Big Technology Podcast - Why Rest of World wants to change international tech news, with Sophie Schmidt and Louise Matsakis

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Rest Of World is a new publication that covers technology outside of North America and Europe. Sophie Schmidt and Louise Matsakis join Big Technology Podcast to discuss why they believe it's setting a new path forward for international tech coverage. Schmidt founded the publication in 2019 after growing convinced that the next tech decade belongs to the rising giants outside of the Western world. Growing up while her father, Eric Schmidt, ran Google taught her some important lessons along the way. Matsakis, formerly of Wired, joined the publication after pitching Schmidt on a role for herself. She is now a senior editor. In this conversation, we discuss the publication's editorial philosophy, along with tech in China, South Korea, Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere.

rest of world is in the house. Hey, Sophie. Hey, Alex. Hello, Louise. Hey, Alex. Nice to have you both here. I'll just read the ad and we can get to it. MediaOcean is for people who like to be efficient, like listening to this podcast at 2X speed. So I'm talking slow to make sure this ad is super clear. If you work in advertising, go to mediaocean.com slash big tech to register. for a big virtual event on March 23rd. That's Mediaocean.com slash big tech. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond.

Sophie Schmidt and Louise Metzakis join us today. Sophie is the founder of Rest of World, a new publication launched in May of last year that focuses on tech outside of the U.S. and Europe. Louise is a senior editor at Rest of World, which she joined from Wired, and is one of the most talented reporters and editors in the field. Welcome, Sophie and Louise. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. That was a nice intro, Alex. Of course.

It's all truth. It's all truth. And Sophie, let's start with you. So I just think the name rest of world is so interesting. It's a term that companies use on their financial reporting to describe regions of the world outside of North America and Europe. And it's like amazing that the rest of the globe, which these companies touch, is actually an afterthought to them so much so that they'll explicitly say it.

So, you know, that said, what made you create a publication that is explicitly there to cover these regions that the North American tech firms, you know, seem to say, all right, well, we'll just loop them into this one less important category and move on. You know, the most mentioning about the category is, it's actually pretty old. You can find it in, you know, economics textbooks from the 1950s. And it's the most interesting encapsulation of the problem we're trying to solve, right? I guess I would say that, you know, it's no small thing to say that we're at a critical time in the world in our lives, coming out of the pandemic, grappling with how America's standing in the world has changed over the last several years. And here we are with these big, intractable

problems in the sort of tech and society category, right? Misinformation, disinformation, surveillance, privacy, you name it, right? And they feel almost unsolvable. We know we're creating panels and commissions and we're shaking our fists at big platforms and saying, please fix it. And it feels a little bit hopeless, right? But the thing that's not coming up is that every other country in the world is also dealing with it, right, in slightly different ways. What if the solutions to our problems, right, lies in the sharing of those experiences and ideas and learnings, right? Expanding the data set. It's honestly baffling, right? We get with billions of people in the world, all using technology all the time, right? I think the last that I saw said there's

So almost 5 billion people online. And depending on how you count, you know, Western versus non-Western, something like 80% of all humans live outside of the Western bubble, right? That means that you have almost an infinite number of parallel experiments, right, playing out simultaneously all around us just outside of you. So why aren't we comparing experiences, right? Why is it such a radical suggestion to say that maybe the person who has an answer for us, is in Nigeria, right? Or Morocco or Bangladesh. I mean, do you know what it takes to build a

business in Bangladesh or to become a top engineer in Lagos, right? The very things that make a lot of countries unattractive to a company, right, actually forge extraordinarily talented problem solvers, right? But we're not listening to them. We're not even looking for them. right that that's the uh i should clarify that's the societal western we we rest of world we rest of world are looking for them if you know some of them come tell us yeah so i i find it interesting because i i have been reading through your stories and one of the thoughts i did have was like wow uh if we look at how countries outside of the u.s or tech scenes outside of the western world as you put it are starting are trying to solve some of these problems we can learn a whole heck of a lot so it is interesting you know

your perspective, and it seems to confirm it, what you're saying is, you know, A, these stories are important to tell, but B, if we start to listen to them, we might actually be able to make some progress on the issues that we're trying to solve out here. It's kind of extraordinary. I mean, the things that are happening, again, just outside of our view, the insights and the lessons that are available to us from people that are, you know, don't speak our language, are a little bit far away, they have a practical and immediate, right, relevancy to us right now, right? Because they tell us where the world is headed. That's where new ideas are coming from.

The future is being built. It's just not where you think. We're cutting ourselves off from that, right, out of a sense of primacy, right, and a kind of Western-centric worldview that has always been in tech and more broadly, right? That basically says, we have all the cool stuff, right? We have all the cool stuff. China has some cool stuff, okay, but it's like dodgy cool stuff, right? We don't want that.

