Interview with XMTP [Shane Mac] | Blockchain Innovation | #AI, #Security

Well, hello, hello to all the Web3 enthusiasts out there. This is Max speaking, and it's a new episode of Synopsys. So another day, another new guest, brought to you by Synopsys. Guys, please welcome Shane Mac. Co-founder of XMTP. Hi Shane, how's it going?

Hey, it's good to see you. How you doing today?

I'm doing well, good as well. So, um, we have a bunch of questions devoted to XMTP and decentralized messaging. So if you don't mind, let's just get straight to the action and shoot them one by one.

Rock and roll.

Okay, cool. So, um, let's start with the introduction. So since it's the first time here at Synopsys, could you please go ahead and introduce the audience to XMTP and and, uh, your role within the protocol.

Yeah, XMTP is a decentralized messaging protocol. Um, and so really all it means is it's secure communication, but no single company, no single person controls the protocol and can shut it down. And so in a world where I think private communication is pretty fragile and you can shut down apps and shut down your entire communication. With XMTP, you own your key to own your messages. And so you can use any app. There's hundreds of apps built on XMTP, and you get to choose which app you trust. And then if you don't like that app or it gets shut down, you take your key to another app and all your messages show up. And so it actually changes the foundation for private and secure communication in the future. Um, and it's wholly open source. And, you know, to give you a little story, a little background here, we were sitting here. I've been working in messaging since 2010, and our company got acquired by BlackBerry, which was BBM. I don't know if you ever knew BlackBerry Messenger, but it was kind of one of the first early days of messaging. And so I've been working on secure and private communication for a long time, and we've had encryption for the last, you know, we've had it for decades, but for the last 15 years, really encrypted messengers kind of became the thing. But the problem was, what does quantum-resistant encryption matter if you can just shut off the app and all of the servers shut down too? And so you had to kind of break apart the app from the key from the network. And that's, that's really what we did. We were like, can we build a quantum-resistant, secure a messaging protocol that is fully open, that no one has a key to, and that anyone can use? And then can you build applications or agents or anything on top of that and really kind of design your app however you want? And then you get to choose which apps you trust, but the messages are portable, so you get to bring them with you. So if you don't, you know, if you like this app and then all of a sudden, say, you know, that right now in chat control, a lot of countries are like, shut down that app. And then because the app owns the server, you lose all your communication and your relationships. In this world, actually, if you shut down the app, you just take your key, your Face ID, your wallet key, whatever, whatever private key, just a, you know, a string, a long string. You go to the new app, you put it in, and that's talking to the XMTP network. And the most important thing about XMTP is this. On the mainnet, no country has over a third of the servers. So what that means is if any country changes their laws on privacy and encryption, the network itself always keeps running. So now you have a network that is decentralized. It is audited by the same firm that audited Signal to be as secure as Signal, but it's not a private server. There's no key to the network. And really, it's just a global secure pipe that anyone can use. And it allows people to build applications and agents on top of it that work for their country. And so I actually think it works better for regulation and working with local governments, because you can build applications specific to your country. And then it can still be interoperable with the world, but if you're building one in, say, France or in Russia or in the US, you can adhere at the app level to whatever the laws and regulations are of your country while still being connected at the global level with XMTP.

Wow, so great intro, and actually nothing to add here but that the questions you touch are extremely relevant nowadays especially, and Uh, in Russia, as I'm Russian, I can say so. Rumors about how the government is integrated into messengers, it never stops. And right now they're promising to shut down Telegram. WhatsApp is already blocked. And well, let's see if we have a new solution for people to stay connected. And a lot of questions I want to ask at the same time, but let's let's do it one by one. So the next thing I wanted to ask is what is the current messaging oversight issue and what shortcomings do current market participants have and where do applications like WhatsApp fall short?

