Pivot - Bob One Returns, Trump Can Tweet Again, and Guest Noam Bardin on Post News

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Kara and Scott discuss Elon Musk’s latest moves, including letting Former President Trump back onto the Twitter. And Bob 1 has returned to replace Bob 2 at Disney. Also, Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to over 11 years, and Swifties are coming for Ticketmaster. Then, they’re joined by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin to discuss his newest endeavor, Post News, a social network with the goal of paying publishers. You can join Post News here: post.news Send us your questions! Call 855-51-PIVOT or go to nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

Scott, you were great on Face the Nation this weekend. I was obviously better. By the way, aren't we fancy on Face the Nation together? We're fancy. Yeah, Margaret. Margaret, wow. She was fancier than us. We were like, did not look fancy next time. I like her. I think she's the best Sunday morning host. She's cool. She's a cool customer, as they say. In addition to that, I think she's the definition of making something that's really hard look really easy. She does.

She just is seamless and asks hard questions but comes across as graceful yet, you know, forceful yet dignified. She's fantastic. But that was – I love how we, by the way, back to us, we go on Face the Nation. Yeah. And rather than talking to Margaret pre-program, you and I are bantering back and forth as if we haven't seen each other in two hours she's like she's like what you have some religion did they talk to you i heard they talked to you about not behaving did they talk to you about behaving i did not i did i did not i did not hear that did they okay i'm sure they probably they were worried they were worried yeah oh yeah well you know what

that's called it's called common sense. They should be worried. You're the one that was throwing out gay sex jokes. I know I was. I was. But you know what? Let's keep ourselves real. That's who we are.

We're going to go, by the way, everybody, Scott and I have made a pact that we're going to peer as many things together as possible. And so we could get in trouble much more easily. Suicide pact. Suicide pact. We're going down together. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, we're speaking of like,

we have so much news. It's crazy. A lot of news. A lot of news. Crazy amounts of news. Today, Disney brings back Bob Iger and Elon Musk brings back Trump. Also, we'll speak with a friend of Pivot,

Noam Barden, about a new social network that wants to pay for content. And it's a really interesting thing. It's called Post News. First, concert goers want to see some swift antitrust action. Last week, Taylor Swift fans tried to buy tickets to her upcoming tour, but crashing

websites and complicated waitlists turned the sale into a disaster, and many were left empty-handed. On top of that, the tickets on resale websites like StepUp were priced at $26,000. Now fans and politicians are pointing the finger at Ticketmaster, the nation's largest ticket seller, and their calls to reverse Ticketmaster's 2010 merger with Live Nation, including from AOC, who tweeted the company should be broken up. There are some reporting that Ticketmaster did tell the team of Team Swift to stagger sales instead of listing the entire tour at once. That was 52 shows. But Swifties are a strong force, and she's been very reasonable but firm at them.

So it's really interesting what's happening here and the struggle between ticketing agencies and Taylor Swift. I feel like Taylor Swift's going to win this round no matter what. Some of the politicians have been a little bit noisy, but nonetheless, my son is mad at Ticketmaster. Louis is like, Ticketmaster, blah.

So reasonable but firm. That's the nickname I have for Cialis. I just thought of that. Oh, a penis joke. Anyway, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. So the idea of 4 million Taylor fans being profoundly disappointed does bring me joy. I got to be honest.

It does bring me joy. I love Taylor Swift. Do not. I know you do. I could name a Taylor Swift song to save my life. I just know that she goes- Well, the one antihero sounds like you. I just know she goes out with a guy for 72 hours and then writes a song about it.

I'm the problem. It's me. Let me just tell you, cleric Jo Katz knows every single lyric to antihero. She's singing it. We sing it together. Yes. Anyways. Look.

Okay. Let's be serious. Yes. Anyways, look. Okay, let's be serious. At the time. Okay, sorry. The unexpected regulator for Meta was Tim Cook. And I'm believing, or I'm starting to believe, that the unexpected head of the DOJ is going to be Taylor Swift because what this has brought attention to is that in 2010, Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged,

creating a behemoth that controls, get this, 70% of live event tickets. Yeah. And so the whole what you call joy around music, live performances, whether it's Elton John's 18th farewell tour. By the way, that guy is so full of shit. He has a lot of farewell tours. I went to his farewell tour a decade ago. Yeah, I know. Where it's like, oh, we got to go because this is it.

And then 10 years later, he's still saying farewell. He literally is the thing that wouldn't leave. By the way, I love Elton John. But when you have 70% of a market, especially in live events, what that means is that off-off Broadway or some little independent band isn't on Live Nation or Ticketmaster, and everyone else is. And here's the thing. They don't need to invest the requisite tens of millions of dollars in technology and infrastructure to ensure they can handle site loads, spikes, because they don't need to. Because when Taylor Swift goes back on the platform and they say, we've fixed the glitch, everyone will show up again. They're not going to go, oh, we'll go to this other site to buy Taylor Swift tickets. So this is a good example of what

it means to exercise monopoly abuse. This is a manifestation. Monopoly power antitrust system has two lines of thinking. The original one was Brandeisian, and that was channel power. For example, Amazon puts a lot of small companies out of business. A lot of e-commerce companies just can't compete because of Amazon's cheap capital and them abusing their custody of the consumer. Then there's the Bork view of antitrust, and that is consumer harm. And it's always been very hard to apply that litmus test to big tech because the majority of their products are free. But in this instance, there is demonstrable consumer harm. So I think any attention is good. Let me push back just a tiny bit because it's a little more complex. This is a really complex

story, actually. It's very easy for politicians to jump on this bandwagon, but it's absolutely true. They dominate, no question. Although some people think those numbers aren't quite correct, and there's some significant research into this. And other companies that were selling tickets also had problems, right? Had problems with this thing. And I think one of the issues I think that's important is the way they rolled this out. And this is a thing called Full Rate No Cap. It's a newsletter, which I thought was interesting. I was reading it. Let me read this. It's pretty obvious that putting 52 dates on sale at once is unnecessary stress to any tech platform. But again, the artist has control. Taylor took to Instagram today to point the finger

at Ticketmaster, but she had made this decision. Another thing is maybe that's the biggest issue. Tuesday was a failure of Ticketmaster and not the pricing. Some have suggested a more competitive marketplace would lead to better tech options that can do a better job selling seats. But if that's true, it's also fair to know that five of Taylor's 52 shows were sold by SeatGeek, not Ticketmaster, which is a fully digital company. Reports show that SeatGeek had very similar problems, impossibly long queues, fans being dropped from the waiting list,

site delays due to unprecedented traffic and bots. And one of the things, and there are other competitors like Tickets.com, et cetera, New Era Tickets and stuff. But you're right. One of the things that I liked about this piece was if Congress actually wants to be helpful, there are some legislative solutions that would protect fans,

create a bot act with teeth, put caps on scalper pricing. The UK has done this and early results are promising. Make service fees transparent. Mandate all in pricing so as advertised cost of a ticket doesn't suddenly jump when it comes to checkout. And more than anything, do not prevent artists from limiting resale. This will empower them to have final word on ticket pricing. And of course, the Ticketmaster execs got attacked by the Swifties and many others. But it's a really interesting problem, and obviously more competition will solve it, but there are some significant things.

Congress has done nothing here that they could do well beyond breaking this thing up that could solve lots and lots of problems here. It is easy to yell at them, but it's also more complex to legislate. And the bot legislation, which has been sitting there forever, is one that is, I think, very important. I really do, I have to say. Often, Congress yells and screams and then doesn't do any legislation. So that's my- I'll tell you though, I don't know if you've noticed,

but whenever I buy a ticket to anything, I'm just struck at the amount of fees that are layered on. It's like Airbnb, same thing. We talked about that. Well, and also Airbnb is, I don't wanna say monopoly, but they dominate. Yeah. And just the fees when you go on these ticket sites.

