Big Technology Podcast - Apple's Problem With Jon Stewart, Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimism, Middle East Misinformation

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) A quick review of Michael Lewis' SBF book 2) The impact of effective altruism on the tech industry 3) Why Apple and Jon Stewart are parting ways 4) China's Belt and Road Forum 5) How a multipolar world impacts Apple 6) Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimism manifesto 7) Max Read's rebuttal to the manifesto 8) Twitter to charge $1 to some users for essential features 9) Twitter users decline since Musk took over, according to new data 10) A new era of misinformation in the middle east --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

John Stewart and Apple are splitting up possibly over some China content. Mark Andreessen is rallying the techno-optimists. Twitter is shrinking, according to some new data I just obtained. And let's go even deeper on misinformation coming out of the Middle East. All that and more, right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Ron John Roy is here with us once again.

We just look through the agenda of today's, show you're going to love it we have a lot to cover and it's great to have you back ronjohn welcome to the show it's good to be back but sad we had to cut out in some of the news there's so much this week exactly and we'll do a tech earnings show next week so if you're here for tech earnings you know maybe stay tuned and hear what we have to in store for you but the big tech earnings show is coming next Friday in the meantime i got to say ronjohn i have been reading the michael lewis book on sbf and i like it and it's you wait sorry what was that I like it. I mean, here's the thing. You like it. Look, it's all the problems that we identified with Michael Lewis, journalistically, are there. He's way too in favor of Sam. But it's actually pretty interesting. Like, it's a very interesting book. And you go through, I'm halfway done. And you go through these twists and turns in Sam's life. And, you know, he doesn't hit you over the head with it every moment. He had trouble with people. You could see this eventually reflected, you know, when FTX collapsed. He like very carefully, like, laid.

out. And we'll see the second half is important, so I don't want to get ahead of myself. But I'm learning a ton about SBF, but even more about the effective altruists. And Molly White was just on the show. And we talked about this effective altruist community that Sam Bankman-Fried comes out of. I think there are obviously a force within the tech world right now. Darryl Modi, who's the CEO of Anthropic, which is a big AI company that we talk about here. He's a member of this community. There's many, many more members of this effective altruist community all over the place and just digging into sam's relationship with them and their bolstering of him and their way of thinking to me is absolutely worth the price of admission on the

michael lewis book all right well i started number goes up by zeke fox and it is a fantastic read i highly recommended i'm about a third of the way through right now but but michael lewis i think to me and i'm very curious and we should definitely talk about this again once you're done is are people going to walk away with the impression that, you know, he is a great writer. No one's ever questioned. He's a great writer and a storyteller. But is his credibility as actual truth-telling journalist? Is that going to go away? Yeah, it's one of those books that's probably bad for the author, good for the reader. I mean, that's what I have to say. And Molly White actually was fascinating breaking down the effective altruist community on the podcast on Wednesday. And she, you know, remember a couple months ago where we were

wondering why there were all these AI letters coming out with like Dustin Moscovitz, who's an effective altruist back in them. Yep, yep, tracing the funding. It turns out it's kind of, it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't regulatory capture from my understanding. Now, having read the book and speaking with Molly, it's these folks are like dead set about saving lives in the future, she said, even if it costs in some cases, lives in the present. I don't want to say every one of them believes it, but some of the group does. And that's why they're so crazy about like the AI threat, even though it doesn't feel present to us right now. It just aligns with their ideology. And maybe some people are exploiting that and saying it would be great for regulatory

capture also. But it's just a mind-boggling thing once you get into this community. I have a hard time even starting to grasp the idea again. Again, having worked on Wall Street, the idea that I'm going to make as much money as I can as fast as possible. no matter the cost and then maybe down the road like people would say i don't give to charity because i want to make as much money as possible and then i'll give some away when i die so that this stuff is to me it's not new it's just a kind of a easy way to mask greed which is fine if that's what you're into we'll certainly talk about the techno optimist uh manifesto very soon right yeah it's interesting your experience on wall street it is i mean i'm sure hearing this ideology like

apparently they didn't fit in these things. It just mirrors it. So it's like, that's what's always, that's what is always frustrated. I mean, I've written about this a lot that so much of the what is communicated in the tech industry exactly mirrors culture on Wall Street in the 2000s. The only difference is there people were just honest about being self-interested and greedy versus trying to kind of mask or cover it in terms like effective altruism. Okay.

Just be honest. about who you were. That's all I ask. Well, definitely, apparently, like, I mean, in Michael Lewis book, you hear about these effective altruists, like, handing loans out, and the interest is 50% on them. And apparently, like, he goes into, like, you'd think they would be chill about money if they're all giving it away anyway, but they're actually more intense than most

people. So it's just fascinating. Speaking of companies that are more intense about money than others, I mean, Apple, right? Right in the middle of the headlines again, this was late breaking news yesterday. John Stewart, who had this show on Apple TV called The Problem with John Stewart, which talks about the news, goes into politics all the time, really doesn't shy away from much. Not going to be renewed. He's John Stewart and Apple are parting due to creative disagreements.

