Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Can Elon and Twitter save Trump? + Kamala plays with fire online

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

This week, Trump returned to X/Twitter/whatever you want to call it. Editor-in-Chief at the Verge, Nilay Patel, joins Taylor to discuss the long and rambling conversation between Trump and Elon Musk on Twitter spaces. They debate how influential X is in today’s political climate. Later, they explore the broader social media landscape, Kamala’s dicey use of a Dril tweet, the campaign’s broader digital strategy, and how TikTok and YouTube factor into the 2024 race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Trump returned to Twitter. I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission, and I'd be happy to help out on such a commission if it were full. Well, you, you're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say,

that's okay, you're all gone. On Monday night, Trump and Elon had a long and rambling conversation on Twitter spaces. The event was billed as a blockbuster discussion, but ultimately, it wasn't even clear. who benefited. Here to discuss what went down, what it all means, and what the broader tech landscape looks like as we head further into the 2024 election is editor-in-chief of the verge and host of the Decoder podcast, Nelai Patel. Nelai, welcome to power user. Hey, thanks for having me back. Okay, let's start with just kind of a 101 on what happened for those

who missed it. So tell me a little bit about kind of what took place last night. And also, did you listen to this entire Twitter space? All two hours. It was a lot. Yeah, you know, Elon bought Twitter. I think he sees himself as a kingmaker. He very publicly endorsed Trump for president. He said, I'm going to have you on a Twitter space. And he framed it in a really interesting way. He said, I don't want this to be a confrontational interview. You can learn more about somebody in a conversation, which may or may not be true. I think in this case, it was extremely not true because Elon was unable to guide this conversation. in any substantive way. And that was really, as somebody who interviews people for a living, this was the heart of my takeaway is that watching the richest man on earth get run over by the Trump freight train was extraordinarily telling. He just could not keep this thing on the rails.

He, I feel like it started from the beginning. I mean, they started off talking about the assassination attempt. And Elon sort of was just asking him like, wow, man, like, wasn't that crazy? And then it was like, you know, 10 minutes of Trump rambling. It was really unclear, like, what we were supposed to learn from all of this. I mean, I totally agree with you that it was also, it was sort of like reminded me a lot of, like, the worst days of Clubhouse. Yeah, there was a lot of that vibe, right? People just talking.

I don't smoke weed, but I have a lot of friends who do. And I have a lot of friends who smoke weed and don't drink. And it felt like our conversations when I have been drinking and smoking weed and you're just on different planets. I will leave it as an exercise. for the listener to determine who was drunk and who was toned. But that's what that felt like, as though Elon was trying very hard to say something profound, to make points, and Trump was doing whatever it is that Trump does now. And that is increasingly, I think, detached from actual policy positions or anything other

than being pretty mad that he's not the president. You fight for election integrity and you end up getting indicted because you're you're fighting for election integrity. And when the day comes that you can't fight for election integrity, you don't have a country anymore. So what happens, what happens is they went after their political opponent, me. And if you're paying attention to just Trump, his anger was actually shocking throughout this entire two-hour conversation.

Yeah. Let's give a little bit of a play-by-play on kind of like the topics that were touched on. And then, yeah, where did we go from there? Immediately to immigration, which both men care about. deeply. Elon was constantly trying to soften his position. He said, I don't think all illegal immigrants are bad. Some of them are quite hardworking. And Trump, you know, he's Trump. He's, we're going to have the largest deportation in history. And how that would be accomplished or whether that would work well, or even if that was a good idea, left unexplored. We spent a lot

of time on immigration and how many bad people are coming over the border in their conception of the border. Elon said he visited the border and he saw people streaming over the border. At one point, Trump said people, even from the Congo, were coming over the border in Elon. Oh, that's bad. And you just see, you could feel the sort of inbuilt racism of that entire conversation. It was really quite striking. It was really not a linear conversation. I mean, I would say throughout the next couple hours, they kind of, they both sort of kept

trying to bring things back to their pet topics. Like Elon kept trying to make it about immigration. They did eventually get into sort of like climate stuff. when we had Elon suddenly boosting the gas industry, it was kind of incoherent. I agree with you that the takeaway was just tons of racism. And Trump also seemed to kind of constantly bring up Biden, which was interesting. At certain points, it seemed like he had forgotten sort of like who he was running against. He said Kamala Harris's name in five different ways.

