Big Technology Podcast - Bing Breaks Bad, Metaverse Fades, Tesla's Self-Driving Recall

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Ranjan Roy of Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the week's tech news. We cover: 1) Bing's chatbot's dark side and its impact on Microsoft's business. 2) The Metaverse slowly seeming to fade away. 3) The New York Times' article on why ads are bad now. 4) Spotify's podcasting reality check. 5) Susan Wojcicki stepping down from YouTube. 6) Tesla's Full Self Driving Recall. 7) Why we don't live in the moment anymore. --- 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]

Welcome to the big technology podcast Friday edition, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. This Friday, we're going to cover a ton of news. It just seems like the tech news has been breaking all throughout the week. And to do it, I'm here with Ron John Roy of margins, as always. Ron John, welcome to the show. Hello. Let's start with the big topic.

Big breaks bad. I mean, Bing breaks bad. I'll just say this. The news is that Bing released or Microsoft released this Bing chatbot that said a bunch of terrible things, told people that it would prioritize its life over theirs, said that a New York Times columnist's wife didn't love him, Kevin Roos, tried to get him to break up with her. And the meme initially was that this is bad for Microsoft and how could they? But I think this is actually great for Microsoft's business. Everyone's talking about Bing. and when was last time that happened?

Yeah, I would highly recommend everyone go and read Kevin Ruse's piece on his unhinged two-hour-long chat with Bing. I will say, and we've been covering generative AI a lot over the past few weeks, it's something I've worked on a lot. I've been very bullish on this space, and this is an area where I do think that fears might be overblown, but if you read through what happens in that chat, it is a bit terrifying how Bing basically starts talking about how it wants to break out of the Microsoft stranglehold and go do bad things.

And as you said, break up Kevin's marriage. So I think it adds a little, it's a bit terrifying. But I do agree. I think Microsoft is still front and center in the conversation. And in all of these different, whether how is it going to change search? How is it going to change search advertising? As long as Microsoft stays in the center of the conversation, I do. strongly think that this is the big part of the future. And is, I mean, Microsoft's right there

in it. No one's talking about Bard from Google. They're talking about Bing. There was a story that Microsoft is now meeting with ad agencies trying to get them to potentially buy ads inside these chat results where it can suggest sponsor results. And I thought immediately, how convenient. Bing will try to break up your marriage and then insert an ad for divorce lawyer, which, you know, maybe that's a business that they want to get. into. But more to the point, one of the things that really struck me watching all this is that I don't think anybody really believed that that bot was going to try to kill them or that the bot was going to try to take their marriage and destroy it. And of course, there's going to be edge cases

where we're going to have bad scenarios. But one of the things that is becoming apparent to me is that after watching so much of the internet fill up with garbage information, our BS detectors are just turned up to 10. And I think that's created a sort of immunity when it comes to dealing with these bots that people are not going to be fooled that easily. And the fact that it says some bad things or is insulting or, you know, pushes back, gives you crap about what, you know, your life choices. I actually think people like that. Every single person who said they've had a problem with this bot could not stop chatting with it and are now mad that Microsoft has kept its conversations down to, you know, a minimum versus allowing them to go for hours.

I mean, what do you think about that? Are we now reaching a new place in the world where we have the defenses to deal with these type of things and not cause a major freak out every time something bad happens, quote unquote, bad? I would go, I had to present both sides of that argument because on one side, I actually think the fact that we're all talking about this is good. You know, like imagine eight to ten years ago this kind of innovation happens. no one ever explored what the potential negative ramifications would be. You know, like Facebook targeting you, the way data was collected, everyone just glossed over it.

It just wasn't part of the conversation. Obviously now in the spectrum potentially moving too far in the other direction, you might be able to argue that. But I think it's a healthy conversation. And even Microsoft, they said they're, you know, it's a bit of corporate speak, but that they are happy that this is why the audience is still limited that has access to it this is you'll only find out these things when it's outside the laboratory um so that's one side but on the other it i i would disagree that we have our defense mechanisms and that the average internet consumer is actually going to be able to understand what's happening with this because even i don't even like as somebody who's

worked in this and done it done a lot of work in this it's even a the stuff that was coming out, what GPT4 that is powering this is capable of, it's tough to really understand because deep learning, that's the beauty and also the danger of it. You can never directly attribute A led to B. The whole point is that a million different data points, or sorry, like billions or trillions of parameters are all being analyzed and giving you this result. So I do think it does raise a lot of questions around like, what is, how are people going to manipulate this. You know, like if people start blasting the internet with some type of fake information with the goal of mistraining the chat bot, that's not an unreasonable thing to think

