The Media and The Sub, Musk vs. Zuck, A Key TikTok Exec Exits

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1:09That's technology at Capital One.

1:16Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. It's been a huge week of news. We have the missing submersible now found, unfortunately, disintegrated on the bottom of the ocean floor. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, they want to fight each other. Who's going to win? We'll handicap the odds for you right here and talk about what the implications of this fight that may or may not happen, probably won't happen, will be. We also have a big executive departure at TikTok. And finally, some of the rubber hitting the road in terms of Spotify's podcast strategy that hasn't really gone according to plan.

1:52So much to talk about. We're joined as always by Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, welcome. It's good to be back. I had a week off last week, but ready to talk a little musk and zuck, among other things, of course. So let's start this week with this missing submersible that has now unfortunately been found, destroyed. So it was called the Titan. It's a submarine from Ocean's Gate. and it was this experimental sub of course the news has been populated by the story of the sub all throughout but there are some secondary stories i mean people people listening probably know exactly what's going on but there's some like the broader story is something that's really worth going into so first of all what do you make of what happened in this in this whole situation um it is a terrifying tragic situation and i will admit i got caught up in following this kind of minute by minute, tweet by tweet.

2:48I think, again, for listeners who may not have been keeping up, a submersible was going down to the deep depths of the ocean to try to see the remnants of the Titanic. It lost connection with the people running it. And then about in just 15 minutes later, it should have been a two and a half hour voyage down. And then for a few days, there was a rescue operation we were trying to find it um they were there was theoretically about four days of oxygen for the passengers i believe it was five passengers exactly um and now we just found out that it is confirmed that the sub imploded in what sounded like a very quick and painless death versus a lot of the other scenarios that were being thrown around um and there's a lot to this i think around this company that has been trying to kind of cut corners cut costs innovate very quickly to create something using materials like carbon fiber rather than you know the traditional materials used in these type of uh devices that james cameron seemed very unhappy about i think there's a lot to this story so this is why i wanted to talk about it because there's been an undercurrent in the tech industry in favor of the makers of the sub let me read you something from mike solana who writes uh the sub stack pirate wires and he's actually going to be on the show coming up in a couple weeks so i'm excited to hopefully speak about this with him but we should talk about it right now he's basically pointed all all the people who said this sub should not have taken risks as kind of losers and basically said that without risk what do you have here's a selection from his newsletter so he talks about how stockton Rush, the CEO, is quoted.

4:32There's this quote about the lack of safety. And it's sort of emblematic of like the real Silicon Valley mentality. So Stockton Rush, who was the CEO of Ocean's Gate, who did die in that submersible, said, at some point, safety is just a waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. And Solana says, and yes, this sounds very bad in the context of what happened. But here's the thing. Isn't it also true? There's no man alive today descended from the first men who foraged for first mushrooms, fruits, and vegetables, sorting out for the rest of humanity, which were poisonous.

5:07But thank God for those crazy ancient caveman era hippies. He talks about Marie Curie discovering polonium and radium and unfortunately dying as a result of the radiation exposure, the explorers that have died before we charted the ocean and the men that have died in combat fighting to protect the country or the fishermen that die so you can have crab legs at your supermarket basically what he's saying is anyone who said this was a reckless risk think about all the other people taking restless reckless risks in the past and where we would be without them yes so i see where he's going with this and i agree like there were moments at my where i was like yeah you want to go two and a half miles down to the depths of the sea and see things that no other human has seen, obviously, you know, you're taking a risk.

5:59However, this is not positioned as a high risk thing. It's positioned as essentially tourism. That's like every time I get on a plane, should I be thinking, well, if it goes down, I guess that's okay that, you know, we're pioneers, we're explorers, we're cavemen, we're trying to make this happen. So I think the idea of what is true exploration and what is actually just tourism and everyday passenger business, I mean, I think separating those two out is incredibly important. My question is, did Stockton Rush, was that part of his pitch to the passengers? Did he start the ride by saying, hey guys, safety is just a waste.