This is from the New York Times. Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives. And now that partnership is done. I mean, it is interesting because we know that Apple had been sensitive about its relationship with China, that China has different rules than we have here in the U.S. in terms of the way that they manage the technology when it comes to Apple. But, you know, and then Apple had also been very careful in terms of Apple TV trying to not anger China. But now it has this moment where it has this host, John Stewart, who wanted to talk about China, it seems like, and now we can't. I mean, what do you make of this whole situation? This whole situation has been very difficult for me because I was a massive John Stewart fan through the 2000s when he was on the Daily Show.

I was very excited when he came back to Apple TV. I was like literally waiting for him to resurface and was always disappointed during the Trump years that he was not there as a leading voice. But myself, among others, did not really watch this show. apparently only 40,000 unique households watched it on average. The show did badly enough. This is according to the bulwark that it was labeled Apple TV Plus's worst performing show of the second half of 2022. So it's tough because I don't know if it was the format, if it was just whatever it was,

it did not catch fire. So then you combine that with the fact that, and I think this is a really important thing to think about is how Apple has really kind of strong. structured its media content strategy as the Ted Lasso company. You know, the Ted Lasso feel good, not too controversial, maybe a little boundary pushing, but that's all they want to do. And they've done this very well. And it's been working, you know, incredibly for them. It sells more Apple TV plus subscriptions. It sells more devices. So they obviously don't want to ruin that and turn into any kind of semi-political organization. So, I mean, for them, it's almost a no-brainer. And I hate

saying this and thinking about it, but when his show is doing that badly and it presents a very high risk, this is clearly what the direction is going to take. I'm a bit excited because I actually think it always felt like John Stewart was a little bit, I don't want to say caged, but just, you know, something had changed versus who he was before. So I'm actually excited to see where he goes and what he does with this. I don't know. He felt a little bit out of touch to me after spending, you know, so much time away. It seems like he just lost the pulse. And also his show, I mean, he did some good segments. I mean, his interview, he did some interviews with Bob Iger, one that was terrific. But his his show was just poorly formatted. It just didn't flow

in the way. It seemed too long. It was droned on a bunch. It got too cute. It just got away from the format that made him funny. And it wasn't as funny as funny as out of touch. I felt it as well. I definitely felt on a lot of topics that, you know, it had a very like mid-2010s where his mind would have been or where everyone's mind was and then things kept moving, whether it, even positions I agreed with him around ZERP or crypto or where we kind of had similar end visions of what was going on. I agree. It could have been a bit of out of touch. But I think Apple, like what does this mean for mainstream media and now recognizing Apple TV Plus,

is a central part of mainstream media, but when it's not even presented, pretending to be a genuine news organization are very, very openly kind of positioning themselves as safe and okay. Almost they're more Disney right now than Disney itself. I think what's that going to do to mainstream content, I think is, I'm curious what you think of that.

I don't really see it even as safe and okay. I see it as a company that's bending the need of China. And, you know, obviously easy decision to not have John Stewart come beyond anymore if the show wasn't doing well. But it is interesting that China is first and foremost in terms of the areas of disagreement there. And we know that Apple doesn't speak out about human rights in China, but happy to do it elsewhere. And we know that Apple will do what it can to please the Chinese Communist Party because so much of its business is there. I mean, 20% of sales is there. And a large part of its manufacturing is done there. And so what I thought was

most interesting was that this is happening in the shadow of this belt and ton bell sorry the belt and road form that jish and ping held in china so it's also from the new york times um with putan by aside she outlines his vision of a new world order it says the leaders of china and russia hailed each other as old and dear friends they took swipes at the united states depicted themselves as building this is crucial here a fair multipolar world and they marveled at their country's deepening trust okay to marvel at this multipolar world so you have you puts apple in this very very weird position by the way the people that were in attendance there Vladimir Putin the president of indonesia the president of serbia the president the prime minister of egypt the pakistani prime minister leaders of sri lanka

the republic of kongo and nigeria right this is what jiji imping is setting up as a counterweight to the United States in the world. And it just leaves Apple in an awkward position because it is obviously so reliant on China. And China is setting itself up as a check and almost in opposition to the U.S. Building its power, taking those photos that look exactly like the ones that you see in the G8, where it's like the U.S. and Canada and Britain and France. And they're doing the same thing in China. And that means, you know, there's going to be, if it's a multipolar world, there's going to be some pulling apart. And who's in the middle when that, you know, when that's pulled apart? I can, I agree, and I think we could, I could spend hours discussing as a former political

science major in college and someone who's read a lot about this. And I do think Apple is, every business is going to have to start kind of taking these considerations. Tesla in their recent earnings call, the Chinese market definitely came up. Every single retail company, luxury goods. All of these companies are definitely going to be caught right in the middle this, but on a slightly lighter note, and I've been wanting to kind of throw this out, when it comes to, because with Apple TV Plus on the table here, have you watched any of the Lienel Messi games? Are you an Apple TV Plus subscriber and or an MLS add-on subscriber? I'm in and out on Apple TV Plus, and I haven't watched any. Trust me, I watch enough sports

as it is that I just can't get into football or American soccer. it would really be the end of me. Like, I would get divorced within 10 minutes. As a huge soccer fan, as a massive soccer fan, it is amazing. And I don't, how brilliant the messy move was. Because for context, and this has been reported, Lino Messi gets a cut of every Apple TV plus subscription or every MLS add-on. So this was worked into the contract.

