The Pomp Podcast - 307: Alex Kantrowitz On Big Tech's Role In Society

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

Alex Kantrowitz, the author of a new book on big technology called Always Day One: How The Tech Titans Plan To Stay On Top Forever. He was previously the lead technology reporter at BuzzFeed, but recently left to start his own media company called Big Technology. In this conversation, we discuss the role of big tech in society, the commonalities between each of them, why Alex left his job to go out on his own, and why the individual media company will be more popular in the future. Alex's Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607065/always-day-one-by-alex-kantrowitz/ Alex's Email: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/ =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at http://www.pompletter.com ===============================

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Alex Kantrowitz is the author of a new book on big technology called Always Day One, How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever. He was previously the lead technology reporter at BuzzFeed, but recently left to start his own media company called Big Technology. In this conversation, we discuss the role of big tech in society, the commonalities between each of them, why Alex left his job to go out on his own, and why the individual media company will be more popular in the future.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, let me remind you that I also write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com, again, Pompletter.com, or go in the description and you can click on the link there. All right, let's get into this episode with Alex.

I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pom or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited to have Alex here. Thanks for doing this, man. Thank you for having me, Pomp. I'm excited to be on.

I've listened to a bunch of your interviews and they're terrific and glad to be in the hot seat. For sure. Well, the big news, obviously, is you recently left your job and have struck out on your own to go build a dominant one-man media company for now. So we'll get to that in a second. But for those that don't know you, maybe let's start with your background and kind of how we got to you writing about large technology companies. Yeah. So I came out of school. I studied industrial neighbor relations, came out in the middle of the recession in 2009, didn't have a job, sat on my parents' couch and was like, what do I do? so it was a moment where the internet was starting to rise as an impactful marketing platform and I took a marketing job and I went in-house as a media buyer at New York City's Economic Development Corporation and came in they were doing a lot of print advertising and I was like we can reach the same readers for less money on the internet and we can target them better and we don't only have

to buy on publications we can buy on google adwords uh we can use facebook and we could use linkedin um and they said really and i said oh yeah this is all possible and so i just made it a point to really learn how to spend money best on the internet to reach audiences uh and it was amazing just to see their willingness like as a government agency they don't move really fast but i had a ten thousand dollar budget for each campaign and it was amazing to see their willingness to let me kind of spray it around and see what the results are. And by doing that, you know, I started to learn the inner workings of how online advertising works. Then I was in New York for a while, you know, at this agency and Bloomberg was the mayor at the

time, kept talking about how important tech was to the future of the city. And at a certain point, I was like, I'm done hearing him talk about it. I want to go do it. And I was like, just get me to a tech company, any tech company. And so I signed on as a lead development representative at an ad tech company that sold order management software to publishers. It's about the most boring type of tech company you could possibly be at, maybe like a neck above an ERP system, but not too much further than that. And by doing that, I learned the inner workings of, you know, I had been buying advertising through the internet. Now I started to learn a little bit more about the plumbing. And at a certain point, I was like, do I want to keep trying to

sell this software, which was all direct sold. We were moving automated as an industry. And so I said, I could keep trying to sell this stuff, or I could start to write about where the energy was going. I chose the second path, went to advertising age, started writing about ad tech as a journalist. was my first full-time staff job. And then, you know, change you've been a part of, right? I saw all the money moving from independent ad tech out to Silicon Valley. And all of a sudden it wasn't like the two moguls and the Yumi's that were the power players in the industry. It was Facebook and Google and Twitter and Snapchat. And I said, I could stay in New York and, you know, write obituaries or I can move to Silicon Valley and start to figure out how these companies work.

And I decided to make the move to Silicon Valley. And that's been the challenge since I've been here. Got it. And so I think part of what's so fascinating about the work that you've had is there's multiple kind of levels or depths to it, right? So one is just, hey, where's these industries going? How do these platforms work? But also then there's tens of thousands of people that work at these companies now, right?

And so there's this kind of entire human layer on top of it. maybe talk a little bit about some of the stories that you wrote about and the process that goes into really how you built your reputation covering those large technology companies. Right. So I showed up here, I showed up here in San Francisco in May, 2015. So almost exactly five years ago. And I had been this ad trade reporter. And so I said, let me make it a point to try to cover everything I possibly can, sink my teeth into these companies in every direction possible and see where it leads me and it's interesting like you cover an ad tech company like it's pretty simple you have the sell side you have the buy side you have some data layered

in between that's what you're dealing with but when you come when you cover a company like facebook you're dealing with you know not only the advertising side but you're dealing with politics entertainment um how society works you're looking at ai uh and um and media you know and so So I decided to go pretty wide in the beginning and just cover whatever I could. And then I started zeroing in on the things that I thought were interesting. And so to me, like the idea was to stop covering the symptoms as much as to cover the physiology. Look at the product decisions, look at the culture of these companies. And by deeply understanding and conveying the repercussions and the results that these systems produce, people could better understand exactly what's going on inside the company.

So instead of, for instance, saying, how could Facebook not apply a label to Trump's tweet or how did Twitter apply a label to Trump's tweet? you know for me the more interesting thing is looking at why do these platforms uh you know from an elemental level start to incentivize the type of posts where you end up having a world leader who could end up putting stuff out there that merits a label or even that discussion like that type of stuff in my opinion doesn't happen by accident and i wanted to learn you know a why why do these companies products spit out the type of communication that they do and then b you know the thing that motivated the book was it was kind of astonishing to me that as these companies got bigger, they actually grew stronger. You know, we're used to companies getting big and getting

bureaucratic and starting to, you know, batten down the hatches and protect an asset and milk that asset until there's nothing left. And then they become Xerox. But these companies are doing something very differently. They just become stronger as they get bigger. And I knew there was a cultural story behind that. And I just wanted to find some way to go out and tell it. And luckily, you know, I got the chance with the book. Got it. And so the book, maybe talk a little bit about kind of just some of the takeaways there. Because what's fascinating to me is we've seen a number of books now written about individual companies, right? And people spend months, if not, you know, more than a year really going deep on one single company and trying to just understand

what's happening to be able to write in depth, a full length book. You did that for multiple companies, right? And so there's this element of almost, it's a more difficult challenge when you're trying to cover so many different businesses. So what are some of those takeaways that you had from writing the book? Yeah. And I think this is the first book that Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have all participated in together. So those are typically rivals and they came together on this one. So I would say that what motivated my book is a different question, right? Most of the books that are out about these technology companies are what did you do? What are you going to do? For me, the question was, how do you do what you do?