And everybody else is catching up to us, right? I've heard that catching up to us one, you know, more times than I can count in the last decade. It's never really been true, but it's especially not true now, right? And the longer we cling to that, the less prepared we will be for the world that's coming. Yeah, and Sophie, I last question about this. So your father, Eric, ran Google for 10 years. So I'm curious, like, how watching him do that, you know, made you see that there was this, you know, this gap needed. And also, like, there's just been all this talk about how tech and the media aren't, you know, doing a good job speaking with each other.

And there's been a feud. And like, it's kind of interesting, you know, growing up in such a tech background now that you're on the media side. So what do you think about that? Oh, man. You're getting canceled. So first on, the first question. You know, I remember getting to tag along sometimes when my dad would make international visits. And it was as close to a rock star reception as you could get, right?

It was foreign dignitaries falling all over themselves saying, oh, my God, Google, please come here, please, please, please, right? It was a different era where, you know, everyone thought that Silicon Valley had the keys to El Dorado. I don't think that happens now, but it gave me a really interesting. perspective on tech's power. I think a lot about, I don't know if you ever read, Steve Cole wrote a book about Exxon called Private Empire, had a big impact on me. And he described a universe where Exxon became so powerful in the countries that had operated in that it developed essentially its own kind of sovereignty.

It didn't have to listen to the State Department. It didn't have to listen to the home country. I felt, I could feel that tech was developing that, right? a different kind of power that didn't necessarily have to answer to anybody. I found that fascinating, right, troubling in different ways. But it signaled, I think, the world that we live in now, right, where you have a lot of different actors. The interesting thing really is that the next decade belongs to rising tech giants that are not here, right, not Western. And those ones, right, the next generation of them,

they're not looking any longer to Silicon Valley for inspiration and they're not looking for permission right so that the game has changed but I think the nature of tech power is is only getting stronger over time and you can see that and you can see that in the way that sometimes states are operating internet shutdowns right these are really complex systems now every country on earth has has complex systems between governments and telecoms and big tech players and pro-democracy activists, everybody's armed. So the game has only gotten more complicated, I think, is what I would say. To your second question, I don't think what the diplomatic way of saying this is.

I think the current state of affairs is a shame. And it makes me sad because there are, I think that there are a lot of good, you know, good intentioned people in tech in media who want to build productive relationships, who want to be able to share information, who want to, who understand that, you know, it's not going to be puff pieces and journalists understand that they're not going to necessarily get all the in their workings. But they understand the function. They understand that it's an important part of how corporate power, right, is expressed in the world and checked. But now you have It's a problem of essentially, you know, loud mouths on Twitter from both sides who don't

represent the majority. And because you have this kind of iced out, you know, tribalism happening, I think it's very hard for people who are not part of maybe both scenes to understand that the loud mouse don't represent the feelings of everybody else. It's very hard to kind of understand how we get out of it. but I'm hopeful. I think it's a shame and I hope it can change. Yeah, and I feel like every time I want to weigh in on it,

my friends are like, don't get involved in that, let the work, you know, show the way, show the way forward, show the way that, you know, this thing should be done. So I think it's cool that, you know, you have a publication and you're letting the work speak for itself, which is nice. And so on that note, let's hear from Louise. I mean, Louise, you had a pretty good job at Wired. We've seen each other at tech conferences over the years.

And, you know, it's interesting that you would pick up and leave for publication like the world, especially in the very beginning. So I'd love to hear more about why you went over and who pitched. Did Sophie pitch you or did you reach out to her? Yeah, that was a good question, Alex. So I totally reached out to her. So this actually started for me in 2019. So I started looking into a story about China's social credit system, which is sort of this like memeified.

thing at this point in the West, and it was totally misunderstood, and it's often sort of compared to Orwell. If I see another 1984 quote in connection with this program, I'm going to throw up. And I went into it with all of the same biases. And I was going to write another one of sort of these problematic stories about what China was doing. That's not to say that, you know, China's surveillance state is not horrifying what they're doing in Xinjiang is really troubling. But as I started to look into the story, I realized just how many misconceptions there were and how, you know, this stuff is so distorted. And I started to realize basically that so many Western journalists misunderstood China and as a result misunderstood so many other places. And I realized that there was this huge

asymmetry. You know, Americans and people in the West know so little about people in the rest of the world, whereas I think a lot of people in the rest of the world know exactly what's going on in the U.S. I've met people in Myanmar. I've met people in Thailand. I've met people in Ghana who can tell me more about the Senate than probably the average American on the street. So I ended up writing this feature actually that the headline was what the West gets wrong about China's social credit system. And that that really kicked off for me a big interest in China. And I started to realize that it wasn't just China.

