just a product of living in that environment because the environment moves at a significantly different pace.

Ruby Thelot: [00:05:09] I'm also a big fan of Nathan Jurgenson's work. He has this essay called The IRL Fetish. There is certainly this fascination that we now have for the physical realm. As soon as we're allowed to go online, suddenly we're like, oh no, wait, it's got to be analog or it's got to be we want to go back to the physical, right, this little sort of dialectic happening. W [00:05:30]hat I like to focus on in this discussion of too online is why someone would want to spend time in a virtual or digital realm. Are you guys familiar with Tube Girl? From TikTok last year. That's one thing I showed in my class. And what's evidenced by Tube Girl is that for this individual, you know, it's kind of shameful to be dancing around like that in the subway. However, there was much to be gained online by the sharing of that act. So it was embarrassment [00:06:00] was this high in the physical realm, but there was so much to be gained in the digital or on TikTok or whatever that people are making a simple calculus. I can go viral, get a brand deal like she did with Mac in the 10th fashion week the next year, or I can do my regular thing in the physical world where I get nothing. As Eugene Wei likes to say, we are optimizing for status and it seems that the path to status is much faster online. It's also much more fickle.

Reggie James: [00:06:27] But I think that that also speaks to, like, the Kai Sanat [00:06:30] and, like, Union Square, right, which I don't think it was you. But someone just kind of mentioned that we start to treat IRL spaces as a sort of selfish playground in order to optimize status elsewhere. And that and maybe I'm, you know, still coming off of my high of being in Tokyo November, but it's sort of like erodes a sense of sociality that's actually really critical for enjoying being in public spaces, enjoying being in a dense city. [00:07:00] If every time I have to walk through SoHo, I get accosted by someone being like, "Hey. What do you do for work?" It's just like, "Dog. What I'm trying to do right now is take a walk. That's what I'm trying to do right now." You know? It's impossible. And I think utilizing sort of public space as a playground for digital status, it sort of creates this weird just using up of this previously shared social [00:07:30] resource.

Ruby Thelot: [00:07:30] Yeah. The public comments are definitely eroded. If you go to Washington Square Park, people are doing pranks and stuff. Yeah. It's rough.

Reggie James: [00:07:40] But I think this is part of maybe a larger trend, which is generally people optimizing the present for some gain in the future. So you're talking about status or whatever, but "Let's make some memories, guys." And it's like, well, that's not actually the point of doing it now. Is just so we have the [00:08:00] memory or just so we have some future experience that surpasses this experience because, of course, by the time we get there, then we'll be optimizing for some other future experience. And so there is something I think about IRL if left truly physically that is in the present. Like, you can't take it with you. There's almost everything digital you can revisit. And, of course, if you take a picture [00:08:30] of the real world, then you can also take that into the future. But I'm not taking a picture of you right now. Let's pretend there was no video. We're just sitting here. It's only right now that we sort of have, whereas the preservation of everything. So, you know, Microsoft introduced this new feature recall, which I'm sure you both saw, and now there's been some controversy where they take a screenshot every millisecond or something of everything you do on your computer so that you can revisit everything you've ever done. But you can [00:09:00] easily imagine how that is going to come to real life also once we have some way to capture 24/7. Then does real life just kind of truly become digital if we could revisit it?

Ruby Thelot: [00:09:14] It's a market. Right? So as soon as we face the impossibility of being offline, the fetish strikes again. And then you have spaces like, I mean, for into Berlin, Berghain, where no cameras are allowed. I think Zero Bond doesn't allow cameras. And so new private [00:09:30] physical spaces are then formed to meet the need of a market of individuals who no longer want to be taking photos or they don't want to be in Snapchats or whatever. So as soon as there's a need, I think the market responds and provides the opportunity for individuals who are willing to pay usually big bucks to access these highly private, non digital physical spaces.