Also, sort of my liberal guilt coming out, every time I go to, and it happens to me really at Disney, I just see how expensive it is. Yeah. And I think, wow, the average American family needs to save all year and then come here every other year. It is, or just to take your kids. My dad used to take me to LA Kings games when we lived in Los Angeles. And I remember we'd get tickets for, I think, six or eight bucks. And obviously, they weren't great seats. But we could afford that.

And I just think for a family of four to go to. It's incredibly expensive. It's extraordinary. You know, I know it sounds crazy. We're taking Clara to Frozen on ice, and we have money and everything else. But when I saw the price of those tickets, I was like, are you kidding me? Yeah, it's crazy. And I can afford it. And I was like, do I want to afford this? This is crazy amounts of money. It was crazy. It's got to be sorted out. And Congress has got to stop screaming. Ticketmaster has to stop being defensive. Taylor Swift has to take some responsibility. And they have to pass some really smart laws to create something where there would be at least parity in terms of people knowing

the prices they're getting. Because people do feel like they're getting screwed, no question, at all levels. So we'll see. Another story, which is totally depressing, again, difficult news out of Colorado. The LGBTQ community is still reeling after a government took the lives of at least five people at a Colorado Springs nightclub over the weekend. More than two dozen people were injured. At least one club patron attacked and subdued the shooter, pinning him to the floor until the police arrived. Police now have a suspect in custody. He sounds, you know, problematic and on lists and stuff like that. He sounds, you know, problematic on lists and stuff like that. A lot of the right wing is saying, don't politicize this right after the event. And I think I shall politicize it because this is a year of propaganda from the right that smeared the LGBTQ and especially trans community as groomers. All this legislation, all this hatred. And it's, you know, Lauren Boebert saying she feels this is very upsetting has been right at the forefront of using terms like rumors and pedos around gay people and trans people. And Matt Walsh, who is just the most loathsome person I think you've ever got to meet, is immediately saying, oh, that they're trying to castrate young people, which is crazy.

So, and then, of course, Elon Musk himself last night did a lovely anti-gay post about him and CBS. Just, and of course, he did the Paul Pelosi thing. This is all, this is not the cause of it, but this is how you get to this. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not going to directly, I will draw a straight line. All this legislation, all this anti-trans stuff, all this anti-gay stuff is precisely why stuff like this happens. Yeah, it's not a, it's not a straight line, but it's a line. And this is how it starts. All this anti-gay stuff is precisely why stuff like this happens. Yeah, it's not a straight line, but it's a line.

And this is how it starts. And when you don't reject hatred and have just a total intolerance around it and shame people and its corporations weigh in, it festers. Yeah. And then there's some sort of economic shock and people are looking for scapegoats. And then you hear elected leaders that are supposed to represent America using terms like grooming. The other thing that was, I mean, amongst the many things that were so upsetting here, what you heard from all the people think that anyone now in any safe place feels less safe. I mean, it's just it's especially heinous that people and any sort of minority that feel like they need to sequester to a place, a safe place where they can be around other people who understand them and they're not judged and they get to be who they want to be and they get to have a good time. they're not judged and they get to be who they want to be and they get to have a good time, that those safe places are not only not safe places, they're less safe than the general community because they've become targets. And then it all comes back to, and we keep this dangerous bereft resignation around guns. In 2020, there were 19,346 gun homicides in the U.S.

Do you know how many there were in the U.K.? What, like two? Thirty. Yeah. And then, and not only that, it's even worse. This gets warranted attention, but in the U.S., 24,000 people will kill themselves with a handgun. Yeah. And it's just something, it's just something.

And also just, you know, I got to, people ask, well, what's the big difference in the UK? You know what one difference is? What's that? Well, when I drop my kids off at school in the US and I would have, I couldn't help it, I have horrible imagery that runs through my head. I don't have that here. Yeah. You know why? You don't think about it.

Because it doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen. And by the way, this notion that it comes at a cost. I'm going duck hunting next weekend. Shooting is a big sport here. It's not like they don't have guns. It's not as if they don't appreciate guns. They can't enjoy access to firearms for sport and hunting.

They're just reasonable around figuring out a way not to have assault rifles everywhere or guns everywhere. It's not the old west. Colorado is not the Old West. This is just, you know, there's nothing we can do to stop the sickness at the heart of the U.S. in this issue. I honestly, I don't think there is. And more sickness, the anti-gay Twitter account Libs of TikTok posted about a Colorado drag group the day after the shooting. It showed no remorse, no sympathy.

They've been, oh, so anti-gay. All kinds of accounts. Their account was suspended from Facebook and from Twitter earlier this year after a directed misinformation came against a Boston Children's Hospital saying they were doing things they weren't doing. You know, and it extends to anti-Semitism, obviously. The Manhattan DA says authorities prevent an attack on a synagogue by a man who runs a white supremacist Twitter group. These are, if you don't see the links,

just trying to pretend they're not there is ridiculous. This kind of language, and combined with a lack of gun control, is really, and a real sickness at the heart of the American DNA around guns and violence is really so irresponsible and so, it's sick. There's just nothing. It made me sick to my stomach. I actually turned off comments. I'm not using Twitter as much. We'll talk about Twitter in a minute. But I tried to turn off all my comments because the first time ever, I started

to get really vile anti-gay stuff. And that used to be just from the PR person for Ron DeSantis. But it started to get really ugly. And I had to turn off my comments only to people that followed me. I just don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. And it was sick. It was sick stuff. And people who, you could see who they were. Yeah, but you put out a powerful tweet. I noticed that because it got a lot of attention. And you said, I'm going to draw a line here, a link here. And you, well, you explain it, the tweet you put out. I put out a tweet that you want to draw a line between all this anti-gay stuff online. And, you know, this is like when Elon Musk, for example, puts that Paul Pelosi thing out,

or yesterday he did a, you know, a Brokeback Mountain one around CBS. He thinks it's ha-ha funny. What they're doing is creating an idea around gay people that is sick. And so people who are mentally ill, like obviously this guy was, act upon it. They act upon these things, whether it's the Pizzagate thing or this or the Pulse nightclub or the attacks on the synagogue in Pittsburgh. This is how it happens. This is how it happens is when people take this as real rather than just dunking on gay people or dunking on trans people. I've lived through it, and it's happening again. I can tell you that. The only thing I would check back on is the notion around the mentally ill.

And I think that the right weaponizes mental illness and will say, well, this was obviously clearly a disturbing man. And here's the thing, 93 plus percent of mass shooters would not qualify as mentally ill the day before the shooting. These are hateful people, but these hateful people who are totally, they're usually looking for social status. They've usually been shamed. They're usually young men and they latch on to something that they think will renew their social status and they pick up on hateful comment, hateful narrative, usually online. So don't, let's be clear, the mentally ill are more likely to be the subject of violence, not the perpetrators of it. And we don't want to give the right this excuse that, oh, we need more mental health counseling. No, we don't. You need to stop putting out content that gives people an excuse that when they want to find social status, then they have access to an AR-15.

Yep, which is what was used here. That they can wreak havoc and tear at the fabric of our society. It's true, 100%. It is because it'd be very easy to just say, oh, it's all these young men who are mentally ill. No, it's more complex than that. It's like saying Kanye West is mentally ill. You know what? He's an anti-Semite.

Not every mentally ill person is an anti-Semite. So it's just not 100%. 100%. All right. We have to move on. It's terrible. And our hearts go out to the people there. And it's just, please stop what you're doing, a lot of you people.

