Mark Zuckerberg may be busy pushing his visions of augmented and virtual reality worlds, but he is far from the first to start imagining them. Niantic CEO John Hanke heads the company that created Pokémon Go, the mobile game that was one of the first massive AR hits. Hanke has been augmenting reality for years now, and he says that his vision to bring people together in the real world is more egalitarian than Facebook's.
This week on Gadget Lab, we welcome WIRED editor at large Steven Levy, who spoke to Hanke about how Niantic is countering Facebook's vision of the metaverse. Then Lauren talks with Bobby Murphy, the cofounder and CTO of Snap, and AR and VR developer Brielle Garcia, who makes lenses for Snap Spectacles, about their vision for our augmented future.
Read Steven’s interview with Niantic CEO John Hanke here. Visit the Augmented World Expo at awe.live, and watch videos of the 2021 expo on YouTube.
Steven recommends the Andover SpinBase, a $299 speaker made for use with record players. Mike recommends the YouTube cooking channel “De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina.” Lauren recommends the “Maybe You Should Go Outside” episode of The Cut podcast.
Steven Levy can be found on Twitter @StevenLevy. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Lauren Goode: Mike?
Michael Calore: Lauren.
LG: We've been talking a lot about Facebook lately, and I'm just wondering if maybe it's time for a break.
MC: You do not have to twist my arm.
LG: Here's the thing though. I can't promise we're not going to talk about the Metaverse maybe, but maybe from a slightly different perspective.
MC: Should I say snap out of the Metaverse or something like that?
LG: Yeah, that's a good one. We're going to get to that.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays.]
LG: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: And I am Michael Calore a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And we're joined this week by WIRED editor at large Steven Levy. Steven, thanks for joining us.
Steven Levy: It's my pleasure.
LG: Your background on Zoom looks really idyllic. It's a fall foliage scene. Where are you?
SL: Well, it's actually where I'm not, it's a fully and seen from my house in Western Massachusetts, but at the moment I'm in Palo Alto.
LG: Got it. OK. So the Metaverse is the Berkshires?
SL: Yes.
LG: OK. So there's been a lot of talk about the Metaverse lately, including on this podcast. But we promise we're going to make it worth your while, Facebook, excuse me, Meta has been pitching this idea of a virtual reality experience where you strap on a headset and you just completely cut off access to the real world. But you're supposed to have this really immersive computing experience. Some technologists though, we're seeing this as a step too far or a little too dystopian and have wanted to offer a different vision of this hyper futuristic world. So take Snap for example, yes. The maker of Snapchat disappearing messages app, the company also makes pretty sophisticated augmented reality as well. And so later on in the show, we're going to hear directly from Bobby Murphy, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Snap, who I spoke to earlier this week.
But another person who has pretty strong opinions on the Metaverse is Niantic CEO, John Hanke. You probably know Niantic as the company that makes Pokemon GO, but Hanke's vision of a connected world is a lot different from what Mark Zuckerberg has been putting out there. And Hanke has no problem pointing out what he sees as the flaws in Facebook's plans for metadata domination. And Steven, you talked with John Hanke from Niantic for a story that is on WIRED.com this week, and it's coming out in our upcoming December issue of the magazine. So tell us a little bit about what his vision is for this hyper futuristic augmented world.
SL: Right. He's actually put a stake in the ground against the Metaverse as portrayed by Mark Zuckerberg. He actually did a blog item a couple of weeks ago, said the Metaverse is dystopian. His vision is not that we're going to cut out all our senses and go to this make-believe world. Have our meetings in some fake place, were we all put on our headsets. He says, I have no desire to have a meeting, being a cartoon character in some place that looks like a cartoon Tahiti. Instead his view is the Metaverse will be a digital layer on top of where we physically are. Now his background is he started a company called Keyhole, weirdly was funded by the CIA, but it did satellite imagery. And then he got hired by Google who bought his company and was instrumental in developing Google Maps.