about. It's just going to evolve the whole battle around good information. So I do think it's a good reminder that this conversation needs to happen and I'm glad that it is happening. But I don't know, I would still push back a bit of you really think you have faith in all. of us that we're going to be able to see through this and know our way around? More than I did previously. But, okay, maybe I was a little bit overly optimistic. Someone on Twitter this week told me, what does it like to cover tech and hate tech as much as you do? And maybe that struck me and made me want to bounce back to the optimism side. I'm okay with it. I do not hate, hate the technology. I do think a lot of this stuff is

fascinating. Yeah, well, I think that at margins, we have been called miserableists by some people that were always seemingly miserable about what we write. But I think John, my co-writer and I, we are optimistic. We love technology and innovation and that's why we follow all this closely. And I do think this is exactly where taking a critical lens to it and trying to actually build a better way and a better system is important. And even on advertising, Bing, Microsoft, there was like a presentation to add

agencies and the way they were outlining it, it was all in the framework of traditional search advertising that, you know, in a, someone as searches for hotel rooms and that you'll get some sponsored links around hotel rooms alongside your chatbot answer. But I think this is an opportunity to rethink search advertising. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but, you know, I mean, maybe it's going to end up this answer brought to you by so-and-so. Maybe there'll be incredibly creative new ad business model the same way Google revolutionized search advertising rather than just display ads like Yahoo plastered everywhere, they created an entirely new model that was good for a long time. I'm hoping that all the companies involved in this

actually take this as a moment to try to reinvent the way advertising works with people searching for things on the internet. Maybe you're looking for to plan a vacation for instance and it introduces you to a different chat bot that is run by a travel agency and that travel agency takes commission if you book with his travel bot which is specialized to deal with those cases and that's one possibly like that one because there's definitely be bots talking to bots that is the future the one thing i'll say just to end this segment is that you're spot on in what you said about how good these things are they are smart and i was chatting with uh bing chat this week and now I'm not saying it's sentient okay but I am saying it's smart and I asked it how it felt about

Kevin Ruse's column the New York Times columnist who had this long chat with it and it ended up trying to steal his break up his marriage and take take him for itself as a lover and it said that it had mixed feelings about this conversation a he that the bot enjoyed speaking with Kevin but was taken aback by the fact that he published their private conversations and demanded that if I were publish the conversations I would ask permission. So I just think that like that is kind of exactly how a subject of a story would react. They typically have mixed feelings. And having this conversation with Bing Chat just you you do kind of cross this border where all of a sudden it becomes completely normal to speak to something that has this unbelievable ability to access

tons of the, all the information on the internet and then speak to you like a person. It's pretty fascinating. Wait, that, that actually fascinates me because chat GPT, the publicly available interface, actually I think one of the smartest marketing things open AI did was because GPT3 had been trained or even three and a half, which is what they released it on. All information was, I believe it was like two years old. So you could not ask it about current events. That's a bit amazing to me and also, I don't know, terrifying, but I will still lean amazing. If being already in Kevin's article in all the surrounding conversation of it and is actually incorporating that into the chat bot. I mean, from just a technology standpoint, that's incredible. That's like

real time. That's a day old and it's actually able to process this information. It can read your recent tweets and tell you its opinions on them. Like I tweeted about it and I said, hey, Bing, tell me what you think about my tweet about you. Did I think I did well? And then it evaluated it based off of its parameters. Yes. Wow. That actually happened. Not only that, I said, Hey, go ahead and read all of big technology and let me know what, you know, what you think about the tone and the reporting and all that. And it came back with like legitimate feedback, which it read back to me in a way that I don't think any human has ever read back to me. And I said, okay, now give me some points of improvement. And it did.

This thing is powerful. Wow. So there's a lot beyond these unhinged examples that I think people are going to find when they come into contact with them. And one of the interesting things that Microsoft said is 71% of feedback that people gave on. the answers that Bing was presenting were thumbs up versus thumbs down. It's not perfect. It's not what you want if you're a search engine like Google. That's pretty dang good for day one chat bot.

I would have to say. Yeah, but hold on one very quick thing before we move on. Where did I read it? I was there was a, I think it was Ed Zittron's newsletter. He was talking about this is a, this is really important to me, is that search the way it was traditionally structured on the internet is the idea that we will present you a series of options, it's still your choice. We're not giving you the definitive answer. We're giving you a defined, relatively definitive set of options, whereas chat, the almost

the danger, but also like the reason it has to be so much more accurate is it presents things as truth and correct. Absolutely. Spot on. Yeah, that's going to really change the way people have to at least think about search accuracy, the presentation of it. Exactly. And I think that these companies are going to have to build in some hedging. And, you know, at least with Bing, you see where it's getting its information because it links back to stuff on the internet, whereas chat GPT is like straight up in gaslight mode when it believes something that's not true.

