Apple's Problem With Jon Stewart, Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimism, Middle East Misinformation

28:57But what Max goes on to talk about is in 2020, this is like you said, it's a redo of time to build. It's time to build, which was during COVID. And we had all these societal problems. And Marc Andreessen was telling us, okay, build our way out of it. Right. And so, you know, this is what Max says. He goes, what are you building? One reason that three and a half years later, Andreessen is reiterating that it's time to build instead of writing posts called, here's what I built during the building time I previously announced was commencing, is that Marc Andreessen has really not built much of anything.

29:31In the years since he's determined that it was time to build, his fund invested tens of millions of dollars in a video game Ponzi scheme that immiserated its players and a company that sells blockchain transaction records said to reflect ownership of ape cartoons. To me, what really stuck out for me, and I think we can move off of this after this, but what really stuck out is this, the push by Andreessen Horowitz to make Web3 happen. And like Molly said on the podcast on Wednesday, then to subsequently reportedly cash out a lot of those tokens and leave the retail investor holding the bag without building some of the crucial things that Mark Andreessen talked about us needing.

30:10That is something that you can't quickly talk away. that's not something that quickly goes away from your venture capital firm and that's not something that people are going to likely forget anytime in the near to mid-future and it's obviously you know something that like like you said maybe beforehand before all this craziness you know we would have paid a lot more attention but it just seems to show how seriously the the cachet that this firm has has had has degraded over these past years and maybe i'm wrong i mean I'm sure reasonable people can see it differently, but that was my takeaway. Yeah, to me, it's trying to do this again.

30:47It's Time to Build had an incredible amount of energy behind it. Everyone was, you know, let's do this. This is the right direction. Let's really rebuild infrastructure in the United States. Let's try to set ourselves up from the future. And as you said, what was the token for the video game called again? it was like smooth love potion uh i mean yeah it was called slp coin smooth in a coin called smooth love potion that then you know uh as you said fleeced retail out of a lot of money but the other thing again like all of these kind of there's so much in this manifesto at least in the early parts that i read around how government is the enemy regulatory capture uh over like a the private sector being run by the public sector is the enemy.

31:37Whereas A16Z is moving more into defense tech, which is good. And if there's a lot of money to be made and, you know, a lot of like it's an opportunity, but that's directly contracting with the government and the public sector. So there's just inconsistencies in all of this that are hard to reconcile. It's an interesting post. I mean, I don't know, kind of think that like I'd rather have people write what they have on their mind and read them. Like a lot of people were killing the writing. And yeah, the writing made it difficult to get through the whole thing. But I'm also just like, I guess you can write it the way that you feel like.

32:14Just it's time to get an editor. That's all I say. No, I disagree. Just get an editor. Write the way that you feel. But write better stuff. I don't know. I just I guess it is just an interesting moment. And Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most fascinating stories because they've been right about so much and they are so smart. And Andreessen is like a standalone personality in the tech industry. They've done a lot of good, but they're searching for, it seems like, a second act or trying to ride a wave of, you know, interesting forces. And I'm not quite sure where it's going to go and we'll see what happens.

32:51They do make the LPs happy. So there's that. Okay, after the break, we're going to talk a little bit about the new data that I have from Twitter. And then after this topic, we are going to talk about the Middle East, which I'm sure will be less controversial. Back right after this. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee.

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34:13You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Beeler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting The World Together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

34:40And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. Ranjan Roy, Ranjan of Margins. You can get it at readmargins.com. Okay, Ranjan. So first of all, Elon Musk started to run a test that you can pay a dollar. He's in a couple of markets that you'll be paying a dollar to use Twitter. I initially was like, oh, this is actually a good idea because it will weed out the bots. But then I thought, oh, man, like maybe this will actually cause even further degradation of Twitter's user base. What's your read on the dollar plan? it's funny because this is exactly the type of system that i like advocated for back in 2017 again some small payment just to verify just to you know like add some kind of incentive or monetary connection to the platform and again it's a dream for a platform once you have that credit card connected then actually upselling on different types of services or even e-commerce it could present a huge opportunity.