And his dream was to layer on a digital substrate to Google Maps that would tell you about things, about where you were geographically. It don't matter if the word Niantic comes from a ship that's buried under a street in San Francisco. People walk over it all the time, but they don't even know it's there. So he has the idea that if you're walking around someplace, things have happened historically in that space might be available to you. If you had glasses or a headset or something that we're able to perceive, what was kind of a digital image, digital scene that was available to you depending on where you are geographically and Pokemon GO actually does that, they have these gyms that are located to physical locations and in a couple of times they got in trouble because people own those physical locations. And they were really annoyed when a lot of Pokemon GO players showed up on their property to run their little Pokemon avatars against each other.
MC: My favorite quote from your talk with Hanke was what he said about AR where we can make the world more interesting in small doses. And he presents this as an opposition to the VR experience, which is just recreating the entire world in one big dose.
SL: Right. So you're not going to be taken out of the world where you are, if a car hurdles towards you're going to get out of the way, but the car might have a bunch of cartoon characters on top of it. We're a civil war reenactment.
LG: So Steven, Niantic is best known for Pokemon GO. But when I think about some of the other titles or experiences that Niantic might offer, I'm a tech reporter and none immediately come to mind. And so I'm wondering how much they can sort of stake their claim in the ground when it comes to the Metaverse. Do they have more IP? I'm just not aware of and what is that IP and what does that look like for them in the future?
SL: Well, they have Harry Potter.
LG: Oh OK.
SL: That was ruled out. We only got, didn't seem to take it off to the degree that a lot of people thought it was, but there's maybe more come on that. They just opened up their platform to outside developers. So it isn't going to be just IP that Niantic owns, but IP that people bring to it. So companies like the PGA and Royal Palaces and even Led Zepplin are developing their own applications on this.
MC: This feels to me like a little bit of a race between the goggles people, like the Facebooks and the Metas and the Oculuses of the world, and the glasses slash phone people, because these are two fundamentally different ways of experiencing a different reality or an augmented reality or virtual reality, right. One is completely immersive. The other is just adding things, additive to the actual world that we're in. And that is really going to define the experience for people in a way that I think is going to determine how they see their humanity in relationship to technology.
For example, I don't want my humanity to completely disappear when I experience technology. I would rather technology just sort of add to my own humanity. So to me, the experience of walking around with smart glasses or looking at the world through my phone to see things added digitally to the world is more appealing to me. That second one is more appealing to me. I wonder if he sees a place for both or if he just feels that one is bad and the other is good.
SL: Well, he sees a place for the more immersive VR-style technology, but he feels that people take it in short bursts for things like entertainment or games. So the one that you're going to have more of is the one where you don't lose who you are. And a lot of people have noted that when mark Zuckerberg did his famous Meta Keynote, you really don't see the people who were sitting there, like slugs with a headset on themselves, while they're in these meeting rooms and beaches and space landscapes, or whatever they're going to, it's just like in the matrix where you see the actual human beings who've been cavorting around in that particular Metaverse, they're all curled up in the fetal position and attach the umbilical cords to some computation then puts their fictional identities somewhere else.
That's a scary dystopian, as Hanke noted vision. But I still, I trust them a little because he was arguing that the Niantic style of augmented reality, was going to make a better world. And he compared it to, if you visited ancient Greece, you'd be able to see the colors and the building the way they allegedly were during the golden age where the classical age, he said that they weren't just plain white concrete, they were different colors and things like that. And I told them, I did worry a little about people going to this other better reality, especially if they were going to wear their glasses all the time. And Niantic has actually involved with Qualcomm when a reference platform for a pair of their own glasses. And he said, well, it's like, you go to Disneyland. By saying, you're in this make believe fun world. And I say, "Yeah, but you leave Disneyland, right?" People are going to be walking around making the world whatever they want it to look like. I think that that can be a little dystopian as well.