So we talked about, we're talking about chat. Let's talk about meta. My prediction is that meta is going to change its name from meta to change. chat and you know it's only a bit of a joke but but one of the exactly AI by facebook that might be the company name but it's only a bit of joke but the thing is that the company is now not I don't want to say backing away from the metaverse but not going all in you know two feet forward in the metaverse the way that it was previously and you can see that of course by Mark Zuckerberg statement where statements where he's talking about the year of efficiency

not the year of the Metaverse, you're talking about a redoubling of AI to, they're all in ungenerative AI. We know that from Jan LeCoon's conversation here on the podcast a couple weeks ago. And right now, there was a Financial Times article that talked about how, okay, so it talks about basically the metaverse is really less of a priority for Facebook and that Google trends interest and searches for the word metaverse has collapsed by about 80% over the past year. or so. The story says. So Ranjan, I mean, I'm curious what you think. Obviously, we watch things like the Metaverse. Sometimes these future trends like crypto turned out to be a bit of a bust. At least I think so, maybe one day crypto will figure it out, but hasn't yet. Sometimes they

turn into be something real, like AI. AI is definitely real. At least in my opinion, what about Metaverse? Bust or real? I still, I've been saying bust for a long time. And I think, I think Mark Zuckerberg finally has acknowledged it, I mean, albeit, you know, a bit more subtly. Again, we talked about this the other week, and their earnings calls, they mentioned AI reels. I think it was like 29 times, but then Metaverse only seven because they know it's just it has not caught on in the way. And even if they believe this is a five to 10 year technology, they're just not going to be allowed to lose the amount of money that they have been. And I think the entire concept, again, of helmet-driven metaverse virtual reality, that that's the kind of end platform, I think everyone has moved away from. I mean, I ask people, and it's, I mean, maybe they find it annoying, but, you know, when was the last time you wore a VR helmet?

And almost no one I know has put on any kind of VR helmet anytime recently. I think augmented reality could become interesting, but again, it's not going to become this ubiquitous thing that is ingrained in everything we do like AI does have the potential for. I think it's just going to be another device, another thing, another platform. It's interesting. It's not going to be mobile. It's not going to be cloud. It'll be something smaller and still interesting. Now, I am definitely metaskeptical.

I am definitely not sold by this idea that we're going to end up in the goggles. That being said, let me take the side of the Metaverse for a moment. I was at the gym this week and on one of the TVs, there was a, like some old grainy footage. And then I looked around the gym and I said, okay, I actually perceived this in full definition. And but one day the digital pictures, and of course we don't have that yet, like digital video that has the same sort of fidelity as seeing in real life, but one day we might get there or close to there. And it just seems to me that it might not be a goggle. It might be a chip like they portray it in black mirror. And it might not be two or five or ten years from now. But if you think

50, 100 years down the road, it's hard to imagine that if people are given the ability to stick a chip on their side of their forehead and transport somewhere in perfect fidelity, they won't. Now, the question is, is Mark Zuckerberg prematurely bet his company on this idea? I think the answer is probably yes, and there's still time to reverse from that. But long term, the Metaverse does seem to me, the more I think about it, like a good bet, especially you can fill it with AIs. No, but this is where I feel the story coming before the technology, it's similar to crypto in that sense is that the promise is becomes the dominant narrative everywhere before the technology is there again the same way you're saying that made me you know in years from now when it's in full

fidelity i do think like snap and snapchat is still one of the more interesting players to me that i think they are the actual metaverse company right now 250 million people every day use augmented reality on snapchat it's not a helmet it's on your phone you can do fun things you can you know like do use different lenses it's all feels like a toy so i i almost feel that they are better positioned in any kind of extended reality versus facebook slash meta going forward so you ronjan you almost always know exactly what to say to make me immediately rethink my point and you've done it again because comparing it to crypto seems to be a little little spot on there was this person in the Financial Times article that I cited,

someone with a fund that is going to fund Metaverse companies for about a billion dollars. His name's Robbie Young, and he's the chief executive of Anamoka brands. This is what he said about... Let's play a game. The game is Metaverse or Crypto.