Paul Canetti: [00:09:53] It's almost like organic food or something. People start to realize what's unhealthy and healthy [00:10:00] and then seek out the healthy, but then that becomes the mainstream, if that makes any sense. I don't know. Okay. Ruby, you wrote this really amazing piece where you sort of coined this term false positive reality, where it's like we become so skeptical about what we see online that we sort of have this default fake mentality. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean there and why you think that's necessarily a [00:10:30] bad thing if you do indeed? Because maybe skepticism is actually good since we want to be vigilant with our media consumption. How do you sort of put a valence on that concept?

Ruby Thelot: [00:10:46] Well, I think it's, not to use the beyond good and evil, it's just a matter of fact. So every technology brings with it a certain reversal, a certain advancement, to use like the McLuhan Tetrad. And in this case, once [00:11:00] we are able to generate images that have the semblance of reality, are mistaken for reality, then suddenly the value socially of images erodes. We can think of it even like in a judiciary context where we start to question the veracity of the images that are presented. And so the default fake is a new approach to people who are raised and who grew up in a culture where we no longer associate images with reality. [00:11:30] And so what then becomes this new source? Well, it is the physical proximity. I like to say that no post unless of a mutual born will be trusted. You need this sort of connection with the individual to know whether or not they are speaking the truth. And so we go back to the eyewitness, which is kind of antiquated. Right? Back in, have you ever seen that movie, Martin Guerre, with Gerard Le Partier? We go back to the eyewitness sort of these, well, he said, she said, but this [00:12:00] association with the individual will be worth more in terms of truth making or sense-making than just an image or just a video or just an audio file. Because all of those could potentially be fabricated.

Paul Canetti: [00:12:15] It's interesting to think about taking someone's word for it as actually being more truthy than some sort of recording. But until eventually, you can hack someone's mind, I guess, and then, you know, we're [00:12:30] all screwed. The last time the three of us were chatting, which was not on a stage, we were talking about how science fiction movies sort of inspire generations of entrepreneurs. And I think it was the very next day that OpenAI had this fiasco where they introduced this new voice capability for ChatGPT that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. Then it turned out they tried to get Scarlett Johansson, and she was suing them. And that sort of all passed within 48 hours. But  [00:13:00]it was so on the nose because it was like there was a movie called Her. This actress played the character of the AI in this movie. They literally tried to get her, pun totally intended, and basically, that inspired this innovation. What do you see as the things that are portrayed in media today that are likely to hit in, you know, 2034, 2044? It seems like you could take a sort [00:13:30] of pass through the last 10, 20, 30 years of film and TV and say, like, "Oh, yeah. That's come true. That's come true. That's come true." I'm not sure that I know what those things are today. What are the seeds that are being planted today?