LG: I have to say, I'm very curious to see where AR glasses go. But after spending a little bit of time yesterday at the AWE conference, which we're going to talk about in a bit and doing a couple of VR demos, it had been a little while since I'd put a VR headset on, I have one here. I just don't use it that frequently. And I did a couple of demos that were just really cool. One was this flight simulator that was, I think it was called Arrow. And I saw that through the Vario headset, which is a company in Helsinki, that's making these really interesting VR headsets. And then I saw a second demo from a French company called Mizik, M-I-Z-I-K. And it was a karaoke app in VR where you become the rockstar, like all of a sudden you're belting Shallow by Lady Gaga at the top of your lungs.
In VR while presumably your friends are sitting around you, laughing at you because you look and sound like a fool with your VR headset on, but you are on stage in front of in a stadium full of people. And it's this really incredible backup dancers and it's this really incredible feeling. And the AR experiences I've had and heads up displays have been a little bit junky and frankly distracting. And so I think those have to get really good. But when you try something like the Oculus Quest two, it already is pretty darn good. There's that inertia and that barrier to putting the thing on and trying it.
SL: Yeah I think the AR stuff coming up is going to be better. I actually talked to Ronnie Abovitz, who was the founder of Magic Leap, which flamed out, but the demos that I had some of the early stuff. Some of them were really good. They were onto something. They just weren't able to convert before their money ran out. And bringing that to bear my guess is that Ronnie is going to be involved in some of this stuff on the lines of Niantic is doing in the future. The one application I'm really looking forward to is to have home concerts by big artists, like Bob Dylan or things like that, acoustic concerts in your house, you gather a bunch of people, everyone shares the same thing and you have kind of a holographic James Taylor or Lady Gaga, The Piano or whatever performing in your house with full spatial audio. I thought that could be really cool.
MC: That would be dope. I mean, you could do that now if you have $30 million you want to spend.
SL: Well, you have that Mike, I'm still saving.
LG: All right, we're going to take a quick break. And then we're going to come back with Snap's Bobby Murphy and AR developer Brielle Garcia, who I spoke to earlier this week at the AWE conference and Steven stick around for recommendations.
SL: Right.
LG: So there's this entire conference dedicated to the Metaverse.
MC: They have that already?
LG: Yeah. Except it's not called that, it's called Augmented World Expo or AWE.
MC: So like, "Aww."
LG: AWE, yeah. That's what Casey Newton said today too, when I told them I went to AWE, great minds.
MC: Great minds.
LG: So AWE takes place in Santa Clara in Silicon valley. And I headed down there for a day this week with my mask on and my headset ready to survey the scene. And I also had the chance to interview onstage Bobby Murphy, the co-founder and CTO of Snap and AR and VR developer, Brielle Garcia, who makes lenses for Snap spectacles. And obviously I had to ask them what they both think of the Metaverse or really just ask them what it is.
And like John Hanke of Niantic, Snap sees the future of computing and more through the lens. See what I did there, more through the lens of AR rather than the full headset VR. So it's definitely a different stance from Facebook. And in fact, the joke in the industry is that Snap's CEO of it and Spiegel is Facebook's quote unquote, chief product officers. Since Facebook has a habit of borrowing many features from Snap.
MC: But when most people think of Snap, they're still thinking of the app that teens use to send disappearing messages to each other, right?
LG: Totally, do you use snap, Mike?
MC: No, it's one of those things that won't install on my phone because my phone knows that I'm over 40.
LG: Kind of like TikTok?
MC: Exactly.
LG: Steven, are you using Snap?
SL: Not too much. I like it, but none of my friends use it.
LG: I don't either. My niece though loves it and she's 13. So this is the podcast all about anecdata here.
SL: My friends were all in retirement homes, so.
LG: So I mean, Snap is a fraction of the size of something like Facebook and it probably has a fraction of the influence too, but Snap also does have that extremely active youngest user base. I think hundreds of billions of messages are being shared in the app every day. And that's exactly the younger user base that Facebook has been striving to get its claws into. And snap has developed some pretty interesting AR technology, they were doing like the dancing hotdog and other cool filters, long before it kind of became mainstream.
