TRASHFUTURE - National Posting Service, Part 1 (feat. Mike Isaac)

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

This week, we're talking to Mike Isaac of the New York Times about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. And, let's be real, his desire to be loved, his insane right wing tendencies, the slow grinding of the platform into the ground, and the bizarre tech-libertarian freak thought undergirding all of the PayPal Mafia's conception of the world. This is part one of two! Get the second part on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/national-posting-75372006 *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trash Future listeners. We're doing an extra free one this week because the whole Elon Musk Twitter meltdown took place while we were on tour in Australia, and we didn't want to leave you hanging. We recorded an episode with Mike Isaac from The New York Times on the subject, and since the episode went long, we split it into two parts. The second part is available on Patreon, and it's been linked in the show notes. And also, since I've got you here, look for some unlocked Britonology episodes on the free feed and on the $5 tier as well.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this second post-Australia bonus episode of TF. You all survived. None of you got, like, eaten by any of the, like, megafauna. No, not a single one of us. Not from lack of trying. Yeah. Milo and I saw Huntsman Spider, but it was far away.

Where do you see the Huntsman? In Brisbane, while walking to the venue. Oh, very cool. Yeah, it was great. It's myself and my fellow Australian Returnee. Yeah, I'm very sad about it. I was in Brisbane trying to, like, find ways to find the swooping bird. I did not find the swooping bird, despite all the warnings saying that I would.

I did find, it was called the Christmas beetle, and it's, like, one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. It just, like, sort of, just, like, fell on my lap and started, like, freaking out. Yeah, I imagine to, like, normal Australian people, that would just be, like, yeah, normal thing. But for me, it was a pretty traumatic time. Oh, right, like, call it the reverse Santa. And of course, the Australian not-returnee is Alice.

I'm ashamed. I'm very sad to have missed Australia, but, you know, I'm very hopeful that at some point we can come back and bring me with us. And the other two Australian returnees both still have plain madness because they stayed for longer. So it is Riley Hussain and Alice. And we are because we are we are talking about Elon Musk finally making comedy legal on Twitter, just like he finally

instituted road safety across the U.S. by making it so that you die if you drive. It is the New York Times's tech reporter, Mike Isaac. Mike, how's it going? Thanks for having me. I'm currently being swooped by birds right now, actually. So if you believe that feedback. Right. Oh, Jesus, that is a metaphor.

That's like the original swooping bird. It is kind of weird how, like, in the two weeks that we picked to be on tour and therefore disconnected from, like, the tech news cycle, the Elon Twitter thing happens. There's a sort of step change downward in the sort of whole world of crypto imploding, and that happens to be like the center of when Matt Hancock is on. I'm a celebrity. Get me out of here. It was like, yeah, it was like a scissorgy.

You know, the thing where all the planets line up. It was like a once in a lifetime astronomical event for our podcast specifically. And you were too busy getting attacked by Beatles. Yeah, it was like the one time where we can't really follow the news cycle because it's all live shows and everything happens. Well, you would wake up and you sort of go online and like you just get this splurge of like news, right? So you'd get all the sort of Matt Hancock stuff that we sort of kind of understand,

but not really. I imagine that we'd have understood the Matt Hancock stuff a lot more if we were sort of experiencing in real time, but you sort of wake up and you'd be like, oh, Matt Hancock, like a kangaroo ball. And also he said some things and loads of people are mad at him. And I was kind of like, yeah, you know, we like our Matt in sort of drips, right? Like an IV drip. And this was too much. It was like, it was like just getting a full shot of the good stuff.

It was like too rich for our blood. Realistically, I think my my issue with Matt going on, I'm a celebrity, was mainly that you don't need to put him in weird situations for him to be weird. Like he's funny when he's trying to be regular, not when he's like, that's also true. And like people were very surprised that he handled it all quite well, the various like humiliations, eating kangaroo penis, you know, being up to your neck and sewage, things of this nature.

And I just think he was he was very stoic about this as part of his like bid to retain or regain popularity. But I was a conservative MP, like no one who has been exposed to any sort of like parliamentary whips is going to be afraid of kangaroo penis. They have like been deadened psychologically by like years of abuse. There's no way that they're being phased by by the kangaroo penis. Yeah, so a strange, a strange series of events happening to a strange man, allowing him to recreate an Britain's most iconic political

ascrab on the bridge out of the torture jungle. I wish him a I wish him more sure. I wish him any more. I wish that either. No, no, because he like he might be trying to turn this into a media career, which would be very annoying. No, no, no, sorry. He by perfect to invite like, yeah, like one of the people who knows everything

about the stuff that's going on in Twitter and be like, anyway, Mike, so about Mad Hancock eating the kangaroo penis. I'm just wrong with it. About our disgraced former health secretary who went on a game show where he has to eat kangaroo penis for a few weeks. Yeah, but he also sort of became like a bit of, I mean, again, I don't know how much of this is true and how much of this is just like media kind of hyping him up, but he seems to somehow now be

but the country seems to be like Hancocked. Like there's no better way I don't know if we're Hancocked or not. I don't know. This is the thing I genuinely don't know if he's popular. I don't know how to feel about him anymore. I feel quite conflicted about us sort of adopting him as our own son. Well, did we like there was this thing where I was like, did we like were we somehow complicit in all this?

Like, did we kind of like the diamond Joe Biden? You know, are we responsible for this? Which which of the producers and I'm a celebrity, get me out of here, listens. This is a bonus episode. It's safe to comment on the Patreon, but no, it's I think what's very funny is like his attempt to become an actual reality TV star. Because I don't know if you all saw this, but he has a plan to like make a reality show of him like and like and Gina

delisio fixing up like like broken Chateau's and stuff in France. And it's going to be called Homes with Hancock. That's his main idea is to do Homes Under the Hammer, but it's not Hancock. OK, you know what? I've come around. I do wish him every success. I hope this pops off. And I hope he's forever followed around by like, you know,

bereaved families, skywriting what an asshole he is, you know. I have to apologize for my American brain, but I'm just picturing Will Smith in a beanie going around and fixing French Chateau's. Matt Hancock doesn't really fit into like an American physiology. I can't imagine an American Matt Hancock. Like in terms of like if if Hollywood did a movie about this, I'm not sure who you would get to play him because I don't think there are I don't think they make Americans who look like him.

He looks to British. I think you would get like if you if you put like James Marsden in like a nuclear reactor for a few hours, you might get it. Who played him in the Kenneth Branagh Boris movie? Because someone had to have done whoever that was. Whoever that was, if you're also a listener to the show, right in. We'd like to know how you got into character. But look, look, this is obviously not our main focus for the day.

My main question for for YouTube, for our audience and for Mike is have you dreamed this man because the information has released an article saying Elon Musk made his first speaking appearance in Aaron Nyer's dream life one night in mid-November. Nyer, a developer relations engineer at Google, dreamt that he was inside Twitter's headquarters where he spotted Musk exiting a meeting. He rushed over to the new Twitter owner and sounded out Musk's receptiveness to reinstalling Jack Dorsey as CEO.