Reggie James: [00:13:44] I mean, I think you have sort of a self selection bias. Because it really depends on what you want to bring out into the world. So it's that joke where it's like, I wrote about the [00:14:00] 2000 Death Star because no one should build the 2000 Death Star. And then you cut to the founders, like, "At long last, we've made the 2000 Death Star from our favorite book." You know? And it's like, "Okay. Well, I would expect that to get ignored." But it will 100% be brought to the forefront by someone. So then I think you have to just, if you want to make a really good prediction about these things, you kind of just have to work in reverse. Right? It's like, who are the people that are in power that are building hardware and [00:14:30] seem to have unilateral control of end to end products? So you have someone like Palmer Luckey and Endural. What does Endural do? Creates the new military industrial complex vibe, but trying to fix that in a way that gets really political. Then you have Mark Zuckerberg. You have Reality Labs. You have AR/VR. You have the Bose. Not the Bose. The Ray Ban joints. Okay. So what does he care about? [00:15:00] So then you look at those folks, and there's a list of them, and you say, what are their references? It's really clear that Mark keeps Neil Stevenson quite high in his references. You can look at the VR headset and you look at Snow Crash and just go through that. And so I think if you want to have a pretty high chance of shooting the target, you just work your way backwards from that rather than just saying, like, "Oh, well, I really love Blade Runner [00:15:30] 2049, and so we'll have Joy from Wallace or we'll have replicants walking around. Now I do think we will have those things, personally. I think we'll have all of those things. It might look a little different. And then I think we have to think about what's the aspirational version of these things. To some, Her is quite dystopic. I think that Her is actually incredibly aspirational. I think you can look at Her as actually AI as a sort of transitory capture [00:16:00] of grief that a lot of people in that movie go through and actually helps them get to the other side of relationship grief. A lot of people didn't view it that way, but I think that's one interpretation. And so, yeah, I think just working backwards from there, and that's a thought exercise anyone can do rather than giving a top down answer. I think to the point of the private spaces thing, you know, I've been sort of ripping through the Dune series. And in the 5th book there's this concept [00:16:30] of a no ship. And a no ship allows its passengers or occupants to escape from the gift of prescience that some people have. Right? So they essentially can't be detected in the universe. And I view sort of these private spaces like a Berghain or like a Zero Bond as a sort of social no ship. Right? It's no photos are allowed here. Anything done in here kind of stays in here, which is almost like anti-biblical. Right? It's like anything done in darkness comes out to light. It's like, well, well, at Zero bond. Maybe. [00:17:00] Maybe you could keep that shit hidden. So I think you can sort of look at these things as, like, okay. Are we going to have no ships in the year 2040? No. Will we have camouflage drones and social dark spaces? 1000%. We already have them.

Paul Canetti: [00:17:17] Well, sort of jumping off that, where do you draw the line then? So, Ruby, maybe since you brought up this concept of these, you know, sort of zones of true physicality or whatever, [00:17:30] or however to capture that sentiment, can you have electricity? Can you have shoes? There are human artifacts that we've introduced that at some point were, you know, considered on the cutting edge and intrusive. And, no, it's supposed to be nighttime. This is artificial. You know? We need spaces where there's no light at night or something like that. Do you think the Internet is like that and that eventually it will just become so [00:18:00] normalized and we could say the same about AI? Like, if you skip ahead a few decades, it's not novel anymore and something else becomes the sort of thing you'd want to block out at a special party. But old technologies kind of get smuggled in. Where do you draw that line? Do you think the Internet is fundamentally different than these other technological innovations from other ages that now we would never have a party where we say, [00:18:30] "There are no wheels allowed at this party?"

Ruby Thelot: [00:18:33] Sounds like you haven't been to a no wheel party. {laughter}

Paul Canetti: [00:18:37] {laughter} Alright.

Ruby Thelot: [00:18:42] I got one next week.

Paul Canetti: [00:18:42] I need to go to the parties you're going to.

Ruby Thelot: [00:21:44] Humans [00:21:30] are weird. But I say this only to say that you probably have some friends, most maybe in SF, who are probably doing these week long, no Internet, no nothing, sort of retreats,  [00:22:00]where you do all sorts of there are other things you can do. No children in the crowd, hopefully. And once there's a market, people can organize these things. My studio, we did something called, IFF, sort of Institute For Farniente, where we went upstate and essentially did nothing, farniente, for a whole long weekend. In the same attempt to capture what Dreyfus and Heidl call marginal practices, right? Escaping the urge to [00:22:30] also always rationalize everything we did. And so if there's a need, it will be met. And next thing you know, you're somewhere in the Poconos or upstate, and there are no wheels whatsoever at the house. And you're like, "What's happening?" Well, you signed up for it, and you probably paid a pretty penny for it as well. It's hard to fully capture and understand and predict what's going to happen. For sure, there are certain things that get naturalized, and that's really the final point of technology when we no longer [00:23:00] start to differentiate it and just becomes part of our regular lives. But some things pick up, some things get adopted, and some things don't. And yeah, it's hard to fully predict, I would say.

