'Bloomberg Technology' Full Show (11/17/2021)
From the heart of where innovation money and power collide. In Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Emily Chang. I'm Emily Chang San Francisco and this is Bloomberg Technology coming up in the next hour the chip shortage is no crisis for in video. Shares of the world's largest chip maker spiking after hours on a strong forecast. We'll dig into the company's bet on
the metaverse and the status of its bid to buy UK chip maker arm. Plus while other tech giants say the metaverse is the next frontier. Sundar Pichai sees Google's future in its oldest offering Internet search. My exclusive conversation with the CEO of Alphabet about the
company's next trillion dollar opportunity. And Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Lipski joins us to talk about the changing of the guard what he has to say about Andy Jassi succeeding Jeff Bezos and his vision for managing the flight to the cloud. We'll get to all of that in a moment. But first take a look at the market. Stocks falling on concerns inflation will threaten a global economic rebound forcing central banks to raise interest rates sooner than expected. Our critic Gupta has been digging through the markets today. Chris what are you seeing. Well Emily a risk off session for sure. You sell the S&P 500 closing in the red and big tech did not come to its rescue even though you saw some of those names. Tesla for example higher on the day but really dragged down which I'm a big tech by what was going on
overseas as Chinese ADR is really falling and dragging the New York thing index lower really off lackluster earnings coming out to bite you in particular. And you really saw some of the money going into treasuries and to really reinforce that risk off them. You can see even cryptocurrency didn't do so well as risk sentiment gauge. They performed pretty in line with the markets were telling which brings me to volatility. How much more can we expect going into the holiday season or are we kind of done. And this is going to be a crucial point. Well we're talking about the markets in particular because you can see we have had several spikes throughout the year. But this starting to slow down that white line is tech or the NASDAQ. One hundred volatility in particular.
So tech volatility essentially could see that spiking up just a little bit. And a lot of that has to do with the E B boom. So you're really going to want to watch that divergence between the broader market really measured by the VIX versus tech in particular measured by the VIX. And I want to get to some micro stories because earnings are still trickling in Emily and still is all about that forecast. Let's kick it off here. With Cisco down 5 percent after hours falling on a lackluster revenue saying they can't meet demand simply because of those supply chain shortages they don't have enough components to be able to do that. But to the upside you have Sony is coming out with a pretty strong forecast better than expected especially in light of this holiday season. So those shares are rallying after hours.
And lastly we have to talk about and video actually reporting a pretty good revenue forecast as well really saying that their diversification of chips really helped them in the last quarter. Emily already Kristie thanks for the roundup. I want to stick with in video results and bring in our buffalo. Joining us now from London. Ed what are your main takeaways especially where in video. Did well. Yeah. I mean he's got a spot on the forecast for the coming
quarters seventy four point four billion dollars well ahead of what analysts were expecting. But this is the key story from video right. There is demand for their graphics chips GP use and that's particularly the case in data centers where revenue grew 55 percent year on year. They also boosted margins because frankly they're selling their more expensive stuff their higher end chips which is helping on the bottom line I thought was really interesting though. They said that they had year on year
revenue growth in crypto mining related products and chips but sequentially quarter on quarter it actually debt. And while they didn't say it explicitly they mentioned that they were susceptible to volatility in crypto currencies lower volumes. And wasn't it just last week Emily we were talking about lower volatility and lower volumes in the crypto market. So I thought that was an interesting little tidbit of volatility in the crypto market continues apparently. Talk to us about where they're not doing well. And of course there are concerns about the slowness of this and the closing of this deal with ARM. Concerns but you see that stock in after hours up as much as four point three percent. They were pretty transparent about
what they said. In particular they were working with the FTC the Federal Trade Commission. We have some compromises as they put it on concerns the FTC has. You remember Bloomberg breaking news in February that the FTC was looking at a probe into the video arm deal. Of course on Tuesday we got news that the UK regulator is also looking into the deal. But from a national security
perspective and this is what video had to say the CFO in her comments that they acknowledge the concerns not just by those regulators but also some competitors but same language as last quarter. We continue to believe in the merits and benefits of the acquisition to arm its licensees and the industry. So some fighting talk. But these are ongoing concerns from Wall Street about what kind of involvement what kind of action regulators will take if this deal is it's get over the line. All right Ed
thanks so much. Moving on earlier this month alphabet surpassed a 2 trillion dollar market cap. Where is the next trillion dollars in growth going to come from. I sat down with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in an exclusive interview to talk about Google's biggest moonshot. Facebook is continuing controversies and whether the search giant will have a role in the metaverse.
