Big Technology Podcast - 2022 In Review, 2023 Predictions — With Casey Newton

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Casey Newton is the editor of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork. He joins Big Technology Podcast to keep up an annual tradition of looking back on the year that was, and looking ahead to the year that will be. In this episode, we review the wild developments at Twitter, the decline of Web3, and Amazon and Meta's progress in 2022. Then, we predict what will take place with ChatGPT, state bans on content moderation, Substack's ad business, and Apple's App Store. Tune in for one of our most fun shows of the year. If you like Big Technology Podcast, please rate it five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. (Big thank you to all who rated in the past few weeks!!). For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. Kason Newton is our guest today. He is the editor of Platformer and the co-host of Hard Fork, and he has been on an absolute role this past year with a series of high-profile Twitter, or scoops. And he's added about 50,000 people to his newsletter. Every year, or at least in the past two years running, Casey and I get together. We take a look back at the year that was and then make some predictions for the year ahead. I think it's a great exercise. It's a way to really take

stock, put a stake in the ground and say, where are we moving and where have we moved from? And it's one of my favorite podcasts of the year because it's absolutely a blast to look back and forward with Casey. And what a year it's been. We have so much to talk about and so So much of the news over the past year has really come out of the blue, everything from generative AI to the decline of crypto, things like FTX, we're talking about that last year. And of course, the real demise of Web3 has been pretty wild to watch. There's Elon and Twitter. How can we forget them?

And when we do these exercises, we can also take some guesses as to where we're going. Are we going to see interesting new legislation come down the pike? Are we going to see new applications or new worries about some of the new artificial intelligence technology that we have at our disposal, and what the heck is going to happen in Twitter, which we'll definitely start with that. So it's going to be a fun show. Casey always brings his A-game, and I'm sure this is not going to be any different. Casey, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Alex. It's great to do this again. We did it last year, and here we are again. It's been a really wild year. It's interesting. I listened back to our episode from last year,

and, you know, I had, I had just gotten COVID and, you know, that was still top of mind. And we were talking a little bit about like meta's business and Amazon's business. And then the year took some really crazy turns. So it'll be fun to recap some of them. I don't even care about those other companies anymore. Now all I think about is Twitter. Exactly. So one of your predictions last year was there was going to be a lot of drama in Twitter.

Drama, Twitter was back. What happened? Let me quickly pull up the Wikipedia page to see if I can get. this straight. Yeah, Elon Musk bought the company and took a business that had been worth about $5 billion, or who had generated $5 billion in revenue last year and rendered it worthless in about six weeks. So it was really quite dramatic. Yeah. So do you think Twitter is worthless today? No, but I do think that there is a real likelihood that he triggered a death spiral over this most recent weekend before we're recording here. I do not see how the company comes

back from what this man has just put it through. Okay, and I promise we're going to do a lot of 2020 to recap and look it forward to 2023, but I feel like we need to start with the current event here, which is the Twitter thing. Talk a little bit about that death spiral. I mean, he suspended, you know, one thing to suspend journalists, he suspended Paul Graham. Like, once you start suspending like the people, the legendary venture capitalists, like there's something going on there, but go ahead. Well, that's exactly right.

You know, like on some level, it was no surprise that he suspended journalists. Like, clearly, you know, the crowd that he runs in has been dying for a chance to suspend journalists for whatever made up reasons for a long time. But, you know, Paul Graham, you know, just a few weeks ago was tweeting things like, wow, you know, seems like a lot of people out there think they know how to run a company better than Elon Musk. You know, I mean, like he was just sort of firmly in the camp of folks who think that, you know, Elon is a genius. And Paul then dared to tweet out a link to his. his Mastodon, or rather a link to his personal page, which contained a link to his Mastodon. He didn't even, yeah, he was careful not to break Elon's rules. Yeah, he didn't break the rules. And, well, look, look where we are now. You know, Paul's, I saw Paul's over on Mastod now. And, you know, even like, you know, I'm not even going to say his name, but there's this sort of like, you know, intellectual dark web like anti-vaxxer, you know, even he's

tweeting like, you know, Elon's like lost the plot here. Because, of course, they all thought that he was coming here in the name of free speech. And then he's like, oh, by the way, you can't post a link to your Instagram. I mean, it's like, Elon has truly made fools of them all. Yeah, he's been more restrictive on speech than previous Twitter was. Now, of course, it's coming through a different fashion. And you could argue that the previous Twitter did restrict speech in its own way. But the impulsivity with which Elon is banning people is really unbelievable.

Yeah. And it's just not, it's not principled, you know? I mean, it just came from. from a place of sheer existential terror that because of the previous mistakes that he made running the platform over the past six weeks, people had just started to flee.