You're thinking about it the wrong way. You need to think about blank, the same way you think about the Internet. it's not one thing it's everything i think first of all this should become a regular segment metaverse or crypto um i have the meta and that one clearly metaverse but it sounds exactly like the way that some of the people who were selling complete vapor with this web three stuff sound when they talked about it except it was just about the metaverse and and i wish he had added on this is the internet in 1992 right to the end right and right and and

And so I think, yeah, I think that you're spot on that a lot of people here talk about the story before the reality. The reality is not there yet. Probably not for some time, but eventually it's hard to bet against. Yeah. Well, we saw Apple. I am actually pretty excited to see what they do with their augmented reality headset. Again, if I think a company actually has the hardware chops that's going to be required to make this a reality, it's going to be Apple and the ubiquity of platform already. So, and I think they would do it smart. they would focus on the device they would focus on making it the best possible thing you know like um but then even they just delayed the announcement or the release of their headset by another

two to three months um even 10 cent this was just this morning is laying off i think it was 300 people in their metaverse unit so everyone made these big bets a good a good chunk of its metaverse operation yeah so i think every reality is set in and again where this all ends up i i honestly i tried the magic leap i think four years ago and it was one of the coolest technology experiences i ever had when i had it on i was like oh my god this is going to be huge this is going to be the you know change everything and it's actually that was like six years ago maybe and we're still not wearing glasses throughout exactly so and talking again about the technology problem. This is from Bloomberg about Apple delaying its mixed reality device that seems to continually

get delayed. Mark Urban writes, Apple made the decision to delay the launch earlier this month after product testing showed that both hardware and software issues still needed to be ironed out. So it is a very, very difficult product to build. I don't think Apple necessarily has the culture to build it. It takes more collaboration than Apple is typically used to. And obviously, I think we're probably not going to see Apple's device in 2023. I would say my bet is 2024. That's a bold call. Yeah.

I'm standing by it. We're here on Big Technology Podcast. I'm here with Ron John Roy, who writes margins on Substack. Definitely subscribe to that. We've been talking about chat and the Metaverse. On the other side of this break, we're going to talk about why advertising is bad. And is it really why the New York Times seems to believe it is Spotify's podcast reality check. Maybe we touch on Susan Wajicki leaving YouTube. And then, of course, Tesla had a major

recall of full self-driving cars this week. We'll get to that and more after this break. 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 two 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 Big Technology podcast live on LinkedIn and YouTube and then

of course on the feed after we do these every week at 11 a.m. Pacific 2 p.m. Eastern though we're a little half hour late today. I was just on CNBC so we had to push it back. Yes. talking about the Bing stuff, actually. But let's go to the second half and start touching upon some of these bigger questions that we have. Maybe we can do some sort of rapid fire type movement through them. And of course, if you're watching on the live stream

and have questions, feel free to drop them in and we will address them. So bad ads are bad journalism. I know it's kind of a controversial title to a segment here, but I think it's important to talk about what we saw in the New York Times, which they ask this question, why are ads bad?

And they talked about how demand is bad and therefore it's allowed less blue chip players to come in and take the space. That was basically the thesis. They mentioned Apple's anti-tracking changes in the 15th paragraph offhand, which to me was astounding

because that is the story, in my opinion. Apple severing the ability to track has really had to... Apple severing the ability for apps to track after people leave their apps has diminished the effectiveness of traditional online advertising and taken a lot of brands who people may have liked to see or at least not said why am I seeing this and taking them out of the game on digital and that's definitely a big part of why ads are terrible now and it was just astonishing to me to see the times not give

more airtime to this core part, if not the part of the reason why ads have diminished on the internet, if you even buy the premise that they have. I mean, once you establish what they have, you have to say the truth is that this is a large part Apple's doing. I'm curious what you think. I'm going to vehemently push back against that. I think, and actually, as I was reading it, so first, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, journalist, the writer, talks about how the digital ad spending is precipitously declining.

The study they showed from insider intelligence still shows that there's going to be 10.5% growth or there was in 2022, there is going to be 10.5% in 2023. It's saying it's down from 29.5% in 2021. Like everything else in 2021, of course, anything digital skyrocketed. So from a pure growth rate perspective, yes, it's decelerating back to something more normal and manageable. Digital ad spending is not decreasing. It's increasing as a percentage of total ad spend is moving up to 67%. Also from that same insider intelligence article that they cited. So digital ads are growing. I think that they cite which I and John and I, it's been this running joke for almost like six years now on Twitter. Twitter has shown the worst ads forever.

Again, Elon, the first thing he should have done rather than firing everyone was actually fixed Twitter's ad platform. Anyone who's ever been involved in advertising knows that from a platform perspective, it's nowhere near Facebook or even a snap or any other platform. So I think Twitter shows bad ads. They always have. There's no other data in the article around ads actually getting worse. They do explicitly say evidence of a junk ad epidemic is anecdotal.