There was misunderstandings about basically every country and these distortions were sort of refracted through tech, coverage. And I also was watching, you know, over the last four or five years as Trump, you know, everything became about the Trump administration and everything became about, you know, four or five tech companies. And I saw that so many stories were being missed, most of them in other countries or about smaller tech companies who were often, frankly, doing stuff that was way more problematic or that was hurting considerably more people than the latest Facebook scandal. You know, that's not to say that I think that these big tech companies should get away with what they're doing. But there were so many other problems that I thought were really being missed because everyone

was narrowing in on the Trump administration and four or five companies. So I really decided that I wanted to do more foreign reporting. And when I saw a rest of world, I was really excited about what they were doing. It seemed like a huge opportunity. And I was also really interested in the approach, right? Like I could have gone to, you know, one of a number of international outlets that have bureaus all over the world, and I could have been essentially a parachute journalist, right? Like, this is a long tradition in a lot of ways of doing international reporting.

It's sort of colonialist. You send in a white reporter, and they tell the story, right? Maybe they have some stringers behind the scenes who don't get bylines or a translator or, you know, fixer, but the white person is still sort of at the center of the narrative, right? And what I was really excited about the rest of the world was that we were elevating local voices. You know, I'm working a lot with very young, green reporters in countries like Nigeria in South America. And, you know, we have reporters on staff, too, or who are in New York, but that was really, really compelling to me, letting the people on the ground tell the story themselves and really nurturing those relationships and nurturing those voices. So, yeah,

you're right. I left a good gig at Wired. I, you know, have a lot of respect for the folks there, but it just felt like, you know, an unparalleled opportunity to do something different and to do it differently. Yeah, I was reading through some of the stories, you know, as research for this. And there's this one great story about, I think it's called Ocash. It's a mobile lending. We'll get into it in the second half. My favorite. Yeah, yeah. Mobile lending company in Africa. And I looked at the byline. And it's from Morris Caruga, who's a Kenyan writer, researcher, a blogger. And I was like, oh, this is cool. This is different. Yeah, exactly. That's a great story. And it's kind of like, okay, we're in it now. So do you want to just quickly tell us about what this story was all about? Because it is a really good one. Yeah. So Ocash is this, you know, FinTech company that's partially owned by Opera, actually, which is this alternative browser that a lot of people like. And I don't think that many people who, you know, think that opera is the more ethical option over, you know, Google Chrome or Safari or something actually know that they're up to this, right? So it's this fintech company that lets people take out.

microloans, basically. And what they were found to do is that if you didn't repay those loans, they would contact literally everyone in your contact list because when you got the loan, you gave the app access to your phone's contact list. Totally nuts. I mean, you're laid on the loan and now your aunt and uncle know that you missed a payment. It's unbelievable. Social shame, right?

It's kind of brilliant, actually, because I'm sure it works. I remember, I think Morris told us that, you know, the solution that they found was that they had two phones, one for their friends and one for their loans, right? You mean, it's kind of crazy that it comes to that point, but yeah, it's wild. Yeah, and I think it's important to talk about sort of like the context of why this happened, right? Like Kenya has extremely regulated banks for good reasons, right? They're trying to avoid, you know, economic turbulence. They're trying to keep the economy stable, but there's no regulation in fintech, right?

And we're seeing this now in the U.S. with apps like Robin Hood, right? like this problem is sort of global in a lot of ways. But so the fintech companies have no system for getting people to repay the loan. So this is the system they came up with in that vacuum because there's no regulation. And here's the really interesting thing about that, too. You know, these things don't happen in isolation, right? What felt to Morris and to the people who were using Ocash, like this extreme one-off, right? Oh, my God, that could never happen here.

We did some digging, you know, and the Filipino SEC had banned, I think, 24 similar types of apps just a few months before that, right? And those ones were inspired by something that came out of China, right? The beauty of covering international tech is that you can trace individual episodes of things all the way back, right, to a kernel of an idea in another country, right? Maybe it was someone sitting in Palo Alto who came up with a slightly smarter way to nudge, uh, nudge their friends, right? buy one more of pair of shoes. And that one idea that's built in a safe environment and a regulated space, right, can travel in ways now that we only are beginning to understand, right? It can mutate and adapt and ping pong around the world until all of a sudden it lands in Nigeria.

