The Pomp Podcast - #259: Josh Constine on the Future of Video Sharing - TikTok vs. YouTube

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Josh Constine is the Editor-At-Large at TechCrunch, where he analyzes social and consumer products. In this conversation, Josh and Anthony discuss the falcon at his wedding, what his main critiques of Twitter are, whether YouTube will be able to compete with TikTok, how he thinks about Bitcoin, and why he believes VR arcades will be popular in the future. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit try.blockfi.com/get-50/?ref=pomp50 to get started with BlockFi today and earn up to $50 in BTC when you create an interest account and make a deposit of $250 or more. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com ===============================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Josh Constein is the editor-at-large at TechCrunch, where he analyzes social and consumer products. In this conversation, we discuss the Falcon at his wedding, what his main critiques of Twitter are, whether YouTube will be able to compete with TikTok, how he thinks about Bitcoin, and why he believes VR arcades will be popular in the future. This was a wide-ranging conversation, and I really enjoyed it. I hope you do as well. But before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our two sponsors. The first is BlockFi. Right now, BlockFi is running a special campaign where they will give you $50 in Bitcoin if you go sign up using the link in the description, deposit $250 in their interest-bearing account, and hold it there for three months to earn interest. The interest can

be as high as 6% for Bitcoin or 8.6% APY. So go sign up for a BlockFi account using that specific link, deposit $250, hold it there for three months, and they'll give you a free $50 in Bitcoin. Everybody likes free Bitcoin, so go do it. Now, our second sponsor is a new sponsor, BlockSet. If you're building in the blockchain space, then I want everyone to know about a company called BlockSet. Their goal is to enable the next wave of developers and business leaders to build amazing applications. Blockset offers accessible data from all the major chains

through a single easy-to-use API. It acts as your hosted blockchain infrastructure and it ultimately enables high-quality apps to be built at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. So go sign up for a free developer account at blockset.com and start building today. Blockset's built by BRD,

the first wallet in the App Store from 2014 and one of the largest in the space today. They've taken the architecture and knowledge they've gained over the last six years to create Blockset, a robust, reliable, and strategic B2B offering for developers and enterprises. Thanks to Blockset, we can all build with crypto assets at light speed using their unified API that has data from all major chains. Just how simple it is by visiting Blockset.com and sign up for a free account today. Blockset.com. Now let's get into this episode after you go to BlockFi, deposit your money, and earn $50 in free USD and sign up for

those developer accounts at Blockset. This one with Josh was a lot of fun. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Josh here with me. Thanks so much for jumping on and doing this. Yeah, absolutely. Excited to do it. Sure. Let's start right off with a bang. You had a wedding in Ireland and you had a damn falcon fly the rings to the, I guess, altar. What were you thinking? You know, if I'm going to drag people all the way to Ireland for a wedding, I want to make sure that it's something pretty unforgettable. And I'm a huge nerd. And while my wife is very classy very very formal very fancy i wanted something that was a bit more lord of the rings so we got a a herring a special type of hawk to basically deliver the rings straight down the aisles

to me at the altar and i detached them from the wings and the falcon actually tried to fly away in the middle of the ceremony but i managed to hold on to him and then he went up and perched on the top of the castle to watch the rest of the show and so this is a place that they train the falcons to do this right yeah so the castle actually has an on-site like falconry establishment which is seems right out of a storybook but with like a weird capitalist twist yeah i love that uh and then what was the uh the reason for going to ireland just that that specific place or any other meaning behind it um my wife's irish and we really wanted to like honor her family i'm half english so i've got a bunch of family over there and we wanted some place where there was no curfew

We actually ended up dancing till about 4.30 in the morning and didn't go to bed till sunrise. But here in Northern California, they shut you down at 10 p.m. because everyone in wine country is a little bit too cautious. Yeah, that makes sense. So let's move from Falcons to Twitter. While you were having a pretty incredible wedding, you've also been a, I'll say, staunch critic of Twitter. And my take on your criticisms is less like,

hey twitter sucks and more just like there's a lot of missed opportunities um and kind of what could have been let's walk through uh some of them um starting with just the lack of the ability to clean the feed and how it leads to kind of a worse experience maybe explain that so the problem with twitter is even with its new algorithmic feed you sort of get stingy once you feel like your feed is full you start to miss people that you really care about the people that you really love and you want to see all of their tweets. If you start to miss those, you become a lot more cautious about adding new people. And the problem is that Twitter has never given you an easy way to figure out who you should unfollow. I think they're a little bit scared about offending someone. Nobody wants to

be on the unfollow list, right? But still, they need some way of saying, hey, you've never replied, liked, retweeted this person. You clearly don't care about them, but we keep showing you them in your feed. Like, do you just want to get rid of them entirely? And if it did this across the board, our feeds would get denser, they'd be higher quality, and people would be more generous with their follows. And new people joining these networks would have a chance because right now, the only people who really have more than a million followers or so are either real celebrities or people who are on super early, that first wave of journalists. And that makes it really tough for the next generation of newsbreakers, of influencers, of people who have something to say

to break through. Yeah. And do you think that this is something where Twitter could like improve the algorithm and actually solve it for us? Or is this something where they've got to give the tools to the user and then allow the user to actually solve the problem for themselves? I think the problem is there are a lot of lurkers on Twitter. People who don't necessarily want to hit that like or that reply button. They don't want to jump into the conversation to be part of the arena, but they want to consume. And Twitter isn't really understanding what is what. They can't tell which tweet on the screen you're looking at or or what uh what other signals to use if you're not giving those explicit signals and so it can only do so much with its algorithm and it surely is

doing a better job than when it was an unranked feed and just totally chronological but you know you're seeing networks like instagram starting to show you the people you interact with least so that you could unfollow them and i think that that's a lot better uh way than just leaving this entirely up to people because if you've ever tried to clean up your twitter followers and look through or the people you're following and look through, you know, each person. Oh, is this person interesting? Are the last five tweets they sent actually relevant to me? It takes forever. It could take you an hour to get through a half dozen people. Yeah. One of the things that's really interesting too, is how this parlays into the user metrics. I know that you've written a

couple of times about how Twitter's incentivized to basically keep as many people on the platform as possible. And so that one is you want as many connections as possible. You want as much content, but also things around free speech and all of that, maybe kind of explain the connection between the inability or making it difficult for people to clean the feed and how that can drive user metric. I think that Twitter has been

in this very precarious position for years now, where its growth rate is only just good enough to keep people from saying, oh, this company's in trouble. You know, it's not shrinking, but it's certainly not growing at some super healthy clip, at least not until very recently. And I think what that means is it's scared to do anything that could disturb its growth rate or just boot a bunch of users off of its platform.

And that's led to some of its most pernicious issues, like all of the trolls, the Nazis, these people that are just out there to disrupt the network. And they're basically attacks on Twitter. They're just dragging down the rest of their network for their own fun. And that comes at a big cost to Twitter, because when you drive somebody off of the platform forever, that means you lose all their ad views and all the content they create that creates more ad views. And so it's really damaging to Twitter. And I know a lot of people say that, oh, this is about free speech, that Twitter is just trying to say, oh, you can talk about whatever you want. We're not going to police your opinions. But that's not what's going on here. Free speech doesn't mean being able to shout somebody else down. That's taking speech from somebody by allowing others to be the bullies. And so if Twitter really cares about free speech, it should care about the speech of the vulnerable people,

the ones who are being attacked by these trolls, and it should prioritize their experience over ones who are desperately trying to drag down its network. So I think Twitter should just kick off a bunch of those people, be damned whatever happens to the user metrics, and long term, it will be a healthier, safer place that more people will actually want to join. Yeah, I watched the interview that Joe Rogan did. I think he had Tim Pool on, he had Jack Dorsey, and then he had, I think, the person who runs kind of their, like, policies around all of this. And he really, I think, did a good job kind of letting them debate it out. And the one thing I took away from it was just how complex the ideas are, right, and then the decisions. And one thing I've appreciated, I think, about your analysis has always been like, there's two sides to this story and acknowledging both of them is important, but you can still prioritize one over the other, even if you recognize that there is another side of the story, right? Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's obviously a ton of complexity. And I feel for tech companies when critics don't offer solutions, when they just say this doesn't work, but they actually don't think through the consequences of whatever they want to have happen.

they don't think about what would this actually mean not only for the rest of the user experience not just the edge cases what it means for the bottom line and you need to make these services sustainable so being like i hate ad just get rid of all the ads like that's not an actionable suggestion so i try to give them you know real ways that they could fix this so for instance if they don't want to block all of these trolls what they should do is make it so if you don't have a phone number confirmed with your account if you haven't been on the service for long enough and showed enough innocent activity they shouldn't let you reply to strangers and send notifications to those people if you have never met this person you have no proof that you're a good person or

that you're a good actor and you don't even have a confirmed uh phone number so they can't track you and make sure and actually boot you with any lasting consequence why should they let you just barge into somebody else's feed and experience and yell whatever you wanted so i think by just controlling replies a little bit better twitter could solve a lot of these problems but again It's just so worried about disturbing any of its hardcore users that it's been unwilling to iterate and evolve. Yeah, it's one of these things too, their historical track record of changes, although highly controversial when they made them, right?