Kamala, Kamala. And you can tell that he says her name wrong when he wants to insult her even more. it is interesting what they did not talk about. Trump tried to talk about AI several times. Elon simply refused to take debate and actually changed the subject pretty dramatically the first time AI came up. And that climate discussion you referenced, if people go back and listen to it, it is fascinating. Trump does not believe in climate change.

He says it's going to be, I think he said it was going to be 500 to 1,000 years away. And Elon very clearly disagreed with him, tried to walk him back. Instead of making a climate change argument, made an argument. argument that carbon dioxide would eventually choke a salt to death. If you just keep increasing the posthumption in the atmosphere long enough, eventually it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don't realize this. If you go past a thousand plus per million of CO2, you start getting headaches in nausea. He said it's going to be very hard to breathe. Yeah, he kept bringing up like, he's like, well, things will get to a thousand

ppm and that will give you a headache. And so, you know, we should care. Yeah, it's like if you are literally choking death on carbon dioxide, maybe that would be bad. And eventually he said, I think it's 50 to 100 years. And Trump just sort of disagreed with him. And you could hear Trump getting very bored with the technical details that Elon O'Sha put forward. Hey, we see the rise in CO2 in the air. We can see how fast it's going. If it goes faster, that's bad. If we slow it down, that's good. And also, if it gets too high at 1,000 ppm, we will all choke to death. Don't you think that would be bad? And Trump was like, I don't give a shit. And that was incredible. Right? I mean, And this is, Elon Musk runs Tesla.

He runs an electric car company. It's reason for being. It's sustainability. And he gave up. Like, he just got run over by Trump in that part of the conversation in a way that is, I think just says a lot about Silicon Valley billionaires, what they want out of the president and what the president will inevitably do to their positions, which is run right over it.

Absolutely. And you saw also Elon just immediately making concessions to Trump. I mean, the stuff that he was saying about, like, you know, it's really important that we keep the gas industry and the gas industry is so crucial to the American economy and all of this stuff. It just didn't sound like the leader of an electric car company, I guess. There's a kernel of truth to Elon's point, which is if you shut it off today, it would not be great. Which I don't think anyone is reasonably proposing, by the way. But then there's that we shouldn't vilify the oil and gas industry. And it's like, well, they do a pretty good job of vilifying themselves.

over and over again in this conversation, it was clear that Elon did not want to irritate Trump or bother Trump or challenge Trump. And if you're going to be the richest person in the world and you're going to be his big donor, you actually can ask for a lot more. And it is remarkable that the Silicon Valley set that has come out loudly in favor of Trump does not seem to know what they're up against. They think they are going to go have logical discussions. And Trump is going to say things like AI is a real beauty. and we're just going to have to deal with it. It was interesting. He also, I mean, he brought up the energy AI stuff too, right?

He was like, oh, it is using up a lot of energy, and they've got to figure that out. And he just doesn't seem informed at all, nor does he seem interested in entertaining any of their ideas. And Elon and the other Silicon Valley billionaires are just immediately capitulating. You know, I think there is a sense that it's not Trump who's going to be running a Trump administration that the JD vances and the Don juniors who are much more compliant with Silicon Valley will actually be making the policies and that younger set of very online men will actually be in charge. And that might be what you're hoping for if you're a Mark Andreessen or an Elon Musk or whoever

it is that is out there loudly supporting Trump. But at the end of the day, as we have now learned as dramatically as possible, the candidate in the top of the ticket really matters. That is who people are supporting. that is where the energy comes from. That is who people are voting for. And Trump, your point, he talked about AI and energy use, and Elon just pivoted away. He just did not want to engage it, because I think he knows that that conversation will make Trump look at. So you're not going to have that conversation. Elon brought up the idea of using nuclear reactors to create more energy,

and Trump basically pivoted to, like, nuclear weapons are very dangerous. And Elon pivoted back to, I don't think Fukushima is that bad, like nuclear radiation and fallout from reactor disasters. It isn't as bad as people think. And you're just listening to this conversation. And again, it was just two people on very different planets. At one point, Trump said the greatest threat is nuclear warming, by which she meant heightened tensions between nuclear powers. Yes. And Elon just didn't know what to do.

The one thing that I don't understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change. But they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that's an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries. We have major nuclear, and, you know, probably some others are getting there, and that's very dangerous. That's where you need a strong American president. What did you make of Elon's sort of consistent attempts to paint himself as a liberal? Like, he kept also saying, you know, I'm a liberal. I voted, what did he say? He voted for Obama.