So yeah, I had some questions about what that was like for snap now that everyone is rallying around this codified idea of the Metaverse and here's what Bobby and Brielle had to say.
[Upbeat rock music fades in as we transition to audio recorded in an auditorium.]
LG: Hi everyone. Thanks so much for being here. I'm Lauren Goode from WIRED and I'm here with Brielle Garcia and Bobby Murphy. Thanks so much to the both of you for being here, for this early bird session. So some of you were probably here yesterday and heard a lot of conversation about the Metaverse. So let's start out by talking about the Metaverse, I'll toss it to Bobby first. What is the Metaverse?
Bobby Murphy: That's a good question. I think to be honest, it's not a term that we've ever used internally or externally to describe what we're doing. And I think part of that it's pretty ambiguous. And I think depending on who you ask, we get very different definitions, which I think for us has made it not particularly helpful in helping anyone kind of understand what we're trying to do. What we are trying to build is really towards this AR future. I mean, we're heavily committed to and invested in augmented reality. And for reasons that I think many in the audience will probably agree with, which is we see augmented reality as this amazing technology that allows people to engage with digital experiences, visualize digital experiences in a way that is very aligned to how we as humans naturally see the world, which is we look out, we ask questions about the things that we're looking at.
We think about decisions we have to make, we visualize and changes and new possibilities in that world. And I think because of that, alignment AR has become an incredibly actually useful and very powerful medium for conveying an idea for conveying a concept. And we've seen tremendous impact to our own business with augmented reality, where hundreds of millions of people are playing with AR every day to express themselves, communicate with friends. And we've seen a lot of early signal around the usefulness and the practicality of AR for many other use cases. I mean, commerce is a great one that we're investing very heavily. And we have for the last couple of years where if you take at SPS, our Snap partner summit this past year, we announced a bunch of capabilities, but one of which was true size for eyewear, allowing you to very quickly and instantly try on a pair of glasses without having to pre calibrate, like kind of scan your head, hold up a card for scale.
It just works instantly. And I think in using that, you realize pretty quickly, not only is this a really impactful way to make a more informed decision about products you may want to purchase, but it's actually way faster than anything that exists today. Faster, certainly than going into a store and trying to browse pairs of sunglasses, but also faster than even browsing a website and clicking through product pages. So this hyper usefulness and hyper practicality makes AR an extremely powerful tool. And I think we're seeing through products like Camera Kit, which allow app developers to bring our full lens technology into their own application experiences, many more companies beginning to realize the same thing that we have for several years now, which is that AR is a fantastic way to add a ton of value to any camera-based experience.
LG: And I want to ask you, if I may interrupt?
Brielle Garcia: Sure, yeah.
LG: I kind of want to ask you about that idea that Snap has been doing this for so long, and now there's this kind of, it's codified word to describe it, but first I want to ask Brielle, when you think of the Metaverse, as it's been historically and how it's being presented now, what is it to you?
BG: Short answer, I believe Metaverse is the internet a longer answer is I think Metaverse is kind of this essence that emerges from spatial social internet experiences. That it's not something we build that it's rather something that just this idea that emerges from connected apps and experiences we're building today. Like what we have with Snapchat or Minecraft or Roadblocks. It's a Metaverse it's here, it's now. Yeah, that's just kind of my philosophy on.
LG: So it already exists?
BG: Yes.
LG: In your mind.
BG: In my mind it's here, we're building it. I don't think it's going to be a moment where we suddenly are like, ah, now it's the Metaverse it's going to just emerge.
LG: I like that. The Metaverse not as a moment, but as a gradual experience. So Bobby, I mean, Snap has been making lenses for a very long time, several years, as you mentioned, and you were doing this even before there were these software frameworks, like AR Core and AR Kit on the biggest mobile platforms, you had your own in-house technology providing these really cool AR filters in the mobile app. And now lots of people are jumping on board and we do have one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Facebook coming out and sort of staking this land grab around it and saying the Metaverse. How does that feel for you as a technologist who really was very early to some of these technologies?
