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A few weeks ago Zillow suspended its iBuying program because it had too much inventory on hand. That was actually a precursor to the company fully exiting the space which is a massive change for its business. Steve Symington joins 7investing Now to talk about what happened, what it means for Zillow, and what it may mean for the concept of iBuying in general. And, later in the show, CryptoEQ’s Spencer Randall comes on talk about the Metaverse, starting with telling us what it is.
November 5, 2021
A few weeks ago Zillow suspended its iBuying program because it had too much inventory on hand. That was actually a precursor to the company fully exiting the space which is a massive change for its business. Steve Symington joins 7investing Now to talk about what happened, what it means for Zillow, and what it may mean for the concept of iBuying in general. And, later in the show, CryptoEQ’s Spencer Randall comes on talk about the Metaverse, starting with telling us what it is.
Sam Bailey 0:14 Welcome to 7investing Now, a show that teaches you how to take a long term view on investing by better understanding what’s happening in the market now.
Dan Kline 0:22 Good afternoon 7investors and welcome to the Friday edition of 7investing Now. My name of course is Daniel Brooks Kline. I’m the host of the program, and I’m being joined today by Steve Symington. We’re going to talk about Zillow (NASDAQ: Z). We’re gonna talk about iBuying. And later on in the program, Spencer Randall, our partner from CryptoEQ, is going to join us. I hope in a question mark suit but probably not. And we’re going to talk about the metaverse.
I don’t really understand what the metaverse is, why I would want to be there. I like the actual universe that we live in. But he is going to explain all of that. Though that being said, Steve, my house is infested with ants and I had an exterminator in today. And I’m guessing my virtual house in the metaverse would not have that problem. Steve, are ants an issue there? Or do they all freeze to death in Montana?
Steve Symington 1:09 I mean, I feel like there might be something like creepers in Minecraft or something. You could have digital monsters if you really wanted to. But I suppose if you didn’t want it to be an option, it doesn’t need to be.
Dan Kline 1:21 Digimon are digital monsters and monsters are the champions. I heard that commercial so many times when my son was young, it is just completely in my head. But that’s not the topic.
We had some pretty shocking news from Zillow this week. Steve, I’m going to resist the urge to say I told you so. But I will say I did about 800 shows over the past two years. That’s an exaggeration. But I did a lot where I told very smart people, some of my best friends in the world, that, oh, I don’t think this is going to be a great business. Margins are really tight. It’s really volatile. It’s really hard to make money. And I don’t like to be right. It’s actually easy to be right when you’re contrarian, which I tend to be, so I’m not taking huge credit here. But Steve, what happened with Zillow? And we of course would love your questions and comments if you want to weigh in.
Steve Symington 2:06 So there’s some nuance there right with the the iBuying industry in general and we’ll get to that in a minute. But starting with Zillow, this was just shocking in more ways than one. Because Zillow came out and announced. So for perspective, let’s start just a couple of weeks ago, they announced that they were putting home purchases on pause through their Zillow offers iBuying business. And that was somewhat surprising, but not really they blamed basically a lack of labor available in the market to be able to fix up the homes they’d already purchased.
So that was interesting, kind of raised some eyebrows and we said okay, temporary pause. And then just a couple weeks later, several days ago, Bloomberg came out reported that Zillow was trying to sell 7000 homes at a loss essentially. And that raised more eyebrows because Zillow ended last quarter with about 3100 homes on its inventory. Oh my gosh, how are they trying to sell 7000? Kind of stunning news there. But then Zillow followed up a day later and said we are suspending Zillow offers indefinitely. The market is way too volatile for our algorithms. And they also revealed that they ended the quarter with over 9000, actually 9790 homes on inventory. Bonkers.
They bought almost 9700 homes during the quarter sold only 3000 in the process. And basically they said it was an admission that their algorithms had failed them spectacularly. So it was really kind of remarkable in the sense that everything was going splendidly with the re-ramp of Zillow offers, even earlier this year was a source of strength and the margins were moving in the right direction. The economics of the business were kind of moving exactly where Zillow’s management said it would. They said within two to four years, this was last year, they expected it to be a $20 billion revenue run rate business with reasonably attractive economics. So kind of interesting how it was moving in the right direction. But then you have to admit this isn’t a normal real estate market. Right? That’s the hard part.