This for Bloomberg's new economy forum in Singapore. Take a listen. We have been known as a company. We are trying to do more with less data. One of the biggest changes we made was making auto delete the default setting for new users signing in and now over 2 million users have their data continuously being deleted. If we rely on trust for people everyday when people come to Google
they placed their trust in us. And vulnerable moments may be a health issue on which they are trying to understand. There's no more important responsibility we have than doing right by that trust. You know when when we provide G.M. to journalists and realize that their accounts may be under attack by an authoritarian government I mean that's what motivates us to make sure be privacy security be trust. We are doing the right thing for time. Regulation will have an important role to play here. I think privacy regulation is important in areas like a regulation will be important. And so I think those will be part of the answers as well. Facebook and Microsoft are all in on the metaverse. What do you think about the metaverse. What's
Google's metaphors strategy. It's always been obvious to me that computing or time will adapt to people and people adapting to computers. You know you weren't always in fact with computing in a black rectangle in front of you. So just like you speak to people you see and interact computers would become more immersive. They would be there when you needed to be. So I've always been excited about the future of immersive computing and being computing a R and we are not count as the metaverse. Is that what that is metamorphosis. I think it means different things to different people. The way I think
about it is evolving computing in an immersive way with augmented reality. As part of that there'll be many experiences some of which will be immersive interactive virtual worlds which is just a metaverse concept. And I think this doesn't belong to any company right then. And this is the evolution of Internet and the web the internet all of it will continue to evolve. Google just hit a two trillion dollar market cap alphabet I should say. Where's the next trillion dollars going to come
from. You know I've always felt you know your market cap valuation is an effect of the value you provide. And I feel fortunate. Our mission is timeless. You know there is more need to organize information than ever before. I still feel surge is our biggest moonshot as a company. People will want radically more conversational experiences. They will want what we call multi-modal experiences. They may speak to search. They may look at something and ask what what the information is being able to adapt to all that. And while search will continue to be the biggest opportunity we are so excited
about the YouTube cloud are our hardware products Google Play. So we are building a diverse set of businesses but an underlying all of it is the investments we are making. I know we've invested hundred billion dollars an hour into the past five years and so applying A.I. in a deep way is probably where we will create the biggest opportunity if it.
Now one of Google's fastest growing markets and fertile ground to develop its biggest moonshot is the Asia-Pacific region home to Singapore where of course we hosted this year's New Bloomberg New Economy Forum. While millions of new users are coming online there every year U.S. companies like Google face tough competition from China. But I also addressed the opportunities and the challenges in the region that lie ahead. Take a listen. You know it's such a fitting timeframe. You know I'm glad you're focused on the region. It's the most vibrant region we see. It's our 20th year since we opened our office in Tokyo. It was our first office outside the Bay Area. You have two and a half billion people on the Internet. There
are many areas in which there they are leapfrogging trends which are here and embracing the future. Digital payments is a great example. So many of our products originated from a park. Google Maps Google Pay a lot of our journey to bring computing to more people. Is this playing out in nature. Yes. Well I am excited about also the
work we are doing through cloud because the companies that are rapidly transforming themselves digitally some chance to provide data something very exciting for us. So super dynamic region. I feel like we are learning as Google being in the region. And so I think it'll transform the first 10 years. I would have said we took products here and brought it day back for the past few years. We are beginning to build things there. And some of our future global products will be a pack first and rest of the
world later. You can't talk about a pipe without talking about China and you're facing stiff competition from Chinese tech giants there and beyond. What should U.S. policymakers know about competing with China. You know there's a lot of conversations about the US and China. The competition is fierce. Many of the ideas like A.I. and quantum computing where we are investing a lot. You know the Chinese companies are NIKKEI neck. What I I think about you I was impressed by the news coming out of Lascaux Long the US China agreement on climate.