This is a thing like multiple people across like various tech companies have now been on record as saying I have been dreaming about Elon Musk, which there's a couple of levels there. First of all, is Elon Musk like a sort of a malign psychic presence is one question. The other is what sort of like, you know, sheen empire sort of imperial eunuch is going around soliciting the dreams of like sort of mid-level Google people to see whether they're good portents or not.

So this is how business is done in America. Actually, Google engineers, who the succession. It's a matter of time until Google like hires an org, you know. Well, it's a matter of time until Google hires like like a kind of dodgy auger who will like release a page of page in your window. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Twitter, Twitter is after all, the bird website. And eventually someone's going to have to do augury on it if it dies.

So. So the fuck up that I am dreaming about Elon. Like, like, yes, but thank you. I just needed to know. No, I have been living this guy for a month that well, at least for this month straight and then earlier in the year when he was threatening to buy Twitter. And it's I think this is just PTSD with work dreams or whatever. But I very much identify with the Google engineer,

although I have no opinion on who should be the next CEO after it. If listeners of this start dreaming about Elon Musk after this, I'm genuinely concerned that we've presented sort of like a cognito hazard here. Well, this or some I try to avoid any like video of Elon Musk or like audio of him talking, just in case he's like, tries to colonize my psyche. I just kind of presume that this is like the intended effect of near a link. Yeah, maybe we got a bunch of monkeys to like dream about Elon Musk.

Sort of going for like mysticism on here is, you know, am I dreaming about Elon Musk or is he dreaming about me dreaming about him? You know, the universe is contained within the beat of a butterfly's wings. So the Androids dream of electric sheep. No, they dream of Elon Musk. So here's here's the Androids dream of electric sheep. Yes, the sheep are also on fire. That's here's Elon.

One person said they dreamed of Elon running wedding guests over in a Tesla. There he is on a horse. He's masterminding a real life Jurassic Park's working for a rocket ship, swigging milk from a stranger's fridge or even hunting humans. I love the idea of this going into a stranger's fridge and swigging milk. I do like that as a concept, not just with like Elon, but just in general. Of course, yeah, dreaming about a milk swing. Yeah, this is this is one of these one of these sort of happenings.

I think one of these things that is going on in the broader culture. And I think people dreaming about it is just another example of the kind of inculcated helplessness of a world in which we are supposed to where your main role is as a consumer of what other things produce. And you sort of have to just your the way that you act on the world is by picking what you consume. The moment that the moment that that sort of very, very limited power

gets occluded by anything, I think there is a psychic breaker. You realize, yeah, a weird dumb guy, like how many people must have dreamed about Trump during the campaign season? And then when he was when he was elected, you know, for the first year or so, where it was just like, oh, great, you know, the the structure of my life is now being materially affected by another weird, a dumber guy who I can't get rid of. He's coming into my house and he's drinking my milk psychologically.

Yeah, that's right. It really, it really, I mean, I do I it's hard to shake the illusions to Trump throughout this whole thing, even though folks that I'm talking to just keep making them, you know, and it's and it makes me like I keep avoiding it only because it feels too obvious. But you can just keep pinning it back to that. I do think that's that's really there. The illusion that I tend to make isn't isn't to Trump

who got what he was looking for and then sort of managed to kind of have some fun with it and kind of make it sort of work for him for at least a while. But to Liz, trust improve. Yeah, to Liz, trust. I kind of see that because Liz, Liz, trust and quasi-quarting like had very similar vibes to Elon Musk in that, like, they thought of themselves as insurgents within the sort of like the power structure, whether that's like tech or whether that's the Conservative Party.

And the idea is we come in, we do, we move fast, we break things, we present this like radical disruptive program. It upsets all the right people. Everyone else loves us. It's very successful. And they presented it and everyone hated it. And it made sort of like genuine, like by genuine metrics of economic success, it was a failure.

And they're just sort of left holding the bag. And I feel a little bit like that's where Elon is with Twitter. Also, like one thing to bear in mind is that the only people that really kind of were on board of the quasi and Liz Trust thing were all the weird nerds in like all the fintanks and stuff. And like with Elon, it's the same as this, that the scale is so much bigger. Just sort of hyping yourself up to do the thing. Yeah.

And actually, like one question I really have for you Mike, like as because we talk about Elon nerds quite a lot. But like, I don't know how much of the actual percentage of people on Twitter are Elon nerds, whether we just see them so much. Yeah, you know, I mean, so just to back up, I had not reported on Elon before. It just is I never I'm not a Tesla reporter. I'm not a SpaceX or or or Neuralink reporter.

So like this is a lot of this is new for me just in the context of him. But I've been writing about Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of tech companies for a long time. And so as I've been sort of doing these stories, I have been flooded with just like literally the weird nerd brigade, just like sort of enters my mentions and is just and I'm pretty dispassionate, you know, as much as I can be just because of, you know, what my job is and how, you know, for better or worse, how they sort of want me to to act on a lot of this stuff.

But I think the, you know, I'm less like rallying against him in certain ways than other folks are and more just like, here's the shit that he's doing and you can make that judgment. And it's pretty insane shit. And like, and it's still like getting brigaded by a bunch of folks who are saying you just don't appreciate it. And like, and I like paying attention to the subreddit too. I don't know if you all ever look in the Elon Musk subreddit,

but that has been truly unhinged. It's very bad. I don't actually recommend it, but it's been truly unhinged, especially as more of his haters come in and post like, look at this fucked up thing he's doing and then the folks pushing back saying, you just don't get it sort of thing. So I think he has broad support, but like, what I'm curious about is if this really crashes his image in a way that he never had to reckon with before,

because he's like putting more of himself out there, I think, in the last couple of years, then people like really got experiences of him in my opinion, because like it was mostly just mythologizing and like the book and the rocket man shit. And so now he's like tweeting random conspiracy theories that are poking holes in how let's say like climate change activists or folks who consider themselves liberal are starting to be like, oh, this guy fucking sucks more than I thought he did.

Well, it's the, this is something actually I have sort of captured for later on as well, which is like, well, that Elon Musk was in addition to being a creature of Silicon Valley, in addition to being a creature of its kind of, let's say more overtly right wing, like say culturally right wing as well as economically right wing, as opposed to like California ideology. He's also a key is if nothing else, a creature of zero interest rates. He is a creature of a world in which valuations just go up because they go up

because it's a place to put money and where, and especially at the end, right at the end of that period in the sort of, as in the sort of 2018-19 and through to 2022, there was this phenomenon that a lot of financial journalists, especially like Matt Levine and Bloomberg referred to as the Elon Musk reality distortion field, which is that, which is, which is that simply by saying, I am going to purchase a Dogecoin, he can cause huge fluctuations in its market capitalization by like just making lots and lots of people just buy into it. And then the more people know about that, they don't even care what Elon Musk thinks,

but they know enough people care what Elon Musk thinks to buy into it and so on and so on. And that was the product of his reputation. Again, much, not just created by himself, but created by a lot of the present company, excluded world of tech journalists, who would frequently just reprint what he would say. It's very funny now that all of those people are like, well, I used to respect him, but now he's changed. He's taken some turn. He's not the same person anymore. Because I think if you go back and look, I don't think that stands up to scrutiny. I think he's always been like this. It's just, as you say, he's like,

allowed himself more people to see this. Because now he's locked into posting. He just has to do it, which is tremendously bad for anyone, I would say. And his most relatable quality, probably. Yeah, I was going to say he's just like me for real. The really funny thing though is that increasingly, he's now 24-hour tech support for weird alt-right guys who have extremely petty beefs about their accounts being shadow banned. And because he's positioned himself in this way, he has to answer Super Hitler 1488 being like, why aren't people liking my posts?