35:42It's just funny that now that everything is framed in, you're giving Elon Musk$1, the entire equation changes. And I can imagine it's just not going to work. Wait, but you're agreeing with Elon on the idea in principle. Yeah. No, I think our listeners, their heads are going to explode, man. This is your like first moment of kumbaya with Elon in months. I'm saying it's the right idea, wrong execution. But if you think about it, Because something minimal enough where it does not exclude a massive proportion of the population. Obviously, you would still need some level of free service associated with it.

36:22But just, you know, creating a paid level around the most basic parts of the service, it just makes it so it's not bad actors can't build entire bots of our armies of bots without at least having to pay for that if they're going to. But I think, yeah, it's the right idea, right direction. I just don't think it's going to work or happen. And it's certainly, it's a starting point for a business that was already in a good and strong place to try to build this thing or to build it from the beginning, like potentially a blue sky or someone should maybe go down this road. But I think at Twitter's level with the debt, like with interest payments are going to have to try to come up with the cash for, this is definitely not going to solve the problem on that side.

37:06And if you think about it, Snap, again, we've talked about this in the past. Snapchat Plus is at 5 million subscribers. And you know it works because it's just through Apple. They're paying the Apple tax. It's$3.99 a month. But clearly, it's a very, and that's per month, not a year. The Twitter proposal is$1 a year. But you already have 5 million people. So really kind of like low-level payments on a recurring basis, whether that's a month, whether that's a year. I think that's the direction platforms are going to be going. And I think it's the right one. Right. And it's kind of interesting because it comes at the one year anniversary mark of Elon taking over Twitter.

37:47On October 26th, I believe, 2022, Elon walked into Twitter headquarters, then Twitter headquarters with a sync. So we're almost at the anniversary now. He took over the company on the 28th. What's happened in the year since? I got some new data from Apptopia. And we found that Twitter has lost 13 % of its users. So they approximate that the estimated daily active users have gone from 140 million every day to 120 million. And it really accelerated around the rebrand. We had months of Twitter losing daily active users, more than 5 % month over month in August and September. after the rebrand and negative reviews went up 2000 % there.

38:33So, okay. So you see that and you're like, all right, that actually seems like Elon's lost less than you'd imagine, given a lot of the hand wringing about his use of, of the platform. Obviously it's still a pretty powerful platform. Some other data that the daily active minutes per user is about consistent and power users are still making up the vast majority of the time spent on the platform. So obviously like work to do, It's shrinking under Musk. It's not shrinking, you know, it's not having, it's still relevant and it still will have staying power. The interesting thing that I saw on the data that really stuck out to me was how Threads is doing compared to Twitter.

39:11Threads was, first of all, only about 10 % of Twitter users have tried Threads and Threads was... 10 % of Facebook users. No, no. 10 % of Twitter users. So you have 90 % of people who are predisposed to this type of product who haven't even signed up for Threads. And it went from around, you know, above 20 minutes per set per day on the app at its launch to under five minutes per day now, where Twitter's like around 15%. So clearly Threads isn't catching on. To me, it's just a kind of signals that this need for people to be in a short form app where news is breaking and they get to see everybody yell, you know, it was novel and it appealed to people and certainly appeals to some percent of people.

39:51but by and large this is not something the population wants not on the the broad population wants maybe niche but not broad they don't want it on twitter and they don't want it on threads i don't think they want it on blue sky they certainly don't want it on mastodon and they don't want it on substack notes yeah i think that was always to me again i'm gonna give elon credit on another one that a premium subscription for twitter power users giving more features was always the business model to me that you have in the hundreds of millions of users as the total addressable market who are excited, willing to use it on a daily basis, like any of us, like you or me.

40:35I mean, like, so easily being willing to pay for things. And I remember when they first, Paragon Crew first launched Twitter Blue, and I was actually a happy subscriber to get bookmarked folders and even the undo tweet feature where you can, it basically just didn't post it for eight seconds or 10 seconds or whatever. Like I think that was always the real opportunity or taking all the Twitter firehose data and selling it and packaging it to hedge funds or other social media marketing monitoring companies. Like these are all the things that Twitter would kind of get into that I think they should have leaned more into.