To me while we talk about all the all the areas where we're competing some of the biggest areas which are common challenges for all of humanity. The pandemic was one A.I. an A.I. safety forward. Time will be a shared one. Obviously sustainability is on the radio like that putting these are all areas in which the countries can come together. And so I think that's a way by which we think about as you know when we compete on the Internet and they may be different visions of how the Internet plays out. So I see opportunities both sides. What are the chances that Google search will ever come back to China
or that Google cloud would ever come to China. You know today we don't provide most of our signed and services in China and I don't see that changing. But you know there are ways as I said in areas like A.I. or sustainability I think there will be opportunities for us to work together through cloud. We will support multi-national companies which have presence everywhere. And so maybe there are opportunities to work that way as well. That was Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaking on behalf of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum we are going to have the full conversation of that interview airing later this month November twenty ninth on the latest edition of Studio One Point. Oh you don't wanna miss it. Coming up crypto influx says Bitcoin in a theory and both retreat from last week's highs. This as the S.E.C. gets aggressive in pursuing crypto rent regulation while
catching up with the co-founder of a theorem and also a founder of the block chain technology company Consensus next. This is Bloomberg. Crypto currencies have suffered a broad retreat from recent record highs. Bitcoin briefly dipping below sixty thousand and either touching its lowest level this month. Tracker coin Gecko Global says the crypto market's total value dropped some 10 percent in 24 hours to about two point seven trillion dollars. Crypto centric stocks also taking a hit with Coinbase micro
strategy marathon digital and riot blocking all lower. For more I want to bring in consensus founder and co-founder of a theory. I'm Joseph Lubin Joe. Great to have you back with us. So first of all what do you make of the latest moves in ether and Bitcoin. Why are we going backwards. Why keep it going forward. It's just that our ecosystem is
volatile and it's volatile in an exponential and and nearly generally up direction. So if you look for look back seven days we're down. If you look back 30 days we're up over maybe thirty seven thirty eight hundred. If you look back seven years we're up about half a trillion dollars.
Fair point. So what's next. What's next to our ecosystem. It continues to grow wonderfully and excitingly we we seem to come upon a new paradigm shifting or foundational construct. A little over a year ago defy really and maybe 18 months ago defy 1.0 took on tremendous impactful importance. The NFTE phenomenon has been just spectacular. Defied 2.0 is
starting to hit the scene. It's taking a different more sustainable approach to defy. Decentralized organizations are starting to be enormously impactful and that's an incredibly exciting development in our ecosystem because we've figured out how to decentralize the trust layer making it possible for the world to have a trust foundation and to bring democratization to the decentralized finance infrastructure of the planet. And really bringing these decentralized organization constructs to bear is going to transform things. Well this is in part where consensus comes in your being backed by a number of new investors massive round and loves third point for example valuing you at three point two billion dollars in part to help with the development of Web 3. How is consensus gonna help us get there. Where is the growth going to come from. So we the way we think of our businesses that we operate a flywheel where we build a bunch of developer tooling that enables us and our community to build applications on an open open source decentralized global super app. And then in Madam Ask and Madam
Ask institutional. We provide the user interface to that super app. And so both from our perspective comes from our ecosystem creating new D5 primitives and thus offering those to our different kinds of users. Bringing this NAFTA phenomenon to bear in both artist communities and sports communities. So it's we're seeing growth in so many different directions and we have a pretty strong enterprise focus as well to join our consumer focus metaverse powered by black chain look like. So it looks like open decentralized protocols it looks like tokenization of many things or all the things it looks like into operation so that you can take your digital assets and move them into different regions of the metaverse. It looks like decentralized governance. Essentially it looks like a metaverse user centric protocols user centric social networks or social graphs. It looks like people and small organizations
having real economic and political agency as opposed to the web to world that we live in where major technology organizations on the platforms control the platforms and can the platform people from that is quite a vision. How much. Meantime before we get there is being made of the competition between a theory Syrian and Solana some going as far as to say Solana isn't a killer that it's gonna take the developers and the users away. How do you respond to that. Solana is a wonderful technology near poker that Cosmo's. So many of those. Platforms they like to think of themselves as Layer 1 platforms are great technologies. They will be important as our ecosystem evolves. But Miriam has chosen to focus on decentralization and that's where you get trust fund. So maximal decentralization
will will bring that trust foundation. And those protocols that are actually not competing with the theorem they're competing with Layer 2 protocols on a theorem. And many of those protocols will end up being layer 2s on a theme just because they focus on execution rather than security or even data availability. Those are the three pillars that you need to focus on as we move into the modular blocks. An ecosystem and a theorem is the clear winner in terms of security. Decentralization and trust. And it's likely to win the guaranteed data availability layer. And then many protocols at layer 2 which benefit from the
security guarantee of a theorem are going to get incredibly inexpensive to operate. They're already bringing thousands of transactions per second to a theorem and cost effectively. So quickly. You're saying a theorem. Thanks. A layer or two we'll become more competitive to Solana. I'm saying Solana has a chance of being really valuable nish execution layer. And whether it sits beside a theorem or on top of a theorem. All
these protocols are going to interoperate with one another. So long as a cool technology and an exciting new ecosystem. But essentially we need different kinds of these decentralized database constructs just in the same way that the Web Two World had. He has sequel databases and no sequel databases and graph databases in different tune into those databases. So so long it will serve certain kinds of use cases. Good to hear your viewpoint on that. Joe Lubin founder of
Consensus co-founder of A Theory. Great to have you here back here on the show. Coming up more on the Activision debacle as investors and others across the gaming industry are weighing in on whether Activision CEO Bobby Kodak could step down. That is next. This is Bloomberg.
