00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I made an old man purchase the other day.
00:03SPEAKER- Wait, you know.
00:04SPEAKER- This is shocking, I know.
00:06SPEAKER- What you got?
00:08SPEAKER- I bought, well, okay, so last year,
00:10SPEAKERor earlier this year when we went up to the mountains,
00:12SPEAKERthe place we stayed didn't have like whole house heat.
00:16SPEAKERSo they had a wood-burning stove
00:20SPEAKERin the center of the house that heated up
00:21SPEAKERthe whole downstairs when you were in there
00:22SPEAKERand pumping wood into the stove.
00:23SPEAKERBut when you went to bed, it went dark
00:25SPEAKERand it got cold, and it was really cold up there.
00:27SPEAKERSo they had these heated mattress pads under the bed.
00:31SPEAKERI was like, this is the greatest thing I've ever had.
00:33SPEAKERI got into the bed, it was super cozy.
00:34SPEAKERIt stayed really warm all night.
00:36SPEAKERIt was beautiful, absolutely wonderful.
00:39SPEAKER- You couldn't tell there was wiring in there?
00:42SPEAKER- No, no feeling of wiring whatsoever.
00:45SPEAKERAnd it's not like, I mean, you're thinking about right now
00:49SPEAKERabout like the electric blankets of our youth
00:51SPEAKERthat you get in and it would be like
00:52SPEAKERa thousand degrees under there.
00:54SPEAKERThis is just, this just puts a little bit extra,
00:58SPEAKERlittle bit of, like when it warms up the bed,
01:00SPEAKERyou hit it in the preheat mode
01:01SPEAKERand it toasts up the bed really nicely.
01:03SPEAKERAnd then it cools down.
01:04SPEAKERAnd it's just been a little bit of extra heat in there
01:06SPEAKERfor those nights when you're chilly.
01:09SPEAKER- Does the heat stay in there?
01:11SPEAKER- Well, I mean, that's what the blankets do.
01:12SPEAKERThat's up to the blankets.
01:13SPEAKER- Depends on your bedding, right?
01:14SPEAKER- Yeah, what's your bedding, Sitch?
01:16SPEAKERYou got comfortable in your bed?
01:17SPEAKERWe got to get a new comforter, a new duvet as well.
01:20SPEAKER- Did we talk about this recently?
01:22SPEAKERMy bamboo, oh yeah, we talked about-
01:23SPEAKER- We talked about your bamboo, yeah.
01:25SPEAKER- I need to vent, I need to vent heat.
01:27SPEAKER- Yeah, see, I'm still, I like to keep it in.
01:30SPEAKERI need feathers, I need some sort of blanket on top.
01:34SPEAKERI got the whole thing.
01:35SPEAKERAnyway, it's real cozy and good.
01:37SPEAKERAnd it's really, really hard to get out of bed
01:40SPEAKERin the morning if that thing is like,
01:41SPEAKERif I wake up and I'm a little chilly,
01:44SPEAKERI just roll over and hit the button for a second.
01:46SPEAKERAnd I'm like, oh yeah, it's the stuff right there.
01:48SPEAKER- It's just 'cause you're all mosty toasty in there.
01:50SPEAKER- I am the toastiest mostiest.
01:52SPEAKER- Well, is this an old man purchase?
01:54SPEAKERI need to buy some polyester quilt batting.
01:56SPEAKER- Well, like just naked?
01:59SPEAKER- Our what?
02:00SPEAKERYeah. - Naked batting?
02:01SPEAKER- That's totally a thing.
02:02SPEAKER- Just a sack of batting?
02:03SPEAKER- Okay, have you ever rejuvenated, revitalized,
02:07SPEAKERresurrected couch cushions?
02:08SPEAKER- I have reupholstered things,
02:10SPEAKERbut I don't think I've ever done a couch.
02:12SPEAKER- You ever had a couch long enough
02:13SPEAKERthat the cushions just start to sag,
02:15SPEAKERlike the foam core just starts losing its spring?
02:18SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that's when it's time to get rid of the couch
02:19SPEAKERand get a new one.
02:20SPEAKER- Oh, well, the couch is still in good shape.
02:21SPEAKER- Well, okay, A, the couch is still in good shape,
02:24SPEAKERother than the cushions.
02:25SPEAKERB, I'm sure as hell not buying a new couch
02:28SPEAKERwhen we're teetering on the brink of moving
02:30SPEAKERout of here at some point.
02:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I've kept a couch for way too long
02:34SPEAKERbecause I've been on the teetering of moving.
02:35SPEAKERI'm like, I'm not gonna move this couch.
02:37SPEAKER- I've suspended all major furniture purchases
02:40SPEAKER'cause who the hell wants to buy new furniture
02:42SPEAKERand then immediately move it?
02:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that is a...
02:45SPEAKERSo why don't you just take them to an upholstery shop?
02:46SPEAKERThey'll redo 'em for you.
02:49SPEAKER- That's what Amazon is for now.
02:51SPEAKERWhat if I just spent 60 bucks on some quilt batting
02:54SPEAKERand some spray adhesive and did it myself?
02:56SPEAKER- So the spray adhesive I've done a lot with,
02:58SPEAKER'cause you use that to fix vinyl
03:00SPEAKERwhere it falls off the inside of your car,
03:01SPEAKERand my last car, the vinyl on the doors
03:05SPEAKERkept peeling off for some reason,
03:06SPEAKERso I would spray adhesive of it back on.
03:08SPEAKERThanks, Ford.
03:12SPEAKERThe rebuilding the cushions I've never done,
03:14SPEAKERthat always seemed complicated to me.
03:16SPEAKERJust layer it on, spray it, stick it, shove it, zip it.
03:21SPEAKERGood.
03:22SPEAKER- I feel like you're gonna end up with a lumpy place
03:24SPEAKERfor your butt to go, though.
03:25SPEAKER- Possible, possible.
03:26SPEAKERThe idea is you cram it so full
03:28SPEAKERthat it kind of expands inside the bag and fills it out.
03:32SPEAKER- I think you're firmly into a place
03:34SPEAKERwhere I would trust an expert to do the work
03:36SPEAKERthat I want done if I liked the couch.
03:38SPEAKER- Hmm.
03:38SPEAKER- If I feel like the couch is something I'm keeping longer,
03:41SPEAKERI would pay them to redo it.
03:42SPEAKERAnd if I feel like the couch is on the end of days,
03:47SPEAKERand I just need something to last long enough
03:48SPEAKERfor me to move and buy a new couch,
03:50SPEAKERthen I would probably do it myself.
03:51SPEAKERLet me ask you a further question.
03:53SPEAKERDo you even need a couch?
03:55SPEAKER- What?
03:56SPEAKER- Why not just put a couple of comfortable chairs in there?
03:58SPEAKERGet a recliner, get a fancy gamer chair, I don't care.
04:01SPEAKER- Couple of gamer chairs, living room gamer chairs.
04:04SPEAKER- What about those moon chairs, the tilt back ones,
04:07SPEAKERlike the ones that are zero gravity chairs?
04:09SPEAKER- Oh God, the orbital lounger?
04:10SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:11SPEAKER- Did you ever sit in that thing?
04:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it was awesome.
04:13SPEAKER- That thing just took up space in the basement.
04:15SPEAKER- I used to sit in that, and I'd grab my laptop
04:17SPEAKERand sit over there and just do work.
04:18SPEAKERIt was great.
04:19SPEAKER- In Sausalito?
04:20SPEAKER- Yeah, was it in Sausalito, or was it in the-
04:24SPEAKER- Yeah, the orbital lounger was downstairs
04:26SPEAKERin the law office.
04:27SPEAKER- Didn't it end up in the engineering corner?
04:30SPEAKERIt was in the dark part of the office, I think.
04:32SPEAKER- Did it get moved to Front Street?
04:33SPEAKER- I think it got moved to Front Street,
04:34SPEAKER'cause that's where I sat, and I never came back.
04:36SPEAKERWe weren't allowed downstairs when we were in Sausalito.
04:38SPEAKERYou guys, only for podcasts, you guys were too cool.
04:41SPEAKER- Wait, what?
04:41SPEAKER- Yeah, I was afraid, I was afraid.
04:44SPEAKERI was like, I don't want to bother the giant bomb guys.
04:46SPEAKERThey're too cool.
04:47SPEAKER- That's right, we're big, important, yeah.
04:50SPEAKER- Yeah, big, important internet people.
04:52SPEAKERBut no, who says, what law said we have to have a couch
04:57SPEAKERand a couple of chairs and a coffee table in your living?
04:59SPEAKERYou could have four chairs, I don't care.
05:01SPEAKER- Look, I can't lie across four chairs
05:03SPEAKERthe way that I can lie across one couch.
05:05SPEAKER- That's why you get a recliner.
05:06SPEAKERThen you just pop, bum, bum, full recline.
05:09SPEAKER- Look, man, my living room, my business.
05:12SPEAKER(upbeat music)
05:39SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
05:41SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:42SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.
05:43SPEAKERI don't know which tech catastrophe to pick from
05:46SPEAKERto talk about this week, although we have pre-chosen.
05:48SPEAKERBut I just wanted to say, boy, there's a lot going on.
05:51SPEAKER- Shout out to FTX, that's what you're saying.
05:53SPEAKER- Dude, like, between the Twitter, okay, hang on.
05:58SPEAKERWe need to go over the term.
06:00SPEAKERTwitterpocalypse is too played, I'm trying to think.
06:01SPEAKER- No, we're not gonna call it Twittergate
06:03SPEAKERor anything stupid like that.
06:04SPEAKERWe're just gonna call it Elon's $44 billion mistake.
06:07SPEAKER- How about this, the twitastrophe?
06:10SPEAKER- Whoopsie.
06:11SPEAKER- Between the Twitter chaos, the midterms,
06:15SPEAKERand now the FTX collapse.
06:18SPEAKER- I'm pretty pleased with the midterms.
06:20SPEAKERI've gotta be honest, that's not really a debacle.
06:21SPEAKERThat worked out as hoped.
06:24SPEAKER- Like that's just shot,
06:25SPEAKERthat's pure schadenfreude at this point.
06:27SPEAKERI'm not saying that's bad.
06:28SPEAKERI'm just saying here are now three extremely chaotic
06:32SPEAKERand like kind of dramatic, wild events
06:35SPEAKERgoing on simultaneously.
06:36SPEAKERAnd bouncing between reading long deep dive articles
06:39SPEAKERon all three of them back and forth
06:41SPEAKERis like making my head spin.
06:43SPEAKER- I mean, first off, we don't usually do current events.
06:46SPEAKERSo this week the Twitter stuff seemed,
06:48SPEAKERand honestly the FTX too had the Twitter stuff not happen,
06:51SPEAKERseems relevant enough.
06:53SPEAKERSo FTX, if you don't know,
06:54SPEAKERis a large crypto trading exchange
06:59SPEAKERthat seemed like it was backed by actual value.
07:02SPEAKERAnd in turns, like most crypto was backed by nothing.
07:06SPEAKERAnd it's collapsing in a most like really visible public way.
07:13SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
07:14SPEAKERWell, but I mean like there's a bunch of like
07:16SPEAKERvery cliched bullet points about it.
07:18SPEAKERLike the type of stuff you would see
07:19SPEAKERon Silicon Valley, the show.
07:20SPEAKER- Yeah, oh yeah.
07:21SPEAKER- Except playing out in real life.
07:23SPEAKERLike the founder is like,
07:24SPEAKERhe might be in his mid thirties now,
07:25SPEAKERbut he might, I think he was like in his twenties
07:27SPEAKERwhen he started it.
07:28SPEAKER- Yep.
07:29SPEAKER- Like giant mop of hair,
07:30SPEAKERlike wears shorts and t-shirts
07:32SPEAKERand sneakers on stage at conferences.
07:33SPEAKER- He allegedly did the original pitch to the Sequoia,
07:40SPEAKERthe venture capital fund that backed him
07:42SPEAKERwhilst playing a game of league of legends.
07:44SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
07:45SPEAKER- And ganking people.
07:46SPEAKER- Like I saw a quote from whoever was a Sequoia
07:49SPEAKERwho talked to him originally
07:50SPEAKERwhen they set the whole thing up,
07:51SPEAKERwho I feel embarrassed for this person.
07:54SPEAKERThey were like, it occurred to me
07:56SPEAKERthat I was speaking to the first future trillionaire.
07:59SPEAKERThat was just like the most breathless nonsense.
08:01SPEAKER- But so anyway.
08:02SPEAKER- Well, real quick, before we move on to the actual topic,
08:05SPEAKERwhich is Twitter,
08:06SPEAKERthey run that thing out of a multimillion dollar penthouse
08:08SPEAKERin the Bahamas, which is a tax haven.
08:10SPEAKER- Of course.
08:11SPEAKER- And there's like 10 of them and they're all super young
08:14SPEAKERand they're apparently all romantically involved
08:15SPEAKERwith each other.
08:16SPEAKERLike they're running this like,
08:17SPEAKERI think FTX was valued at like 36 billion at its height.
08:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
08:22SPEAKER- And it was literally like 10 recent college grad
08:25SPEAKERprogrammers and finance types.
08:27SPEAKER- Perfect.
08:28SPEAKER- On an Island tax haven and now all the money is gone
08:32SPEAKERand also a bunch of it got hacked and stolen.
08:34SPEAKER- It's probably fine.
08:36SPEAKER- Anyway.
08:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, look, the contest this week
08:39SPEAKERwas to see who can piss away billions of dollars fastest.
08:41SPEAKERI think in the speed race,
08:43SPEAKERI'm gonna say FTX probably is the winner, right?
08:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I think like in pure financial terms, yes.
08:48SPEAKERI would say that the, what, roughly 15 years of social cache
08:54SPEAKERthat Twitter has built up that is being flushed
08:56SPEAKERdown the toilet and moment by moment
08:58SPEAKERlike that makes it a little fuzzier.
09:00SPEAKERI mean, I think if you're looking at like
09:02SPEAKERwho can destroy the most long-term value in the fast,
09:05SPEAKERlike I didn't know what FTX, I mean, I knew what FTX was,
09:08SPEAKERbut I hadn't paid any attention to it
09:09SPEAKER'cause I don't pay attention to crypto stuff.
09:11SPEAKER- Same.
09:11SPEAKER- Like the Twitter, I knew what Twitter was obviously.
09:13SPEAKER- Yes, yes, that's my point.
09:16SPEAKERTwitter is a cultural institution
09:18SPEAKERthat is rapidly being dismantled, I would say.
09:20SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I mean, the thing about Twitter
09:22SPEAKERis it's always been a, it's been a cultural institution
09:24SPEAKERfrom the beginning almost
09:26SPEAKERand it's always been a shitty business.
09:28SPEAKERLike they've never been able to, like Facebook,
09:30SPEAKERFacebook, there was a point where you're like,
09:31SPEAKERthey don't really like money on Facebook.
09:32SPEAKERI have no idea how this works.