And he was like, well, you know, we can't have that. So just a complete embarrassment after a set of cell phones. Yeah. And now why do you think that, so death spiral basically triggering something that is going to cause the death

and you can't really come out of it. So what is that? What exactly do you think's happen? Well, I mean, look, you know, Twitter was an advertising business, right? They made 90% of their revenue from ads last year. Then he tanked that ad business by letting 60,000 of the worst people

to ever tweet back onto the platform by creating a brand impersonation crisis with the botch relaunch of Twitter Blue. And so I have a very hard time believing that Twitter is going to be having a great quarter for ads. In fact, we've actually heard, you know, that they're down by just staggering percentages over the previous year. And that's, you know, at a time when the ad revenue should be up because the World Cup is happening. And that's traditionally Twitter's best performing time ever is sort of when the World Cup is going on. So the ads business is tanking. Then they are trying to relaunch this blue thing to get a verification badge, but the initial launch was so bad. It's relatively expensive. It doesn't really come with any features. And then

you sort of throw into the mix the fact that the policies are just changing every single day in radical ways. And that's just undermining trust in the platform, right? Why am I going to pay Elon Musk 11 bucks if he's just going to tell me the next day like, well, you know, you can't tweet a link to your Instagram. So he's just destroyed that foundation of trust. And then by suspending the journalist, he triggered the sort of moment, this long overdue reckoning where reporters are like, okay, well, like clearly Twitter is not going to be where I'm distributing my news for the rest of my life. I got to go build a lifeboat somewhere else. And I think what he's going to find six months from now is that the journalist who he so disdains

were one of the major forces that were propping Twitter up because it, like, they were the reason that it set the global news agenda. Because like, all the reporters were in one chat room, now those reporters are going to be other places, right? And when you don't have them, they're breaking news all the time or news is breaking in other places, you're just going to sap the platform of that vitality,

which was its only path to making back that ad revenue or subscription revenue. So it's just, it is all starting to fall apart. And it's interesting that after so long running the platform, being close to the platform, the thing that Jack Dorsey settled on when he was, the CEO's Twitter was a news app.

And it was the home for news. He went all the way in on news. You're right. the people, if you lose the people that are breaking the news on the app, it's going to be a lot more difficult to fulfill that value proposition. And then you look at the others who want to get in. I mean, look at Andreessen Horowitz, right? Speaking of failures over the past year, their future app is, future news site is dead. Their attempt to displace media with Clubhouse is dead. The Andreessen Horowitz podcasts are not doing very well. I mean, it's all sort of this whole promise

of disintermediate and and push down the journalists, you know, I get, I, I sort of understand why they wanted to own the message, but it, it's not workable and it's not, it's not working. Yeah, I mean, Andreessen Horwitz are like media investors who hate the media. It's not working out great for them. I would maybe try to find a new thesis in 2023. Yeah, it is interesting. And I mean, the only thing that they're doing well is, well, their only media investment is that's doing well as substack. So, and even that's struggling. And we'll get to that in some of your predictions. Yeah. We hope. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I would love to see the financials. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Okay. So, all right, a couple more things on Twitter.

We're recording on a Monday. And by the way, usually I was going to hold this for the last Wednesday of the year because that's sort of like a good quota to the year. I'm not holding it. We're going to put this on on this Wednesday. And then we're going to have Andy Yan, the CEO of Proton Mail, who's going to come on next week. And he'll read your encrypted. messages live on the air. Exactly. Right. And the reason why is because this is such a dynamic situation. And what's happening today might not even hold for Wednesday. But Elon obviously put this poll up that said that he was going to put it up to the users about whether or not he was going to remain CEO or not. Do you think he's going to abide by that? He says he will. I think the answer is yes. I think the question is like, what is the time frame? He had already been telling investors that he was

going to step down in like three to six months anyway. I don't think he has somebody on standby. I'm sure Jason Calacanis would love to do it. But really any member of the All-In podcast. Yeah. So maybe he'll just hand it over to one of his podcast buddies. But short of that, he actually does have to find someone to run it. I think it's going to be someone we've never heard of from Tesla or SpaceX. But, you know, how soon does he do that? I don't know. And I think the other question is just like, you know, part of me thinks of the question is like how much more damage like will he do in the meantime? And part of me feels like the damage is done. You know, there's really no more damage left to do. Like he destroyed the platform.

Yeah. And so there's also been some thought that, you know, either, A, maybe he'll sell it. I mean, if he sold it, Tesla stock would jump, what, 25% in a minute or the other idea is maybe he just goes bankrupt and just hands it all over to Morgan Stanley. Do you think either of those the work? I mean, sure. Why not? Like, at this point, it seems like a better option than him having anything to do with it. Right. Yeah. And I mean, I might have been, I mean, I was, I was trying to see his perspective for a long part of this year. And I think some of the ideas that he had were actually good. Execution, obviously, has been a disaster. And let's go through them. Let's go through some of Elon's great ideas, Alex. Remind me. Well, anyway, I think we should, we should just move into the

predictions. I don't want to date. Well, like, I think that the idea of leaning more on subscription revenue is a good one. I wouldn't kill the ad business in the pursuit of the subscription business. So, I mean, that's really what I thought was good. Anyway, we can spend the whole podcast on this. Let's just do these quick predictions, then do a little bit more recap, than do more predictions after the break. What does Twitter look like a year from today? smoking crater you know like um go on give me a serious answer about yeah did you see the end of um the most recent season of stranger things uh this is a spoiler alert for the most recent uh season of stranger things but like you know all the characters sort of like walk out under the landscape and they look

and like the sky's been torn open and demons are flying out of portals and like their town is in flames like that's what i think twitter is going to look like a year from now does Elon still own it yeah i mean i think there will be sort of like legal entanglements that will mean he will probably be have some sort of legal tether to it a year from now the service that twitter plays for the internet right sort of this you can tell what's happening you know what everybody in the internet thinks is that is that gone is that distributed to a bunch of different platforms what does that look like i think like the life just bleeds out of it all year i don't know how quickly the life is going to bleed out of it everything is moving much faster than i thought though

So, like, you know, if you go on tech meme, which is, you know, industry source for news, they're already putting posts on Mastodon above the tweets, right? So it's like the industry is reacting to this in real time. And I would not be surprised if we see a lot of like new stuff next year and all of it just kind of like leaches more of the life for us away from Twitter. Yeah. Are you, I wonder if any of those can really be successful, though, without like the critical massive users.