And that's when you start to get into things that you see, you know, instead of telling a history, you start to talk a little bit more and it's kind of nerdy, but about process and technology and culture and leadership that's enabled them to be successful. And the more I dug into it, the more I saw there were some real parallels in the way these companies operate. One of the things that they all do is that they have this view of work. And you might have seen this, you know, in your various steps, but they view work as you're either going to be spending your time creating something new, or you're going to be spending your time supporting something that exists. And what they've done is minimize the time people spent supporting what exists using various forms of technology,

AI, automation, collaboration tools to make room for them to create something new. And that's kind of my idea with the title, which is always day one. The idea is that they're always reinventing themselves. It's as if their first day with little regard for what came beforehand. And they do this by making much more time for people to come up with new ideas and bring them to life. And then And the second half of that is they've built systems that once somebody has an idea, they're able to get it to a decision maker with incredible speed. So at Facebook, you probably saw if you have an idea, you could bring it right to Zuck or maybe somebody who's going to tell Zuck about it.

And in a typical company, you tell your boss when you have an idea and then your boss laughs at you. And then maybe they'll bring it to their boss and their boss will laugh and they'll bring it to their boss. And if anybody along the chain says, no, your idea is gone, and a startup across the street who's now operating with the lowest startup costs in history, who's now operating with the fastest time to create a company in history, can go create that idea while it's making its way through useless middle management who are all laughing at you. And so the tech giants have done a really good job of giving people the permission to come up with ideas, which is important. And then making sure that those ideas have a way to get to decision makers and don't get caught up in that corporate muck. Yeah. I'll even take a step

further. I actually tell people that one of the things that was the most surprising to me at Facebook is I would see people come up with these ideas and they would go to kind of somebody who would have brought it to Zuck. And the response was not a, I like that idea. I don't like that idea it was something to the effect of like well if you're an engineer like why don't you prototype it or if you're not an engineer like why don't you go try to find somebody who will prototype it with you uh and then let's talk about does this work does it not once something's actually built right kind of this idea of like code win wins arguments um and to your point like it's just all about speed right this and the speed really leads to that innovation which is uh which is pretty

interesting any kind of funny stories from the process of writing the book uh and anything that didn't make it into the book that uh that you just found either funny or or you think people would enjoy hearing about yeah definitely um a couple of fun zuck stories if you're up for them um first is so i knew zuckerberg used a snapchat and um i kind of wanted to get him into this position where he admitted it to me um and so i'm telling him you know we're talking about stories And I have an idea of how stories came to be, you know, again, this is part of the feedback culture, people telling him that you need to do this or else your products are going to die. And I knew that he was using Snapchat and he alluded to like, you know, watching stories.

And I was like, so you did it on Snapchat. And he goes, well, and Instagram, I was like, but you use Snapchat. And he goes, yeah, but I use all of our competitors products. And then he said um he said uh he um was uh when facebook was starting to experiment into the dating app scene he had to try them out so he got onto the dating apps with his own picture and started experimenting with them and um he said he was on this one app where you match with a new person every day um and he thought it was a cool looking app so he showed it to his wife priscilla he goes hey priscilla check it out you know here's this dating app that's pretty interesting and she looked at the person on screen and was scheduled to have dinner with her the next night so anyway it's

kind of one of those stories where i'm like okay i'm sitting here next to zuckerberg and he's telling me he's using dating apps to meet his wife's friends that's interesting um yeah i i mean, and look, I think part of that is like, it's funny, right? And, and, you know, one, those are great stories. But two is, it also shows the level of maybe obsession is the wrong word, but just really wanting to understand how technology works, what are other people doing? What should we be doing, right? And being critical of products. And I've said over and over again, you know, Mark was probably one of the only people I've ever met that could sit in a room and talk about high level strategy of an entire division within a, you know, multinational corporation. And then

literally during the demo, zoom in and pick up, you know, why is that pixel off? Right. And just the ability to kind of go up and down. And one time somebody said to me, who'd been in the company a long time, they said, look, you got to remember that Mark has more context than anybody else who works here he's been working on it longer than everybody so he has the story behind every single one of these products he's seen them all get developed and all this and if you kind of go across all the major tech companies that is one thing that remains constant is most of them are still run by their founders or the founders are still in some sort of influential position which i'm assuming that you kind of saw as one of those patterns across the companies right

totally and i think that like you're right the way that he's using these apps shows a willingness to believe in a product outside of facebook right like the problem that companies get into is they believe that their software is the best therefore they'll never even try another person's software and like to me it was surprising that zuckerberg is using snapchat and dating apps but like looking back of course he is um like amazon has an interesting leadership principle called invent and simplify and the idea is um you know you invent and then you build systems to make sure you're not spending too much time supporting that existing product but they say explicitly you know we don't have this dedication to building to using stuff only invented here

if something was invented elsewhere we'll use it and we're going with best of breed you contrast that with Microsoft when Steve Ballmer was running Microsoft you couldn't bring an Apple product into the campus you know Steve Ballmer once pretended to throw an iPhone in a meeting with people so So people sort of knew if I'm working on a Mac, even from developing for Mac users, I'm going to get a dirty look if I'm working on this computer in Microsoft Campus. And I think it sort of shows when you have a willingness and an appreciation to ideas from anywhere, when you have a willingness to admit that other companies are developing good software and you want to learn why they've done well, then you're going to be in good

shape. But when you want to sort of, you know, again, look and protect your asset and think that that's the only thing that matters in the world and that all your competitors don't have a chance in the world, that arrogance ends up leading to bad business outcomes. For sure. And since you are the go-to expert on these big tech companies, what's your assessment of kind of their role in the world right now? Obviously there's everything from the coronavirus to the economic crisis to now we've got kind of social unrest in the United States. And in this debate over, do you label tweets or posts? Do you not? And kind of what is a platform's role? Like, how do you see