6:39Don't worry. Let's think about the cavemen and radiation poisoning right so there's parts where solana is definitely right in terms of people need to take risks in order to have discovery but there's parts where i think are completely wrong one of the examples he gives in this piece is about solo climbing think about alex honnold as he climbed el capitan in yosemite without ropes his decision was reckless right but he never said anything the likes of what stockton said about safety in fact if anyone watched the movie free solo, you see that it takes years of painstaking preparation bit by bit where safety is actually paramount.

7:16You put safety at the front. I think the idea of being reckless about safety and taking risks, conflating those two is actually ridiculous. The people who take risks are often more intent about safety than anybody else because they know what can go wrong. And actually that's what leads to these breakthroughs is people that have been saying, I am going to take a risk, but I'll be damn sure that I will take every bit of precaution possible before I go ahead and do that. And that's not what happened here. And so I think people are pointing out that these people in the submarines were fools, have a point that, you know, and I don't want to like dance on their graves, but if you go out there and you flaunt the fact that safety is ridiculous, and then you die because of your lack of safety precautions, it is almost an example of like, you're proving the opposite point, right?

8:04That safety is paramount. Yeah. And I also think, I mean, this really fits well into the whole conversation around full self-driving and to bring it back to Elon and Tesla, because I was listening to the New York Times, the Daily Podcast had an interview with someone who's been at the forefront of submersible exploration for years. And he was very concerned about what this is going to do to the field. Again, you get in a tiny little submersible, whatever it is and go down to the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure every one of those people still recognize that there's a tremendous amount of risk, but they have that mentality that they want to be pioneers.

8:44But what does it do to the long-term viability of any kind of exploratory forum where you're trying to make it mainstream? Because think about full self-driving, the idea that let's push the entire industry forward, let's cut corners, let's try to actually make this a thing. And we're going to say that we are the road to actually making it real. But instead, what happens is now everything is much messier from a regulatory perspective, because, you know, it was pushed in such a way. And that's, I think, what you're seeing here. You think that full self-driving in the Tesla cars, do you think that's led to more accidents and more crashes than actual human operators?

9:23Because I've read the statistics about full self-driving. I mean, this is sort of a tangent, but let's talk about it because I got to push back on you here a little bit. It does seem like there haven't been as many accidents as I thought there would be. No, my argument about full self-driving, I would guess, and I do believe that it will be safer than human drivers in the long run. However, to get it to achieve widespread adoption, there has to be some cooperation between the National Highway Transit Safety Authority or regulators or who the people who built the highways or the people who build infrastructure.

9:57Like there has to be some coordination and accepted behaviors and norms around how you're pushing this technology to make it acceptable and work across everyone everywhere. Because again, the first time, or I guess an Uber self-driving car had already killed someone. And of course that's going to happen. But understanding who's liable, how are they liable? This stuff, it can't just be pioneers and cavemen eating mushrooms or whatever else So Marie Curie, you know, exposing herself to radiation, that's all great. But if we're going to create some kind of like widespread adoption of technology, the whole Uber just go in, guns blazing, regulators be damned, I think we saw that that just did not work over the last decade.

10:44And I think it slows down innovation and technological adoption versus the alternative. And I think, I mean, I was, I will admit this actually made me, this whole thing made me more interested in going in a submersible i'm not going to deny exactly i didn't i didn't really know it existed that well so i mean either but it's this is a thing i think that what you're talking about is actually kind of a disproof to some of the things that you've been saying because you need at least i think you need some of the recklessness in the beginning if you're going to make progress because they push the standard forward and then eventually industry followers follows and regulators make it safe you know it's sort of like the god i'm going to say the example that we always get that that i think is so ridiculous but there's some truth to it that cars came first and then came the seat belt but they first were like let's get these cars on the road and then they're like ah okay when they crash people go through the windshield let's try to figure out how to stop that so i think it's a one-two process yeah but again i would say aviation is a different approach right so yes the very very first people who are flying it's are the cavemen eating mushrooms, as Mike Solano would say.