The hot seat is getting hotter for Activision CEO Bobby Kodak after allegations that he was aware of sexual misconduct and harassment claims at his company for years and didn't inform the board. Now some shareholders are asking for his resignation. This following a walkout by Activision employees who want the CEO and other executives to step down. Other gaming companies are also weighing in with PlayStation chief Jim Ryan telling his employees that he and his leadership expressed their deep concern to Activision and that they do not believe their statements of response properly address the situation. Meantime cryptocurrency exchange and Wallet BLOCK Phi is being scrutinized by the S.E.C.. The platform is popular for paying its customers high interest rates for their for lending out their tokens with annual yields. I can go as high as nine and a
half percent compared to the point 0 6 percent average with bank savings accounts. The S.E.C. now reviewing whether blocked by accounts act as securities that should be registered with the regulator. And LeBron James and his teammates are getting a new name for their home court now known as the Staples Center next month though crypto dot com will replace the office supply store chain as a sponsor. The arena will unveil its new name on Christmas Day during a Los Angeles Lakers game. Bloomberg has learned the deal is worth more than seven hundred million dollars over 20 years. End of an era. Coming up what is it like to take over the division your boss
helped launch. I ask that question to Amazon Web Services new CEO Adam So Lipski in an exclusive interview coming up next. This is Bloomberg. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology AM Emily Chang in San Francisco. Amazon gave Visa a one two punch. First Amazon saying it's going to stop accepting Visa credit cards as a form of payment in the U.K. starting next year. Now Bloomberg is reporting Amazon is in talks to switch its own co branded credit card from Visa to MasterCard according to Bloomberg sources. Let's get back to London where at Ludlow is standing by with more. Ed what do we know.
Yeah. So for a long time Amazon and other retailers have been upset about the fees that they've had to basically absorb every time a customer uses a credit card and these are the latest steps in that pushback that Amazon is making to the likes of Visa or MasterCard. It played out in the equity markets. You look at the drop that Visa experience and one time it was down by the most since March 20 20 and that negative sentiment passed on to others even though according to Bloomberg sources Amazon is considering that switch to MasterCard. But what it comes down to the grievances. If I have a high rate credit card and I buy something on Amazon dot com at the moment in most jurisdictions Amazon is the one that covers that cost. They don't pass it onto the consumer. And here's what Amazon told Bloomberg about that. They say that the cost of accepting card payments continues to
be an obstacle for businesses. Of course Amazon made trying to play a strong hand at the moment say it supports merchants on its platform and those striving to provide the best deal for customers. Now in other jurisdictions for example in Singapore Amazon issued a surcharge. If I live in Singapore and I use my credit card as opposed to a debit card then they will charge me for the right to do so. But it's interesting the rules that they've left in place. They are basically trying to encourage consumers to make an active change to move away from UK issued credit cards to cash cards or debit cards or if they switch away from a credit card completely. They're offering consumers 20 pounds or 27 U.S. dollars off their next transaction if they
make that switch today because clearly Amazon's a bit fed up of swallowing the cost. Emily. All right. Thanks for breaking that down. Moving on to Amazon's NWS its rapidly growing cloud division that now boasts millions of corporate customers around the world. I recently traveled to Amazon headquarters in Seattle to speak with new NWS CEO Adam Zalewski who was also one of its
earliest employees. We talked about the changing of the guard how anti Jassi will be different from Jeff Bezos and how so Lipski will be different from Jassi along with his vision for the platform. He helped launch. We're all different as leaders. I think it's important that we it's important that we all bring our own stamp to it and operate
within ourselves. I don't think I would be a very good Andy. I don't want to presume but I would assume that Andy wouldn't be a great Jeff because you know just Jeff and his Andy and me. So I think that Andy will certainly bring a great depth of experience for most of us which is one important part of the business and well having operate that business for so long. And I expect that will also give him an opportunity although he was involved in other parts of Amazon certainly for four for a number of years. We'll be able to bring a fresh perspective to the whole company just as I hope to bring data of us. And I think that fresh perspective is is often helpful. I think just the mere act of change is is useful for for the business for customers for