09:34SPEAKERBut then all of a sudden out of nowhere,
09:36SPEAKERFacebook started making billions of dollars
09:38SPEAKERand they're like, we're just gonna be able
09:39SPEAKERto let you advertise to specific people, right?
09:42SPEAKERAnd I don't mean like a class of people.
09:45SPEAKERI mean, like if you wanna advertise to a guy
09:47SPEAKERwho's 47 years old and lives in Pacifica, California
09:49SPEAKERand wears glasses, they can probably find me, right?
09:52SPEAKER- Right, or even more to the point,
09:55SPEAKERif you wanna, if you're a seller of mattress pads
09:58SPEAKERand you want to advertise exclusively to people
10:00SPEAKERwho our algorithms tell us are actively
10:03SPEAKERin the process of looking for a mattress pad, here you go.
10:07SPEAKER- Well, whereas Twitter, when you'd buy ads on Twitter,
10:09SPEAKERif you got too specific, like this is a game
10:12SPEAKERI like to play when I'm in the ad buying setup
10:14SPEAKERand anybody can make an ad account and do this.
10:17SPEAKERI like to see if I can find myself, right?
10:19SPEAKEROr find my parents.
10:20SPEAKERAnd when you get too specific on Twitter,
10:23SPEAKERthey're like, hey, that's too specific.
10:24SPEAKERWe don't let you advertise to that few a number of people.
10:27SPEAKERSo-- - Can anybody
10:28SPEAKERjust access this interface?
10:29SPEAKER- You have to agree with terms of service
10:31SPEAKERin a contract probably.
10:33SPEAKER- Huh, okay.
10:35SPEAKER- But yeah, anybody can access those interviews.
10:36SPEAKERIt turns out they wanna, they'll say if you wanna buy ads,
10:38SPEAKERthey're willing to sell ads to you, it turns out.
10:41SPEAKERSo anyway, earlier this year in January,
10:44SPEAKERMusk bought a bunch of outstanding Twitter stock
10:46SPEAKERat a fairly low price and ended up with about 9%
10:50SPEAKERof the company as one does.
10:52SPEAKER- Was there any, so my memory of this whole,
10:55SPEAKERI think we're gonna like briefly run through
10:57SPEAKERthe absurd timeline of events of last few months and then--
11:02SPEAKER- I think it would be constructive
11:03SPEAKERbecause especially in the last couple of weeks
11:05SPEAKERhave been the kind of weeks where you look up
11:06SPEAKERand you're like, oh yeah, that was a month ago.
11:08SPEAKERAnd then you look at the calendar and you're like,
11:10SPEAKERoh no, that was three days ago.
11:11SPEAKER- Dude, dude, I am having that experience
11:13SPEAKERon the timescale of days, two hours at this point.
11:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it's-- - Like quite literally,
11:18SPEAKERit's like, you know, name any one of the two dozen things
11:22SPEAKERthat's happened since he took over.
11:24SPEAKERAnd like, I can read about that the next day
11:27SPEAKERand think it was a week ago.
11:28SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, I mean, and I think before we do this,
11:32SPEAKERwe should maybe, like, why does Twitter matter?
11:37SPEAKERLike that's, as I was going down this whole thing,
11:39SPEAKERI've been thinking about Twitter a lot
11:41SPEAKERthis last couple of weeks, obviously.
11:44SPEAKERBut like, why does Twitter matter?
11:48SPEAKER- I think the brevity of, the brevity and simplicity
11:51SPEAKERof the posts is still crucial
11:53SPEAKERto why it is such a kind of thought center.
11:56SPEAKER- I also think it's the verified,
11:59SPEAKERthey were early on verification.
12:01SPEAKERAnd as a result, a lot of like everything,
12:05SPEAKERobviously famous people are there,
12:07SPEAKERbut also like government entities are there.
12:10SPEAKERYou know, the Department of Parks
12:11SPEAKERand the, my water board posts stuff on Twitter
12:14SPEAKERwhen they're having problems, you know,
12:17SPEAKERit's one of the ways they notify people of issues.
12:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so like trending topics also were an early component
12:23SPEAKERof exposing people.
12:24SPEAKERI mean, yeah, whatever.
12:25SPEAKERI mean, say what you want about them.
12:26SPEAKERBut like they were an early component of exposing you to,
12:28SPEAKERlike, here's what people are talking about in a very,
12:31SPEAKERlike everything on Twitter is distilled in a way
12:33SPEAKERthat I don't feel like something like Facebook is.
12:36SPEAKER- Yeah, the fact that it has to be short
12:37SPEAKERmeans that people, even if you make a thread,
12:40SPEAKERyou make a list of paragraphs, it's hard to,
12:42SPEAKERit's impossible to do a wall of text on Twitter,
12:45SPEAKERwhich is Facebook with the wall of text
12:47SPEAKERseems to be the default way to communicate
12:48SPEAKERfor a lot of people.
12:49SPEAKER- Right.
12:52SPEAKER- So, okay, so I mean, I think my answer to that question
12:56SPEAKERis probably that it's become a default form of communication
13:00SPEAKERfor a lot of businesses and politicians and celebrities
13:03SPEAKERand musicians and pretty much everybody,
13:05SPEAKERbut the visual artists and the, I mean,
13:07SPEAKERInstagram has taken over some of this, obviously,
13:09SPEAKERover the last few years.
13:10SPEAKERBut also the fact that it was reverse chronological sorted
13:13SPEAKERfor a long time meant that there was no algorithm
13:15SPEAKERinterference in what you saw.
13:17SPEAKERThat's changed, but you can still set it
13:19SPEAKERto be reverse chrono if you want.
13:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
13:22SPEAKER- Anyway.
13:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so what I was gonna say was my memory
13:26SPEAKERof all this stuff really starts in April
13:28SPEAKERwhen he made the ridiculous offer to buy.
13:30SPEAKER- So the first I saw about it was when he bought the stock
13:32SPEAKERand the board got nervous.
13:34SPEAKER- So that's what I'm saying is that in going through
13:37SPEAKERthis timeline, I remembered like, oh yeah,
13:38SPEAKERhe did buy a bunch of stock in January,
13:40SPEAKERbut that's what I was gonna ask was,
13:41SPEAKERwas there any prelude to that?
13:43SPEAKERLike any, you know, bloviating from him or like,
13:47SPEAKERis there any, is there any like awareness
13:49SPEAKERof why he made that initial stock purchase?
13:51SPEAKER'Cause it seems like his, it seems like his, you know,
13:54SPEAKERsoapbox free speech absolutism really didn't super pick up
13:57SPEAKERuntil like March, April when he actually made the offer.
14:00SPEAKER- Okay, so the thing to remember here is that he made,
14:04SPEAKERokay, so Elon Musk's history is that he worked at a company
14:08SPEAKERthat he bought a company that invented money,
14:10SPEAKERbut on the internet, right?
14:11SPEAKERAnd then two years later, three years later,
14:13SPEAKERthey got bought by PayPal or eBay.
14:18SPEAKEROkay, the company he bought got merged with PayPal
14:21SPEAKERand then PayPal got bought by eBay,
14:23SPEAKERbut he ended up, he ended up being, and then he was sacked.
14:26SPEAKERMaybe not exactly in that order.
14:27SPEAKER- Was he sacked after the purchase?
14:29SPEAKER- I think he was sacked just, but just before,
14:31SPEAKERbut he still made money.
14:32SPEAKERI don't know the specifics of that, I don't care.
14:34SPEAKER- Anyway, the eBay acquisition of PayPal
14:36SPEAKERis what gave the world Elon Musk and Peter Thiel,
14:39SPEAKERso thank you for that.
14:39SPEAKER- Yeah, good job eBay.
14:40SPEAKERBut the point is, it's not like Bezos
14:44SPEAKERwhere Bezos had 10 years where everybody's like,
14:46SPEAKERthis Amazon thing is a complete waste of time.
14:47SPEAKERThey're never gonna make money, blah, blah, blah, blah.
14:49SPEAKERAnd he had to maintain the company through that, right?
14:52SPEAKERLike three years is no time in terms of like
14:55SPEAKERhow long you have to keep people working together
14:57SPEAKERand supporting.
14:58SPEAKERSo it's not like it's exceptional management skill
15:01SPEAKERor whatever, it's just, hey, they had enough money
15:03SPEAKERto make it three years and then somebody bought them
15:05SPEAKERfor a shitload of money.
15:07SPEAKERWhen you look at how he's used Twitter
15:09SPEAKERin the post Tesla era, when he bought his way into Tesla,
15:13SPEAKERand then the stuff he's done pumping and dumping stock
15:20SPEAKERand crypto and stuff like that on Twitter
15:22SPEAKERin the last few years, he probably has made more money
15:24SPEAKERon that than he did on PayPal, right?
15:27SPEAKERLike more of his wealth has come from his use of Twitter
15:31SPEAKERto engage an audience to do things that he wants them to do
15:34SPEAKERthat manipulate the price of different assets,
15:39SPEAKERhas made him a shitload of money over the last few years.
15:41SPEAKERSo in that sense, spending half of his fortune
15:44SPEAKERto buy the thing that made him more than half
15:47SPEAKERof that fortune kind of makes sense.
15:50SPEAKER- Sure, his manipulation is not withstanding.
15:52SPEAKERI mean, my understanding is that like
15:54SPEAKERjust by automaker standards, Tesla is like wildly,
15:58SPEAKERwildly overvalued.
15:59SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's worth more than all the other
16:00SPEAKERU.S. car manufacturers combined.
16:02SPEAKER- Yeah, that's--
16:03SPEAKER- I mean, maybe not now 'cause it's dropped a lot
16:05SPEAKERin the last couple of months, but--
16:06SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's tanked.
16:07SPEAKER- Well, but like compared to when you look
16:11SPEAKERat the number of cars they ship and the value of the stock,
16:13SPEAKERI mean, we're not analysts, whatever.
16:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
16:16SPEAKER- It's wildly overpriced.
16:18SPEAKERAnyway, there's also some legal stuff coming on him.
16:23SPEAKERThere's a criminal probe coming at Tesla
16:26SPEAKERfrom the Department of Justice, I think.
16:27SPEAKERI can't remember about Tesla's auto driving stuff.
16:31SPEAKERSo good news on all fronts for Elon.
16:33SPEAKERAnyway, the point is when he bought 9% of the company,
16:37SPEAKERthe Twitter board looked at how much money he had
16:39SPEAKERand the outstanding number of shares and were like,
16:41SPEAKER"Oh shit, we're a hostile takeover target."
16:43SPEAKERWhich means he would just go start buying stock
16:47SPEAKERon the market until he owned 51% or 50.00001%
16:52SPEAKERand then he would sack everybody on the board.
16:54SPEAKERSo they did a poison pill clause.
16:56SPEAKERAnd what it says is basically that if any one shareholder
16:59SPEAKERgets more than X percentage of the shares,
17:01SPEAKERyou offer all of the shareholders more shares at a discount
17:06SPEAKERthat effectively dilute the shares
17:08SPEAKERheld by the entity doing the takeover.
17:10SPEAKERSo what you do is you let them buy in
17:13SPEAKERand get more shares to maintain the percentage
17:15SPEAKERthat they had while the person
17:19SPEAKERwho is doing the takeover gets nothing.
17:22SPEAKERSo that means that each of their shares
17:23SPEAKERbecomes worth a smaller percentage
17:27SPEAKERas more people buy into the new round.
17:30SPEAKERAnd that's gonna tank your stock price,
17:32SPEAKERbut it means that you'll retain the control of the company,
17:34SPEAKERwhich is the goal.
17:36SPEAKERIt only works if investors think
17:38SPEAKERthat there's something worth buying there.
17:40SPEAKERSo some block of investors would have to have put
17:45SPEAKERenough money in that they actually diluted Elon's shares.
17:51SPEAKERSo when they did this, they also offered him a board seat
17:53SPEAKERin exchange for promising that he wasn't gonna buy
17:55SPEAKERmore than 10% of the outstanding stock,
17:59SPEAKERwhich he accepted and then backed out of almost immediately.
18:03SPEAKER- Kind of seems like a pattern with him.
18:05SPEAKERIt seems like he says yes to a lot of stuff
18:07SPEAKERand then immediately changes his mind.
18:10SPEAKERAnyway. - I started to,
18:11SPEAKERI started to, I don't know if I should,
18:15SPEAKERI don't know if-
18:16SPEAKER- I mean, he listens to podcasts, he might find it,
18:17SPEAKERbut I think he's probably hanging out with Joe Rogan
18:19SPEAKERinstead of us, right?
18:20SPEAKER- I don't know if I should speculate
18:21SPEAKERabout what his drug intake is at this point,
18:24SPEAKERbut it seems probably profound.
18:25SPEAKER- I'm not, I don't think there's,
18:29SPEAKERlook, regardless, the behavior is not,
18:33SPEAKERit's strange behavior.
18:35SPEAKERIf you're a billionaire,
18:36SPEAKERyou can do whatever the fuck you want
18:36SPEAKERand I think he's aware of that.
18:38SPEAKER- So it seems.
18:40SPEAKER- So in April, he made this ridiculous offer
18:42SPEAKERto buy the whole company for $44 billion,
18:45SPEAKERwhich was even a premium at the time.
18:47SPEAKERThe stock was still at like 40 bucks,
18:48SPEAKERtrading at like 35, $40 at that point.
18:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so that was famously $54 and 20 cents a share,
18:54SPEAKERwhich-
18:56SPEAKER- It's the weed number, her, her, her, her.
18:57SPEAKER- Boy, does he really think that 420 is funny, man.
19:00SPEAKERGod, holy shit, this guy is such a fucking moron.
19:03SPEAKERAnyway, so the Ukraine war had been going on
19:10SPEAKERat that point for a little bit.
19:11SPEAKERThe entire market tanked in make
19:13SPEAKERwhen the war didn't stop on schedule.
19:15SPEAKERAnd he tried to back out at that point,
19:17SPEAKERbut Twitter's board was like, no, you're stuck to the deal.
19:20SPEAKERIt's worth pointing out that when he said
19:22SPEAKERthat he was gonna buy the company,
19:23SPEAKERhe was like, let's just make this happen fast.
19:24SPEAKERI waive all rights to diligence, blah, blah, blah, blah.
19:27SPEAKER- I was literally about to ask you when that happened.
19:29SPEAKERWas that it?
19:30SPEAKERWas that right up front at the initial offer?
19:31SPEAKERThat seems like he waived all that stuff?
19:33SPEAKER- I don't know the timing on that, but it was early.
19:36SPEAKER- Pretty early, 'cause that later became a focal point
19:38SPEAKERof his efforts to back out in saying
19:41SPEAKERthat they had not provided sufficient data
19:44SPEAKERon numbers of bot accounts and so forth.
19:46SPEAKERAnd they said, well, you have no entitlement to that
19:49SPEAKERbecause you signed it away.
19:52SPEAKERAnyway.
19:53SPEAKER- That's it.
19:53SPEAKERSo Twitter's board was like, no, dude, you gotta buy
19:56SPEAKERthe company.