What's Mastodon been like for you? You've moved basically, you've basically entirely moved. It's like, um, it means. It's kind of like, you know, God, I don't know if I want to use this analogy because I don't want to sound insensitive. I'm not going to use the analogy. You'll just have to wonder when my insensitive analogy was. It's a place where we are all, it's like a way station that we have like stopped at that is clearly not our final home and that most of us do not want to be in. But like there is shelter there. You know, there's like running water and electricity and like, you know, meal rations. And like we can just kind of survive there while we wait for someone to build a real platform.

So that's how I think about it. Like a lifeboat. That's what, uh... Yeah. Yeah. I've heard other alternatives described as. Okay. That's Twitter.

And that's Twitter. That's Twitter. That was Twitter. That was Twitter. 2008 to 2020. RIP. And here, it'd be nice. If you could just play Angel by Sarah McLaughlin, just sort of like a nice, I don't know if you have the rights to that on the show.

We could probably get 10 seconds. Nate, if you got it. Yeah, maybe 10 seconds. It'd be good. In the arms of the. so all right um oh let me just run one theory then we're really going to move on from twitter is elliot management responsible for all this i mean they were the activist investor that came in and basically pushed jack dorsey out and jack pushed this this entire thing on

twitter yeah i mean like they they're responsible in the sense that they're like sort of one of the first dominoes to tip right right you know i I think had they never come on board, would Jack still be the CEO? I don't know. Jack Doris is a weird guy. You know, like I have no idea what Jack is doing in this alternate universe. But Twitter would probably still be like a going concern if that had happened. So, yeah, thanks, Elliot.

And as, I mean, obviously, like, they were able to come in because Jack Dorsey was splitting time between the two companies, not doing a great job monetizing the thing. Yeah. Has anyone lost, I mean, and Jack called Elon the singular solution to Twitter. Has anyone lost more esteem? over this year than Jack Dorsey. Yes, it was Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah.

But after Elon. They're neck and neck, though. They really gave each other a run for their money. It was a photo finish. The thing about Jack is that he basically took the company and he said, let's give it to this person. And he heard his friend, obviously, when Elon, Elon obviously would rather not be doing this. We know because he tried to get out of it. And all the people that I worked for him for years, obviously, you know, they're out.

They may not get severance now, which is. is pretty wild. Yeah, he's a terrible boss. If you wake up in the morning and Elon Musk is your boss, I'm sorry for you. It seems terrible. Yeah.

Okay, we're done with Twitter. So, um, you know, you keep saying, I have a feeling that Twitter's going to come up again. We might bring it back. Okay, but I feel like this is,

this is about as good as we could do on Twitter. Let's talk about some of the other companies. So you talked last year about in your, in your year in recap posts about how 2021 was really a year of transition for big tech. You know, Jeff Bezos, stepped down, meta pivoted, Jack Dorsey, which we thought was the big move, you know, left Twitter. So I want to look back and see how those transitions are going. So first of all, how do you think Andy Jassy is doing at Amazon?

No one's really talked about it. Yeah. And I don't know. It seems like it's basically fine. You know what I mean? It's like Amazon lost a lot of value this year, along with all of the other tech companies. You know, I couldn't tell you if Amazon. release some big innovation this year.

I mean, I think Amazon's biggest release this year was the Lord of the Rings TV show. You know, aside from that, I don't know what they're up to over there. Oh, and, you know, busting up unions. Those seem to be their two main passions in life. Yeah. So I don't know.

You tell me, are they fine? They see, it seems fine. We had Stephanie Link on the show last week from High Tower Advisors. And she mentioned that one of the interesting things that's happened to Amazon's business is that the incumbents, like the targets and the Walmarts are getting better at, you know, doing the tech side of things.

And that's posing a real interesting challenge to Amazon. So I think they're fine. But they did lose like 40% of, or close to 50, I think, of their, of their market cap this year. And Jassy, Jassy comes from the AWS side, kind of tough to strain, restrain costs when you're from the part of the business that prints the cash, as opposed to the one that needs to be tighter to the vest, which is retail. So I think that's really showing. I don't know.

It's, it's been interesting watching him try to figure it out this year. It's obviously tough time to come in. I'm going to say, I think it's been boring watching him trying to figure it out this year. I think, you know, as much as I hate the dramatic Elon Musk Twitter, I think Andy Jassy should do something crazy in 2023. I don't know if it's like a new haircut, maybe starting to wear in flashy clothes, but like, do something to get our attention, Andy Jassy. I'm bored of you. All right. If you were Andy Jassy, what would that exciting thing be?