Paul Canetti: [00:23:12] Yeah. This sort of brings me to another question which is around this concept of dematerialization. So this is, you know, things that used to be in the physical world becoming digital and remaining digital. So some simple [00:23:30] examples for everyone would be a map. In the olden days, we had a paper map, and now you have a digital map. We used to have a physical calculator. Now you have a digital calculator and so on. And so those things, once they exit the physical world for all intents and purposes, you could still buy a physical calculator just, like, as a prop, then the only way to do that thing is to be in the digital realm. And [00:24:00] in theory, a lot more things could make their way there. Let's say we're all wearing some sort of augmented reality glasses. This screen could be part of that. This sign could be part of that. Even the lighting could be digitized. I think the clothes we're wearing could be digitized. So if and when that happens, how do you get outside of it when so much material becomes dematerialized into the digital?

Ruby Thelot: [00:24:29] I think the [00:24:30] premise is slightly wrong here because there will always, well not always, but there tends to be if you have like your curve of adoption, there's like a parallel curve of adoption of people who stay with something. I have this essay called Learning to Love Your Losers. And there's this group of people... No. It's funny because yeah. There are people who once they adopt a product, the product tends to fail. You know? And they've identified which zip codes adopt products and the correlation [00:25:00] between that and the product is failing, like a Betamax tape or HD DVD. Now what is very strange about these consumers is that in spite of the product no longer being on the market, they still, to this day, will buy it. I have a calculator on my desk. I kid you not. And similarly, even if clothes get digitized, you will have a group of rebels who will scour the ruins of Nordstrom in search of a brand new pair of jeans because that's their shtick. In spite of the  [00:25:30]generalization of digital spaces, I think you're always going to have these little rebels who maintain and adopt whatever analog culture. They may be driven by nostalgia. They may be driven by a specific sense of materiality. For instance, people taking photos with film cameras. They just like the grain. They like the image of it. In spite of the iPhone being 40 plus big megapixels. Right? And as culture shifts, I think what we can expect if we take a look at say  [00:26:00]the resurgence of the hipster in 2010s and now the kids are really into DigiCams, like sort of old Sonys, is that they burst back into culture when people are trying to reconnect with their now bygone teenage years. Right? So whatever people are doing now, sort of Gen Alpha or Zoomers when they're 10, 12, I think we can expect to sort of come back once they have the money to buy it again once they're late twenties or whatnot.

Paul Canetti: [00:26:28] Revisit that sort [00:26:30] of past or their parents passed or something like that. Yeah. I mean, talking about different types of hardware, whether it's revisiting old paradigms or new, Reggie, you write about this a lot. It seems like you're sort of scouring the interwebs waiting for someone to create some sort of new hardware paradigm, and we seize these sort of little false starts bubble up. I'm not going to ask you for prediction per se, but why do you think [00:27:00] that we are at the end of the S curve with smartphones? You know, we all use them. We all love them. I see everyone just walking around all day like this. We seem pretty happy. So why would you presume that a brand could come in and say, "That thing you love, we want you to get rid of it. We want you to do something else?"