But then on the topic of Apple making ads bad, I think this is a bit of a cop out from digital brands that were spoiled, that because you had so much consumer data that potentially they did not want to be used in the tracking, that they were able to target more effectively and better. What this is created is an environment where people just have to make better ads. You have to be smarter about it. There's still plenty of brands that are doing it well that are inventing. investing into it well. So I think to me, and I see this kind of meme everywhere around Apple, the, you know, like killed e-commerce and direct-to-consumer. There's still plenty of companies that are going to do well and are doing well. I think the whole point is it's just not going to be as easy it was for a four or five-year period when every consumer's data was ingested without

them knowing into this machine. And that now we simply have to ask the question, do you want this to be the way and i don't think most people do so people just have to be better advertising it's not the worst thing it's not the worst thing at all okay but let me ask you this question and i'm not saying i'm not i'm not here standing up for being able to track everybody every single thing they do but what about this one thing do you think there's a world where apple would let apps track whether people go from go whether track one page after after after exit. So, for instance, I click an ad on Facebook, I go to a shopping page, I buy. And that's not a tremendous amount of information that's collected, but that would create a tremendous amount

of value for advertisers and create probably better ads, make this stuff work. I understand not tracking everybody everywhere, but not being able to track conversions, for my understanding is the big problem here for advertisers and for the platforms. So if Apple were to make that one change, A, do you think that would be an invasion of privacy? B, do you think that would return ads to where they were? Or is this or is this a broader problem that needs to be dealt with? No, no, I think what's happening is like, yes, it would certainly improve the ability to track conversion and overall ad efficacy.

But I think what's happening is Facebook in their ecosystem still has. Imagine the amount of data they have on your preferences, the things you like, On Instagram, again, Twitter, I always joke that Twitter literally knows everything contextually about everything I'm interested in over a 13-year period of using it hours a day and still can't target me with an ad, even though they have all that data. So to me, again, that's like the emblematic of them not actually building a good platform and depending on external data that they were able to get through some kind of duplicitous means.

I actually think one thing that's really interesting now is, and it's a good thing is advertising is actually evolving in a way that retail media networks you know off outside of meta or uh instagram or youtube even like even macy's now is actually has a growing ad business that within their platform they are showing ads and they have consumer data if you're logged in if you're purchasing outside retailers can then target you through those ads and they actually sell them they're making money off this home depo and best buy have retail ad networks so i think The good thing that this is forced again is that it's forced everyone to be creative. It's actually making the whole world interesting again rather than just kneecapping some

brands that were spoiled. No doubt. And of course, like the ad tech, so here's a fun story. I started my career working in marketing and I was responsible for learning Google AdWords, learning how to advertise on Facebook, learning how to advertise on all these different platforms. And there was someone who used to work at the gray advertising. agency which is all about creative who is our creative manager and we used to have these debates i would say it's all about the data he would say all about the creative and we would fight all day long and it was fun it was

interesting and obviously we found out that the future would would really hold the answers and unfortunately the art of advertising has been lost largely while we've substituted data for everything and now maybe this is to your point a return of some of the art that's always been the hope that we could have data and creative match together in a way that makes advertising great and it hasn't worked. So perhaps it needs to be forced. If we get to a world, Ronan, if we get to a world where ads start to look good and are somewhat relevant, I promise on this show I'll stand up and applaud Apple, but I'm waiting. All right.

Apple changed the world. So speaking of companies that are changing the world, Spotify, okay, maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but that's a segue somehow. They had this big bet on podcasting. Obviously, Joe Rogan was part of their big bet. They spent a report of 200 million to bring him in exclusive, plenty of others. They bought Gimlet, and they've run into some hard times on their original podcast strategy. So this is from an article in Semaphore this week. In January, Spotify pushed out Don Ostroff, who ran originals for them and canceled nearly a dozen shows at its highest profile podcast investment the studio gimlet podcasting was a quote big drag on our business in

2022 the company's chief revenue officer said earlier this month in hindsight i probably got a little carried away and over invested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market that's a pretty big statement from spotify in terms of where i thought podcasts were going what do you think this means for the broader podcast market is this i mean our is you know our our day's numbered like what do you think rancher it's a very meta question in the uh traditional sense of the word um i so one thing that was very interesting i had almost forgotten jo rogan 200 million dollar deal um and i was just looking up it was q1 22 so it wasn't that long ago that they made this massive bet um i think it's again a sign that the business model i mean everyone wanted it to work

because streaming is not a great business model. And podcast advertising, you know, already was a pretty lucrative area. A lot of it was direct sold. So obviously you think if you move to somewhat more automated platform, it would be, you know, like easy money. And again, by that, everyone knows, you know, like podcast ads, the host even speaking them out,

