The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► The saying that's been in my head ever since you kindly agreed to be on the show today,

00:00:04 ◼   ► and I was thinking about the stuff I wanted to talk about,

00:00:07 ◼   ► is the famous Chinese blessing that is in fact a curse, "May you live in interesting times."

00:00:17 ◼   ► Got what you're wishing for, right?

00:00:18 ◼   ► And if that does not in a single sentence summarize November 2022, I don't know what else does.

00:00:28 ◼   ► I feel like I keep hearing that phrase, and I keep hearing, "The dog who caught the car it was

00:00:32 ◼   ► chasing."

00:00:33 ◼   ► That very much true. So if you don't mind, and I don't talk electoral politics often on this show,

00:00:41 ◼   ► but it's been an eventful month, and I kind of feel it ties into the discussion of Twitter,

00:00:46 ◼   ► which is going to be the main thrust of the show. I don't know if you've heard, I'm presuming that

00:00:53 ◼   ► you've heard.

00:00:53 ◼   ► What? What happened? What?

00:00:55 ◼   ► But I don't think that they are unrelated at all.

00:00:58 ◼   ► No, they're inseparable.

00:01:00 ◼   ► Right. Former TV game show host and New York real estate magnate Donald,

00:01:05 ◼   ► let me check the spelling here, Trump, announced that he'd be running for president last night.

00:01:10 ◼   ► Surprising, absolutely nobody.

00:01:12 ◼   ► Yeah, can't believe it.

00:01:13 ◼   ► But there is a weird thing going on, where the good news for me and you,

00:01:18 ◼   ► probably most people listening to the show, but I realize that because this is not a political show,

00:01:22 ◼   ► there's certainly some people, lean Republican who listen, and I'm not trying to turn this

00:01:27 ◼   ► opening segment into a go blue power hour. But you know, the Democrats had a good election.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Everybody, I don't know any-

00:01:35 ◼   ► Shockingly good.

00:01:35 ◼   ► Yeah, shockingly good. Historically, in the US, where we have elections on a very regular schedule,

00:01:42 ◼   ► as opposed to like a parliamentary system, every four years, we have a presidential election,

00:01:47 ◼   ► and in between, we have what we call the midterm. And historically, whichever party holds the White

00:01:53 ◼   ► House, the midterms tend to go to the opposition party. And it makes-

00:01:57 ◼   ► Well, usually they get shellacked. It's like it's not a slight tilt.

00:02:00 ◼   ► It's usually they get their butts handed to them.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Right. And most recently, or among the most recent, but the one that almost doesn't seem

00:02:10 ◼   ► intuitive, given how we think of him and his presidency is Barack Obama,

00:02:15 ◼   ► who finished two successful terms and left with very high ratings and is still,

00:02:20 ◼   ► I would say universally acclaimed as the most popular political figure on the left in the

00:02:26 ◼   ► United States and whoever is in second place-

00:02:28 ◼   ► In generations.

00:02:29 ◼   ► In generations.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Maybe since Kennedy or something. Yeah.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Yeah. And Kennedy obviously left on martyrs terms. So it's hard to compare. Whereas Bill Clinton,

00:02:39 ◼   ► who left with very high approval ratings, was much more controversial because of his personal

00:02:46 ◼   ► predilections, for lack of a better term, among other things.

00:02:50 ◼   ► And I don't think the years have been kind to his legacy, even amongst his supporters.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Right. But he did leave office, let's just say, you know, he's very popular,

00:02:58 ◼   ► but not in a way- so let's say, how long are we out of Obama? So we're six years post-Obama, right?

00:03:04 ◼   ► Is that right?

00:03:05 ◼   ► That sounds right.

00:03:05 ◼   ► So six years post Bill Clinton would be 2006. He felt more like, not history,

00:03:12 ◼   ► but-

00:03:12 ◼   ► Wasn't really relevant.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Bit of a relic.

00:03:14 ◼   ► Yeah. Already in 2006. And 9/11 was sort of a snap of the fingers change of the dynamics

00:03:22 ◼   ► of everything anyway. And it had nothing to do with Bill Clinton, but Barack Obama, very popular,

00:03:28 ◼   ► he got killed two years in the midterm elections, two years in.

00:03:32 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. Again, almost at a historic level.

00:03:35 ◼   ► Right. Like, just devastating rejection of his policies or revert back to the center,

00:03:42 ◼   ► whatever you want to call it. Democrats did very well this year for a midterm. There are

00:03:47 ◼   ► two opposing explanations. I mean, I know all politics is very complicated and multi-

00:03:53 ◼   ► I thought we were going to go straight to, and therefore it's time to fully socialize Twitter.

00:03:57 ◼   ► No, that's not- okay, sorry. I just- full communism, we're taking it over,

00:04:03 ◼   ► this is now the state media.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Sorry, I should jump the gun. Sorry. Okay.

00:04:09 ◼   ► One explanation is that Donald Trump is still obviously the leader of the Republican party,

00:04:14 ◼   ► and he is so deeply unpopular that, and has insisted upon for fealty, for his political

00:04:24 ◼   ► followers to promulgate the big lie, a true capital B, capital L, big lie out of the big lie,

00:04:34 ◼   ► playbook of demagoguery, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, that he actually

00:04:41 ◼   ► did not lose the election that he very clearly lost by not that- he wasn't that close. It was closer

00:04:50 ◼   ► than I would like it to be in various states, but when you overall look at it, it wasn't even that

00:04:54 ◼   ► close. He lost. And again, I don't know if you recall, but before he left office, he attempted

00:05:03 ◼   ► what I honestly believe was a coup. Yeah, to stay in the right historical term. So that's one

00:05:10 ◼   ► explanation of why the Republicans lost in this midterm is that he's still a leading figure,

00:05:15 ◼   ► his party still hasn't completely rejected this nonsense and said, "No, you lost, you big dummy,

00:05:21 ◼   ► let's move on." The other is that earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade,

00:05:30 ◼   ► which had been 50 years of legal precedent, making abortion, legalized abortion, the law of the land

00:05:37 ◼   ► in all 50 coast to coast, 50 states, all US territories, and that this was so unpopular.

00:05:45 ◼   ► And this is, I think, where you're going with the dog catching the car, right? That for you're in my

00:05:49 ◼   ► lifetime and most the lifetimes of most of the people who are going to be listening to us, if not

00:05:54 ◼   ► their entire lifetimes, this has been a hot button issue in United States politics every year. It's

00:06:00 ◼   ► never abated. It doesn't ebb and flow. It's always red hot. And it has been incredibly effective for

00:06:10 ◼   ► Republicans because there is a certain portion of their base, the evangelical vote in particular,

00:06:16 ◼   ► who is electrified by this issue, who truly believes that they want abortion to be illegal,

00:06:22 ◼   ► and that they could use that issue every single election to drum up a certain portion of the

00:06:29 ◼   ► electorate who would vote on that issue.

00:06:31 ◼   ► Right. There's a substantial number of single-issue voters who are galvanized by that to the exclusion

00:06:36 ◼   ► of everything else.

00:06:36 ◼   ► To the exclusion of everything else. And therefore, if what Republicans wanted to do in a state level

00:06:43 ◼   ► or at a national level had nothing to do with abortion or even healthcare at all, just something

00:06:48 ◼   ► to do, let's say, with the tax rates, which often comes up, but they could galvanize some portion,

00:06:55 ◼   ► a significant portion of voters who care about nothing else, or at least while they might care

00:07:01 ◼   ► about other things.

00:07:02 ◼   ► They might compromise on everything else for this.

00:07:04 ◼   ► Right. And so that strategically, the best thing that could happen to them, according to this

00:07:11 ◼   ► theory of politics, would be for Roe v. Wade to remain the law of the land forever, but keep it

00:07:20 ◼   ► out in front of the voters and keep saying, "We'll keep nominating judges who are skeptical about it,

00:07:25 ◼   ► and we'll keep doing it."

00:07:26 ◼   ► Always on the cusp.

00:07:27 ◼   ► Always on the cusp.

00:07:28 ◼   ► James Bond never dies. He's just always in danger.

00:07:32 ◼   ► Cinematically, I think it's one of the great scenes of movie history is in Indiana Jones and

00:07:38 ◼   ► the Last Crusade with, of course, Steven Spielberg as the director, and it's near the end, and

00:07:43 ◼   ► there's the Holy Grail. And this temple is falling apart, and Indiana Jones has fallen into this

00:07:49 ◼   ► crevice, and there's his father is holding onto his hand. He's slipping, but he's got one finger

00:07:55 ◼   ► on the Holy Grail, and he can almost tilt it. And if he could just tilt it, maybe—

00:07:58 ◼   ► I can almost get it, Dad.

00:07:59 ◼   ► —a quarter inch, just that! And his dad finally calls him by the name he prefers, Indiana Let's

00:08:07 ◼   ► Go. Or I forget the exact line, but he gives it up. Let it—

00:08:10 ◼   ► I think he says literally, "Let it go."

00:08:11 ◼   ► "Let it go." And—

00:08:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:13 ◼   ► But that finger on the cusp of the whole—we're so close, we're so close—

00:08:18 ◼   ► has been—now, where those two theories—and they've both—

00:08:23 ◼   ► And this is that one rare Spielberg movie where the dad's actually sticking around, right?

00:08:26 ◼   ► So it's as deep as it gets.

00:08:28 ◼   ► It truly is. I think it's a great movie.

00:08:31 ◼   ► Yeah, it is a good one.

00:08:33 ◼   ► And yeah, it's true that that's the one where the dad—yeah, it's deep on that level. In the

00:08:39 ◼   ► Spielberg-y—and when we look back on his whole career, it'll stick out for that reason, too.

00:08:44 ◼   ► Of course, both of these things can be true. That Donald Trump's overall unpopularity with

00:08:49 ◼   ► the overall electorate, combined with the overwhelming majority of U.S. voters who favor

00:08:56 ◼   ► some level of legalized abortion, including support for Roe v. Wade remaining the law of the land,

00:09:04 ◼   ► and even while Roe was the law, there obviously have been, especially in recent years,

00:09:10 ◼   ► state-by-state restrictions.

00:09:12 ◼   ► Yeah, it's been effectively illegal for a lot of people for a long time.

00:09:15 ◼   ► It has been.

00:09:15 ◼   ► Or—

00:09:16 ◼   ► —difficult.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Illegal by your and my perspective from Pennsylvania and New York, right? But from

00:09:22 ◼   ► where we might be going was legal. So they're not in conflict. Both things could be true.

00:09:27 ◼   ► But the interesting confluence of them is that Donald Trump personally was aghast when the

00:09:36 ◼   ► Supreme Court Dobbs decision that overturned it leaked. The leaked version was other than—

00:09:42 ◼   ► Was pretty accurate.

00:09:43 ◼   ► It was like a few bits of copyediting different.

00:09:47 ◼   ► It's like the final draft, not final, final draft.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Right. Well, the one thing—every once in a while, it's not like I sit there and read

00:09:56 ◼   ► Supreme Court decisions as a hobby, but it is interesting to me as a layperson to the law

00:10:03 ◼   ► how well-written they are.

00:10:04 ◼   ► They're great writers. They're incredible writers.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:06 ◼   ► The journalist Dahlia Lithwick, who is one of my favorite journalists, period, and she

00:10:11 ◼   ► covers Supreme Court law for Slate, and you see in the way she quotes it, that level of

00:10:16 ◼   ► fluency they have where they know they are many times just literally writing history.

00:10:20 ◼   ► Correct. And she's been at Slate for, ooh, a long time.

00:10:25 ◼   ► Yeah, a hens' age.

00:10:26 ◼   ► Yeah, for all the turnover in the media world, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate covering the Supreme

00:10:31 ◼   ► Court has been a mainstay, and you're correct. I will say this. I, of course, did not agree

00:10:36 ◼   ► with his politics almost at all. I also feel that he was quite a bit of a hypocrite in terms

00:10:43 ◼   ► of his proclaimed adherence to certain principles and the way he voted in certain cases where

00:10:51 ◼   ► it went against his way.

00:10:52 ◼   ► But Antonin Scalia, with the standard of Supreme Court justices being good writers, was an

00:10:58 ◼   ► exceptional writer.

00:10:59 ◼   ► I mean, like, really, I mean, just read some Scalia decisions and it's like, oh, man, this

00:11:05 ◼   ► guy had, like, a columnist's bones in him for, like, a turn of phrase.

00:11:09 ◼   ► He's a good enough writer that it was exasperating that he was wrong about everything for me.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Like, it's one of those things where you're like, ah, yeah, it'd be better if you sounded

00:11:16 ◼   ► like a caveman while being, while pushing all my buttons.

00:11:19 ◼   ► But it, but as soon as this, that decision leaked and it turned out the leak was going

00:11:25 ◼   ► to be their decision, also then leaked that sources close to President Trump down in Mar-

00:11:31 ◼   ► Mar-a-Lago, that he was aghast at this and thought this is going to be a disaster for

00:11:37 ◼   ► Republicans with suburban women and young women.

00:11:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And guess what?

00:11:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:44 ◼   ► It was.

00:11:45 ◼   ► So in some ways, these two things, while they could both be true, they're sort of in conflict.

00:11:50 ◼   ► And then there's a part of you that wants to say, my God, Trump, you're the one who

00:11:55 ◼   ► nominated three of these fucknuts.

00:11:57 ◼   ► So, yeah, I mean, I think there's a sort of, I'm very skeptical of, like, grand unifying

00:12:03 ◼   ► theories and everything is 12 dimensional chess and everybody has a plan and understands

00:12:07 ◼   ► what's going on.

00:12:07 ◼   ► I think we ascribe historical narratives retrospectively and like, this is why this

00:12:12 ◼   ► happened, right?

00:12:12 ◼   ► And it's like, you got to get at least 15, 20 years, maybe 50 years clear or something

00:12:17 ◼   ► and then that narrative forms.

00:12:18 ◼   ► But this is one of those things where I think there is a common thread and believe it or

00:12:22 ◼   ► not, I think this actually even ties to the Twitter story, which is you have true believers,

00:12:26 ◼   ► right?

00:12:26 ◼   ► Obviously, there are people who are anti-abortion in America.

00:12:29 ◼   ► And like I said, that's the, almost the animating principle of their political view, social

00:12:33 ◼   ► view of the world.

00:12:34 ◼   ► And also importantly, a big part of their identity, right?

00:12:37 ◼   ► That's how they sort of form groups and make friends and navigate the world is this is

00:12:41 ◼   ► their sense of who they are as a person.

00:12:44 ◼   ► And then a much larger adjacent audience for whom some of that is there, some part of principle

00:12:51 ◼   ► there, but also there's an animating force.

00:12:54 ◼   ► And this is again, one of the things where like, just objectively, it is much more common

00:12:57 ◼   ► on the right, which is like, I want to own the libs.

00:13:00 ◼   ► And it's a weird, it's like a, I guess it's very intoxicating.

00:13:03 ◼   ► Like it's a thing I actually struggled with.

00:13:04 ◼   ► I'm saying like, you know, I get mad at people I politically disagree with, but when I'm

00:13:08 ◼   ► not thinking about that issue, I'm not thinking about them.

00:13:10 ◼   ► I'm not sort of saying, how can I rub my hands together and find a way to make their

00:13:14 ◼   ► life worse today?

00:13:15 ◼   ► But it is almost like kind of the sport, right?

00:13:18 ◼   ► It feels very much like that.

00:13:19 ◼   ► Like it's fun.

00:13:20 ◼   ► It is fun for people who hate the Yankees to hate Yankees fans.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:25 ◼   ► It's a really, and so like that's kind of the best analogy I can think of.

00:13:28 ◼   ► And also there's been this sort of similar dynamic around popular culture, right?

00:13:32 ◼   ► So people who are stands of a certain artist on social media, like they have to perform

00:13:37 ◼   ► their fealty to the artist, even if it's kind of like an opposition to something else.

00:13:40 ◼   ► Like, I don't think as far as I know, there's no actual animosity between Beyonce and Taylor

00:13:45 ◼   ► Swift, but their fans kind of have to hate each other because that's the way you play

00:13:49 ◼   ► fandom right now.

00:13:51 ◼   ► That is that's how you perform fandom right now.

00:13:53 ◼   ► And so that thing about the, like on the lips piece, I think it's a big piece of where

00:13:57 ◼   ► they're like the impact of the policy or even the substance of the policies are relevant

00:14:01 ◼   ► compared to, does it antagonize the right people in a way that I find satisfying and

00:14:06 ◼   ► that performs in group sort of identification for us.

00:14:09 ◼   ► And what's funny about this is, I mean, like there's not funny at all, obviously in terms

00:14:13 ◼   ► of like real world policy and real world impact.

00:14:16 ◼   ► But what's striking about this is this is kind of impacted the most powerful people

00:14:20 ◼   ► in the tech industry, like the wealthiest, some of the wealthiest people who've ever

00:14:23 ◼   ► existed in the history of humanity are juicing themselves up on the same, like kind of own

00:14:29 ◼   ► the libs energy and getting that far divorced from reality, even when they're going to

00:14:33 ◼   ► face a backlash.