I mean, I would start with a new haircut. But, no, I actually, I don't even know what Andy Jassie's haircut looks like. It's a very restrained haircut. Yeah. Yeah. Here's what I'll say. Amazon used to work on a lot of robots and drones and everything. And then, you know, they're a stock crash and you'd read stories about what they're shutting down all these programs. Bring back some robots. You know, let's have some really interesting house robots and really just kind of kick off the robot revolution. That's what I'd love to see Amazon do next year. I think the more that they work on busting these unions, the more you're going to see those robots that can pick stuff out of boxes. And instead of human workers, they're going to get to work. I mean, they're getting close. So it could be an Amazon prediction. Watch out for that.

How about meta? I thought meta had like a fairly quiet year. I guess it might have just be where Twitter is kind of exploding in public. Meta might be just having this like real simmer and maybe burn from the inside type of thing. What do you think about their year? I think they are so happy over there about the Elon Musk stuff because the minute Elon walked into that company with a sink, the entire tech press corps

stopped writing about Facebook. Had there been any stories about Facebook in the last two months? I mean, yes, there have. But, you know, the focus has clearly shifted elsewhere. You know, this really has been a transitional year for them. Their heads are down. They're trying to figure out the Metaverse.

They put out the pro version of their headset. It doesn't seem like that really got that great of a reception. So, you know, they're just kind of trying to figure it out. but like it's just kind of a slow grind over there obviously had the layoffs you know i think mark is trying to project this idea of like we're going back you know sort of like a nicer version of the Elon Musk like you know if you want to be here like you got to be hardcore you know we really got to figure this stuff out um but i don't know is it really showing up in the products like what's the last like product feature that like facebook introduced that made you say like

oh that's like super cool i want to show this to someone else i have do not remember anything like that. I mean, it seems like they're working on basically autopilot there on the flagship stuff. The other thing is that you've been a believer every time we do these. You've been a believer in Meta First type of idea in VR and in AR. Do you still believe that? And do you still think that meta has a good chance of being the one that succeeds there? Well, here's my logic. You know how like when you walk out in the world and you just see people looking at their phones all the time? Like, you know, you see a couple having dinner at a restaurant and both of them are just looking at their phones. My logic has always been, uh, if you, if you're going to do this and hunch over and look at your

phone, you might as well just glue, literally glue the phone to your face, right? Like, what people clearly want is to just be jacked into a real-time feed of notifications and widgets and bleeps and bloops and who, you know, who knows and what else. I think that's what the metaverse is going to be. And so it's just a question of like, how quickly can you develop and miniaturize the technology needed to like put bleeps and bloops either like, you know, in front of my eyes on glasses or I don't know, you know, you'll put it on a contact lens, whatever. Like, I think that that is the direction. I don't think that the tech industry is going to stop until it gets there.

The question is just like, is that a five-year project? Is that a 10-year project? Is that a 20-year project? And what position will, you know, meta be in to capitalize? And I think, like, I don't know. You know, I think there's reasons to think that they can do it. And there's reasons to think that they can't do it. I do think it's the riskiest thing that Zuckerberg has ever tried.

And I think that, you know, whenever any company takes that bigger risk, you sort of default to assuming it won't work out. But, you know, people underestimate him a lot and he makes a lot of money. Yeah. And it's one thing to say, okay, you know, we're going to invest 10 billion a year, which is what meta is doing in Metaverse and, you know, have the pedal to the metal. I think they're going to invest 20% of all the money they make next year into Metaverse stuff, which is up from 18 this year.

But the question is, do you have the right culture to do it? When you're reinventing, can you do it with a startup's pace and vigor? or do you do it as a big company? And if you do it as a big company, you might get into trouble. There was a memo from John Carmack who was working on me. He was high up in meta, working on Metaverse stuff. And he wrote this memo when he was leaving internally that really crushed their culture. He says, we have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage

and squander effort. There's no way to sugarcoat this. I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say, half, ha, I'm at a quarter efficiency. What do you make of that, you know, argument coming from inside the company and how concerning of a sign is that? I will say that over the past couple years, I've heard more complaints about the way that,

not just how meta is organized, but how it is sort of continuously being reorganized. And so there's not really a lot of institutional memory there. And you just sort of have a lot of product managers who are trying to, like, hit some kind of quarterly KPI so they could get a bonus and then, you know, maybe do that for two quarters and then they'll get reorged into something else. So, you know, that seems like a problem. But, you know, do I know what the ideal organization structure for meta should be? Like, no, I have no idea. So, you know, I think Carmack was really respected internally. I think they, and this is just a kind of pure speculation, but I think they just kind of liked having them

around as an old crank because, you know, what he was really saying, if you read between the lives is like, work harder, do better. And like, I think Zuckerberg liked having somebody like that around. And they kept him around for like a pretty long time. You know, he's, you know, a legendary programmer and somebody, a lot of people respect. And, you know, he put in his time and now he's done. So, you know, I don't know. I don't think it's like red alert, you know, meta isn't a crisis. But maybe they should pick an organization structure and stick with it for a out. How big do you think the competition from Apple is going to be with when Apple introduces its headset and comes into competition with meta? I think it'll be really big. I mean,

I think Apple is just good at this stuff and people like Apple. I mean, like, that's the big difference. Like people like Apple. People don't like Facebook. So that's just going to give Apple a huge head start. You know, is that first product going to be amazing? Like the state of the art is just not that good. It's like not as good as people wanted to be. But I look back at the first Apple Watch. I didn't buy the Apple Watch. I didn't buy an Apple Watch until at an always on display. because I was like, I don't want a watch that's worse at being a watch than a watch is. So, like, maybe it's just going to take five generations, you know, before you actually want to put one of these things on your head.