the major tech companies playing their role in society, given that, again, it's not just on one issue? Like they pretty much touch everything at this point. How do you kind of evaluate that role? Yeah, I think they play important roles. Are they the only actors in this world? No. Like, when we talk about Facebook's impact in the U.S., we have to talk about Fox News and MSNBC and CNN. We talk about Twitter's impact in the world. We also have to talk about the way the president uses it, not just the product. So these are, but they're all self-reinforcing systems. I mean, we know they have, they're definitely changing the way people in society see information. I mean, the anti-vax movement is a good example, right? I mean, you know, I don't think this is

surprising, which is sad, but the anti-vax groups on Facebook are growing at double the rate that they were a year ago. And so what's going to happen when we have a coronavirus vaccine and people by the tens of thousands refuse to take it because their mind's been poisoned inside these groups? Then you get into pretty tricky territory. So I do think they're definitely changing the way people think. I mean, that was appealing to me. When I started going after this beat is I would realize that these companies have a pretty important role to play in the way that information gets to people now when I was I was coming from the ad world I was mostly interested in what publications they were going to support but it turns out that they play you know they've

you know not surprisingly played a role everywhere and like my only thought on this is they got to slow it down a little bit like they're too fast and the share button and the retweet button just enable like quick unthinking dissemination of bad information and if those buttons even had like you know you have to wait 10 seconds before you hit them or you have to click the link before you retweet the story I think we would be living in a better society yeah and it's interesting because now what we're starting to see is kind of a divergence in maybe not ideology, but like action, right? So the obvious one, and maybe we just talk directly about it, is the president's tweets where Twitter has decided to go ahead and put a

label over those tweets. I think they've now extended that to other government accounts that are tweeting similar things or the same things. They've also gone and done it to other politicians. Facebook instead has taken the position that for the most part, they're going to be a kind of free open platform. They don't want to make decisions on labeling things and not labeling them. They're obviously under heat for that. Kind of walk me through a little bit like your understanding based on Zuck and Jack specifically, you know, those decisions are coming from the top. This isn't a policy person making it like at the end of the day, they are maybe not betting their companies, but definitely stepping into a very controversial situation. And so the CEOs themselves

for making these decisions. Yeah. And one of the things that's really disappointed me in this whole situation is that the employees protesting and the media have only focused on the labels. And I'd love for them to focus on what is going on inside your platforms

that are making them turn into what some people have really accurately referred to as anger video games. And where like the points are retweets and the points are shares and the points are reach. And why is the most incendiary content from the most fringe actors being amplified this way on these platforms? I mean, they've created status games.

So people who have mainstream status are not actually going in and playing in them, which means the fringe occupies all the room. And then since the fringe is making all this content for these platforms, they're just getting amplified like crazy with the retweet and share button. um so then we we get into the situation where the media sees like the fringe say you know be pretty successful and then say we need to you know take this stuff down and that just gives them fuel and say see this is you know we've been here all along um and the mainstream has kept us down and they don't want us to be successful um but of course that's not the case they've just been been successful by nature of the fact that they've rode these the systems themselves and become pretty popular you know on the platforms and in the world because of it so I'd like to see that

fixed and I'd like to see more discussion about that because until we really get into that discussion you know we're we're kind of talking about window dressing now we you know you know as far as the labels go I don't really think they're going to make a difference like Twitter put the label on Trump's tweet and the rioting didn't stop. Um, so, you know, they, they fact check his, um, his tweet about mail-in ballots, but I don't think that's going to make him stop trying to, um, you know, start to cast dispersions on the validity of this next election. You know, he's behind in the polls. Why do you think he's doing this? So, um, ultimately I think that, Jack has been more willing to act than Mark. And so this sort of ends up following that type of

pattern. But I know this is sort of unsatisfying, but I think that neither of them are in the right until they start to examine the fundamentals of what their platforms are doing and start to fix them. Yeah. And it's really interesting because I do think that most people are focused on this idea of like are the platforms becoming publishers uh and they think of it um in this like editorial perspective but it's always about did they put the label or did they not did they censor or did they not and coming from somebody who uh who's worked on these systems and understands you know some of the the complexity of them like there's a lot more to uh and and it's very uh nuanced right it could literally just be hey alex posted something and he gets less uh reach because of

a word he used right or the easy example i always tell people is on facebook for example if you see a post uh and everyone starts writing congratulations in the comments it explodes right because obviously if everyone's writing congratulations it must be this like super engaging awesome thing for this person uh and everyone then gets this dopamine hit and it's like this self-fulfilling you know cycle but that's kind of an editorial decision as well right like what goes behind the algorithm Exactly. That's exactly it. Like they are, they've been editors, they are editors, they will be editors. And whether they put a label on a tweet or send you to a fact check, what's happening underneath is playing a far greater role than when you see them act with

a quote unquote heavy hand. Like, let's look at the systems and let's look at the belly of the beast, you know, versus its haircut. All right. So most people who listen to this will agree in some form or fashion that, uh, the platforms have a hard time claiming, um, Hey, we're the phone company, right? The, the phone company, the analogy there is just, Hey, look, they don't listen to the, well, they're not supposed to listen to the calls. Right. And, and they definitely don't, uh, yeah, they don't say, Hey, I'm trying to call Alex, but because we're going to talk politics, like I'm not going to connect the call, right. Or I'm going to cut you short at five minutes rather than give you 30 minutes, because we're going to talk about something in the

conversation so it's a it's not quite an apples to apples comparison but what is the solution right and so when you talk about like examining the actual um kind of belly of the beast like they let's say that they say okay you know what we have this problem we're going to go ahead and be very introspective we're going to take this seriously like what do you think is the the direction that they can go or that like finish line if you will um where they end up creating solutions. Yeah. So I don't want to be one of those people who say they must do something because as you know, unless we test something, we don't really know what the outcome is going to be, but I do know what I want to test. So I want to test and see what the outcome is. If three things