And he has to do it within a couple of hours. It's a hell of his own making. He's like, I'm interesting. I'll look into that. It is quite funny how he sort of take over of it. Well, it's sort of like actions towards Twitter where it kind of feels, and based on what I've seen of the notes already, I'm sure we'll go into this in more detail, that he sort of oscillates between being really, really obsessed with Twitter, but also not really enjoying the whole process very much. And not least because a lot of these guys who are like blowing smoke up his ass and stuff are now just like Matt Walsh being like, Elon, people keep posting this picture of,

no, not Matt Walsh. James, what's his name? James Lindsay. James Lindsay. Yeah, the mad conceptual James. Ways of these James are too conceptual. He keeps getting mad, but people are posting pictures of him next to a known sort of like sex cult member. The Nexian lady. Yeah. And you have various other instances of this as well. And it's just very much, and I don't know. A lot of it really just comes down to, or from what it seems like, you have a lot of people who felt that once Elon took over Twitter,

they would like have a really good time on it because they felt that like what was really holding back their posts from getting like fire numbers were like the woke left who were like turning like turning down the dials on their posts. And then once you sort of, because I had an interaction with one of these accounts the other day where like they had bought a blue check and you know, all that stuff. And like despite buying the blue check for what I assume because they want more visibility and more like people to engage with them on Twitter, they were still like only getting about two or three likes per post maximum. And I just like kind of wonder like at what point do these guys sort of realize that like,

oh fuck, you know, yeah, this can't be because my tweets suck ass. It must be because there's like one woke left guy in the basement somewhere who keeps turning down the dial on my post specifically. I wonder if Liz Truss had like an analog for these guys. I wonder if there were like sort of psycho think tank guys who are about to go into the treasury and thinking, I'm going to have a fantastic time in there doing sort of like freedom economics and we're out within two weeks. Yeah, I'll tell you, there were those guys. It's the woke bond markets people. Yeah, the woke markets who keep publishing their reports without capital letters. They're the ones that are about, they're the ones who keep the economy. So I'm going to resetting

a little bit here. So what we've said about Elon and Twitter, I think has largely been proven basically right, which is that he and a group of his weirdest friends have been increasingly radicalized by like Slate Star Codex or Crypto or stories they tell themselves about local politics in San Francisco and thinking about Meet Free Mondays at UC Davis. They purchased a different company than they thought they were, they thought that they were thought they purchased a different company than they actually purchased and are proceeding to be really strange about it and appear to be driving it into the ground specifically because of this shared PayPal mafia ideology that they all have, which is I think described as the cathedral and the bizarre.

Yeah, I brought this into the thing. So I want to talk about this. I want to say first and foremost, I hate that I have to engage seriously with the ideas of a man called Curtis Yavin. You may know him as Mencius Moldberg. He has been a huge influence on Peter T on that whole sort of like group. And the crucial thing to remember about him is that he is a deeply stupid and unserious man. However, because his deeply stupid and unserious ideas have seriously influenced deeply stupid people like Elon Musk, we got to talk about them. And so one of them is this idea of the cathedral. And the cathedral is sort of like it's like baby's first Marxist ideology, right? It's like, wait a second, all of these guys who are in positions of power all seem to have shared

interests. But where your Marxist gets off that train at, yeah, of course they do because they class organises itself capital, organises to defend itself all these things. You're Moron, like Elon Musk goes, yeah, because they're all having secret meetings about what the new pronoun should be. And that organisation is what Yavin refers to as the cathedral. He's cribbing this from like an old social science book where like two methods of organising society are the cathedral and the bizarre. And the bizarre is like your sort of libertarian free exchange thing where everyone's all rationally consuming together. And so the cathedral is like this thing, this wokest thing that encompasses all modern sort of liberal ideology. And Elon has sort of been

led to believe that the cathedral is located within Twitter and it controls what all the posts are. And so now he's got in there, he's found that there isn't a big cathedral button. And so he's just wandering around opening closets, finding like affinity group t-shirts that say stay woke on them and going, nah, the cathedral. As someone's been following this for a while, Mike, does that sort of resonate with you and how he's thinking? No, I think that's really good. I think, I mean, it's very bad, but I think that's a good synopsis of it. Just one thing that really struck me, by the way, Riley, is like, I actually have sort of revisited as my career in tech journalism has gone like the eras of what tech coverage have looked like. And I wrote this book on Uber and

like a lot of my early Uber coverage was like, look at this sort of ascending company and the valuations are going crazy. And I think a lot of tech journals had to like reset their mindset in a lot of this. And I don't think I was one of the worst offenders by any means, but I do think that looking at them through the proper lens has been something that's grown over the past few years and at least folks are like trying to atone for it. I do, I totally agree, like it's what I was saying, like there are definitely sort of backroom slacks, this sounds super nerdy, backroom slacks and like sort of places where folks who share this sort of thinking, you know, convene and like post tweets from, I mean, me being at the New York Times is probably like a perfect example of like

cathedral stenographers, you know, for for the woke publication in the United States. You guys get like told what to write by the cathedral, you get like an email in the inbox at every morning, right? That's the idea. 100%. 100%. I sometimes miss it, but I check my spam. No, but that's the sort of that's like the I got into a fight with former ace, ace 16s, the Andreessen Horowitz investor the other day, because he sort of insinuated that I'm covering Twitter critically, because it's a competitor to my company. And therefore, my bosses are telling me to like to hit pieces, which I mean is absurd on a lot of different levels, but also like, think about how much I would have to be invested in the profitability of the New

York Times in order to change my entire like, it's just like all different conceptions of what they think, you know, worker mentality is what companies are, how they sort of move forward. But I do think, yeah, just to your point, Alice, like this, I do think that's a lot of the thinking in there right now. I think he's cleaning house specifically with these sort of layoffs and code reviews that he's making people post of like how much they've done in the past 10 days or seven days. And he wants to recruit ideologues that sort of line up behind him, because that's where he's comfortable. And that's how he feels like mission driven, I think, you know. So he wants basically, it's the way I sort of see this, and this is going to come up, I think,

again and again, is that if we understand Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter ideologically as like acting out this cathedral bizarre, as we say ideology, this idea, right, that fundamentally the guys who are mad at the cathedral, and we see this over and over again, they're sort of, they're looking for something that isn't there or rather, when they're talking about like ruling class organization, they don't see themselves as part of it. No, of course, that's what that's the advantage of having this like theory of the cathedral is that it allows you as a billionaire to feel like you're an outsider or an insurgent. You're not, you know, you don't have any sort of place in in reproducing the ideology of your class because