I think they all have one simple problem which I actually have a lot of empathy for. They all require you to trust the CEO. Here's what I actually— when I hear about Telegram maybe getting shut down in Russia, or I hear about Iran kicking out WhatsApp, or I hear about Turkey banning Discord, or I hear about a backdoor in the Apple in the UK, or Signal has to leave a country because they are going to have to give the backdoor, etc. I think the— I have so much empathy for those founders like Pavel and Zuckerberg and even, you know, Elon and XChat and Apple and the Signal Foundation. You know, they still manage the whole stack. They have the server, they have the app. They've done so much for private communication in the world. But here's the problem. The problem is that all of this debate and all of this like battle and this kind of jurisdiction and regulation and banning things. It all requires the CEO to say, trust me. And that is the most important thing that we have to change. The way XMTP is going to be really successful is if you don't have to trust me. That is what matters. What matters is that the network is as secure as Signal. It is quantum resistant. It is fully open sourced. There's no private server. Everyone can see everything that's happening. It is geographically diversified so that it can never be shut down in one single point. You know, if you look at the Bitcoin world, that's kind of what they nailed, right? They nailed the ability to have this distributed network of kind of the miners that allow you to make sure it's resilient and enduring and sustainable. And so that, that single thing To me is the thing that is the biggest difference of what we're trying to do. All the messengers of today have great encryption. You know, Telegram, you have to turn it on. Most people don't. So it's not even that encrypted. It's more like a social network. Sure. But that debate to me is tired because actually a lot of people use it. And what matters is it's, you know, I, I, I listened to a lot of Pavel's stuff, right? And he's doing a good job fighting the fight. But I actually think the way to win is not to have to fight to say, trust me, the CEO. It's to create a system in which you don't have to trust me. And the most important thing I think we're doing is that all of the last big messengers of the world require you to truly trust the CEO to fight, to, I will not give away the key. I will not turn off the server. And in our world, I don't have a key. I don't have a key to the network. There's no way for me to look in XNTP. So therefore, if someone asked me to give them the data in the network, I can't. And I think we have to move to a world where you can't see the network, not promising that you won't. And that is the fundamental shift here. That is what it means to go from a centralized world to a decentralized world. And for me, you know, that philosophical difference is a very, very big shift in the world. We could get in a feature-off all day. Well, Telegram doesn't have this and WhatsApp doesn't have this. Zuck says he doesn't take metadata. And, you know, Telegram says that it— I think it's a losing game. The question is, if you have the best encryption in the world, but your single app can be turned off with a light switch in any country. Does it actually matter?

Well, so, uh, sounds extremely reasonable, and, uh, we will get back to comparison with our messengers in the next block with regard to, uh, devoted to Canvas. And, uh, well, uh, what you said in the introduction, like, not your keys, not your messages, uh, let's, um, speak about what does ownership actually mean in the context of digital communication? Shane, are you with me?

Yeah, I was just thinking. Yeah, for me, you know, ownership is one of those like human properties that kind of changed the world. And, uh, I think you can have sovereign money and now you can have sovereign communication. And all that we've been trying to do since the beginning is be able to own your communication. The, the challenge is it's hard when you say something like that. People are like, why do I want to own my communication? What does that even mean? And so if you break it down, it's actually pretty simple. If you don't own the key, you don't own the messages. If you have to log into an account, it's not yours. You're logging into something that is another person's server. Um, and so I think what's happening here is the app layer, especially in an AI world, you can build app interfaces in a day. The app layer is becoming an infinite commodity. There's gonna be millions of apps. So what matters is the private key you own can send messages to any other private key, and the network is decentralized so that you can move across any application and never be locked in. And today, you know, it's kind of funny, it's, it's how the internet originally started. It's how a lot of the open standards and protocols worked. You know, SMTP for email allows you to move across different apps and take the identity layer with you. SMS is similar. It's tied into a phone number, but it's, you know, an open protocol. Uh, it's just not secure. And then the secure messengers, it takes more work. It takes a lot more, uh, technology to make this encryption and these global security standards happen. And so it all became centralized, right? Every single secure messenger mostly is just an app. A server and like the whole stack. And if the app shuts down, you lose everything. Uh, and there's no real open standard, but there's been a lot of kind of, uh, work here. There just hasn't been the right incentives. And I think the right technology to come together at the right time to create an open network where apps want to build on top of it. And so we actually use MLS, which is Messaging Layer Security, which is the IETF global standard for secure, you know, group communication. Uh, and I think we're one of the first decentralized protocols to ever use the technology. Uh, and it's cool working with them. You know, they're, they're the internet standards body. And for me, that allows you to let the people have choice, which is you might use an app on XMTP that you made called, uh, Russia Chat. I may use an app called Convos, but because it's just private key to private key both of those apps can communicate simply and interoperably. Um, and I think that's a huge shift in the world for private communication. And then if you don't trust the Convos app, it's fully open source, but it's still an app we make. We make our, you know, the Convos app, it's an app we made on the protocol. If you don't trust it, you can fork it and ask Claude Code to make you a new version of it and run it on your own server, or you can go use someone else's app. And then if you just take your private key, use the new app, all your messages show up. The app is just an interface, like a door into the protocol. Much like, I think, you know, the financial crypto world kind of invented that, right? Like I can use any wallet to access my money on chain. The private key is what matters. And I think the cool thing is Apple and Google and kind of the, the internet with passkeys has made this more secure and more simple to use with passkeys. So a lot of the core of passkeys is built in. It's native on iOS and Android. And so really just, you know, your Face ID or make a passkey on your device, and that passkey is the key that can send messages anywhere in the world. And then you can move between any applications and move your key around very simply. And that moves the ownership back to the edges. And I think what's happening in this whole world is just Moving the ownership and control back to the edges, not centralized in the middle.