So the feed ranking you described kind of going chronological to ranked, also the number of characters, there was pretty significant backlash. Like people forget, and I was actually one of the people going from 140 to 280 being like, whoa, why are we doing this? Right? And then once you see it on the other side of it, I'm like, that might have been one of the better decisions they've ever made, right? Was kind of increasing the character limit. The ranked feed obviously did much better. Do you think that these types of things that you're

bringing up now are similar in that there's controversy upfront, people fight it, but then once you make it, obviously on the backend, everyone kind of agrees that it was a good decision? Yeah. Over time, we've definitely seen that social networks can make decisions that users hate at first, but will grow to love. The Facebook newsfeed is a perfect example. Everyone hated when Instagram went to an algorithmic feed, it actually boosted usage significantly because suddenly the people who aren't using these services all the time, they get the best tweets, the best posts first. And for the most hardcore users, you know, preferencing the entire experience around those people is going to make it really tough to grow long-term. But that said, I think

Twitter has had this history of deliberating endlessly about its problems. And whenever they do interviews, especially Jack Dorsey. He just dances around every question and he tries to weigh both sides and he like gives you all the context, but he doesn't give you a decision. He doesn't tell you what actually needs to happen or what's going to change with any real speed. And I think that that is holding Twitter back significantly. And we've seen that over time that yes, you may prove yourself right over time, but that doesn't mean you can just ignore user sentiment in the future. And I think that's the lesson that Facebook has mistaken from all of its experiences. You know, ever since the newsfeed blew up after people originally protested against it,

it's basically discounted and discredited all of the public's criticism. It says, oh, no, no, we know better than you do. We like last time we made a big change, you hated it and you ended up loving it. So just bear with us. But time and time again, that's led them into these massive privacy problems, these safety problems. And I think Twitter is in the same position now. You know, it can't say that, oh, just because we made good decisions in the past that you might not have liked means that, oh, we should just ignore everything people say from now on. Yeah, it's kind of this weird, like, black and white world, right, in the sense of, hey, I'm not going to be right all the time, but I do have these data points that suggest, like, I'm more right than wrong. and I have data that can prove that versus admitting like, if we're not going to be right all the time, what's the framework we decide to use on when do we listen to data versus when do

we listen to kind of the human critic? And, you know, I've worked at Facebook, etc. And there's not a good framework for that in most of these companies. And so it's almost one of these questions of like, if you went down that path to explore it, how would you if you're sitting inside one of the companies, think about the data balanced with the human critic? Yeah, I think you need to think more with your gut, more with your instincts about what is right as a human being and for society. Because I truly believe that long-term, that's the most value-accruing thing you can do. That's what will actually satisfy Wall Street in the long-term. And these tech companies, they often have enough control, especially with Facebook, to be able to make

their own decisions somewhat divorced from the shareholder sentiment. And they should be using that to say, hey, we're going to take short-term profit hits in exchange for long-term safety. And Facebook has actually made that commitment. While Twitter has talked so much about how it really fights for users and it's better for political discourse and all this stuff, it has never made a firm financial commitment to safety. It's never made a firm financial commitment to fighting misinformation. While Facebook has committed billions of dollars to doing this, and it's warned that it's going to hit its profits, it did hit its profits. The shareholders did definitely dock it for that. But long-term, if that means Facebook gets to survive for an extra five years, that accrues so much more money than just trying to make the short-term decision. And I think Twitter's been making that short-term decision for the long-term now. It spent years thinking quarter by quarter.

And that's why Twitter still has the same share price it basically did five years ago. which is pathetic for something that's clearly grown massively in its value to the public. Yeah. What about the political ads? I know that that's probably the biggest difference in approach between Facebook and Twitter, at least a couple of months ago. How have you thought through how both of those two companies have handled whether to surface political ads and how they actually police that? I still stick with my original opinion, which is that Facebook has to ban political ads. The danger of these is so much greater than what people are thinking. When you look at a corollary like TV or radio or billboards, those are not the same. And that's why I think

Twitter's decision was actually very bold and very smart to say, we're just not going to allow political ads. It's not worth it for us. You know, Facebook's argument has been, oh, these political ads, they give an advantage to newcomers who don't have the advantage of, you know, already having tons of media presence. Take the presidency. Newcomers, new Democratic challengers don't get the same screen time that Donald Trump does. And so the argument is, oh, allowing political ads gives these people a method of growing. But that completely ignores the real safety concern here, which is if you don't police lies in political ads and you allow political ads, you get this insane flywheel where somebody can make the most egregious claim, the most scandalous,

the most sensationalized idea, put it into an ad and say, these people are going to take your guns or these people are going to force this type of healthcare situation on you or, oh, you're going to lose all your freedoms, but only if you donate to me by midnight tonight, I'll match those donations 5X, but just for tonight, and you'll be entered into a contest to win this thing. And all of that can be lies. There can be no deadline. There can be no matching. There can be no sweepstakes it doesn't matter and especially none of those political claims even have to be true but they can instantly cause people to click that donate button fund more of those ads and you get this awful flywheel and so that's why it's different than television yes people could lie

in television ads but they couldn't necessarily get people to donate with a single click and yes there there were media gatekeepers that could go in and say yes this is this is what's going on this is wrong. This is inaccurate. But now on the internet, these politicians can reach their constituents in the voting base directly, and they don't need those gatekeepers who are supposed to keep them honest. So without the gatekeepers, with them being able to use lies to raise more money, to buy more ads, to spread more lies, Facebook's decision to allow political ads and not police them for misinformation is terribly dangerous for democracy. And this is one of the few things where I say Twitter has done an amazing.

Yeah, I think Facebook went back on it, right? They're now saying that they're gonna add some more controls in place or am I misremembering? So they're only making very specific exceptions. Things for voter suppression and census suppression and for misinformation that could cause immediate harm due to around health claims, that's where they're making exceptions

and saying they'll take away posts or they'll police political speech. So the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, he's been making claims that, oh, we should all be going back to work and hydroxychloroquine is gonna solve this whole crisis of coronavirus. And Facebook is saying, no, that could lead to people

disobeying shelter in place orders and getting sick. And so that's direct harm. And so they're taking down those political statements. But it's been unwilling to do that in America where it would really face scrutiny for taking down some of Donald Trump's claims, for instance. And I think that if it's not going to take down, if it's not, if it's going to allow political ads at all, it needs to get much more serious and much more expansive about

what misinformation it bans. Yeah, this is probably one of the greatest debates that I have with friends is if you're sitting in Twitter seats specifically, what do you do with a president, right? Trump is obviously the president now, but even future presidents who use your platform And how do you draw the line between facts, twisting of like data and facts, and then outright lies? And who do you listen to, to make those decisions, right? And then do you actually ever get to the point where you take a president off of your platform?