It's very dangerous. Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to over 11 years in prison. The judge announced Holmes was responsible for defrauding $120 million out of 10 victims, investors all, and that her refusal to take responsibility played a part in her sentencing. She'll report to prison in April. Sunny Balwani is set to be sentenced on December 7th. We got a related listener question on this topic from Stephen. He wrote, what's the difference between Adam Newman's actions and those of

Elizabeth Holmes that allow Adam to raise huge sums for his next boondoggle, but send Elizabeth to prison? Both stories seem to illustrate the gross lack of due diligence by investors. Well, investors agreed to testify here in the case of Adam Newman. No, they just said nothing. They let it happen. In the case of Adam Newman, in the case of Adam Newman. No, they just said nothing. They let it happen. In the case of Adam Newman, in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, she hid a number of things along with Sonny Belwani, according to the court testimony. So it's a little different, but you're right. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens with Sam Bankman Freed versus Elizabeth here. So what do you think, Scott? Well, we've talked a lot about this. I think

it's troubling, and I think it warrants scrutiny. It appears the only one we're locking up for more than 10 years has ovaries. And I think Elizabeth Holmes is a very unlikable person, and I'm not suggesting she shouldn't go to prison, but if she's going to prison, I don't understand why a lot more white dudes aren't also going to prison, or male tech leaders. And here's the thing, you zeroed in on the fulcrum here. It comes to state of mind. First off, Elizabeth Holmes didn't make a lot of money herself. She lost a billion dollars of investors' money. The difference between Adam Neumann, the reason why she is going to prison or San Quentin and he is going to Coachella, he lost 13 billion, is that that goes to state of mind. They believe that she knew she was lying.

They believe that Adam bought into his bullshit and thought he was just gonna change the world, that he genuinely believed it. But the big difference, and you zeroed in on this, was Masayoshi San did not want a loss of face. Because if he had gone after Newman, it's likely the company would have had to declare BK and American investors would have come in and taken it.

Whereas in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, the essentially exceptionally esteemed gentleman on that board decided to go after her. If Masayoshi Son and the board of WeWork had said he lied, this exaggeration was- They might've been able to prove it, yeah. Trust me, it would have been a different outcome. And this is what I don't get about Adam. If I were Adam Neumann, I would be keeping the lowest profile in the world right now. Yeah, he got out of it.

And so I think Elizabeth Holmes is a cautionary tale. I think she's a very unlikable person. There is something uncomfortable about the only person that ends up in prison here person there is something uncomfortable about the only person that ends up in prison here uh 10 years plus is a woman with a board that's all a bunch of white dudes in their 60s and 70s yeah i would agree i would agree i had got a lot of like how dare you say it's a woman thing i'm like um look at the data and several of the people i was like you might be in jail if if your investors had really you know what i mean it was kind of fascinating it kind of i was like, you might be in jail if your investors had really, you know what I mean? It was kind of fascinating. I was like, look in the mirror, dudes. It was funny. You just didn't get charged. That's all. But what you did was problematic. The question is, can you prove

it's an illegal act? In this case, she was. But a lot of people didn't go to jail. They just didn't go to jail. They didn't have to. And often, these guys get a pass by the investors because they're waiting for the next thing, as in the case with Adam or many others. I think there's much worse behavior than Adam's, I'll tell you that. But they're just not going to jail because the investors don't want to make a fuss, and they just are moving on. And hopefully, they'll have a better thing next time or something like that. They could throw her to the wolves. That's what they could do. It was easy. I was thinking about, I was listening to a podcast with Julie Wainwright, the woman who owns The Real Real. She was talking about her whole life as a CEO,

she's just had to think constantly about how she looks. And I was thinking about it. I was thinking about just the double standard and that is people notice a male CEO if he's in the top 10% of looks. They notice female CEOs if she's in the bottom 90. And that is if you're really hot as a man in business, people notice, otherwise they ignore it. And if you're not hot as a woman, they notice it. It's an entirely different standard. And also the resentment and the anger and the disgust. Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart.

Do you think any of those men hadn't done what she did a hundred times more? No, but she's the one that goes to jail, Martha Stewart, for insider trading. She's another cautionary tale. She went to prison for not for what she did, but for refusing to acknowledge that she did. But anyway. That's what I mean. I'm just saying, you think there haven't been a dozen of those? Like hundreds, hundreds of dozens. The interesting one to watch will be Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam Bankman-Fried. You know, we've got to move on, but this is, we'll see what happens here

with Sonny Balwani and Sam Bankman-Fried and see if it's fair or not. It is not. We don't think it's fair. Speaking of good looking people, let's get to our first big story. Bob One is number one again. In an abrupt move, Disney announced that former CEO Bob Iger, who we like to call Bob One, will return to his old job. Iger explicitly told me that would never happen

when I asked him about it earlier this year. Let's play a clip. There are rumors that you could become Disney's CEO again. That's ridiculous. Ridiculous. I was CEO for a long time. You can't go home again. I'm gone. Really? It's happened before? I gave my ID up, my name tag up, my office, my email address. It's all gone. Right. And all the headaches that come with it. Would you want to be CEO of any other company? Would you think about doing that? I think if I wanted to run a company, I'd still be running Disney.

No, no, I did that. In September, he came to code and he was dressed like he just got off his sailboat from French Polynesia. He was wearing the khakis, the wrinkled, fantastic wrinkled shirt, the stubble, and he was doing the same thing. He was doing the same,

hey, I like investing, I like doing this. And I believe none of it because I believe none of it. But go ahead. The only person that was more disingenuous than Bob Iger at your conference was Gavin Newsom, Secretary Buttigieg, Senator Klobuchar, Mark Cuban. Supposedly, none of them are interested in running for president, but they all got their asses on a plane to fly five hours to speak in front of the tech community. Yeah, they did. I mean, it was just hilarious. Oh, no, I'm not running for president. All right. But you love Bob.

What are you talking about? You went on and on about Bob Iger and his handsomeness. He was like effortlessly. He replaced, by the way, Bob to Bob Chapek, who took the job in 2020. He had so many misses during his tenure. He angered Disney staffers when he offered late resistance to Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill after first not. He clashed publicly with Scarlett Johansson, which I think is against the law. He ruffled some feathers last month when he said adults don't watch animated movies, which they do. But most importantly, Disney missed earnings and revenue in the last quarter, leading to a sharp stock drop. And then he was sort of jocular on the call. It was crazy. He did a bunch of other things, too, in the parks and things like that. So what do you think about this?

Beyond Bob One's handsomeness. A lot of this, so much of your life is just out of your control. A lot of this was self-inflicted injury. But more than anything, this was timing. You know, Bob, too, got handed kind of a shitty hand between COVID. The stock was probably overvalued. So it's come off about 45%. But the last nail in his coffin, I listened to their earnings call last week,

and he wouldn't stop talking about the success of the Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Night. And it was literally, does this guy know what's going on around him? Well, that's because of the streaming mess, right? The amount of money, that he wasn't acknowledging that, correct? He seemed just totally out to lunch. And a guy like Bob Iger gives people comfort. And he didn't want to acknowledge the problem. I think a lot of this stuff's out of his control. Actually, the business unit that Bob 2 oversees is killing it, the parks. Yeah, oversaw it. He's had a lot of missteps. but more than anything, he had bad timing because this is,

and here's what's going to happen. Bob won A, Bob won again, and he's going to have the wind at his back. COVID has gone away. The parks are going to continue to kill it. He's going to be able to cut costs in the streaming network and not see a dramatic drop off in subscriber growth because everybody else is going to have to cut costs. Yeah. He'll make a couple of big moves.