And then he came in and just, I mean, some of the, like his very first game in, in injury time, makes a free kick to win the game. Like one after the other, it was incredible. And it brought it everyone I know starts talking about this, starts subscribing. So, so I actually think like Apple again, as a reminder, and this is actually, you know, it feeds into this John Stewart topic very well, how well they're able to kind of structure their contract and their businesses with the talent and, you know, like invest in the talent and actually make the economics of the service relate to the talent itself.

It's very interesting what they're doing. So I don't know. I think this whole space, we've talked a lot about streaming is going to be a tough business. I think Apple TV Plus is not in a bad situation right now. I guess like your perspective is just let G dictate your content slate and you're in good shape. I mean, he's already doing that. Disney has the same thing going. on it is interesting though you talk about these live sports and Netflix reported earnings this

week just as a side note they reported earnings they they beat on subscribers at 8 million new subscribers it's the biggest jump since 2020 and they are raising prices wall street loved it sent the revenue up but they you know it was kind of interesting thinking about it where apple has their sports package with the MLS Amazon has their sports package with the NFL Netflix has a quarterback to documentary I mean it's nice to know about Kurt Cousin's personal life, but, you know, it seems like Netflix basically brought F1 to the U.S. Like the entire documentary series around F1 Formula One, like it's, it's that drove popularity. And they could have, if they had started moving into these areas earlier,

they could have before it became this popular been the center point, the center channel of this sport in the United States. So yeah, I agree. I think, uh, It's a huge missed opportunity for Netflix. How long till... How long till they're going to... How long till they go after sports rights? I think pretty soon. But the thing is, like, which sport and where?

Because again, the NFL has already chopped itself out for the Thursday or Sunday or Monday. Don't you think it's... The NBA? Is there something... It's going to be the NBA. All right. Yeah, Netflix and the NBA. That's an optimistic take.

Yeah. That's my thought. Okay. Okay. So Mark Andreessen this week came out with a post, very long post, 5,000 words. It's called a techno-optimist manifesto. And it goes deeply into, effectively it's a case for why we should celebrate tech, why we should allow tech to grow without any guardrails, why the people who are getting in the way of tech are getting in the way of humanity's progress. And basically, it's time to build. Did you read this post? I'm curious. what you came away. It made a big stir. I feel like people weren't 100% sure what to make of it. I mean, but it basically with almost everything Andreessen does, there was like half of a group celebrating it and half a group criticizing it. What's your nuanced take on the techno-optimist manifesto? My nuanced take is I did not read it in its entirety. I started to. I did not complete it.

Did you finish reading it or? No, okay. So here's a thing. I read a lot of it, probably more than half, but then I just could not finish it. And it just, it was kind of mind-numbing trying to read it because if anyone who's, if you haven't read it yet, it's just kind of like a bunch of tweets strung together. It seems like 5,000 words of tweets. I feel like half the sentences start with we believe. It was just extremely difficult to follow. Imagine if it was a Twitter thread that It started with 1 slash 534. Yeah, that's what it felt like. That's what it felt like.

And it's interesting because like Andreessen is kind of talking a lot about how basically like we need to celebrate tech and not get in its way and it's only going to lead to human progress. And then there was this post from Ezra Klein talking about how effectively it was interesting to watch Mark Andrew. Okay, here it is. There's no starker proof of McLuhan. the medium is the message thesis, then the way the medium of Twitter has colonized the way Mark Andreessen thinks and expresses these thoughts. That he seemed totally unaware of this, and his tech optimist manifesto repeatedly states that humans are the masters of their technologies, and there is no way in the technologies

have become the masters of their humans only sharpens the lesson. I mean, it really did feel, like, I like reading Mark Andreessen, I like listening to him. I think he's brilliant. And even if I don't agree with everything he has to say, I feel like it's worth listening to. But watching him spit this thing out was just quite surprising. I like reading Mark Andreessen when he talks about technology itself, not technology vis-a-vis society, its role in democracy in the future of humanity, when it's simply about here's what I think is happening about AI stacks going into the future or whatever else it is. But to me, and this has come up a lot over the last couple of years, especially with margins, because we're always, like, we're skeptical about a lot of technology, but we're both,

John and me, who writes with me, we're very, very positive and lovers of technology. And, like, we, everything, I get excited all day long about trying different services and apps and gadgets or whatever else it is. I'm obsessive about it. But the thing with Mark Andreessen, it's very clearly outlined in this piece, it's technology in the way that I express it or in the way that my circle and I want to like express our views, our models around technology. And there's a lot of kind of inconsistency in it because there's a whole line around like monopolies and regulatory capture are bad. However, dominating markets to the point

monopoly is something that's been core to many of the companies that Mark Andreessen has run or, I mean, invested in and, you know, like been a cheerleader of. So I think it's very clear that it's like, this is not about should you be excited about the next iPhone or should you be excited about whether augmented reality in the Vision Pro or Facebook's helmet does well and changes the way we can all use technology or agricultural AI can actually feed more of the world. No one is arguing against that. It's simply that maybe a very small group of venture capitalists located in one place who are all friends with each other should not dominate the entire ecosystem and claim it as their own versus making people who think differently and approach

technology differently accessible for everyone. I think that's, as you can tell, this is something that I've thought about a lot. Right. And I agree. I agree with a lot of the central points that Andresen is making. I mean, I've written about them. This has been in big technology, even published about in the Boston Globe. Like, here's the beginning. We are told that technology is taking our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything. I mean, I've written about the fact that like AI, you know, these hysteria is about AI taking our jobs. Like they just do not materialize in the way that a lot of the