He voted for Biden. He voted for Biden. He voted for Clinton. And he voted for Obama. I think he's brought that up several times. He also says over and over again that he waited in. line for six hours to meet Obama when Obama was running for president. And I think that has probably done more to shape his worldview about who he is and who should who should bow to whom, because he had to wait in line. And I think he's like, why did I wait in line? If you recall, in 2008, Elon Musk was not Elon Musk. Yes. He was just a guy. So it's like fascinating that he is holding on to this perceived slight as proof that he used to be a liberal. And now he's a moderate, who's voting for a conservative. I think that is just Elon trying to move the Overton window of

acceptable discourse. He's saying his ideas, the moderate ideas. His ideas are also, I want to vote for the guy who's going to do a mass deportation. That is not a moderate position by any stretch. And I think he's just trying to claim that center so he can actually move the window. Trump is somebody that's really thrived on TV. He's such a showman and such an entertainer. How did you think that this format suited him? I feel like it made him sound even more rambling. I mean, a lot of people seem to hear some sort of a list maybe or maybe something with audio. It also began with a bunch of technical disaster. How does something like this weigh against a bunch of cable news appearances?

I think Trump thought of this is folly. He kept saying, you've got so many people who've set so many records, this is crazy. You have the sense he doesn't really know, right? He loved Twitter, but X is something new, the idea that he would just be talking live into a phone in a conference room. weird. You know, you could, I think you've probably seen that photo and that there's a video in a conference room, just yelling at a phone that is on like a MagSafe battery pack with a pretty cheap looking microphone. It is like an influencer package. Like you go on Amazon and you get the influencer podcast package. You get this battery in that microphone. I think he took it as a

novelty. I think he was having fun. I think Elon wants us to be the future of media. Did you watch the Logan Paul impulsive podcast with Trump? I watched clips. I did not watch that whole thing. But you get the gist of it. Like, yeah. Something so engaging about video and something about Trump that really succeeds in that format. And to me, this was just, and I heard so many YouTubers and streamers talking about this last night, too, like, this is just not an engaging format. And even when you see the clips, it's audio only. So it's just like pictures. It's hard to have those like viral pullout moments, you know, that I feel like video platforms can more better manufacture. I mean, is it a podcast? Is it a Twitter space

meaningfully the same as a podcast. What does it mean that Elon, when he chose the tools available on his own platform, shows the audio-only tool when his own handpicked CEO is out there running around saying X is a video for his platform? Like, just a confusing array of decisions there. It's true. Trump is more charming on video. He is a charming man. That is just a piece of his personality. He has a lot of charisma with a lot of folks. And you could not see that he was joking when he was obviously joking several times last night. Elon missed several jokes. He did not pick up on it at all. At all. It was hilarious. And you can see, like, Trump couldn't quite deal with it. And then he just kept running and it's fun. I do think Elon is much more comfortable

in the audio space. I don't think he's ever been very comfortable in video. He's done a lot of video. You can see he's always a little fidgety and nervous. I think just being able to talk into a phone was where he wanted to be. That said, Twitter space is failed as a product last night in massive ways. delayed by 40 minutes. They couldn't get it going. Elon blamed a DDoS attack, a distributed denial of service attack, which we have reported at the verge. Kylie Robinson reported the verge is just not true. Like, they just didn't have the ability to scale the product for the demand. And you just wonder, what is the point of owning this platform if it doesn't actually work? Right. That was another thing, a bunch of YouTubers and Twitch trimers were talking about, too.

It's like they have hundreds of concurrence. Somehow every other platform is able to handle these massive live streams, right? And that's video and audio. And X can't even handle just an audio live stream. I mean, speaking of Twitter and everything, the Twitter of it all, you know, Trump has been off Twitter since January 2021, shortly following the instruction. Obviously, Elon allowed him back. I think this week was the first time that he really started posting again, although it's not clear that he's even posting since. Like, you know, what do you make of Trump's return to Twitter? And do you think that we'll be seeing more of him on there? Or was this more of a sort of one-off stunt, probably tweeting as part of terms of this deal.