Reggie James: [00:27:22] Yeah. I mean, I think this actually dovetails nicely with the previous thing. I wrote this thing with my friend, Elena,  [00:27:30]basically asking, like, "How long is the long tail?" And what we just mapped is seeing that once a tail starts in a media category, that tail will remain. It might get really thin, but it will never go anywhere. Similarly, we have any song you want in your pocket through Spotify. I still, every time I visit a new city, go record digging. So on [00:28:00] this question of hitting the end of the S curve of the iPhone or smartphones in general and new hardware, we have to go to sort of, you know, McLuhanisms, but just to say on the tech S curve, the iPhone still has a long like, the S curve doesn't just go horizontal. It's just, like, it's not as pitched as when it was vertical. And the reality is Apple specifically has been investing for a long time [00:28:30] in Apple's silicone and switching all of their chips over to their own chips. And we saw the byproduct of that yesterday at WWDC. They wouldn't be able to do all this on prem AI tooling without that shift to Apple Silicon. So they still probably have a ways to go. I think the thing that we have to ask ourselves is do we want to continue having a sort of physical orientation to our information that is like this? This [00:29:00] is a very specific way to see the world. It's a very specific way to receive information. It's a very specific way to sort of interact with people. And it's up to our imagination to imagine new ways of seeing. And so although, you know, I think the rabbit is a scam, I do think humane vision, is a really [00:29:30] powerful one. And I know Kyle was talking about sort of images and we were just talking about images. But I do think that the humane image is a powerful one. In a world like this, why not be like this? I think they botched their marketing, but the upcoming new hardware phase is not one of synthesis. It's one of explosion. I'm sure many of [00:30:00] you remember pre iPhone launching. We had a multitude of devices, and you probably carried them all in your bag or your backpack. And no one thing did everything perfectly. So the phone being so overpowered is hard to break out of that space of what can these things be. But I think when you look from an industrial design perspective and an interaction perspective, people will sort of take a lifestyle [00:30:30] stance of maybe I really just can't do this anymore, or maybe I have a new itch. And I think new hardware needs to answer those lifestyle questions rather than trying to answer how am I going to compete with the iPhone? The iPhone is not like the iPhone in isolation. The iPhone is 50 years of Apple. Fifty years is a lot of learnings. Steve's ghost is still kind of in it. I think it may have been finally got [00:31:00] rid of it yesterday because yesterday was rough.

Paul Canetti: [00:31:02] The colorized icons really did it for you?

Reggie James: [00:31:05] Yeah. But some other things as well. But yeah, it's not about asking, "Oh, this thing's going to replace my phone." It's really thinking about what type of lifestyle can this device sort of afford because it's it's upstream of culture.

Paul Canetti: [00:31:23] I've been working on this concept just to bounce it off both of you where it might be that when it's all said and done, there was [00:31:30] this 50 ish year period of humanity where we spent a lot of effort creating these kinds of interfaces and these new ways to accomplish things. And then in the end, we'll come back to something that looks a lot like it did pre computer. So before computers, when we just had other people to rely on, the way we interface with those people was through language. "Hey. Can you do this for me?" "Sure." "Do you want this or this?" "I want that." And now it feels like that paradigm is kind of [00:32:00] coming back. We used to read magazines, and the form factor was something that, at least for 100 of years, we were pretty happy with. And then we spent all this effort sort of trying to imagine interactive media. But in the end, again, if you're wearing Apple Vision Pro or some equivalent, it might be that you just have a PDF that looks kind of like this in your field of vision. We might be coming full circle. And so, again, this is something I'm trying to work through, but do [00:32:30] either of you have a sense of whether there is some sort of equilibrium that as humans were trying to settle back into and that the technology really is this big dematerialization or rematerializing things that used to be people that are now AIs, things that used to be physical are now digital. But in the end, those form factors are actually right. Talking to someone is actually the way that we like to communicate and [00:33:00] seeing things and holding things is something we actually enjoy. And that in the end, we don't need pull down menus and form fields when it's all said and done.

Reggie James: [00:33:11] Uh, I mean, I just don't think anyone would argue that they don't like talking to people. Obviously, there are extreme cases. But if you go to a college campus, those kids are still going into each other's dorms. They're still hanging out. Someone's hoping that one person stays later so that they can make out. None of those [00:33:30] things, like, go away.

Paul Canetti: [00:33:31] "Want to watch a movie?"

Reggie James: [00:33:32] Yeah. "Want to watch a movie?" None of those things go away. And I also think when we talk about dematerialization, I still think it's important to remember there are still giant server farms that are holding the dematerialized. It's not fully just gone. Rem Koolhaas has a great project called Countryside where he talks about how we've sort of carved up the countryside with Amazon warehouses. And he just [00:34:00] shows the scale of these Amazon warehouses in previously pure nature settings. So it's like, yes, that space is no longer used for a store that you walk into, but that store just kind of just moved off premise for the convenience to come to your home. I think when it comes to specifically interfaces and these sort of interactions, I think we genuinely love computers, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And they do a lot. The [00:34:30] same way if you put a VR headset on a Victorian child, their brain would explode. We will just, we will reach something in, like, 20 years in which if you gave that to my parents or if you gave that to even someone in 2001, it would not compute to their brain. And it's just as individuals are in a constant state of becoming, collectively, we're in a constant state of becoming, and we'll just arrive to these things smoothly and [00:35:00] rapidly, and it'll be fine. It won't look like the drop down menu, but drop down menus are tired anyway.