41:13But again, the idea that they were ever going to grow the average Twitter user or the everyday daily active user to hundreds of millions or billions never really made sense to me. And now, again, once it becomes, once the platform itself is degraded, once it gets inextricably tied to Elon Musk, you kill any chance of that. Right. Okay. So let's go one level deeper and talk about how frustrating of an experience it can be to follow the news on a platform like a Twitter, like a threads even. And that is what's happening in the Middle East this week. I mean, over the past few weeks. Last week, I was here on the show and said that a few things.

41:56First of all, I said they should separate from news. I think I'm going to rephrase that. obviously news is going to be a core part of any platform like this that will give you up to the minute information in short text bursts so for news organizations to completely go away may not be wise simply because you want to have good actors who are steering the conversation and you know putting their analysis in the feeds that being said to fully embrace and go whole hog on the feeds is I think a little bit too much. Like you, you know, these feeds will never be the main way you reach your audience. They'll never be the main way that you build an audience.

42:38They'll never be the main way that you gather news. And so that's why I think there should be a little bit of distance between news organizations and social media platforms. I also said that I found it pretty, I also said I found it pretty easy to follow or possible to follow the news on these feeds. And this week obviously proved that to be much more difficult than I anticipated. There was so much misinformation flowing around Twitter about the hospital that was bombed in, or the hospital parking lot that was bombed in Gaza, not only on Twitter, but within the mainstream news publications, I mean, places got it obviously wrong, you know, putting headlines and images up there that seemed to indicate with certainty things that had happened that had not happened or were under dispute.

43:30And, you know, I don't know necessarily whether I have to fully revise it. I mean, I still was able to follow the discussion in real time and was able to make my own assessments, but it's certainly a lot messier this week than it was last week. I think you have to fully revise it, Alex. I think it's time to fully revise it. Go ahead, go ahead, make the argument. Okay, so I was listening. I was away last Friday and I was listening and I definitely heard that idea that Twitter is still the best place to get breaking news and to try to keep up with it. I would say for people who are very active and open-minded and nuanced around it, it's still, I have been on Twitter in the last two weeks, probably more than I had in the past few months.

44:13But what really, really, really worries me about this is two parts. It's one, as you said, mainstream news organizations, we all know every journalist still spends all their time on Twitter. so it makes them knee-jerk and the whole editorial process tried to move potentially faster than it should be and we saw that with the hospital whatever happened and which is still not definitive and it's clear that it's not definitive what happened is that the New York Times posted a headline right away when they shouldn't have and I feel in a previous era editorial processes wouldn't have jumped the gun that quickly so I think that's one side is that mainstream news organizations have to break away from the twitter pace of breaking news like and as much as they want to be at that pace and as much as each journalist is still processing things oh i agree with that completely that's definitely point one the first point that i made was that for sure news or news institutions need to you know have a one or two degrees of separation from these feeds they're extremely unhealthy for for journalists to be on all the time like you said all the time but that being said i do think that they're being in the feeds are pot it's possible if you have discernment and news judgment to learn what's going on from them do you disagree with that yes and no yes and no because i i say this as someone who has spent a lot of time digging through and i give myself some credit around being able to parse through information but what i noticed that was really different about this versus the past and this is where elon's degradation of the platform really plays a role is that the core economic structure of the platform is now one where anyone can get the blue check is incentivized to to four clicks and views to potentially be paid out that everything about the platform pushes bad actors to actually spread misinformation or more salacious information again i mean it almost became a joke that the belling cats of the world that really brought this interesting way.

46:22And for people unfamiliar, it's like, you know, using digital knowledge and data and understanding to be able to bring, you know, geolocated coordinates or other image analyses to verify information or debunk it. Now, literally my entire feed was like anyone with a blue check suddenly turned into an OS expert, like a military expert. And it's just like, all you would have to do is throw out random coordinates and say like, okay, I've verified here's a thread and people will click on it. So I think when the entire platform is now incentivized for anyone to get a blue check, pay eight bucks a month, and then make themselves be allowed to be paid off of that, all incentives point towards spreading misinformation versus in the past the blue check was still around verification by the platform however opaque that process was so anyone on there there's that had nothing to do with how much money you could or could not make on the platform in fact you couldn't make any money on the platform so the only real incentive was to build trust and following so it scared me it scares me right now like if this is happening one week into this conflict two weeks into this conflict where this can go and how much worse it can get as long as this is still knowing this is still the central place where news starts um i don't know it's it's a little bit terrifying i mean you're right that is the the supply side i would say demand side it's a little different like demand side if you're using it as a user i think you can still get a lot out of it and it's a useful tool however like you know that i'm starting to question the merits of being in there so often, like maybe it is better to just wait and read it on news sites, you know, because it's just, it is, it is, um, it's, it's not as much for me, the misinformation, it's more of like the partisanship and everybody's like out there just like yelling their talking points and, you know, skewing the information in the way that conforms with their agenda.