And oh my God, right, it comes out as this totally extreme example because the things that can happen outside of regulated environments tell us what the limits of tech are. They tell us what tech can be, right? That's why it's such an exciting space to watch. Yeah, and I like how your publication just digs a little deeper. Like we know, you know, the headline here is that, oh, there's like this new mobile banking application, you know, like M-Pesa, for instance. And that's all we get. And when you dig a little deeper, you're like, hey, wait a second, there are other sides to this story that are just totally being missed by the press in the United States. So I personally, like, read that story and I was like, oh, that's, yeah, it's really fascinating

stuff. I mean, the knowledge gap is enormous, right? I still get people kind of pitching us things like, hey, I was, you know, driving around Africa and, oh, my God, they're using mobile money, right? And PESA launched more than 10 years ago, right? And that gap in reporting, the gap in infrastructure of reporting, which is what we're trying to build and, you know, why Louisa is spending time, training and developing writers in their own countries, is because most of the countries that we cover have no tech journalism

tradition at all, right? Maybe they'll come up in like one story once, but that's a big problem because these countries are changing incredibly quickly, right? And I think of how much attention we put, right, on our tech experiences, and we're only scratching the surface of what it's doing, right? The thing that makes me really, really excited about our commitment to working and training local writers is that if we're successful, right, 10 years from now, we will have trained a generation of tech journalists in their own countries, right? Maybe they write for us a couple of times and then they go off and they go work at Dawn or they go work at the nation.

The more capacity we can build, right, in different regions, beyond just the kind of tech crunch trade journal version of this, right? The better off will all be. Totally. Yeah, I think it's needed. And it's cool to see it in action. All right, I feel like we should talk about China. So why don't we do that right after the break? We'll be back right after this here in the big technology podcast. So stick with us and we will return in a moment. 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 business and and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should

care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're here for the second half of the big technology podcast with the rest of the world crew. We're here with Sophie and Louise talking a little bit about the work that they've done, why the publication exists. And we're going to get a little bit into the stories. So, Louise, I'd like to ask you, you know, you mentioned that you wrote this story about how our conception of the Chinese, of the social credit score in China was off and that perception needed to be corrected. So you actually piqued my interest on that front. Can you explain what the social credit score is and then how we're

misunderstanding it? And then we'll get into some other stories about China. It's basically a way for the government to keep track of how individuals and corporations are behaving. So it's not algorithmic at all. It's sort of this giant misunderstanding. Right. But the belief is that just sorry, I feel like we should establish this, the belief is, you know, at least maybe the misconception is that people get rated based off of what they do in society. And that rating basically determines where they can rent apartments and stuff like that, like the Black Mirror episode. Exactly. Yeah. So it's this black beer idea that like there's going to be a, you know,

number from zero to 100 on your back or something. And if the number dips below 99, you're not going to be able to board a train or something like that. Right. That's the fear. So that's wrong? Yeah, that's completely wrong. So it's definitely true that there are cases in which maybe if you have a big debt or if you did commit some sort of crime, you might not be able to buy a plane ticket or something like that. But these cases are pretty narrow and those cases are troubling. But it's more about existing rules and regulations that you violated. And it's basically a system for trying to keep track of that. But that got totally misinterpreted in the West, basically for years. I think both because of a lack of expertise in the country and a lack of

people who speak Mandarin. And it was this, you know, giant game of telephone where different people were blogging this for years. And it was a total misunderstanding. And I was one of the first reporters to sort of be like, hey, wait, what's going on here? Why are you guys so wrong? And that really showed me, oh, wait, you guys are wrong all the time. And lots of Western journalists are wrong about China and many other countries constantly. And here's sort of a really prime example of which was this one sort of program that was really misinterpreted. And I ended up talking to, I think, you know, half a dozen Chinese researchers. And they were all really exhausted because they had been screaming about this for years about how it was so misinterpreted. So it was sort of interesting to me.

And I think there are a lot of researchers and a lot of people on the ground like that, not just in China, but in lots of countries who are saying, wow, you know, the journalists who do come here for a day or two and then write their one story and then never talk to us again, get it wrong. And they don't actually understand what's happening because they don't have the right local context. They don't have the language skills. So what is the, I mean, I'm hearing what you're saying and I'm like, okay, well, isn't it kind of weird, then someone can't buy a plane ticket if they get a bad score on this? So how do, I mean, let's correct in real time. Why isn't this, you know, what people are saying it is? So the idea is like, okay, if you broke a law, the social credit system will then sort of report that to other agencies.

So let's say, you know, you owe someone $6,000 or something. The idea in China is like, okay, maybe if you're, you know, not repaying that loan and you've never responded and they gave you a couple of times to, you know, pay it off, why should you be able to buy a plane ticket, right? Like, that is the argument. Do I think that that's fair? No, but that's very different from like some sort of score that's being tabulated as you walk around constantly, right?

It's more of kind of like pretty like abstract or like obtuse, like legal argument. I think honestly, you know, it's. It's definitely troubling in some ways, but it's sort of a question more for, like, you know, constitutional legal scholars or something like that. It's not this big brother surveillance tool that people think it is. And there are plenty of other things like that in China. But for some reason, I think- It's not this one. Yeah.