also, also they, when you're mad at the cathedral, generally speaking, you're most frequently mad at ads, like you're mad at the marketing for power. Yeah, it's branding. And it's like, I'm not mad at the existence of Chase Manhattan as a bank. I am mad because Chase Manhattan has a pride float, right? Does the pride float sort of meaning, meaningfully impact on the way Chase Manhattan does business? Probably not. Have there been like a lot of criticisms of this kind of like pinkwashing by by queer people? Sure. Is any of that registering? No, of course not. It's like, no, Chase Manhattan is woke now. The Marines are woke now. Whatever. Yeah. And this is kind of like an ultimate form of cope as well, because like the reason why they sort of say this

is because when you sort of point out, well, like, you know, in this country, but also like in the US too is like, well, kind of conservative, like the left haven't been in power like ever, right? And like in the case of the UK, like, you know, the conservative right wing party has been in power for 12 years. And I definitely wouldn't say that like the new labor government before was like a kind of like socialist or even sort of left wing. So and when they have to sort of acknowledge that they have to acknowledge that, oh, like, you know, it is kind of like the, you know, it is kind of conservative government and conservative politics, neoliberal politics, that have kind of caused this kind of real deterioration in, in living standards.

But as you sort of mentioned, like, they don't want to sort of see themselves as part of like that decline, in which like Elon Musk is very much sort of like a benefactor of like the post toward 2008 economy. The way that they sort of square that circle is, well, actually the left own all the cultural institutions, and there are no elections and stuff for that. So we can present ourselves at, you know, and Pete Steele kind of like says this quite directly, you know, we can kind of present ourselves as a true insurgents, because not only did we sort of like play the game by the rules, so to speak, but ultimately, culture has more influence than politics anyway. And that sort of seems to be like where Elon kind of comes from. I don't think

that he's a guy who's like read any of the books or like will understand it. But I definitely think that there are people who reads tweets and goes interesting. Again, he's just like me for real. He's like, I'm gonna say, shit, is that bad? You're telling me that the most credulous racist in the world is easy to red pill? But like, there's like lots of documentation about like Pete Steele. And like Pete Steele was like a guy who was like telling Elon to go by Twitter during the moments where he was like, oh, maybe this might not be a good idea. And I should just stay posting. But like you have guys who are very, very much invested, who then use Elon to kind of enact this fantasy. And Elon can

see himself. And I think ultimately, all his behavior, both online and offline, it's like it's much more like he just wants to have the vibe of like being someone who is liked and seen as cool. You can kind of prove that the cathedral is like an elite ideology for elites in that it allows no role for sort of like normal people, right? What we've actually seen, there's like the what you might think is an acknowledgement of this within, within Teal or Moberg or anyone else's theories is that like, there has been a genuine cultural shift in terms of how we talk about things like racism or homophobia or whatever,

that these things have become less popular, for instance. But the in order to have the theory of this this cathedral, it is that that that's a change that is being directed top down by a mysterious elite group of a few people. We're not going to get into who those people are, but maybe we can later in DMs, kind of like wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of thing. And it's purely an ideology for people who are used to elites getting their own way all of the time, and thinking, Oh, what must be happening is that I'm not I'm seeing a pride flag when I don't want to, because some other elite is doing that, because those are the only people who can affect changes. And indeed, like this is a chase Manhattan when it puts out a pride float,

a pride float is not actually like any less homophobic organization. The US Marines, the US Marine Corps is not like necessarily a great place to work if you're if you're LGBT, like, and is not improved as much as one much by them doing a post that's like we are actually a good place to work if you're LGBT, they might not mean it, but it doesn't register doesn't matter. All that is solid melts into posts. Why it's important to talk about this before we talk about the actual nuts and bolts of what's happening at Twitter is I think this is the lens that makes it all make sense to me, which is that basically the the all the railing against woke capital all the anger at the pride float for chase Manhattan or whatever is basically

these people they're not seeing it as a split within within the elite right the this whole cathedral ideology is basically saying I don't disagree with anything that the powerful are doing, except that they wish that the powerful would delight in the exercise of power, they wish it would be not they hate that it has a human face to market itself to people, and they wish that it would just have the terminator skeleton face, because they because they just love the brutalization the hierarchies etc etc. And that is more satisfying love brutalization and hierarchies. It's insane. This is also incredibly funny to me because it really just amounts to like, we just didn't we just don't want power to be like aesthetically relatable.

And it's like almost it's very similar in my mind to like comic book nerds who get really angry when like normies sort of, you know, are like present themselves as being like comic book nerds too. And like, you know, the whole kind of thing about oh, you're not really authentic. It sort of reminds me a little bit of that, which could kind of also make the whole Elon kind they could make it could like explain a lot of things. So that's all I'm saying. Let's let's go back to sort of Tesla Tesla, excuse me, Twitter, an equally effective company. Let's go back to Twitter itself. And what's actually happening there, right? And I think it's what we have is we have what is the state of play with Twitter,

like at time of recording? Mike, tell us what's going on. Last I checked, he posted a 3D printed gun to his timelines and and apparently drinks a lot of 3D drinks, a lot of 3D caffeine, 3D coax, caffeine free weirdly, doesn't use coasters. Yeah, I don't like I feel like I'm most mad at the caffeine free diet. I can understand caffeine. Elon's 100% the type of guy to take a bunch of neurotropics that don't do anything, but also not do caffeine because that like affects his thinking. So what he what he seems to be doing right right is he has fired an enormous number of people, as you say, Mike, probably probably going to then hire some like people from like the

Stanford conservative review or whatever to replace them. So we're basically going to have like big gab seems to be. Yeah. No, I mean, like that's he so he cut first, he cut the workforce in half with layoffs that actually gave people severance, although, you know, as of last weekend, as of this weekend, I talked to folks who were telling me they still haven't received their severance payments. They're worried that they're going to get them at all, even if and there was a period in which Elon tried not to pay them out. But his lawyers calculated that it would cost him more in court to fight than to just pay these people out, which is the only reason he chose to do severance. But yeah, that now he's to give you an example, the latest person he's hired,

people he's hired, were the two guys who pretended to be laid off Twitter employees and like hoax the media. I don't know if you guys saw that, but it was just the Ligma Rahul Ligma like Ligma Balls sort of thing. I did full for that. I'm sorry. Elf me. No, I think I think a lot of folks did. I thankfully did not because it would have been super embarrassing for me. But I think the so like Elon was like, this is the funniest joke in the world. I'm hiring these two kids and what are they going to do? What do they do? Look, there need to be people working on Twitter's meme libraries that we need to find more. Look, we started with Pepe and then we got a more racist improved Pepe in terms of Grey Perk. He was nude and he was more mischievous. We need a third frog.

But the thing is, like, Elon doesn't even post that many Pepe. All his Twitter memes are stuff that are like 20, like between 20, like the 2012 earlier memes, right? And they're all like fried and weird. And he, oh my God. Yeah, I'm not going to go into that. I feel like I'm going to lose my mind if I talk about his posts. The thing about all of Elon Musk's companies, right, is that they accrue, they grow on them like mold, a certain amount of like Elon related bullshit. Like you have to do, you have to be, you must be at least this epic to write, right? And so the problem with Twitter is that all of his other companies have this sort of like layer of insulation. They have like enough, like enough sort of company underneath them. Tesla does at least make cars.