critics you shouldn't even have to you shouldn't even have to answer to that of course the we are being told is already get turning and and as you said did your point around the azra klein kind of twitter high like twitter mindset you don't need to say that like some people are saying that and some people don't say that it's like i mean it's not that we are being told it's that some people make certain nuanced points around how you know inequality is increasing or certain jobs are being taken, but it's not some that the entire world is against Mark Andreessen and technology in trying to push this. But to me, the more interesting part about this was I had this weird flashback where if it was summer of 2020, I would have been really,

really interested in this piece and the debate. It had a COVID feel to it, like a pandemic era. Dude, I came away with the same thing. I was just like, this reads like COVID broke his brain. yeah no it it's feel like we're still in the pandemic and and i would have been very into this and the surrounding debate and i would have spent hours analyzing every think piece and response to it because i would have been locked inside it's we've moved on and that that's actually the more interested part like is is he and who else i always wonder this is still in pure covid brain because that's what this red like for me okay so um let's just talk about one more part of that. And then I want to go to Max Reed's response to it. So this was the thing that caught

everybody's attention. It was his enemies section. He goes, we have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people, but rather bad ideas. By the way, it's just kind of crazy to call, I mean, bad ideas, enemies, like enemies are people usually. Our president's society, and sorry, that was me, let me get back to our Andreessen. Our president society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades against technology and against life under varying names like existential risk, sustainability, ESG, sustainable development goals, social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, precautionary principle, trust and safety, tech ethics, risk management, degrowth, and the limits of growth. The demoralization campaign is based on bad

ideas of the past, zombie ideas, many derive from communism. They're disastrous then and now that refused to die. It does seem, Rajan, like he's speaking directly to you. I mean, yes. The thing, what makes this so ridiculous is, like, you can have problems with the UN Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the United Nations, which is where that term comes from. But the term sustainability, when he's talking about technology feeding humanity and coming up with new novel solutions, that is sustainability. When you're talking about risk management to group that into, again, any of these other terms, risk management, do we not want that in companies? Do we not want companies? Like, it's one of the, it's just a reminder that,

again, going back to the COVID mind, all of these things get grouped in very oddly for him in like really targeted personal ways versus the idea that as in quotes, risk space management, end quote, is a enemy of you and your business. and people and is going to hurt humanity is just weird to me. Yeah, I mean, I feel like SBF would agree with him. Oh, yeah, okay. And look at what a beautiful business that turned out to. Definitely risk management was a massive enemy of Sam Bankin-Fried, and he vanquished that

enemy, and he never, that enemy never stepped foot in his operations ever again. You know, Michael Lewis got that right. So one of the responses that I did want to read and go through, was from Max Reed, who has a newsletter on a subset called Read Max. I thought it was a very interesting response to it. So, first of all, I'm going to read part of it, but this is a parental guidance moment. So if you have kids who are listening, maybe it's a good time to pause and return, because anyway, I'm just going to go on.

I've made the warning. Okay, so Max talks about, I'm just going to read the beginning. I would say my main question about the techno-optimist manifesto and essay by the prominent venture capitalist Mark Andreessen is whether or not the Goatzy was intentional. The manifesto published to the website of Andresen's fund A16Z Monday. It currently occupies the entire front page of the fund site. Oh, by the way, Ranjan, did you see this?

It's the whole webpage of A16Z is this manifesto. You go to A16Z.com, all you see is manifesto. I am laughing a lot in the background in trying to mute myself, so it's not coming through and dominating the sound right now. Okay, so he says it was originally accompanied by the following digital illustration, which many readers will recognize immediately. And if you're listening, the illustration is basically some news clips in the corners and then a big orange circuit board and then two disembodied hands pulling a light.

put it pulling the middle apart with like a light shining through pulling a hole apart in the middle the two hands okay look familiar all right so i mean this is i'm going to try to get through this part okay does this image of a cybershincter pulled apart by the two strong hands revealing a pixelated heaven inside look familiar uh did mark andresen a man who certainly would like to be known as a funny online guy familiar with the folkways of the internet was he able to cut it able to cut it up with regular shit posters on east streets mean for his grand statement okay did he mean for his grand statement of purpose to be illustrated by the abstract version of the internet's most famous and beloved shock image okay this shock image i just recently learned about this by the way i guess

i've been living under a rock where you just learned within the past year apparently goatee for those at home goatee is an image are you going to are you going to say it yeah I'm going to say it I feel like people should know what it is so they understand like I always go with the my my goat see philosophy is always a casual go look it up make sure no one else is around but I'm ready I've never even seen the image I still haven't seen the image I'm not looking at the image oh all right you got to look at the image but anyway continue continue what Goetzee is is it's two hands pulling the part the back end of a human being and it's a photo of it and it's apparently very disgusting and stretched out and so that's exactly what mark and trees and story art looks like for this

techno optimist post and so now max read is trying to figure out whether this was intentional he goes and by the way everybody saw it and was immediately like that to go to even i who didn't has never seen the image knew exactly what this was and he goes sadly probably not the image has since been changed the hands removed the resemblance gone it's too bad because before it was swapped out the goatee was about the only surprising or intriguing component of andrescent's manifesto okay so now that we've gotten past that all right we made it through listeners we we made it through the goatsie segment i mean it was just so crazy to see it illustrated that likely and hopefully the only goatsy segment for the rest of 2020