Dan Kline 4:13 But there’s never a normal real estate market, and that’s the problem. When we moved from Connecticut, we sold our house in like the three weeks where the market was terrible, and it probably cost us like $25,000. If we had literally been able to sell a month later, we didn’t know that of course, because we could have just waited but we didn’t. Real estate is always volatile. So when you’re doing iBuying here’s what you do. You buy a house at, let’s say 7% to 10% because it’s about a 6% real estate commission. They take a little bit more about somewhere between 6% and 10% less than what the going market rate would be. And then in theory, they put some money into it. That’s always difficult because Steve, I might put in a beautiful granite countertops and you want poured concrete.
So whether that’s valuable to the person or not, is an issue, and then they resell it. So that means they’re hoping that the market goes up a little while they own it, that the work they did adds some value to the price. But if it doesn’t, if the market stays flat, or goes down a little bit, the margins you’re talking about are really small. But Steve, is there a tactical error here? If they just said we’re pausing and not said we’re cancelling?
Steve Symington 5:21 Yeah. It seems like it was just the last couple of weeks. It was a huge about-face, that’s the thing. They went from, we’re suspending purchases through the end of the year to we’re done for good. And I mean, they’re eaten it hard. There was a $304 million write down in inventory on the homes in their inventory generated and adjusted EBITA loss of $381 million for just that segment alone this quarter. And that was the bizarre part was that it was such an about face. And I think this is, at least at this stage, it seems like a very Zillow specific thing, right? Not the market conditions, obviously all the iBuyers like Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN) and Opendoor (NASDAQ: OPEN) are struggling with the same market conditions.
But I’ve read reports that, and we need to confirm this still, but Opendoor and Redfin, we’re being more conservative about there iBuying. Kind of scaling things back because of the volatility. Whereas Zillow appeared to have leaned harder on its algorithms to kind of pull it through and hopefully extend kind of its its gains in ramping this. And, if anyone’s supposed to have a front row seat to how the real estate market is working, it should be Zillow, right? They boast that they had 11 million machine learning models running every single night to update their Zestimates. And they said within, like 90% or 95% of their Zestimates were within 5% of the actual houses’ value. And it sort of held true until it didn’t. And then Zillow said that a lot more people accepted their Z-offers the Zillow Offers offer than they expected, which is why they ended up purchasing almost 10,000 homes this quarter, because they said whoops, like we shouldn’t have accepted all those offers.
And of course, people are looking at this saying, Zillow’s offering me what for my house? Yeah, I’ll take it. But what’s also crazy is they have almost 8200 homes under contract at the end of the quarter that they say, you know what, we’re gonna fulfill those contracts. And it’s gonna take several quarters to wind it down, they’re also laying off 25% of their workforce over the next several quarters. So it’s going to be a slog for Zillow from here. And, man, what a painful, shocking announcement for this. And hey, I’ll give you that I told you so. I don’t think it necessarily translates to Opendoor and Redfin. I think they were more, they’ve been more conservative, at least from early reports. But yet to confirm that. Should be interesting to watch those two as well.
Dan Kline 7:45 So when we sold our condo, Steve, I explored some, I always thought it was “Zest”imate. But “Z”estimate makes a lot more sense. We explored some people just buying it for cash. And the ones who were doing it, were buying it at well below market. And that makes sense. We sold for like, I don’t know, $330,000-$340,000 I forget the exact number. And if you can buy that for like $300,000. Well, that gives you a lot of leeway. Especially because our plays didn’t particularly need any work. It was very neutral, very basic. But the offers we got were like $260,000, like they were dreadful. Now if we needed cash or if we had paid cash or maybe if we bought 20 years ago and we paid $30 grand for it and now it was worth that it wouldn’t matter. Or we’re trying to buy something. But Steve, is this a case of Zillow had to do this, or like all of Zillow goes out of business.
Steve Symington 8:34 Yeah, I think, the way they put it was that the volatility and the potential negative impact on their business from quarter to quarter was so much greater than they expected that they said you know what, this isn’t worth it, which is just the shocking admission for a business that they had touted as potentially. Looking at this, Zillow from its lows in March had like quadrupled, quintupled by this past February, and then as this kind of unfolded it’s pulled back really hard. It’s trading up kind of modestly from early 2020 levels.
And, I think Zillow, to be fair, they still have a relatively healthy core business with their premium agents, advertising and their ability to generate modest growth from that. I think they said their premium agents ad business was up like 16% year over year. And their mortgages business, which is still very tiny, was up like 30%. They have some bets in rentals as well.