And also what's sort of funny about it is that, like, it reminds me a lot of credit scores, which are very- Yeah, I was about to say, it sounds exactly like the credit score you'd have with the credit card or maybe a background check like we have in the U.S. Right. and some of the Chinese researchers I talked to were like, we got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it. Like we're trying to build sort of like a trustworthy system. And like they're doing it in their own way. And there are definitely problems with it in authoritarian country for sure. But there was no one who was willing to look at the details. And I think a lot of reporters just jump to assumptions, you know, I think sometimes which are

sort of xenophobic or that are, you know, rooted in sort of like colonial ideas or that are rooted in misunderstanding that led to, you know, to being able to jump to assumptions about what was actually going on here. And I think that that happens a lot. So I have another question. So, you know, when you're working with writers in local, you know, communities or in countries across the globe, how do you ensure that you're not taken, you know, by some form of propaganda or some form of, you know, reporter in a country that you're just starting to learn about that has an agenda, you know, at least in the U.S. U.S., we can kind of, you know, we report here, we can kind of, and it's not an argument not to do it,

but I'm actually just curious in terms of the way that you work through this. Like in the U.S., we definitely go through, you know, well, we can kind of tell where someone's political leanings are. So how do you ascertain that, you know, when it comes to working with people at the rest of the world? So I think there's a couple of things. So the first thing is that we have regional editors in place who have deep reporting experience in each of their region. So if I'm working with a reporter in India. I can go to my colleague Meher, who is our Southeast Asia regional editor, who, you know, has worked in Pakistan, who speaks Urdu, you know, who has worked in the region. And I can say, hey, this seems a little fishy to me or I don't really understand the political

context. And she can, you know, help me with that, right? Like, we have intentionally hired a team of reporters and editors who have worked all over the world and who speak, you know, dozens of languages. So that really helps. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is, you know, ensuring that you're doing the right research like are you need to they need to be working with a co-reporter do they need to be working with a different editor um you know i think another thing i have to spend a lot of time doing is that there are different standards of journalism all over the world so it's spending time with the writer saying like okay you know this needs to be an exact quote i need you to record this conversation you know i need you to double check this or i need you to make sure that you know go to the company with this accusation right it's like you know making sure you're super clear about your standards and then i think the last thing is also So just we have a really, really robust fact-checking operation. You know, the vast majority of our stories are fact-checked, which is pretty unusual for a digital publication, I think. You know, there's a long...

That is unusual, for sure. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of things there that we're, you know, being very careful about how we go about telling these stories for, you know, a lot of reasons. But to me, like you said, it's totally worth it. It's worth putting that investment in. Right. And, you know, to piggyback off of this stuff, let's keep talking about Channel.

Louise, you did write about emotion recognition in China. And we know that Amazon is patenting something like that with, you know, it's Alexa devices here in the U.S. So can you talk a little bit more about what that is, why that seems to be taking off now and whether you expect it to be widespread? Yeah. So I think that this is sort of an evolution in some ways. They're really different technologies.

But I think that that's how some of the people who are building these tools are looking at it, of facial recognition, right? So the difference between facial recognition, and emotion recognition is that facial recognition is a matching, right? Does this person match the images and videos, you know, previously that we identified as being that person? Emotion recognition is about discerning based on, you know, body movements, tone, the facial expressions that somebody makes how their, you know, internal state is, right? Can we, you know, base someone's facial, can we look at someone's face and say whether they're happy or sad? That's the idea.

The problem with emotion recognition is that it's basically junk science. It's not based on any fundamental facts about human behavior. We all have been really sad and have smiled, right? That's a very universal experience. And there's also differences across cultures. If you showed the same video to people in 20 countries, they're not necessarily going to make the same movements in their face. So I think that's the problem is that facial recognition has a lot of issues and there are a lot

of biased algorithms in it. But this is true, right? Like we all open our iPhone now with our face, right? And it's clear that this technology is rooted in some sort of reality. But emotion recognition isn't. And this report, which was really interesting, we had sort of a semi-exclusive on it. And it was basically showing that there's a lot of companies across China trying to use this faulty science for a number of different applications, whether that's monitoring students, trying to identify suspicious people at the border. And what was really important to me about writing that story was to show that China's not the only country doing this, right?