But, you know, Apple's the richest company in the world. They can afford to play the long game. That's right. Okay. Obviously, crypto is this interesting. It took an interesting turn, shall we say, in 2022. Yeah. Took a turn off a cliff.

Yes, it did. And there was more optimism in your prediction for 22 than turned out to be the case. You said that there was going to be this bad. between, you know, the anti-crypto folks and the crypto-religionists. And I think in your updated post, you said it went so bad for the people who were pro-Crypto that, like, there was no debate because they were all discredited. Why do you think it turned so bad for crypto this year, worse than expected? I mean, my thing with crypto has always been, even though there are many good arguments that

have been made to me about why it cannot or should not work. At the end of the day, you had so much money and talent going into it that I felt like, well, something's going to come out of this. You know, it's like you don't put that many smart people and that much money into something and get nothing. At the same time, I wrote in January about the fact that, like, look, if y'all crypto people really want to make a go of this, you have to radically improve the user experience. You have to make it much safer and more reliable to use. And you need to really kind of focus on that user experience, right, make something that's really fun. And I feel like 12 months later, they have just not done. that at all, right? We've seen this constant parade of breaches and, uh, you know, frauds and bankruptcies

and scams. Um, there are no fun products to use in crypto, right? And you had like the entire collapse of the ecosystem, you know, first the NFT market, uh, collapsed. And then you had, you know, the Voyager and the three arrows and the FTX. And, you know, now it's like, you know, a fun game you could ask yourself or a fun question you could ask yourself is like, will Binance exist in 12 months. I mean, it's like, you know, I'm not sure I would be a strong yes, you know, for my prediction. So the whole thing is a nightmare. And, you know, it's just so interesting to me. It's like, and here we are back at Twitter. Like all the same people that are like, you just wait and see, like give Elon Musk a chance. You know, he's actually a genius and he's

going to turn this company around. So many of them are the same people rooting for crypto, being like, you know, crypto's the future and decentralization is going to change everything. So I'm just like, I'm just observing that like there's a crowd in which these kinds of predictions circulate and they have all been wrong. Right. And not only that, some of the people who talked about the need for decentralization and how Web3 is going to be the future of all apps, then went into Twitter and started working with Elon. And it's like, that's the like prototypical Web 2 company that you hate. And you're going and you're working for the world's richest man. Do you really ever, did you really actually believe in Web 3 or did you just want to offload some tokens and

companies that you invested in? Yeah, they believe in getting rich quick. That was that was the core belief there right because yeah you talk about the use case and it seems like the use case for web three you know the primary use case was speculation and outside of that there's never product people wanted to use that really was not uh TikTok um you you like kind of when we spoke last year you kind of wondered whether TikTok was still going to be as prominent as it is this year social media companies tend to have in a really short half lives uh yeah TikTok is in a pretty good spot this year. I'm kind of curious what you think the state of TikTok is and whether it will continue growing the way that it is. I think they're in a good spot. I don't think it's going to grow the way

it grew in the past. I mean, I think the big story of this year with TikTok was just like Facebook and YouTube started a catch up, right? You know, reels and shorts are just doing well. And so I think they're just making it harder for TikTok to grow. You know, TikTok still has not managed to get a deal with Siphyas, the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States. And just in the past couple weeks, you've seen a bunch of Republican governors ban it on state devices. The Senate passed a bill, I believe, that would ban it from government devices. So, you know, all those threats are kind of around. I think the thing that we've learned is, you know, people are just never going to give

Bight Dance a Chinese company the benefit of the doubt. And I think Bight Dance has, like, known that for a long time. They don't know what to do about it because it's not clear there's anything they can do. but in the meantime, they operate one of the biggest apps in the world. So I think culturally, TikTok is still very prominent. Like, I think it's still kind of the champion of the social entertainment products. But as you point out, these things have a short half-life. So, you know, I think we may look back.

Like, as 2024 begins, we may feel like TikTok peaked at some point, like, you know, either this year or next year. Interesting. So, I mean, I'm trying, I'm on TikTok. I'm trying to build like, an audience there for the podcast content. Good investment, bad investment. Well, you know, could go away at any point. So I'm curious what you think.

Yeah. Well, Alex, I don't know if you know this, but I'm also the co-host of a podcast. It's called Hard Fork, and it's fantastic. And everyone who listens to this podcast, I hope, goes out and downloads a Hard Fork immediately. And one of the things that we've been doing to promote Hard Fork is to start a TikTok channel, which you can find at TikTok.com slash Hard Fork. And, yeah, it does like shockingly well, you know, it's like, I don't know. I like, they clip like 30 seconds of me running my mouth and it's like, you know, it gets like 50,000 likes or something.

So that seems like a great way to grow a podcast. And, you know, Kevin Roos, my co-host, like, this was his idea to do this. And he's like, this is the only way that podcasts are growing in like 2022 is through TikTok. Okay. So keep going. Keep again, for anyone who's thinking about it, give it a shot, even if there's a chance at it will disappear. Give it a shot.