11:50That's just stuck in my head right now. The first men foraging for the first mushrooms. But the moment it becomes any kind of business, the moment you start going beyond the first men and the first mushrooms into everyday people and saying, this is a business, we have a service, at that point, it has to be safer. If you're going to actually make it an institution, if you're going to make it an industry, it's got to be safer. I agree. And that's probably what's going to come now. I mean, I don't think anyone's getting into 10 cans of merciful anytime soon until they read all the fine print, which I don't think the people who went in this actually did or didn't consider enough, obviously.

12:33There's another side of this story that's actually quite fascinating, which is the media side of the story. And you dropped this in our notes before the call, but the New Republic actually had this story. I thought it was really good talking about how that, you know, we've seen so much. I mean, it was a full week story covering this submersible. Meanwhile, there was a boat filled with refugees and migrants off the coast of Greek with 800 people that sank earlier in the month. And there was almost no media attention. In fact, I'll say I have a pretty broad consumption of media, you know, part of the job.

13:05I didn't even know that this, the ship went down. And it's sick that the media, this is the sort of the critique, it's sick that the media has been covering this submersible so intently and can't pay attention to the ship with the migrants. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I'm first going to turn it over to you and see what you think, Ranjan. I think I'm not surprised that a story involving 800 migrants off the Greek coast is not getting the same airplay as uh four billionaires and uh uh captain on a submersible especially the like a part of me almost was wondering who who took over from chris licked at cnn because there's a handful of people okay but obviously good for them for cnn i'm sure has been on this non-stop i mean i think it's just a reminder again that this is the type of story that is just made for summertime American media consumption.

14:08This is like all the, especially four days of oxygen left. How long are they going to make it? How is it going to go? I mean, it's almost sad, but you can just see how well structured this is for ongoing media consumption like the Malaysian plane. Right. So I had a few thoughts when I first saw this. First of all, I was like, you know, it is true that the media should be paying attention to other tragedies and likes to just chase after this type of thing. And there's really no excuse for it. So I thought that that was a good critique. I think there should be more coverage. The one thing that I will say about it is that or the other thing I will say about it is that this is a supply and demand marketplace, which often gets lost in the discussions of the media.

14:56Right. And so media are responding to their audiences. And if people will not read stories about tragedies off the Greek coast with migrants in a ship, then they're just going to have less of those stories that will come out. And if people are going to click like crazy on this submersible thing, then they will put out more stories. And that is what happens. I think that the audience-driven side of media decisions really does get left out often. And I'm sure what happened in this case was that people just went banana. So it's sort of like, is it a media problem? Yes, but it's also really a society problem.

15:34Like for all the people saying we need more coverage of this, like effectively, it's just not getting attention from folks. And at a certain point, how long do media companies, you know, I mean, of course, like I think, of course, there should be coverage here. But it's also like you in some ways, the media companies will always listen to their audience because those are the people that are reading and consuming. and they're going to produce the stuff they're interested in. That's a tough, tough segue into what the next story is then. Musk v. Zuck. Yeah. So speaking of stuff that the media likes and people are interested in, we have a potential huge fight coming.

16:13I mean, God, it was – dude, I think that's the worst transition in the history. In the history of podcasts. Of our show. But we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. We're going on. We were debating earlier, do we cover this? but we're going to do it. I think this is an important story to cover. So for folks who are just learning of this, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might fight in a UFC cage after effectively what happened was Mark Zuckerberg is trying to build a Twitter clone within Facebook and his executives have said that this could be the same thing as Twitter, but just run by saner management.