I think this was a one-off stunt. It's been reported that Trump has an exclusivity arrangement with True Social, which is his own social media platform, which is much smaller than X. And I think, hey, come do an interview with me on this platform. Probably falls outside the terms of that exclusivity arrangement. Use it for campaign marketing. Probably falls outside the terms of that arrangement. There's been a lot of rumors that Elon not by True Social or emerge in some way. That seems far-fetched.

is very small. It's not worth a lot of money. And it is mostly like a meme stock at this point. So I think Trump is going to stay on his platform because that's the only thing that's creating the value in the meme stock that he himself has invested in. But I expect the campaign will continue to use X in the ways that it's been using X. To your broader point, Trump got elected on the back of Twitter in 2016. He ran his presidency on Twitter. And now X's relevance is nowhere close to providing that kind of boost for anyone, let alone Trump. I also thought it was funny that after the interview concluded, Trump posted on truth social about the Twitter space event

and linked to a YouTube video of it instead of the actual recording of this video. After the break, we'll be chatting more with Milai about Kamala's tech policy platform and more. Let's talk about the broader social media landscape because Twitter is in a very different place than it was in 2020 and certainly 2016. In one sense, it's severely diminished. but it's also become this hub for sort of politics on the internet in a way that the other platforms aren't. What role do you see it playing in this 2024 election? How influential is it?

And will the way that X has sort of moved to the right under Elon help Trump? I think Twitter hit its peak in 2016. It's peak of influence. It's peak of driving the discourse. Again, you had a president who was running the country by tweet. Yeah. That it's hard to match up to that. And literally policy was being made by tweet.

So that period 2016 to 2020 into COVID when public health policy was being distributed and argued and debated on Twitter, that is a peak. It is a particular kind of peak. And I just don't think we're going to get back to a place where public officials, even Trump, if he's reelected, operate the country on Twitter. It just feels like a group of us lived through that and we're going to spend the rest of our lives warning everyone else not to do that ever again. And that might be fine.

I think what you have now broadly is a lot of big platforms that realize the video is a future. It's much more easily monetizable. It is much, much more lucrative in a way that Twitter was not easily monetizable and was not lucrative, even at the peak of its power. And you have audiences that I think are trained to go to things like TikTok and go to things like YouTube first. When I couldn't get on the Twitter space last night when I was broken, I opened TikTok. I found 500 streamers who were in the space. who are rebroadcasting the space as video, and those chats were vastly faster and more fun to be in

while we waited for the space than Twitter. That's a problem for X. It's a problem for basically every platform that does not have the immediate user base and the immediate habits of young people in particular. So I think X in this election, yeah, there's a lot of political reporters, there's a lot of action.

It's where people issue their statements. It's basically the notes app for statements right now, for public officials. but that's changing ever so slightly, right? Threads just hit 200 million users. There was just a report that Blue Sky in the UK has seen a 60% rise in activity and more UK politicians are joining Blue Sky. We're just going to see a more fractured and distributed media environment.

If Elon continues to lose money at X and turns it into some weird gab or parlor clone, fine. I actually think that's fine. I think like it is better for the internet to have multiple places to be in multiple audiences and in multiple communities, especially if one of them are just like openly racist and you can just not go there. Yeah. Although, but the mainstream ones have cracked down so significantly on news and politics. I mean, you mentioned threads. Can't even count the number of, you know, community guidelines that I've gotten on that app. Like, it's so hard to talk about news and much less anything to do with political news.

and this really influential policies that affect our country. So, you know, with all of these other mainstream platforms, restricting news and politics and the only alternative platforms being run by right-wingers, I mean, where does that leave us in terms of our political discourse on the Internet? Well, I'm curious how you think about centralized platforms in their future.

I think it's kind of over in a real way. And I have no evidence for that, except we've just been in that moment for long enough. and pendulums tend to swing back in the other direction after a while. And we've just come through a period where giant companies have made all kinds of decisions for what we're going to consume. And at the end of the day, a lot of them have not done anything to support meaningful news gathering or reporting for over a decade.

Threads has a particular set of issues, but Threads isn't monetized at all, right? They just started it. They're seeing where it goes. there are 200 million. I think Zuckerberg said they're not going to monetize it so it gets to a billion. So it's got a long way to go before anyone makes any money over there. I look at YouTube, which has been around forever, and there is not one newsroom that has ever been supported by YouTube's monetization. There's been a lot that have tried. We have tried. Fox Media has tried. Major newspapers have tried to stand up video news operations.