You know, give it a chance. Casey Newton is the editor of Platform where you can find it on Platformer. News and the co-host of Hard Fork. You can get it on TikTok. And wherever you get your podcast, I hope you go check it out. We will be back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and

original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on the second half of big technology podcast with Casey Newton. He is the editor of platformer. He's also the co-host of Hard Fork. We've also

had a couple of nice sparring sessions on CNBC. This year, it's been fun doing those with you, Casey. We got a huge fight. We didn't speak to each other for months. Outside parties had to intervene. That's correct. This is a bit of a healing session for us. So I'm glad to be back on the line with you. More turmoil at Twitter unfolding within the last 24 hours.

Another round of employee resignations last night amid rising concerns about the future of the social media company. Let's bring in Alex Cantowicz of Big Technology and Casey Newton of platformer. Both are CNBC contributors and both are with me here at post night. It's good to see you both in the house for a change. change. At the end of the year, I want to heal. That's how I, that's how I feel. That's what we're doing. We're going to go in 23 with, um, with good vibes only. I love it. So I want to get to some of your, um, your predictions that you put out in platform or about, about, uh, I prefer to call them prophecies, but go on. Prophecies. Well, you, you were right about drama Twitter. So,

um, okay, we were about to, I was about to read a Twitter one. I will get to it. But, um, let's talk a little bit about, about chat GPT. So I want to get to your perspective on how chat GPT is going to cause an education, an education controversy this year. But I first want to ask, when we look forward to 23, is what is Google going to do on chat, on this chat, GPT, because they can't, I know some people say it's ridiculous that you're comparing this to search where they can't sit still, can they've been talking about the future is conversational search forever. Yeah.

So, I mean, I feel like I spend the last like three or four Google Ios listening to them, you know, drone on endlessly about their large language models and how amazing they are. But the big thing that happened this year was like somebody else put out a large language model that we could just use. And like it was great. So, you know, I am told that Google's is as good or maybe even better. I think the question is, can they release it? And if so, how? They have a lot of regulatory concerns that make it harder for them to release it. They have a lot of business concerns that make it harder for them to release it. And I think an interesting question to carry in in 2020 is like, are they ripe for classic Clayton Christensen style disruption where something like

ChatGBTGPT comes along that is like worse at search than a lot of things, but that is better at search for a lot of things. And it kind of creates this new opportunity and sort of how does Google respond? But I don't know. I hear that they're taking it extremely seriously in there. I'm sure they're going to have a response. But it's tricky for them. So I'm very curious about this.

what do you think their response looks like? Well, I mean, they just have, I mean, like, they could put out what open AI has put out. Like, they have all of it. And, like, the question is just like, but how do you introduce it, right? Because if, you know, imagine if like they released, you know, Lambda, the way that they released, you know, Gmail in the early 2000s where it's like, you know, we'll give, you know, you have infinite free credits and like, go do whatever. Like, it would be massively expensive for them, you know, there would probably be, you know, some sort of trust in safety issues, you know, people using it to start. abuse campaigns or, you know, misinformation campaigns or whatever, like, they have to think through all that stuff. And then they have to figure out, like, how is that going to mess with their business? You know, it's like their business is based on people clicking on things. The thing that

makes chat GPT interesting is a lot of times you don't have to click on anything. It just gives you what you want. So that's just like a really interesting maze of, uh, of problems for them to work through. And if you're at Google and you're working on that, please message me because I'd love to hear how you're doing that. What do you think the business model is going to be for something like a chat GPT. Well, I mean, look, you know, one of the examples that I've written about is I asked chat GPT, like, what are some shoes that belong in every man's wardrobe, you know, and whereas Google just gives you like a list of blog posts, you know, it's like, here, go do your own damn research. Chat GPT is like, here are the shoes that you should have, you know, in your wardrobe.

And of course, that was just, you know, ingested from some blog post that is not being credited. So, you know, that's an issue. But it's not hard to figure out how you monetize that, right? you just be like, you know, you should have a pair of like Oxford's in your collection. Click here for, you know, Zappos.com. So I still think you're going to find a lot of those kind of like e-commerce, you know, like chat GPT can be a funnel of intent the same way that Google is. They got to build it. Okay.

And so how do you think they end up causing this education controversy? Well, so what's happening right now is that kids are fighting out about this stuff. You know, like chat GPT, news about it is spreading like wildfire. We talked about it on our show, Hard Fork, and we get emails now and DMs from like high school I got a message from this high schooler yesterday that said, thank you so much for telling me about chat GPT. I just used it to write a paper. And I was like, well, I feel bad about that.

And, you know, definitely, you know, don't use it to be academically dishonest. But obviously millions of kids are going to use it to be academically dishonest. And, man, you know, a lot of teachers, I don't think see this coming pretty. soon they're going to figure out that like AI is writing like every assignment for kids from like six to 12th grade. They're not always going to be able to figure out like what is written by the AI and what's not. And so like I think there's like a chance that the open AI people are up in front of Congress like in the next six months. Right. And it's difficult for teachers to figure out that the AI wrote it. I mean, it's not like people to figure it out. Exactly. It's not

like it's like plagiarism in the traditional sense because, you know, it's not copied directly from someone, even though it is taking... It was divined from the sentient life that is AI. How do you think educators should tackle this? I think educators should freak out. I don't know. Like, you know, you can... These are not my ideas, but, you know, like Kevin and my co-host has talked about,

probably do more, like, in-class writing, like oral exams, like stuff where you can essentially observe the person doing the work and not, like, rely on them. I think there's also a world, though, where it's, like, you give people assignments to do with chat GPT, right? Like, sort of teach kids to use it as, like, a research assistant. In the same way that, you know, 20 years ago, they were probably teaching kids how to use Google as a research assistant.