We're not touching on that ever again. Maybe 2024. We'll see how this go. If you are a legendary VC and you illustrate your post like that, then we will talk about it. But what Max goes on to talk about is in 2020, this is like you said, it's a redo of time to build. It's time to build, which was during COVID. And we had all these societal problems. And Mark Andreessen was telling us, okay, build our way out of it.

right and so you know this is what max says he goes what are you building one reason that three and a half years later andresen is reiterating that it's time to build instead of writing post called here's what i built during the building time i previously announced was commencing is that mark andresen has really not built much of anything in the year since he's determined that it was time to build his fund invested tens of millions of dollars in a video game ponzi scheme that emiserated its players and a company that sells blockchain transaction records said to reflect ownership of ape cartoons. To me, what really stuck out for me, and I think we can move off of this after this, but what really stuck out is this, the push by Andresen Horowitz to make

Web 3 happen. And like Molly said on the podcast on Wednesday, then to subsequently reportedly cash out a lot of those tokens and leave the retail investor holding the bag without building some of the crucial things that Mark Andreessen talked about us, us needing. That is something that you can't quickly talk away. That's not something that quickly goes away from your venture capital firm. And that's not something that people are going to likely forget anytime in the near to mid-future. And it's obviously, you know, something that like you said, maybe beforehand, before all this craziness, you know, we would have paid a lot more attention.

But it just seems to show how seriously the, the cachet that this firm has had, has degraded over these past years. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I'm sure reasonable people can see it differently. me, but that's, that was my takeaway. Yeah, to me, it's trying to do this again. It's time to build had an incredible amount of energy behind it. Everyone was, you know, let's do this. Let's, this is the right direction.

Let's really rebuild infrastructure in the United States. Let's try to set ourselves up from the future. And as you said, when, what was the token for the video game called again? It was like smooth love potion. I mean, there was so many. Yeah, it was called SLP coins, smooth love in a coin called smooth love potion that then, you know, as you said, fleeced retail out of a lot of money. But the other thing, again, like all of these kind of, there's so much in this manifest or at least in the early parts that I read around how government is the enemy, regulatory capture, over like the private sector being run by the public sector is the enemy. whereas A16 Z is moving more into defense tech, which is good and if there's a lot of money to be made and, you know, a lot of, like, it's an opportunity, but that's directly contracting with the government and the public sector.

So there's just inconsistencies in all of this that are hard to reconcile, but it's an interesting post. I mean, I don't know, kind of think that like I'd rather have people write what they have on their mind and read them. Like a lot of people were killing the writing. And yeah, the writing made it difficult to get through the whole thing. But I'm also just like, I guess you can write it the way that you feel like. Just it's time to get an editor. That's all I said. No, I disagree.

Just get an editor. Write the way that you feel. But write better stuff. I don't know. I just, I guess it is just an interesting moment. And Drisian Horowitz is one of the most fascinating stories because they've been right about so much. And they are so smart. And Andreessen is like a standalone personality in the tech industry.

They've done a lot of good, but they're searching for, it seems like, a second act or trying to ride a wave of, you know, of interesting forces and I'm not quite sure where it's going to go and we'll see what happens. They do make the LPs happy. So there's that. Okay. After the break, we're going to talk a little bit about the new data that I have from Twitter.

And then after this topic, we are going to talk about the Middle East, which I'm sure will be less controversial. 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 Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you. you're using right now. And we're back here on big technology podcast Friday edition. Ron John

Roy, Ron John of margins. You can get it at read Margins.com. Okay, Ron John. So first of all, Elon Musk started to run a test that you can pay a dollar. He's in a couple of markets that you'll be paying a dollar to use Twitter. I initially was like, oh, this is actually a good idea because it will weed out the bots. But then I thought, oh man, like maybe this will actually cause even further degradation of Twitter's user base. What's your read on the dollar plan? It's funny because this is exactly the type of system that I advocated for back in 2017.

Again, some small payment just to verify, just to add some kind of incentive or monetary connection to the platform. And again, it's a dream for a platform. Once you have that credit card connected, then actually upselling on different types of services or even e-commerce, it could present a huge opportunity. It's just funny that now that everything is framed in, you are giving Elon Musk $1, the entire equation changes. And I can imagine

it's just not going to work. Wait, but you're agreeing with Elon on the idea in principle. Yeah. No, I think. Okay. Our listeners, their heads are going to explode, man. This is your like first moment of kumbaya with Elon in months. I'm saying it's the right idea, wrong execution. But if you think about it, because thing, something minimal enough where it does not exclude a massive proportion of the population, obviously, you would still need some level of free service associated with it, but just, you know, creating a paid level around the most basic parts of the service, it just makes it so it's not, bad actors can't build entire bots of, you know, armies of bots without at least having to pay for that if they're going to. But I think, yeah,

It's the right idea, right direction. I just don't think it's going to work or happen. And it's certainly it's a starting point for a business that was already in a good and strong place to try to build this thing or to build it from the beginning, like potentially a blue sky or someone should maybe go down this road. But I think at Twitter's level with the debt, like with interest payments are going to have to try to come up with the cash for, this is definitely not going to solve the problem on that side. And if you think about it, Snap, again, we've talked about this in the past.