on the share button, one is if you remove share and retreat completely, two is if you put a 10 or 15 second timer you know on that retweet so you have to wait 15 seconds after you've seen it before you can hit it and three is if you have to click the link before before you can hit that button and we know research shows if you don't hesitate you're much more likely to share fake and sensationalized news and i would say probably outrage as well right um if we put that pause in artificially, I am really curious to see what the platforms will find out. And my guess is that it will create a much better environment inside. The other thing is status, right? So here's the other thing I want to test. I'd love to test what these platforms look like without follower counts

and without retweet and like counts. Now, look, these are going to have, you know, potentially some negative effects, right? Because we might not be able to tell someone who's pretty influential from a bot. So it will put their, you know, opinion down, you know, kind of on the same plane, which has been an issue. So I'm not sure this is an issue, but I'd like to actually see what it looks like. And then maybe you could just do tiers, right? Because think about it, Twitter counts up every single follower that you have, you can see it. And, you know, anybody on Twitter knows that that's freaking addicting and hard not to check. What if Twitter did it here? You know, you're 500 plus, you're 1,000 plus, you're 2,000 plus, 3,000. You know, then all

of a sudden, you know, it becomes less of a status game and more of a signal in terms of audience. And I think that like, if we end up testing things of this nature on, you know, along the lines of what I'm suggesting, we will end up getting to a more civil place. Because again, this status game with quick virality to me seems unwinnable for everyone. I mean, it's pretty good for engagement. It keeps people checking these things more than they should. But if we're thinking about the way that society is impacted by these platforms, these are some of the fixes I'd like to see. Yeah. And I guess one of the things, and I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but really if you think about following people without the follower accounts, email lists have

basically done that right so like hey i subscribed to an email list a lot of times i don't know how many subscribers they have i may have a good sense of it's big or it's not um but but really unless they tell me i've got zero clue i'm just subscribing for that specific content uh which is kind of it sounds directionally one of the things that um those tests would try to see is that make the platform uh quote unquote better based on the metrics that you're using yeah and Eugene Wei has this great post about, he calls it status as a service, and talks about how humans are status hungry monkeys. And we use these platforms as the incentives teach us to. And again, like, you know, it's not like this is the first time society is fraying, like we had a

Holocaust before Twitter and Facebook. So I don't think they're the cause of all evil. But I do think that the public discourse that we have is important and it does lead to you know a lot of outcomes in real life and so if we can find ways to improve it versus say oh this is just the way it is it's just going to be better for all of us and we can maybe you know I know it's we're not in a time where we can start talking about social media with this utopian view that it was talked about in the beginning, but I don't think the promise is, uh, is gone yet. I think we can get to a better place with social media, just not the type of social media we have today. Yeah. And the other thing I always, you know, remind people of, uh, and I'm biased. Look,

I worked at some of these companies, right. It's just like, they've had a net positive impact on society, in my opinion, um, in the sense of, you know, how many people are now connected and all this stuff. Now there's bad things that came with it. I think they would be the first ones to admit that, you know, there's challenges and they've got to try to solve them. But I think that these are really important conversations. And really what we're asking every large tech company to do is do the impossible, right? Give us all the benefits without any of the downsides. But some of the downsides are definitely worth focusing on and addressing in the short term. What's going on with Google and Amazon and some of the non-social media large

tech companies in your opinion? Yeah. So Google is in the middle. So in the book, I talk a little bit about how Google, people think Google is this company that figured out how to do search and just wrote it to a multi, you know, 100 billions of dollars of valuation, and that was it. But Google is this company that's really gone through so many different transformations in its history. It started out as a website you would access on Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer. Then it really became a browser extension on Internet Explorer. I don't know if, you know, many people remember but um the primary way that people used to access google was through google toolbar which is an extension you would install onto internet explorer and it would like show up in

the browsers you know chrome every chrome is everything that's not part of the browsing window and you would type your searches in and it would show up in the browser actually more than 60 of google search went through toolbar at a certain time so google was an extension um And then the Google team saw, led by Sundar Pichai, who's now the CEO of Alphabet, they saw that Microsoft was starting to mess with them a little bit with that toolbar. As you might imagine, Microsoft was like, we're delivering billions of dollars of value to Google, and we own the browser. So why are we continuing to do this? And so Google realized that the longer it depended on Microsoft, which was then working on live search, which would become Bing, it was going to be dead. And that's when it really had to build its own browser.

And it's funny, I remember seeing ads for Chrome and being like, why is Google building a browser? Why is the search engine so intent on the browser? But Chrome saved the company. And without building its own successful browser where you can type your searches in the address bar, we might be binging today. That might be the verb. and so that that's obviously chrome worked out really well for them so google's safe but then we move from desktop to mobile all of a sudden they need to reinvent again and they do that using android which they acquire and then build up and then you know we start we start getting into this mobile world all of a sudden voice computing happens and what you do with google as you ask it questions you know what time is is this going to happen at you know where did this take place and people start asking the you know amazon echo these questions this is google's bread and butter so google needed to reinvent again uh and that's where it started developing the google

assistant sundar brings the whole company together uh and said he does he puts this big slide up in front of the in front of the company and it's all google's products and there's like this squiggly line and it points to assistant and said the number one thing that we're doing in this company is turning what we have into one cohesive assistant uh the google assistant and i think that like this is going to be google's future is whether it can make that assistant overtake um you know the echo i can't say here let me pause uh mute it um sorry overtake alexa uh or um you know it can't lose that and and if google if the google assistant is good then all of a sudden it propels all the google products you use it propels android and it propels the google home which is still

second to the echo but if you look at the order um you know the echo is has the lead then you got google then there's like an other category and somewhere deep inside that other category which has very few units sold as apple's home pod um so apple is totally uh letting this revolution slip buy it um in terms of amazon you know amazon's like this invention factory uh its culture you know i talked a little bit about you know working on ideas versus working on execution and its culture has um you know baked in an like incredible technology that allow its employees to um focus on invention and that's why amazon's been able to go from you know a online bookseller to a massive first-party marketplace, third-party marketplace, logistics and fulfillment operation, a cloud