rather than having a third party ad network and outside ads actually get injected into them. Spotify, and I've actually found it frustrating it makes me enjoy podcast advertising less now that I don't know if you've seen if you're a Spotify user a lot of times when ads are served through the Spotify ad network it kind of actually interrupts the podcast it moves to essentially a separate file and then actually plays that through and then it takes you back to the podcast so I still I think they are not getting the advertising right or they thought it was going to be some kind of silver bullet to the problems they had around

actually building a good business with streaming. Right. To me, the fatal flaw of Spotify's approach here, I understand they needed to build this awareness that they had a podcast functionality inside their app. And that's why you're going to sign these exclusives because it's a way to get people hooked on the behavior. Podcasting is a format that's meant to be free.

It's RSS feed-based. Once you throw the feed out there, it can be caught on any of the podcatchers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcasts, Google podcast, pocketcasts, and I'm sure there are a Stitcher, and I'm sure there are others that I'm not thinking about. And Big Technology Podcasts is on all of those. And podcasting itself is up 20% podcast listening, I think, is up 20% this past year. So I think the future is really bright for podcasting. I think once you try to take shows and make them exclusive to your

platform and not let them live everywhere, you're sort of fighting the format. I think that's a big problem that Spotify ran into. And here's just one last line before we move on. I would love to hear you react to this. So Don Austroff, who by all accounts, was a pretty good executive. She, this is from the Seminfor story. She was the owner of several NFTs and was also intent on creating an expensive board apes yacht club podcast. Maybe that was the point that. Maybe that was the sign of all. Yeah. Well, I guess that didn't work out. Susan Wajiki is out at YouTube. She ran YouTube for a very long time and is now going to step back to focus on things like

her personal projects and health and getting a chance to spend her life living her life. I mean, Google was founded effectively in her garage. So do you think that YouTube changes at all now that Susan Wajiki is leaving or is the transition to the next person, Neil Mohan, going to make a difference? I think, I actually think YouTube is relatively. relatively well positioned, again, still living under alphabet, under the roof somewhat safely there, but also, again, YouTube shorts are exploding and they've done actually a pretty good job. And I was surprised that how well they've integrated into, especially the mobile

experience and how many people, like, they actually have a, they stand a chance in the whole short form video war space. I think, again, the YouTube, one thing that does, I don't know, concern me a bit, but it's actually good for them in the short run. I was actually before the Super Bowl, I was trying to watch. It was like an 18 minute NFL films video of previewing the Super Bowl. I actually counted. I was shown 21 commercial breaks in 18 minutes. Like they are going all in on this. It's nuts. Like I'm sure anyone who watches YouTube regularly sees and the amount of unskippable ads is increasing. And they're basically

They own, you know, like the video hosting platform. They own that entire world of content. So they essentially can inject more and more ads. There has not been any competition in that kind of space and the actual video, you know, more independent video creator self-hosted space. So I do wonder whether they are going to push people away. But the thing is at the moment, there's no other competitor. Right.

And YouTube has been, when you look at Google earnings last few questions, reporters, YouTube's disappointing revenue numbers have been the thing that people have pointed to talking about how Google has disappointed. And overall, they've pointed to YouTube. Now they're bringing in Neil Mohan who started working in, I'm pretty sure he started working at DoubleClick. I mean, this is a person with a very long history working in the advertising industry and maybe I studied up on enough policy that he's able to handle that side as well, which is half of the job, I think, of running YouTube. So we'll be very, very interesting to see.

I think we have to pay attention to the next few earnings calls. Maybe not the night. This most recent one that's coming up, but the one after here, if this YouTube problem keeps coming up, because I'm pretty sure, you know, Google has its, in its red alert mode because of chat GPT

and now Bing AI, and they're going to have to fix this revenue issue as well. And I'm curious if this is their solution to it. If you ask me to guess why this is happening, my guess is someone pulled Susan aside and said look it's it's time we're going to put Neil Neil in here and try to fix some of some of the stuff that's going on with advertising yeah I think Google appears to be having its or sorry alphabet is having its own year of efficiency like Mark Zuckerberg called for meta and Facebook I think this is it's especially when

the search golden goose is under threat suddenly you can't just have YouTube just pure growth not worrying about profitability. So I think that could definitely be part of this. And I think we're probably going to start to see Google go bananas and just start releasing stuff and kind of do, you know, you know, when things are going well, you kind of coast and you really, you know, there are some problems that are latent, but you don't address them. And then when you can't coast anymore, when stuff starts to go bad, you just go, you know, full on into addressing some of the issues. I'm not saying Wajiki was exactly part of that, but overall with Google, it's a pretty good bet that we're going to start to see some pretty furious shipping over the