19:57SPEAKERAnd when the price of the stock crashed at that point,
20:02SPEAKERA, it's a real, it's kind of a bummer that Twitter's board
20:06SPEAKERwas like, hey, he's offering $10 a share more
20:09SPEAKERthan we're trading at right now.
20:11SPEAKEROur fiduciary duty as, if you don't know,
20:14SPEAKERif you're on the board for a company
20:15SPEAKERor you're the CEO of a company or whatever,
20:17SPEAKERyour goal, you have a legal responsibility
20:21SPEAKERto do what makes money for the company.
20:23SPEAKERIt's one of the hallmarks of American capitalism.
20:25SPEAKERIt's probably bad, just to be clear.
20:27SPEAKERI mean, there's no probably, but it's almost certainly bad.
20:32SPEAKERBut it means that you have to represent the best interests
20:36SPEAKERof the shareholders.
20:37SPEAKERAnd the shareholders looked at this and like,
20:38SPEAKERlook, man, we've been doing this for a long time.
20:40SPEAKERWe have no idea what we can, nothing we can do
20:42SPEAKERis gonna make more money than Elon just buying the company
20:45SPEAKERis a real bummer.
20:47SPEAKER- Everybody who owns stock in this came made out
20:49SPEAKERlike an absolute bandit.
20:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
20:52SPEAKERSo when the stock crashed in May,
20:54SPEAKERhe immediately tried to start getting it.
20:56SPEAKERLike he was, he clearly was in trouble
20:59SPEAKER'cause he was gonna pay an enormous,
21:00SPEAKERhe was already paying a premium for the company.
21:03SPEAKERAnd now he's paying an enormous premium for the company.
21:05SPEAKERWhen this stock is trading at $22 or $32
21:09SPEAKERor something like that, he's gonna make a buttload
21:10SPEAKERof money for everybody that's outstanding.
21:14SPEAKERSo in July, he tried to get out of the deal.
21:17SPEAKERThey had a court date set for October.
21:20SPEAKERDuring this time, there was a lot of discovery
21:22SPEAKERand we got to see a lot of text messages from billionaires.
21:24SPEAKERI don't know if you have any excerpts, Brad, but.
21:27SPEAKER- I've got the document here.
21:29SPEAKER- I have to imagine that his billionaire friends
21:31SPEAKERwere as pissed off about the text being revealed
21:35SPEAKER'cause it's all of the conversations about
21:39SPEAKERwhat he should do with the company
21:40SPEAKERand how he should manage it and things like that.
21:42SPEAKER- I mean, quite literally there is talk
21:44SPEAKERabout the suspension of the Babylon Bee from Twitter in here.
21:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
21:48SPEAKER- Like this is where it seems to be.
21:49SPEAKER- What's the Babylon Bee, Brad?
21:52SPEAKERIt's an all right news.
21:54SPEAKER- Bad, bad right wing The Onion.
21:57SPEAKER- Okay.
21:59SPEAKERAnyway, you do get the sense from reading.
22:01SPEAKERI mean, there are texts in here between him and his ex-wife
22:03SPEAKERand him and Jack Dorsey and him and one of the co-founders
22:09SPEAKERof Palantir, Joe Rogan, all kinds of people.
22:13SPEAKERAnyway, you really get the sense from reading this stuff
22:15SPEAKERthat he actually is serious about the free speech stuff
22:19SPEAKERor I'm gonna use that term in some sneer force, let's say,
22:24SPEAKERbut like his conception of it,
22:26SPEAKERhe actually believes that stuff.
22:28SPEAKERIt's not like you've been seeing some conspiracy theories
22:32SPEAKERfloating around about how he's trying to destroy
22:34SPEAKERthe digital public square to pave the way for autocracy
22:39SPEAKERor he's cozying up to whatever foreign regime or whatever.
22:41SPEAKERAnd maybe he does have some lizard brain level desire
22:47SPEAKERto do that stuff.
22:48SPEAKERBut I don't think there's some calculated plan
22:51SPEAKERto destroy Twitter here.
22:52SPEAKERI think he actually does.
22:53SPEAKERI think he really does have these shallow ideas
22:55SPEAKERabout this stuff that he claims to.
22:59SPEAKER- It's interesting because, oh, I'm looking up an article
23:03SPEAKERhere so I don't mess up the names.
23:07SPEAKERBut Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt did a series on the,
23:11SPEAKERI'll actually just post the links in the show notes
23:13SPEAKERso people can find them 'cause they're worth reading
23:15SPEAKERif you care about the stuff.
23:16SPEAKERHe actually went through, hey, here's why Twitter
23:20SPEAKERis the one that was good at free speech
23:22SPEAKERof the social networks 'cause most of the other sites
23:25SPEAKERjust ban you for saying things that are unpopular.
23:28SPEAKERWhereas Twitter has spent a fair amount of money and time.
23:31SPEAKERTheir chief legal officer, I guess,
23:34SPEAKERwho was one of the people that was immediately sacked
23:37SPEAKERhad spent a lot of time testifying and fighting
23:40SPEAKERagainst the section 230 reform stuff
23:42SPEAKERand all of the things that made Twitter a haven for speech.
23:47SPEAKERSo anyway, I think the thing that became clear
23:53SPEAKERis that what Musk thinks is free speech
23:55SPEAKERand what is actually free speech as determined
23:57SPEAKERby years of Twitter having to deal with it.
24:04SPEAKERLike, free speech is a hard problem, just to be clear.
24:08SPEAKERThe thing about free speech, and this is a thing
24:10SPEAKERthat people who listen to this show, I assume, know,
24:12SPEAKERis that the First Amendment doesn't protect you,
24:14SPEAKERdoesn't let you say anything to anybody anywhere
24:17SPEAKERon whatever medium you want.
24:19SPEAKERIt just says that the government can't say,
24:21SPEAKERyo, you can't say that.
24:22SPEAKERLike, that's it.
24:24SPEAKERCorporations that host stuff, anybody who's hosted
24:27SPEAKERon the message board is familiar with the phrase,
24:28SPEAKERwell, free speech doesn't exist here.
24:30SPEAKERWhat speech I allow in the message board
24:32SPEAKERis the speech that is what we're gonna have here.
24:37SPEAKERAnd he has the edgelord, I'm a freshman in college
24:40SPEAKERand I just got access to the internet in 1993.
24:42SPEAKERI can say anything I want anywhere.
24:44SPEAKER- That's what I meant about the absolutism
24:46SPEAKERand that is exactly it.
24:47SPEAKERLike, it absolutely feels like a very, very early
24:50SPEAKERsomething awful poster when that forum was dominated
24:53SPEAKERby Bush-era libertarian type view of things.
24:56SPEAKER- Yeah, and so the thing,
25:00SPEAKERMike Masnick wrote a bunch of things.
25:01SPEAKEROne was like the, hey, here's all the stuff
25:04SPEAKERthat Twitter actually does to protect free speech
25:07SPEAKERin a way that Facebook and TikTok and the other companies
25:09SPEAKERthat own social media don't.
25:11SPEAKERBut he also posted this thing that was a speed run
25:14SPEAKERfor content moderation learning curve,
25:16SPEAKERwhich is, again, familiar for everybody
25:18SPEAKERwho ran a message board at some point.
25:20SPEAKERLevel one is, hey, we're the free speech platform,
25:22SPEAKERanything goes.
25:24SPEAKERAnd then the response to that is,
25:26SPEAKERhey boss, we're getting reports that there are
25:28SPEAKERchild sexual exploitation and abuse images
25:30SPEAKERand videos on the site.
25:31SPEAKEROh yeah, we should take that down.
25:33SPEAKERLevel two, we're the free speech platform,
25:35SPEAKERbut no child exploitation.
25:39SPEAKERBoss, there's a huge stack of emails from Hollywood
25:40SPEAKERsaying something about DMCA takedowns.
25:42SPEAKEROh right, copyright infringement is bad, get rid of that.
25:44SPEAKERWe're the free speech platform,
25:46SPEAKERbut no child exploitation and infringement.
25:47SPEAKERAnd it just goes on like this for like 35 levels.
25:49SPEAKERSo like, yeah, everybody's pissed off at you all the time
25:54SPEAKERwhen you run this.
25:55SPEAKERLike that, one of the metrics of like video,
25:59SPEAKERlike when I was reviewing video cards,
26:01SPEAKERif the AMD people and the Nvidia people
26:02SPEAKERwere equally pissed off at me,
26:03SPEAKERI knew I was doing my job right.
26:05SPEAKERThis is the same thing.
26:05SPEAKERLike if the free speech people and the right,
26:08SPEAKERif the right wing and the left wing are both pissed off
26:10SPEAKERat you 'cause you're doing a shit job they think,
26:12SPEAKERthat means you're probably okay.
26:13SPEAKERIf one side really likes you, you've messed up.
26:16SPEAKERAnyway.
26:18SPEAKERSo we tried to get out of the deal,
26:19SPEAKERthey were gonna go to court.
26:21SPEAKERThe sale, they ended up, at the last minute,
26:24SPEAKERright before they went to court,
26:25SPEAKERI assume he talked to a lawyer who was like,
26:26SPEAKER"Hey, you're gonna have to pay in addition
26:28SPEAKERto the difference in the stock price to get out of this."
26:32SPEAKERLike, my assumption is that some lawyer at some point
26:35SPEAKERwas like, "Hey, look, you can get out of buying this,
26:38SPEAKERbut you're gonna have to pay $30 billion to do it,
26:41SPEAKER$10 billion to do it."
26:42SPEAKERSome enormous amount of money,
26:43SPEAKERversus the $1 billion that he would have to pay
26:47SPEAKERif he backed out of it before.
26:48SPEAKER'Cause that was another part of the sale contract,
26:51SPEAKERI forgot about this,
26:52SPEAKERis that because he had agreed to be on the board
26:54SPEAKERand then backed out, they put a clause in that was like,
26:56SPEAKER"Hey, if you back out of this one,
26:57SPEAKERyou owe us a billion dollars,
26:57SPEAKERplus the differences and costs."
27:00SPEAKERSo anyway, the point is it was probably cheaper
27:03SPEAKERfor him to buy Twitter than to not buy Twitter.
27:05SPEAKERSo they closed the sale on October 27th.
27:08SPEAKERThe stock was delisted and then shit got really crazy.
27:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it's kind of shocking how fast it went from
27:15SPEAKERhe's trying to get out of it,
27:16SPEAKERto he's being forced to buy it,
27:18SPEAKERto he's in there with a sink,
27:19SPEAKERto he has fired all the executives.
27:21SPEAKER- Let that sink in, Brad.
27:23SPEAKER- To he has cut half of the workforce
27:27SPEAKERto Mario is flipping off the entire internet
27:32SPEAKERfrom what looks like Nintendo of America's official account.
27:35SPEAKER- That was verified, that was a real account.
27:37SPEAKER- It all happened so fast and there's so much
27:39SPEAKERand I don't know if I can go through it all.
27:41SPEAKERI would love to recap everything in order,
27:44SPEAKERbut it's fucking impossible.
27:45SPEAKER- Well, okay, so the big ones,
27:49SPEAKERthe sink thing was unfortunate, like not funny.
27:55SPEAKERIt was maybe the worst dad joke I've seen in a while,
27:58SPEAKERbut so they were like,
28:01SPEAKERI was trying to break it up into multiple phases.
28:03SPEAKERThere was an early phase.
28:06SPEAKERWell, okay, first off he came in and he booted the CEO
28:09SPEAKERin the C-suite basically entirely on the first day.
28:11SPEAKERI think like two people survived that.
28:13SPEAKER- That was his first real big move, right?
28:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:17SPEAKER- Like the day he came in, he fired all the executives.
28:19SPEAKER- It seemed like there was no internal communication.
28:23SPEAKERSo it's not like he let people know what was going on
28:26SPEAKERwho worked there.
28:28SPEAKERThere was all sorts of weird code review stuff
28:30SPEAKERwhere they were asked to print out the code
28:33SPEAKERthey'd contributed and then maybe don't do that
28:35SPEAKERand shred it instead.
28:37SPEAKER- Right, God, I forgot about that one.
28:38SPEAKERYeah, again, there was so much.
28:40SPEAKERSo I'll put this in the show notes.
28:41SPEAKERI'm referring to a timeline that IGN posted
28:44SPEAKERof kind of the main bullet points,
28:46SPEAKERwhich are, like you said, for example,
28:48SPEAKER27th is the day he walked in with the sink,
28:50SPEAKER27th is also the day he fired all the executives,
28:53SPEAKERbut I guess this is the point I'm trying to make.
28:56SPEAKERLike the code review at the time was complete insanity,
29:00SPEAKERbut there has been so much subsequent
29:02SPEAKERand more intense insanity that that has like
29:04SPEAKERcompletely fallen out of the collective memory, right?
29:07SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, the code review is really telling to me
29:09SPEAKERbecause that's one of the things that's like,
29:10SPEAKERhey, for somebody who's worked in technology
29:13SPEAKERfor 23, four, five years at this point,
29:16SPEAKERhe's missing a core,
29:19SPEAKERlike there's a fundamental arc to software developers
29:22SPEAKERwhere in the beginning you don't write much code,
29:23SPEAKERthen you get good at writing code
29:24SPEAKERand you write a bunch of code,
29:25SPEAKERand then as you become more and more senior,
29:27SPEAKERyou get put onto harder problems,
29:28SPEAKERwhich means you probably write less code
29:30SPEAKERas somebody who's been doing this for 15 or 20 years
29:32SPEAKERthan you do early on,
29:33SPEAKERbut you understand how the architecture works
29:35SPEAKERor how you're working on free speech problems
29:38SPEAKERor like naughty hard problems.
29:40SPEAKERSo it's like what he's saying by writing by,
29:42SPEAKERhe's saying I'm only gonna keep the people
29:44SPEAKERin the middle of that path.
29:45SPEAKERLike when I have to sack, when I'm laying people off
29:49SPEAKERis as we all know, the best way to cut costs
29:52SPEAKERat a company that's losing money
29:53SPEAKERis to fire all the people that understand
29:55SPEAKERhow the thing works.
29:56SPEAKER- Of course, and also keep it running.
29:57SPEAKERIt's come out in the last few days
29:59SPEAKERthat he fired 80% of like,
30:03SPEAKERI don't know what the name for the department is,
30:06SPEAKERlike site reliability engineers and ops,
30:08SPEAKERlike the people who actually maintain all the systems
30:11SPEAKERand keep them running.
30:11SPEAKERAnd sure enough, I don't know if you've seen it,
30:13SPEAKERbut I absolutely have seen numerous examples
30:15SPEAKERof functionality just breaking on Twitter
30:17SPEAKERthat you haven't seen in years,
30:19SPEAKERlike implies failing to load in
30:21SPEAKERand all kinds of weird little stuff.
30:23SPEAKERLike retweets, retweets fell back.
30:25SPEAKERApparently they had a fallback mode on retweets
30:28SPEAKERto fall back to, remember the original style of retweets?
30:29SPEAKER- It was RT colon?
30:31SPEAKER- Yes, when people did it manually
30:32SPEAKERand they just wrote RT and pasted somebody's text in,
30:36SPEAKERlike it fell back to that for like half a day last week.