And he just gives people comfort on the investor call. He does. Investors love him. And they're subject to a lot of recently, a lot of activist investors. He can massage them a little better, I would say. Wall Street trusts him. And by the way, Bob Chapek will be fined. He's signed his contract, so he's

going to get paid out. But one of the things that Bob Iger, who I very much regard as one of the best CEOs around and one of the very earliest to digital, was he didn't plan his succession well. There was a whole bunch of stags. They didn't like each other, right? They didn't get along. These two didn't later, yes. But there was a bunch before that. And so I think he knew that his succession was done badly by him. And it was Kevin, what's his name, and Tom Staggs, et cetera. But none of it worked out. He had all these people. I think he's going to spend a lot of time on picking a successor like Dana Walden,

maybe Dana Walden, but it's Dana Walden, or bring back Peter Rice, who Chapik, a very popular executive who Chapik got rid of. He's going to re-restructure it from Chapik's very bad restructuring where the distribution people got power over the content people. He's going to give power back to the content people. But I think he's going to fix the succession thing, because I would say that would stain on his legacy,

and go out, you know, bringing it back to the top, and then put someone really good in place, like a Tim Cook-like character. That's what he's got to do. I think you're speaking rationally. I think the problem here is that they're men and they think they're immortal and they have enormous egos. And I don't know Bob Iger well enough to say this, but I've been shocked at how important a company is, how many people's livelihoods depend upon it, how important it is to your legacy. Yeah. And the top guy's natural reflex is to shoot anyone who looks like a competitor.

Sort of. And more evolved, more mature people would say, okay, it's important. The company is bigger than me and I'm going to always have. You should, any great company should have three or four people who can step in and be CEO. That's correct. He did a bad job here. No question. And most of them, I don't know, most of them, actually, no, most of them didn't. I remember I was on the, when I was on the board of the, I've been on the board of so many companies and whenever anyone appears ambitious and like they could be number two, unless you, you know, prostrate yourself to the CEO, he or she has it. Because they're naturally very competitive people.

Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, Bob Iger was very acquiescent to Michael Eisner, which is how he survived the CEO stakes there. Well, Michael Eisner was this in spades. He kept saying he was the thing that wouldn't leave. Yeah, yeah. And Bob Iger was Steve Young sitting on the bench as probably the greatest quarterback in the NFL waiting for Joe Montana to leave. And Bob waited and was very gracious.

I don't know. Others did not. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Let me ask you two questions. One is, I do think he made mistakes here. That said, he was so bored. I could tell he was bored. You know what I mean?

Like when we started talking about investing, you know, or the stuff he was doing. One time he referred to himself as a house husband, which, you know, he was bored and he wanted to be in the game. This guy is like a, like still, he's like sort of Tom Brady kind of thing. Like I can still throw. Let me put me in coach kind of thing. And I think what he saw was so many mistakes by Chapek that it was sort of offensive. And that's just happened. Listen, it's not new. Howard Schultz went back to Starbucks. You just predicted that Jeff Bezos will come back to Amazon. They're very vibrant and smart people. Bob is over 70, but he looks like, I wish I looked like him right now. He's really fit and he's just raring to go and at the top of his game. And so that's not a surprise. Now, let me ask you one question about this. He had success from these acquisitions, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, 20th Century Fox. What should he buy? Because one thing he told me on stage at one of the two interviews I did with him this year was even Disney's almost

not big enough. So he was talking about buying something. Now he put a lot of debt buying 20th Century Fox on the company. I think it was a good move nonetheless. He has to compete in a tighter streaming market, cheaper Netflix tier, more players like Paramount Plus, possibility of Apple or Amazon getting NFL Sunday streaming rights, which is worse for Warner, I think, in many ways. What would you buy? Would you buy Warner? Would you buy Netflix? What should he make a big-ass acquisition? He said it very clearly. We're in a pickle. Disney's in a pickle. He kept saying we're when he was talking about Disney, which was kind of funny. So they can't afford to buy Netflix. It would be a merger. I mean, I don't know what, I'm not sure what their market caps are. Reed Hastings loves him.

He just tweeted an incredibly positive thing about Bob Iger. I would argue as a Disney shareholder that their assets are more diversified and more enduring than Netflix. I'd be scared to give up whatever it is, 40 or 50 percent, whatever they need to give up. It would be a merger. You asked me what they should buy. If I were Disney, I'd have my pencils out and I'd be looking at Pinterest. I think that Pinterest- He's had some bad things around internet acquisitions, but go ahead. I think Pinterest is the most aspirational and least toxic of the platforms. They could use it around marketing their film franchise. And I also think they could use it as vertical distribution

around ancillary sales, sort of the equivalent of Disney stores. Oh, I like that one. Not Warner. The problem with these right now, I mean, okay, so the problem is Warner would have to get to the point, does Disney want to take on $50 billion in debt? And it would absolutely make them the number one streaming platform. It's a fit strategically. It's just that does Disney want to take on $50 billion in debt. And it would absolutely make them the number one streaming platform. It's a fit strategically. It's just that does Disney want to take on $50 billion in debt? And I don't know

what Disney's current cap structure looks like right now. But a less bet the ranch acquisition would be to come in and buy Pinterest. Spin some stuff off. They wanted to spin off ESPN. There was a couple of spinoffs that people had talked about. That might make sense. That's what Dan Loeb wanted. This is one of the activists. Dan was a couple of spinoffs that people had talked about. That might make sense. That's what Dan Loeb wanted. This is one of the activists. Dan was probably behind. I wouldn't be surprised if Dan was. I wouldn't be surprised, by the way, if Dan played a role in what happened over the weekend.

He's under pressure. Bob is under pressure. We think Bob won is up to it, but Bob won is under pressure, and he will have to really perform. He sent a lovely letter to employees. He's reaching out. He's having meetings. He's a pro. I heard he made everyone show up with their latest animation.

That's good humor. There was a lot of jokes like that. I mean, the contrast between him and Elon Musk is so vast. But Bob Marley is not going to put up a penis joke on Twitter. It's not happening. I don't know. The only real difference is grace, maturity and real hair follicles. I don't think there's much, really much difference here.

Well, experience, judgment, kindness. I mean, I don't know what to say. You know, Bob's named his children after numbers. Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry. But Bob's had nine children by seven. Oh, wait, no, no, no. But Bob is fomented anti-gay. No, no. But Bob is fomented anti-gay. No, no. All right. We're going to get to him in a second. Let's go on a quick break. We come back. Twitter employees and Trump tell Elon Musk, thanks, but no thanks. And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Noam Barden, about how social media can save journalism. It's something that Scott and I have been cooking up. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.

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He said that he doesn't see any reason to go back. That's in keeping with the statements he's made all year long. Musk brought back other suspended accounts, including Kanye West. I'm not calling him Ye. I'm just not. Project Veritas and Kathy Griffin. While some employees said no to Musk, at least 1,200 tweets passed on Elon's ultimatum to go hardcore, according to the New York Times. They left the company instead. Bloomberg is reporting another wave of layoffs at Twitter, this time affecting the sales team. As of now, it's unclear how many people are affected. He complained about bots on Twitter. So then he does a bot-filled Twitter poll. He said he was going to have a content moderation council. And then, of course,

he made the decision, which we said he would. Re-platforming Ye, Trump, and Project Veritas. He's accusations that he's organizing a space for fascists. I kept to tell you it's gotten worse in the past couple of weeks, for sure, perceptibly. A notable departure from Twitter, Apple's Phil Schiller appears to have deactivated his account. That's not a surprise. He didn't use it that much. That's led to some ridiculous speculation that Apple could take action against Twitter, like removing it from the App Store. Oh, my God, the right wing has literally nothing to do all day but make up stupid conspiracy theories. But what do you think about all this? Okay. You summarized it. It's meaningless.

Meaningless, yeah. I predicted he wouldn't come back on the platform because I don't think a megalomaniac wants to share the stage with another megalomaniac. You said he would. You're right. I'm wrong. But who knows what will actually happen? And then there's this bullshit around whether or not Trump can go on the platform because the agreement he signed with True Social. It's a private platform. They can bring whoever they want back on the platform. Yeah. So I don't think it's – I'm not nearly as worried as many people are.