Do you shadow ban them? Like, how do you think through that given the ramifications for that person is much bigger, the action you take, obviously, than if they did it to you or I, or just, you know, somebody with 10 followers? This is an incredibly complex situation. This is worthy of debate because pretty much every solution is going to cause crisis. You know, what you might immediately think is like, well, you should stick a flag on it that says this is misinformation. Turns out those flags can make their supporters feel even more affirmed in sharing them saying, oh, yeah, like the mainstream media

hates this. So we're going to share this. And it draws more visual attention to these things. You know, Chinese fact checks, the fact checks never travel as far as the false information. We know that. You see something where, you know, a piece of false information has hundreds of thousands of retweets and the correction gets a few dozen. You know, that's not a sustainable way of addressing this. And I think that trying to algorithmically demote this kind of content when it happens, doing it kind of secretly, these kind of shadow ban-y things, that's going to lead to the

kind of confusion and constant claims of bias that I think are just untenable for a network to deal with over time. That's why I think Twitter should actually rip the band-aid off and just say we're going to completely delete tweets from politicians that have real world harm or that are blatantly blatant misinformation. It should either set up an independent or acquire or establish a set of fact checkers that are independent and are actually unbiased and when they say something is misinformation, it should just be deleted. And what it should do is deal with the fact that conservative politicians are going to lose their minds. They're going to completely flip out and say, oh, this is bias against us. But at some point, this is when

the techies need to stand up for what they believe is right. Because I think one of the biggest problems in the political system right now is that the technologists, the people who we kind of trust to be the smartest, the ones who are building the most advanced visions of the future, if they don't take a moral stance about how their technology is used, it will be used for evil. And these people, they have enough money. They don't care about the money, to be honest. Most of these CEOs are so rich that when people are like, oh, they're doing this because they want to make more money, they don't care. They're literally just too rich to even care anymore. But what they do like is power. They don't want to lose their power. And they're worried

that all their conservative users might abandon their network if they do one of these things. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do to just stay silent. And I think at some point, these networks have to say, this is enough is enough. We're going to shut this stuff off and say, if people are angry about us, if they want to go start a new network or go leave for another network, that's fine. We're better off without them. We want real honest discourse. Yeah. It's one of the just most complex issues I think that face any tech company today is Twitter specifically with just anyone who uses their platform the way that the current president does. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about video and kind of live type components.

Twitter has or had Vine, obviously, and it was growing. It seemed pretty good. That got shut down. And now TikTok is like all the rage. What's kind of your thoughts there? I mean, the fact that Twitter had Vine, it was working. It was popular with the right user base who were creating content, comedians, the kind of culture makers in this country. And they even started to add the music features that TikTok are now known for, the ability to sort of borrow the audio from another video or using audio clips that are designed for perfect loops.

Like Twitter had it all. Vine had it all together. And then, just because Jack Dorsey mismanaged the finances of Twitter, you know, was running a bit too tight on cash and was worried about where they were spending, they just decided, rather than pay for the hosting costs for Vine, we're going to shut it down. And that, I think, will remain one of the stupidest decisions in social networking history. because now we've ceded control to this fundamental piece of social networking to a Chinese company, which does not share our country's ideals and values. And the fact is that this product is popular because it is fun. I use TikTok every day because it's incredibly entertaining. This concept of micro entertainment that instead of this autobiographical story stuff that we're all getting a bit sick of,

that instead of someone spending 15 seconds to shoot something that we spend 15 seconds creating, On TikTok, people spend two hours, 10 hours creating something 15 seconds long to just densify that entertainment and make it as valuable for your per second as possible. And that's why these networks are important and why micro entertainment like TikTok cannot be easily cloned by Instagram or YouTube or Facebook, which are all building their own versions. Facebook Lasso, Instagram has a thing called Reels.

It's testing in Brazil. And just yesterday, it was revealed that YouTube is building shorts. But the thing is, you need a base of content to remix in order for these networks to thrive. And any of them starting from scratch are going to have a really tough time. You can copy all their features the same way that Facebook copied Snapchat stories and did a very good job and was very successful with that. But with stories, you don't need any prerequisite content. With TikTok, you have to have this entire corpus of source material that people can

remix in order to make great content. And Facebook and Instagram are just not going to have that. They're going to come out of the gate flat footed. The only hope is that YouTube unlocks its massive archive of videos, you know, the 5 billion plus videos that people watch every day and make those available for remixing in their YouTube shorts app and doesn't, you know, aggressively apply content ID and take down any video that uses copyrighted sound. This is promotional. When somebody puts a song in a TikTok, that's how Lil Nas X's Old Town Road went to the top of the charts. Don't take that stuff down. So Google could only succeed here if it understands it needs to unlock its database of videos and not police it too carefully with content. Yeah, the Lil Nas X story is incredible. For those that don't know, what he basically did was he created the song and then he would look for videos or gifs that were kind of going viral and then he would basically take that visual, put his song overlay, and then send it to whoever was

posting the original video that was going viral and say, hey, use this one. And I think his big break was he put that song overlay over, what is it, the guy standing on the horse, like going really fast or something, and then the song blew up with the video. And next thing you know, he's kind of this global sensation simply by really hacking together a song with viral content. Exactly. And that's what you're not going to see on these networks that aren't designed for sort of this cross-sharing. The atomic unit of TikTok is the remix. You take the audio from somebody else's video, you shoot a new video recontextualizing that joke, and suddenly you have something new without having to be perfectly creative. And that's the, that's the real importance here is you can lower the bar for creating something truly valuable and watchable through remixing. And that's why TikTok is so powerful. And it's why Vine was so great in its era and why it's going to be so difficult for even if Twitter were to relaunch Vine now, it would be really difficult to catch up because they don't have that same back archive of content for remixing. Yeah. And wasn't there an issue where like the Vine creators all like got together? And I think I remember reading an article, there was like a showdown between like Twitter management and a bunch of Vine creators living off Vine Street in the apartment or something, right? Yeah, absolutely. So Twitter never decided to directly support VineStar. They were not good at bringing them in-house and sort of giving them tutorials or helping them meet the team or use the features. They were not great at connecting them with brand deals. And it just meant that these VineStars were effectively contributing all of this content for free and getting nothing in return.

And, you know, the next big wave of social networking is about monetizing and helping creators monetize. It's not about just slamming people with ads. It's letting the people who make this content share in the rewards that they're generating. And, you know, eventually Vine bought my cousin Darren Lockman's startup called Niche and brought it in-house so that it could help do these deals and connect Vine stars to brands. And then Twitter neglected Niche and eventually just sort of let it wither. And this is again, this is like a pioneering establishment in the influencer marketing world. And again, Twitter squandered its opportunity. And I think the fact that, you know, Jack Dorsey has consistently done this, bought something great like Periscope, which it also failed to properly integrate into the rest of its product. And eventually, it really lost that use case to Facebook Live. That's what everybody is doing all their live streams of their concerts and stuff on. it's not it's not periscope it's not twitter live it's facebook live because twitter was unwilling to go all the way and make a drastic change and integrate periscope directly into twitter for so long then it did the same thing with vine neglecting it and eventually shutting it down in neglected niche and i think at this point you have to wonder does jack dorsey still deserve this job and so when there's these new corporate raiders coming in saying if you don't

get the metrics up and do all this and all these twitter you know employees are fighting for him saying, oh, no, he's a great boss. He's a nice guy. I've met him. He's very kind. He's very empathetic. He really thinks through things, but he's not getting it done. And that's what Twitter needs right now, a decisive leader. So two of my questions were going to be to finish up the Twitter part of the conversation. One, do you think that Twitter is a better product today than it was three to five years ago, even in spite of all of the kind of critiques? I mean, the product is absolutely better. Specifically, the algorithmic timeline makes it so much easier to actually find the best stuff. The reason Twitter is special is that it makes everybody as smart as anybody. It lets somebody take all of the research, all of the knowledge, all their wisdom from their life, use that as a lens for consuming new information and then distilling it to the most important parts. that is a fundamental part of our world we as a species are so specialized we all live such