But this is a fundamentally different business if you’re a Zillow shareholder from the one that they were touting earlier this year even. And without this incremental growth, it definitely changes the story here. And I would lean harder toward those businesses that are maybe still in the iBuying race. Because I do think there are some companies that can potentially win in this space by being conservative and maybe not leaning so hard on an algorithm to determine whether you should buy. Because that’s proven to be a extraordinarily difficult task. And, yeah, Zillow basically just threw in the towel and said, you know what, we’re going to focus on our core business. So that’s tough.
Dan Kline 10:18 We will get to Spencer Randall in just a few minutes. But Steve, I actually think the business here, and I would argue that Zillow is a nice business, not a great investment. The business here isn’t selling houses. You’re playing with 6%. They are disrupting something that costs 6%. And I would argue that that 6% is really worth it in a difficult real estate market. My agent helped me buy our vacation property, and we never would have got it. And so that’s 6% is totally worth it.
But that being said, I’m actually really bullish on all the ancillary things Zillow could sell you. Your commission on a mortgage is basically a mortgage payment. You can take a commission on a home inspection, on insurance, and the ongoing, payment on that. I actually think Zillow could use that to like figure out ways to sell like home warranties. And who knows, maybe they could sell you the Roomba subscription plan? Isn’t that sort of like where they’re going to be go? Sort of a one stop shop for all things new house related?
Steve Symington 11:17 Yeah, I mean, one stop shop for all things new house related with the exception of actually purchasing that house now is where they are. And I would say that 6% model is ripe for disruption. Because there’s an increasing number of people who believe it’s not worth it. You’re someone who does a lot of real estate transactions, right. So, you kind of uniquely understand the value that a good real estate agent provides.
But a company like Redfin, they can actually step out and say we’ll charge you 1% or 1.5% on both sides of the transaction if you do it with our agents. That’s a really interesting model that can take a lot of market share from the traditional 6% kind of group.
But what was interesting about iBuying, specifically, is when when these companies buy it, they’re not charging that lower commission to buy or sell it. And a lot of these sellers were actually willing to accept 7% to 9% commissions for the relative convenience of being able to have a company that buys your house and does all the repairs for you. You just don’t have to do anything. You accept a slightly lower offer at a slightly higher commission. You eat that and say, you know what, convenience is worth it. That was the attractiveness of the iBuying model was even at a higher commission, people are willing to bite that bullet.
But yeah, I think it kind of shifts the dynamic of the industry and potentially makes the existing remaining iBuyers a little bit stronger for their ability to not have to compete with Zillow, which was just driving prices up, unintentionally.
Dan Kline 12:46 And private money is driving prices up. That’s a problem in the resort market. And I would argue that the Redfins of the world, we’re gonna move off this in a second, but the Redfins of the world will kill all the bad real estate agents, which might stop some of them from later growing into good real estate agents. But they’re not necessarily going to handle like a difficult house to sell or buying in a competitive market.
I want to take this comment from ZL, because it touches upon something. It’s not what we’ve been talking about. But Sam, do you want to bring that up? “Do you guys have a price target for Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) market cap is around $900 billion, how much higher can it go”? We do not do price targets. What we do at 7investing is we look at a company, we look at its total addressable market, we look at its valuation, we look at its management, we look at all the different things it can do. And go, is this a company we believe can grow? Facebook is not a company I’m particularly a fan of, we’re going to talk about it a little bit with Spencer Randall. But it is a company that you can make an argument could be three times bigger, could be five times bigger. I’m not saying it will. I don’t particularly like what they’re doing. And we’ll talk about that momentarily. But Steve wanted to give you a chance here.
Steve Symington 13:51 Yeah. So if you look at our frequently asked questions, we have one Frequently Asked Questions article on the www.7investing.com website called “Why doesn’t 7investing assign price targets”. And we go into kind of some great detail. And the big reason is that price targets vary based on the inputs and vary widely. So that’s why you’ll see analysts who might have a price target for Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) anywhere between $15 bucks a share and $1000 right back when it was pre-split.
Dan Kline 14:18 If you see it at $15, buy it!
Steve Symington 14:23 Yeah, unless it’s like a 20 to 1 split or something. But yeah, you’ll never see us assign a specific price target to the companies that we recommend. Rather we focus on the long term growth stories and their potential to increase their share price relative to their current valuation. So we recognize that price targets tend to be an exercise in futility and can vary widely based on the inputs that you place in them.
Dan Kline 14:50 They can also stop you from buying really good companies.
So what do we do at 7investing? We offer our seven best stock picks each month. So each advisor makes a pick. It’s our highest conviction pick. And then we do a write up on that pick. A big, expansive, like you could just read the key takeaways. You could read the valuation, you could read the management, you could read all of it.