They're taking a lot of these cues from big tech companies in the U.S., from companies in other places. You know, I think basically every big tech company in the West has tried some version of this. You know, sometimes they'll sort of say have a caveat. I think Microsoft has a caveat that's like, you know, this isn't intended to discern the internal state. of people. Well, then what is it for, right? What is it for, by the way? Like, why are companies and

countries trying to figure out what people's emotions are? So, you know, one application that we talked about a lot in the story, which is pretty widespread and seems to be growing pretty rapidly is students, right? Can you assess whether a student is paying attention? And we saw this a lot actually in the pandemic, right? A lot of these like proctor surveillance tools that universities and high schools are now using for like test taking, right? We've seen a lot of problems with them. It's very similar. Can you discern whether a student is not cheating? Can you discern whether a student is happy or sad or engaged in the lesson or not? Not really. You can't, you know, you can't discern that without talking to them is sort of the issue. But that's the

idea is can you automate some aspects of evaluating students or evaluating incarcerated people or evaluating travelers at the border. That's what a lot of it is about, about whether you can. Yeah, you don't think we're going to get there at some point. I don't think so. Honestly, I think that it's just not a fundamental truth, right? We know how to mask how we're feeling, you know, on our face, right? Like, that's a totally common experience we do every day. So I don't think so necessarily. And I think that there's a lot of problems with it. I think that, you know, maybe we could approximate it. And there's maybe like some applications of this technology that might actually be legitimate. But I think it's incorrect to assume that it's just, you know, the next generation of facial facial recognition. which is what, you know, some of these companies in China are advertising it as. It's also worth noting, Alex, that different cultures express emotions very differently, right? So none of the insights, even if you solved it in one country would scale. And that's one of these really interesting kind of breakdown moments when you just try to

distribute one product or one tool across different people groups, right? Yeah, totally. And it's like, I don't know, I'm definitely seeing here how, like, you can look to a country like China and then say, okay, how is this going to actually? Because I mean, obviously the headlines have been made about this stuff here in the U.S. But it is interesting. It seems like maybe China, you know, presses a little bit further ahead on this stuff. And we can learn a little bit in terms of what they're doing and how it might apply here. And it might be the case that, hey, actually, this stuff isn't going to work. So it's fascinating to hear about it from that standpoint. Yeah, totally. And I think

there's also just like a lot of money to be made in selling snake oil, right? And I think that that's what you're seeing in a lot of these circumstances. And it's important to point that out where you see it. Definitely. Okay, let's move on to South Korea. There was another great story that you wrote about, or I don't think it was that you wrote it, Louise, but the publication published it, and we can talk about it. And I'll hand it off to either you, Sophie, or you Louise, but, or maybe we can both talk about it. There's this loner culture in South Korea, where it used to be very community-based and now, you know, potentially with the introduction of smartphones, young people are totally comfortable with you know, being alone versus, you know, being in a community and they're using the, yeah,

and there's a whole economy that's starting to cater to them. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, I could take it. I think it might even predate, Lee's. I love the story, though. It's one of our best, I think. So this is a phenomenon called Hanjok. And it's, it's something that you see across East Asia, where young people who are up against enormous societal pressure opt out, right? They're like, undone, right? And they go into their homes and they live life as sort of hermets. Now, in South Korea, what was really interesting was that we commissioned this story well

before the pandemic, right? And it was so interesting on its own, right? Because you had this community of people who had opted out, but were also using technology to crowdsource tips, right, on how to better seclude themselves. There was actually a whole online community of these. people. So they weren't entirely cut off. It was sort of a modern take on Harvard, right? And there were now enough of them that this whole micro economy developed, right, to serve a new consumer segment with like single serving delivery tactics, right? It was great on its own, but then, you know,

the pandemic hits and suddenly they were ahead of the curve. The entire world is, is required to adopt this lifestyle, right, that they already were doing. Right. And so, it's one of those great moments where you think, can we call them? Can I ask them, like, how to do this better, right? But again, we're so, we're so, we've got to get in our own way and think that we're the first people to ever experience something when, in fact, you know, if we can find a way to communicate across borders and across customs and all those things, I would love to get their tips, right? I would love to understand how to make it more palatable. We're, what, a year into a pandemic and got living through kind of daily,

reminders, right, that the choices and preferences and behaviors of people very far away from us directly impact our lives, right? It's a perfect example of how many sort of advanced versions of what we're living through already exist in the world. Yeah, did you get any inspiration from reading that story in terms of how you could handle your own quarantine? Honestly, no. I don't know that I'm supposed to suck no matter what. No, no. I think I don't play enough video games and sort of online community activities maybe to make it really work. Yeah. You also had a story on Clubhouse. I think we should talk about Clubhouse for a moment because it is fascinating to watch it spring up all across the globe and see how many

international rooms there are. So is there a sense that like club from your part, from your end, because you guys are watching this closely? Is there a sense that Clubhouse might change the way that that politics works globally is it can't bring out like political change or change, you know, the way that discourse works inside, you know, countries worldwide because there has been, at least something I've heard is that, you know, authoritarian countries seem to have, you know, pretty big spikes in clubhouse use. So I'm curious if you're watching that and what you think is going to happen there. Yeah, totally. We are definitely watching that really closely. So I think it could go one of two ways, actually.