48:30And that drives me nuts. And I actually, I put a thread about this, uh, this week i guess it was also a treat i did it no not threatened i put a did a thread about it uh wait a twitter thread or a thread post facebook and i put on both platforms anyway okay okay i said basically like it was it's frustrating this is my weekly check-in to make sure you have threaded yeah it's frustrating to me because what i'm seeing is there's so many people are on these platforms the whole dialogue is they did this and they did that and they're bad and they're worse and can you believe it? It just drove me nuts.

49:03And I think that one of the key things that I put out there was that maybe instead of just talking about the problem all the time, we should speak about the solutions, even if it doesn't fit in the feed. No one's talking about solution, and it's embarrassing, I think. What do you mean solutions in this case? To this conflict. That's a tough one, I feel, in terms of, again, yeah, Twitter. short form metrics driven content is not where anyone is going to have podcasts however we can do it how much energy is being put to splitting people apart versus bringing them together and maybe that's me being naive but it's just absurd no but that's where that's again what I'm saying all incentives of the platform are around doing exactly that right now if you want to make money on the platform that's the easiest way to do it and it's the best thing you can do.

50:00Like it's the, if you're, it's like the Macedonian teenagers in 2016 with Facebook pages. Now the economic incentives point towards that, which they didn't before. So that's why I think this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Right. And I wrote this in our document, but this is almost like the anti soundbite war. It's so frustrating because it's impossible to put, uh, any, anything into a soundbite here because there's so many years of context that really, that are important for every little bit of the situation that's happening. And, you know, I just, it's frustrating to me because like people are trying to shoehorn this into like 280 characters and be like, you know, this side is right because, or that side is right because, and it's like, you know, you have people in Gaza who don't like Hamas.

50:47You have people in Israel who have been marching in droves to overthrow the government there. I mean, not like with a coup, but like calling on the president to resign large portions or the prime minister to resign large portion of the country. And so like it's just it doesn't lend itself to social media. It really is frustrating. And then think about this. I've seen so many people I've talked to so many people who already you know are like either the anti-semitism or the islamophobia is so apparent in all of the replies to anything I've said of course every bot army right now is going to be in there mixed with real people as well but it's like the easiest opportunity for any bad actor to just get everyone feeling like division is all there is because there's again both the geopolitical incentive the economic incentive everything is incentivizing splitting people like that based on how the platform's structured right now and right and it does by the way it spills over into newsrooms and we just touched on this but i think that mainstream newsrooms really did have been doing a terrible job uh covering this conflict so there's been some good but some of it's bad including folks that should know better you know people who might touch on covering disinformation sharing clearly wrong numbers about numbers numbers of casualties and not using that to walk back and not examining you know the roots of of why those numbers were shared and why they shared those numbers to me that just it's not good just don't tweet okay that that's the lesson don't tweet don't read twitter i don't know it's tough yeah um all right last question should i go to web summit explain to listeners why that's a question so um right now there's all these so web summit is one of the biggest tech conferences in the world and um it's in lisbon every year i go almost every year and um patty cosgrave who uh runs the thing and i know him um made a bunch of statements about this conflict, you know, basically winking at the fact that Israel is committing war crimes without naming any specific war crimes.

53:05And also just, I think, tweeting somewhat insensitively on October 7th before any of the bodies in Israel were really cold. Okay, I'm just going to say it because it's important to draw it out. After the Israelis were massacred on that day, he published a chart, or tweeted a chart that showed the differences between Israeli and Palestinian deaths in the conflict year by year. It's an accurate chart. It's a chart worth discussing and not worth ignoring. But to share that on the day that so many innocents were killed gave the impression that it was like, well, they deserve this or like, you know, no big deal.