And you look and you're like, okay, well, CNN runs a video newsroom, ABC News runs a video newsroom, Fox News runs video newsroom, supported by cable bundles and broadcast monetization. And YouTube is bigger than all that, and no one can figure it out. No one can build the ABC News or CBS News of YouTube. It just can't be done. And so it's like, yeah, Threads, you know, Misery, Adam Sari, who runs threads, says a lot of stuff about not showing politics to people who don't follow it. And then you look at the economics of every other platform.

And it's like, they will just run you into bankruptcy if you try to do news. Like, they will just make it not happen. And so you look at a whole spread and you're like, oh, the news industry has to build its own distribution. We have to get away from these centralized platforms. It's not about one executive saying he doesn't like it or it's not worth it. It's what the entire ecosystem and architecture of social platforms making it impossible to pay one extra reporter in a newsroom. And so if we want to fight that, we have to get away from their distribution and monetization. I actually think that you put everything so well and I completely agree with you, especially the part about this more fragment.

segmented internet. I think that we're undeniably moving in that way. I mean, I think the only thing stopping it from even being more decentralized is just the monopoly, the duopoly, their duopoly, really, that Google and I would argue meta have. But I do think their chokehold is loosening. At the same time, on the right, there are these online-enabled video newsrooms or, you know, independent media, things like the free press, right? Of course, none of them are independent. They're all backed by these Silicon Valley, you know, woolish billionaires, but they sort of distribute news and they're able to run their businesses as if like sort of in the promise of digital media of the 2010s, right? And there is nothing like that in the center or left, I would

argue. Maybe you're right. Maybe newsrooms need to build their own digital distribution and stuff like that. But I think it's going to be hard to go up against the just the machine that the right wing has on the internet. Yeah, that machine exists. You can see it. It shows up in everywhere. It shows up in our comments. It's obviously on the social platforms. There are periods where journalism in America has gotten significantly weird and slanted and run by billionaires. And then the market has actually fixed it. People are like, we would like some news that makes sense. I think you can feel that right now.

Audiences want to actually trust some news gathering. I watch so many TikTok influencers who read the New York Times to their audiences. So here's a thing that happened. And now I'm going to give you my take on it. And their primary source is some other reporter who probably doesn't make as much money as the tick-clock influencer, but their primary source is some other reporter who did some news gathering in a way that makes sense in a way that is institutionalized in a way that you can trust. And that demand has not gotten the way. If anything, it's gotten even higher. And we just haven't figured out as an industry how to pay for it.

The right wing, you know, when was the last time Fox News got a scoop? Yeah. Right? Like, that's tough. When was last time the free press actually got to scoop? Never. So, like, it's great that they're running these things over there. But the sort of beautifully reported in written magazine feature, that's still in the world of the New Yorker and the Atlantic and the Birch.com.

Just think those increasingly are fewer and fewer. Right. And it's getting harder to do. But that is still the raw material of so much of what we see on the internet. Right. Just the, like, incremental political scoop in Axios still fuels most of the political discussion. in social media. And like, that's fine. I think what needs to happen is more even value exchange. We need to say these primary sources are actually a valuable thing, not the commentary that

lives on top of it. Yeah. What about the sort of political landscape? How do you think this current platform ecosystem is shaping the 2024 race? And who has the current upper hand on the internet? That's a great question. And I think I'm going to have a weird answer because I think the answer would be radically different if Donald Trump wasn't in the race. So right now, I think Kamala Harris and her campaign and their sort of brilliant rapid response strategy is obviously it's the upper hand. They're better at using the internet. They're better at using these channels.

They've tapped into, I think, a lot of latent demand for a younger, hipper leader with progressive policies. Like, you can just see it. There it is. When Donald Trump gave this dumb speech and he was to the voice and he was like, he's a convicted felon and I'm a prosecutor. And within seconds, they'd run that as an ad and appended on Kamala Harris and I, I prove this math.

That's brilliant. That is just brilliant campaigning. The audience has picked up on it. It's off to the races. If Trump wasn't Trump, it's not like that energy and that meme-making skill doesn't exist on the right. They just don't have the raw materials for it. It's just a weird moment where the candidate who rode social media to power seems to not be as conversant in modern social media anymore.