services platform, a voice computing platform, a hardware manufacturer, and a grocer and an Academy Award-winning movie studio is because the company knows how to operate. Its process is baked in. And we're starting to see some of the fruits of its most ambitious AI program called Hands Off the Wheel. And I go into that in depth in the book. Hands Off the Wheel is a way that Amazon used machine learning to automate a good amount of tasks in its retail organization. So its retail employees were on the phone with brands like Tide and saying, we need this many detergent units and this many fulfillment centers at this time for this price. And Amazon looked at itself and was like, we got two decades worth of retail purchase data. Why are we having people do this? We can

just have software. And then slowly but surely over the last few years, they've worked to automate all these tasks. So if you're tied right now, a machine sends you the purchase order, you get an email, right? You go and negotiate with a portal. The pricing and promotions are all done with technology, not people. Used to be a very big organization inside Amazon. And by freeing those people up, the company's really been able to invent, you know, his next new products. My favorite story is one of this guy, Dilip Kumar, who ran pricing and promotions in the retail organization. He goes and spends like a year and a half under Bezos taking meetings that Bezos was taking as a technical advisor. By the time he's done, pricing and promotions is totally

automated. So he can't go back to this division. So he gets together with a bunch of people from Amazon's retail organization that are feeling displaced and need to do something new. And they say, why don't we use technology to solve the most annoying part of shopping in real life, which is checkout and that is the team that developed amazon go which you can just walk in and take something out uh and then it charges you um you know you there's no scanning you scan in once with a qr code grab what you want and then walk out it feels like stealing probably the future brick and mortar retail period i think that these systems we're going to see in supermarkets all over the place uh and and in stores and and i think that amazon's really hit on something with

this. And it all happened because they were able to use technology to change the way they work and make room for more invention and have the process to invent. So I think that company is really good shape from a business standpoint. The only caveat I'll make with Amazon is the company needs more empathy. You can tell by the way that they've engaged in this coronavirus moment that they've fired their whistleblowers. They've tried to run a nasty PR campaign targeting somebody in their fulfillment center that spoke up saying he was inarticulate and they wanted to make him the face of worker resistance. And honestly, it's much easier just to treat your workers well than to go through all this effort and the PR campaign to try to make somebody look

bad. And I think at a certain point, Amazon needs to realize that because consumers might one day actually say, I want to go to a company that's first priority is making sure that the people that work for it are safe and making sure that the businesses that sell into it are sustainable. That's good for everyone. And if Amazon doesn't prioritize that, it's going to be in bad shape. Yeah, that's a fantastic overview. It's fascinating how the use of technology across these companies, this idea of not spending time supporting things that have been built and just constantly innovating, constantly inventing, you know, is kind of that layer of commonality across all of them. In terms of also inventing or building something, you recently made the jump

to leave your job and go it alone. Maybe talk a little bit about what you're doing and kind of what the thought process was behind leaving and starting big technology. Yeah, so I was at BuzzFeed for five years as a senior technology reporter. In BuzzFeed years, I think that's 35 or so. It's a long time in a digital media company. And I released Always Day One in April. And it happened, we released in the middle of a pandemic, which is, if I write a second book, I'll make sure to not release in a pandemic because it adds an element of challenge to the whole system that isn't great. And I basically kind of looked at what's going to happen to me in my life over the next handful of years and said, you know, I could stay here and,

you know, stay in this staff job, hopefully, and try to ride out what's going on in this pandemic and, you know, keep reporting on these companies and the traditional news ecosystem. Or I could just try to take my future and my destiny in my own hands. And that means helping to get the word out about the book in a way that I wasn't beforehand, because again, like full-time reporter job is pretty demanding and i i think that there are some lessons in the book that are valuable to you know anyone no matter what industry they're in and and you know spent a long time working on it and figured it was worth that effort and then the other thing is so you know i think that and and you are you know totally you know uh you've been early and ahead of this uh for a long

time is that I think we're seeing a movement of reporters, people with perspective, you know, people with something to say, to do it without a filter, to do it with as a direct relationship with readers and listeners. And, you know, I've been writing about this for a while and seeing it take place. And I thought it was possible. I believed in and you know, what people like you are doing and said, it's time for me to give it a shot. So along with going and spending, you know, leaving and spending more time, you know, getting the word out about Always Day One, I wanted to start my own publication. So I did, went to Substack. I've had discussions with the Substack guys for a while. And, you know, I trust them. I think it's a good platform

and a good place to start out. So I'm starting this new newsletter called Big Technology on Substack. And it's not entirely new, like I've been writing a newsletter for BuzzFeed called the Tech Giant Update. But again, trying to do that in between stories. Now I'm going to make the newsletter my main focus. And I'm sure like, you know, you've done this, right? You know, you know, when you send a newsletter, and you have people that reply, and then you can start having a conversation with them. That's so rewarding, so much more rewarding than putting it on a website. So I'm really looking forward to that back and forth interaction with subscribers. and then you know i'm going to do a podcast as well um and you know people subscribe to the

newsletter then they'll you know be able to get a heads up when the podcast comes out but to me you know the best part of my day is spent speaking with interesting people and trying to figure out what their worldview is like and you know i just think that it would be pretty cool to be able to release those conversations to the world uh and so i'm right now trying to find a partnership with a media company i've had a couple of good conversations so far where like we would do like a uh sort of an audience for revenue yeah audience for content trade and then a revenue split essentially saying you know i i think i have a pretty good idea of how to make this content you know you have an established audience you know i want to start big and so the idea would

be to do this partnership you know they help drive listeners and i'll you know go out there and make sure to to make great audio and so i think by the end of june we'll have something to announce on that front that's awesome yeah one of the things going back to the kind of the social media conversation and the algorithms uh i keep going back and forth on um there's definitely this value of uh rather than write an article put it into a publication on the web and then have that distributed through social media and hope that the algorithm gods are are kind and give you a big boost uh email is still one of the best ways to deliver content right you have that relationship directly with um the reader uh recently i've had two separate people say yes

But don't forget that Google, of all companies, could put you in the promotions tab, right? And there can be a little bit of filtering there as well. And so how have you just thought about, you know, there's the content creation, but then there's the delivery. And so it sounds like you're pursuing still written and audio, so kind of two different channels there. But any thoughts about just like what you can do to continue to, you know, really cultivate a relationship directly with the reader or the listener and kind of wean yourself off the dependency on some of these larger platforms? Yeah, I think it's a reality today. Like anyone who says that email is totally filter free is probably kidding themselves. Like you definitely are going through a filter with email.

