Big Technology Podcast - The Internet's Impact On Productivity, Meta's AI Plan, RIP Big Tech Perks

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Ranjan Roy of Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the week's tech news. We cover: 1) Whether the Internet has actually helped increase our productivity 2) Whether AI will do a better job of it 3) How Meta might use AI 4) Google's plan to but AI chat into search 5) Whether companies developing on AI platforms might be subsumed by them 6) The jobs report 7) The end of perks at big tech companies 8) Workers who did nothing at big tech companies 9) Twitter vs. Substack 10) Substack's financial report 11) The bliss of life without smartphones -- 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 Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we cover the week's news in our typical cool head in a nuanced manner. Joining us, as always, is Ron John Roy, back from vacation. We have plenty to talk about. We're going to talk about the Internet's economic value. We're going to talk about AI moves inside meta and Google. We're going to talk about substack and its fight with Twitter and the state of the newsletter platform itself. and then also where are all the perks going inside tech companies that and more coming up

over the course of the next hour or so ronjan welcome to the show it's good to be back great to have you back i missed you man how was paris it was good there there was trash on the streets there was a lot of trash on the streets i did not see anything burning directly in front of me but we uh our travel was a little messed up some of the time based on the strike so so what you're seeing is a bit real. So now you're back and one of the stories that you read on your break was this story that Paul Krugman wrote about the value of the internet and whether actually it helped, whether it actually helped increase productivity. So basically what Krugman is saying is that everyone's talking about the internet has been great for people's

productivity. Maybe not though. He says nobody's arguing the internet has been useless. Surely it has contributed to economic growth. The argument instead is that its benefits weren't exponentially large compared with those of earlier, less glamorous technologies. For example, in 1920, only about one in five U.S. households had a washing machine. By 1970, almost everyone had access to one. Don't you think that made a big difference? Are you sure that it made less of a difference than widespread access to broadband? So kind of a contentious argument. What do you think about it? Yeah, this one sparked a good amount of debate with some friends because, and I do think it's interesting. On one side, it does feel a bit for, I'm sure many listeners know Paul Krugman

still catches flack for his prediction, I think, in the late 90s that the internet would not amount too much that seemed to have gone viral lately. So this New York Times opinion, PC wrote, almost seemed as a response to this argument where he does intellectualize the idea that, yes, in fact, the internet turned into an economic disappointment. But I do think it's a really interesting argument because it's the idea that productivity like labor productivity is not up total factor productivity is not up the internet did not actually generate massive productivity gains in aggregate across the economy for very specific sectors it did but on mass it actually did not create some like massive increase in productivity the way the industrial revolution

the power loom the steam engine these inventions really changed the entire economic the entire economy in a fundamental way, he's arguing that the internet, at least from the way we measure output, hasn't. And it's true because it made me think, like, just take a business like TikTok. It will, the actual economic, measurable economic output that's generated are the advertisements created and the revenue generated from that. Everyone's sitting there and spending time scrolling through videos. That's not actually measured as economic activity or output. The jobs created the labor created you know those things all matter but overall if this is one of the biggest companies in the world it's actually not creating a ton of GDP for any of these countries right so let me

throw out a theory here that i'm sure is i'm going to caveat it's not fully formed i think that our measure of productivity at least in the u.s is wrong and we've effectively solved productivity with all of those inventions that we had in the 1920s that we're talking about, the fact that we're able to produce things at low cost, that's a soft problem in some ways in the U.S. And, you know, we definitely have issues with poverty, but basic needs have largely been met. And, you know, now all of our economy is not really working towards how do we produce more goods, more goods. It's largely a service economy. It's an internet economy, which requires a completely different form of measurement when you want to think about growth. What do you think about that?

No, no, I think that's fair. I think even when you think about companies and the way they measure their actual, I mean, revenue is still in terms of goods sold or services sold, but in terms of actually understanding assets, like you can take a building or a printer and ascribe some kind of tangible value to that, but an actual algorithm, you can't. And that does not sit on a firm's balance sheet. So I totally agree that the way we measure everything around digital goods and assets, it doesn't really make sense. And I think that's why I thought it was a good, it was a good piece, even though I felt he was kind of just trying to, you know, cover his ass a little bit from his 1990s predictions. But it is. It's a reminder that on one side, I agree the way we measure has not caught up to the way the actual economy works. But on the other, I think it is interesting that, you know, in aggregate life expectancies going down, inequality increasing, overall did economic output and quality of the life. how much has it really improved in the U.S. since the advent of the internet in the last 25 years or whatever, 20, 30 years versus the way at least the Silicon Valley, VC community, or others try to claim that, like, you know, this is completely transformed everyone's life in the way we live for the better. Well, I think everybody wants, would be happy to have an iPhone or a smartphone, and that's definitely made life better.

and we'll get to that actually at the end about the degree to which it has because we have a fun story to tell that'll be our fun story of the week but then then again like there is something that I kind of agree with with crewman about which is that once you get basic needs met like what are you doing you know what is our economy all about and sometimes it is a question because it feels like in some ways that it's like you know okay so there's money that's been made to you know on production and then the rest of it is kind of like a wealth accumulation game for for many people, for large sectors of the economy, and in entertainment and a service game. And, you know, as you mentioned, inequality has increased as we're doing this.