53:47I think that's what the impression was given. And lots of Israelis pulled out of the conference. Meta, oh, let's see. Oh, Meta is out now. Google is out now. Intel is out now. Siemens is out now. I mean, basically all of their key speakers have withdrawn. I'm struggling with this, to be honest. I think people are entitled to make mistakes and he did apologize. I don't know if what patty did was he wasn't like i mean i've seen so many instances of worse on you know both people who support israel support the palestinians um with who've used worse language than he did far worse um and it hasn't really i guess i'm still planning to go it didn't really come to the level for me that like it's you know worth having web summit destroyed over although like I understand where the concerns come from, but I don't know what to do.

54:47What do you think? I mean, for me, the most kind of odd part of this whole story was I saw certain people saying because they took money from the Qatari investment authority, that that's a reason to come out. and and to me again i mean separate from i think again the topic of what people are posting and when this is where you had mentioned apple in china and all the kind of like difficult decisions that's going to create for people i mean the vision fund sorry like i mean well division funds through the saudi investment authority uh like you know mbs and saudi arabian money in every venture capital fund or tech company there's going to be more and more and more of these very very complicated and messy connections and situations that i think yeah none of these questions are going to be answered anytime soon and it's only going to get messier yeah absolutely i mean i know patty so i think that's sort of you know what's shaping this for me in some way and i i I mean, I also don't think that, I mean, again, like I think his statements were bad and in poor taste, but.

56:04No, this is where. Oh, sorry. It just seems to me that to have all these companies pull out over them is, I don't know. It's bold. Go ahead. No, but this is where to bring it all back to Jon Stewart. why I became such a Jon Stewart fan in the 2000s was I remember living here in New York in the post 9-11 era especially in the build-up to the Iraq war he was one of the only voices on any kind of network television even though it's still cable but like on any easily accessible television that actually was in a smart and I think that's where comedy was really important because he was able to get out the message that maybe this is not a good idea, but do it with humor so people allowed it and listened to it.

56:54But otherwise, that message was just not allowed anywhere. So I think it reminded me a lot of these kind of things that you can potentially see as an overreaction. I think that's where Jon Stewart managed to thread the needle very well back in the day in terms of in a very heated environment still trying to bring a nuanced view to a very difficult situation. And his context mattered, by the way. I mean, he was a New Yorker. This war was being fought. I mean, in terms of 9-11 victims, I don't think there's been anyone who has taken the cause as much as Jon Stewart. Yeah. And so, like, I think that he was stepping up and saying effectively, like, in my name, in the name of my city, like, I mean, obviously it's the whole country that was involved, but, you know, he had some authority there.

57:40Paddy grew up in Ireland, of course, and Ireland has its own problem with terrorism groups. And he immediately drew a line between the two. Unfortunately, it's just, you know, it is not the same thing. You know, and I do think that's been a real problem in the U.S. where a lot of people are trying to put their like, you know, their context of how their political ideology works and just neatly fit it on top of what's going on inside Israel and Gaza. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah, but I was actually going to say, I disagree that people are even trying because it's so convoluted and twisted and messy that, again, I don't think there's a way, you know, like the far right, which side do they take in this conflict?

58:27Like I feel it's, it just, there's been so much complexity in all the different connections and where people stand in different ways that it's a reminder that again, this is all messy and complex and, uh, people aren't able to only very limited. People are able to confirm all their priors in terms of what's going on. Yeah, no doubt. At some point it gets messier. Um, that will do it for us this week. Next week, we're going to talk about, uh, big tech earnings. a lot on tap including Amazon so stay tuned for that okay who do we have on tap next week Meredith Whitaker is the CEO of Signal is scheduled to come on next Wednesday so that should be an interesting discussion maybe I'll go even deeper but about the techno optimism with her so if you like this conversation stay tuned for that one and that's gonna do it for us here so thank you Ranjan thank you everybody for listening and we'll see you next time on Big technology podcast.