I today, Steve worked on my transcript because on the eighth of the month, we add transcripts for the videos we record, which is basically, we pitch everybody, and one of them this month got heated. I say heated, that’s a negative word. It was very friendly, heated. But there was definitely one of our advisers pushed back very hard on one of the picks. So you don’t just get the bull case. You also get the bear case. You get what we don’t like.
How do you become a member? There are two ways to do that. First, the easy way. You go to www.7investing.com/subscribe. There you can join for $49 a month, or, and this is the deal, $399 a year. That is the amazing, easy way to do it. The other way to do it is to find Steve on the street and hand him $49 every month that’s very tricky. So we recommend that you go to www.7investing.com/subscribe to join.
We also have an $84 per year student membership. You have to be an actively enrolled student. You can buy it for a student, but it has to be an actively enrolled student at any level of education. So you could be getting your master’s degree, you are a student. You can be in culinary school, Steve do we count culinary school as education? We are open! You’re could be studying to become the Rug Doctor. No, that probably does not work. But if you have trouble with that, shoot us an email at info@7investing.com.
At this time, let us welcome our good friend, Spencer Randall. He is one of the founders of CryptoEQ. Spencer, how are you today?
Spencer Randall 16:41 Happy Friday. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Dan Kline 16:43 We are glad to have you. We’re gonna talk about Meta, Facebook, and the metaverse. This sounds like something out of a Marvel movie. Like if you told me that Ultron was going to take over the metaverse I would not be at all surprised. But that’s not what’s happening here. But why don’t we start Spencer, and Steve jump in wherever you want here. Why don’t we start with what is the metaverse?
Spencer Randall 17:07 Yeah, so we’ve been doing a lot of content on this lately. And I think the best frame of reference for people is the movie Ready Player One. So like when I say the word metaverse in a live stream or Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) Space. Most people ask, Hey, is this like that movie that came out a few years ago called, was it, Ready Player? And so yes, I would say that the metaverse could be a lot like what plays out in that film. And that there’s headsets. And there’s augmented reality. And there’s virtual reality. And it’s very immersive.
I think having watched the whole keynote from Meta, and Facebook and Mark and the team, it feels like a continuation of technological advancement. It feels like a more immersive experience, where the focal point isn’t necessarily the device, or devices. You know, we’re all looking at screens in this present moment. But an integration of the headset, making you feel more like it’s in person. So it’s like, in my mind, it’s an adaptation of what we call the meatspace, the physical space that, Dan I know you open the show you like the in-person stuff. It’s an integration of the meatspace with the internet and technology. And what I see is the advancement of interaction.
Dan Kline 18:27 If you’d like to meet me, I will be in Las Vegas next week. Shoot me a DM happy to buy you a cup of coffee. There might be someone else with me who would be enjoyable to meet from our past world.
That being said, so I want to hit a couple of points here. We’ve been promised this since like 1982. Like you’d go to arcades back in the early days, and there’d be headsets. And is there any proof that people actually want this? Because I see some business uses, like I’ll go to a board meeting, or I’m not on any boards, or I’ll go to a meeting where it feels like we’re all in the same room. And I guess we all walk over and get virtual snacks together. Like I’m not sure what happens there. I’ll maybe get together with like some some friends to play poker, like that seems kind of cool. But for the most part, this seems like it’s very niche. And by the way, the book Ready Player One, not the movie Ready Player One. It was a book long before. Also written by Ernest Cline, who is not related, not spelled the same way, and I’ve never read it. So that’s also a pretty bleak future. Are we sure people want this?
Spencer Randall 19:30 So great point about it was a book before film. Definitely take that one. I think the film’s a nice reference because you can get the visualization and the immersiveness. Is the market ready for this? Great question. Well, let’s look where we have some traction. And so for how this ties into CryptoEQ and our research, is there’s a lot of demand for the gaming piece. So you know in the the keynote, gaming is touted as the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Now, if you look at the continuation of gaming, I do think that eSports is incredible. I do think that immersive gaming as a theme makes sense. And I think that blockchain games are showing early stages of traction.