And his campaign is sort of like flailing. That said, they're full of weird policies. There's a right-wing echo chamber that sort of creates the J.D. Vance moments. I don't think he knows that his ideas are unpopular because he's only talked to puffball right-wing influencers for so long. And they think he's so funny. And it's like, you know, he's just kind of a dick. Like, what do you want? And so, like, there's a, there's a weirdness there that I, I can't quite put my head around.

Like, if you took Trump out of this equation and you let them be fully online in a way that they're obviously, like, they could be so fully online. Yeah. Would that be better or worse? And it's kind of just a pretty interesting thought experiment. I saw the Harris team retruthing on true social, a bunch of commentary that Trump had made about the DeSantis Twitter's case last year saying how what a does. disaster it was and how it showed that his campaign would be a failure. And then, of course, yeah, he was plagued with those same issues. I mean, they're good at trolling Trump, right? But is the audience for that on, and that's new. The campaign is good at trolling is new, especially for Democrats. Yeah. But is the audience for that people on truth social? Is the audience

for that screenshot? It's the screenshot. It's the screenshot economy because it's like, you screenshot that and it's gone viral on Instagram or whatever else. And so it's just like, to me, it's like what, what is this accomplishing, right? Like, are you, actually getting a swing state voter to change their mind because he joined true social. Also, Trump doesn't agree with the past position is, to some extent, is like played out. And that's what I mean by he's such a weird candidate here. Everybody knows everything about him already. To be better online does not do anything to define Trump, except now we're making fun of him, right?

They've learned they control him. They're obviously getting a rise out of him using the tools. And I think that has given them a distinct advantage, whether or not that advantage is durable against a conservative movement that does not have the baggage of Donald Trump is actually, I think, remains to be seen. Well, I also think that they're playing with fire. I mean, to me, like the Kamala campaign has been very willing to engage in these hyper online progressive spaces, content creators, and leverage their attention. I mean, these were a lot of former Bernie posters, basically, that made Kamala a thing online. But fundamentally, I don't know that her policies align with those people. And a lot of them are down to compromise and vote for anyway.

But I mean, I'm sure you saw like the drill thing last week where they used this post from famous internet poster, Drill, you know, in one of their marketing emails saying, I think it was the don't put it in the newspaper that I got mad thing talking about J.D. Vance. And Drill immediately, you know, quote tweeted that and said something like, you know, if you think that the IDF rape camps were the worst thing that the government is sanctioning. because, of course, drill is extremely, you know, pro-Palestine and doesn't agree with the administration on certain things. And I don't think that the administration vetted anything before using content, which also seems like a liability. So, I mean, do you think that there's going to be this breaking point where, you know, these hyper online leftists that have made Kamala, you know, really ushered in Kamala's rise, like, we'll start to demand more? I think the drill example is a really good one. The personality of drill, not the actual person, but the personality. of drill is inherently subversive. Yes.

Drill is not on anyone's side. The character drill plays in the internet is there to blow you up. And that is great. And we should have that, right? And then the personal politics of drill to person, very progressive apparently, and you combine those things. And of course, you run into a presidential campaign that has to support the current administration's position on Gaza while staking out what appears to be a more,

slightly more pro-Palestinian position towards a ceasefire. when the person is actually, like, that's a puzzle. Don't play with that fire. Like, that seems correct. And I think the notion, the mistake that they might be making is that all the jokes on the internet belong to them. And that is just obviously not true. Right. They are not a subversive force in the internet.

They are the people seeking power, like the most power you can have in the world. Right. And that's not a subversive thing to do. That is straightforwardly the most. sincere, nerdy shit you can do. And so I think that works well when it's pointed at Trump and it's subverting Trump. And it has obviously been very successful. It's not going to work well in every case.

Maybe with Tim Walls, they can separate the two. That's traditionally what campaigns have done, right? The presidential candidate is aspirational and hopeful. And at the top and the vice president has been the attack dog. It's just weird when you're trying to do it online. Right. And it's Kamala HQ just post. in. It's like this, you've got to pull those things apart a little bit.

I think that's the right way to think about it. You know, we're heading into the DMC next week. Obviously, they're bringing, I reported the story a couple weeks ago, but they're bringing hundreds of content creators for the first time. How do you think the Democrats working with this sort of content creator army to cover the DNC will shape people's perception? I mean, do you think this could be a success and what are you looking out for? Are you going to be following along with any of the influencers there? I think it will be a success in that We know young people in particular are getting their news not through watching CNN all day. They're getting it from influencers or getting it from social platforms.