Right now, it's going this way that it's sort of facilitating these conversations that could never happen before, basically. One of the most interesting examples of this to me was in Saudi Arabia, actually. We published a really great story by our fellow there, Meher, where she talked to a number of people who were like, yeah, we're having these political discussions about feminism, about, you know, women in the workplace that really couldn't happen in a Saudi cafe or something like that. they couldn't happen anywhere else. There's no analog equivalent of this. But at the same time, you know, then a Saudi official joined the platform. And it's sort of like, you know, what is going to happen there? So I think, yes, this could change politics. This could change things in a lot of countries. But I think the second option, which we're already sort of seeing glimmers of is that it's going to get banned in more places. And the places where it doesn't get banned, it's going to be

very closely surveilled. And I worry that, you know, not just Clubhouse, but a lot of companies like this that expand internationally really quickly, don't necessarily think about these problems still, which is kind of shocking after the last four years of sort of watching. You would imagine if they would get it. Yeah, they're complicated questions, right? And I think that what we're starting to realize also, and I think a big, you know, theme in my reporting, and not just on Clubhouse, but on a lot of apps like this, is that, you know, we probably need different solutions for different cultures in different

context. I'm not necessarily convinced that the same, you know, standards, the same community guidelines can apply globally. It's a nice idea, and I think that there are some principles that should be, you know, definitely followed everywhere, but a one-size-fits-all approach maybe isn't going to work. But I think it's really interesting what's happening with Clubhouse. We're working at another story right now about politicians in South Korea who are using it. It's definitely really interesting and I think that it has more potential than people realize. And what I really liked about one of the stories that we did, which looked at Clubhouse in four different countries, which was Japan, Nigeria, India, and Hong Kong, which I guess is a city, but a territory. And it was just

really interesting to see how it was influencing, you know, culture there and how the conversations were so different in so many ways. So, you know, I was surprised to see that. And I was really glad that we did that story. And we actually hosted an event on Clubhouse and talk about it, which was really fun. Oh, that's cool. We'll have to, I'll have to join your next one. It sounds like it'll be a fun event or was a fun event. Okay. And then I guess like this is a natural segue to a theme that we talk out, talk about a bunch on this show, which is just like what the future of the global internet is going to look like. There seems to be a U.S. vision, which is that the internet will be open, dominated by American companies and global. And then other vision starting to

emerge. One in China, actually is entrenched at this point. And then another one in India and then elsewhere across, like even the Solomon Islands, I think, are banning Facebook now. So where do you think all this goes? Do you think that there's one vision that wins out? And how does the battle play out? I think it's probably a mix of the two. I think that this idea that there is a binary is sort of false, right? It reminds me of the, you know, the argument of like, is China and the U.S. going to decouple? Like, not really, right? Like, I think that the idea that a decouple, like, I think that the idea that a decoupling is possible is sort of naive. And I think similarly, the idea that this is really a battle and that one vision is going to win out is not really true. I think that

Facebook is going to continue to be used by so many countries. I think that, you know, Google is going to continue to be a huge browser provider in many places and that's not going to change anytime soon. But I do think that we're going to continue to see the rise of local alternatives. And I think that these platforms are going to get bigger than people realize. This is especially true in countries like India, right? You know, TikTok was banned there. And quickly, there is, you know, half a dozen alternatives. And, you know, those might seem sort of easy to brush off. But, you know, some of them have, you know, close to 100 million, if not more than 100 million users, which is kind of a lot, you know, even for a country like India. So I think that

we're going to see maybe a more balanced internet in a lot of ways where these big Western tech companies still play a relatively large role. But there's many more local alternatives. And in lot of places those local alternatives are going to win out. You know, I don't think that every country is going to be using WhatsApp pay, for example. I'm not convinced that Facebook is going to win the TikTok, you know, short form video, you know, battles with reels. I think that we're going to see a lot more of a mix, but in a lot of places you're still going to be using, you know, one or two Facebook apps or, you know, you're still going to be using Chrome as your main browser. But the space is going to become more crowded. And I think that these big players that have dominated will

maybe not dominate quite as much. I think the other thing that's worth noting, again, when you compare across countries, is that the less sexy thing to talk about is infrastructure, right? Internet is kind of this magical thing that exists up in the universe, and there's lots of things happening all the time. But the reality of how the Internet is built, right, is that there are entry and exit points that governments control, right?

Governments can order telecoms to shut things down, and they're getting better at it, right? they can hire their own hacker teams, right, to intercept all sorts of encrypted tools that people are using on the ground. When we talk about a balkanized internet, we talk about internet nationalism, we also have to remember that there are still practical grounded realities when it comes to tech, right? There are towers and their systems and they're engineers. And ultimately, governments, right, whether or not we like it, hold a lot of cards, right? that's not to say that the democracy activists in Myanmar are not getting better and smarter. You know, something like the Miltay Alliance is fascinating, right? And so encouraging.