employees and just to shake things up a little bit. So I think just a fresh perspective. How will you be different from Andy. Well I think that the the world around us is changing so so much that we're going to have to be different. It doesn't matter what we did yesterday. Right after I joined we actually added two new leadership principles which is very exciting ones around striving to be Earth's best employer. And the second around focusing on the fact that that success and scale bring broad responsibility. And those are things about which I personally am very passionate. And so I really personally look forward to digging in and helping the company to figure out what are those things that we have to figure out where can we innovate to to be Earth's best employer. And then also to figure out externally what can we do to to really be great citizens of our local
communities to be great citizens of our national communities and to be great citizens of the global community. And I'm I'm I care a lot about those things as a lot of other people do here. But I plan to put a good amount of energy and time and focus and hopefully help Amazon innovate and all of those areas. How closely do you work with Andy. Day to day. Does he regularly weigh in on NWS decisions or not. He's he's got a pretty broad scope of things to worry about now.
So he's got a pretty pretty intense day job I believe. So he's really focused across the company as you would expect him to be. But that being said obviously NWS remains an important part of Amazon. And so we touch base regularly be it in person or via email just on the most important things going on in the business. Does Jeff ever weigh in on NWS decisions. Yes. I mean really from the beginning Jeff was involved at the very very beginning at some of the most fundamental decisions. How do you price to. What do you name as three. What is the detail page looked like. Obviously over time
we the business grew and Jeff was always. Available when we needed him and I certainly anticipate that'll be the same go for it. So is he still available now and what do you what do you understand that just priorities are short. Well I'll let it just speaks his own priorities. But but certainly Jeff has been available when for example we've been doing our annual planning cycle as many companies have. And it's been great to have have Jeff year when on really and where we're heading for the next year and beyond and to make sure it's easy to get focused on the details of the business. And it's great to have multiple multiple people who can help you pick your ISE up a little bit. Amazon Web Services CEO Adam So Lipski there you can catch much more of that interview with Adam Sam Lipski on the latest episode of Bloomberg Studio 1.0. Coming up later right here on Bloomberg Television we're going to talk about the future of
cloud innovation data privacy. The metaverse of course and so much more. And speaking of that coming up termination shock because that is the newest book from the author who actually coined the term metaverse back in nineteen ninety two. Neal Stephenson will join us next to talk about that and more. This is Bloomberg. We've been talking about the metaverse a lot to talk him coined in nineteen ninety two by Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash. Since then from Giant Monarch and The Matrix in the Nineties to Tron and Ready Player one more recently there have been many guesses as to what a world in which life mixed with virtual reality will really look like. Now Neal Stephenson is
out with a new book Termination Shock a new thriller in which climate change is out of control. And a visionary billionaire has a big idea for reversing global warming a topic which couldn't be more timely as well. Neal Stephenson joins us now here in the studio. And it is great to have you here in person. It's good to be here. Thanks for inviting me joining us. You
have a massive following and you could've written about anything. You chose climate change which is a topic that the masses have had a hard time really understanding and grappling with. Why did you decide to take this on for your next book. I think even scientists and people who were technically on the ball can have a hard time getting their heads around the whole topic. So I have kind of got a niche as someone who writes popular fiction
about technical subjects. And so I thought it made sense for me to take a crack at this. The story centers around a billionaire who decides to take matters into his own hands and solar geo engineer the planet using a big cell. Forgotten. What exactly does that mean. And is that really possible. So for a long time all through human history there have been volcanic eruptions
that put plumes of sulfur into the stratosphere the high atmosphere. And what we've learned over time is that when that happens for a couple of years afterwards the climate all over the planet will get cooler. Until that stuff kind of naturally washes out. So the proposal has been made that we could essentially build artificial volcanoes that do the same thing by artificially injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. And we call that solar geoengineering because the purpose of it is to bounce back the solar radiation that's heating up the planet. Now obviously it's very controversial and not everyone is on board with the idea of doing this. But for me as a storyteller that was just more fodder to tell an interesting story. It's not just