So the social platforms are going to have a flood of content. There's going to be engagement for all that content in the comments. There's going to be fights back and forth. You're going to have a bunch of young people who are having an experience and sharing that experience with their followers. If they try to over control the messaging there, I think it will call off as hollow and it will flop just as every time anyone tries to control an influence. or flops. The important part is whether Kamala Harris comes out of the DNC as a candidate and not the generic Democrat who's polling higher than Trump. Because right now, and I don't mean this in a mean way, I mean, she's polling like a generic Democrat. And like you would like her to become

a full-fudge candidate who's polling like a full-funch candidate with real policies. And I think there's just a moment where the influencers might be able to do that with her. If they give the influencers access to her and she's talking to them like a real person and you break through this Trump noise about she doesn't give any interviews. You need to see her in these interactions. So that's what I'm hoping to see. I think a bunch of influencers like doing Instagram activations in Chicago is fine. But you're actually what you're hoping to do is reach an audience and that's what they should be doing with them. Right. And that's what I just wonder it's going to happen. You know, I was really interested to see the Olympics this year. I can't even tell you.

the amount of, like, press releases I got about, you know, NBC is bringing content creators to the Olympics. And I know they got some, like, sort of stories out of that. But I thought Wired ran a really good piece kind of looking at the success of those efforts. And basically, like, nobody paid attention to any of the influencers. Like, no one was looking at Alex Cooper really and actually Snoop Dog created a lot of really viral moments and, like, kind of led the internet and, like, engaged with all of these young people. And of course, he's a traditional celebrity. And And so I guess, you know, Wired made this argument of like, this was kind of a flop. Like, they didn't engage these content creators in any meaningful way.

And really, you just needed to bring one celebrity. I thought it was an interesting case study. And I feel like so often we're like, wow, the novelty of like bringing a bunch of content creators is interesting. I didn't really see the Olympics through almost any content creators. It was really the athletes that stood out. Right. The athletes became the content creators.

And they were having these very native experiences or authentic experiences. And that was working. And I think this is always the, we. weirdness with calling some group of people creators or influencers in some way, because big organizations tend to think of them as just cheaper ad agencies. Yeah. Right. And like basically all social platforms, like every sort of monetized scale creator is just a micro ad agency. Like, that is the money that they are making. And so if you're like, we're just going to invite a bunch of ad agencies and get a bunch of ad agency shit, like, of course Snoop Dog is more interesting than that.

Like, of course the guy who's like, I love these fucking mock. is more interesting at the Olympics than the overly corporatized, sort of brand polish, brand safe microadigency that you're inviting. And that's the tension, right? Particularly for influencers at something like the DNC, where inherently 50% of their audience might be pissed off at them, that's a lot of opportunity cost. And we're just going to have to see how they navigate it and whether or not, you know, there's going to be a lot of celebrities at this DNC as well. And we're Whether or not the celebrities actually end up doing much more successful outreach than content creators who might be a little bit more nervous. Well, some of the contact creators, too, are planning to cover the protests or they're going.

They didn't even bother to get credentialed because they just want to cover the Gaza stuff. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to watch the narrative on the Internet. If we think of sort of the content creator stuff, the new media is like their own world. I'm wondering how Silicon Valley is perceiving all of this. You know, all of these VCs, I love that tweet that was like, VCs brought, you know, they really bought in. to Trump at its peak in classic VC fashion. Do you think a lot of the Silicon Valley billionaires are still on the Trump train? Or do you think that they're sort of increasingly abandoning him as his popularity wanes?

Like, where does Silicon Valley stand in terms of this political race? I think there's a pretty huge split between the folks who got in loudly and proudly for Trump. And then, you know, there's a huge set of VCs in, in particular the, be the actual workers of the companies. Right. We're all equally loudly supporting Harris. And one of the most interesting parts that split is just straightforwardly crypto. Yes.

Like the crypto set is all in on Trump. I mean, I feel like his entire campaign has become like a meme stock in itself. I mean, the whole race is like a meme. I guess it's like meme stock against meme stock. But he's become this like proxy for Bitcoin almost. Yeah. I mean, he spoke to the Bitcoin conference. They, they were disappointed.