BM: Yeah, I mean, we were able to innovate based on what we see in our kind of growing community. I mean, as I was kind of describing, I think that we're seeing a very rapid expansion of value that AR is driving for many businesses network, such that I think if you are any company and you have any consumer facing camera experience, that experience when connected to AR will be more valuable, more useful than if not. And that in turn is actually creating tremendous distribution opportunity for our lens creator. So for us, it's less about, I don't know, defining some 10, 20 year thing. It's we are seeing really tangible value today in mobile AR and probably for the next several years, we'll see a very rapid expansion and proliferation of augmented reality, across many companies really changing the way consumers are capable of engaging with their favorite brands and with experiences. And I think that that momentum is really what is inspiring. A lot of the work that we do.
LG: Do you agree with the joke that Snap is often Facebook's chief product officer?
BM: Yeah. Some of the things that they've done haven't quite been super inspired. I think like I said, we're focused on really innovating around what we see in our community.
LG: OK, so not entirely a joke from that, one of the apps in particular that we have here, that is a really cool demonstration of what could be done through, you've got the glasses on the Spectacle Air spectacles, what can be done and built through them. Describe first what the app is. You've many apps and everyone should go check out Brielle's webpage and see some of these examples. I really liked, there was a Game Boy one, it was really cool. There was also one 3D Stonks, very relevant today, Stonks. Tell us a little bit about this menu app that you've created for Len's. I should call it Lens.
BG: So when I got into spectacles, my mind was just racing with so many ideas of what I could do. And I have just been slowly working down that list of ideas. This one came to me, I was out to breakfast with family for the first time in a year. And we were sitting down and I noticed all the menus had QR codes now, or they had QR codes to get the menu. And I had the spectacles on me at the time and I was like, "Wouldn't this be really cool, if I could scan this with the spectacles and then the menu are the meals." And I immediately went home and got some food scans and made some scans and started putting together this proof of concept of what it would feel like.
And as soon as I saw the food sitting there in front of me, I was like, "This is a game changer." This is a big deal. And my parents were visiting and I was like, "Dad come look at this." And I put them on him. And he said, "Wow, I never want to use another menu again." He was like, "This is amazing." And he could use it immediately. And I was like, there's so much value here. And there's so much promise with the technology.
LG: And as you were envisioning that were you envisioning it just for the glasses, I mean is presumably your whole family. It'd be cool to think of your whole family sitting there, with their piece.
BG: Yeah.
LG: Awesome.
BG: A lot of the experiments with spectacles, I've been thinking about what does hands-free stereoscopic enable? And you can do the experience on mobile and it's great and compelling, but there is something just magical about when it's a hologram in front of you and it physically looks like it's sitting on the table in front of you. It kind of changes your dynamic of what do I want to eat? And as you're swiping through, it's like, "Oh, this actually looks really good. I wasn't thinking I wanted sushi, but this sushi looks really good." And it was a lot of interesting things that emerged out of the experiments, but a lot of the work I've done with spectacles is thinking about just when you have your hands free and it has depth, what can that enable?
LG: There's a lot of conversation they think about what is the real world in the digital world right now and how it's like a one or the other thing, but what you're actually describing through a Snapchat lens, a Snap lens is this blending of the two? It's not quite the same as seeing the plate out, in the Deli counter of the food you might order, but it's maybe the next best thing.
BG: I think too, it's representative of one of the values of AR, which can be very transactional. In this case, it's a fantastic way to make a decision about something you want to eat and then you can put it away and then eat the thing that you are trying to eat. And so it actually is a very quick and efficient experience to make an informed decision.
LG: One of the questions I have when I talk to both creators and the people who are running the platforms is around interoperability. If you're committed to something like lens studio and building something for lens, how portable is that to another platform and how easily would the, what you call the end user people who are using this stuff, be able to just move seamlessly from one platform to the next?