Ruby Thelot: [00:35:09] So I think one thing that's also evident is that we are still in the wake of modernity with like a capital M. The ideal of Steve Jobs, whether it be Geeta Rams at Brown or any of these sort of what we call the geniuses of industrial design have this idea of building tools [00:35:30] that are universal. There is this like figure, there's persona as we say in design, of the man and the woman, and we will build something that they can all use. When you look at a Bauhaus chair, this is meant to be used by all. I think if we want to take a little look at this shift that we may see is that I think we're going to go back to arts and crafts when we talk about the British aesthetic movement where we go back to more artisanal ways of doing not [00:36:00] only furniture, which of course is still prominent, but now software and hardware. Because we now have the capabilities to manufacture at smaller scale and have the capabilities to produce software at smaller scale. We did this forecast two years ago and oone of them was called an App for Emily. Right? This idea that suddenly Emily, whom I love, of course, I can make an app only for her. And if you want to use it, sure, by all means. But this shift may be less towards modernity and [00:36:30] more towards this arts and crafts sensibility, this William Moore sensibility of making something for one individual in the digital.

Paul Canetti: [00:36:37] Right. Where you have these bespoke experiences that are enabled by, for instance, innovations in AI where it becomes essentially 0 cost, 0 time to create anything.

Reggie James: [00:36:50] Yeah. I mean, Diamond Age is a really good example of that. Right? With just, like, the materializer piece. And all you have to do is imagine an on prem AI on a 3D printer, and you can [00:37:00] start printing anything you might need in your home in that moment. That becomes a material science question, but it's like, we're close to having some rudimentary forms that you can have at any period, any moment today printed in an hour. We are there, just not evenly distributed blah blah blah. But yeah.

Paul Canetti: [00:37:21] Yeah. I wonder because we were supposed to also have bespoke personalized experiences in our social feeds. That's the whole point. But what we've been talking about today [00:37:30] is how that ends up with monoculture. And so I wonder if what are supposed to create fully personalized I am unique in the world, and everyone ends up with the same unique templates.

Ruby Thelot: [00:37:44] The difference, the important thing to note is that that's what happens when we try to scale personalization, when we try to do it en masse. The idea here is that we are able to do it on a 1 to 1 basis, me and Emily specifically, [00:38:00] versus the sort of more general approach, which, of course, Facebook with the fetus tried. This filterworld, to use Kyle's idea, happens when we try to do it at scale. I think the future of software and digital experiences will resist scale. I think it'll be more custom and bespoke.

Paul Canetti: [00:38:22] I need to meet this Emily. I think it's time for some questions from the crowd.

Audience Support: [00:38:30] I [00:38:30] think we only have time for one question.

Paul Canetti: [00:38:32] Okay. Question from the crowd.

Audience Member: [00:38:36] Pressure. So the point you just made about kind of home cook software as like Maggie Appleton talks about, do you think the incentive structure is really there to allow that to happen when it's not at scale? Do you think, you know, VCs that are built in this world of wanting to just invest in making it bigger and bigger will actually go away when private equity is [00:39:00] kind of buying everything up? Just kind of curious.

Ruby Thelot: [00:39:03] Can I answer this one, Reggie? Okay. When I am making an app for Emily, I am not in the business of generating venture-scaleanalog returns. When I am in the business of making an app for Emily, I'm in the business of love. Completely different paradigm.

Paul Canetti: [00:39:20] Seems like a good place to end. Thank you both.

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