30:39SPEAKERLike things are breaking and most of the people
30:41SPEAKERwho were there to keep things from breaking or fix them
30:43SPEAKERare no longer there.
30:45SPEAKER- Well, yes, okay.
30:45SPEAKERSo he brought in, he fired the executive team.
30:48SPEAKERAnd then that period after that was categorized
30:51SPEAKERby friends of Elon posting polls
30:53SPEAKERthat seemed to be affecting policy changes on the site.
30:58SPEAKERAnd also after the Paul Pelosi attack
31:02SPEAKERthe weekend after he bought Twitter,
31:05SPEAKERhe posted some fake news about,
31:07SPEAKERit's like from a not just questionable resource,
31:15SPEAKERbut like a site that just posts lies.
31:18SPEAKER- Right, like it's not questionable
31:19SPEAKERthat that site thrives on conspiracy theories.
31:23SPEAKERIt's like, it's very documented.
31:25SPEAKER- And like replied to Hillary Clinton,
31:27SPEAKERlike was proud of himself.
31:29SPEAKER- Yes.
31:30SPEAKER- So this is when, so up until that point
31:34SPEAKERonly GM I think had said,
31:36SPEAKER'cause the important thing to think about at this point
31:37SPEAKERis Twitter makes all of its money from ads
31:39SPEAKERprior to October 27th, right?
31:42SPEAKERLike they have a tiny number of Twitter blue subscriptions.
31:45SPEAKERThere's a little bit of money
31:46SPEAKERthat goes through like the super follow stuff,
31:48SPEAKERbut compared to advertising, it's a drop in the hat.
31:52SPEAKERSo GM said, hey, we're gonna pause ads on Twitter
31:56SPEAKERfor a little bit.
31:57SPEAKERIt's important to understand where Twitter falls
31:59SPEAKERin the advertising market as well,
32:02SPEAKERbecause without that highly specific direct targeting,
32:05SPEAKERthere's a thing that Facebook and Instagram
32:07SPEAKERand the Facebook companies do where Nike,
32:12SPEAKERNike has a Facebook cookie on their site.
32:14SPEAKERAnd they know when you go and look at a pair of shoes
32:20SPEAKERon Nike's website, Nike will know and Facebook knows.
32:24SPEAKERAnd Nike's like, hey,
32:24SPEAKERthis person was interested in a pair of shoes.
32:26SPEAKERWe're gonna flood their feed with ads for this shoe
32:31SPEAKERand shoes that are adjacent and close to it
32:33SPEAKERto see if we can find the exact shoe
32:34SPEAKERthat they wanna spend money on right now.
32:36SPEAKERTwitter doesn't really allow that kind of advertising.
32:39SPEAKERIt doesn't enable that kind of advertising.
32:41SPEAKERSo Twitter is much more brand advertising,
32:43SPEAKERlike Facebook is very transactional.
32:45SPEAKERIt's like, hey, you need to buy something.
32:46SPEAKERWe're gonna put that thing in front of you and we're gonna,
32:48SPEAKERif you don't want, if you also,
32:50SPEAKERif Nike doesn't buy the ad for that shoe,
32:53SPEAKERfor that shoe customer,
32:55SPEAKERNew Balance and Adidas are right there ready to go, man.
32:58SPEAKER- Right, targeted is the word.
32:59SPEAKER- Yes, hyper-targeted.
33:02SPEAKERTwitter was much more about brand advertising.
33:04SPEAKERSo companies like Procter and Gamble
33:05SPEAKERthat make toothpaste and laundry detergent and shampoo.
33:10SPEAKERAnd I can't remember the new name
33:13SPEAKERof the company that owns Kraft,
33:14SPEAKERbut the company that owns Kraft owns Nabisco and Oreo
33:16SPEAKERand all sorts of cereals and stuff like that.
33:18SPEAKERGeneral Motors and Ford car companies are in the same boat.
33:22SPEAKERAnd because Tesla doesn't advertise,
33:25SPEAKERMusk doesn't believe in advertising,
33:27SPEAKERhe spent his whole career not learning how this shit works.
33:30SPEAKERSo when he comes out in the morning
33:32SPEAKERand immediately post a conspiracy theory website.
33:36SPEAKER- About an attempted political assassination.
33:39SPEAKER- Yeah, about something that,
33:40SPEAKERlike the advertisers are like, oh shit.
33:42SPEAKERAnd at the same time, there was a massive increase
33:44SPEAKERin the rise of hate speech on the platform.
33:46SPEAKER'Cause the moment Elon took over,
33:48SPEAKERthe racists in the shit bags came out
33:51SPEAKERand started posting all sorts of horrific stuff again,
33:54SPEAKER'cause they assumed that their boy was in and it was cool.
33:57SPEAKER- Yeah, at exactly the same moment
33:59SPEAKERthat moderation and enforcement
34:00SPEAKERwere in the process of being gutted.
34:02SPEAKER- Yeah, so, and while all this is going on,
34:06SPEAKERthey're posting cutesy polls,
34:09SPEAKERasking like whether advertisers should support free speech.
34:13SPEAKERThe advertisers continued to pull their ads
34:15SPEAKERfrom Twitter at this point.
34:17SPEAKER- They're also, this is another example of type stuff
34:20SPEAKERthat will get lost in the shuffle,
34:22SPEAKERbut there were people that worked in advertising
34:24SPEAKERat the time, there was both anonymous reporting
34:26SPEAKERand also a couple of them actually came out
34:28SPEAKERand tweeted about it directly.
34:29SPEAKERLike there was, he had a big conference call with advertisers
34:32SPEAKERa few days in that apparently was an absolute disaster.
34:35SPEAKERLike he clearly had no plan whatsoever
34:38SPEAKERfor how to execute any new strategy
34:42SPEAKERor how to address any of their concerns.
34:43SPEAKERAnd like some of the reporting was that like some ad reps
34:46SPEAKERat some companies were literally canceling future ad spend
34:50SPEAKERwhile that call was still going on.
34:51SPEAKERLike they were so astonished at what a mess,
34:54SPEAKERwhat a clown show it was.
34:55SPEAKER- Well, and I was gonna say the other thing to remember
34:57SPEAKERis we're in a soft economy going into a recession
35:00SPEAKERit looks like, right?
35:01SPEAKERAnd the first thing that goes in a recession
35:03SPEAKERis always brand advertising, right?
35:05SPEAKERLike you, transactional advertising makes sense
35:07SPEAKER'cause you're like, okay, this ad,
35:08SPEAKERthis sale cost us a dollar to make.
35:11SPEAKERSo we make $80 on the shoes.
35:13SPEAKERIt costs us a dollar for the ad.
35:15SPEAKERWe'll continue spending money on transactional ads.
35:17SPEAKERThat makes sense.
35:18SPEAKERBrand advertising, they're like, we have no idea
35:20SPEAKERwhat the return on this car ad on Twitter is.
35:23SPEAKERYou know, a tiny percent, nobody clicks on ads on Twitter.
35:26SPEAKERNobody clicks on links on Twitter at this point.
35:28SPEAKERIt's just staying inside the,
35:30SPEAKERit's like watching the watching machine go around in there.
35:33SPEAKERSo he's giving something there,
35:37SPEAKERhe's giving them an excuse to publicly look good
35:40SPEAKERby doing something they're already probably inclined to do.
35:43SPEAKERRight?
35:44SPEAKERSo the advertisers are gonna jump,
35:45SPEAKERit's like rats from a sinking ship at this point.
35:49SPEAKERAnd out of the tweet, out of the poll tweets
35:53SPEAKERcomes the Twitter blue slash verified thing.
36:02SPEAKERIt's interesting 'cause I talked to some friends
36:04SPEAKERwho ran message boards in the 90s
36:06SPEAKERand talked to people from my past.
36:08SPEAKERLike you had mentioned low tax earlier and something awful.
36:12SPEAKERLiterally speed running the how do we make money
36:14SPEAKERon message boards at this point.
36:16SPEAKERAnd I think around this time I tweeted something like,
36:18SPEAKERhey man, the secret of social media
36:21SPEAKERisn't that the posts are the content.
36:24SPEAKERIt's that the moderation is what you can sell
36:26SPEAKERbecause advertisers never ever ever wanna have
36:29SPEAKERtheir expensive brand ad up against a picture
36:31SPEAKERof some guy's junk or somebody,
36:33SPEAKERsomething horrible happening to somebody.
36:35SPEAKERLike they don't wanna be associated
36:37SPEAKERwith the worst day of somebody's life ever.
36:39SPEAKERRight?
36:40SPEAKER- Once they cross that bridge,
36:41SPEAKERmaybe they should just go all the way
36:42SPEAKERand let you pay to change other people's avatars
36:45SPEAKERand put red text on their profiles.
36:47SPEAKER- Well, so I was gonna say that's gotta be coming.
36:49SPEAKERSo the first-
36:53SPEAKER- Sorry, before we get too far ahead,
36:55SPEAKERI think this is also around the time
36:57SPEAKERthat he started publicly blaming woke activists
37:00SPEAKERfor the ad polls and not corporations
37:04SPEAKERbeing skittish about their brand safety.
37:09SPEAKER- At that point, one of the woke activists
37:12SPEAKERwho runs the ads for democracy group had publicly tweeted,
37:17SPEAKERwe haven't done anything yet.
37:19SPEAKERWe just were sitting here watching
37:20SPEAKERto see what was gonna happen
37:21SPEAKERand decide if we needed to do something.
37:23SPEAKERAnd you took care of it for us
37:24SPEAKERwhen you started tweeting conspiracy theories.
37:26SPEAKER- I mean, it's astonishing how, God, I shouldn't even.
37:30SPEAKERReading Twitter replies makes me want
37:32SPEAKERto stab my eyes out these days.
37:33SPEAKERLike it's really upsetting how effectively
37:36SPEAKERthose narratives catch on.
37:37SPEAKERLike people have no idea what is actually happening.
37:39SPEAKERLike they just are so primed to believe like,
37:44SPEAKERwhatever Twitter is a cabal of social justice warriors
37:48SPEAKERsilencing free speech, you know what I mean?
37:54SPEAKERAttachments and narrative has completely supplanted
37:56SPEAKERattachment to reality at this point.
37:58SPEAKER- Well, it's interesting 'cause I was thinking about,
38:00SPEAKERI wrote a blog post about this the other day
38:01SPEAKERand I was thinking about it.
38:05SPEAKERThe time that Twitter was best
38:07SPEAKERwas when Twitter didn't push anything
38:10SPEAKERthat was from outside of my people I follow into my feed.
38:14SPEAKERSo like before trending topics,
38:16SPEAKERbefore you could really retweet stuff
38:17SPEAKERfrom other people's feeds into your feed,
38:20SPEAKERbefore you saw a bazillion replies
38:23SPEAKERon every publicly trending post,
38:27SPEAKERlike it was just me and people I knew
38:29SPEAKERand people I was interested in their work
38:32SPEAKERkind of shooting the shit.
38:33SPEAKERAnd it was a lovely, that was a lovely experience.
38:35SPEAKERIt was like, I've coasted for 10 plus years
38:39SPEAKERon how good that was in the early 2010s.
38:44SPEAKERAnyway.
38:44SPEAKERSo yeah, so not only did he blame the loss of ad revenue
38:49SPEAKERon the leftist boogeyman
38:51SPEAKERand all of his sycophants ate it up,
38:53SPEAKERhe also was going, and also again at the same time,
38:56SPEAKERI was like, literal ad people are out there
38:59SPEAKERtalking about why they pulled their ads.
39:01SPEAKERYou still believe this bullshit.
39:02SPEAKERAnyway, I don't know if you saw,
39:04SPEAKERI assume you saw that tweet about nuclear name and shame.
39:09SPEAKERAt some point, people were complaining
39:11SPEAKERabout what was going on.
39:15SPEAKERHe basically said like, yes,
39:16SPEAKERthere's going to be a nuclear naming and shaming
39:18SPEAKERof the advertisers who are undermining the business.
39:20SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, yeah.
39:21SPEAKER- And it was like, oh yeah, yeah, great.
39:23SPEAKERLike the people who are voluntarily pulling their money
39:26SPEAKERthat are destroying your revenue,
39:28SPEAKERit's probably a good idea to threaten them.
39:29SPEAKERI'm sure that will make them come back.
39:31SPEAKER- Brad, the first amendment means that you have to spend
39:33SPEAKERmoney on a billionaire's website that you don't want to.
39:36SPEAKERThat's what freedom means.
39:37SPEAKER- The chilling thing is that prior to the mid,
39:39SPEAKERthis was directly prior to the midterms
39:41SPEAKERwhen everybody thought that Republicans
39:43SPEAKERare going to take firm control of Congress
39:44SPEAKERand there were like Mitch McConnell's former chief of staff
39:48SPEAKERwas out there basically saying like,
39:51SPEAKERwe're going to hold these companies
39:52SPEAKERin front of a congressional committee next year.
39:54SPEAKERYou know, like there's some like genuinely chilling stuff
39:57SPEAKERbeing said politically about the companies
39:59SPEAKERwho were pulling out, but anyway.
40:01SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I mean, look, I don't think it's...
40:07SPEAKERAgain, I said this earlier, I'm gonna explain it.
40:10SPEAKERThe idea that you could moderate content
40:12SPEAKERat the scale of a social network is what allowed,
40:16SPEAKERis what allowed social media to be able to sell ads, right?
40:20SPEAKERLike without Procter and Gamble,
40:24SPEAKERNabisco doesn't want an ad for Oreos
40:27SPEAKERacross from some guy calling somebody the N word ever.
40:30SPEAKERAnd if your platform can't guarantee
40:32SPEAKERthat it's not gonna happen,
40:33SPEAKERthey're not gonna spend money with you.
40:35SPEAKERWhether it's not about free speech,
40:36SPEAKERit's just really straightforward.
40:38SPEAKER- Yes, anyway, sorry,
40:42SPEAKERwe were moving into the verification stuff.
40:43SPEAKER- Yeah, so the verification thing
40:44SPEAKERis when it really became a...
40:46SPEAKERIt went from like train wreck to farcical clown show.
40:51SPEAKERHe gave a seven day project and he was like,
40:53SPEAKERhey, the verified check mark is gonna go
40:55SPEAKERto everybody who signs up for Twitter Blue.
40:57SPEAKERNow, Brad, you and I both have check marks.
41:00SPEAKERI got a check mark 'cause I thought it was really funny,
41:03SPEAKERrealistically. - Sure.
41:06SPEAKER- I got mine because the entire...
41:09SPEAKERI started to say entire company, which is not right,
41:11SPEAKERbut like our entire, the games group got them.
41:14SPEAKER- Every public facing person in the game,
41:16SPEAKERin like journalists got them.
41:17SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think there may have been an ad buy involved.
41:20SPEAKERLike it was just literally like,
41:21SPEAKERhey, like we're doing enough business with Twitter
41:23SPEAKERthat we can just get everybody verified,
41:24SPEAKERlike send us your info.
41:26SPEAKERI was like, okay, sure, whatever.