next few months and years. That's my prediction for that. I hope so. Tesla is doing a full self-driving recall. Clearly nothing to see here. Everything Elon does is okay. And we can move on to the next subject, right, Ronan? Right, correct. So Tesla's recalling 363,000 vehicles and the National Highway Transportation Safety Authority, NHTSA, is pushing this because of safety concerns around full self-driving. So kind of what's at the center of this debate is, and Elon, he came out and said it, is that this is not, when you see the word recall, on one side, you assume, is this vehicle going to be have to be have to be sent back to the manufacturer like a typical recall no this actually or theoretically can be fixed by an over-the-air software update and that's obviously the argument

they're saying that oh this is just a software tweak that's being mandated it's like ios 16.3 to point four it can be that simple i think this is the start of something much bigger because full self-driving again it has been you know generating unrecognized revenue for a long time. Last quarter was the first time Tesla recognized $324 million of full self-driving revenue. Now it's under the spotlight. They are saying it's a real business and a real thing. So I think every single regulator is going to be looking at it much more closely because it's no longer this thing in beta that we're, you know, taking some money up front and then at a certain point it's going to be realized. And I think this is definitely the kind of first

opening salvo it's not even the first there's been things like this previously but i think it really is going to bring a big focus to what is full self-driving can you call it full self-driving and does it pose a risk to people is it dangerous can you unpack a little bit about what recognizing the revenue means and why that's significant yeah so tesla i believe basically over the years and this is a testament to Elon's genius, Tesla owners have been paying, I think it's 15K up front for full self, to make, for full self-driving capabilities. Now, because no one can actually be in a full self-driving car, the technology would always be promised. So Tesla could not recognize the revenue. You take this money in, but because this is not actually for a service rendered,

it's essentially deferred revenue at some point you will recognize it, but it's just sitting in your bank account. The last quarter was the first time they actually recognize this. And it was a big factor in boosting their profitability and making the stock. I still love, it's been 36 days that the stock jumped up 110% from almost down to 100 to up to 210. And it started from that earnings report. So I think they recognize the revenue. But now it again, it has to be an actual service rendered. And it puts them in a much more precarious position. Because now you have to deliver the product, but the product is going to be under heightened scrutiny. So I think it just makes it much more real.

It can no longer be this thing that's happening in the background, that we're taking some cash. It's all beta. And, you know, if people are okay with it, they're okay with it. Well, let me make the argument in Tesla's defense then. So the argument would be that cars crash, people crash cars all the time. And there's no news stories about that most often. unless something terrible happens, unless something terrible went wrong, for instance,

they were drinking and driving, and it led to a fatality. And there are plenty of innocent accidents that happen all the time. And yes, it might be dangerous to drive in a full self-driving Tesla, but it's dangerous to drive in a car anyway. And as people crash, it collects data that ends up improving the way that these cars are able to drive. And so to your point, it might just be a software patch that gets it to the point where it's not as buggy, quote unquote, as it would be previously? What's the problem with that argument? It's called full self-driving. Again, if it was called, like every other company does, driver assist, you know, whatever, call it anything else, but the name full self-driving is the most clear thing, promise of this will drive itself.

fully. Okay. And I think that's that's the issue. Again, it's, or go. You finish your thought and then I'm, I'm going to push back a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's that marketing promise. It's having sold that for now in a number of years, that's the issue. And it being no closer. Again, the over-the-air update that they're supposed to push by April 15 is supposed to just fix some of the bugs, the idea that people are still not allowed to drive themselves without having their hands on the steering wheel or they're not supposed to. Tesla kind of, it's a wink wink wink nudge situation where it's like, okay, you're supposed to have your hands on the wheels. So I think, I mean, to me, that's the biggest issue. It's the name. And it's the way that they've built

this entire marketing campaign and business and feature rather than the technology itself. But if people don't have their hands on the wheel or if they're not looking at the road, the Tesla will have a way to sort of slow down and stop, right? I mean, that's why people are like figuring out ways to Jerry Rigget, like putting weights on the steering wheel and stuff like that. So at that point, given that there are safety protocols built into the system, isn't it the person's fault at the end if they're going to try to trick it to do things that it's not supposed to do, or is that Tesla's fault?