They are. I actually kind of like Trump being on the platform because I want to have a front row seat to seeing his demise. Yeah, Republicans can't be happy. Republicans can't be happy. But look, this is what's happening. Republicans can't be happy. But look, this is what's happening. The biggest business mistake Musk is making is not one they're talking about.

And that is the more moderation, the more profitable the platform. Full stop. And so he's alienating people. People don't want to be a part of this S-pull. They don't want to. They're mental. People are finally waking up to the fact that just seeing this shit, just being a part of it, and then maybe you get tempted to weigh in and say, you know, ye, I don't agree with your statements, and then other people attack you. It takes a toll on you.

I would agree. I've stopped doing that. I'm only using that platform. I will market our stuff. Like I'll say, here's a podcast, and that's essentially marketing. I'm not putting any personal stuff. Yeah, I'm not putting any personal stuff on. And I'm not like, like, like, like, oh, this Washington Post article is interesting. I'm not helping them do that. I'm not putting up anything I'm reading. It's just I'll purely respond on stupid Musk things like these ridiculous conspiracy that Apple will pull it off because Tim is liberal and gay, which is Tim is a capitalist pretty much. And by the way, he met with Trump a bit. So he had to, he's an executive. These people live in a different world of weird conspiracies. It just, everyone's a capitalist except for you people, because they will do what they need to do. And if it becomes dangerous, they'll take it off. If it's not, they won't. That's pretty much it.

And so I think it's really, yeah, exactly. I didn't write any, like, I can't believe Trump's back, except like, of course he's back, like I said. Like, I'm not going to get mad at these people. I've cut off their comments because I don't want to listen to them because one, they're anti-gay and two, they're stupid. And so I feel so much better. It's a much better experience without that. I have to say you were right about that. So what's going to happen next? Anything's going to happen next or do we care as much? I'm caring less and less. My prediction is, and we've been saying this for a long time, I'm doing ahead of lettuce does. I've ahead of lettuce and until the site goes down. Now, I want to be clear, the site, you've said

it before, the site's gone down before. Yeah. I don't think you can treat people this way and then not have some ramifications. It's fine to lay off people. It's not fine to disparage them or try and fire them for cause or shortchange them. I just, I think this is all a political stunt. I think he would, I think he would rather kill a live puppy on Twitter spaces than be out of the news for 48 hours. Yep. I would agree with you. It's a poll.

Oh yeah. Okay. Sure. Like you, like just when you ran the poll around whether you should sell Tesla stock, and it ended up you'd been selling stock all along. Yeah. You know, so in my sum, he should absolutely take that poll and stick it up his ass. I'm just sick of these polls. Well, you saw that. Yeah, it's ridiculous. The gay stuff just drives me crazy, I have to say. Someone reached out to me and said, you should reach out to Elon. And I was like, you know what? That's not your turn to be graceful.

You've given him the best. You have been about as strong an ally as you could have been. I think I said he can go fuck himself after the last game. Yeah, I think that's what I said. I said, no, I'm not going to. I don't care if I ever speak to him again. This is ridiculous. I know it would be a big get.

But honestly, if he comes, he better get ready. He better be loaded for bear because bear is bad. ridiculous. I know it would be a big get, but honestly, if he comes, he better get ready. He better be loaded for bear because bear is bad. And I just, I was like, no, I'm not reaching out. I'm not, there's nothing. I'm like, if that's the person I become, I'd rather not be in the profession. At some point, you'll, I will talk to Bob Iger though, because I like talking to Bob Iger. It's a pleasure. I'll talk to most people. Him in his cashmere ways? Yeah, his cashmere. I call him the cashmere prince. He really is. It's a pleasure. Him in his cashmere ways? Yeah, his cashmere. I call him the cashmere prince.

He really is. He really is. He's just gracious. That's not why I like him. By the way, I talk to lots of assholes. But at this point, it's like, no, I don't think so, sir. I think you better get yourself. I don't know what.

I don't know what you can do at this point. Anyway, we don't care. But we do care about the things we like about Twitter, which is community, meeting cool people. I mean, it's so much fun when it's fun and not when it's a cesspool that it's become. So let's bring in our friend of Pivot. Noam Barden is the founder and CEO of Post News, a social network with the goal of paying publishers. Barden is the founder and CEO of Post News, a social network with the goal of paying publishers. He previously served as the CEO of Waze for many years, a popular map app, before and after its acquisition by Google.

All right, welcome, Noam. And for full disclosure, I have been advising and helping Noam on the project, and Scott is an investor. We like to put that up front, and there's reasons for it. For my part, and Scott can answer for himself, I have never helped any entrepreneur before. I love Twitter. What's happening is depressing to me. And I think what Gnome's put together is wonderful and really interesting. It doesn't mean it's going to succeed. It's very hard to do these things. But never before have I done this, and I'm doing it for lots of different

reasons, most of which have to do with, I think there needs to be a great place to trade news and understand news and talk with people you don't agree with. Scott, do your little disclosure. Yeah, I've put substantial personal capital behind GNOME and Post News. And first and foremost, I'm a capitalist. I see a huge economic opportunity. GNOME was able to carve out with ways the unimaginable, and that is when Apple and Google were spending billions of dollars on maps. He came in and, which is a superior product, built something they couldn't compete with. So just as you'll find out in this interview, pretty much Gnome is arguably the most successful product guy in the history of recent tech. And also like you, Kara, I can imagine a better world where

social is about enrichment and not about enragement. And so, I asked you to get involved. You get asked all the time. And much to my surprise and delight, you said yes. So, anyways, with that preamble. All right. Noam, let's get into it. So, let me just say, one of the things I tell people, I think one of them is like, who is this guy?

And I was like, you know, Waze was a social network for traffic. So I'd love you to talk about that first and then talk about the problem Post is meant to fix. So I guess Waze was not exactly a social network, it was a community-driven application. Right, I'm using that broadly. At Waze, there's an amazing community of people all over the world who are hierarchically managed in the sense that they're local editors, they're area managers, they're country managers, they're global champs, they're experts at localization, experts at specific routing. And this community really makes Waze what it is. This community makes sure that Waze is local in every market that it is. That's how we know in Malaysia what the name of a road is. And this is a similar model that I want to apply to content moderation.

When I imagine how social networks should be moderating their content, it should be done by local people who understand what's going on locally, but have also proven themselves to play by the rules over time, built up a reputation. So if you think about what happened in Myanmar, right, between the Buddhists and the Muslims, no person, very few people in the world would have understood what was going on there to moderate that content. Any person in Myanmar would immediately tell you what's going on because for them, it's obvious. And that's exactly what we want to tap into with this community of moderators that we want to build within Post.

Right. So what's the problem it's meant to fix? What does it do that, say, Twitter Blue doesn't or Twitter doesn't, for example? So I'll take a step back. I've been obsessing for the last six years about this triangle between publishing and news journalism, social media networks, and the changing consumer behavior. And these three things have been working together, I believe, to bring us to the worst possible place. News has moved to subscription, which basically converts maybe 2% of the users and so blocks 98% of the users from getting real editorialized content. Consumers have changed their behavior. They want to consume their news in their feed. And so obviously consumption from a feed does not work with subscription.

And social media networks with their advertising-based model promote the worst in us because it works. I mean, the algorithms don't really care. They just try to achieve engagement at any cost. And so I spent a lot of time since I left Google about two years ago building different products in this space, trying different things. And finally realized there's no choice but to build something new. And what I've realized is there's a moment of opportunity now, and it's wider than just what's going on on Twitter, right? Facebook basically decided to drop news, move it out of the news feed, and then stop paying news organizations, right? On the legal side, regulators are trying to force platforms to pay publishers, right? There's this whole ecosystem

of where does news fit in that is kind of broken today. And I believe it stems from the business model. What I believe consumers want is to be able to get multiple sources of news in their feed, some from creators, some from people, some from professional journalists. They are willing to pay something for it. It doesn't have to be free if you want good quality news, but that doesn't mean you're going to subscribe to every publication. The fact that every publication thinks you're going to subscribe to it

just mathematically can't work, right? Obviously, that's not going to work. So we need other models, and we can't have a world of just advertising or subscription. So, you know, part of the problem around what's happened with social media is that the incentives lead to real externalities.