They might have to recall half of them and they might kill your kid, but they do make a car. There is a product involved. SpaceX makes a rocket. Twitter, he's cut everything that like makes it happen and the mold is growing. Like it's sort of, it's dragging it down because it's much, much weaker than either of these previous companies were because it doesn't have other shit going on. It can't support the weight of all of the memes. Well, more specifically, SpaceX has like all of what used to be NASA's budget. And then, and then Tesla has carbon credits. That's what supports all of the other stuff and allows, again, another thing that I think, I wonder if you've seen Mike is other people coming out of the woodwork from his other companies to

post about how there were whole teams of people who were there to insulate the company from Elon. Yeah. Oh my God, that was so good. That tweet thread. I think, by the way, I think the next thing you're going to see is subsidized memes probably from the government when he starts lobby. No, the, so that was the most fascinating psychology or look into his psychology for me. And I've had other folks just to recap there, folks on Twitter saying like, hey, I worked for him. He had this like coterie of folks at the top, but really even across the company whose job it was to manage him, right? And I think that, I think that is both specific to him, but also specific to billionaires and like this type of person, I think too. Like, I think that you could probably say

it's not a one-to-one comparison, but Zuckerberg is similarly surrounded by sort of folks who know how to handle him or Bezos when he was at the top or whatever. Like, I definitely think, but for Musk, it's specific in that he's like, folks are like, all right, we know you're like the visionary, but also, you know, quote unquote visionary, but also like we need to like do things. We need the company to like work. And so here's some stuff to distract you or here's a way that we know that you will like this thing that we're pitching. So this is how we sort of present it. And it seemed to work. And none of those people, the reason it's so chaotic at Twitter right now is because none of those people are there. You know, you don't have the court jester

entertaining him while like, you know, dad actually like runs the fucking business or whatever. So I think that it feels even more chaotic now. And I'm wondering, someone was telling me they're like, he needs a COO, a chief operating officer to come in and like do stuff while he can fucking like do psilocybin in the desert with his buddies who are like, which is what he kind of wants to do anyway, you know, so and then like throw off random ideas in the meantime, many of which were already sort of in the works inside of Twitter that he's now taking credit for basically. Oh, that's he's never done that at a different company before. What I think is interesting and what I think I think the difference if there is a difference

between the way that he is managed and the way that Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos manage is that neither of them have really committed themselves to this sort of like ideology that is anti themselves. Right. I think a lot of this sort of like insulation around him is go back to cathedrals and bizzars, right? It's a bunch of guys throwing up market stalls around and to be like, yep, this is this is definitely the bizarre to a guy who is wearing a sort of like Episcopal mitre and like vestments. He is he has essentially purchased a very large house and is ripping the copper wire out of the walls trying to find the cathedral. It's in here somewhere. I know it's in here somewhere. And we talk about ripping the copper wire out of the walls,

right? We're talking about not just firing the people who actually like maintain a lot of those code libraries, which are again, this is totally unsurprising to me, right? Rickety often sort of legacy systems all built on top of one another, because most of these tech companies are a lot of companies. In fact, how they actually work is that they solve problems in the short term, and their goal is just to keep everything ticking over for now. Oh, yeah. I mean, I know no one who's who's used Twitter could say that Twitter was like not wasteful or was like always efficient, right? Every every employee I've ever talked to has said it's built on like popsicle sticks. And I think they use Ruby, I'm not a coder, but like I think

they use like Ruby and like legacy code that is just not great for infrastructure. And so he's coming into an already sort of fucked up foundation and further fucking it up, I guess. And specifically, he's getting rid of the people who know how to do that is like Keck Himmler 1488. So whoever he's going to hire from Stanford, you know, does that guy going to know Ruby unlikely? Well, I mean, that's the thing. I think the right wing sort of tech complex is much smaller than some of some of the others, because generally speaking, if you want to like become influential in like in a right wing movement, if you want to do sort of like Keck Himmler 1488 stuff, you don't really learn to write code, you learn to write

laws, right? And like the sort of like the right wing law school pipeline is significantly much is like much more bloated than this. And we've seen the sort of like legislative effects of that. Tech, you know, it's not really as prevalent. And the sort of the culture there is different in a way that is less conducive for the moment for now, we'll see, we'll see to sort of like smuggling this stuff in, I think. That's really interesting. I mean, I think there's he has this stranglehold on, I mean, this is not even unique to him, right? Like the idea of like build, build, build, build, like like anyone who's not like building something is a waste or something that you don't need someone that you don't need to care about or something. And I think that he's

like the Pied Piper of those folks, you know, more than more than Zuckerberg, more than Nindris and Horowitz are a lot of these companies. But but I agree, like the this sort of immediate impact or at least the immediate impact on laws, I guess, is not as felt, you know, right away, you know, in the sort of tech pipeline. But I do, I do wonder, and probably think those might converge over time. And like one of the one of the things that tech always has a history of is like just out, I mean, it's like by its nature, outpacing regulation, just because they're just building new things faster than, you know, regulators can keep up with. But but yeah, I think they've also there's like a line of technologists who also are recognizing that

getting the getting the JD is going to get them, you know, moved faster and how they can shape culture. And that's that's becoming and those Stanford grads are like the ones who are thinking about that. I think that's the other thing that folks ascribe like, sort of liberal ideology to the Bay Area or to San Francisco. And I think it really has changed quite a bit in the past, you know, 10 years alone, basically. So it's just it's a different landscape. Well, I think if we want to just sort of sort of go back into a little bit of that Cathedral Bazaar PayPal Mafia ideology, I think it works to remember that it is deeply ensconced in tech solutionism as well. Because the the concept of tech solutionism is there is a problem

if only someone would just be smart and capable enough to solve it and was unafraid of tipping sacred cows or breaking things that exist or whatever in order to engage in some shampterian creative destruction. And when you look at what the sort of right wing tech salute what what the what that ideology demands, like the place where its demands are sort of clearest and most related to what politicians can actually do is San Francisco local politics, which is basically and their demands are we if only someone would be brave enough to let the police do what they needed to do. Right. The cops should have mortars. I should never have to see a homeless person. That that is essentially a lineup between right wing politics and tech solutionism and the

class pans of those two things are if only someone would do something if only someone would build something if only someone would get elected in Britain and then remove the top tax rate, then everything else would just fall into place. It's the belief that with enough vigorousness and power, you can through your own sort of heroic greatness rest into being a better world. You just have to crush everything that's in your way, whether your Facebook moving fast and breaking things, whether your Elon Musk deciding that the only people we're going to hire are the ones who are just writing the most lines of code, not even the best code, the most inefficient coders they stay because they're building more or whether you are trying to get rid of a progressive