00:14:34 ◼   ► And it's really striking because I don't think Trump and his people in his circle are

00:14:39 ◼   ► under any delusions that they're going to be liked by people.

00:14:41 ◼   ► I mean, they're like, we know who our audience is and we care about them and everybody else

00:14:45 ◼   ► we explicitly don't care about.

00:14:47 ◼   ► And that's the game, right?

00:14:48 ◼   ► Striking thing though, is like, Musk is in this bubble and this is, there's pure teal.

00:14:54 ◼   ► There's sort of this cohort, these guys that have gotten high on their own supply as they've

00:14:58 ◼   ► become incredibly wealthy and sort of detached in the real world where they've kind of lost

00:15:03 ◼   ► the plot.

00:15:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:15:04 ◼   ► And I think about this sort of when Musk was building base acts rockets, he's not like,

00:15:09 ◼   ► I care about your alignment with me more than I care about whether the rocket goes up and

00:15:13 ◼   ► we've turned the corner fully into like rocket goes up to secondary to literally your field

00:15:19 ◼   ► to me, as we record this, he was just sort of had a, he's like fifth consecutive day

00:15:23 ◼   ► of loyalty pledges.

00:15:24 ◼   ► He's demanding from engineers of all people, right?

00:15:27 ◼   ► That sort of least inclined personality type to say, let me leave with fealty.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:15:32 ◼   ► And so it's such a, it's such a striking thing.

00:15:34 ◼   ► You're like, well, how did they get to this place that is obviously grand scale foot shooting?

00:15:39 ◼   ► Like it's just an unbelievable misread of like cultural standards and norms around technical

00:15:46 ◼   ► culture.

00:15:46 ◼   ► And you realize it's because they've been sort of hyping themselves up and the folks

00:15:49 ◼   ► you've got in the room, like a Jason Calcanis, who's fairly well known within the industry,

00:15:53 ◼   ► but I think outside the industry is not known.

00:15:55 ◼   ► He's a doofus and he's been a doofus for like 20 years.

00:15:58 ◼   ► People have been like, ah, that guy's kind of a chucklehead.

00:16:00 ◼   ► He's not dumb per se, but he's definitely a kiss ass, right?

00:16:04 ◼   ► Calacanis for people who don't know or vaguely remember his name started web blogs, Inc.

00:16:11 ◼   ► I believe was his endeavor.

00:16:13 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:13 ◼   ► Well, he really started with Silicon Alley insider, which was sort of the trade mag for

00:16:17 ◼   ► New York during the dot com bubble, which is both true and damning with faint praise.

00:16:21 ◼   ► But then web blogs, Inc.

00:16:24 ◼   ► Was like when blogs first took off and blog became, it was like a fresh word.

00:16:30 ◼   ► In everybody's mouth.

00:16:31 ◼   ► And it was trying to be the rival to the Gawker network.

00:16:33 ◼   ► So you had Gizmodo and you had Engadget and this was a rival.

00:16:36 ◼   ► I mean, you know, meaningful rivalry.

00:16:37 ◼   ► And more or less though, he would find anybody, any blog that had gotten any traction in some

00:16:45 ◼   ► measure of success, then web blogs, Inc.

00:16:47 ◼   ► Would come out with a clone of it.

00:16:48 ◼   ► And yeah, yeah, very explicitly.

00:16:50 ◼   ► There was no, there was, I mean, it was very straightforward.

00:16:53 ◼   ► It's like if Nick Denton and Gawker won in a category, then we're going to do that category

00:16:57 ◼   ► too, with like a very obvious imitation of it.

00:17:01 ◼   ► It was sort of the first generation Samsung phones, like, boy, that looks a lot like an

00:17:05 ◼   ► iPhone.

00:17:06 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:06 ◼   ► And it was like this.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And again, everything eventually mixes together.

00:17:10 ◼   ► And there were very talented people who worked at Gizmodo, which was the clone and Engadget.

00:17:16 ◼   ► Gizmodo was the Gawker winning.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Oh no, that's right.

00:17:18 ◼   ► That's how confused I am.

00:17:19 ◼   ► That's how confused I am.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Well, I have friends who had worked at both.

00:17:24 ◼   ► They were both good, but that was basically the idea was you come up with one.

00:17:27 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden Nick Denton got like a car blog and now Weblogs Inc had a car blog.

00:17:32 ◼   ► And then as soon as blogs became not really the hot thing anymore, he just lost interest

00:17:37 ◼   ► in it and moved on.

00:17:38 ◼   ► 100%.

00:17:39 ◼   ► Sold it to AOL and then skipped out.

00:17:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:17:41 ◼   ► And some, now he's in Elon Musk's inner circle.

00:17:44 ◼   ► Well, and the texts have come out and this is the kind of thing where like in the substance

00:17:48 ◼   ► of it, it doesn't matter that much, but it's been telling because the texts that were

00:17:51 ◼   ► subpoenaed for Musk for another trial.

00:17:53 ◼   ► So they included these texts with Calcanis and it was this very obvious ass kissing.

00:17:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:58 ◼   ► And it was kind of striking because I was like, I would think, well, one, if you're the richest

00:18:03 ◼   ► man in the world, I'm sure you're constantly getting peep kissing your butt because they

00:18:06 ◼   ► want to get close to you.

00:18:08 ◼   ► But I would think that would naturally put you off of it because it's very obvious.

00:18:11 ◼   ► And yet here they are in there.

00:18:13 ◼   ► And I was like, man, this guy doesn't have any friends.

00:18:15 ◼   ► And that started starting the same thing as when Musk had done SNL because it was just

00:18:20 ◼   ► brutally unfunny.

00:18:21 ◼   ► Right. It's just a really horrible misread.

00:18:24 ◼   ► And it's the kind of thing where it's like, oh, you don't have any friends because somebody's

00:18:28 ◼   ► going to tell you like, this isn't working, man.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Like this isn't, you don't, it's not winning.

00:18:32 ◼   ► Like this isn't your lane or whatever the language is.

00:18:34 ◼   ► But like, it was such a striking thing because I'm like, that's a rough place to be as if

00:18:39 ◼   ► you don't have that backstop.

00:18:41 ◼   ► And it is striking because you look at, there have been similarly powerful tycoons, right?

00:18:45 ◼   ► The most pertinent for you, the Steve jobs.

00:18:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:48 ◼   ► And certainly a domineering presence, certainly somebody who held no truck with bullshit from

00:18:54 ◼   ► people and could bowl people over.

00:18:55 ◼   ► But clearly the kind of person that could take feedback.

00:18:59 ◼   ► And I mean, actually, I think the thing he would tend to do with the next day, come back

00:19:01 ◼   ► and sort of say, oh, that was my idea, but he took the feedback and heard the point where

00:19:06 ◼   ► somebody's like, that's not it.

00:19:06 ◼   ► That's not working.

00:19:07 ◼   ► And also stayed in his lane.

00:19:10 ◼   ► Like he was not trying to be a cultural figure.

00:19:12 ◼   ► He was not trying to date supermodels.

00:19:13 ◼   ► He was not trying to the things are that the trappings of losing the plot about your ego

00:19:18 ◼   ► in the world.

00:19:19 ◼   ► And he had a huge ego, but not in that lane.

00:19:21 ◼   ► Well, let's say this.

00:19:23 ◼   ► I would say most obviously it almost indisputably would be his leadership of Pixar where, yes,

00:19:32 ◼   ► where by all accounts, he never tried to, he never stepped in and told them how to make

00:19:40 ◼   ► movies.

00:19:40 ◼   ► Now they famously, and John Lasseter has said this, Ed Catmull has said this, other directors

00:19:45 ◼   ► have said this where, you know, while Jobs was alive.

00:19:48 ◼   ► And in those like early years of Pixar, I know it's not the earliest years of Pixar as

00:19:53 ◼   ► a company, but Pixar post independent.

00:19:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:56 ◼   ► In between Toy Story and Disney acquiring Pixar that they and everybody who's ever worked

00:20:03 ◼   ► at Pixar always talks about its story.

00:20:05 ◼   ► It's not about the computers.

00:20:06 ◼   ► It's not about the actors, it's story.

00:20:08 ◼   ► And every Pixar movie has always had a point where they realize while they're in production,

00:20:14 ◼   ► uh, the story, we got to start over.

00:20:17 ◼   ► The story breaks here, 40, 45 minutes into it or 50 minutes into it or somewhere between

00:20:23 ◼   ► act two and three.

00:20:23 ◼   ► Oh, this really breaks.

00:20:26 ◼   ► And that there have been, there were times where they would show Steve Jobs the rough

00:20:29 ◼   ► cut and he would have like, just like two comments, but it was because, Hey, Steve,

00:20:33 ◼   ► take a look at this.

00:20:34 ◼   ► And they asked him and then he'd get, and they said like often he would come up with

00:20:39 ◼   ► very insightful, but very brief, not acting like, Oh, I can direct movies.

00:20:44 ◼   ► I can do line readings better than Tom Hanks.

00:20:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:47 ◼   ► That's sort of it is the idea of like expertise.

00:20:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:20:50 ◼   ► And I think, and you look at the, also the legacy of execs surrounding Jobs where like

00:20:56 ◼   ► there is not historically a better global supply chain manager than Tim Cook probably

00:21:02 ◼   ► ever.

00:21:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:03 ◼   ► Johnny Ive speaks for himself.

00:21:04 ◼   ► I mean, and I think those things is like, people like that are drawn to a leader who's

00:21:08 ◼   ► going to give them the shot to do the thing where they can be the best in the world at

00:21:11 ◼   ► what they do.

00:21:11 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:12 ◼   ► Nobody's going to be what he is in a keynote.

00:21:14 ◼   ► And there is zero people in the world who know how multi-million scale social networks

00:21:19 ◼   ► work, who would tell you Jason Calcanis is the guy to get in the room.

00:21:22 ◼   ► All right.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Let's step back before we keep going with Twitter.

00:21:26 ◼   ► I'm going to go out in the lane now.

00:21:29 ◼   ► I've got, I've already got probably some crow to eat here on Twitter and I'm not

00:21:33 ◼   ► afraid to admit when I'm wrong.

00:21:34 ◼   ► I would like to think good trait.

00:21:36 ◼   ► I've often said that the way to be right all the time is to hopefully be right most

00:21:42 ◼   ► correct most of the time, but to have the self-awareness and humility to recognize

00:21:46 ◼   ► when you're wrong and then go back, figure out why you're wrong and say, Oh, I was

00:21:50 ◼   ► wrong.

00:21:50 ◼   ► And now here's what I think.

00:21:51 ◼   ► And if you can do that, you can come pretty close to being right all the time.

00:21:55 ◼   ► Probably said some things that have already not aged well about Twitter and under

00:22:02 ◼   ► Elon Musk, but let me go out on a limb here politically and say something publicly

00:22:06 ◼   ► that I have been saying to friends privately for over a year, which is that I do not

00:22:11 ◼   ► believe Donald Trump is going to be the nominee for the Republicans in the next

00:22:16 ◼   ► presidential election.

00:22:17 ◼   ► And I don't even think it's going to be close.

00:22:19 ◼   ► He can announce, you know, he did yesterday, but I don't even think it's going to come

00:22:24 ◼   ► to the point where it's some kind of close.

00:22:26 ◼   ► Oh, which the next slate of whatever.

00:22:29 ◼   ► I think by the time the actual primary start in early 2024, he'll already be out of the

00:22:34 ◼   ► race.

00:22:34 ◼   ► It'll be a runaway.

00:22:35 ◼   ► So this is interesting because I was talking to a friend of mine who is an immigrant

00:22:38 ◼   ► who's been very successful in the U S and, and again, I hate grand unifying theories,

00:22:42 ◼   ► but this is another one where I'm like, Oof, this one it's hard for me to argue against,

00:22:46 ◼   ► which is that, and this is the thing where immigrants always have the insight into

00:22:49 ◼   ► American culture that like we miss growing up here.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Cause I grew up in Pennsylvania too, right?

00:22:54 ◼   ► Is he's like, you know, Americans hate losers.

00:22:56 ◼   ► It's like, they don't want to come back story.

00:22:59 ◼   ► They don't mind the water in the wilderness and then, and now you're going to try and

00:23:02 ◼   ► regain your title, but they really hate losers and these hate sore losers.

00:23:08 ◼   ► Like it's sad and it's gross and they don't want to get any on them.

00:23:11 ◼   ► And that was the thing where I was like, man, if that ain't the truest truth.

00:23:14 ◼   ► And especially in traditionally like conventional masculinity, conservative American identity,

00:23:21 ◼   ► you know, I grew up like I, you know, my, my girlfriend drove me to my senior prom in

00:23:25 ◼   ► an F one 50, right?

00:23:26 ◼   ► Like this is where I'm from.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Although she was driving.

00:23:28 ◼   ► So they probably got mad about that.

00:23:29 ◼   ► But the thing is that like that identity cannot stand the idea of a loser.

00:23:36 ◼   ► Like a loser, like a sore loser is who I got to say is my guy.

00:23:41 ◼   ► Like, no, like, no, I'm not going to do it.

00:23:43 ◼   ► I'm not going to do it.

00:23:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:44 ◼   ► Cause like we're super fickle.

00:23:45 ◼   ► Like I like my team when they're winning.

00:23:48 ◼   ► And so I think that thing where like the nuanced, like it definitely like folks like me who

00:23:53 ◼   ► are like now the big city liberal media types are like, oh, it's sometimes you have a downtime

00:23:58 ◼   ► or whatever, but like the people who got mad about Luke Skywalker taking a sabbatical in

00:24:02 ◼   ► the star Wars sequels, right?

00:24:04 ◼   ► Like they're not trying to find a guy who's like still real mad about something that happened

00:24:09 ◼   ► years ago as their leader.

00:24:11 ◼   ► And I was like, that is a very plausible argument.

00:24:14 ◼   ► And that does lead me to believe your assertion about a nomination doesn't look good because

00:24:19 ◼   ► it's like, he's got loser stench all over him.

00:24:21 ◼   ► The, what I'm predicting is not based on Trumpism declining, which I hope people who are in

00:24:26 ◼   ► or in they're not going away, but I would love it if it did.

00:24:28 ◼   ► And I would love if whoever the Republican nomination nominee ends up being is untrumpy

00:24:34 ◼   ► in as many ways as possible.

00:24:36 ◼   ► Even though I know that the least Trumpy Republican who might win, let's say like a Mitt Romney,

00:24:43 ◼   ► right?

00:24:43 ◼   ► Like I would not have been a fan of a Mitt Romney or a John McCain presidency in numerous

00:24:49 ◼   ► ways, but I also respect both men.

00:24:51 ◼   ► And that's part of living in a democracy is I understand that as long as I have my health

00:24:57 ◼   ► maintains for the remaining decades of my life, there are going to be Republican presidents

00:25:03 ◼   ► and Democratic presidents.

00:25:04 ◼   ► And I'm probably not going to like any of the Republicans, but I at least hope that

00:25:07 ◼   ► whoever they are, are honest people with the best intentions for the country.

00:25:13 ◼   ► And I think Trumpism is a political slant that that's not true for.

00:25:17 ◼   ► But yeah, no, it's a poison to the system, right?

00:25:19 ◼   ► It's not a balance of this vision of democracy versus that one.

00:25:23 ◼   ► It's like, let's break the system.

00:25:24 ◼   ► But that's it.

00:25:25 ◼   ► But, but so I ideally and talking, you know what I mean?

00:25:30 ◼   ► Speaking of ideals, political ideals, I care more about that, but I'm just saying as an

00:25:37 ◼   ► observer who's, you know, overall pretty good at predicting elections.

00:25:42 ◼   ► I actually want some money betting on this one on predicted.

00:25:48 ◼   ► No, I mean, it wasn't just because I was the market is wise.

00:25:51 ◼   ► I wasn't just voting based on who I hoped win, but who I actually thought would win

00:25:55 ◼   ► like here in Pennsylvania.

00:25:56 ◼   ► I thought I think John Fetterman will pull this out.

00:25:59 ◼   ► And he did.

00:25:59 ◼   ► But that's another one again, where it's like having grown up around the folks who would

00:26:03 ◼   ► be voting for him.

00:26:03 ◼   ► I'm like, Oh yeah, this guy's got it.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a no brainer.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Oh, and if he hadn't had the stroke, I mean, he would have run away with it.

00:26:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I think he's going to be all right on that front.

00:26:10 ◼   ► But anyway, it's that he's a loser.

00:26:13 ◼   ► And Trump knows it too.

00:26:15 ◼   ► And I think that's why he's so latched on to this big lie theory is that it's his only

00:26:20 ◼   ► chance because otherwise he lost and you can't.

00:26:23 ◼   ► These two things can't both be true.

00:26:26 ◼   ► You can't say Joe Biden totally sucks.

00:26:30 ◼   ► And I lost to the guy who totally sucks.

00:26:34 ◼   ► You should vote for me again next time.

00:26:36 ◼   ► Look at my power.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Yeah, it doesn't work.