BG: I think interoperability is really hard, especially on a deeper software level, all of these assets, these are FBX files, GLTF, they're portable to any modern platform. So in that sense, it's extremely portable from a code sense. Every platform is different. They may share JavaScript, but their approach to JavaScript is different or they focus more on a certain type of coding or something. So that kind of interoperability is hard for everyone, I think, but the assets are portable and can go kind of anywhere.
LG: So when you say it's hard for anybody, you mean as a developer, meaning you have to take those assets from.
BG: As a developer, as someone building a platform, I think for Snap and other companies that level of interoperability between compatibility and projects, it's a tough problem and not always in everyone's best interest to bring all that together, but the assets are just infinitely portable and yeah.
LG: Bobby, how are you thinking about interoperability these days? You look at Niantic, John Hanke spoke yesterday, what Microsoft is doing with Mesh, what Facebook is doing with Meta. Am I crazy to think that maybe all these companies aren't going to play nice with each other all the time?
BM: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. I'll say for us at this moment in time, the first priority is our ability to innovate and part of the reason that we're investing so heavily in for example hardware, is because we have an opportunity to control and really tinker with every aspect of the experience from hardware all the way through software and that control actually gives us a really remarkable ability to actually innovate and really kind of find the sweet spot amongst all these different constraints. And the same thing is true of mobile, where we can optimize the heck out of any of the algorithms that we're building and the tools that we're building, because it's all one seamless thing that said, the last couple of years, we've done a lot of work and we're continuing to invest pretty heavily in actually a different forms of interoperability.
We have through Camera Kit, capacity for lenses to run in many different applications. We are working with a ton of companies now to either feed data and information into lenses or feed lenses into their experiences. And so it is absolutely very exciting to see what Niantic and other companies are doing in this space. And I think certainly as we continue developing, we'll look for ways to partner with them and figure out how lenses and these other AR experiences can work together.
LG: What does that actually look like though, for both of you, if you say you partner with a company like Niantic, what eventually does that mean? How does someone experience that app or that lens?
BM: Well, the thing is it's hard to say now because we're probably at less than 1 percent of the total potential over the next couple of decades of AR. And so at this point in time, it feels like the most important value for anybody who's operating in the secret system, to provide is to actually just help people get interested and involved in augmented reality to kind of see the value in it, create an experiment with AR experiences.
And as that starts to happen, as more and more businesses realize that they can create these highly differentiated customer experiences as new companies form old companies can get involved. I think that's when the demand around the edges of like, if I built something for one company, how do I make sure that that also works. Then those problems become much easier as far when you have concrete examples of how they need to connect versus trying to decide early when very few companies are really fully invested in augmented reality.
LG: Yes, I guess that it's early, but also people are really creating these, they're laying the groundwork right now for what this is going to look like right. So I'm kind of wondering what both of you, what your pie in the sky ideas are for how we eventually experienced these lenses and apps in a more fully formed Metaverse.
BG: I want to see lenses everywhere. I want to be able to take the stuff I'm building in Lens studio and can I use these Lens effects, on my Pokemon and Pokemon GO, or I think there's value in just bringing, because Lens studio is such a wonderful development platform. For me, it's so fast. I'll see something's trending on Twitter and I'm like, oh, I want to make a meme lens of that. I can make it in an hour and ship it. And people are using it before the moment has passed. And being able to use that kind of development tool to bring these types of experiences into other platforms and applications would be my dream as a developer.
LG: And then eventually that becomes a commerce platform too, right? I mean, these applications, lenses experiences are going to be monetized. They're likely going to be ads in the Metaverse, we're almost certain. And we even saw in Facebook's demonstration last week, virtual demonstration of its vision of the Metaverse someone standing at a virtual vending machine and seeing an NFT for purchase in virtual merch. Some of you may have watched this. So, when you think about how this digital world is going to be monetized, what does that look like? If this is the successor to the mobile internet, what's been your biggest learning and how things are monetized now that you think should be different in this future, this future world that we're talking about?