about doing the engineering but it's about how other people react. Now there are a number of real life billionaires who are trying to take on climate change as well. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos what do you make of the involvement of billionaires. I know you're based in Seattle and they're both based in Seattle as well. Should we welcome them as a society to this fight. It's an interesting place that we've got to as a society that we now look to billionaires to take big actions for us. You know I don't think that was true say 50 years ago but it is true now that a lot of our institutions that we might have looked to you know in the 50s or the 60s to take care of our problems. Big government institutions and conventional big companies don't seem to be playing that role for us anymore. And we've
kind of got in the habit of leaning on billionaires to do that. And I don't necessarily think that's an ideal way to organize a society but it is kind of what we've ended up with. And so that's the point of departure for writing this book. So coming out of COP 26 do you think it is more likely we're going to see governments and companies around the world come together on climate action or governor governments and companies and perhaps real people like your character T.R. Schmidt take matters into their own hands individually. So I think what's going to happen is that
we'll see at least partial implementation of some of the very good ideas and proposals that came out of COP 26. And so I think that legitimate efforts are gonna be made to reduce carbon emissions and hopefully to move towards a zero carbon emission economy. And that is all great. The more that the more the better. However the issue is that even if we completely stopped putting CO2 into the atmosphere today the level of CO2 in the atmosphere which is dangerously high right now wouldn't start to go down unless we intervened and began to remove carbon from the atmosphere. So when is the
tipping point for you. I mean I know you look at 10 years out right. When do you think the real tipping point will be. Twenty five years ago. So it's too late. You're saying. I think it's a it's what we have to do now is carbon capture. I think it's all about carbon capture. It's all about that. I think it's going to be the biggest engineering project in human history to build the. The systems that are needed to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere CO2 that we've been pumping into the atmosphere ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution and get the CO2 level back down to a livable level. And you know that is going to take us probably the rest of this century. Well the metaverse be our
escape from climate destruction. Man I hope not because there is no escape. We need to we need to focus on on the physical world. We need to get outside in your breakup box. Snow crash. You coined that term metaphors. Now 30 years ago what did you envision then and how do you define the metaverse today. Well look what I envisioned then was what we would now call a massively multiplayer online 3D world just meaning that a large number of people can be in it and interact with each other in real time. And we've seen that implemented in a lot of popular games. So we know that we can do this. The other element that's coming along is sort of implementing that not just on the screen of a P.C. or a game console but in actual 3D virtual reality headset. What do you think of the tech companies take on this term that
you coined. I mean we've seen Facebook we've seen Microsoft. What fails and what succeeds. Well I think the first thing to keep in mind is what are these companies actually doing today. Because right now there is no metaverse. Facebook is running Facebook and and WhatsApp and
Instagram but they don't actually have a product that looks like the metaverse yet. And they probably won't for for a number of years. So. So we should focus on what actually exists today. And you know when they've actually built this metaverse then we can we can take a look at it. Do you trust Facebook now. Do you trust Metta to do this. Well I it depends on what you mean. I'm a yes. In the sense that I think they'll they'll probably build something. But I don't have a high opinion of their business model which is is all about getting people to use a free application for multiple free applications. Because when you're using a free application you are essentially contributing labor to their product. You're building their product for free. And
what they're selling is is your eyeballs. They're selling your attention and your your your information to advertisers who are their actual customers. So. So that's a business model that as we've seen can can lead us into some less than desirable consequences. And I would like to see them change that before implementing the same business model in a highly immersive three dimensional environment. Well there is grave concern on that note that the metaverse will will replicate the worst of society as we have often seen on social media. What are your biggest fears about the metaverse of the future whether Facebook builds it or not. Well these devices can gather a lot of information about you.