How are you going to build in different incentives with post-news? So I think the incentives or the business models obviously drive the behavior. And today with social media, frankly, the platform doesn't care what content is on it. It cares the engagement between the content units because that's where they sell their ads. And so they don't care if you actually read the content. All they care is that you stay on the platform. And if you go and spend five hours on a platform and walk away angry and upset, that's success for them.

For us, we want to be able to bring the right content to the right user at the right price. And that means that if you come on the platform, spend 15 minutes, walk away feeling smarter, that's success. But it also means that our incentives are aligned with content creators, whether it's publishers or individual content creators. We both make money or don't make money. Unlike today, where the platforms make a lot of money, but the publishers and the creators make nothing. Yeah, how difficult is to deal with the publisher? That's something

you came to me about. And you know, they're very risk averse. They've been also through the ringer with these people. It just doesn't work. they've kept promising things I I remember when I got approached by Facebook about being on Facebook live and they're like Kara it'd be better for you I'm like why what tell explain to me why well because you'll get better known I'm like I am well known like what what is the plus is there money and then they're like well we could pay you I'm like why would you give me money if I didn't earn it like I was so irritating to them and I was like there no plus for me. There's a lot of plus for you. Same thing with over at Twitter. You know, I've had this famous $8 fight.

Stephen King made it more famous, but I'm not paying them for something I don't want. And everyone's like, you can afford it. I'm like, I don't want to afford it. How do you get to a place where value is created for publishers? Because that's really their question is why should we do this?

Because they're famously risk averse, as you know. So it's been definitely an interesting time spending the last almost two years with publishers. And I think when you look historically, publishers have missed every opportunity the internet had. And they always came in too late doing the wrong thing. They could have been Google. They could have been Facebook, right? You forget how powerful they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago. They couldn't have been, but go ahead. Putting aside that, but from a market perspective, and they could have also negotiated a very different relationship with these platforms in the beginning. Yes, they could. And so I think we need to reboot that relationship and redefine

it in that sense. Yes, they've been screwed by every tech platform. And I can say, wave my hands and say, I'm not going to screw you, but they've heard that before. But I think what can work is the incentives. And that to me really is this. If our incentives are aligned, the product can change a million times along the way. So give me an example of that. Give me an example. So subscriptions, you hit a paywall, you know, unless you were part of it, you don't get to read. And even sometimes on Twitter, I hit the Washington Post and I have a subscription and I have to sign in and sign in again.

So that's just irritating. But what are the incentives for them? Explain the example of publisher A. So let's start always from the consumer. By the way, that's one of the problems with publishers. They don't talk about the consumer at all. The consumer, it's not part of their DNA. They're saving the world. But when it comes from the consumer perspective, the modern consumer wants to get multiple sources in their feed. Why can't you do that today? Because every time you click on it, you hit a paywall and you're not going to subscribe to everything, right? And so this means that publishers are losing 98% of the traffic. Now, the 2% that subscribe are obviously very, very valuable to them. And so what this means from a newsroom perspective is they end up writing for that 2%, which are the most extreme and

politically aligned group, and they're not writing for the average. And if they could hear, hear in terms of monetization, the requests of the average, I believe that would also impact dramatically what they cover and how they cover it. So in my view, you're going through your feed, you see an article from the Washington Post on inflation, you click on it and you read it, no friction, friction is our biggest enemy, right? You one click, you pay for it, you read it. Next article coming in might be the Wall Street Journal on inflation because your feed has been changing based on what you're reading and you're going to read that suddenly. So suddenly you've read two different takes on

inflation in your feed, but you're not subscribed to either of them. But the publisher can set the price. They can set the terms. They control the content. So it's micropayments. Micropayments. Exactly. Micropayments. Which was a mistake Twitter made at the beginning. They never had that integrated in. So I think it's a mistake of the internet, if you want to call it that way, that that model never came out, but it makes sense.

Micropayments require paywalls. Without, you know, if content is ad supported, you can tell me all you want that people will pay to get rid of the ads. That's a few people in Silicon Valley. You know, theers have short hands and deep pockets. They can't get to their credit card, right? So we have to be able to remove the friction, make it seamless, but also make the price relevant. A one cent read of an article is a $10 CPM in advertising. So if you're comparing to subscription, obviously if someone's paying you $400 a year, it's a different story. But if you compare it to what you're making on advertising today, a few cents an article

is a game changer for your monetization. Yes, it requires publishers to do things differently, and they don't like that. It requires consumers to do it differently. Because they talk about cannibalization. I'll let Scott in a second. But they talk about, that's what I hear from them. I said, you don't have these list readers. They just hit the paywall and leave.

So you never had a chance to impress them in any way. So yeah. So cannibalization is interesting. That's a buzzword for not doing anything. Because if you think about micropayments, pricing can be dynamic. It doesn't have to be set. So if someone's reading three, four articles of yours, maybe the price is super cheap. If they're going to read 40 articles of yours, well, maybe the price should go up at that point so they have incentive to subscribe. Because if you're reading 40 articles a month from a specific publisher, you should be subscribed to that publisher. So we can build the different components. One of the challenges, I don't think publishers have strong enough analytics system to understand what they're beginning to understand. The traffic from social media does not convert at all.

So your risk here, your risk is so low, right? So it's much more in your head. In addition, you can stop whenever you want. You know, it's like nothing is set in stone and I have to make it work for the publishers or there's no business here. Yeah, I think the micropayments part, whether it's Simon Holland with his dad jokes or the Wolf Conservation Group that has these wonderful videos of wolves. Just the idea, and what I love about Post News so far is I can just say, this made me feel good, here's a buck. Anyways, my question, there's a tough needle to thread here, and that is the dissenter's view is really important,

because sometimes what seems crazy ends up not being that crazy. How do you thread the needle between ensuring that the center's voice is respected, but at the same time, trying to ensure there's not a crazy amount of spread of disinformation? Well, let's start from the fact that there's no simple answer to it. And there are edge cases forever, and the world's gray, right? So it's like, there's no solution to this. The question is, what's your incentive, right? What are you trying to achieve? And to me, I think one of the big differences is, are people attacking the person or the concept? I think that's one thing that I want to make very firm on this platform.

You can attack anyone's ideology, but you can't attack the person. And that, I think, is one of the things that have fallen apart. And then there's this kind of false equation of allowing people to be assholes means free speech. It's not true. We can all be a little bit more respectful of each other. think about that person's lifestyle, that obviously degrades us to where we are today. And I do think that being able to preserve the reputation of the user algorithmically in the backend will allow us to be able to find who are the players, the good players who are actually playing by the rules, and we should be promoting their voice on the platform. Right. So talk about that, because it's a reputation. There's that that happens at Reddit, on the platform. Right, so talk about that because it's a reputation.

There's that that happens at Reddit and not distributing anonymous people except to their followers, right? So talk about that, the reputation system. So let's put a big caveat here. We're super early. We started this about five, six months ago.