16:47And Elon Musk took exception by that. By the way, Elon has a long history of disparaging Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. So he tweeted earlier, this is from CNBC earlier this year, he tweeted that Instagram makes people depressed and that Facebook was lame. And then he also tweeted, I don't use Facebook and never have just don't like Facebook gives me the willies. Sorry. And he's also tweeted about WhatsApp that it cannot be trusted, which is like against the entire selling proposition of WhatsApp. So effectively Musk and Zuck, they do not get along at all which is interesting i didn't think that this would be i kind of thought there might be some some you know collegiality between the two of them i don't know why but they obviously hate each other and musk suggested that he would fight zuckerberg in a cage match and then zuckerberg posted that to instagram and said name a location and i'll just say what's happening now so this is actually we're actually talking to the ufc about doing this so dana white told tmc sports he said Mark Zuckerberg hit me up first and said, is he serious?

17:54And then he reached out to Elon Musk and Elon said, yeah, I'm dead serious. So White is surmising that this could end up bringing in over a billion dollars in pay-per-view revenue if it actually happens. So I'm curious what you have to say about this, Ron John. First of all, handicap for us, who would win? Second of all, is this thing actually going to happen? And third, who are you rooting for? it's a tough one on the handicap because again mark zuckerberg we've gone over this on this show has posted a number of photos of him winning and crushing other people we've never actually seen any of the combat we've never actually seen him we've never seen him lose so no no that's not true anymore there is a video circulating of him getting uh basically um knocked out by somebody or technical lockout or the ref stopping the fight okay i had not seen that i'd seen the new York Times, I think it was Joe Bernstein had a piece where apparently it was reported that he had lost consciousness during one of the matches.

18:51Right. But then they tried to clarify. But yeah, that video was out. Once Joe wrote about that in the Times, that was coming out and that video is now out, shared by the person who beat him. His wife actually posted it to Twitter or shared it with someone who tweeted it. So if you tweet Mark Zuckerberg, sorry, if you search like something like Mark Zuckerberg wrestling or Mark Zuckerberg, you know, knocked out or something on Twitter, you can find that video if you want to if you're trying to figure out what to do with your weekend this is potentially a good good plan for you i know what i'm doing right after um okay i'm gonna try to find the serious angle to this story and here's what it's gonna be the fact that this is being covered by the way it's being covered by cnbc by bloomberg the tweets about it i've been kind of keeping notes about this around again people are advertising this as though it is wwe or ufc or as though this is like you know in the cage zuck v musk who's gonna win what and and it still absolutely blows my mind one quarter or maybe two quarters now for meta of of a comeback and zuck is jumping all into this musk obviously will take any attention he can get But the question is, here's what I'm going to ask.

20:09What's Musk trying to distract from? He's the king of anytime there's something else going on, he goes over the top with some kind of other thing that grabs everyone's attention, the diversion. I feel there's something again that he is the fact that he how much he's been leaning into this and I think he is the world's greatest tweeter and he knows exactly what he's doing and this is fun to push for a little bit but I feel he's only going to lean into this this heavily if there's something else coming out. i disagree i think that musk is talented at getting attention we know that we understand that's why he became the most prolific tweeter the most popular tweeter and then eventually bought the platform when he didn't like the rules so i think that this is just an example of musk seeing that there's some energy and interest and then just going all the way in to try to exploit that to his best ability well how far is going all the way in i mean i do okay i don't want to I don't want to handicap the fight.

21:08I want to handicap, does the fight happen? I would say no. I would say there's probably 25 % chance that it happens. What do you think? I would take the under on that. I would say significantly less. I feel this is, again, this is drawing attention. This is pulling it, again, like the quote we had in here from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, this is real bad blood. This is a beef that has lasted over years it's getting more and more nasty and it looks like the only way it's going to be settled is in the cage this is a guy who's supposed to be a serious analyst on cnbc who gets the credibility to talk about tesla seriously in every instance yet this is the kind of stuff that's being said right but maybe dan knows about this and this i mean the anemone between the two of them the fact that musk has been bashing facebook for so long and zuckerberg's ready to fight him maybe Dan is on to something I know this if this fight happens you and I we got to do a live YouTube show uh where we watch this fight and just you know we'll do the courtside announcing as it goes down I'm in I'm in for that because I know it's not now listen I will handicap it I think Zuckerberg would obviously win but uh Elon has this move he says I have this great move that I call the walrus where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing so I think that if Elon was able to get Zuckerberg in the walrus then that would be you know challenging to get out of but I'm already trying to think uh I think Andre the Giant way back had a move where he ran back and forth and just sat on the person so or maybe that was Earthquake if you remember it I don't know that was a long time ago but I don't remember Earthquake I mean Rikishi from back in the day would would definitely do oh he had the move i guess okay i guess it they uh it evolved over uh big men in the wwe right but i i anyway i would not i don't think elon lasts around with zuckerberg to be quite honest i think he lasts maybe a minute until not even a question yeah again i again what what was the the the zuckerberg murph post where what did he say he can do for Memorial Day where it's like running some amount, doing some amount of pushups.