And so even when you're just scrolling through a Web site on your your laptop or your phone these things are are collecting a lot more information than most people realize. You know if you linger and you look at a particular screen for a little bit. If you if you're a mouse you know sort of lingers over a button even if you don't press that button. They're collecting data about what has attracted your attention and VR headset. Today our headsets can can gather a whole lot more data. So. So you think our privacy our personal information is even
more at risk in the metaverse than it is now. For sure. For sure. If if the companies that build it keep running on the same business model that we see in the case of classic social media applications. Is your view of the future utopian or dystopian. I think we've got a rough few decades ahead of us largely because of climate and largely because of the breakdown in in our kind of social institutions how government works how democracy works. That we've seen as a result of the polarization of opinions which I think is is largely a social media phenomenon. It's bad actors gaming the Internet to deliberately mess things up. So you're a short term pessimist is that what you're saying is short term pessimist. I do think that eventually we're going to we're going gonna pull out of it.
There's you know every time a new communications medium comes into into use it doesn't take long before sort of bad actors latch on to it and begin to use it to create trouble. Do you feel any amount of responsibility or even pride in putting the term metaverse out there all those years ago. I put it out there. It's as you say 30 years ago it was a plot device in a book. And I'm I'm happy when people read my my work and think it's cool and want to try to build something if it inspires them or motivates them to to work on a project that excites them you know and that gives them fulfillment. That is all that is all great. Obviously.
Control the direction these projects all go. You also wrote a book about crypto back in the 90s so crypto now McCone. Where's it going. So in that book it's all it was based on a kind of earlier idea of pre block chain idea of how cryptocurrency would work which was that basically you had to have a room somewhere a secure facility where you could have your servers. That was kind of
immune from government interference and that made for some fun storytelling because I got to send my nerd characters out into different parts of the world to to to to build these these facilities. Course what we've ended up with was block changes that you don't need that they've found a mathematical scheme that distributes the system over the whole world. And so in that sense what we're seeing today is a new generation of how cryptocurrency works that's more capable than what I talked about. But by kind of follow it you know it's kind of interesting. But I can't keep up with all of the different you know initial coin offerings and other things that are popping out of the woodwork. Well it all goes to show that we should listen to your story read your stories.
So far they have been very oppression. And we will see about termination shock your newest book about climate change. Neal Stephenson author of Termination Shock and so many more books. Thank you so much for joining us. Been fun. Good to have you. Coming up a big change for Apple. Yes you can now DIY that busted iPhone screen at home. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman coming up to explain how and more importantly why. That's next. This is Bloomberg.
Well the next time you drop your iPhone don't worry now you'll be able to fix it yourself. Apple is finally allowing customers to fix their own devices with a brand new service. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman joins us now. Mark I can't tell you how many times I've dropped my iPhone or my kids have dropped my iPhone. Why is Apple doing this and how does it work.
So why are they doing this. Well they really had no choice over 20 states. I believe twenty three to twenty five states have been discussing right. To prepare laws making it so that consumer electronics companies and other companies would have to allow consumers and users of their devices to be able to do self repair. Up to this point you had to go to an Apple authorized repair center like a Best Buy an Apple retail store or other location to get official servicing to get official Apple parts. Now with this program next year they'll start selling those parts different tools and of course manuals to consumers helped them do it themselves. Is it going to really be that easy. Can I trust myself to do this. Well I can just tell you personally I don't want to speak for you but personally I probably still would go to the Apple store or an Apple authorized retailer if I had an issue. Quite frankly it's not something that I want to deal with. It could be a lot cheaper probably with Apple. Care
to go to an Apple store authorized retailer to have your your your device fixed. But there were so many laws. The Biden administration has even been talking about this. Apple has been under a lot of scrutiny for not allowing consumers to repair their own devices. So now they're giving that choice. I also think it's going to help their bottom line not that they need much help with that given these pricey parts are probably going to be all I should say. These parts are probably going to be somewhat pricey when they go on sale next year. One thing I know they're starting small. It'll be for the iPhone 13 and iPhone.
Twelve batteries cameras and screens. The most prominent parts that need replacement and then Macs later on. All right. Mark Gurman thanks for breaking it down. We'll see. Thank you. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco. That does it for this edition of the show. Don't miss Studio 1.0 tonight. This is Bloomberg.
2021-11-18 22:51