different lives and have such different knowledge that we need a product like this to be able to all share in each other's wisdom but and i think the algorithmic timeline does a great job of that and the 280 character change does help that yeah sometimes it makes it a little bit exhausting to read twitter but it's a lot less confusing because you're not trying to thread all these things together just to make a pretty simple point. That said, Twitter in the meantime has done very little to fix its safety problems. It's allowed them to just run completely rampant. And now when people think of Twitter, they think of getting attacked. They think of the celebrities that they've heard of, like Leslie Jones, who've had to leave Twitter because they've been so harassed. And they just

think of the confusing experience. If you start a new Twitter account today, you will be dumbfounded about how bad the onboarding experience is. They basically just show you a bunch of celebrities, say, follow these people, and then dump you on the timeline. They don't teach you anything about what you should tweet about, how you should steal information

from the real world and share it. They don't teach you about digging into your specific niche interests and finding the experts in those areas rather than these totally catch-all, lowest common denominator celebrities. And they don't really teach you about how to interact on the timeline,

how replies really work, how uh you know how any of the these different uh tools like retweets and faves really affect your timeline and with that people they get started they don't understand it they feel like they're talking to a black hole because they do a very bad job of getting new users followers and they say why am i doing this you know facebook's big metric has always been how fast can they get you to 10 friends because once you have 10 friends your feed starts getting good you stick around. Twitter never understood how to prioritize that onboarding experience and so it has hundreds of millions of people who have

tried Twitter at some point and churned away and are now soured on the platform and are a lot less likely to ever come back because of this rotten onboarding experience. And so if there was one thing that Jack Dorsey could still do to improve the growth rate and maybe keep his job or that a new CEO should come in and prioritize right away fix that onboarding experience make Twitter accessible to anyone that we can all be as smart as anyone for sure and the second question is do you think that the deal with Silver Lake and kind of those corporate raiders you mentioned etc do you think that changes anything really

or is this more of we'll kind of see the same both positive and negatives moving forward I feel unfortunately that it may just exacerbate the problems that that Twitter has had because again, now it has to think even more short term. It can't be even thinking about next year, let alone just thinking about three years from now where it really should be prioritizing. Instead, it just has to save its ass quarter to quarter.

And I think that that's gonna make things even worse for Twitter. And that's why I don't really, and given this crisis, while people might be home doing more on Twitter, and they might be spending more time there, the entire social networking advertising space is taking a massive hit.

Huge companies like Airbnb and Marriott have said, just not advertising we're not doing any marketing anymore and that is going to directly affect the bottom line of these companies so i feel it's very unlikely that jack dorsey is going to hit his metrics and be able to keep his job and you know maybe that's for the best i don't really think of corporate raiders as generally being better at prioritizing long-term growth but i don't know it can get a lot worse than what jackson um talking about uh tick tock and youtube Um, what you mentioned the security concerns around TikTok, uh, but you, that you still use the product, um, kind of walk me through like, what, what do you think is real in those

security concerns? What I mean by that is I think that TikTok is one of these weird things where there's actually a lot of, um, controversy and people, um, you know, kind of promote different talk tracks around it, but nobody really knows what's going on. I feel like you of all people would, would have the best beat on that. How do you look at the security concerns? I mean, at the end of the day, you have to understand that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, China's most valuable private company right now. And we just don't really know what's going on

inside of it. And what we do know is that they really don't have America's best interests in mind in general. And so what you're going to experience is this uncertainty about where your data is going. And when it comes to moderation, you also have the worry that you know, China and TikTok can be influencing the global moderation standards for TikTok and saying, here's what we do and don't want on the app. And there's been instances where people saying, you know, criticizing the Chinese government or have suddenly had their, you know, their accounts suspended. And then, oh, TikTok, once it becomes a big media scandal, they say, oh, that was an accident. We didn't mean to do that. But, and now TikTok's trying to set up this,

you know, this moderation board and, you know, these transparency measures to try to tell people and explain what's going on with the algorithm, but at the end of the day, the company is still owned by a Chinese giant. It has not shown that it's willing to make fair choices for the globe or be able to follow in line with what we imagine as being free speech and how speech should be regulated. I do think it's reasonable that CFIUS, the government's regulator that looks at foreign investment is considering whether the acquisition of TikToks and of Musical.ly, which was another Chinese company, but that operated largely in the U.S., that when they acquired, when TikTok acquired Musical.ly and merged it in and it became the TikTok we know today, whether that should be

undone in hopes that it might give a chance for an American competitor, maybe Instagram Reels, maybe Facebook Lasso, maybe YouTube Shorts, maybe even Vine coming back to life or Byte, which is started by one of the Vine founders to give them a chance at owning this social entertainment use case. So I'm not worried enough that every day I'm just going to block or delete TikTok entirely from my app. But that said, I wouldn't use the face swap feature that it was testing in China, which makes you do like the full volumetric scan of your face, the way that you set up face ID on your iPhone. Don't give that scan to any company you don't trust. And they're not doing that in the u.s yet and i broke the news that they were testing and prototyping this

but there are certain things certain types of biometric data you never want to give to anyone because that's going to be the thumbprint of the future yeah it's pretty scary when you realize um it's kind of the 23andme and all the dna testing it's the the trojan horse of hey we can tell you um you know where your family's from or we can tell you this or that and the next thing you know uh oh wait that got shipped out to another country or it's being sold to people etc i think people get very nervous about that um so calling it out early and often super important there uh youtube what do you actually put there um the odds of success uh with i think it's called youtube shorts um do you know that uh youtube has stories i did not know that yeah nobody knows that

because they did such a bad job with it that youtube has become such an expansive and bloated app that it's very difficult for it to launch significant new features that aren't right in the center of its existing experience. You know, it can modify the recommendation algorithm and that will have massive effects. But, you know, any feature that's not just what you already know YouTube to be is going to be so buried that you're never going to find it. So nobody knows or really uses YouTube stories. And similarly with Shorts, Shorts is going to be designed to be another sub feed of the app, sort of another buried feature. And so unless it's willing to go all out, the way that Instagram did with stories, Instagram didn't put stories in a separate tab,

which you'd never check. It stuck them right at the top of the screen. Unless YouTube's willing to make a bold enough bet on shorts and put it right on the home screen, it's never going to take off. And on top of that, it will have to make a bunch of smart policy decisions about how to unlock its archive of remixable content, how not to apply content ID, and do really brilliant influencer outreach to get all these people started and say, hey, did you miss the boat with TikTok, we got a new boat for you. What other areas of consumer or social are you either paying attention to or excited about that you think people should be aware of? The two base areas I think are really fascinating in social right now are calendaring and offline meetups.

And those are kind of connected. And so specifically, there's a few companies like one's called Saturn, which is a calendar designed for teenagers, and another is called IRL, which I just wrote about today, and IRL is an event discovery platform and calendar, which makes it easy to figure out what's going on around you, set up plans to do it with the friends, or come up with a new plan, like, hey, let's have a Netflix watching party, and then set a soon date, and then figure it out with your friends in an in-app chat. You know, it's trying to make the calendar social in a way that it hasn't been before. While Saturn is for high school students

and helps them share their classes and class notes and basically becoming kind of a professional LinkedIn-esque tool, but for high schoolers. And I think both of those are really fascinating. And IRL actually, it was about in real life. Today, it pivoted to be in remote life because we can't really go to any events. Like imagine being a startup

where you just help people discover real world events and then it becomes illegal to go to real world events. Like that is a death knell for most startups, but they were smart to really quickly adapt to the change, lean into it and pivot to being all about discovering live streams of concerts, educational classes, e-sports tournaments and stuff like that. So I think that's really fascinating. Is the idea that a lot of these are going to just basically take the social components that we know exist on other platforms and just overlay that on the actual calendar? Is that the general premise? Yeah, that's part of it. It's about taking what is really too deeply bundled into Facebook and that Facebook has largely ignored and make it into something, a standalone product that's really, really high utility and really simple.