00:26:38 ◼   ► It doesn't work.

00:26:38 ◼   ► He's a loser.

00:26:39 ◼   ► And you're so right.

00:26:41 ◼   ► When you're an outside observer, like an immigrant and you just observe it, you just say, Oh,

00:26:44 ◼   ► yeah, Americans hate losers in a way that other countries maybe don't have.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Nobody will be empathetic about it.

00:26:51 ◼   ► Yeah, because they're like, Well, everybody takes a turn.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Everybody's a loser sometimes.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Or we're like, No, I don't.

00:26:55 ◼   ► I'm in straight denial.

00:26:56 ◼   ► We've only ever been winners.

00:26:58 ◼   ► You look at our narratives around national greatness.

00:27:00 ◼   ► And I would say I bet the majority of Americans believe we've never lost a war.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Oh, I grew up thinking that.

00:27:07 ◼   ► I mean, we were probably taught that in school.

00:27:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:09 ◼   ► And it's just like a fascinating like delusion, which I honestly kind of find charming.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Like, yeah, obviously, there's really there's a lot of really negative effects to it.

00:27:17 ◼   ► But like as a personality trait for a country, it's like, Oh, that's like, oh, that's kind

00:27:21 ◼   ► of sweet.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Like you have this weird fixation that like you have to be the best and you won everything

00:27:25 ◼   ► and you're a winner all the time.

00:27:26 ◼   ► So anyway, that's my theory.

00:27:28 ◼   ► But I also I just I just see a certain irony in it in that it was exacerbated in this midterm

00:27:34 ◼   ► in a way that Trump himself exactly predicted.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And I actually his political instincts are astute.

00:27:42 ◼   ► I mean, sadly, he did a moment very well.

00:27:44 ◼   ► But he also is zero impulse control.

00:27:47 ◼   ► And so I think it's a really weird combination, right?

00:27:51 ◼   ► Usually people who are good at understanding the political temperature, like, and therefore,

00:27:55 ◼   ► I will use that to decide what I do in response.

00:27:58 ◼   ► But that's not him.

00:27:59 ◼   ► Let's get back to leaders who have very poor impulse control in a moment.

00:28:06 ◼   ► But I am going to take a break here and thank our first sponsor, our good friends at Collide.

00:28:10 ◼   ► That's K-O-L-I-D-E.

00:28:12 ◼   ► If you are listening to the talk show, the odds are very good that at some point you

00:28:17 ◼   ► your company is going to go through an audit like SOC 2 or ISO 27001.

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00:29:51 ◼   ► That's collide.com/thetalkshow.

00:29:57 ◼   ► My thanks to them.

00:29:58 ◼   ► You don't want to mess around with SOC 2 compliance. You gotta get it right.

00:30:02 ◼   ► SOC 2? See, I never know what you pronounce.

00:30:04 ◼   ► So, for the first time in my life, I work at a publicly traded company.

00:30:07 ◼   ► I've never had a grown-up job. I've been in startups my whole career.

00:30:10 ◼   ► And now I work at Vasily, and they're a publicly traded company, and they do all the grown-up

00:30:14 ◼   ► stuff, and it's like, "Oh, this is fascinating."

00:30:16 ◼   ► It's actually very interesting.

00:30:18 ◼   ► And it's the contrast to organizations that don't have grown-up leadership that wants

00:30:21 ◼   ► to do things right.

00:30:22 ◼   ► What was I talking about?

00:30:23 ◼   ► Billionaires with impulse control.

00:30:25 ◼   ► Although, actually, one of them is a legit billionaire.

00:30:27 ◼   ► Yeah, his name is Elon Musk.

00:30:29 ◼   ► All right, let me read a tweet from my good friend.

00:30:31 ◼   ► Everybody.

00:30:32 ◼   ► The internet's good friend, Cable Sasser.

00:30:34 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:30:35 ◼   ► Yeah, he tweeted at me, I believe it was this morning.

00:30:38 ◼   ► Nope, it was yesterday.

00:30:39 ◼   ► But he's a good friend.

00:30:41 ◼   ► He was the first live guest.

00:30:44 ◼   ► When the first time I ever did a live episode of this show, Cable was my guest.

00:30:47 ◼   ► Good friend, and I can take this in all the good spirit.

00:30:50 ◼   ► But he said on Twitter, "Every day, I am champing at the bit."

00:30:54 ◼   ► He got "champing" correct, of course.

00:30:56 ◼   ► Yep, not "champing."

00:30:57 ◼   ► "I am champing at the bit to make a small run of,

00:31:00 ◼   ► quote, 'I'm more optimistic about Twitter's future than I have been in years.'

00:31:07 ◼   ► John Gruber.

00:31:08 ◼   ► T-shirts."

00:31:08 ◼   ► Do they taste like crow?

00:31:12 ◼   ► They taste like claim chowder.

00:31:15 ◼   ► Claim chowder, yeah.

00:31:16 ◼   ► You got chowder'd, man.

00:31:18 ◼   ► You got chowder'd.

00:31:19 ◼   ► Well, I did say that.

00:31:20 ◼   ► And I would not say that today.

00:31:28 ◼   ► I still am not as pessimistic about Twitter's future as many people are.

00:31:35 ◼   ► But perhaps one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is maybe you'll talk

00:31:39 ◼   ► me into being even more pessimistic than I should be.

00:31:41 ◼   ► I want to diagnose why you said it.

00:31:44 ◼   ► All right, can I dig into that?

00:31:47 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:31:48 ◼   ► That's a great question.

00:31:49 ◼   ► All right, number one, my theory of Elon Musk.

00:31:53 ◼   ► And I'm not disabused of it entirely yet.

00:31:56 ◼   ► Although I've obviously-- this is the part that I would have to backtrack the most on,

00:31:59 ◼   ► is regardless of Twitter, but Elon personally, is that I see Elon Musk as an unreliable narrator,

00:32:07 ◼   ► a highly unreliable narrator.

00:32:11 ◼   ► And that this is--

00:32:12 ◼   ► As a strategy.

00:32:13 ◼   ► It's an intentional--

00:32:14 ◼   ► Partially strategic.

00:32:16 ◼   ► And again, that is-- I've said this on podcasts before, too, that-- and some people, when I

00:32:21 ◼   ► said it, made any comparison to Steve Jobs, some people object to it because people still

00:32:27 ◼   ► admire Steve Jobs.

00:32:28 ◼   ► And now that he's passed, there's a martyr aspect to it.

00:32:31 ◼   ► And people see it as sacrilegious or offensive.

00:32:34 ◼   ► You can't be critical.

00:32:35 ◼   ► To say that there's any similarity between a despised figure like Elon Musk and a revered

00:32:41 ◼   ► figure like Steve Jobs.

00:32:42 ◼   ► But with Steve Jobs, the canonical example to me is when they first came out with the

00:32:47 ◼   ► iPod that had a color screen, and the reason-- why would you add a color screen to these devices?

00:32:55 ◼   ► And it was, well, you can now, in addition to your music, you can sync your photo library--

00:33:00 ◼   ► But we're never adding video.

00:33:01 ◼   ► Yeah, and in the hands-on area after the keynote, and Steve Jobs was there, and they actually

00:33:08 ◼   ► let the media ask questions at the time.

00:33:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And they said, hey, Steve, these photos look great on the iPod, but why not?

00:33:17 ◼   ► What about video?

00:33:18 ◼   ► And he said, ah, nobody wants to watch video on a screen that small.

00:33:21 ◼   ► And then 12 months later, they came out with an iPod with the same size screen that, in

00:33:28 ◼   ► addition to showing your photos, played video.

00:33:31 ◼   ► Now, in addition to-- it's not like, oh, in those 12 months, they realized that.

00:33:37 ◼   ► The way that these lead times worked, the day that Steve Jobs said no one wants to watch

00:33:41 ◼   ► video on a screen that size, he knew damn well that next year's iPod is already well

00:33:48 ◼   ► into some phase of--

00:33:49 ◼   ► In development.

00:33:50 ◼   ► --of engineering.

00:33:52 ◼   ► It was halfway through development and was in product testing.

00:33:55 ◼   ► At the quantities they were making iPods at that time, you don't add a feature like that

00:34:00 ◼   ► six months beforehand.

00:34:02 ◼   ► He knew that they were coming out with a video playing iPod.

00:34:05 ◼   ► He was an unreliable narrator for strategic reasons because he didn't want to say anything

00:34:09 ◼   ► that would discourage people from buying an iPod today and waiting a year for one that

00:34:14 ◼   ► played video.

00:34:14 ◼   ► Why not have them buy one today and then buy another one a year from now to get the video?

00:34:19 ◼   ► So I do see Elon Musk as an unreliable narrator strategically in the same way.

00:34:25 ◼   ► But I also see him as an unreliable narrator in a completely unstrategic way, which is

00:34:32 ◼   ► his lack of impulse control.

00:34:34 ◼   ► And he'd be the first to admit it, that he at times has gotten high and tweeted things.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Sure.

00:34:40 ◼   ► Which is not a thing I think we would say about Jobs.

00:34:43 ◼   ► No, and not a thing you would say about the CEO of any company or--

00:34:49 ◼   ► Any of the other previous richest people in the world in the last several centuries.

00:34:53 ◼   ► Right.

00:34:53 ◼   ► It is not something that those people in those positions would tend to do.

00:34:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:35:00 ◼   ► And so therefore, my basic idea of why I felt like, "Hey, this might be good for Elon

00:35:06 ◼   ► Musk to buy Twitter, take it private, alleviate it of any shareholder pressures, and seriously

00:35:15 ◼   ► rejigger and do a lot of stuff."

00:35:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:19 ◼   ► I want to sort of share a couple theories of how we get to--

00:35:23 ◼   ► Because this is not me dragging you.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Like, I have made these bad calls many times too, being on social media for as long as

00:35:31 ◼   ► you have been too.

00:35:31 ◼   ► And I think there's a couple things I've seen in terms of the pattern of like, "Why

00:35:34 ◼   ► do we get it wrong?"

00:35:35 ◼   ► Or "Why do we get optimistic about these things?"

00:35:37 ◼   ► I think the first is to the unreliable narrator point.

00:35:40 ◼   ► Visionaries don't deal in facts, right?

00:35:44 ◼   ► Because if you say factually, "I'm going to make a phone and we're going to sell a

00:35:48 ◼   ► hundred million of them," it's an irrational statement.

00:35:51 ◼   ► And every person who's ever said it except for like two was lying.

00:35:56 ◼   ► And so you have to have an irrational belief, or whatever, "We're going to finally revive

00:36:02 ◼   ► the electric car market."

00:36:03 ◼   ► These are irrational statements.

00:36:04 ◼   ► And so--

00:36:05 ◼   ► Or "We'll have millions of electric cars on the road by 2017."

00:36:09 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:36:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:36:11 ◼   ► So these are things where you have to believe beyond what's rational.

00:36:14 ◼   ► And I mean, I've been a founder and run companies and obviously nowhere near that

00:36:17 ◼   ► scale.

00:36:17 ◼   ► But in terms of like, we have a platform that people have made millions of apps on.

00:36:22 ◼   ► And five years ago, you said people are going to make millions of apps and they're going

00:36:24 ◼   ► to do it on the regular old web.

00:36:26 ◼   ► That was an irrational statement with Glitch.

00:36:28 ◼   ► And so I think that's a thing where like, I have a tremendous respect for that.

00:36:31 ◼   ► And I think there's something like, this is what we tell our kids, right?

00:36:34 ◼   ► Dream big and shoot for the stars, right?

00:36:35 ◼   ► Like, that's a really-- that is actually a good thing.

00:36:38 ◼   ► And it's indistinguishable from narratively.

00:36:43 ◼   ► I'm surrounded by a bunch of kiss asses in a boardroom and we're all high on our own

00:36:48 ◼   ► supply or just high.

00:36:49 ◼   ► And our takeaway is we can do anything we want, right?

00:36:53 ◼   ► And so because those are so structurally similar, then the question is like, how can we distinguish

00:36:59 ◼   ► when it's in the former visionary category and not in the latter, like I said, high on

00:37:04 ◼   ► your own supply category.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And I think part of it is we have a weird erroneous belief in the genius myth.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And again, this is one of the things where Jobs being an outlier has set us up for a

00:37:15 ◼   ► whole generation of people that think they're him to make the same mistakes because they

00:37:19 ◼   ► learned the wrong lessons about the narrative that was applied to him, which is that they

00:37:23 ◼   ► have this idea of an ineffable genius that a person can have and it's all dudes that

00:37:27 ◼   ► some guy can have that is applied across different domains and genres and contexts and problem

00:37:33 ◼   ► spaces, right?

00:37:35 ◼   ► And the thing that I love is this conversation about the Twitter and Musk coming in.

00:37:39 ◼   ► They're like, "Look, this isn't going to be that hard for him.

00:37:41 ◼   ► It's not rocket science."

00:37:42 ◼   ► Right?

00:37:43 ◼   ► And I'm like, "You're right.

00:37:43 ◼   ► It's harder.

00:37:44 ◼   ► It's harder than rocket science."

00:37:46 ◼   ► Because when you launch a rocket at SpaceX, you're only launching one at a time and nobody's

00:37:52 ◼   ► trying to take the rocket down.

00:37:53 ◼   ► There's only gravity, right?

00:37:55 ◼   ► Whereas you have bad actors that are trying to take Twitter down or share misinformation

00:38:00 ◼   ► messages and the problem is largely social, cultural, political, as much as it is technical.

00:38:05 ◼   ► And it's really hard.

00:38:06 ◼   ► It's a really hard problem, right?

00:38:08 ◼   ► And so this set of skills is not applicable across these domains.

00:38:13 ◼   ► And that's a thing that is not popular to say.

00:38:16 ◼   ► And also the important thing here too is who are the deputies?

00:38:21 ◼   ► Who are the people that surround you?

00:38:22 ◼   ► Are they as enamored with the mission of doing this work?

00:38:26 ◼   ► And is it the thing that gets them up in the morning?

00:38:28 ◼   ► Because I think everybody, again, I don't know much about SpaceX and I'm not some huge

00:38:32 ◼   ► fan of theirs, but they got rockets in a long time.

00:38:34 ◼   ► It's a hard problem.

00:38:35 ◼   ► I guarantee you everybody in senior management there is obsessed with getting rockets in

00:38:39 ◼   ► the air, right?

00:38:40 ◼   ► There's no question about it.

00:38:41 ◼   ► You can tell.

00:38:42 ◼   ► It wouldn't get there if that wasn't happening.

00:38:45 ◼   ► And there is nobody in the inner circle around Musk that is like, "I want to enable

00:38:51 ◼   ► this new kind of conversation."

00:38:52 ◼   ► And the tell was he came in talking about the blue checkmark, which is a concern that

00:38:56 ◼   ► is an obsession with a tiny percentage of people, even on Twitter itself, let alone

00:39:01 ◼   ► in society as a whole.

00:39:02 ◼   ► And also a particular obsession of the sort of extremist tech tycoon circle jerk that

00:39:09 ◼   ► he's in, right?

00:39:10 ◼   ► Where they're like, this is the kind of thing they think is really important.

00:39:13 ◼   ► And they kind of, this is why journalists hate us and all this kind of stuff.

00:39:16 ◼   ► And you're like, normal people are just like, I go on here to see what's happening with

00:39:19 ◼   ► sports scores, maybe like what's happening at an awards show.

00:39:22 ◼   ► That's just like some detritus on the screen while I do it.

00:39:25 ◼   ► It's Chrome and UI.

00:39:26 ◼   ► It's not a thing that I think about conceptually as having to do with my sense of self or what's

00:39:31 ◼   ► important in the world.

00:39:32 ◼   ► But they started with this thing.

00:39:33 ◼   ► You're like, of all the problems this company had, that was so low on the list of things

00:39:37 ◼   ► that were broken to start with.

00:39:40 ◼   ► I will say that in these, what are we at?

00:39:43 ◼   ► Three weeks?

00:39:44 ◼   ► Three weeks into the mascara?

00:39:46 ◼   ► In these very long three weeks.

00:39:48 ◼   ► Yeah, incredibly.

00:39:48 ◼   ► Long Musk era.

00:39:49 ◼   ► That was the moment where I first, my stomach sunk and I thought, oh, well, this guy's a

00:39:54 ◼   ► chump.

00:39:55 ◼   ► Um, no, but let's, I don't want to move past the, uh, your, your keenly asked question

00:40:01 ◼   ► of why would I say that I felt more optimistic when it was officially made, it was officially

00:40:07 ◼   ► going to be handed over to Musk.

00:40:08 ◼   ► Why did I feel more optimistic about Twitter than I have in years?

00:40:11 ◼   ► All right, let me go back to that.

00:40:12 ◼   ► I don't want to, it's, it's worth examining.

00:40:15 ◼   ► So let's put Musk aside.

00:40:17 ◼   ► Twitter as it stood, I thought was in a terrible position.

00:40:22 ◼   ► It, and I love Twitter.