Like you mentioned Google's or, you know, Microsoft's if you're sending there. The one thing that I found really amazing about email is just that, like, when you go – and inbox is a pretty sacred space for people. People get mad if they see a bad email. They're okay if they see a bad tweet, even if it's in the promotions tab. So there's a lot of trust coming in. And you have to – I think, like, from my perspective, when I'm going to send an email, you know, I'll make sure that it's going to be worth somebody opening it if they do decide to make that click. and then you know people have controls right like you can drag an email and i've done this with plenty of newsletters that i like i've seen it show up in my promotions tab i can drag it into

my main inbox and say google will say do you want this to appear here from now on and i'll do that but yeah ultimately we are at the mercy of big technology company algorithms whether we like it or not and i think the thing that we can do is give ourselves the best our best chance to be able to cut through the noise and so if you ask me would you rather send an email or send a tweet an email is a much much better way to do it i mean i'll do both uh but i i just think the two-way communication on emails is so great and there's something something else is nice about it i don't know if you found this with sending your email but the privacy uh is cool um where people feel that comfortable to share thoughts they wouldn't share like as a reply on twitter you know like a

reply on twitter you know typically you'll get like you know you're a dumbass and here's why a reply on email you might actually get something civil and something constructive and a way to think about the issue uh in a different way um and and then more stories will come that way so i'm pretty uh freaking excited to get sending and you know over the past week i was going through some of the replies to the tech giant update and just like man like a lot of people were like you know send these more often and i was like yeah but i'm writing stories full time so to be able to combine that is something i'm stoked for yeah i i could definitely vouch for the idea that the feedback is much much more thoughtful via email uh sometimes literally people

write back like paragraphs and paragraphs and i'm like wow you really care right like like you really were listening and, uh, and thoughtful about this. So definitely agree there. How do you think that this affects, right? Like going from, uh, working at a large publication where, uh, when you reach out to sources or, um, anything like that, uh, it's a Buzzfeed reporter is reaching out to now it's Alex is reaching out, right. And you're going to build the name of a publication, but on day one, um, you are better known than the publication right now over time, hopefully that kind of flips, but how do you think that that affects one, the stories that you can kind of get access to, to the relationship with sources and maybe kind of talk through if

you did any analysis there or thinking as to whether that would change the way that you actually could cover some of this stuff? Yeah, it's going to be hard. Like I don't think it's going to be easy. Like you have to, in this world, you have to earn it, right? People are going to see big technology. Many of them have never seen a story from it. I've never even seen my intro post and so i'm gonna have to go and earn trust and and make a mark by you know producing big hard-hitting stories and so like my goal i'm gonna give it a couple of weeks before launch because i have a couple i'm reporting out but i want to come out guns blazing um and then like the other thing is that like you know i kind of know what this is like um because i was one of

the original members and BuzzFeed Silicon Valley Bureau. And we came on the scene and, you know, BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed had done some tech content before, but it wasn't known to be a hard hitting tech desk. And so we had to literally prove to the world that we were capable of doing the work that they should pay attention to. And that required a lot of hard work that required, you know, getting on the phone and, you know, sometimes sources are just like, okay, but buzzfeed you know or they were like you know i'll speak to anyone that's what that's one i love oh okay you're for with buzzfeed i'll speak to anyone you know which was literally what happened to me people like oh i thought this was for ad age you know now people would much rather speak

to buzzfeed than ad age i think um and so yeah we had to you can't we had to work hard and we had to punch hard and we couldn't go into it with an ego or a narrative right i feel like if you go in knowing knowing what you're doing and then writing original pieces not narrative driven pieces you know you go and writing stuff that people actually get value out of not like the 10th version of the story that everybody's written that's where you're going to make people want to start to speak with you and I mean I don't know like to me the cool thing about starting this on my own is if I get this right I can keep it you know that's pretty neat for sure and I think part of the allure of going out on your own, right, for journalists that I've seen do this

is, hey, look, I get to write the stories that I want to write, right? And it's not to say that they couldn't always do that, but there's definitely editors and kind of other things at play when you're writing stories. And so that's an attractive component to it. But what you lose is those editors, you lose some of the support staff, you lose some of the resources. So kind how have you thought about um the pros and cons of those large organizations right you get some freedom but you also lose some resources and just kind of like how do you balance that in your head and think about it as you kind of start um now yeah so i mean i've done seven years as a full-time reporter after starting out freelance um and i feel like if i were to do this starting out i

wouldn't know what I was doing. Like, I mean, I started out, you know, doing Forbes blogging when Forbes would let lots of people, you know, go and use its platform. And that was like a good learning moment for me. And it was a way for me to sort of make mistakes in real time. Now, like, I feel like I have an idea, you know, of what I'm doing. And I feel confident that I'll be able to find the stories that are going to cut through. And like, you know, with my newsletter beforehand, I think that um watching the type of stuff that i would write and how it would resonate with people um was like a good chance for me to sort of uh uh give this a give this a shot experiment a little bit and see if it could be something more broadly uh more broad you know you can't uh you can't um

i feel like everyone could use an editor like you can't replace the value an editor brings um so while i'm excited to start assigning myself stories uh i am gonna miss that second set of eyes Um, you know, this isn't something interesting, um, that Ben Smith brought up in one of his recent columns about, you know, people going out and going independent, whether it's celebrities or like, you know, um, you know, people with influential tech followings or like B-list journalists like myself, you know, it's like, um, uh, the, the services that are, um, the services that are there for you, like Substack may eventually start doing something like, you know once they get enough people are they gonna have an editor on call that you can just