So there's probably some sort of, you know, equilibrium that can be reached, but it's going to be messy. Do you think there are any other, like, pretty powerful use cases that we should be paying attention to with this stuff? Or is education, like, the main one? I think sort of creating, like, a sentient AI that destroys all human life would be a huge issue. And if you're trying to do that,

knock it off, you know? Right, right. Well, it depends if you're on the AI or you're the human. That's the question. Yeah, and if the AI is listening to this, I just want to say, I was always on the side of the AI. And why do you think I do what I do? I'm trying to bring this into existence, okay?

I'm a pioneer. Okay. All right, but all right. So throw out some others outside of education. Others outside of education, literally any knowledge, work, job, right? It's like all jobs require research. You know, I, you know, I've, I've,

I've experimented with saying, for example, like I was writing about India and Twitter, and I was like, oh, like, remind me why did India, why did Twitter sue India? And like, it just gave me the end. And, you know, it's just like two seconds. And of course, I had to go make sure that it was right. But like, yeah, it's helping with that.

You know, it's very good for creative work, writing poems, song lyrics, you know, just little funny, like, plays, you know. But I really do think there's like almost no job that isn't going to be touched by this in some way because, like, they're just, like, obvious uses for it. So I've been asking folks if they believe that this is something that's going to be a flash in the pan, like, oh, cool use cases and then sort of fades away or whether it is this real paradigm shift. Because if you look at Dolly, for instance, like, I mean, you and I use Dolly to illustrate our newsletters, but, you know, it's not like it's upended the world of graphic design.

So I'm curious if you think chat TPT or chat TPT like applications are going to end up being more powerful than what we saw with Dolly. yeah they're completely different like because most people don't need to generate an image every day but most people do most knowledge workers are doing some kind of writing every day right and like the the the the the sort of um like lay landscape of uses for dolly is as broad as like what do people use text for you know and there's just like a million things whereas you know dolly is kind of much more contained use case and dolly's amazing like I think dolly is like you know if it hadn't been for chat GPT like we'd probably spend more time talking about dolly this or because it's always really amazing, but people just don't have as much of a need for it.

Oh, okay. So you meant the type of, the number of use cases for chat GPT or unconstrained. Yeah. Or constrained only by text. Yeah. That's true. I think it's pretty wild. And, you know, this, it all came kind of out of nowhere, which was wild.

Like, if you would have, if our predictions would have been in the beginning of the year, you're going to be talking to a chat bot that will respond like a brilliant, like, well, somewhat brilliant human and have, you know, AI artists. on demand that's going to crush illustrations, it would have seemed fanciful, but here we are. And then it feels just like normal technology. It's like, oh, I'll just make a dolly. Like, you know, what? It's crazy. Okay, another prediction of yours, Casey, is that content moderation is going to become legal in some parts of the country. Say more a little bit about that. Yeah. And this is like one of my lower confidence predictions. But next year, the Supreme

Court is expected to hear a couple of cases about these. laws that were passed in Florida and Texas, which make it illegal for companies to remove content based on the political viewpoint it expresses. There are a lot of questions about what that's going to mean in practice, but an outcome, if the Supreme Court decides that it wants to uphold those laws, is that in Florida and Texas, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, will not be able to remove Nazi content, or at the very least, they could be sued for doing so. And that's a really wild one, right? You know, I would argue that companies have a First Amendment right to essentially set the, like, rules of discussion in these forums that they build. But the Supreme Court

has become increasingly sympathetic to the idea that we should regulate these like common carriers, like railroads or telecoms, and they should not discriminate based on the viewpoint. So, you know, there's a lot of downstream implications of that. But, you know, Clarence Thomas basically called on either, you know, someone to sue and bring him a case or someone to pass a law and bring him a case. And, like, now he has his cases. And, you know, he may have, you know, the five or six votes he needs. It's pretty wild. It means that Elon Musk, for instance, to bring it back to Twitter, but he could, you know, be going against the law to remove lawful speech. I mean, which is why he bought Twitter. It says he bought Twitter in the beginning. I mean, if you're talking about

the link stuff, I think, you know, that's probably not a political deal. But yes, the Kanye, yeah, that would be illegal. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about substack. So obviously the email provider for both of us, they are dedicated to subscription revenue. But you suggest they're going to launch an ad network. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So, you know, substack got really good this year at free recommendations. You know, so it's like, you know, I recommend your newsletter, you recommend my newsletter. It brings us all a bunch of new subscribers. That's great. So, you know, as a result, you know, I've added tens of thousands of new free subscribers to my network over the past year. That's been phenomenal. The problem is those people don't really monetize very well because they have no idea who you are. Like a box was already checked for them. They didn't uncheck it. And now they're getting your newsletter, right? That's like not a high value customer. But I have found that those people will still open the emails, right? A good percentage of them do. And so the question is, you know, if you're like me and you have paid newsletters, but you're not monetizing, you know, 90s. plus percent of your users, at some point, you want to just monetize them, right? And so I think a lot more sub-stackers, as their mailing list grow, we're going to experiment with ads. And I think