Wow, thanks, Shane. And I would say it's a very interesting idea. At first glance, seems simple, but never thought about that the messenger itself can be like an interface and owning your keys can help you like just migrating with your own messages into another application.

I mean, A year ago, messengers in the, in the past historically are like pretty hard to build. And I was like, I don't know if people are going to make their own messengers, whatever, but everything is open source. We have combos and XMTP. We have, uh, CLIs that all the AI tools can use now. So this kid in, in India, his name is Sim. I don't know if he's a kid actually, but he, he built a signal-level secure messenger. And you can click here and see there's QR code you can scan to talk to me. It has group chats, it has, um, all of my kind of different groups on the app, all your modern messaging features. But he built it in a way like we've done. You can just click here and scan anyone's code. He built it in a week with Claude Code. He also integrated Bluesky, so another open social protocol, so you can see and find people from Bluesky and talk to them on XMTP. So you're combining open protocols now because XMTP supports any identity layer. So you can connect any identity, you can connect to email, you can connect to Blue Sky account, you can connect, uh, crypto wallet. It doesn't matter. Um, and I think what's interesting is one person with AI built their own Signal on their own server because XMTP does all of the hard security and, and privacy and decentralization work, that app developers can build anything they want now and only have to trust themselves. And so I'm talking to him from my app that we built, and he's on his app Wave. And the idea that everyone's going to build more like micro apps or apps for the community, or there's going to be this abundance of applications because everyone can now build the app layer, I think is going to happen. I think it's called situ— situated software. Clay Shirky talked about it in like 2004. And I think, I think it's really having a moment where it's now possible to do that. And, you know, this one guy in India was able to build the app of his dreams for all his friends and family. There's no signup. You just scan the QR code. And then because it's an invite-only QR code, you never get spammed. And we're moving into a world where The main problem with all these messengers is they're all built on phone numbers and they're all just spam, AI, scam, you know, vehicles.

Wow, and also an example. Thanks for sharing and get to learn more about this and a great case to show that actually innovations are not always something extremely complex, what takes a lot of budget and the team. So you just have to think different, make simple solutions that will be user-friendly, and well, sounds like a piece of success recipe. Once again, thanks for sharing, and I cannot wait but to jump into the next block of questions devoted to Canvas since it was mentioned a lot of times already. So let's start with highlighting some core differences between actually Canvas and encrypted messaging applications like Telegram or Signal. What are they?

Do you want me to just share my screen and show it to you?

Um, yeah, okay, go ahead. Yeah, while Shane is preparing, so guys, don't waste time and drop your comment in the comment section under this video. And also, to see Shane in more episodes, to learn more about XNTP and Canvas, thumbs up, guys. And we'll for sure do another new exciting episode in several months. Hopefully Shane will join.

All right, so Convos is private chat for the AI era, and here's what that means. So when you click in here, private chat for the AI era, I'm going to show you why the messengers of today aren't built for private communication and group communication of tomorrow. So Every time you start a convo, when you download the app, there's no sign up. That's the first big thing. There's no app to sign up for. So I hit start convo, it scans, it's a QR code. I can also do the share link. You'll see at the bottom, see my name?

Yeah.

And then it went away. Every time you start a convo, it says, do you want to show up as Shane? Or do you want to show up with the nickname? Or do you want to show up as somebody and just, you know, protect your name for this time? And so every time you start a conversation, it's an entirely new world. So instead of the apps of today that are all a single global identifier, a username or phone number, every single conversation is actually a new entire containerized box that is a new XMTP ID. And the app can see no information across any of your conversations. So there's no leakage across any conversations, and there's no way you can ever get spammed. So it's an unspammable messenger because you are in control of who you invite in. So every time you just say, okay, I'm at a dinner with 10 people. The cool thing is it's faster than all the other apps. All the other apps are like, hey, what's your username? What's your phone number? I'll add you as a contact. And then Okay, who's 615? Who's 819? You're trying to figure out all these things. In this world, you simply scan the QR code, or I can share it to any of those messengers. It works with all modern messengers. I can literally share it to Telegram, share it to Signal, share it to WhatsApp. All of a sudden I have a group of 5 people. I get to choose how I show up. So every single time I can click here, I can use my name if I want. So I can literally go into my little My Info section. Okay, in this, in this conversation, I'll use Shane. Now I'm Shane. I get to choose. The biggest difference we're doing is if I sit in the top right, I can invite an assistant. We call them instant assistants to every single group. So now I can add AI. Everyone's adding AI to their Signals and their WhatsApps and their Telegrams, except when you add it to that, it knows your phone number, it sees your graph, it knows your contacts. You can see across conversations. The AI that's in my family group chat could be the same one with my therapist, could be the reading the one that's actually with my friends. And that leakage is going to be a disaster. Try different AI, different models. And then if I don't like it, I can delete it and it only cryptographically can know what's happening in that one group. Because there's— every group is a new world. Private chat for the AI era. Um, and what that means, you had to, in our mind, you had to rebuild the foundation. So to start, I think the main thing to, to understand is what Convos doesn't do. And so there's no login, there's no signup, there's no phone number, there's no email. There's no personal information that we ask for you. There's no ask the app to track, there's no data tracking, there's, there's nothing. The app actually stores no data. It's all on the XMTP network. It's just a private key per convo. And then every single convo is a separate world. So there's no connection between all of your conversations and your identities. So when you start a convo, you literally open the app and you always get to choose whether or not you use your name or not. So it asks you at the bottom, tap to chat to Shane. Sure. And this one I will, but you don't have to, right? You can have a private conversation. The trust can live between you and I. The, the name is actually just a quick name that's locally saved on your device. It's never on the network. Um, and then in any single group, you can add an assistant. And what this does, everyone's adding AI to all their apps already. We wanted to create the foundation by which it could be a much safer place to use AI. And so what that does is every group cryptographically can only know what's happening in that group. So you can invite an assistant you built, you just send the invite code to your assistant and it'll join, or you can use the ones that we have built in called Convo's assistants. But that assistant only is scoped to the group you're in. And so you don't have to worry that it's going to read all your other messages, it's going to know your contact book, it's going to be able to read all of the metadata scoped just to that group. And so you can try out new assistants, you can try everything, and if you don't like it, you can delete it. The cool thing is, if, if you and I were in a chat and you scanned it, I can literally just hit lock, lock the convo. Now that it burns the invite key, it's locked. You have a proof of human and like proof of IRL. So if I knew I was with 3 people, we all scanned the room, I locked the room, that room can never let someone else in. I know who's in the room. I can never have an AI get in that room. And then we choose how we show up. So even if you screenshot the room and I never use my name, there's no way to prove who's actually in the room because the trust lives offline, not with the technology. So you don't have to trust the technology. It means you can choose, like if we named the room, you know, Sunday Party, we know what room we're in. It's like being in a private room together in real life. But we don't need to know and put our names in if we don't want. So it lets you have full control over your privacy in a way that like no other apps do because they're all tied to a single ID. What's cool is you start talking to the assistant, you can add anyone to this group. The assistant can do anything. It has SMS built in, it has emails built in, it can go browse, it can be reminders. My favorite one is I have a racquetball club And we use the assistant to schedule all of our games. Uh, and so I'll just say, hey, who wants to play on Saturday? Everyone replies back, hey, I'd love to play. It can coordinate everything. It knows the 3 venues we play. It knows if the weather's under 50 degrees to pick the indoor venue. It knows how to find times between everyone. It'll spend 2 hours coordinating all the chaos of group chats. And then be, I come back 2 and a half hours later and it's like, hey, we're playing tomorrow. Everything's booked. Here's the 4 people who can play. Here's the Google Maps link, and I already went and booked, uh, the courts using the login to my system. And this is like a whole different world, and this is just scoped to this one group. And so the racket club, which we call it Nashville, is one group, but you can do anything. You can have one for your food group, you could have one with your spouse, you can have one to call local service providers to get quotes from people, and then actually a group chat with you and your partner. You're texting people and you don't have to ask your wife like, hey, Did you text the plumber? Because you're, it's actually a group chat that is able to text externally so the assistant can manage things for you. It can summarize, it can negotiate. It can be like, hey, these are the 3 best plumbers. Do you want me to text them back? But you can see everything going on together. So in one group you can have an assistant. Um, and the coolest part is this. Once you're done with it, we have what's called Explode. It's a time bomb. For any group. And so I can set a timer. So let's do 60 seconds. And once you light the fuse and your countdown can't be changed, once it starts, you can't turn it off because the expectation set. If you're in the group with me and we're like, hey, it's Sunday night at 9:00 PM, this thing's gonna blow up. You'll see the timer, 47 seconds, 45 seconds, 44 seconds here on the right-hand side. It's up at the top. And then you'll also see it in here. When that timer ends, it actually burns the keys, rotates them in the protocol on every single person's device. So if there's 20 people in a group, that goes off on all their phones, it explodes it. And then what that does is it allows you to have almost like a scheduled incognito mode, because if there's an AI in that group, it also burns the key for the AI. So you don't have to worry about these agents and assistants having memory forever and having all this information. You can just use them in a more like one-time pop-up ephemeral type way. It's really useful for the weekend, or if you had a really sensitive conversation, you don't want that actually tied and remembered and it's gone. So you'll see on my screen, it just exploded. It rotated the keys. That assistant's gone forever. Anything we said to it no longer exists, and there's no way to ever access it again. And so this idea of like more, um, a faster way to start groups. If you're at a dinner table and you pop up a convo, You can be in a group chat in under 10 seconds because no one has to sign up for the app. Everyone just scans, taps download, they're in the group, and then everyone gets to choose how they show up and how. And then you can add an assistant to the group if you want. And then there's all kind of controls across the group. Another thing we did that's cool is we made photos kind of feel like, uh, we made photos feel like Instagram. So When you're in the group, every group is its own little social network. So you could have a group of 7 people and the photos are beautiful. They're full bleed. You can reply and they always, they always start blurred. So you can always have privacy. You never have to have a photo landing in your chat and then it actually is just like, oh shit, you know, there's a photo. If it's a photo that you wanted to keep blurred, cause you always scroll back through it to show people later, but then you're scrolling through photos you had with your girlfriend. You're like, oh, Oh shit, you know, if you had a little spicy photos, whatever, but you control it. You control the entire experience and it's just a more intimate and private space. And then what's cool is literally it's called reveal mode. You can have your own little social networks. And my vision is that every group chat is its own social network. There's no algorithm, there's no ads. I get to choose who's in it and I can actually You know, we're sharing photos. I can connect an assistant to summarize all of our social media posts, the news this group cares about, the Strava bicycling app data. And actually, it can, it can go collect all this data, and at the end of every day, it can post a photo that is like a Spotify Wrapped for the day, just for the 7 people in this group. And so in this world of algorithms and ads taking all of our attention, you can kind of Flip it and you can say, I want to have my own little private groups, my own little space. I want to lock it. I want it to be private. I want to add an assistant. I want to kick the assistant out. You're in full control. And the app Convo knows nothing. If you go on the website or you go on the Apple App Store, even all of the messengers, the one that is the most private still says phone number collected. And when you look at the Convo App Store, it says data not collected. There's nothing in the app. And so I think like the ability to be fully open sourced, everyone can trust it and read all the code. Everyone can verify for themselves and then have a beautiful app that actually is faster and built for a new era of communication where you're protected from AI, but you can also have a safe space to use it. And this idea of like chats for your friends and family, with AI is a really powerful idea, but we had to rebuild foundation from the ground up. Because if you're adding your single AI assistant to all your different group chats and it knows all this stuff about you across groups, that's going to end up being a disaster.