Snapchat Plus is at 5 million subscribers, and you know it works because it's just in, it's through Apple. They're paying the Apple tax. It's $3.99 a month. But clearly it's a very, and that's per month, not a year. The Twitter proposal is $1 a year. But you already have $5 million people. So really kind of like low level payments on a recurring basis, whether that's a month, whether that's a year. I think that's the direction platforms are going to be going, and I think it's the right one.

Right. And it's kind of interesting because it comes at the one-year anniversary mark of Elon taking over Twitter. On October 26th, I believe, 2022, Elon walked into Twitter headquarters, then Twitter head of quarters with a sync. So we're almost at the anniversary now. He took over the company on the 28th. What's happened in the year since? I got some new data from Apptopia. And we found that Twitter has lost 13% of its users. So they approximate that the estimated daily active users have gone from 140 million every day to 120 million. And it really accelerated around the rebrand. We had months of Twitter losing daily active users more than 5% month over month in August and September.

After the rebrand and negative reviews went up 2,000%. there. So, okay, so you see that and you're like, all right, that actually seems like Elon's lost less than you'd imagine given a lot of the hand-wringing about his use of the platform. Obviously, it's still a pretty powerful platform, some other data that the daily active minutes per user is about consistent and power users are still making up the vast majority of the time spent on the platform. So obviously, like work to do, it's shrinking under Musk. It's not shrinking, you know, it's not having. It's still relevant. and it still will have staying power.

The interesting thing that I saw on the data that really stuck out to me was how Threads is doing compared to Twitter. Threads was, first of all, only about 10% of Twitter users have tried threads, and Threads was... 10% of Facebook users. No, no, 10% of Twitter users.

So you have 90% of people who are predisposed to this type of product who haven't even signed up for threads. And it went from above 20 minutes per day on the app, but it's launched to under five minutes per day now where Twitter's like around 15%. So clearly Threads isn't catching on. To me, it's just kind of signals that this need for people to be in a short form app where news is breaking and they get to see everybody yell.

You know, it was novel and it appealed to people and certainly appeals to some percent of people. But by and large, this is not something the population wants, not on the broad population wants, maybe niche but not broad. They don't want it on Twitter and they don't want it on threads. I don't think they want it on Blue Sky. They certainly don't want it on Mastodon, and they don't want it on substack notes. Yeah, I think that was always, to me, again, I'm going to give Elon credit on another one, that a premium subscription for Twitter power users giving more features was always the business model to me, that you have in the hundreds of millions of users as the total addressable market who are

excited, willing to use it on a daily basis, like any of them. us, like you or me. I mean, like, so easily being willing to pay for things. And I remember when they first, Paragon crew first launched Twitter Blue, and I was actually a happy subscriber to get bookmarked folders. And, uh, and even the undue tweet feature where you can, it basically just didn't post it for eight seconds or 10 seconds or whatever. Like, I think that was always the real opportunity or taking all the Twitter fire hose data and selling, you know, and selling, it and packaging it to hedge funds or other social media marketing monitoring companies. These are all the things that Twitter would kind of get into that I think they should have

leaned more into. But again, the idea that they were ever going to grow the average Twitter user or the everyday daily active user to hundreds of millions or billions never really made sense to me. And now, again, once it becomes, once the platform itself is degraded, And once it gets inextricably tied to Elon Musk, you kill any chance of that. Right. Okay. So let's go one level deeper and talk about how frustrating of an experience it can be to follow the news on a platform, like a Twitter, like a threads even.

And that is what's happening in the Middle East this week. I mean, over the past few weeks, last week I was here on the show and said that a few things. First of all, I said they should separate from news. I think I'm going to rephrase that. Obviously, news is going to be a core part of any platform like this that will give you up-to-the-minute information in short text bursts. So for news organizations to completely go away may not be wise simply because you want to have good actors who are steering the conversation

and putting their analysis in the feeds. That being said, to fully embrace and go whole hog on the feeds, is i think a little bit too much like you you know these feeds will never be the main way you reach your audience will never be the main way that you build an audience they'll never be the main way that you gather news and so that's why i think there should be a little bit of distance between news organizations and social media platforms i also said that i found it pretty i also said i found it pretty um easy to follow or or possible to follow the news on these feeds. And this week obviously proved that to be much more difficult than I anticipated. There

was so much misinformation flowing around Twitter about the hospital that was bombed in, or the hospital parking lot that was bombed in Gaza, not only on Twitter, but within the mainstream news publications. I mean, places got it obviously wrong, you know, putting headlines and images up there that seemed to indicate with certainty things that had happened that had not happened or were under dispute. And, you know, I don't know necessarily whether I have to fully revise it. I mean, I still was able to follow the discussion in real time and was able to make my own assessments, but it's certainly a lot messier this week than it was last week.

I think it's time to fully revise it, Alex. Go ahead, go ahead, make the argument. Okay, so I was listening. I was way last Friday and I was listening, and I definitely heard that idea that Twitter is still the best place. to get breaking news and to try to keep up with it. I would say for people who are very active and open-minded and nuanced around it, it's still, I have been on Twitter in the last two weeks, probably more than I had in the past few months. But what really, what really, really worries me about this is,

is two parts. It's one, as you said, mainstream news organizations, we all know every journalist still spends all their time on Twitter. So it makes them knee-jerk and the whole editorial process tried to move potentially faster than it should be. And we saw that with the hospital, whatever happened and which is still not definitive, and it's clear that it's not definitive what happened, is that the New York Times posted a headline right away when they shouldn't have. And I feel in a previous era, editorial processes wouldn't have jumped the gun that quickly. So I think that's one side, is that mainstream news.

organizations have to break away from the Twitter pace of breaking news like and as much as they want to be at that pace and as much as each journalist is still processing things. Oh, I agree with that completely. That's definitely point one. The first point that I made was that for sure. News institutions need to, you know, have one or two degrees of separation from these feeds. They're extremely unhealthy for for journalists to be on all the time, like you said. All the time. But that being said, I do think that they're being in the feed. are possible if you have discernment and news judgment to learn what's going on from them. Do you disagree with that?

Yes and no. Yes and no. Because I say this is someone who has spent a lot of time digging through. And I give myself some credit around being able to parse through information. But what I noticed that was really different about this versus the past. And this is where Elon's degradation of the platform really plays a role is that the core economic structure of the platform is now one where anyone can get the blue check is incentivized to four clicks and views to potentially be paid out, that everything about the platform pushes bad actors to actually

spread misinformation or more salacious information. Again, I mean, it almost became a joke that the Belling Cats of the world that really brought this interesting way. And for people unfamiliar, it's like, you know, using digital knowledge and data and understanding to be able to bring, you know, geolocated coordinates or other image analyses to verify information or debunk it. Now, literally my entire feed was like anyone with a blue check suddenly turned into an OSint expert, like a military expert and is just, like all you would have to do is throw out random coordinates and say like, okay, have verified, here's a thread, and people will click on it. So I think when the entire platform is now incentivized for anyone to get a blue check,

pay eight bucks a month, and then make themselves be allowed to be paid off of that, all incentives point towards spreading misinformation versus in the past, the blue check was still around verification by the platform, however opaque that process was. So anyone on there, there was, that had not. nothing to do with how much money you could or could not make on the platform. In fact, you couldn't make any money on the platform. So the only real incentive was to build trust and following. So it scared me. It scares me right now. If this is happening one week into this conflict, two weeks into this conflict, where this can go and how much worse it can get as long as

this is still, knowing this is still the central place where news starts, I don't know. It's a little bit terrifying. I mean, yeah, right. That is the, the supply side. I would say demand side, it's a little different. Like demand side, if you're using it as a user, I think you can still get a lot out of it and it's a useful tool. However, like, you know, I'm starting to question the merits of being in there so often. Like, maybe it is better to just wait and read it on news sites, you know, because it's just, it is, it is, it's not as much for me the misinformation. it's more of like the partisanship and everybody's like out there just like yelling their talking points and you know skewing the information in the way that conforms with their agenda and that drives me nuts

and I actually I put a thread about this uh this week I guess it was also a threat I did it no not threatened I put a did a thread about it uh wait a Twitter thread or a thread post Facebook and I put on both platforms anyway okay okay I said basically like it was it's frustrating this my weekly check and to make sure you have threaded. Yeah, it's frustrating to me because what I'm seeing is there's so many people who are on these platforms. The whole dialogue is they did this and they did that and they're bad and they're worse and can you believe it?

It just drove me nuts. And I think that one of the key things that I put out there was that like maybe instead of just talking about the problem all the time, we should speak about the solutions, even if it doesn't fit in the feed. Like no one's talking about solution. And it's just an, it's embarrassing, I think. the state of what do you mean solutions in this case to this conflict i that that's a tough one i feel in terms of again yeah twitter short form think about this short form metrics driven content is not

where no anyone is going to have but how much podcasts however yeah we can do it i mean how much energy is being put to splitting people apart versus bringing them together and maybe that's me being naive but it's just absurd no but that's where that's again what I'm saying, all incentives of the platform are around doing exactly that right now. If you want to make money on the platform, that's the easiest way to do it, and it's the best thing you can do. Like, it's the, it's like the Macedonian teenagers in 2016 with Facebook pages. Now the economic incentives point towards that, which they didn't before. So that's why I think this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Right. And I wrote this in our document,

but this is almost like the anti-soundbite war. It's so frustrating because it's impossible to put anything into a soundbite here because there's so many years of context that are important for every little bit of the situation that's happening. And, you know, I just, it's frustrating to me because, like, people are trying to shoehorn this into, like, 280 characters and be like, you know, this side is right because or that side is right because. And it's like, you know, you have people in Gaza who don't,

don't like Hamas. You have people in Israel who have been marching in droves to overthrow the government there. I mean, not like with a coup, but like calling on the president to resign large portions or the prime minister to resigns large portion of the country. And so like it's just, it doesn't lend itself to social media. It really is frustrating. And no, but then think about this. I've seen so many people. I've talked to so many people who already, you know, are like either the anti-Semitism or the Islamophobia is so apparent in all of the replies to anything I've said, of course every bot army right now is going to be in there, mixed with real people as well, but it's like the easiest opportunity for any bad actor to just get everyone feeling

like division is all there is, because there's, again, both the geopolitical incentive, the economic incentive. Everything is incentivizing, splitting people like that based on how the platform structured right now. Right. And it does, by the way, it spills over into newsrooms. And we just touched on this, but I think that mainstream newsrooms really did have been doing a terrible job covering this conflict. So there's been some good, but some of it's bad, including folks that should know better, you know, people who might touch on covering disinformation, sharing clearly wrong numbers about numbers of casualties and not using that to walk back. back and not examining, you know, the roots of, of why those numbers were shared and why they

shared those numbers. To me, that's just, it's not good. Don't tweet. Okay. That's the lesson. Don't tweet. Don't tweet. Don't read Twitter about that. I don't know. It's tough. Yeah. All right. Last question. Should I go to Web Summit? Explain to listeners why that's a question. So right now there's all these. So WebSummit is one of the biggest tech conferences in the world. And it's in Lisbon every year. I go almost every year. And Patty Cosgrave, who runs the thing, and I know him, made a bunch of statements about this conflict, you know, basically winking at the fact that Israel is committing war crimes without naming any specific war crimes and also just, I think tweeting somewhat insensitively on

October 7th before any of the bodies in Israel were really cold. Okay, I'm just going to say it because it's important to draw it out. After the Israelis were massacred on that day, he published a chart or tweeted a chart that showed the differences between Israeli and Palestinian deaths in the conflict year by year. It's an accurate chart. It's a chart worth discussing and not worth ignoring, but to share that on the day that so many innocents were killed gave the impression that it was like, well, this, they deserve this. Or like, you know, no big deal. I think that's what the impression was given.

And lots of Israelis pulled out of the conference, meta, oh, let's see, oh, meta is out now, Google is out now, Intel is out now, Siemens is out now. I mean, basically all of their key speakers have withdrawn. I'm struggling with this, to be honest. I think people are entitled to make mistakes, and he did apologize. I don't know if what Patty did was he wasn't like, I mean, I've seen so many instances of worse on, you know, both people who support Israel, support the Palestinians, who've used worse language than he did, far worse. And it hasn't really, I guess I'm still planning to go.

It didn't really come to the level for me that like it's, you know, worth having Web Summit destroyed over, although like I understand where the concerns come from. But I don't know what to do. What do you think? I mean, for me, the most, the kind of odd part of this whole story was I saw certain people saying because they took money from the Qatari investment authority, that that's a reason to come out. And to me, again, I mean, separate from, I think, again, the topic of what people

are posting and when, this is where you had mentioned Apple and China and all the kind of like difficult decisions that's going to create for people. I mean, the vision fund, sorry, like, I mean, will division funds through the Saudi Investment Authority, like, you know, MBS and Saudi Arabian money in every venture capital fund or tech company, there's going to be more and more and more of these very, very complicated and messy connections and situations that I think none of these questions are going to be answered anytime soon and it's only going to get messier. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I know Patty. So I think that's sort of, you know, what's. shaping this for me in some way and I mean I also don't think that I mean I again like I think his statements were were bad and poor taste but um no this is where oh sorry it just seems to me that to have all these companies pull out over them is I don't know it's it's bold go ahead but I this is where to to bring it all back to John Stewart why I became such a John Stewart fan in the 2000s was I remember living here in New York in the post 9-11 era, especially in the buildup to the Iraq War,

he was one of the only voices on any kind of network television, even though it's still cable, but on any easily accessible television that actually was in a smart, and I think that's where comedy was really important because he was able to get out the message that maybe this is not a good idea, but do it with humor so people allowed it and listened to it. But otherwise, that message was just not allowed anywhere.

So I think, like, it reminded me, like, a lot of these kind of things that you can potentially see as a overreaction. I think that's where John Stewart managed to thread the needle very well back in the day in terms of, like, in a very heated environment still trying to bring a nuanced view to a very difficult situation. And his context mattered, by the way. I mean, he was a New Yorker. This war was being fought. I mean, in terms of 9-11 victims, I don't think there's been anyone who has taken the cause as much as John Stewart. Yeah. And so, like, I think that he was stepping up and saying effectively, like, in my name and the name of my city, like, I mean, obviously it's the whole country that was involved, but, you know, he had some authority there. Patty grew up in Ireland, of course, and Ireland has its own problem with terrorism groups, and he immediately drew a line between the two.

Unfortunately, it's just, you know, it is not the same thing. You know, and I do think. that's been a real problem in the U.S. where a lot of people are trying to put their like, you know, their context of how their political ideology works and just neatly fit it on top of what's going on inside Israel and Gaza, it just doesn't work that way. Yeah, but I was actually going to say, I disagree that people are even trying because it's so convoluted and twisted and messy that, again, I don't think there's a way, you know, like the far, right, which side do they take in this, this conflict? Like, I feel it's, it just, there's been so much complexity in all the different connections and where people stand in different ways that it's a

reminder that again, this is all messy and complex and people aren't able to, only very limited people are able to confirm all their priors in terms of what's going on. Yeah, no doubt. At some point, it gets messier. That will do it for us this week. Next week, we're going to going to talk about big tech earnings a lot on tap including amazon so stay tuned for that okay who do we have on tap next week meredith whitaker is the CEO of signal is scheduled to come on next wednesday so that should be an interesting discussion maybe i'll go even deeper but the about the techno optimism with her so if you like this conversation stay tuned for that one and that's going to do it for us here so thank you ronjohn thank you everybody for listening and we'll see you next time

on Big Technology Podcast.