sub-stack, which, you know, needs to live up to this very high valuation that it has and is going to struggle to do that with subscriptions only, is eventually going to come around to what I think is now obvious and, like, they're just going to build an ad network. Does that mean you're going to try to sell ads on your newsletter this upcoming year? talking to people about it. Yeah, yeah. No, I, I am, it's kind of interesting because I started with ads only and my newsletter has been free, but this upcoming year, I'm going to, you know, keep pushing the pedal forward with ads, but then add a subscription layer. So I think we'll both end up filling out the area that the other one was participating in. But I think it's good. I think the

combination of ads and subscription makes a ton of sense. It's what I believe from the beginning. And I think it's cool to see that there's going to be more demand and more interest in the in the supply side for making ads work on newsletters. Yeah, for sure. It could be fun. So one of the interesting things that's happened with Apple is this big fight with Epic and others about their ability to build other app stores on the iPhone. Europe just made this big ruling that's going to, or not, it was actually pressure

from Europe that's going to cause Apple to now open up the ability for others to create app stores on the iPhone in Europe. do you think that it's actually a significant move and do you think that spreads beyond Europe? I mean, we'll see. You know, like when Apple has lost these sorts of things before, they have gone out of their way to change as little as possible. You know, so it's like in the Netherlands,

they allow dating apps to use external payment processors, but they charge a 27% commission, right? Which is like 3% less than they were charging just for using in-app payments. So I wonder, you know, what the equivalent of that is here. You know, I think just because third-party app stores are allowed in Europe on the iPhone, they will not be allowed in the United States.

Like, I think Apple is going to sort of be dragged, kicking and screaming into all of that. But I also think it's clear where the wind is going to go. And I think over time, they are going to have to open up more, and regulators are going to force them to sort of play ball and, you know, be less anti-competitive. And I

look forward to that. Yeah, and just following up on a couple of things from last year, we predicted that Peloton, was going to be acquired. They're down 71% from when we last spoke. So now they're a bargain. Independent. Yeah. Yeah, they're a bargain. So do you think that this is the year it happens? I don't. Who cares about Peloton anymore? Peloton, like, what a pandemic company. I couldn't care less than what happens to Pelotan. People like, go outside. That's my answer. No, Peloton's over. Who cares? And lastly, San Bank McFried. What goes on with him? Wow, what a legend and an inspiration.

and, yeah, I don't know. From hero to zero in record time. Yeah, right. And, I mean, like, Casey, you're obviously missing. Like, you might not think that crypto is going to take off, but, you know, you'll be looking back on this comment a long time from now and be like, yeah, I really shouldn't have doubted Sam on his way to jail and away he goes. Hey, you know, hashtag free Sam, hashtag.

We don't have all the facts. You know, let's see what his legal defense team has to tell us. Do I do, I mean, by the way, in case people get to, I'm being sarcastic. He's a bad person. Yeah. Do you think he's going to end up? I mean, they threw the book at him in terms of the stuff they're charging him with. Do you think he has a long prison sentence ahead of him?

I mean, I don't know anything about the legal system, Alex. You know, here's what I'll say. If Elizabeth Holmes is spending 12 years in jail, I think Sam Bankman-Fried will also be spending some time in jail. You know, but sometimes rich people got to. acquitted of things. So we'll have to see. That's true. Any wishes for the new year? You know, I mean, I've long wished for a sort of peace on earth and just sort of let's lay down the guns and let's come together as one human family and a spirit of kindness and goodwill. And really just, you know, take advantage of our, of our only shot. You know, you only live once.

And why spend all of it with a gun in your hand? That's true. Okay. Last year's wish was everyone gets vaccinated. This one, stop shooting. It's a true inspirational case newton message of the year. I'm next year I want to do some motivational speaking. So thanks for letting me practice out some of my lines on. Of course. I think you're going to land a contract in no time. So hey, congrats on the great year, 50,000 new subscribers for platform or a new podcast,

a new coworker for you, which is cool with Zoe and a really great run, breaking lots of news on Twitter. So looking forward to see more of it in 2023. Thank you very much. and likewise, congratulations on all your success. I know big things are coming for big technology in 2023. Sounds good. And that'll do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast.

Thank you, Casey. Newton for joining. Always great to talk to you, Casey. Always fun. Thanks to all of you, the listeners. Appreciate it coming back week in week out. If you haven't yet and want to, and you like the show,

if you can rate us five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcast, that would be great. Coming up on 100 ratings on Spotify, we're hanging out of a 4.9 rating. everyone goes a big way because it helps these platforms amplify the show. And we love that. Thank you, Nick Guadne, for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network.

And thanks to all of you, the listeners. Again, Andy Yen, the CEO of ProtonMail, is going to be on the show next week. We're going to talk about whether we should encrypt our devices. You won't want to miss it. So if this is your first time here, please subscribe. And that will do it for us here. So until next time, it's Alex Cantorwitz. and we hope to see you soon on Big Technology Podcast.