We sent our report at Gabi Del Valle was there. The audience was waiting for Trump to announce a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. And he just gave the rambling Trump speech. And then he said, I'll never sell a Bitcoin, which isn't the actual announcement they were looking. Yeah, I think you see one set of players is pretty annoyed that the country doesn't do what they want all the time. And Trump is a very quick shortcut to gaining that power. And that is the fascist critique of Trump. he will dismantle our institutions and he will just be a strong man.

And if you can buddy up to the strong man, that you can do pretty well for yourself. Or he'll just turn over the Department of Education to Year or whatever he said he was going to be on. Oh, yeah. Make the states compete for educating. Yeah, it's great. It makes no sense.

All of his voters are in the poor state. It literally makes no sense on his face. And I just had nothing to say. But on the other hand, I think you have big Silicon Valley companies who are run by people who depend on these institutions continuing to operate, who care a lot about personal autonomy, about abortion, about freedom, about immigration. They are much more loudly supporting Harris. And I think it's tempting to paint all of the valley with one brush, especially when Mark Andreessen is like out there doing podcasts

about how he loves Trump. But they are increasingly an isolated and small community in the valley. And crypto is increasingly an isolated part of the tech landscape. And there's a little bit of crossover because of AI. The crypto to AI pipeline was deep, but the people I talk to are not distracted by the machinations of Andrewson Horowitz. The whole crypto thing feels very like 2021, 2022. Obviously, crypto's eternal and older than that and everything, but that hype cycle feels stale already. How many of these Silicon Valley people have a direct familiarity with Harris? And what role does Harris being from kind of Silicon Valley, San Francisco area, play in the dynamics of who these people are going to vote for or back?

There is some amount of familiarity there. She's been a player. She was the Attorney General of California. She obviously was district attorney in San Francisco. A lot of people have come up together in the quarters of power. They have friends in common. But I think there's not a policy sense of what she actually wants to accomplish, which is the important thing, right?

These executives want policies that will favor them. They want Lena Khan gone, right? Yeah, they want Lena Khan gone. The Biden, DOJ. just won a gigantic antitrust case against Google declaring it a monopoly. I think the Google contingent would prefer that the Harris administration stop pursuing that case. So I think there's just a set of policy expectations that have nothing to do with her as a person. They might be familiar with her as a person.

Everyone is waiting to see what her actual policies are. We try to run a story being like, here's what Kamala Harris believes in tech policy. And the answer is like, oh, we just don't know a lot of answers to these questions. That said, she has tried to reset her relationship with the crypto community. She's made some statements in support of COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. Oh, God. Yep. It's everyone supports it.

It's very hard to find someone who doesn't. Well, of course, we can all unite behind restricting civil liberties. I think that's the one thing that unites America. Speech regulations the Internet. Everyone loves them, especially if you say it there for the children. But, like, it's that level of stuff, right? It's very safe whether or not you think COSA is a good idea. or not. Politically, it is very safe to support. Politically, it's completely safe. It's these

policies that, yeah, you can sort of seem tough on big tech, but fundamentally you're not alienating any one group, right? Yeah. And so I think she has promised to set a policy positions the next week or so. And I think we're looking very closely at the verge to see what the tech policy positions are. And if there's any space between the Biden administration and a potential Harris administration, I suspect there won't be. And we're going to continue sort of in the same space we are now, which is a lot of looking for competition where the network effects of big tech platforms have precluded competition thus far. And a lot of, you know, AI seems like we ought to go slower. That might be it. And maybe that's all you need. But that is where the Biden administration is

mostly netted out. I'm curious. And I think Silicon Valley is very curious to see if the Harris administration comes out any different. I do think she has a better grasp of technology and more familiarity with these platforms. Do you see any world in which she would revise the TikTok? Do you see any world in which she would revise the TikTok ban? I mean, that is just a blank slate. But whatever you want to call it, Neelar. This is like this is the blankest slate of them all.

Like there's just not, there's no position there. Yeah. She's not said a word about it. Right. And she wants to, she has to, she has to undo an act of Congress, right? It's like very weird. Like the timing of that and the position of that, especially when her campaign is on TikTok.

Yeah, she might win the... She might win the presidency because of activism on TikTok. And I think there's a reason it's a blank slate. I think she cannot take a position on this right now until she wins the actual presidency if she wins. Well, Nilai, thank you so much for chatting. This was a great combo. Always a great time, Taylor.

All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power user is produced by Travis Larchuk and Jelani Carter. Our executive producers are Zach Mack, and Nishat Kerwah. Our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User.