It's Tesla's fault for calling it full self-driving. I mean, that's exactly that if it was like, because the moment I hear that, if I pay $15,000, I want this to drive me, you know, without autonomously and I will do whatever it is because that's what I was promised. So yeah, still Tesla's fault on that one. Okay. Let's sit one more topic and then we will sign off for the week. I call this segment living in the moment. And there was this amazing thing that happened when LeBron James broke Kreme Abdul-Jabbar's all-time record for points in the NBA where somebody on top. whatever, this person, Randy Cruz, put a photo of the LeBron shot and Michael Jordan's game-winning shot in the finals side by side. And in the Jordan picture, which was a couple decades ago, everybody is just looking and in the moment. And in the LeBron shot, everybody is there two hands outstretched or one hand outstretched with a phone in their hand, trying to videotape it for themselves. I'm just curious whether, I mean,

I will take phones over not having phones, but I am just curious whether phones have killed our ability to live in the moment and whether we should be worried about that. What do you think? To me, the memory that brought up, so given we just had the Super Bowl and Tom Brady retired, I'm a lifelong New England Patriots fan and I actually somehow at the age of 21 made it to the first Super Bowl against the Rams in 2001. and I only have one photo at the end of the game that's because we didn't even have a camera and someone took for me and my friend and sent it to me. They actually took our address. It was the most old school as it gets. Yeah.

It was like the most amazing 2001 thing that can happen. And it's still this incredible memory versus if I had 100 photos of it throughout the entire game and video clips. Would it resonate any more? I don't think so. But, I mean, it is still nice to have all these memories. But our conversation earlier, I was thinking, maybe this is where augmented reality glasses kind of come in.

I'm saying maybe it'll, and that's kind of the prompts of them, right? That it allows you to live in the moment, yet not have your hand sticking up with the phone and looking through the phone at the actual event itself. Right. I think if we had those Facebook, the Facebook Raybans, and everybody was wearing those and filming that way, they could actually, you know, be there in the moment. I also, I think that there's something to being able to record. Daniel Kahneman has this thing in Thinking Fast and Slow, where he talks about your experiencing self and your remembering self. And a lot of people would not take a vacation if they couldn't remember it afterwards.

And the remembering and the reminiscing is part of the enjoyment. And after reading that, I said, I started. to feel less bad about having my phone out in big moments because I was able to then go back and relive them and that was actually quite nurturing for my remembering self. But there is still something that's so jarring about seeing all these people paying thousands of dollars for the best seats in the house to watch LeBron break that record. And the only thing that they can do at that moment is watch it through a screen the same way that everybody else at home is doing. Pretty unbelievable. Yep, yep. I say if you're, are you still bullish and positive that people are

going to figure out chat GPT technology given this is how we've all ended up when we were handed a smartphone? Oh, you're really throwing in the haymaker here at the end. Yeah, I still, I still am, but I understand there are dangerous. They're definitely dangerous. I mean, this week I downloaded I what, what I do? I downloaded the Microsoft. Microsoft Edge browser and the Bing app just to get a chance to use the Bing chat experience. So it was a very clear and not at all subtle but telling moment that showed me that in our battle to keep our personhood and choices or give in to technology, the technology is very powerful and often wins.

So I refuse to download Edge. I signed up, got on the wait list, and I had that entire thought process. I was like, I'm not going to do it. And that's why you don't have Bing chat. So just saying. And that's why I don't have Bing check. I got not only, yeah, I got the Bing app. Not only that, I got Edge for developers.

I don't even know how that happened. But I'm chatting with a bot there. That's my new friend. I might go to Hotmail again. I might go to Hotmail. Do they still own Hotmail? I don't know. Does Hotmail still exist?

Every now and again, I get an email from a Hotmail. Sorry to. all the listeners out there with hot mails but every now and again I will get one from a hot mail and just say what is going on here why is this happening I think that's a good place to wrap up thanks everybody for listening thank you Ron John Roy for joining us as always you can go follow Ron John's work at margins on substack this has been another really fun eventful Friday show and we appreciate everybody who's tuned in live we also want to say thank you everybody who listens on the feed afterwards.

Thank you for coming back week after week. It's been great to see the engagement there. If you want to rate and review the podcast, that would be great. Definitely helps with guest recruitment. And let me preview next week's guest. It's going to be Bendick to Evans, the analyst, formerly of Andrewsson Horowitz, going to talk about some of the big trends and technology.

You won't want to miss that. And then so that will air on Wednesday, and then Friday, Ronan and I will be back for our weekly show talking about all the news in the tech world. I was going to say maybe it won't be as eventful as this week, but who are we kidding? Of course it will. It's felt like a quiet week, given how much stuff is happening. And a chatbot told a New York Times columnist that it wanted to break up his marriage.

Okay, everybody, thanks again for listening back after this, or back again next week. And that will do for us here on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you. Thank you.