41:27SPEAKER- So it's not always tied to ad buy.
41:30SPEAKERLike if you have an agent and your agent can do that,
41:32SPEAKERlike it's basically the point of verification,
41:36SPEAKERaside from me thinking it's funny that I'm verified
41:40SPEAKER'cause my name's Will Smith and people get confused
41:41SPEAKERand it's all continuous. - When did you get yours?
41:43SPEAKERWas it very early?
41:44SPEAKER- Like 2015, 2013, I don't know.
41:47SPEAKERIt was before you could do the public application,
41:49SPEAKERbut it was after, it was when I was attested still.
41:52SPEAKERSo maybe it was 2012, I can't remember.
41:55SPEAKER- The point is that verification serves
41:56SPEAKERa functional purpose regardless of how frivolously
42:00SPEAKERthey started granting it later.
42:01SPEAKERLike the point is you're enough of a public figure
42:04SPEAKERthat it serves you and the rest of Twitter
42:08SPEAKERto prove that you are who you say you are.
42:10SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and then it also gives you access
42:13SPEAKERto some filtering tools that we didn't,
42:14SPEAKERI think now everybody gets those,
42:15SPEAKERbut you didn't get them for a long time.
42:17SPEAKER- That is the case.
42:18SPEAKERAnd I remember thinking that that was really shitty
42:19SPEAKERwhen I got verified and noticed that I was able
42:22SPEAKERto much better control the amount of bullshit coming at me
42:26SPEAKERand thinking like, boy, that sucks
42:28SPEAKERthat everybody doesn't have this,
42:29SPEAKERbut yes, that eventually they did.
42:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so he basically said seven days,
42:35SPEAKERwe're gonna change Twitter blue.
42:36SPEAKERYou're gonna get the verified check mark.
42:37SPEAKERAt this point, it became clear that he,
42:39SPEAKERso the other thing that people should understand
42:42SPEAKERif you don't pay a lot of attention to Twitter
42:43SPEAKERis that normal people realize that the blue check mark
42:46SPEAKERmeans, hey, this person is who they say they are.
42:50SPEAKERCrazy right-wingers, right wing, like all right people,
42:55SPEAKERthink that the, I think they mean,
42:57SPEAKERI think that it means it signals like media lead
42:59SPEAKERor left-wing West Coast liberal, coastal liberal.
43:03SPEAKERIt's unclear to me exactly what it signifies
43:05SPEAKERexcept for that it's like,
43:06SPEAKERhey, these people are better than us.
43:08SPEAKER- Right, and that correlates with what I was saying
43:10SPEAKERabout like entire media outfits
43:11SPEAKERwere just getting their whole staff verified.
43:14SPEAKERAnd so like here is like some assistant editor
43:16SPEAKERmaking 30K a year living in a shoebox is verified
43:20SPEAKERand you think this is a coastal elite.
43:22SPEAKER- Well, and just to be clear,
43:24SPEAKERthe verification stuff started
43:25SPEAKERbecause there was a real impersonation problem early
43:27SPEAKERon Twitter.
43:28SPEAKERLike the reason Shaquille O'Neal's Twitter account
43:32SPEAKERis real Shaq is because he came to Twitter.
43:36SPEAKERHe was the first, I'm picking on Shaquille Shaq
43:38SPEAKERbecause he's the first celebrity I remember on Twitter.
43:41SPEAKERHe came to Twitter because he heard about somebody
43:43SPEAKERimpersonating him on Twitter and he's like,
43:44SPEAKERhey man, that thing sounds pretty fun.
43:45SPEAKERI'm gonna go do that.
43:47SPEAKERAnd then he started posting Shaq,
43:49SPEAKERthis kind of shit you see on basketball games
43:51SPEAKERwhen he's doing the halftime show on Twitter.
43:55SPEAKERIt was really good.
43:56SPEAKERIt was funny.
43:56SPEAKERIt was like made him feel like a human being
43:58SPEAKERinstead of like a larger than life public figure.
44:00SPEAKERAnd that kind of opened the flood gates.
44:03SPEAKERSo there was this, there was a period of time
44:04SPEAKERwhere there was a mixture of actual celebrities,
44:08SPEAKERactual politicians, actual government entities
44:11SPEAKERand people parodying actual politicians
44:16SPEAKERand government entities.
44:16SPEAKERThe only way you could tell them apart
44:18SPEAKERwas that the parody ones had to have parody
44:20SPEAKERwritten somewhere in their profile,
44:22SPEAKERwhich nobody ever looked at.
44:23SPEAKERSo it was a shit show all the time.
44:25SPEAKERAnyway, they rolled out the check mark
44:28SPEAKERas a result of that.
44:29SPEAKERIt originally was really hard to get.
44:30SPEAKERThen it was slightly less hard to get.
44:31SPEAKERThen it was impossible to get for a long time
44:33SPEAKER'cause they just stopped doing it.
44:34SPEAKERAnd then it became really, really easy to get later on.
44:40SPEAKERSo Elon takes this thing that's designed to say,
44:46SPEAKERhey, this person is who they say they are.
44:50SPEAKERThis entity that you're seeing on the website,
44:52SPEAKERthe picture, whether it's Nintendo or me
44:55SPEAKERor Tucker Carlson, this person is who you say you are
45:00SPEAKERand says, we're gonna give this to everybody
45:02SPEAKERwho pays at first 20 bucks a month.
45:06SPEAKER'Cause it's like, how much could a banana cost, $20?
45:08SPEAKER- Yes, until hero of the people, Stephen King, intervened.
45:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
45:12SPEAKERAnd then it comes down to eight bucks.
45:15SPEAKERAnd meanwhile, while this is happening,
45:18SPEAKERall the people with actual that are verified are like,
45:20SPEAKERthis is fucking stupid.
45:22SPEAKERI'm not paying $8.
45:23SPEAKERI'm here, I'm providing,
45:25SPEAKERStephen King's argument was cogent.
45:27SPEAKERI'm providing value to you.
45:29SPEAKEREvery other platform that I can,
45:31SPEAKERif I had a sub stack right now,
45:32SPEAKERI could be charging money for this, right?
45:34SPEAKERWhy am I here making free content for you
45:36SPEAKERwhen you're gonna charge me to use your thing?
45:38SPEAKERFuck that.
45:41SPEAKERWhich is, just to be clear,
45:42SPEAKERthat's a thought we've all had on Twitter
45:44SPEAKERfor many times over the years.
45:48SPEAKERHe goes on with it.
45:50SPEAKERA bazillion people tell him it's a bad idea.
45:53SPEAKERThe advertisers are, meanwhile,
45:55SPEAKERthe five that are remaining are running like hell.
45:58SPEAKERAnd it goes live.
46:00SPEAKERAnd what happens immediately, Brad?
46:01SPEAKER- Oh my God.
46:02SPEAKER(laughing)
46:07SPEAKERSo from what I know, a writer I know at one point said,
46:10SPEAKER"You could not write this."
46:11SPEAKERAnd they are absolutely 100% correct.
46:14SPEAKERLike the bedlam that has ensued
46:16SPEAKERsince that change went into effect is beyond parody.
46:19SPEAKERLike just, like, I don't know how to describe it.
46:22SPEAKERLike it was, well, I mean,
46:24SPEAKERit was exactly what you expected to happen.
46:25SPEAKERLike the biggest accounts on Twitter
46:28SPEAKERimmediately were being impersonated
46:29SPEAKERwith check marks next to their name
46:31SPEAKERand spreading all kinds of stuff
46:32SPEAKERthat a ton of people took as legitimate.
46:35SPEAKER- Hey, Brad, insulin's gonna be free.
46:37SPEAKER- Yeah, like stock prices have crashed massively
46:40SPEAKERon Twitter hoaxes since this happened.
46:44SPEAKERA bunch of slightly more benign examples also exist.
46:48SPEAKERSomebody impersonated Valve and announced something fake.
46:52SPEAKERSomebody used Mario to flip everybody off
46:54SPEAKERfrom a real seeming Nintendo account, like I said.
46:58SPEAKER- That was, that Mario one was the first one I saw.
47:01SPEAKERI was like, this is pretty funny.
47:02SPEAKER- Yeah, it was the Valve one for me,
47:04SPEAKERwhich again, like featured a pretty believable
47:06SPEAKERfake product announcement.
47:09SPEAKERIt was exactly what you expected to happen.
47:11SPEAKERAnd it happened.
47:12SPEAKERAnd this was the part to still my favorite moment
47:16SPEAKERin this entire saga.
47:18SPEAKERLike the part where I decided, okay, fine.
47:20SPEAKERI'm on board with the idea that this is too entertaining.
47:23SPEAKERLike I was really not happy about the whole thing prior.
47:27SPEAKERAnd at that point I was just like, okay,
47:29SPEAKERthis is a lost cause.
47:29SPEAKERI'm just gonna laugh at it.
47:31SPEAKERIt was the point that they rolled out the official tag.
47:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
47:34SPEAKER- It was the point that they reinvented verification
47:37SPEAKERbecause they had just destroyed verification.
47:40SPEAKER- I mean, it's profoundly like,
47:44SPEAKERit's just a lack of understanding
47:46SPEAKERabout how people use things.
47:47SPEAKERLike Elon Musk would have known that.
47:51SPEAKERI would have known that
47:52SPEAKER'cause we would spend too much time on Twitter.
47:53SPEAKER- Is it lack of understanding though?
47:54SPEAKER'Cause people were like tweeting screenshots to him
47:56SPEAKERof a bunch of the major hoaxes that had been perpetrated
47:59SPEAKERand he was like posting laughing emojis at them.
48:00SPEAKER- No, no, no.
48:01SPEAKERThe idea that, I mean, look,
48:04SPEAKERwhat this says to me is that his thesis is
48:07SPEAKERthe only thing of value that Twitter makes
48:09SPEAKERis blue check marks, right?
48:10SPEAKER- Right.
48:11SPEAKER- So he could sell blue check marks
48:14SPEAKERto a bunch of presumably MAGA chuds.
48:17SPEAKER- Yeah, like the response to that whole thing
48:19SPEAKERcould not have made it more crystal clear
48:20SPEAKERthat it's all just about spite and grievance.
48:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's fair.
48:26SPEAKER- But even those people,
48:27SPEAKEReven the people who are gonna pay the $8
48:29SPEAKERto feel like they're owning the libs or whatever,
48:33SPEAKERlike that revenue is not gonna last.
48:34SPEAKERLike how long?
48:36SPEAKERI mean, some of them will forget to click cancel
48:39SPEAKERand just let it ride.
48:40SPEAKERBut like that high is gonna wear off pretty fast
48:43SPEAKEReven if this program even comes back.
48:46SPEAKERAnd like after two or three months,
48:47SPEAKERthey're gonna cancel because nobody's gonna care anymore.
48:50SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
48:50SPEAKER- So it's one of the most short-sighted moves
48:54SPEAKERin all of business I have ever seen.
48:55SPEAKER- It is a cell phone on the same scale
48:58SPEAKERof Microsoft shipping Windows 8
49:00SPEAKERwith a UI that works great for touch
49:02SPEAKERand terrible on desktops.
49:04SPEAKER- Oh, I think it's way worse than that.
49:05SPEAKERWell, I mean, that was-
49:06SPEAKER- 99% of computers are desktops.
49:08SPEAKER- I mean, this you overnight completely devalued
49:13SPEAKERand delegitimized the integrity of your entire platform.
49:16SPEAKER- Yeah, there was a good post.
49:17SPEAKERI can't remember who posted it,
49:19SPEAKERbut there was a good series of posts
49:20SPEAKERabout the trust thermocline,
49:22SPEAKERwhich is an idea that I hadn't really thought about before.
49:25SPEAKERI mean, it's something I'd considered,
49:27SPEAKERbut I hadn't, it's a good metaphor for it.
49:29SPEAKERAnd the idea is that as you have,
49:33SPEAKERthermoclines are sudden changes in temperature in the water.
49:36SPEAKERSo like when you go deeper in the ocean or a lake,
49:38SPEAKERthen it gets colder all of a sudden.
49:40SPEAKERAnd the idea is that when you cross one of those,
49:43SPEAKERthat there are trust thresholds that are the same.
49:45SPEAKERAnd when you cross over one of those thresholds,
49:48SPEAKERthat trust is gone and you can't get it back.
49:50SPEAKERAnd I think we were at that,
49:52SPEAKERwe're well beyond that point with Twitter at this point.
49:55SPEAKER- For sure, absolutely.
49:55SPEAKERI mean, it's just, the idea is just a tipping point
49:59SPEAKERwhere people have lost enough trust in your platform
50:02SPEAKERthat it's not fixable and that they like,
50:05SPEAKERthere was some component of that, that like-
50:08SPEAKER- Eli Lilly lost $20 billion in valuation because of this.
50:12SPEAKERThere was some, there was some component in that concept
50:14SPEAKERof like the effort required to just leave the platform
50:18SPEAKERis now less than the effort to stay and subject yourself
50:21SPEAKERto something that you inherently don't enjoy and trust.
50:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
50:25SPEAKERMore so, and like, just to be clear,
50:27SPEAKEReverybody's relationship with Twitter,
50:29SPEAKERwho spends time on Twitter,
50:30SPEAKERis fraught after the Trump presidency, right?
50:33SPEAKERLike between, like the party stopped for Twitter
50:37SPEAKERwhen Gamergate started in 2014, 2013,
50:41SPEAKERand it's gotten progressively worse each year since then.
50:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I would say,
50:49SPEAKERI mean, I don't know when it was
50:50SPEAKERduring the Trump administration,
50:51SPEAKERbut at some point it became such a vehicle
50:53SPEAKERfor propaganda and untruth that like,
50:57SPEAKERits effect on my mental health was never good,
50:59SPEAKERbut like, once it got to the point
51:00SPEAKERwhere you literally could not believe anything
51:02SPEAKERyou were reading and you were watching like,
51:04SPEAKERlike very harmful mass delusion play out in real time,
51:07SPEAKERlike it got to be really hard to swallow
51:09SPEAKERand yet we all keep subjecting ourselves to it.
51:12SPEAKER- Yeah, people looking for the basements
51:14SPEAKERof pizza places that didn't exist.
51:17SPEAKERThey turned off Twitter Blue after about 36 hours
51:20SPEAKERafter it went live,
51:21SPEAKERafter the verification badges went live.
51:24SPEAKER- Do you know if-
51:25SPEAKER- The timing on that was hard to find, actually.
51:27SPEAKER- Do the people who already paid keep the check marks
51:29SPEAKERor did they lose them?
51:30SPEAKER- That is unclear.
51:32SPEAKERI have not seen-
51:33SPEAKER- I actually, I know for a fact,
51:35SPEAKERyou know, you can quick click into profiles now
51:37SPEAKERand click the check mark and it'll tell you if they-
51:39SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:39SPEAKER- Paid for it or if it was a legacy one.
51:42SPEAKERSo I still have seen people with those,
51:44SPEAKERthe paycheck marks around in the last day or two, so.
51:48SPEAKER- That's good.