And so, yeah, with IRL, whether it's about getting you to be able to watch a live stream with friends or actually meet up at a coffee shop or go to the park together, it's trying to figure out an offline availability indicator. That's something that we don't have. You have a green dot on all your chat apps that let people know when you're on the chat app, but you don't have a green dot to say, hey, I'm just home by myself doing nothing right now. I'd love to get dinner, or I'd love to do a workout together, or I'd love to co-watch something on Netflix, you know, and I think that that's a really massive area for innovation, which can make us a lot less lonely. you know you know I think a lot of us if any of you have this college experience where you know your doors were always open in the dorm and you could just walk around and see what other people were up to and spontaneously make plans as we grow into adults we put all these walls and doors between us and it suddenly becomes a lot tougher to have a spontaneous social interaction and it can feel really awkward and kind of depressing if you reach out directly to a bunch of friends

hey what are you doing tonight you want to hang out you want to go get dinner you want to watch movie or something and nobody responds or everyone's like oh no i'm busy i've got plans it's really discouraging and so these apps need to figure out a way to make that more passive show my friend that oh it looks like josh is free so that they could reach out to me if they wanted rather than me having to do that work and expend my social capital and feel awkward when i get rejected yeah it's super interesting it's like every couple i know uh they all manage their joint life together via gmail uh the g calendar right it's just like hey look we've got a shared calendar i can see what you've got going on you can see what i've got going on

and so being able to bring that to a wider audience than just a kind of a party of two i think makes a lot of sense but it also overlays with what you said kind of the second component of just offline events in general what's kind of the thesis there or what has you excited about that i'm just excited about the idea that you know we spend so much of our time staring at a screen and most of these apps they monetize by getting you to stare even deeper into that screen. And I think the next wave of social apps, Zenly, which is a product

that was acquired by Snapchat, Snapchat's own Snap Map, things like IRL, the real opportunity is to say, get people offline, get them to have real interactions together in person. Those are the things we remember. Those are the memories that we cherish. And if you want to add value to someone's life, I think that's the easiest way to do it. But if you can't meet up offline, there's a whole new wave of apps that are helping people hang out online, and that's around screen sharing. So specifically, there's an app called Squad, which is blowing up right now. I think it's at like number 15 on the App Store charts. All of a sudden, it's rocketing up the charts after launching last year. And basically, it just lets a few people screen share together.

So one person can be scrolling Instagram while the other people comment, or you can be debating a Tinder profile and saying, oh, should I swipe right or swipe left? And it basically creates the same kind of experience that many of us had growing up hanging out in parking lots and basements where you weren't really doing anything. You weren't like going to a place, spending money, doing like a planned event. You're just co-hanging out. And we haven't had a corollary for that online. And now we finally have one, which is this screen sharing. You don't have to be in the same room to basically just be hanging out and you don't even have to be actively talking. I think what we had was this big wave of live streaming, but most people don't want to be the center of

attention on camera for a sustained period of time, nor do they have enough to say or do or to show off to actually be entertaining. And so, you know, things like house party made it easier for people to all, so that it's more about group video chat. Nobody's the center of attention. Everyone's just chatting at once. But screen sharing takes it to the next level where nobody even has to be on camera. You could both just be sharing your screens, not looking at each other's faces, but laughing and joking around together and occasionally talking. And, you know, Fortnite has similarly created a role for that for young men. And I think apps like Squad, which has a female CEO, an amazing woman named Esther Crawford, has an opportunity to do that more for young

women as well as everybody. Yeah, it's really interesting, actually, the live streaming component. If you look at many of the largest live streamers, they're things like gamers, etc. And basically what they would do is exactly what you're talking about. So whereas most people would try to use live streaming for shorter periods of time and like, hey, let me entertain you. And these folks who in the gaming industry would just log in, they'd be on for eight to 10 hours, they play video games and just like passively hang out with whoever was there and kind of talk and all of those things that you would do in like the basement, you know, years ago, they actually ended up being some of the best live streamers and built the biggest

audiences, et cetera. And so it's unique how maybe the people who are the best at using these tools actually use it in a different way than kind of the majority of folks who, you know, got boxed into thinking like, this is just like a short TV screen. And I actually think this is really important for mental health. I don't know about you, did you ever spend long periods of time on the phone with your male friends growing up? Never. I didn't either. But now, suddenly, boys can sit together on Fortnite for hours just chatting about their life because they have the plausible distraction of, oh, we're shooting

people. So this is clearly manly. There's no affront to my own masculinity. They can feel comfortable. And I think that's really productive because a lot of young men have a lot of feelings they need to get out and they don't have other outlets for them and so creating a channel where they can talk about it without having to be like hey buddy I need to have like a really hard conversation with you which might be a bit daunting instead it could just be like hey we've been playing fortnight for an hour I was like hey man this girl actually broke my heart like what do you think I should do like that's the kind of conversation that I think we all need to have more of we need to have more of those vulnerable real conversations with our close friends and any

product whether that's a game like fortnight or that's a screen sharing app like uh like squad or whether it's getting people together offline, like an app like IRL, you know, that is a great thing for destroying loneliness, making people happier, making people feel less isolated. And that's critical, especially. Yeah. So a lot of what we've talked about so far is what I'll call more like personal and social components of our lives. Obviously given the quarantine, we've kind of seen the world thrust into, in the professional world, like the whole remote work vertical. And so things like Zoom, Slack, et cetera, are all ticking off in usage. I think the Zoom numbers they just reported was like 10 million DAUs. And 90 days later, they're now at 200 million,

which is just mind boggling growth. What are you seeing in kind of the more professional side of all of this communication and live streaming or video chats, et cetera? Yeah. I mean, Zoom is just blown up and blown up literally with Zoom bombing, which is this term i coined a few weeks ago and now it's being cited by the fbi and by eric on the the ceo of zoom as you know this problem of people you know just searching out for urls of zoom calls and jumping into them and disrupting them or screen sharing awful you know two girls one cup and awful porn things to people's screens and really offending people you know it's clear that these enterprise apps have suddenly have to had to adapt to social use cases but i think the other uh the

The opposite direction is what's making the enterprise products so much better. We're seeing a lot of them embrace a lot of the consumer social tropes and making themselves a lot less frictionful, a lot less complicated, and just really focusing on the interaction, the human interaction, rather than all the Chrome surrounding it. And so two of the apps that I think are really fascinating in this space are Loom and Around. They're both enterprise video chat products, but unlike a big square like Zoom, with Loom, you record short little video clips and then send them to your coworkers and they can watch them and they can quickly send them back. And they do a really good job of auto processing the footage and uploading it before you finish it so you can really go back and forth. It's like a video walkie talkie for the office. And that's actually a lot more productive than just being constantly connected like you can be on Slack where you're just always talking or Zoom. If anybody has spent the last few weeks not getting any work done yet having nonstop Zoom calls, you know that one on one or like group video chat can be very distracting to your work if it's just constantly going and taking up so much of your screen.

whereas Loom just wants you to pop in and out. Around is another enterprise video product and this one I think is especially brilliant. It basically turns your co-workers into tiny little bubbles that like rest across your screen and they overlay on the top of the rest of your screen and so rather than you having to have a big window open with Zoom that covers up your other work and you're sort of struggling to juggle apps and tabs to be able to have enough space to actually get something done, around just hovers over the top of your desktop and lets you just instantly chat with people whenever you want. And it makes it really easy. It's almost like being in the same office together where you're not constantly talking, but you can be like, hey. And that's,

I think, is a really good use case is thinking about how these offline products and how our offline behaviors work and how you can more faithfully convert them into a digital experience. One more I think is really cool. It's called Screen. That's a new screen sharing tool by the guy who created Screen Hero and sold it to Slack. He didn't think Slack did a good enough job

of integrating it. So we left and rebuilt the company. It's called Screen. And it lets you do collaborative screen sharing where everybody gets their own cursor and everybody can affect everything. So it's like Google Docs for all apps. You can co-code together.