00:40:24 ◼   ► I think it is from the moment it has been something special right from the start, from

00:40:28 ◼   ► the start, as soon as I saw it, it's the rare thing.

00:40:31 ◼   ► And I tend to see, I tend to be confused by new things.

00:40:35 ◼   ► And if I don't get it, I don't want to sign up for it.

00:40:37 ◼   ► I got it right away.

00:40:38 ◼   ► It's like, oh, you just get a name and then you have a box and you hit a button and then

00:40:42 ◼   ► it's like, you've said a thing and then it has a URL and everybody can see that you said

00:40:47 ◼   ► the thing.

00:40:47 ◼   ► And the limit is bloggers.

00:40:49 ◼   ► It was better in some ways than what we had.

00:40:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:51 ◼   ► And the limit was, it was fascinating.

00:40:55 ◼   ► In fact, I was so enamored of the 140 character limit that I was opposed to raising it to

00:41:00 ◼   ► 280.

00:41:01 ◼   ► But I realized the most John Gruber thing I've ever heard in my life.

00:41:04 ◼   ► I remember that.

00:41:04 ◼   ► And I was like, yeah, a lot of writers were, I remember Stephen King and JK Rowling both

00:41:10 ◼   ► were too.

00:41:11 ◼   ► Again, I don't want to, again, there's a whole discussion we could have.

00:41:14 ◼   ► Fraud examples, but sure.

00:41:15 ◼   ► Let's keep it.

00:41:16 ◼   ► But well, Stephen King, let's just say that Stephen King was not a fan of it because they

00:41:21 ◼   ► saw the, I think I said, I think I said this on dithering.

00:41:27 ◼   ► So because that's a paid podcast, I'm not, yeah, or maybe it was on, well, whatever.

00:41:33 ◼   ► I said it recently, but I'll say it again.

00:41:34 ◼   ► To me, it fitting a complex thought into 140 characters to me satisfied the same part of

00:41:42 ◼   ► my brain that solving wordle every day does.

00:41:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:41:45 ◼   ► And it's a puzzle.

00:41:46 ◼   ► And it's like, ah, crap.

00:41:48 ◼   ► What I did, this thing I want to tweet this funny joke or I got to get in this box.

00:41:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:53 ◼   ► But Christ, I mean, they would tell you like a game.

00:41:58 ◼   ► They would tell you how far away you were.

00:41:59 ◼   ► Like, that's not even close.

00:42:00 ◼   ► You're at a 211 characters.

00:42:02 ◼   ► And it's like, it's puzzle solving in community with people.

00:42:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:42:05 ◼   ► Now I had this where I had a link blog.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Actually, I had one before you, as a matter of fact, I had a link blog and I love because

00:42:10 ◼   ► my design was crappy.

00:42:11 ◼   ► I had a very finite amount of space.

00:42:13 ◼   ► It might've been 140 characters virtually.

00:42:15 ◼   ► And I loved writing headlines there.

00:42:17 ◼   ► Cause it had to fit into this little sidebar on the crappy blog layout that I had.

00:42:21 ◼   ► And I did that for like four years and it was such a joy cause it was exactly that thing,

00:42:26 ◼   ► which is like, I have this much space to get.

00:42:29 ◼   ► And for me, it was like to get this story across and also have it like be funny.

00:42:33 ◼   ► And it's probably like the best training grounds I could have had for Twitter.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Yeah, that was possible.

00:42:38 ◼   ► So I, you know, I've learned my lesson.

00:42:40 ◼   ► Two 80 did not break Twitter.

00:42:42 ◼   ► It still is a game because it turns out many thoughts are 300 or more characters and still

00:42:46 ◼   ► feels like a game.

00:42:47 ◼   ► But I think having a limit period when I know that there are numerous people who just think

00:42:52 ◼   ► that you should be able to post this, why have any limit at all?

00:42:54 ◼   ► Computers can handle lots of texts.

00:42:56 ◼   ► And I think that would be disastrous because I know, again, no offense to anybody who's

00:43:01 ◼   ► ever sent me a long email.

00:43:03 ◼   ► I love the email I get from readers, but people have, sometimes people have a hard time editing

00:43:09 ◼   ► and putting what could be a 280 character observation into less than 200, 2,800 words.

00:43:17 ◼   ► So I love Twitter.

00:43:18 ◼   ► I still like using it.

00:43:19 ◼   ► It is the, it is and remains the only communal forum for daring fireball readers that has

00:43:26 ◼   ► ever existed.

00:43:26 ◼   ► I mean, if it does go away or becomes unusable, I mean, I'll find something else, but I want

00:43:32 ◼   ► Twitter to thrive.

00:43:33 ◼   ► I think it's worth saving, but I feel like they've never had great leadership.

00:43:38 ◼   ► I feel like, or it's always been a kind of a clown car when people like Ev Williams were

00:43:45 ◼   ► nominally in charge.

00:43:47 ◼   ► They were under, it's not that I think Ev didn't get it or want to see it go in a good

00:43:52 ◼   ► way, but they were under pressure from like financial sources.

00:43:56 ◼   ► And well, and also, I mean, one of the things I think about, like, you know, I was, I still

00:44:00 ◼   ► talked to Ev a lot, Jason Goldin who was early there, like all those early Twitter folks,

00:44:04 ◼   ► except for Jack, I still have some degree of relationship with.

00:44:06 ◼   ► And I think one of the things is like, they were in over their heads from day one.

00:44:10 ◼   ► Like it was, again, it would be irrational.

00:44:13 ◼   ► They were the opposite.

00:44:14 ◼   ► They weren't like, we are going to make a text box that you type in and it will control the

00:44:19 ◼   ► political and media conversation of the world in five years.

00:44:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Like that's not, they weren't Babe Ruth pointing at that fence.

00:44:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:25 ◼   ► It is like a thing that happened to them.

00:44:27 ◼   ► And then they're sort of holding on.

00:44:29 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:29 ◼   ► They are like, they're a dog that caught a car they didn't know they were chasing.

00:44:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And so I got, I have so much more empathy for that, which is like, oops, a multi-billion

00:44:38 ◼   ► dollar company happened to us.

00:44:40 ◼   ► Like I have way more empathy for that than the person that's like, I set out to do this.

00:44:43 ◼   ► I think part of why I'm always skeptical about the approach people have to either competing

00:44:47 ◼   ► with it or fixing it is like, it's a real hard thing to do on purpose.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Nobody's ever done it on purpose.

00:44:53 ◼   ► And so, so I think that's really important, but I think the other thing that, that underpins

00:44:57 ◼   ► a lot of this too, is the, you know, you and I are of a cohort of folks that came into

00:45:02 ◼   ► technology sort of pre-internet right.

00:45:05 ◼   ► And then the rise of the internet, I think justified why we liked computers right back

00:45:10 ◼   ► when they used to be called.

00:45:10 ◼   ► And then what came of that, and this is keep in mind, like we are in the cohort too.

00:45:15 ◼   ► That is mostly in political power, mostly in professional power.

00:45:19 ◼   ► Like most organizations are run by people who came up from that same kind of gen X cohort

00:45:24 ◼   ► that we did or late gen X cohort that we did.

00:45:26 ◼   ► And there's this baked in kind of Clinton era techno solutionism, which is like, we'll

00:45:33 ◼   ► throw software at it and that'll fix it.

00:45:34 ◼   ► And that's happened in politics has happened on these areas.

00:45:37 ◼   ► And I think it's really closely related to that idea of the genius creator, right?

00:45:41 ◼   ► You know, like if you can get something to compile in X code, then you can solve any

00:45:45 ◼   ► problem, right?

00:45:46 ◼   ► Even if it's a domain you've never heard of or aren't good at.

00:45:49 ◼   ► And that's a intoxicating thing that suits, like I have been poisoned by this.

00:45:56 ◼   ► It suits my ego to believe that is true.

00:45:58 ◼   ► Even though demonstrably, it is false, sometimes catastrophically false.

00:46:03 ◼   ► And so that's the thing that I'm very, and why I asked you that question about, like,

00:46:07 ◼   ► why do we say this?

00:46:08 ◼   ► Cause like I have been, I was seduced by that same siren many times when I built social

00:46:13 ◼   ► media tools that I think you still use.

00:46:16 ◼   ► I was like, Oh, and then this will democratize publishing.

00:46:19 ◼   ► And like, it was true.

00:46:20 ◼   ► And we did get voices like yours and complete denial about the downside risk of like, also

00:46:27 ◼   ► it might amplify conspiracy theorists or hate groups or whatever else that came along with

00:46:31 ◼   ► it.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And we took, I literally had a job that was to say, we're going to enable people to do

00:46:36 ◼   ► things like daring fireball.

00:46:37 ◼   ► We're going to enable great voices like John Gruber.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And I was happy and proud to do it.

00:46:42 ◼   ► And then when people use it to make hateful things, I was like, Oh, that's not our fault.

00:46:45 ◼   ► That's just human nature.

00:46:46 ◼   ► Well, and think back to go before publishing on the internet to earlier computer technologies,

00:46:52 ◼   ► like the laser printer, where all of a sudden anybody could print out eight and a half by

00:46:58 ◼   ► 11 output that looked professional.

00:47:02 ◼   ► It didn't look like it came out of a typewriter.

00:47:04 ◼   ► It didn't look, it wasn't dot name.

00:47:05 ◼   ► It was indistinguishable from the most expensive thing you could do.

00:47:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:08 ◼   ► And that there were companies, big companies who had infrastructure that was all based

00:47:14 ◼   ► around the typewriter or dot matrix printers for their stuff.

00:47:17 ◼   ► So that you, the person, the Joe or Jane computer user who just had access to a laser printer

00:47:24 ◼   ► could get better looking output than bigger name people.

00:47:27 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And of course, anybody, you could print anything on your laser printer, right?

00:47:32 ◼   ► So the person whose politics you agree with who had could just as easily make a very lovely

00:47:37 ◼   ► looking flyer as somebody whose politics you completely disagree with and nobody thought,

00:47:42 ◼   ► well, that's the printer's fault.

00:47:44 ◼   ► And I think that was the same mentality that we all had in the early years of publishing

00:47:49 ◼   ► and publishing, creating publishing tools on the internet.

00:47:53 ◼   ► I think there was also a naivete about the legitimizing effect that everybody having

00:47:57 ◼   ► the same tools would do if you couldn't tell the difference, right?

00:48:01 ◼   ► It's the same fonts and the same way of the paper and all that kind of stuff between the

00:48:07 ◼   ► whack job and the expert.

00:48:09 ◼   ► The fact that we were relying so much on the social signals is, I mean, again, you know

00:48:12 ◼   ► this better than anybody having been a designer.

00:48:14 ◼   ► We take our credibility cues from the packaging.

00:48:18 ◼   ► Even people who claim that they don't care about design don't even realize how subliminally

00:48:24 ◼   ► they are affected by it.

00:48:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:25 ◼   ► They can't resist the cues that we've been trading.

00:48:27 ◼   ► And again, for good reason historically.

00:48:29 ◼   ► There were lots of, like, there was a lot of time where like, okay, this is well-produced,

00:48:32 ◼   ► it's in the magazine.

00:48:32 ◼   ► That means that there was a gatekeeper, which is bad, but it also means there was an editor,

00:48:36 ◼   ► which is probably good.

00:48:37 ◼   ► And so that thing of that real balance, we weren't taught, right?

00:48:40 ◼   ► That level of fluency, the meta level of fluency and the communications and media, we weren't

00:48:45 ◼   ► taught.

00:48:46 ◼   ► And so, because nobody had encountered it before, like the last time that came around,

00:48:49 ◼   ► you know, it was the printing press.

00:48:51 ◼   ► And so to come back around to this, we're like, oh, I didn't realize this was the stakes.

00:48:56 ◼   ► And I think that there's a sort of a denial still.

00:48:59 ◼   ► I know, like, again, I went through this, or like, I was the arms dealer giving people

00:49:03 ◼   ► these weapons and in denial about the implications of it until it was being misused.

00:49:10 ◼   ► And I think that still permeated.

00:49:12 ◼   ► And also, like, we were of the cohort that got to see these impacts first, right?

00:49:17 ◼   ► We were early and got to see it go through.

00:49:19 ◼   ► So everybody is a couple of years behind, depending on when they got to social media,

00:49:22 ◼   ► maybe several years behind in realizing these same things.

00:49:25 ◼   ► And so that lag is an opportunity for the Musks of the world to sort of say, hey, look,

00:49:31 ◼   ► software is software.

00:49:32 ◼   ► If I can make the dashboard on your Tesla, which he doesn't do, but, you know, he takes

00:49:37 ◼   ► credit for, then I could certainly make a couple tweets appear in a way that you like.

00:49:41 ◼   ► And you're like, these are completely different problem spaces.

00:49:44 ◼   ► The fact that they both involve writing some code does not mean they're the same kind

00:49:47 ◼   ► of problem at all.

00:49:48 ◼   ► Very much.

00:49:51 ◼   ► Well, who was the CEO before Gil Amelio was the CEO before Steve Jobs.

00:49:55 ◼   ► And again, I see a similarity here where I see Twitter as being worth saving.

00:49:59 ◼   ► I do not think that before this entire Musk saga started that they were on a path anywhere

00:50:06 ◼   ► good.

00:50:06 ◼   ► And I thought it was so disappointing when Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO to focus.

00:50:15 ◼   ► Well, and sold out his workers.

00:50:17 ◼   ► I mean, the wild thing is that Jack was playing both sides of the deal.

00:50:21 ◼   ► This was actually one of those things where, like, again, I don't get surprised either

00:50:24 ◼   ► this industry is I have no misgivings about what it is.

00:50:27 ◼   ► It's a multi trillion dollar industry, but I did not think he would be saying one thing

00:50:32 ◼   ► in public and to his workers and be doing a backdoor deal to sell to Musk at the same

00:50:38 ◼   ► time, just straight up.

00:50:39 ◼   ► I mean, it's a lie and it's a rare thing.

00:50:41 ◼   ► Like again, like you can be critical of CEOs for many valid reasons, but actually they

00:50:46 ◼   ► very rarely will bald face tell a lie to the world about that kind of thing.

00:50:51 ◼   ► They will about are we going to do a video iPod or not, but not about like that kind

00:50:55 ◼   ► of thing.

00:50:55 ◼   ► That was really stark and striking.

00:50:57 ◼   ► And one of the sort of like the first in the series of jaw dropping dominoes that started

00:51:02 ◼   ► to fall around all this.

00:51:03 ◼   ► And I just I don't know Prague Agrawal, who was the CEO for what, a year, I guess, or

00:51:09 ◼   ► almost a year.

00:51:09 ◼   ► Although he'd been CTO for a while.

00:51:11 ◼   ► I know well, but naming him CEO to me without knowing him or knowing that it just seemed

00:51:17 ◼   ► very clear to me that he was not the person he wasn't going to do what I think needed

00:51:22 ◼   ► to be done to fix Twitter.

00:51:23 ◼   ► And again, it's not my specific ideas like, Oh, you should name me John Gruber, the CEO

00:51:28 ◼   ► or or pay me to be a consultant for a couple of weeks so I can put it all on a whiteboard.

00:51:33 ◼   ► It's not that I had a plan.

00:51:34 ◼   ► It's just that I would know it when I saw it and steady as she goes.

00:51:40 ◼   ► We'll just keep going the way we were, which was more or less Twitter for the last few

00:51:44 ◼   ► years wasn't going to do it.

00:51:47 ◼   ► And so, I mean, I've had some conversations with Prague over the years, and I have a little

00:51:52 ◼   ► bit of a window into some of the technical choices because actually to this, as far as

00:51:56 ◼   ► I know, I'm sure after this comes out, Musk will delete it.

00:51:58 ◼   ► But if you go to the Twitter developer site, they say, get started trying it.

00:52:01 ◼   ► It's a glitch app, and I run glitch.

00:52:03 ◼   ► So we see that.

00:52:04 ◼   ► And so we had a chance to talk about the platform and like he's a technologist.

00:52:10 ◼   ► One thing that's important to understand with Jack having picked Prague as a successor is

00:52:14 ◼   ► it's very rare.

00:52:15 ◼   ► You almost never see a publicly traded company, multi-billion dollar company where somebody

00:52:20 ◼   ► goes from CTO to CEO.

00:52:22 ◼   ► Technology is not the path by which you become executive of a technology company.

00:52:28 ◼   ► That's a really, there's a million things I can unpack from that statement, but that

00:52:31 ◼   ► is just a factual statement.

00:52:33 ◼   ► And yet that happened there.

00:52:35 ◼   ► And also, Prague started Blue Sky, which is their sort of attempted making a protocol

00:52:40 ◼   ► that Twitter could run on to sort of decentralize things.

00:52:42 ◼   ► And we can talk about Mastodon and Fediverse and all that stuff too.

00:52:45 ◼   ► But conceptually, not the wrong idea, really interesting idea.

00:52:48 ◼   ► And he was much more committed to it than Jack was.

00:52:50 ◼   ► I mean, Jack was sort of like, yeah, we'll fund it, we'll do it.

00:52:52 ◼   ► But Prague was a person that understood how it worked, was interested in it.

00:52:55 ◼   ► So I don't think conceptually he was impossible to have tackled the problems, but I do think

00:53:01 ◼   ► he was taking an incremental approach.

00:53:03 ◼   ► And this is one of the things that I think I pull away from the valid part of what you're

00:53:06 ◼   ► saying is an incremental approach wasn't going to fix what was broken with Twitter.

00:53:09 ◼   ► They needed a more vigorous shaking.

00:53:12 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's exactly what we're trying to make.

00:53:14 ◼   ► Would you consider Satya Nadella an exception to that as well, though, as a technologist

00:53:19 ◼   ► who became the leader of Microsoft?

00:53:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of complicated feelings about the pattern in our industry

00:53:26 ◼   ► of Indian immigrant CEOs becoming CEOs at these companies when they're in duress, right?

00:53:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:33 ◼   ► There's a phrase that people use around, especially women becoming CEOs of glass cliff.

00:53:37 ◼   ► It's sort of related to the glass ceiling, right?

00:53:39 ◼   ► Of as soon as things get bad enough, we'll bring you in.

00:53:41 ◼   ► And it helps that the...

00:53:42 ◼   ► We'll let you drive the company over the cliff that it's obviously inevitably heading

00:53:47 ◼   ► towards all of it.

00:53:47 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:53:47 ◼   ► And then you'll take the fall.

00:53:48 ◼   ► But I mean, I think it's one, I actually do think the pattern is real, but I also think

00:53:52 ◼   ► of like at Google, things were not in a dire place.

00:53:55 ◼   ► Microsoft, you could argue things have been stagnant for a long time, which for their

00:53:58 ◼   ► culture is a dire place.

00:53:59 ◼   ► And then obviously Twitter was in serious duress.

00:54:02 ◼   ► There is a rare path as a technologist.

00:54:05 ◼   ► Microsoft is an outlier place because...

00:54:07 ◼   ► They value technology to such a profound degree.

00:54:10 ◼   ► And also they started as a developer tools company and have essentially gone back to

00:54:14 ◼   ► becoming a developer tools company, especially with the acquisition of GitHub and all the

00:54:18 ◼   ► other things they've done.

00:54:19 ◼   ► So it's a really interesting thing where I think in a lot of ways, that was a return

00:54:24 ◼   ► to the starting point after having had a lot of digressions over the years.

00:54:28 ◼   ► That is a really interesting thing because they were...

00:54:30 ◼   ► I mean, this is a tangent, but I think a relevant one.

00:54:33 ◼   ► Microsoft made developer tools for all major platforms.

00:54:37 ◼   ► That was what they did to start with before Windows, before DOS, before anything.

00:54:41 ◼   ► And then would make sure that the apps that you created on those were pretty easily portable

00:54:45 ◼   ► to any place that their platforms were running.

00:54:47 ◼   ► And to an approximation, that is what they do now, where their apps run on every platform

00:54:52 ◼   ► and they own the entire developer stack top to bottom with coders write their code in

00:54:57 ◼   ► and where they host their code and what they hope is where they run their code.

00:55:01 ◼   ► That's a really...

00:55:02 ◼   ► That thing, I think, is that explains the exception of why technologies can come up.

00:55:06 ◼   ► But I think there's also this broader pattern of, was the problem with Twitter about technology?

00:55:10 ◼   ► And it's not, it's about culture, right?

00:55:12 ◼   ► It was really about like, what does it want to be culturally?

00:55:14 ◼   ► There was obviously a huge cultural battle about what it is.

00:55:16 ◼   ► It had become a signifier, I think largely because of Donald Trump, of the larger cultural

00:55:22 ◼   ► battles that are happening in America and around the world.

00:55:24 ◼   ► And those are problems that are uniquely ill-suited to trying to solve through technical formats.

00:55:32 ◼   ► Like it is not an API problem that people are having political battles in your platform.

00:55:37 ◼   ► Dave- But basically that was my thinking, was that this...

00:55:39 ◼   ► Prague was obviously not the person to give Twitter the shakeup.

00:55:43 ◼   ► Whether it's because maybe he had the ideas to do it, but he obviously didn't have the

00:55:47 ◼   ► political clout to do it.

00:55:49 ◼   ► Right?

00:55:49 ◼   ► Michael- Well, also there is an inherent conservatism to being a CEO of a publicly traded company,

00:55:54 ◼   ► especially under an FTC consent decree, which leads to taking an incremental approach.

00:55:59 ◼   ► He might have had, I don't know, this is not a conversation I've ever had with him or anybody

00:56:03 ◼   ► else that was at that level, but he may have had a radical vision.

00:56:06 ◼   ► And even if he did, and he had board buy-in to pursue it, the grown up right way to do

00:56:14 ◼   ► it would be build the plan, iterate over time, make sure things are secure, reassure your

00:56:20 ◼   ► advertisers, build a plan about what your staffing is going to look like.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Those are the things you do.

00:56:25 ◼   ► And so there's no way to know now because of how things have played out, but it is not

00:56:31 ◼   ► at all impossible that he had a good plan and was executing it and we couldn't see it.

00:56:34 ◼   ► And that making your decisions based on what people are tweeting at you is actually a bad

00:56:39 ◼   ► way to make decisions.

00:56:40 ◼   ► And so I think that's because like you look at, again, going back to the jobs example,

00:56:43 ◼   ► you know, when he goes to the sort of first, after the return from the next exile, he goes

00:56:48 ◼   ► to Macworld and he's talking to people and it's not an obvious immediate turn, right?

00:56:53 ◼   ► Like it is a short time to effectively when the iMac comes out, right?

00:56:57 ◼   ► But on the way there, he didn't say anything that said we're doing this radical change.

00:57:02 ◼   ► He said, we have to get it together.

00:57:03 ◼   ► There was no hint that a Microsoft partnership was coming.

00:57:06 ◼   ► There was no hint, like the things that were seen as these radical bold moves were not

00:57:11 ◼   ► communicated until they were communicated.

00:57:12 ◼   ► And so I think that's the thing that like a turnaround for an organization is a very

00:57:16 ◼   ► hard thing for any leader to do.

00:57:19 ◼   ► And you actually, there's the right way to do it is to not be disruptive until you know

00:57:23 ◼   ► what you're doing.

00:57:24 ◼   ► I remember, I don't know how to explain it.

00:57:28 ◼   ► I just, again, it's an, I know it when I see it.

00:57:30 ◼   ► And when Gil Amelio was named Apple CEO after a run of bad, even worse CEOs, Michael, Michael

00:57:39 ◼   ► Spindler famously, right, right, right, right, right.

00:57:42 ◼   ► At one point it was reported in a book that he, it was, they had like an upcoming quarterly

00:57:47 ◼   ► report and they thought he was in his office and he wasn't.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And where is he?

00:57:50 ◼   ► And it turns out he was in his office and he was under his desk crying.

00:57:54 ◼   ► I mean, it was bad, bad, relatable, and really did not.

00:57:58 ◼   ► Well, if you listen to it, it wasn't there long, but he did a lot of damage to the company.

00:58:02 ◼   ► But when Gil Amelio was named, he said some things that were right.

00:58:06 ◼   ► You know, like he obviously didn't like totally not get the Mac or Apple.

00:58:11 ◼   ► And I think the one thing I remember him saying was that he saw Apple as the mag light of

00:58:16 ◼   ► computers and that sure, most people aren't going to buy, aren't going to, if they're

00:58:21 ◼   ► going to go buy a flashlight, they're not going to spend the money on a mag light, but

00:58:25 ◼   ► the people who really want a good one are going to, and that's Apple's role in the

00:58:30 ◼   ► computer business.

00:58:31 ◼   ► And in broad strokes, that's right.

00:58:33 ◼   ► It's not factually incorrect, but it's a horrible story to tell.

00:58:35 ◼   ► And it's also, that alone does not make you the right person to be CEO of Apple.

00:58:40 ◼   ► That's right.

00:58:40 ◼   ► That's right.

00:58:41 ◼   ► And actually there's a meta point here too, which is Apple is the epitome of a company

00:58:46 ◼   ► for whom the story has to come first because it is what sustained them in the low points

00:58:50 ◼   ► and is what made the high points possible.

00:58:52 ◼   ► And so when you're bad at telling the story, you are a failure in the role, even if your

00:58:57 ◼   ► business strategy is right.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And this is true of Twitter as well.

00:59:02 ◼   ► The reason Twitter is a household brand, despite not being that big, certainly compared to

00:59:06 ◼   ► Facebook, but even compared to like Pinterest or, and they handed TikTok to the world by

00:59:12 ◼   ► killing vine, right?

00:59:14 ◼   ► Like their failures are billion dollar companies.

00:59:16 ◼   ► And so, so like this is the thing is like, you have to be a master storyteller.

00:59:22 ◼   ► Jack is good at personal storytelling, but not at the company storytelling.

00:59:25 ◼   ► Still doesn't like to tell a story that he, for 20 years, he has not wanted to be a public

00:59:30 ◼   ► figure.

00:59:30 ◼   ► So like that wasn't the guy.

00:59:32 ◼   ► So like that part about like, that's why the story has been filled in by press and media

00:59:35 ◼   ► and politics and the rest of the world is there.

00:59:38 ◼   ► And then you get somebody in who wants to be the story at the expense of the product

00:59:42 ◼   ► and the team.

00:59:43 ◼   ► And it's a failure.

00:59:44 ◼   ► And I think that's that thing that like the people who built the myth around Musk, like

00:59:48 ◼   ► he has fans, which is a weird thing for CEO.

00:59:51 ◼   ► Cause again, even like going back to the jobs example, obviously there are lots of people

00:59:55 ◼   ► who are jobs fans and acolytes and stuff like that.

00:59:57 ◼   ► But he didn't have a fan culture in that way when he was alive because he didn't cultivate

01:00:05 ◼   ► it.

01:00:05 ◼   ► Like he was fine if people liked his work and appreciated it, but he wasn't carrying

01:00:09 ◼   ► himself.

01:00:09 ◼   ► Like he wasn't doing TV appearances and having people falling over him and creating that

01:00:13 ◼   ► kind of cult of personality famously did very little of it.

01:00:16 ◼   ► Really.

01:00:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:00:17 ◼   ► I often say this, another often recurring theme here on the podcast is me saying, boy,

01:00:24 ◼   ► you know, I've been writing Daring Fireball for over 20 years now, but boy, I wish I'd

01:00:28 ◼   ► been writing it for 25 because, you know, there's a lot of stuff when the story starts.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And there's, you know, and I'm honest about it.

01:00:38 ◼   ► And I would, I will be very honest that if I had been writing about Apple when they acquired

01:00:43 ◼   ► Next, you know, I definitely, I was as keen an observer of the company as I am now as

01:00:49 ◼   ► I write Daring Fireball.

01:00:50 ◼   ► I was still that obsessed with the company and was perhaps even if possible, even more

01:00:56 ◼   ► so, cause I was so worried that they were going to go under and I didn't know what

01:00:59 ◼   ► I would do with myself.

01:01:00 ◼   ► You know, what computers would I use?

01:01:03 ◼   ► When they bought Next, my thought was, I don't know if this is the right decision.

01:01:09 ◼   ► I was sort of more honestly hoping they would buy B, you know, the famous thing was that

01:01:14 ◼   ► they could have bought B.

01:01:16 ◼   ► B had the technical correctness again, right?

01:01:19 ◼   ► And I thought was actually more technically correct than the Next operating system.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Totally.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Totally.

01:01:24 ◼   ► Right.

01:01:24 ◼   ► And it was appealing at the superficial level, but again, Gasset was not this storyteller

01:01:28 ◼   ► that did shops.

01:01:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:01:30 ◼   ► And I didn't own a B box, which is still, it's a great name.

01:01:33 ◼   ► What a great name, but I had used one and I knew that they ran on the Power PC platform

01:01:39 ◼   ► and famously they had this demo, which in 1995 or six or whenever they did the demo,

01:01:44 ◼   ► had four windows on a 15 inch or 17 inch display running four different videos at the same

01:01:52 ◼   ► time.

01:01:52 ◼   ► Full motion video.

01:01:53 ◼   ► It was incredible.

01:01:54 ◼   ► It was incredible.

01:01:54 ◼   ► One of the great demos of all time.

01:01:56 ◼   ► It was jaw dropping.

01:01:57 ◼   ► So I was of the opinion that they should have bought B and not Next.

01:02:00 ◼   ► I thought Next was old news already and had sort of lost their workstation war to Sun

01:02:06 ◼   ► and that a workstation OS wasn't really the right thing for consumers.

01:02:11 ◼   ► I was familiar with B.

01:02:12 ◼   ► I knew B had better color support.

01:02:15 ◼   ► Eh, I would have been, you know, I will admit I was on the record of thinking they should

01:02:19 ◼   ► have gone that way, but when they went the Next route instead, I at least thought, even

01:02:25 ◼   ► though I thought I wish they had bought B instead, I thought at least this gives them

01:02:30 ◼   ► a chance.

01:02:31 ◼   ► And also it wasn't hard to believe that Steve Jobs could understand Apple.

01:02:35 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:36 ◼   ► No, like that was not the part where we're like, I don't know if he knows the culture.

01:02:41 ◼   ► Like that is not the challenge.

01:02:42 ◼   ► And you know, famously in hindsight, he was not instantly named CEO.

01:02:46 ◼   ► He was an advisor and then used political cloud and got, Emilio was ousted and then

01:02:53 ◼   ► he took the CEO title.

01:02:55 ◼   ► Which is very Twitter-esque actually now that you think about it.

01:02:57 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:57 ◼   ► Like that's that Dick Costolo tweet about like the first day of COO, step one, undermine

01:03:03 ◼   ► the CEO.

01:03:04 ◼   ► Yeah, first day.

01:03:05 ◼   ► He was the interim, you know, the joke was he was the I CEO, you know, interim CEO.

01:03:12 ◼   ► I'll be the temporary CEO just while we find a permanent CEO.

01:03:17 ◼   ► Right, he was working real hard to find a replacement.

01:03:18 ◼   ► But, you know, he's admitted to his biographer, you know, that he did it because he was

01:03:23 ◼   ► uncertain that even he could save Apple and he just did, you know, that way.

01:03:26 ◼   ► You don't want to get the stench of failure on you, right?

01:03:29 ◼   ► Nobody likes a failure.

01:03:30 ◼   ► Nobody likes a loser, right?

01:03:31 ◼   ► Yes, exactly.

01:03:32 ◼   ► And that's the thing is, I mean, I think an important part of this whole story is Next

01:03:38 ◼   ► also would have failed, right?

01:03:41 ◼   ► They were definitely going to fail.

01:03:43 ◼   ► Right.

01:03:44 ◼   ► Like they had no negotiating leverage except his storytelling ability, but it's not like

01:03:47 ◼   ► Next was going to win.

01:03:48 ◼   ► And I think that's part of it is like, he did not want to have a failure because America

01:03:53 ◼   ► hates losers.

01:03:54 ◼   ► And, and, and also because, you know, he was a child of immigrants and I'm sure we're

01:03:58 ◼   ► all aware of that.

01:03:59 ◼   ► But I think that's this part that is really interesting with Musk.

01:04:05 ◼   ► It's like Musk is very clearly in his flop era.

01:04:07 ◼   ► It is dead obvious, right?

01:04:10 ◼   ► Like you jumped the shark going on SNL, you jumped the shark having the like the musician,

01:04:15 ◼   ► you know, a girlfriend and then the breakup and the whole thing.

01:04:18 ◼   ► Like, like he is in every cliched of the, like the middle-aged guy.

01:04:22 ◼   ► Like he already had the hair plugs, like the whole thing about being in his flop era.

01:04:26 ◼   ► And then this is the like grasp at relevance to sort of be like, I can do this.

01:04:32 ◼   ► I'm this genius.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And also a lot of Silicon Valley guys are obsessed with having a third win because then

01:04:38 ◼   ► you're in jobs territory.

01:04:39 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:40 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Because then it proves that weren't you weren't a fluke, right?

01:04:45 ◼   ► You know?

01:04:46 ◼   ► So, but basically that's my feeling is, you know, Steve Jobs and next wouldn't have been

01:04:50 ◼   ► my first choice in 1997, but I thought at least this gives them a chance, especially

01:04:55 ◼   ► if Jobs stays around and, you know, it turns out that was right.

01:04:58 ◼   ► And the job also was not in a cultural moment where tech CEOs were cultural figures.

01:05:04 ◼   ► Oh, definitely.

01:05:04 ◼   ► And where people were obsessed with them, like they were nerds and unpopular in 97.

01:05:09 ◼   ► And that's really, really important because you had to want to do it.

01:05:12 ◼   ► And he was a person who did date musicians because they liked it.

01:05:16 ◼   ► It wasn't cool.

01:05:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:05:18 ◼   ► And so like, this is a really, like this, the thing again, where the sort of the fun

01:05:21 ◼   ► house mirror version of this is like, you know, the, the, the difference between Grimes

01:05:26 ◼   ► and any given folk singer that, that, you know, jobs is attached to Joni Mitchell, I

01:05:31 ◼   ► believe.

01:05:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:32 ◼   ► Joan Baez, maybe both.

01:05:33 ◼   ► Joan Baez, not Joni Mitchell, but, but, but Joni Mitchell, different vibes, but, but

01:05:37 ◼   ► Jon Baez.

01:05:38 ◼   ► And that's the thing is like, Jon Baez was not going for somebody cool and not going

01:05:43 ◼   ► for the richest guy in the world.

01:05:44 ◼   ► Well, like if they were, I don't know if they were ever photographed together while

01:05:47 ◼   ► they were out, but if they had been every, it would have been there's Joan Baez with,

01:05:51 ◼   ► I don't know who, some guy who works in technology, some handsome young man.

01:05:54 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:05:55 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:05:55 ◼   ► And, and so, so that's really, really important, right?

01:05:57 ◼   ► Because, because the, the thing that people can't understand is like, these things are

01:06:01 ◼   ► shaped the same, aren't they the same?

01:06:03 ◼   ► And yet the cultural signifiers are the exact opposite, right?

01:06:06 ◼   ► Like he absolutely could talk fluently about music to Joan Baez in a way where they're

01:06:11 ◼   ► credibly spending time together because they care about creativity and culture.

01:06:15 ◼   ► And that is the opposite of by the time I became the richest person in the world, I

01:06:20 ◼   ► could find a cool musician to date me.

01:06:22 ◼   ► And, and, and that part, like, and that's the same reason you have the difference in

01:06:26 ◼   ► this approach to, and then like, and I'm not somebody who idealizes jobs.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Like I have lots of criticisms of him, but I think that part about like the story has

01:06:33 ◼   ► to be true at some level, if you're going to tell a good story.

01:06:36 ◼   ► And in the story of like, when Elon Musk was a little boy, he dreamed of building a

01:06:41 ◼   ► communication network so people could share their ideas with each other is not true.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Well, before we move on, I will just say that that's the last part of my opt- I'm

01:06:51 ◼   ► more optimistic than I have been in years was at least with Elon Musk, I thought he

01:06:56 ◼   ► will shake up the company.

01:06:57 ◼   ► It needs a shake up.

01:06:58 ◼   ► And he, he, he himself obviously uses and loves Twitter.

01:07:03 ◼   ► And I think that gives him a chance.

01:07:04 ◼   ► I don't think he's good at it.

01:07:05 ◼   ► No, and we'll get to that.

01:07:07 ◼   ► You know, that might be a good sign.

01:07:09 ◼   ► But I do think that that's been a profound problem for Twitter for its entire lifetime,

01:07:14 ◼   ► that it's never been led by people who really seem to use it.

01:07:20 ◼   ► You know, I mean, Jack used it, but not, I'm not saying you have to tweet prolifically.

01:07:26 ◼   ► I mean, maybe Jack used it enough, but Dick Costello didn't really use it at all.

01:07:30 ◼   ► No.

01:07:30 ◼   ► And the thing is he would have been good at it, but I think the culture is such that he

01:07:34 ◼   ► couldn't have done it.

01:07:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:35 ◼   ► I've met Dick.

01:07:35 ◼   ► I met him at a South by Southwest, I think a long time ago, but he's very fun.

01:07:39 ◼   ► He's a funny guy.

01:07:39 ◼   ► He really is.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:40 ◼   ► He's a brilliant, he did stand up comedy actually.

01:07:43 ◼   ► Now that I think about it, I mean, that's how funny, you know, like successfully, not

01:07:47 ◼   ► like in a cringy Elon Musk.

01:07:49 ◼   ► Not on Open Mic Night.

01:07:50 ◼   ► Well, not Open Mic Night, not Elon Musk hosting SNL was actually, you know, could do it, but

01:07:57 ◼   ► therefore could have been, you know, comedians in my opinion tend to be excellent at tweeting.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Well, and also like it's the skill is especially for improv comedy, reading the room.

01:08:10 ◼   ► Right.

01:08:11 ◼   ► And this is this really pertinent thing about, you know, how do you become, how do you have

01:08:16 ◼   ► the right set of skills?

01:08:17 ◼   ► But you know, I think there's just such a, it's funny because all these examples keep

01:08:21 ◼   ► coming back to culture.

01:08:22 ◼   ► You talk about comedy, you talk about music, you talk about the arts.

01:08:25 ◼   ► Like these are things that are about culture,

01:08:27 ◼   ► influence in what humans are passionate about, and those are not the, you know, the drivers

01:08:34 ◼   ► for this, this sort of like outside acquisition.

01:08:37 ◼   ► It was ego.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And also the ambivalence about it is the indication.

01:08:39 ◼   ► Like I'm not passionate about this thing.

01:08:41 ◼   ► And those are the, again, zero question that, you know, a turnaround by Steve Jobs is, is

01:08:48 ◼   ► he passionate about the computers that Apple builds?

01:08:51 ◼   ► Like it's, it's like why he gets up in the morning, right?

01:08:55 ◼   ► Liz breathes and eats it.

01:08:56 ◼   ► And, and if you're like, I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy it or not, but then I got tied

01:09:00 ◼   ► into the deal and I had to go through with it.

01:09:02 ◼   ► You're like, man, that is, that's the opposite energy.

01:09:05 ◼   ► Everybody knew and still knows that the reason Keynote is one of the best apps Apple has

01:09:10 ◼   ► ever made and that anybody's ever made is that Steve Jobs himself was a diehard user

01:09:14 ◼   ► of Keynote.

01:09:15 ◼   ► And in fact, he had been using Keynote before there even was Keynote.

01:09:20 ◼   ► There was some app that Next made, you know, that, that was the roots of Keynote.

01:09:23 ◼   ► And in between the next years and when they announced, okay, we're going to come out with

01:09:28 ◼   ► this iWork suite for the Mac called, you know, with a Keynote and pages and numbers.

01:09:33 ◼   ► Numbers.

01:09:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:34 ◼   ► He had been using what is Keynote throughout all that time.

01:09:37 ◼   ► He had a team of people making it.

01:09:39 ◼   ► It was that I bet he had great product feedback.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sure because he used it all the time.

01:09:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:43 ◼   ► All right.

01:09:45 ◼   ► Anyway, let me take a break here.

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01:11:36 ◼   ► Ah, all right.

01:11:39 ◼   ► That was why I was optimistic.

01:11:42 ◼   ► So you know what's interesting too is there's a broader thing that's happening in like some

01:11:47 ◼   ► parts of tech, the sort of like I said, the tech tycoons.

01:11:49 ◼   ► I think if you look at the mosque, you look at Peter Thiel, you look at the sort of Andres

01:11:54 ◼   ► and Horowitz VC folks, they've kind of radicalized each other into the opposite of what they

01:12:00 ◼   ► used to be.

01:12:01 ◼   ► So there was a narrative that venture capitalists would say at the beginning of like the web

01:12:05 ◼   ► 2.0 era, which is like, you know, you're the founders, you're the visionaries, you're the

01:12:09 ◼   ► geniuses, we just want to fund the brilliant things that you make so that they can change

01:12:14 ◼   ► the world.

01:12:15 ◼   ► And that was a very common refrain.

01:12:17 ◼   ► They all said that.

01:12:17 ◼   ► And then you go back, actually, this is probably the beginning of the year, so more than a

01:12:22 ◼   ► couple months ago now.

01:12:22 ◼   ► Andres and Horowitz put out a really a political platform.

01:12:26 ◼   ► They called it like the, you know, America Rebuilding or something like that.

01:12:31 ◼   ► And it's a very explicitly strongly political document about the way that, you know, capital

01:12:38 ◼   ► should be allocated as a country and what we should invest in, what the resources should

01:12:41 ◼   ► be, and the rest.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And they sort of said, if you conform with this political platform that we are advocating,

01:12:51 ◼   ► then we will write you a check.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:12:54 ◼   ► And this sort of even carried out in their partner Chris Dixon talking about web 3.0 and

01:12:57 ◼   ► the same kind of thing, which is like a very explicit political and economic set of goals

01:13:02 ◼   ► and an approach.

01:13:04 ◼   ► And if you conform with that, then we'll cut you a check.

01:13:07 ◼   ► But it's akin to the old days when you would get a loan from, you know, for your mom and

01:13:12 ◼   ► pop company from the bank.

01:13:14 ◼   ► You're like, I want to open a flower shop.

01:13:15 ◼   ► And they're like, okay, we're going to tell you what flowers to sell.

01:13:17 ◼   ► And if you sell those, you can have a lot.

01:13:19 ◼   ► And it's the opposite.

01:13:21 ◼   ► And it's a rare thing where you go like a 180 from the narrative of half a generation

01:13:27 ◼   ► before of like, whatever you are, you know, where our jobs is to support you and give

01:13:31 ◼   ► you resources to.

01:13:32 ◼   ► This is what we're commissioning, right?

01:13:35 ◼   ► Like we're the metages.

01:13:36 ◼   ► And we expect you to deliver this.

01:13:39 ◼   ► And I think that inversion of power of like the sort of the big central capital folks

01:13:43 ◼   ► saying, we want you to follow our, you know, sort of political whims is a really stark

01:13:52 ◼   ► and striking change.

01:13:53 ◼   ► And it's very different.

01:13:54 ◼   ► It leads to different things being made and a different sort of allocation of resources

01:13:59 ◼   ► to what people focus on.

01:14:01 ◼   ► But it's such a, I think it's a direct cause of why we're at the moment that we're at

01:14:08 ◼   ► with not just mosque, but sort of across the board in tech is like, if you had the ambition

01:14:14 ◼   ► to sort of do something really interesting and empowering for people, you know, the first

01:14:20 ◼   ► test is going to be well, but does this, you know, help us do what we're trying to do.

01:14:23 ◼   ► And I think the good example is to look at, you know, in the last generation, one of the

01:14:28 ◼   ► big wins for the venture capitalists is something like Uber, right?

01:14:30 ◼   ► And, you know, there's a lot of, I think everybody's hashed out a lot of the pros and the cons

01:14:34 ◼   ► like you can, you know, you can Google that stuff, but there are a couple of inarguable

01:14:39 ◼   ► things about Uber.

01:14:40 ◼   ► One of which is that it's never made money and it's never come close.

01:14:42 ◼   ► And that the investors who invested early in Uber have made billions of dollars off

01:14:50 ◼   ► of it going public.

01:14:50 ◼   ► And also that it's had, you know, a transformative and deleterious effect on the workers who

01:14:57 ◼   ► drive cars and used to make money doing so.

01:15:01 ◼   ► And that thing of you can make lots and lots of money as an investor by sucking all of

01:15:09 ◼   ► the money out of a market, even to the harm of the people who were in that business before.

01:15:12 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter if the business ever makes money because you'll still get ahead.

01:15:17 ◼   ► And then of course we've seen sort of extreme versions of that with the crypto world.

01:15:21 ◼   ► We're like, again, is people are losing their shirts in the crypto crash.

01:15:24 ◼   ► You know, Andreessen Horowitz has had the most profitable fund they've ever had in their

01:15:29 ◼   ► history investing in the web three stuff.

01:15:32 ◼   ► This is a really striking shift from how we used to think about making technology.

01:15:36 ◼   ► And then it leads to the takeaway, which is you should tell people what to do because

01:15:41 ◼   ► you'll make lots of money that way, even if it all crashes and burns.

01:15:44 ◼   ► You're really cheering me up here on you.

01:15:48 ◼   ► I'm sorry, but this is why, you know what, this is why I wasn't optimistic about Musk

01:15:53 ◼   ► coming in.

01:15:53 ◼   ► This is why I didn't have what I used to have the same hope you did.

01:15:57 ◼   ► Like this will shake things up because I'm like the direction you're shaking when you

01:16:02 ◼   ► shake things up matters.

01:16:03 ◼   ► And I'm like, I don't believe that he wants to solve the problem that Twitter was born

01:16:07 ◼   ► to solve.

01:16:07 ◼   ► And that's still my lens of like, why did you start doing this?

01:16:11 ◼   ► And I'm like, if he had been skeptical of the other thing, because he is one of those

01:16:14 ◼   ► people says you should make stuff.

01:16:15 ◼   ► Cars are real.

01:16:16 ◼   ► Rockets are real.

01:16:17 ◼   ► You should make stuff.

01:16:18 ◼   ► Right.

01:16:19 ◼   ► And then I'm like, okay, okay.

01:16:20 ◼   ► But how are you approaching this?

01:16:23 ◼   ► And it was not, I know where we're headed.

01:16:25 ◼   ► This is the vision.

01:16:26 ◼   ► This is the story.

01:16:28 ◼   ► Which would have been what it looked like if this is the thing he cared about.

01:16:30 ◼   ► Well, let me read a tweet from you.

01:16:33 ◼   ► I think you tweeted it too, but I've got it on your Mastodon account in front of me.

01:16:36 ◼   ► This is from April.

01:16:38 ◼   ► Back in April of this year, you wrote people, this is an April.

01:16:42 ◼   ► This year would be, I think after Musk announced that he wanted to buy Twitter.

01:16:49 ◼   ► I think it was the day of the first conversation about it.

01:16:51 ◼   ► All right.

01:16:51 ◼   ► There hadn't been anything.

01:16:52 ◼   ► And there had been a couple of weeks before where he might invest in Twitter.

01:16:55 ◼   ► They might put him on a board.

01:16:56 ◼   ► He said, F you.

01:16:57 ◼   ► We don't want you on the board.

01:16:59 ◼   ► This, that.

01:16:59 ◼   ► And then he was like, you know what?

01:17:00 ◼   ► Screw it.

01:17:01 ◼   ► I'm just going to make an offer to buy you and take you public.

01:17:04 ◼   ► And here is what you wrote in April.

01:17:06 ◼   ► People are really not realizing how F-ing terrible.

01:17:10 ◼   ► You wrote the real word.

01:17:11 ◼   ► I'll just say F-ing in case people are trying.

01:17:14 ◼   ► I swear enough on the fly on this podcast.

01:17:16 ◼   ► But I'll try to keep this clean for people who listen to the...

01:17:20 ◼   ► I was cursing.

01:17:21 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:17:21 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:21 ◼   ► People are really not realizing how terrible the Musk era of Twitter is going to be.

01:17:27 ◼   ► They see it as some amusing novelty when it's actually going to reveal how many places Twitter

01:17:32 ◼   ► was actually making good choices because those will end.

01:17:35 ◼   ► So, you know, being right points to you at least so far.

01:17:39 ◼   ► But you know what?

01:17:41 ◼   ► You know what actually inspired that was a couple of years ago, I'd had an interaction

01:17:48 ◼   ► with one of the guys who hosts the Chapo Trap House podcast.

01:17:52 ◼   ► And those guys at that time, I don't know how they feel now, but they really didn't like me.

01:17:56 ◼   ► And it is one of those, like, you know, people being dicks to you on Twitter kind of things

01:18:02 ◼   ► where I was like, Oh, this sucks.

01:18:03 ◼   ► And then one of the guys, Felix reached out to me and he's like, Hey, you know folks at

01:18:08 ◼   ► Twitter, right?

01:18:09 ◼   ► And I was like, yeah.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And he's like, we found these folks that are reporting kids in Saudi Arabia who are

01:18:18 ◼   ► gay and reporting them to the authorities because it's illegal to be gay there.

01:18:22 ◼   ► And they can be imprisoned and even sentenced to death.

01:18:25 ◼   ► And, you know, it's something he's very fluent in and cares sincerely about.

01:18:29 ◼   ► And he, you know, the fact that he reached out to somebody who he had been publicly dunking

01:18:33 ◼   ► on for months is an indication of sincerity.

01:18:36 ◼   ► And I was like, yeah, you know what?

01:18:37 ◼   ► Like none of this Twitter beef means anything.

01:18:39 ◼   ► These kids are in harm's way.

01:18:41 ◼   ► And so I connected him to the right folks and, you know, kudos to him for raising the

01:18:45 ◼   ► issue and getting it handled.

01:18:47 ◼   ► And kudos to Del Harvey who used to be in charge of trust and safety at Twitter for

01:18:52 ◼   ► doing the right thing on her.

01:18:53 ◼   ► And this was based on these teens in Saudi Arabia, what they were doing on Twitter, either

01:18:58 ◼   ► direct messages.

01:18:59 ◼   ► So they were on Twitter.

01:19:00 ◼   ► And I don't know the full circumstance because I don't read all of the relevant languages,

01:19:06 ◼   ► but what was clear to me was they had not outed themselves.

01:19:12 ◼   ► And that the people who were doxxing them as being gay had like real world visibility,

01:19:20 ◼   ► like physical world visibility into who they were.

01:19:23 ◼   ► And so knew the implications of what they were doing there.

01:19:25 ◼   ► It could not be a more stark and obvious example of what these platforms can do and things

01:19:29 ◼   ► that Silicon Valley insiders don't think about, which is, you know, real people's real lives.

01:19:37 ◼   ► The example I always go to is the Facebook one, which is, you know, Amnesty International,

01:19:42 ◼   ► which could not be more credible and respected globally, has said that Facebook played a

01:19:47 ◼   ► central role in the enabling the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar because of its information

01:19:53 ◼   ► policies.

01:19:54 ◼   ► And I know Rohingya people, right?

01:19:56 ◼   ► This is not abstract to me.

01:19:57 ◼   ► And this is like, you know, these can be my cousins.

01:20:00 ◼   ► They look like my family members.

01:20:01 ◼   ► And this is a thing that doesn't get talked about very much in the Musk conversation.

01:20:07 ◼   ► Nobody said, what are you going to do?

01:20:09 ◼   ► Because he said, you know, I'm about free speech and then one of his early policies,

01:20:12 ◼   ► actually around this time that I wrote that message was, you know, anything that's legal

01:20:16 ◼   ► to share is going to be legal on Twitter, right?

01:20:19 ◼   ► Because that's what free speech means.

01:20:20 ◼   ► And it is absolutely 100% legal to out a gay child underage in Saudi Arabia and lead them

01:20:31 ◼   ► to the destruction of their life.

01:20:34 ◼   ► That is a legal thing to do.

01:20:35 ◼   ► And it is immoral.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Right.

01:20:39 ◼   ► It's a terrific example because it's clearly not the right policy for Twitter.

01:20:43 ◼   ► Right.

01:20:44 ◼   ► It's just such a crystal clear example.

01:20:46 ◼   ► And it's also one that is very familiar to people who practice, like there's trust

01:20:49 ◼   ► and safety organizations now as industry organizations, where people have this trade

01:20:54 ◼   ► craft across many different platforms and learn from each other and practice how do

01:20:58 ◼   ► you do this stuff and what are the concerns and what do you need to be aware of?

01:21:01 ◼   ► And there are people that have been doing this for 20 plus years, you know, and, you

01:21:06 ◼   ► know, that that's something where like you, you can become an expert in it.

01:21:10 ◼   ► And in doing so you can save people's lives.

01:21:12 ◼   ► And these are not people who were consulted or even considered in this transaction.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And now they're all gone.

01:21:19 ◼   ► All of them at Twitter, every person who had knowledge of this domain of problem is gone.

01:21:24 ◼   ► And I didn't know that was going to happen in April, right?

01:21:28 ◼   ► Like, but I knew that he wasn't asking about it.

01:21:31 ◼   ► And that is exactly the sort of thing that I have a terrible, you know,

01:21:36 ◼   ► in these long three weeks.

01:21:38 ◼   ► And again, just to go back, I'll just, it's my domain of knowledge, but to go back to

01:21:46 ◼   ► Steve Jobs and coming into Apple, he knew they needed to shake up.

01:21:49 ◼   ► They, at the time, I think I just reread the article.

01:21:53 ◼   ► I think Apple laid off 4,100 people at some point after the next reunification, you know,

01:21:58 ◼   ► which is a lot of people, you know, substantial percentage of the whole company, a substantial

01:22:02 ◼   ► percentage, but it was extremely measured, you know, and famously, I mean, this is not

01:22:10 ◼   ► like, oh, that sounds like a good story in hindsight, but I'm sure it didn't work out

01:22:13 ◼   ► that way.

01:22:14 ◼   ► But no, it really did work out that way where Jobs thought, I'm probably almost certainly

01:22:18 ◼   ► going to have to lay off the entire hardware design wing of the company because they're

01:22:26 ◼   ► hard, everything they make looks like shit.

01:22:28 ◼   ► So obviously they all suck, but didn't just axe them upon taking CEO, went and met them

01:22:36 ◼   ► and found a young designer who was leading them named Johnny Ive and saw that they had

01:22:42 ◼   ► all sorts of wonderful ideas that the company just wasn't making and that there was an enormous

01:22:48 ◼   ► amount of talent.

01:22:49 ◼   ► And he also, famous Jobs also famously then said that he was extremely surprised and it

01:22:54 ◼   ► gave him, once he got to know the company, how much software engineering talent was still

01:22:59 ◼   ► there because he just assumed that all of the, Apple was in such trouble that surely

01:23:06 ◼   ► none of the, there are no good software engineers left because they would have left.

01:23:10 ◼   ► They already left, right?

01:23:11 ◼   ► No, and it turned out they love the company and its goals and its ideals so much that

01:23:15 ◼   ► they still were there and it was talent to be tapped.

01:23:18 ◼   ► Right, they were just enduring shipping things that they were crappy.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Right, and without, just as an outside observer, with the timeline of Twitter's layoffs since

01:23:31 ◼   ► Musk took over, you don't have to be an insider to think that they laid people off willy-nilly,

01:23:43 ◼   ► you know?

01:23:43 ◼   ► And there's reports even that they laid people off and then realized some of the people they

01:23:48 ◼   ► laid off were actually essential and asked them back 24 hours later.

01:23:51 ◼   ► I mean, I have a friend I've known for quite a while who had that experience.

01:23:56 ◼   ► I don't know anybody firsthand, but I know I can confirm secondhand that yes, I know

01:24:01 ◼   ► somebody secondhand who that story is actually true.

01:24:05 ◼   ► It wasn't just one person, it was quite a few.

01:24:08 ◼   ► That's not how you do layoffs, wisely, you know?

01:24:13 ◼   ► Well, it's also just the inhumanity of it all.

01:24:15 ◼   ► All of it was needlessly cruel.

01:24:16 ◼   ► I mean, I think the same day that Twitter began its layoffs, they had layoffs at Stripe,

01:24:19 ◼   ► the payment company.

01:24:21 ◼   ► And Stripe is obviously not Twitter in a million ways.

01:24:25 ◼   ► One, it's very behind the scenes, sort of technical, but two, it's actually much bigger

01:24:30 ◼   ► business in terms of dollars.

01:24:32 ◼   ► And it's always awful to people being laid off and to go through that experience.

01:24:41 ◼   ► They were so thoughtful about it.

01:24:43 ◼   ► I mean, they really articulated what mistake they'd made, that it was a mistake, that

01:24:47 ◼   ► the leadership is the ones who are accountable for why this has to happen in the first place,

01:24:51 ◼   ► but here's what we can do about it.

01:24:52 ◼   ► They built alumni email addresses for people to be able to be reachable and be able to

01:24:57 ◼   ► connect with one another because one of the most dehumanizing aspects of a layoff is you

01:25:02 ◼   ► lose contact with your coworkers who were the people around you.

01:25:05 ◼   ► All those things they sort of thought through, and I thought, you never want to have to do

01:25:10 ◼   ► it, but if you are going to have to do it, here's how you can do it.

01:25:13 ◼   ► And it was the same day.

01:25:15 ◼   ► It was the same day.

01:25:16 ◼   ► It was within the same 24 hours.

01:25:17 ◼   ► And you can't make up the serendipity or the contrast.

01:25:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:23 ◼   ► And it was stark too, because I also think, so Patrick and John Carlson, the brothers

01:25:28 ◼   ► who founded Stripe, they're Irish.

01:25:30 ◼   ► And I think a big part of this too is also the culture, right?

01:25:33 ◼   ► They come from a culture where you're supposed to treat people with dignity at work.

01:25:39 ◼   ► There's a limited number of hours you work and people are supposed to be paid and there's

01:25:42 ◼   ► a social safety net and any manner of considerations is a very proud worker culture in Ireland.

01:25:49 ◼   ► And so I think that informs their sense of obligation and sort of social responsibility

01:25:57 ◼   ► around it.

01:25:58 ◼   ► I don't want to be too reductive.

01:25:59 ◼   ► Obviously, it's also they made a good choice and their leaders make good choices all the

01:26:02 ◼   ► way down, but that contrast sort of draws.

01:26:05 ◼   ► There's no reason that these have to be different.

01:26:07 ◼   ► There is no reason that these had to be so stark or contrast in terms of the humanity

01:26:11 ◼   ► of it.

01:26:12 ◼   ► And this is why I say, I think one of the galvanizing forces for all this is that poisonous

01:26:18 ◼   ► analog to owning the liberals, which is within the tech tycoon circles in that conference

01:26:27 ◼   ► room with David Sachs and Jason Calcanis and all these folks that Musk has around him.

01:26:31 ◼   ► This is how we show we're strong, which is the sort of classic thing that we can insecure

01:26:36 ◼   ► people do.

01:26:37 ◼   ► We show we're strong by bullying these people who we have power over.

01:26:40 ◼   ► Right, that doing layoffs in the most dehumanizing.

01:26:45 ◼   ► I don't think there's any other word for it.

01:26:46 ◼   ► And again, you can come up with a hypothetical science fiction scenario of the worst, but

01:26:52 ◼   ► in practical real world terms, it's hard to imagine how Twitter could have done it in

01:26:57 ◼   ► a more dehumanizing way.

01:26:59 ◼   ► You know, with emails going out at midnight that said, here's what you do.

01:27:04 ◼   ► You check your email at eight in the morning and it's either going to find out if you got

01:27:08 ◼   ► a job still.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Yeah, it's just I mean, I would even come up with an idea like that.

01:27:16 ◼   ► I mean, it's and what you know, how what was the rush?

01:27:22 ◼   ► The rush wasn't the however bad Twitter's finances are and they're not good.

01:27:30 ◼   ► It's famously one of the problems is overall in the history of the company, they're unprofitable.

01:27:35 ◼   ► And I do think they're bloated.

01:27:36 ◼   ► I've said this, you know, I'm sure they're quite bloated.

01:27:40 ◼   ► You know, the layoffs were the right move, but there was no reason to do it on 12 hours

01:27:47 ◼   ► notice.

01:27:47 ◼   ► You know, it's just not even close, right?

01:27:50 ◼   ► It's not even worth perseverating on the point here on the podcast.

01:27:53 ◼   ► It is.

01:27:54 ◼   ► And other than to point out the point you made, which is that the cruelty of it was the point,

01:28:00 ◼   ► you know, that that doing it in this fashion wasn't a happenstance or oh, they didn't even

01:28:07 ◼   ► it didn't really occur to them that this is a sort of cruel, cruel way of doing it.

01:28:15 ◼   ► Well, and it's a performative cruelty for their peers, right?

01:28:18 ◼   ► This is this thing that they're sort of I think we're going to see one up some ship on this.

01:28:23 ◼   ► I think the others in that cohort are going to do sort of similarly depraved things, you know,

01:28:28 ◼   ► in the months and years to come because that standards now been set.

01:28:32 ◼   ► He's being cheered on by his fanboys for this.

01:28:35 ◼   ► Like, let's keep in mind.

01:28:36 ◼   ► It's not like people's reaction to this was the human and, you know, rational thing where

01:28:41 ◼   ► you sort of say, gosh, these are people with lives and families.

01:28:45 ◼   ► And why are you acting this way?

01:28:46 ◼   ► Like his fans are like that shows them.

01:28:49 ◼   ► This is us getting back at, I don't know, woke culture or whatever their argument is.

01:28:53 ◼   ► And I guess, you know, I did not see this coming.

01:28:57 ◼   ► I, you know, I'm not a David Sachs fan.

01:29:00 ◼   ► I don't know him that well, but I know of him, you know, and I know that he was close to Musk,

01:29:04 ◼   ► but I really did not expect David Sachs to be at Twitter headquarters Friday night, you know,

01:29:10 ◼   ► interviewing engineering managers and making a list of, yeah, that guy, you know, seems okay.

01:29:18 ◼   ► Keep him.

01:29:19 ◼   ► She doesn't just get rid of her.

01:29:21 ◼   ► You know, I did not expect him to be playing a role like that.

01:29:25 ◼   ► I did not expect layup, massive layoffs to happen within a week.

01:29:29 ◼   ► Wait, obviously nobody could do that within a week, right?

01:29:32 ◼   ► No, no, you can't.

01:29:33 ◼   ► And it's the whole point.

01:29:34 ◼   ► How else do you find out that there's a Johnny Ive in the design department

01:29:38 ◼   ► other than taking your time?

01:29:39 ◼   ► There's the right pace.

01:29:41 ◼   ► It's not, oh, we have all the time in the world.

01:29:43 ◼   ► You know, urgency is different than what's urgency is okay.

01:29:52 ◼   ► Acting as though the building is on fire is not when it, when it's not.

01:29:55 ◼   ► I just didn't see it coming.

01:29:59 ◼   ► And I think I put too much faith in the fact that he obviously knows,

01:30:05 ◼   ► Musk knows what it's like to lead very large companies that need

01:30:11 ◼   ► very talented people working for them to succeed, right?

01:30:17 ◼   ► There is no way to create a rocket ship that works, let alone to innovate

01:30:24 ◼   ► and have a rocket ship that can go up and then come back down and land on a raft,

01:30:29 ◼   ► as opposed to going, you know, and again, you make breakthroughs like that.

01:30:32 ◼   ► I forget what you were talking about earlier on the show where we look back

01:30:36 ◼   ► and, you know, years and laugh, but in hindsight, it's crazy that the way

01:30:41 ◼   ► that we've been putting things into satellites, into space for 50 years

01:30:46 ◼   ► involves massively expensive rockets, just ending up in the bottom of the

01:30:50 ◼   ► Pacific or Atlantic oceans, you know?

01:30:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:52 ◼   ► That's that's slightly wasteful.

01:30:54 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:54 ◼   ► That's that's a high five.

01:30:56 ◼   ► That's that's the team mission.

01:30:57 ◼   ► That's the victory.

01:30:58 ◼   ► Mission control is high fiving each other.

01:31:00 ◼   ► You know, it's Miller time, you know, celebrate.

01:31:02 ◼   ► It was a successful launch.

01:31:03 ◼   ► We just dropped a 50 missile in the ocean.

01:31:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:31:09 ◼   ► You make breakthroughs like that by acquiring and holding talented people.

01:31:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:19 ◼   ► So what I'll give is that people, people talk about coders, right?

01:31:22 ◼   ► Or programmers.

01:31:23 ◼   ► Are they talking about one?

01:31:24 ◼   ► I think there's a, again, amongst the bubble that he's in and the sort of

01:31:28 ◼   ► most extreme of right wing media.

01:31:30 ◼   ► I think there's this perception of like, Twitter was like 90% content moderators

01:31:34 ◼   ► just trying to shut down anybody saying anything nice about Republicans.

01:31:38 ◼   ► You know, millions of sort of this weird, distorted thing.

01:31:40 ◼   ► And it's like, it's mostly a bunch of coders.

01:31:41 ◼   ► Like it's, it's, it's a technology company, but also, you know, you'll know

01:31:46 ◼   ► what this has been, maybe not everybody else to the, the SRS systems, reliability

01:31:50 ◼   ► engineers, this is a very specific discipline within a large tech companies,

01:31:56 ◼   ► but it is, you know, the people, what it sounds like it's about reliability.

01:32:00 ◼   ► It's making sure that these, these systems that the very many complicated

01:32:04 ◼   ► systems that, that run these modern internet platforms keep running.

01:32:09 ◼   ► And it's it's a extremely demanding, extremely technical practice and very

01:32:18 ◼   ► frequently, you know, relies on being on call like just like doctors are, right?

01:32:22 ◼   ► It's like, if this thing blows up, you got to come in and fix it.

01:32:24 ◼   ► And and Twitter has arguably some, some of the best SRS who have ever done this

01:32:31 ◼   ► work anywhere.

01:32:32 ◼   ► You know, you put them up against Google, you put them up against, you know,

01:32:35 ◼   ► Facebook, anybody you want to put up there and keep in mind, Google and Facebook

01:32:39 ◼   ► are much, much larger than Twitter.

01:32:41 ◼   ► As much as attention as Twitter gets, it is nowhere near in the same league as

01:32:45 ◼   ► the trillion dollar companies like Amazon and Google.

01:32:47 ◼   ► And yet some of the best SRS who've ever done the work have been at Twitter

01:32:53 ◼   ► historically.

01:32:53 ◼   ► And it's because of the challenge, because it is that hard to be the real

01:32:58 ◼   ► time information engine for the world.

01:33:01 ◼   ► And and that group being decimated, like I can obviously articulate the story

01:33:08 ◼   ► around, you know, the content moderators.

01:33:09 ◼   ► We can all understand that, but this is the kind of thing where you have, you

01:33:13 ◼   ► have the rocket scientists, right?

01:33:15 ◼   ► You have the people who can do this unique task in the world in a way better

01:33:18 ◼   ► than anybody else has done it to the point where all the other platforms are

01:33:21 ◼   ► leaning on their technologies that they invent.

01:33:24 ◼   ► They're using the same architecture, you know, and those folks are all gone or

01:33:29 ◼   ► worse willy nilly.

01:33:31 ◼   ► People are feeling like the guy to the left of me and the person to the right

01:33:34 ◼   ► of me both got picked off and I'm still here and I don't know why I survived,

01:33:37 ◼   ► which is a lot of people's feeling.

01:33:39 ◼   ► It's so destabilizing.

01:33:42 ◼   ► And that's what I honestly find surprising given that, you know, that Musk

01:33:48 ◼   ► didn't, he's not coming from, I realized that Tesla is, they're not similar to

01:33:55 ◼   ► Twitter and their problems, but they're similar in the way that they need to,

01:33:59 ◼   ► like I said, acquire and hold on to talent.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Why in the world given his leadership in three weeks would anybody of talent take

01:34:09 ◼   ► a job at Twitter going forward?

01:34:12 ◼   ► I mean, it's, I mean, SREs are leaving Tesla because of this, like this is the

01:34:16 ◼   ► thing is like, it is a community that exists beyond one company and they all

01:34:20 ◼   ► talk and, and, and, and you go into that practice because you value stability.

01:34:26 ◼   ► That is your job.

01:34:28 ◼   ► The thing you were doing there, you're sacrificing your nights and weekends for

01:34:31 ◼   ► and missing out on movies with your kids for is because you think it's important

01:34:34 ◼   ► to offer stability to the world and the technology that they use.

01:34:37 ◼   ► And there is nothing less stable than this.

01:34:41 ◼   ► Like it could not be a more perfect way to undermine their values at a human

01:34:45 ◼   ► level, their sense of purpose in the world.

01:34:47 ◼   ► And as you alluded to earlier to demand personal fealty from engineers.

01:34:54 ◼   ► I mean, again, it's not a way to me, demanding personal fealty is no way to

01:34:58 ◼   ► lead any group, anything.

01:35:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:00 ◼   ► It's always a sickness, but in this case, it's the particular worst sickness you

01:35:04 ◼   ► could possibly have.

01:35:05 ◼   ► And I've often said this, I have many friends.

01:35:07 ◼   ► I know you do too.

01:35:08 ◼   ► I'm just, and I'm sure most of the, many of the people listening are engineers.

01:35:12 ◼   ► And certainly almost everybody who listens to my show knows software

01:35:16 ◼   ► engineers or hardware engineers.

01:35:17 ◼   ► I've always thought engineers are among, are the most interesting.

01:35:22 ◼   ► If you just, if that's all I know about you is that you're an engineer of some

01:35:25 ◼   ► sort, then there's a much higher, way higher chance than a random person that

01:35:33 ◼   ► I would enjoy talking about politics with you, whether we agree or disagree,

01:35:38 ◼   ► whether you have voted Republican almost every time for your life.

01:35:43 ◼   ► And I've voted Democrat most of the time in my life.

01:35:46 ◼   ► I bet we could have a really interesting decision or discussion about the

01:35:50 ◼   ► differences because the engineering mindset is to look at it analytically and

01:35:56 ◼   ► rationally and talk about actual problems and actual solutions and to try to try

01:36:02 ◼   ► actively to take the emotion out of it.

01:36:06 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:06 ◼   ► And politics famously, it's, you know, nobody can completely detach emotion from

01:36:10 ◼   ► it, but you can try.

01:36:12 ◼   ► And that's what can give an interesting discussion between people who disagree

01:36:17 ◼   ► and probably will not come to agreement simply by having the discussion.

01:36:21 ◼   ► But that's the, that mindset is exactly the sort of thing that, you know, click

01:36:25 ◼   ► this link to say you agree that you're going to, you're going to go totally

01:36:30 ◼   ► hardcore.

01:36:30 ◼   ► I mean, I'm not as offended by his memo that he sent out last night as some, some

01:36:35 ◼   ► people are totally outraged.

01:36:36 ◼   ► I see some of what he's saying there.

01:36:38 ◼   ► I certainly wouldn't have used the words that he used.

01:36:41 ◼   ► I think calling it going, I don't know how you could.

01:36:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:46 ◼   ► What's the show on HBO, Silicon Valley, right?

01:36:50 ◼   ► They, they mock, they mock Silicon Valley culture.

01:36:53 ◼   ► If I were in the writers' room.

01:36:57 ◼   ► This is more extreme than any parody.

01:36:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:59 ◼   ► If I were in the writers' room and the episode had the Elon Musk thinly veiled

01:37:04 ◼   ► Callen character writing an email saying that their culture was going to be,

01:37:09 ◼   ► quote, totally hardcore.

01:37:10 ◼   ► I would say that's, that's too much.

01:37:13 ◼   ► We, you know, I get it.

01:37:14 ◼   ► So corny.

01:37:15 ◼   ► I mean, that's the other thing too, that I think is really important in all this

01:37:17 ◼   ► too.

01:37:18 ◼   ► It's so the, what more personifies the tech bro attitude, the guy's got no taste,

01:37:24 ◼   ► right?

01:37:24 ◼   ► Like this is this thing.

01:37:25 ◼   ► It's like, this is corny.

01:37:26 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:27 ◼   ► This is embarrassing.

01:37:28 ◼   ► That's an embarrassing thing to put in the subject's line of an email who talks

01:37:32 ◼   ► like that in 2022.

01:37:33 ◼   ► We, right.

01:37:34 ◼   ► That's boomer behavior.

01:37:35 ◼   ► Why are you doing that?

01:37:36 ◼   ► Inspiring the whole company to that we, we're, you know, we need to build Twitter

01:37:42 ◼   ► 2.0.

01:37:43 ◼   ► We, the company is not in good shape.

01:37:45 ◼   ► You know, we've had to let go of a lot of people.

01:37:48 ◼   ► So now we're, there's fewer of us than there were.

01:37:51 ◼   ► We need to work harder than we've been working to build this thing.

01:37:56 ◼   ► There you go.

01:37:56 ◼   ► There, you know, I mean, I mean, the other thing is you would do that first,

01:38:00 ◼   ► right?

01:38:00 ◼   ► That's not the thing you would do after chaos for a month.

01:38:03 ◼   ► You can, you know, saying we need to work harder and, and come up with better

01:38:08 ◼   ► ideas and we need to do a better job of execution and ship new features faster.

01:38:13 ◼   ► All of it.

01:38:13 ◼   ► You could say that.

01:38:14 ◼   ► And that's the CEO.

01:38:16 ◼   ► And the CEO in the industry is saying that right now.

01:38:18 ◼   ► That's the CEO as the coach of the team, inspiring the team to, to play at the

01:38:23 ◼   ► highest level that they're capable of.

01:38:25 ◼   ► But it's, we got to be totally hardcore.

01:38:29 ◼   ► Totally.

01:38:29 ◼   ► It's ridiculous.

01:38:30 ◼   ► I also want to, I want to put out something.

01:38:31 ◼   ► So as we're recording this, I'm getting ready tomorrow.

01:38:34 ◼   ► I'm going to be at this.

01:38:35 ◼   ► This is going to be like the most political episode you've ever had.

01:38:38 ◼   ► I'm at this Obama Foundation, a democracy forum.

01:38:41 ◼   ► And they're, you know, sort of wrangling with all the different things that are

01:38:43 ◼   ► threatening democracy around the world.

01:38:45 ◼   ► No big topic there.

01:38:46 ◼   ► And we have conversation about, you know, misinformation, disinformation, media

01:38:51 ◼   ► manipulation, all these sort of related topics, but obviously Twitter is a huge

01:38:54 ◼   ► part of that conversation.

01:38:55 ◼   ► And there's an interesting thing where like Obama had done a speech at Stanford

01:39:00 ◼   ► in the spring of this year.

01:39:01 ◼   ► And it got, you know, I got a little bit of coverage, not actually that much

01:39:05 ◼   ► because it's sort of, you know, I think people feel like they already know he's

01:39:08 ◼   ► going to say.

01:39:09 ◼   ► And it was in his way, you know, very professorial and even handed and, you

01:39:15 ◼   ► know, like these are things that are not entirely compliments, but like, it's

01:39:18 ◼   ► fine.

01:39:18 ◼   ► He did what he does and he's a great speaker.

01:39:20 ◼   ► But in there, there was a really interesting section that jumped out to me,

01:39:25 ◼   ► which was he talked about, you know, everybody's focused on the algorithms

01:39:29 ◼   ► and what gets, you know, amplified and whether they're being fair to everybody.

01:39:33 ◼   ► But he's like, it's a market failure that we care this much about any one

01:39:37 ◼   ► platform, whether it's Twitter or anything else.

01:39:40 ◼   ► And I think it was right after Musk had talked about, you know, started saber

01:39:43 ◼   ► rattling around Twitter.

01:39:44 ◼   ► And it was a really astute analysis or is a really sharp point, which is the fact

01:39:51 ◼   ► that we care about any one of these platforms means the market isn't

01:39:54 ◼   ► competitive and that we're not inventing enough new ways to communicate and

01:39:58 ◼   ► connect and that we don't have enough, you know, he did not his, those were kind

01:40:01 ◼   ► of his words of the party.

01:40:02 ◼   ► He didn't say it's like what I would articulate open protocols, open standards,

01:40:05 ◼   ► interoperability, right?

01:40:06 ◼   ► Like, like nobody feels like beholden to their email provider.

01:40:10 ◼   ► Right.

01:40:10 ◼   ► And it was really stunning because I was like, it one it's true.

01:40:16 ◼   ► It's absolutely correct diagnosis, right?

01:40:18 ◼   ► Like it shouldn't matter this much if Twitter gets broken.

01:40:21 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:40:22 ◼   ► Like it actually is a failure of the ecosystem that there isn't some other

01:40:26 ◼   ► player and, you know, in competitive markets, like it is, it has been

01:40:30 ◼   ► absolutely phenomenal for the iPhone that Android is such a strong ecosystem

01:40:35 ◼   ► and so innovative, right?

01:40:36 ◼   ► Like that's a great thing.

01:40:37 ◼   ► That is a competitive, fiercely competitive market market.

01:40:40 ◼   ► Even if there's a little bit of unfair play by the two big players who run it,

01:40:43 ◼   ► right?

01:40:44 ◼   ► But like it's inarguably competitive and Twitter does not have any direct

01:40:49 ◼   ► competitors, right?

01:40:49 ◼   ► Facebook is not, nobody said I'm fed up with Twitter.

01:40:52 ◼   ► I'm going to go to Facebook.

01:40:53 ◼   ► Not one person, right?

01:40:54 ◼   ► Even though everybody has a Facebook account, that's telling these are not.

01:40:57 ◼   ► The closest thing they have to a direct competitor would be Instagram because

01:41:01 ◼   ► the basic paradigm is sort of similar where it's you, but nobody uses

01:41:05 ◼   ► in the same way.

01:41:05 ◼   ► Well, they are socially and culturally right, right.

01:41:07 ◼   ► And because of Instagram's design and again, I could go on and on about it,

01:41:13 ◼   ► but it, it, it really does matter what you started ads.

01:41:17 ◼   ► Even when you started, you know, when Instagram started as a, you know,

01:41:20 ◼   ► three, four, five people and Twitter was, you know, just a weird side project

01:41:26 ◼   ► of Odeo and there were only a half a dozen people working on it.

01:41:30 ◼   ► But the basic idea that little kernel that grows into this massive billion

01:41:35 ◼   ► user thing that Instagram has, I know Twitter only has 200 million users or

01:41:40 ◼   ► whatever it, that matters.

01:41:42 ◼   ► It was, but yeah, you're right.

01:41:44 ◼   ► There are, there's no, there, there is no direct competitor, but that's also

01:41:47 ◼   ► true of Instagram too, right?

01:41:48 ◼   ► We could do a whole podcast episode about the, the defacement of Instagram

01:41:52 ◼   ► over the last few years by Facebook.

01:41:54 ◼   ► I don't recognize, I don't use Instagram very much.

01:41:56 ◼   ► I go in like maybe every couple of months.

01:41:58 ◼   ► It's never the same twice and it is never what I think it is.

01:42:01 ◼   ► It's it, you know, and again, there is no real competitor, you know, you know,

01:42:06 ◼   ► I've, I've moved to glass and I had the founders of glass on the podcast a

01:42:09 ◼   ► couple months ago, but they, they don't describe themselves as a competitor to

01:42:13 ◼   ► Instagram.

01:42:13 ◼   ► No, they're doing a different thing that happens to be photos, right?

01:42:15 ◼   ► I actually have been really heartened by like seeing I've been seeing flicker

01:42:20 ◼   ► a lot lately since this sort of chaos.

01:42:22 ◼   ► And, and with the, the, the NASA launch of Artemis talking about, you know,

01:42:27 ◼   ► innovation and competition.

01:42:28 ◼   ► They're the official NASA account photos are on flicker because flicker has got

01:42:32 ◼   ► this, you know, the flicker foundation where they're sort of preserving

01:42:35 ◼   ► historical photos over time.

01:42:37 ◼   ► And it was just such an interesting thing where I was like, look at that 20

01:42:40 ◼   ► years in, this is the place that, you know, our, our preeminent space agency

01:42:46 ◼   ► finds is a good home.

01:42:47 ◼   ► But going back to this point about the competition, right?

01:42:50 ◼   ► Like, that was a, that was a really key point that I think got lost in his

01:42:55 ◼   ► co in Obama's conversation, but also what was telling was the reaction on Twitter

01:43:00 ◼   ► from Marc Andreessen, who is as powerful a figure as the tech industry has, was

01:43:06 ◼   ► Obama's telling you to shut up.

01:43:08 ◼   ► It's literally what he said, right?

01:43:09 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:10 ◼   ► And again, think of the contrast of a generation ago, venture capitalists

01:43:15 ◼   ► would say, we want robust competitive markets.

01:43:17 ◼   ► We'd like to fund the next Twitter.

01:43:19 ◼   ► If you've got a competitor Obama's right, build that competitor with us, right?

01:43:24 ◼   ► We need more competitive markets.

01:43:25 ◼   ► Who's the, who's the radical upstart.

01:43:27 ◼   ► This is what Silicon Valley's narrative was supposed to be.

01:43:29 ◼   ► We, we, we are disruptors.

01:43:31 ◼   ► We challenge the status quo.

01:43:33 ◼   ► We make radical things.

01:43:34 ◼   ► We think different.

01:43:35 ◼   ► That's what we are.

01:43:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:37 ◼   ► And instead he hears somebody saying at Stanford, right?

01:43:42 ◼   ► Where Google and Yahoo and all these things come from at Stanford.

01:43:45 ◼   ► We need to be more competitive and have more dynamic markets and invent new

01:43:49 ◼   ► things.

01:43:50 ◼   ► And he lies and says, this guy's telling you to shut up.

01:43:54 ◼   ► And that is not how it used to go.

01:43:56 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:57 ◼   ► That's just different.

01:43:57 ◼   ► And I think that change is so stark and so obvious that like, and it's hard

01:44:02 ◼   ► because like, I think people process these things as inherently political.

01:44:05 ◼   ► As soon as you hear Obama's name, you think, Oh, this is a political statement.

01:44:07 ◼   ► And it's like, it is not like, I am a very boring middle-aged dad who has been a

01:44:12 ◼   ► CEO.

01:44:13 ◼   ► I'm not a radical person structurally in what I am in the world.

01:44:17 ◼   ► And yet I'm like, I like that story that I should be able to be an entrepreneur

01:44:21 ◼   ► and be competitive in technology.

01:44:23 ◼   ► And the person who's telling me I don't is the guy who wrote a political tract

01:44:26 ◼   ► and said, we will funnel billions of dollars to anybody who builds in compliance

01:44:30 ◼   ► with our political tract.

01:44:31 ◼   ► And that guy is not Obama.

01:44:33 ◼   ► That guy's Teresa.

01:44:34 ◼   ► All right, let me take one last break here.

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01:46:40 ◼   ► How bad do you think it is at Twitter?

01:46:45 ◼   ► Do you think it's the people I talked to every single person is leaving.

01:46:49 ◼   ► There's not one person I know.

01:46:50 ◼   ► And I know a lot of people at Twitter.

01:46:52 ◼   ► Well, I used to know a lot of people at Twitter.

01:46:54 ◼   ► Now I know a handful.

01:46:54 ◼   ► There's not one who is saying I'm staying.

01:46:58 ◼   ► And it's funny because even there's people, this is a really interesting thing.

01:47:03 ◼   ► I know a good number of people there who are like, this is my job.

01:47:05 ◼   ► This is what I do.

01:47:06 ◼   ► A lot of them had stints at other tech companies, right?

01:47:10 ◼   ► So they worked at Google or they worked at Microsoft or something.

01:47:12 ◼   ► And they're like, this is my stint at Twitter.

01:47:15 ◼   ► And they were not like, I'm somebody who's like very politically opinionated and has

01:47:20 ◼   ► a point of view and like a very mission driven around when it gets my job.

01:47:23 ◼   ► It's what I do.

01:47:24 ◼   ► They have been radicalized by this.

01:47:27 ◼   ► Like they have come out and been like, what they say, because they know me.

01:47:31 ◼   ► They're like, I, the, all this stuff you've been ranting about all these years.

01:47:34 ◼   ► Now I get it.

01:47:35 ◼   ► Like there wasn't some opt out.

01:47:37 ◼   ► There wasn't some way to like, not think about what is the political agenda of these

01:47:41 ◼   ► guys or what are they saying to each other?

01:47:42 ◼   ► Cause like I used to tune all that stuff out.