51:48SPEAKERI mean, I saw Nintendo's account still had it, so.
51:52SPEAKERAnd like, it was such a deluge,
51:57SPEAKERlike there's a channel of Discord that you and I are in,
52:00SPEAKERBrad, that was just, I mean,
52:02SPEAKERthe TechPod Discord had a bazillion of them posted.
52:04SPEAKERIt was just like a nonstop chain of,
52:06SPEAKERhey, here's the giant corporate entities
52:10SPEAKERbeing mocked with parody in the account name
52:14SPEAKERand a verified badge.
52:16SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
52:17SPEAKER- He made some statements about having parody,
52:20SPEAKERparody has to be clear or whatever,
52:22SPEAKERand everybody made fun of him
52:23SPEAKER'cause he opened the week before
52:25SPEAKERwith comedy is back on Twitter or some nonsense.
52:28SPEAKER- Right.
52:30SPEAKERThat almost brings us to the present day,
52:31SPEAKERbut I mean, there's some stuff we've glossed over.
52:33SPEAKERIt would take two hours to exhaustively
52:34SPEAKERgo through all this stuff,
52:35SPEAKERbut there was the part where after they laid off
52:38SPEAKERhalf of the workforce, within like 12 hours,
52:40SPEAKERit got out that they were starting to solicit
52:43SPEAKERsome of those people to come back
52:44SPEAKERbecause they had not done any diligence at all
52:47SPEAKERand decided I'm gonna get rid of.
52:49SPEAKER- Then there were posts from the Slack,
52:51SPEAKERscreenshots from the Slack where the manager
52:54SPEAKERthat was having to hire those people back was like,
52:55SPEAKERwe're just gonna suck the knowledge out of them
52:57SPEAKERand then fire them again in a few weeks.
52:59SPEAKER- Right, and there was a really gross ideological dent
53:02SPEAKERto that screenshot that you were talking about
53:03SPEAKERthat I saw last night that basically was like,
53:05SPEAKERsome of them may not even like be okay
53:07SPEAKERwith an Elon Twitter at all and stuff like that.
53:10SPEAKER- Well, and then there were also,
53:12SPEAKERthere was also the,
53:17SPEAKERoh, I completely lost the thread, I'm sorry.
53:19SPEAKER- Well, that's okay, there's plenty of more material
53:21SPEAKERto go through here.
53:21SPEAKERThere was the kind of all hands call he had
53:25SPEAKERwith the remaining staff where people basically
53:27SPEAKERsort of asked him like, hey, what are your plans
53:30SPEAKERto form and rally all of us around a shared vision
53:34SPEAKERand his response was essentially,
53:35SPEAKERI don't know, we're all gonna have to be more hardcore.
53:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
53:38SPEAKER- That was the same call that he admitted to everyone
53:40SPEAKERthat he didn't know how much burn rate
53:43SPEAKERor how much runway the company had left
53:45SPEAKERand that it wasn't out of the question
53:46SPEAKERthat they would declare bankruptcy.
53:48SPEAKERThis was less than two weeks in.
53:50SPEAKER- Well, I mean, 'cause like from a pure numbers standpoint,
53:54SPEAKERthe advertisers are mostly gone.
53:56SPEAKERLike I'm not even, I usually block all the ads
53:58SPEAKERthat I see that annoy me
53:59SPEAKERand I'm just getting absolute garbage like,
54:01SPEAKERhey, come click on our content farm for 22 pages
54:04SPEAKERso we can make more money than the cost of this ad.
54:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I think we may have neglected to mention
54:09SPEAKERand I'm sure most people know this at this point,
54:11SPEAKERbut due to the way his loans and the deal were structured,
54:15SPEAKERthe company now has about a billion dollars
54:17SPEAKERof annual debt to service.
54:19SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:20SPEAKER- So like they've got to cover a billion dollars a year
54:22SPEAKERjust on the debt on the purchase,
54:24SPEAKERlet alone all of their other burn for operations.
54:29SPEAKER- And then the other thing is the people who work
54:31SPEAKERin, who formerly worked in ops have been reliably,
54:34SPEAKERseem reliable, will have to seem to have reliable information
54:37SPEAKERthat the state, the service has always been a little wobbly.
54:40SPEAKERLike in the old days, we saw the fail whale fairly often.
54:43SPEAKER- Yes.
54:44SPEAKER- But you know, the idea that Twitter is going to continue
54:49SPEAKERto be around forever is in question now
54:52SPEAKERbecause it's unclear whether they have the people internally
54:55SPEAKERto keep the service going.
54:56SPEAKERLike it's complicated and it's heavy.
54:58SPEAKER- You're starting to see, like I said earlier,
55:00SPEAKERcurrent and former employees talking about like
55:02SPEAKERsome of the little problems with functionality
55:04SPEAKERthey're happening and how those can no longer
55:06SPEAKERbe addressed efficiently.
55:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:10SPEAKERThe other thing, there's a fundamental,
55:11SPEAKERlike I didn't go to business school clearly,
55:15SPEAKERbut there's a fundamental approach to it.
55:16SPEAKERLike him coming into this all hands and saying,
55:18SPEAKER"Hey, we got to get more money,"
55:20SPEAKERwhile he's torching the existing revenue streams.
55:22SPEAKERThat's not generally how you do that.
55:24SPEAKERUsually you buy something because it already makes money
55:26SPEAKERand you're like, "Oh, we can make more money by doing this."
55:29SPEAKERAnd coming in and throwing out the existing revenue streams
55:32SPEAKERwith seemingly no idea, like, I mean, it's possible
55:35SPEAKERthere's some 4D chess happening here,
55:37SPEAKERbut it just seems like he's in over his head
55:39SPEAKERand doesn't really understand how this business worked
55:40SPEAKERand maybe just like posting on Twitter,
55:43SPEAKERbut now gets to be the star of Twitter every single day.
55:46SPEAKER- That's exactly what I've seen people saying.
55:48SPEAKERHe bought Twitter so he could be
55:50SPEAKERthe main character every day.
55:53SPEAKERAnother thing I was going to mention just now,
55:54SPEAKERanother thing you're seeing from remaining employees is
55:58SPEAKERI've seen several talking quite openly
56:01SPEAKERwhile they still work there about the fact
56:03SPEAKERthat they are planning to leave or are looking.
56:05SPEAKERLike the people who are still there are being very blunt
56:08SPEAKERabout like, "Hey, I'm available,
56:09SPEAKERlike I'm not planning to stick around for long.
56:11SPEAKERHere's my LinkedIn."
56:13SPEAKERLike I'm kind of shocking how little people
56:15SPEAKERseem to care at this point.
56:17SPEAKER- I think that there were a lot of people
56:20SPEAKERwho knew he was going to lay,
56:21SPEAKERso we didn't even talk about the fact
56:22SPEAKERthat he tried to screw people out of the severance
56:24SPEAKERand realized only after the lawyers told him
56:27SPEAKERthat if he didn't actually follow the law,
56:31SPEAKERhe was going to be subject to way more fines
56:33SPEAKERand have to pay anyway.
56:35SPEAKER- Yeah, California requires you to either,
56:36SPEAKERwhen you're doing mass layoffs,
56:37SPEAKERgive 60 days of notice or pay 60 days of severance.
56:41SPEAKER- Yeah, and benefits.
56:42SPEAKER- And yes.
56:43SPEAKER- So I assume that there were a bunch of people
56:45SPEAKERwho were hanging out waiting,
56:48SPEAKER'cause like his reputation in the valley is that,
56:52SPEAKERlike I've had multiple people who worked at Tesla
56:54SPEAKERtell me that their strategy at Tesla
56:56SPEAKERwas just to stay out of his attention
56:58SPEAKERuntil they'd fully vested all the shares
57:00SPEAKERthat they earned by working there.
57:02SPEAKERAnd then, 'cause the moment you come into his focus,
57:05SPEAKERyou're at risk of being sacked at any moment.
57:07SPEAKER- Right, yes, I've also heard similar stuff
57:10SPEAKERabout working at his company is that he,
57:12SPEAKERit's kind of exactly what his public impression,
57:14SPEAKERor what his public persona gives the impression of,
57:16SPEAKERwhich is that he'll just kind of like waltz in
57:19SPEAKERin the middle of important work
57:20SPEAKERwith some cockamamie idea that he saw somewhere,
57:23SPEAKERand all of a sudden everybody has to grind to a halt
57:25SPEAKERand pivot to whatever,
57:26SPEAKERto executing whatever insane thing it is
57:29SPEAKERthat he just came in with.
57:30SPEAKER- I mean, look, he's really good at,
57:32SPEAKERwell, he's not really particularly good at announcing stuff.
57:33SPEAKERHe's bad on stage,
57:35SPEAKERbut he announces a lot of stuff
57:37SPEAKERand ships some of it eventually.
57:38SPEAKERI mean, I'm still way down in the truck,
57:41SPEAKERbut it's just, I don't know.
57:45SPEAKERLike the number of people,
57:46SPEAKERthe engineers of the caliber
57:48SPEAKERwho work at someplace like Twitter
57:49SPEAKERare generally good enough to get jobs wherever they want.
57:51SPEAKER- But that's the point I was trying to make.
57:52SPEAKERSo they eliminated half the workforce.
57:57SPEAKER- Seemingly willy nilly.
57:58SPEAKER- And the people who were there, like I said,
58:01SPEAKERare talking pretty openly about leaving,
58:03SPEAKERbut then we also haven't mentioned,
58:04SPEAKERlike he eliminated remote work entirely.
58:07SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:08SPEAKER- Like everyone has to come into the office
58:09SPEAKERfive days a week now.
58:10SPEAKERThey've eliminated a lot of perks,
58:11SPEAKERlike free lunch and stuff.
58:12SPEAKERLike that's the point that you were making.
58:14SPEAKERLike, yes, we are heading perhaps into a tougher economy,
58:16SPEAKERbut, and like Facebook also just cut a ton of people.
58:19SPEAKERSo like the job market for tech and engineers
58:22SPEAKERmaybe is not as robust as it was,
58:24SPEAKERbut still like these people absolutely have better options
58:27SPEAKERthan to continue putting up with this.
58:29SPEAKER- I mean, so the last time there was a recession
58:31SPEAKERof this scale, the people who got laid off
58:37SPEAKERwent and started companies like Google
58:39SPEAKERand Facebook and Twitter.
58:40SPEAKERI mean, that was over two different ones,
58:41SPEAKERbut like Google hired a shitload of engineers
58:44SPEAKERand the post 2001.com bubble,
58:47SPEAKERwhen the bubble burst.
58:49SPEAKERFacebook and Twitter and the social media companies
58:51SPEAKERhired a bunch of engineers in 2007, 2008.
58:54SPEAKERThere's going to be stuff for the engineers to do.
58:56SPEAKERThe people who are smart have ideas for products
58:58SPEAKERand they're going to pitch them right now in the valley
59:00SPEAKERand like, they'll get a couple of million dollars
59:01SPEAKERto get started.
59:02SPEAKERAnd the next wave of big companies will come out of this.
59:06SPEAKERLike the thing, I assume people were waiting
59:08SPEAKERto see if they got the severance package
59:10SPEAKERbefore they decided when they were gonna quit, right?
59:12SPEAKER'Cause if you get the severance package,
59:13SPEAKERit's like winning the lottery.
59:14SPEAKERYou get three months, you get six weeks, 60 days, two months.
59:18SPEAKER- I think they're paying three months.
59:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
59:20SPEAKER- That's what they said.
59:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, compared to Facebook,
59:23SPEAKERFacebook actually laid off way more people,
59:26SPEAKER10,000, 11,000 people this week.
59:28SPEAKERAnd they gave a, I was kind of surprised.
59:31SPEAKERIt was a shockingly generous severance package.
59:33SPEAKER- Yeah, it was like six months of health insurance
59:35SPEAKERfor employee and family.
59:36SPEAKER- Yeah, and-
59:37SPEAKER- It was like a scalable severance based on years worked.
59:41SPEAKER- But it started at a high number.
59:43SPEAKERIt started like three months or something.
59:44SPEAKERIt was a lot.
59:46SPEAKER- Pretty actually generous, I think.
59:49SPEAKER- And Zuckerberg took responsibility.
59:52SPEAKERZuckerberg was like, "Hey."
59:53SPEAKERI can't believe it.
59:54SPEAKERZuckerberg comes out looking like,
59:56SPEAKERthe rest of the valley's gotta be thrilled
59:57SPEAKERthat Musk is taking over Twitter
59:58SPEAKER'cause it makes Zuckerberg look like a benevolent overlord.
1:00:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I read Zuckerberg's statement.
1:00:05SPEAKERI mean, I get, you know.
1:00:07SPEAKER- He sucks.
1:00:08SPEAKER- It seems pretty safe, a safe bet
1:00:10SPEAKERthat he was coached through every word of that statement,
1:00:12SPEAKERbut the proof is in the pudding of the severance,
1:00:16SPEAKERwhich again is pretty generous.
1:00:18SPEAKER- Yeah, those people worked for him.
1:00:19SPEAKERHe made the mistake.
1:00:20SPEAKERI mean, he could have taken a loss there.
1:00:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:00:24SPEAKER- But anyway-
1:00:25SPEAKER- The point here is that he is just,
1:00:27SPEAKERMusk is doing everything humanly possible
1:00:29SPEAKERto utterly destroy both the morale
1:00:31SPEAKERand the effectiveness of the Twitter workforce.
1:00:34SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, I like, I literally,
1:00:38SPEAKERI think he understands how to post
1:00:40SPEAKERand I think he understands how to engage an audience, right?
1:00:42SPEAKERI don't think he understands anything
1:00:43SPEAKERabout how advertising works or how that business works.
1:00:46SPEAKERAnd it's like, it is shocking to me that the,
1:00:54SPEAKERand it's entirely possible that three years from now
1:00:56SPEAKERwe'll come back and we'll be like,
1:00:57SPEAKERman, Musk really turned Twitter around.
1:00:58SPEAKERIt's like the number one place for, I don't know.
1:01:02SPEAKERI don't know what it's gonna be, but we'll see.
1:01:04SPEAKERHe has this, he has what I would describe
1:01:06SPEAKERas a fairly cockamamie scheme to turn it into a,
1:01:08SPEAKERlike a WeChat style one app where you have money
1:01:13SPEAKERand messaging and all sorts of other stuff.
1:01:16SPEAKERIt's a mess.
1:01:17SPEAKER- Yes, I can't wait to put my payment details into this app.
1:01:21SPEAKER- Yeah, right.
1:01:22SPEAKER- Dude, we could literally sit here all day talking about,
1:01:24SPEAKERlike I've seen talk about like the people that were there
1:01:27SPEAKERto make sure that the tracking isn't provided
1:01:29SPEAKERto the wrong third parties.
1:01:30SPEAKER- Oh my God.
1:01:31SPEAKER- User tracking, like that's no longer a safe bet.
1:01:37SPEAKER- I missed that they laid off a bunch of contractors
1:01:39SPEAKERyesterday by just turning off access to Slack and email.