But it doesn't change the facts, right? The facts is the government, the internet still has to exist somewhere. It has to have access to an underwater sea cable, right? And that's a big challenge, I think, because we can get very excited about the potential, right, of internet transformation. And you had, well, Goni on your show a few weeks ago, he's a fascinating character, right? And his views have really changed in the 10 years since he was a symbol of the incredible democratizing power of smartphones, right? We have to live in a more nuanced version of reality if we're going to start to understand what the future of the Internet looks like. I agree with that 100%. So I guess as we wrap up, I'd like to know how do you get this stuff noticed?

because, you know, these are all important stories, but they don't neatly inject themselves into the news cycle, which is a beast and seems to be the thing that delivers views and all that other stuff. So what's the planner or how have you thought about ways to make people pay attention to this stuff? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, we face all the same headwinds as anybody creating any kind of content on the internet. And I think that the answer is that we have to go low and slow for a long time. time. There isn't a pre-made constituency for this type of story, right? Many of the people that we hit with the story for the first time, they literally didn't know what's happening, right? They never heard of this thing. And so that creates a different kind of path for us, I think, to build

an engaged audience over time, because we cover a lot of countries, too, right? It's a pretty small number of people who are agnostic across country, right? There are people that like China, people that like Brazil, maybe they'll stay for a story in Mongolia. If it's really compelling, we need to be smart enough to understand the way people want to read international news and then find a way to serve that over time. And it's going to take time. We have to experiment and hopefully, you know, partner with other publications to meet new audiences continually because, you know, headwinds are strong. Everyone knows them. For sure. Last thing I noticed is that there's no ads on the site, and you don't ask for subscriptions. So how is this thing

going to sustain itself financially? So I'm a primary funder right now, and I've made a 10-year commitment to fund us at our current level. So we're pretty happy at the moment. You know, we're structured as a nonprofit for a few reasons. One, I think just candidly, I didn't know how I could monetize this, right? When you're giving people something that they didn't know that they wanted, right? I think there's also a lot of promise in nonprofit models. And I'm very, you know, I admire things like Texas Tribune and the Marshall Project is sort of being able to fill voids in news gathering, right, that don't have a kind of market imperative. That's a really important role, I think, for publication like ours. I think we're open to, you know, outside

funding if we want to expand, but I also, having seen lots of nonprofits over the years, one mistake that nonprofits make a lot is that they think that they're companies and they think that they need to grow forever, right? They need to keep growing. And they end up kind of veering out of their core competency, right, to justify more grants and all that kind of stuff. I want us to be really efficient, really good with what we have before we start needing to expand. Yeah. Alex, just to answer your previous question, for me about like getting readership, I think it's two things. It's, first of all, making global connections wherever you can, right? Like, we publish a story this week about the retail investors in Korea who also hate shortsellers

just as much as the Robin Hood investors in the U.S. do, right? So it's making these global connections wherever we can. And I think the second thing is, you know, you know better than anyone that if there is a compelling scoop, no matter what website it's on, everyone's going to read it there, right? So it's finding the stories that people need to read to know what's going on. is another big thing that I think about is it doesn't matter. If it's on medium, if it's on some guy's random blog, you're going to read it if it's the story that everyone needs to know. Yeah, for sure.

And I think you've had plenty of those so far. And I think that the way that you're describing, you and Sophie are describing how this publication functions is exactly the right way. And the proof is in the pudding. Stories have been great. It's a fun read. And I don't know. I'm looking forward to continue to read it,

at least for the next 10 years. And we'll see what happens after that. But I appreciate you both coming on the show. Thanks for having us, Alex. Thanks for having us. Before we head out, let's make sure that folks who are listening can get in touch with you guys and can find ways to stay along with the story. So what's the best way to do that? Our website is rest ofworld.org.

We're on all of the usual platforms and just look us up. Rest of world and don't bother with the. Okay. And there's a great newsletter also that I recommend people subscribe to as well. Amen. We love newsletters. Pro Newsletter here on the big technology podcast. All right. Well, Sophie Schmidt, Louise Messakis, thank you so much for joining us this week. It's been a pleasure having you on.

Thanks, everybody for listening. If this is your first time here, please subscribe. We have a new show that comes out every Wednesday with Tech Insiders, outside agitators, and journalists. So if you enjoyed this one, there's more on the way. And if you're a longtime listener, please give us a rating. If you can, those help with Discovery. We're trying to get noticed as well. Well, that will do it for us here.

week on the big technology podcast wishing you all a good rest of the week and thanks again to the folks of the rest of the world for coming uh come in on the show it's been a great opportunity to ask you some questions about the mission publication i'm a fan of all right that will do it for us thanks again and we will see you next time here on the big technology podcast