You can debate designs together and all like move things around. You can do ephemeral drawings and text over the top to label and annotate things. It's actually like all staring at one screen huddled around together. I think that's. Yeah. One of the things I keep going back to think through is the three things you just described, all three of those companies, they're almost like a version of AR, right? Where basically you have like this shared experience, there's overlays, we can interact. And it's probably not the AR that I think we all initially thought that we would adopt with like the glasses

overlaid on the real world being, you know, the physical world. But to me, like there are a lot of similarities here. And I wonder, can we get AR adopted and kind of people familiar with it on the screen? And then eventually that brings it into the physical world. You seek any of the corollaries there? Oh, that's actually a really smart concept I hadn't thought of is that, you know, if you think of virtual reality as taking over your whole screen and augmented reality is only being a little bit of the screen overlaid on your real life. Similarly, you could think of a Zoom as being the virtual reality, while something like Around is augmented reality.

It's overlaid on the rest of your screen rather than trying to take up the whole thing. And yeah, I think we may be able to grow more comfortable with those augmented reality experiences contained within a screen, and we have the hardware to do it already, then we're gonna be able to for quite a while in the real world.

The fact is that augmented reality hardware for like eyewear is still a ways away. snapchat ceo evan spiegel thinks it's going to be 10 years till it's mainstream uh magic leap seems to think it's going to be now but that company i think is destined to go out of business or be sold in a fire sale because there's just no way there's just not use cases like nobody has given me a compelling reason why i should walk around like this all day and any product that can't do selfies or video chat how is that the future like i don't really see that being the future for quite a while. I think the fact that we have this cool device that's actually on an auto-stabilized

six-axis gimbal is like, it's a pretty good way to interact with technology in the real world. Yeah. It almost feels like AR and VR still got to go through the evolution that literally the phones did or even like take headphones, right? Where like it got closer and closer to us and got smaller and smaller until eventually you get something like an AirPod, right? Or you get the ability to use the iphone etc it just felt like people tried to jump from like non-existent arvr to like what we all think the final state is and now what we're realizing is like hey there's got to be that evolution that's how you get the user comfortable using it because there are you know magically at least some of the demos that i've seen like online uh there was one where i saw

like the heart beating right and it was kind of this virtual heart and you could walk around it and do all this stuff it's like that's cool but like when would i ever use that right maybe if i like a doctor like an er doctor okay but that's a pretty small use case for that specific application and so i just don't know if people are really comfortable with this no i think we're going to see augmented reality for the enterprise for the workplace long before it becomes consumer ready because in the workplace you don't have to look carry care if you look dorky right it doesn't matter if you've got a big weird thing on your head you're being paid for it so it's okay or there's some sort of weird edge use case that you know you know you're going to do every single day

day in and day out. So it makes sense to wear a helmet that helps you do it. But in our day-to-day consumer lives, our patterns are always changing. We're always doing different things. We're vain. We care about how we look. We don't want to be uncool. And so I just don't really see something usurping the phone anytime soon. It might be a toy. It might be good for gamers. It might have some very specific use cases, you know, for influencers or live streamers, but I don't think it's going to be something we're all going to be using anytime soon. Yeah. I'm going to ask you what you think your best or favorite ar vr experience has been but while you're thinking of what that is uh i don't know if you've seen i think it's google images you can like google

a tiger or a bear or something and then basically open the camera and it will put a vr uh image of a tiger or a bear like in your living room or in your kitchen and it's cool for kids right like you or i may do it to show our friend one time it's not something that i'm doing on a daily basis or have really kind of utility for other than hey this is cool but i do think that those are like small steps in the right direction any idea what like the best ar or vr experience that you that you've seen is best vr experience by far is the stuff that you can't actually do at home i think the concept of the vr arcade is destined to have a real lifespan you know companies like sandbox vr and the void vr those are really awesome ones where it's like mixed reality experience you put

on all their hardware. You go to a real life place. You and your friends all get to do it together. You play these expansive games. They have this concept of misdirected walking. You've never heard of this. This is the most mind blowing thing ever. So with misdirected walking, you can put people in a big circular track. Imagine like a 50 meter diameter like track and it's a circle, but in the VR headset, they crook it so it makes it look straight. And so what basically happens is by adjusting your view very slightly, they actually act like they, they subtly, uh, trick your brain into walking slightly left. And so you walk in a circle when you're thinking you're walking straight and it lets you create these very expansive VR experiences where you think

you've walked a mile and you're in like a tiny warehouse. Uh, it's really brilliant. Um, so those are fun. The void and sandbox VR. My favorite VR experience to date is called Birdly. You strap into an animatronic table with giant wooden wings and you basically you lay on this flat table and the robotic arms of it like lift your legs up and when you tip your wings forward you're a bird in VR and you actually dive and it lifts your feet up behind you and it cranks up a fan in your face and it really feels like flying. I tried this I think five years ago at Sundance and it's still my favorite VR experience. It was the only one where when they took me out I was like no don't make me go back i want to be a bird and like they just they it was they had to like drag me out of

this vr experience and so yeah vr arcades are going to be a thing especially for you embodying those fantasies that many of us have like flying and in augmented reality i can't say that there's some experience that when i think about it it's like wow that really blew my mind and made my life better i've gone to sundance year after year and tried out a bunch of their experiences magic leap and all this other stuff you know i've seen some interesting stuff with a augmented reality art galleries where you have an empty room but there's all these giant art pieces that you can like walk around and explore um and i think there's definitely use cases for uh for like maps and being able to pull up hidden information but i think that a phone works

just fine for that and you know i've tried the newest version of snapchat spectacles they over like on video later you can overlay these sort of real world augmented reality effects they don't it's a joke. It's a toy. It's not that cool. And so, you know, until people come up with those killer use cases, there's no way people are buying any AR hardware. Yeah. I tend to agree that it'll come. It's just going to take some time. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin and crypto? I don't know how much you've looked into it, but what's your general thoughts there? You know, I think we're in this moment with crypto and decentralized finance and dApps where it's about usability. You know, we got this early adopter base, these developer base, these people were really into code and finance to adopt crypto and we had that massive spike, you know, about a year and a half ago.

But there's been this sort of trough of disillusionment since. And I think that's because it's really difficult for most mainstream people to use crypto, you know, powered experiences or decentralized apps. They require complex browsers and these really long cryptographic keys that nobody can remember, you know, stitching together all these different tools. And what we really need is something that's more like Facebook login for crypto. We need something that makes it really easy for me to bring all of my crypto assets, all of my my identity wherever I go and instantly log into these experiences. You know, there's companies like Bitsky, which is trying to build this kind of login layer and usability layer for the crypto and decentralized app space. And I think, you know, there's other people who are trying to build stuff like this to Coinbase is in that space of like login with Coinbase, that kind of idea. I think until that usability arrives and until we can say, here's not only a use case for Twitter, but it's an easily usable use case.

That's when you're going to finally get the mainstream adopting it. And I think we're going to see prices increase again. Yeah, it's really interesting, because if you actually think about what's the most user friendly experience, it's like buying the crypto assets, right? So it's getting on a Coinbase, a Gemini, whatever, and actually just buying it. Once you get past that very simple action, it's incredibly difficult. And the example that I always use when talking to people is like, we're still sending to wallet addresses that look like random strings of letters and numbers. and until that gets solved there's just an entire population of users that I think can't come into the space so I think that you're generally spot on there do you see the large tech companies moving more and more into the space obviously Facebook's got Libra and kind of what they're doing there what do you see kind of from the big tech intersection I feel like trying to do something really big and ambitious has been pretty well dissuaded by Libra's reaction I can't imagine any company like Google or Amazon, especially anybody with any antitrust concerns, who's already

having problems, who's trying to sort out which of their other bets to focus on, that they're going to dive into this space. It's become very clear that regulators are not going to allow tech giants to do something that has the level of power, the level of scope that would be necessary for it to be this insane win for their businesses. You know, in a lot of cases, a lot of what, you know, Facebook wanted to do with Libra can be done with other visions of its payment technology. It's like, yeah, people want to be able to do remittance easily. People want to be able to buy and sell things without the same credit card transaction fees. I think those are really smart goals for crypto, but I don't think necessarily trying to replace the currency we currently use is the way