And, you know, a lot of people out there are suffering, even though they're able to, you know, eat and put a roof over their heads. And it's a question. Yeah, no, I mean, even think about the revenue per employee at one of the big tech companies has definitely, you know, multiples, like exponential multiple is higher than a, railroad company worker in the 1920s or something like that. But that's why I think in terms of actual technological advances that, you know, increased overall economic output and productivity for the society at large, you know, I think it is an interesting question with the power loom or the steam engine or any other

transformative technology and where does the internet at least sit in there. I think is up for debate. And I think he even recognizes that, I mean, we'll get into AI, I'm sure, even though I've been gone a few weeks and there's probably a new GPT that's been released or whatever else has happened. Damn it. But yeah, like maybe could that be the truly transformative technology where as logging into websites wasn't in like in terms of actually creating genuine economic output? I think it's a good debate. And I think it's one that, uh, Again, you know, Krugman can definitely spark the ire of certain groups, but I think he raises a really good point here. So we're going to move on to AI topics, but I feel like there's one more thing we need to hit on this, and you just brought it up, whether artificial intelligence will be able to increase the productivity that we have in the economy, right? That's the big deal. And there are people talking about how an AI can take one engineer and make them a 10x engineer.

I could take a 10x engineer and make them 100x engineer effectively increasing productivity because it can help them code. Then you think about all business analysts, right, like the business analysis, business intelligence inside companies, you dump all the numbers into the AI. It spits out basically the findings. So you can end up going to work on higher value tasks, improvements in medicine, improvements in other areas of our economy. Do you think that we're going to, and obviously we don't know yet, but do you think that AI might be able to show not only that kind of intangible productivity game, but also the tangible productivity gain that we would see in the numbers that Krugman is looking at. Yeah, I think I actually, this is where I am bullish on AI. And I think, especially from kind of a measurable economic output standpoint, AI hits that exactly in terms of increasing productivity, increasing the end output in the business world in terms of different

problems or services or goods or anything versus, I mean, if you think about like the ability to more quickly connect with people via email versus a phone call has been incredible at a personal level, the way being able to really stay in touch with people. But has it been exponential in terms of business productivity and output? Maybe not in the way you're saying. Like, I do think, especially if we've realized the hype, AI can definitely be the type of thing that really changes the way business is done for the better. I'm actually bullish on it. So speaking of AI, right? We have this new report about where Mark Zuckerberg is spending his time. And I guess this is one of the least surprising reports on meta I've ever read because it was obvious it was heading

there. But there's a report in CNBC that meta's top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, chief product officer Chris Cox, and chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, are spending most of their time working on artificial intelligence, according to an interview Bosworth. Bosworth gave at Nake Asia on Wednesday. Zuckerbrook, it seems like five minutes ago was spending all this time on Metaverse. Now he's spending all of his time on AI. What do you think about that shift? What do you think it says about the direction of that company? Yeah, we've been saying this for a while now. I remember I was actually on CNBC in December talking about this exact topic about whether meta was going to move away from the Metaverse. And it was the day that Boz, the Facebook

CTO, sorry, the meta CTO had written a post saying they were committing to the Metaverse, that, you know, like basically trying to justify the whatever $13.2 billion that they're losing per year to say, no, we're actually going to go even bigger into it. This is the future. It's funny because in that interview, they really try to wiggle out of it by saying that the work on AI that they do now can then, of course, be used in the long term for generating metaverse worlds and generative AI can be used for, you know, the metaverse, whatever it's going to end up being. But yeah, I think, of course, it's the year of efficiency over there. They got to go all in on AI. Do you think, do you think, are we going to

see Zuckerberg wearing an Oculus helmet in 2023? Or is he going to show up in Horizon's world? any time publicly in 2023 again? Or is it just AI now? Yes, I think he's still going to, I think I'm growing more and more of a believer in this metaverse idea, although I do think it's going to take some more time for it to go to fruition. So I don't see them giving up necessarily quickly. However, I think that the AI is going to be baked. It's not just going to be baked into Metaverse. It's going to be baked into the Facebook product when it comes to content creation, right, giving people the opportunity to create images for instance is like the almost the perfect way for facebook to get posting back up and people

engaged again so i think that's coming using ai to enhance photos and videos i think that's coming and there's been a report that i read that i really believe is going to be true that they're going to use ai for advertising where an advertiser submits one piece of creative for instance one ad and then you hit a button and generative ai for meta makes a thousand different possibilities of that ad then you hit you know play and it starts running that ad across the network right now you're running it to billions of people out of the thousands piece thousands of pieces of creative you find the one or two that resonate the most and advertisers then get a minute get the opportunity to double down on that it's what the most sophisticated facebook ad shops have been doing up to this point and it's

what they are going to enable through their tools and it's just another data point that shows that they have a chance of circumnavigating some of these Apple changes. Maybe with creative. I'm going to run out and buy MetaSock right now from that because you just sold me on it. I mean, I think the two, you're right, the two exact points, the increasing the amount of posting that the average user does, which is, I mean, tremendously gone down and giving them easier ways to create great content, you're right. This actually does open the door on that.