So that’s where it ties into our business that CryptoEQ is the gaming component and the entertainment component. So of the hour and a half keynote, right? There’s really four segments. There was the home, the worlds, the workrooms and the marketplace. So those were the four. And so where do I think adoption would occur first? To me it would be the worlds. So that the hobbyists and the entertainment piece, the fun piece. And the marketplace for creators. So that’s where I think we could have traction early. And if you look at the gaming component within the virtual worlds piece, on the blockchain side, we already have some traction. So the best piece of data I could point to to say, does the market want this, would be Axie Infinity’s millions of active users. So that would be the one place I would start if folks are wanting to look more into this would be blockchain gaming, and specifically Axie Infinity as a tie in to the metaverse.
Dan Kline 21:22 Steve let me jump in here. Are your kids doing anything in the so called metaverse? Are they playing Roblox (NYSE: RBLX)? Which I would say is at least metaverse adjacent?
Steve Symington 21:29 Oh, yes. It’s kind of stunning to me to see how quickly they’re willing to adopt these new technologies right? Several months ago I reached the point where my kids have known songs are out there now popular on the radio for six months, right. So like, I feel like the old person in that sense. But yeah, I sit down watch my seven year old, he hops into Roblox picks a game. And he knows exactly what he’s doing. Same thing with Minecraft and Fortnight, right? Of course, metaverse adjacent, but you make this broad enough, and, I think if any company is positioned well enough. And to be clear, Facebook is now what Meta Technologies [Meta Platforms, Inc.] or something Meta is the new company name. I think if any company can do it, Facebook can. And they have the reach to play this game.
But, you do see other companies also kind of positioning themselves for success in the metaverse. And, I think you’re gonna see, like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), for example, is kind of prepping to meet demand for new computing requirements for this. And I think I read something about Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). It was was Nadella, right?, stepping out and talking about their kind of efforts to prepare. And it could be huge, and maybe we’ve got a bunch of bitter now, middle-to-older adults who are mad that it wasn’t a thing when they were back in the 80’s and 70’s. But I think now it’s technologically feasible. And, as soon as we have big businesses plowing 10’s of billions of dollars into this effort, it can be really, really interesting.
Dan Kline 23:15 So I’ll throw it back to Spencer in a second. I believe in the gaming aspect. I believe in the business aspect. I even believe in like, we’ve seen with Microsoft and HoloLens, the healthcare aspect or the architectural. So all of those are uses. I’m not sure I believe in the Ready Player One world where we all live in these like depressing stacked up vans, and we escape to this reality. That’s not a future anyone is looking for. So with Facebook here, and I want to throw out a little note to any business journalist watching. Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta, they did not change the name of the product Facebook to Meta. So they’re calling the Oculus group Meta now, but Facebook is still Facebook.
So it’s like when you talking about Google the search engine, you don’t call it Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL). So I know that’s silly, but I’ve seen that incorrect a lot of times. But Spencer, what do you think Facebook is doing here? And how is it going to work? Because this doesn’t seem to me like a company that has its pulse on what actual real people want to do. That seems like something they got lucky with once and had been really bad at since then.
Spencer Randall 24:19 Yeah, Mark even said that in the keynote. He talked about how much they’ve been focusing on listening to feedback instead of deploying the product that people may not want. What’s attractive to me is the integration with blockchain. And so they do talk about interoperability. Which that, that really ties into our research. Because if you have different virtual worlds that are built in parallel. So I’ll try to give some more concrete examples. There’s a project called Decentraland that is a virtual world that has an underlying crypto asset, a token that powers the economy.
There’s a virtual world called The Sandbox that has a blockchain component with an underlying token that powers The Sandbox economy. So if those are to integrate, and those virtual worlds are tied together by the metaverse, the universe, there has to be interoperability between those different virtual worlds if you want to teleport or planet hop.
And so the mental model that I see is a company, it doesn’t have to be Facebook, but a company that has network effects around a universe, a metaverse that is specializing in tying these different virtual worlds together, so that you can swap your created items, your in-game items, your art, your virtual shoes, your virtual skins, everything that you would want to exist virtually for fun between the worlds.
So that’s the that’s how I’m thinking about it this Friday afternoon. It’s all changing so fast. And then I’d also add to Dan’s point, the end game of Ready Player One. I think that even to have meaningful adoption of the headsets themselves for gaming, we’re still looking at five to 10 years. I think this is a long, long road. And I think that starting with the fun hobby aspect of gaming as entertainment clicks for me, because I’m a gamer at heart. I’ve played a lot of games and so that’s where it clicks for me.
Dan Kline 26:26 I do really want to meet Pac Man. So that is a thing. But doesn’t it all come down to technology? I have an Oculus, I have the early version of the Oculus. And it’s like fun for like 10 minutes, but it’s heavy, and it’s not great. So don’t we need to get to sort of like Tony Stark sunglasses land? Where this is just something that’s perfectly comfortable to wear? And then yeah, like, wouldn’t it be awesome if the 7investing happy hour we all felt like we were in the same room. I think that’d be really cool. But not if I have to wear like a 12 pound Nintendo Virtual Boy on my head. That’s what, like a 90’s product? It hasn’t gotten that much better except it’s not just red dots it’s a pretty immersive world.
Spencer Randall 27:07 Yeah, well, sorry to jump in Steve. It’s like the have a dozen different initiatives that they walked through in the keynote. And I would say like all of the problems are in the process of being addressed. I mean, it is a lot of product development to take a heavy, clunky headset and turn it into something that is wearable and integrated and interchangeable with say, your your favorite sunglasses. So I think all the feedback’s heard and they’re working on it. My experience, playing around with VR headsets, they’re disorienting. I agree with everything that you said. It’s not something that I think I would be ready to do for hours just because it was disorienting. But in spurts I thought it was very exciting. And I could see myself using one recreationally for entertainment.
Dan Kline 27:59 I tried watching Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) on the Oculus on a plane. Because it’s actually a really cool way, like if you download something, it is a really cool way to watch it because it’s very immersive. The problem is the device itself is so heavy if you don’t have neck support. So take that to the Ray Bans, or the other things, and if you can make it, I see the promise. So talk a little bit Spencer, and then Steve, I’ll let you get get a word in before we close out here. What is GameFi? You put the note on the sheet here. Tell me what GameFi is and how it relates to what you guys are doing it CryptoEQ.
Spencer Randall 28:30 Yeah, GameFi is the intersection of gaming and finance. And it’s hard for us to talk about blockchain gaming without also talking about the metaverse. They’re very tangential, very interrelated. To me the GameFi movement, the blockchain gaming movement, is the idea of a direct monetization and path of a gamers efforts. So with the explosion of Twitch, which is still certainly on the upside, still trending up. Gamers are monetizing attention. But what I’m talking about is taking your actual in-game items and efforts and transacting in a blockchain based marketplace and being compensated in real world value in a token of your choosing for your in-game work. So that’s the heart of GameFi me, the killer app is a direct path to monetization for in-game creators and in-game players.
Dan Kline 29:28 The token of Steve’s choosing would of course be Chucky Cheese tokens. But Steve, let you get a last word in here.
Steve Symington 29:34 Yeah, I’m still kind of catching up on the conversation, there’s so much to process in here. I haven’t watched the the keynote from Facebook. I’m sensing that’s worth a watch, correct? For sure, if we have a little bit of time. Did he demonstrate ReSkin on that keynote or was that a separate video that he was talking about, by the way?
Spencer Randall 29:57 Well, if by ReSkin do you mean like your ability to change in avatar?
Steve Symington 30:01 No like ReSkin. I know Zuckerberg was subsequently talking about a new material called ReSkin, R-E-S-K-I-N. It’s like a tactile sensing suit that’s really low cost to manufacture that could kind of support their metaverse ambitions for human interaction with with actual objects.
Spencer Randall 30:21 So along the lines of like haptics?
Steve Symington 30:24 Yeah.
Spencer Randall 30:25 Okay. Yeah. So there’s all these different product lines and segments within Meta’s efforts. And yes, they do talk about haptic and augmented reality and more immersive experiences. So they touch on it.
Steve Symington 30:39 Yeah. Okay. I really need to dig into that keynote now I’m sensing. So pun intended, right, sensing?
Spencer Randall 30:48 Well, I do feel like, I’m not a big fan of Facebook’s products today. Lots of questions and concerns. But the idea of the metaverse I’m a fan of, as the theme, I’m a fan of that. And I think the keynote’s important to watch not necessarily for Facebook itself, but for what could define the next five to 10 years of efforts from technology companies. That’s the way I looked at the keynote.
Dan Kline 31:15 Spencer Randall, we’ll revisit this [AUDIO DROPPED]
Steve Symington 31:19 Oh, did we lose Dan?
Spencer Randall 31:22 We might have, he might be shifting to the metaverse now.
Steve Symington 31:25 At least he’s frozen with a good face
Dan Kline 31:27 We’ll be back, or we maybe just disappeared. I am not entirely sure of that. But we will be back on Monday. I’ll be in Las Vegas. If you’d like to get in touch with us info@7investing.com. And with that Sam, why don’t we end the show because [AUDIO DROPPED].
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