BM: I think the main thing is, well, first I'll say there are a ton of really amazing branded experiences, which we've seen reach a ton of engagement, even more so than many of our kind of organic lenses that Brielle has worked on behalf of many companies to do some amazing stuff. So I think the idea that you can engage with characters and products and services that you really care about and really resonate with you as a person. That's actually a fantastic use case for augmented reality. So to your point, yes we definitely know that probably some form of a sponsored AR advertising in the years to come will exist as a form of monetization in AR. But I don't think that will be the only, and maybe not even the primary way that monetization happens.
We're seeing some interesting development, like you mentioned around NFTs, I think through commerce, we're seeing a real value in AR facilitating transactions, helping people make decisions about products they want to buy. So I think AR is such a big space that I imagine that there will be many different ways that people find ways to build businesses and many different ways to reach customers and monetize, their experiences. And so our job as a company is as we continue adding capabilities and growing our lens platform is to make sure that we are kind of open to and enabling a wide range of opportunities for lens creators.
LG: Right, because it seems there's this distinction between using augmented reality to spur purchases of physical goods versus the emerging market for virtual goods that we're seeing right now. There was a period of time where I swear every AR app demo I went to, they were like, and here's where you placed the sofa. And I was like, my dude, how many sofas do you think I buy per year? And so there would be these kind of limited experiences, of how many physical goods we're actually going to gain understanding around in the virtual worlds. But this market for NFTs and other digital assets is so interesting. I mean, do you think this is a fad or is this here to stay?
BM: I'm keeping an eye on it. There's a lot of good questions being asked about things that we need to address about environmental impact of certain blockchain technologies. And can we address that and bring more value to what the technology underlying these tokens can provide? Because I do believe there's value in blockchain technology. I think there's some very interesting potential uses, and I'm excited to see what we can come up with in the future. I don't think this current craze we're seeing right now is necessarily exactly it, but I'm looking forward to what are we working on next? How can we really push this technology? And can we address some of the real-world concerns that we do have about specific blockchain technology.
LG: I think our time is up, thanks so much to both of you for your time and thanks to everyone for listening. Let's take a break and then we're going to come back with our recommendations.
[Break]
LG: Steven, as our guest of honor this week, what's your recommendation?
SL: I think I have a good one this week. Lately, and maybe I'm a little presentation by Michael will help do this. I've been yearning to return to my turntable, which has been put away for many years. And I wanted to set it up in the home office. I set up that used to be my son's bedroom, where there was no stereo system. So I got this thing called the Andover SpinBased turntable speaker. It's a, one-piece, pretty excellent audio device that has a preamp built in. You just plug the speaker into the back of the turntable and bam, you're ready to go for vinyl. And so I've dug out some of my LPs and put down the natal and listening to really cool music on the $300 Andover SpinBased turntable.
MC: So does it have a phono amp inside of it? Is that the idea that it's like?
SL: Yeah, it has an amp, but it also is got Bluetooth. So if you're not spinning the discs, you get access to the celestial jukebox and can just use the speaker.
MC: Fantastic.
LG: Nice and do you know if there are supply chain issues around that right? Will people be able to order it, if we link to it?
SL: I got it pretty quickly. I have to say I was trying to time it for when I was home and it got there just in time. I'm glad I was around.
LG: All right. That's great we did an entire episode last week with Adrian, so it was super fun. I mean, despite the fact that we were talking about all of the supply chain was, but it was all about the supply chain. So I had to ask. Mike, what's your recommendation this week?
MC: I'm going to recommend a YouTube channel that I just discovered it is called "De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina," which is that's my lovely Spanish pronunciation in case you couldn't discern, that means from my ranch to your kitchen. And it is a cooking channel on YouTube. It is a woman, a 60 something woman from Ishukan, Mexico. Her name Anhela and she makes traditional Mexican recipes in her home kitchen, over a wood-burning stove with a Komal on top, a griddle on top and a molcajete that she uses to grind things. So she makes things like enchiladas. She makes pan de muerto. She makes chilaquiles, she makes carnitas she does all of this just standing in her kitchen and it's an open kitchen. So there's the jungle and you hear jungle noises.