DA in San Francisco because he's not turning on the punish button. He's not building the prison, it's ludicrous to imagine, I think really. It was unusual that tech solutionists would be at all progressive because what tech solutionism is, what build, build, build is, what all of these things are is just a kind of aestheticization of speed, of breaking things. It's Italian futurism. It's Italian style fascism. Wow. That's very astute. These things are the same thing. But we also- I think there's a- Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, please, please, please. Oh, I was just going to say the one sort of thing that I am seeing as a pushback to that is there is a, I think a small but growing sort of undercurrent of leftist techies that are sort of seeing this

and are aware of it and are bothered by it. I don't think it's as large as the pretty right wing sort of impulse to strongly support punishment and policing, hardcore policing in San Francisco and just sort of tamp down in a way that I think a lot of the folks who got rich during the Facebook IPO and the Uber and Twitter IPOs, more like early 2010 IPOs, are the ones who sort of identify with that. But there's like a younger class of Googlers and even some Facebook people, interestingly enough, that are pushing back on it. And that ideology is very interesting to me. It's more complicated just in that it's kind of tangled up with the companies and what the companies sort of mean and stand for. But I think that exists and is happening more in the Bay Area than

let's say like the past few years. The way I would see that breaking down is that if you look at Google, for example, there is a history of work of developer organizing at Google to like the protest against working with like Project Maven or whatever. So like so many things, the dividing line comes with, are you as a like tech worker identifying with your other workers or are you identifying with your boss? And if you identify with the boss, then you go and reply to Elon and you say, oh my God, I love that you made a third frog, but can you please just credit me as having invented the third frog? I don't even need you to, I'll still pay you the eight dollars. Just please tell everyone that this new router naked or frog was actually my creation. I love you.

Please kill me with a car. Please run me over with the Tesla. Yeah. And so this is back to sort of what he's doing as well, right? He's not just firing the people who know how like the popsicle sticks and tape and gum that Twitter is built on actually work. He's also firing huge swaths of people that let's just say, I don't think he knows why they're important yet. This is for example, the entire Brussels office. Now, I don't think again, as someone who is obsessed with the European regulation, what does that mean? Not important. As someone who is obsessed with the cathedral, all he sees are agents of the cathedral trying to stop him or drag him down or maybe whose job was to continue the kind of homeostatic self-preserving elite cathedral that

he was reeling in. If you're looking for some kind of like rules obsessed, kind of scolding, school marmish like liberalism, you really can't hit on a larger or slower target than the European Union. However, yes. The Brussels offices of a lot of tech companies, they exist to have places for former Eurocrats to go and work to get great salaries so that while they're being Eurocrats, they don't, for example, enforce data protection laws on you. And he doesn't seem to fucking understand that. So he's basically like, has his one division and doesn't do much. And the only reason that division exists is to go take a suitcase of money and put it in front of a very big scary door once a week. And then nothing bad happens. The new mob boss who's like, why are we even paying off these

cops? They don't do anything. And he's starting to run into that immediately. The funny thing, I was talking to the Buntuk guys about this, just how quickly the dismantling is having those effects. When I unban thousands of folks who were banned for a particular reason, and our advertisers suddenly get super squeamish, now I have to fund this myself. Like, what the fuck? Like, why is this happening? But it's just more swift than I would have ever expected it to happen, basically. Well, it's because the advertisers, they're all in the cathedral too. Because Apple hates free speech in America because of, again, a bunch of reasons that they'll just sort of come up with. He hasn't quite gotten there yet. What he's saying is that the

woke left... Oh, no, this is literally something he has said. Oh, as he said, okay. Because last time I checked, it was like the cathedral, in this case, we're telling the advertisers not to be on the platform. So now he's gone. No, the advertisers are actually in the cathedral as well. They're a little old school. The cathedral just keeps growing. They keep building out new wings. Which is the only explanation for anything that isn't an immediate success. Once again, the right people are in power. Once the hard rain has come and swept away the former bureaucrats or all this stuff. Once that happens, the only explanation can be clearly there's a bit of the cathedral in here I haven't found. I need to go rip out more copper wire until I find it.

And he immediately... This is the problem too. He's gassed up 24-7 by all the folks on Twitter that... Yes, gassed up by the folks 24-7 and nothing else. And his staunchest supporters, like you were saying, David Sacks, who's Pafe Palmafia, and Jason Calacanis, and there's a guy, Shriram Krishnan, who's an A16Z. Just like folks who fully believe in... I mean, he is too many tech folks like the second coming of Steve Jobs because they want this figurehead person who was the visionary and none of the other tech CEOs have stepped up to that in their minds. This guy is the guy. And him failing immediately is because of me at the New York Times writing pieces that are mean to him or advertisers who have the woke

mind virus or just any host of excuses that are coming up. And it's just very... Podcasts. It's because of the podcast. Yeah, exactly. The Trash Future podcast. It's very weird to see play out in real time, but it's happening. But one of the things I think we can come to as well is that this ideology is the product of isolation. It is the product of the wealthy and powerful... Spending too much time on the computer. No. Well, partly, yes. But also partly, the wealthy and the powerful, especially again,

since the financial crisis, the widening gulf between the wealthy and powerful, whether that's the politically powerful, the wealthy, etc., between them and the normal concerns of most people, I think is evident in the fact that they are burning huge amounts of money. And again, this is also true when Liz Truss and Kwase Kwarte take over Britain, right? The huge gulf, the insulation of the world in which they live from the actual concerns of regular people. Of course, they're putting off all their advertisers because Volkswagen doesn't give a shit about the cathedral. Volkswagen wants to sell Volkswagen's and Volkswagen has an idea, because they do a lot of market research of what normal people think.

They don't read fucking Mench's Moldbug to figure out what... If you read Mench's Moldbug, then... And that's mostly what you do when you look at the comments of Mench's Moldbug. And now they got me demolishing this fucking cathedral. Then you will think that most normal people actually care about the cathedral, or more likely, to explain why most normal people don't care about the cathedral. Then they'll read more Mench's Moldbug and be like, oh, that's because they're hobbits who want to grill and wear dark elves and they're other elves. And so it's infinite, but all these infinite explanations... Can't stress enough how much dumber the shit gets the more you read.

Yeah, the more... Yeah, it's true. But that fundamentally, right, these are people who have swept into these institutions expecting that when they do the weird shit that they and their friends have been talking about for ages, that they will usher in a second coming of a paradisle age. And this is, I think, again, driven by the fact that the rich have gotten so much richer, so, so much richer. And people have gotten so alienated and depoliticized that it's very difficult for them to make what they actually want heard. And so really, you just get people who live in a different fucking universe talking to one another, arguing about what the world should look like. Should there be a cathedral here? And meanwhile, any normal person

who's looking can see there is no cathedral there. There's nothing there. It's a Wendy's. It's funny, I was thinking about... I'm in the middle of procrastinating writing another book right now, but I've been thinking about how Zuckerberg has grown up in Silicon Valley. Literally, most of his adult life has been in this one place in Silicon Valley, surrounded by the same people, the same thinkers. He and Mark Andreessen are very connected cerebrally, emotionally. And I think the... And a lot of the ultra-wealthy who rocketed to that position very quickly with, again, writing on the advent of the iPhone and funding these startups that turn into billion-dollar unicorns in a very short amount of time compared to wealth