And I think our first code was written in July. So we're struggling to keep up. And really, thank you, everyone that's been involved. And I apologize to the people on the wait list. We're trying to get you off as soon, thank you, everyone that's been involved. And I apologize to the people on the wait list. We're trying to get you off as soon as possible. We're working on it. So it's not there. But from a vision perspective, what we want is a situation where

if you are a verified user, and our verification will cost a little bit of money because it's going to be with a third party and you have to show your ID, you have to be really you. If you're verified, you'll be under your real name. There's no verification of not being under your real name. You can choose. You can be anonymous. You can be verified. If you're verified and you're going to get into our recommendation engine and we're going to try to distribute your content, if your score, your reputation score goes down because people are complaining about it, we're going to take you out of the reputation. And suddenly your content will only go to your explicit followers.

you out of the reputation, and suddenly your content will only go to your explicit followers. And if you continue to misbehave, your followers will not be able to reshare that content on the network until the point where we throw you off. We would rather have a smaller community of people who feel safe and are open about their discussion than having every single person on the platform allowing the worst of us to emerge. So everyone talks about Twitter's technical debt and that since it started, advances in cloud computing have just created an opportunity to build feature functionality at a fraction of the person years required.

If you were to build something as good or better than Twitter right now in terms of functionality, how many people do you think it takes? So that's always a big question. People ask, so why does Google have 150,000 people? Now, the more you scale, the more edge cases you reach into, the more support you have to accessibility, languages, internationalization, et cetera. I think there are a few core things. One is the advertising model requires a tremendous number of people, salespeople, support people, add-ons, et cetera. And hopefully we can move away from that. Second thing, as you said, cloud technologies today are a different world. You

don't need to manage your own data center. What AWS can do for you and what it's done for us in such a short period of time is unbelievable. I think about 80% of what we did at Waze, today you get out of the box on AWS. So you can do really amazing things there, and that's going to help a lot. But more than that, I think it goes back to engaging with the community. Community has to be built day one into the DNA of the company. It's not something you can tack on later on. And if you do it right,

we built Waze on $38 million. That's the money we spent to build the company and to really build versus competitors that spent a billion dollars a year doing a similar thing. And that's because of this amazing community. People want to engage. They want to be part of it. They want to take responsibility, but the platform has to give them that responsibility. The reason people but the platform has to give them that responsibility. The reason people spend so much time with Waze is because we have editors that have the rights and permissions to delete the 101 Highway. So they're there because we give them that trust. And in return, they don't abuse that trust.

But that means building it from the core. And this is, I think, where we'll see the most savings is that we can engage the community, we'll get higher quality, more relevant moderation, and obviously more cost effective. So we don't need to fill up the platform with ads and do everything else. So, Taka, I'm just curious what you think about what's happening at Twitter right now. You have had to move this forward really quickly, right? You are going to launch months from now, correct?

Or at some point. right? You were going to launch months from now, correct? Or at some point. So before I get to that, actually, you've got an investment from one of Twitter's investors, correct? Yes. So Andreessen Horowitz and Scott are my two investors today. We did a C round. I sent you some others because I'd like you to have more women on the cap table. Definitely. And when we talk about our A round, I know something we've been talking about, how do we bring non-traditional investors in? And we have to figure that out. Can you say how much they invested? I'd love to know how much Scott invested. No, it's not really relevant. But they're also investing in Twitter,

just for people to know, which is my favorite part of this whole thing. Those people would sell their mother home if they needed to, trust me. I would put it a little differently. Every large firm is invested in multiple bets. Oh, you're so – see, look at – that's the difference between you and I. See, I can be polished. Yes, you can be. Very good. But I'd love to know –

I've never seen anyone, except maybe a few strip bars, throw more money at someone than they are throwing at gnome Bardeen right now. Anyways. Okay, Scott, thank you for entering that in the picture. But speaking of which, how do you think what's going on at Twitter? Because you had to rush it forward. This is sort of declined in six days versus the six months that you had. You've had to really work all weekend. You're putting out some great notes about that.

People really appreciate them. I know regular people do. Can you talk about what you think is going on there and how it affects you? Can you talk about what you think is going on there and how it affects you? Well, look, I don't believe that anyone could have fixed Twitter at the price point that was set. As soon as the price was set, it was kind of defined. There's no way you can generate enough cash off that business. You need to go, the whole idea of taking a company private is to go low and spend a few years cleaning things up.

You need a lot of cash for that at this cost base, at that debt level. And so to me, when I heard the price, it was obvious this is not going to work. I assumed it would take like six months for that to happen and not six days. On top of that, look, the team that's taken over Twitter have not built on the modern internet in a long time. Yeah. And there are ideological kind of components there that are just, I don't know, I'm trying to be polite and it's just not like me. Look, it's just screwed up. I mean, let's be realistic, right? Nobody acts this way. Just from a pure human-to-human interaction level to support anti-Semites and to make jokes about Christian ideology when they're not funny and about gay rights. And, you know, there's some things that people care about. Well, a smart marketer, a smart entrepreneur said he's doing it for marketing.

He called it, you know, one person called it snarketing, that he needs attention at any level. That's why bring on Trump. Needing attention and marketing are two different things. Yeah. And this is definitely needing attention. And it was funny because just the day that Trump came back on in the morning, we had a discussion internally and we thought it would take a few weeks. Again, everything's happening faster than we think. And my position was they're not going to be able to, they're going to do it in spite of themselves.

They're not going to be able to give up this amazing opportunity to stick it in the eye of everyone else. Now, social media is fragmenting into different platforms. Yeah, there's lots of them. There are a lot of them. There are ideological ones like Truth Social. There's Mastodon. Mastodon is a federated one. There's Blue Sky is going to come

out soon. There's obviously TikTok and Snapchat. There are a lot of different options. And I think each platform needs to represent something. What does it stand for? I think right now we see what Twitter is standing for. And that's fine. That determines obviously

what the user base is going to be and what the feature set is going to be, et cetera. We want to stand for something very different. I want to care about the 75% of users that today on Twitter don't tweet, right? They really are who I'm thinking about more than anything. Not the small percentage that make all the noise and have all the followers and all the excitement, right?

Regular people who want to use social media to get their news. They want to communicate with others. They have questions and they don't want to be called a Nazi or a communist for just having a question out there. They don't want to be doxxed and they don't want their gender discussed, you know, widely. We can do better than that, you know, as a society. We don't have to go to our lowest common denominator. And the core of that is being willing to throw people off the platform.

Twitter never had a problem with rules. They have lots of rules. They just never enforced it. Partially, they had no full-time CEOs. Nobody really cared. Let's be realistic. And thankfully, now CEOs do have a... We are important, so that's good for me, for my job security.

But the flip side of it is that you have to be able to stand behind something and actually prioritize it. And when you don't, when you say the rules are there, but we're not going to enforce them, people will act that way. It's by design. It's all driven at the end of the day from the business model. I know the capital isn't a problem. I know the size of the waiting list isn't a problem. What is your biggest challenge right now to overcome? Number one is execution. And that means not disappointing our users. I'm trying very hard to manage expectations. And that's always the biggest problem. Yeah. Because we are not where we need to be. And it's going to take a long time to get there. We have basic feature. I mean, over this weekend, we basically rolled out search and a personalized feed.

Meaning on Friday, you couldn't find anyone. And on Saturday, even if you followed them, it didn't matter because everyone saw the same feed, right? That's the extent of what we're missing. I think people have been, the thing that I find most exciting is how engaged and supportive people are. I sent an email to the waitlist telling them,

basically, I'm not letting you in. And people write back, thank you. We'll wait. Thank you for doing this. I write an email that we just released this product at 11 o'clock at night. Get some sleep. Make sure that the team is sleeping. We can wait another day. And that's really what the community and social used to be about, right? People just wanting things to be better and volunteering. I get the tremendous amount of people volunteering for all different kinds of roles. Tell us what we can do to help. So first of all, if you're an engineer, definitely there's a lot you can do to help and come help. But that's our challenge.