Wow, sounds amazing, and thanks for a great walkthrough. Got to definitely dive deeper into it and Okay, so Shane, you rushed through all my questions I had prepared. So let's jump into the last block of questions. So with some summaries and stuff. So one of these questions is, what does post-forward secrecy mean, and why does it matter for users?

It's just called forward secrecy. So it's post-compromise security. And forward secrecy. So just to, just to be really clear for the security experts out there, um, you know, there's two things happening. One is something Signal really championed and we built in core to the protocol, which is forward secrecy and post-compromise security. And all that means is if there's 6 people in a room and then you join the group chat, you can't see the history of that room. So whenever someone joins, they don't get to see everything we've talked about before. And what it does, it rotates the keys. There's basically a new state of the room that has now 7 members, and that's a new conversation going forward. So that protects, you know, the past. Like, if you're in a private room with people having a conversation in real life and someone enters the room, they don't just know what happened before they got there. And so I think that's just a really powerful thing. Here's the problem in an AI world. This can change things and we need to be very aware of it. So we are working on how to create a better space for the AI world. So the ability to lock the room so you can't— anyone can't just invite someone in or even add an assistant. And the ability to kick out a member that is an AI assistant and add them back in, or we're even thinking a lot about the ability to pause or remove the member for a moment in time and then also invite it back later, but know that it didn't have any context. There's a lot of things we need to invent here because here's the problem: if I have an AI assistant in the room and there's 6 of us and it's remembering all the stuff going on in that room, and then say you join the room and you're number 7, the first thing you could say is, hey assistant, what happened before I got here? All of a sudden it'll summarize the last 3 hours of conversation the minute you walk in the room because the AI is in the room and it's recording everything. And so there's a new era where we need control on what it can hear. Can I remove? Can I add? Is someone listening? We need to assume people are listening. We actually built Combos in a way where— imagine post-forward secrecy literally doesn't— it's, it's like can't exist if the device is recording the entire conversation the whole time and the AI could just summarize what it's seen on the screen. Well, that's why we give you the ability to choose how you show up. So then it's not actually your name and it's not tight. Like there's just all these new foundational things that we need to think about. I don't— not saying we have all the answers here. I'm saying that in a world where AI is on the device, it can be added to a member in the room. There are all these new little nuances. And we need to think about what is forward secrecy in a world where there is also AI. And I think we have a lot of cool things we're working on. Literally, the conversation we're having with the team last night around this is the ability to remove— you tap remove, it removes itself as a member, but I can add back in and reinvite the AI later. And it doesn't have any of the knowledge of whatever conversation happened when it was out of the room. It's like forward secrecy for assistants and agents. And so we're working a lot on like, what is this new foundation? And we are early in that exploration, but I think we're building an entirely new foundation where you can have private communication with humans and AI, and you can be protected from it, but also you can also, uh, work safely with it. Got it.

Thanks for putting everything in order. And actually, we can spend half an hour more speaking about AI integration, but let's leave it for future discussions. And since we get into the final part of today's podcast, let's drop some teasers and/or announcements. So could you please tell us what should we expect in the upcoming year from Convo? What should we put an eye on?

We're just getting ready to roll out Convo's with Convo's assistants. And now you can add your own group chat assistant to every single group with your friends and family. Um, this idea of one-time groups that can do anything for your group— you can have a different assistant across all of your groups. It's not one AI for me. That's ChatGPT and Claude and all these others and OpenClaw. It's actually a thousand different AI assistants. For every group. Every group is its own little economy, and every group should have its own assistant. It should have its own phone numbers, have its own emails. It should have its own currency. It should have a shared wallet. Like, every group chat is its own little economy. So we're really excited to roll out Convo's assistants. We're also rolling out a full open-source web platform. So, you know, you can use Convo on iOS and then the Android, but also you can use it, uh, on the web. And that to me is really powerful because when there's no signup, I can just send you a link and you can have the most secure communication with just sending someone a link instantly. And the idea of pop-up conversations— our logo is a balloon, so you can pop up a chat. You can also pop it, explode it, right? It's a little more just like fun. But the idea that you can have more ephemeral, one-time, quick, really secure communication that isn't tied to like a single identifier or a tracking or a phone number or a login. And actually, I can just spin up a group of 3 people, chat, add an assistant, set a timer for 24 hours. It's gone when it's done. I think there's a huge opportunity to change the communication paradigm of the web when everything's not logged. Today, group chat feels like you add a contact and really go get everyone to add you to their address book. I think tomorrow, actually, groups should be more like real life. You meet people, you pop up a chat, you can chat digitally. It doesn't have to last forever. It can if you want. You can use AI, you can't. It's just way more fluid. And my prediction is that 90% of group chats in the world don't exist yet because it's too hard to start them.