accumulation in the past, they haven't experienced life in any other way as an adult human being that goes through struggle and that goes through conflict in their real life and that goes through having to be around unhoused people or city problems or whatever, and then just broadcast their vision of what the future should be like and then are shocked when there is any pushback. And then that's when, to your point, just that's when the sort of inspiratorial thinking kicks in and they all start sort of retreating. And I absolutely think that's more prevalent now than was ever before, at least with Valley thinkers and sort of the people at the top. Well, it's not even, I think, that they start retreating. It's that they try the

thing and then because they live in a sort of cartoon soft world, they try to do the thing in the real world. And again, you bring up Zuckerberg. I think that Zuckerberg is kind of doing the same thing to Metta that Elon's doing to Twitter just slower and less dramatically by trying to fund what is essentially a fantasy that he has because he can't imagine a world in which maybe people don't want to go into the office, but he can't imagine a world in which people want to go and actually see one another. That seems odd. Why can't they just have poker nights in the Nintendo Wii home or whatever? I kind of have not sympathy per se, but I can understand where Zuck comes from in the sense of Facebook has obviously had a huge impact

on the entire world. And you can sort of see that in a material way. And regardless of how fucked and broken and this stupid Metta is, I don't think you can deny the impact that Facebook has had and why that would sort of convince him to be like, okay, well, I think based on what the success of Facebook, how I've kind of seen this, the thing like with Elon, this very funny is that because he doesn't invented anything and because he sort of bought this website, he's coming at it entirely from like a user's position. So it's not even the case of like, I remember the impacts of like Facebook from when it was like the website where like you kind of like perved on Harvard women to what it is now. Elon's a guy who's just like he

wanted to be a drug dealer, keeps like getting high on his own supply, but just thinks that it's really great. And then he just got a bunch of money to just get loads and loads of cocaine, because he wants to be like the biggest drug dealer, but he keeps eating his own supply. And I guess I can like, because he sort of comes out of Facebook, he keeps eating coke off the depths. I'm a good boy, he went to religious school, I only have a smoke weed. I have just seen that is how you do cocaine. That's right. You make it into a nice cake and you have it. How can the Coke spoon is so small? That's why you see like cops rub it on their gum.

That's right. I mean, all I was going to say was that because he's coming at it from the perspective of the user, like for him, it's just very much like, I'm having a great time on this website with all my friends who keep telling me I'm cool and like really funny. And like his sort of Twitter strategy is very much as based on the idea. But if he's having a great time, then everyone else is having a great time. And the people who aren't great at having a great time are the haters who are all in the cathedral doing the eyes wide shot, like a fucking ritual to like, which we all love him specifically. The other thing, this isn't like strictly speaking related, but the one thing I do think about when I think about like isolated rich people,

especially isolated tech rich people is that they're all giant nerds who are like, you know, we've all read the articles about bunkers obsessed with the idea of the apocalypse, right? We're going to like shit's going to pop off and Zuckerberg is going to have to go to Hawaii or New Zealand and like seal himself in a bunker with a bunch of like, you know, Academy guys who have shot collars on so they don't kill him. And all of those guys are like praying for the apocalypse to happen. And then we had like a two year long pandemic that kind of felt alternately like it was the apocalypse, but also you were going insane and it wasn't. I don't think that's been good for anybody's mental health, least of all these guys. I think

probably being a billionaire was one of the worst ways to experience the pandemic psychologically in terms of what it did to you, short of being on the front lines of it. I think it genuinely damaged a lot of these guys. And I also wonder whether like, because, you know, the sort of one of this sort of like parts of the whole ideology that underpins both like Trussism and also like tech guys is the idea that like when the apocalypse comes, like, you know, they're going to sort of be needed more than ever, right? And they can sort of be- Runepoint Elon said he was going to make ventilators. That's right. Yeah, he never did.

But like these, you know, these sort of like fantastical leaders that are sort of going to save society and like all the sort of haters in the New York Times are going to be really sorry when they have to like beg Elon Musk for like one of his two ventilators, which he didn't create. And then what you end up realizing is that actually, no, like these guys are fucking useless. Like they're bad at what they do anyway, and they don't really have any new ideas. And like the ideas that they did have and the effects of them really suck. Like, you know, this sort of general attitude I imagine to social media or like the social media platforms, I imagine they're sort of like broadly pretty negative, maybe average, but certainly like no

one sort of like talking about them in glowing terms in the way that they did like a decade ago. And I do wonder whether like part of this resentment from tech guys comes and you can see it in like crypto spaces as well, comes from this idea that like they really want to desperately see not just as cool, but like the saviors of humanity, right? They desperately want to kind of- they want the deification that Steve Jobs got. And like Steve Jobs died at the right time because like God forbid, like, you know, if he was still around, like, you know, I don't know. So like they want like the Steve Jobs deification, they've now sort of like they're not going to get it. But like because they've wanted it so badly, like what's coming out is just this real kind of

resentment. And they're just like blaming people for not getting what they feel like they deserved. Also, I want to go back to something you said a little earlier, Hussein, which I think is also very revealing of how they are choosing to run the company, which is that they're thinking of it as a user because they're not thinking of it as a company with advertisers. There's not thinking about it as a company that like needs to meet a bunch of standards that are set by other powerful organizations. Again, not for reasons that are inscrutable to them. Apple isn't secretly woke. Apple has obligations to other advertisers and so has to enforce certain policies about what it can put in its app store. Apple has obligations to countries,

that it's a way of seeing the world. And it's not saying like I'm not sort of trying to suggest that I'm in any way some kind of a conservative who thinks these things are good, but rather that these things are just much more complex than the person who sees Twitter, not as the pile, not as all at number one, all of the employees who know how to maintain the tape and gum or the tape and gum or the advertiser relationship who just sees it as the timeline. And at the timeline appears magically in that there are people who are like making the timeline better or worse or whatever, whatever. For the automated luxury space capitalism. Yeah, indeed. And the fact is that they're seeing it as users. It's almost like a kind of

incredibly stubborn commodity fetishism among the only people who really, if they want to be good capitalists, should not be commodity fetishists. Yeah. Well, I think this is like, I was saying this on like Paris's podcast quite recently and Mike, you probably like know more about this as like someone who kind of understands the industry at a much like broader level. But like, I think the kind of main contradiction with Elon has always been that he's actually, he's always wanted to be a poster and like he's just wants, he just wants to post on the platform and he had like a good time doing it. And then somehow he kind of got convinced like that, oh, well, if you enjoy love, if you enjoy posting so much, you should own it. And that way you

can sort of shape it in your own image. And like everyone can enjoy it in the same way that you can. But then what he's finding is like the contradiction. And this is like something that I think, what sets him apart from Zuckerberg is that like Zuckerberg still thinks of Metta, I believe as a business, he'd like it to sort of be something more. But I think that like there is at least a good part of him is like, okay, Metta sort of has to work commercially and everything. Whereas like Elon has never kind of really had that before, because again, like he's never like invented anything really, like he's kind of bought his way into companies. And sort of like used the sort of post recession economy as a way to boast bolster