23:27Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, it was something like the, it was named after one of the fallen servicemen, like the Murph or something like that. Yeah, and he gave a time that seemed almost impossible. Under 40 minutes. Yeah, and then it came out that he actually stopped in between every exercise and did, and then he was like, well, it's more of a circuit training. So, but again, he's in shape. He's, I'm not denying, He clearly is putting in the effort and putting in the time, unlike Elon. So yes, I'm with you. I would put the odds on Zuck significantly higher than Musk. The best possible fight you could see is the fight starts out.

24:02Musk immediately jumps on Zuckerberg, does the walrus, and then Zuckerberg turns it on him. I don't know. I think I would take Tim Cook in all of this because that man has talked about waking up at 4 a.m. to go to the gym. I read this somewhere, I remember, and I was like, i think tim cook secretly he's a killer i think tim would would uh he would be able to take musk out but i think zuckerberg zuck remember part of fighting is rage and the amount of stuff that tim cook has done to zuckerberg's business you think that zuckerberg is gonna not channel all that rage and his training tim cook has been crushing zuckerberg in the business realm now i think i think that would carry over to the cage listen i think speaking of will this happen tim cook would never fight would be terrible for apple but i think zuckerberg you don't understand you don't understand tim cook he's secretly a killer clearly i have to do more to the to any listeners that is completely ingest okay good confirmation what i'm saying is is actually a killer in the cage what i'm saying is zuckerberg versus versus musk could actually happen tim cook would watch it it's not it's tim cook would really enjoy it secretly you would oh yes of course speaking of speaking of fights there's a really interesting fight brewing between spotify executives and uh harry and megan um so first of all spotify has been on this there's much better segue than our last one um spotify has been on this like um real kick recently uh well over the past couple years trying to buy podcasts like the joe rogan podcast call her daddy um and bet that those hits would end up creating like a really nice business for it.

25:44It hasn't worked. And this is from The Verge. In the world of podcasts, a series from an acclaimed filmmaker, bestselling author, or even a former president can barely register on the charts. And after years of chasing this hit-making strategy, it all seems to be falling apart. So I just want to pause and say, you can put all the former presidents and former royalty you want. They're not going to stack up against big technology podcast Friday edition. It's just not going to happen. Sorry, Barack. Sorry, Barack. Sorry. But it is very interesting to see how Spotify has sort of done an about face on this strategy.

26:18And it really has kind of come to a head with Harry and Meghan. And I'm going to get into Bill Simmons, who's a podcaster and a Spotify executive. I'm going to get into his comments after this. But first, a moment to react, Ron, John. Yeah, I think the really interesting part of this story, Again, Spotify was at$230 million for Gimlet in 2019, The Ringer for$200 million in 2020. I think Joe Rogan, they paid$100 million to just pouring money into this. I think this is yet another business situation that totally captured the rise of pandemic consumption and extrapolation out from that consumption and just being completely wrong about it.