Yeah, sounds awesome. And a lot of big things are yet to come. Looking forward to meeting and trying them. And well, we'll see how you try it out.

It works in Russia today. Go to the App Store. Are you, are you on iOS?

Uh, yep.

Download the app right here. You have, I mean, you want to do this right? Let's do it right.

Uh, yeah, let's do it.

And here, watch this. This will be an under— I'll see if this works. Um, let me, uh, make this— this would be a good piece of content for you— make it actually real. Check it out.

Okay, let's do it.

All right, you see my screen?

Uh, yeah.

See it?

Yeah.

All right, I'll pop up a combo. Use your camera, scan the code. Okay, so all you have to do is tap download, takes a few seconds, and then there's no sign up. So when you open the app, you don't even have to sign up. Let me know when it's ready.

Uh, well, uh, it's, uh It's opening. Maybe I need to do some stuff with the VPN or changing my region to download because I see this and then— oh yeah, I can get it.

There you go.

Okay, while I'm downloading it, let's Uh, I see I need to update my iOS.

Oh, you're on the old iOS? Yeah, we built it for the future, and so it's iOS 26 and later, which came out last September.

Okay, that's, uh, that's the first thing I will do after this, uh, right after.

So take that link I sent you, text that link to yourself. That is the invite link. So I'll name this— what's your name, Sam? Max.

Yeah, Max.

Max and Shane. Um, and then that group's waiting for you, and then the only people that have it are me and you, right? And then by the time this podcast comes out, that QR code— I'll lock the room, and then it actually burns that invite link so that QR code is no longer valid, and we'll have a private space. I can add an AI assistant here for us called Instant Assistance. And we can have everything here.

Awesome. So shifting to Canvas and well, to finish today's discussion, let's— sorry, I was so inspired by downloading Canvas. So can you please, Shane, go ahead with some piece of advice addressing directly to our audience? So this might be some call to action, some basics reminder, whatever comes to your mind to share with our viewers. So please go ahead.

The thing on my mind right now is how to build technology that connects us more. If you— even if you see everything we're building, you know, there's one path where we're all using AI and we're all in our own little silos and our own little bubbles. And, you know, we already have a loneliness epidemic globally and there's like addiction to social media and all these things. And AI is more addictive than all of them. And a lot of the things I see being built are just, I end up going down a path for 4 hours talking to this AI robot and it's just an isolated, little lonely world. Um, and so a lot of the things we're trying to build are how do we build technology that connects us and brings us together and really like brings back the humanness in technology. And I think, uh, we lost a lot of that. So when we think about everything we can build in the future, even when building with AI, the thing that's on my mind is how do you use AI to actually connect us more? How do we use technology to connect us more? How do we let technology do things for us so we can actually spend more time in real life and not be on our devices all the time. So I'm, I'm kind of trying to think a lot about that, and so encouraging people to find the use cases that make us more human and make us more connected.

Wow, a very encouraging and philosophical ending, and thanks for sharing. Nothing to add here but a small piece of advice. So guys, keep your iOS up to date not to miss the opportunities to get in touch with, with unique people. And well, for today that's it. Thank you very much, Shane, for your time, for dealing with some technical issues I had on my end. It was a pleasure to meet you and hope to see you in more episodes.

Amazing, thank you for having me. And you know, uh, Yeah, update your phone.

Well done. And yeah, of course, thanks for our audience for watching us till the end, guys. Uh, stay tuned, stay safe, secure, and, uh, see you in more episodes. Bye-bye.

Bye, have a good one.