Some days it's raining. It's really lovely. She speaks in Spanish. So if you don't speak Spanish, you have to turn on the subtitles to watch it. But it's a really great lesson in very simple, very traditional cooking. She's also just a delight to watch. I found this because people were sharing it on Twitter, when somebody was trying to figure out the best way to make chilaquiles and everybody was sharing their favorite recipes. So I clicked on hers and watched her video. And not only do I now use her method, but I also have watched 10 of these so far, and it's only been a day and a half. So I'm sure I'm going to watch the rest later.
I will say that it's not exactly a secret. She has millions and millions of followers in each of her videos has several million views. So I may be late to "De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina" but it's taken my heart.
SL: Mike that probably works out for you. Cause that's your kitchen setup, isn't it?
MC: No, I have a somewhat, I have a kitchen that's about modern with 1987.
LG: Yeah, if Mike had that kind of kitchen, we'd probably would've lost him to Bon Appetit a long time ago.
MC: Yeah, totally. Although I do yearn for a Komal, I would love to have a wood-burning stove that has a griddle, and I can also use it as an oven and I can bake wonderful things, but I'll make do with what I have right now. Anyway Lauren, what's see your recommendations.
LG: It sounds super cool. My recommendation is a little bit in honor of you Mike, do you remember a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the Metaverse and I said at the top of the show, what's your favorite part of the Metaverse? And you said my favorite part is what I get to log off and get outside.
MC: It's still, my favorite part.
LG: Still is the best part of the Metaverse. Well, I happen to be listening to The Cut podcast this week, which is done by New York magazine part of Vox media. And there's an episode titled "Maybe You Should Go Outside" and it's in conversation with The Cut's, Jasmine Aguilera, who also used to produce our Vogue podcast here. And her guest is Stephanie Foo, Stephanie talks about how she was feeling really burned out, and she was looking for access to nature, but she lives in New York City. And the closest thing was prospect park and how she just got really deep in the world of plants. Started to spot native plants and invasive species and started figuring out what weeds were decided she was going to start weeding. And then she went through this official stewardship program where she became a super steward for the park.
And she and Jasmine make a joke about how super steward is kind of a lame name and they should call it plant parenthood instead, which made me laugh. They both talk about how when they were living in California and Mike, this something you and I are very fortunate enough to have access to. There's a lot of great access to nature where we are here. It's not too hard to get to the forest or the beach, or just find yourself outside and reconnect in some way and remind yourself of what it's like to be away from so many screens all the time, but it can be harder to do when you're in a densely populated urban environment. And so they just have a really thoughtful conversation about the little things you can do to try to reconnect with nature and get outside, when you're feeling overwhelmed by tech and life and other things. And so I recommend taking a listen, it's called, "Maybe You Should Go Outside."
MC: Nice.
LG: All right. That's our show for the week, Steven, thank you for joining us from your-
SL: Metaverse.
LG: With the beautiful foliage and the backgrounds. I really love it.
MC: It's foliage.
LG: Did I say foilage?
MC: You said foilage.
SL: Foilaged again.
LG: We have to leave that in. All right in the Metaverse the foilage is, what did I say foilage again? Foliage. All right I give up. All right.
MC: I went to school in Vermont. This is the one thing that I learned.
LG: Thanks to all of you for listening and especially to this part and thanks to the organizers of AWE, where I recorded the conversation with Bobby Murphy and Brielle Garcia. You can also watch the session on AWEs YouTube channel, and then all the other AWE 2021 sessions can be found at awe.live. And if you have feedback for us, you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the show notes. And this show is produced by the always excellent, unflappable Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now. And we'll be back next week.
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