27:03But this is basically Clubhouse is the microcosm of what happened to Spotify in that everyone thinking, okay, podcast usage utilization is up this much. People, this time spent listening is this much. Revenue is up this much. So let's extrapolate that out at consistent growth rates for the next three to five years so we can justify these kind of investments. And it just didn't work. And I think it makes sense that it should have been a very strong part of the business. it makes sense that, again, becoming your go-to audio platform, personally as someone who's subscribed to Spotify since 2011, I always wish that they'd actually split out the app like Apple does into a separate podcast app, and I would have been a happy subscriber.

27:48It's made the app experience a little bit messier for me, but it should have been a reasonable, decent business. Again, also the idea of podcast advertising being done in network, so you don't have to buy your own advertisements, but you can actually just be part of the network and then actually get ads delivered through the overall network, that actually is very valuable. And I mean, as you as a podcaster, it's less lucrative per ad, but at least takes all the selling and that part of it away. So all of this should have been fine, but they just went in too big. The expectations were too high.

28:23Yeah, and you start making bets. This is what happens, right? When you start to spray money all over the place, you end up making a few bets that like work out okay, lots of bets that had potential but were disappointing, and some bets that are absolute disasters. And Harry and Megan was an absolute disaster. And I want to read just a few comments that Bill Simmons made about them. It's pretty unbelievable. So this is, you know, he just said this recently about them. He says they're effing, though the effing grifters, That's the podcast we should have launched with them. I got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try to help him with a podcast idea.

29:05It's one of my best stories. He also talked about them in January 22. I completely missed this. Here's what he said about Harry. Shoot this guy to the sun. I'm so tired of this guy. What does he bring to the table? He just whines about stuff and keeps giving interviews. Who cares? Who cares about your life? You weren't even the favorite sun. You live in effing Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares about what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain about them. I mean, they had a contract with these people for$20 million.

29:40It's unbelievable how badly that it went. This is why I think deep down I'm an optimist, Alex. And it's because finally the world makes sense with Harry and Meghan. is that when all of this was happening, I was like, even from a pure content standpoint, it was repetitive. It made no sense. It's like, how many times can you say the same thing over and over again? I don't know if you saw, I think it was the most recent Chris Rock special. He gets into it over, you know, the Harry and Meghan media machine and how it just became repetitive and ridiculous. So I don't know. I think this is just a sign that, you know, sometimes the arc of justice been, what's the saying again?

30:21Bends towards history. Arc of history bends towards justice. Arc of history bends towards justice. Oh, my God. And then we went there. Harry and Meghan being called effing grifters, I think, is a sign that we're there. Folks, we're live here on LinkedIn this week, and we did just get a comment saying that they're still all in on Harry and Meghan. So, you know, the man is popular. But, you know, it's interesting because the experience that they had with Spotify and there was a great New Yorker article that was written by his ghostwriter, which is just a must read. It's such a good story. One of my favorite stories this year, talking about how much of a pain he was to work with.

30:57I mean, I guess that sort of comes with the territory, though. You're part of the royal family. He's a prince. He's a prince. He's a royalty. Like, is anyone thinking that, yeah, just for producing a regular podcast, that he would be, you know, super diligent and hardworking? And I don't know. I think, again, I think maybe they left the royal family. You would imagine that they would, but no. yeah just get harry give us something interesting join the podcast come on next friday and uh and uh let's talk about tech harry we know that you love podcasting but you probably hate scripting so we're just giving you the floor here that was the problem that was the problem yeah he he didn't like the scripting the scripted nature of the show we will give him a free reign to speak his mind about technology news love it all right harry you're welcome we're here on big technology podcast with Ron Jan Roy of Margins.

31:49Great first half. A lot of very interesting consequential stories. In the second half, we are going to get to some more great stuff. We might cover Amazon and the FTC if we have time, but we're definitely going to talk about some leadership changes at TikTok. So more on that when we're back right after this. Shape the future of enterprise AI with agency. A-G-N-T-C-Y. Now an open source Linux Foundation project, Agency is leading the way in establishing trusted identity and access management for the Internet of Agents, a collaboration layer that ensures AI agents can securely discover, connect, and work across any framework.

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