And yeah, on the advertising side, I've thought about that a lot. And if they can actually bake those type of tools in, because, I mean, it's actually a perfect scenario for them because if they both allow you to generate those thousand different ad variations and it's their same algorithm that's actually targeting those ads and seeing what's working and it could even reallocate spend to the ones that are working, as you said, that's exactly how sophisticated ad shops work right now. it's done manually, at least on the content creation side. The algorithms already know how to do that to reallocate spending to winners. So if it's all automated, that can definitely work. But my one piece of pushback here would be on the content creation side, because they've gone down this TikTok route of only the best content wins and basically because it's not follower-based anymore,

and now it's much more driven by just pure engagement. It actually is even more of a disincentive for anyone to post unless you're like a professional content creator. So if you have a nice tool and you can create your cool generative AI post, still no one's going to see it because it's not, it's going to be pretty average because it's generative and everyone is able to do it. On one side, it helps them solve the problem, but because at a higher level, they've totally changed the way the platform works,

I still think it's not going to do it for them. Yeah. So I would definitely be more skeptical on the creation side than the ad side. But the ad side, I mean, it builds a world-class advertising platform and meta is one of the few companies that can do it because of the size of their audience. So that's something I think is worth looking out for and would not be shocked if we see some big announcements coming up on that front in the next couple months. speaking of AI baking it into the main products finally it looks like alphabet google is going to add chat to the google search experience so this is from the wall street journal a conversation with google ceo sundar pichai it says google plans to add conversational artificial intelligence

features to its flagship search engine um and pachai is saying this as it deals with pressure from chatbots such as chat gpt and wider business issues What do you think about the fact that Google is going to start adding this functionality into search itself? Because that's a big step, right? For Bing, who cares? Right, add the chatbot. By the way, that Bing chatbot is really good in getting better. I'm just going to say it here.

But for Google, it's a very different situation. Okay, okay. So I just got back from two weeks of traveling. Still, I use TripAdvisor. I use like what's searched through reviews. I literally, it felt like it was still 2010. traveling around like in the way i was actually trying to find stuff to do trying to make an agenda and yes like i played a lot with the bing chatbot and i got back some very reasonable agendas and

suggestions and stuff but i didn't actually stick with it i wasn't actually going to take the suggestion to actually you know put my whole family in a car and go somewhere because bing told me i still kind of and you know maybe that's a behavioral thing at the moment but i think this is where when Google says it will include AI in chat, these announcements, especially from Google's perspective, are getting a bit tiresome for me because, like, I want to see it. I want to see it in action. Already they, you know, they release this incredible demo. Did you see the Google Docs workspace generative demo where it's like, it's like people are on a meeting. It instantly and magically extracts the insights from those meetings, creates a dock and then creates a deck, and then creates

a deck and goes basically from like meeting to deck and presentation and action plan without you having to do anything good luck like I mean honestly like when I see when that happens in my day-to-day life I will be the happiest person in the world but until I see it happen remember duplex and restaurant reservations were supposed to be automated and that was from 2018 we were promised so so I don't know I think Microsoft's brilliance in this and open AI even more so is being product release first and announcement second. And I think that's where Google is still kind of with the old playbook of fancy demo and

announcement first and then waiting on the product release. I think it's going to be really problematic in this battle right now. Oh, yeah. And it's interesting to watch Sundar make this little press to our right. He went on hard fork. He talked to the journal. He doesn't talk. He does not talk to the media.

This is extremely rare for him to give two interviews in the span of a week, not around a major developer conference. Satyindella did say that he wants to see Sundar, or wants to see Google dance, excuse me. And this is them dancing. And it's just a sign that, like, there is something going on inside that company that is, they're scared.

I think they're playing from a place of fear. And it'll be interesting to see what that pushes them to do on the product perspective, because you're just going to see more features. No, and I agree, Google should be a player in this, a big player, if not the player. Again, they are years ahead on this, or they should be as, you know, on par with an open AI. They should be on par. Like, and where, you know, like you had Jan Lacoon on the show talking about how Facebook does have the models. Like, Google should definitely

have them. They have the products. They have the user base. I mean, I'm a Google workspace user, and I think it's a much better overall product suite than Microsoft Office. But, like, they need to start getting this stuff out. They need to start really pushing this and showing that they have the products to match up the technology. In both interviews, there have just been clear indications that Google got caught by surprise here. I mean, just this quote from the journal story where Sundar says, we were iterating to ship something and maybe timelines changed given the moment in the industry. It says everything you need to know, maybe time.

What are you not sure if your timeline changed or not? You're the CEO of a company. This is your biggest challenge right now. And you're going to say maybe timelines changed when they asked him in Hard Fork about whether he was caught by surprise by Open AI's bot. Instead of just saying no, we've been developing this technology, we know what it can do. He said they built a good product. It's just an admission that they got beat, which is very interesting, very astonishing.

But also, I think one thing I really want to push on. In general, is this kind of narrative that Google was caught behind because they're trying to be safer. And it's almost like the excuse that companies are using right now is an almost, I mean, I hate to say, like trying to attribute it to wokeness slash like worries about being, you know, better on the diversity front or being safer in terms of like how the AI works. I don't think that's the case. I think yes, but even like Microsoft, remember Tay? Yes. That was a disaster, but they still were aggressive on this. And I don't think it's wrong to be aggressive in pushing out new products

that are using older models that are already tried and tested. Like, yes, GPT4 slash whatever other GPTs I missed in the last two weeks. I think like releasing products on stuff like that, it's worth, you know, making sure things are at least working properly, but I think it's a bit of a cop-out the way they've been trying to say, oh, well, you know, we're trying to be as safe as possible because otherwise everyone's going to get mad at us. I think that's definitely been a way they've been trying to escape the blame for just being behind on this. Yeah, absolutely. And from every indication that I had Lambda, the internal Google chatbot was better than chat GPT in the original stage. But I don't

know. We'll see. Maybe Open AI and Microsoft have better technology using GPT4 than whatever Google's working on internally. Hopefully we'll see soon. Yep. So there's another interesting thing that's that started to emerge in my discussion earlier this week with Joe Marquesi and Mike McNano and also in the article that I just wrote in big technology that came out today on Friday, where it seemed clear that chat GPT and BingChat and Bard were all demos, trying to get others to build on top of the technology that exists underneath them, right? So effectively, if you like using chat GPT, why don't you build your own bot or something that you can use for our, for your company on our tech? That to me seemed like the selling point. Now, a very interesting thing

has happened. These demos work. There's obviously a lot of interest in the APIs, but alongside it, they've become destinations themselves, even surprising the company's putting this stuff out. now what they're doing is kind of opening them up we talked about plugins like a couple weeks ago or earlier this week where you can now develop your own application within something like a chat GPT and maybe eventually within Bing and it does make me wonder whether this is going to scare developers away from working with these companies or whether eventually you know they won't have any choice and the AI can just subsume their experience because if you're like for instance a open table or chatting inside and chat GPT with the user or an Instacart, like, do you eventually like

lose your functionality where the AI starts to take over and ends up placing that order at the restaurant for people? So I'm curious what you think about it. I mean, the headline that I had was as AI gets better, could it swallow the companies building with it? What's your take? No, I think this is a really interesting question. I know in that podcast, you all use the example of kayak, that Kayak builds a plug in today, but Kayak is kind of the middleman layer between the customer and the airline. So why couldn't Delta and the few other airlines all just go directly into chat GPT and feed their data? I think it's a really interesting space. I actually do think in the airline ticketing space, it is interesting because there's only a few players that really

need to connect their data to open AI or whatever other platform and they could create the service and literally displace kayak on day, I mean, in a very, very short time frame. But I do think this also gets back to the big debate around like where is the value. Is it in the original data set and those relationships? Like OpenTable has relationships with every single restaurant or I mean, you know, some large percentage of them. Is that where the value? is or is in the value the actual ability to integrate, aggregate, and, you know, distribute that data in the form of reservations? And I think, I think there's an argument to be made that it's actually those relationships with the restaurants. Open Table has above others. Rezi has with certain

restaurants. So, so the idea that chat GPT, right now chat GPT looks cool because it's able to take the data that Open AI is already aggregated and, you know, serve it to you in a more quick, you know, a concise format. I do think it's, I still think there's a lot of value in those original data sets, especially if companies are more protective around them and are able to use them in smarter ways. Yeah. So obviously this is not going to happen overnight. There's relationships like you mentioned. There are barriers to getting the data. But there's a lot of, for instance, enterprise technologies like task management, for instance, that once the AI gets smart enough And if people are chatting with it, it can be like, hey, by the way, you have this to do today or good morning, here are your tasks, have you completed this?

Or even, you know, here is some help with this. Or even as the facts on the ground have changed in this project, I am updating your presentation that's going to be ready for tomorrow. I mean, this is, of course, a number of years out. And, you know, maybe it's some fan fiction about AI. But given what we've seen up to this point, I don't think it's too fanciful to think that this. is possible. Yeah, you had brought this up and still, I think tweet of the year is still going to Benedict Evans for his tweet about that, you know, maybe it's not an assistant to a spreadsheet. Maybe the point of AI and generative AI is that we don't need spreadsheets at all. And it's

going to change the actual interface and the way we interact with data in businesses. And I think that to me is the most kind of fun, exciting part of this is, is it going to be chat the way we tried to like book travel and does that displace kayak or is the entire way we even approach booking travel or like coming up with agendas is that going to change and whether it or not it's a chat interface i think that's so that's the fun stuff and i can totally see why uh especially in the vc world while why thinking about this in terms of like completely new industries and massive companies completely disintermediating the existing you know dominant players it's got to be be a fun time. Maybe that's why everything is taken over with such intensity. So Ranjan,