uh you know give a call to and talk a little bit about i can see that happening are they gonna have health care okay that might be more of a stretch but the editor thing certainly certainly possible and you know until that day like you know when i have something that's pretty you know controversial or you know um i'm not sure about i'll just gut check it like i'm lucky to have friends who are reporters who you know I probably can't ask them every day but every now and again I'm sure I can say hey can you just take a look at this before I hit the publish button and I don't know if it's gonna be something that will be smooth all the time like it will definitely have hiccups in the way

that working in a established media corporation you know didn't you know wouldn't have as many of and you know my approach to this is to admit that that's can happen to ask my readers to trust me to admit when I mess up because I will and to learn and grow from it yeah I look you already know this but I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you the whole key is the persistence of just doing it in a very disciplined manner right hey if I'm gonna write every Monday write every Monday and make the mistakes and stuff but I think I've been writing on Substack for two years now, actually, as of May. And that's probably the most defendable thing I've done is I just did it every day, right? And a lot of other people started out

and then stopped at some point. How do you think about this changing the content you write? And what I mean by that is when you're writing a story at BuzzFeed, it's less your opinion and it's much more kind of reporting the facts now you do have that trust of the reader right they're subscribing to hear from you you think that that leads to more opinionated uh pieces do you want to write more opinion like talk a little bit about how you um kind of balance uh the opinion component given that now it's less hey i'm just reading this on buzzfeed and maybe i don't know or I haven't paid attention to who the writer is to now know I'm specifically getting this because I've chosen to get content from Alex. Yeah. I mean, I think the reporting will lead

the way. So people are going to hear the reporting first and then my opinion second. But I think that there's definitely going to be more opinion in the stuff that I write. And I'm excited to do that. I don't think there should be in any form of journalism. Well, actually, Maybe that's debatable, but like every venue you should have, if you have an opinion, you should have, um, the ability to write it. Um, otherwise, you know, we're holding stuff back from readers and what, you know, who does that, who, like, yeah, what type of good does that do? I'm not into it. Um, so yeah, I think the readers of, of this newsletter will hear what I think for real. Um, there, there might be surprised, like, you know, like I talked about narratives, like oftentimes coverage goes in narratives. you know people say what's the big story and then they all try to advance you know and i'm just kind of skeptical of that a lot of the time like people will not hear you know after reading a story in the new york times in the wall street journal and buzzfeed and fortune and in forbes they won't see my you know same story they're going to see a different perspective from me um so it's going

to be um there'll be a lot of first person there'll be um some opinion i mean my book is like a good example and always day one um you'll see the reporting lead you'll get i feel like a reader can kind of get lost in the reporting and then i'll bring it back into like what i saw and what i felt um and yeah like i think it'll be it'll be a two-way conversation um it will be me learning from subscribers them learning from me and who knows like it might go in different interesting directions we could get spiritual we can think about you know things like meaning which i think is important to think about when you think about tech and ultimately we'll just i'll just let that two-way discussion drive yeah it's really interesting too because uh you keep mentioning

this two-way discussion and it's almost like what you actually end up doing is you end up building a community right and that community is there to um kind of consume the content that you're creating but then the discussion afterwards there's kind of intellectual satisfaction to it but also too that's what ultimately uh brings value as well and so um as part of that like how do you think about uh monetizing all of this is this a uh there's some for free and some that people will pay is it an ad supported model like how do you kind of we're talking about it as if you've been doing it for years obviously you're just starting but like like what does that monetization look like um you know as you see it today yeah so um i have like three main monetization goals

um one is um i'll just do the easy one first to sell another book um so to me that is the first thing I'm going to do is do my best to get always day one out there as much as I can. And hopefully that gives me another opportunity to write another book. Second, with the newsletter, I'm going to go to a model of a free article, probably a free article a week, and then maybe two or three for subscribers only through the week. So it will be reader supported. And then third will be the podcast. Like I mentioned, I'm going to try to build a big audience on that and then just do revenue share with, uh, with the media company. I mean, if, um, you know, with, with the podcast and the newsletter, like if the, I mean, I'm kind of curious what you think about this, but like

if the podcast does really well, or the newsletter does really well, um, then maybe I can, you know, make the other one free. Like if the newsletter crushes it, you know, probably do like the podcast, like ad free, or if the podcast gets a big audience, then I can move and make the newsletter uh you know free to everyone um to me they they all reinforce each other and i'm not you know my goal isn't to get rich off of this my goal is to sort of be able to do this type of work that i love to do and share you know what i know about these companies and what i know about the tech world you know without an end date uh in a way that i can support myself independently and not be reliant on somebody else to give me the permission to do that. I think you're thinking

about it the right way. I mean, that's what's so crazy about all this, right? And I've obviously thought a lot about it, but I forget the woman's name who coined the term of the passion economy, basically this idea that, you know, look, you only need a couple hundred people to pay for whether it's reader or listener supported uh content and most people could replace their salary right with just a couple hundred people and uh and so what's i think really interesting is um when you see journalists leaving to go start this uh you know you did a pretty good job outlining like it's the same body of work yeah there's some tweaks and maybe with some less resources whatever but like you're still writing about the things that you were writing about and

want to write about, you're just choosing to monetize that work in a different way. And it involves taking more risk, right? Because if you're unsuccessful in getting people to pay for it, then obviously you make less money, but you also have uncapped upside. And so it's very interesting to kind of see, you know, some people are very attracted to that. And some people say, hey, look, just pay me my paycheck. And, you know, I don't want to ever think about monetization in my life. I just want to do my work. And so it's kind of cool now that the tools are in place for other people um who previously didn't have this you know avenue to pursue they have it now right totally yeah and you know i've i've a high risk tolerance um and i've been you know i mean started

out on the business side as opposed to starting out in journalism so i've seen the changes in the media industry you know reported on the changes in media and social media and you know succeed or fail, like this will be a cool experience to kind of see what it's all about once I get out there. I love that attitude. Um, before I finish up, I always ask two questions and then you get to ask me one question to finish. Um, what is the most important book that you've ever read other than your own? Um, this is, I love the book, the forever war. Uh, it's by Dexter Filkins. Have you read it? Fantastic book. Yes. I'm getting chills just thinking about it because we're never going to have, so for your listeners who haven't read it, it's a book by