How do we grow the organization fast enough without bloat and while staying efficient and while actually delivering to our users and not overpromising? And this is really what keeps me up at night. And I think also it's hard to build a social network. It just is. It's hard to make things happen in that regard. But you do have to set the rules at the start in order to get there in the first place. Look, we already had an interesting kind of first issue around moderation on the platform where someone posted a Kanye's Shalom post, which was obviously extremely offensive to Jews, but anybody who doesn't like anti-Semites. And someone posted it on a article in Post and basically said, look what's going on on Twitter. And a bunch of people got really upset by that. I don't want to

see this. Why are you posting it here? Blah, blah, blah. And this is what social is about, right? And the rule is simple. We can talk about bad things if we're not talking about people, Bad things happen and we should be able to talk about that. And people came around to it. Some maybe not want to see it. But the point is, as long as we know kind of what we want to do, people are rational and people want to help. a non-consistent way. When we say we stand for things and then we let other things happen, that's a problem. I would rather people not say they stand for anything than say they stand for something and not deliver. And stand means you're willing to take a pain for that position. If you're not willing to take any pain, then you don't stand for it. So just don't say it. Yep. Very good. All right, Noam, you can see why I said yes to this. But by the way, if you may have any screw-ups, I'm going to be right there to smack you around. You are every day smacking me around on all the screw-ups.

I do. I do. I do. And privacy. I do it on privacy. I really expect a lot of you. And so, although the bar is low, as you know. So, but I really, I'm very excited about this.

And I hope people will really give it a chance. And I know you're trying. One of the things I'm saying is this is early. These are hard to do. It might not work, but when you build it with the correct, my big issue around everything on the internet is if the architecture is bad, everything else follows from it. And so, so far, so good. I like how you're building this house. And so we'll see where it goes. And we really appreciate it. Again, full disclosure, I'm advising and Scott is an investor. And I want to just like, just again, thank the two of you.

You've been instrumental along the way on really kicking me around, as you said, on the feedback and on helping promote this. But I really want to thank the people on the wait list. I know it's frustrating. There are people that have been on it for five days and we're doing everything we can to let you in. Believe us, you'd rather get in when things are a little more stable and we're doing everything we can. So, you know, a little more patience

and thank you very much for the support. You can find Noam's latest project at post.news. Thank you, Noam Barden. Thank you very much, Karen Scott. All right, Scott, you dragged me into this. It better work out. Anyway, I think you're right. I really hope the best for this.

He's such a great entrepreneur and I've always admired him. Anyway, I think you're right. I really hope the best for this. He's such a great entrepreneur, and I've always admired him. Anyway, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. You know, I'm feeling pretty good. I have just two wins today, and they're both about engaging with your sons or your kids. I went to this wonderful photo exhibition this weekend in London called Seeing Auschwitz, and obviously a very dark, heavy topic, but my sons are now at that age. I want them to know more about our blessings. I've always said that the reason I was told them the reason that they are here is that the brains, brawn and blood of the British Americans and Russians, respectively, in a 21 mile strip of ocean known as the English Channel are the reason they're here because their grandmother, my mother, is a five year old Jew living in London. Her life would have ended with a train ride and that we need to know what happened and I want them to start learning about it. And this exhibition was very moving because I had seen many of these

photos before, but what they do is they have a narrative to make you look deeper at the photos to see some things you may not have observed or what's going on. You know, a child looking around for his or her mother or someone in an oversized coat, what the SS officers were doing. I think that stuff is just, and then, and something I really appreciate, and they do this at the genocide memorial in Kigali in Rwanda, they talk about other genocides. And as a species, unfortunately, we are very good at genocide. It's not something that just happened in the middle of the last century. It continues to happen. So I think that's something I share with my boys. It's obviously not joyous, but I think it's important.

And I think I feel closer to them and they're starting to understand just how blessed they are and how much of our good fortune is not our fault. And then the other, just speaking along the lines of sharing with the boys, and I realize there's a lot of controversy around the World Cup right now. I am having already just a wonderful time, England 6-1 victory. I'm going to watch the USA later playing against Wales. My son has picked Argentina and the Netherlands to go a long way. But I would just tell people, dads and moms, I am not into sports. Cara, you and I are kind of the same mind on sports. I could give a shit about them. I am not into sports. Kara, you and I are kind of the same mind on sports. I could give a shit about them. But I'm telling you, it's such, if one of your kids gets into sports, it's just an amazing- Oh, I'm going to all the basketball games for my son. It's just an amazing way to connect with your kids.

And I'm going to Doha just as I went to Russia four years ago. And I'm super excited. This kid, Saka, who I watch in Arsenal games, he's 21 years old. Yeah. Really interesting backstory. I just love, I'm just still very fortunate

to engage with my boys over things from totally different I am going to all my son's basketball games. I like basketball. What are your wins and fails? I'm going to do one that's silly. I just watched

The Sex Lives of College Girls last night, the latest season. What a great series. There's another season? Yes, and it's so good. It's so much tighter and watched The Sex Lives of College Girls last night, the latest season. What a great series. There's another season? Yes. And it's so good. It's so much tighter.

And they're so good together. This group is really gelled. This entire group. There's four girls at the center of it. But just wonderfully funny. It's Mindy Kaling, right? Mindy Kaling. Yeah, she's very good.

Amanda and I were watching last night. We were just laughing out loud. It was such a pleasure. It's so funny. It was such a pleasure. It's so funny. It's on HBO Max. It's worth it. It's so good.

It's so funny. And it's not substantive, I guess, but it's witty. It's very witty. So I really enjoyed it. I was saying to Amanda, it's effortlessly diverse. Like I know it sounds dumb. Sometimes when it's made to be diverse, you're like, eh, what are they doing here? It doesn't work.

It's awkward. In this case, it's just, it's just funny. It's just funny. I love it. Negative, obviously, these anti-gay tweets by Elon Musk are repulsive and disgusting. I just don't know what to say at all on the height. I mean, and towards everybody, Noam was right. After a shooting, And towards everybody, Noam was right. After a shooting, a murder, murders at a gay and lesbian and trans club in Colorado Springs, his juvenile and toxic memes is what I tweeted, aimed at women and then gays. Really sick, I have to say. It's getting into sickness.

And I'm so sorry for the people in Colorado Springs. I'm sorry you're not safe. We are not. I've never felt safe being gay. I'm sorry you're not safe. We are not. I've never felt safe being gay. I'm sorry to hear that. But let's hope for better days. Hope for better days. Anyway, on that note, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Okay, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday. We have a parenting show, Scott. Isn't it good? I'm excited about that. Yeah, it was good. We love being parents. It's our favorite thing. What's your favorite part of parenting right now, very quickly, to preview people? Raising competent, loving people with someone I love, and every night, we can marvel at just how wonderful it is. Yeah, and I like my kids dunking on me. I think it's very funny. I like being shit. I get a lot of that.

There's no shortage of that. I think I get a little too much of that. That's my favorite part. That is my favorite part, just hearing about their days. Anyway, you'll love this show. It's really good. We've got some great experts and some great questions from listeners, and we really appreciate it. And Scott, I just want to say to you, have a beautiful Thanksgiving in London.

I guess they don't, do they have Thanksgiving? I guess you're going to have your Thanksgiving, correct? Yeah, we're doing a Friendsgiving actually on Wednesday here. A Friendsgiving, well, happy Thanksgiving to your family. I hope you have a wonderful meal. Thank you, likewise, Cara. And to all our amazing listeners, I have to say one of the greatest parts of our job is we have astonishing listeners who are cordial and respectful and also interesting, and we really wish you a happy Thanksgiving. We're very thankful for you. Yes. Thank you for your support. And we always talk about it. People come up to us and they just couldn't be nicer. And it's just a lovely part of our lives. Thank you very much.

All right. Read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Indertot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Mia Silverio. Yes, that's right. I sold my Tesla. But before I did, I took a big fucking dump in the passenger seat. I don't know if that'll affect resale value.