you've been away for a couple of weeks. Probably had some time to think deeply about this quick temperature check. We're in the middle of a hype cycle around AI. There's no doubt about that. What is your feeling in terms of this technology, especially generative AI? What is your gut feeling in terms of its potential to disrupt the state of business today? Yeah, this is the tough part is having used this a good amount and actually worked with this, I think it has tremendous potential. My worry is, is the hype cycle is like, I mean, and this is what I've written about voice computing in Alexa is that can the hype cycle actually prevent a technology from ever realizing its potential? And I know, I mean, it almost sounds ridiculous in some ways, but imagine,

like right now I am told that I'm going to be like, be able to book my travel. in a completely new and innovative way. And then I go try to do it and everything looks the same. And even six months from now, a year from now, is stuff really different? But it's every bit of disappointment someone feels based on that the hype that was presented to them is going to chip away at the longer term potential because people will potentially stop working on solutions. Honestly, I mean, I still don't know. Could crypto have been integrated into our daily lives by now?

Could Web 3 have been a real thing? Like, I mean, payments still suck in the U.S. Why hasn't that been fixed? Like, was it the hype cycle around crypto that actually killed its potential? Right. So I just got a comment on my newsletter today talking about like what's going to happen when people get fatigued with chatbots. And I think that's a totally reasonable question, especially given that we've had already

a wave of chatbot hype that didn't turn out to be anything. and this time though I think is different I don't think that we're going to see the fatigue because these things are so good that's just my take on it are you using any kind of like chat bot apps or anything outside of kind of opening Bing and no I'm a Bing boy you're a Bing guy being boy yeah all right I'm I'm a I'm a bard kind of guy I think but I actually haven't use bard but. Then you can't be a bard guy. It's against the rules. Okay, let's take a break. We're here with Ron John Roy. He is the author of Margins, which you can find at read Margins.com. It's not blocked on Twitter. We're going to talk about that and more in the second half.

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discussing the week's news. So another number that just came out today is the jobs report. The U.S. economy added 236,000 jobs. Sounds like a lot, but it also shows that we've had some cooling growth in jobs. And the market is kind of, I don't know, wobbling a little bit. We're expecting weaker economic growth. We've been talking about a recession for like, what, seven years at this point. And, you know, we're still not in that territory. But it does make you wonder whether maybe it's coming now.

What's your read on it, Ron John? Yeah, I think the thing everyone should look at listening over this weekend and going into Monday is this report is, this should have been a very bullish report in the sense that job growth is slowing, growth is still relatively stable, meaning that it's actually almost the perfect soft landing scenario for the Federal Reserve, the idea that, okay, we're not going to overheat because the job market stays overly hot, we're getting down to a more manageable point. But if you look at the activity on yields today and over the last few days, the two year has jumped above 4% again, which is where it was before suddenly a, you know, Silicon Valley

Bank happened and everyone thought, okay, the Fed is might even cut, if not stop hiking rates. The 10 years started moving. Like basically over the last week, yields have completely been retracing towards the levels that they were before all the Silicon Valley Bank worries started to resurface. And I think that's saying that there's still worry that the Fed is going to need to hike. Inflation is still a threat, but also there's a lot more worries about slowing growth, which again, it's like the worst of both worlds. This should have been a bullish thing. And I think we'll see on Monday, we'll be the stock market, whether it actually responds negatively to this.

Yeah, and we'll have plenty more to talk about next week, Jim McHelvey, who is the co-founder of Square. He also is the founder of Invisibly. And he's also on the St. Louis Fed. He's going to come join us next week and we're going to talk deeply about this economic data. It's going to be super fun. So companies now are adjusting to the current environment and this brings us to a segment which I call Google, where's my stapler? Google has pulled back perks across the board. This is from CNBC again. It's cutting back on fitness classes, stapler's tape and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees. And the real detail here is that Google employees that are not engineering, not in engineering rules, but require new laptops are getting Chromebooks. So that's

the extent that we've landed in with Google. Now, I do need to add that a Google spokesperson is pushing back on the stapler detail. Their comment is that staplers and tape continue to be provided to print stations. Any internal messages that claim otherwise are misinformed. So good news for Google staplers, maybe, but where is my stable? What does it mean? I think for anyone who's seen the movie Office Space, obviously the stapler reference is a bit of cute in terms of where that's the first thing to go when you're being pushed out. But I think, I mean, honestly, Google is the poster child for this.

A funny thing was when I was running my own early stage startup in 2013, when I left the corporate world to go become an entrepreneur a bunch of my friends worked at google and my co-working space was right near the google office and occasionally i'd go and get to experience those lunches are as ridiculous as everyone talked about i mean they they were off the charts and that's even you know and now what's 10 years ago so i think they always were the poster child for the excesses of like the big tech era and i think yeah it's the air efficiency it's time to cut back and it's It's been, I mean, Ruth Porat, when she was hired as a CFO, has been talking about, you know, like cutting out extraneous projects, you know, pulling back on moonshots and trying to refocus on the core business. But, but yeah, it's time.

Though I still feel bad if you're stuck with a Chromebook instead of a normal laptop. Do you, do they get MacBooks if they wanted or? Google's always been, I don't know if they, if Google would provide the MacBooks, although I think they might have because Google's always been like fairly agnostic on technology, even in Android. it. If you were working on that division and you wanted to use an iPhone, that was okay. Whereas in Microsoft, in the Windows era, if you showed up with an Apple computer, you were given extremely dirty looks and maybe even worse. So I do know Google is pretty good about allowing them to use all the different types of technology. But it is interesting to see that perks start running out. And I think the deeper message here is also that it's more of a shift of power back to the company

and away from the worker. Or like before, you know, these. these perks dried up, you might lose out on some of the best talent. But in the tech, in the tech world, the talent pool has contracted so much because of all the layoffs that like, now the companies are like, we need it. We need margin. We're going to get it from some of the perks. So the fitness classes are gone. I'm pushing back on this whole conversation around this is a shift in power back to the companies or management away from labor. Because management was benefiting just as much as the workers over the last 10 years of these excessive perks. So it's not like they were sacrificing from their side in order to give these benefits to the

employees. Everyone was, you know, like rolling in the cash like Smith McDuck. But you're assuming that their appetite for money is bounded by just doing well where it isn't. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that's what I'm saying. But they gave those perks so they could hire more engineers, and that was actually looked at as a positive by the stock market for whatever reason, mainly ZERP. But that was a positive. So they did it because it increased the stock price, and it allowed them to make more money themselves.

So I think this isn't a shift back that the average worker didn't necessarily have power. They were still just, you know, like part of the overall charade that was whatever these hiring practices were. Okay. I'll buy that. The one thing that I'll say that sort of builds on this is that this might be like a good thing if you're looking strictly at productivity for companies. Because I feel like once you're delivering all these perks, working there becomes about

the perks, right? I'm sure your Google friends talked about the lunches unless they were more excited about the lunches and the massages and the coffee than they were about the products they were working on. And ultimately, if you're at a company, it's the products that you're working on that really matter. So, no, no, they loved Google, they loved Google Wave. They loved Google Wave. No, or actually what, Google Plus. Sorry, Google Plus.

That's what I was thinking. Well, the case in point, man. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. All right. So, wait, what we're saying is that Paul Krugman is going to be happy because total factor productivity will rise again. And he can no longer say the internet was an economic disappointment.

Right. He could say that, yeah, the perks were economic disappointment. And now that they're gone, we're back to the good old days. We've been building up to this for the last 35 minutes, by the way. So we finally hit our punchline of the episode. Speaking of some of the excesses of those days, there are also another story that was so interesting, which you kind of knew this was happening, but it's like interesting to actually see it reported out, where workers who've been at these companies that were doing absolutely nothing,

are now going on TikTok that a lot of them have been laid off they're going on TikTok and they're starting to talk about like how stupid the jobs that they were in actually were because they were not doing anything and that wasn't because they were being bad employees it was because the tech companies were stashing talent and had no idea what to do with them but they just know they just knew that they needed them and there's a recruiter that's talking about it I think she was at meta where she goes, we just don't hire anybody and like we still get paid. Oh, this is the TikTok, right? And they were paid $190,000 a year and was told not to expect to hire anyone in her first year

given that she was learning the ropes. I mean, a year, working for a year, but not being put to task to recruit people. I mean, it's not like, I mean, I'm not, I look, shout out to all the recruiters there, but it does not take a year to prep to learn how to recruit. But this is going back to, this is what the company at the higher level was rewarded for. I mean, think about, you know, we saw those numbers that even with the massive layoffs recently, companies are still much bigger than they were at the beginning of the pandemic because they hired at insane levels because that's what management and the company as a whole

was rewarded to do. So, yeah, I think, again, this is not a bad thing that these kind of jobs are no longer existing. Maybe this is the type of stuff where there did need to be a bit of cleanup. But yeah, I mean, on one side, this feels like this very recent thing that's kind of like a total distortion. But on the other, if anyone ever watched Silicon Valley on HBO, there was a big head. There was like an entire character and threat about just resting, investing, and not having to do anything and just go to work and sitting there all day. Let me ask you this. We talk about this often as a product of the market, right? I think we do that probably more of the most shows,

talking about ZERP for instance, zero interest rate policy. But what about the agency of the companies? Like, they went along with this, right? They got rewarded for growing their companies, but they did it. And they knew, just like Silicon Valley Bank knew that we might not have zero interest rate policy forever and did poor risk management and, you know, bought those bonds. These companies stashed employees that they were rewarded by, you know, the market for it, but isn't part of their job, just like Silicon Valley Bank's job was to manage risk, isn't their job to appreciate the market conditions and make the prudent decisions? I'll disagree and I'll separate the two, because I think Silicon Valley's job was to manage risk

and to be able to kind of, you know, make sure that obviously the bank did not blow up, but overall, it's like the core function was managing risk. I will say that, yeah, a Google, a meta, part of their job as an organization is managing talent, retaining talent, having proper hiring practices, but they're not necessarily in a terrible place as long as they're just looking at employees as kind of disposable goods, which they are, which is the way this works, is that if the market's going to reward hiring, they're going to hire more, and the market's going to reward firing, now they're going to fire more. So I think it's that part, it's almost just, They have the agency, but they are playing the game, not necessarily poorly.

They're playing the game, actually, the way it's kind of outlined for them. However, having just come back from Europe, I'm sure you've seen it's a little tougher for them in countries like France and Germany because of labor laws where they're unable to lay off as quickly. And I think that's where you start to see if the, you know, in the U.S. at will employment, it's using, you know, increasing your headcount and then slashing. it is just kind of part of day to day or month-to-month corporate existence, but it's not working like that everywhere. Of course, yeah. And the headlines are like playing it off like, oh, in Europe, they're learning about European labor law. It's like, come on. These companies are

not just learning about European labor law. They certainly knew about European tax law. Yeah. So anyway, I just found that to be kind of hilarious. Speaking of funny things, Twitter and Substack are fighting. So Twitter, I'm sure listeners, no, substack you probably know also. Ranja and I both have newsletters on Substack. It's an email provider, and they built their own Twitter kind of, like somewhat similar to Twitter product called Notes. None of the Twitter copycats have really taken off so far, but Substack decided to go for it. They have some, you know, wink, wink, anti-Twitteric after about a year ago saying Twitter employees that are leaving because of the speech policies of Elon need not apply. Anyway, now they're competing with Twitter.

and maybe somebody inside Twitter saw what they were doing and said, we don't want Substack to get an advantage by using our product to drive traffic there. And now, if you have a URL, today at least, if you have a URL with Substack in it, you are not able to retweet it. You can't like it. You can click it, but you can't quote tweet it. And it does seem like the tour at war. You also can't embed tweets in Substack, although I don't know.

I was never really into embedding. tweets inside substack so i like embedding tweets yeah i know you're like i'm gonna miss this quote the tweet and link it that's my style but i appreciate yours as well so but but really what do you think about this this fight here it does seem to me like i mean the twitter files were disseminated in some way through substack a lot of the reporters that elan is close with are using these tools and um it just seems to me to be extremely short-sighted and petty whether if you know if this was actually done intentionally. And if it wasn't fixed quickly because of those reasons, I mean, my God, same things. So what's your perspective? That's the first question. Was it done intentionally? I mean,

who knows at this point in terms of could something like that actually just be an accident or mistake is not, you know, a complete impossibility? I think it is hilarious. As you said, the Twitter files, almost all of them, it's Barry Weiss, Matt, you be like everyone is on substack, most of those pieces were embedded or large portions of them were embedded tweets. Like you're essentially after all that fuss over the Twitter files, almost killing off those entire segments of like the way that Elon had kind of, you know, promoted these. But, but I mean, yeah, I think on one side, it's kind of hilarious because the two companies do have a lot, you know, at least in terms of political worldview or just overall

worldview they seem pretty aligned in terms of management and just the way they kind of approach the technology world. But yeah, I don't know. I think have you posted a substack note yet, though? Because I did see you tweet that you were excited about the product. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the product. I don't have access to the notes yet. I think it is a good way for if the feed builds attention. I don't see it as a Twitter replacement. I see it as a good way to promote substacks to potentially other audiences that are reading substack. That might be interested in big technology. all right oh wait so it's not it's not publicly available yet not yet so i haven't done still all this controversy yeah i have not done a note uh i will do notes i think that it's interesting

i give substack credit for innovating and trying to build new products uh to help newsletters grow their audiences it'll probably be easier like per post to grow your audience natively within substack than it will within twitter where people don't really click out and aren't necessarily intending to subscribe to newsletters. So I'm eager to use the new product, but no, haven't used it yet. Well, I actually, I do see potential in it. I mean, in the sense that substack, their referral product where you can, or recommendations where you could recommend a few newsletters. And we've talked about this before, but that was incredibly powerful. That was a huge growth lever for every newsletter writer in substack to subscribe to other substack.

I mean, has it doubled the size of margins? I mean, maybe not double, but it was definitely, you know, there was a short period where we were like, where's all this coming from? Yeah, I thought I was going to read with the spam attack when the subscription started coming in. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's a testament to the network effects within substack itself. So, so yeah, maybe it could work. But again, maybe like Google, wait until the product's ready before us, admiring us in all this controversy and just let us. at least try it and play with it.

Exactly. And if this did come from Elon, you just wonder what this guy is doing with his time? I mean... Oh, this is exactly what he's doing with this time. It's like, don't you have a rocket to build and an electric car? I don't know. This is exactly.

But on the other side of it is remembering, you did say, I don't know if you saw Substack's financials came out, but not all their financials 2020 and 2021. So for those who don't know, substack, the newsletter service both of us work on, they're raising a crowdfunded round, investment round of, and they're up to around $7 million on it. And so they had to legally release the two years in the prior year before you actually launched the crowdfunding campaign.

So they did do 2020 and 2021. There's a lot of people, me included, it's why would you not release 2022? There's a reason. Because if I was an institutional investment, I would have access to that. So if I am a everyday crowdfunding investor and putting in a grand into you, why do I have, you know, different access, I think is something they need to answer for. But the numbers are pretty interesting because on one side, I think it was 12 million in revenue total for 2021. That was a bit more than people had expected.

But my favorite number is they actually break out. They had six million in subscription fees. and then $5.5 million in partnership subscription fees. I was a little confused about that. So when you read into the notes, the partnership subscription fees, they separate out the writers who they gave big advances to. That's the money coming from those publications. The amazing part is in 2021, they spent $15.5 million in advances.

I mean, I knew it was a thing. I'm sure you heard too. there's definitely some rumors of million-dollar deals here and there, but they've really spent $15.5 million to make $6.5 million. The question obviously is that's an upfront payment. So what's the payback period? Are you going to see some kind of return on that over a multi-year period? Maybe, probably if they stick around. But the bigger thing to me is like that was just such a reminder that this actually, it's not a terrible business. Even investing $15 million up front making six and a half six million in the first year off that set of publications if they stick

around would be good over a few years but it's not exponential growth this is like a really boring media business you know so the idea of anywhere being a venture scaled uh 600 million dollar value business i think these numbers actually show why that's just not the case so first of all did you invest no i didn't either i didn't really think hard about it at all but i agree i i so I'm hearing you talk through the numbers, obviously reviewed them beforehand, but I do think that $15 million to get $6 million or something in the whereabouts, that's a good investment. I think that it's actually a great investment because you're not really looking to get one for $1 back.

You're looking to get big riders on the platform who eventually will just continue to pay into your revenue. And if you were able to get $6 million of recurring revenue and that's going to grow over time from these riders, you know, that subsidy goes away the next year. Will it grow? I think you will. That's a, if it did, they would have showed us. If it did, that actually would have been the most interesting number to see what's their

2022 partnership revenue because those numbers, I agree. In theory, you know, you start at a certain level and then you're going to grow. But in practice, remember, 2021 was still kind of like the aftermath of COVID. It was still the, you know, everyone, anything digital, people are still pouring money into to everyone. Clubhouse was, I think, and still in 2021, a thing. Like, you know, I, to me, did it grow in or in reality, like most subscription businesses, without active marketing investment, you're churning. You're slowly going to be losing users unless you're really, you know, actively investing in the marketing side. So, so I think them not showing us the

2022 numbers, it's a huge deal. Okay. All right, let's end with this. You lost your phone in France and you learned a valuable life lesson our phone story of the week I uh so my wife's phone was stolen in France which obviously uh did not start as a great thing for our vacation but in the end it was kind of crazy because we had one phone we were traveling around a lot we had you know slower data connections which actually drains your battery a bit more so we had to conserve the battery so I really didn't use my phone that much even at dinner and sometimes for you know some parents who have little kids you'll let them watch something um and then suddenly we had no phone and actually had to talk to each other and it was amazing it was amazing this whole world of uh

being disconnected while on vacation and but having just enough connection I realize like to still get you where you need to go still take photos here and there but definitely not uh being like fully connected like you always are. And again, I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous, but in a weird way, being forced to be disconnected at least a little bit was kind of a good thing. Yeah, I think it's great.

And I'm doing everything I can, usually to try to wean myself off the phone and off the laptop. And sometimes that means putting a phone in a different room during dinner, putting it in a different room before I go to bed. And I do find that disengaging from the phone. phone is definitely like the best thing that I can do. I just wish I could do it more and I feel like a lot of people probably have this issue, but it's freaking hard. No, no, my, okay, my action plan

now that I'm back, I'm going to subscribe to a like a data plan on my watch now. I think on T-Mobile, which I have, it's like 10 bucks a month or something, which before I thought was totally extraneous, but the idea of being able to leave the house now, just receive messages, still make calls, Maybe even, I think you can, I can have Spotify music downloaded to there if I want to, even this podcast. And that's it, but you can't surf anything. I'm like, this could be the answer. Actually, but also, whatever happened to those, the simple phones or, you know what I'm talking about?

There were supposed to be phones that basically were kind of like an old Nokia flip phone. Yes. So there was, those have been popular and then gone. away. And I also think that there was a, well, I was going to just say one thing that's building on that, but there's this investor that tweeted that they just met with a founder who ditched his iPhone for a BlackBerry. And it just has emails. And he doesn't want to be distracted by any apps and stuff like that. And the tweet was like, you know, showed a photo of the BlackBerry and was like instant investment. Oh, that's such a power moment. Oh, my God,

it's amazing. And I was just like, damn, I should really do that. It seems smart. That would actually that would be an amazing way to enter any meeting is just drop your blackberry on the table and just sit there casually and attentive and be like yeah this is my thing exactly and i'm so focused on the task at hand that i've given up the beauty of the smartphone i don't tweet i just email i just email that's it and and text and text and so i think that after as long as you can listen to a big technology podcast i definitely approve as long as you can listen to big technology podcast then your whatever media diet you you follow make sure it includes big technology podcast exactly well thanks everybody for listening ronjohn welcome back great to see you again i'm excited

a lot going on yeah all right that'll do it first here so take care and that'll be it for this edition of big technology podcast Thank you.