this correspondent who'd been at the New York Times and the New Yorker covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I don't think we're ever going to have another book like this because he was sort of the last war reporter to write a book about what it was like to embed with people who were fighting with the U.S., where they still needed the filter. There was no YouTube for the Taliban to use when he was in Afghanistan. And so he got unbelievable access and is able to tell this fascinating first-person story about the sort of repercussions of the U.S. action in those two countries. And I think that, yeah, I don't know. I just was blown away by every single chapter. that he, that he told. And I think that it's a good read for anyone that's trying to figure out

sort of what actually happens when the U S N goes in and invades, because too often where, you know, we, our networks won't really show us what's happening there. Our newspapers won't, won't cover the full story. They do a good job getting the basic details, but we don't really see the extent. And I think the book does a really good job of that. Yeah. It's one of these books that um not only has great content kind of the access and just information you can't get anywhere else and then it's also very well written as well right a lot of times you get one or the other this one has both and and uh man that's i read that a while ago but that's a fantastic suggestion uh second question is a more fun one which is um aliens believer or non-believer

oh pop you got me on the tough one here at the end uh i i'm gonna um just say that if we had if if if there are aliens out there i'll be shocked but not surprised like okay why because math says there should be um but we haven't seen any any of them yet and i know there's that theory theory that like you know maybe most civilizations get to a certain point and then they annihilate themselves and right now that seems fairly believable um so it's possible that all the other aliens have annihilated themselves at this point and we haven't really made contact with them but i mean we think about it universe is big and you know the the chance of another earth-like planet is not out of the picture so you know if they're here um oh yeah

like you remember when there was that comment that comment that was gonna came pretty close and i think i had tweeted something like you know you know appreciate your interest in visiting but we're going through some shit right now maybe try another time that would sort of be my message to the aliens like or maybe they should come now because you know might as well you know deal with all the crap at one time that would be the most on-brand 2020 thing ever right it's like oh Aliens came too. Of course they did. Exactly. What do you think, Pop? I definitely think that the math suggests that there's other life, right?

I cheat because I've asked this question out of 300 people and I've heard every variation of answer. But I think the two big questions are, are you talking about life or intelligent life? So let's just say that we're talking intelligent life. um okay math would suggest it's out there somewhere uh but then two and and i forget who's the person who originally said this to me as part of their answer but they said yes but then you have to cut it also by time and what they basically were saying is like the odds from if you just look at how vast the galaxy is uh is that there is other intelligent life out there but they could have been here a million years ago right or they could be here a

million years from now and i said look you know you're blowing my mind to the point where like i feel you know like it uh not only small insignificant and also just really stupid right because these things are so complex yeah um but but like the math suggests it and so from a probability standpoint um you know we it is probably out there but we have but we haven't uh identified it like that's the other thing is right is how we already discovered them and just haven't said it yet i don't i don't go that far have you seen the videos of the flying saucers that are being captured by the air force and are you buying and selling on the idea that that's extraterrestrial life uh so i've seen them um i don't know what to think of them frankly and and

really what i mean by that is there's two pieces to it one is uh there's something there right unless they're like literally it's a optical illusion or something but but it appears that something's there two is that the part that actually makes the uh argument around alien life or something else uh the most believable to me is actually the fact that um there's multiple reports of things that we can't explain with physics today right so hey we've got this understanding of science but something that we saw we can't explain through what we're seeing um look you know there was plenty of things in science we didn't understand 100 years ago that we now understand today because the technology whatever so doesn't mean that we can't figure

it out but just like that to me is um probably one of the more compelling uh arguments for like why aliens would exist okay i got one more one last question for you sorry i've taken over your interview but you really sparked a topic of interest for me um all right so i'm sure you have friends in the tech world who believe that we're in a simulation. How do you react when you hear that? 2020, anything's possible. No, I think that, again, it's a probability thing. People way smarter than me have done all the math and can rattle it off. I don't know how probable it is um what i would say is uh when you start to go down this path of like simulation aliens

whatever um i actually kind of come at it weird because because what look from a life experience standpoint right like i went to iraq right i was at war like i saw all that kind of stuff and you just get reminded like we're all gonna die right and so like is it a simulation are aliens like war all this chaos whatever like we're all gonna die and uh you and i are about the same age um and uh you just kind of start thinking like yeah i think i've got like another 50 years or so right like like that's what the math would tell me is you know probability wise but that could not happen and i could die tomorrow and so it's just like let's just enjoy what we have right like let's go live our lives let's go do the cool shit now because uh if we're living

in a simulation or anything else like i almost don't want to know right it's like let me believe that i'm actually doing the things that i want to do yeah it's like the old question like if you do the day you're gonna die what you want to know nah oh no thanks keep that away for sure where can we send people to uh one find the book and then two to uh to sign up for uh for big technology Yeah, so if you Google always day one, or Bing always day one, or type it into whatever weird search engine you use, you'll be able to find it everywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BookBound, the whole deal. Apple Books, if that's your cup of tea. I haven't been banned on Apple Books yet, so that's good. and um the newsletter is just bigtechnology.substack.com um and yeah that thing will be firing up any day now so i'd love to see you all there awesome awesome man we'll link to both of those in the uh in the description as well and then uh appreciate you doing this uh you know

best of luck as you go down this path because i think it's uh it's pretty cool that uh that you're doing it and i got no doubt that you're uh you're gonna be pretty successful yeah thank you, Papa. I'm looking forward to continuing to listen. All right, guys, thanks for listening to that episode. I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did. My goal is to educate as many people with these conversations as possible. So please go subscribe on your favorite podcast channel, leave a five-star rating and a review. These things really help the podcast get higher up on the popularity charts, which ultimately brings more people to learn. Also, don't forget you can go to YouTube to watch each conversation in video format as well. Just search my name,

Anthony Pompliano, on YouTube, and you'll find our channel with hundreds of awesome and informative videos. Thanks again for listening to this one, and I'll see you for the next one.