1:01:42SPEAKER- Yes, they cut a bunch more contractors last night.
1:01:45SPEAKER- I mean, there's the stuff where he was like trying,
1:01:47SPEAKERthe FTC basically was like looking over their shoulder
1:01:50SPEAKERabout whether their kind of consent decree
1:01:53SPEAKERabout user data was being followed.
1:01:56SPEAKERAnd he basically personally assured engineers,
1:01:59SPEAKERlike, don't worry, you will be held liable if we're sued,
1:02:01SPEAKERwhich does not at all seem to be the case.
1:02:03SPEAKER- Oh no, yeah.
1:02:04SPEAKERJust to be clear, if your company ever says,
1:02:05SPEAKERhey, if your company ever says, hey, don't worry,
1:02:10SPEAKERdo this thing that you know to be illegal
1:02:11SPEAKERor against the law, we got your back,
1:02:14SPEAKERask the lawyer if they represent you or the company.
1:02:17SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:02:18SPEAKER- And then don't do it.
1:02:19SPEAKER- Yes.
1:02:20SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a good way to end up
1:02:21SPEAKERon the wrong side of the stick.
1:02:23SPEAKER- Yeah, we should probably move on
1:02:25SPEAKERand wrap up with the last bit here,
1:02:27SPEAKERbut like, I mean, there's all this other stuff.
1:02:28SPEAKERI mean, we're not finance people,
1:02:30SPEAKERbut my understanding is like based on how badly
1:02:34SPEAKERthe Twitter debt situation gets and also how much
1:02:37SPEAKERthe value of Tesla stock continues to tank,
1:02:39SPEAKERlike there are scenarios where he can be forced
1:02:42SPEAKERto put up more of his Tesla shares as further collateral
1:02:45SPEAKERin this loan, like it's a gigantic mess.
1:02:49SPEAKERLike this whole thing is just like astonishing to watch.
1:02:53SPEAKER- There's also the, hey,
1:02:58SPEAKERthis is impacting his other businesses, presumably.
1:03:01SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:01SPEAKER- Like he's going to get more,
1:03:03SPEAKERhe's going to like the FTC is going to get involved,
1:03:05SPEAKERit seems like, like there's other entanglements.
1:03:10SPEAKERAnd like, I got to imagine, I mean,
1:03:12SPEAKERmaybe the Tesla shareholder is like,
1:03:13SPEAKERhey, this is actually pretty good.
1:03:14SPEAKERWe want him out of here, not paying attention to us
1:03:16SPEAKERfor a little bit, it'll help the company,
1:03:17SPEAKERbut it doesn't seem like that from the stock price.
1:03:19SPEAKER- Oh, I mean, Tesla's lost over 50% of its value
1:03:22SPEAKERsince January.
1:03:24SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems bad.
1:03:25SPEAKER- Yeah, there is no way to read the tea leaves
1:03:27SPEAKERand figure out where Twitter's got.
1:03:29SPEAKERLike again, you could not write this shit.
1:03:31SPEAKERLike you would get laughed out of the room
1:03:32SPEAKERif you tried to write a story about this.
1:03:34SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:35SPEAKER- And yet it's happening and there's no way to predict
1:03:36SPEAKERwhat's going to happen next, but.
1:03:38SPEAKER- What are the, okay, so if you want to know more
1:03:41SPEAKERabout this, Casey Newton, Mike Isaac and Mike Masnick
1:03:44SPEAKERare all doing really good reporting around it.
1:03:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:47SPEAKER- Casey Newton writes a newsletter called Platformer,
1:03:51SPEAKERused to be at New York Times.
1:03:53SPEAKERMike Isaac is at New York Times and Mike Masnick
1:03:56SPEAKERis at Tech Dirt, all good sources.
1:03:59SPEAKER- Yes, so the last little bit I wanted to go through here
1:04:02SPEAKERreal quick is like, what are the feasible
1:04:04SPEAKERTwitter replacements?
1:04:06SPEAKER- Oh, hey Brad, what's your Mastodon?
1:04:10SPEAKER- Gee, let me remember what instance I signed up on.
1:04:14SPEAKERWait, do I, I'm not sure I want to throw it out there yet.
1:04:16SPEAKERI'm not sure if I'm serious about using it.
1:04:18SPEAKEROh, whatever, it's, do they start with an @?
1:04:22SPEAKER- It starts with an @.
1:04:23SPEAKER- Okay, and then there's also the @ instance.
1:04:25SPEAKER- It's double @.
1:04:26SPEAKER- I'm @radshoemaker@mastodon.content.town.
1:04:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:30SPEAKER- But I've literally never used it.
1:04:32SPEAKER- You posted that you were buying socks or something,
1:04:34SPEAKERI think.
1:04:35SPEAKER- I posted, I posted eating a sandwich
1:04:36SPEAKERbecause that is the canonical first tweet.
1:04:38SPEAKER- No, my first tweet was about mouse reviews.
1:04:40SPEAKER- That was, that was, okay.
1:04:42SPEAKERYeah, but.
1:04:44SPEAKER- Oh, you're saying that was Ev's first tweet.
1:04:47SPEAKER- Oh, was it?
1:04:48SPEAKERI just, in my mind, like that's very 2007, 2008 Twitter use
1:04:52SPEAKERwas just you post like eating a sandwich.
1:04:53SPEAKER- Here's what you're doing.
1:04:56SPEAKER- So yeah, like I made a little list here.
1:04:58SPEAKERMastodon is an open source, essentially Twitter.
1:05:02SPEAKER- It's a Fediverse front end.
1:05:04SPEAKER- Yeah, so it runs on a federated instance model,
1:05:07SPEAKERmeaning that anybody can set up their own instance
1:05:09SPEAKERof Mastodon, federated to other instances that they want,
1:05:14SPEAKERand then you will get the traffic from those other instances
1:05:19SPEAKERfiltering into your feed.
1:05:20SPEAKER- Yep.
1:05:23SPEAKER- There are all kinds of issues around it.
1:05:25SPEAKER- Everybody hosts their own instances is the big issue.
1:05:28SPEAKERAnd it's a little heavy as a hosting.
1:05:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it's kind of unpredictable,
1:05:33SPEAKERlike which instances are gonna be connected
1:05:34SPEAKERto which other instances.
1:05:35SPEAKERThere are privacy issues around like people
1:05:37SPEAKERthat run the instances have more access
1:05:39SPEAKERto user data than they should right now.
1:05:41SPEAKER- Like I could, like we wouldn't do this,
1:05:43SPEAKERbut we can read, you shouldn't use DMS on Mastodon.
1:05:46SPEAKERThat's the DLDR for right now.
1:05:47SPEAKER- Yes, the instance operator can read the DMS
1:05:49SPEAKERof everybody on the instance, which is not.
1:05:51SPEAKER- Incoming and outgoing.
1:05:52SPEAKER- Yes.
1:05:54SPEAKERIt's also, you know, like it is, I mean,
1:05:56SPEAKERit kind of broadly looks like Twitter
1:05:58SPEAKERfrom about eight years ago.
1:06:00SPEAKER- It looks like TweetDeck.
1:06:01SPEAKER- Yeah, kind of, but like it generally the interface,
1:06:04SPEAKERlike it's got the kind of typical open source
1:06:07SPEAKERUX deficiencies in a lot of ways.
1:06:10SPEAKERLike it's been really telling watching people try to,
1:06:14SPEAKERyou know, leave Twitter in mass and figure out
1:06:16SPEAKERwhere they're going and a whole bunch of people
1:06:18SPEAKERimmediately bouncing back onto Twitter going like,
1:06:20SPEAKERwell, I'm never messing with Mastodon again.
1:06:21SPEAKERThere's no way I can understand this.
1:06:23SPEAKER- Well, okay, and then the other thing is
1:06:25SPEAKERbecause people don't, most people aren't spinning up
1:06:28SPEAKERtheir own instances to host their stuff.
1:06:30SPEAKERSo everybody's going on the popular big public instances
1:06:35SPEAKERlike Mastodon.social and stuff like that.
1:06:37SPEAKERAnd as a result, those are really, really overloaded
1:06:40SPEAKERand it's really slow.
1:06:42SPEAKER- Right, like it's just, it's not been a good experience
1:06:44SPEAKERfor a lot of people for pretty obvious reasons.
1:06:47SPEAKER- It's pretty good on the one that only you and I are on.
1:06:49SPEAKER- Yes, I agree.
1:06:50SPEAKER- We should open that up though.
1:06:52SPEAKER- Yeah, cohost.org.
1:06:55SPEAKER- Yeah, cohost.
1:06:56SPEAKER- Been seeing people talk about, I mean,
1:06:57SPEAKERI made an account on cohost a few months ago
1:06:59SPEAKERand then never touched it again, but people have been
1:07:01SPEAKERtalking about it more and more.
1:07:04SPEAKER- Cohost is interesting.
1:07:05SPEAKERIt seems like people who liked Twitter and Tumblr
1:07:08SPEAKERkind of smashed them up and made one thing
1:07:10SPEAKERthat was a little bit of both.
1:07:12SPEAKER- That's exactly how I describe it,
1:07:13SPEAKERis it's the kind of follow and feed model of Twitter,
1:07:17SPEAKERbut with the post format of Tumblr.
1:07:20SPEAKER- Also Tumblr had a follow and feed model.
1:07:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I know it did, I know it did, but like,
1:07:25SPEAKERthat stuff is a little more central to Twitter.
1:07:27SPEAKERBut the point is though, the post can be as big as you want
1:07:30SPEAKERand often are quite big from what I've seen.
1:07:33SPEAKER- Yeah, there's walls of text there.
1:07:37SPEAKERI don't know, I have a cohost account too.
1:07:39SPEAKERI know, I also, disclosure, I also know some of the people
1:07:42SPEAKERwho make cohost.
1:07:46SPEAKERI like the idea of what they're doing.
1:07:49SPEAKERThey said they're not gonna take money from anybody ever,
1:07:51SPEAKERor venture money, and they're funding it
1:07:56SPEAKERon like basically make donations,
1:07:58SPEAKERyou get access to some goofy features, some fun stuff,
1:08:02SPEAKERif you give them 50 bucks a year.
1:08:03SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think eventually it's in the roadmap
1:08:06SPEAKERto allow users to take kind of tips,
1:08:10SPEAKERlike donations, contributions from other followers,
1:08:13SPEAKERand I assume they'll take a small cut of that.
1:08:15SPEAKER- Knowing the folks who are involved,
1:08:17SPEAKERthat makes sense to me.
1:08:19SPEAKER- But it seems like their hearts are very much
1:08:21SPEAKERin the right place about what they're going for.
1:08:23SPEAKER- Yeah, there were some TOS issues,
1:08:25SPEAKERbut I actually haven't paid enough attention
1:08:27SPEAKERto get into there.
1:08:27SPEAKERKnowing some of the folks involved,
1:08:29SPEAKERI'm fairly confident that it's, yeah, I don't know.
1:08:33SPEAKERI don't know what the issues are.
1:08:35SPEAKERI don't really care.
1:08:36SPEAKER- Yeah, no, no, I mean, again, I think,
1:08:40SPEAKERit seems very much on the up and up,
1:08:42SPEAKERlike it also, it's fairly idealistic,
1:08:43SPEAKERand whether that can survive the Rickers of our hell world.
1:08:48SPEAKER- Yeah. - Perpetuity, who can say?
1:08:50SPEAKER- Like it's, the thing that it's hard,
1:08:53SPEAKERlike Twitter got to where it is now
1:08:54SPEAKERbecause of a 15-year process that it like of going,
1:08:59SPEAKERlike it was forged in flame, right?
1:09:02SPEAKERAnd I think any of these,
1:09:04SPEAKERMastodon has been through that.
1:09:05SPEAKERCo-host is starting to see that.
1:09:08SPEAKERYou know, the other things that didn't make it,
1:09:10SPEAKERthe peaches and the, what was the one
1:09:12SPEAKERthat was just for friends? - Oh, peach.
1:09:13SPEAKERPeach.
1:09:14SPEAKER- What was, Path.
1:09:17SPEAKER- Oh, I don't know, I've never even heard of Path.
1:09:18SPEAKER- Oh, Path was good.
1:09:19SPEAKERPath was like, Path's whole pitch was what if Twitter,
1:09:22SPEAKERbut for like the 10 people you actually are friends with.
1:09:25SPEAKERAnd it was like a place that you could post your,
1:09:29SPEAKERhey, I'm gonna go to the blah, blah, blah,
1:09:31SPEAKERthe corgi day or whatever at the beach.
1:09:33SPEAKERDo anybody wanna come down?
1:09:34SPEAKER- Does peach still exist?
1:09:35SPEAKER- Peach has gone long gone, dude.
1:09:40SPEAKERAnd then the last thing is the Blue Sky AT Pro.
1:09:42SPEAKEROkay, that's not the last thing.
1:09:43SPEAKERThere's a bunch, there's like this Project Mushroom thing.
1:09:45SPEAKERThere's a bunch of other stuff.
1:09:46SPEAKER- Oh, I haven't even heard of, are there others?
1:09:49SPEAKER- Yeah, Project Mushroom is spun off of another company.
1:09:52SPEAKERI can't remember what the other company does,
1:09:53SPEAKERbut I haven't really get into that,
1:09:54SPEAKERso I don't know what it is.
1:09:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, presumably there are going to be
1:09:57SPEAKERa bunch of other potential competitors popping up,
1:10:00SPEAKERlike some tech journalists like Kara Swisher
1:10:03SPEAKERhave been like hinting very obliquely at something
1:10:06SPEAKERin the works that sounds like a competitor to Twitter,
1:10:09SPEAKERbut they've been so vague about it
1:10:11SPEAKERthat it's hard to know if it's anything or not.
1:10:13SPEAKER- Hey, Brad, do you know how you picked the Super Bowl
1:10:16SPEAKERbefore the first kickoff of the season?
1:10:19SPEAKER- How's that?
1:10:19SPEAKER- Well, there's only a limited number of Twitter,
1:10:22SPEAKERof football teams in the NFL, and you just post,
1:10:24SPEAKERI think so-and-so is going to win for each team,
1:10:27SPEAKERand then you delete all the ones that lose.
1:10:29SPEAKER- I see, okay.
1:10:30SPEAKER- So anyway.
1:10:32SPEAKER- Yeah, the point is there's other stuff in the rumor mill,
1:10:34SPEAKERbut who knows what that stuff is,
1:10:35SPEAKERbut Blue Sky seems like the other thing
1:10:37SPEAKERworth mentioning here that seems
1:10:40SPEAKERpotentially very interesting,
1:10:43SPEAKERmaybe if not for the involvement of Jack Dorsey,
1:10:46SPEAKERbut everything else sounds like it might be promising.
1:10:50SPEAKERIt started as an RD project under Twitter
1:10:55SPEAKERessentially to create a unique protocol to run Twitter on.
1:10:58SPEAKER- This to me sounds like, "Hey, we need an AWS.
1:11:02SPEAKERWe need to unify the backend for this."
1:11:06SPEAKER- So I don't know if that analogy fully holds
1:11:09SPEAKER'cause AWS is entirely controlled by Amazon.
1:11:12SPEAKER- That's true.
1:11:14SPEAKER- So I looked through their documentation a little bit.
1:11:15SPEAKERThey spun it off.
1:11:16SPEAKERIt was an R&D thing at Twitter
1:11:18SPEAKERthat then spun off into a public benefit LLC.
1:11:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:11:21SPEAKER- They have documentation up about the spec of the protocol
1:11:24SPEAKERthat they're still hammering out.
1:11:26SPEAKERI haven't seen this said.
1:11:28SPEAKERThey have a blog, but I don't know if,
1:11:30SPEAKERdoes this end in an RFC being submitted to the IETF?
1:11:33SPEAKERAre they actually that serious
1:11:35SPEAKERabout making this an open protocol?
1:11:36SPEAKERThat's what they say.
1:11:37SPEAKER- I think this ends with just it petering out
1:11:40SPEAKERand nothing ever happening.
1:11:41SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I'm not talking about the reality
1:11:43SPEAKERof how it plays out.
1:11:44SPEAKERI'm just saying like, is that their goal?
1:11:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it'd probably be the W3C, right?
1:11:50SPEAKER- I think it's the IETF that ratifies that stuff, I believe,
1:11:54SPEAKERbut I could be wrong.
1:11:55SPEAKER- Wait, are they saying it's like an HTTP-style protocol?
1:11:58SPEAKER- Yes, they are building what they are building
1:12:00SPEAKERis called the authenticated transport protocol.
1:12:02SPEAKERSo ATP, or I think it's, I mean,
1:12:05SPEAKERthe URL prefix is AT colon slash slash.
1:12:10SPEAKERBut what they're promising,
1:12:12SPEAKERwhat they are pitching is that it's an open protocol.
1:12:16SPEAKERIt sounds a lot like Mastodon,
1:12:17SPEAKERexcept it will be an open protocol
1:12:18SPEAKERand not just one code base like Mastodon is.
1:12:22SPEAKER- The idea is that Mastodon can connect anything as well.
1:12:25SPEAKER- Okay, I didn't know that.
1:12:26SPEAKERSo maybe it's even more like Mastodon than I thought.
1:12:28SPEAKERLike it also, here's another part
1:12:31SPEAKERwhere maybe some skepticism is warranted.
1:12:33SPEAKERLike the pitch actually sounds quite a bit
1:12:35SPEAKERlike the multiverse, but for social media,
1:12:37SPEAKERbecause some of the pitch they're making is like,
1:12:40SPEAKERso essentially what they're saying is multiple platforms
1:12:43SPEAKERcan be built on the same protocol and then inter-operate,
1:12:46SPEAKERbut they can each have like their own sorting algorithms
1:12:48SPEAKERand blah, blah, blah.
1:12:49SPEAKERBut what they're saying is like,
1:12:52SPEAKERoh, your account will be portable
1:12:53SPEAKERand your followers will be portable.
1:12:54SPEAKERSo you could just like move your account
1:12:56SPEAKERto another, to a competitor's service
1:12:58SPEAKERif you're not happy. - That sounds great.
1:12:59SPEAKERThat sounds fantastic.
1:13:00SPEAKERI would love to move my account
1:13:01SPEAKERto another service right now.
1:13:03SPEAKER- So, well, right.
1:13:04SPEAKERSo like if this had been like concepted 30 years ago
1:13:07SPEAKERwhen a lot of other protocols were coming about like this,
1:13:09SPEAKERI would, it would be awesome.
1:13:11SPEAKERLike now the way the internet and the tech business is now,
1:13:14SPEAKERI don't know for sure if it's fully trustworthy or not,
1:13:18SPEAKERbut like what they're saying sounds interesting.
1:13:22SPEAKER- It's, this seems,
1:13:28SPEAKERhonestly, my reaction to this is it seems like
1:13:30SPEAKERwhen people who are making games and NFTs
1:13:33SPEAKERand doing blockchain stuff say,
1:13:34SPEAKERhey, you'll be able to move your game skins
1:13:36SPEAKERfrom one game to the other.
1:13:38SPEAKERAnd I'm like, that's not, that's really hard to do, man.
1:13:40SPEAKERThat seems really complicated from the bit
1:13:42SPEAKERthat I know about game development, so.
1:13:45SPEAKER- So I think that's, that's probably the actual way
1:13:47SPEAKERto think about this is, is this HTTP or is it Bitcoin?
1:13:53SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:13:54SPEAKER- I'm not sure which it actually is.
1:13:55SPEAKERLike they are, they're making,
1:13:56SPEAKERthey're making it sound like the former,
1:13:59SPEAKERbut that remains to be seen.
1:14:02SPEAKER- Then the, so, I mean, this is kind of what the meta,
1:14:06SPEAKER'cause like the idea of Mastodon,
1:14:08SPEAKERwhen you join a Mastodon instance,
1:14:09SPEAKERyou're not supposed to say,
1:14:10SPEAKERhey, I'm really excited to be here on Mastodon.
1:14:12SPEAKERYou're joining the Fediverse
1:14:13SPEAKERand the Mastodon instance is just the way you view that.
1:14:16SPEAKERIt also is conveniently the only way you can view that
1:14:18SPEAKERright now that I'm aware of.
1:14:20SPEAKERThe other, the other, other, other thing
1:14:23SPEAKERthat I don't know why, why they would do it,
1:14:25SPEAKERbut people were, there was a day or two
1:14:27SPEAKERwhere people were talking about Zuckerberg
1:14:29SPEAKERspinning up a text fork of Instagram,
1:14:34SPEAKERdubbed Instafeed that's just Instagram without the pictures.
1:14:40SPEAKERAnd I like, given the trouble Twitter's had
1:14:43SPEAKERmaking money on Twitter,
1:14:44SPEAKERI don't know why anybody would like mimic that business.
1:14:48SPEAKERBut anyway, yeah, it's, it's a, it's an interesting,
1:14:50SPEAKERit's an interesting time.
1:14:52SPEAKER- Yes, it certainly is.
1:14:54SPEAKER- So I started a blog this week.
1:14:55SPEAKERI decided I'm going to own my content.
1:14:57SPEAKER- Dude, I have been, I've been thinking for a very,
1:14:59SPEAKERlike a couple of years now that I really miss
1:15:02SPEAKERthe way the internet used to be, meaning every platform
1:15:05SPEAKERwas not proprietary and controlled by a corporation.
1:15:08SPEAKER- Yep.
1:15:09SPEAKER- That like, that's why I get excited
1:15:10SPEAKERwhen I hear the word protocol, because like,
1:15:13SPEAKERthat's what it was in the nineties, right?
1:15:14SPEAKERLike there were a bajillion IRC servers out there
1:15:18SPEAKERbecause it was just an open protocol
1:15:19SPEAKERand anybody could spin one up.
1:15:20SPEAKER- Yep.
1:15:21SPEAKER- You know, Usenet, you name it.
1:15:24SPEAKERLike I, I miss the older, you know,
1:15:27SPEAKERit wasn't democratized in a lot of ways, but in,
1:15:29SPEAKERbut in the sense of, again, corporate control,
1:15:32SPEAKERit absolutely was.
1:15:33SPEAKER- Yeah, well, if you want to find the blog,
1:15:34SPEAKERit's at shitty.blog.
1:15:37SPEAKER- Sorry, what?
1:15:38SPEAKER- I made a shitty blog.
1:15:39SPEAKERIt's at shitty.blog.
1:15:41SPEAKER- I didn't, I didn't know they allowed cursing in.
1:15:45SPEAKERI guess they did.
1:15:46SPEAKERThey don't care.
1:15:47SPEAKER- Of course they do.
1:15:47SPEAKER- In top, in domains?
1:15:49SPEAKER- Well no, .blog is not a naughty word.
1:15:51SPEAKER- No, no, no, you're right.
1:15:52SPEAKERNot, not, not the TLDs, but just in domain registration.
1:15:55SPEAKER- That's up to the registrar.
1:15:57SPEAKER- I guess so.
1:15:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, it's been fun.
1:15:59SPEAKERIt's been fun sending up a blog.
1:16:01SPEAKER- I haven't had a blog in a really long time.
1:16:02SPEAKERI got Twitter and I realized that Twitter
1:16:04SPEAKERimmediately made me lazy about like,
1:16:07SPEAKERwhy would I make a blog or a newsletter or whatever
1:16:09SPEAKERwhen I can just, you know,
1:16:10SPEAKERjam out something in the app on my phone and it's there.
1:16:13SPEAKER- Oh man.
1:16:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:16:15SPEAKER- This is your blog.
1:16:16SPEAKERLook at this.
1:16:17SPEAKER- This is a blog ass blog.
1:16:18SPEAKER- Is this just like a WordPress template?
1:16:19SPEAKER- It's a WordPress template.
1:16:21SPEAKERIt took about an hour to set up.
1:16:22SPEAKER- Man, I should do this.
1:16:23SPEAKERI went on a domain buying spree last year
1:16:26SPEAKERand I should use one of those.
1:16:27SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I figured.
1:16:28SPEAKERI was like, hey, I have some domains.
1:16:30SPEAKERI, you know, another of the fine content
1:16:33SPEAKERfound content town family of websites.
1:16:36SPEAKERWe just started up a web ring.
1:16:38SPEAKERIf you want to do a blog, we'll set up a web ring and.
1:16:39SPEAKER- All right, I'm in.
1:16:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:16:41SPEAKER- It'll be like 2008 when I left GameSpot
1:16:43SPEAKERand we all started blog spot blogs
1:16:46SPEAKERthat we all posted to about half a dozen times
1:16:48SPEAKERand then a bit.
1:16:50SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:16:51SPEAKERWas that part of the,
1:16:52SPEAKER'cause that's what, that's what the wordsmith,
1:16:54SPEAKERthe AOL and gadget people did
1:16:56SPEAKERwhen they went to start the Verge
1:16:58SPEAKERwas they started a blog called This Is My Next
1:17:00SPEAKERthat ended up becoming The Verge.
1:17:02SPEAKER- Huh, interesting.
1:17:04SPEAKER- I feel like that was a thing that we did at that time.
1:17:06SPEAKERMaybe they did it because of you guys actually.
1:17:08SPEAKER'Cause I feel like Jeff, didn't Jeff do a blog?
1:17:11SPEAKERLike there was a thing that as people started coming over,
1:17:17SPEAKERyou all had standalone blogs too, right?
1:17:19SPEAKER- Yes.
1:17:20SPEAKER- There was a thing that was giant bomb,
1:17:21SPEAKERthat became giant bomb.
1:17:22SPEAKER- Oh, well that was, they started a little blog
1:17:24SPEAKERjust to post, to have something to post on
1:17:26SPEAKERwhile the actual site was being built.
1:17:28SPEAKER- Okay.
1:17:28SPEAKER- But here I am, here I am looking at my blog from 2008.
1:17:32SPEAKERThe very last thing I posted about was the,
1:17:37SPEAKERwas about Sarah Palin becoming the candidate.
1:17:39SPEAKER- But you didn't even post a, you didn't even post a,
1:17:41SPEAKER"Hey, here's the blog website I'm working at now, post."
1:17:45SPEAKER- Oh, I'm sorry, this was after I started there.
1:17:47SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
1:17:49SPEAKERYou're just keeping it real.
1:17:50SPEAKER- I guess I felt like I would keep blogging for a while
1:17:52SPEAKERafter I had a place to blog professionally.
1:17:54SPEAKER- It turns out when you have a place to blog professionally,
1:17:56SPEAKERit's pretty tiring.
1:17:57SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:17:59SPEAKER- I guess that'll do it for us today.
1:18:01SPEAKERSo I'm just posting, I'm posting shit
1:18:02SPEAKERthat I would normally post on Twitter
1:18:03SPEAKERin like a long thread there.
1:18:05SPEAKERAnd also pictures that I make with stable diffusion.
1:18:08SPEAKER- Shitty.blog is pretty good.
1:18:10SPEAKER- I mean, it's a shitty blog, man, what can I say?
1:18:12SPEAKERI feel like the expectations are managed.
1:18:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I think I'm moving from,
1:18:20SPEAKERI think I'm moving from a feeling of catastrophe
1:18:22SPEAKERand to be clear, like Twitter falling apart
1:18:24SPEAKERis a catastrophe for a lot of reasons.
1:18:26SPEAKER- It's bad, yeah.
1:18:27SPEAKER- It's served a lot of very good,
1:18:29SPEAKERnoble purposes for a lot of people
1:18:31SPEAKERand like to have that go away.
1:18:32SPEAKERAnd for the reasons it's going away is awful.
1:18:35SPEAKERI'm starting to feel some optimism now though,
1:18:37SPEAKERat the idea that like maybe something better can be built.
1:18:40SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and there's a freedom to starting new, right?
1:18:43SPEAKERLike I posted on Mastodon the other day
1:18:46SPEAKERthat I was excited to not be,
1:18:50SPEAKERto not have post something and get five people
1:18:54SPEAKERthat respond to everything with,
1:18:55SPEAKER"Hey, have you slapped anybody today?"
1:18:56SPEAKER- Right, yes.
1:18:58SPEAKER- That seems nice.
1:18:59SPEAKERIt's a unique problem specific to me, I realize, but.
1:19:01SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I guess what I mean is like at some point,
1:19:04SPEAKERthe feeling of loss will be replaced
1:19:06SPEAKERby the feeling of forward movement.
1:19:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:19:09SPEAKER- And that's a good thing ultimately, I hope.
1:19:11SPEAKER- Can I just say something about how fucking broken
1:19:15SPEAKERyou would have to be to want to be
1:19:16SPEAKERthe star of Twitter every day?
1:19:17SPEAKER- Man, I can't even.
1:19:19SPEAKER- Having had the tiniest taste of that, it's bad.
1:19:23SPEAKERYou don't want it, it's not a good feeling.
1:19:25SPEAKERI can't even tweet anymore, like I don't,
1:19:27SPEAKERI can't even, I have a hard time even participating.
1:19:30SPEAKERIt's social media at this point,
1:19:32SPEAKERlet alone having everybody looking at you.
1:19:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it's awful. - All right.
1:19:37SPEAKER- Anyway, that'll do it.
1:19:38SPEAKER- Yes.
1:19:40SPEAKER- We will be back next week
1:19:41SPEAKERwith another episode of the show.
1:19:41SPEAKERLet's thank our patrons, Brad,
1:19:43SPEAKER'cause it's the time of the show where we thank our patrons.
1:19:45SPEAKER- Let's, thank you, patrons.
1:19:46SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:19:48SPEAKERAs always, if you would like to support
1:19:49SPEAKERBrad Wilmeade at TechPod,
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1:20:05SPEAKERLast month, we talked about questions.
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1:20:09SPEAKERWhat did we talk about last month?
1:20:10SPEAKER- Last month, last week.
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1:20:47SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this week.
1:20:48SPEAKERThank you all for listening,
1:20:49SPEAKERand we will see you next week.
1:20:52SPEAKER(upbeat music)