his own personality and his own like, you know, PR team, and just like the kind of the company itself. So then he comes onto Twitter where he like, he approaches it as a user, but as a very specific kind of user. And he realizes that no, to run a platform, like not only do you have to kind of think about all the kinds of users on your platform and how they interact with each other, but also like the way in which your platform, which doesn't really make that much money and is quite small compared to like all the competitors, how it even survives in the first place. And as you mentioned, like part of that is, you know, it's very fragile system architecture and like how you sort of maintain that. It also means like, how do you sort of

placate your biggest advertisers who probably don't want to be on a platform where there is like fucking Nazis and you know, weird, you know, and has a reputation for like spam bots and stuff like that. And because he hasn't really thought and because he's going to think about that really, really late, like the result is that you're sort of having a platform that is like declining, but he is not necessarily publicly accepting that just yet. And what I do wonder is that when he does, when he does have to accept that, like how his sort of like ride or die guys who have sort of like propelled him this far, how they're going to respond to it. I mean, I really, I think the perfect example of, because I absolutely agree that he's approaching as a user. I think the perfect

example of that is the blue check controversy, the self induced controversy that he sort of fucking shot himself in the foot, foot immediately. But it was, it was the idea of, and this is something that I approached differently because I have seen it as a utility for a long time. I'm like, okay, I'm, I'm a journalist. This is why I have it if there's someone impersonating me or if like there's a political account that I need to make sure is them or whatever. That's how I see this sort of system, you know, for better or worse, I think it's still been shitty and imperfect for a long period of time. But like the, there's this particular subsection of users who believe that it, it signifies status, it signifies sort of maybe, maybe it's an exemplification of this

cathedral sort of, you know, poster person. Yeah, the bricks of the cathedral of blutics. He did get me to, I mean, mine did get me to so her house once. So who's to say whether that's good or bad. So please go on. Go on. I think that's bad. I, I, I, no, but I, and so his solution to that was to say anyone can buy a blue check, which, you know, automatically sort of fucks up how the system has, the imperfect system has worked for years and, and through a bunch of gears in the, or wrenches in the gears as far as verification, who is, who they say they are, who, like if, if sort of important people or, or companies or whatever decide, like the, the fake Eli Lilly decides to tank the really like Lilly's market cap because they said insulin is

free, which is probably one of the funniest things I've ever seen. But like, but this sort of, he just immediately fucked it up because of his conception of how folks in his sort of circle and his poster circle think of that. And, and then you see advertiser flight because of course they, they don't want instability or whatever. So I, I, I'm curious, I think to your, I don't know who's saying who's you, but I think to your point of like, when the reckoning comes of like, maybe he can't, maybe he can't do it all or something. I still think the diehard enthusiasts will point to the New York times or will point to like the masses of haters who didn't let him do it because, because we don't believe or whatever, which I think is like the default sort of safety

way. I guess it's sort of, I was going to say, I guess it's like sort of like this whole Trump thing where it's just like the sort of excuse that they made about like Trump not building the wall and all that stuff is just like, oh, well basically the cathedral stopped him from doing that, right? The cathedral full of pedophiles stopped him from doing it. So if we want to talk, by the way, about some of that reckoning, I think it might have lurched closer today as Elon is now posting that he's going to go to war with Apple, which I am certainly smart. Okay. That's where the cathedral is. It's in Tim Apple's house. Again, and where Apple is, Apple is basically just a gigantic, you know,

Apple is basically a gigantic barge with trillions of dollars on it that incidentally makes iPhones and it has its app store. And again, it uses the massive group incident shakes out at the moment was curious still out in the making iPhones. But, but that it is, it also is again, has is a huge monopolist over at production. And again, what Elon, what Elon and his friends see is that Apple has some kind of a global homo agenda and that they are trying to keep the free speech from happening because somehow free speech, like genuinely free speech is a, is would be a problem for Apple because then people would like send that meme of the many little fish engulfing the shark to one another because Apple wouldn't throttle them. And then

they would all put on the V for Vendetta masks and like go, you know, yell at Tim Apple until he like says that you can say whatever you want until he finally unthrottles cat turd to his post. That's kind of the chain of reasoning that's going on here, right? Or they don't see is they don't see that Apple through their Apple through their app store because they want to keep being a trillion dollar company and weren't and and were like, let's say weren't as directly just a beneficiary of being boosted by forces outside their own control as say Elon and all his friends were, right? That they need to actually be concerned with with the real world around them. They need to be concerned with say complying with laws and the jurisdictions in which they

operate. They need to be concerned that they don't scare off like people that might might want to advertise with them on the apps that they do sell. They want to keep their position as a monopolist, which means that they need their higher barriers to entry. If you want to look at like where the various cathedrals are, it's just, it's just people work, it's just companies like Apple say maintaining a monopoly over the app store so they can continue charging 30% of all app sales. If you want to know where the cathedral is, we will have to sit down for this introductory lecture about a class structured about ideology, right? And so the idea that he's going to, he so he once again, he's going to war, but with an enemy that he's imagined and he's

tilting at a windmill that can deploy a trillion dollars to crush him. Can I just say that Apple is actually a very large advertiser for Twitter? Like this is what I was talking to source over the weekend who was saying like him fucking with Apple is just like again, self-inflicted wounds because they for them, advertising on Twitter is a rounding error for Twitter. It is a significant portion of their revenue. And so to what you were saying earlier Riley, like I don't, we're not saying these systems are good, but we're saying that some of these players live in reality at least. And like to your point, like Tim, Tim Apple wants to maintain his hold on where he is. And so plays by the rules in these certain things. And I think there are folks in tech who

would say, well, that's why we like Elon because he doesn't play by these rules. And because he is like a mover and shaker or whatever, like is willing to buck against it. But like the his conception of what those forces holding him down are is just so removed from reality a lot of the time that I wonder what that looks like. Well, again, because he's approaching all of this as a user and like he's just sort of reacting to things at the moment, right? So like on the one hand, it's like global homo that's like the enemy. Then it's advertisers like miscellaneous. Now it's like specifically Apple, but then like it's also like Taylor Lorenzo. Like I like is all like the problem is, is that like his opponent keeps changing because he keeps on like reacting to people

in the same way that like people who fought for getting a blue check would get them invited into like whatever fucking club that the blue checks are in, realizing that this club doesn't exist. Now just kind of have to turn to can get into so. Wait, now like now having to sort of like justify the decision that they make, but also just to sort of signal that like, you know, I'm actually laughing and not crying at all. And yeah, so he's approaching me exactly. And I've kind of just said to people like on various shows, like if you want to understand what he's doing, like think of him as just a like think of him as a Twitter user who has suddenly been given like the steering wheel. I was talking to

again, the Boonta crew about this, and it feels like a super monkey's paw situation, like imagine being the richest sort of man in the world. And now you've, you know, actually I was talking about it in the context of imagine being the richest man in the world, but also you are, you know, profoundly unfunny and can't actually do the one thing you want to do, which is do good posts. But like, but also like dog catching the car and realizing that all the things he believed or maybe realizing all the things he believed are not true. And and and half the people on Twitter now are just yelling at him all day for all the things he's fucking up rather than just only his mentions being filled with people that love him all the time. So

it's and that says, as you say, the dog catching the car it's been chasing. That's why I always reject the Trump comparison and say it's truss. It's truss. It's truss. Perhaps one of the least credible people in the entire world.