to do that. If so, it's like, let Facebook do that on the backend. Let me pay real money. It does the crypto transfer in Libra on both sides and then spits out U.S. dollars on the other side as well. That would be so much more comprehensible for the regulators to accept than what it's trying to do with Libra. And so I think it's not necessary for these big tech companies to launch things like that. I think they're much more interested in launching their own credit cards, their own financial services that play with the traditional financial system because that's where the real money is being made because there's not the same usability issue yeah and is it almost that every one of these companies is going to have to go into fintech right like they have the advertising

they've got like all the models they currently have but it just feels like each one of whether it's google it's facebook it's apple etc they're all just slowly making progress into this space and some of them are doing it direct like obviously apple with the apple card etc is like a direct shot into finance um but even some of the other companies um trying to introduce like pos's and things like that. Just are they all having to go to that space? Yeah, I feel like the old trope was that every app eventually becomes a messaging app. And now it's like every app eventually becomes a finance app. It's just because that's where the money is being made. When you move a ton of money around, some of it inevitably falls off the truck and into your pocket. And I think that that's why

the banking sector makes so much money. They're not creating a lot of value. They're just moving the money around and somehow a bunch of it ends up in their pockets. And so I think for that same reason, these tech companies are going to get into it more and more. You're already seeing interesting plays in this space. Things like ClearBank, which will take your Stripe and your Facebook ads accounts, analyze them and say, hey, you're worthy of a much better priced loan than you can get from a bank because we know you're actually selling things and every dollar we give you, you earn $3 back. And so they can give you these loans. So I wouldn't be surprised to see more uh more businesses more tech giants getting into that phase then things like patreon are

creating funds to sort of fund the initial content creation setup for creators and i think you'll see that too you know one of the latest y combinator companies is actually a loan system for influencers where they can say hey look at all the money that i'm making on my uh on my sponsored content posts give me a loan so that i can buy a better camera i can hire a photographer then i'll make even more money off my following. And I wouldn't be surprised to see people like Twitch and YouTube start to get into that influencer financing space. And then of course, you've got things like Robinhood that are trying to expand into all types of lending and services. But anybody who deals with small businesses, as we've seen with Square, there's an opportunity to get into that financing

space. These tech giants have tons of cash on hand. They're not doing anything with it. It'd be better for them to invest it through one of these models and make a higher return than just sitting on it. So if you've got a ton of cash and you've got a ton of users, you may as well turn into a finance company. Yeah. I want to finish up. You mentioned kind of the influencers and content creators. And to me, this is like one of the most interesting places in tech. And it sounds weird saying that because it's not actually technology in many cases. It's like the users of the technology. And especially when you get to the marketplaces where like the content creators are providing one half of the market and the content they create, what do you see changing

there, right? So like you talked a little bit about maybe how they finance their operations and things like that, but what are you kind of seeing there or looking at over the next couple of months? I mean, to date, most of the financing for creators has been through advertising. It's either been through an ad split like YouTube does, where they give you a piece of the revenue from ads that run near your content, or there's through sponsored content where influencers arrange their own deals and do sort of product placement, things like that. The next wave is certainly tipping and subscription patronage, where all of these platforms are going to get a lot more serious about letting you pay, you know, a one-time fee to a creator to be able to

say, you know, to highlight yourself in a live stream chat or get a special badge or get some kind of message or communication with them. Things like Cameo are allowing people to pay for direct interaction with influencers. And I think that like subscriptions like Patreon are going to become more common across the space because people forget when they subscribe and pay for things. And so they end up just paying a lot more money. So it's good for creators and it's probably good for these platforms as well. The next thing I think is really important though is merchandise. Because whenever you're talking about digital experiences, you're still talking about the long tail. All of these fans who might be willing to pay a dollar or two or maybe five

dollars a month or something. But the real money is in monetizing the whales. The gaming industry understands this they make a ton of their money the majority of their money off of a tiny fraction of their users who are just total hardcore addicts if you will who are just buying every in-app purchase and you know i actually used to work for bon jovi running all of his ticketing merchandise websites fan clubs and the way that bon jovi made his money was on 3500 two front row seat packages that came with a signed program you got a flip cam with it i'm dating myself you got a flip camera in it. He maybe got a backstage experience, but it was about monetizing these whales, his super fans, and selling them a super high-priced product. And that's why I think the next big phase of

influencer monetization is in merchandise and sort of either offline or online personal one-to-one experiences. Because people want to have memories with these creators. They don't want to just watch them. They want to be part of their lives too. They want them to notice me, senpai. You know, They want to be part of it, and that's why I think Cameo is a great idea, and I think you might end up seeing companies like Facebook and Twitch and YouTube adopt a Cameo-esque option where it's like, oh, are you watching this person's video? Pay $50 and schedule a two-minute phone call with them. I think that's going to be really popular, and I think merchandise, selling large-priced

sort of collector's items that these creators are making, I think that will be a huge space, especially because they already have the interaction with their fans to be able to a b test these different options for what kind of merch they want in fact one of the smartest things they can do is say hey here's three different t-shirt options i'm considering vote for the one you like best and then they make the one that gets the most votes and then all the people that voted for it they feel like they were part of the creation process they want a memento of that interaction and they buy that shirt for sure and so i think all of these platforms are going to need to embrace merchandise, not just being like effectively a Shopify store, but working

with them directly the same way we have influencer relations, which teach influencers how to best use the digital tools. We're going to have merchandise representatives that help them create their own brand in the physical world that helps them translate their online personality into offline objects and sell them for a lot more than they're making in tiny little $1. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting because when you layer in the subscriptions, like, uh, I've been using Substack for a long time. And the second you get out of like the ad model and you get into the, uh, kind of audience funded model, uh, it really does change the way, um, that you think about it as a business, right? You don't have to worry about pleasing advertisers. You spend zero time

talking to advertisers. Um, and you also have this sense of like, like fuck everybody else, right? Like I can, I can do whatever I want because the people that are paying me, uh, i'm doing it for them um so it's really interesting how that changes when it comes to like these super fans though do you see any companies that are really helping uh creators do that yet so like the bon jovi type thing uh whether it's digital or um you know in person yeah we've seen a few of the companies that have been in this space kind of get acquired or you know not really hit their full potential so no way you know one of them got acquired by patreon came in house to help them with their merchandise operation.

And so Patreon is definitely a leader in this space. They're thinking a lot about how to do merch. Spotify, to their credit, eventually did do things where you can now buy merch and see those kinds of options right on an artist's page. And I think the streaming music companies have enormous influence in this space, especially for anybody who's in the music industry.

These streaming companies are the main connection between an artist and a fan. And I would be surprised if Spotify doesn't get more serious about selling that access, selling direct messaging to those users so that people can sell more content. You know, if Spotify is like, hey, rather than putting up a billboard, which is like maybe reaches, has like a 1% hit rate of actually hitting your target audience, why not buy a billboard inside of Spotify, which is only shown to your biggest fans. And every time they click, you're going to make money. You know, I think that that's, that kind of a model is going

be more and more popular so anybody who has a large uh social graph anybody who has a big following i think these platforms are going to help them directly contact and sell things to their their uh their fans better you cameo is obviously a big one you know the fact i think they may have their breakout moment this week because they're selling access to the tiger king cast you can get like the tiger king cast members to send your friend like an insane message or video call. And like, I can't think of a better use than $50 right now than just like blowing up my group chat with a personalized meme from one of the Tiger King cast members. You know, I think that that's going to become increasingly popular. But even things like Facebook, they just widen

their stars platform, which is their online tipping platform. And so now instead of just for gamers, that's going to other types of influencers as well. So they're getting into it. Periscope and Twitter have their own method. But, you know, everybody is going to need tools for this that are sort of platform agnostic. And so I think there's room for independent startups to come in and be the tool for this that works across all of the social platforms, helps you get the word out about your merchandise or your offline experiences or your phone calls with people, their entire fan base. And if anybody's out there looking for a startup idea, I think that's a really good one. Yeah. My favorite use of Cameo so far as I just saw that somebody hired

or paid for, I remember the woman that was in that Peloton ad and she created a message for the Peloton short sellers. So they basically had her like say, Hey, you know, who better to deliver this message than me? Uh, Peloton's not going anywhere. And I said, you know, look at if, uh, if you get a couple of more of kind of like these commercials that go viral, like that one did, you can immediately see those actors or actresses then turning around and basically almost becoming like pseudo spokespeople for the company um and something like cameo could easily uh help facilitate yeah absolutely especially given that people now can live stream that like i'm surprised i haven't seen anybody just doing back-to-back-to-back cameo calls while live streaming

the whole experience to their entire audience and just being like yo let's see what crazy person i have to talk to next and just like going at it yeah absolutely uh all right man listen i really appreciate you doing this uh last two questions to finish up and then you get to ask me one question uh the best book you've ever written uh read sorry not written read um i think uh herman hesse's steppenwolf was really important to me when i was growing up this book is about what it's like to feel animalistic to feel caged in society which I think is more relevant now than ever, you know, just feeling totally boxed in and claustrophobic in your own skin and trying to determine what is it that really matters in life. And the real

answer is following your instincts and being yourself and finding a way to turn your passion into a profession. And I think that's what so many of our generation are really trying to figure out right now is how do I not sell my soul to the corporates? How do I not become this lifeless drone? How do I make what I care about a big part of my life? And Steppenwolf is really all about that story. So that's one that I really love. Yeah, I love that answer. People who read a lot or are well read, think about that question a lot. They don't have one right off the top of their head. So it's cool to see that that's what you remember. Aliens, believer, non-believer, think they're real? Sorry, say that one more time. Aliens, think that they're real?

um i think yes i do think aliens exist somewhere in the the greater galaxy um do i think that we're going to interact with them anytime soon no in our lifetime likely not you know the universe is just extraordinarily vast and there's all of those very good reasons why it might not happen uh you know they don't want to disturb us you know the the anyone that reaches out and sort of makes contact ends up getting destroyed you know i'm really hoping that the whatever these aliens are you would imagine that the technological advancement would make them peaceful because when you gain technological advancement you eventually gain abundance and you have no scarcity why do you need to steal or take from other people or be aggressive unless there's some

sort of like global or i'm sorry intergalactic religious orthodoxy where they say if you don't follow our special leader then then we don't want anything to do with you that's maybe my biggest existential fear for the entire earth is that that that's the one way technological advancement could be defeated is through orthodoxy. Yeah, after seeing the response to the virus, I don't know if we're ready to deal with any sort of alien contact right now, especially if they're coming here.

Yeah, I think they're probably gonna just do a U-turn as soon as they see what's going on on this planet. Cool, man. What's the one question you have for me to finish up? You know, I would really wanna ask, what does it feel like to be someone who influences people's finances? because this is something that's so core to their life like you actually lead people to have great

wins or maybe great losses and you know that can really weigh on someone and so I want to know what you know what does it feel like in its best of times and its worst of time yeah that's a fantastic question um so this this has definitely changed over time in a weird way of like uh I didn't early on have any influence like I actually had you know like 500 followers or whatever and then over time, as you kind of gain a larger and larger following, uh, it takes a while to actually realize that you have any influence. And then there's like certain moments, like I look back on it, it's probably five or six more. I'm like, Oh, like, okay. That was like a level up from where I thought I was. Um, and so what you actually learn is there's two components to it.

One is, uh, you become much more responsible. So like I could say things when I had 500 followers, that would be like offhand comments that I wouldn't think about. But now if I said it, people would be like, you know, he's basically giving advice. So there's a lot of caveating and like uh kind of like disclosures almost right i feel like i'm like reading like fine print almost um when i talk about certain things uh so that's like a little weird um and then the second thing is uh i've become uh much more cynical and i think it's because uh what i see is like um literally today i've probably gotten three or four dms on twitter like one of them was some guy asked me hey is this your instagram account they're dming me asking me to set up a digital wallet to send

money so like scam account then two is like hey have you heard of this person and they show me somebody on twitter who's literally running scams right as like financial advice and then three is like what do you think about this product or that product and what you quickly realize is like one the lack of education right like people just don't know and actually want to learn and they want to understand but they just don't know and so they end up making bad decisions because they have like bad data. Uh, but then the second thing is, um, you, you get to this world where you have to understand that, like, I'm not here to tell people what to do. What I'm here to do is give them the information and hopefully present it in a way where like, this is how you should contextualize

the information I'm giving you, but you ultimately have to have responsibility for the decisions you make. Um, and I think that when you take, when you get to that point, then it becomes less about like, Hey Josh, you should do X with your money. And instead it comes to, Hey Josh, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing with my money. If you have questions, like I'm happy to answer it for you. But at the same time, like you've got to make your own decisions and here's all of the risks and all of the potential benefits, but like you have to be like responsible for yourself. And I just don't know if our society is like ready for that world. Like we're, we're, we're in such a world of like, I want to blame everybody else for anything that goes wrong. But when things go right, I want

to take all the credit myself, that just like ownership of this is like a really weird time to kind of see that coming to play. Yeah, I've had to grapple with that as a journalist myself. And, you know, I've taken a different take on it, which is that, you know, if I do all the research, if I have all the context, I talk to people, I get the undistilled version, I get the unabridged version. And then I'm giving people the abridged version, the sort of the crib notes. If I don't give them some subjective direction of what I think is right, then I'm effectively cheating them out of all the excess information I couldn't cram into the article, everything that I couldn't crystallize. And I would hope that given in the current state of things, people are free to follow

and listen to whoever they want. And if so, if they don't believe in my subjective takes on it, they can find someone they do. But if I'm not giving them that subjective take in the first place, I feel like I'm really cheating them out of something. And given we're in a place where being just sort of totally neutral doesn't work with technology, because technology just absorbs whatever the morals are of the people who are the most forceful with it. And so if left to people, those were the worst incentives, the greed, the lust for power, those are the ones that are going to shape what technology is. But so I think those of us, and I think of you as one of these people who really does have empathy for the world who wants to see things go better you know as my

mission statement personally is to like help the world more gracefully adapt to the future I think people like us have to be willing to take a subjective stand point to where we think the things should go and reveal our moral compass because the moral the technology doesn't have a moral compass of its own yeah I actually think that there's one uh twist to this right so like most of the things that you talk about aren't directly like put your money x right like you're not giving like investment advice. Um, and so what ends up happening is like, uh, one of my business partners basically says all the time that, uh, for every one, um, computer science engineer that we graduate in the U S South Korea graduates like 40 or something or 17, I think it

is. Uh, but for every one lawyer, they graduate, we graduate like 40 here in the U S. And so like, that's like a country of wealth creation. And we're a country of like wealth redistribution and the legal frameworks. Um, and that plays out in finance all the time. Like, right. As people are always looking for like oh you gave financial advice they lost money and they all freak out and so what i think ends up happening is uh there's actually like a a scale of objectivity and subjectivity um and where i completely agree with you though is uh in things like um what technology should be used for the security components like all of that stuff i think it's actually a um a requirement it should be to some degree of like your contribution to society is if

you have a platform in voice. You have to stand up for the things that you believe in. And your point about that goes all the way up to the top of the CEOs of these companies and all the way down to the users that have the platforms with them. I think we'd be better off if more people took that position. Yeah. We can be subjective with our hearts and minds, but it's probably good to be objective about the wallet. Yeah. Great way to put it. Listen, Josh, I appreciate you doing this. Where can people get directed? Do you want them to go to Twitter or somewhere else? Yeah.

So if you go to my Twitter, that's at Josh Constein, or just search Josh from TechCrunch on Twitter, you'll find me. You can follow me there. And I also have a newsletter that's through the site called Review. It's called Moving Product. If you search for Josh Constein, Moving Product, you can sign up for my newsletter, which is coming up. And it's about discussing product and technology through a sociological lens, about how we

interact with each other and trying to talk about some of that moral compass of how do we guide the world towards making things that are not only fun, but also productive and safe. Well, making sure that we still embody that like wild, wild west zeal. That is, I think why a lot of us got into technology. I love it. Other than we got to get you off review and onto a sub stack, but we'll talk about that later. So, all right, man, listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this and we'll have to do it again. Thanks again. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the

off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain